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Introducing the Ultimate Genre Guide: Singer-Songwriter

John Robinson
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Introducing the Ultimate Genre Guide: Singer-Songwriter

My first meeting with a giant in the field of singer-songwriting wasn’t in an LA canyon, but somewhere on a hill outside San Francisco. Tasked 25 years ago with interviewing Neil Young for NME, myself and a photographer took a long taxi ride outside the city and up to what was then apparently one ...

My first meeting with a giant in the field of singer-songwriting wasn’t in an LA canyon, but somewhere on a hill outside San Francisco. Tasked 25 years ago with interviewing Neil Young for NME, myself and a photographer took a long taxi ride outside the city and up to what was then apparently one of Neil’s incognito hangs – a homey restaurant within a wooded area called the Mountain House. As we pulled up and stepped out of the taxi in our unCalifornian black clothing, we were greeted by a genial voice: “Great,” it announced, wryly. “The English are here!”

This, of course, was Elliott Roberts, then 30 years into a role which he occupied for over half a century, quietly influencing the careers of the most single-minded and ungovernable artists in music history: Neil Young of course, but also Crosby, Stills and Nash, and our cover star, Joni Mitchell. These artists, their contemporaries, kindred spirits and fellow travellers like James Taylor, Carole King, Judee Sill and Jackson Browne are at the heart of this publication.

They are also what we think of when we talk about the art of the singer-songwriter: the song as an investigation of the self, a discovery of emotional truths. Geographically and metaphorically it was an escape from the crowd: the old bands, and the old ways of doing things. As much as it was about the individual writer, it was also about a wider empathy: a tuneful and engrossing pursuit which won its musicians millions of fans all over the world.

In this magazine, you will of course read about the Canyon artists – the mismatch between turbulent life and melodious, easy-listening music of James Taylor is a particularly extraordinary treat – but you will also read in-depth reviews of artists who didn’t easily sit within the west coast songwriter circle. 

There’s impressive new and recent writing on the resolutely east coast Laura Nyro, whose work so enraptured the young David Geffen, and helped point his road ahead. Present also are new opinions on unclubbable visionaries like Van Morrison and Tim Buckley, and the quietly spectacular Paul Simon. Joni Mitchell connected Leonard Cohen to the Laurel Canyon scene, but his troubled relationship with his muse was destined to sit uneasily within it, despite the best efforts of David Crosby. You’ll find what amounts to last words on the scene from Croz at the back of the magazine.

“And then there was Joni,” he says. “Formidable talent doesn’t even begin to describe it, she was the best of us. She’s absolutely the best singer-songwriter of our time.”

You can find yourself a copy here.

Aziza Brahim – Mawja

Nigel Williamson
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Aziza Brahim – Mawja

Aziza Brahim’s homeland of Western Sahara is listed by the UN as the last remaining colony in Africa. Under Spanish control until 1976, the territory was then annexed by Morocco and has been under occupation ever since. Denied self-determination, many of its people, the Sahrawi, were forced into e...

Aziza Brahim’s homeland of Western Sahara is listed by the UN as the last remaining colony in Africa. Under Spanish control until 1976, the territory was then annexed by Morocco and has been under occupation ever since. Denied self-determination, many of its people, the Sahrawi, were forced into exile in refugee camps in the Algerian desert. Those camps are where Brahim was born, her mother having fled the family’s ancestral home following Morocco’s military invasion.

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

Growing up, Brahim recalls singing as the principal form of entertainment, and she was soon setting to music the verse of her grandmother, Lkhadra Mint Mabruk, a celebrated Sahrawi writer, revolutionary and feminist hero known as “the poet of the rifle”.

In her teens Brahim was educated in Cuba before returning to the desert in 1995, where she joined the National Sahrawi Music Group. She then chose Spain as a suitable base from which to raise the plight of her oppressed people via her music.

After releasing her debut album in 2012 – which included settings of her grandmother’s poems – she was signed by Glitterbeat, for whom she has recorded a series of proudly defiant albums full of moving songs yearning for her homeland and espousing the cause of freedom.

A fearless moderniser who at the same time sounds somehow ancient, her work to date has found acclaim in world music circles without making the transition from a WOMAD audience to the mainstream in the way that, say, Tinariwen have done.  Deeply rooted and yet sonically adventurous, Mawja should, if there is any justice, change that.

‘Mawja’ means ‘wave’ in the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic, a reference to the radio signal which growing up in the refugee camp kept her in touch with the outside world and the electronic “waves” that now carry her music and the story of her people to a wider audience.

Since her last album, 2019’s Sahari, much has happened to turn Brahim’s universe upside down and the travails have fed into Mawja to create her most accomplished and rounded work to date. With her mother, brothers and sisters and one of her daughters still living in the barren region of the Algerian desert known as The Devil’s Garden, she suffered a crisis of anxiety, characteristic of many exiles separated from their loved ones, which was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Then in November 2020 the uneasy 30-year ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the armed wing of the Sahrawi liberation movement, broke down and fighting resumed.

In 2022 came the death of the grandmother whose revolutionary poetry Brahim had sung so stirringly and who had taught her to be “proud and tenacious” in the face of adversity. Out of anguish, though, came inspiration, and the spirit of the great matriarch permeates the album from “Duaa”, a blues-drenched prayer in her honour, to the tender tribute “Ljaima Likbira”.

Brahim’s default musical currency is a resonant African desert blues freighted with a mournful yet defiant passion, but with a distinctly feminist perspective that is as different from Ali Farka Toure or Tinariwen as, say, Bessie Smith was from John Lee Hooker or Robert Johnson.

It’s a potent and compelling sound, inextricably linked to the resistance struggle but with an inherent dignity and elegance – not merely a cry of protest at oppression but a celebration of a proud culture, too. Her country may have no official status but it “exists without restrictions in our words, in our memory and in our voices.”

Playing the traditional Sahrawi hand drum known as the tabal and accompanied by Western rock instrumentation, her soulful voice has a delectably creamy tone capable of subtly different emotional shading. With its flute and chiming guitar there’s a folkish vibe to “Marhabna 2.1” (‘Welcome’), a syncopated reimagining of the opening track on her 2012 album. There’s more of a defiant edge to “Haiyu Ya Zawar” (‘Cheer, Oh Revolutionaries’), a song of resistance and struggle with some thrilling flamenco-style guitar played on a Cuban tres, while the raw, fiery blues-rock of “Metal Madera” was inspired by Brahim’s admiration for The Clash.

Amid the militant rallying cries there’s a healthy dose of myth and magic, too, particularly on the gently swaying “Bubisher” about a legendary bird, the appearance of which in Sahrawi folklore is meant to be a portent that better times are on the way. The Sahrawi, it seems, desperately need another sighting. Meanwhile, Mawja is an eloquent homage to the indomitable spirit and rich culture of Brahim’s troubled but proud people.

How To Buy Jerry Garcia And Friends

Jon Dale
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How To Buy Jerry Garcia And Friends

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME With the reissue of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman's So What, a meandering and lovely acoustic jazz set from 1998, Jon Dale singles out other collaborative highlights from the Grateful Dead frontman's extra-curr...

PINK FLOYD ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

With the reissue of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s So What, a meandering and lovely acoustic jazz set from 1998, Jon Dale singles out other collaborative highlights from the Grateful Dead frontman’s extra-curricular career…

JERRY GARCIA & DAVID GRISMAN

So What (reissue, 1998)

ORG MUSIC

7/10

A curious album, this one. Garcia and Grisman were long-time collaborators, having met in the late ’60s, which led to Grisman appearing on the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album American Beauty; they’d soon play together in bluegrass band Old & In The Way, and later, in the ’90s, they released a string of collaborative albums, including an album of children’s music (Not For Kids Only). There were many strings to their collective bow, then, and while their focus did tend to be on bluegrass and folk – Grisman combined these genres with jazz into a form he called Dawg Music – So What feels like a bit of an outlier, given its focus on acoustic jazz. They take on a few Miles Davis tunes here, flexing from a spirited “So What” to a tender “Milestones”; the real gems here, though, are the lovely runs through Milt Jackson’s “Bag’s Groove”.

The best of Jerry’s collaborations

HOWARD WALES & JERRY GARCIA

Hooteroll?

DOUGLAS, 1971

8/10

A surprisingly sturdy, impressive jazz-rock album, Hooteroll? has Wales and Garcia going at it particularly feverishly. It’s on Wales’s terms, largely – his overdriven organ tends to dominate proceedings – but when Garcia steps in, he’s more than capable of taking up the baton. One of the better albums in this genre.

MERL SAUNDERS

Fire Up

FANTASY, 1973

8/10

Saunders started playing with Garcia at The Matrix, the beginning of a long, fruitful collaboration. On Fire Up, Saunders is joined by Garcia, fellow Grateful Dead member Bill Kreutzmann, and Creedence’s Tom Fogerty. It’s a joy, Saunders’s piano and Garcia’s guitar and singing in perfect tandem, a deep blues-funk groove.

OLD & IN THE WAY

Old & In The Way

ROUND, 1975

8/10

A joyous, celebratory live performance from this bluegrass gang, where Garcia returns to the banjo, and joins David Grisman (mandolin), Vassar Clements (fiddle), Peter Rowan (guitar) and John Kahn (string bass). Playful and full of spirit, it’s a lovely documentation of the group, recorded late ’73 in San Francisco.

Hear Paul Weller’s new single, “Soul Wondering”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Paul Weller’s new single, “Soul Wondering”

Paul Weller has released a taster for his new studio album. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME You can hear "Soul Wondering", the first single taken from 66, below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lReXeJLz00I 66 is released on May 2...

Paul Weller has released a taster for his new studio album.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

You can hear “Soul Wondering”, the first single taken from 66, below.

66 is released on May 24 on Polydor Records. The album will be available on all major streaming platforms, CD and vinyl. It’s been produced by Weller and recorded at his Black Barn studio over the course of three years with a host of guest musicians including Suggs (“Ship Of Fools”), Noel Gallagher (“Jumble Queen”) and Bobby Gillespie (“Soul Wondering”).

66 also sees the co-writing return of Erland Cooper and duo White Label, and string arrangements from Hannah Peel. Additionally, there are two collaborations with French producer and recording artist Christophe Vaillant (Le Superhomard) while Brooklyn trio Say She She add vocals to “In Full Flight”. Other collaborators include Dr Robert, Richard Hawley, Steve Brooks and Max Beesley.

The tracklisting for 66 is:

Ship of Fools

Flying Fish

Jumble Queen

Nothing

My Best Friend’s Coat *

Rise Up Singing

I Woke Up

A Glimpse of You *

Sleepy Hollow

In Full Flight **

Soul Wandering

Burn Out ***

Produced by Paul Weller

Except:

* produced by Christophe Vaillant

** produced by Weller / White Label

*** produced by Weller / Charles Rees

I’m New Here – Conchúr White

Johnny Sharp
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I’m New Here – Conchúr White

The term ‘dreampop’ is often used in these pages, but it seems to apply to Conchúr White’s work in a slightly different way to that of his ethereally inclined contemporaries. In the songs of his debut album Swirling Violets, dreams – surreal visions and imaginings of the afterlife – form ...

The term ‘dreampop’ is often used in these pages, but it seems to apply to Conchúr White’s work in a slightly different way to that of his ethereally inclined contemporaries. In the songs of his debut album Swirling Violets, dreams – surreal visions and imaginings of the afterlife – form a recurring theme, framed within beautifully soft-sung acoustic vignettes and chamber pop confections.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

“I got friends who died a thousand different times, strewn across the sky,” run the first words of opening track “The Holy Death”, luring us into a world of “surreal settings with tangible messages”, as he has previously put it. Northern Irishman White (his first name is pronounced “Conor”) has seen his profile grow over the past couple of years thanks to slots opening for the likes of John Grant, John Cale and The Magnetic Fields. Meanwhile, last year’s “Atonia” single, inspired by studies of sleep paralysis, proved an enticing precursor to Swirling Violets.

“I’ve long had an interest in filmmakers like David Lynch and stuff like Carl Jung’s The Red Book,” says White. “I spent a lot of time wrestling with those ideas: dreams and death, collective unconsciousness. When I was a kid growing up in a Catholic household, I’d ask so many questions about whether there’s an afterlife, my parents got a bit worried about me!”

This enduring sense of wonder has infused his songs since he parted company in 2018 with indie-folk outfit Silences, the band he helped form at school in Portadown, County Armagh. In some instances, his warm harmonies, pop hooks and nostalgic reference points will strike a universal chord, as on “501s”, a catchy paean to a childhood crush. But he also speaks of particular times and places in lines such as “Remember the boy at the Centrepoint / When he kicked us out for passing the bottle,” referring to youthful mischief at his hometown’s leisure centre.

Elsewhere, there are darker allusions to the Ulster he grew up in, mostly post-Troubles, but still scarred by the intolerance that characterised them. “Fenian boy without a father / Mother drank / It almost sunk her and it drowned him in the end,” he sings on “Deadwood”, and while it’s not autobiographical, he explains that “it’s just about how as a child you’d be narrowed down. That’s what you were – a Fenian or… I don’t want to say the other one.”

White’s interest in inner lives was further piqued by his former day job working in child and adolescent mental health services, something he says has seeped into some songs on this album, such as the “Women In The War”, with its passionate declaration of undying devotion to a (possibly unrequited) love who is “pushing daisies”.  “You’d come across that kind of intense love and infatuation, but also intense pain and tragedy,” he says.

All this is beautifully wreathed in atmospheric arrangements, whether it be the ghostly whispers shrouding “Deadwood”, the delicate piano and woozy electronic decoration of “Righteous”, or the subtle lacings of vocal harmony on “River”. So far, White hasn’t been able to fully recreate this sound in his stripped-down solo support slots, but that hasn’t stopped him winning followers with every performance. “I’m hoping to go out with a full band [later this year],” he says, “but I’m a big believer that if a song sounds good when it’s fully arranged or when it’s just played with a piano and vocal, then it’s passed an important test.”

Swirling Violets is out now on Bella Union

Four Beatles biopics to be directed by Sam Mendes

Michael Bonner
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Four Beatles biopics to be directed by Sam Mendes

Separate biopics of each of the four Beatles will be the directed by Sam Mendes. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME According to Mendes' creative vision, the four feature films – one from each band member’s point-of-view – will inter...

Separate biopics of each of the four Beatles will be the directed by Sam Mendes.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

According to Mendes’ creative vision, the four feature films – one from each band member’s point-of-view – will intersect to tell the Fabs’ story.

“I’m honoured to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” said Mendes.

This is the first time Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison – have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.

According to a statement, ‘the dating cadence of the films, the details of which will be shared closer to release, will be innovative and groundbreaking.’

When Pirates Ruled The Waves

David Cavanagh
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When Pirates Ruled The Waves

With Radio Caroline and Radio London both turning 60 in 2024, here's a piece on the much-loved pirate radio stations from the Uncut archives. This feature first appeared in Take 144, dated May 2009. Since this piece was originally published, the author as well as some of those interviewed have died....

With Radio Caroline and Radio London both turning 60 in 2024, here’s a piece on the much-loved pirate radio stations from the Uncut archives. This feature first appeared in Take 144, dated May 2009. Since this piece was originally published, the author as well as some of those interviewed have died.

A misty November morning in 1964. Radio Caroline’s 21-year-old breakfast DJ Tony Blackburn awoke early in his cabin and wandered up on deck. The sight that greeted him was like a scene from Powell & Pressburger’s The Battle Of The River Plate. The thick sea mist slowly cleared, revealing a huge ship – twice the size of Caroline’s – anchored a fair distance away. Three-and-a-half miles off the coast of Essex, Caroline suddenly had company.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

The new arrival was the MV Galaxy, a 780-ton former WWII minesweeper. Now it was to be the home of Radio London (‘Big L’), an American-financed station that would give Caroline – the original UK pirate, launched seven months before – a serious run for its money. Radio London would play an all-day diet of the best ’60s pop (Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks) as well as helping to ‘break’ many important bands of that decade, notably The Byrds, The Animals, The Small Faces, The Move and Cream. The Perfumed Garden, a show hosted by John Peel from March to August 1967, would earn a dedicated late-night listenership for its unique mix of psychedelia, folk, West Coast rock, blues and poetry. Wherever you looked on the Galaxy, the future was happening.

“The ship that transformed everything was Big L,” agrees Tony Blackburn, who joined it in 1966. “Everybody remembers Caroline as the famous one, but Big L was modern radio as we know it.”

As it began broadcasting for the first time (December, 23 1964), Radio London had two advantages over its rival Caroline. Firstly, it boasted the slickest American-made jingles that UK audiences had ever heard; and secondly, it had Kenny Everett, a 20-year-old newcomer who would become a pirate radio sensation. Everett’s daily double-header with Dave Cash (the surreal, knees-obsessed Kenny & Cash Show) began in April 1965, soon topping the ratings. Other Big L jocks included Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, Tommy Vance and Keith Skues.

“It was a very professional station, very much based on American Top 40 radio,” recalls Skues, nowadays a veteran of BBC regional broadcasting. “The boat was much larger than Caroline, so you could go out and sunbathe on deck, which we did, until someone told us we were going to die of radiation from the aerial. We were also warned we’d lose our hair by the age of 26.”

The ’60s pirate radio phenomenon was founded on a simple loophole and a cunning understanding of maritime law. If a ship was moored three or more miles off the British coastline, it was technically sailing in international waters. A commercial radio station broadcasting from that ship – without a licence, on a stolen (‘pirated’) frequency, and with no intention of paying taxes on its profits – was legally untouchable. The Government, police, Navy, Customs & Excise and Coastguard had no jurisdiction.

“We had left the British Isles,” points out Blackburn. “Officially we were on the way to Holland. We just never got there.”

One can almost hear Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” as we visualise the scene. A flamboyantly-garbed DJ bobs up and down on the ocean wave, braving a force nine gale, fighting off an attack of seasickness and defying Harold Wilson’s Government all in the same moment. At the height of Big L’s popularity, that DJ broadcasted to around 12 million listeners a week, who showed their appreciation by sending fanmail by the sack. The pirates – heroes, outlaws, celebrities, pariahs – were an habitual topic du jour in Parliament, not to mention a source of immense discomfort to the BBC. But what would it take to stop them?

In the end, it would be a shotgun.

Mid-1965. In less than a year, Caroline and Radio London have revolutionised British radio. By giving airplay to new groups – Big L even puts them in its Fab 40 – the pirates have curbed the dominance of major labels EMI and Decca, and made the BBC (which rations its pop output to a few hours a week) look like a dinosaur. Keith Skues: “Pirates started appearing all over the place. They changed the whole face of ’60s music.”

“Suddenly the cartel was broken,” remarks ex-pirate Johnnie Walker, who began on Swinging Radio England in 1966, “and a lot of music – like Motown – was played for the first time.” The BBC may have denounced the more excitable pirate DJs as “bingo callers”, but the BBC, as Gary Leeds of The Walker Brothers explains, was the main reason why the pirates had to exist. “There was a Catch-22 situation,” he says. “The BBC had to play your record to get you in the charts. But if you weren’t in the charts, the BBC wouldn’t play your record.”

As a pirate, Tony Blackburn had enjoyed adventures that no land-based BBC presenter like Alan Freeman could match. One day Blackburn shinned to the top of the mast of Caroline’s vessel Mi Amigo, after a severe gale entangled the wires on the aerial. On another occasion he was hauled to safety when the Mi Amigo ran aground on the Essex coast. Pirates frequently had to broadcast in atrocious weather while the shipped rolled giddily. “In the summer, it was much nicer,” notes Keith Skues. “Little pleasure-boats used to come out from Frinton and people would throw presents to us.”

Radio London’s DJs shared the Galaxy with a crew of Dutch seamen, including a captain. The captain’s rules – no drunkenness, no girls, no insubordination – were not negotiable. Each DJ was permitted two bottles of beer a day, no more. Food and cigarettes were provided free.

They settled into a three-week cycle. Two weeks at sea; a week of shore leave. To return to the boat, they caught trains from London to Harwich, showed their passport at Customs and took the two-hour journey out to the Galaxy in a tender boat. The tender also ferried provisions (milk, water), occasional pop stars such as Marianne Faithfull, and the all-important new record releases.

The Walker Brothers were particularly grateful to Radio London for its support, even recording special jingles for Kenny Everett and Dave Cash. “Can you imagine?” Cash laughs. “‘Kenny and Cash on Lon-do-n…’ With Scott Walker’s amazing voice, and that echo.” Gary Leeds: “We know the image that Scott projects now, right? But it was totally different back then. We were young and foolish. Sometimes we’d have our picture taken up at Marble Arch, and Dave and Kenny would be around the back making rude noises.”

Kenny Everett, a timid Liverpudlian who became electrifying behind the microphone, was envied for his genius as a tape editor, and for his assortment of Goon Show-inspired voices and characters. Everett also proved vital in establishing Big L’s friendly relationship with The Beatles, travelling with them on their 1966 US tour – he later recalled fainting with excitement when he heard that he’d been invited – and remaining on good terms socially. This culminated in Radio London’s greatest coup of 1967: a world exclusive pre-release of Sgt. Pepper, which they played in its entirety again and again.

For the most part, the Big L Top 40 format was strictly adhered to. The DJ would play a song from the Top 10, then one from numbers 10 to 40, followed by a ‘climber’, then another Top 10, then another 10-to-40, then an oldie. The sequence would be repeated. But some areas of Big L’s schedule proved more difficult – if not impossible – to control, and the anarchic Everett became the first Radio London DJ to be sacked in disgrace.

Skues: “We had a religious programme called The World Tomorrow. None of us liked it, but the company that produced it paid Radio London a huge amount of money. We were constantly told, ‘This is where the income comes from, so don’t knock it.’”

Hosted by an American evangelist, Garner Ted Armstrong, The World Tomorrow was pre-recorded and sent out to the ship on tape. Everett, sick of having his daily show interrupted by Jesus Christ, decided to edit one of the tapes. Dave Cash: “We cut it apart, so that instead of saying ‘Garner Ted Armstrong loves you all’, it said ‘Garner Ted Armstrong loves vice, sex and corruption.’ Oh dear. And he happened to be in the country at the time.”

Even at their most innocent, however, the pirates were a scourge to Tony Benn, the Government’s Postmaster General (in charge of telecommunications and broadcasting), who promised legislation to ban them. He called the pirates a hazard to shipping (which they denied) and condemned them for stealing their frequencies (which they accepted, while adding that there were plenty to go round). In 40 years, Benn has never wavered from his position. He says today: “It had nothing to do with the music they were playing. That was never the issue. In fact, I bullied the BBC into starting Radio 1 to cater for the pop music audience – which they didn’t want to do. They said it would be like keeping the pubs open all day.”

In June 1966, with the pirates’ audiences still rising, and no sign of an end to the media coverage (both pro- and anti-), a pop group manager named Reg Calvert, who owned a pirate station called Radio City, paid a visit to the Saffron Walden home of a Radio Caroline director, Major Oliver Smedley. The two men had planned a joint venture, but had abandoned the idea after an argument. Later that day, it was reported that Smedley had shot Calvert dead.

From that day forward, the pirate ships knew they were on borrowed time. “Without a shadow of a doubt, the Radio City incident stirred the Government to try and speed up legislation,” Keith Skues writes in his authoritative history of offshore radio, Pop Went The Pirates. In the extraordinary series of events that followed Calvert’s death, his widow was given police protection, Major Smedley was acquitted at his trial on grounds of self-defence (and awarded 250 guineas costs), and the Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill was introduced to Parliament in July 1966.

Johnnie Walker is not the only ex-pirate to feel uncomfortable. “It was very suspicious, that whole thing,” he says. “The Bill was announced almost immediately. I think there can be question marks over that episode.” Dave Cash: “There was a hell of a lot of political manoeuvring.” One source suggests that Smedley, who died in 1989, may have had influential political friends.

The Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill passed through the House Of Lords in June 1967, receiving Royal Assent on July 14. Under the new Act, it would become illegal at midnight on August 14 for a British subject to operate, assist or publicise a pirate radio station. Most of the stations prepared to close. Radio London considered – then decided against – forging ahead with a new team of non-British DJs. It broadcast for the last time on August 14, shutting down at 3pm. Keith Skues, on shore leave at the time, met the Big L presenters off the train at Liverpool Street. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Thousands of people had turned up. It was like a stampede. I got knocked over and dragged down, and ended up in the ladies’ loo. They weren’t attacking us, they were there to greet the DJs off the ships. No DJ who was on that train will ever forget it.”

One pirate station defiantly carried on: the station that had started it all. As the clock ticked towards midnight, Johnnie Walker on Radio Caroline cued up The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and told his listeners: “We belong to you, and we love you. Caroline continues.” Walker knew it was a huge moment. In a year when two of The Rolling Stones had been sent to jail, it seemed realistic to imagine Caroline being surrounded by police launches within hours of defying the midnight deadline. Walker and his fellow Caroline DJs, facing instant arrest if they set foot in Britain, now based themselves in Holland. But the station’s advertisers had pulled out, and the tender boat stopped its daily deliveries, and the fanmail no longer arrived. Radio Caroline, as it had been in 1964, was out there on its own.

Of the pirate DJs who returned to dry land, many accepted jobs at the BBC’s new pop station, Radio 1. After three years of being the enemy, the Corporation was now the employer. Tony Blackburn opened up Radio 1 on September 30, 1967, Keith Skues following him on to the air. Dave Cash, Kenny Everett and Ed Stewart decamped to Broadcasting House too, as did Radio London’s late-night DJ John Peel, who’d joined the station in its final months. After some initial doubts (Skues: “I thought, ‘What a weird bloke’”), the other presenters had warmed to Peel’s intelligence and gentle personality. “He was good for the station,” Dave Cash admits. “He attracted a whole different set of advertisers, and he had music integrity all round.” Peel would go on to become Radio 1’s longest-serving presenter (1967–2004).

Johnnie Walker’s stint on Radio Caroline ended in March 1968. Having flouted the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act for seven months, he found doors slamming in his face when he returned to London to seek work. One memo from BBC bosses to Radio 1 producers read: “On no account employ Johnnie Walker for at least a year, to let the taint of criminality subside.” Walker went on to become one of Radio 1’s star presenters of the 1970s. He now broadcasts on Radio 2, and in February 2009 began a new Saturday night programme. With wonderful irony, it celebrates the golden days of ’60s pirate radio stations, among them Radio Caroline.

17-track Brian Eno compilation to accompany new doc

Sam Richards
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17-track Brian Eno compilation to accompany new doc

Gary Hustwit's experimental "never the same twice" documentary about Brian Eno will get its UK premiere at London's Barbican on April 20. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME The day before that, UMR will released an accompanying soundtrack a...

Gary Hustwit’s experimental “never the same twice” documentary about Brian Eno will get its UK premiere at London’s Barbican on April 20.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

The day before that, UMR will released an accompanying soundtrack album, featuring 17 Brian Eno tracks culled from throughout his career, including three previously unreleased recordings. Hear one of those, “Lighthouse #429”, below:

You can pre-order the album on double black vinyl, double pink and blue vinyl or CD here. If you place an order by 4PM GMT on Wednesday (February 21), you will receive exclusive access to the ticket pre-sale for the Eno film premiere at the Barbican on April 20, including a live discussion with Brian Eno, Gary Hustwit and the film’s creative technologist Brendan Dawes.

Watch a trailer for Eno below:

Grandaddy – Blu Wav

Laura Barton
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Grandaddy – Blu Wav

The great gift of Grandaddy records has always been their ability to immerse the listener in a distinct musical landscape. The small-city drift of Under The Western Freeway, the humidity of 2000’s The Sophtware Slump. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT T...

The great gift of Grandaddy records has always been their ability to immerse the listener in a distinct musical landscape. The small-city drift of Under The Western Freeway, the humidity of 2000’s The Sophtware Slump.

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The band’s sixth studio album belongs to somewhere new again: in part rooted in Modesto, the California city where songwriter Jason Lytle was raised, and to where he returned in 2016, setting up a home studio. It belongs, too, to neighbouring Nevada, where in recent years Lytle has liked to take long desert drives. And in some way it is a record of Tennessee – on one of his roadtrips, Lytle having heard Patti Page’s 1950 recording “Tennessee Waltz” spilling out of the car radio, and wondering whether maybe heartbreak didn’t sound something like pedal steel.

Various heartbreaks run through Blu Wav. Not least the loss of long-term Grandaddy member Kevin Garcia, who died suddenly of a stroke in 2017. Garcia’s passing was the latest downswing in the life of a band that had often been unsettled, and was sometimes barely a band at all. Formed in 1996, and often touted as America’s answer to Radiohead, Grandaddy spun a kind of warm, witty space rock chronicling the melancholy meet-cute between mankind and the natural world. 

For a time they seemed destined for immense success, but despite touring extensively and enjoying critical success, the rock’n’roll life proved too unwieldy, too mentally draining, too financially precarious, and the band broke up in 2005. A later reformation brought the post-divorce record Last Place, but came to an abrupt halt with the death of Garcia two months later. None of this – the loss of a friend, the end of a band, appears to be addressed directly on Blu Wav, and yet it runs beneath these songs like a strange kind of undertow.

More directly, these are songs of romantic break-up and disenchantment, storytelling sometimes, autobiography the next: an outdoorsy sort acknowledges the inevitable failure of his relationship with an office worker in the exquisite “Watercooler”; a jealous lover haunts his ex via their favourite songs on “Jukebox App”; and a far-flung suitor drifts into deep longing on the bittersweet “On A Train Or Bus”. All tell stories of love at a remove – protagonists out of time or physically apart – and these intimate emotional gulfs help to underscore the sense of space that has long characterised Grandaddy’s music; a vastness that somehow sweeps together the American landscape, cyberspace and great expanses of feeling.

“Ducky, Boris And Dart” is more tangential – named for three departed animals, a kitten, a bird and a cat, and at first sounding little more than a dusty, sweet ditty, it manages to serve as a tribute to all losses, drawing the ear back, looping it around and burrowing deep. It’s too categorical to call this a song for Garcia, but it’s hard not to wonder as Lytle sings the song’s refrain: “Well thank you my friend, but this ain’t the end/We will meet again”.

Lytle made this record pretty much solo, though in the story of Grandaddy this has often been the case; the songs unspooling from him, and for the most part set down by him, too. This has allowed the band to establish a particular sonic signature in which the pastoral meets with technological twists and buffers Lytle’s dusky falsetto. Blu Wav’s title nods to an unexpected intersection between bluegrass and new wave, and the songs here do meet that brief: they sound both heartfelt and hardwired, simple and lilting tunes encounter electronics and overdubs, found sounds, recordings made at the local Guitar Center, and tapings of coyotes in Los Angeles. 

Lytle has noted that seven out of the album’s 13 songs are waltzes, and that there is “an inordinate amount of pedal steel” to boot. It’s the first time Grandaddy have in any way rooted themselves in a specific genre, and it proves strikingly successful; Lytle’s more experimental electronica pushing against any notion of nostalgia or country pastiche. It’s not unfamiliar territory – a fine recent companion to Blu Wav might be Angel Olsen’s Big Time, which also reckoned with loss via a contemporary take on country music. Lytle similarly takes distinct musical touchstones, those waltzes and pedal-steel quivers, pairs them with some of the iconography of Americana, cabins, jukeboxes, barrooms, and wraps them in synths and compressors and pre-amps. 

The effect is to send the listener into a kind of emotional, geographical and chronological freefall, as if we might be passing through any decade, state or era in recent American history. A little lost, a little lovelorn, in hope of a place to land.

Brittany Howard – What Now

Sharon O'Connell
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Brittany Howard – What Now

Following the release of their second album, Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes were slated to scale even greater heights than a US Number One album and four Grammy Awards. However, Brittany Howard had reached a crossroads. Her decision to step away in 2018 wasn’t a move against the band – “inc...

Following the release of their second album, Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes were slated to scale even greater heights than a US Number One album and four Grammy Awards. However, Brittany Howard had reached a crossroads. Her decision to step away in 2018 wasn’t a move against the band – “incredible” is how she described the Shakes’ achievements to Uncut – but rather towards creative and personal fulfilment. The wisdom of that move was borne out by Jaime, her 2019 solo debut, which landed as a tour de force of funk, jazzy R&B, soul and blues-edged rock, corralled into songs about everything from racism to a childhood crush on an older girl.

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If that stylistic departure both surprised and impressed, Howard has trumped it with the follow-up, a Jaime 2.0 likely to secure her status as an auteur in terms of both conception and execution. It’s a bigger, freer-thinking and more dynamically audacious record; one which uses lessons learned from her debut – chiefly, to forget any fear and trust herself – while uniting her disparate musical loves and, with long-term collaborator Shawn Everett, being more adventurous in arrangements and production. Howard took a relaxed approach, so much so that when she first started writing, in March 2020, she didn’t really know she was making an album. As she tells Uncut, “I was just day-to-day recording music in this little room in a house I’d rented in Nashville, just going in there and kind of journaling my thoughts and feelings.” It was August 2022 when she went into the studio with a batch of demos, and around three months later What Now was finished. Most of the recording was done at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, with players including the Shakes’ Zac Cockrell on bass and drummer Nate Smith, both returnees from Jaime. Clearly, there’s no bad blood there, and though it’s been more than eight years since the Shakes’ last LP, officially they’re on hold rather than disbanded.

The album’s title is intriguingly slippery: it seems to echo our widespread collective despair and exasperation born of the current global hellscape – what else could possibly happen? – yet lacks the question mark that would indicate righteous ire. At the same time, it’s a kind of rallying cry: we must do something, pronto – but what? In fact, the title track tells of a love that’s died and is a brutally honest, borderline venomous declaration of disengagement: “I surrender, let me go/I don’t have love to give you more,” sings Howard, in her thrillingly powerful growl. “You’re sucking up my energy/I told the truth, so set me free.” That statement, referring not to one particular partner but a situationship the singer found herself in again and again, is set to an infectiously juddering, synth-soul backing. It’s both typical of the self-interrogation at the heart of this record and a strong argument for how much more effective a song may be if the mood contradicts the emotions expressed. It’s a juxtaposition Howard enjoys, having grown up listening to girl groups like The Supremes and The Marvelettes and later picking up on the same, bittersweet interplay in Latine music.

What Now airs less obvious socio-political comment than Jaime: these new songs focus heavily on love and the singer’s behavioural patterns in relationships, her self-exploration the result of “for the first time being able to feel my feelings and look around” during the 2020 lockdown. Meditation, counselling and alternative therapies, including sound baths, also played a part. The exception is “Another Day”, though its message, like that of the brief “Interlude”, which features a clip of Maya Angelou reading from her poem “A Brave And Startling Truth”, is more humanitarian than political. In it Howard, a queer, mixed-race woman, declares her faith in a future where unity and understanding have displaced divisiveness and intolerance: “I believe in a world where we can go outside and/Be who we want and see who we like/And love each other through this wild ride”.

While her ground-level emotions give the songs viability, it’s Howard’s artistry that sends them off on an invigoratingly fresh course, switching between currents of Southern soul, R&B, astral jazz, psychedelic funk, doo-wop, garage blues and rap, while her voice is variously mellow and tender, a belting force of nature, sweetly reassuring and degraded. The hypnotic tones of crystal singing bowls (played by two of her friends) act as a mood reset in between each track, while cardboard boxes, forks and an empty jug are used as instruments. On “Samson”, the otherworldly sounds of the Cristal Baschet can be heard. Opening the set is “Earth Sign”, where in a soaring, multi-tracked vocal Howard manifests her desire for new love in a way that’s more spiritual than carnal or romantic. “I Don’t” follows, reading like an ode to our post-pandemic existential malaise and carried by a sweet mix of doo-wop and vintage R&B given warm, deep-space production. There’s a woozy cocktail of synth soundscaping and cosmic soul on “Red Flags”, which sees Howard admit to a habit of charging headfirst into love while ignoring all warning signs, her voice rising to a sky-scraping falsetto before dropping suddenly to a choral chant, then drifting off into wordless vocables.

On the other side of “Interlude” sits the thumping “Prove It To You”, in which mid-period Prince (Howard’s voice sounds strikingly similar) is recontextualised for loved-up clubbers via broken beats, a tinkling keys motif and clouds of blissed-out synth. “Samson”, the longest track here at just over five minutes, follows. Moody, sensual and effortlessly light on its jazz-soul feet, it features Fender Rhodes and a forlorn, blues-soaked trumpet in a missive about summoning the courage to leave a relationship when, mentally, emotionally and psychically, you’ve already checked out. There’s a radical switch with “Power To Undo”, where high-wattage falsetto, flashes of dirty, buzzing guitar and cardboard-box beats recall a mix of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Prince and Jack White.

Howard exits with the beautifully bruised “Every Color In Blue”, addressing the depression that’s dogged her since childhood in a voice like an anguished angel, with plaintive trumpet accompaniment. “Here comes that feeling we don’t talk about,” she sings, “that dull cloud coming in on the horizon/I feel the rain but it’s all out of rainbows.” As album closers go, it strikes an unusually sombre note, but the singer told Uncut that she “didn’t want to wrap it up tidily. I didn’t want to end it like everything’s okay, because I don’t think that’s realistic.” As a child she didn’t talk about her feelings, “just never did. I always felt this shame around it. Like, you can’t tell anyone how sad you are.” Emotional truth-telling, broken taboos and myriad questions about how best to live her life in music that thrillingly expands Howard’s artistry, rather than treads old ground. Which begs another question: where might she go next?

Pearl Jam: “10 million records, that’s such a crazy number”

Nick Hasted
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Pearl Jam: “10 million records, that’s such a crazy number”

With news that Pearl Jam are releasing Dark Matter, their 12th studio album, on April 19, we dip back into the Uncut archives for this Album By Album feature from Take 109, from June 2006. Pearl Jam are, along with Mudhoney, grunge’s great survivors. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ame...

With news that Pearl Jam are releasing Dark Matter, their 12th studio album, on April 19, we dip back into the Uncut archives for this Album By Album feature from Take 109, from June 2006.

Pearl Jam are, along with Mudhoney, grunge’s great survivors. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were in the Seattle genre’s first band, Green River, then Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andy Wood, in what would become a Seattle disease, fatally overdosed on heroin on the verge of success. But when charismatic, beautiful, tortured singer Eddie Vedder joined the pair in 1990, alongside co-guitarist Mike McCready and a succession of drummers (Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron took the seat with 2000’s Binaural), Pearl Jam swiftly became America’s biggest rock band. Sometimes sneered at in the UK for perceived self-pity, in the US Vedder’s sympathetic lyrics of teen sufferation made him a generational figurehead second only to Kurt Cobain. Later refusal to release singles, videos or even tour for a time shed millions of fans. But their albums have actually improved, seeing them bloom into a classic, morally concerned, spiritually questing American band.

When Uncut visits them at their Seattle office, founders Gossard and Ament pair up, then McCready and Cameron. Vedder sits alone in a shadowy, candle-lit alcove, his dog at his feet, and talks warmly in his sonorous voice of the grunge days, Kurt’s death, and how and why Pearl Jam are still here.

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TEN

Epic, 1991

Released in Nevermind’s wake, the more traditional hard rock of Pearl Jam’s debut was initially derided by Cobain (he later retracted). But teen suicide smash ìJeremyî, a triumphant Lollapalooza slot and a cameo in Cameron Crowe’s Seattle movie Singles helped shift 10 million

AMENT: The first week that we played with Ed, we knew it was on. It was like a second chance. Because up to that point, I was in limbo, man. I was thinking that somebody had some big plan for me, and that Andy dying was part of the plan. When Ed turned up and we started playing those songs, it was like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do.’

GOSSARD: We went from playing two Seattle clubs a year in front of 50 people to touring with the Chilli Peppers in front of 2000 people every night, and actually having magazines wanting to talk to us. There’s 11, 12 years before that where if any one of those things had happened it would have been the greatest year of your life. But I was just thinking, we’ve gotta hold it together, with the stress of knowing what happened to Mother Love Bone. I didn’t enjoy it until recently.

McCREADY: It was all very exciting, all the band’s cylinders were firing. This is what I’d been dreaming about since I was 11 years old and I got into Kiss. It was brand new. We were just beginning.

CAMERON: Ten was exploding in the charts. The grunge phenomenon was something we’d never anticipated in Seattle. Suddenly there were cultural ramifications to what we were doing, which we didn’t feel within ourselves. Once Nirvana started to take over, it became a post-Nevermind world. No-one wanted to be left in the dust. There was this unspoken competition.

VEDDER: Any phenomenon that extreme is going to have positives and negatives. How much rich food can you eat? The first two mouthfuls taste great, then you’re vomiting for days. It had a global effect which in the end I think we’re all proud of. I think Kris [Novoselic] and Dave [Grohl] are absolutely proud of it. I liked the idea that women were going to clubs with tattered sweaters that allowed them to be who they were, and not with bustiers and leather pants. There wasn’t a mandate, I don’t think. There was just this natural evolution into self-expression and independence and self-worth, based on people understanding their isolation, and being able to share it through the music. I think what was interesting about that first year is how quickly the feeling of excitement changed. It went from going downhill, and thinking, ‘Oh, this is great, we’re finally getting some speed, to – we’re gonna fuckin’ die.’

Vs.

Epic, 1993

This sold a million in its first week, five times Nirvana’s In Utero, and sharp punk punches like “Animal” improved on their debut. But Vedder agonised about the staggering scale of success on stage, cutting a graceless figure to some

McCREADY: We’d had a wave of emotions at selling millions, from gratitude to confusion to fright. The energy of what we’d gone through is on that record. It’s hard-hitting and immediate, on songs like “Go”. There was some pressure, but the songs were so good, we felt like it was going to do okay. Then things just exploded again. I think we had a better hold of it. But maybe not.

AMENT: I think the Vs. era was a pretty dark time. We had all kinds of battles going on at that point.

GOSSARD: It was the transition of Ed asserting himself in the band. In the beginning, Jeff and I put the deal together, we had the relationships in the record business. But Ed was realising, ‘Wow, I’m the centrepiece of this thing that’s sold fucking 10 million records. And I’ve gotta have my hand on the wheel.’

CAMERON: It’s difficult to complain when you’re successful. That’s always been the Seattle perception, that we’re all just a bunch of whiney bitches. We’re the Choke Central city of the world. And to a degree that’s true.

VEDDER: When you’re up there, you fall into things that you think a rock star should be. It was a struggle. But I do think I was reacting to things as a human being. Not like a celebrity non-human, or a prop put up there by the corporate mainstream. Those are difficult situations, especially at that time, to have been graceful in. I mean, putting a gun to your head isn’t graceful either. But that was certainly one approach.

VITALOGY

Epic, 1994

Released a week early on vinyl (also fetishised on “Spin the Black Circle”), this saw Pearl Jam pull free of grunge into a more relaxed rock classicism. Cobain committed suicide soon after its first sessions, on March 4 1994

McCREADY: I think we were on tour when Kurt killed himself. I remember that, because Ed destroyed a hotel room.

VEDDER: It affected me in ways that are just endless. I normally don’t talk about it too much, in respect to Kris and Dave. Because those feelings are still very alive in all of us. The positives and the negatives. It seemed like it was such an extreme act, and moment, and some kind of insane resolution. It seemed like that was just going to change things in the same way that I thought it would when Princess Diana was killed and the paparazzi were involved. It changed music. But it didn’t change the level of understanding about people to artists. I thought it would. We retreated after that, for survival.

AMENT: If you look at Kurt killing himself and not being able to deal with the pressures of what he became, Ed related to that in a big way. In that period I was feeling more for Dave and Kris, because I was more like them. This is crazy, but maybe six months after Kurt died, a friend and I were going snowboarding, and we got in a car wreck. I thought we were dead. I got out, look back, the car’s upside down, it’s smoking, snow’s coming down. And the first person that turned up was Kris, who I hadn’t seen since Kurt died. I was like, ‘I am fucking dead.’ It was like the biggest hallucination I’ve ever had in my life. He pulled up and he goes, [stoner voice] ‘Hey, Jeff – what’s u-up?’ I thought he was up in heaven visiting Kurt. And that that’s where we were.

GOSSARD: Oh my God, I didn’t know that. There was something in the air then. Even lyrically, in one session we wrote “Dead Man Walking”, “Immortality”, “Nothingman” – all three could have resonance with Kurt. It’s because Ed had been through enough to recognise what Kurt felt, in terms of – ‘I’ve got this fucking huge thing going, and I don’t know if I can do it, and it can take you somewhere you don’t want to go, and how do you get off, how do you control it?’ We were still at the stage where we were blind to the potential of the situation we’re at now – that of course, we can just go home. All we’d done was work our asses off for 15 years, and then it happens, and it’s like, wow, nobody seems to be very happy here. It’s all falling apart.

Vitalogy was a real nervous time for me, because Ed starting to write a lot more songs, and I was feeling disconnected from that process. Simplicity scared me when we made it. I wanted more riffs, more complexity, more Zeppelin. I was like, I don’t know if I wanna play someone else’s songs.

McCREADY: I was pretty fucked up then, on drugs, and drinking. I have a real blurry vision of that time – I don’t remember most of it, you know. It’s this weird dark period of my life.

NO CODE

Epic, 1996

Released as the band’s bitter fight with Ticketmaster over their price-inflating near-monopoly on US concert ticketing saw touring grind to a halt, this more contemplative, experimental record felt like an abdication from audience expectations. It would be their last really big seller.

GOSSARD: Ed was pushing us as a band to say, we can be small. A song doesn’t have to have this enormous impact, Ed doesn’t have to scream his head off, it’s about something else than someone might expect from Ten.

VEDDER: When it came to the songs on that record, maybe we were indulgent in a way where we just didn’t give a fuck. If we wanted to keep the momentum of the group going in the context of all the other music that was out there at the time, No Code should’ve been a heavier record. But we had to get it out of our system.

McCREADY: It felt like a left-turn when I wanted to go straight back to rocking. Part of me thought the album cover was better than the album itself. We were all on different wavelengths then. The band were travelling by plane, and Ed was driving around, doing his own radio show after a three-hour gig, cold and sweaty in a van. Which is crazy. I have pictures of four of us getting on a plane – where the hell’s Ed? It got to the point where he got sick, at a free show in Golden Gate Park where 50,000 people showed up. It was a fucking nightmare. Neil Young jammed with us for a few songs, and people were still pissed. We had a big three-hour meeting the next day, and I remember Stone going to Ed, point blank: ëDo you still want to be in this band?’ Fortunately, he did.

BINAURAL

Epic, 2000

Partly inspired by the anti-globalisation riots that flared in Seattle as they recorded it, this re-integrated their rocking and sensitive sides on career highs like “Insignificance”. But nine fans being crushed to death as they played Denmark’s Roskilde Festival on June 30 2000 overshadowed its release.

AMENT: We were in the studio when the riot happened. You could stand out in the sidewalk and hear it going on. At one point, I rode my bike down there, and then the crowd suddenly got big behind me, I was riding my bike through thousands of people, and I ended up getting out of there, because obviously shit was not going right. It was pretty surreal.

VEDDER: Those protests were something we had to think about, they were happening right outside our door. The interesting thing about them was the way they were handled. Why weren’t you able to walk down the streets with signs and singing? Why were there rubber bullets and tear gas from guys in shoulder pads provided by Nike? That was the beginning of realising that free speech in America was not the guaranteed right we thought it was.

McCREADY: Then Roskilde coloured all of our lives, I think. It’s a void, or a terrible tragedy, that I will never forget. I’ve never been through anything like that before, and I never want to again.

CAMERON: It’s the last thing you would ever expect, and we saw it happen. I don’t think we all went into deep depression for a great length of time. We saw it as the tragic accident that it was. But it was always associated with our show by the media, and that wasn’t nice to go through.

PEARL JAM

J, 2006

Partly a continuation of the overtly politicised, post-9/11 Riot Act (2002), anti-war sentiment here alternates with songs like “Big Wave”, where Vedder seems to want to get away from the whole mess. Their hardest rocking set for a decade

GOSSARD: This record has a little bit of AC/DC or the Stones. We can play it top to bottom live, we don’t have to worry about the tabla part. The lyrics seem to run the full gamut. They’re politically engaged and topical, and then ìSevered Handî’s about somebody just indulging themselves to the ultimate degree. You don’t get that out of Ed a lot.

VEDDER: It’s healthy to limit yourself when you can to things that actually concern you. I mean really – this might be dangerous to say – but on a certain level, we could look at the war where it doesn’t affect us one stitch. It’s healthy to step back from that sometimes, to get out in the ocean and surf and clear my head. Life offers you situations where you can’t step back, where your best friend is dying and you have to be living next to the nightmare. On the other hand, it was a gift to be in a studio the day after Bush’s election. It was a mental health issue at that point.

Musically, we know we’re going down roads that have already been cut, by The Who, or Springsteen or The Stooges or Velvet Underground or Talking Heads, or even some of the side-paths cut by Sonic Youth or Fugazi. And I think at this point we are trying to keep that spirit and legacy alive. We want to represent that.

CAMERON: The initial blast of Pearl Jam came at a time when there was a palpable groundswell, there was a real event that happened. People wanted to hear something different, and the band’s association with that initial realism in rock has carried over. Not necessarily in the music industry. They probably think we’re just a bunch of old greaseballs, and I love that. I love that they don’t respect us, and they don’t think we have anything left in our tank. It’s a great feeling that we’re being perceived as underdogs, when we’re still really successful.  

GOSSARD: I think when you sell 10 million records, that’s such a crazy number. I don’t think anyone can keep that going. For Ed to show us that we could actually pull back and take control of the situation was a huge transition. Maybe we’ll end up making another record that people do relate to in a big way like Ten. Or maybe we’ll make some records and they’ll do whatever they do, and we’ll just be a live band.

VEDDER: Did pulling back save my life? I’ve fallen off a number of cliffs since. If they had’ve been higher, I could have died. Yes.

The Making Of “Bra” by Cymande

Sam Richards
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The Making Of “Bra” by Cymande

A key scene in new documentary Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande shows how DJ Jazzy Jay used to cut between two turntables to extend the exuberant breakdown of “Bra”, sending a Bronx block party into raptures. It’s no surprise that the track became a foundation stone of hip-hop, sampled by...

A key scene in new documentary Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande shows how DJ Jazzy Jay used to cut between two turntables to extend the exuberant breakdown of “Bra”, sending a Bronx block party into raptures. It’s no surprise that the track became a foundation stone of hip-hop, sampled by Sugarhill Gang, Gang Starr and De La Soul, as well as on Raze’s early house hit “Jack The Groove”.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME



So who were the impossibly funky crew behind it? Surely they were from Harlem or New Orleans? Or maybe Kingston or Lagos? Nope. “Bra”’s co-writers Patrick Patterson and Steve Scipio grew up on the same street in Balham, south London, after their families emigrated to the UK from Guyana when they were kids. Coming of age in the late ’60s, they envisioned a band that would capture the spirit of the times – black pride, peace and love – while celebrating their Caribbean heritage. Their name came from a popular calypso about “a dove and pigeon fighting over a piece of pepper” – Cymande was the dove – and they recruited band members from south London’s Caribbean diaspora.

With lyrics that encouraged its listeners not to abandon the struggle (“But it’s alright/We can still go on”) “Bra” made a decent splash on its US release in 1973, following Cymande’s debut single “The Message” into the R&B charts and winning the band a support tour with Al Green. But back in the UK, the glass ceiling descended. Dispirited with the lack of opportunities for black British groups, Cymande disbanded in late 1974.

Patterson and Scipio eventually both studied law, going on to take up important positions in the governments of various Caribbean nations. As such, they were oblivious to Cymande’s second life as hip-hop progenitors. But word eventually reached them of their popularity amongst a new generation of crate-diggers, and Cymande reformed to jubilant scenes in 2014 with most of their original lineup intact. A new album is currently in the works, to follow the reissue of their original three albums.

“I had no idea,” says drummer Sam Kelly of Cymande’s miraculous rebirth. “One of the things that blows my mind is that we played in Brazil, we went to Croatia, all these places. My partner and I went to Australia a couple of years ago – we’d go out to a restaurant and hear our music being played in Melbourne, 12,000 miles away. It still puts a shiver down my spine.”

PATTERSON: I came to London in 1958, Steve came in ’63. And since then we’ve been together. Our street was full of people, many of whom came from our country, and we were all in the same community. So we carried our Caribbean culture with us. [In the late ’60s] we had a jazz group called Metre, which was the genesis of Cymande. We used to do Miles Davis’s “Footprints”, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, things like that. We liked to play in different time signatures. Looking back on it now, we were very inventive.

SCIPIO: For seven or eight months before we started to put Cymande together, we also played with a Nigerian band called Ginger Johnson And His African Drummers. Ginger was a well-known performer, he played with The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park.

PATTERSON: All of it contributed to where we were as musicians, directing us towards our future musical style.

KELLY: We started in the basement of my family house on Crawshay Road in Brixton. The main thing they emphasised is that, come hell or high water, they wanted to do original material. I wasn’t playing an instrument at all before I joined Cymande, but I used to listen to everything from James Brown to Hendrix, Sam & Dave to Pink Floyd. I was a blank canvas – I didn’t want to sound like any other drummer. The person that had the most influence on my playing was Steve. He didn’t play bass rhythmically, he played it lyrically. I was just trying to complement what he was playing.

PATTERSON: The support for black bands like ours was from places like Upstairs At Ronnie Scott’s, The 100 Club, the Pheasantry, Café Des Artistes. Small venues. We played the Croydon Greyhound with Edgar Broughton.

SCIPIO: We started doing some shows outside London, in some of the northern clubs. But I don’t think we were what they were expecting! In some of them, it didn’t go down very well…

PATTERSON: [adopts bolshie northern accent] “Do you know any Bill Haley? Come on!”

KELLY: Obviously we came across problems when we were trying to get record deals. They’d say, “You’re an all-black band, you should try to sound like the Americans – Otis Redding or Curtis Mayfield.” But we didn’t want to sound like that.

SCIPIO: There’s so many versions about how we connected with [producer] John Schroeder. John says he was in Soho, was passing this club and heard this racket going on. But my recollection is that our booking agent brought John Schroeder to us. In those days, John was a cool fella! Long blond hair and a big white Roller.

KELLY: He liked what he heard and thought he could work with us as a producer, which is a bit strange in a way, because the people that he had produced before – Cliff Richard or Helen Shapiro – were a million miles away from what Cymande was going for. But he let us just do what we did.

PATTERSON: We always give him credit for his commitment to the band. He liked what he heard and wanted to capture that, not to produce it or turn it into something else.

SCIPIO: Most of the first album was already written because those were the songs we were using on the road – they got perfected while we were gigging. For “Bra”, the bass was the genesis. How we were writing at the time is that the bass was used melodically. I’d go to Patrick with an idea and often he’d start putting stuff on top of that. In some songs, the vocals were the last thing to be developed. Normally it’s the other way around.

PATTERSON: When I was laying things on top, I was just thinking about patterns to fit. I’m a touch player, not a heavyweight player, so I’m bouncing off Steve rather than setting a thing myself.

KELLY: Unlike a lot of rhythm sections who are trying to lock in, we’re all playing individual things, so you’ve got this mixture going on.

SCIPIO: “Bra” was one of the popular songs at gigs. The middle break with just the bass and drums, as recognised in the documentary, people appreciated that even then.

KELLY: I’m playing four-to-the-bar on the bass drum. We were just trying to think how we could join the middle of the song to the end section. But the DJs turned this into a whole new record – amazing.

PATTERSON: When we came up, it was the time of “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud”. You had the Black Panthers, you had the Black Liberation Front, you had artists who were articulating a black position and trying to make sure that black people recognised the importance of working together. The lyrics of “Bra” reflected that time.

SCIPIO: “Bra” is slang for brother. Within our community, everybody knew what it meant. It was only when we went to the States that you might have people saying, “Why are they singing about brassières?”

PATTERSON: Joey Dee was a talented, brilliant singer. He had a wonderful range, so we could put anything before him and he could sing it. And he had a good presence too. The voice was an instrument in Cymande, but it still gave him scope for demonstrating his talents.

SCIPIO: De Lane Lea was a wonderful studio because it was used for recording movie soundtracks as well as bands. Everyone had their little compartment to control the spillage and we just performed as if we were doing a live gig. We were young people, uninhibited! We didn’t have responsibilities, so when we went in the studio it was just pure enjoyment. A lot of producers want to put their stamp on the music, but John wanted the raw element of what he heard.

PATTERSON: And he produced it well. You could hear every instrument in its own space. Working with John was easy.

SCIPIO: It was very exciting to see our records on the charts in America. John wanted us over there as soon as possible to ride on the wave. It was like going to the centre of music, the Mecca.

KELLY: In England, we were playing relatively small venues. To then be suddenly supporting Al Green on these huge stages… I was half a mile away from Patrick and Steve! But Al Green’s drummer was amazing. For the first week, he would stand by the side of the stage and watch me play, and afterwards he’d come over and give me some advice. I’ll forever be grateful for that.

SCIPIO: The Apollo [in Harlem] had a reputation for not tolerating below-par performances – and the crowd would let you know! So I think some of us had some apprehension about it, but the week we did there was fantastic. We had Jerry Butler coming in and shaking our hands.

KELLY: The Apollo was a real pit, to be honest! The paintwork was crumbling, it smelt… but there was so much black music history oozing out of those walls. It was a great experience.

SCIPIO: It was very frustrating to have your music appreciated by that number of people and then to come back here and there being no-one at the airport, not even one reporter asking about how the tour went. No interest, no articles, nothing.

PATTERSON: It was demoralising. We were entitled to some recognition. So you come back and you find nothing… It says a lot about the industry and how it deals with us as black musicians. There was little or no promotion here, and no airplay.

SCIPIO: [After a while] we all recognised that performing in front of 40,000 and then doing gigs to 300 people, that’s not where we should be.

PATTERSON: We can’t go backwards in that sense. Who does it help? It doesn’t help black musicians or the aspirations we might have to achieve things in music. So let’s take a rest and see where we go.

SCIPIO: I joined Mike [‘Bami’ Rose, Cymande flute/sax player] in a South African band called Jabula. I played with them for maybe five years, but I wasn’t satisfied with just being a squad member in somebody else’s project. I started my law degree, and that was the last time I played any live music until Cymande came back together. I moved to Anguilla to work in the attorney general’s chambers.

PATTERSON: After Cymande, I was musical director for the Black Theatre of Brixton, then I went back to my law studies. I practised in chambers in England, then I worked for the government of Dominica.

SCIPIO: I certainly wasn’t aware of what was going on [with “Bra”’s use
by hip-hop DJs]. The documentary was an eye-opener for me!

KELLY: Myself and Bami Rose kept playing professionally. I’d be somewhere setting up or packing away my drums and I’d hear “Bra” or “The Message” being played, which was really satisfying. But I didn’t have any idea what the DJs in the States were doing. It wasn’t ’til the film came out that I found out people had taken our tracks and remixed them. Watching these DJs talk about Cymande’s music in such reverent terms was just amazing.

SCIPIO: I’m happy people see something in our music that’s influential. To listen to something and appreciate it is one thing, but for it to impact on you in such a way that you take elements of that thing and make it part of your own, that’s on an entirely different level.

KELLY: We had unfinished business, but I didn’t know it was going to take 40 years!

SCIPIO: When we came off the road in the ’70s, it was never intended to be a disbanding, just a hiatus. But the renewed interest in us provided the opportunity to put into effect the plans we had when we first decided to call it a day.

PATTERSON: It was very exciting to see that we had, if you like, travelled through time. We were now faced with a bunch of young people appreciating our music.

SCIPIO: We’ve just completed a tour of Canada and the US, and at the end we took three or four days off and said, “We’ll do a couple of tracks.” And they went well.

PATTERSON: We recorded at a great studio in LA. It suited us, because we still cut live. This will be quite an important album, I think. The aspiration has to be consistent with what we have already created.

SCIPIO: The spirit of the performance should still be recognisably Cymande. Not like a load of old doddery guys just going through the motions!

Neil Young & Crazy Horse announce album and tour dates

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young & Crazy Horse announce album and tour dates

The tour and FU##IN' UP are both due in April Neil Young & Crazy Horse are back on tour in April and May this year, with an album called FU##IN' UP due as well. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME The 16-date Love Earth tour beg...

The tour and FU##IN’ UP are both due in April

Neil Young & Crazy Horse are back on tour in April and May this year, with an album called FU##IN’ UP due as well.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

The 16-date Love Earth tour begins in San Diego. The line-up features Young, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot with presumably Micah Nelson once again deputising for Nils Lofren, who’ll be fulfilling his E Street Band duties with Bruce Springsteen at that time.

Wednesday, April 24 – San Diego, CA – Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre
Thursday, April 25 – San Diego, CA – Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre
Saturday, April 27 – Phoenix, AZ – Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre
Wednesday, May 01 – Austin, TX – Germania Insurance Amphitheater
Thursday, May 02 – Dallas, TX – Dos Equis Pavilion
Sunday, May 05 – Huntsville, AL – Orion Amphitheater
Tuesday, May 07 – Atlanta, GA – Ameris Bank Amphitheatre
Wednesday, May 08 – Franklin, TN – FirstBank Amphitheater
Saturday, May 11 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live
Sunday, May 12 – Camden, NJ – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion
Tuesday, May 14 – Queens, NY – Forest Hills Stadium
Friday, May 17 – Mansfield, MA – Xfinity Center
Saturday, May 18 – Bridgeport, CT – Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater
Monday, May 20 – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage
Wednesday, May 22 – Clarkston, MI – Pine Knob Music Theatre
Thursday, May 23 – Chicago, IL – Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island

Tickets will be available starting with a Neil Young Archives pre-sale beginning on Tuesday, February 13 at 10 AM PT. Additional pre-sales will run throughout the week ahead of the general onsale beginning on Friday, February 16 at 10am local time at LiveNation.com. At time of purchase, fans can opt in to receive a physical CD of FU##IN’ UP included with their tickets for no additional cost.

The provenance of FU##IN’ UP is slightly less clear at this point. According to an email received bt Young’s Archives subscribers:

Neil and The Horse have played together for over 50 years and the performances of these familiar songs, recorded in 2023, is a true highlight. As Neil explains, “In the spirit it’s offered…made this for the Horse lovers. I can’t stop it. The horse is runnin’. What a ride we have. I don’t want to mess with the vibe. I am so happy to have this to share.” FU##IN’ UP contains 9 songs on 2 LPs. The album will be released in limited edition color vinyl pressing on Record Store Day April 20 with a wider, all format release starting April 26.

According to rumours, it might well be a recording from a private performance at The Rivoli, Toronto on November 3, 2023.

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets annouce new tour dates

Michael Bonner
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Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets annouce new tour dates

Set the controls! Nick Mason's Saucerful Of Secrets will head out on a new UK tour later this year, including a show at London's Royal Albert Hall. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME This is the Saucers first UK tour since their May 2022...

Set the controls!

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets will head out on a new UK tour later this year, including a show at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

This is the Saucers first UK tour since their May 2022 Echoes Tour. Since then, they have since played extensively through America and Europe.

Their stop-off at the Royal Albert Hall is significant: The Pink Floyd first played there on December 12, 1966, as part of an Oxfam benefit evening. They subsequently returned to the venue in 1967, 1969 and 1970. Meanwhile, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets made their Royal Albert Hall debut in 2022.

Says Mason, “Six years ago when I got behind the drums again and we started playing the early Pink Floyd material, it was a real pleasure on so many levels. Many of the tracks had never actually been played live, so to have performed them all over the world has been something we’ve all enjoyed immensely. To get the opportunity to come back to the UK for another tour is something the band and I had been hoping we would be able to do, so to say ‘we’re back’ feels good!”

Aside from Mason, the Saucers’ line-up includes Gary Kemp, Guy Pratt, Lee Harris and Dom Beken.

Tickets for the tour go on sale from Friday, February 16 at 11am from www.myticket.co.uk.

The tour dates are:

Tuesday, June 11 – Stoke, Victoria Hall

Wednesday, June 12 – York, Barbican

Thursday, June 13 – Nottingham, Royal Concert Hall

Saturday, June 15 – Oxford, New Theatre

Monday, June 17 – Bristol, Beacon

Tuesday, June 18 – Birmingham, Symphony Hall

Wednesday, June 19 – Manchester, O2 Apollo

Friday, June 21 – Glasgow, SEC Armadillo

Saturday, June 22 – Gateshead, The Glasshouse

Monday, June 24 – Cardiff, Wales Millenium Centre

Tuesday, June 25 – Poole, Lighthouse

Wednesday, June 26 – Brighton, Dome

Friday, June 28 – Ipswich, Regent Theatre

Saturday, June 29 – London, Royal Albert Hall

The band have already announced a brace of European shows:

Thursday, July 18 – Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan

Friday, July 19 – Piazza Dei Signori, Vicenza

Saturday, July 20 – Sequoie Music Park, Bologna

Sunday, July 21 – Cavea, Rome

Tuesday, July 23 – Belvedere San Leucio, Caserta

Wednesaday, July 24 – Teatro Il Castello, Roccella Ionica

July 28 – Herzberg Festival, Germany

Inside this month’s free Uncut CD

Tom Pinnock
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Inside this month’s free Uncut CD

Julia Holter, Phosphorescent, The Jesus And Mary Chain and more appear on our Real Live Wire compilation All copies of the March 2024 issue of Uncut come with a free, 15-track CD – Real Live Wire – that showcases the wealth of great new music on offer this month, from The Jesus And Mary C...

Julia Holter, Phosphorescent, The Jesus And Mary Chain and more appear on our Real Live Wire compilation

All copies of the March 2024 issue of Uncut come with a free, 15-track CD – Real Live Wire – that showcases the wealth of great new music on offer this month, from The Jesus And Mary Chain, Julia Holter and Phosphorescent to Rosali, Sam Lee and Dean McPhee. Now dive in…

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

1 ROSALI
Rewind
On her fourth album, Bite Down, Rosali Middleman has created one of the first great LPs of 2024, a wildly inventive breakup record. Head to page 54, where we catch up with the singer-songwriter in her new home of North Carolina.

2 SHEER MAG
Moonstruck
After years on their own label, the Philly gang have signed to Third Man for their new album, Playing Favorites. As our lead review reveals, on page 22, it’s an eclectic, bounding journey of a record, with Tina Halladay in fine voice over the group’s garagey amalgamations of punk, country and disco.

3 THE HANGING STARS
Disbelieving
Straight from Edwyn Collins’ studio in the Highlands comes the latest from this London country group, On A Golden Shore. There’s a cosmic element to these rootsy laments, thanks to Richard Olson’s shimmering songwriting and Joe Harvey-Whyte’s pedal steel. Potent stuff.

4 THE BEVIS FROND
Wrong Way Round
Nick Saloman has been making records as The Bevis Frond for decades now, but new LP Focus On Nature still knocks it out of the park with his psych-tinged indie-rock. On this track, the Neil Young of Walthamstow launches off into flights of kraut-fringed fancy.

5 JULIA HOLTER
Spinning
Something In The Room She Moves, our Album Of The Month on page 18, finds Holter subsuming her past records into a stellar new work: gone is the thorny tangle of 2018’s Aviary, replaced by liquid fretless bass, divine and floating keyboard textures and some of her most indelible and unexpected melodies.

6 DEAN McPHEE
Lunar Fire
A concept album united by space, aliens and the unknown, the latest from West Yorkshire’s interstellar guitar wrangler, Astral Gold, contains some of McPhee’s most transportative soundscapes yet. Teleport yourself to page 34 for a full review and Q&A.

7 THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
JAMCOD
Jim and William Reid are back 40 years after their debut single, their love for fuzz gloriously unabated. Here’s a highlight from their new album Glasgow Eyes, a reassuringly caustic slab of distorted motorik.

8 PHOSPHORESCENT
Revelator
This is the title track of Matthew Houck’s latest album, the long-awaited follow-up to 2018’s C’est La Vie, crafted at his own Spirit Sounds studio in Nashville. Uncut joins him there on page 80 to discuss songs, sadness and toilet walls.

9 FRANCIS PLAGNE
Here Is Dull Earth (Edit)
This Melbourne-based musician, better known for his experimental work, ventures into out-there song on his new LP, Into Closed Air. Here’s an exclusive edit of one of its mammoth tracks, coursing with the spirit and melancholy of prime Canterbury Scene sounds,

10 CHARLES MOOTHART
One Wish
The LA multi-instrumentalist is releasing his first album under his own name, though you’ll recognise him from his work with Fuzz, CFM and Ty Segall. Inspired by experiments with a sampler, Black Holes Don’t Choke is a forward-thinking, playful rock record, dipping into genres at will.

11 SHEHERAZAAD
Mashoor
‘Produced by Arooj Aftab’ should be enough to prick up most ears, and deservedly so here: much like Aftab’s work, Sheherazaad’s brief debut album Qasr is a brilliantly modern meshing of Asian and Western music. Read our review on page 35.

12 HIGH LLAMAS
Toriafan
Sean O’Hagan has painted with various styles throughout his career, but the Llamas’ new album Hey Panda brings him bang up to date, with bit-crushing, Auto-Tune and the most current of beats. On paper it seems like a risk, but the reality, as “Toriafan” shows, is sublime.

13 WHITELANDS
Now Here’s The Weather
Shoegaze is bigger than ever these days – just ask anyone on TikTok, if you dare – and here’s a great young London group worshiping at the shrine of Slowdive and Ride. Night-Bound Eyes Are Blind To The Day is almost slavish in its reverence, but with tracks as mighty as this, it’s a pleasure not a problem.

14 SAM LEE
Meeting Is A Pleasant Place
On his fourth album, song-finder (and former wilderness survival expert) Lee continues his voyage into traditional song. Bernard Butler is back on production duties, and the result is resiliently modern, deeply textured and moving.

15 ADRIANNE LENKER
Sadness As A Gift
Whether Lenker is writing for her own projects or for Big Thief, her albums become little worlds, as endless in their scope and power as her well of songs can sometimes appear to be. Bright Future is no different, as this deep, generous ballad proves.

An Audience With Damo Suzuki

Sam Richards
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An Audience With Damo Suzuki

*This feature originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of Uncut. Kenji ‘Damo’ Suzuki is a performer so dedicated to the art of improvisation, you could even say he’s improvised his own life. Leaving Japan at the age of 18 to pursue the hippie dream in Europe, he landed – via Sweden and r...

*This feature originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of Uncut.

Kenji ‘Damo’ Suzuki is a performer so dedicated to the art of improvisation, you could even say he’s improvised his own life. Leaving Japan at the age of 18 to pursue the hippie dream in Europe, he landed – via Sweden and rural Ireland – in Germany, where he was spotted busking in his own inimitable style on the streets of Munich by Holger Czukay, who instantly recruited him to replace vocalist Malcolm Mooney in Can.

Suzuki’s stint with the krautrock legends ushered in their imperial phase, yielding experimental rock touchtones Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, but he left Can after just three years citing spiritual differences – he soon became a Jehovah’s Witness, quitting music and taking a job laying pavements. Yet his free-spirited nature couldn’t be suppressed forever. In the 1980s, he joined Dunkelziffer before forming The Damo Suzuki Band with ex-Can colleague Jaki Liebezeit. Eventually he rejected the idea of performing with a regular band altogether, embarking on a ‘never-ending tour’ in which he turns up alone at each venue, improvising a set of new material on the spot with a group of ‘Sound Carriers’ that he has sometimes only just met. 

For a while it looked as if Suzuki’s never-ending tour might be permanently derailed by a life-threatening bout of colon cancer, but he has recovered to the point where he’s regularly back out on the road, even if his “quite strong” medication has limited his ability to wander at will. Instead, Suzuki estimates he has about 10,000 books, “500 of which are about cooking”. Not that he consults them for recipes. In fact, Suzuki’s approach to preparing a meal is not dissimilar to his approach to making music. “I don’t have a plan,” he explains. “My girlfriend buys something, mainly organic food, and I just improvise. My life is like this! I don’t take any kind of information, only football. If I have so much information in my head then creativity is not flexible. If you don’t have any plan you can get more from time.”

What was it like to leave home on a one-way ticket to Europe at such a young age? Lucy Harminster, Sheffield

For me it was quite necessary and important to have a kind of adventure. Things were not so much possible in Japan, so if I stay in Japan I must go the same way as other people – go to university and get employed in a good company or something. Not very interesting. So that’s why I went out. The situation was quite different because at that time if people went outside the country maybe they don’t come back again. Now you’ve got airports everywhere and cheap flights. Why I bought a one-way ticket is because I didn’t have much money to buy both ways. But I cannot really remember the feeling, it’s more than 50 years ago!

I’m fascinated by your strategy of ad-hoc backing bands. What do you do if they turn out to be rubbish? Mark Thompson, Deal

Rubbish or not rubbish depends on the perspective. And I like every kind of sensation, so maybe there are no rubbish things if you make music in this way. Things that happen by accident can be a very special moment. That’s why I say nothing is rubbish, just the opposite: everything is beautiful. And if somebody experiences a rubbish concert, I think it’s quite interesting too – to know what is their meaning of rubbish! Because I don’t know the meaning of it. But when [the musicians] start playing a Can song, that’s not so good. I really don’t like if somebody is forcing me to do something. It destroys my curiosity. It’s horrible! It’s better people playing with me don’t have any information in their head and don’t think I was once a singer of Can, because the answer is already there. I don’t like to have any kind of answer. 

What do you miss most about playing with Jaki Liebezeit? Karim Mouvedi, via email

He’s a special drummer and he had his own style. When he played together with Damo Suzuki Band, for me, that was his best time. He played really much more wild. Also this band was only four people, there was no bass; it was his dream to play without a bassist. Jaki was quite a hard person, so everybody had sometimes a problem with him. But mainly he was right! 

Do you still have the half-pink/half-red velvet jumpsuit your wore at Can’s 1972 ‘Free Concert’? Alistair Morton, Whitchurch, Shropshire

No! Many people are asking me to buy it but I don’t have any fancy dress from that time any more. I don’t know what happened to it. Some rock music museum in Germany, they were asking for this one too. But I’m quite easy to say goodbye to any kind of thing, so I don’t have any stuff from old times. I designed it myself but I had a special tailor to make it. She usually designed only for ladies. I brought her my ideas and some textiles and she made it. It wasn’t so comfortable to wear! It was quite tight and I didn’t really think of how to go to the toilet. I had quite a few such things: trousers with many butterflies, long scarves, orange-coloured dresses, silver trousers, many things. But the material was quite expensive, so it wasn’t so great when I was smoking a cigarette and the ashes dropped down. It was quite an expensive hobby. 

What did you think of The Fall’s song about you? And what did you talk about with Mark E Smith when you met? Lee Phelps, Wigan

It was a strange moment! I didn’t know the band and suddenly they made this piece. Actually first I thought maybe there is another Damo Suzuki. But it was also funny to me. I think it’s good. 

Some people said I must make a song about Mark E Smith, but I didn’t, so… I understand him changing quite often the band. If you are travelling with people together for a long time, opinions can be totally different: where to go, where to eat. So changing a member is not such a bad thing. You need a fresh moment sometimes, it keeps creativity more fresh.

You ran a Kinks fan club at school. What did you prefer about them over The Beatles and The Stones? Andy Clough, Kingston-Upon-Thames

The Kinks were my favourite at that time because The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were already mainstream and everybody listened to them. But The Kinks were special for me because they made interesting things with simple chords, and their melodies fitted together with me – sometimes very sentimental. I think The Kinks are true British rock. The Rolling Stones played almost only American ideas; Beatles is a kind of schlager music, from the Germans. The Beatles are like Abba, they are everybody’s darlings. So The Kinks is the only band from that time I could follow. 

I read that the making of Ege Bamyasi was delayed by the fact that you and Irmin Schmidt were obsessed with playing chess. Who won the most games? Vincent Jaunes, Montpelier, France

I feel like I won. But he’ll say a different answer, I’m sure! We both got quite into chess. At that time we liked to play chess more than music, so we were in trouble with Holger. Strategy? No. I improvise always. Every good chess player already has ideas for maybe 15 moves but I think that’s quite boring. If you are too good, it’s not so interesting for me. It’s like a too-good guitarist, playing so quick – there is no space I can get into.

Is it true you once painted your bedroom completely black? Dave Franklyn, via email

Yes! Black was good because I wanted to have it without any information. If you have some colours, it’s already information or direction for you. If you are in a dark place, you don’t know if it’s a really small space or really huge. I like to have this moment when you are hanging on the air, or something like that. Every time I went into that room I felt different. That was a thing I needed at that time.

Do you ever have the urge to write and record a more traditional pop song? Alex Hinton, Newmarket

Not really, I never thought about this. Melodies come sometimes and I think, it could be a good pop song. But I never think why I should make this kind of stuff. I’m not rich, but I have enough things. Plus I’m already quite old, next year I’m 70. So why would I make a pop song? Pop music is like a hamburger – easy to eat but without any substance. It’s not too good for spiritual things if you eat this kind of food all the time, you get really like a lobotomy. 

When was the last time you cried with joy on stage? Alisha Jones, via email

This happens sometimes because I’m really sensitive about having these special moments and I can share this with other people. If you share your music with other people you have much more feeling. It’s difficult to remember exactly the last time – maybe I’m too much on the medication! Once after a concert a girl came to me and she was really crying because she was so thankful. I’m happy that I can have these beautiful moments sometimes.

Fantastic Voyage: New Sounds For The European Canon 1977-1981

Jon Dale
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Fantastic Voyage: New Sounds For The European Canon 1977-1981

Bowie goes Berlin, music quakes – here’s the fall-out The concept behind Fantastic Voyage, compiled by Bob Stanley of St Etienne and Jason Wood from the British Film Institute, is simple: tracking the two-way flow of influence between David Bowie’s Berlin-era albums and the German electroni...

Bowie goes Berlin, music quakes – here’s the fall-out

The concept behind Fantastic Voyage, compiled by Bob Stanley of St Etienne and Jason Wood from the British Film Institute, is simple: tracking the two-way flow of influence between David Bowie’s Berlin-era albums and the German electronic and avant-rock that informed Bowie’s thinking at the time. It’s a smart conceit for a compilation, something that Stanley in particular has become exceptionally good at over the past decade. Indeed, the recent string of collections he’s pulled together for Ace Records are often sensitive mappings of discrete cultural scenes or imagined aesthetic collisions; while 2020’s Cafe Exil: New Adventures In European Music 1972-1980 pieced together what Bowie and Iggy might have been listening to in their favourite Kreuzberg haunt.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

It’s not hard to see the ways that Fantastic Voyage’s remit can be stretched, massaged and morphed. Some of the names here are to be expected – Holger Czukay, Cabaret Voltaire, The Associates – but some may land, initially, as quite a surprise: Daryl Hall, Peter Gabriel. It’s the latter inclusions that make Fantastic Voyage more valuable than a predictable hipster’s selection of ‘the right records’. Treating the Bowie-Berlin creative nexus as pliable material, Stanley and Wood offer other ways of thinking about how electronic music and rock went mutually mutant in the early ’80s.

The Hall contribution is one of the compilation’s most gorgeous moments: “The Farther Away I Am” is a late-night hymn, an intimist’s dream of a song, taken from his album Sacred Songs. Recorded in 1977 but not released until 1980, Sacred Songs is Hall’s masterpiece, made in collaboration with Robert Fripp. Indeed, Fripp understandably hovers over Fantastic Voyage as a kind of éminence grise: the taut and itchy “Exposure”, from Fripp’s album of the same name, is also included here, and he turns up on guitar on Peter Gabriel’s tortured “No Self Control”.

Gabriel’s contribution precedes the song that feels like Fantastic Voyage’s core, The Walker Brothers’ “Nite Flights”. The moment where Scott Walker truly unshackles himself from the brothers’ lush, brooding balladry and goes fully existential, it’s still startling, 40 years on, a stealthy machine of a song, a warped hybrid of krautrock’s rhythmic monotony and stylised art-rock. Bowie’s “Heroes” was a reference point for Walker while recording his contributions to “Nite Flights”’s attendant album, and Bowie would repay the favour, decades later, covering it on 1993’s Black Tie White Noise.

Lest Fantastic Voyage come across as an exercise of reinforcing myths, the veneration of a gang of white intellectuals exoticising Berlin’s post-war ruins, Stanley and Wood are careful to bring in other voices. One of the highlights of Fantastic Voyage is the plasmic drift of Brigitte Fontaine and Areski’s “Patriarcat”; another is Isabelle Mayereu’s “On A Trouvé…”, from her chanson curio, Des Mot Étranges…; Grauzone’s “Eisbar” still feels like a beautiful anomaly in the landscape. And that’s the great art of Fantastic Voyage – drawing up new plans that allow different contexts for such strange, glorious architectures.

Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band – Dancing On The Edge

Tyler Wilcox
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Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band – Dancing On The Edge

Sprawl, swagger, poetry and epics It hardly needs saying that we live in an age of ever-shortening attention spans – especially when it comes to music. How dire has the situation got? Well, take the recent New York Times profile of Michael Stipe, wherein The 1975’s Matty Healy tells the ex-RE...

Sprawl, swagger, poetry and epics

It hardly needs saying that we live in an age of ever-shortening attention spans – especially when it comes to music. How dire has the situation got? Well, take the recent New York Times profile of Michael Stipe, wherein The 1975’s Matty Healy tells the ex-REM frontman of an encounter he’d had with a 12-year-old.

“So I said, ‘Well, what songs do you like?’ And he said to me: ‘What full songs?’ That was his response! The decimal point has moved! I didn’t realise that the denomination was now smaller than the song.”

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

In the face of these rapidly diminishing returns, it’s refreshing to sink into a record like Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band’s Dancing On The Edge, a seven-song double LP with a lyric sheet as dense as its striking cover art. With several tunes that creep towards the 10-minute mark, there’s a sprawl and swagger here that not many current songwriters would dare to attempt. And yet Davis isn’t a rambler, really; his songwriting isn’t the stream-of-consciousness blather of a Dylan wannabe or a navel-gazing plumber of the quotidian depths. What’s most impressive about Dancing On The Edge is how he keeps you hanging on every word, savouring his weird wisdom, oddball poetry and wry sense of humour. When one of these humble, vastly entertaining epics comes to a close, you might wish it had gone on even longer.

This is his first album under his own name, but Davis is far from a new kid on the block. The Louisville-based musician released several stellar records under the State Champion moniker; he has played with Tropical Trash and Equipment Pointed Ankh, both well-nigh unclassifiable collectives; he steers the ship at the eclectic Sophomore Lounge label, which has released terrific LPs by Arbor Labor Union, Ned Collette and C Joynes; and in 2010, he co-founded the long-running music festival Cropped Out, bringing a wide array of underground talent to Kentucky over the years. In other words, Davis is a lifer, with a deep well of musical experience and influences to draw upon.

Dancing On The Edge comes five years after State Champion’s Send Flowers, and Davis says that for a while there, he believed he might be done with the sometimes-taxing process of straightforward songwriting, instead focusing on experimental electronic tracks, freeform improvs and visual art. “For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t thinking about touring or promoting or even any sense of ‘community’ whatsoever,” he reveals. “I just wanted to make new things. Almost obsessively. And the more I sharpened those instinctual tools, the more I slowly started circling back toward the unexpected desire to return to ‘song’ form with a clear and conditioned mind. It certainly didn’t come easy. It was painful, actually.”

That pain has paid off with Davis’ best work so far. And his songwriting sabbatical seems to have provided him with an overarching theme: stasis and the desire to move forward but not knowing how to do so. It’s a portrait of the artist in his late thirties looking wearily down the barrel of middle age. “I’m doing 25-to-life just waiting on a friend to get back from a piss,” Davis sings at the album’s outset. Elsewhere: “I lie awake and I wait quietly for a tax return/To come howling down from the side of a mountain somewhere.” Or, most hilariously, he complains of the purgatory of drinking in a bar where the jukebox “only plays ‘Sultans Of Swing’.”

At first blush, these concerns may not seem like the stuff of a gripping LP, much less a double LP. But the sound that Davis and his collaborators have crafted here gives Dancing On The Edge a buoyancy that carries the listener along beautifully. For example, the album’s 10-minute centrepiece, “Flashes Of Orange”, is a remarkably infectious ride – especially given that it appears to be sung by someone who can’t get out of bed. The alt.country signifiers are here: chiming guitar and piano, pedal steel swells, full-blooded harmonies (provided by fellow Louisvillian Joan Shelley). But the song keeps shifting in unexpected ways, careening into unusual synth breakdowns, left-turning into minor keys, uncovering an almost danceable groove at times. Throughout, Davis comes across like Jay Farrar possessed by the spirit of David Berman. “I’ve seen the sunset, babe, through each and every shade of beer,” our despairing narrator exclaims. “And I can tell you each and every kind of hanging tree that’s native here.” It’s a song that the late, great Berman would’ve been proud to call his own.

Or Kurt Wagner. Or Bill Callahan. Or, hell, even John Prine. Dancing On The Edge is singular and strong enough to put Davis in league with some of the very best American songwriters of the past and present. He’s someone with the originality, wit and ambition to cut through the murk. Someone worth paying attention to.

Can’s Damo Suzuki has died aged 74

Michael Bonner
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Can’s Damo Suzuki has died aged 74

His tenure coincided with the band's most acclaimed releases Can vocalist Damo Suzuki has died, aged 74. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME His death was confirmed by the band, who posted on their Instagram today (February 10, 2024): ...

His tenure coincided with the band’s most acclaimed releases

Can vocalist Damo Suzuki has died, aged 74.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

His death was confirmed by the band, who posted on their Instagram today (February 10, 2024):

It is with great sadness that we have to announce the passing of our wonderful friend Damo Suzuki, yesterday, Friday 9th February 2024.
His boundless creative energy has touched so many over the whole world, not just with Can, but also with his all continent spanning Network Tour. Damo’s kind soul and cheeky smile will be forever missed.
He will be joining Michael, Jaki and Holger for a fantastic jam!
Lots of love to his family and children.

Born Kenji Suzuki on January 16, 1950, he left Japan as a teenager, travelling round Europe – where he was spotted busking in Munich by Can’s Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay, who invited him to join them onstage that night.

Suzuki made his debut with Can on “Don’t Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone” on 1970’s Soundtracks, which also featured two tracks from their recently departed vocalist Malcolm Mooney.

Suzuki went on to appear on the band’s peerless run of early ’70s albums – 1971’s Tago Mago, 1972’s Ege Bamyasi and 1973’s Future Days.

After leaving Can, Suzuki stepped away from music to become a Jehovah’s Witness, returning to music in 1983 with Damo Suzuki’s Network – touring extensively, he would form ad hoc ensembles for each location.

Suzuki’s most recent album Arkaoda was released in 2022. His battle with cancer was the subject of a 2022 documentary, Energy.

Can Live In Paris 1973 is due for release on February 23; it’s the first instalment of the band’s live releases to feature Suzuki on vocals.

Iron & Wine share new track, “You Never Know”

Michael Bonner
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Iron & Wine share new track, “You Never Know”

Sam Beam's new album is coming in April Iron & Wine have announced details of a new album, Light Verse, which is due from Sub Pop on April 26. You can hear a taster for the new album, "You Never Know", below. TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT - HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO...

Sam Beam’s new album is coming in April

Iron & Wine have announced details of a new album, Light Verse, which is due from Sub Pop on April 26.

You can hear a taster for the new album, “You Never Know“, below.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

Light Verse is Sam Beam‘s first full-length Iron & Wine release in over seven years.

The album also features Tyler Chester (keyboards), Sebastian Steinberg (bass), David Garza (guitar), Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, Kyle Crane (all drums/percussion) and Paul Cartwright (strings), while Fiona Apple appears on a duet called “All In Good Time”. 

The tracklisting tor Light Verse is:

You Never Know

Anyone’s Game

All in Good Time (Feat. Fiona Apple)

Cutting It Close

Taken by Surprise

Yellow Jacket

Sweet Talk

Tears that Don’t Matter

Bag of Cats

Angels Go Home

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