Graceland: I’ve reason to believe we all will be received

Graceland is the nexus of the Elvis Presley multiverse. 

Elvis feels more alive than ever in 2026, closing in on 50 years since his death. He was a bit of a joke, a punch line for much of my teenage years, but it kind of feels like we’ve all moved past that a bit to appreciate the massive cultural space he filled in America’s 20th century. Sure, there’s Vegas Elvis in all his jumpsuited splendour but there’s also raw Sun Elvis, hungry and strange, and swaggering ’68 Elvis, showing the kids how it’s done. 

I hadn’t been to Graceland since the mid-1990s sometime, where it felt kind of quaintly humble, but it’s since blown up into a full Disneyland-style complex. It’s not cheap – is anything these days? – but for anyone even slightly interested in Elvis and the pop history of America, it’s a must. It’s plonked down in a rather apocalyptic, run-down section of Memphis which isn’t exactly inspiring, but once upon a time it was the suburban mansion on a distant hill that a boy rock star decided to buy as his first – and only – home. 

I suppose once the “Elvis is really still alive” jokes all started to fade (I mean, the dude would be 91 by now even if he was secretly lurking in Mongolia somewhere), I started to respect a little more the dreamy kid from Tupelo and his ascension to the top of the world, the thunderbolt effect he had on pop culture (a moment which Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis movie, flawed and rushed as it is, really captures ferociously well). 

The mansion itself remains the same as always, a kitschy time capsule of what a superstar considered fancy circa 1976. Elvis’ Graceland has survived the spins and twists of what’s fashionable to kind of be weirdly cool again with its low carpeted ceilings and brash colours and sweetly low-key touches. It remains the sort of home a poor Mississippi kid made good would have had rather than the kind of sterile megamansion an Elon Musk probably owns 10 times over. 

Here is where Elvis watched his three TVs at once (imagine how he would’ve fared in the multi-screening device age), here he played pool in a densely curtained room decked out like an ancient sultan’s lair, here in the oddly peaceful ‘Jungle Room’ he laid down some of his final songs surrounded by shag carpeting and tiki-tacky exotic furniture. 

Once upon a time, I visited Graceland with friends in the mid-1990s, paying tribute at his graveside (which sadly today now includes his daughter and his 27-year-old grandson as well). I came this time at the start of “Elvis Week,” marking the 49th anniversary the King left this mortal coil, and the memorial area was decked out with wreaths from Elvis fans around the world, Belgium to Japan. Elvis is everywhere, as Mojo Nixon famously sang. 

What’s changed the most since then is the sprawling “Elvis Presley’s Memphis” complex across the road, 200,000 feet of Presley-ania covering his entire career from the scholarly to the silly. Excess was Elvis’ brand, and the music and pop culture nerd in me adored the trips through Sun Studios, his Hollywood era, the comeback years and the final days.

Everywhere you turn there’s little bits of musical history – an acetate from Sun, the Presley family’s battered personal copy of his first record. High and low art mingle freely – an entire room devoted to Colonel Tom Parker, even a section devoted entirely to Elvis’ hats, in case that floats your boat. 

Only in Graceland would the remote control to Elvis’ television get a quirky little display case of its very own, or the handwritten letters Presley infamously wrote President Richard Nixon before their well-documented White House meeting. 

I admit, when I walked into a room where the famous leather jumpsuit from the Elvis ’68 Comeback Special sits in a glass case, I felt a bit like the time I saw Abraham Lincoln’s hat in the Smithsonian. History in black leather. 

At another point, I walked into one towering room where more than 50 bedazzled Elvis jumpsuits are stacked up 30 feet high, and I surprised even myself as I gasped out loud. As the kids say these days, Elvis was a lot. The cheesy tacky “fat Elvis” years don’t seem quite as awful as they once did to me, but the kind of last gasps of a dying lion, and the over-the-top showmanship those Vegas years displayed have echoed in music ever since – I mean, have you seen a Chappell Roan concert? 

Is Graceland “worth it”? I spent four hours there without a pause and probably could’ve done another two (I mean, you’ve got to check out every Elvis hat, am I right?). In its reinvented modern form, its big glorious slab of rock star overkill and the lingering tastes of Southern humility and hospitality, Graceland almost feels like a museum for America itself, of rises and falls and all the echoing ripples we get from our stars, no matter how quickly they fly by. 

Maybe Paul Simon put it best – in some strange way, Graceland feels a little to me like coming home. 

Maybe I’ve a reason to believe

We all will be received

In Graceland

– Paul Simon, Graceland, 1986

On the road again: How America can still soothe my soul

Oh, how I needed a road trip. 

I’ve just returned from an epic 3-week, 11-state, 3000+ mile road trip across the land of my forefathers, from Texas to Mississippi to Kansas to California. It’s the furthest I’ve travelled in America for years, and it was a much-needed anecdote to the boiling chaos of the endless news cycle. 

The road and the sky, the lines on the pavement and the clouds on the horizon – strip life back to the basics, for a few days, and hit the road, jack. You won’t regret it. 

The thing about New Zealand is, you really can’t drive 8 hours straight in any one direction without running into the ocean eventually. It can sometimes get a wee bit claustrophobic. America goes on forever, and so much that you pass through are empty vast panoramas and blindingly blue skies. 

There’s something primal about the American road trip that has stirred song and poetry from everyone from Woody Guthrie to Kerouac. You can ride along the freeways, the backroads and byways until the sun sets and still only make it a few inches on the map. 

It was a pleasure to be reminded America is far more than the dipshits currently in power, that while the country is going through a very lousy time at the moment, it is possible to put away your phone and spend several hours hurtling along the interstate with fields and mountains and endless landscapes rippling by and not think of Washington, D.C. once. 

The last serious solo road trip I took in America was, dear god, nearly 30 years ago, back in 1997 when I loaded up my Toyota Camry with supplies and CDs and rode away from my life in Mississippi to discover strange new worlds back in California. It was a weird, lonesome trip for much of the time – pre-internet, pre-Google Maps, following along on my floppy road atlas as I unwrapped the country over the miles. No mobile phone, and there were hours at a time where nobody on Earth knew where I was.

These days, Apple Music, Google Maps and diligent application of cruise control made the roads a little less empty, although I really could’ve done without my fancy-pants Kia rental car talking to me sometimes and letting me know I needed to take a rest break. A steady soundtrack of Americana kept me company, all the old favourites rolled out – a little Wilco, a little BB King, a little John Mellencamp, a little Dolly Parton. Hurtling along the interstate at 82 miles an hour, every song feels like an anthem, somehow. 

I made it through Kansas for the first time, and while I’d never want to live there, especially with some of the current political atrocities going on, Kansas is still a powerfully evocative piece in the American jigsaw. Superman came from there, after all, and the Wizard of Oz, and Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart and my “imaginary friend” the great underrated musician Freedy Johnston. I marvelled at the infinite fields and the thousands of towering windmills lining the land, spinning across the prairie. 

America is, at its heart, still the land of wide spaces, of final frontiers, and the landscape of my home country is something I’ve longed for at times despite how much I love New Zealand. I rolled through Utah’s endless geology, and I thought, “at last.” I bopped along Louisiana’s alligator-filled bayous, Missouri’s rippling Ozarks, Colorado’s steep jagged canyons and Nevada’s sturdy laconic cowboy country and even the places I’d never been felt familiar to me, somehow. 

A landscape tells its own stories, separate from all our chattering human concerns. Americans grow up steeped in their landscape’s mythology and legends, for better and for worse, and while there’s an awful lot of things that vastly disappoint me about what’s going on back home, I can still never let it go entirely. I’m always ready to get back on the road again, and see where it takes me.

Maybe I’ll learn something, maybe I’ll be different at the end, and maybe you will, too. 

The Internet 2026, or, why even bother with this stuff?

So, I’ve been wondering whether or not it’s even worth it. 

I took a little hiatus from blogging back in June, as I had a lot of life stuff going on, but it also gave me a little chance to pause and try and figure out what my place is in this great churning, gurning algorithmic content machine most of us are caught inside these days. 

To tell the truth, I’ve gotten a little discouraged in the last 12 months or so. As someone who makes a living writing words for fun and profit, the rise of generative AI, the ongoing social media-fuelled breakdown in polite society, the daily doomscrolling and the hourly outrage alerts have started to make it all feel quite futile. There’s too much of everything and not enough of something, and it kind of feels like we’ve all developed a case of Ren and Stimpy’s space madness, doesn’t it? Do my little words even matter?

There’s a lot of nostalgia for the pre-collapse internet era out there these days. Like a lot of people, I got mesmerised by the shiny town squares of MySpace and Facebook and Twitter back in the day, sharing all kinds of random babble and life moments that I’d be truly embarrassed to do now. Again, like a lot of people, I’m a lot more cautious now about my online life, what I say and what I share. I begrudgingly still use Facebook (honestly, when you live on the other side of the world from a lot of your friends and family, it still has its uses), I abandoned Twitter years ago when the Nazis took over and find most other sites incredibly irritating (the various Twitter replacements) or full of stupidity (hello, Reddit). 

These days, many of the spaces I used to go to online just make me feel sad, mad, or bad. 

I started this website all the way back in 2018 when I was at a bit of a creative slump in life, mired in journalism jobs that weren’t really fulfilling and needing a bit more of an outlet. I could write about anything and everything I wanted here, and it spurred me to stretch my brain a little more.

It’s been a good impetus – I’ve ended up migrating in my work to doing far more writing and reporting than I’ve done in years for what I humbly think is New Zealand’s best news web site, and restarted my long-dormant comics hobby with Amoeba Adventures in 2020. Writing for this website has turned into my “pressure valve” for writing about things that don’t quite fit into my paid writing niches, a chance to babble on about cool music and comics and movies and sometimes whatever’s going on in my life. 

But yeah, sometimes I get a bit discouraged, when I start to think about how many “readers” to this website may now just be AI bots scraping my actual words for their soulless slop, about how hard it is to make actual human connections online now. Sometimes it feels pointless. Sometimes you want to toss your phone in the ditch and walk away.

The quandary is if you want to be a writer in 2026, you have to use the internet, at least a little bit. So I’m not going anywhere on this space, just yet. 

I took a break for a few months to mull it all over, feeling so very tired of the “enshittification” of online spaces and ideas. I took a little holiday in the real world to remember what it’s like out there and to remind myself that, ultimately, as much as I appreciate every single person who reads my words out there, I write the words for me, because I have to get them out, because being a writer is the only serious job I’ve ever considered in my life since I was about 12 years old and because, I hope, in the end real words by real people are always going to feel more real than all the endless garbage being churned out by opportunists and grifters out there. 

It ain’t a big site, this one, and yet I’ve had a blast writing my little essays here for the past 8 years, despite moments of doubt. 

 “I’m looking to something more than endless scrolling for that dopamine hit,” I wrote back in my first post on this site in 2018. “I’ll focus on what keeps me going in this tattered world.“

Why bother? Well, it beats the alternative, doesn’t it? In a world gone mad, we find the joy where we can, when we can. Onwards!

Paul Chadwick’s Concrete: The best comic book you may have never heard of

There were a lot of fantastic comics that launched in the 1980s – your Dark Knights and Watchmen, your Maus and Love and Rockets – but one of the closest to my heart is Paul Chadwick’s unforgettable Concrete, a series he’s been writing and drawing on and off now for 40 years. 

After far, far too long of a hiatus, the first new Concrete story in 20 years is set to come out this week, Stars Over Sand. It’s pretty much the comic event of the year for me. 

Concrete has always been an unusual animal and while it’s widely loved amongst comic fans, it’s not hard to feel it’s still somewhat overlooked and underappreciated.

For a series that is steeped in realism, it has its roots in the fantastic – political speechwriter Ron Lithgow is abducted by aliens and his brain transplanted into a hulking stone body, before the aliens vanish from the story forever. Concrete is about a man divorced from his own humanity but gifted with possible immortality trying to find a way to fill up his new life. And it’s not by fighting crime or other superheroic tropes, but by writing, exploring, and using his strange body to wring the most out of existence. 

Chadwick started with a superhero-esque premise, but the fantastical origin story aside, has resolutely kept Concrete a story in human scale, even with a towering golem as its lead. Concrete and his human friends/handlers Larry and Maureen remain some of the best written, nuanced characters in comics – smart and funny but also capable of being vain, conceited, cruel or forgetful. It’s quite possible the most humane comic out there. 

Chadwick’s stories are deeply researched – Concrete’s visit to Nepal has the realism of Chadwick’s own visit there, for example – but he has an eye for the little bits of character or distraction that help make his work so authentic – Concrete’s occasional inexplicable outbursts of temper, or Larry being distracted by the need to urinate during a harrowing hostage scenario.

Concrete is a gloriously ruminative, verbose figure, given to imaginative flights of fancy or philosophical meanderings that make him all the more relatable. He’s a writer, and Chadwick makes him feel like a writer, always testing out ideas and questioning. Chadwick’s art has got a classical elegance that shows in his quirky page designs, which sometimes leap right into surrealism, and his clean, expressive style that carries his wordy, thoughtful stories well. 

I re-read the entire Concrete series of stories every few years and I keep finding new layers in them each time.

The original 10-issue Concrete series of the 1980s is only dated by its fashion and technology – the underlying stories, whether it’s Concrete’s daring exploration of Mount Everest or a Gothic-flavoured tale of love and pain on a small family farm – hold up beautifully. Chadwick has gotten more ambitious with time, tackling contentious topics like how far environmental activism can or should go and whether or not humanity should aggressively work to lower the world’s population. Yet even with the knottiest of subjects, his love for his characters shines through. 

A series of miniseries and piles of wonderful short stories have tackled everything from suspenseful action movie to comic catastrophe to unlikely love story, but for those of us who love the rocky old dude, Concrete stories have been few and far between, and 2006’s The Human Dilemma was the last gasp for now – leaving us with a rather shocking cliffhanger change in status quo for the character I’ve been often thinking about ever since. 

I’ve missed seeing new stories with Concrete, who feels like a fond friend after so many years. I imagine it’s been hard for Paul Chadwick to make a good living doing Concrete alone – he’s dabbled in film, other comics and more, but this is ultimately his magnum opus. In a perfect world we’d be up to like Concrete #300 by now, I guess, but the 40 or so comics and dozens of short stories are still a fine legacy to have. 

Concrete has never quite broken through to the mass public – there’s been talk of movies (Chadwick turned his own movie experience working on the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie into the hilarious satire miniseries Concrete: Fragile Creature), but perhaps Concrete is a character who works best on the printed page. Chadwick has said he’ll turn to prose novels as a way of continuing Concrete stories, which isn’t quite the same, but I’d be keen to see how he makes that happen.

Whatever the future holds, Chadwick’s work on Concrete, forged these last four decades, is still some of the best comics I’ve ever read, and I can’t wait to see, finally, finally, where he’s taking his hero next, and hope there isn’t quite so long a wait until the next time. 

Laugh? I thought I’d cry – The best comedian documentaries do a little bit of both

Mel Brooks from the film “Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!” (HBO Max via AP)

The lives of comedians are a funny subject for documentaries, but I find I can’t get enough of them. 

Right now is a golden age for those of us who like long (sometimes very long) documentaries about classic ‘70s and ‘80s comedians. Just in the last year or two, films about Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, John Candy, Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, Martin Short, Pee Wee Herman and probably a heap of others I’m missing have all stumbled onto centre stage. 

Other great documentaries in the past several years have taken apart the careers of Robin Williams, Garry Shandling, George Carlin, Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder and so many more. Honestly, it’s easier to make a list of ‘70s/80s comedians who haven’t gotten a sprawling documentary look at their lives yet. 

There’s a theory out there that explaining comedy ruins it, but I have always been weirdly interested in dissecting what exactly makes something funny.

Sometimes, these documentaries are about reinforcing what we already know – everybody loves plucky Martin Short, everyone has a story about what a jerk Chevy Chase can be, Steve Martin is so much more than a wild and crazy guy and Garry Shandling may have been the most neurotic man alive. 

Yeah, there is sometimes too much reverence and not enough bite in these films. Comedy should sting a little bit, and so should documentaries about its makers.

And yet, I’m kind of here for them all. 

I’ve grown to appreciate Martin Short’s guileless energetic charm more and more over time, and Marty: Life Is Short is the textbook example of showing us how comedians often come from the saddest possible circumstances but can turn that pain into a sword and shield. Short lost his parents and a brother before he was 20 years old – and later, his wife to cancer – and yet he’s forged a career being one of the most likeable men in show biz. “There were laughs,” he says at one point, reflecting on the darkest times in his life. “That’s the point.” 

The recent John Candy documentary I Like Me is haunted by Candy’s ridiculously sad early death at age 43, and often falls into the trap of telling, not showing, with maudlin footage of Candy’s funeral and sappy strings dominating until it loosens up and starts to show us exactly why Candy was so funny and loved. It’s a tricky thing – you want to show the ups and downs but if you tip too far into the sadness, your comedian documentary starts to feel more like a wake. 

Still, a little bit of self-congratulatory backslapping also goes a long way, like the recent Being Eddie that fails to ask the hard questions about Murphy’s career. I don’t want a documentary that just feels like a tribute special. I want to know how these folks work. By far the best comedian documentaries are the ones which really rip away the public image to give you an idea how these people tick and how they think. 

I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Not is actually one of the more effective documentaries I’ve seen lately, because it doesn’t hold back in examining Chase’s longstanding reputation as, well, a massive asshole. It features several brutal clips and stories that show Chase insulting peers, crossing the line between comedy and cruelty without actually being funny – but it also digs into the abusive childhood he lived through, and makes us realise nobody is truly 100 percent villain or hero, success or failure. It’s a canny look at an often off-putting, self-sabotaging man who still has made me laugh a lot over the years. 

Documentaries have all their cliches – the random talking heads, the jittery home movie flashbacks and the standup performance videos. Sometimes they get too formulaic. Why do we need to have Ryan Reynolds’ opinion on Chevy Chase, for instance?

Several of them go very long, giving the creator of Spaceballs the same treatment you might give the American Civil War. Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, George Carlin and Pee Wee Herman all got two-part, nearly four-hour long deep dives. It may be excessive, but done right, I could watch this stuff all day. 

Mel Brooks is a living treasure, turning 100 in a few weeks time, and The 99-Year-Old Man! is a loving tribute to a man who shaped comedy for me ever since I saw Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein flickering away on TV reruns. Nobody expected Brooks to last this long, but the 216-minute documentary shows us why he matters and is still vital, even if at times it feels sad to watch a man who one day won’t be with us, knowing when we lose Mel we’ll lose a lot. But we’ll always have the laughs. 

Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, didn’t make it past 70 years old, but as I’ve written before, Pee Wee As Himself is one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in recent years. It reveals a lot about Paul Reubens’ art background and experimental work before Pee Wee became a blockbuster and patron saint for oddballs, and fills in the gaps on the private comedian’s personal life and loves.

There’s a fine balance to comedian documentaries. I mean, everyone’s story has the same sad end – people leave your life, then eventually you do, too – but comedians can show how you cope with that and even find the sprinkles of wit in the worst days. Comedian documentaries often tend to be tearjerkers in their final act despite all the funny clips – John Candy’s potential sadly cut short, Robin Williams’ tragic mental health struggles, or the images of aged, shrunken Mel Brooks at nearly a century, smiling away and cracking wise even as he becomes the last man standing from his friends and loves. 

A good comedian documentary should make me laugh… but I don’t mind if it makes me choke back a tear or two as well, as long as it’s got a little of both, sugar and salt. Life is a funny thing, and it’s sometimes a sad thing. And a lot of the time, it’s everything all at once. 

Can Doctor Doom be funny?

Doctor Doom is, of course, the greatest comic book villain of all time. 

Forget the Joker or Darkseid – both way too overexposed – or figures like Catwoman, Magneto and Loki, who’ve all been turned into vaguely redeemed antiheroes too often. Villains are often one-note sadists, like the Green Goblin (who should’ve stayed dead decades ago) or Bullseye, or gimmicky like the Riddler and Captain Cold. Lex Luthor is probably comics’ second-greatest villain, but he’s still ultimately a bald tech bro with envy issues. 

Victor Von Doom is an imposing monarch, an egotistical perfectionist and would-be ruler of the universe who’s been battling the Fantastic Four for more than 60 years now. He’s a rich enough character that writers are constantly finding new depths in him. 

But should he be funny? 

I’ve been reading the Doctor Doom epic collections Marvel has recently put out which collect all Doom’s early ’60s appearances across Fantastic Four, Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man and more, and it’s interesting to observe the gradual evolution of Doom. It took a while for Doctor Doom to truly become “Doom” – in his first appearance, of all things, he’s ordering the Fantastic Four to make a time heist to steal the pirate Blackbeard’s treasure! 

In the early years, Doom was often your standard-issue bad guy, turning up with wild plans and wacky weapons only to be defeated for another day. His haughty monologues and occasional wails of defeat could be funny, but he was a little less self-assured than he eventually became.

Gradually Stan Lee and Jack Kirby realised they had the ultimate Fantastic Four villain in Doom, whose tortured backstory – his youth as a poor, abused Romani child, the death of his mother, a face disfigured by scientific meddling, et cetera – was slowly filled out. Once his side hustle as the ruler of European nation Latveria was brought in, it gave a whole new side to Doom – beloved and feared world leader, as well as calculating supervillain. 

Under a series of great writers including John Byrne, Ryan North, Mark Waid and Jonathan Hickman, Doom’s complexity has gradually been unpacked over the years. I don’t envy writing Doom – it’s a hard line to make him a figure of some dignity while also keeping him consistent as a power-mad villain. I mean, he’s done stuff like kill his childhood ex-girlfriend and turn her skin into magical armour and sent Reed Richards’ young son to Hell. Yet he’s not an utter psychopath like the Joker, who at this point will murder you because it’s a Tuesday.

Doctor Doom is going to have a big year as the centre of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. I’m nervous – Doom has already been messed up in four live action movies and counting, and the stunt casting of Robert Downey Jr is a worry. If Doom shows up and immediately turns out to be some multiversal dopplegänger of Tony Stark, they’ve done it wrong and don’t even understand Doom’s appeal. 

Doom is a figure that demands respect in his best stories, and like any comic book villain, he’s got infinite potential if written well – I can’t count how many times his evil plans have been thwarted or he’s been just outright killed, but Doom always comes back. In the stories where he does briefly end up ruling the world, he usually is defeated by his own demons. 

And Dr Doom can be funny – but strictly on his terms. Good Doom humour (‘Doom-mour?’) stems directly from his overwhelming ego and confidence that he is the greatest man there ever was. Heck, he’s even smack-talked Superman!

A big ego can be funny. I’ve got zero regard for the man in the White House these days, but I will admit one thing about him – he has, at times, been funny, and that’s usually a direct result of his grotesquely swollen ego. And so it is with Doom.

There have been plenty of funny moments in stories featuring Dr Doom in the past 60 years, although an awful lot of them make him the butt of the joke.

These days you probably won’t see Doom engaging in slightly problematic smack talk with Luke Cage… 

Or fighting super-powered squirrels … 

Sometimes portrayals could be unintentionally funny, like the time Dr Doom was shown shedding a few tears in a mawkish Spider-Man memorial comic after 9/11. No matter how sentimental you’re trying to make your story, Dr Doom does not cry.  

It took a while for Dr Doom to evolve into comics’ greatest villain. Doom being plonked into funny situations, like fighting Squirrel Girl, doesn’t quite sit right for the character anymore.

Doom can indeed be funny, but really, only on Doom’s own terms. Disobey him at your peril. 

How Deadloch shows us a different side of Australia

Australia is far weirder, bigger and louder than compact little ol’ Aotearoa. I love the place, but it always seems like the swaggering older brother. 

The gloriously profane and funny TV series Deadloch feels like the most Australian thing I’ve seen in ages (even though it actually co-stars a famous Kiwi comedian). It’s a foul-mouthed sendup of the broadest and silliest stereotypes about how we imagine Australia – but also an open-heartedly inclusive show. 

Deadloch, which just released its second series recently, is a spin on the well-worn buddy cop genre, with Kate Box as brainy, restrained gay detective Dulcie Collins and NZ’s Madeline Sami as Eddie Redcliffe, the most bogan, loud-mouthed sweary Aussie you can imagine, a thong-wearing mess from steamy Darwin who is sent to Tasmania to dig into a crime with Dulcie. Deadloch gradually reveals itself to be a confidently feminist take on all those hoary true-crime cliches. 

The duo are a true Mutt-and-Jeff combination, with 6-foot Box towering over Sami. Sami’s Eddie is an incredibly over-the-top agent of chaos, whose energy is nicely balanced out by Box’s analytical Kate (and the inevitable loud clashes between the two of them give the show a lot of its zing). Sami is hilarious belting out a thousand variations on calling someone a c**t.

But it’s actually Box’s Dulcie who feels like the real star of Deadloch – she’s repressed and tense, and Box does a wonderful job showing her slowly open up to Eddie despite her initial revulsion. Deadloch in part is the story of Kate learning to be comfortable with herself. 

There’s a million cop and mystery shows out there these days and I don’t have time for most of them (the very phrase “cozy crime” makes my teeth itch), but after visiting Tasmania recently, Deadloch grabbed me with its gorgeous scenery and clever look at what being an Australian really means these days.

Deadloch interrogates the ideas of Aussie bloke and sheila in clever ways – many of the characters besides Dulcie are also queer, and the series never gets more venomous than when it hones in on the corrupt, clueless old boys’ network of local police, who are shown to be toxic men that are impossible to take seriously. Meanwhile, Kate and Eddie just get shit done, although there’s plenty of comic stumbles along the way. 

Antagonistic buddy cops have been done to death, but Kate and Eddie are both outsiders in the blokey system, despite their vast differences. It’s not a two-woman show – Deadloch excels in its cast of well-drawn bush eccentrics in both seasons, from Kate’s needy wife Kath and the comic cop sidekicks Abby and Sven, to the drunken sweaty misfits of the Top End or the pretentious old rich blood of Tasmania. It incorporates Australia’s complicated colonial history and historic racism in both subtle and broad ways. 

In many ways the murders in Deadloch are less important than the vibe, whether it’s the end-of-the-world chill of Tasmania or the sweaty tension of the Northern Territory.  (In the Darwin-set Season 2, everybody seems to be perpetually perspiring.) Australia itself is a third lead in Deadloch, whether it’s spooky rows of gum trees on the Tasmania coast or the primal rumbling of crocs in the waters near Darwin. 

Of course it’s broad in its satire – not every person in Darwin is a sweaty mess and Tasmania isn’t all Gothic murdertown – but in embracing so many of the cliches about Australia and gently chucking so many of them under the chin, Deadloch also feels like a love song to these unmistakably, uniquely weird places tucked in at the bottom of the world. The real mystery, in the end, is Australia itself. 

Concert review: Sparks, Auckland, May 23

For a band that’s been making hit records for over 50 years, Sparks still feel a little bit underrated. 

In their first New Zealand shows, the cult legends showed why they’re so often described as “your favourite band’s favourite band.” You can find their fingerprints in the sounds of everyone from Queen to Björk to the Pet Shop Boys. 

They’re not British, although many people mistake them for that. They are actually brothers, raised in sunny southern California. And they get along, unlike the famously battling brothers of Oasis or the Kinks. 

Brothers Ron and Russell Mael have been dishing up perfect pop songs since the early 1970s, but unlike a lot of other surviving bands of that era, they’ve also been constantly changing, growing and experimenting with their sound. 

They hit Christchurch and Auckland with their top-notch band for shows this week that drew out their extremely dedicated fanbase. 

“Better later than never,” Russell told the audience Saturday night.

For their Auckland gig at Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Sparks ripped through nearly two hours of classics and still vital new songs – and even though Russell is 77 and big brother Ron is now 80, they felt as energetic as ever. Their quirky stage presence has always been a big part of their charm – Russell’s bouncy good cheer and immense vocal range combined with Ron’s deadpan, ramrod-straight presence at the keyboards. 

The very second song they played – the newer ‘Do Things My Own Way,’ anchored with a moodily insistent keyboard hook, feels like it sums up Sparks’ whole aesthetic. “Not a phase / All my days / Gonna do things my own way,” Russell chanted over a driving beat. While they’ve got an accessible sound, Sparks’ musical invention and deconstruction of stale songwriting cliches is as punk rock as it gets. 

Their vast catalog of nearly 30 albums span from their 1974 proto-punk breakthrough Kimono My House to 2025’s vibrant Mad! Even now, the eruptive chaos of their first hit ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ doesn’t quite sound like anything else. 

Director Edgar Wright’s terrific must-see 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers served to introduce them to a whole new audience, as did Cate Blanchett’s silly-slash-sexy dance routine in the video for 2023’s earworm ‘The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte.’ 

Russell’s soaring falsetto and Ron’s swooping keyboards add up to a legacy that still feels utterly unique in the rock world. Sparks have dabbled in guitar rock, disco, electronica, operatic excess, pure pop and baroque concept albums, always with a dash of wry observational humour and a heaping helping of killer riffs. 

The very first song I ever heard by Sparks, long ago on a mix tape a friend gave me (remember those?), is called ‘Eaten By The Monster of Love.’ It’s a title only Sparks would use. Their songs are frequently hilarious – they can take in everything from the pleasure of using your lawnmower to the benefits of eating pineapple – but they’re not a comedy act. Instead, they’re kind of joyful observers of this weird old world. 

When 1982’s swoony love song ‘Sherlock Holmes’ started up, a woman in front of me let out a loud yelp of sheer glee. “They’re playing my favourite song,” she yelled. Sparks tend to get that reaction. The night included their best-known hits and relative obscurities like ‘Let’s Get Funky,’ spoke-sung in a hilarious duet by the brothers as they swayed across the stage. The proto-techno 1980 tune ‘Beat The Clock’ sat comfortably next to the pummeling thump of 2025’s ‘Running Up A Tab At The Hotel For The Fab.’ I bet each of them was someone’s favourite song. 

Sparks worked hard to overcome the somewhat stiff initial vibe of the cavernous Aotea Centre theatre, but it wasn’t until the insanely catchy bop of ‘Music That You Can Dance To’ that the seated crowd took entirely to their feet and the energy in the room felt fully equal to the music.

It kicked off a banger four-song run of some their absolute best songs – the yearning, gorgeous ‘When Do I Get To Sing ‘My Way,’’ the utopian disco bliss of ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’ and of course, the still-startling whip crack of ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us.’ By the time an expressionless Ron shuffled to centre stage and broke out in a big grin and a few quick dance moves, the crowd was won over for good. 

Ron’s keyboard work – played with his trademark staring-straight ahead intensity – anchors Sparks songs, while Russell – who was, amazingly, still able to hit an awful lot of those high falsetto notes of their classic era – acted the antic cheerleader, clad in a dot-filled suit and repeatedly urging the crowd to clap their hands and get to their feet. 

At the end, before a rousing singalong of their anthem ‘All That,’ Russell promised repeatedly that Sparks would try to come back to New Zealand again sometime. It was a little disappointing to see the Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre wasn’t filled to the brim for this still essential band’s first time in Auckland – the upper levels were mostly empty (blame the footy final, perhaps?). 

But if they do make it here again, Sparks are a must-see. They may still not quite be the household name that they deserve to be, but you know, I hear they’re your favourite band’s favourite band. 

This review also up over at Radio New Zealand!

New Zealand Music Month and the songs I didn’t grow up with

May is New Zealand Music Month, and as always, I’m all for celebrating the towering cultural footprint little ol’ Aotearoa has made in the music scene with everything from Flying Nun Records to Lorde to Marlon Williams. 

Something I love about New Zealand music is how much of it is, still, well, new to me, nearly 20 years after moving to this part of the world. 

The music you listen to between the ages of roughly 12 and 20 sinks into your brain like quick-set concrete and hardens your musical tastes for life, whether you like it or not. I can’t hear the eerie beats that open “When The Doves Cry” or Madonna’s boppy “Lucky Star” without being a 12-year-old California kid again. Even the songs I don’t like take me back in time and strike a chord now that I’ve hit middle age.

I’ve long had a love for NZ music, as I’ve written before, ever since a high school girlfriend got me into Crowded House and the lovely woman I’d eventually marry introduced me to the antipodean cool of The Chills and The JPS Experience.

But I didn’t grow up with New Zealand music. 

Because I didn’t grow up with all those catchy, kitschy ‘70s and ‘80s New Zealand-forged pop songs sputtering out of the radio, I still frequently stumble on ones that are new to me, like little glittering bits of buried treasure.

They’re coated in the sounds of their era, but because I didn’t have them filling up my head as a sponge-like teenager and come to them as an adult, they often sound like messages from an alternate universe where they might sit comfortably on Sacramento, California’s FM 102 right next to Hall and Oates and Rick Springfield. 

The Kiwi bands that have made it big worldwide like Split Enz and Lorde are on one level, while the hits of The Dance Exponents, Dragon, Th’ Dudes and so many others are more bound to this part of the world. Sometimes I like to imagine what it would’ve been like to grow up in this strangely isolated island nation back when, as my wife often reminds me, there were only two television channels and instead of MTV, you had “Radio With Pictures” blasting out the latest videos. 

There are hit songs like the 1983 Pātea Māori Club’s thumping “Poi E,” a one-hit wonder that was performed entirely in Māori and has the carefree swagger of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” with an entirely Pacific spin. I know some people who hate this song because it was inescapable for a while here, and yet I listen to it with the novelty of discovery every time – a joyful indigenous song in a language I didn’t even know existed when I was 12 years old, but a huge hit on the other side of the globe. 

…Or Hello Sailor’s smooth and sexy “Blue Lady,” which sounds a little like the greatest Steely Dan song I never heard, a gem that reeks of secondhand smoke and stale VB beers.

As a big fan of nerdy synth-pop of the age like Soft Cell and the Human League, I was delighted to stumble on Mi-Sex’s catchy stuttering 1979 single “Computer Games.” It felt like stumbling on an old Commodore 64 game setup in a closet I’d forgotten I owned.

Twenty years into my life here, I still find new novelties – recently the ‘80s NZ band The Crocodiles re-released their discography down here and I rather loved their new-to-me sappy ballad “Tears,” (Crocodile Tears, get it?) which could sit comfortably with Air Supply’s “All Out Of Love” and Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” as anguished lovelorn transmissions from 1983 or so. 

I wouldn’t argue that all the new-to-me Kiwi tunes of yesterday I stumble across are necessarily better than the Cyndi Lauper and Prince and Huey Lewis I grew up with. Some of it’s sappy and some of it’s daft and some of it’s lame … and some of it is great. 

But they are all distinctly Aotearoa sounds, birthed and sung here at the far end of the world. New Zealand Music Month is as good a time as any to crank up the wireless and enjoy it all, eh mate?