“I think I was reaching quite high from the beginning. I may not have had any right to be, but I was. I was always interested in people that were older than me and I looked up to them – people really from a different era to me: Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, even writers like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I wasn’t particularly influenced by my contemporaries. They weren’t very good.”
When I first started reading what used to be Melody Maker, in a time now shrouded not so much in what are usually called the mists of time as they are in a fog as dense as anything that might gather over Dogger Bank, I used to accept its weekly delivery in the manner of some kind of jackal, cur or otherwise fanged and ravenous critter.
Shameless plug coming your way! This Thursday, March 14, the next in our ongoing series of Ultimate Music Guides hits the shops. This one is dedicated to The Smiths.
Reg Presley has died at the age of 71.
Presley died at his home in Andover, Hampshire – the town of his birth – from cancer yesterday (February 4), in the company of his family. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in December 2012 during a tour of Germany, and is reported to have had a number of strokes before the diagnosis, according to messages posted by music publicist and close friend Keith Altham.
The next Uncut Ultimate Music Guide goes on sale on Thursday (January 17), hot on the heels of our special on The Kinks, and is dedicated this time to The Beatles. There’s the usual mix of brand new reviews of all The Beatles albums by our current team of writers alongside some truly remarkable interviews from the archives of Melody Maker and NME, for which the description ‘mind-blowing’ seems barely adequate.
In Part 2 of this exclusive interview from Uncut’s October 1999 issue, David Bowie looks back on 30 years of genius, drugs and derangement. Words: Chris Roberts
There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying – turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many – booked Gram parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population when Gram died in September, 1973.
Ray Davies sheds light on his new projects, including an opera, a film and a solo album, in the new issue of Uncut, out on Thursday (January 3, 2013).
The former Kinks frontman also explains the conflicting feelings he experiences when songwriting.
Revealing what he goes through when he realises he's writing one of his great songs, Davies says: "It’s a moment of excessive emotion. And I do get very emotional when I write, sometimes… It’s just a chill you get.
Following on from yesterday's Top 75 new albums of 2012 post, here's our Top 30 compilations, reissues and box sets of 2012, with links to the original reviews where possible.
Have a great Christmas and New Year, folks!
