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The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Blogs

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4th September 2022

The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Like tentative wildlife, they make cautious appearances; peeking from the undergrowth, withdrawn but aware of their rarely-seen beauty. If you’re up early enough you might catch them soundchecking on the Garden Stage, chirruping snippets of “Desert Island”. Mid-afternoon, if you’re skilled a...

Like tentative wildlife, they make cautious appearances; peeking from the undergrowth, withdrawn but aware of their rarely-seen beauty. If you’re up early enough you might catch them soundchecking on the Garden Stage, chirruping snippets of “Desert Island”. Mid-afternoon, if you’re skilled at following their tracks or are in with the serious hunters, you’ll spot them briefly on the Piano Stage in the woods, playing the 30-second “Castles Of America”, a stripped down acoustic “The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side”, “All The Umbrellas In London” and a cranky cover of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something In The Air” delivered by their guitarist at the piano in what we’ll call an “optimistic” key.

The Magnetic Fields have arrived at End Of The Road 2022, preparing for their titanic bill-clash with Pixies, and a certain portion of the EOTR crowd, somewhat ironically, feel their electricity in the air. Anticipation for the world’s greatest chamber pop delights adds a certain frisson to the day; opening the Garden Stage, Yasmin Williams’ plucked, tapped and bowed melodies trip all the sweeter from the neck of her laid-flat guitar.

On the Woods Stage there’s additional charm to The Umlauts’ groove-laden post-punk chants of “hungover!”, and to Los Bitchos dedicating psychedelic go-go instrumental “Lindsey Goes To Mykonos” to Lindsey Lohan, offering her a free T-shirt and a tequila shot if she happens to be here.

Kevin Morby takes the task of warming up the Garden Stage for Team Merritt very seriously indeed. In a frilled golden cowboy jacket, and at a mic stand bedecked with roses, he charges through firebrand sax-rock aplenty in the shape of “This Is A Photograph” and “Rock Bottom”, transforms into the canyon Lou Reed on a roar through “A Random Act Of Kindness” and builds the mirrorball blues of “Five Easy Pieces”, with its memorable romantic declaration that “you fuck like a monster but you still drive me wild”, to a microphone-flinging wig-out. Compared to the plentiful, muscular material from this year’s This Is A Photograph album, more laid-back numbers like “Campfire” and a tropical saunter through “City Music” feel like the flashbacks of a rock god to their stoner youth; this time round, Morby’s grooves have grown elemental.

Perfume Genius, meanwhile, is busy turning the Woods Stage into a demonic cabaret. Bathed in red light and wrapped in a voluminous chiffon top, he plays mouthpiece for the devil’s idea of orchestral balladry and salsa funk party music. At his most maudlin and dramatic he sounds like The xx have corrupted the soul of a ‘50s crooner, while the stabbing synths and impish falsetto of “Grid” make for a gory glam rock, complete with a chorus of screaming blue murder. “Queen”, with its glorious electro fuzz and fire siren chorus, is perhaps synthpop’s most glowering showstopper.

Back in the Garden, though, the faithful gather close. The Magnetic Fields have broken cover, bearing ukuleles, acoustic guitars and Sam Devol’s centre-stage cello, and their every squeak and motion is exquisite to witness, right down to lugubrious mainman Stephin Merritt’s only “dance” move, spinning once in his chair during “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”.

It’s an evening not short on wonders. The sublime synth country lollop of “I Don‘t Believe In The Sun”. “Andrew In Drag”, synthpop on record, here stripped down to its Regency undergarments. The swelling emotions of “All My Little Words” and “Grand Canyon”, Merritt’s voice as deep and majestic as the geological feature itself. The moment actual frugging breaks out as they launch into their Broadway high-kicker “The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side” with guitarist Anthony Kaczynski manfully recreating Dudley Klute’s original vocal tour de force. They may grumble between themselves about an unexplained buzz in the monitors but the sound is richer here than at their own (stupendous) Hammersmith Apollo shows this week; tracks like “The Flowers She Sent And The Flowers She Said She Sent”, “All The Umbrellas In London” and “Quick!” – a song that masterfully strips away everything besides the repeated hook – arrive with all of their bubbling electronic quirks attached.

Merritt’s pure alt-country/folk melodies rank among the greatest ever written, but what elevates him into the pantheon of leftfield gods is his almost casual ability to melt arch wit into profound emotion. A stark and stunning “The Book Of Love”, on baritone and banjo alone, is plaintively comedic on its own (“the book of love is long and boring, no-one can lift the damn thing”) but, to much laughter, Merritt then piles straight into “The Biggest Tits In History”, his recent tongue-in-cheek tribute to competitive bird breeding. Indeed 2020’s Quickiesalbum, a collection of 28 largely sub-two-minute songs, provides most of the laughs. The bold chorale “The Day The Politicians Died” – envisioning a politico-free world where “it’s all one big party now”, and suggesting “we’ve got the taste for blood, now let’s eat all the priests” – is met with celebratory whoops, and “Death Pact (Let’s Make A)” was inspired, Merritt explains, by Alice Cooper renewing his wedding vows “in a very Alice Cooper way”.

Having charmed us out of our minds with what must surely be amongst EOTR’s finest ever sets, Merritt then breaks every heart in a five-mile radius with “’14 I Wish I Had Pictures”, a track from the closing throes of 2017’s autobiographical 50 Song Memoir album about the fragility of memories and the corrosions of age. As a song it’s quintessentially Merritt: quietly staggering.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

Blogs

Mark Beaumont

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4th September 2022

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The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3

“I definitely think I came up at a good time,” The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman tells host Laura Barton midway through the second Uncut Q&A of End Of The Road 2022, on the woodland Talking Heads stage. “There really was suddenly room for women in music and things were shifting, but ...

“I definitely think I came up at a good time,” The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman tells host Laura Barton midway through the second Uncut Q&A of End Of The Road 2022, on the woodland Talking Heads stage. “There really was suddenly room for women in music and things were shifting, but everywhere I would go there’d still be all these guys in music who’d be like, ‘OK, let me let me tell you what to do’. Intended in a very helpful way, but it was hard to realise, like, ‘Wait, I don’t have to listen, and I don’t have to respond’.”

She’s talking in particular about her shift from acoustic folk to more electronic and synth textures on last year’s fifth album Ignorance, Uncut’s album of 2021. “When you’re a blonde woman holding an acoustic guitar, people are like, ‘That’s perfect, stay that’. And I was like, ‘I can’t do that’. I really tried, but I couldn’t.”

The shift, she explains, was partly inspired by the experimentation she’d hear playing festivals like End Of The Road. “I am this idiosyncratic guitar player and I was playing music where I really love to have silence and dynamics in music,” she says. “I just was realising, to me, there’s such a difference between headphone music and live music, and live music is – no matter who you’re listening to – still a communal experience. And so I was thinking about the experience of an audience and a room of music. And that led me to rhythm and realising how powerful a very steady beat is, and I also was realising that I liked, more than I realised, dance music or pop music. Sometimes there’s something very reassuring about it.”

The conversation naturally turns to the ’80s pop greats. “There’s so many songs that we’ve all heard by, like, Talking Heads or Tears For Fears, or Duran Duran or Kate Bush. We’ve all heard these songs that have penetrated your mind and they’re just there. But then you revisit them as an adult and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s actually a very thoughtful key change’ or ‘that’s a really interesting chorus’ or you really realise how interesting the production is. It was such a beautiful time where I love how much melody there still was in 80s pop and how much harmonic complexity there can be in a huge hit.”

Over 30 minutes, the discussion traces Lindeman’s route to alt-pop fame. Life as a teenage TV actor, she reveals, “taught me a lot and took me around the world and it got me out of high school. I was going to a small rural high school and on a film set I would meet wonderful weirdos and artists. It was like this vision of another way to live.” But she learnt to despise being moulded, dressed and directed. “When I was 19, I just had this lightning bolt moment of like, ‘I’m going to make music, I’m going to record my own records’,” she says. “The idea of being completely in charge of every aspect of it was something that was very formative.”

Finding herself in the “Torontopia” indie rock scene in the early ’00s, she found music “approachable” and learnt banjo to join bands while also making her first “insular” music in her walk-in closet. Back then she saw her “computer music” as an artwork of sound to be constructed. “I was just trying to figure out sound and not even really thinking about songs or lyrics. I was like, ‘If I layer this on top of this, it creates this picture’.”

And so began a career-long battle to keep her hand on the rudder. “With my first computer record, it was very much only me, and then other people got involved and started having opinions,” she says. “And then it was another journey to learn how to push against that in a kind way. To try to just be fully on your own journey is difficult.”

A journey made tougher by regular and unpredictable bursts of sonic shame. “I went back and forth between thinking [Ignorance] was just way too poppy and then sometimes thinking it was just way too like fucked up,” she admits. “It’s always felt like I have revealed a terrible secret. Even playing a show or putting out a record or a song. There’s always a vulnerability hangover, a shame hangover, where you feel like crawling into bed for a couple days and you don’t want anyone to see you. Every music video I’ve put out in the last two years, I’m so proud of it and then it comes out and I’m just like, ‘What have I done?’ I literally get very angry at myself every time.”

When did this shame become something like pride, Barton asks her, pointing to the album’s success. “That’s not really how shame works,” she replies. “It can show up anytime, no matter what. It’s a quite a mystical substance.”

Nonetheless, she can recognise the similarities between herself and an icon such as Joni Mitchell: “she’s pulling apart these very, like knotty things. A lot of her songs are questions and that to me is what I think of when I think of what does it mean to be a feminine writer.” And the practice of writing a book about how to write lyrics and mentoring other musicians has helped her deal with her own creative stumbling blocks.

“The place that you’re stuck is really important,” she says. “Now in myself as a writer, I feel so much less trapped by my own tangles, because I’ve seen them in other people. What I found was for all the female singer songwriters in particular, the part in the song that they were unsure of, or where the lyrics just suddenly didn’t make any sense, it was always this deep well of complexity in their lives, or it was a question that they were afraid to ask or it was something they didn’t want to know or something they didn’t want to say. Writer’s block and insecurity are actually very important things that have a lot to teach you.”

Lindeman and Barton discuss the “anger of betrayal” which led Lindeman to theme Ignorance around the climate crisis, and her peaks and dips of optimism on the topic under Biden’s presidency. “When I wrote that record, it was very much coming out of the anger over the silence and the lack of acknowledgement of ‘this is happening’. There were so many feelings that were in my heart at the time that have shifted, because the conversation has really leapt forward in the last couple of years. People are so much more able to talk about it, much more willing to talk about it. We’ve really moved somewhere.”

The main chat touches on the relation between Ignorance and this year’s “sister” record How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, before the floor – well, dusty hill – is thrown open for audience questions. Here we learn that Lindeman can’t listen to her own albums (“I can’t hear it like a normal person can….sometimes now my songs are on the radio or I’m in a coffee shop, I have to leave”) and that it’s something of a miracle that she’s ever finished a record at all.

“I have a song about the moment before you write the song, where it’s perfect, and it’s wonderful and it’s everything,” she says. “And then every word you write and every note you record it’s like you’re cutting off escape routes. It’s this beautiful well of possibility and then everything you do you’re cutting off limbs and closing doors. It’s not going to be this, it’s not going to be that. [When it’s released] it’s like a butterfly that’s pinned to the wall. So I think I just had to make peace with how much I’ve struggled with that and how upsetting it is, just make peace with losing all the possibilities. Then I could sometimes put it on and it’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s so alive’, once I made peace with all the things that it wasn’t.”

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

Blogs

Sam Richards

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3rd September 2022

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Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

“Welcome to the Sahara!” With the ground still dry and dusty underfoot, Tinariwen’s greeting feels less of a stretch than it might do at a typical rain-soaked British festival. In these conditions, with a light breeze blowing across the main stage arena, the band’s traditional Touareg robes ...

“Welcome to the Sahara!” With the ground still dry and dusty underfoot, Tinariwen’s greeting feels less of a stretch than it might do at a typical rain-soaked British festival. In these conditions, with a light breeze blowing across the main stage arena, the band’s traditional Touareg robes may prove to be the ideal End Of The Road attire.

They begin at a gentle pace playing songs from their recent album Amadjar, which despite its crop of special guests felt like a return to the band’s roots, recorded as it was on location in the western Sahara. Bandleader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib is in his sixties now, a fact betrayed by his greying mop, but the most thrilling moments still come when he straps on an electric guitar and plays those biting, quicksilver runs. Gradually the beat quickens and the crowd begin to sway along, copying the band’s dance moves: arms outstretched, bodies twisting in time to the infectious, undulating rhythm, which it’s hard to believe is being tapped out on a single drum.

Sadly there’s no cameo from Warren Ellis, one of Tinariwen’s Amadjar collaborators. But Ellis’s old Dirty Three bandmate Mick Turner is here, with his new band Mess Esque. It’s probably no surprise to learn that they are slow and mysterious, Turner stroking his guitar cryptically stage-right. But thanks to keyboard-playing frontwoman Helen Franzmann, some impressive songs begin to emerge from the murk.

They lay the groundwork in the Tipi tent perfectly for Skullcrusher – the misleading nom de plume for a skinny American called Helen Ballentine – who is even slower and more mysterious, playing desolate mini-epics in the vein of Grouper or Galaxie 500. Her songs are hazy and vague, briefly snapping into focus before crumbling apart – everything feels, as she sings, “just out of reach”. Ballentine seems genuinely overawed that so many people have turned up to watch to this minimalist performance, but given the way she creates something compelling from the barest of ingredients, she might have to start getting used to the attention.

Nigerian-born singer-songwriter Uwade holds them similarly rapt on the Talking Heads stage, although this may be more down to her engaging presence than her actual music. Playing solo on an emerald-green guitar, her voice is stunning but her songs of unrequited crushes are a little sappy and generic.

She makes a more telling contribution later in the evening, boldly singing the opening to Fleet Foxes’ first song, “Wading In Waist-High Water”, before the full band crash in, to euphoric effect. Robin Pecknold has smartly augmented his band’s sound with a New Orleans-style brass section containing not one but two trombones. They even have their own name – The Westerlies – and when they attack the coda of a song such as “Third Of May/Ōdaigahara” or the closing “Helplessness Blues”, it’s a with a tremendous woozy rush of sound that you wish was permitted more often in the set. But Pecknold is also keen to remain true to the sparse, mountain-song strangeness of the early Fleet Foxes material, and hearing those four-part harmonies ring out with perfect clarity across the field really does take your breath away.

For those seeking gnarlier thrills before the night is out, the music continues in the tents. The Big Top hosts Battles, now reduced to a duo, but making up for their lack of personnel with a relentless rhythm assault. Drummer John Stanier is the star, whacking out tough, complex beats with almost unbelievable precision, like some kind of extreme sports challenge. He pauses briefly to chug a beer – to cheers from the crowd – and then continues on his singular, pummelling mission. He’ll surely sleep well, airbed or not.

And to finally dispel Fleet Foxes’ wholesome vibe, heeeere’s Beak. Or as Geoff Barrow spits, “Hi everyone, we’re fucking Mumford And Sons”. In between complaining about Londoners, or Louis Theroux’s snoring, or having to play too quietly to avoid spooking the horses in the next farm, they play a set of brilliantly curdled kraut-rave, even encouraging an outbreak of righteous air-punching on a monstrous “Alle Sauvage”. However reluctant they may be to entertain, they get the job done.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

Blogs

Mark Beaumont

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3rd September 2022

0

Naima Bock, James Yorkston, Black Midi: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2

“When I first came out, there was nobody here, just a peacock,” says Philly’s Rosali Middleman, gazing out at the thoroughly chillaxed crowd on camp chairs and blankets spread out across the idyllic lawns of the Garden Stage. A sigh: “quite magical.” It’s as succinct a take on End Of The...

“When I first came out, there was nobody here, just a peacock,” says Philly’s Rosali Middleman, gazing out at the thoroughly chillaxed crowd on camp chairs and blankets spread out across the idyllic lawns of the Garden Stage. A sigh: “quite magical.” It’s as succinct a take on End Of The Road’s unique vibe as you’ll hear, and Rosali makes the quintessential music to open a stage geared to lull us into the weekend proper. Alone with her electric guitar, she weaves chiming, gossamer alt-folk full of quiet agonies.

Londoner Naima Bock, on next, seems even gentler, since she brings a full band but just as restrained a tone. She strips back the electronic, percussive and orchestral layers of tracks such as “Giant Palm” and “Working” to expose soft-as-snow pastoral folk songs adorned with unobtrusive saxophone and peppered with blasts of Celtic chorale. Later, Anais Mitchell picks up the beatific baton with the seagoing Americana of “Ships”, the soul scraping folk of “Young Man In America” and the Feistian New York pop of “On Your Way (Felix Song)”.

On the Talking Heads stage, a solo James Yorkston gets more raw and intimate still, sat at a keyboard playing soul-folk laments for his disappointing album chart placings and poetic paeans to “towns the size of a teacup”. By the time he starts singing of “cocaine fuelled electronic cabarets” in “Woozy With Cider” he’s channelling the same sparse magic as Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs For Drella.

Back on the Garden Stage it falls to Brighton’s Porridge Radio to prepare EOTR for the chaos to come. Their febrile and passionate post-punk boasts melodies to seduce, but also a cultish air, particularly when their violinist waves branches in the air as if to ward off Larmer Tree Gardens’ notorious wood sprites. In the oddball stakes, however, they’re fated to be monumentally upstaged.

There is a point, barely a few minutes into Black Midi’s headline set, where you’re forced to abandon all hope of coherence and just go with the maniacal flow of it all. The opening “Welcome To Hell” – the shore leave doubts and dischargement of one Private Tristan Bongo, culled from the maniacal rock opera album Hellfire which dominates the set – is aptly titled. For 75 intense minutes, howling jazz punk gives way to hardcore thrash, evil math-prog and, in the case of “The Defence”, a Billy Joel piano song, often without warm-up or warning.

When singer Geordie Greep doesn’t sound like he’s babbling in tongues, he’s barking random pop culture references (“Honey, I shrunk the kids!”), asking the crowd to vape in unison to create a smoke machine effect and yowling about deadly boxing matches (“Sugar/Tzu”) and a philosophical music hall compere exploding onstage (“27 Questions”). As a jazz rock or prog band they’re particularly boundless; as post-punks they go to volcanic places Fontaines DC wouldn’t dare. Rosali’s peacock doesn’t know what’s hit it: welcome, if you can handle it, to the age of the senseless things.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1
Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2
Tinariwen, Fleet Foxes, Beak: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 2
The Weather Station Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
The Magnetic Fields, Kevin Morby: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Pixies, Margo Cilker, The Weather Station: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 3
Kurt Vile Q&A: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
10 Highlights From End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 4
Yard Act, Bright Eyes: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4
Aldous Harding, Ryley Walker, Cassandra Jenkins: End Of The Road 2022 – Day 4

Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2

Blogs

Sam Richards

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2nd September 2022

0

Black Midi Q&A: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 2

Black Midi are slowly poisoning us. With wild ideas. “We’ve been spoon-feeding a bit more each time,” says Geordie Greep, Black Midi singer and, it transpires, unlikely wit and bon vivant of the freak rock fraternity. “It’s like in The Princess Bride where he can drink poison because he ha...

Black Midi are slowly poisoning us. With wild ideas. “We’ve been spoon-feeding a bit more each time,” says Geordie Greep, Black Midi singer and, it transpires, unlikely wit and bon vivant of the freak rock fraternity. “It’s like in The Princess Bride where he can drink poison because he has a little bit every day. We’ve given it a little bit more shit so now it’s really good. It gets the same eight-out-of-ten but it’s a far cry from the goodness it once was.”

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

He speaks of the frenetic eclecticism of most recent album Hellfire, at the first of End Of The Road’s daily Uncut Q&As with our very own Tom Pinnock on the Talking Heads stage. In conversation he’s as fascinatingly changeable as the album. One minute he’s delivering insightful rock wisdoms: “You only got so much time. And if you try and do something that you know you definitely can’t do, then maybe your failure will be interesting.” The next he’s frothing over the idea of appearing on Pointless. “I would love that. I wanna go on the everyman’s one. I want to win that cash prize. A thousand pounds to go on a little package holiday. I want to be seen by geriatrics across the globe, get myself a rich widow, get written into some wills.”

Facing accusations of Hellfire flirting with the ridiculous, he’s graciously sanguine. “Thank you,” he says. “Ridiculous might be an insult sometimes but usually it’s a way of saying something is different or unique or individual, and isn’t that one of the main goals? Even if it is stupid and bizarre, once reined in it’ll become something original and good. Or maybe all of it is rubbish.”

In a broad, roaming discussion, Greep discusses his changing attitude to salsa music – hating it for being “the most brash, annoying, really irritating music you can think of” when forced to sit in on his mother’s classes as a child, now a major convert – and unrepentantly defends his Brit School past. “There’s a weird public perception of the school as a sheltered or privileged thing or whatever,” he argues, “but the only barrier to entry is an audition, based on skill, all sorts of people go there. There’s loads of people that it’s on public record they went there, but it’s not really a point. Imogen Heap or FKA Twigs. It’s less of a sin to have gone. But it’s a great school, I think they’re doing a great thing and I hope it goes on for many more years. No bankruptcy in sight.”

America, where Black Midi have played two tours this year and return on Monday, gets a more mixed review. “It’s cool,” he says, “but somewhere I’d never ever, ever, ever in a million years want to live. It’s an awful place. It’s like Disneyland, who’d want to live in Disneyland? You have your crazy two months but you know there’s an end – on this day I go home. If you live there, it’s ‘wait, where’s the end? I’m stuck in this horrible place’. Some people are born there. I consider myself lucky.” What do they make of you? “To be honest, our best crowds are there. I might even end up having to live there. Much younger crowd, which is always better because they buy more merchandise and they’re more susceptible to advertising. And in the shows there’s just more energy.”

Fascinating insights into the recording process of Steve Albini – with whom the band recorded recent flexidisc tracks – emerge. “It’s good to work with someone who basically treats it like a science. He’s not really interested in commenting or anything to do with the musical aspects of it or the worth of it. The only thing he’s interested in when recording a band or artist is the fidelity. Are there any technical issues? When you’re recording the vocals all he listens to in the mix room is the solo vocal and, like, a drum track or a bass track. It doesn’t even sound like music, really. He’s literally just listening for technical imperfections. You finish a take and say, ‘How was that, Steve?’ He says, ‘I don’t really see a technical imperfection’. So he doesn’t care about your performance, which is good because he’s an engineer at the end of the day. You should respect any wrong choice that the band wants to make. If they want to make a terrible album… at least it’s gonna sound good. If an architect makes an absolutely garish, hideous building, you’ve still got to lay the bricks as usual if you’re just the builder. You don’t you say, ‘oh, man, I really think the left wing’s a bit naff, don’t build it’.”

Midi fans, though, are perhaps more interested in the fate of the mysterious Orange Tree Boys, the bluesy sometime Black Midi “support band” who share many attributes with the band. Such as their faces. “The band from Las Vegas?” Geordie says, playing along with the alter-ego conceit like a pro. “They’re really good. They’re like a kind of a throwback blues ensemble. They’ve had a bit of trouble. A lot of their tours were cut short due to visa issues. I don’t know if they can go across the Nevada state line anymore.”

Might he ever decide to join the band for good? “Blues bands have an infinite revenue stream,” Greep says. “There’s always some guys listening to blues music. If this fizzles out, jump on the phone, plane to Vegas and just do your blues residency. Easy money… Start every day, Jamesons. I’ll lose it all, all I wanna do is play the blues.”

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road Festival 2022 coverage here:

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1

Blogs

Mark Beaumont

-

2nd September 2022

0

Khruangbin, Sudan Archives: End Of The Road Festival 2022 – Day 1

And so, at last, the best festival of 2021 finally gets underway. After pandemic travel issues saw last year’s comeback End Of The Road bill necessarily crammed with UK acts, the line-up of alt-rock dreams is pieced back together for this year – Bright Eyes and Pixies are to fulfil their 2021 ob...

And so, at last, the best festival of 2021 finally gets underway. After pandemic travel issues saw last year’s comeback End Of The Road bill necessarily crammed with UK acts, the line-up of alt-rock dreams is pieced back together for this year – Bright Eyes and Pixies are to fulfil their 2021 obligations, and eighteen months of anticipation is palpable as the site fills on Thursday night. Bars are abuzz with the big dilemma of the weekend – Pixies or The Magnetic Fields on Saturday night? – and word spreads of rearrangements in the woods. They say there’s a ship run aground out there…

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

Long considered the finest UK festival for the discerning leftfield music fan, EOTR 2022 offers a fittingly diverse and intriguing line-up for its warm-up night. Early evening in the Tipi Tent London’s Vogues delivers a tentative set of corroded neo-soul, where the minimalist, maudlin tone of The xx is slathered with synthesized fuzz rock guitar. A shaven headed vision in sheer blouse and skirt, Davy Roderick’s voice is a fragile instrument, ice-thin in falsetto and loosely freeform when delving into a Stuart Staples-like croon. EOTR watches on uncertain if they’re watching the future or a pale, fleeting snapshot of 2022.

Over on the main Woods stage, Michael Flatley would be fuming. “I always wanted to be in a fiddle band,” says Sudan Archives, striking up a crooked, haunted Irish jig on the violin she waves around as she bounds across the stage, otherwise concerned with the earthier matters of auto-tuned ambient glitch rap. If Dingle had a Stringfellows if might contain the sort of dance moves that Brittney Park throws, and several tracks similarly combine the sexual and sensitive. “I just want the D-I-C-K,” she tells us on an otherwise heart-tugging “Homesick (Gorgeous & Arrogant)”, and she ends “NBPQ” on her back on the floor howling “I just wanna have my titties out!” as if in naturist primal scream therapy.

Back in the Tipi, Canadian jangle-punks Apollo Ghosts bash out post-punk and alt-pop tunes with a feral urgency, stopping only to declare “fuck the Tories”. It’s the sort of chill-souring endeavour very much at odds with tonight’s headliners Kruangbin. Resembling a mechanised AI exhibit of what the machines believe humans might have listened to on cruise ships in their decadent pre-extinction era, guitarist Mark Speer and bassist Laura Lee glide around the stage in synchronised patterns as if on rails, playing gaseous cosmic guitar riffs and sparse, low-slung bass. The effect on tracks such as “August 10” is a gilded take on prog funk, and on the rare moments they sing together, their airy vocals melt beautifully into a Tame Impala-like spacewalk.

A step-change takes place with the pop quiz round that makes up the latter third of the set. Over space lounge backing, Speer fires out a quickfire medley of recognisable riffs for us to guess before they’re gone. We catch Spandau Ballet’s “True”, Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” before they burst into Dick Dale’s “Miserlou”, neck a shot each and celebrate a crowd well roused. Consider End Of The Road 2022 docked to its first stage station and ready for deep space.

Catch up with the rest of Uncut’s End Of The Road 2022 coverage here:

David Sylvian – Blemish/Manafon

Stephen Troussé

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2nd September 2022

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Interviewed in 2009, David Sylvian mused upon the supposed difficulty of Manafon, his last vocal studio album to date. “I don’t personally hear it as being a difficult album, but I’ve always known the experience would be different for others. Time will soften its edges. It may sow the seeds fo...

Interviewed in 2009, David Sylvian mused upon the supposed difficulty of Manafon, his last vocal studio album to date. “I don’t personally hear it as being a difficult album, but I’ve always known the experience would be different for others. Time will soften its edges. It may sow the seeds for what might develop into a new genre for vocal music perhaps? Or maybe it’s simply a passing glitch on the digital face of popular music. I don’t know. But what I am sure of is that, over time, its abstractions will become much easier to embrace.”

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The reissue of Manafon, along with its older sibling, 2003’s Blemish, on 180g vinyl, offers an opportunity to reconsider what increasingly look like the last works of David Sylvian’s long, brilliant and elliptical pop career. It’s fair to say they haven’t yet seeded a new genre – though you might find echoes of these spectral artsongs in the work of Björk and Julia Holter. But as predicted, they now seem eminently embraceable: tatterdemalion torchsongs, that for all their atmospheric disturbances you might file alongside Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Frank Sinatra’s Where Are You?, John Cale’s Music For A New Society…

Blemish was the turning point. It’s a case study in not letting a good crisis go to waste, composed as Sylvian’s relationship and domestic life with Ingrid Chavez was disintegrating. With 2000’s Everything And Nothing compilation serving as a timely epitaph of his two decades at Virgin, Sylvian was free of commercial imperatives and already casting around for new directions. He had detected new signals in the glitchy electronica of acts like Oval, and found fresh succour in the abstract laments of Derek Bailey’s Ballads. And with his home studio in New Hampshire complete, he had a sonic fortress of solitude all ready and waiting.

The old forms that had served him to abundant success on Dead Bees… were simply no longer adequate, and the urgency of his midlife soulstorm facilitated his voyage into improvisation. It was a process that had always been on his horizon, from his teenage Stockhausen infatuation, through collaborations with Holger Czukay and Keith Tippett. Now he had Derek Bailey, Virgil to his Dante, as a guide.

Bailey’s abstract plucking and fretting – like curious crows pecking at the remains of the relationship – seemed to prompt Sylvian’s own reinvention of the guitar, whether in new tunings or electronic treatments. But the songs are anchored in an awful profundity of feeling. “Life’s for the taking”, he sings with abject gravity on the title track, “so take it away”.

Contrary to its bleak reputation, though, the moments of lightness on Blemish have become more apparent. “Late Night Shopping” feels like a Mogadon cousin of Iggy’s “Nightclubbing”, while “Fire In The Forest”, Sylvian’s first collaboration with guitar alchemist Christian Fennesz, feels almost like a “You’ll Never Walk Alone” moment of showstopping uplift – “There is always sunshine above the grey sky/I will try to find it”.

Fennesz proved to be a crucial stargate to a new galaxy of free and electro-acoustic improvisers. While Sylvian was in Cologne touring Blemish in 2004, Fennesz invited him to the opening night of a showcase for Jon Abbey’s Erstwhile label, featuring Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, Toshi Nakamura and Sachiko Matsubara among others. The introduction helped materialise Sylvian’s tentative plans for an album of new chamber music, cultivating the seeds that had been planted on Blemish into a rich and strange forest of free improvisation and narrative song.

Recording sessions in Vienna, Tokyo and London, with a shifting cast of players, including the Erstwhile crew plus members of drone ensemble Polwechsel, pianist John Tilbury, saxophonist Evan Parker and turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, Sylvian compared his role to that of a film director – with characteristic arthouse dolour he suggested Bergman, but the Swede loathed improvisation. A better analogue might be Mike Leigh, encouraging and nudging group discovery, for material to be edited and cut together later.

For some in the audience Manafon might have been the final straw: a suite of atonal, meandering narratives concerned with cantankerous, antisocial poets (RS Thomas and Emily Dickinson were presiding spirits). Sylvian himself suggested that the record might be best appreciated posthumously.

But listening to it today, without the dashed hope that he might return to more conventional song forms, what you hear more than ever are the continuities. On the opening track, “Small Metal Gods”, even as he puts away his childish things in a ziplock back, as he sings of “the wretched story line”, “the narrative that must go on”, backed by Werner Dafeldecker’s woody bass, you can hear the same delicate, devastating deconstruction of the pop song that began in earnest with “Ghosts” back in 1982.

Of course he was already ahead of us. “Manafon is a pop album,” he told a sceptical Keith Rowe way back in 2010. “You could replace my voice with voices of the past and it would take a small step into an alternate future. Imagine Sinatra or Hartmann singing these songs! It takes just the smallest of leaps.”

Vince Guaraldi – It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

John Lewis

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2nd September 2022

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Vince Guaraldi – It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

For millions around the world who were children between the mid-’60s and the early 1980s, Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons is deeply engrained. It was often the first jazz music they will have heard, although, at the time, Guaraldi’s upbeat, cheerful themes must have seemed an o...

For millions around the world who were children between the mid-’60s and the early 1980s, Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons is deeply engrained. It was often the first jazz music they will have heard, although, at the time, Guaraldi’s upbeat, cheerful themes must have seemed an odd choice to soundtrack the grim, bleakly comic world of Charles M Schulz.

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Born in San Francisco in 1928, Guaraldi emerged in the ’50s accompanying the vibist Cal Tjader, later joining Woody Herman’s big band. In 1962 he belatedly jumped on the bossa nova bandwagon with Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, an album of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa songs from the 1959 film, although you got the impression that Guaraldi often got bored of playing to a bossa rhythm, instead lapsing back into the comforting world of swing beats and funky piano licks.

He did have a way with simple, catchy melodies, delivered with a bluesy flourish, and a track on the Black Orpheus album, “Cast Your Fate To The Wind”, was a surprise hit, earning a Grammy for best jazz song. One fan was TV producer Lee Mendelson, who thought that Guaraldi’s style – likeable, slightly yearning, hip but not too out-there – was a perfect fit for the animated adaptations of the Peanuts strip he was making.

You can find versions of Guaraldi’s tunes from Charlie Brown – “Linus And Lucy”, “The Red Baron”, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”, “Charlie Brown Theme”, “Christmas Time Is Here”, “Skating” and “Baseball Theme” – on many of his albums, but this is the first LP featuring the complete tunes, mood music and “stings” from a single soundtrack. Craft released a CD of this 1966 soundtrack in 2018 that was, rather clumsily, taken from the actual broadcast, featuring sound effects and snippets of speech, but this version is taken from recently unearthed original analogue tapes. It’s a little disjointed and frustrating to hear in one go (there is a lot of repetition, and many tracks are less than a minute long) but, for us Peanuts obsessives, it’s fascinating to hear a sonically flawless original soundtrack recording.

Where most of Guaraldi’s LPs are piano/bass/drums recordings, this is more lavishly arranged in partnership with conductor John Scott Trotter (best known as Bing Crosby’s long-term musical director), featuring Mannie Klein on trumpet, John Gray on guitar and Ronald Lang on woodwind. Lang’s flute is, for many, a signature sound of the series. On tracks like “Snoopy And The Leaf”, it is oddly reminiscent of Harold McNair’s heartbreaking flute solos on the soundtrack to Kes (another poignant hymn to childhood).

The cartoons were regular fixtures of network television around the world well into the 1990s, and the royalties made Guaraldi very rich by jazz standards. But he didn’t enjoy his lifestyle for long – in February 1976, he suffered a massive heart attack and died, aged only 47. His music, however, lives on forever.

Bob Dylan adds new dates to UK tour

News

Michael Bonner

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1st September 2022

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Bob Dylan has added three new dates to his upcoming UK tour. The UK leg of of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour will now also include shows at Manchester, Oxford and Bournemouth. Dylan had already announced nine shows - including four nights at the London Palladium - beginning on October 19. D...

Bob Dylan has added three new dates to his upcoming UK tour.

The UK leg of of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour will now also include shows at Manchester, Oxford and Bournemouth.

Dylan had already announced nine shows – including four nights at the London Palladium – beginning on October 19.

Due to popular demand, his first UK tour for five years will now stop at:

October 19: London Palladium
October 20: London Palladium
October 23: London Palladium
October 24: London Palladium
October 26: Motorpoint Arena Cardiff
October 27: Bonus Arena Hull
October 28: Motorpoint Arena Nottingham
October 30: Armadillo Glasgow
October 31: Armadillo Glasgow
November 2: Manchester Apollo
November 4: Oxford New Theatre
November 5: Bournemouth BIC

Tickets go on sale at 10am on Monday, September 5. Visit Dylan’s website for more details.

We’re off to the End Of The Road Festival 2022!

Blogs

Michael Bonner

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1st September 2022

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We’re off to the End Of The Road Festival 2022!

Bags packed, toothbrush ready, weather forecast checked... and we're off to this year's End Of The Road festival. You can read our daily coverage of the festival on this site throughout this weekend. As well as headliners like Fleet Foxes and Pixies, we'll be digging Jake Xerxes Fussell, Margo Ci...

Bags packed, toothbrush ready, weather forecast checked… and we’re off to this year’s End Of The Road festival.

You can read our daily coverage of the festival on this site throughout this weekend. As well as headliners like Fleet Foxes and Pixies, we’ll be digging Jake Xerxes Fussell, Margo Cilker, Alabaster DePlume, Jana Horn, Nala Sinephro and a host more.

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As well as reporting from around the festival, we’re also holding the Uncut Q&As each day, where Tom Pinnock and Laura Barton will be chatting to some very special guests on the Talking Heads stage:

black midi: Talking Heads, Friday, 16:00 – 16:45

The Weather Station: Talking Heads, Saturday, 15:15 – 16:00

Kurt Vile: Talking Heads, Sunday, 15:45 – 16:30

All in all, it’s a very busy weekend for Uncut and we can’t wait for the gates to open.

See you down the front!

Woodland wonders! Six End Of The Road Festival 2022 picks

Interviews

Sam Richards

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1st September 2022

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Woodland wonders! Six End Of The Road Festival 2022 picks

“We always try to give people something they don’t expect,” says End Of The Road Festival co-founder and curator Simon Taffe. As well as the festival’s usual smattering of secret shows and pop-up performances, the Disco Ship has been transformed into The Boat – a new live stage dedicated t...

“We always try to give people something they don’t expect,” says End Of The Road Festival co-founder and curator Simon Taffe. As well as the festival’s usual smattering of secret shows and pop-up performances, the Disco Ship has been transformed into The Boat – a new live stage dedicated to out-there sounds that Taffe describes as “Cafe Oto in the forest”, hosting the likes of James Holden, Snapped Ankles and Duncan Marquiss.

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“It’s a real music lovers’ festival,” he says proudly. “People aren’t there just to get fucked up and have this lairy party – although it’s obviously not completely tame! Hopefully people notice the attention to detail that we’ve put into it, from every art installation to the way we curate the bands.” Here are Taffe’s top tips for a short-cut to EOTR nirvana…

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
I think Stephin [Merritt] is one of the greatest living songwriters. The way he uses words is so spot on, funny and wry. It’s very underplayed but still showy as well. I’ve been trying to get him to play since our first year in 2006. I don’t think he’s much of a festival person, but we convinced him with the allure of the Garden Stage. It’ll be quite a special Saturday-night headline show – even if some idiot’s put them up against the Pixies!

GRACE CUMMINGS
She’s from Australia and she’s in the world of King Gizzard, all those bands, but she’s nothing like them. It’s kind of folk-punk, I guess. Actually the best way to describe her is like a blues singer. She’s got this really deep, gravelly voice, almost like a female Nick Cave. I’m really excited about her as someone new on the scene and I think she’s going to go far.

NAIMA BOCK
I’ve been following her for a couple of years. Obviously she was in Goat Girl back in the day and she’s part of this whole ‘rebirth of folk’ scene in South London at the moment with Broadside Hacks and Shovel Dance Collective. But her solo stuff also has this Brazilian element, and her voice is just incredible. I saw her with a full band at Servant Jazz Quarters and it was one of my favourite shows of last year.

BCUC
I’m into a lot of African music and this is just pounding live energy. You feel like you’re in a workout session, they fully go for it for a solid hour. It’s like going into a boxing ring with lots of people – a joyful boxing ring! You don’t have to know the band at all, just turn up and you can’t not enjoy the show.

THE GOLDEN DREGS
For me, they’re one of the most exciting English bands around. They played last year and we had to have them back. Singer Ben Woods has got this really dry style that’s kinda country-ish, but not. I guess the best comparison is Bill Callahan meets David Byrne. His songwriting’s so grown-up and interesting and funny.

ALABASTER DePLUME
He’s been on the scene around the Total Refreshment Centre for years, but there’s no-one who sounds like him. He’s doing something completely different where he’s mixing jazz and folk and spoken word. He’s got this Northern wit about him, but also this pure joy. There’s something magical about him, like a shaman. You don’t ever know what to expect from his performance, but he has this quality where he makes you feel amazing.

Fleet Foxes: Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 30, 2022

Blogs

Michael Bonner

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31st August 2022

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Fleet Foxes: Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 30, 2022

For the last few tours, Fleet Foxes have closed their live sets with “Helplessness Blues” – a song about Robin Pecknold’s struggles to overcome existential worries about his place in the modern world. “What’s my name? What’s my station?” he sings. “Oh, just tell me what I should do...

For the last few tours, Fleet Foxes have closed their live sets with “Helplessness Blues” – a song about Robin Pecknold’s struggles to overcome existential worries about his place in the modern world. “What’s my name? What’s my station?” he sings. “Oh, just tell me what I should do”. In the 11 years since the song was first released, you could argue that the conditions that first inspired Pecknold to write “Helplessness Blues” have become more pronounced; but the man singing the song in 2022 is evidently in a different place entirely. Indeed, watching Pecknold bobbing and bouncing around the stage tonight with infectious, Tiggerish enthusiasm, you could be forgiven for thinking that the knotty soul-searching of Helplessness Blues and Crack-Up, its successor, had happened to someone else.

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It transpires that Shore – the band’s most recent studio album – was a turning point for Pecknold. Having finally worked through his anxieties, the record was awash with positivity, gratitude and optimism. Even during lockdown and surrounded by the death of his musician heroes, Pecknold refused to turn inward and instead threw himself wide-open. In the midst of all this, the old stereotype of Fleet Foxes as bucolic fabulists resurfaced on Shore – here was an album that celebrated the restorative power of the seasons – “one warm day is all I really need” – as if the elements were perhaps enough to keep his earlier unease at bay. Following Pecknold’s coming of age through his music – from the guileless openness of their debut, through the insecurities of Helplessness Blues and the flux of Crack-Up – Shore was as much about Pecknold recalibrating what Fleet Foxes meant to him as it was about us, in turn, recalibrating our relationship with Fleet Foxes.

In a way, all these Robin Pecknolds are present tonight. Physically, dressed in a camouflage jacket and beanie hat, he doesn’t look much different from the first time Fleet Foxes visited the UK in 2008 (his hair is shorter and the beanie is smaller, though). Meanwhile, as the band revisit the rhapsodic harmonies of “Ragged Wood” and “White Winter Hymnal” from the debut, channel the epic beauty of “The Shrine/An Argument” from Helplessness Blues or map out the elaborate sonic terrain of “Third Of May/Ōdaigahara” from Crack-Up, the arc of his creative progress is clearly laid out. It occurs to me, part way through a free squall of horns on “Third Of May/Ōdaigahara”, that no matter how challenging or involving Pecknold’s songs can occasionally be, the fundamental charms of his band shine through.

“Third Of May/Ōdaigahara” is a mid-point in the set, actually, so I’m getting a little ahead of myself. They’d opened with the first three songs from Shore – “Wading In Waist-high Water” (with Uwade Akhere, their tour support, on vocals), “Sunblind” and “Can I Believe In You”. Considering Pecknold largely recorded Shore himself, this tour is the first time we’ve heard the full band arrangements, which naturally sound fuller. The presence of Andy Clausen, Chloe Rowlands and Willem de Koch from brass ensemble the Westerlies further bolsters the sound – but never to the point where they overwhelm the songs. For a band that expressly strives to present songs of ravishing prettiness, they are also commendably robust. They circle back to their debut for a brace of songs before stretching out for the longer, more expansive songs. Flanked by his right-hand man, Skyler Skjelset, Pecknold leads the band through the song’s winding contours and digressive segments, reinforcing the point that – however much Pecknold is driving this – Fleet Foxes are a communal endeavour. Incidentally, props to Morgan Henderson – clearly at the receiving end of Pecknold’s ambitious musical vision – who is tasked with playing flute, stand-up bass, tambourine, bass and saxophone at various points during tonight’s set. Meanwhile, dressed in slim-fitting black shirt and trousers, Skjelset acts as both guitarist and bandleader; one minute, coaxing bright, clean lines from his guitar and the next communing with the Westerlies on the harmonies for “White Winter Hymnal”. There are some fine harmonies, too, from bassist Christian Wargo.

“… Hymnal” acts as a kind of buffer for the rest of the main set. The second half is rangier somehow, featuring a version of “Phoenix” – from Big Red Machine’s How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? album – and an acoustic section from Pecknold which includes a cover of Judee Sill’s “The Kiss”. Driven by Casey Westcott’s gently swung keys and Chris Icasiano’s fluid drumming, “Phoenix” consciously recalls the soulful vitality of The Band – “How do you bear the full weight?” sings Pecknold, as if you need further clues as to what’s afoot here. The Big Red Machine collaboration, of course, finally brings Pecknold into direct contact with The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon – contemporaries among the early 00s collegiate indie rock explosion. More than most, Pecknold and Vernon’s trajectories, meanwhile, have been broadly similar: from hirsute backwoods beginning through their struggles with success and complex sonic experiments. While “Phoenix” is one of the stand out tracks on How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, I can’t help but wonder how a more comprehensive country soul Fleet Foxes record would sound.

The rest of the set swells and eddies towards Helplessness Blues’ closer, “Grown Ocean”, a thrumming, beautiful song where Pecknold – reborn as a “wide-eyed leaver, always going” – finally finds his peace. Pecknold returns for a sun-lit “Montezuma” before Uwade joins them for a warm, communal singalong through “For A Week Or Two” and “Going-to-the-Sun Road” and, finally, “Helplessness Blues” itself. In a way, it feels like we’re at the end of a protracted Phase One for Fleet Foxes – where the business begun on their debut album has reached some kind of natural resolution on Shore, with their tide-like ruminations on ageing, loss and uncertain times. Where next..?

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

Fleet Foxes played:

Wading in Waist-high Water
Sunblind
Can I Believe You
Ragged Wood
Your Protector
He Doesn’t Know Why
Featherweight
Third Of May/ Ōdaigahara
White Winter Hymnal
Phoenix
Maercstapa
Mykonos
Blue Spotted Tail
The Kiss
A Long Way Past The Past
Drops In The River
Blue Ridge Mountains
Grown Ocean

Encore:
Monetezuma
The Shrine/An Argument
For A Week Or Two
Going-to-the-Sun Road
Helplessness Blues

Khruangbin & Vieux Farka Touré: “It felt like a perfect fit”

Sam Richards

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31st August 2022

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Khruangbin & Vieux Farka Touré: “It felt like a perfect fit”

First they travelled the world, then they conquered it with their languid, cosmopolitan funk. Now KHRUANGBIN have pulled off their most impressive musical fusion to date, covering the songs of Ali Farka Touré in a seat-of-the-pants collaboration with the Malian legend’s son VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ. �...

First they travelled the world, then they conquered it with their languid, cosmopolitan funk. Now KHRUANGBIN have pulled off their most impressive musical fusion to date, covering the songs of Ali Farka Touré in a seat-of-the-pants collaboration with the Malian legend’s son VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ. “We were all flying blind,” they admit to Sam Richards in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, August 18 and available to buy from our online store.

The idea of escape to distant climes is baked into Khruangbin’s soul. After all, they are named after the Thai word for aeroplane – a tribute to the psychedelic Southeast Asian pop that, according to bassist and occasional singer Laura Lee Ochoa, “was one of the first seeds in the Khruangbin DNA”. Ochoa is a seasoned traveller; her uncle worked for the American embassy and she used to go and stay with him in various far-flung corners of the world. When she was 17, she visited him in Singapore, hopping up the Malay peninsula for that first life-changing visit to Thailand. By contrast, drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson didn’t have a passport until he joined the band. But it turns out that their home city of Houston is a better place than you might think to hear music from across the globe.

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“It’s actually the number-one most diverse city in America,” explains Ochoa. “As well as the oil and gas, it’s the biggest medical research centre in the whole of the United States, so you get people from all over the world. There’s the Mahatma Gandhi District where you can go to find Indian cassette tapes, there’s Little Saigon where you can find the Vietnamese and Korean VHS tapes which I used to get. It’s pretty easy to find these different parts of the world in Houston.”

But while Khruangbin’s music is proud to flaunt its cosmopolitan hues – you can add dub, cumbia, Ethio-jazz, Turkish psych and more to the mix – the band are careful not to evoke any particular destination. “I hope that the music takes you somewhere in your mind,” says Ochoa. “Not a specific country, just in a daydream sort of way. I don’t want to paint the picture for everyone, I want them to paint their own.”

Their latest project, an inspired mindmeld with Mali’s Vieux Farka Touré, continues their global voyage of the imagination. So it’s a surprise to find that the collaboration took root in the distinctly unexotic locale of a London pub. Touré was looking for a Western group to help record an album of songs by his father, the legendary Ali Farka Touré, and he’d gone to watch Khruangbin on the suggestion of his manager, Eric Herman. Within moments of sitting down to a dinner of fish and chips with the Texan trio, he knew he’d found what he was looking for.

“I was so impressed with them as musicians and as really cool people,” says Touré. “It is clear in their music that they have wide-open ears and hearts for music from around the world. But more than that they are sympathetic and thoughtful people. They told me how they loved my father’s music and I could feel that in their hearts they wanted to honour him. It felt like a perfect fit.”

PICK UP THE NEW UNCUT FOR THE FULL STORY

The 6th Uncut New Music Playlist Of 2022

Blogs

Michael Bonner

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30th August 2022

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The 6th Uncut New Music Playlist Of 2022

You join us on a busy Monday morning where we're in the throes of finishing an issue. We'll talk about that soon enough - stand by for revelations concerning the car boot sale purchases of one of our most beloved artists - but for now here’s something to ease you into the week: a list of the recor...

You join us on a busy Monday morning where we’re in the throes of finishing an issue. We’ll talk about that soon enough – stand by for revelations concerning the car boot sale purchases of one of our most beloved artists – but for now here’s something to ease you into the week: a list of the records we’ve played over the past couple of days in the virtual Uncut office. Lots of good new stuff from Margo Price, Arctic Monkeys, Pole, Caitlin Rose and The National as well as some more recent discoveries for you. Incidentally, I’m off to see Fleet Foxes tonight, so with any luck I’ll get a blog up about that tomorrow sometime.

Anyway, here we go…

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Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

MARGO PRICE
“Been To The Mountain”
(Loma Vista Recordings)

POLE
“Grauer Sand”
(Mute)

ARCTIC MONKEYS
“There’d Better Be A Mirrorball”
(Domino)

CACTUS LEE
“Perfect Middle Hall”
(Mapache)

<a href="https://cactuslee.bandcamp.com/album/perfect-middle-hall">Perfect Middle Hall by Cactus Lee</a>

GUMA
“Highway 10 Blues”
(Gold Robot)

BETH ORTON
“Friday Night”
(Partisan)

BITCHIN BAJAS
“Amorpha”
(Drag City)

CHRIS FORSYTH
“You’re Going To Need Somebody”
(No Quarter)

<a href="https://chrisforsyth1.bandcamp.com/album/evolution-here-we-come">Evolution Here We Come by Chris Forsyth</a>

THE NATIONAL
“Weird Goodbyes” [feat Bon Iver]
(4AD)

<a href="https://thenational.bandcamp.com/track/weird-goodbyes">Weird Goodbyes by The National feat. Bon Iver</a>

DRUGDEALER
“Someone To Love”
(Mexican Summer)

CAITLIN ROSE
“Black Obsidian”
(Names)

JUNIOR BOYS
“Night Walk”
(City Slang)

UN.PROCEDURE
“Polytunnel”
(Self-released)

ONE ELEVEN HEAVY
“Tyrant King”
(Kith & Kin)

LOU TURNER
“Microcosmos”
(Spinster)

JULIA JACKLIN
“Be Careful With Yourself”
(Polyvinyl)

BURD ELLEN
“The Hermit [live]”
(Mavis)

HONEY HARPER
“Broken Token [Live from EastWest Studios]”
(Bella Union)

GOAT
“Under No Nation”
(Rocket Recordings)

Bonny Light Horseman: the folk collective return

Erin Osmon

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29th August 2022

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Bonny Light Horseman: the folk collective return

As BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN, the trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman and Eric D Johnson have reframed trad-folk ballads for the present, earning a Grammy nomination and the patronage of Bon Iver and The National’s Aaron Dessner along the way. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine - in UK shops from ...

As BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN, the trio of Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman and Eric D Johnson have reframed trad-folk ballads for the present, earning a Grammy nomination and the patronage of Bon Iver and The National’s Aaron Dessner along the way. In the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, August 18 and available to buy from our online store, Erin Osman meets them in Kansas to discuss dulcimers, the unifying power of the Grateful Dead and the joy of late-night jams. “The energy was off the charts,” they share.

Like everywhere else, Kansas City is in the grip of near-unprecedented heatwave. From a shaded patio table adjacent to the swimming pool at the city’s Intercontinental hotel, the three principal members of Bonny Light Horseman – who are here on tour, opening for Bon Iver, the band led by their friend and 37d03d label boss Justin Vernon – are sheltering from the oppressive heat, water and coffee in hands, explaining why they’re not a supergroup. “A supergroup is about vaunting identities, and what we’re doing is about shedding identities,” contends Anaïs Mitchell. “It’s not so much a Mount Rushmore of folk icons,” adds Josh Kaufman. “It’s much more of a collective, making something together.”

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

Concludes Eric D Johnson: “We’re not a casual one-off or a fleeting ’80s side project. That term reminds me of something that would have a member of Yes in it.”

However, it’s easy to understand why the term has stuck. Each member joined the group as a proven artist with an established fanbase and celebrated body of work. Mitchell has released eight solo albums and won Tony awards for her musical Hadestown, Kaufman is an in-demand multi-instrumentalist and producer whose credits include Bob Weir, The National, Josh Ritter, The Hold Steady and Taylor Swift, while Johnson has been making indie-rock under the Fruit Bats moniker for more than two decades.

It almost doesn’t make sense for the trio to form a humble folk act – except that each artist is clearly not content to inhabit the same role over and over. Kaufman explains that he’s been craving the familial energy that comes with a band; Johnson began as a teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago; Mitchell has long wanted to be a part of something beyond her own silo. “I ran into someone recently who asked, ‘Aren’t you in that band Bonny Light Horseman?’” she recalls. “I felt so incredibly happy to be identified that way.”

Their ravishing self-titled debut album from 2020 reframed trad-folk ballads for the present day, making fresh currency of Napoleonic War-era laments, Appalachian spirituals and Irish ballads. They were rewarded for their efforts with a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. On Rolling Golden Holy, the band’s second album, and first composed of all original songs, they double-down on the group dynamic. “There were moments where we went into Voltron mode, each using our superpower,” says Johnson. “But it’s not like Anaïs wrote all the lyrics and I wrote all the melodies and Josh played all the instruments.”

PICK UP THE NEW UNCUT FOR THE FULL STORY

The Watersons’ Frost And Fire: A Calendar Of Ritual And Magical Songs to be reissued

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Michael Bonner

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26th August 2022

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The Watersons’ Frost And Fire: A Calendar Of Ritual And Magical Songs to be reissued

The Watersons' ageless Frost And Fire: A Calendar Of Ritual And Magical Songs is being re-released by Topic Records on October 28. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut It's coming as a remastered vinyl pressing cut at 45rpm, while the sleeve is a replica of t...

The Watersons‘ ageless Frost And Fire: A Calendar Of Ritual And Magical Songs is being re-released by Topic Records on October 28.

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

It’s coming as a remastered vinyl pressing cut at 45rpm, while the sleeve is a replica of the original (with minor adaptations for 2022), including the original sleevenotes by folklorist, A.L. Lloyd.

Originally released in 1965, Frost And Fire has become one of English folk music’s essential recordings. Meanwhile, the Watersons – Norma, Mike and Lal Waterson and their cousin, John Harrison – assumed the status of folk royalty.

Frost And Fire is available to pre-order here.

Should you need it, the tracklisting for Frost And Fire is:

Side A
Here We Come A-Wassailing
The Derby Ram
Jolly Old Hawk
Pace-Egging Song
Seven Virgins Or The Leaves Of Life
The Holly Bears A Berry
Hal-An-Tow

Side B
Earsdon Sword Dance Song
John Barleycorn
Harvest Song: We Gets Up In The Morn
Souling Song
Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand
Herod And The Cock
Wassail Song

Ezra Furman – All Of Us Flames

Sharon O'Connell

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26th August 2022

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Plenty of artists openly protest against their categorisation along genre lines, while many more just quietly resent it, but across five albums since 2012, Ezra Furman has unabashedly channelled the rock’n’roll classicism of Reed, Dylan, Young and (especially) Springsteen, while repurposing its ...

Plenty of artists openly protest against their categorisation along genre lines, while many more just quietly resent it, but across five albums since 2012, Ezra Furman has unabashedly channelled the rock’n’roll classicism of Reed, Dylan, Young and (especially) Springsteen, while repurposing its power to a unique end. In the run-up to 2013’s breakthrough, the hectic Day Of The Dog, Furman, who came out as a trans woman last year, declared her ambition was to be like Elvis, Buddy Holly or Patti Smith, and though solo identity as a group leader was on her mind there, not glory, with the blazing All Of Us Flames she’s stepping into the spotlight.

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

It follows 2019’s Twelve Nudes and the previous year’s Transangelic Exodus and though it wasn’t planned as part of a trilogy, when the new LP was finished Furman noticed she’d intuitively been developing the themes explored on those earlier records – very real institutional threat and the active oppression of minority communities, including her own. The title is lifted from the single “Book Of Our Names”, whose springboard was the second book of the Hebrew Bible. It sees Furman demanding a space where society’s outcasts can freely and safely declare themselves: “I want there to be a book of our names/None of them missing, none quite the same/None of us ashes, all of us flames”. Squint and it could be a Springsteen lyric, but on this album Furman has translated his politico-personal take on how any of us might make the kind of society we want to belong to and find a part to play in it, into her own (Jewish) faith-based yet hugely humane survival manual. It’s religious, not political belief that fires up the livid compassion and defiant, collectivist spirit of these 12 new songs.

Much of the record was written early on in the pandemic, when Furman was driving around Massachusetts in search of a quiet refuge from her overcrowded house, parking up at random and writing in her car. Produced by John Congleton, it flexes some of the same muscles as Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow and Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors, roaring with emotional truth and transformative power, against whatever odds. Speaker-busting single “Forever In Sunset” is the exemplar, and with its road references, high-contrast dynamics and throat-tearing vocal intensity, also Furman’s Boss-iest tune yet. Opening the set, though, is “Train Comes Through”, a synth-pop anthem with a slow build to juggernaut urgency, as befits a metaphor for seismic change: “But a great machine can break down suddenly if someone removes a tiny screw/And the solid things will move in all directions when the train comes through”. “Throne” is next, with its bluesy drama, horns and unexpected nod to ’80s Dylan (circa his “Christian trilogy”), but a switch occurs with the bittersweet, Shangri-Las-like theatricality of “Dressed In Black”. There’s the odd flash of sly humour, too: Furman describes (herself, perhaps) “an obsessive, detail-oriented heathen Jew” in “Train Comes Through” and later, in the darkly twinkling “Ally Sheedy In The Breakfast Club” admits, “The black shit on your eyes, your purse full of junk/I built my world on versions of your VHS visage”.

Despite its will to collective power, the record’s tone is by no means solely triumphant. With its deceptive sweetness, well-placed “motherfuckers” and suggestion of “Comes A Time” given a Spacebomb rinse, “Point Me Toward The Real” ushers in a run of fragile, more contemplative songs, interrupted only by the ’80s art pop-edged “Poor Girl A Long Way From Heaven”, which tells of a childhood encounter with God. Most striking in the album’s second half are the last two tracks, both unbearably poignant: first is the Prince-ly, slow-mo “I Saw The Truth Undressing”; finally, “Come Close”, the tender tale of a brief sexual encounter and the set’s only directly autobiographical song, described by Furman to Uncut as “an open wound for me, lyrically” and “so intimate it almost scares me”.

All Of Us Flames is not a collection of diary entries or part of a memoir in progress. Personal it may be, but the inclusivity of that title betrays Furman’s intent: these are songs of connection and (un)belonging for – as “Come Close” has it – “the broken hearted”, “the desperate ones” and the “freak[s] with no place to hide”. A revitalised rock’n’roll soundtrack for a push towards the brightening of the light.

Lou Reed – Words & Music, May 1965

Alastair McKay

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26th August 2022

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In 1965, Lewis Reed was a half-formed thing. In fluctuating quantities he was a street poet, a reporter, a Greenwich Village folkie, a comedian, a pop hack. He had his own ideas, some of them borrowed, a few of them blue. He was an experiment. He wasn’t yet an original. Run the tape backwards – ...

In 1965, Lewis Reed was a half-formed thing. In fluctuating quantities he was a street poet, a reporter, a Greenwich Village folkie, a comedian, a pop hack. He had his own ideas, some of them borrowed, a few of them blue. He was an experiment. He wasn’t yet an original. Run the tape backwards – to 1963/4, say – and it’s evident that Reed’s metamorphosis was speeding up. Back then, when two years in pop history was an age, the Dylanisms came loaded with harmonica and deference to the workmanlike chug of the blues. Peer back further, into the mists of Reed’s teenage imagination, and you’ll hear the innocent joy of doo-wop, but also a pre-echo of The Velvet Underground’s last proper album, Loaded, from 1970. The end and the beginning were the same.

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

As an act of archaeology, Words & Music, May 1965 is an understated triumph. The album is the first fruit of an exploration of the Reed archive, excavated from the office of Sister Ray Enterprises Inc in New York’s West Village. The collection reaches from Reed’s final performance in 2013, back to his high school band, The Shades, from 1958. Over 600 hours of tapes were found and catalogued. The bulk of this album comes from 1965, from a 5” reel-to-reel tape that was found in a package Reed had mailed to himself at his parents’ house in Freeport, New York, as proof of copyright.

Deep context is provided by the inclusion of that 1958 rehearsal tape of The Shades doing a song called “Gee Whiz”, with Reed on guitar and lower harmony vocals. The Shades were a doo-wop group who recorded one single (as The Jades) for Time Records. The rehearsal tape is a fragment. It captures Reed and lead singer Phil Harris toying around with the tune. Harris suggests the song could be modified. Reed argues for another key, saying, “What do ya have to lose?” The discussion is unresolved, but it’s an interesting moment. Bob & Earl’s “Gee Whiz” is a fragile, floating thing, anchored in an idealised notion of teenage romance. It is insecurity, communicated with vocal purity. Reed and Harris’ approach is more knowing. Heavenly perfection is beyond them, and their efforts bristle with the tidal energy of surf music.

That, though, is a road not taken. Just as Reed modified his singing voice to something approaching the murmur of his mind’s internal dialogue, so he learned to wrap his sincerity in the ambiguity of character. Listening to songs such as “Heroin”, “I’m Waiting For The Man” and “Pale Blue Eyes” in their earliest stages releases them from the bondage of Reed’s persona. There are two passes at “I’m Waiting For The Man”. The first strides out like a Johnny Cash gunslinger, but there’s a hint of the nursery in the circular twang of the tune. The conversational parts are acted out comically, with John Cale playing the dislocated white boy as an English fop, before a harmonica solo drags the narrative up the stairwell. The second take is faster with the comedy subdued, but the rhythm jitters until it implodes.

On “Heroin”, Reed delivers a near catatonic performance with blurred diction and hesitant two-chord guitar, but the tune rushes as the narrative develops. There are lyrical anomalies – a squirt instead of a shoot – but the song is basically complete. “Pale Blue Eyes” is similarly hesitant, with Reed and Cale’s bruised harmonies bringing it home. There are many lyrical differences, but the chorus’s exhausted melancholy is intact.

These sketches give a sense of how Reed’s songs would be finessed. The less familiar tunes reverse the telescope, throwing the focus on the way Reed bullworked his writing muscles, toying with novelty and genre. Just as “Heroin” shows the influence of Reed’s poetic sensibilities, songs such as “Buzz Buzz Buzz” and “The Buttercup Song” illustrate the playfulness that developed from (or perhaps earned him) his job as a staff writer at Pickwick Records, winning credits on songs by bands such as The Beachnuts, The Roughnecks and Spongy And The Dolls. Songs in this context were exercises that could be elevated with a modicum of wit. “The Buttercup Song” is a novelty, verging on Monty Python parody, with Reed and Cale just about making it to the end of a lyric that tips a wink to bestiality and an androgynous goldweed.

In terms of understanding what worked, Reed is at his best when he eschews the blues and dumps the harmonica. What these early sketches show is that by combining novelty and song craft with the soul of a poet, Reed could reach higher. Humour could sweeten his mordant imagination. Plus – no minor consideration – John Cale was a great foil, challenging but not erasing Reed’s rock’n’roll manners.

And so it begins, as Cale takes the vocal on “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams”. It’s a folk nursery rhyme, musing on death, yet it sounds like something from Bagpuss, a warping of innocence that is both comforting and disturbing. Suddenly everything is in place.

Bridget St John – From There / To Here – UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

Jim Wirth

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26th August 2022

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Bridget St John – From There / To Here – UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

Speaking in the mid-1970s, singer-songwriter Bridget St John was aware that her personal musical golden age was over. “It’s not enough to make nice records anymore,” she told the Liquorice fanzine. “You’ve got to have a whole campaign behind you.” A slightly untogether free spirit, St ...

Speaking in the mid-1970s, singer-songwriter Bridget St John was aware that her personal musical golden age was over. “It’s not enough to make nice records anymore,” she told the Liquorice fanzine. “You’ve got to have a whole campaign behind you.” A slightly untogether free spirit, St John struggled to adapt to a more bread-headed world, with this 3CD boxed set, stacked with unheard recordings, capturing the Nico-voiced bohemian’s curious and woolly attempts to stay artistically upright in a time when being a John Peel show regular was no longer quite enough.

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

The poster girl of Peel’s Dandelion record label, the Surrey-born doctor’s daughter carved out a niche on the teacher-training-college-gig circuit at the turn of the 1970s with a run of three winsome LPs: Ask Me No Questions, Songs For The Gentle Man and Thank You For…. Initially encouraged to write by John Martyn (who she met while bunking off from her studies at Sheffield University), her deep, reedy voice featured on Kevin Ayers’ Shooting At The Moon and Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn as she became a feature of the post-psychedelic UK underground landscape.

However, after Polydor pulled the plug on Dandelion in late 1972, times got less groovy. St John recorded a one-off single for MCA, “Passing Thru’”, before a new manager, Steeleye Span hustler Jo Lustig, managed to snare her an album deal with Chrysalis. An exhausted Martyn cried off producing 1974’s Jumble Queen, but stand-in Leo Lyons did a stand-up job. The Ten Years After bassist’s sensitive accompaniments and orchestral arrangements (most notably on “Song For The Waterden Widow”) help to make St. John’s last ‘proper’ album to date perhaps her best.

There are shades of Ayers on opener “Sparrowpit” – named after the Derbyshire village St John had retreated to after splitting with her husband – while the mournful “I Don’t Know If I Can Take It” might have been a commercial winner if Judy Collins had recorded it. Gawky whimsy helped to make St John’s early album’s cult favourites, but Jumble Queen has a more weathered take on love 1970s style (which may explain why it was enthusiastically reviewed by feminist magazine Spare Rib).

“Last Goodnight” bridles at the limitations of open-door relationships (“if we made any promises we never wrote them down,” she sings sadly), and St John writes unashamedly about being the opposite of a hippie house momma on the strange, stately title track (“nothing is stable, I know I’m unable to rise, the dishes are dirty, my hands are unclean”). Languid closer “Long Long Time” offers some hope that love might somehow redeem all at some time in the future, but St John’s position – in love and life – was probably better summed up by her line on the Nick Drake-ish “Want To Be With You”: “Floundering in promises, holding on to dreams.”

In the immediate aftermath of Jumble Queen, Chrysalis dropped her, while Elton John’s Rocket label flirted with picking her up, only to sign Kiki Dee. A note from publicist Al Clark reproduced in the booklet accompanying this set shows that Virgin records boss Richard Branson was considering releasing St John’s dolorous take of Perry Como smash “Catch A Falling Star” (“A cassette of this is now in Richard’s possession and is being considered with optimism… and caution,” it reads), but the phone call never came.

St John might sensibly have quit then, but From There/To Here shows how she found new impetus after an ill-starred romantic adventure took her to New York in 1976. She found a new home and community in Greenwich Village, playing and recording fitfully until the birth of her daughter Cristy in 1983 changed her priorities. Honking 1980s sax perhaps obscures the quality of the songs on the second disc (previously released as Take The 5ifth), but if St John’s sleevenotes show her frustration at her inability to land another record deal (“I imagine I had no MTV appeal,” she sighs) this collection suggests she may have had more fun trying and failing than she ever would have done succeeding. With modern firebrands Steve Gunn and Ryley Walker now enlisting her as a collaborator, St John’s fuzzy cachet remains undiminished. In the long run, making nice music was enough after all.

Soundtrack for David Bowie’s Moonage Daydream doc revealed!

News

Michael Bonner

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25th August 2022

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Soundtrack for David Bowie’s Moonage Daydream doc revealed!

The forthcoming David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, will be joined by a companion album. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Directed by Brett Morgan, Moonage Daydream opens in cinemas on September 16. A digital edition of the companion album will be ...

The forthcoming David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, will be joined by a companion album.

ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

Directed by Brett Morgan, Moonage Daydream opens in cinemas on September 16. A digital edition of the companion album will be released by Parlophone on the same date. A 2 x CD edition will follow on November 18 with a 3 x LP due next year.

The album contains unheard versions, live tracks and mixes created exclusively for the film. You can hear a Moonage Daydream mix of “Modern Love” below.

The album also contains a previously unreleased live medley of “The Jean Genie / Love Me Do / The Jean Genie” recorded live at the final Ziggy Stardust concert at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, featuring Jeff Beck on guitar. Other rarities include an early version of “Quicksand” and a previously unreleased live version of “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me” from the 1974 Soul Tour.

The album is available to pre-order here.

The tracklisting for the digital edition is:

“Time… one of the most complex expressions…”
Ian Fish U.K. Heir (Moonage Daydream Mix 1)
Hallo Spaceboy (Remix Moonage Daydream Edit)
Medley: Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud / All The Young Dudes / Oh! You Pretty Things (Live)
Life On Mars? (2016 Mix Moonage Daydream Edit)
Moonage Daydream (Live)
The Jean Genie / Love Me Do / The Jean Genie (Live) (featuring Jeff Beck)
The Light (Excerpt)*
Warszawa (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
Quicksand (Early Version 2021 Mix)
Medley: Future Legend / Diamonds Dogs intro / Cracked Actor
Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me (Live in Buffalo 8th November, 1974)
Aladdin Sane (Moonage Daydream Edit)
Subterraneans
Space Oddity (Moonage Daydream Mix)
V-2 Schneider
Sound And Vision (Moonage Daydream Mix)
A New Career In A New Town (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Word On A Wing (Moonage Daydream Excerpt)
“Heroes” (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
D.J. (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Ashes To Ashes (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Move On (Moonage Daydream acappella Mix Edit)
Moss Garden (Moonage Daydream Edit)
Cygnet Committee/Lazarus (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Memory Of A Free Festival (Harmonium Edit)
Modern Love (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Let’s Dance (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
The Mysteries (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
Ian Fish U.K. Heir (Moonage Daydream Mix 2)
Word On A Wing (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Hallo Spaceboy (live Moonage Daydream Mix)
I Have Not Been To Oxford Town (Moonage Daydream a cappella Mix Edit)
“Heroes”: IV. Sons Of The Silent Age (Excerpt) *
★ (Moonage Daydream Mix Edit)
Ian Fish U.K. Heir (Moonage Daydream Mix Excerpt)
Memory Of A Free Festival (Moonage Daydream Mix Edit)
Starman
“You’re aware of a deeper existence…”
Changes
“Let me tell you one thing…”
“Well, you know what this has been an incredible pleasure…”

* Performed by Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop

Tracklisting for the 2 x CD edition is:

CD1
“Time… one of the most complex expressions…”
Ian Fish U.K. Heir (Moonage Daydream Mix 1)
Hallo Spaceboy (Moonage Daydream Remix Edit)
Medley: Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud / All The Young Dudes / Oh! You Pretty Things (Live)
Life On Mars? (2016 Mix Moonage Daydream Edit)
Moonage Daydream (Live)
The Jean Genie / Love Me Do / The Jean Genie (Live) (featuring Jeff Beck)
The Light (Excerpt)*
Warszawa (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
Quicksand (Early Version 2021 Mix)
Medley: Future Legend / Diamonds Dogs intro / Cracked Actor
Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me (Live in Buffalo 8th November 1974)
Aladdin Sane (Moonage Daydream Edit)
Subterraneans
Space Oddity (Moonage Daydream Mix)
V-2 Schneider

CD2
Sound And Vision (Moonage Daydream Mix)
A New Career In A New Town (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Word On A Wing (Moonage Daydream Excerpt)
“Heroes” (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
D.J. (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Ashes To Ashes (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Move On (Moonage Daydream a cappella Mix Edit)
Moss Garden (Moonage Daydream Edit)
Cygnet Committee/Lazarus (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Memory Of A Free Festival (Harmonium Edit)
Modern Love (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Let’s Dance (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
The Mysteries (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide (Live Moonage Daydream Edit)
Ian Fish U.K. Heir (Moonage Daydream Mix 2)
Word On A Wing (Moonage Daydream Mix)
Hallo Spaceboy (live Moonage Daydream Mix)
I Have Not Been To Oxford Town (Moonage Daydream acappella Mix Edit)
“Heroes”: IV. Sons Of The Silent Age (Excerpt) *
★ (Moonage Daydream Mix Edit)
Ian Fish U.K. Heir (Moonage Daydream Mix Excerpt)
Memory Of A Free Festival (Moonage Daydream Mix Edit)
Starman
“You’re aware of a deeper existence…”
Changes
“Let me tell you one thing…”
“Well, you know what this has been an incredible pleasure…”

*Performed by Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop

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