Absolute Elsewhere
Music interviews, overviews, critical essays and reviews. Big names, cult acts and interviews exclusive to Elsewhere. Straight and bizarre, oddball and ordinary music and musicians. Important moments from the past . . . and things happening right now. Or about to. The Elsewhere place if you are curious about music.
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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 born which always... > Read more
Hurry on Father (demo from the Golders Green album)
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 where the film reached... > Read more
Dealing Despair
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 Jericho under... > Read more
CHARLOTTE YATES, ACKNOWLEDGED (2025): Doing it for herself this time
3 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
Singer-songwriter Charlotte Yates is possibly better known for what she has done for others than on her own account. She was the prime mover behind four important albums, Baxter, Tuwhare, Ihimaera and Mansfield for which the writings of those towering figures (James, Hone, Witi and Katherine) were set to music by stellar casts of contemporary musicians, among them Don McGlashan, Mahinarangi... > Read more
The Water's Edge
LUCINDA WILLIAMS, VIC CHESTNUTT AND BUTTERCUP (2025): Anger and tone revisited
31 Mar 2025 | 3 min read
Vic Chestnutt was a gifted singer-songwriter who was much admired by his peers. He had been in a car crash at 18 and was effectively a quadrapilegic although had some small movement in his hands so he could still play simple chords on guitar. His first two albums were produced by Michael Stipe of REM and a fund-raising album for him had his songs covered by Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage,... > Read more
THE FREEWHEELIN' JESSE WELLES (2025): With Bob on his side
24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
No sooner had Timothée Chalamet been announced as playing the young Bob Dylan in the bio-pic A Complete Unknown than internet naysayers weighed in. The pretty boy from Dune playing Dylan? Willie Wonka as Bob? When the film arrived questions and complaints kept coming. Why was Bob's girlfriend Suze Rotolo renamed Sylvie Russo? (A. Dylan requested the change) Why wasn't... > Read more
Wheel (from Middle)
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO, A TRIBUTE ALBUM: Another look in the art-rock mirror
24 Mar 2025 | 4 min read
Has there even been an album whose cultural influence far outstripped it's commercial impact more than the debut by New York's Velvet Underground? Their 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico – in that famously provocative banana cover by the band's champion and nominal “producer” Andy Warhol (a phallic pink banana revealed when the skin was peeled back) – arrived... > Read more
THE BEAU BRUMMELS' COMPLETE RECORDINGS 1964-1970: Beat-pop out of LA, destination Nashville
17 Mar 2025 | 4 min read | 1
Like their peers, the Beat-era Buckinghams from Chicago, the Beau Brummels out of San Francisco formed in the wake of the British Invasion and adopted the look, style and a name which ensured that they would be mistaken for another great UK pop-rock band. Needless to say they would insist that much of this wasn't deliberate – yeah, like naming yourself after an English Regency dandy... > Read more
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT (2025): The rise and return of Nothing At All!
11 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
In those ancient days before the internet made self-promotion easy and lazy, artists had to create their own audience through live shows. Anticipating the emergence of garageband rock'n'roll bands like the Datsuns, Hellacopters, Von Bondies, Detroit Cobras, Guitar Wolf and others, the Nothing At All! trio out of Auckland's North Shore took their punk-fuelled rock'n'roll to audience through... > Read more
GET UP, STAND UP AGAIN (2025): The resurrection of All Fall Down
10 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
It was long ago and, from where we sit, far away: Christchurch in the Eighties to be specific. There were a lot of bands around at the time and with just the EP My Brand New Wallpaper Coat released on Flying Nun in 1987 it seems almost inevitable that All Fall Down should be one of those here-today-and-gone bands from that era. But All Fall Down were – as we now know through the... > Read more
Star Sign (live)
THE LAST HURRAH (2025): Martin Phillipps' last Chills album
10 Mar 2025 | 3 min read
David Bowie knew his end was coming and so his final album blackstar – released on his 69th birthday and just two days before he died – contained references to his impending departure. Leonard Cohen's posthumous Thanks for the Dance in 2019, released three years after his death, may come with a title like a farewell note but the songs were part of his on-going writing.... > Read more
Juicy Creaming Soda
THE LONG TWILIGHT IN LIVERPOOL (2025): After the legends left
3 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
Many years ago an interesting but hardly essential compilation What About Us? pulled together material by Liverpool bands (the Chants, Koobas, Johnny Sandon etc) and also-rans like Tommy Quickly in the years of Beatle-led Merseybeat. It was a bit of fun but few of the songs leaped to attention as lost classics from the era. A more recent collection compiled Bob Stanley of St... > Read more
Imagination, by Clayton Squares
SEQUEL SONGS: And you'll never guess what happened next . . .
17 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
In the late Fifties and early Sixties the idea of answer songs (Dodie Stevens' Yes I'm Lonesome Tonight for example) was pretty common, as were sequel songs. The most obvious sequel song was Peggy Sue Got Married by Buddy Holly and most in the genre were cash-ins, replication songs (Wanda Jackson's follow-up to Let's Have a Party was the photocopied Man We Had a Party) and pretty gimmicky.... > Read more
Man We Had a Party, by Wanda Jackson
CLASSIC GIRL GROUPS (2013): All the young elles
10 Feb 2025 | 3 min read
Even in a very long list of great groups there will be omissions. And today, despite constant reissue programmes, repackaging and a trawling of the backwaters of pop music's past, there can still be amnesia when it comes to some of the most important groups of an era. The Shirelles, for example, have gone woefully overlooked given how many hits they sprang, how they defined a sound and a... > Read more
Uptown, by the Crystals
CMON CMON, PROFILED (2025): Something beginning with C
27 Jan 2025 | 2 min read
The release of the new single Turn Off The Lights by the Belgian trio Cmon Cmon reminded us of what a fine power pop band they are. But before we introduce them – we're guessing they would be new to you – we'll quickly address power pop, one of our favourite escapist genres. Essentially the style takes the elements of guitar-based pop – strong melodies, verse-chorus... > Read more
The Summers We Missed
THE RETURN OF RINGO (2025): The country calls again to a Starr
26 Jan 2025 | 2 min read
For at least a decade before it became a popular opinion, Elsewhere championed the McCartney's Ram album (and the album by Paul's brother Mike which was like a slightly lesser companion album). We also went into bat for Ringo's country album Beaucoups of Blues of 1970, his first serious solo album after Sentimental Journey, an album of standards which mum liked and he'd grown up on. On... > Read more
Rosetta (with Billy Strings and Larkin Poe)
JIM PEPPER, REMEMBERED (2025): A man comin' . . . an' too soon goin'
20 Jan 2025 | 3 min read | 2
It is a rare jazz musician who can score a rock-radio hit -- but saxophonist Jim Pepper was a very rare jazz musician indeed. Of Kaw and Creek descent, Pepper was born in Oregon in 1941 and described himself as an "urban Indian". He spent much of his early life between family homes in Oregon and Oklahoma and although he grew up listening to big band jazz and bebop he was also... > Read more
Ya Na Ho
THE GANTS, RESURRECTED (2024): The British Beat from Mississippi
31 Dec 2024 | 2 min read
In the years immediately following the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, literally scores of American bands adopted the Mersey Beat style (or what they thought it was) and many went further than just copying the Beatles' hairstyle but took on British-sounding names: the Buckinghams, Beau Brummels, Beefeaters, . . . Quite what effect the Kingsmen out of... > Read more
I Wonder
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2024: THE EDITOR'S PICKS
9 Dec 2024 | 10 min read | 4
It is that time again when we reflect on the year that has sped by, and of course we single out albums that made it all so much better. As always these are not “the best” of the year because we couldn't hear everything and anyway, “the best” are those that you enjoyed the most. But here we remind you of those albums which stood out from... > Read more
THE EASYBEATS REMEMBERED (2015): I got hit songs on my mind . . .
2 Dec 2024 | 6 min read | 1
The edges of the vision are blurry but at the centre of the frame things are clear. I am a teenager, my friend Barry and I and perhaps a couple of others are stumbling down a dark road near what is now the Whangaparaoa shopping centre. We had just been at a movie – may have been kicked out – and are drunk on Blackberry Nip or McWilliam's Sweet Sherry. As we pass by the old... > Read more