Essential Elsewhere
A selection of cornerstone albums to help you build an interesting collection of diverse Elsewhere music. These essays will introduce albums which can lead you into whole threads of music, areas you might not have otherwise considered or enjoyed. Explore . . . and don't be afraid of going Elsewhere.
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Nick Lowe: Dig My Mood (1998)
18 Nov 2024 | 3 min read
It is coming up close to three decades since Nick Lowe -- once a laddish and witty figure in British rock in the immediate post-punk days -- decided to take the long view on his career and reposition himself. As he told Elsewhere late in 2011, “Back when I first got noticed in the Seventies it was for being rather irreverent and popping bubbles, and I was a bit cheeky. A certain... > Read more
You Inspire Me
John Mayall: Blues From Laurel Canyon (1968)
8 Sep 2024 | 3 min read | 3
In the wake of '67s Sgt Pepper's the new thing in rock was "the concept album" and at the tail-end of that decade and well into the Seventies a long list of bands weighed in: the Pretty Things with SF Sorrow,The Who with Tommy, The Moody Blues, Genesis, Yes . . . Mostly these were musicians with an art school background and so testing themselves over a 40 minute album was... > Read more
John Mayall: Fly Tomorrow
Gretchen Peters: Dancing with the Beast (2018)
18 Aug 2024 | 2 min read
These Essential Elsewhere album entries, by virtue of this being “elsewhere”, mostly sidestep the albums you'll find in any Greatest Albums Ever list alongside Dark Side of the Moon and Material Girl. Yes, we have pointed to Joni Mitchell's Blue. But albums by King Sunny Ade, John Martyn, Jacques Brel, Reem Kelani and Buffy Sainte-Marie are unlikely to appear in any list.... > Read more
Lowlands
John Mayall with Eric Clapton; Blues Breakers (1966)
28 Jul 2024 | 3 min read | 2
For an album which is a cornerstone in any serious consideration of the British blues boom of the Sixties, the Blues Breakers record -- John Mayall with Eric Clapton -- of July '66 hardly had an auspicious gestation. In March '65 Mayall and the Blues Breakers had been dropped by their label Decca after just one album (a live outing, John Mayall Plays John Mayall) and across on the other... > Read more
All Your Love
The Scavengers; The Scavengers (2003 vinyl issue of '78 sessions)
20 May 2024 | 2 min read
We all have musical moments written into our autobiographies. The emblems afterwards -- the album, concert ticket or scar beneath the eye -- are inadequate to convey the emotion you experienced, whether it was when Tina Turner belted out your favourite-ever song to you personally (and 35,000 others), or when you got nailed at Zwines in Auckland by some pogo-ing punk back in the late... > Read more
The Scavengers: Money in the Bank
Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson: Rattlin' Bones (2008)
1 Apr 2024 | 1 min read | 1
Chambers -- daughter of the very great singer-songwriter Bill -- is one of Australia's finest alt.country/roots artists and for this album she teamed up with her husband Nicholson for their first album together. Oddly enough although they played together in their casual side-project The Lost Dogs covers band they hadn't previously written together -- yet the evidence on this album is that... > Read more
Sweetest Waste of Time
World Party: Goodbye Jumbo (1990)
25 Mar 2024 | 3 min read | 2
By any measure, 1990 was a pretty good year in rock and pop: Sinead O'Connor announced herself with the single Nothing Compares 2 U and the album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got; George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 delivered timeless music; and things toughened up in Seattle with Sub Pop signing Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden and Nirvana. Janet Jackson unleashed her... > Read more
Way Down Now
Shivkumar Sharma, Brijbushan Kabra, Hariprasad Chaurasia: Call of the Valley (1967)
11 Mar 2024 | 1 min read | 2
When this beautiful, elegant tone poem of Indian classical music was reissued in 1995 on the EMI Hemisphere label (with three extra tracks), people like me with a long affection for Indian music could hardly believe our luck. It was one of those long-hard-to-find albums -- although it had been kept in print in India, where I'd bought a bad copy on cassette in then-Calcutta -- Call of the... > Read more
Rag Pahadi
Love: Forever Changes (1967)
1 Jan 2024 | 3 min read | 2
When the British rock magazine Mojo published a special supplement on psychedelic rock back in February 2005, among the albums noted were all the usual suspects: Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix took out the top spot and further down were Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s and albums by the Mothers of Invention, Jefferson Airplane, Country... > Read more
Love: Andmoreagain
Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express (1977)
25 Dec 2023 | 2 min read | 1
In the rush to acclaim Kraftwerk as electro-pioneers, it is often overlooked how they grew out of the German avant-garde/post-hippie prog-rock scene. As Organisation -- and on the first two Kraftwerk albums -- founders Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider (and others) engaged in long, almost free-form jams with Schneider playing flutes and bells. After their Ralf and Florian album however... > Read more
Kraftwerk: Showroom Dummies
Mink De Ville: Return to Magenta (1978)
25 Dec 2023 | 5 min read | 4
The curious things about the life of Willy De Ville was not that he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in early August 2009, but that he had lived so long. He was 58 when he died -- but from the time he appeared on the post-punk New Wave scene in New York in the early Eighties he seemed to be destined for a short but bright flight. He was junkie, his first wife would pull a knife on rock... > Read more
Mink De Ville: Just Your Friends
Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble: Mnemosyne (1999)
18 Dec 2023 | 2 min read

When jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek teamed with the classical vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble for the warm yet glacial holy minimalism of Officium in 1994, not even ECM label boss Manfred Eicher - whose idea it was - could have predicted its crossover success. It became the banner album in ECM's already excellent 10-year-old label for contemporary classical recordings, ECM New... > Read more
Remember Me My Dear
The Master Musicians of Jajouka: Brian Jones presents The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka (1971)
4 Dec 2023 | 3 min read
Some albums have auspicious beginings and a messy legacy. So it is with this album recorded in Morocco in 1968 by Brian Jones, then of the Rolling Stones. By the time the album was released Jones had been dead a year -- he drowned a year after his trip to Morocco and was no longer a Stone -- and a shadow was cast over its mesmerising music. When it was reissued in '95 by Point Music it... > Read more
The Master Musicians of Jajouka: Take Me With You My Darling, Take Me With You
Blue Cheer: Vincebus Eruptum (1968)
20 Nov 2023 | 3 min read | 4
For many decades I kept a clipping about Blue Cheer and this particular album inside the record cover, and of course when I went to look for it recently it was gone. But the gist of it was this: Blue Cheer were the loudest band in the whole history of ever, according to the writer, and when they recorded this monster in a North Hollywood studio they blew out all the speakers or the desk... > Read more
Summertime Blues
Dennis Wilson: Pacific Ocean Blue (1977)
10 Sep 2023 | 4 min read | 1
It was a tragic irony that Dennis Wilson, the only genuine surf-rat in the Beach Boys, should have drowned. But by 1983 when he died in the waters of Marina Del Rey, he was a spent force who had succumbed to alcohol, depression and cocaine -- and he'd only recorded one solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue in 1977. That was also a tragedy because POB suggested that if anyone could have carried the... > Read more
Dennis Wilson: Friday Night
Various Artists, Tommy Boy Greatest Beats Vol 1. 1981-96
14 Aug 2023 | 3 min read | 2
Hip-hop is such an integral part of music today that it is hard to believe radio stations once proudly announced "no crap, no rap". Half a century on -- with everyone from classical quartets, gospel legend Mavis Staples, alt.country singer Steve Earle and stadium-shakers U2 using scratching and samples -- the tools of hip-hop have crossed genres and styles. Middle-class... > Read more
Everything's Gonna Be All Right, by Naughty By Nature:
June Christy: Something Cool (1955)
10 Jul 2023 | 4 min read | 1
Although for casual listeners the title of Miles Davis' 1957 album Birth of The Cool gave its name to the movement, it largely fell to others to define and refine the territory and sound of “cool jazz”. Notable players in this genre which turned down the energy of bebop in favour of a more gentle, laid back and quietly exploratory style were Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan,... > Read more
The Night We Called It A Day (mono 1954)
Fripp and Eno: No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star (1975)
18 Jun 2023 | 4 min read
Context is everything -- or almost everything -- at Essential Elsewhere, these being albums you can return to repeatedly so probably stand outside of time, yet are always born of a specific place and time. Even if they owe nothing to it. And these two albums seem to owe very little to their period. Which is what makes them special. If some Essential Elsewhere albums epitomise their time... > Read more
Fripp and Eno: Evening Star (from the album Evening Star, 1975)
Max Romeo: War Ina Babylon (1976)
17 Mar 2023 | 2 min read | 1
When Max Romeo's Holding Out My Love to You album was released in '81 it came with heavy patronage: Keith Richards was a Romeo fan and had produced some of the tracks . . . so there was a cover sticker proclaiming "Featuring Keith Richards -- Free Colour Poster of Keith and Mick Inside". Romeo had moved from Jamaica to New York a few years previous (he wrote and starred in a... > Read more
Max Romeo: Uptown Babies
Tom Waits: Orphans; Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards (2006)
20 Feb 2023 | 2 min read | 1
The American journalist Robert Wilonsky once observed of Tom Waits' music, either you like the sound of a barking dog, or you buy yourself a cat. Those of us who love and admire Waits' work live with the sound of the barking dog. Waits may have often made a beautiful noise, but it was a noise nonetheless. From a bohemian barfly poet with an affection for the Beat Generation, Frank... > Read more