Absolute Elsewhere
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TALL DWARFS, RESURRECTED AND REISSUED (2022): In their own write and draw
10 Jun 2022 | 2 min read
When Chris Knox suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009 it effectively ended much of the creative career for one of this country's most unique and diverse talents: Knox was an artist (with a keen eye for caricature), cartoonist (his Max Media strip ran every week in the Herald from 1987), cultural critic, music writer, television presenter and so much more. And most notably a musician whose... > Read more
Bee to Honey
THE CLASH, COMBAT ROCK + THE PEOPLE'S HALL (2022): Band on the stagger
6 Jun 2022 | 1 min read
Although there was a subsequent album – the awful Cut the Crap – Combat Rock in 1982 was the last Clash album anyone could take seriously. Which isn't to say it's any good. It arrived in a nondescript cover almost free of meaning, aside from the band members looking in different directions, and while the title resonated with their militant stance it could also have referred... > Read more
CATE LE BON, INTERVIEWED (2022): Living in time suspended
30 May 2022 | 4 min read
For the past two years, the life of the acclaimed British avant-pop singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon has been defined by disparate dots on the map, threads of friendship and 21st century technology. Just before lockdown in early 2020, the 39-year old Welsh-born Le Bon – who relocated to Los Angeles in 2013 – left her newly-purchased home in rugged Joshua Tree in southern... > Read more
THE RETURN OF UHP (2022): Look out, here comes the posse
9 May 2022 | 3 min read
That local reggae at the start of the Eighties and our first hip-hop statements at the end of that decade came from Herbs and Upper Hutt Posse respectively should not have been a surprise. In its original form as it appeared in the Seventies, reggae was rebel music, the voices of those outside mainstream culture (few were more outside Jamaican... > Read more
Preeach
GOT TO HURRY RECORDS (2022): Sixties/Seventies stockist in central Stockholm
9 May 2022 | 5 min read
When Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love came to Bo Nerbe's tiny record story Got To Hurry in the old town of Gamla Stan in central Stockholm, he enthusiastically bought all three albums by the local band Stomachmouth, an Eighties garage-punk outfit. “I had released them on my Got To Hurry label and Kurt Cobain bought all three. And half a year later or so there was an American guy in the... > Read more
Got To Hurry, by the Yardbirds (guitar Eric Clapton)
JACK WHITE, RETURNS (2022): White, black and red, now blue
15 Apr 2022 | 2 min read
The free CD which comes with the current issue of Mojo, the British rock magazine, is Hello Operator: The Songs Jack White Taught Us. However many of the magazine’s readers would have been familiar with the songs by bluesmen Son House (his spooky Death Letter Blues), Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson, as well as Johnny Cash’s Big River,... > Read more
THE ROLLING STONES AT 60 (2022): And then there were two
8 Apr 2022 | 1 min read
There are many ways to measure the longevity of the Rolling Stones: since their formation in 1962 they’ve rocked on through 14 US presidents, 13 British prime ministers and almost 30 James Bond movies. The only two original founding members – Sir Michael Philip Jagger, net worth about $800 million, and Keith Richards – have outlived half the Beatles, half the Who and any... > Read more
THE MOVE: ALWAYS AND FOREVER; BELATEDLY (2022): Classic pop, great rock then forgot
28 Mar 2022 | 8 min read | 4
Anyone dumb enough to rely on an encyclopedia of rock or -- worse -- that self-described disgrace which is "Classic Hits" radio, would be forgiven for not knowing that the Move ever existed. Those DJs at "classic rock" certainly would have no clue . . . but we expect them to be clueless, I suppose. Shame on them. It seems the Move -- despite their... > Read more
Fire Brigade
YOKO ONO, REVISITED AND RESPECTED (2022): Octogenerian great-grandmother of avant-indie kids
19 Mar 2022 | 2 min read
When Marlon Williams sang Nobody Sees Me Like You Do at his sold-out Auckland Town Hall concert in 2018, it’s a safe bet few who loudly applauded knew who had written the song: Yoko Ono. Although she remains reviled by some older Beatle-obsessed fans for her artistic and personal relationship with John Lennon – who she has outlived by more than 40 years – Ono has... > Read more
BRITISH PROG 1970-75: (2022): Yes, but is it rock?
14 Mar 2022 | 15 min read | 3
Warning!!!!! This was big stuff, songs went for 15 - 20 minutes, there were double albums and triple albums, records had linked narratives so you have to listen to the whole thing . . . Whew! So not pop then, huh? ORIGINS OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK The Beatles extending the contract of pop into Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby (both with strings) and the St Peppers album as a... > Read more
THE JAZZ BUTCHER REVISITED, PART III (2022): A farewell to the Fish
7 Mar 2022 | 1 min read
Although Elsewhere profiled Britain's Jazz Butcher (the vehicle for singer-songwriter Pat Fish) in 2017 and 2018, it's likely that Fish's extraordinary output has meant almost nothing in the Antipodes. Perhaps the first some had heard of him was when he died of a heart attack in late 2021, a couple of months short of his 64thbirthday. A literature graduate inspired by the freedom and... > Read more
LOU ADLER PROFILED (2022): What a wonderful world his would be
21 Feb 2022 | 2 min read
In '69 the producer, songwriter, film producer, club owner and impresario Lou Adler - because he could -- took a bunch of soulful musicians into the studio to record a bunch of Bob Dylan's songs in a gospel style. That long forgotten item -- The Brothers and Sisters, Dylan's Gospel -- was reissued in 2014 and so Lou Adler's name went back into the wider world as reminder of what... > Read more
Oh No, Not My Baby
THE ELECTRIC PRUNES 1966-1969, REVISITED (2022): From high times to High Mass
21 Jan 2022 | 2 min read
As with the Blues Magoos, LA's Electric Prunes were in the vanguard of psychedelic pop-rock with their singles I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night and Get Me to the World on Time, the latter reflecting them being a bridge between garageband and psychedelia. It's likely most people would be happy with just those two songs by them (both on their self-titled debut album, Dream on the original... > Read more
Get Me to the World on Time
THE DREAM SYNDICATE, REVISITED: (2022): Fifty-one shades of Grey
16 Jan 2022 | 2 min read
In mid-'86, the LA indie-rock band the Dream Syndicate released their third album Out of the Grey. The critical consensus had it as their best to date – and in retrospect still their finest studio moment – but as so often happens, it didn't sell as expected. And expectation was high because songwriter Steve Wynn (who went on to a very creditable solo career after the band broke... > Read more
Dying Embers
I'D LOVE TO TURN YOU ON (2022): The psychedelic year of 1967 in Britain
12 Jan 2022 | 9 min read | 1
"Tune in, turn on, drop out" -- LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary THE MUSICAL JOURNEY FROM MARIJUANA TO LSD: '66 TO THE SUMMER OF LOVE IN 1967 after years of British dominance in the middle of the decade as we noted in this article, the focus moves back to the US Psychedelic music inspired or influenced by the consciousness changing drug LSD aka acid becomes a dominant style.... > Read more
THE BEATLES AS CHANGELINGS and MID-SIXTIES POP, 1965-66. (2022): The pivotal period from pop to rock
10 Jan 2022 | 15 min read | 2
"I've met them. Delightful lads. Absolutely no talent" -- actor/writer Noel Coward on the Beatles. "The thing with them is that almost every track on each of their albums is memorable. When they arrived at the beginning of the Sixties there was a lot of dross in the charts, and the Beatles legitimised coming from England in the face of all this brilliant American... > Read more
WEST SIDE STORY. THEN, AFTER, NOW (2021): Something's coming, and it just kept on coming
24 Dec 2021 | 3 min read
In her 2021 autobiography Last Chance Texaco, Rickie Lee Jones wrote about her affection for the musical West Side Story, a film she saw when she was only nine. She loved the drama of the Jets and Sharks street gangs, from her Arizona-distance she was seduced by the romance of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet star-crossed young lovers relocated to tough inner-city New York, and found... > Read more
Maria, by PJ Proby (1965, from In Town, Elsewhere vinyl remix!)
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2021: THE EDITOR'S PICKS
20 Dec 2021 | 10 min read
What an odd year in music when the discussion points were the new chart-topping but mundane Abba album, something from Elton John again and the Beatles who – thanks to Peter Jackson – invited us in to their recording sessions 52 years ago. We just needed a new Sir Cliff album to have a retro-fitted villa full of period charm. Nice to have Adele and Tony Bennett back though.... > Read more
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2021: THE READERS' CHOICES
20 Dec 2021 | 8 min read
Yep, a lousy year for many, especially those like us who endured a seemingly endless and dull second lockdown in Auckland. But we should count ourselves lucky. Very few of our fellow citizens died and, although many fell ill, the message finally got out and people got vaxxed up to protect themselves and their families . . and by extension their fellow citizens. We also had books, TV and... > Read more
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2021, THE YEAR IN REISSUES (AND SUCH).
13 Dec 2021 | 9 min read
As we sometimes remind, we can blame or thank Bob Dylan perhaps, after all it was his five record, 1985 Biograph box set of rare tracks and unreleased material which alerted record companies and the marketplace there was interest in such things. Five years later the first of his Bootleg Series box sets confirmed it. Since then it has been open slather. Here Elsewhere picks the best... > Read more