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Uncut – March 2023

Uncut
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Uncut – March 2023

HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME Curtis Mayfield, AC/DC, Yo La Tengo, Tom Tom Club, Spencer Cullum, John Sinclair, Killing Joke, Linda Thompson, Laraaji, The Necks and Mogwai all feature in the new Uncut, dated March 2023 and in UK shops from January 12 or available to buy online now. Thi...

HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

Curtis Mayfield, AC/DC, Yo La Tengo, Tom Tom Club, Spencer Cullum, John Sinclair, Killing Joke, Linda Thompson, Laraaji, The Necks and Mogwai all feature in the new Uncut, dated March 2023 and in UK shops from January 12 or available to buy online now. This issue comes with an exclusive free 15-track CD of the month’s best new music.

CURTIS MAYFIELD: Sixty years on from The Impressions’ pioneering debut album, Uncut salutes the gentle genius of Curtis Mayfield. Friends, family and famous fans – including Paul Weller, Nile Rodgers, Kurt Wagner, PP Arnold, Brittany Howard, Jim James and Courtney Marie Andrews – join us to celebrate the soul superstar’s finest moments as band leader, solo artist, songwriter, producer, guitarist and label manager. Stand by for music filled with righteous anger, spirituality and a profound desire to tell hard truths with depth, empathy and humanity. “It’s one classic after another,” hears Graeme Thomson

OUR FREE CD! SOUNDS OF THE NEW WEST VOL 6: 15 tracks of the month’s best new music

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

AC/DC: IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE TOP …if you want to be the biggest hard rock band in the world. With AC/DC on the point of their 50th anniversary, Uncut charts their first steps. You join us in Sydney, Australia, where a major 1960s pop star is signing up new talent: including his younger brothers. From their dabblings in glam, to their first classic lineup, we learn how AC/DC’s audaciously simple sound was hewn from the rock, and their true leader emerged. “Malcolm had no ego,” one former member tells John Robinson. “He knew what he wanted. He wanted a great band.”

YO LA TENGO: Start spreading the news… The epic adventures of Yo La Tengo continue with This Stupid World – “an energetic record” that finds New Jersey’s most enduring cult band giving renewed prominence to big, loud guitars. Jason Anderson visits the band in their studio to learn how Sinatra (Frank and Frank Jr), surveillance and sandwiches have informed this latest marvellous step forward in their lengthy history. “We just try to do what’s inside of us.”

SPENCER CULLUM: From Romford to East Nashville, Spencer Cullum has taken a peripatetic journey from pedal steel to pastoral psychedelia. Tom Pinnock hears how secret societies devoted to the Grateful Dead, “krautrock wormholes” and sojourns accompanying country superstars in Las Vegas have propelled this sonic upstart into bold new directions. “It’s more about gradually trying to find my identity…”

TOM TOM CLUB: In 1981, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz proved that they were far more than just the rhythm section of Talking Heads. Decamping to Compass Point studios in The Bahamas, they formed Tom Tom Club, the casually mould-breaking musical collective whose good vibrations are still being felt today. Sam Richards tunes in for colourful tales of island life, French schoolyard rhymes, lost James Brown sessions and a famished Ian Dury. “It was so fun to have this wonderful karmic spirit,” says Weymouth. “It felt like angels were coming.”

JOHN SINCLAIR:The renegade jazz poet and one-time MC5 manager on John Lennon, surviving jail and why he’s still kicking out the jams

KILLING JOKE: The making of “Wardance”.

LINDA THOMPSON: The folk-rock luminary charts the bright lights and shadows of a stellar career.

LARAAJI: Newly unearthed recordings and a 1970s gem are collected on a four-disc motherlode of zithery bliss.

CLICK TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from The Necks, Robert Forster, Lisa O’Neill, Joe Henry and more, and archival releases from Laraaji, John Lee Hooker, Mogwai, and others. We catch the The Cure live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Enys Men, Nostalgia, Eo, More Than Ever and January; while in books there’s Adam Levy and David Jacks.

Our front section, meanwhile, features Terry Hall, Christine McVie, Moldy Peaches, Celtic Connections, while, at the end of the magazine, Anton Newcombe shares his life in music.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

CLICK TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane set for 50th anniversary reissue

Damian Jones
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David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane set for 50th anniversary reissue

David Bowie's 1973 iconic album Aladdin Sane is set for a special 50th anniversary reissue. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: “Everything is performance”: Brett Morgen on David Bowie and Moonage Daydream The late icon's sixth album, and the...

David Bowie’s 1973 iconic album Aladdin Sane is set for a special 50th anniversary reissue.

The late icon’s sixth album, and the follow-up to 1972’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, was originally released in April 1973. Produced in the wake of his post-Ziggy stardom, most of the tracks were written while on the road in the US.

The reissue, which is out on April 14, will be released as a half-speed mastered LP and a picture disc LP pressed from the same master. You can pre-order it here.

According to a press release, the new pressing was “cut on a customised late Neumann VMS80 lathe with fully recapped electronics from 192kHz restored masters of the original master tapes, with no additional processing on transfer.” The half-speed record was cut by John Webber at London’s AIR Studios.

To mark the release, a 4K remastered version of “The Jean Genie” music video has also been shared, which you can view below.

The album was originally co-produced by Bowie and Ken Scott and recorded at Trident Studios in London and RCA Studios in New York. It would be the last album that the line-up of Mick Ronson (guitar, piano, backing vocals), Trevor Bolder (bass) and Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey (drums) would appear on and featured avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson.

Last year, Bowie’s fourth studio album, Hunky Dory, was released as a deluxe reissue that included unreleased home demos, live recordings and other rarities from that era.

The White Stripes announce deluxe 20th anniversary Elephant reissue

Damian Jones
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The White Stripes announce deluxe 20th anniversary Elephant reissue

Third Man Records have announced plans to release an expanded 20th anniversary reissue of The White Stripes' seminal 2003 album Elephant. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Entitled Elephant XX, the package includes a new mono remix of the entire record on red...

Third Man Records have announced plans to release an expanded 20th anniversary reissue of The White Stripes’ seminal 2003 album Elephant.

Entitled Elephant XX, the package includes a new mono remix of the entire record on red and white LPs, a red glitter 7 inch with Jack White’s original solo demos of fan favourite “Hypnotize”, a DVD with never-before-seen footage from the era, and a 28-page booklet of previously-unshared photos, all housed in a custom slipcase.

Mixed by White and Bill Skibbe at Third Man Studio in Nashville, the mono remix was executed on the same Calrec board used to complete the original stereo mix of Elephant at Toe Rag Studios in London back in 2002, according to a press release. You can view a trailer and artwork below.

Elephant XX is the 55th instalment of Third Man Records’ Vault subscription series. You can sign up to order it here now until January 31.

Tying it all together is a 28-page 12 inch x 12 inch booklet full of previously unshared photos from the Elephant album cover shoot, candid backstage pics, handwritten lyrics, concert posters and proposed/abandoned tracklists.

Elephant spawned the the duo’s iconic single “Seven Nation Army” and Dusty Springfield cover “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” along with “Black Math”, “Ball And Biscuit” and “The Hardest Button To Button”.

You can view the full tracklisting for Elephant XX below:

1. “Seven Nation Army”
2. “Black Math”
3. “There’s No Home For You Here”
4. “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”
5. “In The Cold, Cold Night”
6. “I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart”
7. “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket”
8. “Ball And Biscuit”
9. “The Hardest Button To Button”
10. “Little Acorns”
11. “Hypnotize”
12. “The Air Near My Fingers”
13. “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine”
14. “It’s True That We Love One Another”

7-inch

1. “Hypnotize (solo demo mix 1)”
2. “Hypnotize (solo demo mix 3)”
3. “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket (take one)”

Elephant Era Video Artifacts DVD

“It’s True That We Love One Another” Toe Rag Studio recording footage
Live @ Shibuya Ax, Tokyo 10/21/03
“Black Math’
“Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground”
“I Think I Smell A Rat/Take A Whiff On Me”
Jack and Meg Interview 10/22/03
Live @ Shibuya Ax, Tokyo 10/22/03
“I Wanna Be Your Dog (The Stooges)”
“Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground”
“Black Math”
“Cannon/John The Revelator”
“Ball And Biscuit”
“In The Cold, Cold Night”
“The Hardest Button To Button” 8mm film reel

We’re New Here – The Murder Capital

Dave Simpson
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We’re New Here – The Murder Capital

Passionate Dublin post-punkers, already evolving into something altogether more colourful – The Murder Capital talks about their upcoming album, Gigi's Recovery in our JANUARY 2023 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. The Murder Capital ended 2019 on a roll. The Dublin quintet’s powerful de...

Passionate Dublin post-punkers, already evolving into something altogether more colourful – The Murder Capital talks about their upcoming album, Gigi’s Recovery in our JANUARY 2023 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

The Murder Capital ended 2019 on a roll. The Dublin quintet’s powerful debut, When I Have Fears, had reached the Top 20 on the back of a string of great reviews. Their subsequent tour of the UK and Europe was an intense but celebratory affair, gigs often ending with singer James McGovern carried above the audience’s heads. Then their momentum was suddenly checked by the pandemic.

“Everything had happened very quickly for us,” McGovern tells Uncut. “That tour was very special, a very precious memory. We never thought it would be closing a chapter.” The band were just two dates into a US tour when the lockdown curtain fell. It’s taken them three years to return, after what began as a classic ‘difficult second album’ struggle turned into a beneficial period of reflection. “We’re very grateful to have been able to go away on a creative level and shape the future,” McGovern says. “It was important for us to evolve. There was a lot of conversation about textures, atmospheres and adding as much colour as we can.”

Second album Gigi’s Recovery is the result. If When I Have Fears – heralded as a modern update of Joy Division – was bleak and driven, the follow-up is more expansive, less monochrome, featuring sampled sounds as well as guitars, bass and drums, with influences including Scott Walker and Leonard Cohen. The debut was informed by suicide and death, but Gigi’s Recovery is more of an emotional kaleidoscope. “The first album was so deeply focused through the lens of pain and grief that at the beginning of writing the new record I felt like an imposter,” the singer and lyricist admits. “It felt in some ways ridiculous to be writing about anything else.”

Gradually, though, new themes emerged. “It started to unfurl into a diary of our lives over the last two years. There are shimmers of the further past and ideas of the future. A lot of this record is posing a question to oneself: what kind of life do you want to live and who do you want to be? Who are you willing to give your time to and who do you want to fall in love with?”

Writing began in Dublin in May 2020. The band had spells in the Donegal countryside and remote Wexford, before decamping to London in 2021. “That shifted the dial. It was the first time we properly socialised in any capacity, and that immediately changed the input. The first album was about death and in turn the second album became about life.”

The album’s title comes from the key song, “Gigi’s Recovery”. “I like the idea of writing a letter to someone you’ve loved or your younger self and burning it,” McGovern explains. “It’s cathartic, and of course the definition of recovery is to return to a place of strength.” His favourite track is “Ethel”, on which he visits a “crossroads where you have the chance to change the way you’re living” – although he insists the song’s visions of future family life shouldn’t be taken literally. “I will not be having a child any time soon!” chuckles the 27-year-old. “We’ve ditched the mad partying and other things that were holding us back, but there’s a lot of rock’n’rolling in me yet.”

Gigi’s Recovery is out on January 20 via Human Season.

Nick Cave shares lyrics from new Bad Seeds album

Ali Shutler
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Nick Cave shares lyrics from new Bad Seeds album

Nick Cave has confirmed he’s started work on a new Bad Seeds album, sharing some early lyric ideas in the process. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on new B-Sides & Rarities compilation: “You can’t buy that ...

Nick Cave has confirmed he’s started work on a new Bad Seeds album, sharing some early lyric ideas in the process.

Last year, Cave said he was planning on writing a new album once his touring commitments had wrapped up.

“It’s about a man sitting down in his space and confronting a complete lack of ideas about things,” he said onstage at London’s Southbank Centre. “I don’t collect ideas, I don’t write things down or get a cool title or whatever. I don’t do that stuff. I just make a date and sit down and start to write a record.”

Now Cave has confirmed that the album-writing process is underway. Responding to a question from Fred about his plans for 2023, Cave wrote on his blog, The Red Hand Files: “My plan for this year is to make a new record with the Bad Seeds. This is both good news and bad news. Good news because who doesn’t want a new Bad Seeds record? Bad news because I’ve got to write the bloody thing.”

He went on to reveal the he started the process at 9am on New Year’s Day. “It is now January 6. Nearly a week has passed and I’ve written a few things but they aren’t very good, or maybe they are, it’s difficult to tell,” he said.

Nick Cave
Nick Cave of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds performs live in 2022. Credit: Jim Dyson / Getty Images

“It’s the same with every record, I feel that familiar feeling of lack, like I’m a big, dumb blank thing in a suit. I’m grumpy as fuck and Susie [Bick] has decamped for a week. Anything that resembles a creative impulse is burrowed way down in some mossy, froggy hole, asleep.”

Cave went on to say he has to “provoke [inspiration] from its slumber. It becomes a nasty, punishing, baggy-eyed business.”

“I’m starting to get an infuriating sing-song voice in my head that actually rhymes, like a madness. Like sadness,” he added, before sharing the first lyrics he wrote for the upcoming Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds record.

“Ushering in the year he knelt down/And crushed his brother’s head with a bone,” wrote Cave. “That felt like an okay way to start a record but it also felt kind of terminal and didn’t really go anywhere.”

He then shared the updated lyrics: “Ushering in the new year he knelt down / And crushed his brother’s head with a bone / It’s my great privilege to walk you home / In the rain / Hop inside my coat.”

“The frogs in the gutter are jumping for God / Amazed of love, amazed of pain / Amazed to land back in the gutter again.”

“And that felt like it summed things up,” continued Cave. “Writing lyrics is the pits. It’s like jumping for frogs, Fred. It’s the shits. It’s the bogs. It actually hurts. It comes in spurts, but few and far between. There is something obscene about the whole affair. Like crimes that rhyme. I hope this doesn’t last long. I’m actually scared.”

Cave had previously said that inspiration is “not something that finds you, or offers itself to you”.

Nick Cave’s last album with The Bad Seeds, Ghosteen, came out in 2019. “Many people have remarked that Ghosteen is a sad album, but I don’t think it is at all,” Cave said at the time. “In fact I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more uplifting, jubilant record before. Why do you think people are reacting so differently to it? I almost feel like I’ve misinterpreted it.”

Meredith Monk – The Recordings

Richard Williams
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Meredith Monk – The Recordings

If Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek were the two improvising musicians who established the distinctive tone of the ECM label’s contribution to jazz over the past 50 years, the composers Arvo Pärt and Meredith Monk played an equivalent role for ECM’s New Series, the imprint under which the company...

If Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek were the two improvising musicians who established the distinctive tone of the ECM label’s contribution to jazz over the past 50 years, the composers Arvo Pärt and Meredith Monk played an equivalent role for ECM’s New Series, the imprint under which the company’s founder, Manfred Eicher, gathers those of his artists who come under the loose heading of contemporary classical music.

Monk, born in New York City in 1942, is a singer, composer, director, choreographer and filmmaker who began to develop her extended vocal techniques with solo performances in the early 1960s before founding her own multi-disciplinary company, The House, in 1968.
Since garlanded with honours and awards, she belongs with Laurie Anderson and
Brian Eno among the ranks of musicians who emerged in the last quarter of the 20th century with music that took its inspiration from John Cage, Terry Riley and others but floated free of defined genres, retaining a trace of its influences in the repetitions, phase-shifts and slowed-down progressions associated with systems music, attracting an audience ready to engage with music that exists beyond established idioms.

A background in performance suffuses her music with a sense of ritual.  Her writing for the human voice, whether solo or stacked, mostly uses non-verbal sounds in her search for “shades of feeling or even spaces between feelings, believing that the voice could delineate the mystery of the indefinable compared to what we label as emotions.”

Now, to celebrate her recent 80th birthday, her dozen albums for ECM have been reissued in a boxset of CDs, each individual album retaining its identity as a single disc with its original cover design, from Dolmen Music in 1981 to On Behalf Of Nature in 2015. The austerity of the set’s title is matched by the characteristically restrained elegance of the packaging. The scale of the music ranges from the voice-and-piano duo of Facing North and the keyboard duets of Piano Songs to the orchestral resources of the opera ATLAS (the knottiest, least approachable piece here) and the large choir of Songs Of Ascension. In between come many compositions for small groups of voices, keyboards, woodwind and tuned percussion. Collaborators include the pianists Ursula Oppens and Nurit Tilles, the singer Theo Bleckmann and the percussionist John Hollenbeck.

Monk’s music reconciles apparent opposites: ancient and modern, simplicity and sophistication. The sounds she conjures seem to reach back to the very origins of music itself while peering into the future. The result, throughout a set of discs spanning three-and- a-half decades of exploration, is a kind of luminous beauty that belongs to her alone.

Lightships – Electric Cables

Alastair McKay
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Lightships – Electric Cables

When it comes to putting himself forward, Gerard Love is – if not exactly backward – elliptical at least. For his first solo album, released in 2012 on The Pastels’ imprint Geographic, he chose not to issue the music under a recognisable brand. “I wasn’t comfortable with using my name,” ...

When it comes to putting himself forward, Gerard Love is – if not exactly backward – elliptical at least. For his first solo album, released in 2012 on The Pastels’ imprint Geographic, he chose not to issue the music under a recognisable brand. “I wasn’t comfortable with using my name,” he says. “If there was merchandise, somebody walking around with a T-shirt with my name on it would be weird. My name kinda belongs to my parents, it’s not my choice. Also I didn’t want to bring too much attention to myself.”

The other reason for Love’s coyness was that he didn’t want to undermine Teenage Fanclub, for whom he wrote such classics as “Sparky’s Dream” and “Ain’t That Enough”. But at that point the pace of the band had slowed, and when Love was offered an outlet for his extra-curricular urges it wasn’t clear when or whether they would emerge from hibernation.

Now that Love is no longer a member of Teenage Fanclub, having elected not to commit to an international tour in 2019, it’s tempting to see Lightships as the first step to a solo career. That’s misleading in several directions at once. Neither Love, not Teenage Fanclub, have taken a career-oriented approach to their music, and that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon. More pertinently, when he conceived Lightships, Love still saw the Fanclub as his central focus, and even recorded the autumnal Shadows in the middle of laying down Electric Cables.

While Love was in Teenage Fanclub, the group gave the illusion of stability. With three exploratory songwriters, they pulled in different directions while also displaying a unity of purpose. They were like The Beatles with three George Harrisons. Yet, while he was responsible for some of Teenage Fanclub’s best-loved songs, Love played bass and saw his role in the group as being structural and supportive. In Lightships, Love plays guitar, and his interest in the textural qualities of the instrument replaces the Fanclub’s Quo gene with something less dogmatic. Love, who claims to be “not much of a guitarist” eschews chords for the most part, concentrating on arpeggios, adding atmosphere with tremolo and delays.

The basic tracks were recorded in Norfolk on Teenage Fanclub’s equipment, and Tom Crossley (flute, glockenspiel, pipes for Lightships) also does a bit of light colouring on the Love-penned opening track of Shadows, “Sometimes I Don’t Need To Believe In Anything”. That song shows the contrast between Teenage Fanclub and Love’s solo work. The Fanclub tune is like a tidal swell, gaining strength as it builds. The sound of Lightships, as the name suggests, is more fleeting, but no less persuasive in the way it directs the listener through emotional undercurrents. Twinkly and soft are the words Love uses to describe it, in a way which suggests that future projects may aim to up the voltage.

What about the songs? An air of gentle psychedelia pervades, nothing druggy, just a seasonal swirl of changing light, of late summer sunsets fading into autumn. “Sunlight, raincloud, seed”, Love sings on “Photosynthesis”, a concise summary of his metaphysical approach. There are hints of Spanish romance in the gentle infatuation of “Sweetness in Her Spark”(walks “through paseos in the burning street haze”) and the stargazing loveliness of the spacey “Girasol”. Detail is scant, but the album is awash with pastoral contentment.

Perhaps it’s misleading to focus only on Teenage Fanclub. Love is also a long-term member of The Pastels, an underrated group whose sonic palette deepened over the years, and whose 2003 soundtrack to The Last Great Wilderness is also being reissued (Jarvis Cocker’s guest appearance on “I Picked A Flower” is a highlight). A third Geographic re-release is the cracked Japanese improv of Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Blues Du Jour, which is wildly eclectic but shares the cunning naivety of The Pastels.

In Lightships, Love’s contradiction is his assertive modesty. Electric Cables offers kaleidoscopic shifts on a defining image in which emotional engagement runs in parallel to the seasons. The words are pared, and though odd details remain – a Roman gate, an enterprise zone – the effect is as mistily hypnotic as the shipping forecast. At the end of the day in the twilight of the season, there is the soft power of “Sunlight To The Dawn”, which finds contentment in a sunset reflected in a lover’s eyes, “bright as the lighthouse to the shore / To guide and stabilise”. For Love, the storm is over. General synopsis: good.

Hear Peter Gabriel’s new track, “Panopticom”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Peter Gabriel’s new track, “Panopticom”

Peter Gabriel has released "Panopticom" - the first new song from his forthcoming album i/o. You can hear the track below. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIDu6a9COmg Written and produced by Gabriel, "Panopticom" was ...

Peter Gabriel has released “Panopticom” – the first new song from his forthcoming album i/o.

You can hear the track below.

Written and produced by Gabriel, “Panopticom” was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London.

“The first song is based on an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,” says Gabriel. “We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.”

The song features long-time collaborators Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar) and Manu Katché (drums), with electronics from Brian Eno and additional backing vocals from Ríoghnach Connolly of The Breath. The lyric is, in part, inspired by the work of three groups, Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat and the Gabriel co-founded pioneering human rights organisation WITNESS.

The song is released on the first full moon of 2023; and future songs from i/o will be revealed with each full moon. “Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky… and the moon has always drawn me to it.”

Each new release of music will come with a specific piece of art and “Panopticom” features the work ‘Red Gravity’ by David Spriggs.

“It was the theme of surveillance that connected me with the work of David Spriggs because he’d done a piece relating to that. David does this amazing stuff using many layers of transparencies so you get these strange creations with a real intensity to them. Part of what he does is imagine what art might look like a few years in the future and then try and create accordingly and I think he’s done that very successfully in this particular piece.”

As well as new music, Gabriel will tour later this year.

i/o The Tour – Europe 2023

Thursday, May 18: TAURON Arena, Krakow, Poland
Saturday, May 20: Verona Arena, Verona, Italy
Sunday, May 21: Mediolanum Arena, Milan, Italy
Tuesday, May 23: AccorHotels Arena, Paris, France
Wednesday, May 24: Stade Pierre-Mauroy, Lille, France
Friday, May 26: Waldbuehne, Berlin, Germany
Sunday, May 28: Koenigsplatz, Munich, Germany
Tuesday, May 30: Royal Arena, Copenhagen, Denmark
Wednesday, May 31: Avicii Arena, Stockholm, Sweden
Friday, June 2: Koengen, Bergen, Norway
Monday, June 5: Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tuesday, June 6: Sportpaleis, Antwerp, Belgium
Thursday, June 8: Hallenstadion, Zurich, Switzerland
Saturday, June 10: Lanxess Arena, Cologne, Germany
Monday, June 12: Barclays Arena, Hamburg, Germany
Tuesday, June 13: Festhalle, Frankfurt, Germany
Thursday, June 15: Arkea Arena, Bordeaux, France
Saturday, June 17: Utilita Arena, Birmingham, UK
Monday, June 19: The O2, London, UK
Thursday, June 22: OVO Hydro, Glasgow, UK
Friday, June 23: AO Arena, Manchester, UK
Sunday, June 25: 3Arena, Dublin, Ireland

Brian Eno & Roger Eno’s Live At The Acropolis concert film to hit UK cinemas

Arusa Qureshi
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Brian Eno & Roger Eno’s Live At The Acropolis concert film to hit UK cinemas

A rare live concert featuring brothers Brian Eno and Roger Eno is to premiere in cinemas across the UK on March 2, 2023. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: Brian Eno – ForeverAndEverNoMore review Live At The Acropolis was filmed at Athens' Ode...

A rare live concert featuring brothers Brian Eno and Roger Eno is to premiere in cinemas across the UK on March 2, 2023.

Live At The Acropolis was filmed at Athens’ Odeon of Herodes Atticus amphitheatre in August 2021, as part of the annual Epidaurus Festival.

The concert included a backdrop of Brian Eno’s images projected onto the walls of the amphitheatre, as Brian and Roger performed music from their 2020 album Mixing Colours. They were joined by Roger’s daughter and Brian’s niece, Cecily Eno, on vocals, ukulele and mandolin, Leo Abrahams on guitars and Peter Chilvers on keyboards.

As well as playing fan favourites, the concert also featured the pair premiering brand new music from their respective 2022 album releases – Brian Eno’s ForeverAndEverNoMore and Roger Eno’s The Turning Year.

The concert will premiere on March 2, with information about screenings and tickets available here.

“I don’t perform live very often, but I couldn’t miss the chance to perform in what may be the world’s oldest theatre, located at the birthplace of Western Civilisation,” Brian Eno said. “I’m grateful to Roger, Cecily, Leo and Peter who made this rare appearance memorable for me, and to the great film-maker Tilo Krause who managed to make a beautiful documentation of the whole event.”

Roger added: “The performers had quite a different view to the members of the audience – they saw Brian’s stunning visuals on the ancient walls of Odeon of Herodes Atticus, whilst we saw, above our heads, the illuminated Parthenon as though floating in the blackness of night.

“It was an exceptional honour to perform in such a place. This film, I think, captures the moment accurately and sensitively. But it is more than a mere momento or a document – it is a work of beauty in itself that can now be shared worldwide.”

In other news, last year a new documentary about Eno’s life and career was announced by director Gary Hustwit.

The filmmaker’s official website featured a page for a documentary called Eno, which is described as “the definitive career-spanning, multi-platform documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno”. A release date is yet to be announced, but the website states the film is “coming in 2023”.

Send us your questions for Mark Eitzel!

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Mark Eitzel!

Johnny Mathis may have once supposedly advised him to disappear in the silk and amphetamine, but thankfully for us Mark Eitzel stuck to his guns, continuing to question himself and the world in that lush, browbeaten baritone. Since dissolving American Music Club for a second time in 2010, Eitzel...

Johnny Mathis may have once supposedly advised him to disappear in the silk and amphetamine, but thankfully for us Mark Eitzel stuck to his guns, continuing to question himself and the world in that lush, browbeaten baritone.

Since dissolving American Music Club for a second time in 2010, Eitzel has gone on to release some of his finest solo work on albums such as Don’t Be A Stranger and Hey Mr Ferryman. He’s also diversified into musicals: Cornelia Street, his third collaboration with writer Simon Stephens, is about to begin a run at New York’s Atlantic Theater.

And as he readies a new solo album for release in late 2023 or early 2024, Eitzel will visit the UK and Europe for a solo acoustic tour this March, click the links below for tickets:

March 9 Hebden Bridge – Trades Club
March 10 London – St Pancras Old Church – two shows!
March 12 Hassocks – Mid Sussex Music Hall
March 16 Antwerp, BE – Djingel Djangel

But before all that, he’s kindly submitted to a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a master of finely-wrought melancholia? Send your questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by Monday (January 9) and Mark will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

The making of Cymande’s “Bra”

Sam Richards
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The making of Cymande’s “Bra”

How a righteous funk anthem and future block party staple was birthed in a Brixton basement. “The bass was the genesis…” in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, December 8 and available to buy from our online store. A key scene in new documentary Getting It Back...

How a righteous funk anthem and future block party staple was birthed in a Brixton basement. “The bass was the genesis…” in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, December 8 and available to buy from our online store.

A key scene in new documentary Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande shows how DJ Jazzy Jay used to cut between two turntables to extend the exuberant breakdown of “Bra”, sending a Bronx block party into raptures. It’s no surprise that the track became a foundation stone of hip-hop, sampled by Sugarhill Gang, Gang Starr and De La Soul, as well as on Raze’s early house hit “Jack The Groove”.

So who were the impossibly funky crew behind it? Surely they were from Harlem or New Orleans? Or maybe Kingston or Lagos? Nope. “Bra”’s co-writers Patrick Patterson and Steve Scipio grew up on the same street in Balham, south London, after their families emigrated to the UK from Guyana when they were kids. Coming of age in the late ’60s, they envisioned a band that would capture the spirit of the times – black pride, peace and love – while celebrating their Caribbean heritage. Their name came from a popular calypso about “a dove and pigeon fighting over a piece of pepper” – Cymande was the dove – and they recruited band members from south London’s Caribbean diaspora.

With lyrics that encouraged its listeners not to abandon the struggle (“But it’s alright / We can still go on”) “Bra” made a decent splash on its US release in 1973, following Cymande’s debut single “The Message” into the R&B charts and winning the band a support tour with Al Green. But back in the UK, the glass ceiling descended. Dispirited with the lack of opportunities for black British groups, Cymande disbanded in late 1974. Patterson and Scipio eventually both studied law, going on to take up important positions in the governments of various Caribbean nations. As such, they were oblivious to Cymande’s second life as hip-hop progenitors. But word eventually reached them of their popularity amongst a new generation of crate-diggers, and Cymande reformed to jubilant scenes in 2014 with most of their original lineup intact. A new album is currently in the works, to follow the reissue of their original three albums.

“I had no idea,” says drummer Sam Kelly of Cymande’s miraculous rebirth. “One of the things that blows my mind is that we played in Brazil, we went to Croatia, all these places. My partner and I went to Australia a couple of years ago – we’d go out to a restaurant and hear our music being played in Melbourne, 12,000 miles away. It still puts a shiver down my spine.”

PATTERSON: I came to London in 1958, Steve came in ’63. And since then we’ve been together. Our street was full of people, many of whom came from our country, and we were all in the same community. So we carried our Caribbean culture with us. [In the late ’60s] we had a jazz group called Metre, which was the genesis of Cymande. We used to do Miles Davis’ “Footprints”, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, things like that. We liked to play in different time signatures. Looking back on it now, we were very inventive.

SCIPIO: For seven or eight months before we started to put Cymande together, we also played with a Nigerian band called Ginger Johnson And His African Drummers. Ginger was a well-known performer, he played with The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park.

PATTERSON: All of it contributed to where we were as musicians, directing us towards our future musical style.

KELLY: We started in the basement of my family house on Crawshay Road in Brixton. The main thing they emphasised is that, come hell or high water, they wanted to do original material. I wasn’t playing an instrument at all before I joined Cymande, but I used to listen to everything from James Brown to Hendrix, Sam & Dave to Pink Floyd.

I was a blank canvas – I didn’t want to sound like any other drummer. The person that had the most influence on my playing was Steve. He didn’t play bass rhythmically, he played it lyrically. I was just trying to complement what he was playing.

PICK UP THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT TO READ THE FULL STORY

Iggy Pop celebrates Raw Power at 50

Uncut
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Iggy Pop celebrates Raw Power at 50

“All three Stooges albums are equal to me,” says IGGY POP. “But Raw Power, that’s the big one.” Raw Power’s foundational influence – on punk’s lineage in particular – is underscored by the musicians Uncut has assembled to celebrate the record’s eight tracks, including veterans of...

“All three Stooges albums are equal to me,” says IGGY POP. “But Raw Power, that’s the big one.” Raw Power’s foundational influence – on punk’s lineage in particular – is underscored by the musicians Uncut has assembled to celebrate the record’s eight tracks, including veterans of HÜSKER DÜ, DINOSAUR JR, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, MUDHONEY, L7 and SPACEMEN 3, in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, December 8 and available to buy from our online store.

In 1972, The Stooges were on life support. Dropped by Elektra after Fun House flopped, they returned home to Detroit to lick their wounds. There, a new version of the band took shape, with James Williamson, second guitarist since 1970, replacing Ron Asheton at Iggy’s right hand. Invited to London by David Bowie and his MainMan management, Iggy seized the chance to rejuvenate The Stooges. Written while roaming West London’s leafy streets, Raw Power became a blueprint for the city’s punk explosion a few years later. On the 50th anniversary of its release, the album remains a masterpiece of slashing guitars and savage, misanthropic blues.

“I realised that there was almost no-one in the world who wanted to save The Stooges,” Iggy tells Uncut. “I knew that there were a few malcontented, strange people out there who were actually going to like this, but there was no apparatus to gather them up. I knew our management didn’t want it, I knew that radio didn’t understand it and I knew that most people wouldn’t get it. On top of that, we were all one step away from becoming junkies and the ones that weren’t junkies were completely out of touch with reality.
I knew what was going to happen.”

Williamson followed Iggy, then later Ron and Scott Asheton crossed the Atlantic – lured to the UK by the promise of gigs that never materialised – with Ron demoted to bass duties. This reconfigured lineup became Iggy And The Stooges. “I had decided the people from MainMan were our best shot to do something,” Iggy tells us. “At least they would respect art. They did. They put us up in London very well. We didn’t relate to English musicians or producers, and we resolved to do it ourselves. They respected us and left us alone. We were given every artistic requirement – a place to rehearse, and a good studio. The band had a nice house to live in. When I couldn’t come up with the lyrics and live with them at the same time, they put me in the basement of Blakes Hotel. I’d stick my head out and see Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret. ‘Oh, I say, it’s Iggy Pop!’

“The fact that there was a very competent, well-educated photographer, Mick Rock, to document our rehearsal sessions helps,” Iggy adds. “Because people have heard about all the wild shit going down around those sessions and they can see it on the album sleeve, too. That’s entertainment!”

Prevented from working in the UK after they finished the album, Iggy And The Stooges stumbled back to America, where they imploded in a series of confrontational, deranged gigs. Raw Power, though, lives on. “I had the faith that if we did our best, things would come around,” Iggy says. “Of course, they did. We were very well rewarded for that record, later. “Search And Destroy” has become very popular. My personal favourite, though, is “Shake Appeal”. Because that was the only three minutes of my life when I was ever going to approximate Little Richard. It’s practically impossible for me to hit a sustained high tone like that and scream that sort of hyped-up, crazy hillbilly rock thing that I always liked. But “Search And Destroy” is the record’s masterpiece. I knew it when we did it. I felt a sense of relief that it made me artistically secure. But I knew I was still socially fucked.”

Raw Power’s foundational influence – on punk’s lineage in particular – is underscored by the musicians Uncut has assembled to celebrate the record’s eight tracks, including veterans of Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Mudhoney, L7 and Spacemen 3. Our panel of heads even includes two part-time Stooges…

“All three Stooges albums are equal to me,” Iggy concludes. “But Raw Power is the high-priced spread when you’re talking about The Stooges. That’s the big one.”

PICK UP THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT TO READ THE FULL STORY

Alan Rankine of The Associates has died aged 64

Will Richards
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Alan Rankine of The Associates has died aged 64

Alan Rankine, singer of Scottish band The Associates, has died aged 64. The news was confirmed by Rankine's sons Callum and Hamish on January 3. He died peacefully at home shortly after spending Christmas with his family,” the sons said in a statement. “He was a beautiful, kind and loving man...

Alan Rankine, singer of Scottish band The Associates, has died aged 64.

The news was confirmed by Rankine’s sons Callum and Hamish on January 3. He died peacefully at home shortly after spending Christmas with his family,” the sons said in a statement. “He was a beautiful, kind and loving man who will be sorely missed.”

Rankine formed The Associates in the late 1970s with singer Billy Mackenzie, going on to release three albums, The Affectionate Punch (1980), singles compilation Fourth Drawer Down (1981) and Sulk (1982).

After leaving the band in 1982, Rankine became a successful producer and worked on albums by Cocteau Twins and more, before launching a solo career in 1986.

Later in life, he lectured at Glasgow’s Stow College, helping students set up the Electric Honey record, which was instrumental in launching the careers of Biffy Clyro, Belle & Sebastian and Snow Patrol.

Others to pay tribute to Rankine include BMX Bandits singer Duglas T Stewart, who tweeted: “Very sad news today that Alan Rankine has died,” he wrote on Twitter. I first became aware of Alan through The Associates and later got to know him a little. Sending love to his family and all who loved him.”

Scottish journalist John Dingwall added: “Very sad to hear the news that my dear friend Alan Rankine of The Associates has died. We lived around the corner from each other and had planned to meet for a coffee. RIP Alan Rankine, a beautiful soul, and condolences to all his family.”

We’re New Here – Skullcrusher

Lisa-Marie Ferla
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We’re New Here – Skullcrusher

Definitely not a thrash metal band – but possibly just as intense, as evident in Skullcrusher's latest effort, Quiet The Room in our DECEMBER 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. Helen Ballentine is not yet sick of questions about the name she chose for her recording project. In fact, th...

Definitely not a thrash metal band – but possibly just as intense, as evident in Skullcrusher’s latest effort, Quiet The Room in our DECEMBER 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

Helen Ballentine is not yet sick of questions about the name she chose for her recording project. In fact, the US singer-songwriter – who releases her deceptively delicate music as Skullcrusher – actively welcomes them. “Skullcrusher allows me to speak about the project in a context that, had I used my own name, I don’t think would be happening,” she explains. “I like the idea of using this violent-sounding thing for music that would otherwise be seen as very light and soft and pretty, when a lot of these songs are about power and anger and aggression.”

The Skullcrusher name actually comes from a term that Ballentine and a friend used for the shoes they used to wear as “tiny women going to techno shows – but it’s also about challenging the perceptions of people who expect certain things from you. I don’t want to say that I’m a violent person, but I do have an aggressive nature, and even though the songs come out sounding softer, they’re still powerful.”

This idea of looking behind the obvious feeds into the debut Skullcrusher album, on which Ballentine interrogates memories of her childhood in New York’s Westchester County. Quiet The Room is, she says, her attempt to capture the full, complex picture of that time: the anxiety and loneliness as much as the innocence and beauty.

Producer Andrew Sarlo – of the first four Big Thief albums – joined Ballentine and partner/collaborator Noah Weinman for the album, in a departure from her previous home-recorded EPs. Sarlo, she says, shared her interest in “moving more towards a more experimental electronic sound”, using Pro Tools, plugins and samples to distort and add depth to the music. Among the more unexpected influences the pair bonded over was Avicii. “We had to have a little Avicii moment in every song,” laughs Ballentine – and while the work of the late Swedish EDM producer isn’t the most obvious jumping-off point, there’s a big difference in tone and texture between the album and the simpler, softer songs of the Skullcrusher EPs. “Window Somewhere” opens with an ambient electronic passage, subtle beats underpin “Whatever Fits Together” and found sounds proliferate.

They recorded at Chicken Shack studio in upstate New York, close to that childhood home whose presence permeates the record. “When I was really little and my parents were separating, they would have their most serious conversations in the middle of the night, and I would wake up and try to listen. I developed insomnia and recurring nightmares. So in my memories it’s as though there are two sides of my house, and I think a lot of that is present in the album: how your memories of childhood can be beautiful and nostalgic and warm, but there’s a darker side too.”

Nowhere is this dichotomy more apparent than on the title track – a song which actually appears twice, as if bookending the record. Opener “They Quiet The Room” is haunted and graceful, with Ballentine’s layered vocals and gently strummed melody emerging from a hiss of static. Penultimate track “Quiet The Room” is a carnival mirror image: it was the first song written for the album, on piano, Ballentine’s voice closer to the listener than it has ever been.

“The two versions mark the passage of time,” she explains. “I’m revisiting the words at a different time of my life. A song – or one recording of it – is just one kind of temporal experience. There are many different iterations of a song, and even if you perform it a million times, every one is going to be different.”

Quiet The Room is released by Secretly Canadian on October 14.

Foo Fighters confirm they will continue without Taylor Hawkins

Rhian Daly
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Foo Fighters confirm they will continue without Taylor Hawkins

Foo Fighters have shared a statement confirming they will continue without late drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died last year. Hawkins died in Bogotá, Colombia, in March 2022 while the band were on tour in South America. He was 50 years old. Foo Fighters’ only performances since his death came...

Foo Fighters have shared a statement confirming they will continue without late drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died last year.

Hawkins died in Bogotá, Colombia, in March 2022 while the band were on tour in South America. He was 50 years old.

Foo Fighters’ only performances since his death came at two massive tribute concerts in London and Los Angeles in September.

“As we say goodbye to the most difficult and tragic year that our band has ever known, we are reminded of how thankful we are for the people that we love and cherish most, and for the loved ones who are no longer with us,” the band said in a statement posted to social media.

“Foo Fighters were formed 27 years ago to represent the healing power of music and a continuation of life. And for the past 27 years our fans have built a worldwide community, a devoted support system that has helped us all get through the darkest of times together. A place to share our joy and our pain, our hopes and fears, and to join in a chorus of life together through music.

“Without Taylor, we never would have become the band that we were – and without Taylor, we know that we’re going to be a different band going forward.”

They concluded the statement by acknowledging how much Hawkins had meant to Foo Fighters’ fans and promised: “We know that when we see you again – and we will soon – he’ll be there in spirit with all of us every night.”

Hawkins will feature posthumously on Iggy Pop’s forthcoming new album Every Loser.

Johnny Marr pays tribute to “beautiful” Modest Mouse bandmate Jeremiah Green

Will Richards
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Johnny Marr pays tribute to “beautiful” Modest Mouse bandmate Jeremiah Green

Johnny Marr has paid tribute to his "beautiful" Modest Mouse bandmate Jeremiah Green, who died of cancer last week. The drummer was diagnosed with stage four cancer in December, his mother shared on Facebook on Christmas Day 2022, with Modest Mouse then confirming his passing on December 31. T...

Johnny Marr has paid tribute to his “beautiful” Modest Mouse bandmate Jeremiah Green, who died of cancer last week.

The drummer was diagnosed with stage four cancer in December, his mother shared on Facebook on Christmas Day 2022, with Modest Mouse then confirming his passing on December 31.

The band told fans: “I don’t know a way to ease into this: Today we lost our dear friend Jeremiah.”

They continued: “He laid down to rest and simply faded out. I’d like to say a bunch of pretty words right now, but it just isn’t the time. These will come later, and from many people.”

Taking to Instagram, Marr – who played in the band with Green from 2006-2008 – hailed “the great Jeremiah Green. My friend, bandmate, and the most creative musician I ever met”.

In a separate post, Marr told stories of Green on tour, writing: “One of my favourite ever things to do in Modest Mouse was to go out shopping with Jeremiah. The whole band were the most acquisitive people I’d ever come across in my life, and each gas station we stopped at was an opportunity to stock up on hats, 3D sunglasses, and fishing nets.

“Being in the Walmart in Mississippi at 3 a.m. with Jeremiah was an education and a treat, as he would saunter around, picking out an array of objects from children’s toys to garden tools with the casual air of a consummate expert, and I would marvel at the man’s aesthetic diversity. Things to make signs, things to make things, and things to stick on top of other things: they would all be launched into the basket.”

Marr added: “When we’d get back to the studio, he’d disappear with his haul and then reappear days later, having made some amazingly crafted item. One morning I went into his room and noticed something unusual. All the furniture had been sprayed gold…the rugs, the lampshades…everything. Everything was sprayed gold. Jeremiah lived in his own lane. His own beautiful lane.”

On December 28, Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock confirmed the news of Green’s cancer diagnosis to fans but said that Green’s treatment was “going smoothly and making a positive difference”.

Green, who grew up in the Seattle area, co-founded Modest Mouse with Brock and bassist Eric Judy in 1993. He later quit the band in 2003 when he suffered a nervous breakdown, telling NME in 2021: “I felt like something bad came into me – not bad, but like a spirit… I started acting really rebellious… I was out for trouble. I was really anti-war and if [other people] weren’t down, I would just go nuts – weird revolutionary type stuff. I was like, ‘I’m gonna do something about this Afghanistan war! It’s bullshit!’”

He rejoined the group in 2004 but his absence meant he did not appear on the band’s most successful album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News.

Green featured on all other Modest Mouse records, helping steer their sound with his acclaimed style. He is often considered one of the best drummers in modern indie and was named one of the Top 50 sticksmen in rock by Stylus Magazine in 2007.

The drummer had been taking part in Modest Mouse’s tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of their breakthrough second album The Lonesome Crowded West but had had to leave the dates before their end due to his diagnosis.

We’re New Here – Myriam Gendron

Tyler Wilcox
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We’re New Here – Myriam Gendron

Enigmatic French-Canadian, reconfiguring folk songs and Dorothy Parker poems – Myriam Gendron walks us through her craft in our NOVEMBER 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. Released in 2014, Myriam Gendron’s Not So Deep As A Well was one of those out-of-nowhere LPs that was so captiva...

Enigmatic French-Canadian, reconfiguring folk songs and Dorothy Parker poems – Myriam Gendron walks us through her craft in our NOVEMBER 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

Released in 2014, Myriam Gendron’s Not So Deep As A Well was one of those out-of-nowhere LPs that was so captivating, you couldn’t help raving about it to anyone who would listen. A collection of Dorothy Parker poems set to skeletal chamber-folk backing, it
felt like an instant classic. Damon Krukowski, co-founder of Galaxie 500 and one half of Damon and Naomi, quickly became one of Gendron’s many fans. “When I first heard Myriam’s recordings,” he says, “they sounded like Vashti Bunyan or another free spirit from the 1960s who seems to have been accidentally caught on tape while they were singing through life.”

Krukowski’s reference to Bunyan, who only put out one record prior to her 21st-century return, is relevant in more ways than one. After releasing a handful of stray tracks and playing a smattering of live shows in the wake of Not So Deep As A Well’s warm welcome, Gendron more or less disappeared from view. But she hadn’t turned into a recluse; she was simply raising a new family and working quietly as a bookseller in Montreal.

“I made Not So Deep As A Well not really knowing I was working on a record,” Gendron tells Uncut. “It was just for fun. So when it came out, I had no expectations whatsoever.” The gushing reviews caught Gendron off-guard, and she began to fear it might have all been a fluke. “People would ask about a follow-up, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s it? Maybe that’s all I had to say!’ I kind of felt like Not So Deep As A Well was an accident. I didn’t know if I could do it again.”

Fortunately, a well-timed grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec gave Gendron several months off to conceptualise Ma Délire – Songs Of Love, Lost & Found, which emerged on Feeding Tube Records in late 2021. The inspiration this time around was closer to home. “I came across this amazing record of French/Québécois traditional music which had a song that I’d never heard before, “Au Cœur De Ma Délire”, and it just blew my mind. I knew I had to do something with this song and bring this music back to life because no-one really knows about it. That was where the seed was planted for the album.”

As if to make up for lost time, Ma Délire is a double album, offering 15 tracks of achingly beautiful melancholy. Singing in both French and English, Gendron transfigures a host of folk songs (alongside a handful of originals), making their ancient lyrics and melodies feel brand new. “The really good traditional songs have these simple melodies that just make sense,” she says. “Whatever you do to them, they’re always going to be perfect.”

While her debut was a solo affair, Gendron drafted in some skilled players for Ma Délire, including avant-garde drummer Chris Corsano for the Dirty Three-esque “La Jeune Fille En Pleurs” and guitarist Bill Nace, whose explosive solo on “C’est Dans Les Vieux Pays” is one of many highlights. “The album needed little touches of colour here and there,” Gendron explains. “I like to blend things. I don’t want to be a folk singer.”

Now, Gendron is jumping back into live performance, having recently opened for Godspeed You! Black Emperor ahead of a solo European tour this autumn. “I really feel at home on stage now, which is new and strange,” she laughs. “Before, I was OK in real life and very stressed on stage. And now real life feels stranger.”

Myriam Gendron plays Broadcast, Glasgow (Nov 1); The Cube, Bristol (Nov 2) and Cafe Oto, London (Nov 3).

Trevor Beales – Fireside Stories (Hebden Bridge Circa 1971-1974)

Rob Hughes
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Trevor Beales – Fireside Stories (Hebden Bridge Circa 1971-1974)

Sometimes the best discoveries are right under your nose. Basin Rock, the Todmorden label that’s brought us a select international roster of Nadia Reid, Julie Byrne, Andrew Tuttle, Aoife Nessa Frances and others in recent times, has now unearthed a genuine treasure from its own Calder Valley home....

Sometimes the best discoveries are right under your nose. Basin Rock, the Todmorden label that’s brought us a select international roster of Nadia Reid, Julie Byrne, Andrew Tuttle, Aoife Nessa Frances and others in recent times, has now unearthed a genuine treasure from its own Calder Valley home. Son of a West Yorkshire soldier and an Algerian stenographer, who settled in the region after meeting in the Second World War, Trevor Beales was composing and playing folk guitar at a young age. Inspired by the likes of Dylan, Django Reinhardt and Welsh folkie Dave Evans, this scintillating batch of songs was recorded in the attic of the family house at various points in the early ’70s, some written when Beales was still a teenager.

There’s a poise and assurance here that belies his years. Beales’ pliant fingerpicking style echoes that of Nick Drake or John Renbourn. Or Evans himself, whose 1974 instrumental “Braziliana” is given a nimble makeover. Everything else is original, showcasing a rare talent that moved seamlessly between piquant narratives, social realism and existential musings. “Marion Belle” is a sinister seafaring tale of ill portent and desperation, the measured authority of Beales’ voice adding layers of understated drama. On “The Prisoner”, he’s locked inside a dream, craving some kind of freedom from the corporeal bonds of life, “where nothing has been schemed or planned”.

Some of these songs were cut during visits home from Essex and London, where Beales lived from 1972 onwards. The thoughtful “City Lights” alludes to both the alienation of the capital and life on the road, the wheels of his songwriting career struggling for traction. “Metropolis” is equally outstanding. Here Beales ponders his fate, choked by the fumes
of the city, dismayed by concrete trees and the indifference of passers-by as he plays
on the street. There’s a subtle environmental edge, too: “I fear the nearing future / Far more than I fear the past”.

Beales’ songs carry a restlessness mirrored in his travels. He busked the old folk train to France and Morocco during these years, odd-jobbing as he did so. In 1975 he took a solo Greyhound trip around America, equipped with little more than a bag of demo tapes. On his return to the UK he formed a prog-leaning sextet, Havana Lake, whose sole debut (1977’s Concrete Valley) includes fleshier versions of a couple of tracks from this collection.

Beales continued to make regular visits to West Yorkshire in the ensuing years. It’s not clear how much more music he produced, but his life was tragically cut short when he died unexpectedly in the spring of 1987, aged just 33. His body of work may be slim, but it’s nevertheless a potent legacy and one finally ready to be celebrated.

Rozi Plain – Prize

Sharon O'Connell
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Rozi Plain – Prize

You can tell a lot about people from the company they keep – and by extension, about their creative expression. Take Rosalind Leyden, for instance, who’s consorted with wayward folkies, mercurial indie-pop types and experimental jazz practitioners. Early on, she played with fellow Winchester-bor...

You can tell a lot about people from the company they keep – and by extension, about their creative expression. Take Rosalind Leyden, for instance, who’s consorted with wayward folkies, mercurial indie-pop types and experimental jazz practitioners. Early on, she played with fellow Winchester-born songwriter Kate Stables (whose This Is The Kit she’s a member of), Rachael Dadd and François Marry (of The Atlas Mountains); later, a friendship with Pictish Trail and King Creosote led to her debut as Rozi Plain and the release of four albums on Fence/Lost Map, which featured increasingly large casts of simpático players.

Though circumstances such as musicians’ availability or geographical separation have often given Leyden no choice, wide collaboration became a preferred practice, and with 2019’s terrific What A Boost, her orbit exerted a pull on musicians connected to London’s Total Refreshment Centre. Now, her free-wheeling spirit has drawn in even more accordant talent for the dazzling Prize.

Co-produced by Leyden with Jamie Whitby Coles, the drummer in her core band (also of This Is The Kit), it’s an instantly captivating set – 10 resonant but unfussy songs distinguished by a balance of up-close intimacy and understatedly elegant composition, attuned to the power of repetitive flow. They were written and demoed through 2020 and 2021, after Leyden’s return from the Isle of Eigg, where she’d been making an EP for Lost Map’s Visitation series, and recorded last October, for the most part at a beachside studio in France. Among those augmenting Leyden’s regular bass/drums/synth trio (she plays a self-built electric guitar) are avant-jazz saxophonists Alabaster DePlume and Cole Pulice, harp player Serafina Steer and violinist Emma Smith (both of Bas Jan), singer Yoshino Shigihara (Yama Warashi) and synth manipulator Dan Leavers aka Danalogue (The Comet Is Coming).

The set opens with “Agreeing For Two”, a dulcet symphony whose spine is a simple guitar pattern that tugs Leyden’s alluringly warm, unmannered voice along with it, its nervous system a bright and jaunty synth motif. “Complicated” follows, almost contradicting its own title as a shimmering dream of a tune with steel drum work, and already it’s clear that this record conjures a singular environment – one outside of time, seemingly unbounded by gravity and with a nuanced weather system. Leyden once revealed that The Beta Band and Arab Strap’s first LPs were early inspirations because the guitar playing chimed with her own tastes. Her music, though, evolved into something far more light and airy, with a silvery, almost mirage-like quality, leaning on circular and push-pull rhythms. It’s maybe a stretch to claim Leyden’s time spent painting boats and taking tickets on Bristol harbour ferries had an impact, but open space, zephyr-like melodies and ebb-and-flow rhythms have always been a feature. So it is with Prize.

Its mix of folk, leftfield pop and pastoral jazz is calming, with an air of contemplation running through – the autumnal “Prove Your Good” (“What do we want? / Less / Do you want more? / Yes”), with its flavour of the Chicago underground, and the undulating bass and piano/synth interplay in the questing “Conversation” (“What is it if it’s not? / Is it love when it stops?”) are prime examples – but not to the exclusion of all other moods. Around the two-thirds mark, the elegiac “Painted The Room” takes flight on winking, space-disco wings, while the winnowing loveliness of “Spot Thirteen” is too transportive by half to lend itself to reflection. Somewhere in between sits “Standing Up”, whose languid, see-saw rhythm gives it a quivering energy that seems to briefly fix time in a holding pattern, until it’s released by crosscurrents of trilling synths. All are luminous songs with intriguingly opaque, deeply interrogatory lyrics and a kind of free-floating poise, though they’re far too tuneful to be called abstract.

Prize suggests Talk Talk, Grouper, Joni Mitchell, Eberhard Weber and The Weather Station as kindred spirits, but aside from her associates present here, there are few UK pop outliers with such a particular, expansive aesthetic as Leyden’s. “With elastic energy / Circular it has to be”, she sings on the plush, divinely woozy closing track, “Blink”, a reminder that in more ways than one, circles are stronger than straight lines.

We’re New Here – Tim Bernardes

Piers Martin
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We’re New Here – Tim Bernardes

Lush, philosophical folk in the tradition of the Tropicália greats – Tim Bernardes talks about his latest album Mil Coisas Invisíveis, in our OCTOBER 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. “The thing about the Tropicália movement in the ’60s and ’70s is they would bring all the in...

Lush, philosophical folk in the tradition of the Tropicália greats – Tim Bernardes talks about his latest album Mil Coisas Invisíveis, in our OCTOBER 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

“The thing about the Tropicália movement in the ’60s and ’70s is they would bring all the influences from the world of music and mix it in a Brazilian way. I wanted to make something that would bring some of those elements back and connect it with music in the moment. I feel that people are getting the connection.” So says Tim Bernardes, the 31-year-old São Paulo singer whose lush, metaphysical folk is making waves far beyond his homeland, where he’s something of an indie star (“I get recognised in certain neighbourhoods”). When we speak, Bernardes is in New York, halfway through his first US tour, opening for Fleet Foxes as the guest of Robin Pecknold, who also invited him to sing on “Going-To-The-Sun Road” on their recent album Shore.

Wearing shades and with a silver chain dangling over a white vest, Bernardes looks every inch the boho beatnik on Zoom as he does on the cover of his enchanting second album Mil Coisas Invisíveis – A Thousand Invisible Pieces – released online in June and available physically next month. It’s a rich meander through the psyche of an unnaturally gifted performer whose poetic ruminations on love, life, truth and beauty give his svelte chamber-pop a wryly existential quality. On “Meus 26” he compares his spirit to the geography of his country – “I saw my inner map in the external map of Brazil, a philosophical reflection,” he says – while “A Balada De Tim Bernardes” is a joyous hymn to overthinking, where Caetano Veloso meets Paul McCartney.

The record took shape during lockdown in São Paulo when Bernardes was forced to stop touring with his band of 10 years, O Terno, a popular psych-rock trio started with a schoolfriend. “I was writing stuff that was more abstract and loose than things I’ve written before,” he says of the Mil Coisas Invisíveis material. “But if you want to see the profoundness in it, you can find it. I don’t like hard music or super-erudite stuff.”

He spent 2021 working in his home studio and adding strings and brass with other players at Estudio Canoa, where he recorded his solo debut, 2017’s Recomeçar (which was nominated for a Latin Grammy for best Portuguese language alternative album). “I was going to this professional studio, then coming back to my home studio, so the album was done in these two environments, between the very inner self and the outside world.”

Bernardes was raised in a musical household. His father was in the experimental new wave act Os Mulheres Negras, who put out a couple of LPs on Warners in the late ’80s, and his mother is a teacher and therapist. They’d listen to “the classics” of Brazilian pop – Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Veloso – and noticed their son enjoyed the music too, enrolling him in classes and supporting him as he mastered guitar, bass, piano and drums. He learnt to record at home on his father’s equipment. While Bernardes is plugged in to contemporary sounds, raving about Dirty Projectors and Mac DeMarco, it is the music of the ’60s and ’70s that resonates most strongly with this self-confessed Beatles nut. “I like the idea that you got to create your own sound, your own thing, during that time,” he says. “Discovering that kind of pop culture is profound. It’s a multi-phased expression of a subjective feeling and it influences everything I do in my life.”

Mil Coisas Invisíveis is out now digitally on Psychic Hotline; physical editions follow on September 9.

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