BLAIR MORGAN

There was a moment in the early "noughts" when it seemed as though indie guitar music was about to save everything.And now, roughly a quarter of a century later, three of those acts ,or in Brandon Flowers' case, one of the principal creative forces behind one of them ,have new albums. The Strokes have Reality Awaits. Interpol have This Mirror Weighs a Ton. And Brandon Flowers, stepping outside The Killers again but carrying much of that band's identity with him, has released

I first found Peter Case by accident, which still seems the right way to find him. It was the mid-1980s, and I was reading the album review section in the Christchurch Star, the Christchurch evening newspaper . The review was about R.E.M's Life's Rich Pageant , the follow up to Fables of the Reconstruction, an album that raarely left the turntable. For the second review following REM it was mentioned a great opening act for REM would be Peter Case.

August 2019. Justin Townes Earle, promoting what would be his last album The Saint of Lost Causes, stood alone on stage in Ōtautahi Christchurch, midway through a set that would barely stretch beyond an hour.

Los Lobos prove that a band can keep evolving, experimenting, and still stay together. The wolf, indeed, survives..

Every now and then, a song taps you on the shoulder and more or less demands to be written.

My annual Top 10 .Happy listening and check out the Spotify playlist for some standout tracks .

Can't exactly recall but could have been my first purchases; a collision of True Colours by Split Enz and The River by Bruce Springsteen or maybe much earlier the "Red and Blue" Beatles collection - think the cover shots 1962 vs 1969 , a young mind could get carried away thinking about how did these guys go from there to there in such a short time?