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Bruce Springsteen on High Hopes: “This is music I always felt needed to be released.”

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Bruce Springsteen on High Hopes: “This is music I always felt needed to be released.”
Bruce Springsteen has written the liner notes for his new album, High Hopes. Springsteen announced details of High Hopes earlier today. In the liner notes - published below - he explains the choice of songs on the album, and provides some of the back stories behind them, too. "I was working on a ...

Bruce Springsteen has written the liner notes for his new album, High Hopes.

Springsteen announced details of High Hopes earlier today.

In the liner notes – published below – he explains the choice of songs on the album, and provides some of the back stories behind them, too.

“I was working on a record of some of our best unreleased material from the past decade when Tom Morello (sitting in for Steve during the Australian leg of our tour) suggested we ought to add ‘High Hopes’ to our live set. I had cut ‘High Hopes’, a song by Tim Scott McConnell of the LA based Havalinas, in the 90’s. We worked it up in our Aussie rehearsals and Tom then proceeded to burn the house down with it. We re-cut it mid tour at Studios 301 in Sydney along with ‘Just Like Fire Would’, a song from one of my favorite early Australian punk bands, The Saints (check out ‘I’m Stranded’). Tom and his guitar became my muse, pushing the rest of this project to another level. Thanks for the inspiration Tom.

“Some of these songs, ‘American Skin’ and ‘Ghost Of Tom Joad‘, you’ll be familiar with from our live versions. I felt they were among the best of my writing and deserved a proper studio recording. ‘The Wall’ is something I’d played on stage a few times and remains very close to my heart. The title and idea were Joe Grushecky’s, then the song appeared after Patti and I made a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It was inspired by my memories of Walter Cichon. Walter was one of the great early Jersey Shore rockers, who along with his brother Ray (one of my early guitar mentors) led the ‘Motifs’. The Motifs were a local rock band who were always a head above everybody else. Raw, sexy and rebellious, they were the heroes you aspired to be. But these were heroes you could touch, speak to, and go to with your musical inquiries. Cool, but always accessible, they were an inspiration to me, and many young working musicians in 1960’s central New Jersey. Though my character in ‘The Wall’ is a Marine, Walter was actually in the Army, A Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry. He was the first person I ever stood in the presence of who was filled with the mystique of the true rock star. Walter went missing in action in Vietnam in March 1968. He still performs somewhat regularly in my mind, the way he stood, dressed, held the tambourine, the casual cool, the freeness. The man who by his attitude, his walk said ‘you can defy all this, all of what’s here, all of what you’ve been taught, taught to fear, to love and you’ll still be alright.’ His was a terrible loss to us, his loved ones and the local music scene. I still miss him.

“This is music I always felt needed to be released. From the gangsters of ‘Harry’s Place’, the ill-prepared roomies on ‘Frankie Fell In Love’ (shades of Steve and I bumming together in our Asbury Park apartment) the travelers in the wasteland of ‘Hunter Of Invisible Game’, to the soldier and his visiting friend in ‘The Wall’, I felt they all deserved a home and a hearing. Hope you enjoy it.”

A Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide sampler: “Broken Arrrow”

John Mulvey
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A Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide sampler: “Broken Arrrow”
The Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide that I wrote about here (along with a review of the forthcoming “Live At The Cellar Door†set) is on sale now, so I thought it might be useful to post a sampler of what you might expect in this Uncut special: namely, this piece by me on 1996’s underrated “...

The Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide that I wrote about here (along with a review of the forthcoming “Live At The Cellar Door†set) is on sale now, so I thought it might be useful to post a sampler of what you might expect in this Uncut special: namely, this piece by me on 1996’s underrated “Broken Arrowâ€. Every Neil album is reviewed in comparable detail – you can find details of where to buy the mag here…

On November 8, 1996, a conceivably weary Crazy Horse fetched up at the Meadows Music Theater in Hartford, Connecticut. A couple of songs from the show made it onto a live CD, Year Of The Horse, the following year: “When You Danceâ€, in fact, opens that set. The first thing you hear on the album is a heckler complaining, “They all sound the same!†In what would eventually become a wry mantra for him, Neil Young has the perfect response ready. “It’s all,†he claims, “one song.â€

A year earlier, David Briggs had died, and Young spent much of 1996 attempting to honour his old producer in as uncompromising a way as possible. The first half of the decade had seen Young accept a sanctified status among a younger cohort of Nirvana and Pearl Jam fans. Now, though, the idea of capitalising upon the success of Mirror Ball appeared unutterably vulgar. His next move was not to hop genre with the kind of cantankerous zeal he displayed in the 1980s. Instead, Young subverted his success by being antagonistically predictable: by reassembling Crazy Horse, giving them license to be ramshackle to a degree that exceeded even their bedraggled reputation, and recording an album that would prove – with an irony which clearly delighted Young – too lo-fi and grungy for the grunge generation.

Shortly before Briggs died on November 26, 1995, Young went to visit him in San Francisco. In Waging Heavy Peace, he recalls asking Briggs – possibly his one equal as a curmudgeon – for “any advice for me on my music going forward?â€

“Just make sure to have as much of you in the recording as you can,†Briggs apparently instructed him. “Stay simple. No one gives a shit about anything else.”
“He told me to keep it simple and focused,†continues Young, “have as much of my playing and singing as possible, and not to hide it with other things. Don’t embellish it with other people I don’t need or hide it in any way. Simple and focused. That’s what I took away. He didn’t exactly say that, but I got that message.â€

It’s a telling insight into Young’s single-mindedness that he asked Briggs for guidance, but acted on his own interpretation of what was said, rather than the producer’s specific instructions. His first move in 1997 was to call Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot and Frank Sampedro back into service. To reconnect to their essence, Crazy Horse embarked on a series of spring gigs way below the radar, including a string of 14 nights at the Old Princeton Landing, a 150-capacity venue close to Young’s Broken Arrow ranch in Northern California. At the same time, the quartet started jamming out a new album back at the ranch, in the studio space named Plywood Analog.

Broken Arrow, as it turned out, certainly captures the spontaneity of the project. The opening sequence of three longish pieces – “Big Timeâ€, “Loose Change†and “Slip Away†– give credence to Young’s assertion that “it’s all one songâ€, and even though the album toys with different styles in its second half, there’s a rumbling, meditative intensity throughout that the seemingly sloppy playing cannot derail.

What some might call meditative intensity, of course, others would describe as lethargy. “Big Timeâ€â€™s lyrics contain what sounds like a pledge to continue Briggs’ vision – “I’m still living in the dream we had. For me it’s not over†– but it is delivered not with vigorous defiance, but at a trudging pace which suggests the exertions of the early ‘90s left Young somewhat exhausted. Crazy Horse are at their most truculent and unstable, with Molina especially idiosyncratic in his approach to keeping time, and even Young’s solos begin by sounding a little tentative. As the song lurches on, though, and Young overdubs a plinking one-note piano line, “Big Time†gradually builds in heft – if not achieving resolution, at least setting the mood for much of Broken Arrow. Young’s vocals are often so frail and mixed so low, notably on “Slip Awayâ€, that he sometimes collapses into the woebegone harmonies of his bandmates. But, beneath the brusque treatments and raw production, these are insidious and strange songs, far better than their reputation promises.

The key moment, perhaps, comes about three and a half minutes into “Loose Changeâ€, when the song’s battered vamp devolves into an abstract, locked-groove churn that suggests more lessons may have been subconsciously learned from Sonic Youth on the Weld jaunt. While Young carves out a few brutal, glancing solos, Crazy Horse get stuck on a single-chord cycle. Dogged and inexorable, they grind on hypnotically for another six minutes towards unlikely transcendence. According to Jimmy McDonough in Shakey, “When Sampedro’s girlfriend asked why the band got hung up on the chord for so long, he said, ‘We were playing David on his way.’â€

After the similarly gusting “Slip Awayâ€, Broken Arrow becomes more fragmented. “Changing Highways†is an amiable enough barn-raiser with a passing resemblance to “Are You Ready For The Countryâ€; “This Town†an odd, whispered, mostly unmemorable chug. “Scattered (Let’s Think About Livin’)â€, though, is a genuinely great song; a Briggs elegy with a see-sawing riff (kin to “Old Man†and “Albuquerqueâ€, perhaps) and Young essaying a message of vague spiritual hope (“When the music calls I’ll be there/No more sadness, no more caresâ€) in the most deflated tone imaginable.

“Music Arcadeâ€, meanwhile, is a fittingly ghostly kiss-off: Young alone with his acoustic guitar, talking about being lost, being found out and being prepared to move on. After the fecund run of ‘90s albums, with hindsight the song feels like a farewell to the business for a while. Following six new albums in six years, his fans would have to wait until 2000 before Young resurfaced with Silver & Gold.

“They’ll shit on this one,†Young told McDonough, pre-empting the critical response to Broken Arrow. “I’ve given them a moving target – there’s enough weaknesses in this one for them to go for it… It’s purposefully vulnerable and unfinished. I wanted to get one under my belt without David.”

To end with “Music Arcadeâ€, though, would be too neat. On the vinyl edition, he tacks on “Interstateâ€, a magnificent outtake from Briggs’ Ragged Glory sessions, with an intricate, almost classical, guitar line, and a vocal that puts the worn-out timbre of Broken Arrow into startling perspective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xErYIU148k

And on one of his most untidy albums, Young has one last exasperating trick. “Baby What You Want Me To Do†finds Crazy Horse loping artlessly through an old Jimmy Reed blues, recorded on an audience microphone (the whoops and chatter are mostly louder than the group) at one of the Old Princeton Landing shows. Just another bar band, it seems, playing for love, a few beers, the memory of an old comrade, and the enigmatic whims of their leader.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

Jonathan Wilson – Fanfare

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Jonathan Wilson – Fanfare

Taking Laurel Canyon songcraft into epic territory on his second album... America’s cultural pendulum often swings from coast to coast. After a decade or so where New York has dominated the pop landscape, Los Angeles is very much in the ascendancy, from Ariel Pink to Flying Lotus, from Frank Ocean to Kendrick Lamar. It’s possibly part of the reason why Jonathan Wilson’s debut, Gentle Wind, was one of the most garlanded releases of 2011. While L.A. is commonly dismissed as a cultural vacuum, here was an album that came plugged into the psychogeography of the city, feeding from its terroir, reactivating its musical history. Wilson recorded Gentle Spirit in his own studio in Laurel Canyon – the bucolic Los Angeles Shangri-La that’s just a short drive from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip – and his band featured many local musicians, including members of The Black Crowes, Vetiver and the Jayhawks. But Wilson also convened with the hippie vibe of late 60s and early 70s Canyon, summoning up images of a bearded Graham Nash strumming love-songs to Joni Mitchell; of Gram Parsons sitting in with the Mamas And Papas; of Jackson Browne jamming at David Crosby’s house. Ironically, Wilson moved out of Laurel Canyon a couple of years ago (“the only people who can afford to live there these days are wealthy Hollywood typesâ€, he says). He’s relocated his studio to the more downmarket inner-city neighbourhood of Echo Park, but the drop in real estate prices seems to have come with a massive upgrade in recording technology. If Gentle Rain had its roots in the folksy, late-night jam sessions that Wilson would host in his old studio, Fanfare is a lavish musical epic, the work of a dedicated studioholic. If it sometimes sounds like Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Crosby, it’s probably because it *is* Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Crosby. All three are fans of Wilson’s, and contribute heavenly harmonies on several tracks. Wilson – a pleasantly geeky, bearded 38-year-old, who speaks in a soft voice with a mild stammer – actually has an impressive CV as a producer and session musician (Glenn Campbell, Elvis Costello, Erykah Badu, Dawes, Father John Misty), and will happily hold forth about vintage analogue consoles and two-inch tape fidelity. And Fanfare is an audiophile’s album. Not only is the musicianship exceptional (Wilson plays piano, keyboards, bass, guitar and drums, sometimes assisted by members of his touring band), but everything is cleanly miked up, deliciously recorded, exquisitely mixed. It also addresses some of Gentle Spirit’s drawbacks: Wilson’s whispery voice is clearer and less whiny, the spiritual hokum is played down, while the songs are better structured. The opening title track is a statement of intent. It’s a love song to a Steinway grand piano that lasts seven minutes, half of that time taken up by a bombastic introduction: slurring string arrangements, muted flugelhorn, tubular bells and a Roland Kirk-ish tenor sax freakout. Few artists these days have the budget – or the chops – to record these kind of epics. “Love To Love†is the most orthodox rock song on the album; an uptempo, FM-radio-friendly, major-key stomper that recalls Jackson Browne’s “Running On Empty†or “Doctor My Eyesâ€. But other tracks take the Canyon references into more arcane territory: we can hear the raga-like extended improvisations of The Doors, the tightly-arranged psych-jazz of Frank Zappa, and the baroque rock of Arthur Lee’s Love. “Dear Friend†starts as a waltzing David Crosby nursery rhyme that goes into a sludge rock section, culminating in a feverish three-minute, Robby Krieger-style wah-wah duel between Wilson and his guitarist Omar Velasco. “Lovestrung†mutates from a piano-pounding Harry Nilsson ballad into a clavinet-led funk workout. “Fazonâ€, a funky oddity by San Francisco rockers Sopwith Camel, gets put through the Canyon prism and sounds like a track from Zappa’s Hot Rats, with James King multi-tracking a tight saxophone arrangement. Again, those goosebump-inducing CS&N-style harmonies are a welcome fixture on most tracks, and this time some of them (particularly the lovely, limpid “Cecil Taylorâ€) actually feature Crosby, Nash and Browne in various configurations. If there’s one surprising leitmotif, though, it’s the very un-Californian sound of mid-70s Pink Floyd: as if you’ve taken a wrong turning on the Ventura Boulevard and ended up in Grantchester Meadows. These Floydian allusions are all over the place: the Animals-style chord drones on the title track; the Meddle-style tom-toms and organ drones on “Future Visionâ€, the Echoes-ish suspended chords on “Her Hair Is Growing Longâ€, the spacey Dark Side middle-eight on “Dear Friendâ€, and so on. But, even here, Pink Floyd’s gloomy melancholy is put through a distinctly Californian prism and emerges dappled in L.A. sunshine, recast as uplifting mantras. This is one of the things about Jonathan Wilson’s music that takes it away from empty pastiche. It might be rooted in nostalgic homage but there’s a transformative quality that’s strangely transcendent. Fanfare rummages through the past in a way that will provide aural comfort food for many Uncut readers and writers (isn’t that the middle-eight from Lennon’s “#9 Dreamâ€? Doesn’t that sound exactly like a 10cc single?) but Wilson has found a way of personalising and transforming these fragments into a very contemporary music. John Lewis Q&A Jonathan Wilson Fanfare sounds much more epic than its predecessor, Gentle Spirit… That was very much the goal. Gentle Spirit was purposefully more of a homespun affair with a personal atmosphere. Fanfare is a fully blown out late-’70s analogue production. I love all that shit – the old-school studios where six assistants are synching up two multi-track machines, where it would take three weeks to get a snare sound. I used my own studio, which helped with the budget, but it took hundreds of hours of studio time, spread over nine months. How did you hook up with Crosby, Nash and Browne? I’ve worked with all of them over the years, both in the studio and gigging, so it wasn’t too hard to reach out to them. We mastered the album at Jackson Browne’s studio, a great place where they mastered the last four Dylan albums. But it’s a dream come true to move from being influenced by them to actually working with them. On the third verse of “Cecil Taylorâ€, where it’s just me, Crosby and Nash, that really makes me smile. Were Pink Floyd an influence? They certainly are. I’m constantly amazed by the music they make. I’ve actually just got hold of a version of the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, with all the tracks that weren’t in the film. Any Pink Floyd references you can hear on Fanfare are probably intentional! What are the lyrics to “Cecil Taylor†about? That’s an inside joke with Roy Harper. If something was inappropriate, or insane, or whatever, Roy would say, jokingly: “…and Cecil Taylor on the White House lawnâ€. It’s a reference to the fact that President Carter, in 1977, invited [freeform jazz pianist] Cecil Taylor to play at the White House for some function. Imagine this gay, avant-garde, African-American musician, in his tie-dye stockings, playing for the President! I saw him with Elvin Jones, and it was very fucking far out. Imagine him playing on the grass at the White House! Are there any lyrical themes you noticed? Yeah, there are definitely more love songs. Songwriting is sometimes my only dwelling place, and I was trying to get back to writing simple, loving lyric that branches out to tell some stories. What instrument do you write on? I used to write on acoustic guitar, but several of these tunes were composed at the piano. The Steinway grand was the centrepiece of these sessions, and it was a complete lifestyle upgrade! They cost about a hundred grand, so we hired one for 90 days. Right till the last, when they were coming to pick it up, we were scrambling to track it on songs. It appears everywhere. I’m basically a drummer, so pianos are exciting to me. It’s like playing 88 tuned drums... That’s actually a Cecil Taylor quote… Is it really? Wow, that’s freaky! So me and Cecil are on the same wavelength there. There are times when I wished that I could combine more complex piano stylings, which is where I use Jason Borger, who plays piano and Hammond in my band. I like the harmonic complexity of the piano. Why the Sopwith Camel cover? My drummer, Richard Gowen, is a walking musical dictionary. He’s got thousands and thousands of terrabytes of these strange 70s albums. Sopwith Camel was a San Francisco band that had a kinda vaudeville hit with “Hello Hello†way back in the mid-60s, and then took a seven-year hiatus and came back in ’73 with this kinda pre-disco, space-age hippy sound that sounded nothing like their hit. It included “Fazonâ€, which I was smitten with. I’ve created a tradition for myself to do a cover on every album, last time I did a Gordon Lightfoot song. What else have you been listening to lately? All sorts. Laura Marling, Father John Misty, and Crazy Horse, who we’ve been touring with a bit. But mostly it’s “classic era†stuff, recorded between 1967 and ’74 or ’75. There are still thousands or amazing, relatively unknown albums made during that period which are new to us. Then there’s also Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and Milton Nascimento, people I listen to nearly every day, like a mantra. I’d love to work with Nascimento. I’m fascinated by the EMI Brasil studio he used. It was like Abbey Road in the jungle. And finally, are you going to record a bluegrass album? You know, I’ve long considered this. I’m from North Carolina originally, and my dad played bass in Bill Monroe’s band – I can play all that stuff in my sleep. I’d love to put together a kinda Newport-style festival of bluegrass music. INTERVIEW: JOHN LEWIS Photo credit: Chris Greco

Taking Laurel Canyon songcraft into epic territory on his second album…

America’s cultural pendulum often swings from coast to coast. After a decade or so where New York has dominated the pop landscape, Los Angeles is very much in the ascendancy, from Ariel Pink to Flying Lotus, from Frank Ocean to Kendrick Lamar. It’s possibly part of the reason why Jonathan Wilson’s debut, Gentle Wind, was one of the most garlanded releases of 2011. While L.A. is commonly dismissed as a cultural vacuum, here was an album that came plugged into the psychogeography of the city, feeding from its terroir, reactivating its musical history.

Wilson recorded Gentle Spirit in his own studio in Laurel Canyon – the bucolic Los Angeles Shangri-La that’s just a short drive from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip – and his band featured many local musicians, including members of The Black Crowes, Vetiver and the Jayhawks. But Wilson also convened with the hippie vibe of late 60s and early 70s Canyon, summoning up images of a bearded Graham Nash strumming love-songs to Joni Mitchell; of Gram Parsons sitting in with the Mamas And Papas; of Jackson Browne jamming at David Crosby’s house.

Ironically, Wilson moved out of Laurel Canyon a couple of years ago (“the only people who can afford to live there these days are wealthy Hollywood typesâ€, he says). He’s relocated his studio to the more downmarket inner-city neighbourhood of Echo Park, but the drop in real estate prices seems to have come with a massive upgrade in recording technology. If Gentle Rain had its roots in the folksy, late-night jam sessions that Wilson would host in his old studio, Fanfare is a lavish musical epic, the work of a dedicated studioholic. If it sometimes sounds like Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Crosby, it’s probably because it *is* Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Crosby. All three are fans of Wilson’s, and contribute heavenly harmonies on several tracks.

Wilson – a pleasantly geeky, bearded 38-year-old, who speaks in a soft voice with a mild stammer – actually has an impressive CV as a producer and session musician (Glenn Campbell, Elvis Costello, Erykah Badu, Dawes, Father John Misty), and will happily hold forth about vintage analogue consoles and two-inch tape fidelity. And Fanfare is an audiophile’s album. Not only is the musicianship exceptional (Wilson plays piano, keyboards, bass, guitar and drums, sometimes assisted by members of his touring band), but everything is cleanly miked up, deliciously recorded, exquisitely mixed. It also addresses some of Gentle Spirit’s drawbacks: Wilson’s whispery voice is clearer and less whiny, the spiritual hokum is played down, while the songs are better structured.

The opening title track is a statement of intent. It’s a love song to a Steinway grand piano that lasts seven minutes, half of that time taken up by a bombastic introduction: slurring string arrangements, muted flugelhorn, tubular bells and a Roland Kirk-ish tenor sax freakout. Few artists these days have the budget – or the chops – to record these kind of epics.

“Love To Love†is the most orthodox rock song on the album; an uptempo, FM-radio-friendly, major-key stomper that recalls Jackson Browne’s “Running On Empty†or “Doctor My Eyesâ€. But other tracks take the Canyon references into more arcane territory: we can hear the raga-like extended improvisations of The Doors, the tightly-arranged psych-jazz of Frank Zappa, and the baroque rock of Arthur Lee’s Love.

“Dear Friend†starts as a waltzing David Crosby nursery rhyme that goes into a sludge rock section, culminating in a feverish three-minute, Robby Krieger-style wah-wah duel between Wilson and his guitarist Omar Velasco. “Lovestrung†mutates from a piano-pounding Harry Nilsson ballad into a clavinet-led funk workout. “Fazonâ€, a funky oddity by San Francisco rockers Sopwith Camel, gets put through the Canyon prism and sounds like a track from Zappa’s Hot Rats, with James King multi-tracking a tight saxophone arrangement. Again, those goosebump-inducing CS&N-style harmonies are a welcome fixture on most tracks, and this time some of them (particularly the lovely, limpid “Cecil Taylorâ€) actually feature Crosby, Nash and Browne in various configurations.

If there’s one surprising leitmotif, though, it’s the very un-Californian sound of mid-70s Pink Floyd: as if you’ve taken a wrong turning on the Ventura Boulevard and ended up in Grantchester Meadows. These Floydian allusions are all over the place: the Animals-style chord drones on the title track; the Meddle-style tom-toms and organ drones on “Future Visionâ€, the Echoes-ish suspended chords on “Her Hair Is Growing Longâ€, the spacey Dark Side middle-eight on “Dear Friendâ€, and so on. But, even here, Pink Floyd’s gloomy melancholy is put through a distinctly Californian prism and emerges dappled in L.A. sunshine, recast as uplifting mantras.

This is one of the things about Jonathan Wilson’s music that takes it away from empty pastiche. It might be rooted in nostalgic homage but there’s a transformative quality that’s strangely transcendent. Fanfare rummages through the past in a way that will provide aural comfort food for many Uncut readers and writers (isn’t that the middle-eight from Lennon’s “#9 Dream� Doesn’t that sound exactly like a 10cc single?) but Wilson has found a way of personalising and transforming these fragments into a very contemporary music.

John Lewis

Q&A

Jonathan Wilson

Fanfare sounds much more epic than its predecessor, Gentle Spirit…

That was very much the goal. Gentle Spirit was purposefully more of a homespun affair with a personal atmosphere. Fanfare is a fully blown out late-’70s analogue production. I love all that shit – the old-school studios where six assistants are synching up two multi-track machines, where it would take three weeks to get a snare sound. I used my own studio, which helped with the budget, but it took hundreds of hours of studio time, spread over nine months.

How did you hook up with Crosby, Nash and Browne?

I’ve worked with all of them over the years, both in the studio and gigging, so it wasn’t too hard to reach out to them. We mastered the album at Jackson Browne’s studio, a great place where they mastered the last four Dylan albums. But it’s a dream come true to move from being influenced by them to actually working with them. On the third verse of “Cecil Taylorâ€, where it’s just me, Crosby and Nash, that really makes me smile.

Were Pink Floyd an influence?

They certainly are. I’m constantly amazed by the music they make. I’ve actually just got hold of a version of the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, with all the tracks that weren’t in the film. Any Pink Floyd references you can hear on Fanfare are probably intentional!

What are the lyrics to “Cecil Taylor†about?

That’s an inside joke with Roy Harper. If something was inappropriate, or insane, or whatever, Roy would say, jokingly: “…and Cecil Taylor on the White House lawnâ€. It’s a reference to the fact that President Carter, in 1977, invited [freeform jazz pianist] Cecil Taylor to play at the White House for some function. Imagine this gay, avant-garde, African-American musician, in his tie-dye stockings, playing for the President! I saw him with Elvin Jones, and it was very fucking far out. Imagine him playing on the grass at the White House!

Are there any lyrical themes you noticed?

Yeah, there are definitely more love songs. Songwriting is sometimes my only dwelling place, and I was trying to get back to writing simple, loving lyric that branches out to tell some stories.

What instrument do you write on?

I used to write on acoustic guitar, but several of these tunes were composed at the piano. The Steinway grand was the centrepiece of these sessions, and it was a complete lifestyle upgrade! They cost about a hundred grand, so we hired one for 90 days. Right till the last, when they were coming to pick it up, we were scrambling to track it on songs. It appears everywhere. I’m basically a drummer, so pianos are exciting to me. It’s like playing 88 tuned drums…

That’s actually a Cecil Taylor quote…

Is it really? Wow, that’s freaky! So me and Cecil are on the same wavelength there. There are times when I wished that I could combine more complex piano stylings, which is where I use Jason Borger, who plays piano and Hammond in my band. I like the harmonic complexity of the piano.

Why the Sopwith Camel cover?

My drummer, Richard Gowen, is a walking musical dictionary. He’s got thousands and thousands of terrabytes of these strange 70s albums. Sopwith Camel was a San Francisco band that had a kinda vaudeville hit with “Hello Hello†way back in the mid-60s, and then took a seven-year hiatus and came back in ’73 with this kinda pre-disco, space-age hippy sound that sounded nothing like their hit. It included “Fazonâ€, which I was smitten with. I’ve created a tradition for myself to do a cover on every album, last time I did a Gordon Lightfoot song.

What else have you been listening to lately?

All sorts. Laura Marling, Father John Misty, and Crazy Horse, who we’ve been touring with a bit. But mostly it’s “classic era†stuff, recorded between 1967 and ’74 or ’75. There are still thousands or amazing, relatively unknown albums made during that period which are new to us. Then there’s also Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and Milton Nascimento, people I listen to nearly every day, like a mantra. I’d love to work with Nascimento. I’m fascinated by the EMI Brasil studio he used. It was like Abbey Road in the jungle.

And finally, are you going to record a bluegrass album?

You know, I’ve long considered this. I’m from North Carolina originally, and my dad played bass in Bill Monroe’s band – I can play all that stuff in my sleep. I’d love to put together a kinda Newport-style festival of bluegrass music.

INTERVIEW: JOHN LEWIS

Photo credit: Chris Greco

Bob Dylan’s tribute to John Lennon receives its live debut

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Bob Dylan’s tribute to John Lennon receives its live debut
Bob Dylan's John Lennon tribute, "Roll On John", received its live premiere last night [November 24]. Dylan debuted "Roll On John" as the last song of the final show of a three night stand at Blackpool’s Opera House. The song is taken from Dylan's 2012 album, Tempest. You can hear a live record...

Bob Dylan‘s John Lennon tribute, “Roll On John”, received its live premiere last night [November 24].

Dylan debuted “Roll On John” as the last song of the final show of a three night stand at Blackpool’s Opera House.

The song is taken from Dylan’s 2012 album, Tempest.

You can hear a live recording below.

Dylan plays London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 26, 27, and 28.

You can read our review of Dylan’s Albert Hall show from November 26 here.

You can read our review of Dylan’s Glasgow shows on November 18, 19 and 20 here.

Bruce Springsteen confirms tracklisting and release date for new album, High Hopes

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Bruce Springsteen confirms tracklisting and release date for new album, High Hopes
Bruce Springsteen has confirmed details of his new album, High Hopes. Details of the album were revealed on Springsteen's Facebook page earlier today [November 25]. The album can be pre-ordered on iTunes. High Hopes will be released on January 13, 2014. It is a mixture of new material, covers and...

Bruce Springsteen has confirmed details of his new album, High Hopes.

Details of the album were revealed on Springsteen’s Facebook page earlier today [November 25].

The album can be pre-ordered on iTunes.

High Hopes will be released on January 13, 2014. It is a mixture of new material, covers and re-recorded versions of existing songs, including a re-recording of “The Ghost of Tom Joad”, a cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” and a studio recording of “American Skin (41 Shots)”, which has previously only been recorded live.

The tracklisting for High Hopes is:

High Hopes (Tim Scott McConnell) – featuring Tom Morello

Harry’s Place * – featuring Tom Morello

American Skin (41 Shots) – featuring Tom Morello

Just Like Fire Would (Chris J. Bailey) – featuring Tom Morello

Down In The Hole *

Heaven’s Wall ** – featuring Tom Morello

Frankie Fell In Love

This Is Your Sword

Hunter Of Invisible Game * – featuring Tom Morello

The Ghost of Tom Joad – duet with Tom Morello

The Wall

Dream Baby Dream (Martin Rev and Alan Vega) – featuring Tom Morello

All songs written by Bruce Springsteen except as noted

Album produced by Ron Aniello with Bruce Springsteen

*Produced by Brendan O’Brien

**Produced by Brendan O’Brien, co-produced by Ron Aniello with Bruce Springsteen

Kevin Shields: “I’ve written my Bruce Springsteen song!â€

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Kevin Shields: “I’ve written my Bruce Springsteen song!â€
Kevin Shields answers your questions in the new issue of Uncut, dated January 2014 and out on Thursday (November 28). My Bloody Valentine’s leader discusses topics including m b v, guitars, Daft Punk’s marketing budget, Patti Smith and Primal Scream in the piece. Shields also reveals that he...

Kevin Shields answers your questions in the new issue of Uncut, dated January 2014 and out on Thursday (November 28).

My Bloody Valentine’s leader discusses topics including m b v, guitars, Daft Punk’s marketing budget, Patti Smith and Primal Scream in the piece.

Shields also reveals that he has a few new songs he’s written in the next year that he hopes to release at some point soon – including one with a surprising sound.

“There are a few tunes I made in the past year,†he says, “and one of them should definitely be on this EP. It’s very weird. It’s a bit Springsteenish. I know, I’ve written my Bruce Springsteen song! It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

“Why is it Springsteen-ish? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have to change it so it doesn’t sound like that anymore.â€

The new issue of Uncut, dated January 2014, is out on Thursday (November 28).

Three hospitalised in Willie Nelson tourbus accident

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Three hospitalised in Willie Nelson tourbus accident

Three people have been hospitalised after Willie Nelson's band's tourbus was involved in an accident. The bus crashed on Saturday morning ([November 23] in Texas on a icy road, reports TMZ. Nelson was reportedly in his own bus when the band bus hit a bridge pillar roughly 80 miles east of Dallas. One person was left with a broken hip but the other two men apparently "walked away with bumps and bruises". Nelson released his last studio album, Heroes, in May of last year. The LP featured covers of tracks including Pearl Jam's "Just Breathe", as well as his pro-cannabis song "Roll Me Up", which featured Snoop Dogg.

Three people have been hospitalised after Willie Nelson‘s band’s tourbus was involved in an accident.

The bus crashed on Saturday morning ([November 23] in Texas on a icy road, reports TMZ. Nelson was reportedly in his own bus when the band bus hit a bridge pillar roughly 80 miles east of Dallas. One person was left with a broken hip but the other two men apparently “walked away with bumps and bruises”.

Nelson released his last studio album, Heroes, in May of last year. The LP featured covers of tracks including Pearl Jam‘s “Just Breathe”, as well as his pro-cannabis song “Roll Me Up”, which featured Snoop Dogg.

Christine McVie expresses interest in permanently re-joining Fleetwood Mac

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Christine McVie expresses interest in permanently re-joining Fleetwood Mac
Christine McVie has expressed an interest in permanently re-joining her old band Fleetwood Mac. McVie, who left the band in 1998, said to The Guardian: "I like being with the band, the whole idea of playing music with them. I miss them all. If they were to ask me I would probably be very delightedâ...

Christine McVie has expressed an interest in permanently re-joining her old band Fleetwood Mac.

McVie, who left the band in 1998, said to The Guardian: “I like being with the band, the whole idea of playing music with them. I miss them all. If they were to ask me I would probably be very delighted… but it hasn’t happened so we’ll have to wait and see.” This September McVie joined Fleetwood Mac onstage at London’s O2 Arena, to perform “Don’t Stop” with the band.

On her reasons for quitting the group, McVie told The Guardian. “I think I was just music’d out. I suffered from some kind of delusion that I wanted to be an English country girl, a Sloane Ranger or something… and it took me 15 years to realise that it’s not really what I wanted at all.”

Her ex-husband, John McVie, was recently diagnosed with cancer, leading Fleetwood Mac to cancel their Australian and New Zealand tour so he can seek treatment. When asked how he was doing, she responded: “really good. He’s having his treatment in LA right now, but they caught it really early so he should be up and running in a couple of months.”

“I don’t like strangeness!” An extensive interview with Kristin Hersh

Michael Bonner
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“I don’t like strangeness!” An extensive interview with Kristin Hersh

I wrote a Throwing Muses feature for the November 2013 issue of Uncut, for which I spoke to all Muses past and present. The key interview, of course, was with Kristin Hersh, which ended up taking place over two lengthy sessions. Kristin was terrific - very open and willing to discuss the band's life and times in detail, and well as her own ups and downs over the years. Inevitably, I couldn't get everything into the finished piece, so I thought I'd run the transcript in its entirely here. What I guess you need to know is that the starting point was the new Muses album, Purgatory/Paradise, and we start talking about the beach because it plays a significant part in the album's creation. Anyway, this transcript is over 6,000 words long, so make a cup of tea and get yourself comfy... Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner. ___________________ Can you tell us a bit about the beach? I just came from there. It’s fucking freezing! The lifeguards must hate me because they have to sit there and watch me swim in something that is not conductive to keeping anything alive. Even the jellyfish left. It seems very central to the album… The chasm itself overlooks the surfer end of the beach, and it’s very dramatic. It’s a long, beautiful drop. The beachy part of the beach, where people lie around and swim, at the other end, it gets less and less dramatic. That’s where I hang out, because I’m less and less dramatic. This is Rhode Island? Yeah, the island we live on is Aquidneck Island. It’s an Indian word. It means Awkward Neck. It’s mostly surfers and hardcore. It’s a little bit of Ireland, it was settled by Irish. It’s full of bars and stonewalls. It would look familiar to you, but it’s not to most Americans. It’s a strange place. There are a lot of Narragansett Indians here. And it’s voodoo. I live in New Orleans for half the year where voodoo is quite prevalent. And the people that set the tone are not white, ever, in America, contrary to public opinion. Our studio is right up from the beach and it’s difficult not to be informed by the salt water and the minerals and the air and the fact you’ve always just come from the beach because that’s all there is to do here. I always imagined Rhode Island to be quite upmarket… We’re the shitty people. I imagine there’s some not shitty people, but they don’t hang out with us. Is there an inspiration behind the collection of songs on Purgatory/Paradise? Ten years off, I suppose. The songs don’t give a shit about whether or not anybody is letting us work. We didn’t want to work in an ugly business any longer. It was never really the right thing to do, except it allowed us to make records. But eventually your morals can’t bear to hear ‘Dumb it down’ one more time. So you’re morally bound to either stop working or work in private if you can’t play the game, and we were not out to play the game any longer. So we did both. There were times when we couldn’t work at all and times when we worked a little bit, and this collection is a window into that more private world. You say you’ve been working on these songs for three or four years. That’s recording. The songs kept coming, and we always play together whenever we can. And that’s all there were but it always was, because we were such dorks we couldn’t really learn how to, I guess care. You’re supposed to want to be a rock star, you’re not supposed to filter down into the choices you make including selling a cartoon version of yourself and your friends and your product. I don’t see how that could not be transparent to everyone right now. I wouldn’t want to be caught doing that even if I could, and I couldn’t because I’m such a dork and so are my friends but eventually we were livid that that’s what was expected of us when all we were trying to do was… well, really what we’re trying to do is manifest heaven. I don’t know how else to put it! There aren’t any better ways. In private, we called Purgatory/Paradise Precious Pretentious! We don’t care anymore about caring. We care so fucking much, we’re tired of apologising for it. This is our Precious Pretentious world and it’s been private for the last decade because we haven’t wanted to engage in the music business and now the music business is dead and we’re dancing on its grave. You say in the introduction, “All the stories on this record are trueâ€. Do you have a favourite? My favourite stories probably aren’t even on this record! I absolutely adore my band. I adore the music, I adore the band members. I wouldn’t work with anyone who didn’t turn me on in every way. They’re the kindest, funniest people I’ve ever met and I’ve lived on buses with them for decades now and there hasn’t been a single moment when I haven’t been thrilled to be in their presence. Honestly. So every fucking day with these people cracks me up. And every time we play, it feels important and touching, I suppose. They’re good weather. Nothing out of control, just something you really want to be grateful for in case it goes away some day. What motivates you to write songs these days? I don’t mean to. I never meant to. I just hear them. I hear noises that form themselves into sounds and then I probably alter their sonic vocabulary until I can relate to something that I would call a song. What I hear initially is… I don’t know, challenging, I’m not sure I would release it that way so I let craft step in and turn it into something that won’t hurt anybody’s feelings too much. I wouldn’t actually want to be precious and pretentious, I just like thinking of myself that way! And so by the time it’s a song I would want anybody to hear, it’s in the category of something they’ve heard before. You know, I have a lot of respect for the tradition of pop music and I don’t want to imitate anybody because it’s what everyone else does and I would get bored, but there’s something very touching about putting a piece of inspiration in an outfit with which we’re all at least partially familiar. You wouldn’t want to dress your kid like a clown, in other words. This is still an ongoing thing for you, and has been for many years. Honestly, when you said that, I welled up. It’s not easy for me. I don’t like strangeness. I like normal. That’s probably why I dress this stuff in a presentable fashion. Because it hurts my feelings and I don’t want to use it to hurt anyone else’s. There is a place for strangeness, you don’t have to work it. “I’m not writing songs anymore, they’re writing me.†It seems to be reflected in that line from Purgatory Paradise. It is what it is. I mean, everybody’s story has to be treated the same way. It is what it is. No one’s turns out too much luckier than anyone else. I’d rather not view it as a trauma but more as a… the gift/curse thing, that’s real. Just about everything can be viewed that way, this is just a little more extreme in my life. It makes me very shy and that’s sad for me, because I love people and I’d like to be one of them. But it’s a reason to hide I suppose, no worse than that. Hiding in plain sight? Oh, yeah. Let’s loop back and talk about the early days of the Throwing Muses. You grew up in Aquidneck on Rhode Island didn’t you, but you were born in Georgia and then you moved to Rhode Island, am I right? That’s right, yeah. I lived in Georgia long enough to have this gay Southern accent though. It dips my IQ by 20 points or so. But you can’t really hear it unless I’m drunk. What do you remember about growing up on Aquidneck Island? Mostly getting beat up for my accent. It was a tough place compared to the South with all this crazy Jesus freaky hats and the staff that would bake pies and take me to Sunday School. It was also gentle, it was kind of nuts, you know, my parents were hippies and I lived on a commune, and everything was kind of soft focused until I got to this cold place. But, this island was the hooker with the heart of gold. There is a warmth and it’s not for strangers, it’s for the people who have proved themselves, it’s a hard ridden place and they let you in after a while. So when did you first meet Tanya? We were probably about 9 years old, I suppose. Was that when you were still in Georgia or had you moved? No, she’s from here. Dave and Tanya are from here, and Leslie, my first bass player, and Brian, my current bass player, they're from California and Boston. So when do you remember your first impressions of Tanya? Oh, no. I remember her trying to talk me out of my accent, she probably felt bad that I kept getting beat up. Actually they never could win the fight, they would try to beat me up, but the one thing they teach you in the South is how to fight. Dumbasses, thought they could pick a fight with a Southern girl! So who were your musical heroes then? My father played music that was wildly diverse when I was a kid. Like Talking Heads, he was a big Talking Heads fan; and he’d play Appalachian folk songs and Phillip Glass. It was kind of a nutty mix, so I never thought to reduce music to a style. To me, that’s like being racist. It’s like saying, I like redheads, redheads and only redheads. It doesn’t really inform your sensibilities in any useful way. So when did you start playing with Tanya? When we were about 14. You had your bike accident when you were 16 which is where everything changes I guess. Yeah, yeah; it was just goofiness until then. It was just goofiness, like kids in a band. They let us play in clubs, we were as good as anybody else but they let us play in clubs because they said girls don’t start fights. Which is WRONG. And I guess Dave counted as a girl and he wasn’t starting any fights. But I’m not sure we sounded like anybody else. It wasn’t… Biblical. Do you remember the bike accident at all? Yeah, yeah. But I had this story that went along with it, my idea was this witch has materialised just to zap me, jam a lightning rod into my skull so that I could pick up music, and she had to do that by knocking the crap out of me. I remember floating in the air when she hit me with her car, you know you go up in the air, and everything was in slow motion, like a lot of people say that after an accident. It was so slow thatI felt like I was hovering, I could watch the whole thing happen, Luckily I had time to think ‘Go limp!’ because otherwise I’d be dead. I didn’t even get knocked out, which is such a fucker. Nothing can knock me out, I take a sleeping pill, I get sped up. In surgery, they can’t knock me out. It’s crazy. It’s like knocking out a 300 pound man to try and get me to sleep. I would give anything, hit me with a tyre iron, anything to black out. But the coolest part was all the blood because that’s just so rad, it was just spewing everywhere. Until you have blood all over you, you don’t know what that’s like. It was interesting. I was only 16 so it was before I could give a shit about myself. Now I’d just be annoyed at best. At the time I just thought it was cool. “Oh, yeah, so it feels like this, now I know.†But my one concern was that since my leg was cut in half, my foot was underneath my leg. When I lifted up my leg, it was cut right in the middle of my shin, so there’s a bone sticking out, with no foot on the end, so I didn’t think I had a foot anymore. My first though was ‘I cant be in a band.’ Which is bogus, like why not? That doesn’t make any sense at all but for some reason I thought I couldn’t be in a band without a foot and that really bummed me out so I went looking for my foot and found it and stuck it back on so no one could tell and say I couldn’t be in a my band anymore. How soon after that did the sounds start to come to you? In the hospital I started hearing noises that I thought were machines. They were sort of whirring… it’s a sound I hear before every song begins, it’s like an industrial hum. Clanging and whirring noises, with static in it and what it says is, it’s about to start picking up vocabulary from what’s going on. Images and noises. And it’s going to make a song out of it. I tried to mimic that sound a couple of times on records, on Sunny Border Blue, the last song, ‘Listerine’, starts with a moment of that, and ‘Shark’ on Muses’ University is some of that noise. But I’ve never gotten it quite right, maybe because it’s a visceral effect, not just a sound. There has to be like an electrical component, you should get a shock at the same time, and I can’t really make that happen on a record yet. Well, we’re combining a book and a record so maybe Virtual Reality next time around and I can Tazer you. It’s like, God, I hate that girl! You’re in Rhode Island at this point? So what else is going at that same time? I was never that interested, and now I’m not interested at all. But the music I am moved by does tent to happen in small places. I think the future of music is probably in attics and garages and basements and churches and bars. And that’s as it should be. I don’t think we all have to hear it. Manifesting heaven would be the point, so it’s not about counting the number of people who are paying attention. It was hardcore bands and us. And that was great, because they sounded like the ocean, and I loved that. We were just included for some reason. I guess because we had distorted guitars nobody could tell what we were doing. I loved those shows where it’s just 14 bands and nobody makes money and nobody’s headlining and that’s sort of as it should be. Except that nobody really listens in bars. I like it when audiences listen! How did you end up going to Boston? We were just told that we should! We were in the scene in Providence, which was more about art rock and less about anyone getting signed. That’s fine, but I don’t know… I was probably a little wishy-washy and I let people tell me what to do. But it was good. We got to Boston and it was sort of what we were used to. No one seemed to be headlining, everybody just played for each other, the bands would just step off stage and become the audience for the next band. It was about making our own noise, so it was a great education for us, to be able to play constantly. There was no competition, except when it came to lousy music. We were trying to drown out the lousy bands. You sign to 4AD and record the first album with Gil Norton. What do you think of the songs on that first album now? I’m not comfortable listening to them now. Dave and I played a show a few years ago, where we played some of them and so I had to learn them and I had to listen to the record and I did get that at least I wasn’t flirtatious or shallow, you know. At least I was in the throes of something real. I just don’t like to go back there. I can appreciate it intellectually. And it is better than what happened to us, which was eventually just throwing Warner Brothers the crappiest crap we could come up with so that they would let us survive. We had a song that was just a joke, and that’s much worse: at least I just sounded psychotic when I started. It’s way more psychotic to try and play that stupid game. We still play a lot of those songs! The record itself is hard for me to listen to. I wasn’t so into the smooth production and I don’t like to hear that crazy, psycho voice of mine very much. But it is what it is. We weren’t lying, in other words, we weren’t trying to impress anyone. It’s like pulling out your liver and tossing it on the table: it is what it is. It’s not pretty, but it’s honest. What do you remember about coming to the UK? I remember thinking, where are the all the girls? The audience in Boston was half women, and there doesn’t seem to be any women at all in England. I guess they were in the back. But I do remember the enthusiasm, a lot of sweaty, drunk jumping boys. And that was nice to have. The chaos on stage matched the chaos in the crowd. And there's the famous Pixies tour in 1988. The Pixies kept us from being lonely everywhere. I made our manager sign them, I made our record company sign them, it’s like – we will not be alone again! The Pixies gave that tour a hometown feel. We were all just little babies in a van together, we were so pathetic we would sing sad folk songs together because we were lonely. We were complimentary bands and we were all close friends. House Tornado and Hunkpapa: came very close together. Plus tours. Was that a very intense period for you? What kind of pressures were you under? I loved the work. It’s not an easy life. The people who live on the road are soldiers and we expect a lot of each other. That’s exhilarating. At the same time, the pressure of the business is just ugly. Not from 4AD, they were very dear friends, but from Warner Brothers who we were dealing with because we were American, it was just made very clear that I wasn’t pretty enough or I wasn’t fashionable enough, I wasn’t writing stupid pop songs and they were going to stop funding our records unless I did some like that. That was mean in the 50s, but to hear it in the 90s was just offensive. Ultimately, I was called difficult. I’m the nicest person in the world! I’m so nice, it’s pathetic. But they don’t like it when you’re a natural musician, they don’t like it when you know about production and have opinions about production, they don’t like you to know what you’re doing because they can’t tell you what to do. And I was not about to turn my back on women by presenting myself as a bimbo and I was not going to turn my back on musicians or any stupid shit by trying to get on the radio. I just ended up giving up. By the time we made The Real Ramona, I was morally bound to quit. This is war, and I am against them. I am on the side of music, not the music business. You’re not sure you can really win, and that’s what we’re doing right now. This success, and I’m willing to call it that, because I love this world and I like to be able to hear it and to have our soundtrack funded by listeners, I’m certainly willing to call that success. What do you think about “Dizzy†now? It was a joke. We were like, ‘You fuckers, you’re so stupid, this is what you want.’ And then they do want it! We were in the studio, saying, ‘Now add something PC.’ It was just so stupid. We expected them to get the point and they didn’t at all, they loved it. The music business was awful and it should have died long ago. We hated that song while we were recording it! We didn’t play it on the tour. Like I said, I respect pop music and it shouldn’t suck. 1990: pivotal year for you and the band. Can you tell us a little bit about the events of that year? That was ugly. Our manager sued us. I’m not allowed to talk about it, still. Then my son was taken away by his father, who tricked me into leaving my house for an house and when I did the cops found me and served me papers saying I’d abandoned my son. He took everything in my bank account, my house, my car, my child. I just lost almost everything that year. I couldn’t afford to finish this root canal that I was half way through when all this happened because my son’s father left me with a tax bill for the money I had earned and took everything out of the bank account. I was also sued by the Musician’s Union as the leader of the band because they wanted me to pay dues in every state where we had played and they were sending me letters to my apartment when I was on tour, so they all went to collection. It was just one of those years where everything falls apart. And Warner Brothers was trying to break up the band. All I had was Billy. I was halfway through this root canal, so I was taking fistfulls of painkillers all day and washing them down with beer and cheap champagne. I was already dead, really. I barely remember making The Real Ramona. I would start a take and then I would hear the producer saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do another one.’ It’s like, well, we haven’t done that one yet. But a take had just gone by and I’d no memory of playing or singing. It was one of those lost years. While I made that record, I said, ‘That’s it, we’re not a band any more, there is no life. I quit.’ So what got you out of that? It took a while. I married Billy, we had a baby. Dave, who’s been my best friend since we were nine years old, so we were still very close, he would come over to play with the baby and listen to the songs I was putting on my four track. We’d talk about the songs. They were like the baby; we were playing with the songs and playing with the baby. Eventually he said, ‘This is bullshit, to let Warner Brothers tell you what to play or what not to play. They destroyed your life and they had no business doing so. So let’s be a band that doesn’t give a shit.’ And that made sense. So Leslie came back for the recording of Red Heaven and Bernie did the tour, and Bernie’s been in the band for twenty years now. We just never went back to giving a shit. When it comes to the music. Which sounds so lame, but… It’s a defensive mechanism. It’s hard being the little guy. It’s hard when you’re bereft. It’s hard when meaning is your only weapon, because it doesn’t make money, and money is survival and money is freedom. But there are more important ways to live than the lie that says you’re supposed to care about it. So somehow we’ve survived long enough to only be about that at this point. What about Tanya leaving the band? We called ourselves step-twins and we were letting ourselves be two sides of a personality, so we like to think that we became whole when we stopped relying on each other that way. University is just the three of you. Is that an album that you have a lot of affection for? Yeah, I love University. It’s so sweet. That our most successful record came at that point is charming. I’m not attached to that as a record, but it meant we got to stay on the road and feel lucky, no sucky, not hating out single. We met great musicians and we got to know our listeners for the first time. We’d always been kept from the audience – you’re in the dressing room and the hotel room and the bus, and this time we were out there meeting the people we were playing for and appreciating the work they were doing. The work of a listener is not a slam dunk. It’s taking a ride and trusting that it’s going to go somewhere worthwhile and we developed a genuine respect for that. The course of events that let music happen between people at that point, and that’s really what we’ve stuck with all this time, is just respect for the listener. Which is unusual. You’ve read Purgatory Paradise, people who don’t want to be swayed by the outside world, we love the people that the soundtrack is for. 50:40 Was it easy to step away from the band to do Hips & Makers? Oh, no, that was a total mistake. I mean, not in retrospect, but I didn’t mean to do it. I recorded acoustic songs for Billy, not really remembering that I was married to one of my managers. So he sent them to my business manager who had them on his desk in Athens, Georgia. Michael Stipe picked it up, took it home with him, listened to it, sent it to Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers was going to release it! It’s like coming across a love letter and saying, ‘Ah, yes, I’ll put this is the newspaper.’ So I said, ‘Let me do it on purpose, then you can release it.’ Michael was convinced I was going to fuck it up, which I understand, but I did it on purpose and it sounds just like the demos. I was still not convinced that they were going to release it. I thought that Warner Brothers felt sorry for me and they were just pretending to care about something like a solo record. I just couldn’t do the math. Like, nobody cares about my band, but they’re going to care about that? But there were a lot of people who preferred a pencil-sketch production of a song. So University and Hips came around the same time, or I made them at the same time anyway. I was surprised that I had to tour by myself, start wearing contact lenses because I had to get out the big theatre stages and climb up on that stupid acoustic girl stool without falling off and if you fall into the microphone everyone can hear it. It was a steep learning curve. But I did learn that the instrument itself is muscular, that it’s wood, you can hear air and muscle and some songs really take to being played in air and wood. And as much as I loved my peddles and hiding behind my bandmates, music deserved a little bit more from me. That was humbling. I don’t feel like I knew what I was doing when I made that record. I didn’t know how to record a cello. It sounded like a horse. I just didn’t know what I was doing. I recorded it in two weeks. But it sold so much that it was in the black the day it was released and what I did was tell Warner Brothers you can have my solo record if you let the Muses go. So I bought out freedom and then found our that the Muses weren’t signed, only I was signed as a key member, so I was buying my own freedom. The day I left, they declared Hips & Makers in the red so I would never make another penny off of it. This is all leading towards CASH Music and these methods of distribution that have characterised your work over the last few years. Is this the way forward? So far, I believe it is. There isn’t the foundation of response that we started with when I started playing. People are no longer well-versed in live music and hw to go about supporting musicians. It’s OK, it’s a re-write, and I think it’s necessary for a lot of reasons. I’m lucky enough to have support historically the support of people who aren’t trendy, those people who aren’t interested in what you just released and then it’s necessarily going to be considered ‘out’ sooner or later. So if you’re working in a timeless genre, if you’re trying to – I’m going to say it again – if you’re trying to manifest Heaven, you’re not going to impress anybody in the next five minutes. So if you’re looking for a long term solution, I would recommend you’re trying to find listeners for whom you feel a great deal of respect. I still consider Limbo to be our best record up to that point. There was no more money afterwards to tour or be in the studio so we just disappeared. I moved out to the desert. I just sort of became a ghost for a few years. I stopped feeling songs. I was quiet. Having thought of Throwing Muses as one long quiet war against smug, it fits like the end of a story, but I was still broken hearted. You know how everyone in the music business is just so smug? And we were losers, and that was important. So it fit. I should probably have seen it coming, but it still broke my heart. Did you think you’d ever reconvene the Muses at that point? No, I thought the music business won. I know we would play together, if it didn’t hurt our feelings too much. And that’s what we did. But the only recording I could bring about was when I was making a solo record. I didn’t use all my studio time so I talked them into the studio for a weekend and we recorded that record that I think is called Throwing Muses. Which is sweet, but it’s more like demos than a record. And of course no one ever heard it. I know that’s not the point, but it’s still a little sad. When did the songs start coming back? It’s a really nutty story. I was on tour, I was touring a record that was all written before everything happened and it was what I think of as a half-arsed record. I was going through the motions, trying to feed my family. I was in New Mexico, I was leaving the morning after the show, and we were in a café getting coffees to go. My husband Billy looked down to take my order and there were tears streaming down my face because I could see the music coming out of the speakers and I remembered the sense that I had lost and I remembered how I had thrown my life away for music, all at once. I suppose it’s my religion. So he started to freak out, whips around to see who’s making me cry, and there’s these two old Indian guys burning herbs over a younger Indian guy’s guitar. Billy races over and says, ‘My wife is crying because she can see music. Did you do this to her?’ They said, ‘Oh, sorry, we’re blessing this man’s guitar. We must have missed and hit your wife in the back of the head.’ The guy was bummed. He’d been fasting in preparation for the blessing. I took the blessing away – I even played for it. So he had my play the guitar for a while, and we talked, and we because friends. His name is Leonard Crow Dog and he sends me birthday cards and lets me know how his guitar is doing. I tried to transfer some of the blessing, I don’t know if it worked, but I could hear songs again after that. What album was I touring? Strange Angels. I don’t know what year. Does this lead into you starting to reconvene to work together again with David and Bernard? No, this was long after that. This was Red Heaven. I had already given up and stayed given up until CASH Music. We would… every time we’d play together, I’d look down the set list, it wasn’t alive anymore, it wasn’t challenging to us any more. We felt as dead as people were treating us. As if we were reviving the past, when really such is not the case. A good song is timeless, and most of the listeners got that. Purgatory Paradise was already being written, just because songs keep writing themselves and these were not 50 Foot Wave songs and solo songs. I tried to make them solo songs but it was really obvious. What does your day to day life entail now? I’m in the studio most days. Because all of my projects are funded now and the days I’m not I’m writing books. The social networking replaced record companies. It’s not an easy thing for a shy person to pick up and do, but I have taken to the warmth of it, I suppose. It’s pretty fucking Zen. The blog – I suppose it depends how quickly and how loudly you read it. What would Kristin of 25 years ago think of you now? I haven’t changed a great deal. But sadly, the nightmares just kept coming. I have not had an easy life and it hasn’t given me much of a break. There’s always somebody worse off you can compare yourself to, but lately I’ve been meeting people who just seem to have a fairly easy time of it. I kept thinking that you can learn a lesson and avoid the traumas but life isn’t really set up that way. I guess it’s asking for a more evolved response, and then maybe it leaves you alone. But after all I’ve been through – my marriage dissolved this year. I’ve been with Billy since I was 22 year, just another nightmare waiting in the wings. I know it’s been difficult, but it’s a body of work of a standard than most people have left. Thank you for saying so. That’s a good way of seeing it. I felt like it shouldn’t have gone to maybe a skinny little white girl. Someone with more wherewithal, someone with a louder mouthpiece, somebody with bigger balls. And you can think that as a mother, too. How better off would my kids have been? But I guess what you’re saying is true, we’re looking for a more evolved response. If you had to chose an album that you’re happiest with from the catalogue, what would it be? This one. Because having claimed all along that you’re morally bound to play the right music no matter who likes it, we were never really fully functioning in that regard, there was always something in the way, whether it was psychosis, or Warner Brothers or a producer. This is the first time where the lack of a middle man has really shown itself, because the listeners demand quality, whereas the middle man demands opposite. We wouldn’t stop making the record until it’s shown that way. Even if we were there just deleting and deleting and deleting – we’re really good at erasing! – that’s carving your statue, you know? We’ve really never had the freedom and the wherewithal and the balls to do that until now. Because we don’t give a fuck. We finally don’t give a fuck about anything but the song in front of us. I mean, duh! That’s the way it should have been all along, although I guess if it were no one would have heard of us. You’ve got to go through that to get to here… Yeah, I suppose so. Right, because you could fall back and make those mistakes at any moment. We know how bad that feels, so we won’t do it again. And it doesn’t help, I mean everyone is trying to suck in order to succeed, so you just get lost in the mess of people willingly sucking. You might as well not suck, and then even if no one’s paying attention at least you’re good. Have you made peace with music? I believe I have. I think writing that book helped show its features in relief so that I could imagine how numb I must have felt in the desert without music. You can’t feel spiritually privileged. You can’t ask for less. You have to take whatever is thrown at you, and that was thrown at me and I can now see that it’s a walking, talking organism that I was honoured to spend time with while I was here and I was playing.

I wrote a Throwing Muses feature for the November 2013 issue of Uncut, for which I spoke to all Muses past and present. The key interview, of course, was with Kristin Hersh, which ended up taking place over two lengthy sessions.

Kristin was terrific – very open and willing to discuss the band’s life and times in detail, and well as her own ups and downs over the years. Inevitably, I couldn’t get everything into the finished piece, so I thought I’d run the transcript in its entirely here. What I guess you need to know is that the starting point was the new Muses album, Purgatory/Paradise, and we start talking about the beach because it plays a significant part in the album’s creation.

Anyway, this transcript is over 6,000 words long, so make a cup of tea and get yourself comfy…

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

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Can you tell us a bit about the beach?

I just came from there. It’s fucking freezing! The lifeguards must hate me because they have to sit there and watch me swim in something that is not conductive to keeping anything alive. Even the jellyfish left.

It seems very central to the album…

The chasm itself overlooks the surfer end of the beach, and it’s very dramatic. It’s a long, beautiful drop. The beachy part of the beach, where people lie around and swim, at the other end, it gets less and less dramatic. That’s where I hang out, because I’m less and less dramatic.

This is Rhode Island?

Yeah, the island we live on is Aquidneck Island. It’s an Indian word. It means Awkward Neck. It’s mostly surfers and hardcore. It’s a little bit of Ireland, it was settled by Irish. It’s full of bars and stonewalls. It would look familiar to you, but it’s not to most Americans. It’s a strange place. There are a lot of Narragansett Indians here. And it’s voodoo. I live in New Orleans for half the year where voodoo is quite prevalent. And the people that set the tone are not white, ever, in America, contrary to public opinion. Our studio is right up from the beach and it’s difficult not to be informed by the salt water and the minerals and the air and the fact you’ve always just come from the beach because that’s all there is to do here.

I always imagined Rhode Island to be quite upmarket…

We’re the shitty people. I imagine there’s some not shitty people, but they don’t hang out with us.

Is there an inspiration behind the collection of songs on Purgatory/Paradise?

Ten years off, I suppose. The songs don’t give a shit about whether or not anybody is letting us work. We didn’t want to work in an ugly business any longer. It was never really the right thing to do, except it allowed us to make records. But eventually your morals can’t bear to hear ‘Dumb it down’ one more time. So you’re morally bound to either stop working or work in private if you can’t play the game, and we were not out to play the game any longer. So we did both. There were times when we couldn’t work at all and times when we worked a little bit, and this collection is a window into that more private world.

You say you’ve been working on these songs for three or four years.

That’s recording. The songs kept coming, and we always play together whenever we can. And that’s all there were but it always was, because we were such dorks we couldn’t really learn how to, I guess care. You’re supposed to want to be a rock star, you’re not supposed to filter down into the choices you make including selling a cartoon version of yourself and your friends and your product. I don’t see how that could not be transparent to everyone right now. I wouldn’t want to be caught doing that even if I could, and I couldn’t because I’m such a dork and so are my friends but eventually we were livid that that’s what was expected of us when all we were trying to do was… well, really what we’re trying to do is manifest heaven. I don’t know how else to put it! There aren’t any better ways. In private, we called Purgatory/Paradise Precious Pretentious! We don’t care anymore about caring. We care so fucking much, we’re tired of apologising for it. This is our Precious Pretentious world and it’s been private for the last decade because we haven’t wanted to engage in the music business and now the music business is dead and we’re dancing on its grave.

You say in the introduction, “All the stories on this record are trueâ€. Do you have a favourite?

My favourite stories probably aren’t even on this record! I absolutely adore my band. I adore the music, I adore the band members. I wouldn’t work with anyone who didn’t turn me on in every way. They’re the kindest, funniest people I’ve ever met and I’ve lived on buses with them for decades now and there hasn’t been a single moment when I haven’t been thrilled to be in their presence. Honestly. So every fucking day with these people cracks me up. And every time we play, it feels important and touching, I suppose. They’re good weather. Nothing out of control, just something you really want to be grateful for in case it goes away some day.

What motivates you to write songs these days?

I don’t mean to. I never meant to. I just hear them. I hear noises that form themselves into sounds and then I probably alter their sonic vocabulary until I can relate to something that I would call a song. What I hear initially is… I don’t know, challenging, I’m not sure I would release it that way so I let craft step in and turn it into something that won’t hurt anybody’s feelings too much. I wouldn’t actually want to be precious and pretentious, I just like thinking of myself that way! And so by the time it’s a song I would want anybody to hear, it’s in the category of something they’ve heard before. You know, I have a lot of respect for the tradition of pop music and I don’t want to imitate anybody because it’s what everyone else does and I would get bored, but there’s something very touching about putting a piece of inspiration in an outfit with which we’re all at least partially familiar. You wouldn’t want to dress your kid like a clown, in other words.

This is still an ongoing thing for you, and has been for many years.

Honestly, when you said that, I welled up. It’s not easy for me. I don’t like strangeness. I like normal. That’s probably why I dress this stuff in a presentable fashion. Because it hurts my feelings and I don’t want to use it to hurt anyone else’s. There is a place for strangeness, you don’t have to work it.

“I’m not writing songs anymore, they’re writing me.†It seems to be reflected in that line from Purgatory Paradise.

It is what it is. I mean, everybody’s story has to be treated the same way. It is what it is. No one’s turns out too much luckier than anyone else. I’d rather not view it as a trauma but more as a… the gift/curse thing, that’s real. Just about everything can be viewed that way, this is just a little more extreme in my life. It makes me very shy and that’s sad for me, because I love people and I’d like to be one of them. But it’s a reason to hide I suppose, no worse than that.

Hiding in plain sight?

Oh, yeah.

Let’s loop back and talk about the early days of the Throwing Muses. You grew up in Aquidneck on Rhode Island didn’t you, but you were born in Georgia and then you moved to Rhode Island, am I right?

That’s right, yeah. I lived in Georgia long enough to have this gay Southern accent though. It dips my IQ by 20 points or so. But you can’t really hear it unless I’m drunk.

What do you remember about growing up on Aquidneck Island?

Mostly getting beat up for my accent. It was a tough place compared to the South with all this crazy Jesus freaky hats and the staff that would bake pies and take me to Sunday School. It was also gentle, it was kind of nuts, you know, my parents were hippies and I lived on a commune, and everything was kind of soft focused until I got to this cold place. But, this island was the hooker with the heart of gold. There is a warmth and it’s not for strangers, it’s for the people who have proved themselves, it’s a hard ridden place and they let you in after a while.

So when did you first meet Tanya?

We were probably about 9 years old, I suppose.

Was that when you were still in Georgia or had you moved?

No, she’s from here. Dave and Tanya are from here, and Leslie, my first bass player, and Brian, my current bass player, they’re from California and Boston.

So when do you remember your first impressions of Tanya?

Oh, no. I remember her trying to talk me out of my accent, she probably felt bad that I kept getting beat up. Actually they never could win the fight, they would try to beat me up, but the one thing they teach you in the South is how to fight. Dumbasses, thought they could pick a fight with a Southern girl!

So who were your musical heroes then?

My father played music that was wildly diverse when I was a kid. Like Talking Heads, he was a big Talking Heads fan; and he’d play Appalachian folk songs and Phillip Glass. It was kind of a nutty mix, so I never thought to reduce music to a style. To me, that’s like being racist. It’s like saying, I like redheads, redheads and only redheads. It doesn’t really inform your sensibilities in any useful way.

So when did you start playing with Tanya?

When we were about 14.

You had your bike accident when you were 16 which is where everything changes I guess.

Yeah, yeah; it was just goofiness until then. It was just goofiness, like kids in a band. They let us play in clubs, we were as good as anybody else but they let us play in clubs because they said girls don’t start fights. Which is WRONG. And I guess Dave counted as a girl and he wasn’t starting any fights. But I’m not sure we sounded like anybody else. It wasn’t… Biblical.

Do you remember the bike accident at all?

Yeah, yeah. But I had this story that went along with it, my idea was this witch has materialised just to zap me, jam a lightning rod into my skull so that I could pick up music, and she had to do that by knocking the crap out of me. I remember floating in the air when she hit me with her car, you know you go up in the air, and everything was in slow motion, like a lot of people say that after an accident. It was so slow thatI felt like I was hovering, I could watch the whole thing happen, Luckily I had time to think ‘Go limp!’ because otherwise I’d be dead. I didn’t even get knocked out, which is such a fucker. Nothing can knock me out, I take a sleeping pill, I get sped up. In surgery, they can’t knock me out. It’s crazy. It’s like knocking out a 300 pound man to try and get me to sleep. I would give anything, hit me with a tyre iron, anything to black out. But the coolest part was all the blood because that’s just so rad, it was just spewing everywhere. Until you have blood all over you, you don’t know what that’s like. It was interesting. I was only 16 so it was before I could give a shit about myself. Now I’d just be annoyed at best. At the time I just thought it was cool. “Oh, yeah, so it feels like this, now I know.†But my one concern was that since my leg was cut in half, my foot was underneath my leg. When I lifted up my leg, it was cut right in the middle of my shin, so there’s a bone sticking out, with no foot on the end, so I didn’t think I had a foot anymore. My first though was ‘I cant be in a band.’ Which is bogus, like why not? That doesn’t make any sense at all but for some reason I thought I couldn’t be in a band without a foot and that really bummed me out so I went looking for my foot and found it and stuck it back on so no one could tell and say I couldn’t be in a my band anymore.

How soon after that did the sounds start to come to you?

In the hospital I started hearing noises that I thought were machines. They were sort of whirring… it’s a sound I hear before every song begins, it’s like an industrial hum. Clanging and whirring noises, with static in it and what it says is, it’s about to start picking up vocabulary from what’s going on. Images and noises. And it’s going to make a song out of it. I tried to mimic that sound a couple of times on records, on Sunny Border Blue, the last song, ‘Listerine’, starts with a moment of that, and ‘Shark’ on Muses’ University is some of that noise. But I’ve never gotten it quite right, maybe because it’s a visceral effect, not just a sound. There has to be like an electrical component, you should get a shock at the same time, and I can’t really make that happen on a record yet. Well, we’re combining a book and a record so maybe Virtual Reality next time around and I can Tazer you. It’s like, God, I hate that girl!

You’re in Rhode Island at this point? So what else is going at that same time?

I was never that interested, and now I’m not interested at all. But the music I am moved by does tent to happen in small places. I think the future of music is probably in attics and garages and basements and churches and bars. And that’s as it should be. I don’t think we all have to hear it. Manifesting heaven would be the point, so it’s not about counting the number of people who are paying attention. It was hardcore bands and us. And that was great, because they sounded like the ocean, and I loved that. We were just included for some reason. I guess because we had distorted guitars nobody could tell what we were doing. I loved those shows where it’s just 14 bands and nobody makes money and nobody’s headlining and that’s sort of as it should be. Except that nobody really listens in bars. I like it when audiences listen!

How did you end up going to Boston?

We were just told that we should! We were in the scene in Providence, which was more about art rock and less about anyone getting signed. That’s fine, but I don’t know… I was probably a little wishy-washy and I let people tell me what to do. But it was good. We got to Boston and it was sort of what we were used to. No one seemed to be headlining, everybody just played for each other, the bands would just step off stage and become the audience for the next band. It was about making our own noise, so it was a great education for us, to be able to play constantly. There was no competition, except when it came to lousy music. We were trying to drown out the lousy bands.

You sign to 4AD and record the first album with Gil Norton. What do you think of the songs on that first album now?

I’m not comfortable listening to them now. Dave and I played a show a few years ago, where we played some of them and so I had to learn them and I had to listen to the record and I did get that at least I wasn’t flirtatious or shallow, you know. At least I was in the throes of something real. I just don’t like to go back there. I can appreciate it intellectually. And it is better than what happened to us, which was eventually just throwing Warner Brothers the crappiest crap we could come up with so that they would let us survive. We had a song that was just a joke, and that’s much worse: at least I just sounded psychotic when I started. It’s way more psychotic to try and play that stupid game. We still play a lot of those songs! The record itself is hard for me to listen to. I wasn’t so into the smooth production and I don’t like to hear that crazy, psycho voice of mine very much. But it is what it is. We weren’t lying, in other words, we weren’t trying to impress anyone. It’s like pulling out your liver and tossing it on the table: it is what it is. It’s not pretty, but it’s honest.

What do you remember about coming to the UK?

I remember thinking, where are the all the girls? The audience in Boston was half women, and there doesn’t seem to be any women at all in England. I guess they were in the back. But I do remember the enthusiasm, a lot of sweaty, drunk jumping boys. And that was nice to have. The chaos on stage matched the chaos in the crowd.

And there’s the famous Pixies tour in 1988.

The Pixies kept us from being lonely everywhere. I made our manager sign them, I made our record company sign them, it’s like – we will not be alone again! The Pixies gave that tour a hometown feel. We were all just little babies in a van together, we were so pathetic we would sing sad folk songs together because we were lonely. We were complimentary bands and we were all close friends.

House Tornado and Hunkpapa: came very close together. Plus tours. Was that a very intense period for you? What kind of pressures were you under?

I loved the work. It’s not an easy life. The people who live on the road are soldiers and we expect a lot of each other. That’s exhilarating. At the same time, the pressure of the business is just ugly. Not from 4AD, they were very dear friends, but from Warner Brothers who we were dealing with because we were American, it was just made very clear that I wasn’t pretty enough or I wasn’t fashionable enough, I wasn’t writing stupid pop songs and they were going to stop funding our records unless I did some like that. That was mean in the 50s, but to hear it in the 90s was just offensive. Ultimately, I was called difficult. I’m the nicest person in the world! I’m so nice, it’s pathetic. But they don’t like it when you’re a natural musician, they don’t like it when you know about production and have opinions about production, they don’t like you to know what you’re doing because they can’t tell you what to do. And I was not about to turn my back on women by presenting myself as a bimbo and I was not going to turn my back on musicians or any stupid shit by trying to get on the radio. I just ended up giving up. By the time we made The Real Ramona, I was morally bound to quit. This is war, and I am against them. I am on the side of music, not the music business. You’re not sure you can really win, and that’s what we’re doing right now. This success, and I’m willing to call it that, because I love this world and I like to be able to hear it and to have our soundtrack funded by listeners, I’m certainly willing to call that success.

What do you think about “Dizzy†now?

It was a joke. We were like, ‘You fuckers, you’re so stupid, this is what you want.’ And then they do want it! We were in the studio, saying, ‘Now add something PC.’ It was just so stupid. We expected them to get the point and they didn’t at all, they loved it. The music business was awful and it should have died long ago. We hated that song while we were recording it! We didn’t play it on the tour. Like I said, I respect pop music and it shouldn’t suck.

1990: pivotal year for you and the band. Can you tell us a little bit about the events of that year?

That was ugly. Our manager sued us. I’m not allowed to talk about it, still. Then my son was taken away by his father, who tricked me into leaving my house for an house and when I did the cops found me and served me papers saying I’d abandoned my son. He took everything in my bank account, my house, my car, my child. I just lost almost everything that year. I couldn’t afford to finish this root canal that I was half way through when all this happened because my son’s father left me with a tax bill for the money I had earned and took everything out of the bank account. I was also sued by the Musician’s Union as the leader of the band because they wanted me to pay dues in every state where we had played and they were sending me letters to my apartment when I was on tour, so they all went to collection. It was just one of those years where everything falls apart. And Warner Brothers was trying to break up the band. All I had was Billy. I was halfway through this root canal, so I was taking fistfulls of painkillers all day and washing them down with beer and cheap champagne. I was already dead, really. I barely remember making The Real Ramona. I would start a take and then I would hear the producer saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do another one.’ It’s like, well, we haven’t done that one yet. But a take had just gone by and I’d no memory of playing or singing. It was one of those lost years. While I made that record, I said, ‘That’s it, we’re not a band any more, there is no life. I quit.’

So what got you out of that?

It took a while. I married Billy, we had a baby. Dave, who’s been my best friend since we were nine years old, so we were still very close, he would come over to play with the baby and listen to the songs I was putting on my four track. We’d talk about the songs. They were like the baby; we were playing with the songs and playing with the baby. Eventually he said, ‘This is bullshit, to let Warner Brothers tell you what to play or what not to play. They destroyed your life and they had no business doing so. So let’s be a band that doesn’t give a shit.’ And that made sense. So Leslie came back for the recording of Red Heaven and Bernie did the tour, and Bernie’s been in the band for twenty years now. We just never went back to giving a shit. When it comes to the music. Which sounds so lame, but…

It’s a defensive mechanism.

It’s hard being the little guy. It’s hard when you’re bereft. It’s hard when meaning is your only weapon, because it doesn’t make money, and money is survival and money is freedom. But there are more important ways to live than the lie that says you’re supposed to care about it. So somehow we’ve survived long enough to only be about that at this point.

What about Tanya leaving the band?

We called ourselves step-twins and we were letting ourselves be two sides of a personality, so we like to think that we became whole when we stopped relying on each other that way.

University is just the three of you. Is that an album that you have a lot of affection for?

Yeah, I love University. It’s so sweet. That our most successful record came at that point is charming. I’m not attached to that as a record, but it meant we got to stay on the road and feel lucky, no sucky, not hating out single. We met great musicians and we got to know our listeners for the first time. We’d always been kept from the audience – you’re in the dressing room and the hotel room and the bus, and this time we were out there meeting the people we were playing for and appreciating the work they were doing. The work of a listener is not a slam dunk. It’s taking a ride and trusting that it’s going to go somewhere worthwhile and we developed a genuine respect for that. The course of events that let music happen between people at that point, and that’s really what we’ve stuck with all this time, is just respect for the listener. Which is unusual. You’ve read Purgatory Paradise, people who don’t want to be swayed by the outside world, we love the people that the soundtrack is for. 50:40

Was it easy to step away from the band to do Hips & Makers?

Oh, no, that was a total mistake. I mean, not in retrospect, but I didn’t mean to do it. I recorded acoustic songs for Billy, not really remembering that I was married to one of my managers. So he sent them to my business manager who had them on his desk in Athens, Georgia. Michael Stipe picked it up, took it home with him, listened to it, sent it to Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers was going to release it! It’s like coming across a love letter and saying, ‘Ah, yes, I’ll put this is the newspaper.’ So I said, ‘Let me do it on purpose, then you can release it.’ Michael was convinced I was going to fuck it up, which I understand, but I did it on purpose and it sounds just like the demos. I was still not convinced that they were going to release it. I thought that Warner Brothers felt sorry for me and they were just pretending to care about something like a solo record. I just couldn’t do the math. Like, nobody cares about my band, but they’re going to care about that? But there were a lot of people who preferred a pencil-sketch production of a song. So University and Hips came around the same time, or I made them at the same time anyway. I was surprised that I had to tour by myself, start wearing contact lenses because I had to get out the big theatre stages and climb up on that stupid acoustic girl stool without falling off and if you fall into the microphone everyone can hear it. It was a steep learning curve. But I did learn that the instrument itself is muscular, that it’s wood, you can hear air and muscle and some songs really take to being played in air and wood. And as much as I loved my peddles and hiding behind my bandmates, music deserved a little bit more from me. That was humbling. I don’t feel like I knew what I was doing when I made that record. I didn’t know how to record a cello. It sounded like a horse. I just didn’t know what I was doing. I recorded it in two weeks. But it sold so much that it was in the black the day it was released and what I did was tell Warner Brothers you can have my solo record if you let the Muses go. So I bought out freedom and then found our that the Muses weren’t signed, only I was signed as a key member, so I was buying my own freedom. The day I left, they declared Hips & Makers in the red so I would never make another penny off of it.

This is all leading towards CASH Music and these methods of distribution that have characterised your work over the last few years. Is this the way forward?

So far, I believe it is. There isn’t the foundation of response that we started with when I started playing. People are no longer well-versed in live music and hw to go about supporting musicians. It’s OK, it’s a re-write, and I think it’s necessary for a lot of reasons. I’m lucky enough to have support historically the support of people who aren’t trendy, those people who aren’t interested in what you just released and then it’s necessarily going to be considered ‘out’ sooner or later. So if you’re working in a timeless genre, if you’re trying to – I’m going to say it again – if you’re trying to manifest Heaven, you’re not going to impress anybody in the next five minutes. So if you’re looking for a long term solution, I would recommend you’re trying to find listeners for whom you feel a great deal of respect. I still consider Limbo to be our best record up to that point. There was no more money afterwards to tour or be in the studio so we just disappeared. I moved out to the desert. I just sort of became a ghost for a few years. I stopped feeling songs. I was quiet. Having thought of Throwing Muses as one long quiet war against smug, it fits like the end of a story, but I was still broken hearted. You know how everyone in the music business is just so smug? And we were losers, and that was important. So it fit. I should probably have seen it coming, but it still broke my heart.

Did you think you’d ever reconvene the Muses at that point?

No, I thought the music business won. I know we would play together, if it didn’t hurt our feelings too much. And that’s what we did. But the only recording I could bring about was when I was making a solo record. I didn’t use all my studio time so I talked them into the studio for a weekend and we recorded that record that I think is called Throwing Muses. Which is sweet, but it’s more like demos than a record. And of course no one ever heard it. I know that’s not the point, but it’s still a little sad.

When did the songs start coming back?

It’s a really nutty story. I was on tour, I was touring a record that was all written before everything happened and it was what I think of as a half-arsed record. I was going through the motions, trying to feed my family. I was in New Mexico, I was leaving the morning after the show, and we were in a café getting coffees to go. My husband Billy looked down to take my order and there were tears streaming down my face because I could see the music coming out of the speakers and I remembered the sense that I had lost and I remembered how I had thrown my life away for music, all at once. I suppose it’s my religion. So he started to freak out, whips around to see who’s making me cry, and there’s these two old Indian guys burning herbs over a younger Indian guy’s guitar. Billy races over and says, ‘My wife is crying because she can see music. Did you do this to her?’ They said, ‘Oh, sorry, we’re blessing this man’s guitar. We must have missed and hit your wife in the back of the head.’ The guy was bummed. He’d been fasting in preparation for the blessing. I took the blessing away – I even played for it. So he had my play the guitar for a while, and we talked, and we because friends. His name is Leonard Crow Dog and he sends me birthday cards and lets me know how his guitar is doing. I tried to transfer some of the blessing, I don’t know if it worked, but I could hear songs again after that. What album was I touring? Strange Angels. I don’t know what year.

Does this lead into you starting to reconvene to work together again with David and Bernard?

No, this was long after that. This was Red Heaven. I had already given up and stayed given up until CASH Music. We would… every time we’d play together, I’d look down the set list, it wasn’t alive anymore, it wasn’t challenging to us any more. We felt as dead as people were treating us. As if we were reviving the past, when really such is not the case. A good song is timeless, and most of the listeners got that. Purgatory Paradise was already being written, just because songs keep writing themselves and these were not 50 Foot Wave songs and solo songs. I tried to make them solo songs but it was really obvious.

What does your day to day life entail now?

I’m in the studio most days. Because all of my projects are funded now and the days I’m not I’m writing books. The social networking replaced record companies. It’s not an easy thing for a shy person to pick up and do, but I have taken to the warmth of it, I suppose. It’s pretty fucking Zen. The blog – I suppose it depends how quickly and how loudly you read it.

What would Kristin of 25 years ago think of you now?

I haven’t changed a great deal. But sadly, the nightmares just kept coming. I have not had an easy life and it hasn’t given me much of a break. There’s always somebody worse off you can compare yourself to, but lately I’ve been meeting people who just seem to have a fairly easy time of it. I kept thinking that you can learn a lesson and avoid the traumas but life isn’t really set up that way. I guess it’s asking for a more evolved response, and then maybe it leaves you alone. But after all I’ve been through – my marriage dissolved this year. I’ve been with Billy since I was 22 year, just another nightmare waiting in the wings.

I know it’s been difficult, but it’s a body of work of a standard than most people have left.

Thank you for saying so. That’s a good way of seeing it. I felt like it shouldn’t have gone to maybe a skinny little white girl. Someone with more wherewithal, someone with a louder mouthpiece, somebody with bigger balls. And you can think that as a mother, too. How better off would my kids have been? But I guess what you’re saying is true, we’re looking for a more evolved response.

If you had to chose an album that you’re happiest with from the catalogue, what would it be?

This one. Because having claimed all along that you’re morally bound to play the right music no matter who likes it, we were never really fully functioning in that regard, there was always something in the way, whether it was psychosis, or Warner Brothers or a producer. This is the first time where the lack of a middle man has really shown itself, because the listeners demand quality, whereas the middle man demands opposite. We wouldn’t stop making the record until it’s shown that way. Even if we were there just deleting and deleting and deleting – we’re really good at erasing! – that’s carving your statue, you know? We’ve really never had the freedom and the wherewithal and the balls to do that until now. Because we don’t give a fuck. We finally don’t give a fuck about anything but the song in front of us. I mean, duh! That’s the way it should have been all along, although I guess if it were no one would have heard of us.

You’ve got to go through that to get to here…

Yeah, I suppose so. Right, because you could fall back and make those mistakes at any moment. We know how bad that feels, so we won’t do it again. And it doesn’t help, I mean everyone is trying to suck in order to succeed, so you just get lost in the mess of people willingly sucking. You might as well not suck, and then even if no one’s paying attention at least you’re good.

Have you made peace with music?

I believe I have. I think writing that book helped show its features in relief so that I could imagine how numb I must have felt in the desert without music. You can’t feel spiritually privileged. You can’t ask for less. You have to take whatever is thrown at you, and that was thrown at me and I can now see that it’s a walking, talking organism that I was honoured to spend time with while I was here and I was playing.

Paul McCartney – New

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Paul McCartney – New

Young producers help locate classic Macca sounds.... As the closest thing Britain has a national minstrel, someone whose reach spans more than a couple of generations, it was only right that Paul McCartney topped the bill at last year’s two great public entertainments, the Queen’s diamond jubilee concert in the Mall and Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony. But those performances, in which that familiar voice struggled for traction on the upper slopes of his much-loved melodies, were not the sort of thing that you would want to put forward in evidence while trying to convince much younger people of his significance, let alone his continuing relevance. So New is an interesting statement, starting with the choice of its title, borrowed from one of its tracks (the first single) and surely hoping to convey a sense of continued forward movement, maybe even of rebirth. After 2012’s Kisses On The Bottom, in which he indulged his affection for the popular songs of his parents’ generation under the supervision of the veteran jazz-oriented producer Tommy LiPuma, now McCartney puts himself in the hands of the music-shapers of the 21st century, working with four younger producers: Paul Epworth (three tracks), Ethan Johns (two), Mark Ronson (two) and Giles Martin, whose name is on six tracks but who is also credited as executive producer of the whole collection. This isn’t necessarily an ideal recipe for coherence, but Martin – the producer of the music for Love, Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show, and for the Rock Band video game – keeps it under control. His guiding hand allows New to follow the path pioneered under his father’s supervision by Revolver, Sgt Pepper, and the White Album, with each song treated as an individual entity and allocated its own musical resources, from the muffled tom-toms and Mellotron flutes of “Alligator†to the Mighty Wurlitzer intro and underwater interlude of “Queenie Eyeâ€. The individual producers are allowed their signature touches, and sometimes the musical solution is an obvious one. The jaunty stride of the title track, for instance, recalls that of “Got to Get You into My Lifeâ€, and Ronson gives it an appropriate retro-soul horn arrangement, with joyous vocal harmonies. After a sudden clatter of drums, the pay-off comes with a brief but glorious choir-and-horns coda, like the Beach Boys bumping into the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. That’s one of the album’s five outstanding tracks, two of which pay a different sort of homage to the past. “On My Way to Work†is a piece of observation from the top deck of a bus, in the style of “Penny Laneâ€, with a jug-band setting: “On my way to work I bought a magazine / Inside a pretty girl liked to water-ski / She came from Chichester to study history / She had removed her clothes for the likes of me.†Had this been a Beatles album in 1965, the song would have made a great and slightly risqué cover for Herman’s Hermits. More explicit in its retrospection is “Early Daysâ€, a singer-songwriterish ballad through which Paul, his voice suitably weatherbeaten, tries to reclaim his past. He describes two boys with guitars walking the city streets before the reverie turns to mild, rather weary recrimination: “Now everybody seems to have their own opinion / On who did this and who did that / But as for me I don’t see how they can remember / When they weren’t where it was at / They can’t take it from me if they try / I lived through those early days.†The one that lodged itself firmly in my head after three or four plays was “Looking At Herâ€, a great song of unrequited love. Once again the Beach Boys are evoked and it’s a considerable compliment to suggest that this is just the sort of song Brian Wilson might have written after being knocked sideways by Rubber Soul. But McCartney has always been equally good at requited love, and it’s probably not taking too many liberties to suggest that his own current state of domestic bliss is the inspiration for “Scaredâ€, the “hidden†track, an unadorned ballad whose unexpected and graceful melodic lift at the end of each verse reminds you who this is, and what he can still do when he puts his mind to it. Richard Williams Q+A GILES MARTIN You’ve known Paul McCartney all your life. Was he like an extra uncle? I wouldn’t go that far. I wasn’t sitting on his knee or anything like that. But when I was about 12, I wanted to do music and my parents weren’t very keen on the idea. Paul said to me, ‘I’ve heard you’ve been writing some music.’ I said, ‘Yes, I have.’ He said, ‘That’s really great – but I want to tell you that it’s not easy. Sometimes I find it really difficult. But stick at it.’ I always remember that. He’s generally very enthusiasic about what people from younger generations are up to. Was it difficult to collaborate with someone who knew you when you were a child? I was nervous. I’d always liked him and he’d always been very kind to me, but I thought it might be different if I became his producer, because you have to say stuff. One day he did a live take of a bass part, and there was a mistake in the verse. I thought, ‘Well, you’re probably going to get fired, but you might as well tell him.’ My dad’s always told me that you’re being paid for your opinion, so there’s no point in just saying, ‘Oh my God that’s brilliant.’ He’s spent 50 years in studios – why doesn’t he do just it himself? I know that he likes to perform, and if you’re performing it’s difficult to listen at the same time. It wasn’t a question of, ‘Oh, let’s get some young producers who’ll make me sound cool.’ If he doesn’t like the direction it’s going in, he’ll do something about it. It’s his record. I think it’s his best for years, but I would say that. INTERVIEW: RICHARD WILLIAMS

Young producers help locate classic Macca sounds….

As the closest thing Britain has a national minstrel, someone whose reach spans more than a couple of generations, it was only right that Paul McCartney topped the bill at last year’s two great public entertainments, the Queen’s diamond jubilee concert in the Mall and Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony. But those performances, in which that familiar voice struggled for traction on the upper slopes of his much-loved melodies, were not the sort of thing that you would want to put forward in evidence while trying to convince much younger people of his significance, let alone his continuing relevance.

So New is an interesting statement, starting with the choice of its title, borrowed from one of its tracks (the first single) and surely hoping to convey a sense of continued forward movement, maybe even of rebirth. After 2012’s Kisses On The Bottom, in which he indulged his affection for the popular songs of his parents’ generation under the supervision of the veteran jazz-oriented producer Tommy LiPuma, now McCartney puts himself in the hands of the music-shapers of the 21st century, working with four younger producers: Paul Epworth (three tracks), Ethan Johns (two), Mark Ronson (two) and Giles Martin, whose name is on six tracks but who is also credited as executive producer of the whole collection.

This isn’t necessarily an ideal recipe for coherence, but Martin – the producer of the music for Love, Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show, and for the Rock Band video game – keeps it under control. His guiding hand allows New to follow the path pioneered under his father’s supervision by Revolver, Sgt Pepper, and the White Album, with each song treated as an individual entity and allocated its own musical resources, from the muffled tom-toms and Mellotron flutes of “Alligator†to the Mighty Wurlitzer intro and underwater interlude of “Queenie Eyeâ€.

The individual producers are allowed their signature touches, and sometimes the musical solution is an obvious one. The jaunty stride of the title track, for instance, recalls that of “Got to Get You into My Lifeâ€, and Ronson gives it an appropriate retro-soul horn arrangement, with joyous vocal harmonies. After a sudden clatter of drums, the pay-off comes with a brief but glorious choir-and-horns coda, like the Beach Boys bumping into the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.

That’s one of the album’s five outstanding tracks, two of which pay a different sort of homage to the past. “On My Way to Work†is a piece of observation from the top deck of a bus, in the style of “Penny Laneâ€, with a jug-band setting: “On my way to work I bought a magazine / Inside a pretty girl liked to water-ski / She came from Chichester to study history / She had removed her clothes for the likes of me.†Had this been a Beatles album in 1965, the song would have made a great and slightly risqué cover for Herman’s Hermits.

More explicit in its retrospection is “Early Daysâ€, a singer-songwriterish ballad through which Paul, his voice suitably weatherbeaten, tries to reclaim his past. He describes two boys with guitars walking the city streets before the reverie turns to mild, rather weary recrimination: “Now everybody seems to have their own opinion / On who did this and who did that / But as for me I don’t see how they can remember / When they weren’t where it was at / They can’t take it from me if they try / I lived through those early days.â€

The one that lodged itself firmly in my head after three or four plays was “Looking At Herâ€, a great song of unrequited love. Once again the Beach Boys are evoked and it’s a considerable compliment to suggest that this is just the sort of song Brian Wilson might have written after being knocked sideways by Rubber Soul.

But McCartney has always been equally good at requited love, and it’s probably not taking too many liberties to suggest that his own current state of domestic bliss is the inspiration for “Scaredâ€, the “hidden†track, an unadorned ballad whose unexpected and graceful melodic lift at the end of each verse reminds you who this is, and what he can still do when he puts his mind to it.

Richard Williams

Q+A

GILES MARTIN

You’ve known Paul McCartney all your life. Was he like an extra uncle?

I wouldn’t go that far. I wasn’t sitting on his knee or anything like that. But when I was about 12, I wanted to do music and my parents weren’t very keen on the idea. Paul said to me, ‘I’ve heard you’ve been writing some music.’ I said, ‘Yes, I have.’ He said, ‘That’s really great – but I want to tell you that it’s not easy. Sometimes I find it really difficult. But stick at it.’ I always remember that. He’s generally very enthusiasic about what people from younger generations are up to.

Was it difficult to collaborate with someone who knew you when you were a child?

I was nervous. I’d always liked him and he’d always been very kind to me, but I thought it might be different if I became his producer, because you have to say stuff. One day he did a live take of a bass part, and there was a mistake in the verse. I thought, ‘Well, you’re probably going to get fired, but you might as well tell him.’ My dad’s always told me that you’re being paid for your opinion, so there’s no point in just saying, ‘Oh my God that’s brilliant.’

He’s spent 50 years in studios – why doesn’t he do just it himself?

I know that he likes to perform, and if you’re performing it’s difficult to listen at the same time. It wasn’t a question of, ‘Oh, let’s get some young producers who’ll make me sound cool.’ If he doesn’t like the direction it’s going in, he’ll do something about it. It’s his record. I think it’s his best for years, but I would say that.

INTERVIEW: RICHARD WILLIAMS

Neil Young: The Ultimate Music Guide

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Neil Young: The Ultimate Music Guide

The latest instalment Uncut's Ultimate Music Guide series is available now - and the subject of this current edition is Neil Young. This lavish, 148 page magazine includes brand new reviews by our crack team of writers of all Young's albums - Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, with Crazy Horse and solo. Meanwhile, we revisit revealing interviews from the archives of Melody Maker and NME, from his earliest solo visit to the UK in 1971 through to meetings on tour in the Rocky Mountains, upstate New York and at his favourite roadhouse close to his Broken Arrow ranch. The special also features rare photographs and a round up of Young memorabilia. Neil Young – The Ultimate Music Guide is on sale priced £6.99. This edition of the Ultimate Music Guide is in shops now, but you can also order it online here. The digital edition is now available to download on digital newsstands including Apple, Zinio and Google Play. To download your copy, click here and select the appropriate newsstand. Other instalments in The Ultimate Music Guide series are also available online at www.uncut.co.uk/store.

The latest instalment Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide series is available now – and the subject of this current edition is Neil Young.

This lavish, 148 page magazine includes brand new reviews by our crack team of writers of all Young’s albums – Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, with Crazy Horse and solo.

Meanwhile, we revisit revealing interviews from the archives of Melody Maker and NME, from his earliest solo visit to the UK in 1971 through to meetings on tour in the Rocky Mountains, upstate New York and at his favourite roadhouse close to his Broken Arrow ranch.

The special also features rare photographs and a round up of Young memorabilia.

Neil Young – The Ultimate Music Guide is on sale priced £6.99.

This edition of the Ultimate Music Guide is in shops now, but you can also order it online here.

The digital edition is now available to download on digital newsstands including Apple, Zinio and Google Play. To download your copy, click here and select the appropriate newsstand.

Other instalments in The Ultimate Music Guide series are also available online at www.uncut.co.uk/store.

Beck opens up about new album Morning Phase

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Beck opens up about new album Morning Phase
Beck has spoken further about his forthcoming album Morning Phase. He has revealed that three tracks - "Waking Light", "Blackbird Chain", and "Country Dawn" were recorded at Jack White's Third Man Records and he described the record, which is due out next February, as coming from the tradition of "...

Beck has spoken further about his forthcoming album Morning Phase.

He has revealed that three tracks – “Waking Light”, “Blackbird Chain”, and “Country Dawn” were recorded at Jack White‘s Third Man Records and he described the record, which is due out next February, as coming from the tradition of “California music”. He told Rolling Stone: “I’m just fumbling around with chords and a mood. The songs are coming out of a California tradition. I’m hearing The Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Gram Parsons, Neil Young – the bigger idea of what that sound is to me.”

He added: “There’s this feeling of tumult and uncertainty, getting through that long, dark night of the soul – whatever you want to call it. These songs were about coming out of that – how things do get better.”

Beck also revealed that he is already halfway through a follow-up album that he hopes to release later next year. He added: “It’s still in flux. I’m thinking about the live show, a certain energy. That’s a whole other kind of writing – and difficult to do. You’re writing for a studio environment that is the antithesis of where the song is going to live.”

Geezer Butler: ‘I wrote a song when I found out about Tony Iommi’s cancer’

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Geezer Butler: ‘I wrote a song when I found out about Tony Iommi’s cancer’
Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler has revealed that he penned a song about bandmate Tony Iommi's cancer following his diagnosis. Iommi has been battling lymphoma throughout the group's reunion and when Butler, learned of his health crisis he felt inspired to get his thoughts and feelings out in lyrics ...

Black Sabbath‘s Geezer Butler has revealed that he penned a song about bandmate Tony Iommi’s cancer following his diagnosis.

Iommi has been battling lymphoma throughout the group’s reunion and when Butler, learned of his health crisis he felt inspired to get his thoughts and feelings out in lyrics for a track he tentatively titled “Hanging By A Thread“. He told Revolver magazine: “It was very much about dying, about giving your last breath and passing your spirit on. But the track didn’t make it on [the band’s comeback album] 13. We never came up with the finished thing.”

Butler admitted that he feared the worst for his bandmate – because former frontman Ronnie James Dio also lost his battle with cancer in 2010. He added: “We didn’t know if he [Iommi] was going to recover from it, especially after seeing Ronnie go so fast. Ronnie went right in six months from being diagnosed to dying.”

An Audience With… Stephen Malkmus

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An Audience With… Stephen Malkmus
Pavement frontman and solo artist Malkmus is releasing a new album, Wig Out At Jagbags, with his band, The Jicks, on January 6, 2014. Here, though, is a classic archive feature from our September 2011 issue (Take 172), in which the guitarist and songwriter answers questions from fans and celebrity a...

Pavement frontman and solo artist Malkmus is releasing a new album, Wig Out At Jagbags, with his band, The Jicks, on January 6, 2014. Here, though, is a classic archive feature from our September 2011 issue (Take 172), in which the guitarist and songwriter answers questions from fans and celebrity admirers including Graham Coxon, Nigel Godrich, Avey Tare, Stewart Lee and Scrabble enthusiast Giles Brandreth. Prepare for confessions about ripping off The Fall, horse-racing and a pubic-hair-eating contest… Interview: John Lewis

___________________

Stephen Malkmus is telling us about a song he’s just finished writing. “It was for my daughter,†he says, rather sheepishly. “It’s about how she loves cream cheese and white bread, passionately, from the bottom of her heart. I always make up shitty songs for my kids to make them laugh. Thing is, they sound like Pavement songs. They have dumb lyrics, they sound like nursery rhymes, and they’re sung in my terrible voice…â€

Apart from being a doting father, Malkmus is also a keen fly-fisherman, rock climber, golfer, softball player and Scrabble obsessive – and he spent much of last year playing to bigger audiences than he’s played to in his life, after reforming Pavement for a world tour and curating a weekend of gigs at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Somerset. Now he’s preparing to release a new album with his own band, The Jicks, Mirror Traffic – produced by his old pal Beck. First, however, there’s the small matter of the Uncut mailbag…

“I’m impressed by your calibre of questioners,†he says. “You seem to have found some friendly voices from the rock mafia out there…â€

___________________

Bit of a boring question, I’m afraid, but what were the five albums that influenced you most?

David Portner (Avey Tare), Animal Collective

That’s a tough question! Okay – Ege Bamyasi by Can. Loaded by the Velvets, Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall, Born Innocent by Redd Kross, and Cats And Dogs by Royal Trux. There. That’s five. All classics!

Is it true you played football – or soccer – in high school?

Richard Cochrane, Crosby, Merseyside

Yeah, I played centre-forward for my school team. Strikers are meant to be flamboyant, but I was just good at being in the right place and scoring tap-ins. I couldn’t dribble around players or take free kicks. We had a coach from England, and he took us on a summer tour around the UK when I was 16. We won a few games but we were usually up against tough 15-year-old inner-city kids who would be finishing their cigarettes at the side of the field and then come on and kill us. But that was a pretty influential trip for me. I went to my first strip bar in Soho. And I remember buying a huge plastic jug of beer from a country pub. It was a light brown plastic jug that stank of hops and beer. I was so impressed that I brought it home as a souvenir.

How do you go about writing lyrics? Are poetry and abstraction important? I’m thinking about tracks like “Texas Never Whispers†for instance.

Graham Coxon

Wow. Graham from Blur! Lyrics come when I’m playing guitar in my house, getting riffs that stick. Then I go off the top of my head and come up with a line that sounds natural and fits in the pocket of the music. That’ll usually be the first line of the verse, or the chorus. I try to get to the unconscious place – I’m still into that modernist idea of an unfiltered unconsciousness. I have ground rules: I don’t do confessional or silly love songs. I read modern American poetry and hope it rubs off. I feel an affinity with post-beat dudes like Jack Spicer and Lew Welch.

When was the last time you spoke to Pavement’s original drummer, Gary Young?

Phil, Stoke Newington

It was last year at Berkeley, when Pavement played. He played a couple of times with us. We got on fine. He’s ready to play, if anybody needs a drummer, he will play on your record. I want to help him out. What’s my favourite Gary Young story? There was a time when he put a dead animal in my bag because he was mad at me. I think it was a roadkill rabbit. I’d probably told him off for doing a handstand during a drum solo, or going skydiving before a gig. I became the focus of his wrath at some point. As the songwriter, I became like the evil father, holding him back. But there are lots of good Gary Young stories, most of which are unprintable. I remember him having a pubic-hair-eating contest with the crew on the last night of a Japanese tour. And I remember that he kissed Courtney Love at a Sonic Youth show that we played. Those are the PG-rated anecdotes.

Various Fall songs of the early ’80s are clearly the source for much of the material on Slanted And Enchanted. Has Mark E Smith ever challenged you about this?

Stewart Lee, comedian

I’d be the first to admit the plagiarism, but we were young California dudes riffing over a band we really liked. The stakes weren’t high. Specifically, we were fans of Grotesque. I did see Mark when we got The Fall to play ATP last year. Did I speak to him? Er, no. I’m nervous of meeting my heroes. But I did see him in his chalet, looking good in a leather coat, drinking beer and smoking, with this cute young girlfriend/wife. I thought, this guy is living the rock’n’roll life! The poet of pop doom! But what would I have talked to him about? “Hi Mark, we stole a bunch of your ideas.†I’m not sure I’d understand a word if I did talk to him! And it’s not like we entirely ripped off The Fall. We also ripped off the Velvets. There’s maybe five per cent of us in there, too…

Did Beck convert all The Jicks to Scientology when he produced your album this year?

Ellie, Edinburgh, Scotland

Whatever is going on in his spiritual life, we never talked about. There’s no pictures of L Ron Hubbard around his place. No, Beck is a great guy, and a pretty free spirit. He’s got great ears. He knows what makes things sound good, what’s technological and what’s soulful, and what that mix should be. He has the ability to listen and make constructive suggestions, unburdened by self-interest. He didn’t play much – keyboards, a touch of tambourine, and he did a lot of conducting of horn players and pedal-steel guitarists. He’s good at geeking out on how loud the vocals should be. There was a lot of geeking out. We recorded it at Sunset Sounds, a famous old room on the Strip in LA, where a lot of famous albums were recorded. Then we completed it and mixed it at his house. Ironically, he started work with Thurston [Moore] after us, but Thurston finished his album before we did!

When we made our first recordings and sometimes even later, I was often embarrassed to sing some of the lyrics in front of the engineers. Have you ever had moments when you’ve found it hard to sing a lyric, either to a bandmate or in front of a technician?

Gina Birch, The Raincoats

Yeah, I was really shy about singing when I started. But it wasn’t the lyrics, it was my voice. I was in a band in high school, and we played at some little outdoor festival. We got a tape of the mixing board playback, and my voice sounded terrible. Far too loud, and very separate from the music. So, based on that one board tape, I didn’t sing throughout my college years. It took me a long time to hear a bunch of different groups and feel that it was okay to sing in a DIY kinda way. Which is why Pavement ended up so self-consciously shambolic. Because the singing was on an equal par to the playing and the production! It was conversational, like a nursery rhyme, with not too many notes. Eventually I become comfortable with that.

Which band would you like to see reform?

Angel, Los Angeles, California

Apart from The Smiths, there’s no one left who hasn’t reformed! Maybe Tago Mago-era Can. I’d love to see them, transported to today. And The Desperate Bicycles – a chaotic little London punk band from the late ’70s – I’d love to see them get back together. Swell Maps would be nice, too, if only because they’d all be alive again. Kinda sad what’s happened there.

What’s your favourite Groundhogs album?

Nigel Godrich, producer

Split or Thank Christ For The Bomb. When Nigel was producing Pavement’s last LP [1999’s Terror Twilight] he’d be playing stuff like Zep, or Hunky Dory, telling us, this is what a great LP should sound like. And he’s right. But, just to wind him up, I’d say, “Man, The Groundhogs are where it’s at. The people’s band!†You got avant-garde meltdowns mixed with totally driving music. He was sceptical at first, but we won him over. But, you know, Hunky Dory is cool, too…

What are your memories of backpacking around the Middle East as a teenager?

Shlomi Charka, Jerusalem

It was 1988 and I was about 21, 22. I went to Jordan, Egypt and eastern Turkey, but I guess the mad bit was going to Iraq and Syria. I don’t think I met any other backpackers while I was there. Iraq was weird. It was a weird ghost town of a place, even then, recovering from the Iran-Iraq wars. I spent 10 days in Baghdad and Basra, and it was also the hottest, most uncomfortable, and least pretty place I’ve ever been to. I understand that the Kurdish areas in the north are nicer. But I just remember thinking, fuck, man, this is bad. Syria, on the other hand, was beautiful. And the people I met were amazing.

What’s Stephen’s favourite Scrabble word? Mine is YEX. It means a hiccup. It’s short, fits in to awkward corners and, thanks to the X, scores quite nicely.

Gyles Brandreth, fellow Scrabble enthusiast

Me and Bob [Nastanovich] used to play Scrabble a lot on tour. Now I play a lot online and on my iPhone. There are lots of obscure words that are good for getting rid of troublesome tiles like I, V, C and U. VAV is a good one. I’ve played HOURI a few times, but I’m not sure what it means. One time, playing with Bob, I spelled the Yiddish term CHUTZPAHS, pluralised, across two double word squares. That was the most points I’ve ever scored. Recently I decimated a guy online with REZEROES on a triple word score. Thing is, like most Scrabble players, I don’t know the meaning of half of the words I’m spelling. And playing on a computer makes you even lazier – the programme bounces back your tiles if it’s not a real word. I miss being able to challenge someone for playing bullshit words!

Ever hang out at the races with Pavement drummer Bob Nastanovich?

Royce da Silva, Cheltenham

Bob’s now a horse-racing tipster and journalist, and over the years I’ve been with him to all the classic tracks. Santa Anita in California, Saratoga in New York, Churchill Downs in Kentucky, Arlington in Chicago. We’ve even been to see harness racing, where guys are riding on the wheeled carriages behind the horses. And there’s this hovercraft that you can take to this one track in New Jersey for a full day trip. Thing is, after a while, I found it kinda boring, to be honest, ’cos I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it, and I don’t really like to gamble. I mean, places like Churchill Downs are a nice, fancy day out, but a lot of racetracks have a down-on-their-luck vibe, filled with fraternity guys drinking cheap beer and shabby dudes looking for discarded winning tickets on the ground. Bob knows his shit, though.

Is it true that you’re moving to Berlin?

Meryl, Berlin

Yes, it is true. I don’t know why. We’re kinda set up in Portland, where we live, but we wanted to make a change, and we couldn’t decide where to go in America. It’s kind of a big thing, at my age, to sell all your shit and move house. We just eventually, somehow, through bargaining and talking, ended up picking Berlin. We’re renting a place for a year and we’ll see how it goes. I’ve been to Berlin 20 times, probably, but I don’t know much about it. Everyone I talk to between the ages of 25 and 35 has some friend that lives there now and they say that they love it. Hopefully we’ll enjoy it. The kids are in a school, it’s biking distance. Maybe we’ll end up loving the Germans.

Ray Davies: “Only people who know me would fully understand my lyricsâ€

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Ray Davies: “Only people who know me would fully understand my lyricsâ€
Ray Davies reveals more about the hidden meanings in his lyrics in the latest Uncut, dated December 2013 and out now. The Kinks frontman and songwriter explains some of the songs on the band’s reissued Muswell Hillbillies album, claiming that their exact meanings are sometimes hard for listener...

Ray Davies reveals more about the hidden meanings in his lyrics in the latest Uncut, dated December 2013 and out now.

The Kinks frontman and songwriter explains some of the songs on the band’s reissued Muswell Hillbillies album, claiming that their exact meanings are sometimes hard for listeners to understand.

“A lot of inner messages are linked into the words,†Davies tells Uncut. “Only people who know me would fully understand them.â€

Analysing lyrics from “Oklahoma USAâ€, Davies adds: “As she walks to the corner shop, she ‘walking on the surrey with the fringe on top’. “’The Surrey With The Fringe On Top’ is a song from Oklahoma!. It’s the song my sister, Rene, was dancing to [at the Lyceum in 1957] when she died.â€

The latest issue of Uncut (dated December 2013) is out now.

Bob Dylan – Glasgow, Clyde Auditorium, November 18, 19 & 20, 2013

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Bob Dylan – Glasgow, Clyde Auditorium, November 18, 19 & 20, 2013

To get to the Clyde Auditorium - the 3,000-seat venue crouched on the riverbank beside the SECC, which Glaswegians only ever refer to as The Armadillo - you have to traverse a long, wormy, weather-beaten covered walkway that bridges a motorway. On the three wintry nights that Bob Dylan and his band are in residency, this shabby arcade plays home to a generous gauntlet of buskers, lined up at regular intervals along the path like exhibits in a strange living waxwork museum devoted to a particular idea of Bob Dylan. Except for the guy shredding blues on banjo, all are solitary men armed with acoustic guitars and harmonicas, and as you pass, they offer strident, vibrant, faithful echoes of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fallâ€, “The Times They Are a-Changin’â€, “I Want Youâ€, “Lay Lady Layâ€, “Like A Rolling Stone†and other deathless songs that you are not going to hear when the real Dylan takes to the stage this time around. Among the voices in the crowd, the song can also remain the same. Inside the Armadillo, over three nights, I heard the same conversations and comments repeat as on a loop, and found myself surprised, again, to realise there were still people turning up somehow expecting to see the Dylan of the 1960s or 70s take to the stage, the man alone behind an acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, the newspapers seem largely content to run rewrites of the reviews they have been running for 30 years or more: he changes the songs so much you can’t recognise them; you can’t make out what he’s singing; his voice is weird; you never know what he’s up to. This time around, though, a brand new, contrary complaint has been added to the repertoire, one that is already well on its way to becoming a standard. This one from frustrated diehards who follow Dylan’s live shows as a nightly ritual, either in person, or online, ticking off the set lists (the moral of the tale: if you’re going to sing about trains, then you’re going to attract trainspotters): he’s playing the same songs every night. Leaving aside that, when collecting bootlegs of the 1966 world tour, few among the same hardcore ever seem to complain that Dylan and The Hawks just did the same set night after night, it’s true. In 25 years or so of catching Dylan whenever I’ve had the chance, I’ve never before seen him do the same songs, in the same order, two nights running. And here he is doing it three nights in a row. I wish it had been four. If you came out expecting to see the Bob Dylan of four or five decades ago, these concerts might have been a disappointment, or possibly a revelation. If you came out to see Bob Dylan, though, they were thrilling. That unchanging setlist is an astonishingly defiant statement. Of the 19 songs played, only six were written before 1997, and only three come from the hallowed 1960s, and two of them don’t appear until the encore. Entire books of the Dylan Bible are just tossed away – nothing from Highway 61 Revisited, no sign of Blonde On Blonde – as he focuses long and hard on his most recent work, and in particular current album Tempest, easily dominating the setlist with six songs. The show begins the same way every night, with rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball in the shadows stage left, strumming out an ominous, twanging overture on acoustic guitar. It trips up and falls clattering right into “Things Have Changed†as the rest of the band arrive and the lights come up. Not that they come up much; for large parts of the night, the bare, intimate lighting is kept as dark as I’ve ever seen on a concert stage. Dylan is there out front, alone at the mic in those stage duds that look to have been designed by a committee of Nudie Cohn, a 1940s street gang and a Civil War army supplier. He rocks and bounces, throws in tiny dramatic gestures – a hand on the hip or to the heart, a gunslinger point of the finger – wipes the sweat from his eyes. Then comes the voice: a rattle, a bark, a whoop, a whip, a snarl, a tease. Or, as the band go into a version of “She Belongs To Me†which pulses and shimmers as though Daniel Lanois had reworked it while dreaming about Mo Tucker, or a “What Good Am I†that comes on like twilight in the country, a purr like velvet. Watching the same set for three nights, watching how they dig deeper down into this territory, a few things become apparent. One is how much Dylan is focussing on his singing, conscious of the present day limitations on his voice, but also, increasingly, testing them. Another is how this apparently fixed set is far from some static, machine-tooled thing. Like Dylan, the band rarely look out into the audience, too involved in watching what they’re playing, watching each other, and watching Dylan for the cues on where to go. Precisely where a song will end is by no means predetermined. Endings can be, and are, left ragged. Improvised call-and-response interplays open up within the long groove fields of the songs, particularly between Dylan’s piano and Charlie Sexton’s hotwired lead guitar, and they shift and change from show to show. How alive it is becomes clear on the second night, the standout night of the run, when the energy levels, and the intensity of everything happening onstage seem to get kicked up by several per cent, and Dylan’s vision of a place where Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael and Howlin’ Wolf meet is most strongly articulated. He stretches his voice a lot more this night, at some points leaving his current growlin’ wolf mode to venture into something like the higher registers of the old. The back and forth with Sexton sparkles through a spiralling, countryfied “Tangled Up In Blueâ€, a song that is forever on the road, still changing and aging with Dylan continuing to edit and rewrite the lyrics as he goes. Similarly, when we arrive at an exquisite “Simple Twist Of Fate†we find things have changed. The object of desire in the song now tells the abandoned lover, “You should’ve met me back in ’58…†The adaptability of the band is clearest on the second night, too, when technical gremlins savage Tony Garnier’s bass on the first encore of “All Along The Watchtower†and the rest of the band flood in to fill the gap while he sorts it out, before easing into the quietly glorious and quite gorgeous soft-shoe soul shuffle that is currently “Blowin’ In The Windâ€. But it is the newer songs that define Dylan in 2013, without argument. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’†is a pure thrill, a dramatic, tumbling junkyard cantina tango, Strictly Come Dancing by way of Tom Waits. “Forgetful Heart†is an almost show-stopping, almost heart-stopping performance by Dylan, whispered and pensive over Donnie Herron’s mournful fiddle. The grotesque details and spiked banjo of “High Water†get more dead-eyed mischievous and sinister with every passing disaster. “Duquesne Whistle†just truly rocks and rolls, and rolls, allowed to stretch out as Sexton’s rockabilly fills flash away like white lightning. “Early Roman Kings†pounds and rattles, drummer George Recile going at it as if he was driving steel nails into the ground. “Pay In Blood†is vicious, Stonesy, dripping. Every night, though, one song shines out over everything else. When I first heard “Long And Wasted Years†on Tempest, I thought it was the standout, but I also figured it was a song I’d be unlikely to ever hear Dylan perform live. Something about that dense, rousing tumble of words, ripped and torn from here and there and god knows where and then collaged straight onto his experience of life; something about the astonishing declamatory style, an unexpected return to the voice of “Brownsville Girl†and the stance of “Angelinaâ€; and something about the odd looping of the music, that endless, strange carnival ride down and down and down – it just didn’t seem like something he’d be doing onstage often, if at all. Here it is, though, three nights straight. Pinned up as the climax of the main body of the set. The lights on stage are suddenly blazing, the band are hitting the music astonishingly hard, and Dylan stands out front alone again, feet planted, telling the truth, or something that feels like it while it lasts. It hits like waves of gold, like time coursing around you and through you. It is just fantastic. If someone told me it was the best thing he had ever done, I might believe them. Each night, it brings the crowd to their feet. On the last night, the first few rows of the audience get past security and crowd standing along the front of the stage for the encores, still thrilling from it. The last two songs feel like another venue – The Armadillo is a somewhat soulless place, although the sound is good – and, at the end, as “Blowin’ In The Wind†skips softly away, Dylan surveys their faces. He weighs up the odds, takes his chances, and takes a step forward, bends over into the crowd, slapping high-fives with audience members who look at once visibly shocked, and like kids at Christmas who just found out Santa is real. Then he’s off, down the road to Blackpool, of all places. As I enter the walkway to head back home, the first busker is playing “Mr Tambourine Man.†He looks like Donovan. Damien Love You can read our review of Dylan's Albert Hall show from November 26 here. SETLIST Things Have Changed She Belongs To Me Beyond Here Lies Nothin' What Good Am I? Duquesne Whistle Waiting For You Pay In Blood Tangled Up In Blue Love Sick INTERMISSION High Water (For Charley Patton) Simple Twist Of Fate Early Roman Kings Forgetful Heart Spirit On The Water Scarlet Town Soon After Midnight Long And Wasted Years ENCORE All Along The Watchtower Blowin' In The Wind

To get to the Clyde Auditorium – the 3,000-seat venue crouched on the riverbank beside the SECC, which Glaswegians only ever refer to as The Armadillo – you have to traverse a long, wormy, weather-beaten covered walkway that bridges a motorway.

On the three wintry nights that Bob Dylan and his band are in residency, this shabby arcade plays home to a generous gauntlet of buskers, lined up at regular intervals along the path like exhibits in a strange living waxwork museum devoted to a particular idea of Bob Dylan.

Except for the guy shredding blues on banjo, all are solitary men armed with acoustic guitars and harmonicas, and as you pass, they offer strident, vibrant, faithful echoes of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fallâ€, “The Times They Are a-Changin’â€, “I Want Youâ€, “Lay Lady Layâ€, “Like A Rolling Stone†and other deathless songs that you are not going to hear when the real Dylan takes to the stage this time around.

Among the voices in the crowd, the song can also remain the same. Inside the Armadillo, over three nights, I heard the same conversations and comments repeat as on a loop, and found myself surprised, again, to realise there were still people turning up somehow expecting to see the Dylan of the 1960s or 70s take to the stage, the man alone behind an acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, the newspapers seem largely content to run rewrites of the reviews they have been running for 30 years or more: he changes the songs so much you can’t recognise them; you can’t make out what he’s singing; his voice is weird; you never know what he’s up to.

This time around, though, a brand new, contrary complaint has been added to the repertoire, one that is already well on its way to becoming a standard. This one from frustrated diehards who follow Dylan’s live shows as a nightly ritual, either in person, or online, ticking off the set lists (the moral of the tale: if you’re going to sing about trains, then you’re going to attract trainspotters): he’s playing the same songs every night.

Leaving aside that, when collecting bootlegs of the 1966 world tour, few among the same hardcore ever seem to complain that Dylan and The Hawks just did the same set night after night, it’s true. In 25 years or so of catching Dylan whenever I’ve had the chance, I’ve never before seen him do the same songs, in the same order, two nights running. And here he is doing it three nights in a row. I wish it had been four.

If you came out expecting to see the Bob Dylan of four or five decades ago, these concerts might have been a disappointment, or possibly a revelation. If you came out to see Bob Dylan, though, they were thrilling. That unchanging setlist is an astonishingly defiant statement. Of the 19 songs played, only six were written before 1997, and only three come from the hallowed 1960s, and two of them don’t appear until the encore.

Entire books of the Dylan Bible are just tossed away – nothing from Highway 61 Revisited, no sign of Blonde On Blonde – as he focuses long and hard on his most recent work, and in particular current album Tempest, easily dominating the setlist with six songs.

The show begins the same way every night, with rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball in the shadows stage left, strumming out an ominous, twanging overture on acoustic guitar. It trips up and falls clattering right into “Things Have Changed†as the rest of the band arrive and the lights come up. Not that they come up much; for large parts of the night, the bare, intimate lighting is kept as dark as I’ve ever seen on a concert stage.

Dylan is there out front, alone at the mic in those stage duds that look to have been designed by a committee of Nudie Cohn, a 1940s street gang and a Civil War army supplier. He rocks and bounces, throws in tiny dramatic gestures – a hand on the hip or to the heart, a gunslinger point of the finger – wipes the sweat from his eyes. Then comes the voice: a rattle, a bark, a whoop, a whip, a snarl, a tease. Or, as the band go into a version of “She Belongs To Me†which pulses and shimmers as though Daniel Lanois had reworked it while dreaming about Mo Tucker, or a “What Good Am I†that comes on like twilight in the country, a purr like velvet.

Watching the same set for three nights, watching how they dig deeper down into this territory, a few things become apparent. One is how much Dylan is focussing on his singing, conscious of the present day limitations on his voice, but also, increasingly, testing them. Another is how this apparently fixed set is far from some static, machine-tooled thing.

Like Dylan, the band rarely look out into the audience, too involved in watching what they’re playing, watching each other, and watching Dylan for the cues on where to go. Precisely where a song will end is by no means predetermined. Endings can be, and are, left ragged. Improvised call-and-response interplays open up within the long groove fields of the songs, particularly between Dylan’s piano and Charlie Sexton’s hotwired lead guitar, and they shift and change from show to show.

How alive it is becomes clear on the second night, the standout night of the run, when the energy levels, and the intensity of everything happening onstage seem to get kicked up by several per cent, and Dylan’s vision of a place where Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael and Howlin’ Wolf meet is most strongly articulated.

He stretches his voice a lot more this night, at some points leaving his current growlin’ wolf mode to venture into something like the higher registers of the old. The back and forth with Sexton sparkles through a spiralling, countryfied “Tangled Up In Blueâ€, a song that is forever on the road, still changing and aging with Dylan continuing to edit and rewrite the lyrics as he goes. Similarly, when we arrive at an exquisite “Simple Twist Of Fate†we find things have changed. The object of desire in the song now tells the abandoned lover, “You should’ve met me back in ’58…â€

The adaptability of the band is clearest on the second night, too, when technical gremlins savage Tony Garnier’s bass on the first encore of “All Along The Watchtower†and the rest of the band flood in to fill the gap while he sorts it out, before easing into the quietly glorious and quite gorgeous soft-shoe soul shuffle that is currently “Blowin’ In The Windâ€.

But it is the newer songs that define Dylan in 2013, without argument. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’†is a pure thrill, a dramatic, tumbling junkyard cantina tango, Strictly Come Dancing by way of Tom Waits. “Forgetful Heart†is an almost show-stopping, almost heart-stopping performance by Dylan, whispered and pensive over Donnie Herron’s mournful fiddle. The grotesque details and spiked banjo of “High Water†get more dead-eyed mischievous and sinister with every passing disaster. “Duquesne Whistle†just truly rocks and rolls, and rolls, allowed to stretch out as Sexton’s rockabilly fills flash away like white lightning. “Early Roman Kings†pounds and rattles, drummer George Recile going at it as if he was driving steel nails into the ground. “Pay In Blood†is vicious, Stonesy, dripping.

Every night, though, one song shines out over everything else. When I first heard “Long And Wasted Years†on Tempest, I thought it was the standout, but I also figured it was a song I’d be unlikely to ever hear Dylan perform live. Something about that dense, rousing tumble of words, ripped and torn from here and there and god knows where and then collaged straight onto his experience of life; something about the astonishing declamatory style, an unexpected return to the voice of “Brownsville Girl†and the stance of “Angelinaâ€; and something about the odd looping of the music, that endless, strange carnival ride down and down and down – it just didn’t seem like something he’d be doing onstage often, if at all.

Here it is, though, three nights straight. Pinned up as the climax of the main body of the set. The lights on stage are suddenly blazing, the band are hitting the music astonishingly hard, and Dylan stands out front alone again, feet planted, telling the truth, or something that feels like it while it lasts. It hits like waves of gold, like time coursing around you and through you. It is just fantastic. If someone told me it was the best thing he had ever done, I might believe them.

Each night, it brings the crowd to their feet. On the last night, the first few rows of the audience get past security and crowd standing along the front of the stage for the encores, still thrilling from it. The last two songs feel like another venue – The Armadillo is a somewhat soulless place, although the sound is good – and, at the end, as “Blowin’ In The Wind†skips softly away, Dylan surveys their faces. He weighs up the odds, takes his chances, and takes a step forward, bends over into the crowd, slapping high-fives with audience members who look at once visibly shocked, and like kids at Christmas who just found out Santa is real.

Then he’s off, down the road to Blackpool, of all places. As I enter the walkway to head back home, the first busker is playing “Mr Tambourine Man.†He looks like Donovan.

Damien Love

You can read our review of Dylan’s Albert Hall show from November 26 here.

SETLIST

Things Have Changed

She Belongs To Me

Beyond Here Lies Nothin’

What Good Am I?

Duquesne Whistle

Waiting For You

Pay In Blood

Tangled Up In Blue

Love Sick

INTERMISSION

High Water (For Charley Patton)

Simple Twist Of Fate

Early Roman Kings

Forgetful Heart

Spirit On The Water

Scarlet Town

Soon After Midnight

Long And Wasted Years

ENCORE

All Along The Watchtower

Blowin’ In The Wind

John Martyn – The Island Years

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John Martyn – The Island Years

Old and new treasures from the folk pioneer... “The roof can leak all it likes if you live in the basement, know what I mean?†says John Martyn, introducing “Bless The Weatherâ€, in a voice like Neil from The Young Ones, to a crowd at a Richmond folk club in 1972. Although dropped casually and with typically endearing wit, it’s loaded, in retrospect, with significance considering the state his life was in. Holed up in a rambling new house in the unsettling seaside town of Hastings with wife Beverley, who had had to endure being compared to the decapitating Salome in his song “John The Baptistâ€, and who was now essentially sacrificing her own promising career to look after her own and John’s children, he was busy running life ragged. Even as this twinkle-eyed roving minstrel could sing songs like “May You Never†and “Back To Stay†about his undying marital fidelity, he was sleeping with Island labelmate Claire Hamill, whose records he had produced and who accompanied him on tour. His free spirit was both gorgeously attractive, and fatally destructive: he remained chirpy even as the attic floorboards were rotting away. But we’ve all been content to let John Martyn off the hook, because of the sheer vitality and beauty of so much of his music. And a box set like this one – following Island’s comprehensive Sandy Denny monolith from 2010 – is a completist’s dream. It contains every Island LP from London Conversation (1967) to The Apprentice (recorded for Island in 1987 but issued three years later in a different version on Permanent), each with never-on-CD extras polished up and tacked on. There are four standalone discs of live recordings or outtakes spanning the same period, again unreleased (including the fine, complete set from Richmond Hanging Lamp, and an entire CD of newly discovered One World discards). There’s also a DVD featuring Martyn on stage and TV, including the complete Foundations concert from 1986, plus the inevitable hardback book with notes by compiler and JohnMartyn.com website host John Hillarby. Four years after his death, Martyn’s life work comes to seem like a philanderer’s testimony, a bipolar misogynist’s covering of his own tracks. What and who was this roving minstrel, a half-English, half-Scotsman who ended up living in Ireland with one leg? He could be charming, erudite, laddish, demented. An uncontrollable alcoholic and adulterer, a charitable philanthropist unafraid of a scrap (he once beat up a heckling Sid Vicious). The contradictions are ever present in performance. Look at the Old Grey Whistle Test footage, some of the best of its kind, of him performing “Make No Mistake†in 1973 – his utter immersion in the song’s passion, tenderness, the yearning coupled with stupendous guitar technique. For those brief minutes while he is inside it, music seems like a refuge from all the world’s ugliness and cynicism. And then between numbers, the pisstaking oaf returns. Age was not kind to John Martyn, metamorphosing him from a merman to a grizzly bear. In his first professional decade he reached down into his own cherubic voice and discovered a devil lurking there. The slurring and roaring on Inside Out (1973) and One World (1977) become, by Sapphire (1984) and Piece By Piece (1986), a raucous, unsavoury bellow. Grace And Danger (1980) – supplied here with a whole extra disc of outtakes and live airshots from the period – remains an appealing tipping point, songs like “Some People Are Crazy†and “Hurt In Your Heart†representing articulate interventions against his own demonic impulses. The Island Years also throws out hints of the more experimental paths Martyn might have trodden. By 1977, captured here in a so-far unheard gig from Sydney, he’s opening sets with the massive echoplex outback of “Outside Inâ€, stretching to a tumultuous 16 minutes. As well as the magnificent testosterone sprawl of Live At Leeds – practically an onstage musical brawl between Martyn, Danny Thompson and Improv drummer John Stevens – and the pearly amniotic folds of “Small Hoursâ€, Hillarby includes the very rare “Anni Parts 1 & 2†by John Stevens’s Away, a funk-driven outfit which Martyn briefly joined after the singer’s notorious 1975 tour. Released as a Vertigo 7†in 1976, it’s stunning to hear it in CD quality for the first time, and it goes a long way to explaining the electronics and slouchy grooves of the following year’s One World. It’s the original UK mix of One World that’s included here – apparently the American edition was given different emphasis, though it’s impossible to compare now. It still sounds fresh minted, bearing traces of Martyn’s recent, colourful sojourn in Jamaica (“Big Muff†was inspired by a lewd comment Lee Perry made about Chris Blackwell’s breakfast china). The dark places Martyn had visited make themselves known in “Dealer†and “Smiling Strangerâ€, but there’s profound joy here too (“Couldn’t Love You Moreâ€), and an aquatic post-rock ambience on “Certain Surpriseâ€, “Dancing†and the title track that no one has quite equalled since. “Small Hoursâ€, recorded in pre-dawn light by a lake in the grounds of Blackwell’s Berkshire farmstead, is what New Age music always should have been: an impassioned, starsailing voyage into the ether, with the air so still you can hear distant trains and geese migrating overhead. Bless The Weather (1971) and Solid Air (1973) feel so canonical by now that there’s little more to be said except that they are included, along with work-in-progress studio takes and guide tracks that are substantially revealing about the fluidity and spontaneity of Martyn’s methods. Sunday’s Child, from 1975, is often overlooked, but it too contains some of Martyn’s tenderest ballads (“You Can Discoverâ€, “My Baby Girlâ€) and the tropical funk he could stew up from a few amplified ingredients, given the right combination of musicians (“Root Loveâ€, “Clutchesâ€). You may well own these already, but the value of this collection is as a portrait of the artist through time, and a compilation of the irresistible outpourings of a man who never really knew who he was. Rob Young Q&A Compiler John Hillarby of johnmartyn.com Did you find everything you hoped for in compiling the set? Were there any big surprises? Research always starts with tape reports produced by the Island Records Tape Archive Facility. Some of the information on the tapes is good and others less so, and it’s often the case that a reel to reel tape that has five songs listed as being on it has more, and unfortunately sometimes the opposite! Many of the song titles written on the tape boxes are working titles and bear no relevance to what is actually on the tape, so it’s always an interesting journey. I was hoping to find some sessions John recorded with [South African free jazz saxophonist] Dudu Pukwana, but they didn’t come to light. I suspect they may be incorrectly labelled in the archive – if they are there at all. You have to do some lateral thinking because, for example, much of the stuff John recorded with [ex-Free guitarist] Paul Kossoff is filed under Kossoff, and if you don’t understand things like that you can miss things. Finding the unreleased songs was a great buzz. There can be the most sublime take, and then in true John style he bursts out laughing, or cracks a joke or asks for a spliff. Panning for the gold of a great unheard song or take or mix is a real buzz... but can be frustrating. What comes over is how naturally music came to John, his sense of fun and, more than anything else, the sheer scope and panorama of this stunning body of work he left us, from acoustic folk to jazz to rock to blues to Eastern textures to rock to pop to 80s synthesizers – he was progressive in the true sense of the word. Any gems that you couldn’t include on the set due to space or other reasons? Inevitably, but almost all of the really interesting material is in the box. Several times we found something that really had to be included, and that meant something else got bumped. That’s always an incredibly tough decision. For example, the USA mix of One World was bumped in favour of the album outtakes. We always try to use unreleased material. Early good quality live recordings are very rare, so the Hanging Lamp concert from 1972 is very special. There is a huge quantity of live recordings that could have been drawn on, but a lot of it, although musically fantastic, is 70s amateur recordings, and a bit too rough for a prestige box set like this. John tinkered with an experimental/jazz/fusion-type direction, but ended up instead with the AOR orientated material of the post-Grace and Danger era. Why do you think that was? John was always influenced by jazz and I’ve always felt that “So Much In Love With You†from Inside Out is a great example. “Anni†(by John Stevens Away) is a fantastic song, and there are definite jazz elements in the Live At Leeds trio. John had enormous admiration for John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders but he didn’t have a jazz background. He did try to play saxophone when he was younger but didn't take to it – thankfully! I don’t think John was ever AOR, he was too honest a songwriter. Much of John’s music has an edge: he didn’t like a ‘straight’ sound or note; he preferred to bend or distort it. I think that edge, and the Celtic notes of sadness and despair, would just never be smooth enough for that genre. For many, John's late 60s/early to mid-70s music will be thought of as his golden age. Is there any reason to re-evaluate the 1980s years? Absolutely. John got bored easily and always looked to change his sound and move forward, and most of the time was way ahead of everyone. Something like his 1981 album Glorious Fool has a different sound, but the vocals, guitar and song writing are first class and stand every inch with his 70s work. The same with Sapphire and Piece By Piece. He was always evolving, looking for something fresh, and some of it worked better than others, as with any artist whose career spans 40 plus years. “John Wayneâ€, “Fisherman’s Dream†and “Mad Dog Days†are outstanding tracks, all from the end of the Island era. Those who expected John’s music to stay as it was in the 1970s totally failed to understand him. John lived for the moment, lived life to the full and experimenting and exploring was part of his being. Those who only listen to John’s 1970s output are missing out on a lot of great music! What is the archetypal John Martyn track? For exploration, experimentation and pushing back the boundaries it would have to be “Outside Inâ€, probably the version from Live At Leeds or the BBC Sight And Sound In Concert version, which is released in this box set for the first time. For sensitivity and John’s unique insight on the world, I would choose “One Worldâ€. It is both innocent and all-knowing at the same time. Yesterday I was at the Environmental Fair in Carshalton Park and there was a handpainted banner by the solar powered stage that simply said, “One Worldâ€. The phrase is commonplace nowadays, but wasn’t in 1977. John would have roared with laughter and said, “Fucking took ’em long enoughâ€. INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG

Old and new treasures from the folk pioneer…

“The roof can leak all it likes if you live in the basement, know what I mean?†says John Martyn, introducing “Bless The Weatherâ€, in a voice like Neil from The Young Ones, to a crowd at a Richmond folk club in 1972. Although dropped casually and with typically endearing wit, it’s loaded, in retrospect, with significance considering the state his life was in. Holed up in a rambling new house in the unsettling seaside town of Hastings with wife Beverley, who had had to endure being compared to the decapitating Salome in his song “John The Baptistâ€, and who was now essentially sacrificing her own promising career to look after her own and John’s children, he was busy running life ragged.

Even as this twinkle-eyed roving minstrel could sing songs like “May You Never†and “Back To Stay†about his undying marital fidelity, he was sleeping with Island labelmate Claire Hamill, whose records he had produced and who accompanied him on tour. His free spirit was both gorgeously attractive, and fatally destructive: he remained chirpy even as the attic floorboards were rotting away.

But we’ve all been content to let John Martyn off the hook, because of the sheer vitality and beauty of so much of his music. And a box set like this one – following Island’s comprehensive Sandy Denny monolith from 2010 – is a completist’s dream. It contains every Island LP from London Conversation (1967) to The Apprentice (recorded for Island in 1987 but issued three years later in a different version on Permanent), each with never-on-CD extras polished up and tacked on. There are four standalone discs of live recordings or outtakes spanning the same period, again unreleased (including the fine, complete set from Richmond Hanging Lamp, and an entire CD of newly discovered One World discards). There’s also a DVD featuring Martyn on stage and TV, including the complete Foundations concert from 1986, plus the inevitable hardback book with notes by compiler and JohnMartyn.com website host John Hillarby.

Four years after his death, Martyn’s life work comes to seem like a philanderer’s testimony, a bipolar misogynist’s covering of his own tracks. What and who was this roving minstrel, a half-English, half-Scotsman who ended up living in Ireland with one leg? He could be charming, erudite, laddish, demented. An uncontrollable alcoholic and adulterer, a charitable philanthropist unafraid of a scrap (he once beat up a heckling Sid Vicious). The contradictions are ever present in performance. Look at the Old Grey Whistle Test footage, some of the best of its kind, of him performing “Make No Mistake†in 1973 – his utter immersion in the song’s passion, tenderness, the yearning coupled with stupendous guitar technique. For those brief minutes while he is inside it, music seems like a refuge from all the world’s ugliness and cynicism. And then between numbers, the pisstaking oaf returns.

Age was not kind to John Martyn, metamorphosing him from a merman to a grizzly bear. In his first professional decade he reached down into his own cherubic voice and discovered a devil lurking there. The slurring and roaring on Inside Out (1973) and One World (1977) become, by Sapphire (1984) and Piece By Piece (1986), a raucous, unsavoury bellow. Grace And Danger (1980) – supplied here with a whole extra disc of outtakes and live airshots from the period – remains an appealing tipping point, songs like “Some People Are Crazy†and “Hurt In Your Heart†representing articulate interventions against his own demonic impulses.

The Island Years also throws out hints of the more experimental paths Martyn might have trodden. By 1977, captured here in a so-far unheard gig from Sydney, he’s opening sets with the massive echoplex outback of “Outside Inâ€, stretching to a tumultuous 16 minutes. As well as the magnificent testosterone sprawl of Live At Leeds – practically an onstage musical brawl between Martyn, Danny Thompson and Improv drummer John Stevens – and the pearly amniotic folds of “Small Hoursâ€, Hillarby includes the very rare “Anni Parts 1 & 2†by John Stevens’s Away, a funk-driven outfit which Martyn briefly joined after the singer’s notorious 1975 tour. Released as a Vertigo 7†in 1976, it’s stunning to hear it in CD quality for the first time, and it goes a long way to explaining the electronics and slouchy grooves of the following year’s One World.

It’s the original UK mix of One World that’s included here – apparently the American edition was given different emphasis, though it’s impossible to compare now. It still sounds fresh minted, bearing traces of Martyn’s recent, colourful sojourn in Jamaica (“Big Muff†was inspired by a lewd comment Lee Perry made about Chris Blackwell’s breakfast china). The dark places Martyn had visited make themselves known in “Dealer†and “Smiling Strangerâ€, but there’s profound joy here too (“Couldn’t Love You Moreâ€), and an aquatic post-rock ambience on “Certain Surpriseâ€, “Dancing†and the title track that no one has quite equalled since. “Small Hoursâ€, recorded in pre-dawn light by a lake in the grounds of Blackwell’s Berkshire farmstead, is what New Age music always should have been: an impassioned, starsailing voyage into the ether, with the air so still you can hear distant trains and geese migrating overhead.

Bless The Weather (1971) and Solid Air (1973) feel so canonical by now that there’s little more to be said except that they are included, along with work-in-progress studio takes and guide tracks that are substantially revealing about the fluidity and spontaneity of Martyn’s methods. Sunday’s Child, from 1975, is often overlooked, but it too contains some of Martyn’s tenderest ballads (“You Can Discoverâ€, “My Baby Girlâ€) and the tropical funk he could stew up from a few amplified ingredients, given the right combination of musicians (“Root Loveâ€, “Clutchesâ€). You may well own these already, but the value of this collection is as a portrait of the artist through time, and a compilation of the irresistible outpourings of a man who never really knew who he was.

Rob Young

Q&A

Compiler John Hillarby of johnmartyn.com

Did you find everything you hoped for in compiling the set? Were there any big surprises?

Research always starts with tape reports produced by the Island Records Tape Archive Facility. Some of the information on the tapes is good and others less so, and it’s often the case that a reel to reel tape that has five songs listed as being on it has more, and unfortunately sometimes the opposite! Many of the song titles written on the tape boxes are working titles and bear no relevance to what is actually on the tape, so it’s always an interesting journey.

I was hoping to find some sessions John recorded with [South African free jazz saxophonist] Dudu Pukwana, but they didn’t come to light. I suspect they may be incorrectly labelled in the archive – if they are there at all. You have to do some lateral thinking because, for example, much of the stuff John recorded with [ex-Free guitarist] Paul Kossoff is filed under Kossoff, and if you don’t understand things like that you can miss things. Finding the unreleased songs was a great buzz. There can be the most sublime take, and then in true John style he bursts out laughing, or cracks a joke or asks for a spliff. Panning for the gold of a great unheard song or take or mix is a real buzz… but can be frustrating. What comes over is how naturally music came to John, his sense of fun and, more than anything else, the sheer scope and panorama of this stunning body of work he left us, from acoustic folk to jazz to rock to blues to Eastern textures to rock to pop to 80s synthesizers – he was progressive in the true sense of the word.

Any gems that you couldn’t include on the set due to space or other reasons?

Inevitably, but almost all of the really interesting material is in the box. Several times we found something that really had to be included, and that meant something else got bumped. That’s always an incredibly tough decision. For example, the USA mix of One World was bumped in favour of the album outtakes. We always try to use unreleased material. Early good quality live recordings are very rare, so the Hanging Lamp concert from 1972 is very special. There is a huge quantity of live recordings that could have been drawn on, but a lot of it, although musically fantastic, is 70s amateur recordings, and a bit too rough for a prestige box set like this.

John tinkered with an experimental/jazz/fusion-type direction, but ended up instead with the AOR orientated material of the post-Grace and Danger era. Why do you think that was?

John was always influenced by jazz and I’ve always felt that “So Much In Love With You†from Inside Out is a great example. “Anni†(by John Stevens Away) is a fantastic song, and there are definite jazz elements in the Live At Leeds trio. John had enormous admiration for John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders but he didn’t have a jazz background. He did try to play saxophone when he was younger but didn’t take to it – thankfully!

I don’t think John was ever AOR, he was too honest a songwriter. Much of John’s music has an edge: he didn’t like a ‘straight’ sound or note; he preferred to bend or distort it. I think that edge, and the Celtic notes of sadness and despair, would just never be smooth enough for that genre.

For many, John’s late 60s/early to mid-70s music will be thought of as his golden age. Is there any reason to re-evaluate the 1980s years?

Absolutely. John got bored easily and always looked to change his sound and move forward, and most of the time was way ahead of everyone. Something like his 1981 album Glorious Fool has a different sound, but the vocals, guitar and song writing are first class and stand every inch with his 70s work. The same with Sapphire and Piece By Piece. He was always evolving, looking for something fresh, and some of it worked better than others, as with any artist whose career spans 40 plus years. “John Wayneâ€, “Fisherman’s Dream†and “Mad Dog Days†are outstanding tracks, all from the end of the Island era. Those who expected John’s music to stay as it was in the 1970s totally failed to understand him. John lived for the moment, lived life to the full and experimenting and exploring was part of his being. Those who only listen to John’s 1970s output are missing out on a lot of great music!

What is the archetypal John Martyn track?

For exploration, experimentation and pushing back the boundaries it would have to be “Outside Inâ€, probably the version from Live At Leeds or the BBC Sight And Sound In Concert version, which is released in this box set for the first time. For sensitivity and John’s unique insight on the world, I would choose “One Worldâ€. It is both innocent and all-knowing at the same time. Yesterday I was at the Environmental Fair in Carshalton Park and there was a handpainted banner by the solar powered stage that simply said, “One Worldâ€. The phrase is commonplace nowadays, but wasn’t in 1977. John would have roared with laughter and said, “Fucking took ’em long enoughâ€.

INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG

John Mayall announces 80th birthday live dates

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John Mayall announces 80th birthday live dates
John Mayall has announced details of his 2014 tour to celebrate his 80th birthday. Mayall will play a number of European dates, as well as one confirmed UK date at Ronnie Scott's on April 19, 2014. You can find more details about the Ronnie Scott's show here. And click here for Mayall's full tour...

John Mayall has announced details of his 2014 tour to celebrate his 80th birthday.

Mayall will play a number of European dates, as well as one confirmed UK date at Ronnie Scott’s on April 19, 2014.

You can find more details about the Ronnie Scott’s show here.

And click here for Mayall’s full tour itinerary.

Photo credit: Cristina Arrigoni

David Crosby and Graham Nash to guest on new David Gilmour album

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David Crosby and Graham Nash to guest on new David Gilmour album
Graham Nash and David Crosby are to guest on David Gilmour's new album. Nash revealed the news in an interview on the Needle Time programme on Vintage TV. Speaking about their appearance on Gilmour's album, Nash said, “What the hell would it cost you to have David Crosby and Graham Nash getting ...

Graham Nash and David Crosby are to guest on David Gilmour’s new album.

Nash revealed the news in an interview on the Needle Time programme on Vintage TV.

Speaking about their appearance on Gilmour’s album, Nash said, “What the hell would it cost you to have David Crosby and Graham Nash getting on a bloody train to Brighton to sing with you? We’re musicians. We love good songs. We’ll sing them until we are dead.â€

David Gilmour‘s most recent album was 2006’s On An Island.

Meanwhile, Gilmour’s former Pink Floyd colleague, Roger Waters, recently confirmed he is also working on his first rock album in 21 years. You can read the story here.

Arcade Fire announce Earl’s Court date

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0
Arcade Fire announce Earl’s Court date
Arcade Fire have announced plans for a huge UK show set to take place at London's Earls Court on June 6, 2014. The band revealed the date via a 15-second long video on YouTube. Scroll down to watch the video. Tickets for the show go on sale November 28. Meanwhile, Win Butler has hinted that the ban...

Arcade Fire have announced plans for a huge UK show set to take place at London’s Earls Court on June 6, 2014.

The band revealed the date via a 15-second long video on YouTube. Scroll down to watch the video. Tickets for the show go on sale November 28. Meanwhile, Win Butler has hinted that the band will also play UK festivals next summer.

In an interview with Jo Whiley on BBC Radio 2, Butler told fans that they should “get [their] wellies ready” in preparation for the UK festival season next summer, although he refused to give any more concrete details of which events he and his bandmates would be playing.

Asked by Whiley if they would be playing UK festivals in 2014, Butler said: “Yeah, I hope so. It’s a special experience.” Whiley then said she was looking forward to seeing the group next summer, leading Butler to teasingly respond: “Get your wellies ready!”

His comments have sparked speculation that Arcade Fire will play Glastonbury next year. The band recently announced a huge US arena tour to take place in 2014, but fans have spotted there is a gap in their schedule between June 22 and July 30 which could potentially be filled by a spot at Worthy Farm.

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