Panda Bear and Sonic Boom – aka Noah Lennox and Pete Kember – have released the Reset Mariachi EP, a reworking of two tracks from their 2022 album, Reset.
Resert Mariachi was rerecorded with the Mexico City outfit Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez.
The EP features two Spanish-language versions of “Peligro (Danger)” and “Viviendo en las sequelas (Livin’ in the After),” one sung by Panda Bear and Sonic Boom and one sung by the vocalists of Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez, with both featuring instrumentals from the mariachis, including guitarron, vihuela, guitar, trumpet, and strings.
The digital EP adds Songbook Instrumental versions of both songs and includes sheet music with Spanish translation; the vinyl version, out September 20 and available for pre-order now, features a “Magic Matrix Puzzle Platter” dual concentric vinyl cut where either version has equal possibility of playing.
Panda Boom have also shares two versions of an animated video by Lucas Moreira & Studio Sparks for both versions of “Peligro (Danger)”.
I joined The Searchers’ fanclub when I was 11, but the first single I ever bought was “5D (Fifth Dimension)” by The Byrds. I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was on about, and you couldn’t dance to it because it was in waltz time, but it was fantastic. By buying it, I became a music fan – you could tell, because I owned a single by The Byrds! It was the first step. I was living in Kettering, a little out-of-the-way East Midlands market town, and all of a sudden there was psychedelia, which I thought had to do with long hair and colours. I didn’t know about drugs or anything like that, but I knew that there was a new world somewhere and perhaps I could be part of it.
CREAM
Wheels Of Fire
POLYDOR, 1968
“Crossroads” was really the only song I would listen to on Wheels Of Fire, it was just fantastic. How three human beings could make that amount of noise, and go off in totally different directions but still sound amazing, was incredible to me. So I started going to concerts. Me and my mate went down to London in 1969 for the Pop Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. We saw Blodwyn Pig, The Liverpool Scene and Led Zeppelin – it was totemic, amazing! I was 15 years old and I’d never heard anything so loud in my life. It was the greatest thing that had happened in my life up to that point, being in this place with so many people, listening to this ferocious noise.
THE ROLLING STONES
Exile On Main St
ROLLING STONES RECORDS, 1972
In 1972, I moved away from home and went to Coventry Art School. I’d see concerts at Lanchester Polytechnic: I saw Man, I saw Ace… I saw Captain Beefheart, which was incredible. I joined the college band, and also I heard Exile On Main St for the first time. I think it’s the greatest album ever made. I’m one of those guys, I’m afraid – although Bill Wyman only plays on half the album. I’m a bass player, so I know these things. The bass is either played by Mick Taylor, Keith Richards, or some guy called Bill Plummer, who I’ve never heard of, but he plays on my favourite song, which is “All Down The Line”. Yeah, that music makes me drive my car faster. It’s great, I love it.
TERRY REID
River
ATLANTIC, 1973
Another album that I really loved was River, which is Conrad Isidore on drums, Lee Miles on bass, David Lindley on guitar, and of course Terry Reid with his amazing voice. The first side of River, that’s right up there. For me, it’s the sound of his voice, and the rhythm section is so funky without being heavy – it’s amazing music. It’s one of those things where I remember where I was when I first heard it. I was in Southampton with the drummer in the college band. We were at a friend of his, and he played it. I was open-mouthed – I thought, ‘Wow!’ Then I went out and bought it the next week.
LITTLE FEAT
Feats Don’t Fail Me Now
WARNER BROS, 1974
At college, I learned to dance – or I felt more comfortable dancing than when I was when I was a teenager. Why was it that I danced to Motown and Stax and Atlantic and not Pickettywitch or Love Affair? It was because I started listening to bass guitar, so I got really into all that music. I saw Average White Band at Coventry Technical College and they did an encore of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, which was transcendent. But one of the most amazing concerts I’ve ever seen in my life is Little Feat at Birmingham Odeon in 1976. They were incredible. How all those people could make such amazing music was absolutely beyond me. Feats Don’t Fail Me Now is the one that I keep going back to, it’s so good.
BURNING SPEAR
Garvey’s Ghost
ISLAND, 1976
I started listening to reggae via Jerry Dammers and the guys that eventually became The Specials. I didn’t really understand it first off, but then someone stood me in the corner at a blues dance next to this huge speaker system and it was like, ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’ Lynval Golding and his friend Desmond Brown [The Selecter], they used to come round my flat with reggae singles and say, ‘OK, listen – this is how the bass goes.’ [Rico Rodriguez’s] Man From Wareika was the album that united a lot of the white guys in The Specials. But I think my favourite is Garvey’s Ghost, which is the dub version of Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey. It’s really interesting to see how they interpret the songs.
THE FABULOUS THUNDERBIRDS
The Fabulous Thunderbirds (Girls Go Wild)
CHRYSALIS
After The Specials, I went back to blues. I spent probably two years listening to the first two Fabulous Thunderbirds albums. I thought they were the greatest band ever, because they were like a bar band – they just set up, played and everybody had a good time. It was the equivalent of what I experienced with the pub rock thing in London in the ’70s. I ran a little four-piece blues combo in Coventry for the past 20 years, we just played locally. We once went as far south as Cheltenham, but we didn’t like it! And that was lovely, playing in pubs for 150 quid. So that’s always been a part of me, and the Dirt Road Band is just an extension of that.
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Decoration Day
NEW WEST, 2003
The only album that’s really wiped me out recently is Decoration Day by Drive-By Truckers. I read an article about them and they sounded really interesting. This is gonna sound really posey, but I was in Amoeba Records in Hollywood and there it was: I bought a secondhand copy, and I was stunned. It sounds like Neil Young & Crazy Horse, that ragged guitar kind of thing, but the songs are fantastic. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley both write great stuff – and on Decoration Day, Jason Isbell was in the band as well. I’ve been buying other albums of theirs, but I think Decoration Day is probably the one.
Dirt Road Band’s Righteous is out now on DRB Records
That elderly lady in the loft, who had no shower or kitchen, who threw parties for the bohemian crowd, where she played strange, ringing, twanging instruments with a faraway look in her eyes? Around New Orleans they said she lived in a hippy commune before hippies existed, or worked her passage as a cabin girl on a Mississippi steamboat, or ran away to a monastery in Mexico with an anarchist priest. They said she had two kids, that she had studied in Europe and travelled all over the world; some said she was secretly involved in a famous pop group over there, though none knew which; others warned not to speak ill of her, lest she cause her hammers to bludgeon the dulcimer of your heart.
These things they said were pretty much true. For Dorothy Carter, whose life ended after 68 years with a stroke in 2003, lived a nomadic, chaotic, private life whose richness found its expression in music – a mesmerizing tapestry of medievalism, folk, songwriting and proto-new age ambient recalled by many who knew her as something transcendent and bewitching.
That’s certainly the impression gained by this masterful re-release of Carter’s 1976 private press LP Troubadour. Its cover artwork, reminiscent of an Edwardian fairytale illustration, drops you straight into a sepia-tinged sensibility. Carter is drawn on the front as a minstrel playing hammered dulcimer in a field outside a fortified citadel. On the reverse are blurry photos of Carter’s instrumentarium, an antique road show of psalteries, sitar, tambour, various dulcimers, flutes, harps and hand drums. The track list is a polyglot assemblage – tunes and songs from medieval France, England and Scotland, psalms, Irish and Israeli melodies, an Essene hymn, a Ukrainian carol, Appalachian folk songs. Although separated in space, their common thread is the rilling, liquid percussion of the dulcimer, a trapezoid-shaped zither native to most corners of civilization and imported to the US East Coast by early 19th century German immigrants. In Carter’s hands, the dulcimer acts as a magical portal which allows Eurasia’s ancient musical spirits to flow into the estuary of 1970s, post-counterculture America.
Carter was not the first of her generation for whom folk music was a tributary from the past. The antiquarian urge was strong in the likes of John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Sandy Bull in the US, and British counterparts John Renbourn, Maddy Prior and Tim Hart. In Carter’s hands, though, the past is composed not of dust but of quicksilver. Opener “Troubadour Song”, with its sprightly dulcimer and pulsing drum, could have come from a David Munrow early music album. Then come the flocking notes and keening flute of “The Cuckoo”; the twinkling lament of “Binnorie”, the glorious songs “Make A Joyful Sound” and “Shirt Of Lace”. The ghost harmonics of her “Troubadour Songs On The Psaltery”. The eerie sensation, in “Tree Of Life”, of time taking a breath in some sun-dappled courtyard in Samarkand.
What makes Carter so intriguing is that she was not just a bargain-hunter at folk music’s white elephant table, but had connections with a fledgling realm of experimental music, alternative tuning and sound art. This was forged after a chance (or cosmically predetermined) meeting with Robert Rutman in Mexico. Rutman, an artist who worked with steel cello and long string vibrations, was living in Mexico City with expatriates David Demby and his wife Constance, who would go on to make a successful career as a spacey new age composer. Rutman, Constance Demby and Carter sparked each other’s creativity for many years after, including in the avant-garde improv band Central Maine Power Company. Rutman later played on Carter’s album Waillee Waillee, which was re-released last year. Eric Demby, son of David and Constance, has contributed vivid notes to Drag City’s Troubadour reissue, providing first-person testimony to Carter’s bewitching presence and her role as a musical vessel rather than a composer.
Demby confirms that Dorothy Carter crossed paths with Laraaji while busking on the streets around Washington Square Park in New York during the ’70s. It makes sense that she was a part of this impermanent network of troubadours, searching for meaning through otherworldly tones, who did not feel a strong pull to monetise their music in the conventional way. The eclecticism and precariousness of her life story also parallels that of Harry Smith, who believed that the collecting and passing-on of songs and folklore put humans in touch with potent ur-civilisational forces for change.
Carter had studied music at Bard College and the Royal Academy of Music in London, but her career path was wayward and pot-holed. Troubadour emerged from the ‘back to the land’ communities of Maine and New England where she ended up in the mid-’70s, living in a hut teetering on wooden stilts. By the mid-’90s she fetched up in Berlin, where she made the acquaintance of Alex Hacke from Einstürzende Neubauten, and contributed a cobweb-light dulcimer solo to the ambient techno track “Things You Like To Hear” by Sun Electric. She is credited as a co-founder of The Medieval Baebes and can be heard on their late-’90s albums Salva Nos and Worldes Blysse. Despite these fascinating side trips, Troubadour makes it clear that Dorothy Carter didn’t view music as bread and butter, but as an eternal stream from which communities could be refreshed.
Both Jewish and Arab, musically omnivorous but unmistakeably Middle Eastern, globe-trotting trio El Khat are a fascinating hot mess of sounds and influences. Their founder, frontman and primary songwriter Eyal El Wahab is part of the huge Yemeni-Jewish population in Israel, mostly children of refugees who fled persecution in Yemen in the late 1940s, a diaspora now numbering over 400,000. Named after the plant famous for inducing mind-bending euphoria, El Khat’s mission is to keep the unsung cultural heritage of their ancestors alive, but on their own terms, adding a healthy dollop of DIY attitude, psych-rock energy and noisy experimentalism. They are promiscuous folk-punk mongrels, not prim world-music puritans.
El Wahab grew up on sober classical and sacred Jewish music. Indeed, his unlikely apprenticeship for El Khat was teaching himself the cello in his twenties, then joining the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra, who specialise in Arabic music from North Africa. But his sonic horizons were blown wide open by the 2012 crate-digging compilation album Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s From Yemen, a treasure trove of lost gems, impassioned vocals and lo-fi arrangements that struck a deep chord with his own half-remembered family heritage. Liberated from concert halls, shaking off the shackles of middlebrow good taste, he quit the orchestra and formed El Khat.
El Khat’s restless wanderlust has taken them from Tel Aviv to their current Berlin home, via stopovers in Brooklyn and other destinations. Their third album digs deeper into their signature junk-shop aesthetic, with El Wahab making his own instruments from scavenged scraps of wood, metal and plastic. This extreme form of recycling is both pragmatic and conceptual: partly a homage to his impoverished Yemeni musical ancestors, and partly a quest for a kind of authentically punky rawness, but also an imaginative way of giving the band a unique sound. Mutefeatures water jugs, plates and kitchen implements alongside more conventional cello, trumpet, violin and organ. Previous albums have included the sampled whoosh of subway trains, bleating goats and sheep. El Wahab is an avowed fan of life’s gritty, grungy imperfections.
Already released as a single, album opener “Tislami Tislami” is a gloriously ragged call to arms, its insistent circular melody full of angular scrapes and nerve-snapping twangs, brassy fanfares and tin-can percussion, herky-jerky rhythms and needling vocals. The title derives from a warm-hearted Arabic word for thanks, but El Wahab’s lyric is edged with punky sarcasm apparently aimed at a cheating ex-lover. Part of the English translation says: “Thank you for the endless tears/So we can have many beers… Thank you for going with another man/So I go to the sea more often.”
Another mighty racket is “Commodore Lothan”, a thrillingly kinetic bone-shaker of clattering clonks, knotty tangles, bowed strings and light-touch electronic twinkles. The furiously inventive, impatient, lopsided rhythm here is pure post-punk, sounding like early PiL stuck in a horn-honking traffic jam, with guest vocalist Katrin Lasko adding a sweeter echo to El Wahab’s microtonal warbles and lusty ululations. The title pays playful, in-jokey tribute to the band’s drummer Lotan Yaish, while the lyric is a philosophical poem with a lunar theme: “From the perspective of the moon, there is neither secular nor religious,” El Wahab croons. “From the perspective of the moon, your wealth doesn’t matter…”
A key highlight among the instrumental tracks is El Khat’s skewed love letter to their new Berlin home. “Almania”, the Arabic name for Germany, is a sprawling acoustic action painting that flirts with cosmic dub reggae at times. A skipping, shuffling, exploded tapestry of plucked strings, pitch-bending fanfares and keyboard runs that seem to gallop off into infinity, it radiates immense charm and almost childlike surrealism, a luminous exercise in kindergarten krautrock remixed by Doctor Seuss.
The longest, most complex compositions here are “Zafa” and its louder, faster sequel “Zafa: Talaatam”. The opening section begins as a surging, swaying shanty with a funky metal-bashing rhythm. Then midway through the melody crests a hill and accelerates into a frenzied post-rock maelstrom of explosive percussion, wild swerves and crazed centrifugal energy, an exhilarating runaway train ride that threatens to hurtle off the tracks at any moment.
From the boisterous brassy bustle and vertiginous key changes of “La WaLa” to the perfumed melancholy and tricksy stop-start architecture of closing number “Intissar”, there is precious little second-rank surplus here. A couple of shorter, more conventional tracks are minor weak points, diluting the band’s electrifying fusion mash-up. But for the most part, Mute finds fertile crosstown traffic between ancient and modern, tradition and innovation, harmony and dissonance, local and universal.
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She arrives, of course, as if by magic. As dancers dressed with giant flower petal costumes move around the stage, like extras from Rio Carnival, she appears without warning, popping up from a trapdoor in the centre of a walkway stretching deep into the audience. She is beamed onto a giant screen that covers the length of the stage, her expression suggesting she’s seemingly been caught by surprise – what are you lot doing here? – before she bursts out smiling and the roar of the crowd gets even louder.
You join us on the penultimate European date of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, a trek which began last March in Glendale and concludes in December in Vancouver. The Eras Tour comes trailing its own set of eye-watering statistics – from global pre-sales to attendance figures and box office receipts – accompanied by an unbroken cycle of clickbait news stories, from the price hikes of hotel rooms near the venues to the grilled chicken handed out by Swift’s father to hungry fans and the value of freebie tickets reportedly gifted to Keir Starmer.
The tragedy of the Southport murders and the Vienna bomb plot, meanwhile, may have unavoidably amplified the mood of this last leg of the European tour, but none of it diminishes the show itself. The atmosphere here is, if not exactly one of outright defiance, then certainly filled with hope, as if the charming loyalty and optimism of the Swifties – all smiles, sparkles and friendship bracelets – has created an aura of goodwill and positivity along the Olympic Way and into Wembley Stadium itself. Even the rain is enterprisingly co-opted into the show: “I think when it rains for more than six minutes, we can officially declare it a rain show!”
It would be hard to dent the Eras Tour spectacle. This is as well-drilled as a Broadway show – at one point, Swift talks collectively about her stage entourage that includes musicians and dancers as “performers” – and full of visual tropes referencing everything from musicals to fairy tales. The tour set-list that covers each of her 10 studio albums one at a time, feels like the ATP classic album treatment – Iggy and the Stooges play Raw Power in full! – but on a massive scale. The Red era – the colour scheme recalls another Nashville incomer, though with more sparkles than The White Stripes – gives way to the leather and beats of Reputation and on through the Stanley Donwood-meets-Marvel Comics decorations of Folklore/Evermore, the cheerleader pop of 1989 and the cold, MC Escher-like structures of TheTortured Poets Department. These are not presented sequentially, so while the narrative of Swift’s artistic development is fragmented, what does emerge is the consistency of her work – from the dubby, Clash/MIA basslines of “You Need To Come Down” to the ‘70s singer-songwriter qualities of “All Too Well”, the minor-chord melancholia of “Champagne Problems” and the sleek synth pop of “Fortnight”. At the core of all these different Taylors, though, is song craft and she’s never better than when solo with guitar or at her piano.
What we learn about Swift herself from all this is a different matter. The autobiographical nature of her songwriting – in essence: “I can handle my shit” from “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” – is empowering but relies mostly on shared experiences rather than drilling deep into specifics. The Tortured Poets Department may be a roman-a-cléf about Swift’s own romantic disruptions – “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea hotel” – but it works best as a generalised meditation on discontent, vengeance and wisdom. But here are other clues, on display. Earlier on in the day, during Paramore’s support slot, Hayley Williams spoke about how they got their chops together in Swift’s basement in Nashville. A great chunk of Swift’s set takes place with her leading her band with an acoustic guitar, a throwback to her hopeful, early slots at the Bluebird Café What the Eras Tour unquestionably, but discretely, underlines is her drive and determination – to overcome early Music Row rejection and push on, honing her craft and ultimately ending up here, adeptly shapeshifting from Tinker Bell to Elsa and beyond in front of 92,000 people. “My name is Taylor, thank you for travelling with us at the Eras Tour.”
“Rock’n’roll,” sang Alex Chilton on 1972’s “Thirteen”, “is here to stay…” We couldn’t agree more, so it’s a real honour to present Out Past Midnight: A Big Star Sampler, a compilation of hand-picked tracks from one of the greatest bands of all time. With this CD, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of Big Star’s Radio City, along with the live tribute shows later this year, and marking a half-century since Chris Bell set out on his solo career with I Am The Cosmos – but really, there’s no need for an excuse to immerse yourself in Big Star.
You can read more about Chris Bell and that incredible, harrowing solo record in the same issue, dated October 2024 (it’s out in UK shops now, or available to buy online), but in the meantime spin these 10 tracks and chart the group’s journey from power-pop perfection on 1972’s #1 Record to the more unhinged, rawer grooves of 1974’s Radio City, and finally the expansive, avant-garde obliteration of Third, recorded in late ’74 and first released four years later.
We hope you dig this sampler as much as we do, whether you’re revisiting these cuts, discovering the rarities or making your first ventures into the world of Chilton, Bell and co. As the former sang on “Thank You Friends”, it’s “never too late to start…”
1 IN THE STREET AVAILABLE ON THE CRAFT ALBUM, #1 RECORD We kick off with perhaps the best-known Big Star track, a joyous, effervescent power-pop song sung by Chris Bell. Much like Chilton’s “Thirteen”, it finds the group looking back to their youth, the days of freedom first tasted but not yet captured: “Wish we had a joint so bad…” Under it all, masterfully arranged guitars, some neatly chiming and others phased and double-tracked, pick out the off-kilter, sugar-sweet riff and lyrical solo.
2 WHEN MY BABY’S BESIDE ME (ALTERNATE MIX, 1972) AVAILABLE ON THE OMNIVORE SOUNDTRACK, NOTHING CAN HURT ME Here’s an early mix of the group’s first single, a power-pop ur-text sung by Alex Chilton, which also served as the opener of #1 Record’s second side. This mix is rawer and airier than the final version, with the drums flung across the stereo spectrum; and yet this emptiness allows us to hear the sublime interlocking guitars of Bell and Chilton, sparring and taking turns to step up.
3 TRY AGAIN AVAILABLE ON THE CRAFT ALBUM, #1 RECORD Smack bang in the heart of the acoustic section that closes the group’s debut, “Try Again” is perhaps the Big Star song that most keenly throws forward to I Am The Cosmos, which Bell would begin two years later. With its pained, heartfelt pleas to the Lord, wall of strummed acoustics and harmonised slide guitars, there’s also more than a hint of George Harrison’s solo work here. That it stands up to that comparison is a mark of its quality.
4 YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE (ALTERNATE MIX, 1973) AVAILABLE ON THE OMNIVORE SOUNDTRACK, NOTHING CAN HURT ME A spiky highlight of second album Radio City here, recorded by the trio of Alex Chilton, drummer Jody Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel after the commercial failure of their debut and the departure of Chris Bell. The middle eight, Chilton’s howl and ensuing Stratocaster solo remain one of the most thrilling parts of the group’s catalogue, and this rare mix only serves to better highlight the raw dynamism of the trio’s sound.
5 DAISY GLAZE AVAILABLE ON THE CRAFT ALBUM, RADIO CITY With writing credits for the whole trio, this suite seems to capture all sides of Big Star: it begins as a morose ballad, the group unsteady, swaying and under the influence, Chilton crying out in abandonment; by the end it’s erupted into a pounding rock juggernaut, the singer having found his strength, even if it’s just to score and proclaim “you’re gonna decease!”
6 O MY SOUL AVAILABLE ON THE CRAFT ALBUM, RADIO CITY Their second album’s opener – only ever available in mono – gives a rare glimpse of Big Star’s heritage; they were, after all, a Memphis band, and on the strutting R&B of the verses they sound it. This is basically a live take, with Chilton’s lead and rhythm guitar part especially stunning, and the overdubbed Mellotron adding some Beatles-y psychedelia to the swampy funk.
7 KANGA ROO AVAILABLE ON THE OMNIVORE ALBUM, COMPLETE THIRD This floating hallucination of a song was recorded by Chilton – on 12-string acoustic and vocals – on one track, and famously given to producer Jim Dickinson as a kind of mischievous dare, to see what he could add to it. The result is sublime, with Mellotrons, guitar feedback and phased drums elevating the original recording into a symphonic, scarred masterpiece.
8 KIZZA ME (FRY ROUGH MIX) AVAILABLE ON THE OMNIVORE ALBUM, COMPLETE THIRD A raging rock number pledging devotion to Chilton’s girlfriend Lesa Aldridge, this opens some versions of Big Star’s third album, recorded when the group were down to the duo of Chilton and Stephens. With its psychedelic punk swirl of sawtooth guitars, cello and barroom piano, this early mix by engineer John Fry is even more manic than the final version; in the strange world of Third, then, a bona fide success.
9 TAKE CARE (FRY ROUGH MIX) AVAILABLE ON THE OMNIVORE ALBUM, COMPLETE THIRD After the nihilism and pain of Third – check out, of course, the crushing “Holocaust” for a really bad time – this acoustic waltz is a tonic, a tender hymn of kindness in the face of darkness. This mix is stumbling and starker, with accordion and eerie whistling foregrounded, and no sign of those romantic violins that tug on the heartstrings in the final version.
10 THANK YOU FRIENDS (FRY ROUGH MIX) AVAILABLE ON THE OMNIVORE ALBUM, COMPLETE THIRD The most uplifting track on Third, and perhaps in the band’s entire body of work, is even more affecting in this rawer form; before the strings, spangled guitar solo and cooing gospel backing singers, was this perfect live take. As with the previous 10 tracks here, there’s something wonderfully organic about the performance, a humanity that’s kept Big Star’s music so beloved for half a century and counting.
A tough act to follow, Led Zeppelin. And as you’ll read in the latest Ultimate Music Guide, just because you were Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the band’s main songwriters, didn’t mean that you found it easy.
For Robert Plant, in the first place it meant retrenching in the past: gathering some bandmates from 15 years ago, and songs even older than that. The mission? To shake out the cobwebs round Britain’s university venues with a band he called the Honeydrippers. Jimmy Page meanwhile hit the rehearsal rooms with Chris Squire from Yes, and plans for another supergroup.
Plant’s willingness to deviate from the accepted path has characterised his music since, making his own way – falteringly at first – and then more confidently charting his course through a solo career made from the base elements of folk, psychedelia and world music. Page solo recordings have been fewer and more widely scattered, as he has dedicated much of his creative life since to preserving the Zeppelin legacy. It’s something that even 30 years ago, he was talking about as his “life’s work”.
Zeppelin, of course, remained in the pair’s DNA. In the magazine, we cover the live reunions both well-intended, casual, and completely jawdropping (like the one in 2007 which we review inside). We also review in depth the recordings the pair made together that pre-dated that reunion. There’s the superb No Quarter, the pair’s completely original take on the MTV Unplugged format, which brings Zeppelin songs to a new type of existence in the company of North African musicians.
Then there’s Walking Into Clarksdale which showed the pair’s willingness to embrace new surroundings, by making an album with the legendary record engineer Steve Albini who died earlier this year. As Steve told me some years ago when we spoke for Uncut, there was a pretty unique set of circumstances involved in trying to make a record with the pair following Led Zeppelin, but that ultimately it was a nice problem to have.
“Every couple of days, Robert Plant would turn up with a sheaf of records that he had just bought, and force Jimmy to listen to things he thought were intriguing,” he told me. “You could tell, they were genuine, committed, lifelong music fans and they were interested in making this record a collaboration.
“Having said that,” he continued, “they do have more money than God, and they live like pre-revolutionary French royalty, and I don’t think anyone has ever said “no” to them. People have asked me what those guys were like, and I have to say I don’t know what kind of people they are, they’ve lived unique existences since they were teenagers. At any time, they could, on the spur of the moment, decide to buy an island. How can you evaluate what kind of a person someone is in those circumstances?”
Follow that. And enjoy the magazine. Get yours here!
Amelia Earhart was the pioneering American aviator who, among her many achievements, became the first women to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932. She led the way in other areas too, using her fame to champion women’s rights, including the Equal Rights Movement, endorse commercial air travel, write bestselling books, take on sponsorship deals and, more broadly, promote her passions in public. She had the ear of President Roosevelt and blazed a trail for women in an industry where female pilots and mechanics are still woefully underrepresented.
On Amelia, Laurie Anderson tells the story of Earhart’s life as she makes her fateful attempt, in 1937, to circumnavigate the world in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra plane. It’s a riveting tale anyway, straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, but Anderson – who was first commissioned to work on this back in 2000 and has performed versions of it, on and off, since then – puts herself in Earhart’s position, right in the cockpit, so that we experience the journey as a daily diary inspired by Earhart’s own pilot entries. With Anderson at the controls, imagining what it’s like to fly, it flows as if in a dream state – part biography, part hallucinatory audiobook.
Having written about herself from an anthropological point of view for much of her career – most recently on 2018’s Landfall, with Kronos Quartet, about Hurricane Sandy, and 2015’s reflection on mortality, Heart Of A Dog – Amelia is Anderson’s first major work of biography. But she approaches Earhart with the same cool-headed mix of fascination and curiosity as any of her weightier subjects, looking for what made the woman tick and extracting the humanity in the story through her research. Of course, both Anderson and Earhart are pioneers in their respective fields, and you sense that Anderson sees something of herself in the way Earhart instinctively positioned herself at the forefront of communications, science and technology in the 1930s while breaking down barriers between the sexes. “She was the original blogger,” says Anderson, noting that had Earhart lived, she planned to open an engineering school for girls. As Earhart declares, in a broadcast excerpt Anderson uses for one track: “This modern world of science and invention is of particular interest to women, for the lives of women have been more affected by its new horizons that any other group.”
Anderson calls her first performance of Amelia, at Carnegie Hall in New York in 2000, “a train-wreck”, and so this final recorded version, propelled by an orchestral score that conjures the serenity and anxiety of flight, is the result of years of tweaks and improvements. She added a layer of electronics, guitar and percussion, as well as engine and external sounds for a more immersive listen, and presents each of the 22 tracks as a short diary entry, either a paragraph or page, narrated by Anderson in that calm, reassuring voice. “I remember going to the airfields at night in Los Angeles, and watching the daredevil pilots do loop de loops in the sky,” she says on “Flying At Night”, which Earhart would have done. As the custodian of her late husband Lou Reed’s archive, Anderson, who is 77, knows how difficult it is to assemble biography – Amelia can only be her interpretation of events, laced with that quality of magic realism Anderson brings to all her projects.
On that final flight, Earhart set off eastwards from Oakland, California on May 20 with her navigator Fred Noonan, stopping off as planned in various countries on the route, where she would speak to local reporters to make sure her trip received as much publicity as possible. On July 2, they took off from Lae in Papua New Guinea for Howland Island, 2,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean, but never made it. Radio communication was poor and the plane likely ran out of fuel, ditching in the sea – there have been various attempts to locate it. Earhart and Noonan were officially declared dead in 1939.
Anderson heightens the drama as Earhart’s flight nears its watery end. The music of “India And On Down To Australia” is melodious and dreamy as excitement builds, Anderson whispers and sings using Auto-tune. But as they head over Indonesia, the physical toll hits Earhart – “I’m tired, so tired” – she’s exhausted, almost hallucinating as the chintzy melody from Altered Images’ “Happy Birthday” appears on “Road To Mandalay”, curdling as she becomes disorientated. The titles tell the rest of the story – “Broken Chronometers”, “Nothing But Silt”, “The Wrong Way” – but Anderson’s admiration and affection for this feminist icon is such that you come away from Amelia with a greater respect for those who keep on taking risks.
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The urge to disentangle certain charismatic artists from the mythos that clings to them is as eternally irresistible as it is futile. Interviews and memoirs are useful for this only if the subject/narrator is 100% reliable; the internet, teeming with wild opinions and purported truths, is no place to look for verification. Which is why a combination of cultural romanticism and institutionalised trust still has us looking to an artist’s songs for clues as to who they “really” are. As someone drawn to the dark side – well documented, not least of all in his unflinching autobiography Sing Backwards And Weep– Mark Lanegan is often the subject of “authentic self or projected character?” enquiry, as if the entire value of his recordings post-Screaming Trees rests on the answer.
It’s an odd thing to ask of someone who didn’t exactly burn through a wide range of personas in their career and barely tweaked their artistic expression. If Lanegan’s years of sombre reflection, the bleak and unshowy poeticism of his lyrics and borderline uncomfortable live performances point to anything, it’s hardly a carefully constructed other. Talking to Uncut about his writing process in 2012, he said, “I always start from some personal place. Some [albums] are more fictional, some are more based on reality, but they all do start from something real.” As for the vast majority of artists, then, so for Lanegan, who steps metaphorically into the spotlight again with this all-formats reissue of his sixth album, Bubblegum.
It lands as a 20th-anniversary release that includes an expanded 2003 EP Here Comes That Weird Chill (Methamphetamine Blues, Extras & Oddities), a 13-track Unreleased Songs & Demosand (in the 4LP boxset) a 64-page hardcover book featuring memorial essays by confreres including Greg Dulli, Josh Homme, Alain Johannes and Troy Van Leeuwen. Released under the name Mark Lanegan Band and co-produced by Johannes and Chris Goss, Bubblegumsits between the bare-boned, almost rootsy Field Songs and the drum machine- and synths-augmented mixed bag that is Blues Funeral. In his book I Am The Wolf, Lanegan revealed the dark turmoil of Bubblegum’s genesis: “I had been awake for days and nights, crazed from no sleep and illegal stimulants. While I had been out of my mind making records in the past, this was a new peak… or low, depending on one’s perspective.” Mixer Rick Will compared the experience to a scene from A Beautiful Mind, while it caused Lanegan’s manager, Brian Klein, to quit before the record was finished. However tortuous the process, though, the tenebrous self at the centre of Bubblegum certainly enthrals, portrayed in a mix of first-person narrative, potent metaphor and flash-card imagery, against a backdrop of haunted blues, charged alt.rock, country and grunge, flecked with psychedelia. The record also clearly shows the influence of Queens Of The Stone Age, whose Homme, Johannes and Van Leeuwen all make major contributions of a resolutely gnarly and turbo-charged kind.
“Did you call for the night porter/Smell the blood running warm/I stay close to this frozen border/So close I can hit it with a stone.” As album openers go, “When Your Number Isn’t Up” is quite the establishing shot – a stark portrait of drug addiction and the singular hell endured by those existing on the knife edge between life and death, set to a soundtrack of cavernous, slow-mo beats, shivering droplets of piano and a lugubrious organ motif. “The night porter” was Kurt Cobain’s nickname for Mark Lanegan, due to his willingness to deliver dope in the small hours, and deemed so fitting it appears on the latter’s gravestone. Lanegan may have been that netherworld stalker, but it hardly defines him: with the roaring “Hit The City”, one of two songs here featuring PJ Harvey, he exudes the escapee’s mix of relief and awareness that the promised land seldom delivers, while both “Strange Religion”, a Spiritualized-style shimmer of psychedelic gospel soul and the strikingly spare intimacy of “Bombed”, which just scrapes over the one-minute mark, show him as the defeated lover at the end of a turbulent relationship. In the poignant and languorous “One Hundred Days”, Lanegan is both the optimist high on hopes of what the future could hold and the realist who knows it’s not for him. There’s a sudden mood switch with “Sideways In Reverse”, a trashy, punk-pop charge centred on compulsion and bad decisions, which is twin to the pedal-to-the-metal squall of “Driving Death Valley Blues”, where Lanegan is behind the wheel, impelled by addictions to both love and “medicine”.
The additional discs in this boxsetare solid inclusions, albeit with different functions. Necessarily less revealing is Here Comes That Weird Chill…, the EP of songs recorded at the same time as those that comprise Bubblegum and released the year before. It sees Greg Dulli and Dean Ween joining Homme, Johannes and Nick Oliveri, among other players, and since it’s often passed over in any appreciation of Lanegan’s catalogue, it’s worthy of a dust-off. Notable are the fragmentary, almost hallucinatory “On The Steps Of The Cathedral”, a cover of Beefheart’s “Clear Spot” – no great stretch for anyone here, perhaps, but a satisfyingly gruff, rough-necked hammering with some fine guitar vamps – and the blasted, desert-rock workout that is “Skeletal History”. Three bonus tracks feature – “Sympathy”, previously only available on the Has God Seen My Shadow?anthology and the two flips of “Hit The City”, “Mud Pink Skag” and “Mirrored”. The first of those is a raucous stomper with a Stones-y thread running through, the other a tender, Cash-like rumination on love’s perception errors, for fingerpicked acoustic guitar and close-mic’d voice.
As is so often the case with reissue extras, the punctum of Bubblegum XX is its unreleased songs and demos. One disc features seven outtakes from the original sessions plus half a dozen tracks Leeuwen recorded with Lanegan in various hotel rooms during downtime on QOTSA’s tours of Japan and Australia, in February 2003. Chief among the outtakes is the breezy, largely acoustic “Union Tombstone”, which now features a newly recorded Beck on harmonica. This collaboration was part of Lanegan’s original plan, but for various logistical reasons at the time, it didn’t pan out. Here, by the sourcing of song stems over 20 years after he wrote it, that’s been rectified. The hotel sessions see Leeuwen playing all instruments, while Lanegan’s unvarnished vocals are the focus. The fact that these recordings survive in their original rough mixes is surprising in itself – “nobody knew those existed and [Troy] forgot about them,” Klein tells Uncut – but they are strikingly intimate and pack an understatedly powerful emotional punch. The standouts here are a charming cover of Johnny Cash’s “You Wild Colorado” (a first-time recording), the Appalachian folk-flavoured “St James Infirmary” and the penultimate “Little Willie John”, a terrific shortened version of Bubblegum’s “Like Little Willie John”. Here, Lanegan’s voice, thickened and so close the moisture in his mouth is almost palpable, is at its most tenderly haunting, as against the sparest acoustic guitar he croons, “Where’s Willie John, been dead so long/Born to fall, for nothin’ at all/ And who’s gonna grieve when you’re gone?” It may be a projective stretch to claim that Lanegan is drawing a direct parallel between his own life and that of a black, R&B-soul singer who died aged 30 in prison while serving time for manslaughter, not least of all because the song is largely a lament to lost love, but Lanegan’s compassion is writ large as his despair. He certainly had no need to piggyback on another’s tragedy for the sake of authenticity. Bubblegum XX not only amplifies its maker’s profile as a heavy hitter in his artistic field, it reveals a newly raw expression of his life and particular times.
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Jacken Elswyth was always likely to be an alternative folk musician. Until recently, her parents were members of the band Sproatly Smith, at the centre of Herefordshire’s ‘Weirdshire’ folk scene; they’re also the two guests joining Elswyth on her new album, At Fargrounds. “It’s not exactly a standard narrative,” she smiles. “My parents aren’t old folkies who sang in folk clubs while I was young. We’re both approaching folk from a slightly oblique angle and doing something a bit strange with it. But it does mean that there is a connection there to the image of traditional song being something inter-generational.”
Elswyth started out making drone-based guitar improvisations as a teenager but stopped performing for several years due to full-time commitment to a doctorate in anthropology at Sussex University. “I was playing banjo through that time,” she says, “but just in my room, on my own.” When she returned to music with focused intent, the folk tradition was core to her interests, but with an experimental edge she’d gleaned from listening to ‘free folk’ artists like Six Organs Of Admittance and PG Six.
Much of what Elswyth does collapses dichotomies in a similar way. Her music often accrues around a drone, or something gently avant-garde, that still somehow grounds the melody. The DIY ethos is fundamental – on 2021’s solo debut Banjo And The Sound Of Its Own Making, you could literally hear Elswyth building her own instrument. When she plays, it’s potent and powerful, revealing a depth of engagement with folk music’s strange qualities and its capacity to reveal something uncanny to the modern ear.
For Elswyth, that weirdness is central to the history of the folk tradition. “It’s a thing we talk about in the Shovel Dance Collective,” she nods, mentioning the bustling musical collective she’s been part of for some years now. “There’s the most weird and the most traditional, and those things are not in opposition, but are actually feeding each other.” Yet while her music embraces the strange, it’s fundamentally rooted in the earth. “That’s also really important to me,” she continues, “the refusal of it being otherworldly. This isn’t music that comes from the faeries.”
If last year’s Six Static Scenes pulled apart traditional melodies to give her space to explore abstraction, At Fargrounds allows her facility with folk traditions to shine through more clearly. “They’re all things I’ve been playing for a long time,” she says. “I wanted to give voice to the way I’ve been playing those trad tunes, in a slightly more trad way, but coming up in the way that I do.”
Interested in expanding the album’s musical palette beyond banjo and shruti box, she invited her parents Kate Gathercole (fiddle and harmonium) and Mark Waters (double bass) to join in. The result is a beautiful set of melodies and improvisations where you can hear the sympathy that resonates through their recordings together, at the family home. “It was really lovely,” Elswyth says, “and really easy.”
The album title further grounds the music in the immediate surrounds of the family experience. “Fargrounds is the name of a field further up the hill from where my parents live,” she explains. “It’s the point at which you can see across the Wye Valley.” It’s a lovely analogy for the openness and wide-eyed spirit that makes At Fargrounds such a gorgeous listen.
When Josef K were promoting a retrospective compilation in 1987, they were asked about the title. Why was it called Young And Stupid? “Because we were,” they replied. Since then, the Edinburgh band’s mystique has only grown, and their slim catalogue has been endlessly reappraised. The fact that Josef K’s music was released on Postcard Records has been a help and a hindrance. The group were outshone by the more flamboyant Orange Juice, and the label’s sock-drawer Svengali Alan Horne sometimes gave the impression he had signed them by mistake.
Josef K’s meteoric career is explored in Johnnie Johnstone’s new biography Through The Crack In The Wall, while the broader question of the label’s influence informs Grant McPhee’s book Postcards From Scotland, which builds on the filmmaker’s Scottish indie documentaries Big Gold Dream and Teenage Superstars. For Johnstone, discovering Josef K was “one of those Velvet Underground moments. Why had no one told me about them? Everything about them – the awkward, slightly forced smiles and ill-fitting suits, the oblique imagery of the lyrics, the frenetic angularity of their sounds – seemed completely thrilling. The combination of frantic, dislocated rhythms borne of a desperate anxiety, with existentialist musings – the whole thing shrouded and made stranger by the band’s debonair appearance – made Josef K truly unique.”
McPhee suggests Josef K had “the perfect career – burning like magnesium, disintegrating but leaving a series of perfect singles that sonically had a profound effect on what came later. Look at the later C86 compilation: that has become something that defines an entire genre of jangly ’60s indie bands, but when you actually listen to it, only 50 per cent of the tracks share that aesthetic, with a huge debt to Orange Juice’s first two singles. The other half seem to have their basis in Fire Engines, The Fall and definitely Josef K.”
McPhee’s oral history of 1980s Scottish indie fractures in several directions. The aftershocks extend to Nirvana and Big Star via The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub and Primal Scream. “Postcard was a real oddball label,” says Stephen McRobbie of The Pastels, whose long career surpassed the limitations of C86. “Something like Rough Trade had a tangible legacy across the landscape of British music, whereas Postcard was this micro-moment, a sudden flash.” Josef K had “a very different energy from Orange Juice,” McRobbie suggests. “There’s something quite European about them. I see Josef K belonging to the same world as something like Joy Division. There’s more darkness.”
“We were the misfits in an otherwise more approachable roster of bands,” says Josef K’s lead singer, Paul Haig. “The music that influenced us was probably more angst-ridden and dark. The guitars were staccato and stopped/started a lot – it was no-wave post-punk, I guess. I don’t remember trying to write classic pop, although I think others might have been. Most of us couldn’t play well enough to craft a polished hit tune anyway. Compared to our label chums at the time, we were more of an experimental group.” Malcolm Ross, who played guitar in both Josef K and Orange Juice, is typically modest about their legacy. “I don’t remember our ambitions being discussed much in Josef K,” he says, “but Paul and I agreed we should only make two albums. We didn’t think many bands made more than two good ones, and the first is usually considered the best. We weren’t career-oriented.” In fact, Josef K made only one album, The Only Fun In Town, though they did record it twice. “We were pretty successful in what we intended,” says Ross. “There is still some interest in us 40-odd years later, and I hope there’s a slight air of mystery remaining.”
Through The Crack In The Wall: The Secret History Of Josef K is published by Jawbone Press
Postcards From Scotland: Scottish Independent Music 1983-1995 is published by Omnibus
NOT long before we started planning this Jimi Hendrix cover story, I found myself playing Running The Voodoo Down! Explorations In Psychrockfunksouljazz 1967–80, a great compilation from 2017 that explored black America’s response to the volume and possibilities of psychedelic rock. Along with George Clinton, Sly Stone and Miles Davis, Hendrix casts a sizable shadow over the proceedings – either in a very overt sense, like the way the Isley Brothers segue from CSNY’s “Ohio” into Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”, or else as a galvanising force, whose questing and progressive imperative encouraged others to follow his example. We visit some of the music Hendrix made in his final creative outpouring, as part of Peter Watts’ cover story that digs into his fecund, if ultimately tragic, 1970. “He was the first person we knew who had stepped outside of the status quo,” recalls one former friend. “He was the spirit of the music.”
There’s more, of course. Stand by for the welcome return of some very old friends of Uncut – Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and Mercury Rev – artists who have in no small way helped shape what we do here – and a tremendous piece on Chris Bell, as we mark a series of Big Star-related anniversaries in this issue. There’s newcomers Brown Horse alongside Fontaines DC, Thurston Moore, Cass McCombs, Yes, Paul Heaton, a farewell to John Mayall, David Crosby by Mike Scott and a deep dive into Neil Young’s Archives Volume III by Allan Jones. Please also check out a terrific review of Wild God and interview with Nick Cave by Alastair McKay – which are by some distance the best things I’ve read on Cave’s latest album.
After all that, you might reasonably ask, what exactly do you do for an encore? How about a 10-track Big Star CD…
Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Fontaines DC, Yes, Jack White, John Mayall, Nick Cave, Chris Bell, Thurston Moore, Mercury Rev, Cass McCombs, Lone Justice, David Crosby, Lawrence, Steve Van Zandt, Paul Heaton, Brown Horse and more all feature in Uncut‘s October 2024 issue, in UK shops from August 16 or available to buy online now.
All print copies come with a free Big Star CD featuring 10 tracks of power-pop perfection, rarities and alternate mixes!
INSIDE THIS MONTH’S UNCUT:
JIMI HENDRIX: In June 1970, the completion of JIMI HENDRIX’s own Electric Lady Studios in downtown New York unleashed a surge of unbridled creativity. Just three months later, he was gone. As a new film and box set explore Hendrix’s final sessions, friends, bandmates and studio staff consider how Electric Lady inspired everyone who entered its softly lit sanctuary. “They were free to create,” engineer Eddie Kramer tells Peter Watts. “I never saw Jimi so happy.”
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS: After a devastating tornado strike, GILLIAN WELCH and DAVID RAWLINGS have spent four years bringing their beloved Nashville studio back to life. As a new masterpiece arrives, Uncut uncovers a tale of destruction and rebirth – and new songs to match the intensity of their near-loss.
FONTAINES DC: With their astonishing fourth album Romance, FONTAINES DC leave behind the post-punk cobblestones for apocalyptic sci-fi stadium rock. But as they prepare to take the world by storm, they explain how the Arctic Monkeys, Mickey Rourke and “dissonance” have helped usher in their imperial phase – and how they plan to avoid the pitfalls of success.
CHRIS BELL: CHRIS BELL was McCartney to Alex Chilton’s Lennon: the other #1 songwriter in BIG STAR. But conflict, disappointment and depression threatened to diminish the power-pop visionary’s brilliance and Bell died tragically young, leaving behind only one posthumously released solo album, I Am The Cosmos.
MERCURY REV: From their base in upstate New York, MERCURY REV preside over a unique environment – full of eccentric sculpture parks, vintage recording studios and the spirits of storied musical pioneers – which has nourished their creativity for over 30 years. With a new album, Born Horses, embedded in the rich topography of the region, Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper guide Uncut around their home turf.
BROWN HORSE: With their ragged harmonies, lap steel laments and fiery jams, valiant young upstarts BROWN HORSE are bringing country rock grit to the Badlands of Norfolk. But how do their Songs: Anglia hold up against the alt.standards that inspired them?
AN AUDIENCE WITH… THURSTON MOORE: The Sonic Youth soothsayer talks free jazz, feminism and Tom Verlaine’s paper-plate poetry.
THE MAKING OF “ROUNDABOUT” BY YES: Interminable touring sows the seeds of a prog rock classic.
ALBUM BY ALBUM WITH CASS McCOMBS: The enigmatic singer-songwriter looks back on a restless career.
MY LIFE IN MUSIC WITH PAUL HEATON: The Housemartins and Beautiful South singer on his happiest hours by the stereo: “It still sounds exciting now.”
REVIEWED: Nick Cave, Jack White, BASIC, Manu Chao, Willie Watson, Nala Sinephro, The The, Neil Young, Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins, Kimbo District, Oasis, Black Artist Group, Patti Smith, Anohni and the Johnsons, Steve Van Zandt, Lawrence, The Jesus And Mary Chain and more.
PLUS: Farewell John Mayall, David Crosby by Mike Scott, Lone Justice, Plantoid and… introducing Thee Sacred Souls.
“Hashtag” is the second track to be lifted from Woodland after “Empty Trainload Of Sky”.
Woodland – which is named after their recording studio in Nashville – is released on their own Acony Records label on August 23. You can pre-order the album here.
You can read the only major UK interview with Gillian and David in the new issue of Uncut, which goes on sale Friday, August 16
To mark the 25th anniversary of his album Mule Variations, Tom Waits has shared a previously unheard version of “Get Behind The Mule“. You can hear it below.
The original concerts – held at 2:30 and 8:00 pm on August 1, 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York – were the first major music benefit of its kind, bringing together all all-star cast including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston and Ravi Shankar to raise awareness about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in East Pakistan/Bangladesh.
The concert yielded a triple album boxset and feature film. This is, of course, the first time the music has been available on streaming platforms. All net proceeds (after taxes), will be donated to the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.
Tracklisting is…
1
George Harrison & Ravi Shankar
Introduction by George Harrison & Ravi Shankar
2
Ravi Shankar & Ali Akbar Khan & Ali Rakha & Kamala Chakravarti
The next volume of Joni Mitchell‘s archives series is coming on October 4 from Rhino. Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976 – 1980) covers her run of albums including Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mingus and the live set, Shadows and Light.
You can hear “Intro To Coyote / Coyote” recorded at The Forum, Montreal, QC, Canada, December 4 1975 below.
King Crimson are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their album Red with a 2CD / 2 Blu-ray set and a 2LP set on 200 gram vinyl released on October 11.
KCXP5017 is a 2CD & 2x Blu-Ray/boxed set in rigid slipcase.
2 x Blu-Ray discs include all new 2024 mixes in Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD MA Surround (5.1) & 24/96 or 24/192 Hi-Res stereo. Elemental mixes, session material, 3 x USA album mixes, 5 x bootleg concert recordings from 1974, instrumental mixes and more… all in Hi-Res Stereo.
2 CDs include 2024 mixes in stereo and instrumental forms, elemental mixes and session material.
KCLPX2024 is a 2LP (200 gram) vinyl set packaged in gatefold sleeve. LP1 features all new 2024 stereo mixes by Steven Wilson while LP2 has all new 2024 elemental mixes by David Singleton.
And here’s the tracklisting…
KCXP5017 Red – The 50th Anniversary Edition
Disc 1 CD 2024 mixes and Additional Material
1 Red
2 Fallen Angel
3 One More Red Nightmare
4 Providence
5 Starless
Additional Material
2024 Instrumental Mixes
6 Fallen Angel
7 One More Red Nightmare
8 Starless – Edit
Produced and Mixed by Steven Wilson
* 9 Providence – Complete Track
Produced and Mixed by Robert Fripp and David Singleton
Disc 2 CD Elemental Mixes and Session Material
Elemental Mixes
1 Red
2 Fallen Angel
3 One More Red Nightmare
4 Starless – Percussion
5 Starless
The Making of Starless
6 Starless – Mellotron
7 Starless – Three Saxophones
8 Starless – Basic Take
9 Starless – Sax Solos
10 Starless – Cornet and Guitar Solos
11 Starless – Cornet takes
Produced and Mixed by David Singleton
Disc 3 Blu-Ray
USA
I * 1 June 28th, 1974, Casino Arena, NJ
DTS-HD MA 24/192 Stereo, 2013 Mix
Mixed by Robert Fripp, David Singleton and Tony Arnold
The documentary follows the band’s 1974 sessions at Abbey Road during the recording of the live-in-studio One Hand Clapping album.
“It’s so great to look back on that period and see the little live show we did,” says McCartney. “We made a pretty good noise actually! It was a great time for the band, we started to have success with Wings, which had been a long time coming.”
The documentary screenings also boast an exclusive filmed introduction by McCartney and previously unseen Polaroid photographs from the sessions.
In addition to the One Hand Clapping documentary, screenings will feature the previously unreleased Backyard Sessions, showcasing McCartney on acoustic guitar performing tracks from his catalogue.
The album One Hand Clapping was released in June.
Tickets for Paul McCartney and Wings – One Hand Clapping will be available beginning Thursday, August 16 at 6AM PT / 9AM ET / 2PM BST from here.
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