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Introducing…The History Of Rock

John Robinson
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Introducing…The History Of Rock

About 10 years ago, we at Uncut started a collaboration with our friends at NME to release a series of magazines which would revisit the archives of New Musical Express and Melody Maker and present an unrivalled archive trip through rock’s golden years.

Times have changed, but the quality of the friendship (and the publications) remain very much the same, so we’ve agreed to re-issue the series, in a limited number, for anyone who missed them the first time around.

The first couple of these issues are available from our shop now. In 1965, you’ll find The Beatles on top of the world, but still up for a chat. There’s a visit to John Coltrane’s hotel room for a rare interview and to observe a pre-festival warm-up. There are hit singles reviewed by hit artists – and the Tamla crew arrive in the UK. More? How about the Byrds, Marianne Faithfull, The Kinks and The Walker Brothers!

In 1966 our cover star Bob Dylan’s back in the UK again, on a mission to electrify and bamboozle. We retreat into the studio with The Beatles, meet Eric Clapton’s new band Cream, and watch the Who in action: “It looked like Attila The Hun had ridden through…” The Stones, The Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder and Ravi Shankar all get a look in, too.

You can get into the swing of it all here and here.

Stereolab: “We’re here to create the world that we desire”

Tom Pinnock
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Stereolab: “We’re here to create the world that we desire”

Taken from Uncut’s January 2020 issue

In an old church by the Thames, the “groop” put together an 18-minute track with a message – here they take Uncut through the creation of “Jenny Ondioline”. “This song is about shifting the perception…”

The centrepiece of Stereolab’s second album, 1993’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, “Jenny Ondioline” has come in many forms: the 18-minute LP version, the snappy single version, and somewhere between those extremes on stage. In any variation, though, there are motorik rhythms, restless guitars, loping bass, droning organs, layered vocals and radical, politically charged lyrics.

“We played this song just last night,” says Lætitia Sadier on the phone from her hotel in Mexico City, where Stereolab are finishing up a lengthy American tour. “It went down very well. We don’t always perform it, and for a while it was not ready to be played, but now we’ve re-adapted it and it feels more friendly.”2019 has seen the group reform for stellar live dates, nominally in support of deluxe remastered reissues of seven of their finest albums, including 1996’s classic Emperor Tomato Ketchup and 1993’s noisier, abrasive Transient….

“‘Jenny Ondioline’ encapsulated everything about Stereolab at that time,” says their longtime manager Martin Pike. “I still think it’s an amazing track.”

“[New York avant-punk guitarist] Rhys Chatham was very influential on me at the beginning of Stereolab,” explains guitarist Tim Gane, “the simplicity of it. I didn’t really understand tunings or just-intonation, but ‘Jenny Ondioline’ was the result of seeing what would happen if you tried to adopt those avant-garde principles for pop music. I just wanted to see what would happen.”

While “French Disco”, originally on the B-side of the “Jenny Ondioline” EP, is perhaps Stereolab’s most widely known song, the title track – named after an early French synthesiser – remains the connoisseur’s choice; strident and positive, it reshapes the politics and musical styles of the past into something fluid, driving and timeless. Sadier, in particular, is deeply connected to the complex lyrics, even if online commentators have sometimes misinterpreted her message.

“I found some versions online which were absolutely horrifying,” she says. “People have got it really wrong. They talk about ‘nation’ in a way that could make me sound like I’m a complete fascist or something! ‘I don’t care if the fascists have to win/I don’t care democracy’s being fucked/I don’t care socialism is full of sin…’ It’s quite a statement to make, right, which can be interpreted in a completely wrong way. But this song is about shifting the perception, saying that we are not the victims, but that we are the creators – we’re not here to cry over our desolate fate, we’re here to create the world that we desire. If you look at things from that point of view, then it’s optimistic.” TOM PINNOCK

SEAN O’HAGAN: Tim and Lætitia lived around Brixton or Camberwell at the time, in various short-stay shared flats. I’d pop over and the little four-track would come out in the bedroom, and I’d hear these very basic demonstrations of new songs.

LÆTITIA SADIER: The demos Tim would give me were little embryos of songs which would then be developed in the studio. “Jenny Ondioline” ends up being quite a droney song, but still there was a chord structure with recurring changes and the melody.

TIM GANE: There aren’t many chords in Stereolab songs, especially at the beginning, which is why Andy [Ramsay, drums] used to call me Captain Easychord! There were two demos for “Jenny…”, part one and part two. But they were based around the same chord. It was the first and only time I ever changed the tuning on the guitar. I just changed it to what I thought was an interesting thing and then just moved my fingers up and down and that was the song. I’m always attracted to things where you don’t have to have a lot of technical ability to sound good – it also feeds back to the drones we’d been using on keyboards since the first record. Lætitia would have put the words and vocals on there soon after I’d demoed it.

SADIER: I was reading a book of paintings by George Grosz at the time. He was German and he painted a lot between the two world wars. Like a lot of artists he was utterly disgusted with what was going on, with the social climate and the social deprivation that was going on around him, and that he was maybe a part of as well. He depicted the Weimar era the best, how depraved men were, and the Nazis and prostitution and misery and people doing all sorts of things to have a bit of bread. In the book they interviewed someone at the time, or maybe it was even Grosz himself, who said that they didn’t care if all this went on, you know, the rise of fascism, and socialism going down the drain. For him what was really important was to remain creative, and to use whatever’s going on around you in the most creative ways. I found that take fascinating.

GANE: This was back in the days when we did rehearse songs a bit – one week after we wrote this, we played it on a French radio show, Black Sessions, presented by this guy Bernard Lenoir. It was quite a big deal back then. He was a big fan, Sebadoh were there in the audience I remember, and we played this 10-minute track and it totally bombed. We should have just played three or four short songs and it would have been hunky dory. When we came to record it a little bit later we just expanded it [even more] and did all these variations. It was our first time at Blackwing Studios.

O’HAGAN: It was a church that was bombed during the Second World War, but one half of the church was never restored, and that became a secret garden with a wall around it, which was pretty amazing. It had two rooms, the big stone one, and the smaller, drier room, which people called the mix room. Back in the ’80s there was this whole thing of having stone drum rooms, for that clattering sound, but this was of course the ’90s when stone rooms were not quite as popular. So everybody actually played in the dry room!

SADIER: I loved going to Blackwing every day; it was our second home for so many weeks. We were either on the road or we were at Blackwing, that’s what I remember from that time. It was like going to work, except we were making the records that we loved making. I remember practising my pool skills there, too!

GANE: We had six weeks there, and that was to record and mix everything on the Transient Random-Noise Bursts… album, and B-sides and ancillary tracks that came out around that time. Transient… definitely has a singular sound and a singular approach, all done in the same place with the same engineer. That does give it a completeness, whereas some of the other albums are a bit all over the shop because they were done in different locations with different people.

MARTIN PIKE: I’d never been into a proper studio for any length of time, so it was all new to me. The studio was quite close to where Tim and Lætitia used to live, so it was easy for them to nip in and out. But the nature of the band in the studio has always been revolving – not everyone’s needed to be there all the time.

SADIER: Around eight or nine each night, cabin fever would set in, and I would cycle around the area. It was like a Jack The Ripper area – you still had real fog in London at that time – and sometimes I would have imaginary adventures around then. It’s not far from the Thames and close to what now is the Tate Modern, but at the time it was just a dark building. I remember discovering this building and being absolutely thrilled by it. All that stretch along the river was in the dark, unexplored.

GANE: In those days we would have recorded guitar, drums and bass together first. Sean might have played the keyboards then, too. I don’t think vocals were done live.

SADIER: I remember it being a bit like a conveyor belt – after the drums, bass, guitars and keyboards were down, then and only then Mary [Hansen, vocals and guitar] and I would start our vocals. It was always quite obvious how to arrange the voices – there was a lead vocal that would carry most of the lyrics which I would sing, and there were some echoing parts which were Mary’s parts. Mary and I would sit down, work it out together and see what would sound best.

O’HAGAN: In those days the organ parts were about not playing the third note in a chord – you’ve got the first, the third and the fifth [in a standard chord], and it was all about leaving out the third. It’s a German chord, it’s got a bit of attitude but it doesn’t have the definition that you’d have with a third in it. When you do that you create overtones, and when you have lots of different instruments playing those two notes you kick off all these other overtones which come out in the room, in the mix. You start hearing things that aren’t actually there, it’s a psychoacoustic thing. The keyboards would have all been amped and all been overdriven. We mainly used a Farfisa single manual and an orange Vox Jaguar then.

GANE: We didn’t record the whole 18-minute thing in one go, we did them in different spots; so we would do five minutes and get that right, and then go on to another version of it. We knew part one would come before part two, but we didn’t know how they would join together. There was lots of noise, throwing things down, putting things backwards, stuff we taped off an audio test record, they were all added on randomly. The speech wasn’t even sampled, we just put the record on and played it over the song.

O’HAGAN: I might have played guitar on the noisiest section, too. There was a little hippie thing to that song. The tape edits were close to that Cluster or Popol Vuh thing, and then the organ at the end would have been going through the Rogue Moog and maybe through an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man box as well. That was a bit of a hippie thing – now it’s not, but back then it would [have seemed that way].

GANE: Then the final composition was done at mastering. The long version is really six or seven separate parts that we edited together. It’s interesting to hear it separated again [on the reissue]; it gives you a different perspective. We always wanted to do a side-long track. We tried to do it again on [1994’s] Mars Audiac Quintet, but it sounded too much like “Jenny Ondioline” but not as good. We didn’t do it on Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but we did it again on [1997’s] Dots & Loops and [1999’s] Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night. I suppose it goes back to my youth, and those Can records where you’ve got some poppy songs on Side One and then a really long track on Side Two. I loved that, it seemed exciting.

O’HAGAN: A lot of the mixing would have been done with five or six people mixing together – somebody would be on all the keyboards, someone would be on the drums, etc, so you’d have to group everything, and use things like pencils so you could fade four tracks at once. There would have been edits too, and it might well have been the 24-track that was cut, which is pretty dangerous to do.

GANE: We got the most bizarre drum sound… I’d like to say it was intentional, but we’d taken this fairly expensive, high-end studio and made it sound like a basement. When we were remastering it, the mastering guy said it was the most bizarre mix of frequencies that he’d ever worked with. It’s all middle – middle on top of middle! But the sound works in its own way, it’s a bit of serendipity and it fits in with the chance thing that I like. We also did another mix for the seven-inch, which was the short pop version.

PIKE: We decided it would be the lead single, but it got flipped soon afterwards and [DJs] put on “French Disco” instead. We didn’t have any money to repress or re-sleeve anything, so we just stickered the remaining copies in the warehouse with a sticker that said ‘Includes French Disco’ or something like that. But in America they continued ahead with “Jenny Ondioline”.

SADIER: Earlier this year I made a selection of 60 songs for potential live contenders. I put the full long “Jenny Ondioline” in there, because I thought it would be a super challenge to do that live. I submitted it to the committee, but Tim and Andy didn’t really feel confident that the long version would sound good, because it’s quite difficult to replicate live.

PIKE: Standing in the audience when they play it now, people really love it. It’s classic early Stereolab, I suppose. We had our own record label, Duophonic, so we didn’t have people saying anything like, “Could you get it down to one album so it’ll be cheaper for us?” We just did what we wanted to do, so that was quite a nice thing.

GANE: It’s one of my favourite things that we did. It works, it still sounds good now. I don’t really listen to the records after we’ve done them, but it was nice to hear this at the remastering. I don’t feel that we’d do it in any other way now.

SADIER: The message it carries is very central to our work, or at least to my lyrical work: that we’re all creative beings and we’re all implicated in the course that humanity will follow. We’re much more responsible than we think, we’re also much more apt than we are made to believe. That was my message to the world, that society influences us and we influence it back. That’s the excitement about living. I came from a family where nothing is ever possible, and that’s why I moved away, because I thought, ‘If I stay here I’m gonna have a really unhappy life.’ Instead I was really drawn to moving away and creating my own life. It’s something I was very lucky to be able to do. I think we’re at a point of crisis now [politically and socially], but it’s in crises that we’re given a chance to shift and grow, to move on to something. I don’t know if we’re quite ready, because it is a rather big leap; but we cannot operate with the old paradigms, we have to change.


FACT FILE


Written by: Tim Gane & Lætitia Sadier
Performers include: Laetitia Sadier (vocals, organ), Tim Gane (guitar, organ), Sean O’Hagan (organ, guitar), Mary Hansen (vocals, guitar), Duncan Brown (bass), Andy Ramsay (drums)
Produced by: Phil Wright
Recorded at: Blackwing Studios, London
Released: August 24, 1993 (LP version), December 27, 1993 (EP version)
Highest chart positions: (EP) UK 75; US –

TIMELINE

March 1993 Stereolab perform an early 10-minute version of “Jenny Ondioline” on French radio show The Black Sessions

May 1993 The group enter Blackwing Studios – housed in a deconsecrated church in south-east London – for six weeks to record their second album, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

August 24, 1993  The album is released, followed by the “Jenny Ondioline” EP at the end of the year

Steve Reich – Collected Works

Rob Young
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Steve Reich – Collected Works

Buy Collected Works here

The thunder lizards of classical and romantic music, from Haydn to Wagner, bestrode the earth for hundreds of years. They achieved musical domination by imposing a sense of form and narrative upon Western music, to express the warp and weft of human emotion and fate. Statement, development, recapitulation, climax, applause. A little over 120 years ago, music began to atomise, harmonies soured, familiar structures devolved into atonalism, spectral texture and formal experiments with microtones and alternative scales.

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Post-war, as avant-garde music drifted towards the hardiest of specialist audiences, another tendency took shape. This one has proved more popular, and commercially viable. US composer Steve Reich is a figurehead of this development, sometimes called minimalism, a term almost none of its protagonists care to associate themselves with. In the mid-’60s, Reich was a music enthusiast based on the West Coast, involved in the experimental music scene around the San Francisco Tape Music Center collective featuring Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Ramon Sender and others. Shortly after performing in the premiere of Riley’s seminal In C in 1964, a civil rights campaigner presented Reich with some recordings of black men wrongly accused of crimes. Reich cut up and looped a tape of 19-year-old Daniel Hamm, one of the ‘Harlem Six’, speaking about his injuries following a beating by police. The resulting work, Come Out (1966), is one of Reich’s earliest pieces, included on Disc One of this gargantuan 27CD odyssey through the life’s work of this titanic figure, who turns 89 later this year.

These first works like It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Pendulum Music (1968), in which four microphones are set swinging above loudspeakers, generating feedback, already seem confident for their era. Although many might think of Reich’s music as being abstract, Come Out was merely the first of many works throughout his life where he has focused on the human voice in the midst of enormous political upheavals. Far from being mere barren exercises in time and interval, Reich has striven for his music to retain a contemporary relevance.

The string quartet and tape piece Different Trains (1988) is the most famous example. Its quietly shocking transition from Reich’s nostalgic childhood memories of trans-continental railroad trips to the recollections of Jewish Holocaust survivors on the trains to the concentration camps struck a nerve, and the Kronos Quartet’s definitive version was a huge hit, in classical music terms. It emboldened Reich to compose other works evoking a sense of people caught in history’s cogwheels: Three Tales (2002, a video opera featuring the Hindenburg disaster, the Bikini atomic tests, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep); Daniel Variations (2006, on the Jewish American journalist Daniel Pearl, murdered by Islamic kidnappers); and WTC 9/11 (2011, on the terror attacks in New York that took place near his family home).

All of these are included in the boxset, not least because Reich came of age in the phonographic era, meaning that his career has been aided and augmented by ongoing relationships with specific record labels. During the ’70s it was ECM and Deutsche Grammofon who helped to spread his reputation by releasing key works such as Music For 18 Musicians and Drumming. In 1985 Reich signed a deal with Nonesuch for his choral work The Desert Music (1985). His compositional output has enjoyed a symbiosis with their release schedules ever since.

This set contains not only all the Reich music Nonesuch has released, but they have also licensed some of those earlier works, to make this a true survey of the man’s oeuvre. As it was my own first encounter with Reich on a spotty DG vinyl, I’m glad to hear again the lovely, twinkling Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ (1973). From the Ghanaian-influenced Drumming (1970–71) through the rest of the decade, Reich – who played a jazz kit in his youth – pushed percussion to the foreground. He referred to his practice, which he explored with his own ensemble of likeminded players, as ‘music as a gradual process’. Now that we have lived through the rise of funk, electronica and sample-based music, it’s easy to overlook how radical this formulation was. It’s what makes Reich’s music so anti-bombastic, compared to the symphonic sounds of the 19th century. The music is built on a system of repetitions and small phase-shifts that ripple through the whole thing with a sonic butterfly effect. It can give the impression of having a mind of its own: instead of a crescendo, it simply halts when the program has run its course, like tickertape running out of the gate. At the same time, though, it is determined by very human components – the players themselves and their choices, the length of time they can hold a breath, the skeletal physics of percussive strikes.

The zenith of this approach was Music For 18 Musicians (1974–76), surging like a pulsar, never stepping in the same river twice. Reich’s signature work is a miracle of aural hallucinations. Describing a performance in his sleevenote, Timo Andres puts it perfectly: “One has the sense of observing a utopian society in miniature, a mass of people working towards a common goal with no apparent leader.” The piece appears in two versions here: the one recorded by Reich’s group for Nonesuch in 1996; and Ensemble Signal’s lithe, swinging version from 2011. The presence of this youthful ensemble on the last disc serves to show how Reich’s music is being accessed and carried into the future by young generations of musicians. The secrets will not be lost with the dying-out of the composer’s closest circle.

Reich’s career began among the whirlpool of radical energies in the ’60s, including alternative spiritual practices such as yoga and meditation. By the end of the ’70s, he felt compelled to reconnect with his Jewish roots, beginning with Tehillim (1981). The 1994 version here masterfully combines the ecstatic female vocals with the earthy ground harmonies of a small group. There is less sense that the music is ‘programmed’, and Reich allows his love of Hebrew psalms and the medieval polyphony of Perotin to combine with intricate rhythms that sound as if a Balinese gamelan troupe had been parachuted into a court in Moorish Spain. Reich has since returned to Old Testament and Jewish themes in works like You Are (Variations) (2004), Traveler’s Prayer (2020) and Jacob’s Ladder (2023), the most recent work in this collection. With its aural depictions of angels climbing and descending a ladder between Heaven and Earth, it is a vivid and mature piece of sonic painting which also perhaps represents the ageing composer gazing into the infinite. 

From The Orb sampling Pat Metheny playing Electric Counterpoint to Reich’s creative relationship with younger composer Nico Muhly, Reich has become a lodestar visible to many younger musicians beyond the contemporary music field. Radio Rewrite (2012) was a homage to Radiohead containing veiled motifs from songs like “Everything In Its Right Place”. Travelling across the entire sweep of this extraordinary boxset, you’re joyously reminded of Steve Reich’s diversity and invention over 60 years, while all the time retaining an audible stamp that is instantly recognisable. It’s a lovingly prepared and curated collection, with essays by some of Reich’s fellow musicians and industry colleagues, extensive listening notes on every piece, complete lyrics and librettos for all the vocal works, exhaustively compiled credits, and a useful timeline of his life and works. A musical evolutionary leap housed in a discographic treat.

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Edwyn Collins – Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Alastair McKay
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Edwyn Collins – Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Buy Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation here

In the video for “Knowledge”, the first single from Edwyn Collins’ 10th solo album, the clan chief of Postcard Records stands like a monument in the wintery landscape around his home in Helmsdale, on the north-east coast of Scotland. It is a grey day. There is snow on the ground. The joyous gospel harmonies can’t disguise the note of disquiet that leaks from the song. “Knowledge” is about unease, the loss and recovery of fond memories. Knowledge, Collins sings, with a nod to Amazing Grace, “first was lost and now it’s found”. The chorus underlines the point, while the video cuts through subliminal flashes of the singer’s musical trophies, rolling into a series of fast cuts of Collins in his popstar pomp, all arch sideburns and long spear collars. He pouts like Elvis, he machine-guns the audience like Eddie Cochran. “Hard to let my old self go,” Collins sings, repeating the point for emphasis. “So hard…”

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It’s a strange thing, listening to “Knowledge”. It sounds so familiar, as if the melody has been around forever. It is, as Donny and Marie once sang, a little bit country, a little bit rock’n’roll. There is a bit of Memphis, some Nashville and – departing from the Osmonds’ formula – in place of Motown, a little bit of Northern Soul. The mood seems to echo the melody of “Rehab”, a song by Collins’ former comrade in Orange Juice, James Kirk. The more you listen, the more that similarity dissolves. Something else, an old country tune, crackles through the static, then that, too, fizzles in the haar.

“All my life, I draw from music I love,” Collins tells Uncut. “There’s so much to dig into. I used to call it cross-pollinating. I’m influenced and then I influence. On this record it’s the same as always, loads of things inspire me. Soul music, gospel music, country music, synthy pop music, guitar players, everything.”

Before we go forward, it’s worth going back. Such is the myth surrounding Collins’ first band, Orange Juice, that the music tends to get lost. In the traditional shorthand, the Creamola Foam rush of Orange Juice came from a chemical blend of The Velvet Underground and Chic, a formula which gives an entirely misleading sense of what they actually sounded like. Postcard-era Juice delivered their tunes in an adolescent blood-rush, a punk ballyhoo made strange by the vagaries of Collins’ voice. The Juice turned left when they heard the Northern Soul iteration of Vic Godard’s Subway Sect. (Could Vic sing swing? Could Edwyn sing Al Green? The calculation is roughly the same).

As Orange Juice developed, they became a vehicle for Collins’s ambitions, scoring a hit when Collins coaxed a liquid bass line from a Roland TB-303. To this, he added an impression of Nile Rodgers shredding a Burns Nu-Sonic guitar, and lyrical nods to Buzzcocks and Eddie Cochran. Cross-pollinating. This time, the formula worked. “Rip it Up” ripped it up. But, be careful what you wish for. It was fun, and then it wasn’t. Tired, perhaps, of the unglamorous reality of being a pop star in pursuit of a second hit, Collins turned the perversity up to 11. Bit by bit, he exploded the group.

Orange Juice and Postcard need no special pleading. What is less appreciated is the consistency of Collins’ solo career, a long arc in which Collins leaned more directly into his influences, culminating with a worldwide hit with “A Girl Like You”.

There is, of course, a before and an after. Collins suffered two strokes in 2005, which robbed him of the ability to play guitar and, for a time, the power of speech. Through sheer force of will, the singer found his voice in music, and there may be a way in which the familiar patterns of song lyrics act as an aid to communication. Aphasia leaves no room for irony. As Collins sings on the title track, “Back when the words came easily/I had the answer to everything/Revelling in a smart alec comeback.”

With Collins’s post-stroke material, there is no disguising the fact that the words are freighted. In Orange Juice, feyness was an aggressive statement. Now, directness becomes a matter of resilience. For a while, it seemed remarkable that Collins was performing at all. He has moved beyond that. In the song, “Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation” his struggle with articulacy – that feeling of voicelessness – is projected outwards, with a twist on the founding motto of the BBC. “If I can’t talk to you, and you can’t talk to me,” Collins sings, “How shall nation speak unto nation?” He is, to paraphrase “A Girl Like You”, talking allegorically.

If this seems bleak, it doesn’t sound it. Working with his regular collaborators – co-producers Jake Hutton and Sean Read, musicians James Walbourne and Carwyn Ellis, and son Will (on bass) – Collins collates his influences into a carnival of understatement. Less becomes more. Midway through “The Heart Is A Foolish Little Thing” – a fairground waltz of Northern Soul – there’s a thunderous xylophone solo. The winsome “Paper Planes” sounds like a tune that could have been showered in bombast by Roy Orbison or Neil Diamond, but Collins respects the flimsiness of the lyric’s central metaphor and keeps it small, sounding vulnerable rather than operatic. There’s a note of sweet simplicity in “A Little Sign”, childishness even, though the tune does wander into a dub postscript. “Strange Old World” is a montage of twang and punk guitar, a bit 1960s, a bit James Bond, with Collins warbling in a shower stall of reverb “it’s a strange old world, but it’s my world.”

Musically, the tunes blend pop stickiness with sonic experimentation, but there is a strong sense of place. “The Mountains Are My Home” reflects Collins’ move to the highlands. It’s also a traditional roaming song in the style of Glen Campbell, propelled by a train-track rhythm. Has Collins ever sung more sweetly than on “It Must Be Real”? Never with such directness. The way he performs now has the conversational bluntness of Lou Reed refracted, perhaps, through the sunny disposition of Jonathan Richman. “When you love, love, love again, you succeed,” Collins sings on “Rhythm Is My Own World”. When he does admit to doubt, the notion is quickly dispelled. “Sometimes it brings me down,” he sings on “Sound As A Pound”, “the pain inside, but I’m ok.”

Mostly, it’s the sound of optimism turned into a tune, informed by the fresh geography of Collins’s life. It helps that his metaphors can be located on the map, but that shouldn’t diminish their universality. An unlikely highlight is “The Bridge Hotel”, a summery incantation which namechecks the venue where Collins celebrated being made chieftain of the highland games in 2010. “It’s a B&B now,” Collins tells Uncut, “run by a nice guy called Hans.” In the song, the hotel is in the midst of an endless summer day, where “the song thrush sings past 10 o’clock in the evening”. So yes, it’s getting late, but the sun is refusing to set. Edwyn is in his happy place, home again. Not falling, but laughing.

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Neil Young and the chrome hearts to headline BST Hyde Park in July

Sam Richards
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Neil Young and the chrome hearts to headline BST Hyde Park in July

The latest headliner to be announced for London’s BST Hyde Park series is neil young and the chrome hearts. Young’s new, all-lower-case band – featuring Spooner Oldham (Farfisa organ), Micah Nelson (guitar and vocal), Corey McCormick (bass and vocal) and Anthony LoGerfo (drums) – will play the London park on July 11.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

This is the first officially announced UK date of neil young and the chrome hearts’ previously advertised world tour, although others are strongly rumoured to follow.

Also on the bill at Hyde Park on July 11 are Yusuf / Cat Stevens and Van Morrison, with more names to be added in due course. Morrison has just announced that his new album, Remembering Now, will be released on June 13.

Tickets go on general sale at 10am on Wednesday (March 5) although there are also various pre-sales in operation – full details here.

LCD Soundsystem announce 8-night residency at Brixton Academy

Michael Bonner
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LCD Soundsystem announce 8-night residency at Brixton Academy

LCD Soundsystem are returning to the UK for an 8-night residency at London O2 Academy Brixton. The run of shows will take place from Thursday, June 12 – Sunday, June 15 and from Thursday, June 19 – Sunday, June 22.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

LCD previously played a sold-out six-night residency at O2 Academy Brixton in 2022, followed by last year’s shows at Glastonbury and All Points East.

Tickets for the new dates go on general sale at 9:00am on Friday, March 7 and will be available from here.

The dates are:

Thursday, June 12
Friday, June 13
Saturday, June 14
Sunday, June 15 **
Thursday, June 19
Friday, June 20
Saturday, June 21
Sunday, June 22 **

** Sunday shows are early shows and run from 5pm – 9pm.

Rod Stewart: “You’ve got flair or you haven’t…”

Jaan Uhelszki
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Rod Stewart: “You’ve got flair or you haven’t…”

From Uncut’s November 2015 issue [Take 222]. Jaan Uhelszki visits ROD STEWART at home in Beverly Hills…

Rod Stewart was never, it seems, a natural songwriter. “I was too busy,” he says, “having a good time.” In autumn 2015, the good times continue unabated for British rock’s most storied playboy. On the eve of a new album and that long-awaited Faces reunion, Rod The Mod opens up his LA mansion to Uncut and, uncharacteristically, reveals all. About Jeff Beck, Britt Ekland and the rock giant who looks “a bit too much like Bin Laden”. About cancer, the old bandmate who drank too much, and the correct way to tie a scarf. And about why The Faces couldn’t reform ’til now: “Mac was a bit of a fly in the ointment…”

YOU kNOW YOU’RE getting close to Rod Stewart’s house when your ears pop. For the past four decades, Stewart has lived on one of the highest points of Beverly Hills, in an exclusive enclave called Beverly Park. Accessible only through two guarded checkpoints, the estate is dominated by sprawling gated properties, with fine views out across the city itself. Once you’ve cleared security, however, it’s no small task finding your destination. There are no street names or pavements; nor is there anyone about to ask. Fortunately, Stewart’s house is instantly recognisable thanks to a soccer pitch visible over a rambling fence. The gates, too, are a giveaway: they are emblazoned with the four-leaf clover symbol of his beloved Celtic football team.

Stewart, his wife Penny Lancaster and their two children live in a large Italianate mansion painted the colour of a Tuscan sunset. Across the circular driveway is a well-appointed guest house where three of Stewart’s older children live. There is also a six-car garage with an array of expensive automobiles – mostly Italian. Stewart still takes his cars out almost daily. “I love to drive,” he explains. “It clears my head and I get my best ideas then. The one thing I don’t do anymore is drive at night, because I like to have a drink of wine every night.” Few celebrities, it seems, live so grandly or unapologetically. “Yeah, largely and hugely,” Stewart laughs. “All this and I still got all me hair.”

Stewart has invited Uncut to his home ostensibly to talk about his new studio album, Another Country. There is also a 5CD set due which collects the run of albums he made between 1969’s An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down to Smiler in 1974. Critically, though, Stewart’s old group, the Faces, are returning to active service. Not only has a boxset just been released of all their studio albums – 1970-1975: You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything – but they also performed live on September 5 during a 2015 Prostate Cancer Uk charity event, Rock’n’Horsepower, at Kenney Jones’ polo club in Surrey. Stewart first reunited to play with the surviving Faces – Ron Wood and Jones – at his 70th birthday party; it seems they had such a good time, they decided to do it again. If Stewart had his way, though, he would also reactivate another of his old groups: “We could have a Faces and a Jeff Beck Band reunion all on one bill,” he beams.

Inside of Stewart’s home, the walls are decorated with an enviable collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. But Stewart steers me to a large oil painting over the fireplace: ‘An Elegant Woman’ by French artist Hippolyte-casimir Gourse. It depicts a rather plain Victorian woman in a long black dress and black shoes, wearing a large feathered hat and reclining on a divan. “Don’t you think that one looks like me?” he asks. “You don’t have to answer; I know it does. It looks just like me when I was 18.” This large painting is given pride of place above the mantle, along with a copy of Daniel Wolff’s biography of Sam Cooke, two dozen painted metal soldiers of the Scottish regiments in battle formation, small miniatures of Celtic players in their green and white shirts, and two small Scottish Lion Rampant flags. “This is my altar, don’t you think?” he asks proudly. Photographs are dotted elsewhere around the room: of him and his children, with Penny, and an especially striking one of his father in a tux. “Aye, that’s my dad. That’s Bob Stewart there, looking very Scottish,” Stewart says.

What was the occasion?

“He was going down the betting shop. I think it was his 70th or 75th birthday.”

Seventy doesn’t look like 70 anymore. “No it doesn’t,” admits Stewart. “I try not to let it.”

A two-hour conversation with Rod Stewart is wide-ranging and digressive. It takes in his early bands and solo work, drinking, his controversial migration to Los Angeles, the Great American Songbook albums, and his return to songwriting. As well, of course, as the Faces reunion. But we begin by talking about clothes. Today, Stewart is wearing surprisingly understated attire – jeans and a denim shirt.

UNCUT: Was wardrobe always a consideration for you? Even when you wore those satin pants and crop-tops?

ROD STEWART: I don’t think I was ever a regular dresser. First of all, you’ve got to be passionate about it, and I always have been. I would consider myself a pretty good dresser before “Maggie May”, before I had any money. So you either can do it or you can’t; you’ve really got that flair or you haven’t.

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT NOVEMBER 2015/TAKE 222 IN THE ARCHIVE

Black Sabbath: the making of “Paranoid”

John Robinson
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Black Sabbath: the making of “Paranoid”

From Uncut’s October 2020 issue [Take 281]. Ozzy and co on the story of Sabbath’s masterpiece. “There was no-one doing this sort of thing,” they tell John Robinson.

IF you play video games you’ll perhaps have heard it on Guitar Hero 3, or Freestyle BMX 2. Enjoy films? It’s shown up in everything from Dazed And Confused to Suicide Squad, even the Angry Birds Movie. If you’re either of a certain age or a fan of archival British pop shows, you may even have witnessed its appearance on Top Of The Pops, and marvelled at a long-haired band at sea within a bopping studio audience, a hard-rocking albums outfit, quite unused to this kind of thing.

Such was and remains the peculiar reach of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”, two and a bit minutes which helped unlock new worlds for the band: the singles charts, television, instant recognition. Pedants have suggested the song doesn’t stand up to clinical evaluation, but the power of the music – a choppy riff , a simple vocal melody, an ancient-sounding guitar solo – remains undeniable.

During its 50 years of service so far, it’s been misheard (during the mid-1980s “satanic panic”, concerned parents heard its lyric to be “I tell you to end your life”, not “to enjoy life”), extensively covered (by, to name a few notables, Mötley Crüe, Ministry and Weezer) and, though unrepresentative of their epic, doomy riffing, widely adored by fans. “We played it on the last Sabbath tour,” guitarist Tony Iommi tells Uncut down the line from his Midlands home. “It’s still very popular.”

It’s fair to say that in 1970, neither Black Sabbath nor their new audience quite expected anything like “Paranoid”. Originally a band called Earth, formed out of a mutual love of heavy blues, the band quickly took things in a more extreme direction, changing their name to Black Sabbath, and spreading their very loud word via European residencies (at Hamburg’s Star-Club, among others) and UK gigs from Low Hesket village hall to the Pied Bull pub in Islington.

“By the time we got to Regent Sound they’d been playing The Star-Club for six 45-minute sets a night,” recalls their first manager, Jim Simpson. “At the weekends they played eight 45s a night. By the time they came back to Britain they were like finely trained racehorses.”

The band’s scarifying debut album was just the start of their spectacular 1970. With an oversupply of material for just one record, the band were developing their follow-up while still promoting their first album. They still needed a few minutes more to turn what they had into a full length album – and what they came up with proved decisive.

OZZY OSBOURNE [vocals]: We were made by a man called Jim Simpson, who used to have a club called Henry’s Blueshouse. We used to carry our equipment around in case someone didn’t turn up; we’d say, “We’ll play.” It was hand to mouth in the beginning.

JIM SIMPSON [sabbath manager, 1969-1970]: People think they were a drug-crazed band, biting the heads off alligators, but they weren’t. They were very serious young men, dedicated to their music. We’d have band meetings: every Wednesday morning when they weren’t on the road, a business meeting in my office with an agenda. One day in the midst of all this, Geezer came in late. He leaned round the door and said “I’ve got it.” What you got? “The name.” I can still remember his facial expression to this day: “Black Sabbath.” There was a collective intake of breath. That led them to write the song “Black Sabbath” and that pointed the direction they were going to go in.

TONY IOMMI [guitar]: There was no-one doing this sort of thing, we had to break down the barriers. A lot of people just didn’t understand us and were quite honestly frightened of us in the early days. They were quite frightened to come and meet us or talk to us or anything. It was very strange. Because of the image that was built up around the band.

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT OCTOBER 2020/TAKE 281 IN THE ARCHIVE

Jenny Lewis: Lady of the Canyon

Stephen Troussé
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Jenny Lewis: Lady of the Canyon

From Uncut’s October 2008 issue [Take 137]. High in Lauren Canyon, you’ll find JENNY LEWIS, third generation showbiz kid and snarky queen of LA’s young bohos. Stephen Troussé takes a seat by the pool as Lewis tells all about her journey from child actress to American indie superstar…

In real terms it’s just a short cruise south through the city, from the sprawl of the San Fernando Valley to the winding lanes of Laurel Canyon. But in the American dreamlife of LA, it’s a world away: the kind of journey people spend a lifetime trying to make, plotting their escape, from obscurity and suburban smog to verdant hillside freedom high above Hollywood.

Not coincidentally, it’s the journey that’s been made over 30 years, with the odd Nebraskan detour, by Jenny Lewis. She was recently honoured by the City of Los Angeles for her services in putting Silver Lake, the hipster enclave that spawned her band, Rilo Kiley, 10 years, on the cultural map. And, in truth, thought she was born in Los Angeles, it’s hard to think of a more exemplary modern Angelino outside a Paul Anderson movie. A third generation showbiz kid, she was born on the cabaret circuit, grew up on screen (playing Lucile Ball’s granddaughter, Angelina Jolie’s schoolmate and Fred Savage’s girlfriend), then escaped to become an indie rock starlet and solo alt.country siren. As though it had all been scripted, she’s transformed herself from Valley Girl to Lady Of The Canyon.

Though Lauren Canyon isn’t quite the boho Eden that enchanted a generation in the ‘60s (these days the twilit lanes are lined with power-walking lawyers rather than pie-eyed flower children) it still feels quite magical. It’s lush and rambling, just minutes from the Strip yet home to mountain lions and rattlesnakes. On the day we meet, LA is shaken by the most powerful earthquake in 15 years. Yet nothing seems to disturb the idyllic calm of Lewis’ new home, nestled up in the hills, filled with antique Wurlitzers and vintage tape decks, with a conservatory – christened “The Soularium” – where a tinny Fisher-Price deck plays a stack of classic Motown. Outside Lewis’ pals – members of Deathcab For Cutie and The Postal Service, along with her toyboy troubadour Johnathan Rice – sit by the pool and sip wine Rice earned playing a gig at a local vineyard.

As Lewis proudly shows me round, it occurs to me that if this were an episode of Cribs, sooner or later Lewis would insist that, despite appearances, she’s really still Jenny from the block. “Hmmm,” she thinks for a moment. “Maybe Jenny from the cul-de-sac.”

The setting feels only right to discuss Lewis’ new record, Acid Tongue. The title track was written on the road while she was promoting her solo debut, 2006’s revelatory Rabbit Fur Coat, and she briefly considered recording it with Rilo Kiley for last year’s Under The Blacklist. “But I knew when I wrote it how I wanted it to sound. I wanted it to sound like Crosby, Stills and Nash,” she says, invoking one of the classic original Canyon bands.

“And that’s not really what Rilo Kiley does.”

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT OCTOBER 2008/TAKE 137 IN THE ARCHIVE

Gene Hackman has died aged 95

Michael Bonner
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Gene Hackman has died aged 95

Gene Hackman has died aged 95. Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with their dog. The BBC reports that the police are not treating the death as “foul play”.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

Born in California in 1930, Hackman undertook military service before joining the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he met fellow student Dustin Hoffman.

Moving to New York in the early 1960s, Hackman started in off-Broadway and television roles, before moving into films.

After a 1967 Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie & Clyde, Hackman went on to become one of the dominant movie stars of the 1970s, appearing in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (1971, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar), Cisco Pike (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation (1974), Penn’s Night Moves (1975), The French Connection II, Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980).

Hackman continued to enjoy strong work in later decades, in Mississippi Burning (1988), Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven (1992), Walter Hill‘s Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Get Shorty (1995) and Wes Anderson‘s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

He retired from acting after 2004’s Welcome To Mooseport.

As with many of the great actors who came up during the 1960s and ’70s, Hackman had formidable range. He equally adept at hard-edged roles like dogged New York detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection or lonely surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation (a role Coppola originally wrote for Marlon Brando) as he was with more comedic roles like master criminal Lex Luthor in Superman or the errant patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Newly restored Pink Floyd At Pompeii due in cinemas and IMAX this April

Sam Richards
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Newly restored Pink Floyd At Pompeii due in cinemas and IMAX this April

Pink Floyd’s 1972 concert film At Pompeii – MCMLXXII, directed by Adrian Maben, will return to cinemas and IMAX worldwide from April 24. The film has been digitally remastered in 4K from the original 35mm footage, with enhanced audio newly mixed by Steven Wilson.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

In addition, the accompanying live album will be reissued by Legacy Recordings on May 2. This will be the first time the album has appeared on vinyl, or in Dolby Atmos. Watch a clip of the band playing “Echoes (Part 1)” from the new version of Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII below:

“Since 1994, I have searched for the elusive film rushes of Pink Floyd At Pompeii, so the recent discovery of the 1972 original 35mm cut negative was a very special moment,” says said Lana Topham, director of restoration for Pink Floyd. “The newly restored version presents the first full 90-minute cut, combining the 60-minute source edit of the performance with the additional Abbey Road Studios documentary segments filmed shortly after.”

Tickets for the film screenings will go on sale on Wednesday (March 5) at 2pm GMT from here. You can pre-order the live album here.

The second Uncut New Music Playlist of 2025

Sam Richards
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The second Uncut New Music Playlist of 2025

With another issue of Uncut done, dusted and due to hit newsagents’ shelves / your doormat later this week – read all about it here – it’s time to share some of the tunes that helped us to put it together.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

Below, you can sample new music from Bryan Ferry, Jason Isbell and Valerie June – all of whom give candid and illuminating interviews in the latest issue. There are sighters for soon-coming new albums by Bon Iver, Beirut, Perfume Genius, William Tyler, Ezra Furman and Sparks (their 28th!), plus one-off singles by Fontaines DC, Hurray For The Riff Raff and Tindersticks, a double dose of Thom Yorke and much more. Dig in!

Hurray For The Riff Raff 
“Pyramid Scheme”
(Nonesuch)

Valerie June
“Joy, Joy”
(Concord)

Bon Iver 
“Everything Is Peaceful Love”
(Jagjaguwar)

Bryan Ferry And Amelia Barratt 
“Orchestra”
(Dene Jesmond)

Sparks
“JanSport Backpack”
(Transgressive)

Fontaines DC
“It’s Amazing To Be Young”
(XL)

Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto 
“Electric War”
(Easy Eye Sound)

Perfume Genius 
“No Front Teeth (ft. Aldous Harding)”
(Matador)

Jason Isbell
“Foxes In The Snow”
(Southeastern)

Lonnie Holley 
“That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music”
(Jagjaguwar)

Beirut
“Guericke’s Unicorn”
(Pompeii Records)

Tindersticks
“Soft Tissue”
(City Slang / Lucky Dog)

Maria Somerville 
“Garden”
(4AD)

The Smile
“Don’t Get Me Started (James Holden Remix)”
(XL)

Barry Hyde
“Come All You Colliers”
(Sirenspire)

Cloth
“Golden”
(Rock Action)

Ezra Furman
“Grand Mal”
(Bella Union)

Chime Oblivion
“Neighborhood Dog”
(Deathgod)

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke 
“Back In The Game”
(Warp)

Nico Georis
“Geological Observations”
(Leaving)

Alabaster DePlume 
“Invincibility”
(International Anthem)

William Tyler
“Time Indefinite, Part One”
(Psychic Hotline)

Fennesz
“The Last Days Of May”
(Longform Editions)

Watch Tom Waits perform “The Fall Of Troy” in new documentary

Sam Richards
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Watch Tom Waits perform “The Fall Of Troy” in new documentary

Tom Waits has contributed to a new documentary about homelessness in the American south. Ultimata Fermata (The Last Ride) is part of the Il Fattore Umano (The Human Factor) series, from Italian public television channel RAI3.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

Waits can be seen performing songs on acoustic guitar and piano, as well as reading from his poem “Seeds On Hard Ground”. Below, you can watch a clip of him playing “The Fall Of Troy”, which originally appeared on the 1996 soundtrack album for the film Dead Man Walking, and later on the 2006 compilation Orphans.

You can watch the full documentary here and support some of the charities involved here, here and here.

Neil Young and the chrome hearts announce world tour

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young and the chrome hearts announce world tour

Neil Young has confirmed tour dates for 2025, including his first European shows since 2019. Young will be joined by his new band, the chrome hearts: Spooner Oldham (Farfisa organ), Micah Nelson (guitar), Corey McCormick (bass) and Anthony LoGerfo (drums).

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

The tour begins in Sweden on June 18 and travels through Europe before reaching North America in August. No UK shows are currently listed, though Young says “More dates will be added shortly.”

Tickets will be available beginning Tuesday, February 25, through an exclusive, 48-hour presale for Neil Young Archives members. General on-sale begins on Friday, February 28. More information on North American dates is available through Ticketmaster.

Young and the chrome hearts released their debut studio recording, “Big Change“, in January.

Neil Young’s 2025 ‘Love Earth’ World Tour
June 18 – Rättvik, Sweden @ Dalhalla
June 20 – Bergen, Norway @ Bergenhus Fortress
June 22 – Copenhagen, Denmark @ Tiøren
June 26 – Dublin, Ireland @ Malahide Castle
June 30 – Brussels, Belgium @ Brussels Palace Open Air, Palace Square
July 1 – Groningen, Netherlands @ Drafbaan Stedpark
July 3 – Berlin, Germany @ Waldbühne
July 4 – Mönchengladbach, Germany @ Sparkassenpark
July 8 – Stuttgart, Germany @ Cannstatter Wasen
August 8 – Charlotte, North Caroline @ PNC Music Pavilion
August 10 – Richmond, Virgina @ Allianz Amphitheater at Riverfront
August 13 – Clarkston, Michigan @ Pine Knob Music Theatre
August 15 – Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio @ Blossom Music Center
August 17 – Toronto, Ontario @ Budweiser Stage
August 21 – Gilford, New Hampshire @ BankNH Pavilion
August 23 – Wantagh, New York @ Northwell at Jones Beach Theater
August 24 – Bethel, New York @ Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
August 27 – Chicago, Illinois @ Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island
September 1 – Denver, Colorado @ Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre
September 5 – George, Washington @ The Gorge
September 6 – Vancouver, British Columbia @ Deer Lake Park
September 10 – Bend, Oregon @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater
September 12 – Mountain View, California @ Shoreline Amphitheater
September 15 – Los Angeles, California @ Hollywood Bowl

The new Uncut: Led Zeppelin, Marianne Faithfull, Jason Isbell, The Waterboys, Bryan Ferry and more

Michael Bonner
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The new Uncut: Led Zeppelin, Marianne Faithfull, Jason Isbell, The Waterboys, Bryan Ferry and more

For bands, navigating the past can often be a tricky business. In some cases, there is an avowed refusal to engage in anything other than the work in front of them – as if stopping to look back will somehow derail hard-won forward momentum. In others, it can be somewhere they’d rather not revisit; a place of bad memories or difficult circumstances. For Led Zeppelin, the past is a source of extraordinary triumphs but also, ultimately, great loss. How, in other words, do you reconcile the good times with the bad times?

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY

For this month’s cover story, we have reunited Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones for a series of exclusive interviews to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Physical Graffiti – the immense double album that marked the loftiest peak of their formidable imperial phase. The three musicians take us far inside the album – but along the way, the story becomes unexpectedly reflective. It’s not simply that, 50 years on, Physical Graffiti continues to work its powerful magic on its principals. But as it deepens, our cover story often feels like an intricate study of the relationships between Plant, Page and Jones as it unfolds in Headley Grange, on the world’s largest stages or in the wilds of Morocco; three very different people whose passion for the work they achieved together remains as strong and unifying as ever. “I was never a great fan of other bands,” insists John Paul Jones. “I didn’t really go to concerts. I didn’t listen to other bands. I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t in them. I was a fan of Led Zeppelin, because I was in it.”

Elsewhere, there’s new interviews with Jason Isbell, Bryan Ferry, The Waterboys‘ Mike Scott, Steel Pulse, Maddy Prior, Destroyer, the Sex Pistols and Valerie June, while David Bowie‘s closest collaborators lift the lid on an early ‘Berlin’ era classic, the survivors revisit hippie stronghold Middle Earth, Mick Jones shares his memorabilia collection and a clutch of luminaries including Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and Adam Granduciel recreate Blood On The Tracks as Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece turns 50.

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Uncut April 2025

Uncut Staff
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Uncut April 2025

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

Every print edition of this issue of Uncut comes free with a free CD called Time To Fly, featuring 15 tracks of the month’s best new music, including Black Country, New Road, Brown Horse, Dean Wareham, Iko Ishibashi, Tobacco City, Florist and more

LED ZEPPELIN: Exclusive! In brand new interviews, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones revisit the magic and epic majesty of their 1975 masterpiece, Physical Graffiti. “There was such an exchange of great energy,” we hear.

JASON ISBELL: Twenty years into his solo career, Isbell is about to release his first solo acoustic album, partly inspired by the confessional singer-songwriters of the ‘70s. Just don’t expect raw truths. “There’s a whole bunch of real personal stuff,” he confides. “But it’s not always coming from a trustworthy narrator’s perspective.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Farewell to a key instigator of the ‘60s pop culture revolution who was cruelly cast out of the inner circle, only to return, bloodied but gloriously unbowed, as a guiding light for future generations of lost souls. “She gave everything and you got everything,” marvels one of Marianne Faithfull’s many collaborators.

BRYAN FERRY: A remarkable new collaboration with painter and spoken word artist Amelia Barratt returns the Roxy Music mainman, elegantly, to the vanguard of the avant-garde. “It’s like playing tennis with somebody who’s really good,” he tells us. “You raise your game.”

STEEL PULSE: Fighting against prejudice and social injustice, the roots pioneers look back the events that inspired their urgent debut album – Handsworth Revolution. “It was second nature to write about we were going through. These were our experiences.”

VALERIE JUNE: The Memphis maverick is a voice of cosmic inspiration within American roots music. “I want to see what the world looks like when we’re focused on light and radiance and joy. Beauty is powerful.”

MADDY PRIOR: The Steeleye Span singer on Bowie, Quo and who was really inside those Wombles costumes…

DESTROYER: A picaresque romp through the greatest works of loquacious rock’n’roll prophet Dan Bejar and friends.

DAVID BOWIE: Fleeting to Europe to escape personal and professional traumas, Bowie and his co-conspirators began work on his ‘Berlin’ trilogy: cue the story of “Sound and Vision“.

REVIEWED: New albums by The Waterboys, Eiko Ishibashi, Bob Mould, Tobacco City, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Brown Horse, Beirut, Songs Of Green Pheasant; archive releases by Souled American, Sex Pistols, Ibex Band, Hiroshi Yoshimura and William Hooker With David S Ware & Alan Braufman; Lloyd Cole and Unclassified Live live; Sly Stone on TV and John and Paul and Brian Wilson in books.

PLUS: Garth Hudson and Mike Ratledge depart; Bob Dylan‘s Tangled Up In Blue reimagined; TV On The Radio‘s Tunde Adebimpe on his favourite albums; Mick Jones‘ attic-full of memorabilia; Middle Earth revisited; a Banshee wails; The Lemon Twigs and Stephen Kalinich team up… and introducing Silver Synthetic.

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Send us your questions for Suzanne Vega!

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Suzanne Vega!

Much like Bob Dylan, Suzanne Vega came up through the Greenwich Village folk scene. And much like Dylan, she made her name by writing massively popular songs that brought societal issues to wider attention (see: “Luka”, a global Top 10 hit in 1987).

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

The connections continue on Suzanne Vega’s forthcoming new album, Flying With Angels, which as she revealed to Uncut in our 2025 albums preview contains a kind of answer song to Bob Dylan’s “I Want You”, written from the point of view of the chambermaid.

Her first album of original material in almost a decade, is poised to be an eclectic collection. You may have already heard the excellent, dance-punky single “Rats”; but as Vega told us, “some songs are more classic rock’n’roll, there are a couple that are sort of folk-rocky, and a couple that are just plain folky. The other surprise is probably a song called ‘Love Thief’, which is almost like an R&B/Motown song.”

The album is due out on May 2. She’s also touring the US in March, with European dates to follow in the autumn.

But before that, Vega has kindly consented to a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a songwriting grandmaster? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Monday (March 3) and Suzanne will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

Yazz Ahmed – A Paradise In The Hold

Ana Gavrilovska
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Yazz Ahmed – A Paradise In The Hold

Buy A Paradise In The Hold here

Trumpeter, flugelhornist and composer Yazz Ahmed has created her most exquisite sonic world yet on A Paradise In The Hold, 10 tracks of magnetic, boundary-transcending jazz that intricately blend influences from her British-Bahraini heritage. Drawn to storytelling, Ahmed writes compositions that tend to have a narrative flow. On this record, her approach is shaped by two traditional forms: joyful Bahraini wedding poems and the sorrowful work songs of the pearl divers. It’s a natural pairing of her interests, incorporating the cultural expressions of weddings with the pure folklore of the pearl divers, who no longer exist in terms of a workforce but remain enshrined in the memory of the uniquely Bahraini genre known as fidjeri, or sea music.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

The journey that led to this album began in 2014, during a research trip taken by Ahmed to Bahrain, the island nation between Qatar and the northeastern coast of Saudi Arabia where she spent her early childhood. Some of the former pearl divers have formed choirs that tour around the Gulf, so she was able to see the Pearl Divers of Muharraq perform at their clubhouse. She sought further inspiration in local bookshops and found it in wedding poems, which often celebrated beauty by connecting it with nature. Her grandfather even sang her songs from his own wedding day. She was just as intrigued by the celebratory music of traditional women’s drumming circles, the way they offered a strong yet playful contrast to the melancholy fidjeri of the pearl divers. Ahmed braids it all together in the hypnotic atmosphere of Paradise…, deftly incorporating traditional polyrhythms with the textural possibilities of modern music.

Ahmed tends to work her subjects into the very form of her compositions. On Paradise…, this process is subtle but refined. The pearl divers sing fidjeri when they’re out at sea, songs about missing loved ones back home. But they also incorporate the actions of a mariner into the music itself, the sounds of pulling the sails and heaving the rope. Ahmed took all these little characteristics and chopped them up, processing them into something unrecognisable and new, which then inspired her to write basslines and melodies. The original field recordings can’t be heard on the album, but their spirit is integral to its very existence.

The songs here, however, are not the first to arise out of Ahmed’s experiences in 2014. That would be the 90-minute suite “Alhaan al Siduri”, named for the Epic of Gilgamesh’s Siduri, a wise woman who lives on a beautiful island, which some scholars have suggested is Bahrain. Ahmed reworked that suite’s main theme into the stunning album opener “She Stands On The Shore”. The trumpet is one of the very first sounds we hear, setting an expressive, yearning tone that will reappear throughout. Samy Bishai’s pensive violin matches this tone just prior to Natacha Atlas’ voice entering the frame, building upon the reverent atmosphere before swirling synths give way to unbeatable grooves.

Ahmed is in full-on underwater sci-fi mode on the mythic, haunting “Mermaids’ Tears”, inky synths and gauzy trumpet best appreciated with a close listen on headphones. But the album, which marks her first time writing for voice, may be at its very best on “Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You”, the lyrics of which were adapted by Ahmed from the words of a pearl divers’ standard, first in English then translated to Arabic. The chants that open this composition are instantly reminiscent of an Arabic-infused take on Alice Coltrane’s ashram recordings, shot through with synth fizz and percussive handclaps. The voices swirl around each other, a spiral of emotion guiding us through the terrain of the song. It closes with an exultant trumpet solo from Ahmed as the final bass note rings out, akin to Ron Carter’s hypnotic grooves on Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, The El Daoud.

A wealth of instrumentation gives this album its shape and textures, but Ralph Wyld’s vibraphone, George Crowley’s bass clarinet and Alcyona Mick’s Fender Rhodes in particular really fill out the aquatic themes, able to evoke gurgling bubbles and rickety wooden ships in equal measure. The range of vocalists brings us back to Earth, grounding the music to the lives of the people who inspire the emotion behind it all. Paradise… brims with life and imagination, humming with the brilliant paradox of a communal spirit imbued with Ahmed’s creative imprint over every note. It’s the work of a composer wrapping her arms around what is possible, surfacing triumphantly with a new form of beauty.

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Sam Fender – People Watching

Stephen Troussé
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Sam Fender – People Watching

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It’s easy to be skeptical of Sam Fender. Blond, blue eyed, looking like Gary Barlow’s indie kid brother, with a name that feels like a brand endorsement, when he picked up the Critics Award at the 2019 BRITs, you might have mistaken him for the industry’s latest tastefully distressed millennial singer-songwriter. But since his debut single in 2017, the canny chanter from North Shields has emerged as the most driven, distinctive and fascinating British pop artist since Amy Winehouse.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

His second album, Seventeen Going Under, released in autumn 2021, was a remarkable achievement in particular, a British pop record that revealed something of the temper of modern times. Fender sang of retail parks, cocaine, casual violence, the DWP and suicide – a world familiar enough in the works of Stormzy or Sleaford Mods, but close to a revelation in the heart of the Radio 2 A-list.

What sold the vision was Fender’s endearing anger and confusion, and his rich Geordie roar, as though the Angel of the North was suddenly breaking into song. No less important was his ability to pull off a convincing take on what his wikipedia page describes as “heartland rock”. In practice it’s the sound of mid-’80s Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen filtered through the dynamics of The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys – with maybe a distant jangling echo of great lost mid-80s Tyneside hopes Hurrah!.

People Watching, his third album, has been a couple of years in the making, recorded in London and then LA, and reveals an artist at a crossroads. The title track, released as the lead single at the end of last year, showcased his collaboration with Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs and felt like a statement of intent. Though it’s rooted in a familiar Fenderworld – a bedside vigil for a dying mentor in an underfunded care home – Granduciel’s booming production seems scaled for the freeway rather the A167. So much of the album seems to have at least one foot or a couple of wheels across the Atlantic: “Crumbling Empire” opens on the ruined streets of Detroit and cruises along in Granduciel’s baleful Bruce Hornsby mode. And in “Wild Long Lie” one of Fender’s mates takes an unlikely moment out from caning it to consider American carceral policy.

If one route from Fender’s crossroads leads to the US, selling heartland rock back to the homeland (it beats taking coals to Newcastle) then another leads back to the old towns and villages where he increasingly feels like a stranger. If Seventeen Going Under was created out of an enforced period of lockdown introspection, People Watching wants to be an opening up, a re-engagement with old pals, guided by the affectionate but implacable spirit of Tish Murtha, the documentary photographer whose pictures grace the artwork.

But if Fender gets out of the confines of his own head, he finds plenty of people getting out of theirs. The ghost of Oasis seems to haunt a lot of the album, from the “Wonderwall”-y guitars that open “Chin Up”, an attempt to lean into and dance with the wild mood swings, to the pervading blizzard of cocaine that falls over so many characters in “Wild Long Lie” which concludes “I think I need to leave this town”.

One more road then, leads straight back inside the prison of the ego. “TV Dinner” is the album’s biggest departure. Over doleful piano chords, it’s a paranoid declaration of independence worthy of Kendrick Lamar, harking back to the demise of Amy Winehouse and detailing all the ways that young talents are led to market as cash cows. “No-one,” he sings defiantly, “gets into my space.”

But Fender – a man very proud of his Greggs Gold card – is ultimately too gregarious to stay in this fortress of solitude for very long. The album concludes back home “stomping around the village with you again”. “Something Heavy” is his version of “The Weight” – a hymn to mutual support in tough times, an offer to keep the kettle boiling even as everyone in the town falls victim to the black dogs of depression.

And the closing “Remember My Name” returns to his old council house in North Shields, with the rousing swells of the Easington Colliery Brass Band and Fender sounding a little like Sting in his higher register. For a lesser artist it might risk embarrassment: a Hovis ad homily to hearth and home. But it’s part of Sam Fender’s art that, like the Boss or Lindesfarne’s Alan Hull, he’s unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, the people and community he’s still a part of and still committed to. In the rolling turmoil of 2025, these troubled heartlands need him more than ever.

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Introducing…Ultimate Record Collection: The Beatles, Vol 1

John Robinson
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Introducing…Ultimate Record Collection: The Beatles, Vol 1

Like me, you probably think you know the story arc of The Beatles pretty well. As we’ve worked on this new publication, the latest edition in our Ultimate Record Collection series, out tomorrow, it’s been a delight to find that the Beatles narrative can still offer up some delightful surprises. 

And the story here? This magazine presents insightful new writing on every Beatles record in order of its appearance, forming a definitive timeline of the first and most thrillingly intense part of the group’s career. What emerges as you listen to the music and read the following pages isn’t only a renewed pleasure in the songs, but also a respect for the Beatles’ composure as the storm of their new fame grew around them.

New fantastic self-penned music followed quickly on the heels of their initial hits. No group had done anything quite like this before, and neither had the record industry, which now had to meet the phenomenal demand for new music. Here you’ll be able to get an idea of how that worked in real time. Alongside the albums you likely know and love already, you’ll see the profusion of new singles, and also the less-familiar formats like the EPs, in their incentivising picture sleeves. Then there’s the overseas editions. 

You could spend a happy lifetime immersing yourself into the worldwide Beatles, but here we’ve confined ourselves, with a few exceptions, to the UK and North American records. For sure, there’s a wry remark or two to be made at the expense of the way the United States handled the album releases – slicing and dicing “superfluous” tracks here, assembling new albums from the cuts, adding the singles (or taking them away). But observing their label’s initial lack of interest, and their haste to try and catch up, you feel not only the size of a less-connected world – and also just how manic Beatlemania must have felt to those involved with servicing its demands. You could even find yourself making the case that Meet The Beatles is a superior document of the era because it starts with “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. We’ve aired our thoughts, and reviewed every record.

We have punctuated the quickfire succession of these releases with other noteworthy events on the timeline. The momentous television broadcasts. The radio appearances. The key business meetings, personnel changes and live shows. What else? From Uncut’s features archive, we’ve pulled deep insights and eyewitness accounts on the formative appearances in Hamburg, on A Hard Day’s Night and the group’s pivotal 1962 (“Not a bad 12 months, was it?”)

As you’ll read here, The Beatles were working collectively like a dog – so hard in fact, we’ve had to expand their story into a second volume, which you can pre-order from us now. We’ll see you here next month with more fab gear!

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