From the Vaults

Weird Al Yankovic: Foil (2014)

1 Sep 2025 | <1 min read

No one is safe from the parodies of Weird Al Yankovic and in fact it's a badge of honour and acknowledgement that “you've made it” if he takes one of your hits and inverts it. If you are an artist offended by it then you take yourself too seriously. So here he is rewriting Lorde's famous break-out hit about accepting we'll never be part of the in-crowd and aren't ashamed of... > Read more

Eddie Vedder, Neil and Liam Finn: Not Given Lightly (2009)

30 Aug 2025 | <1 min read

After Chris Knox suffered his massive stroke in June 2009, there was an understandable outpouring of support from friends and fellow travellers who knew him, although it's fair to say not many understood just how debilitating and on-going that event in his life would be. It changed everything. Everything, for him and his family and those closest to him. As with a divorce or... > Read more

Bob Dylan: Tight Connection to My Heart (1983), Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart (released 1991)

25 Aug 2025 | 3 min read

Bob Dylan is famous -- some might say notorious -- for revisiting his songs and revising them, changing lyrics and reinterpreting them musically. We've previously singled out the two versions of a song which was released as Brownsville Girl but began life as New Danville Girl. Here's another one which comes in two versions, and it is the shift in tone as much as the lyrical... > Read more

The Herd: From the Underworld (1967)

18 Aug 2025 | 1 min read | 1

It's not often Greek mythology cracks the top 10, but the Herd managed to do it with this song from the autumn of love (September '67) which is based on the Orpheus and Eurydice story. After the death of Eurydice, Orpheus travels to the underworld and by using music he melts the hearts of the gods down there. They agree to let the missus come back into life. The deal however is that she... > Read more

Jerry Lee Lewis: The Return of Jerry Lee (1958)

11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read

When Jerry Lee Lewis arrived in Britain in May 1958, the rock'n'roll crown was his for the taking. He was the wildman at the piano with crazy stacked-up hair, had delivered seminal, sweat-inducing hits with Whole Lotta Shakin' and Great Balls of Fire, and he was repressed sex personified and unleashed. He may have been a country boy at heart but he was the pulse of rock'n'roll. Britain... > Read more

Dinah Washington: Big Long Slidin' Thing (1954)

4 Aug 2025 | <1 min read | 1

It's about a trombone player's instrument, of course. Well, of course it is . . . But the sexually voracious and seldom satisfied Washington (seven husbands, countless lovers) knows exactly what this is about and manages to milk the innuendo in her typically sassy way. Her real forte was torch songs and she crossed effortlessly between jazz, blues, pop and rhythm and blues -- and... > Read more

Bruce Springsteen: Fugitive's Dream (1983)

28 Jul 2025 | <1 min read

Not really pulled from our vaults because this was only recently pulled from Springsteen's. It has been released on the box set Tracks II: The Lost Albums. That sequel to the 1998 box set Tracks collects seven unreleased and complete albums (more correctly six discrete albums and one collection of sessions). It is like a slightly alternative journey through Springsteen's career: there... > Read more

Fugitive's Dream, version 1

The Ugly's: Wake Up My Mind (1965)

21 Jul 2025 | 1 min read

Among the many unusual things about the story of the Ugly's is why a band (with an unnecessary apostrophe?) from Birmingham should have enjoyed a huge hit in Australia and New Zealand with this song, and not made a ripple back home. The Ugly's had emerged from the Dominettes which had been caught up in the skiffle boom of the late Fifties. But as they embraced r'n'b and had new members... > Read more

Jean Claude Vannier: Les Mouches (1973)

14 Jul 2025 | <1 min read

French writer/arranger and producer Vannier has worked with anyone who counts in his home country (Gainsbourg, Francoise Hardy, Juliette Greco, jazz pianist Martial Solal etc) as well as Astor Piazzolla, American pop writer Mort Shuman and many others. His trippy and conceptual sonic journey album L'enfant assassin des mouches in '73, from which this track comes, was reissued in 2005 and... > Read more

Polyrock: Your Dragging Feet (1980)

7 Jul 2025 | <1 min read

While it's always been fashionable and hip for rock musicians -- especially those in what we might call avant-rock -- to namedrop jazz or contemporary classical composers in interviews, when you listen to their music there's usually scant evidence of an influence. However Polyrock from New York -- who mostly came off as more jittery post-Talking Heads/Feelies on their self-titled debut... > Read more

The Bangles: How is the Air Up There (1982)

30 Jun 2025 | 4 min read

Until the Herbs EP Whats' Be Happen? in 1981, Aotearoa New Zealand had no great tradition of political songs. There were the odd gestures (the Howard Morrison Quartet's humorous My Old Man's an All Black) but these were unusual. There were however an increasing number of songs which were about teenage rebellion, dissent and anti-social comment. Johnny Devlin's Get a... > Read more

Doris Willingham: You Can't Do That (1968)

23 Jun 2025 | <1 min read

We've posted a track at Elsewhere previously by this soul singer, but she was Doris Duke then. Between being born Doris Curry and Doris Duke, she was Doris Willingham and had worked in Motown's New York office and as backing singer for Nina Simone. You'd think that would have meant she was well placed for success but it wasn't to be, not even with slice of shouty soul. That came... > Read more

Sneaky Pete Kleinow: You Are Here (1973)

16 Jun 2025 | <1 min read

Although Sean Lennon talked up John Lennon's Mind Games album when releasing the 2024 expanded box set with numerous mixes and such, it was – in its original form – a somewhat disappointing album with a few real nuggets and some filler. But among the many discs in the reissue was an album called Elemental Mixes which were just certain parts of the songs isolated. Among them... > Read more

Diane Hildebrand: You Wonder Why You're Lonely (1969)

9 Jun 2025 | 1 min read | 1

Record Store Days can make a major gouge in my bank account, but even so there were always some accidental bargains in my bag. While waiting in the queue at Southbound Records a few years ago with some pricey gems I found myself by their discount bin and so, idly flicking through the selections, I . . . Yes, the album by Diane Hildebrand made itself known to me for a number of reasons:... > Read more

Karen Dalton: God Bless the Child (1966)

2 Jun 2025 | 1 min read

The new wave of folk artists have belately come to Karen Dalton, who palled around in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties with the likes of the young Bob Dylan (who was hugely impressed with her singing and guitar playing) and Fred Neil. It's said that she is the subject of Robbie Robertson-Richard Manuel song Katie's Been Gone on the Basement Tapes with Dylan. She was also admired by... > Read more

The Chicks: The Rebel Kind (1966)

26 May 2025 | 1 min read | 2

New Zealand has no great tradition of political pop or rock. All those years of high unemployment during the Flying Nun heyday . . . and who mentioned it? Very few. Even the Springbok tour in '81 barely generated a whisper from musicians. (Riot 111 here being the noble exception.) And during the Vietnam period? Barely a dickey-bird . . . aside from, oddly enough, mainstream pop... > Read more

Tupac Shakur: Picture Me Rollin' (1996)

19 May 2025 | <1 min read

Is there a more sad song in the retrospect than this, after Tupac (assailants "unknown") was gunned down? The great poet of rap gets into a beautiful low, confidently cruising but melancholy groove while giving himself some big-ups because, after all, those punk police have passed on and now we need to picture him at the top of his game . . . Yeah. Rolling . .... > Read more

Spencer Davis Group: I'm a Man (1967)

18 May 2025 | 3 min read | 2

Down the years – from Mairzy Doats in 1943 to Springsteen's Blinded by the Light three decades later (“madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer”) – lyrics have been open to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. For years I thought Manfred Mann's Ha Ha! Said the Clown was “the horse hit the town”. I'd been ready for Dylan's surrealism.... > Read more

Eddie Hinton: I Want a Woman (1986)

12 May 2025 | 1 min read

Alabama-born Eddie Hinton (1944-95) is hardly a household name but was one of the great Southern soul songwriters and sessionmen. As a Muscle Shoals musician he played guitar on scores of sessions (for everyone from Aretha Franklin to Boz Scaggs, Elvis to Solomon Burke) and was a prolific, if under-recorded, songwriter. His most notable hit was Breakfast in Bed, a co-write with Donnie... > Read more

The Waikikis: Nowhere Man (1968)

5 May 2025 | 1 min read

It is a well known fact that Honolulu and Liverpool have much in common. Both are port cities and . . . Err. Maybe not. But the emotional and physical difference didn't stop the Waikikis from adapting a bunch of Beatles songs into their distinctive Hawaiian style. Not that there was anything unusual in a band adapting the Lennon-McCartney songbook into their own voice, there are... > Read more