Interviews, overviews, critical essays and extended music reviews

JULIAN REID: SOUNDS AND VISION (2025): The album as travelogue

1 Jul 2025 | 1 min read

Expat songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Julian Reid has lived in Britain for more than two decades but in the past five years his work has taken him to through Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, Pakistan and India, Canada and the United States. And elsewhere for holiday downtime. He has become a well-known photographer but he has always written music. We have featured one self-titled... > Read more

Raised

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

MID-YEAR REPORT: THE TOP 25 OF '25 (2025): Lend me your ears . . .

30 Jun 2025 | 5 min read | 1

It's the middle of the year and progress cards are being sent out. Here Elsewhere singles out excellence from the many dozens of albums we have written about so far this year. But note, these are only chosen from what we have actually reviewed: we heard more but didn't write about them. And we also didn't hear albums which are doubtless your favourites from the past six months.... > Read more

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

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

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

Absolute Elsewhere