Chatterbox: James Brown in town

Get your funk on because James Brown - the Godfather of Soul - is coming back to town.

The 72-year-old soul and funk pioneer, whose music career started in 1956 with the release of his first single, Please, Please, Please, plays one gig at the Civic Theatre in Auckland on February 10.

Brown - dubbed the hardest-working man in show business - last played here at the St James in March, 2004.

That concert was a sell-out.

A Herald review of the show did point out that while Brown wasn't up front much of the time "he is a legend and his audience was there to dance, worship, and just be in the presence of the Godfather".

And when he cranks into Sex Machine and It's a Man's Man's Man's World, then that's something you just got to see.

Tickets for the February show are on sale now.

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Time for action

Cast aside all thoughts of Laguna Beach - now's your chance to turn that lazy summer into a screen masterpiece.

From the folks who brought us 48 Hours comes the Moonlight Shorts film competition.

Teams will have until February 10 to produce a film no longer than seven minutes. Entry is free no matter your experience. Only 12 shorts will be chosen to screen at the final at Coyle Park, Pt Chevalier, on March 4.

The winner's entry will be transferred to 35mm film courtesy of Peter Jackson's Park Road Post (The Lord of The Rings, King Kong) and will be shown in cinemas and on C4. For the rules, see www.moonlightshorts.co.nz.

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There's more at Splore

Here's two more reasons to go to Splore: funky Washington breaks DJs Fort Knox Five and Kiwi singer-songwriter Hollie Smith.

Fort Knox have remixed the likes of Tito Puente, Louis Armstrong and Krafty Kuts and recently worked with Afrika Bambaataa. Hollie is the chick from Fly My Pretties and has worked with Trinity Roots, Fat Freddy's Drop and Recloose.

The music and arts festival - also featuring Talib Kweli, the Cuban Brothers, the Nextmen and more - is at Tapapakanga Regional Park, south of Auckland, February 17-19.

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No one said good music was cheap . . . 

Downloading music straight to your mobile phone is expensive. This week Telecom launched its music store where you can download direct from a choice of 300,000 tracks.

Vodafone, which started its music store in August, has 400,000. But it's not cheap at $3.50 a track compared with buying a CD single or downloading an MP3 track from legal download sites such as digirama.co.nz and coketunes.

You can buy Kanye West's Gold Digger from Telecom for $3.50, but for $4.95 you can buy the CD single, which has three tracks, including a remix of the excellent Diamonds From Sierra Leone and a video of Gold Digger. You can download MP3s for $1.69 at digirama and $1.75 at coketunes, and whole albums for $15.99 and $18.

An example: the new 17-track Eminem greatest hits album would cost nearly $60 to download to your phone but you can buy the CD for half that.