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
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... > Read more
BOOKSHOP PRAYERS by PAUL McLANEY
9 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
Although better known as a musician – an impressive number of albums under various guises – Auckland's Paul McLaney surprised recently with the beautifully presented little book The Deep Dark Hole/The Faint Glimmer of Hope which was designed like a physical metaphor of a journey into depression and, when flipped over, the pathway out. It was a lovely,... > Read more
The Tide
EARTH TO MOON by MOON UNIT ZAPPA
9 Sep 2024 | 3 min read
When Moon Unit Zappa went to college she felt sorry for the kids because they had to share their name with other people, and she couldn't believe that some of the kids' parents had divorced because of infidelity. Her dad Frank had serial relationships with women other than his wife Gail, sometimes these women staying in the family home. “It's just... > Read more
David Gilmour: Luck and Strange (digital outlets)
9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Many decades ago there was a New Zealand whisky called 45 South. My father used to say it was a perfectly fine drink . . . as long as you didn't think of it as a whisky. I mentioned this the other night to a friend when the topic of the new David Gilmour album came up. Neither of us had rated his solo albums outside Pink Floyd as being up to much and then I said I... > Read more
The Piper's Call
GUEST MUSICIAN TAMI NEILSON talks us through her new album Neilson Sings Nelson
9 Sep 2024 | 7 min read
When I met Willie Nelson in person for the first time, we hugged hello, then rehearsed our duet Beyond the Stars [on her 2022 album Kingmaker]. It was one of the most magical moments of my life. I performed with him at Luck Reunion 2022, and at the end of that year, returned home to a very scary turn of events. I was admitted into ICU with life-threatening... > Read more
I Never Cared For You
Mystery Waitress: Bright Black Night (digital outlets)
9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
In a recent conversation with a fellow music writer, the conversation turned to the problem of giving early acclaim to local artists on the basis of very little: maybe just a single or two. My friend said it could give the artist an artificially inflated idea of self-worth and raised unreasonable expectations. It's a fair point, but then I mentioned a band which... > Read more
Mountain
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: Woodland (digital outlets)
9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
When we interviewed Gillian Welch 20 years ago it was still relatively early in her career, but she and her partner David Rawlings were already being acclaimed – on the basis of the albums Hell Among the Yearlings and Time (The Revelator) – as being in the vanguard of a deeply rooted Americana. Their debut – although credited solely to Welch – was... > Read more
The Day the Mississippi Died
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... > Read more
The Rolling Stones: I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys (1965)
9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Right at the end of the Rolling Stones doco Charlie is My Darling -- which captures extraordinary footage of a brief tour in Ireland in '65 with a stage invasion and general mayhem -- we see the Stones goofing off and playing a song that was a rarity. This one. And its rarity value is two-fold. First it was credited to Keith Richards and their manager Andrew Loog... > Read more
John Mayall: Blues From Laurel Canyon (1968)
8 Sep 2024 | 3 min read | 3
In the wake of '67s Sgt Pepper's the new thing in rock was "the concept album" and at the tail-end of that decade and well into the Seventies a long list of bands weighed in: the Pretty Things with SF Sorrow,The Who with Tommy, The Moody Blues, Genesis, Yes . . . Mostly these were musicians with an art school background and so testing themselves over a 40... > Read more
John Mayall: Fly Tomorrow
Pitch Black: Echoes of the Night; The Adrian Sherwood Remixes (digital outlets)
6 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Elsewhere at Elsewhere Mike Hodgson – one half of Pitch Black alongside Paddy Free – explains how these four remixes of their material came into being. Have a look here. So here let's just acknowledge how very different the results are from the source material on their 2007 Rude Mechanicals album. The haunting opener Transient Transmission is twist... > Read more
Transient Transmission
Peel Dream Magazine: Rose Main Reading Room (digital outlets)
6 Sep 2024 | <1 min read
Across 15 seductive songs this LA-based trio offer what sounds like lush miniatures which blend languid vocals, warm synth washes, minimalist repetition and understated melodies. The sort of music you could imagine playing quietly in a reading room. They aren't averse to glistening pop (I Wasn't Made For War) and we might guess the band's songwriter Joe Stevens had... > Read more
Machine Repeating
GUEST MUSICIAN MIKE HODGSON OF PITCH BLACK AND MISLED CONVOY reflects on 40 years of music and a special new release
6 Sep 2024 | 3 min read
In 1984 I moved to Christchurch and began work at the Court Theatre as a props designer. Over time I met local artists and, in my time off, we would meet up and talk about music. I was very much into the industrial scene and on one occasion was describing a 23 Skidoo record, The Culling is Coming. As my description didn’t sound like what my friends thought the band... > Read more
Third Light by Pitch Black, Adrian Sherwood dub mix
MIDAS MAN, a film by JOE STEPHENSON
3 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
Among the many big problems for a film like this – a biopic of the short, fast life of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein – is that many of the characters in it are so familiar: four of them among the best known faces in the world, even now. So invariably some responses default to: well he (Jonah Lees, Phantom of the Open) does look a bit like John Lennon but... > Read more
I Just Don't Understand
CHASING ME TO MY GRAVE by WINFRED REMBERT
2 Sep 2024 | 3 min read
It is said that history is written by the winners, and that is largely true. But it is also written by academics with access to files. Notes, documents and the work of other academics. Many of these researchers are dedicated and intent of getting to the multi-dimension truths of events. A writer/researcher like Antony Beaver is someone whose view from the battlefield... > 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... > Read more
Favourite Five Recent Releases
OUT FROM THE UNDERGROUND (2024): Steve Wynn far beyond the paisley years
2 Sep 2024 | 4 min read
Popular music as we know it is 70 this year, we're seven decades on from Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, Elvis' That's Alright Mama and Blue Moon of Kentucky, Big Joe Turner's Shake Rattle and Roll, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman and Hank Ballard's Work With Me Annie. We're also 70 years on from Chet Baker's My Funny Valentine, the Moonglows' Sincerely, Errol Garner's... > Read more
What Were You Expecting
Rodrigo Amarante: Tuyo (2015)
2 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
For a Netflix series awash with drugs, guns, bloodshed, serial smoking, violence, impossibly large amounts of money and hedonism, the theme song to Narcos by the Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante is ineffably sad. The narcocorrido ballad – a style of music from the borderlands of Mexico and the US which alludes to drug smuggling – was written by... > Read more
Troy Kingi and the Cactus Handshake: Leatherman and the Mojave Green (digital outlets)
2 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Troy Kingi can at last see the finish line of his 10/10/10 project: 10 albums in 10 genres in 10 years. He's knocked off classic soul, reggae, cosmic rock, folk . . . This impressive double album – which debuted at the top of the New Zealand charts – is number eight in the projected series and in the TVNZ+ documentary series Troy Kingi's Desert Hīkoi about... > Read more
Mezcal Eye Drop
LacLu: self-titled (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
LacLu is guitarist Keith Price (academic/teacher in the jazz faculty at Auckland Uni) and two recent graduates, saxophonist Francesca Parussini and drummer Maximillian Crook, recorded here in the Kenneth Myers Centre in Auckland, the former IYA radio building on Shortland Street. The four spare, considered and spacious pieces hint at their nature through the titles of... > Read more