Just before the release of 2007’s Era Vulgaris, Uncut’s Jaan Uhelzski headed out to California to see if head wrangler Josh Homme could keep the party going when the group’s hedonistic regulars had been barred…
ARE WE ROLLING?
Before meeting him for the first time recently for the feature in this month's issue, I read a lot of interviews with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker in which he was variously cast as a brooding outsider, a sullen introvert, generally moody, an outcast, someone on the edge of things, inclined to solitary misery.
“I think I was reaching quite high from the beginning. I may not have had any right to be, but I was. I was always interested in people that were older than me and I looked up to them – people really from a different era to me: Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, even writers like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I wasn’t particularly influenced by my contemporaries. They weren’t very good.”
The last time I had occasion to write about my old friend BP Fallon in Uncut was in March, 2010, when he’d just released his debut single, produced by Jack White and released by Jack’s Third Man Records as the first in the label’s new Spoken Word-Instructional record Series. “Fame #9” was backed with “BP Fallon Interview By Jack White” and “I Believe In Elvis Presley”, on which White played some viperish slide guitar, with The Raconteurs’ Patrick Keeler on drums. There was also a video, featuring some of BP’s many friends, including Kevin Shields, Bobby Gillespie and Gemma Hayes.
Storm Thorgerson has died, aged 69.
His family released a statement earlier today (April 18) saying he died peacefully earlier in the day, surrounded by family and friends. It read:
"He had been ill for some time with cancer though he had made a remarkable recovery from his stroke in 2003. He is survived by his mother Vanji, his son Bill, his wife Barbie Antonis and her two children Adam and Georgia."
When I first started reading what used to be Melody Maker, in a time now shrouded not so much in what are usually called the mists of time as they are in a fog as dense as anything that might gather over Dogger Bank, I used to accept its weekly delivery in the manner of some kind of jackal, cur or otherwise fanged and ravenous critter.
Original Yardbirds members Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja take us through their career in pictures in the latest Uncut, dated April 2013 and out now. Jeff Beck, perhaps the band’s most explosive lead guitarist, took on questions from Uncut readers and famous fans in our March 2010 issue (Take 154), answering queries on haircuts, hot rods and playing with, er, Beverley Craven… Interview: John Lewis__________________________
It’s easy – and probably useful, sometimes – to lambast major labels for what looks from the outside like chronic short-termism. The climate is, understandably I guess, a neurotic one, and those days are long gone when labels would work long-term with a select group of trophy artists, whose usefulness to the company was more silvery and nebulous, more about cachet than quick profit.
