Paul McCartney was joined by the three surviving members of Nirvana at his gig in Seattle last night (July 19). See below for footage of McCartney and the Nirvana trio performing “Helter Skelter”.

McCartney was giving the first ever concert at the Safeco Field in Seattle, the city whose grunge scene Nirvana became an integral part of. To mark the occasion, he welcomed Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear on stage during his encore to play “Cut Me Some Slack”, the track they recorded together last year (2012) for Grohl’s Sound City film project.

The Nirvana trio stayed on to play a selection of Beatles’ songs with McCartney: “Get Back”, “Long Tall Sally” [a song the The Beatles covered], “Helter Skelter”, “Golden Slumbers”, “Carry That Weight” and “The End”.

McCartney first played live with Grohl and Novoselic at a Hurricane Sandy benefit gig in New York last December. A few days later, they played ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ again on American TV show Saturday Night Live – this time joined by Smear on guitar.

However, the Seattle gig marks the first time McCartney and the Nirvana members have played multiple songs together – and the first time they’ve joined forces on Beatles material.

Pearl Jam debuted two new songs at a concert in Chicago on Friday (July 19). Scroll down and click ‘play’ to watch fan footage of both songs being played live.

The band were just seven songs into their gig at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Consequence of Sound reports, when torrential rain forced them offstage.

After a delay of three hours, the band were finally able to return and rewarded the crowd by playing two previously unheard songs from their forthcoming album Lightning Bolt: the title track and “Future Days”. On the latter, the band were joined by producer Brendan O’Brien on keyboards.

Earlier this month (July), Pearl Jam announced that they will release Lightning Bolt, produced by O’Brien, on October 15.

Lightning Bolt will be the US band’s 10th studio album and their first since 2009’s Backspacer.

Morrissey has cancelled his remaining tour dates in South America.

Last week (July 13) the singer apologised for pulling a number of tour dates in Peru and Chile after being struck down with food poisoning. At the time, he said he would be well enough to return for a run of four dates in Argentina and Brazil beginning in Buenos Aires on July 28.

However, none of these shows will now take place, Morrissey has confirmed. “I am informed today that the projected tour of South America is snuffed out, thus euthanized – due, I’m reliably advised, to lack of funding. It’s quite easy to sell tickets, yet impossible to transport band and crew from F to G,” the singer writes in a post on the True To You fansite.

“In a year when far too many disappointments have been buried this really is the last of many final straws, and I am not alone in feeling this,” the singer continues. “The future is suddenly absent, and my apologies are now so frequent as to be somewhat ridiculous, and it is I who apologize because no one else would bother.”

Later in the blog post, the singer adds: “Cancellations and illness have sucked the life out of all of us, and the only sensible solution seems to be the art of doing nothing.”

Over the past year Morrissey has postponed and cancelled a host of tour dates because of his mother’s and his own ill health. He recently revealed that he nearly died earlier this year due to medical problems.

Steely Dan‘s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have been speaking about recording a new album.

Interviewed separately by Rolling Stone ahead of the opening show on their 53-date Mood Swings American tour, Fagen discussed the possibility of a new Steely Dan album – which would be their first since 2003’s Everything Must Go.

Fagen said: “Yeah. We’ve been talking. We always talk about it on airplane rides. Usually we forget what we talked about before we do anything about it. But yeah, we actually had a conversation about it the other day, so who knows?”

Becker, meanwhile, when told of Fagen’s comments, replied: “Donald, Donald, Donald. Always Donald. Yeah, whatever Donald says, he’s right. Yeah.”

The interview is available online here.

An extremely rare Radiohead demo cassette from 1986 is to be sold at auction this September.

The demo cassette features six songs that have never appeared on any official Radiohead releases: “Fragile Friend”, “Girl (In The Purple Dress)”, “Everybody Knows”, “Mountains (On The Move)”, “Lemming Trail” and “Lock The Door”.

The nine-track demo cassette is rounded off by remixes of “Fragile Friend”, “Lemming Trail” and “Lock The Door”. At the time of recording, Radiohead were still known as On A Friday. Tracks from the demo cassette have appeared online in recent years and you can listen to “Lemming Trail” at the bottom of this article.

The demo cassette will go to auction at 10.30am on Saturday, September 14 at Omega Auctions in Stockport. Auctioneer Paul Fairweather told NME that he expects the sale price to exceed £1,000 and also clarified the origins of the item.

“It has come directly from an old friend of the band who was at school with them at Abingdon School. We have copies of his school yearbook from 85/86 showing him and all four members of the band,” Fairweather explained.

John Cooper Clarke has been awarded an honorary degree by the University of Salford.

The honour was given to the poet yesterday (July 18) at a ceremony at The Lowry in Salford. The Salford native was awarded a doctorate of arts to pay tribute to his lengthy career. “What a thrill – who’d have thought it? Now I’m a doctor, finally my dream of opening a cosmetic surgery business can become a reality!” he said.

“There’ve been lots of positive changes in the city since I worked at Salford Tech in the seventies, and I’m pleased to be known as Salford’s Bard and to have helped put it on the map,” he added.

Cooper Clarke features on the new Arctic Monkeys album, AM, on a track called “I Wanna Be Yours”.

Richard Hell answers your questions in the new issue of Uncut, dated August 2013 and out now.

The co-founder of Television, the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids discusses punk, drugs, Madonna and the afterlife in the piece, and also reveals his current relationship (or lack of one) with his former Television bandmate, Tom Verlaine.

“What level of connection there is, is just some kind of inevitable consequence of the friendship that we once had,” Hell explains.

“I don’t even know what he does now. I never see him or talk to him, and after my book I’m sure that’s even less likely. But, yes, sure, there’s a connection in the sense that we spent so much time together in a period that was really crucial for me.

“He is just necessarily built into who I am.”

As well as queries from readers, Hell answers questions from famous acquaintances, including Thurston Moore and Richard Lloyd.

The new issue of Uncut is out now.

A former HMV worker has opened a music store in Derry called HVM.

Entertainment.ie reports that Tony Cregan has opened up the replacement shop after his branch of HMV closed down earlier this year. Cregan, who ran the Derry HMV, opened the new store after he got 15,000 signatures on a petition in order to save the original branch of the high street music store and saw a gap in the market. Of the store name, he commented: “We thought what is the point calling the new show Local CDs, or whatever, we’ll just call it HVM. HMV is gone.”

However, Cregan was contacted by Hilco, the restructuring company who bought out HMV, who asked him to change the name. A letter from Hilco stated that the “continued presence in the market of your business operating under the name HVM has caused and will continue to cause substantial damage to our client’s reputation and goodwill.” Cregan responded by turning the store’s sign upside down and the shop is now called WAH. Cregan said: “People are saying the vibe here is great, it’s really friendly. I’d love to say that was our intention all along and we’re really smart, but that wasn’t the plan at all.”

Meanwhile, HMV is reportedly looking to return to its Oxford Street flagship store in London. The retailer which went into administration earlier this year, is in negotiation to move back into the 20,000 sq ft store at 363 Oxford Street. The site is currently occupied by the US chain Footlocker. According to the Evening Standard, HMV has exchanged contracts on the shop’s lease, subject to landlord approval.

A relaunch of the retailer, which went into administration in January saddled with £176 million debt, is expected later this year. While no exact details have been confirmed, it is expected that a new HMV website will focus on a music and film streaming service similar to The Vault, the digital streaming platform offered by its sister company in Canada. Previously, HMV UK lost money selling CDs and DVDs from its website because of distribution and postage costs.

Photo credit: PA

Alice Cooper has claimed that branding Mumford and Sons a rock band would be an “offence to rock ‘n’ roll”.

Speaking to Fuse, the shock-rock singer said that modern musicians were “afraid to be in a rock band” and claimed that the current generation need to “quit eating vegetarian food” and “eat a steak” instead.

Asked for his views on current rock music, he said: “I just feel that this whole generation needs to all eat a steak. Maybe they just need to quit eating vegetarian food and get out there and get some blood pumping in their system. Rock ‘n’ roll is not about ‘Happy happy happy, everything’s okay. We’re The Lumineers, let’s clog dance.’ Hey, there’s a place for that. If I wanted to see a great clog dancing band, I’d see The Lumineers.”

Using Mumford And Sons as an example, meanwhile, he went on to add: “Mumford And Sons are great at what they do. But it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. Don’t call it rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an offence to rock ‘n’ roll.”

“I get they want to be folk rock, and I guess they want to look like everybody else,” he continued. “I’m old school when it comes to if you’re in a band, you’re an outlaw. You don’t play by those rules, you’re a rock ‘n’ roll outlaw. It doesn’t mean you have to be on drugs,, but when you get onstage you don’t play the guitar up here, and it’s not an acoustic guitar. You play the guitar down here. It doesn’t come from your brain, it comes from your guts. It comes from your groin. It’s sexual. It’s tribal.”

He finished by saying: “Finally, I just went ‘Okay – you guys don’t want to be rock bands, great. That’s better for us’. There’s more for Foo Fighters, there’s more for Green Day, more for the bands that really are rock bands. I don’t understand why everybody is so afraid to be in a rock band.”

Cooper, who recently gave fans the chance to play a round of golf with him for the sum of $10,000, released his most recent studio album Welcome 2 My Nightmare in September 2011.

John Bonham could appear as a hologram in his son Jason Bonham’s tribute band.

Jason, who joined Led Zeppelin for their last proper show at London’s O2 Arena in December 2007, told Legendary Rock Interviews that he had been speaking to special effects experts about the possibility of duetting with his father in his group The Led Zeppelin Experience.

“When I first started doing this I was working with some of the people behind some of the biggest tribute tours like Pink Floyd Experience, The Beatles and now I’m doing it,” he said. “It’s imperative that i continue putting together the best shows and take it to the next level. I’m talking to people about holograms and my dream is to do the hologram drum solo with my dad next to me.”

Last month, John Paul Jones quashed hopes that the rock behemoths could play a series of reunion shows in the near future as he is too busy writing an opera. Singer Robert Plant had hinted in February that he would be open to the idea of Zeppelin reuniting next year, but Jones said a tour was unlikely as “2014 is full of opera for me at the moment.”

Although the band have not performed together since their London O2 Arena gig in 2007, a film of the concert titled Celebration Day was released on DVD in November 2012 following a brief run in cinemas.

Kings Of Leon have debuted their new single “Supersoaker” – scroll down to the bottom of the page and click to listen.

The track, which was broadcast on Zane Lowe’s Radio One show yesterday evening (July 17), is the first track to be taken from the band’s forthcoming new album Mechanical Bull. The single is also now available as a download.

Speaking on Radio One last night, singer Caleb Followill said that the band had felt under no pressure while making the highly-anticipated new LP. “I think the last one took the pressure of us,” he said. “Come Around Sundown followed-up to what was at the point the biggest record of our career [2008’s Only By The Night], so going into this record it was like, ‘The monkey’s off our back, we don’t have that pressure of whether we’re going to be able to match what the last record did.’ We changed it up a bit on this record.”

He and his bandmate Nathan Followill also hinted that they had enough material left over from the sessions to start work on another LP straight away as there was “still a lot of material at the studio waiting” and that the “next record’s halfway done, almost”.

The album is out on September 24. Bassist Jared Followill told NME in March of this year: “I thought we were going to make a really mature album but I’m amazed how youthful it sounds.”

Since then, Jared has revealed that the album is “more musically complicated” than the band’s previous efforts. In a Q&A with fans on Twitter last month (May 27), he also said the “vibe” of the record could be compared to their first two albums – 2003’s Youth And Young Manhood and 2004’s Aha Shake Heartbreak – but that the songs sounded like a “culmination” of all their previous work.

Van Morrison is to release a deluxe edition of his 1970 album, Moondance.

It will be released by Warner Bros on September 30 across various formats.

A 4 CD/1 Blu-ray Deluxe Edition will feature a newly remastered version of the original album, three discs of previously unreleased music from the sessions, and a Blu-ray Audio disc with high-resolution 48K 24 bit PCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound audio of original album. It will be presented in a linen-wrapped folio and includes a booklet with liner notes from Alan Light and original engineer Elliot Scheiner.

A 2CD Expanded Edition set that features the newly remastered version of the original album and 11 previously unreleased tracks drawn from highlights from the Deluxe Edition.

A Standard Edition of the newly remastered version of the original album.

The full track listing for Moondance Deluxe Edition is:

Disc One – Original Album Remastered

1 “And It Stoned Me”

2 “Moondance”

3 “Crazy Love”

4 “Caravan”

5 “Into The Mystic”

6 “Come Running”

7 “These Dreams Of You”

8 “Brand New Day”

9 “Everyone”

10 “Glad Tidings”

Disc Two – All Previously Unreleased

1. “What do we call this Van?”

2. “Caravan” (Take 1)

3. “Caravan” (Takes 2-3)

4. “Caravan” (Take 4)

5. “Caravan” (Takes 5-6)

6. “Caravan” (Take 7)

7. “Caravan” (Take 8)

8. “I’ve Been Working” (Early Version Take 1)

9. “I’ve Been Working” (Early Version Take 2)

10. “I’ve Been Working” (Early Version Take 5)

11. “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” (Outtake)

12. “I Shall Sing” (Take 1)

13. “I Shall Sing” (Takes 2-3)

14. “I Shall Sing” (Takes 4-6)

15. “I Shall Sing” (Take 7)

16. “I Shall Sing” (Takes 8-12)

17. “I Shall Sing” (Take 13)

Disc Three – All Previously Unreleased

1. “Into The Mystic” (Take 10)

2. “Into The Mystic” (Take 11)

3. “Into The Mystic” (Takes 12-13)

4. “Into The Mystic” (Takes 14-16)

5. “Into The Mystic” (Take 17)

6. “Brand New Day” (Take 1)

7. “Brand New Day” (Take 2)

8. “Brand New Day” (Take 3)

9. “Brand New Day” (Take 4)

10. “Brand New Day” (Takes 5-6)

11. “Brand New Day” (Take 7)

12. “Glad Tidings (Take 1)

13. “Glad Tidings (Takes 2-4)

14. “Glad Tidings (Takes 7-8)

15. “Glad Tidings (Take 9)

16. “Caravan Redo” (Takes 1-2)

17. “Caravan Redo” (Take 3)

Disc Four – All Previously Unreleased

1. “Come Running” (Take 1)

2. “Come Running” (Take 2)

3. “Come Running” (Takes 3-4)

4. “Come Running” (Take 5)

5. “Come Running” (“Rolling On 4”)

6. “Moondance” (Take 21)

7. “Moondance” (Take 22)

8. “Glad Tidings” (Alt. Version)

9. “These Dreams Of You” (Alt Version)

10. “Crazy Love” (Remix)

11. “Glad Tidings” (Remix 1)

12. “Glad Tidings” (Remix 2)

13. “Glad Tidings” (Remix 3)

14. “Caravan” (Remix)

15. “These Dreams Of You” (Remix)

16. “I Shall Sing” (Mix)

Disc Five

Blu-Ray Audio disc with high-resolution 48K 24 bit PCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound audio of original album (no video)

The track listing for Moodance Expanded Edition is:

Disc One

Original Album Remastered

Disc Two – All Previously Unreleased

1. “Caravan” (Take 4)

2. “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” (Outtake)

3. “Into The Mystic” (Take 11)

4. “Brand New Day” (Take 3)

5. “Glad Tidings” (Alt. Version)

6. “Come Running”(Take 2)

7. “Crazy Love” (Mono Mix)

8. “These Dreams Of You” (Alt. Version)

9. “Moondance” (Take 22)

10. “I Shall Sing” (Take 7)

11. “I’ve Been Working” (Early Version, Take 5)

Beck has unveiled a new version of his recent stand-alone single “I Won’t Be Long”, this time featuring Kim Gordon.

The track follows another new song, “Defriended”, which Beck unveiled last month. The new, 15 minute long version of “I Won’t Be Long” features a spoken word segment by the former Sonic Youth member. Listen to the track here.

.

Speaking exclusively to NME about his latest project, Beck recently said that although he’ll be releasing plenty of new material in the near future, he has no firm plans to make an album. “For 10 years I’ve been talking about putting out a series of 12-inch singles, one at a time. But I was holding them back ‘cos I wasn’t sure what I was doing with them. And I just wanted people to hear them.”

The Waterboys have unveiled the tracklisting for their six CD Fisherman’s Box set.

Due to be released on October 14, the set comprises of tracks from the band’s Fisherman’s Blues sessions recorded between January 23, 1986 to June 2, 1988.

Mike Scott will be writing the liner notes with additional contributions from Decemberist Colin Meloy.

Fisherman’s Box Tracklist CDs 1-6

CD 1

1. Stranger To Me

16. Saints And Angels

CD 2

1. We Will Not Be Lovers

23. Space Out There, Trevor

CD 3

1. Steve And Anto’s Overture

15. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

CD 4

1. Billy The Kid

20. Higher In Time Symphony

CD 5

1. Higherbound (3rd Version)

21. The Stolen Child (Prototype)

CD 6

1. On My Way To Tara

26. Buckets Of Rain

The band will also tour the UK in December, which will reunite Scott and Steve Wickham with Fisherman’s-era members Anto Thistlethwaite and Trevor Hutchinson alongside current Waterboys drummer Ralph Salmins.

The tour dates are as follows:

December 8, Liverpool Philharmonic.

December 23, Dublin Convention Centre

Full Waterboys tour dates can be found here.

Photo credit: Steve Meany

Mazzy Star are set to release their first new album in 17 years, Seasons Of Your Day.

The band’s fourth studio album will come out on September 24 and was recorded in California and Norway. Click below to listen to the first single from the album, “California”. The album follows 1990’s She Hangs Brightly, 1993’s So Tonight That I Might See and 1996’s Among My Swan.

Written by Hope Sandoval and David Roback, the new album follows the 2011 release of the single “Common Burn”/”Lay Myself Down”, and features a guest spot from the late guitarist Bert Jansch, on the track “Spoon”. The band will tour Europe and North America this autumn after appearances last year at the Coachella and Field Day festivals.

The tracklisting for Seasons Of Your Day is:

‘In The Kingdom’

‘California’

‘I’ve Gotta Stop’

‘Does Someone Have Your Baby Now’

‘Common Burn’

‘Seasons Of Your Day’

‘Flying Low’

‘Sparrow’

‘Spoon’

‘Lay Myself Down’