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Jack White jams with Pearl Jam

Charlotte Treadaway
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Jack White jams with Pearl Jam

Jack White appeared on stage with Pearl Jam last night (9 June) during their surprise performance at his own company Third Man Records in Nashville.

He played guitar for the rendition of their song “Of The Earth”. The band only played nine other songs, including a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive”.

The gig was an impromptu warm up to Pearl Jam’s headline set at Bonaroo festival this weekend – and was before an audience of just 200.

See pictures below:

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

 

Ringo Starr opens up about “great, kind and loving” George Martin

Charlotte Treadaway
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Ringo Starr opens up about “great, kind and loving” George Martin

Ringo Starr has spoken about George Martin.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, he said: “He was great, and kind, and loving. And understanding of four punks from Liverpool. At the beginning he was the boss. It was so crazy, he was the only man who could press record.”

He was asked whether he had learnt any production tips from Martin, who died in March of this year, to which he replied: “Not really, but I suppose, subliminally, everything – you know what I mean? But I don’t think, ‘Oh, George would have done this,’ or ‘That’s how that goes.’ I just get on with it, really.”

Starr described Martin as “always being at a higher level” than the four and said he was a “great match” for them, adding: “We were lucky to get him.”

He also relayed an anecdote about Martin initially bringing the band songs from other writers for them to cover in the early years (given that being the norm of pop music at the time), but they convinced him to allow them to sing their own songs. “It was very ballsy of us as a new act to think, ‘No, no, we want to do Lennon and McCartney songs,’” he said.

Starr’s All-Starr Band has just kicked off their US summer tour.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Paul McCartney releases 360 degree photo of tour

Charlotte Treadaway
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0
Paul McCartney releases 360 degree photo of tour

Paul McCartney released a 360-degree photo to Facebook last night, coinciding with the launch of the social media site’s new 360-degree photos app.

The photo was taken on his One On One tour in Argentina at Alberto Kempes Stadium – and is just the first in a series to be released by him.

The post accompanying the picture reads: “Paul in 360° at the Alberto Kempes Stadium in Córdoba, Argentina on 15th May 2016. This is Paul’s first tour photo using the hashtag #OneOnOne360 – there will be more to come…!”

By clicking on the photo, Facebook users are able to see more details as the picture wraps around the screen.

The app allows users to post photos taken “in the round” – and McCartney, along with NASA and The New York Times, was among the first to test the feature.

The photo is just one of a number of high-tech promotional tools he’s incorporating. He also launched a six part Virtual Reality documentary series called PURE McCartney VR to coincide with the release of his compilation album today (10 June).

The European leg of the One On One tour will come to an end on June 30, before restarting in the US in Milwaukee, Cleveland, on July 8.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

“I just don’t listen!” An audience with Neil Young

Michael Bonner
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“I just don’t listen!” An audience with Neil Young

“I just don’t listen,” says Neil Young. He is considering the capricious turns his career has taken and whether, along the way, he has ever listened to any advice offered to him by his fellow musicians. “Many years ago, I was touring in England, maybe 1973,” he continues. “I was playing Tonight’s The Night. We had an opening act, The Eagles. Glenn Frey said to me, ‘Why are you destroying your career? You have this incredible record that came out [Harvest], and everybody loves it. Now you’re singing about heroin and overdoses and cocaine and gunshots and blood all over the car. What are you singing this stuff for? Why do you do this?’ There’s no answer. I don’t have an answer.”

Young is currently in the prestigious surroundings of his UK record company, Warner Brothers, for a bespoke event to launch his latest album, Earth – a tremendous live set recorded on tour with his current backing band, Promise Of The Real. Taking place in a bright, airy space in the middle of the building, which also doubles as the company’s canteen and bar, the event consists of a Q&A followed by a playback of the album. The audience consists of journalists, band members and crew and a smattering of celebrities including Noel Gallagher and the actress Caroline Catz.

High up on a wall – decorated to emulate the sleeve for Pink Floyd’s album The Wall – hangs a large photograph of Young, intended to promote tonight’s event: ‘An evening with Neil Young’. In the photograph, Young is depicted wearing a grey suit jacket and a white hat; he looks spruce and clean-shaven, with his muttonchops neatly trimmed and his eyes bright and clear.

“The guy in that picture, he’s scary,” Young says, gazing at this image of his younger self. “That was a long time ago.” He points at his face. “This is now.”

‘Now’ – aged 70, that is – Young is wearing a black t-shirt with the word ‘Earth’ emblazoned on it. Over that, he wears a grey check shirt while a black hat barely restrains his hair, which is gradually turning white.

Earlier, Young has been 20 minutes late arriving – caught in traffic on the motorway, it transpires – and while we waited, Weld – Young’s 1991 live album with Crazy Horse – was played over the stereo system. It might seem a little unfair to stack an album as storied as Weld next to his current live effort. But hearing Weld so close to Earth helps put this new album into valuable context. Both records find Young and his backing bands at their most rapturous and expansive. Promise Of The Real sound not unlike Crazy Horse, and deliver the crunching riffs, deafening major chords and harmonies that have typified many of Young’s best records.

While Weld offered a pleasing summary of Young and Crazy Horse’s many peaks together, Earth has a different agenda. Recorded on last year’s Rebel Content tour, Earth brings together songs from throughout Young’s career that address his lengthy, quixotic history of eco-activism, stretching back to 1970’s After The Goldrush.

“This album is a natural progression of things that started in my head maybe 5 or 10 years ago,” Young explains. “I started thinking about the concerts that I’d done, the songs that I’d been singing for some years and how I’d come round to focus on things that I think matter now more than my own personal life. So I decided that I’d try to put these songs together – the songs that represented something – in a tour.

“I was in the studio listening to live recordings that I’d made. I listened to 25 shows, which ran to 2 ½ to three hours. I listened and listened and picked the tracks that we liked, and those are the tracks that make up Earth. When I listened to all these tracks, that’s when it came to me what I was doing. That if I chose these tracks, we were going to be singing about this thing for years.”

As anyone who has followed Young’s career recently will have noticed, he has taken issue with the McCorporations who dominate the agricultural industry. On his last album, The Monsanto Years, he levied a sustained attack against the with agrochemical giant and their patronage of genetically modified seeds.

“In the short run, coffee gets you going,” he says. “But after a while, you have another cup and it’s like any drug, you start taking it. That’s what they’re doing to the land. At first, it seems more productive because its jacked out of its mind, it’s completely going off. After a few years, it can’t sustain that, so it’s over. What’s the solution to that? Luckily, the scientists have come up with the idea that you just use more of the product, then everything will be fine. So more pesticides.”

The purpose of Earth, says Young, is straightforward. “I wanted to say something on behalf of the animals and on behalf of the organic things on earth that are being polluted by all of these GMO seeds and the diversity that we’re losing through all this.”

Among the album’s highlights are several tracks that have not been performed live since the early Seventies, including “Vampire Blues” and “Hippie Dream”. The former, from On The Beach, is an assault on the rapacious oil industry. Young dates the song: “1973,” he says. “‘Sucking blood from the earth’. It sounds good. ‘I’m a vampire / sucking blood from the earth / give me 20 barrels worth’. That’s cool. Over time, it turned out not to be so cool. Not cool at all.”

“Hippie Dream”, meanwhile, reflected Young’s increasing dissatisfaction with the way the Sixties’ ideals had become corrupted. The line, “Just because it’s over for you / doesn’t mean it’s over for me”, was reportedly directed as David Crosby, who was then struggling with a heavy drug habit.

“That was me speaking to a drug addict that was wasting a lifetime,” Young acknowledges. “But it’s not what songs are about. People say things because they feel them, but if you really feel it, really believe it, then everybody everywhere feels that you really believe what you said then they apply it to their lives. It’s not precisely what I was talking about. They have a feeling, they can latch onto that as being authentic and real then they can actually ride and go wherever they want to go with it.”

“I’m a rocker,” concludes Young. “I just sing what I believe and what I’ve learned. I’ve studied it, I’ve spent a lot of time doing that and I take it very seriously.”

EARTH is released on June 17 by Reprise

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Brigid Mae Power reviewed

John Mulvey
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Brigid Mae Power reviewed

In early 1993, the 4AD label released a boxset dedicated to their in-house supergroup of sorts, This Mortal Coil. Within its exquisite art-goth packaging sat four CDs: the first three albums by the band plus a compilation, which corralled all the original versions of songs they’d covered. That disc, featuring Gene Clark, Chris Bell, Tim Buckley and Pearls Before Swine among others, was an exceptional act of curation by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell. It presented a strand of classic singer-songwriters whose work was at once personal and other-worldly, their music ready to be remade as something that would conform to the label’s ethereal brand identity. Here, the rawest human emotions could be aestheticised, with bespoke “Filigree And Shadow”, and without losing any of their visceral impact.

 

Brigid Mae Power, a remarkable new artist from Ireland, is not much familiar with most of that canon; she has only recently heard Mary Margaret O’Hara, a very useful point of reference. But as soon as her first album for Tompkins Square begins, Power seems to be instinctually channelling that heritage. “I’d cling to these beautiful things, immerse myself in their feelings,” she sings rapturously and, though she’s specifically referring to “the seaweed on the beach, the sun falling down over the sea,” it feels like she could just as easily be invoking a pantheon of spectral influence. The song is called “It’s Clearing Now”, built around the most indolent of acoustic strums, a string arrangement that blurs the horizon like heathaze, and Power’s ineffably graceful, sometimes wordless, ululations. It manages to recall both Elizabeth Fraser and Tim Buckley, while never sounding much like the point they historically intersect – This Mortal Coil’s version of “Song To The Siren”. It’s also the sort of piece that encourages dazzled hyperbole: I can’t imagine hearing a song I’ll like more in 2016.

Power, it transpires, has been making music of comparably rarefied beauty for a few years now. On Bandcamp, you can find a wealth of her early efforts, often recorded in churches and underground car parks, the sessions underscored by ambient noise leaking in from the world outside. The locations suggest a certain conceptual affinity, since Power’s work often has the resonance of liturgical music, and is delivered with a generally uncompromising sense of minimalism and verite. In fact, they were the products of expediency, of recording on a non-existent budget, in pursuit of architectural reverb to give the songs an unostentatious grandeur. A version of the traditional “My Lagan Love” is emblematic, just a creaking harmonium and Power, sounding extravagantly forlorn, far in the distance.

“Brigid Mae Power” brings this talent into focus, taking her from the empty spaces of Waterford to an actual recording studio, The Sparkle in Portland, Oregon, that belongs to the artist and producer Peter Broderick. Given the uncanny charms of Power’s early work, it’s a risky transition, but fortunately these songs are enriched by the process, and neither overburdened nor over-finessed. On “Let Me Hold You Through This”, over a pump organ that evokes the solemnities of early sacred music, Power’s declaration of unmediated love for her five-year-old son is in no way diminished by Broderick’s harmonies.

He does, though, deploy himself sparingly, appreciating the singularity of Power’s vision and the intimacy which contributes so much to her appeal. “Looking At You In A Photo” finds her alone at the piano, meditating on a picture of the child she has brought up alone. He is in his paddling pool, “so happy”, but Power remembers her own contrasting emotions: “I was so tired and lonely.” The infant, she believes, could see she was faking contentment, in the midst of people “who weren’t for us/Though they claimed to be.” It is one of Power’s many gifts that she can render sublime what seems on the page to be awkward, diaristic writing, and she also has a knack of tagging her poignant tales with upbeat conclusions. “We came through it, sweetheart,” she consoles, at the end of “Looking At You In A Photo”.

“Sometimes” is similarly unadorned – again, nothing more than Power and the piano – and even more moving. “Sometimes I just want to collapse into you,” she begins, before losing conventional vocabulary for a while and articulating a state of mind that is both transported and hesitant. Eventually, she ventures the second half of the line, “But I don’t know if you want me to.” The song works carefully towards a resolution, where she can finally trust those welcoming arms as secure.

Like “It’s Clearing Now”, “Sometimes” encapsulates the album’s subtly-implied theme of struggle and doubt transcended, of better times coming slowly into view. At the climax of this hugely satisfying album, Power even gives us that rarity: a happy ending, via a laugh and a dreamy, Karen Dalton-ish folk song called “How You Feel”. Before her words dissolve again into a minute or so of post-lingual harmonies, the last line is one of blissful reassurance: “I feel safer,” she sings, “than I ever have before.”

//

Q&A

UNCUT: What music influenced you? Do you come from a folk background?

BMP: Yeah, I grew up playing traditional music from quite a young age, I played the accordion and was exposed to a lot of different types of music. I was always trying to find my own way of singing, but when I heard Tim Buckley it was like a light went off. It allowed me to sing how I wanted to.

Can you explain what “Looking at you in a photo” is about?

I’ve been a single mum for five years and it’s given me lot of stuff to write about. A lot of tough times happened, and you don’t really get that many people writing about motherhood. But it’s such a huge thing to be responsible for someone, there’s a lot of doubt comes up, and I think I work through that in the songs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Sabbath’s final ever gig to be held in Birmingham

Charlotte Treadaway
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Black Sabbath’s final ever gig to be held in Birmingham

Black Sabbath have announced additional dates on their farewell tour. The 61-date world tour, The End, will wrap in the band’s home town of Birmingham, in February 2017.

The news was announced at Download, where the band are this weekend playing a headline slot. Flyers were handed out to festival goers revealing the dates of the 6-date final leg of the tour, aptly named “The End”.

Guitarist Tony Iommi has previously admitted his hopes to have the band’s final show in Birmingham: “when we’re home where we started, we always find it a bit nerve-wracking. But Birmingham means such a lot to us. It would be nice to think it could finish where it all started in Birmingham”.

The classic Sabbath line-up of Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward originally formed in Birmingham in 1968. This tour will feature the original line-up, excluding Ward, who this week announced his new band Day Of Errors.

Black Sabbath will play:

Manchester Arena (January 22)
Glasgow SSE Hydro (24)
Leeds First Direct Arena (26)
London O2 (29-31)
Birmingham Genting Arena (February 2, 4)

Ticket pricing and details are expected to follow next week.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Axl Rose confirms new Guns N’ Roses material

Charlotte Treadaway
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Axl Rose confirms new Guns N’ Roses material

Axl Rose confirmed earlier this week that he has been developing new Guns N’ Roses material with original members Slash and Duff McKagan.

Whilst in conversation with Sir David Tang at London’s China Exchange, Rose said: “I got a lot of stuff together, and I played some stuff for Slash and Duff and they liked it, and they might be on it.”

This could signal some of the first new material featuring any resemblance to an original Guns N’ Roses line up in over 20 years.

For Guns N’ Roses fans, the news will come as a sigh of relief. 2008’s Chinese Democracy is the most expensive rock album ever to be produced in music history, taking 13 years to make, and listing 14 studios and countless lineup changes in the credits.

In the interview, Rose also discussed his plans to write a book on his GNR career, projects for an upcoming UK tour, and the difficulty in filling Brian Johnson’s shoes at recent AC/DC live shows: “sing it wrong and you may not be singing again”.

Watch footage from the full interview below.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Tony Visconti criticises “boring” modern pop music

Charlotte Treadaway
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Tony Visconti criticises “boring” modern pop music

Tony Visconti has criticised modern pop music, calling it “fluff”.

Speaking to The Daily Star to promote his new talent show Guitar Star, the producer said: “There’s a sound to pop now that is so perfect it’s boring, because everything is fixed.

“Guitar Star aims to unearth old fashioned, raw ability. I’m looking for virtuosos like Hendrix, Cobain and Bowie.”

Singer Adele was specifically in the firing line (much to the displeasure of her fans, many of whom voiced their anger with the comments on Twitter) – he said: “You turn the radio on and it’s fluff, you are listening to 90% computerised voices. We know Adele has a great voice but it’s even questionable if that is actually her voice or how much has been manipulated. We don’t know.”

He also took an indirect shot at the inferiority of modern TV talent shows, saying: “There’s no fluffy back story, there’s no ‘I lost my pet dog in 97 and that made me want to play’ nonsense… No one can mistake me for Simon Cowell. It’s the worst time ever in the music industry”

Guitar Star sees its contestants compete to play at a major UK festival. It returns for a second series on June 14 on Sky Arts

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Marissa Nadler – Strangers

John Lewis
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Marissa Nadler – Strangers

In a musical age of compression – in sound files, budgets and, sometimes, ambitions – Marissa Nadler is someone still committed to building the grand musical palaces once known as ‘sonic cathedrals’. For more than 12 years, this Boston native has been making albums of intense, spectral torch songs influenced by murder ballads and country blues. There have been songs about dead cities, about unfaithful partners, about Virginia Woolf and Victorian Siamese twin circus performers, along with covers of Leonard Cohen and settings of Edgar Allen Poe.

2014’s July was something of a breakthrough, an elegiac album that downplayed the freak-folk and transformed her sound into something epic with help from producer Randall Dunn. Dunn had already helmed albums by primarily acoustic acts like Akron/Family and Six Organs Of Admittance, but he brought to Nadler’s music the bowel-quaking intensity that he gave to trancey drone metal outfits like Sunn O))) and Earth. The results were austere and all encompassing – acoustic Americana of epic proportions, like a clapboard shack built to the dimensions of a gothic cathedral.

Dunn is onboard once again for Strangers, which expands that sonic palette even more, with pianos, strings and a (very minimally deployed) rhythm section. The clawhammer guitar is still there – particularly on the coma-paced ballads like “Skyscraper” and “Dissolve” – but they are drenched in a specific type of reverb and resonance that turns them into something suitably epic. Opening track “Divers Of The Dust” transfers Nadler’s guitar patterns onto a piano, enhanced by strings. It envisages a post-apocalyptic scenario (“Lying here on the rocks/With the cliffs disintegrating”), which seems to set the tone for the entire album of dystopian narratives, be they about lost love or friendship.

Nadler opens the Roy Orbison-ish bolero “Shadow Show Diane” – a curious portrait of voyeurism – with lyrics about being “tired of watching TV” and “taking pictures on my phone”. It’s oddly startling to hear such modern references in an album that makes a point of its timelessness – these are songs that could have been sung 20, 30 or 200 years ago.

What’s even more effective is that Nadler never pushes towards the epic. In the same way that a skilled actor playing a drunk tries to sound as sober as possible, her voice achieves grandeur through subtlety and understatement. It is intimate, sometimes almost conversational, and words are sighed, whispered, confided. Oddly, the more she pulls back, the more epic it sounds. On “Skyscraper”, she double-tracks spooky, medieval harmonies with herself, in the style of Linda Perhacs. On “Katie I Know” and “Janie In Love” her voice soars, dreamily, over a full band accompaniment that sounds like something that skilled sessionmen from Laurel Canyon circa 1971 might have provided.

Sometimes, her approach conjurs up whole new areas of fusion. The title track invents a kind of gothic country and western music, where a woozy pedal steel weaves in and out of distorted riffs and E-bowed guitars, with Nadler’s gently sighed vocals holding things together.

According to Nadler, one central lyric here is on the wonderfully woozy “Waking”, which she compares to the experience of Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, where the protagonist is not aware of what is a dream and what is reality. And Strangers is an album filled with such reverie – an album that seems to exist in some hinterland between dream, nightmare and reality.

Q&A
Marissa Nadler
You used that Dadaist cut-up technique on the first song. How does that work?
After writing mainly about relationships and heartbreak, I wanted to try a new approach, to look outward into the world, rather than inward. I put together collages, using pages from history books, newspapers and old National Geographics. I’d literally cut them up and look for words that were beautiful and inspiring, and then find relationships between the words, and create stories based on those relationships.

The lyrics here seem to be less personal, less about heartbreak – is that right?
Yes and no. I’ve realised that your personal life doesn’t have to be in a shambles to have material for lyrics – that’s not a sustainable songwriting model! But a lot of the songs are still personal, they’re just less about romantic relationships and more about human themes of friendship. This time I’ve approached things in a more painterly manner – it’s less hyper-realistic, more abstract and surrealist.

Is it true you’ve collaborated with death metal bands?
Yes! I did some work on a Xasthur record, among others. Ambient vocals work really well with that kind of music. It also chimes with the innate darkness and melancholy in my music – a lot of my fans are heavily into black metal, which should seem odd, but I don’t think it is.

What have you been listening to lately?
There are certain constants I always love, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. And I’ve recently been listening to a lot of Roy Orbison, Townes Van Zandt, Liz Harris’s Grouper, Angel Olsen and Glenn Jones. All the singers I love don’t have any affectations. I’ve tried to strip my voice back to its purest, and remove the frills, let the music speak for itself.
INTERVIEW: JOHN LEWIS

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The Who criticise “totally ridiculous” Quadrophenia sequel

Charlotte Treadaway
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0
The Who criticise “totally ridiculous” Quadrophenia sequel

The Who have criticised plans for a sequel to Quadrophenia, the film based on their rock opera of the same name.

The Mirror last month published a report that To Be Someone would be set 35 years after the original – and stars including Phil Daniels and Toyah Wilcox were said to be reprising their roles.

Pete Townsend, Roger Daltrey and their manager Bill Curbishley have since issued an official statement distancing themselves from the project.

Curbishley said, “Quadrophenia has an enduring appeal and will forever be THE definitive mod film. Quadrophenia is a significant and influential film based on The Who’s music not some Carry On franchise. Any follow up to this film could only be made by the authors of the original and would need to be worthy of the name. This karaoke sequel announced recently in the press would be totally ridiculous”.

The new film, which doesn’t feature Sting, Leslie Ash or Ray Winstone, let along any words or music from The Who is, as far as the group and original producer are concerned, “a blatant attempt to cash in” on the original’s enduring popularity.

Curbishley added that he “found it hard to understand why any of the original cast would lend themselves to this crass attempt to cash in on the excellence of the original when this quite clearly isn’t a sequel”.

“The band and management are keen to confirm that the project isn’t endorsed by The Who, Who Films, Universal or any of the other rights owners of the original.”

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool finally coming to Spotify

Charlotte Treadaway
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0
Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool finally coming to Spotify

Radiohead’s newest album, A Moon Shaped Pool, will be available for streaming on Spotify from Friday, June 17>.

The band’s ninth studio album, which features singles “Burn The Witch” and “Daydreaming“, has been available on rival streaming services Apple Music and Tidal since its release on May 8.

A message on the band’s Spotify artist page states “Radiohead’s latest album will be available from 17th June…come back then to listen”, confirming what will be a notable U-turn in the band’s inflammatory relationship with the streaming service.

In 2013, Thom Yorke called the service “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”, while Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich tweeted “new artists get paid f***-all with this model” as he pulled the band’s music from the app.

Radiohead’s online campaign for A Moon Shaped Pool has been far from traditional. The band recently erased their entire social media presence, dispatching instead a cryptic selection of enveloped flyers to select fans.

In May, they made a triumphant live return to London – read the gig Uncut review here

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The 19th Uncut Playlist Of 2016

John Mulvey
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The 19th Uncut Playlist Of 2016

Gutted to be missing Neil Young & The Promise Of The Real, for various reasons, this week: even more so now that I’ve seen this “Down By The River” from Glasgow (embedded below).

Still lost in the new Ryley Walker, but please check out Rafi Bookstaber, the new Angel Olsen and Sarathy Korwar. Also the Teenage Fanclub single is classic and I’ll link as soon as I can. Oh, and don’t write off The Avalanches album just yet…

Until then…

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

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

2 Head Technician – Zones (Ecstatic)

3 Rafi Bookstaber – Late Summer (Woodsist)

4 The Avalanches – Frankie Sinatra (XL)

5 Angel Olsen – My Woman (Jagjaguwar)

6 Slow Club -One Day All Of This Won’t Matter Anymore (Moshi Moshi)

7 Cool Ghouls – Animal Races (Melodic)

8 Dinosaur Jr – Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not (Jagjaguwar)

9 Diga Rhythm Band Featuring Jerry Garcia – Happiness Is Drumming/Fire On The Mountain (Youtube)

https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/145559136987/happiness-is-drumming-diga-rhythm-band-w

10 Teenage Fanclub – I’m In Love (PeMa)

11 Simon Scott – FloodLines (Touch)

12 Sarathy Korwar – Day To Day (Ninja Tune x Steve Reid Foundation)

13 Bob Brown – The Wall I Built Myself (Tompkins Square)

14 Nils Frahm & Woodkid Featuring Robert DeNiro – Ellis (Erased Tapes)

15 Thee Oh Sees – A Weird Exits (Castleface)

16 DD Dumbo – Satan (4AD)

17 Chris Robinson Brotherhood – Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel (Silver Arrow)

18 Neil Young & Promise Of The Real – Down By The River (Glasgow SSE Hydro 5/6/2016)

David Bowie exhibition film to be re-released in cinemas

Charlotte Treadaway
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David Bowie exhibition film to be re-released in cinemas

The documentary film of David Bowie‘s V&A exhibition is going to be re-released in cinemas.

David Bowie Is was directed by the BAFTA winning Hamish Hamilton, documents the exhibition which was held at the V&A between 23 March and 11 August 2013.

It was filmed on the closing night of the exhibition, and offers viewers the opportunity to relive the widely acclaimed retrospective of the career of Bowie.

The exhibition, which has travelled to seven other locations including Berlin, Toronto and Melbourne, was the fastest selling in the V&A’s history. Its collection consists of handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, set designs and Bowie’s own instruments.

The film also features contributions from Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto and Jarvis Cocker.

Also featuring are curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, who provide expert insight into the exhibition.

They said in a statement: “We were deeply saddened to hear of the death of David Bowie. His far-reaching influence on cultural life is unparalleled and the film offers illuminating detail about key objects from the David Bowie Archive with commentary from special guest contributors and a fantastic soundtrack.”

The film will be shown at selected Vue Cinemas from 14 July 2016.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Vinyl sales reach 28 year peak

Charlotte Treadaway
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Vinyl sales reach 28 year peak

Annual sales of LPs are on track to smash through the three million unit mark for the first time in 28 years.

The highest selling vinyl album of 2016 is David Bowie’s Blackstar, which sold out of its original pressing days after its release. Bowie’s 1975 single “Golden Years” also leads 2016 vinyl single sales.

The news comes as HMV, the UK’s largest vinyl retailer, estimates that over 1.5 million LPs will this year be sold across its 128 stores.

Gennaro Castaldo, Director of Communications at BPI, said in a statement: “Sales of vinyl have risen dramatically since their low point in 2007, with over 2 million LPs purchased last year for the first time in more than two decades.

“The BPI has every expectation this trend will continue, and estimates that up to 3.5 million LPs or more could be purchased during the course of 2016”.

Next week, HMV will celebrate this with their annual ‘Vinyl Week’ (13th-19th June), offering 50% of selected titles. On Saturday 18th June, the store will also unveil a series of limited-edition vinyl reissues, including a green vinyl of The Clash’s debut LP, and a pink vinyl of The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks.

The full list of HMV reissues is as follows:

Sex Pistols: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols (1000 copies on pink vinyl)
Manic Street Preachers: Everything Must Go (1000 copies on blue vinyl)
Various Artists: Let’s Bop – Sun Records Collection (1000 copies on black vinyl)
Teenage Fanclub: Bandwagonesque (500 copies on ‘hmv pink’ vinyl)
The Clash: The Clash (1000 copies on green vinyl)
Velvet Underground: Loaded (1000 copies on white vinyl)
Deep Purple: In Rock (1000 copies on marbled vinyl)
Alex Turner: Submarine OST (500 copies on 10” black vinyl)
Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow: Ex Machina OST (500 copies on frosted vinyl)
John Martyn: Solid Air (500 copies on green vinyl)
Iron Maiden: Brave New World (first ever edition on black vinyl!)
Pulp: Different Class
Pulp: His ‘n’ Hers
Pulp: This Is Hardcore
Pulp: We Love Life
Laura Marling: Alas, I Cannot Swim
Laura Marling: I Speak Because I Can
30 Seconds To Mars: This Is War
Beastie Boys: Check Your Head (Deluxe Edition, Remastered)
Various Artists: Guardians Of The Galaxy OST (2 LP soundtrack & film score on black vinyl)

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Watch: Paul McCartney talks about the birth of The Beatles

Charlotte Treadaway
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Watch: Paul McCartney talks about the birth of The Beatles

Paul McCartney has discussed the beginnings of The Beatles in the newest clip of his six-part documentary series PURE McCartney VR.

‘Early Days’ finds McCartney reminisce about the formation of the band: “I don’t really think we thought it would come true, but you know what? It did.”

He talks about walking round Liverpool with John Lennon, “hoping that one day someone would actually listen to our songs and that we’d be able to write more and we’d be able to maybe make a living out of what this whole thing was.”

He also shares his memories of late producer George Martin, the production of “Love Me Do” and a “mystical experience” at a party with Bob Dylan.

The series was produced to commemorate the upcoming launch of career spanning compilation album PURE McCartney. Each part was filmed in his private home studio – and they take the viewer on a personal journey of anecdotes, memories and never before seen footage.

Other available clips (below) include ‘Dance Tonight’ and ‘Coming Up’, and the remaining two – ‘My Valentine’ and ‘Mull of Kintyre’ – will be released episodically until the PURE McCartney compilation album comes out this Friday (10 June).

‘Dance Tonight’

‘Coming Up’

The clips are previews of the full 360 Virtual Reality experience – that can be accessed by downloading the Jaunt App for IPhone, Android or Gear VR

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Carole King “didn’t want to be a solo artist”

Charlotte Treadaway
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Carole King “didn’t want to be a solo artist”

Carole King “didn’t want to be a solo artist” in her early years, her producer Lou Adler has told Uncut.

As a successful publisher, Adler had serviced King and her husband Gerry Goffin’s demos through much of the ‘60s, and later produced her Tapestry album.

Adler was confident that she could have been a solo artist and set about signing her to Ode record label in the late 1960s – but King insisted that she would only sign as part of a band (The City, featuring Danny Kortchmar, Charley Larkey and drummer Jim Gordon). “She wanted to record but she didn’t want to be a solo artist.” He said.

According to Adler, this trepidation stemmed from the fact that King had bad stage fright – she had a minor hit single in 1962 with the Goffin-King song “It Might As Well Rain Until September”, but didn’t enjoy even the relatively small amount of exposure it brought.

He said: “She was shy and she didn’t want to go on the road and perform. So she put herself in the middle of this group. That was her cover so to speak.”

Even in the group, she was known to shy away from and even cancel gigs – that is until James Taylor invited her to accompany him on stage and she found a way into being a performer.

Read the full story about the making of King’s Tapestry album in the July issue of Uncut, in UK shops now.

Carole King is performing at British Summer Time Hyde Park on 3 July.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

ABBA perform together for the first time in 30 years

Charlotte Treadaway
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ABBA perform together for the first time in 30 years

The four members of ABBA surprised fans with an impromptu singalong at a private party in Sweden on Sunday.

The party, which took place at Stockholm’s Berns Hotel, was a celebration of Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson’s 50th anniversary of their writing partnership. Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad performed the song “The Way Old Friends Do“, and Ulvaeus and Andersson joined in toward the end.

This marked the band’s first public performance in 30 years. Their previous one was on Swedish version of show This Is Your Life, which was three years after their 1983 split.

They won the Eurovision song contest in 1974, and have since sold almost 400 million albums worldwide.

ABBA have been under intense pressure to reunite since splitting, reportedly being offered $1bn dollars (£689m) to tour in 2000. Fans had therefore long stopped hoping for a reunion like the one seen on Sunday.

Andersson told Sweden’s Expressen newspaper: “It’s been a great night,” and Lyngstad said: “It was absolutely amazing. A lot of emotions… We’ve made this journey throughout our history. Benny and Bjorn in particular. It’s been very nostalgic.”

This performance comes after a small amount of public appearances together – including the premiere of Mamma Mia! in 2005, and the recent opening of an ABBA-themed restaurant in Sweden.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Watch: Yusuf / Cat Stevens releases charity single

Charlotte Treadaway
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Watch: Yusuf / Cat Stevens releases charity single

Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) has released a single to raise funds and awareness for lone child refugees.

“He Was Alone” was inspired by lone child refugees he met at camps on the Turkish / Syrian border. The song has been backed by Sean Penn, Miley Cyrus and others – and Islam has also called on the likes of Pete Townsend, Blondie and Queen to help promote it using the hashtag #YouAreNotAlone.

He said in a statement: “While the world faces incomprehensible numbers and statistics created by the refugee crisis, the tragedy and story of a single soul gets missed.

“It was difficult to stand by just watching this tragedy without trying to do something. I simply decided to help humanise the narrative and lend my voice to the call for keeping hearts and doors open to every refugee, especially youngsters, who have lost what future they might have once hoped for.”

The single will be performed at an exclusive sold out live concert at Central Hall Westminster on 14 June.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music

Little Richard’s early classic albums collected in new box set

Charlotte Treadaway
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Little Richard’s early classic albums collected in new box set

A deluxe 5-LP boxset of Little Richard’s classic early studio albums is going to be released.

Mono Box: The Complete Speciality and Vee-Jay albums will include the entire output of studio albums he recorded for the Speciality and Vee-Jay labels, work spanning from 1957-1965.

The albums have been remastered from analog tapes and will be presented in their original mono mixes. A 16-page booklet featuring new liner notes from journalist Bill Dahl, as well as photos from the era, will accompany the collection.

The box set will be released on 30 September 2016.

Albums and track lists are as follows:

Here’s Little Richard (1957 debut album)
“Tutti Frutti”
“True, Fine Mama”
“Can’t Believe You Wanna Leave”
“Ready Teddy”
“Baby”
“Slippin’ and Slidin'”
“Long Tall Sally”
“Miss Ann”
“Oh Why?”
“Rip It Up”
“Jenny Jenny”
“She’s Got It”

Little Richard (1958)
“Keep A Knockin”
“By the Light of the Silvery Moon”
“Send Me Some Lovin'”
“I’ll Never Let You Go (Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo)”
“Heeby-Jeebies”
“All Around the World”
“Good Golly, Miss Molly”
“Baby Face”
“Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey”
“Ooh! My Soul”
“The Girl Can’t Help It”
“Lucille”

The Fabulous Little Richard (1959)
“Shake A Hand”
“Chicken Little Baby”
“All Night Long”
“The Most I Can Offer (Just My Heart)”
“Lonesome and Blue”
“Wonderin”
“She Knows How To Rock”
“Kansas City”
“Directly From My Heart”
“Maybe I’m Right”
“Early One Morning”
“I’m Just A Lonely Guy”
“Whole Lotta Shaking Going On”

Little Richard is back (1964)
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”
“Going Home Tomorrow”
“Money Honey”
“Only You”
“Hound Dog”
“Goodnight Irene”
“Lawdy Miss Claudia”
“Groovy Little Suzy”
“Short Fat Fanny”
“Cherry Red”
“Memories Are Made of This”
“Blueberry Hill”

Little Richard’s Greatest Hits
“Good Golly Miss Molly”
“Baby Face”
“Tutti Frutti”
“Send Me Some Lovin”
“The Girl Can’t Help It”
“Lucille”
“Slippin’ and Slidin”
“Keep A Knockin”
“Rip It Up”
“She’s Got It”
“Ooh! My Soul”
“Long Tall Sally”

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Terry Reid – The Other Side Of The River

Jon Dale
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Terry Reid – The Other Side Of The River

Terry Reid’s story has the itinerant singer-songwriter crossing paths with some of rock’s heaviest characters: from early days under Mickie Most’s wing, through touring with the Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones, playing a decisive hand in the formation of Led Zeppelin, to declining an offer to join Deep Purple. But what if all that was never so important; if these were, instead, merely interludes in a more personal trajectory? Listening back to Reid’s small, yet beautifully formed body of work, particularly his two stunning 1970s albums, River and Seed Of Memory, it’s pretty clear he’d never have sat comfortably with Zeppelin, who’d also offered him lead singer duties, or the Purple.

For better or worse, Reid was on his own, wholly holistic trip. A voracious listener and researcher, by the 1970s Reid had tuned into the highly advanced, political song of Brazil, from the bossa nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim through to the wild-eyed Tropicália experiments of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. He was also up to his knees in soul and R’n’B, and was exploring folk music from across the globe. All of this found its way into Reid’s music, a deeply syncretic and idiosyncratic take on blues, rock and soul that often found its way to popular culture thanks to the efforts of others: both The Hollies and John Mellencamp recorded his classic, “Without Expression”; ditto Cheap Trick and “Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Piece”.

His best album, 1973’s River, has always had strong purchase within an alternate corpus of rock music, one that takes the canon at something close to its word, but allows the understated players, the characters that followed the tones rather than the mythology, their moment in the sun. River is just as elusive and gorgeous a beast now as it must have been on first listen, 43 years ago: swaying into view with the cat-scratch funk of “Dean”, coasting the shimmering, right-angled boogie of “Avenue”, and then drifting off into the acoustic bossa reveries of the album’s seductive flipside, it’s an object lesson in the power of approaching material from unexpected angles – there are things going on in River that don’t quite happen the same way anywhere else.

All of which makes The Other Side Of The River a very good thing indeed. There has long been rumour of a double-album’s worth of songs recorded during River’s sessions, and producers of this project, Pat Thomas and Matt Block, should be applauded for pulling together such strong material from the previously unreleased tapes. There are five alternate versions of songs that appear on River, which are treats in themselves, but the real core of the set is six newly available songs, all of which point outwards in different directions, another set of ways the river could have flowed.

The alternate versions are just as loose and hypnotic as those eventually released on River, but they also offer new perspectives. “Avenue” has a heavier rhythmic thunk, and the riff that instigates the groove gets driven, mercilessly, into the depths, Reid’s voice pirouetting across the gorgeous soul caress of the session’s backing vocalists, The Ikettes. He draws even more insinuated sensuality out of the bossa nova swirl of “River”; perhaps more importantly, though, hearing these songs in the context of the previously unreleased material proves just how deft a thinker and writer Reid was during the 1970s.

This Brazilian influence comes through even more strongly on The Other Side Of The River, which is unsurprising given the appearance of Brazilian music legend Gilberto Gil on the album – he was a regular at Reid’s Cambridgeshire country house, after he’d been hounded out of Brazil by the military dictatorship. “Listen With Eyes” moves with the languid shuffle of a great Carlos Jobim or Luiz Bonfà composition, proof that Reid had understood on an almost molecular level the deep structural intelligence behind the breeziness of great bossa.

There’re a good number of rockers on The Other Side Of The River, too, where Reid’s grounding in the blues comes through both in the vibrant clang of his guitar and the slack-wound grain of his voice. But the tale told by this set, ultimately, is one of relaxed experimentation, and an ability to take great, peerless players and industry mavericks – besides Gil, the group here also includes the aforementioned The Ikettes, and David Lindley of Kaleidoscope, and a good portion of the album’s sessions were produced by R’n’B legend Tom Dowd – and give them the space to mould fantastic new shapes out of Reid’s songs by finding where genres begin to buckle, and placing subtle stress on these pressure points. The end result is some of the most compelling and gorgeous rock music of its decade.

Q&A
TERRY REID
How did this whole process come about?
Warners found out that all of the tapes [for my albums] were in lockers in London. My friend Matt Block flew to London, went to the lockers, looked up and there’s a row of tapes going across of the room, all these two-inch tapes… He took them to a studio, played them, and voila, came up with 24 different pieces of material. He called me and said, “Did you know about all this?” I said, “Well, I know we did a lot!”

Do you remember recording the material?
We were in the studios for so long, for a couple of months, day to day. It’s not until you hear it that it all comes rushing back. We were doing all different kinds of things, mixing country style, R’n’B, rock’n’roll, a whole mixture of influences. We’d just keep playing things, having a lot of fun, and I got Gilberto Gil and everybody to come into the studio with me, and add little bits to what we were doing. So now there’s a whole Brazilian influence in there.

Brazilian music had some really interesting political dimensions.
The way I look at it, all music is subject to crisis, to the politics of the country of origin. I’m a really big fan of Bulgarian music. I started collecting a lot of the music from there, Romania, Yugoslavia, and when you listen to their folk music, you hear all these Turkish influences. All the conquerors that came through, they left – well, they left a mess, but they also left the influence of their own music.
INTERVIEW: JON DALE

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie 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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