Paul Weller has curated a 26-track compilation for Ace Records called That Sweet Sweet Music, featuring some of his favourite soul cuts from the likes of Betty Davis, Baby Huey, Richie Havens, Syl Johnson and The Dells.
“Years before I went out looking for soul music, it found me,” writes Weller in the liner notes. “Soul soundtracked my early life. I filled the C90 tapes we swapped with our mates and the mixtapes we sometimes did to impress girls… it feels weird to me that the act of putting together a simple mixtape is something you can’t do any more. So the opportunity to put together this collection is doubly welcome.”
That Sweet Sweet Music will be released on CD and vinyl on March 28. Pre-order it here and peruse the tracklisting below:
Side 1 01 God Made Me Funky – The Headhunters 02 Spanish Twist – The I. B. Special 03 Breakaway – The Valentines 04 Top Of The Stairs – Collins & Collins 05 Dont Let The Green Grass Fool You – The Spinners 06 Black Balloons – Syl Johnson Side 2 01 Soulshake – Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson 02 I Can’t Make It Anymore – Richie Havens 03 You Got To Have Money – The Exits 04 Pull My String (Turn Me On) – The Joneses 05 Run For Cover – The Dells 06 On Easy Street – O.C. Smith 07 It Ain’t No Big Thing – The Radiants Side 3 01 Summertime – Billy Stewart 02 In The Bottle – Brother To Brother 03 Hard Times – Baby Huey 04 Maggie – Johnny Williams 05 When – Joe Simon 06 Pouring Water On A Drowning Man – James Carr 07 Preview That’s Enough – Roscoe Robinson Side 4 01 Blackrock Yeah Yeah – Blackrock 02 Golden Ring – American Gypsy 03 Search For The Inner Self – Jon Lucien 04 Life Walked Out – The Mist 05 In The Meantime – Betty Davis 06 Beautiful Feeling – Darrell Banks
Every print edition of this issue of Uncut comes free with an exclusive Wilco CD called Noisy Ghosts, featuring tracks taken from their upcoming A Ghost Is Born 20th-anniversary edition along with one track unique to this compilation
WILCO: Uncut meets Jeff Tweedy and his cohorts in Chicago to unearth the triumphs and tribulations behind Wilco’s artistic triumph, A Ghost Is Born. “If you don’t have any kind of struggle in your life, how do you learn anything..?”
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: Sixty years on, Grace Slick and her former co-conspirators recall taking the counterculture to the masses. “We felt that we were on the crest of a wave,” we learn. “Of course, you think it’s going to last forever.”
PATTERSON HOOD: The Drive-By Trucker reactivates his long-dormant solo career. “I just have to follow what my gut tells me,” he says. “That’s all I can do.”
THE ZOMBIES: Colin Blunstone, Rod Argent and their bandmates look back in wonder. “The enjoyment and the applause has made it all worthwhile,” they confide. “It was something we never expected to see in 1968…”
GANG OF FOUR: As the radical post-punks go on tour one last time, Jon King and Hugo Burnham revisit the band’s potent early days. “We were banned more than the Sex Pistols!”
RICHARD DAWSON: We meet the singular songwriter at his allotment, tending his compelling new album End Of The Middle. “A song is a form of magic,” he tells us.
VASHTI BUNYAN: The bucolic singer-songwriter on Nick Drake, Monty Python and her remarkable second life: “I still don’t quite understand it!”
THROWING MUSES: Kristin Hersh counts backwards through one of indie-rock’s most gloriously idiosyncratic catalogues.
PP ARNOLD: Sabotaged by Rod Stewart, spiked by Andrew Loog Oldham… how the soul singer’s future rested on the success of her signature track.
THE WHITE STRIPES: Rewind to Jack and Meg at the height of White Stripes mania in 2005.
REVIEWED: New albums by Edwyn Collins, Edith Frost, Sam Fender, David Grubbs, Immersion | Suss, Lonnie Holley, The Tubs, Panda Bear; archive releases by Steve Reich, Godley & Creme, Yachts, Ella Fitzgerald and You Ishihara; Spiritualized and The Jesus Lizard live; Led Zeppelin on the big screen.
PLUS:David Lynch and Sam Moore depart; The Soft Boys reunite; Wolfgang Flür on his favourite albums; Fugazi doc revealed; Torres and Julien Baker team up… and introducing Sam Moss.
Faithfull rose to prominence during the 1960s, with the 1964 single “As Tears Go By” and her self-titled debut album the following year. She also starred in a number of films, including The Girl On A Motorcycle (1968), while her relationship with Mick Jagger put her at the heart of the London in-crowd.
She struggled with addiction and homelessness during the 1970s, returning in 1979 with Broken English, which re-established her as a potent musical force.
Faithfull continued to record, enjoying successful creative partnerships with long-term producer Hal Willner as well as Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Her later run of albums included career highlights like Easy Come, Easy Go (2008) and Give My Regards To London (2014).
Her final album, 2021’s She Walks In Beauty, a collaboration with Warren Ellis, found her putting Romantic poetry to music.
He went by many names. Blackbeard. The Dub Band. African Stone. The 4th Street Orchestra. Dennis Matumbi. Today, though, they simply call him Dennis Bovell MBE.
Bovell was one of the central figures in the great flowering of homegrown UK reggae in the 1970s and ’80s, and surely the most adaptable. A multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, sound system selector, chart hitmaker, architect of lovers rock, and an in-demand producer for everyone from dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson to post-punk groups like The Pop Group and The Slits – Bovell did it all, and has the box of dusty dubplates to prove it.
Despite that silver he picked up in the Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours, you could convincingly argue that Bovell hasn’t received the full recognition he deserves. Blame that rash of pseudonyms, perhaps – or that many of his productions probably got cut to acetate, played out at a dance and then filed away, their destiny having been realised. Well, if Bovell has been in any way overlooked, Sufferer Sounds is a major step to redress that balance.
This compilation has a backstory. Matthew Jones, proprietor of the Warp Records imprint Disciples, also runs the General Echo Reggae Disco at the Walthamstow Trades Hall in north London. In 2018, Dennis Bovell graced the decks, and Jones had a fanboy moment, quizzing Bovell on the provenance of various lost or forgotten tunes. That chat became an ongoing conversation, and soon the idea of Sufferer Sounds took shape: a collection of early obscurities and deep cuts, focused on and around the fertile period that Bovell spent with Jah Sufferer Sound System between 1976 and 1980.
Sufferer Sounds isn’t anything like a Greatest Hits. A compilation like that would undoubtedly include a track like Janet Kay’s “Silly Games”, a sultry reggae production written and produced by Bovell that hit No.2 in the summer of 1979 and was recently revived by director Steve McQueen for Lovers Rock, a film from his 2020 anthology series Small Axe. Instead, Sufferer Sounds features the track “Game Of Dubs”, a remix that pulls back Kay’s vocal, applying lashings of echo and delay and some pizzicato violin courtesy of collaborator Johnny T. It’s very much an alternate take, but one that shows Bovell at the peak of his powers.
By the time the music on Sufferer Sounds was made, Bovell already had a good decade of music-making under his belt. Born in Barbados, he moved to London in 1965 at the age of 12. His father ran a sound system playing blues parties to African diaspora communities across south London, and the young Bovell would attend and take notes. Soon, he was cutting dubplates at the recording studio at his school in Wandsworth, adapting well-known tunes and taking them out as one of the selectors for the Battersea sound system Jah Sufferer Sound, who would clash rival sounds like Jah Shaka and Lion Sound across the country.
In tandem, Bovell was honing his talents as the bandleader and guitarist in Matumbi – a live group formed, in part, to play backing band for visiting Jamaican vocalists like Ken Boothe and Johnny Clarke. But Matumbi also started recording original material and stepping out alone, and some nights Bovell would take to the mixing desk as the band played, remixing them live. The group developed some formidable chops – Bovell recalled how they blew The Wailers offstage at the Ethiopian famine relief concert in Edmonton in 1973, and some of that energy is evident on the two Matumbi tracks here, “Dub Planet” and “Fire Dub”.
All this early experience feeds into the music we hear on Sufferer Sounds, a collection of tracks that showcase Bovell’s compositional talents, adventurous dub production style and can-do, bootstrap attitude. Some tracks here, like The Dub Band’s “Dub Land” and “Blood Dem” – recorded under the name Dennis Matumbi – are early solo joints which Bovell created alone in his basement studio, layering tracks on a four-track TEAC machine: first drums, then bassline, then guitar and keys. The latter is particularly intense – a sepulchral number that Bovell says was inspired by his memories of Enoch Powell’s divisive “Rivers Of Blood” speech, as well as a watching of Roots, the 1977 American TV miniseries that followed the lineage of an African family from their enslavement through to abolition. Often Bovell would bring in a guest vocalist, but he sings this one himself, scrambling his vocals with whooshing edits. Sometimes, though, a stray line escapes: “You know I’m going back to Zion one day/Makes no difference if you change my name/In my heart I’ll remain the same…”
Elsewhere, tracks like “Suffrah Dub” and African Stone’s “Run Rasta Run” find Bovell in bandleader mode, assembling ensembles featuring hotshot personnel like Matumbi drummer Jah Bunny, guitarist-for-hire John Kpiaye and the Cuba-born horn player Rico Rodriguez, later of The Specials. Bovell was by no means a dub purist – on the contrary, on an album like 1981’s Brain Damage, he seemed driven to express the idea that dub reggae was flexible enough to encompass other genres – and backed by the right musicians he could put those ideas into practice. That seems to be the impulse behind a track like Young Lions’ “Take Dub” – a sort of reggae reimagining of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”, with the original’s shuffling jazz drums reconfigured into a tuff dub strut, and the original’s naggingly familiar saxophone line reinterpreted by the sessioneer Steve Gregory.
If you could rightly say a figure as versatile as Dennis Bovell had a superpower, it was in blending the rough with the smooth. By the 1970s, London audiences were tiring of the hellfire and damnation of Rastafarian reggae, and were ready for something a bit more sweet, cosmopolitan, female. Bovell was one of the prime movers behind lovers rock, a homegrown British sound blending Jamaican rocksteady with American soul music, often exploring themes of romantic love. Angelique’s “Cry” is a gem of the genre, marking the first-ever recorded performance by a future Bovell collaborator, Marie Pierre. The loveable “Jah Man”, meanwhile, is vocaled by another amateur, Errol Campbell – a young follower of Jah Sufferer Sound who Bovell plucked from the crowd and put on the mic. Bovell has a knack for taking these untrained voices and coaching them to a seamless, professional performance while keeping something of their wide-eyed innocence intact.
It was a matter of pride for Dennis Bovell that he would not be easily pigeonholed. All those pseudonyms had a dual purpose. For one, in the late ’70s, Bovell was extraordinarily prolific, churning out enough music that it made sense that he diversify, splitting his product across several projects. For another, it was a skilful feat of misdirection. Some sound systems would turn their nose up at homegrown British tunes, so by moving fast and flying under the radar he could sneak his tunes into the right record boxes without fear of prejudice.
Has it made his legacy harder to assess? Arguably. But the quality of music collected on Sufferer Sounds makes it hard to deny: in the field of UK reggae, Dennis Bovell was one of the greatest to ever do it.
Friendship. Concord. Openness and generosity. If folk is an innately community-minded music, then these are surely its cornerstones, not only practically but idealistically, too. They’re certainly qualities that have shaped Will Oldham’s career of 30-odd years. Though the title of his debut album may have conjured an enigmatic loner squaring up to life’s bleak truth, possibly from a backwoods shack in Kentucky, There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You was recorded with Slint’s Brian McMahan and Britt Walford, among others and released under the name Palace Brothers. In the four years following, Oldham teamed up with countless different musicians, using variations on the “Palace” theme. Despite a self-confessed tendency toward isolation, he’d started as he meant to go on.
So to his umpteenth album as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, which follows 2023’s endearingly down-home Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. It sees Oldham’s collaborative spirit fully – though differently – charged and his hermetic questing further settled as a mix of compassion, lived wisdom and domestic contentment. None of which precludes existential dark clouds. It also sees him drawing heavily on Nashville’s talent pool and working with a producer, David Ferguson, for only the second time. Oldham has said that when he listens to The Purple Bird, “oftentimes I can’t help but laugh in wonder that life allowed me to participate in such a thing.” That joy and wonderment are part of the listening pleasure of these dozen songs, which lean heavily into country music and are relaxed about showing their variegated roots, while cutting simple, heartfelt emotion with daffy humour.
The set grew out of writing sessions in Nashville – another first for Oldham – with half a dozen country notables, among them the heavyweights Pat McLaughlin and John Anderson, one of his vocal heroes. Recording was done locally, with players of Ferguson’s choosing, while half the tracks feature only vocals from Oldham. Though they channel the spirits of Merle Haggard (his North Star), Buck Owens, Michael Hurley and Don Williams, Oldham’s idiosyncratic expression is never eclipsed. “Turned To Dust (Rollin’ On)” opens, its lazy, clip-clop rhythm and sheeting melody carrying a philosophical message that’s common to country music – since our time here is short, “can’t we all just get along as life keeps rolling on”. It’s a rather sombre start, a mood underscored by later mention of those “tempted by the lure of a liar/Who preys upon the foolish and the weak”, which may or may not refer to Trump. However, it ends on a positive, personal note: “If we rely on love to lift us higher/Things’ll be all right for you and me”.
That sentiment is threaded through the record: the idea of cleaving to what’s right, avoiding wrong and focusing on life’s micro pleasures – for the author, swimming, dancing and singing – rather than the macro horror. “London May” follows. Originally written by Oldham for a movie starring his friend, the titular musician/actor, it dims the mood further, ranging over long, dark nights of the soul, the need to take a stand whatever the consequences and the final dying of the light. Similarly, “Sometimes It’s Hard To Breathe”, with its air of Celtic-folk mysticism and mesh of acoustic and steel guitars, has him wondering, “For a while, can it all make sense?/For a while, can this endless life seem fine?”, given that “truth [is] forever on the scaffold/Wrong forever on the throne”.
Uplift is provided by “Tonight With The Dogs I’m Sleeping”, a freewheeling take on that (dubious) country-folk staple, the comic narrative about a drunk man fearing the wrath of his woman after a boys’ night out. Oldham keeps his touch light and knowingly affectionate – the hokey side of tradition might demand a howl in the chorus but he demurs. There’s more drollery, albeit of a less straightforward kind, in “Guns Are For Cowards”, a rambunctious knee-slapper with accordion runs and oompah trombone, which jokily muses on where’s best on the body to shoot someone dead before making the entirely serious point that “guns are for cowards and cowards created by fear and withholding of love”. “The Water’s Fine” is driven by an acoustic hillbilly chug with a pull-back where honky-tonk piano and fiddle kick in, over which Oldham, in fine, sweet voice, uses swimming as a metaphor for setting down one’s load and jumping right into life. Water is a recurring theme on the record, as with the alluringly close-mic’d, Southern-soul number that is “New Water” and “Downstream”, a sober eco lament which nods to Haggard’s “The Winds Of Change” and features Uilleann pipes alongside John Anderson’s deep voice.
The Purple Bird is a consummate listen-through that makes highlights hard to pick but “Boise, Idaho”, a yearning beauty with a fine arrangement and hints of Glen Campbell, is one. The others are the aforementioned “New Water” and a cover of Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark’s “Is My Living In Vain”, written for The Clark Sisters. Though he doesn’t change the lyrics, Oldham reworks the organ-hammered gospel hit as an exquisitely lonesome call for both artistic and existential reassurance, sounding by turns anguished and emphatically positive as melodic strands gather like storm clouds. “No, no, of course not, it is not all in vain,” he soothes himself, though you’d imagine a catalogue of 20-plus well received albums, some rapturously, would be evidence enough. Less cynically, the underplayed richness of The Purple Birdand the obvious delight Oldham took in its making proves that in his long battle between collaboration and isolation, the former has won hands down. It’s now his natural habitat.
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The relationship between Uncut and Wilco stretches back to our very first issue in 1997. There, in the reviews pages alongside album releases from The Jam, Mark Eitzel, Prefab Sprout, Paul McCartney, Laura Nyro, Supergrass and Melvin Van Peebles, Uncut contributor Tom Cox caught Wilco live at Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun Hall as they toured in support of Being There. “Suddenly, the whole thing explodes into clanging feedback and it’s as though the conflicting energies of punk and country have been tossed into a giant nuclear reactor,” Tom wrote. Since then, of course, Wilco have become an institution here at Uncut – a band who have continued to surprise and delight us in equal measure during an unbroken run of remarkable records and stunning live shows.
While Wilco have always striven to be forward-looking, these past few years have seen them reach several notable milestones – not least the 20th anniversaries of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2022 and now A Ghost Is Born. We couldn’t let such momentous occasions go unmarked, so as we honoured Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with a cover, we’re delighted to give its successor similar red-carpet treatment. And once again, Wilco have reciprocated by compiling an amazing, bespoke covermount CD for us, showcasing the upcoming A Ghost Is Born deluxe boxset and featuring a bona fide exclusive track for good measure.
The issue is well-stocked beyond our cover stars, of course. Settle down for reads on Jefferson Airplane, Edwyn Collins, Edith Frost, the Soft Boys, Fugazi, Yachts, Patterson Hood, You Ishihara, Steve Reich, PP Arnold, Gang Of Four and much more.
And next month? Well, as one of our cover stars reveals, “My story’s always been consistent, but I’ve left a whole lot out in the past. I’m not leaving it out now.” See you then.
Featuring never-before-seen footage, performances and music, director Bernard MacMahon’s film explores Led Zeppelin’s creative, musical, and personal origin story. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, the film is told in Led Zeppelin’s own words and is the first officially sanctioned film on the group.
After an exclusive IMAX release on February 5 and 6, the Led Zeppelin documentary will open in UK cinemas nationwide from February 7. You can buy cinema tickets here.
We have TWO pair of tickets to give away for the screening at the BFI IMAX Waterloo on February 5, 2025 at 6:10pm.
To enter, click the link and answer the question below. The first two correct entries picked at random will win the tickets. Closing date: Monday, February 3 at 10amGMT.
Billed as The Yardbirds, where did Led Zeppelin’s first ever concert on September 7, 1968 take place?
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Michael Shannon&Jason NarducyAnd Friends have announced a 2025 UK tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of R.E.M.’s 1985 album, Fables of the Reconstruction.
On the tour, Shannon and Narducy — alongside Jon Wurster (drums), Nick Macri (bass), DagJuhlin (guitar) and VijayTellis-Nayak (keyboards) — will play Fables of the Reconstruction in full each night in addition to many other R.E.M. songs.
The dates are:
August 19 – Gorilla, Manchester August 20 – The Garage, Glasgow August 22 – The Garage, London August 23 – The Garage, London August 25 – Rescue Rooms, Nottingham August 26 – Thekla, Bristol
Tickets go on general sale on Friday, January 31 at 10am GMT, and are available here.
Watch Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy perform the Fables of the Reconstruction track “Driver 8” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon below.
Released on March 21 by MPL and UMe, a new half speed master edition cut at by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios is available to pre-order here. The album reproduces the original UK pressing, with recreations of the original “Venus and Mars are alright tonight” circular sticker and “comparative sizes of sun and planets” bookmark sticker. It comes with two posters with photography by Aubrey Powell and Sylvia de Swaan. The original album artwork by Hipgnosis has been meticulously recreated and presented in a gatefold sleeve.
Venus And Mars will also be available to stream in Dolby Atmos for the first time, newly mixed by Giles Martin and Steve Orchard.
Tracklisting for Venus And Mars is:
Side One Venus and Mars Rock Show Love in Song You Gave Me the Answer Magneto and Titanium Man Letting Go
Side Two Venus and Mars – Reprise Spirits of Ancient Egypt Medicine Jar Call Me Back Again Listen to What the Man Said Treat Her Gently – Lonely Old People Crossroads
From Uncut’s March 2020 issue (Take 272). As Robert Wyatt celebrated his 75th birthday, he invited Uncut round for a chat. Over carrot cake, we heard tales of the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and Wyatt’s own wide-ranging musical appetites. But will he ever make new music again..? “Occasionally, I hit the piano and go, ‘Ah, that would be good. I must remember that’…”
The tea is made, the carrot cake is ready to be sliced and Robert Wyatt has just slid his electric wheelchair under the edge of the dining table, when he realises he’s forgotten the cake knife. Uncut offers to fetch it from the kitchen.
“No, it’s alright,” Wyatt says, reversing his chair. “I can get it without standing up, mate.”
He returns with a huge knife – “It’s a bit Agatha Christie” – and proceeds to slice the cake. “It’s great, I can sit anywhere in town,” he adds, detailing one of the advantages of being wheelchair-bound, “while everyone else has to sit on a bench. It’s a bit toytown round here, like one of those imaginary places in train sets, but that’s no bad thing.”
The town in question is Louth in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where Wyatt and his wife Alfreda Benge have lived for over 30 years. Their house, situated right in the hilly centre, is deceptively large, its ground floor stretching back through room after room. The space facing the street is Wyatt’s music room, complete with a baby grand piano and woven Tunisian wall hangings, while other areas are decorated with prints and paintings by the likes of Oblique Strategies co-creator Peter Schmidt. While Wyatt might have retired from making his own records after 2007’s Comicopera, music still plays a huge part in he and Benge’s lives: indeed, when Uncut arrives, Who Is In Love?, by Iranian singer Shahrem Nazeri and composer Amir Pourkhheleji, is blasting through the large dining room stereo.
“A friend of mine just came back from the Iranian film festival,” Wyatt explains, adjusting his yellow and pink glasses. “Apart from being irritated that she couldn’t wear her designer clothes there, she brought back some records for me. What I really like is Iranian singing, it’s just beautiful, so I’ve been playing this.”
On January 28, Robert Wyatt turns 75. It’s a milestone he didn’t expect to reach. To discover how retirement is treating one of our musical national treasures, Uncut has travelled to Lincolnshire for an afternoon with the singer, songwriter and musician; during our time in Louth, Wyatt regales us with tales of Soft Machine and The Wilde Flowers, of Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, Nico, Nick Mason and Brian Eno, of hanging out with Robert Graves in Majorca, and of his own shape-shifting musical passions. He explains how he and his wife’s health problems are inevitably changing their lives, but also why putting together a forthcoming book of their lyrics for Faber has revitalised them.
“It’s a great thing that’s happened in terms of tidying up who we are, me and Alfie. They gave us a couple of months to sort it out, with Alfie’s stuff too – we’re doing it together. Alfie keeps diaries which is lucky, but we had to remember the situations in which certain records were made, which was a good exercise for elderly forgetful people. The timing was fantastic – just as we were finishing the book, Alfie started to get seriously ill to the point where we couldn’t have carried on doing it. She’s being taken care of, having operations and scans, and she will be for months. We’ll see how that goes.”
Sleeping upstairs is Wyatt’s son Sam. He’s a nurse at a nearby hospital, and often stops in at their house to rest after night shifts. It’s been more than helpful, considering their health issues, to have him there, and Wyatt seems to take huge pleasure in spending time with him.
“By the time he was 19 and he’d delivered his first baby, I thought, ‘He’s already done something much more important than I will ever do in my life.’ I wasn’t there for him as a dad, but he doesn’t seem to be resentful at all. It’s great having him here because, well, he’s a nurse, but he’s also very kind and very clever. You can’t look anywhere in the house without seeing something he fixed.
“One of the things that changes as you get older is the past,” Wyatt adds, pondering life as he approaches his 75th birthday, free of alcohol or cigarettes but as lucid, frank, modest and wryly funny as ever. “It’s like you’re born in a village at the bottom of a valley and it’s all you know. Then your life is spent climbing up this mountain and you’re looking back down, and you see your village is just one of many villages. Then you see there’s a whole landscape and you see the horizon – you can still see your little village, you know where it is, but you’re seeing it from this strange height. It just looks so different. That was one of the weirdest things about putting these lyrics together for the book. ‘Did I really write that?’”
Cutting another slice of cake, Wyatt gestures to Uncut’s recording gear. “Are you sure you’re getting this? John Walters came up and recorded me for the BBC once, and none of it came out. I don’t mind, I can just do it again. But the alarming thing is I always seem to say something quite different to the previous time.”
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MARCH 2020/TAKE 272 IN THE ARCHIVE
From Uncut’s March 1999 issue (Take 22). We spoke to Keith Butler, the fan incensed by Dylan’s electrified performance at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. “The anger just welled-up inside me… I really flipped.”
“Judas!”
Nearly 33 years ago, on May 17, 1966, a young man famously hurled this insult at Bob Dylan. The young man was sitting in the balcony of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Dylan was standing down-stage right, wielding a black Fender Strat. Behind him, was a band. Soon to become, as most of us know, THE Band.
Most of us also know that the moment has passed into legend. It’s a pivotal moment, which both fulfilled and defied expectations, audacious, impassioned, prescient, epochal… Dylan seized it, defined it.
“I don’t believe you,” he spat, chewing at his guitar. “You’re a liar!”
He cranked up the volume and, with a terse instruction, had the band crash into a stinging, sulphuric, sublime “Like A Rolling Stone“.
Despite what the rest of us know and knew, the infamous heckler himself had no idea of the effect he’d had. No idea that for millions this moment was impossibly epiphanic. No idea, even, of his own notoriety. He shouted his shout, got up and walked out. Never really thought about it again.
Until last October.
Last October saw the official release of the recordings of the event – as Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert – and a revival of world interest. If the concert took place at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, why call the official record “Royal Albert Hall”?
As CP Lee explains in Like The Night: Bob Dylan And The Road To The Manchester Free Trade Hall (Helter Skelter) – his book about the evening – when bootleggers came across the tapes in the early Seventies, they assumed they were drawn from the tour’s final performance, in London.
Their illicit releases were labelled accordingly. Under-the-counter sales were brisk. There was no doubting the quality of the performance.
Why question its finality?
It wasn’t until a copy of the bootleg fell into the hands of the young CP Lee that the mistake was discovered/ He’d been at the Free Trade Hall to see Dylan, and recognised his own experience. “Ain’t it just like the night I attended?” he thought. His mates agreed. But, by then, the myth had grown. The hostility with which Dylan’s electric tour was greeted had gathered an absurd momentum, given universal voice in that one accusation, that cry of “Judas!”
CP Lee knew that this wasn’t quite the case, that Manchester not London was where the famous bootleg had been recorded with its bitter exchange.
What he didn’t know was who that fan was and what had become of him. In Toronto one night last October, Keith Butler, 53, was awoken by an asthma attack. He puffed on his inhaler, but couldn’t get back to sleep. He did what he never does. He got up, picked up a copy of The Toronto Sun. He stopped at a review of Live 1966 by Scott Bauer. “Judas!” was the first word of the review.
Deep within Butler’s memory, something stirred. He read on. It came flooding back; first, the recognition that he had attended this very concert and, then, the understanding that he himself was a principal protagonist in the record’s history. Bauer describes contemporary reaction to Dylan’s audacity by quoting the words of a youth in the foyer of the Free Trade Hall by one of the crew filming Eat The Document, Dylan and DA Pennebaker‘s still-unreleased sequel to Dont Look Back. “Any pop group could produce better rubbish than that,” one young man says. “It was a bloody disgrace, it was… He’s a traitor.”
“Those were my words,” Butler now says, tracked down finally by Lee and in Manchester for the recording of an Andy Kershaw Radio 4 documentary about the night. He remembers being approached by what he thought was a news crew as he and a friend walked out. “Were we dissatisfied customers? Yes. Would we care to share our views with an American audience? Sure.”
Butler was only too eager to tell the camera crew what he thought of Dylan. He delivered a north country fatwa, and it was this, rather than the infamous accusation – which he confesses he shouted – which stuck in his mind.
Butler has lived in Canada since 1975, but his resemblance to the outraged fan in Eat The Document is compelling, his bluff northern manner entirely compatible. So what prompted his challenge?
“What really sent me over the top, I think, was when he did two songs that I was very fond of in the acoustic way and he did them in that electric guitar way. That was ‘Baby, Let Me Follow you Down‘, which I really liked, and ‘One Too many Mornings‘. The anger just welled-up inside me… I really flipped.”
Having realised his infamy, what did he think of his youthful fervour now?
“With all the wisdom of the years behind me, right, I kind of think, ‘You silly young bugger!”
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MARCH 1999/TAKE 22 IN THE ARCHIVE
On January 22, Dylan announced a show in Tulsa for Tuesday, March 25.
Dylan will now also visit Century II Concert Hall in Wichita, Kansas, on March 29, Mayo Clinic Health System Event Center in Mankato, Minnesota on April 4 and The Weidner-Cofrin Family Hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on April 6.
Tickets for those shows go on sale from Friday, January 31; visit Dylan’s website for more information.
The line-up for this year’s Teenage Cancer Trust concerts has been confirmed. The week of shows runs from March 24 – 30 at its regular home, London’s Royal Albert Hall.
This year’s shows will feature two performances by The Who, along with Frank Carter and Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols plus The Corrs and James Arthur. A comedy night features Micky Flanagan.
Frank Carter and Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols kick off proceedings on Monday, March 24. Says Jones, “After an incredible 2024, we are itching to get going again this year and what better way than on home territory at a venue that wouldn’t have let us near it back in the day! Albert will be turning in his tomb. It’s an honour to help this great charity.”
Micky Flanagan leads a night of comedy on Tuesday, March 25.
James Arthur headlines on Wednesday, March 26 and The Corrs play on Friday, March 28.
The Who, meanwhile, play two shows: the first one on Thursday, March 27 and then on Sunday, March 31. Support comes from Level 42.
Tickets for this year’s shows are available from midday, January 31 from here.
Guitarist Carlos Alomar and bassist George Murray – the two surviving members of David Bowie’s ‘DAM Trio’ who backed him on the Berlin Trilogy of albums – will tour together this autumn for the first time since 1979.
The Back To Berlin Tour 2025 – honouring David Bowie and third DAM Trio member Dennis Davis, who both died in 2016 – will also feature Bowie’s Live Aid guitarist Kevin Armstrong, singer Cunio, drummer Tal Bergman, keyboardist Axel Tosca and backing vocalist Lea Lorien. The audiovisual element of the show will be overseen by Bowie archivist and video editor, Nacho.
The band pledge to faithfully perform songs from Low, Heroes and Lodger, some of which never found their way into Bowie’s live sets.
“Where other bands have toured Bowie’s songs extensively since his passing, these songs haven’t been performed the way they were meant to be. Until now,” says Alomar. “The Spiders From Mars are well known, but the DAM Trio remains rock and roll’s best-kept secret. It’s time to honour our legacy, including Dennis’s.
“The fans we’ve met along the way are the ones who have driven this. We feel obliged to do it because they’ve waited so long for us to return to these songs. This could very well be our last spin of Europe.”
The tour begins on November 7 at Berlin’s Metropol – fittingly just a short walk from Hansa Studios where much of the Berlin Trilogy was recorded. See the full list of dates below. Tickets go on general sale at 10am on Friday (January 31) from here.
Fri 7 Nov – Berlin, Metropol Sun 9 Nov – Oslo, Santrum Scene Tue 11 Nov – Gothenburg, Lorensbergsteatern Wed 12 Nov—Malmo, Slagthusets Teater Thu 13 Nov – Veji, Vejle Musikteater Sat 15 Nov – Eindhoven, Muziekgebouw Sun 16 Nov – Utrecht, Tivoli Vredenburg Tue 18 Nov – Zurich, Volkshaus Wed 19-Nov – Paris, Casino De Paris Fri 21 Nov – Antwerp, Stadsschouwburg Sun 23 Nov – Sheffield, Octagon Mon 24 Nov – Liverpool, Philharmonic Wed 26 Nov – Glasgow, The Old Fruitmarket, City Halls Fri 28 Nov – London, Barbican Sat 29 Nov – Bristol, Beacon Hall Mon 1 Dec – Dublin, Vicar St
The UK Americana Music Awards demonstrated the organisation’s evolving values on Thursday night, with a healthy proportion of female winners, and a definition of Americana which escaped the confines of country-rock to encompass blues, gospel and soul. There was much talk of the sustaining quality of “community” as the genre’s UK practitioners and supporters gathered, before contrastingly uplifting performances from Lyle Lovett and Candi Staton.
Hackney Church’s ancient walls ensured a resonant boom to The Heavy Heavy as they opened proceedings with sheets of rasping glam guitar. “Ah, Americana – what a week to be celebrating something with America in the title!” host Baylen Leonard then sighed, as the world digested Donald Trump’s inauguration and initial shock and awe acts. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings embody a very different idea of their nation, of course. They accepted the International Song Of The Year award for “Empty Trainload Of Sky” while away on tour, strolling at night near Sydney Opera House as they thanked veteran Beatles/Bowie engineer Ken Scott for his work on their latest album, Woodland. When this was duly named International Album Of The Year, Uncut editor Michael Bonner accepted the prize on the duo’s behalf, and invited the audience to raise a glass to The Band’s keyboard genius Garth Hudson on the week of his death. Jason Isbell also accepted International Artist Of The Year from somewhere on the road.
Robert Vincent won UK Song Of The Year for “Follow What You Love and Love Will Follow”. He preceded a performance of the song which set his loping acoustic guitar at the heart of Michele Stodart’s house band by noting its title’s aptness in harsh times: “The meaning of this song is everything that we should do.”
The value of these awards for the tight-knit group of musicians practising Americana in the UK was shown when Hannah White received UK Album Of The Year for Sweet Revolution. “I’m so grateful, I can’t speak!” she gasped. By the time she returned to win UK Artist Of The Year, White was choking back laughter and tears. Her performance of “Chains Of Ours” boasted swampy blues guitars recalling Daniel Lanois, rockabilly twang and country swing, before her voice gave a sultry, slurring, honkytonk noir edge to its finale.
UK Live Act Of The Year Kezia Gill was also in tears as she won. “When my husband and I had a dream board years ago of everything we wanted to achieve,” she said, ‘AMA’ was on it…just to be accredited to a community that I’ve tried so hard to be a part of means so much.” UK/Ireland Trailblazer award-winner and Irish chart-topper CMAT also noted ostracising by those who “didn’t really accept me as a country singer for a while”. Her irreverent, bisexual identity and her fanbase’s strong LBGTQ+ element cuts against the sometimes conservative country grain, though the vocal twang as she sang “I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!” was steeped in Nashville verities.
UK Instrumentalist Of The Year Kieron Marshall described a different sort of exclusion, stating: “People from my background don’t usually come to fancy events like this.” He came, he said, from “a council flat, heroin family, criminals, and I’m really grateful to music…I got here because of opportunity. And the one thing we can all do as a community is give opportunity.” Footage of the AMA’s outreach programme for ex-offenders’ music-making perhaps met this challenge.
The Grassroots Award to promoter David Messer also honoured those lifting musicians up behind the scenes, while Emerging Artist Of The Year Toby Lee, just 19 and a self-described “guy who lives on a farm in Cornwall”, belied his age with his big, confident voice and guitar swagger.
The American artists present undeniably dug deeper than their transatlantic disciples into Americana’s specific locale, history and imagery, beginning with International Album nominee and Old Crow Medicine Show founder Willie Watson. His self-titled 2024 album’s song “Real Love” found its narrator “chained to the heart of a ghost” and “shadows in the eyes of the people that I used to know”, as his voice shivered to the song’s redeemed conclusion.
Kyshona’s “The Echo”, from her album Legacy, dug into a personal genealogy making her the great-great-great-grandchild of a freed South Carolina slave. “LA Woman”-eerie keyboard chimes supported her voice’s rich gospel-blues boom, as she laid out a history rarely acknowledged in her current Nashville home.
International Trailblazer award-winner Lyle Lovett was the first taste of real American stardust, but the Texan was all humility as he considered the night’s young talents, striving at work they loved. “That sort of life is what I wish for my children,” he said quietly. He recalled his 1987 UK debut playing London’s Mean Fiddler, and the local agents who had let him “play halls I had dreamed of seeing”. “Those memories are important to me,” he said simply. His band, attired like their leader in the black suits and crisp white shirts of country gentlemen, appeared to play his beautifully crafted classic “If I Had A Boat”. Throwing his head back, Lovett looked to the church’s rafters as if glimpsing heaven.
Candi Staton topped even that as she won a richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award, having wrested uplifting art from a lifetime of bitter blues. “First, I want to thank you God that I’m standing here with you,” she said, in a voice brooking no argument. “I’m going to do what I love until the Lord calls me home,” she added, almost breaking down as she peered out at family members in the crowd.
The all-star finales traditional at such events are usually shambolic affairs. Staton’s presence at the heart of “You Got The Love” made this one intensely moving. It’s a song of deceptively harsh romantic blows, relieved by its ecstatic chorus. Violin and cello gave orchestral sweep to the assembled 22 musicians, and Lovett cheekily interpolated “Young Hearts Run Free” as Staton grinned. Staton herself, though recently retired from touring, raised her voice one more time, bringing her gospel-soul truth to this church and the crowd to their feet. The young women next to her danced and sang, and hugged her with awed delight at the end. As with this music and its awards’ best moments, she had lent them the energy to move on up somewhere better.
Award Winners:
UK Artist Of The Year Hannah White
UK Album Of The Year Hannah White - Sweet Revolution
UK Song Of The Year Robert Vincent – “Follow What You Love and Love Will Follow”
UK Instrumentalist Of The Year Keiron Marshall
International Artist Of The Year Jason Isbell
International Album Of The Year Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Woodland
International Song Of The Year Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – “Empty Trainload of Sky”
Live Act Of The Year Kezia Gill
International Lifetime Achievement Award Candi Staton
In this month's issue of Uncut, we celebrate The Band's 30 greatest songs. As a special bonus, here's another 10 songs we didn't have room for in the magazine, as chosen by Richard Thompson, Jim James, Nathan Salsburg, Amy Helm, Steve Wynn and more...
In this month’s issue of Uncut, we celebrate The Band’s 30 greatest songs. As a special bonus, here’s another 10 songs we didn’t have room for in the magazine, as chosen by Richard Thompson, Jim James, Nathan Salsburg, Amy Helm, Steve Wynn and more…
GOIN’ TO ACAPULCO (The Basement Tapes, 1975) TOM RUSSO, ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER: Every now and then I return to The Basement Tapes, and this song in particular. On the face of it, the character Dylan paints is kind of desperate and pathetic, but the delivery and the ragged, soulful backing The Band bring to the song elevates his longing into something religious. You can feel the self-loathing hangover he is about to crash into once the tequila wears off. Obviously having Dylan as a songwriter doesn’t hurt, but The Band do something all great backing bands do – know your role and stick to it. They get out of the way of the vocal, and only step in with the lightest touches to help it take flight. No individual is doing anything remarkable, but the sum of the parts is instantly recognisable and iconic. You can tell they’re still feeling it out, but the essence of the song is there. Doing anything more would be a bit tacky. There is a Jim James & Calexico version with soaring vocals and horns, which is great in a different way, but to me, the original version is still the best. Maybe it’s demo-itis, but there is magic in the first few renditions of a song, when the concrete hasn’t set on it yet. They’re in the zone, riding the chord changes, and we’re lucky enough to be sitting on the couch in the corner, hearing the song be born.
TOO MUCH OF NOTHING (The Basement Tapes, 1975) LILLY HIATT: My parents [singer-songwriter John Hiatt and film sound editor Isabella Wood] listened to The Band a lot when I was growing up, and of course I knew stuff like “Up On Cripple Creek”. But when I was in college I got into vinyl with my roommate, and I bought Stage Fright. So that’s what kind of locked in my love for The Band. Every song on there resonated. Stuff like “Stage Fright” and “The Rumour” just sounded so free. “Too Much Of Nothing”is a very special song to me too. When I was at a turning point in my life – I think it was 2016, when I put a new band together and we went on the road – John, the guitar player, played The Basement Tapes in the van. I’d never really listened to that record before, but it just gave me a feeling of a sense of freedom and belonging again, with these new friends I had. It really hit me that I was turning a page and that everything was going to be okay. I always liked the sad-sounding songs with forlorn melodies, and “Too Much Of Nothing” has that. Hearing that song opened up a new mindset for me. I was about to make some music of my own again and I was making these connections with new people. And I was on the tail-end of heartbreak, which takes its time. So this was just the beginning of putting that behind me. And remembering how music moves you through the difficulties of life. I love The Basement Tapes because it sounds like they’re all just having a lot of fun. And they’re all so relaxed. Those lyrics – “Say hello to Valerie / Say hello to Marion” – are just so cool. When we were listening to it in the van, I was sitting there thinking, ‘What is Dylan talking about?’ The Basement Tapes is still mysterious to me. It’s like, ‘Where’s he going with this?’ But it seemed like his friends, The Band, were liberating that in him. Dylan sounds loose and happy, like he’s with his buddies. The combination of him with those guys seems like they’re just cutting loose.
BESSIE SMITH (The Basement Tapes, 1975) NATHAN SALSBURG: When I was 13 – playing Nintendo, listening to my mom’s copy of The Basement Tapes and having zero familiarity with a historical personage named Bessie Smith – the image called to mind by this song was of my grandmother’s first cousin. Aunt Bessie was a large and kindly old white lady from rural Western Kentucky who made delicious yeast rolls and lived in a tiny apartment in a grim six-storey senior-living facility with two small windows looking out over a liminal zone of auto-body shops and an interstate highway. That mental association endured long after I discovered the singer Bessie Smith – brightest star in the pre-World War II female ‘blues shouter’ pantheon – and, somewhat wilfully, it still does, as appreciating the song is made considerably easier if you can avoid associating the subject with the hugely successful recording and performing artist. If you can’t, you may find the whole conceit grating: a young white guy’s fantasy of the Empress of the Blues’ “sweet love” pining away for him down the road, suspended in history and vague circumstance, like the ‘old-time blues’ she sings. Of course, the trick may in fact be to associate the narrator with someone other than Rick Danko. He wouldn’t have had much of a chance with my Aunt Bessie, either.
LONG BLACK VEIL (Music From Big Pink, 1968) BILL MACKAY: There are some really potent things in The Band’s version of this song. When you’re doing a cover, there are ways to do it where you use the musical elements outside the voices, or outside the story, to accentuate the words. On “Long Black Veil”, it feels like they use certain musical elements, consciously or not, to sharpen the tale that’s unfolding. One thing that hit me was the accentuation of the piano in the chorus about the woman’s steps traipsing through the hills, in this hypnotic kind of way, like a distant staccato sound. And the organ, at various points, really seems to me to be in this ethereal area, as if supporting the idea of somebody speaking from beyond the grave. It seems like that spaciousness is in there, yet it’s subterranean too. It’s ghostly. In the second verse, when the judge is asking for the narrator’s alibi, there’s something very low – either a trombone or organ – that really seems to push that idea of an imperious judge and the seriousness of the trial. Listening to The Band’s voices, Levon, Rick and Richard all seem to be characterised by hurt in a lot of places. And with different flavours of hurt. With Levon, there’s something about him that’s very defiant in a lot of his vocalisations, with real strength, but also anger too. In Richard Manuel there’s often a weariness and a resignation in his voice. And with Rick Danko there’s this plaintive yearning. Beyond that, it seems to me that they harmonised on this song differently than a lot of groups might’ve done. There’s something natural about the way their voices mix, unlike The Beach Boys, who all had different vocal qualities but in harmony they could often sound like a chord. But The Band’s voices are really distinct. It seems like they’re branches from the same big oak tree – they’ve developed differently and tangle in different ways, so you hear all the different timbres of their voices. I think that yearning and that weariness kind of pulls them together. It really fits this story, which is so devastating.
IN A STATION (Music From Big Pink, 1968) JIM JAMES, MY MORNING JACKET: The last time I saw Richard was in a space station out near the edge of the known universe. I guess he could tell I was feeling a little lost and so, in a fatherly gesture, smiled and motioned for me to follow. We began to walk through the halls and streets of the station and up the face of a man-made mountain inside of the “Natural Surroundings” dome placed within the middle of the ship’s massive complex inner workings. This was a place built to feel just like home, where many of the plants and animals were contained – both for farming and survival, but also for beauty. The designers wanted everyone to try and maintain some sense of connection to the natural world we had to leave behind when we left earth. I could tell he was trying to show me some greater truth here, so we silently sat and gazed for a while. Off and on he would hum some beautiful melody I knew from somewhere but could not quite place. Eventually I stretched out on the ground and drifted off to sleep in the artificial moonlight of the dome’s 24-hour earth cycle. As the neon sun began to rise and bring its light to life, I drowsily came to in that strange in-between – uncertain if I was dreaming or awake. I noticed that he was already up, or perhaps had never even fallen asleep, and sat cross-legged, gazing out from our mountaintop over the green landscape dotted with people working in it far below. “Isn’t everybody dreaming?” I asked. “Then the voice you hear is real,” he whispered. Out of all the idle scheming, I was grateful he had given me something to feel.
THE UNFAITHFUL SERVANT (The Band, 1969) RICHARD THOMPSON: I would argue that the Band’s second album is one of the strongest in the history of rock/popular music, although it doesn’t fit comfortably into any genre, being a perfect blend of American roots – rock‘n’roll, jazz, Appalachian, gospel, R&B, blues and country. Three great vocalists, rhythm section to die for, wonderful songs, killer guitarist, and Garth as the genius behind the keys! “The Unfaithful Servant” has biblical undertones in the title and the story, but the lyrics borrow from country and popular music, and possibly Dylan – but not to take away from their originality of style. Musically, you could say The Band pretty much invented this laid-back, four-square rhythm with songs like “The Weight”. The vocal by Rick Danko is yearning and heartfelt, but the icing on the cake are the horns. I always loved the tracks where the group played the horn parts themselves, with that slight Salvation Army creakiness. The Allen Toussaint stuff is slicker clearly, but for emotion… Apparently Garth went back in with John Simon after the track was laid down, and they added soprano sax and tuba – an unlikely blend, but they achieve something remarkable here. Note little touches like the B5 under the minor 6 chord on the bridge, and the fact the song ends each section a semitone above the tone centre of the piece. A joy of a piece of music among many joys on this album, equalled in achievement by little since.
ROCKIN’ CHAIR (The Band, 1969) PETER BREWIS, FIELD MUSIC: When we first started doing Field Music, The Band were very important. Me and my brother [David] and Andy [Moore], who’s still an occasional third member, listened to the brown album a lot in our 20s. That sort of looseness, the idea of The Band playing together. I remember watching a classic albums episode on the brown album, where they said they’d rehearse a song during the day, get drunk at night, then in the morning they’d try to start recording it, having learned it the day before. That’s what we ended up trying to do. We’d rehearse a song in the afternoon and then almost half-remember it in the morning. We thought it would give some mystical looseness to it, some extra Band vibes to it. We actually recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” for our first single release. I think we did it quite well, but just thought, ‘This is stupid, I don’t know why we’ve done it.’ But we loved them so much that we actually tried to do a cover of it. Three lads from Sunderland probably shouldn’t be singing about the South rising again! “Rockin’ Chair” is one of those songs where you can really hear the voices on it. You really hear the looseness. They’re essentially doing three-part harmonies. You tend to think of three-part harmonies as a technical thing, like The Beatles or The Eagles used to do, a homogenous thing. But The Band aren’t like that at all. The three of them – Manuel, Danko and Helm – have similar voices, but they’re also very sort of personal. They blend, but not in a homogenous way. And it makes it feel more polyphonic. So it’s their individuality, I suppose, that comes through on “Rockin’ Chair”. Not to dismiss Robbie Robertson as a songwriter, but I think it’s the singers who make the song feel like an old one. It’s definitely got a similar feel to John Wesley Harding going in. There’s lots of rhymes in “Rockin’ Chair”, which might seem trite in the hands of another songwriter, but it never does here. And I’ve never figured out why it feels so authentic to me. I can’t put my finger on it, which is maybe the whole thing about The Band themselves. The song almost makes you believe in some kind of magic, something intangible. Even if you break it down, it still doesn’t reveal everything about itself.
DANIEL AND THE SACRED HARP (Stage Fright, 1970) IAN FELICE, THE FELICE BROTHERS: What I love about this song is the strangeness of it. The theme itself is not unusual, we all know countless parables about the loss of one’s soul by the pursuit of power. But there’s a theatricality to the arrangement and vocalisation of the song that gives it a unique quality. The tale is a Faustian one about a character named Daniel. There’s no defined setting in the song, although some would argue that the reference of a whippoorwill places it in an earlier, mythical America. Daniel finds a way, through deception and wealth, to acquire a sacred harp that he believes will grant him salvation or some kind of undefined power. Of course, he immediately sees the folly of his actions and confides in his brother and father who offer him little sympathy. The transaction ultimately leaves him soulless and damned. The song has two main vocalists, Rick Danko (Daniel) and Levon Helm (the narrator) and opens with a chorus they sing in harmony, bringing to mind the tradition of rural choral music that the title references. The chorus doesn’t happen again until the end, which bookends the tale with the strange image of Daniel dancing merrily through a field of clover holding the instrument that will ultimately spell his doom. The Band never played this song live. It features Richard Manuel on drums, which I always love and gives the song a special quality. I rank the trading of vocals between Levon and Danko to be one of the best examples of this classic hallmark of The Band’s style.
4% PANTOMIME (Cahoots, 1971) STEVE WYNN: Robbie Robertson was one lucky guy. Don’t get me wrong, he was a great songwriter and all. One of the best. You don’t need me to tell you that. But he also happened to have been blessed with three of the best singers on the planet to deliver his muse. Amazing. On my own personal favourite Band song, “4% Pantomime”, Robbie gets dealt a lucky hand from the bottom of the deck by picking up yet one more great singer on board in Van Morrison, setting his compositional contraption into motion with Van and Richard Manuel duking it out like songbird versions of Frazier and Ali, while grousing about bad tour routing and shady poker tables. They start out lightly trading jabs and then it’s a full flurry of fists by the last minute to a split decision, Van laying out a fierce rat-a-tat combo on “without the slightest blush” while Richard plays rope-a-dope. Then Van wildly flails on the final chorus before they hug it out in a barrage of “la-la”s at the end. It’s glorious. With singers like that, you could put a couple of chords behind an email to your agent about a venue screwing up the hospitality rider and still have a stone classic. But this song is more than that. There’s some truth in the ‘it’s the singer, not the song’ maxim, but a catalogue of great songs makes it all work better. And Robbie’s got plenty.
ATLANTIC CITY (Jericho, 1993) AMY HELM: It’s not my favourite ever song of theirs, but “Atlantic City” is special because it reminds me that I got a front row seat to watch the reinvention of one of the great singers in The Band: my dad. And I got to watch it happen in real time. My father was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998 and went through treatments and lost his voice completely. He couldn’t sing a note, he could just whisper, so he focused on drumming. Then after years and rehab, he started to slowly sing again at his Midnight Rambles that he built in Woodstock at his home. At those concerts, he took these tiny steps towards reinvention. And the first tiny step that he took towards singing again was leaving the drum kit, coming up to the front of the stage with his mandolin in hand, and trying to sing “Atlantic City”. Sometimes the notes were there, and sometimes they would fall out from under him because of the scar tissue and the damage done from radiation on his vocal chords. So I got to stand next to him at a microphone. He’d have me sing unison and hold the melody for him a little bit, because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. And I guess I include it as a Band song because it took such courage and brave commitment to serving the song that got him to that point. I also think that choosing to cover it on one of their ‘90s albums – in their second iteration of The Band, without Robbie – is just a cool chapter in any band’s history anyway. What do you do when you’ve reached your peak and you’re trying to reinvent yourself? How do we keep moving as working musicians? How do we find the songs that fit? And where do we find that magic of those voices, twisting around on that chorus? I think the recorded version of “Atlantic City” is a beautiful testimony to them continuing to try to do that, in the midst of everything you could possibly imagine to pile on top of yourself: drugs and everything beyond, then his reinvention and rediscovery of his voice in the 2000s at The Midnight Rambles. When I was very little, I didn’t really understand what The Band was. I thought The Band was Rick Danko’s band, and the only song I really cared about was “Stage Fright”, because that was my favourite. So when I was six or seven years old, I’d peek around the corner if I was at a show, and watch them do that song. And my dad was Rick’s drummer. That’s kind of how I thought of it in my mind. Which is as it should’ve been! Stuff like …Big Pink was never really played around the house. It was mostly Ray Charles and Muddy Waters that my dad would play around the house, not The Band’s records. What made them unique? Three voices that are so distinctive as lead singers, but that actually blend in that harmonic overtone. That’s unusual, right? Garth added a colour and a tone to it that kicked it way out of anything else that it could have been categorised as. And Robbie’s guitar-playing alone had its own kind of grit and differentiation. Someone gave me a bootleg of them when they were Levon And The Hawks. I was listening to some of it – I think it was Richard singing “Lucille”, or maybe it was my dad, I can’t remember – but they’re singing these Chuck Berry and Little Richard tunes. And they were all so young. I go to my dad, “How did you guys sound like that by the time you were 17? It’s not just that you could rip into those notes and sing that music with such technique and prowess, but it’s that your own voices were emerging. I don’t hear you imitating anyone. I actually hear Richard’s whole thing emerging.” And he was like, “Well, it wasn’t that we were such geniuses. It’s because we were playing seven days a week, and on Sundays, we were playing a matinee and a late show. And after we were done playing these shows, we’d go to a rehearsal space and play for another two hours.”
UNCUT: You’re getting a lifetime achievement nod at the UK Americana Awards. Are you surprised to be categorised as Americana? CANDI STATON: Not really. I’ve been doing Americana music for 10 years or more. I didn’t know I was doing it, it’s just songs I like to sing.
Presumably you would have heard country music on the radio when you were growing up in Alabama? Oh yeah. My mother wouldn’t let me listen to anything except country music and the Christian stations. We couldn’t listen to the blues – she thought it was the devil’s music. With country, the only thing different is the music. The lyrics say the same thing: let’s go get drunk, I’ll meet you on the corner. What my mother always liked was at the end of every country show, they sang a gospel song. She thought that made it OK.
There are a few gospel numbers on your new album, Back To My Roots… We’re doing songs my sister and I learned together. I also covered “Shine A Light” – I think the Rolling Stones are gonna really like my version. I did it as much like Mick Jagger as I could, with my vocals, but I now know why they wrote it. It was because one of their band members [Brian Jones] passed away, and it’s in remembrance of him.
What are your memories of recording at the FAME studio in Muscle Shoals? That’s a book within itself. I worked with Rick Hall for eight years straight. We got with Capitol Records and to make my name a household name, they spent over a million dollars. We went on a seven-state tour. We would have dinners, five courses with Dom Pérignon. I was a little country girl. I was so scared, I would be shaking in my shoes. I was green as grass.
You stopped singing secular songs for a while. Why? Everything was changing, and I had so much competition. You had Aretha out there. You had Chaka Khan. You had Gladys Knight. If my record came in with theirs, who do you think the DJs would pick? So I was kicked to the backburner. I dealt with the chitlin circuit, basically. I had all these blues songs.
It’s a tough school, the chitlin circuit… Yeah, it was my college. I graduated from it – I learned how to do shows. Sometimes I’d dress in the kitchen, sometimes in the bathroom. There was nowhere to put my gown on, so I would dress in the back of my limo. The chitlin circuit was a teaching experience. When disco came out, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
What is it about “Young Hearts Run Free” that makes it so popular? It has such a wonderful story behind it. I laugh about it sometimes – that’s my life story in three minutes. I was with a guy that had threatened my life, he threatened my mother’s life, if I ever left him. People that don’t understand say, ‘Why you been married so many times?’ I had to, I didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t find the kind of man I wanted. And when I got him, he turned out to be a monster.
Where do you go after Back To My Roots? This is my last record, I’m not going to do any more albums. I’ve done 33! I’ve done my civic duty. I have given to the world all I need to give!
The UK Americana Music Awards take place at London’s Hackney Church on January 23
Candi Staton’s Back To My Roots is released by Beracah Records in February
Now’s your chance to put a question to one of the great voices of British folk-rock. Maddy Prior, of course, is best-known for co-founding Steeleye Span – the band she still fronts today, 56 years on. In fact Steeleye Span are currently readying a new album for release later this year, and will tour the UK throughout April and May (see the full list of dates and buy tickets here).
As well as also making numerous albums with The Carnival Band, June Tabor and Martin Carthy, Prior has collaborated with everyone from David Bowie to Mike Oldfield, Jethro Tull to Status Quo. And next month, she’ll make an appearance on the new Everything Is Recorded album, singing a song co-written by Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig.
So please send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Monday, January 27 and Maddy will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
A surprising amount of good announcements and discoveries so far means a lot of stuff we've played thus far this year has been brand new. Key entries are Tobacco City's Cosmic Americana, Florist's rarified indie folk and Brown Spirits' super heavy kosmiche as well as Ex-Vöid's fizzy racket, Eiko Ishibashi's bewitching jazz grooves and Silver Synthetic's easygoing choogle. Plenty of familiar faces, too - Throwing Muses, My Morning Jacket, Lonnie Holley etc - and a lovely cover of The Passions' "I'm In Love With A German Film Star" by Andy Bell, Dot Allison and Michael Rother, which has come a long way since the prototype version Andy's been playing in his electronic solo project, GLOK. Please enjoy...
A surprising amount of good announcements and discoveries so far means a lot of stuff we’ve played thus far this year has been brand new. Key entries are Tobacco City‘s Cosmic Americana, Florist‘s rarified indie folk and Brown Spirits‘ super heavy kosmiche as well as Ex-Vöid‘s fizzy racket, Eiko Ishibashi‘s bewitching jazz grooves and Silver Synthetic’s easygoing choogle. Plenty of familiar faces, too – Throwing Muses, My Morning Jacket, Lonnie Holley etc – and a lovely cover of The Passions‘ “I’m In Love With A German Film Star” by Andy Bell, Dot Allison and Michael Rother, which has come a long way since the prototype version Andy’s been playing in his electronic solo project, GLOK. Please enjoy…
Dylan will now perform at the Tulsa Theater on Tuesday, March 25. On the venue’s website, the show is branded with the Rough & Rowdy Ways tour logo. The “2021 – ’24” date stamp from previous tour literature has been removed, though, implying the tour is now an ongoing project.
Tickets go on sale on January 25.
It’s been a good start to the year for Dylan. The success of the A Complete Unknown biopic has given Dylan’s catalogue a healthy bump. According to Billboard, Dylan’s weekly streaming numbers have grown by roughly 150% since before the film was released in America in December.
