Absolute Elsewhere
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GILES MARTIN INTERVIEWED (2012): Producing in the material world
14 Jun 2012 | 10 min read
Given his famous father George was the Beatles' longtime producer, there seems almost an inevitability that Giles Martin – coincidentally born on the same date as John Lennon, October 9 – should find his life as a music producer entwined with the Famous Four. But early on his dad discouraged him from making music a career (he sidestepped him and joined a band then moved... > Read more
Let It Be Me
JENNIFER ZEA INTERVIEWED (2012): From metalhead to soul-jazz songstress
11 Jun 2012 | 8 min read
Singer and songwriter Jennifer Zea is quite a colourful flower in the landscape of New Zealand music. The Venezuelan-born singer and songwriter has impressed in live performances for her vigorous and vital enthusiasm, and her album The Latin Soul – produced by Nathan Haines and reviewed here – captures her melange of styles, wraps them up in pop-jazz compatibility and is... > Read more
Satelite
THE PICTONES 1957-67: Supper clubs and . . . hashish?
11 Jun 2012 | 3 min read | 3
Quite why the Pictones would record an instrumental enticingly titled Hashish back in '62 has long fascinated those who explore the less traveled paths of New Zealand music. But when Elsewhere posted the track and opened up speculation (here), the answer was almost immediate. Dave Clarke the guitarist from the band – now 71 – got in touch to explain. But first, how did... > Read more
My Bonnie
ELECTRIC WARRIOR, 35 YEARS ON: A case of T.Rexstacy
30 May 2012 | 2 min read
Even today, almost 35 years after his death, people still place flowers at the spot in London where Marc Bolan was killed. Bolan was a fortnight short of his 30th birthday when the car he was in with his girlfriend Gloria Jones, hit a tree. Some might wonder "what might have been", but the sad fact is Bolan was one of those who had already been. At the time of his... > Read more
ROBIN GIBB INTERVIEWED (2010): To Bee Gee, or not to Bee Gee
24 May 2012 | 5 min read
Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees – younger brother of Barry and twin to Maurice who died in 2003 – is on the road again, this time singing the Bee Gees' classics as a solo artist. And he's done it before. Forty years ago in fact when he briefly quit the band after their Sixties fame (half a dozen chart-topping singles) and was enjoying a solo hit with Saved by the Bell – a... > Read more
Saved by the Bell
RAINER PTACEK REMEMBERED (2012): The flame still burns
21 May 2012 | 2 min read | 1
When rock magazines do their “favourite cult heroes” lists and pull out the eccentric Daniel Johnston, drug-damaged types like Roky Erickson, the late Syd Barrett and Skip Spence, and bands like the Slits or the Sonics, one name never appears: Singer-guitarist and songwriter Rainer Ptacek who died of a brain tumour in 1997 at age 46. Perhaps Ptacek was too big to qualify... > Read more
21 Years
ETTA JAMES REMEMBERED (2012): A lady not for turning
7 May 2012 | 2 min read
When Etta James died at age 73 in January after a protracted battle with leukemia, there a was genuine but surprising acknowledgment of her career in the media. Not that James didn't deserve them, but the singer whose life was troubled by heroin addiction and time in rehab was an unlikely candidate for obituaries. She didn't have that many hits, not even At Last which many hailed... > Read more
Your Good Thing is About to End
TOY LOVE; A RETURN BOUT? (2012)
10 Apr 2012 | 4 min read | 1
Since the cheaply printed posters reading "Toy Love, live at the Gluepot Sat 21st April" started appearing on walls and lamp posts around central Auckland, I have had to answer a few questions. People say things like, "So Toy Love are playing the Gluepot, huh?" Without being condescending I have to point out the famous/notorious Gluepot pub no longer exists, so . . .... > Read more
Photographs of Naked Ladies
BLUES MAGOOS 1966-68: Pop's psychedelic pioneers
2 Apr 2012 | 4 min read | 2
Some albums catch a band at a turning point, one foot in the past and the other stepping towards an unknown but promising future. If the Beatles, through exhaustion and wrung out by the constant pressure to produce, had called it a day in late 1965 their legacy would have been easy to distill down: a few joyfully adolescent pop hits, Beatlemania, a classic pop film in A Hard Day's Night . .... > Read more
Tobacco Road
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