Absolute Elsewhere
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MIKE SKINNER/THE STREETS INTERVIEWED (2004): The sound of the tenements
29 Mar 2012 | 4 min read
This is called an irony: on The Streets' new album A Grand Don't Come For Free the mouth behind the street-smart monologues, Mike Skinner, bangs on about how his cellphone keeps cutting out. The album has been read as a conceptual piece, with Skinner talking about what could be a day in the ordinary - bloody mundane, actually - life of thousands of young bored Britons whose lives... > Read more
NICK LOWE INTERVIEWED (2011): Looking for that old magic
23 Mar 2012 | 8 min read
A couple of years ago we passed by this way, a phone call to Nick Lowe at the most unrock'n'roll hour of 9am in the UK (see here). But Lowe again laughs it off -- “I have a six-year old so this is the middle of the day for me” – and concedes that while he was once a notorious party animal (he barely remembers playing in Australia in the early Eighties) says “I... > Read more
Stoplight Roses
GERRY ROSLIE OF THE SONICS INTERVIEWED (2012): The noise of the Pacific Northwest
22 Mar 2012 | 6 min read
In Seattle's Experience Music Project – a music and sci-fi museum funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who is a massive Hendrix fan – there is, aside from a breathtaking Hendrix display of course, a large section devoted to the music which roared out of the Pacific Northwest region from the late Fifties and early Sixties. Bands like the Kingsmen (with Louie Louie), the... > Read more
The Witch
JAY FARRAR INTERVIEWED (2012): Raising the spirit of Guthrie again
19 Mar 2012 | 6 min read | 2
You could almost make the case that the music and life of Woody Guthrie had become better known in the past two decades than it was at the time of his death in 1967. Certainly in the very early Sixties when Bob Dylan was borrowing heavily from Guthrie's speak-sing folk style, his name was out there, and folkies in particular have always held him in particular reverence. But put aside... > Read more
VD City
PULP REISSUED (2012): Portrait of the Jarvis as a young knobhead
16 Mar 2012 | 3 min read
When the Sheffield band Pulp gate-crashed the relentlessly jingoistic and self-aggrandising Britpop party in '95 with their single Common People, they were hardly a new band. The Different Class album which that cynical, emotionally detached and pointed single anticipated was their fifth, and in some form or other – always around singer-songwriter Jarvis Cocker – they had... > Read more
Death Goes to the Disco
BOB SEGER RECONSIDERED (2012): Rock and roll should never forget him
12 Mar 2012 | 3 min read | 3
If he hadn't had a fear of flying -- and Bruce Springsteen hadn't come on so strong in the Seventies -- Bob Seger out of the Detroit area would have been the great working class rock'n'roll hero. He came from that world: After his dad left when he was 11, Bob -- with his mum and brother -- found himself in a single bedroom flat; later he worked three jobs, started playing in bands for... > Read more
Hollywood Nights (live)
DIANA ROSS, COMING OUT IN '80: From soul-pop princess to Chic dancefloor diva
2 Mar 2012 | 4 min read | 3
By the late Seventies, Diana Ross had put almost two decades of Motown soul-pop and various dress-up personae behind her. She'd been the pop princess decked out in eye-liner and increasingly chic'n'slender dresses in the Supremes hit machine, had pushed her name out front so they became "Diana Ross and the Supremes" and then, with the help of her lover and Motown boss, Berry Gordy... > Read more
Upside Down (Chic original mix)
DOUG JEREBINE INTERVIEWED (2012): The distant light that shines again
27 Feb 2012 | 8 min read | 3
Doug Jerebine sounds both amused and detached about the fact that two days in a London recording studio some 42 years ago have now thrown him into the spotlight. At 67, and with almost four decades in the Krsna movement as a teacher and respected translator between those two days and now, he hardy sounds like the long-haired young man on the cover of the newly released album... > Read more
Midnight Sun
NEW ORDER REISSUED AND RECONSIDERED (2012): Dreams never end . . .
24 Feb 2012 | 3 min read | 1
Few bands can survive loss of a lead singer who has been the focal point. Even fewer can reinvent themselves. Genesis did when Peter Gabriel quit after The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Phil Collins stepped out from behind the drum kit, and Pink Floyd morphed into another form after Syd Barrett checked out of reality . . . and again when Roger Waters went into a solo career. To his... > Read more
Ceremony
ROD STEWART, STORYTELLER: The easy case for the defense
22 Feb 2012 | 6 min read | 3
It was always easy for me to forgive Rod Stewart his excesses and mistakes. His graduation from soulful r’n’b singer through frontman impersonations with the boys-night-out Faces band and into a solo career was a pleasure to watch. When he wasn’t being entertaining, he was tearing your heart out with his singularly sandpapery voice. And when he took his... > Read more
Rod Stewart: The Killing of Georgie
BADFINGER, 1968-73 (2012): The shop-soiled Apple band
20 Feb 2012 | 8 min read
There are two stories every young musician should read, the first is obvious. The Beatles story is full of magic and coincidence; McCartney's meeting with a drunk Lennon, Harrison getting in by playing Raunchy to them while on a bus, the Hamburg days and the death of Stu Sutcliffe, the firing of Pete Best and Ringo entering just before they went into the studio, the touring and madness,... > Read more
Badfinger: Day After Day
ALABAMA 3 INTERVIEWED (2012): Pills'n'Thrills and country heartaches
13 Feb 2012 | 5 min read
On paper, it doesn't work no matter which way you look at it. A sound which brings together techno-dance beats with American country music and upbeat hand-clap gospel? If you tried to sell it as a concept you'd be turned down at every corner, as Alabama 3 out of Brixton in London were by big American record companies like Sony and Geffen. “Someone told me, 'You cannot mention... > Read more
Fix It (featuring Shane McGowan)
THE SHARP SARACENO AND THE MYSTERIOUS MARKETTS: Tales from the farce side
3 Feb 2012 | 4 min read
After the accountants took over what used to be called the entertainment business, there was less room for "real characters". Perhaps it was a good thing to get the Mafia out of the music business (for that story you should read Tommy James' autobiography Me, the Mob and the Music), but those larger than life people -- cigar chomping, money juggling and often opportunists at the... > Read more
Out of Limits
THE DOORS; LA WOMAN, 1971: Four decades gone, the big beat goes on
27 Jan 2012 | 3 min read
On record at least, the Doors career began and ended well. Their self-titled debut album of early '67 arrived in the same year as any number of striking first outings (Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape etc) and classic albums (Cream's Disraeli Gears, the Beatles Sgt Peppers). And in this company, the Doors' dark and poetic music stood apart as owing... > Read more
Riders on the Storm (rehearsal)
STEPHEN STILLS INTERVIEWED (2012): He's a real everywhere man
23 Jan 2012 | 6 min read | 2
Few musicians can claim to have played at the three defining musical festivals of the Sixties. But a few, very few, were on stage at all of them. One of them was in Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 which launched the peace'n'love era, and with Crosby, Stills and Nash at Woodstock in mid 69 which was the zenith of the era (CS&N's second concert). And he was... > Read more
My Love is a Gentle Thing (demo)
JOHN DENSMORE INTERVIEWED (2012): Re-opening the Doors four decades on
23 Jan 2012 | 10 min read | 2
When it came to watching the rapid decline of Jim Morrison – and the Doors' once promising career being relentlessly dragged down with him -- John Densmore had the best seat in the house. From his drum stool he saw it all – from the thrilled and awe-struck audiences as the handsome and sexually electric Morrison in leathers delivering his rock poetics through to the... > Read more
The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)
BILLY EBELING PROFILED (2012): Troubadour for our time
10 Jan 2012 | 2 min read | 3
The way I remember it goes something like this. It was the early Nineties and on Auckland's Queen St there were very few buskers. And they were uniformly awful. A man playing a guitar who can't play guitar was funny once . . . but after that it was just sad. And it did no credit to the student radio station that they adopted him for a little while. So any busker who could stop... > Read more
I Want You To Want Me
CHARLIE RICH (1932-1995): The Smash hits that never were
9 Jan 2012 | 5 min read
When the Beatles visited Elvis Presley for the first and only time in August 1965, it wasn't quite the great meeting of minds or collision of musical genius as might have been expected. The Beatles were, by their own account, so into marijuana at the time they forgot where it was they were going until the limo pulled up outside Elvis place in Los Angeles' Benedict Canyon. When they got... > Read more
Dance of Love
RADIO BIRDMAN REMEMBERED: Detroit rock'n'roll . . . . outta Sydney, Australia
6 Jan 2012 | 4 min read
Radio Birdman were one of the great Detroit rock bands, except they came from Sydney. Inspired by the Stooges and MC5, they blasted out of Australia in the pre-punk Seventies in one of those short, fast flights that would end in legend or obscurity. They managed to achieve both. Most people have never heard of them let alone their sonic boom thrash-pop, but the few who did became... > Read more
New Race
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011: History repeats in box sets
16 Dec 2011 | 6 min read
Any clear-eyed look back on 2011 would say it wasn't a great one for electric guitars. Classic, mainstream rock albums were few and far between, and the singles charts – often a bridge between guitar pop and indie.rock – have long been the domain of r'n'b/hip-hop (“featuring Bulldog”). In what might loosely be called “rock culture”, rock music... > Read more