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The Breeders – Mountain Battles

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The Breeders – Mountain Battles
Breeders albums are like country buses: you wait a really, long time for one, and when it does finally turn up, the vehicle is so battered, and the driver so laid-back, you wonder how it ever got there at all. It took the Deal twins nine years to follow grunge-pop classic Last Splash with the sweet...

Breeders albums are like country buses: you wait a really, long time for one, and when it does finally turn up, the vehicle is so battered, and the driver so laid-back, you wonder how it ever got there at all. It took the Deal twins nine years to follow grunge-pop classic Last Splash with the sweet but flimsy Title TK. Now they’ve frittered away another six summers on Mountain Battles.

At least they’ve got better excuses this time. Kim spent two years on tour with the reformed Pixies, penning their only new song “Bam Thwok”. Kelley has long since swapped heroin needles for knitting needles, and has a book of rock-themed knitting patterns coming out later this year.

They certainly haven’t spent time auditioning string players or mastering Pro Tools. Mountain Battles is marginally more polished than Title TK but it still sounds as if it was recorded in one take in Steve Albini’s toilet. A good thing, as it turns out. The intimacy of is what makes it precious.

Electrifying reverb-drenched opener “Overglazed” is a red herring. What follows is a miscellany of pithy, lo-fi curios: one song in German (the lurching, riffy “German Studies”), another in Spanish (“Regalame Esta Noche”, an old Latin bolero, sung beautifully by Kelley), and several which are barely there at all. “Istanbul” is built from swampy, Arabesque organ loops, a glowering bassline, eerie vocal chants and an ominous rhythm, like someone rattling twigs against the bars of a cage. It’s bizarre and brilliant.

As always, the sweetly menacing harmonies of the Deal twins pull everything together. They’re mesmerising on “Night Of Joy”, whose fairytale fragility is a quality more commonly associated with their former Breeders cohort Tanya Donnelly. Even better is the drowsy 6/8 waltz “We’re Gonna Rise” where Kim sings “”. It’s the credo that’s been guiding the Deals for 46 years, and there’s no reason for them to abandon it now.

SAM RICHARDS

UNCUT Q&A WITH: KIM DEAL

The album feels very sparing and intimate. Is that the intention?

A lot of people have said that the album is minimal, but I don’t agree. There are four people in the band, all playing at once. I think it’s because people are used to the fake denseness of digital music.

How did you come to cover Regalame Esta Noche?

I head it on the jukebox in a bar called El Capiro. It’s the one place in East LA where you can still smoke because it’s directly across the street from the Sheriff’s Department. All the detectives are in there smoking. I got Mando Lopez, our bass player, to translate the song for me. “” – that bit’s really nice, but then there’s lots of metaphors that don’t translate well, so we kept it in Spanish.

You do a song in German too. Can you speak three languages now?

No, I can’t speak shit!

INTERVIEW: SAM RICHARDS

Lemonheads – It’s A Shame About Ray

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Lemonheads – It’s A Shame About Ray

It’s not always easy to remember these things: in 1992, did It’s A Shame About Ray sound quite so poignant, so tender, so presciently damaged? If memory serves, we all jumped on this, Evan Dando’s fifth Lemonheads album, as a sort of exuberant and charming riposte to grunge. Dando had gradually steered his brattish Boston punk band into becoming a rough-edged powerpop outfit. Compared with, say, Alice In Chains, the Lemonheads certainly sounded fun, if not quite the lightweights they were portrayed as in the wake of that ill-advised dash through “Mrs Robinson”. But listening to It’s A Shame About Ray now, what’s most striking is an emotional frailty at the heart of these swift and memorable little songs, a vivid intimation of the mess that Evan Dando would soon become. After his fourth album, Lovey, had underperformed, Dando escaped to Sydney and fell in with a bunch of indie musicians, centred around a cute band called Smudge and a lively label called Half A Cow. Smudge’s frontman, Tom Morgan, and Half A Cow’s owner, Nic Dalton, became Dando’s new musical accomplices: Dalton would soon join the Lemonheads full-time as their bassist. Morgan and Dalton certainly encouraged Dando’s warm melodic gifts, his goofier side – as did The Robb Brothers, who produced Ray at their studio in LA. But amongst all the “butterscotch streetlamps” and so on, the singer’s insecurities were already pronounced. On “My Drug Buddy”, a gorgeous, countryish lope that briefly posited Dando and Juliana Hatfield as a ‘90s Gram and Emmylou, he notes sorrowfully, “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else.” “Rudderless”, meanwhile, is saturated with regret: “Walked back home to my place (tired of getting high), Guess I don’t wanna die.” This, remember, is purportedly Dando’s age of innocence. In fact, he had been seriously experimenting with drugs for years. It’s A Shame About Ray, in its 2008 incarnation, is still a great album, but a palpably darker one. The original 29 minutes remain a compact pop thrill. “Mrs Robinson” remains a trouble-making aberration (and one left off initial pressings of the album). There’s a sweet b-side, “Shaky Ground”, and then nine solo demos that provide a rueful new coda. Beneath the fresh bubblegum zing, they reveal the truth about Evan Dando: long before fame got to him, he was exquisitely well-prepared to self-destruct. JOHN MULVEY UNCUT Q&A WITH EVAN DANDO: Do you still hate your cover version of “Mrs Robinson”? I’m not so bothered by it now, it was the song that turned a lot of people on to the band. But we never liked it, we never played it live apart from a couple of times on TV shows. I tried to keep it off the reissue. The reason I wanted the reissue to come out was that I found this cassette of demos that I really liked. What are you up to at the moment? I have a cold and I need to get a decongestant or something. But I’m working on a covers album with Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. We’re doing some obscure psychedelic stuff, then some more obvious stuff like Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, a Dan Penn song called “Zero Will Power”. INTERVIEW: JOHN MULVEY

It’s not always easy to remember these things: in 1992, did It’s A Shame About Ray sound quite so poignant, so tender, so presciently damaged? If memory serves, we all jumped on this, Evan Dando’s fifth Lemonheads album, as a sort of exuberant and charming riposte to grunge. Dando had gradually steered his brattish Boston punk band into becoming a rough-edged powerpop outfit. Compared with, say, Alice In Chains, the Lemonheads certainly sounded fun, if not quite the lightweights they were portrayed as in the wake of that ill-advised dash through “Mrs Robinson”.

But listening to It’s A Shame About Ray now, what’s most striking is an emotional frailty at the heart of these swift and memorable little songs, a vivid intimation of the mess that Evan Dando would soon become. After his fourth album, Lovey, had underperformed, Dando escaped to Sydney and fell in with a bunch of indie musicians, centred around a cute band called Smudge and a lively label called Half A Cow. Smudge’s frontman, Tom Morgan, and Half A Cow’s owner, Nic Dalton, became Dando’s new musical accomplices: Dalton would soon join the Lemonheads full-time as their bassist.

Morgan and Dalton certainly encouraged Dando’s warm melodic gifts, his goofier side – as did The Robb Brothers, who produced Ray at their studio in LA. But amongst all the “butterscotch streetlamps” and so on, the singer’s insecurities were already pronounced. On “My Drug Buddy”, a gorgeous, countryish lope that briefly posited Dando and Juliana Hatfield as a ‘90s Gram and Emmylou, he notes sorrowfully, “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else.” “Rudderless”, meanwhile, is saturated with regret: “Walked back home to my place (tired of getting high), Guess I don’t wanna die.” This, remember, is purportedly Dando’s age of innocence. In fact, he had been seriously experimenting with drugs for years.

It’s A Shame About Ray, in its 2008 incarnation, is still a great album, but a palpably darker one. The original 29 minutes remain a compact pop thrill. “Mrs Robinson” remains a trouble-making aberration (and one left off initial pressings of the album). There’s a sweet b-side, “Shaky Ground”, and then nine solo demos that provide a rueful new coda. Beneath the fresh bubblegum zing, they reveal the truth about Evan Dando: long before fame got to him, he was exquisitely well-prepared to self-destruct.

JOHN MULVEY

UNCUT Q&A WITH EVAN DANDO:

Do you still hate your cover version of “Mrs Robinson”?

I’m not so bothered by it now, it was the song that turned a lot of people on to the band. But we never liked it, we never played it live apart from a couple of times on TV shows. I tried to keep it off the reissue. The reason I wanted the reissue to come out was that I found this cassette of demos that I really liked.

What are you up to at the moment?

I have a cold and I need to get a decongestant or something. But I’m working on a covers album with Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. We’re doing some obscure psychedelic stuff, then some more obvious stuff like Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, a Dan Penn song called “Zero Will Power”.

INTERVIEW: JOHN MULVEY

Various: Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story

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Various: Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story

Remember those days in 1991-2 when Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque was a ubiquitous hit and everyone paid homage to Alex Chilton and Big Star (pictured above)? I interviewed Chilton at Maxwell’s in Hoboken during that period. He probably wished he had a pound for every time the word “influential” came up in conversation. Battle-scarred, pale as chalk, he dismissed my Big Star eulogies as absurd. Chilton was a veteran of the British Invasion, a purist. In his world, music died in 1967. I looked into his eyes, his disappointed eyes, and he meant it. A degree of hard-nosed Anglophilia, coupled with a bittersweet sense of what might have been, are the prevailing themes of Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story. A two-CD anthology of the small Memphis label that put out Big Star’s first two albums (#1 Record, 1972; Radio City, 1974), it’s a poignant tale to immerse oneself in, not least because a key protagonist, Big Star’s co-founder Chris Bell, was sent into a mortal depression by his band’s commercial failure and lost his life in a car-crash at the age of 27. It’s a story of valiant endeavour and broken hearts. As Ardent’s founder John Fry said to me recently: “So much optimism – and then, boy, downhill.” Thank You Friends… celebrates three distinct eras of the Ardent label, which has released local Memphis product, on and off, for nearly 50 years. Our first glimpse of Ardent comes in 1961. It is run from Fry’s parents’ house, and is knocking out quirky, and completely obscure, tunes such as “Geraldine” by The Ole Miss Downbeats. A rugby club’s idea of a Bo Diddley rumble, with a heavily featured duck-call, “Geraldine” is like a cry from a lost civilisation. By 1966, garage-rock was sweeping the States and Ardent was a proper professional studio. Maverick producer Jim Dickinson oversaw a series of blistering sessions at Ardent involving bands like The Bitter Ind, The 1st Century and The Wallabies. Although these productions, in hindsight, are the equal of anything on Nuggets, many went unissued at the time because America wasn’t looking to Memphis for new developments in garage or psychedelia. A real pity, but we can certainly appreciate Dickinson’s ingenuity now. The Wallabies’ “White Doors” is a delicious marriage of Lewis Carroll and twisted Merseybeat. And on The Bitter Ind’s “Hands Are Only To See”, the producer creates a hallucinogenic soundworld by juxtaposing fuzz bass, ghostly harmonies (“Walls are lost when you think you’ve found them”) and an erratically plucked viola. With Dickinson gone by 1969, and the pop-minded Terry Manning installed as house producer, a change in approach is discernible in the latter half of the anthology’s first disc. Compiler Alec Palao’s informative sleevenotes paint a vivid account of young middle-class Memphis music-makers, still enchanted by The Beatles and The Yardbirds, aesthetically disengaging themselves from Memphis’s R&B and soul traditions in search of their own identity. Out of time, out of the cultural loop, this coterie of hip teenagers enjoyed free use of Ardent Studios, where John Fry encouraged Chris Bell and like-minded friends to experiment at their leisure on top-of-the-range recording equipment. Imagine Abbey Road throwing open its doors to unknown kids from north London. Thus began the evolution of Big Star. Long-lost or rare tracks by Christmas Future, The Badgers and Rock City – all featuring Chris Bell – show us how the quintessential Big Star style was carefully assembled, even before Alex Chilton returned to Memphis from his whirlwind spell with The Box Tops. Rock City’s “Lovely Lady” is (itals)almost(itals) the finished article: palpably influenced by Badfinger, it has that marvellous chunk-and-jangle sound that would grace #1 Record. The second disc of Thank You Friends… is dominated by Big Star. Illustrating how significant they were to Ardent’s push for national recognition in 1972–4, Big Star account for 15 of these 24 tracks, most of them demos or alternate mixes. “Mod Lang”, for example, was recorded at a late-night session directed by an audibly gin-soaked Chilton, during a time when Big Star had briefly split up. Later cleaned up for inclusion on Radio City, this version has Chilton adding “… Just like John Mitchell” after the line “I wanna witness, I want to testify”. The remark leaps out of the speakers. It’s bizarre to think of Big Star existing in the same time-frame as the former Attorney General’s Watergate grand jury testimony. Having started on a high note with Big Star’s early promise and a fantastic power-pop single by Cargoe (“Feel Alright”), disc two descends into abject disillusion with the collapse of Ardent’s distribution deal with Stax in 1975. The notorious Chilton/Dickinson sessions for Big Star’s third album, full of desolate thought patterns and unhinged arrangements, wrench us out of a Rickenbacker pop dream and lower us into a grim, pinprick-eyeballed abyss. The most haunting line of all, perhaps, in this ultimately sad story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities is left to Chris Bell. “Plans fail every day,” he sings in a cracked voice on his solo tune “You And Your Sister”. The bright, clean acoustic guitars of Big Star’s “Thirteen” have been bent out of shape by terrible luck. Meanwhile, as a recording facility, Ardent continues to have a worldwide reputation, and has attracted artists as diverse as Isaac Hayes, ZZ Top, Cat Power and The White Stripes. DAVID CAVANAGH UNCUT Q&A WITH: JOHN FRY (Founder, Ardent Records and Studios), TERRY MANNING, JIM DICKINSON AND JODY STEPHENS: FRY: “I started a studio in my parents’ house around 1959, recording 45s and trying to release them locally. Ardent Records is not a continuous thing, it’s been an off-and-on thing. If you look through the timeline, there are these hiatuses for several years.” TERRY MANNING(producer/musician): “John was still running the studio from his house when I came along. I was in a band called Bobby & The Originals, later called Lawson & Four More, later called The Goatdancers.” FRY: “In 1966 we rented a commercial building and put in a proper studio. The national profile of Memphis was always Elvis and Sun Studios; then there was a shift in the ’60s when Stax started to gain prominence with soul music. But we were Beatles fans and Anglophiles. We were out of step with Memphis.” MANNING: “The studio started doing well. We took on a lot of Stax’s business, and Hi Records’, and people would come up from New Orleans. Anything non-country, that was our domain.” FRY: “Jim Dickinson was introduced to me as a producer who could create a vibe, make things happen. Our idea was to find groups and make records which we would place with labels that could sell and promote them nationally.” JIM DICKINSON (producer/musician): “We were doing very un-Memphis-like music. I was trying to be Glyn Johns. He was the big name I kept reading in New Musical Express. About half the material I produced at Ardent was never released. That’s one of the problems with Memphis over the years – it’s hard to find the door out.” FRY: “Most of the bands we recorded were kids that Jim knew. The Wallabies had a guy who went around speaking in an Australian accent. I think he was from Mississippi.” MANNING: “Nobody was taking these deals, nobody was leasing our bands. We were isolated. We were obviously influenced by the British Invasion more than R&B. Finally we got a couple of bands – Cargoe and Big Star – and decided to start up Ardent Records again.” FRY: “Everything was optimistic. The studio was going great guns, we had property, we had plans, we had a new building under construction. Stax was offering us a distribution deal for Ardent Records.” JODY STEPHENS (drummer, Big Star): “Stax was like Mount Olympus. Musically in Memphis, Stax was the highest peak you could aspire to.” FRY: “Stax was primarily a soul label and people were not expecting products like #1 Record from them. I thought it was going to be great, but then Stax moved their distribution to Clive Davis at Columbia. The Columbia deal never worked for Ardent or Stax. It came into effect in 1973 and by ’75 Stax were bankrupt.” MANNING: “Stax were almost no help in the pop genre. Cargoe’s ‘Feel Alright’, we promoted in-house. It got into the Top 100, and we had a make-it-or-break-it week where we needed a certain number of radio adds to get a star or a bullet. Our last hope was a station in Waterloo, Iowa, and we were hitting them, calling them, ‘please add Cargoe in heavy rotation, we need this, we need this’. And they wouldn’t do it.” FRY: “Big Star got great press and some airplay, but they never got on Columbia’s radar. When Radio City came out, I went to a Columbia sales conference in Nashville and they had a presentation, where the new albums are projected on a screen and a song from them is played. Radio City came on the screen, and “September Gurls” kicked off. Everybody under twentysomething in the room cheered and hollered. The rest of them looked around and said: ‘Are we distributing this crap?’” JIM DICKINSON (producer, Sister Lovers): “I had known Chris Bell since he was a little kid and I found it hard to take Big Star seriously. East Memphis rich kids, y’know, I wasn’t interested. But Alex [Chilton] remembered me as someone who had shown interest in his musical vision.” FRY: “When we made Sister Lovers, there were dark clouds. We didn’t have anybody to distribute our records. I got really depressed and almost left the music business to go into aviation. And Alex was having a dark time, as is reflected in those songs.” DICKINSON: “Alex was resentful because he hadn’t made any money from Big Star, and he’d already been badly exploited with The Box Tops. The third Big Star album was a series of recordings that was never finished. We just kept on recording while Stax went out of business.” FRY: “I didn’t know what to make of it. Even songs that sounded happy and upbeat had a twist. Where’s he coming from? Is he sincere or is it sarcasm?” DICKINSON: “Fry made the mistake of telling Alex he liked the demo of ‘Downs’. Alex totally destroyed the song after that. We used a basketball for a snare drum. That’s because Fry said the demo sounded like The Kinks and he could imagine hearing it on the radio.” FRY: “The reason the album didn’t come out was, we went around literally every major company in the country and nobody would touch it.” DICKINSON: “I went to New York and LA and played it for people who now worship it. Jerry Wexler told me: ‘This music makes me feel very uncomfortable.’ Lenny Waronker said: ‘I don’t have to listen to it again, do I?’” MANNING: “The label was already over by the time of Chris Bell’s death [in 1978]. His death was the great tragedy of the whole thing.” FRY “We cranked Ardent up again in the ’90s and started releasing contemporary Christian music. During the ’60s and ’70s, I’d been one of the most dedicated pagans you could meet. I came to my faith at the end of 1978, after Chris died. Ardent is not a Christian company, and you don’t have to be one to work here, but we’ve probably issued more Christian music, now, than any other kind.” INTERVIEWS: DAVID CAVANAGH

Remember those days in 1991-2 when Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque was a ubiquitous hit and everyone paid homage to Alex Chilton and Big Star (pictured above)? I interviewed Chilton at Maxwell’s in Hoboken during that period. He probably wished he had a pound for every time the word “influential” came up in conversation. Battle-scarred, pale as chalk, he dismissed my Big Star eulogies as absurd. Chilton was a veteran of the British Invasion, a purist. In his world, music died in 1967. I looked into his eyes, his disappointed eyes, and he meant it.

A degree of hard-nosed Anglophilia, coupled with a bittersweet sense of what might have been, are the prevailing themes of Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story. A two-CD anthology of the small Memphis label that put out Big Star’s first two albums (#1 Record, 1972; Radio City, 1974), it’s a poignant tale to immerse oneself in, not least because a key protagonist, Big Star’s co-founder Chris Bell, was sent into a mortal depression by his band’s commercial failure and lost his life in a car-crash at the age of 27. It’s a story of valiant endeavour and broken hearts. As Ardent’s founder John Fry said to me recently: “So much optimism – and then, boy, downhill.”

Thank You Friends… celebrates three distinct eras of the Ardent label, which has released local Memphis product, on and off, for nearly 50 years. Our first glimpse of Ardent comes in 1961. It is run from Fry’s parents’ house, and is knocking out quirky, and completely obscure, tunes such as “Geraldine” by The Ole Miss Downbeats. A rugby club’s idea of a Bo Diddley rumble, with a heavily featured duck-call, “Geraldine” is like a cry from a lost civilisation.

By 1966, garage-rock was sweeping the States and Ardent was a proper professional studio. Maverick producer Jim Dickinson oversaw a series of blistering sessions at Ardent involving bands like The Bitter Ind, The 1st Century and The Wallabies. Although these productions, in hindsight, are the equal of anything on Nuggets, many went unissued at the time because America wasn’t looking to Memphis for new developments in garage or psychedelia. A real pity, but we can certainly appreciate Dickinson’s ingenuity now. The Wallabies’ “White Doors” is a delicious marriage of Lewis Carroll and twisted Merseybeat. And on The Bitter Ind’s “Hands Are Only To See”, the producer creates a hallucinogenic soundworld by juxtaposing fuzz bass, ghostly harmonies (“Walls are lost when you think you’ve found them”) and an erratically plucked viola.

With Dickinson gone by 1969, and the pop-minded Terry Manning installed as house producer, a change in approach is discernible in the latter half of the anthology’s first disc. Compiler Alec Palao’s informative sleevenotes paint a vivid account of young middle-class Memphis music-makers, still enchanted by The Beatles and The Yardbirds, aesthetically disengaging themselves from Memphis’s R&B and soul traditions in search of their own identity. Out of time, out of the cultural loop, this coterie of hip teenagers enjoyed free use of Ardent Studios, where John Fry encouraged Chris Bell and like-minded friends to experiment at their leisure on top-of-the-range recording equipment. Imagine Abbey Road throwing open its doors to unknown kids from north London.

Thus began the evolution of Big Star. Long-lost or rare tracks by Christmas Future, The Badgers and Rock City – all featuring Chris Bell – show us how the quintessential Big Star style was carefully assembled, even before Alex Chilton returned to Memphis from his whirlwind spell with The Box Tops. Rock City’s “Lovely Lady” is (itals)almost(itals) the finished article: palpably influenced by Badfinger, it has that marvellous chunk-and-jangle sound that would grace #1 Record.

The second disc of Thank You Friends… is dominated by Big Star. Illustrating how significant they were to Ardent’s push for national recognition in 1972–4, Big Star account for 15 of these 24 tracks, most of them demos or alternate mixes. “Mod Lang”, for example, was recorded at a late-night session directed by an audibly gin-soaked Chilton, during a time when Big Star had briefly split up. Later cleaned up for inclusion on Radio City, this version has Chilton adding “… Just like John Mitchell” after the line “I wanna witness, I want to testify”. The remark leaps out of the speakers. It’s bizarre to think of Big Star existing in the same time-frame as the former Attorney General’s Watergate grand jury testimony.

Having started on a high note with Big Star’s early promise and a fantastic power-pop single by Cargoe (“Feel Alright”), disc two descends into abject disillusion with the collapse of Ardent’s distribution deal with Stax in 1975. The notorious Chilton/Dickinson sessions for Big Star’s third album, full of desolate thought patterns and unhinged arrangements, wrench us out of a Rickenbacker pop dream and lower us into a grim, pinprick-eyeballed abyss. The most haunting line of all, perhaps, in this ultimately sad story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities is left to Chris Bell. “Plans fail every day,” he sings in a cracked voice on his solo tune “You And Your Sister”. The bright, clean acoustic guitars of Big Star’s “Thirteen” have been bent out of shape by terrible luck.

Meanwhile, as a recording facility, Ardent continues to have a worldwide reputation, and has attracted artists as diverse as Isaac Hayes, ZZ Top, Cat Power and The White Stripes.

DAVID CAVANAGH

UNCUT Q&A WITH: JOHN FRY (Founder, Ardent Records and Studios), TERRY MANNING, JIM DICKINSON AND JODY STEPHENS:

FRY: “I started a studio in my parents’ house around 1959, recording 45s and trying to release them locally. Ardent Records is not a continuous thing, it’s been an off-and-on thing. If you look through the timeline, there are these hiatuses for several years.”

TERRY MANNING(producer/musician): “John was still running the studio from his house when I came along. I was in a band called Bobby & The Originals, later called Lawson & Four More, later called The Goatdancers.”

FRY: “In 1966 we rented a commercial building and put in a proper studio. The national profile of Memphis was always Elvis and Sun Studios; then there was a shift in the ’60s when Stax started to gain prominence with soul music. But we were Beatles fans and Anglophiles. We were out of step with Memphis.”

MANNING: “The studio started doing well. We took on a lot of Stax’s business, and Hi Records’, and people would come up from New Orleans. Anything non-country, that was our domain.”

FRY: “Jim Dickinson was introduced to me as a producer who could create a vibe, make things happen. Our idea was to find groups and make records which we would place with labels that could sell and promote them nationally.”

JIM DICKINSON (producer/musician): “We were doing very un-Memphis-like music. I was trying to be Glyn Johns. He was the big name I kept reading in New Musical Express. About half the material I produced at Ardent was never released. That’s one of the problems with Memphis over the years – it’s hard to find the door out.”

FRY: “Most of the bands we recorded were kids that Jim knew. The Wallabies had a guy who went around speaking in an Australian accent. I think he was from Mississippi.”

MANNING: “Nobody was taking these deals, nobody was leasing our bands. We were isolated. We were obviously influenced by the British Invasion more than R&B. Finally we got a couple of bands – Cargoe and Big Star – and decided to start up Ardent Records again.”

FRY: “Everything was optimistic. The studio was going great guns, we had property, we had plans, we had a new building under construction. Stax was offering us a distribution deal for Ardent Records.”

JODY STEPHENS (drummer, Big Star): “Stax was like Mount Olympus. Musically in Memphis, Stax was the highest peak you could aspire to.”

FRY: “Stax was primarily a soul label and people were not expecting products like #1 Record from them. I thought it was going to be great, but then Stax moved their distribution to Clive Davis at Columbia. The Columbia deal never worked for Ardent or Stax. It came into effect in 1973 and by ’75 Stax were bankrupt.”

MANNING: “Stax were almost no help in the pop genre. Cargoe’s ‘Feel Alright’, we promoted in-house. It got into the Top 100, and we had a make-it-or-break-it week where we needed a certain number of radio adds to get a star or a bullet. Our last hope was a station in Waterloo, Iowa, and we were hitting them, calling them, ‘please add Cargoe in heavy rotation, we need this, we need this’. And they wouldn’t do it.”

FRY: “Big Star got great press and some airplay, but they never got on Columbia’s radar. When Radio City came out, I went to a Columbia sales conference in Nashville and they had a presentation, where the new albums are projected on a screen and a song from them is played. Radio City came on the screen, and “September Gurls” kicked off. Everybody under twentysomething in the room cheered and hollered. The rest of them looked around and said: ‘Are we distributing this crap?’”

JIM DICKINSON (producer, Sister Lovers): “I had known Chris Bell since he was a little kid and I found it hard to take Big Star seriously. East Memphis rich kids, y’know, I wasn’t interested. But Alex [Chilton] remembered me as someone who had shown interest in his musical vision.”

FRY: “When we made Sister Lovers, there were dark clouds. We didn’t have anybody to distribute our records. I got really depressed and almost left the music business to go into aviation. And Alex was having a dark time, as is reflected in those songs.”

DICKINSON: “Alex was resentful because he hadn’t made any money from Big Star, and he’d already been badly exploited with The Box Tops. The third Big Star album was a series of recordings that was never finished. We just kept on recording while Stax went out of business.”

FRY: “I didn’t know what to make of it. Even songs that sounded happy and upbeat had a twist. Where’s he coming from? Is he sincere or is it sarcasm?”

DICKINSON: “Fry made the mistake of telling Alex he liked the demo of ‘Downs’. Alex totally destroyed the song after that. We used a basketball for a snare drum. That’s because Fry said the demo sounded like The Kinks and he could imagine hearing it on the radio.”

FRY: “The reason the album didn’t come out was, we went around literally every major company in the country and nobody would touch it.”

DICKINSON: “I went to New York and LA and played it for people who now worship it. Jerry Wexler told me: ‘This music makes me feel very uncomfortable.’ Lenny Waronker said: ‘I don’t have to listen to it again, do I?’”

MANNING: “The label was already over by the time of Chris Bell’s death [in 1978]. His death was the great tragedy of the whole thing.”

FRY “We cranked Ardent up again in the ’90s and started releasing contemporary Christian music. During the ’60s and ’70s, I’d been one of the most dedicated pagans you could meet. I came to my faith at the end of 1978, after Chris died. Ardent is not a Christian company, and you don’t have to be one to work here, but we’ve probably issued more Christian music, now, than any other kind.”

INTERVIEWS: DAVID CAVANAGH

Radiohead Invite Fans To Remix New Single

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Radiohead Invite Fans To Remix New Single
Radiohead are giving fans a chance to remix their new single, “Nude”, released this week (March 31). Using specially released component tracks, or “stems”, fans can add their own instrumentation and effects, and upload their version to the Radiohead Remix website. The stems- vocals, guitar...

Radiohead are giving fans a chance to remix their new single, “Nude”, released this week (March 31).

Using specially released component tracks, or “stems”, fans can add their own instrumentation and effects, and upload their version to the Radiohead Remix website.

The stems- vocals, guitar, bass, drums and strings- are available to buy as individual downloads on iTunes, which can be downloaded and edited with a number of programmes including garageband, iTunes Plus and Logic.

Public votes for the final mixes will determine the winner. Voting closes on May 1.

Pic credit: PA Photos

The 14th Uncut Playlist Of 2008

John Mulvey
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One of those professional obligation sessions in the Uncut office right now: we’re on Track Eight of the Panic At The Disco album, “Pretty. Odd”. Interest piqued by some frothing and slightly dubious suggestions that “Pretty. Odd” is a landmark of WEIRD! and AMBITIOUS! rock music, imagine our surprise when it seems to sound a bit like The Feeling and those shabby Beatles pastiches that Tears For Fears came up with in the ‘80s. We do, however, have new records by Paul Weller, Peter Walker and James Blackshaw. Weller’s “22 Dreams” is interesting because it seems he’s finally stopped talking about various jazz musicians and started trying to incorporate their influences in his music. Hence “Song For Alice”, a creditable and commendably transparent stab at Alice Coltrane. I’m really not qualified to talk about this, but to an unbeliever like me, it’s nice to see Weller having a go at something a bit weirder – weirder even than Panic At The Disco, if you can countenance such a thing. The Blackshaw album is a new solo record and, as an obsessive fan, I think it might be the best thing he’s ever done. But I’ll deal with that properly in a few days. Oh, and after the blog on Sun Kil Moon yesterday, Mark Kozelek got in touch to say he’s publishing a book of his lyrics, which sounds good. Anyway, today’s playlist. As your comments suggest, the Raconteurs album gets better and better, I think. . . 1. The Raconteurs – Consolers Of The Lonely (XL) 2. Joan As Police Woman – To Survive (Reveal) 3. James Blackshaw – Litany Of Echoes (Tompkins Square) 4. Sun Kil Moon – April (Caldo Verde) 5. Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant (Bella Union) 6. White Denim – Let’s Talk About It (Full Time Hobby) 7. Paul Weller – 22 Dreams (Island) 8. Mellow Candle – Swaddling Songs (Esoteric) 9. Animal Collective – Water Curses (Domino) 10. John Fahey – John Fahey Visits Washington (Ace) 11. Various Artists – Nigeria Rock Special: Pyschedelic Afro-Rock And Fuzz Funk In 1970s Nigeria (Soundway) 12. Peter Walker – Echo Of My Soul (Tompkins Square) 13. Panic At The Disco – Pretty. Odd (Decaydance/ Fuelled By Ramen)

One of those professional obligation sessions in the Uncut office right now: we’re on Track Eight of the Panic At The Disco album, “Pretty. Odd”. Interest piqued by some frothing and slightly dubious suggestions that “Pretty. Odd” is a landmark of WEIRD! and AMBITIOUS! rock music, imagine our surprise when it seems to sound a bit like The Feeling and those shabby Beatles pastiches that Tears For Fears came up with in the ‘80s. We do, however, have new records by Paul Weller, Peter Walker and James Blackshaw.

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The Courteeners – St Jude

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The Courteeners – St Jude

An over-hyped Manchester guitar band with a gobby singer called Liam? Something tells me we’ve been here before. However, St Jude proves that there is much more to The Courteeners than first meets to the eye. “Bide Your Time” is a clinical dissection of modern mores along the lines of The Arctic Monkeys’ “A Certain Romance” while “Not Nineteen Forever” shares the same tuneful self-awareness which made The Kaiser Chiefs into a stadium concern. “I’m like a Morrissey with some strings” sings Liam Fray, tongue firmly in cheek, in “What Took You So Long?’. Whatever, he’s one to watch. PAUL MOODY

An over-hyped Manchester guitar band with a gobby singer called Liam? Something tells me we’ve been here before. However, St Jude proves that there is much more to The Courteeners than first meets to the eye. “Bide Your Time” is a clinical dissection of modern mores along the lines of The Arctic Monkeys’ “A Certain Romance” while “Not Nineteen Forever” shares the same tuneful self-awareness which made The Kaiser Chiefs into a stadium concern. “I’m like a Morrissey with some strings” sings Liam Fray, tongue firmly in cheek, in “What Took You So Long?’. Whatever, he’s one to watch.

PAUL MOODY

Echo and the Bunnymen To Play 30th Birthday Show

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Echo and the Bunnymen To Play 30th Birthday Show
Echo & The Bunnymen have just announced they are to play a special 30th Anniversary show with in Liverpool this November. Playing with a full orchestra, the Bunnymen will reprise the entire of their Ocean Rain album as well as showcasing songs from their forthcoming new album. The show takes p...

Echo & The Bunnymen have just announced they are to play a special 30th Anniversary show with in Liverpool this November.

Playing with a full orchestra, the Bunnymen will reprise the entire of their Ocean Rain album as well as showcasing songs from their forthcoming new album.

The show takes place in their hometown at Liverpool’s Echo Arena on November 27, marking 30 years to the day from when they played their debut gig at the city’s Erics venue.

Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch explains “Because of the overwhelming response to our Royal Albert Hall ‘Ocean Rain’ show in September – which sold out – I decided that we should take it around the world – New York, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Moscow amongst other cities. Obviously, my home city, the place I love and live in had to be there.”

Tickets will go on sale this Friday (April 4) at 9am.

Leonard Cohen To Replace Hasselhoff On America’s Got Talent

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Leonard Cohen To Replace Hasselhoff On America’s Got Talent
Leonard Cohen is set to replace David Hasselhoff as the new judge on the third season of NBC's talent show, America's Got Talent. Cohen will join Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan as judges of the US version of the "Opportunity Knocks" style show. Hasselhoff was unable to return for a third series ...

Leonard Cohen is set to replace David Hasselhoff as the new judge on the third season of NBC’s talent show, America’s Got Talent.

Cohen will join Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan as judges of the US version of the “Opportunity Knocks” style show.

Hasselhoff was unable to return for a third series due to ongoing health problems.

A source close to the singer said Cohen was hoping to bring “gravitas and sense of perspective” back to light entertainment.

The Grammy winner and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, best known for his hits “Chelsea Hotel” and “Avalanche”, is due to start his world tour on June 6.

For a full list of Leonard Cohen’s world tour dates click here.

Pic credit: PA Photos

Creedence Clearwater’s John Fogerty To Play UK Shows

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Creedence Clearwater’s John Fogerty To Play UK Shows
John Fogerty has announced that he will play two shows in the UK this June. The former Creedence Clearwater Revival singer will play at Manchester's Apollo venue on June 22 and London's Royal Albert Hall on June 24. Fogerty's show in London marks 38 years since he last appeared at the Royal Albert...

John Fogerty has announced that he will play two shows in the UK this June.

The former Creedence Clearwater Revival singer will play at Manchester’s Apollo venue on June 22 and London’s Royal Albert Hall on June 24.

Fogerty’s show in London marks 38 years since he last appeared at the Royal Albert Hall. He previously performed there in April 1970.

With his return to the venue, Fogerty will celebrate last year’s studio album release Revival with his show’s repertoire featuring his solo and CCR hits.

Neil Young To Release More From His Archives?

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Neil Young To Release More From His Archives?
Neil Young has today (April 1) posted news on his website NY Times that he is to release a new Crazy Horse album from his archive called 'Toast'. The previously unreleased album is named after a defunct recording studio in San Francisco and the posting claims that 'Toast' is "a dark Crazy Horse cla...

Neil Young has today (April 1) posted news on his website NY Times that he is to release a new Crazy Horse album from his archive called ‘Toast’.

The previously unreleased album is named after a defunct recording studio in San Francisco and the posting claims that ‘Toast’ is “a dark Crazy Horse classic for the ages. This first NYA “Special Edition” is the beginning of a new series of unreleased albums”.

Maybe we are being paranoid about the date, but as far as April Fools Day jokes go, this seems fairly plausible.

The article mentions that John Hanlon, “the original co-producer with Neil, is at work mixing all of the Toast material”. A quick google search

to recordproduction.com on the internet does seem to corroborate that Hanlon is indeed “is currently producing Neil Young’s next album”.

Young’s article explains that “The band recorded there for months and came up with very little. Nothing, other than one song, “Goin’ Home” was ever finished. But a lot was started. Several of the songs written at Toast showed up on the “Are You Passionate” album with Booker T. and the MGs. But that album met with mixed reaction”.

He goes on to say that the tracks that are being worked on now “share a bluesy, jazz-tinged vibe as a common thread. Three solid rockers are interspersed in the mix. Other songs are long with extensive explorations between verses, a Crazy Horse trademark, kind of like a down-played Tonight’s the Night, except these songs deal directly with love and loss, not drugs.”

Read the full NY Times news posting here.

Stay tuned to www.uncut.co.uk for further details of a release date for ‘Toast’, if any!

Hard-Fi Latest Confirmed To Play Love Music Hate Racism

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Hard-Fi Latest Confirmed To Play Love Music Hate Racism

Staines rockers, Hard-Fi have been announced as the latest addition to the free Love Music Hate Racism carnival at Victoria Park on April 27. Organised to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the original Rock Against Racism, the event will have performances from some of the original line-up including Poly Styrene, lead singer with the early punk-pioneers, X-Ray Spex, Jerry Dammers of The Specials. “It’s hard to believe its actually happening in your neighbourhood. I think people sometimes try to just brush aside racism and hope it will go away,” said Hard-Fi front man, Richard Archer. “You need to get your voice heard.” Other artists confirmed include original reggae punk, Don Letts, Patrick Wolf, Roll Deep, Jay Sean and The Paddingtons. Love Music Hate Racism was set up in 2002 in response to rising levels of racism and electoral successes for the British National Party (BNP). It runs the tradition of the Rock Against Racism gigs, which were organised with the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in 1978. For more information see www.lovemusichateracism.com

Staines rockers, Hard-Fi have been announced as the latest addition to the free Love Music Hate Racism carnival at Victoria Park on April 27.

Organised to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the original Rock Against Racism, the event will have performances from some of the original line-up including Poly Styrene, lead singer with the early punk-pioneers, X-Ray Spex, Jerry Dammers of The Specials.

“It’s hard to believe its actually happening in your neighbourhood. I think people sometimes try to just brush aside racism and hope it will go away,” said Hard-Fi front man, Richard Archer. “You need to get your voice heard.”

Other artists confirmed include original reggae punk, Don Letts, Patrick Wolf, Roll Deep, Jay Sean and The Paddingtons.

Love Music Hate Racism was set up in 2002 in response to rising levels of racism and electoral successes for the British National Party (BNP). It runs the tradition of the Rock Against Racism gigs, which were organised with the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in 1978.

For more information see www.lovemusichateracism.com

Paul Weller Collaborates With Noel Gallagher On New Album

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Paul Weller Collaborates With Noel Gallagher On New Album
Paul Weller has confirmed that the first single to be released from his forthcoming double album 22 Dreams will be a collaboration with Oasis’ Noel Gallagher and Gem Archer. “Echoes Round the Sun” will be released as a double A-side with “Have You Made Up Your Mind” on May 26. “In song...

Paul Weller has confirmed that the first single to be released from his forthcoming double album 22 Dreams will be a collaboration with Oasis’ Noel Gallagher and Gem Archer.

“Echoes Round the Sun” will be released as a double A-side with “Have You Made Up Your Mind” on May 26.

“In songwriting terms, it’s the first Weller/Gallagher collaboration,” said Weller. “Noel came down to the studio with this loop he’d never been able to do anything with. He played the bass and the piano and then Gem played guitar on top. It’s a top tune.”

The double album, due for release on June 2, was recorded over the course of a year at Weller’s own Black Barn Studios.

Other collaborations on the album include the opening track, “Light Nights” with folk guitarist, John McCusker,, Little Barrie, on “22 Dreams” and Graham Coxon, on “Black River”, which was originally the B-side to their previous collaboration, “This Old Town” released last year.

The album also features a spoken word track featuring ex-Stone Roses guitarist, Aziz Ibrahim.

“I had the lyrics in an old notebook. I’d written them seven or eight years ago. Then Aziz came down to the studio and we just did it. The fact that he’s Muslim obviously gives it another dimension.”

The full tracklisting for 22 Dreams is:

Disc One:

Light Nights

22 Dreams

All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)

Have You Made Up Your Mind

Empty Ring

Invisible

Song For Alice

Cold Moments

The Dark Pages of September Lead to the New Leaves of Spring

Black River

Why Walk When You Can Run

Disc Two:

Push it Along

A Dream Reprise

Echoes Round the Sun

One Bright Star

Lullaby Für Kinder

Where’er Ye Go

God

111

Sea Spray

Night Lights

Metallica To Headline Reading and Leeds Festivals 2008!

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Metallica To Headline Reading and Leeds Festivals 2008!

Metal legends Metallica and Rage Against The Machine have both now been confirmed as the headliners joining previously announced The Killers for this August's Reading and Leeds Festivals. The festivals take place over August Bank Holiday weekend (August 22-24) and Metallica will headline Reading on the Sunday and Leeds on the Friday. Rage Against The Machine will headline the Main Stage on the Friday (August 22) at Reading, playing at Leeds on the Saturday (August 23). As reported earlier, The Killers will play Reading on the Saturday, close the Leeds festival on the Sunday (August 24). Babyshambles, NME's Godlike Genius Award Winners Manic Street Preachers and The Cribs will all play headline slots on the NME/Radio 1 Stage this year. Other artists so far confirmed for Reading and Leeds include Queens Of The Stone Age, The Enemy, The Raconteurs, Editors and Slipknot. See below for the full line-up confirmed for Reading and Leeds, more acts are to be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets are available over at nme.com/gigs. Reading: Friday August 22, Leeds: Saturday August 23 Main Stage Rage Against The Machine Queens Of The Stone Age The Fratellis The Enemy Biffy Clyro Serj Tankian Dizzee Rascal Taking Back Sunday Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly Anti-Flag NME/Radio 1 Stage Babyshambles The Wombats Vampire Weekend MGMT Reading: Saturday August 23, Leeds: Sunday August 24 Main Stage The Killers Bloc Party The Raconteurs Editors We Are Scientists Dirty Pretty Things The Subways NME/Radio 1 Stage Manic Street Preachers Bullet For My Valentine Justice Foals Reading: Sunday August 24, Leeds: Friday August 23 Main Stage Metallica Tenacious D Slipknot Feeder Avenged Sevenfold Dropkick Murphys NME/Radio 1 Stage The Cribs Conor Oberst Pendulum

Metal legends Metallica and Rage Against The Machine have both now been confirmed as the headliners joining previously announced The Killers for this August’s Reading and Leeds Festivals.

The festivals take place over August Bank Holiday weekend (August 22-24) and Metallica will headline Reading on the Sunday and Leeds on the Friday.

Rage Against The Machine will headline the Main Stage on the Friday (August 22) at Reading, playing at Leeds on the Saturday (August 23).

As reported earlier, The Killers will play Reading on the Saturday, close the Leeds festival on the Sunday (August 24).

Babyshambles, NME’s Godlike Genius Award Winners Manic Street Preachers and The Cribs will all play headline slots on the NME/Radio 1 Stage this year.

Other artists so far confirmed for Reading and Leeds include Queens Of The Stone Age, The Enemy, The Raconteurs, Editors and Slipknot.

See below for the full line-up confirmed for Reading and Leeds, more acts are to be announced in the coming weeks.

Tickets are available over at nme.com/gigs.

Reading: Friday August 22, Leeds: Saturday August 23

Main Stage

Rage Against The Machine

Queens Of The Stone Age

The Fratellis

The Enemy

Biffy Clyro

Serj Tankian

Dizzee Rascal

Taking Back Sunday

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly

Anti-Flag

NME/Radio 1 Stage

Babyshambles

The Wombats

Vampire Weekend

MGMT

Reading: Saturday August 23, Leeds: Sunday August 24

Main Stage

The Killers

Bloc Party

The Raconteurs

Editors

We Are Scientists

Dirty Pretty Things

The Subways

NME/Radio 1 Stage

Manic Street Preachers

Bullet For My Valentine

Justice

Foals

Reading: Sunday August 24, Leeds: Friday August 23

Main Stage

Metallica

Tenacious D

Slipknot

Feeder

Avenged Sevenfold

Dropkick Murphys

NME/Radio 1 Stage

The Cribs

Conor Oberst

Pendulum

Babyshambles Confirmed For Reading and Leeds Festivals

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Babyshambles Confirmed For Reading and Leeds Festivals
Babyshambles have been revealed as this year's NME/Radio 1 Stage headliners at this year's Reading and Leeds Festivals. The Wombats have also been confirmed to play the same stage, and join previously announced headliners The Killers at the two site rock festival. Babyshambles will headline the NM...

Babyshambles have been revealed as this year’s NME/Radio 1 Stage headliners at this year’s Reading and Leeds Festivals.

The Wombats have also been confirmed to play the same stage, and join previously announced headliners The Killers at the two site rock festival.

Babyshambles will headline the NME/Radio 1 Stage on Friday (August 22) in Reading and Saturday (August 23) in Leeds.

Tickets for festival which takes place August 22-24 will go onsale today at 7.30pm (GMT).

See nme.com/gigs for more details.

The Stranglers To Appear At Liverpool Pops Festival

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The Stranglers To Appear At Liverpool Pops Festival
The Stranglers have been confirmed as one of the headline acts for this year's Liverpool Summer Pops festival, with the new wavers set to perform on July 22. The band's JJ Burnell said: “As a band we may have seen many changes in our career over the years but we can guarantee you, there’s plen...

The Stranglers have been confirmed as one of the headline acts for this year’s Liverpool Summer Pops festival, with the new wavers set to perform on July 22.

The band’s JJ Burnell said: “As a band we may have seen many changes in our career over the years but we can guarantee you, there’s plenty more yearsinblack!”

Blondie have also been announced as support to The Stranglers and frontwoman Debbie Harry is looking forward to performing, saying: “Liverpool is a great city, we can’t wait to be back.”

As perviously reported, the Summer Pops festival will also feature American rock band Counting Crows, whose fifth album Saturday Nights, Sunday Mornings has just charted at 12 in the UK album chart — their highest position in twelve years, Def Leppard and Diana Ross.

Tickets for The Stranglers and Blondie go on sale this Wednesday (April 2) at 9am.

All other Summer Pops shows are on sale now. Details of artists confirmed so far are below.

Mick Hucknall (July 1)

The Australian Pink Floyd Show (July 4)

Counting Crows (8)

Crowded House (9)

Deacon Blue (11)

Diana Ross (12)

Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Thunder (15)

Michael Bublé (20)

The Stranglers, Blondie (22)

The Australian Pink Floyd Show (26)

Tickets and more line-up info is available by clicking here for www.accliverpool.com

Pete Townshend Guests On New Martha Wainwright Album

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Pete Townshend Guests On New Martha Wainwright Album
Martha Wainwright's new studio album I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too features a host of guest singers and musicians including The Who's Pete Townshend and The Band's Garth Hudson. The album, Wainwright's follow-up to her 2005 self-titled debut also features Steely Dan's Donald F...

Martha Wainwright‘s new studio album I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too features a host of guest singers and musicians including The Who‘s Pete Townshend and The Band‘s Garth Hudson.

The album, Wainwright’s follow-up to her 2005 self-titled debut also features Steely Dan‘s Donald Fagen on the track “So Many Friends” as well as help from her musical family.

Brother Rufus helps on “In The Middle Of The Night”, mum Kate McGarrigle, aunt Anna McGarrigle and cousin Lily Lanken all feature on Wainwright’s cover of Pink Floyd‘s “See Emily Play.”

Wainwright says of the new album: “The title sums up my dark humour. Plus it’s an homage to a few good men and women that I’ve loved at one time or another. After all, these people never go away. You end up loving them for life.”

Martha Wainwright is set to play some shows in the UK in May, backed by her full band. Catch them at:

London Royal Festival Hall (May 19)

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (23)

Birmingham Symphony Hall (24)

Manchester Bridgewater Hall (25)

marthawainwright.com

myspace.com/marthawainwright

Chuck Berry To Be Played By Mos Def In New Film

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Chuck Berry To Be Played By Mos Def In New Film

Rapper Mos Def (pictured above) is set to play rock'n'roll legend Chuck Berry in forthcoming new movie 'Cadillac Records' based on the true story of 50s and 60s blues label Chess Records. Mos Def has been added to the cast which will also see former Destiny's Child Beyonce Knowles playing Etta James and Adrian Brody starring as blues/R&B record exec Leonard Chess in the Darnell Martin-directed biopic. The film is based on a true story of Chess Records, a Chicago based record label which was home to blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Mos Def has most recently appeared in Michael Gondry's Be Kind Rewind whilst Beyonce previously starred in Dreamgirls, the film inspired by The Supremes. Meanwhile, Chuck Berry is set to appear at this year's Bestival music festival at Lulworth castle in Dorset on July 18. More details from www.campbestival.net

Rapper Mos Def (pictured above) is set to play rock’n’roll legend Chuck Berry in forthcoming new movie ‘Cadillac Records’ based on the true story of 50s and 60s blues label Chess Records.

Mos Def has been added to the cast which will also see former Destiny’s Child Beyonce Knowles playing Etta James and Adrian Brody starring as blues/R&B record exec Leonard Chess in the Darnell Martin-directed biopic.

The film is based on a true story of Chess Records, a Chicago based record label which was home to blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

Mos Def has most recently appeared in Michael Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind whilst Beyonce previously starred in Dreamgirls, the film inspired by The Supremes.

Meanwhile, Chuck Berry is set to appear at this year’s Bestival music festival at Lulworth castle in Dorset on July 18. More details from www.campbestival.net

Sun Kil Moon: “April”

John Mulvey
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Someone from a site called Splicetoday spammed one of my old REM blogs last week, posting a link to an interesting compare-and-contrast piece on both “Accelerate” and Mark Kozelek’s new Sun Kil Moon album, “April”. It reminded me, amongst other things, that I’d been sleeping on the Sun Kil Moon record; that maybe the embracing familiarity of Kozelek’s latest doleful epic had made me take it for granted. Or maybe it was just that I’d been listening to it on one of those moody secure streams, and today a CD arrived. An obsession with Kozelek and his first band, Red House Painters, frequently got me into trouble at NME in the early ‘90s, when it was perceived (probably accurately) that I’d much rather be filling the mag with whingeing sadcore Americans rather than the bright and ambitious young tyros of Britpop. I remember spending an entire flight back from San Francisco listening to early mixes of songs that ended up on the two self-titled albums from 1993, after visiting Kozelek in the studio at the end of my first visit to the States. He’s always had a difficult reputation, but I always seemed to get on OK with him; apart, maybe, from the interview when I asked him too many tricky questions about the ex-girlfriends who filled his songs (chiefly Katy) and he slowly retreated until he was almost entirely under the duvet and I was hovering at the end of the bed with a microphone. But I digress, possibly because much of “April” is so preciously similar to that early phase of Kozelek’s work. “April” is ostensibly the follow-up to 2005’s “Tiny Cities”, an album of Modest Mouse songs which proved, yet again, that Kozelek could take any song and make it sound like one of his own; morose, unravelling, slow beyond the endurance of most listeners. With “Tiny Cities”, mind, unlike his past adventures with the AC/DC catalogue, for instance, it was hard to see the point. “April” proves that Kozelek’s own songs are much better – though, in truth, it’s hard to remember individual songs here. More than ever, the whole album rolls on with that inexorable, weary, stubborn momentum which Kozelek minted right at the start of his career. I used the word “unravelling” in the last para, but it strikes me as inaccurate, actually. Kozelek’s songs often go on for a long time, but there isn’t often any great dynamic shifts or epiphanies. Sun Kil Moon songs demand immersion, the better to detect tiny shifts of gear, to become hypnotised by Kozelek’s melancholy incantations. That said, the opening “Lost Verses” works through maybe ten minutes of delicate acoustic scene-setting, before a brief rock coda, the closest here to a dramatic event. It’s a neat opener, showcasing both the febrile prettiness of Kozelek’s balladry (“Lucky Man” is especially gorgeous here, with a touch of Nick Drake and maybe some of Red House Painters circa “Ocean Beach”) and that chundering Crazy Horse plod which came to the fore on the brilliant first Sun Kil Moon album, “Ghosts Of The Great Highway”. “April” isn’t quite as good as that record, and I could’ve done with a bit more of the Neil-ish jams that makes the likes of “Tonight The Sky” (home to an extraordinarily staticky solo that sounds like a serene hailstorm) so compelling. There’s a sense on this album, though, that Kozelek, if not exactly becoming a scenester, is finally making some judicious connections. Will Oldham is a ghostly presence on backing vocals here, coming into focus on the lovely “Like The River”. Oldham’s perpetual quest for reinvention, for new collaborators and challenges, is a striking contrast to Kozelek’s meticulous ploughing of the one unending furrow. Part of me wishes that the latter would be a little more adventurous, inch tentatively out of his comfort zone. But as I type, “Tonight In Bibao” is playing, and Kozelek’s resolution, his constancy, that almost sepulchral stillness, seems oddly noble.

Someone from a site called Splicetoday spammed one of my old REM blogs last week, posting a link to an interesting compare-and-contrast piece on both “Accelerate” and Mark Kozelek’s new Sun Kil Moon album, “April”. It reminded me, amongst other things, that I’d been sleeping on the Sun Kil Moon record; that maybe the embracing familiarity of Kozelek’s latest doleful epic had made me take it for granted. Or maybe it was just that I’d been listening to it on one of those moody secure streams, and today a CD arrived.

Continue

Patti Smith Does Dylan’s Boathouse

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Patti Smith Does Dylan’s Boathouse

Punk legend, Patti Smith will give a poetry reading at Dylan Thomas’ boathouse today (March 31) to an audience of just 20 people as part of the Laugharne literary weekend. The intimate set is her second performance at the festival following her full set of poetry and music at the 200-capacity village hall last night (March 30). Tickets for the gig sold out in minutes when they were put on sale in February. The gig was the highlight of a line-up that included author and journalist, Will Self, former drug baron, Howard Marks, comedian Keith Allen, music from ex-Gorky’s guitarist Richard James and a duet with Patrick Wolf and Ed Larrikin of Larrikin Love. The Smiths guitarist, Mike Joyce held a question and answer session with a small audience after showing the new documentary “Inside the Smiths”. The performance will close the annual festival held in the home of the famous welsh playwright. For more information see the Laugharne weekend website.

Punk legend, Patti Smith will give a poetry reading at Dylan Thomas’ boathouse today (March 31) to an audience of just 20 people as part of the Laugharne literary weekend.

The intimate set is her second performance at the festival following her full set of poetry and music at the 200-capacity village hall last night (March 30). Tickets for the gig sold out in minutes when they were put on sale in February.

The gig was the highlight of a line-up that included author and journalist, Will Self, former drug baron, Howard Marks, comedian Keith Allen, music from ex-Gorky’s guitarist Richard James and a duet with Patrick Wolf and Ed Larrikin of Larrikin Love.

The Smiths guitarist, Mike Joyce held a question and answer session with a small audience after showing the new documentary “Inside the Smiths”.

The performance will close the annual festival held in the home of the famous welsh playwright.

For more information see the Laugharne weekend website.

Keith Richards Slams UK Smoking Ban

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Keith Richards Slams UK Smoking Ban
The Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Keith Richards, has attacked the UK smoking ban in an interview with The Sun newspaper today. “It’s a drag because you’ve got to freeze your balls off to light a cigarette, you’ve got to go outside. It’s draconian – socially, politically-correct bullshit...

The Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Keith Richards, has attacked the UK smoking ban in an interview with The Sun newspaper today.

“It’s a drag because you’ve got to freeze your balls off to light a cigarette, you’ve got to go outside. It’s draconian – socially, politically-correct bullshit. That’s what it is. They’ll get over it”.

It’s the second time that Richard’s has clashed with the ban after smoking on stage last August at the O2 arena.

“It’s like prohibition, they tried to stop booze once. Ha, look what happened. It ruined America.”

He also revealed that he still regularly smokes hash and cannabis calling it “my benign weed”. He added; “I smoke my head off. I smoke weed all the damn time. There, you’ve got it.”

For the full interview see The Sun’s website here.

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