Page 563 – UNCUT

The Beach Boys – Live In Concert

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4th December 2012

The 50th Anniversary Tour captured on film... Perhaps the most surprising thing about this concert from The Beach Boys' 50th Anniversary Tour - apart from the decision not to include their greatest song ("God Only Knows") - is how engaged Brian Wilson appears. In recent years, both on stage and on telly, Brian seems to have moved from apparent disenchantment to actual hatred of performance, glowering darkly at audiences for making him take the stage at all, and beetling swiftly offstage before the last chords have resounded. But at this concert, he even smiles a few times, and the sheer pleasure he takes in ensuring the harmonies are up to scratch speaks well of his professionalism. These shows represented the first time since 1965 that Brian had accompanied the group for an entire tour. The nostalgic tone is set by opening with "Do It Again", before a couple of less-popular surf numbers - "Catch A Wave" and "Hawaii" - heralds the first standout, a rare outing for "Marcella" featuring Brian's lead vocal and the first of several guitar breaks from David Marks, who's assumed Carl Wilson's duties. The first of several new songs from this year's That's Why God Made The Radio - inexplicably, their highest-charting album since 1965's Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) - follows: "Isn't It Time" has decent harmonies and a fine lead vocal from Al Jardine, but the lame lyric doesn't bring the same zest to nostalgia as "Do It Again". A car medley climaxes with "I Get Around", the ne plus ultra of cruising anthems, before Brian brings an unusual clarity to an unimpeachable "Heroes And Villains". Then the familiar home-movie footage of hijinks in the pool accompanies euphoric versions of "Sloop John B" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice", perhaps the high point of the set. It's followed by some more new songs, then "Sail On Sailor", which Brian sings with such exaggerated hand gestures it looks like chair-bound physical jerks at the retirement home, God bless him. "Good Vibrations" and "California Girls" confirm how much they rely on Jeff Foskett's falsetto these days, while "Kokomo" exposes how much they miss Carl's breathy timbre – which may be why they skip "God Only Knows". The evening draws to a close with a somewhat arthritic "Rock'n'Roll Music" and more euphoric "Fun, Fun, Fun": all in all, a decent but slightly frustrating representation of one side of The Beach Boys which strenuously avoids the more sensitive corners of their catalogue - no "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", no "You Still Believe In Me", no "Please Let Me Wonder", no "Don't Worry, Baby", no "Disney Girls"; not even "In My Room". It's as if they're straining a touch too much to appear fit and full of beans, which at 50 is understandable but inelegant. Clearly, it's a far more truncated set than the 51-song Red Rocks Amphitheatre show previously announced for DVD release. Plans are underway for another tour next year, accompanied by another CD based around material written by Brian around the time of his Imagination album, which given that album's lacklustre tone, doesn't bode too well. But Wilson was reportedly surprised by Mike Love's decision to play further dates in October with a budget version of The Beach Boys comprising just himself, Bruce Johnston and a smaller band than that used on these shows; whether this will torpedo future reunion plans remains to be seen. EXTRAS: A standard bio-doc, Doin' It Again, whose most interesting parts are footage of Brian, drummer Hal Blaine and the Boys during sessions for "Good Vibrations", and Brian's revelation - as much a shock to Mike, Al and the others as it is to us - that it was Carl's idea to use theremin and cello on the song. You learn something every day. Andy Gill

The 50th Anniversary Tour captured on film…

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this concert from The Beach Boys‘ 50th Anniversary Tour – apart from the decision not to include their greatest song (“God Only Knows”) – is how engaged Brian Wilson appears. In recent years, both on stage and on telly, Brian seems to have moved from apparent disenchantment to actual hatred of performance, glowering darkly at audiences for making him take the stage at all, and beetling swiftly offstage before the last chords have resounded. But at this concert, he even smiles a few times, and the sheer pleasure he takes in ensuring the harmonies are up to scratch speaks well of his professionalism.

These shows represented the first time since 1965 that Brian had accompanied the group for an entire tour. The nostalgic tone is set by opening with “Do It Again”, before a couple of less-popular surf numbers – “Catch A Wave” and “Hawaii” – heralds the first standout, a rare outing for “Marcella” featuring Brian’s lead vocal and the first of several guitar breaks from David Marks, who’s assumed Carl Wilson‘s duties. The first of several new songs from this year’s That’s Why God Made The Radio – inexplicably, their highest-charting album since 1965’s Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) – follows: “Isn’t It Time” has decent harmonies and a fine lead vocal from Al Jardine, but the lame lyric doesn’t bring the same zest to nostalgia as “Do It Again”. A car medley climaxes with “I Get Around”, the ne plus ultra of cruising anthems, before Brian brings an unusual clarity to an unimpeachable “Heroes And Villains”. Then the familiar home-movie footage of hijinks in the pool accompanies euphoric versions of “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, perhaps the high point of the set.

It’s followed by some more new songs, then “Sail On Sailor”, which Brian sings with such exaggerated hand gestures it looks like chair-bound physical jerks at the retirement home, God bless him. “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls” confirm how much they rely on Jeff Foskett’s falsetto these days, while “Kokomo” exposes how much they miss Carl’s breathy timbre – which may be why they skip “God Only Knows”. The evening draws to a close with a somewhat arthritic “Rock’n’Roll Music” and more euphoric “Fun, Fun, Fun”: all in all, a decent but slightly frustrating representation of one side of The Beach Boys which strenuously avoids the more sensitive corners of their catalogue – no “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”, no “You Still Believe In Me”, no “Please Let Me Wonder”, no “Don’t Worry, Baby”, no “Disney Girls”; not even “In My Room”. It’s as if they’re straining a touch too much to appear fit and full of beans, which at 50 is understandable but inelegant. Clearly, it’s a far more truncated set than the 51-song Red Rocks Amphitheatre show previously announced for DVD release.

Plans are underway for another tour next year, accompanied by another CD based around material written by Brian around the time of his Imagination album, which given that album’s lacklustre tone, doesn’t bode too well. But Wilson was reportedly surprised by Mike Love’s decision to play further dates in October with a budget version of The Beach Boys comprising just himself, Bruce Johnston and a smaller band than that used on these shows; whether this will torpedo future reunion plans remains to be seen.

EXTRAS: A standard bio-doc, Doin’ It Again, whose most interesting parts are footage of Brian, drummer Hal Blaine and the Boys during sessions for “Good Vibrations”, and Brian’s revelation – as much a shock to Mike, Al and the others as it is to us – that it was Carl’s idea to use theremin and cello on the song. You learn something every day.

Andy Gill

Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards: ‘Sometimes I despise Mick Jagger’

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3rd December 2012

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Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards: ‘Sometimes I despise Mick Jagger’

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have spoken about their working relationship, revealing that they are somewhere between brothers and a married couple. In a new interview with Esquire, Richards says that he often "despises" his Rolling Stones bandmate but that ultimately he loves him like family. Sp...

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have spoken about their working relationship, revealing that they are somewhere between brothers and a married couple.

In a new interview with Esquire, Richards says that he often “despises” his Rolling Stones bandmate but that ultimately he loves him like family. Speaking to the magazine, Richards says: “You’ve got two very volatile guys who’ve been through a whole lot of stuff in their life and still somehow manage. Sometimes I despise the man, others, I love that man so much. It’s like your brother. I never had one, so he’s my brother. That’s the way it is, bless his heart.”

Mick Jagger, meanwhile, seems less keen on the idea of being ‘married’ to Richards, stating: “People say the stupidest things and that’s one of the dumbest because it’s completely different from being married when you work with someone. I work with Keith and I’ve known him for a long time.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Richards shows just what the band means to him, comparing The Rolling Stones to every day essentials such as food and water. “What is there in life? There’s the air you breathe and the food you eat… and then there’s The Rolling Stones. They’ve just been there forever, for them, from their point of view. The world wouldn’t be complete without The Rolling Stones!”

The Rolling Stones played the second of their two London concerts last week with both Eric Clapton and Florence Welch joining them onstage at the O2 Arena.

Led Zeppelin meet Barack Obama at the White House

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3rd December 2012

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Led Zeppelin meet Barack Obama at the White House

Led Zeppelin have been honoured at the White House by Barack Obama for their contribution to America culture and the arts – watch a video of it below. Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page were among a group of artists who received Kennedy Centre Honours, Sky News reports. David Letterman ...

Led Zeppelin have been honoured at the White House by Barack Obama for their contribution to America culture and the arts – watch a video of it below.

Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page were among a group of artists who received Kennedy Centre Honours, Sky News reports. David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman also received the award.

“When Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham burst onto the musical scene in the late 1960s, the world never saw it coming,” Obama said in his tribute.

“There was this singer with a mane like a lion and a voice like a banshee, a guitar prodigy who left people’s jaws on the floor, a versatile bassist who was equally at home on the keyboards, a drummer who played like his life depended on it,” he continued.

He added: “It’s been said that a generation of young people survived teenage angst with a pair of headphones and a Zeppelin album … but even now, 32 years after John Bonham’s passing – and we all I think appreciate the fact – the Zeppelin legacy lives on.”

The president then thanked band for behaving themselves at the White House given their history of “hotel rooms being trashed and mayhem all around”.

He finished his speech, saying: “We honour Led Zeppelin for making us all feel young, and for showing us that some guys who are not completely youthful can still rock!”

Led Zeppelin released their live DVD Celebration Day on November 19. The film is a concert of the band’s 2007 reunion show at London’s O2 Arena.

Scott Walker – Bish Bosch

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3rd December 2012

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Tubax! Zercon! Ceausescu! Walker’s meta-textual journey continues... Scott Walker famously never listens to his own records once they are completed; and at times during Bish Bosch – particularly when adrift amid the testing 21 minutes of “SDSS 1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)”, a song every bit as perplexing as its title – I’m with Scott on this one, to be honest. Rarely, I’ll warrant, have such formidable battalions of sonic weaponry – including eight different guitar tracks, rams horns and the tubax, a bizarre hybrid of tuba and bass saxophone, of which only two exist in this country – been marshalled in the service of music destined to be played so infrequently. But this, of course, is all in keeping with the Scott Walker mystique, involving an aura of exacting asceticism combined with prickly, uneasy, often alarming music and lyrics that resemble the most cripplingly cryptic of crosswords. Some tracks on Bish Bosch come with copious footnotes attached, like an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem, though mercifully Walker at least sticks to the English alphabet here. And throughout, there’s an evident delight in lexicographical obscurity that echoes James Joyce or Will Self: no bad thing in itself, though when allied to the sometimes impermeable, abstract constructions, the results can be frustratingly opaque. In an era when every two-bit micro-celebrity begs for one’s attention in ever more demeaning and salacious ways, Scott Walker just seems to shrug his shoulders, turn his back and walk away, unconcerned whether anyone actually bothers listening or not. Which does tend to tweak the interest of those brave souls who like a challenge. It’s tempting, then, to search for some unifying principle or theme linking the album’s nine lengthy tracks together; and none seems more appropriate than the Shakespearian coinage “What a piece of work is a man”, Hamlet’s ironical assessment of humanity, and its linked apprehension of the surrounding world as “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”. Bish Bosch is an album suffused with corporeal disgust and philosophical disquiet, in which mankind, the pinnacle of creation, is reduced to little more than a bag of bones and soft tissue, inhabitant of a wasteland realm long abandoned by its creator. Yes, it’s that much fun. Actually, it’s more fun than you might expect, Walker’s characteristic seriousness tempered occasionally with a gallows humour and bawdy ribaldry of which Shakespeare’s audience would have approved. The complex “SDSS 1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” is studded with a series of gratuitous insults, punctuated by passages of silence in which the contempt hangs like a fart: “Look, don’t go to a mind reader, go to a palmist; I know you’ve got a palm”; “Does your face hurt? Cuz it’s killing me”. And the bodily disgust so elegantly expressed in “Epizootics!” is suddenly interrupted by “Take that accidentally in the bollocks for a start”, a rough-house line all the more hilarious for being delivered in Walker’s aloof, academic tones. The album title makes similarly broad-humoured play with Hieronymus Bosch, the artist whose Garden Of Earthly Delights offers a cavalcade of barbarous carnality, humanity reduced to meat and unfettered malice at the hands of ghastly demonic monsters. Accordingly, death stalks these songs, from the opening “‘See You Don’t Bump His Head’” – a title borrowed from lines cut from From Here To Eternity, Montgomery Clift addressing the soldiers carrying the corpse of Frank Sinatra’s character – through to the closing “The Day The ‘Conducator’ Died”, whose title references the abrupt execution of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Its wanly repeated refrain describing the impatient firing-squad, “And nobody waited for ‘fire’”, is this album’s equivalent of Tilt’s haunting “I’ll give you 21, 21”. Elsewhere, Walker punctures the more hifalutin coinings of “Corps De Blah” – “Epicanthic knobbler of ninon, arch to Macaronic mahout in the mascon” is not untypical – with more gaseous extrusions, “sphincters tooting our tune”. It’s just as varied musically, building from an a cappella intro through isolated, fragmentary noises before a barking cuica squeak and organ dischord are suddenly barged along by determined but intermittent drums. Shrill bursts of strings like shrieking sirens, a demonic twinkle of abstract zithering, bee-buzz raspberry farts and dentist-drill whines, a grisly collusion of pain and bathos, are punctuated by merciful lacunae of silence, each more tantalising than the last, until the final image of “double-bladed axe poised over shoulder” is accompanied by the metallic swish of machete blades. Off with his head! The same swishing blades accompany Walker’s rudely disputatious dismissals of Biblical claims in “Tar”, the aural equivalent of Occam’s Razor slicing God from the universe. “There but for the grace of God goes God,” he mutters. Elsewhere, “Phrasing” uses some stark, angular guitar riffing, Latin percussion and a stop/start dynamic alongside more meaty metaphors to accompany a glum meditation which opens with the claim “Pain is not alone” and ends sourly with “Here’s to a lousy life”. “Epizootics!” employs the deep, burring drone of tubax, spiky skronk guitar and BJ Cole’s mutant pedal-steel tones over a fast galley-slave tattoo and errant fanfares of trumpets to animate a lyric of tropical putrefaction, “greasy black hairlines” and “melianomed ankles”, in which a fat chap is vividly (and revoltingly) depicted as “Adepocere in a zoot, sloshing, karat, ballooning down the street”. “SDSS 1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” is undoubtedly the album’s centrepiece, a colossal parade of grotesque imagery whose cryptic lyric embraces classical and Biblical allusion, private jokes, astronomy and anatomy, with contemporary curiosity alongside atavistic antiquity. It remains the most impervious to explication – I’m still no clearer, for instance, about the strings of Roman numerals that are recited at various junctures, nor about any bar the most obvious connection between Attila The Hun’s dwarf jester (Zercon) and the brown dwarf star of the title – and its 21-minute trail of sonic exclamations, textures and evocations is the most abstract of the album, effectively a Foley-board of audio effects as much as a musical composition. But at least there’s plenty of meat to work with, to use the apt terminology; all that’s required is to pluck up the inclination to want to hear it for a fourth and fifth time. Andy Gill

Tubax! Zercon! Ceausescu! Walker’s meta-textual journey continues…

Scott Walker famously never listens to his own records once they are completed; and at times during Bish Bosch – particularly when adrift amid the testing 21 minutes of “SDSS 1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)”, a song every bit as perplexing as its title – I’m with Scott on this one, to be honest. Rarely, I’ll warrant, have such formidable battalions of sonic weaponry – including eight different guitar tracks, rams horns and the tubax, a bizarre hybrid of tuba and bass saxophone, of which only two exist in this country – been marshalled in the service of music destined to be played so infrequently.

But this, of course, is all in keeping with the Scott Walker mystique, involving an aura of exacting asceticism combined with prickly, uneasy, often alarming music and lyrics that resemble the most cripplingly cryptic of crosswords. Some tracks on Bish Bosch come with copious footnotes attached, like an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem, though mercifully Walker at least sticks to the English alphabet here. And throughout, there’s an evident delight in lexicographical obscurity that echoes James Joyce or Will Self: no bad thing in itself, though when allied to the sometimes impermeable, abstract constructions, the results can be frustratingly opaque. In an era when every two-bit micro-celebrity begs for one’s attention in ever more demeaning and salacious ways, Scott Walker just seems to shrug his shoulders, turn his back and walk away, unconcerned whether anyone actually bothers listening or not. Which does tend to tweak the interest of those brave souls who like a challenge.

It’s tempting, then, to search for some unifying principle or theme linking the album’s nine lengthy tracks together; and none seems more appropriate than the Shakespearian coinage “What a piece of work is a man”, Hamlet’s ironical assessment of humanity, and its linked apprehension of the surrounding world as “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”. Bish Bosch is an album suffused with corporeal disgust and philosophical disquiet, in which mankind, the pinnacle of creation, is reduced to little more than a bag of bones and soft tissue, inhabitant of a wasteland realm long abandoned by its creator. Yes, it’s that much fun.

Actually, it’s more fun than you might expect, Walker’s characteristic seriousness tempered occasionally with a gallows humour and bawdy ribaldry of which Shakespeare’s audience would have approved. The complex “SDSS 1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” is studded with a series of gratuitous insults, punctuated by passages of silence in which the contempt hangs like a fart: “Look, don’t go to a mind reader, go to a palmist; I know you’ve got a palm”; “Does your face hurt? Cuz it’s killing me”. And the bodily disgust so elegantly expressed in “Epizootics!” is suddenly interrupted by “Take that accidentally in the bollocks for a start”, a rough-house line all the more hilarious for being delivered in Walker’s aloof, academic tones.

The album title makes similarly broad-humoured play with Hieronymus Bosch, the artist whose Garden Of Earthly Delights offers a cavalcade of barbarous carnality, humanity reduced to meat and unfettered malice at the hands of ghastly demonic monsters. Accordingly, death stalks these songs, from the opening “‘See You Don’t Bump His Head’” – a title borrowed from lines cut from From Here To Eternity, Montgomery Clift addressing the soldiers carrying the corpse of Frank Sinatra’s character – through to the closing “The Day The ‘Conducator’ Died”, whose title references the abrupt execution of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Its wanly repeated refrain describing the impatient firing-squad, “And nobody waited for ‘fire’”, is this album’s equivalent of Tilt’s haunting “I’ll give you 21, 21”.

Elsewhere, Walker punctures the more hifalutin coinings of “Corps De Blah” – “Epicanthic knobbler of ninon, arch to Macaronic mahout in the mascon” is not untypical – with more gaseous extrusions, “sphincters tooting our tune”. It’s just as varied musically, building from an a cappella intro through isolated, fragmentary noises before a barking cuica squeak and organ dischord are suddenly barged along by determined but intermittent drums. Shrill bursts of strings like shrieking sirens, a demonic twinkle of abstract zithering, bee-buzz raspberry farts and dentist-drill whines, a grisly collusion of pain and bathos, are punctuated by merciful lacunae of silence, each more tantalising than the last, until the final image of “double-bladed axe poised over shoulder” is accompanied by the metallic swish of machete blades. Off with his head! The same swishing blades accompany Walker’s rudely disputatious dismissals of Biblical claims in “Tar”, the aural equivalent of Occam’s Razor slicing God from the universe. “There but for the grace of God goes God,” he mutters.

Elsewhere, “Phrasing” uses some stark, angular guitar riffing, Latin percussion and a stop/start dynamic alongside more meaty metaphors to accompany a glum meditation which opens with the claim “Pain is not alone” and ends sourly with “Here’s to a lousy life”. “Epizootics!” employs the deep, burring drone of tubax, spiky skronk guitar and BJ Cole’s mutant pedal-steel tones over a fast galley-slave tattoo and errant fanfares of trumpets to animate a lyric of tropical putrefaction, “greasy black hairlines” and “melianomed ankles”, in which a fat chap is vividly (and revoltingly) depicted as “Adepocere in a zoot, sloshing, karat, ballooning down the street”. “SDSS 1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” is undoubtedly the album’s centrepiece, a colossal parade of grotesque imagery whose cryptic lyric embraces classical and Biblical allusion, private jokes, astronomy and anatomy, with contemporary curiosity alongside atavistic antiquity. It remains the most impervious to explication – I’m still no clearer, for instance, about the strings of Roman numerals that are recited at various junctures, nor about any bar the most obvious connection between Attila The Hun’s dwarf jester (Zercon) and the brown dwarf star of the title – and its 21-minute trail of sonic exclamations, textures and evocations is the most abstract of the album, effectively a Foley-board of audio effects as much as a musical composition. But at least there’s plenty of meat to work with, to use the apt terminology; all that’s required is to pluck up the inclination to want to hear it for a fourth and fifth time.

Andy Gill

Some notes on Uncut’s Top 75 of 2012

John Mulvey

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3rd December 2012

0

As many of you will have seen by now, the current issue of Uncut features our Top 75 albums of 2012 and, as usual, there’s been a fair amount of comment online about the list. I’m going to try not to be too defensive about this, but as the person who compiled the list, I thought it might be useful to post a few notes that’ll hopefully clarify one or two issues that have been raised. First off, I say compiled, but the Uncut chart is actually a straightforward vote, with 45 of the magazine’s staff and writers contributing. This year, they submitted Top 20s, and I allocated 20 points to their top album and, yep, one point to their Number 20. Leonard Cohen ended up with 167 points, Carter Tutti Void with 31. I wouldn’t presume to guess how some other mags compile their charts, but this is the way I’ve handled the job at Uncut for the past few years. Second, I understand and appreciate that it’s frustrating to see end-of-year charts appear at the end of November, with the chance that one or two late releases won’t make the cut (I guess, this year, Scott Walker’s “Bish Bosch” is probably an auspicious absentee in the Uncut rundown). I would say, though, that thanks to advance promos received by most of Uncut’s writers, we do tend to cover off most of these records – and also, that I suspect most readers would prefer a slightly compromised list in the pre-Christmas issue rather than the post-Christmas one. It’s a publishing expediency, of course – everyone does it – and I imagine we’d worry about list fatigue if we published our chart so much later than everyone else. I’m actually carrying out a small experiment at the moment, asking our writers to resubmit lists of their favourite albums of 2011, to see how much their thoughts have changed in the intervening 12 months, and to gauge the impact of those end-of-year releases (last year, the Black Keys’ “El Camino” may have been the most significant). I’ll publish the reconfigured Top 50 in the next issue of Uncut: should be interesting reading. As for the constitution of our chart this year, I agree that it is rather bizarre so many of the top albums are by artists of pensionable age: six, I think, out of the Top 10. To make clear, this isn’t the result of some editorial policy, merely the outcome of our voting. Perhaps 2012 saw a lot of what might be termed heritage artists releasing albums – though not all of them (John Cale, ZZ Top and The Beach Boys spring to mind) made the list - compared with 2011. In the 2011 Top 50, the comparable artists are much fewer – Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, Paul Simon, Gil Scott Heron, Kate Bush – which I suspect is attributable to release patterns rather than any conscious change of policy on the part of the writers or Uncut in general. There’s also, I think, a bit of a shortage of newer bands this year who enjoy something approaching consensual approval from our varied writers. Nevertheless, it’s still worth pointing out that artists like Ty Segall, Grimes, Sharon Van Etten, Frank Ocean, Julia Holter, The Allah-Las, Alabama Shakes and so on did do pretty well here; in fact, I’d estimate that around 30 of the 75 records were made by artists more or less under 30, which hardly suggests we’re ignoring younger talent, or indeed that younger talent making the music Uncut cares about is drying up in some way. I guess what I’m proudest about, with regards to this year’s list, is that it reinforces – very, very forcefully, it’s true – a core belief that many of us here share: namely that it’s wrong to assume that there is a ‘right’ time for musicians to stop releasing their music; that notions of diminishing powers and so forth are crude generalisations, and ones that we don’t automatically attach to actors, directors, writers. If Uncut’s Top 75 is extreme in that direction, it’s no more extreme than, say, the 2012 Mercury shortlist: a competition allegedly for the best British album of the year, which assiduously seemed to focus on new artists and debut albums (only Richard Hawley could in any way be considered a grizzled vet in that company). Much of the music business’ energies are channelled towards launching new artists, which is understandable enough and, undoubtedly, can be an exciting way of consuming music. But it can also be chronically short-termist, and disdainful of the way many people engage with artists, and the way many artists develop and sustain careers. If this year’s Uncut list stands as an implicit rejection of that impatience, then that’s fine by me. Feel free to disagree, of course. Please use the Facebook comments box below, and I’ll try to keep involved in the debate. For what it’s worth, I’ll also be posting a long list of my 2012 favourites here in the next week or so. Thanks. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

As many of you will have seen by now, the current issue of Uncut features our Top 75 albums of 2012 and, as usual, there’s been a fair amount of comment online about the list. I’m going to try not to be too defensive about this, but as the person who compiled the list, I thought it might be useful to post a few notes that’ll hopefully clarify one or two issues that have been raised.

First off, I say compiled, but the Uncut chart is actually a straightforward vote, with 45 of the magazine’s staff and writers contributing. This year, they submitted Top 20s, and I allocated 20 points to their top album and, yep, one point to their Number 20. Leonard Cohen ended up with 167 points, Carter Tutti Void with 31. I wouldn’t presume to guess how some other mags compile their charts, but this is the way I’ve handled the job at Uncut for the past few years.

Second, I understand and appreciate that it’s frustrating to see end-of-year charts appear at the end of November, with the chance that one or two late releases won’t make the cut (I guess, this year, Scott Walker’s “Bish Bosch” is probably an auspicious absentee in the Uncut rundown). I would say, though, that thanks to advance promos received by most of Uncut’s writers, we do tend to cover off most of these records – and also, that I suspect most readers would prefer a slightly compromised list in the pre-Christmas issue rather than the post-Christmas one. It’s a publishing expediency, of course – everyone does it – and I imagine we’d worry about list fatigue if we published our chart so much later than everyone else.

I’m actually carrying out a small experiment at the moment, asking our writers to resubmit lists of their favourite albums of 2011, to see how much their thoughts have changed in the intervening 12 months, and to gauge the impact of those end-of-year releases (last year, the Black Keys’ “El Camino” may have been the most significant). I’ll publish the reconfigured Top 50 in the next issue of Uncut: should be interesting reading.

As for the constitution of our chart this year, I agree that it is rather bizarre so many of the top albums are by artists of pensionable age: six, I think, out of the Top 10. To make clear, this isn’t the result of some editorial policy, merely the outcome of our voting. Perhaps 2012 saw a lot of what might be termed heritage artists releasing albums – though not all of them (John Cale, ZZ Top and The Beach Boys spring to mind) made the list – compared with 2011. In the 2011 Top 50, the comparable artists are much fewer – Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, Paul Simon, Gil Scott Heron, Kate Bush – which I suspect is attributable to release patterns rather than any conscious change of policy on the part of the writers or Uncut in general. There’s also, I think, a bit of a shortage of newer bands this year who enjoy something approaching consensual approval from our varied writers.

Nevertheless, it’s still worth pointing out that artists like Ty Segall, Grimes, Sharon Van Etten, Frank Ocean, Julia Holter, The Allah-Las, Alabama Shakes and so on did do pretty well here; in fact, I’d estimate that around 30 of the 75 records were made by artists more or less under 30, which hardly suggests we’re ignoring younger talent, or indeed that younger talent making the music Uncut cares about is drying up in some way.

I guess what I’m proudest about, with regards to this year’s list, is that it reinforces – very, very forcefully, it’s true – a core belief that many of us here share: namely that it’s wrong to assume that there is a ‘right’ time for musicians to stop releasing their music; that notions of diminishing powers and so forth are crude generalisations, and ones that we don’t automatically attach to actors, directors, writers. If Uncut’s Top 75 is extreme in that direction, it’s no more extreme than, say, the 2012 Mercury shortlist: a competition allegedly for the best British album of the year, which assiduously seemed to focus on new artists and debut albums (only Richard Hawley could in any way be considered a grizzled vet in that company).

Much of the music business’ energies are channelled towards launching new artists, which is understandable enough and, undoubtedly, can be an exciting way of consuming music. But it can also be chronically short-termist, and disdainful of the way many people engage with artists, and the way many artists develop and sustain careers. If this year’s Uncut list stands as an implicit rejection of that impatience, then that’s fine by me.

Feel free to disagree, of course. Please use the Facebook comments box below, and I’ll try to keep involved in the debate. For what it’s worth, I’ll also be posting a long list of my 2012 favourites here in the next week or so. Thanks.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds debut new single ‘We No Who U R’ – listen

News

Uncut

-

3rd December 2012

0

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds debut new single ‘We No Who U R’ – listen

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have debuted their new single ‘We No Who U R’. The track, which is taken from the band’s forthcoming new album ‘Push The Sky Away’, is currently streaming online via Rolling Stone. It is also released as a digital download today (December 3). Push The Sky Aw...

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have debuted their new single ‘We No Who U R’.

The track, which is taken from the band’s forthcoming new album ‘Push The Sky Away’, is currently streaming online via Rolling Stone. It is also released as a digital download today (December 3).

Push The Sky Away will be Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ fifteenth studio album and is set for release on February 19, 2013. It follows 2008’s Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! and was recorded by regular Bad Seeds and Grinderman collaborator Nick Launay at La Fabrique studios, a 19th-century mansion in the south of France. CD, vinyl, deluxe CD and DVD and a special super deluxe box set of the album are all available to pre-order now at Nickcave.com.

The box set is priced at £90 and includes a CD album and vinyl album, a DVD with specially created visuals by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and two exclusive 7″ vinyls containing non album bonus tracks. It also features a 120-page replica of Nick Cave’s handwritten notebooks and a numbered certificate of authenticity signed by Nick Cave.

Speaking about the album, Nick Cave said: “If I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children, then ‘Push The Sky Away’ is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren [Ellis]’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat.”

The band have announced North American shows for 2013 and are rumoured to be playing the Coachella Festival in California in April.

Jack White: ‘I will always miss The White Stripes’

News

Uncut

-

3rd December 2012

0

Jack White: ‘I will always miss The White Stripes’

Jack White has admitted that he will “always miss” his old band The White Stripes. White released his solo debut LP, Blunderbuss, earlier this year, but in an interview with Esquire he said he would always be nostalgic about the band with which he made his name. He said: "Yeah, I always will...

Jack White has admitted that he will “always miss” his old band The White Stripes.

White released his solo debut LP, Blunderbuss, earlier this year, but in an interview with Esquire he said he would always be nostalgic about the band with which he made his name.

He said: “Yeah, I always will miss The White Stripes. My dad’s dead; it’s like saying do you miss your dad ? Of course, I always will. How could I not?”

White also condemned reality TV and Twitter, stating: “The goal of modern celebrity is to make yourself into the lowest common denominator. ‘Hey, I’m a guy just like you. I like a beer, a football game’. Especially in reality television, you’ll see people will go so far as to make a fool out of themselves just to prove that.

Twitter is the most perfect example of modern living,” he added. “I think the only people who should have [Twitter accounts] are comedians. Because it’s all about one-liners.”

The Rolling Stones, London 02, November 29, 2012

Uncut

-

30th November 2012

0

The Rolling Stones, London 02, November 29, 2012

After all the hoo-ha, huff, hysteria and hot air, here, finally, are The Rolling Stones doing what they do even better than raising the collective temperature with impertinent ticket prices, something they seem to have been doing at least since their 1969 American tour, nothing new in the Stones being accused of commercial banditry and the cynical exploitation of their fans, on whose behalf so many complaints have been indignantly voiced since the 50 And Counting dates in London and New York were announced. Why don’t they celebrate their half-centenary with, say, a free concert, the cry went up in some quarters, and let more people have a chance to see them, and for nothing too? Well, when they tried that in 1969, look where it got them: Altamont. Anyway, here we at the O2, and the Stones are something like 45 minutes into a 23-song, more than two hour set, and they’re playing a version of “Miss You” that’s turning into a communal roar. Mick’s got a guitar strapped on that he’s not really playing, although he looks fabulous posing with it. Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards, until now both somewhat withdrawn, even when a couple of numbers earlier they were trading solos with Eric Clapton on a torrid version of Muddy Waters’ “Champagne And Reefer”, are both now increasingly animated, starting finally, perhaps, to loosen up, relax into a famously familiar groove. The miracle of the moment is that it hasn’t actually taken them longer to locate. This is after all only the second time they’ve played together in five years or whatever it is, to which extent there’s a certain early stiffness, something almost stifled, about “Get off Of My Cloud”, with its vaguely unconvincing new funkiness, and professionally dispatched but weirdly remote takes on “I Wanna Be Your Man” and “The Last Time”, Keith noticeably muted on the latter. Things had picked up spectacularly with a dramatic “Paint It, Black” whose sinister nihilism was mind-blowingly nailed, driven hard by Charlie Watts and given serpentine lustre by Ronnie Woods’ lubricious guitar lines, Ronnie on mostly terrific form tonight. On Sunday, at the first of these two London shows, Mary J Blige had guested with the Stones on “Gimme Shelter”, which tonight features a striking cameo from Florence Welch, who seems almost giddy with excitement at sharing a stage with them. She gives first Mick and then Ronnie and Keith each a huge hug before quitting the stage, then runs back on, as if she’s forgotten something, which turns out to be Charlie, who also now gets a smothering embrace when she leaps up onto the drum riser and wraps herself around him in a manner that suggests it may take a crowbar and a couple of strong men to detach her. It’s followed by what’s apparently the first live performance of “Lady Jane” since 1967, but it’s from “Miss You”, though, that everything takes off. Ronnie and Keith seem suddenly unburdened, start to really spark, Keith increasingly limber. “One More Shot” and “Doom And Gloom”, the two new numbers recorded for the recent Grrr! Compilation, are played with crackling conviction, Ronnie tearing the place up on the latter, even if neither are truly front-rank Stones songs. Still, it’s the indisputable classics the fans have come to hear, and the Stones are unstinting when it comes to playing them. The last hour or so of the show is therefore the Stones at their most swaggeringly imperial. Bill Wyman comes on for “It’s Only Rock’N’Roll” and an incandescent “Honky Tonk Woman”, a set highlight. Keith’s inevitable ‘solo’ turn, greeted with huge affectionate cheers, features the still-defiant rebel chug of “Before They Make me Run” and a blistering “Happy” and then Mick Taylor joins them for “Midnight Rambler”. Taylor looks like he’s tucked heartily into the backstage sandwiches, a bulky bloke draped in some kind of shawl, but still, as he demonstrates, an amazing guitarist. The rest of the set goes by in something of a blur – “Start Me Up”, followed by “Tumbling Dice”, a hugely raucous “Brown Sugar” and “Sympathy For The Devil” – as the crowd’s hysteria becomes ever more tangible, a surging excitement, something tidal sweeping through the entire crowd, most of whom have now been on their feet for nearly two hours, by which time more than a couple of us are wishing we had a fraction of Jagger’s jaw-dropping stamina, which would be pretty astonishing in a 25-year old, let alone a man of nearly 70, which it is nigh on impossible to believe Jagger will be next year. The London Youth Choir are assembled on either side of the stage for a fabulous “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” meanwhile, is essayed with a delirious abandon that spills over also into a seething “Satisfaction”, Keith and Mick strolling together like debauched boulevardiers along the horseshoe catwalk that partly encircles the VIP mosh-pit at the front of the stage. I’ll be writing more on the Stones at the 02 in the next issue of Uncut, in the meantime, if you were there, let me know what you thought of the show. Set List 1 Get Off of My Cloud 2 I Wanna Be Your Man 3 The Last Time 4 Paint It, Black 5 Gimme Shelter 6 Lady Jane 7 Champagne And Reefer 8 Live With Me 9 Miss You 10 One More Shot 10 Doom And Gloom 11 It’s Only Rock’N’Roll 12 Honky Tonk Woman 13 Before They Make Me Run 14 Happy 15 Midnight Rambler 16 Start Me Up 17 Tumbling Dice 18 Brown Sugar 19 Sympathy For The Devil Encores 20 You can’t Always Get What You Want 21Jumpin’ Jack Flash 23 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction Pic: Phil Wallis

After all the hoo-ha, huff, hysteria and hot air, here, finally, are The Rolling Stones doing what they do even better than raising the collective temperature with impertinent ticket prices, something they seem to have been doing at least since their 1969 American tour, nothing new in the Stones being accused of commercial banditry and the cynical exploitation of their fans, on whose behalf so many complaints have been indignantly voiced since the 50 And Counting dates in London and New York were announced. Why don’t they celebrate their half-centenary with, say, a free concert, the cry went up in some quarters, and let more people have a chance to see them, and for nothing too? Well, when they tried that in 1969, look where it got them: Altamont.

Anyway, here we at the O2, and the Stones are something like 45 minutes into a 23-song, more than two hour set, and they’re playing a version of “Miss You” that’s turning into a communal roar. Mick’s got a guitar strapped on that he’s not really playing, although he looks fabulous posing with it. Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards, until now both somewhat withdrawn, even when a couple of numbers earlier they were trading solos with Eric Clapton on a torrid version of Muddy Waters’ “Champagne And Reefer”, are both now increasingly animated, starting finally, perhaps, to loosen up, relax into a famously familiar groove.

The miracle of the moment is that it hasn’t actually taken them longer to locate. This is after all only the second time they’ve played together in five years or whatever it is, to which extent there’s a certain early stiffness, something almost stifled, about “Get off Of My Cloud”, with its vaguely unconvincing new funkiness, and professionally dispatched but weirdly remote takes on “I Wanna Be Your Man” and “The Last Time”, Keith noticeably muted on the latter.

Things had picked up spectacularly with a dramatic “Paint It, Black” whose sinister nihilism was mind-blowingly nailed, driven hard by Charlie Watts and given serpentine lustre by Ronnie Woods’ lubricious guitar lines, Ronnie on mostly terrific form tonight. On Sunday, at the first of these two London shows, Mary J Blige had guested with the Stones on “Gimme Shelter”, which tonight features a striking cameo from Florence Welch, who seems almost giddy with excitement at sharing a stage with them. She gives first Mick and then Ronnie and Keith each a huge hug before quitting the stage, then runs back on, as if she’s forgotten something, which turns out to be Charlie, who also now gets a smothering embrace when she leaps up onto the drum riser and wraps herself around him in a manner that suggests it may take a crowbar and a couple of strong men to detach her.

It’s followed by what’s apparently the first live performance of “Lady Jane” since 1967, but it’s from “Miss You”, though, that everything takes off. Ronnie and Keith seem suddenly unburdened, start to really spark, Keith increasingly limber. “One More Shot” and “Doom And Gloom”, the two new numbers recorded for the recent Grrr! Compilation, are played with crackling conviction, Ronnie tearing the place up on the latter, even if neither are truly front-rank Stones songs. Still, it’s the indisputable classics the fans have come to hear, and the Stones are unstinting when it comes to playing them. The last hour or so of the show is therefore the Stones at their most swaggeringly imperial.

Bill Wyman comes on for “It’s Only Rock’N’Roll” and an incandescent “Honky Tonk Woman”, a set highlight. Keith’s inevitable ‘solo’ turn, greeted with huge affectionate cheers, features the still-defiant rebel chug of “Before They Make me Run” and a blistering “Happy” and then Mick Taylor joins them for “Midnight Rambler”. Taylor looks like he’s tucked heartily into the backstage sandwiches, a bulky bloke draped in some kind of shawl, but still, as he demonstrates, an amazing guitarist. The rest of the set goes by in something of a blur – “Start Me Up”, followed by “Tumbling Dice”, a hugely raucous “Brown Sugar” and “Sympathy For The Devil” – as the crowd’s hysteria becomes ever more tangible, a surging excitement, something tidal sweeping through the entire crowd, most of whom have now been on their feet for nearly two hours, by which time more than a couple of us are wishing we had a fraction of Jagger’s jaw-dropping stamina, which would be pretty astonishing in a 25-year old, let alone a man of nearly 70, which it is nigh on impossible to believe Jagger will be next year.

The London Youth Choir are assembled on either side of the stage for a fabulous “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” meanwhile, is essayed with a delirious abandon that spills over also into a seething “Satisfaction”, Keith and Mick strolling together like debauched boulevardiers along the horseshoe catwalk that partly encircles the VIP mosh-pit at the front of the stage.

I’ll be writing more on the Stones at the 02 in the next issue of Uncut, in the meantime, if you were there, let me know what you thought of the show.

Set List

1 Get Off of My Cloud

2 I Wanna Be Your Man

3 The Last Time

4 Paint It, Black

5 Gimme Shelter

6 Lady Jane

7 Champagne And Reefer

8 Live With Me

9 Miss You

10 One More Shot

10 Doom And Gloom

11 It’s Only Rock’N’Roll

12 Honky Tonk Woman

13 Before They Make Me Run

14 Happy

15 Midnight Rambler

16 Start Me Up

17 Tumbling Dice

18 Brown Sugar

19 Sympathy For The Devil

Encores

20 You can’t Always Get What You Want

21Jumpin’ Jack Flash

23 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

Pic: Phil Wallis

Interview: Peter Strickland on Berberian Sound Studio

Michael Bonner

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30th November 2012

0

Interview: Peter Strickland on Berberian Sound Studio

You’ll hopefully have spotted Uncut’s Films Of The Year in our current issue. High up the Top 10 is the brilliant Berberian Sound Studio, director Peter Strickland’s spin on low-rent 70s Italian horror movies and a tribute to the Heath Robinson-style endeavours of foley artists and sound designers of a certain generation. Ahead of the film's imminent release of the film on DVD – and Broadcast’s score in the New Year – I caught up with Peter Strickland to chat about the film and his influences. UNCUT: Before you started out in film, you were involved in an outfit called the Sonic Catering Band, using food to make music. Can you explain a little about who they were and what they did? PETER STRICKLAND: We started off in 1996. Initially, it was just two of us. It was the brother of a friend of mine from school, Colin Fletcher, and we just wanted to make an accessible entry point into musique concrete, by still making difficult music but making it very accessible concept around it, something that everyone can relate to. It was basic surrealist thing of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. By the act of recording something, you are turning it onto something extraordinary. And what I quite liked about it was the idea of formula, why don’t we follow scores, why don’t we follow recipes. It was an analogy really, in terms of how you take raw sound and raw food and you multi-track them, mixing them together, processing them and so on. And we had very mixed results. A lot of it is terrible, but usually what we found was the better the food was the worst the recording was and vice versa. But initially we were completely in awe of all these effects we could get our hands on. One of the effects used, the Watkins Coffee cups, is in Berberian. We were always using that. But in the end, we thought, are we showcasing the sound or just showcasing the technology? It’s something you have to address when you’re making a film or music. We rethought things around 2000, we just dropped any sense of melody or rhythm, and we got into people like Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley, who just let sounds exist in their own realm. One of the most important things to me was “I Am Sitting In A Room” by Alvin Lucier, where he just re-records his voice and re-records the re-recording, and it makes you aware of physical acoustics. It’s really powerful, and really simple. We just did some gigs for the John Cage centenary. The guy who played Massimo in Berberian [Jozef Cseres], he’s a big John Cage fan. He doesn’t like acting, so part of the deal with Berberian was that we’d do some John Cage performances with him in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. When we got back to the hotel, I dropped this bottle of sesame oil and spent hours and hours cleaning it up. It reminded me why I hate playing live. When did you have the idea of making a film about sound? It started off as a bit of a joke. I wanted to make this very innocent Ed Wood/Vincent Price/William Castle mini-narrative, like a sketch, and that was that and I put it aside. At the end of 2006, I got thinking about doing something a bit darker with it, to make it a bit longer than one minute. Various ideas that had been there and hadn’t really formatted themselves came to the fore. There’s Cathy Berberian's piece with Luciano Berio, "Visage". It's a 17-minute avant garde piece of howling. It got me thinking about association and context, and if you put that same piece of music in ahorror film that would respond to it the same way they responded to Penderecki in The Shining. It triggered off this idea about association and context, and how the very innocent sound of chopping a cabbage becomes really horrific and disturbing when you change the context. So it’s just playing with that. I hope when you watch Berberian you know no one is going to suffer, you know it’s completely artificial – but why is it disturbing us? We had that as filmmakers. I’m with actresses in the studio screaming, but it really freaks you out when you hear it again and again… One of the most memorable sequences in the film is when an actor, played by Jean-Michael van Schouwburg, is brought in to provide the voice for a "dangerously aroused goblin". You should have been on set that day. He went on all day long… Jean-Michael van Schouwburg does a lot of free jazz stuff. He works in Brussels mainly. I met him through Josef. I met half these guys through him, really. He puts on happenings and so on all around eastern Europe. He was doing that basically, and I thought it would be great to get him. He’s the Goblin, basically. He’s an avant garde performer, but you can imagine had he lived in Italy in the Sixties he’d have made money on the side doing stuff like that. It’s funny, I used to work for a computer game but I never really played them. Most people in the office didn’t play them either. I remember going to a Steve Reich concert in the evening and half the office were there, too. They’re all basically making their money doing computer games but all into other stuff and using those methods to do different things for computer games. Are there any specific influences you had in mind for the main character, Gilderoy? There was an element of Adam Bohman. He did this recording with brother [Jonathan] called "Purely Practical", which is them reading out DIY catalogues, and it was just fantastic. I begged them to let me put it out as a 7”. It was almost like Samuel Beckett or something, this weird inscrutable thing, completely mundane, but with this very hyponotic effect underneath it. The first draft I wrote of Berberian, Gilderoy’s dialogue was all completely technical. But Gilderoy also came out of Vernon Elliott, a lot of stuff you find of Trunk Records: Desmond Leslie, Basil Kirchin. That whole garden shed thing, which leant towards the dark side sometimes. It’s a very English thing. Like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop characters had this dark streak, alcoholism and so on. If you look at the old tape designs from the period, the actual boxes, the commercial blank tapes, they look like sigils or some kind of pagan symbol, so you can imagine if your eyesight goes a little wonky up late and night looping again and again… you might flip somehow. The weird thing about analogue, it’s a very ritualistic thing. The idea of splicing with razor blades and so on. How far did you develop your film-within-a-fim, The Equestrian Vortex? Up to a certain point. I tried to write it in scene numbers. Obviously you have gaps between the scene numbers in Berberian, but if you imagine the spaces in between you roughly get the idea of what has happened. So basically, it’s a very lame Suspiria rip off where these nouveau riche parents send their kids off to this summer riding school, run by this stern mistress, and there’s been some goings on the years before and in the library they find some clues that witches were interrogated there hundreds of years ago. The unleash a spell and the witches come back to life and create havoc. In the Broadcast soundtrack, there’s more clues to what happened, and also to Gilderoy’s Box Hill intersection. What about Gilderoy’s Box Hill film? It's one of the DVD Extras. It’s only 5 minutes long. We tried to make it as close as possible to documentaries in the 1970s. Why Box Hill? Dorking came naturally. The more I got to go there, the more I got to read about it, the more perfect it felt. There are also these weird connections with Santini’s film, like the Dorking chicken, which is the symbol of Dorking, has five claws. That comes from Italy, bizzarely enough, and it fits into the idea of the poultry tunnel in Berberian, which also leads into Death Laid An Egg, a giallo film, that a guy who worked with Cathy Berberian called Bruno Maderna did the soundtrack to. I don’t expect anyone to know this stuff, but it’s there if you want to get into it. There’s lots of ley lines on Box Hill, too. And the whole history – like John Logie Beard with the first television experiments and so on. Can we talk about Julian House's visuals and the Broadcast score. They both bring a tremendous amount to the film. I know Rog [Stevens], who was the former keyboardist. I knew him socially without even knowing he was in Broadcast. He did some stuff for [Strickland's debut feature] Katalin Varga and later down the line he put me in touch with Trish and James. Julian’s stuff I’ve known about since the Stereolab times. I’ve always liked his work and later Trish [Keenan] and James [Cargill] told me I should get in touch. Broadcast, first of all, I was a fan. I saw Broadcast in Reading in 1996, and they were alright. Then they did the Book Lovers EP and they completely changed into something else. They’re an amazing band, very hypnotic and immersive. And they’d talk about Bruno Nicolai and Basil Kirchin, so they had those two sides completely mapped. I guess you could say Berberian partly came out listening to Broadcast and Stereolab. And also the attitude of just taking things and putting them on your sleeve. Julian, I think, he has all those references where he guides you in the right direction. That opening sequence was all his idea, it wasn’t in the script. It was a blessing to have them on board. Berberian Sound Studio is released on DVD by Artificial Eye on December 31; Broadcast's score is released on Warp Records on January 7 2013

You’ll hopefully have spotted Uncut’s Films Of The Year in our current issue. High up the Top 10 is the brilliant Berberian Sound Studio, director Peter Strickland’s spin on low-rent 70s Italian horror movies and a tribute to the Heath Robinson-style endeavours of foley artists and sound designers of a certain generation. Ahead of the film’s imminent release of the film on DVD – and Broadcast’s score in the New Year – I caught up with Peter Strickland to chat about the film and his influences.

UNCUT: Before you started out in film, you were involved in an outfit called the Sonic Catering Band, using food to make music. Can you explain a little about who they were and what they did?

PETER STRICKLAND: We started off in 1996. Initially, it was just two of us. It was the brother of a friend of mine from school, Colin Fletcher, and we just wanted to make an accessible entry point into musique concrete, by still making difficult music but making it very accessible concept around it, something that everyone can relate to. It was basic surrealist thing of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. By the act of recording something, you are turning it onto something extraordinary. And what I quite liked about it was the idea of formula, why don’t we follow scores, why don’t we follow recipes. It was an analogy really, in terms of how you take raw sound and raw food and you multi-track them, mixing them together, processing them and so on. And we had very mixed results. A lot of it is terrible, but usually what we found was the better the food was the worst the recording was and vice versa. But initially we were completely in awe of all these effects we could get our hands on. One of the effects used, the Watkins Coffee cups, is in Berberian. We were always using that. But in the end, we thought, are we showcasing the sound or just showcasing the technology? It’s something you have to address when you’re making a film or music. We rethought things around 2000, we just dropped any sense of melody or rhythm, and we got into people like Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley, who just let sounds exist in their own realm. One of the most important things to me was “I Am Sitting In A Room” by Alvin Lucier, where he just re-records his voice and re-records the re-recording, and it makes you aware of physical acoustics. It’s really powerful, and really simple. We just did some gigs for the John Cage centenary. The guy who played Massimo in Berberian [Jozef Cseres], he’s a big John Cage fan. He doesn’t like acting, so part of the deal with Berberian was that we’d do some John Cage performances with him in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. When we got back to the hotel, I dropped this bottle of sesame oil and spent hours and hours cleaning it up. It reminded me why I hate playing live.

When did you have the idea of making a film about sound?

It started off as a bit of a joke. I wanted to make this very innocent Ed Wood/Vincent Price/William Castle mini-narrative, like a sketch, and that was that and I put it aside. At the end of 2006, I got thinking about doing something a bit darker with it, to make it a bit longer than one minute. Various ideas that had been there and hadn’t really formatted themselves came to the fore. There’s Cathy Berberian’s piece with Luciano Berio, “Visage”. It’s a 17-minute avant garde piece of howling. It got me thinking about association and context, and if you put that same piece of music in ahorror film that would respond to it the same way they responded to Penderecki in The Shining. It triggered off this idea about association and context, and how the very innocent sound of chopping a cabbage becomes really horrific and disturbing when you change the context. So it’s just playing with that. I hope when you watch Berberian you know no one is going to suffer, you know it’s completely artificial – but why is it disturbing us? We had that as filmmakers. I’m with actresses in the studio screaming, but it really freaks you out when you hear it again and again…

One of the most memorable sequences in the film is when an actor, played by Jean-Michael van Schouwburg, is brought in to provide the voice for a “dangerously aroused goblin”.

You should have been on set that day. He went on all day long… Jean-Michael van Schouwburg does a lot of free jazz stuff. He works in Brussels mainly. I met him through Josef. I met half these guys through him, really. He puts on happenings and so on all around eastern Europe. He was doing that basically, and I thought it would be great to get him. He’s the Goblin, basically. He’s an avant garde performer, but you can imagine had he lived in Italy in the Sixties he’d have made money on the side doing stuff like that. It’s funny, I used to work for a computer game but I never really played them. Most people in the office didn’t play them either. I remember going to a Steve Reich concert in the evening and half the office were there, too. They’re all basically making their money doing computer games but all into other stuff and using those methods to do different things for computer games.

Are there any specific influences you had in mind for the main character, Gilderoy?

There was an element of Adam Bohman. He did this recording with brother [Jonathan] called “Purely Practical”, which is them reading out DIY catalogues, and it was just fantastic. I begged them to let me put it out as a 7”. It was almost like Samuel Beckett or something, this weird inscrutable thing, completely mundane, but with this very hyponotic effect underneath it. The first draft I wrote of Berberian, Gilderoy’s dialogue was all completely technical. But Gilderoy also came out of Vernon Elliott, a lot of stuff you find of Trunk Records: Desmond Leslie, Basil Kirchin. That whole garden shed thing, which leant towards the dark side sometimes. It’s a very English thing. Like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop characters had this dark streak, alcoholism and so on. If you look at the old tape designs from the period, the actual boxes, the commercial blank tapes, they look like sigils or some kind of pagan symbol, so you can imagine if your eyesight goes a little wonky up late and night looping again and again… you might flip somehow. The weird thing about analogue, it’s a very ritualistic thing. The idea of splicing with razor blades and so on.

How far did you develop your film-within-a-fim, The Equestrian Vortex?

Up to a certain point. I tried to write it in scene numbers. Obviously you have gaps between the scene numbers in Berberian, but if you imagine the spaces in between you roughly get the idea of what has happened. So basically, it’s a very lame Suspiria rip off where these nouveau riche parents send their kids off to this summer riding school, run by this stern mistress, and there’s been some goings on the years before and in the library they find some clues that witches were interrogated there hundreds of years ago. The unleash a spell and the witches come back to life and create havoc. In the Broadcast soundtrack, there’s more clues to what happened, and also to Gilderoy’s Box Hill intersection.

What about Gilderoy’s Box Hill film?

It’s one of the DVD Extras. It’s only 5 minutes long. We tried to make it as close as possible to documentaries in the 1970s. Why Box Hill? Dorking came naturally. The more I got to go there, the more I got to read about it, the more perfect it felt. There are also these weird connections with Santini’s film, like the Dorking chicken, which is the symbol of Dorking, has five claws. That comes from Italy, bizzarely enough, and it fits into the idea of the poultry tunnel in Berberian, which also leads into Death Laid An Egg, a giallo film, that a guy who worked with Cathy Berberian called Bruno Maderna did the soundtrack to. I don’t expect anyone to know this stuff, but it’s there if you want to get into it. There’s lots of ley lines on Box Hill, too. And the whole history – like John Logie Beard with the first television experiments and so on.

Can we talk about Julian House’s visuals and the Broadcast score. They both bring a tremendous amount to the film.

I know Rog [Stevens], who was the former keyboardist. I knew him socially without even knowing he was in Broadcast. He did some stuff for [Strickland’s debut feature] Katalin Varga and later down the line he put me in touch with Trish and James. Julian’s stuff I’ve known about since the Stereolab times. I’ve always liked his work and later Trish [Keenan] and James [Cargill] told me I should get in touch. Broadcast, first of all, I was a fan. I saw Broadcast in Reading in 1996, and they were alright. Then they did the Book Lovers EP and they completely changed into something else. They’re an amazing band, very hypnotic and immersive. And they’d talk about Bruno Nicolai and Basil Kirchin, so they had those two sides completely mapped. I guess you could say Berberian partly came out listening to Broadcast and Stereolab. And also the attitude of just taking things and putting them on your sleeve. Julian, I think, he has all those references where he guides you in the right direction. That opening sequence was all his idea, it wasn’t in the script. It was a blessing to have them on board.

Berberian Sound Studio is released on DVD by Artificial Eye on December 31; Broadcast’s score is released on Warp Records on January 7 2013

Eric Clapton on Cream: “I was in a confrontational situation 24 hours a day…”

Tom Pinnock

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30th November 2012

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Eric Clapton on Cream: “I was in a confrontational situation 24 hours a day…”

The director of a new film profiling Ginger Baker is interviewed in the new issue of Uncut (dated January 2013, and out now), explaining why the Cream drummer broke his nose during filming… As a companion piece, this week's archive feature finds Baker's former bandmate, Eric Clapton, providing a p...

The director of a new film profiling Ginger Baker is interviewed in the new issue of Uncut (dated January 2013, and out now), explaining why the Cream drummer broke his nose during filming… As a companion piece, this week’s archive feature finds Baker’s former bandmate, Eric Clapton, providing a painfully frank account of his days in Cream – psychedelic drugs, 24-hour confrontations and their love of Pet Sounds included. From Uncut’s May 2004 issue (Take 84). Interview: Nigel Williamson

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Uncut: It’s often said that the model for the power-trio style of Cream was Buddy Guy’s band. Is that how you recall it?

Eric Clapton: I’d seen Buddy live and it was unbelievable. He was in total command and I thought, “This is it.” So yes. That’s where the idea came from. It seemed to me you could do anything with a trio – at least if you were a genius and a maestro like Buddy Guy. I was suffering from delusions of grandeur in that direction.

After the Bluesbreakers album, the “Clapton Is God” graffiti was already starting to appear round London, wasn’t it?

Around that period, yes. But I don’t take back what I say about delusions of grandeur, because once I stepped into the reality of trying to realise my musical vision with Cream, it just disappeared. On the first day of rehearsal with Jack and Ginger it was obvious to me that I didn’t have what it took.

How come?

Maybe I had something of the technical ability, or was at least heading in the right direction. But I didn’t have the confidence, or anything like it. I was seeing Buddy Guy and thinking, “I can do that.” But, in fact, I’d never really sung in my life. Only bits and pieces with The Yardbirds and a couple of times with John Mayall. I’d seen myself as the front guy with Cream. But when we got there, the reality was that Jack was easily the best equipped for that role. And that’s how it immediately evolved.

Jack was also the main songwriter, wasn’t he?

Totally, because he had a working relationship with Pete Brown (poet and musician who collaborated with Bruce on lyrics) and so he was coming to rehearsals with ready-made songs. It left me thinking, “Bloody hell, what am I going to do here?” So I turned to reinterpreting obscure blues songs, and Ginger came in with compositions with an African or an Afro-jazz feel. And that’s what Cream was all about, really. The amalgam of those three ingredients.

And the irony is you practically had to blackmail Ginger into letting Jack join Cream, didn’t you?

When Ginger invited me to join, I asked him who else was in the band. He said, “I don’t know yet.” So I suggested Jack. He said, “No, what did you have to go and mention him for?” I said, “Because I just played with him and he’s a great bass player and you guys played together with Graham Bond and Alexis, so I thought you’d be pleased.” And he said, “No, we don’t get on very well at all.” So I withdrew at that point. Then I said I would only go in with Ginger if he would go in with Jack. So he had to say OK.

Then, shortly after Cream started, The Jimi Hendrix Experience came along…

We were playing at the London Polytechnic the day Jimi arrived in England and Chas Chandler brought him to see us. He said he’d like to play. And he got up and played Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor”. Even today I don’t know many people who can play that. It’s a very, very tough piece of music. But Jimi did it and then he put the guitar behind his back and I thought, “My god, this is like Buddy Guy on acid.”

Did you feel threatened by him?

I fell in love with him. I think Ginger and Jack felt threatened because they could see he was going to corner the market, for sure. But I felt an incredible sense of relief that there was somebody else on the planet who was as devoted to that music as I was. Of course, he was a showman. But he knew what the blues was about. I was really keen to get to know him and spend time with him. But he was an elusive guy and he wasn’t that available for friendship. I still don’t know what the real deal was with him or what his motives were or what the long-term plan was, or even if he had one. He definitely pulled the rug out from under Cream, though. I told people like Pete Townshend about him and we’d go and see him at different clubs and I wondered how he was going to make what he did work on record. Then we went off to America to record Disraeli Gears, which I thought was an incredibly good album. And when we got back no one was interested because Are You Experienced had come out and wiped everybody else out, including us. Jimi had it sewn ⌦up. He’d taken the blues and made it incredibly cutting-edge. I was in awe of him.

How heavily did psychedelic drugs impact on Cream’s music?

Very heavily. I don’t know how many times we tried to play while using acid, but there were a few. In America we were doing a lot of acid. We’d met Owsley, who made the stuff for the Acid Tests and the Grateful Dead, and he showed up at all our gigs. It went on after Cream for me, as well. I carried on experimenting.

Looking back, what do you think was the legacy of Cream?

It’s an interesting question because I don’t really know. I’m not even sure what we really set out to do. My impression at the time was that we were scraping by. It was always, “What are we going to do now?” So we just jammed. The initial agenda was that Cream was going to be a dada group. We were going to have all these weird things happening on stage and it was going to be experimental and funny and rebellious. We said at the time it was going to be anti-music. But in the end we got such a kick out of just going to the instrumental part and seeing what would happen, that’s what we became known for. By the time we went to America, we’d play half-hour solos in the middle of anything. It wasn’t just “Crossroads”. We’d do it in any song. We got into a lot of self-indulgence and a lot of easily pleased people went along with that. It flattered our vanity, and after that I think we stopped trying.

Were Cream the fathers of heavy metal?

There was a band called Blue Cheer, who I think were probably the originators of heavy metal because they didn’t really have traditional roots in the blues. They didn’t have a mission. It was just about being loud. Cream were very loud, too, and we got caught up in having huge banks of Marshall amps just for the hell of it. But we had a really strong foundation in blues and jazz. Led Zeppelin took up our legacy. But then they took it somewhere else that I didn’t really have a great deal of admiration for.

Where did the more melodic influences – as on songs like “I Feel Free” – come from?

Totally from Jack. I’d never known any kind of musical scale, other than the strict blues scale. And I still find it hard to step out of that. Jack brought with him an immense experience of classical and jazz and popular music. Believe it or not, when Cream was evolving its ideology of what we wanted the sound to be, the thing we were listening to most, apart from the blues, was Pet Sounds. Jack was very interested in Brian Wilson’s viewpoint, and saw it as the new Bach.

And the first single, “Wrapping Paper”, sounded nothing like Cream at all.

That was Jack again. When I heard the song, I said, “What is that?” And Jack said it was a great way to start a power trio by giving people something they really didn’t like or expect or want. I loved the idea of that. I thought, “Yeah, that makes sense to me” [laughs]. Jack has always had the most beautiful melodies. That man’s solo albums after Cream were amazing, too. Songs For A Tailor – what great writing that was, with stuff like “Theme For An Imaginary Western”. Just fantastic.

Your own writing also began to blossom along more melodic lines, with songs like “Badge”.

Well, I owe that to Jack. It was his influence, although I’ve always had that lyrical thing in me. “Badge” was probably my first attempt to put it down. It goes right back to my liking Joseph Locke and very traditional forms of singing and music as a kid. When I’m writing now, I always have to censor myself not to go too far in that direction. I have to try hard not to let it get too sweet.

Along with Hendrix’s “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp”, “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” on Disraeli Gears must have been one of the first records to use a wah-wah pedal. How did that come about?

I picked it up at Manny’s guitar shop in New York, I think. They said that Jimi had one and so that was enough for me. I had to have one, too. I loved it because it sounded like someone talking and it reminded me of Sparky and those kids records with all the effects. “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” was very much a part of the 1967 hippie thing, because the words were written by my flatmate, Martin Sharp, who also did the cover designs for the Cream albums. It’s got this guitar line that I thought no one had ever done before, but in fact it’s exactly the same as “Summer In The City”. Maybe I subliminally ripped it off from that, because I adored The Lovin’ Spoonful. But it seemed like it was so easy to write, and with the wah-wah pedal and Martin’s incredible lyrics, I felt like I’d really made some kind of a breakthrough there.

Why did Cream split up?

Well, the workload was pretty severe. We were playing six nights a week and I lost weight until I was about nine stone and I looked like death. I was in bad shape. It wasn’t so much self-abuse as self-neglect. I think that all added to the psychology of the situation, which was pretty tricky at the best of times. Ginger and Jack were dynamic characters and pretty overwhelming. It felt like I was in a confrontational situation 24 hours a day. Half my time was spent trying to keep the peace. And on top of that you’re trying to be creative and make music. I was calling home to Robert Stigwood, our manager, and saying, “Get me out of here – these guys are crazy. I don’t know what’s going on and I’ve had enough.” He’d always say to give it one more week. That was bearable as long as there was no visible alternative. But when something came along that showed another way, that was it for me.

And when did you find the alternative?

When I heard The Basement Tapes. I heard them first from a friend in London called David Lipenhoff. He told me about this band who had been called The Hawks and how they were now hanging out with Dylan. I’d missed all that because I wasn’t a big fan of Dylan at that time. But I heard The Basement Tapes and it sounded like they’d jumped on to what I thought we ought to be doing. That was what I wanted us to sound like and here was somebody else doing it. After that another friend played me Music From Big Pink. It shook me to the core. The first time I heard it was under the influence of some pretty powerful Mexican weed and that exaggerated it all the more.

Why was that such a turning point?

Because I felt somebody else had achieved what I’d set out to do but which had got lost with Jack and Ginger. Cream had achieved something else, in retrospect. But I wasn’t happy to recognise that at the time because I had this other kind of mission in mind. The Band had done it without even trying, and I harboured that as a weapon of resentment against Jack and Ginger, who had a lot more respect for what we were doing than I did. But it’s one of my character defects that the best party is always down the road. When I get what I want, I don’t want it any more. I really wasn’t happy, and I used The Band as a lever to say I’d had enough.

Did you talk to The Band about working with them?

I went to visit Robbie Robertson and all of them in Woodstock. Dylan was there, too. I spent a day with them. But it became quite obvious to me I was on a different planet to these guys. I had an Afghan jacket and curly hair and pink trousers. They looked like The Hole In The Wall Gang. They had a very closed scene. I wanted to be part of it. But there was no way in. There was no room. So all I could do was admire it from afar and long for something similar.

Could Cream have gone in the same direction as The Band?

I was absolutely certain if we had engaged the assistance of Steve Winwood we could have gone in that direction, but done it in a very English way. In fact, he’d already started to do that with Traffic and the concept of a communal, family band. At first, I hadn’t understood that. I think I even had a contempt for what they were doing. But later I realised Traffic were the English version of The Band. I’d been trying to get Steve in for ages. I think I must have talked to Jack and Ginger about it. But he was rooted in what he was doing in Traffic. Then suddenly something happened there and he was available. Which is how Blind Faith was born.

Picture: Roz Kelly/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds unveil NSFW ‘Push The Sky Away’ album artwork

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30th November 2012

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds unveil NSFW ‘Push The Sky Away’ album artwork

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have unveiled the NSFW artwork for their forthcoming new album, Push The Sky Away. The LP will be the band's fifteenth studio album and is set for release on February 19, 2013. The cover art features a naked woman in a sparsely decorated room and a be-suited Cave holding...

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have unveiled the NSFW artwork for their forthcoming new album, Push The Sky Away.

The LP will be the band’s fifteenth studio album and is set for release on February 19, 2013. The cover art features a naked woman in a sparsely decorated room and a be-suited Cave holding open the shutters to a window.

The album follows 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and was recorded by regular Bad Seeds and Grinderman collaborator Nick Launay at La Fabrique studios, a 19th century mansion in the south of France.

CD, vinyl, deluxe CD and DVD and a special super deluxe box set of the album are all available to pre-order now at Nickcave.com. All pre-orders come with a digital download of the album track ‘We No Who U R’, which will be delivered on December 3.

The box set is priced at £90 and includes a CD album and vinyl album, a DVD with specially created visuals by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and two exclusive 7″ vinyls containing non album bonus tracks. It also features a 120-page replica of Nick Cave’s handwritten notebooks and a numbered certificate of authenticity signed by Nick Cave.

Speaking about the album, Nick Cave said: “If I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children, then ‘Push The Sky Away’ is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren [Ellis]’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat.”

The band have announced North American shows for 2013 and are rumoured to be playing the Coachella Festival in California in April.

Jimi Hendrix burned Monterey guitar sells at auction for £237,000

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30th November 2012

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Jimi Hendrix burned Monterey guitar sells at auction for £237,000

The guitar Jimi Hendrix is believed to have set alight in 1967 has been sold at auction for over £200,000. An important part of rock history, the the black Fender Stratocaster was made famous after Hendrix set fire to it at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. Although, legend has it that the guitar Hendrix was playing onstage was switched with a lesser, cheaper instrument moments before the burning. James Wright, a manager at Hendrix's label, previously owned the original guitar and sold it for £237,000 at auction in London on Tuesday (November 27). Speaking to The Metro, Wright explained the origins of the story and how Hendrix only set fire to the guitar to get one over on Pete Townshend of The Who, who had smashed up his guitar earlier in the day. "Jimi asked for some lighter fuel. He wanted to outdo Pete. At the time, it was his favourite guitar and he didn’t want to ruin it." The tracklisting for People, Hell & Angels, the forthcoming album of previously unreleased studio recordings by Jimi Hendrix, was revealed last week. The album will be released on March 4, 2013 and features 12 'new' songs, which see Hendrix experimenting with horns, keyboards, percussion and a second guitar. The tracklisting for 'People, Hell & Angels' is: 'Earth Blues' 'Somewhere' 'Hear My Train A Comin'' 'Bleeding Heart' 'Let Me Move You' 'Izabella' 'Easy Blues' 'Crash Landing' 'Inside Out' 'Hey Gypsy Boy' 'Mojo Man' 'Villanova Junction Blues' The tracks were recorded in 1968 and 1969 and were meant for 'First Days Of The New Rising Sun', the follow up to 'Electric Ladyland' that Hendrix was working on when he died in 1970.

The guitar Jimi Hendrix is believed to have set alight in 1967 has been sold at auction for over £200,000.

An important part of rock history, the the black Fender Stratocaster was made famous after Hendrix set fire to it at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. Although, legend has it that the guitar Hendrix was playing onstage was switched with a lesser, cheaper instrument moments before the burning.

James Wright, a manager at Hendrix’s label, previously owned the original guitar and sold it for £237,000 at auction in London on Tuesday (November 27).

Speaking to The Metro, Wright explained the origins of the story and how Hendrix only set fire to the guitar to get one over on Pete Townshend of The Who, who had smashed up his guitar earlier in the day. “Jimi asked for some lighter fuel. He wanted to outdo Pete. At the time, it was his favourite guitar and he didn’t want to ruin it.”

The tracklisting for People, Hell & Angels, the forthcoming album of previously unreleased studio recordings by Jimi Hendrix, was revealed last week. The album will be released on March 4, 2013 and features 12 ‘new’ songs, which see Hendrix experimenting with horns, keyboards, percussion and a second guitar.

The tracklisting for ‘People, Hell & Angels’ is:

‘Earth Blues’

‘Somewhere’

‘Hear My Train A Comin”

‘Bleeding Heart’

‘Let Me Move You’

‘Izabella’

‘Easy Blues’

‘Crash Landing’

‘Inside Out’

‘Hey Gypsy Boy’

‘Mojo Man’

‘Villanova Junction Blues’

The tracks were recorded in 1968 and 1969 and were meant for ‘First Days Of The New Rising Sun’, the follow up to ‘Electric Ladyland’ that Hendrix was working on when he died in 1970.

The Rolling Stones are joined onstage by Florence Welch and Eric Clapton in London

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30th November 2012

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The Rolling Stones are joined onstage by Florence Welch and Eric Clapton in London

The Rolling Stones last night (November 29) played the second of two shows at London's O2 Arena in celebration of the band's 50th anniversary. As per their show on Sunday, this was to be a hit-packed, guest-filled evening, with the return of Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor plus first-time guests Eric Cl...

The Rolling Stones last night (November 29) played the second of two shows at London’s O2 Arena in celebration of the band’s 50th anniversary.

As per their show on Sunday, this was to be a hit-packed, guest-filled evening, with the return of Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor plus first-time guests Eric Clapton and Florence Welch of Florence And The Machine. Scroll down the page to see fan shot footage of Florence performing ‘Gimme Shelter’ with the band.

The show began just before 8.30pm with an introductory video featuring Johnny Depp, Pete Townshend and more talking about the Stones. Iggy Pop said: “We’d never seen people with teeth like that. And skin like that. Ugh!” He also said: “The sound of Keith’s guitar – it was like being hit with a dead mackerel”.

After the video and a procession of drummers wearing gorilla masks, the band took to the stage, and the entire crowd rose to its feet.

The Rolling Stones began with ‘Get Off My Cloud’ and Beatles cover ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, after which Mick Jagger – dressed in a shiny silver jacket – said, “blimey that’s an old song. It’s ancient. Back then, the price of a pint of milk was three pence, the price of a loaf of bread was sixpence and the price of a concert ticket was… I’d better not go there…”.

He later made reference to the fact that their set was cut short on Sunday night, saying, “We’re more relaxed tonight, we’ll get to play the whole thing. We had to pay £100,000 because we went on too long. That’s like… Ten seats!”

Florence Welch joined for ‘Gimme Shelter‘, wearing a red velvet suit and singing face to face with Jagger. On Sunday, Mary J Blige provided the same vocal part. Welch kissed and hugged the entire band before exiting the stage.

After, Jagger spoke of his connection to the area. “It’s close to where Keith and I grew up in Dartford, but it seems a long way from exchanging records at the station. Have you still got that Bo Diddly record Keith?”

Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood both took seats to play acoustic guitars on the version of ‘Lady Jane’ that followed. “We haven’t played that one for a while… In public,” said Jagger after.

Jagger then introduced guest Eric Clapton, who played blues guitar on ‘Champagne And Reefer’. Clapton’s presence seemed to breathe life into Richards, who himself took a solo for the first time of the night.

Throughout the evening, the stage set – a giant pair of lips plus tongue catwalk – changed as curtains were raised revealing a larger video screen.

Jagger picked up the guitar for disco track ‘Miss You’, after which the band played new tracks ‘One More Shot’ and ‘Doom And Gloom’.

Former member Bill Wyman joined as bassist for ‘It’s Only Rock N Roll’ and ‘Honky Tonk Woman’.

While introducing the band, Jagger joked that they’d be “all down the Indigo Club after – it’s just round the corner.” Keith Richards received the biggest cheer of all, and took lead vocals for ‘Before They Make You Run’.

Guitarist Mick Taylor joined the group for ‘Midnight Rambler’, showcasing his formidable guitar playing.

The encore began with a chamber choir singing the intro to ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, then ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and ‘Satisfaction’ – the song that was cut from Sunday’s show due to time constraints.

The Rolling Stones played:

‘Get Off My Cloud’

‘I Wanna Be Your Man’

‘This Could Be The Last Time’

‘Paint It Black’

‘Gimme Shelter’

‘Lady Jane’

‘Champagne And Reefer’

‘Live With Me’

‘Miss You’

‘One More Shot’

‘Doom And Gloom’

‘Honky Tonk Woman’

‘Before They Make Me Run’

‘Happy’

‘Midnight Rambler’

‘Start Me Up’

‘Tumbling Dice’

‘Brown Sugar’

‘Sympathy For The Devil

‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’

‘Satisfaction’

Photo: Phil Wallis/NME

The House Of Love – The House Of Love

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30th November 2012

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Guy Chadwick’s fractious gang’s debut, now expanded – and at times, truly exhilarating... The House Of Love always seemed a weird group for Creation Records to sign in 1987. At that time, the label was still suffering the slings and arrows of C86, and their roster was made up mostly of well-intentioned but underwhelming jangle-pop (Blow Up, label idée Alan McGee’s own Biff Bang Pow!, The Bodines) and the odd obscurant blast of welcome rock’n’roll (Slaughter Joe’s great “I’ll Follow You Down”, Nikki Sudden). So when The House Of Love’s first single, “Shine On”, dropped in May, a twisting, turning epic almost cast adrift in reverb, it seemed a little portentous and almost self-involved – a rock behemoth trying to struggle out of an indie pop caste. The history was stranger still, with lead singer Guy Chadwick already having tried and failed at the music game with The Kingdoms, before going underground, finding the first line-up of The House Of Love through advertising in the music papers, sending a demo to Creation that McGee would initially give short shrift, until his then-wife started obsessively playing “Shine On”. Legend has it that Chadwick’s vaulting ambition alienated the group from some of the Creation crew, but McGee, possibly still smarting from the loss of The Jesus & Mary Chain, plotted The House Of Love’s career with svengali panache, ultimately hooking them up with an out-of-control deal with Fontana in 1989. But if Chadwick’s songs were the bedrock of the group, then it was their lead guitarist, Terry Bickers, who gave the group their flammability, both on record and on stage. A perpetually shorting livewire, Bickers’ ecstatic playing could move from pre-shoegaze texturology to blasted anti-rock heroics with the flick of a reverb pedal. He was the magician-artisan of the group, and from the buzzing, solar flares of the opening notes of “Christine”, the first song on this, their 1988 debut album, you could tell that in many ways, the record was his – when Chadwick’s songs drop in quality, at least the guitars still sound fantastic. Indeed, listening back to The House Of Love, you realize that the songs aren’t quite as potent as you might have remembered. Of course, a clutch are still staggering – “Christine”, of course; the beautiful poise of the closing “Touch Me”; “Love In A Car”’s tension-release dynamics and oddly Chameleons-esque guitar arpeggios; and most of all, the heartbreaking ballad “Man To Child” – but at times, Chadwick’s songs are undercooked, like the slight “Salome”, or “The Hill” from the “Christine” single. Sometimes, he goes the other direction, and courts a kind of arch, over-knowing prissiness. In many ways, the best of this era of The House Of Love is on the b-sides to the singles, compiled on the second disc – “Flow”, “Nothing To Me”, “Plastic” and “Blind” are all slippery, seductive pleasures, the first two all the better for Andrea Heukamp’s gorgeous backing vocals. Heukamp was the first casualty of The House Of Love, leaving the group amicably in 1987. Bickers would exit, fractiously, in 1989, and with him, much of the alchemy of the first phase of The House Of Love. The better Chadwick’s songs got – and there’s a very real case to be made for some of his best songs coming later, with 1992’s “The Girl With The Loneliest Eyes” a particularly overlooked gem – the less he seemed capable of marshalling around him other musicians who could flesh things out with the electricity and tension of these formative line-ups. For most of their time, The House Of Love never quite got it right. But in 1988, for a brief window of under a year, they could have had it all. This debut album is the sound of potential that would remain, both frustratingly and tantalizingly, unrealised. EXTRAS: Two discs, the first of which compiles their singles from the ‘Creation era’, the second featuring assorted demos and alternate versions. The singles are essential and sometimes superior to the album itself, the demos and versions somewhat less so… 7/10 Jon Dale

Guy Chadwick’s fractious gang’s debut, now expanded – and at times, truly exhilarating…

The House Of Love always seemed a weird group for Creation Records to sign in 1987. At that time, the label was still suffering the slings and arrows of C86, and their roster was made up mostly of well-intentioned but underwhelming jangle-pop (Blow Up, label idée Alan McGee’s own Biff Bang Pow!, The Bodines) and the odd obscurant blast of welcome rock’n’roll (Slaughter Joe’s great “I’ll Follow You Down”, Nikki Sudden). So when The House Of Love’s first single, “Shine On”, dropped in May, a twisting, turning epic almost cast adrift in reverb, it seemed a little portentous and almost self-involved – a rock behemoth trying to struggle out of an indie pop caste.

The history was stranger still, with lead singer Guy Chadwick already having tried and failed at the music game with The Kingdoms, before going underground, finding the first line-up of The House Of Love through advertising in the music papers, sending a demo to Creation that McGee would initially give short shrift, until his then-wife started obsessively playing “Shine On”. Legend has it that Chadwick’s vaulting ambition alienated the group from some of the Creation crew, but McGee, possibly still smarting from the loss of The Jesus & Mary Chain, plotted The House Of Love’s career with svengali panache, ultimately hooking them up with an out-of-control deal with Fontana in 1989.

But if Chadwick’s songs were the bedrock of the group, then it was their lead guitarist, Terry Bickers, who gave the group their flammability, both on record and on stage. A perpetually shorting livewire, Bickers’ ecstatic playing could move from pre-shoegaze texturology to blasted anti-rock heroics with the flick of a reverb pedal. He was the magician-artisan of the group, and from the buzzing, solar flares of the opening notes of “Christine”, the first song on this, their 1988 debut album, you could tell that in many ways, the record was his – when Chadwick’s songs drop in quality, at least the guitars still sound fantastic.

Indeed, listening back to The House Of Love, you realize that the songs aren’t quite as potent as you might have remembered. Of course, a clutch are still staggering – “Christine”, of course; the beautiful poise of the closing “Touch Me”; “Love In A Car”’s tension-release dynamics and oddly Chameleons-esque guitar arpeggios; and most of all, the heartbreaking ballad “Man To Child” – but at times, Chadwick’s songs are undercooked, like the slight “Salome”, or “The Hill” from the “Christine” single. Sometimes, he goes the other direction, and courts a kind of arch, over-knowing prissiness. In many ways, the best of this era of The House Of Love is on the b-sides to the singles, compiled on the second disc – “Flow”, “Nothing To Me”, “Plastic” and “Blind” are all slippery, seductive pleasures, the first two all the better for Andrea Heukamp’s gorgeous backing vocals.

Heukamp was the first casualty of The House Of Love, leaving the group amicably in 1987. Bickers would exit, fractiously, in 1989, and with him, much of the alchemy of the first phase of The House Of Love. The better Chadwick’s songs got – and there’s a very real case to be made for some of his best songs coming later, with 1992’s “The Girl With The Loneliest Eyes” a particularly overlooked gem – the less he seemed capable of marshalling around him other musicians who could flesh things out with the electricity and tension of these formative line-ups. For most of their time, The House Of Love never quite got it right. But in 1988, for a brief window of under a year, they could have had it all. This debut album is the sound of potential that would remain, both frustratingly and tantalizingly, unrealised.

EXTRAS: Two discs, the first of which compiles their singles from the ‘Creation era’, the second featuring assorted demos and alternate versions. The singles are essential and sometimes superior to the album itself, the demos and versions somewhat less so… 7/10

Jon Dale

Uncut plays the music of Beck

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29th November 2012

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Beck has a new album out - Song Reader: Twenty New Songs By Beck. It is available only as sheet music. We dispatched Uncut's very own musical expert, John Lewis, to play the album, track by track, on his beloved piano. Below, you can watch the results - and let the magic of Beck's music wash over yo...

Beck has a new album out – Song Reader: Twenty New Songs By Beck. It is available only as sheet music. We dispatched Uncut’s very own musical expert, John Lewis, to play the album, track by track, on his beloved piano. Below, you can watch the results – and let the magic of Beck’s music wash over you…

1. We All Wear Cloaks

A faintly terrifying and demented gothic song, written in A minor and in the unusual time signature of 7/4 (there is one irregular bar at the end of each chorus in ¾). Sample of the verse lyrics: “Salamander rolling zig-zag/marching to a hum-drum/between the truth and a cryptogram/like skeletons struck dumb”. I’d imagine this being sung by a voice that’s been pitch-shifted or vari-speeded up an octave to make it sound even more demented.

2. Rough On Rats

A bluesy, knockabout, swing song. With lyrics like “your scarecrow spiders and your shipwreck bones/the fossilized bibles of Geronimo Jones”, I’d imagine Tom Waits doing a kinda junkyard jazz version. The artwork on the sleeve is exactly the same as a song of the same name released in 1882, while the back page has an advert (and the first 24 bars) for another Beck song called “Leave Your Razors At The Door”, which appears to be the name of a real song from the 1880s.

3. Saint Dude

This is a great kinda soft rock ballad, a bit “Hey Jude”, a bit Laurel Canyon. The chords in the verse remind me of a Carpenters song, the chorus recalls Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. I’d imagine it working with a pedal steel in the background. Lyrics seem to be about a secular saint (“Ascension day/there’s a plane skywriting out your name/the people stood and watched it blow away/cos nothing’s good until it’s gone away”).

4. Sorry

A swing song in the key of G major with a very tidy middle-eight. Opening lyrics: “I’ve been hanging around again/hang my head on the ground again/Turn my face to the wall/turn my head to the wall/(chorus) Nobody knows you when you’re feeling sorry/nobody needs you when you’re feeling sorry/I’m sorry”. Back page has adverts and short extracts from other songs, including “If You’re Sorry Then Why Don’t You Look Sorry?”, “Are You Really?”, “Stop Being A Baby” and “Don’t Apologize”.

5. Last Night You Were A Dream

A ballad in the key of G major (“Please do not hurry this song” says the performance note). With all the chromatic chord shifts, I could also imagine this working as a kind of Nirvana/Pearl Jam grunge plodder. Opening lyrics: “Last night you were a dream/now you’re just you/and I am just a fool/someone you once knew”. Back page has an advert (and first 24 bars) of a Beck song called “Won’t You Fondle Me?”.

6. Eyes That Say “I Love You”

This is a vaguely epic-sounding ballad in the key of E minor. I could imagine it working as a James Bond theme, sung by Shirley Bassey or Adele, particularly that dramatic chord change at the start of the chorus. But it might also work as a rave song, with a kinda Italo-house piano riff running all the way through. Opening lyrics: “when the night/has gone cold/and you’re standing so alone/on the threshold of the rest/of what you know”. Back page has adverts and excerpts from several “Songs You Won’t Be Able To Get Away From And Otherwise Inescapable Melodies”, including “Heavy Breathing On The Phone (Is How You’ll Know It’s Me)” and “When You’re Sleeping, You Know I’ll Be There (In The Yard)”.

7. Just Noise

A swinging shuffle in the key of G major, apparently written by a Beck as a “60s-style pop song”, but would also work as a 1970s guilty pleasure. Opening lyrics: “if you hear my heart breaking/and you don’t know what it is/don’t be alarmed it won’t do you no harm/it’s just noise/it’s just noise”. On the back of the sheet music is an essay entitled “The Secret To Music Is Hygiene”.

8. Please Leave A Light On When You Go

A pretty waltz in the key of C, quite easy to play. You could imagine Mark Lanegan or Joanna Newsom doing this justice. Opening lyrics: “How fast/can a heart shatter/before you’re walking on spliters/your head aches/just to feel what it knows/please leave a light on when you go”. On the back page is an advert (and the first 20 bars) for a Beck song called “If You Come To My Garden Of Love (Don’t Mind The Weeds)”.

9. Heaven’s Ladder

A harmonically complex mid-tempo song in the key of C, but where the verses appear to be in G and the choruses in D. Opening lyrics on verse: “Look up heaven’s ladder/watch the angels climb down”. Lyrics of chorus: “On the ground where there’s nowhere else to go/but only further down into the hole/you could see the whole world down below/down below, down below…”. The back of the sheet music advertises “even more songs from the afterlife!”, including one called “There Are Actually Too Many Dogs In Heaven At This Point”.

10. The Wolf Is On The Hill

This is a vaguely Celtic-sounding song in 6/8 (although it would also be notated as a waltz, in ¾ time), with lots of slightly daft bucolic imagery (“the wolf is on the hill/the bird is in the briar/the thorn is on the rose/and your time is on the wire”). The artwork on the sleeve is exactly the same as a song of the same name released in 1874.

11. America, Here’s My Boy

The artwork here is based on some patriotic songs written for World War I, although the ultra-melodramatic lyrics here (in which, surprise surprise, the son dies at the end) seem to undercut the vaguely militaristic march feel.

12. Title Of This Song

A kind of straight-four rock ballad in the key of A major with lots of self-referential lyrics (“You’ve taken the title of this song/from a life that’s beyond/something that you could belong to/but is it wrong to sing along?”) and some nice, Blur-ish chord changes. Back page has another Blurry sounding song called “Why?”.

Song Reader: Twenty New Songs By Beck is released by McSweeney’s/Faber & Faber

Ask Sinéad O’Connor

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29th November 2012

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Ahead of a run of live dates - including shows at London's Albert Hall and the Barbican Centre - and a new single, Sinéad O'Connor is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular An Audience With... feature. So, is there anything you've ever wanted to ask Sinéad? Her previous collaborations include Brian Eno, Ian Brown and Christy Moore; is there anyone she'd still like to work with? What are her memories of playing at Roger Waters' The Wall concert in Berlin in 1990? What does she remember about the music scene growing up in Dublin the 1970s? Send up your questions by noon, Friday, December 7 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com. The best questions, and Sinead's answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine. Please include your name and location with your question.

Ahead of a run of live dates – including shows at London’s Albert Hall and the Barbican Centre – and a new single, Sinéad O’Connor is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular An Audience With… feature.

So, is there anything you’ve ever wanted to ask Sinéad?

Her previous collaborations include Brian Eno, Ian Brown and Christy Moore; is there anyone she’d still like to work with?

What are her memories of playing at Roger Waters’ The Wall concert in Berlin in 1990?

What does she remember about the music scene growing up in Dublin the 1970s?

Send up your questions by noon, Friday, December 7 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com. The best questions, and Sinead’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine. Please include your name and location with your question.

The Black Keys settle lawsuits with Pizza Hut and Home Depot

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29th November 2012

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The Black Keys settle lawsuits with Pizza Hut and Home Depot

The Black Keys have settled legal claims with Pizza Hut and Home Depot over copyright infringement. The US blues-rock duo sued both companies in June this year, saying their music had been used in TV adverts without their permission. The pizza chain was alleged to have used "significant portions" o...

The Black Keys have settled legal claims with Pizza Hut and Home Depot over copyright infringement.

The US blues-rock duo sued both companies in June this year, saying their music had been used in TV adverts without their permission. The pizza chain was alleged to have used “significant portions” of their track ‘Gold On The Ceiling’, while they claimed the DIY chain had used ‘Lonely Boy’ to sell power tools.

In the original claim, the band said the adverts had made use of slightly-amended ‘soundalike’ versions of the songs in a “brazen and improper effort to capitalize on plaintiffs’ hard-earned success.” But both companies strenuously denied the allegations and requested that the band pay their legal fees if they won the case.

However, both claims have been settled out of court, according to BBC News. Lawyers for the band told a federal judge in Los Angeles of the Pizza Hut settlement on Monday (November 26), while the Home Depot agreement was made earlier this month.

Neither company has commented on any settlement. The tracks in question both featured on the duo’s breakthrough seventh album, which has sold more than a million copies. Watch the video for ‘Lonely Boy’ below.

You can read an exclusive Album By Album feature with The Black Keys in the current issue of Uncut.

Elbow confirm ‘gap year’ hiatus and debut new song

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29th November 2012

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Elbow confirm ‘gap year’ hiatus and debut new song

Elbow have confirmed that they will be taking a hiatus. During the band's gig at Nottingham's Capital FM Arena earlier this week (November 26), frontman Guy Garvey told the crowd: "We're taking a gap year." During the set, reports the Worksop Guardian, Elbow also debuted a new song which they play...

Elbow have confirmed that they will be taking a hiatus.

During the band’s gig at Nottingham’s Capital FM Arena earlier this week (November 26), frontman Guy Garvey told the crowd: “We’re taking a gap year.”

During the set, reports the Worksop Guardian, Elbow also debuted a new song which they played again last night (November 27) at Wembley Arena. “At the moment it’s called ‘Challenge’,” said Garvey. Scroll down to watch fan-shot footage of the song.

Garvey recently spoke to The Sun and talked about a possible break for the band.

He said: “We’ve got our arena tour this November and December, which will be like a farewell party. We’ve already done six songs for the next album, then we’ll come back to finish it next year.”

The frontman is taking a break from Elbow for most of 2013 to concentrate on writing music for a new stage musical adaptation of King Kong, after he was asked to join the writing team by Massive Attack‘s Robert Del Naja.

“As soon as the tour ends I’m off to New York for six months. Where better to write songs for a King Kong musical than the place it’s set?”

Elbow play Birmingham NIA tonight (November 28) and then Liverpool’s Echo Area on November 29, before heading to their Manchester hometown on December 1. They will finish up at London’s The O2 on December 2.

Nick Oliveri reunites with Queens Of The Stone Age

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29th November 2012

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Nick Oliveri reunites with Queens Of The Stone Age

Former Queens Of The Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri has apparently teamed up with his old band to help out with their forthcoming new album. Oliveri was fired from Queens Of The Stone Age in 2004 after allegations of domestic violence, but it was revealed earlier today (November 28) – via the Facebook page for Oliveri's band Mondo Generator – that he has recorded vocals for a new QOTSA song. The post states: NEWS: Nick has re-joined Kyuss, and has recently recorded his vocals on a new Queens of the Stone Age song! Stay tuned. In August Oliveri avoided a potential 15-year jail sentence for charges relating to domestic violence, firearm and drug offences. He negotiated a deal that meant he would be sentenced to three years of felony probation and serve 200 hours of community service and 52 weeks of anger management sessions. Queens Of The Stone Age are currently working on their sixth LP, the follow-up to 2007's Era Vulgaris. Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor is working on a song for the album and Dave Grohl will also be lending a hand on the LP. After announcing that the Foo Fighters will be on a temporary hiatus, the frontman is now filling in for drummer Joey Castillo, who has left the band. Meanwhile, Queens Of The Stone Age have been confirmed as headliners for next years' Open'er festival in Poland and will also play Download Festival.

Former Queens Of The Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri has apparently teamed up with his old band to help out with their forthcoming new album.

Oliveri was fired from Queens Of The Stone Age in 2004 after allegations of domestic violence, but it was revealed earlier today (November 28) – via the Facebook page for Oliveri’s band Mondo Generator – that he has recorded vocals for a new QOTSA song. The post states: NEWS: Nick has re-joined Kyuss, and has recently recorded his vocals on a new Queens of the Stone Age song! Stay tuned.

In August Oliveri avoided a potential 15-year jail sentence for charges relating to domestic violence, firearm and drug offences.

He negotiated a deal that meant he would be sentenced to three years of felony probation and serve 200 hours of community service and 52 weeks of anger management sessions.

Queens Of The Stone Age are currently working on their sixth LP, the follow-up to 2007’s Era Vulgaris. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is working on a song for the album and Dave Grohl will also be lending a hand on the LP.

After announcing that the Foo Fighters will be on a temporary hiatus, the frontman is now filling in for drummer Joey Castillo, who has left the band.

Meanwhile, Queens Of The Stone Age have been confirmed as headliners for next years’ Open’er festival in Poland and will also play Download Festival.

Bruce Springsteen announces UK and Ireland tour dates for 2013

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29th November 2012

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Bruce Springsteen announces UK and Ireland tour dates for 2013

Bruce Springsteen has announced plans for a run of UK and Ireland dates next summer, as part of a full European tour. Springsteen, who's on the cover of Uncut this month, will play London's Wembley Stadium on June 15 2013, Glasgow Hampden Park on June 18 and Coventry Ricoh Arena on June 20. He wi...

Bruce Springsteen has announced plans for a run of UK and Ireland dates next summer, as part of a full European tour.

Springsteen, who’s on the cover of Uncut this month, will play London’s Wembley Stadium on June 15 2013, Glasgow Hampden Park on June 18 and Coventry Ricoh Arena on June 20.

He will then visit mainland Europe before travelling to Ireland to play Limerick Thomond Park on July 16, Cork Páirc Uí Chaoimh on July 18 and Belfast King’s Hall on July 20.

Springsteen is currently finishing up the North American leg of his ‘Wrecking Ball’ tour, and will play a star-studded benefit for Hurricane Sandy relief on December 12 in New York.

Bruce Springsteen will play:

London Wembley Stadium (June 15 2013)

Glasgow Hampden Park (18)

Coventry Ricoh Arena (20)

Limerick Thomond Park (July 16)

Cork Páirc Uí Chaoimh (18)

Belfast King’s Hall (20)

The Beach Boys – Live In Concert

Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards: ‘Sometimes I despise Mick Jagger’

Led Zeppelin meet Barack Obama at the White House

Scott Walker – Bish Bosch

Some notes on Uncut’s Top 75 of 2012

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds debut new single ‘We No Who U R’ – listen

Jack White: ‘I will always miss The White Stripes’

The Rolling Stones, London 02, November 29, 2012

Interview: Peter Strickland on Berberian Sound Studio

Eric Clapton on Cream: “I was in a confrontational situation 24 hours a day…”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds unveil NSFW ‘Push The Sky Away’ album artwork

Jimi Hendrix burned Monterey guitar sells at auction for £237,000

The Rolling Stones are joined onstage by Florence Welch and Eric Clapton in London

The House Of Love – The House Of Love

Uncut plays the music of Beck

Ask Sinéad O’Connor

The Black Keys settle lawsuits with Pizza Hut and Home Depot

Elbow confirm ‘gap year’ hiatus and debut new song

Nick Oliveri reunites with Queens Of The Stone Age

Bruce Springsteen announces UK and Ireland tour dates for 2013

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