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Neil Young announces vinyl release of Odeon Budokan

Sam Richards
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Neil Young announces vinyl release of Odeon Budokan

Neil Young’s 1976 live collection Odeon Budokan will get a standalone vinyl release via Reprise on September 1.

Side 1 was recorded live at Hammersmith Odeon on March 31 1976 and features Neil Young’s solo set on guitar and piano from the first half of the concert. Side 2 was recorded two weeks earlier at Nippon Budokan Hall in Tokyo on March 11, 1976, with Crazy Horse in full electric flight.

Produced by David Briggs and shelved for several decades, the album was previously available on CD in 2020 as part of the Archives Volume II collection. This will be the first official vinyl release.

Check out the Odeon Budokan tracklist below and pre-order here.

Side 1
1. ‘The Old Laughing Lady’
2. ‘After The Gold Rush’
3. ‘Too Far Gone’
4.‘Old Man’
5. ‘Stringman’

Side 2
1. ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’
2. ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’
3. ‘Lotta Love’
4. ‘Drive Back’
5. ‘Cortez The Killer’

Gal Costa – Índia (reissue, 1973)

Jon Dale
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Gal Costa – Índia (reissue, 1973)

In the mid-’70s, in opposition to the repressive fist of the military junta, the Brazilian counterculture flourished, finding their métier in resistance through dropping out and turning on. The return of two exiled musicians and legends, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, had something to do with it; Veloso’s long hair and feyness was a defiant finger to conservative sensibilities, for example. But there was more going on here, with ragtag assemblages of ‘curtição’ and ‘desbunde’ (trip-outs and dropouts), artists, filmmakers and musicians, all gathering to get free on the beaches of Ipanema, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro.

The figurehead for all this activity was Tropicálista singer and icon, the late Gal Costa. With her air of insouciant cool and her history as a popular avant-gardist and provocateur, she was in the right place at the right time, and her status was assured when the local countercultural mavens named a stretch of the beach dunes of Ipanema ‘Monte da Gal’ in tribute. “Gal was the queen of this scene,” Veloso wrote in his autobiography, Tropical Truth, describing the “slip of beach” that Costa frequented as “an area where a pile of sand had been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean for the construction of a ‘submarine emissary’.”

It all paints a picture of a roughshod idyll under pressure, the ‘desbunde’ blowing off the broader oppressions of Brazilian culture. Within that climate, Costa – whose music merged Brazilian popular music with rock, psychedelia and electronics – recorded Índia, one of her greatest albums. A hymn and testament to the liberatory powers of popular music, its reflections on Brazilian society and politics were coded and cloaked in the gorgeous melancholy and rutting grooves of these nine songs, whose melodies soared thanks to one of the singer’s most compelling performances.

Costa was not one for understatement, as the cover images of Índia attest, the upfront sensuality of the front cover’s bikini shot balanced out by a back cover where Costa posed, near-naked, in an indigenous Brazilian outfit. Unsurprisingly, it drew the attention and ire of the military leadership, who censored the sleeve. The content of the album was no less unflinching, though with the help of arranger Arthur Verocai and musical director Gilberto Gil, Costa formulated a sound that embraced the experimentation of her earlier albums but framed this within a more ‘naturalistic’ setting.

Costa’s song choices throughout Índia are instructive, with her preternatural ear for a great, appropriate melody allowing everything here to sit beautifully within her range. The opening title track, written by José Asunción Flores and Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, a composer and poet, respectively, from neighbouring country Paraguay, is unabashedly lush. A truly great writer, Flores is widely recognised as the inventor of the Guarania genre, a music centred around the Paraguayan harp, its unique sound mobilised to help tell the stories of the Paraguayan people.

Costa’s interpretation of Flores’ song builds from a version with lyrics by Brazilian singer and actor José Fortuna. Building in intensity through its five minutes, “Índia” has Costa catching the arc of Flores’s melodic developments beautifully, the orchestral arrangement full of drama, stippling each verse with lush texture, while brass and flute punctuate throughout. It’s a complex, dazzling arrangement, and Costa pulls off the yearning in the melody perfectly.

The beating heart of Índia, though, is two songs by Veloso. “Relance” (“Glance”) is one of the most startling grooves here, Dominghuinhos’s accordion huffing a repeating, see-sawing phrase through the entire song, the bass and guitar colouring the song unexpectedly, as an incessant rhythm ploughs through; Costa’s abrupt chants and squeals deliver the declamatory lyrics with ferocity. “Da Maior Importãncia” (“Of Major Importance”) is stripped back, a sly, halting guitar motif circling through the song as Costa sings bewitchingly – it’s reminiscent, a little, of the deconstructed songs of fellow Tropicálista Tom Zé.

Every song here has the capacity to startle, from the blasted percussion and voice that pockmark Portuguese folk song “Milho Verde” (“Green Corn”), to the jazz-infused piano-and-voice duo on samba composer Lupicínio Rodrigues’s “Volta” (“Return”). “Passarinho” (“Bird”), written by Tuzé De Abreu, whose 2018 album Contraduzindo is a late-period masterpiece, feels almost Cubist in design, at first, with its jutting, fragmented riff, though this resolves to some of Toninho Horta’s most sensitive guitar-playing, while Costa carries the song’s sleek melody with sensuality, the corners of the notes blurring together as they slip from her mouth.

At first glance, Costa’s run of albums across the ’70s have her walking a tightrope between countercultural exploration and respect for tradition. Perhaps that’s too simplistic a reading of what’s going on in this multi-faceted, fascinating music, though. One thing Costa seemed to share with the likes of Veloso was a constant desire to unearth the radical potential of music that may have settled into complacent conservatism. It’s no surprise, then, that Costa signs off Índia with Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova standard “Desafinado” (“Off-Key”). It’s a knowing way to wrap up an album that reinvigorates the many pasts of Brazilian song by letting it all hang out.

Sam Burton – Dear Departed

Wyndham Wallace
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Sam Burton – Dear Departed

There’s always been a fine line between the nostalgic and the timeless. Both acknowledge the past, of course, but one depends upon former glories to justify its present, while the other’s historical ties are a mere bedrock for its future. The line’s becoming ever finer, too, as pop continues to eat itself. Contrived familiarity, after all, is a comforting illusion, and if recent legal cases – like the Marvin Gaye estate’s against Ed Sheeran – have exposed the form’s structural limitations, advancing technology has also allowed easier appropriation of production techniques.

Not that the nostalgic is purely worthless, nor that to innovate is the only ambition of value. Indeed, these qualities can be mutually beneficial, and Sam Burton’s second album – barring two cassettes, recorded in his bathroom for Chthonic Records – embraces each, largely successfully. Produced by Jonathan Wilson at his Topanga Canyon studio, it conjures up earthy aromas of a bygone Laurel Canyon and soft rock’s subsequent, slick sophistication; indeed, there are moments that might suit Mapache Records’ marvellous new One Mile From Heaven compilation of privately pressed 1970s songwriters. Its polish, though, is distinctively contemporary, in the manner of Wilson’s work with Angel Olsen and Father John Misty, not to mention his own releases.

Admittedly, Wilson’s simply tweaked the style of 2020’s Jarvis Taveniere-produced I Can Go With You, opening up Burton’s horizons from the poolside terrace to the mountains beyond. In this, he’s much aided by keyboardist Drew Erikson, whose gracious yet never ostentatious string arrangements elevate multiple tunes. Sometimes redolent of Glen Campbell’s work with Jimmy Webb, they shimmer over the starry-eyed “Maria” and weep beneath “Looking Back Again”’s wings, while “I Don’t Blame You” is introduced like Robert Kirby does on Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter.

Still, the more one listens, the more one recognises that Burton’s a step removed from such esteemed forerunners. It’s true that at times, as on “I Don’t Blame You”’s highest notes, his faintly tremulous vocals are like a restrained Tim Buckley, and there are also moments when he exhibits a reedy air of John Lennon, while his songs move at the lugubrious pace of Neil Young’s After The Goldrush. Yet this wistful fug is ambiguous, with Wilson’s production inventive in its disorientating artifice, like a cowboy crying into a martini. Something’s off, in a mysterious but appealing fashion. One’s thus as likely to contemplate these icons as the Beck of 2002’s Sea Change, the Bill Callahan of 2009’s Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle, the Sylvie of last year’s Sylvie, not to mention the Weyes Blood of And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow.

Naturally, to avoid accusations of overexploiting nostalgic instincts, Burton needs to deliver memorable songs. Natalie Mering, whose UK tour he recently opened, leaned into Karen Carpenter to bring Weyes Blood to a bigger audience. Burton, on the other hand, appears content to amble at a leisurely, sometimes forlorn pace, trusting his melodies to bed in over the time that Wilson’s muted but refined production invites. Indeed, few tunes break the 100bpm barrier, and two – “I Don’t Blame You”, which calls upon Townes Van Zandt’s tenderness, and the drowsy “I Go To Sleep” – are gentle waltzes. Fortunately, though it can sometimes take a moment to differentiate one track from another, such lethargy suits him: having wallowed in opener “Pale Blue Night”’s lush melancholy, he revels in the breezy “Empty Handed” and saunters carefree through the classy “Coming Down On Me”, noting on “Long Way Around” that “I could linger on behind and get there still”.

That these songs weren’t born of LA, where Burton lived for several years until late 2020, and to which he’s since returned, is likely significant. Instead, they emerged while he travelled back to childhood roots in Salt Lake City, then on to rural northern California, where he worked on his grandmother’s farm. Consequently, they’re less the reiteration of a sound whose history once surrounded him than a reimagining, crafted at a distance, enabled afterwards by Wilson. If nowadays almost everything sounds like something, what ultimately matters is whether this serves a purpose. For Burton, using the past to shape Dear Departed insists we pay attention in the present, and that’s the least these songs deserve.

Moby Grape: “They always rocked the house!”

Rob Hughes
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Moby Grape: “They always rocked the house!”

The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy direct from us here – includes a deep dive into the heady world of San Francisco psych pioneers Moby Grape, investigating why a band blessed with five songwriters and seemingly endless promise fell apart so quickly.

You can read the full feature exclusively in the magazine itself, but here’s a little piece of bonus content for you: a short interview with Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, recounting his personal encounters with the Grape: “Quite simply, their sophistication was over my head!”

What did you make of the Moby Grape dynamic?
I saw them live many times. I remember being stunned by their vocal harmonies. And then there were the guitarists. Jerry Miller, as a guitarist, was intimidating. Before I got into Jefferson Airplane I would have never been interested in exploring the possibilities of the electric guitar. For better or worse, fingerstyle acoustic was my world as a player. However, loving electric blues as I did, my heroes were Muddy Waters, Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, BB King, Mike Bloomfield.

One must remember that I was a burgeoning electric guitar-playing rock’n’roll band-member for the first time. It was all new to me, it was unknown territory. We were all finding our way, strangers in a strange land, to reference Heinlein. On some levels the Grape seemed way more ‘professional’ to me than the Airplane did. Based on my limited artistic worldview at the time, I thought having three guitar players was excessive and unnecessary but this says more about me at the time than them. Quite simply, their sophistication was over my head! That said, their show was always powerful and multi-dimensional. They always played as a band and they rocked the house!

How well did you get to know the band members themselves?
For some reason I was closer to the guys in the Dead and Quicksilver than the Grape. I don’t know why. It might have had something to do with the fact that Matthew Katz was their manager, but this far down the road your guess is as good as mine. San Francisco bands had an interesting gestalt reality that was peculiar to the Bay Area. We were all family in a way, but some family members were closer than others. Skip [Spence] was the only member of Moby Grape that I knew. I knew him from my Benner Music Company days in San Jose on Stevens Creek Road in ’63 and ’64. He was always mercurial – in that, he would remain consistent. Skip was always a larger than life personality, for better or worse. I would have to say, from my limited perspective, that he was at the very least the most visible member of the band and at the most the driving force. Again, I had known Skip for some years and he was always the light in the room.

Did Moby Grape strike you as the kind of band who were going to be very successful?
The Grape seemed to be born to be successful. An infinite talent pool, a record company solidly behind them – don’t forget, they actually had a commercial logo! Looking back at it all from this far down the road, it’s a tragedy that their collective artistic lives are not better remembered.

Read more about Moby Grape in the September 2023 issue of Uncut, on sale now!

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, James Blackshaw, Rhiannon Giddens, Blur and more: welcome to this month’s 15-track Uncut CD

Michael Bonner
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Bonnie “Prince” Billy, James Blackshaw, Rhiannon Giddens, Blur and more: welcome to this month’s 15-track Uncut CD

HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

All copies of the September issue of Uncut magazine come with a free, 15-track CD – Now Playing – that showcases the wealth of great new music on offer this month. All of these artists appear in the pages of Uncut’s September 2023 issue – either in features or our essential reviews section. Here, then, is your guide to Now Playing…

1 Blur
St Charles Square
Messrs Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree return with the second track from their new album, The Ballad Of Darren, and it’s a spiky, Scary Monsters behemoth that’s been opening all their recent gigs – and now appears here in its first ever physical release. The full record is our Album Of The Month, reviewed alongside a Q&A from Graham.

2 Cut Worms
Don’t Fade Out
Brooklyn-based Max Clarke has been making music as Cut Worms for a while, but his new self-titled LP is his best yet: 10 tracks of vintage garage-folk filtered through modern sensibilities. Here’s the lovely, melancholic opening cut.

3 Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Stand Anthem
The Ones Ahead is Glenn-Copeland’s first album since the Canada-based artist was rediscovered and showered with long-deserved acclaim. A soulful, wistful set recorded with his live group Indigo Rising, it’s quite unique – new-age gospel-folk, dripping with emotion.

4 James Blackshaw
Why Keep Still?
An increasingly legendary player of modern British guitar, James Blackshaw is currently working on a new album, due out later this year. You can hear more about his difficult journey in the Instant Karma section.

5 Hiss Golden Messenger
Shinbone
MC Taylor is back with Jump For Joy, a loose, rhythmic expression of delight after a couple of darker detours. “We are going to be playing these songs to rooms full of people, so let’s give them something to move to, not just think about,” explains Taylor.

6 Public Image Limited
Car Chase
The highlight of PiL’s new LP, End Of World, “Car Chase” is a breakneck voyage into madness, with death disco beats and an Arabic flavour. Read our review and chat with Lydon in the mag.

7 Dot Allison
Moon Flowers
The Scottish singer teams up with Andy Bell and Hannah Peel on Consciousology, her sixth album and a peak in her work. In the review section, she tells us about her lofty ambitions for the record, and her duet with a plant.

8 Rhiannon Giddens
Wrong Kind Of Right
The musical polymath tries her hand at country-soul on her latest album, You’re The One, her first bona fide solo album since 2017’s Freedom Highway. The result is impressive songs like this, which mix her rootsy folk with a new soulful swagger.

9 Bush Tetras
Walking Out The Door
On their first new record in over a decade, these NYC No Wavers are joined by Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums for an abrasive, powerful set of songs. Singer Cynthia Sley is an especially vital presence on this careening highlight.

10 Ricardo Dias Gomes
Muito Sol
Gomes has spent years playing with some of the biggest, bravest Brazilian artists, most notably Caetano Veloso, but his third solo album, experimental and welcoming in equal measure, strongly deserves wider attention.

11 Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek
Flitting Splits Reverb Adage
On their first album together, New Future City Radio, this dynamic Chicago duo create their own futuristic sci-fi radio station, mixing glitching electronica collage with leftfield hip-hop to startling effect.

12 Be Your Own Pet
Goodtime!
16 years after splitting, Jemina Pearl and co return with a new album and new thirtysomething concerns but the same joyfully snotty, noisy sound. With Mommy, they’re now on Third Man, but otherwise it’s business as usual, in the best way.

13 Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Bananas
Will Oldham unveils Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, his first solo album this decade, and it’s a bold, sparse record recorded with friends in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. His return’s reviewed at length in the magazine.

14 Jim Wallis
Parachute
When he’s not drumming in Modern Nature, Still Corners and others, Wallis makes exploratory music of his own. In Huge Gesturing Loops is a sparkling celebration of ambient Americana drift, made in collaboration with pedal steel player Henry Senior.

15 Sally Potter
Dance Girl Dance
Better known as a pioneering film director and writer, Potter has finally ventured into the world of the singer-songwriter on Pink Bikini. Experimental master Fred Frith assists on guitar, but Potter’s evocative exploration of youth leads the way here.

Buy Uncut’s September 2023 issue – with the free Now Playing CD – here

The Who unveil Who’s Next / Life House deluxe editions

Sam Richards
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The Who unveil Who’s Next / Life House deluxe editions

On September 15, UMR will reissue The Who’s 1971 album Who’s Next in a series of deluxe editions incorporating the abandoned Life House project from which it evolved.

In new liner notes, Pete Townshend describes Life House as “a portentous polemic about the coming of a nation beaten down by climate issues and pollution.”

The Super Deluxe edition of Who’s Next/Life House will contain 10 CDs, all remastered from the original tapes by longtime Who engineer Jon Astley, plus a Blu-ray Audio disc with newly-created Atmos & 5.1 surround mixes of Who’s Next (and 14 bonus tracks) by Steven Wilson.

Among the 155 tracks on the Super Deluxe edition are Townshend’s demos for Life House; The Who’s 1971 session recordings at the Record Plant in New York; sessions at Olympic Studios in London from 1970-1972; and, for the first time, two newly mixed and complete 1971 concerts from London’s Young Vic Theatre and San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium.

The box set also contains a 100-page hardback book containing Townshend’s introduction and new sleevenotes. Also included is Life House – The Graphic Novel, a newly commissioned, 170-page hardback book overseen by Townshend that tells the story behind the project. Completing the set are reproductions of two gig posters and two concert programmes, plus pin badges and a colour photo of The Who with printed autographs.

Who’s Next will also be available as limited edition 4-LP and 3-LP sets, featuring, respectively, the first-ever complete release of the San Francisco concert from 1971 and vinyl replicas of Townshend’s original Life House. The original Who’s Next album will also be available as a single LP half-speed remaster completed at Abbey Road Studios, and in other exclusive single vinyl versions.

Peruse the complete tracklistings and pre-order here.

Ultimate Genre Guide – Goth

John Robinson
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Ultimate Genre Guide – Goth

With a Cure album eagerly awaited, Nick Cave in the studio and our cover star Siouxsie on a European tour, the time is right for us to present the Ultimate Genre Guide to Goth. Reviews and interviews with the legends of goth. Goth film. Goth in America. 50 goth disco classics. The full story of what happened when post punk went dark.

In the shops next Thursday, but you can release the bats here now. Enjoy.

Introducing our Ultimate Music Guide to AC/DC

John Robinson
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Introducing our Ultimate Music Guide to AC/DC

Angus Young, I am told by his representative, will phone me at 9.10am precisely on an autumn day in 2014.

As a fan, it’s an exciting message to receive. Of course, we’ll talk about the band’s new album Rock Or Bust. But maybe we’ll also be able to go a bit off-topic and get into Angus’s thoughts on some classics from his catalogue: say, the particular dynamic brilliance of “Down Payment Blues” or “Bad Boy Boogie”. Whose idea was that odd stepped rhythm for the riff on “For Those About To Rock”? Maybe we can get into some other riffs, too.

“You’ll have 10 minutes,” she says.

As it turns out, that’s fine. Angus is a succinct talker not much given to philosophising or reminiscence, which does its own job of explaining why AC/DC have stayed as good as they are for as long as they have. This is a band of extreme focus, pragmatic decisions, and in abeyance to a quality control in evidence from their first recordings (guided by Malcolm and Angus’s older brother George) to their most recent album, //Power Up//. The band has weathered firings, the death of a crucial singer, deafness, alcoholism, an inexplicable spell of criminality, retirement – even the death of a founder member, but still keeps on going.

It’s an enduring quality you’ll find celebrated in this new magazine. In it we’ve reviewed each of the band’s albums, and visited them at key stages in their lifespan – discovering classic interviews from our archive. Particularly good are the reportage pieces which show the band’s developing showmanship. There is something called the “Human kangaroo” which is discussed in a 1976 interview with NME, but it’s too upsetting to go into here.

As it turned out, Angus and I did have a bit of time to get into the building blocks of AC/DC: the riffs. “It can come any number of ways. Sometimes you’ll have a good guitar riff, other times you might just need a good title and it sets you thinking – what if I try this, see how it goes?

“Most of the songs that we’ve ever sat and played about with have been guitar riffs – any songs we came up with, they were always in combination with each other. It’s something we always did. Sometimes we borrowed bits from each other. Like Malcolm would say, “You know that riff you had from that other period? Let’s try that with this…”

Even with Malcolm now departed, the message is still coming through loud and clear. AC/DC will be with us a long time yet.

For those about to get one here… We salute you!

Ultimate Music Guide – AC/DC

John Robinson
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Ultimate Music Guide – AC/DC

Hells bells! In the run up to the band’s 50th anniversary, we present the Ultimate Music Guide to the world’s most unyielding rock band: AC/DC. Fashions couldn’t change them. Death couldn’t stop them. School uniform would never outgrow them. Get your copy here.

Bob Dylan – Ultimate Music Guide Definitive Edition

John Robinson
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Bob Dylan – Ultimate Music Guide Definitive Edition

The Deluxe 172-page edition. All 40 studio albums reviewed in depth. Major interviews with the British press rediscovered. Eight page fold-out chronology. The full rough and rowdy story.

Get your copy here!

The making of “Melody” by Serge Gainsbourg

Tom Pinnock
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The making of “Melody” by Serge Gainsbourg

This article originally appeared in Uncut Take 287 (April 2021)

“I think I called him Serge Bourguignon,” says Jane Birkin, recalling her first meeting with Gainsbourg on the set of the film Slogan in 1968. “He was quite vexed that I didn’t know who he was, so not long after that he gave me a book called Chansons Cruelles, ‘cruel songs’. It was a little leather volume with some of his lyrics, and in it was written, ‘For Jane B, with whom I’ll write Histoire De Melody IE Nelson.’ Right from the beginning he knew that he’d write this.”

Released in March 1971, Histoire De Melody Nelson did little to trouble the charts in France or abroad, but its reputation as a stunning and unique piece of work has grown immeasurably in the half-century since. Now, 30 years after Gainsbourg’s death, the influence of its knotty orchestral funk-rock is more potent than ever.

“The whole poetry of the thing is so incredible,” says Birkin, “I thought people would be screaming for it and that it would be a hit immediately. It wasn’t the case, we had to wait. Serge handed the gold record over 20 years later and said, ‘Well, at last we got it.’ But it took a long time.”

To record this Lolita-inspired concept album about a young girl from Sunderland and the Parisian man she meets, Gainsbourg and arranger/co-writer Jean-Claude Vannier tapped up their favourite London session musicians, notably guitarist Alan Parker and Dave Richmond, veterans of previous hits such as “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” and “69 Année Erotique”.

“He recorded in the UK because of how we could work,” explains Parker, “what we were capable of. Serge said British musicians were the best, and that’s why there’s sometimes been a bit of disgruntlement in Paris with him not using French musicians. He was forever smoking when I knew him, and he drank quite a bit and he enjoyed it, but it didn’t make him nasty or aggressive, he just carried on as he was – the laid-back Serge, as we called him.”

The album begins with “Melody”, seven and a half minutes of hallucinatory grooving rock, a different take of which formed the bedrock for the LP’s closing track, “Cargo Culte”. The work of the British musicians is enhanced by Jean-Claude Vannier’s Paris-tracked orchestral work, while Gainsbourg and Birkin’s spoken word outlines the tragic tale of Melody, the narrator, his Rolls-Royce and all.

“In Melody Nelson there are no tunes, not like a normal pop song,” says Jean-Claude Vannier. “On ‘Melody’, the melody is only [from the] orchestra.”

“It was inspiring stuff,” says Birkin, “and it was a divine time – [Birkin’s first daughter] Kate was tiny, I was having Charlotte and all was well with the world, it seemed to me. My parents and Serge had kicked it off so extraordinarily well after such a disastrous marriage with John Barry, and I’d fallen in love with Paris and this extraordinary man… Russian, Jewish, funny, sad, a poet. It was incredible. And such good fun!

“It’s 30 years since he died this year, and Charlotte’s finally opening up his house as a museum. It’s like sleeping beauty, nothing has moved since the night he died – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to get in there.”

____________________

JANE BIRKIN (vocals): I used to film quite a lot of rubbish, and Serge thought doing films was a dangerous metier, so he would come along always and take a suite in beautiful hotels, if they were beautiful, or get really angry if he was in a squalid hotel, which was more often the case. He used to say it was too beautiful to write at home in the Rue de Verneuil. At the end of his life he was writing a song a night, but in Melody Nelson days he took his time. The piano and the themes and the music he did with Vannier.

JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER (arrangement, orchestra direction): We were very close friends. We would work all the time. I first met him in London. He lived in Chelsea at this time – in Cadogan Hotel, a big hotel where Oscar Wilde spent his last night before going to jail – and we began to work together doing the music for a French movie, [1970’s] Cannabis.

BIRKIN: Serge always found great orchestras, he had Michel Colombier for the first version of “Je T’Aime…”, and that was pretty fantastic, and he did a lot with him, and he had Arthur Greenslade, and then it moved to Vannier after that, and to Alan Hawkshaw an awful lot in England [later]. Vannier was very important for Serge, because his orchestrations provided an oriental colour that has never dated.

VANNIER: After Cannabis, Serge said, “We have a new project, it is called Melody Nelson.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “I only have the title. I don’t know what it is yet.”

BIRKIN: As he was in London [with Birkin’s family] for all Christmases and Easter, and summer holidays on the Isle Of Wight, [the name] Nelson was quite normal for him [by then].

VANNIER: He said, “Have you some music in your drawer?” And I gave him some music for songs. I wrote the orchestra, parts of melodies, and some ideas. He would sing the melody to me, and then play chords on the piano.

ALAN PARKER (guitar): They were great days. I did the original “Je T’aime…” with Brigitte Bardot. That was my first encounter with Serge, and as we got on so well he booked me for this and for that.

BIRKIN: It was so charming to see Alan and Serge together, they complimented each other terribly and he was such a comforting figure for Serge. He loved working with those musicians.

PARKER: So many massive hits were done at the Phillips studio: The Walker Brothers, Dusty Springfield and so on. I’ve recorded there when you couldn’t put a pin between musicians. In those days it all went down in one, so there was a lot of pressure on everyone, particularly the engineer – you could remix it, but there was so much spill you couldn’t do much.

DAVE RICHMOND (bass): It was underground, you went down stone steps to get there, like a cellar really. But when you got down there it was very plush.

PARKER: We created that Melody Nelson sound? Yes, in a way. It was never a case of “I want this sound” or “I want that sound”, he wasn’t like that, Serge. He would say, “I want it rougher, or very sympathetique”… We were used to it – you’d have to be a semi-mindreader and come up with things until it was perfect.

RICHMOND: I think it was Barry Morgan on drums, but no-one knows for sure. We didn’t use a click track much then, apart from for film scores, and Barry’s timing was extremely good.

VANNIER: I wrote out detailed arrangements. I like improvisation in jazz, Monk, Miles Davis and so on. But in my sessions, I’m very afraid that if I let musicians improvise they will play like they are on another record. And I don’t want to have problems with that. So I write very particularly… In Melody Nelson, there is an amount of improvisation, but very light.

PARKER: With Serge a lot of it was improvisation. Vannier said he wrote it all, that’s absolute bunkum, of course he didn’t – he gave us guidance, if you like, on behalf of Serge, but then Serge also chipped in, in his way.

RICHMOND: Can you imagine it all written out?! If we’d had a part written like that I wouldn’t have been able to read it to play it! With all the bends, it would have been horrendous to read.

PARKER: There might have been one bar of an example style and then just chords – you see what they’re getting it, and then you adapt it.

RICHMOND: They just left us, me and Alan, improvising on this continuous drumbeat until they told us to stop. They might have indicated when they wanted a fill, or to bring it up or down a bit.

PARKER: Most of the time Vannier stayed in the control room, and it was Serge in the studio getting across what he wanted. The way Serge would describe things was emotion: “I want tension here, lust there.” Regarding the orchestration, we didn’t have a clue because that was being put on later. What we delivered could have interfered with some of Vannier’s orchestral lines – but it wasn’t our fault because we didn’t know what those lines were. I used a Gibson Les Paul Standard – I’ve still got it – and my Fender Deluxe Reverb with a little preamp built into it, feeding into the main amp. The feedback on “Melody” was controlled by how close I was to the amp, which way I was facing. Yes, it’s hard to control – you find a position and it’s not comfortable to play or sit in, but you tolerate it just to maintain the feedback.

RICHMOND: I was using my Burns Bison bass. I had played double bass in Manfred Mann, but someone told me there was work for electric bass players, so I went to buy an electric bass from Denmark Street. My wife said, “Oh, that looks a nice one”, because it was very impressive-looking, and that was that. But fortunately it turned out I was the only session musician using a Bison, everyone was on Fenders of various types. It was very good for that ‘click sound’ – everyone was asking for a click bass then and I became known for it. Once we’d recorded, Serge would take the tracks back to France and finish them there with Vannier.

VANNIER: After the music was recorded, he wrote the lyrics. He always saw it as a film. A film without pictures. A film in the head.

BIRKIN: Melody is a 14-year-old girl on a bike, and he’s in his Rolls-Royce – Serge did have a Rolls-Royce, he bought one after we did two films in Yugoslavia, just before I had Charlotte. We did Romance Of A Horse Thief, and having done that, we did another film [Ballade à Sarajevo], where Serge was supposed to be the head of a resistance army in Yugoslavia, if you can imagine, and I was playing a nurse. We held up the whole Nazi army by me coming out of a frozen lake and Serge gunning them down with a machine gun from behind. Serge got paid in cash, and when we got back to Paris it gave him a kick to think that with money from a communist country he was going to buy himself a Rolls-Royce. So off he went to Rolls-Royce in Paris and he found one with one of the Rs in red. It was very rare, it looked like a car from The Avengers. We needed a chauffeur to drive it because Serge didn’t have a license – so he unscrewed the radiator tap where it had the ‘spirit of ecstasy’ on it, and he put it on his mantelpiece. Of course, “Melody” mentions “Silver Ghost” and “spirit of ecstasy”, so he was probably thinking about it while we were in Yugoslavia and just after.

VANNIER: Melody Nelson is a dream, you know. But I don’t think it was a good thing to put pictures on the music [in the short film Melody, made to accompany the album]. If you see the girl, it is dead. The film is not very good, I think, and I believe that Serge felt the same way as me.

BIRKIN: In Tony Frank’s lovely photo for the cover, Serge made me wear a red wig and paint on freckles on my nose. I had red hair because my best friend Gabrielle Crawford’s daughter Lucy had red hair, and so he wanted Melody to have red hair and freckles – I think he was terribly influenced by Lolita by Nabokov. I held up my monkey so you wouldn’t see that I’d opened my jeans because I was four months pregnant.

VANNIER: The album is very far out. At the time, in the 1970s, the LP was not a success, and we passed on to other things. I don’t know what happened. It is strange for me. I liked to play, to work with Serge, he was a very close friend, and we had the pleasure of writing this album.

PARKER: Serge and I got on very well, without a doubt. When I lived in Surrey I had a studio at home, and that’s where we recorded some of that last album we did with Jane [1990’s Amours Des Feintes]. When we recorded the music for that album it was in the winter and I lived very high up on the North Downs then, there was snow and everything, and Serge arrived in his trademark no-socks and these little white leather plimsolls. “Aren’t you cold?” “No, no…” You could see, poor sod, he was shivering! But he got into his Pernod and his Gauloises, and he was ok.

RICHMOND: Until a few years ago I’d forgotten all about Histoire De Melody Nelson. I had no idea it was a cult record, I’d never bought it, never heard it until a few years ago. Now I think it’s brilliant!

BIRKIN: In those days, songs that were number one were never ours. Serge was immensely popular, but at the same time he wasn’t number one, number one was people like Claude Francois, so [it was typical] that he would write this opus and it should be recognised but not be the bestseller. He was always 20 years ahead of his time. The comfort to me is that by the time he died he knew that he was the most popular man in France.

Julie Byrne – The Greater Wings

Sharon O'Connell
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Julie Byrne – The Greater Wings

“I was made for the green/Made to be alone”, sang Julie Byrne on 2017’s “Follow My Voice”. A startling declaration from her second album Not Even Happiness, it nails the motifs that continue to shape her songs. Aloneness and its non-identical twin, loneliness, are feelings Byrne, an only child, has turned this way and that in examination of her largely itinerant life. “The green” is the natural world, which she describes in rapturous yet unfussy poeticism, as you might expect of someone who studied for a degree in environmental science and worked for a time as a ranger in Central Park.

Those themes run through The Greater Wings, too, though their value has shifted: nature is every bit as vividly present but the locales often stand in for feelings, and while solitude still sits deep in the bones of Byrne’s new songs, they’re warmed by connectivity’s richness. Here are profound expressions of timeless love, nostalgic memories of relationships past, reflections on fulfilment, grief, desire, belonging and habitual non-belonging.

Accordingly, Byrne has expanded her sound palette: alongside finger-picked guitar and voice are a harp, strings, piano and analogue synths, which bear the songs aloft, despite their weighty emotions. There are no drums or percussion; any earthing is done by vocals and guitar. Linda Perhacs, Weyes Blood, Grouper and Mark Hollis are kindred spirits, but a visual reference is more apt: there’s something of Terrence Malick in Byrne’s ravishing quietude, with its tilting at the mystical.

She’s moved quite some distance from her debut album, 2014’s Rooms With Walls And Windows. It combined two earlier cassette releases and is largely a set of sparse, spellbinding acoustic folk in which her voice shifts between angelic purity and a bluesy, soulful ache. However, two instrumentals point at what’s to come – the brief, soughing “Piano Music”, with its unexpected jags of distortion, and “Piano Music For Lucy”, a sorrowful organ piece with an astral bent. Not Even Happiness upped the ante by putting synth flesh on lean song structures and adding lustre without severing Byrne’s folk roots, though it’s Dylan’s freewheeling ’60s spirit that occasionally blows through, alongside Judee Sill’s. She’s never been in thrall to past songforms, but The Greater Wings repositions Byrne in the genre-less present, in the way that My Woman and Are We There did for Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten respectively.

The album was written between 2018 and 2022, during the singer’s time in New York, LA, Chicago and Albuquerque, with residencies in Portugal, Thailand and Morocco also playing a part. The recording was similarly nomadic, with the earliest sessions held in returning producer Eric Littmann’s Chicago home studio, the last in upstate New York. The sudden death of Littmann, who also plays synth and piano, in June 2021 meant the album remained untouched until January the following year, when Byrne and two of her players reconvened in the Catskills with Alex Somers as producer.

Some lyrics were changed following the tragedy, but only one song post-dates it – “Death Is The Diamond”, the lustrous closer. Its bookend is the title track, a sensual ripple of acoustic fingerpicking around which synths gently swell and recede, while Byrne’s voice blossoms in charcoal-soft tones: “Distant galaxies move/I’m not here for nothing”, she declares, later noting in metaphysical wonder, “I feel it, the tilt of the planet, panorama of the valley”.

There’s intimacy alongside this lyrical expansiveness: the divine, slow-mo “Moonless”, with its almost mystical, Weyes Blood-ish richness, revisits a night in an old hotel and suggests that love is never lost, rather temporarily displaced until “pools of a moment widen through the air”, enabling reconnection to the source. “Summer Glass” is in glorious contrast, vaporous synths and a trilling motif the foil for Byrne’s cooing. It swells tantalisingly on the brink, but instead segues into the brief, Budd-like “Summer’s End”.

“Lightning Comes Up From The Ground” delivers a slow-mo, surprising likeness of The Lotus Eaters’ “The First Picture Of You”, while the gentle, sustained gush of “Conversation Is A Flowstate” suggests a meeting of Blue-era Joni and William Basinski. “Hope’s Return” soars skyward, sensual and celebratory, a symphony of plush synths roaring gently behind, before “Death Is The Diamond”. A soft-burnished tribute to Littmann with just piano and voice, it’s necessarily sorrowful but flares like a new beginning, rather than a burnout. “Does my voice echo forward?” Byrne wonders, as she makes something like peace with her cataclysmic loss in a neutral universe. Emphatically, yes.

Codeine – Frigid Stars / “Barely Real” EP / The White Birch

Jack Milner
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Codeine – Frigid Stars / “Barely Real” EP / The White Birch

When music is slowed down and the space between notes is stretched out, it stands to reason our brains are more efficient at interpreting the soundwaves that our ears then process into electrical activity. Our relationship with the individual notes, the words and the rhythms, can become something more profound. That’s one theory anyway, and Codeine’s music goes a long way towards proving the hypothesis.

The group began somewhere between New York City and Oberlin, Ohio, in the late 1980s, arriving fully formed into an independent music landscape that had been sculpted by hardcore. Although closely associated with the Louisville scene that birthed Slint, it could be argued that Codeine have more in common with their adopted home of New York City; albeit the New York of No Wave, The Velvet Underground and La Monte Young. From the get-go, they were a group unshackled from the restraints of commercial ambition. This was cerebral, ambitious music, blessed with Stephen Immerwahr’s beautifully restrained melodies.

Codeine and the bands that emerged bearing their influence would go on to be labelled ‘slowcore’; like many hastily imagined labels, it’s admirably succinct but ultimately reductive. For one, drummer Chris Brokaw is dismissive about the influence of hardcore on Codeine: “We had experience listening to and playing some hardcore in earlier bands, but I don’t think hardcore has a lot of bearing on Codeine.” But perhaps it’s fair to say that without the DIY culture that arose around hardcore, and the elevation of ideas over virtuosity, then innovative bands such as Lungfish, Tortoise and Codeine couldn’t have existed. Either way, Immerwahr, John Engle and Brokaw have always seemed comfortable with their legacy, secure in the knowledge they have more in common with the expansive ambition of My Bloody Valentine or even Talk Talk than the dreary imagery that ‘slowcore’ or ‘sadcore’ conjure up.

Earlier this year Codeine announced shows in support of their lost album Dessau, which they recorded in 1992 but released just last year via Numero Group. The shows will also be preceded by these three reissues, Frigid Stars, “Barely Real” (EP), and The White Birch, the first time the records will be available on single vinyl since they were originally released.

Codeine’s output over the course of their career was remarkably consistent, and so Frigid Stars, their debut for Germany’s Glitterhouse label, is the blueprint for everything that followed. It’s a wonderfully accomplished debut and a slow-burning classic, categorised by jarring silences, impossibly dense noise and expansive grandeur. The tempos border on glacial, but this has the effect of opening up the music to the point where the particles are visible. Stephen Immerwahr’s lyrics have a deadpan humour and the phrasing has a composure more associated with jazz. These feel like torch songs, and yet “D” is as melodically engaging as anything their more commercially viable contemporaries were releasing.

In 1991, amid glowing reviews for the initial run of Frigid Stars, Codeine signed to Sub Pop and, with inflated expectations, accepted an invite from David Grubbs (then of Gastr Del Sol) and fellow Oberlin College alumni John McEntire (Tortoise) to open for their band, Bastro.

Travelling extensively for the first time and gaining momentum as a live group, the band returned to the US ready to record a follow-up to Frigid Stars. Over the course of a few months and several slightly fragmented recording sessions later, a lack of cohesiveness to the songs led to a decision to turn them into an EP (Dessau also began life here). The “Barely Real” EP, their first release on Sub Pop, bore all the hallmarks of Frigid Stars but elaborated on several different directions which all could have been pursued. Codeine’s unique signature – the considered phrasing, the long silences and the melodic intricacy – was there but it pointed towards several influences and similarities that perhaps weren’t immediately apparent on Frigid Stars; namely PiL, The Fall and Erik Satie.

In the spring 1993 issue of New York City’s The Village Voice, you could have found this advert: “DRUMMER NEEDED. CODEINE seeks drummer for slow, taut, melodic music. Steadiness more important than fills.” In the wake of successful tours of the US and Europe, they had found themselves without their spine when drummer Chris Brokaw chose to depart to tour with his band Come and focus on writing the Matador band’s follow-up to their debut, Eleven. Auditions for Codeine were apparently painful, with as many as 20 percussionists coming and going, most of whom struggled to find the patience and composure required to play as slow as Immerwahr and John Engle required. The last drummer to audition was Doug Scharin. Engle, frustrated with the long, drawn-out audition process, describes Scharin’s arrival as a revelation: “I couldn’t believe how powerfully he was playing the drums. Not heavy handed, but just the gravitas he brought to it, how much he physically put into the drums. Two songs in, I thought the kit was going to explode.”

Revitalised, Immerwahr, Engle and Scharin relocated to Louisville to rehearse the new album. For the first time, Codeine was a full-time occupation for the three members, and after two successful tours opening for The Flaming Lips and Mazzy Star, the band were on the crest of a wave. If Frigid Stars was the blueprint, then The White Birch is the finished masterpiece. Any tentativeness that could’ve been levelled at the band previously had been worked through, resulting in a soundscape that was both more idiosyncratic yet expansive. The same economy was present; the frozen pauses, the monolithic chords and the magic approach to dynamics, but they were filtered through a very laconic sense of confidence.

Immerwahr’s lyrics, always blessed with a romantic nihilism, were now something even more meaningful, and confidently walked a tightrope of melancholy. “What does the word vacancy mean, when you don’t expect anything?” he sings on “Sea”. “It’s not necessarily depressed,” says Immerwahr, “but it certainly is a little bit resigned. In terms of themes of what the lyrics were – yes, it was anger. But one way to deal with anger is to turn the thermometer down so you’re freezing it, containing it by turning down everything else – whether that’s emotions, edges or tempos.”

It seems fitting that Codeine have quietly become one of the most influential bands of the ’90s. These reissues come at a time when many of the bands they directly influenced or performed with, such as Duster and Mazzy Star, are having a resurgence via the digital word-of-mouth avenue of TikTok. A new generation of teenagers seem to be finding solace in the cold cinematic soundscapes and melancholic romanticism. Codeine, forever content to carve their own path, have always seemed refreshingly immune to hype or trends, and it’s that quiet confidence and courage in their convictions that colour every second of these records.

Tom Waits to reissue his complete Island catalogue

Sam Richards
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Tom Waits to reissue his complete Island catalogue

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Swordfishtrombones on September 1, Tom Waits will issue a newly remastered version of that landmark album, along with its two follow-ups, Rain Dogs (1985) and Franks Wild Years (1987).

They will be followed on October 6 by the reissues of his remaining Island studio albums, Bone Machine (1992) and The Black Rider (1993).

All albums were mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. Swordfishtrombones was sourced from the original EQ’ed ½” production master tapes while Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine and The Black Rider were sourced from the original ½” flat master tapes. The new vinyl editions will come with specially made labels featuring photos of Waits from each era in addition to artwork and packaging that has been recreated to replicate the original LPs.

Each album will be released on CD and in two vinyl options: 180-gram black vinyl and a limited edition colour variant that will be available exclusively via TomWaits.com and UDiscover Music. Ahead of their physical releases, all of the remastered albums are available to stream now – click here to pre-order or stream.

Send us your questions for Terry Reid!

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Terry Reid!

The next issue of Uncut will feature An Audience With Terry Reid, in which Mr Superlungs himself will kindly respond to the questions sent in by you, the Uncut readers.

Renowned for his powerful voice, Reid was a fixture on the London rock scene of the late 1960s, rolling with Hendrix, Cream and the Stones. Famously, he was in the frame to front the band that would become Led Zeppelin, before recommending Robert Plant for the role instead.

Reid’s subsequent 1970s solo albums include the magnificent River – influenced in part by a period spent living with the exiled Gilberto Gil – and Seeds Of Memory, conjured up in California with his old friend Graham Nash.

Reid has continued to gig furiously down the years, playing with a huge variety of musicians and ensembles from Africa Express to The Cosmic American Derelicts. Indeed he’s still going strong, with UK shows slated for the autumn, including a gig at London’s Jazz Cafe on October 2.

So what do you want to ask? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Wednesday July 19 and Terry will answer the best ones in the next issue of Uncut.

Hear Margo Price covering Leon Russell’s “Stranger In A Strange Land”

Sam Richards
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Hear Margo Price covering Leon Russell’s “Stranger In A Strange Land”

A new Leon Russell tribute album, A Song For Leon, will be released by Primary Wave Music on September 8.

Among those contributing covers of Leon Russell songs are Margo Price, Pixies, Orville Peck, Hiss Golden Messenger and US Girls with Bootsy Collins. Hear Price’s take on “Stranger In A Strange Land” below:

“I’ve always loved Leon Russell’s vibe and approach to music and life in general,” says Price. “I had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at a show many years ago in the hallway. I always remember what he said during the live interview that day, which was that ‘It was his job to misinform the press.’ He was an old man at the time, but I’ll never forget how mischievous he seemed.

“After my band and I cut [“Stranger In A Strange Land”], we decided to perform it live at many shows. The monologue in the middle is my favourite. It still seems absolutely pertinent, and its subject still matters today. He’s talking about the afterlife and equality and goes off about starting a new race where we all just learn to love each other. We can all learn a thing of two from Leon Russell.”

Pre-order A Song For Leon here and check out the full tracklisting below:

1. Margo Price – “Strangers in a Strange Land”
2. Durand Jones & The Indications – “Out in the Woods”
3. Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats – “Tight Rope”
4. Orville Peck – “This Masquerade”
5. U.S. Girls with Bootsy Collins – “Superstar”
6. Pixies – “Crystal Closet Queen”
7. Monica Martin – “A Song for You”
8. Bret McKenzie with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band – “Back to the Island”
9. Tina Rose, Amy Nelson, Jason Hill – “Laying Right Here in Heaven”
10. Hiss Golden Messenger – “Prince of Peace”

Luaka Bop to reissue Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 album, Pharoah

Sam Richards
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Luaka Bop to reissue Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 album, Pharoah

On September 15, Luaka Bop will release the first official remastered edition of Pharoah Sanders’ rare and influential 1977 album, Pharoah. The 2LP set will include two previously unreleased live recordings of “Harvest Time”, plus a 24-page book of photographs, archival materials and interviews.

Watch the announcement video below and pre-order the album here:

To accompany the release, The Harvest Time Project: A Tribute To Pharoah Sanders – a live performance featuring Irreversible Entanglements, Joshua Abrams, Domenico Lancellotti and the Pharoah album’s guitarist Tisziji Muñoz – will premiere at November’s Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht.

Uncut – September 2023

Michael Bonner
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Uncut – September 2023

HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

Kate Bush, Ronnie Lane, Blur, Elliott Smith, Moby Grape, XTC, Joan Jett, Tinariwen and more all feature in the new Uncut, dated September 2023 and in UK shops from July 13 or available to buy online now. All copies come with a free, 15-track CD of the month’s best new music including tracks from Public Image Limited, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Rhiannon Giddens, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Dot Allison, James Blackshaw and more.

INSIDE THIS MONTH’S UNCUT

KATE BUSH: We celebrate 40 of Kate’s greatest songs in the company of musicians and eyewitnesses, as we attempt to unravel the magical thinking and creative mysteries behind one of the most consistently adventurous and radical songbooks of the last 50 years – from her career defining hits to b-sides, deep cuts and even a Christmas song. “The one thing that she taught me, there are no barriers,” says one collaborator. “Too many people think you shouldn’t do this or that. But Kate would often ask, “Is that weird?’ or ‘How can we make this weird..?”

RONNIE LANE: Mod, mystic, vagabond, songwriter and more… friends and bandmates celebrate the many (ace) faces of Lane, from superstardom with The Small Faces and the Faces to ragged roots hootenannies, spiritual enlightenment and beyond. “Ronnie was an extraordinary guy,” says Pete Townshend. “He had his own space which he was going to occupy, musically, and he never deviated from it.”

MOBY GRAPE: Blessed with three guitarists, five distinctive songwriters and seemingly endless promise, things began to fall apart for San Francisco’s finest early on. We hear how record company hype, a coercive manager, a witch named Joanna and a ‘fake’ touring line-up of the band brought chaos to their exuberant psychedelic folk rock imperative. “Our story isn’t straightforward,” one former member confirms.

ELLIOTT SMITH: The first few months of 1998 were a critical time for Smith. A major label record label, a new batch of songs and an unexpected Oscar nomination promised much – but as this extract from a major new biography reveals, the additional pressures this new found level of fame brought began to take their toll on the shy, introverted singer-songwriter: “It was the beginning of the end.”

XTC: From hit singles and getting banned from Top Of The Pops to (almost) working with Brian Eno and his love-hate relationship with his Swindon hometown, Andy Partridge’s candour knows no bounds. “If people think we’re so good, then fucking say it now, come on,” he tells Tom Pinnock. “Why wait?”

TINARIWEN: We meet the valiant Tuareg collective in Paris to discuss how the troubled genesis of their latest album and how turmoil and tragedy in their homeland has only brought them closer together. “We don’t want the band to ever stop.”

AN AUDIENCE WITH… JOAN JETT: The former Runaway and lifelong rock’n’roll advocate talks beach gurus, British humour and the power of the guitar.

THE MAKING OF “IF I’M IN LUCK I MIGHT GET PICKED UP” BY BETTY DAVIS: How the former Mrs Miles Davis hooked up w with Sly Stone’s drummer to create a “stinkingly funky” song about sexual autonomy

ALBUM BY ALBUM WITH OREN AMBARCHI: A handy primer to the ever-expanding catalogue of the Aussie experimentalist.

MY LIFE IN MUSIC WITH PROTOMARTYR: Frontman Joe Casey on the records that raised him: “If you’re from Detroit they give you a Stevie Wonder album at birth”.

CLICK TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

REVIEWED Blur, Public Image Limited, Rhiannon Giddens, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Blake Mills, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, DeYarmond Edison, Kevin Ayers, Mellow Candle, Hipgnosis and more

PLUS Tony McPhee RIP, Elton at Glastonbury, Brian Eno, Shaun Ryder, James Blackshaw returns, and introducing instrumental avant-rockers Horse Lords

CLICK TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

Inside the new Uncut: Kate Bush, Ronnie Lane, Blur, Elliott Smith, XTC and more

Michael Bonner
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Inside the new Uncut: Kate Bush, Ronnie Lane, Blur, Elliott Smith, XTC and more

When Kate Bush was 8 years old – she writes in the introduction to How To Be Invisible, her collection of lyrics – she found a discarded instrument an unlikely outlet for her growing musical ambitions. “I used to play an old harmonium that had ostensibly been dumped in the outhouse in the garden,” she remembered. “It was so exciting. One stop was ‘flutes’, another ‘trumpets’. I adored playing with these different sounds, but then, one by one, the stops were eaten away by the mice who lived in the harmonium.”

It’s an instructive anecdote, not least in what it tells us about the way Bush could find something magical in an object the rest of us might otherwise consider junk. But in essence, Bush has been truffling out enchantments under the ivy – or, perhaps, in the barn – for over 40 years now. As “Running Up That Hill” celebrates passing one billion streams on Spotify, and with the parent album Hounds Of Love due for a reissue later this year, we attempt to reveal the mysteries behind Bush’s idiosyncratic vision, whose determination to bring that vision to fruition, has been there right from the start. Reflecting on Bush’s alchemical gifts for transforming the ordinary into the unexpected, I’m surprised she didn’t write a song about that harmonium – one to add to her uncanny bestiary alongside snowmen, magicians, angels and washing machines…

Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll find other exponents of English music, no less surprising than Kate Bush. The many faces of Ronnie Lane – from mod to seeker, gypsy and beyond – are celebrated by a host of friends, including Pete Townshend, while eternal refusenik Andy Partridge shares his inimitable views on XTC’s glorious canon. We travel further afield, to San Fransicsco’s Bay Area circa 1969 to meet Moby Grape, then to New York in the late ‘90s where Elliott Smith finds himself at a pivotal point in his career, and lastly to Paris, in the present day, where Tinariwen are emerging from a period of enforced hibernation. There’s more, of course – Betty Davis, Joan Jett, the return of Blur and a free, 15-track new music CD.

It’s enough, we hope, to keep you entertained for the month ahead…

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

Gwenno to lead Joni Mitchell tribute at Cardiff’s Llais festival

Sam Richards
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Gwenno to lead Joni Mitchell tribute at Cardiff’s Llais festival

The first wave of artists has been unveiled for 2023’s Llais festival, taking place at Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff on 11–15 October.

One of the programme’s highlights is Both Sides Now: Celebrating Joni Mitchell (October 13), featuring singers including festival co-curator Gwenno Saunders, Laura Mvula, Eska and Charlotte Church performing Mitchell’s songs accompanied by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Gwenno will also perform her own solo show at the festival, and there will be concerts from Bat For Lashes, Angeline Morrison and The Staves, as well as James Yorkston and Nina Persson with The Second Hand Orchestra. The Unthanks will host a special all-day event featuring performances and participatory events.

“It has been such a joy to curate this year’s Llais,” says Gwenno. “I’m a proud Cardiffian and that was always in the back of my mind when thinking of performers and artists to join us. Cardiff is made up of a rich tapestry of cultures and languages that makes the city unique and truly part of the world, and particularly the Docks where Wales Millennium Centre is situated, defines so much of our identity as people of this city, and it was a celebration of this that I was aiming for.”

For more information and tickets – 10% of which will be available on a ‘pay what you can’ basis – visit the official Llais site.

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