Over the last two nights (November 6 and 7) at LA's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a panoply of music stars have been covering Joni Mitchell songs for her 75th birthday.
Participants included James Taylor, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, Chaka Khan, Diana Krall, Kris Kristofferson, Los Lobos, Graham Nash...
Over the last two nights (November 6 and 7) at LA’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a panoply of music stars have been covering Joni Mitchell songs for her 75th birthday.
Participants included James Taylor, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, Chaka Khan, Diana Krall, Kris Kristofferson, Los Lobos, Graham Nash, Seal and Rufus Wainwright.
There’s a moment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World where Harrison, in archive footage, reflects on the distance travelled in his comprehensive and remarkable career. “People say I’m the Beatle who changed the most. But really that’s what I see l...
There’s a moment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World where Harrison, in archive footage, reflects on the distance travelled in his comprehensive and remarkable career. “People say I’m the Beatle who changed the most. But really that’s what I see life as being about. You have to change.”
Change, it seems, has always been Harrison’s modus operandi. Not so much ‘the quiet one’ as ‘the restless one’, Harrison always seemed to be looking for the next thing. You can read about many of those next things – Beatles, solo, Wilburys and more – in the latest addition to the Uncut family. Among our most requested volumes, George Harrison: The Ultimate Music Guide is in shops from Thursday but you can also buy it from our online shop now by clicking here.
When I last talked to anyone who knew George Harrison, it was about how he played the guitar. In the early 1960s, Brian Griffiths (“Griff”) along with his pals John Gustafson (“Gus”) and John Hutchinson (“Hutch”) was a member of The Big Three. Favourites at the Cavern, (where they recorded their debut EP) and in Hamburg, the band knew the Beatles before there was much screaming.
Gus told me about how he once met a sheepish George in Liverpool, shortly after his premature return from Hamburg. George told Gus that Stuart Sutcliffe had recently left the band, and if he wanted to have a go, The Beatles were looking for a bass player. Griff, meanwhile, remembered George as someone eager to learn.
Aware of the spikier nature of his own tone, he asked the other guitarist for some advice on achieving a slicker and more accomplished kind of sound. Griff remembered George as a “very English” guitarist and also his enquiry: “How do you make the notes flow…?”
When you’re introducing a magazine dedicated to a musician like George Harrison, it’s a pretty helpful choice of words, illuminating aspects of some Georges we think we already know. There’s George the recessive Beatle, happy to try and sink into the shadow of popular music’s most powerful spotlight by smoothing out his sound. There’s George the seeker after spiritual enlightenment, looking to pass easefully but meaningfully from one state to the next.
Really, though, it reveals more about George simply as self-critical individual, an important part of the man and his music that you’ll find emerging constantly throughout the career covered in depth in this new magazine. As important as was the output he made while attempting to transcend the material world – his abiding friendship with Ravi Shankar and affinity for the music of India – much of his most characterful work comes from his engagement with and interrogation of life in a less than ideal, identifiably terrestrial form.
If Apple was a political vehicle for John, a crucible for new talent for Paul and a place with green carpets for Ringo, for George it was a place to take stock. “Getting back” might be a McCartney phrase, but it’s a George sentiment. As leery as he may have been in the limelight and the consequences of being a worldwide celebrity, he knew as much as anyone that playing rock music again would be a possible way down from the studio-based experiments of Pepper. To read him talking about working with Jackie Lomax, or Elvis, or Little Richard is someone telling it like it is, even if no-one was giving him their full attention.
Musically, George wore his heart on his sleeve. It didn’t always reap huge rewards: “Only A Northern Song”, his thinly-veiled gripe about songwriting and its royalties was said to have made George Martin shudder. Dark Horse, as Nick Hasted recounts here, was a bad time in his life set almost artlessly to music. But this inability to conceal his feelings also brought us the compassion behind the concert for Bangladesh, the wit of “Taxman” even the rock ‘n’ roll revivalism of the Traveling Wilburys. George had many guises, but his essential nature always remained intact.
Perhaps he was an English guitarist. But George was also an artist scanning all round the world, and the worlds beyond.
When a feature film is released 48 years after it started shooting, there’s something to be said against rushing to snap judgements about its merit. And when its director is Orson Welles, whose films have invariably fuelled long-running debate, a thumbs-up-or-down response isn’t necessarily w...
When a feature film is released 48 years after it started shooting, there’s something to be said against rushing to snap judgements about its merit. And when its director is Orson Welles, whose films have invariably fuelled long-running debate, a thumbs-up-or-down response isn’t necessarily what’s required. So perhaps it’s too soon to know what to make of Welles’s final film, The Other Side Of The Wind – now at long last pieced together, and viewable through Netflix. But what was clear when it was premiered at the Venice Film Festival recently was that this was an extremely modern film by an old-school maestro – and at the same time, for better or worse, a work very much of its time.
Welles shot the footage piecemeal between 1970 and 1976 – and in its discontinuity, it shows. This is a movie about movies – and inescapably, about Orson Welles. He doesn’t appear, but he has a formidable stand-in: another Hollywood legend, John Huston, playing a celebrated director named Jake Hannaford. The action takes place on the last day of Hannaford’s life, mainly at a party at which his friends, enemies, business associates and various hangers-on assemble to watch fragments of his latest film, entitled – what else? – The Other Side Of The Wind. Hannaford’s movie, hugely stylised and in vivid colour, is an erotic reverie in which a hippie-ish young man (Robert Random) pursues a mystery woman (Welles’s partner and the film’s co-writer Oja Kodar) across an eerie Los Angeles, playing tag with her in and out of deserted sound stages and having a spontaneously torrid encounter in a car.
During a frenzied car ride, and then at the house of a Dietrich-like actress (Lili Palmer), Hannaford and young critic-turned-director Brooks Otterlake (Welles’s own protégé Peter Bogdanovich) engage in debate with all comers on cinema, notably musing on Hollywood’s past, present and (debatable) future: remember, this was a period when the once unshakeable studio system was contemplating its collapse.
Tentatively edited by Welles for years, the completed film has been pieced together by editor Bob Murawski with producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall (the latter was part of Welles’s original crew), while Bogdanovich is an executive producer. The result is a perplexing hybrid. The black-and-white material, veering between docu-style roughness and chiaroscuro expressionism, mainly comprises the party, its floods of overlapping dialogue evoking John Cassavetes and Robert Altman. It features several filmmakers appearing to all intents and purposes as themselves – among them, Claude Chabrol, Paul Mazursky and a reliably mouthy Dennis Hopper. Also on the mix is a barrel-load of Shakespeare references, some dream surrealism (shop dummies, the mandatory dwarves), and a homosexual subtext involving Hannaford’s male star, who seems to be the director’s real love object.
As for Hannaford’s colour film, it’s dazzling to behold, but looks uneasily like a period piece – partly because of its stylised parody of contemporary art cinema (including Antonioni’s sex- and-desolation epic, Zabriskie Point), partly because of its unreconstructed objectifying of Kodar, naked for much of the time. The footage is deliriously beautiful, however, and it’s a safe bet that cinematographer Gary Graver studied his fair share of Elektra album sleeves.
The Other Side Of The Wind is hard to get a grip on for multiple reasons. One is its super-dense script, its verbal torrents too relentless to be easily assimilated. Another is a fundamental contradiction: on one hand you have Hollywood’s great experimenter, supposedly a dinosaur at the time, energetically reinventing himself for a new age; on the other, there’s no escaping that the hipness of that era’s New Hollywood now itself looks antediluvian in many ways.
We can’t know how much this film really captures of what Welles intended. Would his version have been so breakneck, so fragmented? And what would ’70s viewers have made of the film if he had been completed it? Would it have signaled his return to acclaim as a radical modernist, or sealed his reputation as a Prospero of cinema, washed up on his own distant shore and weaving hermetic spells in exile?
Two things are certain, however. One is that the film stands as a magnificent testimony to cinematographer Gary Graver, who stuck with the project over many difficult years, and whose images crackle with virtuoso invention. The other is that Michel Legrand’s newly added score contributes considerably to the film’s freshness. There’s some contemporary pop and rock mixed in, too – and there’s something irresistibly improbable about an Orson Welles film containing both Tony Hatch’s “Music To Watch Girls By” and proto-metallists Blue Cheer.
Anyone who’s ever been to a truly wild party knows that it can be very hard to put on the brakes. That’s what the senators of Rome learned in 186 BC when they officially prohibited the worship ceremonies for Dionysus (or Bacchus, as the Romans called the god of wine and music). Alas, the decree ...
Anyone who’s ever been to a truly wild party knows that it can be very hard to put on the brakes. That’s what the senators of Rome learned in 186 BC when they officially prohibited the worship ceremonies for Dionysus (or Bacchus, as the Romans called the god of wine and music). Alas, the decree was ignored for a few more centuries. It’s not hard to understand why given the lurid accounts of the rites; along with the copious amounts of wine, there were torches and masks, orgies and animal sacrifices, the beating of drums and, of course, plenty of dancing.
Such images are evoked by the most frenzied passages of the new Dead Can Dance album. Yet Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard also emphasise the notion that there was a practical purpose for these ancient ragers. Typically held at harvest time, the worship ceremonies marked seasonal cycles of death and rebirth while offering participants fleeting chances for liberation from societal restrictions and transcendence from the self. Aspects of the rites persisted long into Judeo-Christian times, disguised as harvest festivals and pagan celebrations.
Other religions had their own iterations, a suggestion that Perry makes with Dionysus’s cover image of a mask made by the Huichol, an indigenous people in Mexico. It’s a reference to their similar use of rite and ritual for healing and mind expansion, albeit with the help of peyote rather than the beverage Dionysus concocted. Of course, musicians have done their best to induce these frenzies in more secular contexts. If the cult of Dionysus has any adherents in the present day, then Perry and Gerrard have provided them with the richest possible soundtrack.
Dionysus is the duo’s second album of new material in the seven years since they resumed the partnership that began in Melbourne in 1981 and yielded a string of enigmatic releases for 4AD, earning Dead Can Dance its own fervent cult. Though the gloom that pervades their early albums unfairly led to a goth association, the duo’s imaginative scope far exceeded those of most Batcave dwellers. The ultimate realisation of their pan-global, high-art ambitions, Aion (1990) and Into The Labyrinth (1993), saw them fuse disparate musical traditions (Celtic, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean) into enthralling settings for Gerrard’s spine-chilling mezzo-soprano and Perry’s booming, Scott Walker-like baritone.
Their approach become more staid on the final albums before Dead Can Dance’s original end in 1998. The first new work after the duo resumed their activities in 2011, Anastasis (2012) was also more placid than passionate. Yet Dionysus is not only one of the most vivid works they’ve recorded, it’s also the most intricately and insistently rhythmic. The product of two years’ worth of research and recording as Perry found his own ways to channel the old magic, the album bursts with all the unruly energy its subject matter demands.
Dionysus is constructed as an oratorio that traces the progress of a Dionysian rite while incorporating other elements of the myth. The first of two acts begins with “Sea Borne”, which portrays the god’s arrival with the intensifying sounds of water, drums and voices. By the time the party peaks in “Dance Of The Bacchantes”, what you hear is a head-spinning swirl of trance-music styles, variously evoking Sufi devotional song, Indian raga and Balinese gamelan. Perry compounds the resulting sense of disorientation by using a wide array of instruments, including the daf, a Persian/Kurdish frame drum, and the fujara, a flute favoured by the shepherds of Slovakia. Meanwhile, the abundance of natural sounds melts any boundaries between musical and non-musical elements.
It’s such a riot of the senses, it’s not so surprising the traditional focal point of Dead Can Dance’s music – Gerrard’s voice – has no presence in the album’s early going. But she dramatically comes to the fore in the second act, in which she portrays Dionysus in female form (the god’s androgyny is another key characteristic) and in his/her role as a guide who accompanies souls into the underworld. Named after the Greek term for this last incarnation, “Psychopomp” ends the album in a softer yet still shamanic mode, the serenity of Gerrard and Perry’s duet being all the more startling thanks to the fervour that precedes it. The gentle completion of the ritual also provides a respite from the more aggressive rhythms and compositional complexity that make Dionysus so compelling. And as Gerrard’s voice recedes into the silence, we’re left with the sense that the hungers for mystery and transcendence this music explores could be as fundamental to us as it was to those who partied so hard so long ago.
Lynyrd Skynyrd have announced dates for the European leg of their Last Of The Street Survivors Farewell Tour.
The Southern rockers – comprising original member Gary Rossington with Johnny Van Zant, Rickey Medlocke, Mark “Sparky” Matejka, Michael Cartellone, Keith Christopher, Peter Keys, Dale...
Lynyrd Skynyrd have announced dates for the European leg of their Last Of The Street Survivors Farewell Tour.
The Southern rockers – comprising original member Gary Rossington with Johnny Van Zant, Rickey Medlocke, Mark “Sparky” Matejka, Michael Cartellone, Keith Christopher, Peter Keys, Dale Krantz Rossington, Carol Chase and special guest Jim Horn – will play four UK shows in June, supported by Status Quo.
June 17, 2019 Erfurt, Germany Messehalle^
June 18, 2019 Berlin, Germany Max Schmelinghalle^
June 19, 2019 Frankfurt, Germany Festhalle^
June 21, 2019 Dessel, Belgium Grasspop Metal Mtg
June 22, 2019 Hinwil, Switzerland Rock the Ring June 26, 2019 Glasgow, UK SSE Hydro Arena*
June 27, 2019 Manchester, UK Arena*
June 29, 2019 London, UK Wembley Arena*
June 30, 2019 Birmingham, UK Genting Arena*
*Features Special Guest Status Quo
^Featured Special Guest Blackberry Smoke
Tickets go on sale on Friday (November 9) from here.
Back in 1972, Sydney Pollack made a film about the recording of Aretha Franklin's 1972 live gospel album, Amazing Grace.
Due to technical and legal issues the film was never released at the time, but it's finally getting its world premiere at the DOC NYC film festival next week.
Watch the trailer ...
Back in 1972, Sydney Pollack made a film about the recording of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live gospel album, Amazing Grace.
Due to technical and legal issues the film was never released at the time, but it’s finally getting its world premiere at the DOC NYC film festival next week.
The first names have been announced for this year's All Points East festival in London.
As with last year's inaugural event, All Points East will take place over two weekends in Victoria Park in Hackney, from May 24 to June 2.
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
...
The first names have been announced for this year’s All Points East festival in London.
As with last year’s inaugural event, All Points East will take place over two weekends in Victoria Park in Hackney, from May 24 to June 2.
The Chemical Brothers will headline the first Friday night of the event (May 24), supported by Hot Chip, Primal Scream, Little Dragon, Spiritualized, Danny Brown, Little Simz and Ibibio Sound Machine.
Tickets go on sale at 9am this Friday (November 9), priced £62.50. A Ticketmaster pre-sale begins 24 hours earlier from here. More acts will be announced over the coming months.
Disinclined to keep it simple, Julia Holter described her belated follow-up to the luminous Have You In My Wilderness as a reflection of “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world”. A quixotic attempt to express the chaos of inner and outer worlds through medieval harmonising, wobbly ja...
Disinclined to keep it simple, Julia Holter described her belated follow-up to the luminous Have You In My Wilderness as a reflection of “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world”. A quixotic attempt to express the chaos of inner and outer worlds through medieval harmonising, wobbly jazz and new age electronics, Aviary is a sizeable leap away from the precisely turned curves and gnomic precision of her 2015 breakthrough. Key adjectives: gigantic, overwhelming, exhausting.
Having edged from the experimental fringes towards frosty art rock with two classically themed solo records – 2011’s Tragedy (inspired by Euripides’ Hippolytus) and 2012’s Ekstasis – Holter convened an ensemble to flesh out 2013’s Loud City Song, an album informed by Colette’s 1944 novella Gigi, and the Lerner and Loewe musical it inspired. Unburdened by any such concept, Have You In My Wilderness offered a series of spectacular musical miniatures, brilliantly detailed, supremely controlled. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to make music that sounds like that again,” Holter warned one interviewer.
With Aviary – the Cocteau Twins remixed by Pieter Brueghel – she has honoured that vague promise. An unwieldy 90-minute gas giant sprawling across two CDs, it emerged from a series of 2017 solo improvisations, and became wilder still in the studio. Opener “Turn The Light On” is typically daunting, Holter wailing ecstatically over what sounds like the Sun Ra Arkestra tuning up at Pink Floyd’s great gig in the sky. It is unfettered, cathartic, magnificent. It also goes on a bit. Aviary in microcosm.
Holter’s vision of a world overloaded with competing voices was partly inspired by a line in a 2009 short story by Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan: “I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds.” Amid Holter’s squawking hubbub, individual threads are hard to discern, the 33-year-old’s lyrics a dizzying mix of found words (medieval troubadour songs, lines from Sappho) and rapturous babble.
The fear of a sun-boiled planet haunts the Stereolab death march of “Whether” while anxieties about the bubonic plague virus re-emerging from melted polar cap ice feed into the witchy “Les Jeux To You”, but Aviary rarely seems so solidly rooted in the world of worms. Instead, there is a feeling of quasi-religious hysteria, some great revelation forever on the tip of Holter’s tongue. She tells Uncut the timbre of Alice Coltrane’s solo works was a benchmark for Aviary, that ashram-raised free-jazz mood coexisting harmoniously with the kind of space-whispered spook poetry sprinkled over the tea-cosy hatted early 1970s Gong albums on “Chaitius”, the turbulent “Voce Simul” and “Another Dream”.
There are jarring moments – the opening expanses of the glowering “Everyday Is An Emergency” echo the interminable honking of a tropical traffic jam – but Holter’s quest to channel the clatter of the universe produces transcendent beauty too. “I Shall Love 2” stumbles on a musical signature from John Cale’s “Ship Of Fools”, and bumbles on into wave after glorious wave of crescendoes. The more earthy “Underneath The Moon”, meanwhile, comes on like Prince’s “Sign O’ The Times” (Holter “testing my moves out in the big room”) before morphing into a Robert Wyatt-ish reimagining of Kate Bush’s Aerial. “Who made this mappa?” Holter asks of the cosmos as the rhythm threatens to carry her away. “I see no beginning, no middle, no end.”
As that might suggest, Aviary’s landscape remains in constant flux, solid surfaces giving way to liquid ones, like the drowned world of “Colligere” and the gaunt “In Gardens, Muteness”, where Holter’s lyrics hint once more at a thousand unanswerable questions. “I stay up ’til three,” she keens, addressing something primal. “It’s a long, long time to waste asking you questions while you sleep.”
Straight answers are elusive beyond the obvious ones: the world is big and strange, existence much the same, and as to the purpose of it all, the only conclusion Aviary can offer is an enigmatic ellipsis. A phonetic translation of a mournful song by Buddhist nun Choying Drolma, Holter’s candlelit finale “Why Sad Song” is solemn, sonorous and arresting, but spookily nebulous. Do lines like “send all the oranges or yams they are yours to eat” make any sense? More saliently, does it matter if they don’t?
Aviary is not a quest for meaning, but a messy attempt to live with the reality of chaos. It’s confused, with a vague feeling of overdue homework, but enlightening too. In an age of warring certainties, Holter’s message may be that the most powerful words left to us are, “I don’t know.”
When a feature film is released 48 years after it started shooting, there’s something to be said against rushing to snap judgements about its merit. And when its director is Orson Welles, whose films have invariably fuelled long-running debate, a thumbs-up-or-down response isn’t necessarily w...
When a feature film is released 48 years after it started shooting, there’s something to be said against rushing to snap judgements about its merit. And when its director is Orson Welles, whose films have invariably fuelled long-running debate, a thumbs-up-or-down response isn’t necessarily what’s required. So perhaps it’s too soon to know what to make of Welles’s final film, The Other Side Of The Wind – now at long last pieced together, and viewable through Netflix. But what was clear when it was premiered at the Venice Film Festival recently was that this was an extremely modern film by an old-school maestro – and at the same time, for better or worse, a work very much of its time.
Welles shot the footage piecemeal between 1970 and 1976 – and in its discontinuity, it shows. This is a movie about movies – and inescapably, about Orson Welles. He doesn’t appear, but he has a formidable stand-in: another Hollywood legend, John Huston, playing a celebrated director named Jake Hannaford. The action takes place on the last day of Hannaford’s life, mainly at a party at which his friends, enemies, business associates and various hangers-on assemble to watch fragments of his latest film, entitled – what else? – The Other Side Of The Wind. Hannaford’s movie, hugely stylised and in vivid colour, is an erotic reverie in which a hippie-ish young man (Robert Random) pursues a mystery woman (Welles’s partner and the film’s co-writer Oja Kodar) across an eerie Los Angeles, playing tag with her in and out of deserted sound stages and having a spontaneously torrid encounter in a car.
During a frenzied car ride, and then at the house of a Dietrich-like actress (Lili Palmer), Hannaford and young critic-turned-director Brooks Otterlake (Welles’s own protégé Peter Bogdanovich) engage in debate with all comers on cinema, notably musing on Hollywood’s past, present and (debatable) future: remember, this was a period when the once unshakeable studio system was contemplating its collapse.
Tentatively edited by Welles for years, the completed film has been pieced together by editor Bob Murawski with producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall (the latter was part of Welles’s original crew), while Bogdanovich is an executive producer. The result is a perplexing hybrid. The black-and-white material, veering between docu-style roughness and chiaroscuro expressionism, mainly comprises the party, its floods of overlapping dialogue evoking John Cassavetes and Robert Altman. It features several filmmakers appearing to all intents and purposes as themselves – among them, Claude Chabrol, Paul Mazursky and a reliably mouthy Dennis Hopper. Also on the mix is a barrel-load of Shakespeare references, some dream surrealism (shop dummies, the mandatory dwarves), and a homosexual subtext involving Hannaford’s male star, who seems to be the director’s real love object.
As for Hannaford’s colour film, it’s dazzling to behold, but looks uneasily like a period piece – partly because of its stylised parody of contemporary art cinema (including Antonioni’s sex- and-desolation epic, Zabriskie Point), partly because of its unreconstructed objectifying of Kodar, naked for much of the time. The footage is deliriously beautiful, however, and it’s a safe bet that cinematographer Gary Graver studied his fair share of Elektra album sleeves.
The Other Side Of The Wind is hard to get a grip on for multiple reasons. One is its super-dense script, its verbal torrents too relentless to be easily assimilated. Another is a fundamental contradiction: on one hand you have Hollywood’s great experimenter, supposedly a dinosaur at the time, energetically reinventing himself for a new age; on the other, there’s no escaping that the hipness of that era’s New Hollywood now itself looks antediluvian in many ways.
We can’t know how much this film really captures of what Welles intended. Would his version have been so breakneck, so fragmented? And what would ’70s viewers have made of the film if he had been completed it? Would it have signaled his return to acclaim as a radical modernist, or sealed his reputation as a Prospero of cinema, washed up on his own distant shore and weaving hermetic spells in exile?
Two things are certain, however. One is that the film stands as a magnificent testimony to cinematographer Gary Graver, who stuck with the project over many difficult years, and whose images crackle with virtuoso invention. The other is that Michel Legrand’s newly added score contributes considerably to the film’s freshness. There’s some contemporary pop and rock mixed in, too – and there’s something irresistibly improbable about an Orson Welles film containing both Tony Hatch’s “Music To Watch Girls By” and proto-metallists Blue Cheer.
Paul Weller has announced a summer 2019 tour of British forests for the Forestry Commission's Forest Live 2019 programme.
He'll play seven dates across the country in June and July.
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
See the full list of dates below. The ticket ...
Paul Weller has announced a summer 2019 tour of British forests for the Forestry Commission’s Forest Live 2019 programme.
He’ll play seven dates across the country in June and July.
See the full list of dates below. The ticket pre-sale begins at 9am on Thursday (November 8) from here.
Friday June 14: Westonbirt Arboretum, near Tetbury, Glos.
Sunday June 16: Bedgebury Pinetum, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Friday June 21: Thetford Forest, near Brandon, Suffolk.
Saturday June 22: Delamere Forest, near Northwich, Cheshire.
Friday June 28: Dalby Forest, near Pickering, North Yorks.
Saturday June 29: Sherwood Pines, near Mansfield, Notts.
Saturday July 6: Cannock Chase Forest, near Rugeley, Staffs.
Mavis Staples has announced the release of Live In London on February 8 via Anti-.
The album was recorded over two nights at London’s Union Chapel – which she calls “the best place in the world to sing” – and was produced by Staples herself. Hear "No Time For Cryin'" below:
https://www.y...
Mavis Staples has announced the release of Live In London on February 8 via Anti-.
The album was recorded over two nights at London’s Union Chapel – which she calls “the best place in the world to sing” – and was produced by Staples herself. Hear “No Time For Cryin'” below:
Pre-order Live In Londonhere and check out the tracklisting below:
1. Love and Trust (Written by Ben Harper)
2. Who Told You That (Written by Jeff Tweedy)
3. Slippery People (Written by Talking Heads)
4. What You Gonna Do – Intro
5. What You Gonna Do (Written by Pops Staples)
6. Take Us Back (Written by Benjamin Booker)
7. You Are Not Alone (Written by Jeff Tweedy)
8. No Time For Cryin’ (Written by Jeff Tweedy and Mavis Staples)
9. Can You Get to That (Written by George Clinton and Ernie Harris)
10. Let’s Do It Again (Written by Curtis Mayfield)
11. Dedicated (Written by Justin Vernon and Matthew Ward)
12. We’re Gonna Make It (Written by Gene Barge, Billy Davis, Raynard Miner and Carl William Smith)
13. Encore: Happy Birthday
14. Touch A Hand (Written by Homer Banks, Carl Hampton and Raymond Jackson)
The Good, The Bad & The Queen have released another song from their forthcoming second album, Merrie Land.
Watch a video for "Gun To The Head" below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTl1W6FioYs&feature=youtu.be
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
The sup...
The Good, The Bad & The Queen have released another song from their forthcoming second album, Merrie Land.
The supergroup have also announced three tiny warm-up dates for their UK tour in the North-East seaside town of Tynemouth:
26 November – Tynemouth CIU Club
27 November – Cullercoats Crescent Club
28 November – Cullercoats Crescent Club
Tickets go on sale on Wednesday (November 3) from here.
You can pre-order Merrie Land on various formats – including limited-edition green vinyl, and a super deluxe boxset containing a wood-cut print, hand-printed by the band’s Paul Simonon – here.
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
When punk hit, only a few ‘progressive’ bands were deemed acceptable; King Crimson, perhaps, but most definitely Van Der Graaf Generator. Formed by the crazed, roaring ‘Hendrix of the voice’, Peter Hammill, in late-’60s...
VAN DER GRAAF VITAL CHARISMA, 1978 With John Lydon in attendance, Van Der Graaf run through some distorted new songs and old favourites at the Marquee on one of the most savage live albums ever
EVANS: The whole album was my baby – we were hitting quite a lot of debt and had decided to stop the band for a while. I came up with the idea of recording us live at the Marquee. I had to borrow a 16-track machine and get it trucked in. It’s pretty in-the-red – a lot of it was just trying to get a decent signal-to-noise ratio – but I also think we were just really loud. It was a complete monster to mix, just trying to tame it. Graham Smith was playing his violin through a little phaser device that was very raw, and I think [cellist] Charles Dickie is actually playing through a fuzzbox. I remember John Lydon was backstage, in the little dressing room. There wasn’t a sense that we were going to consciously embrace punk, but because this climate was around, we thought it might give us a bit more scope to be a bit rough around the edges.
HAMMILL: We kind of knew there’d been the odd nod [from punks], and we certainly hadn’t felt threatened by what was incoming, and didn’t feel that we were boring old farts. The idea that you could get into music by getting together with your mates and bashing out songs with a couple of chords was where I had come from – that had seemed to be going by the wayside [with prog], but the fact that that seemed once again possible was utterly laudable and positive.
____________________________
PRESENT CHARISMA, 2005 After 28 years apart – and a serious heart attack for Hammill in 2003 – the classic quartet carried on from where they left off with this improvised double
BANTON: We had bumped into each other periodically and Peter had made 103 albums in the meantime. What was it like getting back together? It was extraordinary, because it was like we’d never stopped. We got together at a place in the West Country, and we didn’t play any old stuff whatsoever.
HAMMILL: Present all dated from our original week of simply getting together to play together. We were fairly sure we’d have a jolly week of working, eating, drinking and playing together, but we weren’t sure at that stage, in early 2004, that we would actually commit to going public with things. So we were away for a week, at a house of a friend of Guy’s down in Devon, and we recorded everything we did in a sellotape and string kind of way. We emerged from that week deciding that yes, we did want to give it a crack, and it turned out once we assembled all the material, that there was an album there. It’s an odd album, as it’s a double, and the second CD is improvisation that we were doing throughout the week. We didn’t want to just be our own tribute band, we wanted to do new material. It came as something of a surprise to people that not only were we playing again, but that we had an album to go with it.
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DO NOT DISTURB ESOTERIC, 2016 Now a three-piece after the departure of David Jackson, Van Der Graaf still impress with what could be their final LP
BANTON: Peter sent me and Guy a CD of tracks that he thought would work for this album, and I think the final record is the exact same tracks, minus one, in exactly the same order. So he’d obviously thought it out. Then we got together for a week to rehearse it, and then a week to record the backings. And then months overdubbing at home. Famously, that first Beatles album was made in seven hours, and now we take seven months.
HAMMILL: As is now traditional in our modern band, we all had all of the masters and could go off in our own studios and do whatever overdubbing needed to be done. Then I took over most of the mixing. It was quite a long process.
EVANS: A song like “Alpha” felt like quite a hark back to The Least We Can Do… days – a straight song, with a bit of a funny middle!
HAMMILL: None of us are getting any younger, so we had at least the glimmer of a thought that possibly this might be the last studio album that we do. We’re not saying it is the last album, but that consciousness has to be there. A lot of the writing of the stuff, especially lyrically, was informed with that thought. I asked the others if there was anything they thought I should be writing about, or indeed not writing about, and a couple of ideas came back. I’m playing a lot of loud guitar on this – good fun! One of the shifts that happened since we became a trio 10 years ago is that I got a responsibility for actually playing my instrument properly instead of being the feckless singer who’s allowed to play things every now and then. It’s rare that we’ve so nakedly been an ageing heavy metal trio as we are in a couple of places here!
“We started to do tape research on More Blood, More Tracks a number of years ago, probably in 2015," says producer Steve Berkowitz in the latest issue of Uncut, in shops now or available online here. "The tapes were in excellent shape. The multi-tracks, for the most part, had not been touched sinc...
“We started to do tape research on More Blood, More Tracks a number of years ago, probably in 2015,” says producer Steve Berkowitz in the latest issue of Uncut, in shops now or available online here. “The tapes were in excellent shape. The multi-tracks, for the most part, had not been touched since the original mix in 1974.
“Blood On The Tracks was originally recorded on 16-track, 2in analogue tape. From the very first track on the first day, ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’, there was a safety-room mic set up, two mics on the guitar and a vocal mic. There are 11 or 12 takes with just Bob, then after ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’ there’s a break and the next thing, a band are brought in. Then there are another 20 takes. To record 32 takes in one day, that’s some stamina. Then the next couple of days, it’s back to him and [bass player] Tony Brown with some keyboards from Paul Griffin. What’s remarkable is Mr Dylan’s focus in the studio. It seems as if Bob Dylan is never not ‘on’: every take is serious. His ability to focus and be in that moment is incredible to hear.
“It was common recording practice that in parallel to the multi-track tape, they would have a mono quarter-inch tape running all the time. We went through all the multi-tracks and the quarter inches and realised there were additional versions and takes that were not on the multi-tracks — they only now lived on these mono reels. They’re in mono, and that’s why they have the heavy reverb because that’s the way Phil Ramone tracked them.
“If you listen closely to ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ (Rehearsal And Take 1, Remake 2)’, you’ll hear lots of, ‘Button!’ Sounds like Mr Dylan was wearing a shirt with long sleeves and had it unbuttoned, and it creates a percussive sound – the button clicking on the wood of the guitar. Since it is mostly voice and guitar, you hear the button on the up-strum of what he’s playing. It’s just real — true — well recorded!
“Mr Dylan named the box More Blood, More Tracks. In presenting these recordings again for this box, [Dylan’s manager] Jeff Rosen and I wanted to focus on Dylan’s voice and the songs and make it more intimate – like you’re in the room rather than a full album production. With the big box, you’re able to go backstage on the original recordings. It’s living history; it’s a thrill to be a part of it.”
Springsteen On Broadway will be released on December 14, featuring the songs and stories from Bruce Springsteen's historic 236-show run at Jujamcyn's Walter Kerr Theatre. The 4xLP or 2xCD album consists of the complete audio from the upcoming Springsteen On Broadway Netflix special, which launches t...
Springsteen On Broadway will be released on December 14, featuring the songs and stories from Bruce Springsteen’s historic 236-show run at Jujamcyn’s Walter Kerr Theatre. The 4xLP or 2xCD album consists of the complete audio from the upcoming Springsteen On Broadway Netflix special, which launches the day after the Broadway run finishes on December 15.
Check out the full tracklisting for Springsteen On Broadway below:
Growin’ Up (introduction & song)
My Hometown (introduction & song)
My Father’s House (introduction & song)
The Wish (introduction & song)
Thunder Road (introduction & song)
The Promised Land (introduction & song)
Born In The U.S.A. (introduction & song)
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (introduction & song)
Tougher Than The Rest (introduction & song) with Patti Scialfa
Brilliant Disguise (introduction & song) with Patti Scialfa
Long Time Comin’ (introduction & song)
The Ghost Of Tom Joad (introduction & song)
The Rising (song)
Dancing In The Dark (introduction & song)
Land Of Hope And Dreams (song)
Born To Run (introduction & song)
LCD Soundsystem have released a cover version of Heaven 17's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang".
Hear the timely interpretation below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUtsnXt-H80
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!Th
Billed as an 'Electric Lady' session...
LCD Soundsystem have released a cover version of Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang”.
Billed as an ‘Electric Lady’ session, it’s believed that the track was recorded at the same time as the mash-up of Chic’s “I Want Your Love” with LCD Soundsystem’s own song “Home”, released on Spotify in September.
A busy week here - the joy of deadlines - so just time to mention a couple of things in passing before I hand over to John Robinson to introduce the latest exceptional member of the Uncut family. At the moment, we're putting the finishing touches to our review of year (it seems to get earlier every ...
A busy week here – the joy of deadlines – so just time to mention a couple of things in passing before I hand over to John Robinson to introduce the latest exceptional member of the Uncut family. At the moment, we’re putting the finishing touches to our review of year (it seems to get earlier every year…), but already we’re deluged with some pretty amazing new music to come in 2019. If you’ve not already checked them out, I urge you to listen to the tasters for new albums from Sharon Van Etten, Cass McCombs, Jessica Pratt and Steve Gunn – who I hope you will be reading more about in the pages of Uncut early next year. Reminds me, I’ll try and get a Playlist together sometime this week, if I get the chance.
Anyway, here’s John to tell you about NME 100 Greatest Covers – which is now in shops or available online by clicking here.
Years before I worked on NME, I’d bought the issue of the paper with what I was certain was the best cover I’d ever seen. I was not an active participant in the Ecstasy generation, and I hadn’t even seen the band live, but I’d been an armchair fan of the Happy Mondays since I’d heard Vince Clarke’s remix of “Wrote For Luck” on John Peel.
Now, with the release of “Step On” imminent, picking up that week’s copy of the paper felt particularly exciting. Something had definitely been building, even out in the provinces where I lived – I’d heard a girl on the bus talking to her friend about a group called ‘Happy Monday’. Now with Shaun Ryder on the cover, laughing from on top of a large letter ‘E’, it felt as if an inside joke had suddenly, daringly, gone public. That copy of the paper felt like a ticket to an extremely entertaining ride, to which everyone was invited.
As has become obvious while editing this special publication celebrating the 100 best covers of NME’s print edition, this experience is what the paper’s editors were after every week. It never felt like it, but it was something like a formula: a combination of magnificent photography, elegant cover lines – and also an almost magical timing. In the shop it meant seeing an artist on the front of the paper at precisely the right time to see them there, a wave of goodwill swelling behind them.
Kevin Cummins, who took the Shaun Ryder picture, tells us about the timing when he talks to us about another of his great images, of the Stone Roses covered in John Squire’s abstract emulsion in 1989. NME’s then-editor thought the paint idea was good, but would keep for another occasion. Kevin tells us that he disagreed. “It’s the right time,” he said to his editor. “We’ve got to do it now.” One NME Editor, Neil Spencer, recounts a hypothetical: “You wanted a great picture of the Gang Of Four at the moment the Gang Of Four were at their hottest.”
This is a publication in which you’ll find beautiful images of legendary musicians by important photographers, the story of a paper and the times it documented. You’ll also find evidence of the bottled lightning that was the weekly music press – in which the right decision could define a cultural moment, define an icon or crown new rock royalty. It might mean a previously-rejected image of a four-piece band in a tube station. It could be made by a snapshot of a television set, or a poster, a graphic, a news shot, or a pun. In the 1960s, it could even be an advert.
As you will read in the testimony here from writers, photographers, artists and editors, the printed NME helped set the tempo of the changing times. As you will also discover, the search for the chemistry of that moment, that right time, was the one thing about NME which always stayed the same.
Deerhunter have announced that their new album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? will be released via 4AD on January 18.
Watch a video for opening track "Death In Midsummer" below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG2TgCuMcjM
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your...
Deerhunter have announced that their new album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? will be released via 4AD on January 18.
Watch a video for opening track “Death In Midsummer” below:
Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? was produced by Cate LeBon, Ben H. Allen III, Ben Etter and Deerhunter in various locations in LA, Texas and Atlanta. According to the accompanying notes, inspirations for the songs include the Russian revolution, James Dean’s last film, Europe in the rain and the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox.
You can pre-order Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? here.
As The Lemonheads prepare to release Varshons 2, we revisit this Album By Album piece, originally published in Uncut's March 2010 issue (Take 154)
Evan Dando has calmed down since his near-procession into narcotic oblivion in the mid-’90s, but he can still do old-school things to hotel rooms. Now...
THE LEMONHEADS THE LEMONHEADS Vagrant, 2006. Produced by Bill Stevenson and Evan Dando A shockingly good set was lent zesty life by a stellar lineup, including J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr, Garth Hudson from The Band and the rhythm section from The Descendents.
I heard about a Brazilian festival where all these young bands were doing Lemonheads songs. They made a whole day of it. I didn’t go, but that made me think there was enough interest out there for us to do another Lemonheads record. And the songs I was writing were faster, and sounded like Lemonheads songs. I ended up thinking that it was the Lemonheads record that sounded like all the other Lemonheads records should have sounded. I mean, it’s just got the best players on it. It was like The Lemonheads on steroids, and it was really great fun. I wanted it to sound like part of The Lemonheads catalogue, but I wasn’t nervous about how it would be received. I’ve gotten past all that stuff. There was a time I’d bite my nails, but now I know I’ve got something going that I can sustain.
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THE LEMONHEADS VARSHONS The End Records, 2009. Produced by Gibby Haynes An eclectic collection of cover versions, reinterpreting GG Allin, Christina Aguilera, Gram Parsons, Sam Gopal, among others. Guests include The Only Ones’ John Perry, Kate Moss and Liv Tyler.
I bought this painting, the one on the cover, and that’s what gave me the idea. I’m not quite done with my next proper record, which will probably be another solo album. And I bought the painting, by Mark Dagley, and I wanted to put it into the art budget rather than just buy a painting that expensive to put on my wall. So I asked Gibby [Haynes, Butthole Surfers] if he’d produce a covers album, and he said yes. There are untouchables – the Velvets, The Stooges, The Beatles, the Stones, Al Green. I never do songs that are my absolute favourites. You don’t want to mess with the recordings. Leonard Cohen is verging on that status, but with Liv I thought it would sound different enough, so that was fair. There were some that didn’t quite make it. “Zero Willpower”, by Dan Penn – we tried to do that and it didn’t really come together. “How Can We Hang Onto A Dream?” by Tim Hardin, as well. But I think that’s coming out as, uh, an e-side, or something.
Massive Attack have announced that they will tour a "totally new audio-visual production" of their 1998 album Mezzanine across Europe and America early next year.
According to a press release, "The show will re-imagine Mezzanine 21 years on from its release using custom audio reconstructed from the...
Massive Attack have announced that they will tour a “totally new audio-visual production” of their 1998 album Mezzanine across Europe and America early next year.
According to a press release, “The show will re-imagine Mezzanine 21 years on from its release using custom audio reconstructed from the original samples and influences”. Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, who sang lead vocals on “Teardrop”, will appear live with the band at all dates.
“It’s going to be a one-off piece of work; our own personalised nostalgia nightmare head trip,” adds the band’s Robert Del Naja.
See the full list of European tourdates below. Presale tickets will be available for selected shows from 10am tomorrow (October 31). Tickets will then go on general sale at 10am on Friday (November 2). Full details at Massive Attack’s official site.
