Gene Hackman has died aged 95. Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with their dog. The BBC reports that the police are not treating the death as “foul play”.
Born in California in 1930, Hackman undertook military service before joining the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he met fellow student Dustin Hoffman.
Moving to New York in the early 1960s, Hackman started in off-Broadway and television roles, before moving into films.
After a 1967 Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie & Clyde, Hackman went on to become one of the dominant movie stars of the 1970s, appearing in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (1971, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar), Cisco Pike (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation (1974), Penn’s Night Moves (1975), The French Connection II, Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980).
Hackman continued to enjoy strong work in later decades, in Mississippi Burning (1988), Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven (1992), Walter Hill‘s Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Get Shorty (1995) and Wes Anderson‘s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
He retired from acting after 2004’s Welcome To Mooseport.
As with many of the great actors who came up during the 1960s and ’70s, Hackman had formidable range. He equally adept at hard-edged roles like dogged New York detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection or lonely surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation (a role Coppola originally wrote for Marlon Brando) as he was with more comedic roles like master criminal Lex Luthor in Superman or the errant patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Pink Floyd’s 1972 concert film At Pompeii – MCMLXXII, directed by Adrian Maben, will return to cinemas and IMAX worldwide from April 24. The film has been digitally remastered in 4K from the original 35mm footage, with enhanced audio newly mixed by Steven Wilson.
In addition, the accompanying live album will be reissued by Legacy Recordings on May 2. This will be the first time the album has appeared on vinyl, or in Dolby Atmos. Watch a clip of the band playing “Echoes (Part 1)” from the new version of Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII below:
“Since 1994, I have searched for the elusive film rushes of Pink Floyd At Pompeii, so the recent discovery of the 1972 original 35mm cut negative was a very special moment,” says said Lana Topham, director of restoration for Pink Floyd. “The newly restored version presents the first full 90-minute cut, combining the 60-minute source edit of the performance with the additional Abbey Road Studios documentary segments filmed shortly after.”
Tickets for the film screenings will go on sale on Wednesday (March 5) at 2pm GMT from here. You can pre-order the live album here.
With another issue of Uncut done, dusted and due to hit newsagents’ shelves / your doormat later this week – read all about it here – it’s time to share some of the tunes that helped us to put it together.
Below, you can sample new music from Bryan Ferry, Jason Isbell and Valerie June – all of whom give candid and illuminating interviews in the latest issue. There are sighters for soon-coming new albums by Bon Iver, Beirut, Perfume Genius, William Tyler, Ezra Furman and Sparks (their 28th!), plus one-off singles by Fontaines DC, Hurray For The Riff Raff and Tindersticks, a double dose of Thom Yorke and much more. Dig in!
Hurray For The Riff Raff “Pyramid Scheme” (Nonesuch)
Valerie June “Joy, Joy” (Concord)
Bon Iver “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (Jagjaguwar)
Bryan Ferry And Amelia Barratt “Orchestra” (Dene Jesmond)
Sparks “JanSport Backpack” (Transgressive)
Fontaines DC “It’s Amazing To Be Young” (XL)
Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto “Electric War” (Easy Eye Sound)
Perfume Genius “No Front Teeth (ft. Aldous Harding)” (Matador)
Jason Isbell “Foxes In The Snow” (Southeastern)
Lonnie Holley “That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music” (Jagjaguwar)
Tom Waits has contributed to a new documentary about homelessness in the American south. Ultimata Fermata (The Last Ride)is part of the Il Fattore Umano (The Human Factor) series, from Italian public television channel RAI3.
Waits can be seen performing songs on acoustic guitar and piano, as well as reading from his poem “Seeds On Hard Ground”. Below, you can watch a clip of him playing “The Fall Of Troy”, which originally appeared on the 1996 soundtrack album for the film Dead Man Walking, and later on the 2006 compilation Orphans.
Neil Young has confirmed tour dates for 2025, including his first European shows since 2019. Young will be joined by his new band, the chrome hearts: Spooner Oldham (Farfisa organ), Micah Nelson (guitar), Corey McCormick (bass) and Anthony LoGerfo (drums).
The tour begins in Sweden on June 18 and travels through Europe before reaching North America in August. No UK shows are currently listed, though Young says “More dates will be added shortly.”
Tickets will be available beginning Tuesday, February 25, through an exclusive, 48-hour presale for Neil Young Archives members. General on-sale begins on Friday, February 28. More information on North American dates is available through Ticketmaster.
Young and the chrome hearts released their debut studio recording, “Big Change“, in January.
Neil Young’s 2025 ‘Love Earth’ World Tour June 18 – Rättvik, Sweden @ Dalhalla June 20 – Bergen, Norway @ Bergenhus Fortress June 22 – Copenhagen, Denmark @ Tiøren June 26 – Dublin, Ireland @ Malahide Castle June 30 – Brussels, Belgium @ Brussels Palace Open Air, Palace Square July 1 – Groningen, Netherlands @ Drafbaan Stedpark July 3 – Berlin, Germany @ Waldbühne July 4 – Mönchengladbach, Germany @ Sparkassenpark July 8 – Stuttgart, Germany @ Cannstatter Wasen August 8 – Charlotte, North Caroline @ PNC Music Pavilion August 10 – Richmond, Virgina @ Allianz Amphitheater at Riverfront August 13 – Clarkston, Michigan @ Pine Knob Music Theatre August 15 – Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio @ Blossom Music Center August 17 – Toronto, Ontario @ Budweiser Stage August 21 – Gilford, New Hampshire @ BankNH Pavilion August 23 – Wantagh, New York @ Northwell at Jones Beach Theater August 24 – Bethel, New York @ Bethel Woods Center for the Arts August 27 – Chicago, Illinois @ Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island September 1 – Denver, Colorado @ Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre September 5 – George, Washington @ The Gorge September 6 – Vancouver, British Columbia @ Deer Lake Park September 10 – Bend, Oregon @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater September 12 – Mountain View, California @ Shoreline Amphitheater September 15 – Los Angeles, California @ Hollywood Bowl
For bands, navigating the past can often be a tricky business. In some cases, there is an avowed refusal to engage in anything other than the work in front of them – as if stopping to look back will somehow derail hard-won forward momentum. In others, it can be somewhere they’d rather not revisit; a place of bad memories or difficult circumstances. For Led Zeppelin, the past is a source of extraordinary triumphs but also, ultimately, great loss. How, in other words, do you reconcile the good times with the bad times?
For this month’s cover story, we have reunited Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones for a series of exclusive interviews to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Physical Graffiti – the immense double album that marked the loftiest peak of their formidable imperial phase. The three musicians take us far inside the album – but along the way, the story becomes unexpectedly reflective. It’s not simply that, 50 years on, Physical Graffiti continues to work its powerful magic on its principals. But as it deepens, our cover story often feels like an intricate study of the relationships between Plant, Page and Jones as it unfolds in Headley Grange, on the world’s largest stages or in the wilds of Morocco; three very different people whose passion for the work they achieved together remains as strong and unifying as ever. “I was never a great fan of other bands,” insists John Paul Jones. “I didn’t really go to concerts. I didn’t listen to other bands. I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t in them. I was a fan of Led Zeppelin, because I was in it.”
Elsewhere, there’s new interviews with Jason Isbell, Bryan Ferry, The Waterboys‘ Mike Scott, Steel Pulse, Maddy Prior, Destroyer, the Sex Pistols and Valerie June, while David Bowie‘s closest collaborators lift the lid on an early ‘Berlin’ era classic, the survivors revisit hippie stronghold Middle Earth, Mick Jones shares his memorabilia collection and a clutch of luminaries including Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and Adam Granduciel recreate Blood On The Tracks as Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece turns 50.
Every print edition of this issue of Uncut comes free with a free CD called Time To Fly, featuring 15 tracks of the month’s best new music, including Black Country, New Road, Brown Horse, Dean Wareham, Iko Ishibashi, Tobacco City, Florist and more
LED ZEPPELIN: Exclusive! In brand new interviews, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones revisit the magic and epic majesty of their 1975 masterpiece, Physical Graffiti. “There was such an exchange of great energy,” we hear.
JASON ISBELL: Twenty years into his solo career, Isbell is about to release his first solo acoustic album, partly inspired by the confessional singer-songwriters of the ‘70s. Just don’t expect raw truths. “There’s a whole bunch of real personal stuff,” he confides. “But it’s not always coming from a trustworthy narrator’s perspective.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Farewell to a key instigator of the ‘60s pop culture revolution who was cruelly cast out of the inner circle, only to return, bloodied but gloriously unbowed, as a guiding light for future generations of lost souls. “She gave everything and you got everything,” marvels one of Marianne Faithfull’s many collaborators.
BRYAN FERRY: A remarkable new collaboration with painter and spoken word artist Amelia Barratt returns the Roxy Music mainman, elegantly, to the vanguard of the avant-garde. “It’s like playing tennis with somebody who’s really good,” he tells us. “You raise your game.”
STEEL PULSE: Fighting against prejudice and social injustice, the roots pioneers look back the events that inspired their urgent debut album – Handsworth Revolution. “It was second nature to write about we were going through. These were our experiences.”
VALERIE JUNE: The Memphis maverick is a voice of cosmic inspiration within American roots music. “I want to see what the world looks like when we’re focused on light and radiance and joy. Beauty is powerful.”
MADDY PRIOR: The Steeleye Span singer on Bowie, Quo and who was really inside those Wombles costumes…
DESTROYER: A picaresque romp through the greatest works of loquacious rock’n’roll prophet Dan Bejar and friends.
DAVID BOWIE: Fleeting to Europe to escape personal and professional traumas, Bowie and his co-conspirators began work on his ‘Berlin’ trilogy: cue the story of “Sound and Vision“.
REVIEWED: New albums by The Waterboys, Eiko Ishibashi, Bob Mould, Tobacco City, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Brown Horse, Beirut, Songs Of Green Pheasant; archive releases by Souled American, Sex Pistols, Ibex Band, Hiroshi Yoshimura and William Hooker With David S Ware & Alan Braufman; Lloyd Cole and Unclassified Live live; Sly Stone on TV and John and Paul and Brian Wilson in books.
PLUS:Garth Hudson and Mike Ratledge depart; Bob Dylan‘s Tangled Up In Blue reimagined; TV On The Radio‘s Tunde Adebimpe on his favourite albums; Mick Jones‘ attic-full of memorabilia; Middle Earth revisited; a Banshee wails; The Lemon Twigs and Stephen Kalinich team up… and introducing Silver Synthetic.
Much like Bob Dylan, Suzanne Vega came up through the Greenwich Village folk scene. And much like Dylan, she made her name by writing massively popular songs that brought societal issues to wider attention (see: “Luka”, a global Top 10 hit in 1987).
The connections continue on Suzanne Vega’s forthcoming new album, Flying With Angels, which as she revealed to Uncut in our 2025 albums preview contains a kind of answer song to Bob Dylan’s “I Want You”, written from the point of view of the chambermaid.
Her first album of original material in almost a decade, is poised to be an eclectic collection. You may have already heard the excellent, dance-punky single “Rats”; but as Vega told us, “some songs are more classic rock’n’roll, there are a couple that are sort of folk-rocky, and a couple that are just plain folky. The other surprise is probably a song called ‘Love Thief’, which is almost like an R&B/Motown song.”
But before that, Vega has kindly consented to a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a songwriting grandmaster? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Monday (March 3) and Suzanne will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
Trumpeter, flugelhornist and composer Yazz Ahmed has created her most exquisite sonic world yet on A Paradise In The Hold, 10 tracks of magnetic, boundary-transcending jazz that intricately blend influences from her British-Bahraini heritage. Drawn to storytelling, Ahmed writes compositions that tend to have a narrative flow. On this record, her approach is shaped by two traditional forms: joyful Bahraini wedding poems and the sorrowful work songs of the pearl divers. It’s a natural pairing of her interests, incorporating the cultural expressions of weddings with the pure folklore of the pearl divers, who no longer exist in terms of a workforce but remain enshrined in the memory of the uniquely Bahraini genre known as fidjeri, or sea music.
The journey that led to this album began in 2014, during a research trip taken by Ahmed to Bahrain, the island nation between Qatar and the northeastern coast of Saudi Arabia where she spent her early childhood. Some of the former pearl divers have formed choirs that tour around the Gulf, so she was able to see the Pearl Divers of Muharraq perform at their clubhouse. She sought further inspiration in local bookshops and found it in wedding poems, which often celebrated beauty by connecting it with nature. Her grandfather even sang her songs from his own wedding day. She was just as intrigued by the celebratory music of traditional women’s drumming circles, the way they offered a strong yet playful contrast to the melancholy fidjeri of the pearl divers. Ahmed braids it all together in the hypnotic atmosphere of Paradise…, deftly incorporating traditional polyrhythms with the textural possibilities of modern music.
Ahmed tends to work her subjects into the very form of her compositions. On Paradise…, this process is subtle but refined. The pearl divers sing fidjeri when they’re out at sea, songs about missing loved ones back home. But they also incorporate the actions of a mariner into the music itself, the sounds of pulling the sails and heaving the rope. Ahmed took all these little characteristics and chopped them up, processing them into something unrecognisable and new, which then inspired her to write basslines and melodies. The original field recordings can’t be heard on the album, but their spirit is integral to its very existence.
The songs here, however, are not the first to arise out of Ahmed’s experiences in 2014. That would be the 90-minute suite “Alhaan al Siduri”, named for the Epic of Gilgamesh’s Siduri, a wise woman who lives on a beautiful island, which some scholars have suggested is Bahrain. Ahmed reworked that suite’s main theme into the stunning album opener “She Stands On The Shore”. The trumpet is one of the very first sounds we hear, setting an expressive, yearning tone that will reappear throughout. Samy Bishai’s pensive violin matches this tone just prior to Natacha Atlas’ voice entering the frame, building upon the reverent atmosphere before swirling synths give way to unbeatable grooves.
Ahmed is in full-on underwater sci-fi mode on the mythic, haunting “Mermaids’ Tears”, inky synths and gauzy trumpet best appreciated with a close listen on headphones. But the album, which marks her first time writing for voice, may be at its very best on “Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You”, the lyrics of which were adapted by Ahmed from the words of a pearl divers’ standard, first in English then translated to Arabic. The chants that open this composition are instantly reminiscent of an Arabic-infused take on Alice Coltrane’s ashram recordings, shot through with synth fizz and percussive handclaps. The voices swirl around each other, a spiral of emotion guiding us through the terrain of the song. It closes with an exultant trumpet solo from Ahmed as the final bass note rings out, akin to Ron Carter’s hypnotic grooves on Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, The El Daoud.
A wealth of instrumentation gives this album its shape and textures, but Ralph Wyld’s vibraphone, George Crowley’s bass clarinet and Alcyona Mick’s Fender Rhodes in particular really fill out the aquatic themes, able to evoke gurgling bubbles and rickety wooden ships in equal measure. The range of vocalists brings us back to Earth, grounding the music to the lives of the people who inspire the emotion behind it all. Paradise… brims with life and imagination, humming with the brilliant paradox of a communal spirit imbued with Ahmed’s creative imprint over every note. It’s the work of a composer wrapping her arms around what is possible, surfacing triumphantly with a new form of beauty.
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It’s easy to be skeptical of Sam Fender. Blond, blue eyed, looking like Gary Barlow’s indie kid brother, with a name that feels like a brand endorsement, when he picked up the Critics Award at the 2019 BRITs, you might have mistaken him for the industry’s latest tastefully distressed millennial singer-songwriter. But since his debut single in 2017, the canny chanter from North Shields has emerged as the most driven, distinctive and fascinating British pop artist since Amy Winehouse.
His second album, Seventeen Going Under, released in autumn 2021, was a remarkable achievement in particular, a British pop record that revealed something of the temper of modern times. Fender sang of retail parks, cocaine, casual violence, the DWP and suicide – a world familiar enough in the works of Stormzy or Sleaford Mods, but close to a revelation in the heart of the Radio 2 A-list.
What sold the vision was Fender’s endearing anger and confusion, and his rich Geordie roar, as though the Angel of the North was suddenly breaking into song. No less important was his ability to pull off a convincing take on what his wikipedia page describes as “heartland rock”. In practice it’s the sound of mid-’80s Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen filtered through the dynamics of The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys – with maybe a distant jangling echo of great lost mid-80s Tyneside hopes Hurrah!.
People Watching, his third album, has been a couple of years in the making, recorded in London and then LA, and reveals an artist at a crossroads. The title track, released as the lead single at the end of last year, showcased his collaboration with Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs and felt like a statement of intent. Though it’s rooted in a familiar Fenderworld – a bedside vigil for a dying mentor in an underfunded care home – Granduciel’s booming production seems scaled for the freeway rather the A167. So much of the album seems to have at least one foot or a couple of wheels across the Atlantic: “Crumbling Empire” opens on the ruined streets of Detroit and cruises along in Granduciel’s baleful Bruce Hornsby mode. And in “Wild Long Lie” one of Fender’s mates takes an unlikely moment out from caning it to consider American carceral policy.
If one route from Fender’s crossroads leads to the US, selling heartland rock back to the homeland (it beats taking coals to Newcastle) then another leads back to the old towns and villages where he increasingly feels like a stranger. If Seventeen Going Under was created out of an enforced period of lockdown introspection, People Watching wants to be an opening up, a re-engagement with old pals, guided by the affectionate but implacable spirit of Tish Murtha, the documentary photographer whose pictures grace the artwork.
But if Fender gets out of the confines of his own head, he finds plenty of people getting out of theirs. The ghost of Oasis seems to haunt a lot of the album, from the “Wonderwall”-y guitars that open “Chin Up”, an attempt to lean into and dance with the wild mood swings, to the pervading blizzard of cocaine that falls over so many characters in “Wild Long Lie” which concludes “I think I need to leave this town”.
One more road then, leads straight back inside the prison of the ego. “TV Dinner” is the album’s biggest departure. Over doleful piano chords, it’s a paranoid declaration of independence worthy of Kendrick Lamar, harking back to the demise of Amy Winehouse and detailing all the ways that young talents are led to market as cash cows. “No-one,” he sings defiantly, “gets into my space.”
But Fender – a man very proud of his Greggs Gold card – is ultimately too gregarious to stay in this fortress of solitude for very long. The album concludes back home “stomping around the village with you again”. “Something Heavy” is his version of “The Weight” – a hymn to mutual support in tough times, an offer to keep the kettle boiling even as everyone in the town falls victim to the black dogs of depression.
And the closing “Remember My Name” returns to his old council house in North Shields, with the rousing swells of the Easington Colliery Brass Band and Fender sounding a little like Sting in his higher register. For a lesser artist it might risk embarrassment: a Hovis ad homily to hearth and home. But it’s part of Sam Fender’s art that, like the Boss or Lindesfarne’s Alan Hull, he’s unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, the people and community he’s still a part of and still committed to. In the rolling turmoil of 2025, these troubled heartlands need him more than ever.
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Like me, you probably think you know the story arc of The Beatles pretty well. As we’ve worked on this new publication, the latest edition in our Ultimate Record Collection series, out tomorrow, it’s been a delight to find that the Beatles narrative can still offer up some delightful surprises.
And the story here? This magazine presents insightful new writing on every Beatles record in order of its appearance, forming a definitive timeline of the first and most thrillingly intense part of the group’s career. What emerges as you listen to the music and read the following pages isn’t only a renewed pleasure in the songs, but also a respect for the Beatles’ composure as the storm of their new fame grew around them.
New fantastic self-penned music followed quickly on the heels of their initial hits. No group had done anything quite like this before, and neither had the record industry, which now had to meet the phenomenal demand for new music. Here you’ll be able to get an idea of how that worked in real time. Alongside the albums you likely know and love already, you’ll see the profusion of new singles, and also the less-familiar formats like the EPs, in their incentivising picture sleeves. Then there’s the overseas editions.
You could spend a happy lifetime immersing yourself into the worldwide Beatles, but here we’ve confined ourselves, with a few exceptions, to the UK and North American records. For sure, there’s a wry remark or two to be made at the expense of the way the United States handled the album releases – slicing and dicing “superfluous” tracks here, assembling new albums from the cuts, adding the singles (or taking them away). But observing their label’s initial lack of interest, and their haste to try and catch up, you feel not only the size of a less-connected world – and also just how manic Beatlemania must have felt to those involved with servicing its demands. You could even find yourself making the case that Meet The Beatles is a superior document of the era because it starts with “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. We’ve aired our thoughts, and reviewed every record.
We have punctuated the quickfire succession of these releases with other noteworthy events on the timeline. The momentous television broadcasts. The radio appearances. The key business meetings, personnel changes and live shows. What else? From Uncut’s features archive, we’ve pulled deep insights and eyewitness accounts on the formative appearances in Hamburg, on A Hard Day’s Night and the group’s pivotal 1962 (“Not a bad 12 months, was it?”)
As you’ll read here, The Beatles were working collectively like a dog – so hard in fact, we’ve had to expand their story into a second volume, which you can pre-order from us now. We’ll see you here next month with more fab gear!
The archive of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – the avant-garde enclave inside the BBC’s sound effects department – will be made available for the first time for use by musical artists and producers, passing on one of the most singular legacies in the UK’s music history.
The archive includes samples of sounds and music made for a vast range of BBC shows from Doctor Who to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all of which were created by electronic music pioneers Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Brian Hodgson and other luminaries.
Using unconventional methods ranging from musique concrète techniques and loop manipulation to creating sounds by scraping piano wires or hitting lampshades, their work has had far-reaching influence. Paul McCartney once approached Derbyshire to remake “Yesterday“, while more recent admirers include Spacemen 3‘s Pete Kember, who worked with her shortly before her death in 2001.
In collaboration with Spitfire Audio and BBC Studios, a library of samples will be released featuring sounds from the Workshop’s archive as well as new recordings and experiments by Workshop members and associates, including Mark Ayres, Kieron Pepper, Bob Earland, Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, Glynis Jones and Peter Howell.
Mark Ayres said: “I’m the youngest member of the core Radiophonic Workshop – and I’m 64! We’re not going to be around forever. It was really important to leave a creative tool, inspired by our work, for other people to use going forward. I hope we’ve made an instrument that will inspire future generations.”
The Spitfire Audio BBC Radiophonic Workshop VST will be available for £149/€179/$199 from February 19, 2025 at www.spitfireaudio.com. An introductory price of £119/€143/$159 is available until March 6, 2025.
“Nothing good happens in a bar at night to a guy over fifty. It’s just a fact,” an old soak named RJ tells Al, the narrator of Willy Vlautin’s seventh novel, The Horse. Al, an ageing songwriter, hiding out in an abandoned mine in central Nevada, takes the advice to heart and resolves to quit the bar life and spend his time listening to old jazz records and Ennio Morricone soundtracks and writing brooding folk ballads on his harmonium, songs with titles like “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”.
It’s one of a handful of songs that show up on Mr Luck & Ms Doom, The Delines’ sixth and finest album to date. Vlautin has always worked on the fertile borderlands or fault lines between fiction and song, and insists most of his novels are songs that somewhere along the way got a little out of hand. In fact, the last Delines album was a largely instrumental soundtrack to Vlautin’s novel The Night Always Comes (which in turn is soon to be a movie). But you’d have to reach for the likes of Bobbie Gentry’s Patchwork or Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates, or indeed a film like Robert Altman’s Raymond Carver amalgam, Short Cuts, to find a world so rich and intimately strange.
It was borne, apparently, out of singer Amy Boone’s desperation, after five albums of gas station meltdowns and trailer-park burnouts to sing “a straight up love song where no-one dies and nothing goes wrong”. As the resident singer in Delines-ville, a burg where broken hearts outnumber the stars in the sky, she surely knows that the chances of such a thing are rare as a Tucson snowglobe. But nevertheless Vlautin came up with the title track, the lush, lazy ballad of a luckless couple of drifters who roll up in St Augustine, Florida. Ms Doom is more used to sweeping hotel floors, but she sweeps him off his admittedly shaky feet, and their fledgling romance finds them wearing out rented mattresses all over town. You can hear the relish the band take with their tale: the piano, bass and guitar, slinking around the corner of every verse, like lovers sneaky-peteing past the motel checkout, Boone’s voice sweet and wry as a glass of bourbon for breakfast.
Of course the mood can’t last – it reminds one a little of the precarious, hard-knock romance in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves a couple of years ago – but even the hazy mirage of happiness is something to be treasured. You can see it glimmer like fools gold throughout the album – the moment where teenage lovers swim “naked in the San Juan River during a thunderstorm” in “Her Ponyboy”. Or the moment in “JP & Me” where the couple cross the Los Cruces Highway from their motel every morning, just to watch the colts.
Even “Left Hook Like Frazier” – one woman’s sorry lovelife litany of boozers, losers and substance abusers – grooves like prime Curtis Mayfield, with Cory Gray’s scintillating horns emerging like sunshine in an Oregon January (weirdly a lot of the album is reminiscent of that strange mid-’80s interlude when Paul Weller and even Billy Bragg managed to marry tales of domestic abuse and political strife to the bluest of blue-eyed soul).
But the heart of the record is that song from The Horse, “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”, sadly not featuring Al’s harmonium but a knife-edge performance from the band. It’s like a dream collaboration between Bobbie Gentry and Bobbie Ann Mason – or the kind of country song that Lucia Berlin might have written if she’d drifted through the Florida panhandle some time in the mid-’80s. The pimp is beanpole nightmare, 6 foot 5 and 110 pounds, living on Orange Crush, powdered donuts and seemingly inexhaustible meth-fuelled self-obsession. Nancy meanwhile is his teenage bride and meal ticket, smart enough to take notes while he’s blabbing, and wise enough to bide her time before decisively pursuing her own happiness. In a little over four minutes Vlautin, Boone and the boys take you on a road trip across the grand divide, from the casinos of Biloxi, Mississippi, right on up to the rodeos of Utah and somehow chart an entire continent of cruelty, desperation and clear-eyed determination. In USA 2025 it feels like a very timely tale.
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When Jay Farrar was preparing Day Of The Doug, Son Volt’s 2023 tribute album to Doug Sahm, he turned to the Complete Mercury Recordings. The 5CD set covering Sahm’s work with the Sir Douglas Quintet from 1968-72 had a limited release in 2005, before sloping back into the vaults, along with Sahm’s reputation as an innovator and inspiration.
It’s not that Sahm is unknown. His work with the Tejano supergroup The Texas Tornados (along with SDQ’s organ player Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez and Freddy Fender) helped define and expand the canon of Texas music. Musicians know. Uncle Tupelo covered “Give Back The Key To My Heart”. The Coward Brothers sang “Be Real”. Margo Price duetted with Doug’s son Shawn Sahm – the keeper of the flame – on “I Wanna Be Your Mama Again”.
The spade-work for Sahm’s later success was done in these recordings with the Sir Douglas Quintet, where he and Meyers chopped their influences into a Texas stew, even when Sahm was pretending to be an English gent, or inhaling Haight-Ashbury from beneath a cosmic cowboy hat.
Sahm’s open-mindedness was rooted in childhood. Born in San Antonio in 1941, he was a musical prodigy, singing on the radio at the age of five. Invitations from the Grand Ole Opry were resisted by Sahm’s mother, who preferred to keep “Little Doug” in school, though he got close enough at one performance to detect whisky on the breath of the ailing Hank Williams. Across a field from his childhood home, Sahm could eavesdrop on club shows by the likes of Bobby “Blue” Bland, Hank Ballard and James Brown, though he mostly listened to country radio, and saw the swinging Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys when he was 10 years old.
Such diversity reflected the reality of San Antonio, where polka, jazz and pop added spice. But it wasn’t necessarily the way to get ahead in the mid-1960s. Sahm’s breakthrough came courtesy of the (later disgraced) producer Huey P Meaux who, aiming to capitalise on the British Invasion, encouraged the pretence that Sahm’s band was English, despite two of them being visibly Mexican, and – ironically – the musicians having a more intuitive grasp of American roots music. The moment of their unmasking, on a TV show hosted by Trini Lopez, followed a performance of their first hit “She’s About A Mover” in which the Beatle-haired Texans shook it up on a set littered with castles, hobby horses and a sullen model in a suit of armour. “She’s About A Mover” appears on this set in a re-recording from 1968, faithful to the fairground shuffle of the original, but with additional “freaky” guitar reflecting the musical journey Sahm made when a drugs bust forced him to flee Texas in favour of Northern California.
The first of the albums in this box, Sir Douglas Quintet + 2 = (Honkey Blues) is the least typical, as Meyers is missing from the lineup, having failed to follow Sahm’s western flight. It’s a significant loss, but the album is underrated. The opening “Are Inlaws Really Outlaws” is a swinging country number with a rasping vocal from Sahm and swinging soul horns. Sahm was more than an interested spectator in the West Coast hippie lifestyle, but he’s faithful to his musical inclinations. There is a hint of a wig-out at the start of “Can You Dig My Vibrations”, and the sense of things being out of proportion, and in uneasy time, infects “Whole Lotta Peace Of Mind” which meanders into jazz before collapsing in a heap.
Normal service is resumed on 1969’s Mendocino, the Quintet’s most approachable album, with Meyers back at the party. The brisk title track is as gorgeous as anything the Quintet did, and Sahm is at his self-mocking best on the self-explanatory “Lawd, I’m Just A Country Boy In This Great Big Freaky City”. There’s also a welcome airing for “Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day”, a bright outtake (as covered by Frank Black).
Sahm was not known for precision in the studio. Creatively, this meant the sound was often ragged. What you get, instead, is the sense of a groove. As a performer Sahm has the languid command of Alex Chilton, and a similar disdain for application, which may be why the most revelatory album is 1971’s The Return Of Doug Saldana, which roots Sahm firmly in the geography of his youth. There are many pleasures to be had on the album of singles (in mono) and in the Spanish language Mexican EP. But it’s hard to beat Sahm saluting Freddy Fender on “Wasted Days, Wasted Nights”, or playing pure country on the plangent “Keep Your Soul”. Best of all, until the moment it collapses into laughter, is “Stoned Faces Don’t Lie”, where Sahm sings sadly about how the San Francisco hippie dream has slipped away. The song has such sweet power that you almost forget the strange elision of the lyrics, definitive in their sadness, but in one-and-a-half minds about whether intoxicated oblivion is an advantageous state.
The tour – in support of last year’s excellent album Passage du Desir, recorded as Johnny Blue Skies – kicks off at the Limelight in Belfast on February 28 then heads to Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, London and Bristol, before heading into mainland Europe. You can find the full tour dates at the end of this story.
We have ONE pair of tickets to give away for Simpson’s show at London’s Eventim Apollo on Saturday, March 1.
To enter, click the link and answer the question below. The first correct entry picked at random will win the tickets. Closing date: Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at 10am GMT.
Which Nirvana song did Simpson cover on his 2016 album, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth?
February 23 – Limelight, BELFAST February 24 – Vicar Street, DUBLIN February 26 – Barrowland Ballroom, GLASGOW February 27 – Albert Hall, MANCHESTER March 1 – Eventim Apollo, LONDON March 2 – Beacon, BRISTOL March 4 – Paradiso, AMSTERDAM March 5 – Markthalle, HAMBURG March 7 – KB Hallen, COPENHAGEN March 8 – Annexet, STOCKHOLM March 10 – Sentrum Scene, OSLO March 14 – House of Culture, HELSINKI March 15 – Alexela Concert Hall, TALLINN March 18 – Metropol, BERLIN March 19 – Muffathalle, MUNICH March 21 – La Madeleine, BRUSSELS March 22 – Le Trianon, PARIS
In a statement posted to his social platforms, Weller wrote:
“I’m shocked and saddened by Rick’s passing. I’m thinking back to us all rehearsing in my bedroom in Stanley Road, Woking. To all the pubs and clubs we played at as kids, to eventually making a record. What a journey!
“We went far beyond our dreams and what we made stands the test of time. My deepest sympathy to all family and friends – P.W x”
Foxton wrote:
“I was shocked and devastated to hear the very sad news today. Rick was a good guy and a great drummer whose innovative drum patterns helped shape our songs.
I’m glad we had the chance to work together as much as we did. My thoughts are with Leslie and his family at this very difficult time – Bruce Foxton”
As The Jam Weller, Foxton and Buckler released six albums and 18 consecutive UK top 40 singles, including four No 1s. After the band split in 1982, Buckler played with several bands including Time UK and Sharp, before moving into production.
He temporarily left music, returning in 2005 with a new band, the Gift, playing Jam material. They were joined by Foxton in 2007 and began performing as From The Jam.
Buckler left the band in September 2009, and while he still performed he also worked in a management role.
He has written several books including a 2015 memoir, That’s Entertainment: My Life in the Jam.
The BBC reports that Buckler had recently been forced to cancel a spoken word tour of UK venues because of health problems.
Jim Keltner may well be the most storied session drummer alive today. Indeed, even to call him a session musician undersells the key role he’s played on records by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, George Harrison, John Lennon, Ry Cooder, Steely Dan, Carly Simon, Richard Thompson, Eric Clapton, Roy Orbison and hundreds more.
He was part of Joe Cocker’s infamous Mad Dogs & Englishmen jaunt, he joined Booker T & The MG’s when they toured with Neil Young, he was Buster Sidebury in the Traveling Wilburys, and he was behind the kit for massive reunion tours by Simon & Garfunkel and CSNY.
Now, fresh from a stint on Bob Dylan’s Rough & Rowdy Ways tour, he’s kindly submitted to a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask the drummer who’s seen it all? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Monday (February 24) and Jim will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
Onstage at the 40 Watt club, Patterson Hood regales hundreds of Heathens with a story about moving to Athens, Georgia, on April Fool’s Day in 1994. As he tells it, he arrived in town and walked directly to this very club, which was already renowned as one of the best rock venues in the South. Cracker and Counting Crows were playing a double bill, and while he didn’t have money to buy a ticket, the doorman let him sneak past. It’s a fond memory of a formative experience, and the fact that he’s recounting it onstage at the 40 Watt is not lost on him.
It’s the second night of HeAthens Homecoming, the Drive-By Truckers’ annual four-night stand in what they still consider their hometown. It’s a tradition that stretches back to the band’s early days, just before they released Southern Rock Opera in 2001, when they were touring nonstop. “The 40 Watt,” says Patterson, “gave us a place to come home to.” Over the years, the event has grown into a grassroots music festival drawing fans from all over the world. Heathens, as they are called, invade Athens for a week, roosting at bars like Little Kings, digging through crates at Wuxtry Records, grabbing breakfast at Mama’s Boy, and convening for a memorabilia auction benefitting a local music nonprofit called Nuçi’s Space. They crowd into Flicker Bar for a poetry reading on Wednesday, a set by the New Orleans band Loose Cattle on Thursday, and a showcase for bassist Matt Patten’s label Dial Back Sound on Friday. Every night around 6:00, the most dedicated of the Heathens line up outside the 40 Watt to grab a coveted spot at the rail.
This year is special. It’s the 25th Homecoming in 26 years (they skipped a year during the pandemic), and the first night at the 40 Watt is the last official stop on the band’s Southern Rock Operatour. They’ve been playing the album more or less in its entirety throughout 2024, and they sound confident, well-rehearsed, and focused — all rarities for a band that hardly ever uses a setlist and very seldom practices. That means the second night is the first real Truckers show they’ve played in nine months, and they seem to relish the opportunity to choose songs off the cuff, go wherever the spirit takes them, and raise some hell along the way. They deliver a version of “Self Destructive Zones” that sounds like it might self-destruct at any moment, and Mike Cooley debuts a new arrangement of his redneck crime monologue “Cottonseed” (which the band haven’t played live in a decade).
The third night is a fan’s set, full of deep cuts and one-off experiments. With local singer-songwriter Schaeffer Llana joining them onstage, they attempt to play “Wilder Days”, a cut from 2022’s Welcome To Club XIII, although Patterson flubs a few lines and cautions the crowd that the song might be beyond him. Yet, the Truckers are at their best when they’re at their rawest, when they’re barely keeping everything between the ditches. So what might have been a disaster instead becomes a bit of Homecoming lore: a moment fans will talk about next year.
Four songs into their set on the fourth and final night, The Truckers play “Grand Canyon”, a rousing showstopper they typically reserve for much later in the show. It felt like they were throwing down a gauntlet, daring themselves to make every subsequent song sound like part of the same three-hour encore. And for the most part, that’s exactly what they do. They run through old favorites at a fevered pitch, accruing more and more musicians with each song. By the time they close with a medley of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ In The Free World” and The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died”, they are ten people onstage, including producer David Barbe and two of his sons. It’s a beloved Homecoming tradition: a lot of folks wailing on guitars and creating a beautiful racket.
These four nights showed off four different versions of The Drive-By Truckers: the professionals running through a beloved album, the perpetual teenagers still geeking out about playing in a band, the rock-and-roll lifers deciding what to do next, and the true believers preaching the gospel to their flock of faithful Heathens. Homecoming has its own traditions, its own customs, even its own culture, but the band always seem to find ways to make it seem new.
SETLISTS
Wednesday, February 12 Days Of Graduation Ronnie And Neil 72 (This Highway’s Mean) Dead, Drunk, And Naked Guitar Man Upstairs Birmingham Ramon Casiano The Three Great Alabama Icons The Southern Thing Surrender Under Protest Wallace Made Up English Oceans Plastic Flowers On The Highway Primer Coat Buttholeville Zip City Let There Be Rock Every Single Storied Flameout Road Cases Women Without Whiskey Life In The Factory Shut Up And Get On The Plane Greenville To Baton Rouge Angels And Fuselage Keep On Smilin’ Rockin’ In The Free World
Thursday, February 13 Lookout Mountain Uncle Frank Goode’s Field Road Where The Devil Don’t Stay Tornadoes Self Destructive Zones The Driver Slow Ride Argument The Deeper In Panties In Your Purse Sink Hole A Ghost To Most Heroin Again Cottonseed My Sweet Annette Marry Me Hell No, I Ain’t Happy Gravity’s Gone Play It All Night Long Maria’s Awful Disclosures Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus) 3 Dimes Down Grand Canyon
Friday, February 14 Feb 14 Ramon Casiano After The Scene Dies Shit Shots Count The Night G.G. Allin Came To Town One Of These Days Drag The Lake Charlie 3 Dimes Down Why Henry Drinks Birthday Boy The Righteous Path Love Like This Wednesday Guitar Man Upstairs The Driver Cottonseed Wilder Days Maria’s Awful Disclosures Do It Yourself When The Pin Hits The Shell Everybody Needs Love Marry Me Buttholeville Zip City A World Of Hurt Shut Up And Get On The Plane Greenville To Baton Rouge Angels And Fuselage
Saturday, February 15 Carl Perkins’ Cadillac The Living Bubba 3 Dimes Down Grand Canyon Where The Devil Don’t Stay Steve McQueen Self Destructive Zones Adam Raised a Cain Slow Ride Argument Troglodyte (Cave Man) Cottonseed The Buford Stick Shit Shots Count Hell No, I Ain’t Happy A Ghost to Most Let There Be Rock Every Single Storied Flameout I’m Eighteen Zip City Mercy Buckets 18 Wheels of Love Gravity’s Gone Lookout Mountain Women Without Whiskey The Company I Keep Shut Up And Get On The Plane Rockin’ In The Free World People Who Died
“I’m not so sure that the story of CSNY could ever really be told,” he tells us. “There have been a couple of new books about us recently, but it feels like both of them are just lists of how we fucked up. I didn’t sense the incredible joy that we felt, being in love with each other and in each other’s music, creating this body of work that travelled around the world.”
Like Neil Young and David Crosby, Nash has written an autobiography with what must at least partly have been the intention of telling that story – and it’s also a challenge that we hope we’ve risen to in this latest Deluxe Edition Ultimate Music Guide. Of course, like anyone would, we’ve enjoyed some of the spicier tales that have emerged from the archive interviews and encounters which we’ve included here to help account for the rise to pre-eminence of four exceptionally strong personalities. We’re only human.
What we’ve really tried to zoom in on in this latest 148-page updated edition, though, is that exceptional and generational music. We’ve gone in-depth on every CSNY album, and the solo careers of the individual players in their various combinations in order to explore the many shades of their harmony. Neil? As you may know, he gets his own magazine , although we’ve only got a few copies of that left.
What’s changed since the initial publication of our CSNY guide is the passing of David Crosby. Croz was a frequent visitor to the pages of Uncut and his many interviews form the excellent career history – from The Byrds through his delightful first solo album and last flurry of inspired work – which is a new addition here. His words on his first solo flight help explain the spirit in which CSN and Y came together – and why that spirit will endure even beyond the life of its players.
“I wanted to be free, breaking down the barriers, stretching the envelope, pushing the walls back,” he tells Graeme Thomson. “Politically, I learned to stick up for what I believe in from people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. I have a picture of Pete Seeger reading Gandhi, and it goes back to there. There is a lineage. I learned it from Pete and Woody and Joan Baez and Josh White and Odetta, and I think other people are learning it from us. It gets passed down…”
The second wave of names added the bill for 2025’s End Of The Road festival includes The National’s Matt Berninger (playing a solo set), dreampop cellist Mabe Fratti and Saharan guitar legend Bombino.
The festival provides an opportunity to see plenty of artists recently championed in the pages of Uncut, including Bridget Hayden And The Apparitions, former Girls frontman Christopher Owens, mystical Cornish singer-songwriter Daisy Rickman, Ezra Feinberg, Florist, Jim Ghedi and Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band.
There are also appearances from long-time favourites such as Jake Xerxes Fussell, Six Organs Of Admittance, Diiv, Vieux Farka Touré, Jennifer Castle and Tucker Zimmerman, while folk collective Broadside Hacks will present a special tribute to The Incredible String Band.
End Of The Road takes place at Larmer Tree Gardens in Wiltshire/Dorset on August 28-31. See the expanded line-up on the poster below and grab your tickets here.
