Listener's Songs of the Week: New tracks by Mavis Staples, David Byrne and more
David Byrne and Mavis Staples have new music out now. Photos / Supplied
Godspeed
by Mavis Staples
The 85-year-old Mavis Staples pours her voice into the gospel-leaning break-up ballad that was a highlight of enigmatic R&B cult star Frank Ocean's 2016 Blonde album. It's been covered before – including by Brit James Blake, who played and produced on the original Ocean
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Otago Daily Times
7 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Bottom trawling doomed after Attenborough film
At the age of 99, documentary film-maker David Attenborough has achieved his greatest triumph. With a single film clip, he has signed the death warrant for one of the world's most destructive industries: bottom trawling. The companies and countries that do it will go down fighting and it will take time, but they will go down. His film Ocean got a simultaneous global release last month to build pressure for a ban on bottom trawling before the third United Nations Ocean Conference last week in the French city of Nice. The ban did not happen last week, and it won't happen everywhere at once, but it is inevitable once enough people have seen that clip. You can't forget it. It's long shots from underwater cameras at the mouth of an enormous net (you can't see the sides or the top). The bottom of the net, weighed down so it scrapes along the seabed, swallows up everything in its path — fish, crustaceans, plants, mud — as it advances inexorably, faster than a walking pace, throwing up a plume of muck in its wake. These bottom trawlers have been working at sea for more than a century, but nobody had ever seen this scene before. No diver would survive where the cameras were, presumably fixed to the net's mouth by some rig that let them see the whole process. It is a nightmare vision of mass death and destruction. No doubt the owners of the commercial trawler that Attenborough's producers hired for this sequence were well paid, but they unwittingly sold out their whole industry. Bottom trawlers are responsible for the bulk of the damage humans have done to the oceans. More than half the fish they catch are "bycatch", thrown back into the water dead or dying because the trawlermen are only after a couple of species that bring a good price. The "clean shave" they give the bottom leaves nowhere for juvenile fish to hide. The first fishing boats that pulled big nets behind them, the so-called "Brixham trawlers" of the early 1800s, were sail-driven, but by the 1870s there were steam trawlers in Britain that could drag much bigger nets and catch ten times as many fish. The global fishing catch then may have been as little as 5 million tonnes annually, but it went up fast. With the advent of "factory freezers" in the mid-20th century — big ships that could travel to distant waters, catch up to 400 tonnes of fish every time they released their nets, and mechanically gut, fillet and fast-freeze the ones they wanted, dumping the rest — total catch reached 30 million tonnes a year by 1950. It peaked at 130 million tonnes in 1996, by which time almost every major fishery in the world was being depleted. Humans have even changed the structure of ocean fish populations. Big, predatory "table fish" (the kind people like to eat) have declined by two-thirds, while the biomass of smaller prey fish, facing fewer predators, has gone up. The worst of it is while the official United Nations goal is to have 30% of the world's oceans in "maritime protected areas" by 2030, most of those still allow bottom trawling. We cannot rebuild healthy oceans unless that is stopped in the safe zones where fish populations should be able to recover, which is why Attenborough has made that his primary goal. It did not happen at the third United Nations Ocean Conference, but it was being heavily debated there. The European Union and the United Kingdom will be moving on the issue soon, and where they go others will follow. But if they really do stop bottom trawling those zones, what will people eat? "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," warns Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia. But we may be spared that fate by the dramatic rise in the consumption of farmed fish. Half the protein people eat from all marine and freshwater sources is already from fish farms, and the ratio is rising. Moreover, the "fish in/fish out" number is steadily improving. It really used to be the "little fish in/big fish out" ratio, with 3 tonnes of little fish ground up for fish meal and fish oil to produce 1 tonne of salmon or trout, but now fish feed is mostly plant-based, and even big cage-raised predators are net neutral, one in/one out. So, the oceans, while still in terrible shape, are getting better, at least as far as fish are concerned. Now all we have to do is reverse the acidification process, stop sea-level rise, and keep the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (the Gulf Stream) from collapsing. Can you start next week? — Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
NZ Herald
14-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Listener's Songs of the Week: New tracks by Mavis Staples, David Byrne and more
David Byrne and Mavis Staples have new music out now. Photos / Supplied Godspeed by Mavis Staples The 85-year-old Mavis Staples pours her voice into the gospel-leaning break-up ballad that was a highlight of enigmatic R&B cult star Frank Ocean's 2016 Blonde album. It's been covered before – including by Brit James Blake, who played and produced on the original Ocean
NZ Herald
10-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Talking Heads frontman David Byrne returns to NZ for one-off Auckland show in January 2026
Talking Heads legend David Byrne has announced his return to New Zealand for the first time since 2018. The 73-year-old Rhode Island rocker will perform a single show at Auckland's Spark Arena on Wednesday, January 14, next year. Known for his flamboyant style and game-changing artistic expressions with and within his solo career, Byrne's tour across Australia and New Zealand will celebrate songs from his latest album Who Is The Sky?, set to be released September 5.
