Raw-boned hills

I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to record Modern Rock.Dunedin is a city in an amphitheater of hills and harbour. It's compact, set close to nature, and a short drive from the city center is the Otago Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean beating against its cliffs and headlands. There are seals, penguins and an albatross colony on the flanks of Taiaroa Head at the entrance to the harbour. It is a stretch of land that has inspired painters and poets and musicians - it generates a deep sense of nature and the spiritual that lingers like sea spray. One of New Zealand's leading painters of the twentieth century, Colin McCahon, painted its…