THE MAGAZINE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Elsewhere is a concept and a place, and for many years Graham Reid has been going there for his wide angle travels, writing, music review columns and interviews with writers, musicians and artists.
Elsewhere is an ever-expanding on-line magazine for people curious about new music, different travel, interesting arts and much more. This site is dedicated to the diversity and possibilities of Elsewhere. It is an equal opportunity enjoyer. Subscribe here (it's free) for a weekly newsletter. Welcome . . .
Latest posts
RONNIE: RONNIE SUNDIN with WILL JESS and his JESTERS, CONSIDERED (1960)
19 Oct 2020 | 3 min read
Although we are right to celebrate our musical pioneers and predecessors, there is serious danger of falling into the myth of exceptionalism, the belief that New Zealand artists were all pretty great and those obscure albums being resurrected from secondhand stores are lost works of art. Well let's be frank, some artists were mediocre and very few albums from the Sixties... > Read more
Various Artists: The Land of Sensations and Delights (White Whale/Southbound)
19 Oct 2020 | 2 min read
Although some people didn't get it, the Turtles hit Elenore in '68 was pisstake. Pushed by their record company to replicate the success of Happy Together, the band simply rewrote it with inane lyrics like “Elenore, gee, I think you're swell, you really do me well. You're my pride and joy, et cetera . . .”. It appeared on their album The Turtles Present... > Read more
The Phoenix Foundation: Friend Ship (Universal/digital outlets)
19 Oct 2020 | 2 min read
“Five years have past; five summers with the length of five long winters! And again I hear” . . . the beguiling and welcome sound of Phoenix Foundation with their soft murmur. In the five years since GUYD (Give Up Your Dreams), the various members of this often enchanting Wellington ensemble have been involved in other projects, but to these ears few are as... > Read more
Josephine Foster: No Harm Done (Fire/digital outlets)
19 Oct 2020 | 1 min read
To paraphrase the old joke about Yoko Ono: “Josephine Foster has a voice that comes once in a lifetime. Unfortunately it came in ours.” Now that is cruel and unfair, but the fact is American singer-songwriter Foster's wobbly and warbling voice – which we have written about previously – is going to be a bridge too far for most. The... > Read more
AOTEAROA MUSIC AWARDS 2020 NOMINEES: I'd like to thank . . .
18 Oct 2020 | 5 min read
Now to be known as the Aotearoa Music Awards (AMA, same initials as the American Music Awards unfortunately), the annual awards for New Zealand music of all persuasions -- from alternative to children's music, from te reo Maori to cover design -- will take place this year on Sunday November 15. Obviously things have been a little confused and uncertain of late in these... > Read more
Neon Quaver: Human Time Ocean Spirit (neonquaver)
18 Oct 2020 | 2 min read
In the Eighties, the Cotton Cub in Auckland run by the late Pat Shaw – usually at the now long-gone Mandalay in Newmarket – was a place for unexpected jazz concerts. Shaw would bring through old bluesmen like Sammy Price and Alton Purnell, the jazz-fusion Sanguma from Papua New Guinea, Ellis Marsalis from New Orleans (father to Wynton and Branford) and many more.... > Read more
GRAMSCI, REVIEWED (2020): Sobering thoughts for staging a show
17 Oct 2020 | 4 min read
Many weeks ago during the second Covid lockdown in Auckland, Paul McLaney – mainman behind his Gramsci project – spoke via Zoom to my third-year music at Auckland university. I first met McLaney at some time in the late Eighties/early Nineties when, as a singer-songwriter under his own name, he launched his extraordinary career which has seen him follow that... > Read more
GUEST MUSICIAN PAUL McLANEY OF GRAMSCI considers the journey to sobriety and the new album Inheritance
12 Oct 2020 | 6 min read
Music and the performance of music are to me a public communion of grace; to share, collectively, in some form of majesty beyond self, of pure surrender and release. Obviously in a post Covid-19 world the luxury of congregation has been temporarily removed from us but Music’s facility to engage multiple minds via the recorded medium means that we can still share and... > Read more
PAUL McCARTNEY: FLAMING PIE, CONSIDERED (1997): The man in the mirror stares himself down
12 Oct 2020 | 5 min read
The Eighties was a tough decade for many who had come to attention in the Sixties: any Best of 80s Bob Dylan compilation is scraping around; singers like Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Dionne Warwick all but disappeared for a while; Van Morrison's album were patchy, the Stones recycled themselves to lesser effect and most people couldn't name a Kinks album in the... > Read more
Julie Lamb Outfit: How Humans Think (julielamb.co.nz/digital outlets)
12 Oct 2020 | 1 min read
As with her 2017 album Ordinary Days under her own name, we again acknowledge Wellingtonian Julie Lamb and the time, effort and artistic presentation of this plain-looking CD which -- when opened out as a quad-fold -- has a pocket containing hand-drawn cards for the lyrics of each of the eight songs, liner note credits and a pop-up cut-out which you should discover for... > Read more
LaVern Baker: Soul on Fire (1953)
12 Oct 2020 | <1 min read
In her long life -- she died in '97 age 67 -- LaVern Baker (born Delores Baker) sang everything from blues -- she started as Little Miss Sharecropper in Chicago -- through soulful ballads, jazz, fairly vacuous pop (see clip), creditable covers of Bessie Smith . . . And this minor classic included in the soundtrack to the '87 film Angel Heart and which could have brought... > Read more
Tobin Sprout: Empty Horses (Fire/Southbound/digital outlets)
11 Oct 2020 | <1 min read
Photo-realist painter Tobin Sprout is perhaps best known for being a key member of Ohio's Guided by Voices alongside Robert Pollard but also ran a solo music career, especially after he left the band for more than a decade in the late Nineties and even when the group re-formed. Now in his mid-60s, his weary voice suits his chosen idiom of lowkey, downbeat Americana and... > Read more
MORE PROVOCATIONS FROM RATTLE (2020): Cutting edge to centre-frame
10 Oct 2020 | 4 min read
As Rattle approaches its 30thanniversary with something around 160 releases of albums in handsome covers, it is enjoyably impossible to categorise easily what the label does. The shorthand would say Rattle – with more than 40 music award nominations, almost half of which were winners -- captures interesting music from Aotearoa New Zealand, be it contemporary art... > Read more
JOHN LENNON AT 80 (2020): Lennon's on sale . . . again!
9 Oct 2020 | 1 min read
The well of John Lennon's solo music is drained dry. In the 40 years since, Double Fantasy, the last album released in his lifetime (with half the songs by Yoko Ono), there has been the posthumous Milk and Honey (further sessions with Ono for an intended album of that title apparently), any number of compilations, the Acoustic album in 2004, the 4-CD box set Lennon... > Read more
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Dead Famous People: “Harry” (Fire Records/Southbound/digital outlets)
9 Oct 2020 | 1 min read
Perhaps more spoken about than heard, Donna Savage's band Dead Famous People tapped into a shamelessly enjoyable mainline of power pop in the late Eighties which was as uplifting as it was melodic. But after their emergence and swept up a little by a brief Flying Nun association, they left for London where the Brits – other than John Peel – were largely... > Read more
Dog
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Cooper-Moore and Stephen Gauci: Conversations, Vol 1 (577 Records/digital outlets)
7 Oct 2020 | 1 min read
No one would say free jazz is easy and perhaps the case can be made that it should by definition be difficult. It is here, because with this duo the listener just has to go with it, clinging on as the players follow their instincts into furious flights of saxophone passages and stentorian piano or down blind alleys, creating dialogues or competing... > Read more
THE BUCKINGHAMS: KIND OF A DRAG, CONSIDERED (1967): The British Invasion from the Windy City
5 Oct 2020 | 3 min read
With their ever-so British name, Carnaby St attire and fashionably Beatles-style hair – not to mention their upbeat pop – the Buckinghams should have been contenders in the mid-late Sixties. And in a modest way they were: they enjoyed two top 20 hits here (Kind of a Drag in '67, Susan the following year) and five in the US (those two, plus Don't You Care,... > Read more
RHINOCEROS: SATIN CHICKENS, CONSIDERED (1969): Made like the Monkees, and not built to last
2 Oct 2020 | 6 min read
If a supergroup is made of people who have had acclaimed prior form, what do we call a group which did nothing at the time but whose members went on to bigger and better things? Is that like a preparatorygroup? We've encountered their likes before in bands such as the Funky Kings, but Rhinoceros out of LA also have an interesting second-tier backstory... > Read more
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE HIGHLY PERSONAL QUESTIONNAIRE: Darren Watson
30 Sep 2020 | 6 min read | 1
From Elsewhere's side of the fence, we'd say few musicians in recent memory have worked harder promoting their album than Darren Watson. Almost undeterred by the Covid lockdowns which meant the cancellation of shows and interviews, Watson took whatever opportunity he could, got onto social media, released live performances and . . . Basically just kept doing the work... > Read more
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE HIGHLY PERSONAL QUESTIONNAIRE: Sola Rosa (Andrew Spraggon)
28 Sep 2020 | 4 min read
As Sola Rosa, Andrew Spraggon has delivered a series of crafted albums which have edged towards soul-funk but sometimes have pulled back to more mellow moods. However his new album Chasing the Sun is a fully retro-fitted and classy channeling of classic late Sixties/early Seventies soul-jazz/soul-funk with a series of guest vocalists and horn players who really... > Read more