June’s Black Deer festival have announced some changes to their line up for this year’s festival.
The festival is due to take place on June 25 – 27, 2021, at Eridge Park in Kent with headliners including Van Morrison and Saving Grace featuring Robert Plant.
Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls have now been added as headliner. The festival promise that a further announcement is “coming very soon”.
For full details of the current line-up, visit the official site here.
Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyric sheet for epochal 1964 song “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is currently being offered for sale by autograph dealers Moments In Time for a cool $2.2m.
If the asking price is met, it will break the record for rock lyrics, currently held by another Dylan song – the handwritten lyrics to “Like A Rolling Stone” fetched $2 million when they were sold at auction by Sotheby’s in New York in 2014.
The sheet of lyrics for “The Times They Are A-Changin'” was once owned by Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen, and is now being sold by an anonymous private collector. It shows an entire discarded verse, as well as number of cryptic notes such as “Carter Family Tune” and “42nd Street Photo Booth”. See it below:
Moments In Time are also selling the handwritten lyrics for two other Dylan songs: “Subterranean Homesick Blues” for $1.2 million and “Lady Lady Lay” for $650,000.
A new release date has been announced for The Psychedelic Furs’ long-awaited comeback album, Made Of Rain. It is now scheduled to come out on July 31 via Cooking Vinyl.
In the meantime you can hear another track from it, “No-One”, below:
Along with previous singles “Don’t Believe” and “You’ll Be Mine”, “No-One” can be streamed and downloaded immediately when you preorder the album from here.
You can read about the making of Made Of Rain – along with every other Psychedelic Furs album – in an extensive ‘album by album’ feature with the band in the new issue of Uncut. Order it now by clicking here.
Talk about foundational UK rock guitarists and it pretty much all comes back to Hank Marvin. After all, he was the first Briton to wield a Fender Stratocaster, imported at great expense back in 1959.
The unmistakable sound he wrung from it, with innovative use of the tremolo arm, was like a clarion call for a whole generation of future rock stars, including George Harrison, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Brian May and many more.
Marvin was just 16 when Cliff Richard recruited him for a UK tour, soon adding his guitar to No. 1s like “Living Doll” and “Please Don’t Tease”. 1960’s towering “Apache” established The Shadows as a hit-making machine in their own right, racking up no less than 14 Top 10 singles until their thunder was stolen somewhat by another gang of handsome young fellas with guitars. Undoubtedly, however, The Shadows had set the template for The Beatles and all British bands to follow.
While The Shadows have successfully reformed several times over the years – coming second in 1975’s Eurovision song contest, packing out Wembley with Cliff in 1989, a huge farewell tour in 2009/10 – Marvin has plenty of other strings to his guitar, playing with everyone from Roger Daltrey to Jean Michel Jarre and Dire Straits to Duane Eddy. More recently, he’s been concentrating on performing and releasing with his Gypsy Jazz Trio.
So what do you want to ask an original guitar master? Send your questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by Wednesday April 22 and Hank will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
Over the past few months, there have been whispers that Joni Mitchell is back in the studio. If true, it’s extraordinary news considering that the songwriter suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm in March 2015, which left her needing to relearn how to walk.
If these rumoured sessions do bear fruit, of course, it’s wouldn’t be the first time that Mitchell has dramatically emerged from retirement. Back in October 2006, she revealed she was in the studio, returning from a self-imposed hiatus begun after the release of 2002’s Travelogue, an orchestral reimagining of some of her older songs. Two Starbucks compilations in 2005 – one of her favourite songs by others and one of her own songs chosen by Bob Dylan, Prince, Elvis Costello and more – had piqued her interest in music again, and the War On Terror had galvanised her urge to write. “When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it’s time for artists to make their mark,” she told the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian newspaper.
Shine, her 19th studio album, appeared in September 2007 on Hear Music, the label co-owned by Concord Music Group and Starbucks. It wasn’t an unusual move for the time – Paul McCartney, Sonic Youth and The Beach Boys all released music through the label – but the cognitive dissonance in releasing Shine, an album outwardly concerned with the environment, in collaboration with a company associated with single-use cups and lids was puzzling.
Now the record, Mitchell’s last to date, is receiving its first vinyl reissue via a Concord subsidiary, Craft Recordings, and as an album whose purpose is protest, its powerful lyrics are fitting for our present time. Mitchell is angry about the desecration of the Earth (“This Place”), about war (“If I Had A Heart”) and about mobile phones (“Shine”, “Bad Dreams”), and she conveys these concerns through occasionally great imagery – on “Bad Dreams” she sings, “So near the jaws of our machines/We live in these electric scabs/These legions were once lakes.”
Mitchell mostly doesn’t attempt the jolts and meandering melodies of her earlier work, and instead appears still, in an act of observation, taking note of the world around her to varying degrees of unrest: “Sparkle on the ocean/Eagle at the top of a tree/Those crazy crows always making a commotion/This land is home to me,” she sings to open “This Place”, before concluding: “I feel like Geronimo/I used to be as trusting as Cochise/But the white eyes lies/He’s out of whack with nature.”
Alongside this new material is a reimagining of “Big Yellow Taxi”, fitting perfectly within the thematic confines
of the album. It demonstrates in sharp relief how Mitchell’s voice has been altered by decades of smoking, and it’s chilling to hear her sing of poison and havoc in a breathy style and with such limited range. She is audibly weakened, but there is strength in the message; the tobacco companies have helped her decimate her high notes, which now live in the museum of her back catalogue, much like the trees in the tree museum that visitors pay a dollar and a half to see.
It’s the sole reworked song here – unlike Travelogue and Both Sides Now, which took on her own songs and standards, Shine saw a return to Mitchell’s form of original storytelling, ponderings on love and worry, hymns to the natural world and curses on those who would threaten it.
Many of the players who backed Mitchell on the orchestral renderings of Travelogue also appear on Shine. Brian Blade’s fine, textural drumming is a playful counterpart to Mitchell’s vocal phrasing, the pairing exceptional on “Night Of The Iguana”. This elegant sonic choreography is similar to the physical movements of the bodies that punctuate Mitchell’s songs in The Fiddle And The Drum, a piece by the Alberta Ballet that the songwriter helped create, which was released in 2007, along with Shine. It’s worth noting that an exhibition of her paintings also opened that year, underscoring the then 63-year-old artist’s potent burst of creative energy.
In softer modes Mitchell is aided by the divine, ambient pedal-steel work of Greg Leisz, while Paulinho Da Costa’s percussion on “Hana” incites a sense of urgency on an album that can otherwise feel solitary, delicate and dreamlike, prompting internal reflection rather than vocal outward reaction. Though Shine’s softness can feel like a quiet acceptance of fate, there is power that burbles among its lines and musical textures. In “Hana”, Mitchell recommends that we “tackle the beast alone with its tenacious teeth”.
“If you can wait/And not get tired of waiting/And when lied about/Stand tall,” she sings on “If”, a reimagining of Rudyard Kipling’s 19th-century poem, the ultimate paean to stoicism. Presumably Mitchell has herself
shown an admirable capacity for patience as she’s recovered her health over the past five years. New music would likely bring its own surprises, but until then Shine stands on it own; funnelling the passion and tender observations of ’60s Joni through the lens of wisdom and freedom that comes with age and experience. Though less acrobatic than her more famous works, among its pliant textures and leftfield flourishes live a glorious menagerie of flora, fauna and emotional unrest.
It’s hard to pinpoint where precisely it occurred on his slide from bad to worse, but somewhere between the publication of Lizzy Goodman’s US rock scene oral history Meet Me In The Bathroom and his facing multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, Ryan Adams decided to air his feelings on Twitter about his sometime contemporaries The Strokes.
Apparently inspired by Liam Gallagher’s unmediated volleys in the medium, Adams described Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr as a “horrible” songwriter (among the many compelling narratives in the Goodman book had been one of Adams introducing Hammond to heroin). He also observed singer Julian Casablancas as being “strung out on lasagne”. He struck a more depressing note when he observed that while his own albums were reliably making the Top 5 every time, those by “the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and the feather earring” (namely, Casablancas) were not so lucky.
It’s hard to imagine a character as hip and inscrutable as Julian Casablancas allowing such remarks to register on his dial, but it’s worth noting that The Strokes have not gone out of their way to make themselves immune from such criticism. At the band’s arguable peak in 2006, Casablancas departed for an extracurricular career that became increasingly diverse: solo album, sneaker ad campaign, Daft Punk collaboration, an absurdist post-hipster band called The Voidz.
The Strokes? According to a recent stage announcement, The Strokes “took the 2010s off”. Which is possibly news to the fans who bought their 2011 album Angles. There was an album in 2013 too, and an EP in 2016, and shows have been played. But the announcement confirmed what we gathered at the time: this was not a band exactly putting their back into it. Now, however, they’re back, and steps are taken here to remind us via studio banter (“The click was always in you, Fab…”) and a casual attitude to ending songs, that this remains a band of brothers in a room together, doing what they do best.
It’s a slightly illusory business. Acting as ever like a personal trainer for bloated creativity, producer Rick Rubin is on hand to perform his patented ritual of past-life regression, stripping away the layers to arrive at an essence. Duly, on several songs here Rubin helps peel back the years to reveal an energy and a passion that reminds you just how powerful was the band’s initial proposition. Opener “The Adults Are Talking” is a case in point, restoring the twin guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond to their patented new wave prog, while Casablancas rules the song with a wonderful falsetto.
In fine voice throughout, his songs aren’t far behind. His style ever to let a phrase carry a meaning beyond its weight, throughout he makes hooks in unlikely places (“I want new friends…” he sings on “Brooklyn Bridge To The Chorus”, “…but they don’t want me”). He retains undiminished his talent for wryly sketching the scene and then disappearing into The Strokes’ domain: the confusion of the night.
While there are familiar modes, the album also attempts to reconcile the band’s core sound with progressions in Casablancas’s musical interests since. “Eternal Summer” finds the band melding Clash-like stylistic fusions with their take on ’90s R&B. First track to be released, “At The Door”, meanwhile, is a synth epic designed to wrongfoot expectations, since it actively sounds, with its ’80s keyboard washes, like a Julian solo track. What drew us in here in the first place was the songs, however they were played, and this reminds you of the band’s intact talent. As the song gathers momentum, Casablancas draws a vignette of emotional brinkmanship: “Beg me not to go/Sinking like a stone/Use me like an oar/To get yourself to shore…” It’s a magnificent piece.
Rubin can help the band access their best qualities – the vocal melodies; the interlocking guitars; the irresistible momentum – but he and the band face unlikeable odds. As Oasis once were, the band are saddled with an unfairly huge expectation to provide the same jolt that they provided with their debut: giving shape to a time by force of musical charisma alone.
In this context, the album’s pacing reflects a slowing down towards realistic expectations. There’s a gentle drift from the jaunty (say “Bad Decisions”, a close cousin of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself”) into the kind of mid-paced guitar brooding we find nearer the close with “Not The Same Anymore”. Here Casablancas adds the weight if not the wisdom of experience to the band’s nighttime patrols. “I fucked up…”
The best is saved for last. “Ode To The Mets” effortlessly recaptures the nonchalant accomplishment of the band’s finest moments: “I was bored with a guitar/I learned all your tricks/It wasn’t too hard.” A minute before the close, however, the band and the song change gear. As it moves to its end, a change of pace heralds as much a new era as it does a new section of the song. A stirring guitar riff begins as Casablancas sings the line, “The old times have been forgotten…”
Easier said than done, perhaps. But if you’re interested in the future of The Strokes as well as their past, it sounds like good news.
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now and available to order online by clicking here – features an in-depth exploration of the making of Prince’s 1985 album, Around The World In Day. Released just two weeks after the conclusion of his Purple Rain tour, it found Prince taking a creative left-turn into psychedelic pop, orchestral soul and Eastern exoticism. 35 years on, Prince’s inner circle divulge the secrets of this remarkable album to Graeme Thomson. Here’s an extract from that feature…
Here are all the ways you can continue reading Uncut safely during the lockdown
In May 1984, Prince installed the Revolution in a warehouse at 9025 Flying Cloud Drive in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie. A low wood-panelled building with a tin roof, he moved his operations there as a designated studio/rehearsal space and convened the band almost every day for several months. It was at Eden Prairie that much of Around The World… came together. Ostensibly they were rehearsing for the Purple Rain tour, but everything was on the table.
“We must have rehearsed for that tour for months, six days a week, from early afternoon until six or sometimes nine or ten in the evening,” says tour manager Alan Leeds. “Some days he would come in and rehearse the show at least once, sometimes two or three times. He wanted it embedded so nobody had to think about what to play next. Some days he might spend the whole afternoon on one song. Or he might come in with a new song. You never knew what to expect, you were never forewarned. All the rehearsals were recorded start to finish, he had hours and hours of tapes, and he would sit up all night listening and thinking about them. You would have no idea what to expect when he walked in the next day. It’s not like he had a script.”
“A lot of it was introducing new material and just jamming,” says Revolution bassist Mark Brown. “He would always be recording and he would get back to his studio and he knew how to take that energy and then build on it. That was the whole purpose of having a group. He wanted that live, real powerful energy that you cannot get as a solo musician in the studio. It’s hard to capture the energy when you play all the instruments yourself. You can’t duplicate that.”
The recording practices at Eden Prairie were rudimentary. “I had a console and a tape machine right there on the warehouse floor, with no separation between me and the band like you would normally have in the studio – it was just open air!” says Prince’s engineer Susan Rogers. “He liked working there. It was seat-of-the-pants, home-school mentality, in a warehouse with a tin ceiling over our heads.”
The variation in sound quality is obvious on Around The World…. Recorded at the warehouse with the band, “Paisley Park” is relatively rough and ready compared to the superior studio taping of “Pop Life”. For Prince, such niceties were secondary to the magic of a particular performance. “He wasn’t a stickler for audio fidelity,” says Rogers. “That was an important lesson I learned from him. He recognised that no-one is going into the record store to look for sounds; they are going there to look for music. What he needed from his audio equipment and the people who operated it was to just keep the signal flowing – don’t let anything break down or make him stop. The answer always had to be ‘Yes’, then you had to figure out how to get it done!”
You can read much more about Prince and Around The World In A Day in the new issue of Uncut, out now – click here for more details about the rest of the magazine.
Bon Iver have released a new single called “PDLIF (Please Don’t Live In Fear)”, in order to support health workers on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic.
100% of proceeds from “PDLIF” will go to Direct Relief, the humanitarian aid organisation coordinating with public health authorities, nonprofits, and businesses to deliver personal protective equipment to responders across the US and the world.
Listen below:
“PDLIF” was produced by Justin Vernon, Jim-E Stack, and BJ Burton. The song stems from a sample of Alabaster dePlume’s “Visit Croatia” and additional musicians include Kacy Hill (vocals), Joseph K Rainey, Sr. (vocals), Eli Teplin (piano), Devin Hoffman (bass), and Rob Moose (string arrangements, piano).
A new film drama about David Bowie’s early-’70s period, as he made the transformation into Ziggy Stardust, is set for release later this year.
Stardust was directed by Gabriel Range and stars actor and singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn as Bowie. It focuses specifically on Bowie’s early 1971 press trip across America, accompanied by Mercury Records publicist Ron Oberman. Without a visa or musician’s union paperwork, he was unable to perform songs from the recently released The Man Who Sold The World album, and was greeted with bemusement and sometimes ridicule. But as the film’s press material states, “he found some of the ideas and influences that he would meld together to create his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.”
Watch the first clip, featuring Marc Maron as Oberman, below:
Says Range, “I set out to make a film about what makes someone become an artist; what actually drives them to make their art. That someone is David Bowie, a man we’re used to thinking about as the star he became, or as one of his alter egos: Ziggy Stardust; Aladdin Zane; The Thin White Duke. Someone I only ever saw at a great distance, behind a mask; a godlike, alien presence. Even in his perfectly choreographed death, he didn’t seem like a regular human being.
“The film is very much grounded in fact but it’s also a work of speculative fiction. We took license with some of the relationships and the film has a slightly heightened, playful tone. But I hope it is true to the spirit of where David was at around that point in his life.”
Three weeks after the surprising the world with “Murder Most Foul”, Bob Dylan has released another new single entitled “I Contain Multitudes”.
As with “Murder Most Foul”, there are no details of when, where or with whom it was recorded, but there are plenty of wryly intriguing lyrics to get your teeth into.
Over a similarly dreamlike backing, Dylan namedrops everyone from William Blake to Beethoven, Indiana Jones to “them British bad boys, The Rolling Stones“. Listen below:
The release only adds to speculation that Bob Dylan is poised to unleash his first album of new material since 2012’s Tempest. You can read more about “Murder Most Foul” and what this tells us about Dylan’s current state of mind in the new issue of Uncut, on sale now.
The Magnetic Fields’ new album Quickies – so named because its 28 songs are all less than 155 seconds long – will be released by Nonesuch in May.
Watch a video for new single “(I Want to Join A) Biker Gang” below:
The Magnetic Fields’ mainman Stephin Merritt explains the concept of Quickies thus: “I’ve been reading a lot of very short fiction, and I enjoyed writing 101 Two-Letter Words, the poetry book about the shortest words you can use in Scrabble. And I’ve been listening to a lot of French baroque harpsichord music. Harpsichord doesn’t lend itself to languor. So I’ve been thinking about one instrument at a time, playing for about a minute or so and then stopping, and I’ve been thinking of narratives that are only a few lines long.
“Also, I had been using a lot of small notebooks, so when I reach the bottom of the page, I’ve only gone a short way. Now that I’m working on a different album, I’m enforcing a large notebook rule so that I don’t do Quickies twice in a row.”
Quickies is released digitally on May 15 and as a CD or 5×7″ box set on May 30.
“(I Want to Join A) Biker Gang” also features on the free CD that comes with the new issue of Uncut. The magazine itself contains a review of Quickies along with more Merritt chat, and you can order your copy right here.
Devon’s Sea Change festival, originally due to take place at the end of May, was an early casualty of the coronavirus pandemic.
However, organisers have rallied to create an online version of the festival for the weekend of April 25-26.
It will include performances from Yann Tiersen, Shirley Collins (in collaboration with writer Brian Catling and sound artist Matthew Shaw), Billy Bragg, Porridge Radio, Katie Von Schleicher, Nap Eyes, Gordi, Mystery Jets, Richard Norris and more to be announced.
Tim Burgess will host a special edition of his popular Twitter listening parties, while there will also be readings from authors Jon Savage, David Keenan and Rob Chapman.
Everything is free to watch via the Sea Change official site and social media channels.
Last week, Polly Samson, David Gilmour and family hosted the second of their livestreams to launch Samson’s new novel, A Theatre For Dreamers.
It opened with Gilmour debuting a new piece of music written for and about the novel, accompanied by his daughter Romany on the harp. He also played two more Leonard Cohen covers, “Fingerprints” (at 13:57) and “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” (30:33). Watch the whole thing below:
You can watch the first livestream and find out how to buy tickets for Samson and Gilmour’s September ‘words and music’ tour here.
Prince, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, The National, Jason Isbell, The Faces, Laura Marling and Brigid Mae Power all feature in the new Uncut, dated June 2020 and available to buy online and in UK shops from April 16. As always, the issue comes with a terrific free CD of the month’s best music.
PRINCE: 35 years on, his inner circle divulge the secrets of Around The World In A Day, the remarkable follow-up to Purple Rain that took in psychedelic pop, orchestral soul and Eastern exoticism. “You never knew what to expect,” recalls one eyewitness, “you were never forewarned.”
OUR FREE CD! High Life: 15 tracks of the month’s best music, including William Tyler, Margo Price, The Psychedelic Furs, Mark Lanegan, The Dream Syndicate, Steve Earle & The Dukes, Woods, Brigid Dawson & The Mothers Network 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:
NEIL YOUNG: The legendary Homegrown album is finally getting a release, and we review it at length as our Archive Album Of The Month, while producer Elliot Mazer recalls the sessions
JASON ISBELL: As he prepares to release his new album, Reunions, the singer-songwriter invites Uncut to his Tennessee barn to discuss the magic of Muscle Shoals, the ghosts of his past and his tenure in the Drive-By Truckers: “Things are very different from those early days…”
THE FACES: Raise a brandy and coke, as Kenney Jones tells the inside story of the group, 50 years on. Get ready for stories about meeting Muhammad Ali, high times at Goose Lake Festival and their very first recording session: “Whenever we came together we had such a great time!”
THE NATIONAL: The making of “Bloodbuzz Ohio”
LAURA MARLING: We review the stunning new album from the London-based singer-songwriter, and talk to her about new personas, Lump and the value of directness
STEVE HOWE: The prog-rock virtuoso talks Yes, Lou Reed, The Libertines and psychedelic love-ins
SKIP SPENCE: We look back on the troubled life and times of the ultimate outsider hero, and his psychedelic masterpiece Oar
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS: Album by album with the returning Butler brothers
BRIGID MAE POWER: The singer-songwriter tells us how she made the journey from playing in churches and underground car parks in Galway to creating her new album Head Above The Water
TALKING HEADS: A fascinating 1980 archive piece from NME finds the quartet discussing Brian Eno, African music and their expanded lineup
In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Laura Marling, Sparks, Brigid Dawson & The Mothers Network, Steve Earle & The Dukes, Woods, The Magnetic Fields and more, and archival releases from Neil Young, Robbie Basho, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Edikanfo, The Fall, Terry Hall, Jim Capaldi and others. We catch Supergrass, Modern Nature and Aoife Nessa Frances live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Moffie, The Eddy and Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time; while in books there’s Mark Lanegan’s memoir and a new tome on Malcolm McLaren.
In our front section, meanwhile, we get a sneak peek at Spike Jonze’s new Beastie Boys photobook, hear about lockdown livestreaming from Waxahatchee, Brendan Benson and Basia Bulat, catch up with Diamanda Galas and spiritual jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz, and meet Nap Eyes. There’s also an in-depth examination of Bob Dylan’s surprise new song, “Murder Most Foul”, while Sonic Boom reveals the music that has shaped his life.
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.
In the shadow of coronavirus lockdown, what will become of 2020’s cultural record? One of the positives to draw from the current crisis is the way many artists have successfully adapted to their circumstances. On page 7 of this issue we talk to musicians who have been livestreaming during the lockdown, while on page 8, brace yourselves for our deep dive into Bob Dylan’s amazing “Murder Most Foul”, released by Dylan with the accompanying instruction to “stay safe”. Being an avid Uncut reader, you’ll have hopefully also enjoyed Neil Young’s Fireside Sessions, Sonic Youth’s cache of live archive recordings and Tim Burgess’ Twitter listening parties among the myriad of other inventive online ways to beat the lockdown blues.
While we’re all currently dispersed as far afield as Edinburgh, Redcar, Brighton and Portugal, we’d like to reassure you that we will continue to be publishing Uncut, as planned, every month – bringing you our regular mix of exclusive interviews, definitive reviews and deep dives into the best old and new music. You’ll still find us in newsagents and supermarkets – but in case you can’t leave the house, here are some ways you can continue to get your fix of Uncut.
You can subscribe to the magazine here and have all future issues delivered direct to your home. Currently we are offering a huge 65% discount on the usual subscription price – all you need to do is enter this code: UCWEBES20
You can order a copy of the latest issue, with free delivery to all UK addresses (and reduced P&P worldwide). You’ll also be able to pick up copies of recent issues that you may have missed.
Uncut is also available as a digital magazine. You can purchase individual issues or take advantage of our latest subscription offers – just as you can with the physical magazine.
Which brings me to this month’s issue. Graeme Thomson digs into the secret history of Prince’s all-singing, all-dancing Around The World In A Day spectacular, Kenney Jones’ pours a Brandy and coke as we celebrate 50 years of the Faces, Jason Isbell takes us out to his barn, Yes’ Steve Howe answers your questions, The National revisit a high (violet) watermark, the Psychedelic Furs relive their career highs, we meet Brigid Mae Power, celebrate Skip Spence and find our what’s what for Talking Heads in 1980.
There’s also Neil Young’s Homegrown – 45 years late – plus a wealth of terrific new albums from Brigid Dawson, Laura Marling, Woods, Steve Earle, Magnetic Fields and The Dream Syndicate.
At the risk of sounding cliched, it is comforting to find so much good new music coming out during these challenging times. Looking ahead, there’s great new albums from Courtney Marie Andrews, Sonic Boom, Rolling Blackouts, Nicole Atkins among many others to soothe our spirits through the next few months.
See you here again, same time next month.
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner
Hope you’re all keeping well and staying sane in these strange times. Thankfully, there’s still plenty of excellent new music around to lift our spirits. Rest assured that we’re continuing with our mission to collate and review the best of it for you, throughout the lockdown period – for information on how to keep reading Uncut, click here.
For now, here are the tunes that we’ve been enjoying while putting together the new issue, due out next week (April 16). New Aphex Twin! Angel Olsen goes disco! The return of Aksak Maboul! Plus Jeff Tweedy paying tribute to the late, great John Prine…
WOODS
“Strange To Explain”
(Woodsist)
PHOEBE BRIDGERS
“Kyoto”
(Dead Oceans)
JEFF TWEEDY
“Please Don’t Bury Me”
APHEX TWIN
“Tha2 [world scam mix]”
KATE NV
“Sayonara”
(RVNG Intl)
AKSAK MABOUL
“Tout A Une Fin/Everything Ends”
(Crammed Discs)
THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
“Kraftwerk In A Blackout”
(Nonesuch)
ONCE & FUTURE BAND
“Andromeda”
(Castle Face)
KAHIL EL’ZABAR’S SPIRIT GROOVE
“Songs Of Myself”
(Spiritmuse)
ANDREW TUTTLE
“Sun At 5 In 4161”
(Room40)
DAVE MILLER
“Fellow Man”
(Tompkins Square)
SNOWGOOSE
“The Making Of You”
(Glass Modern)
GREG FOAT
“Nikinakinu”
(Strut)
ANGEL OLSEN
“All Mirrors (Johnny Jewel Remix)”
(Jagjaguwar)
FLOATING POINTS
“Bias (Mayfield Depot Mix)”
(Ninja Tune)
So very special… The deluxe, 148-page, updated edition of the Ultimate Music Guide to Radiohead. In-depth reviews of every Radiohead album and every solo work. Revealing archive interviews. Their greatest 30 songs, as chosen by their collaborators and peers. It’s the complete story of the world’s most adventurous band!
Buy it now by clicking here!
Sent out to support Santana on a 1971 European tour, Karen Dalton may have realised that mainstream success was never going to be her thing. Having spent the previous decade playing for change in the folk clubs of Boulder, Colorado and Greenwich Village, the Texan-born singer with a voice like a battered trumpet had never been much inclined to perform for audiences who weren’t prepared to listen. Faced with impatient crowds, tight schedules, less-than-rapt attention, she struggled.
“She had a stellar backup band and great support, but she was difficult to travel with,” remembered Peter Stampfel from East Village dirtbags the Holy Modal Rounders. “By the end of the tour, she had missed at least one date by simply refusing to come out of her dressing room.”
A vintage press advert included in a booklet accompanying this collection of the freewheelin’ singer’s early recordings states “for 10 years, Karen Dalton has been trying hard not to be famous”. In practice, being overlooked came rather naturally. While hep-cat friends like Fred Neil and Tim Hardin became recording artists and successful songwriters, the striking but surly Dalton struggled to carve out a niche, lacking the showbiz chops of Judy Collins, the righteous verve of Joan Baez or the down-home authenticity of Hedy West. Her supernatural ability to warp songs to her own bleak sensibility remained a folk-circuit secret until Neil (the man of the moment following the success of “Everybody’s Talking”) persuaded Capitol to release 1969’s It’s So Hard To Know Who’s Going To Love You The Best. However, Dalton’s recording career ended abruptly with 1971’s In My Own Time, nerves, despair, heroin and alcohol confining her to the margins. She died of an Aids-related illness in 1993, long before Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom got the chance to sing her praises.
How much she would have welcomed that acclaim is a moot point. Listening back to the two discs of Dalton performing at the Attic club in Boulder in October 1962 (recorded by her friend Joe Loop and first released as Cotton Eyed Joe in 2007), she doesn’t show any burning need for approval. She begins without a word of introduction with a six-minute take of “It’s Alright”, transforming Ray Charles’ soulful blues into a folksy death march. Hillbilly hoe-down “Cotton Eyed Joe” is stretched out into a languid, 12-string ballad, with Fred Neil’s anti-war “Red Are The Flowers” reduced to a similar crawling pace to allow Dalton to stretch her extraordinary, haunted howl around it.
Some attributed Dalton’s unnatural ability to insinuate herself into these folk and blues songs to her Cherokee roots and hardscrabble upbringing in Oklahoma. It’s a myth her daughter, Abralyn Baird, has been keen to debunk. Dalton was no hayseed ingénue; she went to college, was well-read and, as for her dirt-poor roots, Baird said, “Her dad was a respected welder. Her mother was a nurse. Not terribly Grapes Of Wrath.”
Her feel for the material might be more down to a vampire’s nose for blood, a spider’s eye for dark places. At the Attic, she luxuriates in the gloom of Leroy Carr’s “In The Evening” and Lead Belly’s “Good Morning Blues”, and sings Bessie Smith favourite “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out” with a hard-won cynicism entirely unfitting
for a woman of 24.
Tellingly, the trad-arr “Katy Cruel” was her signature tune; she played it live at the Attic, and on the set of 1963 home recordings here (previously released as Green Rocky Road) then recorded it on In My Own Time. A bad penny’s lament, it summed up the “roving jewel”’s uneasy relationship with the straight world; twice married and twice a mother before she turned 20, Dalton felt doors had been slammed in her face, and that sense of injustice burns as she sings, “When I first came to town they gave me drinks aplenty/Now they’ve changed their tune and hand me the bottles empty.”
Her attitude to outsiders was hostile, suspicious (“My mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers,” Baird remembered). Let loose in her own space, however, she came alive. Taped at her flat in Boulder, her home-grown “Green Rocky Road” – Dalton dubbing on banjo as well as 12-string – is a gently joyous, jazz-age oddity. “Ribbon Bow” is transformed into a proto-Cure scowl, while she swells the traditional “Nottingham Town” to almost 13 minutes, medieval murk morphing into raga enlightenment somewhere along the way.
Dalton ultimately moulded her style to fit her producers’ vision on her studio LPs, but these recordings are pleasingly unfettered, and so informal that the phone rings in the background at one point. However, if the sound can be cutesy quaint, there’s no disguising that the manner in which Dalton transforms coffee-shop favourites into work that – for all of its ramshackle construction – has an Ingmar Bergman existential heft.
Ahead of the game in the age of Beatlemania, these unvarnished pieces may well catch Dalton at her peak. In the years ahead, she wrote songs but didn’t record them, and never expanded far beyond the repertoire she was playing at the Attic (her two LPs, and another home-recorded collection, 1966, feature much of the same material). Weaving through Santana’s gear to play her 30-minute slots in 1971 to a bunch of teenage stoners, the 30-something Dalton can only reasonably have concluded that her time to shine had long since passed. Listening to this collection, though, her possibilities still seem endless.
In 1970, a songwriter from Virginia called Jerry Williams, along with his friend Gary US Bonds, wrote a heart-wrenching number called “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got)”. It was initially recorded in January 1971 by the Southern soul singer Freddie North, whose punchy, horn-assisted version (produced by Williams) made the Billboard Top 40 and the R&B Top 10. A few months later, the outlaw country singer Johnny Paycheck picked up the song, added some Nashville vocal harmonies and a touch of bottleneck guitar, and took it to the top of the country and western charts. Before long it had been covered by everyone from Loretta Lynn to Conway Twitty, from Tanya Tucker to George Jones, and transformed into a country standard.
Jerry Williams went on to reinvent himself as Swamp Dogg, a charismatic, pint-sized 5’5” soul and funk howler, developing a cult reputation with much-sampled albums like Total Destruction To Your Mind and Cuffed, Collared And Tagged. But he always maintained a love and respect for country music. He’d already written “Just For You”, recorded by Waylon Jennings in 1966, and in 1981 he recorded his own country album for Mercury Records, which went unreleased for more than 20 years. “I had this idea of an outrageous black country singer, with a cape and shit,” he said. “Like Little Richard, but pure country. But I think the music industry decided that there was only room for one black country star, and they already had Charlie Pride.”
Now, 50 years after he wrote “She’s All I Got”, a 77-year-old Swamp Dogg is revisiting it as the centrepiece of his first proper country album. It’s a deliciously slow reading of the song, pitched perfectly between Southern soul and country, between white and black – a mix of choral Nashville harmonies, clipped wah-wah guitar and pedal steel guitar.
As on his 2018 album Love, Loss And Auto-Tune, Swamp Dogg is assisted by a younger generation of musicians – Ryan Olson from the Minneapolis synth-pop band Poliça serves as producer, while Justin Vernon – a member of Ryan Olson’s Midwest supergroup Gayngs as well as a serial collaborator with everyone from Kanye West to Bruce Hornsby – adds plenty of woozy guitar flourishes, and the core band features members of Poliça and Gayngs along with the gospel pianist Derrick Lee. Crucially, there are no drums – all the rhythm tracks are provided by a chugging Sly Stone/Shuggie Otis-style Maestro Rhythm Machine drumbox. But, where that new generation of musicians were consciously dragging Swamp Dogg into android-voiced 21st-century R&B on the last album, here they serve as Dan Auerbach/Rick Rubin-style authenticity merchants.
As Ray Charles observed in the early 1960s, country songs – with that schlocky, world-weary narrative of heartbreak and rejection – aren’t so dissimilar to a certain strain of confessional soul ballad, and Swamp Dogg is good at mining that intersection. Sometimes he draws heavily upon Southern rock: “Family Pain”, a 12-bar blues about a family turning to drugs to cope with austerity, features some twangy Duane Allman-style guitar from Jim Oblon, and Appalachian swing fiddle from Sam Amidon. Other times he dips into that fusion that you find on so many “country got soul” compilations, using touches of wah-wah guitars, as on the horn-heavy country funk of “Good, Better, Best”. Like so much of the album, it’s a track that flips the embittered, “my-woman-wronged-me” misogyny that’s common to so much country and soul music. “Ain’t no such thing as a bad woman,” croons Dogg. “All of them sweet as a Georgia peach/Even the worst woman is better than the best man.”
Along with a few star backing vocalists – Justin Vernon, Jenny Lewis, Channy Leaneagh from Poliça – there are a couple of duets with John Prine, a sardonic country star of a similar vintage and attitude to Dogg. “Memories” is a jaunty country shuffle subtly spiked with wobbly electronic effects, while “Please Let Me Go Round Again” is heartbroken ballad laced with a piano/organ combo that comes straight out of a Baptist church.
But the two standout tracks suggest that Swamp Dogg’s take on C&W doesn’t need any gimmicks. The heartbroken ballad “I’d Rather Be Your Used To Be” starts as a virtual retread of “Cold Cold Heart” before Swamp Dogg ramps up the Southern soul stylings, like Hank Williams slowly mutating into Otis Redding. Best of all is “Billy”, one of those almost parodically tragic country ballads, sung from the POV of a widower visiting his dead wife’s grave. It should, by rights, be ridiculous, but the lyrics are presented with such conviction that it becomes quietly devastating. Rather like Swamp Dogg himself.
Manic Street Preachers have announced a pair of special concerts at Cardiff Motorpoint Arena on December 4 and 5.
The first night will be a free show for NHS staff. For the second, tickets are on sale to the public with all profits going to NHS Wales charities.
The band said: “We wanted to do something to show our appreciation, love and respect for the NHS and its amazing brave workers. One free show and one fundraising show seemed the best way for us to express our deep gratitude for all their heroic work.”
Those eligible for free tickets for the December 4 show will be all NHS staff that work within NHS hospitals in the United Kingdom including, but not limited to, doctors, nurses, support workers, porters and cleaners. Tickets will be limited to two per person (eligible NHS staff members and one guest) and will be available from 7pm on Friday (April 10) from here.
Tickets for the December 5 show (limited to 4 per person) go on sale at 7pm on Friday (April 10) from here.
