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Richard Swift To Be Joined By First Aid Kit At Club Uncut

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Richard Swift To Be Joined By First Aid Kit At Club Uncut
Richard Swift will be joined by young Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg who comprise First Aid Kit at next month's (February) Club Uncut at London's Borderline. First Aid Kit's influences range from Cat Power and Joanna Newsom to Fleet Foxes, The Beatles and Johnny Cash, so be sure to g...

Richard Swift will be joined by young Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg who comprise First Aid Kit at next month’s (February) Club Uncut at London’s Borderline.

First Aid Kit’s influences range from Cat Power and Joanna Newsom to Fleet Foxes, The Beatles and Johnny Cash, so be sure to get down to the show early on February 24.

Swift will previewing his forthcoming, eagerly-awaited follow-up to Dressed Up For The Letdown.

Tickets cost £10 and can be bought from www.seetickets.co.uk. As usual, the show is at the Borderline, on Manette Street, just off London’s Charing Cross Road.

And don’t forget there are tickets still available for our first show of 2009, a showcase for two of the most exciting new bands in America. Long Beach psych-punks Crystal Antlers and The Delta Spirit (kin to Cold War Kids and Dr Dog, perhaps) will be playing Club Uncut at London’s Borderline on January 27. Support comes from Italian-in-London noisepopper Banjo Or Freakout, and tickets are available for £7, again from www.seetickets.co.uk.

We’ll be announcing the headline act for the March Club Uncut tomorrow, so check back for details!

For more music and film news click here

Part Two: Texas Country Singer Rodney Crowell

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Part Two: Texas Country Singer Rodney Crowell
In this month’s issue of Uncut , we bring you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interview...

In this month’s issue of Uncut , we bring you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interviews.

And here’s the second one: Rodney Crowell

Houston, Texas born country singer songwriter, and one-time husband of Rosanna Cash, a nervous Crowell asked Cash to sing on 2001’s “I Walk The Line Revisited”. “It was like getting Da Vinci to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa,” he recalled.

***

UNCUT: When did you first meet Cash?

CROWELL: At the Beverley Hills Hotel when I was dating his daughter. Went to dinner in the Bungalow, just me and her and John and June. You can imagine – I was 27 years old. It was just a delightful dinner. And they treated me like royalty. They were just so charming. John and June were world-class charming human beings. I was a couple of feet off the ground. The next time, Rosanne and I were living together. John didn’t smile on that. He thought that was not right. So we received a summons – airline tickets to their sugar plantation down there [in Jamaica]. So I got drunk all the way. I drank bloody Marys to Miami and then switched to rum going down to Montego Bay, and then when we got there I was really way up in my cups. There was a confrontation between John and Rosanne about sleeping arrangements, so I with drunken bravura I cut into the conversation. I said, you know I’d be a hypocrite if I changed my lifestyle – trying to be a puffed-up man and hold my own with [chuckle] one of the world class icons – and he kind of looked at me, and he said: “Son. I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone.” He dismissed me in a heartbeat. Which instantly sobered me. And from that point on… he made a friend for life with me, because he just showed me what real strength is.

It must have been intimidating – these presumably are your musical heroes.

Certainly the second meeting was extremely intimidating. The first one was more a dream sequence. Just a really delightful dinner for four. A fireside dinner at the Bev Hills Hotel,. And for me, just getting my legs under me in the music business, it was huge.

Is JC somebody that, when you were bumming around with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, was up in the pantheon for you?

Yeah. Going way back. In Nashville in that day when Guy and Townes were two steps above the street, and the rest of us were still scrapping on the street, John with his compound out on the lake was the top of the ladder. I remember, Guy had a small house across the lake and his next door neighbour had a boat, and we’d be out there on a full moon night in the boat, putting by over the cove where John’s big house was. Looking at it, going ‘God! That’s pretty cool.’ Roy Orbison was next door.

You have this song, “The First Time I Heard Johnny Cash Sing I Walk The Line”/ I’ve heard you read the memoir of it – the way you describe his voice sounding like Abraham Lincoln looked – what did you mean?

It’s just that kind of gravitas. Deep gravitas. And also that iconic sense – that you could have his bust on Mt Rushmore. Put him and Dylan and Chuck Berry and Merle Haggard and Hank Williams up there.

Is the song literally true, that when you first heard “I Walk The Line” you were transported?

Yeah – well, I was trying to capture the poetry of the moment in the way I wrote that. But I think that when that particular experience was through with me – I mean, given my parents and my life, chances are I’d have been a songwriter – but hearing that when I was 5 years old and going that far away, it sort of sealed the deal.

Did you ever work together? I presume his vocal is dubbed onto that record.

Yeah it was dubbed on. I helped in the studio. I produced a record with him and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. A live record. It was recorded in Germany.

What was it like working with him?

Great. It was funny. My favourite thing about John was his wicked sense of humour. He was a kid. Whenever he suited up and was the Man In Black he was an imposing figure – this worldwide icon, but relaxed and away from that he was a prankster. He was a funny kid. And he really indulged his childish self. It was fun.

Did you consider him to be a genius?

Well you know that word is… that’s a tricky word. How do you define it? I think a song like “How High’s The Water Mamma”, that’s Faulkner. That’s genius. Or “I Walk The Line”, “I Still Miss Someone”, or “Big River”. There’s a poetic genius, for sure. I think the genius lies in being an elevated everyman. You don’t get to that place if you’re not somehow touched with that extra bit of charisma. And as my friend Stuart Smith would always say, he was a body language genius. We used to tour with him and we would open, and I remember doing this show at the Albert Hall, and my band would open, and we’re standing watching him from that little door by the stage, and Stuart turned to me and he said “There is no greater body language than that man on stage.”

Just from the way he stood?

Yeah – just you know, hey, I’m comfortable here. Like his most comfortable chair was on that stage, standing up singing for people.

This phrase you used – elevated everyman – it is a difficult position to be celebrated for being apparently like everybody else. And being above it.
It’s hard to do. It’s hard to be in both places at once. And I think he paid a price for it. He died a young man. He wore himself out doing it. He lived hard.

Was he conflicted about the responsibilities of that?

No I don’t think so. I think he was really comfortable. He was more conflicted about his own personal demons, that he struggled with. There was a part of John that I was aware of: he had currents swimming in two different directions. He struggled with drugs, most of his life. There was always that clean-up time, which he really had, where he had that really big turnaround with June, but he still struggled later on.

What was at the root of the drug problem? Was it a recreational thing that spiralled?

No. It was like he survived what Elvis didn’t survive. I talked to him about this. You know, when they came of age and they were out there, and those guys were making records and going on the road and trying to keep their schedule together, and somebody handed him amphetamines. And if you’re pre-disposed toward chemical dependency – we talked about this – they handed those guys the hard stuff from the get-go. At least when I came up people were handing you a beer and a joint. It was a gentler entry into that world. For those guys coming up in the Fifties – the Everlys and all of those guys – they handed them amphetamines, which is basically like plugging yourself into the light fixture. And scientifically there are those who are pre-disposed to struggle with introducing chemicals to the body. And you’re in for a long bout with that: amphetamines are rough. When you’re flying on it it’s like you can conquer the world, but coming down off it’s a really hard crash.

Is there one story which sums up what you think of John?

The one I told you about being drunk out of my mind and insinuating I was going to have my way with his daughter. He put me in my place with world class resolve. But there’s also another personal memory I have – that we were in the cabin that he and June had on their property, and he had a hammock on the front of it. Somebody had a video camera, and John was just laying in the hammock, just kind of swinging idly, really relaxed. And someone handed me the camera and said: shoot dad. So I put the camera on him, and I watched this relaxed man, this patriarch lying in a hammock, become Johnny Cash, through the camera. And it was so powerful. It was almost like this transformation. It wasn’t a Jekyll and Hyde thing, it was just ‘oh, the camera’s on’, and whenever it was time to go to work, even if it was just for a home movie, he became that icon. I just watched that icon inhabit that body. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Good God, it’s so strong.’

Was that a conscious thing with him?
No. I think he probably called on it consciously when he needed to. But this particular time, it was just the instinct of, ‘Oh, the camera, it’s on me, I’m who I am,’ and pfff, there it is! Going from just lying in a hammock enjoying a summer’s day. It was really profound, to be looking through a camera lens and see it. So I can imagine, a photographer, lurking – like Alan Messer shot Johnny Cash a lot – and we had this conversation, because he shot my new album cover and I told him that story and he said, oh yeah it was always that way whenever we would start to shoot. He said he would snap, take the picture, and the legend would assume itself right before his eyes.

You compared him to Will Rogers once – what did you mean?
It’s what we already talked about – the elevated everyman. It’s like the everyman as poet, you know? As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style. Will Rogers was a pundit, really, in a way. And John had that same kind of comfortable everyman – but the difference between him and the common man was his poetic brilliance. He was really a poet. At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast

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Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
Andrew Bird has a theory about whistling. Roughly speaking, he views it as the most efficient way to extract the music from his imagination. “It’s like sonic vapour escaping,” he says. “The melody’s in this cloud-like shape in your head.” So, when he whistles – which he does quite freq...

Andrew Bird has a theory about whistling. Roughly speaking, he views it as the most efficient way to extract the music from his imagination. “It’s like sonic vapour escaping,” he says. “The melody’s in this cloud-like shape in your head.” So, when he whistles – which he does quite frequently – he is getting to the music without thinking about how to translate it to an instrument. “There’s no frets, there’s nothing imposing it’s odour on it, so you end up with less conventional melodies.” These were not, its fair to speculate, the concerns of Roger Whittaker when he recorded The Mexican Whistler. But Bird is an unusual pop musician. As he has demonstrated over seven albums (as well as several informal live recordings), he is capable of channelling folk dance rhythms – as on his 1996 debut, Music of Hair, and with his previous band, The Squirrel Nut Zippers – and operating in the basements of the Chicago and Minneapolis undergrounds. His last album, Armchair Apocrypha, could have been filed alongside Wilco’s more experimental recordings, but Noble Beast is a step back towards a folkier sensibility.

A classically-trained violinist writing pop, Bird’s music exists in the airlock between theory and intuition. The air can be a bit dry in there, but when the vacuum is breached, there’s a magisterial quality to his melodies. He was trained in the Suzuki method, a “folk” approach, in which Mozart and Bach are learned by ear. He channelled this into an appreciation of jazz, and plays his violin in the style of a tenor saxophone.

He doesn’t appreciate comparisons – no wonder, since he has been compared with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Joanna Newsom – but if you put aside the plaintive echoes of Thom Yorke (on “Nomenclature”) or Paul Simon (on “Tenuousness”), you end up with a kind of clinical soul, a heartfelt music that takes time to release its charms, like Scott Walker channelling Sufjan Stevens. But “soul”, too, is misleading. As a vocalist, Bird is effortless. There is no sense of him sweating the emotional stuff. Lyrically, he wouldn’t have lasted past morning roll-call in the Brill Building. He favours an arcane vocabulary and a cryptic approach to meaning.

A song such as The Privateers could represent a heartfelt cheerio to the ethics of the Bush era, or it could be a snarky farewell to a lover. The singer favours the latter, but won’t exclude the former, as he doesn’t always know what his songs are about. When Bird wrote about songwriting in the New York Times, he took time out to explain why he had opted for the phrases “calcified arhythmatist” over “unemployed ex-physicist” in the album’s opening song “Oh No”. Not, you’d imaging, a choice that ever tormented Hal David.

Bird is aiming for a kind of pastoral simplicity on Noble Beast. Cinematic moments, where the sound goes widescreen, are almost an afterthought. On the lovely “Effigy”, the violin has a Ry Cooder-ish feel to it, like a campfire accordion, while the twanging guitar of Jeremy Ylvisaker evokes the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. Bird concedes that the reverb-heavy whistling is suggestive of spaghetti westerns, but claims he was aiming more for a 1960s Nashville feel – something with the sonic grandiosity of the Everlys, Roy Orbison or Kris Kristofferson. These influences are buried: while you might discern a folk memory of “Ghost Riders In The Sky”, it would be an age before you discerned any similarity to “Only The Lonely”. But “Effigy” is a lovely song, and sturdy enough to survive re-interpretation. You can imagine it in the voice or Lee Marvin or Leonard Cohen, and there’s no greater praise.

The Nashville inference is no accident. The songs were assembled with the assistance of Lambchop collaborator Mark Nevers, while drummer Martin Dosh added rhythm tracks in his Minneapolis basement. But this isn’t a genre piece. There’s a sense throughout that Bird’s head is engaged in a battle with his heart, as if aware that there’s a pop masterpiece squatting on the far horizons of his intuition.

As grand and controlled as it all sounds, there is something unbalanced about Bird’s pop. In the album’s bonus disc, “Useless Creatures” – a free-spirited, indulgent collaboration with Wilco’s Glenn Kotche – you can hear him rustling and scratching away from the melody. The pulsebeat of Noble Beast travels in the other direction, but the aim is the same. Except that when Bird plays pop, you can whistle it. And if you don’t, he will.

ALASTAIR McKAY

UNCUT Q&A With Andrew Bird:

Were you aiming for a pastoral sound?

Before I made this record, I sat down and said, now what do I want to hear? If I went into a record store, what’s missing? I decided I wanted to work more with acoustic instruments, getting this warm, rich, bubbly sound. I visualised a place on my farm in the country where there’s a spring coming out from underneath this tree, and everything’s covered in moss and in a state of decay, and it has a steamy fecund quality. That’s what I wanted to do sonically.

Have you moved beyond your jazz influences?

My influences are not as clearly visible. When you first start writing you have your record collection and you think this is as good as it gets. This Lester Young solo from 1956 – I can only hope to make music that cool. When you start writing you’re gonna naturally write that way. So instead of studying other violinists I tried to play like Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, and I still do play that way – like a phrase is a breath of air. But it’s just not jazz. It’s not stylistically specific anymore. On a tune like “Masterswarm”, there’s a bit of a guilty pleasure about just playing a violin solo. It was a thrill – like I had to give myself permission: it was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna rip this lead out here.’

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY

For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

The Rakes: “Klang!”

John Mulvey
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Not, perhaps, the sort of thing that I write about here very often, but The Rakes always sounded round these parts as one of the best bands to emerge from the whole post-Libertines/post-punk/Britpop Nouveau thing of a few years ago. They seemed to have a fair bit more wit and interesting angles than most of their contemporaries, and maybe a healthy affinity to Elastica. That said, I can’t pretend to remember much about The Rakes’ second album, so the arrival of their third didn’t initially cause that much fuss. It’s really good, though: it’s called “Klang!”, possibly due to it being recorded in the band’s new hometown of Berlin. “Klang!”, however, is not much like Krautrock, being instead a lean and determined reiteration of the Rakes’ skills: choppy riffs; bug-eyed social observation; very short songs. “Klang!” has ten songs, the longest of which comes in at less than three and a half minutes. The titles are pretty good value in themselves: “The Loneliness Of The Outdoor Smoker”, “Shackleton”, “Mullers Ratchet”, the last of which apparently refers to a genetic disorder which manifests itself in asexual populations and is not the sort of thing you get dealed with so catchily in, say, a song by The View. And as something like “That’s The Reason” belts past, the infectious bristling economy comes across as a neat rejoinder to the new Franz Ferdinand album, where their schtick seems so tired and needy. The price of success, maybe: if “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand” finds a band so anxiously trying to cling on to fame and overcompensating as a result, “Klang!” showcases one unburdened by any such expectations. Frankly, The Rakes’ time of hipness may have past, but the quality of these clipped dispatches – and the unglossy punch bestowed on them by Les Savy Fav producer Chris Zane – suggest a longevity uncommon in British bands of their generation. The best thing of many good things here is a song called “1989”, a roisteringly nostalgic knees-up which may have something to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which faintly resembles “Hong Kong Garden” with its gothic portent replaced by something at once blokey and somehow cerebral. Everything flies past in a blur, but occasionally you catch Alan Donohue’s blurry narratives through those precisely ringing and strutting guitars, that mathematically chundering bassline. In “Shackleton”, he seems to be comparing himself to “Harry Hill on happy pills”, and though I’m fairly sure there’s more erudite references in here, that one sticks out this morning. Good record.

Not, perhaps, the sort of thing that I write about here very often, but The Rakes always sounded round these parts as one of the best bands to emerge from the whole post-Libertines/post-punk/Britpop Nouveau thing of a few years ago. They seemed to have a fair bit more wit and interesting angles than most of their contemporaries, and maybe a healthy affinity to Elastica.

Continue

The Incredible String Band – Tricks Of The Senses

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The Incredible String Band – Tricks Of The Senses

Modern ears frequently can’t get past the more frivolous side of The Incredible String Band: the Gilbert & Sullivan silliness of “Minotaur Song”, or the fuzzy-felt folk of “Painting Box”. Which is a shame, because if you listen beyond the mimsy and screen out the velvet loon pants, you find a group whose trial-and-error traversal of world religions and alternative spirituality are conducted with such poetic fervour, it makes the music of most other late 60s mystics sound spiritually malnourished. This 16 track compilation of rarities and unreleased music, spanning six of the group’s eight years, leans relatively heavily on their questing and experimental side, with enough tomfoolery for light relief. Fans have long hoped for outtakes from their most celebrated album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. This definitive trawl of the Witchseason and Island warehouses by ace ISB investigator Adrian Whittaker turned up nothing from the 1968 classic. Instead he’s pulled together a mix of alternate studio takes, live recordings, an astonishing American radio session, and a Leadbelly song from the coveted, long-undiscovered ‘Balmore hoard’, the earliest home recordings by Mike Heron and Robin Williamson as a duo, on which they announce themselves as “poets and players, and prophets from the North”. “Lover Man”, left off 1967’s 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, shows the paradox that it was Heron, the rock ’n’ roller, who sang out like a trad hollerer, while Williamson, the Scots folknik, exploited the intimacy of the microphone for his bardic odysseys. In “The Iron Stone”, an alternate take of the acoustic raga from Wee Tam And The Big Huge (1968), Williamson describes finding a lump of meteorite that acts as a magic portal to a mental carnival of Atlantean beings. Much of the surrounding folk-rock – from Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” to Shirley Collins’s Anthems In Eden – contained similar time-travelling leaps, but few stage-managed the illusion with such arresting panache. The May 1968 session for WBAI’s Radio Unneameable show is a fascinating time capsule of the era: host Bob Fass clears the air with Tibetan gongs and drums, before Williamson recites his mystic poem “The Head”, backed by recorders and dippy flutes. This, and the “Poetry Play #1” which appears on CD2, is an experimental, freeform String Band that never made it to vinyl. “See All The People” shows off the duo’s deft, gossamer guitar interplay, while Heron’s “Douglas Traherne Harding” is a homily lodged in a parable secreted in a conundrum. CD1 closes with “Maya”, a gnomic paean to the Hindu goddess of illusion. Because the original Big Huge version cuts off in mid-jam, it’s one of the most hotly contested tracks in the canon. This radio version helps lay the controversy to rest; the saffron buzz of its agitated sitar is allowed to wind right down to an idling coda. The break between the two CDs effectively rings down the interval curtain between the String Band’s first and second phases. “All this world is but a play/be thou the joyful player”, they had chorused in “Maya”. After 1969 they awarded girlfriends Likky McKechnie and Rose Simpson full group membership; signed up to the Church of Scientology; joined forces with Stone Monkey, former prancers extraordinary at UFO and Middle Earth; and indulged a group passion for theatrics with U, an indulgent psychedelic mummery produced at London’s Roundhouse and across America in 1970. Culled from a noisy tape of their Roundhouse residency, U is represented by the camp swashbuckler “El Ratto”, whose punning text is declaimed with relish by Williamson, and the brief ballad “Long Long Road”, neither of which appear on the album of the show. Continuing the amateur dramatics, “Queen Juanita And Her Fisherman Lover” (a missing track from 1970’s I Looked Up) will either seem charming or drawing-room twee, depending on how high you’ve calibrated your threshold for briny 16-minute melodramas featuring Ondes Martenot, wave machine and giggling recitative. The compilation is wrapped up with two cuts from the 1972 Earthspan sessions. “Secret Temple”, written and sung by Likky, starts in Mo Tucker mode and develops into a serpentine roundelay for shenai and minimalist piano. “Curlew” is a crystalline chamber-folk instrumental whose Hardanger fiddle and penny whistles point towards Williamson’s destiny as a Celtic troubadour and storyteller. All in all, this collection of ones that got away is far from barrel-scraping stuff: a rarities collection to be savoured alongside Joe Boyd’s long-awaited remasters of the Incredible discography, due later this year. ROB YOUNG UNCUT Q & A With Robin Williamson UNCUT: Did you enjoy rediscovering these forgotten tracks? RW: Yes, the surprise for me is the rehearsal of “Relax Your Mind”, that’s come out of somebody’s back cupboard. That was never intended for issue, but it has got a nice, fresh, funky sort of feel to it. And the Likky song, “Secret Temple”, is very good. And so is the instrumental “Curlew”, which I’d forgotten about completely. “The Iron Stone” seems to have stayed with you throughout your career. I’ve recently re-recorded that again for ECM. I still have the iron stone – I think it’s a meteorite, I found it on the beach at Cramond, near Edinburgh. It had come from so far away, from outer space, and it seemed to be carrying this atmosphere of parallel worlds and possibilities. Did your theatricals with Stone Monkey reflect the madness of your own lives at the time? Actually it was quite like that, yeah. U was something that grew that winter. The loch froze solid, and you could drive a car over it, spinning round and round in circles. Do you still consider music a spiritual journey? At the age of 65, the notion of what we’re doing in the world at all, and the miracle of being alive, and our destiny as spiritual entities, is what concerns me more profoundly than anything else. Me and my wife Bina are working together doing seasonal programmes doing precisely that. And we’re having a tremendous time doing it. INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Modern ears frequently can’t get past the more frivolous side of The Incredible String Band: the Gilbert & Sullivan silliness of “Minotaur Song”, or the fuzzy-felt folk of “Painting Box”. Which is a shame, because if you listen beyond the mimsy and screen out the velvet loon pants, you find a group whose trial-and-error traversal of world religions and alternative spirituality are conducted with such poetic fervour, it makes the music of most other late 60s mystics sound spiritually malnourished. This 16 track compilation of rarities and unreleased music, spanning six of the group’s eight years, leans relatively heavily on their questing and experimental side, with enough tomfoolery for light relief.

Fans have long hoped for outtakes from their most celebrated album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. This definitive trawl of the Witchseason and Island warehouses by ace ISB investigator Adrian Whittaker turned up nothing from the 1968 classic. Instead he’s pulled together a mix of alternate studio takes, live recordings, an astonishing American radio session, and a Leadbelly song from the coveted, long-undiscovered ‘Balmore hoard’, the earliest home recordings by Mike Heron and Robin Williamson as a duo, on which they announce themselves as “poets and players, and prophets from the North”.

“Lover Man”, left off 1967’s 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, shows the paradox that it was Heron, the rock ’n’ roller, who sang out like a trad hollerer, while Williamson, the Scots folknik, exploited the intimacy of the microphone for his bardic odysseys. In “The Iron Stone”, an alternate take of the acoustic raga from Wee Tam And The Big Huge (1968), Williamson describes finding a lump of meteorite that acts as a magic portal to a mental carnival of Atlantean beings. Much of the surrounding folk-rock – from Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” to Shirley Collins’s Anthems In Eden – contained similar time-travelling leaps, but few stage-managed the illusion with such arresting panache.

The May 1968 session for WBAI’s Radio Unneameable show is a fascinating time capsule of the era: host Bob Fass clears the air with Tibetan gongs and drums, before Williamson recites his mystic poem “The Head”, backed by recorders and dippy flutes. This, and the “Poetry Play #1” which appears on CD2, is an experimental, freeform String Band that never made it to vinyl. “See All The People” shows off the duo’s deft, gossamer guitar interplay, while Heron’s “Douglas Traherne Harding” is a homily lodged in a parable secreted in a conundrum. CD1 closes with “Maya”, a gnomic paean to the Hindu goddess of illusion. Because the original Big Huge version cuts off in mid-jam, it’s one of the most hotly contested tracks in the canon. This radio version helps lay the controversy to rest; the saffron buzz of its agitated sitar is allowed to wind right down to an idling coda.

The break between the two CDs effectively rings down the interval curtain between the String Band’s first and second phases. “All this world is but a play/be thou the joyful player”, they had chorused in “Maya”. After 1969 they awarded girlfriends Likky McKechnie and Rose Simpson full group membership; signed up to the Church of Scientology; joined forces with Stone Monkey, former prancers extraordinary at UFO and Middle Earth; and indulged a group passion for theatrics with U, an indulgent psychedelic mummery produced at London’s Roundhouse and across America in 1970. Culled from a noisy tape of their Roundhouse residency, U is represented by the camp swashbuckler “El Ratto”, whose punning text is declaimed with relish by Williamson, and the brief ballad “Long Long Road”, neither of which appear on the album of the show. Continuing the amateur dramatics, “Queen Juanita And Her Fisherman Lover” (a missing track from 1970’s I Looked Up) will either seem charming or drawing-room twee, depending on how high you’ve calibrated your threshold for briny 16-minute melodramas featuring Ondes Martenot, wave machine and giggling recitative.

The compilation is wrapped up with two cuts from the 1972 Earthspan sessions. “Secret Temple”, written and sung by Likky, starts in Mo Tucker mode and develops into a serpentine roundelay for shenai and minimalist piano. “Curlew” is a crystalline chamber-folk instrumental whose Hardanger fiddle and penny whistles point towards Williamson’s destiny as a Celtic troubadour and storyteller.

All in all, this collection of ones that got away is far from barrel-scraping stuff: a rarities collection to be savoured alongside Joe Boyd’s long-awaited remasters of the Incredible discography, due later this year.

ROB YOUNG

UNCUT Q & A With Robin Williamson

UNCUT: Did you enjoy rediscovering these forgotten tracks?

RW: Yes, the surprise for me is the rehearsal of “Relax Your Mind”, that’s come out of somebody’s back cupboard. That was never intended for issue, but it has got a nice, fresh, funky sort of feel to it. And the Likky song, “Secret Temple”, is very good. And so is the instrumental “Curlew”, which I’d forgotten about completely.

“The Iron Stone” seems to have stayed with you throughout your career.

I’ve recently re-recorded that again for ECM. I still have the iron stone – I think it’s a meteorite, I found it on the beach at Cramond, near Edinburgh. It had come from so far away, from outer space, and it seemed to be carrying this atmosphere of parallel worlds and possibilities.

Did your theatricals with Stone Monkey reflect the madness of your own lives at the time?

Actually it was quite like that, yeah. U was something that grew that winter. The loch froze solid, and you could drive a car over it, spinning round and round in circles.

Do you still consider music a spiritual journey?

At the age of 65, the notion of what we’re doing in the world at all, and the miracle of being alive, and our destiny as spiritual entities, is what concerns me more profoundly than anything else. Me and my wife Bina are working together doing seasonal programmes doing precisely that. And we’re having a tremendous time doing it.

INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG

For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Beirut – March Of The Zapotec

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Beirut – March Of The Zapotec
Zach Condon is the Tintin of modern American indie. Under the name of Beirut, armed only with his trusty ukulele and trumpet, the plucky cub musician has bravely journeyed Into The Land Of The Gypsies (on 2006 debut Gulag Orkestar), caroused in The Paris Of The Golden 20s ( 2007's The Flying Club Cu...

Zach Condon is the Tintin of modern American indie. Under the name of Beirut, armed only with his trusty ukulele and trumpet, the plucky cub musician has bravely journeyed Into The Land Of The Gypsies (on 2006 debut Gulag Orkestar), caroused in The Paris Of The Golden 20s ( 2007’s The Flying Club Cup) and now, in his latest double feature, takes brief soujourns in The Valley Of The Zapotecs and The Lair of the Laptop.

What buried treasure or fabulous secret is he on the trail of? It may be that every white bohemian seeks elective affinities with some romanticised cultural other. Punk seized upon the righteous dread of reggae, post-punk found salvation in the locked grooves of funk, and even indiepop divines ultimate romantic rapture in Northern Soul. You could argue that it’s the inescapable global ubiquity of modern US indie’s really Big Other – hip hop – that has driven young romantics like Condon to ever greater lengths in search of forms to idealize.

The backstory of the first half of the new record almost feels like a put-on: idly considering composing a soundtrack for a film based in Mexico, Condon became besotted with the funeral bands of the Oaxaca region. Determined to trace the music back to its source, the New Mexico gringo travelled down to the tiny Zapotec village of Teotitlan de Valle and, with the help of a trilingual translator, collaborated on 6 new tracks with the 19-piece Jiminez Band.

You half-hope this is all an elaborate fabulation, especially since it’s actually not as radical leap as you might expect. Banda, the traditional brass music of Mexico, developed in part from the polka music brought over by German and Polish immigrants in the 19th century, and is similarly founded on the relentless oompah of the sousaphone.

It’s a charmingly woozy picturesque postcard Mexico: full of inconsolably grieving mothers, carnivalesque town squares, bitter wives and death by bayonet. Just as Gulag was actually initially inspired by the films of Emir Kusturica and Flying Club existed in a snowglobe Jacques Demy-Monde, MZapotec feels like it could be the soundtrack to some fanciful Wes Anderson Mexican road movie. And, like Jason Schwartzman in the Darjeeling Limited, traveling across India, but seemingly locked within the world of “Where Do You To My Lovely?”, the fixed-point at the heart of it all remains Condon’s richly romantic, melancholy croon.

Funnily enough, the second half of the record, entitled Holland and credited to “realpeople” (an early pre-Beirut alias), was recorded at home but seems like a greater departure. Comprising five limpid electronic sketches, it reveals Condon’s hitherto shady roots as a teenage devotee of Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt. “My Night With a Prostitute From Marseilles”, originally commissioned by this generation’s Winona, Natalie Portman, could be one of the Magnetic Fields early formalist exercises in romantic synthpop.

The comparison does Condon few favours though: while Merritt is the most bleakly ingenious writer of his generation, the oddly uninspired electronic arrangements (“No Dice” feels like an interminable 80s computer game theme) only highlight Condon’s lack of interest in real songcraft. More worrying, when he’s working in a form you’re more familiar with, the purely generic music makes you wonder how much of a free pass he’s given on his more exotic homage-holidays.

Holland is at its best on “Venice”, where pale winter sunbeam synths, reminiscent of Boards of Canada, are played upon by a mournful breeze of brass. It’s wonderfully unexpected, as though Miles Davis was riffing with Vangelis on some post-bop Blade Runner. So much so that you kind of regret the entrance of Condon’s fruity voice, which brings the track firmly back down to the familiar terrain of Beirut. Nevertheless the beauty of those opening moments suggests that Condon’s future really does lie in soundtracks, where you can imagine him collaborating with and finding inspiration in the baroque visual inventions of an Anderson or a Gondry, and where his restless musical wandererings might yet chance upon the truly undiscovered countries of the imagination.

STEPHEN TROUSSÉ

UNCUT Q & A With Zach Condon

So this is very much a game of two halves?

CONDON: It’s a double EP, not an album. Each disc is vastly different so it’s to avoid confusion. March Of The Zapotec came about because I was approached to do a soundtrack to a movie about Mexican immigrants. For inspiration, the director showed me videos of traditional music from Oaxaca – not mariachi, more like funeral dirge music. The movie thing fell through but I ended up falling in love with the music. A band member of ours’ mother lives in Oaxaca six month of the year, so she helped us find these 17 musicians from a town called Teotitlan del Valle. They all play rusty, beaten-up brass instruments that have probably been passed down through a couple of generations. They’re Zapotec Indians, they don’t even speak much Spanish. We had to run our portable studio with solar power because the electricity is so spotty down there.

How about the synth pop half?

CONDON: Holland is the complete opposite. From the age of 15, before I started Beirut, all the music I made was electronic. It’s a dirty secret of mine that whenever I got stuck in a rut on the last two Beirut albums I’d slip off and record one of these synth-pop songs to have some fun and cleanse the palate. It’s some of the most straightforward stuff that I do. If was to compare it to anything, it would be early Stephen Merritt [The Magnetic Fields] material.

INTERVIEW: SAM RICHARDS

For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Pavement – Brighten The Corners (R1997)

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Pavement – Brighten The Corners (R1997)
Pavement’s languid yet hysterical shredding of North American rock always reminds me of the scene in Blue Velvet, where cleancut Jeffrey Beaumont breaks into the chicken walk. Brighten The Corners is stocked with familiar Pavement furniture: slack-strung guitars, chords changing gear with a satisf...

Pavement’s languid yet hysterical shredding of North American rock always reminds me of the scene in Blue Velvet, where cleancut Jeffrey Beaumont breaks into the chicken walk. Brighten The Corners is stocked with familiar Pavement furniture: slack-strung guitars, chords changing gear with a satisfying, early Big Star crunch; lyrical nonsequiturs that snip through sense.

This gleamingly remastered, double CD edition adds 32 extras including outtakes, live cuts, BBC sessions and B sides. Like a stoner Jonathan Richman, Stephen Malkmus plays the merry fool, from musings on Geddy Lee’s speaking voice on “Stereo” to the almost De La Soul-like scat on “Blue Hawaiian”. In another universe, “Shady Lane” and “Type Slowly” might have made hit singles; as it is, this slice of weird-rock from a more contented American decade is playful and preposterous in equal measure.

ROB YOUNG

For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Revolutionary Road

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Revolutionary Road

DIRECTED BY Sam Mendes STARRING Leonardo Di Caprio, Kate Winslet “You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” coos Winslet’s April to Di Caprio’s Frank, early in this stodgy, airless drama, before the couple’s rapport turn sour. She clearly hasn’t met many people. Mendes compresses Richard Yates’ brilliant 1961 anti-suburbia novel into an acting showcase for the grown-up Titanic duo, and is so besotted with his wife’s face that he all but plasters on subtitles announcing her every narrowing of the eyes. Leo, in a role several layers thinner than the book’s lead, feels increasingly like a gooseberry in a vanity project. The Wheelers want to be special, to defy social conventions. April suggests they leave Connecticut for Paris. Yet temptation in the form of trivial affairs and job promotions causes Frank to lose sight of his ideals. A depressed April takes irrational, tragic action. TV’s Mad Men did the Stepford-period angle with more style and subtlety, and the bickering pair’s only arc here is from conflict to more conflict. It’s all rather depressing. While Yates’ story retains flecks of perceptiveness, this is as disappointing as the characters’ compromises. CHRIS ROBERTS

DIRECTED BY Sam Mendes

STARRING Leonardo Di Caprio, Kate Winslet

“You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” coos Winslet’s April to Di Caprio’s Frank, early in this stodgy, airless drama, before the couple’s rapport turn sour. She clearly hasn’t met many people. Mendes compresses Richard Yates’ brilliant 1961 anti-suburbia novel into an acting showcase for the grown-up Titanic duo, and is so besotted with his wife’s face that he all but plasters on subtitles announcing her every narrowing of the eyes. Leo, in a role several layers thinner than the book’s lead, feels increasingly like a gooseberry in a vanity project.

The Wheelers want to be special, to defy social conventions. April suggests they leave Connecticut for Paris. Yet temptation in the form of trivial affairs and job promotions causes Frank to lose sight of his ideals. A depressed April takes irrational, tragic action. TV’s Mad Men did the Stepford-period angle with more style and subtlety, and the bickering pair’s only arc here is from conflict to more conflict. It’s all rather depressing. While Yates’ story retains flecks of perceptiveness, this is as disappointing as the characters’ compromises.

CHRIS ROBERTS

Rachel Getting Married

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Rachel Getting Married

DIRECTED BY Jonathan Demme STARRING Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin Halfway through this rambling family drama, one sister announces she’s pregnant. “That’s so unfair!” squeals her sibling, all but stamping her foot and pulling her hair out. It’s a scene which sums up everything that’s interesting and infuriating about Demme’s very Altmanesque ensemble piece: the moment is unexpected, surprising. Yet it’s also self-indulgent, whiney and hard to like. Hathaway gives an against-type turn as central figure Kym, leaving years of rehab to attend Rachel’s (DeWitt) nuptials. Kym’s the black sheep, which is signified by her chain-smoking, promiscuity and stream of acidic put-downs. Hathaway gives it her all but you feel she may have over-studied Ellen Page in Juno. Demme, meanwhile, appears to have watched A Wedding until he knows it backwards: quirky characters emerge then fade with no real momentum. Inevitably, dark buried secrets are slowly forced to the surface. Debra Winger cameos as the sisters’ estranged mother and oozes such effortless acting grace that everyone else seems to be straining. Also dropping by are Roger Corman, Fab Five Freddy, Demme favourite Robyn Hitchcock and - as the husband to be - TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. All of which suggests something cool and unconventional. At heart however, despite the juddering hand-held camerawork, this is well-trod dysfunction of the Ordinary People school. CHRIS ROBERTS

DIRECTED BY Jonathan Demme

STARRING Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin

Halfway through this rambling family drama, one sister announces she’s pregnant. “That’s so unfair!” squeals her sibling, all but stamping her foot and pulling her hair out. It’s a scene which sums up everything that’s interesting and infuriating about Demme’s very Altmanesque ensemble piece: the moment is unexpected, surprising. Yet it’s also self-indulgent, whiney and hard to like.

Hathaway gives an against-type turn as central figure Kym, leaving years of rehab to attend Rachel’s (DeWitt) nuptials. Kym’s the black sheep, which is signified by her chain-smoking, promiscuity and stream of acidic put-downs. Hathaway gives it her all but you feel she may have over-studied Ellen Page in Juno. Demme, meanwhile, appears to have watched A Wedding until he knows it backwards: quirky characters emerge then fade with no real momentum. Inevitably, dark buried secrets are slowly forced to the surface. Debra Winger cameos as the sisters’ estranged mother and oozes such effortless acting grace that everyone else seems to be straining.

Also dropping by are Roger Corman, Fab Five Freddy, Demme favourite Robyn Hitchcock and – as the husband to be – TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. All of which suggests something cool and unconventional. At heart however, despite the juddering hand-held camerawork, this is well-trod dysfunction of the Ordinary People school.

CHRIS ROBERTS

Oscars 2009 Nominations: See The Shortlist Here

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Oscars 2009 Nominations: See The Shortlist Here
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button leads the field with thirteen nominations for this year's Academy Awards which take place in Los Angeles on February 22. Starring Brad Pitt, who is up for the Best Actor award, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is also up for Best Picture, Best Director and Bes...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button leads the field with thirteen nominations for this year’s Academy Awards which take place in Los Angeles on February 22.

Starring Brad Pitt, who is up for the Best Actor award, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is also up for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress amongst it’s haul of 13.

Closely behind is Brit Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire, which gets the nod in ten categories, including Best Film and Best Director.

The new Gus Van Sant film Milk has also received eight nominations, the same as the Dark Knight, for which Heath Ledger gets a posthumous nod for Best Supporting Actor.

For more on this year’s Oscars, and to have your say on this year’s nominated films, go to Uncut’s film blog The View From Here now.

Here are the nominees in the main categories for the 81st Academy Awards:

Best picture

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Frost/Nixon

Milk

The Reader

Slumdog Millionaire

Best director

Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire

Stephen Daldry – The Reader

David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Ron Howard – Frost/Nixon

Gus Van Sant – Milk

Best actor

Richard Jenkins – The Visitor

Frank Langella – Frost/Nixon

Sean Penn – Milk

Brad Pitt – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler

Best actress

Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married

Angelina Jolie – Changeling

Melissa Leo – Frozen River

Meryl Streep – Doubt

Kate Winslet – The Reader

Best supporting actress

Amy Adams – Doubt

Penelope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Viola Davis – Doubt

Taraji P Henson – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler

Best supporting actor

Josh Brolin – Milk

Robert Downey Jr – Tropic Thunder

Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt

Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight

Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road

Best foreign language film

Revanche – Austria

The Class – France

The Baader Meinhof Complex – Germany

Departures – Japan

Waltz With Bashir – Israel

Best animated feature film

Bolt

Kung Fu Panda

Wall-E

Best adapted screenplay

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Doubt

Frost/Nixon

The Reader

Slumdog Millionaire

Best original screenplay

Happy-Go-Lucky

Milk

Wall-E

In Bruges

Frozen River

For more music and film news click here

Oscar nominations

Michael Bonner
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Here's the list of nominations in the key categories for this year's Academy Awards... I'll be back with some no doubt vague and rather woolly thoughts after the list: BEST FILM "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" "Frost/Nixon" "Milk" "The Reader" "Slumdog Millionaire" ACTOR Richard Jenkins, “The Visitor" Frank Langella, "Frost/Nixon" Sean Penn, "Milk" Brad Pitt, "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" Mickey Rourke, "The Wrestler" ACTRESS Anne Hathaway, "Rachel Getting Married" Angelina Jolie, "Changeling" Melissa Leo, “Frozen River” Meryl Streep, "Doubt" Kate Winslet, "The Reader" DIRECTOR Danny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire" Stephen Daldry, "The Reader" Gus Van Sant, "Milk" David Fincher, "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" Ron Howard, "Frost/Nixon" SUPPORTING ACTOR Josh Brolin, "Milk" Robert Downey Jr., "Tropic Thunder" Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Doubt" Heath Ledger, "The Dark Knight" Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road” SUPPORTING ACTRESS Amy Adams, "Doubt" Penelope Cruz, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" Viola Davis, "Doubt" Taraji P. Henson, “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” Marisa Tomei, "The Wrestler" Well, I can't claim there's too many surprises here, though I'm delighted to see Richard Jenkins and Marisa Tomei acknowledged for their great work in The Visitor and The Wrestler. It's good to see, too, nods for Downey (for Tropic Thunder) and Anne Hathaway (for Rachel Getting Married). It would be churlish to grouch about the posthumous nomination for Ledger, even if I find the Internet obsession with both him and The Dark Knight rather tiresome. If I had to predict anything -- gun to head, mind you -- I'd say Benjamin Button for Best Picture, Rourke for Best Actor and Boyle for Best Director. It strikes me, they'd represent a satisfyingly broad cross-section of where the Academy's heads are at. Benjamin Button (which, I admit, I didn't like much) is a weighty prestige studio picture, that's done remarkably well despite it's relatively unconventional plot. Rourke. Well, everyone loves a comeback, and he's on a roll at the moment with The Wrestler. Boyle. Slumdog Millionaire is charming and feelgood, and has also racked up impressive box office takings in the US. I also think it's the most accessible movie in its category; which would be ideal for countering the criticisms last year that the Oscars were being too exclusive with movies like There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men having relatively low recognition value in middle America. Of course, I reserve the right to be completely wrong come February 22. And let us know what you think should win...

Here’s the list of nominations in the key categories for this year’s Academy Awards…

Continue

Nick Cave On Working With Johnny Cash

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Nick Cave On Working With Johnny Cash
In this month’s issue of Uncut , we bring you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interview...

In this month’s issue of Uncut , we bring you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interviews.

And here’s the first one: Nick Cave

Covered Cash’s “The Singer” in 1986 and sang together on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” for American Recordings VI. Their version of UK folk ballad “Cindy” came out posthumously on the Unearthed boxset.

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UNCUT: How did you meet Johnny Cash?

CAVE: I had two phone calls from Rick Rubin. The first one I was on holiday somewhere in the south of France and I got this call completely out of the blue from him – just asking if I had any problems with Cash recording “The Mercy Seat”. And that was just such a strange thing – nobody was supposed to know where I was, and it was such a very strange phone call that came through.

I didn’t have too many problems with that, at all. So that just kinda happened without incident. And I got the record and heard it and was really, really moved by it. And thought it was offered another side to that song that I could never have brought to it, I don’t think. It was just his age and his stature, and what had happened brought to that rendition of that rendition of that song. And it had that strange wigged out harpsichord at the end.

So that was one of those little gifts that you can never predict. The next time I was in LA on tour and I got another of these phone calls from Rick asking if I wanted to come down and sing with Johnny Cash the following day. Obviously I wanted to, but I was full of trepidation about the whole thing. He just said bring a couple of songs and we’ll do them. Actually [Bad Seeds’ collaborator] Warren Ellis suggested the Hank Williams song, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. We also did a little version of “Cindy Cindy”, which was very funny.

But he was there with June, and she was an absolute trip, this woman. When I mentioned the song “Cindy Cindy”, they said, “Oh we know that,” and this particular song has got these floating verses where everyone throws everything into ot. And they were yelling out verses that I’d never heard to each other – “Do you remember the one, ‘If I had a needle’?!’” and all that sort of stuff. It was a joy to watch. But the real highlight was the Hank Williams song. He’d done it before – I didn’t know that. And that was his favourite Hank Williams song, he said.

What physical state was he in?

When I saw him I was half an hour early. Well, I was on time, and he was half an hour late. I was sitting in the recording studio with the band and Rick, and then he appeared, and there were these steps that he had to walk down to get into the studio. Whatever the condition he had – one of the problems I think was diabetes, and if he went from light into dark he couldn’t see, he was basically blind for ten minutes, so when he came into the studio, he looked real ill, and was helped down the stairs by two people.

He had his arms out in front of him going “Are you there Nick? Are you there?” And I’m like, fucking hell, how’s this guy going to be able to sing anything? Let alone get down the stairs. So it was quite a shock, you know? He sat down and talked and his eyes adjusted to the light, so he could see, and we sat around and talked about things for a while. Then he said, so what do you want to play? So I told him, and the band just started up – they were fucking unbelievable, and he sang it. I was secretly terrified that I wasn’t going to be able to sing this song with him – that it would be in some kind of key that I couldn’t get to, and that I was going to fuck it up. But everyone was so relaxed about it and he was so relaxed and generous with his praise that I felt all right when I actually sang it.

When the song finished there was this sort of silence, and Rick Rubin’s voice came through the cans saying “We’re gonna have to do that again.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m flat, right?” And he goes “Nope, Johnny’s flat.” So suddenly I felt a sense of freedom, to sing the song. I had got away with it. Then they got me to sing some harmonies on the other song. And I’m like you don’t want me to do that. And June’s going “You get in there and you sing those harmonies!” I’m like, [sheepish] all right.

We heard that Johnny’s voice was gone and he had to pray to get it back.

Well yeah. He went into this kind of long rant about various things, but he said that he’d had pneumonia three times that year, and he’d woken up and his voice had completely gone. And that he’d got down on his knees and said to God: “I never asked for nothing in my life, I never asked for nothing; but you give me back my voice! So I can go and sing with Nick Cave.” Then he says “And I woke up the next day and I’m singing like a bird!” And June’s going “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

It was the real deal, and it was extraordinary. When he started singing all his illness just seemed to fall away. He became energised by that. I often hear that, and often it’s a load of shit, but this is actually true. In some ways when I was sitting there talking to him, I was kind of wondering how this man was going to be able to sing anything at all. Once he sat down there was just this real strength – this force of nature that came out of him. For me – it was two hours, and I walked out thinking, fuck, what happened then? That was the extraordinary thing. I felt I had really seen something that for me was hugely comforting, and inspirational, and truly incredible.

Some fans of the early stuff say the Rubin material doesn’t have the rhythm and attack of the earlier records.

I disagree with that. To do something like that – what Rick did with him – I’ve heard criticisms as well, from certain people, that Rick was kind of bleeding him dry by getting him back into the studio. But I’ve gotta say, it was the other way around. He was energising this man and giving him something that he hadn’t had for a while. Now there were certain songs that he got Johnny Cash to sing that were stepping into really risky areas, “Personal Jesus” and stuff like that. It’s risky, to haul this legend right up to the cliff face of contemporary music and expect him to do something with it. But I love the way he did those songs: the U2 song, they were great. And I think there were enough older songs to make those records really work.

What do you make of Cash as a singer? He’s almost intoning rather than singing.

It’s in the tone, and the phrasing. He has this unconventional and extremely awkward phrasing sometimes. It’s rhythmic, I guess, but it’s really on the one. Like that Bob Dylan song, “It Ain’t Me Babe” – “No, no, no!” But being on the one like that lends a certain gravity to what he sings sometimes. And also with the tone of his voice. I don’t think other people can get away with singing in that way. That’s the thing. You know, you’re really hearing every word thundering out.

There’s so much that’s complex with Cash. The sense of sin, and danger, and Biblical righteousness. But he has this stage persona, too…

I saw that show that he did in London maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It was in three parts. He did early stuff with a small band, and then he sat and played. It was at the time the first of those American Recordings came out, I guess. In the middle he sat and played this new stuff on the guitar by himself, and then at the end June came out, and it was a big kind of knees-up end to the whole thing. And it really showed these three sides of him in quite an unconscious kind of way. When he did this stuff in the middle it was spine-chilling cos it was so… there was something wrong with his voice. When he put it low there was some irritation going on with his voice, but he just sang it anyway.

It was so beautiful, and so wracked at the same time. And such a contrast to that early stuff. Then he went on and did the thing with June Carter, doing Jackson and all that kind of stuff, and slapping their knees. I could be reading things into it, but he looked onstage as if he was quite uncomfortable doing that final stuff: that he was now somewhere else. And it was when he was doing that stuff on his own that it was just so beautiful. But I only met him for those couple of hours in the studio and he was everything that I thought he would be.

Was he a genius?

I don’t know what that word means.

Which period do you like best?

I go through all the different periods. Sometimes I listen to him a lot, and sometimes I don’t listen to him for years. And sometimes he seems to be having a huge influence over things.

Did he have a tangible influence on you?

I remember Mark E Smith coming up to me once, in is usual charming manner, and saying “Anyone that sings with a deep voice is an arsehole,” or something. And I was like, “All right, well what about Johnny Cash?” he was like, “Oh, no, you’re right.” And fuck you! But for me, it gave me a licence to sing in a certain way. Not that I sing like Johnny Cash, or by any means think that I have that tone of voice that he has, but I discovered a way of singing through trying to sing his songs, where you could sit back and there was a kind of relaxed tone. You could get down in that place where he gets down. and that there was still a kind of strength to that.

I discovered that from trying to sing some of that Muddy Waters, and trying to sing “Long Black Veil”, and those kind of songs that he recorded from years ago. That if you just sat back and sang quietly, I discovered that I had this pleasing tone to my voice that I didn’t know that I had at all. Because all through the Birthday Party I basically screamed, and I could never sing softly because the music was so loud. It was when we started to sing soft music that I discovered there was this kind of fluidness about my voice that I didn’t realise that I had. And that was very much from trying to sing those Johnny Cash songs.

So there’s a power in restraint?

Absolutely, and that really influenced the kind of songs that I wrote for quite a while. That I’m actually a better singer when I sing quietly than I am when I sing loudly. My voice pushes into a different tone when I sing loudly that’s pretty unattractive. People forgive me for it, but there was something about it. I guess it’s a kind of crooner thing.

ALASTAIR McKAY

The Faces Complete First New Studio Album In 30 Years

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The Faces Complete First New Studio Album In 30 Years
Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea has joined the reunited Faces to help the group complete their first album in over three decades. Speaking to the Daily Mirror at the South Bank Awards earlier this week, Ronnie Wood has confirmed that the RHCP's bassist will join The Faces for their reunion tour, and t...

Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ Flea has joined the reunited Faces to help the group complete their first album in over three decades.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror at the South Bank Awards earlier this week, Ronnie Wood has confirmed that the RHCP’s bassist will join The Faces for their reunion tour, and that they have completed their first album since ‘Ooh La La’ was released in 1973.

Wood also revealed that the new material was written during a trip abroad he and Rod Stewart took over Christmas.

The Mirror reports that Wood and the band’s frontman Rod Stewart visited Costa Rica, Bermuda and Miami to get inspiration, and then wrote the album’s songs in three days.

For more music and film news click here

First look — The Doors doc, When You’re Strange

Michael Bonner
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From this year's Sundance Film Festival in snowy Utah, here's our verdict on The Doors documentary, When You're Strange, from Living In Oblivion director Tom DiCillo. It’s perhaps strange that unlike, say, The Beatles or the Stones, The Doors – and Jim Morrison, in particular – have been left relatively alone when it comes to documentary treatments. On film, of course, there’s Oliver Stone’s Doors biopic, and in some ways director Tom DiCillo’s documentary owes some stylistic debt to Stone’s movie, even though the end result is perhaps understandably more restrained. DiCillo’s greatest achievement here, arguably, is the great care with which he’s assembled a coherent narrative exclusively from archive footage shot between 1966 and 1971. You might find the absence of contemporaneous interviews means there’s no talking heads to guide you through the story. In fact, it works to DiCillo’s advantage, giving the material space to flow naturally. And, perhaps more importantly, it means we’re spared from woolly armchair psychoanalysis of Morrison. As a framing device, DiCillo uses outtakes from Morrison's aborted 1969 film project, Highway. When You’re Strange opens with the singer emerging from a crashed car. He starts hitchhiking. Suddenly, he's driving another car crazily. On the radio, DiCillo overdubs a news broadcast that enables Morrison to hear the coverage of his own death in July 1971. Suddenly, we're whisked back in time and Morrison and his newfound friend Ray Manzarek are plotting to form a band and, almost by accident, land a residency at the Whiskey A Go Go. The narration here is quite perfunctory, and for a while the film threatens to be simply an aural and visual scrapbook, or a catch-up for those unfamiliar with the band. One wonders, for example, whether we'll ever hear a song or performance in its entirety, and whether, if we will, it's going to interrupt the breakneck pace. Over time, DiCillo lets the pace settle and the footage breathe. What’s most remarkable here is the extraordinary live material, particularly DiCello’s meticulous reconstruction of The Doors’ 1969 concert at the Dinner Key auditorium in Coconut Grove, Miami. Morrison, consumed by alcohol and disillusion, is confronted by a crowd baying for nothing more than their latest hit (“LIGHT MY FIRE! LIGHT MY FIRE! LIGHT MY FIRE!”), and he just flips. But, for once, you see the chaos through Morrison's eyes: he's thinking, ‘I'm trying. We're trying. Why aren't you?' The film climaxes as the band's 1970 performance at the Isle Of Wight festival, where n overweight, bearded Morrison croons through a surprisingly effective rendition of “The End”. DiCillo uses the song as a death knell for the ‘60s – Charlies Manson makes his appearance right on cue – with Morrison fully aware that the optimism that characterised the birth of the California hippie dream no longer exists. It's rare that a documentary seems to evolve with its subject, and by the time it ends, When You're Strange will confound you: how did it all come together? Did DiCillo write the story first and find the clips, or vice-versa? Either way, it's quite an achievement. But perhaps most of all it might remind you what a great band The Doors were, and, refreshingly, DiCillo keeps a distance from the band's daily soap opera, refusing to analyse, as many have, Morrison's personal demons. The last images of the band show holiday footage of a smiling, skinny-dipping Morrison as “The Crystal Ship” plays. “Deliver me from reasons why,” sings Morrison. This movie, like that lyric, is perhaps the closest we'll ever get to him. DAMON WISE

From this year’s Sundance Film Festival in snowy Utah, here’s our verdict on The Doors documentary, When You’re Strange, from Living In Oblivion director Tom DiCillo.

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Neil Young Contributes To Brand New Booker T Album

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Neil Young Contributes To Brand New Booker T Album
Booker T has enlisted the musical help of Neil Young and the Drive-By Truckers for his first new studio album in 20 years, 'Potato Hole.' Neil Young and DBT contribute guitar to nine of the ten tracks on the album, which is set for release on April 20. Booker T who was inducted into the Rock &...

Booker T has enlisted the musical help of Neil Young and the Drive-By Truckers for his first new studio album in 20 years, ‘Potato Hole.’

Neil Young and DBT contribute guitar to nine of the ten tracks on the album, which is set for release on April 20.

Booker T who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 for his huge soul success with the MGs has also covered three songs on the new album.

Outkast‘s “Hey Ya,” Tom Waits‘ “Get Behind the Mule” and the Drive By Truckers‘ own “Space City” all get the Booker treatment on Potato Hole.

The full tracklisting for ‘Potato Hole’ is:

1. Pound It Out

2. She Breaks

3. Hey Ya

4. Native New Yorker

5. Nan

6. Warped Sister

7. Get Behind The Mule

8. Reunion Time

9. Potato Hole

10. Space City

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Pic credit: PA Photos

Nick Cave’s Founding Bad Seeds Member Quits

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Nick Cave’s Founding Bad Seeds Member Quits
Bad Seeds co-founder Mick Harvey has announced that he is to leave the band who play with Nick Cave after 25 years. In a statement released on Thursday (January 22), multi-instrumentalist and producer Harvey says: "For a variety of personal and professional reasons I have chosen to discontinue my...

Bad Seeds co-founder Mick Harvey has announced that he is to leave the band who play with Nick Cave after 25 years.

In a statement released on Thursday (January 22), multi-instrumentalist and producer Harvey says:

“For a variety of personal and professional reasons I have chosen to discontinue my ongoing involvement with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. After 25 years I feel I am leaving the band as it experiences one of its many peaks; in very healthy condition, and with fantastic prospects for the future. I’m confident Nick will continue to be a creative force and that this is the right time to pass on my artistic and managerial role to what has become a tremendous group of people who can support him in his endeavours both musically and organizationally.

It was a fantastic experience to finish my touring days in the band with the recent shows in Australia and the unique events that took place in conjunction with All Tomorrow’s Parties, especially Mt. Buller, which was one of the many highlights of my involvement with the band throughout the years. I shall continue working on the Bad Seeds back catalogue re-issues project over the coming year and look forward to the new opportunities I shall be able to accommodate as a result of my changed circumstances.”

Harvey has previously released four solo albums and a live album, the most recent being ‘Three Sisters – Live At Bush Hall’.

This year, Harvey has performed solo, as support to PJ Harvey as well as performing with her during her own set.

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Pic credit: Neil Thomson

AC/DC, Elbow, Iron Maiden and Radiohead Shortlisted For BRIT Awards

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AC/DC, Elbow, Iron Maiden and Radiohead Shortlisted For BRIT Awards

The nominations for the 2009 BRIT Awards were announced this Tuesday (January 20), with Coldplay and Duffy both being shortlisted in four categories each, including Best Album and Best Single. Elbow are also in contention for two BRITs, one for Best Album and for Best British Group, hoping to follow up their Mercury Musoc Prize win for 'The Seldom Seen Kid' album. If confirmation were needed of a heavy rock return to the mainstream, AC/DC and Iron Maiden have both been shortlisted. AC/DC are up for two awards, Best International Album for Black Ice and for Best International Group. Whilst Iron Maiden are up for Best Live Act, for their Somewhere Back In Time Tour which kicked off last year. Kings Of Leon, Girls Aloud, Take That, Coldplay, Duffy and U2 are to perform at this year's BRIT Awards, which are to take place in London on February 18. Presenting this year's ceremony at Earls Court on February 18 will be pop star Kylie Minogue who will appear alongside James Corden and Matthew Horne. Pet Shop Boys will receive the 2009 Lifetime Achievement award, whilst Florence And The Machine are named this year'sCritic's Choice. The full list of BRIT Award nominees is: MasterCard British Album Coldplay – 'Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends' Duffy – 'Rockferry' Elbow – 'The Seldom Seen Kid' Radiohead – 'In Rainbows' The Ting Tings – 'We Started Nothing' British Group Coldplay Elbow Girls Aloud Radiohead Take That British Single Adele – 'Chasing Pavements’ Alexandra Burke – 'Hallelujah' Coldplay – 'Viva La Vida' Dizzee Rascal featuring Calvin Harris and Chrome – 'Dance Wiv Me' Duffy – 'Mercy' Estelle ft Kanye West – 'American Boy' Girls Aloud – 'The Promise' Leona Lewis – 'Better in Time' Scouting for Girls – 'Heartbeat' 'The X Factor' Finalists – 'Hero' British Male Solo Artist Ian Brown James Morrison Paul Weller The Streets Will Young British Female Solo Artist Adele Beth Rowley Duffy Estelle M.I.A. British Breakthrough Act Adele Duffy The Last Shadow Puppets Scouting For Girls The Ting Tings British Live Act Coldplay Elbow Iron Maiden Scouting For Girls The Verve International Album AC/DC – 'Black Ice' Fleet Foxes – 'Fleet Foxes' The Killers – 'Day & Age' Kings of Leon – 'Only By The Night' MGMT – 'Oracular Spectacular' International Group AC/DC Fleet Foxes The Killers Kings Of Leon MGMT International Male Solo Artist Beck Neil Diamond Jay-Z Kanye West Seasick Steve International Female Solo Artist Beyonce Gabriella Cilmi Katy Perry Pink Santogold British Producer of the Year Bernard Butler Brian Eno Steve Mac Outstanding Contribution Award Pet Shop Boys For more music and film news click here

The nominations for the 2009 BRIT Awards were announced this Tuesday (January 20), with Coldplay and Duffy both being shortlisted in four categories each, including Best Album and Best Single.

Elbow are also in contention for two BRITs, one for Best Album and for Best British Group, hoping to follow up their Mercury Musoc Prize win for ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ album.

If confirmation were needed of a heavy rock return to the mainstream, AC/DC and Iron Maiden have both been shortlisted. AC/DC are up for two awards, Best International Album for Black Ice and for Best International Group. Whilst Iron Maiden are up for Best Live Act, for their Somewhere Back In Time Tour which kicked off last year.

Kings Of Leon, Girls Aloud, Take That, Coldplay, Duffy and U2 are to perform at this year’s BRIT Awards, which are to take place in London on February 18.

Presenting this year’s ceremony at Earls Court on February 18 will be pop star Kylie Minogue who will appear alongside James Corden and Matthew Horne.

Pet Shop Boys will receive the 2009 Lifetime Achievement award, whilst Florence And The Machine are named this year’sCritic’s Choice.

The full list of BRIT Award nominees is:

MasterCard British Album

Coldplay – ‘Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends’

Duffy – ‘Rockferry’

Elbow – ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’

Radiohead – ‘In Rainbows’

The Ting Tings – ‘We Started Nothing’

British Group

Coldplay

Elbow

Girls Aloud

Radiohead

Take That

British Single

Adele – ‘Chasing Pavements’

Alexandra Burke – ‘Hallelujah’

Coldplay – ‘Viva La Vida’

Dizzee Rascal featuring Calvin Harris and Chrome – ‘Dance Wiv Me’

Duffy – ‘Mercy’

Estelle ft Kanye West – ‘American Boy’

Girls Aloud – ‘The Promise’

Leona Lewis – ‘Better in Time’

Scouting for Girls – ‘Heartbeat’

‘The X Factor’ Finalists – ‘Hero’

British Male Solo Artist

Ian Brown

James Morrison

Paul Weller

The Streets

Will Young

British Female Solo Artist

Adele

Beth Rowley

Duffy

Estelle

M.I.A.

British Breakthrough Act

Adele

Duffy

The Last Shadow Puppets

Scouting For Girls

The Ting Tings

British Live Act

Coldplay

Elbow

Iron Maiden

Scouting For Girls

The Verve

International Album

AC/DC – ‘Black Ice’

Fleet Foxes – ‘Fleet Foxes’

The Killers – ‘Day & Age’

Kings of Leon – ‘Only By The Night’

MGMT – ‘Oracular Spectacular’

International Group

AC/DC

Fleet Foxes

The Killers

Kings Of Leon

MGMT

International Male Solo Artist

Beck

Neil Diamond

Jay-Z

Kanye West

Seasick Steve

International Female Solo Artist

Beyonce

Gabriella Cilmi

Katy Perry

Pink

Santogold

British Producer of the Year

Bernard Butler

Brian Eno

Steve Mac

Outstanding Contribution Award

Pet Shop Boys

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Fever Ray: “Fever Ray”

John Mulvey
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A couple of weeks ago, I posted this blog which, in a slightly bewildered-old-man way, wondered why a raft of electropop types like La Roux and Little Boots were being tipped so enthusiastically for success in 2009. As something of a palate-cleanser, I recommended the artier synthpop of Telepathe, and today let’s add Fever Ray into the mix. Fever Ray is the solo project of Karin Dreijer Andersson, who normally works as half of Sweden’s The Knife. More so than most spin-offs, the sound of “Fever Ray” is uncannily similar to that of The Knife – crisp minimal music, heavily treated but still intimate vocals – though overt techno flourishes are generally avoided on these ten crafted and compelling songs. Essentially, Andersson makes a kind of synthpop which, while still referencing certain ‘80s (and ‘70s) things, is palpably made in the wake of all number of minimal house and techno references. If Telepathe have a sort of austere witchiness, juxtaposed with de-evolved R&B and grime textures, Fever Ray is more domestic, if still somewhat spooked, and grown out of a leftfield clubbing environment. The closing “Coconut”, for instance, reminds me of a post-Kompakt take on Vangelis (“China”, maybe, though it’s a long time since I heard those records), while “When I Grow Up” is something like a very rough cross between Kate Bush circa “The Dreaming” and the delicate memory games of Mum. Andersson frequently shifts the pitch of her voice – on “Dry And Dusty” it assumes a manly husk – but at the same time there’s a curious, odd celebration of the mundane; a blend of the processed and human which is far more effective than, say, the autotuned self-pity of Kanye West on “808s And Heartbreak”; the tunes are a lot more memorable, for a start ("I'm Not Done", this graceful album's one moment of relative urgency is playing now, and it's amazing). Perhaps it’s novelty value, but there seems to be something much more affecting about Andersson sombrely detailing how good she is at looking after plants. This all reaches its apotheosis on the fantastic “Seven”, which strikes me as ostensibly a modernist fusion of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” and Abba’s “The Day Before You Came” (“The Man-Machine” and “The Visitors” both seem to be touchstones for the album, actually). Andersson is talking about a childhood friend, and the telephone conversations they continue to have. “We talk about love,” she intones, “We talk about dishwasher tablets.” Profound and moving, in its odd little way.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this blog which, in a slightly bewildered-old-man way, wondered why a raft of electropop types like La Roux and Little Boots were being tipped so enthusiastically for success in 2009.

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The Third Uncut Playlist Of 2009

John Mulvey
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OK, so some weird technical business over the past few days has meant a very spotty service here of late. Hopefully it’s fixed now, and I can get back into the blogging swing. A big batch of new arrivals in this week’s mixed bag, including PJ Harvey, Pete Doherty, The Decemberists, Marianne Faithfull (covering Espers!) and The Rakes. Best of these new entries, though, is currently looking like the terrific Fever Ray album, from one half of The Knife. Can I also direct your attention – especially if you got something out of the Sun Araw album a week or so back – to Stag Hare’s Myspace. Epic tribal kosmische there, for sure. 1 PJ Harvey & John Parish – A Woman A Man Walked By (Island) 2 Elvis Perkins In Dearland - Elvis Perkins In Dearland (XL) 3 Pete Doherty – Grace/Wastelands (Parlophone) 4 Various Artists – War Child Heroes (Parlophone) 5 The Rakes – Klang! (V2) 6 Taylor Swift – Fearless (Big Machine) 7 The Decemberists – The Hazards Of Love (Rough Trade) 8 The Chatham Singers – Juju Claudius (Damaged Goods) 9 Marianne Faithfull – Easy Come, Easy Go (Naive) 10 Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City) 11 Fever Ray – Fever Ray (Rabid) 12 Wavves – So Bored (Young Turks) 13 Roedelius/Noh1 – Fibre (Barking Green) 14 Bruce Springsteen – Working On A Dream (Columbia) 15 Astral Social Club – Octuplex (VHF) 16 Psychic Ills – Mirror Eye (The Social Registry) 17 Here We Go Magic – Both Of Us (http://www.myspace.com/herewegomagic) 18 Stag Hare - Born Into Magic (http://www.myspace.com/staghare) 19 Bill Callahan – Woke On A Whaleheart (Drag City)

OK, so some weird technical business over the past few days has meant a very spotty service here of late. Hopefully it’s fixed now, and I can get back into the blogging swing. A big batch of new arrivals in this week’s mixed bag, including PJ Harvey, Pete Doherty, The Decemberists, Marianne Faithfull (covering Espers!) and The Rakes.

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Bruce Springsteen: “Working On A Dream”

John Mulvey
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I posted this yesterday, but our blogs are misbehaving at the moment and it's seemed to have disappeared. So again: Bruce Springsteen, "Working On A Dream". Apologies for the day-old Obama stuff. There’s a certain grand, neat inevitability to the new Bruce Springsteen album turning up online on the day Barack Obama is inaugurated as President. There’s a certain perverse irony, too, in the Springsteen camp claiming that “Working On A Dream” is not actually a political record. After a couple of listens, a couple of weeks apart, it doesn’t, for sure, appear to be explicitly political. But unlike its recent predecessors, “Working On A Dream” does seem suffused with hope. Perhaps abstracted optimism is the best way of reflecting the energy and possibilities presented by the start of the Obama era, rather than addressing issues directly and being forced to face up to the heinous situation that America and the planet in general currently face. “Working On A Dream”, then, from the title track on, presents something of an ideal soundtrack to this auspicious day – “My Lucky Day”, as Track Two calls it. It’s a maturely positive record, rooted in domestic contentment, reverberant with Springsteen’s supercharged brand of sentimentality. Although the record was predominantly written and recorded during last year’s tour, it doesn’t feel anything like a rushed-off, road-hardened bunch of jams. Instead, as the epic opener “Outlaw Pete” signals so graphically, much of “Working On A Dream” is a sort of blousy, ornate pop. Cloaked in billowing strings (or more likely synthesised strings), it’s a gallop that someone here at Uncut has just described as “Latterday Bob Dylan playing ‘Paint It Black’, but a lot better than if Dylan actually did play ‘Paint It Black’.” There’s a hint of The Beach Boys in there too, specifically the bass harmonica wail that closes “Pet Sounds”. A more overt Beach Boys influence comes on the outstanding “This Life”, a chiming chamber classic that compounds the idea that the trigger for a good few of these songs was “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” on “Magic”. Towards the end, Springsteen melts away and leaves the band to multi-track themselves into an ecstatic “God Only Knows”-style chorale, eventually joined by a clipped and equally euphoric Clarence Clemons solo. That sax solo, of course, means that for all the airy pop and polish, there remains a rockish swagger to “Working On A Dream”. “This Life” is followed by “Good Eye”, a grungy blues identified by Andrew Mueller (in his much more thorough and authoritative album review in the next issue of Uncut) as a relative of the E Street Band’s recent live revamp of “Reason To Believe”. There’s a bit of Springsteen’s Suicide love in there, too. And while Andrew is keen to point up the relative weirdness of “Working On A Dream” (not least “Queen Of The Supermarket”, a schmaltzy love song of mundane epiphanies that eventually dissolves into spacey orchestration), it’s distinctly relative. Essentially, these are big, unabashed pop songs with fearsome hooks – “This Life”, “My Lucky Day”, “What Love Can Do”, “Surprise Surprise”, the title track, “Kingdom Of Days” - that are broad, proud, teary and memorable. Even the country stroll of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the comparatively downbeat “Life Itself” (with a guitar line that discreetly carries on where Roger McGuinn left off on “Eight Miles High”) stick quickly in the head. Not being an expert, I’d struggle to accurately place this one in the Springsteen canon. But today, it sounds excellent – as you can hear for yourself at NPR. Once you’ve had a go, let us know what you think.

I posted this yesterday, but our blogs are misbehaving at the moment and it’s seemed to have disappeared. So again: Bruce Springsteen, “Working On A Dream”. Apologies for the day-old Obama stuff.

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