Arnold Dorsey struggled to break into the music industry until he was advised to adopt a more interesting stage name. Dorsey took the name Engelbert Humperdinck from the German composer of Hansel and Gretel. Already in his early thirties, the…
Universally beloved soul singer Bill Withers passed away this week. He came from the small coal mining town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, and spent his early career in the Navy. His career as a professional musician was notably short…
Power pop band Fountains of Wayne was formed by Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood – they took their name from a now-defunct lawn ornament store in New Jersey. Apart from one fluke hit (2003’s ‘Stacy’s Mom’) they were never huge…
Emma Paki was born in Whakatane, the New Zealand town closest to where White Island erupted in December 2019. She was born to a Maori heritage; and received her first guitar at the age of 8. Paki’s debut single was…
‘La Bamba’ is a traditional Mexican folk song, from the state of Veracruz. Ritchie Valens, a 17 year old rising star, converted the tune to rock and roll. It’s one of the best known Spanish language tunes in the rock…
Neil Finn joined the band Split Enz as a guitarist when he was still a teenager. His brother Tim was the band’s leader, writing most of their material, but Neil Finn wrote many of the band’s successful singles in the…
It’s a long way to the top (if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll), and Australian hard rock band AC/DC spent much of the 1970s building their profile. They cracked the big time with 1979’s Highway to Hell, which peaked at…
Of all the b-sides that I’ve covered in this series, Elvis Presley’s cover of ‘Mystery Train’ is the most iconic. It was voted on a 2003 Rolling Stone as the 77th greatest song of all time, an astounding feat for…
Marillion were named after JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, and were formed in 1979. Early Marillion were often compared to the progressive-rock era of Genesis – lead vocalist Fish’s theatricality was similar to Peter Gabriel. The core lineup of guitarist Steve…
Patti Smith was one of the first punk artists to make a record. 1975’s Horses, produced by John Cale, was a confronting album. Musically it drew from 1960s garage-rock, while lyrically it was provocative. Smith was clearly influential on an…
The Cure have been around for more than forty years, with leader Robert Smith the only constant member. The band formed in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1976, and have covered a lot of ground over their career, from the Gothic…
The b-side is often a British commodity, but one American artist was the equal of any British artist with the quantity and quality of his outtakes. Prince was so prolific that he released 70 official non-album b-sides, as well as…
Canadian power-pop band The Pursuit of Happiness scored a surprise top 40 hit in 1986 with their independent single ‘I’m An Adult Now’, helped by a low-budget, self-produced music video. The Toronto-based group signed with Chrysalis Records to make their…
The Kinks formed in Muswell Hill, London, in 1964. They launched their career with hard-driving rock and roll like ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’, songs that are considered as landmarks in the development…
In The Beatles, George Harrison often suffered the indignity of being limited to two songs per LP. It worked fine at the start of the group, when he was the junior partner in the band. By the end of The…
Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is one of the great cult records. Issued in 1998, it’s full of enigmatic lines, like “Now she’s a little boy in Spain/Playing pianos filled with flames”, and Jeff Mangum’s raw…
Cat Stevens‘ work has endured because his low-key songs are relateable and accessible. Stevens has explored different styles over the course of his career – he started as a teen pop idol in the 1960s, and moved towards progressive rock…
The Police were arguably the greatest singles band of their era. In the late 1970s and early 1980s they released a string of great songs – ‘Roxanne’, ‘Message in a Bottle’, ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’, and ‘Every…
American rock icon Bruce Springsteen celebrated his 70th birthday this week. This means it’s half a lifetime since he released his most commercially successful album, 1984’s Born in the USA. A decade earlier, 1975’s Born to Run had launched Springsteen…
It’s the year of Our Lord 2019, and we’re rapidly approaching peak-rock-star-death era. The Cars’ mastermind Ric Ocasek passed away earlier this week. I was surprised to learn that he was 75, older than many of the stars that he…
Aside from their debut, each of The Go-Betweens’ studio albums follows a set formula – exactly ten songs with five written by Robert Forster and five by Grant McLennan. The pair anchored the Australian indie guitar band over two stints…
In 1978 New Zealand art-rockers Split Enz were in crisis. The group had lost key original members like Phil Judd and Mike Chunn. Their art-rock was out of step in the late 1970s, pushed from the mainstream by punk and…
Neil Young first rose to prominence in 1960s folk-rock group Buffalo Springfield, playing lead guitar on their breakthrough hit ‘For What It’s Worth’ and writing ‘Mr Soul’ and ‘Broken Arrow’. Young’s Buffalo Springfield work isn’t his earliest recorded legacy –…
John Flansburgh and John Linnell have been making nerdy pop music as They Might Be Giants since 1982. The Massachusetts pair released their debut album in 1986. One of their best known songs is their 1990 cover of ‘Istanbul (Not…
Little Richard emerged in the first wave of rock and roll in the 1950s, with hits like ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’. He and his contemporaries lost steam by the late 1950s; Elvis joined the army, Buddy Holly perished…
Every country has a songwriter who’s very successful in their home territory but hasn’t translated well elsewhere. Australia has Paul Kelly, while Canada had Gord Downie from The Tragically Hip. New Zealand’s equivalent is Dave Dobbyn, a songwriter who emerged…
A bunch of New Zealand acts where I don’t have the patience to review all their records. It’s a mixed bag. Supergroove probably deserve their own page, Fly My Pretties’ first record is the worst thing I’ve ever covered on…
As a New Zealander, this site’s naturally biased towards New Zealand artists. I’ve collated them all into one page. New Zealand pop music didn’t start in earnest until later than the rest of the world. Despite flickers of brilliance like…
James Murphy always intended to be a drummer or a sound technician, but ended up fronting a dance-rock band New York’s LCD Soundsystem bridge the divide between dance and rock – Murphy’s raw vocals are a great entry point for…
In 1967, The Rolling Stones followed The Beatles into baroque psychedelia. While the resulting album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, has its admirers, the band were quick to abandon the summer of love, toughening their sound for the blues-rock of 1968’s…
There are b-sides that are of high quality, that should never have been left off their parent albums. And then there is ‘The End of the Affair’, from Prefab Sprout. If forced to choose between the b-side ‘The End of…
Ed McWilliams and Geoff Maddock met in art class at high school in Auckland, New Zealand. They formed the trio Breast Secreting Cake with drummer Joel Wilton. Forced to change the name of their band, the group chose Bressa Creeting…
Rock chameleon David Bowie experienced two separate career peaks. Most artists improve with experience then run out of ideas, but Bowie reversed his decline and returned with a second set of excellent releases. In the early 1970s his career took…
I spent many happy hours in my late teens and twenties trawling used bins for CD bargains. I gained a lot of great music this way, and it became even easier as people converted their music collections to mp3. It…
The b-side is largely a 20th century commodity – from around 2005, singles charts began to count digital downloads, and the physical single is now obsolete. But there are still 21st century equivalents to the b-side – for example I…
It’s counter-intuitive to include The Smiths‘ most iconic song in a b-side series, but it was first released as the flip side of a single. Recorded in a four day burst of creativity that also yielded ‘William, It Was Really…
So far, in this b-sides series, there have been four scenarios in which good songs find themselves languishing on the flip-side of a single. These are: i) When a great song should have been featured on an album, but is…
As much as I love The Beatles, their solo careers have always mildly disappointed me. If you put ten years of your life into a burst of creativity, it makes sense that you don’t have much left in the tank…
The Replacements started as a bratty punk band, but as the 1980s wore on they lost their rough edges. They signed to a major label and shot for mainstream success. Their best years are generally reckoned to be the mid…
The late Tom Petty was a brilliant singles artist – he wrote hit after hit of likeable, jangly rock. Contemporaries like Bob Seger and John Mellencamp were popular in America, but didn’t translate to New Zealand radio as easily; Petty’s…
The untimely passing of Talk Talk mastermind Mark Hollis this week has sent many fans back to re-examine his masterpieces. Many Talk Talk fans opt for the group’s final two records, the spacious and experimental Spirit of Eden and Laughing…
Kate Bush‘s 1982 album The Dreaming was excellent, but it wasn’t especially commercially successful. She’d previously enjoyed ground-breaking UK success; her debut single ‘Wuthering Heights’ made her the first female artist to hit UK number one with a self-penned song.…
B-sides are a relatively rare commodity for progressive rock bands. They often refused to stoop to the level of those pop proletarians, issuing singles. Additionally, if they had spare song fragments lying around, they could simply incorporate them into epic…
Remember the 1990s, when physical albums sold by the truckload? Manchester band Oasis had their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, sell more than 22 million copies, and this volume of sales allowed them to lavish even their b-sides with…
In hindsight, The Flirtations’ best known song, ‘Nothing But A Heartache’, sounds like a girl group classic from the early 1960s. It’s a terrific piece, with a pounding back-beat and a strident lead vocal punctuated by horns. But at the…
Last week’s great b-side was a 1980s college rock band with folk-rock inclinations covering a folkie from the previous generation – 10,000 Maniacs covering John Prine’s ‘Hello in There’. This week’s pick is very similar – R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs…
Folk-rock band 10,000 Maniacs often recorded covers for their b-sides; a smart move, as they showcased how cool their record collections were, and Natalie Merchant’s affected accent always gave their versions a point of difference. ‘Hello In There’ was featured…
After Ian Curtis’ passing, Joy Division transitioned into New Order, with Bernard Sumner taking over the front-man role, and Gillian Gilbert joining on keyboards. It’s hard to be too critical of Sumner as a wordsmith, given that he only accidentally…
I mean, Led Zeppelin didn’t write tunes that every one liked. They left that to the Bee Gees. Wayne Campbell As noted in the movie Wayne’s World, Led Zeppelin didn’t play the pop game. They avoided releasing singles, instead preferring…
1982’s Toto IV was the best known record by collective of LA studio musicians known as Toto. The record spawned three top ten singles, ‘Africa’, ‘Rosanna’, and ‘I Won’t Hold You Back’. ‘Africa’ in particular is well-loved, with a recent…
I was originally planning to feature Elton John’s Christmas themed B-side, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! (Who’d Be A Turkey At Christmas)’, and feature this story, written by my 6 year old daughter about our family vacation. Almost every time I went…
Despite their short career, Joy Division were one of the best known bands from the post-punk era. The Manchester quartet had previously operated as a punk band named Warsaw, but didn’t find their signature sound until they slowed down their…
For this b-side series, I’m only counting material that wasn’t released on studio albums. For instance, ‘Black Water’ by The Doobie Brothers became a #1 single, after its original release as a b-side, but it was also included on the…
Joni Mitchell paid her dues playing folk clubs in the mid 1960s, and she wrote songs for other folk artists like Dave Van Ronk, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Judy Collins before she recorded her debut album. Her first song to gain prominence…
English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has created cult records all the way back to his days in The Soft Boys in the late 1970s. The Soft Boys began their recording career in Cambridge, and Hitchcock’s closest frame of reference has always…
The early Byrds albums are best known for their cover versions – their take on Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ launched their career, while their second album was named for Pete Seeger’s biblical ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ While Roger McGuinn, David Crosby,…
Growing up in a white middle class neighbourhood, The Clash were an important gateway band for me. Buying Clash albums introduced disco, hip hop, and dub into my record collection. While you could argue that explorations into disco and hip…
Most rock bands are remembered for their albums, but British pop-punk quartet Buzzcocks are most loved for their compilation Singles Going Steady. The group’s driving, tuneful, and love-lorn songs suited three minute bursts, and their run of a-sides includes ‘Ever…
Detroit power-pop maestro Marshall Crenshaw isn’t a household name. But his tuneful, often exuberant, 1982 debut album sometimes sneaks onto greatest album lists. Deservedly so – it’s a great little record of guitar pop, with a timelessly simple three-piece sound,…
During sessions for their debut album Ten, bassist Jeff Ament, guitarist Mike McCready, and vocalist Eddie Vedder improvised a song in the studio. McCready’s opening guitar licks are inspired by Jimi Hendrix, while Vedder made up lyrics on the spot…
Kimbra Johnson was earmarked for stardom early. Online videos show her singing as a pre-teen, while she placed second in New Zealand’s national secondary school rock quest at 14. But after a generic debut single ‘Deep For You’, she took…
The Jam are arguably the most British band ever, with all the telltale traits. They: Although they were from the class of 1977, The Jam were never punk. They were often fast and frenetic, but they were 1960s revivalists, taking…
Fleetwood Mac‘s 1977 album Rumours was a sales behemoth, jam packed with hits written by the group’s three songwriters, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham. But there was at least one great song that didn’t make the cut –…
I think that, regardless of our musical differences, we can all agree that the current decade has been tough for sharks in popular music. We all ironically enjoyed the performance of the “Left Shark” in Katy Perry’s 2015 Superbowl show,…
Spring is my favourite time of the year in New Zealand – the days get longer and sunnier. I don’t have a song that I associate with any other season, but my spring song is 10,000 Maniacs’ ‘These Are Days’.…
It’s difficult to not pick favourite members in a band like The Moody Blues; during their “Core Seven” albums, between 1967 and 1972, all five members wrote and sang (or in drummer Graeme Edge’s case, recited) their own material. I’ve…
A few months ago we discussed a curious incident at Wellington Zoo, New Zealand, when an intruder broke into the squirrel monkey cage, and was fought off by the tiny primates. The man responsible has appeared in court this week,…
I’ve been tremendously under the weather this week, and one of the best parts of being sick is the hallucinatory dreams I sometimes experience. In the throes of sickness I dreamed that I interviewed Neil Finn (of Crowded House and…
For some reason, hosting a birthday slumber party for my seven year old daughter on Friday reminded me of this song. The Records are a power-pop band from the late 1970s, best known for the minor hit ‘Starry Eyes’. …
1970s progressive rock is one of my favourite eras of music – bands like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant produced adventurous sonic tapestries. If you broaden the definition of progressive rock outside of symphonic rock acts, you can…
The prodigiously talented Jeff Buckley only made one studio album, 1994’s Grace, before his accidental drowning in the Mississippi River in 1997. \His estate has continued to release a wealth of posthumous material. These range from top notch material like…
In New Zealand, this week has witnessed the beginning of sprinter. The daffodils are flowering, and the washing is drying in the sunny breeze. In New Zealand and Australia, some weather scientists have attempted to change our weather paradigm to…
It’s a fair bet that Queen’s Brian May is the only person to have achieved a number one pop song and a PhD in Astrophysics. He combined these two skill-sets in ”39′, an album track from 1975’s A Night At…
Rickie Lee Jones is a one hit wonder in the eyes of the public; she charted with the jazzy, breezy ‘Chuck E.’s In Love’ from her 1979 debut album, which established her bohemian credentials, dating Tom Waits and wearing a beret.…
By the mid 1980s, The Clash were in disarray – musical lynch-pin Mick Jones had been fired from the group, and impresario Bernard Rhodes was back pulling the strings. The resulting album, 1985’s Cut The Crap, was widely derided, and…
Written by guitarist Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, ‘Kashmir’ is one of Led Zeppelin’s most well known and best loved tracks. It’s from their sixth studio album, the sprawling double Physical Graffiti. As well as the Eastern scales than Page…
Singer-songwriter Nadia Reid hails from Port Chalmers. It’s a port suburb of Dunedin, New Zealand, known for alternative life-stylers and artists. Her mother is a local jazz singer. Operating in the singer-songwriter genre, it’s easy to overlook what a capable…
After a string of successful albums with Crowded House, Neil Finn teamed up with his older brother Tim and recorded a relaxed and low-key album in 1995. The brothers’ previous attempts to write together had been incorporated into the 1991…
I’ve undergone a career change this week – I’ve dropped from full-time to a few hours a week, while my wife has returned to work almost full-time. It’s been quite a sudden change – we realised that I was finding…
My walk to work this week has been different than usual. Can any of my perceptive readers guess which city I’ve been working in? This clue is a red herring, as I haven’t actually been working in Liverpool: I had…
Warren Zevon was an industry veteran by the time he made his major-label debut in 1976. He’d toured with the Everly Brothers as their band leader, and was rooming with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in 1975. Jackson Browne had…
Up until this year’s Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe’s entire musical career has consisted of Afro-Futurist concept albums, based around her alter-ego Cindi Mayweather. But with Dirty Computer, Monáe’s created a much more personal album, expressing her political and sexual concerns; she.…
With all the success The Flaming Lips enjoyed with their layered, emotional Pet Sounds-inspired albums like The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, it’s easy to forget that they started back in the 1990s, as a raw, psychedelic guitar band. This song,…
Although jazz bassist Charles Mingus was best known for his musical accomplishments, he was a renaissance man with interests in surprising areas, namely the Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program. Mingus writes that it took him three or four weeks to…
‘Heads Roll Off’ has one of my favourite openings – a Church-like organ fills the room, before a chugging guitar and thick Scottish accent delivers a memorable opening line; “Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name….to anybody that doesn’t have…
Making and reading lists is one of the Great Pursuits of music geekdom, and I’ve certainly indulged from time to time. But while I generally limit myself to finite, single artist lists, a list written by Bill Wyman (but not…
It’s been an interesting month for 1970s band reunions – first we had Fleetwood Mac drop Lindsey Buckingham, effectively becoming Fleetwood House and a Heartbreaker. And now ABBA have announced their first new music for 35 years, along with a…
My wife and I are away on our tenth wedding anniversary holiday this weekend. I wanted to post a song befitting the landmark, but I struggled to find anything appropriate. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Ten Years Gone ‘ has always felt autumnal…
Every New Zealand #1 single… Slice of Heaven by Dave Dobbyn and Herbs Topped the NZ chart from 5 October 1986 for 8 weeks. 10 Every country has a musical act that’s part of the national identity, yet obscure internationally.…
The most interesting news story to emerge from New Zealand this weekend was an attempted monkey burglary at Wellington Zoo. Thieves broke into the squirrel monkey enclosure with bolt cutters, but were fought off by the small primates. Despite only…
It’s already Easter Sunday in New Zealand today, so it seems appropriate to cover a piece of music that I associate with Church. As soon as Church is over each Sunday, the vicar likes to hook his phone up to…
The Replacements are one of my favourite bands of all time, with their rough and ready bar band sound contrasting with Westerberg’s sensitive insightful lyrics, and creating some terrific college rock. After making one of my favourite trios of albums…
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg had a controversial career – he was a modernist who embraced the 12 tone scale, and the Nazis labelled his music as degenerate. There are plenty of famous deaths in 20th century music; Buddy Holly’s plane…
In late 1964, Brian Wilson quit touring with The Beach Boys so that he could focus on composing and arranging their records. His replacement for the first few months, covering his bass and falsetto, was the talented Glen Campbell. Campbell…
My favourite musical discovery of 2018 has been Nadia Reid. Reid is from Dunedin in the south of New Zealand, and ‘Richard’ is from her second album, 2017’s Preservation. Preservation was runner-up for album of the year in Mojo magazine,…
There’s recently been a study released, based on streaming data from Spotify, that indicates that most people gravitate towards music that was released in their early teens. Females favour music that they first heard at the age of 13, and…
