S.G. Goodman has shared a new track, “Fire Sign”, a taster for her upcoming third studio album, Planting By The Signs – which is released via Slough Water Records / Thirty Tigers on June 20.
Says Goodman of “Fire Sign”, “After touring relentlessly for 2 years, ‘living like the sun don’t shine / on the same dog’s ass everyday,’ as the song puts it, I came off the road questioning my purpose and choices. People are quick to tell you that you are not working hard enough, but slow in telling you that you are working hard enough. That seems to be up to you, as well as your ‘why?’. Despite this burnout and other personal setbacks, I found the fire to keep pushing and to make what I believe is my best record yet. ‘Who’ll put the fire out?’ The only person who can put my fire out is myself.”
Goodman recorded Planting By The Signs at the Nutt House in Sheffield, Alabama, alongside co-producer Drew Vandenberg (her co-producer on 2022’s Teeth Marks) and guitarist/songwriter Matt Rowan. Bonnie “Prince” Billy appears on a duet, “Nature’s Child”.
The tracklisting for Planting By The Signs is:
Satellite Fire Sign I Can See the Devil Snapping Turtle Michael Told Me Solitaire I’m In Love Nature’s Child (feat. Bonnie “Prince” Billy) Heat Lightning Planting by the Signs (feat. Matthew Rowan) Heaven Song
Dubbed The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, the films star (l to r) Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr) and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison).
The four theatrical feature films – one from each band member’s point-of-view – will open in cinemas from April 2028.
As yet, the scriptwriter on the project is unknown.
The Grateful Dead co-founder will be joined by his Wolf Bros bandmates: Don Was on bass, along with Dead & Company‘s Jeff Chimenti on piano and Jay Lane on drums.
This orchestral project debuted in America in 2022 with a sold-out four-night run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where Weir and his bandmates performed with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Tickets for the Royal Albert Hall performance will be available through a series of presales beginning Wednesday, April 2 at 2PM BST and the general on sale will follow on Friday, April 4 at 4PM BST. Fans can sign up for the artist presale here.
Small Faces are the stars of our latest free CD, Something Nice, available with the May 2025 issue of Uncut.
Small Faces are the stars of our latest free CD, Something Nice, available with the May 2025 issue of Uncut.
The 11-track album includes rarities, alternate takes and live cuts, including a set of tracks from the new deluxe edition of The Autumn Stone.
This slew of rare Small Faces goodies is largely pooled from Kenney Jones’s recently revived Nice Records. “I started the label in the ’90s to raise money for Ronnie Lane when he had multiple sclerosis,” Jones tells Uncut. “I put it to bed after he died, but have since thought, ‘No, I want to do something with this.’”
The first Nice release was 2021’s Live 1966, an extraordinary document of Small Faces’ two sets at the Twenty Club in Mouscron, Belgium, selections from which comprise the first half of our CD. “It was one of the first gigs we’d ever done abroad,” recalls Jones. “We always loved jamming and that gig is really what the Small Faces were all about. You can hear why Led Zeppelin became big fans – Page and Plant in particular. The spirit of those early days never left us.”
Also included are rare mixes, cuts from the newly expanded edition of 1969’s The Autumn Stone and an in-progress version of Tim Hardin’s “Red Balloon”, exclusive to Uncut. All of it carries Small Faces’ unique imprint. “We had so much chemistry,” Jones adds. “There was a kind of telepathic understanding between the four of us. We just always knew what was needed.”
1 Ooh Poo Pah Doo (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) “Formidable!” cries the excitable Belgian stage announcer, before Small Faces launch into the opening song of their matinee set in Mouscron. Originally released in 1960 by New Orleans singer Jessie Hill, “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” undergoes a full rock’n’roll makeover, with Ronnie Lane’s bluesy vocals out front and Ian McLagan driving along on organ. One of several songs the band never captured in the studio.
2 You Need Loving (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) Steve Marriott fairly flies into this heaving R&B remake of Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love”, still four months shy of its studio counterpart on Small Faces’ debut album. Built around an improvised jam, the song had been in the band’s repertoire since they first started. Robert Plant evidently took note, later mining Marriott’s raw phrasing for Led Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love”.
3 Plum Nellie (medley) (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) Along with “Green Onions”, “Plum Nellie” was one of two Booker T & The MG’s instrumentals in Small Faces’ early setlists. Here it forms part of an epic medley that includes a fearsome take on Big Joe Williams’ “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (styled after Muddy Waters) and Bukka White’s mighty “Parchman Farm”, before climaxing in a breathless blues blowout.
4 What’Cha Gonna Do About It (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) Crowd hysteria ensues after Marriott introduces “our current British hit”, a pumping R&B powerhouse directly inspired by Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love”, with lyrics by Ian Samwell and Brian Potter. It would find its way into the Sex Pistols’ setlist a decade later, falling short of Small Faces’ ferocious live attack, however. “This really suited the power of Steve’s voice,” notes Kenney Jones.
5 Comin’ Home Baby (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) Previously recorded by the Dave Bailey Quintet, Herbie Mann and (with the addition of vocals) American jazz crooner Mel Tormé, this searing instrumental offers a fabulous insight into Small Faces’ intuitive dynamic. Marriott singles out McLagan during the lead-up – “This is our organist, Mac… Hope you dig it a lot” – but it’s very much a groove-riding ensemble piece.
6 E Too D (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) This Marriott/Lane original, developed from a live jam, is essentially a two-chord blues vamp (hence the title). Yet there’s also room for spontaneity and an old-school tip of the hat (“You heard of Chuck Berry? You heard of Nina Simone?”) as Marriott unpacks a tortured, imploring lead vocal. The studio version would fetch up on Small Faces in May ’66.
7 The Autumn Stone (mono single mix) September 1968 saw Small Faces record for the final time as a four-piece at Olympic Studios, where Marriott’s sublime, semi-acoustic “Jenny’s Song” was reworked as “The Autumn Stone”. Rejected as a single by Immediate, whose Andrew Oldham felt unsure of its commercial potential, this mono mix remained in the vaults until being issued on limited-edition vinyl for Record Store Day 2016.
8 Green Circles (mono) Inexplicably ditched in favour of “Talk To You” as B-side of “Here Come The Nice” (Small Faces’ debut single for Immediate), “Green Circles” is a firm fan favourite, marking the band’s shift from bullish mod-pop to bucolic psychedelia. Lane and Marriott share trippy vocals about an enlightened stranger imparting wisdom: “He dreamt of circles in the air/And you and I and everywhere”.
9 I Can’t Make It (stripped-down acoustic mix) The single version of “I Can’t Make It” was caught in the crossfire that accompanied Small Faces’ acrimonious switch from Decca to Immediate in 1967, barely troubling the Top 30 after the group refused to promote it. In its pared-back form – as heard on the expanded The Autumn Stone – the song’s limber groove and Stax/Motown core feel all the more invitingly lucid.
10 Red Balloon (Take 4 backing track) Exclusive to Uncut, this newly mixed instrumental backing track finds the band veering into warm folk-roots territory, highlighted by electric piano, distorted 12-string guitar and Jones’s nimble brushwork. “Red Balloon” was cut at Trident in late May 1968, a day before the release of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. Another Tim Hardin tune, “If I Were A Carpenter”, was already in their live set.
11 All Or Nothing (Live) This Steve Marriott classic landed Small Faces their first UK No 1 hit in September 1966. An essential component of the band’s live show from thereon in, by the time of this November ’68 performance at Newcastle City Hall it had taken on a richer, more measured tone, accentuated by McLagan’s soulful organ textures. “All Or Nothing” would later form the requiem at Marriott’s funeral.
The double LP will include seven previously unreleased bonus tracks, a 40-page art book and a new essay by Stevens. Hear the previously unreleased “Mystery Of Love (Demo)” below. Taken from the original Carrie & Lowell album sessions, it was later re-worked and re-recorded for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name:
The bonus disc also includes demo versions of “Death With Dignity”, “Should Have Known Better”, “The Only Thing” and “Eugene”, as well as expansive outtakes of “Fourth Of July” and “Wallowa Lake Monster”.
Things were very different in early 1995 when Spiritualized’s magnificent second album Pure Phase came out at the height of Britpop, reaching number 20 in the charts. But as Jason Pierce shows this evening, not much has changed in his world. Seven albums and 30 years later, J Spaceman’s vision remains essentially the same as he channels the heavy cosmic blues and raw Americana that has come to define the Spiritualized sound through a 15-piece ensemble for this special anniversary performance.
This is the band’s second night at the Barbican as part of a run of shows this year celebrating Pure Phase, the Spiritualized album that tends to get overlooked in favour of its follow-up Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space, but which many fans consider to be the perfect distillation of Pierce’s musical genius.
It moved the band on from their more delicate debut Lazer Guided Melodies by bringing in some of Pierce’s most immediate pop songs – “Medication”, “Lay Back In The Sun” – and introducing the soulful gospel tropes he’d explore in rich detail later on, while retaining the electronic tones and harmonious drones that always suggested he was tuned to a celestial frequency only he could hear – a result of his fastidious production and mixing methods.
Pure Phase also gave the band some personality and helped to solidify their approach. Back then, Pierce played up to his spaced-out image by wearing an astronaut suit and posing vacantly for press shots in a T-shirt with the slogan “Drugs Not Jobs”, arm in arm with his partner at the time, Kate Radley.
This evening, Pierce is the only person on stage not wearing black as he stands to the right in a pale shirt, shades and silver trainers with his band arranged in a semi-circle around the stage, leaving a large empty space in the centre. The eye lands on the rhythm section anchored in the middle, Starsailor’s James Stelfox on bass and long-time Spiritualized drummer Kevin Bales. Above them, a huge moon is projected on the backdrop – maybe we will be floating in space? – and the room is bathed in swirling green light, reflecting the colour of the Pure Phase reissue in 2021.
You usually know what you’re getting with a Spiritualized show, but this evening you really do because Pure Phase is played in sequence. Pierce’s regular five-piece band is joined by strings, brass and four backing singers, which allows him to deliver maximalist versions of each song, perhaps presenting Pure Phase in its entirety for the first time in the way he’d always imagined it (budget permitting).
Somehow Pierce turns 60 this year, and for all the garlands tossed at his most recent album Everything Was Beautiful, he has effectively been writing versions of “Medication” for the last 30 years. “Every night I stay up late and make my state more desperate,” he sings, slightly crumpled, on this transcendent junkie prayer that opens the show, but by the end he’s come alive as the brass rings out: “Makes me feel so good – leaves me fucked up inside!” This leads into the sweeter “The Slide Song” and gentler “All Of My Tears” before the audience is vaporised by the pulsating sax-and-strobe overload of “These Blues”.
Everything that makes Spiritualized such a compelling live experience is contained in Pure Phase – even the sinuous electronic passages seem to glow as if beamed in from another dimension. And yet the 20-minute encore of “Cop Shoot Cop”, that deep-fried acid-rock gospel trip from Ladies And Gentleman…, immediately illustrates the leap Pierce took for his next album. That one turns 30 in two years – start queuing for tickets now.
SET LIST 1 Medication 2 The Slide Song 3 Electric Phase 4 All Of My Tears 5 These Blues 6 Let It Flow 7 Take Good Care Of It 8 Born, Never Asked 9 Electric Mainline 10 Lay Back In The Sun 11 Good Times 12 Pure Phase 13 Spread Your Wings 14 Feel Like Goin’ Home ENCORE 15 Cop Shoot Cop
It says a lot about Roger Daltrey’s support for the Teenage Cancer Trust that when The Who take the stage at the Royal Albert Hall it is the band’s first show for almost exactly a year – in fact, it’s their first since last year’s Teenage Cancer Trust show. And The Who will be back here again on Sunday to headline a second evening on behalf of the charity. Tonight, at least, Daltrey and Pete Townshend are in fine form, delivering a set packed with hits but also containing a great deal of warmth, humour and character. On the likes of “Love, Reign O’er Me”, “Behind Blue Eyes” and “5.15”, they don’t quite roll back the years, as much as embrace the reality of their age with a heartening defiance.
The Who first played the Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust a quarter of a century ago in 2000. On that occasion, they were joined by special guests including Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Eddie Vedder and Nigel Kennedy. For last year’s show, they were accompanied by an orchestra. But this time round, it’s just the band – Pete and Roger, plus five others including Zac Starkey on drums and Simon Townshend on second guitar. “Do you miss the orchestra?” gasps Townshend after whirl-winding his way through “Pinball Wizard”. “I fucking do. When we had the orchestra, I only had to pretend to play.”
Townshend is feeling particularly fragile as he’s just had his left knee replaced – news that is greeted with nods of sympathy from a crowd that has aged with the band. When Daltrey, now 81 but astonishingly spry, fluffs a line on “I Can See For Miles”, he blames it on a “senior moment”. Later he complains of failing eyesight to go with his poor hearing – “if I lose my voice, I’ll have the full ‘Tommy’,” he jokes.
That doesn’t seem likely. Daltrey’s voice is a miracle, and he knows it. After a pair of looseners to get everybody in the mood – “I Can’t Explain” and “Substitute” – Daltrey moves through the gears, with fantastic renditions of demanding numbers like “Bargain” and “The Real Me”. By the time we reach “5.15”, it’s clear he’s singing as well as ever, and when he hits the extended, agonising howl of “looooove” after Townshend’s solo on “Love, Reign O’Er Me”, it brings the crowd to their feet. That song is one of the highlights, with Townshend delivering a frantic performance that has the rest of the band watching his hands searching for a cue on where to go next.
The set is a masterclass in giving the fans what they want, from the beautiful performance of “Behind Blue Eyes”, which at times is just Pete and Roger working together to fill the song, to the rare airing of “Love Ain’t For Keeping” and then the quick-fire medley of “My Generation”/“Cry If You Want”/“See Me Feel Me”/“Listening To You”. Townshend gets a couple of songs on lead vocal: a great “The Seeker” and later “Eminence Front” – the latter to give Daltrey’s voice a break as it follows the taxing medley. Between songs, Daltrey praises the charity and urges further support in raising funds, with Townshend watching his friend’s passion with obvious pride.
The final straight begins with the crowd singalong “You Better You Bet” followed by “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in quick succession. Those two epics draw the best from the entire band, with keyboard player Loren Gold enjoying his big moment on the intro to “Baba O’Riley” while Starkey wallops the drums. As “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crashes along, Daltrey breaks out the harmonica, locking perfectly into Townshend’s guitar. The rest of the band then slips away, leaving the stage to “the two old farts at the front” who close the set together with “Tea And Theatre” from Endless Wire, a song about the band, what they did, who they were and what remains: “We play them as one; We’re older now; All of us sad; All of us free; Before we walk from this stage; Two of us”. New knee, old friends, a good cause and testament to one of the most unlikely and enduring partnerships in music.
The Who’s set list, the Royal Albert Hall, London, March 27, 2025:
I Can’t Explain Substitute Who Are You? The Kids Are Alright I Can See For Miles Bargain Pinball Wizard Love Ain’t For Keepin’ The Seeker Behind Blue Eyes The Real Me 5.15 I’m One Love, Reign O’Er Me My Generation/Cry If You Want/See Me Feel Me/Listening To You Eminence Front You Better, You Bet Baba O’Reilly Won’t Get Fooled Again Tea & Theatre
From Uncut’s March 2015 issue [Take 214], how The Smith’s 1985 album Meat Is Murder provided a radical manifesto for troubled times, one overshadowed by the “violence, oppression and horror” of Margaret Thatcher. Uncut tracks down band members, intimate associates and contemporaries to tell the full story of a band at their closest and most adventurous…
The distance travelled by The Smiths in late 1984 can be measured, to some extent, in car journeys. En route with the rest of The Smiths from their respective homes in Manchester to Amazon Studios in Kirkby during the winter of 1984, Morrissey would sit at the back, to best enjoy the full benefit of the car’s central heating system. The vehicle – a 1970s white stretch Mercedes rented from R&O Van Hire, Salford – had once been used for weddings. Now it was being used for another type of celebration. The Smiths – along with their fledgling co-producer, Stephen Street – were heading to Amazon to record their second LP, Meat Is Murder. “We had a feeling the grown-ups had left the building and it was left to us to break some rules and have some fun,” Johnny Marr told Uncut. Despite the weather, the daily trips shuttling to and from Kirkby were conducted in high spirits, characterised by an air of anticipation for what the coming sessions would bring. The interior of the car featured two rows of seats, facing each other like a cab. Morrissey and Johnny Marr would face forward on the back seats, while Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce sat in front of them, facing the rear of the car. If there were any disagreements between the band members, it was usually to do with the heating – which Morrissey would complain wasn’t turned up high enough. “Amazon was on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhere,” says Andy Rourke. “It was the freezing winter. We’d stop for a cup of tea at this mobile café and carry that into the studio. That was our routine for two or three weeks.”
An industrial estate in Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, in the depths of winter, hardly seems the most auspicious setting from which to storm the citadel. All the same, the work started here by The Smiths on Meat Is Murder was freewheeling and stimulating. “It was very exciting,” acknowledges Stephen Street. “It felt like all the stars were in alignment, everything seemed to be working.”
While historically Morrissey’s songs had lingered on a nostalgic, post-war vision of England – one of juvenile delinquents, underworld spivs and “jumped-up pantry boy”s – Meat Is Murder presented a different, highly politicised side to the band. The songs on the album addressed powerful, contemporary themes including animal rights, domestic and institutionalised violence.
“The Smiths were out there on their own,” Paul Weller tells Uncut. “I thought they were similar to The Jam, really. It wasn’t a party line thing, and the lyrics weren’t always overly political. But they still seemed to reflect what was going on in people’s lives.”
“The issues they were addressing in the songs on Meat Is Murder were socio-political,” adds Billy Bragg. “My politics were more ideological, but The Smiths were more involved in broader issues; we lived in a time when those issues were right to the forefront of debate.”
“The politics of the day had a big effect on the music and Morrissey’s lyrics,” admits Andy Rourke. “That’s what we wrote songs about: our experiences. That comes across in the music, also.”
If Meat Is Murder helped establish The Smiths as a radical force, it had other, equally far-reaching implications for their career. These were fluid and fast-moving times for the group: since releasing their first single, “Hand In Glove”, in May 1983, their ascent had been rapid and exhilarating, building on a brace of thrilling singles and, in February 1984, a self-titled debut album. Meat Is Murder, though, is best characterised as an exchange of ideas at a higher level. It moved their story forward credibly, giving them their only No 1 album, in the process dislodging Springsteen’s Born In The USA from the top of the UK album charts. It also represented a point where Morrissey and The Smiths were at their tightest. “Morrissey always wanted to be part of a gang,” says Richard Boon, then production manager at Rough Trade Records. “He’d never been, because he was such an outsider character.I remember being in the band’s van once when they were coming down to London. They were all wearing white T-shirts because that would make us stand out and they wanted to stand out. By Meat Is Murder, The Smiths had cohered as a gang.”
“It all happened very quickly,” reflects Rourke. “Especially at that time, things picked up even more, and the records started selling better than they had done. I think it always continued upwards, but around Meat Is Murder, it definitely stepped up a gear. They were crazy, busy times.”
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MARCH 2015/TAKE 214 IN THE ARCHIVE
From Uncut’s April 2021 issue [Take 287], the indomitable first lady of folk shares her whole story with Uncut: an epic 85-year odyssey that also involves Woody Guthrie, Ewan MacColl and Greenham Common
This morning, Peggy Seeger has been out in her garden in Oxfordshire to inspect the bird tables. These, she explains, have now been squirrel-proofed and she was keen to see how successfully they were working. “Connecting with nature is something you do a whole lot when you get old,” she says, with a typically commanding blue-eyed stare. “I’m not a mature citizen, I’m not vintage, I’m old. Bloody old. You’ll soon be joining the whole of nature’s system and learning to understand it is what I’m doing now. And it is magical. Absolutely magical.”
A leading figure in the most politically radical stream of the UK folk revival, Seeger has not morphed into an earth mother. There are no dreamcatchers on her living room wall, no obvious crystals. However, the younger half-sister of Pete Seeger, and widow of Ewan MacColl, has a pleasingly cosmic outlook. “Everything is interlaced,” she explains. “No element of the earth, the galaxies, human thought, the natural systems – none of it is separated from the rest. Until we learn that, we’re doomed.”
If artists tend to stick to their fundamentals once they get past retirement age, Seeger is determinedly extending her range. Aged 85, she is increasingly out there.
Seeger’s place in the world may have been defined by the work she did in the 1950s and 1960s, when – as the loyal lieutenant to the Oliver Cromwell of the folk revival – she helped set standards for all folk singers, whether they wanted them or not.
“Peggy was my total role model,” says singer Sandra Kerr, who later made the music for Bagpuss. “She was everything I wanted to do. She sang, she wrote songs, she played three or four instruments, she had great empathy with people and she was a livewire.”
With and without MacColl, Seeger wrote important contemporary songs, including feminist standards “I’m Gonna Be An Engineer” and “Carry Greenham Home”. “Peggy’s made a huge contribution to the culture of political music in this country,” Billy Bragg tells Uncut.
However, the most remarkable thing about Seeger may be that she is making the most sophisticated, challenging work of her career now. Her new album (billed as her last), First Farewell, takes on the meditative chanson mood of 2014’s beautifully crafted Everything Changes, but steers toward starker terrain.
If she owed her traditional repertoire to her father, folklorist Charles Seeger, the abstract piano shapes on First Farewell are all down to her mother, ‘ultramodernist’ composer Ruth Crawford Seeger – who died in 1953, when her daughter was 18. “My mother used to make me get lost on the piano and then find my way out into a good harmonic ending,” she says. “She made me go to anything, including dissonance.”
“This odd fusion of Aunt Molly Jackson and Béla Bartók, that’s her thing,” says her second son Calum MacColl, who has helped realise Seeger’s most recent records along with his older brother Neill and his sister-in-law – rock’s top oboist, Kate St John.
On the bible-black “Swim For The Star” from Everything Changes, Seeger followed the Titanic as it slipped under the waters of the Atlantic; on First Farewell, she goes deeper still. “I’m dealing with matters that to me are very serious in the world, but trying not to preach on Hyde Park Corner,” she explains.
Seeger’s early work could be harsh and astringent – “I don’t have a beautiful voice, I have a character voice,” she says – but she is using softer power here. “If you have a strident song that says ‘hypocrisy and greed are part of our system’, people say, ‘Oh, it’s those lefties talking again,” she explains, talking through the weary “How I Long For Peace”. “But if it’s in a gentle, really tuneful song and has a chorus…”
However, while she expertly connects sex and the movement of tectonic plates on “Lubrication”, and challenges attitudes to ageing on the cheeky “The Invisible Woman”, her steps into meditative space are even more impressive: the angular “The Puzzle”; the chilling “One Of Those Beautiful Boys” and – most remarkable still – rapturous opener “Dandelion And Clover”.
Here, the deaths of a seven-year-old schoolmate and her first lover are woven into a song that softens the horrible certainty of death with the comforting glow of memory, set to a wondrous, undulating melody. Steering by candlelight, she is stretching toward the unearthly twinkle of Robert Wyatt or Ivor Cutler. Fittingly, given her unusual musical journey, Seeger has not heard of either of them.
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT APRIL 2021/TAKE 287 IN THE ARCHIVE
From Uncut’s May 2017 issue [Take 240], we salute the genius of “The Bronx Brontë”! Laura Snapes tracks down Nyro’s closest collaborators to uncover the true story of a revolutionary singer-songwriter and her own thwarted career…
There is an abiding image of Laura Nyro as the black sheep at the crowning of the counterculture. On June 17, 1967, the 19-year-old played Monterey. According to cousin and confidant Alan Merrill, the moment producer Lou Adler called and asked Nyro to play, “Her lips went blue from the shock.” Once she recovered, she started sketching costumes. Her outfit was a black dress that hung off one shoulder, forming a batwing beneath the other arm. A decade later, Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks would take this look mainstream. In ’67, Nyro came off as an earnest East Coaster in a field of flower children.
Onstage at Monterey, Nyro would have preferred to perform at the piano, but there was little precedent for a young female artist playing her own songs, and the house band struggled with her complex charts. Certain she had heard the crowd booing, Nyro demanded that DA Pennebaker omit her performance from his documentary. When he reviewed the footage in 1997, he discovered these were cries of “beautiful!” and invited her to see for herself, but Nyro died from ovarian cancer before she could resolve her fear. The film shows the Russian Jewish/Italian Catholic girl from the Bronx to be the greatest white female soul singer until Amy Winehouse emerged four decades later. “Wedding Bell Blues” sparkles with festive harmonies, while on “Poverty Train”, Nyro searches the sky as she details a bad trip. She’s vulnerable and dramatic, and appears daunted by her own power.
Contrast this tentative performance with a solo appearance at LA’s Troubadour in 1969. In attendance was Jackson Browne, songwriter, admirer and aspiring artist. (Joni Mitchell was also allegedly there, taking notes. “She was the only female singer-songwriter at the time that I knew,” she would tell PBS.) “She had brought in a grand piano,” Browne recalls. “Her fans were so crazy about her that, in between each song, she’d walk out to the edge of the stage and pace the front to rolling applause. Then she’d compose herself, and go into another song. I’d never seen anything like it. She wore a red velvet dress – she was not like the freaks, the hippies she was playing to. Her audience was just wilding for her. But she was a diva; she took this in her stride.” Browne laughs. “There was no false modesty in Laura! Never any, ‘Oh, you’re too kind’, she just expected it.”
“From the moment that I met her, she had a presumption of her own power,” says friend Ellen Sander, who met Nyro in the office of her first manager, Artie Mogull. “She sensed that what she was doing was important and should be popular.” Alan Merrill, who played on Nyro’s teenage demos, says her confidence was inbuilt. “Nobody could touch her in terms of musical strength, at least as a writer,” he says. “She was inimitable. She knew it. She was a musical force of nature, more than a talent.”
Contrary to the image of Nyro as a fragile failure, 50 years since the release of her debut, More Than A New Discovery, it’s apparent that Nyro was a confident, gentle visionary who thrived when she got to create her own terms. She upset the archetypes for female musicians, fashioning new aesthetic moulds and poetic expressiveness, and made a case for authorship as autonomy. She inspired Joni Mitchell to take up piano, and Carole King’s push to be taken seriously as an artist. With her natural producer’s touch, Nyro co-pioneered the LP’s transition from pop vending machine to studio-crafted statement, and found on the streets of New York analogues for the cyclical violence of war, poverty, and injustice plaguing the US at the end of the ’60s: “The Bronx Brontë”, as one writer described her. “She was inexorably the way she was,” says Browne. “A person who could focus her feeling, and summoned the song in a way that was real every time. That was a great example of how to conduct yourself as a performer. Someone who’s gonna get up there to represent their work.”
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MAY 2017/TAKE 240 IN THE ARCHIVE
Lexi Goddard and Chris Coleslaw first met while working at the same café in Chicago, soon uniting to perform Neil Young covers and, in time, writing their own songs as Tobacco City. Debut EP “LSD” arrived in 2018, followed by 2021’s full-length Tobacco City, USA, an album that suggested their spiritual locus lay at some movable point between ’60s Bakersfield and the bleached expanse of the American Southwest. Echoes of Gram and Emmylou shaped their harmonies, while a supporting cast conjured up the kind of glazed psychedelic country so beloved of early Flying Burritos.
i)Horses(i) is even more impressive. Smart, evocative and almost casually assured, it’s the sound of a band pooling their influences into something timeless, their unhurried songs as vivid as their lyrical depictions of carefree youth, weightless days and bitter experience. “Autumn” is a wry portrait of teenage life in smalltown America, where a dirty lakeshore breeze comes in from the water treatment plant, diner grease fills the air and there’s always someone running from the police. It’s rich and poetic, reminiscent of The Handsome Family in its sense of quotidian drama. The gorgeous “Time” carries something of My Morning Jacket’s effortless drift, countrified by fiddle and Andy ‘Red’ PK’s radiant pedal steel. “Watching berries ripen on the vine/Gonna take my time,” sing Coleslaw and Goddard, as if willing this reverie to last forever. A similar form of ambience steers “Horses”, essentially an interlude in three parts, like fragments from a fast-fading dream.
Goddard takes the lead on slow-rolling ballad “Fruit From The Vine”, her voice as softly expressive as Judee Sill, thoughts of regret tainting what appears to be an idyllic scene: “And the women all singin’ while the sun disappears/And the roosters wrestle over the last warm beer.” By contrast, she and Coleslaw get to frolic freely on the up-tempo “Buffalo”, as flames burn across the plains. It’s a wonderful rush of good-time choogle and barroom honky-tonk, driven by voices that feel like they’re here to stay.
For Kenney Jones, reclaiming the Small Faces legacy has been a lengthy battle, doggedly pursuing unpaid royalties and restoring the management of this beloved group’s back catalogue. “I don’t think any band’s been treated worse than the Small Faces,” Jones’s former bandmate Ian McLagan ruefully told Uncut in 2014. Jones’s achievements, then, are nothing short of heroic – as this month’s cover story attests. Nominally a celebration of the posthumous – and now radically expanded – The Autumn Stone album, our cover story explores the band’s tumultuous 1968, discovering along the way tantalising new insights into the music they made in their final year together. “It’s amazing how many songs we did in such a short space of time,” says Jones. “And how much we’ve touched people. Did I think it was going to last? It never entered my mind. But here we are, 60 years later, still talking about it.”
You’ll have also noticed, I’m sure, that print editions of this month’s issue also come with an exclusive Small Faces CD featuring a slew of rare mixes, alternate takes and live cuts. Everything a young mod could possibly ask for, in other words.
As usual, there’s an embarrassment of riches inside, from Slade to Keith Jarrett, Suzanne Vega to Oasis, Jonathan Richman to These New Puritans. While I wouldn’t normally single out any specific feature for your attention, do please check out Alastair McKay’s piece on Lou Reed’s fearsome Metal Machine Music, which makes for both incredibly funny and deeply insightful reading.
You’ll also find advice from Lou’s guitar tech on how to recreate Metal Machine Music in the comfort of your own home.
What will the neighbours think? Let’s hope they’ve got room for ravers after all.
EVERY PRINT EDITION OF THIS ISSUE OF UNCUT COMES WITH A COPY OF SOMETHING NICE – A FREE AND EXCLUSIVE SMALL FACES CD OF ALTERNATE MIXES, RARITIES AND LIVE CUTS
SMALL FACES: 1968 was a year of extremes, from hit singles and a career-defining album to a final, on-stage bust-up. But while the bonds between them were strained by internal tensions and external dramas, the music Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagen and Kenney Jones made in their final months together pointed tantalizingly in bold, new directions…
LOU REED: In 1975, Metal Machine Music almost destroyed its creator’s career. But was it a drug-crazed act of self-sabotage, a venomous rebuke to a record label expecting hits… or the latest in a long line of experimental projects Reed had pursued since his earliest musical forays?
BOOTSY COLLINS: 73-years-young, P-Funk’s talismanic showman is still the No #1 Funkateer, full of tales about the glory days aboard the Mothership, life lessons from James Brown and misadventures in the Bermuda Triangle.
RADIOHEAD: The Bends was both Thom Yorke and co’s reaction to sudden fame and their first experimental art-rock blockbuster. On tour in America with R.E.M. in 1995, backstage pranks and on the road ennui helped make sense of their place at music’s top table.
THESE NEW PURITANS: From their base in the Essex hinterlands, sonic mystics Jack and George Barnett have created a singular body of work that has evolved beyond its nervy post-punk roots to encompass English classicism, visionary pop and taut, experimental music.
DEAN WAREHAM: From Galaxie 500 onwards, the singer-guitarist has been making quietly influential indie-rock for almost 40 years now. But that’s only part of a story that runs from New Zealand to Harvard, from supporting The Velvet Underground to a parallel career in film.
SUZANNE VEGA: The quintessential New York singer-songwriter on rats, remixes and “Luka”.
BELLY: Misheard lyrics, a Pixies tour and a studio “taskmaster” contribute to the genesis of an early-’90s indie-pop gem.
REVIEWED: New albums by Kassi Valazza, Bon Iver, William Tyler, Benmont Tench, Hawkwind, Jerry David DeCicca, Evan Parker, Salif Keita, Màiri Morrison& Alasdair Roberts; archive releases by The Blasters, Lonnie Liston Smith, Jeff Bridges, Henry Badowski and Julee Cruise; Jonathan Richman and Sturgill Simpson live; Pink Floyd, Neil Young and John & Yoko on Screen Extra and The Shangri-Las and Mike Campbell in books.
PLUS:David Johansen and Brian Jones depart; Slade In Flame at 50; Bridget St John returns; Oasis unseen; Keith Jarrett‘sKohn concert: the documentary!; Peter Capaldi‘s favourite albums… and introducing indie-folk quartet, Florist.
While the majority of Dylan’s band remained the same – Tony Garnier (electric and stand-up bass), Bob Britt (acoustic guitar, electric guitar) and Doug Lancio (acoustic guitar, electric guitar) – Jim Keltner, who had been drumming with Dylan since the Outlaw Festival last June, was replaced by Anton Fig.
Fig has previously played with Dylan before, on “Clean Cut Kid” from 1985’s Empire Burlesque and “Drifting Too Far From Home” on 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded. He was also drummer at the 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration in October, 1992.
As a session musician, Fig’s credits include Paul Simon, Warren Zevon, Roseanne Cash, Rodney Crowell and Cyndi Lauper, as well as being drummer with David Letterman‘s house band from 1986 – 2015.
Aside from Fig’s introduction, the setlist remained unchanged from the previous leg of the tour:
All Along the Watchtower It Ain’t Me, Babe I Contain Multitudes False Prophet When I Paint My Masterpiece Black Rider My Own Version of You To Be Alone with You Desolation Row Key West (Philosopher Pirate) Watching the River Flow It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You Mother of Muses Goodbye Jimmy Reed Every Grain of Sand
Following last year’s packed-out cameo, Stewart Lee returns to top the comedy bill, alongside Grace Campbell, Michelle de Swarte and Adam Buxton (who will host a special live edition of The Adam Buxton Podcast).
Ivo Graham and Alex Kealy bring their own podcast Gig Pigs to the festival, Adam Riches hosts his Dungeons ‘n’ Bastards gameshow, while Harriet Kemsley, Sean McLoughlin, Helen Bauer and Sharon Wanjohi are among the other comedians appearing.
On the literature front, Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch presents his debut novel Nobody’s Empire, Audrey Golden will discuss her book about The Raincoats with Gina Birch, and there will also be talks with Miranda Sawyer, John Harris, Joe Dunthorne and 2024 Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey.
Tickets for End Of The Road 2025 are still available here.
Both LPs will come housed in gatefold sleeves featuring the original fully restored artwork, plus an extra disc featuring B-sides, dubs and extended mixes. The inserts will feature new photos and extensive sleevenotes from Clinton Heylin. Both albums will also be available on CD for the first time since 2006.
Domino have also created a Pete Shelley exclusive for Record Store Day (April 12). Yesterday Is Not Here: Radio Sessions 1979-1983 is a collection of three never-before-released radio sessions – an acoustic one broadcast on Piccadilly Radio on in January 1979, and the other two recorded with full bands for David ‘Kid’ Jensen in December 1981 (prior to the release of Homosapien) and Feb 1983 (prior to the release of XL-1). More details on that here.
Moments before the Sex Pistols launch into a scathing version of “Problems”, frontman Frank Carter tells the massed punks in the Royal Albert Hall that is the first time Steve Jones has ever visited the venue. That’s something of a surprise given that not only has Jones spent 50 years in the music industry, but before that he was the teenage master of blagging his way into West London venues, usually to liberate some of the gear. But this evening’s show marks his debut – as well as one of the more unlikely shows the hall has seen in its 154-year history.
A few days previously, the band warmed up for this Teenage Cancer Trust charity show with a rambunctious secret gig (under their old SPOTS pseudonym) in the more familiar setting of the 100 Club watched by a crowd that included Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie and Gary Kemp. Outside the Royal Albert Hall, fans young and old – but mostly old – swap punk rock war stories and compare tattoos. The Pistols aren’t the first punk band to play the venue, but there still seems something very implausible about this appearance, not just in terms of their own history as one-time scourges of the establishment as much as the fact the band have reunited at all.
The three original Pistols – Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook – recruited Frank Carter, previously of Gallows, as their new singer in autumn 2024. It’s worked incredibly well. Carter brings energy and enthusiasm to the role, allowing the three older members to focus on the music. Carter, dressed for the occasion in a Mark Powell suit, tackles Pistols songs without resorting to a Johnny Rotten impression, an accomplishment in itself, and spends most of the gig in the audience. He’s standing on the barricade for “Pretty Vacant” – placed surprisingly early in the set – and then belts out “Bodies” while surfing through the crowd on the heads and shoulders of the fans. For “Silly Thing” he takes his mic stand and plants it like a military standard in the middle of the pit as the crowd surges around him like a human whirlpool. Back on stage, Glen, Paul and Steve shrug and carry on. They’ve seen worse.
John Lydon had always seemed so irreplaceable, that it was unimaginable the Pistols would perform with another singer. But Lydon’s failed attempt to ban the use of Sex Pistols music for Danny Boyle’s Pistol miniseries appears to have broken the last remaining bond between the group. The Pistols felt liberated, finally ready to replace Lydon with somebody a little less awkward and cynical, but with their own charisma and presence.
There must be something very cathartic about this. Back in the day, the Sex Pistols came and went in the blink of an eye – half a blink for Matlock – leaving a totemic legacy that even Lydon has struggled to overcome. The reunions with Lydon felt forced and were nakedly commercial – the band seemed to distance themselves from the shows even as they were playing them, with Lydon lacing everything in mockery and contempt. But now, the Sex Pistols can embrace that history, that music, and claim it for themselves.
Because it bears repeating that the Pistols wrote half-a-dozen of the best pop songs of the decade. They open with “Holidays In The Sun” and then dip into the classics throughout a short, intense set that also includes a fine pair of covers: “No Fun”, which is Frank doing Johnny doing Iggy; and “My Way”, one Frank doing Sid murdering another Frank. But strip away those layers of irony and this is a fantastic, frantic show, with a wild mosh pit, pogoing in the Royal Box and just the right balance between music and mayhem. The band end on “Anarchy In The UK”. With Frank Carter once more lost in the crowd, Matlock and Jones drop out, leaving Cook to maintain the beat while the audience repeat an a cappella refrain of “I wanna be anarchy”. At first it sounds menacing, then it sounds beautiful, then it sounds like “Kumbaya”, so Jones hammers down the riff, Matlock picks up the bass and the Sex Pistols bring the Royal Albert Hall back to the boil.
The Sex Pistols’ set list, the Royal Albert Hall, London, March 24, 2025:
Holidays In The Sun Seventeen New York Pretty Vacant Bodies Silly Thing Liar God Save The Queen No Fun Satellite No Feelings Problems EMI My Way Anarchy In The UK
The Sex Pistols’ chaotic tour of America in 1978 has always divided opinion. For some observers – and even participants – it was a disaster, “the worst thing you’ve ever seen”, as John Lydon said at one show, and “a complete circus” as Steve Jones remembered in his autobiography. But others were enthused. American critics raved about the shows, while Rory Gallagher was at the infamous final show in San Francisco. Deciding that “this is as close to Eddie Cochran as you’re going to see”, he promptly abandoned the album he’d recorded with Elliot Mazer and regrouped with a new, ass-kicking power trio.
These shows have long been available in bootlegs of variable quality, but now three of the seven concerts receive an official release: Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco – the first and last dates of the tour, and one from the very middle. These are initially released in stages on vinyl – red, white and blue respectively, with one coming out each month in February, March and April. Then all three concerts are released together in a 3CD boxset.
The Pistols hit the States like Apocalypse Nowon a tour bus. Lydon had had enough, Vicious craved attention and heroin in equal measure, while Paul Cook and Jones were fed up with their bandmates but ready to see where Malcolm McLaren’s rollercoaster would take them next. The tour was meant to start in Pennsylvania before heading to Chicago, Cleveland and Virginia but these had to be cancelled because of visa issues; the seven remaining dates were strung across the South, where the Pistols would meet an audience composed of fellow freaks as well as local meatheads and rubberneckers, who Sid routinely dismissed as “cowboys”.
Pelted with objects by the hostile audience, the band responded physically and verbally, all of which got in the way of the music. The first show of the tour was in Atlanta, where Peter Buck was in the audience, at least until he was ejected after one song. “New York” is the first of several disasters as instruments drop out, equipment fails, and timing and tunings go to pot. But Cook and Jones’s brutal muscle and Lydon’s more slippery charisma remain enthralling, pushing through the wince-inducing moments. As for Vicious, the bass is barely discernible, but his audience-goading is essential.
For all its faults, this is the best sounding of the three shows – perhaps sourced from bootlegs but the origin isn’t clear – with great moments like a wild “Problems” and a cracking “Pretty Vacant”, consistently their strongest live tune. The closing number, “Anarchy In The UK”, might be good, but comes from a completely different sound source, recorded somewhere in the middle of the crowd. It’s enough to leave Atlanta screaming for more; one audience member can be heard telling a friend “I’m blown away” as the tape continues to roll and an upcoming show by The B-52s is announced to the departing crowd over the PA.
Five days later, following brutal shows in Memphis, San Antonio (the legendary “shoot-out”, still frustratingly unavailable through official channels) and Baton Rouge, the band were in Dallas, at a club once owned by Jack Ruby. The recording begins with a gloriously over-the-top radio advert, but the show is more subdued, at least until Sid decides to call the crowd “a fucking bunch of cowboys” and is knocked to the floor during “Holidays In The Sun” – to Lydon and Jones’s obvious delight – playing the rest of the show with a broken nose. That spurs the band into a frantic “No Feelings”, followed by a thundering “Pretty Vacant” and “Anarchy In The UK”, rewritten as “Anarchy In The USA”. This time the band return for an encore, playing a jagged, echoey, PIL-inducing “No Fun”. The sound is muddier than Atlanta, but the strange energy is fascinating.
Following a show in Tulsa – where a hole in the wall punched by Sid is still framed backstage – the Sex Pistols limped into San Francisco for their final performance. The gig was filmed and widely bootlegged as Gun Control, and while this recording is initially murky, the sound quickly improves as the band deliver a fine “I Wanna Be Me” and then bludgeon the audience with “EMI”. Widely dismissed as a disaster, the concert is far better than its reputation, even with occasional equipment malfunctions and Lydon’s unpredictability – one moment clearly bored and disheartened, the next at his seething, charmless best.
The show ends with “No Fun” and Lydon’s famous exit lane – “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – probably the greatest onstage quip since Lennon’s “rattle your jewellery”. Within days Lydon had left the band, and the Sex Pistols were, effectively, kaput. Disintegration has rarely sounded so compelling.
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On Bob Mould’s last solo album, 2020’s Blue Hearts, he unleashed a fire in his belly. The album contained a series of polemics that railed against the state of America and all the parallel injustices and inequalities that he saw mirroring the Reagan era that defined his formative years. On the follow-up, his 15th solo album, the same musical dynamism can be heard – striking, sharp, sub-three-minute bursts of intense pop-coated alt.rock that recalls the fizzy joy of the Buzzcocks – but Mould’s political bite is tamed here. Instead, it’s a record that grapples with his own life, past, present and potential future, along with navigating the crippling uncertainties and colossal fears that modern life can impart on us all.
On Bob Mould’s last solo album, 2020’s Blue Hearts, he unleashed a fire in his belly. The album contained a series of polemics that railed against the state of America and all the parallel injustices and inequalities that he saw mirroring the Reagan era that defined his formative years. On the follow-up, his 15th solo album, the same musical dynamism can be heard – striking, sharp, sub-three-minute bursts of intense pop-coated alt.rock that recalls the fizzy joy of the Buzzcocks – but Mould’s political bite is tamed here. Instead, it’s a record that grapples with his own life, past, present and potential future, along with navigating the crippling uncertainties and colossal fears that modern life can impart on us all.
On the opening “Here We Go Crazy”, Mould lays out the literal landscape of the album, setting a scene of wide-open Californian desert terrain with wind blowing in the mountain tops, as he ponders the volatilities of life, as man and nature square off. In a snappy, hooky, chorus Mould sings “here we go crazy” as his own vocal harmonies sing backing lines about being lost in the mountains. It sets the tone for the album that is loaded with breezy, infectious, sometimes soothing melodies that can often bely a darker lyrical undercurrent. Tracks such as “Neanderthal”, a two-minute firecracker of a song driven by Jon Wurster’s pummeling drums and Mould’s racing riff work, may be about revisiting the violent household that Mould grew up in, and a means of processing that trauma, but it almost recalls Mould’s Sugar era, such is its catchy and irresistible nature.
Mould assembled the record to have a three-act structure: an opening collection of songs that tap into uncertainties, feeling unsettled and unsure, before a mid-section that explores a darker period, and the final part coming out of the other side and seeing flashes of hope and optimism emerge from periods of pain and anguish. What’s especially impressive with Mould’s approach, though, is just how much fun he makes the whole thing sound. Even on songs which tap into more difficult territory, such as “When Your Heart Is Broken”, he delivers it with such a seamless knack for melodic songcraft, that he even turns heartache into foot-stomping riffs and sing-along choruses. Similarly, while “Fur Mink Augus” may plunge the listener deep into the frozen depths of a long, cold, isolated winter as feelings of cabin fever takes hold, the sheer energy of the song – with a remarkable drum outro from Wurster – keeps it as arresting and incandescent as it does angry and downcast.
Perhaps part of the immediacy of the album is down to Mould’s decision to strip things back. The sonic palette is as basic as it gets, with very little in the way of added instrumentation, production or bells and whistles. Inspired by his recent solo tours, where many of these songs were debuted, there’s a feeling of wanting to capture a similar sense of connection – removing all the obstacles that get in the way, and leaving as direct a path between Mould and his audience as possible.
The third and final act of the album, of creeping towards the light from the darkness, is typified by songs such as “You Need To Shine”. Unashamedly uplifting, it could be read either as a message of hope and positivity for those going through a dark time or as a bold statement of self-affirmation – “don’t let sadness get into our weary bones, don’t let darkness take your soul… you need to shine.” With REM-esque overlaps of vocal harmonies giving way to a Dinosaur Jr-like squealing guitar solo, it’s a genuinely joyous piece of music.
The closing “Your Side” is the slowest, quietest song here, wrapping things up with an ode to how love and companionship will prevail despite the ongoing anxieties and catastrophes of the world, especially the climate crisis. In many ways, it’s a sad song to close on, imagining a world where “everything is gone” and clinging to whatever you have that’s left dear. But it’s also a touching sentiment, and one that underpins the record as a whole: cherish those you love and find beauty amid chaos where you can.
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“We’ve definitely refined our sound on Rosalie,” says singer-guitarist Chris Lyons of Silver Synthetic’s latest album. “We were still figuring out who we were on our first record, but this one has a clearer identity. It’s just a lot more dynamic.”
A beatific union of cosmic Americana and harmonious guitar grooves, Rosalie is certainly a step up from the New Orleans quartet’s 2021 debut. Its charm partly lies in its warm evocation of another era, while also aligning the band to contemporaries like Rose City Band or Beachwood Sparks. Indeed, the latter’s Brent Rademaker was so impressed that he signed Silver Synthetic to his Curation imprint, enthusing: “This is the album the label have been looking for!”
Curation may feel like a perfect fit, but it’s taken the band a while to find their way. The journey began in 2017, when Lyons found himself writing pieces that didn’t suit the garage-punk aesthetic of his regular outfit, BottomFeeders. His first instinct was to call guitarist Kunal Prakash. “I had all these songs with a mellower thing going on,” he explains. “I’d seen Kunal around and knew he was a sick guitar player.”
Fresh from Nashville rockers JEFF The Brotherhood, Prakash was intrigued by the invitation. The pair soon began shaping the songs together, alongside bassist Pete Campanelli and BottomFeeders drummer Lucas Bogner. “We were jamming for about a year,” Prakash recalls. “So by the time we started playing shows, it felt like we were a proper band.”
Their musical direction found a natural course. “We definitely had some discussions about what not to do,” says Prakash. “All of us – at least me and Chris and Lucas – had been playing around New Orleans, where there’s a lot of garage punk bands. So the most punk thing we could do was be the opposite of that: sing in harmony and play melodic music. Keep the guitars and production pretty clean. We didn’t want to sound like all these modern psych bands.”
Having played locally, Silver Synthetic were picked up by Third Man after a gig in Nashville, only their second ever show outside New Orleans. “From the start, the reactions we were getting were pretty high,” says Lyons. “It just felt like we’d hit something.” 2020 EP “Out Of The Darkness” and the ensuing Silver Synthetic album blended the band’s love of Neil Young, mid-’70s Lou Reed, Big Star and Eno circa Here Come The Warm Jets, but their relationship with the label didn’t work out.
“At a certain point, we knew we needed to leave Third Man,” says Prakash. “We asked them if we could and they said yes, and that we could take our record with us. So I started reaching out to friends and other musicians.”
With new bassist Ben Jones in place, Rosalie smooths the contours of their debut, streamlining those same influences into something quietly spectacular. Prakash cites Modern Nature as a key reference point: “All Jack Cooper’s stuff has been big for me. I love those albums, particularly the drum sounds. The production feels really natural and there’s a lot of space, which resonates with us, trying to keep things uncluttered and human.” Rosalie also invites parallels to Teenage Fanclub, which can be no bad thing. “We get compared to that band a lot, especially when we played the UK,” says Lyons. “Everyone was bringing them up. Even the sound guys would put them on after our shows.” Prakash can’t resist a cheeky shout-out: “They’re such a great band. So yeah, if they end up reading this, take us on tour!”
Rosalie is released by Curation Records on April 25
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