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ELVIS PRESLEY (2007): Merchandising, marketing and maybe some music?
So Elvis is back in the building? That’s the impression we must draw on the 30th anniversary of his death with the announcement of plans to expand the visitor’s centre in Memphis. As part of some grand design the current centre will be bowled and a new one -- seven times the size of his home of Graceland across the road -- will be built. And some kind of 3D hologram imaging will... more >>
Added: 22 Jan 08
CHARMAINE NEVILLE INTERVIEWED (2000): Who's in a name?
Sometimes, as with those Lennon children Sean and Julian, and of course Bob Marley's offspring, you just have to live -- sometimes live up to -- with the name you've been bron into. A help . . . but a hindrance no doubt. Yes, the name was an issue when she started, says singer Charmaine Neville, daughter of Neville Brothers' saxophonist Charles and one of the... more >>
Added: 20 Jan 08
JOHN MARTYN'S 1980 ALBUM GRACE AND DANGER: How can you mend a broken heart?
Like his peer Richard Thompson, with whom he sometimes recorded, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist Martyn came from a folk background in the mid 60s then incorporate rock gestures into his playing. Unlike Thompson however he also explored jazz deeply and so his guitar playing has a kind of free-ranging, adventurous sound that is rare. Again like Thompson though he worked with... more >>
Added: 17 Jan 08
SPEAKING WITH SULU: STAR TREK'S GEORGE TAKEI INTERVIEWED (2004)
George Takei - "it rhymes with okay" - began his career with a minor role as a crew member on the USS Enterprise. But Star Trek became a cult hit and Takei, as Mr Sulu, a star. Since then he has been in dozens of sitcoms, tele-series, movies and theatrical productions, and is involved in civic and political causes. Are you keeping well? Are you worried for me? I am hale and... more >>
Added: 3 Dec 07
PAUL McCARTNEY GOES CLASSICAL (1993): An oratorio for everyman
Around the time of his 50th birthday in June last year, Paul McCartney could have -- if he so chose -- picked up a couple of mainstream British newspapers and read editorials and think pieces suggesting that this former Beatle be made a knight of the realm. And why not? James Paul McCartney is undeniably Britain’s most popular living composer and, as the writers pointed out,... more >>
Added: 20 Nov 07
THE BEACH BOYS' BRIAN WILSON INTERVIEWED: Heroes and Villains
The city is melting by mid-morning. One of the newspapers - under the thumping headline "Blast Furnace" - says the Met Office is predicting the hottest day of the month: a withering 42C. Summer is scorching its way to town, so Sydney responds with shirts off and shorts on. And by coincidence the soundtrack beneath the hiss of bus brakes and rattle of trams around Circular... more >>
Added: 7 Nov 07
THE BEACH BOYS' MIKE LOVE INTERVIEWED (2007, and concert review): Hang on to Your Ego
It is a rare individual who can claim that the Beatles sang “happy birthday” to him. But then Mike Love -- the Beach Boy who keeps their early surf songs alive today -- is a rare man indeed. Now 66, Love can reflect on a life in popular music that began with 60s pop capturing the breezy vibe of southern California, but which became somewhat darker as the decade rolled on.... more >>
Added: 2 Nov 07
THE ROLLING STONES, AN ESSAY: Living in Memory Motel
If memory serves me still, it was schoolmate Chris Gilbert and I who went to see the Stones together at Auckland's Civic Theatre on March 1, 1966. I know I wore a black polo-necked sweater (of the kind that Stones Brian Jones and Keith Richard favoured), and that the show, while not actually changing my life, had a profound --and not entirely favourable -- effect on me.Even as a spotty... more >>
Added: 20 Oct 07
JOHNNY CASH REMEMBERED 2006: Solitary, and singular, man
The last photographs of Johnny Cash told their own story: the thinning grey hair, the once tough jaw bent out of shape by years of painful dental surgery, the lines which spoke of a world-weariness. And the ineffable sadness in those dark eyes as if he was looking into the beyond where he would once again be with his wife June, who died just nine weeks before Johnny passed on in September... more >>
Added: 20 Oct 07
IGGY POP AND THE STOOGES, AGAIN: Loud, fast and out of control
A few years ago, a cartoon in a rock magazine captured the essence of the Stooges. It showed a guy in headphones whose head had exploded and his friend in the other room saying over his shoulder, "So what do you think of the remastered version of Raw Power?" The Stooges, fronted by Iggy Pop, delivered that kind of sonic intensity on albums like their drug-addled, self-titled debut in... more >>
Added: 20 Oct 07
JOHN CALE INTERVIEWED (2005): Flipping the Velvet
At the end of a digressive conversation with John Cale, I thank him for his time then add, "and I didn't even mention The Other Band". Cale -- Welsh, classically trained and fiercely intellectual -- lets go a baritone chuckle and says, "and thank you" -- then makes his escape, as if fearing inevitable questions about it may come. The Other Band was The Velvet Underground.... more >>
Added: 20 Oct 07
THE ROLLING STONES LIVE IN CHICAGO (2002): Men of Stone
From the back row of Chicago's United Centre, about four storeys above the stage, Mick Jagger - not the biggest of men anyway - is the size of a matchstick held at arm's length.But even without his roadmap features projected on the screen behind him, this is undeniable Mick. He struts'n'thrusts across the stage and still possesses that animal sexuality he learned from watching Tina Turner... more >>
Added: 20 Oct 07
JOHN FOGERTY INTERVIEWED (2005): The Long Road Home
In an airless room backstage at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre after the concert, Australian promoter and entrepreneur Michael Gudinski is buzzing. "Wasn't that bloody fantastic?" he says to no one in particular. "I want that set list," and he reaches for his phone. Minutes later a guy appears at the door with it. Gudinski scans the 20 or so songs then says, "Only... more >>
Added: 13 Oct 07
BOB DYLAN, AND DA PENNEBAKER INTERVIEWED (2007). Looking back on Bob
Fortysomething years ago the New York filmmaker DA Pennebaker received an offer he couldn’t refuse -- and which would subsequently define the genre of rock documentaries, rockumentaries if you will. The phone call came from Albert Grossman, the most important manager in music at the time after the Beatles’ Brian Epstein. Grossman -- who later managed Janis Joplin, Todd Rundgren... more >>
Added: 19 Aug 07
STEVIE NICKS OF FLEETWOOD MAC INTERVIEWED (2006): Actually, not such a gypsy queen
Stevie Nicks -- the fairie queen singer in Fleetwood Mac -- is in a plush Melbourne hotel room ready to go off to another soundcheck. In a few days she will perform her ethereal songs with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, but "the waiting" -- as her old friend Tom Petty once offered, and with whom she sang on the memorable Stop Draggin' My Hear Around-- is "the hardest... more >>
Added: 17 Aug 07
DAVID CROSBY AND STEPHEN STILLS INTERVIEWED (2007): Survivors' stories
The life of 65-year old David Crosby is an open book. In fact, it is two open books. In the late 80s Crosby wrote his autobiography Long Time Gone which, in compelling detail, outlined his career from a Greenwich Village folk singer to being a founding member of the Byrds, his friendships with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, being fired from the Byrds and forming Crosby, Still and Nash... more >>
Added: 14 Aug 07
JIMMY WEBB INTERVIEWED (2005). The songwriter's songwriter
When Jimmy Webb, one of the most sophisticated and successful songwriters of his generation, speaks of making music it is like eavesdropping on genius. And that is what he is considered to be by his peers and those who have followed his long career. Before he was 21 Webb had already written some of pop’s most enduring songs, including By The Time I Get To Phoenix (which Frank Sinatra... more >>
Added: 13 Aug 07
ELVIS COSTELLO, THE EARLY CAREER CONSIDERED: Anger is an energy
At the time of this writing -- 30 years on from his spectacular debut album My Aim is True, released at the height of the UK punk era -- Elvis Costello's most recent albums (four in less than three years) have been as follows: Il Sogno, a classical album with the London Symphony Orchestra written for a ballet; Piano Jazz with 89-year old jazz pianist Marian McPartland; My Flame Burns Blue, a... more >>
Added: 10 Aug 07
PERE UBU'S DAVID THOMAS INTERVIEWED (1999). Fools rush out
The bare facts in any encyclopaedia of rock can't even approach what Pere Ubu out of Cleveland in the late 70s have been about. They once described themselves as the sound of things falling apart. That was close.To hear frontman David Thomas tell it however they are the mainstream and everyone else has deviated."Rock music from the 50s to the 70s was a straight line of growing complexity... more >>
Added: 7 Aug 07
TIGI NESS INTERVIEWED (2003): From street warrior to natural mystic
The high-rise skyline shimmers in the summer heat beyond the faded iron roofs of Auckland's inner-city suburbs. Tigi Ness sits on the back porch of his Grey Lynn home, in the foreground a tended and productive garden, far beyond those gleaming towers of greed.At 47, Ness is the patriarch of Aotearoa reggae. A Rastafarian for 20 years, the years allow him to smile at his own mis-steps on life's... more >>
Added: 2 Aug 07 
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