The Kids are Alright

December 7, 2023 2:17 PM

Stairway to Heaven. (YouTube via Invidious so you aren't tracked.) At the annual prize-giving ceremony at St Andrews College in Ōtautahi (Christchurch) in Aotearoa, the music department covers Led Zepplin's 'Stairway to Heaven' and absolutely nails it. It's going viral here but deserves a wider audience.
posted by vac2003 (34 comments total)

'New Zealand school goes viral for Stairway To Heaven performance.

Their version takes inspiration from Hearts cover of the famous track.'

a most excellent performance, thanks for posting it.
posted by clavdivs at 3:08 PM on December 7, 2023

Two and a half minutes shaved off the original is just right. Great performance!
posted by rhizome at 3:09 PM on December 7, 2023

Just excellent!
posted by Gorgik at 3:32 PM on December 7, 2023

When I was in high school we were doing songs from the '50s in jazz band. In combination with this performance, I conclude that there is a 40-50 delay from radio play to high school music.
posted by clawsoon at 3:44 PM on December 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Nicely done!
posted by humbug at 3:58 PM on December 7, 2023

Holy cow.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:01 PM on December 7, 2023

Impressive! A real "School of Rock" vibe with the school uniforms. Well done, kids!
posted by Mallenroh at 4:57 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

AMAZING! Thanks for posting.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:12 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, that was great! It’s good to hear these old tunes reborn courtesy of some very talented younger folks. They deserve virality. It made me remember something posted here years ago, a French high school conservatory of music does Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:36 PM on December 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Home town on Metafilter FTW!
posted by Samuel Farrow at 5:42 PM on December 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Loved the lead guitar, her swagger and cool. Plus she played a tele for extra authenticity.
posted by signal at 5:46 PM on December 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I cannot wait for the lead guitarist's first album. Holy majoley.
posted by thivaia at 6:27 PM on December 7, 2023

This is so good. The lead singer is astonishing. What talent!
posted by OrangeDisk at 6:55 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

does anybody remember laughter?
posted by logicpunk at 7:16 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

that gave me goosebumps!
posted by tarantula at 7:27 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Really well done. Very effective staging, too. What an amazing experience to be part of as young performers, I hope they had a blast doing it.
posted by EvaDestruction at 7:58 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Loved it!
posted by billsaysthis at 9:00 PM on December 7, 2023

I worked in a wine shop for six months to buy my first guitar (a Westone). Our drummer at the time lived in an unheated basement and subsisted on tinned pilchards. I've played gigs in front of five people, had bottles thrown at me, and our amps unplugged in mid-show. Happily, the reason I didn't make it was not poverty, but simple lack of talent; the same is not true of some other musicians I knew.

It costs NZ$47,000 a year to send your child to St. Andrew's College. That's the school hall they're playing in. The acoustic guitarist is playing a Taylor 200 series, retailing at US$1,000 and up.

Yes, I'm jealous. But these kids, especially the lead guitarist and singer, are superbly talented and I'm glad they're using their privileged start in life to produce something beautiful for all of us, instead of just being e.g. Elon Musk.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:03 AM on December 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yeah I was going to point this out, this is a private NZ school - something quite rare (a few decades back most private schools went bust and were semifolded into the state system, the city I live in has no fully private schools like this one) - private schools like this are very much the pervue of the rich (much more so than in the US) - often they have boarding facilities and have a lot of farmer's kids attending (here farmers are considered very well off, drive expensive cars, we don't have the US stereotype of the dirt poor farmer)
posted by mbo at 1:52 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Holy shit mamma, that was excellent!
posted by Meatbomb at 3:01 AM on December 8, 2023

Sorry, I love a good tribute band, but that was bloodless and dreadful, and she was either pitchy or not pitchy enough. Technically excellent to some standard I’m sure, but vitiated of every last thing that makes the original, or Heart’s cover, rock.
posted by nicwolff at 4:16 AM on December 8, 2023

It costs NZ$47,000 a year to send your child to St. Andrew's College.

So, just for giggles I did a little number shuffling and it turns out this is only a smidge more than the average out-of-state tuition in the US, like probably within the margin of error of the currency exchange.

Sorry, I love a good tribute band, but that was bloodless and dreadful, and she was either pitchy or not pitchy enough.

I wish I could say I agreed with this less than I do. I enjoyed it, but I’d call it “good for college kids.” The vocalist had some good technique, but needed to pick one technique and stick with it.
posted by gelfin at 4:29 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a high school not a college, it's brit/commonwealth/empire naming convention to call a private secondary school a college.
posted by Morpeth at 5:51 AM on December 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

>it's brit/commonwealth/empire naming convention to call a private secondary school a college
That's not quite right, in the UK it's just the last two years of secondary school that we call sixth-from college and in my experience it's not limited to private schools.
posted by tomp at 8:37 AM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a very good job for high school kids. Doesn't have a lot of punch and the rhythm section should be behind the beat, not on it. But that's to be expected. That guitar player does have some swagger and strut to her. I bet this will get to Page or Plant and they'll have a kind comment on social media.

The Heart cover at the Kennedy Center does have all of those things, especially having Jason Bonham on the drumkit just punching the song into another level. Ann Wilson is no stranger to covering Zeppelin and she just nails it.

[Disclaimed: I saw the song performed by the one and only in a hockey arena in 1977. In addition, the lead guitarist was sober and breathing fire. An eight minute song rose into twelve/thirteen minutes and while the sound was LOUD it was so clear you could hear the keys under the guitar solo. Hammer of the gods, indeed}
posted by Ber at 1:57 PM on December 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wow, Ber's evaluation matches mine exactly. As in, the comment I started to write (but abandoned) made the same points in the same order as Ber's 1st, 2nd, and 4th sentences. I implied the 3rd.

I wondered how subjective my opinion was, especially because I'm a drummer/percussionist. I thought I might have been especially sensitive to the relative lack of dynamism and drive. But I'm definitely comparing this performance with the Wilson sisters' Kennedy Center performance and Ber also had that in mind, so probably for those of us familiar with it, the contrast between the two made the weaknesses of the kids' performance much more obvious.

Don't get me wrong: this was very good.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:30 PM on December 8, 2023

“That's not quite right, in the UK it's just the last two years of secondary school that we call sixth-from college and in my experience it's not limited to private schools.”

My ex-wife is Canadian, grew up in TO, and she was in the last year in Ontario when they still did the final 13th grade. We both ended up going to (different) liberal arts colleges with "College" in their names here in the US, and this confused some of her Canadian family and friends.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:37 PM on December 8, 2023

The term College is used rather randomly in Canadian usage.

We have Royal Military College (RMC) which is a university;
We have Upper Canada College which is a private very expensive high school.
St. Michal's College school, a Catholic high school.
Brescia College a womens only university
Humber, Seneca College are community colleges

And many high schools in Toronto use the term Collegiate institute

Typically you would say you attend university rather than college,
posted by yyz at 3:23 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here in NZ "College" is mostly used by High Schools - and some older University halls of residence
posted by mbo at 3:35 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

“Typically you would say you attend university rather than college...”

That is, in fact, what I learned to do. I still do, even though I've been divorced for almost thirty years.

I also say "have a shower". I picked up a number of Britishisms/Canadianisms from marriage.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:08 PM on December 8, 2023

I attended an institution that called itself a "University College". It wasn't a college of a university. It wasn't a university. It wasn't a college. But it was an accredited degree-granting... thing.
posted by clawsoon at 4:11 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pedantic: Seneca is a Polytechnic now. College is indeed pretty random up here.

This was very lovely, thank you.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:29 AM on December 9, 2023

I bet this will get to Page or Plant and they'll have a kind comment on social media.

Does anybody remember a kind comment on social media?
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:43 AM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yuck, alumni of producer Brent Hansen and his trashy1990s music channel MTV
posted by Narrative_Historian at 6:33 PM on December 12, 2023