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The Verve’s New Album Reviewed!

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The Verve’s New Album Reviewed!
Uncut.co.uk publishes a weekly selection of music album reviews; including new, reissued and compilation albums. Find out about the best albums here, by clicking on the album titles below. All of our album reviews feature a 'submit your own album review' function - we would love to hear your opinio...

Uncut.co.uk publishes a weekly selection of music album reviews; including new, reissued and compilation albums. Find out about the best albums here, by clicking on the album titles below.

All of our album reviews feature a ‘submit your own album review’ function – we would love to hear your opinions on the latest releases!

These albums are all set for release on July 28, 2008:

THE VERVE – FORTH – 4* Stormy, heavenly and hymnal – it’s like they’ve never been away

TEDDY THOMPSON – A PIECE OF WHAT YOU NEED – 4* The son also rises. A great, Orbison-inspired piece of work. Plus Q&A…

STEREOLAB – CHEMICAL CHORDS – 3* Latest findings from the pan-European pop boffins

GLEN CAMPBELL – MEET GLEN CAMPBELL – 3* Rhinestone Cowboy returns to Capitol. With added Travis

Plus here are some of UNCUT’s recommended new releases from the past month – check out these albums if you haven’t already:

SHIRLEY & DOLLY COLLINS – THE HARVEST YEARS – 5* Remastered recordings dust off the crowning glories of English folk’s Indian summer. Includes a Q&A with Shirley Collins…

THE BASEBALL PROJECT – VOLUME ONE: FROZEN ROPES AND DYING QUAILS – 4* REM’s Scott McCaughey and ex-Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn team up for garage rock ‘supergroup’ album

THE WEEK THAT WAS – THE WEEK THAT WAS – 4* Dense, dazzling concept pop from Field Music man Peter Brewis

CONOR OBERST – CONOR OBERST – 4* The Bright Eyes mainman strips away the bombast for a rare solo album

CAROLE KING – TAPESTRY – 4* Low-key, high impact pop; Reissued over two discs with live versions

RANDY NEWMAN – HARPS & ANGELS – 4* Newman is back with a blinding album after almost a decade.

PRIMAL SCREAM – BEAUTIFUL FUTURE – 3* “It’s too blunt, messy and reverent to be up there with their best, but you hope that it also serves a secondary function: to clear the decks for one last magnificent tilt at rock deification on album number ten,” says Uncut’s Sam Richards. Check out the review here. Then let us know what you think of Gillespie’s latest.

WALTER BECKER – CIRCUS MONEY – 4* First in 14 years from the other Steely Dan man

U2 – REISSUES – BOY / OCTOBER / WAR – 2*/ 2*/ 3* Passion, and politics: the early years, remastered, with extras

THE HOLD STEADY – STAY POSITIVE – 5* Elliptical, euphoric and “staggeringly good” says Allan Jones, plus a Q&A with Craig Finn

For more album reviews from the 3000+ UNCUT archive – check out: www.www.uncut.co.uk/music/reviews.

First look — Tropic Thunder

Michael Bonner
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It was back in March that Tropic Thunder first made it onto my radar. I was skimming through a copy of Entertainment Weekly, and found a full-page picture of Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jnr in combat fatigues, rifles at the ready, creeping through the brush in a jungle setting clearly meant to represent Vietnam. What struck me, first, was the idea of these excellent comic actors making a Vietnam spoof could be a brilliant wheeze; secondly, the rather jaw-dropping fact that Downey was in blackface. Hopefully, you're already aware of Tropic Thunder – it not, you can see the trailer here. Directed and co-written by Stiller, it’s a film about a bunch of hopelessly narcissistic actors shooting a Vietnam movie that goes disastrously wrong and the actors find themselves caught up in a real war. The characters are all extremely funny send-ups of Hollywood archetypes: Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a Stallone-esque action hero on the wane; Black is Jake Portnoy, a fart gag merchant modelled on Chris Farley; Downey is Kirk Lazarus, a multi-Oscar winning Method actor. Amping-up Tropic Thunder’s film-within-a-film conceit, you can even find fake websites for Speedman, Portnoy and Lazarus (the Lazarus one is a hoot…). Meanwhile, iTunes are hosting a Hearts Of Darkness-style making of doc, Rain Of Madness, which takes the meta-textual fun to another level. The movie’s picked up a lot of flack in America, surprisingly, though, not from the Afro-Caribbean community, who seem – at time of writing, at least – not to have vocalised any qualms with Downey’s blackface make-up. The complaints have come from a coalition of 22 disabilities groups, who’re calling for a boycott of the film. Their criticism lies with Tugg Speedman’s previous movie, an Oscar-baiting drama about a man who overcomes his learning disabilities, called Simple Jack. Simple Jack riffs on the cynicism of actors who chase award glory by playing disabled characters; it also serves to demonstrate how little Speedman knows about life outside of the Hollywood bubble. Speedman and Lazarus repeatedly use offensive language to describe the movie and Jack himself, but the point is to amplify their cluelessness and crass insensitivity. As with everything else in Tropic Thunder, the joke is at the expense of the characters. Certainly, the idea that Lazarus is so keen to immerse himself in the role of the platoon’s Afro-American sergeant he’ll surgically change the colour of his skin is directed at how pompous certain actors can be. Anyway, Tropic Thunder opens this weekend in America; and the question is whether it can finally knock The Dark Knight off the top spot at the box office. Interestingly enough, perhaps, with all this talk of Heath Ledger receiving a posthumous Oscar nomination for his portrayal of The Joker, my money would be on Downey -- who's astonishing career renaissance of late deserves to be rewarded. Over here, we'll have to wait a little longer for Tropic Thunder -- it opens in the UK on September 16. I've reviewed it for the next issue, and I'll post the full review here nearer the time.

It was back in March that Tropic Thunder first made it onto my radar. I was skimming through a copy of Entertainment Weekly, and found a full-page picture of Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jnr in combat fatigues, rifles at the ready, creeping through the brush in a jungle setting clearly meant to represent Vietnam. What struck me, first, was the idea of these excellent comic actors making a Vietnam spoof could be a brilliant wheeze; secondly, the rather jaw-dropping fact that Downey was in blackface.

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The Verve – Forth

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The Verve – Forth

Some bands will attempt to schedule their album release for the time of year that best reflects the mood of the music contained therein: Halloween, say, or summer’s first golden murmurs. Others will have their release dates held back or rushed forward for more cynical reasons by record companies attempting to capitalise on the perky pre-Christmas market or to balance their books for the financial year. The release of The Verve’s comeback album, on the other hand, has been deliberately scheduled to coincide with the start of the football season. According to a Parlophone marketing wonk quoted in Music Week, the timing is all part of their campaign to target “the 25- to 44-year-old male-biased market with a strong Northern regionality.” This news is dispiriting. Football crowds, en masse, aren’t noted for their subtle musical discernment, as their ready adoption of such progressive works as DJ Otzi’s “Hey Baby” and The Fratellis’ “Chelsea Dagger” have shown. The Verve have always played on the tension between their laddish tendencies and their explorative impulses – the dominance of the former is, you suspect, why Nick McCabe split up the band, twice – but Parlophone’s strategy appears to betray the fact that, on Forth the blokeish anthems have won out. Thankfully, that isn’t the case. Lead-off single “Love Is Noise” is as direct as Forth gets, and it is propelled by an insistent, high-frequency alien siren, surely McCabe’s doing. On the recorded version, this metallic wail is muted for radio palatability, compared to when The Verve unveiled the song at the awesome climax to their Glastonbury headline set, when it threatened to consume the entire valley. But as with “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, “Love Is Noise” achieves a transcendence that is greater than the sum of the band’s parts: the vivid, mesmeric swirl of the music lends Richard Ashcroft’s vocals a cool authority and allows the lines he’s borrowed and butchered from “Jerusalem” (“Will those feet in modern times/ Walk on soles that are made in China?”) to seem profound, rather than the meaningless twaddle they probably are – a classic Verve trick. The febrile “Thaw Sessions” jam that circulated as an MP3 last year raised hopes that The Verve were back to their strange, soupy, psychedelic best. If there’s nothing quite as thrillingly loose here – Ashcroft has wrested control again, and rather than float with the undulating tide of the music, he feels compelled to direct and contain it – then at least McCabe is allowed to take over the running of the show as each track edges closer towards the seven-minute mark. There are unexpected echoes of a pre-definite article Verve on Forth: the featherlight ripples of “Judas” bring to mind early single “She’s A Superstar”; “Columbo” is a distant cousin of “Man Called Sun”, toughened up with a spy-theme bassline and tugged in an unexpected direction by a tempo change midway through; and “Valium Skies” also boasts the kind of quicksilver chord changes and scrupulously-layered shimmers that The Verve seemed to forget about once they’d fallen under Oasis’s spell and confused making big music with courting big audiences. The compromise that the band sometimes have to find between Ashcroft’s song structures and McCabe’s propensity to meander leaves “I See Houses” and “Appalachian Springs” sounding a little torpid, like Urban Hymns’ bloatier back end. However, even when The Verve plod, there are swoops, whirrs and inspired, slithering counterpoints that keep you transfixed. They’ve ventured new ideas too. “Noise Epic”, although suggesting The Verve have run out of song titles, finds Simon Jones and Pete Salisbury working up a motorik groove, McCabe dousing it with static, and Ashcroft alternately whispering and raving over the top. It’s very Primal Scream, and dives impressively into a screechy, Stooges/XTRMNTR-style coda, with Ashcroft hollering “I got spirit!” and announcing “I don’t just use my fists/ Yeah, I use my feet” like an excitable kickboxer – notes of the old Mad Richard. Elsewhere his voice is serene and majestic, occasionally slipping into a sweet, soulful falsetto, and arguably sounding better than ever. In an age when most British guitar bands strive to sound dry and down-to-earth, The Verve’s relentless quest for epic-ness and indifference to ridicule is welcome back. Forth certainly makes it seem like they’ve never been away, the stench of those woeful Ashcroft solo albums extinguished. Older fans hoping for an unfettered psychedelic voyage may not be completely satisfied with the way McCabe is largely made subservient to the songs, but the targeted football terrace casuals are certainly going to get more than they bargained for. SAM RICHARDS

Some bands will attempt to schedule their album release for the time of year that best reflects the mood of the music contained therein: Halloween, say, or summer’s first golden murmurs. Others will have their release dates held back or rushed forward for more cynical reasons by record companies attempting to capitalise on the perky pre-Christmas market or to balance their books for the financial year.

The release of The Verve’s comeback album, on the other hand, has been deliberately scheduled to coincide with the start of the football season. According to a Parlophone marketing wonk quoted in Music Week, the timing is all part of their campaign to target “the 25- to 44-year-old male-biased market with a strong Northern regionality.”

This news is dispiriting. Football crowds, en masse, aren’t noted for their subtle musical discernment, as their ready adoption of such progressive works as DJ Otzi’s “Hey Baby” and The Fratellis’ “Chelsea Dagger” have shown. The Verve have always played on the tension between their laddish tendencies and their explorative impulses – the dominance of the former is, you suspect, why Nick McCabe split up the band, twice – but Parlophone’s strategy appears to betray the fact that, on Forth the blokeish anthems have won out.

Thankfully, that isn’t the case. Lead-off single “Love Is Noise” is as direct as Forth gets, and it is propelled by an insistent, high-frequency alien siren, surely McCabe’s doing. On the recorded version, this metallic wail is muted for radio palatability, compared to when The Verve unveiled the song at the awesome climax to their Glastonbury headline set, when it threatened to consume the entire valley. But as with “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, “Love Is Noise” achieves a transcendence that is greater than the sum of the band’s parts: the vivid, mesmeric swirl of the music lends Richard Ashcroft’s vocals a cool authority and allows the lines he’s borrowed and butchered from “Jerusalem” (“Will those feet in modern times/ Walk on soles that are made in China?”) to seem profound, rather than the meaningless twaddle they probably are – a classic Verve trick.

The febrile “Thaw Sessions” jam that circulated as an MP3 last year raised hopes that The Verve were back to their strange, soupy, psychedelic best. If there’s nothing quite as thrillingly loose here – Ashcroft has wrested control again, and rather than float with the undulating tide of the music, he feels compelled to direct and contain it – then at least McCabe is allowed to take over the running of the show as each track edges closer towards the seven-minute mark.

There are unexpected echoes of a pre-definite article Verve on Forth: the featherlight ripples of “Judas” bring to mind early single “She’s A Superstar”; “Columbo” is a distant cousin of “Man Called Sun”, toughened up with a spy-theme bassline and tugged in an unexpected direction by a tempo change midway through; and “Valium Skies” also boasts the kind of quicksilver chord changes and scrupulously-layered shimmers that The Verve seemed to forget about once they’d fallen under Oasis’s spell and confused making big music with courting big audiences.

The compromise that the band sometimes have to find between Ashcroft’s song structures and McCabe’s propensity to meander leaves “I See Houses” and “Appalachian Springs” sounding a little torpid, like Urban Hymns’ bloatier back end. However, even when The Verve plod, there are swoops, whirrs and inspired, slithering counterpoints that keep you transfixed.

They’ve ventured new ideas too. “Noise Epic”, although suggesting The Verve have run out of song titles, finds Simon Jones and Pete Salisbury working up a motorik groove, McCabe dousing it with static, and Ashcroft alternately whispering and raving over the top. It’s very Primal Scream, and dives impressively into a screechy, Stooges/XTRMNTR-style coda, with Ashcroft hollering “I got spirit!” and announcing “I don’t just use my fists/ Yeah, I use my feet” like an excitable kickboxer – notes of the old Mad Richard. Elsewhere his voice is serene and majestic, occasionally slipping into a sweet, soulful falsetto, and arguably sounding better than ever.

In an age when most British guitar bands strive to sound dry and down-to-earth, The Verve’s relentless quest for epic-ness and indifference to ridicule is welcome back. Forth certainly makes it seem like they’ve never been away, the stench of those woeful Ashcroft solo albums extinguished. Older fans hoping for an unfettered psychedelic voyage may not be completely satisfied with the way McCabe is largely made subservient to the songs, but the targeted football terrace casuals are certainly going to get more than they bargained for.

SAM RICHARDS

Teddy Thompson – A Piece Of What You Need

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Teddy Thompson – A Piece Of What You Need

On his self-titled debut in 2000, Teddy Thompson, then 24, came off as a smart-pop tunesmith and vocalist on the order of Crowded House auteur Neil Finn, further refining his skill sets on 2004’s Separate Ways. But here he’s going for something grander – A Piece Of What You Need is the most delectable Roy Orbison-inspired LP since Chris Isaak’s 1985 debut, Silvertone, but this record is way less slavish. Like Orbison, Thompson has located the connective tissue linking rock’n’roll, stone country and pure pop, and he’s made one of the year’s most captivating and musically impressive LPs. He couldn’t pull it off, obviously, without a golden voice. On tracks like “The Things I Do”, “In My Arms” and the magnificently operatic “Slippery Slope (Easier)”, the wan melancholy that sometimes diffused the emotiveness of Thompson’s singing on the his first two albums is blown away like dead leaves, as he powers through the boldly cantilevered choruses he’s written for himself. Likewise, he bites into the prime meat of rockers “What's This?!!” and “Can’t Sing Straight” like a guy coming off a two-week spell on the wagon. There’s nothing half-assed about this. Much of the credit has to go to producer Marius de Vries (Björk, Neil Finn), whose vibrant and ultra-dynamic settings are as perfectly calibrated to this artist’s chara cter as was his work on Rufus Wainwright’s Want One in 2003. de Vries’ touches are audacious but never gratuitous, like the punched-up segues of “In My Arms” from the surging chorus hook to his cascading Wurlitzer break to some falsetto oohs. The preface of the Ray Davies-style character study “Jonathan’s Book” evokes a melodramatically purple Bernard Hermann film score before hanging a left down Penny Lane. The outro of the exhilarating rocker “Can’t Sing Straight” sees the brassy blast of a Dixieland band improbably appear, jumping atop the chugging groove like hobos throwing themselves into the box car of a moving freight train. The provocative “Turning the Gun On Myself” finds Thompson entering the heady, iconoclastically urbane terrain of Randy Newman, and opens with the narrator sitting by the window of his New York apartment as the sounds of “Rapper’s Delight” waft up from the street. The he camera angle then rotates to reveal the gun in his hand and the “What if?” look on his face. As the lyric darkens to take in the lethal uses to which he could put the weapon without moving from this very spot, the arrangement gets increasingly buoyant, culminating in a happy-go-lucky whistle from de Vries. For the most part, Thompson’s vocal tone resembles that of his mother in its honeyed richness, but on the title track, he locates the tangy bile that has distinguished his father’s. When he pushes hard on his vocal, you can hear the bloodlines coursing. The venom in his voice is rooted in the marvelously agitated lyric, an indictment of lowest-common-denominator contemporary music that progressively widens its attack to take in the entire dumbing down of modern-day consciousness in an impassioned update of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”: “Let’s stop getting everything we want/And get a piece of what we need…” The hidden track, a cover of the Everly Brothers’ “The Price Of Love”, cries out to be unhidden, because it’s a killer, romping along with the slap-back resonance and bristling humanity of Plant and Krauss’ Raising Sand. Thompson clearly has a thing for Everly codas considering that he hid “I Wonder If I Care as Much”, a duet with Emmylou Harris, at the end of his first album and tagged “Take a Message to Mary” onto Separate Ways. His roots run deep, and he never forgets it. Teddy’s Richard and Linda’s son, for God’s sake – how could he not be gifted? Indeed, he’s been making high-quality music all along. But this is where the kid really comes into his own. If he keeps this up, Thompson’s lineage will recede from the start of any conversation about him to become no more than an intriguing footnote. BUD SCOPPA Q&A TEDDY THOMPSON: UNCUT: Were you musically influenced by either or both of your parents? TEDDY THOMPSON: Not consciously, but the English folk roots run fairly deep. I did some writing with my mother on her records, and I can feel it there, and I love that music. But it’s in the blood rather than in the mind. With this album, do you feel like you’ve finally moved out of the looming shadows of your legendary parents? Everybody wants to kill their father and sleep with their mother – that Oedipal thing is in all of us – the thing that makes you want to break out and step over your father and become the man. But I have much stronger feelings in the direction of enjoying the folk tradition and playing with my family. So I don’t feel like I have to kill my dad just yet. The title song is the closest you’ve come to your dad’s signature barbed social commentary. The song is a microcosm of our disposable lives in general; the idea of trying to make something a bit more solid and worthwhile. I can be English and self-deprecating and say it’s just another record, but I feel the need to take myself more seriously these days, and not be afraid to say that this is a good, solid, important piece of work, and that we should all be trying to do better pieces of work, and you should all love it! INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

On his self-titled debut in 2000, Teddy Thompson, then 24, came off as a smart-pop tunesmith and vocalist on the order of Crowded House auteur Neil Finn, further refining his skill sets on 2004’s Separate Ways. But here he’s going for something grander – A Piece Of What You Need is the most delectable Roy Orbison-inspired LP since Chris Isaak’s 1985 debut, Silvertone, but this record is way less slavish. Like Orbison, Thompson has located the connective tissue linking rock’n’roll, stone country and pure pop, and he’s made one of the year’s most captivating and musically impressive LPs.

He couldn’t pull it off, obviously, without a golden voice. On tracks like “The Things I Do”, “In My Arms” and the magnificently operatic “Slippery Slope (Easier)”, the wan melancholy that sometimes diffused the emotiveness of Thompson’s singing on the his first two albums is blown away like dead leaves, as he powers through the boldly cantilevered choruses he’s written for himself. Likewise, he bites into the prime meat of rockers “What’s This?!!” and “Can’t Sing Straight” like a guy coming off a two-week spell on the wagon. There’s nothing half-assed about this.

Much of the credit has to go to producer Marius de Vries (Björk, Neil Finn), whose vibrant and ultra-dynamic settings are as perfectly calibrated to this artist’s chara cter as was his work on Rufus Wainwright’s Want One in 2003. de Vries’ touches are audacious but never gratuitous, like the punched-up segues of “In My Arms” from the surging chorus hook to his cascading Wurlitzer break to some falsetto oohs. The preface of the Ray Davies-style character study “Jonathan’s Book” evokes a melodramatically purple Bernard Hermann film score before hanging a left down Penny Lane. The outro of the exhilarating rocker “Can’t Sing Straight” sees the brassy blast of a Dixieland band improbably appear, jumping atop the chugging groove like hobos throwing themselves into the box car of a moving freight train.

The provocative “Turning the Gun On Myself” finds Thompson entering the heady, iconoclastically urbane terrain of Randy Newman, and opens with the narrator sitting by the window of his New York apartment as the sounds of “Rapper’s Delight” waft up from the street. The he camera angle then rotates to reveal the gun in his hand and the “What if?” look on his face. As the lyric darkens to take in the lethal uses to which he could put the weapon without moving from this very spot, the arrangement gets increasingly buoyant, culminating in a happy-go-lucky whistle from de Vries.

For the most part, Thompson’s vocal tone resembles that of his mother in its honeyed richness, but on the title track, he locates the tangy bile that has distinguished his father’s. When he pushes hard on his vocal, you can hear the bloodlines coursing. The venom in his voice is rooted in the marvelously agitated lyric, an indictment of lowest-common-denominator contemporary music that progressively widens its attack to take in the entire dumbing down of modern-day consciousness in an impassioned update of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”: “Let’s stop getting everything we want/And get a piece of what we need…”

The hidden track, a cover of the Everly Brothers’ “The Price Of Love”, cries out to be unhidden, because it’s a killer, romping along with the slap-back resonance and bristling humanity of Plant and Krauss’ Raising Sand. Thompson clearly has a thing for Everly codas considering that he hid “I Wonder If I Care as Much”, a duet with Emmylou Harris, at the end of his first album and tagged “Take a Message to Mary” onto Separate Ways. His roots run deep, and he never forgets it.

Teddy’s Richard and Linda’s son, for God’s sake – how could he not be gifted? Indeed, he’s been making high-quality music all along. But this is where the kid really comes into his own. If he keeps this up, Thompson’s lineage will recede from the start of any conversation about him to become no more than an intriguing footnote.

BUD SCOPPA

Q&A TEDDY THOMPSON:

UNCUT: Were you musically influenced by either or both of your parents?

TEDDY THOMPSON: Not consciously, but the English folk roots run fairly deep. I did some writing with my mother on her records, and I can feel it there, and I love that music. But it’s in the blood rather than in the mind.

With this album, do you feel like you’ve finally moved out of the looming shadows of your legendary parents?

Everybody wants to kill their father and sleep with their mother – that Oedipal thing is in all of us – the thing that makes you want to break out and step over your father and become the man. But I have much stronger feelings in the direction of enjoying the folk tradition and playing with my family. So I don’t feel like I have to kill my dad just yet.

The title song is the closest you’ve come to your dad’s signature barbed social commentary.

The song is a microcosm of our disposable lives in general; the idea of trying to make something a bit more solid and worthwhile. I can be English and self-deprecating and say it’s just another record, but I feel the need to take myself more seriously these days, and not be afraid to say that this is a good, solid, important piece of work, and that we should all be trying to do better pieces of work, and you should all love it!

INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

Stereolab – Chemical Chords

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Stereolab – Chemical Chords

It can only be a matter of time before some lucid, dreamy software imagineer devises a computer program for generating Stereolab records. Select from a series of generic inputs – oh, let's say mid-70s post-tropicalia vibes, Serge Gainsbourg reverb bass, Lieutenant Pigeon pub piano, Left Banke harpsichord, austere Yé-Yé vocals – drag and drop, dice and splice, loop and timestretch, press play and, voila!, a guaranteed, subtly evolving soundtrack for the avant-pop bachelor pad for years to come. I can see the titles now: “Fuzzyfelt Ectomorph”, “Fever-dream of the Subspace Spirograph”, “Pop-O-Matik Barock”, “Neon Beanbag”... It's really not so farfetched. In fact, the last of those turns out to be the first track on Chemical Chords – depending on your patience and cataloguing system, the ninth, tenth or eleventh Stereolab album since 1991, and their first, if you don't count the Fab Four Suture singles compilation, since 2004's Margerine Eclipse. And the band's working methods increasingly seem to be aspiring to some of that abstract, experimental, aleatory playfulness – involving, according to Tim Gane, “messing around with with a series of about 70 tiny drum loops on top of improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone... then later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up”. Is this just arid audio research? An expression of creative exhaustion? Or simply the band going about their long-term laboratory business: diligently remixing and matching, plotting and dreaming, rubbing disparate genres up against each other, searching for that elusive spark or chemical reaction? Some were surprised that Margerine Eclipse, recorded in the wake of long-time 'Labcoat Mary Hansen's death, proved to be such a sunny, defiantly upbeat affair. Similarly you might have reasonably expected the global credit implosion, soaring fuel inflation and food riots – the bearing out, after all of their prophecy on “Ping Pong” of a “huger slump, bigger war, shallower recovery” - to have sharpened the band's Marxist wit. But instead Chemical Chords journeys yet further into a kind of blithe heart of daftness, an imaginary 1966 midway between the Monkees' “Pleasant Valley Sunday” the Left Banke's “Pretty Ballerina” and Terry Riley's “In C”, breezy with Herb Alpert brass, dappled with Motown bass. If there's little likely to fry your mind or even tickle your fancy as much as, say, Dots And Loops or Emperor Tomato Ketchup, it's still a hugely enjoyable record, from the playgroup doowop of “Neon Beanbag”, through the soundtracky atmospheres of the title track to the rinkydink piano singalong of “Daisy Click Clack”. The heart of the record, though, might be “Silver Sands”, an expression of wonder at the “delicate, intricate” natural magic of gardening, where “sunlight and water transform into life”. You might see this as in some way self-referential, an analogue of the project of Stereolab themselves, humbly tending their own prim garden of strange blooms and exotic flora. And, indeed, it chimes with the album title - chemical chords suggesting the recombinatorial weave of DNA, as it spirals into new and evermore wonderful manifestations. But you could take the analogy further: isn't that fertility and novelty dependent on fresh encounters, new cultural chromosomes cross-pollinating? The worry for Stereolab, in their increasing refinement and cultivation, must be a certain amount of inbreeding. You wonder if their music might not be as vivid, comic, daft, tasty, elegant and iconically pop-art as the banana - but maybe also ultimately as genetically sterile. With a new album of the less pop material from these same sessions due later this year, let's hope for some new mutations. STEPHEN TROUSSÉ Q&A WITH STEREOLAB'S LAETITIA SADIER: U:It's been four years since the last album – was there any sense of creative block? Are you more focused on your own projects these days? LS: Well, we've been working on other things – I worked on my own project, Monade, and Tim worked on the soundtrack to the the film La Vie d'Artiste. And we released the singles that were collected on Fab Four Suture. But I think Tim was not feeling inspired by the idea of a new album. The very idea of the album seems to be fading out – there are different ways to release music now... Chemical Chords seems a very serene, sunny album. What with the state of the world in 2008, did you ever feel like making an angrier album? I don't think you need to be angry to make political music. You can be calmly critical. I don't think just blaring out your rage is necessarily very effective... You've recently moved back to London from France – were you forced to flee the new Sarkozy regime? Well, really I just missed London – it is much more dynamic there. Everything in France is so slow. If you want to start up a small business, like a small record label, you have to get permission from your local mayor! In London it is all much simpler. INTERVIEW: STEPHEN TROUSSE Pic credit: Steve Double

It can only be a matter of time before some lucid, dreamy software imagineer devises a computer program for generating Stereolab records. Select from a series of generic inputs – oh, let’s say mid-70s post-tropicalia vibes, Serge Gainsbourg reverb bass, Lieutenant Pigeon pub piano, Left Banke harpsichord, austere Yé-Yé vocals – drag and drop, dice and splice, loop and timestretch, press play and, voila!, a guaranteed, subtly evolving soundtrack for the avant-pop bachelor pad for years to come. I can see the titles now: “Fuzzyfelt Ectomorph”, “Fever-dream of the Subspace Spirograph”, “Pop-O-Matik Barock”, “Neon Beanbag”…

It’s really not so farfetched. In fact, the last of those turns out to be the first track on Chemical Chords – depending on your patience and cataloguing system, the ninth, tenth or eleventh Stereolab album since 1991, and their first, if you don’t count the Fab Four Suture singles compilation, since 2004’s Margerine Eclipse. And the band’s working methods increasingly seem to be aspiring to some of that abstract, experimental, aleatory playfulness – involving, according to Tim Gane, “messing around with with a series of about 70 tiny drum loops on top of improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone… then later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up”.

Is this just arid audio research? An expression of creative exhaustion? Or simply the band going about their long-term laboratory business: diligently remixing and matching, plotting and dreaming, rubbing disparate genres up against each other, searching for that elusive spark or chemical reaction?

Some were surprised that Margerine Eclipse, recorded in the wake of long-time ‘Labcoat Mary Hansen’s death, proved to be such a sunny, defiantly upbeat affair. Similarly you might have reasonably expected the global credit implosion, soaring fuel inflation and food riots – the bearing out, after all of their prophecy on “Ping Pong” of a “huger slump, bigger war, shallower recovery” – to have sharpened the band’s Marxist wit. But instead Chemical Chords journeys yet further into a kind of blithe heart of daftness, an imaginary 1966 midway between the Monkees‘ “Pleasant Valley Sunday” the Left Banke’s “Pretty Ballerina” and Terry Riley‘s “In C”, breezy with Herb Alpert brass, dappled with Motown bass.

If there’s little likely to fry your mind or even tickle your fancy as much as, say, Dots And Loops or Emperor Tomato Ketchup, it’s still a hugely enjoyable record, from the playgroup doowop of “Neon Beanbag”, through the soundtracky atmospheres of the title track to the rinkydink piano singalong of “Daisy Click Clack”. The heart of the record, though, might be “Silver Sands”, an expression of wonder at the “delicate, intricate” natural magic of gardening, where “sunlight and water transform into life”. You might see this as in some way self-referential, an analogue of the project of Stereolab themselves, humbly tending their own prim garden of strange blooms and exotic flora. And, indeed, it chimes with the album title – chemical chords suggesting the recombinatorial weave of DNA, as it spirals into new and evermore wonderful manifestations.

But you could take the analogy further: isn’t that fertility and novelty dependent on fresh encounters, new cultural chromosomes cross-pollinating? The worry for Stereolab, in their increasing refinement and cultivation, must be a certain amount of inbreeding. You wonder if their music might not be as vivid, comic, daft, tasty, elegant and iconically pop-art as the banana – but maybe also ultimately as genetically sterile. With a new album of the less pop material from these same sessions due later this year, let’s hope for some new mutations.

STEPHEN TROUSSÉ

Q&A WITH STEREOLAB’S LAETITIA SADIER:

U:It’s been four years since the last album – was there any sense of creative block? Are you more focused on your own projects these days?

LS: Well, we’ve been working on other things – I worked on my own project, Monade, and Tim worked on the soundtrack to the the film La Vie d’Artiste. And we released the singles that were collected on Fab Four Suture. But I think Tim was not feeling inspired by the idea of a new album. The very idea of the album seems to be fading out – there are different ways to release music now…

Chemical Chords seems a very serene, sunny album. What with the state of the world in 2008, did you ever feel like making an angrier album?

I don’t think you need to be angry to make political music. You can be calmly critical. I don’t think just blaring out your rage is necessarily very effective…

You’ve recently moved back to London from France – were you forced to flee the new Sarkozy regime?

Well, really I just missed London – it is much more dynamic there. Everything in France is so slow. If you want to start up a small business, like a small record label, you have to get permission from your local mayor! In London it is all much simpler.

INTERVIEW: STEPHEN TROUSSE

Pic credit: Steve Double

Glen Campbell – Meet Glen Campbell

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Glen Campbell – Meet Glen Campbell

Not for Glen Campbell the “Rubin route” – the stripped down presentation in old age of core values, as favoured by Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. Instead, at 72, Campbell has kept faith with the gilded lilies that have served him well throughout his career: sumptuous countrified settings, atop which his vocal effortlessly rides, a sheriff-like upholder of the song’s order. Interestingly, unruly rock music – Travis, Velvets, Tom Petty, Lennon – provides the material here. But the listenable authority of Campbell’s voice, especially on Foo Fighters' “Days Like These”, confers the poise you suspect Richard Ashcroft was looking for while solo, but never found. JOHN ROBINSON Pic credit: PA Photos

Not for Glen Campbell the “Rubin route” – the stripped down presentation in old age of core values, as favoured by Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. Instead, at 72, Campbell has kept faith with the gilded lilies that have served him well throughout his career: sumptuous countrified settings, atop which his vocal effortlessly rides, a sheriff-like upholder of the song’s order.

Interestingly, unruly rock music – Travis, Velvets, Tom Petty, Lennon – provides the material here. But the listenable authority of Campbell’s voice, especially on Foo Fighters’ “Days Like These”, confers the poise you suspect Richard Ashcroft was looking for while solo, but never found.

JOHN ROBINSON

Pic credit: PA Photos

Radiohead, The White Stripes And Beck On New DVD

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Radiohead, The White Stripes And Beck On New DVD
Radiohead, White Stripes and Beck are among the artists who appear on a forthcoming live sessions DVD release. The intimate gigs were recorded for the first series of Sky Arts programme "From The Basement" and featured a diverse array of artists; from PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth to Damien Rice and Su...

Radiohead, White Stripes and Beck are among the artists who appear on a forthcoming live sessions DVD release.

The intimate gigs were recorded for the first series of Sky Arts programme “From The Basement” and featured a diverse array of artists; from PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth to Damien Rice and Super Furry Animals.

Out on November 3, the two hour DVD also features two unique solo ‘In Rainbows’ performances by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke; “Down Is The New Up” and “Videotape.”

From The Basement’s full track listing is:

RADIOHEAD – 1) Weird Fishes / Arpeggi 2) Reckoner

WHITE STRIPES – 1) Blue Orchid / Party Of Special Things To Do 2) Red Rain

BECK – 1) Motorcade 2) Cell Phone’s Dead

JAMIE LIDDEL – 1) In The City

THE SHINS – 1) Turn On Me 2) Phantom Limb

JARVIS COCKER – 1) Fat Children

NEIL HANNON – 1) A Lady Of A Certain Age

LAURA MARLING – 1) Your Only Doll (Dora)

SONIC YOUTH – 1) The Sprawl 2) Pink Stream

EELS – 1) Millicent Don’t Blame Yourself 2) It’s A Motherfucker

ALBERT HAMMOND JR – 1) Everyone Gets A Star 2) Postal Blowfish

P.J. HARVEY – 1) The Piano 2) The Devil

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS – 1) Let The Wolves Howl At The Moon 2) The Gift That Keeps On Giving

DAMIEN RICE – 1) Delicate 2) Blower’s Daughter

AUTOLUX – 1) Let It Be Broken

JOSE GONZALEZ – 1) Abraham 2) High Low

THOM YORKE – 1) Down Is The New Up 2) Videotape

Pic credit: PA Photos

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Beatles’ Contract With Brian Epstein Up For Sale

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Beatles’ Contract With Brian Epstein Up For Sale

The original version of The Beatles' first contract with manager Brian Epstein is among the items to be put up for auction at The Fame Bureau's 'It's More Than Rock and Roll' auction in London next month. The original paperwork contracted The Beatles to Epstein while he sourced their first record deal - and is signed by all band members, as well Lennon and McCartney's fathers, as John and Paul were under 21. The document, first drafted and signed by the band on January 24, 1962 was completed with Epstein's signature on October 1 the same year. The paperwork is now estimated to be worth in the region of £250, 000. The memorabillia auction, taking place on September 4 at the Idea Generation Gallery in London will also see the piano used for the recording of "Hey Jude" be sold. The Trident Studios's Bechstein Grand Piano which also features on David Bowie's Space Oddity, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust albums is estimated between £300- £400, 000. More details about the sale lots, and for images, see the website: www.famebureau.com. For more music and film news click here

The original version of The Beatles‘ first contract with manager Brian Epstein is among the items to be put up for auction at The Fame Bureau’s ‘It’s More Than Rock and Roll’ auction in London next month.

The original paperwork contracted The Beatles to Epstein while he sourced their first record deal – and is signed by all band members, as well Lennon and McCartney‘s fathers, as John and Paul were under 21.

The document, first drafted and signed by the band on January 24, 1962 was completed with Epstein’s signature on October 1 the same year. The paperwork is now estimated to be worth in the region of £250, 000.

The memorabillia auction, taking place on September 4 at the Idea Generation Gallery in London will also see the piano used for the recording of “Hey Jude” be sold. The Trident Studios’s Bechstein Grand Piano which also features on David Bowie‘s Space Oddity, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust albums is estimated between £300- £400, 000.

More details about the sale lots, and for images, see the website: www.famebureau.com.

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Go Betweens Man Announces UK Tour

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Go Betweens Man Announces UK Tour
Go-Betweens founder Robert Forster is to play his first series of UK shows since former band partner Grant McLennan passed away. The dates, which start next month in Dublin, will see Forster accompanied by fellow Go-Betweens bassist Adele Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson for his first UK tour i...

Go-Betweens founder Robert Forster is to play his first series of UK shows since former band partner Grant McLennan passed away.

The dates, which start next month in Dublin, will see Forster accompanied by fellow Go-Betweens bassist Adele Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson for his first UK tour in three years.

The trio will be drawing from Forster’s critically acclaimed new album ‘The Evangelist’ as well as some back catalogue material.

The full Robert Forster venues and dates are:

Dublin, Button Factory (September 19)

Glasgow, Oran Mor (20)

Manchester, RNCM (21)

Oxford, Carling Academy Oxford (22)

Lancaster, Lancaster Central Library (24)

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall (26)

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Oasis Confirm First New Single, and Tour Plans

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Oasis Confirm First New Single, and Tour Plans
Oasis have revealed details for their forthcoming new single "Shock of the Lightning", the first to be taken from their upcoming studio album 'Dig Out Your Soul'. The single will feature a remix of new album track "Falling Down" by the Chemical Brothers, the first time that the band have released ...

Oasis have revealed details for their forthcoming new single “Shock of the Lightning”, the first to be taken from their upcoming studio album ‘Dig Out Your Soul’.

The single will feature a remix of new album track “Falling Down” by the Chemical Brothers, the first time that the band have released an official remix of one of their songs.

“Shock of the Lightning” is to be released on September 29; on CD, seven-inch vinyl and download formats, prior to the album’s release on October 6.

Oasis, current cover stars of Uncut magazine, have also confirmed that UK tour plans are soon to be revealed.

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Peter Gabriel Completes Big Blue Ball Project

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Peter Gabriel Completes Big Blue Ball Project
Peter Gabriel's Big Blue Ball project has finally been completed for release as an 11 track album, 18 years after recording began. Constructed from three week long recording sessions at Realworld studios in Box, Wiltshire across 1991, 1992 and 1995; Gabriel and Waterboys' Karl Wallinger enlisted th...

Peter Gabriel‘s Big Blue Ball project has finally been completed for release as an 11 track album, 18 years after recording began.

Constructed from three week long recording sessions at Realworld studios in Box, Wiltshire across 1991, 1992 and 1995; Gabriel and Waterboys’ Karl Wallinger enlisted the help of over 30 artists to create the music for the album.

Amongst the musicians who appear, as well as Gabriel and Wallinger, are Sinead O’Connor, Jah Wobble, Tim Finn, Natacha Atlas.

Speaking about the circumstances the record first started in 1991, Gabriel who writes, performs and produces on the album says: “We had this week of invited guests, people from all around the world, fed by music and a 24 hour café. It was a giant playpen, a bring your own studio party. There’d be a studio set up on the lawn, in the garage, in someone’s bedroom as well as the seven rooms we had available.”

“We were curators of sorts of all this living mass. We had poets and songwriters there, people would come in and scribble things down, they’d hook up in the café. It was like a dating agency, then they’d disappear into the darkness and make noises –and we’d be there to record it.”

A 23 minute podcast hosted by Gabriel and Wallinger which includes excerpts from the new album, is available here.

Big Blue Ball’s complete track listing is:

Whole Thing

Habibe

Shadow

altus silva

Exit Through You

Everything Comes From You

Burn You Up, Burn You Down

Forest

Rivers

Jijy

Big Blue Ball

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David Byrne and Brian Eno’s First Album In 27 Years – Preview!

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David Byrne and Brian Eno’s First Album In 27 Years – Preview!

As previously reported, legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and equally renowned artist and producer Brian Eno have co-written their first album together in 27 years, entitled 'Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.' A taster, the first track "Strange Overtones" is currently available as a free download from the pairs' website here, with the entire 11 track album being released next Monday (August 18) However, you can find out what the entire album is like on our wild Mercury Sound blog now! Click here for the Uncut.co.uk album preview of Byrne and Eno's new collaboration. The full tracklisting for the forthcoming album "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today" is: 1. Home 2. My Big Nurse 3. I Feel My Stuff 4. Everything That Happens 5. Life Is Long 6. The River 7. Strange Overtones 8. Wanted For Life 9. One Fine Day 10. Poor Boy 11. The Lighthouse More info is available from the album website: www.everythingthathappens.com Pic credit: PA Photos For more music and film news click here

As previously reported, legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and equally renowned artist and producer Brian Eno have co-written their first album together in 27 years, entitled ‘Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.’

A taster, the first track “Strange Overtones” is currently available as a free download from the pairs’ website here, with the entire 11 track album being released next Monday (August 18)

However, you can find out what the entire album is like on our wild Mercury Sound blog now! Click here for the Uncut.co.uk album preview of Byrne and Eno’s new collaboration.

The full tracklisting for the forthcoming album “Everything

That Happens Will Happen Today” is:

1. Home

2. My Big Nurse

3. I Feel My Stuff

4. Everything That Happens

5. Life Is Long

6. The River

7. Strange Overtones

8. Wanted For Life

9. One Fine Day

10. Poor Boy

11. The Lighthouse

More info is available from the album website: www.everythingthathappens.com

Pic credit: PA Photos

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Isaac Hayes: 1942 – 2008

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Isaac Hayes: 1942 – 2008

When Isaac Hayes walked on stage to accept his Best Music Score Oscar for Shaft in 1972, draped in dyed-blue ermine and rattling gold chains, it heralded more than the arrival of an innovative film composer. The centre of attention in a room packed with the stuffy tuxes of the Academy voters, Hayes’s success was viewed by the black community as mainstream acceptance of a much wider culture. He may well have relished his elevation to figurehead status and the affectionate soubriquet “Black Moses”, and the recognition of his talents undoubtedly opened doors for others to walk through, but for Hayes it was a personal triumph, a seal of approval for his own singular vision of what soul music could be. Beginning his career in a string of bands around Memphis, just a few miles south of his birthplace of Covington, Tennessee, Hayes joined the staff of the city’s legendary Stax Records in 1964, initially as a session musician. He played on dozens of the label’s releases, one of his most notable early contributions being the powerful Hammond riffs on Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness”. In tandem with David Porter, he wrote numerous hits for Sam & Dave (“Soul Man”, “Hold On! I’m Comin’”) and others in the Stax stable, but it was his own 1969 album, Hot Buttered Soul, that singled him out as a groundbreaking musician of extraordinary depth and invention. The subtle under-played instrumentation and the extended whispered raps of his intros astonished listeners, not least on an 18-minute version of Jimmy Webb’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”. The high life afforded him after Shaft also proved to be a curse, however, and within five years he was filing for bankruptcy, surrendering his Tennessee mansion and gold-plated limousine to the taxman. He continued to make records throughout the 1970s and 1980 but with less fanfare, although his profile received intermittent boosts when hip-hop stars like Public Enemy sampled his back catalogue. Hayes welcomed good-natured send-ups of his image in spoof movies like 1988’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka!, and worked steadily as an actor in small TV and film roles, as well becoming a radio DJ. In recent years he found himself a new fanbase as the voice of Chef in the much-loved and controversial South Park, even scoring a UK Number One hit with a song from the series, “Chocolate Salty Balls”, but he quit the show in protest at the makers’ lampooning of Scientology, the faith he’d embraced years before. Family members found Hayes collapsed by a treadmill in his home gym in Memphis on Sunday afternoon (August 10), just days before his 66th birthday. TERRY STAUNTON Pic credit: PA Photos

When Isaac Hayes walked on stage to accept his Best Music Score Oscar for Shaft in 1972, draped in dyed-blue ermine and rattling gold chains, it heralded more than the arrival of an innovative film composer. The centre of attention in a room packed with the stuffy tuxes of the Academy voters, Hayes’s success was viewed by the black community as mainstream acceptance of a much wider culture.

He may well have relished his elevation to figurehead status and the affectionate soubriquet “Black Moses”, and the recognition of his talents undoubtedly opened doors for others to walk through, but for Hayes it was a personal triumph, a seal of approval for his own singular vision of what soul music could be.

Beginning his career in a string of bands around Memphis, just a few miles south of his birthplace of Covington, Tennessee, Hayes joined the staff of the city’s legendary Stax Records in 1964, initially as a session musician. He played on dozens of the label’s releases, one of his most notable early contributions being the powerful Hammond riffs on Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness”.

In tandem with David Porter, he wrote numerous hits for Sam & Dave (“Soul Man”, “Hold On! I’m Comin’”) and others in the Stax stable, but it was his own 1969 album, Hot Buttered Soul, that singled him out as a groundbreaking musician of extraordinary depth and invention. The subtle under-played instrumentation and the extended whispered raps of his intros astonished listeners, not least on an 18-minute version of Jimmy Webb’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”.

The high life afforded him after Shaft also proved to be a curse, however, and within five years he was filing for bankruptcy, surrendering his Tennessee mansion and gold-plated limousine to the taxman. He continued to make records throughout the 1970s and 1980 but with less fanfare, although his profile received intermittent boosts when hip-hop stars like Public Enemy sampled his back catalogue.

Hayes welcomed good-natured send-ups of his image in spoof movies like 1988’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka!, and worked steadily as an actor in small TV and film roles, as well becoming a radio DJ. In recent years he found himself a new fanbase as the voice of Chef in the much-loved and controversial South Park, even scoring a UK Number One hit with a song from the series, “Chocolate Salty Balls”, but he quit the show in protest at the makers’ lampooning of Scientology, the faith he’d embraced years before.

Family members found Hayes collapsed by a treadmill in his home gym in Memphis on Sunday afternoon (August 10), just days before his 66th birthday.

TERRY STAUNTON

Pic credit: PA Photos

Support For This Month’s Club Uncut Revealed

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Support For This Month’s Club Uncut Revealed
The Week That Was have been confirmed to join Brooklyn heroes Yeasayer at the next Club Uncut which takes place next week (August 20). An Evening With Yeasayer follows previous sold-out Club Uncut nights featuring Joan As Police Woman, Okkervil River and White Denim. The Week That Was, a twelve pi...

The Week That Was have been confirmed to join Brooklyn heroes Yeasayer at the next Club Uncut which takes place next week (August 20).

An Evening With Yeasayer follows previous sold-out Club Uncut nights featuring Joan As Police Woman, Okkervil River and White Denim.

The Week That Was, a twelve piece collective (including brass, piano and vibraphone!) from Sunderland, are set to release their self-titled debut album next week (August 18). To get a taste of their ambient rock sound check out their Myspace page here here.

Yeasayer, as you probably know, are one of the finest new bands to emerge in the last 12 months or so, a fearlessly eclectic quartet from (inevitably) Brooklyn. When we featured them in Uncut back in January, Sam Richards wrote, “They pass world music and experimental rock through the stadium-pop filter of Peter Gabriel, arriving at a kind of awesome apocalyptic soul not a million miles from that of fellow Brooklyn voyagers TV On The Radio.”

Tickets cost £11, and Uncut’s exclusive allocation are available from www.seetickets.com

The show is open to anyone over 14, though under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

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Up The Junction

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Up The Junction

Swinging London: a groovy paradise where class aspirations soared as high as the hemlines, and you couldn't stroll down the street without bumping into a moody photographer eager to catapult you into the big time. At least, that's how the Sixties might look if you were to take Blow Up or social satire Smashing Time at face value. But 1967's Up The Junction tells a different story. Based on Neil Dunn's 1963 novel, and inspired by Ken Loach's groundbreaking 1965 BBC adaptation, it's a warts'n'all portrait of working class Battersea where sexual liberation means a post-pub fumble "over the bombsite" and Austin Powers wouldn't last five minutes. Bored by her privileged upbringing, Chelsea ŽmigrŽ Polly Dean (Suzy Kendall) gets a job at a sweet factory where she befriends salt-of-the-earth sisters Rube (Adrienne Posta) and Sylvie (a beehived Maureen Lipman). To complete her metamorphosis, she exchanges her trouser suit for a miniskirt and seduces junk-shop assistant Peter (an angelic Dennis Waterman), who is as eager to scramble up the social ladder as Polly is to descend it. "Don't you think that's very beautiful?" she says to him, surveying an Orwellian landscape of terraced houses and smoke-belching factories. "No, not really," he snorts. As class critiques go, it may not rank up with, say, Loach or Mike Leigh at their late Sixties' TV peak. But despite the clumsy social commentary (abortion; marital abuse), Up The Junction's refusal to sugar coat its message that life "over the water" in Chelsea is unattainable still packs a punch. No flower-power finale here. Instead, one character is killed in a bike crash, and another ends the film languishing in a cell. Admirably unsentimental, eerily prescient in it's portrayal of the gentrification of the capital's slum areas, and blessed with a cracking paisley-scented soundtrack by Manfred Mann, Up The Junction is as close as you can get to an alternative - and arguably more realistic - cinematic portrait of Sixties London without the aid of a time machine. EXTRAS: None. PAUL MOODY

Swinging London: a groovy paradise where class aspirations soared as high as the hemlines, and you couldn’t stroll down the street without bumping into a moody photographer eager to catapult you into the big time. At least, that’s how the Sixties might look if you were to take Blow Up or social satire Smashing Time at face value.

But 1967’s Up The Junction tells a different story. Based on Neil Dunn‘s 1963 novel, and inspired by Ken Loach‘s groundbreaking 1965 BBC adaptation, it’s a warts’n’all portrait of working class Battersea where sexual liberation means a post-pub fumble “over the bombsite” and Austin Powers wouldn’t last five minutes.

Bored by her privileged upbringing, Chelsea ŽmigrŽ Polly Dean (Suzy Kendall) gets a job at a sweet factory where she befriends salt-of-the-earth sisters Rube (Adrienne Posta) and Sylvie (a beehived Maureen Lipman). To complete her metamorphosis, she exchanges her trouser suit for a miniskirt and seduces junk-shop assistant Peter (an angelic Dennis Waterman), who is as eager to scramble up the social ladder as Polly is to descend it. “Don’t you think that’s very beautiful?” she says to him, surveying an Orwellian landscape of terraced houses and smoke-belching factories.

“No, not really,” he snorts.

As class critiques go, it may not rank up with, say, Loach or Mike Leigh at their late Sixties’ TV peak. But despite the clumsy social commentary (abortion; marital abuse), Up The Junction’s refusal to sugar coat its message that life “over the water” in Chelsea is unattainable still packs a punch. No flower-power finale here. Instead, one character is killed in a bike crash, and another ends the film languishing in a cell.

Admirably unsentimental, eerily prescient in it’s portrayal of the gentrification of the capital’s slum areas, and blessed with a cracking paisley-scented soundtrack by Manfred Mann, Up The Junction is as close as you can get to an alternative – and arguably more realistic – cinematic portrait of Sixties London without the aid of a time machine.

EXTRAS: None.

PAUL MOODY

Various Artists – Punk’s Not Dead

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Various Artists – Punk’s Not Dead
Susan Dynner's affectionate documentary neatly bookends American punk, the DIY ethic of the early 80s (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Religion) contrasted against the more modern corporate approach of "punk renaissance" bands like The Offspring and Green Day. From tales of social lepers crashing on...

Susan Dynner‘s affectionate documentary neatly bookends American punk, the DIY ethic of the early 80s (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Religion) contrasted against the more modern corporate approach of “punk renaissance” bands like The Offspring and Green Day.

From tales of social lepers crashing on fans’ floors to college-educated business brains discussing marketing strategies, it’s a witty examination of how the mainstream ultimately embraces that which it fears.

EXTRAS: 3* Deleted scenes, live performances, featurettes, trailers.

TERRY STAUNTON

Pic credit: PA Photos

Anchorman – Special Edition

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Anchorman – Special Edition
Will Ferrell's greatest movie - a brilliant comedy set in a TV newsroom in the Seventies, with Farrell's testosterone-fuelled chauvanist Ron Burgundy getting in a flap about the arrival of a new female news anchor. The key addition here is Wake Up Ron Burgundy - a second movie, compiled from outta...

Will Ferrell‘s greatest movie – a brilliant comedy set in a TV newsroom in the Seventies, with Farrell’s testosterone-fuelled chauvanist Ron Burgundy getting in a flap about the arrival of a new female news anchor.

The key addition here is Wake Up Ron Burgundy – a second movie, compiled from outtakes and a cut subplot from Anchorman, with Burgundy investigating a pacifist paramilitary outfit called The Alarm Clock.

EXTRAS: 3* Arguably more than you really need, including cast auditions, rehearsal footage and Burgundy’s diary, alongside the usual Behind The Scenes gubbins.

MICHAEL BONNER

Green Man Festival Stage Times Confirmed

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Green Man Festival Stage Times Confirmed

Just a few days now till this year's Green Man Festival kicks off in the Brecon Beacons, Wales. The three day event (August 15-17) is set to be headlined by Spiritualized (pictured above), Super Furry Animals and the reformed Pentangle, who will culminate their one-off 40th anniversary tour at the festival. The group comprising original members Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Jacqui McShee, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox recently reformed to play a one-off 40th anniversary concert, but demand has forced them to play a world tour. Other artists playing the intimate, three stage festival include Richard Thompson, Howlin Rain, Black Mountain, Drive By Truckers, Iron & Wine, Wild Beasts, The National and The Cave Singers. Information about Green Man is available from the event's official website here:www.thegreenmanfestival.co.uk. The stage times revelead today for the weekend's festivities are as follows: FRIDAY 15TH AUGUST MAIN STAGE: 11.30-12.30am Spiritualized 10.00-10.45pm Drive-By Truckers 8.30-9.15pm King Creosote 7.00-7.45pm James Yorkston 5.30-6.15pm Alela Diane 4.30-5.00pm Sennen 3.30-4.00pm Fight Like Apes 2.30-3.00pm Agnostic MGC 1.30-2.00pm Truckers of Husk 12.30-1.00pm Cats in Paris FOLKEY DOKEY: 11.00-11.45pm Black Mountain 9.30-10.15pm The Cave Singers 8.00-8.45pm F***Buttons 6.30-7.15pm O'Death 5.00-5.45pm The War On Drugs 4.00-4.30pm One Little Plane 3.00-3.30pm 2.00-2.30pm Mugstar 1.00-1.30pm Threatmantics 12.00-12.30pm Green Poll Winners - Booger Red GREEN MAN CAFÉ: 11.15-12.00pm Ben Ottewell 9.45-10.30pm Lou Rhodes 8.15-9.00pm Cath and Phil Tyler 6.45-7.30pm Burning Leaves 5.15-6.00pm Rod Thomas 4.15-4.45pm Mary Hampton 3.15-3.45pm Paul Marshall 2.15-2.45pm Sara Lowes 1.15-1.45pm David A. Jaycock 12.15-12.45pm George Thomas SATURDAY 16TH AUGUST MAIN STAGE: 11.30-12.30am Super Furry Animals 10.00-10.45pm Richard Thompson 8.30-9.15pm Junior Boys 7.00-7.45pm Howlin Rain 5.30-6.15pm School of Language 4.30-5.00pm Devon Sproule 3.30-4.00pm Jennifer Gentle 2.30-3.00pm Babel 1.30-2.00pm 9Bach 12.30-1.00pm The Saffron Sect FOLKEY DOKEY: 11.00-11.45pm Lightspeed Champion 9.30-10.15pm Archie Bronson Outfit 8.00-8.45pm Wild Beasts 6.30-7.15pm Eugene McGuinness 5.00-5.45pm Emmy The Great 4.00-4.30pm North Sea Radio Orchestra 3.00-3.30pm The Yellow Moon Band 2.00-2.30pm The Drift Collective 1.00-1.30pm Cate Le Bon 12.00-12.30pm Brigyn GREEN MAN CAFÉ 11.15-12.00pm Badly Drawn Boy 9.45-10.30pm Heather Jones 8.15-9.00pm John Stammers 6.45-7.30pm Gwyneth Glyn 5.15-6.00pm Essie Jain 4.15-4.45pm The Orange Blossom Special 3.15-3.45pm Clare Maguire 2.15-2.45pm Duke Garwood 1.15-1.45pm The Swanton Bombs 12.15-12.45pm Pamela Wyn Shannon SUNDAY 17TH AUGUST MAIN STAGE: 10.45-11.45pm Pentangle 9.15-10.00pm Iron and Wine 7.45-8.30pm The National 6.15-7.00pm Damien Jurado 5.00-5.45pm Laura Marling 4.00-4.30pm Los Campesinos! 3.00-3.30pm Simone White 2.00-2.30pm Bowerbirds 1.00-1.30pm Radio Luxembourg 12.00-12.30pm Cymbient FOLKEY DOKEY: 11.00-11.45pm Caribou 9.30-10.15pm Magik Markers 8.00-8.45pm Nina Nastasia 6.45-7.30pm The Peth 5.30-6.15pm The Accidental 4.30-5.00pm Prince Rama of Ayodhya 3.30-4.00pm The Owl Service 2.30-3.00pm Mumford & Sons 1.30-2.00pm Moon Music Orchestra 12.30-1.00pm Wolf People GREEN MAN CAFÉ: 10.15-11.15pm Little Wings 9.00-9.45pm Pete Molinari 7.45-8.30pm Wildbirds & Peacedrums 6.30-7.15pm Sefa 5.15-6.00pm Nic Dawson Kelly 4.15-4.45pm City Reverb 3.15-3.45pm Beth Jeans Houghton 2.15-2.45pm Pete Greenwood 1.15-1.45pm Jane Weaver 12.15-12.45pm The Gentle Good Pic credit: Neil Thomson

Just a few days now till this year’s Green Man Festival kicks off in the Brecon Beacons, Wales.

The three day event (August 15-17) is set to be headlined by Spiritualized (pictured above), Super Furry Animals and the reformed Pentangle, who will culminate their one-off 40th anniversary tour at the festival.

The group comprising original members Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Jacqui McShee, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox recently reformed to play a one-off 40th anniversary concert, but demand has forced them to play a world tour.

Other artists playing the intimate, three stage festival include Richard Thompson, Howlin Rain, Black Mountain, Drive By Truckers, Iron & Wine, Wild Beasts, The National and The Cave Singers.

Information about Green Man is available from the event’s official website here:www.thegreenmanfestival.co.uk.

The stage times revelead today for the weekend’s festivities are as follows:

FRIDAY 15TH AUGUST

MAIN STAGE:

11.30-12.30am Spiritualized

10.00-10.45pm Drive-By Truckers

8.30-9.15pm King Creosote

7.00-7.45pm James Yorkston

5.30-6.15pm Alela Diane

4.30-5.00pm Sennen

3.30-4.00pm Fight Like Apes

2.30-3.00pm Agnostic MGC

1.30-2.00pm Truckers of Husk

12.30-1.00pm Cats in Paris

FOLKEY DOKEY:

11.00-11.45pm Black Mountain

9.30-10.15pm The Cave Singers

8.00-8.45pm F***Buttons

6.30-7.15pm O’Death

5.00-5.45pm The War On Drugs

4.00-4.30pm One Little Plane

3.00-3.30pm

2.00-2.30pm Mugstar

1.00-1.30pm Threatmantics

12.00-12.30pm Green Poll Winners – Booger Red

GREEN MAN CAFÉ:

11.15-12.00pm Ben Ottewell

9.45-10.30pm Lou Rhodes

8.15-9.00pm Cath and Phil Tyler

6.45-7.30pm Burning Leaves

5.15-6.00pm Rod Thomas

4.15-4.45pm Mary Hampton

3.15-3.45pm Paul Marshall

2.15-2.45pm Sara Lowes

1.15-1.45pm David A. Jaycock

12.15-12.45pm George Thomas

SATURDAY 16TH AUGUST

MAIN STAGE:

11.30-12.30am Super Furry Animals

10.00-10.45pm Richard Thompson

8.30-9.15pm Junior Boys

7.00-7.45pm Howlin Rain

5.30-6.15pm School of Language

4.30-5.00pm Devon Sproule

3.30-4.00pm Jennifer Gentle

2.30-3.00pm Babel

1.30-2.00pm 9Bach

12.30-1.00pm The Saffron Sect

FOLKEY DOKEY:

11.00-11.45pm Lightspeed Champion

9.30-10.15pm Archie Bronson Outfit

8.00-8.45pm Wild Beasts

6.30-7.15pm Eugene McGuinness

5.00-5.45pm Emmy The Great

4.00-4.30pm North Sea Radio Orchestra

3.00-3.30pm The Yellow Moon Band

2.00-2.30pm The Drift Collective

1.00-1.30pm Cate Le Bon

12.00-12.30pm Brigyn

GREEN MAN CAFÉ

11.15-12.00pm Badly Drawn Boy

9.45-10.30pm Heather Jones

8.15-9.00pm John Stammers

6.45-7.30pm Gwyneth Glyn

5.15-6.00pm Essie Jain

4.15-4.45pm The Orange Blossom Special

3.15-3.45pm Clare Maguire

2.15-2.45pm Duke Garwood

1.15-1.45pm The Swanton Bombs

12.15-12.45pm Pamela Wyn Shannon

SUNDAY 17TH AUGUST

MAIN STAGE:

10.45-11.45pm Pentangle

9.15-10.00pm Iron and Wine

7.45-8.30pm The National

6.15-7.00pm Damien Jurado

5.00-5.45pm Laura Marling

4.00-4.30pm Los Campesinos!

3.00-3.30pm Simone White

2.00-2.30pm Bowerbirds

1.00-1.30pm Radio Luxembourg

12.00-12.30pm Cymbient

FOLKEY DOKEY:

11.00-11.45pm Caribou

9.30-10.15pm Magik Markers

8.00-8.45pm Nina Nastasia

6.45-7.30pm The Peth

5.30-6.15pm The Accidental

4.30-5.00pm Prince Rama of Ayodhya

3.30-4.00pm The Owl Service

2.30-3.00pm Mumford & Sons

1.30-2.00pm Moon Music Orchestra

12.30-1.00pm Wolf People

GREEN MAN CAFÉ:

10.15-11.15pm Little Wings

9.00-9.45pm Pete Molinari

7.45-8.30pm Wildbirds & Peacedrums

6.30-7.15pm Sefa

5.15-6.00pm Nic Dawson Kelly

4.15-4.45pm City Reverb

3.15-3.45pm Beth Jeans Houghton

2.15-2.45pm Pete Greenwood

1.15-1.45pm Jane Weaver

12.15-12.45pm The Gentle Good

Pic credit: Neil Thomson

U2’s First Ever Concert Video To Be Released On DVD

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U2’s First Ever Concert Video To Be Released On DVD
U2 are to release their first ever live concert video on DVD this September. Live At Red Rocks, from their 1983 Colorado show has been expanded for the new release. The concert film, recorded at the Red Rocks Ampitheatre will feature five extra, previously unreleased songs as well as a director's c...

U2 are to release their first ever live concert video on DVD this September. Live At Red Rocks, from their 1983 Colorado show has been expanded for the new release.

The concert film, recorded at the Red Rocks Ampitheatre will feature five extra, previously unreleased songs as well as a director’s commentary.

U2 will simultaneously re-release the accompanying live soundtrack, culled from their North American and European War Tour shows, Under A Blood Red Sky. The remastered album will be available in heavyweight 180gm vinyl as well as part of a deluxe package with the DVD.

The full Live At Red Rocks DVD track listing is:

Out Of Control

Twilight

An Cat Dubh

Into The Heart

Surrender

Two Hearts Beat As One

Seconds

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Cry

The Electric Co.

October

New Year’s Day

I Threw A Brick Through A Window

A Day Without Me

Gloria

Party Girl

11 O’Clock Tick Tock

I Will Follow

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The DVD and CD are released by Universal on September 29, 2008.

For more music and film news click here

David Byrne & Brian Eno: “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today”

John Mulvey
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A few weeks back, while grappling with the earthshattering business of a new Coldplay album, I kicked off a discussion about Brian Eno’s recent track record. I was confounded by his taste for generally working with giant and, to my ears, fundamentally quite conservative bands. After literally decades of hitching his wagon to the likes of Coldplay, U2 and, lest we forget, James, I found it fascinating that Eno still retained a profound avant-garde cachet. Have we been letting him get away with a lot of mediocre music, just because he talks cleverly about it? Eno, I suspect, finds some kind of experimental gratification in the way he approaches the process of making a record, rather than the way it actually sounds when it's finished: convenient when you’re Guy Hands and need a Coldplay album to sell an eight-figure digit worldwide, but perhaps less important for a cloistered music hack and blogger who treasures the memory of Eno as an innovator, rather than a facilitator. The reunion with his old aesthetic twin, David Byrne, inevitably smells a lot more promising. And reading the way Eno talks about “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” in the press release, it all looks very alluring, with him musing on the potential of gospel music as “a music of surrender, and the surrendering rather than the worshipping was the part that interested me.” Eno describes the album as “something like electronic gospel”, which should immediately alert you to the fact that we’re not in for a rerun of “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts”. This one isn’t about using religious samples for subversive ends, it’s about tapping into a faith-powered musical tradition. So Byrne muses, in a calm and familiarly quizzical way, about coming to terms with age, mortality and an accelerating world, while Eno packs the background with his slightly dated array of electronic trickery. It is, to be honest, a lot better than this makes it sound. Again, there’s precious little that could comfortably be described as radical: a fair few of Eno’s purportedly experimental soundscapes could have sat happily on some mid-‘90s armchair electronica record, there’s a fair whiff of latterday Radiohead here and there (notably on “I Feel My Stuff”), and I keep thinking of REM’s “Up” as a comparison, wherein traditional songcraft is mildly subverted by some artful electronic trim. “Poor Boy” is frenetic and jittery in a way which vaguely recalls some of the prickly areas of “Bush Of Ghosts”, but it comes across as rather strained, oddly pedestrian. Perhaps it’s better to focus on Byrne rather than Eno, who doesn’t come saddled with quite such oppressive expectations. We’re told that Eno passed over a bunch of musical ideas to Byrne, for him to work into songs, and he’s done a generally impressive job. Essentially, “Everything That Happens” is an enormously pleasanr, gospel-tinged pop record, with some genteel nods towards funk. “Strange Overtones” is available as a free download here, and is a good indication of Byrne’s form: writing the most graceful and immediate songs he’s done in years; making a strength out of the mournful, encroaching frailty of his voice. That last point really comes to the fore on “The Lighthouse”, the last track and the one that best plays to Eno and Byrne’s talents. Byrne sings beautifully, as if in a lucid dream, but it’s the way that Eno’s dreamlike music complements it – faintly echoing “Another Green World”, perhaps – that finds the two working most harmoniously. A very nice album, but if it had featured ten more songs of the calibre of “The Lighthouse”, we might just be talking about another great one.

A few weeks back, while grappling with the earthshattering business of a new Coldplay album, I kicked off a discussion about Brian Eno’s recent track record. I was confounded by his taste for generally working with giant and, to my ears, fundamentally quite conservative bands. After literally decades of hitching his wagon to the likes of Coldplay, U2 and, lest we forget, James, I found it fascinating that Eno still retained a profound avant-garde cachet. Have we been letting him get away with a lot of mediocre music, just because he talks cleverly about it?

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