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The 23rd Uncut Playlist Of 2016

John Mulvey
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The 23rd Uncut Playlist Of 2016

This week’s default morning Zen music has very much been this Hailu Mergia reissue, but plenty more new things that’ll hopefully be of interest, including a great session from Itasca to download (RIYL Jessica Pratt, Meg Baird, Rosali etc), and footage of one of the highlights of Kendrick Lamar’s storming London show last Saturday. I really should get on with writing about that, actually…

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

1 Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band – Wede Harer Guzo (Awesome Tapes From Africa)

2 Kendrick Lamar – These Walls (Live At Hyde Park)

3 Earth Wind And Fire – Can’t Hide Love (Columbia)

4 Bjorn Olsson – Bjorn Olsson (OM)

5 Itasca – Live At WFMU On The Avant Ghetto 5/30/2016 (Free Download)

6 Various Artists – Electri_city 2 : Elektronische_Musik_Aus_Dusseldorf (Gronland)

7 Various Artists – Imaginational Anthem 8 (Tompkins Square)

8 Miles Davis – Les Filles De Kilimanjaro (Columbia)

9 Mitski – Puberty 2 (Dead Oceans)

10 Pye Corner Audio – Stasis (Ghost Box)

11 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani – FRKWYS Vol 13: Sunergy (RVNG INTL)

12 Various Artists – Basket Full Of Dragons: A Tribute To Robbie Basho Vol II (Obsolete)

13 Kandodo McBain – Lost Chants (Rooster)

14 Scott Hirsch – Blue Rider Songs (Scissortail)

15 The Avalanches – Wildflower (XL)

16 Brother Ah – Sound Awareness (Manufactured Recordings)

17 Cool Ghouls – Animal Races (Melodic/Empty Cellar)

18 Ryley Walker – Golden Sings That Have Been Sung (Dead Oceans)

19 Nathan Bowles – Whole And Cloven (Paradise Of Bachelors)

20 DD Dumbo – Field Recordings (4AD)

21 Kamasi Washington – The Epic (Brainfeeder)

Pixies announce new album, Head Carrier, and share track “Um Chagga Lagga”

Michael Bonner
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Pixies announce new album, Head Carrier, and share track “Um Chagga Lagga”

Pixies have announced details of a new studio album, Head Carrier.

The album will be released on September 30 via Pixiesmusic/Play It Again Sam.

You can hear a track from the album, “Um Chagga Lagga“, below.

Head Carrier has been produced by Tom Dalgety (Killing Joke, Royal Blood) and the band recorded at London’s Rak Studios; the sleeve features original artwork by the band’s longtime art director, Vaughan Oliver.

A special limited edition deluxe box set of Head Carrier will be available exclusively through Pixiesmusic.com, and will include the CD, the album on heavy-weight/180 gram black vinyl, and a 24-page, oversized booklet with the song’s lyrics and Oliver’s artwork.

Also available only through the band’s website is a special bundle that includes the deluxe box set, special t-shirt, and a special screen printed 12 “x 12” record sleeve-sized poster of Oliver’s album artwork.

All songs were written by the Pixies apart from “All I Think About Now”, which was written by Black Francis and Paz Lenchantin.

The tracklisting for Head Carrier is:

Head Carrier
Classic Masher
Baal’s Back
Might As Well Be Gone
Oona
Talent
Tenement Song
Bel Esprit
All I Think About Now
Um Chagga Lagga
Plaster Of Paris
All The Saints

The band have also confirmed the following European dates:

NOVEMBER
15: Stadthalle, Vienna, Austria
16: HWS Arena, Poznan, Poland
17: Forum Karlin Hall, Prague, Czech Republic
18: Auditorium Stravinski, Montreux, Switzerland
20: Sant Jordi Club, Barcelona, Spain
21: Coliseum, Porto, Portugal
23: Zenith, Paris, France
25: Lotto, Antwerp, Belgium
27: HMH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Reviewed! Leon Russell in A Poem Is A Naked Person

Michael Bonner
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Reviewed! Leon Russell in A Poem Is A Naked Person

In 1972, Leon Russell invited the filmmaker Les Blank to visit his recording studio compound in Oklahoma. The musician was on a roll at the time. He had graduated from Delaney & Bonnie And Friends to play a key role in Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs And Englishmen touring band, while his own solo career had taken off with “A Song For You”. Now based in his native Tulsa, Russell and his producer Denny Cordell commissioned Blank to make a film about him. Meanwhile, Blank had recently completed location filming on Dry Wood and Hot Pepper, two documentaries about the life and music of the Creole communities in Louisiana’s Cajun country, when he accepted Russell’s offer. Over a period of two years, Blank and his assistant Maureen Gosling filmed Russell, taking up residence in one of Pappy Reeves Floating Motel Cabins on the Grand Lake Of The Cherokees, not far from Russell’s studio.

A Poem Is A Naked Person is a rich mix of portraiture, social scenes, nature photography and ethnomusicology. His camera holds on shots of water snakes and alligators moving through the lake’s waters, or the retired Oklahoman couple who have come into Russell’s employ. During footage of Willie Nelson performing “Good Hearted Woman”, Blank seems as intent filming the locals at the Floore Country Store Dine Dance as he is framing tight close ups of Nelson’s sweat-drenched face. In a perfect meshing of music and anthropology, he shoots Russell talking to an old boy about the beliefs of the local Quapaw Indians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b7jcBs4BBU

Blank had previously made shorts on Dizzie Gillespie and Lightnin’ Hopkins – musicians of a different discipline to those depicted here. There is plenty of woolly rock talk – “Everything was not what it was supposed to be in the first place,” drawls a stoned-sounding Bill Mullins. There is plenty of horseplay in hotel rooms, paddling pools and other locations. Elsewhere, texture is provided by artist Jim Franklin scooping up baby scorpions from an empty swimming pool, a catfishing expedition and footage of a baby chick being fed to a boa-constrictor as a metaphor for American consumerism. There is live performance, too – splendid, hand-held film of the charismatic Russell leading his band through good time rock’n’soul, in the studio in with local musicians or jamming with Neil Young’s producer David Briggs on a wonky version of “Lady Madonna”.

Russell blocked the release of Blank’s film. It is only due to the perseverance of his son, Harrod, that Russell has finally granted permission. Les Blank died in 2013 with a strong body of documentary films behind him – including the legendary Burden Of Dreams, about Werner Herzog’s filming of Fitzcarraldo. A Poem Is A Naked Person, meanwhile, is a brilliant, free flowing depiction of a time, a place and the people who inhabit it. At one point, Russell appears to break the fourth wall and address the viewer directly. “Are you loaded now?”

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON IS RELEASED IN THE UK ON JULY 8

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Swans – The Glowing Man

Louis Pattison
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Swans – The Glowing Man

When Michael Gira announced that he was reforming his ’80s group Swans in 2010, it was reasonable to be sceptical. In their early life, Swans had pretty much become a byword for violent extremity in the rock’n’roll idiom: a band loud enough to make an audience want to flee the venue, and cruel enough to bolt the doors so they couldn’t. Throughout the two decades of their first incarnation, Swans underwent a mellowing, and come the turn of the millennium, Gira had transitioned into a cowboy-hatted patriarch, recording quietly intense folk music under the name Angels Of Light and playing patron to young musicians including Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family.

With Gira nearing his seventh decade, what could a reformed Swans offer to contemporary music? The answer turned out to be: plenty. A powerful cast of players – including guitarist Norman Westberg and percussionist Thor Harris – paired with Gira’s insatiable, spirited performances, ensured the output of Swans Mark II turned out to be both deeper and wider than the music they made in their first incarnation. This was particularly evident in the live arena, where shows stretched out to three hours, familiar songs sprouted new improvisatory segments, and in the white heat of the stage, new ones blazed into life.

If Swans at times seemed unstoppable, the arrival of The Glowing Man puts pay to that. This is to be the last Swans LP under the current lineup, with the band due to dissolve at the close of the forthcoming tour (Gira will continue recording and touring as Swans, but with a revolving cast of collaborators). Clocking in at two hours, The Glowing Man is every bit as gigantic as the two albums preceding it, 2012’s The Seer and 2014’s To Be Kind. But it has a slightly transitory feel; a half-step back from those monolithic builds and whiplash grooves, gesturing towards something more contemplative and… well, “softer” feels the wrong word, but certainly weathered by the journey.

The presence of country and gospel in Swans’ music has long been noted, but just as key is the influence of New York downtown composers like La Monte Young and Glenn Branca, whose numinous, droning music aimed to capture feelings of transcendence or obliteration. The first two tracks, “Cloud Of Forgetting” and “Cloud Of Unknowing”, clock in at 13 and 25 minutes, respectively, and are not so much songs as vast, arid landscapes – salt flats of sound. Gira himself calls them “prayers”, and they certainly have that feel. The former drifts in on clouds of sobbing lap steel and dulcimer, Gira bellowing like a man supplicant beneath an uncaring sky: “Surrender! Surrender! Take us! Take us!” The album’s title track, meanwhile, is bigger still. Having grown out of a live improvisation around To Be Kind’s “Bring The Sun”, it stretches out to an immense 29 minutes, veering from twinkling orchestral lulls to a malevolent Neu!-meets-Stooges churn.

Several moments on The Glowing Man feel like a reflection on Swans’ past exploits. A fidgety mantra titled “The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black” finds Gira reviving some of his earliest lyrics, borrowed by Thurston Moore for Sonic Youth’s “The World Is Red” on their 1983 debut, Confusion Is Sex. Other tracks feel like farewells, or gesture to a moving on: “People Like Us” is a sea-shanty set adrift on a blasted landscape of methane-belching seas and clouds the colour of rust; while a closing, climactic march titled “Finally, Peace” strikes an almost valedictory tone.

Speaking about Swans in recent times, Gira tends not to talk about pain and cruelty, but love and tenderness. There is compassion, of sorts, in “Frankie M”. Described by Gira as “a best wish for a wounded soul”, it builds from a clamour of voices and beaten cymbal into a eerie strut, over which Gira reels off a litany of banned substances – heroin, opium, methedrine, MDMA – over cascading female voices. Then there is “When Will I Return?”: a song penned by Gira for his wife Jennifer to sing, its harrowing lyric deals with her attempted kidnapping some years before, and she sings it with a tremble in her voice that is clearly genuine. It is a song that leads you to reflect on Gira’s unusual muse. If Swans are the sound of love, it is not a love everyone will recognise as such.

The Glowing Man arrives amid some drama. In February, Larkin Grimm, a former signee to Gira’s Young God Records, accused him of having raped her in 2008. Gira first described the incident as “a slanderous lie”, later as “a consensual romantic moment that fortunately was not consummated” (a former bandmate of Grimm’s has accused her of fabricating accusations of sexual harassment, but the truth of the matter remains opaque). Under this cloud, Swans set off on an 18-month tour that will end with their own scheduled self-destruction. Where next for Michael Gira is unclear, but he’s made a 35-year career out of staring down death. It seems improbable he would stop now.

Q&A
Michael Gira
The reactivation of Swans has clearly been artistically fulfilling for you. Why break up the band?
I love working with these guys – they’re my friends, and we’ve come to know each other’s scent quite well. However, I think it’s reached its apex, and all the things we could discover in one another are played out. It’s necessary for me, if I’m going to continue the name Swans, to shake things up. I basically don’t want a band any more, and the responsibility that that entails. I don’t know what the future route entails. I have some vague colours in my mind, but I don’t know what I’m going to pursue stylistically. I’m looking forward to being utterly adrift.

What is the story behind “When Will I Return”?
I wrote those for my wife to sing. Seven years ago, before I met her, she was walking down a street in New Orleans late at night. A fellow jumped out of some bushes and attempted to abduct her – his car was waiting there, the door open. Being who she is, she fought vigorously. And he beat the shit out of her. But eventually people came, and he fled, and she was hospitalised. I guess there was a person at large with an MO that matched this fellow, who was a serial killer. She had that whole thing where her life flashed in front of her eyes, and she just said: I’m not letting this happen. These things have a lasting effect – it’s altered her brain chemistry, her psyche forever. So this is a tribute, a prayer, saying how much I respect and appreciate her courage and strength.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Introducing The History Of Rock 1977

John Mulvey
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Introducing The History Of Rock 1977

A couple of things happening on Thursday (July 7). First is the arrival of our History Of Rock volume for 1977. It’s the one with The Clash on the cover, and you can order a History Of Rock 1977 from our online shop now.

The second thing is the beginning of an auspicious new event on the calendar: The Syd Arthur Festival, which runs from July 7 until August 3; the dates when Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee died ten years ago. The organisers – Julian Cope, Dorian Cope and Avalon Cope – promise the “ultimate psychic rock’n’roll festival”. “No pricey tickets, no camping like sardines in some infernal swamp,” they write. “For those who choose to engage in these proceedings, they may do so from their own home, favourite areas, but most specifically from within their own minds.”

A great idea, I think, and one which you can find out more about by visiting www.sydarthurfestival.com. Get ready for July 16: “Today, let’s search out Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga dancing to the 13th Floor Elevators’ ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ and join them.”

In the meantime, here’s the intro to that aforementioned new History Of Rock 1977, courtesy of John Robinson…

“Welcome to 1977. After the widely-publicized stirrings of the Sex Pistols at the close of 1976, punk rock has now become more than a media sensation. It is a widespread discussion, talked about in political, and increasingly even in musical terms. Bands like the Clash, Stranglers and Sex Pistols are even releasing albums.

“Mick Jagger has checked out the bands in New York and listened to the singles (‘Chelsea, “Right To Work” – that one’s awful’). Keith Moon makes a riotous trip to The Vortex club, to confront punk rock head on. Robert Plant, who has seen the Damned at the Roxy, is unconcerned. ‘The dinosaurs,’ he memorably says, ‘are still dancing…’

“Still, they are a little on the defensive side. Plant seems anxious to downplay punk’s youth, claiming Rat Scabies and Johnny Rotten are older than they look. They’re not – indeed Plant himself is only 28 – but generationally-speaking he may as well be a cabinet minister. He is professionally expert and enormously wealthy, but in this changed musical economy, this only contributes to his irrelevance.

“His discomfort is not soothed by the press. Punk doesn’t only politicize youth and revolutionize how records are made, it also effects change in music papers, which become bolder in layout, more irreverent in tone. Features by staff writers like Tony Parsons contain important interviews with bands like our cover stars The Clash – but these only support the main thrust of his communiqué.

“This is the world of The History Of Rock, a monthly magazine which follows each turn of the rock revolution. Whether in sleazy dive or huge arena, passionate and increasingly stylish contemporary reporters were there to chronicle events. This publication reaps the benefits of their understanding for the reader decades later, one year at a time. Missed one? You can find History Of Rock back issues here (Worth mentioning that we’ve finally got copies of the first issue, History Of Rock 1965, back in stock if you’re missing that one).

“In the pages of our 13th edition, dedicated to 1977 and on sale in the UK this Thursday, you will find verbatim articles from frontline staffers, filed from the thick of the action, wherever it may be. In court with Keith Richards. Looking at the Westway with the Clash. Being called a wanker with Keith Moon.

“It is Moon, in fact, who best articulates the anxieties of his generation of musician in 1977 when he reveals to a young punk in the Vortex a simple biographical fact.

“’I’m 30,’ he says.”

Oh, and before I go, we have some kind of summer sale thing going on for subscriptions to Uncut magazine. Have a look here and make the most of an opportunity to get hold of Uncut at a hefty discount…

Quintessence – Spirits From Another Time 1969 – 1971

Tom Pinnock
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Quintessence – Spirits From Another Time 1969 – 1971

When Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death at Altamont Speedway on December 9, 1969, the story goes that the ’60s died too, the hippie dream dissolving into a less idealistic, more individualistic era. The echoes of the decade, however, could be felt long after the six had been replaced by the seven, and it’s the frame of this ‘long ’60s’ – a period which historian Arthur Marwick defines as lasting until 1974 – that Quintessence fit within.

Formed in fashionable Ladbroke Grove in 1969, this international six-piece played extended, improvisatory compositions highlighted by lengthy guitar solos, flute, sitar and communal, Indian-inspired chanting. They took on Eastern names to match their philosophies, with Australian flautist and founder Ronald Rothfield becoming Raja Ram, for example, and American bassist Richard Vaughan known as Shambhu Babaji. Far from a niche, underground concern, however, Quintessence quickly signed to Island after a major-label bidding war, and soon appeared frequently in the music weeklies, and even live on BBC2 and in Nicolas Roeg’s Glastonbury Fayre. Across five studio albums, ranging from 1969’s In Blissful Company to 1972’s Indweller, they journeyed into their own groovy mysticism, lyrically paying as much heed to St Pancras and Ladbroke Grove as to Mount Kailash and various deities.

Despite their popularity at the time, they have since slipped under the radar in recent years, being denied the resurgence of, say, The Incredible String Band, or even the credibility of weirder Eastern-inspired acts like The Third Ear Band. Spirits From Another Time attempts to rectify this, with two CDs of outtakes and alternative recordings from the vaults, many forgotten by their creators and in need of reconstruction; two cuts here even feature new guitar and vocals from Dave ‘Maha Dev’ Codling and Phil ‘Shiva’ Jones.

The results are impressive, though Quintessence were clearly at their best when they abandoned their scenester pretensions and Jones’ slightly hammy vocals, and instead launched into relaxed improvisation. Disc One’s 12-minute take of “Epitaph For Tomorrow” is stunning, a steady, subtle groove over which lead guitarist Allan Mostert is free to slowly unwind his subtle soloing, his instrument increasingly affected by echo and wah-wah effects; “Body” similarly embarks on some swinging guitar improvisation, while opener “Notting Hill Gate” moves from exhortations of meditation and “getting it straight” into peals of echoed flute and buzzing sitar. What’s most striking is the restrained, almost ambient manner of their sound, presumably aimed straight at enlightenment rather than hedonism.

If Quintessence’s music is at times too time-stamped, and lyrics like “celestial wine filling you with divinity” too gauche for the cynical decades that came after, perhaps now, with the continuing resurgence of new age music and renewed appreciation for the likes of the Grateful Dead, is the right time again to appreciate these overlooked cosmic adventurers.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Prince online museum launches

Michael Bonner
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Prince online museum launches

An online archive of Prince’s official websites that spans over two decades has launched.

The Prince Online Museum comprises 12 of Prince’s websites, beginning with an early CD-ROM version called Prince Interactive in 1994 up to 3rdEyeGirl.com – his final website.

“We launch with 12 of Prince’s most popular sites, but over 20 years online, Prince launched nearly 20 different websites, maintained a dozen different social media presences, participated in countless online chats and directly connected with fans around the world,” Sam Jennings, director of the museum, told Billboard.

The archive demonstrates Prince’s evolving web presence. By 2001, he launched a site, NPG Music Club, that allowed fans to purchase and stream his music online.

In 2006, Prince won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award and the NPG Music Club won a Webby Award for best celebrity/fan site.

“This Museum is an archive of that work and a reminder of everything he accomplished as an independent artist with the support of his vibrant and dedicated online community,” Jennings said of the initiative.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Queen, Pink Floyd, The Beatles: the biggest-selling albums of all time revealed

Michael Bonner
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Queen, Pink Floyd, The Beatles: the biggest-selling albums of all time revealed

Queen’s Greatest Hits tops the list of the UK’s biggest-selling albums of all-time.

To mark 60 years of the official album chart, OfficialCharts.com has unveiled the 60 biggest-selling albums in the chart’s history.

Queen’s 1981 Greatest Hits collection has an unassailable lead of 6.1 million copies sold. Queen’s Greatest Hits II also makes it into the Top 10 at Number 10 with almost 4 million albums sold.

“What a great bit of news to wake up to!” Brian May told OfficialCharts.com. “The most popular album? Well, I always thought the band showed promise, but this is beyond our boyhood dreams!”

May’s bandmate Roger Taylor added, “Incredible… marvellous… humbling… thank you… I feel good!”

Meanwhile ABBA – Gold: Greatest Hits is the UK’s second biggest-selling album of all-time – nearly 5.2 million copies have been shifted since its release in 1992.

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is at No 3, also is also the only other release in history to break the five million UK sales barrier (5.1 million).

The Top 10 best selling albums in the UK of all time are:

1 Queen – Greatest Hits
2 ABBA – Gold – Greatest Hits
3 The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
4 Adele – 21
5 Oasis – (What’s The Story) Morning Glory
6 Michael Jackson – Thriller
7 Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon
8 Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
9 Michael Jackson – Bad
10 Queen – Greatest Hits II

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Grace Jones – Warm Leatherette Deluxe Edition

Piers Martin
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Grace Jones – Warm Leatherette Deluxe Edition

Disco had sashayed well past its sell-by date by the time Grace Jones’ third album Muse arrived in September 1979. The final instalment in her high-gloss New York trilogy, Muse, like Portfolio and Fame before it, portrayed Jones as the decadent diva still swanning around Studio 54, but no amount of sumptuous Tom Moulton production could disguise the fact that disco had already faded from fashion. Punk and its mutant offspring had wiped off the glitter and a backlash was underway, its mooted US flashpoint the infamous ‘disco demolition night’ at Comiskey Park, the home of the Chicago White Sox, in July ’79. There, thousands of disenfranchised rock fans turned up to a baseball game and stormed the pitch to smash and burn Village People and Bee-Gees records – an isolated, brainless event that quickly made headlines.

Record sales also fell with disco’s decline in the States, down 11 per cent year-on-year from 1978. “I thought we were in a bit of trouble after the third album. It didn’t sell very well,” notes Chris Blackwell, Jones’ Island Records boss, in the singer’s memoirs, published last year. His solution was to invite Jones – pregnant with her son Paolo – to his Compass Point studio complex on the tiny island of Nassau in the Bahamas in a bid to push her in a new direction that would draw attention to her irresistible force and gender-bending qualities, an idea that seemed quite natural at the time but with hindsight proved both prescient and radical. On the cusp of the 1980s, this new decade needed a striking star with a modern, uncompromising sound. Jones, familiar yet unknowable, might fit the bill.

As part of his plan, he and fellow producer Alex Sadkin, who manned the mixing desk, had assembled a crack squad of session musicians who, under Blackwell’s guidance, would interpret recent cult hits and compose new material for Jones. Factory Records’ funk outfit A Certain Ratio were in the running to be the backing band, but it soon became clear that Blackwell’s team of players, dubbed the Compass Point All Stars, had developed extraordinary chemistry when the tape began to roll. Impressed by recent Island signings Black Uhuru, Blackwell recruited bassist Sly Dunbar and drummer Robbie Shakespeare, the backbone of countless dub and reggae grooves, who could claim to be the finest rhythm section in the world. Alongside percussionist Uzziah ‘Sticky’ Thompson and guitarists Mikey Chung and long-time Marianne Faithfull cohort Barry Reynolds, suave Parisian keyboardist Wally Badarou brought European flair to the mix. The group had never played together but gelled almost instantly, producing in these sessions enough material for Warm Leatherette and its more admired successor Nightclubbing.

Warm Leatherette is often considered a rehearsal for Nightclubbing but in some ways it’s the most radical of the pair, because it unveiled to a shocked audience the new-look Jones, presented on the sleeve in stark black and white as a kind of sinister Pierrot by her partner Jean-Paul Goude. Shaded from the Caribbean sunshine, the projected mood is cold, hard and cynical after the gaiety of the disco years. This post-punk menace is all over the music, too, epitomised by Blackwell’s calculated choice of “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal as the first song to be covered. The grubby DIY electro of Mute boss Daniel Miller’s fetishised hymn to JG Ballard’s Crash is a world away from the designer luxe Jones was accustomed to, yet out of this collision between neurotic European new-wave and unflappable Jamaican groove she emerges a changed woman: the diva as Terminator.

She dominates The Pretenders’ “Private Life” and Roxy Music’s “Love Is The Drug”, extending and dubbing-out Chrissie Hynde’s song to make it her own. “When I first heard Grace’s version I thought, ‘Now that’s how it’s supposed to sound’,” Hynde said, no doubt pleased this also became Jones’ first UK hit. Renditions of The Marvelettes’ “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game”, written by Smokey Robinson, and Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” illustrate the breadth of the material covered, while of the original songs, Barry Reynolds’ “Bullshit” has a certain insouciance. Having waded through the numerous 12-inch mixes and alternative versions stacked up on CD2 – all previously released – a dub mix of this synth-heavy cut would be a treat. The key tracks on this disc are the three echo-chamber dub versions of her freaky cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”, which should have been on the album in the first place. Nor should the irony of that title go amiss, because after Warm Leatherette Grace Jones was very much in charge.

Q&A
Wally Badarou, Compass Point All Stars keyboard player
How easily did you all gel as a band for Warm Leatherette?
I suppose when we all realised we were not in for the regular assignment – ie reggae musicians doing reggae, and pop/rock musicians doing pop/rock – we felt there was a challenge to be won, to gain mutual respect and not to disappoint those who had faith in our ability. Chris Blackwell’s enormous charisma was key. He dreamed of the project, got us together, and let us go with no verbal explanation of what he was looking for. I guess he was as surprised as we were because he wouldn’t tire of telling us how the end results far exceeded his expectations. Things were not clear until we did “Private Life”: then and only then, the ever-growing mutual respect helped everything gel.

Had you met Grace before embarking on these sessions?
No, we met in Nassau. She came down to the studio with Chris and it was the first time I saw those two. I was busy setting up the keyboards, so I don’t recall having been formally introduced either to Chris or Grace. By the time Sly’s drums were ready, Chris played the “Warm Leatherette” cassette and we started working out arrangements – no further conversation.

What made the Compass Point Allstars special?
Chris Blackwell’s spirit, period. Without much explanation, he managed to get the best out of each of us. Then the bass and drums’ fantastic drive could meet the rock guitars and the sophisticated keys in a very special way: powerful and sober, thanks to Alex Sadkin’s philosophy of making everything sound pristine from the word go. Things never got overproduced, because it all sounded like it was mixed before we ever finished the overdubs.
INTERVIEW: PIERS MARTIN

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Michael Cimino remembered + Kris Kristofferson on the making of Heaven’s Gate

Michael Bonner
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Michael Cimino remembered + Kris Kristofferson on the making of Heaven’s Gate

Speaking Uncut in 2002, Kris Kristofferson recalled his experiences shooting Heaven’s Gate for Cimino. “It was a wonderful opportunity to work with a good guy,” he told Damien Love. “A guy who really represented America in the whole scheme of things. And a wonderful canvas. Unfortunately, it was done in. And Michael was collateral damage.”

The calamity of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate never quite left Cimino, who died on Saturday aged 77. The film – a majestic reconstruction of the Johnson County Wars – famously brought down United Artists as the director’s meticulous attention to detail slowly pushed the budget from $12 million to $38 million; it is also often cited/blamed as bringing to a halt the golden era of New Hollywood. Cimino’s subsequent career was littered with dead ends and false starts. After Heaven’s Gate, he directed four films – The Year Of The Dragon, The Sicilian, The Desperate Hours and The Sunchasers – but claimed he had written over 50 unproduced screenplays.

“You can’t look back,” Cimino told Vanity Fair in 2010. “I don’t believe in defeat. Everybody has bumps, but as Count Basie said, ‘It’s not how you handle the hills, it’s how you handle the valleys.”

040716michaelcimino

In 2001, I received a phone call from Cimino. His debut novel, Big Jane, was coming out soon and I’d been trying to arrange an interview with him for several months. Although at the time he didn’t have a publicist, a contact in America offered to pass on to Cimino a letter I wrote outlining what we would like to talk about in an interview. The trail seemed to go dead; but one evening, just as I was about to leave the office for the day, my phone rang. On the other end, a man with a distinctive New York accent who introduced himself as Michael Cimino. He was unfailingly courteous – he insisted on calling me “Mr Bonner” throughout our conversation – and said he would be delighted to do an interview, but in exchange for a cheque for $1,000 that he would donate to an order of Carmelite nuns based in Mexico. For convenience’s sake, it would be best if I made the cheque payable to CASH.

We didn’t pay Cimino the money, but that didn’t stop him from talking to me for over an hour – off the record, unfortunately. It was essentially a one-sided conversation, where Cimino touched on everything from the on-set cocaine consumption of an actor during the filming of The Deer Hunter to a moving reverie on the achievements of the late John Casale. He also talked about Heaven’s Gate, which was then beginning to enjoy rehabilitation.

The great moments in Cimino’s filmography really are very good. The screenplays for Silent Running and Magnum Force, his directorial debut Thunderbolt And Lightfoot and then The Deer Hunter found Cimino incrementally building on his talent; but Heaven’s Gate was a marvellous leap forward – grand, distinctive, passionate.

Here’s Kristofferson on working with Cimino on Heaven’s Gate, from Uncut’s June 2002 issue.

“Chris Walken told me he would trust Michael implicitly, so that’s the way I went at it. Just do whatever this artist is trying to get done. Michael would tell me exactly what he wanted. He would go through the different motions, actually act it out: how I would wake up hungover, down to the point of hitting my head, where to do it. I’d never seen anybody do 53 takes I hadn’t messed up myself. But I did it without question; to the point sometimes I depressed myself. There’s a part of you that’s gotta feel, ‘Well, I’m just not good enough.’ Y’know. But, in general, I just figured it was his creative eye, and I trusted it.”

“The story looked so much like the America I saw around me, when Reagan was taking power. The people who were fighting in Johnson County Wars are still fighting there are guys who still really believe cattle are more important than people, y’know. And they, unfortunately, are the guys with all the guns and money and political power right now.”

“I didn’t feel the pressure around the movie – mainly because I was working all the time. The people who probably felt the pressures were guys like John Hurt, who didn’t have to do anything for months except hang around the bar at his hotel. And it really got crazy, I guess. But it was all in the name of art. I think Heaven’s Gate is waiting to be rediscovered, just like I think they’re eventually going to tell the truth about the Kennedy assassination – but I wouldn’t look forward to it being tomorrow. It’s more of a European film than what’s going on for American film right now. But someday, somebody will address the fact that it was about America and it’s relevant. Nobody did that back when they assassinated it. They just talked about Michael’s arrogance and bloated expenses.”

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Elvis Presley’s Elvis Country: “He was on a different planet!”

Nick Hasted
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Elvis Presley’s Elvis Country: “He was on a different planet!”

June 1970. A rejuvenated Elvis Presley arrives at RCA Studio B in Nashville wearing a flamboyant black cape and carrying a lion’s head walking stick. His business, though, is to reconnect with the long-lost roots of his music; to create a remarkable album, Elvis Country. “I was wondering,” he says, “if any of you guys would like to help me make a few phonograph records?…” Words: Nick Hasted. Originally published in Uncut’s February 2014 issue (Take 201).

____________________________

It’s a sleepy Sunday afternoon on the outskirts of Bonn. Last night, veterans of Elvis Presley’s TCB Band packed out the city’s Stadthalle as part of a European tour to celebrate what would have been the King’s 78th birthday. Today, a couple of middle-aged men in pompadours from the local Elvis Presley fan club drift around the foyer of a hotel close to the venue. Meanwhile, just a few feet away from them, sitting at the rear of the hotel’s restaurant, two members of the TCB Band are reminiscing about a forgotten peak in Presley’s career. James Burton was Presley’s guitarist and right-hand man from 1969 until the singer’s death in 1977. Sporting a thin moustache and a black Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame cap and jacket, he trades stories with bassist Norbert Putnam, a founding member of Alabama’s iconic Muscle Shoals rhythm section. They met in Nashville, almost 44 years ago. A copy of the first record they played on together, Elvis Country, lies on a table between them – a photograph of the future King Of Rock’n’Roll, aged two, staring out at them from the front cover.

“I was totally stiff with fright before that first session,” laughs Putnam. “I don’t know why, because I’d already had a very successful 10 years in the studio. But something told me, this is bigger than anything that you’ve ever been a part of. I remember standing in the bathroom, just before I went out there, and I’d look in the mirror and say, ‘Dear God, guide my fingers. Don’t allow me to be the one to screw up this up.’”

When Elvis Presley entered the studio in June 1970, he did so as a man enjoying an unexpected third-act peak. The NBC TV special – the ’68 Comeback – his record-breaking live return in Las Vegas, and a batch of sessions at Memphis’ American Sound Studio resulting in the acclaimed From Elvis In Memphis album had successfully reinvigorated his career after a decade of artistic and commercial decline. These are remembered now as the final flare of Presley’s majesty, but the Elvis Country sessions tell a different story: of a comeback with some distance left to run. As the surviving musicians who gathered in Nashville’s RCA Studio B now testify, they found Presley energised, determined, ready to pull off whatever he set his mind to. “He was fearless,” confirms Putnam. “Elvis didn’t have any borders.”

The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” drum kit to be sold at auction

Michael Bonner
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The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” drum kit to be sold at auction

The drum kit used on The Beatles‘ recording of “Love Me Do” is up for auction for a starting price of £113,300 [$150,000].

The kit was played by one time Beatles drummer Andy White, who briefly sat in for Ringo Starr during the recording of the track. White was asked to re-record the hit with Starr on tambourine.

The sale of the Ludwig drum kit is being handled by Nate D. Sanders Auctions.

“This is a piece of rock history and there is only one drum kit that was there that day that this first track was laid down, the track that launched the Beatles,” explained auction house manager Michael Kirk to Reuters.

The Beatles drum set includes a letter of authenticity from White’s widow, Thea.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Lawyer who sued Led Zeppelin suspended from practicing law

Michael Bonner
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Lawyer who sued Led Zeppelin suspended from practicing law

The lawyer who sued Led Zeppelin in the recent “Stairway to Heaven” plagiarism case, has been reportedly suspended from practising law.

Francis Malofiy‘s behavior as an attorney has been the subject of repeated judicial scrutiny, records The Hollywood Reporter, and will serve a suspension of three months and one day for violation of “various rules of conduct” during a copyright infringement lawsuit surrounding Usher’s song “Bad Girls”.

During the six-day “Stairway To Heaven” trial, Malofiy racked up more than a hundred sustained objections and multiple admonishments from Judge R. Gary Klausner.

After the jury ruled in Led Zeppelin’s favor, Malifoy said he lost on a technicality and hinted at an appeal.

The suspension only applies to the state of Pennsylvania, where the Usher trial was held, but could also affect Malofiy’s work in California.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Hear Bruce Springsteen read new Born On The Fourth Of July foreword

Michael Bonner
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Hear Bruce Springsteen read new Born On The Fourth Of July foreword

Bruce Springsteen has recorded a new introduction to the audiobook edition of Ron Kovic’s anti-war memoir, Born On The Fourth Of July.

In the foreword, Springsteen reveals how he first discovered the book in 1978 – two years after its original publication. By coincidence, he met and befriended Kovic who brought Springsteen to a veterans’ centre in Venice, California. The experience inspired Springsteen to stage a concert to benefit the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and the Mental Health Association in Los Angeles in 1981.

Springsteen’s foreward features on a new audiobook edition of the book, which will be released on July 4 to mark the book’s 40th anniversary. It also features the narration of voice actor Holter Graham.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Watch David Gilmour’s rare live performance of a Pink Floyd classic

Michael Bonner
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Watch David Gilmour’s rare live performance of a Pink Floyd classic

David Gilmour gave a rare outing to Pink Floyd’s “One Of These Days” earlier this week.

Gilmour played the instrumental track during his European tour opener at Freedom Square in Wroclaw, Poland earlier in the week. It was the first time Gilmour had played the song live in 22 years, and the first time he’d performed it during a solo set.

“One Of These Days” originally appeared as the opening track on Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle.

Gilmour also played other Floyd songs, including “Wish You Were Here”, “Run Like Hell”, “Time,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb”, alongside material from solo albums On An Island and Rattle That Lock.

Gilmour is now set to play two shows in Pompeii in Italy on July 7 and 8 for the first time since Pink Floyd played there in October 1971.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Jeff Beck exclusive! Hear new album track, “Scared For The Children”

Michael Bonner
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Jeff Beck exclusive! Hear new album track, “Scared For The Children”

It’s a busy year for Jeff Beck.

There’s a summer tour of the States with Buddy Guy and a new book – Beck01 – published by Genesis Publications – which explores his passions for hot rodding and rock’n’roll.

But Beck is also back with Loud Hailer – his first new studio album in six years.

And, below, UK fans can hear an exclusive preview of the album – “Scared For The Children“.

The album features Beck alongside vocalist Rosie Bones, guitarist Carmen Vandenberg, drummer Davide Sollazzi and bassist Giovanni Pallotti; it has been produced by Filippo Cimatti and will be released on July 15 on Atco Records.

You can read our exclusive interview with Jeff Beck in the new issue of Uncut – in shops and available to buy digitally now – where the maestro looks back on a lifetime of rock reinvention

The tracklisting for Loud Hailer is:

The Revolution Will Be Televised
Live In The Dark
Pull It
Thugs Club
Scared For The Children
Right Now
Shame
Edna
The Ballad Of The Jersey Wives
O.I.L.
Shrine

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The 22nd Uncut Playlist Of 2016

John Mulvey
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The 22nd Uncut Playlist Of 2016

Once again, something that might hopefully be a bit of a distraction from ongoing multiple meltdowns: this week’s selection of music from the Uncut stereo. Please do check new additions: the ever-excellent Nathan Bowles (been sat on this one for ages and am relieved to finally share); another top Pye Corner Audio/Head Technician jam; the crazy Patten mixtape (Cocteaus! Cypress Hill! Hecker etc!); Devendra’s return (the album’s kinda early Caetano meets Flight Of The Conchords and is maybe his best in a while); the Betty Davis preview of course; and this week’s revelatory Neil clip…

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

1 Pye Corner Audio – Stasis (Ghost Box)

2 Nathan Bowles – Whole And Cloven (Paradise Of Bachelors)

3 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani – FRKWYS Vol 13: Sunergy (RVNG INTL)

4 Scott Hirsch – Blue Rider Songs (Scissortail)

5 The Avalanches – Wildflower (XL)

6 Patten – Re-Edits Vol 2 (Soundcloud)

7 Devendra Banhart – Ape In Pink Marble (Nonesuch)

8 Rafi Bookstaber – Late Summer (Woodsist)

9 Ryley Walker – Golden Sings That Have Been Sung (Dead Oceans)

10 Jack Rose – Raag Manifestos (VHF)

11 Mark Eitzel – 60 Watt Silver Lining (Warner Bros)

12 Noura Mint Seymali – Arbina (Glitterbeat)

13 Betty Davis – The Columbia Years 1968-1969 (Light In The Attic)

14 Kendrick Lamar – Good Kid mAAd City (Top Dawg Entertainment)

15 Various Artists – Basket Full Of Dragons: A Tribute To Robbie Basho Vol II (Obsolete)

16 Neil Young & Promise Of The Real – Like An Inca (Paris 2016)

17 Allah-Las – Calico Review (Mexican Summer)

18 Teenage Fanclub – Here (PeMa)

https://soundcloud.com/theepema/iminlove

Robert Ellis – Robert Ellis

Rob Hughes
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Robert Ellis – Robert Ellis

For all its offshoots and mutations, there remains the suspicion that country music has pretty strict border controls. Recent years have seen a number of artists, evidently mindful of being typecast, break out into more inclusive territory. Sturgill Simpson is a keen example, forgoing the traditional slant of his early work for amorphous albums that embrace gospel, psychedelia and cosmology; while the likes of Justin Townes Earle, Daniel Romano and (most strikingly) Israel Nash have all ditched their prior formalism for a more expansive type of music whose relationship to country has become increasingly tenuous.

Much the same can be said of Robert Ellis. Reared in the Southern Texas enclave of Lake Jackson, Ellis emerged from a religious community where there were just two types of music: country and bluegrass. By the time he began his recording career, both 2009’s The Great Rearranger and follow-up Photographs (2011) – intuitive records that shifted back and forth between countrypolitan and folk – suggested he belonged to the lineage of George Jones or Kris Kristofferson.

But 2014’s wonderful The Lights From The Chemical Plant flipped all that on its head. This time country played a secondary role to R’n’B, white soul, a dash of jazz and a baroque form of singer-songwriterly pop. It was a vivid and unexpected transformation, Ellis tapping into such influences as Paul Simon and Randy Newman. “Because of Photographs, I feel like people have made certain associations with what I do and who I am,” he told Uncut. “It’s important sometimes to put things in context for them.”

Robert Ellis feels like a natural extension of this approach, placing an even greater distance between its creator and his roots. Primarily a guitar player but also extremely tidy on piano, Ellis brings a wider pallete of textures. Keyboards are more prominent, as is a three-piece string section that gives a number of these songs a slightly ornate, chamber-pop feel. “The High Road”, for instance, makes its presence felt with a concerted shimmy of violins and cello, before being ushered along by trebly electric guitars and limber acoustics in lovely interplay. The song’s sense of rapt deliberation is in pointed contrast to “Screw”, a curious instrumental in which Ellis and Kelly Doyle improvise a guitar duet over electronic ambience and the soft purr of indistinct vocal samples. This experimental tone finds fuller expression in “It’s Not OK”. Beginning with a stabby piano riff reminiscent of 10cc or Harry Nilsson, it eventually gives way to some fabulously digressive jazz-rock, all rolling cymbals and free rhythms, punctuated by a piercing guitar solo.

At its heart, though, this is essentially a great pop album. Both “Perfect Strangers” and the burnished “California” sound like the sort of bittersweet entreaties that might have come from the pen of Dwight Twilley in his ’70s prime. Or, more recently, West Coast darlings Dawes (whose singer Taylor Goldsmith, incidentally, featured on Ellis’ last album). Written by Delta Spirit’s Matthew Vasquez, “How I Love You” posits Ellis as the broken romantic, crying hurt over yearning guitar-pop and piano, underscored by steel. Things get beefier on “Couples Skate”, though it’s trounced by the twanging country-rock of “Drivin’”, co-written by Angaleena Presley, formerly one-third of Pistol Annies.

Picking through the lyrics, you might be forgiven for assuming that Robert Ellis is a break-up album. Most of these tunes address relationships in crisis, love souring with familiarity and the passage of time, couples allowing the weeds to grow between them. What’s more, given Ellis’ split from his wife since The Lights From The Chemical Plant, and his subsequent move away from his adopted Nashville home, it’s tempting to conclude that it’s all autobiographical. Yet Ellis is less interested in confession than he is in acute character studies, folding whatever first-hand experience he has into narrative songs that try to make sense of the impulses that drive us. “We can adapt or maybe we could divorce”, he sings on the dizzyingly beautiful “Elephant”. “We could jump ship or we could easily change course”.

The open road, pop music’s most trusted symbol of freedom and flight, instead becomes an agent of imprisonment. “Elephant”’s protagonist is torn between staying and leaving, “The High Road” of the title has worn its subject down, the abandoned woman in “California” can’t bear to make a fresh start, for “every road leads away from the things you wanted”. Souls in flux, forever undergoing some kind of transformation. In Ellis’ gifted hands, these restless portraits serve as a perfect reflection of his own voyaging musical self.

Q&A
ROBERT ELLIS
Did your recent marriage break-up play into this album in some way?
Whatever’s happening in your life inevitably ends up in your narrative songwriting, but I wouldn’t say it’s strictly autobiographical by any means. A lot of the stuff maybe started from a feeling, then sort of evolved as the characters took shape and the stories developed. I don’t necessarily find my life to be the most interesting story that one could tell.

How conscious were you of escaping the folk/country tag?
When we were writing and arranging the songs I think we were far enough down the path of our own voice that I wasn’t consciously trying to make it not country. Certain things, like “Drivin’”, just came out sounding like country tunes. At one point in time I really didn’t want to be typecast, because country can be pejorative in some ways. But I really don’t give a shit anymore.

The album is self-titled, often an indication of someone trying to make some sort of statement. Was that the case here?
I thought about it a lot. And seeing as I produced this one and we did it in Houston, where I began, I feel personally like I’ve grown into whatever I’m doing now, in a way that feels really comfortable and natural. Whereas maybe on previous records I was still kind of figuring some of that stuff out. When the record was finished I thought it sounded like us. And everyone gets to do the self-titled record thing one time, right?
INTERVIEW: ROB HUGHES

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Rob Wasserman – Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison bassist – dies aged 64

Michael Bonner
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Rob Wasserman – Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison bassist – dies aged 64

Rob Wasserman – who played bass with Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Bob Weir and many others – has died aged 64.

The news was broken by Weir, a long-serving musical collaborator.

A classically trained violinist, Wasserman moved to the upright bass when he was 20 and released his first jazz album, Solo, in 1983. He released four more solo albums.

Wasserman recorded with Van Morrison (Beautiful Vision), Lou Reed (New York, Magic And Loss, Lulu), Elvis Costello (Mighty Like A Rose), Rickie Lee Jones (Flying Cowboys, Naked Songs) among many others.

His last album, the six-CD set Fall 1989: The Long Island Sound, recorded with Jerry Garcia Band and Weir, was released in December 2013.

Wasserman and Weir created RatDog in the mid-’90s following the Grateful Dead’s break up in 1995.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Watch the Beatles’ new video for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

Michael Bonner
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Watch the Beatles’ new video for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

The Beatles have released a new music video for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

Directed by Dandypunk, André Kasten and Leah Moyer, the video for this version of the song honours the memory of Sir George Martin.

The string arrangements and recording session at Air Studios in 2006 for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (LOVE Version) were Martin’s final pieces of work.

The video has been made in conjunction with Cirque du Soleil to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Beatles LOVE at The Mirage Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, Genesis Publications have announced a book of rare photos taken on The Beatles’ 1966 Tokyo concerts.

In 1966 The Beatles embarked on their last tour, playing concerts in seven cities over the course of four months, beginning in London and ending in San Francisco.

On June 29th 1966, The Beatles arrived in Tokyo to play five shows to sold-out crowds at the Nippon Budokan. This stay in Tokyo is captured in a new book of photographs taken by Japanese photographer Shimpei Asai, entitled Hello Goodbye: The Beatles In Tokyo, 1966.

Asai is the only Japanese photographer to have been given official access to The Beatles in Tokyo, and his photos have remained unknown to most outside Japan.

You can find more details about the book here.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

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