This Saturday (September 26), OSees celebrate the release of recent album Protean Threat by broadcasting a Levitation Session set, captured outdoors at Pioneertown in the California desert.
Watch a clip of OSees performing “Chem Farmer / Nite Expo” below:
The ticketed livestream starts at 7pm CT (1am BST), but can be watched any time up until October 8. You can buy tickets, including various merch bundles, here.
Early into lockdown, people began sharing clips on social media of deer roaming housing estates in Essex, coyotes prowling across the Golden Gate Bridge, goats promenading along Llandudno high street and other signs that animals were moving into the spaces that humans had vacated. Nature, it seemed, was making a comeback in the wake of the pandemic.
It feels, then, like an appropriate time to welcome back Fleet Foxes. Shore, their fourth album, is accompanied by a film shot around Washington State comprising a series of nature scenes – water running over stone, flowers in the field, horses in a meadow, distant mountains, trees glimpsed across a misty lake, a crescent moon. Much like these sun-dappled images of the American wilderness, Shore is an emissary from a better, more beguiling world than the one we left before lockdown began in April.
It transpires lockdown has been useful, creatively-speaking, for Robin Pecknold. He started work on this album not long after the band wrapped their world tour to support 2017’s Crack-Up. Preliminary writing took place at his home in New York, then in Portugal, before he took early demos of the album to Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond studio in upstate New York. The music took shape there, improved by further sessions in Paris and Los Angeles. But Pecknold now admits to being “a bit lost” with the album. He had music; but the lyrics evaded him. Lengthy, lockdown drives through upstate New York, though, gave him inspiration – the wild, empty landscape providing creative nourishment.
Released on the autumnal equinox, Shore finds Pecknold taking a left turn. On a superficial level, the album doesn’t feature any other regular members of Fleet Foxes, who were absent due to lockdown restrictions. Pecknold is at great pains to make clear that he hasn’t abandoned them: “The studio albums have always been predominantly my work and my vision,” he writes in an artist’s statement. “I’ve always handled all the songwriting, most of the vocals and harmonies, and most of the recording of the instrumentation, usually working most closely with one other person, a producer or bandmate, to see the album through to completion.” He anticipates reconnecting with his bandmates for “nine more songs”, written collaboratively, “to augment the fifteen here.”
For Shore, Pecknold’s chief collaborator is engineer Beatriz Artola, while the other musicians include Christopher Bear, Kevin Morby, Daniel Rossen and Joshua Jaeger. The first voice you hear isn’t even Pecknold’s: it’s Uwade Akhere, who Pecknold met while they were both students at Columbia University, providing an early signal that you might expect something different here. Nothing radical, perhaps, but all the same Shore feels like a comfortable progression from Crack-Up.
Crack-Up found Pecknold and his cohorts pushing the band’s trademark luscious harmonies and wonderful orchestrations to the limit. With Shore, Pecknold appears to be striving to embrace simplicity. The lyrical heaviness has gone – although he can’t resist subtitling Shore as “IV. Rising Phase” (which I guess is better than, say, “The Search For Spock”). Meanwhile, eight of the album’s 15 tracks are under four minutes long; the digressive song-suites of Crack-Up have been replaced by bright chord progressions.
Shore begins, though, roughly where Crack-Up left off. The cover image of a shoreline loosely refers back to Hiroshi Hamaya’s painting Eroded Sea Cliff At Tōjinbō, which appeared on Crack-Up’s sleeve. There is a lot of water on this album – songs take place near it, characters interact with it, its powerful cleansing and destructive qualities are both cited. There are oceans, rain and even a reference to the Silver Jews album, American Water. The album opens with “Wading In Waist-High Water”, with Akhere accompanied only by warm acoustic guitar, before a shift in tempo introduces horns, a choir, piano and drums. It’s an epic progression, but the transitions are far smoother and more natural than some of the jumps on Crack-Up.
The horns segue into “Sunblind”, whose rapturous chorus is one of the most joyous and uplifting moments on Shore. A celebration of Pecknold’s fallen musical heroes – most prominently, Richard Swift and David Berman – the song seeks out positivity even in these immense losses. “I’m loud and alive, singing you all night,” Pecknold rhapsodies over beautiful rolling piano and ravishing acoustic guitar. “Can I Believe You” and “Jara” are focussed and determined, carried along on soaring melodies and breathless percussion.
Pecknold slows the pace for “Featherweight” – which he debuted last month as part of Vote Ready, a livestream event that encouraged viewers to register to vote. Ostensibly, a sweet folk song, it is full of tiny details – filigrees of guitar and brisk piano motifs lying under the main melody – that remind us, even in the most superficially straightforward material, Pecknold can still find room for nuanced dynamics. Similarly, the Laurel Canyon loveliness of “A Long Way Past The Past” features plenty of detail to burrow into, although never at the expense of the song itself. “For A Week Or Two” is ostensibly Pecknold and a piano, but even something as simple and effective as this is augmented by birdsong at the end.
The birdsong segues into “Maestranza” – named, possibly, after a bullring in Seville – driven by Pecknold’s swaggering acoustic guitar, before bursting into “Young Man’s Game”. It’s tempting to view this song as Pecknold (now at the ripe old age of 34) looking back at his younger self: “I could dress as Arthur Lee / Scrape my shoes the right way / Maybe read Ulysses / But it’s a young man’s game”. Its playful melodies, skittering drums and tumbling harmonies give it a playful quality: “I’ve been a rolling antique / For all my life” he sings at one point. It contrasts with the autumnal mood of “I’m Not My Season”, which in turn gives way to “Quiet Air/Gioia”. Another of Pecknold’s song-cycles, its shifts are gentle, organic, soothed by Pecknold’s multi-tracked vocals.
“Going-To-The-Sun Road” sweeps along on harpsichord, horns and acoustic guitars while “Thymia” builds around a simple horn and piano arrangement. Then it’s back shifting tempos and layered instruments on “Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman” (guitars, violin, drums, horns). The song opens with a sample of Brian Wilson working on vocal overdubs for “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” from the Pet Sounds box set; as good an indication as any where Pecknold’s head is at.
The ebb and flow, from quite straightforward songs to more complex and textured compositions, gives Shore its internal rhythm – tide-like, you might say – that reaches its conclusion with the title song. A lament to the fallen – John Prine, David Berman and the fire that devastated the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Parks – it’s minor chords, layered orchestral passages and subtle processing recall In Rainbows era Radiohead.
All in all, it’s a beautiful record – and one that bears repeated plays. I’ve been playing it for around 10 days now, mostly on headphones, and it’s still revealing new details with each listen. Pecknold has created another beautiful, immersive world for us to dive into – and with the prospect of more new music, this time with the rest of his regular Fleet Foxes bandmates, to follow in 2021, it feels like Pecknold has a lot left to say. Four albums in, he’s showing no signs of letting his quality control slide.
Linda Peters and Richard Thompson’s partnership began with a dreadful conversation in a Chelsea restaurant, and ended with the ‘tour from hell’, car theft and an arrest. In between, there were those experiences common to most relationships. You know the sort: marriage, children, six poorly selling albums and more than a year in a couple of intense Sufi Muslim communities.
Hard Luck Stories attempts to catalogue, across eight CDs, this fragile decade the Thompsons spent together and all that they created in that tumultuous time. Inside there’s one masterpiece and three very fine records, all remastered. There are also two albums disowned by their creators and reissued here for the first time in almost 30 years, along with demos and live tracks.
The Thompsons came from folk-rock, of course, with the couple first meeting at the sessions for Fairport Convention’s monumental Liege & Lief at London’s Sound Techniques studio in late 1969. But despite the occasional dabble with accordions and crumhorns, the duo’s material was all Richard’s own, oscillating between earthy misanthropy and devotional hymns. Whatever the content, Linda sang with a beautifully sad, ageless poise, her deep voice neither as unadorned as Shirley Collins or the Watersons’, nor as high and clear as Maddy Prior or Jacqui McShee’s.
Their first tours in late 1972 found the pair visiting dreary folk clubs, Linda driving as Richard couldn’t, their rare go at trad-arr material represented here by a strident “Napoleon’s Dream”, Richard puffing as if he’s just run from Cecil Sharp House to the Rainbow. His solo debut, April’s Henry The Human Fly, had featured Linda, and a couple of those tracks also appear on the ‘early years’ disc, along with rock’n’roll numbers the pair covered as part of supergroup The Bunch – Linda and Sandy Denny’s take on the Everlys’ “When Will I Be Loved” is a keeper.
None of the Thompsons’ previous work hinted at the majesty of their debut, 1974’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, a stately dive into melancholy depths. There’s a sublime restraint to these 10 songs, from Linda’s vocals and Richard’s guitar (the latter biting only on “When I Get To The Border” and “The Calvary Cross”) to a measured rhythm section of Timmy Donald and Pat Donaldson. The drums dissolve completely for the closing “The Great Valerio”, its gothic mood matched by the acoustic guitar’s sour chords and a snatch of Satie’s ghostly “La Balançoire” to close.
As on most of Hard Luck Stories, the remastering is barely noticeable, but the previously unreleased bonus tracks are more notable: “Mother & Son”, the Thompsons harmonising over an awkward piano tune, is a throughline from the more ghoulish parts of Henry The Human Fly; a sparse early take of “Down Where The Drunkards Roll” shows just how fluid Linda’s vocal inflections could be; while “The End Of The Rainbow”, here sung by Linda instead of Richard, is a peek at an alternate universe. None of these tracks merit inclusion on the original LP, but it’s fascinating to hear their development.
Hokey Pokey (1975) continued their twisted brand of joie de vivre, but added bleak gallows humour. Even when things start off well for the protagonists, as in “Georgie On A Spree”, there’s a certainty that illness or heartbreak will soon reduce them to the penury of the people “writhing around in the mud” on “The Sun Never Shines On The Poor”. Yet the Thompsons assure us that being “poor in the heart” is “the worst kind of poor you can be”, which lays the path for the same year’s Pour Down Like Silver. The duo had already found religion – see Hokey Pokey’s “A Heart Needs A Home” – but now they were adorned in some top Sufi gear on the cover and were singing thinly veiled hymns to God. The sorrowful rapture of “Night Comes In”, inspired by the whirling Sufi dervishes, is almost post-rock in its quietude, with Richard’s multi-tracked solos spiralling off into the perfumed dark. Here the LP’s joined by some unheard outtakes, the grooving “Wanted Man” and “Last Chance”, which shows that even a singer as peerless as Linda had the odd off-day.
The fifth disc, The Madness Of Love, is the box’s greatest new treasure, starting off with six live acoustic songs from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in April 1975, including the plaintive “Never Again”. After spending 1976 in various Muslim communities, the Thompsons returned with an all-Sufi band to showcase brand-new songs on a May ’77 tour; inspired by Islamic scripture and poetry, few of these songs were ever recorded, but their live versions appear here. While they can’t match, say, “Withered And Died”, the soulful “The King Of Love” and the mellifluous “A Bird In God’s Garden” have a sound that would have been worth exploring further. Droning and packed with percussion and electric piano, they’re more funk-fusion than folk-rock, and as heavy and heady as the scent of Arabian oud. We also get “an old one”, a stunning 13-minute “Night Comes In”, this time exquisitely sung by Linda.
The Thompsons’ most controversial records, 1978’s First Light and 1979’s Sunnyvista, both on Chrysalis, are reissued here for the first time in decades. The couple were sharing studios with the Banshees, but First Light possesses little punk vigour. Tracked with crack US sessioneers, it’s syrupy and confused: at one point, smooth ballad “Sweet Surrender” is followed by the quasi-disco “Don’t Let A Thief Steal Into Your Heart” and then the trad instrumental “The Choice Wife”. The agitated “Layla”, however, is a highlight, as is “Pavanne”, a rare co-write that recaptures the magic of their doomy early ballads. Sunnyvista features attempts at cajun (“Saturday Rolling Around”) and cabaret (the title track) that could only be described as ill-advised, and a take on reggae-tinged new wave (“Civilisation”) that somehow succeeds. “Justice In The Streets”, meanwhile, is bastardised funk with a Middle Eastern or North African twist – it should be terrible, but it ends up sounding, rather pleasantly, like Tinariwen or Tamikrest.
Arabic funk isn’t the fastest route to the hit parade, though, and Chrysalis, expecting commercial success, dropped the pair. Enter Gerry Rafferty, a man who knew a bit about folkies becoming pop stars, to fund and produce new sessions in 1980. Six of the results are featured here, but frustratingly not everything on the Rafferty’s Folly bootleg or what’s now on YouTube. A missed opportunity for completists, for sure, even if the fruits of the Rafferty sessions are generally (save a devastating “Walking On A Wire”) inferior to the re-recordings on 1982’s Shoot Out The Lights. The vibe is back-to-basics, so there are no fusion jams or hints of reggae – just eight vaguely folky rock songs that might have appeared on vintage Fairport LPs without too much adjustment, and are all the better for it.
“Let me ride on the wall of death one more time,” the pair sang on Shoot Out The Lights’ triumphant closer, “Wall Of Death”. There would be no more trips, though, with Richard leaving a pregnant Linda as 1983 dawned. Solo careers ensued, but neither would find a better creative foil or quite re-create the magic of their first three albums together.
After the split, of course, there was one grim footnote: a 1983 US tour that the pair were strong-armed into honouring. Linda, self-medicating with drink and pills to get through her struggles with dysphonia, at one point even stole a car and found herself at a Niagara police station. Infamously, she would kick her teetotal husband in the shins while he soloed. On the strength of “Pavanne”, one of two songs included from an Indiana gig, she was at least in fine form at the mic.
Aside from some hurried thanks, the last voice heard on Hard Luck Stories’ final track, a raucous cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “High School Confidential”, is Linda’s: she’s lost in rapture – one undoubtedly musical and chemical rather than religious – whooping exultantly as the song tumbles to a close. Richard and Linda were over. Long may their work live on.
Extras: 8/10. A 72-page hardback book with new essays (and a great deal of formatting and spelling mistakes) and previously unseen photos.
Bob Dylan has recorded a new episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour programme, due for broadcast later today (September 21) via Sirius XM.
Dylan last hosted the show in 2009 but has revived the format in order to highlight his recent Tennessee bourbon collaboration with Heaven’s Door. Naturally, the theme of the new show is whiskey.
“It’s been so long, I’m not even sure if we should call it Theme Time Radio Hour any more,” says Dylan in the show’s intro, which you can hear below. “I mean, does anybody still have a radio? Some folks might even be listening on a smart toaster.”
In another clip, you can hear Dylan introduce Charlie Poole’s version of “Hesitation Blues”, which uses verses from a song known as “The River Was Whiskey”:
Theme Time Radio Hour airs today on Sirius XM’s Deep Tracks channel at 5pm BST.
Neil Young has revealed the tracklisting for the long-awaited second volume of his archive anthology.
Archives Vol II: 1972-1976 is a ten-disc boxset, due for release on November 20 exclusively through Neil Young archives. Pre-ordering begins on October 16.
The set features 12 songs that have never been released before, as well as 50 previously unreleased alternate versions.
The unreleased songs include “Letter From ‘Nam”, “Come Along and Say You Will”, “Goodbye Christmas On The Shore” and “Sweet Joni” from 1972-3; “Greensleeves” from the On The Beach period; “Born To Run” with Crazy Horse; and a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Raised On Robbery”.
See the full tracklisting below:
* previously unreleased song
# previously unreleased version
Disc 1 (1972-1973)
Everybody’s Alone
1. Letter From ‘Nam *
2. Monday Morning #
3. The Bridge #
4. Time Fades Away #
5. Come Along and Say You Will *
6. Goodbye Christmas on the Shore *
7. Last Trip to Tulsa
8. The Loner #
9. Sweet Joni *
10. Yonder Stands the Sinner
11. L.A. (Story)
12. LA. #
13. Human Highway
Disc 2 (1973)
Tuscaloosa
1. Here We Go in the Years
2. After the Gold Rush
3. Out on the Weekend
4. Harvest
5. Old Man
6. Heart of Gold
7. Time Fades Away
8. Lookout Joe
10. New Mama
11. Alabama
12. Don’t Be Denied
Disc 3 (1973)
Tonight’s The Night
1. Speakin’ Out Jam *
2. Everybody’s Alone #
3. Tired Eyes
4. Tonight’s the Night
5. Mellow My Mind
6. World on a String
7. Speakin’ Out
8. Raised on Robbery (Joni Mitchell song) *
9. Roll Another Number
10. New Mama
11. Albuquerque
12. Tonight’s the Night Part II
Disc 4 (1973)
Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live
1. Tonight’s the Night
2. Mellow My Mind
3. World on a String
4. Speakin’ Out
5. Albuquerque
6. New Mama
7. Roll Another Number
8. Tired Eyes
9. Tonight’s the Night Part II
10. Walk On
11. The Losing End #
Disc 5 (1974)
Walk On
1. Winterlong
2. Walk On
3. Bad Fog of Loneliness #
4. Borrowed Tune
5. Traces #
6. For the Turnstiles
7. Ambulance Blues
8. Motion Pictures
9. On the Beach
10. Revolution Blues
11. Vampire Blues
12. Greensleeves *
Disc 6 (1974)
The Old Homestead
1. Love/Art Blues #
2. Through My Sails #
3. Homefires
4. Pardon My Heart #
5. Hawaiian Sunrise #
6. LA Girls and Ocean Boys *
7. Pushed It Over the End #
8. On the Beach #
9. Vacancy #
10. One More Sign #
11. Frozen Man *
12. Give Me Strength *
13. Bad News Comes to Town #
14. Changing Highways #
15. Love/Art Blues #
16. The Old Homestead
17. Daughters *
18. Deep Forbidden Lake
19. Love/Art Blues #
Disc 7 (1974)
Homegrown
1. Separate Ways
2. Try
3. Mexico
4. Love Is a Rose
5. Homegrown
6. Florida
7. Kansas
8. We Don’t Smoke It No More
9. White Line
10. Vacancy
11. Little Wing
12. Star of Bethlehem
Disc 8 (1975)
Dume
1. Ride My Llama #
2. Cortez the Killer
3. Don’t Cry No Tears
4. Born to Run *
5. Barstool Blues
6. Danger Bird
7. Stupid Girl
8. Kansas #
9. Powderfinger #
10. Hawaii #
11. Drive Back
12. Lookin’ for a Love
13. Pardon My Heart
14. Too Far Gone #
15. Pocahontas #
16. No One Seems to Know #
Disc 9 (1976)
Look Out For My Love
1. Like a Hurricane
2. Lotta Love
3. Lookin’ for a Love
4. Separate Ways #
5. Let It Shine #
6. Long May You Run
7. Fontainebleau
8. Traces #
9. Mellow My Mind #
10. Midnight on the Bay #
11. Stringman #
12. Mediterranean *
13. Ocean Girl #
14. Midnight on the Bay #
15. Human Highway #
Disc 10 (1976)
Odeon Budokan
1. The Old Laughing Lady #
2. After the Gold Rush #
3. Too For Gone #
4. Old Man #
5. Stringinan #
6. Don’t Cry No Tears #
7. Cowgirl in the Sand #
8. Lotto Love #
9. Drive Back #
10. Cortez the Killer #
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now and also available to order online by clicking here – features a deep dive into the making of PJ Harvey’s 1995 album To Bring You My Love, the first of many radical career inventions for its creator. Peter Watts talks to Harvey’s closest collaborators about toy dinosaurs, skittle alleys in Dorset and Bob Dylan bootlegs – and how a creative rebirth became a definitive moment in Harvey’s remarkable career.
Towards the end of 1993, Harvey saw a student production of Hamlet, scored by John Parish, in Yeovil. An old friend, Parish first worked with Harvey in 1988, when she joined his band, Automatic Dlamini. The two stayed close and, after listening to her latest demos, Parish found himself working on Harvey’s first solo album.
“Polly had the arrangements very much in place already,” says Parish. “It was a case of trying to embellish what was already there, making it sound better and more engaging, enhance the strengths. The job on To Bring You My Love – as it often is with Polly – is identifying what you can take from a demo that, firstly, really works for the listener, who has no particular emotional attachment to the recording, and, secondly, what the artist loves about the song.”
To Bring You My Love was recorded during autumn 1994 at The Who’s old studio, Townhouse 3 in Battersea. Also present was co-producer Flood – real name Mark Ellis – who became another essential member of Harvey’s team. While the To Bring You My Love demos had been recorded at home by Harvey with keyboards, drum machine, guitar and vocals, they were typically strong and efficiently presented – she even had some of the string arrangements down pat. In the studio, however, such diligence caused problems for the musicians making the album, who struggled to add their own musical imprint.
Among them was American guitarist Joe Gore. “We met in a rehearsal place in London,” he recalls. “The first song was something like ‘Naked Cousin’. After we had finished, she and Flood looked a bit downcast. I had been playing very gung-ho and it soon became clear that what she wanted to hear was what she put on the demos. The process was, ‘Can you play it more like I played it?’ Everything I was playing was not leading to happiness. I had just discovered this fabulous fuzz pedal and brought three over for me, John and Polly. There was silence before Flood said drily, ‘Well, Norman Greenbaum has arrived.’ It was not a compliment.”
Gore now thinks that Harvey was using the record to step away from her old role as a guitar player in favour of becoming more of a frontperson. His job was to be what he describes as “her prosthetic guitar hand… At this point, she was focused on being a frontperson. She was taking dance lessons and wanted to be a commanding frontperson who didn’t have a guitar strapped to her.”
Having played with Tom Waits, Gore had acquired a knack for the weird and the scratchy. On “Working For The Man” he played guitar through a toy plastic amplifier miked up inside a shoe box. Meanwhile, on “Long Snake Moan”, he ‘played’ a toy dinosaur, recording its roar through his guitar pick-up.
“I went from contributing nothing to inserting myself on most of the tracks,” he says. “Almost everything I suggested got in. We had a similar process for Is This Desire?, when I came in with more prepared ideas and more of them were tossed out in the first round. She has the right to do that. Polly is like Tom [Waits]. An auteur in the classic sense. She conceived and executed everything. One time, Tom was talking about another artist and he said, ‘It sounds like she was taking her songs to the hairdresser and the make-up artist.’ He was saying that it was the producer who was giving the songs their style and the artist was relying on somebody else to find the gestalt of the project. It’s not like that with Polly. She knows what she wants.”
You can read much more about PJ Harvey and the making of To Bring You My Love in the November 2020 issue of Uncut, out now!
Rock history tells us that there is usually a pretty good reason why chart-topping bands take an extended break. From rehab to road weariness to the age-old ‘musical differences’ – code for mutual loathing brought on by too long in each other’s company – it rarely bodes well.
Doves’ 11-year absence, on the other hand, has, we’re told, simply been the result of midlife drift, the kind that sees old friends lose touch as real-world responsibilities take over. Having explored various musical avenues with their solo projects – Jez and Andy Williams with Black Rivers, Jimi Goodwin with solo debut Odludek – the trio began making music again in 2017, reigniting a 30-year partnership dating back to their days in dance outfit Sub Sub.
It’s a narrative in keeping with an everyman appeal that has seen their combination of romantic, widescreen rock and cryptic, small-screen lyrics – think Cold Feet, as filmed by David Lean – earn them two consecutive No 1 albums in the wake of 2000 debut Lost Souls, with 2002’s The Last Broadcast and 2005’s Some Cities. Kingdom Of Rust didn’t do badly either, reaching No 2 in 2009.
However, while The Universal Want’s lyrics are typically enigmatic, they suggest that Doves – who all turned 50 this year – have been through the emotional mill during their decade away. In the run-up to release, Jimi Goodwin has spoken of “a lot of casualties in my past… we shouldn’t be afraid to reference the damage that life can do”, and their fifth album comes with a cathartic feel. Densely layered – four of the 11 tracks are over five minutes – it’s also as complex as a Rubik’s Cube, the elaborate arrangements owing more to progressive rock than contemporary pop.
Opener “Carousels” sets the tone. While the lyric is archetypal Doves – a nostalgic reminiscence of childhood holidays in North Wales – it’s musically fearless, building from a sample of Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen into an atmospheric, six-minute soundscape where soaring guitar glissandos and blistering techno bass merge in an “A Day In The Life”-inspired crescendo.
There’s a similarly bullish feel to “I Will Not Hide”. Ostensibly a country-pop cousin to “Catch The Sun”, it manages to shoehorn burbling synths, helium-balloon vocals and a liquid, John Squire-esque guitar solo into four breathless minutes. If these are scene-setters, “Broken Eyes” is where everything clicks into place. A La’s-esque leftover from the Kingdom Of Rust sessions, it’s an instant classic forged from the simplest of materials. The specifics remain obscure – is Goodwin singing: “I can’t help it if you don’t feel satisfied” to his bandmates, or a lover? – but it hits home like a slap in the face, hinting at inner turmoil.
There’s a different, darker kind of tumult in “Cathedrals Of The Mind”. Set against a dazzling musical backdrop where cascading synths give way to a sample from a ’60s Black Panthers rally decrying police brutality and then to a dub-meets-ambient end section, its haunting lyric (“Every day I see your face/Everywhere I see those eyes/ But you’re not there”) could apply to the aftermath of any human tragedy. The emotional Geiger-counter flips into the red on a storming “Cycle Of Hurt”. Almost hypnotic in its despondency, it finds Goodwin asking rhetorically: “Have I got the nerve, to end this cycle of hurt?”, the tension erupting in an explosive guitar solo before an electronic voice repeats: “It’s a trick/It’s a trap.”
This being Doves, the lyrical storm clouds always come shot through with musical sunlight. “Prisoners” is a Tame Impala-informed northern soul nugget reminiscent of “Black And White Town”, while a stunning “For Tomorrow” sees the Rubik’s Cube turn again. Similar in feel to Rotary Connection’s “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun”, it’s a stone-cold classic, the cosmic desolation of the verses traded for renewed hope in a sky-scraping chorus of “From tomorrow, we will live again”.
The sense that, 20 years on from Lost Souls, Doves have come full circle is made explicit in the final two songs. Starting off as a prog-ish rumination on the pitfalls of consumerism, the title track is a slow burning epic, its “Sympathy For The Devil”-style groove mutating into a minimalist techno outro. If it acts as a flashback to sweaty nights at the Haçienda, a sublime “Forest House” soundtracks the comedown, a bucolic celebration of midlife tranquility.
The message is clear: Doves’ hedonistic past is largely behind them, but it informs everything they do. With their fifth album they’re taking strength from sadness, hope from despair, and wisdom from experience. In troubled times, The Universal Want is exactly what we need.
The Vox Phantom VI Special guitar that Ian Curtis played in the video to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is up for auction at Bonhams, where it is expected to fetch £60-80,000.
Curtis also played the guitar on “Heart And Soul” and on Joy Division’s 1980 European Tour. After Curtis’s death, it was used by Bernard Sumner (on New Order’s “Everything’s Gone Green”) and by Johnny Marr in Electronic, before being passed back to Curtis’s daughter Natalie in 2002.
In an interview for Pat Graham’s book Instrument, Sumner says, “Ian really liked this guitar. The Phantom had tons of effects built into it, as an added bonus… The guitar has a battery in it, and if you press the buttons in the wrong combination it will go into self-oscillate mode and start to make this strange twittering sound that Ian liked very much. It is a pretty wacky guitar. It sounded like some of the thinner guitars on Velvet Underground tracks, clean and jangly.”
Read more about the guitar – and bid! – here.
This winter, Brian Eno will release Film Music 1976 – 2020 via UMC – a collection of his film and television soundtrack work.
Spanning five decades, it includes music from Heat, Dune, Top Boy and Trainspotting, as well as seven previously unreleased tracks.
Hear “Ship In A Bottle” from The Lovely Bones below:
Film Music 1976 – 2020 will be released digitally, on double vinyl and on CD on November 13, although the physical versions won’t be released in the US until January 22. Pre-order the album here and peruse the tracklisting below:
‘Top Boy (Theme)’ from ‘Top Boy’ – Series 1, directed by Yann Demange, 2011
‘Ship In A Bottle’ from ‘The Lovely Bones’, directed by Peter Jackson, 2009
‘Blood Red’ from ‘Francis Bacon’s Arena’, directed by Adam Low, 2005
‘Under’ from ‘Cool World’, directed by Ralph Bakshi, 1992
‘Decline And Fall’ from ‘O Nome da Morte’, directed by Henrique Goldman, 2017
‘Prophecy Theme’ from ‘Dune’, directed by David Lynch, 1984
‘Reasonable Question’ from ‘We Are As Gods’, directed by David Alvarado / Jason Sussberg, 2020
‘Late Evening In Jersey’ from ‘Heat’, directed by Michael Mann, 1995
‘Beach Sequence’ from ‘Beyond The Clouds’, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1995
‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’ from ‘Married to the Mob’, directed by Jonathan Demme, 1988
‘Deep Blue Day’ from ‘Trainspotting’, directed by Danny Boyle, 1996
‘The Sombre’ from ‘Top Boy’ – Series 2, directed by Jonathan van Tulleken, 2013
‘Dover Beach’ from ‘Jubilee’, directed by Derek Jarman, 1978
‘Design as Reduction’ from ‘Rams’, directed by Gary Hustwit, 2018
‘Undersea Steps’ from ‘Hammerhead’, directed by George Chan, 2004
‘Final Sunset’ from ‘Sebastiane’, directed by Derek Jarman, 1976
‘An Ending (Ascent)’, from ‘For All Mankind’, directed by Al Reinert, 1989
To mark the 50th anniversary of his death on September 18, 1970, a new Jimi Hendrix exhibition has opened at London’s Masterpiece Art gallery.
Bold As Love: Celebrating Hendrix includes rare and unseen photographers of the rock legend by the likes of Ed Caraeff, Baron Wolman, Gered Mankowitz, David Montgomery, Ulvis Alberts and Charles Everest.
Accompanying the photographs will be two sculptures by Guy Portelli entitled Hey Joe and Wight Spirit — a large-scale glass mosaic panel which features the handprints of more than 80 musicians who performed at the 1970 Isle Of Wight festival, including the handprint of Hendrix himself which Portelli mapped from a photograph taken by Baron Wolman.
The exhibition also features the original Isle Of Wight 1970 WEM speaker system used by Hendrix at the festival, including his personal Fender neck headstock pieces and Univibe effects pedal.
Bold As Love: Celebrating Hendrix is at Masterpiece Art in Holland Park, London, until September 30. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the exhibition is by appointment only. For more details and to make an appointment, visit the Masterpiece Art website.
The Beatles: Get Back is a lavish 240-page hardcover book due to be published alongside Peter Jackson’s film documentary of the same name on August 31, 2021.
It tells the story of the creation of the 1970 album Let It Be via transcribed conversations drawn from over 120 recorded hours of The Beatles’ studio sessions, culminating in the historic final rooftop concert.
The book also features hundreds of previously unpublished images – including photos by Ethan A. Russell and Linda McCartney – plus a foreword by Peter Jackson and an introduction by Hanif Kureishi.
The Beatles: Get Back costs £40 and can be pre-ordered here. Watch a trailer for it below:
You can read much more about the making of The Beatles’ Let It Be and the Get Back film in the August 2020 issue of Uncut, which is still on sale here.
The great thing about pressing play on a new Todd Rundgren release is that you genuinely have no idea what it’s going to sound like. Will it be a sumptuous slice of blue-eyed soul? Will it be an intergalactic prog opus, a la Utopia? Will it be a synthy studio exploration, or a note-perfect Beatles homage? Or perhaps all of those things together, as on his 1973 masterpiece A Wizard, A True Star?
But as you can hear below, “Espionage” is something new again for the ever-evolving Rundgren. Featuring Iraqi-Canadian rapper Narcy, it’s an impressively on-point cosmic hip-hop voyage that wouldn’t sound out of place on Brainfeeder or Stones Throw:
“Espionage” is the first taster from Rundgren’s upcoming album Space Force, due to be unveiled in instalments over the next few months, with other guests including Sparks and Rivers Cuomo of Weezer.
To celebrate, Rundgren has agreed to undergo a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers, for our regular Audience With feature. So what do you want to ask a multi-faceted musical legend? Send your questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by Friday (September 18), and Todd will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
Jeff Tweedy’s new solo album Love Is The King will be released digitally by dBpm on October 23.
Hear two tracks from it below, “Guess Again” and “Love Is The King”:
“At the beginning of the lockdown I started writing country songs to console myself,” says Tweedy. “Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way. ‘Guess Again’ is a good example of the success I was having at pushing the world away, counting my blessings — taking stock in my good fortune to have love in my life. A few weeks later things began to sound like ‘Love Is The King’ — a little more frayed around the edges with a lot more fear creeping in. Still hopeful but definitely discovering the limits of my own ability to self soothe.”
Pre-order the digital album here (physical formats to follow) and check out the artwork and tracklisting below:
1. Love Is The King
2. Opaline
3. A Robin or A Wren
4. Gwendolyn
5. Bad Day Lately
6. Even I Can See
7. Natural Disaster
8. Save It For Me
9. Guess Again
10. Troubled
11. Half-Asleep
This Friday (September 18), Tweedy and his band will be playing a drive-in show at the Outdoor Theater in McHenry, IL. You can buy tickets for the livestream here.
In this issue, John Fogerty talks about the influence that one of his favourite bands had on Creedence Clearwater Revival: “Booker T & The MG’s were our idols and our template for how you ought to be as a band. They were unselfish in their music.”
While I suspect Fogerty’s observation was more about the MG’s’ creative generosity of spirit, I’d like to think that the phrase “unselfish in their music” also applies to the joy they brought listeners. It’s a positive trait I’m sure is true of many of the musicians we write about in Uncut – whether it’s Polly Jean Harvey’s phantasmagorical career reinventions, Creedence’s ramble tamble adventures, Idles’ cathartic volume, Isaac Hayes’ extravagantly rich manifesto, Tom Petty’s understated musical ingenuity, Matt Berninger’s midlife melancholy or other artists you’ll find elsewhere in this month’s issue.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR
Beyond that estimable lineup, I’m thrilled we’ve got a Hüsker Dü piece in this issue – the last time we wrote about them in any depth was way back in Take 69! I’d also like to thank reader Dave Nwokedi, who mentioned Steel Pulse in passing during a recent email conversation. We’ve not often written about the UK’s late-’70s/early-’80s reggae scene, so I’m delighted that our Making Of Steel Pulse’s “Ku Klux Klan” is one of this month’s highlights.
By the time I write next month’s Editor’s Letter, I’ll have started work on our Albums Of The Year lists. At the moment, I’m listening to the North Americans’ new album Roped In, due in October on Third Man; serene and immersive psychedelic folk. It’s heartening that there’s still so much good new music being made, despite everything, so far into the year. And there’s at least one more exceptionally good album (as yet unannounced) that’s been on heavy rotation here for a week or so…
Anyway, thanks again for your continued support and loyalty to Uncut in 2020. It means a lot – and I’m pleased to report that we’ve got some excellent issues lined up to take us into 2021. But, as ever, please write to us – letters@www.uncut.co.uk. It’s always good to hear from you.
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner
CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR
CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR
PJ Harvey, Tom Petty, Idles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Matt Berninger, Steel Pulse, Hüsker Dü, Laura Veirs, Chris Hillman, Isaac Hayes and Hen Ogledd all feature in the new Uncut, dated November 2020 and in UK shops from September 17 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.
PJ HARVEY: 25 years after To Bring You My Love, we talk to Harvey’s closest collaborators about toy dinosaurs, Dorset skittle alleys and Dylan bootlegs – and how a creative rebirth in 1995 sparked off her remarkable career. “It built an audience that was expecting to be challenged from record to record…”
OUR FREE CD! DOWN BY THE WATER: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the month’s releases, including songs by Songhoy Blues, Sufjan Stevens, Hen Ogledd, Garcia Peoples, Diana Jones, Fuzz, Adrianne Lenker, Andy Bell, Magik Markers and more.
This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.
Inside the issue, you’ll find:
TOM PETTY: We review the expanded Wildflowers & All The Rest set, and speak to Benmont Tench about Petty’s journey to making the record and his future plans for it
IDLES: As they release their third album, Ultra Mono, we catch up with the combustible Bristol five-piece offering an unflinching response to terrible times
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL: John Fogerty, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford look back at their turbulent 1970, a year when they became the biggest band in the world with Cosmo’s Factory
MATT BERNINGER: The National singer unveils his first solo LP, produced by Booker T. Has the “sad-sack, grungecore guy” lightened up?
LAURA VEIRS: Album by album with the Portland singer-songwriter
STEEL PULSE: The making of “Ku Klux Klan”
HÜSKER DÜ: Bob Mould takes us through a groundbreaking career, from Minneapolis dive bars and abandoned churches to concept albums – “We were single-minded, driven and prolific…”
CHRIS HILLMAN: The “good lieutenant” in The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and more finally tells his own story
ISAAC HAYES: In an archive interview from 1971, Melody Maker’s Richard Williams encounters Hayes in his Stax HQ – “Music is the universal language, it keeps society together when nothing else will work…”
CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR
In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Garcia Peoples, Hen Ogledd, Adrianne Lenker, Songhoy Blues, Diana Jones, Magik Markers and more, and archival releases from Tom Petty, Lou Reed, Thin Lizzy, New Order, Barbara Lewis and others. We catch Lankum and a tribute to Joe Strummer live online; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Tenet, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Roger Waters’ Us + Them and Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine; while in books there’s Jimi Hendrix, William Burroughs and the New Romantics.
Our front section, meanwhile, features Perry Farrell, Jakko Jakszyk and The Mountain Goats, and we introduce Bab L’Bluz.
You can still pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.
For more information on all the different ways to keep reading Uncut during lockdown, click here.
Lambchop have announced the release of a new covers album called Trip via City Slang on November 13.
It features six songs, all chosen by a different member of the band. Hear their version of Wilco’s “Reservations” (as selected by Matthew McCaughan) below
“As with all the covers on Trip it was chosen not so much for it’s content or as a tribute to the original but for what our group could bring out in the recording of it,” says Kurt Wagner. “In this case I think it best demonstrates who we are as a group and what we are currently capable of expressing.”
Trip was recorded December 2–7, 2019, at Battletapes in Nashville, TN, and produced, engineered, and mixed by Jeremy Ferguson (with the exception of “Reservations” which was co‐mixed by Ferguson and Matthew McCaughan). Check out the full tracklisting below and pre-order here.
1. Reservations (Jeff Tweedy) – chosen by Matthew McCaughan
2. Where Grass Won’t Grow (Earl “Peanut” Montgomery) – chosen by Paul Niehaus
3. Shirley (Jamie Klimek and Jim Crook) – chosen by Matt Swanson
4. Golden Lady (Stevie Wonder) – chosen by Andy Stack
5. Love is Here and Now You’re Gone (Brian Holland, Edward Holland and Lamont Dozier) – chosen by Tony Crow
6. Weather Blues (James McNew) – chosen by Kurt Wagner
On November 13, Columbia/Legacy Recordings will release Johnny Cash And The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, an album that “reimagines” 12 Johnny Cash performances in new symphonic arrangements.
Produced by Nick Patrick and Don Reedman and recorded at Abbey Road Studio 2, Johnny Cash And The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is the latest in a series of RPO albums featuring similar treatments of songs the likes of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. Watch a trailer for the project below:
The recordings of “I Walk The Line” and “Flesh and Blood” used in making Johnny Cash And The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra are both previously unreleased alternate takes from Johnny Cash’s soundtrack sessions for the 1970 film I Walk The Line.
“I believe we have captured the emotion, sensitivity and genuine honesty of Johnny Cash through his story telling and his touching and captivating vocal performances,” says Don Reedman.
“My father, Johnny Cash, was in some ways an orchestra unto himself,” adds John Carter Cash, named as executive producer of the album. “I remember when my father introduced me to the RPO. I was around ten years old and he and I went to see three films from the James Bond saga at a festival in New York. When the theme for Goldfinger began, he leaned over to me. ‘That’s the finest orchestra in the world, son,’ he said. ‘That’s the Royal Philharmonic.’… He knew the music of the RPO. He respected them all throughout his life… I know my father would be enormously excited to see this new album become a reality.”
Van Morrison turned 75 on August 31, and for the last month or so, various Irish music luminaries have been paying tribute by covering his songs for Hot Press.
The series came to a stirring climax yesterday with Sinead O’Connor’s cover of “Who Was That Masked Man” from Veedon Fleece. Listen below:
Other contributors to the Rave On, Van Morrison series have included Bob Geldof, Paul Brady and Irish president Michael D Higgins. View those highlights below and watch the whole series here.
The sad news came through this morning (September 12) that reggae pioneer Toots Hibbert of Toots And The Maytals has died, aged 77. Uncut were honoured to interview him just a couple of months ago, on the release of his new album Got To Be Tough. Here’s Graeme Thomson’s full feature, which originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Uncut, Take 280.
“Is a good day,” pronounces Frederick “Toots” Hibbert breezily, calling Uncut from his studio in Kingston. “Is good here all the time.” It’s precisely the kind of blunt positivity we’ve come to expect from the man who has been fronting the mighty Maytals for the best part of 60 years, a man whose songs – vibrant, righteous, urgent, joyful – are synonymous with the golden age of Jamaican music.
Alongside Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Dekker, Hibbert was part of reggae’s first international wave. The youngest son of a Baptist minister, he grew up singing gospel in his father’s church choir. With its echoes of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Ray Charles, his soulful voice is one of music’s most evocative sounds, encompassing all the sweetness and sweat of his homeland, from chapel to dancehall, lush countryside to febrile inner city.
Hibbert made the same journey in his teens as his great friend and contemporary Bob Marley, moving from the rural outlands – in his case, the town of May Pen – to the Kingston ghetto of Trench Town. There he formed The Maytals in 1962 with “Raleigh” Gordon and “Jerry” Matthias.
Working first with producer Coxsone Dodd at Studio One, and later Prince Buster, Byron Lee, Leslie Kong and Warrick Lyn, The Maytals blended ska, reggae, soul, blues and R&B with soulful three-part harmonies. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, they defined the era with the genre-minting “Do The Reggay”, jailbird’s lament “54-46, That’s My Number” and the karmic curse of “Pressure Drop” – alongside “Monkey Man”, “Time Tough”, “Pomp And Pride”, “Funky Kingston” and dozens more classics. In their prime, The Maytals were a bigger deal than The Wailers. Their record of 31 No 1 hits in Jamaica has never been equalled. “I was on top of the moon, man, in those days,” says Hibbert. “But we still didn’t get paid.”
Signing to Island in the early 1970s, they became Toots & The Maytals and appeared in the classic rude boy film The Harder They Come, featuring twice on the hugely successful soundtrack album. They toured with The Who and the Stones and proved a key source for the punky reggae ska revival: The Specials covered “Monkey Man”, The Clash “Pressure Drop”. Ever adventurous, Hibbert has since recorded with Willie Nelson and Jim Dickinson, and even had a swing at Radiohead’s “Let Down”. Every step, he says, has been guided by a powerful sense of destiny. “People over here say, ‘Hey Toots, you’re a star, man!’ I say, ‘No, I’m a son.’ You know what I mean? It was the call of the Almighty. He blows in me. I have different talents from other artists.”
At 77, the man Ziggy Marley calls Uncle Toots is still burning bright. He was last seen in these parts touring with The Specials in 2017. Now the latest iteration of The Maytals are back with a new album, Got To Be Tough, the first since Flip And Twist in 2010. It’s a lively, engaged affair, largely self-played and self-produced, with assistance from Zak Starkey on guitar, Sly Dunbar on drums and Cyril Neville on percussion. There are characteristic calls to keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground, as well as a punchy reading of Marley’s classic “Three Little Birds”.
The album title is a manifesto of sorts. Hibbert was struck on the head with a bottle thrown by an audience member at a concert in Virginia in 2013, an incident which left him shaken but unbowed. As we shall see, he has been through worse and survived: false imprisonment, “deep-down scams”, not to mention being saddled with a stage name he hates. “When The Maytals came in, we had to go through a lot of different vibes before we be what we are today,” he says. “I keep telling people that: ‘You have got to be tough. Don’t just give up in life. Be strong and believe in what you believe in.’”
From “Pressure Drop” to new tracks like “Just Brutal” and “Got To Be Tough”, I always think of your best songs as short, sharp sermons. Has the writing process changed over the years?
All my songs tell a story. A true story. Things just come to me and I write. An intelligent spirit came to me from the Lord, and we have to make sure that all of my words in my songs are permanent, intelligent and good to the ears of the people – children, big people, all people: my family, my friends, my musicians, the whole world. That’s how it is, and how it has always been. My vibes are coming from my spirit.
Your version of “Three Little Birds” has an energy that turns it into an almost completely different song. Why did you cover it?
It’s a good song! Me and Bob were very close friends, and bredren. There are quite a few of his songs that I’d like to sing one of these days. I just asked his son, Ziggy, “Let’s do this song for your daddy,” and Ziggy said, “Yes, Uncle Toots.” He call me Uncle Toots! I went home, I played all the instruments, as usual, and then Ziggy go to California and he came in on top. I put a different effort into it, between reggae and R&B.
Can you remember when you first met Bob?
I can remember it, but I don’t know the date! I met him in Trench Town, in the ’60s. When I first came to Kingston, after a while I live in Trench Town, and I get to meet Bob and Bunny [Livingstone] and Peter Tosh, and a lot of great people like that: Alton Ellis; Bongo Herman, the conga player; Byron Lee; “Chicken Scratch” Perry! Scratch is different, is all I can say. He has remained the same. He makes a lot of jokes, he makes you laugh, he makes you think. He’s a good friend. I go with these people, and it was quite nice. I didn’t plan it, but me and my friends, “Raleigh” Gordon and “Jerry” Mathias, three young boys, we started playing. We started with my compositions, we taught each other great things, and then I create the name The Maytals. I compose that name and I still have it. There was no Toots at the time. Toots is my nickname. I don’t like it when people call me Toots these days. My brother gave it to me, but he has died now.
So, what does Toots mean?
It mean nothing! It mean a laugh. You know: [high camp voice] “Hey, Toots!” I don’t like it, but I have to like it, because it’s part of my career. Friends call me by my spiritual name, Naya, but all my friends accept Toots as my career name all these years. My name is Toots & The Maytals on stage. Everyone who appear on stage with me, they share the name Maytals with me. I’m more than one person, I consider.
Are you still in touch with the original Maytals?
Raleigh died a few years ago now, but Jerry is still living in Brooklyn. I talk to about the old days when I see him. The only time I see him is when I go to Brooklyn and visit him. He’s still going strong.
You were making your way at the same time as The Wailers, The Skatalites, The Upsetters, The Pioneers, The Heptones. Was there rivalry?
That was just musical. It was exciting. But you know, the spirit that Bob has is very clean. I wrote a song [on 1972 album Slatyam Stoot] called “Redemption Song”, and Bob listened to it and said he wanted to write one like that. I said, “Yeah man, go ahead Bob.” We had a good thing going ever since we met.
Your voice is so distinctive and soulful. What were your influences growing up?
My voice was developed going to church with my family. I love singing; singing was what I thought I should do because it was born in me and I grew into it, straight from the church. We never talk about it, but my parents already know what I’m going to be.
The story goes that “54-46, That’s My Number” is titled after your prisoner ID, when you were wrongfully jailed in 1966 for possession of marijuana…
[Laughs] Well, I’ve never really been to prison, you know. It was just politics. I never smoked weed in those times. I never do nothing like that. I was just finished leaving school, but I won this festival [the inaugural Jamaican Independence Festival Popular Song Competition] with “Bam Bam” and people get jealous, and frame me for weed. I got the chance to meet some people, one of them was Chris Blackwell, and after the festival I was supposed to go away on my first Europe tour, but then some kind of musical politics came in. They couldn’t do nothing else than what they did because they didn’t have goodness in them heart for me. It was politics. I never go to prison. They bring me to a special place, where I have my own clothes, I got my own food from my home, I got my guitar, I got all the comforts that I have at home. When you go to prison you don’t have those comforts.
It was a kind of house arrest?
Yeah. Politics served me out, for 30 pieces of silver. They get to hold me back from my success. It’s a long story. So, what did I do? I wrote a song about it. I still have to feed on my enemies who did it. It was three persons. I can’t call no names, but I think they all die now. They were in the music industry, or something like that. But I have a good mind for them.
The Jamaican music industry seemed fairly rough and ready back then.
Well, we never used to get paid. All my good songs, all we get sometimes is three shillings for three of us, sometimes five shillings, sometimes 10 shillings – sometimes we got nothing. We just have to sing some more. There was a criminal element. Even now, it’s still there.
You popularised the term reggae with “Do The Reggay” in 1968. Some people say you invented it.
I never invented it. Something like reggae was playing in Jamaica long time, but nobody knew what to call the beat. Some people called it blue beat, or boogie beat, all different names, and then I came up with the word “reggae”. I realised I had to put the “rrrr” in the music! I had to let the people know the name of the music we play.
“Pressure Drop” is one of the lodestars of reggae. Do you remember writing it?
I remember everything I wrote! When we have all these problems with money, like I told you, somebody was supposed to pay us our first one or two thousand pounds – but we never get it. I wrote this song which, instead of trying to fight this person or do him any harm, it said, “Pressure going to drop on you.” But he knew I was talking to him. Again, I can’t call no names! I wrote that song about that moment because he didn’t pay me my money. It felt just like another song to me, I didn’t think it was going to be so great. All these songs were No 1 in Jamaica. I had, like, 31 No 1 records in those days, on the two stations – RJR and JBC – which no other artist ever get to do.
“Pressure Drop” has been covered by everyone from The Clash to Robert Palmer. You’ve recorded versions with Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. Do you have a favourite?
I just make it out to be a very nice thing to happen to reggae and Toots & The Maytals. It was a good thing, to meet other great artists and to make sure we are one family – black or white, we don’t care. Keith? He’s an amazing writer, musician, creator, producer. He’s everything that is great in music.
The Maytals performed “Sweet And Dandy” and “Pressure Drop” on The Harder They Come. Internationally, was that a game changer for you?
I think I was on top of the moon, man, in those days – but we still didn’t get paid. Up until now, I still don’t get paid for that performance in the [film]. But I love it, man, because of the fellow who stars in it: Jimmy Cliff. It was one of the best adverts for Jamaica, with Jimmy and all these people who put it together. Jimmy is still my friend and my brother, and we still come together.
Chris Blackwell eventually signed The Maytals to Dragon, an Island subsidiary, around the time he signed The Wailers. Did you and Bob discuss the merits of Blackwell and Island?
Chris kept listening to my songs. He’s a great guy, and he’s a great guy for listening to a record and telling you if it’s going to be a hit or not. He have good ears! Me and Bob didn’t get that close to talk about business. Neither Bob or myself, nor Bunny, we don’t know what this contract means to our career. People never can tell you what a contract means, unless you get a good corporate lawyer, which we never knew in those days. We didn’t converse about that.
At Island, you made a string of classic albums in the mid-’70s: Funky Kingston, In The Dark, Reggae Got Soul…
It build up a career in such a dynamic way that I can never forget. The albums are all special, because I have to work them everywhere I go, but Funky Kingston is really special, yes. I think that is one of my best songs, also. It was conversed by me and Chris Blackwell. He told me, “Hey man, I want you to sing a song like [The Beginning Of The End’s] ‘Funky Nassau’.” He keep on talking, talking, talking about this for about an hour. I said, “OK, Chris, I’m going to sit beside my two friends and take my guitar with me”, and I actually planned it. In five minutes’ time I go in the studio and we record it together. Jackie Johnson, Hux Brown, all the musicians, we went in and did the song – one time. We didn’t have to re-record anything, not even the voice. One time, that was it. Those are the times you just can’t forget.
It’s a very different way of working than nowadays. You played most of the new album yourself.
I miss the old days. In the old days it would be my bass player, guitar player, keyboard player, we would go in the studio and we would do it live. Everybody would have the feel, but I would always say, “Do it my way.” I miss that. On this album, I created the music and I produced it myself, with Nigel [Burrell] alongside as a co-producer. I played everything. Bass, guitar, keyboards, the kick drum, the arrangements – everything [apart] from blowing horns. It is the first time I have done a whole album like that. The Maytals live in various countries, and that’s why I start to do things by myself, because it’s hard for them to come down so many times. I play what I think I would ask them to play for me on these songs. But I have a good memory of how it used to be, that’s why I can get the similar sound in the studio, and it’s all right. I play my bass like Jackie [Jackson] would be playing it. In other words, I prefer the old times, and I still respect the new times.
“Monkey Man” was covered by The Specials during the ska revival, and you toured with the band in 2017. How was that?
We did shows all over the place with The Specials, it was so nice. The audience are usually always with the rock’n’roll, [but] in those gigs, it was mostly ska fans, and the skinhead gave a good turnout! It was really, really crazy – but great.
Zak Starkey is head of your new label, Trojan Jamaica, and he also plays guitar on the new album. Do you know him well?
Not really at all. Just enough for him to know Toots & The Maytals. I met him once, and we had a good time. When Zak came, he said he wanted to be a part of it – but there were no parts for anyone to come in, because I had played all the parts already. He just put his guitar on and respect what I done. Beautiful. He was very nice to work with. Anyone who played anything, I told them what to play. Sly Dunbar, too. Like you read a script and follow it. It was all good.
It has been 10 years since your last studio album. What took you so long?
I was just trying to keep away from the audience for a while. It’s just my style. I don’t want to overdo nothing. Songs need to find the right time and the right company. You need the right people to do justice to a good song.
Was the hiatus related to the injury you received on stage in 2013?
That was some time ago, quite a few years now. I get hurt very badly. I think about it, but I try to put it aside – because I’m still alive. I never felt like stopping. I went there to sing a free show for all the students there. This guy, he was so happy singing the song with me, and then he went away and he just drink something that he shouldn’t have done. He had something in his pocket, and he drank it. He didn’t throw the bottle at me, it just happened that it catch me.
The perpetrator was sentenced to six months in jail, although you pleaded for leniency.
He was a young student. I forgive all those people, but I don’t forget.
What do you make of the state of reggae nowadays? Why is it less potent and popular than it was in the heyday of the ’70s and ’80s?
I think the younger generation has to pay more attention to what all the elders did before. From The Wailers, Jimmy Cliff, all the great singers in Jamaica that were born before them. They should pay more attention to their writing, their lyrics, to see that we were the ones who captured the world. Reggae is not overtaking the world the way it was with Bob, but there are still a lot of great people out there.
The tour for Got To Be Tough, which was postponed owing to the coronavirus, was billed in the press as a farewell tour. Is that still the case?
I never knew about that. I never tell nobody that. People have their own intentions, and they corrupt it in their minds, and corrupt other people. It was a scam, a deep-down scam, without me knowing anything about that. Unprofessional! I’m going to keep going all the time, man! You will see me again because I’m not going to resign for now. I keep on doing this thing. My audience don’t expect me to stop.
Got To Be Tough is out now on Trojan Jamaica/BMG
The original Southern Journey was a schlep undertaken by the American musicologist Alan Lomax in 1959. He and his then partner, English folksinger Shirley Collins, lugged an Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorder though Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina, collecting performances by church choirs, jug bands, chain gangs, barroom warblers, front-porch crooners and assorted other guitar-pluckers, harp-blowers and banjo-botherers. Lomax and Collins’ recordings were – and are – astonishing, a glorious trove of treasures hauled from the deepest recesses of the collective national memory. There was gold indeed in them thar hills.
Southern Journey (Revisited), a film by Rob Curry and Tim Plester, is first and foremost a retracing of Lomax and Collins’ steps. Curry and Plester have form here, having previously made the 2017 documentary The Ballad Of Shirley Collins, released around her comeback, aged 82 and after a 30-year silence, with the startlingly vigorous Lodestar. They head for the Deep South using America Over The Water, Collins’ account of the original Southern Journey, as a guidebook.
There is, inevitably, more going on with Southern Journey (Revisited) – or so the directors hope – than a mere re-beating of Lomax and Collins’ path. Southern Journey (Revisited) is a contribution to the already considerable canon of journalism and art hoping to understand and/or explain the rages, manias and follies of those portions of America – Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina prominent among them – who decided, in November 2016, to take their country’s chances with a manifestly unqualified real estate grifter turned gameshow host.
This impulse has resulted in some great work – one thinks of Sarah Smarsh’s fine memoir Heartland, or Drive-By Truckers’ seething The Unraveling. It has also resulted in quite a lot of the kind of expedition which has become derisively known in journalism as the Cletus Safari, as big-city reporters venture briefly into the boondocks, scare up a few picturesque yokels, diligently stenograph an amount of paranoid whining, and serve it up to their readers as reassurance that none of this is their fault.
Southern Journey (Revisited) is very much fit to be bracketed with more thoughtful recent explorations of the heartland. Set against the backdrop of the 2018 midterm elections, in which Republicans across the United States were dealt quite the kicking, it takes a wilfully unobtrusive approach – the people Curry and Plester meet along the way are encouraged to tell their own stories, and sing their own songs. The picture that emerges will ring true to anybody who has visited these places – the locals are far smarter than often given credit for, unaffectedly proud of their traditions, and more or less bottomlessly hospitable.
The film also finds that the music means no less, and sounds every bit as fine, as Lomax and Collins discovered – and the film meets people who recall meeting those original explorers, back in 1959. If anything fundamental has changed since then, it’s a heightened awareness among people of the South of the low opinion of them often held elsewhere. One of Curry and Plester’s subject reflects on how the only media they usually see only want to ask them about Trump. Another smiles wryly – yet affectionately – at the “hipster doofuses” who descend from time to time to record the gospel singers. It says much about the filmmakers’ – merited – confidence in their work that they left that in.
