Absolute Elsewhere
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COLD CHISEL ALBUMS, REMASTERED AND RE-PRESENTED (2011): The last wave, again . . .
1 Aug 2011 | 10 min read
The reason for Cold Chisel's July 2011 Sydney press conference was to announce the biggest archival reissue in Australian music history. All their albums (including live releases) remastered and packaged up with rare and unseen DVD footage (some bought from eBay says Barnes), and 56 extra tracks available only on digital download. Here's a run-down of the Cold Chisel remastered and... > Read more
The Last Wave of Summer
HOLLIE SMITH INTERVIEWED (2011): Are friends electronica?
1 Aug 2011 | 6 min read
In Berlin it's 8.15am so a yawning Hollie Smith is forgivably vague about where her friends Electric Wire Hustle played last night. And she is also on holiday, despite having a new album Band of Brothers Vol 1 – with Mara TK of EWH – released back home. “I did talk last year of moving over here for a lot longer,” she says “but things kept changing so... > Read more
Promised Land Hotel (Pt 1 and Pt 2)
CHANTS R&B 1966: New Zealand's rocking witchdoctors
25 Jul 2011 | 2 min read | 2
Chants R&B, who styled themselves "soul agents for r'n'b," were a raucous four-piece from Christchurch, New Zealand who would seem to have been in cultural isolation from r'n'b rock of the mid Sixties by them being at the bottom of the bottom island at the bottom of the world. But Christchurch had an American airforce base and so -- as with Max Merritt and Ray Columbus before... > Read more
I Want Her
R.E.M. LIFES RICH PAGEANT REISSUED (2011): The turning point
25 Jul 2011 | 3 min read
When R.E.M. re-signed to Warners for a reported US$80 million in 1996, it was hard to know whether to stifle the gasp or the guffaw. Although that figure bandied about was doubtless inflated and involved complex deals regarding recording, promotion and royalties, it wasn't the number that was so significant. It was what Warners thought they might be getting. After all, the band were... > Read more
Fall On Me (Athens demo)
THE GREATEST LOST ALBUM IN ROCK? (2011): The remarkable story of The Voyage of the Corvus Corrone
18 Jul 2011 | 4 min read | 5
In late 1976 keyboard player Rick Wakeman of the progressive rock band Yes – riding a string of solo successes with his prog-rock concept albums The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Citizen Kane – gave a revealing interview to the British magazine New Music Maker in which he described his forthcoming project, a concept album based on Sir James... > Read more
The Edges of the Map
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB (2011): The Dylan tribute albums
18 Jul 2011 | 3 min read
Bob Dylan's 70th birthday in June 2011 hardly went unobserved in the world – you couldn't turn around without bumping into profiles, reconsiderations, essays and the like – and nor was it coincidence that many artists lined up for tribute albums. Some got in early – like Ben Sidran whose Dylan Different arrived before Bob's 69th birthday – and others had... > Read more
Tomorrow is a Long Time
PITCH BLACK INTERVIEWED (2004): Lights, camera, action
16 Jul 2011 | 4 min read
Fortunately, Paddy Free and Mike Hodgson, who are Pitch Black, get the joke behind the question: why is it so many electronica artists like themselves live in the bush or by the ocean, and are inspired by all that nature out there? Whatever happened to nightclubbing and staying up until dawn? Free, who lives at Piha and calls Karekare his spiritual home, says these days he couldn't... > Read more
SUEDE REISSUED AND RECONSIDERED (2011): England made me
4 Jul 2011 | 4 min read | 3
At the going down of the sun we will remember them, those great Britpop bands who were The Next Big Thing – like Longpigs, the Seahorses, Mansun, the Supernaturals . . . All household names, right? Yes, it was – and still is -- easy to be cynical about Nineties Britpop, especially from this distance when Oasis and Blur were being set off against each other, and British... > Read more
The Asphalt World
TEX PERKINS INTERVIEWED (2011): Cash money and black is back
2 Jul 2011 | 4 min read
The hotel's drawn blinds shut out the mid-morning Auckland sun, pills are scattered on a table, the remains of takeaway food are on another and there's a pervasive air of “the morning-after”. “Yeah, very Johnny Cash,” says Tex Perkins, the room's slightly disheveled occupant, in a husky and weary voice. The Australian singer-songwriter – in such... > Read more
What Do You Want Now?
ACID DAZE PART THREE: A Day in My Mind's Mind Vol 3; 28 Kiwi Psychedelic Trips 1967-72
25 Jun 2011 | 2 min read
As with the second volume in this excellent on-going and budget-priced series, I wrote the liner notes to this album and -- with the invaluable research and help of Grant Gillanders who once again chose the tracks and must be on the shortlist of an honour's list for services to Kiwi music -- I also wrote the profiles on the bands who feature.Again rather than me itemise the trippy music and... > Read more
The Smoke: Never Trust A Woman
ACID DAZE PART TWO: A Day in My Mind's Mind Vol 2; Fantasies, Polka Dots and Flowers
25 Jun 2011 | 2 min read
Rather than essay this second collection of Kiwi psychedelic songs from '67-'72 -- subtitled "Fantasies, Polka Dots and Flowers" -- why don't I just reproduce below the liner notes I wrote for it?.................. The exciting thing about this on-going series of psychedelic music from New Zealand in the late 60s and early 70s is not just that it brings back some great songs and... > Read more
The Music Convention: Bellyboard Beat
PAUL McCARTNEY 1970 AND 1980 (2011): Lowkey at each end of his first post-Beatles decade
20 Jun 2011 | 5 min read
In a few months Sir James Paul McCartney, age 68, will premier his new work, a major orchestral piece for the New York City Ballet entitled Oceans Kingdom, written in conjunction with American composer John Wilson. This ambitious career move in the classical world follows his Liverpool Oratorio, Standing Stone and Working Classical with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Eighties,... > Read more
Paul McCartney: Coming Up (live, 1979)
TOWNES VAN ZANDT INTERVIEWED (1988): Say hello and wave goodbye
16 Jun 2011 | 7 min read
You hate to say lt, but Townes Van Zandt had probably already written his own obituary - many times. Try this as a sample of his cut-to-the-bone, white knuckle lyrics: “There ain’t much I haven’t tried -- fast llvin’, slow suicide, I try to tell myself I’m fine but it just aln’t so.” Van Zandt has always lived on that knife edge of self-doubt, a man... > Read more
Townes Van Zandt: You Are Not Needed Now (live, 1985)
NICK CAVE, FROM OUTSIDER TO AUTEUR IN THE NINETIES: Let Love In to No More Shall We Part
2 Jun 2011 | 4 min read
From the early Nineties, Nick Cave -- ever so slowly -- ceased to be a preoccupation of those who immersed themselves in the gloom of his raw and dirty blues-based music and became a respected, almost mainstream figure. You could mention him in most conversations and people would know who you meant. Songs like Straight To You, Christina the Astonishing, Papa Won't Leave You Henry... > Read more
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Stagger Lee (from Murder Ballads)
STEVE IGNORANT OF CRASS INTERVIEWED (2011): A working classy act
1 Jun 2011 | 4 min read
In Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip's pointed but very funny rap on Thou Shalt Kill four years back, Scroobius rolled out a catalogue of groups noting after each one they were were “just band”. And so it goes: “The Sex Pistols, just a band; the Clash, just a band; Crass, just a band; Minor Threat, just a band . . .” Hold up. What's the punk-era Crass doing in such... > Read more
TINY RUINS INTERVIEWED (2011): Some were meant for greatness
31 May 2011 | 6 min read
Hollie Fullbrook – who performs as Tiny Ruins – laughs with slight embarrassment, tells of how she came to her stage name and asks I not mention it because it sounds pretentious. It doesn't actually – unless you think mentioning Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea and the forties singer/band leader Tiny Bradshaw in the same anecdote qualifies as pretension. But that is... > Read more
Tiny Ruins: Adelphi Apartments
HOWE GELB INTERVIEWED (2011): The price and pay-off of the path less traveled
20 May 2011 | 22 min read | 1
Howe Gelb of Tucson, Arizona is one of the long distance runners. He's been in for the long haul with his band Giant Sand (two dozen albums since the mid Eighties) and diverse solo projects under his own name (around 18 which range from gospel in Canada to flamenco desert-rock in Cordoba, Spain on his new release Alegrias). And there are other albums as OP8, the Band of Blacky... > Read more
Howe Gelb and A Band of Gypsies: Cowboy Boots on Cobble Stone (from the album Alegrias)
STEVE WINWOOD PROFILED (2011): From teen-soul boy to mainstream man
19 May 2011 | 4 min read
When the salty bluesman Howlin' Wolf growled “the men don't know, but the little girls understand” on the 1961 Willie Dixon-penned Back Door Man we know he was talking about something more earthy and sexual than pop singers like Justin Bieber. But when Bieberfever arrived to what appeared to be the surprise of anyone over 16, there were many music writers bewailing his... > Read more
BEN WATERS INTERVIEWED (2011): One more time for the boogie woogie man Ian Stewart
11 May 2011 | 13 min read
When he was just nine – 26 years ago – Ben Waters briefly saw something in a pub which changed his life. He was at his auntie and uncle's 25th wedding anniversary in the Wynyard Gap in Somerset, just across the border from his home county of Dorset, and the great pianist Ian Stewart was a family friend who sat down and played some boogie-woogie. “It was the first live... > Read more
Ben Waters with PJ Harvey: Lonely Avenue
RUTHIE FOSTER (2011): A Southern soul sister rises
3 May 2011 | 4 min read
When the once-great B.B. King recently played in Auckland it was my unhappy task to write the review of his sad, disappointing and uncomfortable performance. The man is clearly past it -- the singing but a spark of its old self, his guitar work now woeful, the "performance" mostly rambling and often distracted talk -- and you had to wonder why he was still doing this. I suggested... > Read more