The baldness of Peter Garrett from Midnight Oil, the one leggedness of Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull, and how completely unlike the Andrews Sisters we sound.
Sounds Like
Great Uncle Pete needed to invent a way to describe they way they sounded. They came up with the term "sheep-country rock", and decided that would be what they sounded like.
rock as in the thing Samuel Johnson kicked in an attempt to refute George Berkeley's immaterialistic claim that matter only seemed to exist (though in actual fact Boswell, reporting on the incident, says it was a "stone" that Johnson kicked, but you get the idea. The Stones certainly rocked, though, that's the sure).
band as in "rubber band", which was what the boys had to string their guitars with in the early days when they were too poor to buy strings.
A prominent Wellington psychologist, and one time band "clapper" (and who specialises in head injuries - of which most of the band members have been declared "probably mostly unlikely to suffer from"), likes to point out that:
Great Uncle Pete is more than a band - it's a way of life.
He may be a quack, but he's right. And where there is life, there is Great Uncle Pete. Still.
Great Uncle Pete write their own songs. Some of them a funny, some of them are strange, some of them are both, some of them are neither. We've tried to present here some of the more presentable ones, because, let's face it, some of the songs are complete an utter crap. But that's ok, because Great Uncle Pete is a way of life, remember, and the paths of life are not all peppered with perfect pop songs, or aligned with alluring alliterations.
The Great Uncle Pete band has been around since the 1990s. That's before most of the myspace generation were born. There was no internet back in those days. If we wanted to send a message to someone we had to carve it into a hunk of rock, and lob it in the general direction on the intended recipient. Ah, times were tough.
Being now grown up (sort of) and having embraced the technological advances of the age (as one might do to a lone sheep), we would here by like to present you with some of our multimedia presentations. There are more on youtube. Thank you.
An impromptu version of the song "Overlocker"
Filmed live in a car (as all good songs are) at Makara Beach back in 2005, I believe.
The classic "I Could Be Your Man" filmed at a warm-up gig in 2006 when Great Uncle Pete were wanting to break in a new line up.
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