Vangelis has announced details of a new new 13-disc box set entitled Delectus, which contains some of his best known work.
Along with Chariots Of Fire, the set includes remastered versions of Earth, L’Apocalypse Des Animaux, China, See You Later, Antarctica, Mask, Opera Sauvage, Soil Festivities and Invisible Connections.
“I always welcome remastering my old work for two basic reasons” – explains Vangelis – “firstly, I get the opportunity to bring the sounds to today’s standards, secondly, it gives me the chance to go through the experiences and memories of the time.”
The set also includes his collaborative recordings with Jon Anderson as Jon & Vangelis – Short Stories, The Friends Of Mister Cairo and Private Collection. The remastered originals will be complemented with rare B-sides and 4 previously unreleased tracks.
The tracklisting is:
Earth
L’Apocalypse Des Animaux
China
See You Later
Antarctica
Mask
Opera Sauvage
Chariots Of Fire
Soil Festivities
Invisible Connections
Short Stories
Private Collection
The Friends Of Mr Cairo
With so much of what is labelled “world music”, the appeal is not always the lure of the Other. In many cases we are seeking a twist on the familiar, be it Tuareg musicians who sound like galloping heavy metal bands, Bollywood musicians making slightly wonky disco, or Nigerian dance bands making pulsating big-band funk. It is the everyday being put through an unfamiliar filter – like seeing ourselves reflected in a fairground mirror.
This, in part, is the appeal of the Cretan lute player Giorgos Xylouris. He is a renowned exponent of traditional music from a noble family – his father and two of his uncles are celebrated exponents of the lyra, a bowed instrument with roots to the Byzantine Empire – and his Xylouris Ensemble (featuring many of his friends and relatives, including some of his own children) play a lively take on traditional Cretan music. But put him and his Cretan lute, or laouto, alongside the free-rock drummer Jim White and his sound seems to transform. Their thrashy drums/lute duels can have the free-swinging energy of The White Stripes or the herky-jerky of a post-punk band, while other times they sound like growling freak-folk balladeers.
The pair met in 1990 while Giorgos was living in White’s home city of Melbourne. After playing on the same bills for nearly a quarter of a century, they finally got together in Manhattan in 2014 (courtesy of the Cretan Association of New York) to record the album Goats. The follow-up, started in New York and completed in studios in Crete and, of all places, Iceland, is a less subtle and more vividly defined cultural collision that is in every sense of the word. The punky tracks are very punky indeed; the brooding ballads particularly broody.
The laouto is an eight-string instrument with moveable frets, sharing the same violin-like tuning (GDAE) and paired strings as the mandolin. In traditional Cretan music, its role was that of “passadorikos”, playing chords and countermelodies to accompany the bowed lyra. Giorgos Xylouris, however, is part of a generation of laouto players who have transformed the instrument from to – from rhythm to lead. And Black Peak sees Xylouris moving freely between the two modes, often within a fraction of a second.
Watch him in action and you’ll see him manipulate the instrument in a variety of ways. He strokes the strings with his fingers, or picks at them with his thumb and fingernails, but usually uses a long, floppy plectrum – historically made of a vulture’s feather – which can be flapped loosely to provide lightly strummed pattern, or held tightly to get an aggressive tone.
The title track of the album opens with a sparkly, plucked riff, backed by pounding floor toms and a stentorian vocal. “Forging” is a powerful one-chord drone that mixes a proggy, chiming metal riff with some thunderous drum pattern and sees Xylouris forcing out a simple four-note melody at the upper end of his vocal register.
A track entitled “Erotokritos” is based on the opening stanzas of an epic 17th-century poem that provides the basis for much Cretan music. “It is about the past and the future,” says Xylouris. “About how our feelings for time go deep into the earth and cry out into the sky.” He adopts a terrifyingly low baritone rumble, while his pal Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy provides eerie vocal harmonies.
Other lyrics, all sung in Greek, are written by a friend of Giorgos, a Cretan farmer (and, apparently, jewellery designer) called Mitsos Stavrakakis. The title track, for instance, is about a black mountain in Crete. “The lyric asks the mountain if he is lonely and needs company,” says Giorgos. Other tracks seem similarly rooted in the landscape, or in traditional folk melodies: “Pretty Kondilies” is a jaunty, sailor’s hornpipe-like instrumental that draws attention to traditional verse.
But most effective of all are the ballads, which are weirdly aggressive affairs. Usually they stay on a single chord and see Xylouris playing tremolo style, strumming chords so quickly and so violently that his instrument sounds like a giant, angry wasp. Throughout White plays with the inventiveness of a free jazz improviser but uses the tom-toms rather than the cymbals to create highly textural accompaniment, while Xylouris sings arhythmically, like a declamatory poet.
When Giorgos’ father Psarantonis arrives on the final track, “The Feast”, to provide countermelodies on the bowed lyra, it sounds like a circle has truly been completed. This is Cretan folk music played with a rock’n’roll intensity that is truly immersive.
Q&A
Giorgos Xylouris
How much of the music is improvised?
We have the basic song before we record. But each time we play, it’s like we are teasing the song to see what it will give back to us. And we try to make more space every time to do a new thing. It’s like we have a map of the song, and, as we play, we then discover more creeks, more peaks, more roads, more trees, more animals! Jim is an amazing, unique musician. I discover myself with him every time we play together.
How do you label this music?
We have been labelled free jazz, post-punk, world music, ethnic music. I think we’re a mosaic of all these labels. My life, since I was 12 years old, was as a professional music. I would play shows with my father: we’d stay in the same room, wake up the next day and play another club. Even now, I play the lute all the time. I worry that my friends want me to shut up and stop playing. I even sleep with my instrument! The other day I fell asleep with it on my chest and it fell on the floor and broke! Luckily I was able to fix it…
What are your influences outside of traditional Greek music?
Initially, the only chance I got to listen to other music was when it was on the radio, in a bar. But I liked lots of it – Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Billie Holiday, Paco de Lucia. Later, in Melbourne, I would hear the Dirty Three, the Bad Seeds, Grinderman, Irish music. I loved it. I am always open to new music – I loved The Cairo Gang when we supported them in the US. I am also obsessed with an Alice Coltrane album at the moment. And so on.
How did you meet up with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy?
Oh, I wish I could record more with Billy! I’m sure we will in the future. When he sings backing vocals, he gives a spiritual, exotic feeling to the music. He gives me this feeling every time I hear him sing. It is the feeling that we exist in a different timing.
INTERVIEW: JOHN LEWIS
A new Johnny Cash book titled Forever Words: The Unknown Poems features 41 previously unreleased poems written by Cash himself.
Some of the poems date back to as early as 1944. The poems collected in the book were chosen from approximately 200 pieces left by Cash in varying states of completion.
According to Pitchfork, the book also features facsimiles of his handwritten poems. In a quote given to the New York Times, Cash’s son John Carter Cash said, “I want people to have a deeper understanding of my father than just the iconic, cool man in black. I think this book will help provide that.”
Rick Wakeman has announced details of a new studio album.
Piano Portraits will be released on January 13, 2017 and the track listing includes versions of David Bowie‘s “Life on Mars?”, which Wakeman recorded the original piano parts for, and “Space Oddity”, to which he contributed mellotron; through The Beatles, Yes and Led Zeppelin; to classical pieces composed by Debussy and Tchaikovsky.
“I’ve been wanting to do a piano album for years and I spent quite a bit of time looking at everything from straight classical pieces to stuff that I’d played on in the past like ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Life On Mars?’,” Wakeman explains. “Plus pieces of music that I thought would work really well like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and classics like ‘Clair de Lune’. Nearly all of the tracks have a memory for me somewhere down the line and it just seemed to work.”
The tracklisting is:
Help
Stairway to Heaven
Life on Mars
I’m Not In Love
Wonderous Stories
Berceuse
Amazing Grace
Swan Lake
Morning Has Broken
Summertime
Space Oddity
Dance of the Damselflies
Clair de Lune
Vow To Thee My Country
Eleanor Rigby
Digital pre-orders will receive an instant download of Wakeman’s interpretation of “Help” by The Beatles.
Brian Eno is to release a new ambient album, Reflections, on January 1, 2017.
The album will be released in three formats. As a CD, in case bound sleeve with 6 page booklet, as a double album – in printed inners, in printed outer sleeve with download card – and digitally.
It consists of one track, “Reflection”, which is 54 minutes long.
You can read a statement below from Eno about the album.
“Reflection is the latest work in a long series. It started (as far as record releases are concerned) with Discreet Music in 1975 ( – or did it start with the first Fripp and Eno album in 1973? Or did it start with the first original piece of music I ever made, at Ipswich Art School in 1965 – recordings of a metal lampshade slowed down to half and quarter speed, all overlaid?)
“Anyway, it’s the music that I later called ‘Ambient’. I don’t think I understand what that term stands for anymore – it seems to have swollen to accommodate some quite unexpected bedfellows – but I still use it to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements.
“The pedigree of this piece includes Thursday Afternoon, Neroli (whose subtitle is Thinking Music IV) and LUX. I’ve made a lot of thinking music, but most of it I’ve kept for myself. Now I notice that people are using some of those earlier records in the way that I use them – as provocative spaces for thinking – so I feel more inclined to make them public.
“Pieces like this have another name: they’re GENERATIVE. By that I mean they make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I’m happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic ( – often taking the form ‘perform operation x, y percent of the time’) the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings.
“Reflection is so called because I find it makes me think back. It makes me think things over. It seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation. And external ones actually – people seem to enjoy it as the background to their conversations.
“When I make a piece like this most of my time is spent listening to it for long periods – sometimes several whole days – observing what it does to different situations, seeing how it makes me feel. I make my observations and then tweak the rules. Because everything in the pieces is probabilistic and because the probabilities pile up it can take a very long time to get an idea of all the variations that might occur in the piece. One rule might say ‘raise 1 out of every 100 notes by 5 semitones’ and another might say ‘raise one out of every 50 notes by 7 semitones’. If those two instructions are operating on the same data stream, sometimes – very rarely – they will both operate on the same note…so something like 1 in every 5000 notes will be raised by 12 semitones. You won’t know which of those 5000 notes it’s going to be. Since there are a lot of these types of operations going on together, on different but parallel data streams, the end result is a complex and unpredictable web.
“Perhaps you can divide artists into two categories: farmers and cowboys. The farmers settle a piece of land and cultivate it carefully, finding more and more value in it. The cowboys look for new places and are excited by the sheer fact of discovery, and the freedom of being somewhere that not many people have been before. I used to think I was temperamentally more cowboy than farmer… but the fact that the series to which this piece belongs has been running now for over 4 decades makes me think that there’s quite a big bit of farmer in me.”
Ahead of the release of a new studio album, Mike Oldfield will be answering your questions as part of our regular An Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’d like us to ask the singer-songwriter?
What’s his favourite memory of Kevin Ayers?
What are the pros and cons of having a huge hit like Tubular Bells?
How did he come to recruit Roger Chapman and Jon Anderson for his Crises album?
Send up your questions by noon, Monday, November 21 to uncutaudiencewith@timeinc.com.
The best questions, and Mike’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine.
The last time we saw Adam Driver, he was driving a lightsabre through his father in the latest Star Wars movie. Thankfully, there are no such interstellar shocks here in Jim Jarmusch’s quietly unassuming portrait of a gentle, artistic man and his wife.
Paterson is a city in New Jersey; it is also the name of Driver’s protagonist, a bus driver and aspiring writer who, bound by the coincidence of his name, enjoys an almost karmic sense of cosmic connection to his hometown. As we learn, Paterson – the place – has yielded many more famous residents, from Hurricane Carter to Sam & Dave’s Sam Moore and 18th century anarchist weaver, Gaetano Breaxi. Paterson’s sense of civic pride is palpable, as each day he goes to work, drives his bus, listens to snatches of his passengers’ conversation on his bus and writes poetry during his lunch-break. One involves a paean to Ohio Blue Tip matches (“sober and furious and stubbornly ready to burst into flame”).
Jarmusch has had a terrific year – although his two projects released in the last 12 months may, superficially, not have been more different. On one hand, the Stooges film was high energy rock’n’roll; on the other, Paterson is a warm and uncynical in its celebration of small-town life and dreams. Yet, as Iggy Pop explains in Gimme Danger, the Stooges were the culmination of his small-town dreams. Although, admittedly, the end results are very different, perhaps there are similarities in the core of each story, after all.
Driver and Golshifteh Farahani as Paterson’s wife Laura are both superb: he is prone to philosophizing while she is loose and unaffected, embarking each day on a new artistic endeavour, from painting to baking and learning to play the guitar. The film is structured as a week in Paterson’s life, where each day is essentially repetitive – the plot consists of distractions from his routine: minor misfortunes and happy accidents, mostly, in which Paterson calmly truffles for meaning. Much like Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai, Paterson is a zen-like spirit searching for deeper enlightenment in the every day.
Earlier today, I spent a few minutes looking for anything I’d previously written about Leonard Cohen. One of the things I found, and had forgotten about, was a review of “Ten New Songs” from my last days at NME. There isn’t much to be proud of in the piece; a lot of pat auto-criticism involving “the qualities that have inspired at least three generations of self-conscious miserablilists” and “cheesy production”. The last line, though, is kind of interesting: “Life’s a bitch and then you die, but in Cohen’s case, nowhere near as early as he imagined.”
The enduring survival of Leonard Cohen – comfortably into his eighties, and some distance beyond many of his juniors, as well as his contemporaries – was a small miracle to take comfort from these past few years. It became more obvious than ever these past few weeks, as “You Want It Darker” landed in a time of such turmoil, at a time when voices of contemplative maturity, wisdom and humanity seemed in chronically short supply.
As is the modern way, and one that may well have been anathema to Cohen himself – though his epigrammatic gifts with a perfectly weighted sentence would have ruled on Twitter – I resorted to sticking favourite songs onto social media. An improbable amount of Cohen material worked almost too neatly as valedictions, so the first thing I turned to, perhaps perversely, was an instrumental, “Tacoma Trailer”, from “The Future”; a tune I’ve always loved, and which felt like the end credits music at the close of an epic, though emotionally measured, drama.
It’s a neat illustration, too, of the point made by Bob Dylan in David Remnick’s recent Cohen profile. “When people talk about Leonard,” said Dylan, “they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines—they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music.”
The second piece I chose was a track called “Recitation”, from the “Live In London” album, recorded at the O2 run in 2008. I’m never sure whether that’s the right title for it, given how it seems to derive from the same poem that produced “A Thousand Kisses Deep”.
Some fine things have been written about Cohen these past few days, and I don’t feel I’m ready, or maybe capable, of matching them. We’re working on what we hope will be suitable Uncut tributes for further down the line, but in the meantime, here’s the best piece from my personal archives: a review of that “Live In London” album, “an uncommonly thoughtful victory lap”…
When The Songs Of Leonard Cohen arrived in record shops just after Christmas, 1967, its creator was already 33 years old – an unusual age to be releasing a debut album. But the patina of experience was critical to Cohen’s appeal. Here was a singer – no, a poet – who could write about the usual stuff, chiefly girls – well, women – with a rueful and weathered maturity far beyond the range of his younger contemporaries.
It was a good trick then, and it remains so four decades later, as Leonard Cohen continues his extraordinary comeback tour. While the likes of The Rolling Stones tackle the songs of their youth in an absurd if bracing defiance of age, and Bob Dylan and Neil Young often seem to have an ambiguous, sometimes fraught, relationship to their back catalogues, Cohen has no comparable problems. The older he becomes, the better he inhabits many of these uncannily graceful and profound songs.
Consequently, Live In London is much more than a souvenir of a memorable show at the O2 Arena in July 2008. It showcases a (then) 73-year-old singer with still-growing wisdom and an ever-deepening voice, who now brings an even greater gravity to songs that were hardly bubblegum in the first place.
Take “Who By Fire”. It’d be risky to claim that this live reading is a more definitive version than the original on 1974’s New Skin For The Old Ceremony. But the incantatory resonance of Cohen’s baritone, the way it is underpinned so delicately by the female vocals, Javier Mas’ lute-like archilaúd and Neil Larsen’s Hammond B3, make it sound more like sacred music than a folk singer’s appropriation of sacred music, band introductions notwithstanding. An enterprising film director would do well to cast this Cohen as the voice of a god – if Cohen could reconcile the complexities of his own beliefs to accept such a frivolous gig.
Then again, as Live In London proves, Leonard Cohen is a covertly frivolous man. If he has been stereotyped for 20, 30, 40 years as the laureate of misery, these shows have redefined him as more of a droll old charmer, not averse to satirising himself.
“It’s been a long time since I stood on the stage in London,” he intones wryly before “Ain’t No Cure For Love”. “It was about 14 or 15 years ago. I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Welbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies and religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”
He says more or less the same every night, but the crafted wit is well worth repeating. Rehearsal does not preclude warmth, and the three months of preparation that Cohen and the band went through before the tour began last spring – down to the ad libs, perhaps – is one good reason why Live In London has more in common with a measured studio album than most live sets.
Spontaneity isn’t necessary here. Instead, meticulous control is crucial to the potency of these 25 songs, particularly in the marvellous sequence that closes the first half of the concert, running through “Who By Fire” and “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” to a broadly celestial “Anthem”.
These are not complete reinventions: the musical director, Roscoe Beck, was imbuing Cohen’s songs with the same stately pacing, with similar Mediterranean fringes, as far back as 1988, judging by the Cohen Live album released in 1994. Now, though, there’s a shade more discretion to Bob Metzger’s guitar playing, and fewer cruise liner flourishes from Dino Soldo on the “instruments of wind”. Javier Mas, the Spanish guitarist, is an obvious star, but as the whole band take compact, jewel-like solos during “I Tried To Leave You”, it’s hard to spot a weak link.
Cohen himself, of course, may be more reliable these days, having lost his old habit of drinking three bottles of wine before a show. He has a clutch of relatively new songs, too, with two from 2001’s underrated Ten New Songs included in the London show, plus a stirring recitation of verses from “A Thousand Kisses Deep” that didn’t make the original recording. A meditation on love, memory, mortality and related topics, it’s an apposite highlight, not least when Cohen intones, “I’m still working with the wine, still dancing cheek to cheek/The band is playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, but the heart will not retreat.”
It captures a man forced back on to the road by financial exigency – back to “Boogie Street”, he might say – only to discover that something else is driving him onwards. Perhaps that something, Cohen realised, is a chance to achieve a resolution of sorts, with both his art and with his fans. An uncommonly thoughtful victory lap, which deserves – and has received – a handsome recorded memorial.
In September, Young unveiled a new song “Indian Givers“, which addresses the proposed and controversial Dakota Access Pipeline that cuts through Native American land. The track will appear on Young’s forthcoming album, Peace Trail.
Fleet Foxes have provided a progress update on the status of their new album.
In an Instagram post from four weeks ago, Robin Pecknold described the alum as “kind of crazy / vast so working on ‘putting babies to sleep / living my truth’ palliative solo album on off days”
Sunset Boulevard is not far from Watts, a few miles, but the two areas of Los Angeles are divided by a cultural chasm. One basks in the glamorous glow of adjacent Hollywood, the other is a black ghetto latterly celebrated in NWA’s Straight Outta Compton and formerly known for the 1965 riots that burned a substantial portion of the neighbourhood to the ground. Racial division in the ‘City Of Angels’ has always been fiercely enforced.
The arrival of Otis Redding to play a weekend of shows at Sunset’s Whisky A Go Go in April 1966 was therefore a statement in itself. Redding was not from Watts – like most of the era’s great soul singers he hailed from the deep South, from Macon Georgia – but a black act bossing the Whisky, a bastion of hip rock bands, was testimony not only to Redding’s soaring popularity but, truly, a sign of the times.
As much was exactly what was intended by Redding and his friend and manager, Phil Walden, a young white impresario who had fallen in love with black music and who would later found Capricorn Records to oversee the career of the Allman Brothers. The pair had decided that ‘crossing over’ – wooing white America – was a game they could win. Motown had already succeeded, so, to a lesser extent, had James Brown, but Otis was coming from a different place to either; Stax Records of Memphis, a label and studio where, as house guitarist Steve Cropper put it, ‘race never entered’.
As audacious as placing a full-blown R’n’B band into the heart of groovy LA was recording the weekend’s six sets, a decision made redundant by Stax’s imperious tour of Europe a year later and the resulting Otis album Live In Europe. The Whisky sessions, in much truncated form, didn’t see light of day until after Redding’s death in late 1967.
Live In Europe and the triumphant performance at the 1967 Monterey festival – a show that sealed Otis’ conquest of the white US audience – are arguably better testimonies to Redding’s live prowess, not least because they have him backed by Stax’s house band the MGs, the co-architects of his studio output. In particular, Cropper’s scything, chattering guitar is a sorely missed presence on the Whisky session. Yet if you want to know how Otis sounded in his ascent through the grind of the so-called chitlin circuit, backed by his regular ten-piece touring band, this is a better guide.
The audience for the Whisky sessions – it was not a large venue, holding a mere 250 or so – was a mix of the curious and the cognoscenti. Minor hits like “These Arms Of Mine”, “Pain In My Heart” (covered by the Stones) and “Mr Pitiful” had put Otis’ name out there beyond his adoring black fans, while Otis Blue, released a few months previously, had opened more ears. Among the crowd were fans like Van Morrison and Dylan, but for others Otis was still news. Robbie Krieger of The Doors (a regular fixture at the Whisky) recalls watching the show slack-jawed at the energy being pumped out onstage by an act of which he had barely heard. Such was the racial divide of the times.
You can hear the gulf at the very start of the record, with Otis introduced by a patter lifted from James Brown’s shows: “It’s star time…” Otis, 24 years old, rips into a furious “Can’t Turn You Loose”, the band’s relentless groove punctuated by the might of its six-piece horn section. The opener brings a smattering of polite applause from an audience uncertain how to react (or simply too stunned), prompting Otis to urge, “Holler as loud as you want, stomp as hard as you want to. Just take your shoes off. Get soulful!”
Otis and band soon had the room cooking, and on later sets you can hear a boisterous audience yelling and singing along, especially to a hyper-ventilated “Satisfaction”, which sits at the heart of every performance. The Stones’ hit was suggested to Otis by Walden, and after being unleashed on Otis Blue quickly became a calling card, transmuted from the droll, loping original into an urgent demand, its guitar riff pumped out by horns. Ry Cooder, who opened the Whisky sets as one of the Rising Sons, remarks that the audience “heard ‘Satisfaction’ done at land-speed-record tempo. I don’t think any white band could play that fast in those days.”
The setlist didn’t vary much across the weekend, and essentially alternated between high tempo, kick-ass numbers like “I’m Depending On You” and plaintive ballads like “Just One More Day” and “Pain In My Heart”. Otis could handle both with equal panache. His voice on slow pieces like “Ole Man Trouble” was strong but mellow and melodic, while “Respect” and “Mr Pitiful” (which mysteriously clocks in around two minutes, rather than the six, seven and eight allotted “Satisfaction”) find him coarse-grained, ebullient. Otis, built like a linebacker, was no great mover – no spins or splits – but exuded a physical force that tumbles out the speakers.
Given the singer’s adulation of Sam Cooke, whom he covered three times over on Otis Blue, it’s a surprise that no Cooke numbers feature here, but Redding was clearly out to showcase his own material like “Chained And Bound”, another tear-jerker. He makes room, nonetheless, for a couple of covers on his last set. “A Hard Day’s Night” becomes a vicious stomp some way removed from the Fabs’ original, and excluding the original’s airy middle eight. “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” is an homage to his fellow Georgian James Brown, something of a throwaway but clearly fun on the night.
Famously, Otis could never sing the same song the same way twice (which made lip-synching a calamity zone) and every number here comes up slightly different, as he punctuates it with assorted stammers, grunts and exhortations. The band, to their credit, rarely miss a cue. The sheer length and repetitions make end-to-end listening of these six sides something for the dedicated, but as a tribute to a still-missed talent, it testifies.
As PJ Harvey ends another momentous year, Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to PJ Harvey provides a definitive guide to one of the most vital British artists of the past 25 years. In this lavish new mag, you’ll find long-lost interviews from the pages of NME and Uncut, that reveal the fluctuating moods and modes of this remarkable performer. There are trips to a Dorset farmyard, and recollections of breakdowns in London. Tense on the road pieces in Los Angeles, and unnervingly garrulous chats about love, Nick Cave, foxhunting and haircare. From Dry to The Hope Six Demolition Project… it’s the complete PJ Harvey story.
Aerosmith have announced European tour dates for next year, as part of their Aero-Vederci Baby! ‘farewell’ tour.
The dates follow on from their series of shows in South America, rocking to their die-hard fans in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru and Mexico.
Joe Perry – “It’s been 3 years since we have been on tour in Europe and I can speak for my brothers that we can’t wait to get over there and take it up a few notches. Last tour in South America we were running on all cylinders and I can see no reason to let up now.”
Steven Tyler – “Aerosmith just got done ripping through South America like true ambassadors of rock…The band is unstoppable right now and in Europe, we’re going to keep doing what we do best… Let The Music Do The Talking…Living On The Edge, and living to rock another day.”
As part of the Aero-Vederci Baby tour, they will also be performing at some of the biggest music festivals in the world including Sweden Rock, France’s Hellfest and Download Festival in Donington, UK.
May 17, 2017: Hayarkon Park, Tel Aviv, Israel
May 20, 2017: Black Sea Arena, Batumi, Georgia
May 23, 2017: Olympiski, Moscow, Russia
May 26, 2017: Konigsplatz, Munich, Germany
May 30, 2017: Waldbuhne, Berlin, Germany
June 2, 2017: Tauron Arena, Krakow, Poland
June 5, 2017: Royal Arena, Copenhagen, Denmark
June 8, 2017: Sweden Rock Festival, Solvesborg, Sweden
June 11, 2017: Download Festival, Donington, UK
June 14, 2017: 3 Arena, Dublin, Ireland
June 17, 2017: Hellfest, Clisson, France
June 20, 2017: Lanxess Arena, Cologne, Germany
June 23, 2017: Firenze Rocks Festival, Florence, Italy
June 26, 2017: Meo Arena, Lisbon, Portugal
June 29, 2017: Rivas Auditorio Miguel Rios, Madrid, Spain
July 2, 2017: Rock Fest Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
July 5, 2017: Hallenstadion, Zurich, Switzerland
To honour David Bowie’s 70th birthday, his former band members, friends, and others will unite for a one-time only series of global goodwill concerts, in aid of local charities, called Celebrating David Bowie.
The London concert takes place at O2 Academy Brixton, on what would have been his 70th birthday on 8 January, with proceeds from the show benefitting the Children & the Arts charity.
The concerts, announced sporadically, will take place in cities that have a strong connection with Bowie and his work.
The London show will feature former band members Mike Garson, Earl Slick, Adrian Belew, Mark Plati, Gerry Leonard, Gail Ann Dorsey, Sterling Campbell, Zachary Alford, Holly Palmer and Catherine Russell, along with Gary Oldman and many other special guests to be announced.
Tickets cost between £55.00 in advance – £150.00 VIP from ticketweb.co.uk or 0844 477 2000.
O2 Priority presale begins on November 16 and for general sale on November 18.
“We thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers during this very, very difficult time. My husband passed in his sleep in our Nashville home. He was recovering from heart surgery in July and looked forward to getting back on the road in January. We appreciate everyone’s love and support.”
Elton John – who collaborated with Russell on the 2010 album The Union – called him a “mentor, inspiration”.
Other tributes came from a cross section of musicians including Booker T Jones, Steve Martin, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Chaka Khan, Okkervil River, Nathan Followill and Whoopi Goldberg.
RIP my friend of 50 years, generous trail blazer, Leon Russell, who rescued me and remained a gentleman throughout Hollywood's trials.
Nick Cave is the latest artist to offer tribute to Leonard Cohen, who has died aged 82.
Since Cohen’s death was announced earlier today [November 11, 2016], tributes have been paid from a wide range of musicians and artists, ranging from Bette Midler to Justin Timberlake.
Now Nick Cave has shared his own tribute, describing Cohen as “the greatest songwriter of them all”.
1/2 For many of us Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate…
Cave has covered many of Cohen’s songs over the years – from “Suzanne” and “Tower Of Song” to “Avalanche“.
Speaking on French TV for in 1994, Cave said: “I discovered Leonard Cohen with Songs Of Love And Hate. I listened to this record for hours in a friend’s house. I was very young and I believe this was the first record that really had an effect on me. In the past, I only listened to my brother’s records. I liked what he liked, followed him like a sheep. Leonard Cohen was the first one I discovered by myself. He is the symbol of my musical independence. I remember these other guys that came to my friend’s house that thought Songs of Love and Hate was too depressing. I’ve realized that this ‘depression’ theory was ridiculous.
“The sadness of Cohen was inspirer, it gave me a lot of energy. I always remember all this when someone says that my records are morbid or depressing.”
Tributes have been paid to Leonard Cohen, who has died aged 82.
“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records,” Cohen’s son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”
The news was confirmed by Cohen’s record label, Sony Music Canada, in a post on the singer’s Facebook page:
“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away.
“We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.
“A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief.”
Meanwhile, tributes have been paid by his contemporaries, including Joan Baez who wrote on her Facebook page:
“Bless Leonard Cohen. I met him in 1961, a mysterious, dark and gloomy, gifted songwriter, in the lobby of the notorious, dingy 60s-atmospheric pot and poetry Chelsea Hotel. Someone was throwing up in the phone booth. I was a newbie to it all.
“Over the decades, from the Village to the stage to the seclusion of a monastery, to his own seclusion, he gave us much of his wisdom and beauty in magnificent poetry and song.
“Hallelujah.”
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, released a full statement on the passing of Leonard Cohen:
“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of the legendary Leonard Cohen.
“A most remarkable Montrealer, Leonard Cohen managed to reach the highest of artistic achievement, both as an acclaimed poet and a world-renowned singer-songwriter. He will be fondly remembered for his gruff vocals, his self-deprecating humour and the haunting lyrics that made his songs the perennial favourite of so many generations.
“Leonard Cohen is as relevant today as he was in the 1960s. His ability to conjure the vast array of human emotion made him one of the most influential and enduring musicians ever. His style transcended the vagaries of fashion.
“Leonard Cohen was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003 and received many artistic honours during his lifetime, including being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“He received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2010 and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize for lifetime achievement in the arts in 2011. In 2013, with a career already spanning more than fifty years, he won Junos as Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year for his 2012 album Old Ideas. His music had withstood the test of time.
“On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I wish to express our deepest sympathies to Leonard Cohen’s family, friends, colleagues and many, many fans.
“Leonard, no other artist’s poetry and music felt or sounded quite like yours. We’ll miss you.”
There have been other tributes paid to Cohen from many different sources, ranging from John Cale and Russell Crowe to Justin Timberlake, Carole King, JK Rowling, Win Butler, Graham Coxon, Mia Farrow, William Gibson and Bette Midler.
very upsetting news 2 learn of Leonard's passing. the world has 1 less gentle soul tnight. we thank u 4 the multitude of gifts u left us. jc
Where do you go after your own fans have called you Judas? Well, of course: you go to Glasgow, where, if anything, things get wilder yet.
Bob Dylan’s 1966 tour, when he took the battle to “go electric” that had started at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 to audiences around the world, is the most mythologised in the history of rock’n’roll: the legend of an unstoppable speeding artist hitting the immovable wall of his audience’s preconceptions about who he was, and breaking through into wide open new territory, dragging popular music with him.
Possibly designed to bridge the gap between the “old” and “new” Dylans, the very structure of these gigs – a solo acoustic performance followed by a full band electric set – served only to heighten the division. The nightly routine was set in stone early. First Dylan would go out alone with acoustic guitar, and the people in the dark would sit in rapt silence and applaud whatever he did. Then he would return backed by the five-man band still known as The Hawks, plug in his Fender Telecaster, and the boos, catcalls and slow-handclapping would begin, as the folk-fundamentalist section of his audience voiced their earnest sense of betrayal.
Much of the tour’s notoriety rests on the show that took place at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on May 17, when a lone voice cried out the vitriolic, ridiculous, heckle that would echo down the decades – “Judas!” – and Dylan, in disgust, instructed his already thunderous band to play the final “Like A Rolling Stone” “fuckin’ loud”.
We know all about that concert, of course. Originally mislabelled “The Royal Albert Hall”, it was one of the most famous bootleg records of all time, and when it was finally given legal release in 1998 as part of Dylan’s Bootleg Series, that manic, majestic performance officially took its place among the greatest live albums ever made. The “Judas!” incident crystallises the poison drama of Dylan’s ’66 world tour so perfectly it’s little surprise Martin Scorsese made it the climax of his kaleidoscopic Dylan documentary, No Direction Home.
But that Manchester gig wasn’t the end of the ’66 tour. It wasn’t even the first time things turned Biblical. Three nights before Manchester, in Liverpool, amid steady cries of “Traitor!” and “Go home,” another voice screamed, “What happened to your conscience?”, and Dylan shot back, “Oh. There’s a fellow up there looking for The Saviour…”
And two nights after Manchester, with the Judas jeer still ringing in his ears, there came Glasgow, where Dylan faced his most restive crowd yet – and, just when it sounded like the factions in the audience were on the verge of physical violence, taunted them further: “Bob Dylan’s backstage. He couldn’t make it for the second half. He got very sick – and I’m here to take his place.”
By this stage, sounding weary and on fire, he had only one week of the tour left to go. But you can hear in his voice that it seemed more like a year. Speaking in 1978, Hawks guitarist Robbie Robertson summed up the surreal, grinding Groundhog Day experience: “It was a strange way to make a living: You get in this private plane, they fly you to a town, we go to this place, we play our music and people boo us. Then we get back on the plane, we go to another town, we play our music, and they boo us.”
Across the remaining shows, combatting crowds in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Paris and London, with every passing song Dylan would sound sicker, stranger, a little closer to burning out for good, and a little more magnificent.
The chance to go through all of this again – to experience “Judas!” in its full, swirling, exhausting context – comes with the release of this astonishing 36CD set, gathering together every concert known to have been recorded during Dylan’s ’66 tour.
It hardly needs saying that this mammoth box is not intended for the casual Dylan listener. Even committed fans might think twice. Essentially, what you get is the same songs played in the same order over 23 nights. But, by God, how they are played. This is Dylan hitting his performing peak, and devotees will revel in it the way jazz heads would an unearthed cache of Charlie Parker. While there are no radical changes in the way songs are played, charting the shifts in focus, the changes in pattern and chemical balance from gig to gig, becomes addictive. Is Sheffield the most glorious acoustic show he ever played? Well, how about this “Mr Tambourine Man” from Birmingham? Or Liverpool’s “Desolation Row”? Meanwhile, as they dig deeper in the face of resistance, strengthening the music’s palatial architecture, you hear his band becoming The Band.
These recordings both prove the legend of the ’66 tour, and add nuance, as it becomes clear that as many in those audiences were with Dylan as against him. In Melbourne, the loudest screaming actually comes from teenage girls reacting to “Tom Thumb’s Blues”, as though the Fab Four had just appeared. It isn’t until he reaches the British Isles that things grow truly toxic, but even during the angriest rumblings of Glasgow, some of the most impassioned voices are crying for more electricity: “Tombstone Blues, Bob!”
The best way to listen might be to treat the boxset almost as you would a TV series, following the underlying drama from episode to episode. And, just as with any great series, there are recurring themes – growing spookier every night, “Ballad Of A Thin Man” becomes a particular psychodrama – and stand-out episodes, legends within the legend. The most significant might be the revelation of the fabled Paris concert that took pace on Dylan’s 25th birthday. He seems close to the end by now (“I wanna get out of here just as much as you…”), and the electric set takes on a ragged, terminal air. Balanced between defiance and despair, he roars himself hoarse, sounding close to throwing up, or passing out.
While the vast majority of the shows here sound fantastic, there are issues with some recordings. The collection is gathered from three sources. The earliest concerts were not professionally recorded, and the handful represented – three in the US, one apiece in Melbourne and Stockholm – come scavenged from tapes made by bootleggers in the audience. Invaluable as muddy snapshots of atmosphere, they are hard to listen to as music.
At the other end of the fidelity scale are four concerts recorded by Columbia Records using multi-track equipment: the previously released Manchester show; the hypnotic Sheffield gig; and the tour’s final two-night stand in London on May 26 and 27, when, before an audience that included Beatles and Stones, Dylan’s patience ran out, and he announced he wouldn’t be coming back. The first of the London shows is also being given a stand-alone release as The Real Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert, newly remixed for this set by Chris Shaw – Dylan’s engineer on recent recordings including 2001’s masterpiece “Love & Theft” – who wrings every last drop of ambient beauty from the truly otherworldly acoustic set.
The bulk, however, are the raw recordings Dylan’s sound engineer made each night using a tape recorder plugged directly into the mixing board. Intended for possible use in Eat The Document, the anti-documentary Dylan was filming as the tour progressed, these are the same tapes he and the band listened to after each show, trying to work out if it was them or the booing audiences who had gone insane. They come at you in glorious mono, warts and all: a few songs missing, tapes sometimes running out mid-tune. But you can’t put a price on this stuff. Putting you right onstage, this is history in a box, exploding.
Lift To Experience have created a brand new mix of their only album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads.
The band returned to the original Texas studio – The Echo Lab in Denton County – with engineer Matt Pence. Josh T. Pearson explains, “We went back to the studio, neck deep in the heart of Texas, where Lift recorded The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads – remixing the album the way it should have be mixed originally. It’s good to have our balls back after years spent being castrated.”
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads will be released by Mute on 3 February 2017 with rejuvenated album artwork.
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads will be available on vinyl, CD and as a deluxe box set, which will feature Lift To Experience’s April, 2001 John Peel session as well as their demo EP from 1997.
The full-tracklisting is:
CD1 – Texas
Just As Was Told
Down Came The Angels
Falling From Cloud 9
With Crippled Wings
Waiting To Hit
The Ground So Soft
CD2 -Jerusalem
These Are The Days
When We Shall Touch
Down With The Prophets
To Guard And To Guide You
Into The Storm
Vinyl Boxset LP1 – Texas
Just As Was Told
Down Came The Angels
Falling From Cloud 9
With Crippled Wings
Waiting To Hit
The Ground So Soft
LP2 – Jerusalem
These Are The Days
When We Shall Touch
Down With The Prophets
To Guard And To Guide You
Into The Storm
Peel Session:
Side A
Falling From Cloud 9
The Ground So Soft
Side B:
Just As Was Told
With The World Behind
EP:
Side A:
Falling From Cloud 9
With The World Behind
Johnny Thunders is to be the subject of a new biopic.
Adapted from Nina Antonia’s 1987 biography Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood, the currently-untitled film will be directed by Jonas Åkerlund – best known for his promo videos for Lady Gaga, The Prodigy and Madonna.
Åkerlund’s previous films include Spun, which starred Mickey Rourke, Brittany Murphy and Jason Schwartzman.
Meanwhile, members of Blondie, the Heartbreakers, the Replacements and the MC5 will perform The Heartbreakers’ album L.A.M.F in full at an upcoming benefit concert for writer Stephen Saban. The event takes place in the Marlin Room at New York’s Webster Hall on November 15.
