Absolute Elsewhere
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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
Van Morrison: Remembering Now (digital outlets)
16 Jun 2025 | 2 min read | 1
It's likely that the vast majority of people who were there for Van Morrison in his first couple of decades have long since parted company: too many album, quite a number a bit indifferent then in recent times his unpopular political statements about Covid mandates, government oppression . . . At least he had new targets because his constant complains about record companies (which dated... > Read more
Memories and Visions
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