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Daily J: Scatterbrains (digital outlets)
21 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
With a band name designed to induce a knowing smile, guitar-driven pop which is breezily conventional (verse/chorus) and an album which collects together previous singles and frontloads them, this one gets a tailwind straight away. The band of three brothers – Jayden, Johnny and Jeese Paul with their mate Rick Everard – have a keen pop sensibility (Go With the Flow) and,... > Read more
GUEST WRITER GARETH SHUTE suggests five acts to check out at Womad 2025
20 Feb 2025 | 4 min read
WOMAD has evolved over the years to serve a dual purpose: curating diverse and fascinating international acts for adventurous listeners whilst also embracing its role as one of a key festivals in central North Island and therefore expanding its line-up to appeal to a wide range of attendees. This has resulted in a line-up for this year’s event that has something for everyone,... > Read more
Dead Gowns: It's Summer, I Love You . . . (digital outlets)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
The full title of this debut album by Maine-based singer-songwriter Genevieve Beaudoin is It's Summer, I Love You and I'm Surrounded by Snow. And that dichotomy of sun and snow is apt on album which should appeal to those who like their alt.folk with a bit of grit, darkness and raw-edge electric guitars in places. Beaudois can deliver with an engrossing weariness which is palpable (the... > Read more
Swimmer
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Various Artists: Eccentric Soul; The Cobra Label (vinyl/digital outlets)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
We draw attention to this terrific compilation of sixties Tex-Mex, rock'n'soul music because the 28 songs have been issued across double vinyl and digitally. From the opening Spanish-language Wooleh Booleh by Sonny Ace and the Twisters (more familiar in the Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs version) and Searchin' popular with Merseyside bands (here by Texans Mike and the Belairs with Nyolia... > Read more
I Don't Want No Woman, by Little Henry and the Laveers
The Blue Stars: Social End Product (1966)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
This country may not have a great tradition of protest songs but there have always been songs of dissent, anger and, from the late Fifties onward, teenage rebellion. One of the first – a punk single 10 years before punk -- was this by Auckland's Blue Stars. The angry young man who won't fit in with society's plan. These days one line needs some explanation: “I don't... > Read more
Thala: Avalanche (Fire/digital outlets)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
The highly productive and still active Juliana Hatfield (Lemonheads, numerous short-lived bands and projects) might take umbrage with the publicity for this second album by Berlin-based Thala: the songs are described as “like a modern day Juliana Hatfield”. The queen is dead, long live the queen? Other references given are Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star) and Japanese Breakfast.... > Read more
Body to You
VARIOUS ARTISTS, THAT SUMMER!, CONSIDERED (1979): Generation defining classics and lesser artists
17 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
In a recent conversation, the topic of the MTV channel devoted just to the '80s came up. One of our number gave the reason succinctly, “because in the Eighties they had great songs”. Simple as that. And quite true when you think of it. Aside from a few key examples – Bowie, T. Rex, the odd solo Beatle like McCartney, Elton, Fleetwood Mac, BeeGees and other chart... > Read more
Another Girl, Another Planet by the Only Ones
Bristol, England: A photo essay
17 Feb 2025 | 3 min read | 1
Like so many cities and towns in England, the port city of Bristol in the southwest sits on its history. Here is a city where human occupancy of the area dates back to the Palaeolithic era, was settled by the Romans (Bath is nearby) and Normans, has been the home to merchants and traders, ne'er-do-wells and patrician businessmen. One of the latter – the 17th century... > Read more
SEQUEL SONGS: And you'll never guess what happened next . . .
17 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
In the late Fifties and early Sixties the idea of answer songs (Dodie Stevens' Yes I'm Lonesome Tonight for example) was pretty common, as were sequel songs. The most obvious sequel song was Peggy Sue Got Married by Buddy Holly and most in the genre were cash-ins, replication songs (Wanda Jackson's follow-up to Let's Have a Party was the photocopied Man We Had a Party) and pretty gimmicky.... > Read more
Man We Had a Party, by Wanda Jackson
Miklos Rozsa: The Lost Weekend (1945, soundtrack)
17 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
The Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rozsa -- who died in '95 -- has a rare accolade in his long career as a composer of film soundtracks: when his music for the Hitchcock film Spellbound won an Oscar, he beat out two other scores, both of which he had also written. Those two were the music for A Song to Remember (about Chopin) and The Lost Weekend (about an alcoholic). For both... > Read more
Bottle is Discovered
GREAT LOST KIWI SINGLES: Rock follies
17 Feb 2025 | 12 min read | 10
They are found at the back of cartons at record fairs, under beds in long abandoned houses and sometimes stored lovingly -- but rarely played -- in the collections of the obsessives. They are great, and not that great, rare Kiwi singles with an interesting story behind them -- often more interesting than the music. Here are some examples, more as they come to light. . Reb Fountain:... > Read more
Peter Cape: Coffee Bar Blues
Paul McCartney: My Valentine (2012)
14 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
For the past many years on this day (February 14), it has been Elsewhere's habit to post the lovely Valentine by Nils Lofgren (with help from Bruce Springsteen) but this time . . . Paul McCartney's 2012 album Kisses on the Bottom was a classy, beautifully produced album of (mostly) covers from the Great American Songbook and beyond. Yes, it was slightly patchy . . . but for songs like... > Read more
STOP. LOOK BOTH WAYS, photography by MURRAY SAVIDAN
13 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
Even before you get to his photographs, Murray Savidan has an impressive and interesting backstory. In the Sixties he was the bassist in the Blue Stars, an Auckland band which was very popular and sprung a great rebellious teen anthem in Social End Product. It was punk a decade before punk. He started in photography when his girlfriend gave him a camera for his birthday... > Read more
Rose City Band: Sol Y Sombra (digital outlets)
10 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
We came upon this band out of Portland – who define the description “mellow” – by chance a while back and their 2023 Garden Party album became a go-to CD for car journeys of some length. This new album of quiet country-rock, pedal steel-coloured material is more of the same if slightly less so in that the pulse is just slightly slower for the most part. But if... > Read more
Radio Song
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG: Best intentions ending as farce
10 Feb 2025 | 1 min read
Well, if it's good enough for Joanna Lumley it's good enough for us. A pull quote from the great Lumley was above the entrance of the intimate Duchess Theatre in London's Covent Garden area. She loved it . . . and wasn't wrong. The Play That Goes Wrong opened in London more than a decade ago and since then has picked up numerous awards and played to packed theatres internationally.... > Read more
Matthew Bannister: The Dark Backwards (Powertools/digital outlets)
10 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
No one could accuse Matthew Bannister of lallygagging around. His resume includes albums with Sneaky Feelings, The Dribbling Darts of Love, The Changing Same, The Weather, releases as One Man Bannister and under his own name, a couple of books (his memoir of his Flying Nun days and an analysis of the album Songs from the Front Lawn), various academic papers . . . Much of this in... > Read more
Hearts Don't Keep
YOKO ONO by LAURIE ANDERSON, ERIKO OSAKA and THIERRY RASPAIL
10 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
At the time of this writing Yoko Ono is a week short of her 92nd birthday, no longer lives at the Dakota which had been her home for 50 years from 1973 and is in a wheelchair. It is believed she has dementia and her son Sean controls her extensive portfolio of investments, music, artworks and properties. By some accounts she's worth US$700 million. This officially approved large... > Read more
CLASSIC GIRL GROUPS (2013): All the young elles
10 Feb 2025 | 3 min read
Even in a very long list of great groups there will be omissions. And today, despite constant reissue programmes, repackaging and a trawling of the backwaters of pop music's past, there can still be amnesia when it comes to some of the most important groups of an era. The Shirelles, for example, have gone woefully overlooked given how many hits they sprang, how they defined a sound and a... > Read more
Uptown, by the Crystals
TOM JONES: GREEN GREEN GRASS OF HOME, CONSIDERED (1967): Here come the other people
10 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
Anyone who digs through the bins of cheap records at op shops or secondhand stores “just in case” knows this: the careers of Nana Mouskouri, Des O'Connor, Ivan Rebroff, Harry Secombe, James Last and scores of others are not going to undergo any great reconsideration. Their work in the Sixties and Seventies has become redundant. One of the reasons their careers stalled after... > Read more
All I Get From You is Heartaches
Anna Russell: Folk Songs (1952)
10 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
With her beautifully modulated tones and remarkable voice -- which went from a soprano squeal to a screech quite effortlessly -- Anna Russell was an enormously popular comedy-cum-classical act in the Fifties. She would poke fun at Wagner and contemporary classical music equally: of the latter she said it was music for the singer who was tone deaf, because in a contemporary song it's very... > Read more