Absolute Elsewhere
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THE ROAD TO THE REVOLVER (2022): Say you want a reinvention . . .
5 Nov 2022 | 3 min read | 2
It's entirely possible that less than a year before they released Revolver, the album many consider a more enduring landmark album than Sgt. Pepper which followed it, the Beatles might simply have called it all off. Exactly a year before Revolver they had released the Help! album to coincide with their knockabout film of the same name – a kind of James Bond spoof as much as a Beatles... > Read more
Paperback Writer (backing track takes I and 2)
LIL' CHIEF RECORDS: TWO DECADES OF MUSIC AND ALBUM ART (2022): Cigarettes and cybernetics
18 Oct 2022 | 3 min read
Auckland's Lil' Chief label first came to attention 20 years ago with the debut album by the Brunettes, Holding Hands Feeding Ducks and the paired release of the Tokey Tones' Caterpillar and Butterfly albums. This was music which was poised, cool, enjoyably effete and well crafted. It was also music which ran against the tenor of the times in local music when garageband rock (the D4, the... > Read more
Bedroom Exotica, the Tokey Tones (2003)
THE BEATLES, REVOLVER REVISITED (2022): Death and taxes
16 Oct 2022 | 3 min read | 2
There will always be those who announce, “I don't like the Beatles”. But that's like saying, “I don't like America”. Which America don't you like? Which Beatles? The moptop Fab Four, the baroque Beatles of Sgt Pepper, the stripped-back songwriting experimentalists, the slick MOR band of the Abbey Road period . . . As someone clever noted, saying you don't... > Read more
Taxman
THE SYRIAN CASSETTE ARCHIVE (2022): Taped and bound
9 Oct 2022 | 1 min read
Despite the conspiracy idiots, people posting photos of dinner or their dog and the usual “me living my best life” photos, Facebook is useful for some things. Recently someone posted a link to the Syrian Cassette Archive which is a project to preserve to music of that beleaguered nation which had appeared on cassette in the years before we associated the country with... > Read more
FRAZEY FORD, INTERVIEWED (2022): When the work stopped, work started
9 Oct 2022 | 6 min read
Gabriola, a small island with a permanent population of fewer than 5000, is a 25 minute ferry trip from downtown Vancouver. This is where singer-songwriter Frazey Ford, who came to attention with the Canadian folk-country band The Be Good Tanyas in the early 2000s but has been on a soul music-inspired solo career for more than a decade, retreats “to... > Read more
THE BEATLES. IN MY LIFE, CONSTRUCTED (2022): The baroque way forward
10 Sep 2022 | 1 min read
When John Lennon wrote Help! in early 1965 (“and now my life has changed in oh so many ways, my independence seems to vanish in the haze”) he was feeling trapped by Beatlemania and the fame he had sought. As he would always say, it was true what he said in the lyrics, it was cry for help. And with that one song, more than any other to that point, he began to realise the... > Read more
SHAYNE CARTER, DIMMER AND A STAR TURN (2021): Groove is in its heart
10 Sep 2022 | 2 min read | 1
About seven or eight years ago when Shayne Carter and I were sharing caregiver duties with Chris Knox – who had had a debilitating stroke in 2009 – our paths would sometimes cross. On one particular afternoon he was very engaged in telling me about Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear – Gaye's acrimonious divorce album – of 1978. I knew of it more than I knew its contents,... > Read more
All the Way to Her
JACKSON BROWNE, INTERVIEWED (2022): The world still in motion
28 Aug 2022 | 8 min read
A year ago when American singer-songwriter Jackson Browne released his 15thstudio album Downhill from Everywhere, the British rock magazine Uncut proclaimed it “as insightful, melodic and artfully measured as anything Browne has done in the past 25 years”. Despite that assessment – Mojo according it four stars – the album didn't sell anything like the quantities of... > Read more
ORNETTE COLEMAN, INTERVIEWED (1996): The gentle genial genius in conversation
22 Aug 2022 | 27 min read | 3
This interview took place on 26 April '96 in the studio of photographer Austin Trevitt, 241 West 36th Street, in the same midtown building as one of Ornette's studios. . For a man who's had his lights punched out, was reviled by critics and audiences, often ignored and -- in latter years -- belatedly recognised as a genius, Ornette Coleman is remarkably slight. Even with his hat on... > Read more
Turnaround (from Sound Grammar, 2006)
ALEC BATHGATE OF TALL DWARFS, INTERVIEWED (2022): Something has happened.
13 Aug 2022 | 14 min read
Alec Bathgate – one half of this country's most idiosyncratic alt.pop group Tall Dwarfs with Chris Knox – is charmingly bashful when talking about the project which has occupied him for almost two years. It is Unravelled: 1981 – 2002, a loosely chronological box set of 55 Tall Dwarf songs spread over eight sides of vinyl. It arrives in a slipcase with a 20-page booklet of... > Read more
Cruising with Cochran
AUGUST 18 1962, WHEN THEY BECAME THE BEATLES (2022): One night in Port Sunlight
24 Jul 2022 | 3 min read
There had been Beatles before August 18 1962, of course. But on that night at Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, south of the River Mersey, they became the Beatles as we know them. That was the night, before a small but enthusiastic audience, Ringo Starr made his official debut with the group. Two days before Peter Best had been fired. Ringo had met them in Hamburg and in March had... > Read more
EMILY MEET MATTHEW, MATTHEW MEET EMILY (2022): The poet mystic and the pop musician
12 Jul 2022 | 2 min read
At a time when local culture is increasingly self-obsessed and seduced by the idea of our exceptionalism, Matthew Bannister – swimming against the current tide – looks out the window rather than in the mirror. His “lockdown album” as One Man Bannister, The Saddest Noise, isn't some morose bedroom pop born of isolation but rather an exploration of the works of... > Read more
TALL DWARFS, REISSUED (2022): At last, something's going to happen
10 Jul 2022 | 2 min read
After his debilitating stroke in 2009, Chris Knox slowly fell from public consciousness: credible book proposals covering his artwork languished for lack of funding; the reissue of his solo albums and those with Alec Bathgate as Tall Dwarfs fell over . . . And Knox – unable to make music, who couldn't paint until he retrained himself to use his left hand – became more spoken... > Read more
The Severed Head of Julio
1972: THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS (2022). Half century ago in the telescope
4 Jul 2022 | 3 min read
Occasionally -- out of boredom, to wind people up or simply make quick money from a book -- a writer will settle on year and proclaim it the most important in popular music. It's an enjoyable but pointless exercise because if they chose, say, 1964 for the the excitement of the British Invasion many will immediately point out the following year was much more interesting musically with albums... > Read more
Madman Across the Water
THE TALE OF TWO SONGS (2022): Stranger things and strangers meeting
27 Jun 2022 | 2 min read
Stranger things have happened on the music charts, but when Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) recently appeared in the new season of the Netflix series Stranger Things, the song suddenly topped the charts, 37 years after it first appeared. The urgently dramatic electro-pop of Running captures the character Max's desperation, her fear and impending death in a psychotic... > Read more
CONOR McPHERSON INTERVIEWED (2022): Taking Bob Dylan to Broadway doubters
26 Jun 2022 | 5 min read
Even Conor McPherson, writer and director of the award-winning musical Girl From The North Country, acknowledges it's a hard one for people to get their heads around. “I can truthfully say,” he says from his home in Dublin, “if someone had said, 'Hey, you want to see a Bob Dylan musical?' my response would've been 'No'. “So I recognise it's a tough sell... > Read more
THE RETURN OF THE ROCK'N'ROLL STAR (2022): The unbearable triteness of Liam
20 Jun 2022 | 2 min read
In his candid and funny Rod, The Autobiography published a decade ago, Rod Stewart reflected on his wayward 1980s. “I never thought in this period that the 'being a rock star' aspect of being a rock star was beside the point, or even something I needed to apologise for. “If I hadn't considered the drinking/shagging/carrying-on to be at least... > Read more
CAPITAL THEATRE, INTRODUCED (2022): From ancient to the present, a rock epic
19 Jun 2022 | 7 min read
In early 2021 I was approached by the manager of an Auckland band I had never heard of. Not surprising, they hadn't played anywhere and at that point had released nothing. But they were an intriguing prospect because their debut album – which they had funded themselves – was a concept album and had been produced by the top LA producer Mike Clink, best known for work with Guns N'... > Read more
MID-YEAR REPORT, THE TOP 20 OF (2022): The taste of Elsewhere
17 Jun 2022 | 7 min read | 2
It's the middle of the year and report cards are being sent out. As many of you know, in the first half of this year we were Elsewhere for three months (Sweden, England, Scotland and Singapore) and filed a weekly column for the Listener, which appeared the following week as Travels in the Time of Covid (and also travels in the time of Ukraine, rising prices and more!) That meant we had... > Read more
WILCO, THEN AND NOW (2022): What goes around comes around . . . to country
13 Jun 2022 | 2 min read | 1
The idea that genres in popular music are immutable has long been eroded. Even by the mid-Nineties No Depression magazine – which took its name from an 1990 album by the band Uncle Tupelo – had as its remit to cover “alternative country, whatever that is”. No Depression would occasionally consider mainstream country artists but more often bands like Whiskeytown,... > Read more