Absolute Elsewhere
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HENRY WAGONS INTERVIEWED (2014): The write stuff
25 Aug 2014 | 10 min read
Even in a country with a long lineage of great songwriters, Henry Wagons stands out. As the writer and frontman for his band Wagons, Henry from Melbourne – born Henry Krips and the grandson of the Australian conductor of the same name credited with bring Mahler to Australian audiences – is a physically energetic entertainer who unashamedly loves his job and sees it as a public... > Read more
Hold On Caroline
JODI VAUGHAN AND JODY DIREEN INTERVIEWED (2014): Having different country music in common
1 Aug 2014 | 5 min read
Although separated by four decades the two Jodies – Jodi Vaughan and Jody Direen – have at least one thing in common, they are in that broad landscape that is New Zealand country music. Of course those decades – Vaughan born in Australia in 1950 and moving to New Zealand in her mid 20s, Direen from Wanaka and only now in her in her mid 20s – would suggest they... > Read more
Lay a Little Lovin' On Me
ROBERT SCOTT RETURNS (2014): This quiet life
21 Jul 2014 | 3 min read
Noel Gallagher once enviously said of Ian McLagan that he'd been enough of a jammy bastard to be in two great bands; the Small Faces and the Faces. We might say the same of Robert Scott of the Clean and the Bats, two of the seminal Flying Nun bands . . . and who, in addition to short stints in Magick Heads and a few other side-projects, has latterly sprung a third parallel life with... > Read more
Your Lights Are Low
MIDGE MARSDEN INTERVIEWED (2014): Going to a well that never runs dry
21 Jul 2014 | 8 min read | 2
Midge Marsden has carved out a singular career in New Zealand music. He has won awards, toured this country and the USA, counted among his friends Stevie Ray Vaughan, studied in Mississippi and has passed the torch on through university tutoring and on bandstands. Marsden – who admits to being “sixty-several” – first came to attention in Bari and the Breakaways... > Read more
I'll Drown in My Own Tears
RIVERS INTERVIEWED (2014): In the footsteps of the master
14 Jul 2014 | 6 min read | 1
Hamilton-based singer-songwriter Chris Baigent aka Rivers makes a fairly extravagant and unquantifiable claim on Facebook as the Number One Dylan Fan in New Zealand. And if you think you are a bigger fan, he challenges you to write in and say why. “No one's really challenged but a friend from Australia said I was like Dylan Fan 102 which was amusing,” he laughs. “The... > Read more
Bird on a Wire
CROSBY STILLS NASH & YOUNG IN '74 (2014): if you can't love the one you're with . . .
11 Jul 2014 | 3 min read
Although their name might have sounded like a corporate entity putting up a united front Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were anything but. “We had to put Crosby’s name first otherwise he’d be impossible to live with,” Stephen Stills told me back in 2007 when talking about CS&N, “and of course once we put him first there was no living with him. We... > Read more
Ohio
J.J. CALE REMEMBERED (2014): Old slowhands together
23 Jun 2014 | 3 min read | 1
I came to the late J.J. Cale rather late. Sure, I heard those Seventies albums, but they were mostly just aural wallpaper to whatever else was going on. Cale didn't shove his music at you, he was like a hoarse whisper in the background. So it wasn't until the late Nineties when, leaving for Australia, I stopped at the letterbox, grabbed a CD which had arrived and put it my bag. The... > Read more
Magnolia
THE BEATLES INVADE AUCKLAND, JUNE 1964
16 Jun 2014 | 12 min read
On the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in New Zealand (June 21 1964) Elsewhere is pleased to present an exclusive extract from the forthcoming book Half a World Away: The Beatles' Australasian Tour 1964 by Greg Armstrong and Andy Neill. We pick up the story after they have arrived at Whenuapai Airport near Auckland and been transported to the Royal International Hotel hotel before... > Read more
Yeah Yeah We Love Them All
THE BATS REISSUED (2014): A timeless flight
16 Jun 2014 | 4 min read
Very few bands get better with age, despite what the members themselves might think or their record company would have you believe. Most make their greatest statements early on, or have a fine peak a bit further down the track. There are exceptions of course -- there are always exceptions -- but by and large you're better off with the second and third albums by a band than the 13th and... > Read more
Sir Queen
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LED ZEPPELIN REVISITED, PART ONE (2014): How many more times?
9 Jun 2014 | 5 min read
He may have been grumpy, sometimes racist and often on the wrong side of history when it came to the directions of jazz, but the writer and sometime jazz critic Philip Larkin could still make some valid points. With regard to critics who wrote that Billie Holiday used her voice like an instrument he said that was “a... > Read more
Gallows Pole (rough mix)
LARRY CARLTON INTERVIEWED (2014): Guitars for the stars
2 Jun 2014 | 5 min read
Larry Carlton --- four time Grammy winner and during the 60s and 70s one of the most in-demand session guitarists on Los Angeles for a roll-call of rock, pop and jazz stars – recalls one especially hopeless session in 74. It came when John Lennon – then on an 18 month “lost weekend” break from Yoko Ono – ended up on a booze'n'coke binge in Los Angles and,... > Read more
LED ZEPPELIN REVISITED. AGAIN (2014): Three steps along the road to the Stairway
30 May 2014 | 5 min read | 1
In all the words spilled about Led Zeppelin's classic Stairway to Heaven – a milestone or a millstone in popular music depending on where you stand, rock's national anthem, hippie vibe-meets-hard rock – it's often overlooked how obvious or inevitable it was in many ways. Although Led Zepp are most often thought of as a hard rock band, they were also just as much a... > Read more
The Immigrant Song (alternate version)
GRACE JONES, NIGHTCLUBBING REVISITED (2014): The ice-maiden returns
30 May 2014 | 3 min read
In Roman Polanski's 1988 thriller Frantic, the actor Harrison Ford gets to play a role he would repeat many times: Homo Panicus, the ordinary man under pressure. When Ford's character, a surgeon from San Francisco, arrives in Paris with his wife for a conference they discover she has collected the wrong bag at the airport. And there the story begins: she disappears mysteriously, he... > Read more
Pull Up to the Bumper (remix)
GARY NUMAN INTERVIEWED (2014): Loving the alien
16 May 2014 | 14 min read
About 15 minutes into a very casual and chatty conversation with Gary Numan -- during which he's talked about his three kids, a prolonged bout of depression, almost breaking up with his wife and then how they'd undergone IVF treatment and lost the baby and being choked with emotion on stage – I interrupt and say, “Many people would be surprised to hear you talk like this... > Read more
Lost
BRIAN ENO (2014): The brain that wouldn't die
14 May 2014 | 3 min read | 1
I was so far behind on phone technology it wasn't until late December that I bought an iPhone. And I didn't muck about. I went straight for an iPhone 5 . . . which took me three weeks to figure out the basics. That's what happens when you leap from a secondhand pushbike into a new BMW. The first playful app I got was one my son recommended: Bloom created by Brian Eno. I've been an... > Read more
A Man Wakes Up
LAWRENCE ARABIA INTERVIEWED (2014): Going back, going forward, taking stock
12 May 2014 | 14 min read
Lawrence Arabia – known at home as James Milne – has made some of the most interesting New Zealand music of the past decade. Over three albums he has crafted fascinating pop which is embellished by strings and strange sounds, but always highly melodic and lyrically engrossing.. His has been an interesting career from playing stand-in bassist for Okkervil River in Australia... > Read more
The Bisexual
BLACK KEYS, TURN BLUE (2014): What a long strange trip it's being
9 May 2014 | 2 min read
For a band made up just two guys, the Black Keys can be awfully hard to keep up with. Akron's finest, now Nashville-based, duo – Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney – have not only been prolific on their own count (eight album since 2002, including their new one Turn Blue) but recorded with hip-hop artists on the Blakroc album (2009), flicked out EPs, and contributed songs on... > Read more
Weight of Love
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON INTERVIEWED (2014): Looking at the end of the road
29 Apr 2014 | 3 min read
The call catches Kris Kristofferson where you might expect him to be, on the bus on the road heading for another show, this time in Australia. “I just woke up so I may sound stupid,” he says with a hoarse, apologetic laugh before his wife's phone cuts out yet again. But when they roll into somewhere with better coverage we get to discuss the reward of the road: he can put... > Read more
Final Attraction
SHARON O'NEILL INTERVIEWED (2014): Surviving in the fires of fame
25 Apr 2014 | 9 min read | 2
Go back and look at the newspaper and magazine articles from the late Seventies and early Eighties if you can -- and I can because I kept many shoved inside her album covers -- and see what writers and reviewers were saying about Sharon O'Neill at the time. After her backstory had been told -- singing as a kid growing up in Nelson, with the band Chapta in Christchurch, some overseas... > Read more
Smash Palace
ELVIS COSTELLO, COVER STAR (2014): 10 Great Interpretations
24 Apr 2014 | 3 min read
When Elvis Costello plays in Auckland this weekend the expectation is going to be high. Last year he and the Imposters -- two thirds of the original Attractions but which Costello sees as a different animal entirely -- delivered a blinder of a show which offered a breathless pace of hit-after-hit and didn't let up until well in when they left the stage and remained came out for an equally... > Read more