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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.

Tom Waits shares unreleased live recordings

Michael Bonner
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Tom Waits shares unreleased live recordings

Leading up to the release of 20th anniversary editions of Alice and Blood Money, Tom Waits is putting out previously unreleased live versions of songs from the records. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut You can hear "All the World is Green" from Blood Money - rec...

Leading up to the release of 20th anniversary editions of Alice and Blood Money, Tom Waits is putting out previously unreleased live versions of songs from the records.

You can hear “All the World is Green” from Blood Money – recorded in Milan in 2008 as part of Waits’ Glitter & Doom Tour…

… while “Fish and Bird” from Alice – recorded in London in 2004.

Alice and Blood Money were originally released on the same day – May 7, 2002. Both albums came about as a consequence of Waits and co-writer Kathleen Brennan’s recent collaborations with playwright Robert Wilson. The music on Alice featured in Wilson’s avant-garde opera, while Blood Money served as the basis of Wilson’s adaptation of Georg Buchner’s play Woyzeck.

Yo La Tengo on “Sugarcube” and working with Bob Odenkirk: “He’s a genius”

Tom Pinnock
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Yo La Tengo on “Sugarcube” and working with Bob Odenkirk: “He’s a genius”

Originally published in Uncut's July 2022 issue “I think it was shown on MTV once, maybe twice,” says bassist James McNew, remembering “Sugarcube”’s video. “As far as I know, that's it. That's all.” In the 25 years since, however, the promo has racked up millions of views on YouT...

Originally published in Uncut’s July 2022 issue

“I think it was shown on MTV once, maybe twice,” says bassist James McNew, remembering “Sugarcube”’s video. “As far as I know, that’s it. That’s all.”

In the 25 years since, however, the promo has racked up millions of views on YouTube, no doubt helped by the presence of its stars David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, the latter now better known as lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He has, it turns out, been a Yo La Tengo fan since the early ’90s.

“We were all fans of Bob’s from The Larry Sanders Show,” explains Ira Kaplan. “Then Georgia and I were on vacation out in LA and we saw that Bob was doing stand-up at a bookstore, so we went out to see the show. Afterwards he was just browsing the record section, and it was kind of out-of-character for us to do this, but we introduced ourselves. It turned out he knew our band.”

There’s more to “Sugarcube” than its video, of course. Since the mid-’80s, the Hoboken-based group had been charting a unique path, mastering the acoustic hush of 1990’s Fakebook as adeptly as they did the brutal fuzz workouts of ’92’s May I Sing With Me. On their eclectic eighth album, 1997’s I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One – now celebrating its 25th anniversary with a digital and vinyl reissue – they perfected this sonic tightrope walk. “Sugarcube”, a highlight of its 16 tracks, is a propulsive, droning delight, Hubley’s drumming and McNew’s unusual organ bass driving Kaplan’s freeform guitar wrangling and their surprisingly gentle harmonies.

“It feels really natural to play “Sugarcube” or to play [quiet instrumental] “Green Arrow”,” says McNew. “Loud music is us and quiet music is us, atmospheric music is us and straight-ahead music is us. We were more comfortable with that idea than other people were, it seems.”

Recording took place in Nashville’s House Of David, a studio converted for Elvis Presley, with the sessions – somewhat typically for Yo La Tengo – efficient and exploratory at the same time. “We’d recorded before at Alex The Great in Nashville,” recalls Hubley, “which is a much more bohemian studio, with a lot of character. But House Of David was on a real street, with a lot of music industry stuff on that road, you know, publishing companies and other recording studios.”

“There were these big magnolia trees in the front yard,” says producer Roger Moutenot, summing up their quest for experimental spontaneity. “One time we went out there and the crickets were just crazy, so I ran in, set up two microphones on the front porch, and we recorded these crickets for “Green Arrow”. At one moment, this one cricket just stepped forward and almost took a solo. We were all just cracking up! It was beautiful. But that was the fun thing about Yo La Tengo – there was nothing too off-the-wall, no boundaries. This was a very free and expressive record to make.”

GEORGIA HUBLEY (drums, vocals): I remember we were pretty excited about the things we were coming up with for I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. We had a pretty crappy rehearsal room in Hoboken, but it was great, we were able to have all our stuff set up, and we’d just keep trying different things.

IRA KAPLAN (guitar, vocals): When we got to the point where we didn’t have to do anything else but be a band, it was great because we could practise during the day. When we had night-time practices, it would be kind of cacophonous with other bands playing simultaneously. But by the time of I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, we were able to work pretty much every weekday afternoon.

JAMES McNEW (organ, percussion): The space has since been demolished and turned into luxury condominiums, as has most of Hoboken, actually. But yeah, we would just play with no real destination in mind, and come up with jams and ideas that were fun to play and that seemed interesting.

KAPLAN: Our rehearsal room was located next door to a woodworking place, and one day as we were walking to practice we saw Teller from Penn & Teller on the street. It turned out they were having some stuff fabricated for them at the shop. At some point we came out of rehearsal and Teller was there, and then we saw blood flying out of his hand. Apparently he was testing some blood-spurting device.

HUBLEY: “Autumn Sweater”, for instance, was started on guitar, and then it just moved over to organ, but that was pretty indicative of a lot of the writing. “Sugarcube” doesn’t have bass guitar, it’s just James playing bass on our Acetone, our beloved, trashy Italian organ, which is very bassy-sounding.

McNEW: I don’t even know where we got the Acetone. It was just in our practice space. We noticed that no-one was ever using it – there was dust on it. So we decided to pay some attention to it, and it turned out to be so great that we would all take turns playing it on different songs. I liked the idea of organ acting as bass – you know, it had a lot of good precedents in Suicide or Snapper, things like that. It was a sound that I really like.

KAPLAN: Electr-O-Pura had been the first record that we’d made exclusively with Roger. We went to Nashville to make that.

ROGER MOUTENOT (producer): We made a deal where they’d come down here to record, and then I would go up to New York to mix. That was the arrangement.

KAPLAN: Going back to Nashville for I Can Hear The Heart…, I think we all felt pretty comfortable, and excited about the songs we had. There were definitely songs where we really didn’t know how they went, we were kind of allowing the process of recording to give us the chance to finish and change songs as freely as we wanted.

MOUTENOT: House Of David was a weird choice for a studio, but I had worked there, and I really, really liked the console. So I thought, ‘Oh, this will be good for this project.’ It had this unique vibe: Elvis was going to work there, and they built this whole entranceway off the garage, so he wouldn’t have to walk outside the building. There was actually a trapdoor that went into the garage, and that was for Elvis.

HUBLEY: I keep trying to visualise the place – I can see the room where we set up, and then there was a little downstairs area where we had a TV and we would watch reruns or whatever, when there was nothing for us to do, if they were working on machines that needed to be repaired or anything like that.

McNEW: They had cable TV, which was a great novelty back then. It was a nice place, a terrific [live] room, and the control room was really nice to use.

MOUTENOT: Most tracks were recorded live, as live as we could get. Sometimes we did vocals too, but I think for “Sugarcube” we just cut the basic tracks. For the most part, the Yo La Tengo stuff I worked on was always live to start with, just to get that band thing. There were a couple of songs on I Can Hear The Heart… that were built up, though, like “Moby Octopad”, which started with drums and then bass, and things like Ira’s piano were overdubbed later.

KAPLAN: I remember us coming up with the little ending for “Sugarcube”. It’s ancient times, so it was recorded on tape, and when you finished you’d rewind the tape machine. If you didn’t turn down the faders you’d hear the sound of the tape going backwards, played really fast. It sounded great, so we recorded that and stuck it on the end.

HUBLEY: The intro with the drum fill, I really cannot remember how that came about: it has to be some sort of weird accident that we decided to keep. I wish I remembered, because it’s so weird and random. I do remember thinking, ‘That’s terrible sounding’ but everybody else was like, “No, that’s great!” It kind of works.

MOUTENOT: That was a special fill! It may have been that Georgia did the fill and I was like, “Oh my God, that’s so great, let’s use that take.” But you know, I did cut between some takes once in a while – I did a bit of editing on that record as it was recorded on tape. I can’t say, but it might have been that.

McNEW: I remember Roger deciding that he needed to do some cutting on tape, and it was as though he was about to defuse a bomb. He ordered everyone out of the control room, so it was just him and whoever the assistant from the studio was. He told us all to just go get lunch, just get out of there while he did this extremely life-or-death manoeuvre on the tape. It was a mystery to me! I just knew that he was doing something very important, and I wanted to give him his space. Though I think that drum fill was actually a part of the arrangement. I don’t recall how it began, where it originated from, but I think it was always part of the beginning of the song, strangely enough.

MOUTENOT: That’s what I love about this particular record, I Can Hear The Heart…, it’s up, it’s down, it’s rocking, it’s soft, it’s got a lot of different textures and feelings. Like, “Damage” is one of my favourites, it just puts me in a dream world every time. When you make a record that way, when you open the can of worms like that and say ‘anything goes’, you could go down the rabbit hole and really get screwed up. But for some reason, with these guys, it all worked because we always would go somewhere but pull it back in to be what the band wanted. It was super fun.

KAPLAN: Apart from being in it, we had very little to do with the video after coming up with the concept – the plot of doing this lousy video and irritating the record company, and then them sending us to rock school; and then we do the exact same video as rock school graduates, the same as they one they hated, but this time they love it. That was what we presented to our pal Phil Morrison, who had directed the “Tom Courtenay” video and a couple of others that we did. Then Phil took that concept and him and his writing partner Joe Ventura came up with the script for the video.

HUBLEY: We knew the storyline, such as it was, but a lot of it’s improvised – certainly, Bob and David do a lot of improvising. We flew out to California just to do the video. I think it was maybe a two-day shoot in a variety of locations, but mostly at a high school or college in Santa Monica. It was shot at a weekend in the summer, so it was fairly empty and easy to film there.

McNEW: It just seemed like a weird dream that it was actually happening – it still seems like a weird dream that it did happen. I mean, I remember just how deeply committed to the idea Bob and David were. They really delivered and gave so much more than you would ever even have possibly imagined that they would give to such a such a ridiculous idea. That’s just kind of inspiring, and it shows how gifted both of those guys are.

KAPLAN: It was really fun. I wish the shoot had been longer. The only part I remember being gruelling at all was filming the scene where we’re getting yelled at by John Ennis, with Bob and David playing the record company flunkies. We were filming in an actual office, and because there was dialogue there was no way you could have AC on. Maybe because it was the weekend the air conditioning was off anyway? But it was really hot in there. That is the closest I can come to a complaint, because it was hilarious. All these takes kept being ruined, because either John was laughing or we were laughing.

McNEW: Keeping a straight face was a pretty sizable challenge. That scene in the boardroom where John Ennis is screaming at us, it was impossible to try to act our way through that. It’s very strange and amazing to see Bob [so famous] now, on television, in theatres. Of course, I’m not surprised, because I felt that he should have been there all along. I think that he’s a genius, as is David. But it is strange when universes collide all of a sudden. I know that I have esoteric tastes, and when they cross over into the mainstream, it’s surreal to think that, ‘Oh, everybody likes Bob. That’s great. That’s fantastic.’

I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One is being reissued both digitally (out now) and on coloured vinyl (out now in the US & Canada, and August 12 elsewhere) for its 25th anniversary, via Matador

__________________

FACTFILE

Written by: Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, James McNew
Personnel: Ira Kaplan (guitar, vocals), Georgia Hubley (drums, vocals), James McNew (organ, percussion)
Produced by: Roger Moutenot
Recorded at: House Of David, Nashville, TN
Released: April 22, 1997 [album], August 4, 1997 [single]
Chart peak: UK -; US –

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TIMELINE

February 28, 1992
Yo La Tengo release May I Sing With Me, their fifth album but first with bassist James McNew

May 2, 1995
Electr-O-Pura marks the band’s first time recording in Nashville entirely with producer Roger Moutenot

April 22, 1997
I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One is released – though it has stiff competition, it remains perhaps Yo La Tengo’s finest LP

August 4, 1997
“Sugarcube” is released as a single, backed on 7” by B-side “Busy With My Thoughts”, and on CD by “The Summer” and a 14-minute take on Eddie Cantor’s Looney Toons theme, “Merrily We Roll Along”

Crazy Horse on Neil Young’s Toast

Michael Bonner
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Crazy Horse on Neil Young’s Toast

It's been another momentous year for Neil fans. Just as we'd settled down to enjoy the rowdy delights of Barn, the Official Bootleg Series truffled out new perspectives on his storied '70/'71 and the Eldorado reissue brought back into focus Young's creative rehabilitation at the end of the '80s. ...

It’s been another momentous year for Neil fans. Just as we’d settled down to enjoy the rowdy delights of Barn, the Official Bootleg Series truffled out new perspectives on his storied ’70/’71 and the Eldorado reissue brought back into focus Young’s creative rehabilitation at the end of the ’80s.

This week, Young releases Noise & Flowers – a live album taken from his 2019 European tour with Promise Of The Real. Young started the tour a few weeks after the death of his long-serving manager, Elliot Roberts, which freights this album with a certain rugged pathos. There’s amazing version of “On The Beach”, too. But, for me at least, the biggest Neil release so far this year has been Toast – the mythical ‘lost’ album recorded in 2000 at the end of a scorching run of records with Crazy Horse. You can read my full review of Toast here – but I thought now the issue is off-sale it wouldn’t hurt to run the Q&As with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and Billy Talbot that accompanied my review. It’s worth reading to the end, as Billy gives some tidbits on the upcoming Horse album and likelihood of a new Horse tour.

Anyway, in case you’ve somehow missed out on this so far, here’s the splendidly ragged “Standing in the Light of Love” to get you in the zone…

Here’s Poncho first, with Billy to follow further down.

UNCUT: What took you to San Francisco in the first place?
Frank “Poncho” Sampedro: It was logistics. Neil and Pegi had taken a penthouse apartment in downtown San Francisco, as their daughter Amber was going to high school there. It was more sensible than travelling in from where they lived out in the woods [at Broken Arrow Ranch], so Amber could be around her friends.

What was Toast like?
There were derelict buildings and squatters. I remember there was a doughnut shop on the corner and that was it. In the studio, we found a backdoor we could open, so we’d go out the back to smoke a cigarette and watch the rats run around. I mean, they were huge. There’s no place to even get dinner, so we would order out and one of the roadies would go pick up all the food. But at Toast, they didn’t have enough forks for everybody. You would think someone might go out and buy a couple of forks. Anyway, they never did.

What kind of place was Neil in at the time?
He never said a word about his relationship with Pegi. All Neil did was sit on the floor in the middle of the studio with a couple of yellow pads and some pencils and pens around them. While he was writing, the rest of us was supposed to just be cool and not bother him. Before that, Neil would always call and just overwhelm us with anywhere from 10 to 20 new songs. He’d start playing them all on their own, so we’d have a game of catch up. But that’s the way it was. It was fun. But at Toast, I can’t even tell you how many weeks – months – we stayed there.

… and then you went to South America.
We were on fire, man! The people loved us. Playing to 200,000 people in Rio de Janeiro was insane. When we started “Like A Hurricane”, the crowd sang the melody back to us, like a soccer chant. The more intense the solo got, the louder they got. I looked over at Neil, he had his head thrown back with his eyes closed, wailing away on his guitar. It was such a high magical moment, man. Wow. We came back to Toast with this new energy. We were all into Latin. Every song, we tried to turn it into Latin. But it quickly got back into the same thing, then it just ended.

Then what happened?
Neil called me, like, two weeks later, He said, “Hey, I want to redo some of the songs. Got a couple other ones. I’m gonna get together with Booker T. I think you and I, we should go for a new studio. That’d be good.” So I flew out to this new studio up north over the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a 2,000 per cent turnaround from Toast. The next day, Booker and Duck [Dunn] showed up. We hit it off right away and we started recording. It was all good. Duck would sit in a chair to play bass, then all of a sudden he’d stand up – and whenever he did that, we knew that was the take. But that’s what made the difference – Neil had the songs this time.

What do you think about Toast now?
I’m amazed at this record. I can’t believe some of the stuff we played. It seems so natural when you listen it. We played all genres and we touched on a lot of different aspects of who the Horse could have been or could be. Neil’s lyrics are really touching. The way he used his vocals were so creative, It’s just unbelievably beautiful. Really.

What do you think of the versions of “Quit”, “How Ya Doin’?” and “Boom Boom Boom”?
They hit me emotionally. When I heard “Boom Boom Boom” and “How Ya Doin’?”, I cried. It was so sad, and so good at the same time. “Boom Boom Boom” is equal to “Down By The River”, it takes you to so many different places. Tommy Brae’s trumpet solo makes you cry. Pegi and Astrid’s vocals are so eerie. The chorus – “Ain’t no way I’m gonna let the good times go” – it sounds like Neil is trying to end the song, then he’ll play a little more and sing that chorus again. It’s so bluesy. But we never stopped. Then we broke into our old selves and started getting crazy and psychedelic at the end. Wow! What a ride. “How Ya Doin’?” is so eerie. I put that right up there with “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”. When Neil sings, “Let’s say I got a habit”, that goes right through you – but it’s about all those things, all the crazy insanity that get into in our lives, from drugs to drinking to love and all the things that hook us. How do we control them? We don’t, we have no control over those things.

Aside from the seven songs on Toast, did you record anything else while you were in San Francisco?
We recorded “Two Old Friends” [later re-recorded for Are You Passionate?] I remember I played it while everybody was taking a break. I was sitting in this little acoustic guitar booth that they built for me and I played the whole song. I just practising. The song was going through the speakers into the studio. When I came out, Neil looked at me and said, “Wow, that’s beautiful.” But we didn’t get it there, for some reason.

It’s strange, though, that after all that Neil writes about Toast: “Crazy Horse shows a depth never seen or heard before. This is a pinnacle. Where they let me go, where they took me, was unbelievable.”
But he wasn’t saying it to us! But I guess he was having a hard time expressing himself. That’s like the best compliment we could ever get. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Way Down In The Rust Bucket blew my mind – but that was material we did well, already. We played it all really good that night live. So that was cool. But this is totally unique for Crazy Horse, it has so many different layers. It’s part of jazz, part of blues and it’s just spooky as hell. It’s going to surprise a lot of people, I think.

And now for Billy Talbot…

UNCUT: When did you hear Toast was finally coming out?
Billy Talbot: About a year ago. That’s when Neil listened to it and, as far as I know, the reason it’s coming out is because he really thinks it’s great. He was a little surprised by it, but probably secretly really knew [how great it was].

And what do you think about it?
I think that it’s kind of understandable it was never released; it might have been misunderstood. It has a certain loneliness to it. It’s kind of spooky. It has a vibe to it, a heavy vibe to it. It speaks of something that happened back in that time in a beautiful, beautiful way. I think Neil really rocked with the Horse.

What are your memories of the studio?
I liked it there. As I remember, the room was big enough. The control room was nice. There had good speakers in there, I guess. I don’t know how we came upon that place. But it was good. It was a good place to record. I remember being able to slip out the back door and go and listen to something in the car, or slip out the back door, a bunch of us and walk to someplace that we eat at or get in a car and drive a few blocks away to someplace and eat something and then come back and do some more music.

What do you remember about the sessions?
It went down easily and slowly. The air was pretty clean, as far as all of it was concerned. We were into the moment really nicely,. It went on after this in another form, I understand. Another record came out. When we were there doing this, it was a beautifully creative, peaceful time.

You went on tour to South America halfway through the sessions…
That was great. Yeah. We went and played, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, in Brazil for one thing. We have some video of that. We were playing great. The Toast recordings don’t reflect that. They’re great in a whole other way. We might even have done a Toast song, “Goin’ Home”, there in Brazil. That show was pretty good. But Toast recordings were a whole ’nother feeling.

What do you mean by that?
There are some songs that don’t sound like Crazy Horse particularly. I’m really partial to “Boom Boom Boom”. “Quit” has a good beginning, the way it glides in. All the songs are unusual. There’s another flavour to them that it’s hard to describe.

Neil said, “Crazy Horse shows a depth never seen or heard before. This is a pinnacle. Where they let me go, where they took me, was unbelievable.”
It’s another dimension. It was really different, the way that other things have been really different and this isn’t the same as those other things. This is another different. I like it because of that. I can understand how it just sat there, in time. Now it’s coming to light. For some reason, it makes sense to me.

Can you explain how?
No! I don’t even want to think about it! Sometimes, some things are not meant to be thought about. They’re meant to just be absorbed. Toast comes from the past. I’m just trying to come to terms with it, then maybe I’ll think about it, or there’ll be some things to think about. The words in the songs – that’s always interesting with Neil.

Tell me a bit about what Neil was like during this session.
He’s always a bit secretive. He doesn’t just run at the mouth. But he’s a nice guy and he likes having fun, enjoying life. At the same time, he was the creator of this music, along with the Horse in a way. But he wrote these various pieces, that we got into, in the way that they are. We got into it that way. And anyway, it’s good to hear.

How do you think Toast fits in with that run of ‘90s Horse albums – Ragged Glory, Sleeps With Angels and Broken Arrow?
I’m just grateful, to be able to go through those years all these years, and still be able to do something – like Colorado and Barn. I liked those records a lot. Through the years we’ve been recorded, and that’s really something to have in your life, to look back on, to see yourself in those times and these times, because we’re always different. We’re people, growing; or maybe not growing but you think you are. In any case, as the years go by, you get to see yourself through these different times with music. And that’s a good thing, for sure.

The Horse have just finished recording with Rick Rubin…
Yeah, we did. We had a lot of fun.

Any plans to tour? It’ll be difficult with Nils off playing with Springsteen next year.
Yeah, he’s going to be occupied. Maybe he’ll slip over and play with us once in a while. We don’t do a lot of stuff. We need everybody to miss us. So when they see us, they’ll just love us. If you miss somebody enough, it’s good to see them.

Is it all the same Horse – from Danny up through Poncho to Nils?
From my perspective, it is. Ralph and I and Neil are always in it. Therefore with Danny or with Poncho or with Nils, all of this is just part of it.  That’s what Crazy Horse is. All of this and all of that. Nils likes to think of himself as being part of Crazy Horse all along, as he was with us years ago. Neil is an incredible songwriter. People are still interested in what he does and consequently, what we do. And we realise that, but we still play together and we still do this and it still happens because we don’t think too much about all of that stuff.

Then you get people like me ringing you up and asking you to explain it…
It’s OK. I understand that. But we’re just really moving along on this planet, trying to get through another day.

John Cale returns with new single, “Night Crawling”

Michael Bonner
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John Cale returns with new single, “Night Crawling”

John Cale has released a new single, "Night Crawling". ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The song is his first new music since 2020's single, “Lazy Day”, and his collaboration with Kelly Lee Owens on “Corner Of My Sky”. Evoking the spirit of mid-'70s N...

John Cale has released a new single, “Night Crawling“.

The song is his first new music since 2020’s single, “Lazy Day”, and his collaboration with Kelly Lee Owens on “Corner Of My Sky”.

Evoking the spirit of mid-’70s New York, the song recalling times when Cale and David Bowie would traverse the city at night.

You can watch the video for “Night Crawling” below:

Says Cale, “There was this period around mid-late 70s when David and I would run into each other in NY. There was plenty of talk about getting some work done but of course we’d end up running the streets, sometimes until we couldn’t keep a thought in our heads, let alone actually get a song together! One night we managed to meet up for a benefit concert where I taught him a viola part so we could perform together. When I wrote ‘Night Crawling,’ it was a reflective moment of particular times. That kind of NYC that held art in its grip, strong enough to keep it safe and dangerous enough to keep it interesting. I always figured we’d have another go at the two of us recording together, this time without the interference of being perpetually off our heads! The thing about creating music is the ability to divine a thought or feeling even when reality says it’s a logical impossibility.”

Meanwhile, Cale tours the UK in October/November. You can see him at:

Sun 23rd Oct – The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Mon 24th Oct – Barbican, York
Fri 28th Oct – Llais Festival, Cardiff *
Mon 31st Oct – Playhouse Whitley Bay, Whitley Bay
Thu 3rd Nov – Birmingham Town Hall, Birmingham
Mon 7th Nov – De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea
Wed 9th Nov – The London Palladium, London
Thun 10th Nov – Cambridge Corn Exchange, Cambridge
Fri 11th Nov – Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool

* = John Cale + special guests, 80th Birthday Celebration

The Comet Is Coming unveil their new album Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam

Michael Bonner
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The Comet Is Coming unveil their new album Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam

The Comet Is Coming have announced details of their new album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Due for release on September 23 via Impulse! Records, the fourth studio album from Shabaka Hutchings and his bandmates Dan Leavers (...

The Comet Is Coming have announced details of their new album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam.

Due for release on September 23 via Impulse! Records, the fourth studio album from Shabaka Hutchings and his bandmates Dan Leavers (Danalogue) and Max Hallett (Betamax) was recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studio.

The band have shared a first single, “Code“:

Meanwhile, the full tracklisting for Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam is:

Code
Technicolour
Lucid Dreamer
Tokyo Nights
Pyramids
Frequency of Feeling Expansion
Angel of Darkness
Aftermath
Atomic Wave Dance
The Hammer
Mystik

Judith Durham, former Seekers lead singer, dies aged 79

Ellie Robinson
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Judith Durham, former Seekers lead singer, dies aged 79

Judith Durham, the former lead singer of The Seekers, has died aged 79. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Her death was confirmed by The Seekers on Saturday (August 6), with the band writing in a statement that Durham passed after a short stay in the Alfred Hospi...

Judith Durham, the former lead singer of The Seekers, has died aged 79.

Her death was confirmed by The Seekers on Saturday (August 6), with the band writing in a statement that Durham passed after a short stay in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Victoria – a short ways out from her hometown of Essendon. She was admitted into palliative care a day prior, and died as a result of complications from her lengthly struggle with a chronic lung disease.

In a personal statement shared on behalf of her band (which also included guitarists Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley), bassist Athol Guy said: “Our lives are changed forever losing our treasured lifelong friend and shining star. Her struggle was intense and heroic – never complaining of her destiny and fully accepting its conclusion. Her magnificent musical legacy Keith, Bruce and I are so blessed to share.”

Sharing the sentiment was Durham’s sister, Beverley Sheehan, who added: “Judith’s joy for life, her constant optimism, creativity and generosity of spirit were always an inspiration to me.”

It is with overwhelming sadness that Musicoast Pty. Ltd. and Universal Music Australia announces the death of…

Posted by The Seekers on Saturday, August 6, 2022

Durham’s family have asked for privacy in the wake of her passing. Over the weekend, Victorian premier Daniel Andrews announced that – with the blessing of her family – Durham would be honoured at a state funeral. In doing so, he described her as “a true icon of Australian music”, and asserted that “her memory will not only live on in her numerous hit songs, but in the hearts of generations of Victorians and Australians”.

Born in 1943, Durham formed The Seekers with Guy, Potger and Woodley in 1962. They released their first album, Introducing The Seekers, a year later. The band released a total of 13 albums – the most recent being 2019’s Back To Our Roots. Durham didn’t sing on any of the four albums released between 1975 and 1989, as she embarked a solo career in 1968. She also wasn’t involved in the band’s first two comebacks.

As a solo artist, Durham released 11 studio albums, bookending her catalogue with the Christmas-themed albums For Christmas With Love (1968) and It’s Christmas Time (2013). She also released five live albums, five compilations and one EP as a solo artist, as well as seven live albums, 36 compilations and six TV specials with The Seekers.

The Seekers enjoyed a litany of monumental accolades. In 1967, they were named joint Australians Of The Year. They were inducted into the ARIA Hall Of Fame in 1995, and the same year, Durham was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM). 19 years later (in 2014), each member of the band was individually honoured as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).

Among the many notable figures to share condolences for Durham’s passing was Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who wrote in a statement: “A national treasure and an Australian icon, Judith Durham gave voice to a new strand of our identity and helped blaze a trail for a new generation of Aussie artists. Her kindness will be missed by many, the anthems she gave to our nation will never be forgotten.”

Cosey Fanni Tutti: “Whatever was thrown at me, it never destroyed me inside”

Laura Barton
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Cosey Fanni Tutti: “Whatever was thrown at me, it never destroyed me inside”

COSEY FANNI TUTTI’s defiantly subversive and progressive work – as a member of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and beyond – has always been fired by a boundless curiosity. But with a new memoir and album imminent, has the one-time “wrecker of civilisation” finally mellowed? “Whatev...

COSEY FANNI TUTTI’s defiantly subversive and progressive work – as a member of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and beyond – has always been fired by a boundless curiosity. But with a new memoir and album imminent, has the one-time “wrecker of civilisation” finally mellowed? “Whatever was thrown at me, it never destroyed me inside,” she tells Laura Barton in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store.

Enjoy this excerpt from Laura’s feature…

Across the fields around King’s Lynn, the wheat grows high and green, and the houses thin out and out until they become little more than occasional farms and small parishes, quiet beneath the Norfolk sky. For more than 30 years, Cosey Fanni Tutti and her partner, Chris Carter, have lived out here, in a village where few are interested in the comings and goings of two avant-garde musicians.

This midweek morning, Tutti sits at her kitchen table, dark-ringed eyes beneath a heavy, dark fringe. The scene is a strange combination of domesticity and defiance: the fitted kitchen, the well-kept garden; behind her on the counter, a row of plastic cereal containers. But next door lies the couple’s home studio, a framed fan-painting of the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats hangs on a wall, and opposite the refrigerator, a glass cabinet displays some of the accumulated paraphernalia of a life spent in sonic and artistic experimentation.

Tutti is 70 now, with a career that has so far encompassed co-founding the music and performance art collective COUM Transmissions in 1969 and industrial music originators Throbbing Gristle in 1975. Later came Chris & Cosey – a duo with Carter – and Carter Tutti Void, the couple’s collaboration with Factory Floor’s Nik Void. There has also been extensive solo work, including her acclaimed 2019 album TUTTI, a memoir called Art Sex Music, her extraordinary soundtrack to Caroline Catz’s documentary film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths And Legendary Tapes, and a new book, Re-Sisters: The Lives And Recordings Of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe And Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Across five decades her work has been subversive and progressive, it has crossed boundaries and melded disciplines, but above all it has been fired by a boundless curiosity – to explore sound as a means of pleasure and pain, to challenge societal norms and conservative thinking, a desire to understand and to question and connect.

In person Tutti is at first a watchful presence, but the reserve softens, and an animation for her subject rises. Her conversation ranges widely, as if constantly seeking connections, so that five minutes in her company might draw together tuning forks, the black, blue and gold Mandarin wallpaper of her teenage bedroom, and the wonder of first seeing Derbyshire’s science exercise books from her school days: “Pages and pages of writing and drawing on wave theory and the shape of the mouth and how it can affect the acoustics,” she says, lit up. “I was just astounded. I thought, ‘Wow, this isn’t about music. No, no. This is sound. That’s the big difference.’”

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Earl’s Closet – The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980

Peter Watts
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Earl’s Closet – The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980

Earl McGrath sounds like a character from a Paul Thomas Anderson film. A socialite and bon vivant, he was born into poverty in Wisconsin before leaving a troubled home at 14 to join the merchant navy. Having broadened his geographical horizons, he started on his cultural ones, meeting WH Auden, Henr...

Earl McGrath sounds like a character from a Paul Thomas Anderson film. A socialite and bon vivant, he was born into poverty in Wisconsin before leaving a troubled home at 14 to join the merchant navy. Having broadened his geographical horizons, he started on his cultural ones, meeting WH Auden, Henry Miller and Leonard Bernstein before organising a music festival in Italy in 1959 featuring Cecil Taylor and Jack Kerouac. While there, he met and married an Italian countess, moving effortlessly into high society. An art collector and cultural dabbler, he worked in Hollywood – he bought pot from Harrison Ford and claimed to have conceived Midnight Cowboy, The Monkees and Saturday Night Live – before enabling a crucial meeting between Ahmet Ertegun and The Rolling Stones.

In return, Ertegun helped McGrath form Clean Records with Robert Stigwood. When that failed, he became president of Rolling Stone Records. When McGrath died in 2016, writer Joe Hogan discovered a cupboard in his apartment filled with 200 demos and masters that McGrath had accumulated over the decades. Twenty-two tracks feature on Earl’s Closet, including previously unheard recordings by Hall & Oates, Terry Allen and David Johansen plus a host of unknowns or also-rans. The sounds are eclectic, but the vibe is distinct: Earl’s Closet is a tour through ’70s LA, all chest hair, musk and laidback slinky grooves.

Fortunately, the music lives up the promise of the great back story. Most of these recordings were rejected, but there’s nothing objectively bad – even David Johansen’s post-Dolls throwaway “Funky But Chic” has a certain charm. The two Hall & Oates numbers are superb, and several others could have been hits, such as Michael McCarty’s ballad “Christopher”, the beautiful Bee Gee harmonies of Shadow’s “I See My Days Go By” or Norma Jean Bell’s ultra-funky “Just Look…”. A handful did become hits, albeit with other artists, such as “Two More Bottles Of Wine”, an original by Delbert McClinton (as Delbert & Glen) that Emmylou Harris took into the charts in 1978. The two Terry Allen numbers are highlights but pick of the lot is “Tension”, a wired Jim Carroll outtake later dressed up in synth and released as “Voices” in 1985.

McGrath’s closet also contained reels of music by The Rolling Stones, Pete Tosh, Eric Clapton and John Phillips, but the artists on Earl’s Closet are, for the most part, the ones who never quite made it. Several burned out on drugs, such as Detroit rocker Johnny Angel, while others had fascinating careers on the sidelines, such as Norma Jean Bell. Folk-rockers Country are an interesting case study; one member got hooked, the other became a hit songwriter for Olivia Newton-John. Then there are the complete unknowns, such as the mysterious Jabor, who dropped a groovy slice of late ’70s MOR on “Sail Away” and disappeared forever. Or at least, until they were found in Earl’s closet and given a second chance to fly.

Little Feat – Waiting For Columbus: Super Deluxe Edition

Jon Dale
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Little Feat – Waiting For Columbus: Super Deluxe Edition

Ask anyone who was a fan of Little Feat during their initial run – a decade-long stretch from 1969 to ’79 where vocalist and guitarist Lowell George, and keyboard player Bill Payne, steered a leaky ship through toil and trouble – and they’ll tell you Little Feat’s music truly came alive on...

Ask anyone who was a fan of Little Feat during their initial run – a decade-long stretch from 1969 to ’79 where vocalist and guitarist Lowell George, and keyboard player Bill Payne, steered a leaky ship through toil and trouble – and they’ll tell you Little Feat’s music truly came alive onstage. Much like peers the Grateful Dead, the Feat needed the unpredictable conduction of energy between band and audience, plus the heat-of-the-moment, now-or-never fury of live performance, to take flight. It’s no surprise, then, that Waiting For Columbus is one of Little Feat’s most enduring albums, often included in lists of the greatest live albums of all time; it’s also wild to consider how the sextet pulled things together against the odds, and almost in spite of themselves.

They’d already been through a hell of a lot. Little Feat formed in ’69, when George left Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, taking bass player Roy Estrada with him, and connected with Payne (whose pre-history included appearing on an obscure garage rock stomper, Something Wild’s “Trippin’ Out”), and drummer Richie Hayward, who’d previously worked with George in The Factory. They recorded two albums (1971’s Little Feat and the following year’s Sailin’ Shoes) as a quartet before the band temporarily split, with Estrada leaving for Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. Reforming soon after, George and Payne replaced Estrada with guitarist Paul Barrère, bass player Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton. The “classic lineup” of Little Feat was thus in place, recording a string of albums across the ’70s, though they always seemed to be in some state of complication or confusion; during a temporary split across ’73 and ’74, for example, members of the group would end up playing with the Doobie Brothers, Robert Palmer and Ike Turner.

The road to Waiting For Columbus seemed particularly rocky, though. There were shifts in the intra-band dynamic; George wanted Payne and Barrère to contribute more, but still needed to maintain his position of dominance in the group. Little Feat’s music, which had, for several years, felt genre-agnostic, moving from blues to country to funk to R&B, seemed to be bending towards a more fluid, improvisatory jazz-rock sensibility, which George found a little alienating. His songwriting contributions decreased and others stepped up to the plate, such that by 1977’s Time Loves A Hero, George’s songs felt almost like an afterthought – he simply wasn’t coming up with enough material. And while Little Feat were having limited success – Top 40 albums, a good concert draw – they couldn’t quite push through to the next level, something that dogged the group through the entirety of their existence.

Band politics and cultural relevance aside, if Waiting For Columbus proves anything, it’s the elasticity and playfulness with which Little Feat approached their material, with a fearlessness that seemed, somehow, to shoehorn – and not uncomfortably – the freedoms of jazz and improvisation into the elemental structures of the song. They do this in two ways – in live performance, you can hear them knocking songs into new shapes, improvising passages that lock together effortlessly, taking songs and re-wiring them entirely. The New Orleans funk that became so central to their music is in full display on songs like “Mercenary Territory”; “Dixie Chicken” is stretched out like so much taffy, woven into a beautifully limber groove; Mick Taylor’s guest appearance on “A Apolitical Blues” is instructive both of how malleable a player Taylor was, and how accommodating Little Feat were as a group. But the album itself is also a Frankenstein, pieced together post-production from various shows, with some guitars and bass re-recorded, and most of George’s vocal performances redone.

Thus, there’s real value in the three full live shows that make up the rest of this super deluxe edition. From the evidence here, they lifted some stellar performances from the Washington show for the album. It’s a bit of a shame to not hear other nights from all three cities represented here, though some are buried, no doubt, for good reason – one night from London would come to be known as “Black Wednesday”, performed, as it was, under a cloud of all-night partying, acrimony and internecine fighting. The August 2, 1977 London show here is a gem, though, the group fully in control, riding the music to peaks of ferocity, but still maintaining a core playfulness. The addition of the Tower Of Power horns gives the songs real heft, and the version of “Mercenary Territory” here is one of their very best. The Washington performance makes up a good portion of the original Waiting For Columbus, but it’s great finally to hear the set in full, as by that point, the Feat were a tightly drilled machine.

The revelation of this deluxe edition, though, is the Manchester City Hall set from July 29, 1977. None of the Manchester recordings have been previously released, which, on the evidence, seems a real missed opportunity. The group hadn’t yet been joined by the Tower Of Power brass section – that would come later, in London – so the Manchester set gives a great chance to hear the Feat in six-piece formation. There’s an electricity pulsing between the members of the group, with potent performances of “Fat Man In The Bathtub”, “Rock & Roll Doctor”, and “Oh Atlanta”, though the set really gets expansive with a 10-minute “Dixie Chicken”, where the group prove their improvisational cojones – there’s both sensitivity and fierce conviction in the way they interact here, and an elasticity that can only really come with years of shared illumination.

If the truth be known, each set has its moments of longueurs; while Little Feat were “on” more often than not, they sometimes were given to the overly prolix, and the jazz-rock “Day At The Dog Races” dragged at times – stretching out to 10 minutes and beyond, its vamp on a repetitive riff could meander, though there are some particularly beautiful moments on the Manchester rendition, when things simmer down a little, and Payne lets out little susurrating sighs of liquid keys over a subdued percussive palette. It’s moments like these that suggest there was more to the Feat’s dalliance in such music than George clocked at the time – allegedly, when he heard the tapes of the studio version, from Time Loves A Hero, George snapped, “What is this? Fuckin’ Weather Report?”

George would often leave the stage while the rest of the group performed “Day At The Dog Races”, a visible marker both of the complex and multiple musical threads being followed by the various group members, and the simmering volatility of the relationships at the heart of Little Feat. But for all this strangeness and unpredictability, listening back to Waiting For Columbus – both in its originally released form, and with the appended live sets in this deluxe collection – reinforces the staying power of the music here, an ideal combination of elevated songwriting, musical voraciousness, and the rare alchemy of a group, on stage, in full possession and understanding of their abilities, playing with nuance and sensuousness. That they’d continue to do so, even after the death of their erstwhile leader, Lowell George, in June 1979, is testament to the lasting power of the music here and its ongoing resonance. Few played it so well, with such generosity of spirit and fluidity of groove, before or since.

Amanda Shires – Take It Like A Man

Lisa-Marie Ferla
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Amanda Shires – Take It Like A Man

To really know somebody is to know all the little ways to hurt them. It’s fitting, then, that the most devastating moments on Take It Like A Man are rarely the most dramatic. “You can say it’s all my fault, we just couldn’t get along”, she sings on the quietly dignified “Fault Lines”. ...

To really know somebody is to know all the little ways to hurt them. It’s fitting, then, that the most devastating moments on Take It Like A Man are rarely the most dramatic. “You can say it’s all my fault, we just couldn’t get along”, she sings on the quietly dignified “Fault Lines”. “Just so you know, I’ll say ‘I don’t know’/But no-one’s gonna be asking me”.

Like a lot of people – like a lot of wives and mothers – Shires experienced something of a compression of identity during the pandemic, locked down at home near Nashville with her husband, the musician Jason Isbell, and their daughter. A touring musician since joining the Texas Playboys on fiddle at the age of 15, Shires had a considerable body of work to her name before meeting Isbell, whose career-defining albums Southeastern and Something More Than Free charted their courtship and the role Shires played in helping him get sober. As Isbell’s star climbed, the love story captured in his songs charmed fans beyond Shires’ own work: on her solo material; with John Prine and in Isbell’s backing band The 400 Unit; and recruiting Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Maren Morris to join her in country supergroup The Highwomen.

Lockdown and the deaths of Shires’ friends and collaborators Prine and Justin Townes Earle put that work on pause, as well as exacerbating tensions in the public-facing fairytale. With two working musicians in the house, Shires found her own creativity stifled. Disillusioned with music after several poor studio experiences, she was convinced she would never record again – until an approach from musician-producer Lawrence Rothman changed her mind.

Take It Like A Man – Shires’ second full-length collaboration with Rothman following last year’s For Christmas – is a bold re-statement of artistic identity. An unsparing document of a very real marriage, it ruthlessly captures the everyday resentments and recriminations, and, ultimately, the love that gets one through those moments. It is, in a sense, Shires’ Lemonade, with Isbell’s guitar work on some of the album’s rawest tracks paralleling Jay-Z’s contributions to wife Beyoncé’s opus.

“Fault Lines”, the piano-and-string-led elegy at the album’s mid-point, is the rawest of those, a portrait of a relationship stretched to breaking point. “Time was all I’d want”, intones Shires over Peter Levin’s gloomy piano, “you can keep the car and the house”. The first song to emerge from Shires’ early correspondence with Rothman and the first to be recorded, it was cut and re-cut from the final tracklisting, its unflinching lyrics – including a reference to the “flagship” character of her husband’s song of the same name – begging to be unravelled. Ultimately it was Isbell who persuaded Shires not to leave it out.

It’s an exquisite move, as it allows the album to ebb and flow from rebirth to redemption through resentment, reconciliation and romance. Opener “Hawk For The Dove” is immediately immersive, its booming bass drum, electric guitar squall and frantic second-half fiddle a counterpoint to the coyness in Shires’ vocals. “You can call me serious trouble, just admit I’m what you want”, she purrs, as Highwomen protégée Brittney Spencer echoes the mischievous refrain.

“Empty Cups”, written solely by Shires, is a lyrical masterwork of tiny resentments: a door slammed so hard that spoons rattle, a hand on a cheek, a “makeup rainbow” of a tear-streaked face. Stately organ and backing vocals from Maren Morris, whose voice could wring tears from a stone at the best of times, complete a picture of looming heartbreak, while “Don’t Be Alarmed”, which features co-writing credits for Isbell, Rustin Kelly and Liz Rose, attempts to paper over the cracks.

A trio of songs on the back half of the album offer solace. “Here He Comes” is a bouncy romp with a horn section as irresistible as the “slight lean and overconfident creep” of its subject matter. “Bad Behavior” tracks a tentative courtship and an underlying wildness, emphasised by glistening keyboards, while “Stupid Love” is a sunny Southern love song complete with a four-part horn section.

While, as in life, no happy endings are assured – see swooping Natalie Hemby co-write “Everything Has Its Time”, with its gentle message of “nothing lasts forever” – the overall journey here is one of self-discovery and self-reliance. Even the title of the album turns out to be a message to that effect, with Shires, as the title track closes, drawing out that final line: no need to “take it like a man” when you can “take it like Amanda”.

Lee Bains & The Glory Fires – Old-Time Folks

Peter Watts
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Lee Bains & The Glory Fires – Old-Time Folks

Like so many artists from the Deep South, Lee Bains is conflicted about his upbringing to the point of obsession. Albums like Deconstructed and Youth Detention have been filled with songs that explore his roots and the complex socio-political legacy of the South, usually set to an energetic musical ...

Like so many artists from the Deep South, Lee Bains is conflicted about his upbringing to the point of obsession. Albums like Deconstructed and Youth Detention have been filled with songs that explore his roots and the complex socio-political legacy of the South, usually set to an energetic musical accompaniment that owes more to The Clash than Skynyrd. Old-Time Folks sees Bains – once of the Dexateens – on familiar lyrical territory, but musically he has tried to slow down a little, introducing elements of folk and country with the assistance of Drive-By Truckers producer Dave Barbe.

Bains is a fascinating character, straddling the polarised worlds of red and blue America. His evocative poems about Southern food have featured in The New Yorker, and he holds down a day job in construction and maintenance. His sometimes tortured need to balance these two worlds have led to his songs becoming perhaps overly verbose, but here he made a conscious attempt to write singalongs in the style of Billy Bragg or classic folk. That said, there are still breakneck epic screeds such as “The Battle Of Atlanta”, an epic study of Civil War and gentrification, or the hardcore “Caligula”.

But the general tone is less hurried and the mood more positive, pointing towards moments of collective harmony rather than discord. Several songs explore working-class life in the South, such as the Stonesy “(In Remembrance Of The) 40-Hour Week” or the country ballad, “Redneck”, a hymn to blue-collar solidarity inspired by a comment from a co-worker. There’s a strong DBT-flavour to tracks like “God’s A Working Man” or “Lizard People”, about media-fuelled paranoia, while the excellent “Gentlemen” is a piano-led piece that sounds like early Jason Isbell. The album is bookended by two versions of “Old-Time Folks”, the first a charged rocker, the second more of a stripped-down country fiddler, showcasing the development in Bains’ sound as he continues to exorcise old demons.

Chris Forsyth – Album By Album

Sam Richards
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Chris Forsyth – Album By Album

Evolution here we come! The gradual blossoming of a modern-day rock guitar maestro. in the latest issue of Uncut magazine - in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store Chris Forsyth talks us through nine key records in his career as a transcendent guitar player. Her...

Evolution here we come! The gradual blossoming of a modern-day rock guitar maestro. in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, July 21 and available to buy from our online store Chris Forsyth talks us through nine key records in his career as a transcendent guitar player. Here, to whet your appetite, please enjoy Forsyth talking through some of his earlier recordings…

“The guitar is like a puzzle,” muses Chris Forsyth, zooming in from an airy cabin in Upstate New York, where his wife Maria Dumlao has an artist’s residency. “I don’t think you ever really figure it out. But it’s important to punch through and find other things, to keep it interesting. Like any relationship, if it stagnates then it becomes less rewarding.”

Forsyth cut his teeth on the New York avant-garde scene of the late ’90s and early ’00s, where rock was a dirty word. But slowly he found his way back, via an enduring love for the work of Richards Thompson and Lloyd; he credits his renewed enthusiasm for the guitar to a period spent studying with the Television legend. Eventually reverting to something approaching a classic rock-band lineup – minus the egotistical frontman – Forsyth retains a nose for adventure and a determination to take rock music somewhere new without abandoning its core principles.

“I’m always trying to reconcile these two sides of my brain,” he admits. “There’s a great Eno quote where he says experimental music is like the North Pole: I like to know it’s there, it enriches what I do, but I’d much rather live in the South of France. I feel that way about both extremes. Jazz, rock, blues, anything can become this regimented, predictable thing that gets frozen in amber or put in the museum, and then it’s supposed to not change. And that’s despicable to me. It’s got to be alive, and being alive means changing.”

PARANOID CAT
Family Vineyard, 2011

After a decade or more in the New York avant-garde, Forsyth makes his first ‘rock’ album

I grew up playing in rock bands, and then in the mid-’90s I kinda got dissatisfied with that. Culturally it felt like rock was drying up and I became more interested in experimental approaches. That coincided with me moving to New York City from New Jersey and being exposed to a lot more diverse music at venues like Tonic. Honestly though, part of why I drifted away from rock music was that I wasn’t very good at it. When I studied with Richard Lloyd, he basically taught me how to play the guitar and how music works on a fundamental basis.

By the time of Paranoid Cat, which was coming together just before I moved to Philadelphia in the summer of 2009, I felt like I was at the point where I could deploy some of these things in a way that was interesting to me, that was worth sharing. I still think of that song “Paranoid Cat Parts 1–3” as one of the more complete things that I’ve done. It’s got that hypnotic, repetitive thing, which comes from classic New York minimalism, but it’s also got this folky thing. I’ve always been attracted to where those places meet, a sort of ‘back porch minimalism’ – stuff that’s got its toes in the mud, but that’s also reaching for something else.

SOLAR MOTEL
Paradise Of Bachelors, 2013

Over the course of four sturdy psychedelic sorties, a band begins to take shape

When I moved to Philadelphia, I got an artists’ fellowship from the Pugh Center, which was a pretty significant chunk of change. They said, “What’s some small project that you’d really like to do?” And I said, “I’d really like to be able to go into a recording studio and record with a full band.” It’s the first time I worked with Jeff Zeigler, who’s been involved in almost all of these records.

We mixed Paranoid Cat together, and then I was able to go into his studio in Philly. We did Solar Motel in three days, it was still very quick. Peter Kerlin helped me record Paranoid Cat but this is the first record where he’s playing bass. Mike Pride is an incredible drummer who can play anything. Shawn Hansen, the keyboard player, is also one of those people who can play anything, but he also was totally fine with playing something really simple. It’s like when guitar players talk about George Harrison, they’re like, “He never played the wrong thing.” Shawn is great at that.

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Stephin Merritt – My Life In Music

Uncut
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Stephin Merritt – My Life In Music

Read more in issue 304 of Uncut - available now for home delivery from our online store. STEREOLAB EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP DUOPHONIC, 1996 There is rarely a foreground in Stereolab and it’s certainly not the vocals, which are often in French and sometimes in gibberish. Definitely not foregr...

Read more in issue 304 of Uncut – available now for home delivery from our online store.

STEREOLAB
EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP
DUOPHONIC, 1996

There is rarely a foreground in Stereolab and it’s certainly not the vocals, which are often in French and sometimes in gibberish. Definitely not foreground is a guitar, so proudly terrified is Stereolab of being called a rock group. And yet they’re as loud in concert as Sonic Youth, ie, too damn loud! I found them by rooting around in a record store and noticing their song title “John Cage Bubblegum”. This was back when I used to say I liked experimental music and bubblegum, and nothing in between. What I turned out to really like is music that takes a set of ideas really far in any direction, without apology.

SWEET
DESOLATION BOULEVARD
CAPITOL, 1975

When I was 11, I had three favourite contemporary bands: Bay City Rollers, ABBA and Sweet. All were essentially singles bands, but Sweet released the great bubblegum metal LP of all time. It turned out they were cheating, combining two UK studio albums with revisions for the US. More cheating, please! Being 11, I had no idea that half the songs were about what we now call rape and the rest were about drugs. I thought they were about growing up. Nope! I was in it for the soundscapes. I listened on headphones as loudly as I could stand and so many times that I’d gone through three vinyl copies by the time it came out on CD.

STEVIE WONDER
INNERVISIONS
TAMLA, 1973

This record turned up mysteriously with no-one remembering buying it. When I read the credits and learned Stevie played almost every instrument it became my archetype for the true solo artist. And when later I learned that Tonto’s Expanding Head Band were patching the synths, I came to appreciate that every auteur needs a gang. Innervisions was recorded in the heyday of the envelope filter, so practically every sound is “byow byow byow”, which seems to convey some mythical ghetto authenticity and probably gave me my lifelong addiction to effects boxes.

JUDY COLLINS
IN MY LIFE
ELEKTRA, 1966

The only record in my mother’s collection from when I was a tot that I’ve owned enthusiastically ever since. As opposed to Bringing It All Back Home, which belongs in every collection but needn’t be played more than once a decade. Judy burns her bridges to the coffee-house folk scene by changing genre constantly.  The lyrics – by Dylan, Newman, Lennon–McCartney, Cohen, Brecht, Brel – are all brilliant in very different directions. It’s the arthouse equivalent of a variety show, and the only album that compares is 69 Love Songs, which took three hours to be as take-no-prisoners eclectic as In My Life managed in 43 minutes.

The Magnetic Fields tour Europe in August and September, click here for dates.

Sam Prekop & John McEntire – Sons Of

Piers Martin
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Sam Prekop & John McEntire – Sons Of

Sam Prekop and John McEntire have worked in harmony for close to 30 years. As the singer-guitarist and drummer in The Sea And Cake – alongside bassist Archer Prewitt – the pair have amassed a body of work that takes a good few hours to sift through on Spotify, though such is the breezy, effortle...

Sam Prekop and John McEntire have worked in harmony for close to 30 years. As the singer-guitarist and drummer in The Sea And Cake – alongside bassist Archer Prewitt – the pair have amassed a body of work that takes a good few hours to sift through on Spotify, though such is the breezy, effortless nature of the material, you’d be hard pushed to remember which songs stand out. For fans, this familiarity has long been part of the Chicago band’s appeal: across 11 albums since their debut in 1994, The Sea And Cake’s innocuous post-rock – at times jazzy, sometimes overtly pop, always elegantly turned out – has been a reliable, comforting presence; a stable reminder that no matter how terrible things are in the world, Sam Prekop will still be singing his inscrutable poetry in hushed tones over lushly arranged grooves, each new instalment of classy fusion slightly different to the last.

Listen closely and they’re a dynamic proposition – elements of modular synthesis and percussive percolations populate 2011’s The Moonlight Butterfly and 2012’s Runner – yet like any quality act, their individual talents are in service to the benefit of the group, and The Sea And Cake’s enduring geniality can often appear to have turned these elite musicians into journeymen. With Sons Of, Prekop and McEntire’s first joint collaboration, we get to hear what happens when they’re freed from the band format, when conventional structures no longer apply, and these inherently reserved creatures are let loose in the wild. As an exercise in live, largely improvised electronics, these four long pieces bring out the best in the pair, showcasing their ability to go with the flow while harnessing their particular strengths.

By choice, McEntire has spent his entire career as an engineer, mixer and producer working within the framework of other bands’ schedules – he recently worked on Ryley Walker’s Course In Fable – and as the driving force behind Tortoise, his skills as post-rock’s rhythm king shine only sporadically these days. Their last album, The Catastrophist, came out in 2016, and even within that group of free-jazz maestros each member has a role to play, naturally curtailing their opportunities for self-expression.

Prekop’s musical evolution is more revealing, because at some point between his 2005 solo set Who’s Your New Professor and 2010’s Old Punchcard he got the bug for modular synthesis and decided to shift his focus from shimmering indie to vocal-less analogue electronics, its patterns and irregularities appealing to his artistic sensibility (he’s also a photographer and painter). For a quiet and thoughtful man, the daring instrumental works on his two recent albums, The Republic (2015) and Comma (2020), perhaps allow him to say more about himself, as he attempts to give shape and meaning to the abstract sounds he’s generating in his home studio in Pilsen, Chicago.

Sons Of – named by McEntire after the Scott Walker song and featuring McEntire’s cats, Jackie and Lamar, on the cover – leads on from a couple of Prekop’s post-Comma excursions, “Spelling” and “Saturday Saturday”, two 20-minute pieces of pastoral circuit-bending for the Longform Editions imprint. Yet it’s McEntire who propels these new tracks along with succulent kicks and crisp snares, the hi-hats dissolving into hiss as “A Ghost Of Noon” breaks down midway in, and the pulses shifting to a four-four climax during “Crossing At The Shallow”. For a project that started out a few years ago as an occasional live improvisation – the pair sat on stage facing each other, hunched over their gear, no fixed idea of where they’re headed – it’s become a tantalising exploration of modern-day kosmische. Seemingly liberated by technology, these two fifty-something blokes conjure the kind of utopian panoplies dreamt up by Harald Grosskopf and Neu! on the 24-minute “A Yellow Robe”, a swirling, burbling journey that also nods to recent experiments by Roman Flügel and Peder Mannerfelt.

That track is based on a live recording from a show in Chicago at the end of last year, while “A Ghost Of Noon” stems from an earlier performance in Düsseldorf. Both were then buffed up by Prekop and McEntire in their respective studios – McEntire now lives in Portland, Oregon – and then sent between each other until finished. What’s most surprising about Sons Of is how comfortable the pair are with this more psychedelic direction – leading you to wonder why they’ve never done this kind of thing before. The closing “Ascending By Night” is a powerful piece of smouldering techno, bathed in gauzy synths. If this is what the post-rock afterparty sounds like, count us in.

The Good Boss

Jonathan Romney
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The Good Boss

Given how all-out sinister Javier Bardem has been in some of his best-known roles – the merciless killer in No Country For Old Men, 007’s suave nemesis in Skyfall – you can’t easily imagine him being avuncular. Yet that’s altogether what he is in new Spanish feature The Good Boss – altho...

Given how all-out sinister Javier Bardem has been in some of his best-known roles – the merciless killer in No Country For Old Men, 007’s suave nemesis in Skyfall – you can’t easily imagine him being avuncular. Yet that’s altogether what he is in new Spanish feature The Good Boss – although his character is as sinister as uncle figures get.

In this black comedy by Fernando León de Aranoa, Bardem, benign-looking in casual jackets and jumpers, plays Blanco, owner of a factory that makes scales. He’s first seen smilingly announcing to his staff that the enterprise is up for a major award, giving them an all-hands-on-deck pep talk and reminding them that he’s more a friend than a boss. But the affable façade wears thin when Blanco must deal with an executive who’s coming undone at the seams and a recently sacked worker who decides to take the time-honoured Disgruntled Former Employee routine to new limits.

And of course, this respectable family man also has a predatory eye on his new intern (Almudena Amor), who’s not nearly the ingénue she looks. The Good Boss is a clever film rather than a really trenchant one, the sly farce just a little too calculated, the pace at moments sluggish. But the film has a definite elegance – not least, in some nice visual variations on the theme of Blanco’s obsession with scales, balance and calibration.

Bardem is one of the few actors who could really carry off this role: Blanco needs to be at once loathsome, reassuring, cosy and yet plausibly seductive – and the Spanish star fleshes him out with brio and a nicely deceptive middle-age joviality that suggests that, when it comes to playing the flawed, middle-aged, middle-class Everyman, he currently has few screen equals.

Andrew Tuttle – Fleeting Adventure

Tyler Wilcox
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Andrew Tuttle – Fleeting Adventure

Andrew Tuttle’s fifth album begins with a sense of being untethered and adrift, washes of abstract sound floating through the mix, a feeling of disorientation dominating. You might be reminded of the famed opening sequence of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, with Popol Vuh’s uncanny ...

Andrew Tuttle’s fifth album begins with a sense of being untethered and adrift, washes of abstract sound floating through the mix, a feeling of disorientation dominating. You might be reminded of the famed opening sequence of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, with Popol Vuh’s uncanny soundtrack accompanying the misty visuals of 16th-century conquistadors trudging through a treacherous Amazon rainforest. Where are we? How did we get here? Tuttle isn’t one to let his listeners drown in a whirlpool of confusion, however. After a minute or so, his resonant, reassuring five-string banjo appears like a beacon in the night, grounding us, guiding us safely down to earth. For this particular adventure, we can rest easy. We’re in good hands.

The banjo is a tricky instrument, one so associated with specific strains of folk, bluegrass and country music that it can come across as a cliché –an all-too-familiar signifier of rootsy flavours and faux-downhome vibes. But some musicians have risen to the challenge of finding fresh new possibilities, from stars like Béla Fleck and Rhiannon Giddens to somewhat more obscure iconoclasts like George Stavis (whose 1969 solo deconstruction of “My Favorite Things” has to be heard to be believed) and Nathan Bowles, who has spent several recent LPs exploring the instrument’s outer limits. There’s a lot of music to be found in the banjo, you just have to know where to look.

Andrew Tuttle definitely knows where to look. Over the course of his four previous albums, the Brisbane-based musician has carved out a comfortable niche for himself, one where trad-based soulfulness peacefully coexists with ambient, experimental and new age leanings. He’s an essentially melodic player – not too many sharp edges here – but with an inquisitiveness and imagination that keeps things from being too cosy. While his chosen instrument will always carry with it folk connotations, Tuttle seems dedicated to uncovering its cosmic qualities. His spacious and captivating 2020 LP Alexandra felt like a breakthrough in this respect; Fleeting Adventure is even better.

This is not a solo banjo affair, however. Far from it. On Fleeting Adventure, Tuttle has gathered an all-star cast of characters to help bring his ambitious visions to life. Back to that opening track, the glorious, seven-minute “Overnight’s A Weekend”. Here, Tuttle’s plaintive banjo is encircled by an array of majestic sounds: serpentine electric guitar via Steve Gunn, enveloping electronics courtesy of Balmorhea’s Michael A Muller, violin swirls from Aurélie Ferrière, and the gentle saxophone of Joe Saxby. The result is a lush and unabashedly beautiful sonic landscape, but Tuttle is painting more than just a pretty picture.

The musicians spread across the album’s seven tracks are separated by vast distances, from Stockholm to San Francisco, from Brooklyn to Texas. More than anything, Fleeting Adventure celebrates the feeling of global connectivity that this kind of far-flung collaboration can foster, digital files sent across oceans that alchemize into moments of genuine magic. We hear Tuttle broadcasting signals through the ether and his friends answering back, a marvelous and heartening call-and-response. Made in the thick of a global pandemic, with the players often locked down in their respective locations, the results aren’t simply a wonder of modern technology. They’re downright miraculous.

One of Tuttle’s collaborators, Chuck Johnson, deserves a special call-out. Not only did he mix Fleeting Adventure (alongside Lawrence English), giving the entire record an uncluttered, widescreen sheen to even its most intricate passages, but he also contributed as an instrumentalist to one of the album’s highlights. One of the leading lights of the burgeoning cosmic pedal-steel scene, Johnson adds his slo-mo tones to “Correlation”, an ideal complement to Tuttle’s shimmering banjo plucks, conjuring up a hopeful sunrise, delivering a ready-made meditative state of mind to the listener. More pedal-steel goodness wafts in from Nashville, thanks to Luke Schneider (whose brilliant 2020 solo LP Altar Of Harmony is well worth seeking out), who sends luminous smoke rings of sound curlicueing through “Next Week, Pending” and “New Breakfast Habit”.

Fleeting Adventure’s closer, “There’s Always A Crow”, finds Tuttle on his own, or at least without any human company. Here, he communes with the natural world, with various feathered friends (including, yes, a crow) duetting with his rippling playing. There’s nothing wildly innovative about using field recordings in this type of music, but Tuttle makes it feel impressively fresh, the song’s momentum steadily building until things begin to break down in lovely, atmospheric fashion, that crow continuing to squawk in the distance. Perfect harmony? Not quite. But close enough.

Grateful Dead – Europe ’72: 50th Anniversary Edition / Lyseum Theatre – May 26, 1972

Nigel Williamson
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Grateful Dead – Europe ’72: 50th Anniversary Edition / Lyseum Theatre – May 26, 1972

When the Grateful Dead departed California for their first European tour on April Fools’ Day 1972, they did so with an entourage almost 50 strong. As the tour programme proudly told us, they were not just a rock’n’roll band but an entire “community”, rooted in a freewheeling hippie idealis...

When the Grateful Dead departed California for their first European tour on April Fools’ Day 1972, they did so with an entourage almost 50 strong. As the tour programme proudly told us, they were not just a rock’n’roll band but an entire “community”, rooted in a freewheeling hippie idealism that for band and fans alike was a core part of the Dead’s raison d’être. Yet among the hipsters, flipsters, lovers and others along for the ride, central to the travelling circus was the recording crew under Betty Cantor, who captured every one of the shows in 16-track glory for the live album that was intended to offset the trip’s huge expenses.

The tour found the Dead at a pivotal moment. It was the last with Pigpen, whose gritty, soulful vocals and R&B leanings balanced the cosmic visions of Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, and the first with keyboardist Keith Godchaux and his wife and backing vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux, the joint addition of whom made the music “warmer and more organic”, as Lesh put it.

Before the year was out, 17 tracks distilling peak moments from shows in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen had been released as the triple LP Europe ’72. But that was only the start. On the 30th anniversary of the trip, Steppin’ Out With The Grateful Dead: England ’72 presented a further 39 tracks from seven of the UK shows. In 2011 came Europe ’72 Volume 2, with 20 tracks not included on the first volume, prominent among them a legendary hour-long jam around “Dark Star” and “The Other One” from the rain-soaked Bickershaw Festival. Then came Europe ’72: The Complete Recordings, a mammoth 73CD boxset containing every one of the 22 shows in full.

Now, three reissues to mark the 50th anniversary keep it relatively simple, with the original Europe ’72 remastered as a double CD and triple LP, and the final show of the tour at London’s Lyceum Theatre captured in its entirety as a 4CD set. The overlap, however, is considerable, for almost half of Europe ’72 comes from that Lyceum show. There’s also a limited-edition, 24LP boxset presenting all four shows the Dead played over consecutive nights at the Lyceum, each with a slightly different setlist and its own vibe.

At the time, the Dead were in the middle of a three-year hiatus from the studio, but it was a golden period for new material, with both Garcia and Weir writing prolifically. This meant that the shows were full of new songs that had never appeared on an album. As a result, on its release, the Europe ’72 album was the first time anyone not at the shows got to hear songs such as “Tennessee Jed”, “Brown Eyed Women”, “Ramble On Rose”, “He’s Gone”, “Mr Charlie” and “Jack Straw” – songs that loosely brought together the traditions of country, folk and blues with the Dead’s mercurial, sparkling improvisations. After some polishing, especially a few vocal overdubs (the tapes showed Garcia had been singing sharp for much of the tour), the takes heard on Europe ’72 became the landmark iterations of some of the Dead’s best-loved songs.

What didn’t make the 17 tracks chosen for Europe ’72 can be heard in the Lyceum set, including the swinging “Chinatown Shuffle” and “The Stranger”, which both showcased the ailing Pigpen’s soulful, ragged croon. In addition, there were songs from solo releases, such as Garcia’s “Sugaree” and Weir’s “Black-Throated Wind”, the latter transformed from horn-assisted blues to something earthier and more desperate, plus covers that had not previously been committed to record. They included Pigpen singing Elmore James’ “It Hurts Me Too”, Hank Williams’ “You Win Again”, Chuck Berry’s “The Promised Land” and Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home”, although the word ‘covers’ hardly begins to describe the Dead’s alchemical transmutation of them.

In the end, there was very little that was familiar. From Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, Europe ’72 features only the opening tear-up “Cumberland Blues”, the gospel-y “Sugar Magnolia” and a 13-minute “Truckin’” plus a similarly extended, beautifully pacific take on “Morning Dew”. The Lyceum set adds a few more, including the scorching boogie of “Dire Wolf” from Workingman’s Dead and a poised, hypnotic “China Cat Sunflower”, first heard on 1969’s Aoxomoxoa.

The term wasn’t in use at the time, but both Europe ’72 and the Lyceum set sound today like quintessential contemporary Americana given a cosmic, countercultural twist, as past and future fuse into a soundtrack for a brave new US frontier. There’s country (“You Win Again”), blues (“It Hurts Me Too”), trad folk (“I Know You Rider”), songs about drifters (the shuffle of “Tennessee Jed”) and outlaws (the wondrous, Stones-y ballad, “Jack Straw”), melodic, psych-pop rapture (“Sugar Magnolia”) and the Dead’s own unique myth-making (“Truckin’”), all fed into some of the most organic and freewheeling rock’n’roll ever made.

Alongside the songs came the epic lysergic improvisations, of which the crystalline “Dark Star” was the mothership; on other nights, the protean, shape-shifting mystery took other forms as Garcia’s serpentine guitar led them into interstellar overdrive on “Playing In The Band”’s jazzy, minor-toned excursions.

The result was that Europe ’72 was a live album like no other. While other acts were locked into a cycle of recording and touring in which the principal aim was the promotion of their current release, for the Dead the live performance rather than the studio take was always the definitive statement – although nothing was ever truly definitive, for every night the songs, moods and modes were different, and each show was a new adventure. If you had to pick a point on the Dead’s long strange trip that marked the zenith of their kinetic luminosity, these recordings lay a strong claim to being that lightning-in-a-bottle moment.

Joni Mitchell reveals the next instalment in her Archives series

Michael Bonner
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Joni Mitchell reveals the next instalment in her Archives series

Joni Mitchell has revealed upcoming plans for her Archives series. It comprises a new boxed set The Asylum Albums (1972-1975), which features newly remastered versions of her immediate post-Blue albums, For The Roses (1972), Court And Spark (1974), the double live album Miles Of Aisles (1974), an...

Joni Mitchell has revealed upcoming plans for her Archives series.

It comprises a new boxed set The Asylum Albums (1972-1975), which features newly remastered versions of her immediate post-Blue albums, For The Roses (1972), Court And Spark (1974), the double live album Miles Of Aisles (1974), and The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975). All four were recently remastered by Bernie Grundman.

The Asylum Albums (1972-1975) will be released on September 23 in 4-CD and 5-LP 180-gram vinyl (Limited Edition Of 20,000) versions, as well as digitally.

If yo pre-order the CD or LP version of The Asylum Albums (1972-1975) direct from the artist’s website will also receive an exclusive, limited edition 7” x 10” of the painting on the cover of the box.

The new collection heralds the upcoming release of Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 3, which will arrive next year. It will be the third instalment in the series exploring different eras of Mitchell’s career through unreleased studio and live recordings. Vol. 3 will focus on the timeframe when she recorded the albums included in The Asylum Albums (1972-1975).

The tracklisting for The Asylum Albums (1972-1975) is:

For The Roses (1972)
“Banquet”
“Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire”
“Barangrill”
“Lesson In Survival”
“Let The Wind Carry Me”
“For The Roses”
“See You Sometime”
“Electricity”
“You Turn Me On I’m A Radio”
“Blonde In The Bleachers”
“Woman Of Heart And Mind”
“Judgement Of The Moon And Stars (Ludwig’s Tune)”

Court And Spark (1974)
“Court And Spark”
“Help Me”
“Free Man In Paris”
“People’s Parties”
“Same Situation”
“Car On A Hill”
“Down To You”
“Just Like This Train”
“Raised On Robbery”
“Trouble Child”
“Twisted”

Miles Of Aisles (1974)
“You Turn Me On I’m A Radio”
“Big Yellow Taxi”
“Rainy Night House”
“Woodstock”
“Cactus Tree”
“Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire”
“Woman Of Heart And Mind”
“A Case Of You”
“Blue”
“Circle Game”
“People’s Parties”
“All I Want”
“Real Good For Free”
“Both Sides Now”
“Carey”
“The Last Time I Saw Richard”
“Jericho”
“Love Or Money”

The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975)
“In France They Kiss On Main Street”
“The Jungle Line”
“Edith And The Kingpin”
“Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow”
“Shades Of Scarlett Conquering”
“The Hissing Of Summer Lawns”
“The Boho Dance”
“Harry’s House/Centerpiece”
“Sweet Bird”
“Shadows And Light”

The Cure announce 30th anniversary deluxe edition of Wish

Michael Bonner
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The Cure announce 30th anniversary deluxe edition of Wish

The Cure have announced details of a 30th anniversary deluxe edition of Wish. Their ninth studio album, Wish became the band’s best-selling album, reaching No 1 in the UK and No 2 in America, and yielding one of their most beloved singles, “Friday I’m In Love”. The new deluxe 3CD 45-tr...

The Cure have announced details of a 30th anniversary deluxe edition of Wish.

Their ninth studio album, Wish became the band’s best-selling album, reaching No 1 in the UK and No 2 in America, and yielding one of their most beloved singles, “Friday I’m In Love”.

The new deluxe 3CD 45-track edition of Wish includes 24 previously unreleased tracks and four more that are new to CD and digital. It’s due for release on October 7 on 3CD, 2LP, 1 CD and digitally via UMC/Fiction/Polydor. You can pre-order a copy by clicking here.

CD1 contains the original Wish album newly remastered by Robert Smith and Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.

The second disc features 21 previously unreleased demos, including four studio vocal demos from 1990 and seventeen instrumental demos from 1991, nine of which are previously unreleased songs.

The third CD in the set features the four tracks from the mail-order only cassette Lost Wishes released in 1993, which have never appeared on CD or digitally. “Uyea Sound” from that cassette can be heard as a digital single now:

The tracklisting for the deluxe edition is:

CD1 Original Album Remastered by Robert Smith and Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios

01: Open (6:51)
02: High (3:37)
03: Apart (6:38)
04: From The Edge of The Green Sea (7:44)
05: Wendy Time (5:13)
06: Doing The Unstuck (4:24)
07: Friday I’m In Love (3:38)
08: Trust (5:32)
09: A Letter To Elise (5:14)
10: Cut (5:55)
11: To Wish Impossible Things (4:43)
12: End (6:45)

CD2 Demos – All previously unreleased versions

*Unreleased track.

01: The Big Hand [1990 Demo] (4:38) [final version on B-side to A Letter To Elise 7”]
02: Cut [1990 Demo] aka “Away” (3:31) [final version appears on WISH]
03: A Letter To Elise [1990 Demo] aka “Cut” (5:01) [final version appears on WISH]
04: Wendy Time [1990 Demo] (5:13) [final version appears on WISH]
05: This Twilight Garden [Instrumental Demo] (3:25) [final version on B-side to High 7″]
06: Scared As You [Instrumental Demo] (2:33) [final version on B-side to Friday I’m In Love 12″]
07: To Wish Impossible Things [Instrumental Demo] (3:33) [final version appears on WISH]
08: Apart [Instrumental Demo] (3:38) [final version appears on WISH]
09: T7 [Instrumental Demo] (2:40) *
10: Now Is The Time [Instrumental demo] (2:20) *
11: Miss van Gogh [Instrumental demo] (2:48) *
12: T6 [Instrumental Demo] (3:14) *
13: Play [Instrumental Demo] (2:28) [final version on B-side to High 12″]
14: A Foolish Arrangement [Instrumental Demo] (2:28) [final version on B-side to A Letter To Elise 12″]
15: Halo [Instrumental Demo] (3:06) [final version on B-side to Friday I’m In Love 7″]
16: Trust [Instrumental Demo] (4:02) [final version appears on WISH]
17: Abetabw [Instrumental Demo] (2:26) *
18: T8 [Instrumental Demo] (2:17) *
19: Heart Attack [Instrumental Demo] (2:41) *
20: Swing Change [Instrumental Demo] (2:10) *
21: Frogfish [Instrumental Demo] (2:35) *

CD3: ’Lost Wishes’ / Studio Out-Takes / 12” Remixes / Live / Rare / Previously Unreleased

*Unreleased track **Unreleased version

01: Uyea Sound [Dim-D Mix] (5:28 [from Lost Wishes MC 1993]
02: Cloudberry [Dim-D Mix] (5:22) [from Lost Wishes MC 1993]
03: Off To Sleep… [Dim-D Mix] (3:47) [from Lost Wishes MC 1993]
04: The Three Sisters [Dim-D Mix] (4:12) [from Lost Wishes MC 1993]
05: A Wendy Band [Instrumental] (3:47) *
06: From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea [Partscheckruf Mix] (7:36) **
07: Open [Fix Mix] (6:51) [B-side to High 12″]
08: High [Higher Mix] (7:15) [High 12″]
09: Doing The Unstuck [Extended 12” Mix] (5:54)
10: Friday I’m In Love [Strangelove Mix] (5:29 [Friday I’m In Love 12″]
11: A Letter To Elise [Blue Mix] (6:36) [A Letter To Elise 12″]
12: End [Paris Live 92] (8:38) **

WISH 2LP Remastered by Robert Smith and Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.
Vinyl cut by Milles Showell at Abbey Road Studios

A1: Open (6:51)
A2: High (3:37)
A3: Apart (6:38)

B1: From The Edge of The Green Sea (7:44)
B2: Wendy Time (5:13)
B3: Doing The Unstuck (4:24)

C1: Friday I’m In Love (3:38)
C2: Trust (5:32)
C3: A Letter To Elise (5:14)

D1: Cut (5:55)
D2: To Wish Impossible Things (4:43)
D3: End (6:45)

LOST WISHES
D2C Exclusive replica cassette EP

SIDE A
01: Uyea Sound [Dim-D Mix] (5:28)
02: Cloudberry [Dim-D Mix] (5:22)

SIDE B
03: Off To Sleep… [Dim-D Mix] (3:47)
04: The Three Sisters [Dim-D Mix] (4:12)

WISH 1CD – Original Album Remastered by Robert Smith and Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios

01: Open (6:51)
02: High (3:37)
03: Apart (6:38)
04: From The Edge of The Green Sea (7:44)
05: Wendy Time (5:13)
06: Doing The Unstuck (4:24)
07: Friday I’m In Love (3:38)
08: Trust (5:32)
09: A Letter To Elise (5:14)
10: Cut (5:55)
11: To Wish Impossible Things (4:43)
12: End (6:45)

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