Sounds of summer

Back at the dawn of time - at least it feels that way, it was 1966 - the Lovin Spoonful's hit Summer in the City captured perfectly the mood of being stuck between skyscrapers as the sun beat down.

"Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck gettin' burnt and gritty ... all around people looking half-dead, walking on the sidewalk hotter than a match head."

The Lovin Spoonful were from New York so you could sympathise, but - because we live at the bottom of the Pacific - not really feel their pain. Here, even on the hottest summer days in the city, you just bugger off to the beach.

So our summer soundtracks are rather more mellow. We like songs that go with backyard barbecues and beach towels.

We're more into steel guitars evoking palm trees and having a beer under the pohutukawa than sweating our way to an air-conditioned office.

Which explains why reggae - bouncing bass lines, off-kilter beats that slow you down - appeals, especially from now through to April.

While you make a list of your favourite songs - Madonna's Material Girl because it came out when you first went to nightclubs, and so on - certain types of music are, well, just summery.

They are lighter, often have rhythms we associate with hot places (that bloody irritating Macarena thing), and there's often something intrinsically uplifting (like those harmonies the Beach Boys used) or languid about them.

Go back into Kiwi rock history and some interesting songs pop up. In the late 60s, the La De Das fired off angry, post-Stones rock with their singles How Is The Air Up There? and On Top of the World. But their biggest hit, which went to No 1 in the summer of 1967, was the lazy Hey Baby.

And Dragon's biggest single, April Sun in Cuba, began its 14-week run in the charts in 1978 in, you guessed it, January. That's the month when a song which starts, "I'm tired of the city life" and name-checks the sun and the exoticism of Cuba was always going to be big.

Jon Stevens did much the same two years later with Montego Bay, about a popular tourist destination in the balmy Bahamas, and the Patea Maori Club's uplifting Poi E rocked our summertime charts in early 1984.

We might have been a nation of black jeans and moody boys from the Nunnery in the 80s, but come summer it's on with the lavalava and off to the beach. And hey, play Slice of Heaven again.

And what was voted as our best ever song? It wasn't anything glum as you might have expected in a nation which makes movies like Vigil and Once Were Warriors, it was Wayne Mason's breezy Nature. We like that kind of stuff here.

And we like summer road trips too, just like the one Steriogram sing about on the opening track to their album Schmack!. Rest assured those good-time boys will be playing a sea-side town near you this summer.

It's interesting how we took Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Donavon Frankenreiter, Breaks Co-op and all that luvverly dubbery from Wellington to heart.

The music they make - and you might add Sisters Underground a decade ago, Herbs even further back, and OMC's slippery How Bizarre - captures the mood of a nation which shuts up shop and goes to the bach for a while.

We could get academic and talk about the circadian rhythms of summer but that would be silly.

We want songs like the Chills' Heavenly Pop Hit. We don't want winter gloom, we want the Exponents at the pub on New Year's Eve.

Conventional record company wisdom was don't release a local album in the run-up to Christmas: the greatest-hits collections by Celine Dion, Robbie Williams and Neil Diamond will bury it.

But if you have a summer album by a local act, why not? Nesian Mystik's Polysaturated album entered the charts in December 2002 - at No 1 - and was the soundtrack to that summer.

Reviewer Russell Baillie said it was "one sunny, funny, funky, hooky collection of hip-hopped high-harmony pop which is already spreading faster than the painted apple moth".

That's the kind of music we like while pushing sausages around the barbie. But there's an irony: our major event of summer, the Big Day Out, is often headlined by people such as Metallica, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson and other black-T-shirt bands.

Surely this is the time and place for the soothing sounds of Bill Sevesi's steel guitar and its summery evocation of the South Pacific? Maybe not. Next year Mudvayne have taken Bill's slot.

But look at the fine print for the BDO 06: Fat Freddy's Drop, Che Fu, Breaks Co-op and Britain's Magic Numbers all offer an airy soundtrack for the hot outdoors.

So, the long, fine days are here, you can drop the serious pouting and put on a Hawaiian shirt and stop playing moody, broody rock or gang-banger hip-hop. This is the time to kick back, relax and play Peter Posa's White Rabbit, Katchafire's GiddyUp and Cornerstone Roots.

It's summer. Chill out. And remember to bring beer and steaks - everyone's gonna be there.