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RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Think: We'll Give You a Buzz (CD/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
One of the many rewards of following the releases on Grant Gillanders' Frenzy reissue label is just how good so many of the bands were at the time but went largely unheard. Sometimes he unearths a band and pulls together an album out of their recordings. Or in the case of the thrilling Grim Ltd he discovers a live tape of their final gig and releases the raw r'n'b garageband rock to... > Read more
Our Children (Think About)
Elsewhere Art . . . Jeff Healey
14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Blues singer- guitarist Jeff Healey -- who died in 2008 -- was a great collector of 78rpm records. When Elsewhere interviewed him in the early 2000s he spoke about the 11,000 he had at home (he'd just bought another 30 or 40 in a nearby store) and so evoking that old time music and look just seemed a bit obvious for this collage. He also loved Dixieland and so there had to be a... > Read more
1968: SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: The world on a short fuse
14 Apr 2025 | 19 min read | 2
1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD? "Somehow Sgt Pepper did not stop the war in Vietnam. Somehow it didn't work. Somebody isn't listening" -- David Crosby of Crosby Stills and Nash, 1970 "Rock stars believed that they possessed the latent power to effect political and cultural change: one anthem and the walls of the citadel would crack, like Jericho under... > Read more
Hotlegs: Neanderthal Man (1970)
14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
It's not unusual for studio experiments to end up on records, less common that they become the record itself -- as was the case with this single. To backtrack a bit. The successful British songwriter Graham Gouldman who had penned hits for Herman's Hermits (No Milk Today), the Yardbirds (For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You) and others ran into a dry spell in the late... > Read more
(Warning, from vinyl so has enjoyable surface noise)
GUEST MUSICIAN MARK DE CLIVE LOWE speaks of the inspiration for his new album Past Present (Tone Poems Across Time)
14 Apr 2025 | 4 min read
This album is a collection of personal moments and reflections. Reflections on family, reflections on the past, reflections on the present. It’s a sonic and intimate journey with my late father Robin de Clive-Lowe top of mind. A journey of discovery, catharsis and healing. My father boarded a cargo ship and made his way from Auckland, New Zealand to Hiroshima, Japan in late 1953, a... > Read more
Heart
Marlon Williams: Te Whare Tīwekaweka (digital outlets/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
In June 2021, the soul singer Teeks appeared in concert at Auckland's Civic Theatre before a large and appreciative audience. It was a significant event beyond being a concert. Here was a young, bilingual gay Māori man singing to a broad cross-section of mainstream Kiwis and, as I noted in a review, the enthusiastic response her got was emblematic of how far we've come and encouraging... > Read more
Kōrero Māori
Serebii: Dime (digital outlets/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
The multi-instrumentalist and expat producer Callum Mower (AKA neo-soul, folksy singer/songwriter Serebii) has said he draws inspiration from Aldous Harding and his frequent collaborator has been local soul-jazz artist Arjuna Oakes. Although he has moved back to this country from London, he is increasingly connecting with a global audience and recent PR out of the US said he was... > Read more
By Design
Haiku Redo: Disco Summer (Failsafe/digital outlets)
11 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Up there in Japan, Rob Mayes of the Failsafe label goes through the dozens of recordings and albums he made with various bands, many from Christchurch during the Eighties, Nineties and some even beyond the label's heyday. It's a rewarding labour love because here was a label on which was the alternative to the alternative (Flying Nun, Xpressway etc) and mostly held the banner high for... > Read more
It's Just Too Long
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JOHN FRED: Soulman in disguise (with Beat pop)
11 Apr 2025 | 4 min read | 1
During the height of Beatlemania (1963-65) there were numerous tribute songs, parodies and humorous copies in the Beatles' style. Not to mention hundreds of artists covering the Lennon-McCartney originals. Among the many tributes were the 18-year old Cher (as Bonnie Jo Mason) weighing in with Ringo I Love You, on the New Zealand homefront Rochelle Vincen covered Donna Lynn's My Boyfriends... > Read more
Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)
STEVE REICH: DIFFERENT TRAINS/ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT, CONSIDERED (1989): Repeat as required
7 Apr 2025 | 3 min read
The 1965 recording It's Gonna Rain by the New York composer Steve Reich was one of the most interesting, innovative and important pieces of its era. At least for Reich. In San Francisco, Reich had heard a streetcorner preacher Brother Walter in apocalyptic mode warning of another Great Flood to wipe out sinners, and Reich recorded him. As with Dylan's Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Reich... > Read more
Alien Weaponry: Te Rā (digital outlets)
7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Lest we forget – and perhaps some never knew – Jamaican reggae was originally a rebel music giving voice to cultural outsiders like Rastafarians and Nyabinghi followers, the marginalised and dispossessed. And those who rejected society. It was adopted as such in this country by bands like Herbs, Aotearoa, Dread Beat and Blood, Unity Pacific and others because it spoke to those on... > Read more
Crown
Ma Rainey: Toad Frog Blues (1924)
7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Few would have described Ma Rainey (1886 - 1939) as one of God's finest creations. Her pianist Thomas A. Dorsey said charitably, "I couldn't say that she was a good looking woman". In Francis Davis' The History of the Blues; the Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie Patton to Robert Cray he writes, "everyone else who knew Ma Rainey described her as pug ugly, a short and... > Read more
Favourite Five Recent Releases
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Womb: One is Always Heading Somewhere (digital outlets)
7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one. Not because it comes in a gatefold sleeve (it doesn't), not because it has a lyric sheet (no to that also) but because it comes with a download code, which Elsewhere thinks should always included with the vinyl opeion If you pay out a wedge of money for a record like this (on transparent vinyl)... > Read more
Just Like Waves
YOKO, A BIOGRAPHY by DAVID SHEFF
6 Apr 2025 | 5 min read | 2
There’s a well-known quote by John Lennon about his wife Yoko Ono, reproduced in the inner sleeve of this new biography: “Everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” It’s pithy and pointed . . . but not entirely true. A lot of people did know what Yoko did, they just didn’t like it. To be fair, conceptual and performance... > Read more
Hell in Paradise
Tony Scott: Music for Zen Meditation (1964)
4 Apr 2025 | 3 min read
Vangelis had a pointed comment about the vacuous New Age music which emerged in the late Seventies and reached epidemic proportions in the Eighties. He said it “gave the opportunity for untalented people to make very boring music”. Many people said much worse about it because this was music which was often mere sound designed not to be listened to but just to offer some... > Read more
A Quivering Leaf, Ask the Winds
ROUGH TRADE CELEBRATES A SAPPHIRE JUBILEE (2025): Eight indies inna box
3 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
Okay we don't usually fall for press releases and we admit this one is about something rather specialised, but here goes . . . because we are excited even if it is capitalism capitalising on nostalgia. The influential British record label Rough Trade Records is going to release limited edition seven-inch singles boxsets to celebrate the label's 25 years in the game. The first of these... > Read more
Alternative Ulster, by Stiff Little Fingers
CHARLOTTE YATES, ACKNOWLEDGED (2025): Doing it for herself this time
3 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
Singer-songwriter Charlotte Yates is possibly better known for what she has done for others than on her own account. She was the prime mover behind four important albums, Baxter, Tuwhare, Ihimaera and Mansfield for which the writings of those towering figures (James, Hone, Witi and Katherine) were set to music by stellar casts of contemporary musicians, among them Don McGlashan, Mahinarangi... > Read more
The Water's Edge
UNRELEASED HENDRIX STUDIO SESSIONS DISCOVERED: Young man blowing his horn
1 Apr 2025 | 4 min read
When Jimi Hendrix confidante and studio engineer Eddie Kramer told Elsewhere back in 2013 that there were no more studio sessions by Hendrix to be released what he really meant to say was, actually there were more to be released. The new collection Both Sides of the Sky apparently completes the posthumous trilogy started by Valleys of Neptune and People Hell And Angels. But then... > Read more
Kazoo, by stoned Jim and the Funky Monkeys
Koh Samet, Thailand: Lonely days
31 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
Greg would have been hard to miss in most places, but on the small beach at the southern end of Koh Samet -- a tiny teardrop-shaped island off to the east of Bangkok -- he was impossible to overlook. It wasn't just that he was, shall we say, a large man. Or that he was conspicuously gay. And it wasn't even that he carried the pampered Miss Spitty, a white Pomeranian, with him everywhere.... > Read more
LUCINDA WILLIAMS, VIC CHESTNUTT AND BUTTERCUP (2025): Anger and tone revisited
31 Mar 2025 | 3 min read
Vic Chestnutt was a gifted singer-songwriter who was much admired by his peers. He had been in a car crash at 18 and was effectively a quadrapilegic although had some small movement in his hands so he could still play simple chords on guitar. His first two albums were produced by Michael Stipe of REM and a fund-raising album for him had his songs covered by Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage,... > Read more