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David Byrne & St Vincent: “Get out of your comfort zone!”

Peter Shapiro
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David Byrne & St Vincent: “Get out of your comfort zone!”

From Uncut’s October 2012 issue [Take 185]. We travel to David Byrne’s office in New York to meet Byrne and Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, to discuss their collaborative album, Love This Giant...

It could be the heat doing crazy things to my brain, but as David Byrne paces around the office of his record label, Todo Mundo, I am struck by a strange thought. In his blue and white wide-wale seersucker trousers with matching braces, short-sleeve white cotton shirt and white flip-flops (to say nothing of his white hair and gradually whitening eyebrows), David Byrne resembles nothing so much as a giant ice lolly.

No-one, not even a freeze pop, wants to be in New York City in the middle of July, and today is why. It’s 100° Fahrenheit with 65 per cent humidity: walking in Manhattan is like trudging through a swamp of other people’s sweat and diesel exhaust. Then there’s the smell. Even on the genteel streets of Todo Mundo’s SoHo neighborhood, which is otherwise populated by swanky Comme Des Garçons boutiques, the fumes of dead rodents exude their unmistakable perfume like the devil’s own bougainvillea.

Although he rode his bike to work through these stifling streets (as he always does — after Lance Armstrong, Byrne is probably America’s most famous bicyclist), Byrne is totally cool and unruffled. A striking contrast, in fact, to the familiar sweaty, anxiety-ridden salary man he portrayed in Talking Heads’ video for “Once In A Lifetime”. Byrne’s Popsicle-like appearance today is only accentuated by the fairground cornucopia of tchotchkes and ephemera that is the Todo Mundo office. The walls are adorned with paintings of the apocalyptic visions of self-ordained minister Howard Finster (one of which was the cover for Talking Heads’ Little Creatures album), game fish taxidermy, pistol range targets complete with bullet holes, a Christopher Columbus jigsaw in which the explorer’s face has been replaced by a comic book’s metal skull, and a photo of an astronaut holding a cassette of Talking Heads’ first album. There is a shelf of a bookcase that functions as a shrine to the caprices of consumerism (at least to an American): tins of spotted dick and mushy peas, odd liqueurs from Turkmenistan, baldness cures, bongs in the shape of skeletons, and miniature statuettes of lucha libre wrestlers from Mexico. Elsewhere, a rather hideous and obscenely phallic cutaway model of an earthworm’s innards sits on top of a television set, conjuring long repressed memories of traumatic biology class dissections.

Byrne’s office may be a reliquary of capitalist detritus, but interior decoration aside, he’s never been interested in resting on his laurels and mummifying his past. Byrne could easily fund a comfortable retirement by donning The Big Suit from Stop Making Sense and churning through “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down The House” until he needs to put his dentures in a glass. Instead, unlike most of his peers, he constantly has his ear to the underground and engages in quirky, charming art projects (like hooking up an old pipe organ to a disused building’s plumbing and ceiling beams so visitors can “play” the building) in order to satisfy his perpetually restless polymath imagination.

“In order to feed my own creative juices, part of that process is being inspired by what other people are doing,” Byrne says. “Not that I want to copy them or rip them off, it’s just keeping my juices flowing, hearing what’s new, hearing what people are doing. I do presume that keeping the creative juices flowing means that you have to do new things fairly often and challenge yourself and get out of your comfort zone, all those sorts of things, which may be a bit much to ask for people who have achieved a certain level of success. They might feel like, ‘I did it. Isn’t that good enough?’”

What’s been catching Byrne’s ears of late is the new wave of ambitious, intelligent indie rock coming out of New York: Dirty Projectors, The National, Sufjan Stevens, and especially St Vincent, the deceptively dark chamber-rock project of Texan exile and former Polyphonic Spree member Annie Clark, with whom he has collaborated on a rather fabulous new album, Love This Giant.

After performing with many of this new guard at the Dark Was The Night charity concert in May 2009, Byrne declared on his blog that they represented the “triumph of art rock”. “I said that? Oops,” he says today, half-joking. “I think I wrote at the time on my blog that with that crowd, Annie included, the ambition wasn’t, ‘I want to be a star. I want to throw televisions on the floor and be driven by chauffeurs.’ It was really, ‘What excites me the most is making great music.’ That’s the vibe I got from this generation of musicians. That’s great. That seems incredibly healthy, besides the fact a lot of them are making really good music.”

Shortly after the Dark Was The Night concert, Byrne and St Vincent were approached by Housing Works, a charity/bookstore in New York, to collaborate on a night of music to be performed at the shop. Byrne, both a relentless collaborator and a “dweeby fan” of St Vincent, naturally agreed. Although on the surface St Vincent’s baroque, fragile songs seem to be an odd match with Byrne’s open-to-anything MO, they actually approach their craft in much the same way: Clark is an as avaricious consumer of art and culture as Byrne, looking for inspiration anywhere she can find it, from Marilyn Monroe’s diaries to the peyote surrealism of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movies, and her perhaps unexpected talent for guitar shredding has landed her gigs with everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Downtown enfant terrible Glenn Branca.

But as they started to throw around musical ideas, they ran into a problem: how do you construct a program of music for a tiny space that isn’t two hippies with acoustic guitars singing campfire songs? “I happened to be really inspired by the timbre of brass at the time and hadn’t really worked with it much,” explains Clark, who’s joined Byrne in the Todo Mundo offices. “I was also thinking that this space would be conducive to a small brass band and just a limited PA, because it’s a bookstore, so you’re not going to bring the bombast. Then we kept writing and kept going, the band got bigger and bigger [laughs]. There’s also something nice about brass in that it can be kind of timeless. It’s not like we were going for a genre study in any particular mode. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s make a…’”

“Dubstep?” Byrne offers.

“Dubstep album,” Clark continues, laughing, “or this is coming straight from Bourbon Street. We were trying to do something a little new with it. What is dubstep anyway?” she asks semi-facetiously.

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT OCTOBER 2012/TAKE 185 IN THE ARCHIVE

Ticket to Ryde

Rob Hughes
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Ticket to Ryde

If you really want to get away from it all, Chale Abbey might be the spot. Situated on the southern tip of the Isle Of Wight, the studio is housed within a fabulous 16th Century barn, all original oak trusses and natural stone walls. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere and a 10-minute walk to the coast,” enthuses multi-instrumentalist Jordan Lehning, flipping his phone camera to give Uncut a virtual pan of the studio. “We’re in the control room now. It’s just beautiful, totally isolated. A great place to make a record.” Even if it means travelling all the way from Nashville, which is where Lehning, Andrew Combs, Dominic Billett and Romford-born Spencer Cullum are usually based. Their new group, Echolalia, is rounded out by bassist Eli Beaird, multi-instrumentalist Juan Solorzano and Lehning’s brother Jason on synths and engineering duties.

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“A few years ago I told Jordan about this magical place, so we ended up booking some days to record here,” explains Cullum, peering over Lehning’s shoulder. The pair loved Chale Abbey so much that they’re back there now, working on another project. But before that, Echolalia’s self-titled debut is due out in February – it’s a warm, psychedelic folk set that often feels peculiarly English, evoking the pastoral spirit of Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers or Cat Stevens. “A lot of the songs were written on the spot, really,” says Cullum. “Then we’d all start chipping in ideas.” There was very little discussion beforehand, deliberately so. “I think we each brought three tunes to the table, and pretty much our first instincts guided the direction,” says Lehning. “We kind of just dove in. I think we cut the record in three or four days.”

The secret to the project’s success, it seems, is trust. These musicians have all been friends for some time, appearing on each other’s records or at live shows. Yet they’d never played altogether before. “It felt like one of those things that you talk about with friends when you’re out for a drink but never seemed likely to come to fruition,” says Combs, joining us over Zoom from the States. “But Jordan made it happen. I think ‘collaborative’ and ‘fun’ were the key words for me.”

Jason Lehning chimes in from Nashville: “With most records, you’re just framing one personality, putting all your energy into making that person sound great,” he observes. “Echolalia has singers and artists, but there was none of that kind of energy. It was like hanging out with your childhood friends and riding bikes around the neighbourhood. But it still has that artistry. That was a really interesting element for me.”

This overriding sense of bonhomie is mirrored in the album’s closing track, the spontaneous “In The Pub”. Essentially a geezer-ish East London singalong, it proved a cultural education for the visiting Americans. “I think it was the first take,” laughs Jordan Lehning. “We couldn’t have done that two or three times. It was the last thing we tracked and it was really funny.”

“I was channelling Chas & Dave,” chirps Cullum. “Me and Dom are big fans!”

It remains to be seen if Echolalia will be a one-off. Schedules being what they are, everyone involved is hopeful that the stars will align again soon. The prospect of touring, most likely in the UK and Europe, is also on the agenda. “For me, it’s the perfect band,” says Cullum. “Every band member is someone that I admire, musically and personality-wise. Usually, when you’re younger and in a band, the bloomin’ bass player wants to do a Snow Patrol song and your drummer wants you all to wear hats…”

Echolalia is released by Full Time Hobby on February 28

Songhoy Blues – Héritage

Nick Hasted
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Songhoy Blues – Héritage

When Tinariwen popularised the idea of desert blues in the West, bandmembers’ previous participation in Tuareg rebel warfare lent their music heroic romance, conjuring images of nomad players as comfortable with a machine gun as a guitar, and finally manifesting The Clash’s fanciful notion of combat rock. The blues’ feedback loop from West Africa through American slavery to Hendrix seemed satisfyingly complete in their dusty grooves.

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Songhoy Blues followed broadly in this musical tradition, but are from a different time and place, and tell a significantly different tale. The Songhoy people originate from the region around the River Niger in Northern Mali which was conquered first by Tuareg rebels then music-loathing Islamists. Guitarist Garba Touré escaped to the capital Bamako in 2012, forming the descriptively named Songhoy Blues with exiled compatriots. Touré was steeped in Hendrix, and (unlike Tinariwen, initially) John Lee Hooker and BB King’s US blues, alongside hip-hop and a multiplicity of Malian styles, forming the basis of the band’s crowd-rousing electric attack. As their participation in the brutal documentary First They’ll Have To Kill Us demonstrates, there is little romance in their background. Instead, this is blues in its fundamental sense: refugee music, played with redemptive joy, but suffused with inconsolable longing.

Songhoy Blues’ three previous albums and thrilling live shows have majored in electric Malian R&B, born out of the steamy Bamako clubs where they started. Héritage is a handbrake turn to acoustic music, with Garba Touré’s trademark electric playing mostly absent. “We always wanted to make an acoustic album,” Touré explains. “When we started the group, all of our songs were composed around a calabash and an acoustic guitar. But when we started playing in clubs things started changing very quickly for us – especially with Africa Express, where we were accelerated even further…[but] we always kept in mind the idea of acoustic Songhoy Blues music.”

Confined to Mali by Covid, they finally had the time, and the opportunity to not only unplug, but connect to Bamako’s sometimes febrile cultural mix, with its edge of violence from military government and continuing conflict in the north. They invited dozens of musicians from every section of Malian society, from childhood heroes such as balafon virtuoso Neba Solo to Ali Farka Touré collaborators Dassi Mabo and Afel Bocoum and ngoni player Mamoutou Diabaté, a guestlist even broad enough to include Texan slide guitarist Kim Herriage.

This was no mere supergroup blow-out. Songhoy Blues songs are typically socially concerned and instructive in nature, and Héritage embodies their desires for their multi-ethnic nation. “There is total confusion at the centre and in the north, creating a climate of mistrust between people,” bassist Oumar Touré explains. “That’s why Héritage is a response to the call to live together, to revalorise our culture from north to south, to avoid amalgamation. So while we’ve remained almost entirely within our pentatonic musical pantheon, we’ve brought in musicians and singers who we felt exemplified different aspects of Malian culture. Malian music has always been a blend of the ethnic groups that make it up, that’s its beauty.”

With what Garba Touré terms their Afro-rock’n’roll dialled down, Paul Chandler and the band’s co-production deploys their epic cast as distinct elements in ultimately communal music. The studio sounds packed yet with sufficient space for each individual contribution. “Borotery” exemplifies the stripped-back yet rich sound-world, as Garba Touré’s languidly intricate acoustic intro precedes a relaxed but thickly woven mix of wailing Texan steel guitar, pastoral flute and twin ngonis. “Batto” then briefly lets Touré cut loose with raw electric squalls taped as if distantly heard over a transistor radio, bracketed by rustic ngoni strums. “Gara”, a gently sung admonition for children to obey their elders, is driven home with mantric insistence, and “Toukambela” replaces electric volume with a simmering polyrhythmic maelstrom streaked with flashes of Malian flute, violin and single-stringed monochord, while Aliou Touré confides and exhorts. The plethora of contributors also lets “Dagabi” ride on Neba Solo’s relentlessly pulsing balafon and set Aliou Touré against massed male and female choruses, in punchy acoustic Malian R&B which lacks nothing in assaultive power.

“Issa” concludes Héritage with an eco-conscious protest song about the need to protect rivers as sources of life. Songhoy Blues are surely thinking of the Niger, whose bend contains their currently lost homeland. Garba Touré’s opening acoustic strum, though, comes straight from the Mississippi, ’til it becomes a tributary of calabash beats and Aliou Touré’s sometimes eager, sometimes yearning voice. Héritage blends traditions from Clarksdale to Timbuktu, bringing it all back to a multitude of homes, until Songhoy Blues one day return to theirs.

Chris Eckman – The Land We Knew The Best

Allan Jones
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Chris Eckman – The Land We Knew The Best

Buy The Land We Knew The Best on vinyl here

This fabulous album is a timely reminder that Chris Eckman has been making sometimes spectacularly singular music since at least the early ’90s, when The Walkabouts, formed in 1984 by Eckman with singer Carla Torgersen, famously became the first non-grunge band to sign with Sub Pop. The label was otherwise awash with bands of incredibly hairy young men in shorts who all sounded angry, frustrated, easily upset. There was a lot of tortured wailing set to loud, bulimic guitars; much monumental riffing. Compared to the heavy musical footprints left by grunge superstars like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden, The Walkabouts on their 1990 debut, Scavenger, stepped more lightly across a musical landscape they made increasingly their own that entertained as well as punk, aspects of folk-rock, country, the blues. You suspected they’d be happier in the studio with Cowboy Jack Clement or David Briggs than Butch Vig or Steve Albini, more likely to cite Kris Kristoffersen, Townes Van Zandt and Neil Young as influences than Black Flag or Black Sabbath.

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This wasn’t hipster gaslighting. They recorded a wild-eyed version of Van Zandt’s “Snake Mountain Blues” on their second album, 1993’s New West Motel (Townes later covered Eckman’s “Stopping Off Place”, from 1996’s Devil’s Road). If Neil Young, meanwhile, had heard the guitars at the end of Scavenger’s epic “Train To Mercy” (a track that also featured Brian Eno on keyboards and backing vocals) or “Long Time Here” from its follow-up, he might have been tempted to record Mirror Ball with them instead of Pearl Jam. On 1993’s Satisfied Mind, they covered Charlie Rich and The Carter Family alongside songs by John Cale, Nick Cave, Patti Smith and Gene Clark, with REM’s Peter Buck playing dulcimer on a striking version of the traditional “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” Their 1994 album, Setting The Woods On Fire, took its title from Hank Williams. For his part, Eckman wrote songs with a literary flourish about wrecked American lives, sometimes reminiscent of the country noir of Appalachian crime writer Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone, The Death Of Sweet Mister). He had a flair, too, for the kind of American gothic once favoured by Nick Cave, murder ballads full of burning rain, rivers on fire, rural apocalypse. The Walkabouts had a rowdy side, too, tracks across most of their albums that recalled the happy racket of early-’80s LA cowpunk bands like Tex & The Horseheads and Blood On The Saddle. Twenty years later, the noise they were making would have been called Americana. At the time, domestically at least, it was largely ignored.

As far as America was concerned, The Walkabouts might as well have spent their entire career in the musical equivalent of a witness protection programme, hidden in plain sight. In other words, America didn’t get them at all. Europe beckoned. They had a constituency there, an actual fan base. And a more sympathetic label, too: Glitterhouse, the German independent label, originally a European outlet for Sub Pop, who from 1993 released 10 further Walkabouts albums, including 1996 highlight Devil’s Road, recorded partly with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, plus three Chris & Carla duo albums by Eckman and Torgersen. The band’s swansong was 2011’s Travels In The Dustland, one of their best. Eckman was meanwhile active on several separate fronts, playing and recording with Norwegian alt.country band Midnight Choir and Willard Grant Conspiracy on their 2003 masterpiece Regard The End and its follow-up, Let It Roll. In 2007, he formed the trio Dirtmusic with ex-Bad Seed Hugo Race and former Codeine and Come guitarist Chris Brokaw and produced the Malian band Tamikrest for Glitterhouse. He’s also recorded six solo albums since 1999’s A Janela, the last of them 2021’s austere, downcast Where The Spirit Rests.

The title of Eckman’s new album suggests some vague kinship with Woody Guthrie, but The Land We Knew The Best is hardly an album of dustbowl ballads, songs about hard lives in a hard country. There’s a shack or farmhouse on the cover, but the landscape is European, a hint of tundra beyond the mountains. So it’s not a letter home, either, a requiem for the America that Eckman left behind, written in exile. Rather, it’s a collection of interior monologues, essays in contrition, apology, enough regret in these songs to flood a valley. “Somehow I missed the memo that said when you reach breaking point, you just say stop…” Eckman sings on the confessional “Haunted Nights”, an attempt to explain ruinous behaviour, the tendency of some people to only be happy when the house is burning down around them, the temple walls collapsing, self-destruction as a default setting.

Where The Spirit Rests was sometimes inhospitably stark, occasionally just Eckman’s voice and guitar. The Land We Knew The Best has an altogether warmer, more inviting sound, played out mostly on piano, acoustic guitars, double bass, violin, some pedal steel, subliminal strings, arranged by Belgian composer Catherine Graindorge, who’s done similar jobs for Nick Cave and Iggy Pop. If much of Where The Spirit Rises sounded like it had come from a small, airless room, “Guinevere”, the opening track here, is the sound of a window being opened to let in a warm nostalgic breeze. Like Dave Alvin’s unbearably poignant “From A Kitchen Table”, the song is a letter, a message to a long-gone love to come, finally, home, to take “the wild chance we never got”. Things will be better this time. “My mind burns different now,” Eckman sings in his raspy end-times voice.

“Town Lights Fade” aspires to the same kind of reassurance. “The rage is gone, and the fear has calmed,” Eckman sings over a dreamy melody, pixilated percussion, an electric guitar like a sudden shaft of sunlight illuminating a better idea of the world. Scything viola brings a vagabond Celtic swirl to “Running Hot”, a defiant porch stomper about rehabilitation and resurrection. “From these flatlands we will rise,” Eckman intones. “Mountain tops got stars for eyes.” The exhilarating “Buttercup” adds an irresistible motorik backbeat to the mix. “Laments” is a slow, smouldering thing, something simmering on a stove, hints of classic Crazy Horse in the gathering musical storm. Four minutes in, the track is finally handed over to the guitars that have been threatening to overwhelm it and finally do, albeit a little too briefly. One of the album’s highlights, “Haunted Nights” is an unfolding of painful memories, a catalogue of broken things, heartbreakingly set to Andraz Mazi’s mournful pedal steel, Slovenian singer-songwriter Jana Beltram adding beautifully hushed backing vocals. “The Cranes” is ominous, brooding, flocks of migrating birds appearing through a low mist, a possibly bleak omen. Delivered with the elegant intimacy of vintage Leonard Cohen, “Last Train Home” is a hymnal finale that perhaps returns the singer to thoughts of Genevieve, still missing from his life, kept close now only in memories of her touch, her taste, her kisses, a postcard of a “skyline in August” sent from somewhere with her love. Beltane’s spectral voice, fading into a final silence, is the last thing you hear on a remarkable album about loss, forgiveness, rebuilding a life from ruin, maybe the best thing Eckman’s put his name to.

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Inside our free Uncut CD – Wilco’s Noisy Ghosts, a companion to A Ghost Is Born

Uncut Staff
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Inside our free Uncut CD – Wilco’s Noisy Ghosts, a companion to A Ghost Is Born

Wilco have compiled another spectacular CD for Uncut: Noisy Ghosts, hooked around their upcoming A Ghost Is Born anniversary edition, is available for free with the March 2025 issue of Uncut.

Wilco have compiled another spectacular CD for Uncut: Noisy Ghosts, hooked around their upcoming A Ghost Is Born anniversary edition, is available for free with the March 2025 issue of Uncut.

“This record isn’t like any other record we’d done before,” says Jeff Tweedy of Wilco’s fifth album. “That’s the sort of thing I value in my own record collection. Those are the records that are the most unique.”

A Ghost Is Born grew out of an intense period of upheaval for the band, who undertook a series of wild schemes and unusual creative exercises at Soma Electronic Sound Studios in Chicago.

“I was already doing some cut-up techniques and free writing and things like that, which I really enjoyed,” says Tweedy. “I discovered that I liked the stuff that I didn’t think about more than the stuff that I did think about. With the sessions for Ghost, I was trying to find ways to extend that to the band and get everybody else to buy into it.”

It didn’t take much persuading. Those Soma experiments allowed them to reconsider what a Wilco album could be, to the extent that they made up a series of fictional albums in the studio, complete with its own fake artwork and fake titles.

This exclusive Uncut CD, compiled by the band, is another alternate-universe Wilco album. Bookended by two very different versions of album highlight “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” – including one unavailable anywhere else – it features strange experiments and outtakes from the early 2000s. A fine satellite to the new 20th-anniversary A Ghost Is Born boxset, this CD shows how much Wilco changed during just a few years.

ORDER A COPY FROM US HERE

1 SPIDERS (KIDSMOKE) (EXCLUSIVE TRACK)
Recorded 3/24/03 at SOMA – Chicago, IL
Originally issued on Noisy Ghosts (Uncut, 2025)
An early — and exclusive! — version of this fan favorite. Tweedy had yet to devise the song’s signature krautrock beat, so they depended on drummer Glenn Kotche to suture the song together. Churchly piano chords fight it out with barbs of guitar distortion, and Tweedy skips the lengthy guitar solo and jumps right into the lighter-raising chord progression. It all wraps up in a tidy five minutes instead of sprawling to nearly eleven. “I didn’t really remember doing this style of the song outside of Sear Sound in New York but apparently we did,” says Tweedy. “When I listened back to it, I was really surprised. Everything happens at different places.”

2 HANDSHAKE DRUGS
Recorded 11/13/03 Take 2 at Sear Sound – New York City
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
(Nonesuch 0075597899009, 2025)
Wilco recorded countless versions of “Handshake Drugs” both in Chicago and later at their official Ghost sessions in New York, but this one might very easily have ended up on the final album. Building from a buoyant pop bounce to a frantic guitar freakout, it’s perhaps Tweedy’s most explicit statement about his mental state during this time, when his intense anxiety attacks and frequent migraines nearly ended Wilco. “There are songs on every record that feel very… not necessarily autobiographical, but they do have a very real, very literal relationship to my life,” he says. “Ghost is pretty abstract, but the songs do work that way.”

3 KICKING TELEVISION
Originally issued on I’m A Wheel (Nonesuch WILCO1/
0075597985177, 2004 UK 7”)
After the departure of Jay Bennett, Tweedy took over lead guitar duties, playing more solos and developing a raw playing style grounded in his post-punk heroes. “Andy Gill and Keith Levene gave me permission to play guitar the way I do,” he says. “At the end of the day, your own technique is the only technique that matters.” This abrasive skewering of self-help culture — or is it an ode to the legendary New York punk band? — didn’t make the Ghost Is Born tracklist but was such a staple on the subsequent tour that Wilco named their 2005 double live album after the song.

4 I’M A WHEEL
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch 0075597980929, 2004)
and I’m A Wheel (Nonesuch WILCO1/0075597985177, 2004 UK 7”)
If “Kicking Television” didn’t make the album, possibly to make way for “I’m A Wheel”. As boisterous as a toddler after too many Oreos, it’s a showcase for Tweedy’s bouncing-off-the-walls guitarwork and his nonsensical cut-and-paste lyrics, but it’s also one of his wildest vocal performances. He wrings great profundity out of a well-placed “ummm” and punctuates the song with a larynx-shredding howl. It also has the distinction of being the only album track released as a seven-inch single, cleverly enacting the sentiment of the song — “I’m a wheel, I will turn on you!” — with each spin.

5 HUMMINGBIRD
Recorded 2/8/02 at SOMA – Chicago, IL
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
(Nonesuch 0075597899009, 2025)
Early in their sessions at Soma, Wilco took a stab at this Ghost track, which originally had a slower tempo, a moodier feel, lots of sticky sound effects, and a skittering dulcimer in the background. Over the next two years the song evolved dramatically, thanks to Mikael Jorgenson’s exuberant piano and Jim O’Rourke’s expressive string arrangement. Tweedy’s father was a fan and even considered it their best song, even if it is a meditation on creative futility: “His goal in life was to be an echo… but in the deep chrome canyons of loudest Manhattans, no one could hear him.”

6 BARNYARD PIMP
Recorded August 2002 at SOMA – Chicago, IL
Originally issued on The Wilco Book (PictureBox Inc.
ISBN 0-9713670-3-5, 2004)
An early experiment from the Ghost sessions, this weird instrumental buzzes and honks with bizarre approximations of farmyard animal cries and strutting drumbeats. It was never considered for the album but did appear in The Wilco Book in 2004, along with several other odd outtakes. Twenty years later, Tweedy laughs at the song and especially its cartoonish title: “There was a period when a lot of things came out of my mouth and were written down, usually just to make Jim O’Rourke laugh. ‘Barnyard Pimp’ is exactly the kind of phrase that would tickle him.”

7 SPIDERS (KIDSMOKE) (LIVE)
Recorded 10/1/04 Live at the Wang Center – Boston, MA
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
(Nonesuch 0075597899009, 2025)
These songs didn’t settle down even after the album was released. Instead, the band kept tinkering with them on the Ghost tour throughout 2004 and into 2005. During that time, this testy, challenging album cut took on new importance in Wilco’s setlists, and this live version, recorded in Boston, represents a pivotal moment in the song’s evolution: an early indication that “Spiders” would become a concert ritual for years to come. “It just gives everybody that sense of release where we can forget our troubles and just surrender,” says guitarist Nels Cline. “It’s like a collective bonding, where you all lose yourself in rock and roll.”

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Marianne Faithfull: “It’s a miracle, really…”

Laura Barton
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Marianne Faithfull: “It’s a miracle, really…”

From Uncut’s June 2021 issue (Take 289). As she prepares to release her 22nd studio album, She Walks In Beauty, rock’s grand dame discussed recovery, Romantic poetry and how the ’60s weren’t all they were cracked up to be…

The old St Joseph’s Convent School, a red-bricked, broad-lawned building founded by the Sisters of St Marie Madeleine Postel, lies close to the centre of Reading. Marianne Faithfull first came here at the age of eight. By sixth form, her main enthusiasm was English Literature. “I sat somewhere near the middle – near the front, but not exactly at the front,” she says. “It wasn’t a very big class, but it was very important to me.”

This Spring, Faithfull releases her 22nd studio album, She Walks In Beauty, a spoken-word collection of some of her favourite Romantic poetry, scored by the composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, with contributions from Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal. It is a crowning moment in her career; the product of a long-held ambition to interpret works by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and their contemporaries that she has carried close since St Joseph’s. Cave calls it “the greatest Marianne Faithfull album ever. And that’s saying something.” Ellis, meanwhile, describes it to Uncut as “this incredible thing, this kind of wonder. This little bit of a miracle.”

On a midweek afternoon, Faithfull, 74, is at home in Putney, south-west London, batting away questions about ’60s infamy to recall the formative influence of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and her English teacher, Mrs Simpson.“She was very ordinary, she had white hair and glasses,” she says. “But she was really, really good. I liked her so much, and she taught me all this stuff about the Romantics. She taught me for that first year, and then of course I was torn away, and I was discovered…”

The story of how Marianne Faithfull was discovered – a teenage ingénue fêted by the in-crowd and caught up with the Stones, then duly lost to scandal and addiction, has coloured much of her career. For a long time, the popular imagination carried her as a kind of tragic muse, a victim of her own beauty and the era’s excesses. Later it recast her as a fighter, a treasure, an artist of indefatigable spirit.

Today, she sounds determined and faintly amused. She has a deeply fragrant voice, grown a little hoarse following a serious altercation with Covid that kept her in hospital for several weeks last spring. “I got terribly ill. I don’t really remember it, but apparently I almost died,” she says. “I managed not to die.”

Still, the effects of the illness have lingered – she warns we might have to conduct our interview in segments, to allow her breaks to recalibrate. “It’s been very hard to cope with,” she explains. “Particularly my lungs, because I used to smoke, and I have of course got emphysema or whatever they call it now.” She pauses. “It’s got another name, and that’s the big problem – my memory, and the fatigue. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this! Not the point!”

The point is that before she contracted Covid, Faithfull had begun work on She Walks In Beauty. “When I came out of hospital I finished it,” she says. “I was worried: would I be able to do it? But I was, amazingly enough. It’s a miracle, really. It’s beautiful, because the ones I did post-Covid are very, very vulnerable and that’s kind of lovely.”

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT JUNE 2021/TAKE 289 IN THE ARCHIVE

Bob Dylan plots Spring tour dates and Outlaw Festival shows

Michael Bonner
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Bob Dylan plots Spring tour dates and Outlaw Festival shows

Bob Dylan has announced a huge run of dates for 2025, both his own shows and as part of this year’s Outlaw Festival.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

He plays 20 shows with his band, beginning in March 25 in Tulsa, followed by 34 dates on the Outlaw Festival 10th anniversary tour. Dylan and Willie Nelson co-headline each show alongside a rotating cast of special guests including Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Billy Strings and more.

Click here for ticket details for Dylan’s shows.

You can find about full line-up details and tickets for the Outlaw Festival here.

Bob Dylan’s tour dates
March 25 – Tulsa, OK @ Tulsa Theater
March 26 – Little Rock, AK @ Robinson Center
March 28 – Springfield, MO @ Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts
March 29 – Wichita, KS @ Century II Concert Hall
March 30 – Topeka, KS @ Topeka Performing Arts Center
April 1 – Omaha, NE @ Orpheum Theater
April 2 – Sioux City, IA @ Orpheum Theatre
April 4 – Mankato, MN @ Mayo Clinic Health System Event Center
April 5 – Eau Claire, WI @ The Sonnentag Center
April 6 – Green Bay, WI @ The Weidner – Cofrin Family Hall
April 8 – Davenport, II @ Adler Theatre
April 9 – Peoria, IL @ Prairie Home Alliance Theater
April 11 – West Lafayette, IN @ Purdue University – Elliott Hall of Music
April 12 – Fort Wayne, IN @ The Embassy Theatre
April 14 – South Bend, IN @ The Morris Performing Arts Center
April 16 – Kalamazoo, MI @ Western Michigan State University – Miller Auditorium
April 17 – Toledo, OH @ Stranahan Theater
April 19 – Youngstown, OH @ Powers Auditorium at DeYor Performing Arts Center
April 21 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Benedum Center for the Performing Arts
April 22 – Williamsport, PA @ Community Arts Center

Outlaw Festival tour dates
May 13 – Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre, Phoenix, AZ
May 15 – North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, Chula Vista, CA
May 16 – Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA
May 18 – Toyota Amphitheatre, Wheatland, CA
May 20 – Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater, Nampa, ID
May 22 – ONE Spokane Stadium, Spokane, WA
May 24 – Cascades Amphitheater, Ridgefield, WA
May 25 – The Gorge Amphitheatre, Quincy, WA
June 20 – Pine Knob Music Theatre, Clarkston, MI
June 21 – Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, OH
June 22 – Riverbend Music Center, Cincinnati, OH
June 25 – FirstBank Amphitheater, Franklin, TN
June 27 – Radians Amphitheater, Memphis, TN
June 28 – Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Maryland Heights, MO
June 29 – Thunder Ridge Nature Arena Ridgedale, MO
July 5 – Dos Equis Pavilion, Dallas, TX
July 6 – The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion Presented By Huntsman, The Woodlands, TX
July 25 – Ameris Bank Amphitheatre, Alpharetta, GA
July 26 – PNC Music Pavilion, Charlotte, NC
July 27 – Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh, NC
July 29 – Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, Virginia Beach, VA
August 1 – Northwell at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
August 2 – Broadview Stage at SPAC, Saratoga Springs, NY
August 3 – BankNH Pavilion, Gilford, NH
August 8 – Darien Lake Amphitheater, Buffalo, NY
August 9 – Hersheypark Stadium, Hershey, PA
August 10 – Empower Federal Credit Union Amphitheater at Lakeview, Syracuse, NY
September 5 – Maine Savings Amphitheater, Bangor, ME
September 6 – Xfinity Theatre, Hartford, CT
September 7 – Xfinity Center, Mansfield, MA
September 12 – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, Camden, NJ
September 13 – PNC Bank Arts Center, Holmdel, NJ
September 14 – Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, MD
September 19 – Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, WI

Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt announce collaborative album, Loose Talk

Michael Bonner
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Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt announce collaborative album, Loose Talk

Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt have announced details of a collaborative album, Loose Talk, which is released on March 28.

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The album follows on from “Star“, a Ferry/Barratt collaboration that appeared on Ferry’s Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 last year.

The first release from Loose Talk is “Orchestra“, which you can hear below.

Says Ferry, “The whole experience of making Loose Talk has had an interesting newness about it. It seems to have opened a whole new chapter in my work. There’s a really strong mood to the work that Amelia does and I was very conscious of not getting in the way of her words. Hopefully, together, we’ve created something neither could do on our own.

“The nearest I ever got to doing pieces like this before would maybe be back in Roxy with ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache‘ and ‘Mother Of Pearl‘. To some extent, those are kind of spoken monologues. I’m pleased that when we’ve played Loose Talk to people, they’ve said, ‘Oh, this sounds really different.’ That’s what I’ve always wanted with everything I’ve done, or been involved in, to be: different. Different to what you’ve heard before, or seen before. That’s the whole point of being an artist: trying to create a new thing, a new world.”

Says Barratt, “Loose Talk is a conversation between two artists: a collaborative album of music by Bryan Ferry with spoken texts by me. It’s cinematic; music put to pictures.

“There’s possibility for experimentation within a frame. And there’s a freedom in knowing exactly what my part to play is, then being able to pass a baton, stretching out creatively and knowing there is someone on the other side to take it further. Nothing feels off limits.”

The tracklisting for Loose Talk is:

Big Things
Stand Near Me
Florist
Cowboy Hat
Demolition
Orchestra
Holiday
Landscape
Pictures On A Wall
White Noise
Loose Talk

The album will be released on black vinyl, green vinyl and clear vinyl, CD and digitally. The album is available to pre-order/save here. 

Paul Weller curates soul music comp for Ace Records

Sam Richards
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Paul Weller curates soul music comp for Ace Records

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.

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“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

Uncut – March 2025

Uncut Staff
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Uncut – March 2025

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

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.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

Marianne Faithfull has died

Michael Bonner
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Marianne Faithfull has died

Marianne Faithfull has died aged 78, at home in London, in the company of her family, according to a statement quoted by BBC News.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

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.

Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds

Louis Pattison
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Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds

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.

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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.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – The Purple Bird

Sharon O'Connell
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Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – The Purple Bird

Buy The Purple Bird on vinyl here

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.

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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 Bird and 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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Introducing the new Uncut: Wilco, Jefferson Airplane, Patterson Hood, White Stripes and more

Michael Bonner
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Introducing the new Uncut: Wilco, Jefferson Airplane, Patterson Hood, White Stripes and more

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY

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.

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Win tickets to see Becoming Led Zeppelin

Uncut Staff
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Win tickets to see Becoming Led Zeppelin

We have TWO pairs of tickets to give away to see Becoming Led Zeppelin.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

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 10am GMT.

Billed as The Yardbirds, where did Led Zeppelin’s first ever concert on September 7, 1968 take place?

CLICK HERE TO ENTER

Terms & Conditions

The competition closes on Monday, February 3, 2025.
Winners will be notified as soon as possible afterwards.
Prize is for 2 adults over the age of 18.
Travel arrangements to the event are not included and are the responsibility of the winner and their travelling companion/s.
The prize takes place on set date of February 5, 2025, and it is the responsibility of the winner and their travelling companion/s to be available over this date.
All elements of the prize must be taken at the same time.
Once booked, the prize cannot be amended or cancelled.
The prize is non-refundable and non-transferable.
No cash alternative is available.

If any prize or product is lost or damaged during the course of delivery to the recipient, Kelsey Media will provide reasonable assistance in seeking to resolve the problem. However, it will not always be possible to obtain replacements for lost or damaged goods, and in that event, no financial compensation would be payable by Kelsey Media or their affiliates.

Kelsey Media reserve the right to cancel the competition, if circumstances change that are beyond our control. 

Entry is free. Open to residents of the UK aged over 18. Employees of Kelsey Media and their family members are not eligible to win. Only one entry permitted per person, no bulk entries will be accepted.

Uncut is a Kelsey Media brand. At Kelsey Media we take your privacy seriously and will only use your personal information to provide the products and services you have requested from us. We will only contact you with news and special offers via the preferences you have indicated. We will never share your information with any third party without your consent. You can view our full Privacy Policy here.

Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy to perform R.E.M’s Fables Of The Reconstruction on UK tour

Michael Bonner
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Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy to perform R.E.M’s Fables Of The Reconstruction on UK tour

Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy And Friends have announced a 2025 UK tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of R.E.M.’s 1985 album, Fables of the Reconstruction.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

After the pair’s acclaimed, sold out run honouring R.E.M.’s debut album Murmur — which saw the four original members of R.E.M. come together for the first time in 17 years at the tour’s Athens stop in America — the Fables tour will bring Shannon & Narducy together again for a run of live UK dates.

On the tour, Shannon and Narducy — alongside Jon Wurster (drums), Nick Macri (bass), Dag Juhlin (guitar) and Vijay Tellis-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.

Paul McCartney and Wings’ Venus And Mars gets 50th Anniversary vinyl edition

Michael Bonner
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Paul McCartney and Wings’ Venus And Mars gets 50th Anniversary vinyl edition

Wings' fourth studio album Venus And Mars is being reissued to mark it's 50th anniversary.

Wings‘ fourth studio album Venus And Mars is being reissued to mark it’s 50th anniversary.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

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

Robert Wyatt: “I’m so somewhere else now…”

Tom Pinnock
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Robert Wyatt: “I’m so somewhere else now…”

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

“Judas!” The fan who heckled Bob Dylan

Bleddyn Butcher
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“Judas!” The fan who heckled Bob Dylan

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

Bob Dylan announces more tour dates

Michael Bonner
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Bob Dylan announces more tour dates

Bob Dylan has announced three more shows for 2025, including one in his home state of Minnesota.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

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.

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