Subscribe
Home Blog Page 13

The Beatles’ Let It Be is coming back to screens

Michael Bonner
-
0
The Beatles’ Let It Be is coming back to screens

Let It Be – director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film about The Beatles – is finally getting re-released.

The film, which has been out of circulation for decades, will launch exclusively on Disney+ on May 8, 2024.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The documentary has been restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production using the original 16mm negative and remastering the sound using the same MAL de-mix technology that was applied to Jackson’s Get Back series.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg says, “’Let It Be’ was ready to go in October/November 1969, but it didn’t come out until April 1970. One month before its release, The Beatles officially broke up. And so the people went to see ‘Let It Be’ with sadness in their hearts, thinking, ‘I’ll never see The Beatles together again. I will never have that joy again,’ and it very much darkened the perception of the film. But, in fact, how often do you get to see artists of this stature working together to make what they hear in their heads into songs. And then you get to the roof and you see their excitement, camaraderie and sheer joy in playing together again as a group and know, as we do now, that it was the final time, and we view it with full understanding of who they were and still are and a little poignancy. I was knocked out by what Peter was able to do with ‘Get Back,’ using all the footage I’d shot 50 years previously.” 

“I’m absolutely thrilled that Michael’s movie, ‘Let It Be,’ has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades,” says Peter Jackson. “I was so lucky to have access to Michael’s outtakes for ‘Get Back,’ and I’ve always thought that ‘Let It Be’ is needed to complete the ‘Get Back’ story. Over three parts, we showed Michael and The Beatles filming a groundbreaking new documentary, and ‘Let It Be’ is that documentary – the movie they released in 1970. I now think of it all as one epic story, finally completed after five decades. The two projects support and enhance each other: ‘Let It Be’ is the climax of ‘Get Back,’ while ‘Get Back’ provides a vital missing context for ‘Let It Be.’ Michael Lindsay-Hogg was unfailingly helpful and gracious while I made ‘Get Back,’ and it’s only right that his original movie has the last word…looking and sounding far better than it did in 1970.”

Worlds of echo

Sam Richards
-
0
Worlds of echo

“There are a great many interesting things about Arthur Russell, one of which is that he was rediscovered through his music being made available for the first time, in many cases. So he was similarly simultaneously discovered and rediscovered. There’s very little biographical information in terms of him speaking about himself to the press. Consequently, there’s an element that Arthur can be whoever you want him to be, enhanced by the fact that he was adept at so many different forms of music.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

“He was a complicated person, of the type who have different versions of themselves. He practised Buddhism, but he was also wildly ambitious. He made avant-garde music, but he also made very warm and accessible music that he hoped would be commercial. I found that going through his archive in great detail just further enhanced the idea that he was an enigma.

“I’ve seen much of his record collection, and he did have things like Tommy James & The Shondells records. And he did like ABBA! But I don’t know how many Beatles or Beach Boys records he had. In the archive, there’s a letter from him aged 16 and he’s writing about John Cage and Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, so he had quite developed tastes for the counterculture. His approach – of not being limited by being a composer or a cellist or a disco producer – obviously hindered him in his lifetime, but it’s actually the approach a lot of people now take. I think one of the reasons for his popularity is that he’s so confident in his ability and he’s unrestricted by the idea of staying in your lane.

“In everything he did, there’s a degree of integrity. In the later period, when he’s making music like ‘Make 1, 2’ or ‘Wild Combination’, they are very catchy, potentially commercial songs. But there’s the same attention to detail that there is in some of his more abstruse compositions. There is a relationship to quality and rigour no matter what sort of musical dialogue he’s engaged in. That is very rare, and is probably one of his defining features.

“Arthur was encouraged by figures like Ginsberg and Philip Glass, but they weren’t facilitators, because I don’t think he’d let people facilitate for him. He was hyper-creative, obviously, but I don’t know how good he was at networking. I don’t think he had the kind of character that could quite get to that point. He only played outside of New York two or three times under his own name, and he could have probably walked to the majority of shows he ever played. So I think it’s very much a nest he built for himself in East 12th Street – a nest bordering on a cocoon. 

“At the point he was diagnosed with HIV in 1986, he’d just released World Of Echo and he had a contract with Rough Trade. Whatever frustrations he’d had, he was probably the best place he’d been in terms of the opportunities ahead. So there is a tragedy that he got sick just as he reached a point where he could have gone on to do whatever he wanted.

“The reason Arthur’s music still sounds so fresh today is partly down to his skill in recording. In most cases, you can’t tell the era in which it was made – <World Of Echo> could have been made yesterday, it just doesn’t sound like anything else. There’s a sense of escape in a lot of his music: the escape of dancing in a club, but also the escape of hearing a very soft voice and a cello, drawing you back to the womb. Not many people sing like him or sound like him. So I do think there is some sort of genius at work.”

Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, A Life is published by Faber on April 18

The Cult announce 40th anniversary tour

Sam Richards
-
0
The Cult announce 40th anniversary tour

The Cult will mark their 40th anniversary with a UK tour in the autumn, concluding at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 4.

Says the band’s Billy Duffy: “Following up from the great energy of Death Cult 8323 shows, I’m looking forward to bringing that sense of celebration of the band’s music, and the communion with our fans, to Cult 8424. CFFC. Let the ceremony commence!”

See the poster below for the full list of dates:

Tickets go on sale on Friday (April 19) at 10am BST from here.

Toumani Diabaté & Ballaké Sissoko – New Ancient Strings (reissue, 1999)

Nigel Williamson
-
0
Toumani Diabaté & Ballaké Sissoko – New Ancient Strings (reissue, 1999)

In 1970, Sidiki Diabaté and Djelimady Sissoko recorded an album of instrumental kora duets called Cordes Anciennes (Ancient Strings). Although it was only released in France and Germany on a specialist ethno-musicological label, as western interest grew in ‘world music’, it came to be regarded as a landmark release – not least because it was the first ever recording devoted solely to the rippling, harp-like textures of the kora.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

More than a quarter of a century later, Lucy Duran, professor of music at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, persuaded Joe Boyd to commission a belated sequel for release on his Hannibal label.

As Djelimady had died in 1981, Duran proposed that Sidiki Diabaté should instead duet with his son Toumani, whose debut album Kaira she had produced in 1988, and who was fast emerging as the most gifted among a new generation of kora players. However, before Duran and her sound engineer Nick Parker reached the Malian capital Bamako in 1997, Sidiki died from a stroke while visiting relatives in Gambia.

Reluctant to abandon the project which she had already decided should be called New Ancient Strings, Duran searched for a new script – and instead of an album of father-and-son duets, decided to record the two sons of the musicians who had made Cordes Anciennes.

At the time, Djelimady’s son Ballaké Sissoko was relatively unknown and New Ancient Strings would be his first appearance on record; but Duran had no doubt that it would work. In jeli tradition the culture is handed down the generations and on Djelimady’s death Ballaké, then only 14, had taken his father’s place in the Ensemble Instrumental National du Mali. What’s more he and Toumani had an intuitive rapport. They were cousins and had grown up side-by-side – Mali’s first president Modibo Keita had given their fathers a plot of land which they divided equally to live together as neighbours.

A week spent scouting for a recording location was fruitless, none of the studios in Bamako proving suitable for the kind of natural, acoustic sound Duran was after. Finally, someone suggested the newly built Palais de Congrès, where they found a vestibule with marble walls and floor which created a perfect, natural reverb. The only problem was that the venue was in constant use throughout the day and early evening and so the space was only available after 10pm – and only for one night.

Yet these obstacles turned out to be to advantages in disguise. The symmetry of the two sons following in their fathers’ footsteps may have been unplanned but it was irresistible. In addition, by the time Toumani and Ballaké came to record New Ancient Strings the calendar had serendipitously clicked round to September 22, the anniversary of the ending of French colonial rule. What better date to record an album paying homage to the country’s most profound musical traditions than Mali’s National Independence Day?

After an hour or more spent chasing out the chirping crickets, it was midnight before tranquility was achieved and recording could begin. Toumani and Ballaké played through the night, entirely live, without second takes, improvising around tunes from the classical Mande repertoire. By seven the next morning, the album was done. Duran subsequently admitted it was the “least produced” album in which she has ever been involved.

If you listen closely in the places where the two kora virtuosi are sparring with each other, you can make a reasonable guess as to who is playing what. Broadly speaking, Sissoko’s playing is perhaps more rhythmic and Diabeté’s more melodically nuanced. But that distinction is too simplistic and, for the most part, the combined 42 strings of the two koras flow together with such perfect contrapuntal calibration between timeless groove and gossamer lyricism that it sounds like a single player with four hands.

If the album can be seen as a tribute to their respective fathers, there are also subtle differences, the “ancient strings” of past generations updated with “new” techniques such as percussive dampening of notes, giving New Ancient Strings a more dynamic sense of light and shade than the album from which it derived its inspiration.

It’s almost impossible to pick out highlights among the eight tracks, which deserve to be listened to as a seamless suite. That said, “Bi Lamban” is a dazzling reworking of a melody alleged to be 800 years old, the minor-key harmonics of “Salaman” ooze with a heart-rending pathos, “Bafoulabe” is as elegant and graceful as anything by Bach or Handel and the lightly pirouetting rhythms of “Cheikhna Demba” are so captivating that Mali’s national television station borrowed the track as its signature tune.

On its release, New Ancient Strings did for the kora what Ravi Shankar did for the sitar in the 1960s, bringing the instrument into the global stream and inspiring western musicians from Björk to Damon Albarn to incorporate its unique sound into their recordings. It’s long been out of print, so if you missed it back then, this long overdue reissue is the perfect way to get acquainted with this vital, timeless, glorious album.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Michael Bonner
-
0
Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood
Buy Now

Over the past decade and a half, Katie Crutchfield has amassed a deep catalogue of quiet revelations, full-band exorcisms and adventurous collaborations, but it took until now for her to write her first love song. It’s called “Right Back To It”, and it’s the immediate standout of her grounded and radiant new album. “You just settle in/Like a song with no end,” she sings in close harmony with MJ Lenderman, the North Carolina songwriter and guitar of the alt.country band Wednesday, whose tender drawl seems to wrap its arms around Crutchfield’s distinctive, cawing voice. In the background, you hear the melodic pluck of a banjo and a slow-moving drumbeat, all propelling one of Crutchfield’s most satisfying, singalong choruses. It’s not just Waxahatchee’s first love song: it’s the first one you can imagine playing on pop radio.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

This gift for immediacy has always hidden in the subtext of Crutchfield’s music. On her early, home-recorded releases, the Birmingham, Alabama-born artist stood apart from fellow DIY songwriters with a peculiar gift for melody and lyrics that burrow deep under the skin (“I don’t believe that I care at all/What they hear through these walls,” went a pivotal early couplet). After building on the word-of-mouth success of her intimate 2012 debut, American Weekend, and heavier fare like 2017’s Out In The Storm, Crutchfield hit a breakthrough with 2020’s lush Saint Cloud. Upon settling in Kansas City after leading an itinerant lifestyle the preceding decade, that release marked her first collaboration with producer Brad Cook, as the lyrics documented her journey to sobriety and the palpable glow of a new, stable relationship with Kevin Morby.

Tigers Blood continues that trajectory, pairing her once again with Cook and exploring new intricacies in the subject matter of tentative, hard-won contentment – a precarious spot she describes early in the record as “the final act of the good old days”. As evidenced by that lyric, Crutchfield has a knack for countering every moment of peace with a light dose of anxiety. Or, as she confesses in the resplendent opener “3 Sisters”, “I make a living crying it ain’t fair/And not budging.” Luckily, she’s assembled a group of collaborators who know precisely how to linger in the sunlight. Lenderman is a welcome presence, offering both his plainspoken harmony and his deceptively fragile, Southern-rock guitar licks that make standouts like “Crowbar” sound beamed in from a dusty roadhouse jukebox. On drums, Spencer Tweedy offers a light touch that offsets the sturdy, Springsteenian heartland rock of “Bored” and the slow-building waltz-time title track. Elsewhere, multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook fills the background with touches of dobro, banjo and organ.

Describing Tigers Blood as Waxahatchee’s pop album is something of an overstatement, especially after the bright, embracing sound of Saint Cloud and Crutchfield’s work alongside singer-songwriter Jess Williamson in the country-rock duo Plains. But what unites this dynamic group of songs is their ability to aim directly at the pleasure centres of big choruses, guitar parts as catchy as the vocal hooks, and lyrics that filter universal themes through a memorably idiosyncratic lens (describing musicians’ fate in the streaming economy as “reading fortunes for free in someone else’s goldmine” might go down as one of the year’s most astute pieces of entertainment journalism). Having long cited Lucinda Williams as an inspiration for her gritty, observant Southern storytelling, in these songs Crutchfield seems equally attuned to the songwriter also capable of starry-eyed crowd-pleasers like “Passionate Kisses”.

Take, for example, “Lone Star Lake”, where a well-placed “baby” in the second verse adds a sense of old-school tenderness that complements the otherwise hyper-specific details (see: rhyming “turkey wheat” with “’Bama heat”). Crutchfield’s years spent earning her stripes among the DIY punk venues of Philadelphia remains evident in her ability to fashion these songs, even at their most quiet and threadbare, into anthems: music you’ll want to shout along with from the heart of the crowd. In fact, she replicates this very sensation to close the record. In the final chorus of the title track, she orchestrates a round of vocalists to sing alongside her, their voices blending together and elevating the words into something like gospel. She has learned by now how transcendent her music can feel when it’s larger than any one voice.

Accordingly, Crutchfield knows just when to pare things back. The acoustic ballad “365” is as spare and simple as things get on Tigers Blood – for the percussion, Tweedy is credited with playing only a cymbal and a “cedar plank”. And in the words, Crutchfield once again adopts the language of love songs to make a pledge that could be equally resonant for someone in a committed relationship or, on the darker side, struggling with a lifelong dependency. “When you fail, I fail/When you fly, I fly,” she sings. “And it’s a long way to come back down.” Accompanying herself with high, creaking harmonies mixed low in the background, she gives the sense of someone looking at a long road ahead. While Waxahatchee has never sounded more suited for sprawling crowds and mass approval, Crutchfield has never seemed truer to herself.

The Other Two reissue their debut album, The Other Two & You

Michael Bonner
-
0
The Other Two reissue their debut album, The Other Two & You

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The Other Two – aka New Order‘s Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert – reissue their debut album, The Other Two & You, on streaming platforms, CD and, for the first time in 30 years on vinyl, from May 31 on London Records.

Stephen and Gillian say, “Is it really 31 years since this was first released? It doesn’t seem that long ago, but that’s old age for you. We’re both very excited that this album (our first attempt at the pop solo spin off malarkey) is getting another outing. This time with added vinyl connoisseur appeal and remixed sleeve artwork.”

You can pre-order here.

The 2024 reissue contains a previously unreleased version of ‘Innocence’ from Love To Infinity on both CD and Vinyl. 

You can listen to a previously unreleased remix of “Innocence” from Love To Infinity.

The tracklisting for The Other Two & You is:

CD 

Tasty Fish

The Greatest Thing

Selfish

Movin’ On

Ninth Configuration

Feel This Love

Spirit Level

Night Voice

Innocence (Love To Infinity 7″ Remix) *different version to the original

Loved It (The Other Track)

Vinyl 

Side One

Tasty Fish

The Greatest Thing

Selfish

Movin’ On

Ninth Configuration

 

Side Two

Feel This Love

Spirit Level

Night Voice

Innocence (Love To Infinity 7″ Remix) *different version to the original

Loved It (The Other Track) *CD only originally

Back To Black

Stephen Troussé
-
0
Back To Black

It’s been 13 years since she died, but it often feels like Amy Winehouse never went away. The  details of her life, all the squalor and the glory, continue to be raked over in the tabloids. Every new British singer from Adele and Raye struggles to escape the long dark shadow of her towering beehive. And the content stream is never ending: after the legacy album editions, the books and Asif Kapadia‘s Oscar-winning documentary, we have, after a promotional campaign that seems to have lasted for most of 2024,  Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic, Back To Black.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Let’s be clear: if you’re looking for dramatic insight into the raging soulstorm that fuelled her greatest music and tore her mind and body apart, you are barking up the wrong tree. If it isn’t quite the Hallmark version, Back To Black plays very safe with some very dark materials.

But it may be impossible to make an entirely dull film about Amy Winehouse. There are hints of something interesting here. Marisa Abel, one moment looking like Dot Cotton’s dissolute daughter, the next like a young Streisand in a Ronnie Spector wig, is remarkable and her portrayal deserves a better script. The first third of the film, following the gobby, gloriously talented girl from Southgate through the training pens of the music industry, leading to a memorable encounter with Jonathan Ross, capture some of her defiant spark. The first encounter with Blake Fielder-Civil in a Camden boozer, where he’s inspired to heights of seductive patter over a pint at the pool table, hint at why Amy fell for him so hard.

The key scene in the movie might be late on, after another failed reconciliation with Blake, where Amy asks her dad to take her back to Soho for a visit to Ronnie Scott’s. She breathes in and sighs: “Pure intoxication.” Back To Black presents Winehouse as an artist in thrall, helpless before the power of a certain dark glamour – whether she finds it in her nan’s black and white photos of the 60s, the voice of Sarah Vaughan, the sound of the Shangri Las, a blond boy in a Fred Perry, or at the end of a crack pipe.

The film hints at these compulsions, but never really follow through. Back to Black ultimately feels like a film pathologically afraid of offending anyone – or more to the point, getting sued. Amy’s dad, Mitch, who felt so insulted by his portrayal in Kapadia’s 2015 documentary, is here portrayed by Eddie Marsan as a proud, loving and concerned dad. Fiedler-Civil, Amy’s seducer, tormentor, and grand passion, comes across as a kind of blond SuperHans – a diamond geezer who just happens to find crack very moreish.

Arguably this is all a useful corrective to the twisted pantomime versions the tabloids have studiously curated over the years. But turning this life and this talent into a product so inoffensive seems contrary to the very essence of Amy Winehouse.

Watch a video for Rich Ruth’s new single, “No Muscle, No Memory”

Tom Pinnock
-
0
Watch a video for Rich Ruth’s new single, “No Muscle, No Memory”

Rich Ruth will release a new album, Water Still Flows, on June 21. Appearing via Third Man Records, it’s preceded by a single, “No Muscle, No Memory” – watch the video below:

Water Still Flows is the Nashville-based experimental musician’s third record, and the follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed I Survived, It’s Over. Recording took place in Ruth’s home studio in the city during breaks between touring as a solo artist and with SG Goodman.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

As Ruth explains, the album was inspired by the struggles of being a touring musician in today’s harsh environment: “After spending a large portion of the past 12 years touring and recording, none of this stuff has gotten easier. Much of the anxiety and intense feelings I’ve poured into this record are a direct correlation to the uncertainty of trying to earn a living with music.

“Despite many hopeful opportunities I’ve been given, it has taken a toll on my body and mental health merely trying to survive playing music in the current age. The soothing quality of these new pieces reflect a constant search for solitude and stability. The frenetic, heavier parts mirror the tense variability I feel on a regular basis as a working musician. At the end of the day, all of the sacrifice and uncertainty is a small price to pay for the privilege to share this music with people.”

The album features guest musicians including Spencer Cullum on pedal steel, Patrick M’gonigle on violin, Jared Selner on saxophone and Ruben Gingrich on drums.

Pre-order Water Still Flows here and peruse Rich Ruth’s US tourdates below:

4/28: Fort Worth, TX – Tulips *
4/29: Oklahoma City, OK – Beer City Music Hall *
5/1: Baton Rouge, LA – Chelsea’s Live *
5/3: Knoxville, TN – The Pilot Light
5/4: Asheville, NC – Eulogy
5/5: WinstonSalem, NC – The Ramkat *
5/8: Raleigh, NC – King’s
5/9: Charleston, SC – Music Farm *
5/10: Savannah, GA – Victory North *
6/22: Nashville, TN – The Blue Room
6/25: Washington DC – Pearl Street Warehouse ^
6/26: Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s ^
6/27: Woodstock, NY – Colony ^
6/28: Brooklyn, NY – Union Pool

  • w/ All Them Witches
    ^ w/ Mikaela Davis

Linda Thompson announces new album, Proxy Music

Sam Richards
-
0
Linda Thompson announces new album, Proxy Music

Folk-rock royalty Linda Thompson has announced that Proxy Music, her first new solo album since 2013’s Won’t Be Long Now, will be released by StorySound Records on June 21.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The title refers to the fact that Thompson herself was unable to sing these songs, due to a rare condition called spasmodic dysphonia that has periodically affected her career since the early 1980s. Instead, vocal duties are handled by a range of all-star guests including John Grant, The Proclaimers, The Unthanks, Eliza Carthy, Rufus Wainwright and various members of Thompson’s talented extended family.

Hear lead single “The Solitary Traveller” – written with James Walbourne and sung by Kami Thompson (AKA The Rails) – below:

“Solitary Traveller, I wouldn’t know,” says Thompson. “I’ve never been one. But, if you have a lot of people in your life, you sometimes yearn for solitude. Conversely, solitary people often crave company. It is a bit of a dichotomy. My daughter doing the honours.”

Pre-order Proxy Music here and check out the tracklisting below:

  1. The Solitary Traveller feat. Kami Thompson
  2. Or Nothing at All feat. Martha Wainwright
  3. Bonnie Lass feat. The Proclaimers
  4. Darling This Will Never Do feat. Rufus Wainwright
  5. I Used To Be So Pretty feat. Ren Harvieu
  6. John Grant feat. John Grant
  7. Mudlark feat. The Rails
  8. Shores of America feat. Dori Freeman
  9. That’s the Way the Polka Goes feat. Eliza Carthy
  10. Three Shaky Ships feat. The Unthanks
  11. Those Damn Roches feat. Teddy Thompson

Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle

Piers Martin
-
0
Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle


Jane Weaver is playing a very good long game. She’s just turned 52 and has spent over 30 of those years deeply involved in music in Manchester – from her early bands Kill Laura and Misty Dixon to her free-flowing solo output and more wayward projects such as Fenella and NeoTantrik – and yet this latest release, Love In Constant Spectacle, is by some distance her most satisfying album. Full of surprises and tantalisingly familiar, it’s the sound of Weaver stretching out and drawing from her wealth of experience to fashion a heartfelt, head-spinning account of grief and solace.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Viewing the curve of her career, you can see how she got here: 2014’s The Silver Globe and its follow-up Modern Kosmology packaged her hippie-ish idealism in proggy chansons and Can-like grooves, a homespun blend of Hawkwind and Hot Chocolate that paved the way for Flock in 2021. This, she’d decided, was to be her pop breakthrough, one she’d play to her swelling fanbase at numerous festivals. She studied the hits of Hall & Oates and the Bee Gees and emulated the parts that worked for her, producing an array of celestial psych nuggets like “The Revolution Of Super Visions” and “Heartlow” that sounded great on the radio. The pandemic scuppered most of her plans – she only finished touring that record in March last year – but Flock certainly helped Weaver take flight.

It was during her band’s runs in America that this album began to take shape, on long desert drives across Southern states into the sunset, soundtracked by the blissful pastorals of Harold Budd and Vangelis. Weaver was coming to terms with her father’s illness and eventual passing, and sought some kind of comfort in the natural world, an attempt by one fairly well attuned to the frequency of the cosmos to place order on the chaos of life. Securing John Parish as producer for the record also allowed Weaver the luxury of revelling in the sound of her music, happily relinquishing control to the man who’s stewarded records by PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding and Dry Cleaning. In the past, Weaver has had a hands-on role in every aspect of her albums, necessitated by budgetary constraints and an inherent resourcefulness, often recording them bit by bit over a couple of years in a local studio. So to have a first-class studio booked months in advance, for a batch of songs already well-rehearsed, with a producer known for channelling the essence of an artist, gave Weaver the space and confidence to look at her work from different angles.

For some songs she tried the technique of automatic writing, translating her lyrics to give the impression she’s singing someone else’s words, which provides a sense of welcome detachment. The opening lines of the spellbinding title track, “Over the head of you/Wanted an island to give to you”, might stem from this process, but it’s the song’s Roxy-ish swagger that pulls you in. Trish Keenan of Broadcast famously used this lyric-writing approach, and there are shades of that group, and Stereolab too, in the chintzy swirl of “Perfect Storm” and the loping funk that underpins “Emotional Components”, not to mention the fuzzy psych of “Happiness In Proximity”. Parish’s presence seems to have given Weaver the freedom to create extravagant arrangements which he hones into focus, as on “Univers”, an enchanting reflection on the natural order of things that started life as a country ballad but evolved into something quite stunning in the studio. Similarly, where perhaps Weaver might have piled on the synths to make a point in earlier recordings, here she exercises restraint to let the songs bloom. “The Axis And The Seed” unfurls atmospherically over a “Metronomic Underground” bassline as Weaver sings of “the crocus buried deep” and finding “the axis and the seed”; this is what she means by love in constant spectacle: although the soil is cold and muddy, life is bubbling away under the surface and come spring the flowers burst into life. By the time the purring final track “Family Of The Sun” coasts out of view, pulled away by a motorik drum-machine and cresting jangle, Weaver is serene and composed, singing, “I’m escaping this loneliness through the optical/And completing this task”.

There’s a pleasing sense of closure in the album’s circular flow, which also, inevitably, possesses that sense of optimism that runs throughout Weaver’s catalogue. This might well be her finest record so far, but you can bet the next ones will be even better.

Epic Soundtracks

Sam Richards
-
0
Epic Soundtracks

In this month’s Uncut, we speak to the reigning king of jazz saxophone Kamasi Washington about how his upcoming album is inspired by new life and the need to overcome old divisions. “Music cleanses us,” he explains.

Now read on for an extract from our interview…

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Around midnight most evenings, Kamasi Washington will sit down at the piano in the living room of his home in Inglewood, Los Angeles, and begin to compose. Despite being synonymous with the saxophone, he only ever writes on piano, which goes some way towards explaining the harmonic richness of his music. “The piano is so much more versatile as far as being able to play the different parts and hear the song in its entirety,” he explains. “I played piano before I played saxophone, so it was always the logical choice. The saxophone is the racehorse, but the piano is the workhorse.”

He never tends to get much written during the day. “When the world gets quieter, it’s easier to focus. There’s rarely something I have to do at one in the morning.” But there’s another reason for his nocturnal schedule: lately his piano has been monopolised by a different, smaller pair of hands. Born during lockdown in 2020, his daughter has already shown aptitude for the family business, even writing one of the songs on his new album, Fearless Movement. “She’s very musical,” beams Washington. “She would get up every morning and go play piano. Sometimes she wouldn’t let me get on! Normally she’d play a bit more random, but one time she was playing this melody over and over again. Luckily, technology’s cool – pulled my phone out and recorded it. Then I started messin’ around with it, slowed it down, added some chords to it. And it made the record!”

The simple, rousing chorus of “Asha The First” – along with some funkier rhythms and a clutch of star cameos – helps to make Kamasi Washington’s fifth solo album his most accessible to date. But it’s still a lavish and expansive piece of work. Washington hasn’t become the most celebrated saxophonist of his generation by crossing over, dumbing down or condensing his vision into Spotify-sized snippets. Instead, he’s flourished as a radical maximalist, making music that’s vast in sound and scope, without losing sight of where he’s from. Indeed, at the heart of each record is the same tight-knit core of musicians, most of whom have been together since their teens, jamming in the garage between bouts of Street Fighter.

“I feel like his music reflects his personality,” says keyboardist Brandon Coleman, who first knew Washington as the lynchpin of South Central LA’s formidable multi-school jazz band, “comprised of all the baddest musicians in inner city schools.” Later they roomed together as students, playing church gigs on the weekend. “Kamasi’s one of the funniest people I know. He can talk to anybody about anything. He’s a genuine person, just a sincere individual. [With the music] his intentions are to create something magical, something unique. And he always stays true to that, even in moments where everyone else is trying to project another idea. He has a very clear stance on what he wants.”

“We end up having very ethereal conversations,” adds long-serving bassist Miles Mosley, another alumnus of the multi-school band. “Sometimes there are very high-level theory discussions about chord structures and harmonies. We will have a lunchbreak-length conversation about E flat minor 13 with the sharp 11! But generally speaking we’re looking for a feeling, and he’s looking for the sandbox to be right. We’ve been making music together for a long time, and he composes his music knowing the arsenal of players he’s going to have at his behest. So he derives a lot of joy from just seeing what happens.”

Read the full feature only in the latest edition of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy direct from us here

Mayday is released on May 3 via Young and can be pre-ordered here

Hymns Ancient And Modern

Laura Barton
-
0
Hymns Ancient And Modern

In this month’s Uncut, we speak to Myriam Gendron, the enigmatic French-Canadian artist who has been quietly transforming folk songs and Dorothy Parker poems with intense, delicate results. With a new album of her own compositions imminent, we hear her remarkable story.

Now read on for an extract from our interview…

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

On the wall of the music room in her Montreal home, Myriam Gendron has hung several posters: one from a party to celebrate the poetry publishing house run by her partner; another from a Michael Hurley show at La Vitrola, where Gendron played support; and a billing for Pour La Suite du Monde, a documentary set in the fishing community of a small island on the St Lawrence River. 

There too, is an enlarged print of a photograph the singer took of a studio house on Villa Seurat in Paris. “Henry Miller used to live there,” she says. “I was a huge fan of Henry Miller when I was a teenager, so I went to visit where he lived.” The picture she took to commemorate that day did not turn out as planned; a problem with the camera film distorting the image of the street. She gestures to the white flare that blooms across the photograph. “But I thought it was beautiful,” she says. “I’ve always had it.”

It is simplistic to suggest that this collection of artworks fully encapsulates Gendron, yet there is something in their marriage of literature, music, tradition that seems to carry her essence. It is there even in that unanticipated flash of beauty of the Miller picture — a kind of illuminating effect between expectation and actuality.

Over the past decade, Gendron has established herself as an artist of immense craft and interpretive instinct. Her first album, 2014’s Not So Deep As A Well, set the poetry of Dorothy Parker to music and became a quiet cult hit. Her second, 2021’s Ma Délire, Songs Of Love, Lost And Found, saw her reinterpret and explore traditional material from Canadian folk tunes such as “Au Coeur de Ma Délire” and “Le Tueur de Femmes” to more familiar and long-storied songs such as “Go Away From My Window” and “Shenandoah” — alongside a couple of her own compositions.

Her voice is a curious thing, capable of moving from dark siltiness to startling clarity across a single line, giving the impression of something forever being heaved up from depth to light. Her musical approach is a similar dance of structure and dissemblage. “She’s spellbinding,” says Will Oldham, who took Gendron on tour last autumn. “I started listening to Ma Délire over and over and over again, then got Not So Deep As a Well. That was during a time when I had a group of songs that I was trying to polish with the intention of making Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. I found that Myriam’s two records were things that I returned to for inspiration. For a powerful distilled intentional presentation of superficially simple arrangements of complex pieces of music. I can listen to her records all day, every day.”

In conversation Gendron is a measured presence. She speaks in English, with the occasional Quebecois twist to her sentences and when she touches on certain subjects her guarded air gives way suddenly — her face lighting up as she discusses the favourite of her seven guitars, say, or the freedom she finds in writing instrumental music “because words lock up meaning.”

For a couple of years, Gendron has spent the bulk of her days in her music room, slowly shifting from reinterpreting the words and compositions of others into the new terrain of her own songwriting. It has proved a strange and sometimes mystical process. “Sometimes I feel more like a witness to what I do,” is how she describes it. “It’s like you’re channeling something, you don’t really know what’s happening, and there it is.”

In this way, Gendron crafted the songs that make up her third album, Mayday. It is a stunning record, encompassing the loss of her mother amid a broader and more intangible sense of grief that she struggles now to articulate. “It was not only my mother, it was trying to be open to a more general sense of loss that anyone can relate to,” she says. “Everyone’s lost something. I think we all have this within ourselves. It’s like an original lost paradise story. The oldest story in the world. We all miss something, maybe it’s been there ever since we were born.”

As she speaks, my eye is drawn back to the posters on her wall, and to a work by the artist Catherine Ocelot, who Gendron recently commissioned to work on the merchandise for her forthcoming album. Gendron turns and looks at the picture for a moment. “It’s a beautiful drawing,” she says. “I just got it. It’s a woman crying into her plant. And the plant is huge.”

Read the full feature only in the latest edition of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy direct from us here

Mayday is released on May 10 via Thrill Jockey & Feeding Tube and can be pre-ordered here

Still On The Ledge

Tom Pinnock
-
0
Still On The Ledge

In this month’s Uncut, we speak to Richard Thompson about his brilliant new album, the magic of Big Pink, adventures in the Sahara and imaginary conversations with Sandy Denny.

Now read on for an extract from our interview…

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Inconspicuous in a black leather coat and cap, Richard Thompson remains undisturbed as he windowshops on London’s Denmark Street. For one of Britain’s most revered guitarists and songwriters, though, this particular road holds temptations and regrets at every turn.

“Roger McGuinn left his Rickenbacker behind in the UK, because the neck was broken,” he says, eyeing a 12-string in one shop window. “Somebody fixed it and I bought it. I’m divorced from it now, but it was good while it lasted. Now I’ve got a Telecaster 12-string, which is great – Jeff Tweedy has three!”

Further along the street, past a display fortuitously presenting two models from his past – a Gibson ES-175 and a vintage sunburst Stratocaster – he pauses to peer into the industrial interior of a chic steak restaurant. Thompson used to come here in the ’60s, back when this was La Gioconda coffee bar and he was just 12 or 13 years old. “You used to see all kinds of people in there,” he recalls. “The Shadows, the Small Faces, anybody. My friends and I used to come down Saturday morning, ogle the guitars and have a cup of tea.”

Only a few years later, Thompson and his pals formed Fairport Convention, and soon went to pioneer an electrifying strand of British folk. By 1971, he’d left the band to go solo and, barring a decade-long partnership with his first wife Linda, that’s where he’s been ever since. While consistency is Thompson’s forte, his last few albums have been some of his strongest: 2013’s Electric and 2015’s Still were excellent, but 2018’s 13 Rivers and his upcoming new album, Ship To Shore, are even better.

“As a batsman I’d like to not be the guy who’s out for a duck or scores a hundred,” he says. “I’d like to be the guy who scores 33 every time, just reliable. It could be a fantastic, elegant, inspirational, artistic 33…”

He turns 75 in April, but to many Thompson remains the gangly teenager of Fairport fame, a prodigy whose first song was, quite bafflingly, the immortal “Meet On The Ledge”. For his part, he seems happy to be forever associated with the group he left over 50 years ago: next year he’ll quite literally be unable to escape his past when he co-headlines a week-long Adriatic cruise with the current line-up of Fairport.

Strolling down Tottenham Court Road, we pass by Watkins, long-time purveyors of arcane and antiquarian books. It was here that Thompson started the spiritual journey that led him to embrace the mystical form of Islam known as Sufism. “I was working my way through the bookshelf from A for anthroposophy and B for Blavatsky, all the way to Z for zen,” he says inside the hushed shop, placing a book of English folktales back on the shelf. “But I stopped at the Sufis. I thought they were my sort of thing, a philosophical, spiritual path – they seemed to be people who had the knowledge, now. As I formed that thought they arrived on my doorstep, there was a meeting a few hundred yards from my house in Belsize Park. I’ve been there ever since.”

We reach our destination, a Covent Garden bistro blasting out a variety of retro tunes that please Thompson no end, including Peggy Lee’s “I’m A Woman” and a version of Earl Hagen’s “Harlem Nocturne”.

“I’ve still got the same mindset as I always had,” he explains over a steaming cup of sencha tea. “I’m always trying to write a good song or play a good solo. That hasn’t changed since I was 18.”


UNCUT: You recorded Ship To Shore while you were living in Woodstock. How did you find it up there?

RICHARD THOMPSON: I think we missed the vibe by 60 years. It’s a bit touristy now, every other shop has a case of crystals. I wanted to get out of New Jersey because it was a bit dull. I didn’t want to go back to the West Coast because New Jersey’s so convenient for popping over to Europe. I thought of Woodstock, because there’s a musical community up there. It’s beautiful up there in the Catskills, really lovely. We visited the basement at Big Pink – there’s an energy there, definitely, the sound molecules have altered the room somehow.

Talking of Woodstock, weren’t you asked to join The Band once?

Twice! I think when Robbie left I got asked, and then again in the ’80s just before the Cate brothers joined. At that point they were really dysfunctional as human beings, Rick and Richard were serious partygoers, I wouldn’t have fitted in and it would have been a hobby rather than my musical goal. Once you get to call the shots, you kind of get used to it.

If you’re making some of your best work over the last decade, you’re not alone – Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and more are on top form recently.

I’m interested to hear the Paul Simon record, it really sounds like divine inspiration the way he described it, like it came from outside of him. Dylan’s made some amazing records lately. It’s totally uncharted territory. As a folkie – I’ll call myself that for temporary convenience – you’re more used to going to a folk festival and them digging out some old fisherman or farmer, but in pop music you’re supposed to have gone by 25. What they call rock music is weird in that way, that the boomer generation of musicians found they still had an audience so they kept going, for better, for worse. I prefer the parallels with someone like David Hockney or my favourite artist Gillian Ayres, she was working every day in the studio in her eighties – perhaps those should be the role models for the ageing boomer musicians?

Read the full feature only in the latest edition of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy direct from us here

Ship To Shore is released by New West Records on May 31 and can be pre-ordered here

The Woman Who Fell To Earth

Stephen Troussé
-
0
The Woman Who Fell To Earth

In this month’s Uncut, we speak to Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, about her the dramas and demons behind her sublime seventh album, All Born Screaming.

Now read on for an extract from our interview…

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Reclining on the sofa in her grand Edwardian hotel suite, Annie Clark seems immaculately composed as she recalls the first strange stirrings of her seventh album.

“I had a sense that I wanted to be pummeled by music,” she says matter-of-factly, holding your gaze. “Who knows if I was reacting to things I’ve done in the past, or things that are around in the culture, but I wanted to be just pummeled. Shaken like a rag doll.” She pauses for a moment, maybe for effect, maybe just considering her words carefully, possibly pondering Brian Eno’s maxim that art is a safe space for violent experiment, a plane you can crash and then walk away from. “I really wanted to explore that feeling of digging your fingernails into your thigh,” she concludes. “You know, just so that it bleeds a little…”

She looks like she means business. At various times over the past two decades under her nom de guerre St Vincent she has manifested in strange guises, like some renegade Timelord or Thomas Pynchon’s elusive, apocalyptic world-spirit, V. One moment Bride-of-Frankenstein cult leader, the next cosmetically disfigured American gothic schoolmarm. From pill-popping suburban housewife via glamazon dominatrix to louche ‘70s hot mess…

Today on a drizzly spring evening in Holborn her dark hair is neatly parted and pulled back into a simple bun. Her white blouse and long black leather coat are offset by girlish white socks and black heels. She is, however, as sweet as Texan apple pie. “Making journalists crawl was as masochistic as it was sadistic,” she says with a smile and a shake of the head, recalling her youthful attempts to “deconstruct the promotional interview” (installing interviewers in escape rooms; recording stock responses on a dictaphone). “I ended up spending 12 hours a days in paint fume rooms. Nowadays I’m like, ‘Nah, don’t reinvent the wheel – let’s just have a chat…’”

There’s much to discuss. The shapeshifting mischief of her muse and her uncanny ability to flit from the margins to the mainstream and back again. Her restless, maverick ambition as a musician, schooled as a guitar prodigy at Berklee, still spurred by the example of everyone from Kate Bush to John Coltrane. And her sublime seventh album, All Born Screaming, which sees her finally release the monstrous, infernal gothic rock record she was honour-bound to make, ever since the moment in 2006 when she plucked her stage name from a Nick Cave song. 18 years since she became St Vincent, it feels like her defining record, a paring back to basics, a reckoning with fundamental facts of life.

“I think we’ve all been through quite a bit of loss,” she says of the season in hell the album recounts. “You know, with worldwide collective plague and all. One of the things that loss like that does, it acts as a clarifying force. Because it forces you to decide, well this matters and this doesn’t fucking matter. So let’s look at what matters and let’s go the long way through Hell. You come around to the realisation that we’ve only got one life, so we better really live it and not take anything for granted. All we have is love and all we have is the people we love. So let’s hold hands and walk through the fire together.”

Read the full feature only in the latest edition of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy direct from us here

All Born Streaming is available from Virgin Music/Fiction Records on April 26 and can be pre-ordered here

Where It’s At

Stephen Deusner
-
0
Where It’s At

In this month’s Uncut, we bring together The Black Keys‘ Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney and Beck for an exclusive interview to celebrate their work together on The Black Keys new studio album, Ohio Players… Let’s just call them The Beck Keys.

Now read on for an extract from this one-off encounter…

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

That’s a picnic lunch 20 years in the making. The two acts have been circling each other for decades, bound by their shared love of blues, funk and soul. After touring together in 2003, the three musicians often talked about jamming, recording or just hanging out together, but their plans only finally came to fruition in 2022, when Beck stopped by Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville and the trio raced through a handful of songs in an afternoon. “When you’re working on a record and the songs are coming together, whatever the energy and the vibe, it just goes into the music,” says Beck.

Such energies are evident on the lively Ohio Players, which combines the thickfreak attack of The Black Keys with Beck’s bottles-and-cans-and-just-clap-your-hands aesthetic. Of the album’s 14 tracks, Beck co-wrote seven and played on several others, injecting them with lively rhythms and flourishes of funk, r&b and even country. “That’s the whole draw of music,” says Carney. “It’s an art form that’s very collaborative. It’s one of the few forms where you create something from nothing.”

To celebrate their fruitful work together, The Black Keys and Beck – let’s just call them The Beck Keys – sat down with Uncut for an exclusive joint interview. In this excerpt, they discuss their first hook-ups…

PATRICK CARNEY: You might not remember this, but I met you on the Odelay tour. I was about 16 and my uncle Ralph arranged through Smokey Hormel [Beck’s guitarist] to get me a backstage pass. It was the first time I went backstage at a show. That was one of my first concerts and it totally blew my mind. I was a huge fan and still am. I think we talked about The Shaggs for a while.

BECK HANSEN: I remember hanging with you… it must have been ’96 or something? We were playing in Ohio. I don’t remember the place, but I remember we talked for a long time. Your uncle Ralph had auditioned for the band and was friend of Smokey’s. I knew about him because he had played with Tom Waits. I remember he showed up at rehearsal with a Chinese nose flute! He had all these weird flugelhorns, which didn’t really go with the songs we were playing at the time. I was like, “Damn, I wish I had the right album for this guy…”

CARNEY: I came to two shows: you played Akron and the following spring you were headlining with The Roots and Atari Teenage Riot. Then we met again at a Saturday Night Live afterparty in 2003. Our friends in Sleater-Kinney got us in. I gave you a promo of Thickfreakness on CD. A couple of weeks later we learned through our agent that you had offered us a spot on his summer tour. That was huge for us. We jumped at the opportunity.

BECK: I remember meeting you guys that night! It was a huge blizzard and we were stuck in New York. I thought you had snuck into the party.

DAN AUERBACH: We did! We weren’t supposed to be there. But here’s our CD, you’re going to love it!

BECK: People would give me CDs all the time, but I remember listening to your album and thinking, ‘Shit, this is really good.’ Then you played at this place down the street from my house called Spaceland. I think you were opening for a band called Jet. I walked down there just to see y’all. I brought this producer friend along with me. There were probably less than 10 people there. Both our jaws were on the floor. I felt like we were at the Forum watching this band play their greatest hits set when they’re 50.

CARNEY: We didn’t know you were in the audience that night. That’s when we were touring in a Buick Century, just the two of this in a car. There was so much gear that we couldn’t even recline the passenger seat. The night before, we had played Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco then we had to drive all night to have a meeting at 10 in the morning in L.A. We were completely zoned…

BECK: But you played an amazing show. It was just so formed, the songs were all good. When you would play a song, it was like, ‘Oh man, they’re playing this one!’ Which is wild for a fairly new band. It was undeniable. That’s when I told my manager I wanted to have these guys out on my tour. It was a big tour. All of North America. I think it started in Boston. It was good to reconnect with you.

Read the full feature only in the latest edition of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy direct from us here

Ohio Players is available now from Nonesuch and can be ordered here

“I’ll Be Your King Volcano!”

Peter Watts
-
0
“I’ll Be Your King Volcano!”

This month’s Uncut cover story digs deep into David Bowie‘s groundbreaking Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars album, as an expansive new box set, Rock N Roll Star!, unearths outtakes, alternate versions, radio sessions and more to shed new light on his doomed extra-terrestrial rocker.

In this excerpt from our cover story, we preview 10 tracks from the upcoming Rock N Roll Star! box…

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

DISC 1

“Hang On To Yourself”

[Early demo]

Bowie had just met Gene Vincent when he recorded this demo at the home of an RCA executive in the US in February 1972, which might explain the retro feel of one of the Ziggy songs that took longest to get right.

“Sweet Head”

[Haddon Hall rehearsal]

An early version of the Ziggy outtake that was probably dropped from the running order due to the sexual references. Bowie also dropped “Velvet Goldmine” for similar reasons – and along with the use of American slang, it shows that he was actively courting the US market.

DISC 2

“I’m Waiting For The Man”

[BBC Radio session]

Bowie’s love of the Velvet Underground was profound and he regularly covered both “White Light/White Heat” and “I’m Waiting For The Man”. This outstanding version of the latter was recorded for John Peel’s Sounds Of The 70s on January 11, 1972 and boasts wild Ronson guitar.

“Five Years”

[BBC Radio session]

Recorded for Bob Harris on Sounds Of The 70s on January 18, this was one of the first times the band had played “Five Years” outside Trident. It was broadcast on February 7, introducing Ziggy Stardust’s scene-setting opener to the wider world.

DISC 3

“Moonage Daydream”

[BBC Radio session]

With the band halfway through their UK tour, Bowie was flying when he recorded this excellent Sounds Of The 70s session with John Peel in May 72. Augmented by Nicky Graham’s jabbing keyboard, it gives a sense of how powerful the band would have sounded in the small venues they were still playing.

“Rock N Roll Suicide”

[BBC Radio session]

This thrilling version of Ziggy Stardust’s dramatic finale was recorded at a Sounds Of The 70s session with Bob Harris on May 23. It was the last song Bowie recorded for the BBC until August 1991.

DISC 4

“Velvet Goldmine”

[Ziggy session out-take]

The cabaret-influenced “Velvet Goldmine” had been knocking about since the start of 1971 before it was finally dropped. The track eventually featured on the B-side of a reissue of “Space Oddity” in 1975.

“My Death”

[Live at Music Hall Boston]

A previously unreleased live favourite recorded at the Music Hall in Boston in October on the Ziggy tour, exquisitely performed and recorded for a proposed live album. Shortly after, Bowie would start to introduce songs for Aladdin Sane to the set list.

DISC 5

“Star”

[Ziggy session out-take]

This was one of the first songs recorded at Trident, and Bowie still hadn’t finalised the lyric, demonstrating that his editing and writing process continued until the moment he recorded the final vocal.

“I Can’t Explain”

[Trident Studio version]

Nobody is entirely sure why Bowie led the band through a rip-snorting cover of the Who classic during a recording session for “John, I’m Only Dancing”. Was he already thinking ahead to Pin Ups..?

Read the full feature only in the latest edition of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy direct from us here

Rock N Roll Star! is released by Parlophone Records on June 14 and can be pre-ordered here

Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies (reissue, 1973)

Stephen Deusner
-
0
Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies (reissue, 1973)

Supporting the old trope that you must suffer for your art, Alice Cooper got an opus out of a toothache. On “Unfinished Sweet”, the deranged heart of the band’s sixth studio album, Billion Dollar Babies, frontman Vincent Furnier sings some lowdown dental blues, describing the pain like a “Saint Vitus dance on my molars tonight” and wincing at the paranoid hallucinations prompted by the laughing gas. The rest of the band are just as committed to the ludicrous concept, with Glen Buxton duetting with a dental drill before colliding head-on with a surf-rock/spy-theme breakdown. At no point does dentistry become a metaphor for anything else associated with rock’n’roll. It’s not about sex or VD. It’s not about drugs or ODs. It’s just candy and cavities.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Therein lies the appeal of Alice Cooper. There was no concept so stupid that it couldn’t be parlayed into a catchy rock song, no idea so weird they couldn’t deliver it to radio with a black bow on top. Before the Ramones made dumb sound smart, Alice Cooper reveled in juvenile jokes, adolescent alienation and bludgeon-to-the-brain riffage. The band developed their love of theatre on the West Coast, where they worked briefly with Frank Zappa and gained a reputation for grotesque live shows. Around 1970, however, they moved back to Furnier’s hometown of Detroit, where The Stooges and the MC5 were bashing out a no-frills brand of heavy rock that would eventually morph into punk. That’s where Alice Cooper learned to marry their wildest notions with their heaviest riffs.

While it may not include the group’s best-known songs, it may be their best album. It’s certainly their most imaginative: a loose concept album about… well, who knows? But it does showcase their wild theatrics, their macabre imagery, their gory guitar licks and their fuck-everybody attitude that’s just about palatable thanks to the weirdo sense of humour that animates every note. With producer Bob Ezrin they recorded first at a mansion in Connecticut and later at Morgan Studios in London, where of all people Donovan added vocals to the title track.

Billion Dollar Babies is a bubbling cauldron crammed with old Mad magazines, purloined Playboys, grisly EC Comics, monster movies and vaudeville jokes. It’s a distinctly American stew – a yank interpretation of glam rock – but Alice Cooper had the songwriting skills and the instrumental chops to create and sustain such an outrageous spectacle. Furnier plays the master of ceremonies on opener “Hello Hooray”, beckoning American youth into a macabre circus tent: “Roll out with your circus freaks and hula hoops,” he commands. “I’ve been ready, ready as this audience that’s coming here to dream.” By album’s end that attention has given him almost God-like powers: “You things are heavenly when you come worship me,” he proclaims on “Sick Things”. But again, there’s no real subtext, which is impressive: rather than ponder the deleterious effects of celebrity, Furnier just likes being onstage.

That makes their sacred-cow-tipping all the more fun. On Billion Dollar Babies Alice Cooper mock everything. They attack the establishment and blow raspberries at the counterculture. “Mary Ann” sounds like they’re melting a Paul McCartney seven-inch, and “Generation Landslide” is a wry parody of Bob Dylan. On the latter Furnier mimics the folk singer’s delivery and wordplay as he describes “militant mothers hiding in the basement/Using pots and pans as their shields and their helmets/Molotov milk bottles heaved from pink highchairs.” Culminating in a cutting harmonica solo, it’s a generational anthem for a generation sick of generational anthems.

The biggest hit from Billion Dollar Babies suggests Alice Cooper’s greatest target for scorn was themselves. “No More Mr Nice Guy” has been so thoroughly absorbed into classic rock radio that you might even forget that it’s by Alice Cooper – or that it’s really savvy and really funny. It’s about rebellion, but not the romanticised counterculture of the 1960s. Furnier saw a grimmer, lonelier angst in this new decade, and he also saw the ravaging effect of adolescent hormones on America’s youth. “No More Mr Nice Guy” is a wicked coming-of-age tale, with Furnier playing the part of a kid suddenly at odds with the adult world. That title phrase may be commonly used as a threat, but any menace Furnier represents is hollow: the song ends with the former Mr Nice Guy getting clocked by Reverend Smith.

Just months after Billion Dollar Babies, Alice Cooper released the strained Muscle Of Love, a too-quick follow-up that is best known for its bulky cardboard packaging. Furnier left the group and took their identity with him, legally changing his name to Alice Cooper before releasing his solo debut. This album, then, while cementing their status as hitmakers, represents the end of an era for Alice Cooper the band and the man, neither of which would reach this peak of weirdness again. Fifty years later, it’s lost none of its morbid magnetism.

EXTRAS: The ’73 live show shows the band in their true elements, but it was already included on the 2001 reissue. The single versions are new, but largely redundant. 5/10

Perfect Circle

Stephen Deusner
-
0
Perfect Circle

On a Thursday night in February at the famous 40 Watt club in Athens, Georgia, REM fans got to witness the closest thing we may ever see to a full-band reunion. As actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy brought their touring celebration of 1984’s Murmur to REM’s hometown, members of the original band began joining the the fray, until Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe were sharing a stage for the first time in 17 years.

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

“Bill asked us if he could play piano on ‘Perfect Circle,’ which he does on the record,” says Narducy. “And when I saw ‘Pretty Persuasion’ coming up on the setlist, I asked our stage manager to see if he could find Mike Mills and invite him up, since that song has such heavy backing vocals. He jumped up and kept on jumping up.” Buck, meanwhile, had been at the club since soundcheck, giving Narducy a few pointers. “Even when he was on-stage with us, he’s showing me these little things as he was playing on the record. It was very touching for a massive fan like myself. I still don’t think I’ve even grasped it, honestly.”

Finally, at the end of the night, Stipe jumped on-stage to thank the band and the excited crowd, completing the quartet. “It’s an honour to hear the songs so fresh, live in a room again,” Stipe tells Uncut later. “Since I was always singing them, I never got to hear them.”

The reunion was the unexpected culmination of Shannon and Narducy’s tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of REM’s legendary debut, with the acclaimed actor and the veteran sideman covering Murmur in its entirety. “It’s not a tribute band,” says Narducy. “We’re not using the exact same equipment or dressing up like them. It’s a pretty weird thing that seems to be working.” The band is more like a theater troupe using the album as a script; rather than recreate it, they reinterpret it each night, with Shannon bringing a more punk-derived vocal and Narducy turning Buck’s guitar riffs inside out. “I was already in love with this band, but then I went deeper into their catalogue and learned the songs inside out,” says Narducy. “Now I’m an even bigger fan.”

The pair both latched on to REM as teenagers in the 1980s, discovering them via Document and then working backwards as they moved forward with their own creative careers. After playing in the influential bands Verboten and Verbow, Narducy has lately been touring with Bob Mould and Sunny Day Real Estate. And many of Shannon’s roles involve music and musicians, including his recent performance as George Jones in the Showtime series George & Tammy. Their partnership has roots in Chicago’s anything-goes music scene, when they met ten years ago to cover The Velvet Underground & Nico with local alt.country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks. Since then, they’ve done similar sets devoted to The Cars, The Smiths, Neil Young and The Modern Lovers.

Of all the albums they’ve covered together, none has provoked such a strong reaction from fans – or from the original artists – as Murmur. Even before they coaxed their heroes back on-stage, they were playing to some of their biggest and most excited crowds yet. “There’s something about early REM that has really struck a chord,” says Narducy. “They were one of the biggest bands in the world, but they’ve maintained this grace and creativity that is so rare.”

REM are on the cover of Ultimate Record Collection: The 500 Greatest Albums of the 1990s, which is on sale now – order your copy here

Introducing the 500 Greatest Albums of the 1990s…Ranked!

John Robinson
-
0
Introducing the 500 Greatest Albums of the 1990s…Ranked!

1991, according to the title of a documentary about Sonic Youth, was “The Year Punk Broke”. What they meant by this was that 1991 was finally when punk – the traditional music of abrasion, alienation and catharsis – finally became commercially successful. It was a strange turn of events, as if this wasn’t in the first place an absurd expectation for such music.

In truth, while exciting music was certainly being made by Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney and Babes In Toyland and others featured in Dave Markey’s documentary, the majority of the actual breaking was being done by Nirvana. As Stephen Deusner writes in his review of Nevermind in this new magazine, other artists launched careers, reinvigorated genres and sold more records in 1991, but no-one had quite the cultural influence of Nirvana. 

True enough, the bands of Britpop – by some reckonings the other dominant genre of the decade – made lesser incursions overseas, but for huge numbers of inland youth the successes of these bands marked a breaking of their own: a victory over the imagined gatekeepers of the pop charts, the ones keeping Take That at the top. If in the previous decade success might have meant the fleeting appearance of The Smiths or the Happy Mondays on Top Of The Pops now Blur and Oasis were almost literally slugging it out at the actual top of the charts. 

Clubbable scenes masking palpable tensions. Artistic/personal success as a source of existential crisis – there were clearly ironies at play in the decade’s music beyond those you might see in a Sleeper video. Maybe the paranoid sorrows of Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack – “Trip-hop” as we called it then – wore the decade’s true colours most boldly. 

Bobby Gillespie saw it all happen. As leader of Primal Scream, in the 1990s he moved from dance into rhythm and blues and gospel, hard rock and into dub, all the while rising above genre: the better to pick out the best in all music. Splendidly isolated as Primal Scream might have been, Bobby can still take some pride in having broken down some barriers that helped others succeed. 

“We opened up a section of youth culture or indie music to go bigger and I think it kind of set the ground for Britpop,” he tells us. “There’s already an audience waiting there – people who had liked The Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the Mondays or The La’s. So when Blur, Suede, Oasis, Pulp and stuff came in there was an audience there. Those bands got really big, they became so much bigger than us. For a while it was a phenomenon.”

Bobby himself, however, confesses he may not have been paying much attention.  

“I’d have been listening to Tricky at the same time,” he says, “that’s where my tastes were.”

Enjoy the magazine. Get one here

Paul Weller – The Lighthouse, Poole, April 4, 24

Stephen Dalton
-
0
Paul Weller – The Lighthouse, Poole, April 4, 24

Paul Weller is not going gently into that good night. On the cusp of turning 66 – the title of his upcoming album – the ever-changing mod-rock godfather remains an edgy, bristling, wired presence onstage; still fired by youthful belligerence despite that sleek silver swoop of hair. Kicking off a short British tour in Poole, Weller keeps his stage banter genial but spare, giving little away. A Palestinian flag hangs behind him, a reminder of his long legacy of political statements. With barely a lull across two frenetic hours, he plays even gentle folk-pop ballads like he is itching for a fight. 

DAVID BOWIE IS ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Powered by a muscular six-piece band, including two drummers, this Poole show mostly sticks within Weller’s boisterous, high-decibel comfort zone. There is doubtless an element of playing to his geezer-rock heartland here: the public gets what the public wants. But all this burly clobbering risks underselling the subtle beauty of songs like the soulful, intricate “Mayfly”or the wafting, perfumed “Above The Clouds”. Even so, there are softer sonic textures in the mix, notably when honking tenor sax player Jacko Peake switches to pastoral flute and plaintive melodica on more introspective tracks like “Glad Times”. Weller may be naturally pugnacious, but manages to rein himself in for a smouldering “You Do Something To Me” and a broody, anguished “Wild Wood”. 

This tour is also a tentative live teaser for Weller’s 66 album, due in May. Continuing his late-career purple patch, his 17th solo collection is a classy affair awash with grainy-voiced, sumptuously arranged, Albarn-meets-Bacharach balladry. We only get three new cuts tonight, including the revved-up bluesy stomper “Jumble Queen” and the wistful rumination “Nothing”. The sole familiar inclusion is recent single “Soul Wandering”, a hymn of spiritual hunger built around twin acoustic guitars and Peake’s pealing saxophone licks. It’s lovely, graceful, autumnal work.

Weller has always had more colours in his musical paintbox than most of his one-dimensional acolytes ever seem to realise, but his recent run of albums have been his most kaleidoscopic yet, leaning heavily into orchestral lushness, experimental soundscapes, wide-ranging collaborations and increasingly overt Bowie homages. He named one of his sons Bowie, after all, which is both sweet and hilarious. There are certainly Bowie-ish moments in this set, from the glam-adjacent bombast of “Hung Up” to the gorgeous lullaby “Rockets”, a dreamy cosmic voyage from South London suburbia to the stars, a regular live highlight since its 2020 release. 

As ever, Weller is stingy with the Jam and Style Council tunes, throwing in just two of each, three of which have been live fixtures for years. An evergreen classic of Britpop social realism, “That’s Entertainment” never fails to tug the collective heartstrings, and predictably becomes the biggest mass singalong of the evening. Likewise “Start!”, wearing its brazen Beatle-isms proudly, sends a surge of adrenaline through the crowd before the group switch almost seamlessly into Weller’s similarity terse “Peacock Suit”.

From the Style Council years, a Springsteen-sized big-band arrangement of “Shout To The Top!” is a pure dopamine rush, and “Headstart To Happiness” a giddy early taste of summer. Weller’s steadfast refusal to become a greatest-hits heritage act feels commendable on one hand, but obstinately self-limiting on the other. Imagine having a dozen killer anthems the calibre of “Going Underground”, “Man In The Corner Shop” or “Walls Come Tumbling Down!” in your back pocket and choosing not to deploy any of them during a two-hour, 29-song marathon.

All the same, this was an impressively rich and high-energy performance, a banquet of music from a spiky elder statesmen who remains rightly wary of embracing his national treasure status. Weller’s stylistic range may have broadened with age, but this roaring, ear-bashing show suggests he will not be mellowing any time soon.

Setlist – The Lighthouse, Poole, April 4, 2024

Rip The Pages Up
Nova
Cosmic Fringes
Soul Wandering
That Pleasure
All The Pictures On The Wall
Above The Clouds
Stanley Road
Glad Times
Village
Fat Pop
More
Hung Up
Shout To The Top!
Jumble Queen
Nothing
You Do Something To Me
That’s Entertainment
Wild Wood
Friday Street
Start!
Peacock Suit
————–
Headstart For Happiness
Amongst Butterflies
Old Father Tyme
Broken Stones
Mayfly
Rockets
————–
The Changingman

1...121314...1,254Page 13 of 1,254

SHOP UNCUT

Advertisement

Subscribe to Uncut today and never miss an issue.

Save up to 26% when you subscribe online

Learn More