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Tama Lundon, keyboard player and co-creator of numerous local hit songs, has died.

RNZ

Herbs keyboard player Tama Lundon has died

A Herbs bandmate shared the news that their longstanding keyboard player had died.

'Herbs collaborated with some big local names including Tim Finn (‘Parihaka’), Annie Crummer (‘See What Love Can Do’) and most successfully with Dave Dobbyn on the hit single ‘Slice of Heaven’, off the movie soundtrack Footrot Flats. It shot to no.1 in October 1986 and stayed there for eight weeks, AudioCulture reported.'

Cory Doctorow on how the movie made blues music and blues artists popular once again. A book review.

Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé’s ‘The Blues Brothers’ (21 Jun 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

" it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit ... you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages."

How do you organise music for organic discovery?

Organising music for organic discovery

Details on how we organised thousands of tracks to build a music discovery service that lets you find your next favourite song from BBC Introducing...

"We reduced our 30+ descriptors to just eight ‘human’ ones: aggressive, danceable, electronic, happy, instrumental, party, relaxed, sad. Each track being rated from -1 (not at all) to 1 (very) on each of those. We tried various combinations until we could see some separation between opposed genres (e.g. classical vs dance) but see similarity between others (e.g.funk and hip-hop) ..."