From the Vaults

The Royal Punkharmonic Orchestra: Germ Free Adolescents (1995)

2 Aug 2011 | 1 min read

The recent death of Poly Styrene threw attention back onto her short career in the often interesting band X-Ray Specs where she was more adept at social comment than many of her phlegmatic punk peers. That was a trait she explored on her final if somewhat indifferent album also, Generation Indigo. One of X-Ray Specs' most memorable songs was the monotone Germ Free Adolescents and it is... > Read more

Jimmy Patton: Okies in the Pokey (1959)

1 Aug 2011 | <1 min read

Jimmy Patton (1931-89) was never really a rockabilly singer although this, his biggest hit, was certainly a rave-up in that style. But Patton's heart had always been in hillbilly country, right up until Elvis came along. Like so many others he grabbed a backbeat and made the shift sideways into rock'n'roll, and specifically the rockabilly end of it. For Okies in the Pokey he had help... > Read more

Riot 111: 1981! (1981)

26 Jul 2011 | 1 min read | 1

New Zealand has no great popular history of topical, political songs -- and the few that there are tend toward the humorous (My Old Man's An All Black with its reference to no Maori being allowed into South Africa in our representative rugby team during the apartheid era, or Click Go The Toll Gates about tolls on the newly constructed Auckland Harbour Bridge). Perhaps it is because folk... > Read more

Cilla McQueen: Crikey (2006)

22 Jul 2011 | <1 min read

Today -- Friday July 22, 2011 -- being New Zeaand National Poetry Day it seems only right we should acknowledge it. It would be easy to go to the collection Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance for some Very Serious Poetics or link back to our particular favourite Selina Tusitala Marsh, but this being Elsewhere -- the place where music is important -- this one by Cilla McQueen... > Read more

Stan Freberg: Rock Island Line (1956)

19 Jul 2011 | <1 min read

Because a parody only works if you know the original it might be useful to check out the video clip here (kinda cute in its own way) before playing American comedian Freberg's poke at it. The original of Rock Island Line was by Leadbelly in the Thirties but Donegan's version of 1955 was emblematic of the skiffle era in Britain where young white guys with acoustic guitars, home made... > Read more

Bob Dylan: Dirge (1974)

18 Jul 2011 | 1 min read | 2

While flicking the pages of a rock magazine the other day I came on an interview with a young musician who cited among his current favourite listening Bob Dylan's Planet Waves. When that album was released it was met with polite but hardly laudatory reviews, and even the enormously successful and highly profitable tour with the Band (Dylan's first since '66 during which many of the... > Read more

Clem Tholet: Rhodesians Never Die (1973)

14 Jul 2011 | 1 min read

Aside from songs about dance crazes, the most immediately redundant songs in popular music are those which attach themselves to a political cause. Times change quickly and today's patriotic or revolutionary song can just sound plain quaint if not simplistic within a year or two. And because political songs can't deal in nuance or contradiction, they tend to be little more than slogans . . .... > Read more

Mr and Mrs Mattis: I'll Never Move Again (date unknown, 1970s?)

13 Jul 2011 | <1 min read

Here is a real mystery single: on the Narrow Way Gospel "label" out of Jamaica (crudely hand-printed, with a quote from Isaiah) comes this oddity which is clearly Jamaican singers but has a peculiar Pacific feel to it in the guitars. Another one-off bought in Brixton just simply because it sounds so good -- but whoever Mr and Mrs Mattis are might remain unknown . . . unless you... > Read more

The Pictones: Hashish (1962)

11 Jul 2011 | <1 min read

Not a lot was known about New Zealand's Pictones out of Levin, an instrumental group who delivered a nice line in country'n'western rock'n'roll on their 1961 single Pistol Packin' Mama which opened with galloping hooves, a whip cracking and a whinny. (The flipside of which was My Bonnie, recorded around the same time as the Beatles did it in Hamburg.) Unusually however, they named this... > Read more

Ira Cohen: Ornette Comes Home (1994)

8 Jul 2011 | 1 min read

The late poet/filmmaker and documentarian Ira Cohen (who died in April 2011 age 76), was one of those rare voices from that co-joining of the Beat Generation of the Fifties and the Sixties counter-culture. He lived for many years in North Africa and India where he sampled the earthly and esoteric delights, and raised his consciousness through spiritual ceremonies and mind altering... > Read more

The Beatles: And Your Bird Can Sing (1966)

25 Jun 2011 | 2 min read | 4

If you are reading this on June 25, 2011, then I'm probably listening to this by a pool in a tropical place where geckos crawl up a white wall and the ceiling fan turns slow. I will have a drink in my hand and my beautiful wife will be by my side. I hope so. And yes, I do expect I will be listening to this. For me, And Your Bird Can Sing is the most perfect piece of trippy,... > Read more

William S. Burroughs: The Mummy Piece (1981)

24 Jun 2011 | <1 min read | 1

Even if you know nothing about William Seward Burroughs (1914-97), when he read from his novels a chill might run down your spine. His slewed, acidic, vitriolic and downright nasty style added an extra dimension of menace to his disturbing visions where heroin, politics, mythology, guns, the CIA and cheap detective stories were cut up and shuffled, and then spat out. He is best known for... > Read more

Joe Harriott: Gana (1967)

23 Jun 2011 | 1 min read

Alto saxophonist Joe Harriott was not the first to take inspiration from Indian classical music (John Coltrane had looked across to it previously) but -- with violinist and harpsichord player John Mayer -- he was among the very first to record with Indian musicians and effect some jazz fusion. Around the time George Harrison was looking at a sitar on the set of Help! and thinking... > Read more

(Warning, some enjoyable surface noise in the transfer from vinyl)

Peter Cape: Coffee Bar Blues (1959)

22 Jun 2011 | <1 min read

The idiosyncratic Peter Cape (1926-79) has appeared at Elsewhere's From the Vaults previously, with his Kiwi vernacular classic She'll Be Right (here). He wrote about things that ordinary jokers and sheilas could understand and were interested in: rural life, the All Blacks, the train on the Main Trunk Line (and the food), trams, beer and betting on the horses, small towns and so on. It... > Read more

Northside: Shall We Take a Trip (1990)

21 Jun 2011 | 1 min read

The difference between the American psychedelic experience of the Sixties and that of the British can be captured in two phrases: in the States Timothy Leary was telling people to "tune in, turn on and drop out" which clearly demanded some committment. In Britain however George Harrison -- on It's All Too Much -- was offering the more measured and slightly detached perspective of the... > Read more

The Pretty Things: Don't Bring Me Down (1964)

17 Jun 2011 | 3 min read | 2

Most people lie about their school days: no one wants to admit they were ordinary. Better to say you hung around behind the bike shed, that teachers and kids hated you for your music, clothes or whatever. Oh, and you smoked. Just makes you seem more cool and interesting -- and most people weren’t. One of the lies people who formed their musical taste in the mid Sixties... > Read more

Perry Como: (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 (1959)

16 Jun 2011 | <1 min read | 1

In the hands of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, Route 66 became a classic rock song -- but its history goes further back and the song has been rendered in the styles of earlier eras. And later one too. Written in '46 by jazz pianist Bobby Troup -- who said he penned it after making the trip, got the chorus quickly but couldn't think of enough words so just put in the place names -- the... > Read more

Paul McCartney: Check My Machine (1980)

13 Jun 2011 | 1 min read

In the Seventies Paul McCartney enjoyed a remarkable revival of fortunes -- at the start of the decade the Beatles broke up, he released a couple of feet-finding solo albums, got the band Wings together and did a lowkey tour of the UK, delivered Band on the Run, conquered America and the rest of the world with hits singles then witnesed Wings slowly decline. In 1980 he went into a small... > Read more

Bunny Wailer: Amagideon/Armagedon (1976)

9 Jun 2011 | 1 min read

As Bob Marley was advancing a more light-filled, if still serious, face of Rastafarianism into the world, it fell to deep roots groups like Culture, the great Burning Spear and Bob's old bandmate in the original Wailers, Bunny Livingston (aka Bunny Wailer) to deliver the darker and deeper themes. The mighty Spear sang as if he had just been freed from the shackles of slavery in a voice like... > Read more

Rosalie Allen: Hitler Lives (1945)

6 Jun 2011 | <1 min read

Because the name "Hitler" became such a signifier for all that was evil and his name a shorthand for the inhuman and demonic, it was inevitable that any portrayal of him as a mere man (albeit a very bad one!) was bound to offend many. Better to think of him as an aberration than a possibility. In this song by Rosalie Allen -- "The Prairie Star" who popularised the... > Read more