Personal Elsewhere

GO WEST THEN WEST AGAIN: Memories in mid-May 2025

11 May 2025 | 4 min read

This week the great American poet/essayist and translator Gary Snyder – who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry half a century ago – turned 95. Snyder was often associated with the Beats (he emerged at the same time, shared some beliefs, Ginsberg and others were his friends) but he was always different. He wasn't urban but grew up on farmland in the Pacific Northwest and... > Read more

UP WHERE I BELONG? The delight and drawback of luxury accommodation

14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read | 1

To the best of my recollection the words “upgrade” and “Mr Reid” have never appeared in the same sentence. Certainly I have stayed in some luxurious hotels -- Sorrento’s Grand Hotel Cocumella (pictured) gets passing mention here to make you envious -- but I knew about them in advance. Yes, a couple of times I have been in that part of the aircraft where the... > Read more

DURANS, CLARY, STUART, GLADYS AND ME: Talent with talons

30 Sep 2024 | 3 min read

Press conferences are a waste of time and no sensible journalist entertains them. Ask your best question and everyone else gets the great answer. And if you are a print journalist those lazy slime from television go to air that night with it and you can wait a day to see it in the paper. And then your mates think you copied it from them. As a journalist I quickly gave up... > Read more

SOME HAVE GONE AND SOME REMAIN: Those who passed this way

10 Sep 2024 | 4 min read

These are the days we are given, if we've been fortunate. And maybe even lucky. When we're young we often lose a few people along the way: school friends who do something stupid, someone who crashes a car, the kid who accepted a dare . . . They are gone from us and we have to live without them. And when you are young, forever is long time. I was lucky. I lost very few people when I... > Read more

THE NIGHT OF FIRE AND FEAR: On the road to nowhere

9 Sep 2024 | 2 min read | 1

In the blackness through rural roads, candle-lit villages and weakly illuminated towns here in western India, our bus driver passed perilously close to a man on a motorcycle – who just briefly I saw beneath me out the window – and clipped him. There was a heart-thumping thud and the scour of metal on asphalt. People felt it, our bus stopped, within minutes outside the... > Read more

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF: Another invisible city

2 Sep 2024 | 2 min read

To be honest, to this day I couldn't tell you what it was all about, but I spent the best part of an afternoon trying to figure it out. It was in Amsterdam and I had done all the right art galleries and museums, and had been to one of the hidden churches in the red-light district. Tomorrow I would leave so on this warm afternoon I settled in at Rasta Baby, a popular coffee shop on the... > Read more

U2 IN PHOENIX: My unforgettable fire

18 Aug 2024 | 4 min read | 1

It was quite a few years ago now but I'll never forget it. U2 damn near killed me. Them, the Arizona sun, a famous architect and tequila actually. It was during their Pop-Mart tour -- the one with the giant Spinal Tap-like lemon -- and I happened to be driving around America. They were scheduled to play at the huge Sun Devil Stadium in Phoenix and so I figured on making my way there to see... > Read more

GRAHAM PATERSON REID (b. Melbourne 1913 – d. Auckland 1985): The big man with the quiet voice

22 Jul 2024 | 13 min read | 1

This piece first appeared in Metro magazine in 1985 under the title The Bach. The Beach was always “only an hour away” according to my father. And back in the early Sixties when we first started going regularly, it was. Thirty miles from our home in Mt Eden to the door of the bach at Stanmore Bay. And my father, always a careful driver, just “took it easy" and... > Read more

BRIEF ENCOUNTER: And a pause for thought

13 Jul 2024 | 2 min read | 1

This is Dry July. It's the month when some people stop drinking and instead get on social media to announce their alcohol-free virtue to whoever is out there. They join others who, whatever the month, will write “Now eight years sober” and watch as friends and strangers respond with “good one, hun” or “well done, just three years for me”. Social media... > Read more

THE DAY SHIFT: Faces and names

8 Jul 2024 | 3 min read | 2

Big Mick was the size and shape of a steel door. As strong too. He had broken teeth – although he rarely spoke and never smiled – and one side of his forehead bore the scar of a deep wound from long ago. Someone said he was an ex-cop and had been bashed about the head a few too many times. Whatever had happened to him he was an imposing, silent presence in the factory... > Read more

YOU SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY (2024): And the band begins to play

25 Jun 2024 | 3 min read | 1

Exactly 60 years ago to the day, the Beatles played in Auckland. It was my 13th birthday. I was a huge fan of course. I had their two albums Please Please Me and With the Beatles: the former a Christmas present from Brett Bensky, the later I bought for my Dad's birthday from The Loft record shop on Vulcan Lane. I had a big poster on my wall (I still have it) and I treasured my... > Read more

Happy Birthday

THE KING IS DEAD: Long live The King

21 Jun 2024 | 5 min read

The next time I see John Francis, I'll apologise and say to him, “You were right”. The likelihood that happening however is pretty remote. The last time I saw him was over 60 years ago at Normal Intermediate School. I don't remember much about primary school – just odd snapshots and moments – but intermediate was a bit different. I was put in a special class or... > Read more

Patch It Up (Elvis live, 1970)

ELSEWHERE, INTERVIEWED (2024): Talk, talk, talk . . .

3 May 2024 | <1 min read

In early March I was interviewed at considerable length by musician Danny McCrum for his podcast series Don't Give Up. What was, I thought, going to be a brief conversation about the Elsewhere website and maybe something about writing reviews ended up being all of that and quite a bit more besides. Danny and I just ended up having long conversations about all kinds of music related (and... > Read more

THE WRITE STUFF: Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift

15 Apr 2024 | 3 min read | 1

When I started at the Herald in 1987, Peter Scherer was the editor. Those were the days before titles like Editor-in-Chief or Editor-at-Large. Peter – who you could call by his first name – was simply the editor. Or more correctly The Editor. He was a remote figure to someone like me and I recall hearing little snippets about him: any aspiring journalist who wrote asking... > Read more

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME: Tony's, endangered

7 Apr 2024 | 3 min read

There’s a scene that has played out hundreds of times at Tony’s restaurant on Wellesley Street in central Auckland. I witnessed it frequently. A young person, possibly a student, asks if there’s any chance of waiting work. Often they are anxious and looking for their first paying job, maybe presenting what passes for a CV at their age. But time and again they... > Read more

CRYING IN THE NIGHT: Wide awake and wondering

25 Mar 2024 | 1 min read

The sound of a baby crying in the night is a terrifying thing. The screams go on and on, no one seems to be taking care of it, you look out your window into the darkness but cannot see where the cries are coming from. You feel helpless. My ryokan in Shin-Nakano, a suburb to the west of central Tokyo was perfect -- except at night when I heard the baby crying. Tokyo may be a... > Read more

MAKING THEM FRIGHTENED AND FEARFUL: My lecturing technique at university

11 Mar 2024 | 4 min read

By chance, I left university lecturing in much the same way as I'd arrived: by slipping out sideways. Some time in the late 2000s I was freelancing, had done a short and unhappy stint lecturing in journalism (which I felt was taking fees from students entering a dying industry) and every now and again I'd be invited by singer-songwriter Karen Hunter to come and talk to her uni music... > Read more

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, THIS LAND IS . . . : New Zealand in the eye of the beholder

25 Feb 2024 | 3 min read

Some many decades ago, after my dad and I had returned from an extended overseas trip, we were having dinner with some friends of my parents. At some point one of the guests – perhaps annoyed we had been banging on about some interesting places we'd been – spoke up for the beauties of Auckland and said, “In what other city in the world can you be swimming in the... > Read more

IN THE TIME OF STOPPED CLOCKS: A year after the flood

23 Feb 2024 | 6 min read

As I write this from my temporary office in the upstairs bedroom, workers outside in heavy fluorojackets and hard-hats are toiling under a sweating sun. There's noise from diggers and massive machinery, the scrabble of scoria pouring from metal buckets, weighty wheels crunching over rocks. And I'm enjoying it because, to me, it sounds like progress. We live beside the Western Line... > Read more

PASSING SHIPS: Mick Jagger and me

5 Feb 2024 | 4 min read | 3

It's a little known fact, but Mick Jagger and I are real tight. And that's not just me saying that. The last time I saw Jagger -- whom I call Mick, of course -- he shook my hand and said, "Graham, we're real tight." Of course there's a back-story here. Let me put this in the greater context. It was November 88 and Mick was in town with his own band. He and... > Read more