Interviews, overviews, critical essays and extended music reviews

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO RATSO (2025): Loud, fast, here and gone

13 Jun 2025 | 2 min read

Auckland band Ratso weren't here for a long time, but they were here for a good time. Like a Space-X rocket they were loud, fast and explosive. And then they did explode. It was all over bar the memories of small gigs in confined space where garageband rock is at its best. We reviewed an Auckland gig and bought their limited edition vinyl live album which was very expensive but we... > Read more

Live for Nothing

THE ART OF NOISE (2025): Grecco Romank's subversive sound and visuals

11 Jun 2025 | 2 min read

You have to admire not just the ambition, but the vision of Auckland underground band Grecco Romank: their new album of edgy techno-rock Arts Colony is just one aspect of the culture they are trying to expand, explore and critique. They put it this way: “We're trying to tap into this vein of slop-culture that's being created in the world, that we're inundated with on social media.... > Read more

Bootlicker

LISA MARIE PRESLEY REMEMBERED (2025): A child of her time

2 Jun 2025 | 2 min read | 1

Mercer Ellington did it, so did two of Sinatra's kids Frank Jnr and Nancy. Two Lennon's and George Harrison's son Dhani did it too (in fact every Beatle has a kid who's done it). So did a few Marleys, Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli and Steve Earle's boy Justin Townes. They all went into the family business. If we suspend our scepticism about this and pull back from... > Read more

Soften the Blows

JAPANESE BREAKFAST INTERVIEWED (2025): The woman who fell to Earth

1 Jun 2025 | 1 min read

Few touring musicians would have quite the reading list of Michelle Zauner. But there aren't many like the 36-year old Korean-American of the band Japanese Breakfast. “I'm reading a great book by Jhumpa Lahiri called In Other Words: A Memoir which is about her living in Italy and learning the Italian language,” she says, “and I just read Eve Babitz' Slow Days,... > Read more

Winter in LA

AOTEAROA MUSIC AWARDS 2025: Ake Ake and Onward

31 May 2025 | 7 min read

Every now and again someone will say that awards are a load of crap and that music isn't a competition. Unfortunately, if we are being honest, it is a competition . .. a competition for attention, chart success, listeners an audience and so on. In that harsh reality there are winners and losers. Much like life, really. The very day of this year's Aotearoa Music Awards (AMA) I was... > Read more

PAUL McCARTNEY, MONDAY JUNE 14, 1965: Just another day

26 May 2025 | 1 min read | 2

The more you think about it, the more impressive the Beatles' work ethic becomes. In the three years after the release of their first UK single Love Me Do in October 1962 they recorded five albums of mostly original songs (A Hard Day's Night had 14 originals), made two films – A Hard Day's Night and Help! – and toured constantly. They did BBC radio sessions (a whopping 275... > Read more

FIFTIES ROCK'N'ROLL; LOUD, FAST AND OUT OF CONTROL: Rock 101, The Originators

26 May 2025 | 5 min read

Billy Joel isn't usually cited in the Elsewhere world as an insightful reference, but his feisty We Didn't Start the Fire of the mid-Nineties was a brisk, rocking historical synopsis of our time (JFK, Chernobyl etc) which was referenced a little in Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues chant-poem of three decades previous. However, by starting his countdown of great events from the... > Read more

Wanda Jackson: Let's Have A Party (1958)

THE KITCHEN CINQ REDISCOVERED: Amarillo, California in the Sixties, y'all

19 May 2025 | 2 min read

In their photos, the Kitchen Cinq out of Texas in the mid Sixties don't look entirely promising, like buttoned-down high school seniors who have been given the afternoon off from library duties. And yet . . . The first thing to pique interest in the 2015 28-song compilation When the Rainbow Disappears; A Drama Worthy of The Kitchen Cinq is that this band from Amarillo were on Lee... > Read more

Please Come Back

ROY ORBISON 1960-65: The years of monumental pop

12 May 2025 | 5 min read | 1

Looked at one way, the great Roy Orbison (who died in late '88) had five separate careers, but he only ever changed musical direction once. "The Big O" -- or "the Caruso of Rock" -- as he was known, had long periods away from the spotlight and it would be fair to observe his defining work was done in an exceptional period of creativity which lasted just four years.... > Read more

In Dreams

BLUES MAGOOS, REMEMBERED: The spirit of '66 and pop's psychedelic pioneers

5 May 2025 | 4 min read | 2

Some albums catch a band at a turning point, one foot in the past and the other stepping towards an unknown but promising future. If the Beatles, through exhaustion and wrung out by the constant pressure to produce, had called it a day in late 1965 their legacy would have been easy to distill down: a few joyfully adolescent pop hits, Beatlemania, a classic pop film in A Hard Day's Night . .... > Read more

Tobacco Road

PERE UBU REISSUED, PART ONE (2016): On a thin wire dancing above the abyss

28 Apr 2025 | 6 min read

In his 1974 philosophical narrative Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the American author Robert M. Pirsig writes of being at the home of some friends where there is a constantly dripping tap. “If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet,” he writes. “This made me wonder... > Read more

Thriller!

PETE HAM OF BADFINGER, REMEMBERED: Take a sad song and make it sadder

22 Apr 2025 | 7 min read | 3

Put simply: Pete Ham was one of the singer-songwriters in Badfinger, the British pop band of the late Sixties and early Seventies which enjoyed the patronage of Paul McCartney. He gave them his Come and Get It (used in the Ringo-Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian) on the condition they record it exactly as his demo. They did, it was a hit, and a band was born which always... > Read more

Hurry on Father (demo from the Golders Green album)

BILLY STRINGS, INTERVIEWED (2025): That ol' bluegrass metal boogie

22 Apr 2025 | 2 min read

The boy's life rolled out like a bleak American black'n'white film set in OxyContin County, Kentucky where fiddlers play on the back-porch and fentanyl is the currency. His father died when he was two, his mother remarried but the couple fell prey to meth addiction. The boy left home at 13 and went through his own dependencies. And that could have been where the film reached... > Read more

Dealing Despair

1968: SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: The world on a short fuse

14 Apr 2025 | 19 min read | 2

1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD? "Somehow Sgt Pepper did not stop the war in Vietnam. Somehow it didn't work. Somebody isn't listening" -- David Crosby of Crosby Stills and Nash, 1970 "Rock stars believed that they possessed the latent power to effect political and cultural change: one anthem and the walls of the citadel would crack, like Jericho under... > Read more

CHARLOTTE YATES, ACKNOWLEDGED (2025): Doing it for herself this time

3 Apr 2025 | 2 min read

Singer-songwriter Charlotte Yates is possibly better known for what she has done for others than on her own account. She was the prime mover behind four important albums, Baxter, Tuwhare, Ihimaera and Mansfield for which the writings of those towering figures (James, Hone, Witi and Katherine) were set to music by stellar casts of contemporary musicians, among them Don McGlashan, Mahinarangi... > Read more

The Water's Edge

LUCINDA WILLIAMS, VIC CHESTNUTT AND BUTTERCUP (2025): Anger and tone revisited

31 Mar 2025 | 3 min read

Vic Chestnutt was a gifted singer-songwriter who was much admired by his peers. He had been in a car crash at 18 and was effectively a quadrapilegic although had some small movement in his hands so he could still play simple chords on guitar. His first two albums were produced by Michael Stipe of REM and a fund-raising album for him had his songs covered by Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage,... > Read more

THE FREEWHEELIN' JESSE WELLES (2025): With Bob on his side

24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read

No sooner had Timothée Chalamet been announced as playing the young Bob Dylan in the bio-pic A Complete Unknown than internet naysayers weighed in. The pretty boy from Dune playing Dylan? Willie Wonka as Bob? When the film arrived questions and complaints kept coming. Why was Bob's girlfriend Suze Rotolo renamed Sylvie Russo? (A. Dylan requested the change) Why wasn't... > Read more

Wheel (from Middle)

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO, A TRIBUTE ALBUM: Another look in the art-rock mirror

24 Mar 2025 | 4 min read

Has there even been an album whose cultural influence far outstripped it's commercial impact more than the debut by New York's Velvet Underground? Their 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico – in that famously provocative banana cover by the band's champion and nominal “producer” Andy Warhol (a phallic pink banana revealed when the skin was peeled back) – arrived... > Read more

THE BEAU BRUMMELS' COMPLETE RECORDINGS 1964-1970: Beat-pop out of LA, destination Nashville

17 Mar 2025 | 4 min read | 1

Like their peers, the Beat-era Buckinghams from Chicago, the Beau Brummels out of San Francisco formed in the wake of the British Invasion and adopted the look, style and a name which ensured that they would be mistaken for another great UK pop-rock band. Needless to say they would insist that much of this wasn't deliberate – yeah, like naming yourself after an English Regency dandy... > Read more

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT (2025): The rise and return of Nothing At All!

11 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

In those ancient days before the internet made self-promotion easy and lazy, artists had to create their own audience through live shows. Anticipating the emergence of garageband rock'n'roll bands like the Datsuns, Hellacopters, Von Bondies, Detroit Cobras, Guitar Wolf and others, the Nothing At All! trio out of Auckland's North Shore took their punk-fuelled rock'n'roll to audience through... > Read more

Wide angle reviews, interviews and opinion
on music, travel and the arts by writer Graham Reid

Absolute Elsewhere