Essential Elsewhere
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Various Artists; Chicago/The Blues/Today! Vol 1 (1966)
30 Oct 2017 | 2 min read
With an American history over a century long, the blues isn't easy an easy journey to begin on: do you go at it chronologically from slave chants and field hollers, or work back from white popularisers like George Thorogood, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Led Zeppelin? Given that most people live in what we might call the post-rock era it might be easiest -- and is certainly rewarding -- to hit... > Read more
Junior Wells with Buddy Guy: Messin' With the Kid
Mantovani: A Lifetime of Music 1905-1980 (1980 compilation)
25 Sep 2017 | 4 min read | 2
In later years he might have looked like an extra from The Sopranos (when smiling maybe a restaurateur, when sullen certainly a hit man) but orchestra-leader Annunzio Mantovani was one the most popular light entertainers of his era -- which was the period before rock’n’roll hit in the mid Fifties. Most people today would quickly dismiss his sweetly orchestrated albums -- yes,... > Read more
Judy Garland: Judy at Carnegie Hall (1961)
11 Sep 2017 | 4 min read | 1
Many people who saw Judy Garland in the final weeks of her life in mid '69 described her in similar terms: That she looked like a sick bird, broken and unable to fly. She was battling a lifetime of debts, betrayals, pills, booze, chronic unhappiness, self-doubt . . . In one of her last interviews she said, “I've worked very hard, you know, and I've planted some of – I've... > Read more
Stormy Weather
Irma Thomas, The Irma Thomas Collection (1996)
19 Jul 2017 | 3 min read
In music, titles are bestowed by The People rather than being handed down from above -- and they are so singular and specific that there can only be pretenders but no replacement figures. So there is only one King of Rock'n'Roll and that's Elvis, only one Queen of Soul and that will always be Aretha, and only James Brown will ever be considered The Godfather. And Irma Thomas will always be... > Read more
Irma Thomas: Wish Somebody Would Care
Dr John: Gris Gris (1968)
12 Jul 2017 | 3 min read
Long careers generally mean the raw and rough edges of the early days are smoothed out, and that audiences forget just how edgy and unusual the artist’s music actually was. So it is with Dr John whose career reaches way back to playing piano in bars as teenager in New Orleans during the 50s alongside legendary figures such as Professor Longhair and Huey Smith. The Dr -- Malcolm... > Read more
Dr John: Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya
Souad Massi: Honeysuckle/Mesk Elil (2007)
5 Jul 2017 | <1 min read
On her two previous albums it was evident that Algerian-born Massi was never going to conform to the prevailing sounds of rai and pop of her homeland. And on this instantly engaging album she takes a step even further away and pulls in Latin sounds alongside her already established, if slightly unusual, blend of Algerian pop-folk with hints of Spanish flamenco music. At its best as in... > Read more
Tell Me Why
Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth (1980)
5 Jul 2017 | 2 min read
Just as Dylan emerged in the middle of the day-glo psychedelic era on a quieter rural route with John Wesley Harding, and the Cowboy Junkies whispered their way to the foreground amidst the bellicose noise of grunge, so Young Marble Giants emerged in the post-punk era with something quieter and more considered than the jerky anger of bands like Public Image, Gang of Four and The Fall. Their... > Read more
Young Marble Giants: Include Me Out
The Tokey Tones: Butterfly, Caterpillar (2007)
28 Jun 2017 | 5 min read | 2
It’s a common occurrence: just when popular music has got up a head of steam, some supportive critical consensus, and is charging off in a particular direction along comes something which, by going the opposite way, captures the imagination. At the height of Day-Glo acid-dropping hippiedom along came the Velvet Underground in all their monochrome gloominess singing about heroin and... > Read more
Tokey Tones: Yoghurt and Vinegar (from Butterfly)
Drive-By Truckers: Brighter than Creation's Dark (2008)
24 Apr 2017 | 2 min read | 2
Now more than two decades into their impressive career -- and with more than two dozen live and studio albums behind them -- the Drive-By Truckers out of Athens in Georgia inspire passionate loyalty for their Southern-framed country rock'n'roll and literate, sometimes provocative, lyrics. They often make you want to crack the top off a beer and kick back, but the words touch some deep... > Read more
Daddy Needs A Drink
The Undertones: The Undertones (1979, reissue 2009)
10 Apr 2017 | 4 min read | 2
It's a measure of how obsessed rock music is with the present tense that in 1979 Paul Morley in the NME would proclaim, "The Undertones have created the greatest pop of this age and thus every age". That use of "thus" there says so much about the pressing immediacy of the punk era in Britain. New and urgent was what mattered. The Undertones out of Derry, Northern... > Read more
The Undertones: Here Comes the Summer
Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers: Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers (1971)
27 Feb 2017 | 4 min read | 3
Although the blues can be a sophisticated music, there's something more earthy, vibrant and appealing about it when it is played from somewhere further south than the cerebral cortext. Hound Dog Taylor played from a point somewhere between the heart, the gut and the groin -- and made the most thrilling music to come out of the Chicago blues scene in the late Sixties/early Seventies. The... > Read more
Phillips' Theme
The Sorrows: Take a Heart (1965)
16 Feb 2017 | 5 min read
Just as the Beatles '64 album With the Beatles defined the sound of Beatlemania, so too its album cover became iconic and an emblem of the era. Those half-lit faces on the cover were shot by Robert Freeman but perhaps had been prompted by Lennon's appreciation of Astrid Kirchherr's similarly lit photos taken of him, Harrison and Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg. And that arty look was seen... > Read more
Teenage Letter
Marvin Gaye: Trouble Man (1972)
9 Jan 2017 | 5 min read
In the sales charts, music history throws up some wonderful anomalies, like the Beatles' innovative double A-side single Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever being kept off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck's ballad Release Me in early '67. And that Marvin Gaye's aching lament for his nation and the troubling times of the early Seventies, What's Going On, was kept off the number... > Read more
Poor Abbey Walsh
Vanessa Daou: Zipless (1994)
18 Jul 2016 | 2 min read | 2
There is sexy music and there is sex music. And there can be quite a difference between the two in execution. Prince made a lot of sex music but slightly less sexy music; Donna Summer and Jane Birkin brought orgasms to music -- and so did Yoko Ono who screamed it to the ceiling and beyond. Ono was sex, the other two sexy. Sometimes Grace Jones could be both. Sexy music -- the... > Read more
The Long Tunnel of Wanting You
Ennio Morricone: Crime and Dissonance (2005)
11 Jul 2016 | 3 min read
The great Italian composer, arranger and conductor Ennio Morricone will be 88 later this year, but he is still as productive as ever. And in February he conducted a concert of his music at London's O2 for which he had on stage the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, the Csokonai National Choir, soprano Susanna Rigacci and the Kodaly Choir. Oh, and a rock band. Right there you get... > Read more
Spiriti
John Mayall with Eric Clapton; Blues Breakers (1966)
20 Jun 2016 | 3 min read | 1
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
Split Enz: Mental Notes (1975)
6 Jun 2016 | 3 min read | 1
In 2000, when Rip It Up magazine (now in the responsible hands of Simon Grigg of audioculture.co.nz) collated votes to determine the top 100 New Zealand albums in the most recent-whenever, it was inevitable Split Enz' dramatic 1975 debut Mental Notes would come out at the top. Such lists are often compiled with little sense of history beyond last year's last-thought . . . but Rip It Up's... > Read more
Stranger Than Fiction
Prince: Around the World in a Day (1985)
26 Apr 2016 | 6 min read
Even before he was cremated a few days after his death, the world was abuzz with how much previously unreleased music Prince Rogers Nelson – aka Prince – had left behind. Those who had seen it spoke of a massive vault of recordings and, tantalisingly, among them were probably the sessions he did with Miles Davis. That said, the reason they remained in Prince's vault... > Read more
Tambourine
The Dwight Twilley Band; Twilley Don't Mind (1975)
21 Mar 2016 | 2 min read | 1
The wonderful, and possibly apocryphal, story about this band is that Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour went to see the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night together in 1967 -- a bit late when you think it was released three years previous -- and immediately decided to form a band. It would be equally wonderful to report they were an overnight success, but in fact -- aside from the '75... > Read more
Dwight Twiller Band: Sleeping
Frank Sinatra: Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958)
2 Mar 2016 | 5 min read
Although neither his best known long playing record from the era (the LP format was just kicking off) nor his biggest seller of the late Fifties, Frank Sinatra's Only the Lonely is an outstanding collection of themed songs. His best known albums from this period are In the Wee Small Hours from '55 (long an Essential Elsewhere album), Songs for Swinging Lovers! and Come Fly With Me... > Read more