Absolute Elsewhere
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
BEATLES FOR SALE, AGAIN: The release of Anthology 1 (London, 1995)
20 Feb 2008 | 7 min read
The release of any Beatles album was always an occasion, so 25 years after the band broke up, the plush ambience of the Lancaster Room in the Savoy Hotel doesn’t seem inappropriate for the launch of The Beatles' Anthology 1, a collection of out-takes and unreleased material, the first of a series of three double CDs that effectively mops up the Mop Tops. But with 200 invited... > Read more
BOB GRUEN PHOTOGRAPHER, INTERVIEWED (1998): The man who shot John Lennon, many times
19 Feb 2008 | 3 min read
Photographer Bob Gruen is affable and chatty but clearly on autopilot. His stories, good though they are, are worn smooth by repetition. But to his credit he repeats them with enthusiasm and they are received by the various media representatives with equal pleasure. And despite this having the feel of the “I danced with a man who danced with a woman who danced with the Prince of... > Read more
THE BEATLES AND APPLE RECORDS: Western communism and rotten at the core
15 Feb 2008 | 2 min read
The Beatles faced a screaming audience for the last time at San Francisco's Candlestick Park in August 1966. After that they retired as a live band. It was inevitable. As Ringo Starr said of their touring years: "It was the worst time and the best time of my life. The best time because we played a lot of good music. The worst time ... it was like 24 hours a day without a break: press,... > Read more
JOHN LENNON, IMAGINE RECONSIDERED (2000): Peace in our time?
14 Feb 2008 | 4 min read
Some people just don't get it, do they? Wouldn't you love to meet those gearing up to pay an expected $4.5 million at on-line auction for the piano on which John Lennon wrote Imagine? Imagine no possessions, huh? Of course, the Famous White Piano will command top dollar because Imagine was recently voted the best song ever written or something, and in Britain was used to welcome the new... > Read more
YOKO ONO: Back with the blueprint (2001) and re-disc-covered (2007)
14 Feb 2008 | 5 min read
Some years ago at another posthumous John Lennon album launch, a journalist asked Yoko Ono why she hadn't released an album of her own in quite some while. "There seemed no great call for it," she laughed. True enough. Whether it be her extraordinary primal screaming and emotional venting, her un-nuanced feminist polemics or naive childlike songs, there was never a groundswell of... > Read more
THE BEATLES IN AMERICA 1964: Songs of innocence -- and experience (DVD reviewed, 2004)
14 Feb 2008 | 8 min read | 1
In the beginning there were just the four of them. Then we learned of the fifth Beatle. Depending on who you talked to it was producer George Martin, New York DJ Murray the K, or the dumped drummer Pete Best. Then we heard about their Hamburg days and the dead Beatle Stu Sutcliffe, their manager Brian Epstein (below) and the rest of the supporting cast. As their legend grew the... > Read more
ERIC BURDON INTERVIEWED 2001: The songs of a survivor
6 Feb 2008 | 6 min read
Eric Burdon is alive and ... well, the fact that this founder member of Britain's legendary 60s r'n'b garage band The Animals is alive is enough to be happy with, let alone that he sounds well. Speaking from his California home in Joshua Tree, Burdon -- croaky of voice and lucid, if tangential, in conversation -- sounds extremely well for a man aged 60 who has been singing throat-abusing blues... > Read more
ROBERT SMITH OF THE CURE INTERVIEWED (2001): Hits and the one that missed out
6 Feb 2008 | 5 min read
He's had a day of interviews yet few people have asked Robert Smith of the Cure the obvious. Something to do with the age of those asking the questions, he laughs. The question is simple: The Cure have a Greatest Hits album out - not their first such collection - but there's a notable omission.So Robert, was it the political climate, pressure from the record company, or are you just so sick of... > Read more
BUDDY GUY INTERVIEWED (2001): One of the last men standing
6 Feb 2008 | 6 min read
Oddly enough, this is not the best time to talk to 64-year-old bluesman Buddy Guy - despite him having released Sweet Tea, one of the finest albums in his long career.It is days after the death of his contemporary John Lee Hooker and Guy is understandably philosophical rather than keen to talk up his new album which was, uncharacteristically for this seminal figure in Chicago blues, recorded in... > Read more
JOHN PAUL JONES OF LED ZEPPELIN INTERVIEWED (2003): The songs remain reissued
6 Feb 2008 | 13 min read
They might have been the biggest band in the world at the time, but they were openly despised, ignored or condemned by critics. Even later, after the shouting had died and a clearer perspective was possible, Dave Marsh, one of America's most venerated rock writers, couldn't resist another attack.He damned one of their classic songs as "the most vulgar record in [rock history]" and... > Read more
BILL PAYNE OF LITTLE FEAT INTERVIEWED (2001): Feat don't fail me now
6 Feb 2008 | 5 min read | 1
Bringing up the "famous dead member" is never easy when you are talking to a band. It can seem ghoulish, is most often unnecessary and can result in suddenly finding yourself alone in the room or that telephone tone which says you've just been hung up on, don't bother calling back. When the American band Little Feat lost their founder, main songwriter and slide guitarist Lowell... > Read more
XTC's ANDY PARTRIDGE INTERVIEWED: A man in the middle ages (1999)
6 Feb 2008 | 6 min read
The last time XTC had a new album out, Oasis didn't. In fact Oasis didn't even exist back when Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory dropped their assured 1992 album Nonsuch on a world which simply looked the other way. Since then these veterans of the 70s punk-new wave wars have been on strike (their deal with Virgin ensured the company would make money, but they wouldn't) and... > Read more
RANDY NEWMAN INTERVIEWED (1999): What's the Buzz?
6 Feb 2008 | 5 min read
Randy Newman is a problem in popular culture, a man misplaced into the rock textbooks simply because there's nowhere else to put him. He's part of rock culture by association (his albums are reviewed in rock magazines) but more correctly he's an ironic, acerbic songwriter who has populated his songs with an extraordinary collection of bigots, misfits, racists and cynics for three decades.He... > Read more
TIM AND JEFF BUCKLEY: Their short musical legacy (2004)
6 Feb 2008 | 4 min read
The shoreline beneath the Memphis Visitors Centre -- with its massive statues of Elvis and BB King -- isn't that appealing. There's a rocky bank scattered with litter leading down to Wolf River, a sliver of thick water between the city and Mud Island, renowned for its swirling eddies and unpredictable undercurrents. You wouldn't want to swim in dirty and dangerous Wolf River, least of all... > Read more
NORAH JONES INTERVIEWED (2002 and 2003) AND ALBUM REVIEWS: Great Expectations -- and then some
6 Feb 2008 | 29 min read
Somebody up there obviously likes Norah Jones and blessed her with extraordinary good looks. Those are her cheekbones and ruby lips which have been replicated in their thousands and grace the cover of her album Come Away With Me. And just in case her looks alone weren't enough to draw attention to this 22-year-old singer/pianist, that somebody up there also blessed her with musical... > Read more
PAUL SIMON INTERVIEWED (2000) The Attraction of Opposites
5 Feb 2008 | 11 min read
Paul Simon calls from New York 15 minutes early, polite and apologetic. He needs to put the kids to bed -- his three children aged 7, 5 and 2 with his third wife, 34-year-old singer-songwriter Edie Brickell -- and read them stories. Could he call back in maybe an hour and a quarter?And, as you might expect from the man's almost obsessive, meticulously crafted music, punctually 75 minutes... > Read more
PATTI SMITH INTERVIEWED (1998): On the road again
5 Feb 2008 | 19 min read
The first phone call to Patti Smith at home in New York catches her weary and breathless. She's apologetic but disarmingly courteous. It's been quite a few years since I've been called "sir" and never, that I recall, by someone from rock'n'roll culture. But it is also an inconvenient time to talk she says. She's been working all day, it's now 5.30 pm and she wants to do... > Read more
STEVE EARLE INTERVIEWS (2004, 2002): A hero on the homefront . . . and relevant album reviews
5 Feb 2008 | 25 min read
By 2004, Steve Earle could reflect on a career and life which had been one of the most extraordinary in American music. He crashed into country music with his 1986 classic rockin' country album Guitar Town then spun through a drug-fuelled downward spiral which earned him a prison term in the early 90s. He emerged a stronger man, vocal advocate of free speech persuasively arguing against... > Read more
BEATLEMANIA IN '64: Good times and bad politics
5 Feb 2008 | 4 min read
Some photographs are deafening. Consider the images of American kids screaming at the Beatles in late 1964. Even now, more than four decades later, those who remember the times or have seen the footage will hear an inexplicable noise as if it were alive and ear-shattering right now. Beatlemania from this historical distance -- a world of moshpits, gangsta rap killings and bellicose stadium... > Read more
The sound of Beatlemania
YOKO ONO INTERVIEWED, THE TOURING LENNON ART EXHIBITION (1997) In his own draw
5 Feb 2008 | 7 min read
For anyone who has only experienced her singing -- which slews wildly between a visceral scream of anguish and an orgasmic howl -- Yoko Ono’s remarkably quiet speaking voice, barely above a whisper, comes as a surprise. And this week as she talks about art and music from her home in New York it is aggravated by a cold and initially reduced to being almost inaudible. “I’ll... > Read more