Interviews, overviews, critical essays and extended music reviews

IT'S A HARD, HARD RAIN AGAIN (2025): And the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’

17 Jul 2025 | 2 min read | 1

On August 5 1945, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by the world's first atomic bomb used in a military context. Three days later Nagasaki was hit. The Manhattan Project had become an awful reality, at the cost of over 200,000 lives in an instant, mostly civilians. It was a “lest we forget” moment for the planet. But some did forget. Immediately. The... > Read more

FRANCOISE HARDY RECALLED (2025): Les chansons pour les jeunesse

14 Jul 2025 | 3 min read | 1

Sometimes music just comes into your life and you can never remember exactly how or why it arrived. So it is with the debut album by French singer Francoise Hardy which came out in her motherland in late '62, a copy of which came into my possession somehow shortly thereafter. I seem to recall it being around at the same time as I was pinning up Beatles posters and images of... > Read more

Les temps de l'amour

THE RETURN AGAIN OF TAMI NEILSON (2025): Even cowgirls get the blues

14 Jul 2025 | 3 min read

In the past few years Tami Neilson must have wondered frequently what gods she had offended. She had moved to New Zealand from Canada (although her natural musical home was the America of Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash and country music). She'd been part of the touring family band in the US but here started at ground zero in her career and rebuilt from modest beginnings. Over time and superb... > Read more

You're Gonna Fall

MICHAEL DeGREVE AND L.A. SOFT ROCK (2025): Echoes of the Canyon

14 Jul 2025 | 1 min read

Just two decades late, in 1989 Los Angeles' Michael DeGreve recorded his album Gypsy's Lament with a crew of supportive stars: David Lindley, Graham Nash, Randy Meisner, famed session musician Leland Sklar and more. Largely out of place in the late Eighties, his breezy singer-songwriter style was closer to the soft rock of 1969 and the likes of John Denver's summershine optimism.... > Read more

Daughter of the Wind

LORDE'S ALBUM, VIRGIN (2025): Released, reviled, revered

9 Jul 2025 | 2 min read

Anyone looking for this country's dark underbelly need only consider social media comments about Lorde's new album. Some are vile, many simply stupid (“she's a wacko”), others shameful and a few telling: “I would rather listen to my 60's music.” From the tenor of many, a significant number of women among them, in the absence of former PM Jacinda Ardern, Lorde –... > Read more

Shapeshifter

THE SYRIAN CASSETTE ARCHIVE (2022): Taped and bound

7 Jul 2025 | 1 min read

Despite the conspiracy idiots, people posting photos of dinner or their dog and the usual “me living my best life” photos, Facebook is useful for some things. A couple of years ago someone posted a link to the Syrian Cassette Archive which is a project to preserve to music of that beleaguered nation which had appeared on cassette in the years before we associated the country with... > Read more

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, TRACKED DOWN AGAIN (2025): The Boss gets synthy and loopy

30 Jun 2025 | 4 min read

When Bob Dylan released the 1985 Biograph box set -- where he mixed alternative versions, rarities, unreleased songs and live material -- he stuck a marker in the ground which dared others to do the same. Most artists, even of his age at the time, wouldn't have quite that much material available, and not of that quality. Six years later he changed the game again with his Bootleg Series... > Read more

Blind Spot

THE NEO-FOLKIE BOHOS OF THE NINETIES: Talking New York City

30 Jun 2025 | 5 min read

In the early Nineties – three decades after the original urban folk movement in Downtown – there was a whole new neo-boho scene in New York. Michelle Shocked was just the first and copped the publicity but behind here were Kirk Kelly, Roger Manning and Cindy Lee Berryhill -- all of whom dressed like fashionable alternative-Eighties types (black jeans), played like early Bob... > Read more

Cindy Lee Berryhill: Damn, I Wish I Were A Man

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' (2025): Goodbye to Brian and Sly

29 Jun 2025 | 2 min read

As news helicopters swirled overhead, demonstrators and troops faced off and smoke rose over Los Angeles, California became the focus of world attention last week. It seemed bleakly ironic that two musicians who helped define the promise and dream of the Golden State should die within days of each other. In very different ways Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, both 82, had shaped popular... > Read more

THE RENEGADES, REDISCOVERED (2025): What might have bin

23 Jun 2025 | 2 min read

Of all the bands who have carried the name The Renegades down the decades -- some moderately well-known and most probably only languishing in the memory of the members -- the British group from the Sixties is among the more interesting. They weren't that well known in their own country – a brief flicker in 1964 with their rejigging of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody as Hungarian Mod... > Read more

Thirteen Women

THE SHARP SARACENO AND THE MYSTERIOUS MARKETTS: Tales from the farce side

23 Jun 2025 | 4 min read

After the accountants took over what used to be called the entertainment business, there was less room for "real characters". Perhaps it was a good thing to get the Mafia out of the music business (for that story you should read Tommy James' autobiography Me, the Mob and the Music), but those larger than life people -- cigar chomping, money juggling and often opportunists at the... > Read more

Out of Limits

TWO EXPERIMENTALISTS WALK INTO A STUDIO . . .(2025): Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe get Lateral and Luminal

23 Jun 2025 | 2 min read

It never takes much for Elsewhere to be interested in an album with Brian Eno's name attached. Over the years we have essayed his innovative work in that decade after he left Roxy Music. And right up to his more recent albums. In the Seventies however he released a series of studio-crafted, influential left-field albums redefining the possibilities of pop. Even at this early stage he... > Read more

Suddenly

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

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

Absolute Elsewhere