Absolute Elsewhere
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ARTISAN GUNS INTERVIEWED (2010): Heart, and art, on their sleeves
16 Apr 2010 | 6 min read
The guys in the young Auckland band Artisan Guns remind me it was four years ago that I first saw them, in this very same room -- the boardroom of EMI in Auckland where the harbour views can be so distracting. When they played four years ago -- an acoustic set to maybe a dozen people on a beer-drinking Friday after work -- the room hushed and everyone was impressed by these high school... > Read more
Artisan Guns: Brand New game (from the EP Hearts)
NATALIE MERCHANT INTERVIEWED 2010: The child inside
16 Apr 2010 | 5 min read
At age 10, Nathalia Crane was an acclaimed poet and the subject of great controversy, not least for the sexual innuendo of The Janitor’s Boy in which she wrote of lustful feelings and how she would “dutifully shiver in bed”. “Her poems came to attention when she was published in American newspapers,“ says singer Natalie Merchant, who has included a musical... > Read more
JOAN ARMTRADING INTERVIEWED (2008): Into and out of the blues
2 Apr 2010 | 4 min read
Joan Armatrading makes an embarrassing admission for someone whose most recent album Into the Blues debuted at number one on the Billboard blues charts: she doesn’t listen to the blues and while some interviewers have noted the influence of John Lee Hooker in a couple of tracks she couldn’t identify a Hooker song if she was asked to. “Yes, some people have said John... > Read more
MARILYN MANSON INTERVIEWED (1999): The spook circus, cont'd
29 Mar 2010 | 6 min read
The curious thing about Marilyn Manson isn't the pancake makeup, the alarming contact lenses or even the cover of his latest album, Mechanical Animals, where he's some kind of naked androgynous character looking like a leftover from the cover shoot for David Bowie's 1974 Diamond Dogs album. No, the curious thing is that the music - which we must remind ourselves is actually what MM does in... > Read more
CAROLE KING AND JAMES TAYLOR INTERVIEWED (2010): Attitudes and platitudes
22 Mar 2010 | 5 min read
Carole King and James Taylor hardly need an introduction. For 40 years -- more in King’s case, she started writing the music for Gerry Goffin‘s lyrics in the early 60s -- their songs and lives have been public property. No classic hits station (or student flat in the early 70s) could be without a copy of Taylor’s Sweet Baby James (1970) or Kings’ Tapestry of the... > Read more
Carole King: Medley (live, 2005)
JIMI HENDRIX AND ALAN DOUGLAS: The fireball and the keeper of the flame
8 Mar 2010 | 6 min read
The name Alan Douglas raises mixed feelings among Jimi Hendrix fans. By a series of canny and right-place, right-time manoeuvres after the death of Hendrix in 1970, Douglas -- a former jazz producer, and a friend and adviser to Hendrix in his final years -- ended up as the curator of the Hendrix legacy. While others, notably the many claiming to be the late guitarist’s manager,... > Read more
Jimi Hendrix: Catfish Blues
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JIMI HENDRIX: THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE BOX SET (2000): Get experienced, but differently
6 Mar 2010 | 2 min read
It should be easy to get together a thorough Jimi Hendrix collection. After all, his recording career lasted fewer than four years. Presumably, all you'd need would be his exceptional debut album Are You Experienced, the follow-up Axis: Bold As Love and the expansive, Essential Elsewhere double album Electric Ladyland. The Smash Hits collection would fill a few gaps, although only the... > Read more
Killing Floor (Paris, 1966)
JAKOB DYLAN INTERVIEWED (2002): Out of his father's long shadow
1 Mar 2010 | 5 min read
You gotta feel sorry for the guy. He's 32 years of age, is now on his fourth album with his band the Wallflowers, and still people want to talk about what he politely calls "the peripheral stuff". You can guess what that might be when the guy's name is Jakob Dylan and he was the youngest of five children growing up with their dad Bob. But the Wallflowers have a 10-year... > Read more
BRIAN AUGER INTERVIEWED (2002): Still on fire, still rollin down the road
1 Mar 2010 | 3 min read | 1
How's this as a measure of a man's modesty: it is only in the closing overs of a lengthy conversation that Brian Auger mentions in passing he plays on an album which is nominated for a Grammy in the contemporary jazz category. And so, three decades after he took the sound of his rocking and swinging Hammond organ into the vanguard of jazz fusion, he is still on the cutting edge.... > Read more
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, WHAT GOES ON (BOX SET, 1993): The velvet blueprint
20 Feb 2010 | 4 min read
Most reviewers of this well-packaged, 57-track, three-disc set can’t help but comment on the overwrought essay by Clinton Walker who starts with superlatives, then works up to a screech. He sets up the customary and needless rock-crit comparisons (VU more street-damaged than the Beatles. So?) to advance the case that the Velvets were the most important band ever in rock –... > Read more
The Velvet Underground: Extemporisation ("melody laughter"?) November 1966
LOU REED AND PATTI SMITH IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Patent pending
15 Feb 2010 | 3 min read
When those archetypal New Yorkers Lou Reed and Patti Smith both released albums in the early days of 2000, it allowed anyone still interested in their careers the chance to consider their relative positions as they entered a new decade -- in fact a new century -- about 25 years (and more) on from their career defining best work. Neither of them seemed especially interested in what we might... > Read more
Lou Reed: Paranoia Key of E
A RHYTHM AND BLUES TIMELINE 1900 - 1960
12 Feb 2010 | 4 min read | 2
Here follows a broad outline of the growth and development of rhythm and blues, courtesy of Rhythm and Blues Records in the UK, a company which specialises in this music. PRE 1910 1877 Invention of the Phonograph 1883 Racist coon songs introduced into vaudeville and burlesque 1896 Jim Crow Segregation laws 1897 World’s first radio station on the Isle of... > Read more
Big Joe Williams: Baby Please Don't Go (1947)
EVAN DANDO OF THE LEMONHEADS INTERVIEWED (2004): Learning to crawl
1 Feb 2010 | 7 min read
You know how the arc of fame moves in the States: you have a minor career in rock, hip-hop or the movies so you take to drink, drugs or become addicted to pain-killers. (Who knew there was that much lower back pain in success?) Then you spin out of control. You do silly things such as marrying in Las Vegas to someone you just met, date transvestites or punch a photographer. Then you get... > Read more
Evan Dando: Frying Pan
JEFF KELLY AND THE GREEN PAJAMAS: The other sound of Seattle
29 Jan 2010 | 3 min read | 1
One day, just before I went to the Pacific Northwest, I had lunch with a friend. When I told him I was going to Seattle he said, "Are you going to see Green Pajamas?" I had no idea what he was talking about, I thought he meant some stage play.At this point my friend -- who has a big-time job in a major record company -- regailed me with enthusiasm about the genius of Jeff... > Read more
Green Pajamas: The White Witch
PET ROCKS AND PUNK ROCK: Have A Nice Decade; The '70s Pop Culture Box considered
17 Jan 2010 | 2 min read
It might have been famously "the decade that taste forgot", but the Seventies has spawned an interesting nostalgia for smiley faces (on e-mails!), terrific films such as Dazed and Confused . . . and this extraordinary box set of seven CDs which unflinchingly collects up the great (James Brown's The Payback, Freda Payne's Band of Gold and Gladys Knight and the Pips' Midnight Train to... > Read more
Paper Lace: The Night Chicago Died
MOTOWN, THE FIRST TWO DECADES: There's a place in the sun
11 Jan 2010 | 3 min read
In 2009, Motown celebrated its 50th anniversary. Not that there was much to celebrate in 2009. The golden years for this classic and culture-shifting label had started to wither some three decades previous and it was notable that when it released compilation albums to cash in on this anniversary they were shoddy and sorry affairs, woeful in their tracklisting, and elevated Michael Jackson.... > Read more
Marvin Gaye: I Heard It Through the Grapevine
MAURICE GREER INTERVIEWED (2002): A stand-up guy
9 Jan 2010 | 3 min read
Yes, it would be at least 30 years since they'd last played together, says Maurice Greer sounding as if the enormity of that chasm in time had just hit him. "Gee, it must have been about the end of 1970, because we'd done the Pins In It album and we'd gone to Australia and Billy had stayed there and I came back and we had a keyboard player ... We've got a family tree made up and... > Read more
MARIANNE DISSARD INTERVIEWED (2009): The Tucson chanteuse
7 Jan 2010 | 11 min read
Marianne Dissard is a woman whose music confounds expectations, yet there is an impeccable logic to it: she is French but lives in Tucson, so there is an almost inevitable marriage of chanson and Americana on her album L’entredeux which was produced by Joey Burns of Calexico, who also wrote the music which envelops and supports Dissard’s poetic lyrics. She in fact has also been... > Read more
Marianne Dissard: L'embellie
NU METAL IN 2001: Look at the nu boss, same as the old boss
1 Jan 2010 | 6 min read
Heavy metal is for young men without a war of their own, wrote a wag in Creem magazine some time in the early Seventies. At the time Led Zeppelin were stomping across the planet delivering their stolen blues and post-pop at ear-shattering volume. You can catch it in their concert film The Song Remains the Same -- and they look like a bunch of pussies. Metal these days is a much more... > Read more
THE ROLLING STONES' GET YER YA-YA'S OUT! (2009): The '69 Garden party
13 Dec 2009 | 4 min read | 1
The live album -- or double live as was standard in the days of vinyl -- has had a chequered history in rock: some live albums defined an artists career (Frampton Comes Alive, Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous) and others added little to the sum of our knowledge (most of Dylan's). Some artists regularly drop live albums (Paul McCartney, who has a huge backlog of songs to draw from) and others... > Read more