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Kraftwerk: a robot speaks!

Sam Richards
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Kraftwerk: a robot speaks!

Karl Bartos on his days in Kraftwerk, the secrets of Kling Klang and Cliff Richard’s hitherto undisclosed influence on New York electro. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine - in UK shops now and available to buy from our online store, he tells Sam Richards more. For a musician synonymous with...

Karl Bartos on his days in Kraftwerk, the secrets of Kling Klang and Cliff Richard’s hitherto undisclosed influence on New York electro. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops now and available to buy from our online store, he tells Sam Richards more.

For a musician synonymous with the interface between music and technology, Karl Bartos’ Hamburg home studio is surprisingly spartan. “I have a piano, a Martin D-28 guitar and a computer,” he reveals. “The core of my old equipment like the MiniMoog and the Arp synthesiser is still there, but they seem to retire now. Usually I go out and record something in the streets.”

Rather than creating his own sounds, Bartos is currently concerned with paying deeper attention to those that already exist around us. “Ambience is really great. I’ve learned a lot from John Cage about that – he said, the great symphony is if you go to a crossroads and listen to the rhythm of the cars. Around here, you hear ships all the time. But basically anything makes a symphony. It’s really a great variety of noises in this world.”

Bartos was always a versatile musician. In his memoir The Sound Of The Machine, recently translated into English, he describes hot-footing it between Kraftwerk’s Kling Kling studio and the orchestra pit at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, while also playing drums in a rock’n’roll band and vibraphone in a jazz quartet. The range of influences that powered minimalist masterpieces like The Man-Machine and Computer World was broader than you think. “I always listen to music as a whole,” says Bartos, settling down to answer your questions. “It’s all the sound of being human.”

Can you describe your feelings the first time you entered Kling Klang studio and played the electronic drums?

– John Densmore, Sunderland
The atmosphere was like what you can read about Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was this big variety of useless things and useful things. In one corner of the room I saw a neon lamp, and so I had this feeling of an art place, not really a musical studio. The first time I went there, we played at a low level. I had these knitting needles in my hand and the sound of them hitting the metal pad was very loud in the room. You can’t really use your technique, if you have a knitting needle! So I get along, and it was OK. But the next time we played full volume, and that makes a difference because then suddenly the sounds were much louder than a normal drum set. The articulation was very low, you had just one boom! But over the years, we developed a style of modulating it through machines, technical effects, and so on. It was an interesting challenge, and it opened my ears to things I knew already. Sly & The Family Stone, they were using a drum machine but I didn’t notice so much because it was deep in the music. What happened with Kraftwerk was the aestheticisation of technology. Like the Eiffel Tower – there’s no facade, it’s just this pure skeleton.

PICK UP THE NEW UNCUT FOR THE FULL STORY

Tinariwen delve into their archives

Michael Bonner
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Tinariwen delve into their archives

Tinariwen are about to release a pair of catalogue projects that sheds new light on their rich history. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut They'll release Kel Tinariwen – an early cassette tape recorded in the early 90s that never received a wider release...

Tinariwen are about to release a pair of catalogue projects that sheds new light on their rich history.

They’ll release Kel Tinariwen – an early cassette tape recorded in the early 90s that never received a wider release – alongside first-ever vinyl reissues of 2007s Aman Iman and 2009s Imidiwan: Companions.

Kel Tinariwen is coming on vinyl, CD and cassette while Aman Iman and Imidiwan: Companions reissues come on limited edition coloured vinyl and standard edition black vinyl.

They’re released on November 4 by Craft Recordings.

Aman Iman (Water Of Life) was Tinariwen’s third studio album, recorded in Mali’s capital, Bamako. It was produced by Justin Adams – Robert Plant’s guitarist and producer of Tinariwen’s debut album The Radio Tisdas Sessions. Meanwhile, Imidiwan: Companions was the band’s follow-up produced by Jean-Paul Romann, and recorded in Tessalit, the Malian desert village home of band members Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and Hassan Ag Touhami.

Tracklisting for the three albums is:
Kel Tinariwen
Side A
À L’Histoire
Kedou Kedou
Atahoura Techragh D’Azaka Nin
Matadjem Yinmexan

Side B
Awa Idjan War Infa Iman
Sendad Eghlalan
Tenidagh Hegh Djeredjere
Arghane Manine

Aman Iman
Side A
Cler Achel
Mano Dayak
Matadjem Yinmixan

Side B
Ahimana
Soixante Trois
Toumast

Side C
Imidiwan WinakaliN
Awa Didjen
Ikyadarh Dim

Side D
Tamatant Tilay
Assouf
Izarharh Tenere

Imidiwan: Companions
Side A
Imidiwan Afrik Tendam
Lulla
Tenhert
Enseqi Ehad Didagh
Tahult In
Tamodjerazt Assis
Intitlayaghen

Side B
Imazeghen N Adagh
Tenalle Chegret
Kel Tamashek
Assuf Ag Assuf
Chabiba
Ere Tasfata Adounia

Uncut’s Ultimate End Of The Road Festival 2022 Round-Up!

Michael Bonner
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Uncut’s Ultimate End Of The Road Festival 2022 Round-Up!

So we’re just about back from Larmer Tree Gardens – and what a brilliant time we all had. If we thought last year was great, this year's End Of The Road was even better - with amazing performances from a huge array of brilliant artists to the packed-out crowds at the Uncut Q&As. Huge thanks t...

So we’re just about back from Larmer Tree Gardens – and what a brilliant time we all had. If we thought last year was great, this year’s End Of The Road was even better – with amazing performances from a huge array of brilliant artists to the packed-out crowds at the Uncut Q&As.

Huge thanks to Tom Pinnock, Sam Richards, Mark Beaumont and Laura Barton for representing us so strongly down in Larmer Tree Gardens.

And now, for your convenience, here’s a round up of all our EOTR 2022 blogs… Dive in!

We’re off to the End Of The Road Festival 2022!

Woodland wonders! Six End Of The Road Festival 2022 picks

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1

Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2

Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4

Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Sam Richards
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Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

It’s midday on Sunday at the bijou Piano Stage. For those feeling a little discombobulated and sleep-deprived, Cassandra Jenkins can empathise. She hasn’t been getting much sleep recently either. “But not for the reasons you think,” she explains. “I was asked to write an essay about my fav...

It’s midday on Sunday at the bijou Piano Stage. For those feeling a little discombobulated and sleep-deprived, Cassandra Jenkins can empathise. She hasn’t been getting much sleep recently either. “But not for the reasons you think,” she explains. “I was asked to write an essay about my favourite movie – turns out I have a lot to say about Wayne’s World…”

Her raconteurial gifts also inform her gorgeously slow-burning, consoling songs. Accompanied here just by a saxophonist and a giant dragonfly who keeps divebombing the audience to much amusement, it really feels like a special moment, particularly when Jenkins follows her own “Hard Drive” with a cover of the equally poignant Evan Dando song of the same name. Even more impressive is that when she reappears with a full band on the Garden Stage two hours later, she manages to retain the warm intimacy of the earlier stripped-down set.

Jake Xerxes Fussell is another performer who manages to make it feel like he’s playing in your living room, with his unshowy but mesmeric folk fingerpicking. “Have you ever seen peaches growing on a sweet potato vine?” he sings. No, but at this festival, we’re not ruling anything out – after all, we have just seen a parrot and peacock hanging out together on a tree behind the press cabin.

Jana Horn also plays solo, though not by choice: her guitarist was held up at the airport, necessitating an even more minimal set than usual. Visibly trembling with nerves, she admits that this is the biggest show she’s played since singing at a police officer’s funeral. On some songs she doesn’t even play chords, tapping out single notes to accompany her wan vocal melodies. It makes Jake Xerxes Fussell sound like Muse by comparison. But songs such as “Optimism”, sparse and simple as they are, have a strange, hypnotic allure.

No reticence from Ryley Walker. “Siiiick!” he yells, after successfully negotiating a particularly knotty prog-noise coda. “The surcharge on your ticket is for extra psychedelia!” As part of a virtuoso trio with Andrew Scott Young on bass and the astonishing Ryan Jewell on drums, Walker’s certainly got chops, adding a jaw-dropping free-jazz freakout to the middle of “The Halfwit In Me”. But for the most part his songs are more thoughtful and nuanced than his exaggerated party bro persona suggests. He’s also smart enough to know exactly which county he’s in, taking a very respectable crack at “Knuckle Down” by local heroes XTC.

It’s about as frenetic as Sunday gets. Ethio-jazz legend Hailu Mergia helms a hugely agreeable set of languid, organ-driven funk. Kurt Vile locks into a mellow mid-tempo groove with “Mount Airy Hill” and stays there for 75 minutes. As always, the moment when you start wondering if it might be getting a bit boring is swiftly followed by the realisation that you’d be perfectly happy for him to carry on choogling forever.

Aldous Harding is another less-is-more advocate. Her songs can feel light as air, but anchored by unsettling, cryptic allusions. She’s a captivating presence, even when she’s sitting stock-still holding an acoustic guitar; when she gets up and starts artfully bashing a cowbell for “Old Peel”, it’s like a piece of avant-garde ballet. But what does it all mean? Harding gives nothing away, which ultimately makes it difficult to really fall in love with what she’s doing. At this stage in proceedings, a more unequivocal emotional connection is required.

So the festival gets a fitting send-off down on The Boat stage, deep in the heart of the woods. Standing opposite each other like duelling warriors, saxophonist Waclaw Zimpel and modular synth shaman James Holden summon a throbbing, elemental jazz-techno maelstrom. “This is a tune we wrote yesterday,” declares Holden. But it could have been written 1000 years ago. At the end of the set, a man dressed as Catweazle raises a giant wooden staff to the sky, a salute to the ancient sonic gods. Our quest has indeed reached the end of the road; we have become one with the forest.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Mark Beaumont
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Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

“We are all here together on this little blue marble spinning in space…” As is the way of many long, lost weekends, in the closing hours things get deeply philosophical. Particularly when intoxicants have been imbibed. Unsteady on his feet and noticeably slurring, as Bright Eyes’ Sunday head...

“We are all here together on this little blue marble spinning in space…” As is the way of many long, lost weekends, in the closing hours things get deeply philosophical. Particularly when intoxicants have been imbibed. Unsteady on his feet and noticeably slurring, as Bright Eyes’ Sunday headline set storms roughshod towards its climax, singer Conor Oberst stops writhing and gyrating like a melodramatic Thom Yorke and engages the crowd in a rambling discussion about the bonding nature of human pain and how “most people I know are pretty wonderful, how did the maniacs get in charge of everything?”

End Of The Road 2022, too, appears to be hurtling towards its end with unpredictable hands at the helm. Like Bright Eyes’ set, it’s clearly fraying at the edges. Mid-afternoon, New Orleans’ Hurray For The Riff Raff confront issues as serious as domestic sexual abuse on “SAGA” (“there is a life after the worst thing that’s ever happened to you,” singer Alynda Segarra says) and institutional racism on “PRECIOUS CARGO”, a semi-rap about the inhumanities Segarra witnessed while visiting a for-profit prison for asylum seekers. Yet, out in the field, a caped wizard goes into ritualistic paroxysms, driven to delirium by the band’s scorched Patti Smith folk-rock and chiming electronics that sound simultaneously ultra-modern and a little bit Enya.

Later, in the Big Top, Bristol’s Scalping concoct some of the most gruesome rave maelstroms of recent years, accompanied by unsettling visuals of crawling insect armies and deformed CGI faces. And here, delayed by a sudden electrical storm closing the tent, Yard Act will close out the festival with a brilliantly malformed display, singer James Smith toasting the crowd with a sick bucket and generally coming on like John Shuttleworth fronting PiL, or a spoken-word Babybird. His motormouth poetry detailing the effects of instant wealth (“Rich”) or weaving surreal capitalist metaphors (“The Trapper’s Pelts”) can shift from intimate recital to babbling yowl, as his band flicker between shoegaze grooves and ramshackle funk-punk. Let’s call it wails of the unexpected.

They’re in good company. Arriving to a psychedelic swarm of home-recorded voices, Bright Eyes throw themselves into a headline set which even they don’t seem sure will stay on the rails. This is largely due to the woozy state of Oberst, declaring “I’ll be John Dog if it’s nice to see you guys”, losing himself in elaborate dance moves that James’s Tim Booth might consider over the top, and attacking the graceful agonies of “Dance And Sing”, from the grief-stricken 2020 comeback album Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was, with such intensity that, for a whole verse, he doesn’t notice he’s shaken his microphone lead loose.

Though he’ll stumble over stage equipment, miss sections of the railroad country track “Another Travellin’ Song” and drift off into self-deprecating admissions of his lack of breakthrough success (“all the managers say ‘this one’s gonna be as big as Taylor Swift’, but it’s never happened”), it adds to the sense of unstable elemental chaos that powers his songs, as much unhinged forces of nature as Oberst is himself. Tornados of anguish, political disillusionment and brutal introspection, as soon as they kick in he’s naturally swept along by them, usually towards some howling emotional crescendo of brass, strings or sweeping alt-rock noise.

“Lover I Don’t Have To Love” is a dark soul hymnal that builds grand edifices of brass; “An Attempt To Tip The Scales” essentially the sound of an acoustic ballad exploding. Powerful melodic rock tracks from Down In The Weeds… such as “Mariana Trench” more than hold their own against cloudbusting I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning favourites like “Poison Oak” and Iraq War lament “Old Soul Song (For The New World Order)” and, by and large, Oberst holds it together with a slightly befuddled charm.

He admits to having wept through Hurray For The Riff Raff’s set before inviting Segarra to duet with him on the glam pound of “Haile Selassie” and finds a bar stool profundity in one last between-song ramble, about how “my pain is your pain, your pain is my pain, and we’re all here together on this marble.” It cues up a final “One For You, One For Me” – “the one song that actually means something to me” – condemning the selfishness that emerges from dislocated and unequal societies. Similarly, Bright Eyes themselves are a thing of barely controllable enormity tonight. All we can do is just dance on through.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Greg Dulli – Album By Album

Sharon O'Connell
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Greg Dulli – Album By Album

In the latest issue of Uncut magazine - in UK shops now and available to buy from our online store, Sharon O'Connell talks to Greg Dulli about his amazing musical journey. Greg Dulli is the driving force of The Afghan Whigs, whose early debt to Hüsker Dü was displaced by a love of ’60s soul ...

In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops now and available to buy from our online store, Sharon O’Connell talks to Greg Dulli about his amazing musical journey.

Greg Dulli is the driving force of The Afghan Whigs, whose early debt to Hüsker Dü was displaced by a love of ’60s soul and R&B that marked them out from the grunge pack. Having survived both a breakup and lengthy hiatus, as well as the death of guitarist Dave Rosser, the Whigs remain Dulli’s highest profile – and most successful – band, with nine albums to their credit (including How Do You Burn?, due in September), but it’s by no means his only project of substance. During their tussle with Elektra, Dulli formed The Twilight Singers, a changeable group of simpático players and friends.

They racked up five studio albums, none of which pulled their leader’s focus away from emotional turmoil and existential angst. There was a different working relationship, if no less intense songs, in play with Dulli/Lanegan vehicle The Gutter Twins, who released just one album, but Dulli busted out of type with his surprise solo debut, Random Desire, an adventurous set whose liberating effect seems to have been carried forward to the new Whigs record. Through all this, Dulli’s prime motivation for recording remains the same: “Will I have a good time? Is this fulfilling? Do I want to take these songs out and play them for other people? It’s really that simple”.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS
CONGREGATION
SUB POP, 1992

The Whigs’ third, its debt to ’60s soul, funk and R&B carving out a singular alt.rock profile

I would call it not only our breakthrough to a bigger public, but also a breakthrough for us as a group; I feel like that’s when we became The Afghan Whigs. That’s when we put it all together – all of the promise and all of the gigs and influences and I think my songwriting caught up to my ambitions. [We felt] a fearlessness to just do what we wanted – not be afraid to play slow songs, for example. We were sort of guided a little bit by the label on Up In It [Sub Pop, 1990] and I feel we broke through and just stated our independence within the structure of the label with this record.

I think Congregation was where I first started to experiment with cinematic structure – the person’s voice who opens Congregation is the person who gets sung about in the next album, Gentlemen. I think [the songs’ complexity] came from the interplay of the gigs we got to play, on a nightly basis. A lot of touring happened after Up In It; we were able to tour Europe and play England for the first time. You start to hone your best instincts and then you start to trust them. And that’s when you become special. I think the recording budget [$15,000] was looked at as extravagant. It certainly was extravagant compared to what we got before that! But I felt like we had earned our place and were worth the investment. And clearly, the investment paid off.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS
GENTLEMEN
ELEKTRA, 1993

Recorded in Memphis, the Whigs’ fourth tells of a toxic relationship via intense songs full of swagger, shame and self-loathing

We wrote it on the road – back-to-back records: Congregation ’92, Gentlemen ’93. That’s something that really doesn’t happen any more. We sort of went non-stop: there was an EP between Up In It and Congregation, so with “Uptown Avondale” we had five releases in a row – bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It was a very prolific period for the group.

When I look back on Gentlemen I see someone trying to figure out relationships, and I think that’s why on side two I gave the big song [“My Curse”] to Marcy [Mays]. There’s no-one like her and we’ve been friends since the late ’80s. That was giving the subject a voice, which also allowed me to call in my own responsibility for the demise of the relationship. And I was able to look at the grey in between the two poles. “Ladies, let me tell you about myself/I got a dick for a brain” was the opening line of “Be Sweet”: clearly, I realised that would get bold faced, so to speak. So much so that I haven’t played that song since that tour. Which is not to say that I don’t think it’s a good song, because I do.

I think the album, Gentlemen, just got hard to sing for a little while. During the Twilight Singers run, I was able to not play those songs and then, when we reunited in 2012, I actually came to a sense of peace about it all. But I still didn’t sing “Be Sweet”. So for whatever reason, that song never got sung again. “I Keep Coming Back” is the flip side to “Turn Back The Hands Of Time”, by Tyrone Davis. I listened to it almost every night. It became like a ritual for me; I became really fixated on that song and the simple message that it was from one person to another.

I remember introducing it to the group at the last minute and we all swapped instruments, so everybody is playing a different instrument on that. It seemed like a good way to end it and then we turned it into a strange instrumental at the end, which gave it the cinematic closing.

PICK UP THE NEW UNCUT FOR THE FULL STORY

Spotted at End Of The Road Festival 2022!

Sam Richards
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Spotted at End Of The Road Festival 2022!

It's been a weird, wonderful and occasionally wild weekend. Here's a selection of curious happenings and colourful characters that have made us smile while wandering the End Of The Road site... ** Best music nerd stage bantz? Ryley Walker, natch: “We’ve only been listening to late 80s ECM r...

It’s been a weird, wonderful and occasionally wild
weekend. Here’s a selection of curious happenings and colourful characters that have made us smile while wandering the End Of The Road site…

** Best music nerd stage bantz? Ryley Walker, natch: “We’ve only been listening to late 80s ECM records – I should technically have a bald ponytail by now”

** Hearty co-sign for Bristol Beer Factory’s Satisfaction ale. Who says you can’t get no? And served by a Deadhead who survived Bickershaw 1972…

** Kudos to the grey-bearded gent in a mirrorball helmet, kindly enhancing everyone’s disco experience in the Somerset Cider Bus tent (big tune: Soulwax’s “NY Excuse”)

** Best wig? It’s a close-run thing but surely taken by the guy in a mohawk made of green carpet

** Not just peacocks but… baby peacocks! And a parrot!

** A woman live-painting The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman during her Uncut Q&A. Please send us the finished picture…

** Lunchtime pop bingo for the under 10s. Surely they know “Come On Eileen”?

** Why are a crowd of people gathered in the woods chanting “Stick, stick, stick”? It’s the stick competition of course! Prizes for the longest, sturdiest… and stickiest

** Uncut’s very own Laura Barton and Michael Hann absolutely crushing it at Saturday night’s Silent Disco: “Sabotage“! “Back In Black“! “Cannonball“! Give these people a Fabric residency

** Overheard from a nearby tent: “It’s terrible – we’re having to drink instant coffee!”

** There really is a group of people roaming the festival site with rock wigs and video cameras, trying to recreate Wayne’s World. Cassandra Jenkins wants in

** Not enough disco or UK garage on the bill for your liking? Just head to the Two Tribes barbecue area, the brilliantly incongruous festival within a festival

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Mark Beaumont
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Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

You join us onstage at a Grammy benefit concert, year uncertain. Neil Young, roped in to a charity supergroup, wanders over to the session keyboardist for a between-solo chat. “You know when people are playing and they go over to each other and say something in the ear?” says Kurt Vile, reco...

You join us onstage at a Grammy benefit concert, year uncertain. Neil Young, roped in to a charity supergroup, wanders over to the session keyboardist for a between-solo chat.

“You know when people are playing and they go over to each other and say something in the ear?” says Kurt Vile, recounting the anecdote he’d heard from said keyboard player for a rapt audience at the third and final Uncut Q&A of End Of The Road 2022. “You never know what they’re saying and they go away and rock away. So Neil Young was doing this, he was rocking out, just getting in the zone, totally shredding his guitar. And then he came over to the keyboard player and he goes, ‘Who’s that guy over there? That guy right there’. And the [keyboard player] is like ‘that’s Joe Perry’. He’s like, ‘Oh, OK, OK’. And he goes away, rocks away for 30 seconds, plays this solo, comes back and he goes to the keyboard player, he says, ‘Who’s Joe Perry?’ ‘Joe Perry from Aerosmith’. ‘Oh, yeah, OK’. And then he goes off and does another solo, comes back and he looks at the keyboard player and he goes, ‘He fucking sucks!’”

Fresh from a secret set at the Piano Stage, Kurt is comfortable in the woodland surroundings of the Talking Heads stage, particularly since it reminds him of his home in Mount Airy, Philadelphia. His home environs play a large part in his discussion with Uncut’s Tom Pinnock, as talk turns to the home studio he’s constructed there, complete with famed producer Mitch Easter’s personal console. “He recorded the first couple REMs and Pavement’s Brighten The Corners,” Vile reveals. “So I knew it was coming from a good place, somebody who knew what they were doing and somebody who knew how to also instal it into my house. It’s his personal board. It’s like an old ’60s console, very Abbey Road vibes.”

Vile also, Tom uncovers, “loved” the pandemic. “Obviously there were scary parts, but it saved my life,” he says. “I feel like before the pandemic maybe I just wasn’t as confident as a performer but the combination of realising I’m lucky that people even like my music, I’m lucky that I got a record deal.”

A major label record deal, with Verve, Tom notes. “Yeah,” Vile chuckles. “You gotta play the game… it can be whatever you want it to be. I like the idea of trying to do something outside of the box and see what happens, so that that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m stoked to be labelmates with The Velvet Underground and Stan Getz.”

Vile claims he can’t remember his 2011 set at EOTR because “I was partying really hard”, but otherwise his memory is so good that “people are scared of it.” He certainly recalls his brief youthful dabbling in bluegrass music. “I took a few banjo lessons,” he admits. “My dad convinced me to play the banjo first, he was into bluegrass. I immediately got him to teach me chords to songs with guitar.”

News that Kurt is eager to get on with the follow-up to this year’s ninth album Watch My Moves (“I got all kinds of new instruments lately that I’m going to use and start recording again when I get back from tour. In the late fall I’m gonna hit it. Hit it hard”) leads the discussion around to collaborators past (Cate Le Bon, Courtney Barnett, Uncut favourite Terry Allen) and possibly future.

“I’m afraid to say certain people out loud,” Vile giggles. “Like I’m obsessed for instance with Charlie XCX, but I shouldn’t even say that out loud.” Tom suggests a supergroup of his own: Vile, Terry Allen and Charli XCX. Kurt nods. “That’s the perfect band.” Just nobody invite Joe Perry.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Suede: “We’ve got to find ways to be uncomfortable”

Tom Pinnock
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Suede: “We’ve got to find ways to be uncomfortable”

SUEDE have just made their best album in decades – just ask their biggest fan, BRETT ANDERSON. Along with the rest of the band, he explains to Uncut how fatherhood, family and “plummeting towards old age” have helped bring fresh perspectives while simultaneously honouring their earliest influe...

SUEDE have just made their best album in decades – just ask their biggest fan, BRETT ANDERSON. Along with the rest of the band, he explains to Uncut how fatherhood, family and “plummeting towards old age” have helped bring fresh perspectives while simultaneously honouring their earliest influences. “We’ve got to find ways to be uncomfortable,” Brett tells Tom Pinnock, in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops now and available to buy from our online store.

Brett Anderson is dressed in the classic Suede uniform when he opens the door: tucked-in shirt, smart trousers and, indeed, socks, all in various shades of black. “I’ve spent a lot of time here,” he says of his west London base, where he stays when he’s not with his family in rural Somerset. “But I’ve not done much to it.” He implores Uncut not to judge him on the dated kitchen, then turns to the lounge area. “The radiators, I chose them, and the chandelier and sofas, so write what you like about those…”

Like its owner, this city bolthole – comprising one floor of a grand, pillared townhouse – is stylish, bohemian and arty, with a touch of weathered glamour. Green leaves and a jetplane sky fill the windows, there’s a moka pot heating on the stove, dark family photos on the mantelpiece and a black vintage guitar propped up against the fireplace. Suede bassist Mat Osman, also in black, is similarly arranged on a kitchen stool.

We’re here to discuss Autofiction, Suede’s ninth album. A raw blast of post-punk noise and stripped-back energy, it is a far cry from the more theatrical, experimental soundscapes of 2018’s The Blue Hour. It’s the group’s most exciting record in decades.

“It’s just the way the pendulum swings,” says Anderson. “After making two quite conceptual, avant-garde records, you naturally want to explore that nastier side. Whenever I do accidentally hear one of our records on the radio, I’m always a bit disappointed and I think ‘God, I wish we recorded that with a bit more fucking balls.’ So this is our attempt to redress that with a really live-sounding record. It’s not theoretical, more a feel record.”

The concept of a ‘Suede do punk’ album was first mooted in producer Ed Buller’s kitchen after the band performed at the Roundhouse in 2016. But Anderson and the band weren’t quite ready to take that path back then.

“I said, ‘You should do a punk album,’” recalls Buller. “I think it was too early then. We’ve always talked about doing it, but we’ve never really had the balls to. But Autofiction is the idea of ‘what would Suede sound like if they were to come out in 1979?’ To be honest, what’s really behind this record is the authenticity of the sound of the band. Not gadgetry, but what they sound like when they play together. At the moment, Autofiction is probably my favourite Suede record.”

In these 11 songs, Anderson addresses the past, the future, fatherhood and family, gazing into the darker side of life with his usual flamboyant turn of phrase: “Our lives too will pass and fade like this moment”, goes “Personality Disorder”. “Our clothes are like an anthem for sorrow…”

“I didn’t want to write an album pretending to be a young man,” he explains, “pretending that I have the same challenges as a 20-year-old. I wanted it to be a snapshot of myself in my fifties, and the darkness you sometimes find in that, as you’re plummeting towards old age. I find that terrifying in lots of ways.”

PICK UP THE NEW UNCUT FOR THE FULL STORY

Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Sam Richards
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Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Given that we’re in the countryside, in the deep south (of England), it’s high time for some country music. And Margo Cilker is a proper country singer with a classic country voice, full of depth and character and twanging vowels, perfect for delivering her tales of moonlight and loss and godly ...

Given that we’re in the countryside, in the deep south (of England), it’s high time for some country music. And Margo Cilker is a proper country singer with a classic country voice, full of depth and character and twanging vowels, perfect for delivering her tales of moonlight and loss and godly Southern men. She’s not one for fancy lyrical conceits, getting straight to the point as quickly as possible: “Everyone I look up to’s gone crazy or died” goes the chorus of one song. But if her unvarnished messaging might sound harsh, Cilker is a warm, welcoming presence and her songs are beautifully played by an effortlessly on-point four-piece band.

There’s more empathy, bucketloads of it in fact, from the capaciously trousered Alabaster DePlume. A true oddball original, his set is a curious mix of lyrical improv jazz, medieval chanting and a particularly intense mindfulness class. “You’re beautiful!” he yells at the crowd. “Don’t forget you’re precious!” Some songs feature three bandmates drumming, on others they just sing. At one point, the bassist puts down her instrument and wafts a peacock-blue fan while DePlume himself switches between sax, guitar and motivational speaking. There is an emotional moment when he dedicates the final song to the trumpeter Jaimie Branch. A year ago, she was standing exactly where DePlume is now, sending out good vibes with her band Anteloper; last month she passed away, aged just 39. So when he signs off by saying “thanks for living, it’s fucking tough”, you know he really, really means it.

“Sorry we’re not who you were expecting!” begins David Tattersall of The Wave Pictures, replacing the sadly unwell Emma-Jean Thackray on the Garden Stage. But his band prove to be entertaining hosts nonetheless, heirs to the wordy, picaresque indie of Edwyn Collins and The Jazz Butcher. A comical indignance powers Tattersall’s songs about Newcastle rain, “a sculpture of marmalade” and the travesty of a £2000 coat.

Tamara Lindeman doesn’t reveal how much her outfit cost, but it’s pretty special: a light blue and white streaked batwing dress that looks, when she opens her arms wide, like she’s wearing the sky. It’s ideal attire for The Weather Station’s moving explorations of climate grief and why Australian magpies are different from British ones. The dress also gives her a bit of a Stevie Nicks vibe, matched by the anthemic tilt of “Tried To Tell You” and “Parking Lot”. The climax of the set comes when man of the day Alabaster DePlume is ushered back onstage to add an ecstatic sax solo to “Robber”.

It’s standing room only for acoustic guitar virtuoso Gwenifer Raymond on Talking Heads. Shoes off, head down, she gets straight down to business at a ferocious pace. She’s Bert Jansch on speed! The Yngwie Malmsteen of folk! Even when she bends forward to pick up a drink, she keeps playing with her other hand. It’s proper superwoman stuff, until she encounters her greatest nemesis: a broken string. But when she triumphantly restrings her guitar, it’s greeted with one the biggest cheers of the day.

Finally it’s time for the mighty Pixies, the band that End Of The Road have been trying to book since the festival’s inception, delayed a couple more years by the pandemic. And they don’t disappoint. Black Francis looks leaner and sings meaner than he has done since the late-’80s; Joey Santiago has finally made peace with his post-hair look; and Paz Lenchantin ably handles all the Kim Deal stuff without trying too hard to be Kim Deal. Their opening salvo of “Gouge Away”, “Wave Of Mutilation”, “Monkey Gone To Heaven” and “Debaser” is as good as it gets. Plus there’s an outing for all your cult favourites, whether that’s a breezy “Caribou” or a hilariously savage “U-Mass”.

But Boston we have a problem. Whenever they play a 21st century Pixies song – which sensibly isn’t too often – the energy levels palpably drop. There’s nothing particularly wrong with solid indie-surf chuggers like “Vault Of Heaven”, but perhaps that’s the issue; most classic Pixies songs sound gloriously, magnificently wrong. Most of the new ones don’t contain that crucial wrongness quotient, not enough devils or whores or cocks. Actually, there is a “cock” in “There’s A Moon On”, which suggests that the forthcoming Doggerel may be their best post-comeback album, although the bar isn’t too high.

But, hey. And indeed “Hey”. They play the old ones with such convincing gusto that it really doesn’t matter. This is a life-affirming celebration of one of the greatest and wildest catalogues in rock. Altogether now: “Wanna grow up to be, be a debaser! De-BASS-er!”

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Mark Beaumont
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The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Like tentative wildlife, they make cautious appearances; peeking from the undergrowth, withdrawn but aware of their rarely-seen beauty. If you’re up early enough you might catch them soundchecking on the Garden Stage, chirruping snippets of “Desert Island”. Mid-afternoon, if you’re skilled a...

Like tentative wildlife, they make cautious appearances; peeking from the undergrowth, withdrawn but aware of their rarely-seen beauty. If you’re up early enough you might catch them soundchecking on the Garden Stage, chirruping snippets of “Desert Island”. Mid-afternoon, if you’re skilled at following their tracks or are in with the serious hunters, you’ll spot them briefly on the Piano Stage in the woods, playing the 30-second “Castles Of America”, a stripped down acoustic “The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side”, “All The Umbrellas In London” and a cranky cover of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something In The Air” delivered by their guitarist at the piano in what we’ll call an “optimistic” key.

The Magnetic Fields have arrived at End Of The Road 2022, preparing for their titanic bill-clash with Pixies, and a certain portion of the EOTR crowd, somewhat ironically, feel their electricity in the air. Anticipation for the world’s greatest chamber pop delights adds a certain frisson to the day; opening the Garden Stage, Yasmin Williams’ plucked, tapped and bowed melodies trip all the sweeter from the neck of her laid-flat guitar.

On the Woods Stage there’s additional charm to The Umlauts’ groove-laden post-punk chants of “hungover!”, and to Los Bitchos dedicating psychedelic go-go instrumental “Lindsey Goes To Mykonos” to Lindsey Lohan, offering her a free T-shirt and a tequila shot if she happens to be here.

Kevin Morby takes the task of warming up the Garden Stage for Team Merritt very seriously indeed. In a frilled golden cowboy jacket, and at a mic stand bedecked with roses, he charges through firebrand sax-rock aplenty in the shape of “This Is A Photograph” and “Rock Bottom”, transforms into the canyon Lou Reed on a roar through “A Random Act Of Kindness” and builds the mirrorball blues of “Five Easy Pieces”, with its memorable romantic declaration that “you fuck like a monster but you still drive me wild”, to a microphone-flinging wig-out. Compared to the plentiful, muscular material from this year’s This Is A Photograph album, more laid-back numbers like “Campfire” and a tropical saunter through “City Music” feel like the flashbacks of a rock god to their stoner youth; this time round, Morby’s grooves have grown elemental.

Perfume Genius, meanwhile, is busy turning the Woods Stage into a demonic cabaret. Bathed in red light and wrapped in a voluminous chiffon top, he plays mouthpiece for the devil’s idea of orchestral balladry and salsa funk party music. At his most maudlin and dramatic he sounds like The xx have corrupted the soul of a ‘50s crooner, while the stabbing synths and impish falsetto of “Grid” make for a gory glam rock, complete with a chorus of screaming blue murder. “Queen”, with its glorious electro fuzz and fire siren chorus, is perhaps synthpop’s most glowering showstopper.

Back in the Garden, though, the faithful gather close. The Magnetic Fields have broken cover, bearing ukuleles, acoustic guitars and Sam Devol’s centre-stage cello, and their every squeak and motion is exquisite to witness, right down to lugubrious mainman Stephin Merritt’s only “dance” move, spinning once in his chair during “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”.

It’s an evening not short on wonders. The sublime synth country lollop of “I Don‘t Believe In The Sun”. “Andrew In Drag”, synthpop on record, here stripped down to its Regency undergarments. The swelling emotions of “All My Little Words” and “Grand Canyon”, Merritt’s voice as deep and majestic as the geological feature itself. The moment actual frugging breaks out as they launch into their Broadway high-kicker “The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side” with guitarist Anthony Kaczynski manfully recreating Dudley Klute’s original vocal tour de force. They may grumble between themselves about an unexplained buzz in the monitors but the sound is richer here than at their own (stupendous) Hammersmith Apollo shows this week; tracks like “The Flowers She Sent And The Flowers She Said She Sent”, “All The Umbrellas In London” and “Quick!” – a song that masterfully strips away everything besides the repeated hook – arrive with all of their bubbling electronic quirks attached.

Merritt’s pure alt-country/folk melodies rank among the greatest ever written, but what elevates him into the pantheon of leftfield gods is his almost casual ability to melt arch wit into profound emotion. A stark and stunning “The Book Of Love”, on baritone and banjo alone, is plaintively comedic on its own (“the book of love is long and boring, no-one can lift the damn thing”) but, to much laughter, Merritt then piles straight into “The Biggest Tits In History”, his recent tongue-in-cheek tribute to competitive bird breeding. Indeed 2020’s Quickiesalbum, a collection of 28 largely sub-two-minute songs, provides most of the laughs. The bold chorale “The Day The Politicians Died” – envisioning a politico-free world where “it’s all one big party now”, and suggesting “we’ve got the taste for blood, now let’s eat all the priests” – is met with celebratory whoops, and “Death Pact (Let’s Make A)” was inspired, Merritt explains, by Alice Cooper renewing his wedding vows “in a very Alice Cooper way”.

Having charmed us out of our minds with what must surely be amongst EOTR’s finest ever sets, Merritt then breaks every heart in a five-mile radius with “’14 I Wish I Had Pictures”, a track from the closing throes of 2017’s autobiographical 50 Song Memoir album about the fragility of memories and the corrosions of age. As a song it’s quintessentially Merritt: quietly staggering.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Mark Beaumont
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The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

“I definitely think I came up at a good time,” The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman tells host Laura Barton midway through the second Uncut Q&A of End Of The Road 2022, on the woodland Talking Heads stage. “There really was suddenly room for women in music and things were shifting, but ...

“I definitely think I came up at a good time,” The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman tells host Laura Barton midway through the second Uncut Q&A of End Of The Road 2022, on the woodland Talking Heads stage. “There really was suddenly room for women in music and things were shifting, but everywhere I would go there’d still be all these guys in music who’d be like, ‘OK, let me let me tell you what to do’. Intended in a very helpful way, but it was hard to realise, like, ‘Wait, I don’t have to listen, and I don’t have to respond’.”

She’s talking in particular about her shift from acoustic folk to more electronic and synth textures on last year’s fifth album Ignorance, Uncut’s album of 2021. “When you’re a blonde woman holding an acoustic guitar, people are like, ‘That’s perfect, stay that’. And I was like, ‘I can’t do that’. I really tried, but I couldn’t.”

The shift, she explains, was partly inspired by the experimentation she’d hear playing festivals like End Of The Road. “I am this idiosyncratic guitar player and I was playing music where I really love to have silence and dynamics in music,” she says. “I just was realising, to me, there’s such a difference between headphone music and live music, and live music is – no matter who you’re listening to – still a communal experience. And so I was thinking about the experience of an audience and a room of music. And that led me to rhythm and realising how powerful a very steady beat is, and I also was realising that I liked, more than I realised, dance music or pop music. Sometimes there’s something very reassuring about it.”

The conversation naturally turns to the ’80s pop greats. “There’s so many songs that we’ve all heard by, like, Talking Heads or Tears For Fears, or Duran Duran or Kate Bush. We’ve all heard these songs that have penetrated your mind and they’re just there. But then you revisit them as an adult and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s actually a very thoughtful key change’ or ‘that’s a really interesting chorus’ or you really realise how interesting the production is. It was such a beautiful time where I love how much melody there still was in 80s pop and how much harmonic complexity there can be in a huge hit.”

Over 30 minutes, the discussion traces Lindeman’s route to alt-pop fame. Life as a teenage TV actor, she reveals, “taught me a lot and took me around the world and it got me out of high school. I was going to a small rural high school and on a film set I would meet wonderful weirdos and artists. It was like this vision of another way to live.” But she learnt to despise being moulded, dressed and directed. “When I was 19, I just had this lightning bolt moment of like, ‘I’m going to make music, I’m going to record my own records’,” she says. “The idea of being completely in charge of every aspect of it was something that was very formative.”

Finding herself in the “Torontopia” indie rock scene in the early ’00s, she found music “approachable” and learnt banjo to join bands while also making her first “insular” music in her walk-in closet. Back then she saw her “computer music” as an artwork of sound to be constructed. “I was just trying to figure out sound and not even really thinking about songs or lyrics. I was like, ‘If I layer this on top of this, it creates this picture’.”

And so began a career-long battle to keep her hand on the rudder. “With my first computer record, it was very much only me, and then other people got involved and started having opinions,” she says. “And then it was another journey to learn how to push against that in a kind way. To try to just be fully on your own journey is difficult.”

A journey made tougher by regular and unpredictable bursts of sonic shame. “I went back and forth between thinking [Ignorance] was just way too poppy and then sometimes thinking it was just way too like fucked up,” she admits. “It’s always felt like I have revealed a terrible secret. Even playing a show or putting out a record or a song. There’s always a vulnerability hangover, a shame hangover, where you feel like crawling into bed for a couple days and you don’t want anyone to see you. Every music video I’ve put out in the last two years, I’m so proud of it and then it comes out and I’m just like, ‘What have I done?’ I literally get very angry at myself every time.”

When did this shame become something like pride, Barton asks her, pointing to the album’s success. “That’s not really how shame works,” she replies. “It can show up anytime, no matter what. It’s a quite a mystical substance.”

Nonetheless, she can recognise the similarities between herself and an icon such as Joni Mitchell: “she’s pulling apart these very, like knotty things. A lot of her songs are questions and that to me is what I think of when I think of what does it mean to be a feminine writer.” And the practice of writing a book about how to write lyrics and mentoring other musicians has helped her deal with her own creative stumbling blocks.

“The place that you’re stuck is really important,” she says. “Now in myself as a writer, I feel so much less trapped by my own tangles, because I’ve seen them in other people. What I found was for all the female singer songwriters in particular, the part in the song that they were unsure of, or where the lyrics just suddenly didn’t make any sense, it was always this deep well of complexity in their lives, or it was a question that they were afraid to ask or it was something they didn’t want to know or something they didn’t want to say. Writer’s block and insecurity are actually very important things that have a lot to teach you.”

Lindeman and Barton discuss the “anger of betrayal” which led Lindeman to theme Ignorance around the climate crisis, and her peaks and dips of optimism on the topic under Biden’s presidency. “When I wrote that record, it was very much coming out of the anger over the silence and the lack of acknowledgement of ‘this is happening’. There were so many feelings that were in my heart at the time that have shifted, because the conversation has really leapt forward in the last couple of years. People are so much more able to talk about it, much more willing to talk about it. We’ve really moved somewhere.”

The main chat touches on the relation between Ignorance and this year’s “sister” record How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, before the floor – well, dusty hill – is thrown open for audience questions. Here we learn that Lindeman can’t listen to her own albums (“I can’t hear it like a normal person can….sometimes now my songs are on the radio or I’m in a coffee shop, I have to leave”) and that it’s something of a miracle that she’s ever finished a record at all.

“I have a song about the moment before you write the song, where it’s perfect, and it’s wonderful and it’s everything,” she says. “And then every word you write and every note you record it’s like you’re cutting off escape routes. It’s this beautiful well of possibility and then everything you do you’re cutting off limbs and closing doors. It’s not going to be this, it’s not going to be that. [When it’s released] it’s like a butterfly that’s pinned to the wall. So I think I just had to make peace with how much I’ve struggled with that and how upsetting it is, just make peace with losing all the possibilities. Then I could sometimes put it on and it’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s so alive’, once I made peace with all the things that it wasn’t.”

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

Sam Richards
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Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

“Welcome to the Sahara!” With the ground still dry and dusty underfoot, Tinariwen’s greeting feels less of a stretch than it might do at a typical rain-soaked British festival. In these conditions, with a light breeze blowing across the main stage arena, the band’s traditional Touareg robes ...

“Welcome to the Sahara!” With the ground still dry and dusty underfoot, Tinariwen’s greeting feels less of a stretch than it might do at a typical rain-soaked British festival. In these conditions, with a light breeze blowing across the main stage arena, the band’s traditional Touareg robes may prove to be the ideal End Of The Road attire.

They begin at a gentle pace playing songs from their recent album Amadjar, which despite its crop of special guests felt like a return to the band’s roots, recorded as it was on location in the western Sahara. Bandleader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib is in his sixties now, a fact betrayed by his greying mop, but the most thrilling moments still come when he straps on an electric guitar and plays those biting, quicksilver runs. Gradually the beat quickens and the crowd begin to sway along, copying the band’s dance moves: arms outstretched, bodies twisting in time to the infectious, undulating rhythm, which it’s hard to believe is being tapped out on a single drum.

Sadly there’s no cameo from Warren Ellis, one of Tinariwen’s Amadjar collaborators. But Ellis’s old Dirty Three bandmate Mick Turner is here, with his new band Mess Esque. It’s probably no surprise to learn that they are slow and mysterious, Turner stroking his guitar cryptically stage-right. But thanks to keyboard-playing frontwoman Helen Franzmann, some impressive songs begin to emerge from the murk.

They lay the groundwork in the Tipi tent perfectly for Skullcrusher – the misleading nom de plume for a skinny American called Helen Ballentine – who is even slower and more mysterious, playing desolate mini-epics in the vein of Grouper or Galaxie 500. Her songs are hazy and vague, briefly snapping into focus before crumbling apart – everything feels, as she sings, “just out of reach”. Ballentine seems genuinely overawed that so many people have turned up to watch to this minimalist performance, but given the way she creates something compelling from the barest of ingredients, she might have to start getting used to the attention.

Nigerian-born singer-songwriter Uwade holds them similarly rapt on the Talking Heads stage, although this may be more down to her engaging presence than her actual music. Playing solo on an emerald-green guitar, her voice is stunning but her songs of unrequited crushes are a little sappy and generic.

She makes a more telling contribution later in the evening, boldly singing the opening to Fleet Foxes’ first song, “Wading In Waist-High Water”, before the full band crash in, to euphoric effect. Robin Pecknold has smartly augmented his band’s sound with a New Orleans-style brass section containing not one but two trombones. They even have their own name – The Westerlies – and when they attack the coda of a song such as “Third Of May/Ōdaigahara” or the closing “Helplessness Blues”, it’s a with a tremendous woozy rush of sound that you wish was permitted more often in the set. But Pecknold is also keen to remain true to the sparse, mountain-song strangeness of the early Fleet Foxes material, and hearing those four-part harmonies ring out with perfect clarity across the field really does take your breath away.

For those seeking gnarlier thrills before the night is out, the music continues in the tents. The Big Top hosts Battles, now reduced to a duo, but making up for their lack of personnel with a relentless rhythm assault. Drummer John Stanier is the star, whacking out tough, complex beats with almost unbelievable precision, like some kind of extreme sports challenge. He pauses briefly to chug a beer – to cheers from the crowd – and then continues on his singular, pummelling mission. He’ll surely sleep well, airbed or not.

And to finally dispel Fleet Foxes’ wholesome vibe, heeeere’s Beak. Or as Geoff Barrow spits, “Hi everyone, we’re fucking Mumford And Sons”. In between complaining about Londoners, or Louis Theroux’s snoring, or having to play too quietly to avoid spooking the horses in the next farm, they play a set of brilliantly curdled kraut-rave, even encouraging an outbreak of righteous air-punching on a monstrous “Alle Sauvage”. However reluctant they may be to entertain, they get the job done.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

Mark Beaumont
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Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

“When I first came out, there was nobody here, just a peacock,” says Philly’s Rosali Middleman, gazing out at the thoroughly chillaxed crowd on camp chairs and blankets spread out across the idyllic lawns of the Garden Stage. A sigh: “quite magical.” It’s as succinct a take on End Of The...

“When I first came out, there was nobody here, just a peacock,” says Philly’s Rosali Middleman, gazing out at the thoroughly chillaxed crowd on camp chairs and blankets spread out across the idyllic lawns of the Garden Stage. A sigh: “quite magical.” It’s as succinct a take on End Of The Road’s unique vibe as you’ll hear, and Rosali makes the quintessential music to open a stage geared to lull us into the weekend proper. Alone with her electric guitar, she weaves chiming, gossamer alt-folk full of quiet agonies.

Londoner Naima Bock, on next, seems even gentler, since she brings a full band but just as restrained a tone. She strips back the electronic, percussive and orchestral layers of tracks such as “Giant Palm” and “Working” to expose soft-as-snow pastoral folk songs adorned with unobtrusive saxophone and peppered with blasts of Celtic chorale. Later, Anais Mitchell picks up the beatific baton with the seagoing Americana of “Ships”, the soul scraping folk of “Young Man In America” and the Feistian New York pop of “On Your Way (Felix Song)”.

On the Talking Heads stage, a solo James Yorkston gets more raw and intimate still, sat at a keyboard playing soul-folk laments for his disappointing album chart placings and poetic paeans to “towns the size of a teacup”. By the time he starts singing of “cocaine fuelled electronic cabarets” in “Woozy With Cider” he’s channelling the same sparse magic as Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs For Drella.

Back on the Garden Stage it falls to Brighton’s Porridge Radio to prepare EOTR for the chaos to come. Their febrile and passionate post-punk boasts melodies to seduce, but also a cultish air, particularly when their violinist waves branches in the air as if to ward off Larmer Tree Gardens’ notorious wood sprites. In the oddball stakes, however, they’re fated to be monumentally upstaged.

There is a point, barely a few minutes into Black Midi’s headline set, where you’re forced to abandon all hope of coherence and just go with the maniacal flow of it all. The opening “Welcome To Hell” – the shore leave doubts and dischargement of one Private Tristan Bongo, culled from the maniacal rock opera album Hellfire which dominates the set – is aptly titled. For 75 intense minutes, howling jazz punk gives way to hardcore thrash, evil math-prog and, in the case of “The Defence”, a Billy Joel piano song, often without warm-up or warning.

When singer Geordie Greep doesn’t sound like he’s babbling in tongues, he’s barking random pop culture references (“Honey, I shrunk the kids!”), asking the crowd to vape in unison to create a smoke machine effect and yowling about deadly boxing matches (“Sugar/Tzu”) and a philosophical music hall compere exploding onstage (“27 Questions”). As a jazz rock or prog band they’re particularly boundless; as post-punks they go to volcanic places Fontaines DC wouldn’t dare. Rosali’s peacock doesn’t know what’s hit it: welcome, if you can handle it, to the age of the senseless things.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2

Sam Richards
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Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2

Black Midi are slowly poisoning us. With wild ideas. “We’ve been spoon-feeding a bit more each time,” says Geordie Greep, Black Midi singer and, it transpires, unlikely wit and bon vivant of the freak rock fraternity. “It’s like in The Princess Bride where he can drink poison because he ha...

Black Midi are slowly poisoning us. With wild ideas. “We’ve been spoon-feeding a bit more each time,” says Geordie Greep, Black Midi singer and, it transpires, unlikely wit and bon vivant of the freak rock fraternity. “It’s like in The Princess Bride where he can drink poison because he has a little bit every day. We’ve given it a little bit more shit so now it’s really good. It gets the same eight-out-of-ten but it’s a far cry from the goodness it once was.”

He speaks of the frenetic eclecticism of most recent album Hellfire, at the first of End Of The Road’s daily Uncut Q&As with our very own Tom Pinnock on the Talking Heads stage. In conversation he’s as fascinatingly changeable as the album. One minute he’s delivering insightful rock wisdoms: “You only got so much time. And if you try and do something that you know you definitely can’t do, then maybe your failure will be interesting.” The next he’s frothing over the idea of appearing on Pointless. “I would love that. I wanna go on the everyman’s one. I want to win that cash prize. A thousand pounds to go on a little package holiday. I want to be seen by geriatrics across the globe, get myself a rich widow, get written into some wills.”

Facing accusations of Hellfire flirting with the ridiculous, he’s graciously sanguine. “Thank you,” he says. “Ridiculous might be an insult sometimes but usually it’s a way of saying something is different or unique or individual, and isn’t that one of the main goals? Even if it is stupid and bizarre, once reined in it’ll become something original and good. Or maybe all of it is rubbish.”

In a broad, roaming discussion, Greep discusses his changing attitude to salsa music – hating it for being “the most brash, annoying, really irritating music you can think of” when forced to sit in on his mother’s classes as a child, now a major convert – and unrepentantly defends his Brit School past. “There’s a weird public perception of the school as a sheltered or privileged thing or whatever,” he argues, “but the only barrier to entry is an audition, based on skill, all sorts of people go there. There’s loads of people that it’s on public record they went there, but it’s not really a point. Imogen Heap or FKA Twigs. It’s less of a sin to have gone. But it’s a great school, I think they’re doing a great thing and I hope it goes on for many more years. No bankruptcy in sight.”

America, where Black Midi have played two tours this year and return on Monday, gets a more mixed review. “It’s cool,” he says, “but somewhere I’d never ever, ever, ever in a million years want to live. It’s an awful place. It’s like Disneyland, who’d want to live in Disneyland? You have your crazy two months but you know there’s an end – on this day I go home. If you live there, it’s ‘wait, where’s the end? I’m stuck in this horrible place’. Some people are born there. I consider myself lucky.” What do they make of you? “To be honest, our best crowds are there. I might even end up having to live there. Much younger crowd, which is always better because they buy more merchandise and they’re more susceptible to advertising. And in the shows there’s just more energy.”

Fascinating insights into the recording process of Steve Albini – with whom the band recorded recent flexidisc tracks – emerge. “It’s good to work with someone who basically treats it like a science. He’s not really interested in commenting or anything to do with the musical aspects of it or the worth of it. The only thing he’s interested in when recording a band or artist is the fidelity. Are there any technical issues? When you’re recording the vocals all he listens to in the mix room is the solo vocal and, like, a drum track or a bass track. It doesn’t even sound like music, really. He’s literally just listening for technical imperfections. You finish a take and say, ‘How was that, Steve?’ He says, ‘I don’t really see a technical imperfection’. So he doesn’t care about your performance, which is good because he’s an engineer at the end of the day. You should respect any wrong choice that the band wants to make. If they want to make a terrible album… at least it’s gonna sound good. If an architect makes an absolutely garish, hideous building, you’ve still got to lay the bricks as usual if you’re just the builder. You don’t you say, ‘oh, man, I really think the left wing’s a bit naff, don’t build it’.”

Midi fans, though, are perhaps more interested in the fate of the mysterious Orange Tree Boys, the bluesy sometime Black Midi “support band” who share many attributes with the band. Such as their faces. “The band from Las Vegas?” Geordie says, playing along with the alter-ego conceit like a pro. “They’re really good. They’re like a kind of a throwback blues ensemble. They’ve had a bit of trouble. A lot of their tours were cut short due to visa issues. I don’t know if they can go across the Nevada state line anymore.”

Might he ever decide to join the band for good? “Blues bands have an infinite revenue stream,” Greep says. “There’s always some guys listening to blues music. If this fizzles out, jump on the phone, plane to Vegas and just do your blues residency. Easy money… Start every day, Jamesons. I’ll lose it all, all I wanna do is play the blues.”

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road Festival 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1

Mark Beaumont
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Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1

And so, at last, the best festival of 2021 finally gets underway. After pandemic travel issues saw last year’s comeback End Of The Road bill necessarily crammed with UK acts, the line-up of alt-rock dreams is pieced back together for this year – Bright Eyes and Pixies are to fulfil their 2021 ob...

And so, at last, the best festival of 2021 finally gets underway. After pandemic travel issues saw last year’s comeback End Of The Road bill necessarily crammed with UK acts, the line-up of alt-rock dreams is pieced back together for this year – Bright Eyes and Pixies are to fulfil their 2021 obligations, and eighteen months of anticipation is palpable as the site fills on Thursday night. Bars are abuzz with the big dilemma of the weekend – Pixies or The Magnetic Fields on Saturday night? – and word spreads of rearrangements in the woods. They say there’s a ship run aground out there…

Long considered the finest UK festival for the discerning leftfield music fan, EOTR 2022 offers a fittingly diverse and intriguing line-up for its warm-up night. Early evening in the Tipi Tent London’s Vogues delivers a tentative set of corroded neo-soul, where the minimalist, maudlin tone of The xx is slathered with synthesized fuzz rock guitar. A shaven headed vision in sheer blouse and skirt, Davy Roderick’s voice is a fragile instrument, ice-thin in falsetto and loosely freeform when delving into a Stuart Staples-like croon. EOTR watches on uncertain if they’re watching the future or a pale, fleeting snapshot of 2022.

Over on the main Woods stage, Michael Flatley would be fuming. “I always wanted to be in a fiddle band,” says Sudan Archives, striking up a crooked, haunted Irish jig on the violin she waves around as she bounds across the stage, otherwise concerned with the earthier matters of auto-tuned ambient glitch rap. If Dingle had a Stringfellows if might contain the sort of dance moves that Brittney Park throws, and several tracks similarly combine the sexual and sensitive. “I just want the D-I-C-K,” she tells us on an otherwise heart-tugging “Homesick (Gorgeous & Arrogant)”, and she ends “NBPQ” on her back on the floor howling “I just wanna have my titties out!” as if in naturist primal scream therapy.

Back in the Tipi, Canadian jangle-punks Apollo Ghosts bash out post-punk and alt-pop tunes with a feral urgency, stopping only to declare “fuck the Tories”. It’s the sort of chill-souring endeavour very much at odds with tonight’s headliners Kruangbin. Resembling a mechanised AI exhibit of what the machines believe humans might have listened to on cruise ships in their decadent pre-extinction era, guitarist Mark Speer and bassist Laura Lee glide around the stage in synchronised patterns as if on rails, playing gaseous cosmic guitar riffs and sparse, low-slung bass. The effect on tracks such as “August 10” is a gilded take on prog funk, and on the rare moments they sing together, their airy vocals melt beautifully into a Tame Impala-like spacewalk.

A step-change takes place with the pop quiz round that makes up the latter third of the set. Over space lounge backing, Speer fires out a quickfire medley of recognisable riffs for us to guess before they’re gone. We catch Spandau Ballet’s “True”, Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” before they burst into Dick Dale’s “Miserlou”, neck a shot each and celebrate a crowd well roused. Consider End Of The Road 2022 docked to its first stage station and ready for deep space.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

David Sylvian – Blemish/Manafon

Stephen Troussé
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David Sylvian – Blemish/Manafon

Interviewed in 2009, David Sylvian mused upon the supposed difficulty of Manafon, his last vocal studio album to date. “I don’t personally hear it as being a difficult album, but I’ve always known the experience would be different for others. Time will soften its edges. It may sow the seeds fo...

Interviewed in 2009, David Sylvian mused upon the supposed difficulty of Manafon, his last vocal studio album to date. “I don’t personally hear it as being a difficult album, but I’ve always known the experience would be different for others. Time will soften its edges. It may sow the seeds for what might develop into a new genre for vocal music perhaps? Or maybe it’s simply a passing glitch on the digital face of popular music. I don’t know. But what I am sure of is that, over time, its abstractions will become much easier to embrace.”

The reissue of Manafon, along with its older sibling, 2003’s Blemish, on 180g vinyl, offers an opportunity to reconsider what increasingly look like the last works of David Sylvian’s long, brilliant and elliptical pop career. It’s fair to say they haven’t yet seeded a new genre – though you might find echoes of these spectral artsongs in the work of Björk and Julia Holter. But as predicted, they now seem eminently embraceable: tatterdemalion torchsongs, that for all their atmospheric disturbances you might file alongside Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Frank Sinatra’s Where Are You?, John Cale’s Music For A New Society…

Blemish was the turning point. It’s a case study in not letting a good crisis go to waste, composed as Sylvian’s relationship and domestic life with Ingrid Chavez was disintegrating. With 2000’s Everything And Nothing compilation serving as a timely epitaph of his two decades at Virgin, Sylvian was free of commercial imperatives and already casting around for new directions. He had detected new signals in the glitchy electronica of acts like Oval, and found fresh succour in the abstract laments of Derek Bailey’s Ballads. And with his home studio in New Hampshire complete, he had a sonic fortress of solitude all ready and waiting.

The old forms that had served him to abundant success on Dead Bees… were simply no longer adequate, and the urgency of his midlife soulstorm facilitated his voyage into improvisation. It was a process that had always been on his horizon, from his teenage Stockhausen infatuation, through collaborations with Holger Czukay and Keith Tippett. Now he had Derek Bailey, Virgil to his Dante, as a guide.

Bailey’s abstract plucking and fretting – like curious crows pecking at the remains of the relationship – seemed to prompt Sylvian’s own reinvention of the guitar, whether in new tunings or electronic treatments. But the songs are anchored in an awful profundity of feeling. “Life’s for the taking”, he sings with abject gravity on the title track, “so take it away”.

Contrary to its bleak reputation, though, the moments of lightness on Blemish have become more apparent. “Late Night Shopping” feels like a Mogadon cousin of Iggy’s “Nightclubbing”, while “Fire In The Forest”, Sylvian’s first collaboration with guitar alchemist Christian Fennesz, feels almost like a “You’ll Never Walk Alone” moment of showstopping uplift – “There is always sunshine above the grey sky/I will try to find it”.

Fennesz proved to be a crucial stargate to a new galaxy of free and electro-acoustic improvisers. While Sylvian was in Cologne touring Blemish in 2004, Fennesz invited him to the opening night of a showcase for Jon Abbey’s Erstwhile label, featuring Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, Toshi Nakamura and Sachiko Matsubara among others. The introduction helped materialise Sylvian’s tentative plans for an album of new chamber music, cultivating the seeds that had been planted on Blemish into a rich and strange forest of free improvisation and narrative song.

Recording sessions in Vienna, Tokyo and London, with a shifting cast of players, including the Erstwhile crew plus members of drone ensemble Polwechsel, pianist John Tilbury, saxophonist Evan Parker and turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, Sylvian compared his role to that of a film director – with characteristic arthouse dolour he suggested Bergman, but the Swede loathed improvisation. A better analogue might be Mike Leigh, encouraging and nudging group discovery, for material to be edited and cut together later.

For some in the audience Manafon might have been the final straw: a suite of atonal, meandering narratives concerned with cantankerous, antisocial poets (RS Thomas and Emily Dickinson were presiding spirits). Sylvian himself suggested that the record might be best appreciated posthumously.

But listening to it today, without the dashed hope that he might return to more conventional song forms, what you hear more than ever are the continuities. On the opening track, “Small Metal Gods”, even as he puts away his childish things in a ziplock back, as he sings of “the wretched story line”, “the narrative that must go on”, backed by Werner Dafeldecker’s woody bass, you can hear the same delicate, devastating deconstruction of the pop song that began in earnest with “Ghosts” back in 1982.

Of course he was already ahead of us. “Manafon is a pop album,” he told a sceptical Keith Rowe way back in 2010. “You could replace my voice with voices of the past and it would take a small step into an alternate future. Imagine Sinatra or Hartmann singing these songs! It takes just the smallest of leaps.”

Vince Guaraldi – It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

John Lewis
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Vince Guaraldi – It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

For millions around the world who were children between the mid-’60s and the early 1980s, Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons is deeply engrained. It was often the first jazz music they will have heard, although, at the time, Guaraldi’s upbeat, cheerful themes must have seemed an o...

For millions around the world who were children between the mid-’60s and the early 1980s, Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons is deeply engrained. It was often the first jazz music they will have heard, although, at the time, Guaraldi’s upbeat, cheerful themes must have seemed an odd choice to soundtrack the grim, bleakly comic world of Charles M Schulz.

Born in San Francisco in 1928, Guaraldi emerged in the ’50s accompanying the vibist Cal Tjader, later joining Woody Herman’s big band. In 1962 he belatedly jumped on the bossa nova bandwagon with Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, an album of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa songs from the 1959 film, although you got the impression that Guaraldi often got bored of playing to a bossa rhythm, instead lapsing back into the comforting world of swing beats and funky piano licks.

He did have a way with simple, catchy melodies, delivered with a bluesy flourish, and a track on the Black Orpheus album, “Cast Your Fate To The Wind”, was a surprise hit, earning a Grammy for best jazz song. One fan was TV producer Lee Mendelson, who thought that Guaraldi’s style – likeable, slightly yearning, hip but not too out-there – was a perfect fit for the animated adaptations of the Peanuts strip he was making.

You can find versions of Guaraldi’s tunes from Charlie Brown – “Linus And Lucy”, “The Red Baron”, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”, “Charlie Brown Theme”, “Christmas Time Is Here”, “Skating” and “Baseball Theme” – on many of his albums, but this is the first LP featuring the complete tunes, mood music and “stings” from a single soundtrack. Craft released a CD of this 1966 soundtrack in 2018 that was, rather clumsily, taken from the actual broadcast, featuring sound effects and snippets of speech, but this version is taken from recently unearthed original analogue tapes. It’s a little disjointed and frustrating to hear in one go (there is a lot of repetition, and many tracks are less than a minute long) but, for us Peanuts obsessives, it’s fascinating to hear a sonically flawless original soundtrack recording.

Where most of Guaraldi’s LPs are piano/bass/drums recordings, this is more lavishly arranged in partnership with conductor John Scott Trotter (best known as Bing Crosby’s long-term musical director), featuring Mannie Klein on trumpet, John Gray on guitar and Ronald Lang on woodwind. Lang’s flute is, for many, a signature sound of the series. On tracks like “Snoopy And The Leaf”, it is oddly reminiscent of Harold McNair’s heartbreaking flute solos on the soundtrack to Kes (another poignant hymn to childhood).

The cartoons were regular fixtures of network television around the world well into the 1990s, and the royalties made Guaraldi very rich by jazz standards. But he didn’t enjoy his lifestyle for long – in February 1976, he suffered a massive heart attack and died, aged only 47. His music, however, lives on forever.

Bob Dylan adds new dates to UK tour

Michael Bonner
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Bob Dylan adds new dates to UK tour

Bob Dylan has added three new dates to his upcoming UK tour. The UK leg of of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour will now also include shows at Manchester, Oxford and Bournemouth. Dylan had already announced nine shows - including four nights at the London Palladium - beginning on October 19. D...

Bob Dylan has added three new dates to his upcoming UK tour.

The UK leg of of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour will now also include shows at Manchester, Oxford and Bournemouth.

Dylan had already announced nine shows – including four nights at the London Palladium – beginning on October 19.

Due to popular demand, his first UK tour for five years will now stop at:

October 19: London Palladium
October 20: London Palladium
October 23: London Palladium
October 24: London Palladium
October 26: Motorpoint Arena Cardiff
October 27: Bonus Arena Hull
October 28: Motorpoint Arena Nottingham
October 30: Armadillo Glasgow
October 31: Armadillo Glasgow
November 2: Manchester Apollo
November 4: Oxford New Theatre
November 5: Bournemouth BIC

Tickets go on sale at 10am on Monday, September 5. Visit Dylan’s website for more details.

We’re off to the End Of The Road Festival 2022!

Michael Bonner
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We’re off to the End Of The Road Festival 2022!

Bags packed, toothbrush ready, weather forecast checked... and we're off to this year's End Of The Road festival. You can read our daily coverage of the festival on this site throughout this weekend. As well as headliners like Fleet Foxes and Pixies, we'll be digging Jake Xerxes Fussell, Margo Ci...

Bags packed, toothbrush ready, weather forecast checked… and we’re off to this year’s End Of The Road festival.

You can read our daily coverage of the festival on this site throughout this weekend. As well as headliners like Fleet Foxes and Pixies, we’ll be digging Jake Xerxes Fussell, Margo Cilker, Alabaster DePlume, Jana Horn, Nala Sinephro and a host more.

As well as reporting from around the festival, we’re also holding the Uncut Q&As each day, where Tom Pinnock and Laura Barton will be chatting to some very special guests on the Talking Heads stage:

black midi: Talking Heads, Friday, 16:00 – 16:45

The Weather Station: Talking Heads, Saturday, 15:15 – 16:00

Kurt Vile: Talking Heads, Sunday, 15:45 – 16:30

All in all, it’s a very busy weekend for Uncut and we can’t wait for the gates to open.

See you down the front!

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