Essential Elsewhere
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
Max Romeo: War Ina Babylon (1976)
17 Mar 2023 | 2 min read | 1
When Max Romeo's Holding Out My Love to You album was released in '81 it came with heavy patronage: Keith Richards was a Romeo fan and had produced some of the tracks . . . so there was a cover sticker proclaiming "Featuring Keith Richards -- Free Colour Poster of Keith and Mick Inside". Romeo had moved from Jamaica to New York a few years previous (he wrote and starred in a... > Read more
Max Romeo: Uptown Babies
Tom Waits: Orphans; Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards (2006)
20 Feb 2023 | 2 min read | 1
The American journalist Robert Wilonsky once observed of Tom Waits' music, either you like the sound of a barking dog, or you buy yourself a cat. Those of us who love and admire Waits' work live with the sound of the barking dog. Waits may have often made a beautiful noise, but it was a noise nonetheless. From a bohemian barfly poet with an affection for the Beat Generation, Frank... > Read more
Tom Waits: Road to Peace (from Brawlers)
Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959)
12 Dec 2022 | 4 min read
Once I was asked if I would contribute a page to a monthly magazine on famous musicians I had met. That part was easy, I've met quite a few. But then the person said they would like to run the article with some photographs of me with such stars. "You must have hundreds," he said. I had to disappoint him: I always saw my role as that of a journalist, not a fan there to get photos... > Read more
Ornette Coleman: Lonely Woman
Dr Feelgood, Stupidity (1976)
5 Dec 2022 | 3 min read | 1
In his superb single Cry Tough of '76, the American singer-guitarist Nils Lofgren (a member of Springsteen's E Street Band since '84) namechecked the British pub-rock outfit Dr Feelgood, showing an awareness few other Americans had. Dr Feelgood, from Canvey Island near Southend, at that time had released three albums in the UK and made a serious live impact for their gritty and energetic... > Read more
Dr Feelgood: I'm a Hog for You Baby
Tony Scott: Music for Zen Meditation (1964)
28 Nov 2022 | 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
Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Way Down in the Rust Bucket (1990, released 2021)
7 Nov 2022 | 2 min read | 3
Elsewhere readers will know we blow very hot and bitterly cold on Neil Young's output. So yet another album from his bottomless archive? Hmm. Let's be honest, there have been so many live and home-recorded albums just in the past few years pulled from dusty archives, most of which don't leave much of a lasting impression beyond their playing time. So when we are enthusiastic it is... > Read more
Over and Over
The Rolling Stones: Live at the El Mocambo 1977 (released 2022)
4 Nov 2022 | 2 min read | 1
The recent reissue of the Clash's Combat Rock showed how damaging internal tension could be to a band's creativity – it's an indifferent and aimless album by a band pulling itself apart. The Rolling Stones however, who'd had punks snapping at their heel and barking in their faces in 1977 ("No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones in 1977" shouted the Clash's Joe Strummer) ,... > Read more
All Down the Line
Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban: Mambo Sinuendo (2003)
3 Sep 2022 | 2 min read | 4
Of all the Cuban albums which came roaring down the turnpike after Ry Cooder waved the starter's flag with the Grammy-friendly Buena Vista Social Club in '97, the most unexpected came from a group called Cubismo. Their lively self-titled album was a real cracker: vibrant rhythms, great horn section, joyousness and so on. All the hallmarks of classic Cuban pop music. Cubismo, however, were a... > Read more
Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban: Drume Negrita
Jackie McLean: Right Now! (1965)
24 Jul 2022 | 1 min read
The Reid Miles-designed cover of this album by altoist McLean is a Blue Note classic. The hammered-out typewriter font blown up large and the thump of the exclamation point hinted at - and the intense opener Eco confirmed - the tough music within. Altoist McLean, born in New York in 1932, studied with his neighbour Bud Powell and played with Thelonious Monk. By the time he signed to Blue... > Read more
Eco
Roky Erickson with Okkervil River: True Love Cast Out All Evil (2010)
17 Jul 2022 | 2 min read | 3
In 2010, the most recent album by the emotionally damaged Daniel Johnston, Is and Always Was, found his often fragile and shaky acoustic pop placed in the context of a band -- and while it was fine to hear his songs that way (as he wanted) there was also a sense that their nakedness had been sacrificed. That wasn't the case on True Love Cast Out All Evil where Roky Erickson -- the battered... > Read more
Roky Erickson: Please Judge
Paul Weller: Wild Wood (1994)
20 Jun 2022 | 4 min read | 1
By the time he came to releasing albums under his own name in the early 90s, Paul Weller had already had two separate careers: first in the Jam and then the Style Council. If the Jam had been quintessentially English and took its references from the Who, the Small Faces and Ray Davies as much as Mod culture and the rage of the punk years, the highly-political Style Council which followed... > Read more
Paul Weller: Can You Heal Us (Holy Man)
The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St (1972, reissued 2010)
16 May 2022 | 4 min read | 1
Few albums in rock have been so surrounded in dark mythology as this sprawling double album which was the last great gasp of the Rolling Stones. Certainly subsequent albums -- Goats Head Soup, It's Only Rock'n'Roll and Black and Blue particularly -- had their great moments but (aside from Jagger's embrace of New York dance and Richards' forays into reggae) they were mostly retracing... > Read more
Plundered My Soul (1971/2010)
The Kinks, Something Else (1967)
9 May 2022 | 2 min read
Anyone looking for that low door in the wall which allows entry into the distinctive garden of English pop-rock is, almost invariably drawn to the Kinks whose songwriter Ray Davies had a mainline into the Anglo-heartland for almost decade from the mid 60s. Davies' songwriting could sometimes be satirical or cynical, but more often than not he felt for his characters -- and his songs are... > Read more
The Kinks: Situation Vacant
Donna Summer, Bad Girls (1979)
11 Apr 2022 | 5 min read
In musical arguments, as with political ones, the area of grey between the black and white can be as big as the other two combined. History books say you were either a Beatles or a Stones fan, but my friends and I liked them both -- and the Four Tops, the Dave Clark Five, Lou Christie, Sam the Sham, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield. Sensible people... > Read more
Dim All the Lights
NEU!: NEU! (1971) NEU!2 (1973) NEU! ‘75 (1975)
28 Mar 2022 | 4 min read | 1
Musical innovations can happen by accident or out of necessity: a stoned John Lennon allegedly spooling the tape of Rain into his player the wrong way and discovering the sound of backwards guitars (he wanted the whole song released in reverse, but settled for just the coda). Or Brian Eno who was mostly confined to bed after an accident stumbling upon a concept of ambient music when he put... > Read more
NEU!: Seeland (from NEU! '75)
Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs (2000)
6 Dec 2021 | 4 min read | 1
Many years ago, because it was silly, I started picking up the odd tribute album. And tribute albums are odd indeed. Without much difficulty -- because tribute albums almost invariably end up in discount bins -- I quickly possessed a tribute to a band that never existed (hats off to the Rutles) and to a band that seemed to have always existed (Grateful Dead). This was dumb fun because... > Read more
Stephin Merritt: The Book of Love
John Martyn: Solid Air (1973)
22 Nov 2021 | 3 min read | 1
When the great British singer-songwriter John Martyn died in January 2009 there was initially very little media coverage -- and then people realised the significance of this innovative and creative artist whose work had rapidly outgrown its folk origins in the late Sixties. Martyn's life was undeniably messy: he was self-destructive, addicted to alcohol and drugs, depressive, erratic and in... > Read more
I'd Rather Be the Devil (album version)
Mavis Staples; We'll Never Turn Back (2007)
31 Oct 2021 | 1 min read
The great gospel-soul singer Mavis Staples -- now in her Eighties -- was a member of the legendary Staples Singers founded by her father Pops Staples, a close personal friend of Dr Martin Luther King. During the Civil Rights period music was on the frontline so to speak. Much of the Staples' music was political or inspirational and gave comfort to those struggling for rights and... > Read more
Down In Mississippi
Merle Haggard: If I Could Only Fly (2000)
2 Aug 2021 | 2 min read
Not too long after the time of this writing in mid 2012, 73-year old Merle Haggard died and against every preconception we might have had about his tough, booze-afflicted life and hard travelling -- he was lucky to survive that long. When he appeared at the White House in 2010 four years before his passing to pick yet another well-deserved honour he scrubbed up pretty well. Stories... > Read more
Crazy Moon
Neil Halstead: Sleeping on Roads (2002)
28 Jun 2021 | 2 min read | 1
Mojave 3 was one of the most oddly inappropriate names a band could have picked. Despite suggestions of deserts and Americana, they were British. And they based themselves in Cornwall, a less likely "Mojave" connection you couldn't find, especially in winter when the rain blows horizontal and the bed'n'breakfast hotels are silent and damp. The Mojave 3 - helmed by... > Read more