ocean colour scene

This beautifully shot, career-spanning, feature-length doco leaves a lot of threads hanging for those who didn't follow every nuance of the relationship between the four members of Brit-pop's Blur, and you certainly get the impression that guitarist Graham Coxon -- often a blitzkrieg of noise on-stage but nervous, reticent and slightly precious...
> music/2915/blur-no-distance-left-to-run-emi-double-dvd-set/

Damon Albarn has had the more visible profile outside of Blur -- Gorillaz, his Mali Music album, The Good, The Bad and The Queen -- but for the band’s former guitarist Coxon (who left after Think Tank of 03) The Spinning Top is his seventh solo outing and extends his interest in Anglofolk of the Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Richard...
> music/2699/graham-coxon-the-spinning-top-transgressive/

It was one of the saddest days I can recall, and yet it had started out so well in Birmingham, a place where I had been drawn to interview the Britpop band Ocean Colour Scene in their hometown. It was 1998 I think. OCS never really made an impact in New Zealand, which was a pity because the night I saw them they were spectacularly good,...
> mybackpages/777/ocean-colour-scene-here-in-my-heart/

A couple of months ago I was invited to give a lecture to Auckland Uni music students about a contemporary songwriter of my choosing whose catalogue of work was interesting and worth studying.I picked Paul Weller on strength of this quote from him about his forthcoming album: "It takes in soul, rock'n'roll, there are some folky moments,...
> music/1719/best-of-elsewhere-2008-paul-weller-22-dreams-shock/

Last year's debut album Costello Music by this rowdy Glaswegian three-piece didn't make it to Elsewhere because, frankly, I didn't rate it as highly as some. I thought it had many of the problems and few of the advantages that attend a debut. But this follow-up is something else.If Costello Music was firmly in the pop-rock camp with an ear for...
> music/1714/the-fratellis-here-we-stand-island/

This album isn't here because this is the 27-year old son of the later Warren (although the surname did attract attention to it) but because it is so . . . Well, if you know his dad's stuff this is surprising. There's nothing to say Jordan should have followed his dad's path (Warren was famously Mr Bad Example we should remind ourselves)....
> music/1589/jordan-zevon-insides-out-new-west-elite/

By the time he came to releasing albums under his own name in the early 90s, Paul Weller had already had two separate careers: first in the Jam and then the Style Council. If the Jam had been quintessentially English and took its references from the Who, the Small Faces and Ray Davies as much as Mod culture and the rage of the punk years,...
> essentialelsewhere/798/paul-weller-wild-wood-1994/

So UB40 were back for another New Zealand tour. Well pardon my lack of enthusiasm. It's not that, like most critics, I don't have much time for their MOR reggae. I don't, but with me it's much more personal . . It was my misfortune to spend a day with the band in Birmingham many, many years ago. But the memory is etched into my brain....
> mybackpages/759/ub40-just-another-labour-of-love/