Tag: Music

I finally went to Woodstock, 57 years later

It’s been a rather busy month full of concerts for me, and so I decided to sit for a couple nights and regroup by finally watching the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock, the nearly four-hour (!) 1970 picture about the grandaddy of all rock festivals. 

The daunting length of Woodstock – 224 minutes in the directors’ cut! – put me off watching it for far too long, but once you sink into its patchouli-scented vibes, director Michael Wadleigh’s uncanny eye for capturing those three days in 1969 (with help from a variety of editors including Martin Scorsese!) sucks you in. 

Woodstock pivots between candid moments of the heaving 400,000+ crowd and intimate, close-up concert footage, swinging between the near and the far in a way that really evokes the scope of the event. Even now, viewing this swelling mass of humanity on Max Yasgur’s farm is startling. These bands were playing on a pretty humble stage and sound set – with no giant screens for the crowd – and yet still managed to hold attention. It all seems so low-fi and ramshackle from our hi-tech world of 2026, but also deeply moving. 

At times it’s almost comical, like watching a grasshopper try to entertain a stadium, like when laidback folk singer John Sebastian alone with his guitar tries to gently lecture a wall of humanity, but then someone like Richie Havens takes the stage and holds the crowd in the palm of his hand with a few strums and footstomps, and it’s magic. 

Everyone remembers Jimi Hendrix’s barn-burning closing performance – which teeters right on the edge of self-indulgence – but how about Ten Years After’s searingly loud take on “I’m Going Home”? Or The Who lurking out of the darkness like rock ’n’ roll spectres? Or Sha Na Na‘s frankly bonkers appearance?

Wadleigh’s eye for both the masses and the music separates Woodstock from many other concert films, and the still-innovative split screen approach gives it an immersive feel not quite like anything else. It’s the small moments that stick with you – the beaming smile on a blonde woman’s face lost in the music during Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice”, or the poignant little interview with the guy cleaning out all the disgusting porta-potties, a hardworking average American joe who says he’s got a kid at the festival – and another fighting away in Vietnam. I wonder how that family came out of all those crazy times (of course, it turns out the toilet guy later sued over being in the movie, so it goes). 

Still, seeing all these hopeful, hairy faces slogging through the mud in Woodstock in 1969, you wonder how and who they are today. The commercialised repackaged idealism of the ‘60s is beyond parody now, but there is a distinct vibe to these times that an awful lot of people have been trying to capture ever since. The occasional sneering angry conservative local and the kindness seen in counterpoint by other locals about Woodstock disrupting their lives seems to evoke so much of the culture wars still splitting America today. It’s not so different, then and now. 

I quickly decompressed from all the hippie peace and love by watching Woodstock 1970’s evil mirror image, the Netflix documentary series Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, the biggest (and last) attempt to pimp hard for that ‘60s nostalgia vibe with a musical journey that went horribly, depressingly wrong. Then again, when you book headliners like Limp Biskit, Kid Rock and Korn, you’re probably not really capturing the vintage Woodstock feeling. Toxic masculinity seems to be the order of the day, with a nihilistic mob of teens lashing out and calling it a “party.” 

Trainwreck was a cold splash of water after Woodstock’s idealism, with an endless army of shirtless frat boys screaming incoherently. Free food and camping turned into price-gouging capitalism run amok. The purpose of Woodstock ’99 was to “get fucking wild” and “party”, and needless to say it all kind of collapsed into a full-on riot of violence, vandalism and fires by the end, which Trainwreck forensically dissects. The desperate need to “repeat” Woodstock ’69 or live up to the impossible nostalgia were the seeds of the festival’s destruction. A sad attempt to do yet another Woodstock reboot in 2019 for the 50th anniversary never even got off the ground. 

Of course, both festivals were flawed, could never live up to expectations and yet probably had their moments, too – Woodstock 1970 glosses over lightly the issue of overcrowding, feeding the hordes and any violence at the scene, while Trainwreck focuses so heavily on the bad vibes and sense of disaster it kind of skims over that there were dozens of non-bro rock artists also playing and that despite everything, some people even apparently enjoyed it all. 

The original Woodstock becoming a proxy for the fanciful mythical never-land of hippie dreams was kind of a happy accident, which defies attempts to do it all over again. I don’t think I would’ve liked to be there, and I know I wouldn’t have wanted to be at ’99, but more than 50 years on the documentary is a powerful piece of cultural history, with some fantastic performances along the way. We put our dreams into music festivals, but in the end, sometimes you just have to go where the day takes you.

 

Laneway Festival Auckland 2026 Review: Chappell Roan, Wet Leg and the kids are all right

I finally got around to quitting Spotify at the end of last year, but not before their silly-ass “Wrapped” feature told me that my musical age was about 77 years old. A bit rude, I thought. 

I admit my musical tastes run old-school – I did just review concerts by 78-year-old Iggy Pop and 73-year-old David Byrne after all – but like a lot of middle-aged dudes, I’m trying to be hip and keep up, and this year’s Laneway Festival featured a great line-up of acts with a median age of under 30 – Geese, Wet Leg, Wolf Alice, Pink Pantheress, Benee, and the hottest act of the moment Chappell Roan. Auckland felt like a cultural capital again for a minute –  Geese just played Saturday Night Live and Chappell Roan was very much in the news this week for her wardrobe choices at the Grammys. 

It was a fantastic, life-affirming if exhausting day in the hot February sun at Western Springs, with somewhere around 40,000 people, most in their 20s, having the time of their lives. As an old dude in his mid-50s (I can’t even say EARLY 50s now) and the first proper festival I’ve been to in eight years, I was worried I couldn’t hack it. I’m sore as heck and blast furnace tanned and had a weird cramp in my leg at 4am, but I had an absolute groove.

I caught up with old mate writer Chris Schulz (who has his own great thoughts on the day) and then I kicked off with the poppy indie rock of Alex G, who put on a fine short set – their bouncy “Runner” is one of my favourite singles of the decade – although they might’ve been suited to a more chill indoor venue rather than the 25C afternoon sun. I was disappointed to only catch half of the set by Geese, whose crunchy, woozy rock is the acquired taste of the moment. Their songs always sound like they’re about to fall apart and serve up some serious Pixies/Modest Mouse vibes, and what I heard was very cool – but thanks to festival scheduling I had to zip over to see one of my absolute faves and missed the last half. 

And that fave was Wet Leg, who put out quite possibly my favourite album of 2025, moisturizer, and their fist-pumpingly cool rock is full of earworms I can’t shake. Rhian Teasdale has turned into one of the sexiest, most confident frontwomen in rock, dancing around the stage with sweaty glee, and they put on a hell of a great show. I was also blown away by Wolf Alice, a band I was only partially familiar with (their single “Bloom Baby Bloom” is dynamite), but their frontwoman Ellie Rowsell may well have been the best singer of the day – powerfully versatile and able to wail and croon through a great set – it’s always awesome to really discover a band at a festival and Wolf Alice are high on my list to hear more from. 

But honestly, I’d say a huge chunk of the 40,000 or so people jamming the field and stands were there to see the bombastic, hugely entertaining set by Chappell Roan, her first ever concert in New Zealand. I really don’t tend to see the truly big pop star concerts and it’s a whole different level to be surrounded by 20-something women loudly singing every word. Roan is an absolute star power, taking the stage on a bloody impressive huge fairy tale castle set and emerging with one of her trademark elaborate costumes looking like a Heavy Metal magazine cover come to life. But Roan’s got the chops to deliver on her showmanship – I’ve been listening to songs like “Good Luck Babe,” “Pink Pony Club” and “HOT TO GO!” and getting hooked on her yearning, empowering songwriting. Proudly queer, like many of the acts at Laneway, Roan cheered on NZ Pride Month and reminded us that even a small town girl from Missouri like her can become an inspiring global superstar no matter how screwed up America is at the moment. 

Sure, my back hurt a bit and I was very aware I was older than most of the Laneway crowd, but it was a festival of optimism and the power of music in a kind of dark time in history for a lot of good people. Maybe I was lucky, but I didn’t see any ugly drunken “bro” behaviour or angry moshing, just a whole heap of young New Zealand folks out to dance the world away and as Chappell Roan sings, “Not overdramatic, I know what I want.”

I thought of a lyric by another band from the old days who t-t-t-talked about their generation once, and I left with a crowd of thousands of people of all genders, dress codes and amazing futures, and even to a mildly ancient dude like me it felt like the kids are all right. 

Concert review: Iggy Pop and Joan Jett, Auckland, January 29

Photo by Jared Donkin

Explorers have long searched the world for a fountain of youth, but maybe it was hiding in a rock and roll song all along. 

Two legends of the trade – punk godfather Iggy Pop and queen of rock Joan Jett – testified to the immortal power of a hard-out tune at Spark Arena Thursday night.

When Joan Jett and the Blackhearts took the stage, it was with the confident and open-hearted attitude befitting rock royalty. Jett kicked off her career at just 16 years old with the all-girl punk band The Runaways and has been a trailblazer for women in rock for decades. 

Clad all in black and as dynamic as ever, Jett and the Blackhearts bashed their way through an hour of classic pop-punk nuggets. 

The expected gems like ‘I Hate Myself For Loving You’ and the Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’ got terrific airings, but there were also some fine surprises in her fast-paced hour-long set. A cover of the empowering tolerance anthem ‘Androgynous’ by the Replacements was a delight, while a real treat was a guitar-powered take on the late Sly Stone’s ‘Everyday People.’ 

Jett, a proud New Yorker, couldn’t let the current instability on the American scene go unmentioned, and made a brief but compelling statement on what she called the many in the US who are horrified at what has been happening in Minneapolis and elsewhere. “Change is gonna come… Oh yes, it is,” she said, before a blistering run through her 2006 slice of optimism ‘Change The World.’ 

Newer songs like ‘(Make The Music Go) Boom’ and ‘If You’re Blue’ had the same fine energy of the classics, but of course it was the anthems like ‘I Love Rock And Roll’ that truly got the arena crowd up and fist-pumping. Jett hasn’t lost a step despite more than 50 years in the business, and the Blackhearts backed her up terrifically, with lead guitarist Dougie Needles particularly sharp. 

Now, I only want to say this once, but it’s worth highlighting – proto-punk legend Iggy Pop is 78 years old … 79 in April. 

I say this because this leathery icon and headliner stalked onto the stage with just as much passion and raw power as he’s had ever since his legendary band The Stooges put out their first album way back in 1969. 

Iggy ripped off his shirt nanoseconds after he took to the stage and immediately tore into a set heavy on Stooges classics and raggedy and raw in all the right ways. His commitment should inspire bands half his age.

Backed by a terrifically tight band and an excellent horn section that pounded their way through an hour’s worth of mostly hard-rocking bangers, Iggy put on a master class in sheer star magnetism that showed you can bash them out as hard at 78 as you can at 25. With age, Iggy has morphed into a kind of punk Yoda, as uninhibited as ever, gyrating across the stage with charm and wit. 

The set was primarily Stooges tunes – and why not? Their molten, uncompromising hard rock is the primal ore from which dozens of bands from the 1970s to the present have emerged, and songs like ‘Gimme Danger, ‘Search And Destroy’ and ‘Raw Power’ still quiver with life more than 50 years on. 

Iggy strutted his way through nearly a dozen Stooges classics, a real treat for fans of this iconic and still somewhat under-appreciated band, of which he’s the last surviving original member. At one point he talked about how radio stations and record labels sneered at the Stooges back in the day, but “the stoners liked it.” It’s a sign of the uncanny power of those untamed songs that an arena full of folk from gray-haired to mosh-pitting Gen Z youth could all proudly dig them now. 

There was a playful, charming edge to his showmanship, with plenty of profane crowd banter and encouraging audience singalongs. The songs may still feel dangerous but Iggy… well, he seems kinda nice, really. He even put in a plug for a Kiwi wine brand, stopping to have a sip of Sauvignon Blanc between tunes, as you do. 

There were a few times when the band’s powerful wall of sound felt a bit muddy at Spark Arena, with Iggy’s vocals getting a little lost, and the Stooges-heavy set meant that a lot of Iggy’s still excellent later work got the short end of the stick. Most of the songs were from the 1970s, and there was nothing from his terrific 2016 Post Pop Depression, and only one song from his quite strong latest album, 2023’s Every Loser. 

But that’s the problem when you have as rich as catalogue as Iggy Pop, who originally made his name as a hellraiser but who’s also dabbled in lush ‘80s pop and a delightful album of crooning pop and French standards. 

When he came off the stage briefly during a roaring take on ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog,’ it wasn’t quite clear if it was on purpose or not, but this septuagenarian singer kept on playing – and when he was helped back onto the stage, the crowd couldn’t help but cheer him on. 

“I suppose I’m going to have to die pretty soon … but not tonight,” Iggy joked at one point. 

And yet mere minutes before he was belting out the chorus to the Stooges’ ‘Search And Destroy,’ screaming ‘I am a world’s forgotten boy,” and making everyone believe it.

You know, maybe the real fountain of youth was Iggy Pop all along. 

This review also up at RNZ!

Concert review: David Byrne, Auckland, January 14

It’s only the third week of January, but David Byrne’s dazzling performance at Auckland’s Spark Arena Wednesday night will go down as one of the concert highlights of the year. 

The legendary frontman for the Talking Heads made a triumphant return to Tāmaki Makaurau with his Who Is The Sky? tour, filling the arena with a constantly moving dynamic 12-piece backing band, a life-affirming blast of treasured pop songs and giving us all a much-needed blast of optimism. 

If between wars, attacks and political chaos 2026 has perhaps already seemed like a bit of a bummer, David Byrne was here to make us feel the love again. 

Byrne was once the patron saint of anxiety in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with Talking Heads’ twitchy earworms like “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down The House” capturing the vibe of a generation. These days, the vibe’s all about hope and doing the best you can with what life gives you. 

An energetic two-hour romp, the show was packed with Talking Heads favourites as well as plenty from Byrne’s loose and cheerful new album Who Is The Sky?, and even a few rarities and a cover of Paramore’s “Hard Times” that surprisingly drew one of the biggest cheers of the night. 

From a beautifully moving take on the Heads’ “Heaven” that opened up the show to underrated gems like his 2001 track “Like Humans Do,” it was a survey of an eclectic yet consistent musical career that’s now lasted more than 50 years. 

His American Utopia tour which visited NZ in 2018 was a stunner – if you haven’t seen the concert film by Spike Lee, rush out and do so immediately – reinventing the stage as a swirling kaleidoscope of dance, performance art and endlessly spinning sound. The Who Is The Sky? tour carries on that energy, with the band constantly swirling around the stage dancing, forming drum lines, even occasionally lifting each other up or Byrne himself as they all continued singing and playing. 

A vivid screen lit up the stage with abstract designs and sharp photographic backgrounds ranging from the Moon to Byrne’s own New York apartment. For “T Shirt,” the screens played a variety of fun slogans, including “Auckland kicks ass!” Perhaps the most cathartic moment of the night was when the screen filled up with fiery confrontational images of ICE protests and violence unfolding in America right now during the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime,” the screens splintering into smaller and smaller images. 

Video screens during concerts are expected now, but the clever deployment of them made them feel like more than just a gimmick, like when Byrne’s apartment began spinning around the dancers, or a witty moment when Byrne’s huge shadow behind him seemed to take on a life of its own. 

The newer songs like the endearingly silly “I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party” or “My Apartment Is My Friend” may not have gotten the crowd up and dancing as much as the familiar hits, but Byrne and company performed them all with an upbeat charm. 

The Talking Heads highlights kept coming – a colourful romp through “And She Was,” which Byrne introduced as a take on an old friend’s blissful acid trip, or a throbbing “Slippery People” with the four drummers pounding their way across the stage. 

White-haired Byrne is now 73 years old – unbelievably, as he looks 20 years younger – but he’s still full of that contagious energy of nearly 50 years ago, tempered by a wonderfully zen perspective on life and an elder statesman’s authority. He’s still playful and witty, but he’s also been around the block a few times by now. He talked about how Covid lockdowns inspired some of his newer works, and how it reminded him of the importance of human connection, a huge theme in this tour. 

The Talking Heads were always hard to pin down – they were part of the CBGB’s sound but they weren’t precisely punk, they had a lot of funk, and Byrne’s long been interested in world music. Maybe that’s what Byrne’s sound really is when it comes down to it – music for the world. 

At one point, Byrne referred to the growing and cheerfully contrarian notion that love and kindness might be the real punk rock in this age of outrage – and why not? His songs have always married that nervous paranoia with a keen eye for the little moments that bring us joy.

The near-capacity crowd at Spark Arena was a mix of grey-haired fans and sparkling youth, a testament to the sturdy timelessness of Byrne’s songs. Talking Heads have never stopped being cool. They’ve also famously never reunited, so Wednesday’s show was as close as we’ll ever get. 

The encore turned the night into a literal house party, with a gospel-inspired revamp of the excellent American Utopia track “Everybody’s Coming To My House,” followed by – what else? – a barn-burning closing take on “Burning Down The House.” 

“Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather,” Byrne famously sings in that song, but you know what? On a damp and steamy January night in Auckland, with David Byrne and his 12 mates along for the ride, it somehow felt like everything might just work out after all, as for a few hours, music made the world go round once more. 

This review also published over at RNZ with many terrific photos that aren’t by me!

And now, it’s my top 10 pop culture moments of 2025!

At this point, complaining about what a terrible year life has thrown at us is a bit of a cliche, eh? So yeah, bad things happened in 2025, oh boy did they … but if you try to doomscroll less and open your eyes a little more to everyday goodness, sometimes things can feel like they even out.  

As always, the soothing balm of pop culture – a good book, a great album, a rad comic or a mind-blowing movie – helps make the world go down a little smoother sometimes. So, at the end of year in review week for me, let’s hopescroll, with the 10 best pop culture moments I had this year! 

Photo Brenna Jo Gotje/The 13th Floor

Amyl and Sniffers live at the Powerstation, February 16: This was not a very big year for live music for me, but I promised 2025 would be my year of punk rock because right now being a punk seems the best way to fight all this enshittification. Australia’s awesome punk rising stars Amyl and the Sniffers delivered a hell of a show, full of joyful rage and a reminder that not everyone has turned evil in 2025. They’ve already played to far bigger crowds this year than the cozy Powerstation, but I’m glad I saw ‘em when I did. 

Superman saves squirrel: If you didn’t like this moment in Superman, what can I say? It’s the essence of Superman – he won’t even let a squirrel die if he can help it! and a welcome return to optimism after far too many grimdark Superman tales. 

Pluribus: Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s apocalyptic new epic starring a fantastic Rhea Seehorn might be the year’s best television – full of fascinating worldbuilding and a methodical yet hypnotic pace – a welcome novelty in this era of endless distractions. While some armchair critics called it ‘boring’ because it didn’t feature Walter White blowing up stuff every episode, I don’t think they get Pluribus. It’s a unique vibe that leaves you thinking about what it really means to be human and part of humanity. I only hope it continues to pay off whenever Season 2 comes around. 

The Pitt: Old-school and yet up-to-the-minute, this electrifying hospital drama was also a sharp reminder that despite all the endless glut of “content” flooding streamers with meandering plots, sometimes you can just pare everything back to good characters and plot momentum and score one of the best shows of the year. 

That juke joint scene in Sinners, which  floored me with its sheer beautiful audacity and confidence that the audience would keep up: “So true, it can pierce the veil between life and death.”

The Collected Cranium Frenzy by Steve Willis: One of the coolest little projects this year was a comprehensive reprinting of Cranium Frenzy, the surreal and hilarious small press comics of the legendary Steve Willis. Never heard of him? You should! As I’ve written in the past, Willis is absolutely one of the greats of the minicomics scene ever since the 1980s, but like most minicomics, it was literally impossible to find his work in print. Phoenix Productions have picked up the ball with five gorgeous little books collecting decades worth of work by Willis all on Amazon, well worth seeking out for the adventures of Morty the Dog and many more!

Wet Leg, moisturizer: I’m an old geezer whom Spotify now tells me is roughly 110 years ancient, but my favourite album by a “new” band this year was Wet Leg’s sprightly, sexy and hook-filled second album, a catchy fusion of alternative rock (does that still exist), post-punk, dance and whatever else you’d like. I’ve been humming along to “liquidize” for months. Be my marshmallow worm!

Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum: A wonderfully quirky miniseries by Ice Cream Man creators W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo that embraces all the wacky insanity of vintage Superman comics and gives it a surreal spin, kind of like if David Lynch tried to write a Spider-Man comic. I’ve sampled Ice Cream Man and it wasn’t my thing, but this Superman miniseries is such a colourful “elseworlds” delight that I’ll be keeping an eye on these creators from now on. 

This one amazing shot in Guillermo Del Toro’s terrific Frankenstein:

Writing a book: I hit 30 years in journalism at the end of 2024 and decided it was time to put together a “greatest hits” of sorts of my columns, essays, articles and more. It’s a total vanity project but I’m really pleased with how Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 came out and the kind words by family, friends and even a few complete strangers who’ve bought it. It’s more than 350 pages of scribbles that somehow sums up my so-called career. Get it now over on Amazon (and you can pick up a few collections of my long running comic series Amoeba Adventures there too)! 

Let’s all try to have a decent 2026!

I never really got over my Beatles phase

My Beatles phase has never really ended.

Like all of us, I go through phases. One week I’ll be super-into the films of Billy Wilder, or I’ll be reading all of Percival Everett’s novels I can find or all of the Daniel Warren Johnson comics I can hoover up, and the next week I’ll be all about exploring the discography of Hüsker Dü. 

But one phase that never really ends for me? That Beatles phase. Sure, it waxes and wanes, I might go a few weeks without listening to or thinking about the Beatles, but in the end, as the man said, I get back, get back to where I once belonged and dive back into figuring out the Beatles. 

There’s been a flood of Beatles content lately, so I’ve been heavy in a Beatles phase the last week or two again – rewatching the terrific 1995 Anthology documentary for the first time in ages now that it’s made its way to streaming, and listening to the latest grab bag of odds ’n’ ends, Anthology 4, all while reading a very enjoyable new deep dive into the great Lennon-McCartney partnership, John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs by Ian Leslie. 

The thing about the Beatles is, like anything that starts to pass into the realms of mythology, you never really get to the bottom of it all. I consider myself a 7 out of 10 on the scale of Beatlemania – I’m not one of those guys who can tell you who Stuart Sutcliffe’s grandparents were or what John Lennon had for breakfast the day they recorded “Penny Lane.” 

There’s 213 or so “official Beatles songs” plus all the infinite demos, jams and alternate takes that have been pouring out the last few years in super fancy special editions. Recently I came back to the mildly obscure track “Hey Bulldog,” and really listened to it – the thumping piano intro, McCartney’s sturdy bass line, the giddy sneer Lennon gives the lines “What makes you think you’re something special when you smile?” It felt like a whole new song suddenly bloomed to me even thought I’m sure I heard it dozens of times before. How did this happen? 

My parents weren’t big music listeners – about all I can recall in the way of “rock” music in the small vinyl collection was some Peter, Paul and Mary – so I didn’t really start hearing the Beatles in childhood, but I was the perfect age to discover them when their albums first started coming out on CD during high school and Generation X got Beatlemania. The Past Masters collections in particular cracked my head open navigating the band’s stunning evolution from poppy singalongs to psychedelic freak-outs. I still can’t quite fathom how they went from singing “Love Me Do” in the Cavern to recording “Tomorrow Never Knows” in less than four years. 

There’s a spark of joy that ignites in me whenever I truly listen to the Beatles, and I think the central mystery at the heart of it all is how these people, these scruffy rough kids from Liverpool, exploded to change pop culture in their decade or so of existence. We want to get inside these songs, to find how creativity itself works. The magic of creation remains the greatest magical mystery tour of all, and in an age where we’re increasingly served up algorithmic bait, fluff and trivia, the rough-hewn analog invention of Paul, John, George and Ringo still feels bottomlessly appealing to me. 

This is why I never really end my Beatles education, because even a bit of a cash grab like the fourth Anthology collection, with its surplus of pretty rote instrumental tracks, can grab me by digging up the gloriously unhinged take 17 on “Helter Skelter.” I sucked up the unabashed nostalgia of “Now And Then” and I dug the rhythmic hypnotic excess of Peter Jackson’s sprawling Get Back miniseries.

I’ve listened to Abbey Road or Revolver a hundred times a hundred times over the years and yet I can still find tiny new scraps of newness in those well-worn grooves. Yep, like everything else, the Beatles have become a content-churning factory in 2025, and, that new “final” ninth episode of Beatles Anthology probably wasn’t truly necessary, yet the little fragments we get of 50-something Paul, George and Ringo (30 years ago!) jamming and messing about with John’s sketchy demos on “Free As A Bird” still feel true despite the glossy sheen of Disney’s content farming. 

And so it’s gone, over the years – I keep coming back to the Beatles, and discovering how much I still haven’t really paid attention to before. 

The very last words Ringo sweetly says as the nine-hour journey of Anthology winds down are, “I like hanging out with you guys.” Me too, mates. 

Why sometimes we all feel like Lloyd Dobler’s girlfriend’s dad

Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything is a great movie and one of the best teen romance movies ever made – quirky yet sincere, witty yet honest. John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler and Ione Skye’s Diane Court feel real in a way so many ‘80s teen movies never manage to. I saw it at least three times in the theatre back in 1989 when I was deeply underwater in my own series of doomed high school love affairs and I love to revisit it in the years since.

And yet – I think just about my favourite little moment in the movie, even more than that whole iconic boombox scene, isn’t anything to do with teen romance at all.

Instead, it’s Diane’s father Jim, played by the late great John Mahoney, singing alone in his car off-key along to Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” just before his life is about to fall apart. 

Poor old Diane’s dad has been defrauding the rest home he manages and will soon be arrested, and it’s a tragic little twist in the movie that the father she idolises turns out to be an inept con man. At this point, Jim probably knows there’s bad things coming, and they do, but just for a moment, he’s in a car and Steely Dan comes on the radio and that’s everything. 

Diane’s dad sings happily along with Steely Dan with all his heart, not caring that he sounds awful, but the music has snagged something deep inside of him and it won’t let go. Sometimes a song gets you like that, usually when you’re alone, and you feel it pulling you inside whether you want it to or not. I have a frickin’ awful singing voice, but sometimes you move on sheer primal instinct. 

Music hits on a different level than most things, and it can break you open in new ways when you least expect it. 

A song by the great Neutral Milk Hotel came on Spotify while I was out exercising a year or so back, and Jeff Magnum’s strained and aching voice hit me hard, bringing to mind all the love and loss we go through and the things we just can’t fix. Almost unconsciously I started singing along with “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” and damn it, the lines “How strange is it to be anything at all” got me suddenly choking up in the middle of a suburban walk, sucked in. It felt wonderful and painful all at the same time, in an inchoate way I can’t even fully explain.  

Or the other day that ‘80s chestnut “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears came on and for some reason this time the chorus got me, and I began singing along alone in the car, ecstatic and sad and nostalgic and hopeful in all the ways a good song can unearth in you. And don’t even get me started about Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” also featured so prominently in Say Anything… that song contains entire multiverses for me.

There’s a part of everyone that sometimes is just like Lloyd Dobler’s girlfriend’s dad, singing along by yourself about Rikki, hoping she doesn’t lose that number, knowing she probably will, but maybe she’ll send it off in a letter to herself. 

There’s a beautiful loneliness to Jim Court’s car singalong, but there’s also the music, keeping him company and for just a few seconds, making everything all right again. 

Sometimes all you want is a medley of the hits, right? 

While foraging at the groovy local record emporium last weekend, I stumbled across a CD single I’d never seen by Prince, Purple Medley. I snatched it up instantly, because I’m a sucker for the cheesy medleys, and a medley of Prince’s golden era is not to be missed. 

OK, I’ll admit – medleys sit at the bottom of the ladder of musical melding, while a little higher up there’s remixes and at the top, skilled sampling. Medleys are the Cousin Oliver or Poochie of pop music, bastard children that nobody really respects. Yet there is a party-down energy to a good medley, which at its best feels like a song of “all good bits” and no boring bits. Medleys are proudly basic – a chorus bashing into another refrain slipping into a good drum solo, with little layering or dissection. 

On Purple Medley there’s goofy fun in hearing “Little Red Corvette” push into the sultry chorus for “Cream,” or the raunchy opening power guitar chords of “Batdance” swerve into the bouncy intro to “When Doves Cry.” It never replaces the Olympian Prince originals, of course, but sometimes all you want is a medley.  

You can’t think “medley” without going past the kitschy world of Stars On 45, the Dutch tinkerers who used knock-off soundalikes to bash out a stew of Beatles ’n’ disco ’n’ Star Wars and much more in the early 1980s. In that distant pre-internet age, such repurposing of well-loved hits felt a bit startling, like a glimpse of the future. It wasn’t much fancier than splicing, but a good medley always carried an element of surprise. 

I always dug Weird Al’s delirious silly “polka medleys” on his albums slapping together a half-dozen or so hits into a crazed Looney Tunes-style joy ride, and I’ll admit, guiltily, to playing Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers’ eminently dopey cassette single for “Swing The Mood” an awful lot back in the day. Jive Bunny turned canned nostalgia into a brief viral sensation by giving old chestnuts like “Rock Around The Clock”, “Tutti Frutti” and Glenn Miller a hip-hop spin. It’s music as party wallpaper, no depth required. 

I won’t argue these are great art, and in fact a lot of the times they’re just awful. But other times, the  appeal of the medley is hearing the bits you know spliced and diced into something new.

It’s not really the same as sampling, which actually is an art form – the bits are shattered into many smaller shards in a sample, chopped up so far that they become building blocks for something new. A lot of great music has been created from the once-maligned art of sampling, from the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique to J Dilla to DJ Shadow to The Avalanches and many more. The samplers take it further, but the medley-making mix masters like Jive Bunny are all about sticking to the surface, cutting and pasting a collage of all the things you already know. 

To my embarrassment, I dabbled in splicing together medleys myself for a spell my freshman year of college – in between the drunken escapades and studying I sometimes found myself playing around with my old-school double tape deck and CD player, painstakingly pressing “record” and “stop” again and again to put together a just-for-me melange of clips from my tape and CD collection of Depeche Mode, cartoon sound effects, Men At Work, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Prince, Aerosmith, Robert Plant’s “Tall Cool One,” Iron Maiden, quotable bits of movies and TV shows all mashed up with excerpts from dire “comedy” cassettes my teen friends and I made. 

I spent an awful lot of hours in that weird time pressing “stop” and “record” to slap together a half-dozen or so silly medleys, but to me at the time, it felt kind of comforting to see the pieces of my past in new ways. I could see the appeal of getting inside sounds. 

Medleys are hacked together for sheer consumerism but sometimes they can feel like a bit of accidental art. Prince didn’t have a thing to do with putting together “Purple Medley” far as I can tell, but it’s still all about echoes of his art. And of course, a medley doesn’t erase the original songs.

One could even argue that it’s a heir of William S. Burroughs’ “cut up” techniques of random art generation, with Jive Bunny part of a long line of iconoclastic innovators. 

…Or maybe not. Perhaps I’m just basic in my occasional need for a medley. But y’know, that “Purple Medley” is pretty darned cool.

Still sticking up for Phil Collins after all these years

Musical tastes change with age, I get it. But no matter how cool you think you get, the stuff you loved when you were 14 years old will always be your secret love.

So it is with me and Phil Collins, whose best work I’ve always got time for, no matter how much other stuff I listen to. 

Phil’s third and best solo album No Jacket Required came out 40 years ago this year, and 1985 really was the peak of Phil-mania or Collins-palooza, whatever you want to call it. The guy was everywhere for a year or so there. And boy, some people hated that. Not me. 

In the summer of 1985, I nerdily rocked out to Genesis’ later albums with Phil and company and the gloriously cheesy video to “Don’t Lose My Number.” There was something about the best of Phil’s songs that excited me – perhaps it was the way Phil’s sincere voice always made everything sound so darned dramatic, or his drummer’s sense of rhythm pushing along the tunes. 

I wouldn’t classify Phil as an innovator, but when it came to pop hooks, the man could cook. That unforgettable drum burst with “In The Air Tonight,” the melodramatic urgency of “Don’t Lose My Number”’s chorus, the soaring keyboard riff that opens the banger Philip Bailey duet “Easy Lover.” Even the annoyingly catchy chorus of “Sussudio,” a song folks love to hate, is a bona fide earworm of amiable gibberish. 

I think what struck me all those years ago on MTV was Collins’ seeming normalcy in the heart of pop stardom. Balding and ordinary, he was the odd man out against flashier, more innovative stars like Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson or Springsteen. He wore Members Only jackets and had a mullet. He’s a history nerd who collected Alamo relics. He felt relatable. I’d never be a George Michael, but maybe I could be a Phil. 

And even though I’m a diehard Peter Gabriel fan until the end, I’ll quietly under my breath admit that when it comes to Genesis, I kind of listen to the radio-friendly Phil years more than I do the proggy Gabriel era. Listening to the vaguely proggy Abacab at a church ski camp felt slightly subversive. And none-more-’80s blockbuster “Invisible Touch” for the win, man. 

Unfortunately there’s a kind of weakness in Collins’ work that only increased with age – his tendency for mawkish ballads. His solo albums tended to be a mix of ballads and rockers – some very good ballads too, like “Against All Odds” or “Take Me Home”, but somewhere around the unfortunately foreshadowing album But Seriously… Phil got more sappy and less sassy, singing about poverty and apartheid instead of Sussudios. 

By 1993’s Both Sides album he slipped mostly into bland soft-rock territory and the hooks of his grand early solo run faded away. He left Genesis and did Disney movie soundtracks and kind of like Billy Joel, he left the work that made him famous for different territories. 

These days he’s basically retired at age 74 – Collins’ health has been notoriously poor the last few years, a lifetime of hardcore drumming catching up with him. Recent reunion tours saw him sitting down the whole show. 

Still, from Face Value through that 40-year-old banger No Jacket Required, Phil Collins was an unlikely arena-filling superstar. And I have to admit a little bit of my love for classic Phil is sticking up for the underdog. Collins became a bit of a piñata for critical beatings over the years, even with “In the Air Tonight” becoming a classic across generations. Even in his breezy autobiography Going Back, you get the sense he sees himself as a little unappreciated. 

Listening to Phil grounds me and reminds me that sometimes it’s just about whether or not the music moves you, not what the in crowd says. Even though I don’t listen to a lot of today’s pop – sorry, I’m still agnostic on the Taylor Swift question – my Phil-fandom means I try not to sneer at anyone else’s tastes too hard. If you like it, you like it. 

Collins’ songs didn’t change the world, but I also can never quite entirely get them out of my head. For a musician, that’s not the worst legacy to leave. I’m too old to care about being cool now, so I’ll listen to Phil Collins sometimes and bang my head to “Easy Lover” like it was 1985 all over again. 

And if you don’t like that, you can Sussudio right off, eh? 

The best image ever taken of Phil Collins in concert, 1981

I’m losing my edge, but I was there: My top albums of 2005

Gaze with me back into the misty reaches of time to a year called 2005, when I was thinking of buying a fancy device called an iPod, where we all thought George W Bush was the worst President ever, the pope had just died and Christian Bale debuted a gritty new take on Batman. We’re at least two Batmans along now on the sliding scale of time, but everything old is new again, ain’t it? 

I mark 2005 as just about the time when I got a little less intensely involved in following all the hip cool new music trends out there – I’d just had a kid, which instantly makes you less cool, and the internet hadn’t quite exploded into a tsunami of content no one person can absorb. While I still try to keep up with what goes on for the youths, I’m well aware I’m a middle-aged white dude and the tastemakers aren’t me. 

Yet, 20 years on, it feels like 2005 was a very good year for the bustling world of indie rock and music – acts like Queens of the Stone Age and Fiona Apple built on their earlier success, quirky pop music was having a moment and singer-songwriters were blazing some new ground with the work of Mountain Goats and Sufjan Stevens. 

So, here’s my 10 fave records to pull up on the ol’ iPod from 2005, and while popular music is always an ever-moving target, many of these songs still feel pretty vital today in our increasingly fractured world. 

ANOHNI (as Antony and the Johnsons), I Am A Bird Now – The soaring voice of the transgender musician now known as Anohni is one of the most evocative in music, and this heartbreaking album by her earlier band is still dazzling chamber pop, rich with love and loss.

Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine – Apple has been determined to follow her own muse, and this album saw her truly embracing her own vision after her earlier flirtations with MTV stardom. Filled with confidence, she sets out her own jazz-influenced territory, channeling influences from Joni Mitchell to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and dares us to take it all in. 

LCD Soundsystem, self-titled – James Murphy’s dance-rock project zipped through the culture like a comet but their first album remains their best, combining hipster self-parody in “Losing My Edge” with joyful anthems like “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” The arch coolness of their work would eventually lose its novelty, but man, I was there, at the start of it. 

Mountain Goats, Sunset Tree – For “This Year” alone, this album deserves a slot in the 2005 pantheon. John Darnielle’s fragile, gorgeous songs delve into his abusive childhood, but makes it a universal concept album about powerlessness, hope and gathering the strength to move on. 

New Pornographers, Twin Cinema – This all-star group of indie musicians with a kind of terrible name includes Neko Case, AC Newman and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar crafting wonderful power-pop. This is their finest set, which plays like a greatest hits collection for a band you’ve never heard before – an upbeat, melodic group of songs that bounces comfortably between each of the members’ distinctive voices. 

Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins – The loosely defined Elephant 6 Collective of psychedelic pop bands had a moment, and of Montreal was always my favourite of them – eccentric, inventive swirling sounds filled with hooks. Like a lot of bands of the time they were insanely prolific and not always great at quality control, but the one-two punch of The Sunlandic Twins and 2007’s Hissing Fauna were their finest hour, with frontman Kevin Barnes’ keen, chameleon voice guiding you down his own very peculiar musical highways. 

The Phoenix Foundation, Pegasus – This New Zealand band’s gorgeous melancholy came together nicely in their second album for a series of atmospheric, wandering songs that feel laidback, yet tense with subtext. It gets more and more rewarding with each listen. 

Queens of the Stone Age, Lullabies to Paralyze – I sometimes feel like QotSA are the last great rock band, left from a time when stoners ruled the earth. Their pounding desert rock coalesces here into a pounding haze of riffs that broods and pummels away. If I had long hair still, I’d be headbanging to this one, which still stands out in Josh Homme’s stellar career. 

Spoon, Gimme Fiction – Spoon never quite became the big name they deserved to be, as alternative rock faded from the zeitgeist, but their attitude-drenched sound had a delicious energy, and this album, packed with swaggering nuggets like “I Turn My Camera On” and “Sister Jack”, holds up well. 

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois – Stevens’ voice, always so delicate, takes us on a concept album through the American midwest, but his ultimate subject is always the fragile human heart. Layering on orchestras, show tunes, baroque pop and gentle ballads, it’s a remarkable album that feels like it covers more than just one state, but the promise and peril of America itself in its songs. It may be 20 years old now, but it’s still pretty timeless stuff.