With all the excitement of Pink’s just finished, record-breaking run of seven sold out New Zealand concerts (six in Auckland and one in Dunedin), it’s easy to forget that another female superstar of the same generation was also in town at almost the exact same time. If we wind the clock back about three years, it…
Category: Music
Why Do Millennials Go Crazy Over You’re The Voice & The Horses? Hanging Out With John Farnham & Daryl Braithwaite At The World’s Most Remote Music Festival, The Big Red Bash
In July I was invited to the deepest depths of the Australian Outback to cover the self-described “most remote music festival in the world”, Queensland’s Big Red Bash. With John Farnham the headline act and fellow Aussie baby boomer star Daryl Braithwaite also on the bill, I went to the towering sand dunes on the…
Farewell To Aretha Franklin – The Heartbreaking Song Her Sister Wrote For Her
10 years ago I was in Melbourne and stumbled into this amazing little vintage clothes shop in a basement somewhere in the central city. Flicking through the stock, it was such a relief to finally find a place that sold music T-shirts beyond the usual suspects of Bob Marley, Led Zeppelin, Metallica and the Rolling…
Great Southern Land: The Soundtrack To An Aussie Outback Road Trip – My NZ Herald Article
On Monday I’ll be returning to the Queensland Outback so here’s a recent piece of mine the New Zealand Herald published about my ‘roo-dodging, Aussie-soundtracked road trip there back in 2016: New Zealand Herald, May 6, 2018: ‘Brisbane – Way beyond the beach’ As the title suggests, this was “way beyond the beach”. As in,…
21 Different Genres, 21 Different Bee Gees Songs – Barry Gibb Gets His Knighthood
I’m so thrilled for Barry Gibb, or Sir Barry Gibb as he is now officially known. His knighthood was finally presented to him by Prince Charles a few hours ago (having been announced in December last year) with Barry joking to the future king about the difficulty in getting up from the stool he had to kneel…
40 Years Since Andy Gibb’s ‘Shadow Dancing’ & The Biggest Hit Of 1978
This past week marked 40 years since Andy Gibb hit the summit of the US singles charts with Shadow Dancing, the title track to his second album. This wasn’t just a big hit. We’re talking double platinum in the US with more than 2.5 million copies sold in that country alone. Then there are the…
Paul McCartney & The Best Ever Carpool Karaoke
Forget every other Carpool Karaoke, this tops them all. I woke up this morning and this clip with James Corden and Paul McCartney was everywhere on Facebook. The cliche of “if you only watch one thing today, watch this” was used about half a dozen times, just from people I know alone. So here it…
Barry Gibb Reveals Long Lost Grease Demo As The Film Turns 40
I can remember reading once that Barry Gibb reportedly earned more money for writing the song Grease than any one person has ever earned for a solitary song in music history. Something both highly contestable and near-on impossible to quantify, but who cares, it’s a great fun fact. Even if the “fact” aspect is mightily…
Martin Luther King 50 Years On: Commodores Bassist Ronald LaPread Recalls The Day He Met Him – My NZ Herald Article
Last week the New Zealand Herald published my article about the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Junior. Click here to link to the piece that details my 2016 visit to the site of King’s assassination, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. If you’re planning a trip to the States and Memphis is somehow missing…
Cat Stevens Live: My NZ Herald Review Of His ‘Intimate And Grand’ Auckland Concert
It’s not everyday you get a retweet from Cat Stevens. Indeed it would be slightly odd if Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam loved your Twitter feed to such an extent. But a one off? I’ll take it. Apparently the man himself liked my review of his Auckland concert late last year and humbly said, that’s a massive…
Why It’s Wrong To Call Maurice Gibb “The Quiet Bee Gee” – 15 Years Since His Death
He was the glue, the joker, the multi-instrumentalist and the rock ‘n’ roll of the Bee Gees and this month, it’s 15 years since Maurice Gibb’s sudden death. Thinking back to the news headlines after Maurice died (due to complications from a twisted intestine), so many stories referred to him as “the quiet Bee Gee”…
Saturday Night Fever Turns 40, Barry Gibb Gets A Knighthood & This Music Geek Discovers Something Unusual About The Fever Songs
Barry Gibb has a knighthood and I’m a happy man. I’m not much into numerology, but there is something about the Gibb family and the number 7. The Bee Gees had their first international hits in 1967, they released what became the biggest selling album of all time in 1977, they stormed back to the top of…