Eno’s sublime new album, Lux, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (December 2012, Take 187) – so we’re delving back to December 2010’s issue to meet the time-travelling conceptualist himself, a man who’s into ecstatic food cults, Music For Maternity Wards – and trying to remember his own past. “One of the big driving forces for Roxy Music,” he says, “was that we hated hippies…” Words: Stephen Troussé
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The banana’s back. Not before time. Late last year, Lou Reed’s reputation suffered a serious blow when his ill-fated collaboration with Metallica met with hostility not witnessed since Metal Machine Music. He even had death threats. This 45th anniversary edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico is a timely reminder (if one is needed) that Reed at his best had few peers and no equals, and that his writer’s eye – literate, probing, explicit – was unflinching right from the start. He was always hardcore.
The new Uncut’s only been on sale since the end of last week, but there’s already been a fair amount of correspondence about our cover story on The Byrds. Most of it’s been about our Top 20 countdown of The Byrds’s greatest tracks. You were broadly in agreement with what was included, but many of you wondered aloud at certain omissions – “Chestnut Mare” was particularly missed by many, including me it must be said.
As part of our Nick Cave cover story in the current issue of Uncut, I spoke to film maker John Hillcoat. Hillcoat and Cave’s friendship stretches back to Melbourne in the late 1970s, while their first professional collaboration came in 1981, when Hillcoat edited the promo video for The Birthday Party single, “Nick The Stripper”.
