Absolute Elsewhere
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
THE STROKES (2001): The future, the past or just passing through?
12 May 2010 | 11 min read
These are indeed worrying times. Steel birds fall from the sky, tall towers tumble to earth, rumours of war is the way of it if you are an innocent citizen, and the end of the world is apparently upon us. Nostradamus warned us of these times. Jezzus, I wished he'd warned us about the Strokes as well. In case you've missed the current media beat-up from the UK, the Strokes -- a... > Read more
The Strokes: Soma (from Is This It)
GORDON RAPHAEL, PRODUCER OF THE STROKES, INTERVIEWED (2004): The sky cries wary
12 May 2010 | 9 min read
Gordon Raphael’s small and shabby studio rooms near London’s classy Docklands have all the obligatory paraphernalia of most recording studios: a deceased lava lamp, Iggy Pop and Hendrix albums stacked up, and Houses of the Holy on a battered turntable. One wall is covered by a swathe of material with an eye-abusing design located somewhere between early Sixties pop art and... > Read more
The Strokes: The Modern Age
MIKE EDWARDS OF JESUS JONES INTERVIEWED (1993): Right here, right now . . . back then
10 May 2010 | 10 min read
Mike Edwards has got a big mouth - and without going too far into the anatomically impossible, it’s his big mouth that gets right up people’s noses. And right here, right now in Birmingham, he’s been getting up the noses of the British music press - which admittedly isn’t hard to do and probably quite worthwhile. A quick glance at the British music... > Read more
Jesus Jones: The Devil You Know (from Perverse)
KINKY FRIEDMAN INTERVIEWED (1994): The art of irritation
3 May 2010 | 5 min read
You have to admire Kinky Friedman. With very little effort he manages to irritate just about everybody. He did in the early 70s when he fronted his country music band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, who parlayed broadly satirical political and country songs and willfully provocative anti-feminist rants such as Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed. And he’s... > Read more
Kinky Friedman: Ride 'Em Jewboy
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN LIVE IN SYDNEY (2003): Normal transmission will be resumed shortly
1 May 2010 | 7 min read
Bruce Springsteen won't forget his show at Sydney's Cricket Ground last Saturday. He said so repeatedly and meant it. Losing power in a show can never be discounted as a possibility. But losing it twice would suggest alarmingly bad luck or poor technical support. Losing your stadium rock thump four times in the first hour, however? Well, that makes a show memorable. The first... > Read more
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER ... REVISITED?: Stu Cook interviewed (2002)
30 Apr 2010 | 4 min read
What's in a name? Well, a lengthy court case if the name you chose is Creedence Clearwater Revisited. We'll get to the litigation, but first let's rewind to Creedence Clearwater Revival, the band which ruled the singles charts for four phenomenal years from the end of the Sixties. With songs penned by John Fogerty they single-handedly invented what was called "swamp rock".... > Read more
DAVE GROHL INTERVIEWED (1995): Post-grunge fun
27 Apr 2010 | 8 min read
Through the swing doors, down the stairs, then hard right. Follow the corridor, then left, right and left again, then . . . umm. You’re in a scene from This Is Spinal Tap. Where, in this maze of corridors under the BBC Studios in Maida Vale, London, is Studio Four where the Foo Fighters are recording? But another labyrinthine 100 metres and there it is, red light on as the... > Read more
Foo Fighters: Big Me
FRANK TURNER: AUDIO INTERVIEW (2010): The documentarian of politics and the soul
22 Apr 2010 | <1 min read
British singer-songwriter Frank Turner moves between many worlds with ease: he plays to hardcore audiences (and started his career in such bands) but also works the folk circuit. He also plays huge festivals and small clubs. His music roams across politics (Thatcher Fucked the Kids), wry humour (I Don't Care What You Did in Your Gap Year) and social obsrvation("once an honest man could... > Read more
Frank Turner: audio interview. In Brisbane: May 21, 2010
NICK CAVE, THE SEEDY MIDDLE YEARS: From Tender Prey to Henry's Dream
19 Apr 2010 | 4 min read | 1
In the early Eighties the safe money would have been on Nick Cave -- then battling various demons and his elusive muse -- not making it much further. Yet here is Cave, now in his early 50s, dutifully going to the office every day to write songs, novels, screenplays and soundtracks, and curating arts festivals . . . And seeing his back-catalogue with his longtime band/co-conspirators the Bad... > Read more
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: The Ship Song (from The Good Son)
NATALIE MERCHANT INTERVIEWED 2010: The child inside
16 Apr 2010 | 5 min read
At age 10, Nathalia Crane was an acclaimed poet and the subject of great controversy, not least for the sexual innuendo of The Janitor’s Boy in which she wrote of lustful feelings and how she would “dutifully shiver in bed”. “Her poems came to attention when she was published in American newspapers,“ says singer Natalie Merchant, who has included a musical... > Read more
ARTISAN GUNS INTERVIEWED (2010): Heart, and art, on their sleeves
16 Apr 2010 | 6 min read
The guys in the young Auckland band Artisan Guns remind me it was four years ago that I first saw them, in this very same room -- the boardroom of EMI in Auckland where the harbour views can be so distracting. When they played four years ago -- an acoustic set to maybe a dozen people on a beer-drinking Friday after work -- the room hushed and everyone was impressed by these high school... > Read more
Artisan Guns: Brand New game (from the EP Hearts)
JOAN ARMTRADING INTERVIEWED (2008): Into and out of the blues
2 Apr 2010 | 4 min read
Joan Armatrading makes an embarrassing admission for someone whose most recent album Into the Blues debuted at number one on the Billboard blues charts: she doesn’t listen to the blues and while some interviewers have noted the influence of John Lee Hooker in a couple of tracks she couldn’t identify a Hooker song if she was asked to. “Yes, some people have said John... > Read more
MARILYN MANSON INTERVIEWED (1999): The spook circus, cont'd
29 Mar 2010 | 6 min read
The curious thing about Marilyn Manson isn't the pancake makeup, the alarming contact lenses or even the cover of his latest album, Mechanical Animals, where he's some kind of naked androgynous character looking like a leftover from the cover shoot for David Bowie's 1974 Diamond Dogs album. No, the curious thing is that the music - which we must remind ourselves is actually what MM does in... > Read more
CAROLE KING AND JAMES TAYLOR INTERVIEWED (2010): Attitudes and platitudes
22 Mar 2010 | 5 min read
Carole King and James Taylor hardly need an introduction. For 40 years -- more in King’s case, she started writing the music for Gerry Goffin‘s lyrics in the early 60s -- their songs and lives have been public property. No classic hits station (or student flat in the early 70s) could be without a copy of Taylor’s Sweet Baby James (1970) or Kings’ Tapestry of the... > Read more
Carole King: Medley (live, 2005)
JIMI HENDRIX AND ALAN DOUGLAS: The fireball and the keeper of the flame
8 Mar 2010 | 6 min read
The name Alan Douglas raises mixed feelings among Jimi Hendrix fans. By a series of canny and right-place, right-time manoeuvres after the death of Hendrix in 1970, Douglas -- a former jazz producer, and a friend and adviser to Hendrix in his final years -- ended up as the curator of the Hendrix legacy. While others, notably the many claiming to be the late guitarist’s manager,... > Read more
Jimi Hendrix: Catfish Blues
_cover.jpg)
JIMI HENDRIX: THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE BOX SET (2000): Get experienced, but differently
6 Mar 2010 | 2 min read
It should be easy to get together a thorough Jimi Hendrix collection. After all, his recording career lasted fewer than four years. Presumably, all you'd need would be his exceptional debut album Are You Experienced, the follow-up Axis: Bold As Love and the expansive, Essential Elsewhere double album Electric Ladyland. The Smash Hits collection would fill a few gaps, although only the... > Read more
Killing Floor (Paris, 1966)
BRIAN AUGER INTERVIEWED (2002): Still on fire, still rollin down the road
1 Mar 2010 | 3 min read | 1
How's this as a measure of a man's modesty: it is only in the closing overs of a lengthy conversation that Brian Auger mentions in passing he plays on an album which is nominated for a Grammy in the contemporary jazz category. And so, three decades after he took the sound of his rocking and swinging Hammond organ into the vanguard of jazz fusion, he is still on the cutting edge.... > Read more
JAKOB DYLAN INTERVIEWED (2002): Out of his father's long shadow
1 Mar 2010 | 5 min read
You gotta feel sorry for the guy. He's 32 years of age, is now on his fourth album with his band the Wallflowers, and still people want to talk about what he politely calls "the peripheral stuff". You can guess what that might be when the guy's name is Jakob Dylan and he was the youngest of five children growing up with their dad Bob. But the Wallflowers have a 10-year... > Read more
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, WHAT GOES ON (BOX SET, 1993): The velvet blueprint
20 Feb 2010 | 4 min read
Most reviewers of this well-packaged, 57-track, three-disc set can’t help but comment on the overwrought essay by Clinton Walker who starts with superlatives, then works up to a screech. He sets up the customary and needless rock-crit comparisons (VU more street-damaged than the Beatles. So?) to advance the case that the Velvets were the most important band ever in rock –... > Read more
The Velvet Underground: Extemporisation ("melody laughter"?) November 1966
LOU REED AND PATTI SMITH IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Patent pending
15 Feb 2010 | 3 min read
When those archetypal New Yorkers Lou Reed and Patti Smith both released albums in the early days of 2000, it allowed anyone still interested in their careers the chance to consider their relative positions as they entered a new decade -- in fact a new century -- about 25 years (and more) on from their career defining best work. Neither of them seemed especially interested in what we might... > Read more