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Joanna Newsom announces live dates

Michael Bonner
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Joanna Newsom announces live dates

Joanna Newsom has announced a residency at Hollywood Forever’s Masonic Lodge in Los Angeles.

Dubbed ‘the Strings/Keys Reincidence‘, Newsom will play five shows in May.

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The residency includes a matinee show where Newom will “tailor the setlist to be not only suitable for children, but specifically designed with them in mind,” says an accompanying statement.

Newsom last performed on March 22, 2023, as the unbilled support for the Fleet Foxes at the Belasco in Los Angeles, where she played an hour-long set.

Aside from the Masonic Lodge residency, Newsom is also due to perform at the all-ages Kilby Block Party festival in Salt Lake City on May 10.

The dates are:

Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Friday, May 17, 2024
Saturday, May 18, 2024 *
Sunday, May 19, 2024

  • matinee show

Heldon – Electronique Guerilla (reissue, 1974)

Sharon O'Connell
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Heldon – Electronique Guerilla (reissue, 1974)

His name may not resonate as widely as those of Germany’s kosmische luminaries, but Richard Pinhas is now acknowledged as a significant player on the European electronic-rock scene of the 1970s, through both his solo work and with his band, Heldon. Named after the republic in Norman Spinrad’s bizarre, science fantasy/metafiction work, The Iron Dream, the group have always been essentially a solo project with changing guest lists. Between 1974-79 they released eight albums, before Pinhas was plunged deep into depression in 1983 and all but disappeared for a decade. However, 1992 marked the start of an intensely prolific and ongoing creative streak, featuring many recordings under his own name as well as collaborations with later generations of experimental musicians, including Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O’Malley and Ruins’ Yoshida Tatsuya. Now 72, Pinhas is still recording and playing live; just 18 months ago, Heldon released a new album.

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Their debut Electronique Guerilla is the latest in their run of ’70s reissues and marks its 50th anniversary in limited-edition, coloured vinyl form. Originally released on Pinhas’s own Disjuncta label, it serves as a great Heldon primer, introducing a delay-heavy style of supremely moody, electronic/cosmic rock that’s undergone minor tweaks down the decades rather than any transformation, while revealing his philosophical, mystical/mythical and futurist interests (he holds a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne and studied Kabbalah for years). Pinhas has always seen himself as a rock’n’roll rather than electronic musician, something borne out by his focus on the guitar and his admiration of Hendrix, alongside Eno and the likes of Terry Riley. More importantly, Pinhas’s early influences were ’70s UK blues and R&B guitarists, notably Peter Green, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Later, he fell under the spell of No Pussyfooting, released the year before Heldon’s debut, and is refreshingly upfront about its – and Robert Fripp’s – importance to him.

Much of this is evident on Electronique Guerilla, a potent and absorbing set on its own terms but also one that helped shift focus from Germany’s enticing experimental scene in the ’70s. It was home-recorded direct to tape on a two-track Revox and produced by Pinhas, who plays a Gibson Les Paul and an AKS synth. Magma cohort Patrick Gauthier (on piano and synth) is among those assisting on some tracks. Intriguing details include the album’s dedication to Robert Wyatt, a William Burroughs namecheck on Side One and a reading from Nietzsche’s The Voyager And His Shadow by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, under whom Pinhas studied.

The set opens with the two-note, sustained drone of “Zind” which, though it bleeds into the start of “Back To Heldon”, is revealed as something of a red herring. In the latter, forlorn and Fripp-ish treated guitar parts undulate over a monotonal and foreboding synth wave, while a single, piercingly relentless note sustains a giallo-style anxiety; alien chatter then guides the track to a calmer place, light years away. “Circulus Vitiosus”, which clocks in at just under nine minutes, suggests a sublime splicing of Fripp/Eno and Tangerine Dream, its bent guitar notes swooning over an orchestra of synth sounds, some of which suggest desperate communications across the void, others stars flaring into existence or flickering before they die. An echo of “Maggot Brain” is hard to deny. In between sit the strikingly contemporary “Ouais, Marchais, Mieux Qu’en 68” (throwing forward to Slint and Godspeed You! Black Emperor), with its Deleuze recitation and the album’s wild card, “Northernland Lady”, which has a blues-drone root and a sweetly hypnotic pull. Here, Pinhas reflects on his two sons about to visit him from Sweden, and their mother. The album closes with the brief “Ballade Pour Puig Antich, Révolutionnaire Assassiné En España”, an elegy for the Catalonian pro-independence militant executed in 1974, which begins with an oceanic gush of synths and adds pulsing synths, over which sit a sombre bass motif and spare, mournful guitar melody.

Half a century on, the “guerilla” of the album’s title may sound like an overheated claim to artistic radicalism, but as Pinhas tells Uncut, as a 22-year-old he wanted to channel “something revolutionary into the sound of the music”, rather than simply be part of the musical vanguard. Heldon’s debut saw him join it on his own terms, speaking to the socio-political disruption of his time while honouring his origins and developing his own signature.

Liam Gallagher John Squire – Liam Gallagher John Squire

Nick Hasted
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Liam Gallagher John Squire – Liam Gallagher John Squire

Imagine the Stone Roses with an immeasurably better singer modelled on Ian Brown, or Oasis with a dazzling lead guitarist. Liam Gallagher and John Squire have, and the resulting album plays to their strengths. Though coming almost out of the blue, it’s the most logical team-up among the remnants of Manchester’s old indie-rock imperium, currently awash with severed alliances searching for completion.

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Liam and Noel were a more extreme version of Morrissey and Marr’s sundering of stellar charisma and musical genius, with Liam’s songwriting vestigial when Oasis split in 2009, and Noel’s vocals reserved for sensitive, doubting songs Our Kid couldn’t sing. Innately cautious, Noel’s albums have nudged at the edges of Oasis’s formula, finding on last year’s Council Skies a sweet spot between middle-aged reflection on his Burnage past and canny Oasis-esque bangers. Liam also hinted at maturity on 2022’s C’mon You Know, but he’s generally been laser-focused on claiming Oasis’s essence and audience for himself, replaying Knebworth, and Definitely Maybe on June’s upcoming 30th-anniversary tour.

Squire was more evenly partnered with Ian Brown in The Stone Roses, but has also proved dependent on his combustible singer for a mass audience the Seahorses couldn’t supply. His time since the Roses’ 2010s reunion has been self-sufficiently private, balancing visual art with family life’s quiet satisfactions. Liam’s invitation to guest on “Champagne Supernova” at Knebworth opportunely coincided with Squire’s renewed interest in guitars and songwriting. Liam followed up by specifically requesting guitar-heavy songs with Squire lyrics for this project.

This is therefore a Squire-centred record, demoed by him at his Macclesfield home studio while Liam emailed broad stokes of musical direction – the Pistols, Hendrix, Faces and Bee Gees. LA sessions were produced by Greg Kurstin (Adele, McCartney’s Egypt Station and much of Liam’s solo debut As You Were), who rounded out the band on bass and piano alongside drummer Joey Waronker. Squire wanted imperfections, “something slightly out of time, a bit sloppy”. Happily out of the star game for so long, his influence on a singer who has to be a star is key to their collaboration.

Opener “Raise Your Hands” suggests Liam is getting his Definitely Maybe tour prep in early, with a bouncy Britpop beat brightened by Squire’s gleaming jangle. Anthemic lyrics secrete a sardonic edge more innate to the Roses than today’s soft-spoken Squire lets on: “If revenge is all that really matters…/Raise your hands.” Liam’s vocal starts as he’ll continue, higher and therefore more vulnerable than usual, relaxed and kind, the cracked grain that usually channels punk gravel now aiding genuine warmth. Squire’s guitar counterpoints West Coast vocal harmonies, with a scratchy blues-rock solo meeting Kurstin’s barrelhouse piano on the fade.

Where Liam’s solo albums provide aspects of his Lennon-worshipping yet sunny worldview, while often sounding written and recorded by committee, this duo debut is unmistakably authored. “Jesus Christ, about last night/I can only apologise,” “Mars To Liverpool” starts, before entering Northern psychedelic realms: “If your travel agent’s cool/Can anybody get me/From Mars to Liverpool?” Liam’s elasticating emphasis of “cool” and “pool” is almost worth the admission. The music, meanwhile, splices The La’s’ “There She Goes” and The Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun”. The Fabs scoreboard elsewhere notches references to Wings’ “Let Me Roll It” and Plastic Ono Band’s heavy primal scream blues on “I’m A Wheel”, “I Feel Fine” on “Love You Forever”, “Getting Better” on “Make It Up As You Go Along”, and the phased guitars, pounding Revolver drums and lysergic effects of “Just Another Rainbow”. The latter’s five-and-a-half minutes has room for windmilling Who clamour too. Its lyric, Squire’s said, deals with “disappointment, and the sentiment that you never get what you really want”, disillusion Liam couldn’t concede on his own.  

The Roses helped legitimise looking back in UK rock, rehabilitating The Beatles for Oasis to fully ransack, yet “Fool’s Gold” also offered a tantalising dance-rock way forward. Oasis similarly developed their punk- and rave-inflected Beatlemania into the majesty of “Champagne Supernova”. Squire draws on this old ambition in “One Day At A Time”. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” he has Liam sing, “We’ve got so many people to be.” Suggesting both “I Am The Resurrection”’s skyscraping lift-off from working-class circumstance and Bowie-like possible persona, Squire twists into a vicious kiss-off: “I know you’re happy in your suburban trance/You should have fucked me when you had the chance.”

Though they each had one eye on the past, The Stone Roses put Squire’s guitar in a radical context, while Oasis’ white-noise clamour was a pioneering new sound made from familiar ingredients; by contrast, Liam Gallagher John Squire is an essentially conservative record of relaxed, early-’70s rock. If the tunes and attitude don’t grip as strongly as they did in either man’s era-bending pomp, both still sound better for getting together. With their regular partners perhaps permanently out of creative reach, this unheralded partnership has strong prospects.

Oren Ambarchi: album by album

Sam Richards
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Oren Ambarchi: album by album

Oren Ambarchi’s future path was defined by a serendipitous mix-up in his grandfather’s Sydney junkshop. Taking home what he thought was a copy of Iron Maiden’s Number Of The Beast, the record inside turned out to be Miles Davis’s even more nefarious Live-Evil. “I was really confused,” recalls Ambarchi. “The music was just bizarre. To my ears it sounded completely chaotic and didn’t make any sense. But I stuck with it, and became really obsessed with [Davis’s] music from that point onwards. It opened the door to a lot of things.” Not only did his grandad’s shop inculcate an early love of freaky sounds, it provided the tools for Ambarchi’s first sonic investigations: “I was bringing home effect pedals and reel-to-reel machines, so I started fooling around with that stuff at home.” He spent his teenage years drumming in free-jazz and noise-rock bands, but was always intrigued by the possibilities of pure sound. When a bandmate abandoned an old guitar in their rehearsal studio, he couldn’t resist picking it up, incorporating its buzzes and clangs into his vivid sound collages. “I always loved guitar, I always loved rock music, but I think I came at it from a different route.”

And so began a remarkably prolific and unconventional recording career, making abstract electronica with guitars or propulsive kraut-jazz freakouts with a “virtual band” that has at times included everyone from Arto Lindsay to BJ Cole. “I love making records,” he enthuses. “It can be tormenting, but it’s really addictive when it works. Just pushing myself to do something different each time really fires me up.”

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OREN AMBARCHI

INSULATION

TOUCH, 1999

For his international debut, Ambarchi challenges himself to emulate glitchy European electronica using just a guitar

I’d been in a lot of noise-rock bands – I’d already been to Japan twice and worked with people like Masonna and members of The Boredoms. Then around ’98, I started listening to a lot of the electronic music that was happening in Europe at the time. The Mego label was absolutely huge for me, and also groups like Pan Sonic. I found myself with an old electric guitar, this instrument that was not associated with those worlds at all. But I was really determined to explore those inspirations – and also the older electronic music I was discovering, like musique concrète – and just see what I could do with the guitar. I was quite extreme in the sense that I was not going to use anything else; I was going to limit it to just these primitive effects pedals and see how far I could push it. Most of that record was recorded to cassette, I was just fooling around at home. I loved the Touch label at the time – I sent a demo to them and they got back to me. I couldn’t believe it. I think they wrote: “We really hate the guitar, but we really like this.”

OREN AMBARCHI

GRAPES FROM THE ESTATE

TOUCH, 2004

A hazy, hypnotic pleasure, employing warm organic textures for the first time

Around the time of [2001’s] Suspension, I found something that was a bit more personal. I remember consciously being like, ‘Wow, I’m letting melody into these abstract guitar pieces.’ I felt a little uncomfortable about that, but it just felt real. So I slowly started tapping into that more, because I grew up listening to a lot of pop music, and I love melody too. I’m not religious about being experimental or anything. There was a studio in Sydney called Big Jesus Burger, run by a very close friend of mine. He had a whole bunch of stuff in his studio that I could play, it was really fun. I thought, ‘Wait a second – why am I being so hardcore, just playing the guitar?’ It was liberating to have other colours going on. He had tuned bells in the studio, and I loved using that. I bought an acoustic guitar for “Remedios The Beauty”, because I didn’t have one. I think the only time I ever used it was to make that track. It sounds like a very relaxed record, but in those days I didn’t have a lot of money to go into the studio, so it was done really quickly and quite stressfully.

OREN AMBARCHI & JIM O’ROURKE

INDEED

EDITIONS MEGO, 2011

The first of three great records created as a duo with O’Rourke

I met Jim in New York in the ’90s. I had a Merzbow T-shirt on from his old label, Dexter’s Cigar. I was walking down the street and someone across the road yelled, “We only sold two of those, you know!” – and it was him. And then we just kept bumping into each other and clicking about stuff. We’re the same age and we love a lot of the same things. The Indeed thing was weird because I was in Japan doing a gig with Mika Vainio and Thomas Brinkmann. Jim wrote to me and said, “Oh, you should come to my house in Tokyo to record.” The night before, I was singing karaoke ’til about four in the morning and I’d drunk way, way too much. I remember emailing Jim: “I’m not in a good way, maybe we shouldn’t do this.” And he was like, “I’ve got coffee, just come over.”

He had a crazy modular synth set-up, and they’re all flickering. Pro Tools was ready to record, and then he hands me Kim Gordon’s guitar! I’m left-handed, it was right-handed, and I’m feeling horrible. I was like, ‘What is going on here?!’ I felt really self-conscious, so I said, “Can you make me sound like David Behrman on Leapday Night?” He jumped up and started patching all these cables into the modular in 30 seconds, it was insane. I remember as I was playing, he was pumping his fist in the air really excitedly. I recorded about 25 minutes’ worth of stuff. And then we literally made the album over the next hour or two in a frenzy of overdubs. He grabbed a banjo, there was marimba, a woodblock – it was just really fun and quick and it made sense.

OREN AMBARCHI

AUDIENCE OF ONE

TOUCH, 2012

Ambarchi expands his horizons in all directions: from ‘proper songs’ to 30-minute kraut-jazz jams to… Kiss covers!

I’d made so many records where it all began with me playing the guitar, and I started to lose inspiration. The big centrepiece of this record is called “Knots”, which came from when I was jogging and listening to a Terje Rypdal record that he made with Miroslav Vitouš and Jack DeJohnette. The drums were jazzy, but very propulsive – almost krautrock. As I was jogging, I thought, ‘I’m going to ask Joe Talia to play in that style for as long as he can, as intensely as he can, and build it over 30 minutes if possible.’ And he did, and then he sent it to me, and I reacted to it on the guitar at home. It was a really liberating thing to have me reacting to someone else’s playing for the first time, and then shaping it into a composition. And then the last piece is a cover of a track [“Fractured Mirror”] by Ace Frehley from Kiss. The Ace Frehley solo album was really big for me when I was eight or nine, and I still love it. In my head, I thought it could sound like an American minimalist piece. An installation artist asked me to do this thing where a guitar was tied to a rope in a huge aircraft hangar building. They wanted me to basically destroy this guitar by violently smashing it against a wall. I tuned all the strings to the same note and it sounded incredible. So the clangy guitar stuff on that Ace Frehley cover comes from me smashing a guitar against the wall.

OREN AMBARCHI

SAGITTARIAN DOMAIN

EDITIONS MEGO, 2012

Oren rocks out over an extended motorik groove, partly inspired by “Purple Rain”

A different installation artist wanted me to make sound for some films, and there was a budget that allowed me to go into probably the best studio in Melbourne for a day. It’s always a luxury for me to work in a studio, I feel like a kid in a candy store. He was very vague about what he wanted, so I went, “OK, well, I’m gonna go into this amazing studio and try to make an album in a day.” I had this recurring backbeat in my head, so I just played drums for about half an hour, and then built it from there. I didn’t even know if it would turn into a record – I was just having fun in the studio.

I remember falling asleep on a long-haul flight from Australia while listening to Prince’s “Purple Rain”. At the very end of it, there’s these strings that come in. It’s so beautiful, but it’s so short. I thought, ‘Imagine doing this extended “Purple Rain” string thing, like Prince meets Gavin Bryars or something.’ It’s also totally inspired by my adolescent Mahavishnu Orchestra fixation.

KEIJO HAINO/JIM O’ROURKE/OREN AMBARCHI

Only Wanting To Melt Beautifully Away Is It A Lack Of Contentment That Stirs Affection Or Those Things Said To Be As Of Yet Unseen

BLACK TRUFFLE/MEDAMA, 2014

The best of many live recordings Ambarchi and O’Rourke have made with legendary Japanese maverick Keijo Haino

The fun thing with that trio is, you never know what Haino is going to show up to the gig with. He has a crazy instrument collection and he grabs something different every time. Haino is always tripping you up – he’s always doing something to change what’s going on, or make things uncomfortable for himself and for us, which pushes you into another area. At that show, I remember thinking, ‘This is so beautiful’: the harp, the 12-string guitar, this very kind of folky otherworldly thing. I just had brushes, I was playing very quietly, and then Haino went over to his electronics and completely obliterated it. I remember feeling really pissed off, so I thought to myself, ‘I’m just gonna keep doing what I’m doing.’ It was kind of absurd, because there’s a guy playing with brushes while this madman is making torrential noise. Jim was still playing the acoustic guitar as well, so I was sure no-one could hear anything. But later I was able to mix the multitrack so I could hear what we were all doing, and it was incredible. It’s inspiring to play with someone who’s constantly creating something unpredictable.

OREN AMBARCHI

HUBRIS

EDITIONS MEGO, 2016

Two relentless rhythmic cavalcades – separated by a serene guitar interlude – with a who’s who of leftfield luminaries adding layer upon layer of freaky noise

I was determined not to make a complicated record, because I just made Quixotism [2014]. There’s a lot of people on that and it was really hard to make, and I was really burnt out. I thought, ‘OK, the next one is going to be really basic.’ And of course it ended up having, like, 98 guitar tracks. But in a way it’s very straightforward. I was listening to a lot of Italo-disco, and there’s a really great track by Tullio De Piscopo called “Stop Bajon”. There’s an instrumental version of it on the 12-inch with two guitars that are panned left and right doing this repetitive, out-of-sync, rhythmic thing, and I loved that. So Hubris was about honing in on these small details, but expanding upon it with various things. It was a reflection of my lifestyle where I didn’t really have a normal home situation, travelling from gig to gig. That record started because I was playing a show in London, and Mark Fell was in Rotherham. I said, “I’ve got this idea for a new record – maybe I could come over and do some stuff?” Then my next stop was Berlin to work with Konrad Sprenger, and it built from there. I think the last person I worked with was Jim, when I was in Tokyo. So the album slowly expanded during my tour – that’s why there’s so many different people from all over the world on that record.

I played with Arto Lindsay when I was 23, with John Zorn in New York, but I didn’t think he’d even remember who I was. I heard this Arto Lindsay guitar thing on “Hubris Part 3”, so I started to do it myself at home. And then I was like, ‘Why am I imitating it? Maybe he would do it?’ So I got in touch with him, and a day or two later I had 30 minutes of Arto Lindsey playing over this piece. Amazing! It kind of sounds like a band, but it’s actually me making a virtual band.

OREN AMBARCHI/JOHAN BERTHLING/ANDREAS WERLIIN

GHOSTED

DRAG CITY, 2022

Ambarchi plays live guitar and various effects in this groovy avant-jazz trio

That was the three of us in a room together, the absolute opposite of a lot of my solo records. I’d worked with Andreas and Johan in Fire! – we made a record and we toured, it was a lot of fun. So they said, “Why don’t we record for a day in Stockholm when you’re around?” It was really relaxed, just three people in a room playing together. I don’t think we even spoke about what we were going to do at all. But I’ve always loved jazz and I grew up listening to a lot of ECM records, and those guys as well. And maybe that side of us came out a little bit. It might have been because we’d worked in Fire!, which was much more aggressive, that we went the other way. I think because there were no preconceptions, it was kind of fresh – it wasn’t this thing where we were going back to what we always do. I’m a little nervous, ’cause we’re recording again in a week. I don’t want to do the same thing again, but there’s something nice about what we do together as well. I’m probably overthinking it!

OREN AMBARCHI

SHEBANG

DRAG CITY, 2022

Intricate yet playful four-part opus, with starring roles for Julia Reidy’s 12-string guitar and BJ Cole’s pedal steel

This record was inspired by me seeing Julia Reidy play for the first time in Melbourne about five or six years ago. She was playing 12-string guitar solo and she blew my mind. In my head, I could hear Joe Talia playing a ride cymbal over what she was doing. So I contacted her and said, “Hey, would you be up for recording some stuff? Can you play at this tempo in this tuning for this long?” And I made all this music related to what Julia was doing.

Again, that record was done in a way where none of us were in the same room – a lot of the time I wasn’t even in the room with the musician, because it was during a lockdown. So I would send people stuff, but I would never send the same thing to more than one person. I didn’t want people to hear the big picture. I had this really long timeline with all these different people reacting to different events. I knew that they would all relate to one another but not in a clichéd, conversational way.

Records to me are like a puzzle, and you’re putting the pieces together. There was a period of about two weeks where I was a mess, I couldn’t even speak to people and focus on the conversation because I was so preoccupied with the stupid thing that I was trying to solve. Eventually I was in the shower and I had this idea. I ran to Konrad Sprenger’s studio and said, “Can you just try this? Move this over here and move that over there?” And that was it.

The making of Love’s “She Comes In Colors”

Dave Simpson
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The making of Love’s “She Comes In Colors”

Love’s reputation rests on their dazzling third album, 1967’s Forever Changes. But the journey there involved several different stops. Not least among these is “She Comes In Colors” – a jazzier, flute and harpsichord-peppered Arthur Lee composition from 1966’s Da Capo. The Los Angeles band’s second album – named after a musical term meaning “back to the beginning” – took a pivotal step on the odyssey from their eponymous debut’s garage rock towards an ornate, psychedelic form of rock’n’roll.

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“The first album was more minimalist, with everything recorded live,” recalls guitarist Johnny Echols, sipping ginger beer on a tour bus in Leeds, shortly before performing the hallowed catalogue with The Love Band. “But Da Capo was a more grown-up album. We wanted to push the envelope. I’m very proud of ‘She Comes In Colors’, because we’d been known as a garage rock band but suddenly jazz musicians would come up to us and ask, ‘How on earth did you guys come up with that..?’”

The seeds of this adventure had been sown shortly before the main album sessions, when Love entered Sunset Sound Recorders’ Studio One with producer Jac Holzman and engineer Bruce Botnick to lay down “7 And 7 Is”, a hurtling proto-punk number that would become their first – and only – American Top 40 single (reaching No 33).

“That single was very different from the song Arthur had written,” says Echols, explaining that it had started out as “a kind of Dylanesque folk song about Arthur, very autobiographical”. As he explains it, an endorsement deal with Vox meant they could try out pioneering new effects, such as a tremolo box for a guitar and distortion pedal for the bass. “Which no-one had then. Arthur was listening in the booth and went, ‘That’s pretty cool.’” The results gave them the confidence to experiment even more, changing producers, studios and engineers for Da Capo and blossoming with “She Comes In Colors”. Receiving little airplay outside the LA area on release in 1966, the song wasn’t a hit but has had quite an afterlife. The Rolling Stones quoted it – “She comes in colours everywhere” – uncredited, in 1967 single “She’s A Rainbow”. The Hoosiers covered it and Janet Jackson sampled it. Even Madonna borrowed from it – unwittingly – on 1999 hit “Beautiful Stranger”, with producer William Orbit later admitting borrowing from the melody. “Arthur got a credit for that,” smiles Echols. “The whole group should have been credited really, but the acknowledgement was nice.”

JOHNNY ECHOLS: “My Little Book” had done quite well as a single [reaching US 52 in March 1966], so we wanted to keep pushing with “7 And 7 Is”.

BRUCE BOTNICK: It was just really, really unusual for me. I had never heard anything like that before. But I loved the energy. The drummer [Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer, who’d trained as a pianist, not a percussionist] struggled with the tempo. After about 30 takes Arthur said, “Sit down, I’ll play.” I guess Snoopy must have then figured out how to do it.

ECHOLS: By that time everyone was cursing at the poor man. We played it so much that by the end my fingers were bleeding, but after that we felt we could do anything. We realised we needed a real drummer, so finally got Michael Stuart [now Stuart-Ware] from the Sons Of Adam.

MICHAEL STUART-WARE: Arthur had heard the Sons play a few times. One day, he came by our pad in Laurel Canyon and said, “You guys can have this tune if you want it”, and banged out “7 And 7 Is” on his black Gibson acoustic. Our lead guitarist Randy Holden said, “That’s not really us”, so Arthur played us “Feathered Fish”. Randy went, “We’ll take that!” and we covered it. Love’s original drummer, Don Conca, was fabulous, but the drugs took over and he stopped showing up for gigs. One night Arthur asked, “Is there a drummer in the house?” So Snoopy had filled in, but was more comfortable once he switched to harpsichord. Arthur was always asking me to join and after the Sons stopped getting along, I finally said OK. When I bumped into Don Conca he said, “That’s cool, man. You’re the only drummer in Hollywood who can handle it.”

ECHOLS: Don Conca was a loud showman, like Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich. Michael was a finesse drummer. He did these rhythmic counterpoints that sounded marvellous. We all had eclectic tastes. Country, gospel, blues, jazz. Arthur and I went to the same Memphis high school as Charles Lloyd and I’d watch fascinated as he played clarinet. After we moved to Los Angeles, Charles came to see Love at [LA club] Bido Lito’s. We were drawing 10 times more people than him. He was kinda miffed, but light-heartedly. When we wanted to go more jazzy we got Tjay Cantrelli, who we’d played with in the Grass Roots, on woodwind. He was just going to play a session, but the flute changed the sound so much that he became part of the group.

STUART-WARE: I’d listened to the first Love album, but Arthur wanted to cover new ground from a jazz foundation. At the first practice at Arthur and [guitarist] Bryan MacLean’s pad on Brier, we smoked hash and listened to Charles Lloyd, Cat Stevens and Fresh Cream. Then Arthur played his new tunes on the Gibson, including “She Comes In Colors”. On stage at Bido Lito’s, Love were a natural LSD trip with no comedown, but the new songs sounded more sophisticated.

ECHOLS: We also changed producers. Mr Holzman [also Elektra Records boss] came from a folk music background and wanted everything clean and pristine, but our sound was loud, levels driven into the red. When Jac told us about Paul Rothchild, who’d just got out of prison for selling marijuana, we thought that was the coolest thing. We hadn’t heard his stuff. The only reason we hired him was because he’d gotten out of prison. We also got a new engineer, Dave Hassinger, who captured our sound as it was and got a great mix. We went into RCA Studios, because Paul Rothchild was working with The Doors in Sunset. RCA had installed an eight-track machine, so we could overdub on Da Capo. It was a brand new slate. I think Paul Rothchild expected us to do something like the first album. It took him a while to get used to these jazzier songs, but then he got on board and he was perfect.

STUART-WARE: Love ruled the Sunset Strip mysteriously. Because the group didn’t play often, everyone was always, “Where are they?” Our racial diversity enhanced that mystique and was an integral part of our difference.

ECHOLS: We were a racially diverse hard rock group because Arthur and I were racially diverse and grew up in a racially diverse community. We wanted our group to reflect who we were. We didn’t want to be typecast as R&B, or play the Chitlin circuit, where Chuck Berry’s manager had to carry a 45 and say, “Pay me now
or he’s not going on.”

BOTNICK: It was highly unusual to have a black person doing rock’n’roll, before Hendrix, but Arthur never called any race issues. He dealt with you on the level of: “This is my music and this is what I want.”

ECHOLS: Arthur had taken accordion lessons and his parents had also bought him an organ. He only joined the band I had with Billy Preston in school because young ladies flocked to us. He had a musician’s soul but didn’t want to take the time to become one. His genius was to be able to sit down with a group of us and sing songs that he’d written, and as we’d find the chords he’d go, “I like that.” He assembled the music like a collage, in his head from what we played. “She Comes In Colors” was the most difficult song on Da Capo to record. It probably took seven or eight takes, because in a way it’s three songs in one, but it’s hard to hear where the changes are.

STUART-WARE: Playing unusual time signatures didn’t present much of a challenge for anyone in the group. I’d listened to Dave Brubeck in school and played in a high school jazz group. The jazzy groove on “She Comes In Colors” was one I had from the get-go. I just had to play harder because I was up against electronic instruments. The flute and harpsichord duet was groundbreaking, and Arthur’s vocal was diverse and immaculate, as always.

ECHOLS: Arthur was a showboat, an introspective child who’d found his thing by being different. In summer he’d wear a fur coat and one shoe, sweating in that coat so much it smelled. He had this idea that a rock person should be nutty, but he was a fantastic poet. Even in elementary school he was always writing little rhymes. He had the knack of taking the most mundane situation into something interesting, and you’d think, ‘Wow.’ He wrote “She Comes In Colors” about his girlfriend, Annette Bonan. She’s Annette Ferrell now, but always wore colourful clothes, like the flower children did then.

STUART-WARE: I never really knew what the songs were about. Arthur usually left it to the listener to work out the reality. If he was ever asked, self-deprecation was his blade of choice: “It’s just about some chick.” But maybe he did write that song for Annette.

ECHOLS: When Arthur sang “When I was in England town, the rain fell right down” he’d never been to the UK. I explained, “Arthur, it should be ‘London town’.” But he sang it anyway. Maybe he didn’t want to share songwriting credits, but people here think “England town” is kinda cute.

BOTNICK: By then Love should have been hugely successful, but Arthur wouldn’t tour, wouldn’t leave Hollywood. In those days to promote an act properly you had to play somewhere to get radio. I think he felt comfortable and safe in his environment, but not touring harmed their career.

STUART-WARE: Concert promoters would track me down by phone. I’d call Arthur and the answer was always no. Eventually he got mad at me for asking. I often wondered, ‘What’s with the not playing?’

ECHOLS: We played in New York, Vegas, or Massachusetts, but we couldn’t play in the South or middle America, or sometimes we’d have bookings cancelled. The problem was the racial makeup of the group. It hurt us, because The Doors and Buffalo Springfield and all those other groups were able to tour. But we were getting successful, buying houses and had women chasing us, whereas at the start we were just trying to make a living. Also, we did some dumb things. I’ll demonstrate the mindset of a rock’n’roll kid. I bought an E-Type Jaguar, and when it ran out of gas I left it at the side of the street. My father begged me to go back for it. Eventually it was impounded and auctioned. Those cars are worth hundreds of thousands now. Leaving my car was probably the dumbest thing I ever did, along with insisting that Elektra sign The Doors. We got a fantastic offer from MCA Records, who could get us into way more shops, but we knew that having Love on their label was part of Elektra’s cachet. We figured that if they had The Doors, maybe they’d let us go. But instead all the money that was going to promote Love went on The Doors. People went “What did you do that for?” Because we were dumb kids! I was barely 18 then.

STUART-WARE: Then The Rolling Stones stole the line “She comes in colours” for “She’s A Rainbow”. Wasn’t Mick [Jagger] afraid of being sued? I remember we all thought, ‘Wow. How could Mick think it was OK to do that?’

BOTNICK: We all take stuff, but I do remember Arthur being offended.

ECHOLS: When Madonna used the melody from “She Comes In Colors” for “Beautiful Stranger”, Arthur was credited as a writer.

STUART-WARE: It doesn’t bother me that neither Da Capo or Forever Changes were hugely successful. What does bother me is that we didn’t work harder to promote both albums, or play more shows just for the thrill of playing.

ECHOLS: But even though Da Capo didn’t sell a whole lot, we felt we’d arrived as a group. People like The Beach Boys were talking to us as peers. On the next album we felt we had to push it to another higher level. The universe smiled on us, we did Forever Changes, and in the 55 years since it’s never been out of print.

The Love band featuring Johnny Echols tour the UK in July – tickets can be found here

Michael Stuart-Ware’s Love book, Behind The Scenes At The Pegasus Carousel, is now available as a Kindle under the title Pegasus Continuum

Hear Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ new song, “Wild God”

Sam Richards
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Hear Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ new song, “Wild God”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have revealed details of their new album, Wild God. Produced by Cave and Warren Ellis, mixed by David Fridmann, the album will be released on August 30 on their own Bad Seed label, in partnership with Play It Again Sam.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Listen to the first single and title track below:

Cave began writing the album on New Year’s Day 2023. It was recorded at Miraval in Provence and Soundtree in London, with the regular Bad Seeds line-up of Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos, Warren Ellis and George Vjestica, plus additional performances from Colin Greenwood (bass) and Luis Almau (nylon string guitar, acoustic guitar).

“Wild God… there’s no fucking around with this record,” says Cave. “When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”

“I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me,” he continues says. “It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There is never a masterplan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.”

Pre-order Wild God here and check out the tracklisting below:

Song of the Lake
Wild God
Frogs
Joy
Final Rescue Attempt
Conversion
Cinnamon Horses
Long Dark Night
O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)
As the Waters Cover the Sea

Kamasi Washington announces new album, Fearless Movement

Sam Richards
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Kamasi Washington announces new album, Fearless Movement

LA jazz titan Kamasi Washington has announced that his new album Fearless Movement will be released by Young on May 3.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Watch a video for the track “Prologue” below:

Fearless Movement features contributions from the likes of André 3000, George Clinton, BJ The Chicago Kid, Thundercat, Terrace Martin, DJ Battlecat and more, including Washington’s own daughter.

Pre-order the album here and peruse the tracklisting below:

  1. Lesanu
  2. Asha The First (featuring Thundercat, Taj Austin, Ras Austin)
  3. Computer Love (featuring Patrice Quinn, DJ Battlecat, Brandon Coleman)
  4. The Visionary (featuring Terrace Martin)
  5. Get Lit (featuring George Clinton, D Smoke)
  6. Dream State (featuring André 3000)
  7. Together (featuring BJ the Chicago Kid)
  8. The Garden Path
  9. Interstellar Peace (The Last Stance)
  10. Road to Self (KO)
  11. Lines in the Sand
  12. Prologue

The Children’s Hour – Going Home

Peter Watts
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The Children’s Hour – Going Home

Before Josephine Foster was an idiosyncratic solo singer, she was a member of short-lived folk duo The Children’s Hour. Here, Foster’s taut, strange voice and occasional harp, piano, ukulele and harmonium player was paired with Andy Bar’s loose and scratchy guitar. The duo recorded an EP and one excellent, underlooked album, SOS JFK, which came out in 2003 on Rough Trade and featured Tim Daisy on drums. But The Children’s Hour recorded a second album not long after, this time as a fully-fledged trio with Dave Pajo. That record, Going Home, is finally getting released on Drag City after being rediscovered in the vaults.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The creation story of Going Home is part of the fun. Even though The Children’s Hour were a strictly minority pursuit, way too weird and abstract for the mainstream, the duo were asked to open for Zwan, Billy Corgan’s post-Pumpkins supergroup that would eventually dissolve in bitter recrimination. That tour saw The Children’s Hour (the name comes from Longfellow rather than the BBC) take their unusual music – oddly sacred, sometimes twee, more than a little freaky – to the arenas of North America. But for the music to work in a bigger venue, it needed additional pep, so Zwan’s David Pajo agreed to step in on drums. Pajo, once of Slint of course, admired The Children Hour’s awkward, almost ungainly, spirit and after the tour finished, he took them into a studio in Shelbyville, Kentucky, owned by Will Oldham’s brother Paul. It’s where Pajo had recorded I See A Darkness.

That’s where the three-piece version of The Children’s Hour laid down the eight tracks on Going Home, which were believed lost until Paul Oldham found them last year during a spring clean. Half of these songs – “Anna”, “Wyoming”, “Adoption Day” and “Going Home” – were new versions of tracks that first featured on JFK SOS and appear here little changed, although perhaps Pajo’s drumming is generally more aggressive than Tim Daisy’s on the original album.

But the other four songs are entirely new. “Leader Soldier”, a version of which featured on Foster’s 2013 out-take album Strangers On The Trail, has Foster at her most Nico-like, while Bar and Pajo provide taut and unsettling accompaniment. On the adorable “Dance With Me”, Pajo’s percussion leads a jangly love song, that features a gorgeous duet between Bar and Foster reminiscent of The Moldy Peaches. “Bright Lights” sees Foster ponder mortality and impending death against another strong Pajo-Bar backdrop, with discordant jabs of post-rock guitar and clattering rhythm. Finally comes “Rainbow”, a ballad with a spidery lead guitar from Bar and ominous vocal by Foster, with Pajo supplying a more minimalist backbeat. Cute and creepy in equal measure.

Faye Webster – Underdressed At The Symphony

Stephen Deusner
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Faye Webster – Underdressed At The Symphony

Faye Webster is most at home in her own head. Every song on her fifth album puzzles over the way her brain works, how it worries over certain details, how it fixates on certain unpleasant feelings, how it works so often against her. She remembers the smell of her old apartment on “eBay Purchase History”, and she thinks she’s figured out why she’s so self-conscious on “Wanna Quit All The Time”. She tries in vain to evict an ex from her brainpan on, well, pretty much every song. That’s not to say she’s an introvert – Webster is active in the Atlanta arts scene as a photographer and collaborator, and that album title suggests she does get out of the house occasionally – but her songs are all set deep within her own mind. Her primary subject is the tangle of needs and desires, fears and doubts, epiphanies and delusions contained therein.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

These new songs are all invitations into that headspace, and to her credit Webster doesn’t tidy up for company. The mess is the whole point. It’s a fascinating place to be, largely because she finds so much meaning in everyday observations and mundane ironies, in the small moments many other songwriters might overlook. On “Wanna Quit All The Time” she admits that she’s “overthinking in my head again” and that she’s “good at making shit negative”, but she ends the song with a stray observation: “Right now I hate the colour of my house”. What sounds like a punchline becomes a gut-punch as she realises how little control she has over any aspect of her life.

Webster refined this balance of humour and pathos on her earliest albums in parallel with an idiosyncratic blend of country and R&B, and both became distinguishing signatures on 2021’s I Know I’m Funny Haha. That album enjoyed a long life thanks in some part to TikTok; Webster doesn’t even have an account, but that didn’t stop fans from soundtracking their own clips with snippets of her songs. Months of sold-out tours and a meteoric increase in streaming does take its toll on her psyche, however. “It’s the attention that freaks me out,” she declares, as though she could give up parts, but not all, of the music-making enterprise. Webster sounds like someone who would be mapping her brain even without an audience.

After recording her previous albums in Atlanta and nearby Athens, Georgia, Webster and her trusted backing band decamped to Texas, namely to Sonic Ranch Studios, where Bon Iver and Fiona Apple, among others, have recently recorded. The change of scenery gave her a new perspective on the place she calls home, but it also allowed the band to cut loose a bit. Tightened by long months on the road, they respond sensitively to her vocals, especially on the opening track, “Thinking About You”. At six-and-a-half minutes, it’s the longest song Webster has ever released, and most of it consists of her singing the title over and over again. Her voice remains steady with each repetition, allowing the musicians to elaborate on motifs and ideas: Matt Stoessel and Nick Rosen uncork increasingly jazzy riffs on guitar and piano, respectively, while drummer Charles Garner and bassist Bryan Howard test the elasticity of the song’s breezy groove.

These familiar elements coalesce into something new for Webster: more than country or soul, Underdressed At The Symphony recalls the plushness of ’70s pop and ’60s exotica, but without any nostalgia and therefore without any irony or distance. That allows “Lifetime” (the album’s aching heart) and “But Not Kiss” (its most dramatic heartbreaker) to sound unself-consciously beautiful – which is all the more surprising given that Webster admits to such extreme self-consciousness. By contrast, “My Baby Loves Me Yeah!” and “Lego Ring” (featuring a vestigial verse from Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty) ride simple yet effective grooves, as she yearns for something beyond what she has, even if it’s just a plastic toy.

On Underdressed At The Symphony, less is more. Less is everything. Restraint is crucial to these songs, not just in the band’s careful arrangements but in the way Webster emphasises expressiveness over vocal power. She is, in addition, a minimalist songwriter who uses as few words as possible to conjure emotions too messy or too contradictory or simply too painful to state outright. “I want to sleep in your arms but not kiss,” she confesses on “But Not Kiss”, an unusually uncommitted breakup song about getting close to an ex but not too close. Or, conversely, about pulling yourself away in increments, as though a gradual separation might spare you the pain. Rarely does overthinking a problem sound so inviting or so productive.

Uncut’s New Music Playlist for March 2024

Sam Richards
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Uncut’s New Music Playlist for March 2024

2024’s torrent of great new music just keeps on coming. This month, we bring you further evidence of Mick Head’s glorious renaissance, Brett Anderson covering Echo & The Bunnymen, Bonny Light Horseman finding inspiration in a remote Irish pub, new singles from Khruangbin and Isobel Campbell, and career-best stuff from Ben Chasny’s Six Organs Of Admittance.

THERE’S PLENTY MORE NEW MUSIC COVERAGE INSIDE THE NEW UNCUT! ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Plus the return of US indie scufflers Les Savy Fav and Diiv, beautifully bleak new business from Keeley Forsyth and Stars Of The Lid’s Adam Wiltzie, and news of a sequel to 2022’s much-loved Ghosted, by Oren Ambarchi and friends. The pleasure’s all ours…

PARAORCHESTRA WITH BRETT ANDERSON & CHARLES HAZLEWOOD 
“The Killing Moon”
(World Circuit)

BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN
“When I Was Younger”
(Jagjaguwar)

MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
“Connemara”
(Modern Sky)

KHRUANGBIN
“May Ninth”
(Dead Oceans / Night Time Stories)

LEYLA McCALLA
“Love We Had”
(Anti-)

ISOBEL CAMPBELL
“4316”
(Cooking Vinyl)

AMANDA BERGMAN
“Wild Geese, Wild Love”
(CowCow)

ROWENA WISE
“We Are Nothing”
(Dalliance)

CEDRIC BURNSIDE
“Closer”
(Provogue)

LES SAVY FAV
“Guzzle Blood”
(Frenchkiss)

HOUSE Of ALL 
“Murmuration”
(Tiny Global Productions)

DOG UNIT
“Consistent Effort”
(Brace Yourself)

DIIV
“Brown Paper Bag”
(Fantasy Records)

AWEN ENSEMBLE 
“Idris”
(New Soil)

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
“Summer’s Last Rays”
(Drag City)

KEELEY FORSYTH
“Horse”
(FatCat)

OREN AMBARCHI / JOHAN BERTHLING / ANDREAS WERLIIN
“Tre”
(Drag City)

STILL HOUSE PLANTS
“No Sleep Deep Risk”
(Bison)

HATIS NOIT
“Jomon (Preservation Rework feat. Armand Hammer)”
(Erased Tapes)

ADAM WILTZIE
“Tissue Of Lies”
(Kranky)

GROUP LISTENING
“New Brighton”
(PRAH)

THERE’S PLENTY MORE NEW MUSIC COVERAGE INSIDE THE NEW UNCUT! ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Take a look inside the new Uncut

Michael Bonner
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Take a look inside the new Uncut

As you’ll have gathered by now, there’s a new issue of Uncut currently in shops, featuring a cavalcade of excellent new interviews and features as well as our definitive reviews section and a free, 15-track CD.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Here’s a rundown of some highlights from the new issue…

PINK FLOYD

With his SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS band, NICK MASON is on a mission to save the potent, foundational music of PINK FLOYD. In doing so, he aims to reassert the Floyd’s historic creative path from three-minute pop fantasias and cosmic-progressive freakouts to the transitional epiphanies that led to The Dark Side Of The Moon. As he prepares to lead the Saucers back out on tour, Mason and his co-conspirators – aka “the jolly Floyd” – dig deep into the band’s years of questing. “In Pink Floyd, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing half the time,” Mason tells us. “What we did have was an abundance of ideas.”

THE BEACH BOYS

From three brothers wrestling on their front lawn to the miraculous creation of numerous pop masterpieces, a new photobook chronicles THE BEACH BOYS’ Californian dream, in their own words and pictures. There are disappointments and dark moments, but a sense of innocent joy prevails. As Brian Wilson recalls, “We were one of the biggest things going.”

ADRIANNE LENKER

Away from her day job with Big Thief, ADRIANNE LENKER has developed a parallel career as a solo artist, whose intricate and vulnerable folk songs mine deep, emotional truths. In New York, she talks to Uncut about creation, catharsis and connection. “In a way, it’s like one song that I’ve been writing since I was 10 years old…”

WAYNE KRAMER

The Motor City is in mourning. Brothers and sisters, the time has come for Uncut’s Jaan Uhelszki to pay a very personal tribute to the inspirational leader of the MC5

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN

Since reuniting in 2007, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN have proved that even the most tempestuous sibling relationships can enjoy successful second acts. As they prepare to mark their 40th anniversary with a new album and an autobiography, JIM and WILLIAM REID explain how the shared ideals they developed in their East Kilbride bedroom still apply in 2024. “Your fantasy of being in a band is in every way better than the reality…”

TOWNES VAN ZANDT

A dive bar in a rundown Texas neighbourhood, The Old Quarter was a regular haunt for TOWNES VAN ZANDT. In 1973, it also became the setting for a live recording that vividly captured the renegade singer-songwriter’s wild charisma and quicksilver poetry. As we mark what would have been Townes’ 80th birthday, friends, admirers and sundry ne’er-do-wells tell the story of this historic recording – and its critical place in Townes’ lore. “I’d seen him fucked up, I’d seen him really good,” says Steve Earle. “For some reason, he took those nights very seriously.”

SHABAKA HUTCHINGS

The UK jazz magus has retired his celebrated bands Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming – and even put aside his trusty saxophone – in order to seek out fresh creative inspiration. His quest takes him from a bamboo forest in Japan via the birthplace of A Love Supreme to a kids’ swimming pool in Croydon, where SHABAKA HUTCHINGS explains to Sam Richards, “It’s gonna be good, so just enjoy the ride…”

AN AUDIENCE WITH… JAH WOBBLE

The former PiL bass invader talks Can, Sid, Sinéad and “going deep into the heart of space”

The Jesus And Mary Chain announce memoir, Never Understood

Michael Bonner
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The Jesus And Mary Chain announce memoir, Never Understood

The Jesus And Mary Chain have announced details of their memoir. Never Understood will be published by White Rabbit books on August 15.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Written by Jim and William Reid, with Ben Thompson, the memoir is available in hardback, trade paperback, ebook and audio digital download, alongside a White Rabbit special edition and a vinyl audiobook. You can pre-order a copy here.

The Jesus And Mary Chain also star in this month’s issue of Uncut, where they discuss their new album Glasgow Eyes, how the shared ideals they developed in their East Kilbride bedroom still apply in 2024 and how the bust-ups and breakdowns of yore are now firmly behind them. “Your fantasy of being in a band is in every way better than the reality,” they tell us.

Bruce Springsteen announces new Greatest Hits set

Michael Bonner
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Bruce Springsteen announces new Greatest Hits set

As Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band head out onto the road this month, Sony Music are releasing Best Of Bruce Springsteen, a new compilation spanning 1973’s Greeting from Asbury Park, NJ to 2020’s Letter To You.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The album is released on April 19 and will come in physical formats as an 18-track set across 2 LPs or 1 CD – and digitally as an expanded 31-song package.

You can pre-order the album here.

The album and CD tracklisting is:

Growin’ Up
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
Born To Run
Thunder Road
Badlands
Hungry Heart 
Atlantic City 
Dancing in the Dark
Born in the U.S.A
Brilliant Disguise 
Human Touch 
Streets of Philadelphia
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Secret Garden
The Rising 
Girls In Their Summer Clothes
Hello Sunshine
Letter To You

The digital deluxe tracklisting is:

Growin’ Up
Spirit In The Night 
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) 
Born To Run
Tenth Avenue Freeze Out 
Thunder Road
Badlands
Prove It All Night
The River
Hungry Heart 
Atlantic City 
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
Born in the U.S.A
Brilliant Disguise 
Tougher Than The Rest 
Human Touch 
If I Should Fall Behind 
Living Proof
Streets of Philadelphia
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Secret Garden
The Rising 
Long Time Comin’
Girls In Their Summer Clothes
The Wrestler
We Take Care Of Our Own
Hello Sunshine
Ghosts 
Letter To You 

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND – 2024 TOUR DATES:

March 19 – Phoenix, AZ @ Footprint Center 

March 22 – Las Vegas, NV @ T-Mobile Arena 

March 25 – San Diego, CA @ Pechanga Arena 

March 28 – San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center 

March 31 – San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center 

April 4 – Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum 

April 7 – Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum

April 12 – Uncasville, CT @ Mohegan Sun Arena 

April 15 – Albany, NY @ MVP Arena

April 18 – Syracuse, NY @ JMA Wireless Dome 

April 21 – Columbus, OH @ Nationwide Arena

May 5 – Cardiff, Wales @ Principality Stadium 

May 9 – Belfast, Northern Ireland @ Boucher Road 

May 12 – Kilkenny, Ireland @ Nowlan Park 

May 16 – Cork, Ireland @ Páirc Uí Chaoimh 

May 19 – Dublin, Ireland @ Croke Park 

May 22 – Sunderland, England @ Stadium of Light

May 25 – Marseille, France @ Orange Vélodrome

May 28 – Prague, Czech Republic @ Airport Letnany

June 1 – Milan, Italy @ San Siro Stadium

June 3 – Milan, Italy @ San Siro Stadium 

June 12 – Madrid, Spain @ Cívitas Metropolitano 

June 14 – Madrid, Spain @ Cívitas Metropolitano 

June 17 – Madrid, Spain @ Cívitas Metropolitano 

June 20 – Barcelona, Spain @ Estadi Olímpic 

June 22 – Barcelona, Spain @ Estadi Olímpic 

June 27 – Nijmegen, Netherlands @ Goffertpark 

June 29 – Nijmegen, Netherlands @ Goffertpark 

July 2 – Werchter, Belgium @ Werchter Park 

July 5 – Hannover, Germany @ Heinz von Heiden Arena 

July 9 – Odense, Denmark @ Dyrskuepladsen 

July 12 – Helsinki, Finland @ Olympic Stadium 

July 15 – Stockholm, Sweden @ Friends Arena 

July 18 – Stockholm, Sweden @ Friends Arena 

July 21 – Bergen, Norway @ Dokken 

July 25 – London, England @ Wembley Stadium connected by EE 

July 27 – London, England @ Wembley Stadium connected by EE 

Aug. 15 – Pittsburgh, PA @ PPG Paints Arena 

Aug. 18 – Pittsburgh, PA @ PPG Paints Arena 

Aug. 21 – Philadelphia, PA @ Citizens Bank Park 

Aug. 23 – Philadelphia, PA @ Citizens Bank Park 

Sept. 7 – Washington, DC @ Nationals Park 

Sept. 13 – Baltimore, MD @ Oriole Park at Camden Yards 

Oct. 31 – Montreal, Quebec @ Centre Bell 

Nov. 3 – Toronto, Ontario @ Scotiabank Arena 

Nov. 6 – Toronto, Ontario @ Scotiabank Arena 

Nov. 9 – Ottawa, Ontario @ Canadian Tire Centre 

Nov. 13 – Winnipeg, Manitoba @ Canada Life Centre 

Nov. 16 – Calgary, Alberta @ Scotiabank Saddledome 

Nov. 19 – Edmonton, Alberta @ Rogers Place 

Nov. 22 – Vancouver, British Columbia @ Rogers Arena

“It’s shamanic!”

John Lewis
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“It’s shamanic!”

In an excerpt from this month’s Pink Floyd cover story, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets – aka Mason, Guy Pratt, Gary Kemp, Lee Harris and Dom Beken – reveal their 10 favourite vintage Floyd songs to play live…

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

“CANDY AND A CURRANT BUN”

“ARNOLD LAYNE” B SIDE; 1967

LEE HARRIS: I absolutely love this song. I think it might be Syd at his best – a three minute pop single that still manages a freakout section. When we first played it, it only took us a couple of rehearsals and it sounded amazing.

“SEE EMILY PLAY”

SINGLE; 1967

DOM BEKEN: There are so many wonderful, unusual sounds on this. Unlike some other tracks, where we were able to sample the original sound effects on the records, I had to recreate them all here. I made my own Rick Wright-style prepared piano by taking apart an old girlfriend’s piano and sampling every single note! I love the piano gliss going into the last chorus. It’s such a great pop song, isn’t it?

“ASTRONOMY DOMINE”

THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN; 196

NICK MASON: This is enormous fun to play, lots of tom-toms, lots of double-bass drum pounding. I love the vocal harmonies, like a Gregorian choir. People think of it as a freakout, but it’s deceptively complicated, with lots of very unusual chord changes.

“INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE”

THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN; 1967

MASON: There’s a lot of muddled labelling between ‘psych’ and ‘prog’, which I’ve always thought were very different things. This is Pink Floyd at our most psychedelic. It is always fun to play. It has that same structure you get in a classic jazz song – you play the melody, improvise around it, then restate it at the end.

“BIKE”

THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN; 1967

MASON: It’s a very funny lyric, isn’t it? “I’d give it to you if I could/But I borrowed it…” You have to follow Syd’s very odd metre to get the rhythm right. Apparently, we never played this live at the time, so it’s wonderful to give it another life.

“SET THE CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE SUN”

A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS; 1968

GARY KEMP: I first played this in 1971, jamming along to the record with my mates from the Anna Scher drama school, Phil Daniels, Peter Hugo Daly and Miles Landesman. It’s fabulous to play – it’s not busy, but a real energy boils up. It’s like a sonic voyage into the sun. It’s almost shamanic.

“THE NILE SONG”

MORE; 1969

GUY PRATT: This is another one Floyd never played live, to our knowledge. I got into this as a teenager, buying that cheap 99p Relics album and falling in love with it. This is Floyd at their punkiest and heaviest. I have to get into a zone where I’m able to howl the vocal part, screaming my guts out.

“ONE OF THESE DAYS”

MEDDLE; 1971

PRATT: This was one of only three songs from this era I’d played before – the others being “Astronomy Domine” and “Arnold Layne”. We often play this as a set opener, a way of setting out our stall. It’s a reminder of how experimental Roger was as a bass player – that wonderful, throbbing groove.

“ECHOES”

MEDDLE; 1971

KEMP: This is the most ambitious thing we’ve done. There are so many sections, so many moods. It took five days of rehearsals to nail it. There’s a gentle, very English, pastoral formality about the vocals that Guy and I have to cling to when we sing those harmonies.

“OBSCURED BY CLOUDS”

OBSCURED BY CLOUDS; 1972

PRATT: I think this is the most recent song in the Floyd canon that we do. Like a punky piece of krautrock. It’s so blissful. Nick said it would work in Ibiza and I think he’s right. It’s heavy and trancey. A lovely world to inhabit.

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Watch Keith Richards cover The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For The Man”

Sam Richards
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Watch Keith Richards cover The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For The Man”

To celebrate what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday, Keith Richards has released a video showing him recording a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For The Man”.

It’s the first track on The Power Of The Heart: A Tribute To Lou Reed, to be released by Light In The Attic on Record Store Day (April 20).

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

“To me, Lou stood out,” says Richards. “The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” Watch the video below:

See who else has contributed a Lou Reed cover to the album below:

The Power Of The Heart: A Tribute To Lou Reed (Vinyl)
Side A:
Keith Richards – I’m Waiting for the Man
Maxim Ludwig & Angel Olsen – I Can’t Stand It
Rufus Wainwright – Perfect Day
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – I’m So Free
Bobby Rush – Sally Can’t Dance
Rickie Lee Jones – Walk on the Wild Side
Side B:
The Afghan Whigs – I Love You, Suzanne
Mary Gauthier – Coney Island Baby
Lucinda Williams – Legendary Hearts
Automatic – New Sensations
Rosanne Cash – Magician

The Power Of The Heart: A Tribute To Lou Reed (CD/Digital)

  1. Keith Richards – I’m Waiting for the Man
  2. Maxim Ludwig & Angel Olsen – I Can’t Stand It
  3. Rufus Wainwright – Perfect Day
  4. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – I’m So Free
  5. Bobby Rush – Sally Can’t Dance
  6. Rickie Lee Jones – Walk on the Wild Side
  7. The Afghan Whigs – I Love You, Suzanne
  8. Mary Gauthier – Coney Island Baby
  9. Lucinda Williams – Legendary Hearts
  10. Automatic – New Sensations
  11. Rosanne Cash – Magician
  12. Brogan Bentley – The Power of the Heart

Stevie Nicks to headline BST Hyde Park

Michael Bonner
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Stevie Nicks to headline BST Hyde Park

Stevie Nicks has been announced as a headliner at this year’s American Express presents BST Hyde Park events in London.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The rest of the bill is still to be confirmed.

Nick last performed in the UK at another BST Hyde Park, supporting Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 2017.

Pre sale will go live at 10am on Monday, March 4 and will run until 9am on Wednesday, March 6. Sign up can be found here.

Elsewhere at this year’s BST Hyde Park, you’ll find Kings of Leon (June 30), Andrea Bocelli (July 5), Robbie Williams (July 6), Shania Twain (July 7), Kylie Minogue (July 13) and Stray Kids (July 14).

St Vincent announces new album, All Born Screaming

Michael Bonner
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St Vincent announces new album, All Born Screaming

Annie Clarke returns with a new St Vincent album All Born Screaming, which is released on April 26th by Virgin Music/Fiction Records.

You can hear “Broken Man” from the album below.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Clarke’s seventh album, All Born Screaming features guests including Dave Grohl, Cate Le Bon and Stella Mogzawa. You can pre-order a copy here.

The tracklisting All Born Screaming is:

Hell is Near
Reckless
Broken Man
Flea
Big Time Nothing
Violent Times
The Power’s Out
Sweetest Fruit
So Many Planets 
All Born Screaming (featuring Cate Le Bon)

Hear Richard Thompson’s new track, “Singapore Sadie”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Richard Thompson’s new track, “Singapore Sadie”

Richard Thompson has announced details of his new album, Ship To Shore. You can hear a taster for the album, “Singapore Sadie“, below.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Released on May 31 via New West Records, Ship To Shore is Thompson’s follow-up to his 2018 studio album 13 Rivers and his 2021 memoir Beeswing.

Produced by Thompson and recorded in Woodstock, NY, the album will be available on standard black vinyl, CD and on digital platforms. A limited “Deep Blue” colour vinyl edition of 500 with a bonus orange flexi disc featuring a demo of the song “Trust” will be available via Rough Trade. An autographed compact disc edition and a limited orange and yellow marble coluor vinyl edition featuring a 5×7 archival print autographed by Richard Thompson will be available via independent retailers and is available for pre-order now via NEW WEST RECORDS. 

The tracklisting for Ship To Shore is:

Freeze 

The Fear Never Leaves You 

Singapore Sadie

Trust  

The Day That I Give In 

The Old Pack Mule  

Turnstile Casanova  

Lost In The Crowd  

Maybe 

Life’s A Bloody Show 

What’s Left To Lose  

We Roll 

Thompson is also heading out on tour:

March 1 – Mamaroneck, NY – The Emelin Theatre *

March 2 – Beacon, NY – The Towne Crier Cafe *

March 15 – Old Saybrook, CT – The Kate *

March 16 – Fall River, MA – Narrows Center for the Arts *

March 17 – Northampton, MA – Back Porch Festival *

March 21 – Fairfield,CT – Sacred Heart University Community Theater *

March 22 – Derry, NH – Tupelo Music Hall *

March 23 – Burlington, VT – First Unitarian Church *

March 24 – Shirley, MA – The Bull Run *

April 4 – Hartford, CT – Infinity Music Hall *

April 5 – Gloucester, MA – The Cut *

April 6 – Roslyn, NY – My Father’s Place *

April 7 – Roslyn, NY – My Father’s Place *

April 9 – Annapolis, MD – Rams Head Tavern *

April 10 – Richmond, VA – Tin Pan *

April 11 – Vienna, VA – The Barns at Wolf Trap *

April 12 – Collingswood, NJ – The Scottish Rite *

May 25 – Cambridge, England, UK – Corn Exchange #

May 26 – Bristol, UK – Beacon #

May 27 – York, UK – Barbican #

May 29 – Glasgow, UK – Royal Concert Hall #

May 30 – Gateshead, UK – Glasshouse #

May 31 – Manchester, UK – Aviva Studios at Manchester Factory International #

June 1 – Stoke-on-Trent, UK – Victoria Hall #

June 3 – Birmingham, UK – Symphony Hall #

June 4 – Cardiff, UK – New Theatre #

June 5 – Portsmouth, UK – Guildhall #

June 6 – Brighton and Hove, UK – Dome Concert Hall #

June 8 – London,UK – Royal Albert Hall #

July 28 – Cape May, NJ – Cape May Convention Hall #

October 18 – New York, NY – The Town Hall #

August 23 – August 30, 2025 – Venice, Italy – Harmony Voyages – Gems of the Adriatic Cruise

* Solo Show

# Full Band

Mdou Moctar unveils new album, Funeral For Justice

Sam Richards
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Mdou Moctar unveils new album, Funeral For Justice

Mdou Moctar has announced that his band’s new album Funeral For Justice – the follow-up to 2021’s Afrique Victime – will be released by Matador on May 3.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

You can watch a video for the blistering title track below:

“This album is really different for me,” explains Moctar. “Now the problems of terrorist violence are more serious in Africa. When the US and Europe came here, they said they’re going to help us, but what we see is really different. They never help us to find a solution.”

Funeral For Justice was recorded by the band’s bassist Mikey Coltun over five days in a mostly unfurnished house in upstate New York. “I really wanted this to shine with the political message because of everything that’s going on,” he says. “As the band got tighter and heavier live, it made sense to capture this urgency and this aggression – it wasn’t a forced thing, it was very natural.”

Pre-order Funeral For Justice here.

Hear T Bone Burnett’s new track, “Waiting For You”

Michael Bonner
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Hear T Bone Burnett’s new track, “Waiting For You”

T Bone Burnett will release a new solo album, The Other Side, on April 19 through Verve Forecast.

The album – T Bone’s first since 2008’s Tooth Of Crime – features contributions from Rosanne Cash, Lucius and Weyes Blood.

You can hear a taster for the album, “Waiting For You“, with Lucius on harmony vocals, below.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The album is available to pre-order here.

Tracklisting for The Other Side is:

He Came Down

Come Back (When You Go Away)

(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day (w/Rosanne Cash)

Waiting For You (w/Lucius)

The Pain Of Love (w/Lucius)

The Race Is Won (w/Lucius)

Sometimes I Wonder (w/Weyes Blood)

Hawaiian Blue Song (w/Steven Soles)

The First Light Of Day

Everything And Nothing

The Town That Time Forgot

Little Darling

Burnett will also play three live shows in Nashville in May to support the album:

May 3— Franklin Theatre
May 9 — The Blue Room at Third Man Records
May 10— Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMA Theater

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