Lorde waxes lyrical but Little-known guy calls the tune

Joel Little, producer extraordinaire, with Lorde at the APRA Silver Scroll awards in Auckland in October. Photo/File

This week's column is the other half of more than one story.

The first is the success of Lorde, the young woman from Auckland who has broken into the international music scene.

She is touted as the great new musical discovery from downunder and the hype has been massive. Much has been said, written and tweeted about her lyrics and image but we hear very little about Joel Little, the producer who created the music and the sound that has carried her so far.

His contribution to the success of Lorde has been overlooked in the rush, the gosh and the gush. He is the other half of the story but has become invisible. She is certainly easier to sell to the youth market than a 30-year-old man with two kids who makes music for a living, so I suspect he has been removed from the image-making machinery despite his undeniable talent.

The lyrics to her songs, without his music, are just words and words may be all she has to steal our hearts away. He is the other half of the success story and I am willing to predict that without his talent she will be a one-hit wonder and within a year she will have disappeared up her own hype.

The second, more serious, story that is missing the other half is the current Australian Government's approach to asylum seekers arriving by boat.

The rhetoric is of war, with the armed forces being tasked with fending off any boats transporting refugees so they do not reach Australia.

In what I consider to be a double dose of hypocrisy, a blanket of secrecy has been cast over activity offshore to reinforce the notion of a war scenario while simultaneously serving to create an atmosphere that in some mysterious way asylum seekers present a dire threat to Australia.

The war talk is pure hyperbole. Who is the enemy against which the might of the Australian Navy must be turned? They are unarmed refugees travelling across dangerous waters in unseaworthy craft in the hope of reaching safety. It is not war but political cowardice on the part of the Abbott government.

I feel sorry for the men and women of the Australian armed forces who have been ordered to do the government's dirty work when it has always been a law of the sea that you assist any vessel in distress where there is risk to life.

Strangely nothing much is said by the same politicians about the thousands seeking asylum who arrive by plane every year but if there was talk of the "plane people" in the same way as that around "boat people" I guess it would lack the political possibilities because we all travel by plane.

The person who took the Chronicle to task for putting the recently released data on infant deaths on the front page was only seeing half that story.

That Whanganui has the highest infant death rate in the country is an important piece of information for the community.

It gives opportunity to talk about prevention strategies so that rather than feel helpless when confronted by such information we respond.

The safe sleep messages: baby needs to be face up, face clear, a smokefree environment and no risk of breathing being obstructed by pillows, or toys or by bed sharing, especially when a parent is affected by drugs or alcohol.

That's the other half of that story.

Terry Sarten is a writer/ musician and social worker. Feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz