Absolute Elsewhere
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AUGUST 18 1962, WHEN THEY BECAME THE BEATLES (2022): One night in Port Sunlight
24 Jul 2022 | 3 min read
There had been Beatles before August 18 1962, of course. But on that night at Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, south of the River Mersey, they became the Beatles as we know them. That was the night, before a small but enthusiastic audience, Ringo Starr made his official debut with the group. Two days before Peter Best had been fired. Ringo had met them in Hamburg and in March had... > Read more
EMILY MEET MATTHEW, MATTHEW MEET EMILY (2022): The poet mystic and the pop musician
12 Jul 2022 | 2 min read
At a time when local culture is increasingly self-obsessed and seduced by the idea of our exceptionalism, Matthew Bannister – swimming against the current tide – looks out the window rather than in the mirror. His “lockdown album” as One Man Bannister, The Saddest Noise, isn't some morose bedroom pop born of isolation but rather an exploration of the works of... > Read more
TALL DWARFS, REISSUED (2022): At last, something's going to happen
10 Jul 2022 | 2 min read
After his debilitating stroke in 2009, Chris Knox slowly fell from public consciousness: credible book proposals covering his artwork languished for lack of funding; the reissue of his solo albums and those with Alec Bathgate as Tall Dwarfs fell over . . . And Knox – unable to make music, who couldn't paint until he retrained himself to use his left hand – became more spoken... > Read more
The Severed Head of Julio
1972: THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS (2022). Half century ago in the telescope
4 Jul 2022 | 3 min read
Occasionally -- out of boredom, to wind people up or simply make quick money from a book -- a writer will settle on year and proclaim it the most important in popular music. It's an enjoyable but pointless exercise because if they chose, say, 1964 for the the excitement of the British Invasion many will immediately point out the following year was much more interesting musically with albums... > Read more
Madman Across the Water
THE TALE OF TWO SONGS (2022): Stranger things and strangers meeting
27 Jun 2022 | 2 min read
Stranger things have happened on the music charts, but when Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) recently appeared in the new season of the Netflix series Stranger Things, the song suddenly topped the charts, 37 years after it first appeared. The urgently dramatic electro-pop of Running captures the character Max's desperation, her fear and impending death in a psychotic... > Read more
CONOR McPHERSON INTERVIEWED (2022): Taking Bob Dylan to Broadway doubters
26 Jun 2022 | 5 min read
Even Conor McPherson, writer and director of the award-winning musical Girl From The North Country, acknowledges it's a hard one for people to get their heads around. “I can truthfully say,” he says from his home in Dublin, “if someone had said, 'Hey, you want to see a Bob Dylan musical?' my response would've been 'No'. “So I recognise it's a tough sell... > Read more
THE RETURN OF THE ROCK'N'ROLL STAR (2022): The unbearable triteness of Liam
20 Jun 2022 | 2 min read
In his candid and funny Rod, The Autobiography published a decade ago, Rod Stewart reflected on his wayward 1980s. “I never thought in this period that the 'being a rock star' aspect of being a rock star was beside the point, or even something I needed to apologise for. “If I hadn't considered the drinking/shagging/carrying-on to be at least... > Read more
CAPITAL THEATRE, INTRODUCED (2022): From ancient to the present, a rock epic
19 Jun 2022 | 7 min read
In early 2021 I was approached by the manager of an Auckland band I had never heard of. Not surprising, they hadn't played anywhere and at that point had released nothing. But they were an intriguing prospect because their debut album – which they had funded themselves – was a concept album and had been produced by the top LA producer Mike Clink, best known for work with Guns N'... > Read more
MID-YEAR REPORT, THE TOP 20 OF (2022): The taste of Elsewhere
17 Jun 2022 | 7 min read | 2
It's the middle of the year and report cards are being sent out. As many of you know, in the first half of this year we were Elsewhere for three months (Sweden, England, Scotland and Singapore) and filed a weekly column for the Listener, which appeared the following week as Travels in the Time of Covid (and also travels in the time of Ukraine, rising prices and more!) That meant we had... > Read more
WILCO, THEN AND NOW (2022): What goes around comes around . . . to country
13 Jun 2022 | 2 min read | 1
The idea that genres in popular music are immutable has long been eroded. Even by the mid-Nineties No Depression magazine – which took its name from an 1990 album by the band Uncle Tupelo – had as its remit to cover “alternative country, whatever that is”. No Depression would occasionally consider mainstream country artists but more often bands like Whiskeytown,... > Read more
TALL DWARFS, RESURRECTED AND REISSUED (2022): In their own write and draw
10 Jun 2022 | 2 min read
When Chris Knox suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009 it effectively ended much of the creative career for one of this country's most unique and diverse talents: Knox was an artist (with a keen eye for caricature), cartoonist (his Max Media strip ran every week in the Herald from 1987), cultural critic, music writer, television presenter and so much more. And most notably a musician whose... > Read more
Bee to Honey
THE CLASH, COMBAT ROCK + THE PEOPLE'S HALL (2022): Band on the stagger
6 Jun 2022 | 1 min read
Although there was a subsequent album – the awful Cut the Crap – Combat Rock in 1982 was the last Clash album anyone could take seriously. Which isn't to say it's any good. It arrived in a nondescript cover almost free of meaning, aside from the band members looking in different directions, and while the title resonated with their militant stance it could also have referred... > Read more
CATE LE BON, INTERVIEWED (2022): Living in time suspended
30 May 2022 | 4 min read
For the past two years, the life of the acclaimed British avant-pop singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon has been defined by disparate dots on the map, threads of friendship and 21st century technology. Just before lockdown in early 2020, the 39-year old Welsh-born Le Bon – who relocated to Los Angeles in 2013 – left her newly-purchased home in rugged Joshua Tree in southern... > Read more
THE RETURN OF UHP (2022): Look out, here comes the posse
9 May 2022 | 3 min read
That local reggae at the start of the Eighties and our first hip-hop statements at the end of that decade came from Herbs and Upper Hutt Posse respectively should not have been a surprise. In its original form as it appeared in the Seventies, reggae was rebel music, the voices of those outside mainstream culture (few were more outside Jamaican... > Read more
Preeach
GOT TO HURRY RECORDS (2022): Sixties/Seventies stockist in central Stockholm
9 May 2022 | 5 min read
When Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love came to Bo Nerbe's tiny record story Got To Hurry in the old town of Gamla Stan in central Stockholm, he enthusiastically bought all three albums by the local band Stomachmouth, an Eighties garage-punk outfit. “I had released them on my Got To Hurry label and Kurt Cobain bought all three. And half a year later or so there was an American guy in the... > Read more
Got To Hurry, by the Yardbirds (guitar Eric Clapton)
JACK WHITE, RETURNS (2022): White, black and red, now blue
15 Apr 2022 | 2 min read
The free CD which comes with the current issue of Mojo, the British rock magazine, is Hello Operator: The Songs Jack White Taught Us. However many of the magazine’s readers would have been familiar with the songs by bluesmen Son House (his spooky Death Letter Blues), Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson, as well as Johnny Cash’s Big River,... > Read more
THE ROLLING STONES AT 60 (2022): And then there were two
8 Apr 2022 | 1 min read
There are many ways to measure the longevity of the Rolling Stones: since their formation in 1962 they’ve rocked on through 14 US presidents, 13 British prime ministers and almost 30 James Bond movies. The only two original founding members – Sir Michael Philip Jagger, net worth about $800 million, and Keith Richards – have outlived half the Beatles, half the Who and any... > Read more
THE MOVE: ALWAYS AND FOREVER; BELATEDLY (2022): Classic pop, great rock then forgot
28 Mar 2022 | 8 min read | 4
Anyone dumb enough to rely on an encyclopedia of rock or -- worse -- that self-described disgrace which is "Classic Hits" radio, would be forgiven for not knowing that the Move ever existed. Those DJs at "classic rock" certainly would have no clue . . . but we expect them to be clueless, I suppose. Shame on them. It seems the Move -- despite their... > Read more
Fire Brigade
YOKO ONO, REVISITED AND RESPECTED (2022): Octogenerian great-grandmother of avant-indie kids
19 Mar 2022 | 2 min read
When Marlon Williams sang Nobody Sees Me Like You Do at his sold-out Auckland Town Hall concert in 2018, it’s a safe bet few who loudly applauded knew who had written the song: Yoko Ono. Although she remains reviled by some older Beatle-obsessed fans for her artistic and personal relationship with John Lennon – who she has outlived by more than 40 years – Ono has... > Read more
BRITISH PROG 1970-75: (2022): Yes, but is it rock?
14 Mar 2022 | 15 min read | 3
Warning!!!!! This was big stuff, songs went for 15 - 20 minutes, there were double albums and triple albums, records had linked narratives so you have to listen to the whole thing . . . Whew! So not pop then, huh? ORIGINS OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK The Beatles extending the contract of pop into Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby (both with strings) and the St Peppers album as a... > Read more