Gregg Allman has paid tribute to Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers Band drummer who has died aged 69.
“I’m heartbroken,” Allman said in a statement. “I’ve lost another brother and it hurts beyond words. Butch and I knew each other since we were teenagers and we were bandmates for over 45 years. He was a great man and a great drummer and I’m going to miss him forever. Rest In Peace Brother Butch.”
Former Allman Brothers Band guitarist Warren Haynes – who played guitar for the group from 1989-1997 and again from 2000-2014 – wrote on his website.
“After all the devastating losses of 2016 I can’t believe it. I’m still in shock. I am truly honored to have played music and shared life with Butch for over 25 years. He was one of a kind-as a drummer and as a human being,” Haynes wrote. “Butch was part of what is unfortunately now a dying breed of musicians who served with honor like soldiers. He put 110% of his self into every song he played. He was the Lou Gehrig of rock drummers. I’ve seen him play many times when he was injured or sick and most people would have bailed or phoned it in. Not Butch. He would play with the utmost intensity till he was about to fall over with no regrets. He was very proud of the fact that up until our last shows in 2014 he was the only member of the band who had never missed a show. His mission in life was to serve the music. And serve the music he did. Butch considered the Allman Brothers Band music to be reverent and each performance to be of the highest level of importance and he drove that “freight train” like no other could. We miss you Butchie.”
Other tributes have been paid from Jason Isbell, Sheryl Crowe and Phish.
Awfully sad to hear of the passing of Butch Trucks. A deserving legend, with a family full of ridiculously talented and truly sweet people.
PJ Harvey, Ryan Adams and Future Islands have been announced as headliners of this year’s Green Man Festival.
Other artists confirmed for the festival include Michael Kiwanuka, Lambchop, Conor Oberst, Angel Olsen and more.
Green Man 2017 takes place in Brecon Beacons from August 17 to August 20.
Line-up in full:
PJ Harvey, Ryan Adams, Future Islands, Michael Kiwanuka, Lambchop, Conor Oberst, Angel Olsen, BadBadNotGood, Jon Hopkins (DJ), Field Music, This is the Kit, Julia Jacklin, Fionn Regan, The Big Moon, Richard Dawson, Melt Yourself Down, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Laura Gibson, Sunflower Bean, Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band, Jessica Pratt, Karl Blau, Grumbling Fur, LVL UP, Shame, Wolf People, Big Thief, Gill Landry, Michael Chapman, Doomsquad, Deep Throat Choir, Girl Ray, Gaelynn Lea, Warhaus, The Orielles.
The Royal Mail are to release a set of David Bowie postage stamps.
The set of 10 stamps will be on sale from March 14 from either local Post Offices or online by clicking here.
The stamps will feature the album artwork for Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, “Heroes”, Let’s Dance, Earthling and ★ as well as four additional stamps of Bowie live from the 1973 Ziggy Stardust Tour, the 1978 Stage Tour, the 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour and 2004’s A Reality Tour.
The stamps will also be available as a range of limited edition sets, including a presentation pack, a First Day Cover set with the six David Bowie Special stamps and a First Day Cover set with the David Bowie live stamp sheet.
There will also be individual framed stamp and print sets, a Berlin Years souvenir cover and an Album Art fan sheet.
Next month sees the release of Lost In France – a new documentary following the rise of the Glaswegian music scene during the 1990s.
In the late 1990s, a collection of musicians from Chemikal Underground Records – among them, Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai, The Delgados and Arab Strap – hired a bus and headed off on a road trip to a town in rural France to play a one-off gig. Now they are headed back to relive the experience.
Featuring a mix of live performances and interviews, the film reunites key personnel in an intimate exploration of friendship, memory and making music.
Lost in France screens as a nationwide cinema event on February 21 as part of Glasgow Film Festival followed by an exclusive performance broadcast live via satellite from the Glasgow O2 ABC, featuring a supergroup including Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand), Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai), RM Hubbert plus The Delgados’ Emma Pollock, Stewart Henderson and Paul Savage. You can find more information about that by clicking here.
A new “intelligent turntable” that allows users to play vinyl from their smartphone is in the works.
According to its page on the Coming Soon tech website, the LOVE turntable “reads vinyl with a stylus, connects to Bluetooth & Wi-Fi, and is controlled by your smartphone”. It promises “the intimacy of vinyl with modern-day convenience”.
A ‘how it works’ section on the site explains: “Once LOVE is synced with your audio device, put any size vinyl on one of the two complimentary 7″ record bases. LOVE then scans the vinyl to determine its size and number of tracks. If you’d like to start your listening experience with track 3, simply Press LOVE’s top shell three times or select the track through the app. From there, sit back, relax, and enjoy your record.”
The LOVE turntable isn’t available to buy yet, but intrigued parties can sign up here to be notified when it launches, and receive a 50% discount on the eventual purchase price.
U2 bassist Adam Clayton has offered an update on the band’s upcoming Joshua Tree 30th anniversary tour.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Clayton said that the group are considering playing songs from their delayed next album, Songs Of Experience, during the shows.
“It would be very much my wish that we could play something from Experience as part of the show, maybe one or two songs,” he said.
“Again, I caution that by saying we really have to see the arc of this show and we have to figure out whether those Experience songs would work well in a stadium in this context, but I’d love to see some of that material out there and people being familiar with it before the album comes out.”
Clayton also issued an update on when fans should expect their next album release, saying: “We all very much feel like it needs to be the end of this year. It’s not on any schedule anywhere, anything like that. We’re going to get back to that later this year and polish it off and finish it off a bit more. But we think we’re there with it”.
“It’s not like the switch to do these Joshua Tree shows was because we needed a lot of time. It was just because it’s pretty much in the bag. We can still work on it throughout this year, all the little nips and tucks that we want to do. It’ll be a pleasure to get out there and play these Joshua Tree songs. In some ways, the experience of playing those Joshua Tree shows and those songs this summer, inevitably, couldn’t help [but] have some impact on what that record ultimately becomes when we finish work on it.”
Father John Misty has announced details of his new album, Pure Comedy.
The record is due for release on April 7 on Bella Union in the UK/Europe and Sub Pop in America.
You can hear the title track of the album below.
Pure Comedy was co-produced by Josh Tillman and long-time producer Jonathan Wilson; mixed by Tillman, Wilson and Trevor Spencer, and mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering Studios.
The album features string, horn and choral arrangements from Gavin Bryars with additional contributions from Nico Muhly and Thomas Bartlett.
The Pure Comedy tracklisting is:
Pure Comedy
Total Entertainment Forever
Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution
Ballad of the Dying Man
Birdie
Leaving LA
A Bigger Paper Bag
When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay
Smoochie
Two Wildly Different Perspectives
The Memo
So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain
In Twenty Years or So
“This record is what it’s like to never know what the fuck happens next,” is Mark Eitzel’s parting shot in our recent interview about his new album. It’s a psychological state that Eitzel’s often used as a starting point for his songs: his forensic eye toward the workaday reality of living with and through love, and his understanding of the unpredictability of the interpersonal, has Eitzel as one of our most curious writers, documenting the confusion of the human condition with rare candour.
Hey Mr Ferryman was written during a complicated time for Eitzel: as he notes in our Q&A, he was shuttling between cities for much of the past few years; the songs themselves were initially recorded with Eitzel’s two bands (one in California, one in the UK), but they “needed some care and attention and so nothing really gelled,” he recalls. After connecting with producer Bernard Butler, they initially considered a simple acoustic album – “mostly because it was all we could afford.” But Butler’s perfectionist streak won out, and he took it upon himself to arrange and re-build the album, the end result, Eitzel marvels, being “the record I wanted to make all along – but simply didn’t think I could.”
Butler is an interesting choice of collaborator: a gifted producer, writer and musician, if there’s any risk in getting him on board, it’s an occasional tendency toward the mannered, the overly polite. But he can also dress songs in remarkably sympathetic settings, and so it is with Hey Mr Ferryman; he knows when to lay it on thick, as with the opening “The Last Ten Years”, a wonderfully droll performance from Eitzel gilded into a ’70s car radio classic by Butler, but he also knows when to pull back and let Eitzel’s voice and guitar do the bulk of the work.
Indeed, it’s those acoustic performances, gently flecked with female backing vocals, keyboard arrangements, and clacking drum machines, that are the core of Hey Mr Ferryman. “Nothing And Everything” is Eitzel at his observational, unflinching best, an evening’s tale of the chill of a fraught relationship, where “night falls like a chain”, where dependence becomes liability, the story eventually panning out to show us a tableau of narcissistic inter-relations. Eitzel’s performance here is chillingly gentle, while Tanya Mellotte’s backing vocals suspend the song in amber.
The following “An Angel’s Wing Brushed The Penny Slots” is similarly unsettling in its frankness, though much of the charm of Eitzel’s writing here is in his canny eye for minutiae, with the meeting of the song’s protagonists made all too human by the off-hand observation, “I tried to rise to her, but the carpet I caught”. Elsewhere, Eitzel turns his gaze to that most puzzling of social gatherings, the band on tour, and “The Road” is as devastating in its bluntness as it is sympathetic in its capture of the group’s character.
Opening with a scenario that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s toured – “We’re on a drive that’s never over/To play for a barman and his hateful brother” – Eitzel teases out the strange, strained suspension of reality that occurs when a group hits the road. The song’s drawn from “watching a touring band play for four people at a bar in Denton TX a few years ago,” Eitzel recalls. “It wasn’t my kind of music but they played their guts out anyway. You really have to love a touring band. You spend 23 hours trying to make one hour where time doesn’t matter.”
‘Time doesn’t matter’ – that’s a good summary of the state that Eitzel often seems to be aiming for in his songs. The gentle melancholy of the closing “Sleep From My Eyes”, a love song from someone in a coma, is another case in point, though here the script flips, and time matters all too much. Either way, the beautifully rendered character portraits of Hey Mr Ferryman, shaped into gorgeous studies of sympathy by Bernard Butler’s production, are compelling in their starkness, their raw, unchecked humour, and their kindness toward people who, as Eitzel says, are looking for “something that will lead them to light and safety”.
Q&A
MARK EITZEL
I remember reading somewhere that the follow-up to Don’t Be A Stranger was going to be called I Am Not A Serious Person. Obviously that’s changed…
Well yeah – I am not what you would call a serious person. Every time I take myself too seriously it ends bad – though I know recent events in the world make such frivolity annoying… My history is a bit of a burden and a lot of the writing I do now is to set up the karma so there is only goodness happening and no sour grapes.
From what I’ve read, these songs were written during a time of personal upheaval – moving a lot, travelling, performing…
I can’t complain – I had to fix up my house to rent to make some money as I am fairly unhireable at this point. So then I’m driving back and forth between LA and SF trying to keep a relationship with my partner – and so now instead of doing the job most musicians do, which is selling beer, I’m scraping paint and washing walls.
What connects the characters that populate Hey Mr Ferryman?
Ha – I have absolutely no clue. Maybe they are people who spend their time hoping that they will find a way out of the endless dark of the cave. You know? Like in the movies: Suddenly there is the sound of ‘rescuers calling out’. Or the hopeful scent of ‘fresh air’. Something that will lead them to light and safety… I’m right there with them. I’m on their side.
INTERVIEW: JON DALE
Ray Davies has announced his new solo album, Americana.
His first new album in over nine years, Americana will be released via Legacy Recordings (a division of Sony Music Entertainment) on April 21.
Davies enlisted The Jayhawks as backing band, and recorded the album in London at Konk, the studio founded by The Kinks in 1973.
“There’s 15 pieces of music on this one, and I’m very pleased with it,” Davies told Uncut. “It’s based on the book, Americana, which is about coming to terms with America after being banned for four years, working our way back, starting again from nothing. It starts with the ban, which was instigated by right wing elements in America. I thought that was a bit too out of date, but recent events have made it really spot on.”
A second ‘volume’ will be released later this year.
Meanwhile, you can hear “Poetry“, from the album, below.
The tracklisting for Americana is:
Americana
The Deal
Poetry
Message From The Road
A Place In Your Heart
The Mystery Room
Silent Movie
Rock ‘N’ Roll Cowboys
Change For Change
The Man Upstairs
I’ve Heard That Beat Before
A Long Drive Home To Tarzana
The Great Highway
The Invaders
Wings Of Fantasy
There’s a scene early on in T2 Trainspotting, where Spud (Ewan Bremner) literally walks through his own memories. Standing in a familiar street in Edinburgh, he watches mesmerized as younger versions of his friends Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Sick-Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) run passed him like flicking ghosts; history unspooling before his very eyes. It is an effective device director Danny Boyle deploys sparingly – splicing scenes and images from the first Trainspotting into this, his long-awaited sequel. T2 is, after all, a film about the past – how we are beholden to it, how we try to escape it and how it shapes us. “Nostalgia, that’s why you’re here,” Sick-Boy tells Renton in another scene, though he may as well be taking to all of us. “You’re a tourist in your own youth.”
As a filmmaker, it isn’t immediately clear why Boyle would need to revisit Trainspotting – his career has always been resolutely forward-looking. But perhaps for Boyle, like the rest of us, the lure of the past is hard to dismiss. There is considerable dramatic pull, too, in the central idea of a group of middle-aged men attempting to recapture their former glories. Boyle’s film finds his four main protagonists – Renton, Sick-Boy, Spud and Begbie – largely unchanged since the first film. This is their tragedy, of sorts. Sick-Boy plans to open a brothel with the proceeds from blackmail scams; Spud is scarred by endemic drug abuse; Begbie is in the middle of a lengthy prison sentence. Meanwhile, Renton appears to have fallen on his feet, living in Amsterdam where he sells stock management software for the retail industry.
It sounds ghastly, which is surely the point. In the first film, Renton’s famous “Choose life” monologue took aim at the dark, tranquilizing forces of capitalism – “choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers”. Has Renton – with his “smug little cunty grin” – now become a model citizen, integrated into normal society? “I’m cleaning up and I’m moving on,” he promised at the end of the first film, shortly after ripping off his friends to the tune of £16,000. As T2 Trainspotting opens, events have conspired to send Renton back to Edinburgh, where he plans to somehow make amends. “So what have you been up to for the last 20 years?”
The success of Boyle’s film is the way in which it understands the passage of time and the value of nostalgia. The four men are brought together again – but the director is keen to show the downsides of middle-aged disappointment. There is a subplot that involves transforming a pub Sick-Boy inherited from his aunt into a high-class brothel; the setting is a run down part of Leith that has so far defied gentrification. Like the four men themselves, the pub a relic of another time. “I’m 47 and I’m fucked,” Sick-Boy admits.
All this makes for an occasionally moving film. It is not quite the big oompah of seeing your favourite band reunite, for the first time in 20 years, and bash out the hits; it is something more nuanced and fleetingly melancholic than that. It is certainly McGregor’s best performance for years. Interestingly, the story is very loosely based on Irvine Welsh’s novel Porno, which imagined the lives of Trainspotting’s protagonists 10 years on. If Boyle had made this film in 2006, one assumes we would have been waiting for a convenient gap in McGregor’s schedule, or perhaps Robert Carlyle’s. As it is, fortunes change and now Miller is the bigger star here, thanks to the success of Elementary. Miller reconnects with Sick-Boy’s quick, venomous wit and provides a useful balance to McGregor’s Renton. In one of the film’s best set-pieces, the pair descend upon a Unionist pub to steal credit cards and are forced to improvise a sectarian song – a follow-up gag at ATM, pivoting around a familiar PIN number, is gleefully funny.
Elsewhere, Bremner manages to keep the hapless Spud the right side of caricature. Carlyle’s Begbie is a tougher proposition, though. In the first film, we were shocked by the extent of his violent impulses – the pint glass tossed blindly over the balcony in a busy pub. Here – still crazy after all these years – Begbie breaks out of prison and embarks on a brutal revenge mission against Renton. At the film’s climax, you might be reminded of another film called T2 – in particular the sequences where Robert Patrick’s T-1000 cyborg relentlessly pursues Edward Furlong and Linda Hamilton through the ‘burbs of Los Angeles.
The need for a suitably ‘filmy’ climax is perhaps the only slight misstep Boyle makes. He is far happier, it seems, just enjoying being back in the company of his four protagonists and perhaps less concerned with matters of plot and narrative. The best scenes involve the characters sitting in bars or Sick-Boy’s apartment, talking. Theirs is a sealed-in, masculine world; even Kelly MacDonald and Shirley Henderson barely register in what amount to disappointing cameo appearances. Will we have to wait another 20 years for a third Trainspotting film? If so, I’d imagine it being like a swearier version of Last Orders – Fred Schepisi’s film about old friends reuniting for a funeral. In the meantime, T2 Trainspotting does a good job of honouring the original while finding something new to say, after all, about its roguish anti-heroes.
Hopefully Uncut’s 101 Weirdest Records list is giving you some musical stimulation in these strange days. In case you’ve missed it thus far, you can find all the info on our weird extravaganza and the latest issue of Uncut here. Also, please get in touch and let us know your nominations for off-piste selections we may have missed: send your personal weird favourites to our letters page via uncut_feedback@timeinc.com.
Today has been mostly dominated by racking up old Can albums into one continuous stream to celebrate the relentless genius of Jaki Liebezeit. I know mantric and improvisatory sound like opposites, but that’s what I hear when I listen to how Liebezeit drove his band with the most inventively repetitive, funky backbeat.
Before that, though, here are some of the reissues and new records I’ve been playing a fair bit, starting with Ty Segall’s “Ty Segall” on Drag City. If anyone else found Segall’s 2016 album, “Emotional Mugger”, something of a Devo-infatuated misstep, the garage rock maven’s second self-titled album is a reassuring retrenchment, of sorts. As with 2012’s “Slaughterhouse”, the vibe often suggests The Beatles turning up on Sub Pop in the late ‘80s (cf “Break A Guitar”), though Segall’s Lennon/McCartney channelling appears to have moved on a few years, from beat boom ramalam to White Album baroque. In this, he’s helped by an expanded band, with faithful retainers Mikal Cronin and Charles Moothart augmented by Chicago multi-disciplinarians Emmett “Cairo Gang” Kelly and Ben Boye. Pleasingly, Segall’s root wildness is enhanced rather than diffused by their jamming virtuosity: witness “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)”, which mutates over ten minutes from slashing grunge to a jazz-tinged freakout, distant cousin to the sort of thing keyboardist Boye has indulged in with Ryley Walker.
On the CD with the latest Uncut, you’ll find an extract from the brand new album by the Necks, “Unfold”, which is great. But fans of their involving, meditative jazz trio jams shouldn’t sleep on “Climb”, a recent solo set by their pianist Chris Abrahams. Abrahams’ early 2016 effort was a frictional, often atonal electronica album called “Fluid To The Influence”. “Climb”, though (his tenth solo endeavour), is a more reassuring beast, focused entirely on the sort of ravishing piano flurries that figure most prominently in his work with The Necks. It’s often tempting to see Abrahams as a Reichian minimalist, operating in an improvised music world. But the likes of “Roller” privilege a lyricism and romantic spirit that recalls Debussy as much as it does Bill Evans.
Possibly just me, but it’s tempting to imagine a record called “The Feudal Spirit” as some kind of PG Wodehouse concept album (even if it does turn up on a label uncomfortably called Poon Village). In fact, Rob Noyes’ “Feudal Spirit” is the latest dispatch from the American Primitive school of guitar-playing. As usual, “Primitive” seems a chronically inaccurate word: Noyes, from Massachusetts, is an acoustic guitarist whose take on folk traditions is delivered with a certain frenzied complexity. On the dextrously overdriven likes of “Paydirt”, The Feudal Spirit shapes up as one of those unvarnished solo 12-string records where you could occasionally be forgiven for thinking there are a couple of instruments duking it out in the mix. Prettiness abounds (cf “Further Off”), but Noyes is scrappy more often than meditative, closest perhaps to Peter Walker from the original Takoma generation. Neat Raymond Pettibon sleeve, too.
Few series have given me as much pleasure in recent years as Soul Jazz’s “New Orleans Funk” comps and, thanks to the Crescent City’s preposterous embarrassment of musical riches, there’s no drop in quality as this exceptional anthology series hits Volume 4. As is the way with Soul Jazz, the tracklisting is a nuanced mix of hits and obscurities, with a standby like Dave Bartholomew’s loping “The Monkey Speaks His Mind” (1957) (how hasn’t that one figured earlier?) sitting alongside rarer sides like Gus ‘The Groove’ Lewis’ kinetic take on JBs funk, “Let The Groove Move You” (1967).
The subtitle this time is “Voodoo Fire In New Orleans”, which seems pretty arbitrary: rather, Volume 4 strives to show the sheer range of what constitutes the city’s sound. Hence there’s room for James Waynes’ first, high-stepping 1951 version of the foundational “Junco Partner” (covered by James Booker, The Clash, and all points in between), as well as squelching 1975 electro-funk from Chocolate Milk, the octet who replaced The Meters as Allen Toussaint’s house band. Pushed for a highlight, though, it might just be Clifton Chenier & His Red Hot Louisiana Band’s “Party Down” (1977), as the accordionist takes his zydeco sound uptown; the sax break is a thing of wonder, all by itself. It is Gus Lewis who provides a suitable mission statement for the whole magnificent compilation: “Can you dig my band, baby?”
My knowledge of Jerry Garcia’s extra-Dead activities is a bit sketchy, to be honest, but I have been digging the 6LP set from Garcia and Merl Saunders, “Keystone Companions: The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings”. Of the many myths of Garcia, the most compelling might just be the one about his overwhelming compunction to play guitar more or less all the time. “The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings” is fluent testimony to a man in love with making music, catching Garcia filling in the nights between Grateful Dead obligations at the Keystone club in Berkeley. His chief foil is Saunders, a Hammond player who gives as good as he gets in these spectacularly amiable sessions, the bulk of which surfaced on a couple of live albums in 1973 and 1988.
Noodle sceptics may take a wide berth, but the 24 tracks here often sound as close to the MGs or the Meters, kicking back, as they do the Dead: check two stabs at “Keepers”, written by Saunders and bassist John Kahn. Garcia doesn’t bring any of his own songs to the party, but his gifts as an interpreter have rarely been better showcased, riffing effortlessly through “I Second That Emotion”, “My Funny Valentine”, “Mystery Train” and a couple of Dylan covers (“It Takes A Lot To Laugh…” and “Positively 4th Street”). A great showcase, too, for Garcia’s perpetually underrated vocals: his take on “The Harder They Come” is a tender triumph.
Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit tell the story behind the band’s hit single – Number One in Germany! This first appeared in Uncut issue 200 [January 2014]…
________
How many hit singles in 1971 started off with the sound of a drum machine? Only one: “Spoon”, by the utopian Krautrock ensemble Can, which went to Number One in their native Germany. Since 1968, Can had occupied a rehearsal/performance space at Schloss Nörvenich, a castle outside their hometown of Cologne. In the autumn of 1971, they relocated to an abandoned cinema building in the small village of Weilerswist, 20 kilometres south west of Cologne, where they set up Inner Space, a live-in sonic laboratory where they developed their unique sound and recorded all their subsequent work. A string of previous film soundtracks (including Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End) led them to be commissioned for the theme tune for one of German TV’s most popular detective series, known as Durbridge, based on the Tim Frazer novels of English crime writer Francis Durbridge. They submitted one of their first recordings in the new space: “Spoon”.
Unlike many of Can’s subsequent music, most of “Spoon” is the sound of Can playing live and as one. A wayard Latin beat on the rhythm box was the catalyst, but Jaki Liebezeit’s scurrying, mechanical groove, Irmin Schmidt’s stabbing synths, Michael Karoli’s searing guitar lines and Holger Czukay’s bass depth charges add up to a vintage Can dish. Damo Suzuki, the Japanese busker they’d recently picked up on the streets of Cologne, improvised a lyric about cutlery that managed to sound comical and menacing by turns.
IRMIN SCHMIDT: We had done this music for a German television programme, Millionenspiel, and that was very successful. So we were asked to do the music to Das Messer. We accepted, of course, and started working, and it was about the first thing we did in the new studio. We did our best, and then when I came with the music to the editing room, the director [Rolf von Sydow] flipped out – he didn’t like the music at all. He said, “I wanted commercial music and not some avant garde music.” He was totally against it. Big trouble – but the guys who actually commissioned the music loved it, and said, “No matter what the director says, this music should remain – it’s fabulous.” That was a few days of sleepless nights, because I thought we had done it all in vain. The film itself got very bad critics, and a hundred different papers all over Germany, even the little provincial papers, all wrote, “It’s a very mediocre Durbridge this time, but the music is extraordinary.” And we went into the charts with it.
HOLGER CZUKAY: It was no French Connection, not at all. But they played it every night, with our song at the beginning and the end. It was good for the band from that point of view.
SCHMIDT: The film is a detective story, criminal, and that’s typical Can – Can music was rarely only friendly and light hearted… Even with “Spoon”, which is a relatively light-hearted song, there is something edgy about it. When we came into this village, Weilerswist, of course we looked pretty wild, that was a very normal middle class and working class village. To them we looked so wild, people got very suspicious about us. And we started together with the work of “Spoon”, we also were working on installing and insulating the studio.
JAKI LIEBEZEIT: The first years were nice. It was a completely empty room in the beginning, the old village cinema. The cinema had given up, because everybody had got a car, to go into town, or a television. It was ten years empty, this room, so we got it and started with nearly nothing.
Born near Birmingham, Watts first performed with Mick Ralphs in a band called Buddies, which eventually became Mott The Hoople after Hunter joined in 1969.
He adopted the stage name Overend Watts at the suggestion of manager Guy Stevens. Ralphs and Hunter left the band in 1974, but Mott carried on until 1979, after which Watts became a record producer, producing albums for rock acts such as Hanoi Rocks.
The original line-up of Mott reunited for a series of 40th anniversary reunion shows in October 2009.
Mott’s drummer Dale “Buffin” Griffin died last January, after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Jaki Liebezeit, drummer with Can, has died aged 78.
The band confirmed his death in a post on its official Facebook page.
“It is with great sadness we have to announce that Jaki passed away this morning from sudden pneumonia,” read the unsigned post. “He fell asleep peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones. We will miss him hugely.”
It is with great sadness we have to announce that Jaki passed away this morning from sudden pneumonia. He fell asleep peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones. We will miss him hugely.
Among the tributes paid to Liebezeit, Jah Wobble called him a “wonderful person and best European drummer” while Portishead’s Geoff Barrow was moved to comment, “If I was only 10% the player you were I’d be happy.”
Absolutely gutted to hear my dear friend Jaki Liebezeit has passed. Wonderful person and best European drummer. King of Saxony lebewohl!!!
Run The Jewels discuss incoming US President Donald Trump and their new album, Run The Jewels 3, in the new issue of Uncut, dated March 2017 and out now.
Rapper and producer El-P explains that their third record was inspired by the “darkness” of 2016, and as a result its content became more overtly political.
“It was not [deliberate],” he tells Uncut. “But hey, we made the record in 2016 so I suppose there was no escaping the darkness and conflict of the heart seeping in a bit.”
Asked whether the Trump era will change the way musicians behave, El-P says: “Fuck if I know. But me and [Killer] Mike didn’t write this [album] in response to Trump per se. Assholes come and go, but the imbalance of power and abuse of the meek stays. We are going to continue to say and feel exactly what we please while smoking potentially dangerous amounts of weed.”
Run The Jewels 3 – which features Zack De La Rocha, Kamasi Washington, Boots and Danny Brown – is reviewed at length in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
How four Manchester studio obsessives created their very own sonic playground and in the process came up with the band’s first, somewhat controversial, No 1 hit… Words: Tom Pinnock
________________________________
When the owners of a Stockport hi-fi shop turfed out their upstairs tenants in 1968, they unwittingly created one of the coming decade’s most inventive British pop groups.
“I had some finance behind me then,” remembers former Mindbender Eric Stewart, who regularly used Inter-City Studios, located on the floor above the shop, to record demos. “I said, ‘Let’s start a new studio. A proper professional studio.’ We found a lovely office building and built a really serious studio, control room and offices, and that was Strawberry Studios.”
Strawberry allowed Stewart, collaborator Graham Gouldman and anarchic former art students Kevin Godley and Lol Creme – all talented singers and songwriters – to submerge themselves in writing and recording, without time restrictions or outside interference from labels, producers or engineers.
“We were carrying on in The Beatles’ tradition of experimentation,” says Gouldman. “Without Strawberry, there would have been no 10cc.”
While 10cc’s debut single “Donna”, a charming doo-wop pastiche, reached No 2 in the UK charts in late ’72, the failure of follow-up “Johnny Don’t Do It” made it clear to the quartet that they couldn’t rely on pastiche or formula. From then on, anything went so long as it excited its creators. “We were all quite eager to find new ways of doing things,” adds Stewart, “and we were picking up stuff from The Beach Boys and Steely Dan. We wanted to do something different.”
The public seemed to approve, with “Rubber Bullets” – its frantic rock’n’roll seasoned with Beach Boys harmonies, wry and controversial lyrics inspired by James Cagney movies, and acidic lead guitar – reaching the top of the UK charts in June 1973. It would be the first of a trio of chart-topping hits for the band across the decade, each one primarily sung by a different member of the group: “Rubber Bullets” by Creme, “I’m Not In Love” by Stewart, and “Dreadlock Holiday” by Gouldman.
“It was an open playing field back then,” recalls Kevin Godley. “It was a wonderful time to be making music. We were never precious about who did what. There was no ego involved. It was about getting an extraordinary finished result.”
Arcade Fire have unveiled a new song, featuring veteran soul singer Mavis Staples.
“I Give You Power” is the first release from the group since 2015’s “The Reflektor Tapes” EP, and all proceeds from the track – released, of course, the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President – will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It’s never been more important that we stick together & take care of each other,” said the group in a tweet signed Arcade Fire and Mavis Staples.
The song is not expected to be included on the band’s upcoming fifth album, which is rumoured to be released sometime in the spring. Their last full-length release was 2013’s Reflektor.
Intentional or not, Howe Gelb has found himself confronted with his own musical legacy in recent times. A strange situation, perhaps, for someone who’s spent so much of his life busying himself with the present, be it as captain of Giant Sand, The Band Of Blacky Ranchette, various spin-off projects or as a solo artist. 2015’s Heartbreak Pass coincided with the 30th anniversary of Giant Sand’s debut, Valley Of Rain, which itself followed a mammoth boxset and reissue campaign.
In his own inimitable way, Gelb untied the bunting from the party celebrations by declaring that “between the exponential cubed expansion of the band to the sheer audacity of its three-decade lifespan, Giant Sand are now dead.” As if to emphasise the point, he’s swiftly returned to his solo career and made Future Standards, a jazz-blues album that serves as an attempt to write more songs that might last through the ages. It’s a mostly minimal affair, Gelb either alone at the piano or joined by guest vocalist Lonna Kelley, with a thin smatter of double bass and brushed drums. And while the subject matter (romantic love) may be familiar territory for a bunch of tunes designed for warm brandy and candlelight, Gelb’s take on things is reassuringly leftfield. It’s doubtful, for example, whether Hoagy Carmichael may have ever considered framing a ballad with the lines, “Clarity, considered a rarity/Hitherto these parts around here,” as Gelb does on “Clear”. Or, as with the more cynical “May You Never Fall In Love”, urged us to “Let the others spend all their whiling/Contemplating the apropos.”
Gelb’s long-held fascination with words, particularly the way certain ones rub up against one another or encourage an allusive phrase, usually stretched over an odd meter, is a joy throughout. As is his deceptive way with a graceful melody, his drowsy voice slips through these songs like smoke. Future Standards is both an intimate, low-key experience and a highly welcome new detour.
