Neil Young And Crazy Horse began their summer European dates in Reykjavík on July 7.
The set included one new song, as well as a two live rarities.
The band debuted a new track, "Who's Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth?".
They also played "Separate Ways", from the Homegrown sessions, which hasn'...
Neil Young And Crazy Horse began their summer European dates in Reykjavík on July 7.
The set included one new song, as well as a two live rarities.
The band debuted a new track, “Who’s Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth?“.
They also played “Separate Ways”, from the Homegrown sessions, which hasn’t had a live airing since 2008, and “Days That Used To Be” from Ragged Glory, which the band hadn’t played live since 1991.
It was the first show since the news broke that bassist Billy Talbot had suffered a mild stoke and would be sitting out the dates; his place was filled by Neil Young’s longtime bassist Rick Rosas.
Mahogany Blue’s Dorene Carter and YaDonna West also joined the tour, filling in for Talbot who also provided backing vocals.
The band’s next date is July 10 in Cork, Ireland, and then July 12 at London’s Hyde Park.
Neil Young And Crazy Horse set list for Laugardalshöllin, Reykjavík, Iceland:
As he prepares to release Shellac's first new album in seven years Dude Incredible, Steve Albini is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the legendary frontman and producer?
Who are his favourite rock trios?
What are his memories of working on Plant and Page's Walking Into Clarksdale album?
As a producer, what makes a good recording studios?
Send up your questions by noon GMT, Thursday, July 17 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com. The best questions, and Steve's answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine. Please include your name and location with your question.
Photo credit: Jordi Vidal/Redferns via Getty Images
As he prepares to release Shellac’s first new album in seven years Dude Incredible, Steve Albini is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the legendary frontman and producer?
Who are his favourite rock trios?
What are his memories of working on Plant and Page’s Walking Into Clarksdale album?
As a producer, what makes a good recording studios?
Send up your questions by noon GMT, Thursday, July 17 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com. The best questions, and Steve’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine. Please include your name and location with your question.
Photo credit: Jordi Vidal/Redferns via Getty Images
I've been playing the new Jeff Tweedy album, "Sukierae", a good deal these past few weeks - or, I should say, the new Tweedy album, since these quietly wired tracks are, strictly speaking, collaborations between the Wilco man and his eldest son, Spencer. I'm slowly beginning to think it might be the best studio album he's been involved with since "A Ghost Is Born".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyO2EY38YcA
Yesterday, it occurred to me that I had a big and possibly interesting interview with Jeff Tweedy that I'd never posted online. It dates from 2005, around the time of Wilco's fantastic "Kicking Television" live album, when I hooked up with the band for a couple of dates: one a headline show in Asheville, North Carolina, that maybe still ranks as the finest Wilco show I've ever seen; the second, a support slot with The Rolling Stones in Atlanta.
Reading the piece again, one detail near the start jumps out, when Tweedy talks about giving up smoking. “I promised my nine-year-old son that I would," he says. "He made up a legal document, and I haven’t smoked since I signed it.” That nine-year-old, of course, is now his drummer…
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
Jeff Tweedy – affable, rumpled, 38 – has what most amateur psychologists would term an addictive personality. Fifteen years ago, while still a member of Uncle Tupelo, he beat alcoholism. Just under two years ago, he stopped taking vast amounts of painkillers essential, he thought, to combating the migraines which had debilitated him since childhood. Without a chemical crutch, he suffered panic attacks so bad he ended up in rehab for a month, where he was treated for the depression and anxiety that caused the headaches in the first place. “I remember thinking, My God, this is what happened when people started writing about Hell,” he says now. “This is what they were trying to relate, this is the biological reason why Hell exists.”
Most Tweedy interviews over the past ten years, the ten years he has spent steering Wilco to the riskier extremes of Americana while selling hundreds of thousands more records than most of his peers, have fixated on his smoking. As if writing about the frontman’s omnipresent cigarette were a way of giving his compulsions a physical shape. Six months ago, though, he even abandoned that, a year to the day after he was discharged from hospital. “I promised my nine-year-old son that I would. He made up a legal document, and I haven’t smoked since I signed it.”
What remains, in the wake of all these trials and rebirths, is an enduring obsession with music and its possibilities, a sense that rock’n’roll is a challenge as well as a consolation. It’s this imperative that has led Tweedy, over an eventful decade, to frequently reconfigure the sound and line-up of Wilco. It has seen him alienate the alt-country apparatchiks who once nurtured him; experiment with elaborately miserable power-pop; fall in with leftfield fixer Jim O’Rourke and add great swathes of radio interference to his songs; be dropped and rescued, triumphantly, by two wings of the same multinational entertainment company; punctuate his last album, A Ghost Is Born, with 12 minutes of enveloping drone and still get two Grammys for his trouble. Tweedy’s journey has been a heroic inversion of received music business wisdom: the more outré Wilco become, the more records they sell.
“I’ve been driven,” he says, “to find something that I feel good about. Music is the one thing I’ve felt good about in my life. I wanted to cling to it. But at the same time it wouldn’t sustain me for very long. I had to keep moving.”
Today, Wilco’s ongoing quest has brought them to Asheville, a small, hippyish college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. A short tour culminates tomorrow night in Atlanta, where the sextet will support The Rolling Stones at the Phillips Arena. Then Tweedy will play a few solo shows and return to work on the sixth Wilco album. “What was most refreshing about the first session,” he laughs, “was that the songs were not weird at all.”
For now, though, there is a wonderful live album, Kicking Television, to promote. Recorded in their hometown of Chicago last spring, it was initially designed as a full stop to the first decade of Wilco. Tweedy’s restless appetite for the next new sound has meant, however, that it is actually a document of a band in constant flux. Predominantly drawing on their last two albums, the latest and best lineup of Wilco (Tweedy, avant-guitarist Nels Cline, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and surviving original member John Stirratt on bass) meddle, brilliantly, with their music. They add great skrees of noise to some of their most straightforward songs, and uncover the pop hearts of some of their most forbidding.
“The record is basically the first glimpse of what the band is like now, going into the future,” suggests Tweedy, settling into a dressing room for an hour or so before his soundcheck. “I’m really at peace with a lot of what has happened for Wilco. I feel lucky, but I don’t think it’s all luck. We’ve got to this point without having made a whole lot of compromises.”
Tweedy is sometimes perceived as a control freak, having dismissed so many Wilco members as his musical agenda has gradually evolved. In fact, he’s put up with a few abusive creative relationships for longer than now seems necessary, beginning with his Uncle Tupelo partner, Jay Farrar.
“There are usually legitimate reasons for marriages to end,” he says. “People decide not to make each other miserable and they move on. A marriage is serious, but there’s nothing like that weighing a rock band down, so why do people want to be in a situation where nobody’s happy? I’m happy that I’m friends with my bandmates. But I’m sorry, I don’t really want to be friends if we’re not going to make great music together.”
That said, it was Farrar – Tweedy’s angsty childhood friend from Belleville, Illinois – who chose to break up Uncle Tupelo in 1994. Tweedy had endured Farrar’s peculiar insecurities – he banned Tweedy from talking onstage, to sustain some kind of indie mystique – for four albums of battered country punk hybrids. By then, Tweedy had also given up drinking.
“I thought I knew everything there was to know about alcoholism because I grew up in a house full of people who were alcoholics. My dad would be devastated to hear me say he’s an alcoholic, but the consensus would be that someone who drinks a 12-pack of beer every day is one. He’s a highly functioning alcoholic, he’s been able to maintain for a long time. My brothers, on the other hand, haven’t been able to and have suffered a lot. One of them is recovering and one of them is still very active in his addiction.
“Even at a very young age I knew that I was an alcoholic, before I ever took a drink. But when I quit drinking, I thought I was saved for the rest of my life – which isn’t how addiction works. I had to find something else, because I really only treated a symptom.”
To the rest of the world, however, Jeff Tweedy had always seemed the easygoing one in Uncle Tupelo – an emotional lightweight compared with the glowering Jay Farrar. Consequently when Tweedy and his other former bandmates from Tupelo – Stirratt, guitarist Max Johnston and drummer Ken Coomer – released their first album as Wilco, it came as little surprise that it was a relatively sunny country-rock collection.
“I was so in love with where Uncle Tupelo was, I wanted to keep that audience, I didn’t want things to change,” he says of Wilco’s 1995 debut, AM. “But then I realised I don’t have any control over things changing. Even if I tried to make the record everybody wanted me to make, they were going to hate it.”
That feeling was compounded by an executive at Wilco’s label, Reprise, telling Tweedy that AM was merely going to “create a buzz” for Farrar’s new band, Son Volt. For his next album, 1996’s Being There, Tweedy determinedly set out to “do everything”.
A 2CD set that ranged confidently across myriad styles, Being There was a loose concept album about the significance of rock’n’roll and how it fitted in with other issues in his life. His first son, Spencer, had just been born, and the album’s working title had been Baby. Another new arrival figured prominently, too; a garrulous multi-instrumentalist and pop classicist called Jay Bennett, who became Tweedy’s new creative sparring partner.
While AM had struggled, selling less than Son Volt’s debut, Trace, Being There dramatically ramped up expectations, shifting over half a million copies in the USA. Tweedy now found himself feted as a Great American Artist, a significant player. But ever the contrarian, he and Bennett started pushing Wilco in a different direction. 1999’s follow-up, Summer Teeth, was a masterpiece of pop baroque, though its rich Mellotron textures cloaked a misery and nastiness that seemed to chart a grim period in Tweedy’s relationship with Chicago club manager, Sue Miller.
“There’s no doubt that was a tough time in our marriage,” he admits. “It can be a very harrowing record, and my wife hates it. But Summer Teeth was consciously constructed to work towards a place of light. One of the things that has helped me in my life has been an innate understanding that things could be better. If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get through rehab, I wouldn’t have been able to get myself to rehab, I wouldn’t have been able to do the records we’ve done.”
Tweedy, it transpires, is a remarkably stubborn man. On every rider, he jokingly demands a puppy for his dressing room: “What could be better than playing with a puppy before a gig to lower the blood pressure?” he reasons. Tonight, as ever, there’s no puppy in the dressing rooms. But Tweedy, you suspect, will not let this one drop.
Similarly, when he has plotted a new trajectory for his band, nothing – not his record company, not even his bandmates – will knock him off course. Hence the tortuous gestation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Bennett left during the recording in 2001, as Tweedy’s long-simmering interest in the avant-garde manifested itself in the recruitment of Jim O’Rourke as mixer. No longer policed by the traditionalist Bennett, Tweedy constructed a dense backdrop of radio static, designed to emphasise the album’s themes of distance and ill communication.
“We asked Jay Bennett to leave the band,” he confirms. “When we were making Summer Teeth he started aligning himself as Number Two, to the exclusion of other people’s input. He was impossible to work with, and it became clear that his idea of music, if he had one, was contrary to what I believed in.”
Next the acting head of Reprise, David Kahne (producer of the forthcoming Strokes album), heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and disliked it so much he allowed the band to buy the album from the label. Relieved, Wilco uploaded the whole record onto their website, then sold it to Nonesuch, a more esoteric part of the AOL Time Warner conglomerate which also owned Reprise.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became a huge critical and commercial success in 2002, but it also scared off some of Wilco’s more reactionary fans. Uncle Tupelo had seen the title of one of their albums, No Depression, adopted by a magazine which purported to represent the flourishing alt-country movement. Now, though, Tweedy’s adventurousness was being condemned by the arbiters of a scene increasingly limited in its outlook.
“I always think that if Poco were around today they’d be considered some kind of cutting-edge alt-country band,” he smiles. “It has become a very conservative movement, that’s not really a movement. It’s stagnant.”
On 2004’s career-topping A Ghost Is Born, Tweedy allowed the sketchy “Less Than You Think” to drift off into an epic drone indebted to ‘60s minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Lamonte Young. It was beautiful, but it provoked reviewers broadly supportive of Tweedy’s work to lash out at him.
“That means it’s the most successful song Wilco’s ever done, in my mind,” he says. “People, y’know, it’s 2004 – this is shocking to you? It’s not an experiment. The experiments have all been done.”
When Tweedy listens to the reverberant buzz of “Less Than You Think” now, though, it reminds him of a migraine. Throughout the sessions for A Ghost Is Born, the headaches which had plagued him for years were worse than ever. He had become addicted to painkillers to combat them, at around three times the dosage his doctor was prescribing. Tweedy would take “Anything I could get that would make my head stop hurting.”
Once, in New York, Tweedy was hunting for Vicodin but hooked up with a dealer who only had morphine in stock. “I bought all this giant supply of morphine and took it for three months. Then I weaned myself off it. My experience has been that I quit and then feel very sure of myself.”
By the time of A Ghost Is Born, he was predominantly using Vicoprofen. He would sing softly in the studio, to try and keep the pain at bay, then go home, sit in the bathtub for hours and panic. The spitting, rearing solo he plays at the climax of “At Least That’s What You Said” is, he thinks, a musical transcription of an anxiety attack.
Just before the album was released, he decided to try the self-administered cold turkey he had used to successfully quit alcohol and morphine. This time, though, the panic episodes became so bad that he ended up in a hospital emergency room, and directed into a rehab programme.
“Most addiction stems from a pre-existing mental condition,” he explains. “I was in the emergency room, I thought I was dying, and they asked me if I’d ever heard of dual diagnosis. It’s a mental ward but you go through rehab. They treat your panic disorder and your depression at the same time. I was like, ‘Can I go there now?’
“I haven’t had a migraine in a year and a half. The pain has stopped because I’ve been able to treat and stabilise the panic disorder. I’ve had headaches but I’ve been able to get rid of them. In the past they would escalate to migraines. They were a trigger.”
At Wilco’s gig in Asheville, Tweedy’s guitar battles with his gifted new sidekick, Nels Cline, have a kinetic intensity and ambition that recalls Television. What’s most striking, though, is how effectively the show contradicts the rather worthy reputation that has blighted the band, especially in Britain. Certainly, Tweedy never shies away from serious issues. But there’s a celebratory aspect to Wilco, too, understood by the 2,500 “pretty rambunctious” people who dance around them for over two hours. For an addict, Tweedy seems to be in recovery. And for a depressive, his positivity is unusually convincing.
“Almost everything I’ve ever done has been considered a fluke,” he says earlier. “After Being There people said, ‘This is playing way over his head. He’ll never make a record like this again.’ Summer Teeth came out and it was, ‘Jay Bennett is doing all of this.’ Then Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and obviously it’s ‘Jim O’Rourke and the story’s better than the record’. With A Ghost Is Born, ‘He exploited his addiction and went into rehab to sell his record.’”
Tweedy looks rueful for a moment, then recovers his sarcasm.
“Man, people don’t buy records like that. A rock star goes into rehab? ‘Wow, that’s a fascinating story – no-one’s ever heard that before! I’ve got to hear what this record sounds like!’ Come on!”
The next night, Jeff Tweedy takes his band, his wife and two sons to meet The Rolling Stones. Keith Richards, a man whose tangles with drugs have kept millions vicariously gripped for decades, leans his elbow on Spencer’s head for photographs. Sam Tweedy, aged five, sleeps through “Sympathy For The Devil”. Ron Wood tells Wilco that they must play with the Stones again. Mick Jagger tells Wilco that Ron Wood says that to all the support acts. When they bound into the secure backstage room, the Stones remind Jeff Tweedy of the Marx Brothers, and he is surprised by how all four of them are the same height and weight. He is also relieved that no-one appears to have read a 2004 interview with Wilco where he ponders, “How many fucking people has Keith Richards killed?”
Tweedy laughs when he’s reminded of this.
“I’m obviously not saying by any intention of his own he killed anybody,” he qualifies. “But the persona that has been projected on him, through him, around him, is one that perpetuates a very destructive myth for a lot of people. And there’s no doubt in my mind that people have used it as an excuse to feed on things that are very bad for them. It’s a pretty safe bet that if Keith Richards wasn’t a rich and famous rock star, his constitution alone would not have kept him alive to this day. Most people aren’t that fortunate.”
Then Jeff Tweedy inadvertently stumbles upon the reason why his own story of addiction and rehab is so interesting. His life might have superficially followed a rock’n’roll trajectory, but the details are critically different: the backstory, motivations and redemption far away from the wasted iconography of Keith and his acolytes. He’s embarrassed to talk about this stuff, but he just can’t stop.
“It’s a pretty uncool thing to say in a magazine, but it’s also undeniable. It’s not just Keith, it’s everything that’s grown up around the drug culture and the rock’n’roll myth. That certainly never helped me.”
Picture: Autumn De Wilde
I’ve been playing the new Jeff Tweedy album, “Sukierae”, a good deal these past few weeks – or, I should say, the new Tweedy album, since these quietly wired tracks are, strictly speaking, collaborations between the Wilco man and his eldest son, Spencer. I’m slowly beginning to think it might be the best studio album he’s been involved with since “A Ghost Is Born”.
Yesterday, it occurred to me that I had a big and possibly interesting interview with Jeff Tweedy that I’d never posted online. It dates from 2005, around the time of Wilco’s fantastic “Kicking Television” live album, when I hooked up with the band for a couple of dates: one a headline show in Asheville, North Carolina, that maybe still ranks as the finest Wilco show I’ve ever seen; the second, a support slot with The Rolling Stones in Atlanta.
Reading the piece again, one detail near the start jumps out, when Tweedy talks about giving up smoking. “I promised my nine-year-old son that I would,” he says. “He made up a legal document, and I haven’t smoked since I signed it.” That nine-year-old, of course, is now his drummer…
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
Jeff Tweedy – affable, rumpled, 38 – has what most amateur psychologists would term an addictive personality. Fifteen years ago, while still a member of Uncle Tupelo, he beat alcoholism. Just under two years ago, he stopped taking vast amounts of painkillers essential, he thought, to combating the migraines which had debilitated him since childhood. Without a chemical crutch, he suffered panic attacks so bad he ended up in rehab for a month, where he was treated for the depression and anxiety that caused the headaches in the first place. “I remember thinking, My God, this is what happened when people started writing about Hell,” he says now. “This is what they were trying to relate, this is the biological reason why Hell exists.”
Most Tweedy interviews over the past ten years, the ten years he has spent steering Wilco to the riskier extremes of Americana while selling hundreds of thousands more records than most of his peers, have fixated on his smoking. As if writing about the frontman’s omnipresent cigarette were a way of giving his compulsions a physical shape. Six months ago, though, he even abandoned that, a year to the day after he was discharged from hospital. “I promised my nine-year-old son that I would. He made up a legal document, and I haven’t smoked since I signed it.”
What remains, in the wake of all these trials and rebirths, is an enduring obsession with music and its possibilities, a sense that rock’n’roll is a challenge as well as a consolation. It’s this imperative that has led Tweedy, over an eventful decade, to frequently reconfigure the sound and line-up of Wilco. It has seen him alienate the alt-country apparatchiks who once nurtured him; experiment with elaborately miserable power-pop; fall in with leftfield fixer Jim O’Rourke and add great swathes of radio interference to his songs; be dropped and rescued, triumphantly, by two wings of the same multinational entertainment company; punctuate his last album, A Ghost Is Born, with 12 minutes of enveloping drone and still get two Grammys for his trouble. Tweedy’s journey has been a heroic inversion of received music business wisdom: the more outré Wilco become, the more records they sell.
“I’ve been driven,” he says, “to find something that I feel good about. Music is the one thing I’ve felt good about in my life. I wanted to cling to it. But at the same time it wouldn’t sustain me for very long. I had to keep moving.”
Today, Wilco’s ongoing quest has brought them to Asheville, a small, hippyish college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. A short tour culminates tomorrow night in Atlanta, where the sextet will support The Rolling Stones at the Phillips Arena. Then Tweedy will play a few solo shows and return to work on the sixth Wilco album. “What was most refreshing about the first session,” he laughs, “was that the songs were not weird at all.”
For now, though, there is a wonderful live album, Kicking Television, to promote. Recorded in their hometown of Chicago last spring, it was initially designed as a full stop to the first decade of Wilco. Tweedy’s restless appetite for the next new sound has meant, however, that it is actually a document of a band in constant flux. Predominantly drawing on their last two albums, the latest and best lineup of Wilco (Tweedy, avant-guitarist Nels Cline, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and surviving original member John Stirratt on bass) meddle, brilliantly, with their music. They add great skrees of noise to some of their most straightforward songs, and uncover the pop hearts of some of their most forbidding.
“The record is basically the first glimpse of what the band is like now, going into the future,” suggests Tweedy, settling into a dressing room for an hour or so before his soundcheck. “I’m really at peace with a lot of what has happened for Wilco. I feel lucky, but I don’t think it’s all luck. We’ve got to this point without having made a whole lot of compromises.”
Tweedy is sometimes perceived as a control freak, having dismissed so many Wilco members as his musical agenda has gradually evolved. In fact, he’s put up with a few abusive creative relationships for longer than now seems necessary, beginning with his Uncle Tupelo partner, Jay Farrar.
“There are usually legitimate reasons for marriages to end,” he says. “People decide not to make each other miserable and they move on. A marriage is serious, but there’s nothing like that weighing a rock band down, so why do people want to be in a situation where nobody’s happy? I’m happy that I’m friends with my bandmates. But I’m sorry, I don’t really want to be friends if we’re not going to make great music together.”
That said, it was Farrar – Tweedy’s angsty childhood friend from Belleville, Illinois – who chose to break up Uncle Tupelo in 1994. Tweedy had endured Farrar’s peculiar insecurities – he banned Tweedy from talking onstage, to sustain some kind of indie mystique – for four albums of battered country punk hybrids. By then, Tweedy had also given up drinking.
“I thought I knew everything there was to know about alcoholism because I grew up in a house full of people who were alcoholics. My dad would be devastated to hear me say he’s an alcoholic, but the consensus would be that someone who drinks a 12-pack of beer every day is one. He’s a highly functioning alcoholic, he’s been able to maintain for a long time. My brothers, on the other hand, haven’t been able to and have suffered a lot. One of them is recovering and one of them is still very active in his addiction.
“Even at a very young age I knew that I was an alcoholic, before I ever took a drink. But when I quit drinking, I thought I was saved for the rest of my life – which isn’t how addiction works. I had to find something else, because I really only treated a symptom.”
To the rest of the world, however, Jeff Tweedy had always seemed the easygoing one in Uncle Tupelo – an emotional lightweight compared with the glowering Jay Farrar. Consequently when Tweedy and his other former bandmates from Tupelo – Stirratt, guitarist Max Johnston and drummer Ken Coomer – released their first album as Wilco, it came as little surprise that it was a relatively sunny country-rock collection.
“I was so in love with where Uncle Tupelo was, I wanted to keep that audience, I didn’t want things to change,” he says of Wilco’s 1995 debut, AM. “But then I realised I don’t have any control over things changing. Even if I tried to make the record everybody wanted me to make, they were going to hate it.”
That feeling was compounded by an executive at Wilco’s label, Reprise, telling Tweedy that AM was merely going to “create a buzz” for Farrar’s new band, Son Volt. For his next album, 1996’s Being There, Tweedy determinedly set out to “do everything”.
A 2CD set that ranged confidently across myriad styles, Being There was a loose concept album about the significance of rock’n’roll and how it fitted in with other issues in his life. His first son, Spencer, had just been born, and the album’s working title had been Baby. Another new arrival figured prominently, too; a garrulous multi-instrumentalist and pop classicist called Jay Bennett, who became Tweedy’s new creative sparring partner.
While AM had struggled, selling less than Son Volt’s debut, Trace, Being There dramatically ramped up expectations, shifting over half a million copies in the USA. Tweedy now found himself feted as a Great American Artist, a significant player. But ever the contrarian, he and Bennett started pushing Wilco in a different direction. 1999’s follow-up, Summer Teeth, was a masterpiece of pop baroque, though its rich Mellotron textures cloaked a misery and nastiness that seemed to chart a grim period in Tweedy’s relationship with Chicago club manager, Sue Miller.
“There’s no doubt that was a tough time in our marriage,” he admits. “It can be a very harrowing record, and my wife hates it. But Summer Teeth was consciously constructed to work towards a place of light. One of the things that has helped me in my life has been an innate understanding that things could be better. If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get through rehab, I wouldn’t have been able to get myself to rehab, I wouldn’t have been able to do the records we’ve done.”
Tweedy, it transpires, is a remarkably stubborn man. On every rider, he jokingly demands a puppy for his dressing room: “What could be better than playing with a puppy before a gig to lower the blood pressure?” he reasons. Tonight, as ever, there’s no puppy in the dressing rooms. But Tweedy, you suspect, will not let this one drop.
Similarly, when he has plotted a new trajectory for his band, nothing – not his record company, not even his bandmates – will knock him off course. Hence the tortuous gestation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Bennett left during the recording in 2001, as Tweedy’s long-simmering interest in the avant-garde manifested itself in the recruitment of Jim O’Rourke as mixer. No longer policed by the traditionalist Bennett, Tweedy constructed a dense backdrop of radio static, designed to emphasise the album’s themes of distance and ill communication.
“We asked Jay Bennett to leave the band,” he confirms. “When we were making Summer Teeth he started aligning himself as Number Two, to the exclusion of other people’s input. He was impossible to work with, and it became clear that his idea of music, if he had one, was contrary to what I believed in.”
Next the acting head of Reprise, David Kahne (producer of the forthcoming Strokes album), heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and disliked it so much he allowed the band to buy the album from the label. Relieved, Wilco uploaded the whole record onto their website, then sold it to Nonesuch, a more esoteric part of the AOL Time Warner conglomerate which also owned Reprise.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became a huge critical and commercial success in 2002, but it also scared off some of Wilco’s more reactionary fans. Uncle Tupelo had seen the title of one of their albums, No Depression, adopted by a magazine which purported to represent the flourishing alt-country movement. Now, though, Tweedy’s adventurousness was being condemned by the arbiters of a scene increasingly limited in its outlook.
“I always think that if Poco were around today they’d be considered some kind of cutting-edge alt-country band,” he smiles. “It has become a very conservative movement, that’s not really a movement. It’s stagnant.”
On 2004’s career-topping A Ghost Is Born, Tweedy allowed the sketchy “Less Than You Think” to drift off into an epic drone indebted to ‘60s minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Lamonte Young. It was beautiful, but it provoked reviewers broadly supportive of Tweedy’s work to lash out at him.
“That means it’s the most successful song Wilco’s ever done, in my mind,” he says. “People, y’know, it’s 2004 – this is shocking to you? It’s not an experiment. The experiments have all been done.”
When Tweedy listens to the reverberant buzz of “Less Than You Think” now, though, it reminds him of a migraine. Throughout the sessions for A Ghost Is Born, the headaches which had plagued him for years were worse than ever. He had become addicted to painkillers to combat them, at around three times the dosage his doctor was prescribing. Tweedy would take “Anything I could get that would make my head stop hurting.”
Once, in New York, Tweedy was hunting for Vicodin but hooked up with a dealer who only had morphine in stock. “I bought all this giant supply of morphine and took it for three months. Then I weaned myself off it. My experience has been that I quit and then feel very sure of myself.”
By the time of A Ghost Is Born, he was predominantly using Vicoprofen. He would sing softly in the studio, to try and keep the pain at bay, then go home, sit in the bathtub for hours and panic. The spitting, rearing solo he plays at the climax of “At Least That’s What You Said” is, he thinks, a musical transcription of an anxiety attack.
Just before the album was released, he decided to try the self-administered cold turkey he had used to successfully quit alcohol and morphine. This time, though, the panic episodes became so bad that he ended up in a hospital emergency room, and directed into a rehab programme.
“Most addiction stems from a pre-existing mental condition,” he explains. “I was in the emergency room, I thought I was dying, and they asked me if I’d ever heard of dual diagnosis. It’s a mental ward but you go through rehab. They treat your panic disorder and your depression at the same time. I was like, ‘Can I go there now?’
“I haven’t had a migraine in a year and a half. The pain has stopped because I’ve been able to treat and stabilise the panic disorder. I’ve had headaches but I’ve been able to get rid of them. In the past they would escalate to migraines. They were a trigger.”
At Wilco’s gig in Asheville, Tweedy’s guitar battles with his gifted new sidekick, Nels Cline, have a kinetic intensity and ambition that recalls Television. What’s most striking, though, is how effectively the show contradicts the rather worthy reputation that has blighted the band, especially in Britain. Certainly, Tweedy never shies away from serious issues. But there’s a celebratory aspect to Wilco, too, understood by the 2,500 “pretty rambunctious” people who dance around them for over two hours. For an addict, Tweedy seems to be in recovery. And for a depressive, his positivity is unusually convincing.
“Almost everything I’ve ever done has been considered a fluke,” he says earlier. “After Being There people said, ‘This is playing way over his head. He’ll never make a record like this again.’ Summer Teeth came out and it was, ‘Jay Bennett is doing all of this.’ Then Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and obviously it’s ‘Jim O’Rourke and the story’s better than the record’. With A Ghost Is Born, ‘He exploited his addiction and went into rehab to sell his record.’”
Tweedy looks rueful for a moment, then recovers his sarcasm.
“Man, people don’t buy records like that. A rock star goes into rehab? ‘Wow, that’s a fascinating story – no-one’s ever heard that before! I’ve got to hear what this record sounds like!’ Come on!”
The next night, Jeff Tweedy takes his band, his wife and two sons to meet The Rolling Stones. Keith Richards, a man whose tangles with drugs have kept millions vicariously gripped for decades, leans his elbow on Spencer’s head for photographs. Sam Tweedy, aged five, sleeps through “Sympathy For The Devil”. Ron Wood tells Wilco that they must play with the Stones again. Mick Jagger tells Wilco that Ron Wood says that to all the support acts. When they bound into the secure backstage room, the Stones remind Jeff Tweedy of the Marx Brothers, and he is surprised by how all four of them are the same height and weight. He is also relieved that no-one appears to have read a 2004 interview with Wilco where he ponders, “How many fucking people has Keith Richards killed?”
Tweedy laughs when he’s reminded of this.
“I’m obviously not saying by any intention of his own he killed anybody,” he qualifies. “But the persona that has been projected on him, through him, around him, is one that perpetuates a very destructive myth for a lot of people. And there’s no doubt in my mind that people have used it as an excuse to feed on things that are very bad for them. It’s a pretty safe bet that if Keith Richards wasn’t a rich and famous rock star, his constitution alone would not have kept him alive to this day. Most people aren’t that fortunate.”
Then Jeff Tweedy inadvertently stumbles upon the reason why his own story of addiction and rehab is so interesting. His life might have superficially followed a rock’n’roll trajectory, but the details are critically different: the backstory, motivations and redemption far away from the wasted iconography of Keith and his acolytes. He’s embarrassed to talk about this stuff, but he just can’t stop.
“It’s a pretty uncool thing to say in a magazine, but it’s also undeniable. It’s not just Keith, it’s everything that’s grown up around the drug culture and the rock’n’roll myth. That certainly never helped me.”
A Motörhead fan had to be treated for a blood clot on the brain after headbanging at a recent gig by the metal band.
The unnamed German man developed the condition after attending a gig by the band with his son, though doctors at the Hanover medical school where the 50 year old was treated were keen to stress that they do not believe that headbanging is a dangerous activity.
German doctors, via The Guardian, claim that the man developed a blood clot after seeing Motörhead live. He received medical attention after "suffering a constant, worsening headache that affected the whole head," for two weeks after the live performance. The patient had no history of head injuries but was a regular headbanger at live concerts.
Doctors were able to allieviate the man's headaches by drilling a hole into his brain and draining the blood. "We are not against headbanging," said Dr Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian, one of the doctors at the Hanover medical school. "The risk of injury is very, very low. But I think if [the patient] had gone to a classical concert, this would not have happened."
This is the fourth documented case of subdural haematoma linked to headbanging – which can cause the brain to bash off the skull and cause injury to the headbanger.
A Motörhead fan had to be treated for a blood clot on the brain after headbanging at a recent gig by the metal band.
The unnamed German man developed the condition after attending a gig by the band with his son, though doctors at the Hanover medical school where the 50 year old was treated were keen to stress that they do not believe that headbanging is a dangerous activity.
German doctors, via The Guardian, claim that the man developed a blood clot after seeing Motörhead live. He received medical attention after “suffering a constant, worsening headache that affected the whole head,” for two weeks after the live performance. The patient had no history of head injuries but was a regular headbanger at live concerts.
Doctors were able to allieviate the man’s headaches by drilling a hole into his brain and draining the blood. “We are not against headbanging,” said Dr Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian, one of the doctors at the Hanover medical school. “The risk of injury is very, very low. But I think if [the patient] had gone to a classical concert, this would not have happened.”
This is the fourth documented case of subdural haematoma linked to headbanging – which can cause the brain to bash off the skull and cause injury to the headbanger.
Death metal band Unfathomable Ruination are to play in an air-tight, soundproof cube until they run out of oxygen – repeating the feat three nights a week until August 1.
The performances, held outside London's Gherkin building at 6pm every Wednesday to Friday, will be inaudible to the public and are part of an installation titled "Box Sized Die" by Portugese artist João Onofre.
Onofre said: "The performance's duration is limited to the length of time in which oxygen is expended. Outside the cube, viewers observe its strange vibrations, only viewing the band’s entrance and exit to the performance space."
London five-piece Unfathomable Ruination formed in 2011 and have released two albums, Musical Album and Misshapen Congenital Entropy. The video for their song "Carved Inherent Delusion" can be seen below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7VqNSWgTs8
Death metal band Unfathomable Ruination are to play in an air-tight, soundproof cube until they run out of oxygen – repeating the feat three nights a week until August 1.
The performances, held outside London’s Gherkin building at 6pm every Wednesday to Friday, will be inaudible to the public and are part of an installation titled “Box Sized Die” by Portugese artist João Onofre.
Onofre said: “The performance’s duration is limited to the length of time in which oxygen is expended. Outside the cube, viewers observe its strange vibrations, only viewing the band’s entrance and exit to the performance space.”
London five-piece Unfathomable Ruination formed in 2011 and have released two albums, Musical Album and Misshapen Congenital Entropy. The video for their song “Carved Inherent Delusion” can be seen below.
The Dead Weather have teased new single "Buzzkill(er)" by streaming a short clip from the track.
Click below to listen to the audio snippet from the band, which features Jack White and The Kills' Alison Mosshart.
The 7" single will be backed with "It's Just Too Bad" and released as part of Third M...
The Dead Weather have teased new single “Buzzkill(er)” by streaming a short clip from the track.
Click below to listen to the audio snippet from the band, which features Jack White and The Kills’ Alison Mosshart.
The 7″ single will be backed with “It’s Just Too Bad” and released as part of Third Man Records’ ‘Vault’ subscription series on ‘gold’ vinyl.
The songs follow the release of “Rough Detective” and “Open Up (That’s Enough)” which were revealed at the start of the year.
A new album from the band is mooted for release in 2015. Their last LP was Sea Of Cowards in 2010. A press release for the two new songs calls them “further examples that this band, in their downtime from Queens of the Stone Age, the Kills and JW solo, are more deadly than 99% of the rest of the also-rans out there.”
Jeff Tweedy has shared a new song from his album Sukierae.
"Summer Noon"- which you can hear below - is a collaboration with the frontman's son Spencer, who drums on the release. The song features on the soundtrack to director Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood.
"When I set out to make this rec...
Jeff Tweedy has shared a new song from his album Sukierae.
“Summer Noon“- which you can hear below – is a collaboration with the frontman’s son Spencer, who drums on the release. The song features on the soundtrack to director Richard Linklater‘s new film Boyhood.
“When I set out to make this record, I imagined it being a solo thing, but not in the sense of one guy strumming an acoustic guitar and singing,” said Tweedy. “Solo to me meant that I would do everything – write the songs, play all the instruments and sing. But Spencer’s been with me from the very beginning demo sessions, playing drums and helping the songs take shape. In that sense, the record is kind of like a solo album performed by a duo.”
The 20-track Sukierae will be released on September 16 on on Tweedy’s own dBpm label. Tweedy is playing songs from the album on a solo North American tour, which finishes up at the Newport Folk Festival later this month. The song “I’ll Sing It” is streaming at WilcoWorld.net now. A different song from the album will be streamed every Monday for the next eight weeks.
The Rolling Stones wrapped the latest European leg of their 14 On Fire tour with a two hour set on the first day of the Roskilde Festival in Denmark on July 3.
The band played a 19 track setlist of hits, starting with "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and ending with "Brown Sugar". They then re-appeared for an...
The Rolling Stones wrapped the latest European leg of their 14 On Fire tour with a two hour set on the first day of the Roskilde Festival in Denmark on July 3.
The band played a 19 track setlist of hits, starting with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, and ending with “Brown Sugar”. They then re-appeared for an encore of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, for which they were joined by the Vocal Linene Choir, and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.
Mick Jagger said, in Danish, “We’re proud to play the famous Roskilde Festival,” while Keith Richards told the crowd: “It good to be here. Well, it’s good to be anywhere really.”
The concert came just days after the band paid tribute to the late soul singer, Bobby Womack, on their official website. The Rolling Stones also recently made headlines for filming a Monty Python sketch for the reunited comics’ press conference.
The band’s next scheduled date is Saturday, October 25 at the Adelaide Oval. They play nine shows in Australia and New Zealand which have been rescheduled from March.
The Rolling Stones played:
‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’
‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’
‘It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)’
‘Tumbling Dice’
‘Wild Horses’
‘Doom And Gloom’
‘She’s So Cold’
‘Out Of Control’
‘Honky Tonk Women’
‘You Got The Silver’
‘Can’t Be Seen’
‘Midnight Rambler’ (with Mick Taylor)
‘Miss You’
‘Gimme Shelter’
‘Start Me Up’
‘Sympathy For The Devil’
‘Brown Sugar’
Encore
‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’
‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (with Mick Taylor)
Pink Floyd have released more details about their new album, The Endless River.
Following yesterday's revelations that the band are to release their first studio album in 20 years, the band have issued a brief statement.
"Pink Floyd can confirm that they are releasing a new album The Endless River...
Pink Floyd have released more details about their new album, The Endless River.
Following yesterday’s revelations that the band are to release their first studio album in 20 years, the band have issued a brief statement.
“Pink Floyd can confirm that they are releasing a new album The Endless River in October 2014. It is an album of mainly ambient and instrumental music based on the 1993/4 Division Bell sessions which feature David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.
“The album is produced by David Gilmour with Phil Manzanera, Youth and recording engineer Andy Jackson. Work is still in progress, but more details to come at the end of the Summer.”
Cabaret Voltaire are set to play their first gig in 20 years at Berlin's Atonal Festival next month.
According to the festival's website: "Berlin Atonal is delighted to announce that it will host the very first Cabaret Voltaire live performance in over 20 years. Cabaret Voltaire’s blend of dance ...
Cabaret Voltaire are set to play their first gig in 20 years at Berlin’s Atonal Festival next month.
According to the festival’s website: “Berlin Atonal is delighted to announce that it will host the very first Cabaret Voltaire live performance in over 20 years. Cabaret Voltaire’s blend of dance music, techno, dub, house and experimentalism made them, without a doubt, one of the most influential acts of the last 40 years.”
They add that the band is now just made up of one member, Richard H Kirk. “With a line up now consisting solely of machines, multi-screen projections and Richard H Kirk, the first Cabaret Voltaire performance of the 21st Century – featuring exclusively new material and no nostalgia – promises to be formidable,” they continue.
Cabaret Voltaire their 11th album, International Language, in 1993 and disbanded the following year.
Prince appeared as a special guest during Nile Rodgers' set at the Essence Music Festival on Friday [July 4].
The pair collaborated on a cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", which Rodgers co-produced.
You can watch fan footage below.
Prince was scheduled to appear at the New Orleans festival in ...
Prince appeared as a special guest during Nile Rodgers‘ set at the Essence Music Festival on Friday [July 4].
The pair collaborated on a cover of David Bowie‘s “Let’s Dance”, which Rodgers co-produced.
You can watch fan footage below.
Prince was scheduled to appear at the New Orleans festival in his own right, but appeared unbilled on stage during Rodgers’ set for the Bowie cover.
Pink Floyd are set to release a new album, called The Endless River, in October.
News of the LP came via the Twitter account of Polly Samson - partner of David Gilmour. The author said that the new album would be based on 1994 sessions with the band's Richard Wright, who passed away in 2008 at the ...
Pink Floyd are set to release a new album, called The Endless River, in October.
News of the LP came via the Twitter account of Polly Samson – partner of David Gilmour. The author said that the new album would be based on 1994 sessions with the band’s Richard Wright, who passed away in 2008 at the age of 65.
Consequence of Sound adds further details of the album, quoting singer Durga McBroom-Hudson who has toured with the band. “The recording did start during The Division Bell sessions (and yes, it was the side project originally titled The Big Spliff that Nick Mason spoke about). Which is why there are Richard Wright tracks on it. But David and Nick have gone in and done a lot more since then. It was originally to be a completely instrumental recording, but I came in last December and sang on a few tracks. David then expanded on my backing vocals and has done a lead on at least one of them.”
Pink Floyd recently released a new box set of their last studio album, 1994’s The Division Bell, to mark its 20th anniversary. The six-disc set includes a remastered double LP edition of the album in a gatefold sleeve; a red 7-inch of single ‘Take It Back’; clear 7-inch of ‘High Hopes’; 12-inch blue vinyl of ‘High Hopes’ with reverse laser etched design; the 2011 remaster of The Division Bell; a Blu-ray disc including The Division Bell album in HD Audio, and a previously unreleased surround sound audio mix of the album by Andy Jackson. The Blu-ray disc also includes a new video for ‘Marooned’.
The album was originally recorded by the band at guitarist David Gilmour‘s Astoria houseboat studio and Britannia Row Studios in London with the majority of the lyrics being written by Gilmour and Polly Samson. The anniversary box-set discs have been remastered by long term Pink Floyd collaborators James Guthrie and Joel Plante.
The first trailer for Jimi: All Is By My Side, the Jimi Hendrix film starring Outkast's Andre 3000, has been revealed. Click below to watch it.
Scripted and directed by 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley, Jimi: All Is By My Side tells the story of Jimi Hendrix's life throughout 1966 and 1967, a period in which he moved to London, formed the Experience and played a career-making set at California's Monterey Pop Festival, which is where the film ends.
The film will not feature any songs recorded or composed by Hendrix himself, as the late guitarist's estate declined permission. Instead, the film will see Andre 3000 perform songs by The Beatles and Muddy Waters that Hendrix himself covered in the '60s.
The biopic premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013. The supporting cast includes Hayley Atwell, Imogen Poots, Burn Gorman and The White Queen's Ashley Charles, who plays a young Keith Richards. A UK release date will be confirmed soon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-KPOxqMazI
The first trailer for Jimi: All Is By My Side, the Jimi Hendrix film starring Outkast’s Andre 3000, has been revealed. Click below to watch it.
Scripted and directed by 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley, Jimi: All Is By My Side tells the story of Jimi Hendrix’s life throughout 1966 and 1967, a period in which he moved to London, formed the Experience and played a career-making set at California’s Monterey Pop Festival, which is where the film ends.
The film will not feature any songs recorded or composed by Hendrix himself, as the late guitarist’s estate declined permission. Instead, the film will see Andre 3000 perform songs by The Beatles and Muddy Waters that Hendrix himself covered in the ’60s.
The biopic premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013. The supporting cast includes Hayley Atwell, Imogen Poots, Burn Gorman and The White Queen’s Ashley Charles, who plays a young Keith Richards. A UK release date will be confirmed soon.
What strange music Jack White makes these days. At the end of this hot, compelling, tempestuous show, he stands triumphantly on a monitor, guitar held high above head like the hammer of Thor, every inch the conquering stadium rocker.
The guitar, though, is a battered acoustic one, and the music White has hurtled through for the past two hours is far from straightforwardly anthemic, subject as it is to weird currents, radical combinations, an overarching vision that is at once baroque and agitated. How on earth did that garage rock guy, the one with the sister, get here?
Jack White’s secret – one of his secrets, God knows he must have enough of them – may be something to do with a volatile psychological mix of ambition in its most grandiose and ruthless form, and a desire to subvert expectations that can swing perilously close to self-sabotage. During a lengthy encore, he and his five-piece band deconstruct the elegant powerpop of “Steady, As She Goes” and rebuild it with a heavy new menace. The fluent melodiousness of the Raconteurs’ original currently seems to have little use for White, who breaks the song down into a fragmented, staccato prowl, knocking it off balance time and again as he and his bandmates take short and often jarring solos.
Most everything here is tense, indignant – even “Love Interruption”, sung with fiddler Lillie Mae Rische, has a rowdy intensity – predicated on a short fuse. It fits neatly with the persona that White is projecting in recent interviews; the lone superstar, wounded and self-righteous, embracing a role akin to that of anti-hero. Swigging champagne from the bottle, spinning semi-intelligible yarns about Mariah Carey, turning most of his songs into bigger, more fraught and priapic creations, White’s love of puzzles and tricks is now sometimes tantalisingly close to antagonism. A divisive rock god of unstable morals, toying with the expectations of his fans and the fabric of his music.
The thing is, most of White’s provocations come off. Dubious new genres are minted at speed, so that “Just One Drink” and “Alone In My Home”, two of the more straightforward tracks on “Lazaretto”, are amped up into a kind of preposterous pomp honky-tonk, with drummer Daru Jones throwing funk breaks into the latter for good measure. Among a notably kinetic band, Jones is a focal point front stage left, too restless to stay on his stool for long, and occasionally behaving like a man who would be happiest with an entire kit of cowbells.
“Lazaretto” itself, meanwhile, very much resembles a rap-rock hybrid made by someone who loves rock, and rap, but has never actually heard any rap-rock before, and consequently comes to it with an innocent delight in the cleverness of his invention. It’s a stunt White’s clearly enamoured with, and so the likes of “Missing Pieces”, the Dead Weather’s “Blue Blood Blues” and even the Raconteurs’ “Top Yourself”, monstrously strung out in this incarnation, find the outraged cadences of White’s vocal melodies pushed even closer to the rhythms of hip-hop.
The show opens with a climax – the curtain pulled aside to reveal White, theatrically buffeted by the force of his guitar playing, and his bandmates in the midst of a cacophonous ending, and it’s this spirit of excess and bombast which dominates, even on vintage White Stripes nuggets like “Astro”. As that song ends, and the brutal lurch of “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground” begins, White’s guitar riff is doubled, tripled, even quadrupled by his bandmates on steel (Fats Kaplin), fiddle (Rische) and organ (Ikey Owens, playing with the same demented fusion of Booker T and Jon Lord that he brought to early Mars Volta shows). Time and again, the bullishness of White’s playing is underpinned with more spectral elements - Rische and Kaplin switch between mandolins, fiddles, steel and theremin – so that even the most straightahead big rock songs like “You Don't Know What Love Is” are given a brittle subtext.
It’s another way in which White creates a destabilising undercurrent, a sense of the unpredictable that is sustained in spite of the meticulously arranged and drilled nature of the band. Perhaps the waywardness is necessarily anchored in stability: the two bands, one male and one female, that White dragged around the world to support “Blunderbuss”, have been scrapped. For this year’s manoeuvres, the male lineup has been retained and augmented by Rische from the distaff troupe. The switch means White has one less schtick (he wouldn’t tell the bands which one was performing until the day of the show) in his armoury, but it also endows him with a band who’ve grown tour-hardened and flexible, who can draw on a richer and wider repertoire and cut loose when the need arises.
That need, it transpires, arises quite often. If the early “Blunderbuss” shows found an uncharacteristically cautious, understated White at work, tonight’s performance has some of the chaos and flux of the wilder nights of The White Stripes. The wired vibes recall a night at the Alexandra Palace in 2006, when much impatient and brilliant song-mangling climaxed with a denunciation of some perceived misquotes in that week’s NME.
Here, songs collapse into one another, others (“Hello Operator”) are handed over to the audience to sing, and tunes are brusquely cut and shut into one another: a gothic, windswept back and forth between Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man” and the White Stripes’ “Cannon” is especially deranged. There is even a brief, apocalyptic version of The Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday In Cambodia”, prefacing a long “Ball And Biscuit” which logically showcases how White, unlike at those early “Blunderbuss” shows, has clearly reconciled himself to the explosive joys of the guitar solo.
Amidst all the carnage, though, other possibilities present themselves. The splutter and thrust might predominate, but it’s significant that the best songs on “Blunderbuss” and “Lazaretto” are the grand romantic dramas, the ones with cascading pianos and red-raw passions. In the maelstrom, “Would You Fight for My Love?” is a swirling highlight: still charged (Daru Jones drives it an unstintingly hard pace), but with a space and grace that this powerful, exciting, ornately messy show sometimes lacks. As Rische provides backing wails, White appears consumed by his work, orchestrating his bandmates through the swells and currents of his tremendous song. The mood is desperate, imploring, but the lyrics tell a different story. “I know that you want more,” he sings, “But would you fight for my love?” And the message is clear: if we want Jack White as our hero, he will entertain, but not pander. We have to accept all his flaws, whims, caprices and manias as a critical, sometimes uncomfortable, part of the contract.
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
SETLIST
1. Sixteen Saltines
2. Astro
3. Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
4. High Ball Stepper
5. Lazaretto
6. Hotel Yorba
7. Temporary Ground
8. Ramblin' Man/Cannon
9. Icky Thump
10. Missing Pieces
11. Three Women
12. Love Interruption
13. Blunderbuss
14. Top Yourself
15. I'm Slowly Turning Into You
16. Holiday in Cambodia
17. Ball and Biscuit
Encore:
18. Just One Drink
19. Alone in My Home
20. Hello Operator
21. You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)
22. Broken Boy Soldier
23. Blue Blood Blues
24. Would You Fight for My Love?
25. Steady, As She Goes
26. Seven Nation Army
And here are some links to other things I’ve written about Jack White in the past: A long interview around the release of BlunderbussA live review from 2012A piece about BlunderbussThe White Stripes, Under Great White Northern LightsThe White Stripes, Hyde Park, July 2007The Raconteurs, Hammersmith Apollo, May 2008The White Stripes, Icky ThumpThe Raconteurs, Consolers Of The Lonely
What strange music Jack White makes these days. At the end of this hot, compelling, tempestuous show, he stands triumphantly on a monitor, guitar held high above head like the hammer of Thor, every inch the conquering stadium rocker.
The guitar, though, is a battered acoustic one, and the music White has hurtled through for the past two hours is far from straightforwardly anthemic, subject as it is to weird currents, radical combinations, an overarching vision that is at once baroque and agitated. How on earth did that garage rock guy, the one with the sister, get here?
Jack White’s secret – one of his secrets, God knows he must have enough of them – may be something to do with a volatile psychological mix of ambition in its most grandiose and ruthless form, and a desire to subvert expectations that can swing perilously close to self-sabotage. During a lengthy encore, he and his five-piece band deconstruct the elegant powerpop of “Steady, As She Goes” and rebuild it with a heavy new menace. The fluent melodiousness of the Raconteurs’ original currently seems to have little use for White, who breaks the song down into a fragmented, staccato prowl, knocking it off balance time and again as he and his bandmates take short and often jarring solos.
Most everything here is tense, indignant – even “Love Interruption”, sung with fiddler Lillie Mae Rische, has a rowdy intensity – predicated on a short fuse. It fits neatly with the persona that White is projecting in recent interviews; the lone superstar, wounded and self-righteous, embracing a role akin to that of anti-hero. Swigging champagne from the bottle, spinning semi-intelligible yarns about Mariah Carey, turning most of his songs into bigger, more fraught and priapic creations, White’s love of puzzles and tricks is now sometimes tantalisingly close to antagonism. A divisive rock god of unstable morals, toying with the expectations of his fans and the fabric of his music.
The thing is, most of White’s provocations come off. Dubious new genres are minted at speed, so that “Just One Drink” and “Alone In My Home”, two of the more straightforward tracks on “Lazaretto”, are amped up into a kind of preposterous pomp honky-tonk, with drummer Daru Jones throwing funk breaks into the latter for good measure. Among a notably kinetic band, Jones is a focal point front stage left, too restless to stay on his stool for long, and occasionally behaving like a man who would be happiest with an entire kit of cowbells.
“Lazaretto” itself, meanwhile, very much resembles a rap-rock hybrid made by someone who loves rock, and rap, but has never actually heard any rap-rock before, and consequently comes to it with an innocent delight in the cleverness of his invention. It’s a stunt White’s clearly enamoured with, and so the likes of “Missing Pieces”, the Dead Weather’s “Blue Blood Blues” and even the Raconteurs’ “Top Yourself”, monstrously strung out in this incarnation, find the outraged cadences of White’s vocal melodies pushed even closer to the rhythms of hip-hop.
The show opens with a climax – the curtain pulled aside to reveal White, theatrically buffeted by the force of his guitar playing, and his bandmates in the midst of a cacophonous ending, and it’s this spirit of excess and bombast which dominates, even on vintage White Stripes nuggets like “Astro”. As that song ends, and the brutal lurch of “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground” begins, White’s guitar riff is doubled, tripled, even quadrupled by his bandmates on steel (Fats Kaplin), fiddle (Rische) and organ (Ikey Owens, playing with the same demented fusion of Booker T and Jon Lord that he brought to early Mars Volta shows). Time and again, the bullishness of White’s playing is underpinned with more spectral elements – Rische and Kaplin switch between mandolins, fiddles, steel and theremin – so that even the most straightahead big rock songs like “You Don’t Know What Love Is” are given a brittle subtext.
It’s another way in which White creates a destabilising undercurrent, a sense of the unpredictable that is sustained in spite of the meticulously arranged and drilled nature of the band. Perhaps the waywardness is necessarily anchored in stability: the two bands, one male and one female, that White dragged around the world to support “Blunderbuss”, have been scrapped. For this year’s manoeuvres, the male lineup has been retained and augmented by Rische from the distaff troupe. The switch means White has one less schtick (he wouldn’t tell the bands which one was performing until the day of the show) in his armoury, but it also endows him with a band who’ve grown tour-hardened and flexible, who can draw on a richer and wider repertoire and cut loose when the need arises.
That need, it transpires, arises quite often. If the early “Blunderbuss” shows found an uncharacteristically cautious, understated White at work, tonight’s performance has some of the chaos and flux of the wilder nights of The White Stripes. The wired vibes recall a night at the Alexandra Palace in 2006, when much impatient and brilliant song-mangling climaxed with a denunciation of some perceived misquotes in that week’s NME.
Here, songs collapse into one another, others (“Hello Operator”) are handed over to the audience to sing, and tunes are brusquely cut and shut into one another: a gothic, windswept back and forth between Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man” and the White Stripes’ “Cannon” is especially deranged. There is even a brief, apocalyptic version of The Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday In Cambodia”, prefacing a long “Ball And Biscuit” which logically showcases how White, unlike at those early “Blunderbuss” shows, has clearly reconciled himself to the explosive joys of the guitar solo.
Amidst all the carnage, though, other possibilities present themselves. The splutter and thrust might predominate, but it’s significant that the best songs on “Blunderbuss” and “Lazaretto” are the grand romantic dramas, the ones with cascading pianos and red-raw passions. In the maelstrom, “Would You Fight for My Love?” is a swirling highlight: still charged (Daru Jones drives it an unstintingly hard pace), but with a space and grace that this powerful, exciting, ornately messy show sometimes lacks. As Rische provides backing wails, White appears consumed by his work, orchestrating his bandmates through the swells and currents of his tremendous song. The mood is desperate, imploring, but the lyrics tell a different story. “I know that you want more,” he sings, “But would you fight for my love?” And the message is clear: if we want Jack White as our hero, he will entertain, but not pander. We have to accept all his flaws, whims, caprices and manias as a critical, sometimes uncomfortable, part of the contract.
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SETLIST
1. Sixteen Saltines
2. Astro
3. Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
4. High Ball Stepper
5. Lazaretto
6. Hotel Yorba
7. Temporary Ground
8. Ramblin’ Man/Cannon
9. Icky Thump
10. Missing Pieces
11. Three Women
12. Love Interruption
13. Blunderbuss
14. Top Yourself
15. I’m Slowly Turning Into You
16. Holiday in Cambodia
17. Ball and Biscuit
Encore:
18. Just One Drink
19. Alone in My Home
20. Hello Operator
21. You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)
22. Broken Boy Soldier
23. Blue Blood Blues
24. Would You Fight for My Love?
25. Steady, As She Goes
26. Seven Nation Army
And here are some links to other things I’ve written about Jack White in the past:
Matt Berninger's awkward little brother creates a strange and moving documentary...
The new film about The National doesn’t quite know what it is. Neither quite a documentary or rock biopic, it’s a strangely subjective picture that works itself out as it goes along. Fittingly, it starts on an uncertain note. “Do you have any kind of organisation or plan for this film?” singer Matt Berninger asks his younger brother, Tom. Set up in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Matt has erected a deckchair and parasol in less time than it takes Tom to think of the first question in his shambolic interview.
Cut to a montage of clippings – 10-page New York Times stories, Billboard chart positions – and newsreel footage that outline just how accomplished The National are these days. Meanwhile, Tom – nine years younger than Matt, a head shorter, a bit heavier – lives with their parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, and sits in the basement listening to metal and making b-movie-style horror films. His directorial intentions can loosely be interpreted as wanting to outdo Peter Jackson’s Braindead for use of fake blood.
Feeling guilty about having left for college when Tom was a kid, and aware of his static home life, Matt offers his brother a job as a roadie on the tour for 2010’s High Violet. As the only member of The National without a brother in the band, it’s a bonding exercise, though not a particularly successful one. Living with his parents has left Tom with a lax attitude towards responsibility: he misses bus call, forgets to sort out Werner Herzog’s backstage pass, and leaves a milky cereal mess on the floor of his brother’s hotel bathroom. In response, Matt runs the emotional gamut from empathetically frustrated to quite terrifyingly livid.
Not that Tom’s particularly bothered at first; to him the job is a meal ticket to make an all-access movie about his brother’s band. His predilection for bludgeoning metal and horror underpins his technique as a documentarian, sneaking money shots (the band asleep in their tour bus beds, drummer Bryan Devendorf naked in the shower) and asking blunt, odd questions that outline the lack of understanding between them. “Where do you see The National in, like, 50 years?” Tom asks Scott, stunned to learn that they don’t plan on being octogenarian rock stars. “So, how famous do you think you are?” he asks his squirming brother.
Part of the film concerns the unfair immunity of fame and the resentment it brews among those who don’t benefit from it, even when they love those who do. The band enjoy many layers of protection, while Tom cries into his camera after eventually getting fired and realising that his life is in “freefall”. From its second act, the film turns into a portrait of his and Matt’s relationship, addressing what hope any of us have against our worst self-defeating impulses. (To see The National try and fight theirs, investigate their first documentary, Vincent Moon’s A Skin, A Night (2008), an incredibly miserable and hard-to-love film about the very fractious sessions behind 2007’s Boxer.)
It’s heartbreaking to see Tom’s happy-go-lucky, endearingly arrogant persona crumble into self-doubt as he realises how pitiful he’s become, almost as if he were a character in one of his brother’s songs. (There’s some footage of The National recording sixth album Trouble Will Find Me, notably “I Should Live In Salt”, which concerns the brothers’ relationship.) He returns home to Cincinnati to interview their parents about the fundamental differences between the siblings. “Having Matt as my older brother kind of sucks, because he’s a rock star and I am not,” says Tom. “And it’s always been that way.” We see photos of a gangly teenage Matt playing quarterback, but also learn about the brothers’ shared depressive tendencies from inside their artist mum’s studio, where she has a wall covered in very un-brothers-Berninger inspirational quotes.
As Tom comes up with a plan for the film, it becomes a kind of metatextual documentary about making a documentary. It’s an odd concept, but it works thanks to the enjoyably strange array of threads being tugged at here. What starts as a one-man Decline Of Western Civilisation Part II comes to evoke a significantly more redemptive American Movie. Tom embraces sentimentality, but his natural comic timing and propensity to fail keeps schmaltz at bay. The National’s public persona is misleadingly serious, but they’re willing to appear in unflattering lights here, and relegate themselves to supporting players in the story of a guy who it’s easy to love even if you’re not a fan of the band. As different as Matt and Tom Berninger are, they both saved themselves in the same way: turning embarrassment and pain into enduring art rich with humanity and empathy.
EXTRAS: Performance footage, interviews and offcuts. 8/10
Laura Snapes
Matt Berninger’s awkward little brother creates a strange and moving documentary…
The new film about The National doesn’t quite know what it is. Neither quite a documentary or rock biopic, it’s a strangely subjective picture that works itself out as it goes along. Fittingly, it starts on an uncertain note. “Do you have any kind of organisation or plan for this film?” singer Matt Berninger asks his younger brother, Tom. Set up in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Matt has erected a deckchair and parasol in less time than it takes Tom to think of the first question in his shambolic interview.
Cut to a montage of clippings – 10-page New York Times stories, Billboard chart positions – and newsreel footage that outline just how accomplished The National are these days. Meanwhile, Tom – nine years younger than Matt, a head shorter, a bit heavier – lives with their parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, and sits in the basement listening to metal and making b-movie-style horror films. His directorial intentions can loosely be interpreted as wanting to outdo Peter Jackson’s Braindead for use of fake blood.
Feeling guilty about having left for college when Tom was a kid, and aware of his static home life, Matt offers his brother a job as a roadie on the tour for 2010’s High Violet. As the only member of The National without a brother in the band, it’s a bonding exercise, though not a particularly successful one. Living with his parents has left Tom with a lax attitude towards responsibility: he misses bus call, forgets to sort out Werner Herzog’s backstage pass, and leaves a milky cereal mess on the floor of his brother’s hotel bathroom. In response, Matt runs the emotional gamut from empathetically frustrated to quite terrifyingly livid.
Not that Tom’s particularly bothered at first; to him the job is a meal ticket to make an all-access movie about his brother’s band. His predilection for bludgeoning metal and horror underpins his technique as a documentarian, sneaking money shots (the band asleep in their tour bus beds, drummer Bryan Devendorf naked in the shower) and asking blunt, odd questions that outline the lack of understanding between them. “Where do you see The National in, like, 50 years?” Tom asks Scott, stunned to learn that they don’t plan on being octogenarian rock stars. “So, how famous do you think you are?” he asks his squirming brother.
Part of the film concerns the unfair immunity of fame and the resentment it brews among those who don’t benefit from it, even when they love those who do. The band enjoy many layers of protection, while Tom cries into his camera after eventually getting fired and realising that his life is in “freefall”. From its second act, the film turns into a portrait of his and Matt’s relationship, addressing what hope any of us have against our worst self-defeating impulses. (To see The National try and fight theirs, investigate their first documentary, Vincent Moon’s A Skin, A Night (2008), an incredibly miserable and hard-to-love film about the very fractious sessions behind 2007’s Boxer.)
It’s heartbreaking to see Tom’s happy-go-lucky, endearingly arrogant persona crumble into self-doubt as he realises how pitiful he’s become, almost as if he were a character in one of his brother’s songs. (There’s some footage of The National recording sixth album Trouble Will Find Me, notably “I Should Live In Salt”, which concerns the brothers’ relationship.) He returns home to Cincinnati to interview their parents about the fundamental differences between the siblings. “Having Matt as my older brother kind of sucks, because he’s a rock star and I am not,” says Tom. “And it’s always been that way.” We see photos of a gangly teenage Matt playing quarterback, but also learn about the brothers’ shared depressive tendencies from inside their artist mum’s studio, where she has a wall covered in very un-brothers-Berninger inspirational quotes.
As Tom comes up with a plan for the film, it becomes a kind of metatextual documentary about making a documentary. It’s an odd concept, but it works thanks to the enjoyably strange array of threads being tugged at here. What starts as a one-man Decline Of Western Civilisation Part II comes to evoke a significantly more redemptive American Movie. Tom embraces sentimentality, but his natural comic timing and propensity to fail keeps schmaltz at bay. The National’s public persona is misleadingly serious, but they’re willing to appear in unflattering lights here, and relegate themselves to supporting players in the story of a guy who it’s easy to love even if you’re not a fan of the band. As different as Matt and Tom Berninger are, they both saved themselves in the same way: turning embarrassment and pain into enduring art rich with humanity and empathy.
EXTRAS: Performance footage, interviews and offcuts. 8/10
Annik Honoré, the Belgian music promoter and journalist, has died aged 56, according to reports.
Honoré was best known for her relationship with Ian Curtis, who she met in London in 1979.
Born on October 12, 1957, in Belgium, Honoré moved to London in 1979, where she became a secretary at the B...
Annik Honoré, the Belgian music promoter and journalist, has died aged 56, according to reports.
Honoré was best known for her relationship with Ian Curtis, who she met in London in 1979.
Born on October 12, 1957, in Belgium, Honoré moved to London in 1979, where she became a secretary at the Belgian Embassy.
Later that year, Honoré and journalist Michel Duval began promoting shows at Plan K in Brussels. Joy Division performed on the club’s opening night on October 16.
In 1980, Honoré and Duval founded Factory Records imprint Factory Benelux, as well as the independent Belgian music label Les Disques du Crépuscule.
Les Disques du Crépuscule released records by Michael Nyman, Josef K, Cabaret Voltaire, Gavin Bryars, The Pale Fountains, and the cassette, From Brussels With Love, which included contributions from John Foxx, Thomas Dolby, Bill Nelson, Brian Eno and Durutti Column.
Honoré left the music business in the 1980s and worked for the EU in Brussels.
Speaking about her relationship with Ian Curtis in a 2010 Honoré said, “It was a completely pure and platonic relationship, very childish, very chaste… I did not have a sexual relationship with Ian, he was on medication, which rendered it a non-physical relationship. I am so fed up that people question my word or his: people can say whatever they want, but I am the only person to have his letters… One of his letters says that the relationship with his wife Deborah had already finished prior to us meeting each other.”
Ringo Starr has discussed A Hard Day's Night movie on its 50th anniversary and ahead of its re-release in cinemas and on DVD.
"I mean, we were in a movie, man. We were making a movie!" remembers Starr in a new interview with Billboard. "Four guys from Liverpool making a movie - it was so great. I l...
Ringo Starr has discussed A Hard Day’s Night movie on its 50th anniversary and ahead of its re-release in cinemas and on DVD.
“I mean, we were in a movie, man. We were making a movie!” remembers Starr in a new interview with Billboard. “Four guys from Liverpool making a movie – it was so great. I loved it…”.
He continues, saying the whole experience of making a film was “mad”. Starr said: “It was a really exciting thing to do. We were making records and, wow, the records were taking off and then we’re playing to bigger and bigger audiences and that’s taking off, and now we’re doing a movie. It was mad… but it was incredible.”
The 1964 film had been fully restored and will be in cinemas and available to download on July 4. A limited edition DVD and Blu-ray release will follow on July 21.
Directed by Richard Lester and written by Alun Owen, the film also starred Anna Quayle, Bob Godfrey, Robin Ray, Lionel Blair and Patti Boyd.
Six previously unheard Nick Drake recordings are to go up for auction.
The tapes have been described as being in "pristine" condition and were recorded in 1968, before the 1969 release of the folk singer's debut album Five Leaves Left. The recordings are currently owned by his friend, the singer Beverley Martyn, who was married to the late John Martyn. Speaking about the tapes to The Independent, she said the recordings are "full of fun".
She commented: "He was young, he sounds full of fun, he sounds light and his guitar playing is absolutely excellent. It really shows that he didn't need to have this whole layer cake of strings."
Martyn has said that she is selling the tapes because of failing health. "Someone else should be able to enjoy it," she said. The recordings are being sold by London based auction house Ted Owen and Company on July 31, and are expected to make at least £250,000. The tapes feature versions of his songs "Fruit Tree", "Saturday Sun" and "Cello Song".
Earlier this year an unheard Nick Drake song was posted online, almost 40 years after the cult songwriter’s death. "Restless Jane" is a collaboration with Beverley Martyn. The track was written and recorded in Martyn's home in Hastings in early 1974, making it one of the final songs Drake wrote before dying of an overdose of antidepressants in November that year, aged 26. The track featured on Martyn's album The Turtle And The Phoenix, which was released in April.
Six previously unheard Nick Drake recordings are to go up for auction.
The tapes have been described as being in “pristine” condition and were recorded in 1968, before the 1969 release of the folk singer’s debut album Five Leaves Left. The recordings are currently owned by his friend, the singer Beverley Martyn, who was married to the late John Martyn. Speaking about the tapes to The Independent, she said the recordings are “full of fun”.
She commented: “He was young, he sounds full of fun, he sounds light and his guitar playing is absolutely excellent. It really shows that he didn’t need to have this whole layer cake of strings.”
Martyn has said that she is selling the tapes because of failing health. “Someone else should be able to enjoy it,” she said. The recordings are being sold by London based auction house Ted Owen and Company on July 31, and are expected to make at least £250,000. The tapes feature versions of his songs “Fruit Tree”, “Saturday Sun” and “Cello Song”.
Earlier this year an unheard Nick Drake song was posted online, almost 40 years after the cult songwriter’s death. “Restless Jane” is a collaboration with Beverley Martyn. The track was written and recorded in Martyn’s home in Hastings in early 1974, making it one of the final songs Drake wrote before dying of an overdose of antidepressants in November that year, aged 26. The track featured on Martyn’s album The Turtle And The Phoenix, which was released in April.
One of those weeks when the office playlist is taken to a whole new level at the very last moment, thanks to the arrival this morning of the new Steve Gunn album. A couple of previously redacted records can now be revealed, too, as the new efforts by Ryan Adams and Goat…
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
1 Syl Johnson – Diamond In The Rough (Fat Possum)
2 Z Aka Bernard Szajner - Visions of Dune (InFine)
3 Blonde Redhead – Barragán (Kobalt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS8FLOMgSlk
4 Various Artists – Night Walker: The Jack Nitzsche Story Volume 3 (Ace)
5 The Juan Maclean – In A Dream (DFA)
6 Robbie Basho – Zarthus (Vanguard)
7 Various Artists – More Lost Soul Gems From Sounds Of Memphis (Kent)
8 [REDACTED]
9 Jack White – Lazaretto (Third Man/XL)
10 Goat – Commune (Rocket)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjquKdvIX6U
11 The Number Ones – The Number Ones (Static Shock)
12 Ryan Adams – Ryan Adams (Pax-Am/Columbia)
13 Lonnie Holley – Keeping A Record Of It (Dust To Digital)
14 Matthew Young – Recurring Dreams (Drag City)
15 A Winged Victory For The Sullen – Atomos (Erased Tapes)
16 Vashti Bunyan – Heartleap (FatCat)
17 Dan'l Boone - S/T (Drag City)
18 Kasai Allstars – Beware The Fetish (Crammed Discs)
19 Hiss Golden Messenger – Lateness Of Dancers (Merge)
20 Steve Gunn – Way Out Weather (Paradise Of Bachelors)
One of those weeks when the office playlist is taken to a whole new level at the very last moment, thanks to the arrival this morning of the new Steve Gunn album. A couple of previously redacted records can now be revealed, too, as the new efforts by Ryan Adams and Goat…
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
1 Syl Johnson – Diamond In The Rough (Fat Possum)
2 Z Aka Bernard Szajner – Visions of Dune (InFine)
3 Blonde Redhead – Barragán (Kobalt)
4 Various Artists – Night Walker: The Jack Nitzsche Story Volume 3 (Ace)
5 The Juan Maclean – In A Dream (DFA)
6 Robbie Basho – Zarthus (Vanguard)
7 Various Artists – More Lost Soul Gems From Sounds Of Memphis (Kent)
8 [REDACTED]
9 Jack White – Lazaretto (Third Man/XL)
10 Goat – Commune (Rocket)
11 The Number Ones – The Number Ones (Static Shock)
12 Ryan Adams – Ryan Adams (Pax-Am/Columbia)
13 Lonnie Holley – Keeping A Record Of It (Dust To Digital)
14 Matthew Young – Recurring Dreams (Drag City)
15 A Winged Victory For The Sullen – Atomos (Erased Tapes)
16 Vashti Bunyan – Heartleap (FatCat)
17 Dan’l Boone – S/T (Drag City)
18 Kasai Allstars – Beware The Fetish (Crammed Discs)
19 Hiss Golden Messenger – Lateness Of Dancers (Merge)
20 Steve Gunn – Way Out Weather (Paradise Of Bachelors)
To mark their 50th anniversary, The Kinks have announced details of an extensive re-release programme covering their classic 1964-1970 catalogue.
The first album in the series will be 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One, which will be reissued on August 18.
This 2-CD reissue expanded edition comes with Mono and Stereo mixes as well as unreleased material and alternative versions, all re-mastered from original tapes by Kinks archivist Andrew Sandoval. The booklet contains rare and unreleased images from the era plus new extensive liner notes. Disc 2 features the 1971 soundtrack album Percy which is also packed with fantastic bonus content.
Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One will be followed by more titles later in the year. The reissue campaign is being masterminded by BMG, who acquired The Kinks catalogue when it bought Sanctuary Records in 2013. BMG has partnered with Sony Music for the release programme.
The tracklisting is:
DISC ONE
Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround Part One
1. The Contenders (2.42)
2. Strangers (3.18)
3. Denmark Street (1.59)
4. Get Back in Line (3.04)
5. Lola (4.01)
6. Top of the Pops (3.39)
7. The Moneygoround (1.43)
8. This Time Tomorrow (3.21)
9. A Long Way from Home (2.26)
10. Rats (2.38)
11. Apeman (3.51)
12. Powerman (4.16)
13. Got to Be Free (2.59)
BONUS TRACKS
14. Anytime (3.32)
15. The Contenders (Instrumental Demo) (3.00)
16. The Good Life (3.16)
17. Lola (Alternate Version) (5.16)
18. This Time Tomorrow (Instrumental) (3.17)
19. Apeman (Alternate Stereo Version) (3.40)
20. Got to Be Free (Alternate Version) (2.02)
Tracks 1-13 originally released in 1970
Tracks 14-20 previously unreleased
DISC TWO
PERCY
1. God’s Children (3.17)
2. Lola (Instrumental) (4.42)
3. The Way Love Used to Be (2.12)
4. Completely (3.39)
5. Running Round Town (1.03)
6. Moments (2.56)
7. Animals in the Zoo (2.19)
8. Just Friends (2.35)
9. Whip Lady (1.18)
10. Dreams (3.42)
11. Helga (1.53)
12. Willesden Green (2.25)
13. God’s Children (End) (0.28)
BONUS TRACKS
14. Dreams (Remix) (3.21)
15. Lola (Mono Single) (4.06)
16. Apeman (Mono Single) (3.52)
17. Rats (Mono Single) (2.40)
18. Powerman (Mono) (4.25)
19. The Moneygoround (Mono Alternate Version) (1.39)
20. Apeman (Alternate Mono Version) (3.40)
21. God’s Children (Mono Film Mix) (3.16)
22. The Way Love Used to Be (Mono Film Mix) (2.04)
23. God’s Children (End) (Mono Film Mix) (0.49)
Tracks 1-13 originally released in 1971 / Tracks 15, 16, 17 originally released in 1970
Track 22 originally released in 1998 / Tracks 14, 18-21, 23 previously unreleased
All recordings re-mastered 2014
To mark their 50th anniversary, The Kinks have announced details of an extensive re-release programme covering their classic 1964-1970 catalogue.
The first album in the series will be 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One, which will be reissued on August 18.
This 2-CD reissue expanded edition comes with Mono and Stereo mixes as well as unreleased material and alternative versions, all re-mastered from original tapes by Kinks archivist Andrew Sandoval. The booklet contains rare and unreleased images from the era plus new extensive liner notes. Disc 2 features the 1971 soundtrack album Percy which is also packed with fantastic bonus content.
Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One will be followed by more titles later in the year. The reissue campaign is being masterminded by BMG, who acquired The Kinks catalogue when it bought Sanctuary Records in 2013. BMG has partnered with Sony Music for the release programme.
The tracklisting is:
DISC ONE
Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround Part One
1. The Contenders (2.42)
2. Strangers (3.18)
3. Denmark Street (1.59)
4. Get Back in Line (3.04)
5. Lola (4.01)
6. Top of the Pops (3.39)
7. The Moneygoround (1.43)
8. This Time Tomorrow (3.21)
9. A Long Way from Home (2.26)
10. Rats (2.38)
11. Apeman (3.51)
12. Powerman (4.16)
13. Got to Be Free (2.59)
BONUS TRACKS
14. Anytime (3.32)
15. The Contenders (Instrumental Demo) (3.00)
16. The Good Life (3.16)
17. Lola (Alternate Version) (5.16)
18. This Time Tomorrow (Instrumental) (3.17)
19. Apeman (Alternate Stereo Version) (3.40)
20. Got to Be Free (Alternate Version) (2.02)
Tracks 1-13 originally released in 1970
Tracks 14-20 previously unreleased
DISC TWO
PERCY
1. God’s Children (3.17)
2. Lola (Instrumental) (4.42)
3. The Way Love Used to Be (2.12)
4. Completely (3.39)
5. Running Round Town (1.03)
6. Moments (2.56)
7. Animals in the Zoo (2.19)
8. Just Friends (2.35)
9. Whip Lady (1.18)
10. Dreams (3.42)
11. Helga (1.53)
12. Willesden Green (2.25)
13. God’s Children (End) (0.28)
BONUS TRACKS
14. Dreams (Remix) (3.21)
15. Lola (Mono Single) (4.06)
16. Apeman (Mono Single) (3.52)
17. Rats (Mono Single) (2.40)
18. Powerman (Mono) (4.25)
19. The Moneygoround (Mono Alternate Version) (1.39)
20. Apeman (Alternate Mono Version) (3.40)
21. God’s Children (Mono Film Mix) (3.16)
22. The Way Love Used to Be (Mono Film Mix) (2.04)
23. God’s Children (End) (Mono Film Mix) (0.49)
Tracks 1-13 originally released in 1971 / Tracks 15, 16, 17 originally released in 1970
Track 22 originally released in 1998 / Tracks 14, 18-21, 23 previously unreleased
