Writing in Elsewhere
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I, ME, MINE; THE EXTENDED EDITION by GEORGE HARRISON
6 Jul 2018 | 2 min read
When George Harrison's slight autobiography I, Me Mine was first published in 1980 as a limited edition hardback his onetime friend John Lennon was livid. He said George had barely mentioned him (true, just 11 single references in about 80 pages of text, and there in only half a dozen of the many photos) and Lennon was angry that the kid he got into his band would be so ungrateful. But... > Read more
WHY BOB DYLAN MATTERS by RICHARD F THOMAS
21 Jun 2018 | 7 min read | 1
When 77-year old Bob Dylan plays two concerts in New Zealand in August – Auckland on 28, Christchurch two nights later – it is hard to fathom who might turn out to see him. There will be the loyalists who will enjoy and decode for days if not months what he does, and no doubt the curious who think that – despite dire warnings he can no longer sing as he once did, mostly... > Read more
Andrew Fagan: It Was Always Going To Be Like This (bandcamp)
20 Apr 2018 | 1 min read
Outside the circle of poets and writers from academia and creative writing courses anointed by a cabal of similarly inclined critics, there have always been those who find their audience by a more direct route, by a clear and unmediated connection with the broader population. In this group we have, however unfashionable and even reviled he might be today, novelist Barry Crump, and of course... > Read more
THE BULFORD KIWI; THE KIWI WE LEFT BEHIND by COLLEEN BROWN
19 Apr 2018 | 4 min read | 2
The question is very simple and so should the answer be, but let's ask it anyway. When World War I ended with the armistice on November 11, 1918 what happened to the thousands of New Zealand soldiers – around 40,000 stationed in Europe and Britain – who had left their homeland to fight and were now still in Europe? The answer of course is obvious: They came back home.... > Read more
LOU REED; A LIFE, a biography by ANTHONY DeCURTIS
23 Nov 2017 | 3 min read
Lou Reed used to say that people would boast about being insulted by him. Not this guy, I twice declined the opportunity to do a phone interview with him because . . . Well, it was the late Eighties and mid Nineties and he wasn't just cantankerous about his obvious genius not being recognised but also would subject interviewers to some interrogation before... > Read more
LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL by MICK WALL
14 Nov 2017 | 2 min read
The cover is awful, the subtitle misleading (“The Larger Than Life Story of Meat Loaf”) and writing by the prolific rock journalist Mick Wall sometimes reads like a potboiler knocked off at speed. But for all that, and especially for those who don'y know the backstory of the fraught relationship between Meat Loaf and songwriter/creative director Jim Steinman, this is a... > Read more
Paradise by the Dashboard Light
AUTUMN OF LOVE by DAVE ALLEN
21 Oct 2017 | 5 min read
Anyone who has been lucky enough to visit pop music museums and exhibitions around the world – and Elsewhere as seen them in Tokyo, London, Seattle, Sweden and Oslo – will attest to how quickly trends in popular music travel. Within weeks of Elvis breaking out in 1956 there were copyists and those adopting rock’n’roll in Mexico, Whakatane, Tokyo, Scandinavia and... > Read more
TEENAGERS; THE RISE OF YOUTH CULTURE IN NEW ZEALAND by CHRIS BRICKELL
21 Jul 2017 | 5 min read
Sometimes when I am talking to my university students about the rise of rock'n'roll in the Fifties – the first musical genre to specifically target teens – I tell them, just to get their attention again, that my parents were never teenagers. They look bewildered and so I explain: my mother in Scotland left school at 14 and my father in this country at 15, and both went to... > Read more
THE PRE-HISTORY OF SKIFFLE (2017): On the origin of a short-lived species
6 Jul 2017 | 10 min read
As with so many historic moments, at the time it was mundane . . . but became culture changing. This one was something as ordinary as this . . . By all accounts July 6, 1957 was an unseasonably warm day in Liverpool, even for summer. It was the time of galas, garden parties and fetes. In the middle-class suburb of Woolton, St Peter's church was hosting a popular fete... > Read more
Rock Island Line by Lonnie Donegan
DYLAN JUNKIE by JEFFREY PAPAROA HOLMAN
4 Jun 2017 | 3 min read
Someone clever and possibly French once said something along these lines: the truest response to a work of art is to create another. In a slight variant of that idea, this collection of astute and sharply observed poems is Christchurch writer/teacher Holman's response to Bob Dylan and the man behind the music, but just as often the myth and the mystery of Dylan's art which has... > Read more
BLADE NZ; TRAVEL STORIES FROM THE ROAD by MATT EARLE
25 Mar 2017 | 2 min read
Well, someone had to be crazy enough to do it, to rollerblade the length of New Zealand. And that task fell to the self-appointed Matt Earle and his pal Josh who cracked onto this somewhat hare-brained scheme – they began at the start of winter and Josh particularly had few skills on the wheels – but they did have the smarts to film their adventure. Their seven-part... > Read more
NEW ZEALAND JAZZ LIFE by NORMAN MEEHAN
10 Feb 2017 | 3 min read
Presented like a piece of jazz – themes laid out and explored, then space for soloists to let their distinct voices be heard – this tight 240-page paperback is an important and very welcome addition to the small body of literature on recent New Zealand jazz. Chris Bourke's excellent Blue Smoke; The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918 - 1964 and the University of... > Read more
AMERICA'S QUEEN; THE LIFE OF JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS by SARAH BRADFORD: Nice'n'sleazy does it
20 Jan 2017 | 4 min read
Writers of trashy, salacious and titillating novels about the rich and famous -- Jackie Collins comes to mind -- must despair when biographies appear which reveal the moneyed and mediocre to be more tawdry, venal and sleazy than even those of their vivid imaginations. Consider this litany of sexual intrigue and incestuousness from the higher realms of power: President John F. Kennedy had an... > Read more
GONEVILLE by NICK BOLLINGER
10 Jan 2017 | 4 min read | 1
Although they are never going to challenge the unassailable supremacy of cookbooks and the lives of people who play sport for money, there has been a discernible increase in the number of books about New Zealand music in the past few years. It's almost as if publishers have belatedly realised what most others know: that popular music has great stories, odd characters and an important... > Read more
Lawdy Miss Clawdy, by Johnny Devlin
SET THE BOY FREE, the autobiography by JOHNNY MARR
25 Nov 2016 | 3 min read
Sometimes a simple, bare fact can make you stop dead. Like this one: Johnny Marr was 23 when the Smiths broke up. As he writes in this unadorned and often flatly emotionless autobiography, “I had no idea what I was going to do”. It's a measure of the depth and detail of this 420 page book that the first third is of his life before the Smiths formed in '82, the central... > Read more
I Want a Heartbeat, Johnny Marr 2012
NEW ZEALAND TOP 20 SINGLES OF THE SIXTIES compiled by WARWICK FREEMAN
3 Nov 2016 | 3 min read
This may be the silliest, most obsessive but singularly important book on New Zealanders' music listening and buying habits in the Sixties ever written. And it is just lists. But what Freeman has done is, by using an interesting mathematical formula (more of that in a minute), determined just what the top selling singles were – even in the era before the charts started in... > Read more
GRANT & I: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE GO-BETWEENS by ROBERT FORSTER
7 Oct 2016 | 4 min read | 2
In his delightful if lightweight film That Thing You Do, director Tom Hanks puts at the centre of the story a Beatles-inspired pop band in the Sixties. In their search for a name they hit on “the Wonders”. But in a bid to be different they spell it “the Oneders”. Which works for them. But not for outsiders. A promoter pronounces it “the... > Read more
Slow Slow Music, by the Go-Betweens
BLOOMSBURY SOUTH: THE ARTS IN CHRISTCHURCH 1933 – 1953 by PETER SIMPSON
6 Aug 2016 | 4 min read
By happy chance, it was on a three-day break near Christchurch when time became available to be immersed in this highy readable, well researched and beautifully illustrated book. And by further coincidence the re-opened Christchurch Art Gallery had exhibitions which incuded works by some of the name players – Rita Angus, Evelyn Page, Louise Henderson and Doris Lusk among them... > Read more
IN LOVE WITH THESE TIMES by ROGER SHEPHERD
7 Jun 2016 | 3 min read | 1
Just as Simon Grigg did with his excellent How Bizarre (nominally about the story behind that remarkable global hit out of Auckland), so too does Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd here extend himself beyond a mere account of his engagement with the label. Although subtitled “My Life with Flying Nun Records”, Shepherd's view takes in the surrounding social, geographic,... > Read more
THE MANY DEATHS OF MARY DOBIE, by DAVID HASTINGS
24 Jan 2016 | 2 min read
As with many compelling stories – from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood through film-noir – this one begins with a murder. And from it, both backwards and forwards, the narrative unfolds with compelling pace and attention to detail. For this was not just any murder. The killing of the Mary Dobie of the title occurred at the crossroads of cultures in New Zealand in the... > Read more