Absolute Elsewhere
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HAL WILLNER INTERVIEWED (2013): More rum, sodomy and the lash
4 Mar 2013 | 11 min read | 2
So how do we describe Hal Willner? He's a musician and producer, of course. And while he's a music supervisor for Saturday Night Live (a role had throughout the Eighties) he also stages concerts based around concepts which interest him, like the songbook of Doc Pomus or civil rights songs. He's also a man with a very fat contact book because on tribute albums to Italian composer Nino... > Read more
Off to Sea Once More
RICHARD THOMPSON INTERVIEWED (2013): Audiences and the art of the song
27 Feb 2013 | 9 min read
Richard Thompson should need no introduction. He has been an acclaimed songwriter/guitarist for over 40 years dating back to his innovative work with the pioneering English folk-rock group Fairport Convention. There were albums with his wife (the ex) Linda – some of which appear in many critics favourite-ever lists -- then a solo career stretching to well over 20 albums under... > Read more
Another Small Thing in Her Favour
MAREE SHEEHAN INTERVIEWED (2013): The beginning of the second act
18 Feb 2013 | 8 min read | 2
After a fine start with a series of singles in the mid Nineties (Make You My Own, Fatally Cool which used taonga puoro), awards, her debut album Drawn in Deep, and the song Kia Tu Mahea on the soundtrack to Once Were Warriors, Maree Sheehan seemed to suddenly fade and disappear. By the turn of the century this talented woman – part of wave of smart young Maori women... > Read more
In the Light
THE STEVE MILLER BAND (2013): From blues to smooth, and back
18 Feb 2013 | 2 min read | 2
Hearing Steve Miller play his fine-tuned and smoothly upholstered hits like Abracadabra, The Joker, Fly Like an Eagle and Jet Airliner – as he will do when he tours with Santana in March – it might be hard to reconcile them as coming from the same guy who earned his chops playing rhythm guitar in Buddy Guy's band in Chicago's toughest blues clubs, and then was one of the more... > Read more
LOU REED, SOLO INTO THE SEVENTIES (2013): Walk and Talk It
18 Feb 2013 | 4 min read
Pity anyone coming new to Lou Reed these days and wondering where to start: there is that Velvet Underground catalogue (brilliant start, diminishing returns), a couple of dozen albums under his own name, almost a dozen live albums (Rock'n'Roll Animal essential, Take No Prisoners hilarious as Lou becomes beligerent stand-up) and a bunch of other odds'n'ends. A greatest hits (of a man who had... > Read more
Kicks
FLEETWOOD MAC; RUMOURS (2013): Decades of discussion and dissection
1 Feb 2013 | 3 min read | 1
Popular culture is certainly taken -- and takes itself -- very seriously these days. There are university courses on everyone from Elvis to Gaga and the bookshelves sag with biographies and autobiographies of people like Cher, Justin Bieber, that guitarist in Kiss, U2 . . . There seems no part of Bob Dylan and John Lennon's lives which have gone unexamined, and the Beatles' recording career... > Read more
For Duster (studio jam)
THE STONE ROSES (2013): Here, for the first time, the second coming
28 Jan 2013 | 3 min read | 1
Some concerts have a disproportionately greater effect than what might have seemed at the time. The Sex Pistols gig in Manchester in June '76 was attended by only a couple of dozen but many there – notably organisers Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Devoto later founding Magazine – went on to form bands. The punk spark had been lit outside of London. At... > Read more
Ten Storey Love Song
CLIFF RICHARD ENCOUNTERED (2013): Is Cliff a voice in the wilderness?
28 Jan 2013 | 5 min read | 33
Cliff Richard was never my pop star. I was the perfect age for the Beatles and the Stones, so when She Loves You and It's All Over Now got their hooks in to me, Cliff seemed old fashioned, redundant and unnecessary. However amidst my older sister's Elvis and Bill Justis 78rpms had been Cliff and the Shadows' Don't Be Mad At Me/Voice in the Wilderness single (from 1960) and before I had... > Read more
One Night (live, 1959)
THEY ARE ALL THE WALRUS: The story of the Exotic Beatles series
12 Jan 2013 | 3 min read
Some people -- like Allan Rouse and Steve Rooke at Abbey Road studios who remastered the complete catalogue -- listen to an awful lot of Beatles' music. Others -- like Jim Phelan -- listen to a lot of awful Beatles' music. Phelan from London is the man behind the hilarious Exotic Beatles collections -- now up to Volume Four -- on which he compiles often terrifyingly bad, frequently... > Read more
I Want to Hold Your Hand
2012, THE YEAR IN REISSUES: Look out behind you!
17 Dec 2012 | 6 min read | 1
At a rough count rock'n'roll is getting close to pensioner age. Elvis's first hits are a long time gone (so is he, 35 years), there are only two remaining Beatles and Who members, and in the Who Shot Rock and Roll photographic exhibition at the Auckland City Art Gallery (which runs until March) there are a lot of dead people framed on the walls. Little wonder then that so many people... > Read more
KEN MATSUTANI OF MARBLE SHEEP INTERVIEWED (2012)
13 Dec 2012 | 2 min read
Initially inspired by T.Rex and classic rock like the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, guitarist Ken Matsutani has helmed the ever-changing line-up of Tokyo's Marble Sheep since their formation in 1987. But right at the start Marble Sheep – who play dates in New Zealand in January, see below – aimed for cosmic rock. Cement Woman which opens their live in Tokyo 1988... > Read more
Melted Moon
THE PRETTY THINGS INTERVIEW (2012): Dick Taylor on life in the wild lane
2 Dec 2012 | 8 min read | 4
Dick Taylor of the Pretty Things says he can clearly remember when they cut a wide and notorious swathe of mayhem, drunkenness and shock-horror headlines through New Zealand in late 1965. At the time they had the longest hair, a raw garageband blues rock sound which made the Stones seem tame, and their name alone was perfect for headline writers. Yes, Taylor -- now 69 and coming back... > Read more
Rosalyn
NUGGETS; ORIGINAL ARTYFACTS FROM THE FIRST PSYCHEDELIC ERA 1965-1968: Diamonds and rough in a box
1 Dec 2012 | 4 min read | 3
There's an interesting local observation to be made about this four-CD box set of what is essentially low-rent, lo-fi American garageband rock. But first, a little history. Back in 1972 Lenny Kaye -- later guitarist in Patti Smith's band -- released the original double-vinyl compilation Nuggets. In a garish psychedelic cover (faithfully reproduced here across the four discs,... > Read more
Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) 1967
THE STEVE MILLER BAND (2012): The space cowboy taking flight
30 Nov 2012 | 6 min read
In rock'n'roll call of great West Coast bands in the late Sixties -- from the Airplane and Big Brother to the Youngbloods and Zappa's Mothers -- one name is almost consistently ignored: the Steve Miller Band out of San Francisco. Yet well before they broke through with the famous hit The Joker in '73 ("some people call me the space cowboy . . .") they had been playing blues-based... > Read more
Going to Mexico
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KENNEY JONES, SMALL FACES, FACES AND WHO, INTERVIEWED (2012): Living in the afterglow
25 Nov 2012 | 10 min read
Kenney Jones has had a busy time of it lately. The former member of the Small Faces and then the Faces (with Rod Stewart and current Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood) was inducted into the Hall of Fame in April, has overseen the remastering and reissue of the Small Faces' albums -- which includes a double disc version of their semi-classic Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake -- and been actively involved in... > Read more
Song of a Baker
ROB ST JOHN PROFILED (2012): A voice from the North
21 Nov 2012 | 2 min read
Variously described as "new folk", "alt.folk, "a troubadour" and likened to both Nick Cave and Nick Drake, Rob St John -- born in Lancashire, longtime musician in Edinburgh and latterly of Oxford -- is also a noted writer on ecological and environmental matters. But it is his dark folk, especially that on his debut album Weald released a year ago -- which evokes... > Read more
Sargasso Sea
LED ZEPPELIN, CELEBRATION DAY (2012): Bring the noise
20 Nov 2012 | 2 min read
When the surviving members of Led Zeppelin – singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist/keyboard player John Paul Jones – gathered in London recently there were two items on the agenda. The first was the launch of Celebration Day -- the DVD/Blu-ray/double CD of their December 2007 reunion concert -- but the second was that question which dogged the solo Beatles... > Read more
Kashmir
LED ZEPPELIN REVISITED (2012): A celebration of excess
16 Nov 2012 | 3 min read | 1
Recently I played Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love at high volume through very large speakers. Nothing unusual I suppose, except it was to university students, none of them pursuing a music degree, Maybe only a dozen out of the 150 had heard it before. Fair enough, it came out over 40 years ago – about two decades before most were born – and it doesn't get airplay beyond... > Read more
Whole Lotta Love
NUGGETS AT 40 (2012): We are the young Americans . . .
15 Nov 2012 | 1 min read
In a year which tripped over itself with anniversaries (the Stones' half century, 45 years since the Velvets' debut and 35 for the Sex Pistols' Bollocks), most of the inevitable reissues played the nostalgia card. But one stands out as different. Forty years ago Lenny Kaye -- later guitarist in Patti Smith's band – compiled the double-vinyl album Nuggets; Original Artyfacts... > Read more
Hey Joe
JOHN MARTYN'S 1980 ALBUM GRACE AND DANGER: How can you mend a broken heart?
14 Nov 2012 | 2 min read
Like his peer Richard Thompson, with whom he sometimes recorded, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist Martyn came from a folk background in the mid 60s then incorporate rock gestures into his playing. Unlike Thompson however he also explored jazz deeply and so his guitar playing has a kind of free-ranging, adventurous sound that is rare. Again like Thompson though he worked with... > Read more