For many of us who came of age in the mid '80s, The Smiths probably provided the soundtrack to a political maturing as much as an emotional one. My epochal moment of teenage rebellion came on July 23, 1986, a day I had strategically reserved for the purchase of The Queen Is Dead, so as to coincide with the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.
Twelve years after he was pulling pints in a pub in London Bridge, Brian Burton is perhaps busier than ever – he has a new Broken Bells album out on Monday (January 13), he’s been working with U2 and is rumoured to be producing the next Black Keys record. It’s been a whirlwind decade for the writer and producer better known as Danger Mouse: after making his name by daring to cross-breed The Beatles with Jay-Z, he’s gone on to work with everyone from Damon Albarn to David Lynch.
In his excellent Uncut review of the Morrissey “Autobiography”, Michael alludes to the get-out clause afforded rock memoirists post-“Chronicles”: why bother obfuscating certain awkward details when you can, by being capricious with time and chronology, just skip the difficult stuff?
Yesterday, ahead of the start of the BBC series, The Sound Of Cinema: The Music That Made The Movies, The Telegraph asked their film critics – and then their Twitter followers – to come up with their favourite film soundtracks.
Quentin Tarantino came to a crossroads in his career when he made Jackie Brown in 1997. Coming after the lary carnage of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, his third film, adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, was an unexpectedly poignant and subtle account of middle-aged people doing whatever they have to do to survive. The guns, double-crosses and gangsters were there, of course - but there were other things, too: warmth, character and nuance.
Eno’s sublime new album, Lux, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (December 2012, Take 187) – so we’re delving back to December 2010’s issue to meet the time-travelling conceptualist himself, a man who’s into ecstatic food cults, Music For Maternity Wards – and trying to remember his own past. “One of the big driving forces for Roxy Music,” he says, “was that we hated hippies…” Words: Stephen Troussé
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Calexico’s new album, Algiers, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (October 2012, Take 185) – so we thought we’d take a trip back to April 2003 (Take 71), when Uncut’s John Mulvey flew out to Tucson, Arizona to discover more about the duo’s redrawing of the alt.country map.
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