Absolute Elsewhere
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THE MONKEES REVISITED (2016): Through the looking glass
20 May 2016 | 7 min read | 1
The point about the Monkees is that most people miss the point about the Monkees. Back in the late Sixties some people – and some even today – got very exercised about the Monkees not playing their own instruments on their early albums. Gee,and can we start an alphabetical list of artists who didn't? The Association, all the vocal acts on Motown, the Beach Boys . . .... > Read more
I'm Not Your Stepping Stone (live '67)
QUEEN BEY THE REVENGER Vs PJ THE REPORTER (2016): Welcome to their worlds
16 May 2016 | 5 min read | 1
Whether you think Beyonce's new album/hour-long film Lemonade is an openly autobiographical letter paying out on the infidelities of her husband Jay Z or just another clever piece of PR positioning, hardly matters. The “visual album” Lemonade – as in, “if life gives you lemons . . . “ – is actually an exceptional multi-media piece of work . . . with... > Read more
Chain of Keys by PJ Harvey
GRATEFUL DEAD REVISITED, AGAIN? (2016): Welcome to the re-resurrection
11 May 2016 | 3 min read
First of all: Jeez! Who knew? If you're under 45 did you know some of your favourite bands and artists – Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Mumford and Sons, Marijuana Deathsquad, Lucius , Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Fucked Up among them – would line up for a four-CD salute to those hippie icons Grateful Dead? And if you're over 55 or of pensionable age and traveling free on... > Read more
Shakedown Street, Unknown Mortal Orchestra
RYAN CHOI CONSIDERED (2016): Ukulele for the 21st century
25 Apr 2016 | 3 min read
Ryan Choi was born, and lives, in Honolulu. And he plays ukulele. But that is where the cliches and expectation ends. Because he plays a very different ukulele in a very different way. But first, let's backtrack a little to say how he came to Elsewhere's attention. Every week on average Elsewhere receives about a dozen CDs for consideration and about the same number of e-mails... > Read more
Inn Blue
RAY DAVIES, SONGS ON SALE (2016): Kinda Kinks but kinda not
25 Apr 2016 | 3 min read | 1
In 1964, when they realised there was money in song publishing, Paul McCartney and John Lennon got in on the game, McCartney was especially keen to flog off songs to others (like the Stones, Peter and Gordon, Cilla Black and others in Brian Epstein's stable of stars like the ill-fated Tommy Quickly). In fact later in life he would joke that he'd go round to Lennon's place and they'd... > Read more
This Strange Effect by Dave Berry
CHEAP TRICK CONSIDERED (2016): Famous for their powerful trickery
18 Apr 2016 | 5 min read | 1
Unfortunately for Cheap Trick, by the time they got to record their album All Shook Up with former Beatles producer George Martin and their engineer Geoff Emerick in 1980, they were starting to pull apart and had run out of puff. And great songs. But the band from Illinois in the mid 70s — sometimes wrongly described as “America's Beatles”, but we'll see why soon... > Read more
Southern Girls
SONIC YOUTH REVISITED (2016): From sideline to frontline to fade away
18 Apr 2016 | 4 min read
When the married couple of bassist Kim Gordon and guitarist Thurston Moore in Sonic Youth separated in 2011, there was great sense of sadness, as Gordon would later acknowledge in her very interesting autobiography Girl in a Band. She quoted from Elissa Schappell's article in Salon which captured what many fans – and even just casual observers of the band – were thinking.... > Read more
Tuff Gnarl (from Sister)
THE PROCLAIMERS INTERVIEWED (2016): Still clocking up the miles
11 Apr 2016 | 9 min read
The problem is common enough: The artists continues to make important music and the audience just wants to hear the hit songs from decades ago. It does seem unusually cruel in the case of Scotland's Proclaimers – twins Charlie and Craig Reid, now 54 – because their latest album Let's Hear It For The Dogs not only contains some of their toughest and most incisive (and... > Read more
Tuesday Afternoon
MURRAY McNABB REISSUED (2016): Spirit having flown
7 Apr 2016 | 3 min read
When New Zealand composer and keyboard player Murray McNabb died in 2013 at age 66 it's a safe bet that more people had heard his music than they might have thought. Outside of his serious jazz work McNabb did serious commercial work, music for television commercials (the famous Crunchie and Mainland Cheese ads), movies (Once Were Warriors), television series (Greenstone) and much... > Read more
Mr Gone (w Space Case, 1982)
RAY COLUMBUS RETURNS (2016): Snap, crackle and rock
30 Mar 2016 | 5 min read | 1
In his often courageously candid 2011 autobiography The Modfather – subtitled “the life and times of a rock'n'roll pioneer” and co-written with journalist Margie Thompson – New Zealand cultural legend Ray Columbus didn't exactly deal the dirt. But then Columbus always came across as a genial, generous professional and – given he lived straight during the... > Read more
Kick Me
SANTANA REVISITED (2016): From Woodstock to Devadip
28 Mar 2016 | 1 min read | 1
Carlos Santana has been famous and prolific for over 45 years and his new album Santana IV finds him re-united with most of the original band. So, essential early albums by the band or from his own solo catalogue? Santana (1969): The debut which introduced Latin-infused jazz-rock to the audience which hadn't been there for the band's stunning debut at Woodstock earlier that month.... > Read more
Waves Within (from Caravanserai)
DAVE DOBBYN CONSIDERED (2016): Magic what he do . . .
21 Mar 2016 | 3 min read | 2
When producer Sir George Martin died in March, much was made — quite rightly — of his long association with the Beatles. What wasn't made more clear to a couple of generations of people for whom the Beatles are a band from the distant past, was how unusual and almost unique that relationship was. Martin was there for just about every Beatle record over seven enormously... > Read more
Harmony House
PERE UBU REISSUED, PART TWO (2016): Deconstructing pop and language
14 Mar 2016 | 5 min read
When Elsewhere spoke with Pere Ubu's mainman David Thomas recently it was ostensibly to discuss the two box sets of the band's early recordings which have been reissued on vinyl (and download) through Britain's Fire Records. But as you may see from that lengthy conversation, many other topics were traversed and there was perhaps less about the reissues than expected because Thomas... > Read more
Petrified (from Song of the Bailing Man)
SIR GEORGE MARTIN INTERVIEWED (1998): The retiring knight of the round vinyl
10 Mar 2016 | 7 min read
Of all the knights of pop -- Sir Cliff, Sir Paul, Sir Elton -- it is Sir George Martin, famously known as the Beatles’ producer, who seems the most deserving of the accolade. It was November '95 when I met him in London at the launch of the Beatles’ Anthology albums. He was self-effacing, courteous and well-spoken. (At age 16 he'd heard his voice on tape and thereafter... > Read more
EILEN JEWELL INTERVIEWED (2016): Bringing it all back home
7 Mar 2016 | 10 min read
There's no category for Eilen Jewell's music: Some will call it country and some alt.country, but there is also a clear European jazz quality in many songs, she acknowledges Billie Holliday and Bob Dylan as early influences, does a sultry cover of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' 1960 hit Shakin' All Over and can break your heart with a straight-ahead ballad. Oh, and in 2010 she did a fine... > Read more
My Hometown
DAVID THOMAS OF PERE UBU INTERVIEWED (2016): Walking with noise and ghosts
26 Feb 2016 | 19 min read
David Thomas is his customary garrulous, funny but incisive and sometimes his visibly irritated self . . . at least he would be if we could see him on this Skype call to his home in England. Somewhere behind the screenshot of his much younger self there is muttering and mumbling as someone, who I take to be his partner, laughing and telling him to push connections. “He's... > Read more
All The Dogs Are Barking (alt mix)
VIOLENT FEMMES REVISITED (2016): Gone baby gone . . . but back?
24 Feb 2016 | 3 min read | 1
Having witnessed the adoration New Zealanders were prepared to pour on the Violent Femmes, Elsewhere would frequently joke that they -- like Cheap Trick -- could turn up in Auckland tomorrow and fill the Town Hall with sweaty, party-ready fans from across at least two generations. They made the kind of singalong, acoustic-rock music we liked . . . and we proved it by being the first country... > Read more
Country Death Song
PERE UBU REISSUED, PART ONE (2016): On a thin wire dancing above the abyss
15 Feb 2016 | 6 min read
In his 1974 philosophical narrative Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the American author Robert M. Pirsig writes of being at the home of some friends where there is a constantly dripping tap. “If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet,” he writes. “This made me wonder... > Read more
Thriller!
LANCE FERGUSON INTERVIEWED (2016): Bringing back an exotic personal and popular past
8 Feb 2016 | 9 min read | 1
Lance Ferguson is among New Zealand's most successful, hardest working but perhaps the least known of our musical exports. The grandson of Tongan-born, New Zealand lap steel legend Bill Wolfgramm (who enjoyed a friendly rivalry with the more successful Bill Sevesi from the Forties onward, and who died in 2003), Lance Ferguson left New Zealand 20 years ago. In Melbourne he founded... > Read more
The Kava Diary
SHOEGAZE CONSIDERED (2016): Trippin' back in time and feelin' fine
5 Feb 2016 | 4 min read
It was a British music writer, of course, who first coined the term “shoegaze”. Writing a mid-'91 review in Sounds of the band Moose, Andy Hurt encapsulated the look – if, unhelpfully, not the sound – of many bands which, heads bowed, explored a kind of widescreen pop irradiated by wide swathes of guitar noise, sometimes droning vocals and dreamy psychedelia.... > Read more