Laura Veirs has today released a new digital single called “The Panther”, featuring two versions of a song based on a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Hear both the electric guitar and ukulele versions of “The Panther” below:
Originally recorded by herself in late 2016, Veirs explains: “I am sharing these songs now because I like them and think listeners might find them interesting, especially because they are such radically different musical treatments of essentially the same lyrics. I also want to share them now because this song adapts words from one of my favourite poems. Since many of us around the world are still in quarantine, I think listeners will be able to relate to the plight of Rilke’s panther. There are times in life when we find ourselves trapped, either by external circumstances or by self-limitation, or both. Hopefully in those times we can realise that our state of confinement will change and pass, like all things, eventually.”
See Laura Veirs’ October UK tourdates below and buy tickets here.
3rd October – Brighton – Komedia
4th October – Guildford – The Boileroom
5th October – Portsmouth – Wedgewood Rooms
6th October – Bristol – Thekla
7th October – Exeter – Exeter Phoenix
9th October – Cambridge – Storey’s Field Centre
10th October – Birmingham – Hare & Hounds
11th October – Newcastle – Civic Theatre
12th October – Glasgow – Stereo
13th October – Edinburgh – Summerhall Arts Venue
14th October – Manchester – The Deaf Institute
16th October – Nottingham – The Bodega Social Club
17th October – Leeds – Belgrave Music Hall
18th October – Norwich – Norwich Arts Centre
19th October – London – Union Chapel
As Bob Dylan may tell you, covering Frank Sinatra classics is not without its risks. Comparisons with Sinatra’s vocal agility is one problem – they didn’t call him The Voice for nothing – while his versions of a large swathe of the Great American Songbook remain definitive, indelibly stamped with his personality and the Rat Pack panache of his prime. Frank liked to own a song.
Willie Nelson is no stranger to either Sinatra or the American songbook. He was an aspiring 22-year-old DJ when Sinatra delivered In The Wee Small Hours in 1955 (its sleeve design is echoed here), and a few years later, when Nelson was singing on Saturday nights at Houston’s Esquire ballroom, Sinatra numbers were surely in the repertoire. They were certainly on the charts. Throughout his twenties Willie was writing country variants of the Songbook – numbers like “Crazy” and “Hello Walls”. Nelson the button-down balladeer predates Willie the bandana’d outlaw by some time.
Since then, Willie has regularly returned to the Songbook and its creators, beginning with 1978’s Stardust, a set of standards quite at odds with his persona as rebel honcho, and whose idiosyncratic charms delivered his biggest commercial success. Willie didn’t bother replicating originals like “All Of Me”, he delivered alternative versions tinged with country and jazz. His guitar playing, still underrated today, helped.
Nelson’s early years fronting a ballroom band are beautifully evoked by the opener here, “Nice Work If You Can Get It”, taken at a brisk pace with a tinge of western swing in the arrangements – dance music, in fact. Willie’s at ease, with nothing to prove but his bonhomie.
Not everything here is such a happy fit. Both That’s Life and his 2018 Sinatra record My Way are meant to be cast in the slightly eclectic mould of Stardust, but mostly adhere to a Sinatra-esque formula of complex brass arrangements, supplemented by syrupy strings. Producer Buddy Cannon understands an orchestra, but massed horns don’t always suit Nelson, who at 87 no longer has the vocal chops (if he ever did) to ride a big band. He copes gamely on upbeat numbers like “You Make Me Feel So Young”, “Just In Time” and “Luck Be A Lady”, but on “You Make Me Feel So Young” he simply gets blown away, subsumed by the growling brass. The mismatch is more glaring still on “I Got You Under My Skin”, where a clumsy samba rhythm (it doesn’t sway, not a bit) evades Nelson, who simply sings on regardless of what is happening behind him.
Nelson has always taken liberties with timing, hanging back on a word or phrase or delivering it early – he has often been accused of ‘talking the lyrics’ rather than singing them. It’s a skill set picked up from Sinatra himself – “Frank didn’t worry about being behind the beat or in front of the beat – he could sing it either way, and that’s the feel you have to have.” The mutual admiration that developed between Sinatra and Nelson was founded in part by their vocal looseness.
For intimacy and authenticity, less musical architecture often proves better. The comparatively minimalist title track is a case in point. Sinatra delivered the song (a major hit in ’66) at full blast, as a piece of high-kicking, top-of-the-heap defiance. Befitting his years, Nelson turns it into weathered philosophising – ‘pauper, pirate, poet’, been there, done that. The crying harmonica here is surplus to requirements and shows up again on “In The Wee Small Hours”. No-one has yet captured the sense of desolation that Sinatra squeezed from the song, and nor does Willie, though he lays on the pathos. Willie doesn’t mind being schmaltzy – it works well on “Cottage For Sale”, for example – coming as he does from an age when sentimentality was welcomed, not shunned (not much schmaltz in “Like A Rolling Stone”, by contrast).
The earliest number here is 1927’s “Lonesome Road”, a gospel call that was an odd fit for Sinatra, for whom ‘Gabriel’s horn’ probably announced the next round of martinis, and Nelson and his team struggle to find much enthusiasm for its pilgrim spirit. At the other end of proceedings comes Jerome Kern’s “I Won’t Dance”, a dizzy duet with Diana Krall that’s a companion piece to the duet with Norah Jones on My Way’s “What Is This Thing Called Love”. Krall, who can do pyrotechnics when she chooses, instead keeps things cool and playful while Willie plays straight man, delivering a husky version of Astaire rather than Sinatra.
Comparisons between the two halves of Willie’s homage to Ol’ Blue Eyes puts them about level, though My Way has the more mellow, accessible numbers. Sinatra would be delighted, as Nelson undoubtedly is with his 71st studio album. Ring a ding ding.
Founded by visionary producer Adrian Sherwood and Slits singer Ari Up, aka Munich-born Ariane Daniela Forster, New Age Steppers were a loose collective featuring a rich talent pool: among them, Mark Stewart and Bruce Smith from The Pop Group, reggae crooner Bim Sherman, Aswad bassist George Oban, experimental improviser Steve Beresford, future pop queen Neneh Cherry, drummer Lincoln “Style” Scott and more. Notable for releasing both the first ever single and album on Sherwood’s long-running underground label On-U Sound, the Steppers relished the seemingly infinite new possibilities and fertile tensions opened up by post-punk, blending covers of obscure Jamaican imports with psychedelic dub sonics, free jazz, industrial funk and musique concète collage, mostly cooked up in a cramped dungeon studio below east London’s Berry Street.
Reissued both as individual albums and as a five-disc boxset, this lavishly repackaged retrospective confirms the Steppers, 40 years on, as tireless analogue explorers and forerunners to sci-fi soundscape masters like Burial, Andrew Weatherall and Flying Lotus. Released in January 1981, their self-titled debut still crackles with Ari’s thrillingly untamed vocals, all hard Teutonic consonants and crazy-paving tangents, which sound beautifully incongruous on swooning lovers rock serenades like Sherman’s “Love Forever”. Elsewhere, Stewart’s anguished political sermon “Crazy Dreams And High Ideals” gets lost in Sherwood’s Radiophonic fog of echo, hiss and clank.
The covers-heavy Action Battlefield, also released in 1981, and its 1983 sequel Foundation Steppers nudged the band towards more conventional melody and production. Ari Up effectively took charge, living and recording in Jamaica before bringing tapes back to London for Sherwood to finish. Alongside Ari’s mellow reggae numbers and ramshackle renditions of standards like “Stormy Weather”, a teenage Neneh Cherry makes her studio debut on the sweetly wonky bluebeat doo-wop skank “My Love”. Bim Sherman also lends his velvet croon to several tracks, notably the sublime “Misplaced Love”.
In October 2010, Ari died of breast cancer at the cruelly young age of 48. Posthumously completed by Sherwood and released in 2012, the final Steppers album, Love Forever, is both sombre memorial and refreshing restatement of the band’s progressive manifesto, adding dubstep, trip-hop and bashment elements to the fissile mix. Meanwhile, Ari’s riot grrrl howl on kinetic dub-punk beasts like “My Nerves” and “Musical Terrorist” recall her Slits heyday.
The most welcome and useful disc here is Avant Gardening, a newly compiled retrospective of rare mixes, B-sides and restored offcuts from the early 1980s. Sherwood’s sonic alchemist side is strongly represented, not least on the magnificent title track, a trippy inner-space odyssey of deconstructed dubtronica, wistful melodica and haunted music-hall piano. The sole “new” addition is Ari’s slight but warm-hearted take on Atlantic Starr’s bittersweet break-up ballad “Send For Me”, salvaged from a long-lost 1983 John Peel session.
Four decades later, many of these innocent youthful experiments still radiate more forever-fresh futurism and genre-dissolving ambition than most 21st-century avant-rock artists.
With the news that My Bloody Valentine have released their catalogue across streaming services for the first time, it seemed like a good opportunity to dust down our cover story from Uncut’s March 2018 issue. Here, then, is the band’s full, epic tale – told by Kevin Shields, Colm Ó Cíosóig, Debbie Googe and Bilinda Butcher, original singer Dave Conway and a host of friends and collaborators.
PERFECT SOUND FOREVER A landmark of songwriting and sonic adventure, Loveless by MY BLOODY VALENTINE didn’t come cheap. As the band’s members explain, this was a recording plagued by poverty, illness and a commitment to “plough through hell”. From Amsterdam, via squats, LSD and chinchillas, this is also the story of the enduring genius of the band’s visionary songwriter KEVIN SHIELDS. “I still can’t really figure out what it is he does,” says PAUL WELLER. “But I know something: only he can do it.”
To the residents of South Kensington, the sound comes from everywhere and nowhere. For an hour, a strange and unaccountable low frequency rumble rattles windowpanes and shakes paintings off their hooks. This is summer, 1989 and My Bloody Valentine are busy conducting a sonic experiment.
At this time, the band has taken up residence in a 16-track studio tucked into the side of a large warehouse space. As befitting one London’s most affluent boroughs, this space also had an art gallery attached to it. “We dragged the amps out to make it as loud as possible,” recalls Kevin Shields, the band’s chief architect. “It was just me and Colm [Ó Cíosóig, drums]. He was on bass and I retuned all the strings so they were all really low and floppy. We just created this huge, grumbling noise. The room was shaking and the lights were flickering. It put us into an altered state of consciousness. The second we stopped, we heard a noise outside. Apparently, the owner had been banging on the doors for about 40 minutes. The gallery didn’t have any soundproofing. He’d heard this crazy noise on the other side of the borough. By the time he got to the studio, the whole building was vibrating. The doors were locked so he couldn’t get in. He was furious, but he couldn’t stay angry with us because he thought we were crazy. You see, Colm and me were laughing like a pair of 5 year-olds. We felt like we were on the strongest drug in the world. That’s when we realized, ‘There’s something in this. What would happen if other people got to feel this, too?’”
As far as it goes, it is possible to pinpoint Shields and Ó Cíosóig’s wilful seismic disturbances as a transformative moment in My Bloody Valentine’s history. The band had always been preoccupied with what to say and how loud to say it: even during their earliest days, on the fringes of Dublin’s post-punk scene, when they drew from The Cramps’ gothic-psychedelic edge and the avant garde musical philosophies of Einstürzende Neubauten. But the wild, heavy drones they conjured that day in West London introduced new perspectives and focus to Loveless, the album they began recording a few months later. “As a piece of work, Loveless is a whole universe in itself,” says Colm Ó Cíosóig. “Every time I listen to it, I hear different things in it. It’s like listening to wildlife or whales or something. It has its own space and time.”
Since it was first released in 1991, Loveless continues to exert a mighty pull on Shields and his accomplices. This month, he finally unveils a new analog edition of the album – along with its predecessor, Isn’t Anything – that has taken him two arduous years to complete. “I got the best I could get,” he says. ”But it’s not over yet. There’ll be a double album version of Loveless eventually…”
“Kevin is always open to going anywhere, but he thinks in very abstract ways,” admits Debbie Googe, the band’s bassist. “He isn’t a very linear person – he doesn’t go from A – B. He goes from A – K to somewhere in the middle. He meanders around things.”
Abstract? Meandering? Certainly, the My Bloody Valentine story can be both of those things – we shall discover colourful digressions involving a haunted tape room, a colony of chinchillas and inner journeys into uncharted hypnagogic states. But critically, the My Bloody Valentine story is also about the fierce connection between four people, even during trying times. “It’s an incredible, fortunate meeting of people,” says singer/guitarist Bilinda Butcher. “We all love each other so much that we just stay together, no matter what. We’ve got this thing nobody else has; it’s really special. Each of us knows that. Even now.”
“I don’t look for extreme life, I don’t,” explains Shields. “But for some weird reason extremes happen all the time, good things and bad things.”
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Even at the start, My Bloody Valentine’s story was informed by a degree of chaos. Arriving from Queens, New York in Cabinteely, Co. Dublin, Kevin Shields discovered punk rock began shortly after his 14th birthday: “The first song I ever played on a guitar was Buzzcocks’ ‘Harmony In My Head’.”. At school, a fellow student in Shields’ Kung Fu class happened to be getting a band together: he already had the attention of Colm Ó Cíosóig, an enthusiastic drummer with no immediate expertise. “The first rehearsals Colm and I did, he didn’t even know about a beat,” recalls Shields. “He was just hitting his drums randomly, and I didn’t know about tuning.”
United in the first instance from the desire to play Motörhead’s “Bomber”, Shields and Ó Cíosóig’s earliest bands rose and fell in line with their personnel. One early accomplice was Liam Ó Maonlaí, later of Hothouse Flowers. Shields found himself asked to leave one group after he discovered a phaser pedal – “I was so fascinated by the sound, I didn’t want to turn it off. I enjoyed moving past the point of reason.”
A union of like minds, the work Shields and Ó Cíosóig began together was made for people not catered for by the mainstream. “We were pushing boundaries,” says Ó Cíosóig. “We had a Tascam four-track portastudio and a synthesizer. We’d make tapes with weird noises and drones and then improvise over them.”
An advertisement placed in a local record shop drew the attention of David Conway, who became their singer in summer, 1983. “He was crazy, a bit like Lux Interior,” says Ó Cíosóig. “It was great to have a wild man upfront, it made the gigs a bit more fun.”
The band – not yet called My Bloody Valentine – played their first gig on August 18 at a small Dublin venue, the Ivy Rooms. The name arrived a short while later, suggested by Conway in the bar of Dublin’s North Star Hotel. Gigs and line-up changes followed; but alas, “we weren’t popular in Ireland,” relates Shields. Taking advice from Virgin Prunes’ frontman Gavin Friday, they moved to the Netherlands. “In Holland, you get paid by the government for gigs, even if there’s no one there,” says Ó Cíosóig. “It was like a union fee, I guess. We sent a demo tape. We got one gig and decided to emigrate.”
Without a regular bass player, they were joined on a Casio keyboard by Conway’s girlfriend Tina Durkin. “When it worked, it was good,” says Ó Cíosóig. “Those early Casios had this cool, organy sound like a Farfisa, which gave the songs a distorted groove.”
“In Amsterdam, we stayed in a dive called The Last Water Hole,” remembers Shields. “It was pretty rough; it was run by bikers. There were no sheets on the bed, just a cover on the mattress. Everyone slept in their clothes.” A sympathetic promoter offered them the run of his house in the countryside near Gouda. Aside from a commendably well-stocked record collection, the band discovered the house also contained a modest cannabis factory in the attic.
“We were pretty broke so were started smoking weed instead of tobacco,” says Ó Cíosóig. “I got used to carrying a big tobacco pouch full of weed around with me. One day, I walked into a police station in Amsterdam with a huge bag of weed in my pocket without even realizing it was there. We tried to get work. Kevin managed to get a job herding cows for a couple of months.”
A move to Berlin in winter 1984 facilitated an introduction to a dynamic local promoter, Dimitri Hegemann. Under his patronage, they record a mini-album – This Is Your Bloody Valentine. “The studio was so cheap that the engineer who was doing the mixing for us had to do a live gig that night, so he had to leave at 6pm,” says Ó Cíosóig. “It took an afternoon to mix the record. One of the tracks was mixed in 10 minutes. We just put the faders up. ‘Done! Next track.’”
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Debbie Googe came to My Bloody Valentine by a circuitous route. Originally from Yeovil, she had been involved in Somerset’s anarcho-punk scene in the late Seventies, where her band Bikini Mutants self-released a cassette on local label, All The Mad Men. In the mid-Eighties, she was in London, working at the Rio cinema in Dalston. Her then-partner, Annie Lloyd, was based in Berlin, where she fronted Hegemann’s band, Leningrad Sandwich. When My Bloody Valentine decided to relocate to London, Lloyd recommended Goodge as a potential bassist. “They were so sweet and innocent,” she laughs. “Colm took ages to decipher. We used to practice in the squats where Kevin and Colm lived. They were pretty smelly, as you can imagine with three boys in a very small room and no open windows.”
As it transpired, the London squat scene proved critical to the band’s growth. “We lived a very free life,” confirms Shields. “I liked it that way. It was very positive. Most of our gigs were squat gigs, too. Some of the squats in London, they’d literally take out the first floor to make it more like a venue. We played in a squatted church in Bath once. It was like Mad Max. Kids running around with ripped clothes and hair black with dirt. It was the hardcore end of the convoy people, basically. They really didn’t like us. I have a tape of that gig somewhere. It’s very funny. You can hear us playing, then they got us to stop and you can hear a guy with a real hippie voice saying, ‘Hey, man. We told you to stop. It’s too loud.’ That was late ’85.”
The picture that emerges of My Bloody Valentine during this period is one of guileless aspiration. The music – evident in songs like “The Devil Made Me Do It”, “Tiger In My Tank” and “The Love Gang” – was reaching for an aesthetic ideal not yet completely formulated. “They needed to get something down that was more in spirit of what they were like when they played on stage – which was astonishing,” recalls Joe Foster, who produced the band’s 1986 EP, The New Record By My Bloody Valentine. “There was total chaos going on.”
“They were great,” says Bilinda Butcher. “I was a bit of a fan. They were a bit different. They all had bowl haircuts. Dave was quite impressive as a frontman. Then my boyfriend at the time said they were looking for a backing vocalist and I went along for an audition. I remember Kevin was hitting pedals and amps, chucking things around. His glasses were stuck together with a plaster. I knew the words to some of the songs; I think that did it for Kevin. For Deb, I sang Dolly Parton’s ‘Bargain Store’ a capella.”
In fact, Butcher was walking into a more fluid situation than she might have imagined. The band was growing restless with their direction; then, shortly after a tour in 1987, Conway decided to leave. Shields was now unsure how best to manage this situation. Take on lead vocals himself? Or was a more radical approach necessary?
As Shields sees it, the arrival of Googe and Butcher – while two years apart – necessitated a change not just in the band’s personal dynamic but also their sound. The music the quartet first made together – a single, “Strawberry Wine” and a mini-album Ecstasy, both in 1987 – was, they all agree, necessarily transitional. Stylistically, the songs shared a number of attributes with the jangly independent music of the mid-Eighties.
“It was the first time I’d ever written lyrics and sung them,” recalls Shields. “I remember coming home from Waterloo in the morning going, ‘I’m a songwriter!’ In ‘87 early ‘88, we very, very, very quickly decided that we didn’t like them. Then we were going to drop the name. We just wanted to erase the whole history.”
“You can hear where we’re going in songs like ‘Clair’ or ‘Please Lose Yourself In Me’,” says Ó Cíosóig. “But we wanted to rock out more. We were very inspired by the American scene – Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü. Then Kevin got a great new guitar, discovered the tremolo arm and the reverse reverb effect. That gave him a whole new place to play in. A whole new sonic world.”
“I used reverse reverb all over the Ecstasy and ‘Strawberry Wine’ records to no great consequence, because I was using it the way it was meant to be used,” explains Shields. “Then in ’88, I discovered that it was extremely sensitive to velocity and how high you hit the string. You could make huge waves of sound by hitting it softer or harder. At the same time, my friend Bill Carey from Something Pretty Beautiful lent me his Fender Jazzmaster. It had a tremolo arm. I played it on ‘Thorn’. The second I did that, something jumped inside me. It allowed me to play in a way where I don’t have to think about what I was doing, I just feel it.”
Change came, and not a moment too soon. My Bloody Valentine showcased these exciting new developments in late 1988 via two EPs, released a few months apart on Creation Records, “You Made Me Realise” and “Feed Me With Your Kiss”.
“To me, the biggest shift was ‘You Made Me Realise’,” says Googe. “I remember when we were mixing it, Kevin said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘It sounds like Jefferson Airplane.’ He said, ‘Fuck that!’ and started pushing things.”
“When we were doing ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, I made the bass so heavy it popped the speaker off the wall,” admits Shields. “Instinctively, the engineer put his foot out to stop it hitting the ground and it broke his foot.”
“By the time we got to Isn’t Anything, it wasn’t just the sound that had changed,” continues Googe. “It was something about the way the songs were falling rhythmically. It sounded different. It felt like a different thing entirely.”
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Foel Studios, Wales, summer, 1988. My Bloody Valentine take up residence to record their debut album, Isn’t Anything.
“It was quite a spooky place,” remembers Bilinda Butcher. “The studio was in a converted barn. Kevin used to fall asleep there a lot and wake up completely freaked out. The guy who owned it, Dave Anderson, had been in Amon Düül. He had some weird stories of stuff that had gone on there. There was a time where something peculiar happened and the tape went into a strange shape on the tape machine, like a pyramid.”
Sessions were dictated by Shields habit of sleeping long into the day and working through the night. “When it came to doing all the vocals, Kevin only had about two hours sleep a night,” remembers Ó Cíosóig. “That’s where the weird, broken lyrics come from – this dream state of the language itself being twisted around and placed in a different space.”
Paranormal activity? Fugue states? There would be more of those to come. But for now, despite such otherworldly conditions, the music of Isn’t Anything was surprisingly gritty. “It was purposefully raw,” acknowledges Shields. “We didn’t add compression or reverb to the vocals. We kept to single takes. The idea was, it’s just us doing what we do – without trying to be something that we’re not.”
“People weren’t prepared for Isn’t Anything,” says Jeff Barrett, who was then working as a publicist for Creation Records. “I went up and down the country with the Valentines. I remember a gig at Nottingham Trent Poly where they were phenomenal. It didn’t feel necessarily year zero, it didn’t feel like scorched earth, but I knew it was going to be a big record. It put a fire up everybody’s arse. There was some good British noise bands. You could go see Godflesh or Jackdaw With Crowbar. Loop were doing their thing. But there was something different about this. The Velvets weren’t the reference point. It was contemporary.”
While Isn’t Anything was an exciting artistic breakthrough for My Bloody Valentine, over the next year the band found the pressure mounting. Shields recounts two failed attempts to record follow-up EPs during early 1988. Domestically, meanwhile, his relationship with Butcher was also beginning to unravel.
“At that point, things were breaking down between us, I think,” she says. “We were living in this house together and we’d see each other – but be in different spheres. Loveless is called Loveless not just because of our relationship breaking down, but because the whole process of making Loveless was difficult.”
Shields’ best work – then, as now – comes to him during the hypnagogic state when the brain transitions between wakefulness and sleep. Butcher recalls him writing songs at night on the sofa in the flat in Brixton, often nodding off with a guitar on his lap. During an American tour to support Isn’t Anything, a fan gave Shields a cassette of The Beach Boys Today! and Pet Sounds. “I fell asleep to it all the time,” he says. “It became part of my life. Maybe because of it, I developed a certain ideas about production.” Inspiration came from other sources too: from his home on Brixton’s Tulse Hill Estate, Shields was exposed to a vibrant mix of gospel, reggae, ragga and – crucially – hip hop. These various factors began to coalesce, towards the end of 1989, into a follow-up to Isn’t Anything. The making of Loveless has been the subject of much conjecture and myth making over the last 27 years. Joe Foster, then an ally at Creation Records, attempts a definitive take on what went down between September 1989 and January 1991. “There are all kind of stories. Some of them make it look like Kevin was an Orson Welles-like genius. Others make it look like he’s a stoner, just useless. Neither of those things were true.”
What Foster leans towards is a kind of third way, where Shields’ creative vision for Loveless was effectively frustrated by bad luck, administrative ineptitude and the band’s own slow, meticulous working practices. The experiments Shields and Ó Cíosóig conducted in South Kensington during June and July, 1989 initiated a shift in Shields’ attitude to the possibilities of sound. Among the songs they worked up was an embryonic version of “Soon”, which would later lead off the band’s Glider EP. In September, the band decamped to Elephant studios in Wapping, south London, for an eight-week period where, Shields claims, “we put down about 20 songs.”
Their relationship with Alan McGee’s Creation label, however, was faltering. “They were penniless, they couldn’t afford £1,000 to do the next Felt record,” says Shields. “They knew we were slow and decided there was no point putting us in an expensive studio. They found these good deals, but that meant the studio wasn’t looked after properly or it was run by weird people. At Elephant, we worked at lot at night and the studio owner was always hanging around. He told us he was hiding out as MI5 were after him. The tapes were confiscated three or four times, because Creation didn’t have the money to pay the bill. That characterised Loveless. Then Colm got really ill.”
“I was going to be evicted from my squat,” says Ó Cíosóig. “I didn’t have a new place. Creation couldn’t even afford £300 deposit for a flat. I’d go to the studio and then as soon as I left, I’d walk the streets looking at places to squat. This was November, it was cold, and I’m out walking the streets. All that got to me. I had this nervous breakdown. I was able to function mentally, but my brain to arm muscle control mechanism stopped working. I managed to get it together for a couple of songs – two songs on the record have live drums. ‘Only Shallow’ and ‘Come In Alone’.”
“It was like a fucking meltdown,” recalls Shields. “So then we got the idea that we would program the bass drum parts and he would just play the hi hat and the snare.”
“The initial process of doing drums was very lengthy,” says Debbie Googe. “You would turn up every day and not really do anything because Kevin and Colm were tuning a drum. You lock into that. It becomes what you do. A lot of time goes by. We were all perilously close to losing our sanity at a certain point. For me, I guess, my sense of self-worth got a little low at times. I wasn’t doing an awful lot.”
“It felt like ploughing through mud,” says Butcher. “Kevin was going through such a lot. I would swan in and out when I was doing my thing, whereas he was there all the time, dealing with everybody, with Alan McGee and the engineers.”
Even now Shields shudders as he recalls the perceived intransigence he encountered first hand in recording studios. “When we recorded ‘Glider’, I remember the guys at the studio saying, ‘You guys are out of your mind, what you’re doing.’ At another studio, one of the engineers wanted to run a pizza place, the other one wanted to move into advertising.”
“Kevin had a vision, we could all see it,” adds Ó Cíosóig. “We needed a proper studio from the get go that didn’t break down, where there were no faulty channels and no crap going on. We were firing engineers all the time. We didn’t do things normally. They’d be freaking out. ‘That frequency, 4hertz, is distorting! You can’t do that!’ ‘We don’t give a shit about your fucking 4khtz! It sounds good. So what?’ They couldn’t get the weirdness of the record, the warpiness. It didn’t help when you had somebody sitting in the corner looking at you like a freak.”
“I used to really love watching Kevin creating his various sound booths in various places – his little blanket tents,” remembers Goodge. “He would construct these things out of foam and blankets and God knows, these crazy little shanty towns inside the actual studios.”
Aside from Ó Cíosóig’s work earlier on, Shields recorded much of the album alone. Butcher recorded her vocals late in the process, at London’s Protocol and Britannia Row studios between May and June, 1991. “Kevin would give me a guide vocal and I’d make up lyrics for it,” says Butcher. “He might not be singing real words, but it would sound like something to me so I would write down what I thought he had sung.”
In February, 1991, the Tremolo EP brought into woozy focus Shields’ gifts for crushing sonic power and delicate vulnerability. One track, “To Here Knows When”, appeared on Loveless, when the album was finally released in November. “I always thought Loveless was a really great pop record,” says Googe. “Kevin has got a really strong sense of melody that people don’t always pick up on. People talk about how he reinvented guitar – which is true – but actually the reason it works and why people remember it is because you do go away whistling these little hooks.”
“How many studios did we work in?” says Shields. “25, I think. It nearly sank us, to be honest, but it didn’t quite. It was just a lot of bad luck. Some people, they would get into a situation like that and then stop to regroup. That’s the smart way to do it. Otherwise you use too much energy and it slows you down. Don’t just plough through hell.”
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Had it ended there, Loveless alone would have granted My Bloody Valentine an unshakeable place in rock history. But the protracted process that led to its follow-up proved the band unable, in this instance, to play the cards they had been dealt. “I don’t know what the hell happened,” reflects Bilinda Butcher. “I look back and think, ‘God.’ I mean, that was really mad.”
The plan, everyone now agrees, seemed sensible at the time. In 1992, My Bloody Valentine signed with Island Records. Shields bought a house in Streatham and began building a recording studio at the property. “We did it really fast,” says Shields. “We got the house in January ‘93, paid for it in March, we had the studio finished in June. Then the desk died.”
“We didn’t understand all the technical aspects of wiring a studio,” admits Ó Cíosóig. “Problems with electricity, tones, frequencies. It took months to try and figure that out; engineers were scratching their heads.”
A second desk proved to be equally problematic. Meanwhile, Island proved unwilling to help the band recoup their outlay. Shields estimates they lost a year. There were other considerations, too. “The house was full of madness,” admits Googe. “We smoked way too much weed. It was like the Partridge Family on acid. It was quite a mad scene. And then there were the chinchillas. I think Kevin bought one as a present for Bill. They thought it might be lonely, so they got another one. Then, like rodents do, they bred. At its peak, I think there were 13 or 14 chinchillas and they had the whole of the upstairs floor.”
“I don’t know what kind of pressure Kevin must have been under to follow up Loveless,” admits Butcher. “But a lot of songs got written there and eventually things were recorded there. That was a spooky place too, I have to say. There were some weird things going on around the tape machine. Both Colm and I saw this apparition like a hooded monk hanging out round where the tape machine room was. Kevin saw all sorts of stuff there. He was going on a voyage of I-don’t-know-what while he lived there.”
“I started getting into serious mind meditation shit after we finished the [1991] tour,” explains Shields. “I read a book by Terence McKenna about using psychedelics as a way to explore the mind. I started experimenting on myself. I’d close my eyes and visualize a cow, for some reason. Then I realised I couldn’t just see the cow, but pass around it. It was solid. That led on to an infinite amount of experiences. I really looked forward to having my own time when everyone went to bed. I’d sit there, close my eyes and trip out. In a very short space of time, I was flying around this solar system: my imagination.”
Shields admits that the music made during this period was essentially “lot of ideas… we were trying not to write songs in a normal fashion. We were listening to a lot of drum’n’bass. We were experimenting with vibrations – how when something’s really distorted it shakes as well and that creates a rhythm. But we lost momentum. We were all right to make a record in our heads, and we were excited by the studio – but somehow it went a bit sideways.”
“There was work done,” adds Googe. “But we were dysfunctional, ridiculously slow. Every day, Colm would get up and say, ‘Today’s the day we’re going to make the record!’ Then Colm left. I really missed him! We were always up first and we’d sit and have our coffee together in the morning. Then I left. I’d driven over to Island to deliver a tape of the Wire song we recorded [“Map Ref. 41°N 93°W”]. It was a Friday evening and as I was driving back to the house, I thought, ‘For my own sanity, I can’t go back.’ So I went back to my flat and phoned Kevin. That was late 1997, I think.”
“I moved back into my council flat in Brixton,” says Butcher. “But I wasn’t leaving, I was there waiting, anytime, to do whatever we needed. But after we all left the house, I think Kevin felt a bit abandoned.”
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One regular visitor to Kevin Shields’ Streatham home during 1998 was Primal Scream guitarist, Andrew Innes. In his home studio, Shields was working on mixes for Primal Scream’s new album, XTRMNTR. “At the time, Kevin wasn’t living a 24 hour day,” recalls Innes. “He’d get up at 6 o’clock at night and then work all night. But he’d work through the next day and go to bed at a different time.”
Shields’ involvement with Primal Scream lasted from 1998 – 2005, where his talents were felt both in the studio and the live arena. “In the studio, he’d say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ We had these little phrases, descriptions of what particular sound we wanted. ‘Can you get that one where you’re cutting down the trees?’ He’d hit the pedals and it would sound like a chainsaw. Live, there were certain tracks on XTRMNTR that were aggressive; we’d hold him back and hold him back and then give him the nod, ‘Kev, hit that button.’ He’d take it to the next level of intensity and pain. There’d be some little kids down the front and they’d be smiling and by the time Kev had played three songs, you could see they were thinking, ‘This isn’t actually very funny.’ It was brilliant.”
Brian Reitzell, meanwhile, speculates that Shields was financially “trapped in Primal Scream. It’s not such a bad trap but still a trap.” As drummer for Air, Reitzell had met Shields on tour in Japan in 2001. A few years later, he approached Shields in an altogether different guise: as the soundtrack producer for Sofia Coppola’s new film, Lost In Translation. Reitzell remembers making three, week-long trans-Atlantic trips to Shields’ studio in Camden between November 2002 and March 2003. Reitzell describes a familiar pattern for these sessions: “We had a different engineer each time because Kevin would burn them out. We would show up at the studio and the engineer had to be there at eight o’clock, but we wouldn’t roll in until 11 at night and then we’d work through until nine or 10 in the morning.”
Along with insight into the recording process, Reitzell also also offers a tantalizing glimpse of material that didn’t make the final cut. He outlines trips to a Camden shop selling instruments from around the world and an attempt to “put an e-bow on one of these weird Asian stringed instruments” that was ultimately ditched. “Kevin and I also did a cue with Martin Duffy on electric piano and Duncan McKay playing layers of trumpet – both from Primal Scream. It was full on Miles Davis / Gil Evans trip. I loved it, but it didn’t make the film.” They also recorded “three proper songs” – although only one, “City Girl”, appeared in the film when it was opened in September 2003.
Critically, Reitzell says that the success of the Lost In Translation soundtrack allowed him greater financial latitude on his next film with Coppola, Marie Antoinette, for which he “grossly overpaid” Shields to do two remixes, facilitating his economic independence.
It is possible to view Shields work with Primal Scream and Brian Reitzell as a process of rehabilitation after the Valentines’ split in 1997. In the immediate aftermath, Shields undertook remix work – for artists ranging from the Pastels to Placebo, Mogwai and Yo La Tengo. He also quietly continued to work on the band’s long-gestating fourth album. “I would bump into Kevin here in Camden on his way to the studio, doing the album,” says Googe. For Shields, though, a turning point came in 2005, when Patti Smith invited him to participate in The Coral Sea project at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. “I never really used the tremolo arm after the last recordings I made in 1997,” says Shields. “I can’t add that way of playing on as an effect for people, so I developed a whole different approach with Primal Scream. When Patti asked me to play Meltdown, I got my tunings from the My Bloody Valentine days and a bunch of guitars and we improvised. Patti really inspired me to start playing guitar again like I used to.”
Paul Weller witnessed first hand the rejuvenated Shields when the two collaborated together on a track, “7&3 Is The Striker’s Name”. “When he came down to here to the studio, be had a big bag of effects and pedals,” he tells Uncut. “They were all buzzing and cracking, almost on the point of explosion. I watched Kevin during that session and I still can’t really figure out what it is he does. But I know something: only he can do it.”
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For the other members of My Bloody Valentine during their extended hiatus, time passed in different ways. Colm Ó Cíosóig began playing with Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. Debbie Googe “floundered for a while; I’d been ‘Deb in My Bloody Valentine’ for years and I didn’t know who I was” before she formed Snow Pony with her then-partner, Katharine Gifford. Bilinda Butcher, meanwhile, opted out of music to raise a family. “But I never gave up faith that it was going to happen again,” she says. The band are all individually keen to stress that they never actually fell out with one another – “They’d had enough of me, but they didn’t hate me or anything,” laughs Shields. In 2006, they received an offer of $300,000 to play the Coachella festival; “it put the idea into our head,” says Shields. In 2007, they decided to make a go of it, booking five nights at London’s Roundhouse. Coachella, meanwhile, upped their offer to a million dollars – but, according to Shields, ”it was too early, we’d literally just got it together in time to do those Roundhouse gigs, so even for a million dollars we couldn’t do Coachella.”
“The first day of practice, it was like I’d gone to the toilet and come back in,” remembers Goodge. “There’s a lot of shared history and familiarity that comes in to play in those situations. But we’d had eight, 10 years away from each other. We chose to come back.”
On June 13, 2008, My Bloody Valentine performed in public for the first time in 16 years during two live rehearsals at the ICA. An extensive world tour was announced, to run through the summer and autumn months. And in the middle of all this sudden, unexpected activity Shields mentioned that the band’s long-gestating third album was at last near completion.
Finally, after 20-odd years of prevarication, false alarms, teases and disappointments, m b v was released through the band’s website on February 2, 2013. Ó Cíosóig describes the album as “closing up a chapter. A lot of the music was from back in the time, the house, pre-implosion. There were some great songs there.” Shields reveals that he began writing the oldest track on the album, “New You”, in April, 1994 “the night after I heard Kurt Cobain killed himself.” Another song, “Only Tomorrow”, was only slightly younger – dating from around 1996. “I went back into the studio and recorded some drums over the drum loops to give it a bit of character,” says Ó Cíosóig. “Give it a bit of push and pull.”
“The m b v record has a theme, for want of a better word,” says Shields. “It’s about change and death and what was happening in the world, as I saw it in the late Nineties. Nostalgia is part of that. Funnily enough, it all made even more sense in 2012.”
Six years later, and Shields seems confident that a fourth album will appear soon. Early forays in the studio began in Ireland over summer 2017. “Kevin was working on drums with Colm,” says Goodge, identifying an all-too familiar pattern in My Bloody Valentine’s recording processes. There was lull, meanwhile, as Shields concentrated on the new vinyl editions of Isn’t Anything and Loveless and a collaboration with Brian Eno, called “Only Once Away My Son”.
“I know he’s got some stuff pretty much nearly ready for me,” says Butcher. “I’m really looking forward to it. It feels really exciting. Kevin’s working on songs in the way he always does. He’s always got millions of songs going round his head.”
“I’m keeping things clear in case I’m needed for Valentines stuff from April,” says Googe. “Certainly, from June on I think we’ll playing live. Between June and August, stuff will happen.”
“Everything’s going really well,” adds Ó Cíosóig. “I’ve been recording with Kevin recently He’s got his studio, I’ve been helping out. The trip. It’s now or never, I guess.”
“In the last few months,” says Kevin Shields, “when things have got quite tense with the remasters, I’ve pulled back from it. I really want to make this new record and I don’t want to get burnt out. You see, I don’t feel like I’m finished. I will be exploring things until I’m dead. I feel like if I don’t do this myself, no one else is going to do it.”
“We all expressed a desire to do something different…”
DAVID CONWAY, the band’s original singer, recalls his time in My Bloody Valentine
“Summer 1983 in Dublin — I had just finished with a band I’d been in for a little under a year. One day, I was in an old independent record shop called Freebird. I noticed a handwritten advertisement placed on a notice board from a band looking for a vocalist. I called the number and spoke to a guy called Mark Ross who was at that time playing bass with Kevin and Colm. We arranged to meet up outside Sallynoggin church in County Dublin. My first impression when I saw Kevin and Colm — accompanied by Mark — was that they looked reassuringly normal.
“Back at the Kevin’s family home in Cabinteely, Kevin and Colm had taken advantage of the fact that the Shields family were away on holiday to set up a drum kit and a couple of amps in the front room. They played a few pieces for me and I was hooked. At this point Kevin’s guitar style was mostly dominated by heavy chords and riffing filtered through layers of distortion, chorus and analogue delay effects — a big, scary wall-of-sound, I think you could say. Colm’s drumming style was already in evidence: a really driving, atavistic attack. In a way they struck me as outsiders — as far as the prevailing Dublin music scene was concerned; an attitude that expressed itself in what I could see as a genuine commitment to do something different.
“Initially, in the first few months or so, the songs tended to mostly emerge from the basic rehearsal process. Kevin and Colm — and, while he was still us, Mark — would come up with the music and I would put the vocals to it. At this stage — between July 1983 and April 1984 — we were also composing backing tapes on a four-track Tascam 244 portastudio, which we incorporated into our live gigs. Though Kevin took responsibility for the lion’s share of this, we all usually contributed something. In fact, this general approach to song-writing — eventually ditching the backing tapes — lasted through a few line-up changes including the writing and recording of This is Your Bloody Valentine in West Berlin in December 1984.
“After we re-located to London and Deb Goodge joined, the approach to song-writing changed. I think we agreed that it was important to write real songs. While I came up with the words — which I would run by Kevin and Colm to see what we all felt did or did not work — most of the melodic lines incorporated into the vocals derived from Kevin’s ideas, since he was creating music with very specific melodic/harmonic/rhythmic relationships in mind. The first really tangible results of this approach appeared on The New Record By My Bloody Valentine.
“There were two major reasons why I left the band. From late 1986, I began to develop rather severe gastric ailments that became increasingly debilitating to the extent that playing gigs — and even rehearsing — started to become extremely difficult. Aside from that, I had begun to feel that — after recording the Sunny Sundae Smile EP — I had less and less to contribute to the band in terms of the direction we seemed to be pursuing. The split itself was amicable.
“The last time I saw MBV would have been at the Brixton Academy when they did the Rollercoaster tour with the Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr and Blur. As for what I thought of the band they became, I suppose it didn’t take me by surprise quite as much as it might have done with many other people. When I first heard ‘You Made Me Realise’, it took me back to when I first met Kevin and Colm and we had all expressed the desire to do something different. To me that record — and the band MBV became — finally validated that promise.”
Visit www.radicalrobotbooks.com for more information on Dave Conway’s current activities
Early in the quarantine period there was talk of making lemonade – of the consolations which might obliquely be taken from the events we had globally been served. Among these was a proposed clearing of an attic or outbuilding, and a general putting of things into order. For many of us, it’s an undertaking which might still be put off indefinitely. For a singular personality, however, such a project might become an all-consuming passion. Not so much an itch which can’t be scratched, but which will need to be approached painstakingly and scratched in just the right way.
Such is the case with Neil Young and the long road to Archives II, which finally arrived with us at the end of 2020. A wonderful payload of music from Neil’s unarguable 1970s, it contains live gems from the ditch, and long-mooted, much-discussed, oft-bootlegged albums like Homegrown – which was also released independently in 2020. There was much to treasure in there, and a map of this shifting territory is prepared for us here by Tyler Wilcox, which joins the new reviews and classic archive interviews in this fully-updated, 148-page Ultimate Music Guide.
Of course, it would be too simple to suppose that Neil Young has spent the four years since the last edition of the Guide simply recompiling his past. In his vibrant present, he has continued to try and put the world into order with his music. In the company of Promise Of The Real and Crazy Horse he has weathered turmoil and joy in his personal life, and taken up arms of a kind – not for the first time, as we know – against an American president. On his porch – or at a tepee at his home – Neil’s Fireside Sessions, which were aired as The Times EP in 2020, found him at the confluence of Black Lives Matter, pandemic and Trump.
However deep in this music you arrive at this collection of enlightening archive interviews and in-depth writing, you’ll no doubt instinctively feel that even with a new president elected, Neil’s mission isn’t one that is ever going to be completely finished – and that idealistic dissatisfaction is part of the fuel which drives him on. What’s most remarkable is the ingenuity with which he continues to express it, and the single-mindedness with which he searches for an answer.
Among his recent releases, you’ll find Way Down In The Rust Bucket, a live album which features Neil and Crazy Horse scorching through the material from Ragged Glory in 1990, while warming up for an arena tour. At The Catalyst, a hall in Santa Cruz, they present a spectacular version of “Love And Only Love” which seems a perfect expression of Neil in action. It’s thirteen minutes of Crazy Horse’s unrelenting onward surge. There’s noise and turbulence of course. But every note is searching for something else: the harmony which will bring us together.
You can buy the magazine here, with free delivery to UK addresses.
Waging heavy peace! Introducing the definitive, fully updated 148-page guide to Neil Young. From Buffalo Springfield to Colorado: every album, by every band, reviewed. The cars! The collections! Archives 1 & 2!
Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and Savages’ Jehnny Beth have teamed up for a duets album inspired by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’s Grievous Angel and George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s We Go Together.
Utopian Ashes will be released on July 2; watch a video for lead single “Remember We Were Lovers”, directed by Douglas Hart, below:
The duo first met in 2015, when they were both invited to perform with Suicide at the Barbican. The following summer, Jehnny Beth joined Primal Scream on stage for a duet of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s “Some Velvet Morning”, which led to the recording of this album in Paris in 2017. It features the Primal Scream trio of Andrew Innes (guitar), Martin Duffy (piano) and Darrin Mooney (drums), alongside Jehnny Beth’s long-term musical partner Johnny Hostile (bass).
“In the same way you create characters for a novel, we’ve created characters here,” says Jehnny Beth. “But you put yourself in it, because you’re trying to understand the human situation. The singing has to be authentic. That’s all that matters.”
“When you write a song you marry the personal with the fictional and make art,” adds Gillespie. “I was thinking about two people living alone, together but apart, existing and suffering in a psychic malaise, who plough on because of responsibilities and commitments. It’s about the impermanence of everything — an existential fact that everyone has to face at some point in their lives… I wanted to put pain back into music. I wasn’t hearing a lot of it in modern rock music.”
Utopian Ashes will be released on stream, download, LP, red LP (HMV Exclusive), clear LP (Indies Exclusive), blue LP (D2C Exclusive) and CD – pre-order it here and peruse the tracklisting below:
‘Chase It Down’
‘English Town’
‘Remember We Were Lovers’
‘You Heart Will Always Be Broken’
‘Stones of Silence’
‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’
‘Self-Crowned King of Nothingness’
‘You Can Trust Me Now’
‘Living A Lie’
‘Sunk In Reverie’
The 2021 edition of resurrected ‘sci-fi music festival’ Futurama will now take place in Liverpool on September 11 and 12, having been postponed from its original April date.
Several new bands have been added to the bill, including A Certain Ratio, Clock DVA, Sex Gang Children, Pom Poko and Blue Orchids.
They join The Chameleons, Heaven 17, Warmduscher, The Chameleons, The Membranes, Billy Nomates, Section 25 and Peter Hook & The Light, who are recreating Joy Division’s 1979 Futurama set.
Domino have today announced the signing of My Bloody Valentine, making their catalogue available digitally for the first time.
The band’s videos have also been restored and are being premiered throughout the day on YouTube – watch “Soon” below:
New physical editions of their three albums will follow on May 21 and are available to pre-order now. Isn’t Anything and Loveless have been mastered fully from analogue for deluxe LPs and also mastered from new hi-res uncompressed digital sources for standard LPs.
Fully analogue cuts of m b v will be available on deluxe and standard LPs globally for the first time. The compilation EPs 1998-2001 is also being reissued (CD and digital only).
As for a new My Bloody Valentine album? To here knows when…
In lieu of this year’s main event, Glastonbury Festival have announced a five-hour livestream taking place at Worthy Farm on May 22.
Directed by Paul Dugdale, Live At Worthy Farm will features acts including Coldplay, Damon Albarn, Haim, Michael Kiwanuka, Idles, Wolf Alice, Jorja Smith, Kano and Honey Dijon playing live from various locations around the Glastonbury site, such as the Pyramid Stage and the stone circle.
Tickets for the livestream cost £20 and are available here. All the artists waived their fees so that Glastonbury can help recoup some of the loss from their two cancelled festivals while still making their traditional charitable donations.
“It’s important for me to support Glastonbury because it’s been such a landmark event since I’ve been alive or indeed been playing my music,” Michael Kiwanukatold The Guardian. “It’s something that brings people together for all the right reasons, but primarily as a celebration of live music.”
Glastonbury organisers are still hoping to stage a small-scale public event in September before returning with the regular festival in summer 2022.
Angel Olsen has announced the release of a new box set called Song Of The Lark And Other Far Memories, comprising her recent twin albums All Mirrors and Whole New Mess, plus a bonus LP and a 40-page book.
The bonus LP features five alternate takes, B-sides, remixes and reimaginings from those two albums, plus a cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This”. Listen to “It’s Every Season (Whole New Mess)” – an alternate version of “Whole New Mess” – below:
Song Of The Lark And Other Far Memories is limited to 3,000 physical copies and will be released by Jagjaguwar on May 7. Pre-order it here and watch Olsen’s unboxing video below:
To mark the album’s one-year anniversary, Katie Crutchfield AKA Waxahatchee has added three bonus cover versions to Saint Cloud (one of Uncut’s Top 10 albums of 2020).
Hear her takes on “Light Of A Clear Blue Morning” by Dolly Parton, “Streets Of Philadelphia” by Bruce Springsteen and “Fruits Of My Labor” by Lucinda Williams below. The latter was captured during the Saint Cloud sessions, while the other two were “recorded a few months back just for fun” with producer Brad Cook.
Sons Of Kemet have announced that their new album Black To The Future will be released by Impulse! on May 14.
Watch a video for lead single “Hustle” featuring Kojey Radical and Lianne La Havas below:
Other guest vocalists on the album include Angel Bat Dawid, Moor Mother, Joshua Idehen and grime artist D Double E.
“Black To The Future is a sonic poem for the invocation of power, remembrance and healing,” says bandleader Shabaka Hutchings. “It depicts a movement to redefine and reaffirm what it means to strive for black power.
“The meaning is not universal and the cultural context of the listener will shape their understanding. Yet in the end, the overarching message remains the same: for humanity to progress we must consider what it means to be Black to the Future.”
Pre-order Black To The Futurehere and check out the artwork and tracklisting below:
Field Negus feat. Joshua Idehen
Pick Up Your Burning Cross feat. Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid
Think Of Home
Hustle feat. Kojey Radical
For The Culture feat. D Double E
To Never Forget The Source
In Remembrance Of Those Fallen
Let The Circle Be Unbroken
Envision Yourself Levitating
Throughout The Madness, Stay Strong
Black feat. Joshua Idehen
Sparks have unveiled new dates their postponed European tour, which will now take place in May and June 2022.
“We are thrilled to finally announce the rescheduled dates for Sparks’ European tour,” say Ron and Russell Mael. “We thank everyone who already has tickets for the shows for being so patient and understanding. Happily, we’ll be at all the same cities and venues as originally planned, AND we’ve also added 5 new concerts in Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. And soon we’ll be announcing our North American tour dates! So, dust off your duds and clear your larynxes – we can’t wait to see you all in concert!”
Check out the new schedule below, and buy tickets for the new shows here (from Thursday at 9am BST).
The Sparks Brothers – a new documentary about the band by Edgar Wright that premiered at the Sundance Festival in January – will be released in cinemas across North America on Friday, June 18. International release dates will be announced soon.
Tickets go on sale on Thursday (April 1) from here.
The band have already rescheduled their show at The Piece Hall, Halifax, for August 29. They’ll be joined for that one by The Rifles, The Skints and OffWorld. Support acts for Dreamland will be announced in due course.
Synth pioneer and Stevie Wonder collaborator Malcolm Cecil, of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, has died aged 84.
According to a Twitter post by the Bob Moog foundation, he passed away on Sunday (March 28) after a long illness.
It is with the heaviest of hearts that we share the passing of the legendary creative genius, musician, engineer, producer, & synthesizer pioneer, Malcolm Cecil, show here w his creation TONTO. He passed away today at 1:17am after a long illness. #malcolmcecil#TONTO#moogpic.twitter.com/yYqcmuf5AV
London-born Cecil started out as a jazz bassist in the late 1950s with The Jazz Couriers, and later joined an early line-up of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.
After moving to New York he pursued a long-standing interest in electronic music, teaming up with Robert Margouleff to build their own huge analogue synthesiser called TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra), the centrepiece of their two albums as Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.
After hearing 1971’s Zero Time, Stevie Wonder tracked down the duo to work with him on his run of trailblazing 1970s albums including Music Of My Mind and Innervisions. “We were always exploring,” Margouleff told Uncut recently. “We made new sounds for every song.”
Cecil also made several albums with Gil Scott-Heron – TONTO stars on the cover of Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s 1980 – and he featured on records by The Isley Brothers, Minnie Ripperton, James Taylor, Randy Newman and more.
Personal narrative is the lifeblood of country music, and Loretta Lynn has a history more famously potent than most. One of eight children born to a Kentucky coal miner, she married at the age of 14 and endured a long, abusive relationship, became the first woman to win the CMA’s Entertainer Of The Year Award (in 1972) and is widely acknowledged as a pillar of the genre. It’s a story of struggle and success that’s sustained multiple retellings, whether in memoir, movie or album, and her 50th full-length is another iteration, with a slight twist.
This year Coal Miner’s Daughter marks its half-century, which makes Still Woman Enough a celebratory release. It’s a mix of reworkings of originals from the ’60s and ’70s and fresh interpretations of traditional songs, plus one new number, the title track, which was co-written with her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell. Margo Price and Carrie Underwood are among the guests, younger carriers of what Lynn calls the “real country” baton. But it’s a celebratory release in another sense: the “survivor” trope may be problematic in terms of representing female experience, but it’s also a core element of country songwriting. Lynn, however, who turns 89 in April, has thrived, rather than simply survived.
Between 2013 and 2017 she recorded more than 90 songs, and these 13 date from the later part of that period. Unsurprisingly, there’s been no major style makeover and Russell, who co-produced with John Carter Cash, admits that when her mother first told them she wanted to re-record some of her older songs she was unenthusiastic, owing to her closeness to the originals. “I love the sound of tape and the youthfulness of her voice,” she told Uncut. “But it was my mom who said these are my songs and this is my record. Once we started tracking the older hits my mom wrote and she was singing them, it became so clear to us that this music was fresh and relevant to her.”
Lynn reasserts her relevance right at the start, with the new title track. It’s the bookend to closer “You Ain’t Woman Enough”, which features Tanya Tucker and is Lynn’s signature hit from 1966. In it she warns a challenger off her beau with a startlingly blunt smackdown that also raises a smile: “Women like you they’re a dime a dozen, you can buy ’em anywhere/For you to get to him I’d have to move over and I’m gonna stand right here”. The new song directs that same fierce energy towards a more self-sustaining end, also voicing it – in the company of Underwood and Reba McEntire – as a broader declaration of female strength. Over a gutsy and hard-swinging, barn-dance tune, Lynn, whose voice has deepened through the years but lost none of its fire, declares, “There’s been times life’s got me down, pick myself up and bounce right back around/ I wasn’t raised to give up and to this day, you know what – I’m still woman enough”.
Canonical original “Honky Tonk Girl”, Lynn’s debut single from 1960, and “My Love”, a track from her 1968 compilation album, are included. The walking bass and lashings of steel guitar on the former are intact, but piano has been introduced, while the Tejano-toned “My Love” has been relocated several degrees further south, to richer romantic effect. “The Pill”, one of Lynn’s best known (and most controversial) songs, doesn’t feature; maybe it was judged overfamiliar and too anachronistic or, more likely, one number about the politics of female reproduction was enough. Whichever, Shel Silverstein’s “One’s On The Way” sees Margo Price – who performed it at Lynn’s 87th birthday tribute while heavily pregnant – trading verses with Lynn from shared experience, the pair of them making light work of its comic element.
Respect is paid to foundational country music both secular and spiritual. With Lynn’s new arrangement and the heft of her own history behind it, threadbare standard “Old Kentucky Home” becomes a sweetly literal example of roots music. A cover of Hank Williams’ country-gospel classic “I Saw The Light” shines and Lynn’s voice raises the (church) roof on “Where No One Stands Alone”, but the set’s centrepiece, literally and emotionally, is “Coal Miner’s Daughter (Recitation)”. A reprise of her 1970 signature hit, it’s a deeply personal declaration freighted with sociological meaning, and Lynn makes it with quiet pride and no sugar added, just spare banjo accompaniment. “A lot of things have changed since way back then and it’s so good to be back home again”, she muses. Still Woman Enough may be sustained by her memories, but it’s not overshadowed by them.
The current issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here, with free delivery for the UK – features a rare and exclusive interview with mercurial Postcard Records founder Alan Horne as he shares his personal selection of photos, artefacts and ephemera from deep within the label’s vaults.
The most inspirationally DIY of the UK’s original post-punk indie wave, Postcard was dreamed into life in the Glasgow of 1979 by Horne, then an ambitiously bored 20-year-old, who famously ran the business out of the sock drawer in his tenement bedroom. Under the banner of its impudent logo – the mischievous kitten banging a toy drum – Postcard was low on resources, audaciously high on insolence and ideas.
Spearheaded by Edwyn Collins, Horne’s co-conspirator in setting up the label, Postcard only had four actual bands – the Scottish trio of Collins’ Orange Juice, Edinburgh’s Josef K, the teenaged Roddy Frame’s Aztec Camera, plus Australians The Go-Betweens – and only really existed for one 18-month blur across 1980–81. Yet it left behind an example, an attitude, that has been inspiring misfits ever since.
Horne followed Postcard in the mid-1980s with the equally short-lived Swamplands label. After lying low several years, he next resurfaced in Glasgow in 1992 to unexpectedly reactivate Postcard, issuing some archive recordings, but focusing primarily on two stunning new albums by an elusive figure who had been part of the Postcard gang since the first: Paul Quinn. Instant cults, the original Postcard albums now change hands for eye-watering amounts. And after making them, Quinn, Horne and Postcard simply vanished.
Until today. So why, after “25 years wandering around in some other parts of the forest”, is Horne rousing the slumbering Postcard from its long cat nap? The answer, again, is Paul Quinn. The sole reason for reviving Postcard this time is to issue Unadulterated/Unincorporated, a lavish vinyl box gathering all Quinn’s Postcard records, alongside unreleased material and live cuts.
Made with the same hands-on approach that once saw Orange Juice colouring record sleeves with felt tips, it’s a labour of love available in an excruciatingly limited edition of only 300 copies. But why now? “Well – I just never tire of Paul’s voice,” Horne says. “I didn’t have a problem with the idea of the original records being hard to get hold of, not being yer mass-market sort of a bloke. But then one thing led to another and I just started to enjoy putting this box together, as an art project. Having never attempted anything on this scale, it turned out great, especially the book of notes and photographs and things in there. The access to technology now makes doing what I did back then – the whole DIY thing – so much easier. I mean there’s now absolutely no conceivable excuse to be whoring yourself off to any crooked corporate malarkey and having to put up with all the usual morons.
“Simply put, though, Paul’s recordings sounded so great back then, and so wonderfully out of step with the times – which, if you remember, were truly dreadful. They sound even better now. As for the times? Mmm…”
You can read much more from Horne, along with some of his snaps from the Postcard scrapbook, in the May 2021 issue of Uncut with The Velvet Underground on the cover – buy a copy here!
Signing to Warp around the turn of the millennium, Chris Clark was always likely to find himself operating in the shadow of the label’s more illustrious names. Early releases duly combined the glazed childlike wonder of Boards Of Canada with the rhythmic disruption of Aphex Twin, but it wasn’t until 2014’s superb self-titled album that a distinct Clark style solidified: glinting and megalithic, occasionally euphoric but freighted with dread. An atmospheric soundtrack for Sky Atlantic crime drama The Last Panthers opened new doors, eventually leading – via remixes of Max Richter and noted proto-raver JS Bach – to an eye-catching transfer to German classical powerhouse Deutsche Grammophon.
So while in some ways Playground In A Lake feels like a stunning reinvention, it’s also the album that Clark’s been stealthily working towards for 20 years. Experiments with choral samples on 2017’s Death Peak and acoustic textures on 2019’s Kiri Variations have emboldened him here to abandon programmed beats entirely, his imperious Blade Runner sonics meshing organically with a more austere, pre-electric soundworld of piano, strings and madrigal-style vocals. Rather than the abstract imagery of his early Warp albums, Playground In A Lake tilts confidently at the big themes: loss of innocence, environmental destruction, the end of the world. We’re a long way from “Nostalgic Oblong” now.
Of course, dance producers have come a cropper in similar territory before – Goldie’s Saturnz Return springs to mind – and string sections can often be hideously misused as a kind of instant-whip gravitas. But Clark’s been careful to retain a razor-like focus amid this liberating new sonic landscape. While he’s cited the orchestral arrangements of Scott Walker as an influence, the opening tracks are more modest, each one foregrounding a different instrument – Oliver Coates’ cello, Rakhi Singh’s violin, Clark himself on piano – as if introducing characters in a play.
Their motifs are outwardly playful yet they keep circling around the same few notes, as if spiralling slowly towards an inevitable fate. On track five (“More Islands”) the machines begin to wrest control of the narrative. By track seven (“Disguised Foundation”) the vocals have acquired a metallic, alien tang and the strings are becoming more obviously chopped and processed, until eventually everything is consumed, on fearsome album centrepiece “Aura Nera”, by an eviscerating synth army.
At this point, Clark goes toe-to-toe with digital noise frontiersmen like Ben Frost and Tim Hecker, but arguably more radical is how Playground In The Lake also makes room for traditional songcraft without slackening the tension. Periodically we encounter what sounds like a plaintive English folk song, albeit one played on synthesisers and sung by a 12-year-old choirboy. It’s not too difficult to see why Nathaniel Timoney was recruited: his fragile yet stoic delivery is able to voice truths that from adult mouths might feel resigned or preachy.
The ravished innocence of Timoney’s delivery on “Emissary” (“I’m like an animal trapped in the flood … You just pretend to care”) is chilling, like the ghost of a Victorian child who’s witnessed something children aren’t meant to see. Current circumstances meant that Timoney had to contribute his vocals via Zoom; the occasional glitching you can hear as a result leaves a further scar of desperation on the recording, as the end times hinted at throughout begin prematurely hoving into view.
Its watery imagery would seem to peg Playground In A Lake as a climate-change fable, a reading that Clark has tentatively confirmed. He’s also called it an “extinction myth” and a story about “the last human on Earth”, which suggests he doesn’t hold out much hope for mankind’s chances of pulling back from the brink. Appropriately, the 11-minute closing track is entitled “Life Outro”. As a nod to symphonic tradition it reprises themes from earlier in the piece, but it also introduces elements we haven’t heard before: a woozy throng of brass and a distant blast of clarinet. Lights on the horizon? It’s hard to say, but either way the effect is breathtaking.
Playground In A Lake’s confident auteurist sweep marks it out as more than just an electronica dude dabbling in neoclassical waters, or another one of those stylish but ideologically vague imaginary soundtracks. A drumless, dreamlike odyssey haunted by a childlike spirit, perhaps the only comparable work of recent times is Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen. Clark might not have the tools to open you up emotionally to quite the same degree, but he’s found an elegant and absorbing way to articulate the current mood of despair like few have managed so far. Here, as in all the best ghost stories, the scariest thing is what we’re doing to ourselves.
ZZ Top frontman Billy F Gibbons has announced that his new solo album Hardware will be released by Concord Records on June 4.
Watch a video for the single “West Coast Junkie” below:
Hardware was recorded at Escape Studio near Palm Springs, California, and was produced by Gibbons along with Matt Sorum, Mike Fiorentino and Chad Shlosser. Sorum also played drums on the album, with Austin Hanks on guitar.
Says Gibbons, “We holed up in the desert for a few weeks in the heat of the summer and that in itself was pretty intense. To let off steam we just ‘let it rock’ and that’s what Hardware is really all about. For the most part, it’s a raging rocker but always mindful of the desert’s implicit mystery.”
