Absolute Elsewhere
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BLONDIE RECONSIDERED (2017): The tide coming in, again.
24 Apr 2017 | 2 min read
More than four decades after their self-titled debut album, Blondie return with a new album Pollinator with songs written by TV on the Radio's David Sitek, Sia, Johnny Marr and others, including original members Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. But let's cherry-pick their back catalogue. Plastic Letters (1978) As with their promising debut of two years previous – and... > Read more
THE FACE OF LATE FIFTIES POP (2017): Where the pretty boys were
10 Apr 2017 | 7 min read
Between the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens (the first Hispanic rock'n'roll star) and the Big Bopper in February 1959, and the emergence of the Beatles four years later, popular music was adrift. Certainly there were surf bands and Motown, Phil Spector, doo-wop singers and girl groups, as well as marginal movements like gravedigger rock, rockabilly rebels and greasers,... > Read more
Blue on Blue, by Bobby Vinton
PAUL McCARTNEY'S FLOWERS IN THE DIRT REISSUED (2017): Putting on a brave face again
3 Apr 2017 | 8 min read
The Eighties was a tough decade for many artists who'd made their name in the Seventies, and more especially those holdovers from the Sixties. Dylan was adrift, and while the Stones started the decade with hit albums they suffered diminishing artistic and commercial returns . . . then Jagger started a solo career to Keith Richard's chagrin. The Who called it a day... > Read more
So Like Candy (demo w Elvis Costello)
GOLDFRAPP CONSIDERED (2017): It used to go like that, now it goes like this . . . and this'n'that
3 Apr 2017 | 3 min read
Let's give British singer Alison Goldfrapp and synth/composer Will Gregory – who perform as Goldfrapp – their due. If nothing else, they always made their career an interesting and unpredictable ride for us these past 17 years. They might have started life working the area between ambient, electronic and cinematic sounds with their still impressive debut Felt Mountain,... > Read more
WHAT THE BEATLES KNEW BY '62 (2017): Much more than too much monkey business
31 Mar 2017 | 5 min read | 2
The best information we have about what songs the pre-Fab Four knew in those days before fame and acclaim hit in 1963 is that they could play somewhere over 80 – and perhaps even close to 100 – songs. Everything from Elvis and the Everly Brothers (Blue Suede Shoes, Cathy's Clown) through Buddy Holly (the first song the pre-Beatles Lennon, McCartney and Harrison and others... > Read more
Too Much Monkey Business, by Chuck Berry
THE DOORS CONSIDERED, AGAIN (2017): Mr Mojo rises once more
31 Mar 2017 | 2 min read
Many consider 1967 rock's greatest year: albums became more important than singles (Sgt Pepper's leading the way) and there were groundbreaking debuts by Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Velvet Underground . . . And The Doors, who brought Jim Morrison's baritone poetics into rock with a great band. Today sees the 50th anniversary reissue of that debut album as a three CD set and again on... > Read more
THE REVOLUTIONARY SNAKE ENSEMBLE PROFILED (2017): The Nawlins beat of the Boston street
27 Mar 2017 | 3 min read
Okay, follow us back for a while, down a few by-ways and familiar names before we get to Boston’s much acclaimed funky New Orleans-influenced brass band. Let’s go way back to Boston’s post-punk outfit Moving Parts who broke up in the late Seventies . . . because out of their remnants came two more familiar names; Mission of Burma and an odd off-shoot called Birdsongs... > Read more
I'll Fly Away
TURKISH PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC FROM THE SEVENTIES REDISCOVERED (2017): Gonna take you wider
20 Mar 2017 | 5 min read
The wheel of history is turning faster and faster. Once, you could understand how Greece, which gave the world the important building blocks of democracy and philosophy, was labouring under the gun of a military dictatorship in the 20th century. Or how Rome, which once commanded a massive empire, had descended into the political chaos which is modern day Italy with its revolving... > Read more
Bu Ellerden Gocup. by Asik Emrah
BILL NELSON REVISITED (2017): Back on the beam
17 Mar 2017 | 3 min read | 1
Actually, the title on this article is a fib: this is not a revisit to the astonishingly prolific English musician Bill Nelson (whom Elsewhere has never previously visited), but merely an excuse to wax lyrical about his typically indefinable album from 1981 entitled -- hold your breath -- Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam. And that probably is a reference to . . . ? The absurdly... > Read more
Cubical Domes
BILL FRISELL PROFILED (2017): Guitarist without portfolio
15 Mar 2017 | 3 min read
No matter where you try to place American guitarist/composer Bill Frisell – one of the chief guests at this year's Wellington Jazz festival – on the musical spectrum, he always seems like the outsider on the inside. Trying to get a clear picture of him is like looking at an image through a prism: From one perspective he's a jazz musician, from another he's the distinctive... > Read more
Mandeville, Bill Frisell w Paul Motian Band, 1981
STRAND OF OAKS INTERVIEWED (2017): Coming to terms with himself
10 Mar 2017 | 13 min read | 1
For a guy who has been battered by life and battered himself, Tim Showalter – who performs as Strand of Oaks – sounds remarkable cheerful, funny and upbeat when we catch at home in a Philadelphia suburb, albeit briefly. “I'm home for about 48 hours after playing in Europe,” he says, “and then we are starting the tour of the US. So we are pretty much going... > Read more
Everything
KLAUS VOORMANN ARTIST: CREATING AN ICONIC ALBUM COVER (2017): Because it revolves around and around
6 Mar 2017 | 2 min read
Klaus Voormann's story is entwined with that of the Beatles from the day he saw them playing in a Hamburg bar. The story has become legend, how after an argument with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr -- an aspiring photographer -- he wandered the streets and was drawn by the sound coming from the club It was the Beatles playing a typically rowdy and ramshakle set, and Voormann was... > Read more
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN CONSIDERED (2017): The needling and the damage done
20 Feb 2017 | 3 min read
The most unexpected thing about The Jesus and Mary Chain's debut album was that they made it at all. When they first started playing live their sets barely broke the double-figures minute mark. In part that was because they'd sometimes take the stage claiming to be the support band and get on and off before anyone twigged. But albums they did make, half a dozen between the... > Read more
Always Sad (from Damage and Joy)
ELBOW, ONCE AGAIN (2017): Guy Garvey, the big Elbow bender
12 Feb 2017 | 3 min read | 2
When Elsewhere interviewed Guy Garvey of Britain's acclaimed Elbow in 2011 he was amused by the fact he'd become something of a rock star. He was for too old for that description he felt -- he was 37 and happily in a relationship (“trying for baby”) at the time. Although I can't remember if it was me or him who noted he looked more like Ricky Gervais in The Office than a... > Read more
K2
THE CHURCHILL'S REMEMBERED (2017): It's a psikhidelish trip from Tel Aviv
6 Feb 2017 | 3 min read
Music news travels fast. Sometimes too fast. A group around the table, talking over bottles of wine and each other, was reminiscing about how scenes used to develop in glorious isolation. Tennessee in the mid Fifties, the South Side of Chicago and Liverpool in the early Sixties, a strange brew of dope smoke and religion on an off-beat in Jamaica a decade later, downtown New York... > Read more
Subsequent Finale
HERMAN'S HERMITS' BLAZE RECONSIDERED (2017): Going out to a blaze of indifference
3 Feb 2017 | 6 min read
In the mid Sixties, no self-respecting fan of the Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks and others took Herman's Hermits seriously. They were a vacuous pop band fronted by the cute Herman (Peter Noone) whose crooked front tooth seemed to get as much attention as their music. To their small credit however, they were sometimes pretty enjoyable in what they did and their early singles included... > Read more
Moonshine Man
LYDIA COLE INTERVIEWED (2017): Then we take Berlin . . .
30 Jan 2017 | 8 min read
Sitting in a Kingsland cafe just a few minutes walk from where she's been flatting for the past few years, singer-songwriter Lydia Cole is a charming and guileless combination of candour, caution and confidence. You get the impression that, even at 29, she is assured about where she is in life but also still feeling her way. And fair enough: she is putting a tour together (dates... > Read more
MUSIC BEYOND GENRE (2017): The brave new post-modern world of Fatima Al Qadiri
23 Jan 2017 | 5 min read
When Aaradhna was awarded but declined to accept the best urban hip-hop award at the 2016 New Zealand Music Awards for her album Brown Girl – saying, among other things she was a singer not a rapper and that she felt marginalised by being put in what she saw as the “brown” category – it set off a small debate about how we label music and artists. Unhelpfully... > Read more
Shanghai Freeway
THE FLAMING LIPS CONSIDERED (2017): White punks on dope
16 Jan 2017 | 3 min read
It was the costumes and huge balloons really, wasn't it? Flaming Lips – the vehicle of Wayne Coyne – proved that even at the height of post-grunge seriousness in the Nineties you were allowed to be silly and have fun. And he always looked like he was. But Flaming Lips had been around a long time — they started in the early Eighties — before their dreamy,... > Read more
PJ HARVEY CONSIDERED (2016): All killer and no Polly filler
12 Dec 2016 | 2 min read
When she first emerged under her own name in the early Nineties with the album Dry we called her “PJ Harvey”, because “Polly” seemed rather too familiar for someone so tightly wound and sharply poetic. And because Dry's follow-up Rid of Me was called “the best miserable album of all time” by Q magazine. She changed over time, but even in 2001... > Read more