Joanna Newsom has recorded a cover of Sandy Denny’s 1971 song, “The North Star Grassman And The Ravens”.

Newsom recorded the song in November as part of a promotional campaign for Wren, the Los Angeles-based fashion collection of Melissa Coker.

Newsom said of the track and the creative collaboration it inspired. “Aesthetically, [Sandy Denny’s] songs are really inspiring to me—they’re really bold strokes that feel sort of theatrical and they’re interested in story, The fashion and design that I’m interested in also has to do with story, very strong statements that have some sort of narrative to them, that they aren’t just interested in the now.”

Newsom’s last studio album was Have One On Me in 2010.

Wren / FW13 / Joanna Newsom from CONNECT THE DOTS INC on Vimeo.

Black Sabbath have confirmed that their new album ’13’ will be released on June 10. Scroll down to see a new behind-the-scenes clip showing the band making the album now.

The album is the first original band members Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler have recorded together since 1978’s ‘Never Say Die!’. The Birmingham rock legends made the album primarily in Los Angeles with renowned producer Rick Rubin (Johnny Cash, Metallica, System Of A Down) and features Rage Against The Machine’s Brad Wilk, who replaces original sticksman Bill Ward on drums.

’13’ will be available in a number of different formats, including the Standard CD album release, a deluxe double CD album (which includes a second disc of bonus material), 12″ heavyweight vinyl (180g) in a gatefold sleeve plus a super-deluxe box set containing a Black Sabbath – The Reunion documentary.

In advance of the new album, Black Sabbath will tour Australia, New Zealand and play a show at Ozzfest in Japan. Additional tour plans are expected to be announced in the coming days.

Meanwhile, it was revealed last week that Tony Iommi has written the song that Armenia will use in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Iommi will not perform at the annual competition, which this year is taking place in Sweden, but he has written the song ‘Lonely Planet’ for Armenian band Dorians.

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Clive Burr, former drummer with Iron Maiden, passed away in his sleep last night (March 12) aged 56.

He had been suffering from multiple sclerosis for a number of years.

Burr played with Iron Maiden from 1972 to 1982, drumming on their first three albums: Iron Maiden, Killers and The Number Of The Beast.

In a statement on the band’s website, band members talked lovingly of Burr, who had played with Bruce Dickinson not only with Iron Maiden, but also Dickinson’s previous band Sampson.

“I first met Clive when he was leaving Samson and joining Iron Maiden,” wrote Dickinson. “He was a great guy and a man who really lived his life to the full. Even during the darkest days of his M.S., Clive never lost his sense of humour or irreverence. This is a terribly sad day and all our thoughts are with Mimi and the family.”

John Fogerty has announced details of his new album, Wrote A Song For Everyone.

The album will be released in the UK on May 27. It finds Fogerty performing a dozen songs from his extensive catalogue, both Credence Clearwater Revival and solo, with guests including My Morning Jacket, Dawes, Bob Seger and Tom Morello.

The album also contains two new songs – “Train Of Fools” and “Mystic Highway”.

Scroll down to watch Fogerty perform “Fortunate Son” with the Foo Fighters.

The track listing for Wrote A Song For Everyone is:

Fortunate Son (with Foo Fighters)

Proud Mary (with Jennifer Hudson feat. Allen Toussaint and the Rebirth Brass Band)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TODQc2Lu3Js

Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders has given the strongest hint yet that the band will release their new studio album later this year.

It is two years since Arctic Monkeys released their last effort, 2011’s Suck It And See, and speaking to NME at the NME Awards in London recently, Helders spoke about the relaxed atmosphere the band have enjoyed while recording in America. Asked what he has been up to recently, the drummer said: “I have been in the desert… with motorcycles. Not with Josh [Homme], no. The band’s just been working together, the band working on our own so far, writing and stuff.”

He added: “There’s no time deadlines or anything like that for release. We’re just getting back into it, because it always takes a while to get back into it.”

Quizzed on what the album will sound like, Helders replied simply by saying: “2013”. Then asked if that meant the album will definitely be out by the end of the year, he added: “Well, we’d be stupid if we made a 2013 album and released it next year.”

Matt Helders has previously stated that he felt the band’s third album, Humbug, was unfairly criticised while frontman Alex Turner has hinted that any new material is likely to be heavier and louder than before, inspired by the success of their 2012 single “R U Mine?”

Bob Dylan has been voted an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first time a rock musician has received the high honor.

The Academy is an exceedingly exclusive club to join. Beside the honorary members, a scant 250 members populate the New York-based institution, with new inductees only to replace the dead. Honorary members are rare, too; there are a mere 82, only 12 of whom are American.

Traditionally, the American Academy of Arts and Letters has favored the classical arts to the modern – jazz musicians, modern poets and rock stars have all been overlooked in favor of classical musicians, novelists and traditional artists. Honorary members include Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, Ian McEwan, Martin Scorsese and Salman Rushdie.

Dylan will join three other honorary inductees: architect Rafael Moneo, writer Damon Galgut and artist Luc Tuymans.

Bob Dylan has broken the rock ‘n roll performer barrier to other awards in the past, being the first to win a Pulitzer Prize (honorary) and the first to be nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award (memoir Chronicles: Volume One).

Shameless plug coming your way! This Thursday, March 14, the next in our ongoing series of Ultimate Music Guides hits the shops. This one is dedicated to The Smiths.

As with previous specials on The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Paul Weller, Led Zeppelin, John Lennon, The Clash, U2 and The Kinks, The Smiths – The Ultimate Music Guide features brand new reviews of all The Smiths’ albums, plus solo excursions from Morrissey and Johnny Marr, written by a stellar team of Uncut writers, plus a ton of truly mind-blowing classic interviews from the archives of Melody Maker and NME, reprinted for the first time in years.

Among them are a few Smiths pieces I wrote for Melody Maker, including a very long interview with Morrissey I did just after the band’s debut album came out, on a wet night in Reading, in the hotel room he was calling home for a night. For the full interview and a lot more brilliant archive content, you’ll need to get hold of the Ultimate Music Guide itself, but here’s an edited version of that original interview I reworked for my Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before page in Uncut.

Have a great week.

Morrissey

Reading: February 1984

Later, when he cheers up, we start talking about death and dying, last breaths, the lights going out, the darkness that in the end takes us all. For the moment, though, Morrissey, in a bleak little hotel room in Reading, where tonight The Smiths are playing at the university on a UK tour to promote their just-released debut album, is sitting on his bed, knees tucked up beneath that singular chin, telling me about his troubled teenage years, something we are going to hear a lot about in the months to come, as The Smiths continue their popular ascendancy and everybody wants to know everything about him.

When he was 18, he initially remembers, his voice an undulation of moping vowels and world-weary sighs, he wanted only to retreat from the world and its daily grit, lived then on a diet of sleeping pills, incapable at times of even getting out of bed to face the day, lost in barbiturate dreams. It had been a bleak old time, by his detailed account, Dickensian in its gloom and debilitating isolation.

“I can’t ever remember deciding that this was the way things should be,” he says. “It just seemed suddenly that the years were passing and I was peering out from behind the bedroom curtains. It was the kind of quite dangerous isolation that’s totally unhealthy. Most of the teenagers that surrounded me, and the things that pleased them and interested them, well, they bored me stiff. It was like saying, ‘Yes, I see that this is what all teenagers are supposed to do, but I don’t want any part of this drudgery.’

“I can see that talking about it might bore people,” he continues. “It’s like saying, ‘Oh, isn’t life terribly tragic. Please pamper me, I’m awfully delicate.’ It’s that kind of boorishness. But to me, it was like living through the most difficult adolescence imaginable. Because this all becomes quite laughable,” he goes on, indulging in a little titter to emphasise the point he’s making. “Because I wasn’t handicapped in a traditional way. I didn’t have any severe physical disability, therefore the whole thing sounds like pompous twaddle. I just about survived it, let’s just say that.”

As I was saying a moment ago, The Smiths’ first album’s just out and they’re very much the current centre of attention as far as what used to be Melody Maker and the rest of the weekly music press are concerned. Which is what Morrissey always knew they would be.

“I had absolute faith and absolute belief in everything we did, and I really did expect what has happened to us to happen,” he says with quiff-wobbling emphasis. “I was quite frighteningly confident. I knew also that what I had to say could have been construed as boring arrogance. If the music had been weak, I would have felt silly and vulnerable. But since I absolutely believe everything I say about The Smiths, I want to say it as loud as possible.”

How long had Morrissey subscribed to the not disagreeable notion that The Smiths were so totally special?

“For too long!” he fairly shrieks, making me jump. “And this is why when people come up to me and say, ‘Well, it’s happened dramatically quickly for The Smiths,’ I have to disagree. I feel as if I’ve waited a very long time for this. So it’s really quite boring when people say it’s happened perhaps too quickly, because it hasn’t.”

As for what people wrote about him, did he recognise himself in what he read?

“Perhaps in a few paragraphs,” he says, a pained expression on his face as he apparently recalled all those column inches, acres of recent newsprint. “But most of it is just peripheral drivel, and a misquote simply floors me. And that happens so much. I sit down almost daily and wonder why it happens at all. But the positive stuff one always wants to believe, and the insults one always wants not to believe. When one reads of this monster of arrogance, one doesn’t want to feel that one is that person.

“Because,” he continues, nosing ahead, “in reality, I’m all those very boring things: shy, and retiring. But, simply when one is questioned about the group, one becomes terribly, terribly defensive and almost proud. But, in daily life, I’m almost too retiring for comfort.”

So what do you do when you’re not working?

“I just live a terribly solitary life, without any human beings involved whatsoever,” he says, apparently resigned to nights in by the fire, a glass of sherry on the mantelpiece, the wireless murmuring in the background, nothing but the weather for company. “And that to me is almost a perfect situation. I don’t know why exactly… I suppose I’m just terribly selfish. Privacy to me is like a life support machine. I hate mounds of people simply bounding into the room and taking over. So, when the work is finished, I just bolt the door and draw the blinds and dive under the bed.

“It’s essential to me. One must, I find, in order to work seriously, be detached. It’s quite crucial to be a step away from the throng of daily bores and the throng of mordant daily life.”

Are you afraid of relationships, of letting people get too close to you or you to them?

“It’s not really fear,” he says by way of considered reply. “I just don’t really have a tremendously strong belief that relationships can work. I’m really quite convinced that they don’t. And if they do, it’s really quite terribly brief and sporadic. It’s just something, really, that I eradicated from my life quite a few years ago, and I saw things more clearly afterwards.

“I always found it particularly unenjoyable,” Morrissey says, and he’s talking about sex now. “But that again is something that’s totally associated with my past and the particular views I have. I wouldn’t stand on a box and say, ‘Look, this is the way to do it, break off that relationship at once!’ But, for me, it was the right decision. And it’s one that I stand by and I’m not ashamed of or embarrassed by. It was simply provoked by a series of very blunt and thankfully brief and horrendous experiences that made me decide upon abstaining, and it seemed quite an easy and natural decision.”

The week that we meet, the papers have been full of other people’s opinions about The Smiths. What did Morrissey himself have to say about the record?

“I am ready,” he says, “to be burned at the stake in total defence of it. It means so much to me that I could never explain, however long you gave me. It becomes almost difficult, and one is just simply swamped in emotion about the whole thing. It’s getting to the point where I almost can’t even talk about it, which many people will see as an absolute blessing. It just seems absolutely perfect to me. For me,” he announces with a flourish that nearly sets the curtains on fire, “it seems to convey exactly what I wanted it to.”

_

It’s a busy day in the Uncut office, but I’ve just time to post about the line-up that’s just been confirmed for this year’s Sundance London festival.

Following on from last year’s festival – which included a rare appearance in London from T-Bone Burnett – Uncut readers can expect some good gear again this time, not least an appearance by The Eagles, a documentary about Muscle Shoals and Steve Coogan’s new film. Elsewhere, there’s an “electro rock opera” from Peaches, and panels featuring David Arnold and – God help us – Jimmy Carr.

Anyway, here’s some of the highlights of what to expect at the festival this year.

History of the Eagles Part One

(Director: Alison Ellwood)

Members of The Eagles – not sure which ones, mind – will be on hand on Thursday, April 25 to participate in an onstage Q&A following the screening of Alson Ellwood’s documentary, History Of The Eagles Part One, which features a reliably strong mix of interviews with the band members, unseen archive footage and

the band’s own home movies. (Incidentally, Parts One and Two will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on April 29).

25 April – 9.00pm + Q&A

27 April – 11.30am

Muscle Shoals

(Director: Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier)

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Steve Winwood, Wilson Pickett and, ah, Bono queue up to pay tribute to Muscle Shoals, the legendary recording studio in Alabama, and Rick Hall, who founded the studio.

25 April – 5.30pm

27 April – 6.00pm

28 April – 2.30pm

The Look Of Love

(Director: Michael Winterbottom)

Winterbottom’s fourth project with Steve Coogan is a typically loose biopic of Soho porn baron, Paul Raymond. The vibe is similar to 24 Hour Party People. Fans of British comedy note: the sight of The Thick Of It’s Chris Addison with a curly perm and beard is something to behold.

25 April – 6.00pm

The festival runs at London’s O2 Arena from April 25 – 28. Tickets and the full line-up can be found here.