Absolute Elsewhere
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KIWI PSYCHE-ROCK AND POP RESURRECTED (2018): Do you think you're groovy?
11 Nov 2018 | 3 min read
Once again compilation enthusiast Grant Gillanders trawls the vaults, magazines and his very large contact book to bring another couple of installments of his usefully annotated collections of New Zealand music from a time when men's hair and collars were longer and bell-bottom trousers were de rigueur for both sexes. His on-going A Day in My Mind's Mind psychedelic rock series reaches... > Read more
LEW PRYME REMEMBERED, AT AUDIOCULTURE (2018): The silver Sixties star with a secret
10 Nov 2018 | 1 min read
It’s a measure of the popularity of singer Lew Pryme in the mid 1960s that he should appear in the John O’Shea directed music/comedy movie Don’t Let It Get You alongside Howard Morrison, the young Kiri Te Kanawa, the Quin Tikis, Herma Keil and then-hot Australian singer Normie Rowe. Pryme – with his chiselled looks, wide smile and bleached-silver hair swished back... > Read more
TAMA RENATA REMEMBERED, AT AUDIOCULTURE (2018): Guitar Warrior
7 Nov 2018 | 1 min read
Directed by Lee Tamahori, the opening scene of the 1994 film Once Were Warriors is among very few viscerally powerful sequences in New Zealand cinema. The camera lingers on a picturesque scene of Aotearoa New Zealand scenery of a river and mountains … then pans down to reveal it is just a power company billboard beside a motorway slicing through urban blight. As much as its visual... > Read more
BOB DYLAN: MORE BLOOD, MORE TRACKS, THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 14 (2018): Songs blowing around his skull
5 Nov 2018 | 7 min read | 1
When David called Kevin on a freezing night in Minneapolis just after Christmas 1974 he had an unusual request. He was looking for a small-bodied Martin acoustic guitar and he thought Kevin, a brakeman on the railroad and part-time musician, may be able to help. Kevin, a guitarist, called his friend Chris who had a guitar shop in the northern district of Dinkytown and, even though he... > Read more
You're A Big Girl Now (take 2)
HORST STUNZNER OF THE SAMOAN SURF RIDERS INTERVIEWED (2018): Fresh off the boat and into the studio
14 Oct 2018 | 7 min read | 1
To hear 84-year old Horst Stunzner tell it, the recording session in 1964 took place somewhere just off Queen St in Auckland. The group was in and out quickly, he expected there might be a single come of it and as far as he remembers little if any money changed hands. “Rudolf and Hugo might have signed something,” he recalls, “but the rest of us never saw any contract, and... > Read more
Tiligiligi (Medley)
THE ZOMBIES: ODESSEY AND ORACLE, REVISITED (2018): Still casting its strange spell(ing)
12 Oct 2018 | 4 min read
In this 50thanniversary year of big albums, many getting expanded reissue – Beggar's Banquet, the White Album, Are You Experienced and others – there will inevitably be those whose anniversary flies by largely unacknowledged. Like the Zombies' mostly wonderful, enduring and enjoyably misspelled Odessey and Oracle. To be fair though, O&O largely went... > Read more
Beechwood Park
HARRY LYON INTERVIEWED (2018): The solo Sailor goes back To The Sea
8 Oct 2018 | 9 min read
Harry Lyon laughs. Yes, he confirms, at 68 he just released his debut solo album. But let's allow him some leeway here, after all he has been kinda busy since he first started getting paid for gigs way back in the mid-Sixties. There was the long-running Hello Sailor which he co-founded with Dave McArtney and which soon enough included Graham Brazier, both now... > Read more
Luxury Cargo
THE ROLLING STONES; BEGGAR'S BANQUET REISSUED AT 50 (2018): A walking clothesline of styles
3 Oct 2018 | 8 min read | 2
Half a century ago the Rolling Stones released their Beggar's Banquet album, widely considered a return-to-form after the debacle of their shapeless attempt at psychedelia on the largely unlistenable Their Satanic Majesties Request of December 1967, released some six months after the Beatles' Sgt Peppers. In a cover which referred to Pepper's glowing hippie-era colours, Satanic Majesties... > Read more
No Expectations
MARTIN PHILLIPPS INTERVIEWED (2018): A lone guide cutting through snow
10 Sep 2018 | 12 min read | 1
Martin Phillipps takes the guitar off his knee so he can talk about, among many other things, the Chills' new album Snow Bound. But he immediately admits that he can leave such instruments around gathering dust. He can be “lazy” and “gave up on being a technically proficient musician a long time ago,” says the man who wrote sublime songs like Heavenly Pop Hit.... > Read more
Time to Atone
BOB DYLAN: A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO . . . (2018): The man in the irony mask
27 Aug 2018 | 5 min read
Given that his singles rarely troubled the charts, one of his few videos which gets any airtime these days is 35 years old (Jokerman) and his albums have long since ceased to appeal to a younger demographic, how might you explain Bob Dylan to anyone under 30, someone who might have only become aware of him in the 21stcentury when he was already in his 60s? Maybe you can't but you could try... > Read more
HA THE UNCLEAR; A VIDEO ESSAY (2018): Somewhere inside the outside in
1 Aug 2018 | 1 min read
With their new album Invisible Lines due out on Friday (August 3) we thought it timely to flick through the backpages of Ha the Unclear's videos just to offer a reminder of what was and what they are now. And the conclusion is that -- then and now -- they are a quirky, melodically powerful, lyrically interesting and utterly fascinating pop-rock band with their own take on . . . well,... > Read more
PHIL SEYMOUR REMEMBERED (2018): Here then and gone yesterday . . .
18 Jun 2018 | 6 min read
If Phil Seymour – who came of age with the Beatles and the British Invasion – has been watching carefully enough he might have read the signs: the Spencer Davis Group, The Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann . . . The clues were all there. These were Sixties bands which took their name from someone other than the singer/frontman. Spencer Davis... > Read more
Precious To Me
TAMI NEILSON, A VIDEO ESSAY (2018): Putting on the style
25 May 2018 | 1 min read
With the release of a sixth album under own name – Sassafrass! – attention once again turns to the award-winning Tami Neilson who has redefined country, brassy soul, rockabilly and rock'n'roll gospel into an amalgam which is distinct and her own. Her story has been well-canvased in the past, how the Canadian-born singer was part of their traveling family band (sharing bills with... > Read more
NEIL YOUNG CONSIDERED (2018): Every Now, and Then
14 May 2018 | 3 min read
For a long time – perhaps from even as far back as '75 – Neil Young earned the right to do exactly what he wants . . . because he just does exactly what he wants. By '75 he has moved from folk-rock to folk and rock as distinct genres as well as finding a place (sometimes very briefly) in Crosby Stills And Nash's close harmonies or going straight down to the darkest reaches with... > Read more
BOB DYLAN: THE RETURN OF THE TROUBADOUR (2018): Still on the road, heading for another joint . . .
14 May 2018 | 2 min read
Without even bothering to do a fact-check it's a safe bet that Bob Dylan's last album would have been one of the poorest-selling of his long career: It was Triplicate, a three album set of him singing standards and followed two prior single albums along the same lines, the wonderful Shadows in the Night and the somewhat lesser Fallen Angels. Even the most patient fans who accepted Shadows... > Read more
THE DURUTTI COLUMN CONSIDERED (2018): Not exactly living the life of Reilly
30 Apr 2018 | 8 min read
For most people the punk period of the late Seventies in Britain was an exciting – but short – time. As Mark E Smith of the Fall put it bluntly in his memoir-cum-rant Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith in 2008: “I've never aligned myself to the whole punk thing. To me, punk is and was a quick statement. That's why most of the main players couldn't handle the... > Read more
Messidor (from LC, 1981)
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING, A VIDEO ESSAY (2018): Of speed, in space and under the ground
18 Apr 2018 | 2 min read
Over three albums, a batch of EPs, impressive videos and exciting live shows, Britain's Public Service Broadcasting have created a niche for themselves between the worlds of dance, electronica, rock, art music and audio-visual spectacular. New Zealand audiences caught them at a Womad in 2015 but each of their albums -- and the attendant videos -- are mesmersing home-play delights.... > Read more
HAMMOND GAMBLE INTERVIEWED (2018): Of another career in the same town
16 Apr 2018 | 10 min read | 2
Trees are down, power is out everywhere, the temperature has dropped and our house is freezing. So when a conversation with Hammond Gamble is relocated to the warmth of Galbraith's Ale House in Eden Terrace it's very welcome. The purpose of meeting Gamble – one of this country's finest blues-rock guitarists, an earthy singer and a much underrated and Silver Scroll-winning songwriter... > Read more
EILEN JEWELL INTERVIEWED (2018): Got them weird, oldtime blues again
13 Apr 2018 | 6 min read
The weather’s often like this at this time, raining and cold,”says Eilen Jewell from her hometown of Boise, Idaho. “It’s the only time of year that it rains, because of the desert here, and most of that rain happens during this month.” Not that she, her drummer/husband Jason Beek, their young daughter Mavis and bandmates Jerry Miller (guitar) and bassist... > Read more
You'll Be Mine
PERE UBU REISSUED, PART FOUR (2018): The long and grinding road
6 Apr 2018 | 4 min read
Facts first: This final installment of the vinyl reissue of the singular Pere Ubu's extensive catalogue in four-album box sets comes under the title Les Haricots Sont Pas Sales 1987-1991. And it is somewhat chronologically confusing for fan-followers, because this record collection lies between two of the earlier reissue sets: The Architecture of Language 1979-1982 and Drive, He Said... > Read more