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The making of The Style Council’s “Walls Come Tumbling Down!”

Tom Pinnock
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The making of The Style Council’s “Walls Come Tumbling Down!”

As a new compilation and an accompanying documentary tell the story of The Style Council, Paul Weller and his bandmates relive those halcyon days in the latest issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here. Perhaps their most striking moment – in today’s climate, at least – is their ninth single, the punchy “Walls Come Tumbling Down!”, which tackled political oppression and complacency over a pounding beat.

“The song was a product of the time, as the band was,” says Weller. “Sometimes I think I wasn’t affected by the ’80s – it’s only when you look back that you realise you were. You can’t really avoid it. Whether it was a stupid haircut or the clothes. Win some, lose some!”

The song marked a new phase for The Style Council: after the loose collective Weller assembled for their 1984 debut album Café Bleu, the 1985 model who recorded the Our Favourite Shop album operated more like a structured group centred around Weller and his chief Council collaborator, Mick Talbot. “I have definite ideas about some things,” says Weller. “Then with other things you let other people do their thing. I’m probably a lot freer with that now. I used to be very guarded over my songs – ‘I know how it should go, I want it to be like this’ – get a bit too precious with it. But generally, players like Mick and Steve [White], you let them do their thing; you know it’s going to be all right.”

“It does stand out on Our Favourite Shop as the rockiest track on the record,” says drummer Steve White, “though it’s still got a great soulful feel about it.”

After “Walls…” was recorded almost completely live in the group’s Marble Arch studio, Solid Bond, the band headed behind the Iron Curtain to Warsaw for the video, where they were monitored by officials and shocked by the grim surroundings. Just a few months later, they were battling through a muddy Glastonbury in white jeans, Pernod and orange in hand.

“Back then it was a bit like being in a warzone, especially if the weather wasn’t on your side,” recalls Mick Talbot. “I don’t know if Glastonbury goes with white leather shoes and wanting to look like you’ve just walked off a yacht somewhere.”

Wardrobes may have changed, but fortuitously “Walls…” has remained a favourite with hardcore and casual fans alike, and all involved in its creation also view it as a high-point of their work. “There’s a few good ones on Our Favourite Shop, I think,” says Weller. “It’s probably my favourite thing we did.”

You can read the full article about the making of “Walls Come Tumbling Down!” in the latest issue of Uncut, out now with Bruce Springsteen on the cover.

Metallica: “We were not very open to having anyone tell us what to do”

John Robinson
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Metallica: “We were not very open to having anyone tell us what to do”

In the latest issue of Uncut – which is in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett of Metallica talk us through the finest albums of their career. In this extract, they reveal how they made their classic 1991 self-titled effort, also known as ‘The Black Album’, on which producer Bob Rock helped Metallica reboot themselves for a new decade.

LARS: When we were done with And Justice For All and the subsequent two-year tour there was no place to go on that path. We’d hit the wall. The last song on that album is a song called “Dyers Eve” and it’s six or seven minutes of the most crazy progressive off-the-wall stuff Metallica is capable of doing. After playing all those songs on the road for a couple of years we said, “There’s got to be a reset here.”

KIRK: It wasn’t easy to make as we wanted a certain sound on that album. We wanted everything to be the best it possibly could be, sound-wise, song-wise and performance-wise and so we went in and – I’ll probably be the first person to mention this –we wanted to come up with a Back In Black, an LP stacked with singles. That was the concept, songs which sound like singles but aren’t. 

LARS: We sat down and thought about The Misfits, AC/DC and the Stones. We thought about the art of simplifying and writing shorter songs. It’s harder to write a short song than a long song and harder to be succinct. The new challenge was to write shorter songs. A little more bounce, to make the music more physical than cerebral.

KIRK: I was listening to a lot of stuff out of the Pacific Northwest, and I’d been listening to the first Soundgarden album since 1987. I didn’t think of it as grunge so much as Sabbath-y. That movement changed the look and style of a lot of bands, and how bands should be at the time. Because we were kind of an entity unto ourselves when grunge came out, people didn’t point at us, because we were who we were. Grunge was calling foul on these other bands but because we were ourselves, we weren’t scrutinised!

LARS: The other part was that we picked up with Bob Rock who had recently worked with The Cult, Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi and had a different approach to sonics. We were interested in having our records be a little bigger and more impactful. That was the next significant thing. We’ve never been in the studio with someone who was challenging us in the way he was. The good news was Bob was very encouraging of us expanding our processes. The bad news was we were not very open to having anyone tell us what to do. When we walked out of the studio a year later with the ‘Black Album’ in our pockets I don’t think any of us thought we’d see each other again. But we ended up spending the next 10-12 years making records together. It was a love affair, but it got off to a rocky start. But thankfully he pushed and challenged us. He didn’t accept our refusal to be experimental and to cast the net wider.

You can read about the making of eight more Metallica albums in the December 2020 issue of Uncut, out now with Bruce Springsteen on the cover.

Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to Talking Heads

John Robinson
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Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to Talking Heads

Once in a lifetime. That’s how often you expect a confluence of talents like those gathered in Talking Heads: the visionary polymath songwriter, the seasoned multi-instrumentalist, the minimalist drummer, and the bass player whose funky pulse helped drive it all inexorably forward.

Buy Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to Talking Heads now!

And, aside from a fleeting reunion in 2002 (three days of rehearsal accompanied by their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame), that was very much the story – a musical event never to be repeated. David Byrne left Talking Heads for an eccentric and magnificent journey through a world of music and big ideas. Jerry Harrison departed to a successful career in production. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth? They pursued a successful life on their own terms as Tom Tom Club, in production, and as rock’s most enduring married couple.

For this latest Ultimate Music Guide, though, we feel we’ve achieved something quite impressive. It should hopefully go without saying that the issue contains your hoped-for blend of deep new reviews of every album by Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, and of every decade of David Byrne’s solo work, alongside a wealth of historic interviews and encounters.

But we’ve also pulled off something like a reunion. An insightful afterword by Jerry Harrison. A fun and freewheeling interview with Chris Frantz (accompanied by a snapshot of the author at his desk by Tina Weymouth). Most expansively, we can offer you a foreword written for us by David Byrne, in which he reflects on the factors which were instrumental in the birth of Talking Heads.

Luck was certainly one part of it, he confides. He is also generous enough to note that music writing had a lot to do with it, too – even the bad reviews which described Byrne as a yelping savant whose eyes bugged out. As he wryly notes, the band’s destiny was sealed: “People had to see this freakshow for themselves…”

You’ll definitely want to check it out, too. The magazine hits UK shops on November 12, but you can order a copy now by clicking here.

James Yorkston announces new album with The Second Hand Orchestra

Sam Richards
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James Yorkston announces new album with The Second Hand Orchestra

James Yorkston has announced a new album with Swedish outfit, The Second Hand Orchestra.

The Wide, Wide River will be released by Domino on January 22 – watch a video for lead track “Struggle” below:

The album was recorded and mixed in Sweden over the course of three days with a selection of musicians brought together by The Second Hand Orchestra leader Karl-Jonas Winqvist, including Peter Morén (Peter, Bjorn & John), Cecilia Österholm (one of Sweden’s best-known nyckelharpa players), Emma Nordenstam (piano & cello) and Ulrika Gyllenberg (violin).

Yorkston says of recording “Struggle”: “The band were sat by in the studio by themselves, looping the verses over and over. I was in the control room, drinking sweet tea. I just had to wait for the right moment and jump on board, like when I’m pushing my kids round on a roundabout in the local park. I love that everyone was singing along so freely when we recorded this. There were vocal mics for everyone, and people would just lean in with a harmony, every now and then. It gives it a very communal feeling.”

The Wide, Wide River will be available on deluxe green vinyl (with 4-piece enamel badge set), green vinyl, standard vinyl, CD, digitally and as a 12” x 12” 100 piece jigsaw (with download code)! Pre-order here.

Talking Heads – The Ultimate Music Guide

Uncut
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Talking Heads – The Ultimate Music Guide

Once in a lifetime… Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to the arty, unparalleled Talking Heads. From the nervy minimalism of their debut to the full-on panglobal funk orchestrations of Stop Making Sense, via solo records, the Tom Tom Club, suits large and small. As David Byrne writes in his exclusive foreword: “the chance to be disruptive and possibly revolutionary was an irresistible lure…”

Buy a copy online by clicking here!

Sufjan Stevens – The Ascension

Laura Barton
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Sufjan Stevens – The Ascension

It’s now five years since the release of Carrie & Lowell, an album of such exquisite intimacy that felt perhaps the record Sufjan Stevens had been carrying all his life. In the years between there have been other projects – film soundtracks, singles and collaborations, including this spring’s Aporia, made in partnership with his stepfather, Lowell Brams. But The Ascension is Stevens’ first full-length solo recording since 2015, and it is a very different creature to its predecessor: banjoed prettiness given way to experimental electro-pop; precise and particular lyricism set aside for broad, swathing choruses.

This feels an anxious, urgent record – intended to reflect, one suspects, this anxious, urgent age. It’s there in the discordant electronics of “Goodbye To All That” and the abrasive mechanical thrust of “Death Star”, and in lyrics that speak of lost patience, hazardous demons and a need for deliverance.

If it is at times uncomfortable – if “Die Happy’’s twinkling opening notes soon twist and sour, or “Gilgamesh”’s soft-wash vocals are scoured by synths, or even if his imagery shifts swiftly from the sublime to the scatological, then it is likely deliberate. These are songs that hang on the brink: “Lamentations” offers a portrait of indecision and uncertain future, “Tell Me You Love Me” stands in the precise moment “before everything falls apart”.

Many tracks seem to contain a battle or debate of sorts. In the hooky “Video Game” Stevens argues against mindless populism: “I don’t care if everybody else is into it,” he sings. “I don’t care if it’s a popular refrain.” Oftenhe sings about what he is not: blessed, a young man, one for controversy; it seeds a sense of unfamiliar negativity and disgruntlement beneath these songs. “Is someone gonna cut me some slack?” he wonders in the rallying “Sugar”. Elsewhere he implores an unspecified other variously to love him, tranquillise him, sanitise him. Not to leave, not to make him wait, not to make him do it again.

But there is brightness in these 15 tracks too – a persistence of love, a gleam of betterment. The musical discord is always buoyed by pop inclination, always lifted by the soar and beauty of Stevens’s voice, and out of the record’s mulchiest moments grows something hopeful. By the time we reach the title track, the album’s penultimate number, Stevens has returned to familiar musical radiance. “What now? What now? What now?” runs its final refrain, sounding if not cheerful exactly then at least open to the life to come.

Stevens has long refrained from publicly discussing his own faith – though it has often surfaced in his work. The Ascension itself is of course a nod to the Christian belief that Jesus physically left the earth, rising into heaven alongside his apostles, and its 15 songs are run through with theological imagery. Stevens sings directly of Jesus and the Lord, of the redeemer and believers, of communion and rapture, and the structure of the record apparently echoes the Biblical narrative. To sing of God in these days of plague, and in a year in which so much of the US election might pivot on Christian faith, seems timely rather than arcane.

The album culminates in the track “America”, which Stevens released as a single this summer, describing it as “a protest song against the sickness of American culture in particular”. At more than 12 minutes it moves first like a synthesised chain-gang and on to an iridescent climax, while its lyrics dismantle the promised land, the worshipped, the dream. Apparently begun in 2014, around the time of Carrie & Lowell, it feels like an addendum to the rest of the record; while Stevens sings of unrest and unease, at moments the song offers a kind of sonic flashback to the pre-Trump, pre-Covid era, as if to suggest not only the possibility of sweeter times, but also to remind us of the other side of Stevens himself.

It is the variousness of Stevens’ work that has long set him apart. It once seemed remarkable that the artist behind the pared-down Seven Swans would find the splendour of Illinois, let alone the experimental textures of The Age Of Adz or Enjoy Your Rabbit. Amid it all there has always been a temptation for audiences to try to locate the ‘real’ Stevens, as if delicate confessional vignettes are somehow more truthful than electronic aggression. This is surely a fool’s errand – there is no reason an artist cannot be both, if not more. On this sometimes obstinate, sometimes sublime record, Stevens shows he contains multitudes.

Hear Big Red Machine cover Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up”

Sam Richards
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Hear Big Red Machine cover Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up”

It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that today is election day in the USA. Justin Vernon’s home state of Wisconsin is one of those crucial swing states, and he’s heavily involved in an initiative called ‘For Wisconsin’ that’s been persuading people to get out and vote.

For today’s final push, Vernon’s Big Red Machine have released a cover of Aimee Mann’s highly apposite “Wise Up”, fronted by Aaron Dessner and featuring most of the rest of The National, as well as Mina Tindle. Watch the video below:

“We recorded this cover of ‘Wise Up’, one of my very favorite Aimee Mann songs, for beautiful Wisconsin,” writes Dessner. “Her lyrics keep coming into my brain these days. The stakes couldn’t be any higher in this election and it may come down to a handful of votes. Text 56005 to VOTE.”

Songhoy Blues – Optimisme

Rob Hughes
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Songhoy Blues – Optimisme

It’s impossible to separate Songhoy Blues and politics. Formed in 2012 as a direct result of being forced from their homes, after rebel jihadists took control of northern Mali and outlawed all music, the band were refugees in their own land when they attempted to start new lives in the capital city of Bamako, down in the south. They took their name from the centuries-old ethnic group they belonged to, just as their music was conceived as a desert blues celebration of a displaced culture.

A guest slot on Maison Des Jeunes, from Damon Albarn’s Africa Express, led to their aptly titled 2015 debut, Music In Exile, which coincided with an appearance in They Will Have To Kill Us First, an award-winning documentary about Malian musicians’ struggle to be heard during the crisis. Amid fluctuating levels of civil war, Résistance followed two years later. The arrival of Optimisme comes in the wake of an insurgent summer, when a military coup seized power from President Keita.

As the title implies, Optimisme finds Songhoy Blues tackling adversity and national unrest with a generous dollop of positivity. The anger may be palpable, but they don’t go in for bitter polemic. Instead the quartet – frontman Aliou Touré, guitarist Garba Touré, bass player Oumar Touré (none of whom are related, incidentally) and new drummer Drissa Koné – choose to spread the message via impossibly infectious grooves and an exhilarating sense of forward motion.

This is partly down to producer Matt Sweeney, leader of math-rockers Chavez and sometime Bonnie “Prince” Billy collaborator. Reprising his role from last year’s “Meet Me In The City” EP, Sweeney urged the band to replicate the dynamic intensity of their live shows, recording the album over the course of a week in Brooklyn, at the back end of a US tour.

Stylistically, Optimisme is a bubbling conflux of West African polyrhythms and elastic guitar rock. A more concentrated vision than Résistance, which found space for R&B and fanfares of brass, at times it hits harder and heavier than anything they’ve attempted before. “Badala” (rough translation: ‘We Don’t Give A Shit’) certainly fulfils its intention, hurtling along like something from late-’70s Thin Lizzy. “Korfo” (‘Chains’) comes at it from a different angle, all blended vocals and an ear-bending melody, before transforming itself into an unstoppable rock beast. As the son of Ali Farka Touré’s old percussionist Oumar Touré, Garba Touré lives up to his musical pedigree with some vigour, either locking into a trebly vamp or, as on “Worry” or “Dournia” (‘Life’), a seriously shreddy solo.

Other songs feel more distinctly Malian in form. “Assadja” and “Fey Fey”, for instance, are each carried by liquid grooves that beg you to shake a hip, further animated by surging beats and Aliou Touré’s agile vocals. Most of these tunes are delivered in Songhai, though there’s the odd excursion into colonial French and, for the first time, English, in the shape of “Worry”. The song is aimed at the younger generation in Mali, in particular the need to keep self-possessed and hopeful amid so much civil turbulence. “There is a long way to go/There is a long journey,” sings Aliou Touré, more in encouragement than despair. “Keep fighting today.”

The more ingrained aspects of cultural tradition are addressed on several songs about women’s rights. “Gabi” (‘Strength’) calls for an end to arranged marriages, told from the viewpoint of a reluctant bride-to-be trying to reason with her parents: “Let me tell you that our generation is different from yours… Let me choose the one I want.” Similarly, the thunderous noise of “Badala” reflects its protagonist’s decision to break free from the patriarchy and shape her own future.

These themes feed into wider questions of national identity. The warrior meaning behind “Assadja” relates to a person’s willingness to contribute to society. “Fey Fey” (‘Division’) recognises the various factions looking to separate Mali, but urges ethnic communities to stick together, just as they have done for centuries: “Even at the cost of our blood or our soul/We are not going to give in to the division of Mali.” By the same token, “Barre” (‘Change’) finds Songhoy Blues concluding that the key to their country’s future lies with its youth. Corruption and injustice may have become the norm, but “change is essential for development”. Over loose funk licks and percussive harmonies, the band’s mission is unequivocal: “Youth! Let’s rise for this change!” As protest music goes, Songhoy Blues are intent on mobilising hearts and minds in their own inimitable way, through force of will and sheer exuberance.

You can read an in-depth interview with Songhoy Blues in the December 2020 issue of Uncut, in shops now!

The secrets of The Doors archive revealed!

Michael Bonner
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The secrets of The Doors archive revealed!

The new issue of Uncut – in UK shops now and available to order online by clicking here – includes a deep dive into The Doors’ archive…

As a deluxe anniversary edition of the band’s Morrison Hotel hits shops, we peek inside Hollywood Vaults… Tucked away between Santa Monica Blvd and Melrose Avenue, this vast, high-security storage facility is home to archives belonging to the biggest names in film, television and music. To protect the materials, temperature and humidity is maintained at 45°F. One visitor says this does something peculiar to your bladder, so you have to use the toilet every hour on the dot.

The Doors have kept their archives in Hollywood Vaults for more than two decades. The band ceased recording new material more than 40 years ago, but the inventory continues to grow as tapes are truffled out from defunct studios or record labels or via collectors and bootleggers. Some items are easy to acquire. Tapes of a 1966 concert at LA’s London Fog, for instance, came direct from a former employee of the club. Others are harder to obtain. A book could be written on the attempts to acquire first-generation copies of The Doors’ 1967 concerts at San Francisco’s Matrix nightclub; a colourful yarn that incorporates scams, misdirection and misunderstandings. The final deal for these prized – and as yet unreleased – tapes took place with all the high-stakes drama of a crime movie. The two sides met on neutral territory, both carrying suitcases – one containing tapes and the other a bill of exchange – with the handover only taking place when everybody was satisfied the music was genuine.

Bruce Botnick, The Doors’ engineer/producer, says they are currently seeking tapes of 1970 concerts in Hawaii, Dallas and New Orleans, as well as a Granada TV broadcast that was wiped for transmission. Jeff Jampol – who manages The Doors along with other ‘legacy artists’ such as Michael Jackson and Janis Joplin – is regularly visited by fans with material they believe could be the Holy Grail – the item that will put their kid through college. “I’m the guy who has to tell him it’s worth $300,” says Jampol. “They think I’m trying to rip them off, but I’ll just put it on the shelf with 300 other reels of silent Super 8 footage shot from 500ft away on a handheld camera.”

Jampol acknowledges that some fans will never be happy with the reissues – the sound quality won’t be good enough, there will be too many outtakes or not enough rarities. In a bid to pre-empt such criticisms, everything is mastered by Botnick and approved by Robby Krieger and John Densmore. The challenge is to please the older fans while also connecting The Doors to a younger audience. “Artists have a magic, and there is something that connects Jim Morrison to a 13-year-old in 1967 and also one in 2020,” says Jampol. “You have to figure out what the magic is. What we’re trying to do is stay authentic while opening up the idea of The Doors to people who haven’t heard it yet. Then you let the music and the magic do its work…”

You can read much more about The Doors and Morrison Hotel as well as Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Fleet Foxes, Metallica, Paul Weller and more in the December 2020 issue of Uncut – in shops now, or available from our online shop.

The return of Joni Mitchell: “She sounds great, clear and light-hearted.”

Michael Bonner
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The return of Joni Mitchell: “She sounds great, clear and light-hearted.”

Joni Mitchell’s return to active service is documented in the latest issue of Uncut – in UK shops now and available to order online.

As Joni Mitchell opens her archives for the first time, her closest friends and confidantes reveal all about her latest, remarkable endeavours. Stand by for extraordinary tales involving hootenannies, visits from Chaka Khan and Eric Idle and nights spent dancing in roadhouse bars…

As we discover, Mitchell has lived in the same hilltop villa, overlooking the Bel-Air Country Club, since July 1974. Hidden from the street, with its own private drive, most of her creative life can be measured in its walls and spaces. Inside the six-bedroom house, built in 1930, there are musical instruments, mementos and small sculptures. A baby grand piano sits in the living room. Strikingly, the walls are decorated with her own canvasses – landscapes, still-lifes, studies of Picasso, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Van Gogh. And, of course, the original self-portraits used on album sleeves like Turbulent Indigo, Travelogue and Both Sides Now.

“I’ve been there many times,” David Crosby tells Uncut. “It’s kind of like a museum in that she’s got her paintings everywhere. And she’s a brilliant painter. So you walk in the house and you’re smitten. You have to struggle to remember to have a conversation, because your eyes are glued to this stuff: ‘Oh my God, look at that one!’”

It’s here that Mitchell has recuperated since suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015. She has likened the place to a refuge in which she lived in relative seclusion. Seven years on, however, her outlook appears to be changing. The arrival of the mouth-watering Archives Volume 1: The Early Years (1963-1967) is the latest sign of renewed activity in the Mitchell camp.

Film director and screenwriter Cameron Crowe first visited the house in 1979, when Mitchell granted him a rare interview during his time as journalist for Rolling Stone. The pair have stayed in touch ever since, to the point where Crowe is now part of her trusted inner circle. Early this year he spent a couple of Sundays on the patio, talking to Mitchell about Archives Volume 1. Their warm, digressive conversations act as liner notes for the five-CD boxset, which contains nearly six hours of unreleased gold – home demos, live recordings, radio sessions – from Mitchell’s formative days.

“Generally we’d be outside in her garden, which she calls Tuscany, because it has that vibe,” Crowe explains of their meetings. “The stuff on Archives Volume 1 is a miracle for any real fan of hers, because she’s not opened the vault on this early material before. And barely even discussed it. So the idea that she was going to focus on this period, inviting questions and thoughts, was just fantastic.”

Mitchell has been directing operations from home, aided by longtime friend and associate Marcy Gensic and chief archivist Joel Bernstein. When not busy with this catalogue of rarities, she’s been spending much of her time, pre-Covid, either dancing at a Burbank roadhouse bar or hosting regular hootenannies. These informal gatherings have featured everyone from Elton John, Bonnie Raitt and Chaka Khan to Harry Styles, Sam Smith and Brandi Carlile. “We’d get together about once a month,” says Carlile. “There’s so much joy and generosity involved. Joni sings too. She sounds great, clear and light-hearted.”

Crowe is ideally placed to note the shift in Mitchell’s life. “The atmosphere in the house is always warm and super-creative,” he says. “When I first went there, it felt like an inner sanctum. But over time it’s only become more heartfelt. You’re never far from an instrument and there’s always a comfortable sofa to sit in. It’s not ornate. It’s wide open and it invites love…”

You can read much more about Joni Mitchell as well as Bruce Springsteen, Fleet Foxes, Metallica, Paul Weller, the Doors and more in the December 2020 issue of Uncut – in shops now, or available from our online shop.

Thin Lizzy – Rock Legends

Nigel Williamson
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Thin Lizzy – Rock Legends

There’s a revealing moment in the 2015 BBC documentary Bad Reputation, included here, in which Phil Lynott talks about his attitude to fame. “I was tired of hearing stars feeling sorry for themselves and saying they disliked being famous,” he drawls in his twinkling Dublin brogue. “I jumped at it. The women are after me, people want to buy me free drinks, to treat me, take me here and there. Great! I went for it hook, line and sinker.”

It seems to encapsulate what made Thin Lizzy, and what destroyed them. The enjoyment, energy and passion with which Lynott and his compadres embraced the rock’n’roll life oozes from every track on this 6CD+DVD set, released to mark the 50th anniversary of the band’s first recording contract.

Later in the same film Bob Geldof remarks that he has never met anyone who “enjoyed being a rock star so much” as Lynott did, while Scott Gorham, one half of the band’s famous twin guitar attack, notes with a mix of admiration and horror that Lynott “could take more drugs, screw more chicks, stay up more days in a row than anyone else”. Yet if Lynott took his partying seriously, he applied an even greater dedication to his music. Every one of the musicians who passed through Thin Lizzy’s ranks between 1970 and 1983 attests to Lynott’s work ethic. The determination to put out his best on every occasion even led to a flawless soundcheck performance ending up on 1978’s Live And Dangerous. There was never any going through the motions; it was always “hook, line and sinker” – and there’s ample evidence of it here, spread across 99 tracks, an impressive 74 of which are previously unreleased.

Disc One starts in familiar territory and acts as an essential Lizzy primer with crisp, three-minute radio edits of 22 hits from “Whiskey In The Jar” and “The Rocker” to “The Boys Are Back In Town” and “Dancing In The Moonlight”. Such tracks are the sine qua non of any collection, but it’s on Disc Two that things start getting interesting with 17 deep and mostly unreleased tracks from the band’s Decca years between 1971 and ’74. Highlights include a never-heard-before six-minute extended “Whiskey In The Jar” with some lovely harmonic guitar soloing from Eric Bell and extemporised vocals from Lynott on the fade-out, and a rough and ready acetate of a raucous 12-bar blues with screeching slide guitar titled “Baby’s Been Messin’”: it later emerged in different form as “Suicide” on 1975’s Fighting.

Elsewhere a brace of Radio Eireann sessions recorded a year apart illustrate the speed of the band’s progression. The first from January 1973 finds Lizzy as standard period blues-rockers, sounding like a Rory Gallagher tribute act on non-album tracks such as “1969 Rock” and a jam with Real McCoy guitarist Eddie Campbell titled “Eddie’s Blues/Blue Shadows”. Yet by the time of the second session exactly 12 months later, the confidence and swagger have undergone a quantum leap and they sound like a different band on the jazzy “Ghetto Woman” and a storming cover of Freddie King’s “Going Down”.

We then get three discs containing demos for 49 songs recorded while they made nine classic albums, from 1974’s Nightlife to 1983 swansong Thunder And Lightning. It might have been fascinating to hear solo demos of the songs by Lynott, but what we get are essentially fully worked-out band versions with the twin harmony guitars in full flow; they hardly sound like demos at all and more or less match the familiar album cuts. Put it down as another indication of how professional rigour marched hand-in-hand with freewheeling hedonism.

Among the well-known, however, are a number of unreleased songs. “Blackmail”, originally slated for Black Rose, is a classic hard rocker, while the slyly syncopated “It’s Going Wrong” has a terrific lyric and vocal which finds Lynott at his most playful. “Kill”, co-written with Rick Parfitt, sounds more like Status Quo than Lizzy, but “In The Delta”, a swamp-rock jam with Huey Lewis on harmonica, and the synth-laden melodrama of “Don’t Let Him Slip Away”, cut during the Thunder And Lightning sessions, are lost gems.

The final disc was recorded live over two high-octane nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in May 1980, capturing Lizzy halfway between 1978’s Live And Dangerous and Life, recorded on their 1983 farewell tour. By the time the opener “Are You Ready” has finished, you can already sense the sweat rolling down Lynott’s face.

A good boxset doesn’t have to be rammed with startling new revelations and, in truth, there are only a handful here; but if the purpose is to make you fall in love with a long-cherished band all over again, consider it mission accomplished.

Extras: 8/10. DVD featuring the Bad Reputation doc and the band’s performance on Rod Stewart’s 1976 A Night On The Town TV Special; replicas of tour programmes; booklet with recollections by members plus quotes from famous fans from Slash and Bobby Gillespie to John McEnroe.

Adrianne Lenker – Songs/Instrumentals

Peter Watts
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Adrianne Lenker – Songs/Instrumentals

For an artist who has been releasing records at a steady chop since 2014 – four Big Thief albums, including two in 2019, plus a couple of solo LPs – there’s always been something elusive about the band’s songwriter, Adrianne Lenker. Emotionally and texturally, her music has the appearance of intimacy but she somehow remains at a distance, populating her songs with a cast of characters and setting them to spider-silk melodies that threaten to float away on the wind if you relax concentration for a second. Songs and Instrumentals, written and recorded in a one-room mountain cabin in Massachusetts after a heartbreak, marks a shift from that. Playing alone and unadorned, every song is written from the first person, creating Lenker’s most unguarded album yet.

She was meant to spend 2020 touring with Big Thief, but Covid sent her into isolation. She had songs she intended to record, but instead ended up writing a bunch of new ones that reflected her vulnerable emotional state, emerging with two records, Songs and Instrumentals, now being released as a double album. Recorded on eight-track tape using only acoustic guitar and vocals, Lenker conjured layers of rippling melodies, coloured by sounds taken from the surrounding woodland, like rain and birdsong. On “Forwards Beckon Rebound”, there are wooden creaks that could come from her guitar, the trees or the cabin itself.

Lenker wanted to showcase the sound of the acoustic guitar – Instrumentals does precisely this – but her lyrics and voice remain major draws. Strong images abound – “his eyes are blueberries, video screens, Minneapolis schemes and the dried flowers from books half-read” goes one line from “Ingydar”, while “Two Reverse” gives us “grandmother, juniper, tell to me your recipe”, meaningful only to her but beautiful in their rhythmic play. Like David Berman, she’s a dab hand at the opening line. “Staring down the barrel of the hot sun/Shining with the sheen of a shotgun” she sings on the superb stream-of-consciousness love song “Anything”, while the lullaby “Heavy Focus” starts with the near-perfect couplet “Cemetery at night/And the dog’s in heat”.

Abysskiss, Lenker’s 2018 solo album, was bookended by tracks about her own death. Songs maintains this theme, ending with a visit from a guardian angel (“My Angel”) who “kisses my eyelids and my wrists”, while in between comes murder and several woundings. She is tender but never sentimental: “Everything eats and is eaten”, goes the refrain from “Ingydar”. Even love songs are clouded in violence. “Anything” features family fights and dog bites. On the gentle sing-song “Not A Lot, Just Forever” there is a mouth stained with poison and intense declamations of romance that come bearing knives.

These are in keeping with Lenker’s gift for the creepy. “Half Return” features a narrator returning to childhood homes, perhaps in a dream – “Standing in the yard, dressed like a kid/The house is white and the lawn is dead” she sings against a rippling melody. The scratchy, sinister “Come” starts with the line “come, help me die, my daughter” and continues in the same American Gothic spirit, emphasising a Gillian Welch-like knack for tapping into an older sensibility.

Her songs, like dreams, veer in and out of lucidity. Some start with fractured images before slowly evolving into more recognisable narratives. Others start with solid scenes and then dissolve into random words and sentences. On the slow reverie “Dragon Eyes”, she starts off “freezing at the edge of the bed, chewing a cigarette” before telling us that “dragons have silent eyes, cracked eggshells, fireflies”. Melodies are similarly hard to pin down. The one time she lays down a hummable tune is the peppy “Zombie Girl”, one of two pre-break-up songs that features another narrative about dreams and absence.

Recordings are lo-fi but could have been more so. Lenker tried recording directly to a Sony Walkman, but ultimately procured an eight-track that allowed for overdubs. All the same, it is rudimentary and in keeping with life in the cabin, where there was no electricity or running water and Lenker cooked by woodstove and bathed in the river. Songs are coloured by birdsong and the sound of falling rain. Most musicians would use these sounds to ground the music in a sense of naturalism, but with Lenker it enhances the mystery. The accompanying Instrumentals consists of two sprawling pieces, one per side. “Music For Indigo” is a collage of improvised instrumental pieces, meditative and ambient, while “Mostly Chimes” uses a small orchestra of wind chimes to lull you into uneasy dreams. Soothing balms following the drama of Songs.

How Bruce Springsteen made his new album, Letter To You

Peter Watts
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How Bruce Springsteen made his new album, Letter To You

The latest issue of Uncut – in UK shops now and available to order online by clicking here – takes you inside the making of Bruce Springsteen’s barnstorming new album, Letter To You. In our exclusive feature, Peter Watts speaks to every member of the E Street Band about life inside “a benevolent monarchy”, the rigorous discipline behind Letter To You’s “Beatles schedule” and honouring the departed. Here’s a taster of what to expect…

When Bruce Springsteen gathered the E Street Band at his home studio in New Jersey last November to record Letter To You, he told them they were doing this one the old-fashioned way. He wanted to bottle the alchemic magic that happens when the E Street Band take the stage, something that hadn’t been captured on record since Born In The USA. They were going to take all that experience, intuition, respect and mutual musical understanding and distil it into a studio album made by a band playing live in the same room. This was something the E Street Band had been eager to do since they reformed in 1999, but now Springsteen felt the time was right – partly because his new album was all about what it means to be in a band for 50 years.

“Bruce got in touch and told us to get ready to record,” recalls Stevie Van Zandt, who first joined the E Street Band in 1975. “I stopped my own tour on November 6 and we met up right after that. I thought we would be in the studio for a month, break for the holidays and return to the studio. I didn’t know we were going to make the whole record in five fucking days.”

For the members of the E Street Band, anticipation ran high. Since The River Tour ended in February 2017, Springsteen had returned increasingly to his past. There was his memoir Born To Run, his 236-date run on Broadway – even Western Stars, his 2019 solo album, came from a place of introspection, exploring the popular culture of his youth through lushly orchestrated cowboy sagas. But in all this rumination there was no role for his trusted cohorts. To cap it all, he hadn’t written any new material since 2012’s Wrecking Ball.

If the E Streeters thought they were running out of road, none admit it. By now they are comfortable with their role in Springsteen’s life, a regular presence but not welded to him. Perhaps it’s that phlegmatic self-determination that makes Springsteen so willing to return to the band – a mutual bond that doesn’t edge into neediness. For Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, it’s part of what makes the relationship work. “They’re close on stage, in the studio and when they travel, and they leave each other plenty of space when we’re not working,” he says.

So even when Springsteen revealed during an interview with Martin Scorsese in May 2019 that he had written some new E Street songs, the band remained sanguine. “Sure that got me excited, but just because he says he’s written some rock songs, I’m not going to bug him,” says Nils Lofgren. “When he’s ready to reach out, he will.”

As the band discovered, the songs Springsteen wrote for Letter To You followed the wistful pattern established in recent years. But he had found a way to combine personal nostalgia with the scale, emotion and universality that comes with the E Street Band. As with much of his recent output, it’s a step forward inspired by the past. “It’s the fourth part of an autobiographical summation of his life,” confirms Van Zandt.

Amid new songs that explore Springsteen’s life as a musician from the perspective of a man in his seventies, he sprinkled three older tracks that tap directly into the deep currents of his past. These are songs he wrote as a younger man, but now interpreted by men in their sixties and seventies. “Janey Needs A Shooter” is an organ-fuelled saga the E Street had tackled several times in the ’70s, but never nailed. Now it was time to try again.

“When he presented ‘Janey’, in my head it was 1977 so I played like it was 1977 – but better,” says Max Weinberg, who joined the band in 1974. “For Letter To You we had largely the same individuals who had spent hundreds of hours in the ’70s figuring out how to do this thing. So when presented with a song of the era of Darkness On The Edge Of Town – musically and in your mind you can go back there. There are many threads in Bruce’s music and we were there for a lot of the sewing. When you record like this it’s extremely close to the soul of what you do. You are laying it out on the line and that is what we are good at. It was a very special week in the life of Bruce and the E Street Band.”

You can read much more about Bruce Springsteen, the E Street Band and the making of Letter To You in the December 2020 issue of Uncut – in shops now, or available from our online shop.

Paul McCartney confirms release of McCartney III

Sam Richards
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Paul McCartney confirms release of McCartney III

Paul McCartney will complete his trilogy of home-recorded solo albums by releasing McCartney III on December 11, via Capitol Records.

The follow-up to 1970’s McCartney and 1980’s McCartney II was written, performed and produced by Paul McCartney alone at his Sussex home studio during lockdown this year.

“I was living lockdown life on my farm with my family and I would go to my studio every day,” says McCartney. “I had to do a little bit of work on some film music and that turned into the opening track and then when it was done I thought what will I do next? I had some stuff I’d worked on over the years but sometimes time would run out and it would be left half-finished so I started thinking about what I had.

“Each day I’d start recording with the instrument I wrote the song on and then gradually layer it all up, it was a lot of fun. It was about making music for yourself rather than making music that has to do a job. So, I just did stuff I fancied doing. I had no idea this would end up as an album.”

The instruments featured on the album include Bill Black (of Elvis Presley’s original trio)’s double bass alongside McCartney’s own iconic Hofner violin bass, and a mellotron from Abbey Road Studios used on Beatles recordings.

In keeping with McCartney and McCartney II’s photography by Linda McCartney, the principal photos for III were shot by Paul’s daughter Mary McCartney, with additional photography by his nephew Sonny McCartney. The cover art and typography is by American artist Ed Ruscha. Watch the album trailer below:

McCartney III will be released on December 11 across digital platforms, on CD, and on LP manufactured by Third Man Pressing. You’ll be able to read much more about McCartney III in the next issue of Uncut, out on November 12…

The Damned’s original line-up reform

Sam Richards
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The Damned’s original line-up reform

The Damned’s original line up — Dave Vanian, Brian James, Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible — have announced that they are reuniting for four shows in July 2021.

The tour marks the 45th anniversary of their debut release, the first ever British punk single “New Rose”. The Damned will perform tracks from the first two albums, B-sides and covers that the original line-up played.

Check out the dates on the official tour poster below:

Tickets go on sale at 10am this Friday (October 23) from here.

Spencer Davis has died, aged 81

Sam Richards
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Spencer Davis has died, aged 81

Influential 1960s hitmaker Spencer Davis has died, aged 81. According to the Birmingham Mail, Davis died of a heart attack on Monday (October 19) at his home in California.

Born in Swansea, guitarist Davis formed The Spencer Davis Group in Birmingham in 1963, after discovering Muff and Steve Winwood (the singer/organist then just 14) playing in a local pub. The band racked up a string of huge hits in the mid-’60s, including the indelible “Keep On Running”, “Gimme Some Lovin'” and “I’m A Man”.

Steve Winwood left in 1967 to form Traffic with Muff moving into A&R, but the group made a further three albums before disbanding for good in 1974. Davis went on to record some solo jazz albums before reforming a version of The Spencer Davis Group in 2006.

The Pretty Things announce 50th anniversary edition of Parachute

Sam Richards
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The Pretty Things announce 50th anniversary edition of Parachute

The Pretty Things have announced a 50th anniversary reissue of Parachute, due to be released on November 13 via Madfish Music.

The 2xLP edition includes the original LP – cut directly from the Abbey Road master tapes – as well as a second disc featuring one side of rare singles and B-sides, with an original etching by Phil May on the flip. An additional four-page insert includes recollections from original band members Skip Alan, Jon Povey and Wally Waller. Pre-order here.

As a tribute to Phil May, Tim Burgess will host a Twitter listening party for Parachute at 7pm on November 9 (May’s birthday).

Read Uncut’s review of The Pretty Things’ recently released final album Bare As Bone, Bright As Blood here.

Hear Lambchop’s version of Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady”

Sam Richards
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Hear Lambchop’s version of Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady”

As previously announced, Lambchop’s covers album Trip is due out via City Slang on November 13.

Hear another song from it below – their version of Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady”, from 1973’s Innervisions:

It was chosen by Lambchop’s drummer and saxophonist Andy Stack, who says: “I wanted to choose an earnest love song, a chance to display the tenderness that we’ve come to know from Kurt, Tony, and the boys. But love is complex, and we discovered that you never find tenderness without a hint of melancholy, darkness, and maybe a little Xanax.”

You can read Uncut’s full review of Trip, alongside an interview with Kurt Wagner, in the new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online here. Pre-order Trip on CD, LP and coke-bottle clear or yellow swirl vinyl here.

Blondie announce 2021 tour and archive boxset

Sam Richards
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Blondie announce 2021 tour and archive boxset

Blondie have announced a 2021 UK tour to accompany the release of their first ever authorised archival boxset, entitled Blondie 1974-1982: Against The Odds.

Blondie will be supported on the November 2021 tour by Garbage. Tickets go on general sale on Friday (October 23) at 10am, although there are various pre-sales in operation – visit the official Blondie site for details. Tourdates below:

November 2021
Sat 6 M&S Bank Arena Liverpool
Mon 8 Utilita Arena Birmingham
Tues 9 AO Arena Manchester
Thur 11 Bonus Arena Hull
Fri 12 Motorpoint Arena Nottingham
Sun 14 The Brighton Centre
Tues 16 Motorpoint Arena Cardiff
Thu 18 The O2 Arena London
Sat 20 The SSE Hydro Glasgow
Sun 21 First Direct Arena Leeds

Blondie 1972-1984 Against The Odds will be released in four formats and include unreleased bonus material.

In spring 2021, the band will release Blondie: Vivir En La Habana, a short film and soundtrack project culled from the band’s live performances during their week-long visit to Cuba last year. They are also currently working with producer John Congleton on their 12th album.

Hen Ogledd – Free Humans

Tom Pinnock
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Hen Ogledd – Free Humans

If Richard Dawson’s 2020 attempted to capture Britain today, the new album by the experimental unit Hen Ogledd, of which he is a quarter, has a far broader temporal scope. We hear of a “pre-Cambrian dream”, of a medieval illuminated manuscript held on an Ethiopian island monastery, and of a galactic pleasure cruise far into the future. The quartet even start us at the end with “Farewell”, which seems to hint at humanity’s reluctant retreat from an apocalyptic Earth, but could just as easily refer to their sorrow over Brexit.

Hen Ogledd’s history is almost as strange as their subject matter: they began as a duo of Dawson on guitar and Rhodri Davies on electric harp, playing scratchy, difficult improv not unlike their serrated instrumental work on the singer-songwriter’s The Glass Trunk. They began to incorporate electronics and vocals when Dawn Bothwell joined in 2016, then became a different beast when Sally Pilkington made them a quartet not long after. Resolutely democratic, they vowed they’d all sing, and Dawson switched to bass, better to anchor the synths and beats from Pilkington and Bothwell. 2018’s Mogic presented their new sound, Technicolor pop with an experimental bent, but Free Humans tops it in terms of sheer adventurousness.

Totalling almost 80 minutes, it’s a blur of different moods; yet like, say, ‘the White Album’, even the weaker tracks are enhanced by the sheer scale of the thing. Recording in just three days meant there was no danger of overthinking the material, and so there’s a vivid vitality to these 14 tracks, even when they’re a little distended with synth overdubs or layered electronic burbles.

It’s possible to sift Free Humans’ songs into three piles: the ‘pop’ songs, the experiments and those somewhere in between. In the more accessible corner, there’s “Trouble”, with Bothwell’s charmingly untutored voice and a stunning electric harp solo from Davies – the title is also the name of Dawson and Pilkington’s cat, which adds another layer to lines like, “Trouble is the name of my shadow.” Elsewhere, “Crimson Star” is glorious sci-fi nostalgia, a little “Running Up That Hill” in its synthetic gallop, with Dawson taking on the role of a former cabaret singer aboard an interplanetary cruise ship; and the closing “Skinny Dippers” is vaguely Middle Eastern-tinged electro-pop with Pilkington singing of the joys of wild swimming.

At the same time, the group are not afraid to embrace the absurd or difficult: “Time Party” is warped disco that incorporates Art Of Noise-esque collage, free-jazz sax and what sounds like melting steel drums, while “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song” finds Bothwell belting out Edwin Morgan’s nonsense poem over pulsing electronics that evoke Autechre after a half-term at circus school. “Kebran Gospel Gossip” imagines Tangerine Dream jamming with Pharoah Sanders, and “Earworm” is obnoxious techno that finds Davies singing in falsetto and then breaking into some choice swearing: “Mumblecrust… mucksprout, fopdoodle… fucksakes!”

All very fun – and yet Free Humans also deals with some complex concepts and deep emotions. “Bwganod” channels the Gaia theory, albeit within a fractured rap from Bothwell: “Smoking choking life out of this rotten planet… Reclaim the female world before it’s too late.” On “Feral”, almost nine minutes of swooning trip-hop, Pilkington quotes Marx and commands the listener “don’t look back”, even as she sings of “fossils underground”. On “Space Golf”, she imagines Trump fleeing the planet he’s helped to destroy: “Looking back on the world below/Safe from the damage and the woe/But you cannot play golf in space.”

Most affecting of all are “Farewell” and “Flickering Lights”, both sung by Dawson and anchored by dewy organ. “Farewell to the unmasked face,” he chants at one point in a stunning bit of precognition, while on “Flickering Lights” he seems to sing from the point of view of a bereaved spouse: “It’s been quite a struggle coping/I suppose I am still hoping/That the rustling leaves I hear/Is you whispering in my ear…” It’s deeply sad, and disarmingly gorgeous.

If the hyperactive following track, “Bwganod”, resolutely shatters that mood with its mentions of “leopard-print fishnet underpants” and “radioactive nuclear bullshit”, then that’s OK; the magic of Free Humans is in that disconnect. Flitting from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the personal to the universal, and from a time before people to a time long after them, it’s a mess, but a glorious one all the same.

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