THE MAGAZINE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Elsewhere is a concept and a place, and Graham Reid goes there for his wide angle travels, writing, music review and interviews with writers, musicians and artists.
Elsewhere is an on-line magazine for new music (we filter out the mundane and spotlight the more interesting albums), different travel, arts and more. It is dedicated to the diversity and possibilities of Elsewhere. It's an equal opportunity enjoyer. Subscribe here (it's free) for a weekly newsletter. Welcome . . .
Latest posts
The Great Learning Orchestra: Selected Recordings from Grapefruit by Yoko Ono (Karl/digital outlets)
25 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
As we've noted in reviews of a couple of recent books about Yoko Ono, people are increasingly aware that she's in her Nineties and by some accounts unwell. There's a kind of concerned death watch going on and a review of her remarkable career. There was a recent retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern and touring exhibitions keep her name and physical art alive.... > Read more
Overtone Piece
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE SONGWRITER QUESTIONNAIRE . . . Lisa Crawley
24 Apr 2025 | 3 min read
Given that New Zealand singer-songwriter Lisa Crawley has been on many people's radar since the early 2000s -- Elsewhere reviewed her EP Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between in 2009 and her debut album Everything That I Have Seen was released in 2011 -- it seems odd that at this later stage we would have her answer some songwriting questions. However she won... > Read more
The Gatekeeper
PETE HAM OF BADFINGER, REMEMBERED: Take a sad song and make it sadder
22 Apr 2025 | 7 min read | 3
Put simply: Pete Ham was one of the singer-songwriters in Badfinger, the British pop band of the late Sixties and early Seventies which enjoyed the patronage of Paul McCartney. He gave them his Come and Get It (used in the Ringo-Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian) on the condition they record it exactly as his demo. They did, it was a hit, and a band was... > Read more
Hurry on Father (demo from the Golders Green album)
Big Boy Groves: Bucket o Blood (1962)
22 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Most songs inviting you to club promise a great night with dancing and drinking and fun times to be had. Ervin Groves from San Diego promising nothing of the sort with this song. In fact this is one club which sounds like it would be a must to avoid because of the bodies stacking up. The mention in the opening lines to the Chicken Shack is a reference to a song... > Read more
BILLY STRINGS, INTERVIEWED (2025): That ol' bluegrass metal boogie
22 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
The boy's life rolled out like a bleak American black'n'white film set in OxyContin County, Kentucky where fiddlers play on the back-porch and fentanyl is the currency. His father died when he was two, his mother remarried but the couple fell prey to meth addiction. The boy left home at 13 and went through his own dependencies. And that could have been... > Read more
Dealing Despair
Tom Lark: Moonlight Motel (digital outlets)
22 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Two years ago it was Tom Lark's time: the debut album Brave Star under the Lark name -- he also works as Shannon Fowler and Shannon Matthew Vanya -- was in our best of year picks, earned him a Silver Scroll nomination and the album was a Taite Prize finalist for the Auckland singer, songwriter and producer. It was crafted collection of slightlydelic dream pop with... > Read more
Dumb Luck
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Think: We'll Give You a Buzz (CD/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
One of the many rewards of following the releases on Grant Gillanders' Frenzy reissue label is just how good so many of the bands were at the time but went largely unheard. Sometimes he unearths a band and pulls together an album out of their recordings. Or in the case of the thrilling Grim Ltd he discovers a live tape of their final gig and releases the raw r'n'b... > Read more
Our Children (Think About)
Elsewhere Art . . . Jeff Healey
14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Blues singer- guitarist Jeff Healey -- who died in 2008 -- was a great collector of 78rpm records. When Elsewhere interviewed him in the early 2000s he spoke about the 11,000 he had at home (he'd just bought another 30 or 40 in a nearby store) and so evoking that old time music and look just seemed a bit obvious for this collage. He also loved Dixieland and so there... > Read more
1968: SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: The world on a short fuse
14 Apr 2025 | 19 min read | 2
1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD? "Somehow Sgt Pepper did not stop the war in Vietnam. Somehow it didn't work. Somebody isn't listening" -- David Crosby of Crosby Stills and Nash, 1970 "Rock stars believed that they possessed the latent power to effect political and cultural change: one anthem and the walls of the citadel would crack, like... > Read more
Hotlegs: Neanderthal Man (1970)
14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
It's not unusual for studio experiments to end up on records, less common that they become the record itself -- as was the case with this single. To backtrack a bit. The successful British songwriter Graham Gouldman who had penned hits for Herman's Hermits (No Milk Today), the Yardbirds (For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You) and others ran into a dry spell... > Read more
(Warning, from vinyl so has enjoyable surface noise)
GUEST MUSICIAN MARK DE CLIVE LOWE speaks of the inspiration for his new album Past Present (Tone Poems Across Time)
14 Apr 2025 | 4 min read
This album is a collection of personal moments and reflections. Reflections on family, reflections on the past, reflections on the present. It’s a sonic and intimate journey with my late father Robin de Clive-Lowe top of mind. A journey of discovery, catharsis and healing. My father boarded a cargo ship and made his way from Auckland, New Zealand to Hiroshima,... > Read more
Heart
Marlon Williams: Te Whare Tīwekaweka (digital outlets/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
In June 2021, the soul singer Teeks appeared in concert at Auckland's Civic Theatre before a large and appreciative audience. It was a significant event beyond being a concert. Here was a young, bilingual gay Māori man singing to a broad cross-section of mainstream Kiwis and, as I noted in a review, the enthusiastic response her got was emblematic of how far we've... > Read more
Kōrero Māori
Serebii: Dime (digital outlets/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
The multi-instrumentalist and expat producer Callum Mower (AKA neo-soul, folksy singer/songwriter Serebii) has said he draws inspiration from Aldous Harding and his frequent collaborator has been local soul-jazz artist Arjuna Oakes. Although he has moved back to this country from London, he is increasingly connecting with a global audience and recent PR out of the... > Read more
By Design
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JOHN FRED: Soulman in disguise (with Beat pop)
11 Apr 2025 | 4 min read | 1
During the height of Beatlemania (1963-65) there were numerous tribute songs, parodies and humorous copies in the Beatles' style. Not to mention hundreds of artists covering the Lennon-McCartney originals. Among the many tributes were the 18-year old Cher (as Bonnie Jo Mason) weighing in with Ringo I Love You, on the New Zealand homefront Rochelle Vincen covered Donna... > Read more
Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)
Haiku Redo: Disco Summer (Failsafe/digital outlets)
11 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Up there in Japan, Rob Mayes of the Failsafe label goes through the dozens of recordings and albums he made with various bands, many from Christchurch during the Eighties, Nineties and some even beyond the label's heyday. It's a rewarding labour love because here was a label on which was the alternative to the alternative (Flying Nun, Xpressway etc) and mostly held the... > Read more
It's Just Too Long
STEVE REICH: DIFFERENT TRAINS/ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT, CONSIDERED (1989): Repeat as required
7 Apr 2025 | 3 min read
The 1965 recording It's Gonna Rain by the New York composer Steve Reich was one of the most interesting, innovative and important pieces of its era. At least for Reich. In San Francisco, Reich had heard a streetcorner preacher Brother Walter in apocalyptic mode warning of another Great Flood to wipe out sinners, and Reich recorded him. As with Dylan's Hard Rain's... > Read more
Alien Weaponry: Te Rā (digital outlets)
7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Lest we forget – and perhaps some never knew – Jamaican reggae was originally a rebel music giving voice to cultural outsiders like Rastafarians and Nyabinghi followers, the marginalised and dispossessed. And those who rejected society. It was adopted as such in this country by bands like Herbs, Aotearoa, Dread Beat and Blood, Unity Pacific and others because... > Read more
Crown
Ma Rainey: Toad Frog Blues (1924)
7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Few would have described Ma Rainey (1886 - 1939) as one of God's finest creations. Her pianist Thomas A. Dorsey said charitably, "I couldn't say that she was a good looking woman". In Francis Davis' The History of the Blues; the Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie Patton to Robert Cray he writes, "everyone else who knew Ma Rainey described her as pug... > Read more
Favourite Five Recent Releases
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Womb: One is Always Heading Somewhere (digital outlets)
7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one. Not because it comes in a gatefold sleeve (it doesn't), not because it has a lyric sheet (no to that also) but because it comes with a download code, which Elsewhere thinks should always included with the vinyl opeion If you pay out a wedge of money for a record like this... > Read more
Just Like Waves
YOKO, A BIOGRAPHY by DAVID SHEFF
6 Apr 2025 | 5 min read | 2
There’s a well-known quote by John Lennon about his wife Yoko Ono, reproduced in the inner sleeve of this new biography: “Everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” It’s pithy and pointed . . . but not entirely true. A lot of people did know what Yoko did, they just didn’t like it. To be fair,... > Read more