Absolute Elsewhere
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GARETH LIDDIARD OF THE DRONES INTERVIEWED (2013): Existential and everyday horrors
2 Sep 2013 | 10 min read | 1
Australia's outsider rock band The Drones – essentially a vehicle for singer-songwriter Gareth Liddiard aka Gaza – have survived against the odds. They've been through changes of physical location (founded in Perth, ended up in Melbourne), litigation which saw their album Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By in 2010 held up for a year, a... > Read more
Nine Eyes
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN CONSIDERED (2013): A journey of light and shade
30 Aug 2013 | 3 min read
In a world awash with attention-demanding acts like Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, Queens of the Stone Age and so on, it's inevitable that many artists – the more discreet ones usually – go right past most people, even if they've had long and creditable careers. One such band is Glasgow's delightful Belle and Sebastian whose thoughtful albums – eight studio releases, a live... > Read more
Your Secrets
SNEAKY FEELINGS CONSIDERED (2013): The Nuns that really flew
23 Aug 2013 | 3 min read
Although Flying Nun was renowned as a label for indie bands (“college rock” as they were known in the States in the Eighties), there were always those on the roster who had a pure pop heart beating: none more so than Sneaky Feelings (1980-89). Along with Martin Phillipps in the Chills and Andrew Brough who brought gorgeous melodies into the early Straitjacket Fits, Matthew... > Read more
LEE HAZLEWOOD REVISITED (2013): Whisky and honey
19 Aug 2013 | 4 min read | 1
When the producer/songwriter and distinctive singer Lee Hazlewood relocated to Sweden at the end of the Sixties -- he said so his son wouldn't get drafted and end up in Vietnam -- it marked the close of a remarkable decade, and perhaps the last most people heard of that oak-barrel baritone which he used on duets with Nancy Sinatra, for whom he wrote her massive seller These Boots Are Made for... > Read more
The Girl on Death Row
ELVIS PRESLEY (2013): The King is gone but he's not forgotten
16 Aug 2013 | 4 min read
When John Lennon was told in August 1977 that Elvis Presley had died, he apparently said, “Elvis died when he went into the army”. That comment is glib, dismissive and inaccurate. But we know what he means. Elvis the rebel rock figure who shook up popular music in the mid Fifties with That's All Right Mama, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede... > Read more
It's Different Now (rehearsal)
JAMES BROWN REVISITED (2013): The Godfather, Parts I, II and III
9 Aug 2013 | 2 min read
If you never saw him at his peak, it's hard to imagine how exciting the late James Brown must have been in concert. I saw him twice when he was past his best, although that first time . . . It was New York in the early 90s and he was at the NBC Radio City Theatre and – having spent the previous day ambling around the famous Apollo Theatre – I couldn't believe my luck at... > Read more
I'll Go Crazy
THE LATE GREAT TOWNES VAN ZANDT, AGAIN (2013): The troubled and troubling troubadour
31 Jul 2013 | 3 min read
When I interviewed Townes Van Zandt in 1988, I had to ask him about his '73 album, The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, the title of which was written in a stark Gothic typeface above a black'n'white photo of him at some emotional and physical distance. He looked a remote figure hunched awkwardly in a corner. It seemed a typically mordant move on his behalf, a man whose lyrics were steeped... > Read more
Snow Don't Fall
THE CLEAN, VEHICLE (2013): Running again at 33 1/3rpm
30 Jul 2013 | 3 min read
By the closing years of the Eighties, Flying Nun -- which had got off to such a brilliant start -- was in trouble, businesswise. The little label that flew had -- like Icarus -- gone too high too fast and had had its wings burned. It was just putting out too many records too quickly and couldn't keep up with demand, had a cash-flow problem and distribution issues (overseas you couldn't get... > Read more
Diamond Shine
SHADOW MORTON (1941-2013): Who knows? The Shadow knows
29 Jul 2013 | 3 min read
Only a fiction writer could make up the life of New York's George Morton, the man who got his nickname "Shadow" because he would simply disappear from work for days at time and whose private life few knew anything of. He was a diligent alcoholic (until hitting a Betty Ford Clinic in the Eighties) and doubtless that explained some of the disappearances. But it was when he was... > Read more
Remember (Walking in the Sand)
WINGS OVER AMERICA (2013): Flying again, but with excess baggage
20 Jul 2013 | 3 min read | 1
When Paul McCartney was approached by Bob Geldof to appear at Live Aid in 1985 he was understandably nervous. He not only didn't have a band – and he'd always been in bands – but he hadn't played live in six years after breaking up Wings which he felt had run its course. It's easy to make jokes about Wings (as Allan Partridge famously did) but rather harder to ignore just... > Read more
Maybe I'm Amazed (Cow Palace)
JOE BOYD INTERVIEWED (2013): The Zelig of the zeitgeist
1 Jul 2013 | 13 min read
In 2005 Joe Boyd published his memoir, White Bicycles, of what he did in the Sixties. At the end he wrote; “I cheated. I never got too stoned. I became the eminence gris I aspired to be, and disproved at least one Sixties myth: I was there and I do remember”. Where he was and what he remembered was extraordinary. As an educated son of the American university system, he... > Read more
Teddy Thompson
BOBBY WHITLOCK CONSIDERED (2013): Sideman at centrestage
28 Jun 2013 | 5 min read
If rock listeners know keyboard player, guitarist and songwriter Bobby Whitlock at all, it's because he was in Derek and the Dominos, the band in which the Derek was Eric Clapton and delivered the exceptional album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in 1970 . . . before drugs and disagreements saw them implode rapidly. On that album Whitlock co-wrote five of the 14 songs with Clapton, and... > Read more
A Day Without Jesus (with Harrison and Clapton)
CLASSIC GIRL GROUPS (2013): All the fine young elles
24 Jun 2013 | 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
SLIM WHITMAN PROFILED (1923-2013): A song to save the world
20 Jun 2013 | 4 min read
In the early Eighties, the late Slim Whitman – who had recorded more than 65 albums -- still held down the record for the longest number one on the British charts, 11 consecutive weeks, a feat unmatched by Elvis or the Beatles. But back home in the States he was a singer without a song. He was a household name but few Americans could name a song by him. And despite that... > Read more
The Love Song of the Waterfall
ZZ TOP IN A BOX (2013): A whole lotta Top
17 Jun 2013 | 2 min read
When you hear the answer you'll go; “Oh yeah”. But you need to know the questions first: What would you get if you cross-bred the Ramones with denim-clad and simple-formula Status Quo, then brought the offspring up on a diet of Texas blues? Oh yeah: Z.Z.Top There's something in our genes which attaches itself to the simple stuff: dramatic Phil Spector pop, flat-tack Sex... > Read more
THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE HUMAN VOICE: That sound, it haunts me still!
12 Jun 2013 | 5 min read
Blame punk’s redrawing of the map - or Yoko Ono, or the much more irritating Celine Dion if you will -- but the limits of our tolerance to the human voice have certainly shifted over the past few decades. We can now listen with impunity to Natacha Atlas’ careening Arabic trip-hop as much as be in awe of Whitney Houston’s lung capacity, or delight in the qawwali music... > Read more
David Thomas: Who is it?
CAN, THE LOST TAPES 1968-1975: On the way to mother sky, again
10 Jun 2013 | 1 min read | 1
Anyone who knows anything of Can, the German experimentalists who were post-rock before the term had been invented, knows the title of this three CD box set is perhaps a joke. Being efficient Teutonics, Can probably never lost anything in their collective lives but rather had everthing scrupulously catalogued, filed and numbered. Cross-referenced too, of course. And in the... > Read more
Millionenspiel
BLACK SABBATH, AGAIN (2013): Back in black
10 Jun 2013 | 3 min read | 1
One day in the late Nineties before a solo tour by Ozzy Osbourne, I phoned him for a chat. This was five years before the notorious television (un)reality family drama The Osbournes so I wasn't quite prepared. I only knew the history and the music, not the language. Ozzy and I chatted for half an hour and most of the time I just laughed and offered the next starting point for a... > Read more
Evil Woman
MIKE McGEAR'S VANISHED MASTERPIECE: Brother can you spare me the time?
5 Jun 2013 | 3 min read | 2
Perhaps "masterpiece" is too strong a word, but the singer-songwriter Mike McGear -- a member of Liverpool's poetry/music group the Scaffold who scored the '68 hit single Lily the Pink -- did crack quite a remarkable album in 1974, which seems to have disappeared entirely. Simply entitled McGear, it was originally released on Warners and in 1991 given CD reissue by Rykodisc. The... > Read more
The Man Who Found God on the Moon
BERNARD STOLLMAN INTERVIEWED (2013): Lawman with ESP for new music
31 May 2013 | 12 min read | 1
For a large part of his adult life, Bernard Stollman was just one of those New Yorkers in a suit going to work. He had an honorific title as an assistant attorney-general in New York City – “one of 600” – and an office on the 46th floor of the World Trade Center. As a lawyer, he represented the interests of patients in psychiatric facilities across the state.... > Read more