From the Vaults

The King: Come As You Are (1998)

28 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

Although there aren't Elvis sighting in gas stations and supermarkets any more, there is still no shortage of lookalikes and impersonators around. While there seems no great call for Kurt Cobain and Mama Cass impersonators, those who swish their hair back and sneer a little seem to be always out there. One week I interviewed two of them and within days I had forgotten which was which,... > Read more

Leonard Cohen: Because of (2004)

21 Oct 2024 | <1 min read | 1

The equation seems simple: Leonard Cohen (the self-described "ladies man") + women + bed = But of course nothing was ever quite that straightforward with a Jewish Zen Buddhist poet-cum-singer and unlikely sex symbol even his mid 70s. Here with amusing self-effacement he confronts aging, his reputation, plays with images of "naked" women bending over the bed . .... > Read more

Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club: Video Killed the Radio Star (1979)

14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

Whenever the story of the Buggles' hit Video Killed the Radio Star is told, two things are invariably mentioned: the clip of it was the first song to be played on MTV in 1981 and that the Buggles -- real one hit wonders and merely a studio band -- never played live. However there is more to the story and it is told by chief Buggle/songwriter and famous producer Trevor Horn in his modest,... > Read more

Bob Dylan: You Belong To Me (1994)

7 Oct 2024 | 1 min read | 2

The idea of "possessing" your lover isn't a pleasant thought these days: the subtext is spousal abuse, just plain creepy stuff and not a few killings you read about on page five. But there are a few songs where that idea of possessive passion has a wistful, oddly lost and sympathetic quality on the part of the singer. At one end it is someone asking Ruby not to take her love to... > Read more

The Rainmakers: Let My People Go-Go (1986)

30 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

Bob Walkenhorst of Kansas City's Rainmakers had a good line about his fellow Americans' willingness to get out of it. "The generation that would change the world is still looking for its car keys." The smart line came from the song Drinkin' on the Job off the band's self-titled, major label album in '86 ("Everybody's drunk, everybody's wasted, everybody's stoned and... > Read more

Norman McLaren: Synchromy (1971)

23 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

Personal story here. In the mid-Eighties I started a brief correspondence with the Canada-based animator Norman McLaren, then very advanced in years. I wanted to tell him the pleasure his short animated films gave me and my senior school students studying film. I think my first letter was sent to the National Film Board of Canada where he had worked and was forwarded to him because he'd... > Read more

Eddie Quinteros: School Blues (1958?)

16 Sep 2024 | <1 min read

One of the pleasures of diving into the vaults is you come across songs you'd forgotten but seem to say so much about an era. At the same time as Chuck Berry was writing his songs celebrating teenagers, the hop, cars and rock'n'roll itself, this Mexican-American from Daly City near southern San Francisco was exactly the right age to be singing about school blues. Eddie Quinteros was 13... > Read more

The Rolling Stones: I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys (1965)

9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

Right at the end of the Rolling Stones doco Charlie is My Darling -- which captures extraordinary footage of a brief tour in Ireland in '65 with a stage invasion and general mayhem -- we see the Stones goofing off and playing a song that was a rarity. This one. And its rarity value is two-fold. First it was credited to Keith Richards and their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and second that... > Read more

Rodrigo Amarante: Tuyo (2015)

2 Sep 2024 | 2 min read

For a Netflix series awash with drugs, guns, bloodshed, serial smoking, violence, impossibly large amounts of money and hedonism, the theme song to Narcos by the Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante is ineffably sad. The narcocorrido ballad – a style of music from the borderlands of Mexico and the US which alludes to drug smuggling – was written by Amarante (who had been... > Read more

The Cure: A Forest (1980)

26 Aug 2024 | <1 min read

Because it is so familiar – the band play it at almost every show and it is the go-to song for archetypal Cure – it is hard to remember how innovative and different it seemed at the time. Melodically and in its tone, it wasn't too far removed from their debut single, the often misunderstood and Camus-inspired Killing An Arab. But the swathes of keyboards and prominent bass... > Read more

Half Man Half Biscuit: Time Flies By (When You're the Driver of a Train) (1985)

19 Aug 2024 | 1 min read | 2

Never let it be said Elsewhere doesn't listen to its constituency. When the cry went up more than a decade ago, "Why no Half man Half Biscuit at From the Vaults?" the solution was obvious. (The answer however is, because they're pretty awful -- but that's neither here nor there) For those who have lived happy and fulfilled lives in the absence of any knowledge of this often... > Read more

Status Quo: When My Mind is Not Live (1968)

12 Aug 2024 | <1 min read

For the past 50+ years, Status Quo have been a heads-down boogie band in denims and "rockin' all over the world". So it's hardly surprising people would know them for nothing more than that enjoyably reductive style. However . . . For a few years in the late Sixties the original band (with the inevitable line-up changes) flirted with trippy hippie rock of the psychedelic... > Read more

Paul McCartney: Twenty Flight Rock (1974)

5 Aug 2024 | 1 min read

In the large and detailed book which came with the recent reissue/remixes of John Lennon's Mind Games, there is an interview with Lennon and Yoko Ono at the time. In it Lennon says what he misses in his solo career was just sitting down and playing with the group. And, as seen in the Let It Be/Get Back movies, when they got together their default position would always be just to jam on the... > Read more

Ernest Tubb: It's America, Love It or Leave It (1965)

29 Jul 2024 | 1 min read

The great patriot Ernest Tubb has appeared at From the Vaults before with his mind-numbingly awful It's For God and Country and You, Mom written by Dave McEnery. Ernest clearly like to keep things simple and in the same year he recorded this little pearler by Jimmy Helms. It became adopted as a satirical statement by those hippie draft-card burners who objected to America'... > Read more

The Fall: Fiery Jack (1980)

22 Jul 2024 | <1 min read

This character-driven rant-cum-diatribe came to attention again recently on the massive post-punk Moving Away From the Pulsebeat compilation. Singer/declaimer Mark E Smith sounds a bit young to be delivering this piece from the viewpoint of a damaged, angry 45-year old who rails against the world while fighting his corner as someone under the bottle, living off lousy food but with a... > Read more

Surf Mesa: ily/I Love You Baby. (2019)

14 Jul 2024 | 1 min read

One of the reasons for joining a gym is to listen to the relentless beat-driven, repetitive banger pop they play by people you've never heard of. The musical standard is so low that anything you choose to play at home, no matter how appalling your taste, will be far superior. Most of what I hear at the gym is music where the singer finally gets the pleading faux-sensitive line right (helped... > Read more

The Beatnix: Woman (1994)

8 Jul 2024 | 1 min read

As they like to say, “there's a lot to unpack here”. At the height of Beatlemania, Lennon and McCartney were knocking off songs for others to cover – notably McCartney although Lennon is credited with saying “Let's write a swimming pool” because he saw there was money in it. McCartney was prolific and offering exceptional songs like Step Inside Love to... > Read more

Ken Nordine: Roger (1957)

1 Jul 2024 | <1 min read

Ken Nordine looked like an ad executive in the Fifties: buttoned down, horn-rimmed glasses and hair neatly bushed and oiled. Sounded like one too with a confident and stentorian baritone which was often used in radio advertisements. But something very strange ticked inside him, a weird intellect capable of surreal juxtapositions of ideas and imagery. He invented “word jazz”... > Read more

The Beatles: Can't Buy Me Love (1964)

24 Jun 2024 | 1 min read

Sixty years ago this week the Beatles were in New Zealand for their only tour. Beatlemania ensued. The story of how they came to be here and the details of that Australasian tour are told in When We Was Fab, a new and thorough book by Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong. It is more than just an eye-witness account from scores of sources but a well-illustrated social history which also goes... > Read more

Tom Waits: Mr Henry (1980)

17 Jun 2024 | <1 min read | 1

Here's a beautiful old rare one -- with surface noise included -- taken from that period when Waits was writing barfly short stories in song. This outtake from the Heartattack and Vine album of 1980 only ever appeared on an Asylum compilation Bounced Checks ('81) and that record hasn't been released on CD. This isn't on any streaming services that I can see either. So here is... > Read more