I wrote a post yesterday about it being 25 years this week since the death of Andy Gibb and mentioned that many music fans might be surprised to learn much of his songwriting was in the country vein. This taps into the endless frustration I have with people’s idiotic appraisal of late 70s music in…
Category: Music
25 Years Since Andy Gibb’s Death – A Remarkable, Lost Song
Andy Gibb. A little over a week since Barry Gibb’s triumphant Mission Estate Concert in Napier (in front of 20,000 fans, see article below about my backstage experience), the Gibb family are in the news again today, specifically Andy. If he was still alive, today would be his 55th birthday and in just five days…
Backstage With Bee Gee Barry Gibb At The Mission Estate Concert
The Two went on tour this past weekend and despite inept road-signs, several u-turns, a missing map-book and an embarrassing absence of modern phone-internet technology, we made it to Napier and back to Auckland in one piece. In the process Pam Corkery and I also had the most welcoming, humbling, human and enthralling backstage…
Barry Gibb Mythology Tour Concert Review – Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne
Barry Gibb at Rod Laver Arena, February 12. Because one Barry Gibb concert was never going to be enough, I decided to jump across to Melbourne for a whirlwind couple of nights to see the second most successful songwriter in music history* play Rod Laver Arena just 11 nights before he’ll be here in New…
Why Cliff Richard Is Much Cooler Than You Think
Last night I saw my very first childhood music hero in concert, the third time I’ve now seen this most unfashionable of pop stars in a live setting. When I was five years old, Cliff Richard was it. Sure, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon were up there too, but top of the pile as a…
Richard Ashcroft Sampling The Bee Gees – 10 Years Since Maurice Gibb’s Death
He was the glue, the joker, the multi-instrumentalist and the rock ‘n’ roll of the Bee Gees and today, it’s 10 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” which…
The Timeless Genius Of Paul Simon’s American Tune
Over the last couple of weeks, Pam Corkery and I (Newstalk ZB’s The Two) have been doing ZB’s weekday evening show and have loved bringing what we do (which is normally once a week on Sundays between 9pm-midnight) to an even wider audience. For us a hugely important part of our shows is the music, even…
Fun. With The Underrated Song Of 2012
Often there’s no rhyme nor reason as to why some songs become hits and others not. Take the band Fun, best known for the fairly poppy We Are Young (a massive US #1 hit) as well as the far more interesting Some Nights (US #3), complete with its schizophrenic Simon & Garfunkel meets the Eagles meets a…
The Barry Gibb Interview 2012 – The Full Transcript Plus Another Forgotten Bee Gees Classic
A few weeks ago I interviewed (alongside my co-host on Newstalk ZB’s The Two, Pam Corkery) the last remaining Gibb brother, Bee Gee Barry Gibb. A feature article based on this interview will be appearing in New Zealand’s number one current affairs magazine The Listener in January ahead of Barry’s concert at the Mission in…
Pink’s Domestic Violence Ballet ‘Try’ – Her Greatest Song Yet
A still from the video for Try. Just a short post to follow-up on a discussion Pam Corkery and I had on last night’s episode of The Two (Newstalk ZB, Sunday evenings, 9pm-midnight) about Pink’s latest song, Try. I don’t know a great deal about what constitutes pioneering dance choreography, but as far as I can…
When A Great Band Gets A Good Album’s First Single Wrong #U2 #TheKillers
Apologies for the hashtags in the headline, but two of my favourite bands have erred in recent times with their new album’s first single and somebody needs to come forward and tell them. Pick me! Today I was at JB HiFi and was reminded of just how brilliant and inspirational U2 can be. Lots of…
4 More Years For Obama – The Irony Of Springsteen’s Campaign Theme Song
It’s almost a week since President Obama won a second term so it’s about time I loaded up a relevant song to The Roxborogh Report to mark the occasion. I’ve gone with what became the campaign theme song, Bruce Springsteen’s We Take Care Of Our Own from his most recent album Wrecking Ball. The song…
