Trans am

As Damon Albarn prepares to release his debut solo album, Everyday Robots, on Monday, and 20 years since the release of Parklife is celebrated, we delve back into the Uncut archive (July 2009, Take 146) and go behind the scenes of the sessions that produced Blur’s classic albums and reveal the conflicts that nearly destroyed the band… Interviews: Nick Hasted

Bruce Springsteen released a new EP, "American Beauty", for Record Store Day 2014. The a 12" vinyl EP featured four unreleased tracks - "American Beauty", "Mary Mary", "Hey Blue Eyes" and "Hurry Up Sundown". To accompany the release, Springsteen and the E Street Band shot an impromptu video for the song "American Beauty" before their gig at Charlotte, North Carolina on Record Store Day itself - April 19. Click below to watch the video.

The Hold Steady and Trans will join Courtney Barnett, Arc Iris, Syd Arthur, The Rails, Alice Boman, PHOX and Ethan Johns on the Uncut stage at this year's Great Escape festival in Brighton. Meanwhile, the festival, which takes place at 35 venues in Brighton between May 8-10, have also confirmed details of another 100 artists who will be performing.

There’s a Youtube clip of Ryuichi Sakamoto, dressed in black hunched over a piano playing the piece of music he is most famous for – “Forbidden Colours”, from the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. It is, I guess, the idea of Sakamoto we’re most familiar with – the artist, his instrument of choice, the music he is playing both delicate and fluid.

Fans of BBC’s Sherlock will know that the legendary detective has what he calls a Memory Palace, in which he is given to roam around, looking usually for clues to mysteries galore. My own equivalent is a sort of Memory Shed, where I am inclined to potter, most recently after reading Peter Watts’ excellent cover story on The Ramones in the current Uncut.

It’s recently been announced that a rare live recording of Syd Barrett guesting on guitar with The Last Minute Put Together Boogie Band in Cambridge in July 1972 is to be released – so now seems like a perfect time to revisit the extensive tribute we published in Uncut just after Barrett’s death in July 2006 (Take 112, September 2006). As well as a fantastic piece written by David Cavanagh, we hear from Syd’s friends, collaborators and admirers, including David Bowie, David Gilmour, Mick Rock, Peter Jenner, Damon Albarn, Julian Cope and Kevin Ayers. Shine on…

So this, I think, might be a new thing: not so much a live recreation of a classic album, but a live recreation of the sessions which resulted in a classic album. A show predicated not just on evocative songs recorded 25-odd years ago, but on a nostalgia for outtakes that – up until a month or so ago, at least – most of the crowd in the Hammersmith Apollo tonight had never even heard.

A trailer for the forthcoming lost Johnny Cash album Out Among The Stars has been released – scroll down to watch. It was revealed earlier this month that the late singer's estate had decided to release the album, which is made up of 12 previously unheard tracks and will be out on March 24, 2014. The songs, which were recorded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1981 and 1111 Sound Studios in 1984, were discovered by his son John Carter Cash at the Sony Music Archives.

Members of Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear and Beach House are among the artists teaming up up for a short tour in which they will perform Gene Clark's 1974 album No Other in its entirety.

The Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide that I wrote about here (along with a review of the forthcoming “Live At The Cellar Door” set) is on sale now, so I thought it might be useful to post a sampler of what you might expect in this Uncut special: namely, this piece by me on 1996’s underrated “Broken Arrow”. Every Neil album is reviewed in comparable detail – you can find details of where to buy the mag here…