“I haven’t yet had my Joni Mitchell phase,” admits Nico Paulo, which for a singer-songwriter born in Canada might be considered close to sacrilege. But Paulo’s parents are Portuguese and they returned to Europe when she was two; instead, the lusophone sounds of Tropicália – Gal Costa in p...
“I haven’t yet had my Joni Mitchell phase,” admits Nico Paulo, which for a singer-songwriter born in Canada might be considered close to sacrilege. But Paulo’s parents are Portuguese and they returned to Europe when she was two; instead, the lusophone sounds of Tropicália – Gal Costa in particular – were the first to make a lasting impression. “I don’t come from a musical background. I’m still discovering it all.”
Paulo grew up in a small town an hour outside Lisbon, and while she sang in church choirs and school musicals it was something she only ever saw as a hobby, opting instead to study graphic design. It wasn’t until 2014, when she moved back to Toronto in search of a graduate internship, that she picked up a guitar for the first time, turning to songwriting as a way to deal with the “culture shock” of her new surroundings.
“I have dual citizenship but I felt this tension when I arrived in Canada, like I didn’t belong here,” she explains. “I didn’t grow up speaking English, and I was living in this big North American city – I felt a little lonely. In a way it was a blessing, because I got to spend a lot of time by myself, with music, and I began to understand that this passion that I have for it was not just a hobby. I do have something that I want to say.”
Paulo left her design job to begin making music full time in 2018, releasing her debut EP “Wave Call” in early 2020 ahead of a short European tour with collaborator and then-romantic partner Tim Baker, the former frontman of Newfoundland indie-rockers Hey Rosetta!. During lockdown in Toronto later that year, the pair decided to relocate to Baker’s childhood home in St John’s, where Paulo quickly found community in the island capital’s flourishing creative scene.
“I feel closer to myself here than I am anywhere else,” says Paulo. “I’m very easily distracted, and in Toronto there are so many things trying to grab your attention. Ultimately I feel more connected to this place: being by the sea, the slower pace of life and having more space to be outside.”
Her self-titled debut album was recorded in similarly idyllic circumstances, in a lakeside cabin on Nova Scotia’s South Shore with Baker and percussionist Joshua Van Tassel co-producing. Fellow St John’s musicians came down to contribute: clarinetist Mary Beth Waldram, singer Steve Maloney, and Baker’s Hey Rosetta! bandmate Adam Hogan on guitar. Kyle Cunjak, head of Paulo’s label Forward Music Group, added bass parts during a three-day recording session.
“The cabin wasn’t planned,” Paulo reveals. “Josh Van Tassel was setting up a studio in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, but a couple of things he needed wouldn’t arrive in time. As the date of the session approached, he suggested turning a family member’s cabin into a studio instead. We only used it as a recording space, so I was staying with some friends who also lived in the South Shore, and their little daughter. It really was magical.”
Pairing lyrics inspired by love, dreams and the passage of time with warm instrumentation and rhythms subtly influenced by those Tropicália records, the final album sounds both comforting and timeless. “I feel like I’m very young as a songwriter, so a lot of the writing that I’ve done is a conversation that I’m having with myself,” says Paulo. “It feels almost like therapy, like a meditation.”
Nico Paulo is available now from the Forward Music Group
In the autumn of 1984, abetted by his Commotions, Lloyd Cole coughed out a masterpiece called Rattlesnakes. In his black polo neck and corduroys, the video to “Perfect Skin” saw Cole looking and sounding like a man willing middle-age gravitas to come and get him. Meanwhile, he fetishised the dre...
In the autumn of 1984, abetted by his Commotions, Lloyd Cole coughed out a masterpiece called Rattlesnakes. In his black polo neck and corduroys, the video to “Perfect Skin” saw Cole looking and sounding like a man willing middle-age gravitas to come and get him. Meanwhile, he fetishised the dreams and disasters of the protagonists in stories by Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. On Easy Pieces, released a year later, he sang about characters who struggled to come to terms with the bad decisions of their ruthless youth.
All of which is worth dwelling on because, in the intervening years, Lloyd Cole finally got to be the thing he so badly wanted to be from the outset. He got old – and when that happens to songwriters, they get a different sort of pass to the one that allows you to ride buses for free. People project onto you the depth that comes with mere survival. It’s something Cole himself noticed in the last decade. After mid-life creative peaks such as Music In A Foreign Language came and went without much fanfare, 2013’s Standards elicited not so much a Proustian rush as a Mexican wave of déja vû from returning fans who rightly held it up as a sonic postscript to that 1984 debut. As it turned out, Standards was something of a red herring. Now that Cole had our attention, with 2019’s elegant, electronic Guesswork he set about creating music that couldn’t be further removed from his precociously florid early work.
And it turns out that when you’re pulling the weight of all that lived experience through life, the less you feel the need to elaborate. “You can’t believe it/It can’t be possible/But it’s happening now”, runs the entire lyric of “This Can’t Be Happening”, the sixth of the eight songs that comprise On Pain. Just those three lines over and over, occasionally accompanied by an impersonally unhuman female harmony, while tentative synth stabs search out a rhythm on which they might be able to ride out of this torment.
At moments like this, the space left by Cole turns the listener into collaborator. The shock of loss; the halogen glare of waiting rooms where people gather to hear the worst; a letter bearing unwelcome news. These are the scenes somehow implied here – and you can’t help but fill them in. On “You Are Here Now”, Cole begins like a man transmitting from a numbness that sits beyond emotion – “Every day the same as every day before” – before a slo-mo digital stampede vaults him into an apparent reconnection with the miracle of his existence. In these moments lies the validation of Cole’s assertion that the only thing about the record that he wanted to sound organic were the sentiments that brought the songs to life.
To which end, it’s an Auto-Tuned iteration of the careworn Cole timbre that takes centre-stage on “I Can Hear Everything”, the singer inhabiting the guise of a mildly exasperated God. It’s not the only song here rooted in a feeling of fin de siecle fatalism. “Warm By The Fire” sounds like a companion piece to Cass Elliott’s “California Earthquake”, which Cole covered on Standards – only this time, the disaster is man-made, hence Cole navigating his lyrical drone over the shopping malls of an Los Angeles being set alight by insurrectionary influencers. It’s good, but this rocky outlier doesn’t entirely sound like it belongs among the sparsely ornamented electronic meditations that surround it.
Much better are the songs that bookend the album: revealed in a sultry fug of nocturnal humidity, “Wolves” offers a dreamlike reversal of the werewolf trope, while the album’s exquisite title track finds Cole’s consolation patter mirroring the music’s cocooned queasiness. On a subdued celebration of Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s mythical German sabbatical, “The Idiots”, Cole sings, “We’ll move to Berlin/Stop being drug addicts/We’ll cycle and swim”. Cole has frequently hymned the effect the pair’s Berlin albums had on him, singling out that same unflinching minimalism he feels is so well-suited to writing from an older perspective.
Perhaps the most perfectly realised authentication of that claim comes with the penultimate song. Incredibly, seeds of “More Of What You Are” were sown in the same overheard conversation that spawned the Commotions’ “My Bag”, the observation that cocaine’s primary effect is to make you “more of what you are”. Over a balletically mesmerising tapestry of synths that evoke Trans-Europe Express’s quieter interludes, Cole extends that observation to the ageing process: the way the lines on our faces deepen and multiply with time, exaggerating the version of us that exists in the collective memory of our friends. Lloyd Cole is no exception. He, too, has become more of what he always was. And somehow he’s achieved that by paring his music down to its rawest essence.
Initially conceived as a 20th-anniversary nod to 2000 debut Not The Tremblin’ Kind, this first-rate studio return was derailed by the pandemic. Just Like A Rose is well worth the wait, though. Cantrell sees it as “more of a celebration than a traditional album”, the sum of myriad influences an...
Initially conceived as a 20th-anniversary nod to 2000 debut Not The Tremblin’ Kind, this first-rate studio return was derailed by the pandemic. Just Like A Rose is well worth the wait, though. Cantrell sees it as “more of a celebration than a traditional album”, the sum of myriad influences and styles that have defined her career thus far, from Peel favourite to Grand Ole Opry performer to successful radio host on Gimme Country.
The protracted gestation of Just Like A Rose… also allowed her to bring in a wealth of guests, among them Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and rockabilly veteran Rosie Flores. The latter directly inspired the title track, a country-rock tribute to female singer-guitarists who continue to roar: “Her colours are wild/Her ways are free”. Producer Flores and fellow guitarist Kenny Vaughan lock into a stinging rhythm, overlaid with Cantrell’s clear, assured voice. A similar sentiment guides the airy “Unaccompanied”, which revisits her formative days in New York City, riding the subway, catching gigs, immersing herself in music – “On my own/ Free to roam/All alone” – its wistful sense of autonomy accentuated by pedal steel from David Mansfield, previously a mainstay of Bob Dylan’s ’70s ensemble.
Earle appears on “When The Roses Bloom Again”, a majestic duet treatment of a vintage tune that Cantrell first cut for her second album, back in 2002, and which owes its arrangement to Jeff Tweedy (the Wilco leader had recorded it with Billy Bragg during the Mermaid Avenue sessions). It’s brightened further by Buddy Miller’s extended guitar break. “Bide My Time” is imbued with a satisfying twang, a gentle-ish paean to ramblin’ country tropes, though the antique vibe is most apparent on “Good Morning Mr Afternoon”. Written by Joe Flood and featuring Paul Burch and his WPA Ballclub, it’s a leisurely exercise in old-school honky-tonk. It finds its greatest contrast in “AWM – Bless”, a biting takedown of entitled, angry white maledom that couldn’t feel more 2023.
In Quantum Criminals, writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay excavate the deep mysteries and myths of the Steely Dan extended universe. It’s not a straightforward band biog, though you’re likely to learn a new detail about the band on virtually every page. Instead, it’s a rich examinatio...
In Quantum Criminals, writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay excavate the deep mysteries and myths of the Steely Dan extended universe. It’s not a straightforward band biog, though you’re likely to learn a new detail about the band on virtually every page. Instead, it’s a rich examination of the Dan’s legacy, with Pappademas’s keen and witty insight complemented beautifully by LeMay’s portraits of “the ramblers, wild gamblers, and other sole survivors” – both real and fictional – who populate the Steely Dan saga. From guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter to “Deacon Blues”’ Expanding Man, the book offers Dan-iacs a fresh and revealing look at what Pappademas calls “a cult band whose catalogue, paradoxically, includes at least a dozen enduring radio hits”.
The timing couldn’t be better. Steely Dan are having a “moment”, the subject of countless internet memes. Pariahs in the alternative rock era, millennials and zoomers now proclaim their love for the band unabashedly. So why are this band formed more than 50 years ago seemingly more relevant than ever? “I think the cynicism of Steely Dan maybe doesn’t feel as poisonous and acrid as it once did,” reckons Pappademas. “It feels sensible! These are dark and strange and cynical times, and there’s something about these songs that just sounds right. Younger generations are responding to that. They’re chasing a certain idea of the past that Steely Dan represents, some version of adulthood that they can live. Becker and Fagen are kind of like spiritual dads.”
The duo’s impeccable jadedness is indisputable. But one of the more surprising aspects of Quantum Criminals is how downright human many of their lyrical subjects come across. LeMay’s colourful, perceptive illustrations play a big part here, with many of her subjects gazing out at the reader in striking fashion. “I wanted them to have a whole lot of humanity,” she says. “A lot of them ended up being funny, but it wasn’t outright mocking. I don’t think the songs are doing that.”
Pappademas agrees. “As I worked on the book, something that came out was this weird empathy that exists in the band,” he says. “It’s veiled in irony, but I think they have a lot of compassion for these delusional people caught up in dreams of making it or imprisoned by their bad past decisions. Not in ‘Haitian Divorce,’ though. That one is just cruel…”
Quantum Criminals is out now, published by University Of Texas Press
To mark the 50th anniversary of her scorching self-titled debut, Light In The Attic will reissue four Betty Davis albums on August 25.
This includes the first-ever vinyl release of 1979's final 'lost' album Crashin' From Passion. Hear its title track below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1CI...
To mark the 50th anniversary of her scorching self-titled debut, Light In The Attic will reissue four Betty Davis albums on August 25.
This includes the first-ever vinyl release of 1979’s final ‘lost’ album Crashin’ From Passion. Hear its title track below:
All four titles were produced in close collaboration with Davis, who sadly passed away in 2022. Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different, and Crashin’ From Passion were remastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters and include rare photos from the era, plus new liner notes by Davis’ close friend, Danielle Maggio. They Say I’m Different also includes a fold-out 24×36 poster.
Is It Love Or Desire? was remastered by John Baldwin and includes liner notes from Oliver Wang.
Each album will be available on CD, black vinyl and a variety of exclusive colour variants, which you can pre-order here.
Put another dime in the jukebox, baby: after last year's acoustic album Changeup, Joan Jett And The Blackhearts are back to full power with a new EP called Mindsets. Featuring six tracks written by Jett and Blackhearts guitarist Dougie Needles, you can listen to it below:
https://open.spotify.com...
Put another dime in the jukebox, baby: after last year’s acoustic album Changeup, Joan Jett And The Blackhearts are back to full power with a new EP called Mindsets. Featuring six tracks written by Jett and Blackhearts guitarist Dougie Needles, you can listen to it below:
Jett is currently touring the US with Bryan Adams, but she’s kindly taken some time out for a Q&A session with you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a one-time Runaway and full-time rock’n’roll queen? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Friday (June 23) and Joan will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
The Smile – Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner – have released a new standalone single called "Bending Hectic". The song was first debuted live last year and featured in their Live At Montreux Jazz Festival YouTube stream, although not the accompanying album.
"Bending Hectic" was pro...
The Smile – Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner – have released a new standalone single called “Bending Hectic”. The song was first debuted live last year and featured in their Live At Montreux Jazz Festival YouTube stream, although not the accompanying album.
“Bending Hectic” was produced by Sam Petts-Davies at Abbey Road studios, with strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Hear it below:
The Smile will be touring Mexico, Canada and the USA for the rest of June and July – full dates below. Following the tour, the band will return to the studio to continue working on new material.
21/06/23 – Mexico City, Mexico – National Auditorium
22/06/23 – Mexico City, Mexico – National Auditorium (SOLD OUT)
25/06/23 – Austin, TX – ACL Live at The Moody Theater (SOLD OUT)
26/06/23 – Austin, TX – ACL Live at The Moody Theater (SOLD OUT)
29/06/23 – Miami, FL – James L. Knight Center
30/06/23 – St Augustine, FL – The Saint Augustine Amphitheatre
02/07/23 – North Charleston, SC – North Charleston Performing Arts Center
03/07/23 – Asheville, NC – Thomas Wolfe Auditorium (SOLD OUT)
05/07/23 – Richmond, VA – The National (SOLD OUT)
07/07/23 – Forest Hills, NY – Forest Hills Stadium
08/07/23 – Philadelphia, PA – Franklin Music Hall (SOLD OUT)
10/07/23 – Pittsburgh, PA – Stage AE
11/07/23 – Cleveland, OH – Agora Ballroom (SOLD OUT)
14/07/23 – Quebec City – Festival d’été de Québec
15/07/23 – Laval, QC – Place Bell
16/07/23 – Ottawa, ONT – Bluesfest Festival
19/07/23 – Kansas City, MO – Midland Theatre
20/07/23 – Chesterfield, MO – The Factory
21/07/23 – Chicago, IL – Pitchfork Music Festival
It’s a trope of the mature artist to want to strip everything back in late career – to drop the production tricks and reveal the truth. Where, then, does that leave Peter Gabriel, whose career has been built on the power of theatrical presentation, at an arena show?
ORDER NOW: Bruce Spring...
It’s a trope of the mature artist to want to strip everything back in late career – to drop the production tricks and reveal the truth. Where, then, does that leave Peter Gabriel, whose career has been built on the power of theatrical presentation, at an arena show?
As mushrooms grow and strawberries rot on screens behind him, and works by favourite artists like Ai Wei Wei complement his performance, you’d maybe think that Gabriel was having none of it and sticking firmly to his position.
It turns out, though, from his initial Pythonesque appearance (strolling on in a flat cap), to his humorous digressions (“I grew up on a dairy farm – only the bull was worried about AI… artificial insemination”) it seems these days Gabriel’s mission is to enjoy the tricks of the performance trade, but also dismantle the power hierarchy and convention of a rock show.
The tone is conversational and intimate. There’s no big entrance. There’s a lot of talking and thanking the band, as he discourses on what concerns him: fake news, AI, the future, and the fate of the individual.
Which all has a charming father-in-law-reads-that-book-about-mushrooms quality, and is certainly a change from hanging upside down in a harness or dressing up as he has in the past but possibly preaching to the choir. For all his diverse interests, you couldn’t fail to get the idea from the songs (“Love Can Heal”, “Live And Let Live”) and the feeling in his voice – the man can still very much hit those soulful high notes, that Gabriel is a pretty right-thinking guy. In case you for some reason thought he might be content with a hits set, there’s a new song “Olive Tree”, from a forthcoming project. VR-themed? Need you even ask?
As the evening progresses Gabriel untethers from the conceptual, Brian Cox feel of the first set (highlights: “Growing Up” “i/o”, “Sledgehammer” which he had to fit in somewhere), to a second half more coherently-programmed for mood. Ayanna Witter-Johnson is our ersatz Kate Bush on “Don’t Give Up”, while the sumptuous “Red Rain” and “Solsbury Hill” end a second set which illustrates how well his funky and textural world pop has travelled.
Ultimately it’s testament to Gabriel’s charisma that as much as he tampers with the dynamics of a big rock concert (a campfire? An actual interval?), his performance – see his “Big Time” formation stepping with bassist Tony Levin and guitarist David Rhodes – can effortlessly bring it back. The encores are epic and expansive versions of “In Your Eyes” and “Biko”, which endorse again the eccentric and utterly unique figure which Gabriel cuts. This is someone who became a superstar using all the tricks of the 1980s, but who did it honourably and in his own way then. Clearly, he sees no reason to change that now.
Band:
Tony Levin (bass and stick) David Rhodes (guitar) Manu Katché (drums) Richard Evans (multi-i Ayanna Witter-Johnson (cello and piano) Marina Moore (violin and viola) Josh Shpak (trumpet, French horn and keys)
Setlist: Peter Gabriel – O2 Arena, London, June 19, 2023
Washing of the Water
Growing Up
Panopticom
Four Kinds of Horses
i/o
Digging in the Dirt
Playing for Time (with Tom Cawley) Olive Tree
This Is Home
Sledgehammer
Darkness
Love Can Heal
Road to Joy
Don’t Give Up (vocal by Ayanna Witter-Johnson) The Court
Red Rain
And Still
Big Time
Live and Let Live
Solsbury Hill
One of the first voices you hear in Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson’s documentary is Syd Barrett himself. Taken from a 1968 interview, Barrett discusses returning to the visual arts after his recent “break” from Pink Floyd. “If I want to say nothing, or if I want to act in an extraordinary...
One of the first voices you hear in Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson’s documentary is Syd Barrett himself. Taken from a 1968 interview, Barrett discusses returning to the visual arts after his recent “break” from Pink Floyd. “If I want to say nothing, or if I want to act in an extraordinary way, then I feel that is justified,” he says in his meticulous, if slightly stoned, BBC English tones. You could argue that he had already acted “in an extraordinary way”, as the leading light of Britain’s psychedelic underground. Now free of the pressures of commercial expectation, bright new possibilities presented themselves. But after two scruffy, endearing solo albums, Barrett chose instead “to say nothing”, absenting himself in the early ’70s until his death in 2006. While Have You Got It Yet? reminds us of Barrett’s many gifts, in doing so it also inevitably underscores what – and who – got lost along the way. “You couldn’t over-emphasise his importance,” says Nick Mason. “He was a creative genius.”
In this context, Barrett’s upbringing in 1950s Cambridge, among well-off academic families with bohemian tastes, provides favourable material from which to investigate his early promise. We hear from many of Barrett’s peers and school friends – of which Thorgerson was one – who remember a tall, handsome youth with good hair, so endowed that he even “smelled nice”. As fellow Cantabrigian Andrew Rawlinson sees it, “Everything he turned to worked. The girls worked. The painting worked. The music worked. The friendships worked.” In 1964, Barrett moved from a secure ecosystem in Cambridge into another, slightly less secure one in London, to study art at Camberwell College of Arts; many of his friends moved, too. Before long he was in a band with Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Rick Wright and Bob Klose; eventually he was earning £200 a week with The Pink Floyd and art took a back seat to his blossoming music career.
Appealing as David Gilmour’s assertion is that “Life was just too easy for him”, as it progresses, Have You Got It Yet? becomes a more subtle cautionary tale than anyone might have expected. This takes place at the affluent end of the counterculture, as Syd’s wider circle of friends head out from their flats in South Kensington to the increasingly popular acid-soaked rave-ups in the capital. “We thought we were moving in this wonderful direction to Utopia,” says Peter Wynne-Wilson, Floyd’s former lighting engineer. “We were fully engaged in the hip dream – and it was a dream. We had spiritual heights in our sights. And Syd, too.” As is often the way with gilded youth, everything seemed so effortless – until such time as it wasn’t. In footage, we see Barrett in the studio turning the dials on his Binson Echorec, interviewed alongside Waters on BBC2’s The Look Of The Week or on stage with the Floyd during their technicolour peak. But the pressures on Barrett became considerable. Co-manager Andrew King recalls the Floyd’s three-week stint performing “See Emily Play” on Top Of The Pops: “By the third week, we couldn’t find him anywhere…”
While this is a film about Syd, it’s also a film about Storm Thorgerson, who began the project with Bogawa in 2011 and died from cancer in 2013, before he could complete it. As much as Thorgerson is mining his old school friends for tales of Syd, there is a valedictory quality here, too. “This whole story depends upon the memories of people of our age,” acknowledges Roger Waters. At least five of the film’s talking heads have died since their interviews took place.
Thorgerson’s involvement opened a lot of doors – along with Gilmour, Mason and Waters, there are interviews with Barrett’s sister Rosemary, a string of his former flames, chums and admirers including Pete Townshend, Graham Coxon and Tom Stoppard. But while the vibe often feels like old friends reminiscing – “Jenny dear, tell me how you first met Syd” – the results are rather more candid and satisfying than you might otherwise expect. “We probably did as much as we could, but we were all very young,” says Gilmour. “I regret that I never went up to his house in Cambridge – in the ’80s, ’90s, ’00s. But none of us did.”
Have You Got It Yet? is part of a modest flurry of Barrett activity, along with the launch of an official Youtube channel and a BBC Radio 4 drama, The Ballad Of Syd & Morgan, about a fictional meeting between Barrett and EM Forster. Landing during Dark Side Of The Moon’s 50th anniversary year, these act as a welcome reminder of the fragile visionary who set the Floyd on their interstellar path. “Syd defined the whole of that moment in the ’60s,” says Townshend in Bogawa and Thorgerson’s documentary. “The colour, the vivacity of it. The psychedelic freedom.”
Essential, then, for lovers everywhere of gingerbread men, terrapins and mice called Gerald.
From inauspicious beginnings, as a scratch band of SEX shop denizens blagging their way onto the stage of the 100 Club for Malcolm McLaren’s 1976 punk festival, Siouxsie And The Banshees blazed a trail through the ’80s and beyond with one of the great post-punk discographies. Goth? Shoegaze? Tri...
From inauspicious beginnings, as a scratch band of SEX shop denizens blagging their way onto the stage of the 100 Club for Malcolm McLaren’s 1976 punk festival, Siouxsie And The Banshees blazed a trail through the ’80s and beyond with one of the great post-punk discographies. Goth? Shoegaze? Trip-hop? They pretty much invented all that, while Siouxsie herself redefined what a frontwoman could be. As she embarks on her first proper tour since 2008, we celebrate her insurgent hits and seminal deep cuts.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Metal Postcard” (John Peel Session, 1977)
Despite Siouxsie’s facile declaration that she was “more into high camp than death camps”, her penchant for swastikas cast a disturbing shadow over early Banshees gigs. Debuted on their first session for John Peel, and dedicated to Dadaist and anti-fascist artist John Heartfield, “Metal Postcard” hinted at a sophistication beyond their punk peers.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Hong Kong Garden” (Single, 1978)
Finally signed to Polydor in 1978, the Banshees recorded their debut single with Steve Lillywhite after initial sessions with Bruce Albertine went awry. The result was this striking (if naive) comment on British colonialism and the immigrant experience, the angular guitars topped with a bubblegum orientalist xylophone riff. It was the first post-punk single to reach the Top 10.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Suburban Relapse” (The Scream, 1978)
If the lead single had emphasised the Banshees’ pop chops, it was a gateway to the hard stuff of their debut album, The Scream: an uncompromising caterwaul of dismay. Most striking was “Suburban Relapse”, anatomising domestic violence like X-Ray Spex, but with John McKay’s guitars emulating Bernard Herrmann’s strings to take the song into Psycho territory.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Playground Twist” (Join Hands, 1979)
“If Ingmar Bergman produced records, they might sound like this,” proclaimed the NME on the release of the Banshees’ third single in June 1979. Somehow breaching the Top 30, “Playground Twist” is the first intimation of the band’s dawning, darkling psychedelia, like a bad-trip version of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Icon” (Join Hands, 1979)
Join Hands, the Banshees’ second album, was originally intended to have a creepily distorted image from a communion card on the cover. The religious overtones spooked Polydor, but were nevertheless abundant on “Icon”, with its images of self-mutilation, the stop-start Wire dynamics giving way to a more complex tumult.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Christine” (Kaleidoscope, 1980)
Following the departure of John McKay and Kenny Morris mid-tour in 1979, prospects for the Banshees seemed dim, but their defiant intransigence somehow produced the uncanny “Happy House”, aided by the expressionist guitar of John McGeoch. It was quickly bettered by “Christine”, McGeoch’s cascades of acoustic wonder providing the soundtrack to Siouxsie’s voyage into the kaleidoscope of the schizophrenic psyche, and the beginning of the band’s imperial phase.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Spellbound” (Juju, 1981)
Arguably the Banshees’ finest single, a furious soulstorm conjured by John McGeoch’s sublime 12-string guitar and Budgie’s booming drums. Though it failed to crack the Top 20 when released as a single in May 1981, thanks to its use in the finale of Stranger Things Season 4, it’s also now their most-streamed song.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Night Shift” (Juju, 1981)
Though its parent album Juju is in many ways the rock upon which the church of goth was founded, the tenebrous “Night Shift”, inspired by Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous trail through the red-light districts of late-’70s Yorkshire and Lancashire, is profoundly darker and more disturbing than anything that emerged from the Batcave.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Slowdive” (A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, 1982)
1982’s A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, a direct influence on the nascent Cocteau Twins, is shoegazing’s ground zero. But ironically the song that named one of that genre’s most languorous leading lights is the album’s most crazed, upbeat moment.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Melt!” (A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, 1982)
On …Dreamhouse, all the Banshees’ intimate, psychological horror exploded into a peerless, glittering neo-psychedelia, abetted by Mike Hedges’ production and strings recorded at Abbey Road. “Melt!” is its sumptuous pinnacle, like John Barry collaborating with Gustav Klimt.
THE CREATURES
“Miss The Girl” (Feast, 1983)
Conceived out of their growing romantic relationship, Siouxsie and Budgie first formed The Creatures in 1981 during a break in the recording of Juju. But their finest hour is Feast, an infatuated fever dream conjured up in Hawaii, combining exotica and JG Ballard. This eerie marimba lullaby, the album’s only single, reached No 21 in April 1983.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Tattoo” (“Dear Prudence” B-side, 1983)
The Banshees’ version of “Dear Prudence” became the band’s biggest British single, only kept off the No 1 spot by the combined forces of Culture Club and Tracey Ullman. But it’s B-side “Tattoo” that proved the stealth hit, its claustrophobic mood and insistent rhythm influencing the likes of Tricky, who covered the song on his Nearly God album in 1996.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Dazzle” (Hyæna, 1984)
The Bunnymen laid down the gauntlet with the swooning, orchestral Ocean Rain, but the Banshees rose to the challenge with “Dazzle”, the imperious opening track of their sixth LP, Hyæna. It was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, “Skating bullets on angel dust/In a dead sea of fluid mercury”.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Swimming Horses” (Hyæna, 1984)
Hinting at the surreal anthropological adventures that had begun on …Dreamhouse, this single was the Banshees’ first to be co-written with Robert Smith and features one of Budgie’s most astonishing rhythms.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Trust In Me” (Through The Looking Glass, 1987)
Covers album Through The Looking Glass felt like a band straining to get back in touch with the seedy, freaky, futuristic glamour of Iggy, Roxy, Bowie and Sparks that had sustained them as bored kids in early-’70s suburbia. However, the highlight was this sublime cover of Kaa the snake’s song from Disney’s Jungle Book.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Peek-A-Boo” (Peepshow, 1988)
The Banshees brilliantly reinvented themselves with 1988’s Peepshow, which refitted their slinky, transgressive soundworld to the era of Prince and Madonna, somehow coming out sounding both more pop and more transgressive than either.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Kiss Them For Me” (Superstition, 1991)
The Banshees repeated the comeback trick with “Kiss Them For Me”. With the help of producer Stephen Hague, it combined a 909 beat from Schoolly D with the spirit of Hollywood Babylon to create a track that felt both up-to-the-minute and timeless, presaging the transglobal avant-dance of Björk.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“The Double Life” (The Rapture, 1995)
The height of Britpop was not a congenial time to be a Banshee, and the group’s final album The Rapture was a lacklustre affair. But this eerie spoken-word track – looking back at centuries of “sin and aftermath” – proved to be a fitting swansong.
THE CREATURES
“2nd Floor” (Anima Animus, 1999)
The first Creatures LP to be conceived as a statement in itself rather than an interim side project, Anima Animus took the band’s early experiments in rhythm and voice to the electronic dancefloor – notably on the lead single, “2nd Floor”, which sounded like Underworld descending into the abyss.
SIOUXSIE
“Into a Swan” (Mantaray, 2007)
Siouxsie’s belated solo debut Mantaray felt like a victory lap, acknowledging her influence on acolytes from Curve to Björk, Suede to Goldfrapp. The lead single was typically commanding, channelling the spirit of T.Rex for a new millennium.
Siouxsie plays Wolverhampton Civic Hall, June 21; Tynemouth Priory And Castle, July 7; Latitude festival, July 23; Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow, July 25; Troxy, London, September 6 & 7
Bob Dylan covered Van Morrison's 1970 song "Into The Mystic" live last week.
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Dylan, who is currently in Europe on his Rough And Rowdy Ways World Tour, performed the Moondance track on Thursday, June 15 at Plaza de Toros in Ali...
Bob Dylan covered Van Morrison‘s 1970 song “Into The Mystic” live last week.
Dylan, who is currently in Europe on his Rough And Rowdy Ways World Tour, performed the Moondance track on Thursday, June 15 at Plaza de Toros in Alicante, Spain.
Dylan has previously included a number of covers into his setlists for the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour – including the Grateful Dead‘s “Brokedown Palace”, “Friend Of The Devil’ and “Truckin'”, Jerry Lee Lewis‘s “I Can’t Seem To Say Goodbye” and The Crickets‘ “Not Fade Away”.
Although this is the first time he’s covered Van Morrison on this current tour, Dylan has form in this department. As well as solo renditions of “Tupelo Honey” in 1984 and “Carrying A Torch” in 2002, Dylan and Van performed “Crazy Love”, “Foreign Window”, “One Irish Rover” and “And It Stoned Me” on the Philopappos (The Hill Of The Muses), Athens, broadcast in the programme Arena: One Irish Rover Van Morrison in Performance.
Speaking to Uncut, Van recalled, “I have a really good memory of the time Bob and I were out near the Acropolis in Athens . It was being filmed for Arena, in June 1989 and Bob happened to be touring Greece at that time. So it was just a very spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment thing for us to get together. I’d been telling the filmmakers about having been to Greece before and going to the Hill Of The Muses, so I’d suggested that Bob and I go up and do something. It was all very easy-going. Bob was so great to be around, very relaxed and amenable. He’s always been that way with me. We had a great time playing up there.”
A street-fighting man who cheerfully scaled cocaine mountains with Sly Stone, and once sought by George Harrison for Apple Records, David Axelrod had barely worked for a decade when, in the mid-’90s, his name began circulating among crate-digging fans. Indeed, just a few years earlier, the former ...
A street-fighting man who cheerfully scaled cocaine mountains with Sly Stone, and once sought by George Harrison for Apple Records, David Axelrod had barely worked for a decade when, in the mid-’90s, his name began circulating among crate-digging fans. Indeed, just a few years earlier, the former Capitol Records A&R and staff producer – who’d started his career in the late ’50s producing jazz records for the likes of Harold Land and Charles Mingus associate Buddy Collette – had been verging on homelessness.
In 1993, however, De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate twice featured a prominent piano from his Lou Rawls production “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, while three years later DJ Shadow’s “Midnight In A Perfect World” lifted from Axelrod’s “The Human Abstract”. Shadow even lured him out of retirement to remix UNKLE and Thom Yorke’s “Rabbit In Your Headlights” in 1998, before Mo’ Wax released an eponymous album of revised, unreleased tracks in 2001.
That same year, Dr Dre’s ubiquitous blockbuster “The Next Episode” hijacked the distinctive, dramatic opening of 1967’s “The Edge”, produced by Axelrod for actor David McCallum. When he died in 2017, Questlove declared, “He WAS hip-hop.”
Axelrod’s appeal is best encapsulated by his first two solo albums, 1968’s Song Of Innocence and 1969’s Songs Of Experience. That these suites were inspired by William Blake’s poetry speaks to their grand ambitions: his flamboyant, dynamic arrangements, all brass, strings and perfectly mic’d drums, with cavernous rhythms ideally suited to the breakbeat generation, were furnished with a luxury suggesting an unassailable urge to dwarf Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound. Such elements remain central to 1974’s Heavy Axe, but it’s telling that it’s provided less fertile ground for sample junkies, and that’s arguably not only because its likeminded production is credited to his friend Cannonball Adderley, himself a frequent beneficiary of Axelrod’s techniques.
Axelrod instead arranges and conducts here, as well as writing the four best tracks. The highlight is “Mucho Chupar”, whose percussive, soulful funk, enhanced by Minnie Riperton-style squeals and Donna Summer moans, hurtles towards a colossal climax, while “Everything Counts” lithely reinterprets Song Of Innocence’s revered “Holy Thursday”. Elsewhere, however, his selection of material is less gripping. Adderley’s own “Get Up Off Your Hands” offers an entertainingly overblown Las Vegas opener, but Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing” is reduced to incidental music for a Quincy episode, and Stephanie Spruill seems hellbent on caricaturing Millie Jackson’s worst excesses on a cabaret “You’re So Vain”. Faithful fans will celebrate this return to vinyl then, but even they will concede that ‘The Ax’ was capable of far heavier, more cutting-edge work.
The self-titled record from singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brigid Mae Power landed in 2016 with the grace and tremulous beauty of a butterfly, but carried with it the uncertain air of a recent storm. An understated yet resonant, folk-edged set, it was built from guitar, piano, strings, ...
The self-titled record from singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brigid Mae Power landed in 2016 with the grace and tremulous beauty of a butterfly, but carried with it the uncertain air of a recent storm. An understated yet resonant, folk-edged set, it was built from guitar, piano, strings, a prominent pump organ and Power’s sweet, pure voice, all of which lent her songs of troubled relationships and maternal responsibilities an intense expression. Cultish acclaim followed – along with a degree of voyeuristic interest in her past, which she later laid bare in a distressing blog post.
Subsequent recordings have included further articulations of her emotional states and agency (or perceived lack of it), borrowing from the classicism of Joni and Neil, Tim Buckley’s vocal style and dreamy, pastoral psychedelia. Folk traditionals have been a feature and in 2021 a covers EP paid homage to Patsy Cline and Dylan, among others. Now, shifting confidently between idioms and having made a kind of peace with her identity, Power looks poised to deliver to a wider audience.
There’s always been a hazy and reflective feel to her songs, but despite the title, her fourth is Power’s most resolute set yet. Though tidal drifting is still a feature and she’s again drawing on both traditional and modern song forms, suggesting kindred spirits from Vashti Bunyan and Judy Collins to Laura Veirs, there’s a new expansiveness in play. It’s as if she’s opened her chest to breathe deeper, all the better to vent emotions – disappointment, longing, quiet anger – but relate different stories, too. Production (shared with Peter Broderick, who’s also prominent on the playing front) is warm and in-the-room intimate.
Despite having eight new songs ready, Power has said she felt “very unprepared” in the run-up to Dream From The Deep Well, even writing some lyrics the night before recording. The process itself, though, sparked enough new ideas to complete the set, which was recorded mostly live to tape. Three of the tracks are from home recordings, while introducing accordion, harmonica and brass helped Power give the album what she described to Uncut as “a different colour scheme”. No loud primaries, of course, but some definite tonal brightening.
Belonging – ancestral, national, geographic – has long been a conflicted notion for Power, but here it’s more a source of inspiration. She opens the set with a slightly eerie interpretation of “I Know Who Is Sick”, an Irish traditional popularised in a much lustier form by The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, and closes with the haunting “Down By The Glenside”, an Irish Republican song from the ’20s chosen for personal rather than political reasons.
Unsurprisingly, the fresh breeze blows stronger through the originals: “Counting Down” nods unmistakably to “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” but adopts an irresistible, country-pop swing that recalls a leaner Julia Jacklin. The song is a tender ode to maternal longing and domestic routine that also addresses Power’s occupational dilemma: “I’m not sure this is what it’s cracked out to be/I’m meeting new friends that always have to leave/I’m considering a new career/But all I can do is play music by ear”. “Maybe It’s Just Lightning” is both personal and universal, inspired by the singer’s early years as a single parent and, more recently, time spent with a mother and daughter from Ukraine. Set to a deceptively light, see-saw rhythm, it addresses the vastly underestimated maternal burden of (child)care and responsibility: “Going through the unimaginable/Doubted, judged and blamed/But still devoting her time to keeping you safe”.
The woozy sea shanty that is “Some Life You’ve Known”, with pedal-steel, accordion and Mellotron, reflects on a sad parting and is an album highlight. Another is “The Waterford Song”, which concerns Power’s relationship with her father’s Irish home and is driven by a strong psych-folk undertow over which her voice rises in a dulcet, wordless incantation. The album’s other cover is of Tim Buckley’s guitar-and-vibes evergreen “I Must Have Been Blind”, a hushed, spell-binding version on piano, violin and synth, Power’s voice suggesting a sweeter Judee Sill.
The title track lands late as the singer’s rebuke to those whose actions don’t square with their advocation of “peace and love”. That “deep well” is an enduring religious metaphor for redemption but rather than drink, Power encourages them to dream from it, thereby realising the potential of the human spirit in this world. Tradition, yes – but 21st-century realism, too.
When Mark Linkous took his own life in 2010, he was in the midst of recording a fifth Sparklehorse album. Now, with the painstaking work of Linkous's brother and sister-in-law, that album has been completed.
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Linkous had alread...
When Mark Linkous took his own life in 2010, he was in the midst of recording a fifth Sparklehorse album. Now, with the painstaking work of Linkous’s brother and sister-in-law, that album has been completed.
Linkous had already provided Bird Machine with a title and tracklisting; a number of the songs were close to completion, while others required the addition of “subtle instrumentation and accompanying vocals”.
“It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” says Matt Linkous. “It’s difficult making a choice about someone else’s art, even if you’ve known them all your life and worked with them, even if they were your brother and best friend. We had long conversations about not wanting to take this into a different direction. We wanted to bring out what was there.”
Bird Machine will be released by Anti- on September 8, and is available to pre-order here. You can watch a video for the song “Evening Star Supercharger” below, featuring Linkous’s art and handwritten lyrics:
Paul McCartney has revealed that artificial intelligence has enabled a "final" Beatles song.
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He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning [June 13] that the technology had been used to "extricate" John Lennon's voice fro...
Paul McCartney has revealed that artificial intelligence has enabled a “final” Beatles song.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning [June 13] that the technology had been used to “extricate” John Lennon‘s voice from an old demo so he could complete the song.
“We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he explained, reports BBC News.
During work on Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, the technology was used to isolate Beatles’ voices to create “clean” audio.
“He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” McCartney told Radio 4’s Martha Kearney. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine. ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’. So when we came to to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”
The track in question is possibly “Now And Then“, an unfinished song by Lennon, recorded in 1978 as a demo, which was considered for inclusion on The Beatles Anthology, following “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love“.
We’re delighted to co-host the streaming premier of Naomi Yang’s directorial debut, Never Be A Punchbag For Nobody.
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Best known for her work with Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, for the last 10 years or so, Yang has been bus...
We’re delighted to co-host the streaming premier of Naomi Yang’s directorial debut, Never Be A Punchbag For Nobody.
Best known for her work with Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, for the last 10 years or so, Yang has been busy developing another strand to her career – directing promo videos for artists including Julia Holter, Steve Gunn and Meg Baird. Now she’s made the leap into full-length features with this documentary about forgotten histories in her Boston hometown.
In Never Be A Punchbag For Nobody, an East Boston boxing gym becomes a symbol of the resilience of people and places facing erasure from gentrification. Equally affecting are Yang’s reflections on the violence in her family growing up and the lessons she learns in that humble gym about claiming space and punching back.
The premier takes place this Friday – June 16 – at 19:00 GMT. Tickets cost £11.93 (or $15) for a 48 period. Click on Pre-Order in the top right hand of the screen below to find out more.
The comedian Stewart Lee has recorded an exclusive online Q&A with Yang, which will be available as a bonus along with the film.
Meanwhile, Yang’s soundtrack to the film is also available to digitally from Bandcamp. You can also hear “Boxing And The City“, from the soundtrack, on Now Playing – the free CD available with this month’s issue of Uncut.
As convivial the atmosphere, and starry the guestlist – that was Jimmy Page, but was that Patti Smith, or Polly Harvey’s mum? – and incredible the music, the defining moment from Bob Dylan’s four night stand at London Palladium in October last year was ultimately a visual one. After playing...
As convivial the atmosphere, and starry the guestlist – that was Jimmy Page, but was that Patti Smith, or Polly Harvey’s mum? – and incredible the music, the defining moment from Bob Dylan’s four night stand at London Palladium in October last year was ultimately a visual one. After playing several songs at the piano, Dylan – now 81 – stepped away from the instrument and into the centre of the stage, and jauntily placed a hand on his hip to receive some of his acclaim. Yes, he seemed to be saying, this is it: as Bob Dylan as it gets.
In this magazine we’re striking a pose of a similar nature. This is our first 172-page Definitive edition, and in it we review each of Dylan’s albums from the eponymous debut to the newly-released Shadow Kingdom, and reprise his most interesting encounters with the British press. We’ve also included a special eight-page fold-out chronology, taking a sideways look at the six ages of Dylan.
It should go without saying that on these pages we honour Dylan’s many indispensable past recordings, his influence on 20th Century culture and thought. But we’re also celebrating the beguiling work in his present, where he has not been idle. Since we last published something like this magazine in 2016 there has been a new, mildly demented Dylan film, a book, and five new volumes of the Bootleg series, in which we’re invited to walk with Dylan not only down the roads he took, but examine alongside him a map showing many of the routes he considered – and enter with him an entire alternative landscape of choice and song.
In that time we have also enjoyed Triplicate, the third instalment of Dylan’s exploration of the Great American Songbook. Then in early 2020, there arrived the event that we had been hoping for: Rough And Rowdy Ways, a double studio album of new Dylan compositions in which everything – ambition, music, and lyrics seemed to be stretching out for the horizon, rolling in rhythm and blues playing that was learned, gutsy and entertaining as the man himself.
At the Palladium and on the Rough And Rowdy tour, Dylan’s and his band seemed to have reached a point where it magnificently all came together: the continuity of the playing joining the music of his present and his past with the currents of older American song. The keyboard playing touched on blues and boogie-woogie. The guitar playing was as fiery as any on a Sun Session. The reinvention and re-arrangement of his own 1960s classics (“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” for example) uncovering new ways of hearing them.
As Dylan placed his hand on hip and the applause mounted in an evening of wry, entertaining and self-referencing music, you could possibly delude yourself that this was Dylan in plain sight, finally revealing his masterplan. As we write, though, and he releases an album of “early songs”, re-interpreted in his riverboat deluxe style, and we attempt to unravel the details of who is playing on the record, never mind why – to pick the lock of the Shadow Kingdom in fact – it’s clear he’s evaded capture once again.
Enjoy the magazine. You can get one here get one here.
Joni Mitchell played her first headline concert in over 20 years on Saturday (June 10).
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Following her surprise set last July at the Newport Folk Festival, she made her official return to the stage as part of Brandi Carlile's E...
Joni Mitchell played her first headline concert in over 20 years on Saturday (June 10).
Following her surprise set last July at the Newport Folk Festival, she made her official return to the stage as part of Brandi Carlile’s Echoes Through The Canyon festival at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state.
According to The Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, Mitchell played for three hours, performing 24 songs, accompanied by Carlile – who acted as MC – and a group of collaborators and guests including Annie Lennox, Blake Mills, Lucius, Sarah McLachlan, Marcus Mumford and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith.
You can watch footage from the concert below.
Joni Mitchell’s set list for the Gorge Amphitheatre:
‘Big Yellow Taxi’
‘Night Ride Home’
‘Raised On Robbery’
‘Come In From The Cold’
‘Amelia’
‘Carey’
‘Sex Kills’
‘Summertime’ (George Gershwin cover)
‘Ladies Of The Canyon’
‘Help Me’
‘Where There’s A Will There’s A Way’
‘Love Potion No. 9’ (The Clovers cover)
‘A Case Of You’
‘A Strange Boy’
‘Cactus Tree’
‘California’
‘Blue’
‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love’ (Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers cover)
‘Shine’
‘Both Sides Now’
‘The Circle Game’
‘Just Like This Train’
‘If’
‘Young At Heart’ (Frank Sinatra cover)
A vivid evocation of a time before air-con, Tinder and low-traffic neighbourhoods, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s sixth single was a huge hit in summer 1966 – and remains a go-to song every time the thermometer nudges into the eighties. It was conceived in the heart of Greenwich Village, where the band...
A vivid evocation of a time before air-con, Tinder and low-traffic neighbourhoods, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s sixth single was a huge hit in summer 1966 – and remains a go-to song every time the thermometer nudges into the eighties. It was conceived in the heart of Greenwich Village, where the band’s frontman John Sebastian and his songwriting brother Mark were born into a musical family (father John was a harmonica virtuoso and mother Jane worked at Carnegie Hall).
While John Jr was swept up in the Village folk revival of the early ’60s, running with the likes of Tim Hardin and Cass Elliot before forming The Lovin’ Spoonful in late 1964, his underage brother was forced to watch the action longingly from a 15th-floor window. However, after bashing out two albums in six months, it was to Mark that John turned when pulling together songs for the band’s third LP proper, Hums Of The Lovin’ Spoonful. Mark’s somewhat jejune ballad became the chorus of a colossal Frankenstein’s monster of a tune, with verses by John, a middle-eight by bassist Steve Boone, spiky guitar from the mercurial Zal Yanovsky, an unforgettable electric piano riff, a cacophony of car horns and a thunderous drum sound achieved by mic’ing up a stairwell.
“We were scattershot and we were trying anything that made sense,” recalls John. “We wanted to do a tune by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Minstrel Of The Appalachians, just as much as we wanted to do a Ronnie Bennett and Phil Spector tune, and all of those elements did end up in ‘Summer In The City’.”
Yet while the single’s release put The Lovin’ Spoonful on top of the world, the seeds of the band’s demise had already been sown when Boone and Yanovsky were busted for marijuana possession in San Francisco a few months earlier. Yanovsky, a Canadian citizen, was threatened with deportation; under pressure to keep the band together, they named their dealer. When this incident was later seized upon (and distorted) by Rolling Stone, the hippies turned against The Lovin’ Spoonful and the game was up.
“It was gruesome,” admits John, but the long afterlife of “Summer In The City” has more than compensated. “Those ice cream commercials, they just keep coming!”
SAM RICHARDS
Written by: John Sebastian, Mark Sebastian, Steve Boone
Personnel includes: John Sebastian (vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboards); Zal Yanovsky (electric guitar, backing vocals), Steve Boone (bass, keyboards), Joe Butler (drums, backing vocals), Artie Schroeck (electric piano)
Produced by: Erik Jacobsen, Roy Halee (engineer)
Recorded at: Columbia Studios, New York City
Released: July 4, 1966
MARK SEBASTIAN, co-writer: My parents had an apartment on Washington Square West. We were 15 stories up and my window looked directly out onto the Empire State Building, almost nose-to-nose. But when the summer came, it was horrific! You’d pray that a breeze might blow from one window to another. I’ve had a lifelong sensitivity to heat ever since.
JOHN SEBASTIAN, vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboards, co-writer: The really stinking hot weather, it’d get ya! [There was no air-con, so] you went to the movies.
MARK: On Sundays there was folk music in the square. There were girls that came down from the outer boroughs with big bouffants and I’d think, ‘Wow, if I could talk to her…’ When the Spoonful happened, it was very exciting. If we walked round the Village with Zally, teenage kids would come up and ask for autographs. I went with them to the Ed Sullivan Theater when they did “Do You Belive In Magic” and we had girls chasing us on the street like in A Hard Day’s Night.
JOHN: “Summer In The City” didn’t start with me. My brother Mark had the idea for the song and a couple of elements: [sings] “It’s gonna get hot/The shadows of the buildings will be the only shady spot/But at night it’s a different world…” And I went, “Whoa, hold on! What are those chords?”
MARK: I began writing my own private little songs at 13, 14. John would come over from his loft on 11th Street to have a home-cooked dinner and he’d listen to what I’d just done. After the Daydream album [released in February 1966], he came over one time and said, “What was that song you had about summer in the city?” He needed grist for the mill because he’d had to write two albums in quick succession. I had a lot of the song, but not the verses. He did a fantastic thing of livening it up by creating those vital, energetic verses.
JOHN: “But at night it’s a different world” was a marvellous release, so we needed to create tension in the beginning. For some reason, I made an association with [Mussorgsky’s] “Night On Bald Mountain”, which scared the hell out of me when I saw it in Fantasia when I was about five. I thought I could create something that’s tense like that and then it would open up into my brother’s chorus. But we still needed what The Beatles used to call a middle-eight. There had been a figure that Steve Boone had been playing in the studio for weeks as we had been developing that album.
STEVE BOONE, Bass, keyboards, co-writer: I think the band was gettin’ sick of hearing me play it! When John said, “I think that would work as a terrific middle section”, I wasn’t gonna argue with him even if that meant I had to give it up as a song in its own right. But I’m so glad I didn’t make a fuss because it fits perfectly in the song. I own a portion of the publishing, so those 12 notes really helped me out quite a bit over the years.
ERIK JACOBSEN, producer: I immediately thought it was a great song and was excited to record it.
JOHN: The way that “Summer In The City” evolved was the beginning of designing [songs] in the studio, which rarely happened in those days.
ERIK: We did what we wanted from the get-go, because we didn’t have the record company or anybody else telling us what to do. I put up the money for “Do You Believe In Magic” because we were turned down by every major label. So we made up the arrangements, the guys and I, and we recorded them. We were not malleable artists. It was like, ‘This is what we’re doing and if you don’t like it, fuck you!’
JOHN: Erik Jacobsen is one of the most under-appreciated producers walking the planet. He was this wonderful mediator for all of these suggestions that would come through on almost every tune. Because we really didn’t want to give up and go, “OK, let’s call Hal Blaine!”
MARK: Just before that era, the studios were very sterile and the engineers were like scientists in white coats. But Erik was totally cool. Longhairs took it over.
JOHN: One of our genius arranger pals, Artie Schroeck, was at the session. I’m not a pianist, and he knew it. He sat quietly through the first 20 takes before he finally said, “Sebastian, go back to the guitar – let me play the damn electric piano!” And he did it so great.
STEVE: I came into the studio and sitting behind the Wurlitzer was a guy I didn’t know. But once I heard that part – dun, dun, du-dun, dun – I went into hyperdrive, because it was too frickin’ good to believe! He nailed it, and it really inspired me on my bass part.
MARK: Some of the words I had in the original were twisted around and used in a different form, but “Wheezing like a bus stop” was John’s. The 5th Avenue buses would pull up and make all these different sounds, I don’t know if it was the hydraulics or what.
JOHN: We began to hanker for a couple of city sounds. We came in for a separate session where we were greeted by a wonderful soundman from radio with trunks of sound-effects records. We said, “We want to create a traffic jam,” and he says, “Well, I’ve got one on 48th Street” – and of course that’s where the band got all of our instruments from, at Manny’s Music. So we said, “Yeah, that’s the one.” Then the trick was how to get this steamhammer. He kept playing different ones until we got this really loud, flatulent steamhammer noise, so that was the one that went on the record.
ERIK: In those days, it was only three- or four-track. To get those things on right, you had to roll your tape and he would try to start the acetate of sound effects on his turntable and get it to sync in.
JOHN: Zal Yanovsky began his traditional complaint about how the drums weren’t big enough. He said, “I want the drums to sound like garbage cans being thrown down a steel staircase.” Our engineer Roy Halee put a microphone up on the eighth floor of the metal stairwell and sent the snare drum out of the big theatre speakers down on the ground. Obviously that gave us enormous amounts of echo. In two years, everybody had cavernous echo on their snare drum! In fact, Roy Halee used the same staircase for “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.
ERIK: Kudos to Roy Halee, he’s the greatest engineer I ever worked with.
MARK: Originally the song had a big, apocalyptic crash at the end. I’m glad they took it out, ’cos it was kinda ridiculous.
ERIK: They were gonna kick the Fender Reverb to create a loud bang. I said, “John, you’re gonna fuck up this record!” So I made a copy of the last verse and chorus and spliced that in there instead, to make an instrumental fade. That saved the record, really.
MARK: I went in for the overdubs and mixing. John really gifted me with certain rights. He let me decide on the background vocal harmony – Joe Butler [drummer and backing vocalist] changed what he was singing per my suggestion, which really chuffed me. Just to sit there and hear my song, much changed, become this thing… It was crazy how it sounded. It was gigantic.
JOHN: Did I know straight away it would be a hit? Yep. No false modesty there!
MARK: That summer I was in Italy because my mom was doing press for the Spoleto Festival Of Two Worlds. I rented a radio and was listening to Radio Free Europe and Radio Caroline every day and finally “Summer In The City” came on and it sounded so good.
STEVE: “Summer In The City” really changed our image because, prior to that, people were like, “Are you guys ever gonna make a real rock song? What’s with all this lightweight stuff about daydreams?” But when “Summer In The City” got on the radio, those attitudes changed overnight. It was the deal-maker for us, it completed our circle. It cemented our place as a genuine rock band.
MARK: I had no sense it would be a hit – their only No 1! I like to rub that in, as a younger brother. It was over so quickly after that.
STEVE: I thought releasing “Rain On The Roof” as the follow-up to “Summer In The City” might have been a mistake. I still love “Rain On The Roof”, it’s one of the prettiest songs John ever wrote, but it couldn’t compete as a hard-rocking song, so I felt we were gonna have to climb that hill all over again.
JOHN: We managed to soldier on for another year or so, but the bust eventually caught up with Zal and Steve. It was a terrible thing because the police had the power to end the band, by sending Zal back to Canada and giving Steve a nice stiff sentence. Or, you could show us where the pot came from… And by the way, we’re talking about an ounce of marijuana which you can buy for under $300 in California at any time now. All of those press guys were so anxious to side [against] us because we’d just gotten a guy busted, but nobody was interested in finding out how we were pressured into that. Zal Yanovsky was not only a genius guitar player, but he’d become a culture hero – the funny-looking guy with holes in his jeans five years before anyone else. And then the next day, he’s a fink. I mean, he feared for his life. That’s why I’ve never tried to do The Lovin’ Spoonful songbook movie – it was great fun but it does not have a happy ending.
STEVE: The air began slowly seeping out of our balloon. I think Zally really felt bad, it put him into a tailspin. John did come to me some time after that and said, “You gotta help me more with songwriting, I can’t carry the whole load.” But I couldn’t get motivated for songwriting, I was totally bummed out with what had happened in San Francisco.
MARK: I worked around The Beach Boys and they’ve had a lot of heartbreak and dysfunction but somehow, as a franchise, they managed to keep going. But my brother has a great artistic vision, which is: if it’s not happening, don’t do it.
STEVE: “Summer In The City” doesn’t have a shelf life. It seems to fit every era, sound-wise. It’s like “White Christmas” – it’ll still be played every year after we’re gone.
JOHN: It feels delicious [to hear the song played every summer]. It means a certain 77-year-old guy doesn’t have to be quite as urgent to take gigs where people hold up iPhones instead of listen…
MARK: I’m so grateful for it. I’m stunned that young people know the song. Quincy Jones did a fantastic version with a long instrumental at the beginning, and many rap artists [have sampled it]. I won an R&B & Hip-Hop Billboard Award in 2001 from a sample. Me winning a rap award is pretty hilarious!
STEVE: If nothing else is left as an example of what me and the other three guys created, then I’m good with that.
Neil Young has announced details of his first tour since 2019.
ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of the latest UNCUT
He broke the news during a Zoom to subscribers of Neil Young Archives on Wednesday [June 7], with a formal announcement following on Friday [June 9].
During the...
Neil Young has announced details of his first tour since 2019.
He broke the news during a Zoom to subscribers of Neil Young Archives on Wednesday [June 7], with a formal announcement following on Friday [June 9].
During the Zoom, Young reveals that the upcoming solo acoustic shows will feature songs that he’s never performed live before.
“I don’t want to come back and do the same songs again,” Rolling Stones reported Young as saying. “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.”
Young specifically mentioned the Pearl Jam collaboration “Song X”, Sleeps With Angels’ “Prime Of Life” and Trans outtake “If You Got Love”.
The tour dates are:
Saturday, July 1 – Los Angeles, CA – John Anson Ford
Sunday, July 2 – Los Angeles, CA – John Anson Ford
Tuesday, July 4 – Los Angeles, CA – John Anson Ford
Wednesday, July 5 – Los Angeles, CA – John Anson Ford
Friday, July 7 – Santa Barbara, CA – Santa Barbara Bowl
Saturday July 8 – Paso Robles, CA – Vina Robles Amphitheatre
Tuesday, July 11 – San Diego, CA – The Shell
Thursday July 13 – Los Angeles, CA – The Greek Theatre
Saturday, July 15 – Berkeley, CA – The Greek
Monday, July 17 – Bend, OR – Hayden Homes Amphitheater
Tuesday July 18 – Ridgefield, WA – RV Inn Style Resorts Amphitheater
Thursday July 20 – Auburn, WA – White River Amphitheatre
Sunday July 23 – Napa, CA – Oxbow RiverStage
