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British jazz giant Chris Barber has died, aged 90

Sam Richards
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British jazz giant Chris Barber has died, aged 90

Trombonist and double bassist Chris Barber, one of the key figures in British jazz, has died aged 90.

As well as being at the vanguard of the trad jazz revival, first with Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen and then leading his own bands, Barber played a crucial role in the development of British rock’n’roll. In 1955, he recorded a version of “Rock Island Line” with his banjo player Lonnie Donegan that became the first debut vocal record to be certified gold in the UK, sparking the skiffle boom.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Barber was responsible for bringing blues artists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Muddy Waters to Britain, incorporating blues elements into his own music. He collaborated with Rory Gallagher – on cult 1972 album Drat That Fratle Rat – and later played with the likes of Van Morrison and Jools Holland.

Barber had recently been suffering from dementia, although he only officially retired from performing in 2019.

Mdou Moctar announces new album, Afrique Victime

Sam Richards
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Mdou Moctar announces new album, Afrique Victime

Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar has announced that his new album, Afrique Victime, will be released by Matador on May 21.

Watch a video for the new single “Tala Tannam” below:

“Tala Tannam means your tears,” says Moctar. The clip was filmed in Niamey, Niger last year. “While the song talks about love, we wanted to show the love between friendships and the love of Niger,” says bassist and producer Mikey Coltun. “The video includes friends and family – in the Tuareg community in villages around Niamey as well as Hausa people from villages in the Dosso region.”

Coltun recorded and produced Afrique Victime around the band’s travels in 2019 ­– working in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, venue backstages, and in field recordings in Niger. “While people have gotten to know Mdou Moctar as a rock band, there is a whole different set of music with this band done on acoustic guitars, which we wanted to incorporate into this album in order to go through a sonic journey,” says Moctar.

Pre-order Afrique Victime here.

James unveil 16th studio album, All The Colours Of You

Sam Richards
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James unveil 16th studio album, All The Colours Of You

James have announced that their 16th studio album, All The Colours Of You, will be released by Virgin Music Label & Artists Services on June 4.

Listen the to the title track below:

The album was recorded in part before the pandemic struck, then produced remotely by Jacknife Lee.

“With all the shit that went down in 2020 this was a miraculous conception and another big jump forward for us on the back of the last 3 albums,” says Tim Booth. “I hope it reflects the colours of these crazy times. Sweet 16 is a proper album, no fillers and is up there with our best.”

Pre-order All The Colours Of You here and check out the tracklisting below:

1. ZERO
2. All The Colours Of You
3. Recover
4. Beautiful Beaches
5. Wherever It Takes Us
6. Hush
7. Miss America
8. Getting Myself Into
9. Magic Bus
10. Isabella
11. XYST

James tour the UK and Ireland later in 2021, supported by Happy Mondays. Dates below and tickets here:

November
25 Leeds, First Direct
26 Birmingham, Utilia Arena
28 Cardiff, Motorpoint Arena
30 Glasgow, SSE Hydro
December
1 Ireland, Dublin, 3 Arena
3 Manchester, Arena (SOLD OUT)
4 London, Wembley Arena

Nirvana – Songlife 1967-72

Jim Wirth
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Nirvana – Songlife 1967-72

Ideas forever above their station, baroque two-piece Nirvana were thrown to the wolves somewhat in 1967 when they were billed to play an Island Records showcase at London’s Saville Theatre. With the stage still half set for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (featuring Cleo Laine and Bernard Breslaw), and the audience eagerly awaiting new rock sensations Traffic, Patrick Campbell-Lyons, Alex Spyropoulos and their mini-orchestra were barely audible. “We had only had three rehearsals,” Campbell-Lyons recalls ruefully in the sleevenotes to this remastered vinyl collection of their five studio LPs, plus an unreleased sixth. “It was a dreadful experience.”

Wobbly-voiced aesthetes with no stomach for paying their musical dues, the original Nirvana found themselves on the wrong side of history as rock got heavy in the late 1960s, but still had a magical career. They made the first rock opera, got doused in paint by Salvador Dalí live on French TV, and even if their most celebrated song (the phasers-set-to-stun “Rainbow Chaser”) was never a huge hit, Songlife is a suitably gigantic testament to a band that – like the Odessey And Oracle-era Zombies or Big Star – failed on the very grandest of scales.

Penny Valentine clocked something of Nirvana’s weedy, proto-indie-pop vibe when she reviewed their Sacha Di-stellar 1967 debut single, “Tiny Goddess”, for Disc, noting that Campbell-Lyons had “a funny little voice of incredible sadness”. Born in Waterford, Campbell-Lyons moved to London in the early 1960s, playing with R&B bands in Ealing before his quirky songs earned him a first bash at the big time with Hat And Tie, a duo with future Roxy Music, Sex Pistols and Pulp producer Chris Thomas.

However, a greater adventure began when he was introduced to Spyropoulos at La Gioconda coffee house on Denmark Street. The Greek cinephile had abandoned his legal studies in Paris to try his luck in peak-groovy England, and after sketching out some widescreen tunes with Campbell-Lyons at Spyropoulos’s west London flat, the pair became one of Island’s first non-reggae signings. Label boss Chris Blackwell saw the potential in their home demos, and – perhaps rashly – encouraged them to bring in an orchestral arranger, and to think big.

Their debut album, The Story Of Simon Simopath, emerged just before Christmas 1967. A head-shop fairytale, it charts the adventures of a depressed youngster who finds happiness on the far side of the cosmos after becoming a space pilot, its monstrous tweeness mitigated by brilliant, primary-coloured songs: “Satellite Jockey”, “Wings Of Love” (as covered by Herman’s Hermits) and the happy-clappy “We Can Help You” (an almost hit for The Alan Bown!). Meanwhile, lush centrepiece “Pentecost Hotel” promises a refuge for “people with a passport of insanity”, a moving exemplar of how Nirvana hinted at emotional fragility behind their crushed-velvet wall of sound.

Simon Simopath proved a hard sell in what was still a singles-oriented age, and Nirvana foregrounded their rococo pop sensibility for 1968’s All Of Us. Their musical calling card, “Rainbow Chaser” has ELO-style strings, wild stereo phasing and slyly transgressive lyrics (“I can talk to him, and I can love him”), but stalled at No 34 in the UK charts in May 1968. It’s a stunning, impish period piece, but the rapturous “The Touchables (All Of Us)” might be even more perfectly crafted, though it was perhaps not a natural fit as the title song for the film of the same name: a sexy pop drama based on an idea by Performance writer Donald Cammell. More modest thrills lurk elsewhere, not least the cheeky use of the word “wanky” on “Frankie The Great”, and Spyropoulous’s psychedelic Astrud Gilberto impersonation, “You Can Try It”.

Unfazed by public indifference, Nirvana doubled down on the pomp for their third LP, but Island politely declined to release it, Blackwell feeling that a record in thrall to Francis Lai’s soundtrack to Un Homme Et Une Femme had no place on a label that was scoring big with King Crimson and Jethro Tull. Nirvana called in favours to get it finished; grateful for a loan to pay for production costs, they gave an extra-large credit to the son of one of Spyropoulos’s cousins on what was supposed to be a self-titled LP, leading it to be misnamed Dedicated To Markos III after it finally dribbled out in 1970. Not helped by an extremely weird-looking bones-and-fingers sleeve (“It looks like a bad advert for nail varnish,” says Campbell-Lyons), it was ill-suited to the golden age of Led Zeppelin, though “Excerpt From ‘The Blind & The Beautiful’” may be the greatest of Nirvana’s non-hits.

Musical returns decreased thereafter. Spyropoulos stepped aside, leaving Campbell-Lyons to bash together an unloved prog divorce album, Local Anaesthetic (almost redeemed by the lachrymose “Saddest Day Of My Life”), before Nirvana deactivated after 1972’s Songs Of Love And Praise. Key features: Las Vegas-friendly reworkings of “Rainbow Chaser” and “Pentecost Hotel”, plus grandstand finale “Stadium”, an oddball collision of Incredible String Band cosmic wonderment and Andy Williams production values.

Eternally hopeful, Campbell-Lyons kept chasing rainbows as Pica, Erehwon and Rock O’Doodle, among others, and even reunited with Spyropoulos in the 1970s to work on a vampire musical. The fleshed-out demos have emerged here for the first time as Secrets, with the Quadrophenia-worthy “Bingo Boy” and Abba fandango “Two Of A Kind” suitably quirky additions to the Nirvana canon. There was some West End interest for a while, but ultimately, Nirvana’s most tangible reward for their efforts came in the ’90s with “an amicable pay-off” from the Kurt Cobain Nirvana for having inadvertently stolen their name.

Their sound, though, remains very much their own. The contrast between Spyropoulos and Campbell-Lyons’ quavering voices and the skyscraping arrangements on Songlife makes for a camp mix of high art and showbiz; Keith West’s “Excerpt From A Teenage Opera” via Fellini’s 8½. Nirvana proved far too convoluted a proposition for the Saville Theatre audience in 1967, but their majestic softness makes complete sense in less alpha-male times. They were the plinky-plonk Pastels of their age – heavenly before Heavenly – a pre-decimal Vampire Weekend: a delirious, freaky flight of fancy.

Extras: 7/10. A big booklet thoroughly documents the Nirvana story, while those in search of non-album Nirvana material should head for Island’s 3CD Rainbow Chaser collection.

Julien Baker – Little Oblivions

Lisa-Marie Ferla
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Julien Baker – Little Oblivions

If you’re already familiar with Julien Baker’s pared back, acoustic guitar and piano-led songwriting, the wider sonic palette is the first thing you’ll notice about Little Oblivions – the exhilarating gasp of synthesiser on “Faith Healer”; the way that “Hardline” roars and crunches to its conclusion; the stately, synthetic percussion underpinning “Relative Fiction”. The Memphis songwriter’s adoption of drums on this third album – her second for Matador – has, as she has joked in interviews, the potential for a Dylan moment given the sparse confessionals typical of her work to date.

But regardless of ornamentation, Baker’s writing remains a rigorous and unforgiving thing, her words too intimate for daylight hours. The characters in these 12 songs seek redemption in substances, shared secrets and snake oil merchants as Baker casts herself somewhere between protagonist and narrator, sometimes in the gutter, sometimes watching from the side of the road as it all goes up in smoke.

Little Oblivions was recorded in Memphis as 2019 turned into 2020 with Calvin Lauber and Craig Silvey, both of whom worked with Baker on 2017’s Turn Out the Lights. It was a period that – just months before much of the world was forced to turn inward, in varying degrees of lockdown – marked the end of a tumultuous time for Baker: both her second album and boygenius, her collaborative project with friends and fellow songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, attracted significant attention and a gruelling live schedule. That summer, medical reasons forced the cancellation of a run of planned European dates and Baker went quiet, reemerging with boygenius on the spring 2020 solo album from Paramore’s Hayley Williams.

Written during that period of turbulence, the songs that make up Little Oblivions seem to predict the collective trauma of 2020: stark lyrical references to violence, vice and what is ultimately the inability to escape from oneself, whether by placing one’s faith in a god or a bottle. The songs are also, curiously, some of the most uplifting Baker has yet written – in part because of the dizzying melodic highs, in part because of the way the songwriter remains standing, defiant, in the face of self-examination at its most brutal.

In this context, “Heatwave”, the album’s second track, is particularly stunning: an unflinching portrayal of the gruesome, self-absorbed reality of an extreme depressive episode. Its central conceit is Baker witnessing a violent accident; her voice dispassionate, disconnected from the electric guitar melody line despite the brutality of the subject matter. “I had the shuddering thought,” she sings, as the car bursts into flames in front of her, “this was gonna make me late for work.”

That relatively subdued track gives way to “Faith Healer”; inspired, says Baker, by the cognitive dissonance of substance abuse. It’s one of the album’s busiest, musically, but there is intention in every sonic detail: the way the melody seesaws over the verses and bridge before the crunch of the chorus, the way Baker’s voice switches between whisper and exorcism. The music is liberating, the lyrics – “I’ll believe you if you make me feel something” – perfectly capturing the paradox of finding escape in the things that you shouldn’t.

Some cognitive dissonance may also be required to get your head around Baker playing almost every instrument on the album – unless, perhaps, you caught her joyful drumming behind Hayley Williams in a live session just before Christmas, or have stumbled across her high school band Forrister on Bandcamp. The raucousness of “Hardline”, cathartic pop chorus of “Relative Fiction” and “Highlight Reel” – which takes half the opening riff from Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and corrupts it into something as claustrophobic as its lyrics – make the quieter moments all the more powerful.

Of these, “Song In E” is the most gut-wrenching: a vocal and piano performance on which you can hear every creak, Baker brutalising herself on behalf of a past heartbreak. “I wish you’d hurt me,” she sings, almost tenderly, “it’s the mercy I can’t take”. On “Bloodshot”, the song which gives the album both its title and its epigraph, the louds and quiets are juxtaposed to particularly devastating effect, all but the most minimal piano dropping away to highlight that “there is no glory in love”.

The album is an embarrassment of lyrical riches, every line a tattoo on the skin. Like Phoebe Bridgers, Baker has a particular knack for tiny details that grab the listener: a moth trapped in the grille of a car on “Favor”, a song which features backing vocals from her boygenius collaborators; a burning engine; the drunks in the bar talking over the band. Everything on Little Oblivions will make you feel, and it’s the catharsis we all need.

The Who Sell Out super deluxe boxset unveiled

Sam Richards
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The Who Sell Out super deluxe boxset unveiled

The Who have revealed details of their mammoth The Who Sell Out super deluxe edition, due for release via UMC/Polydor on April 23.

It features 112 tracks across five CDs and two 7″ singles – 46 of which are previously unreleased, including 14 unheard Pete Townshend demos: hear “Pictures Of Lily”, “Kids! Do You Want Kids” and “Odorono” below:

The super deluxe edition also comes with an 80-page full-colour book – including rare period photos, memorabilia, track by track annotation and new sleevenotes by Pete Townshend – plus nine posters and inserts, including replicas of The Who posters, flyers and newsletters from 1967.

The Who Sell Out will also be reissued in a 2xLP deluxe (stereo) vinyl version, featuring the original album and highlights from box set; a 2xLP deluxe (mono) vinyl version pressed on coloured vinyl; a 2xCD edition; and a variety of digital formats.

Check out the full tracklistings and pre-order here.

Of course, you can read much more about The Who Sell Out in the latest issue of Uncut, which features an exclusive interview with Pete Townshend – order a copy here.

Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye: “We decided we were going to start a new scene”

Tom Pinnock
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Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye: “We decided we were going to start a new scene”

Man the barricades! The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to order online here, with free P&P for the UK – features Ian MacKaye’s first-person account of Fugazi’s incredible, and loud, career at the vanguard of America’s post-hardcore scene. In this extract, he recalls being inspired by Sex Pistols and The Cramps to form Minor Threat, before ripping it up and starting again in even more ambitious fashion with the radical, inspirational Fugazi…

—-

When punk rock appeared, the media were really derisive about it. At first I just took a bite of the media’s pie and thought, “Yeah, this is fucking ridiculous, these idiots stabbing themselves with safety pins and vomiting into each other’s mouth…” But I had really good friends with great taste who were into it, so I had to listen. When I heard “Bodies” by the Sex Pistols, it hit me that this was the underground, the counterculture. I’d really believed in music as a revolutionary thing growing up in the ’60s, but then by the ’70s it seemed like everyone just wanted to rock, so I’d given up on music in the sense of a community. With punk, it was like being led into a secret cavern. On February 3, 1979, I went to see my first punk show, which was The Cramps. To my mind, that’s still the greatest show of all time.

When Minor Threat started playing in December 1980, [we had] this idea of the punk scene creating an external kind of family. It worked, and the scene here in Washington became pronounced, identifiable and connected. But if you look at interviews with us from 1981, we acknowledge that, as part of the scene becoming bigger, you’re going to get more assholes. The media depicted punks as psychopathic, self-destructive, nihilistic looney birds, with the result that psychopathic, self-destructive, nihilistic looney birds thought they were punks. They would start coming to shows, and then the shows became a problem.

After Minor Threat split in 1983, there was a period when the scene was fractured. There were a lot of people – and a lot of people we didn’t know. There was also a burgeoning street-punk/skinhead scene that was so not what me or my friends were interested in. Their behaviour was detestable – stealing, vandalising, gay-bashing – just fucked up, and they were nationalists, thinly veiled white supremacists. It was very discouraging. We decided that instead of quitting punk or driving those people out, we were just going to start a new scene – we’d play music that would not be appealing to those people, let them do their thing at their place and we’d do ours at other venues.

That’s what gave birth to Revolution Summer – we weren’t trying to create a revolution, it was just a moniker, a start date, a somewhat concerted effort to do something creative, to start bands or fanzines, get involved with political stuff. We wanted to take what we’d learned and developed in forming our tribe and take it to another level. These new bands were profound: Beefeater, Rites Of Spring, Kingface, I was in a band called Embrace. They were very offputting to the more conservative punks, but they were challenging, intellectually stimulating. I mean, Rites Of Spring were one of the greatest bands of all time, they were so incredible live.

Embrace only played 11 shows. In March 1986, when we played our last show, I realised my misstep. I had gone in thinking that I wanted to be in a band, but what I really wanted was to play music – and that’s different. Joe Lally used to drive gear for Rites Of Spring. I heard that Joe wanted to play bass in a band, so I called him and said, “Hey, I wanna play some music, but not form a band. Do you wanna play with me?” So we just started to play together.

By this point we had a lot of the early stuff – “Merchandise”, “Waiting Room”, “Bad Mouth” – but I still wasn’t thinking we’d be a band. I’d known Brendan [Canty] and Guy [Picciotto] since 1980 or ’81, they were in Happy Go Licky by this point, so I asked if Brendan wanted to play drums with me and Joe. That really changed the way we sounded – he has his own style of playing, he’s an absolutely brilliant musician. At some point Brendan took a break and we tried all these different drummers, including Dave Grohl.

But Brendan came back, as Happy Go Licky were kind of part-time. So we started playing again. On September 3, 1987, we did our first show. We kept trying to get Guy to play with us, because he was around all the time and Brendan and Guy were pretty inseparable. The original idea of Fugazi was that it was gonna be a revolving cast of people in the band, all sorts of guest musicians and different singers. But Guy couldn’t see a role for himself. At our third show, he hung at the side of the stage, singing backups, and then the fourth show we went down to Richmond, North Carolina, and he came with us. We became more of a group. In October, he sang his first Fugazi song, “Break-In”, and that was incredible.

Read much more about Fugazi in the April 2021 issue of Uncut, out now with The Who’s Pete Townshend on the cover and available to buy direct from us here.

Paul Weller announces new album Fat Pop (Volume 1)

Michael Bonner
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Paul Weller announces new album Fat Pop (Volume 1)

Paul Weller has announced details of a new studio album, Fat Pop (Volume 1).

The album is released by Polydor on May 14.

Weller is joined by his core band members (drummer Ben Gordelier, Steve Cradock on guitar and bassist Andy Crofts) as well as a number of guests including Andy Fairweather Low (“Testify”), Leah Weller (“Shades Of Blue”) and The Mysterines’ Lia Metcalfe (“True”). Steve Cradock has co-written “Still Glides The Stream”.

Tracklisting for Fat Pop (Volume 1) is:

Cosmic Fringes
True
Fat Pop
Shade Of Blue
Glad Fimes
Cobweb/Connections
Testify
That Pleasure
Failed
Moving Canvas
In Better Times
Still Glides The Stream

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis release new album, Carnage

Michael Bonner
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Nick Cave and Warren Ellis release new album, Carnage

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have released a new album, Carnage.

Cave describes the album as, “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.”
“Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity,” says Ellis, “the eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days.”

The pair have recorded numerous, film, TV and theatre soundtracks together, although this is the first time they have recorded a proper album between them.

Ellis first played with the Bad Seeds in 1993, prior to joining the band as a full time member. The two have also recorded as Grinderman, formed in 2006, with sundry Bad Seeds.

Carnage is out now on Goliath Records on all digital platforms. Vinyl & CD will be released on 28 May – Pre-order here.

Tracklisting is:

Hand of God
Old Time
Carnage
White Elephant
Albuquerque
Lavender Fields
Shattered Ground
Balcony Man

Mogwai: Album By Album

Sharon O'Connell
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Mogwai: Album By Album

Founded in 1995 and initially a trio, Glasgow’s Mogwai made their debut with “Tuner/Lower”, a self-pressed seven-inch in thrall to Slint and Codeine. They went on to synthesise post-rock, metal, slow-core, instrumental soundtracks, Krautrock and electronica into something distinctively their own, moving well beyond the “quiet/loud” aesthetic that dominated their early years. Their reach has encompassed a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf”, on obscure, absurdly titled split single “Two Sonic Scratches Of The Big Bad Rock Arse”, substantial remix projects and scores for art movies, such as the cultish and acclaimed Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. As they release their latest studio set, As The Love Continues, Mogwai reassess the highs and happenstance of an impressive career.

YOUNG TEAM
CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND, 1997
Demonstrating from the off a disregard for recording conventions, Mogwai wrote a set of brand new songs for their debut, defining the formidable quiet/loud dynamic that was their early trademark
STUART BRAITHWAITE: We made it really hard for ourselves, because we’d done a lot of singles but since we were all really obsessed with Joy Division, we didn’t want to put any of them on the album. Plus, we gave ourselves a deadline with a release date, which makes no sense for a band’s first record, but I was 20 and John [Cummings] was only 18, so everything was new to us. We should have realised that if all those early seven-inches had only sold 500 copies, then it didn’t really matter if we re-recorded some of the songs, like “New Paths To Helicon, Pt. 2”, which was one of our best. After making a load of seven-inches, we were excited
by being able to have these long songs and “Like Herod” is a bit like Nirvana’s “Endless Nameless” – and like Slint. It’s still fun to play live; we always get a laugh when people aren’t paying much attention to begin with and then shit themselves.
JOHN CUMMINGS: In terms of being aware at the time of whether “Like Herod” was a “stayer”, I don’t think then we’d even considered that the band was a stayer. Just the fact that we were being allowed to record an album was more than we could have hoped for. It’s not the kind of thing you presume when you’re selling 500 seven-inches – that someone’s going to give you a few thousand pounds to go into the studio for a month.

COME ON
DIE YOUNG
CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND, 1999
Producer Dave Fridmann steered the experimentalism that quickly became vital to Mogwai’s sound, but this was a powerful set of surprisingly spare and fx-free songs.
DOMINIC AITCHISON: I was very happy with getting Dave Fridmann in, because I was a huge Mercury Rev fan at the time and also it gave us the opportunity to go off to America to record. It was painless to make, because we had it finished before we went out there to record, the only time we’ve done that. A lot of the songs are sparse and downbeat and he didn’t really mess with them at all; he was quite hands-off. But my abiding memory is Dave recording something onto what was practically fence wire; it was the most odd-looking, antiquated stuff ever and produced really low-grade recordings that made everything sound incredibly distorted and quite primitive.
JOHN: Dave’s very quiet, pragmatic and a really nice guy – not what we were expecting. Yes, it was a wee bit disappointing, but it doesn’t make the record sound any less good. That wasn’t due to magic, it was due to someone knowing what they were doing and that was very inspiring.
STUART: At the time, we thought we could have done better with the first album and that we were flying by the seat of our pants, so we really had a mission with the second record, to make it something pretty special. As ill-prepared as the first one was, this was meticulously prepared and we wanted it to be different. We’d been doing the quiet/loud thing and wanted to show we could do more than that. The reason we went with Dave was because we heard Deserter’s Songs and it sounded really lush and special, and Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space had just come out. In our heads we thought we were doing something a bit like that, but to me now, the point of comparison for CODY is the early Cure records – very dark and kind of frosty. Dave’s studio is in upstate New York, in the middle of nowhere. I remember saying I was going to go for a walk and he told me to watch out. So I went out and someone had these wild wolves on chains in their garden. I saw a snake… I never went out again. Wayne Coyne would apparently go out with a stick and just bash things, but he was running. I was not running.

ROCK ACTION
PIAS/SOUTHPAW, 2001
A big budget saw (some of) the band going bonkers. Multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns made his mark and a strong electronic/synth element was introduced. As was a banjo.
DOMINIC: We went to Dave [Fridmann]’s studio and recorded all the band stuff, then Martin and myself went back home for three weeks and Barry, John and Stuart went down to New York City to do all the overdubs. They did the best partying ever there, but they didn’t do much recording and everybody reconvened three weeks later to mix it. Me and Martin got sent CDs of what they’d done in that time and we were both so pissed off. It was clear they’d done nothing. I told them to their faces I was pissed off they hadn’t done any work, but I was actually just pissed off I’d missed out on three weeks of running around New York having a right old laugh! Looking back, it’s utterly mortifying the amount of wastage around that album.
STUART: You can’t make music in Manhattan, unless maybe you’re from there and you’re oblivious to what an awful amount of fun there is, constantly happening. We recorded a lot of songs, but the record’s really short – around 38 minutes. It’s got some good songs on it and it’s really lovely sounding, but the sound we started out making had become kind of predictable and there were an awful lot of bands around making wash-y, long instrumental songs, so we did have a plan, which was to do something different. But we needed more of a plan than that.

HAPPY SONGS FOR HAPPY PEOPLE
PIAS, 2003
Label personnel changes, a departed manager and a shift in the musical climate disturbed the picture. Mogwai moved even further towards a more subdued sound
JOHN: The making of this was more influenced by what we’d done with Rock Action, in terms of the size of it [41 minutes] and the time spent on it, the best part of three months. It’s an interesting bridging record. Stuart got a laptop, I was messing about with sequencers and bleeps and bloops. There’s more of that on the albums that followed.
DOMINIC: I think we all realised that Rock Action should have been a lot better than it was and I felt we’d blown it a bit. We had quite a lot of songs for this album and not a lot of it was fully formed beforehand. We had no idea what it was going to be like until it was mixed and it’s probably one of my favourites. It could have turned out absolutely shite and I’m the pessimist; I always think a record’s going to be terrible until it’s done, so it was a brilliant surprise that it came together.
STUART: I was fairly conscious that people weren’t as excited about what we were doing as they’d been before, because the musical climate had changed. People became interested in more overtly retro music, like The Strokes, and it felt like at this point in particular, we had to make a really good record. We’ve always felt that, of course, but around that time we did feel the pressure, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that was only me. But we stood firm and it actually worked out well.

MR BEAST
PIAS, 2006
A curiously hybrid creation, heavy on the ambient instrumentals, lighter on the vocals and too long in the cooking, although it featured Cummings’ monstrous “Glasgow Mega-Snake”
STUART: It was our first time recording at Castle Of Doom, which is owned by us and [producer] Tony Doogan and has been in three different locations. This time, it was in a weird building in Glasgow’s West End, where the control room was up a floor from the live room. It worked very strangely – I think we had those baby monitors – but it was fun. Mr Beast seems to be the LP people like more as the years go by, but it’s not my favourite; it’s very polished. I’m immensely fond of Alan [McGee, Mogwai’s then manager] as a personality and he’s quite like us, but the way he projects himself is utterly dissimilar to us. I wasn’t very happy when he said Mr Beast was “possibly better than Loveless”, because I’m friends with Kevin [Shields] and the last thing you want is to be used as some point scorer between two of your friends who aren’t getting on. It’s certainly not the kind of comment any of us would ever make, but…
DOMINIC: We had a long time to work on the album – about two months – so we ended up really messing about with the songs. I can’t listen to it now, it seems so over-produced and slick. It’s not the way we sound, which is not a reflection of Tony’s recording skills – it was our decision to keep tinkering and we’ll never do that again. We’ve realised that strict deadlines work well for us, because we are inherently quite lazy.

THE HAWK IS HOWLING
PIAS/WALL OF SOUND, 2008
Entirely instrumental and the product of a failed commission, but Mogwai delivered some compellingly heavy tracks – and comically deadpan titles
DOMINIC: We’d been asked to do the music for a South American film and had been given a time frame of five days, so we pulled this music for it out of thin air. We were happy with what we’d produced, but they hated it and sacked us, so we reworked a lot of that music for The Hawk…. We had a brilliant time recording it and it’s really good fun to play live, although it’s really dour
and probably a little bit too one-note.
STUART: The track with Roky Erickson [a Japanese bonus track] was supposed to be on Mr Beast, but it took a lot longer to organise than we expected. I went over to Austin and went into the studio with him, so that was a really special thing to happen. He was lovely; he’s been in the wars, but he was really nice. And he’s a proper legend.
JOHN: “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” was a concerted attempt to come up with a song title that mentioned Jim Morrison, without being too base. “Jim Morrison, American Prick” was a phrase we’d enjoyed, although it hadn’t been assigned to any piece of music, but we thought it was too childish. And there’s no need to be so vulgar.

HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE, BUT YOU WILL
ROCK ACTION, 2011
All things are relative, but some surprisingly poppy tunes surfaced on Mogwai’s seventh album and their love of motorik grooves kicked in seriously
STUART: By this point, Barry had moved to Germany and we had quite an intense period of getting together and rehearsing, so that was a factor in that we didn’t really have much time to think about what we were doing. Dominic said he thought that my guitar on “George Square Thatcher Death Party” sounded like The Killers. I remember playing it to Arthur Baker before we finished it and he was totally adamant that we should have proper vocals on it. He said it was the only song we had that could ever possibly get played on the radio.
JOHN: What strikes me about it now is its relative poppiness. Certainly a few of the songs I had written I hadn’t written for Mogwai, particularly; I’d just been messing about and didn’t think they were appropriate. “Mexican Grand Prix” was just a wee Casio, Krautrock-sounding thing and when I was playing about I managed to get a computer to sing, although I can’t remember how I did it. You can put a Neu! drumbeat on anything, so I hadn’t really expected us to make much of that.
DOMINIC: I have absolutely no idea where these upbeat songs came from, but again, we don’t really know the direction a record’s taking until it’s nearly done. I definitely raised my eyebrows when I first heard “George Square Thatcher Death Party” because I thought it was too straight-ahead and not like us, but it was fun to play and it sat well when we were sequencing the album. A lot of long-term Mogwai fans absolutely hate that tune.

LES REVENANTS, OST
ROCK ACTION, 2013
The French television series (The Returned) about a mountain town visited by a number of dead former inhabitants was given the moody and minimalist Mogwai treatment, to stylishly spooky effect
JOHN: The director and writer had wanted music in advance of filming, to set the tone and make sure we were on the same page, so we were writing blind. We’d read the first couple of episodes in English, plus a rough synopsis of the rest of the series, but that was really all we had to go on. It was difficult to put a finger on until they’d started filming, but by that point they’d already decided in large part the kind of music that they wanted. We’d just been writing stuff and sending it to them and they’d been saying either, “That’s not quite right for this” or “Yeah, that’s perfect”. Maybe of the 40 things we’d send them, they’d be into 10 or 15 of them, so we’d work further on those. It certainly fell into place once we had seen the first four episodes and heard how they were using our demos. We only formed the complete pieces on the album after we’d done the music for the series. We didn’t want to have a soundtrack album with a minute-and-a-half crescendo that just stops, but nor did we want to have a badly edited piece of music just put onto a random scene. We wanted to make music tailored for the scenes it was being used on and also to have songs that you could put on an actual album, so we did them separately. It could have ended up being cobbled together pretty badly, but it was very satisfying that it all came together. It was great.

RAVE TAPES
ROCK ACTION, 2014
The horror! Mogwai source ’70s Italian prog and video nasty soundtracks alongside Krautrock, via heavy use of Burns’ vintage modular synth
STUART: I think the feel of Les Revenants seeped into Rave Tapes a little bit, and because we did them both in Castle Of Doom it felt like part of the same thing. We were listening to an awful lot of horror film soundtracks – Goblin, Fabio Frizzi, John Carpenter, Morricone’s theme to The Exorcist II… we’re not good enough to do anything like it, but it’s amazing stuff. I think Boards Of Canada are of the same mind; I can hear a lot of that on their latest record. The title “Repelish” is a word that Martin [Bulloch]’s mum uses when she wants another drink; she means “replenish”.
DOMINIC: Barry had recently bought all of this absolutely demented keyboard equipment and he has his own studio space in Berlin, where he’d go and record all of these demos, so we’d get these really crazy, John Carpenter-esque… squelches, basically. We’d all been listening to a lot of ’70s horror soundtracks and although I’d seen most of the films, I’d forgotten about the music, but ever since Death Waltz started putting out all these soundtrack vinyl reissues, I’m hooked. It’s like football stickers when I was a kid; it doesn’t matter what label it’s on – if it’s on lurid vinyl and it’s from a video nasty, I’m buying it. Because they were recorded quickly, there’s a chaotic charm to a lot of these soundtracks. They’re quite rough around the edges and that’s a big part of the appeal for me; they’re the complete opposite of big Hollywood soundtracks.

AS THE LOVE CONTINUES
ROCK ACTION, 2021
25 years since their first EP, their 10th album is a career peak
STUART: 
We were due to go over to [producer] Dave’s [Fridmann] studio in New York in May, but obviously that couldn’t happen.
So we found an amazing place in Worcestershire [Vada Studios] instead. Dave was still really involved, on a live Zoom call, while we were playing, which had a weird Wizard Of Oz vibe about it. In a funny way, I think it kind of helped the record. Dave wanted us to do at least one thing that we wouldn’t normally do for each song. So if we were going up one avenue, he’d want a complete U-turn and try for something completely different. He definitely kept us on our toes, so as not to make the same record again. We were talking about getting some other people in too. We’ve already collaborated with Atticus [Ross] on the Before The Flood soundtrack [2016 documentary about climate change], so we knew that was something that was going to work. The one with him on it [“Midnight Flit”] is quite a big production, with a full string section. Quite epic. And we’re all really big fans of Colin Stetson [Arcade Fire, Bon Iver], so he’s on the record as well. “Ritchie Sacramento” has vocals on it. Bob Nastanovich put up a post a year after David Berman had died. The first line of the song is based on something that David had said when they were all drunk at college and he threw a mop at a sports car.
I asked Bob if he’d mind me using it in a song.

Thanks to Rob Hughes

Paul McCartney announces new lyric-based memoir

Sam Richards
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Paul McCartney announces new lyric-based memoir

Paul McCartney has revealed details of a new book, The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, to be published by Allen Lane on November 2.

Described as “a self-portrait in 154 songs”, it features the definitive lyrics to McCartney’s best-known songs along with his commentary describing the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. The book will also include never-before-seen drafts, letters and photographs from McCartney’s personal archive.

“More often than I can count, I’ve been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right,” says McCartney. “The one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I’ve learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.

“I hope that what I’ve written will show people something about my songs and my life which they haven’t seen before. I’ve tried to say something about how the music happens and what it means to me and I hope what it may mean to others too.”

Adds editor Paul Muldoon: “Based on conversations I had with Paul McCartney over a five year period, these commentaries are as close to an autobiography as we may ever come. His insights into his own artistic process confirm a notion at which we had but guessed — that Paul McCartney is a major literary figure who draws upon, and extends, the long tradition of poetry in English.”

Watch a video trailer for The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present below:

Spiritualized launch The Spaceman Reissue Program

Sam Richards
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0
Spiritualized launch The Spaceman Reissue Program

Spiritualized have announced new vinyl versions of their first four albums as part of what they’re calling “The Spaceman Reissue Program”, via Fat Possum.

First up is their 1992 debut Lazer Guided Melodies on April 23. The album comes pressed on 180g double vinyl mastered from a half speed lacquer cut from original sources by Alchemy Mastering, presented in a gatefold jacket with reworked art by Mark Farrow.

It will be available in both a standard black vinyl pressing and limited edition white vinyl exclusive to indie retail and the band’s own webstore (where you can also find new Lazer Guided Melodies merch).

Recalling the process of making Lazer Guided Melodies, Jason Pierce says: “We recorded the tracks in the studio near my flat which was a place where they predominantly recorded advertising jingles and it’s where we made all the Spacemen 3 records, but then the recordings were taken to Battery Studios in London, to explore a more professional way of making music… Once I approached that way of doing things it opened up a whole world and I was astounded that somebody could take those tracks and turn it into the record it became…”

Details on the next albums in The Spaceman Reissue Program – Pure Phase (1995), Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (1997) and Let It Come Down (2001) – will be announced soon.

Unpublished Jim Morrison writings collected in new anthology

Sam Richards
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0
Unpublished Jim Morrison writings collected in new anthology

HarperCollins will publish The Collected Works Of Jim Morrison on June 8, a mammoth 600-page tome compiling most of The Doors frontman’s previously published work, along with unseen notebooks, journals, poetry, song lyrics, drawings and photos.

Roughly half the book consists of unseen material. This includes unrecorded lyrics and handwritten excerpts from 28 recently discovered notebooks, including Morrison’s thoughts on his 1970 trial for obscenity and what are to believed to his last ever writings before his death in Paris the following year.

The book will feature a foreword by novelist Tom Robbins and a prologue by Morrison’s sister, Anne Morrison Chewning. An audiobook version will include the first ever release of Morrison’s final poetry recording session, from December 1970.

Pre-order The Collected Works Of Jim Morrison here.

Hear Dinosaur Jr’s new single “I Ran Away”, featuring Kurt Vile

Sam Richards
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0
Hear Dinosaur Jr’s new single “I Ran Away”, featuring Kurt Vile

Dinosaur Jr’s 12th album Sweep It Into Space is due out on April 23, via Jagjaguwar.

It’s co-produced by Kurt Vile, who also plays lead 12-string guitar on the single “I Ran Away” which you can hear below:

The album was recorded at J Mascis’s Biquiteen Studios in Amherst, Massachusetts, beginning in late autumn 2019. After the sessions with Kurt Vile were disrupted, Mascis says he “ended up just mimicking a few things he’d done. I was listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy, so I was trying to get some of that duelling twin lead sound. But the recording session was pretty well finished by the time things really hit the fan. When the lockdown happened in March, that meant I was on my own. But it was cool.”

Pre-order Sweep It Into Space here and check out the tracklisting below:

1. I Ain’t
2. I Met the Stones
3. To Be Waiting
4. I Ran Away
5. Garden
6. Hide Another Round
7. And Me
8. I Expect It Always
9. Take It Back
10. N Say
11. Walking To You
12. You Wonder

Send us your questions for Peter Murphy

Sam Richards
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0
Send us your questions for Peter Murphy

It didn’t take long for Peter Murphy to make an impression. Three minutes into Bauhaus’s first ever studio session, the former bookbinder’s apprentice from Northampton stepped up to the mic and began singing about velvet-lined coffins and virginal brides with such conviction that their first-take recording of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” remained on the indie charts for two years.

In that time, Bauhaus managed to stake out a whole new musical territory. Murphy understandably bristles at the ‘Godfather Of Goth’ epithet, given that his wide-ranging solo career has taken in everything from violin-driven alt.rock (on massive US radio hit “Cuts You Up”) to experimental fourth-world pop (2002’s Dust). But any singer who’s ever blackened their wardrobe and whitened their face to sing about matters of the heart in extravagant metaphor owes something to Peter Murphy.

Having reformed Bauhaus for three dates at the Hollywood Palladium in late 2019 (and with a show at Alexandra Palace to come in October), Murphy is currently overseeing the reissue of his five Beggars Banquet solo albums, spanning 1985’s Should The World Fail To Fall Apart to 1995’s Pascal Gabriel-produced Cascade, along with a compilation of rarities from that period.

Furthermore, he’s kindly consented to a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers, for our next Audience With feature. So what do you want to ask the man in the translucent black cape? Send your questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by Friday (Feb 26), and Peter will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

Hear Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama’s new Spotify podcast

Sam Richards
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0
Hear Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama’s new Spotify podcast

Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama have launched a new Spotify podcast called Renegades: Born In The USA.

Over eight episodes lasting around 45 minutes each, the pair – who met on the campaign trail in 2008 – will “discuss their hometowns and role models, explore modern manhood and confront the painfully divided state of America today and how we can all move forward together.”

Watch a video trailer for the series and listen to the first two episodes, “Outsiders: An Unlikely Friendship” and “American Skin: Race in the United States”, below:

Daft Punk have split up

Sam Richards
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0
Daft Punk have split up

Trailblazing dance duo Daft Punk have called it a day after 28 years together.

Today, a video entitled ‘Epilogue’ was posted on their YouTube channel, featuring a poignant scene from their 2006 film Electroma along with the legend ‘1993-2021’. No further details were provided on the decision to quit.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo released four albums during their 28 years together as Daft Punk, the most recent being 2013’s multi-Grammy-award-winning Random Access Memories. Since then they have kept a typically low profile, producing the occasional track for The Weeknd and Australian band Parcels, but rumours of a 2017 tour came to nothing.

It is not known whether the duo will continue working together under a different guise, or pursue separate projects.

Posthumous Tony Joe White album due in May, produced by Dan Auerbach

Sam Richards
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Posthumous Tony Joe White album due in May, produced by Dan Auerbach

A posthumous Tony Joe White album, Smoke From The Chimney, will be released by Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound label on May 7.

The songs were worked up by Auerbach from a batch of vocal/guitar demos passed to him by Tony Joe White’s son and manager, Jody White. The album also features Bobby Wood on keyboards, Paul Franklin on pedal steel, Marcus King on guitar and Stuart Duncan on fiddle.

Watch a video for the first single “Boot Money” below:

“For one reason or another, my Dad would never just want to go into a studio and write with somebody, or go work with somebody,” says Jody White. “He liked to do it at his place, and his way, and it turned out how it turned out, you know what I mean? So, this album really all worked out perfectly. He was making these tracks for Dan all along, but we just didn’t know it.”

Adds Auerbach: “These songs feel like a collection to me and they all seem to work together, in a weird way, even though they’re so different. There’s some heartbreaking ballads and some really raunchy carnal blues. But it all works together like scenes of a movie.”

Pre-order Smoke From The Chimney here and check out the tracklisting below:

Smoke From The Chimney
Boot Money
Del Rio, You’re Making Me Cry
Listen to Your Song
Over You
Scary Stories
Bubba Jones
Someone Is Crying
Billy

Tindersticks – Distractions

Louis Pattison
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Tindersticks – Distractions

Explaining how Tindersticks’ 13th studio album came together, frontman Stuart Staples is adamant: Distractions isn’t to be considered a lockdown album. Yes, naturally the events of the last 12 months have had a bearing on how this new collection of songs was born. But the groundwork for the record was laid way back in a burst of writing in February 2020, when the idea of an international pandemic might still have seemed a fanciful proposition. The recording, meanwhile, was completed last September at Staples’ own Le Chien Chanceux studio in Limousin, France, with the full Tindersticks band present for a brief window before the shutters clanged back down once more.

Staples no doubt felt the need to point this out because Distractions feels like a step change for Tindersticks, a record that disposes with many of the old methods, and ushers in a few new ones. The group’s last album, 2019’s No Treasure But Hope, was a sensuous and sumptuously orchestrated outing that found Staples – an incorrigible romantic, albeit one with a long pessimistic streak – creeping towards some sort of contentment. Distractions, on the other hand, sounds rather different. Lean and stripped back of instrumentation, possessed of a prickly temperament and – by Tindersticks’ rather lugubrious standards – a fire burning in its belly, it proves that even this rather venerable band still have the capacity to surprise.

For a taste of this, look no further than the opening track. It clocks in at a remarkable 11 minutes in length, but “Man Alone (Can’t Stop The Fadin’)” is a lean and urgent thing, characterised by stripped-back electronics and a simmering, coiled-spring tension. Staples’ nervy vocal brings to mind the manic ululations of Suicide’s Alan Vega, and every now and then, as his voice falls out of narrative and slips into chant (“Can’t stop the fadin’/Can’t stop the fadin’…”) it is suddenly interrupted by a sonic intrusion: a cacophony of car horns, or a burst of torrential rain. Equally sparse is the following “I Imagine You”, which finds Staples lost in a reverie of remembrance, his husky whisper swaddled by the lilting tones of David Coulter’s musical saw.

Tindersticks have long been recognised for their bold cover versions, and Distractions’ mid-section is given over to three audacious reinterpretations. Staples is joined by regular collaborator Gina Baker for a cover of Neil Young’s “A Man Needs A Maid”, the lonely sentiments of the original transmuted into a sleek electronic torch song with shades of Angelo Badalamenti. A take on Dory Previn’s “Lady With The Braid”, meanwhile, feels more playful. Previn’s original is a seduction monologue that grows in desperation with every passing line, and Staples warmly embraces both the song’s tragedy and its levity: “Would you care to stay ’til sunrise/It’s completely your decision/It’s just the night cuts through me like a knife…” Finally, a grooving, dub-tinged reworking of Television Personalities’ “You’ll Have To Scream Louder” marks a rare burst of political rage for the band, pointedly drawing lines between the iniquities of the post-punk age, and our current moment. “I’ve got no respect for/People in power/They make their decisions/From their ivory towers,” seethes Staples.

But Distractions saves its most moving moments ’til last. Tindersticks were regular performers at Le Bataclan, the Paris theatre which became the site of a terrorist attack in 2015. “Tue-Moi” is a tribute to the venue and those who died there. Staples sings it in French, backed only by Dan MacKinna’s Rachmaninoff-inspired piano, and the result is deeply moving, imbued with noble sadness and a glimmer of rage. Finally, there is “The Bough Bends”. The album’s closing track, it adopts a gentle pace, its soft drum machine adorned by Boulter’s twinkling Mellotron and Neil Fraser’s softly rugged guitar. Lyrically, it has the feeling of a summation or a weighing of the past, Staples shifting between husky croon and spoken word as he dwells on past romances, missed opportunities, and the smile of a loved one. The song ends, as it begins, with the twitter of bird song, although such is the sense of heavy emotional weather that it lingers a little after the album draws to a close.

This deep into a band’s career, you rather come to expect familiar moves – the soundtrack work, the theatre shows, the occasional new albums that further deepen and build on those early themes. In many ways, Distractions is an enigma. In years to come, we may look back on this record as transitional, or a product of its times. But to hear a band of this vintage still listening – and responding – to their instincts is a joy in itself.

Cuba: Music And Revolution – Experiments in Latin Music 1975-85, Vol 1

John Lewis
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0
Cuba: Music And Revolution – Experiments in Latin Music 1975-85, Vol 1

Cuba is the island that taught America how to dance. For much of the 20th century it provided the United States (and, by extension, the Western world) with every key dance craze: the mambo, the rumba, the cha-cha-cha, the charanga, the bugalu. When jazz moved into the concert halls it was the Afro-Cuban influence that kept bebop on the dancefloor. And, throughout the 1940s and ’50s Havana was where American hedonists went to party.

But then came Fidel, and Che, and the 1959 revolution, and the Bay Of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that cultural dialogue between Cuba and the US came to a halt. Cuba carried on in isolation, besieged by US sanctions, no longer visited by jazz royalty, no longer the playground of American playboys and gangsters. Its most famous musicians – singer Celia Cruz, bassist Cachao, percussionist Mongo Santamaria – defected to the States, never to return. Cuban music was rebadged as “salsa”, and its biggest stars were now in Miami and New York.

For many, 1959 is where Cuba’s music history ends, a narrative perpetuated by Ry Cooder’s celebration of pre-revolutionary music, Buena Vista Social Club. The real story is, of course, rather more complex, and explored by Cuba: Music And Revolution, compiled by DJ Gilles Peterson and Soul Jazz Records founder Stuart Baker (it accompanies a lavish hardback book of the same name).

It shows us how, from the 1960s onwards, Cuban music continued under the watchful eye of the Communist Party. The island’s formidable musical conservatoires specialised in Western classical music (something also encouraged by Cuba’s communist allies), creating thousands of highly trained Cuban musicians. But what could they play? Cuba’s nightclubs, tainted by association with the pre-revolutionary leader Batista, were closed; dance music was regarded as suspiciously decadent; rock’n’roll and US R&B were banned as cultural weapons of Yankee imperialism; and even the term “jazz” had to be renamed “música moderna”. “We wanted to play bebop,” said trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, from the legendary Cuban band Irakere, “but we were told that our drummer couldn’t even use cymbals, because they sounded too jazzy. We eventually used congas and cowbells instead. It helped us to come up with something new and creative.”

The two remarkable tracks from Irakere that bookend this compilation bear this out, placing fiery Afro-Cuban hand percussion under fearsome Brecker Brothers-style jazz-rock horn arrangements and distorted Fender Rhodes solos. Irakere’s rambunctious Latin jazz has been winning Grammys for 40 years and they’ve long been regulars at Ronnie Scott’s and on the European jazz festival circuit, but they’re one of only two bands on this compilation we might be familiar with. The other is Los Van Van, a funky charanga group founded in 1969, who mix descarga piano with percussive strings and florid horn solos – like a baroque version of a Philly disco band.

This compilation uncovers many other gems. Some are pre-revolutionary artists whose careers were given a funky reboot in the 1980s, like the sprightly son montuno band Conjunto Rumbavana, or the all-female vocal trio Las D’Aida (featuring Buena Vista Social Club star Omara Portuondo, here in a surprisingly proggy setting). There are three tracks from Grupo Monumental, all spiky horns, squeaky Farfisa organs and sly invocations of American funk. There is Los 5 U 4, a quartet featuring three blind members who are as close to an Anglo-American band as you’ll find here, performing a slow-burning Latin-rock ballad that climaxes in a heavily distorted guitar frenzy. There are two pieces of hypnotically funky prog from Los Reyes 73, featuring swirls of organ, wah-wah guitar and angular horn riffs.

Best of all are the tracks by Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC, led by the cosmopolitan classical guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer. Commissioned by the fêted film director Alfredo Guevara to provide movie soundtracks, they had the cultural clout to be a bit more avant-garde than other Cuban acts.

You’ll hear unusual time signatures, heavy-duty psychedelic organ solos, FX-laden guitars and touches of atonalism: imagine an Afro-Cuban blaxploitation soundtrack played by an incarnation of Soft Machine who just happen to have sensational Latin-jazz chops. This adventurous spirit is shared by the band’s sidekicks who also feature on this compilation, like the bassist Eduardo Ramos or the remarkable pianist Emiliano Salvador.

One can only hope that this LP will be accompanied by other Soul Jazz releases delving deeper into these discoveries. It’d be great to hear more by the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC, and also more by the hippie-ish “nueva trova” singers who often recorded with them, like Pablo Milanes (also a gifted scat vocalist) and Silvio Rodriguez. They were effectively state-sanctioned protest singers who managed to smuggle slyly subversive messages onto records controlled by a brutal police state. It’s effectively what every track on this compilation does musically.

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