Interviews, overviews, critical essays and extended music reviews

MICK, MAC and LU (2021): Jagger, McCartney and Lucinda Williams

8 May 2021 | 2 min read

Steve Coogan does a passable parody of Mick Jagger, but Jagger is his own best imitator as his new video Eazy Sleazy with Dave Grohl proves. He rolls his eyes, that yawping mouth yelps out the tumbling lyrics like a Jagger impersonator. Ostensibly about coming out of lockdown, the thrashy song is as ambiguous as Street Fighting Man of 53 years ago. Seemingly satirical... > Read more

RINGO ON RECORD IN THE SEVENTIES (2021): The rise and fall of a Starr

2 May 2021 | 9 min read

Even before their protracted divorce, the various Beatles had been releasing albums under their own names. The first was Paul McCartney who, with considerable help from George Martin, wrote the soundtrack to the 1966 film The Family Way. George Harrison did the uneven but sometimes interesting soundtrack to the '68 Joe Massot film Wonderwall (released on Apple as... > Read more

JOHN LENNON, PLASTIC ONO BAND, REMIXED AND EXPANDED (2021): The dream may be over, but it begins again

24 Apr 2021 | 7 min read

Although Paul McCartney announced the dissolution of the Beatles in a self-written sheet accompanying his eponymous solo album in April 1970 (“Q. Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles? A. No”), it was John Lennon who, that December on the release of his Plastic Ono Band album,unequivocally closed the account on the group which had dominated and defined... > Read more

Isolation (demo)

ANDREW BROUGH, REMEMBERED (2021): The sparkle that shone too briefly

19 Apr 2021 | 3 min read

The first time I met Andrew Brough to talk to at any length was in mid 1988 when Straitjackets Fits were in The Lab Studios with producer Terry Moore and recording their debut album Hail. We'd passed a few quick greetings in the past, notably when I smuggled my 16-year old son into the Gluepot so he could see a band I believed would conquer the world. Yes, I thought they were that good.... > Read more

Save My Life, by Bike

RECOMMENDED VINYL: OMC's How Bizarre (2021): Wanna know the rest, buy the album

12 Apr 2021 | 4 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one . . . . In his excellent 2015 memoir-cum-biography-cum social history How Bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the Song That Stormed the World, Fuemana-champion Simon Grigg, with clear eyes, wrote candidly of the problems with Pauly Fuemana who had died in January 2010. Pauly was difficult... > Read more

DIANNE SWANN, INTERVIEWED (2021): The journey is also the destination

10 Apr 2021 | 22 min read

Above our heads the speakers are playing some uninterrupted selection of classic rock: Zeppelin, Elton, Eagles and all the usual suspects. This is familiar music calculated not to offend the patrons of the excellent Beer Spot in Morningside. But on this Wednesday lunchtime there is only Dianne Swann and me. We're here to have a beer or two and talk about her new album The War on... > Read more

Reel You In

TEEKS, IN HIS TIME (2021): Soul searching sounds

3 Apr 2021 | 2 min read

From the Yandall Sisters, Māori showbands and Mark Williams through to Aaradhna repurposing Motown and the R'n'B of Vince Harder, Black America's music has long been a reference point for local artists, notably soulful Māori and Pasifika singers. The sound of spiritual yearning but secular concerns – that short distance between pleading to the Lord or to a lover – is the... > Read more

TEEKS, A VIDEO ESSAY (2021): Soul star rising

22 Mar 2021 | <1 min read

If there is one long-awaited debut album from a New Zealand artist it is that by Teeks – Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui) – whose 2017 debut EP The Grapefruit Skies announced a major talent. His writing and vocal style brought together gospel language (Wash Over Me) and classic 60s soul (If Only, Never Be Apart) . You believed every... > Read more

ESTÈRE THEN AND NOW, AN OVERVIEW (2021): For the Jung at heart

19 Mar 2021 | 4 min read

Although the 2018 album My Design, On Others' Lives by Wellington's Estère didn't make much of a dent in public consciousness or the chart for albums by local artists – just two weeks on, in at 10 dropping to 15 – anyone who heard it recognised an extraordinary production by one of our most acute, enjoyable and ambitiously unconstrained artists. ... > Read more

Mad About Your Sea

ROBERT SCOTT ON THE CLEAN'S MISTER POP (2021): It's pop, mister. But different

17 Mar 2021 | 2 min read

As we noted when the Clean's David Kilgour walked us through track-by-track of the band's Unknown Country of 1996, the US label Merge now has the rights to Clean's complete catalogue they have decided to issue two of the band's albums – Unknown Country and Mister Pop (2009) -- on vinyl for the first time. Elsewhere recently wrote a lengthy reconsideration of Unknown Country and... > Read more

DAVID KILGOUR ON THE CLEAN'S UNKNOWN COUNTRY (2021): Track by track down the sidetrack

15 Mar 2021 | 2 min read

With the US label Merge now having the rights to Clean's complete catalogue they have decided to issue two of the band's albums – Unknown Country (1996) and Mister Pop (2009) on vinyl for the first time. Elsewhere recently wrote a lengthy reconsideration of Unknown Country, an album which didn't find much favour with critics and some fans, but now band member David Kilgour walks... > Read more

THE CLEAN, UNKNOWN COUNTRY, REVISITED (2021): The roads less taken

10 Mar 2021 | 4 min read

When the Clean's 1996 album Unknown Country arrived it clearly wasn't the album Clean critics, schooled on their early Eighties output and the more recent Vehicle, wanted. Many thought it a hodge-podge of diverse ideas from musicians with short-concentration spans – 18 songs in 45 minutes may have been a pointer – and that was true. Sort of. About five years before... > Read more

Whisk

MADISON BEER, AN EARLY OVERVIEW (2021): Another young pretender?

6 Mar 2021 | 3 min read

While it's true 21-year old Madison Beer from New York does not make music for Elsewhere's ears, she is of considerable interest for all kinds of reasons. And her long overdue debut album Life Support – arriving eight years after her debut single and three on from her debut EP – isn't bad at all . . . . by the current, downbeat self-centred and languidly sensual pop standards.... > Read more

BOB DYLAN IN 1970 (2021): A self-portrait at the end of the decade he defined, but why?

28 Feb 2021 | 5 min read | 1

For the remaining few who care about Bob Dylan in reissues – refracted portraits of the artist as a younger man? – the newly released triple-CD of previously unreleased rehearsals and sessions in 1970 will be . . Well, you'd like to say the set – under the simple title, 1970 – contains material which is seminal, reveals unexpected depths, that those sessions... > Read more

I Went to See the Gypsy (take 2)

MIRIAM CLANCY, AT AUDIOCULTURE (2021): The survivor thriving

27 Feb 2021 | 1 min read

The words – sung quietly over a hushed and haunting backdrop – speak about dead-end suburbs, tinny houses, boys getting young girls pregnant, and that place where “there’s always nothing to do”. The song is ‘Ghost Town’ on Miriam Clancy’s 2009 Magnetic album and as an encapsulation of lives on New Zealand’s margins it is... > Read more

THE WEATHER STATION, AN OVERVIEW (2021): Long distance outlook, fine

26 Feb 2021 | 3 min read

As if to telegraph a new beginning, the 2017 album by the Weather Station out of Toronto was simply titled, The Weather Station. By that point however the Weather Station – the vehicle for singer and songwriter Tamara Lindeman – had already released four albums and two EPs. However, you always had the sense Lindeman was on a journey from the folk of her early days to... > Read more

FORTENSKY, INTRODUCED (2021): Musical travels during lockdown

17 Feb 2021 | 3 min read

The name will be unfamiliar – unless you followed the marriages of Elizabeth Taylor. Larry Fortensky was her seventh and final husband: they were married at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch in October '91 after she met him – a construction worker – in rehab in '88. They were divorced five years later. She died in 2011, he died in 2016. None of which has anything... > Read more

Las Vegas

THE BEATLES AS BORROWERS (2021): Just let me hear that . . .

16 Feb 2021 | <1 min read

As original as they were, the Beatles – especially in their early days – drank from some very deep wells of rock'n'roll, country and black American soul. As we noted in What the Beatles Knew By '62, they had an enormous repertoire of covers in their armory, so when they came to write originals they knew how songs worked and could mix'n'match styles to create something of their... > Read more

St GERMAIN, RETHOUGHT (2021): 20 YEARS ON AND STILL TRAVELING

13 Feb 2021 | 2 min read

In the early 2000s, sitting in his office six floors above midtown Manhattan, Bruce Lundvall had every reason to be happy. As head of Blue Note Records – the company which defined the sound of classic jazz and the look in the 50s and 60s with artists like John Coltrane, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock – he'd rescued the label, which had faltered in the 70s, to make it the... > Read more

AN OFF-RAMP OF THOKEI TAPES (2021): Spools of sound from home and abroad

7 Feb 2021 | 3 min read

Elsewhere has previously written about Thokei Tapes out of Germany, an independent company specialising in cassette tapes of New Zealand artists not on the main motorways of music, or those on the road who have turned off for a while. That has meant compilations of obscurities and rarities by artists such as Chris Knox, Robert Scott (Bats, Clean), David Yetton (JPSE, Stereo Bus), Magick... > Read more

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

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