Essential Elsewhere
A selection of cornerstone albums to help you build an interesting collection of diverse Elsewhere music. These essays will introduce albums which can lead you into whole threads of music, areas you might not have otherwise considered or enjoyed. Explore . . . and don't be afraid of going Elsewhere.
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Jon Hassell: Dream Theory in Malaya (1981)
12 May 2025 | 2 min read
When I imported this album in 1981 it was on the basis of faith: faith that the Melody Maker writer who had hailed it was on the money, that Brian Eno who appeared as a collaborator and on whose EG Music imprint it appeared was right, that it would be as good as their previous collaboration . . . and that it would arrive intact. My faith was vindicated on all counts and the album has proved... > Read more
Jon Hassell
Tony Scott: Music for Zen Meditation (1964)
4 Apr 2025 | 3 min read
Vangelis had a pointed comment about the vacuous New Age music which emerged in the late Seventies and reached epidemic proportions in the Eighties. He said it “gave the opportunity for untalented people to make very boring music”. Many people said much worse about it because this was music which was often mere sound designed not to be listened to but just to offer some... > Read more
A Quivering Leaf, Ask the Winds
The Rolling Stones, The Unstoppable Stones (1965)
10 Mar 2025 | 4 min read | 1
The early albums by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones appeared in different versions in Britain and the States. New Zealand being a colony thankfully got the UK versions for the most part, just as the gods intended. But in some instances we got something different from both -- and in this case, better. The album The Unstoppable Stones only ever appeared in Australia, New Zealand and... > Read more
You Can't Catch Me
Miklos Rozsa: The Lost Weekend (1945, soundtrack)
17 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
The Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rozsa -- who died in '95 -- has a rare accolade in his long career as a composer of film soundtracks: when his music for the Hitchcock film Spellbound won an Oscar, he beat out two other scores, both of which he had also written. Those two were the music for A Song to Remember (about Chopin) and The Lost Weekend (about an alcoholic). For both... > Read more
Bottle is Discovered
Nick Lowe: Dig My Mood (1998)
18 Nov 2024 | 3 min read
It is coming up close to three decades since Nick Lowe -- once a laddish and witty figure in British rock in the immediate post-punk days -- decided to take the long view on his career and reposition himself. As he told Elsewhere late in 2011, “Back when I first got noticed in the Seventies it was for being rather irreverent and popping bubbles, and I was a bit cheeky. A certain... > Read more
You Inspire Me
John Mayall: Blues From Laurel Canyon (1968)
8 Sep 2024 | 3 min read | 3
In the wake of '67s Sgt Pepper's the new thing in rock was "the concept album" and at the tail-end of that decade and well into the Seventies a long list of bands weighed in: the Pretty Things with SF Sorrow,The Who with Tommy, The Moody Blues, Genesis, Yes . . . Mostly these were musicians with an art school background and so testing themselves over a 40 minute album was... > Read more
John Mayall: Fly Tomorrow
Gretchen Peters: Dancing with the Beast (2018)
18 Aug 2024 | 2 min read
These Essential Elsewhere album entries, by virtue of this being “elsewhere”, mostly sidestep the albums you'll find in any Greatest Albums Ever list alongside Dark Side of the Moon and Material Girl. Yes, we have pointed to Joni Mitchell's Blue. But albums by King Sunny Ade, John Martyn, Jacques Brel, Reem Kelani and Buffy Sainte-Marie are unlikely to appear in any list.... > Read more
Lowlands
John Mayall with Eric Clapton; Blues Breakers (1966)
28 Jul 2024 | 3 min read | 2
For an album which is a cornerstone in any serious consideration of the British blues boom of the Sixties, the Blues Breakers record -- John Mayall with Eric Clapton -- of July '66 hardly had an auspicious gestation. In March '65 Mayall and the Blues Breakers had been dropped by their label Decca after just one album (a live outing, John Mayall Plays John Mayall) and across on the other... > Read more
All Your Love
The Scavengers; The Scavengers (2003 vinyl issue of '78 sessions)
20 May 2024 | 2 min read
We all have musical moments written into our autobiographies. The emblems afterwards -- the album, concert ticket or scar beneath the eye -- are inadequate to convey the emotion you experienced, whether it was when Tina Turner belted out your favourite-ever song to you personally (and 35,000 others), or when you got nailed at Zwines in Auckland by some pogo-ing punk back in the late... > Read more
The Scavengers: Money in the Bank
Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson: Rattlin' Bones (2008)
1 Apr 2024 | 1 min read | 1
Chambers -- daughter of the very great singer-songwriter Bill -- is one of Australia's finest alt.country/roots artists and for this album she teamed up with her husband Nicholson for their first album together. Oddly enough although they played together in their casual side-project The Lost Dogs covers band they hadn't previously written together -- yet the evidence on this album is that... > Read more
Sweetest Waste of Time
World Party: Goodbye Jumbo (1990)
25 Mar 2024 | 3 min read | 2
By any measure, 1990 was a pretty good year in rock and pop: Sinead O'Connor announced herself with the single Nothing Compares 2 U and the album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got; George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 delivered timeless music; and things toughened up in Seattle with Sub Pop signing Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden and Nirvana. Janet Jackson unleashed her... > Read more
Way Down Now
Shivkumar Sharma, Brijbushan Kabra, Hariprasad Chaurasia: Call of the Valley (1967)
11 Mar 2024 | 1 min read | 2
When this beautiful, elegant tone poem of Indian classical music was reissued in 1995 on the EMI Hemisphere label (with three extra tracks), people like me with a long affection for Indian music could hardly believe our luck. It was one of those long-hard-to-find albums -- although it had been kept in print in India, where I'd bought a bad copy on cassette in then-Calcutta -- Call of the... > Read more
Rag Pahadi
Love: Forever Changes (1967)
1 Jan 2024 | 3 min read | 2
When the British rock magazine Mojo published a special supplement on psychedelic rock back in February 2005, among the albums noted were all the usual suspects: Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix took out the top spot and further down were Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s and albums by the Mothers of Invention, Jefferson Airplane, Country... > Read more
Love: Andmoreagain
Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express (1977)
25 Dec 2023 | 2 min read | 1
In the rush to acclaim Kraftwerk as electro-pioneers, it is often overlooked how they grew out of the German avant-garde/post-hippie prog-rock scene. As Organisation -- and on the first two Kraftwerk albums -- founders Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider (and others) engaged in long, almost free-form jams with Schneider playing flutes and bells. After their Ralf and Florian album however... > Read more
Kraftwerk: Showroom Dummies
Mink De Ville: Return to Magenta (1978)
25 Dec 2023 | 5 min read | 4
The curious things about the life of Willy De Ville was not that he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in early August 2009, but that he had lived so long. He was 58 when he died -- but from the time he appeared on the post-punk New Wave scene in New York in the early Eighties he seemed to be destined for a short but bright flight. He was junkie, his first wife would pull a knife on rock... > Read more
Mink De Ville: Just Your Friends
Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble: Mnemosyne (1999)
18 Dec 2023 | 2 min read

When jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek teamed with the classical vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble for the warm yet glacial holy minimalism of Officium in 1994, not even ECM label boss Manfred Eicher - whose idea it was - could have predicted its crossover success. It became the banner album in ECM's already excellent 10-year-old label for contemporary classical recordings, ECM New... > Read more
Remember Me My Dear
The Master Musicians of Jajouka: Brian Jones presents The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka (1971)
4 Dec 2023 | 3 min read
Some albums have auspicious beginings and a messy legacy. So it is with this album recorded in Morocco in 1968 by Brian Jones, then of the Rolling Stones. By the time the album was released Jones had been dead a year -- he drowned a year after his trip to Morocco and was no longer a Stone -- and a shadow was cast over its mesmerising music. When it was reissued in '95 by Point Music it... > Read more
The Master Musicians of Jajouka: Take Me With You My Darling, Take Me With You
Blue Cheer: Vincebus Eruptum (1968)
20 Nov 2023 | 3 min read | 4
For many decades I kept a clipping about Blue Cheer and this particular album inside the record cover, and of course when I went to look for it recently it was gone. But the gist of it was this: Blue Cheer were the loudest band in the whole history of ever, according to the writer, and when they recorded this monster in a North Hollywood studio they blew out all the speakers or the desk... > Read more
Summertime Blues
Dennis Wilson: Pacific Ocean Blue (1977)
10 Sep 2023 | 4 min read | 1
It was a tragic irony that Dennis Wilson, the only genuine surf-rat in the Beach Boys, should have drowned. But by 1983 when he died in the waters of Marina Del Rey, he was a spent force who had succumbed to alcohol, depression and cocaine -- and he'd only recorded one solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue in 1977. That was also a tragedy because POB suggested that if anyone could have carried the... > Read more
Dennis Wilson: Friday Night
Various Artists, Tommy Boy Greatest Beats Vol 1. 1981-96
14 Aug 2023 | 3 min read | 2
Hip-hop is such an integral part of music today that it is hard to believe radio stations once proudly announced "no crap, no rap". Half a century on -- with everyone from classical quartets, gospel legend Mavis Staples, alt.country singer Steve Earle and stadium-shakers U2 using scratching and samples -- the tools of hip-hop have crossed genres and styles. Middle-class... > Read more