Little Stevie McCabe has been making music for over 15 years now.

As the founding force behind Sleek Bott Music Publishing, and one of the two principal Axemen guitarist/songwriters (the other being Shaft’s Bob Brannigan AKA Robert Cardy) he has lived and played through the changing tides of punk, post-punk, new wave, post-new wave, disoc, post-disco, neo-punk,neo-new wave, new-romantic, post-new romantic, neo-disco, grunge, post-grunge, retro-punk,retro-new wave, retro-disco, retro-grunge, post-renaissance Beatle revivals and has risen above it all with a vengeance.

Born the day the Beatles were doing the final mixes of "Revolver", McCabe wrote his first song at the age of seven. Taking up the guitar, (and later the piano) McCabe formed his first band at the age of 10 (The Gasping Raspers). This was followed by a succession of Intermediate and High School Bands (The Dents, The Tsetse Philharmonic, [his first serious artrock outfit, formed after seeing the And Band and Perfect Strangers perform in a band rotunda in Christchurch] Pete & His Pigeons, and the seminal and influential Gorillas). Look out for a digitally re-mastered Gorillas retrospective release on Sleek Bott soon!

It was with the Gorillas that McCabe’s love affair with recording music began, and it was with this experience he entered into the devillish pact, back in 1981, with fellow musicmakers Bob Brannigan and Stu Kawowski when the legendary Axemen were formed after a chance Brannigan/McCabe encounter whilst punting on the River Avon. The inevitable formation of the Axemen (it was destiny - all members of the band later admitted to their almost total loss of freewill in the years the band were playing together due to the overwhelming sense of well-being and togetherness which ensued whenever they would meet, whether to record, play live, or quaff gallons of coffee wine. All the time, McCabe was learning his craft, recording everything that could be recorded and pushing his four-track to its limits.

The inevitable decay of the volatile Axemen after a respectable 10 years of music-making and merriment was the beginning of slippery slope which was to lead to near-ruin for McCabe, who virtually disappeared from public life for two years before surfacing again briefly with the CFC’s in 1994. Following radio play from BFM of the Frisbee-recorded "Made To Die" and some classic live performances and other (as yet unreleased) Frisbee recordings, McCabe purchased a 486 computer, a step which was to change forever the way he produced music.

The computer age brought to McCabe a way of producing exactly the music he had been hearing in his head for years, the kind of music he could not have dreamed of making until the arrival of the silicon chip and soundcard. In "Generations", McCabe’s first ‘official’ release since the Axemen split in 1992 after the ill-fated "Across the Universe" Tour, McCabe has finally come home, and promises the listener the experience of a rebirth previously only able to be experienced by born-again christians and some buddhists.

Sleek Bott is the recording and distribution arm of the McCabe production machine. Formed in 1986, following the purchase of a Tasccam portastudio and reel to reel recorder used for mastering, for his own amusement and as a mechanism for making available the volumes of recordings McCabe had been producing over the years of himself, his bands and the bands of his contemporaries. Before this time, releases were laboriously copied from cassette to cassette on sub-professional tape duplication decks under a variety of dubious label names. The first Sleek Bott release, McCabe’s "Sweat It Out" LP was received well on its release and remains a sought-after item to this day, due to its limited release run and its historical value as one of the very last LPs to roll out of the EMI pressing plant in Wellington.

This was followed by about 20 other releases of recordings by such acts as the Axemen, the Sleek Bott Gang, Shit Pop Boyz, Garam Masala, Bob Brannigan, Steve McCabe and various other non-Axemen projects.

Sleek Bott announced in early 1998 that its entire available back-catalogue had now been digitally re-mastered and released on CD. A full listing of available releases is available from the Sleek Bott website, at:

Despite his lack of public appearances in recent years, McCabe has not been sitting on his laurels, nor his ass. Having spent the last couple of years training himself up in the use of computers for the composition and production of music, and methods of information dissemination via the world wide web, the heightened production standards learned in McCabe’s epic and most just quest for pleasure-inducing and ethereal sounds - the sounds which an at once quell an army, sooth a nation and even induce an opiate-like stupor in some fortuantely predisposed listeners.

McCabe has maintained in recent discourses that he never really stopped, he just learned himself up good and is now ready and prepared to face the world again.

In fact, before Generations was even released, he had already started on a commission work (expected for release later in the year) an epic revisiting of the songs of the recently buried (but not dead) Marty Sauce & the Source. This was commissioned by shocked former Source guitarist/Songwirter Dave Graham, reportedly too stricken at the news of Marty’s premature demise to record the album himself. Sauce was last reported to living the life of a hermit in a cavern west of the breaking rocks of Piha.