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Watch a ‘making of’ video for Nick Cave’s new album, Wild God

Sam Richards
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Watch a ‘making of’ video for Nick Cave’s new album, Wild God

Pre-order now Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have released a new 'making of' video for their upcoming album Wild God, due out on August 30 via Bad Seed in partnership with Play It Again Sam. Filmed by Megan Cullen at Miraval Studios in France, the video shows Radiohead's Colin Greenwood ad...

Pre-order now

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have released a new ‘making of’ video for their upcoming album Wild God, due out on August 30 via Bad Seed in partnership with Play It Again Sam.

Filmed by Megan Cullen at Miraval Studios in France, the video shows Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood adding a bass part to one track as Cave and the rest of the Bad Seeds nod their approval.

It also reveals some paths (presumably) not taken on the new album. “We could make a couple of hours of ambient yoga music,” suggests Cave to Warren Ellis at one point, before considering “throwing an idea into ChatGPT to knock out some lyrics in the style of Nick Cave.”

Watch the video below:

Roger Corman interviewed: “I had no experience or training”

Damien Love
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Roger Corman interviewed: “I had no experience or training”

From Uncut's archives - 2004 vintage. Roger Corman has assured his place in the history books several times over. As fast and furious director and/or producer of over 300 no-budget exploitation movies since 1955, he remains the most successful independent film-maker Hollywood has ever known. ...

From Uncut’s archives – 2004 vintage.

Roger Corman has assured his place in the history books several times over. As fast and furious director and/or producer of over 300 no-budget exploitation movies since 1955, he remains the most successful independent film-maker Hollywood has ever known. 

If he’d done nothing but direct his ’60s cycle of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, films that found a perfect balance between haunted elegance and Pop hallucination, he would be remembered. As that turbulent decade wore on, however, Corman responded to currents in the air – and the money burning holes in the pockets of a restless new youth audience – with films that reflected the era in ways major studios couldn’t comprehend. Nihilistic biker films such as The Wild Angels (1966) and head movies like The Trip (1967) led directly to Easy Rider (in whose creation he was instrumental) and the subsequent revolution in ’70s Hollywood.

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His greatest legacy, however, might be the incredible roster of talent he nurtured. Almost all the Easy Riders Raging Bulls players started out working for him. After they had graduated, he was instrumental in kickstarting another generation: names such as Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Ron Howard and James Cameron.

Corman has always been synonymous with incredible economy – not for nothing did he call his autobiography How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime – and acknowledges the irony that Cameron went on to direct the most expensive movie ever made. “That was fine. In fact, I admire Jim for spending $180 million, because you can see it in Titanic. What I object to is somebody who spends $80 million and it’s two people walking around a room.What happened to the money on that?”

At 78, Corman remains tirelessly active. In the past four years alone he has produced over 20 movies for his straight-to-video enterprise and continues to be called upon by former employees to play cameos in their movies: most recently in Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, he’ll next be seen in Demme’s Manchurian Candidate remake. Here, though, the Godfather of American independent cinema graciously ushers Uncut into his busy schedule, to grade some of Corman University’s most illustrious alumni.

JACK NICHOLSON

Corman produced the film which gave Nicholson his first starring role, as the eponymous Cry Baby Killer (1957), then directed the actor’s  depraved breakthrough in The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960). Across the early 1960s, Nicholson developed into a key member of Corman’s stock company.

CORMAN: Little Shop Of Horrors was a comedy-horror, with the emphasis on comedy. Jack played a masochist in a dentist’s office who wanted to have his teeth drilled. He was very, very funny. The only problem was, the scene was supposed to end as a duel between Jack and the dentist, using a scalpel and a dentist’s drill and – I shot this picture in two days – on the first take, they knocked over the dentist’s chair, so I said, “Alright, the scene ends right there,” because we’d no time to repair the chair. I’d first encountered Jack through the acting classes Jeff Corey was running in LA. As a director, I had no experience or training. I had a degree in engineering, and felt able to learn the use of the camera, editing, all the technical aspects, but I didn’t know enough about acting, so I joined Jeff’s class to learn. Jeff was teaching the Method, which is based to a large extent on improvisation, and Jack was exceptionally good, really the best in the class. He had a unique ability to play a dramatic scene with great intensity and at the same time bring humour to it, without undercutting the drama. That’s very difficult, and very unusual – particularly when you consider Jack was only about 19. I think it’s one of the things that’s served him throughout his entire career. He’s always been a fine actor, and is simply getting better. He helped out behind the camera, too. I did a picture called The Terror (1962), with Boris Karloff and Jack, which I shot two days of on standing sets from The Raven (1962), with only part of a script written. Boris worked those two days, and Jack was going lead the rest of the picture, when the script was written. I had various people directing parts, Francis Coppola, Monte Hellman. The last day of shooting, there was nobody available, so Jack said, “Roger, every idiot in town has directed part of this, lemme direct the last day.” And the work he did was good. We stay vaguely in contact – I see all these people at parties and so forth. Jack, when he directed The Two Jakes (1990), offered me a role, but I had to be in Europe, so I was unable to do it.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

Coppola cut his teeth recutting ’50s Russian sci-fi movies for Corman to redistribute Stateside; for his first effort, Battle Beyond The Sun (1963), he added a notorious new scene, involving monsters constructed to look like a huge penis and vagina. Corman subsequently produced Coppola’s directing debut, Dementia 13 (1962). Instigating a trend among Corman alumni, Coppola paid thanks by casting his mentor in a cameo in The Godfather Part II (1974).

Francis came straight out of UCLA film school. This was in the ’60s, and I had bought the American rights to some Russian science fiction films, which were very well made technically, but contained some really outrageous anti-American propaganda. So Francis’ job was to recut the films: dub them into English, cut out the anti-American elements. On Battle Beyond The Sun, I had told Francis I wanted an additional battle scene between monsters put in, and asked if there could be some erotic quality to it. Well, he went beyond anything kind of vaguely symbolic! He made it pretty blatant. We had to cut that back a little. Francis became my assistant after that, and went on to direct Dementia 13 for me. He was capable of doing just about any job there is on a film, and doing it well. For instance, we went to Europe to do The Young Racers (1962) with a very small crew, just followed the Grand Prix circuit, and on that, Francis was First Assistant Director, handled some of the sound, and also handled second unit camera on the racing days.  Both with him and Jack, I could recognise early on they had great abilities, and I expected them to do well. But I had no way of knowing they would do as well as they did. When he directed me in Godfather Part II, that was fine. When he cast the Senate Investigating Committee, of which I played a member, he used writers, directors and producers for all the various Senators, which was interesting. He talked to us, explained the scene, ran through the rehearsals, then left us to totally to our own during the takes. Which I think is a very nice thing for a director to do.

PETER BOGDANOVICH

A buff hoping to break into films, the future Last Picture Show director had recently arrived in Los Angeles and was working as a critic when Corman hired him to rewrite and help out on his biker classic, The Wild Angels. After Bogdanovich performed surgery on another Russian sci-fi epic – released as the self-explanatory Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women (1967) – Corman assigned him to direct his chilling debut, Targets (1968), based around preexisting footage of Boris Karloff.

I think almost all the good directors I’ve worked with have been very much in love with film. They all have a great knowledge of film history, but Peter and Marty Scorsese may have the greatest. Peter was still working as a critic when I first met him, in a screening somewhere. We began talking and were very friendly after the screening, and he came to work for me. On The Wild Angels, he was my assistant, and he directed some second unit. He didn’t get along, frankly, with the Hell’s Angels we hired for that film all that well; they clearly came from two totally different worlds. Then he wrote and directed Targets; I had a couple of days with Boris Karloff, as a result of a contractual obligation from a previous picture, and so Peter wrote Targets around Boris’ brief sequence. He had given me a number of ideas for the rest of the movie, which I had rejected. Then, when he came up with this idea – of juxtaposing the artificial horror of the motion picture screen, which Boris epitomised, with the actual horror of real life, a sniper in a drive-in theatre – I approved that. He worked out an outline, then he wrote the script which I approved, but in the actual shooting I left him totally alone. My approach changes from director to director, but, in general, when someone works for me, I talk mostly about the technical aspects and meaning of a film. The actual directorial style, I leave to the director. I feel I’ve made the choice of director, I have faith in that choice, and I must leave him free to do his film the way he sees it – providing he stays true to the thoughts he and I have discussed.  And that film’s concept of random violence in society is, if anything, actually more pertinent today, unfortunately, than when the film was made. 

PETER FONDA & DENNIS HOPPER

The Easy Rider duo first worked together on Corman’s Jack-Nicholson-scripted paean to LSD, The Trip. Prior to that, Fonda had already become a Corman icon as biker protagonist of The Wild Angels. Hopper, who had acted in new scenes in another of Corman’s Russian remix movies, Queen Of Blood (1966), was, not for the last time, on the comeback trail, after having been blackballed by the major studios following a legendary blow-up with Henry Hathaway on From Hell To Texas (1958).

I met Peter first. I think he was aware of the great fame and stature of his father and, to some extent was, as any son would, trying to establish his own persona. Of course on The Wild Angels I had a Fonda and a [Nancy] Sinatra, and that was two things; yes, partially to have those surnames on the posters, but also because they were both good actors and could play the roles. Peter Fonda got on a little bit better with the Hells Angles, because he was able to ride a motorcycle, and as a result could relate with them. And, as an actor, he worked with them, tried to help their performances. It was through Peter I met Dennis. They were friends, and after The Wild Angels, when I did The Trip, Peter suggested Dennis for a role. I think their friendship developed working together on that, and eventually led to Easy Rider; it was a friendship that became a friendship and also a business and artistic partnership. Dennis gave me no problems whatsoever. I had been told he had given problems to several directors and might be difficult. He was never difficult. I got along well with him, and have nothing but admiration both for his ability and work ethic. He shot some second unit for The Trip, his footage was very good, and that good work was one of the reasons I went along with the combination of Peter to produce and Dennis to direct Easy Rider; I was the original executive producer, but then it moved, for a variety of reasons, from [Corman’s regular studio] AIP to Columbia. You can almost chart a line from The Wild Angels to The Trip to Easy Rider, following the counterculture of the day. I thought Easy Rider was a good picture, and caught the spirit of youthful rebellion in the United States. I anticipated it being a success, but I didn’t realise how big it would be. The major studios were beginning to be aware for the power of the independent movement, and Easy Rider really shook them up, caused them to bring in a number of the independent film-makers.

ROBERT DE NIRO

The 26-year old De Niro had only acted in a couple of underground films by his friend Brian De Palma when Corman cast him as Shelley Winters’ youngest, glue-sniffing hoodlum son in Bloody Mama (1969). A loose adaptation of the life and crimes of Ma Barker, this Bonnie And Clyde cash-in ditched backwoods glamour for violence: just your everyday story of rape, incest, drugs and murder.

De Niro was and is just one of the most dedicated, most intense actors I have ever seen. We were going to be shooting in Arkansas, and De Niro went to Arkansas – on his own – a week or so before shooting, just hung around, wandering through small towns, picking up accents, learning how people moved, what their opinions were. He was a very, very intense actor, and it was clear, from the beginning, that he was brilliant. He played a junkie, and started losing weight to get into the character. I wouldn’t say starved himself, but… well, yes. I dunno how much weight he lost, but he definitely lost weight for that portion of the film. That level of commitment was somewhat out of the norm. But I understood what he was doing, and I approved of it, provided he didn’t damage his health, which he didn’t. But, yes, it was an intensity you will see in very few actors. 

MARTIN SCORSESE

Corman produced Scorsese’s first studio feature, the bloody depression ballad, Boxcar Bertha (1972), then came close to derailing cinema history when he agreed to back the young auteur’s next project, Mean Streets (1973), providing Scorsese rewrote it as a Blaxploitation flick. Scorsese turned the offer down, but was still granted use of Corman’s crew to shoot what would become his breakthrough.

I had seen a picture Marty had done in New York, an underground picture in black and white, I don’t even remember the title [Who’s That Knocking At My Door], and it was clear he was a brilliant young film-maker. He had never done a film in Hollywood, and I met him, I don’t remember exactly how, but we got along well. I had done *Bloody Mama*, about a rural woman gangster in the 1930s, and AIP wanted me to do a second one. I had just started my own company, New World, so I said I would produce, but didn’t want to direct, because I didn’t have the time. So I chose Marty to direct, and he did an exceptionally good job. But, at first, AIP did not like his work. Some junior executive or someone had seen the dailies and didn’t think Marty’s work was good. They wanted me to step in and replace him. I said I didn’t have the time, and also that they were wrong; I considered this work to be exceptionally good. Eventually,they agreed with me – and history has vindicated me! But, yes, it’s true I offered to back Mean Streets if he changed it to – well,  I dunno if it was a black exploitation, but my idea was that black films were doing very well, and I felt this type of film as a black film would be very successful. And, yes, in the long run, he was totally correct not to do it. 

You know, I’m still as enthused by the young people working for me; I have two young directors who have just finished two low-budget films: Brian Sechler, out of New York University film school, who’s done a picture about black amateur boxers, Rage And Discipline, and Henry Crum, who’s done a street-racing picture with a Hispanic background. These are two of the best young directors I’ve ever worked with… 

Watch Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band cover The Pogues’ “A Rainy Night in Soho” in Kilkenny

Michael Bonner
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Watch Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band cover The Pogues’ “A Rainy Night in Soho” in Kilkenny

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band opened their set last night [May 12, 2024] at Nowlan Park, Kilkenny with a cover of The Pogues' "A Rainy Night in Soho". ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD! The performance was in honour o...

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band opened their set last night [May 12, 2024] at Nowlan Park, Kilkenny with a cover of The Pogues‘ “A Rainy Night in Soho“.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

The performance was in honour of Shane MacGowan, who died on November 30, 2023.

Springsteen had previously paid tribute to MacGowan, writing on his website:

Over here on E Street, we are heartbroken over the death of Shane MacGowan. Shane was one of my all-time favorite writers. The passion and deep intensity of his music and lyrics is unmatched by all but the very best in the rock and roll canon. I was fortunate to spend a little time with Shane and his lovely wife Victoria the last time we were in Dublin. He was very ill, but still beautifully present in his heart and spirit. His music is timeless and eternal. I don’t know about the rest of us, but they’ll be singing Shane’s songs 100 years from now.

Springsteen and the E Street Band’s next show is on May 16 at Cork’s Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Watch the Rolling Stones cover Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” in Las Vegas

Michael Bonner
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Watch the Rolling Stones cover Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” in Las Vegas

The Rolling Stones covered Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" on Saturday [May 11, 2024] at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD! Watch the footage below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxvgfpoOi...

The Rolling Stones covered Bob Dylan‘s “Like A Rolling Stone” on Saturday [May 11, 2024] at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

Watch the footage below.

The Stones are currently on their Hackney Diamonds tour, which began on April 28, 2024 at NRG Stadium, Houston. Read Uncut’s review of the Huston show here.

“We didn’t write this song,” said Mick Jagger by way of introducing their Dylan cover. “This was specially written for us by a Nobel Prize laureate.”

The Stones have often covered “Like A Rolling Stone” in concert, beginning on May 26, 1995 at Amsterdam’s Paradiso Grote Zaal.

The Vegas show also saw a number of other tour debuts, including “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, “You Got Me Rocking” and “You Got The Silver”.

The Stones’ next show is on May 15 at Seattle’s Lumen Field.

Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch

Laura Barton
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Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch

Buy here In 1979, Joan Didion published The White Album, a selection of essays that captured California on the brink of the 1970s, its counterculture dream beginning to curdle. “A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community,” as she described it. “The jitters ...

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In 1979, Joan Didion published The White Album, a selection of essays that captured California on the brink of the 1970s, its counterculture dream beginning to curdle. “A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community,” as she described it. “The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”

There is something of Didion’s description in Jessica Pratt’s fourth album, Here In The Pitch. The singer draws on the seedy history of her Los Angeles home, that peculiarly West Coast sense of an American utopia on the turn, to create her finest set of songs to date. Tales of sins and crimes and “evil innocence” lie beneath a musical palette of bossanova and orchestral ’60s pop. Melancholy moves below lustre. Sweetness buries the gloom. Even the album’s title suggests some latent malevolence. The ‘pitch’ in question refers both to absolute darkness and to bitumen; that oily black substance that forms, oozing and ominous, somewhere beneath the earth, and bubbles to the surface in places like LA’s La Brea Tar Pits.

Since her self-titled 2012 debut, Pratt has established herself as a near-mystical figure. Her records are intimate and bewitching, but there is something half-glimpsed about her music, as if she and her songs are absorbed in their own intricate reverie. This is not a bad thing. Indeed it is a quality that only encourages audiences to lean in closer. Live shows inspire a kind of pin-drop reverence; as if one false move in the crowd might startle the singer from the clearing.

Pratt’s first two albums were recorded in rudimentary fashion – her debut featured analogue recordings set down in 2007, although they could reasonably have belonged to some earlier age. Tim Presley, who began a record label specifically to release the record, described it as “Stevie Nicks singing over David Crosby demos, with the intimacy of a Sibylle Baier.”

Its successor, 2015’s On Your Own Love Again, was no less primitive: a lo-fi, four-tracked and finger-picked affair made in her own apartment. Only in 2019, for her ‘breakthrough’ record, Quiet Signs, did Pratt relocate to a formal studio setting and work with a producer; her ambition to make something more cohesive and deliberate. Bigger, in a warm kind of fashion.

For Here In The Pitch, Pratt headed back to the same setting – Gary’s Electric Studios in Brooklyn, calling once again on multi-instrumentalist and engineer Al Carlson, and keyboardist Matt McDermott. This time, she also added Spencer Zahn on bass and percussionist Mauro Refosco (David Byrne, Atoms For Peace). Rather than overwhelm Pratt’s distinctive sound, these layers of instrumentation – flute and saxophone, glockenspiel and timpani, alongside her laminated vocals, work to swell the songs seemingly from the inside out. The effect is a cresting, rolling record of complexity and depth.

Pratt has spoken of how when she conceived of these songs she dreamed of “big panoramic sounds that make you think of the ocean and California”. Her touchstone, naturally, was Pet Sounds, but she sought that album’s moments of quiet as much as its baroque shimmer; the points at which you can hear the studio’s stillness; the feeling that “you could reach out and touch the texture of the sound in the air”.

The texture of sound is an intriguing thought in relation to Pratt. Her voice has always held its own extraordinary composition: sour, grained, sweet and reedy; as if in strange correspondence with the air around it. On early recordings, it bent towards Karen Dalton or Joanna Newsom, something high and lonesome. Here, her vocal runs lower and more weary – on “Empires Never Know” almost touching late Marianne Faithfull. This shift was a deliberate move; Pratt seeking a more physical mode of singing for this record. The result is a greater sense of range and a deeper kind of darkness.

Pet Sounds wasn’t the only inspiration for Here In The Pitch. Opening track “Life Is” strides in like a Phil Spector number, or The Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”. There are horns and strings and Mellotron, a guest guitar turn from Ryley Walker, as Pratt sings of insecurity and half-cornered frustration, chasing the circularity of her own thoughts as she notes how, “Time is time and time and time again.”

Oftentimes these tracks work this way, performing a kind of songwriting sleight of hand: the music moving brightly one way, while the lyrics draw in the opposite direction – small, tight, imagistic. On “Better Hate”, for instance, the music pitter-patters and sha-la-las, curlicued and sweet, but squint and you might see the honeyed vengeance of its lines: “Just a sad case, I’m nobody’s fool,” she sings, as if asking the way to San Jose. “And you’ve won it all, but your smile’ll be gone/When you’re yesterday’s news.”

Across these nine songs, the lyrics cast a world in which the light is low and the sun is dipping, autumn lies just round the corner. Its characters are trapped and untrusting. There are beggars and thieves, curfews and curses, lives “sunk in the middle” and “dreams of highways out”. Pratt’s songwriting may draw on dreamy ambiguity, but the themes on Here In The Pitch feel familiar; a kind of modernist Springsteen, pressed up against the Pacific.

This is a short album that was a long time coming, as all of Pratt’s records have been. But with each release the sense is never of a musician struggling for ideas, rather of an artist who is a master of distillation. “I was just trying to get the right feeling,” she has said of this record’s slow journey to release. It’s a testament to her talent that in the pursuit of that feeling, Pratt questioned so much of what had worked for her in the past, reconfiguring her sound, her band, her own much-loved voice. By Here In The Pitch’s close, she seems even to be having fresh thoughts about what led her here in the first place.

The album’s sole instrumental, “Glances”, arrives as a soft-lapping fingerpicked motif, surges with brass, then retreats. This wordless interlude cleanses the palate before album closer “The Last Year”, a track that proves unexpectedly hopeful, in a dark kind of way. “I think it’s gonna be fine, I think we’re gonna be together,” Pratt sings buoyantly. “And the storyline goes forever.”

With these two tracks, that ‘demented and seductive vortical tension’ gives way. The jitters abate and the dogs lie quiet, and even the moon begins to wane. We are out of the pitch, they seem to say, let us move toward the light.

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Broadcast – Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009

Piers Martin
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Broadcast – Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009

Buy now Broadcast always attracted plenty of speculation and intrigue when they were active, but since the death of singer Trish Keenan at the age of 42 in January 2011, the band’s enigma – and reputation – has only grown. Eleven years after their final album – an eccentric soundtrac...

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Broadcast always attracted plenty of speculation and intrigue when they were active, but since the death of singer Trish Keenan at the age of 42 in January 2011, the band’s enigma – and reputation – has only grown. Eleven years after their final album – an eccentric soundtrack to Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, completed by remaining member James Cargill – Broadcast are more popular than ever. Their 750,000 monthly listeners on Spotify hammer the Birmingham group’s first three albums – The Noise Made By People, Haha Sound and Tender Buttons – which Warp have kept repressing since 2015 to meet demand. Walk into any coffee shop in Brooklyn, anecdotal evidence suggests, and there’s an 85 per cent chance they’ll be playing Broadcast.

There’s a sense today that Broadcast were on the cusp of further greatness at the time of Keenan’s passing, though it’s easy, with hindsight, to ascribe momentum to a career cut short. In fact, back then the group were deep in the midst of their most experimental phase when Keenan died from pneumonia after contracting swine flu at the end of a tour of Australia. By that point, Broadcast had become the kind of cult act they once looked up to in the mid-’90s – radical psych explorers like the United States Of America or White Noise – peddling esoteric sound collages drawn from a very British palette of trippy Hammer films, the smoke and mirrors FX of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the sinister air of arcane 1970s kids’ TV shows like Children Of The Stones and The Owl Service that, looking back, seemed entirely unsuitable for the intended audience.

This is best expressed on their final release as a duo, …Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, a 2009 collaboration with The Focus Group – the electronic project of their long-time graphic designer and Ghost Box label co-founder Julian House – in which Cargill and Keenan conjure lurid pastorals and anxious freakbeat full of tumbling jazzy drum fills and babbling circuitry, a cursed library disc of bad vibes and auditory hallucinations. The pair appeared quite content to keep exploring this obscure hauntological world from their home in Hungerford – live footage from late 2010 shows them playing versions of tracks from that record in Australia – but, compellingly weird as it is, what’s absent from this period is the warmth and emotion, the human touch, that Keenan brings. For Broadcast, her presence is the strange attractor.

Perhaps that’s why their last commercially inclined album, 2005’s Tender Buttons, has come to be regarded as their definitive release. This is the last collection of conventional songs composed by Cargill and Keenan, who, working as a duo after losing their drummer, stripped their sound back to rhythm boxes and electronics in a bid to move away from the ’60s chanson style that characterised their earlier work. Keenan’s pop instinct propels “Tears In The Typing Pool” and “America’s Boy” to great heights, but the music is colder, more primitive, the mood mysterious and restless. Coolly received at the time, you can hear its influence on Thom Yorke’s solo work, the sci-fi imperative of Flying Lotus and the LA beat scene, and even Paul Weller, whose love of Broadcast led to him releasing an EP of spooked exotica, “In Another Room”, on Ghost Box a few years ago.

Appropriately for a band whose enchanting music evokes memories that are at once familiar yet unknowable, Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009 upturns everything we thought we knew about Broadcast during that final period. It fills in gaps we didn’t know were there, offers tantalising clues to their unfinished fifth album, and somehow ends up enhancing their mystique, despite laying all the cards on the table. Like opening a treasure chest and basking in the golden glow, Spell Blanket collects 36 demos and sketches from Keenan’s extensive archive of four-track tapes and MiniDiscs, recorded in the years after Tender Buttons, and which it’s assumed would have shaped the sound of their next record – all while they focused, as if in a parallel world, on the folk-horror experiments. It’s the first of two Broadcast archival releases this year by Warp; the second, Distant Call, due in the autumn, rounds up early demos of songs from the first three albums and will be the group’s final release.

Readers of Broadcast’s Future Crayon blog will know that, each September 28, Cargill posts a birthday tribute to Keenan, who was his partner. On a few of these occasions, he’s posted an unreleased Broadcast demo or audio clip, something that Keenan made. The first one he posted, in 2012, the year after her death, was a 40-second recording she made of herself, walking outside, cheerfully singing a verse called “The Song Before The Song Comes Out”, almost making it up as she goes. It’s intimate and unaffected, presumably never intended for wider circulation, and it opens this collection, setting the tone for a wealth of material that sheds new light on Broadcast’s songwriting process and Keenan’s approach to lyrics, providing insight into her state of mind through the words she wrote.

What strikes you is the sheer variety of styles and textures that Keenan and Cargill were playing around with. It’s a shimmering patchwork of ideas and moments, some more realised than others, some beautiful, some stark, and in this sense, Spell Blanket follows on quite naturally from Berberian Sound Studio, itself a series of short film cues. Ranging in length from 30 seconds to close to four minutes, there’s enough potential material here for three or four albums, if only the demos could be worked on and completed – but that will never happen and, in any case, there’s a certain charm to the brevity and roughness of these recordings that fits Broadcast’s aesthetic. In just the first eight tracks, there’s spectral hymnal drone (“March Of The Fleas”), choral loops (“Greater Than Joy”) and flute-laced witch-folk (“Mother Plays Games”), followed by the fuzzy soft-focus psych of “Roses Red”, an irresistible minute of “Hip Bone To Hip Bone” and the heavy ritual groove of “Running Back To Me”. Elsewhere, we hear Keenan trying a technique on “Singing Game”, there’s a lush synth surge called “Dream Power”, and a killer cut titled “The Games You Play”. The whole thing is an abundance of riches that illustrates how versatile and special Broadcast could be.

Keenan’s poetic lyrics touch on memories of childhood, the natural and supernatural world, her body and her dreams, seeking comfort in the domestic – familiar subjects for her, but here, presented in a beautifully designed booklet by House, it all represents something quite moving and substantial, a testament to her unique vision. Phrases stand out: “Hairpin memories loose in wish water”; “Mondrian child let loose with the pen”; “One by one the clocks fall asleep”; “The trees full of new leaves offering green tears to the earth”; “Drink up your water, Mother, watch your daughter growing tall”.

This is where the heart is, in these first takes and early demos, when the sentiment is true and the feeling is pure. Of course, it’s all we’ve got at this point, all that’s left at the end of the story. Spell Blanket is a glimpse at what might have been. A memory of the future.

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End Of The Road Festival 2024 day splits revealed!

Michael Bonner
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End Of The Road Festival 2024 day splits revealed!

The day splits have been announced for this year’s End Of The Road Festival, which runs from August 29 – September 1 at Wiltshire’s Larmer Tree Gardens. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD! Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Ri...

The day splits have been announced for this year’s End Of The Road Festival, which runs from August 29 – September 1 at Wiltshire’s Larmer Tree Gardens.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Richard Dawson will kick things off on Thursday, while IDLES return to Larmer Tree Gardens this time taking the billing reins on Friday. They top a supporting bill including Sleater-Kinney and Baxter Dury as well as Garden Stage headliners Lankum and Mdou Moctar.

Saturday is topped by Slowdive who will follow Jockstrap. Richard Hawley, Phosphorescent and Camera Obscura grace the Garden Stage,

Fever Ray will bring the Woods Stage to a close on Sunday, with strong support from Altin Gün and the Big Top is closed by Cornelius. In the Garden, there’ll be the welcome return of Yo La Tengo and Ty Segall.

We’re proud to once again be partnering with End Of The Road for what promises to be a brilliant festival. We’ll also be bringing you our usual on-site Q&As from the Talking Heads stage. More on those soon…

You can read Uncut’s ultimate End Of The Road round-up from last year’s festival here.

Introducing…Pink Floyd: A Life In Pictures

John Robinson
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Introducing…Pink Floyd: A Life In Pictures

Set the controls for our new issue! As much as they were about unbelievable music, Pink Floyd were about incredible images. When the band played their first official gig at All Saints Hall in London in 1966, they did so accompanied by a phenomenon as new as their own ever-extending R&B: a lig...

Set the controls for our new issue!

As much as they were about unbelievable music, Pink Floyd were about incredible images. When the band played their first official gig at All Saints Hall in London in 1966, they did so accompanied by a phenomenon as new as their own ever-extending R&B: a light show.

With that event begins the relationship between sound and vision you’ll see unfold before you in this lavish new magazine. Accompanied by eyewitness recollection – Floyd’s Nick Mason is a key player here – Pink Floyd: A Life In Pictures follows the band on their unlikely journey from paisley shirted improvisers to feuding multimillionaires, each with their own take on the band’s legacy. 

In between, they’ve been pop stars, film composers, and commissioners of large inflatable objects – and images have always been key to the Floyd experience. When their songwriter/frontman Syd Barrett was unable to continue with the group in 1968 it required them to think urgently about a creative emergency in their music. But for all the larks depicted here, it would be wrong to think that this was a group ever completely at ease in the spotlight.

At the start of their career audience and band were bathed in a democratic, unifying light. As it went on, and the concepts in their records became even more important, the band did everything they could to distract attention from the granddad shirts and cords comprised the band’s most outlandish stagewear. What begins in 1970 with an inflatable octopus is the start of a retreat into spectacle. The band no longer appear on the record covers – instead, they are replaced by the strong visual signature of their longtime collaborators, Hipgnosis.   

On stage, meanwhile, the band pushed restlessly onwards, making an (occasionally uncomfortable) home for themselves at the cutting edge of rock performance: with brass bands, special screens, films, taped elements, inflatables, and eventually a 340 piece wall which represents the band’s increasing alienation from its audience. 

No band can completely supress its personalities behind stage business, though, and that’s also a story you can see told here, from the departure of Roger Waters and the return of the reformed group in 1987, through the rapprochement of their appearance at Live 8 and their current rather more frosty state of relations. The story, however, as experience has shown us, surely isn’t completely over yet…

The magazine is out now, or you can get it from us here.

Introducing the latest Ultimate Music Guide: Black Sabbath

John Robinson
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Introducing the latest Ultimate Music Guide: Black Sabbath

Our latest Deluxe, 148-page edition It is, the internet tells me, shortly after Christmas 1987, and a few friends and I are huddled in a chilly corner of a pub in London’s Soho. We are here for various reasons. For one, we know that they serve pints of bitter even to self-evidently underage cus...

Our latest Deluxe, 148-page edition

It is, the internet tells me, shortly after Christmas 1987, and a few friends and I are huddled in a chilly corner of a pub in London’s Soho. We are here for various reasons. For one, we know that they serve pints of bitter even to self-evidently underage customers like us. For another, hard rock lore suggests that this is a spot we might run into Lemmy – surely an encounter to delight all parties equally. The main reason we’re there, though, is to find consolation after grave disappointment. We have failed to phone ahead before travelling from the provinces, and so have only within the last hour learned that the Black Sabbath show at Hammersmith Odeon we hoped to witness this evening has been cancelled. 

As you’ll read in this new 148-page deluxe edition of our Ultimate Music Guide to Black Sabbath, we certainly weren’t the only people to have been wrongfooted by Black Sabbath in the 1980s. In a new interview for the magazine, Tony Iommi launches a new box set which attempts to find some continuity in this era of the band, and explains some of what was going on in an era which was confusingly both post-Ozzy and post-Dio, but also post-Gillan, pre-Dio and pre-Ozzy.

Tony shares humbling tales of advertising in the local paper for a frontman, of regrouping with known heavy Midlands associates, and of playing in Russia to a crowd of rabid fans, but also to a decorously-seated collection of Soviet-era dignitaries. Much like my teenage Sabbath fan self, Tony Iommi was confident in the material and in what we didn’t then call the Black Sabbath brand. He also believed in his new singer: Tony Martin. “If you have a factory and someone leaves,” Iommi tells Peter Watts, “you don’t close the factory, you hire someone new.”

There’s a lot to unpack in Iommi’s analogy of Sabbath to a factory. But Sabbath certainly was for many years a leading British heavy industry; the awesome swing of the band given a engaging character in the person of Ozzy Osbourne, a soulboy and a Beatles fan transformed into a prince of darkness during a formative Cumbrian tour. Geezer Butler told me a few months ago how impressed he was and remains with Ozzy’s musicianship. As you read Ozzy’s own vivid intro to the magazine, or enjoy his interviews in these pages, you’ll salute that and much more besides. 

He certainly knows what’s what in Black Sabbath. “We’ve been friends, we’ve been enemies, said all sorts of things about each other,” he tells us, “but no-one can come up with them riffs like Tony Iommi. I don’t know how he does it. It’s scary, like “What?” Sometimes he would come in and say, “Ah, I’ve got nothing.” Then he’d be tuning up and this amazing fucking riff would come out. “Well, that sounded like something, Tone…”  

Enjoy the magazine. You can get it in shops next week, or pre-order here now.

Drive-By Truckers announce Southern Rock Opera deluxe edition

Michael Bonner
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Drive-By Truckers announce Southern Rock Opera deluxe edition

Drive-By Truckers will release a deluxe edition of their 2001 album, Southern Rock Opera. An expanded new 3xLP edition is released via New West Records on Friday, July 26. Pre-orders are available now. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILM...

Drive-By Truckers will release a deluxe edition of their 2001 album, Southern Rock Opera.

An expanded new 3xLP edition is released via New West Records on Friday, July 26. Pre-orders are available now.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

For this deluxe edition, the double album has been remixed, remastered and re-sequenced to include a third LP featuring two sides of additional studio material and live recordings.

The supplemental LP comprises Side A – Betamax Guillotine, featuring three songs recommended to play between the original album’s Acts I & II including the previously unreleased “Mystery Song”.

The third disc’s Side B – Live In Atlanta (2001) collects four tracks recorded November 24, 2001, at The Earl in Atlanta, GA during the Southern Rock Opera Tour, including the unreleased bonus track, “Don’t Cockblock the Rock”.

Southern Rock Opera – Deluxe is housed in a foil-stamped rigid slipcase with the original album packaged as a 2xLP set in gatefold and supplemental LP packaged in a separate jacket.

The deluxe edition also includes a perfect-bound 28-page book with never-before-seen photos and expanded liner notes by Patterson Hood.

The tracklisting for Southern Rock Opera – Deluxe is:

ACT I

SIDE A

Days of Graduation

Ronnie and Neil

72 (This Highway’s Mean)

Dead, Drunk, and Naked

Guitar Man Upstairs

SIDE B

Birmingham

The Southern Thing

The Three Great Alabama Icons

Wallace

Zip City

ACT II

SIDE A

Let There Be Rock

Road Cases

Women Without Whiskey

Plastic Flowers on the Highway

Cassie’s Brother

SIDE B

Life in the Factory

Shut Up and Get on the Plane

Greenville to Baton Rouge

Angels and Fuselage

SUPPLEMENTAL LP

SIDE A – BETAMAX GUILLOTINE

Birmingham

Mystery Song

Moved

SIDE B – LIVE IN ATLANTA (2001)

Don’t Cockblock The Rock

Zip City

Road Cases

72 (This Highway’s Mean)

Michael Lindsay-Hogg interviewed: “Let It Be was misunderstood”

Peter Watts
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Michael Lindsay-Hogg interviewed: “Let It Be was misunderstood”

With The Beatles' Let It Be back on our screens - at last! - after an absence of over 50 years, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg talks to Uncut about his memories of the original shoot, earlier attempts to bring it back into circulation and it's relationship to Peter Jackson's Get Back... ORDER YOU...

With The Beatles’ Let It Be back on our screens – at last! – after an absence of over 50 years, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg talks to Uncut about his memories of the original shoot, earlier attempts to bring it back into circulation and it’s relationship to Peter Jackson’s Get Back…

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

“I feel so pleased it is coming out again. It has been 50 years and thank God some of the principles are still alive, including me. Peter Jackson’s Get Back was very influential in getting Let It Be reissued because Peter always saw Let It Be as the cherry on top of the cake. He thought it needed to be seen to complete the Beatles experience of that particular time.

“When the film originally came out, it was collateral damage from the Beatles breaking up. When we shot the movie, edited the movie, made the rough cut and the final cut, there were four Beatles. We screened the movie to the band, and then we all went for a fancy dinner. There was a discotheque and we all went down and danced. This was November 1969 and everybody was very happy. But then, unbeknownst to everybody, a little earthquake went off at Apple. Let It Be was the next project, it was ready to go, but then it sat on the shelf as they were breaking up.

“When it was eventually released to fulfil the United Artist contact it came out a month after they broke up. None of them went to the London premiere or supported the film, and everybody who went to see it assumed it had been made as they were breaking up rather than more than a year before. That simply wasn’t true. It was minimised as a movie because of that whole experience.

“It played in cinemas in 1970, appeared on the BBC a couple of times and then Apple put it on VHS, but that quickly got pulled because of an issue around music licensing. The movie was withdrawn. When I asked Apple why it wasn’t re-released after that issue was settled, they told me it was because of the state of play in the Beatles. There was no appetite to release Let It Be.

“This meant that the only way people could see it was bootlegs from the few BBC broadcasts, which tended to have very poor sound quality and really dark visuals. Not only was Let It Be misunderstood when it came out, when people did get the chance to see it, it looked shitty. Over the years that followed, I made videos with Wings and every so often I’d ask Paul about Let It Be. Paul would always say he’d like to see it come out, but nothing ever happened. Then after a while, every time he saw me there’d be a panicky look in his eyes.

“In the late 90s after Anthology, Apple made some in-house documentaries about the making of Let It Be. They wanted to do something but weren’t sure what. I was interviewed by Mark Lewisohn and it was so long ago I still had gelled hair. But the Beatles were all doing their own things and it never happened.

“Then Peter Jackson got involved. Apple said that Peter Jackson wanted to take a whack at re-editing the original footage and making a longer version of the movie. They were interested in how I’d feel about that, and worried I might throw a wobbly but I was thrilled. I had made this in 1969 and didn’t really want to go and look at it all myself. Peter and I had completely different briefs. When I made the film, I was planning to shoot a concert – the rehearsal footage was really meant to be a sort of trailer for the concert. Then when George left, part of his proviso when he came back was there should be no more talk about a TV special. He just wated to make an album. It suddenly became a different thing. We could have stopped filming after the concert idea was dropped but we kept going because I needed to figure out an ending for the movie and create something that could play in theatres. We eventually compromised with the rooftop concert.

“Peter had all this footage and spent three years working on it. He lost a year through Covid but that allowed him to make it for streaming rather than the cinema – so he made an eight-hour movie over three episodes. This was twice as long as Gone With The Wind. Get Back was amazing and won an Emmy but it was a different thing.

“While Peter was working on Get Back he was looking at the Let It Be footage and he was always very respectful. He’d ask questions, he’d send me clips and he’d ask about technical stuff and we’d talk about things I couldn’t do at the time. One example is the conversation between Paul and John about George round the table in the canteen. Back in 1969, there was tension brewing and Paul, John and I had lunch. I had a feeling something might come up so I put a mic in the flower pot. I left them and they had this conversation about George, but when I played it back later all I could hear was cutlery and plates clanging.

“Peter was able to isolate the conversation using his technology. He could also separate guitar and voice, which was really useful because guitar players are always strumming when they talk so you can’t hear anything. Pete sent me the audio clips of the Beatles talking without any of the other noises. He had developed this technology where we could hear these conversations for the first time.

“Peter has always liked Let It Be and seen it for what it is. He understands that Get Back and Let It Be are completely different movies, made for completely different reasons with different technology at different times for a different audience. He has been very effective at putting the idea of Let It Be out there. Paul and Ringo and the families of John and George were very happy with Get Back but Peter kept telling Apple that they needed to also release Let It Be.

“They figured they could restore the print. They were originally working off an old print but we wanted a more filmic look, so they worked on that while also working on Get It Back and helped to restore the print. Peter didn’t run off with my baby the way other directors with more ego might have done. He really was a collaborator. Peter and the Apple team have been very helpful. It looks and sounds great and now you can look at without the cloud that hung over the movie when it first came out.

“The film is about four men who loved each other but were no longer the Fab Four. They hadn’t performed for three years and were nearly in their 30s. They were looking at life differently to those glorious years when they changed the world. They were trying to work out what their expectations were. It was about four men growing up. That’s how I cut it. You see great affection, but you also see them staking out their own turf. It was a frustrating time for George in particular. He knew he was a great songwriter and was trying to figure out how to get his work looked at with more attention by John and Paul.

“The relationship between Get Back and Let It Be is unparalleled. There’s no equivalent to compare it with. And you can’t compare Let It Be with Get It Back. This is a film that hasn’t been seen by most people for 50 years so it’s totally out of a time capsule, while Peter could make Get It Back with 50 years of hindsight.

“Was it tempting to make a different edit? No, although I did think about it. But I felt I didn’t need to as Peter’s film covered a lot. I thought Let it Be should be seen for what it was when I made it. I wanted to just let it be.

“We originally had one edit that was 30 minutes longer that we screened for them on the day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I knew that was too long. There was repetition, longueurs. A lot of it was just footage of them rehearsing which is great but after a while it got a bit boring. I had to show them collaborating more. Because the Beatles weren’t on the road together, they weren’t writing together. You could see that when Paul is recording ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and he just gave them the chords.

“In the first rough cut I had some of George leaving. We had Paul, John and Ringo talking without George. The Beatles themselves did not offer a lot of input during the edit but sometimes you would hear from another person what might work better, just occasionally. On this occasion, Neil Aspinall suggested we didn’t need the stuff without George as it was confusing for the viewer. They saw that The Beatles were very powerful as an entity and didn’t want to go into the stuff about George. That meant that in Let It Be there were always four Beatles. You have to realise that at the time, there was no real sense they were actually going to break up. We felt they might go and do solo projects – they were already starting to do that – but they would always come back as the Beatles, as it was such a powerful force.

“We showed the first cut and that evening I had dinner with Paul and Linda, John and Yoko and Pete Brown from Apple. We didn’t talk about the movie so my understanding was that they were very happy. We had a lovely evening, very civilised, then Pete Brown called a couple of days later and said he was wondering if there was too much John and Yoko in the film. I didn’t think there was – I had tried to keep John and Yoko in most of the shots as that was what it was like in the room. Pete said, “Let me put it like this, I have had three phone calls this morning from three different people all suggesting there is too much Yoko.” I knew what that meant. So I made the change.

“Generally, they interfered very little and when they did, I understand exactly why they wanted what they wanted. It always made sense and I was okay with it. The sequence of George and Paul arguing, which everybody thought was controversial, they never even blinked at – this was, for them, regular talk between musicians about a song. It happens. It’s a conversation about creativity. People took it for a sign that something was rotten but at the time, it didn’t seem that way.

“I am very proud of the concert footage. Coming up with the idea and then pulling it off. They were thrilled when they did it. They were so happy on that roof, even though it was so cold and windy. They were so happy to be playing together for an audience even though they couldn’t actually see them. And then you get the blue meanies coming up to stop the concert right at the end – what could be better?

“What is the right order to watch it in – Get Back or Let It Be? I have no idea. I was fascinated by the story that Peter was telling and had a lot of fond memories of some of the shots as I had taken them myself. He was able to explore the story about George that I had taken out. I was very touched by the way Peter always talked about Let It Be. He said it was a wonderful movie that had a bad rep and needed to be seen again. We weren’t in cahoots, he’s just been an advocate and he believes the two need to be seen together.

“Peter was dealing with different Beatles to me. I had all four of them at a difficult time in their lives, while he was working with Paul and Ringo, both around 80 with very different views of things back then. Now, Paul and Ringo were very excited about seeing all that old footage that Peter was able to use. They weren’t interested in that at all in 1969 and they might not even have watched Let It Be since it came out.

“Will they enjoy it? I think it’s a very valuable picture and I was always sad that it came off the market. People were always asking about it but lot of people who asked that question are now dead. This is a completely new audience. It does look pretty good now, and that will make a difference – it looks and it sounds great. I am fascinated to see how people receive it.”

Let It Be launches exclusively on Disney+ on May 8

Watch the trailer for blur: To The End documentary

Michael Bonner
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Watch the trailer for blur: To The End documentary

A new documentary blur: To The End is coming to screens in the UK and Ireland on July 19. You can watch the trailer below. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD! The documentary follows Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave...

A new documentary blur: To The End is coming to screens in the UK and Ireland on July 19. You can watch the trailer below.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

The documentary follows Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree as they came together in early 2023 to record the songs that became their The Ballad of Darren album, ahead of their first ever shows at London’s Wembley Stadium in July last summer. 

The film is directed by Toby L and produced by Josh Connolly, via production house Up The Game.

Speaking in the film, Alex James said – “We’ve barely communicated for the last 10 years… I mean even when we really split up, it didn’t take this long to make a record, but what’s wonderful is as soon as the four of us get in a room together, it’s just exactly the same as it was when we were all 19….”

With Graham Coxon adding – “With each other… In the nineties, it was a very intense time. On the same sort of level as a relationship, or marriages and things like that. I think it’s okay to say that time apart was taken up with other friendships and just sort of recuperating or doing other things.”

Dave Rowntree said – “The fact that we haven’t always got on, that is one of the chemistry points that has led to us being able to make the music we do. I’m absolutely convinced of it.”

Damon Albarn said – “I don’t think any of us thought we’d make another record, especially not a record like this. I suppose that’s why I wanted to try and make it as good as possible.”

FInd your local cinema by clicking here.

David Gilmour interviewed: “There was no pious false respect”

Pete Paphides
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David Gilmour interviewed: “There was no pious false respect”

David Gilmour returns with Luck and Strange, his first studio album for nine years. In this extract from Uncut's world exclusive cover feature, Gilmour, his wife and collaborator Polly Samson, bass player Guy Pratt and producer Charlie Andrew reflect on the genesis of his new album... “Have y...

David Gilmour returns with Luck and Strange, his first studio album for nine years. In this extract from Uncut’s world exclusive cover feature, Gilmour, his wife and collaborator Polly Samson, bass player Guy Pratt and producer Charlie Andrew reflect on the genesis of his new album…

“Have you checked your Instagram recently?” said the message from Charlie Andrew’s manager last summer. The 42 year-old producer duly logged into the app and waiting for him was a message which said, “Hi, David Gilmour here, please give me a call.” The preceding six months had seen Gilmour and Polly Samson re-emerge carefully from their post-lockdown bubble. Weekdays were spent in a London flat they bought for the specific purpose of working in anonymity. On one floor, Gilmour growing fragments into songs with melody lines he then handed over to Samson. Cold water dips, morning walks and a record label oblivious to their industries. No pressure. And bookending the working week on their drive to and from Sussex, they listened to albums helmed by producers who may have what it takes to turn these new songs into an album.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

There had already been false starts – “try-outs with different people, and nothing quite felt like the right fit.” During a visit to see Mark Knopfler at his West London studio, Gilmour asked him “who the good producers are these days” and neither seemed able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Gazing on in mild exasperation as “they ran through those same names,” Samson remembers thinking, “I just spent a day gathering names of people who had won prizes for music production.” More car journeys. More records. But the one name that came up time and again was Charlie Andrew – not just his work with Alt-J, but also critically feted records by Marika Hackman and Sivu.

“How does one put it?” elaborates Gilmour, “Charlie seemed like one of us. Younger, but on the same wavelength. He had worked at Abbey Road when he was young – and that’s always a tick in my box.”

Adjourning from tracking the strings that he and Gilmour recorded on a recent trip to Ely Cathedral, Andrew recalls the invitation for dinner that secured his services. “They played me some of the demos and most of my questions were for Polly rather than David. Because, for me, lyrical content is important for understanding where the song should be going.”

For Gilmour, the clincher was Andrew’s lack of baggage. “There was no pious false respect or anything like that. He shouts his mouth off about things in a very direct way, and it’s great. One of the first things he said was, ‘Why do all the songs have to fade out?’ In that moment, you realise that’s it’s just a habit you’ve fallen into. Or the other one: ‘Why do you have to have a guitar solo in everything?’ It’s refreshing to be with a person that is not overawed.”

Quite the reverse, it seems. The sessions began with “Luck and Strange”, a song which – thanks to the fragment of a 2007 jamming session around which it was written – posthumously features fallen Floyd keyboard player, Rick Wright. “Understandably,” recalls Andrew, “David kept mentioning Rick when he was talking about ‘Luck and Strange’, and I was like, ‘I’m sorry, David, I’ve got to stop you there, who’s Rick?’ But I think that’s been part of the enjoyment, I think, for David. I’m not trying to regurgitate another Pink Floyd album, or one of his solo albums.”

As well as being the song that kicked off the sessions, “Luck and Strange” also sets out the sonic and thematic reach of an album that, at times, feels like an existential audit undertaken by the man singing it. It’s a pensive, pulsing meditation on the providence enjoyed by baby boomers coming of age in a time of peace and prosperity – “demob happy street and free milk for us all”. For Guy Pratt, bassist on all of Gilmour’s Pink Floyd and solo work since 1987, the final section of that song offers a timely if inadvertent corrective to what he sees as the pernicious narrative espoused by Roger Waters in a Telegraph interview last year to plug his re-recorded version of The Dark Side Of The Moon: “[Gilmour and Wright] can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them.” It’s a view angrily disputed by Pratt: “You only need to go right back to 1971 with ‘Echoes’, off Meddle, and listen to the final section of that song to be reminded that so much of what people loved about Pink Floyd was this musical conversation between David and Rick.”

“It’s time for a decision!” Read Uncut’s exclusive cover feature with David Gilmour in full!

Watch Bruce Springsteen debut “If I Was The Priest” live in Europe

Michael Bonner
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Watch Bruce Springsteen debut “If I Was The Priest” live in Europe

Bruce Springsteen debuted "If I Was The Priest" in Europe on May 5, 2024 at the Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Wales. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD! The song dates back to Springsteen's singer-songwriter days in the early '7...

Bruce Springsteen debuted “If I Was The Priest” in Europe on May 5, 2024 at the Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Wales.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

The song dates back to Springsteen’s singer-songwriter days in the early ’70s. Springsteen performed it during his audition for John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records in 1972.

The song was eventually recorded and released in 2020 for Springsteen and The E Street Band’s Letter To You album.

Otherwise unperformed publicly since 1972, it appeared on the setlist on February 14, 2023 at the Toyota Center, Houston, Texas. Springsteen performed it again on two more occasions that month.

Watch the Cardiff performance below.

The setlist for the the Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Wales was:

So Young And In Love

Lonesome Day

No Surrender

Prove It All Night

Darlington County

Ghosts

Better Days

The Promised Land

Spirit In The Night

Hungry Heart

If I Was The Priest

My City Of Ruins

Nightshift

The River

Last Man Standing

Backstreets

Because The Night

She’s The One

Wrecking Ball

The Rising

Badlands

Thunder Road

Encore

Born In The U.S.A

Born To Run

Bobby Jean

Dancing In The Dark

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

Twist And Shout

Encore

I’ll See You In My Dreams

Springsteen and The E Street Band next play Boucher Road Playing Fields, Belfast, Northern Ireland on May 9.

Mdou Moctar – Funeral For Justice

Daniel Dylan Wray
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Mdou Moctar – Funeral For Justice

Buy now The politics of this album, rooted in the plight of Niger and the Tuareg people, may be lost via a language barrier, but the intensity that drives it speaks loud and clear. From the opening title track, ferocious guitar and polyrhythmic drumming explode, almost recalling a math ro...

Buy now

The politics of this album, rooted in the plight of Niger and the Tuareg people, may be lost via a language barrier, but the intensity that drives it speaks loud and clear.

From the opening title track, ferocious guitar and polyrhythmic drumming explode, almost recalling a math rock band in full swing.

From here, Moctar and his group blaze their way through an album of emphatic psych-rock.

However, despite remarkable playing and energy that charges through much of this record, it’s also contemplative, varied and tender at times, with the gentle sway of tracks like “Takoba” hitting as hard as the noise and fury of “Sousoume Tamacheq”. 

Buyer’s Guide to Mdou Moctar

ANAR

2008, self-released

On Moctar’s laidback debut album his acoustic guitar gifts a soulful humanity to computerised drum beats and robotic auto-tuned vocals, with bewitching, hypnotic results.

ILANA (THE CREATOR)

2019, Sahel Sounds

Moctar’s first studio album with a backing band brings his raw, ragged electric guitar sound to the fore in a barrage of speaker-melting solos.

AFRIQUE VICTIME

2021, Matador

The most sonically diverse record in Moctar’s catalogue, Afrique Victime changes gears effortlessly between soul-stirring acoustic blues and full-throated psychedelic rock.

FUNERAL FOR JUSTICE

2024, Matador

Louder, faster and wilder than anything he’s recorded before, Moctar’s latest album captures his band at their righteous and ferocious best.

Kevin EG Perry

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St Vincent – All Born Screaming

Bud Scoppa
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St Vincent – All Born Screaming

Buy now All Born Screaming introduces a new Annie Clarke, as she discards her icily cerebral persona and becomes nakedly feral. The transition to beast mode happens when second track “Reckless” mutates from genteel to carnivorous with a blitzkrieg of concussive programmed drums and ch...

Buy now

All Born Screaming introduces a new Annie Clarke, as she discards her icily cerebral persona and becomes nakedly feral.

The transition to beast mode happens when second track “Reckless” mutates from genteel to carnivorous with a blitzkrieg of concussive programmed drums and chinking synths.

Dave Grohl’s massive drums intensify the hard-funk ferocity of “Broken Man” and “Flea” before the LP’s first half climaxes with the Princely strut, “Big Time Nothing”.

The vibe becomes lusher as trumpets herald the ’60s film theme vibes of “Violent Times”, lifts off with the massed voices and serrated guitars of “So Many Planets” and climaxes with the title track, a Cate LeBon collaboration that shape-shifts from frisky rave-up to hallucinogenic excursion, as Clarke completes another radical musical/psychological metamorphosis.

The Road to All Born Screaming

STRANGE MERCY

(4AD, 2011)

Though she was covering Big Black’s “Kerosene” in her live set, there was as yet little of that energy in Annie Clark’s recordings. But her songs were growing darker and more direct: notably on “Cruel”, the video

ST VINCENT

(Loma Vista, 2014)

On her breakthrough album, Annie goes big, goes bold and brings a new pop ambition (“I want all of your mind” she sings on “Digital Witness) to her troubled funk workouts.

MASSEDUCTION

(Loma Vista, 2017)

Annie hits her imperial peak on this matchless collection of neurotic electropop (“Los Ageless”, “Young Lover”) and bilious late night bar ballads (“New York”).

Stephen Troussé

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David Gilmour announces new UK live dates

Michael Bonner
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David Gilmour announces new UK live dates

David Gilmour has announced his first live shows in London for eight years, to coincide with his new album, Luck and Strange, which is released by Sony Music on September 6. Gilmour will play London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 15. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FE...

David Gilmour has announced his first live shows in London for eight years, to coincide with his new album, Luck and Strange, which is released by Sony Music on September 6.

Gilmour will play London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 15.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

Fans pre-ordering Luck and Strange from the official David Gilmour store will be able to participate in an exclusive ticket pre-sale on Thursday, May 9.

The window to qualify for the pre-sale ends at 3pm BST on Wednesday, May 8, with all existing pre-orders from the official David Gilmour store also eligible. Tickets will then go on general sale from the Albert Hall and on Ticketmaster from 10am BST on Friday, May 10.

In a world exclusive interview in this month’s edition of Uncut, Gilmour spoke about his tour plans, telling us there was “an unwillingness to revisit the Pink Floyd of the ‘70s”, but that he would be more likely to perform songs from other decades: “Yeah, they might be better represented. I mean, at least one from the ’60s. The one we’ve done in the past is ‘Astronomy’ [The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, 1967]. That’s always entertaining and fun and gets people off to a happy start.

“There’s songs from the Momentary Lapse Of Reason and The Division Bell albums. I mean, I think ‘High Hopes’ is as good as anything we ever did at any time.”

Gilmour also spoke about amendments he has made to his touring band, says: “It was all too robotic, and some people would have been better off in a Pink Floyd tribute band. So I thought we’d get people who are genuinely creative and give them a little more space. That’s the plan. So we’re going to have some of the younger guys alongside Guy [Pratt] and the Webb Sisters, who sang with Leonard Cohen on his last tours.”

End Of The Road’s comedy and literature line-up revealed

Sam Richards
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End Of The Road’s comedy and literature line-up revealed

End Of The Road has announced its comedy and literature line-up for this year's festival, taking place at Larmer Tree Gardens on August 29 to September 1. Comedians Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Janine Harouni, Fern Brady, Ria Lina and Pappy's are among those making the journey to Dorset this year. ...

End Of The Road has announced its comedy and literature line-up for this year’s festival, taking place at Larmer Tree Gardens on August 29 to September 1.

Comedians Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Janine Harouni, Fern Brady, Ria Lina and Pappy’s are among those making the journey to Dorset this year.

On the literature side of things, Richard King will be there to talk about his new Arthur Russell biography Travels Over Feeling, as recently showcased in Uncut. Also discussing their new books will be legendary producer Joe Boyd, and Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins and Bella Union fame.

See the full comedy and literature line-up below. Last tickets for the festival are available here.

Duane Eddy has died aged 86

Michael Bonner
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Duane Eddy has died aged 86

Duane Eddy - "the first rock and roll guitar god" - had died aged 86. BBC reports that he died on April 30 in Franklin, Tennessee. The cause was cancer. ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD! Born on April 26, 1938 in Corning, New...

Duane Eddy – “the first rock and roll guitar god” – had died aged 86.

BBC reports that he died on April 30 in Franklin, Tennessee. The cause was cancer.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

Born on April 26, 1938 in Corning, New York, Eddy began playing guitar aged 5. He formed a duo, Jimmy and Duane, with friend Jimmy Delbridge, aged 16; their first single, 1955’s “Soda Fountain Girl“, was produced by Lee Hazelwood.

His second single, “Moovin’ n’ Groovin’“, also produced by Hazelwood, was credited to Eddy “and his ‘twangy’ guitar”.

Eddy’s third single, “Rebel-‘Rouser“, another Hazelwood/’twangy’ guitar hook-up, have him his first Top 10 single.

Eddy’s recording of Henry Mancini‘s “Peter Gunn” number six in the UK in June, 1959. He went on to enjoy 16 Top 40 singles between 1958 and 1963. He continued to chart in the ’80s, playing on a re-recording of “Peter Gunn” by The Art Of Noise.

“Instrumentalists don’t usually become famous. But Duane Eddy’s electric guitar was a voice all its own,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Kyle Young told Variety. “His sound was muscular and masculine, twangy and tough. Duane scored more than 30 hits on the pop charts. But more importantly, his style inspired thousands of hillbilly cats and downtown rockers – the Ventures, George Harrison, Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Marty Stuart, to name a few – to learn how to rumble and move people to their core. The Duane Eddy sound will forever be stitched into the fabric of country and rock & roll.”

Hear a remastered version of “Coyote” from Joni Mitchell’s The Asylum Albums (1976-1980)

Michael Bonner
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Hear a remastered version of “Coyote” from Joni Mitchell’s The Asylum Albums (1976-1980)

Joni Mitchell has revealed upcoming plans for her Archives series. It comprises a new boxed set The Asylum Albums (1976-1980), which features newly remastered versions of Hejira (1976), Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977), Mingus (1979) and the live album, Shadows And Light (1980). All fo...

Joni Mitchell has revealed upcoming plans for her Archives series.

It comprises a new boxed set The Asylum Albums (1976-1980), which features newly remastered versions of Hejira (1976), Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), Mingus (1979) and the live album, Shadows And Light (1980). All four were recently remastered by Bernie Grundman.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW UNCUT, FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW AND A FREE CAN CD!

The Asylum Albums (1976-1980) will be released on June 21 in 5-CD and 6-LP 180-gram vinyl (a limited edition of 5,000) versions, as well as digitally. These sets are available to order here.

Accompanying the set is a heartfelt essay penned by Meryl Streep, a lifelong fan of Mitchell’s work. She writes: “It’s not just the artifact – music and lyrics – that Joni gives us. Her artistry leaves us, ourselves, changed. She has shifted things around inside us. And that’s how artists change the world.”

You can hear a remastered version of “Coyote” below.

As if you need it, the tracklisting for The Asylum Albums (1976-1980) is:

Hejira

LP One

Side One

  1. “Coyote”
  2. “Amelia”
  3. “Furry Sings The Blues”
  4. “A Strange Boy”
  5. “Hejira

Side Two

  1. “Song For Sharon”
  2. “Black Crow”
  3. “Blue Motel Room”
  4. “Refuge Of The Road”

Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

LP One

Side One

  1. “Overture – Cotton Avenue”
  2. “Talk To Me”
  3. “Jericho”

Side Two

  1. “Paprika Plains”

LP Two

Side One

  1. “Otis And Marlena”
  2. “The Tenth World”
  3. “Dreamland”

Side Two

  1. “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter”
  2. “Off Night Backstreet”
  3. “The Silky Veils Of Ardor”

Mingus

LP One

Side One

  1. “Happy Birthday 1975”
  2. “God Must Be A Boogie Man”
  3. “Funeral” (Rap)
  4. “A Chair In The Sky”
  5. “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey”

Side Two

  1. “I’s A Muggin” (Rap)
  2. “Sweet Sucker Dance”
  3. “Coin In The Pocket” (Rap)
  4. “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”
  5. “Lucky” (Rap)
  6. “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”

Shadows And Light

LP One

Side One

  1. Introduction
  2. “In France They Kiss On Main Street”
  3. “Edith And The Kingpin”
  4. “Coyote”
  5. “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”

Side Two

  1. “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”
  2. “Amelia”
  3. Pat’s Solo
  4. “Hejira”

LP Two

Side One

  1. “Black Crow”
  2. Don’s Solo
  3. “Dreamland”
  4. “Free Man In Paris”
  5. Band Introduction
  6. “Furry Sings The Blues”

Side Two

  1. “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”
  2. “Shadows And Light”
  3. “God Must Be A Boogie Man”
  4. “Woodstock”

The Asylum Albums (1976-1980)

CD Track Listing

Hejira

  1. “Coyote”
  2. “Amelia”
  3. “Furry Sings The Blues”
  4. “A Strange Boy”
  5. “Hejira
  6. “Song For Sharon”
  7. “Black Crow”
  8. “Blue Motel Room”
  9. “Refuge Of The Road”

Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

  1. “Overture – Cotton Avenue”
  2. “Talk To Me”
  3. “Jericho”
  4. “Paprika Plains”
  5. “Otis And Marlena”
  6. “The Tenth World”
  7. “Dreamland”
  8. “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter”
  9. “Off Night Backstreet”
  10. “The Silky Veils Of Ardor”

Mingus

  1. “Happy Birthday 1975”
  2. “God Must Be A Boogie Man”
  3. “Funeral” (Rap)
  4. “A Chair In The Sky”
  5. “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey”
  6. “I’s A Muggin” (Rap)
  7. “Sweet Sucker Dance”
  8. “Coin In The Pocket” (Rap)
  9. “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”
  10. “Lucky” (Rap)
  11. “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”

Shadows And Light

Disc One

  1. Introduction
  2. “In France They Kiss On Main Street”
  3. “Edith And The Kingpin”
  4. “Coyote”
  5. “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”
  6. “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”
  7. “Amelia”
  8. Pat’s Solo
  9. “Hejira”

Disc Two

  1. “Black Crow”
  2. Don’s Solo
  3. “Dreamland”
  4. “Free Man In Paris”
  5. Band Introduction
  6. “Furry Sings The Blues”
  7. “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”
  8. “Shadows And Light”
  9. “God Must Be A Boogie Man”
  10. “Woodstock”
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