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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 Timeâ€, plus a 24-page book of photographs, archival materials and interviews....

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 Timeâ€, 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'...

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..?â€

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.â€

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.â€

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?â€

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.â€

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 birthâ€.

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,â...

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.â€

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. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT One of the programme's highlights is Both Sides Now: Celebrating Joni Mitchell (October...

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.

PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old Year Dying

Alastair McKay
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PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old Year Dying

When PJ Harvey announced the release of I Inside The Old Year Dying, her sense of relief was palpable. The seven-year gap from Harvey’s last record, The Hope Six Demolition Project, was due to a number of factors. One of them was a matter of will. She felt distant from music. The new album was dif...

When PJ Harvey announced the release of I Inside The Old Year Dying, her sense of relief was palpable. The seven-year gap from Harvey’s last record, The Hope Six Demolition Project, was due to a number of factors. One of them was a matter of will. She felt distant from music. The new album was difficult to make, she said, “and took time to find its strongest formâ€.

That said, Harvey has not been idle these past few years. Now that her musical creativity is burning again, it’s worth taking a moment to examine the route the singer has taken on the road to this obliquely powerful album. There has been film and television soundtrack work, for All About Eve, Bad Sisters and The Virtues, on which Harvey explored atmospheres, putting her music at the service of the image, adding blusher to the bruises of other people’s stories. There has been a fair bit of self-examination. Harvey’s back catalogue has been reissued, and in demo form too, a process which invites speculation about the recording process itself. The demos often have an immediacy, a raw power, which is diminished in the finished recordings. Sometimes it works the other way. When Harvey’s records have tended towards the febrile, the demos betray an intimacy that is less performative. They feel closer to the source.

Most importantly, there is Orlam, a book which does its best to defy description, being pitched somewhere between a poem and a narrative, the jumbled bones of a screenplay, or the half-remembered details of a dream which recurs in subtly different form every night before sinking back into the unconscious, its meaning lingering in menace and confusion. To add to the sense of bewilderment, the verses are written in the dialect of old Dorset. Even in English, the meaning seems less important than the mood, which seems to do with the marshy land adjoining childhood, adolescence and that brutal state, maturity. Orlam is gothic and lyrical, rural and biblical, its verses pregnant with maggoty slugs, swollen badgers and horny culvers. There is dark humour, and temporal dislocation. The word “orgasm†is slanged into a “Jim’ll Fix Itâ€. There is a mention of Cluedo (a playful board game about murder), and the sweet innuendo of “fingers of Fudgeâ€, which requires no further speculation.

In that book and on this record, Elvis stalks the land, though his character in the narrative is that of a dying soldier, a girl’s first love, a Christ-figure (the “dark-haired Lordâ€). He is also clearly the actual Elvis, as is evidenced by the occasional choruses of“Love Me Tenderâ€, a song which pillaged its melody from the sentimental ballad “Aura Leeâ€, sung around campfires in the American Civil War. (Soldier, Elvis – Harvey has considered all the layers.) The poem “Lwonesome Tonight†(aka “Lonesome Tonightâ€) references both the Presley song and John 13:34, as it records the un-girling of a girl, a loss of innocence signalled by a satchel full of “Pepsi fizz†and – the King’s favourite – peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The song is quite lovely, a magical mystery in which a girl – naive or ready, it wouldn’t do to judge – approaches her shepherd expectantly, trilling, “Are you Elvis?/Are you God?/Jesus sent to win my trust?†Perhaps the synth is a sign that all is not perfect. It coils beneath the tune, a detuned radio signalling distress.

On her last two albums, Let England Shake (2011) and The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016), Harvey turned towards commentary. The recording of Hope Six was devolved to a theatrical project, with the singer performing at the centre of a creative zoo within London’s Somerset House. Her digression into poetry can be taken as further evidence of her frustration with the limitations of the traditional rock lyric. She certainly took the process seriously, seeking tuition from the Dundee poet Don Paterson, a writer with a keen understanding of musicality. “It might not be unexpected that Harvey’s songwriting would take a more inward direction,†Paterson writes. “Few, though, will have anticipated so minimalist a turn into quite so eerie a landscape.â€

The words in Orlam were written as poems, not songs, though Harvey expressed a hope that they might emerge in another form; a strange film, perhaps, or a theatre piece. She didn’t rule out music. And here they are, more or less, murmured and tra-lah’d over a musical soundtrack which contrives to blend the folky innocence of the Moomins with – at the parched extremes – the alarm and discord of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Chernobyl soundtrack.

The influence of trusted collaborators John Parish and Flood is vital. This time around, Harvey all but abolished the demo-ing phase, recording stray thoughts into a phone and trusting instead in the collaborative process. Echoing the process of Hope Six, the studio was arranged for live playing, with tunes emerging from spontaneous performance. This gave Harvey the freedom to explore the possibilities of her voice. She sings with the confidence that every insinuation will be heard, even when the words are unfamiliar. On the opening “Prayer At The Gateâ€, she sounds both pained and distracted: her voice rises to an almost religious pitch, as the tune hums like an electrical substation. “Autumn Term†has an almost comical falsetto, and the noise of children playing is spliced into the song’s witchy spell. The singing is bell-like on “The Nether-Edgeâ€, a digression into superstition and darkness which sounds like a playground chant, yet contrives to wave at both Hamlet and Joan Of Arc, while weaving a spell about “femboys†and a “not-girl†being “zweal-ed†on the stake.

You can probably decode zweal-ed, but the riddles in the lyrics are further explained in the sleeve notes. Many of the meanings are as implied. The “poser-rod†of a horny devil or a goaty God is, as you might surmise, “a devil’s penis, abnormally largeâ€. “Chalky†is “ghostlyâ€. Less predictably, “bedraggled angels†are wet sheep, and “Elvis†– it says here – is “all-wiseâ€.

What does it mean to sound this ancient, this strange? Well, it’s to Harvey’s great credit that this fever dream never appears forced, and the experiment of shedding most of her signature sound is painlessly achieved. Elvis might intrude, sounding like Zooropa-era Bono, in the middle of “Augustâ€, but that is a feint. These days, PJ Harvey don’t play no rock’n’roll. There is only a ghostly scratching at the bedpost of the Beefheart blues, most notably on the closing “A Noiseless Noiseâ€.

Impressively, the density of Orlam is made more accessible by its re-enactment as a suite of songs. It’s not necessary – perhaps it is not even possible – to understand that the narrator of the poems is a lamb’s eyeball, because the music has its own strange energy, a thunderless storm of electricity showering ripe insinuations. The weirdness is intense, but channelled, and the surprises arrive in a way that threatens, but fails to obliterate, the innocent fearfulness of childhood. Strangeness abounds. The strangeness of wondering.

Hark! I Inside The Old Year Dying is a singular thing. For all its disguises, all the tree-tears and twiddicks, it might be PJ Harvey’s most autobiographical record.

Charlie Watts – Anthology

John Lewis
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Charlie Watts – Anthology

Charlie Watts wasn’t the first Stone to go solo – that honour goes to Bill Wyman in 1975. But, two years later, in an event that seems to have gone largely unrecorded in Stones folklore, Watts found himself in front of 200 punters at the Swindon Arts Centre, playing blues and jazz standards with...

Charlie Watts wasn’t the first Stone to go solo – that honour goes to Bill Wyman in 1975. But, two years later, in an event that seems to have gone largely unrecorded in Stones folklore, Watts found himself in front of 200 punters at the Swindon Arts Centre, playing blues and jazz standards with a band featuring the local boogie-woogie pianist and singer Bob Hall. “This is a one-off thing,†Watts told the Swindon Advertiser at the time. “I have never really played with this sort of band before, although I used to play with bluesmen like Alexis Korner in the early days.â€

It was, in hindsight, something of a clue for how Watts’ solo career would develop. Previously unreleased, three tracks from that Swindon session form the climax of this mammoth overview of Watts’ extracurricular work. He’s joined by old friends: Ian Stewart, the hidden sixth Stone, is on piano, while the bassist Dave Green, a childhood friend and neighbour from the Wembley prefabs where Watts was raised, is on bass (as he is on most of Watts’ jazz releases over the next four decades). It’s a fascinating session – a waystation between the rock’n’roll of his day job and the big-band swing that Watts loved. There’s a rumbling Louis Jordan-style version of John Lee Hooker’s “Rockhouse Boogieâ€, with a three-piece horn section; a rather daft 12-bar blues sung by Bob Hall; and an impromptu piece of jump-blues written by the trumpeter Colin Smith called “Swindon Swing†(one that Watts also recorded on a tour of Europe with a band called Rocket 88, featuring a few members of this Swindon lineup).

A commitment to the Stones’ touring and recording schedule prevented Watts from making more music like this. But in 1985, with Mick Jagger promoting his debut solo album She’s The Boss, Watts took advantage of a furlough to form the Charlie Watts Orchestra. He enlisted one of his heroes, the Charlie Parker-inspired British alto saxophonist Peter King, to assemble a 30-piece big band that blended well-established London beboppers (the likes of Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins and Alan Skidmore) with more experimental veterans (Evan Parker, Harry Beckett, Dave Defries) and the cream of young London players (Courtney Pine, Annie Whitehead, Ted Emmett, Steve Sidwell, Gail Thompson).

The extracts from their 1986 debut album Live At Fulham Town Hall are wonderfully chaotic and rambunctious recordings. The two tracks that open the album, the Benny Goodman band favourites “Stompin’ At The Savoy†and “Flying Homeâ€, start as hard-driving big-band swingers, edge into jump-jive territory, and eventually morph into Mingus-style orchestral freakouts. Watts isn’t the only drummer here – he’s flanked by the free-jazzer John Stevens and the old-school bebop veteran Bill Eyden – but the drums are very low in the mix: Watts is happy to just stoke the fire.

In 1960, while working as a graphic designer, Watts created a scrappy self-made picture book called Ode To A High Flying Bird, with his cartoons and handwritten text telling the story of Charlie Parker (“a tribute, from one Charlie to anotherâ€). London’s Beat Publications cashed in by publishing it in 1965, but it wasn’t until 1991 that Watts turned this offering into a musical project. From One Charlie is represented here by five tracks, all recorded with a tight Parker-style quintet: Watts, Green and King are joined by pianist Brian Lemon and the prodigious teenage trumpeter Gerard Presencer. There are two Parker covers – a sinuous blues called “Relaxing At Camarillo†(the most cheerful song about being confined to a mental institution you’ll ever hear) and “Bluebird†(another blues, with a dazzling Presencer playing the Miles Davis role). But it’s Peter King who dominates the show, writing all the other tracks on the album in the Bird style, including “Practising, Practising, Just Great†(which starts with a three-minute alto solo), the languid blues “Going, Going, Going, Goneâ€, and the uptempo “Blackbird, White Chicksâ€.

Also recorded in 1991 – with Watts taking advantage of another Stones furlough – is a live set from Ronnie Scott’s short-lived Birmingham franchise. A Tribute To Charlie Parker With Strings sees the quintet joined by a string sextet (who play some sensational, angular harmonies) and New Yorker Bernard Fowler. Fowler is best known as a backing singer for the Stones as well as artists as diverse as Herbie Hancock, Gil Scott Heron, Sly & Robbie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, but he makes a remarkable, soulful jazz frontman, his androgynous tone stealing the show on versions of “Lover Man†and “If I Should Lose Youâ€.

Watts’ most experimental album by far is his 2000 collaboration with Jim Keltner, an electro-acoustic project where all nine tracks were dedicated to the pair’s drumming heroes. It’s represented by two tracks here – the heavily synthesised digi-funk of “Roy Haynes†and the dreamy Brazilian samba “Airtoâ€, featuring the multi-tracked voices and keyboards of Emmanuel Sourdeix and Philippe Chauveau.

There is yet another Watts lineup featured here, from 2004’s Watts At Scott’s, with Watts and King assembling a 10-piece with another fine cross-section of the UK jazz scene, including avant-gardist Evan Parker, Loose Tuber Julian Arguelles and vibraphonist Anthony Kerr. Portugal’s Luis Jardim, a mainstay of the London session scene at the time, assists on percussion, helping Watts to move in an Afro-Cuban direction on Dizzy Gillespie’s Cubop standard “Tin Tin Deoâ€, and adding fire to a couple of Duke Ellington favourites. As ever, Watts does nothing flashy – he’s content to listen carefully, play what’s needed, swing hard and make his extraordinary band sound as good as they can be.

Hawkwind unveil 11-disc 50th anniversary edition of Space Ritual

Sam Richards
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Hawkwind unveil 11-disc 50th anniversary edition of Space Ritual

Hawkwind have shared details of the 50th anniversary reissue of their thunderous 1973 live album Space Ritual, to be released by Cherry Red on September 29. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT A Super Deluxe 10CD/Blu-Ray Edition includes a new remaster of the origi...

Hawkwind have shared details of the 50th anniversary reissue of their thunderous 1973 live album Space Ritual, to be released by Cherry Red on September 29.

A Super Deluxe 10CD/Blu-Ray Edition includes a new remaster of the original album, along with new mixes of all three complete concerts recorded on the tour at Liverpool Stadium, Sunderland Locarno and Brixton Sundown, all mixed by Stephen W Tayler.

The set comes with a region-free Blu-Ray disc featuring a 5.1 Surround Sound mix of the album, plus a 68-page illustrated book with new essay and a reproduction of the rare Space Ritual poster-format tour programme.

Space Ritual will also be available in 2CD and double transparent vinyl editions. View complete tracklistings and pre-order here.

To celebrate, Hawkwind will play London’s Royal Albert Hall on release day (September 29) – tickets here.

Uncut’s New Music Playlist for July 2023

Sam Richards
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Uncut’s New Music Playlist for July 2023

We all love a surprise collaboration, and this month's new music survey has thrown up some particularly intriguing combinations: there's Cillian Murphy guesting with The Coral, Nick Cave and Debbie Harry covering a rare Jeffrey Lee Pierce song, Laura Marling's LUMP giving a Elizabeth Fraser an elect...

We all love a surprise collaboration, and this month’s new music survey has thrown up some particularly intriguing combinations: there’s Cillian Murphy guesting with The Coral, Nick Cave and Debbie Harry covering a rare Jeffrey Lee Pierce song, Laura Marling’s LUMP giving a Elizabeth Fraser an electro makeover, Ride’s Andy Bell remixing Dot Allison, and The Chemical Brothers enlisting the services of French psych-pop singer Halo Maud. Everyone sounds like they’re having a ball, as you can hear below.

There’s also a pell-mell new single from Blur, the long-awaited return of Slowdive, a gripping Animal Collective epic, and a tonne of other great tunes that we guarantee will make the daily grind a little more bearable…

BLUR
“St. Charles Squareâ€
(Parlophone)

THE CORAL
“Oceans Apart feat Cillian Murphyâ€
(Run On Records)


MARGO CILKER
“Keep It On A Burnerâ€
(Loose)

FAYE WEBSTER
“But Not Kissâ€
(Secretly Canadian)

NICK CAVE & DEBBIE HARRY
“On The Other Sideâ€
(Glitterhouse)

VERA SOLA
“Desire Pathâ€
(City Slang)

BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND
“Stand Anthemâ€
(Transgressive)

WOODS
“Between The Pastâ€
(Woodsist)

SLOWDIVE
“Kissesâ€
(Dead Oceans)

SUN’S SIGNATURE
“Bluedusk (LUMP Remix)â€
(Partisan)

PETER GABRIEL
“So Much (Dark-Side Mix)â€
(Real World)

ALABASTER DePLUME
“Did You Know (feat. Momoko Gill, MettaShiba)â€
(International Anthem)

JOHN RAYMOND & S CAREY
“Callingâ€
(Libellule Editions)

CARLOS NIÑO & FRIENDS
“Flutestargateâ€
(International Anthem)

MAROULITA DE KOL
“The Youniverseâ€
(Phantom Limb)

GOAT
“Jazzman”
(Rocket Recordings)

DOT ALLISON
“Unchanged (GLOK Remix)â€
(Sonic Cathedral)

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS
“Live Again (featuring Halo Maud)â€
(EMI Virgin)

TRAYSH
“Paint Sinkâ€
(Husky Pants)

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
“Defeatâ€
(Domino)

End Of The Road 2023 announce listings for the Cinema Stage

Michael Bonner
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End Of The Road 2023 announce listings for the Cinema Stage

End Of The Road have announced the line-up for the Cinema Stage at this year's festival, which runs from August 31 - September 3 at Wiltshire’s Larmer Tree Gardens. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT This year's film selection has been curated by The Banshees...

End Of The Road have announced the line-up for the Cinema Stage at this year’s festival, which runs from August 31 – September 3 at Wiltshire’s Larmer Tree Gardens.

This year’s film selection has been curated by The Banshees of Insherin writer/director Martin McDonagh, Enys Men writer/director Mark Jenkin, cinema streaming specialist MUBI and festival founder Simon Taffe handpicking the films.

You can see the line-up for each day below, but we hope to see many long-term readers of Uncut at the screening of The Wild Bunch on Saturday morning.

Full Cinema Stage listings:

Thursday
Curated by Simon Taffe
Alien (1979) (15)
The King Of Comedy (PG)
The Outfit (1973) (15)
All The Beauty & The Bloodshed (18)
The Eight Mountains (12)

Friday
The MUBI Screen
The African Desperate(15)
Return To Seoul (15)
Annette (15)
Shiva Baby (15)
The Worst Person In The World (15)
Aftersun (12A)
Ema (15)
Petite Maman (U)
My Life As A Courgette (PG)

Saturday
Curated by Martin McDonagh
Badlands (15)
The Wild Bunch (18)
Performance (18)
Five Easy Pieces (15)
The Parallax View (15)
Days Of Heaven (PG)
Double Indemnity (PG)
A Matter Of Life And Death (U)
Whistle Down The Wind (PG)

Sunday
Curated by Mark Jenkin
Lost Highway (18)
Jubilee (18)
The Shout (15)
Long Weekend (15)
Big Wednesday (12)
Radio On (18)
Stand By Me (15)
Gallivant (15)
Haunters Of The Deep (U)
Flight Of The Navigator (U)

We’re proud to once again be partnering with End Of The Road for what promises to be a brilliant festival. Aside from our on-side coverage, we’ll also be bringing you our usual Q&As from the Festival’s Talking Heads stage. More on those soon…

Meanwhile, you can read our round-up of all our coverage from last year’s Festival by clicking here.

Read the line-up for Bert Jansch’s 80th Birthday Concert

Michael Bonner
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Read the line-up for Bert Jansch’s 80th Birthday Concert

A tribute concert to mark what would have been Bert Jansch's 80th birthday is taking place on November 4 at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT The line-up for this event includes Bernard Butler, Jacqui McShee, Rob...

A tribute concert to mark what would have been Bert Jansch‘s 80th birthday is taking place on November 4 at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank.

The line-up for this event includes Bernard Butler, Jacqui McShee, Robert Plant, Kathryn Williams, Brigid Mae Power & Steve Gunn, Martin Simpson, James Yorkston and Sam Lee.

Jansch had a long history of performing at the Royal Festival Hall: Pentangle’s first major performance took place here in 1967 and they recorded part of their Sweet Child album here in 1968. The original Pentangle line-up reformed to play the same hall exactly 40 years later and it was a Pentangle show at the Royal Festival Hall in August 2011 that proved to be Jansch’s last performance.

Tickets go on sale to Southbank Members presale at 10am, July 4 and generally at 10am July 7.

Listen to Nick Cave and Debbie Harry cover Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s “On the Other Side”

Michael Bonner
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Listen to Nick Cave and Debbie Harry cover Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s “On the Other Side”

Nick Cave and Debbie Harry have covered Jeffrey Lee Pierce's "On The Other Side" for a forthcoming tribute album dedicated to The Gun Club leader. The cover appears on The Task Has Overwhelmed Us, which is released on September 29 via Glitterhouse Records. You can hear it below. ORDER NOW:...

Nick Cave and Debbie Harry have covered Jeffrey Lee Pierce‘s “On The Other Side” for a forthcoming tribute album dedicated to The Gun Club leader.

The cover appears on The Task Has Overwhelmed Us, which is released on September 29 via Glitterhouse Records. You can hear it below.

The Task Has Overwhelmed Us is the long-awaited fourth volume in The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project series, which presents new interpretations of tracks from the Gun Club and solo along with fresh works constructed from demos, previously unheard lyrics and songs only otherwise performed live.

. This edition also features contributions from by Dave Gahan, Warren Ellis, Mick Harvey and Lydia Lunch as well as the late Mark Lanegan and Mark Stewart.

“On The Other Side” is the fourth duet from Cave and Harry for this series following “Free To Walk†on 2009’s We Are Only Riders, “The Breaking Hands†from 2012’s The Journey Is Long and “Into the Fire†from 2014’s Axels and Sockets.

The album is available to pre-order here.

Read the setlist for Neil Young’s first solo show for four years

Michael Bonner
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Read the setlist for Neil Young’s first solo show for four years

Neil Young took to the stage last night (June 30, 2023) at The Ford, Los Angeles for his first solo show in four years last night. Young had promised fans that this tour would focus around songs that he’s never, or rarely, performed live before. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cove...

Neil Young took to the stage last night (June 30, 2023) at The Ford, Los Angeles for his first solo show in four years last night.

Young had promised fans that this tour would focus around songs that he’s never, or rarely, performed live before.

“I don’t want to come back and do the same songs again,†he said. “I’ll feel like I was on some sort of carnival ride. I’d rather be doing these others songs I haven’t done…. I won’t have to compare how I’m doing ‘Heart of Gold’ to [how I played it in] 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020.â€

In the end, he drew the set list from the span of his career, from Buffalo Springfield and CSNY to his latest album, World Record. Most interestingly, perhaps, were the cluster of songs from his peerless run of ’90s albums, Ragged Glory, Sleeps With Angels and Mirror Ball. He did, hilariously, also play “Heart Of Gold”.

The set list, thanks to Sugar Mountain, was:

I’m The Ocean (Mirror Ball)
Homefires (unreleased)
Burned (Buffalo Springfield)
On The Way Home (Last Time Around)
If You Got Love (unreleased)
My Heart (Sleeps With Angels)
A Dream That Can Last (Sleeps With Angels) *
Song X (Mirror Ball)
Prime Of Life (Sleeps With Angels)
When I Hold You In My Arms (Are You Passionate?)
Mother Earth (Natural Anthem) (Ragged Glory)
Ohio (CSNY single)
Days That Used To Be (Ragged Glory)
Don’t Forget Love (Barn) *
Heart Of Gold (Harvest)
Love Earth (World Record) *
Four Strong Winds (Comes A Time)

* song debut

Young’s next show at the Ford is tonight (July 1).

Young has also announced that his great lost 1977 album Chrome Dreams has been confirmed for release on August 11 via Reprise Records.

Chrome Dreams is available to pre-order here and includes an instant download of a previously unreleased version of “Sedan Deliveryâ€, which you can also hear below.

Young originally recorded the songs on Chrome Dreams between 1974 and 1977, but the album ended up was never released – adding to the pile of ‘lost’ albums Young accumulated during his career along with Homegrown and Toast.

Although many of the songs on Chrome Dreams eventually made their way onto other Young albums – including American Stars n Bars, Comes A Time, Hawks And Doves and Rust Never Sleeps – they exist here in different or tweaked versions.

Chrome Dreams tracklisting:

Pocahontas (August 11, 1976)
Will To Love (December 3, 1976)
Star of Bethlehem (December 13, 1974)
Like a Hurricane (November 29, 1975)
Too Far Gone (September 5, 1975)
Hold Back The Tears (February 6, 1977)
Homegrown (November 19, 1975)
Captain Kennedy (August 11, 1976)
Stringman (March 31, 1976)
Sedan Delivery (May 22, 1975)
Powderfinger (August 11, 1976)
Look Out for My Love (January 20, 1976)

The Making Of “Common People” by Pulp

Nick Hasted
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The Making Of “Common People” by Pulp

As Pulp prepare to play London’s Finsbury Park this weekend (Saturday, July 1), we dig back into the Uncut archive - to Take 159, no less - to bring you the story of their evergreen classic, with Jarvis Cocker at the peak of his powers, disguising biting social commentary and class observations wi...

As Pulp prepare to play London’s Finsbury Park this weekend (Saturday, July 1), we dig back into the Uncut archive – to Take 159, no less – to bring you the story of their evergreen classic, with Jarvis Cocker at the peak of his powers, disguising biting social commentary and class observations with wicked humour and a brilliant, anthemic chorus.

“I realised that we had written something that had pretensions to being anthemic,†says Jarvis Cocker. “It was an anthem. A class anthem.â€

At the start of the 1990s, Pulp – the band Cocker had formed as a 15-year-old schoolboy in Sheffield in 1979 – were still languishing in relative obscurity. “One more year on the dole, then that would be that,†remembers keyboardist Candida Doyle. But their fortunes began to take a more positive turn when the band’s 1994 album, His ‘n’ Hers, received a Mercury Music Prize nomination and reached No 9 in the charts. The record that finally made them stars, though, was Cocker’s memoir about a fellow art student from his time at Central St Martins College of Art and Design: a rich girl who wanted to slum it with the “common peopleâ€.

“Around London, you met these southern toffs,†drummer Nick Banks explains. “You got that idea they were different. That they could muck around and do what they wanted for a few years, then call in the trust fund and bugger off to the south of France. For most people, that ain’t the case. You’re stuck with what you’ve got.â€
“I don’t think he [Jarvis] liked southerners much,†believes producer Chris Thomas. “He was suspicious of me. I think he was uptight at not having ever made it.â€
But then “Common People†hit No 2 in June, 1995.
“That song released him. Suddenly, while ‘Common People’ was in the charts, Jarvis blitzed eight songs in 48 hours for Different Class. Every one was a winner.â€
Later that same month, Glastonbury headliners The Stone Roses were forced to pull out, with Pulp invited to take their place. “If you really want something to happen enough then it will,†Cocker told the crowd at the end of the band’s set, culminating with “Common Peopleâ€.
“It seemed the perfect thing to say,†says Banks. “And from that moment, the audience always sang along with ‘Common People’; you could feel this tangible response, that they knew what the song was about, and agreed with it. The crescendo of ‘Common People’ at Glastonbury 1995 was the high-water mark of the band.â€

JARVIS COCKER: It all started with me getting rid of a lot of albums at the Record And Tape Exchange in Notting Hill. With the store credit I went into the second-hand instrument bit and bought this Casio keyboard. When you buy an instrument, you run home and want to write a song straight away. So I went back to my flat and wrote the chord sequence for “Common Peopleâ€, which isn’t such a great achievement because it’s only got three chords. I thought it might come in handy for our next rehearsal.

STEVE MACKEY: We were just chuckling about how simple it sounded.

COCKER: Steve started laughing and said, “It sounds like [Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s version of] ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’.†I always thought the word “common†was an interesting thing. It would be used in “Fanfare For The Common Man†as this idea of the noble savage, whereas it was a real insult in Sheffield to call someone “commonâ€. That set off memories of this girl that I met at college. She wanted to go and live in Hackney and be with the common people. She was from a well-to-do background, and there was me explaining that that would never work. I hated all that cobblers you got in films and magazines in which posh people would “slum it†for a while. Once I got that narrative in my head it was very easy to write, lyrically.

CANDIDA DOYLE: Jarvis’ neck would have to be on the line before he would write the words. And singing them would be a drunken affair, hiding behind a door. That went right up to our last LP. Scott Walker tried to talk him out of it. He just found it very personal.

COCKER: Part of the tension in that song is that I might have been repelled by what she was saying, but I was sexually attracted to her and wanted to cop off with her. I never did make a move. But I changed the song so she was attracted to me and wanted to sleep with me. Which was, you know, a lie. It was an anthem. We wanted to find someone to produce it who would give us a big sound but not make us sound like twats. Which is what brought us to Chris Thomas. He produced the Sex Pistols.

NICK BANKS: Chris has known everyone. Every 10 minutes you’d get, “Oh, the time when I was with Bowie…†After a few days, the eyes start rolling. “Here we go, Marc Bolan again…â€

CHRIS THOMAS: We spent maybe nine days on it. It was quite hard work. I was aware that there were some tempo changes in it, so I tried to go for a rough average. And that was insane. Jarvis didn’t have time to sing the verses because it was too fast, and at the end it completely dragged. So we got them to play it the way they would normally, and found out that it moves from about 90bpm, right up to 160. It starts galloping. And that acceleration is absolutely intrinsic to the excitement.

BANKS: I devised that tempo especially for the song, due to my inability to keep time.

MARK WEBBER: When we recorded that song, it had become inevitable that what we did next would be really successful, and that continued right through that album. There was this feeling of urgency within the group.

BANKS: I was sat in the control room watching Chris Thomas titting around, and someone came in, and he stood up and shouted, “For fuck’s sake! We’re trying to make a hit record here!†I thought, ‘He might be right.’

THOMAS: A big hit’s what I went in there to create. There were a lot of changes made. The intensity built bit by bit.

DOYLE: When we played it live, we sampled a lot of the sounds on the record onto my keyboard – like those two piercing notes on the solo, and the sound of a gunshot. If you just hear all those, it’s powerful.

THOMAS: The very last night, Jarvis says, “It’s not right. It’s supposed to be like ELO’s ‘Mr Blue Sky’. I’ve got a copy here…†Then right at the end, at four in the morning, Jarvis said, “I want to put an acoustic [guitar] on now.†We just put it on the vocal mic. It was the crappiest sound you’d get. And it was compressing so much, it just sunk it into the track, it glued the whole thing together. That was the whip on the horse, that made it go.

MACKEY: Jarvis and I and [co-manager] Jeanette Lee went to Island with an impassioned plea to release this record immediately, because we believed it was prescient. Suede and Blur and Oasis were all pushing as well. We wanted to be part of that.

COCKER: The video was just a little dance I made up on the spot. Sing along with the common people, wave your hands, clap your hands… stupid things you do, you make a windscreen wiper gesture with your index finger. It was rubbish, really, but it worked.

BANKS: We were playing the Radio 1 Roadshow in Birmingham the day it charted. Your Boyzones were all getting called out to prance about on the back of an articulated lorry when they got their chart positions, and the room got emptier and emptier. We got more excited.

DOYLE: Jarvis ended up pissed under a table when it was announced it was No 2.

MACKEY: I remember Jarvis slipping on stage, and thinking how funny it was that when you get where you want, you end up on your arse in the rain in Birmingham.

WEBBER: Then Glastonbury was handed to us on a plate.

DOYLE: We heard that [The Stone Roses’] John Squire had been injured. We were recording Different Class at the time, so we went that day and stayed that night. And we had to stay in tents, because we’d turned up so late. It was like, “God, we’ve made it.â€

BANKS: For the first five songs of the set, I didn’t look up. You could see the crowd disappearing off into the distance. It was June, still nippy at night, so there was steam rising off them.

DOYLE: The sound was not that good on stage. I couldn’t tell how good the concert was until right at the end when we were playing “Common Peopleâ€, and they put the lights on the audience. You could see for miles, the lights and people dancing and singing. It really scared me. I was like, “Oh, no, no.â€

BANKS: Playing the crescendo of “Common Peopleâ€, you really could hear the audience singing the words back. We’d never had that before.

DOYLE: The Glastonbury version of “Common People†is my favourite. Jarvis is telling Nick, “Take it downâ€, and he’s still really going fast. Then he’s going, “Take. It. Down!†When I heard it later, I couldn’t believe the speed.

BANKS: You’ve got to register that excitement.

DOYLE: Afterwards was like an out-of-body experience. I felt traumatised. Then the group went out into the fields and watched the sun come up. And I couldn’t, I had to get in my pyjamas and go to bed. Because I just didn’t know where I was. I just wanted normality, because it felt so scary. Fuckin’ hell.

MACKEY: Jarvis was singing in a band in 1979. That’s 16 years of preparation for that opportunity. It doesn’t always work out that everything you want happens! So when it did, we were ready to enjoy it.

DOYLE: The next day, we were all given cameras and when we went back I took a picture of Townhouse Studios where we were recording, because everything just felt touched by gold. Everything had been transformed by doing that. It really speeded up time in terms of how famous we were.

BANKS: A lot of the lyrics at that time were about a class divide. “Common People†was the pinnacle of that idea. And you thought, ‘It’s reaching out to people who do feel pissed off you get these poncey knobs poncing about. The audience are getting into that angry, us and them feeling, that idea of upstarts working their way up.’

DOYLE: That was partly why Russell [Senior] went off [he left Pulp in early 1997]. Once we’d made it and were still doing “Common People†it just didn’t ring true. He didn’t like the irony of it.

COCKER: I’m not ashamed of that song at all. I’m quite proud of it. I hear it on the radio and it still sounds all right!

DOYLE: Later in Pulp’s career I was thinking of groups that had written hit songs that never got forgotten, and I thought, ‘Oh, I wish we’d written one of those.’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, we have.’

COCKER: Was that girl real? Yes. On that BBC Three documentary [2006’s The Story Of… Pulp’s Common People], the researchers went through all the people who were contemporaries of mine at St Martins and they tried to track her down. They showed me a picture and it definitely wasn’t her. I dunno. Maybe she wasn’t Greek. Maybe I misheard her.

Come and talk to Uncut!

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Come and talk to Uncut!

We would like to get to understand more about what you do, what you like, what music you listen to and more. Complete our reader survey and - to say thank you - you can choose to enter our prize draw for the chance to win one of 3 HMV vouchers worth £100 each. Please click here to take part. ...

We would like to get to understand more about what you do, what you like, what music you listen to and more.

Complete our reader survey and – to say thank you – you can choose to enter our prize draw for the chance to win one of 3 HMV vouchers worth £100 each.

Please click here to take part.

The survey should take no more than fifteen minutes. Entries close August 31, 2023. The survey winners will be drawn on September 7, 2023 and contacted within three working days.

Thanks, from all of us, for taking part.

Cheers!

Smell The Coffi

Sam Richards
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Smell The Coffi

If the Super Furry Animals seemed to spring fully-formed into the Britpop fray circa late ’95, it’s probably because their members all served long apprenticeships in other bands. Before SFA, frontman Gruff Rhys and drummer Dafydd Ieuan were in Ffa Coffi Pawb, who evolved from “making experimen...

If the Super Furry Animals seemed to spring fully-formed into the Britpop fray circa late ’95, it’s probably because their members all served long apprenticeships in other bands. Before SFA, frontman Gruff Rhys and drummer Dafydd Ieuan were in Ffa Coffi Pawb, who evolved from “making experimental noise jams and selling homemade cassettes out of a carrier bag†to their harmony-rich third album Hei Vidal!, which is now being made available for the first time since 1992.

Rhys and guitarist Rhodri Puw (later of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci) formed Ffa Coffi Pawb as 16-year-olds in Bethseda, inspired by John Peel, Flying Nun records and Welsh-language legends Datblygu. A certain irreverence was evident from the outset: Ffa Coffi Pawb translates literally as ‘Everybody’s Coffee Beans’ but say it out loud and it’s something much ruder. “I suppose the name of the band was a stunt,†considers Rhys, “in that we got instantly banned from radio and TV.†Gigs would often consist of “just one song, “Sister Rayâ€-style. We’d have electric drills, to drill our guitars. We couldn’t find a singer, so I ended up singing by default.â€

Anglesey-based producer Gorwel Owen bought one of those homemade cassettes. “I then saw them live a couple of times at a small pub in Caernarfon. They sounded very influenced by Jesus And Mary Chain, with lots of feedback, but in the context of some great melodic songs.†With Owen’s encouragement, Ffa Coffi Pawb used the studio to experiment, incorporating elements of techno and psychedelia before eventually alighting on the joyful stomp of “We were going through an obsession with glam and powerpop,†explains Rhys. “Our elders were from the post-punk generation and we were rebelling by singing close harmonies.â€

“Helping to make that record changed my whole outlook on recording,†adds Owen. “I have a very clear memory of faffing about adjusting the reverb on the drums, trying to decide on whether it sounded better at 4.6. and 4.7. Daf leant over and put it near 10, which was the correct setting of course.â€

As vibrant as the album sounds now, the London-centric music industry of the early 1990s had little interest in bands singing in Welsh. Ffa Coffi Pawb only ever played three times in England, while hitting a wall at home. “We’d been playing around Wales for seven years and we felt we’d run out of road,†says Rhys, of their dissolution in 1993. “We’d play the same towns over and over again to the same people, so it was a mutual thing between us and the audience. It was like, ‘That’s enough of that, then!’â€

Rhys and Iuean moved to Cardiff, teaming up with ex-members of U Thant to form Super Furry Animals, whose early records – co-produced by Owen – are clearly an extension of the overdriven glam pop sound first explored on Hei Vidal! Rhys remains particularly proud of “Dilyn Fy Nhrwyn†– a kind of personal manifesto which translates as “Follow My Nose†– and the breezy Bolan fantasy of “Lluchia Dy Fflachlwch Drosda iâ€.

“That lyric is like, ‘’,†he explains. “It’s on the basis that the world has failed, and all we can hope for is for dumb pop to save us from hell. I’m happy with the lyrics and how they subvert some of the poppiness. I have no idea if that transcends or not to an [English] listener because it’s in Welsh, but it’s a melodic record and a curiosity of the time. Personally it brings back really positive memories – the joy of feeling your way around making records.â€

Ffa Coffi Pawb’s Hei Vida! us reussyed vt Ara Deg on July 28; their other two albums follow soon

AR Kane – AR Kive

Jon Dale
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AR Kane – AR Kive

Dream POP, they called it. Given AR Kane’s Alex Ayuli once worked for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s no surprise that he and collaborator Rudy Tambala invented their own genre before critics could stick their oar in. It was a canny move, but more importantly, it was accurate: the mus...

Dream POP, they called it. Given AR Kane’s Alex Ayuli once worked for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s no surprise that he and collaborator Rudy Tambala invented their own genre before critics could stick their oar in. It was a canny move, but more importantly, it was accurate: the music of AR Kane was made for dreamers, by dreamers, and its languor and longing made it particularly bewitching listening; their music is often smeared and blurry, happily lost in its own indefinable pleasures. “We wanted dream pop,†Tambala says, “that feeling of a dream where the rules are different. Dream logic.â€

The AR Kane story is one of experimentation and enterprise, of unexpected developments, of willing the future to accord with one’s bidding. It’s also one of smart moves and headstrong independence, bordering at times on intransigence: Ayuli and Tambala were full of cocksure youthful energy, something you can hear across the material compiled in this AR Kive boxset. Collecting three of their six releases across 1988 and 1989 – the “Up Home!†EP, debut album sixty nine, and double-album i – the music contained in AR Kive is swarming with great ideas, wild juxtapositions and brilliant pop moments, where AR Kane’s songs overflow with melody. The key to everything here, though, and the reason why it all works so well, is the near-telepathic communication developed, over two decades, between the group’s core members.

Ayuli and Tambala grew up in east London, the children of Nigerian and Malawi-English parents, respectively, meeting at Park Junior School in Newham when eight years old. Their shared experience as outsiders with keen creative interests, and their grounding in soundsystem and jazz-funk club cultures, granted them the confidence of the misfit, but seeing the Cocteau Twins on The Tube was the moment their switches flicked. After the performance, they called each other via landline, marvelling over what they’d seen, convinced they could do something similar.

Soon, Tambala met Ray Shulman, an ex-member of Gentle Giant who’d moved into production; when Shulman’s wife asked what Tambala did, he bluffed that he was in a band, though AR Kane barely had any songs. A hastily arranged demo landed the duo an audience with the One Little Indian label, whose Derek Birkett said, “You’re shit. Let’s make a record.†That first EP, 1986’s “When You’re Sadâ€, led AR Kane to legendary indie 4AD, where Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins produced the following year’s “Lollita†EP. They also collaborated with Colourbox on a dance record, M/A/R/R/S’s “Pump Up The Volume†– no-one expected it to hit No 1 worldwide. The resulting legal and inter-personal complexities torpedoed their relationship with 4AD.

Those first few EPs hinted at AR Kane’s capabilities. “When You’re Sad†had them tagged in the music press as the ‘black Jesus & Mary Chain’, but “Lollita†and “Pump Up The Volume†proved there was a lot more happening in AR Kane’s world, and in interviews, they feigned ignorance of indie, claiming their influences were Weather Report and Basement 5. But “Up Home!â€, their third EP and first for new label Rough Trade, is where everything comes together. Originally demoed for 4AD, those recordings convinced Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis to sign the duo. It’s no surprise, given the ambition of the four songs – there is, quite simply, so much going on here.

Everything on “Up Home!†is bigger, richer; the guitars are huge, as though they’re being played through the clouds, massive gusts of blue-green noise that move across the stereo spectrum like weather systems. “Baby Milk Snatcher†is built around face-flattening dub bass, with glinting piano and shards of guitar ricocheting through the song. “W.O.G.S.†is delirious to the point of expiration; “One Way Mirror†is their attempt at weird, lopsided ‘anti-funk’, the song’s melody crushed by avalanches of six-string interference. And the closing “Up†is AR Kane’s masterpiece, a disembodied thud pulsing at its heart as a six-note guitar melody spirals ever onward, Ayuli’s voice lost in its own reverie, hymning escapism via references to Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey’s ‘black star line’.

Indeed, one thing that makes AR Kane stand out from many of their peers is explicit politics. While other guitar groups of the time, like MBV and Dinosaur Jr, embraced vagueness and the unreal, Ayuli and Tambala’s experience as black artists in whitewashed British culture granted them political smarts. “Baby Milk Snatcher†collapses sexuality and Margaret Thatcher, its title referencing her early 1971 decision to eliminate free milk for junior school students. The eroticism was lifted from reading JG Ballard, who once daydreamed about “the arch of [Thatcher’s] nostrils and the sheen of her lower lip.â€

Collapsing the sexual and the political is part of what made “Up Home!†so unique. By the time of their debut album, sixty nine, though, AR Kane’s music changed, yet again. Here, the duo have gone astral, pointing to the outside world (“The Sun Falls Into The Seaâ€), but they’ve also internalised, exploring psychological states. That inward focus makes sense, given the LP’s recording sessions, the duo hidden away in the basement of Ayuli’s mother’s house. There’s something hermetic about sixty nine, and it is the purest expression, perhaps, of Ayuli’s and Tambala’s vision.

There are great pop songs throughout, beautiful melodies like “Crazy Blue†and “Scabâ€, but the LP is most powerful when AR Kane push the boat far, far out. “Suicide Kiss†dissolves midway into a fury of punch-bagged drums and overloaded amplifiers; “Sulliday†lets go of structure, mapping chaos via feedback and muttered come-ons. But the album’s centrepiece is a triptych on Side Two, where their songs dissolve together. The drift song of “The Sun Falls Into The Seaâ€, with its guitars that refract and shiver, a burbling clarinet wandering through a heavenly landscape as Ayuli murmurs, descends into the troubled “The Madonna Is With Childâ€, a stark piano-led mantra shattered by ice-pick guitars.

Listening back to sixty nine, it’s striking how important the bass guitar is to the music’s engine, from the slippery ECM-warble across “Crazy Blue†to the thrumming pulse through “Spermwhale Trip Overâ€. If AR Kane made the guitar mysterious again, they also situated the bass at the core of their music, its lifeblood. You can also hear that through their 1989 double-album, i, where AR Kane shift into another gear. If sixty nine was a cloistered, covert collection of songs, i is its opposite – 26 tracks, ranging from five-second snippets of guitar feedback to the six-minute penultimate dub-scape, “Catch My Driftâ€.

i suggests AR Kane could have been pop contenders, if they’d been more focused, but its lack of attention span is its eventual triumph. It flicks through genres like a child impatiently thumbing a kineograph, from the Sun Ra-inflected dance pop of “A Love From Outer Space†– a song so ecstatic, Andrew Weatherall later named a club night after it – through the drowsy dub confusion of “What’s All This Thenâ€, the pop confection of “Miles Apartâ€, the languorous soul of “Sugarwingsâ€. They return, on occasion, to the guitar-scapes of their past – the lagoon of drone that is “Downâ€, the featherlight amble of “Honeysuckleswallow†– but the gist is making everything brighter, clearer, more curious.

After i, things started to fall apart – there was a remix EP in 1990, and then, four years later, a third album, New Clear Child, on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. More poised and direct, peaceable where its predecessors were unpredictable, it has its own charms, and is perhaps the most underrated of their albums. But an attempted fourth album stalled, and the duo splintered, Tambala working with sister Maggie firstly as Sufi, and now Jübl, while Ayuli, resident in America, released two solo albums as Alex! before retiring from music. But perhaps what we have here is all we really need – two years where AR Kane dreamed for us all a new pop music, an alchemical vision of what dream pop really could be.

Dudu Tassa & Jonny Greenwood – Jarak Qaribak

Tom Pinnock
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Dudu Tassa & Jonny Greenwood – Jarak Qaribak

The Middle East is, to put it lightly, a complex region; especially so if you expand your view to include Arabic North Africa and the land stretching across to the Oxus, most of which comprises the ‘Middle World’ according to writer Tamim Ansary. It’s an area that’s been crucial to humanity,...

The Middle East is, to put it lightly, a complex region; especially so if you expand your view to include Arabic North Africa and the land stretching across to the Oxus, most of which comprises the ‘Middle World’ according to writer Tamim Ansary. It’s an area that’s been crucial to humanity, historically a cradle of civilisation, culture and learning, yet in recent centuries it’s been repeatedly failed, pillaged and divided by poor rulers and imperialist outsiders.

Yet one thing that vaguely unites the Middle East, despite its myriad peoples and cultural currents imprisoned in often arbitrary national boundaries, is music. Most strikingly, their strong modal sense, with melodies slipping fluidly between major and minor keys, and their use of quarter-tone tuning, can make conventional Western melodies and harmonies sound more than a little stiff. Only the ‘blue note’ in blues comes close to the ache and bittersweet longing found throughout Middle World music.

It’s little surprise, then, that Jonny Greenwood has come to be fascinated with this music; always an intrepid musical explorer, he’s further connected to it through his marriage to Israeli artist Sharona Katan. “It’s such passionate music,†he tells Uncut. “[The tunings] just sound right to me: perhaps they were exotic – a horrible word – when I first heard them, but now they’re just… correct.â€

He has form with this kind of thing, as on Junun, a 2015 collaboration with Israel’s Shye Ben Tzur and India’s Rajasthan Express. This outfit supported Radiohead live after A Moon Shaped Pool’s release, along with another group, Dudu Tassa & The Kuwaitis. A Tel Aviv rock singer-songwriter, Tassa is descended from the Al Kuwaiti Brothers, pioneering musicians in Iraq and Kuwait who moved to Israel in the ’50s. His Kuwaitis project covers and updates the work of his grandfather and great-uncle, but here he and Greenwood cast their eyes over the whole of the Middle East, excavating often-obscure songs from the past 70 years (including by Tassa’s ancestors), and recruiting eight phenomenal singers from different MENA countries to interpret them in their own way. So, for instance, there’s UAE’s Safae Essafi interpreting an Israeli song, Iraq’s Karrar Alsaedi taking on a Yemeni piece and Tassa himself singing a Moroccan song. Greenwood and Tassa have been keen to make clear that these are love songs rather than protest anthems. Indeed, the album – its title translates as ‘Your Neighbour Is Your Friend’ – is an open-hearted, optimistic reminder of what unites the region in the face of the kind of oppression that’s seen at least one of these vocalists suffer historically due to their choice of collaborators.

While the vocalists are the focal points on Jarak Qaribak, Greenwood and Tassa provide many of the most important textures here. Every song is built on drum machines and buzzing modular synths, recorded in Oxford – a subtle electronic tapping is the first sound we hear on the opening “Djit Nishrabâ€, an Algerian song performed by Egyptian Ahmed Doma, while “Ya ’Anid Ya Yabaâ€, a Jordanian song sung by Syrian artist Lynn A, stutters into life with a collapsing drum-machine clatter. Most of the nine tracks here blossom into rich layers of sound, often led by echoed spirals of ragged, picked electric guitar and funky, overdriven bass. Both recall Greenwood’s work in The Smile – that band’s “A Hairdryer†could have slotted into Jarak Qaribak without issue – so it’s surprising to learn that Tassa and Greenwood shared guitar and bass work.

On top of this more modern bed are traditional instruments, including qanun, oud, brass, percussion and copious Arabic strings (not, this time, arranged by Greenwood). The pair mostly resist the temptation to take the spotlight, leaving the eight singers to weave their spells. To Western ears, of course, they share many qualities, but there are striking differences: Baghdad’s throaty, passionate Karrar Alsaedi is heavy on the microtones, Sfax’s Noamane Chaari and Zaineb Elouati are pleasingly reserved and keening, Aleppo’s Rashid al-Najjar is impassioned and gloriously untethered, and Palestine’s Nour Freteikh and Dubai’s Safae Essafi are breathily, beautifully melismatic. The latter’s “Ahibak†(‘I Love You’) is perhaps the record’s highlight, a seductive slice of Levantine R&B, its syncopated beat fighting through droning horns, echoed stabs of strings, jangling qanun and Greenwood’s dub effects.

The importance of the vocalists is underlined by the spoken introductions to each song, with the title of the track, the singer’s name and their city of origin. It’s a throwback to the same practice on some of the old recordings Greenwood and Tassa love, and a sign of their reverence for this music. That Jarak Qaribak manages to combine that respect – for the songs, the singers and their various cultures – with a free-flowing, light sense of exploration that feels joyfully current, is its triumph.

Uncut’s 5 Glastonbury 2023 highlights

Mark Beaumont
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Uncut’s 5 Glastonbury 2023 highlights

Our man in a field reports back on his 5 highlights from this year's festival at Worthy Farm... ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT Arctic Monkeys Baffling the TV audience by opening with imposing The Car cut “Sculptures Of Anything Goesâ€, Alex Turner and t...

Our man in a field reports back on his 5 highlights from this year’s festival at Worthy Farm…

Arctic Monkeys
Baffling the TV audience by opening with imposing The Car cut “Sculptures Of Anything Goesâ€, Alex Turner and the Arctic Monkeys delivered a suave, low-lit and quasi-theatrical Friday night headline set that struck an engrossing balance between youthful urgency, beastly/sultry desert rock, grotesque carnival tones and post-modern lounge crooning.

The Pretenders
“Oh Glastonbury, how many memories?†sighed Chrissie Hynde from the Park Stage on Saturday evening, then set about making a few more. After an opening half hour of brash new wave, she introduced Johnny Marr to add his trademark gossamer licks to “Back On The Chain Gangâ€, Dave Grohl to drum on “Tattooed Love Boys†and Paul McCartney to wave at the end.

Tinariwen
“Welcome to the Sahara,†says Alhousseini ag Abdoulah, referencing both music and mercury. Ahead of The Pretenders, the Park Stage was lulled into a bliss state by the Malian desert blues of Tinariwen, merging eastern textures, North African rhythms and western psych and funk rock into a hypnotic, free-flowing hour. No Dave Grohl though, surprisingly.

Gwenno
In a flowing black frock, Gwenno draped her haunting and spacious atmospheres across Sunday afternoon tackling topics, in Cornish and Welsh, both whimsical (‘Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow was about “a land that time forgotâ€) and technological (‘Jynn-amontya’ concerned “AI and the battle for it not to forget human beingsâ€). The leylines sang along.

Elton John
What “might be†the last UK show from one of its greatest showmen could only go one way – a cornucopia of hits from an opening “Pinball Wizard†to a closing “Rocket Man…â€, dotted with special guest spots including Gabriels’ Jacob Lusk (“Are You Ready For Loveâ€), Brandon Flowers (“Tiny Dancerâ€) and Rina Sawayama (“Don’t Go Breaking My Heartâ€). A celestial farewell.

The Jesus And Mary Chain unveil new live album, Sunset 666

Sam Richards
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The Jesus And Mary Chain unveil new live album, Sunset 666

The Jesus And Mary Chain have outlined details of a new double live album, Sunset 666, to be released by Fuzz Club on August 4. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT It was recorded live at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018, during their North American tour in support ...

The Jesus And Mary Chain have outlined details of a new double live album, Sunset 666, to be released by Fuzz Club on August 4.

It was recorded live at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018, during their North American tour in support of Nine Inch Nails. Hear the Sunset 666 version of “Sometimes Always” below, with Isobel Campbell in the Hope Sandoval role:

Pre-order Sunset 666 here and peruse the tracklisting below. The Jesus And Mary Chain play South Facing Festival at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl on August 4, alongside Primal Scream and The Black Angels.

1 Just Like Honey
2 Sometimes Always (feat. Isobel Campbell)
3 Black and Blues (feat. Isobel Campbell)
4 Amputation
5 All Things Pass
6 Some Candy Talking
7 Head On
8 The Living End
9 Cracking Up
10 Teenage Lust
11 I Hate Rock ‘N’ Roll
12 Reverence
13 Blues from a Gun
14 Far Gone and Out
15 Between Planets
16 Halfway To Crazy
17 In A Hole

Hear Modern Nature’s expansive new 7-minute track, “Murmuration”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Modern Nature’s expansive new 7-minute track, “Murmuration”

Modern Nature have shared a new track, "Murmuration", which you can hear below. The track is taken from their new album, No Fixed Point In Space, which is released on September 29 through Bella Union. ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT https://www.youtub...

Modern Nature have shared a new track, “Murmuration“, which you can hear below.

The track is taken from their new album, No Fixed Point In Space, which is released on September 29 through Bella Union.

No Fixed Point In Space is the third full-length album by Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature, following on from 2021’s Island Of Noise.

“With this record,†Cooper explains, “I wanted the music to reflect nature: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, process and chance. I wanted the music and the words to feel like roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, the unknown.

“The way you see or hear music in your head is abstract and magic… often more beautiful than what eventually appears on tape. When you sit down with an instrument and begin translating an idea, it quickly conforms. I’ve tried to develop this music without thinking in terms of set rhythms, time signatures, folk or pop structures, syntax; the devices you associate with the music world which I come from. I wanted to make music that was abstract, free and honest, whilst still being predominantly tonal and recognisably song based. It feels like time to make something that no one has heard before.â€

Tracklisting for No Fixed Point In Space is:

Tonic
Murmuration
Orange
Cascade
Sun
Tapestry
EnsÅ

Additionally, Modern Nature have announced news of a UK tour in December as well as their very own new music festival, named Murmuration, which takes place on Saturday, September 30 at Newport Village Hall in Essex.

Tour dates are:

Monday, December 11 – Birmingham – Hare and Hounds
Tuesday, December 12 – Ipswich – The Smokehouse
Wednesday, December 13 – Lewes – Lewes Con Club
Thursday, December 14 – Bristol – Rough Trade
Friday, December 15 – London – Café Oto
Saturday, December 16 – London – Café Oto
Sunday, December 17 – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
Monday, December 18 – Glasgow – Glad Café
Tuesday, December 19 – Manchester – The Carlton Club

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