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The National: How we made “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

Michael Bonner
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The National: How we made “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

The National have announced details of a surprise new album, Laugh Track. To celebrate, here's our piece on the making of their classic track “Bloodbuzz Ohio” from Uncut's June 2020 issue. Now read on... In 2009, The National were burned out. They had toured solidly on the back of their Al...

The National have announced details of a surprise new album, Laugh Track. To celebrate, here’s our piece on the making of their classic track “Bloodbuzz Ohio” from Uncut’s June 2020 issue.

Now read on…

In 2009, The National were burned out. They had toured solidly on the back of their Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2008) albums and found themselves in what guitarist Aaron Dessner calls “a dark place… It was exhaustion and everything that comes with being that fatigued,” he says. “Relationships were suffering. We almost broke up, actually.”

Instead, The National set up their own studio in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighbourhood and made High Violet – an album of brooding magnificence that “healed the band”, reaching No 3 in the US charts and taking them into arenas and what Bryce Dessner describes as “another universe that wasn’t even in our vocabulary”.

“Everyone was more ambitious,” remembers vocalist Matt Berninger. “We could all feel that we were on the edge of something. There was the real possibility that if we didn’t fuck this up we’d never have to have real jobs again and we could play music for the rest of our lives.”

In 2008, they set out on tour with Modest Mouse – featuring Johnny Marr – and REM. “So suddenly we had a loose connection to two of our biggest influences, REM and The Smiths,” remembers Aaron Dessner. “Michael Stipe and all those guys pushing us felt like a real moment, like we’d been anointed or something. Realising that REM were good, hard-working people gave us confidence that if we worked at it we could be, you know, a great American band.”

Berninger suggests that tracks such as lead-off single, “Bloodbuzz Ohio” – a simmering anthem of nostalgia and displacement – were also inspired by the “great advice” Stipe gave them on that tour. “He said, ‘Don’t be afraid of writing pop songs.’ But the next night he said, ‘If you want to be a band that lasts, you have to write lots of hits or none at all.’ We wanted to write pop hits but had very different ideas about what that meant. ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ started as a sweet little folk song, which we transformed. But we knew that was a good one right away.”
Dave Simpson

AARON DESSNER: Back then, we put a tremendous amount of pressure on ourselves. None of us liked mainstream rock, so we weren’t trying to make something commercial. We wanted to build on what we’d already done with Boxer. Bigger sounds, with more orchestration.

MATT BERNINGER: I mostly remember my exhaustion. We had been on tour to promote Boxer for what seemed like years, because it was. Then my daughter was born. I wrote most of the songs in that half-conscious, under-slept mental state. Happy but a little delirious. Carin [Matt’s wife] says she remembers me writing on the edge of the bed a lot.

BRYCE DESSNER: My architect brother-in-law helped us make a studio in Aaron’s garage in Brooklyn. You could get two or three people in there. Someone might be standing in the garden playing, with a line leading into the amp inside the studio. Bryan [Devendorf] somehow got his drum kit in the garage. We were all living on the same block pretty much at that time, so we’d hang out, like a clubhouse, bit of drinking. Our community of artist friends was very involved. Richard Parry from Arcade Fire, orchestral players, brass or strings, a lot of different colours. I recorded a lot of the orchestration instrument by instrument, in the garage.

AARON: Because we weren’t running up studio bills, we had freedom to experiment. We were recording on Pro Tools. The energy was more important than high fidelity. The band usually writes the music first and even records quite a lot of it before Matt gets to the lyrics. Then a lot of it gets discarded. But with “Bloodbuzz” we had played versions of it live.

BRYCE: “Bloodbuzz” began as a folk song without a drum beat. It was originally written on guitars and ukulele – almost like an English ballad or something.

BERNINGER: I actually wrote to a mandolin sketch from [touring violinist] Padma Newsome. It was a sweet little folk song until Bryan brought in the beat, then Aaron really delivered on the arrangement.

AARON: We recorded endless versions of some songs on High Violet. There were about 100 versions of “Lemonworld”, perhaps almost as many of “Bloodbuzz”. When we went to [mixer] Peter Katis’s studio in Bridgeport we still hadn’t finished recording it, so carried on.

SCOTT DEVENDORF: “Bloodbuzz” became more of a rock song eventually. Matt was directing us: “I want it to sound like this!”

BERNINGER: Everyone was trying to break out of their habits and patterns – but we weren’t breaking in the same directions. I was pushing for uglier, fuzzier textures to get away from the sad-sack Americana label that had stuck to us from the beginning. I remember asking for guitars that sounded like “loose wool” or “warm tar”. Aaron was trying to interpret what that meant, while Bryce was bringing in these big, ambitious string arrangements. It was a struggle to get the ideas to work together.

AARON: Our song “Fake Empire” had this brass fanfare, so we asked Pad Newsome to write a similar part for “Bloodbuzz”, but right at the end of mixing Matt said, “We can’t have another fanfare song,” so we took it off. Peter Katis has a way of miking drums and making everything sound better, but he got really quite upset with us over that, actually. Because we’d recorded it and been performing it live like that. But Matt was right. There were a lot of aesthetic tugs of war.

BRYCE: It’s always intense between us!

AARON: There’s been a few times when it gets heated. Some people run hot, they have a quick temper. Others run colder. Matt and I have never had a fight or a loud screaming match, but we get upset with each other during recording. It’s the sign that you’re making something good, usually.

BERNINGER: We were actually trying not to fight as much as we used to. Making Boxer was a painful experience and nobody wanted to go through that again. I remember trying to focus on just battling the song, not each other, but it was a hard battle.

AARON : At one point I doubled the speed and played in a cross rhythm. Matt got mad. I still have the email. He thought I was ruining the thing. Then he got into it over time.

BERNINGER: We couldn’t ever get what we were all looking for. Everything felt like a cross-bred mutant. Eventually we gave up and embraced it. The whole album is like that. It’s a desperate record. It admits that openly in the song “England” with the line about being “desperate to entertain”. I usually have lots of lyrics and melodies piling up. I usually have an easier time writing to simple guitar or piano ideas, but this time they were sending me complex arrangements with different guitar parts and key changes.

AARON: The first time we heard the lyrics was when Matt sang them. We all have our own ideas about what “Bloodbuzz Ohio” means. To me it was a lament, an existential nostalgic love song about where we’re from, about family and the way America is so frayed and divided. So you can be family in blood but estranged because of social values. Obama had just gotten in, but we were coming out of the Bush years and the financial crisis had meant people had worked their whole life and watched their savings just disappear. Hence “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe.”

DEVENDORF: There’s a homesickness to the song. We’re a band from Ohio that formed in New York. So we were channelling a feeling of being far away from a place you knew in another life.

BRYCE: “I was carried from Ohio on a swarm of bees.” I grew up in Ohio so I have a fondness for it, but it’s a place that’s quite disturbed. Everything that’s wrong in America, you can find there. Ohio is a beautiful place with amazing people, but also hard problems, social, economic issues and racism. It’s a swing state, red and blue. We grew up in that environment.

BERNINGER: It’s about being stuck between an old version of yourself and the one you’re becoming. I was trying to shed my skin. That’s what the first line about lifting up my shirt means to me. I definitely didn’t feel like the same person I used to be. I didn’t feel like an Ohioan any more and I definitely was not a New Yorker. I was married with a baby, living in Brooklyn, which was still a foreign land to me, and on the verge of becoming a rock star if I didn’t blow it. It was winter, and I remember pacing around ice puddles in Peter Katis’s yard trying to finish the words.

DEVENDORF: By now there was a deadline – partly from us and partly the label – and we were rushing towards it. It wasn’t all dour, but I remember Matt getting really sick and then his grandmother died.

BERNINGER: I’d just quit smoking after 15 years, and when you quit cold turkey like that you’re kind of coughing shit up for a while. Then I caught a really bad cold on top of that. I could barely sing, so we postponed everything for a couple of weeks. Then when I flew to Cincinnati for my grandmother’s funeral, my eardrum ruptured when I landed from the sinus pressure. Blood was coming out of my ear when my parents picked me up. I couldn’t even hear the eulogy. When I got back to the studio I had very little hearing in my right ear. Apparently, Aaron would pan stuff that I didn’t like to my deaf ear so I wouldn’t notice it.

BRYCE: The doctor put Matt on horse steroids as we were finishing the mixing.

AARON: Matt was discovering these different aspects to his voice. On Alligator he was screaming. On Boxer he found an almost whispered murmur. By High Violet he found something else, kinda iconic. He found the sweet spot in his voice. He couldn’t get healthy, and you can hear that on the record, but it’s a great performance.

BERNINGER: It was tough to get through the vocals, but not just because of the cold. I used to just chant or mumble, but I wanted bolder, more musical melodies and it took me a while to get there. Every time I would try a more ambitious melody, Bryan would start singing Will Ferrell’s impersonation of Robert Goulet doing “Red Ships Of Spain”. When I listen to High Violet now, I definitely hear that.

BRYCE: Bryan’s drums are almost like what a guitar riff would do, this really iconic, recognisable riff, but on drums. Bryan’s really methodical and writes his parts out so they have interesting patterns. They’re not intuitive. He’s very influenced by Stephen Morris from New Order and that feel. With “Bloodbuzz”, the piano riff inspired the drum beat.

AARON: We recorded Bryan’s drums so many times. It wasn’t about the playing, it was the sound. He played the drums to “Bloodbuzz…” yet again on the very last day. We were in perfectionist mode.

DEVENDORF: Some songs don’t reveal themselves until the end. When there was lyrics and drums it became, “OK, this is what the song is now.”

DESSNER: The guitar hooks were added on the last day, I think. The fuzzy guitar solo was also done very late. It was super hard to find those details.

DEVENDORF: The pictures on the [High Violet] sleeve are testament to how tired we were by the end. We all look worried or grumpy. There’s a lot of unseen tension on that record. Operating as a democracy added to it, but the dynamic got us to a place where we’re all satisfied.

AARON: We were obsessed. We kept circling the vortex as we wanted to make a timeless classic.

The National play All Points East on Friday, August 26. For more info, click here.
They play Connect Festival on Sunday, August 28. For more info, click here.

Cass McCombs – Heartmind

Tom Pinnock
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Cass McCombs – Heartmind

The ancient provocateur Diogenes – a kind of Grecian hybrid of Slavoj Žižek and Steve Bray – is one of Cass McCombs’ recent obsessions. Born two and a half millennia ago, Diogenes demonstrated his radical philosophy by living on the streets of Athens, sleeping in a ceramic wine vessel and o...

The ancient provocateur Diogenes – a kind of Grecian hybrid of Slavoj Žižek and Steve Bray – is one of Cass McCombs’ recent obsessions. Born two and a half millennia ago, Diogenes demonstrated his radical philosophy by living on the streets of Athens, sleeping in a ceramic wine vessel and offending the public with various stunts, all in the service of sticking it to the corrupt ruling class of the time.

McCombs’ fascination is understandable, for Diogenes could easily have stepped from his catalogue; say, from one of the Californian’s many songs celebrating outsiders, the damaged and addicted, “the poor and screwed”, as he put it on 2013’s “Home On The Range”.

As peripatetic as he’s often been, McCombs has not so far made his home in a jar. Yet his opaque, twisting lyrics have consistently dealt with existential and absurd questions: matters of spirituality, morality, property, personal responsibility. That this is never boring, or in the least bit earnest, is down to McCombs’ use of unreliable narrators, sarcasm, the language of the gutter and other acts of literary subterfuge. “Silverfish quilting testicle”, goes 2005’s “Equinox”; a song on the importance of voting is titled “Don’t Vote”, its contents equally misleading; the pretty “Morning Star”, from 2013’s Big Wheel And Others, muses on the feeling of defecating in space. With McCombs, smoke and mirrors are de rigueur, nobody is talked down to and no-one’s given the easy answers.

If all his records contain fathoms to explore, Heartmind, his 10th, is one of the deepest. It’s a departure from the course taken on 2016’s Mangy Love and 2019’s Tip Of The Sphere: those were glossy explorations of the American psychedelic rock tradition, presentable enough to meet the in-laws once the scent of weed dissipated, and they earned McCombs more listeners and plaudits. Heartmind is a thornier and ultimately more interesting proposition, returning to the lo-fi experimentation of his earlier records across a breezy 42 minutes.

There are eight tracks here, and almost as many genres, with half the album firmly rooted in American traditions: “Unproud Warrior” a wistful folk waltz with a jazzy rhythm section, a mirage of a Nashville Pentangle; “A Blue, Blue Band” a major-key country ballad with gorgeous harmonies. Both these songs also feature fiddler Charlie Burnham, who provides earthy responses to McCombs’ lines with his artfully distressed voice.

Opener “Music Is Blue” is crunchy rock with complex Crimson rhythms, “Karaoke” evokes The Cure’s mid-’80s pop pomp and “Belong To Heaven” is electric folk with a tinge of the Caribbean. That’s not the only global influence on Heartmind: a jet-setting cousin of Mangy Love’s Afrobeat-influenced “Run Sister Run”, “Krakatau” is full-on cumbia with multi-tracked percussion, the sound degraded like a cassette that Habibi Funk might have found in a cellar. The closing title track is perhaps McCombs’ own version of spiritual jazz, with corvid saxophone, Moog synth, electric guitar and uillean pipes – a surprisingly psychedelic instrument – extending the piece to eight and a half minutes.

“New Earth” is positively tropical, a kitsch slice of exotica with bossa nova chords and artificial bird noises, McCombs’ soft vocals backed by a female chorus. Listen with half an ear and you’ll notice lines about “such a glad day” and “today is the birth of a new earth”, but dig a little deeper, and some kind of apocalypse seems to have occurred, perhaps the destruction of the earth itself. This “glad day”, you realise, has come “after a very, very, very bad day”, McCombs keening “thank God time has ended”. Elsewhere in the song, “tweeting was muted all season… Mr Musk was in a bad way/Stewing in his bullion like a phony chef…”

“Unproud Warrior” plays the same trick as “New Earth” and “Don’t Vote”. A tale of a young, discharged soldier, it initially romanticises the plight of the veteran: “September the second, 2017/That’s your discharge date, etched in your soul/It’s been nearly two years now, gone by so fast”. The character is suffering with the things he did, and with the reality of war compared to the movies. But as the picture comes into focus, McCombs suggests that he alone is responsible for his choices – “a soldier is not a cog, but a man, like any other”. He even argues that youth is no excuse, pointing out the ages at which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, SE Hinton The Outsiders and Stephen Crane The Red Badge Of Courage, “which is still known as one of the most realistic depictions of war/Even though Crane was born after the Civil War ended”. It’s brave, but it works.

McCombs mostly uses his Twitter account to pay tribute to departed artists and friends, and Heartmind is dedicated to three of his lost compadres, Neal Casal, Girls’ Chet ‘JR’ White and Sam Jayne. “Belong To Heaven” is a fitting memorial, sincere and touching but still nuanced – “for all the questions I want to ask/I hope that you find peace at last… so far away from all that now/I guess it doesn’t matter anyhow”.

Like Thom Yorke, McCombs has a voice that sounds endlessly sincere, and like Yorke, it means the humour in his lyrics can often be lost. There is, though, a great deal of comedy on Heartmind. “Karaoke” opens in a bar, a character taking the stage, “a Chiffon, a Supreme/And reading from a TV screen”. Breezily sprinkling its lines with titles of karaoke classics, it raises questions about authenticity and the roles we play. “Guess I’m a load of karaoke too”, he concludes. It’s a real ear-worm, the one track here that could displace “County Lines” as McCombs’ ‘hit’.

“A Blue, Blue Band” also provides light relief. The tale of a group from Virginia City, Nevada, in a blue van, who turn audiences blue too, it meanders through multiple comic verses – “there’s a tremendous harmonica player whose name now escapes me” – before ending with a reminder of the power of music, an echo of the opening “Music Is Blue”: “Listen to them playing what’s been weighing heavy on your heart”.

Perhaps that’s McCombs’ conclusion on Heartmind: that music, from karaoke to bar-room ballads, can affect us in ways nothing else can, can change hearts and minds even more than sleeping in a jar may do. The message is unclear, messy even, as things are in real life, more often than in song.

Ultimately, pinning this endlessly complex songwriter’s work down to a single tagline or meaning is unwise. His songs are not always easy, they’re not always straightforward, but 10 albums in, they’re mounting up to create one of the most impressive bodies of work of the century so far. Surely, Diogenes would have dug him too.

Tall Dwarfs – Unravelled: 1981–2002

Erin Osmon
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Tall Dwarfs – Unravelled: 1981–2002

Tall Dwarfs emerged among a handful of standout ’80s punk-adjacent acts from New Zealand, burbling up in the wake of iconic label Flying Nun’s founding; and they tread a familiar path – locally beloved, but otherwise more obscure, an intriguing and essential layer in the country’s cultural u...

Tall Dwarfs emerged among a handful of standout ’80s punk-adjacent acts from New Zealand, burbling up in the wake of iconic label Flying Nun’s founding; and they tread a familiar path – locally beloved, but otherwise more obscure, an intriguing and essential layer in the country’s cultural underground. They were born out of cult band Toy Love, who were at one point so popular they made the hop to Sydney, on the promise of a springboard to London, but were swiftly met and then rejected by head-scratching pub-rock punters who didn’t get it. Crestfallen, Dwarfs co-founders Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate retreated home to Dunedin, bought a four-track and began experimenting, determined to never again fall prey to the music industry’s trappings, which Knox called, “totally 100 per cent despicable”.

Never underestimate the motivating force of “I’ll show you” – that’s not to say that Knox and Bathgate, as Tall Dwarfs, turned the music industry on its head, or even charted. But, beginning in 1981, they crafted exceptional work that stands on its own, on their terms. One would be forgiven for thinking they’d found the template for In The Aeroplane Over The Sea after listening to the Dwarfs’ closest thing to a hit, “Nothing’s Going To Happen”, from their 1981 debut EP Three Songs, released on short-lived Kiwi indie Furtive.

The song’s captivating melody and stripped-back, drum-free arrangement, anchored by Knox’s impassioned, out-in-front singing – it lands somewhere between Jonathan Richman and a sea shanty – helped launch a wave of oblique bedroom folk to come (Neutral Milk Hotel, Decemberists, Casiotone For The Painfully Alone) and effectively set the template for the band; one that they’d embellish, or carve away at, but never stray far from, in their 20 years of making records. “All My Hollowness To You”, from the same EP, demonstrated their use of handclaps-as-percussion, and love of the Casiotone keyboard.

The group’s second EP, Louis Likes His Daily Dip, was released on Roger Shepherd’s iconic Flying Nun in 1982, and the Dwarfs remained with the label for the rest of their career, which spanned eight EPs, six LPs and two compilations. Now Merge, in a longstanding partnership with Flying Nun, has compiled this 55-track anthology of the band’s output on four LPs or two CDs, and everything is up on streaming services for the first time. It’s a great opportunity to dive into the genealogy of a polarising sound, co-opted by major labels by the mid-noughties. As is often the case, one can’t go wrong with the original.

Loudon Wainwright III – Lifetime Achievement

Stephen Deusner
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Loudon Wainwright III – Lifetime Achievement

“How old is 75?” Loudon Wainwright III asks near the end of his new album, Lifetime Achievement. There’s a rickety banjo strumming in the background as he answers his own rhetorical question: “So old you’re barely alive”. It lands like a punchline, but Wainwright tempers that levity with...

“How old is 75?” Loudon Wainwright III asks near the end of his new album, Lifetime Achievement. There’s a rickety banjo strumming in the background as he answers his own rhetorical question: “So old you’re barely alive”. It lands like a punchline, but Wainwright tempers that levity with an almost unbearable gravity. On the verses to “How Old Is 75?” he notes that he’s already outlived his mother by one year and Loudon II by 13. What does that signify? Nothing really. It’s just the math of mortality, which measures the quantity but not the quality of years: “With our allotted amounts, what gets done is what counts”, he sings over strings that quiver and quake. “Was it time wasted or was it well spent?”

It’s not necessarily a new sentiment, but Wainwright delivers it in a way that makes it sound like wisdom passed down from generation to generation, from artist to listener. And what has he done with his own allotted amount? A lot, it turns out. In addition to landing memorable roles in films (The Aviator, Knocked Up) and sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Parks & Recreation), he has released 31 studio albums in just over 50 years and penned thousands of songs, one of which was a hit (1972’s “Dead Skunk”) and one of which remains perfect (1973’s “The Swimming Song”). Even more than any of the other so-called “new Dylans” of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Wainwright defined himself as a writer both profoundly funny and profoundly sad, who often uses a joke to convey the tragedy of a situation.

That ability has made him such a vital artist so late in his life; he was something like an old man even when he was young, so he takes to the subject of ageing with grace and insight. He tested these waters on 2012’s Older Than My Old Man, but Lifetime Achievement embraces the folksier elements of his sound, paring the music down to guitar, banjo, occasionally a harmonica and even more occasionally a full band. Working with a crew of old friends and collaborators, Wainwright arranges these songs with just one or two instruments, which gives them a delicacy that can be wistful (“Fun & Free”), weirdly humorous (the playfully austere “It”), or heart-wrenching (“It Takes 2”). He delivers “One Wish” a cappella, with no other instrument obscuring the grain or the keening arc of his voice. He’s lost little power over the years, even if the song is about struggling to blow out his many, many birthday candles.

But Lifetime Achievement isn’t an album about growing old. Or, it’s not only an album about growing old. Without sounding curmudgeonly or misanthropic, Wainwright continues to write about his own alienation from other people, including and especially his own loved ones. Sometimes he has fun with it: “I need a family vacation, I mean a family vacation alone”, he sings on the Tolstoy– and Sartre-quoting “Fam Vac”, extolling the simple pleasure of “leaving the fucking family at home!” It would sound mean-spirited if they didn’t need a vacation from him, too. Age makes that alienation more acute, as though he’s uncomfortable wherever he is. On the motormouthed “Town & Country”, which swings like Mose Allison, he recounts a trip to New York and discovers that the hubbub that used to excite him now just frays his nerves. That song slides tidily into “Island”, which he wrote 40 years ago but only just now got around to recording. “Back on the mainland they’re going crazy, I’m too old for that insanity”, he sings, but also notes the tedium of island life. Is it a haven away from the hubbub, or a hell of boredom? Probably a little of both.

What age does offer him, however, is a new perspective on his life. Lifetime Achievement is an album about identifying and appreciating the things that are most important, that make life in the city or on the island worthwhile. For Wainwright, it’s family. It’s loved ones. It might even be us, his listeners. On the title track he surveys his shelves full of trophies and walls heavy with every award imaginable: “Trophies on my mantelpiece, citations on my wall”, he sings over a country two-step, “but who needs cash and prizes? What I achieved is you”. He never really says who “you” is. It might be a love song to his girlfriend, a fatherly ode to his kids, or maybe a paean to his fans. But that only makes his declaration sound all the more poignant, as though Wainwright is still figuring it all out while the clock ticks down.

Previously unseen photos of The Band and Bob Dylan released

Michael Bonner
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Previously unseen photos of The Band and Bob Dylan released

A set of previously unseen photographs of The Band have been unearthed. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Taken by Ernst Haas, this series of never-before-seen photographs document the final date of The Band's four-night residency at New York's Academy of ...

A set of previously unseen photographs of The Band have been unearthed.

Taken by Ernst Haas, this series of never-before-seen photographs document the final date of The Band’s four-night residency at New York’s Academy of Music on December 31, 1971. There, The Band were joined by Bob Dylan, who played four songs with his former backing band: “Down In The Flood”, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” and “Like A Rolling Stone”.

The four shows were recorded and released as the Rock Of Ages album in 1972 – which turns 50 this month – and as part of the expanded 2013 release Live at the Academy of Music 1971: The Rock of Ages Concerts.

“Bob Cato, The Band’s long standing album designer brought Ernst Haas to my attention,” explained Robbie Robertson. “He spoke of Ernst as having a special gift with his use of colour. He was the first single-artist show of colour photography at New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. It would be unusual for Ernst to photograph a live concert but he agreed to shoot the Rock Of Ages shows. His pictures have depth and vibrate to the music and off the page. We were grateful and honoured that Ernst Haas helped capture this event for The Band.”

You can see the full set of photographs here.

Joni Mitchell: “I can’t believe how good my voice sounds!”

Graeme Thomson
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Joni Mitchell: “I can’t believe how good my voice sounds!”

When you’ve released a generation-defining masterpiece, as JONI MITCHELL did with BLUE, what exactly do you do for an encore? In Mitchell’s case, embark upon an extraordinary run of albums – FOR THE ROSES, COURT AND SPARK and THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS – which pulled her far away from her f...

When you’ve released a generation-defining masterpiece, as JONI MITCHELL did with BLUE, what exactly do you do for an encore? In Mitchell’s case, embark upon an extraordinary run of albums – FOR THE ROSES, COURT AND SPARK and THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS – which pulled her far away from her folk roots and expanded her confessional writing into something tougher and more expansive. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, August 18 and available to buy from our online store,  Graeme Thomson talks to friends and collaborators to discover fresh insights into these canonical records and the powerful and complex creative processes of their creator. “They’re all classics in my book,” says Neil Young. 

It is June 2022, and Joni Mitchell is in a playback studio in Los Angeles, listening to her most successful album, Court And Spark, being radically reborn. “I love the sound of my voice,” she tells Ken Caillat, the engineer overseeing new Dolby Atmos mixes of four albums Mitchell released between 1972 and 1976, rendering them as an immersive sound experience. “I can’t believe how good my voice sounds!” Aged 78, and still recovering from the effects of the aneurysm she suffered in 2015, she is sufficiently moved to start dancing. “She was thrilled,” Caillat tells Uncut. “And we were thrilled that she was thrilled.”

A month later, on July 24, Mitchell stunned the music world by performing in public for the first time in 20 years at the Newport folk festival. Appearing alongside Brandi Carlile, Marcus Mumford, Wynonna Judd and sundry other friends, she played guitar and sang a slew of her classic compositions as well as covers of “Love Potion No 9” and “Summertime”.

These two wildly cheering events were closely connected, believes Patrick Milligan, director of A&R at Rhino Records, who has been working closely with Mitchell overseeing the ongoing reissue programme. “Joni has been going through therapy to get beyond her aneurysm, and in the three years I’ve known her, the improvement has been incredible,” he explains. “She told me, ‘Working on these projects has helped me.’ I think we’re going to be hearing more from her all the time. She is really getting back into the swing of things.”

The latest spate of legacy work on Mitchell’s back catalogue focuses on three studio albums – For The Roses, Court And Spark, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns – and the double live album, Miles Of Aisles. “They are all classics in my book,” says her old friend and compatriot, Neil Young. “I listened to every album as it came out. The musicians she played with were always above my abilities. She had grown from folk to jazz and in between, creating a unique kind of sound that I loved to listen to over and over.”

Presented with the problem of following the generation-defining Blue, Mitchell embarked on an extraordinary run of records which pulled her far away from her folk roots and expanded her confessional writing into something tougher and more expansive. Working with LA Express, a five-piece group of skilled and versatile fusion players, Mitchell infused her music with rich musical textures, complex string and horn arrangements, and an overt jazz influence.

“She still wrote by herself, but now opened up the recording process to a bunch of virtuosos,” says Ellis Sorkin, who engineered Court And Spark and The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. Harnessing the power of the collective, Mitchell expanded her ambitions, shaping and manipulating sound and texture, relishing the push and pull between control and release. “She valued spontaneity, until she got her hands on the music after the fact,” says LA Express guitarist Larry Carlton. “With her great musicality she got to shape the final product off of our spontaneity. That’s where her brilliance shines through. I always like to make sure that she gets all the credit! She was such a great musical editor, and if you gave her gems and pearls, she could put them together and make something wonderful out of what she received.”

PICK UP THE NEW UNCUT FOR THE FULL STORY

Introducing the new Uncut: Joni Mitchell, Small Faces, Kraftwerk, The Fall and more

Michael Bonner
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Introducing the new Uncut: Joni Mitchell, Small Faces, Kraftwerk, The Fall and more

For many of us, July 25 began unexpectedly. There, online, was footage of Joni Mitchell singing “The Circle Game”, “A Case Of You”, “Help Me” and “Amelia” among other cherished songs – the previous day at the Newport Folk Festival. Watching  Mitchell giving her first full live per...

For many of us, July 25 began unexpectedly. There, online, was footage of Joni Mitchell singing “The Circle Game”, “A Case Of You”, “Help Me” and “Amelia” among other cherished songs – the previous day at the Newport Folk Festival. Watching  Mitchell giving her first full live performance since 2002 proved, it goes without saying, to be a hugely emotional way to pass a Monday morning.

Graeme Thomson had already filed this month’s cover story – about Mitchell’s fecund creative run that followed Blue – when the Newport story broke. Thanks to some impressively swift and assured work, Graeme was able to turn round a coda to his cover story, speaking to musicians who performed alongside Mitchell at this momentous show and the festival organisers themselves. “Our minds were blown,” one musician reveals – which is perhaps the only adequate response to Mitchell’s extraordinary return to the stage.

There’s plenty more inside this month’s issue, of course. A survey of the Small Faces’ greatest songs by Kenny Jones, PP Arnold, Andrew Loog Oldham and sundry other Immediate lags. Tom goes round Brett Anderson’s house to witness the return of Suede – enjoy the soft furnishings – Erin Osmon heads to Kansas City where Bonny Light Horseman are getting back in the saddle (apologies for the numerous bad equine puns around this), Sam hears all about Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin’s rich and deep collaboration of Ali Farka Touré covers, and John assembles former members of The Fall to recall the band’s gloriously idiosyncratic 1982. There’s Kraftwerk, Deniece Williams, Greg Dulli, Dexys and The Byrds, while we have fine new albums in Reviews from Jake Blount, Makaya McCraven (one of my favourite albums of the year so far), Beth Orton, Al-Qasar and a brilliant piece from John Lewis in our archive section on black British music during the ’60s.

You’ll find some of these folks on our free CD, too, which filters 15 tracks from this month’s new releases for your delectation. Dig in.

And finally, we’re off to End Of The Road at the start of September. As usual, we’ll be hosting on-site Q&As with some of our very favourite artists who are on the bill at this year’s festival. We’ll see you there!

Until next month…

Bill Callahan announces new album, YTI⅃AƎЯ

Michael Bonner
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Bill Callahan announces new album, YTI⅃AƎЯ

The genius that is Bill Callahan has announced details of a new studio album, YTI⅃AƎЯ. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut YTI⅃AƎЯ is released on October 14 via Drag City, with a vinyl edition coming next year. Callahan's first album since 2020's Gol...

The genius that is Bill Callahan has announced details of a new studio album, YTI⅃AƎЯ.

YTI⅃AƎЯ is released on October 14 via Drag City, with a vinyl edition coming next year. Callahan’s first album since 2020’s Gold Record, the new record also features Matt Kinsey on guitar, Emmett Kelly on bass/backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on piano/backing vocals and Jim White on drums.

Pre-order here and peruse the tracklisting below:

First Bird
Everyway
Bowevil
Partition
Lily
Naked Souls
Coyotes
Drainface
Natural Information
The Horse
Planets
Last One At The Party

Uncut – October 2022

Uncut
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Uncut – October 2022

HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME Joni Mitchell, Suede, Bonny Light Horseman, Small Faces, Khruangbin, Deniece Williams, Greg Dulli, The Fall, Karl Bartos, Jake Blount and Clare Grogan all feature in the new Uncut, dated October 2022 and in UK shops from August 18 or available to buy onlin...

HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

Joni Mitchell, Suede, Bonny Light Horseman, Small Faces, Khruangbin, Deniece Williams, Greg Dulli, The Fall, Karl Bartos, Jake Blount and Clare Grogan all feature in the new Uncut, dated October 2022 and in UK shops from August 18 or available to buy online now. This issue comes with an exclusive free 15-track CD of the month’s best new music.

JONI MITCHELL: When you’ve released a generation-defining masterpiece, as Joni Mitchell did with Blue, what exactly do you do for an encore? In Mitchell’s case, embark upon an extraordinary run of albums – For The Roses, Court And Spark and The Hissing Of Summer Lawns – which pulled her far away from her folk roots and expanded her confessional writing into something tougher and more expansive. Graeme Thomson talks to friends and collaborators to discover fresh insights into these canonical records and the powerful and complex creative processes of their creator. “They’re all classics in my book,” says Neil Young.

OUR FREE CD! NOW PLAYING: 15 tracks of the month’s best new music

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

KHRUANGBIN: First they travelled the world, then they conquered it with their languid, cosmopolitan funk. Now Khruangbin have pulled off their most impressive musical fusion to date, covering the songs of Ali Farka Touré in a seat-of-the-pants collaboration with the Malian legend’s son Vieux Farka Touré. “We were all flying blind,” they admit to Sam Richards.

BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN: As Bonny Light Horseman, the trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman and Eric D Johnson have reframed trad-folk ballads for the present, earning a Grammy nomination and the patronage of Bon Iver and The National’s Aaron Dessner along the way. Uncut meets them in Kansas to discuss dulcimers, the unifying power of the Grateful Dead and the joy of late-night jams. “The energy was off the charts,” they tell Erin Osmon.

SUEDE: 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.

SMALL FACES: As Kenney Jones masterminds reissues of the Small Faces’ much-loved albums – and treasures from the vault – we celebrate 20 of their greatest songs in the company of Jones, friends, labelmates and collaborators. Will your favourite be among them…?

KARL BARTOS: The ex-Kraftwerk man on the secrets of Kling Klang, nights out with Neil Tennant, and Cliff Richard’s influence on New York electro.

DENIECE WILLIAMS: The making of “Free”.

GREG DULLI: The Afghan Whigs and beyond –a grunge-soul man’s torrid trail.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: Stunning compilation takes us from Winifred Atwell to The Foundations, via ska, R&B, doo-wop and jazz.

CLICK TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Jake Blount, Lambchop, Makaya McKraven, Beth Orton and more, and archival releases from Marianne Faithfull, David Sylvian, Vince Guaraldi, and others. We catch the Womad Festival and Richard Dawson & Circle live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Nope, Crimes Of the Future, Both Sides Of The Blade, Official Competition and The Forgiven; while in books there’s Alex Harvey and Paul Sexton.

Our front section, meanwhile, features The Byrds, End Of The Road, Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle, Dexys’ Helen O’Hara & Kevin Rowland and Tim Bernardes, while, at the end of the magazine, Clare Grogan shares his life in music.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

CLICK TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

Dennis Bovell on his finest albums: “I have no problem calling the shots”

Tom Pinnock
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Dennis Bovell on his finest albums: “I have no problem calling the shots”

Originally published in Uncut's July 2022 issue Pioneering producer, songwriter, dubmaster and now MBE, Dennis Bovell has been busy as ever as he heads towards his eighth decade. In the last year alone, there have been ongoing dub reimaginings for the likes of Animal Collective and The Smile, var...

Originally published in Uncut’s July 2022 issue

Pioneering producer, songwriter, dubmaster and now MBE, Dennis Bovell has been busy as ever as he heads towards his eighth decade. In the last year alone, there have been ongoing dub reimaginings for the likes of Animal Collective and The Smile, various archival and new Bandcamp releases, and Y In Dub, a new version of The Pop Group’s seminal Bovell-produced debut.

“I got to get back into those tracks and marvel at the sounds I’d put down on the tape,” he explains of the latter. “They’re mad about dubbing, Mark Stewart especially, so they were going crazy!”

His latest project is a career-spanning anthology, The Dubmaster, so Bovell’s agreed to take Uncut through nine of the pivotal albums he’s helped create, from Matumbi’s reggae classics through to production work for The Pop Group, The Slits and Fela Kuti, and right on to his latter-day dub work.

“I have no problem calling the shots,” he says of his firm approach to making music. “You need that iron fist. If I didn’t like something, I let it be known. And if I thought it could be better done some other way, I let that be known as well!”

TOM PINNOCK

________________

MATUMBI
SEVEN SEALS
HARVEST, 1978
The debut album by the London reggae group, featuring Bovell on guitar
DENNIS BOVELL: “Our first studio session was in October 1971, so last year marked 50 years since the first Matumbi recording. When I ran the band like a totalitarian regime, it seemed to work a bit better, but then everyone went, ‘Urgh, it’s a bit totalitarian, yeah?’ So I went, ‘Alright, we’re all equal, everyone’s got an equal say.’ I think that was the beginning of it falling apart. We did this at Gooseberry Studios in Soho, then the band had a mutiny – they didn’t want me to mix the record, saying that I was gonna make the band sound like all the other bands I’d been mixing and engineering. I thought, ‘What’s wrong with that, there’s success there?’ But they said, ‘No, we want a white guy to mix it.’ I go, ‘What, is that the only criteria, he has to be white?’ The chief engineer at Gooseberry, Dave Hunt, had just taken a new job at Berry Street on my recommendation. They suggested Dave to mix the album, and because I’d suggested him as engineer there, I couldn’t say no. But I think it was a very good mix, except for on one song he put an echo on my rhythm guitar that seemed to me to be out of time. I complained about it, but the band said ‘We liked it.’ The album did very well, though – it sold more in Japan than any other territory.”

 

________________

BLACKBEARD
STRICTLY DUB WIZE
TEMPUS, 1978
Bovell’s first solo album, a masterful psychedelic dub haze
“Some people in Matumbi took offence to my solo career – they were like, ‘You’re in competition with the band.’ There was one instance where my record was at number one in a chart, and the band’s record was at number seven or something. So I stopped singing and started making dub records – ‘See, I’m not in competition with the band anymore, I’m not singing, I’m just doing dubs.’ That’s why the album’s called Strictly Dub Wize, it was a statement to the band. I got out of that one! This was all done at Gooseberry. We had a Revox tape machine that was doctored, so it could facilitate vari-speed. That was the main delay line, because then we could vary it to the tempo of the tune. It worked fantastically, because then we could have any speed for the delays. We had two Roland delays and an AKG BX20 reverb, which was quite famed, and also an EMT reverb plate: lots of outboard gear, because that’s what we did there, a lot of dub work, so we had to have machines. I couldn’t really afford session fees for other musicians to come on board and play what I told them to play – and 10 to one, I’m gonna have to correct them afterwards. So I thought, ‘If I’m able to do it, I might as well.’ I needed a drummer though, mainly because the control room was some distance from the drum booth, so it was quite a laborious process to play it and then come back to the control room to EQ it.”

________________

***UNCUT CLASSIC***
THE POP GROUP
Y
RADAR, 1979
The Bristol group’s chaotic, experimental debut, produced by Bovell at Surrey’s Ridge Farm Studios
“They were the first punk or post-punk band I worked with, but it really appealed to me – it was a chance to get in touch with my rock side again. I met the lads and found they were all very crazy, but in need of a referee. They wanted my undivided attention, so they decided to lock me in the studio so I couldn’t go home! And I stayed in that studio for about nine months to a year, because once I’d finished The Pop Group’s Y, I then did The Slits’ Cut, then Matumbi’s Point Of View, then Marie Pierre’s Love Affair. Why did I record them back to back? Because I was afraid someone else would get in the studio and I’d be locked out! Bryan Ferry was hovering around, you know. The equipment belonged to John Anderson of Yes, and they were on tour. We’d broken out their new gear, and we were breaking it in for them! Mate, some serious music was made on that farm. There was a lot of overdubbing with The Pop Group – I remember one day we recorded about two reels of just pure feedback from Gareth [Sager], and then we sat there noting which bits were the most exciting bits, editing them off and then spinning them back into the multitrack and timing it so each bit of feedback would be at a particular point. Which is now known as sampling, but we were sampling using tape.”

________________

THE SLITS
CUT
ISLAND, 1979
The legendary debut from the London group, with Bovell helping them combine reggae and dub with punk
“Chris Blackwell at Island said to me, ‘Look, these girls are going to be the first female punk band. I want them polished, but I want them sounding rough all at the same time.’ Then he handed me a cassette of the demos, and I listened to them and had plans for every song before we went into the studio. I remember in ‘Shoplifting’ there was a line I objected to: I said to them, ‘I’m not gonna sit here while you lot sing, “Mr Paki won’t miss much and we’ll have dinner tonight…” I propose to change that word to “Babylonian”.’ They changed it, and I went, ‘OK, I’m gonna produce the album then.’ I mean, it was punk to use that kind of language, but for me that was over the line. Their playing was rough – I made them do it and do it and do it until they were pissed off with it and then they did it right. I would say, ‘Nah, it’s better if you do it this way. Trust me, you will love it in five years’ time!’ I was forbidden to play any instruments because they knew of my instrumentality – ‘We don’t want you to play it, we just want you to show us how you would play it and then we’ll adapt what you did to our way of playing.’ And it worked! So I’m not actually playing, I’m just steering it from behind. It’s like when you learn to drive, the instructor doesn’t take the wheel.”

________________

DENNIS BOVELL
BRAIN DAMAGE
FONTANA, 1981
The first album under his own name, an adventurous double-LP which stretches reggae to eclectic extremes
“I was building my own place, Studio 80, because I needed more time to do my own projects. I was thinking of making a solo album titled Brain Damage, when I got a telephone call from someone in Japan who says ‘I hear you’re building a studio. My name is Ryuichi Sakamoto. I want to come over to London to your studio and record a few things and get you to do some dub mixing.’ Don Letts had gone to Japan with Big Audio Dynamite and met Sakamoto, and he’d said, ‘Do you know Dennis Bovell?’ And Don went, ‘Yeah, he’s my mate.’ Sakamoto says to me, ‘I want to use your studio before you do.’ I was like, ‘That’s a strange request, but I’ll take that, I’ll let you be my guinea pig.’ What a guinea pig, mate! And then he came over with this strange instrument called the Prophet 10. Until then, we’d only seen the Prophet 5. I was knocked out by it and the sounds that came out of it. After working with Sakamoto, I made Brain Damage. It mixed all sorts of styles – I wanted to do a rock’n’roll version of ‘After Tonight’. I thought Mac Poole was one of the greatest rock’n’roll drummers, so I invited him to come down to the studio, and I got Steve Gregory to play saxophone – he was the guy who played on ‘Careless Whisper’ for George Michael, and he was also a member of the backing band for Boney M, and played with Georgie Fame. His pedigree was tight, so I got him to do all the horns.”

________________

JANET KAY
CAPRICORN WOMAN
ARAWAK, 1982
After crafting pop-reggae hit “Silly Games” for the singer and actress, Bovell produced and wrote her debut album
“A producer, Delroy Witter, came to me and said, ‘I’ve got this singer, I want you to mix a couple of tunes she’s sung.’ I quite liked the way Janet handled it, then Delroy said, ‘Right, now I want you to do a recording with her in London.’ We went into the studio with my team and cut ‘I Do Love You’. After that, she said, ‘If there’s anything you think I can do, let’s work together.’ I unveiled ‘Silly Games’ and the rest is our story. It was designed as a pop reggae hit, with a nonconventional drum pattern I invented – it was supposed to be so amazing that drummers everywhere would want to play it, because it was quite intricate, a bit like juggling on the drums. It had a kind of Caribbean calypso soca hi-hat and then an Afrobeat snare, and a disco kick drum. And then Janet with this high note that you had to be Minnie Riperton to get to! I was doing all the music for her, all she had to do was sing, though she did write some of the songs. She wanted to become an actress, and she got a part in a programme on Channel Four called No Problem. And that was a problem, because instead of wanting to be in the studio recording, she wanted to be in the TV studio recording a TV programme. It meant I had to get other singers to do the backing vocals on a couple of tracks, which she wasn’t happy about. Other voices made it a bit stronger in my opinion.”

________________

FELA KUTI & EGYPT 80
LIVE IN AMSTERDAM
EMI/CAPITOL, 1984
Fake passports and Hells Angels on the lights: Bovell helps out the Afrobeat pioneer
“EMI said, ‘We want you to go with Fela to Amsterdam and record a live album.’ But there was some trouble with the electricity, because the Paradiso is an old building. There was a lack of earth, so the lighting rig made buzzes on the equipment. This Hells Angel on the lighting was having fun making the lights make those noises, so I said, ‘Don’t do that, we’re recording, mate.’ He was like, ‘This is my job, this is what I do.’ He had an eyepatch and what looked like a gun holster, so I didn’t argue. When we got back to London, I managed to filter his buzzes away, but I couldn’t do it from the bass. It was entrenched. Fela was furious: ‘Let me go back to Amsterdam and find that guy and sort him out.’ I’m going, ‘Nah, we won’t need to do that, I’ll replay that bassline for you.’ So I got the bass out, plugged it in. It took deep concentration, but I did it, and he was very happy. Then we recorded lots of material at my studio, but before it was finished the Nigerian authorities put him in jail – he was about to go to America to tell the tale of what the government had been doing in Nigeria, and it might have prejudiced an IMF loan. He wanted to take me to Nigeria at one point, and he arrives with a forged passport, with my picture in it. He says, ‘You’re an Igbo.’ I’m going, ‘Fela, I’m not going to Nigeria on a false passport, my British passport is good enough to go anywhere in the world. Knowing that you’re not flavour of the month for the authorities in Nigeria, and I’m there with a false passport, we’re both in trouble…'”

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LINTON KWESI JOHNSON
MAKING HISTORY
ISLAND, 1984
A turning point in Bovell and Johnson’s long working relationship
“We forged a relationship that’s lasted 45, 50 years almost, now – ever since Vivian Weathers told him, ‘If you want to record in London, you want to get the right reggae sound, you got to get Dennis Bovell.’ Up until Making History, we’d always had two teams of players. It was like a football team, we’d have a team playing and a team sat on the bench, two of everything. As the football manager, Lynton would take off a player or put on a new player. He didn’t care about who was great, it was all, ‘He played drums when we were at school, I want him on this…’ But when we made Making History, that stopped, because I then had the opportunity to choose musicians, and not just old school friends of Linton’s. Richie Stephens, especially, played some amazing drums. There was a poem on there, ‘Di Eagle An’ Di Bear’, which referenced America and Russia: ‘Di eagle and di bear got people living in fear/Of impending nuclear warfare/But as a matter of fact/Believe it or not/Plenty people don’t care…‘ Because they’ve got other issues like finding food, sending their children to school. All this eagle and the bear are presently in the news, aren’t they?”

________________

DENNIS BOVELL
MEK IT RUN
PRESSURE SOUNDS, 2012
A sublime set of dubs, crafted from the producer’s abandoned tape archive
“I’d had an operation called a laminectomy – I’d fallen over and cracked the top of my spine, unknowingly, and when my fingers started to curl up, I thought, ‘It’s time to go to the doctors.’ My spine had healed itself and trapped the nerve to the right side of my body. It was a massive operation – I’ve got a seven-inch scar at the back of my head, but it’s great, because I can’t see it! After the operation, I was laid up a bit and thinking, ‘What am I gonna do?’ I was feeling restless. The first thing was Lee “Scratch” Perry came and said, ‘I want to record with you.’ So I recorded three songs with him. Afterwards, he said, ‘Keep them until I’m dead because they’ll be worth more.’ I thought, ‘Well, they’re never going to come out because you’re immortal!’ Then Pete Holdsworth from Pressure Sounds said, ‘It’s about time I had another album from you, innit?’ So I dragged myself into Mad Professor’s studio and unravelled all these tapes of stuff I had recorded but abandoned, and finished them off by doing some dub mixing of them. I had to bake some of them and then play them straight onto ProTools. I like to get the best of the digital and the best of analogue, because they’ve both got something. If you hit a good medium between them, it usually works. I’ve got seven or eight different echo gadgets – my latest is the Ninja, it’s out of this world. I just mixed a dub for Animal Collective, and there’s one part where I actually freeze the music, and it’s running backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, like some kind of scratching effect. You can grab a few tracks and whizz them around and make some lovely noises.”

The Dubmaster: The Essential Anthology is out now on Trojan; Bovell’s solo work is due for digital re-release throughout 2022

 

Bill Pitman, Wrecking Crew guitarist, has died aged 102

Michael Bonner
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Bill Pitman, Wrecking Crew guitarist, has died aged 102

Guitarist Bill Pitman, a veteran of The Wrecking Crew, has died at the age of 102. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut As reported by The New York Times, Pitman died on Thursday August 11 at his home in La Quinta, California. No cause of death has been revea...

Guitarist Bill Pitman, a veteran of The Wrecking Crew, has died at the age of 102.

As reported by The New York Times, Pitman died on Thursday August 11 at his home in La Quinta, California. No cause of death has been revealed, however Pitman reportedly spent the last month of his life recovering from an accident that left him with a fractured spine.

Born on February 12, 1920, Pitman was raised in a musical household, as his father worked as a staff bassist for programming at NBC. His journey with music began at age five and through high school, making regular treks from New Jersey to Manhattan as an admirer of the local jazz scene. He began playing in jazz clubs around LA in 1951 (at age 31) and his career catapulted after scoring a regular gig in Peggy Lee‘s backing band.

He went on to perform regularly for The Rusty Draper Show, a radio gig that he stuck with for three years before being poached for session work by artists like Al Hendrickson, Howard Roberts, Buddy Rich and Red Callender. His introduction to rock’n’roll came via Phil Spector, who, after a chance meeting with Pitman, recruited him into his cohort of big-name session players.

Though unnamed at the time, this collective – which featured a fluctuating roster of members all based in LA – went on to be dubbed by member Hal Blaine as The Wrecking Crew. Their first hit was The Teddy Bears 1958 single “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, which led to Pitman being invited to all of Spector’s future recording sessions.

As a member of The Wrecking Crew, Pitman performed on albums by the likes of The Byrds, Nancy Sinatra, James Brown, The Monkees and many others.

Some of his most revered contributions include work on The Beach Boys‘ “Good Vibrations“, Dylan‘s “Mr. Tambourine Man”, The Ronettes‘ “Be My Baby“, Sinatra‘s “Strangers In The Night” and Barbra Streisand‘s “The Way We Were“.

Pitman’s most recognisable work is said to be the acoustic guitar playing on Pet Sounds’ opening track, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice“. With his fellow Californians, Pitman also performed on ‘The Beach Boys Today!’ and ‘Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)’, both released in 1965.

Elsewhere, Pitman worked on a litany of film and TV soundtracks. His earliest contribution to cinema can be heard in Elvis Presley‘s 1961 film Blue Hawaii, while later accomplishments include scores for M*A*S*H (1970), Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982), Dirty Dancing (1987) and Goodfellas (1990).

The Wrecking Crew’s success was celebrated in the 2008 documentary The Wrecking Crew!, directed by Denny Tedesco, son of fellow Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco.

On the official Facebook page for the film, Tedsco shared a tribute to Pitman. “He was my dad’s friend who played guitar and golf with him,” he wrote. “It wasn’t until I got older did I understand the impact that he made. Bill could be heard from ‘Mr. Tamborine Man’ to ‘Good Vibrations’… He was an amazing man.”

The tribute was shared alongside a five-minute interview with Pitman that featured in The Wrecking Crew!, filmed when he was 82 years old – watch it below:

Passing of Legendary Wrecking Crew member, Bill Pitman

We've lost another friend of ours last night. Bill Pitman has passed away. He was 102. Born on February 12, 1920Growing up, as a little kid, I always knew who Bill Pitman was. He was my dad's friend who played guitar and golf with him. It wasn't until I got older did I understand the impact that he made. Bill could be heard from Mr. Tamborine Man to Good Vibrations. Hundreds and hundreds of Film and television. He became the first call with the Danelectro guitar for many years. The interview I did with Bill for the WC Movie, he was 82 years young. He was an amazing man. Best to his wife Jan and his children. Jr. Salt, we will miss you. Say hello to Sr.

Posted by The Wrecking Crew on Friday, August 12, 2022

Pitman is survived by his wife Jan and their children.

Additional reporting by Ellie Robinson.

Sandy Denny’s four solo albums to be reissued

Michael Bonner
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Sandy Denny’s four solo albums to be reissued

Sandy Denny's four solo albums are to be reissued by Proper Records in collaboration with UMC, on 180gm vinyl. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Originally released by Proper between 1971 and 1977, The North Star Grass Man And The Ravens, Sandy, Like An Ol...

Sandy Denny‘s four solo albums are to be reissued by Proper Records in collaboration with UMC, on 180gm vinyl.

Originally released by Proper between 1971 and 1977, The North Star Grass Man And The Ravens, Sandy, Like An Old-Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous map our Denny’s musical journey after Fairport Convention and Fotheringay.

The reissue campaign will begin with The North Star Grass Man And The Ravens and Sandy on September 23 with Like An Old-Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous following on November 11.

As if you needed it, here’s the tracklisting for each of these four much-loved albums.

THE NORTH STAR GRASSMAN AND THE RAVENS
Side One
Late November
Blackwaterside
The Sea Captain
Down In The Flood
John The Gun

Side Two
Next Time Around
The Optimist
Let’s Jump The Broomstick
Wretched Wilbur
The North Star Grassman And The Ravens
Crazy Lady Blue

SANDY
Side One
It’ll Take A Long Time
Sweet Rosemary
For Nobody To Hear
Tomorrow Is A Long Time
Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood

Side Two
Listen, Listen
The Lady
Bushes And Briars
It Suits Me Well
The Music Weaver

LIKE AN OLD FASHIONED WALTZ
Side One
Solo
Like an Old Fashioned Waltz
Whispering Grass
Friends
Carnival

Side Two
Dark The Night
At The End of the Day
Until The Real Thing Comes Along
No End

RENDEZVOUS
Side One
I Wish I Was a Fool for You (For Shame of Doing Wrong)
Gold Dust
Candle in the Wind
Take Me Away
One Way Donkey Ride

Side Two
I’m a Dreamer
All Our Days
Silver Threads and Golden Needles
No More Sad Refrains

Julia Jacklin: “I was trying to mix Celine Dion with Throbbing Gristle”

Tom Pinnock
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Julia Jacklin: “I was trying to mix Celine Dion with Throbbing Gristle”

Having flirted with acting, Julia Jacklin eventually found herself in Montreal, speed-writing a follow-up to the acclaimed Crushing on a Roland keyboard in view of Leonard Cohen’s house. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine - in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online...

Having flirted with acting, Julia Jacklin eventually found herself in Montreal, speed-writing a follow-up to the acclaimed Crushing on a Roland keyboard in view of Leonard Cohen’s house. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store – Tom Pinnock hears how she came up with a modern classic by crossing Celine Dion with Goblin. “I was trying to keep the beauty,” Jacklin says, “but make sure it was never getting too pretty.”

Every Thursday night, in a brightly lit suburban strip mall above a dental surgery, Julia Jacklin searched for new horizons. She’d already tried tap-dancing and screenwriting classes in her adopted city of Melbourne; now she was enrolled on an acting course. “It was hilariously bad,” she laughs, “just excruciating. It was this very bizarre group of people shoved together in this small room for three hours each week. I was going through a bit of a crisis during the pandemic. I guess, like a lot of musicians, I was trying to extend my artistic repertoire.”

In part, Jacklin’s new pursuits were an attempt to decompress after the pressures of making and touring her second album, 2019’s Crushing. A powerful, wry examination of relationships and sexual dynamics, delivered via the Australian’s truly classic, burnt-honey voice, it established her as an artist to be taken seriously – except, that is, when Jacklin herself is joking around. A lockdown mercifully put an end to that acting course after six weeks, but it was enough to make her reset her goals completely towards music. “Yeah, I think I’ve got to stay in my lane.”

Fittingly, new album Pre Pleasure might just be her best yet: across 10 tracks, it pairs the tortured and imagistic lyrics of Crushing with more accessible and bolder musical textures, at times lushly orchestral or crisply fuzzy, at others intimately stripped down. “I was trying to keep the beauty and the joy and the easy listening side of Robyn, Luther Vandross and Celine Dion,” she explains of her unusual influences, “but make sure it was never getting too pretty. And that’s where, like, Throbbing Gristle and Goblin came in…”

Uncut first catches up with Jacklin via videocall while she’s on a short trip to Tasmania. She’s come away for a few days on her own, hoping to work on some new songs. As seems to be the way with her mercurial muse, however, little actual writing has occurred. “What have I been doing? I don’t know! Not much, honestly. Walking. I’ve been buying books that I probably won’t read for a while. I’m in a real memoir phase at the moment, so I bought David Sedaris’ new one, and Alice Walker’s journals. I’m enjoying reading other people’s thoughts at the moment.”

“The most obvious thing about Julia’s music is just how personal her lyrics are,” explains Marcus Paquin, who co-produced Pre Pleasure with Jacklin in Montreal. “She speaks of her own journey through self-discovery and feelings of inadequacy – and she’s able to express those ideas poetically.”

“She has such a cinematic vision,” adds Fran Keaney of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, fellow Melbourne residents and occasional collaborators. “It’s such neat storytelling – her songs are almost like Raymond Carver short stories.”

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The Foundations – Am I Groovin’ You – The Pye Anthology

Terry Staunton
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The Foundations – Am I Groovin’ You – The Pye Anthology

One of the earliest, most noteworthy chart battles in the UK was fought between Bayswater-based The Foundations and their north London contemporaries The Equals, with both bands striving to be the first mixed-ethnicity outfit to make it to number one. The former’s debut release, “Baby, Now That ...

One of the earliest, most noteworthy chart battles in the UK was fought between Bayswater-based The Foundations and their north London contemporaries The Equals, with both bands striving to be the first mixed-ethnicity outfit to make it to number one. The former’s debut release, “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”, triumphed when it reached the top spot in November 1967, eight months before their rivals’ “Baby, Come Back” followed suit.

The victors had been honing their craft in clubs and dancehalls for two years as The Ramongs and The Ramong Sound. A change of name brought success, but the template remained the same: upbeat soul with singalong, pop-minded aspirations, yet infused with the edgier, grittier elements of Booker T & The MG’s or the house band at Motown’s Hitsville power base.

While The Foundations only troubled the Top 20 on four occasions, the commercial bounciness of their chart-topper, plus “Back On My Feet Again”, “Build Me Up Buttercup” – more of which later – and “In The Bad, Bad Old Days” only tells part of the story outlined on this 3CD anthology. They’re particularly in their element on the frenzied “Jerkin’ The Dog” (previously a minor US hit for R&B showman The Mighty Hannibal), and the mod strut of “Mr Personality Man”. For the fullest, most vivid portrait of the band in their pomp, the inclusion on this set’s third disc of the ’68 live album Rocking The Foundations is hard to beat. From the Hammond-led funk of the Freddie Scott song that gives this compilation its title, to the horn-blasting howl of Edwin Starr’s “Stop Her On Sight”, it’s a masterclass in how to confidently throw soul-infused shapes across a dance floor.

All was not well in the ranks, however. Shortly before the album’s release, singer Clem Curtis announced he was quitting to try his luck as a solo artist in the US (where he was briefly mentored by Sammy Davis Jr, and played a Las Vegas residency opening for the Righteous Brothers). Diplomatically, he hung around to help run auditions for his replacement, the gig ultimately going to Colin Young. The new boy’s arrival saw the release of the group’s second-biggest hit; like its predecessors, “Build Me Up Buttercup” came from the pen of their longtime producer Tony Macaulay (writing in tandem with Manfred Mann’s own new singer, Mike D’Abo), its structure intentionally aping material Holland-Dozier-Holland were fashioning for The Four Tops – a ploy rewarded by a spell at No 1 in the American trade magazine Cash Box chart.

But the relationship with Macaulay was becoming increasingly strained, largely because of his reluctance to allow the group to contribute self-penned material. The recording of 1969’s Digging The Foundations displeased some members, unhappy with having to play, especially, a version of “Let The Heartaches Begin”, the Macaulay ballad that had been a UK No. 1 for Long John Baldry two years earlier (knocking “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” off the top spot, in fact) and the producer’s lightweight “That Same Old Feeling”, which would later see chart action when covered by Pickettywitch.

To be fair, The Foundations’ overhaul of the Baldry track has a lot going for it; a quickening of tempo gives the song the air of an early Drifters hit with a smidgen of The Isley Brothers on the side, while the same album’s “Take Away The Emptiness” possesses the finger-clicking fizz of Chairmen Of The Board at their best. Ties with Macaulay were severed the following year (he would go on to write million-sellers for David Soul), and although singles like “Take A Girl Like You”, the theme song to the Hayley Mills movie of the same name, adhered closely to the Macaulay formula, the hits days were over.

The band finally got their wish when the Young-penned “I’m Gonna Be A Rich Man” was chosen as the A-side for what would turn out to be their last single, but while its bluesy psychedelia was representative of the harder direction they wanted to pursue, fans were in no hurry to go with them.

Curtis returned to the UK in the late ’70s to front a new band bearing The Foundations name, resulting in a legal wrangle with a similar ad hoc lineup put together by Young (compilers of this set include recordings by both). Young later toured in another permutation of the group with original guitarist Alan Warner (who still shepherds a lineup today), following renewed interest when “Build Me Up Buttercup” featured prominently in the 1999 comedy There’s Something About Mary. Yet their influence goes further than just their own trailblazing hits: their hybrid of white pop and black soul was a torch carried forward into the ’70s and ’80s by the likes of Hot Chocolate and The Beat, while Lynval Golding of The Specials has cited seeing The Foundations on the Midlands club circuit in the ’60s as a seismic inspiration.

Danger Mouse & Black Thought – Cheat Codes

Louis Pattison
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Danger Mouse & Black Thought – Cheat Codes

There have been times when it feels like everywhere you look, you see the hand of Danger Mouse. Over the last decade or so of work, the New York-born producer Brian Burton has accrued a list of credits that read like a who’s who of modern music. Adele, Gorillaz, U2, Beck, The Black Keys, Norah Jon...

There have been times when it feels like everywhere you look, you see the hand of Danger Mouse. Over the last decade or so of work, the New York-born producer Brian Burton has accrued a list of credits that read like a who’s who of modern music. Adele, Gorillaz, U2, Beck, The Black Keys, Norah Jones – and that’s before you get to his artistic collaborations, with Cee-Lo Green in Gnarls Barkley, The Shins’ James Mercer in Broken Bells, and Karen O for 2019’s Lux Prima.

As impressive a CV as this is, it’s sometimes given the impression that Burton has been keen to leave his past behind him. He began his career as a hip-hop producer, recording the seminal 2003 LP Ghetto Pop Life with the Brooklyn MC Jemini before breaking into the public consciousness with 2004’s The Grey Album, a visionary – and very much unsanctioned – mash-up of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ self-titled “White Album”. Since The Grey Album, Burton has occasionally returned to rap (in particular, see Danger Doom, his collaboration with the late masked rapper MF DOOM). But by and large, it appears he’s nudged his career on a different track, honing his skills as a musical auteur and leaving the beats and rhymes behind.

Cheat Codes marks Danger Mouse’s return to rap, and does so with panache. This collaboration with Tariq Trotter – aka Black Thought of The Roots – is the result of an artistic collaboration that’s been teased as far back as 2006. And on Burton’s part, you sense a degree of wish fulfilment. He describes Trotter as his favourite rapper, and you can hear it; these warm, vintage-tinged tracks feel elegantly crafted, shaped to the contours of Trotter’s voice.

The formula is deceptively simple. There are 12 tracks here, most built around an extended sample pulled from the depths of Danger Mouse’s deep cuts section. The cinematic slide of “Saltwater” is spun together from “L’Amico Suicida” by the ’70s operatic Italian prog group Biglietto Per L’Inferno, while “Identical Deaths” shakes a shimmering segment from “Future Recollections”, a track by the obscure UK psych group Raw Material.

But Burton isn’t one of those samplers who seems overly concerned with covering his tracks. One of his tricks is to retain a fragment of the song’s original vocal, letting it slide into focus behind the MC at an opportune moment. See “Sometimes”, which takes a snatch of Gwen McCrae’s “Love Without Sex” and slows the vocal into an androgynous cry of despair.

Cheat Codes feels like a platform for Trotter’s skills, Burton lining up the beats and letting his hero spit unimpeded. There’s no surrounding concept, no skits or extraneous scene-setting. Tracks like “No Gold Teeth” and “Close To Famous” showcase his mix of lyrical ingenuity and pugilistic one-upmanship without distraction. You get the sense they could have made Cheat Codes in a state of hermetic seclusion, just the pair of them vibing off one another. Instead, it features a diverse, if carefully selected parade of guests. Michael Kiwanuka delivers a breathy hook over the atmospheric boom-bap of “Aquamarine”. “Because” features verses from Joey Bada$$, Russ, and Danger Mouse’s vocal protegee Dylan Cartlidge. And there’s an unfeasibly stacked lineup on the claustrophobic “Strangers”, Black Thought budging up to accommodate both A$AP Rocky and Run The Jewels.

For many, though, the key verse will be the late MF DOOM’s cameo on “Belize”. Burton says he recorded the vocal after the recording of Danger Doom’s 2005 album The Mouse And The Mask but hadn’t yet found a place for it. Deployed expertly here, it captures what DOOM did best – a blend of gymnastic wordplay, cartoonish imagery and playful assonance that takes a few listens to fully unpack. Fans have been clamouring for a follow-up to The Mouse And The Mask for years. It looks likelier than ever that record will never come. But Cheat Codes finds Danger Mouse rolling with a new lyrical foil and this one feels like it could run and run.

Send us your questions for Robyn Hitchcock

Tom Pinnock
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Send us your questions for Robyn Hitchcock

How often does he really dream of trains? Why was Balloon Man filled with houmous? And how does one know if they have fegmania? That's right, groovers, Uncut's next Audience With... star is the utterly unique Robyn Hitchcock, back soon with his first new album in five years, Shufflemania. The rec...

How often does he really dream of trains? Why was Balloon Man filled with houmous? And how does one know if they have fegmania? That’s right, groovers, Uncut‘s next Audience With… star is the utterly unique Robyn Hitchcock, back soon with his first new album in five years, Shufflemania.

The record, out October 21 on Tiny Ghost Records – you can preorder it here – features a host of guests, from Johnny Marr to Sean Ono Lennon – so why not ask him about his many musical connections? Of course, also to be untangled are his obsessions with death, fish, Syd Barrett and Bryan Ferry, what it’s like being an Englishman in Nashville, the strange days of The Soft Boys and much more…

Send your questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by August 21, and Robyn will answer the best ones in the next issue of Uncut.

Introducing the Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to Leonard Cohen

John Robinson
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Introducing the Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to Leonard Cohen

BUY THE LEONARD COHEN ULTIMATE MUSIC GUIDE HERE “It’s just the way it is” It’s been a while now, but mention of 2016 can still prompt an involuntary shudder in music fans. The passing of so many legendary artists and top-class musicians in that year didn’t only prompt sadness and ret...

BUY THE LEONARD COHEN ULTIMATE MUSIC GUIDE HERE

“It’s just the way it is”

It’s been a while now, but mention of 2016 can still prompt an involuntary shudder in music fans. The passing of so many legendary artists and top-class musicians in that year didn’t only prompt sadness and retrospective admiration; on isolated occasions it also led to talk of achieving a kind of perfection.

For some artists, their death came to seem like their latest meticulously planned creative step. David Bowie’s Blackstar album, for example, was released on his 69th birthday – just two days before he died on January 10. The passing later in the year of Leonard Cohen (at 82, though his gravitas made him seem far older) might well be thought of as confronting a finality for which his whole life had been a preparation.

Cohen began life as a poet and novelist, pragmatically became a musician, and – as Richard Williams points out in his review of the posthumous 2019 album Thanks For The Dance, in which Cohen’s final song sketches are spoken softly over a newly tracked backing – ultimately returned to poetry. You might choose to see that as completion of a perfect circle.

As you’ll read in this Deluxe, 148-page Ultimate Music Guide, what occurred between those points was often turbulent, but Cohen seemed to take it all in his stride. His private life is sometimes portrayed as an eventful itinerary of romances, but was founded on longstanding complex relationships and deep self-questioning, which all found a place in his songs.

Nor were things uneventful professionally. Cohen’s recording life often seemed a battle: a historic conflict between artistic achievement and commercial expectations. One of the features we have added to this new edition is Stephen Troussé’s forensic investigation of Leonard’s tumultuous early 1970s, when he thought he was all washed up – and leading a band, not uncoincidentally, called the Army.

How all this manifested itself in the work, from the self-lacerating Songs Of Love And Hate to the deranged Phil Spector collaboration Death Of A Ladies’ Man you can read about in greater depth in the reviews collected here. What emerges in the longer feature articles, meanwhile, is a picture of a person who made not much attempt to conceal what he was going through (“Make this your last interview,” he says to Roy Hollingworth in 1973, “and let’s quit together”). There were trials, but there were also lessons, however bitter they may have been.

For his fans, Leonard Cohen is a poet, a songwriter, a tunesmith (Bob Dylan particularly praised his melodies). Those who worked closely with him seem more impressed by an artist at the peak of his powers, but who achieved a rare equanimity. Hattie Webb, one of his backing singers, recalled how he behaved during a worrying mid-air incident during Leonard’s 2008 tour.

“All the people around me were very frightened,” she recalled. “I was gripping hold of my drink and seeing my life flashing before my eyes, and I looked over at Leonard. He was completely and utterly calm, and said: ‘Don’t worry, darling, nothing can happen to you – it’s just the way it is.’ That’s what we take from Leonard. He worries about the small things and deals with those. And with the big things, he lets nature take its course.”

Enjoy the magazine.

Buy a copy of the magazine here. Missed one in the series? Bundles are available at the same location…

Leonard Cohen – Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide

Uncut
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Leonard Cohen – Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide

Hallelujah! On the launch of a new documentary film and greatest hits collection, we celebrate the life and career of Leonard Cohen. From his bohemian 1960s all the way to his triumphant return to performance in the 2000s, he’s your man. “Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely ...

Hallelujah! On the launch of a new documentary film and greatest hits collection, we celebrate the life and career of Leonard Cohen. From his bohemian 1960s all the way to his triumphant return to performance in the 2000s, he’s your man. “Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in…”

Buy a copy here!

Blondie: “It was always kind of an experiment…”

Peter Watts
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Blondie: “It was always kind of an experiment…”

A new boxset shines fresh light on BLONDIE’s remarkable journey from downtown scenesters to uptown habitués. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine - in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store - Peter Watts explores the roads not travelled during their formative ...

A new boxset shines fresh light on BLONDIE’s remarkable journey from downtown scenesters to uptown habitués. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store – Peter Watts explores the roads not travelled during their formative years in the company of DEBBIE HARRY, CHRIS STEIN and CLEM BURKE. “It was always kind of an experiment…”

When Chris Stein moved out of Manhattan around 20 years ago, he took several boxes of Blondie ephemera with him and stored them in his garage. These included a backstage mirror from Hammersmith Odeon that was hauled back to America like Viking plunder, as well as approximately 100 water-damaged reels of unreleased music, acetates, vinyl and home-recorded cassettes. Some came from the very start of the band’s career in 1974, when Stein and Debbie Harry lived together in a succession of crummy New York apartments. Others were experimental remixes, created in 1982 as the band fell apart. In between were the origins of most of Blondie’s biggest hits.

Did Harry have any idea of what her bandmate was sitting on? “I know he is a very good collector and he always kept very interesting things,” she says. “It’s been a while since we lived together, but I knew that anything he recorded at home or in his own studio would be there. There’s all the stuff we recorded together, home demos. Chris had his own label, Animal, so it’s all that stuff too.”

“All that stuff” has been reclaimed from Stein’s garage, restored, transferred and listened to anew for the Blondie boxset Against The Odds: 1974–1982. This is the first time Stein, Harry and drummer Clem Burke have authorised such a deep dive through Blondie’s archives. As well as the six original studio albums, there are four albums of rare material including 36 previously unreleased tracks. Collectively this represents a chance to take a proper overview of Blondie’s career as well as a glimpse some of the roads not taken – weird experiments with sequencer and drum machine, a discarded album with Giorgio Moroder, unexpected covers and song ideas that never left Stein and Harry’s home.

“My garage had become a repository for all the Blondie stuff that was floating about,” says Stein. “We wanted to put some of this stuff out in the world. There’s a lot of interest in the process of how this stuff got made. People like to hear demos. They are the beginning of the creative journey – they show that initial idea before we get to the reality of the finished thing. I didn’t see The Beatles thing [Get Back], but everybody was very enthusiastic about it, watching them just fuck about in the studio for hours on end. People told me that was the charm of the thing, seeing it normalised. This set is another version of that.”

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Lamont Dozier dies aged 81

Michael Bonner
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Lamont Dozier dies aged 81

Lamont Dozier has died, aged 81. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The news was broken by his son, Lamont Dozier Jr, via his Instagram account, reports The Guardian. https://www.instagram.com/p/ChBtNoBusKb/?hl=en Dozier, of course, was one thirds of the pee...

Lamont Dozier has died, aged 81.

The news was broken by his son, Lamont Dozier Jr, via his Instagram account, reports The Guardian.

Dozier, of course, was one thirds of the peerless Motown song-writing partnership Holland-Dozier-Holland, who wrote hits for the Supremes, the Four Tops and the Isley Brothers, among others. Their songbook includes “Baby Love”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, “Where Did Our Love Go” and “Nowhere To Run”.

No cause of death has been announced.

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