It's now seven years since Damage, the last Blues Explosion album, a hiatus during which Jon Spencer got to indulge his psychotic rockabilly side with three albums with Heavy Trash, and also pursue a few other alternative musical endeavours with the likes of Andre Williams, Solex and Cristina Martinez. It was also a period during which the original punk-blues pioneers saw their influence put to more remunerative use not just by The White Stripes but by The Black Keys as well, as stripped-back roots riffage unaccountably became one of rock's more commercially potent modes.
In the latest issue of Uncut (Take 181, June 2012), out now, we visit Tom Petty at his California home to discuss the history of the Heartbreakers, why he's "a ridiculous control freak" and why the group are heading to the UK for the first time in 15 years – so it seems like a good time to check out this great piece by Adam Sweeting on Petty's 'lost classic', 1985's Southern Accents, from Uncut's May 2004 issue.
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Fired up by disco and punk, Jagger’s swagger returns, with a disc of unreleased songs...Wrongly or rightly, the allegations against the Stones came thick and fast in 1977. They’d lost their edge. They’d become gluttonised, lazy, too rich and bored to care. Some of them had the temerity to be in their mid-thirties (NME called them “The Strolling Bones”). The urgent sound of punk had made their jet-set rock seem passé.
Click on the links for Part One, Part Two and Part Three of the interview.
Is it fair to see the last three LPs of a piece? They seem to sit together as a sequence.
Yeah I think what I found, funnily enough, is sometimes you get what you want when you stop trying to get it.
Welcome to Waitsville. A place where bad jokes are good, Vaudeville never died, and the talk is of smoking monkeys, weasels and the mating habits of the preying mantis.
