From Uncut's February 2013 issue (Take 189), the incredible Pete Seeger on Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the enduring power of protest songs. Interview: Neil Spencer
Sometime last autumn, maybe, an EP called “Artorius Revisited” by Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band was quietly released in limited quantities. Last time he surfaced around 2006/2007, in a quixotic, thwarted and mostly transcendent musical career that now stretches back some three decades, Head and his longest-lasting configuration, Shack, were signed to Noel Gallagher’s Sour Mash label. It didn’t last.
Happy new year, everyone. Since we’re into 2014 now, and (perhaps more pertinently) since all of our 2013 charts generated so much traffic to www.www.uncut.co.uk last month, I thought it’d be useful/cynical to post a Best Of 2014 (Thus Far) list.
The Making Of Robert Wyatt's "I'm A Believer" feature in this month's issue reminds me that when it was released in September, 1974, I made it Single Of the Week during a brief but lively stint as Melody Maker's singles reviewer.
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
From Uncut, March 2009.
'Thirty years on from the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's reign of terror, Uncut revisits a tempestuous and invigorating period in British pop history. PAUL WELLER, THE SPECIALS, THE BEAT, UB40, SOUL II SOUL and THE FARM recall a time when mass unemployment energised a whole generation to learn one chord, learn another, form a band - and then make an insurrectionist statement on Cheggers Plays Pop...'
Hopefully, you'll have seen the new issue of Uncut by now, which includes a terrific cover story on The Who's early ascendancy, plus Cream, Matthew E White, Jeff Lynne, Kurt Vile, and more - including a piece by Allan on Kevin Ayers.
Everybody we spoke to about Kevin Ayers following his lonely death in the South of France at the age of 68 had so much to say that trying to fit everything they told us into the tribute feature I've written for this month's issue was like trying to pour the Atlantic into a bucket.
