Absolute Elsewhere
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TIFFANY INTERVIEWED (1988): I Think She's Alone Now
21 Nov 2010 | 9 min read
It's a pretty ordinary kind of success story by American showbiz standards, nothing to get too excited about. It's your standard tale of a girl of average talent from the suburbs north of Los Angeles who, by astute management and a radio craving for the Next Big Thing, gets to sell four million copies of her debut album, earn the contempt of "serious" rock listeners and wind up... > Read more
Tiffany: I Think We're Alone Now
POWER POP: God's gift to guitars
14 Nov 2010 | 7 min read
The perfect pop gig, no doubt about it. A tidy 40 minutes of three minute songs accompanied by lots of bouncing up and down -- then off. And back for a four-song encore. By my reckoning, that's the playing time of two sides of vinyl and an encore of EP dimensions. Perfect. And this was pop -- power pop more correctly – and Sweden’s Wannadies, rocking the roof off... > Read more
The Wannadies: Might Be Stars
GEORGE BENSON INTERVIEWED (2010): King for the night
14 Nov 2010 | 3 min read
Just the thought of it amuses George Benson and he lets go a low chuckle: he'd recently found a tape of himself at age seven playing ukulele. “This was before I started playing guitar, and I was singing Mona Lisa. You know, I think you'll hear that because we'll play a bit of that before our concert. It'll knock your socks off. “You think, 'That cannot be George... > Read more
TICKET, HALF-REMEMBERED (2010): Hair today and gone until tomorrow
14 Nov 2010 | 3 min read
Two things I remember clearly about Ticket: their hair was long and their songs were even longer. And back in the early 70s those were two very good things indeed. In truth I don't remember much else – definitely not the names of the long gone Auckland clubs I saw them at – but they were at that Elton John show at Western Springs in late '71 because I dragged some... > Read more
Ticket: Music Man
THE BEATLES; LIVE IN 95: All back to the Beeb
1 Nov 2010 | 6 min read
It was a curious thing, but in '95 the Beatles released a new single, Baby It’s You, which came on seven-inch vinyl with extra tracks (an EP no less!) and there was an accompanying video. The Beatles in ’95'? What could they teach us 30 years after the event? Quite a lot, actually. While it was easy to be cynical about the huge Christmas-time success of the... > Read more
The Beatles: Keep Your Hands Off My Baby
NOEL GALLAGHER OF OASIS INTERVIEWED (1998): Just being here, now
1 Nov 2010 | 7 min read
The trademark cockiness and dismissive directness is still there, but at times this also sounds like a very different Noel Gallagher, a man more circumspect and, although still expletive-heavy, sounding less prone to shooting from the lip. A little over two years ago we met before an Oasis gig in Leicester and he was garrulous, quick-witted, supremely confident and media-savvy. World... > Read more
Oasis: My Big Mouth (from Be Here Now)
PAT BOONE INTERVIEWED (1995): Still the same Mr Nice Guy
31 Oct 2010 | 5 min read
If conventional wisdom and the rock'n'roll history books are to be believed, Pat Boone was one of the villains - simply because he was so nice. He was the square when his contemporaries were the sneering, hip-swinging Elvis, the outrageous Little Richard and the adult, knowing Chuck Berry. Boone – who turned down a film role early in his career because he would have had to... > Read more
Pat Boone: Wish You Were here Buddy (1966)
PAUL WELLER: THE MODFATHER (2010); The ways forward
25 Oct 2010 | 5 min read | 1
Some careers get too long to be easily digestible. Pity those doing the Paul McCartney reissue. His solo career in pop-rock – we leave aside his classical projects and The Fireman – stretches to almost 20 albums, and about twice that many of you include Wings and live albums. Even Paul Weller, who started his recording career late in that decade when McCartney stepped... > Read more
Paul Weller: No Tears to Cry (from Wake Up the Nation, 2010)
LEONARD COHEN PROFILED: Life of a ladies' man
25 Oct 2010 | 10 min read
Even the writer Pico Iyer, who knows him better than most, concedes Leonard Cohen – so melancholy he used to be referred to as “a one man Joy Division” – presents a problem. "He is for most of us,” Iyer wrote in Sun After Dark, “a figure of the dark, sitting alone sometime after midnight and exploring the harsh truths of suffering and... > Read more
Leonard Cohen: In My Secret Life (from Ten New Songs)
MATTHEW SWEET INTERVIEWED (1993): It should be a more Sweet world
25 Oct 2010 | 6 min read
Matthew Sweet comes with a double handicap: the unthreatening “Matthew” and then . . . “Sweet” Hmm, very soft, very sweet. It isn’t a promising start and he made life doubly difficult by calling his last album Girlfriend and putting a lovely furwrapped, teenage Tuesday Weld on the cover. Wow, Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend ? Would you go into your local... > Read more
Matthew Sweet: I Thought I Knew You (from Goodfriend promo only album, 1993)
AFRIKA BAMBAATAA INTERVIEWED (1988): The shape of things hip-hop and political to come?
18 Oct 2010 | 6 min read
He answers the phone exactly as you might expect - a booming, stentorian tone like some Old Testament prophet and commands: “Speak.” We speak . . . and the voice changes into the quiet tones of unassuming politeness as he patiently explains his political philosophy -- and there's a lot of it. For this is Afrika Bambaataa, head of the Zulu Nation, an organisation of New... > Read more
Time Zone (Afrika Bambaataa, Bill Laswell, John Lydon): World Destruction, Industrial Remix (1985)
GRAHAM BRAZIER INTERVIEWED (2004): The Brazier still burning
13 Oct 2010 | 6 min read
Graham Brazier's house has a boisterous doorbell named Kitty, a large platinum retriever which barks enthusiastically on the first knock, bounces at you on entry and then - after we have made our way downstairs to the kitchen-cum-library - promptly falls asleep under the old wooden dining table. Brazier's 102-year-old, double-brick terrace house at the top of Chinaman's Hill is a... > Read more
SOLOMON BURKE INTERVIEWED (2002): The rock'n'soul preacherman
11 Oct 2010 | 8 min read | 1
Just exactly when soul music disappeared off radio and out of people's consciousness is hard to pinpoint. Soul - born in the church and taken to the street by Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and many others in the Sixties -- simply evaporated by the early 70s. Marvin, Otis and Sam were gone, and some say the golden age ended in April '68 with the murder of Martin Luther... > Read more
JOHN LENNON, REMASTERED AND RECONSIDERED (2010):
9 Oct 2010 | 6 min read | 1
In what would be one of his final interviews around the release of Double Fantasy in late 1980, John Lennon said – as a married, settled man at 40 with a young child – he was interested in seeing if it was possible to have a life centred around a family and a child and still be an artist. “Could the family be the inspiration of art, instead of drinking or drugs or... > Read more
John Lennon: Woman (from Stripped Down)
GANG OF FOUR, A 100 FLOWERS BLOOM: Would you like politics with that?
7 Oct 2010 | 1 min read
The ideas and ideologies which came in the late 70s with punk, new wave and anarcho-pop threw up some extraordinary bands, not the least of which was Gang of Four, an outfit from Leeds whose 1979 debut Entertainment! brought together minimalist punk-funk bass and drums with guitarist Andy Gill's switchblade guitar and howling feedback. Oh, and over the top were Jon King's Marxist lyrics... > Read more
Gang of Four: Damaged Goods (1978)
PINK MARTINI, THOMAS LAUDERDALE INTERVIEWED (2010): Sweet and sophisticated
27 Sep 2010 | 4 min read
Yes it's true, says Thomas Lauderdale, he was deeply involved in politics in his adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon and had worked in a number of civic positions. “I would love at some point to run for mayor. I'd have to write the tell-all book before I do of course,” laughs this man who knows all the drag clubs, strip joints and high camp hangouts around town.... > Read more
Pink Martini: Over the Valley
JAH WOBBLE INTERVIEWED (1996): Spiritual traveller stay-at-home
27 Sep 2010 | 8 min read
The message had a kind of road-to-Damascus ring to it: “Jah will meet you at Bethnal Green tube station next to the ticket counter.” And there he is: Jah in jeans and a sweater. Not quite what Rastafarians have in mind. But, accidentally or not, this child of Stepney’s working class streets has chosen an appropriate nom-de-rock because, once behind the doors of his... > Read more
THE VIVID FESTIVAL, SYDNEY 2010: The laughin' Lou and lovely Laurie show
25 Sep 2010 | 5 min read
“This'll be my second old rocker today,” says the photographer. “I just did Peter Garrett this morning.” We're in a small foyer of the Sydney Opera House waiting for the married couple of “old rocker” Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, who have co-curated the Vivid Live component of the annual Vivid festival. There's a sense of palpable anticipation... > Read more
Boris: Attention Please
LIL BAND OF GOLD (2010): The journey of swamp pop from past to present
20 Sep 2010 | 6 min read
C.C. Adcock has done a lot of living in his 34 years, from playing in bands around his hometown of Lafayette in southern Louisiana when barely into his teens to making a glam-metal noise in LA, then backing the late Bo Diddley and Zydeco legend Clifton Chenier to hanging out with the undead . . . Yes, these days Adcock's music is used in the steamy swamp drama True Blood to conjure up... > Read more
Lil Band o Gold: Teardrops
DEE DEE RAMONE INTERVIEWED (1998): Life in the grim lane
19 Sep 2010 | 8 min read
First, there is a moral here, honest. But there's a lot of drugs to get through first. So, let’s set the scene: the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty Third, New York City, for decades home to the talented and the tragic. Within these thick walls Arthur Miller wrote three novels, a plaque outside acknowledges Dylan Thomas “from here sailed out to die” and upstairs Arthur C.... > Read more