A handwritten letter Paul McCartney wrote to Prince has sold at auction for $14,822 (£11,233).
The note, which begins “Dear Princely person,” reveals McCartney asked for a donation to help establish the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
The letter recently sold for $14,822 at Boston’s RR Auction.
McCartney co-founded the Institute in 1996.
The letter in full reads:
Dear Princely person,
Hi there! I know how hard it is to always be getting letters that ask for some favour or another, so it was not easy for me to accept the job of Lead Patron for a Performing Arts School to be located in my home town, Liverpool.
But, you guessed it! I did agree to do it, so now I’m writing to “friends and all good people” to try and interest them in the scheme.
The story started just after the inner-city riots in Liverpool a few years ago. A friend suggested that “what the city needs is a “Fame” School.”
I liked the idea as a possible positive focus for local and overseas kids, but it was only later when I went back to my own old school that was in ruins, that I thought by locating a Performing Arts Centre there we could save the 1825 building in the process.
So….. (phew!)
We’re now well on our way, as the enclosed info shows, but there’s still a lot to be done.
Now the hard part. A donation from you would be a great boost to the project, and I know your involvement in some way, would be a thrill for everyone concerned.
Hope you didn’t mind me writing this, it’s so long since I’ve written letters I feel like I’m back at school myself.
Anyway, one of these days you’ll have to come and teach a class some moves!!
Who knows, it may turn out to be something special for thousands of future kids.
Mudcrutch have released a new video for their track, “I Forgive It All“.
The track appears on the band’s second album, Mudcrutch 2.
The band – who consist of Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Tom Leadon and Randall Marsh – formed in Gainesville, Florida in 1970. They broke up in 1975. Petty reformed the band in 2007, and they finally released their self-titled debut the following year.
The video has been directed by Sean Penn and stars Anthony Hopkins.
“Sean really put his heart in it,” Petty told Uncut. “It’s really good. It’s really good.”
It was the comeback they said would never, could never, happen. But in 2004, the Pixies reformed, and blew everyone’s minds again. Here, the band who invented Nirvana and Radiohead speak exclusively to Uncut about their dramatic rise and fall and rise again. Words: Nick Hasted. Originally published in Uncut’s December 2004 issue (Take 91).
________________________
“I didn’t do those songs for a long time, because I was already demonised and made a fool of – ‘Oh yeah, he used to be cool, and look at him now! He’s hardly selling any records, the fucking idiot!’ So I felt, I’m not going to give people more fuel and go up there and sing ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’, so they could go, ‘Yeah look at him, the only decent song is his old hit.'”
It’s September 2004, and Charles Thompson, aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis, is in an LA hotel room, midway through the triumphant tour that has reunited his band the Pixies after 12 long years, and seen his reputation miraculously revived. But he hasn’t forgotten the contempt heaped on him in the time between. He has some scores he’s been itching to settle, and he’s about to explode with rage.
“It’s frustrating to think, ‘Oh yeah, I was a genius five years ago, and now I’m an idiot’,” he simmers. “That doesn’t add up for me, neither one. It bothers me when people get personal and lampoon me because I’m overweight, or because I have male-pattern baldness. I’m 39 years old, you dumb fuck. You think I’m gonna go and get a fucking hair transplant? I don’t really give a shit if I have a bald spot on my skull. Does that mean I’m not supposed to be in a rock band? You’re not gonna tell Biggie Smalls that he’s a fat fuck, are you, you lameass motherfucker? But you’re gonna make fun of me because I’m a chunky guy? I just wanna get into a fist-fight with these people. I feel like I’m back in junior high school, and people are making fun of the fat kid. I’m a middle-aged man, and I’m an artist, I make fucking goddamn art. I’m contributing, for better or worse, to higher culture. I tour around the fucking planet. There are people who pay me thousands and thousands of dollars, even at the lowest point of my career, to come and bring art to their town. And you guys are lampooning me because I don’t look like some fucking heroin addict? Fuck you! No!”
The Pixies have loomed so large over Thompson’s wilderness years that those around him dared not even say the band’s name until recently. But others have not been so bashful. Nirvana, Radiohead and PJ Harvey are among those who have freely admitted to cribbing the core of their sound from the Pixies, a chain reaction without which rock’s last decade would be unimaginable. The band may have sounded like no-one else in their five short years of making records, with their soft verses of bone-crunching incest and outer-space dreams and unholy, shrieking choruses. But their reunion shows have been places of reverence, as if whole generations want to make up for lost time; as if, rather than humble prophets lighting the way for Cobain, the Pixies were rock’s real messiahs all along.
It’s a story that Kim Deal, always the band’s most unrestrained voice, has been dissuaded from telling Uncut. But Thompson, Joey Santiago and many others from their glory days speak long and freely, clearly still in love with the band that changed all their lives. It is one of rock’s strangest tales, fuelled by repression and denial as much as riotous abandon. As Jeff Craft, the Pixies’ agent to this day, warns Uncut, they were always a band with secrets.
“There is another world that’s underneath everything,” he warns. “On the face of it, they all appear to be very polite, ordinary people. And then you listen to what they do. You can’t make music like that and be as they appear to be. That means that there is always something below the surface. But if they allowed it to come out, then they couldn’t possibly exist. They avoid confrontation all the time. Just in case the confrontation tapped into that thing beneath. They are all strange characters. None of them are normal. They’ve all got their own personal anxieties, but they all have to keep the lid on them. The Pixies are like a volcano, with a tough crust over it. But it could go off any day.”
Love‘s Forever Changes was originally intended as a double album, guitarist Johnny Echols has told Uncut.
The legendary album, mostly written by frontman Arthur Lee and released in November 1967, was planned as a conceptual, narrative-based release.
“We had planned to do songs that fitted together and told a story,” says Echols in the current issue of Uncut, which is on sale in UK shops and available to buy digitally. “But the story is not complete as not all of the music that was written for the story was recorded. You don’t get the full impact. And that’s sad – it’s like watching a movie with the middle or the end taken out.”
The guitarist explains that the album was originally planned to include songs by him, as well as more songs written by the group’s second songwriter, Bryan MacLean. The version of Forever Changes that was released only featured two by MacLean – opening track “Alone Again Or“, and “Old Man“.
“I wouldn’t have done a double,” argues Elektra label boss Jac Holzman. “You have to have the material to produce enough material for two records that would mean something. I didn’t think they had it. But when I heard the finished thing, I was in love with it.”
Echols, Holzman, Love drummer Michael Stuart-Ware and producer Bruce Botnick explain the full tale behind the making of Forever Changes in the new issue of Uncut, out now – while the musicians in Arthur Lee’s later Love groups reveal how the songwriter grew to understand the record decades later.
James Booker is described by Dr John as “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.” You can also add conspiracy enthusiast, jailbird and enthusiastic teller of tall tales. At one point, director Lily Keber stacks together the different yarns Booker span to friends and associates about the loss of his eye. One involved being thrown from a window by debt collectors, another occurred during a fight with Ringo Starr and yet another was, mysteriously, “something to do with Jackie Kennedy”.
Booker, who died aged 43 in 1983, backed a huge number of musicians – from Fats Domino to Little Richard, Jerry Garcia and John Mayall. But his solo work – shown here in rollocking, flamboyant archive performances – allowed him to give full flight to his infectious and innovative mix of jazz, blues and classical. Harry Connick Jr – whose father Harry Connick Sr occasionally acted as Booker’s legal counsel – is among the local musicians queuing up to pay tribute: “There’s nobody that could even remotely come close to his playing ability,” he says.
But despite his gifts, Booker spent much of his adult life addicted to drugs – he was given morphine as a child when an ambulance hit him and broke his leg. In 1970, he was incarcerated for possession of heroin in the Louisiana State Penitentiary – a former slave breeding plantation nicknamed ‘Angola’. Later, he toured East Germany wearing an afro wig stuffed with weed. “It was hard for James to take care of himself,” remembers one friend. Promoters would book him, “shovel cocaine up his nose, feed him Crème de Cacao or Seagram’s 7 and make money off his performance.” Yet in an unexpected turn of events, Booker took a job at City Hall and tried to clean himself up. It came too late. “It’s just pathetic that he passed away so young,” says Dr John. “It’s life, and how it goes in a world of this racket we call music.”
A long one this week, including a new PJ Harvey tune, a Stereolab-sampling Jamila Woods, lots of other things and not one but two new albums from Hiss Golden Messenger, which I’ll doubtless go on about ad nauseam until they finally drop in October. I don’t seem to have played “Golden Sings…” these past few days, surprisingly, but please do have a look at my interview with Ryley Walker that I posted the other day; very interesting and entertaining man.
Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey
1 Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band – Wede Harer Guzo (Awesome Tapes From Africa)
2 Noura Mint Seymali – Arbina (Glitterbeat)
3 Syrinx – Tumblers From The Vault: 1970-1972 (RVNG INTL)
4 Scott Hirsch – Blue Rider Songs (Scissortail)
5 Jenny Hval – Blood Bitch (Sacred Bones)
6 Psychic Temple – III (Asthmatic Kitty)
7 Pye Corner Audio – Stasis (Ghost Box)
8 Stevie Wonder – Songs In The Key Of Life (Motown)
9 NORE – Nothin’ (Def Jam)
10 Robert Stillman – Time Of Waves (Orindal)
11 Betty Davis – The Columbia Years 1968-1969 (Light In The Attic)
12 Sarathy Korwar – Day To Day (Ninjatune)
13 Television – Adventure (Elektra)
14 Thee Oh Sees – A Weird Exits (Castleface)
15 Jamila Woods – Heavn (Closed Sessions)
16 Hiss Golden Messenger – Heart Like A Levee (Merge)
To mark Harry Dean Stanton‘s 90th birthday today, I thought I’d post my interview with him from our July 2014 issue, around the release of the Partly Fiction documentary and album. We had to cut short our interview when he learned that a friend had been admitted to hospital; we reconvened the following night. Considering the company he has kept over the years – Brando, Nicholson, Dylan – he came noticeably modest and sweet-natured. Anyway, here he is – a great man and it was a genuine pleasure to have interviewed him. Long may he continue to be a marvellous analogue presence in a digital world.
After over 250 roles, Harry Dean Stanton has all but retired from the movies. These days, it seems the actor – an indelible, laconic presence in films like Cool Hand Luke, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Wild At Heart, Alien, Repo Man and Paris, Texas – spends much of his free time watching television. “I’m addicted to the game show channels,” he reveals. “I hate the hosts and the people. I just like the questions and answers.” But cinema’s loss is music’s gain: aged 87, Stanton has recorded his debut album, a collection of covers of songs by Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Fred Neil which accompanies a new documentary about the actor, Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction. As a singer, Stanton has regularly performed at some of Los Angeles’ most colourful watering holes. He lists Luciano Pavarotti and Patsy Cline as his favourite singers, while conversation is peppered with references to musicians he has befriended through the years. “I love Dylan’s work, and Kristofferson,” says Harry Dean. “I’ve sung with both of them, in fact. Tom Waits, we’re good friends. He’s gnarly. He’s a fine poet. James Taylor’s song, ‘Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox’? He borrowed my guitar to compose that song.”
After turning the sound down on his television, Harry Dean focusses his attention on your questions. “I’m sure there’s dozens more things we could talk about,” he says, after a lengthy, digressive chat that’s taken in Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Leon Russell and Alfred Hitchcock. “But I think we got enough, don’t you?”
Harry Dean, do you like chocolate bunnies? David Lynch
Chocolate bunnies? Of course. David is a big fan of mine. He first got in touch with me to play the part Dennis Hopper ended up playing in Blue Velvet. Because I play myself as much as I can, I didn’t want to go there emotionally, I guess, killing people and stuff. I told him to get Dennis. Dennis had dropped out at that time. He was down in New Mexico or somewhere, I think. I really liked The Straight Story. It was very touchingly written, the scene I had. David called me up and said, “I want you to do the last scene in the movie and I want you to cry.” He had me read a letter from Chief Seattle to the President in the 1800s. Chief Seattle was the first Indian to be put on a reservation. He wrote this great letter to the President: “How could you buy or sell the sky…” It’s beautiful. Anyway, it makes me cry. So I read that. And cried.
Uncut’s latest Ultimate Music Guide is a 124-page blockbuster dedicated to the extraordinary life and even more extraordinary music of Eric Clapton. It’s the story of a guitarist so great they called him God, and the epic lengths he went to prove his mortality.
For this expansive tribute magazine, we’ve unearthed a wealth of long-lost Clapton interviews from the archives of NME and Melody Maker. They stretch from the hesitant first steps of The Yardbirds, through the volatile supergroups era of Cream and Blind Faith, and on into a solo career where encounters veer from drunken tragicomedy to moments of great reflective wisdom.
We’ve also revisited every one of Clapton’s albums to provide a comprehensive survey of his career; a career which, observed from the vantage point of 2016, is a lot more consistent than even the guitarist himself might credit.
In the words of his great compadre, JJ Cale, he’s got that green light, babe. He’s got to keep moving on…
It is a previously unreleased song from The Hope Six Demolition Project sessions, recorded in January 2015 during Harvey’s month long Recording In Progress residency at Somerset House.
The song is released on digital platforms worldwide today [July 13].
Meanwhile, tickets go on sale for Harvey’s forthcoming European tour, including two shows at London’s Brixton Academy in October, followed by Glasgow, Manchester and Wolverhampton.
The full list of live dates, including two festivals, is:
Oct 10 Falconer, Copenhagen, Denmark
Oct 12 Tower Hall, Warsaw, Poland
Oct 13 Forum Karlin Hall, Prague, Czech Republic
Oct 15 Palladium, Cologne, Germany
Oct 16 HMH, Amsterdam, Holland
Oct 18 Rockhal, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Oct 19 Forest National, Brussles, Belgium
Oct 21 Zenith, Paris, France
Oct 23 Alcatraz, Milan, Italy
Oct 24 Obihall, Florence, Italy
Oct 25 Hallenstadion Club, Zurich, Switzerland
Oct 27 Coliseum, Lisbon, Portugal
Oct 28 Bime Festival, Bilbao, Spain
Oct 30 Brixton Academy, London, UK
Oct 31 Brixton Academy, London, UK
Nov 2 SECC, Glasgow, UK
Nov 3 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester, UK
Nov 4 Starworks Warehouse, Wolverhampton, UK
Nov 6 Iceland Airwaves Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis has written the soundtrack for a new film, Hell Or High Water.
The film is directed by British filmmaker David Mackenzie (Starred Up) and written by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario). It stars Ben Foster, Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges.
Said Mackenzie, “What I love about Nick and Warren’s film music is that it’s epic and expansive without being grandiose. For me as a filmmaker this hits a sweet spot where the score is able to have scale and emotion but not feel manipulative or overwhelming.”
The soundtrack is released on August 12 via Milan Records. Aside from the score from Cave and Ellis, it includes songs by Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt.
Hell Or High Water tracklisting is:
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Comancheria”
Townes Van Zandt: “Dollar Bill Blues”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Mama’s Room”
Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Dust of the Chase”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Texas Midlands”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Robbery”
Waylon Jennings: “You Ask Me To”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Mountain Lion Mean”
Colter Wall: “Sleeping on the Backtop”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “From My Cold Dead Hands”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Lord of the Plains”
Scott H. Biram: “Blood, Sweat and Murder”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Casino”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: “Comancheria II”
Chris Stapleton: “Outlaw State of Mind”
A new documentary about Marvin Gaye has been announced.
Gabriel Clarke and Torquil Jones will co-direct, with their Noah Media Group partners John McKenna and Victoria Barrell producing, who together made up the team behind documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans.
Marvin, What’s Going On? will focus on the singer’s creation of his 1971 album, drawing from interviews with Gaye’s fellow Motown artists and previously unseen archive footage.
The film also marks the first time that the Gaye children, along with his former-wife, have supported and contributed to such a project.
In a statement, Gaye’s three children Nona, Marvin III and Frankie Gaye have also spoken about their involvement in the project, “We would like to express our excitement about the upcoming documentary feature film about our father and the creation of his amazing What’s Going On album. We are proud that his relevance remains intact and we look forward to being a part of this cinematic journey.”
In the next issue of Uncut, I’ve written a big review of Ryley Walker’s terrific third album, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. To go with that review, I called him up in Chicago a couple of weeks for a chat. A longish extract of that interview will appear in the mag, but Ryley is a generous and entertaining talker, and so I thought the full transcript – in which he discusses Chicago, Eitzel, Kozelek, his wild years, God, the touring life, being a “dumbass”, being a “giant dick”, being a guitar “fraud”, being a “total idiot”, being immensely self-deprecating and so on – would be worth parking here. It begins with Ryley at breakfast, having just made a smoothie.
“It’s mango and banana, man, a little yogurt, a little ice. I’m trying to live a long time…”
I figured we should talk about what happened after Primrose Green, and how you got fairly quickly from Primrose Green to Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. Pretty soon after the album came out last year you were talking to Uncut about how you’d moved on and weren’t interested in those songs any more. How soon did the ideas that became Golden Sings start formulating in your head?
Well we recorded Primrose Green about a year before it came out, so I’d probably heard those songs about 500 times before it came out. When the tour for Primrose Green began in March or April last year, we had half this record written. I knew I wanted to make an album a year, so come the summer I was fixated on having the songs recorded this year and out next year. Three records in three years; it was a huge goal of mine.
You were saying at the time that it was going to be just four long songs and that you were listening to Stormcock a lot.
Oh man, I totally forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me. It was important I did something different, so at first it was like, ‘Oh, I’ll do a four song suite’. Everyone else in the band said ‘that sounds stupid’, so they kinda talked me out of it. I had this song “Sullen Mind”, one of the first ones I wrote, and I originally wanted it to be one side of the record. More ideas kept coming to me, and I needed more songs on the record. I think I just wanted it to be weird at first. I wanted my label to be like, ‘What? What in the hell are we going to do with this?’ I thought that’d be interesting, to not have a single, and not have anything that could be played on the radio, something like a Coltrane record or Stormcock, but I just kept writing these kind of baroque songs.
It still kind of works as a suite, though.
The songs do flow together nicely, for sure, but there are definitely no 15-minute sprawlers. Since I recorded Primrose Green I’ve changed so much as a songwriter and as a guitar player. I feel like kind of a fraud in the guitar business, theres so many great guitar players out there today. I just wanted to focus on songs rather than be a guitar player.
I guess the Bill Mackay and Charles Rumback duet records are outlets for you to concentrate on the guitar stuff?
Yeah those are important, too. It’s important for me to keep people close who are way better than me; Bill Mackay is just an unbelievable guitarist and a very good friend. He’s going to start playing in my band on tour. All the guys who play in my regular band are so busy, and they have a band on their own. It’s always nice to change the band too. It keeps it refreshing for me live and I guess the audience too. The personality of the music changes so much with different musicians, they improvise differently, their approach is different. Some drink more, some drink less; that can have an effect too when you’re sitting around in a bar in England for six hours before a show. The DNA of the music can be altered, and that makes four months of touring pretty bearable when you know every night’s going to be completely different.
The Primrose Green record’s OK and it connects with a lot of people, I don’t dislike it. I just got in the groove last year of writing lyrically. I didn’t want a picture on this record, I wanted everything to be different; a fresh start.
It feels more composed and less jammed. Is that fair?
That’s really fair. We usually write on the road, I come up with a riff and we just try it, and a lot of times we fall flat on our face doing that, but it works. As far as recording, pretty much every note was accounted for and calculated, and that was a nice rigid structure. We also took a lot of time, at least for me. The last record, aesthetically, was ‘let’s do this really quick’ – economically as well. But with this one we took 10 days instead of one or two, so we had time to listen back to things, and we had Leroy Bach as producer and as an objective voice. He had the perspective to say ‘that’s shit, that’s cool’; he had so much wisdom and confidence from making far-out records for most of his life, and it was nice having him in there to guide things.
It strikes me he’s one of the key reasons why this feels like such a Chicago record.
Yeah, for sure. He’s done so many great records, and not just the Wilco records. It might be a cliché, but he’s really in it for the music. He was in the biggest band in the world and he stepped out to play free jazz at the California Clipper, which is a bar four blocks from me. He curates the live music there and he’s there every night to see everything, he plays most nights too. He’s just a fantastic dude to have around, a really smart and cool guy.
There are some real echoes of Chicago music in there as well, like the Jim O’Rourke feel of “The Halfwit In Me”.
Oh yeah, definitely. Playing all these baroque structures and adding a clarinet or whatever, Leroy really shaped that song. It was real different when I wrote it last fall. We recorded the record in December and I think I started going to Leroy’s house in October. I hadn’t seen him for a long time and we were at Bill Mackay’s birthday party last March. I was hammered and like, “Leroy man, you’d be a great record producer,” and he said, “I haven’t done that in a long time.” I was like, “Will you do it?” and he said, “I dunno, I’ll get back to you,” then I totally forgot about it.
He has a little house in Humboldt Park on the west side of town and a big practice space in there with a piano, so I brought my guitar over in October last year and he was like, ‘What ideas do you have?’ “The Halfwit In Me” was one of the first songs I brought to him, and that whole first part he kind of composed, wrote the piano part and the bass parts. He brought a veteran Chicago sound to it, which is great; I grew up on those records – The Sea And Cake, Gastr Del Sol, Shrimp Boat, they were all very important to me in my upbringing.
Has a god ever strived harder to be mortal than Eric Clapton? As we were piecing together our Clapton Ultimate Music Guide (on sale in the UK on Thursday, but available from our online shop now), that question kept running through my mind. Here, after all, appeared to be a guitar hero who tried to disappear into the ranks. A blues purist who kept finding himself at the forefront of musical revolutions. An everyman so gifted that he couldn’t help but become a superstar, even as he tried to run away from it. This is, perhaps, the paradox of the man they called God: no matter how many style changes and sidesteps he has made, his genius has always remained visible to extraordinary numbers of true believers.
“It’s one of my character defects that the best party is always down the road,” Clapton admitted to Uncut’s Nigel Williamson in 2004. “When I get what I want, I don’t want it any more.” He was talking specifically about the end of Cream, and about how Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker “had a lot more respect for what we were doing than I did.” The welcoming bonhomie of Delaney, Bonnie and friends would soon embrace him, and lead him down a path of making the kind of unadorned, communal music, rooted in American tradition, that would make him happiest – and, of course, make millions of other people happy, too.
Soon enough, though, the Clapton myth would hit further complications: an epic love story, full of harrowing twists to be memorialised in song; a litany of addictions; a controversial habit of speaking his mind. “I was fed up with being nominated all the time,” he tells Melody Maker in 1978, exhausted with the burden of being our Greatest Living Guitarist. “It was just getting on my nerves. How can you live with that on your back? You can’t. It’s best just to be A Musician.”
Here, then, is the complete story of A Musician, albeit one who worked his way through five epochal bands before he was 26, and then embarked on one of the most cherishable and enduring of rock solo careers. For this expansive Ultimate Music Guide, we’ve taken our usual trip into the archives and come back with a wealth of long-lost interviews from NME and Melody Maker. They stretch from the hesitant first steps of The Yardbirds, through the volatile supergroups era of Cream and Blind Faith, and on into a solo career where encounters veer from drunken tragicomedy to moments of great reflective wisdom. We’ve also revisited every one of Clapton’s albums to provide a comprehensive survey of his career; a career which, observed from the vantage point of 2016, is a lot more consistent than even the guitarist himself might credit.
In the words of his great compadre, JJ Cale, he’s got that green light, babe. He’s got to keep moving on…
Monsters Of Folk – the indie supergroup comprised of M. Ward, Conor Oberst and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, reunited over the weekend for their first performance together in nearly six years.
They appeared during M. Ward’s set opening for Brian Wilson at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday [July 9], reports Consequence Of Sound. Mike Mogis, the band’s fourth member, was absent.
The group hadn’t performed together onstage since their 2010 tour in support of their lone 2009 LP, but during Ward’s set they performed three tracks: Monsters of Folk’s “Whole Lotta Losin’” plus Ward’s own “Vincent O’Brien” and “To Save Me“.
Think of the New Orleans sound and you’ll probably think of musical pandemonium. The ecstatic holler of Dixieland, the discordant clatter of ragtime piano, the chaotic squall of the marching band, right up to the “dirty south” hip-hop of the Cash Money and No Limit labels.
One of New Orleans’ most famous sons, Allen Toussaint, who died last November, aged 77, could certainly cut rough, producing raucous, chart-topping dancefloor fillers, from Ernie K Doe’s 1961 single “Mother-In-Law” to Labelle’s 1975 “Lady Marmalade”, via all those killer Meters grooves that have been sampled to death by hip-hop DJs.
His solo albums, however, paint a much more genteel vision of Crescent City. All the signature components are there – the “Spanish-tinged” habanera pulse, the twin-fisted stride piano acrobatics, the influence of whorehouse pianists such as Professor Longhair, Dr John, James Booker, Fats Domino and Jelly Roll Morton. But there’s a daintiness in the way Toussaint refracts these influences, like a parlour pianist creating a low-volume, gently bubbling pandemonium.
Six of the 14 tracks on this posthumous album are piano solos, recorded at his own home studio in New Orleans, all of which illustrate how Toussaint masterfully irons out the kinks and the dissonances from the city’s music. On a version of Professor Longhair’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” – a song best known to British listeners as the theme to A Bit Of Fry & Laurie – he turns Professor Longhair’s chaotic original into a quizzical, spacious jazz miniature, all open chords and modal improvisations. While improvising around “Big Chief”, another N’Awlins boogie-woogie classic, he artfully segues into Chopin’s Prelude in C minor (the same chords that Barry Manilow used as the basis for “Could It Be Magic”). Fats Waller’s “Viper’s Drag” is turned into a wonderfully jaunty Pink Panther prowl. Tellingly, he also includes a piano piece by a fascinating 19th-century composer called Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a Jewish Creole pianist from Louisiana whose quirky, romantic solos prefigured New Orleans jazz by half a century.
The jazz songbook provides the backbone of American Tunes, with standards that Toussaint tackles in his wonderfully dainty way. Earl Hines’ “Rosetta” – an uptempo piece of jump jive in the hands of Nat King Cole or Django Reinhardt – is taken at half speed and turned into a dainty ballad. Bill Evans’ “Waltz For Debby” is Toussaint-ized to the point that it’s not actually a waltz at all, but a stately boogie-woogie in 4/4. “Confessin’ That I Love You”, is a played quite straight, with a few Thelonious Monk-ish blue notes and quirky gaps in the melody.
The standards also give room for the guests. Bill Frisell’s guitar wobbles deliciously on a few tracks, in particular Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom”, while Duke Ellington’s “Rocks In My Bed” features Rhiannon Giddens doing her best Cotton Club howl.
If there’s one thing missing from this album, it’s Toussaint’s yawning, slyly soulful voice. When it finally crops up on the titular final track, “American Tune” – over Greg Leisz’s acoustic guitar – it’s like the arrival of an old friend to a party. Over Bach’s hymnal melody and Paul Simon’s lyrics of weariness and struggle, Toussaint sounds like he’s singing his life story. “Still, tomorrow’s gonna be another working day/And I’m trying to get some rest”, he sighs, wearily, turning the song into the Civil Rights anthem that it was always destined to be.
The story has it that Allen Toussaint’s best known song, “Southern Nights” – a US chart-topper for Glenn Campbell in 1977 – was inspired when his friend Van Dyke Parks visited him in the studio in 1975 to help fix Toussaint’s writers’ block. “Consider that you were going to die in two weeks,” VDP suggested. “If you knew that, what would you think you would like to have done?” It’s fitting that Van Dyke Parks turned up only weeks before Toussaint’s shock death last year to collaborate on an instrumental version of “Southern Nights”, turning the song into a piano duet, overlaying glissandos, classical flourishes and oriental-sounding harmonies over the top of Toussaint’s wistful, dream-like meditation on rural Louisiana. It’s the perfect instrumental eulogy for one of America’s true musical greats.
Johnny Marr joined The Last Shadow Puppets on stage at Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl, where he played “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me“, from The Smiths‘ 1987 album, Strangeways, Here We Come.
You can watch footage below.
Meanwhile, Marr’s former bandmate Mike Joyce was also at the gig and wrote on Facebook: “So I’m at The Last Shadow Puppets gig tonight and Johnny Marr walks on and they play, ‘Last Night I Dreamt…’
“The guy next to me says, “Seen the guy on the right with black hair? That’s Johnny Marr, the guitarist from The Smiths and this is a Smiths song they’re playing”. I didn’t say owt, I just couldn’t.”
Marr also performed a cover of The Fall’s “Totally Wired” with The Last Shadow Puppets.
PJ Harvey will play 17 headline dates across Europe later this year, including two shows at London’s Brixton Academy in October, followed by Glasgow, Manchester and Wolverhampton.
Harvey has played a number of festivals – including London’s Field Day and Glastonbury Festival – in support of her The Hope Six Demolition Project album.
The tour has been directed by theatre director Ian Rickson, dressed by Ann Demeulemeester, with lighting by Adam Silverman and set design by multi-media artist Jeremy Herbert. Harvey is joined by long-time collaborators John Parish, Mick Harvey and Jean-Marc Butty, and friends Alain Johannes, Terry Edwards, James Johnston, Kenrick Rowe, Alessandro Stefana and Enrico Gabrielli.
The full list of live dates, including two festivals, is:
Oct 10 Falconer, Copenhagen, Denmark
Oct 12 Tower Hall, Warsaw, Poland
Oct 13 Forum Karlin Hall, Prague, Czech Republic
Oct 15 Palladium, Cologne, Germany
Oct 16 HMH, Amsterdam, Holland
Oct 18 Rockhal, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Oct 19 Forest National, Brussles, Belgium
Oct 21 Zenith, Paris, France
Oct 23 Alcatraz, Milan, Italy
Oct 24 Obihall, Florence, Italy
Oct 25 Hallenstadion Club, Zurich, Switzerland
Oct 27 Coliseum, Lisbon, Portugal
Oct 28 Bime Festival, Bilbao, Spain
Oct 30 Brixton Academy, London, UK
Oct 31 Brixton Academy, London, UK
Nov 2 SECC, Glasgow, UK
Nov 3 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester, UK
Nov 4 Starworks Warehouse, Wolverhampton, UK
Nov 6 Iceland Airwaves Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland
Tickets for London on sale Wednesday 13 July at 9am BST. Tickets for Glasgow, Manchester and Wolverhampton on sale Friday 15 July at 9am BST. For information visit www.pjharvey.net
David Gilmour performed two shows at the Pompeii Amphitheatre in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, marking the first time he has played there in 45 years.
Gilmour, who had previously played at the amphitheatre for the 1971 film Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii, played songs from his current album, Rattle That Lock, as well as a number of Pink Floyd classics.
Among them were “One Of These Days“, the only song that was also performed at the 1971 show, “The Great Gig In The Sky” – sung in three-part harmony by backing vocalists Louise Marshall, Lucy Jules and Bryan Chambers – and “Wish You Were Here“, whose new arrangment featured a honky-tonk solo from keyboardist Chuck Leavell.
Gilmour – who has been made an honorary citizen of Pompeii – said of the shows “It’s a magical place and coming back and seeing the stage and the arena was quite overwhelming. It’s a place of ghosts… in a friendly way.”
David Gilmour Live In Pompeii setlist
1st Set
5am
Rattle That Lock
Faces Of Stone
What Do You Want From Me
The Blue
Great Gig In The Sky
A Boat Lies Waiting
Wish You Were Here
Money
In Any Tongue
High Hopes
2nd Set
One Of These Days
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Fat Old Sun
Coming Back To Life
On An Island
The Girl In The Yellow Dress
Today
Sorrow
Run Like Hell
It is nine days after at least some of the people of Britain choose to leave Europe. Uncertainty is rife, domestic as well as international politics appear to have entered a grotesque post-factual phase, and musical respite would be hugely welcome. On the face of it, a rapper who observes, deep into “These Walls”, that “race wars happening”, might not be the most obvious escapist choice. Kendrick Lamar, after all, has spent the past few years assiduously documenting the iniquities suffered by impoverished, marginalised communities in America. In the wake of a horrific spike in the number of racist incidents reported in the UK, it seems possible that his set in London’s Hyde Park will feel more like a fractionally-adjusted news report than a holiday from reality.
In truth, Lamar is far too complex and potent a performer to be understood in such reductive terms. For an hour, he packs great tranches of learning, wit, politics and rage into the smallprint of his raps, then delivers them in dense and vivid narrative skrees. These are the texts which helped place To Pimp A Butterfly in the upper echelons of 2015’s myriad Album Of The Year polls, not least the one in Uncut. They are not, however, the only weapons in his armoury. Like so many black radical performers before him – Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, for a start (and he deserves to be judged in that company) – Lamar understands that hurt can be combined with showmanship and musical nuance, and that the resulting blend can have great empowering and celebratory potential.
For those who remain sceptical about contemporary hip-hop’s place in an epic musical continuum, Lamar’s set also offers a timely corrective. When his band The Wesley Theory arrive on stage in the late afternoon (they are the notional support act on this Barclaycard British Summer Time bill, just beneath Florence & The Machine), they begin with a limber jazz-funk instrumental that sounds as if it could’ve been a Crusaders offcut. In fact, subsequent research reveals it to be a discreet version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love”.
Lamar himself arrives a couple of minutes later, nonchalant in a Boy London sweat and ripped jeans. When he reaches the centre of the stage and drops his mic into its stand, the band stop playing with uncanny precision. Now, he pauses to stare coolly and silently at the crowd for what seems an audaciously long time, and immediately the session’s ground rules are established: control and command.
The band might not include the marquee jazz musicians like Thundercat, Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper and Ambrose Akinmusire who invigorated so much of To Pimp A Butterfly; one of them, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, is preparing to play his own set on the other side of the festival site. Nevertheless, The Wesley Theory can kick up a fearsome avant cacophony on the opening “For Free”, a suitably freestyle backing for Lamar’s poetics, at this point equal parts Gil Scott-Heron and Ken Nordine. Sheet metal guitar blasts also add rabble-rousing punctuation to some of the selections from 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City like “Backseat Freestyle” and “M.A.A.D City” itself, the song’s two distinct parts played separately, and in reverse order.
They are most comfortable, though, with the deceptively lugubrious, roomy grooves that allow most space for Lamar’s verbal pyrotechnics. Sometimes – on the outstanding “These Walls” and “Money Trees” – these provide a considered, historically resonant update on the lope of G-funk. While other songs are mashed and abbreviated to pack in as much action as possible into a tight festival set, Lamar lets “These Walls” and “Money Trees” run in full, allowing his words to linger a little more poignantly.
Given an extra ten or 15 minutes, you’d hope he would go into more abstracted territory, into the sort of strung-out meditations that surfaced on this year’s valuable set of offcuts, Untitled Unmastered. But for the most part, modernism is delivered in a similar fashion to how Lamar delivers his political insights; in overwhelming torrents. By the end and “Alright”, the filigree jazz funk has been diced into martial surges, and Lamar is exhorting the crowd to jump with him, and turning a song of hope and doubt into one of triumphal consolation. He exits briskly, as the refrain of Boris Gardiner’s “Every Nigga Is A Star” reverberates around Hyde Park.
Although his music is more conventionally rooted in jazz, and predominantly instrumental, Kamasi Washington’s set taps into a similar spirit. “Our love, our beauty, our genius/Our work, our triumph, our glory,” Patrice Quinn sings on “The Rhythm Changes”, but the song’s momentum shifts live, from the languid supper club hit on Washington’s 2015 blockbuster The Epic, into something driven by two drummers hammering breakbeats, creating a much more forceful piece of music with explicit affinities to hip-hop. This is very much the vibe throughout Washington’s ecstatic 45 minutes, as “Change Of The Guard” and “Askim” are reborn in intense new forms. The former is especially supercharged, transformed into a call-to-arms that operates somewhere between peak Funkadelic and Archie Shepp’s impassioned Attica Blues. There’s a sense that Washington’s infectious energy has caught one of those rare moments when jazz – helped of course by the efforts of Lamar – can occupy a place adjacent to the mainstream; or at least the open-minded European festival circuit, for one rewarding summer, in spite of everything.
Kendrick Lamar, meanwhile, heads straight back to the States. Two days later, he plays a July 4 barbecue at the White House, and President Obama applauds Lamar and his fellow performer Janelle Monae for being “amazing artists… but they’re also very conscious about their responsibilities and obligations.” It is unclear whether “Institutionalized” – “If I was the president I’d pay my mama’s rent… Lay in the White House and get high” – is performed. By the end of the week, the climate of violence towards black people in America has escalated to what feels like new and awful heights, and a former congressman briefly tweets, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” This, if it really needed spelling out any more explicitly, is the world which Lamar has to navigate, and to somehow reconcile with his superstar privileges. As he articulates on “Hood Politics”: “While my loved ones was fighting a continuous war back in the city/I was entering a new one.”
