Absolute Elsewhere

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WAI INTERVIEWED (2000): One hundred percent te reo to the future

27 Jul 2010  |  3 min read

Maaka McGregor has had a good day. In Auckland for a week from his home in Titahi Bay and talking up the Wai 100% album he has recorded with his partner Wai (aka Mina) Ripia, he's just come from Mai FM. His pitch met with a positive, if unpublishably enthusiastic, response from programme director Manu Taylor. A good day. McGregor is under no illusions how difficult it will be to... > Read more

ROGER GUINN, BACK FROM RIO (1991): The return flyte

19 Jul 2010  |  2 min read

When Jim McGuinn changed his name to Roger in ’67 during a period of chaos without and within for The Byrds, there were those who thought it was an elaborate hoax. Jim had taken off to Rio and been replaced by his lookalike brother, said Paul-is-Dead paranoids and conspiracy theorists. Hence the wry in-joke title on his album Back From Rio in 1990, McGuinn’s first solo... > Read more

Roger McGuinn: Someone to Love

QUINCY JONES INTERVIEWED (1990): The boss back on the block

19 Jul 2010  |  6 min read

Quincy Jones does quite put it this way, but he knows that with great power comes great responsibility. And Jones has great power because of a financial empire founded on an extra ordinary career in music which spans from be-bop to hip-hop. This is the man who hung out with jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the early Fifties, counts his Grammy nominations in the... > Read more

Quincy Jones, Ice T, Tevin Campbell, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and others: Back on the Block medl

FIFTIES ROCK'N'ROLL; LOUD, FAST AND OUT OF CONTROL: Rock 101, The Originators

14 Jul 2010  |  5 min read

Billy Joel isn't usually cited in the Elsewhere world as an insightful reference, but his feisty We Didn't Start the Fire of the mid-Nineties was a brisk, rocking historical synopsis of our time (JFK, Chernobyl etc) which was referenced a little in Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues chant-poem of three decades previous. However, by starting his countdown of great events from the... > Read more

Wanda Jackson: Let's Have A Party (1958)

WANDA JACKSON INTERVIEWED (2010): The 72-year old teenager

14 Jul 2010  |  9 min read

As a teenager barely out of school, Wanda Jackson – “the sweet girl with the nasty voice” as she became known – toured with and dated Elvis Presley; scored minor hits with Mean Mean Man, Fujiyama Mama (big in Japan in '58) and her signature song, the larynx-tearing invitation Let's Have a Party in 1960. Let's Have a Party – which Presley had... > Read more

GUY CLARK INTERVIEWED (1989): Close to the chest and heart

12 Jul 2010  |  4 min read

In a way it almost doesn’t matter if you don’t know who Guy Clark is -- Bono and the rest of U2 do. Not only do they attend his concerts (and a month ago, when Clark was in Dublin for a television show, they dropped by there too), but the Irish stadium rockers have signed this quiet singer/songwriter from Nashville to a distribution deal with their newly established Mother... > Read more

BILL LASWELL INTERVIEWED (1994): In the den of the alchemist

28 Jun 2010  |  13 min read

The apartment seven floors up on Park Ave South, just around the corner from the exclusive Gramercy Park area of New York, is much as you might expect. Albums and CDs line the walls. Over there the new Last Poets 12-inch single leans against the wall, on that shelf there the Yoko Ono CD box set sits alongside books by Carlos Castenada. Photographs of William Burroughs and Lee Scratch... > Read more

Material: Black Light (from Hallucination Engine, 1994)

THE CHURCH INTERVIEWED (1994): Men keeping the faith

21 Jun 2010  |  9 min read

Fourteen years after springing their classic paisley-pop hit An Unguarded Moment, six years on from picking up an American gold disc for their album Starfish and looking at a back-catalogue of releases that reaches dangerously close to double figures, the Church -- now trimmed back to founder members Steve Kilbey and Marty Willson-Piper after the departure of bassist Peter Koppes - are... > Read more

The Church: Day of the Dead (from Sometime Anytime, 1994)

ROSANNE CASH INTERVIEWED (2004): The road less travelled

21 Jun 2010  |  6 min read

When Rosanne Cash crashed into the country music scene in the late 80s she was, as the Americans say, a real piece of work. With purple hair, a drug problem and a brusque manner, she arrived in Nashville from California and immediately alienated the country music establishment. Despite her high irritant factor, Cash - daughter of Johnny and born the same month in '55 that her dad... > Read more

Rosanne Cash: Western Wall

CHRIS BAILEY, THE SAINTS, INTERVIEWED (1994): From Saint to Pope

21 Jun 2010  |  7 min read  |  1

There were always a couple of good reasons for liking the Saints, Brisbane’s punk-to-pop finest who were fronted by sole constant Chris Bailey. The first was Bailey running intellectual rings around rock show host Dick Driver on national television. The other was a great song. What that song was came down to taste. Maybe it was their first hit from ’77, a piece of... > Read more

Chris Bailey: On the Avenue (from 54 Days at Sea, 1994)

BILLY BRAGG INTERVIEWED ABOUT WOODY GUTHRIE (1998): Woody'n'Wilco and rude'n'boozy songs

14 Jun 2010  |  5 min read

From the rollicking singalong which opens the new Mermaid Avenue album by Billy Bragg, you know something is different. There’s Bragg and the American band Wilco in a swaggering tale of looking for booze and, to put it delicately, female companionship. From there on it’s a strange trip with Bragg and the band: an old man’s teenage reminiscences of taking a girl’s... > Read more

Jeff Tweedy and Billy Bragg: California Stars

NEIL FINN AND CROWDED HOUSE (2010): The returning son

14 Jun 2010  |  2 min read

Many, many years ago Neil Finn told me he believed bands, and he was referring to Split Enz at the time, had a natural lifespan. Some years after that – in 2001 when he was well into a solo career with the album One Nil – I asked him the question again, and specifically if he felt that about Crowded House. His answer was the same. Yes, bands did have a natural lifespan... > Read more

Crowded House: Archers Arrows

ANTON FIER PROFILED (1988): A new career in a new town

7 Jun 2010  |  5 min read

Anton Fier was, until recently, a star without a bank account -- or manager come to that -- and yet at the nucleus of the hippest collection of New York’s avant-garde ever to hit vinyl. When Fier gets going, the going gets fearful as left-field jazz players, peripheral rockists and unusual combinations of singers,squawkers and shapers come together under the banner of his band,... > Read more

Golden Palominos: Omaha (1985)

TURIN BRAKES INTERVIEWED (2004): Something in the ether

5 Jun 2010  |  6 min read

So you're travelling to the States soon and wondering about that new fingerprinting and high-security thing at the airport on arrival? Tell it to Gale Paridjanian of Turin Brakes. He's been down that path repeatedly, the first time almost a year ago. "I was born in Iran," says the quietly spoken Londoner, who first sang with bandmate Olly Knights in the church choir at age seven .... > Read more

THE WHITE STRIPES INTERVIEWED (2003): The Elephant in the room

1 Jun 2010  |  8 min read  |  1

Jack and Meg White are easily spotted in the large lounge of Sydney's swanky new W Hotel on a converted wharf in Woolloomoloo. But they were always going to be. The Detroit duo who are The White Stripes - formerly said to be brother and sister, but now we know are ex-husband and wife - always wear a combo of red and white, and occasionally black. On this day Jack sports a red shirt, black... > Read more

The White Stripes: I Just Don't Know What to do With Myself

CLIMIE FISHER INTERVIEWED (1988): Studio changes everything

1 Jun 2010  |  6 min read

The rock music thing used to be quite straightforward. A few people got together, practiced a few covers, wrote some original material and the band honed its act in pubs and clubs and on the road. Somewhere down the line a record company appeared and the band made records. These days that process can be reversed. Noel Crombie of Schnell Fenster talks of journalists being flown... > Read more

CHRIS WHITLEY INTERVIEWED (1991): The Law man living with the lore

24 May 2010  |  7 min read  |  2

Sometimes you can just get too much too soon - and the wrong kind of attention. Take American singer Chris Whitley, whose debut album Living with the Law has been picking up praise by the bucketload. Sure it’s a great album; Rolling Stone called it “riveting and original” before acclaiming Whitley as “a visionary who trades on archetypal symbols and classic... > Read more

Chris Whitley: Big Sky Country

THE VERLAINES; REISSUED AND RECONSIDERED (2010): Listened to Mahler, look over my shoulder . . .

17 May 2010  |  5 min read

Quite why anyone thought there ever was a "Dunedin sound" is bewildering -- without even hearing a note of the music all you had to do was look at the cover of the famous "Dunedin double" album of mid '82 to see how each of the four bands -- the Stones, the Chills, Sneaky Feelings and the Verlaines -- thought of themselves and wanted to portray that to the world. On... > Read more

The Verlaines: Doomsday

GRAEME DOWNES OF THE VERLAINES INTERVIEWED (2003): Such brave, flawed diamonds

17 May 2010  |  8 min read

If there were awards in local rock for candour beyond the call of duty, then Graeme Downes, linchpin of the formative and formidable Flying Nun band the Verlaines (1981-97), would be saying “Thank you” at the podium more than most. Always a straight shooter, Downes settles over lunch to chat about the long overdue Verlaines’ compilation - the 19-track You re Just Too... > Read more

The Verlaines: Anniversary (from Some Disenchanted Evening, 1990)

UTE LEMPER INTERVIEWED (2010): The fearless angel comes treading

15 May 2010  |  4 min read

Ute Lemper – the foremost interpreter of Weimar cabaret songs and the music of Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill and Edith Piaf – doesn't pull her punches. With no prompting at all after she mentions one of her most recent projects has been creating a multi-media theatrical setting for the poetry of barfly Charles Bukowski, she notes the production is better received in Europe... > Read more