Absolute Elsewhere
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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
She
GRACE, INTERVIEWED (1995): North Shore to Black Sand Shore
6 Apr 2014 | 8 min read | 1
The rooms backstage at the Auckland Town Hall aren’t up to much. Clean, certainly, but this very small one comes with only a tiny mirror above the handbasin, the toilet is somewhere down the hall, and the six people waiting here are rotating in the five available seats. This is an important night for the room’s temporary occupants. Grace – the three Ioasa brothers... > Read more
Distant Blue
JASON ISBELL INTERVIEWED (2014): Living in Different Days
4 Apr 2014 | 8 min read | 3
Now well out on his own, Jason Isbell was formerly of Drive By Truckers for six years until 2007 and contributed some of their finest songs, like Dress Blue about the death of a school friend in Iraq, their classic Decoration Day and Danko/Manuel about the lives of the members of The Band. But he was young when he joined them, the road took its toll and he started drinking heavily,... > Read more
Different Days
DEAD MOON REVISITED (2014): Back from the graveyard
2 Apr 2014 | 4 min read
The promoter John Baker – who brought Dead Moon over to New Zealand for the first time – reminded me recently of when that was: August 1992. I hadn't remembered the month only vaguely had the approximate year, however I have never forgotten the moment Dead Moon came into the highly conservative offices of what people jokingly then called “The Royal New Zealand... > Read more
Walking on My Grave
JYOSNA/JYOSHNA PROFILED (2014): When the spirit moves
31 Mar 2014 | 3 min read | 1
I first met Jyosna LaTrobe in January '91 after the release of her cassette Reign of Love which I had reviewed for the Herald. I was aware of who she was – she'd been a founding member of the all-women acoustic trio Turiiya – but her album came as “a modest delight” as I called it in my four-star lead review. The musical arrangements embraced sitar and... > Read more
Sakal maner vina
ANE BRUN INTERVIEWED (2014): The selfish art of songwriting
20 Mar 2014 | 7 min read
Danish-born and Swedish-resident Ane Brun was one of the highlights at the recent Womad for her crafted songs and pure voice. And with a small ensemble (a drummer and a percussion player plus two women multi-instrumentalist backing singers) she presented quite a colourful palette of sounds. Now in her late 30s, she can look back on a career in music which began more by accident than... > Read more
Do You Remember
DELANEY DAVIDSON INTERVIEWED (2014): Christchurch, Colorado and Womad
9 Mar 2014 | 1 min read
Singer and songwriter Delaney Davidson has carved out a rare niche in New Zealand music. Along with Marlon Williams, Tami Neilson and others he has rejigged traditional and contemporary country music into something that bridges folk, country and rock. He has twice won the Country Song of the Year award and also picked up the Country Music Album award in 2013. Although he has... > Read more
Lonesome Mile
BENMONT TENCH INTERVIEWED (2014): The Heartbreaker's solo flight
3 Mar 2014 | 9 min read | 1
Benmont Tench has considerable history. He was a teenage fan in Florida of a local group called Mudcrutch whom he saw, fell in love with, went to their shows and eventually joined them as their keyboard player. When Mudcrutch broke up in '75 he, founding member Tom Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell – by then in California – formed Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and... > Read more
Wobbles
DON WALKER INTERVIEWED (2014): Cold Chisel, apples, pears and Engelbert
3 Mar 2014 | 7 min read | 1
The droll, dry and fiercely intelligent Don Walker is consider by many to be among Australia's greatest songwriters -- if not the greatest – because of his songs for Cold Chisel, with the band Catfish and also for Tex, Don and Charlie (with Tex Perkins and Charlie Owen) . . . as well as his lower profile solo releases. From a rural background in North Queensland, he came... > Read more
On the Beach
NATHAN FORD INTERVIEWED (2014): The highly proactive listener
24 Feb 2014 | 8 min read
Nathan Ford laughs quietly when I ask him about the strange, whispery folk album by Kitchen Cynics (Scotland's Alan Davidson) he's posted at his music blog. It isn't exactly what I'd call psychedelic, which is the ethos behind his impressive and rapidly expanding blog. “I've probably got a much broader definition of what people think is psychedelic. To me it is often music... > Read more