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Hear Bob Mould’s new track, “Here We Go Crazy”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Bob Mould’s new track, “Here We Go Crazy”

Bob Mould has announced of a new studio album, Here We Go Crazy, which is released on March 7 via Granary Music/BMG Records.

Bob Mould has announced of a new studio album, Here We Go Crazy, which is released on March 7 via Granary Music/BMG Records.

You can hear the title track below.

THE FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING THE BAND, THE YARDBIRDS, SHARON VAN ETTEN, KEITH RICHARDS, THE VERVE, ASWAD AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

“I’ve been spending time in the Southern California desert over the past few years, and the video was shot there. Chilly wilderness atop a mountain, expansive vistas below the hills, distant places to escape life’s routines,” Mould says of the video. “’Going crazy’ can be many different things. The joy of reckless abandon, the uncertainty of the world’s future, the silence of solitude.”

Here We Go Crazy is Mould’s 15th solo album and features drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy. “On the surface, this is a group of straightforward guitar pop songs. I’m refining my primary sound and style through simplicity, brevity, and clarity,” Mould says. “Under the hood, there’s a number of contrasting themes. Control and chaos, hypervigilance and helplessness, uncertainly and unconditional love.”

The tracklisting for the album is:

Here We Go Crazy
Neanderthal
Breathing Room
Hard To Get
When Your Heart Is Broken
Fur Mink Augurs
Lost Or Stolen
Sharp Little Pieces
You Need To Shine
Thread So Thin
Your Side

Click here to pre-order Here We Go Crazy.

Mould will also head out on an American tour to support the album:

Apr 1st | San Diego, CA – Music Box*
Apr 2nd | Pioneertown, CA – Pappy & Harriet’s*
Apr 4th | Los Angeles, CA – Teragram Ballroom*
Apr 5th | San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore*
Apr 7th | Seattle, WA – Neptune Theatre*
Apr 8th | Portland, OR – Wonder Ballroom*
Apr 9th | Boise, ID – Knitting Factory*
Apr 11th | Denver, CO – Marquis Theater*
Apr 12th | Fort Collins, CO – Washington’s*
Apr 14th | Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room*
Apr 15th | Maquoketa, IA – Codfish Hollow Barn*
Apr 16th | Madison WI – Majestic Theatre*
Apr 18th | Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall*
Apr 19th | St. Paul, MN – Palace Theatre
Apr 25th | Chicago, IL – Metro
Apr 26th | Chicago, IL – Metro
Apr 27th | Detroit, MI – El Club
Apr 29th | Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop
Apr 30th | Pittsburgh, PA – Mr. Smalls Theatre
May 2nd | Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
May 3rd | New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge
May 4th | Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
May 7th | Washington DC – Black Cat
May 9th | Louisville, KY – Headliners Music Hall
May 10th | Indianapolis, IN – HI–FI Indy
May 11th | Kalamazoo, MI – Bell’s Beer Garden w/ Winged Wheel
 
* = support from Craig Finn

Throwing Muses announce Moonlight Concessions album

Michael Bonner
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Throwing Muses announce Moonlight Concessions album

Throwing Muses have announced details of their new album, Moonlight Concessions, which is released on March 14 via Fire Records.

Throwing Muses have announced details of their new album, Moonlight Concessions, which is released on March 14 via Fire Records.

They’ve released a new track from the album, “Summer Of Love” which you can hear below.

THE FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING THE BAND, THE YARDBIRDS, SHARON VAN ETTEN, KEITH RICHARDS, THE VERVE, ASWAD AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

The album announcement follows the release last November of “Drugstore Drastic“, which accompanied UK and EU tour dates.

Moonlight Concessions was produced by Kristin Hersh at Steve Rizzo’s Stable Sound Studio in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. The album can be pre-ordered here.

The tracklisting for Moonlight Concessions is:

Summer Of Love
South Coast
Theremini
Libretto
Albatross
Sally’s Beauty
Drugstore Drastic
You’re Clouds
Moonlight Concessions

A companion album, Moonlight Confessions, is available to pre-order from Rough Trade.

Frank Black – My Life In Music

Sam Richards
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Frank Black – My Life In Music

The Pixies mainman welcomes us to his planet of sound: “You have to embrace the simplicity, the rawness”

The Pixies mainman welcomes us to his planet of sound: “You have to embrace the simplicity, the rawness”

THE FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING THE BAND, THE YARDBIRDS, SHARON VAN ETTEN, KEITH RICHARDS, THE VERVE, ASWAD AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

THE BEATLES

The Beatles

APPLE, 1968

This would not have been my first Beatles experience, but it’s probably the first one that connected with me in a more intellectual way. Songs like “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” or “Birthday” are very minimalist. There’s an attitude of, ‘We don’t need to do a really big, fleshed-out song.’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” is more sophisticated, it goes to a lot of different places. But “Wild Honey Pie” is just a stomp with the same phrase over and over again. Not all listeners are going to be necessarily comfortable with that, or at least not right away. You have to embrace the simplicity, the rawness and the minimalism. So I really credit ‘The White Album’ with introducing me to that kind of idea.

CAT STEVENS

Mona Bone Jakon

ISLAND/A&M, 1970

My parents took me to see Harold And Maude when it came out [in 1971] and that’s where I would have heard this music first, before I had a copy of the record. They’re pop music arrangements, with percussion and background vocals and keyboards and sometimes strings, but it’s still dry – not super-fancy, not lush, it’s more about the beauty of the instrument. And of course, the real instrument of beauty on that record is Cat Stevens’ voice. His vocal delivery is very original – it has this beautiful masculine muskiness to it. And one of the things I like about Cat Stevens is that even when he’s being precious in a singer-songwriter kind of way, you really believe him. Whatever he’s selling, it’s so convincing.

DONOVAN

Greatest Hits

EPIC, 1969

This may have even preceded my relationship with The Beatles. I’d decided I wanted to be a drummer, so for my eighth birthday I received a snare drum and a small crash symbol and a pair of drumsticks. “Mellow Yellow” is one of those few great rock’n’roll songs where there’s one simple element of the drumkit that is almost the hook of the song. So even though I didn’t have a hi-hat, I could do a pretty good play-along version of “Mellow Yellow”. I listened to “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Season Of The Witch” and all the other songs, but [“Mellow Yellow”] in particular was important to me, because it was the first time I picked up an instrument and participated with what I was listening to.

BOB DYLAN

Greatest Hits Vol II

COLUMBIA, 1971

My cousin used to live with us occasionally. He would sometimes leave records behind, and this was one of them. I would have been about eight or nine years old and I was probably dreaming about being in some kind of a band. So this is the record that would have really given me a notion of attitude. It’s not just a song, it’s not just a performance, but it’s the attitude of the artist, which in Dylan’s case was a little bit flippant: ‘I’m not going to coddle you, you’re not necessarily going to get all this, you’ve just got to come along for the ride and enjoy it as best you can.’ “Watching The River Flow” is probably still one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs.

RY COODER

Paradise And Lunch

REPRISE, 1974

This is another record that got left behind at my parents’ house by my cousin. It’s very well produced but it’s not slick. It’s recorded very carefully, to bring out the rawness of blues and gospel music. Later I would realise, of course, that he is a notable guitarist and he is known for his prowess on the instrument. But when I listened to that record, it was all about the selection of the material and the humour that he brings. As a little kid I didn’t understand all of it, but that’s when I started to get my first whiff of sexual innuendo, double meanings. But it’s done in a very lighthearted, almost vaudevillian kind of way. It’s very charming. To this day, if I don’t know what to listen to, I’ll put on Paradise And Lunch.

JOHN MAYALL’S BLUES BREAKERS

Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton

DECCA, 1966

I’d been given a stack of records by the physical education coach at my school, because he needed another player on the baseball team. It included some Leon Russell records and about five or six John Mayall records. Growing up in the early ’70s, you don’t discover the blues from listening to Lead Belly, but from [the Blues Breakers]. And I really love John Mayall’s voice. It’s unassuming, a bit fragile, not necessarily showing a lot of attitude, just trying to serve the song. It’s not trying to emote and sing to the back of the room. It’s a little more like folk music – it doesn’t have the strut of ’70s hard rock that would eventually become Spinal Tap.

THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE

Electric Ladyland

TRACK/REPRISE, 1968

I was starting to listen to music a little on the loud side, and I believe I took this record out of the library. I knew “All Along The Watchtower” already from Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, so for me at that time it would have been a ‘standard’. And then here’s this guitar guy very casually manhandling this song, just dominating it and making it his own. There’s a sort of fearless aggression, like, ‘I don’t care that one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century wrote this song, I’m gonna do my own fucking version of it.’ That was an early indicator to me, as a musician, [that I had] permission to do thatmyself if I wanted to. Good enough for Jimi Hendrix, good enough for me!

JETHRO TULL

Stand Up

ISLAND/REPRISE, 1969

Jethro Tull was my first concert, when I was 14. It was mostly because of Aqualung, which I thoroughly love. But the record I discovered after that was their second record, Stand Up. It doesn’t have the cleanliness that maybe later Tull records have, where there is maybe more focus on playing things correctly. It’s more of a blur, but behind the blur is something that’s almost a little bit punky, a little impolite. It’s where you really hear Ian Anderson’s flute solos where he’s just spitting all over the thing – you hear a lot of his breath coming out. It’s got the spirit of trying to prove something. It’s got a lot of oomph, and I really appreciate it for that.

A 30th-anniversary vinyl remaster of Frank Black’s Teenager Of The Year will be released by 4AD on January 17; he’ll perform the album in its entirety at the London Palladium on February 6

Mike Scott: “There’s a sense of musical history in the record”

Sam Richards
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Mike Scott: “There’s a sense of musical history in the record”

Following this week's announcement about the new Waterboys album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper, here's the Mike Scott talking about the record in our Album Preview from Uncut's January 2025 issue.

Following this week’s announcement about the new Waterboys album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper, here’s the Mike Scott talking about the record in our Album Preview from Uncut’s January 2025 issue.

THE FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING THE BAND, THE YARDBIRDS, SHARON VAN ETTEN, KEITH RICHARDS, THE VERVE, ASWAD AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

MIKE SCOTT: “It’s a concept record that tells several stories at the same time. There’s a central story [about Dennis Hopper], but it’s also telling the story of our times, the story of the counterculture, which is a fascinating subject. And the further away we get from that big bang of the 1950s and ’60s, the more fascinating it becomes. There’s a sense of musical history in the record. It’s a rock’n’roll record, basically, and there’s a strong flavour of Americana in it too.

“Initial recordings were done during that strange period of lockdown. So I would record my parts here in Dublin and the other Waterboys would record their parts separately. James [Hallawell] did a lot of his stuff in his studio in London. Brother Paul [Brown], our other keyboard player, lives in Nashville – he has a home studio too. After lockdown lifted we did some proper band recording, all in a room together, but a lot of it was done during that weird period. We were all working on our own, through the miracle of email and file-sharing.

“Actually, I like working like that. Even if I’m recording on my own, I switch into my inner teenager and play like I’m 16 years old, so it always has that wildness and fire. And one of the drummers who worked on the record, a guy called Greg Morrow, he’s one of the top session players in Nashville. I would send him a track which might’ve been recorded using a drum loop or a pulse, and he’d send me back these absolutely fantastic drum tracks. It sounded like he was in a room with all the musicians playing completely naturally. So I’m blessed to be working with musicians of that calibre.

“I wrote a song with Steve Earle for this record. I had a particular lyric that was set in America and I’d written music for it, but my music just didn’t sound right. I needed someone who could write real deep Americana music, and Steve Earle and I know each other, we share a manager. So he wrote the music for this track and he sent me a demo with his vocal on it.

“The idea was that I would sing the actual recorded version on the album. But when I heard his demo, my God, it sounded fantastic with him singing, so I asked him if he would sing it for real on the record. It’s the opening track, so when people put on a Waterboys record, the first singing voice they’ll hear is Steve Earle and not me!”

Inside our latest free Uncut CD – Take A Load Off: 15 tracks of the month’s best music

Uncut Staff
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Inside our latest free Uncut CD – Take A Load Off: 15 tracks of the month’s best music

The Weather Station, The Delines, Richard Dawson, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and more feature on our latest free CD.

The Weather Station, The Delines, Richard Dawson, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and more feature on our latest free CD.

The 15-track compilation, Take A Load Off, showcases the month’s best new music, and comes with our issue dated February 2025.

See below for more on the full tracklisting…

ORDER A COPY FROM US HERE

1 Chris Eckman
Buttercup
The Land We Knew The Best is our Album Of The Month, and finds the former Walkabouts guitarist and singer making some of the best music of his life in his adopted home of Slovenia.

2 Jim Ghedi
Sheaf & Feld
The English singer and guitarist tackles the degradation of his hometown Sheffield on his new album, Wasteland – here’s one of the record’s highlights, a raging and heavy amalgamation of elemental rock and folk.

3 The Weather Station
Humanhood
Tamara Linderman’s latest, Humanhood, is one of her finest yet, a mix of stellar songs and fluid instrumental improv. The rhythmic, kinetic title track is a triumph too, which is no mean feat considering the gems in her catalogue.

4 Yazz Ahmed 
Waiting For The Dawn
A Paradise In The Hold is the long-awaited latest from the jazz composer and trumpeter, inspired by her British-Bahraini heritage and the Persian Gulf island’s history of music and pearl diving.

5 Richard Dawson
Boxing Day Sales
Despite Dawson’s joke that this is his attempt at a festive hit, “Boxing Day Sales” is a clever, compact look at consumerism from his upcoming album End Of The Middle: “You can’t afford to not own this/Go on, you owe it to yourself…” 

6 Prison
Eyes For Keys
Downstate is the latest LP from the Endless Boogie universe, with Sarim Al-Rawi, Matt Lilly and Paul Major teaming up with myriad guests for a set of feral, pounding and exploratory rock grooves.

7 Luther Russell
Happiness For Beginners
When he’s not playing with Those Pretty Wrongs or SBT, Russell makes his own albums; his new LP Happiness For Beginners mines the propulsive, melodic gold of early REM and The Replacements, and this, the title track, is a perfect demonstration of the jewels found within.

8 The Delines
Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp
Mr Luck & Ms Doom might be the greatest record The Delines have produced to date, with Willy Vlautin on top form as a songwriter. “Nancy…” is closely linked to his 2024 novel The Horse, and a highlight of the LP.

9 Echolalia
Blood Moon
Here’s a lovely cut from the self-titled debut by this Nashville supergroup, featuring Spencer Cullum and Andrew Combs, incongruously recorded on the Isle Of Wight. Dominic Billett took the songwriting lead for this, a sleepily gorgeous ballad featuring pedal steel and drum machine.

10 Jean Claude Vannier
La 2CV Rouillée (The Rusty 2CV)
Jean Claude Vannier Et Son Orchestre De Mandolines is the latest record from this most mercurial of French composers and arrangers. Strings are out, replaced by massed mandolins and accordion, but Vannier’s genius still shines through on cuts like this.

11 Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)
Van Etten’s band now get equal billing, and their self-titled album finds the quartet exploring airless electro-rock of an infectiously goth-y variety. Check out this highlight.

12 Bonnie “Prince” Billy
London May
The Purple Bird is a rare Will Oldham record made with a producer, David Ferguson, and a team of crack Nashville session players. Such is Oldham’s expressive voice, and the depth of his songwriting, though, that it’s never slick or compromised: his unique vibe is front and centre.

13 Sunny War
Cry Baby
Sunny War’s new album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress, follows hot on the heels of 2023’s Anarchist Gospel, and finds the LA-based singer-songwriter once again working with producer Andrija Tokic. Valerie June and Crass’ Steve Ignorant guest on a surprising and multi-layered record.

14 Squid
Crispy Skin
Bristol post-punks Squid return with a new album, Cowards, that concerns itself with the nature of evil. On “Crispy Skin”, they do that over a background of Terry Riley synths, krautrock rhythms and fidgety guitars, to great effect.

15 Nadia Reid
Baby Bright
Now based in Manchester, the New Zealand singer-songwriter has branched out to supple soul on her fourth record, Enter Now Brightness. “Baby Bright” is a lilting, gorgeous thing, pointing to Bon Iver or the Spacebomb family as much as it does Reid’s own previous work.

THE FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING THE BAND, THE YARDBIRDS, SHARON VAN ETTEN, KEITH RICHARDS, THE VERVE, ASWAD AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

The Waterboys announce new album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper

Michael Bonner
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The Waterboys announce new album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper

The Waterboys have announced details of their sixteenth studio album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper, which is released on April 4 via Sun Records.

The Waterboys have announced details of their sixteenth studio album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper, which is released on April 4 via Sun Records.

THE BAND, THE VERVE, SHARON VAN ETTEN AND MORE STAR IN THE NEW UNCUT; ORDER A COPY HERE

Running to 25 tracks, the album is a song cycle framing the late actor/director/photographer’s life story against the last 75 years of western pop culture. “The arc of his life was the story of our times,” says Mike Scott. “He was at the big bang of youth culture in Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean; and the beginnings of Pop Art with the young Andy Warhol. He was part of the counter-culture, hippie, civil rights and psychedelic scenes of the ’60s. In the ’70s and ’80s he went on a wild 10-year rip, almost died, came back, got straight and became a five-movies-a-year character actor without losing the sparkle in his eye or the sense of danger or unpredictability that always gathered around him.”

“It begins in his childhood, ends the morning after his death, and I get to say a whole lot along the way, not just about Dennis, but about the whole strange adventure of being a human soul on planet earth,” says Scott.

Produced with Waterboys bandmates Famous James and Brother Paul, the album features guests including Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple, Steve Earle, Nashville-based artist Anana Kaye, English singer Barny Fletcher, Norwegian country-rockers Sugarfoot, Dawes‘ Taylor Goldsmith, Kathy Valentine of The Go-Go’s and Patti Palladin.

Neil Young to release Oceanside Countryside on vinyl

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young to release Oceanside Countryside on vinyl

Neil Young releases Oceanside Countryside, the latest of his great “lost” albums, on February 14 as part of his Analog Original Series (AOS) via Reprise.

Neil Young releases Oceanside Countryside, the latest of his great “lost” albums, on February 14 as part of his Analog Original Series (AOS) via Reprise.

THE BAND, THE VERVE, SHARON VAN ETTEN AND MORE STAR IN THE NEW UNCUT; ORDER A COPY HERE

The album was recorded from May to December 1977, preceding the release of Comes A Time in 1978. The two albums share the same country/folk sound, and three songs (“Goin’ Back”, “Human Highway” and “Field Of Opportunity“) appear on both albums.

The vinyl release of Oceanside Countryside includes some tracks that are on the CD of the same name in Young’s Archives Vol. III. However, this track list is how Oceanside Countryside was originally planned to be released and finally will be made available on vinyl for the first time. Recorded on tape, these are the original mixes done at the time of recording.

Says Young, “This analogue original album, recorded in 1977, was unreleased at the time. These songs are the original mixes done at the time of the recordings. I sang the vocals and played the instruments on Oceanside, in Florida at Triad studios and Malibu, at Indigo studio. I sang the vocals and recorded with my great band of friends at Crazy Mama’s in Nashville on Countryside. I hope you enjoy this treasure of an Analog Original recording as much as I do.” 

The details for tracklisting are below.

Side One: ‘Oceanside’ 

1. ‘Sail Away’

Produced by Neil Young

Recorded at Triad Studios, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, September 12, 1977 with Michael Laskow and Paul Kaminsky.

Neil Young: Guitar, Vocals

2. ‘Lost In Space’

Produced by Neil Young

Recorded at Triad Recording Studios, Ft. Lauderdale with Michael Laskow and Paul Kaminsky.

Neil Young: Guitar, Vocals

3. ‘Captain Kennedy’

Produced by David Briggs, Tim Mulligan & Neil Young

Recorded at Indigo Ranch Studios, Malibu with Richard Kaplan

Neil Young: Guitar, Harmonica, Piano, Vocals 

Greg Thomas: Drums

Dennis Belfield: Bass

Ben Keith: Steel Guitar & Dobro

Rufus Thibodeaux: Fiddle

4. ‘Goin’ Back’

Produced by Neil Young

Recorded at Triad Studios, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, September 16, 1977 with Michael Laskow and Paul Kaminsky

Neil Young: Guitar, Stringman, Vocals

5 ‘Human Highway’

Produced by Neil Young

Recorded at Triad Studios, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, September 14, 1977 with Michael Laskow and Paul Kaminsky

Neil Young: Guitar, Vocals

Side Two: ‘Countryside’

1. ‘Field Of Opportunity’

Produced by: Neil Young & Ben Keith

Recorded at: Crazy Mama’s, Nashville, TN, May 3, 1977

Neil Young: Guitar, Vocals 

Ben Keith: Pedal Steel Guitar

Rufus Thibodeaux: Fiddle

Joe Osborn: Bass

Karl T. Himmel: Drums

2. ‘Dance Dance Dance’

Produced by: Neil Young & Ben Keith

Recorded at: Crazy Mama’s, Nashville, TN, May 3, 1977

Neil Young: Guitar, Vocals

Ben Keith: Dobro

Rufus Thibodeaux: Fiddle

Joe Osborn: Bass

Karl T. Himmel: Drums

3. ‘The Old Homestead’

Produced by: David Briggs, Elliot Mazer, Tim Mulligan & Neil Young

Recorded at: Quadrafonic Sound Studio, Nashville and Broken Arrow Studio, Redwood City, CA with Elliot Mazer

Neil Young: Guitar, Harmonica, Piano

Levon Helm: Drums

Tim Drummond: Bass

Ben Keith: Steel Guitar, Dobro

Rufus Thibodeaux: Fiddle

Tom Scribner: Saw Player

Levon Helm appears courtesy of MCA Records Inc.

4. ‘It Might Have Been’

Produced by: Neil Young & Ben Keith

Recorded at: Crazy Mama’s, Nashville, TN, May 3, 1977

Neil Young: Guitar, Vocal

Ben Keith: Pedal Steel Guitar

Rufus Thibodeaux: Fiddle

Joe Osborn: Bass

Karl T. Himmel: Drums

5. ‘Pocahontas’

Produced by: David Briggs and Neil Young

Recorded at: Indigo/Triad, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, September 4, 1977 with Michael Laskow and Paul Kaminsky.

Neil Young: Guitars, Vocals 

Neil Young confirms he will play Glastonbury

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young confirms he will play Glastonbury

Neil Young WILL play Glastonbury after all - just days after saying he would not play the festival because "it is a corporate turn-off, and not for me like it used to be.”

Neil Young WILL play Glastonbury after all – just days after saying he would not play the festival because “it is a corporate turn-off, and not for me like it used to be.”

In a new post on his Neil Young Archives website, Young wrote, “Due to an error in the information received, I had decided to not play the Glastonbury Festival, which I always have loved.Happily, the festival is now back on our itinerary and we look forward to playing. Hope to see you there!”

Meanwhile, Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis responded on Instagram. “What a start to the year! Neil Young is an artist who’s very close to our hearts at Glastonbury. He does things his own way and that’s why we love him. We can’t wait to welcome him back here to headline the Pyramid in June”

In the studio with Stevie Wonder

Barney Hoskyns
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In the studio with Stevie Wonder

From Uncut's June 2005 issue (Take 97). In a world exclusive interview, Uncut visited the soul legend in his studio as he worked on his then-upcoming album, A Time 2 Love...

From Uncut’s June 2005 issue (Take 97). In a world exclusive interview, Uncut visited the soul legend in his studio as he worked on his then-upcoming album, A Time 2 Love…

By the small hours of Saturday morning, L.A.’s Koreatown district is hushed and still. The odd car rattles along Western Avenue, but most of the Friday nightclubbers have dispersed and headed home. “Little Seoul”, if one can call it that, is slowing down.

Unbeknownst to the few locals still awake, the soul legend once known as Little Stevie Wonder is hard at work in the studio that sits slap-bang in the midst of this improbable neighbourhood where few signs or billboards are in English. The blind genius who recorded at least five of the most remarkable albums in the history of American music is rounding off another night behind the massive SSL console of Wonderland, putting finishing touches to a track from his forthcoming A Time 2 Love.

Wonder at work is everything you might imagine. His head sways from side to side as he mumbles melodiously along to “Please Don’t Hurt My Baby“, the track he’s working on tonight. The famous gums of his open smiling mouth show above his upper teeth. His braided hair is bunched behind him, tiny seashells dangling at its ends. He’s dressed entirely in black that matches his sunglasses.

A TV monitor above the console shows a group of women wearing denim and corn-rows and standing round a microphone lowered from the ceiling. The most senior of them, Shirley Brewer, has sung with Stevie since 1972’s Talking Book; hers is the hollering voice that comes in halfway through ‘Ordinary Pain’ on his 1976 masterpiece Songs In The Key Of Life. Like the others, Shirley is trying to master an idiosyncratic vocal line that involves compressing ten syllables into approximately two seconds. Wonder makes the women repeat the line again and again – not like some punishing tyrant, just like a producer who hears each misplaced micro-nuance and needs to hear it done right. He demonstrates it to them once again, semi-scatting the line into their headphones. Eventually they get it down, sensuously purring the line “Before you were usin’ it like a toy” in a way that makes all too plain what “it” is.

Wonder is like a kid brother around these women. It’s not hard to imagine the 12-year-old Little Stevie on the buses that took the famed Motown Revue around America in the early ’60s – the pint-sized japester who’d steal up behind Diana Ross and pinch her petite derriere. He strolls over to one of the singers and extracts a packet of Frito-Lays from her pocket. Before inserting one into his mouth he lifts it to his nose. “Oooh, smell like dirty feet,” he says in the voice of a Mississippi cotton-picker. “Smell like Uncle Charlie’s feets…” The ladies squeal with delighted displeasure. He repeats the phrase several more times and then gobbles down the Frito-Lay.

Wonderland is a hermetic haven of a studio. The family of employees that Stevie has created around him makes for an atmosphere that’s insular but always friendly. Even the security guys are teddy bears. Laughs come thick and fast here, and one of the most infectious belongs to bassist Nathan Watts, who has played with Wonder for 30 years. “I should be in The Guinness Book of Records for longest-serving bass player,” he says. It’s Watts’ birthday today, which is why he’s hanging around long after his services were last required, putting off the long drive back to his home in Chino Hills.

Stephanie Andrews, president of Stevie’s production company, is also sitting in tonight. A tiny woman with a pretty, light-skinned face, she has bought an ice-cream birthday cake for Watts, whose cuddly physique – squeezed into a pair of high-waisted denim shorts – suggests such treats aren’t exactly strangers to his diet. Wonder himself packs a fair paunch under his loose shirt as he emerges to join the impromptu party, which inevitably entails the rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, his jubilant 1980 tribute to assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

When the cake has been devoured, Wonder challenges one of the singers to a game of air hockey on a table that sits in the studio’s main recreation room. Despite not being able to see the plastic puck, Stevie repeatedly wins the game, demonstrating what he would doubtless call his Taurean need to triumph at all costs. Then it’s time to go back to work.

“We’re trying to stay in the realm of getting things happening at a reasonable time of day,” Wonder replies when asked if his sessions always run this late. “Sometimes we do work long hours, but very rarely do we work and sleep here for a whole week.”

It turns out that music has reverberated inside these walls for several decades. Back in the ’40s, Wonderland was McGregor’s, a studio used by Benny Goodman, Nat ‘King’ Cole and others. The interior of the building is like something out of Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown, with intricate tiling and wood panels.

When you wander round the back of the studio, outside the bubble-like chamber of the control room, you stumble on relics from Wonder’s own past. Standing alone and somewhat neglected is the original Moog synthesizer he used on Music Of My Mind, Talking Book and Innervisions. Around the corner from that magnificent creature, draped in black cloth, is the Yamaha “Dream Machine” he used on Songs In The Key Of Life.

At the risk of fetishising technology, there is a certain awe in beholding these outmoded dinosaurs. So significant was the role Moog and Yamaha played in the radical brilliance of Wonder’s run of masterpieces from Music (1972) to Songs (1976) that one feels like prostrating oneself before such superannuated devices.

“I’m always intrigued by his orchestral use of synthesizers,” said jazz giant Herbie Hancock, who played on Songs In The Key Of Life‘s impassioned “As”. “He lets them be what they are – something that’s not acoustic.” Listening to the almost classical arrangements of songs such as ‘Pastime Paradise‘ and ‘Village Ghetto Land‘, one appreciates what Hancock meant: it’s as if Wonder is celebrating the very artifice of synthetic sound.

“I think everything has its own character,” Stevie says. “Even in sampling strings, a keyboard player cannot really play like a string player. You can have various samples at various places on the keyboard to accentuate a feel and give you a sense of that, but the whole purpose of me using synthesizers was to make a statement and to express myself musically – to come as close as possible to what those instruments could do, but also to expressing how I would allow those things to sound.”

Wonder’s discovery of electronics was just part of the extraordinary burst of creativity that flowered when he came of age in 1971, ten years after signing as a pint-sized prodigy to Berry Gordy‘s emerging Motown label. In a frenetic four-year run he left “Little Stevie” and the ’60s behind and became one of the towering artists of the new decade.

Imagine black American music without “Superwoman“, “Superstition“, “Too High“, “Living For The City“, “Higher Ground“, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’“, “I Wish“, “Sir Duke” or “Pastime Paradise“. Or without “Blame it On the Sun“, “He’s Misstra Know-it-All“, “They Won’t Go When I Go“, “Knocks Me Off My Feet“, “Joy Inside My Tears“. This is a concentrated body of work that stands alongside the best of the Beatles or Brian Wilson and often eclipses even them.

It’s also a body of work in whose shadow Stevie Wonder has lived ever since. The question in 2005 is, will he ever emerge from it?

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT JUNE 2005/TAKE 97 IN THE ARCHIVE

Loretta Lynn: “If you’re good to the ghosts, they’ll be good to you”

Jaan Uhelszki
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Loretta Lynn: “If you’re good to the ghosts, they’ll be good to you”

From Uncut's March 2016 issue (Take 226). We meet the Queen of Country in her haunted Tennessee mansion and look back on her spectacular career...

From Uncut’s March 2016 issue (Take 226). We meet the Queen of Country in her haunted Tennessee mansion and look back on her spectacular career…

Welcome to Hurricane Mills, the second-most-haunted house in Tennessee and, for the past 50 years, home of the supernaturally gifted Loretta Lynn. Here, the Queen Of Country Music looks back on her sparkling career, her wayward spouse, her legendary friends — from the Cash family to Jack White — and the spirits that surround her to this day.

There is no mistaking the route that leads to Loretta Lynn’s estate in Middle Tennessee. At five-mile intervals along the freeway that bisects the Volunteer State from East to West, there are folksy billboards showing the Queen Of Country Music in a red, checked cowboy shirt. Her head is tilted to one side, her well-appointed brown curls grazing her collarbone, while the hoarding invites you to “Visit the Legend Loretta Lynn in Hurricane Mills”.

In fact, more than 500,000 people come through the doors of Lynn’s antebellum mansion each year. Lynne recalls the Sunday afternoon in 1966 when she and her late husband, Oliver “Doolittle/Mooney” Lynn, got lost on the back roads of Humphreys County. “I seen that house and I said, ‘Doo, I want that house right there,”‘ Lynn explains. There was one problem, though: the house came with a whole town, including a working grist mill, a post office, a waterfall, a store and a gas station. But what Loretta wants, Loretta generally gets, as evidenced by a magnet on the restaurant-quality refrigerator in her airy open kitchen that reads, “When Mama ain’t happy, nobody is happy”. Is it true? Lynn takes off her rhinestone-encrusted reading glasses and says with a throaty chuckle, “What do you think?”

The couple didn’t waste much time putting a down payment on the 3500-acre town. Money wasn’t an object any more for the singer, who grew up poor in Paintsville, Kentucky. She’d released two albums that year. Hike ‘Em Country, which reached No 2 on the Billboard charts, and the vituperously autobiographical You Ain’t Woman Enough, which reached No 1, and whose title song became Lynn’s biggest hit up to that point. Based on a dalliance Doo was having with another woman, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” was a turning point for Lynn. The song’s true-to-life lyrics cracked with female empowerment and righteous indignation — something unheard of in country music in those less-enlightened times. Lynn continued to refine the theme in songs like “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)“, “”Your Squaw Is On The Warpath“, “Rated X” and “Fist City“, where women didn’t just stand by their men, but stood up to them. Perhaps most radical of all, there was “The Pill” — which intimated that, with birth control, a woman had the same rights as a man. It was clear that Lynn was drawing from her own life and marriage in her increasingly bold songwriting. “I wasn’t doing anything — what did you call it? — revolutionary,” she insists. “I was just saying what everyone else was really thinking, but didn’t talk about it in public. It turned out, I was just the first one to write it like the women lived it.”

Today, Lynn is dressed in a sparkly pink shirt, tight velvet trousers and sequinned black house slippers. Lynn no longer lives in the antebellum mansion, but in a smaller property across the driveway. It is here that she sits in an oversized red leather sectional. As we talk, Lynn angles her head toward a bigger house that lies across an asphalt walkway. “It’s silly, I know, but I fell in love with the house because it reminded me of the house in Gone With The Wind. But you know, this place was never really a plantation. But I’ll tell you one thing, it is haunted.”

In fact, Lynn’s ranch has been certified the second most-haunted place in Tennessee. Located high on a hill, the 14-room property was built in 1845 and was used as a hospital in the Civil War. According to records at nearby Middle Tennessee State University, it was also the site of a Civil War battle on July 22, 1863, where 19 solders lost their lives. All of them are buried in a cemetery near the church erected on the property – one of three cemeteries on the 6,500 -acre estate.  In the old part of the house lies the ‘brown room’, where Lynn’s eldest son, Jack Benny Lynn, slept and experienced his own visitation after coming home one night and falling asleep on his bed with his clothes on. He was woken by someone trying to remove his boots: a soldier dressed in an American Civil War uniform.  

Does any of this bother Lynn? “No. If you’re good to the ghosts, they’re good to you,” she says.

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MARCH 2016/TAKE 226 IN THE ARCHIVE

Uncut – February 2025

Uncut Staff
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Uncut – February 2025

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

Every print copy of this issue comes with a free 15-track CD featuring brand new music from The Weather Station, The Delines, Richard Dawson, Sunny War and more. Meanwhile, inside the magazine…

THE BAND: 50 years on from the release of The Basement Tapes, Uncut invites compatriots, aficionados and heads – including JASON ISBELL, RICHARD THOMPSON, LUCINDA WILLIAMS, ELVIS COSTELLO, VAN MORRISON, MARGO PRICE, STURGILL SIMPSON – to celebrate the 30 greatest songs of ROBBIE ROBERTSON, RICK DANKO, GARTH HUDSON, RICHARD MANUEL and LEVON HELM.

THE VERVE: Before Urban Hymns briefly made them the biggest band in Britain, THE VERVE summoned some of the most rapturous rock music of the ’90s, fuelled by a prodigious diet of booze, drugs, Rosicrucianism, home-delivered lasagne and lashings of self-belief. Luckily, they lived to tell the tale: “We wanted that rock’n’roll life. It was all that mattered.”

SHARON VAN ETTEN: With her new band THE ATTACHMENT THEORY set to make their debut, SHARON VAN ETTEN reveals how she found fresh inspiration in collaboration. “How can I keep doing what I’ve been doing, but try new things?”

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT: From hippie communal living to sold-out arena tours via heavy licks and eldritch mythologies, BLUE ÖYSTER CULT were one of ‘70s rock’s biggest – and strangest – bands. “We had no concept of being commercial…”

ASWAD: Championed by Bob Marley and lauded by early punk audiences, ASWAD were UK roots reggae pioneers, battling prejudice to share their message of anti-racism, Rastafarianism and community. “We wanted to fight for what we believed was right.”

NADIA REID: After a rollercoaster decade, the stars finally seem to have aligned for New Zealand singer songwriter NADIA REID as she prepares to release her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness. “The whole thing’s been mad.”

THE MOODY BLUES: LSD with Timothy Leary, trips to Disneyland and a Vietnam-inspired hit single. Behold, the lost heroes of psychedelia!

SEAN O’HAGAN: Career highlights from MICRODISNEY to THE HIGH LLAMAS via STEREOLAB and (almost) THE BEACH BOYS.

GARY KEMP: The Spandau Ballet songwriter turned Saucerful Of Secrets frontman talks Soho, Black Midi, Ronnie Kray and kilts…

EDDIE CHACON: The second-chance soulman on the records that bring him pleasure, joy and happiness: “I learned that imperfections can be beautiful”

REVIEWED: New albums by Chris Eckman, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Yazz Ahmed, The Delines, Songhoy Blues, Jim Gedhi; archive releases by Lotti Golden, Doug Sahm & The Sir Douglas Quintet, Television Personalities and Brides Of Funkenstein; Mark Lanegan birthday tribute and The Necks live; James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic on the big screen and the Yardbirds on the small screen

PLUS: Paul McCartney gets back; The Chills; Keith Richards unseen; Candi Staton; Echolalia; farewell Andy Paley and Leah Kunkel and introducing Greg Mendez

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

Introducing the new Uncut: The Band, The Verve, Sharon Van Etten, The Moody Blues and more

Michael Bonner
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Introducing the new Uncut: The Band, The Verve, Sharon Van Etten, The Moody Blues and more

CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY

CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY

Back in the dim and distant days of June last year, Will Hermes emailed me from Woodstock, where he was interviewing Mercury Rev for us. After several stop-offs at sites of interest, they found themselves in the studio belonging to Aaron Hurwitz, “where they tracked Levon and Garth for Deserter’s Songs”, wrote Will. “Classic Woodstock, truly like stepping back in time. FYI, this was sitting on a coffee-table when we arrived unannounced…” Attached to the email was a photo of Uncut’s April 2005 issue, with The Band on the cover.

As you can imagine, it’s deeply satisfying to find traces of our history lingering in such hallowed spaces. Of course, in 2005, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson were all still with us; now it’s only Garth. In fact, we started discussing a new Band cover shortly after Robbie’s death in August 2023, which became more advanced as we headed towards this year’s 50th anniversary of the release of The Basement Tapes. Rather than retell familiar tales from The Band’s story, we asked some of our favourite artists to choose their favourite songs, including Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson, who all jumped at the chance to participate. And on it went; you can find out the results of our Top 30 countdown in our latest issue. As our first cover story of 2025, we hope it offers you some light and comfort in an otherwise cold, damp January.

In further good news, a quick note about Uncut+, our new subscription upgrade, free to all existing print subscribers, which unlocks our digital archive, stocked with every issue of Uncut stretching back to Take 1 in 1997 as well as a comprehensive collection of our Ultimate Music Guides and other special editions. You’ll find instructions to login to Uncut+ here. If you’re not already a subscriber but are interested in becoming one, please click here, where we have one of our best Uncut subscription offers running right now.

Enjoy the issue – there’s tons inside, from Blue Öyster Cult to Nadia Reid, Sharon Van Etten to The Verve, The Moody Blues to Echolalia – not to mention an excellent new music CD to banish the January blues featuring Chris Eckman, Jim Ghedi, The Delines, Yazz Ahmed, Sunny War, The Weather Station, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and others.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY

Meanwhile, stand by for a very special cover story and CD next month…

Tributes paid to Johnnie Walker

Michael Bonner
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Tributes paid to Johnnie Walker

Tributes have been paid to Johnnie Walker, who died on January 31, 2024 aged 79. Walker had retired from a long career in broadcasting at the end of October.

Tributes have been paid to Johnnie Walker, who died on January 31, 2024 aged 79. Walker had retired from a long career in broadcasting at the end of October.

His death was announced on air by fellow BBC Radio 2 DJ, Bob Harris, who described Walker as an “incredible, warm, wonderful, superb broadcaster” who “was passionate about his music”.

On Twitter/X, Robert Plant wrote, “so long Johnnie Walker, all across the years ..a defender and gatekeeper of great musical taste .. a cool, kind man who kept the bar high for all of us who loved him ….”

Also on Twitter/X, Joan Armatrading wrote, “RIP Johnnie Walker and thank you. Thank you for all you did for my music and the many other musicians you brought to the public’s attention. I loved talking with you on your shows. I will miss you. You will be very missed by many x”

And Rick Wakeman wrote, “Johnnie Walker was a great friend and stunningly influential within radio. We talked about Caroline a lot and his overall radio knowledge and experiences were second to none. A privilege to have been able to call him a true friend. Radio Heaven now has a real DJ gem”

Fellow broadcasters also paid tribute to Walker, including Ken Bruce: “So sorry to hear the news about the great Johnnie Walker. Not only was he a wonderful broadcaster but also a man of great personal strength and kindness.”

Walker’s radio career spanned 58 years, beginning as a pirate DJ on the offshore station Swinging Radio England, then Radio Caroline, before joining Radio 1 in 1969. He later worked in America before returning to the BBC.

Photo: Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

In 2009, Uncut interviewed Walker – alongside other veteran DJs – about the glory days of pirate radio. You can read the article here.

Neil Young pulls out of Glastonbury

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young pulls out of Glastonbury

Neil Young has pulled out of this year's Glastonbury, saying he believes the festival, which is partnered with the BBC, is now "a corporate turn-off".

Neil Young has pulled out of this year’s Glastonbury, saying he believes the festival, which is partnered with the BBC, is now “a corporate turn-off”.

Writing on his Neil Young Archives website, he said, “The Chrome Hearts and I were looking forward to playing Glastonbury, one of my all-time favorite outdoor gigs. We were told that the BBC were now a partner in Glastonbury and wanted us to do a lot of things in a way we were not interested in. It seems Glastonbury is now under corporate control and is not the way i remember it being. Thanks for coming to see us the last time!

“We will not be playing Glastonbury on this tour because it is a corporate turn-off, and not for me like it used to be.

“Hope to see you on one of the other venues on the tour.”

Young last played Glastonbury in 2009.

Young’s latest band The Chrome Hearts – comprising guitarist Micah Nelson, bassist Corey McCormick, drummer Anthony LoGerfo and Spooner Oldham on keyboards – recently finished an album at ShangriLa Studios in Malibu with producer Lou Adler.

Uncut’s Best New Albums of 2024

Uncut Staff
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Uncut’s Best New Albums of 2024

50
OREN AMBARCHI/JOHAN BERTHLING/ANDREAS WERLIIN
Ghosted II
DRAG CITY
2022’s improvised mindmeld between Aussie experimental guitarist Ambarchi and the Swedish jazz rhythm section of Berthling and Werliin proved so successful that the trio reconvened for this lively sequel. Their telepathy now honed, Ghosted II was groovier and hookier than its predecessor, Berthling’s propulsive basslines providing structure and drive for Ambarchi’s shimmering bliss-outs.

THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT FEATURES KATE BUSH, QUINCY JONES, THE WEATHER STATION, THE DAMNED AND OUR ESSENTIAL 2025 PREVIEW – ORDER YOUR COPY NOW

49
STILL HOUSE PLANTS
If I Don’t Make It, I Love U
BISON
The post-rock trio, formed a decade ago at the Glasgow School Of Art, rocketed out of the improv underground with a fissile breakthrough album that recalled Life Without Buildings, Labradford and the slanted, enchanted skronk of Bill Orcutt. But tracks like the standout “Silver Grit Passes Thru My Teeth” were thrillingly all their own work.

48
DAVID GILMOUR
Luck And Strange
SONY
Working with a new producer (Charlie Andrew, notable for his work with prog upstarts Alt-J) and new musicians (including Tom Herbert, bass player with Polar Bear), Gilmour sounded reinvigorated on his fifth solo album – never more so than on a startling cover of the Montgolfier Brothers’ magnificently bleak “Between Two Points”, beautifully sung by his daughter Romany.

47
SARAH DAVACHI
The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir
LATE MUSIC
Her 12th long-player was the most impressive statement yet from the ‘slow music’ figurehead: an exploration of the myth of Orpheus, recorded on four different pipe organs from across the world, not to mention an array of other keyboards and synthesisers, plus choir, trombones, bass clarinets and medieval string instruments. Deep, mysterious and genuinely awe-inspiring.

46
CHARLES LLOYD
The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
BLUE NOTE
The flower-power jazz veteran extended his late-career renaissance with this album of mellifluous sax and flute marvels. Released on Lloyd’s 86th birthday, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow sounded as fresh and engaged as any of the new-school spiritual jazz touchstones, with “The Water Is Rising” and “Defiant, Tender Warrior” carrying a subtle yet potent political message.

45
LAURA MARLING
Patterns In Repeat
CHRYSALIS
Written and recorded in stray, snatched moments at home with producer Dom Monks when Marling was “high as fuck” after the birth of her first daughter, Patterns In Repeat charted the journey from postpartum euphoria to deeper questions about family and ageing, mortality and memory. These beautifully fingerpicked lullabies were occasionally graced by the elegant strings of violinist Rob Moose.

44
CHRISTOPHER OWENS
I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair
TRUE PANTHER
Perhaps only former Girls frontman Christopher Owens could imbue an album with so much personal tragedy – heartbreak, homelessness, hospitalisation – and still make it sound uplifting. “I died the day you left me/ I die again every day”, he sang desperately on opener “No Good”, and yet the overriding emotions were joy, redemption and a sense that everything was ultimately OK. A truly life- affirming comeback.

43
RICHARD THOMPSON
Ship To Shore
NEW WEST
On his first album in six years, Thompson sang from the perspective of
a traumatised squaddie (“The Fear Never Leaves You”), a lovestruck Jack Tar (“Singapore Sadie”), and even Donald Trump (“Life’s A Bloody Show”). Throughout all this, he kept his musical compass set on the miraculously consistent course of excellence he’s maintained for six decades now.

42
KIM DEAL
Nobody Loves You More
4AD
The Breeders’ records always contained more stubborn variety than the band’s status as alt.rock hellraisers gave them credit for. On her first ever solo album, Kim Deal expanded those horizons in all directions: from mariachi-tinged swooners to electro-rock thumpers, featuring Brian Wilson’s musical director, as well members of Slint, Savages and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Deal’s unique charisma ensured it all cohered perfectly.

41
PAUL WELLER
66
POLYDOR
1966 may have been the white-hot peak of popular modernism, but 66 the album saw an elegiac mood overtaking the Modfather, with songs like “I Woke Up”, “Sleepy Hollow” and “My Best Friend’s Coat” evoking a Kinksy autumn almanac. Best of a host of co-writes (with Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie, Richard Hawley and Suggs, among others) was “Ship Of Fools”, an unsentimental farewell to the Tories.

40
GRANDADDY
Blu Wav
DANGERBIRD
Inspired by the sound of Patti Page’s 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz”, Jason Lytle returned with an enchanted album of new-wave bluegrass. These were songs of loss, regret and heartbreak in the mall parking lot (“Jukebox App”), the office cubicle (“Watercooler”) and out on the wide-open American highway, with Max Hart’s pedal steel guitar duetting with the burble of analogue arpeggiators – the sound of cosmic consolation.

39
BROWN HORSE
Reservoir
LOOSE MUSIC
You would have got fairly long odds on this year’s best country-rock debut emerging from the fine city of Norwich, but Brown Horse’s assured take on East Angliana made a whole lot of sense. On Reservoir, their gripping vignettes of stolen horses and “feet wet in the mudflats” were delivered by powerful twin vocals, backed up by rousing guitars, fiddle, accordion and pedal steel.

38
DIRTY THREE
Love Changes Everything
BELLA UNION
It’s been another busy year for Warren Ellis, what with the Wild God album and tour, various film soundtracks and his animal sanctuary on Sumatra. Thankfully he also made time to reconvene his much-loved instrumental trio Dirty Three. Inspired by Alice Coltrane, their first music in a decade was an extended improvised suite, unmoored from conventional structures but full of rapture.

37
SHELLAC
To All Trains
TOUCH AND GO
Steve Albini’s unexpected death just days before its release cast a long shadow over To All Trains, but this was the most unsentimental farewell possible, with Shellac’s metallic machine music at its intense, thrilling best. “I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover”, Albini sang on his final exit. “If there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone…”

36
MYRIAM GENDRON
Mayday
THRILL JOCKEY/FEEDING TUBE
Myriam Gendron has made her name as an inspired interpreter of other people’s words – particularly the poems of Dorothy Parker – but Mayday prioritised her own sad, stoical lyrics, sung in both English and French. Jim White and Marisa Anderson applied some subtle shading, though Gendron held fast to her spartan approach – until, right at the end of final song “Berceuse”, all that contained emotion burst out in an ecstatic sax solo by Zoh Amba.

35
BRITTANY HOWARD
What Now
ISLAND
Having successfully established herself as a solo artist with 2019’s raw and personal Jaime, the former Alabama Shake decided it was time to cut loose. What Now was a hard-hitting party record of the type Prince used to make in his prime: funky but thoughtful, and sonically adventurous too: “Another Day” rode a confounding industrial-soul groove, while “Prove It To You” even dabbled in house music.

34
ROSALI
Bite Down
MERGE
After last year’s intriguing solo guitar excursions as Edsel Axle, Rosali Middleman made a triumphant return to the big stage with Bite Down. Featuring staunch backing from Omaha’s Mowed Sound, her fourth album was hard-rocking yet tender, experimental yet anthemic, funny yet sad, exposing the fearless vulnerability of the songwriter behind it all: “I’m letting things come as they may/ Hope you know why I do it this way…”

33
WILLIE NELSON
The Border
LEGACY
At the age of 91, Nelson is still showing few signs of slowing down. This was his 75th album, and his 10th in the last seven years. Rodney Crowell’s two song contributions – the title track and “Many A Long And Lonesome Highway” – struck an ominous tone, but Willie’s restless maverick spirit was still alive on the jauntily madcap “What If I’m Out Of My Mind?”

32
BEAK>
>>>>
INVADA
Beak>’s fourth album turned out to be Geoff Barrow’s swansong with the band, the “mumbling drummer” recently announcing his plan to step down after their current tour. His parting gift was a telling contribution to an album of typically dank Bristolian grooves and ’70s sci-fi dread, but with a surprisingly rich seam of wistful, folky reflection.

31
MABE FRATTI
Sentir Que No Sabes
UNHEARD OF HOPE
Is this pop? Experimental? Post-classical indie jazz? Mexico City-based Guatemalan Mabe Fratti actively embraces such confusion. The title of this album translated as ‘Feel Like You Don’t Know’, which neatly summarised her playful, open-hearted approach, finding kinship with Björk, Julia Holter and fellow cellist Arthur Russell.

30
KIM GORDON
The Collective
MATADOR
Kim Gordon embarked on her seventh decade with an album of savagely satirical sawtooth synthpop, partly inspired by Jennifer Egan’s dystopic novel The Candy House. “Tongues hanging out/ Bodies on the sidewalk/ Driving down Sunset/ Zombie meditation”, she sang on “Psychedelic Orgasm”, like a 21st-century Joan Didion cruising through LA on her way to the apocalypse.

29
OISIN LEECH
Cold Sea
OUTSIDE MUSIC/TREMONE
After a decade-and-a-half in folk duo The Lost Brothers, Dublin’s Oisin Leech announced himself as a singer-songwriter of some distinction with this stunning solo debut. As crisp and clear as the North Atlantic ocean beside which it was recorded, Cold Sea benefitted from the subtle presence of some stellar musicians, namely Steve Gunn, M Ward, Planxty’s Dónal Lunny and Dylan bassist Tony Garnier. But the acute sense of yearning was all Leech’s own.

28
JAKE XERXES FUSSELL
When I’m Called
FAT POSSUM
The discovery of a discarded school journal by the side of a California highway inspired this North Carolina folklorist to make his most enthralling album to date, bringing together songs of wildly disparate origin – Scottish traditionals, Benjamin Britten, cowboy artist Gerald ‘The Maestro’ Gaxiola – for a collection that was not only cohesive but often incredibly moving.

27
ENGLISH TEACHER
This Could Be Texas
ISLAND
The Leeds four-piece delivered one of the most distinctive debuts of the year, a radiant collection of tumbling, twisting prog-pop songs that charted a fiercely lyrical path through the squall of England’s ongoing civil wars. Somewhere at the heart of it, “You Blister My Paint” was an unexpectedly touching ballad, like the sun coming out on a rainy Bank Holiday.

26
MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
Loophole
MODERN SKY
The Mick Head renaissance continued with the former Pale Fountains frontman’s third album in seven years, another inspired collection of acoustic reveries set adrift on memory bliss, produced by Bill Ryder-Jones. With “Tout Suite!” and “You Smiled At Me”, he casually crafted the sweetest, most swoonsome love songs of the year.

THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT FEATURES KATE BUSH, QUINCY JONES, THE WEATHER STATION, THE DAMNED AND OUR ESSENTIAL 2025 PREVIEW – ORDER YOUR COPY NOW

25
NALA SINEPHRO
Endlessness
WARP
Sinephro’s blissful 2021 debut Space 1.8 placed the London-based harpist and modular synthesist at the vanguard of the new cosmic jazz movement. This filmic follow-up made fine use of some of the scene’s most expressive players – Sheila Maurice-Grey, Nubya Garcia and Natcyet Wakili among them – but it never felt like a jam session, instead radiating a unanimous sense of wonder and calm.

24
PHOSPHORESCENT
Revelator
VERVE
Matthew Houck’s eighth album as Phosphorescent, and his debut for Verve, was a beautiful refinement of the elegant melancholy he has been steadily crafting since 2013’s Muchacho. A standout was “Poem On The Men’s Room Wall”, which found some respite from the end of the world in a cold beer and the underappreciated erotic charm of Phyllis Diller.

23
HIGH LLAMAS
Hey Panda
DRAG CITY
Turns out you can teach an old Llama new tricks. After three decades of exquisite retro orchestration, Sean O’Hagan took an unexpected left-turn here into digital production and avant-R&B. The results were spectacular, retaining all of O’Hagan’s beloved quirks while allowing guest vocalists like Bonnie “Prince” Billy to indulge their inner pop freak.

22
ALAN SPARHAWK
White Roses, My God
SUB POP
Written and recorded after the loss of wife and bandmate Mimi Parker
in 2022, Sparhawk’s first post-Low release was an astonishing, artful transmutation of grief into cybernetic gospel via the medium of the Helicon VoiceTone pedal. It sounded, on the closing “Project 4 Ever”, like PC Music producing the Book Of Job.

21
JOHN CALE
POPtical Illusion
DOMINO
After the jagged future-shock of last year’s heavily collaborative Mercy, this impressively swift follow-up found Cale in more contemplative mode – though he still sounded more vital than most artists a quarter of his age, dispensing the sagest of wisdoms over dreamily inventive electronic beats: “If you’ve done things you’d wished you’ve never done/ Think of the things you’re going to do tonight…”

20
HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF
The Past Is Still Alive
NONESUCH
“Say goodbye to America, I wanna see it dissolve,” sang Alynda Segarra on “Colossus Of The Roads” – amid stiff competition, the most devastating track on the ninth Riff Raff album. But on songs like the Conor Oberst collaboration “The World is Dangerous”, they remained committed to making astonishing music while the ship goes down.

19
PETER PERRETT
The Cleansing
DOMINO
Perhaps as astonished as anyone to still be here, the mercurial former Only Ones frontman joked about outstaying his welcome on nagging punk earworms “Do Not Resuscitate” and “I Wanna Go With Dignity”. The irony being, of course, that Perrett was in the form of his life, decrying our morally bankrupt leaders and the evils of WhatsApp in his bone-dry south London drawl.

18
SHABAKA
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
IMPULSE!
Swapping his trusty saxophone for an array of Japanese and South American flutes naturally led Shabaka Hutchings towards more serene waters. But just as you’d hope from the former Comet/Kemet firebreather, he approached this seemingly tranquil music with gripping intensity, the introspective mood matched by guest vocalists including Lianne La Havas and Moses Sumney.

17
JOHNNY BLUE SKIES
Passage Du Desir
HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN
He’s thrown a few curveballs in his time, but country renegade Sturgill Simpson – for it was he – pulled off his greatest trick yet by absconding to Europe and adopting the Johnny Blue Skies moniker to consider the lot of the semi-famous musician from a position of wry remove. Beautifully sung and played, these were also some of the finest songs he’s ever written: soulful, wistful, funny and tender.

16
BILL RYDER-JONES
Iechyd Da
DOMINO
The title is Welsh for ‘good health’, and on his first album in five years the former Coral man set sail from lockdown anguish to calmer waters, buoyed by the kindred spirits of Gal Costa, Echo & The Bunnymen, and – on the gorgeous orchestral interlude “…And The Sea” – the inspired combination of Michael Head and James Joyce.

15
JACK WHITE
No Name
THIRD MAN
“Nothin’ in this world is free”, warned Jack White on No Name’s taut, prowling opener “Old Scratch Blues”. That is, unless you were lucky enough to visit the Third Man store on July 19 to have a copy of this unmarked LP slipped into your bag. But if the release was discreet, the music itself was anything but: a relentless barrage of garage-rock bangers with White in blistering, rabble-rousing form.

14
MDOU MOCTAR
Funeral For Justice
MATADOR
Though recorded thousands of miles from Moctar’s Niger homeland, Funeral For Justice went in hard on both the country’s current leaders (the title track) and its malign colonial overlords (“Oh France”). Suffice to say, this fiery rhetoric was more than matched by some incendiary guitar-playing; while to underline the strength of the songwriting, an acoustic version of the album – Tears Of Injustice – is due early next year.

13
FONTAINES DC
Romance
XL
With their colossal fourth album, the Irish post-punkers hooked up with a new label (XL) and a new producer (James Ford) to venture far from the Dublin cobblestones. They drew on the cityscapes of Tokyo, the fashion sense of Korn and apocalyptic arthouse cinema to create an IMAX-scale album of dystopian lovesongs, fit for the stadiums they increasingly seem destined to fill.

12
JULIA HOLTER
Something In The Room She Moves
DOMINO
When Julia Holter topped this chart in 2015 with Have You In My Wilderness, we described its unique sound as “Aphex Twin meets The Beach Boys”. If anything, this album pushed that glorious dichotomy even further as Holter’s psychedelic nursery rhymes inhabited an alluring fourth-world wonderland full of squelching electronics, stacked voices, fluttering flutes and fretless bass.

11
CASSANDRA JENKINS
My Light, My Destroyer
DEAD OCEANS
Cassandra Jenkins proved that An Overview On Phenomenal Nature was no fluke with a cosmic third album that roamed from Betelgeuse to Aurora, Illinois, via the pet shops of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Throughout, her quizzical sprechstimme and calmly forensic eye rooted her in the reality of everyday heartaches.

10
WAXAHATCHEE
Tigers Blood
ANTI-
“You just settle in like a song with no end”, sang Katie Crutchfield, harmonising beautifully with 2024’s MVP MJ Lenderman on “Right Back To It”, the lead single from her boldest, most accessible record yet. Tigers Blood was an album that saw her burnishing the romantic hooks that always lurked in her songwriting and laying a reasonable claim to being the millennial Lucinda Williams.

9
CINDY LEE
Diamond Jubilee
REALISTIK
Patrick Flegel’s seventh release under his indie-drag alias Cindy Lee was a tour de force of lo-fi Lynchian guitar soul lasting more than two hours. Astonishingly for a 32-track album, there were no space-filling goofs and hardly any drop-off in song quality: witness, around 83 minutes in, the heart-tugging triptych of “To Heal This Wounded Heart”, “Golden Microphone” and “If You Hear Me Crying”.

8
MJ LENDERMAN
Manning Fireworks
ANTI-
Still only 25, Jake “MJ” Lenderman is already wiser than most of us
will ever be. On his fourth solo studio album – he’s also notched up another couple as guitarist for the equally excellent Wednesday – he skilfully deployed classic rock references to paint vivid portraits of smalltown ennui (“How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns/ He’s just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse ’til it burns”). Great solos, too.

7
THE SMILE
Wall Of Eyes
XL
The first of two terrific albums The Smile released in 2024, emphasising the purple-ness of the patch in which Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner currently find themselves. Here, their agitated rhythms were often wreathed in lush orchestral arrangements, though that only seemed to heighten the ever-present sense of threat (“I am going to count to three/ Keep this shit away from me”). Next stop: a rumoured Radiohead live reunion in 2025…

6
ADRIANNE LENKER
Bright Future
4AD
Lenker’s solo career is the opposite of a diversion from her main gig fronting Big Thief. “Real House” continued the raw, autobiographical tale of “Mythological Beauty” from the band’s 2017 album Capacity, while recent single “Vampire Empire” was presented in a radically different form. Yet beyond these fan-pleasing callbacks and overlaps, there is much to be said for hearing Lenker’s precise melodies and perennially wise words in their most unadorned state.

5
JESSICA PRATT
Here In The Pitch
CITY SLANG
Even when playing these songs live in the flesh at a bewitching Union Chapel gig earlier this year, there remained something apparitional about Jessica Pratt, the ghost of LA’s Gold Star Studios. Ingenious arrangements – brass, Mellotron, Brazilian percussion, whole caverns full of echo – warped these songs so far out of time to be completely discombobulating, yet Pratt’s piercing melodies cut straight to the core.

4
AROOJ AFTAB
Night Reign
VERVE
Keen to puncture the myth of the “Sufi goddess” while maintaining the intense and rarified emotion of 2021 breakthrough Vulture Prince, Aftab found the perfect blend of earthiness and otherworldliness in Night Reign’s rich, seductive ambience. A splash of Auto-Tune here and a filthy bassline there showed that she could bend pop techniques to her will, rather than the other way around. And, oh, that voice…

3
BETH GIBBONS
Lives Outgrown
DOMINO
A decade in the making, released as she was about to turn 60, Beth Gibbons’ solo debut proved worth the wait in gold. Working with producer James Ford, she drew upon all the bitter wisdom of midlife. On songs like “Reaching Out” and “Rewind”, she constructed an awesome orchestra of loss from corrugaphone, recorder, folksong and her indomitable, astonishingly wracked voice.

2
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS
Woodland
ANCONY
Thirty years into their musical partnership, Welch and Rawlings released the first original record credited to the two of them. Maybe it was disaster that strengthened their union? Woodland was full of the stuff, from the 2020 tornado that destroyed their studio to an apocalyptic vision of the Mississippi run dry. They’ve certainly never sounded so attuned, their harmonies blending to uncanny effect on the desolate “What We Had” and the closing “Howdy Howdy”.

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1
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Wild God
PIAS
“We’ve all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy”. For the first time since 2016, Nick Cave properly reconvened The Bad Seeds – Thomas Wydler on drums, Martyn Casey on bass, Warren Ellis a one-man orchestrator of chaos and grace – and the result was a surging, storming work of radical, Blakean exuberance. It had the form of the blues but felt more like a rapture, full of “bright, triumphant metaphors of love”, with producer Dave Fridmann arranging the tumult like a man conducting a storm-tossed ocean.

Like so much of Cave’s work since 2016, it was addressed to his lost sons, but there were also heartfelt songs of devotion to his wife (“Final Rescue Attempt”), his dear, departed exes (“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”) and songs of praise for any creator who saw fit to invent Anita Lane’s panties, cinnamon horses and Kris Kristofferson.

Since the mid-1980s, Nick Cave has been trying on the vestments of these lay preachers – Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, the Elvis of “An American Trilogy” – and a large part of the charm has been the gall and gumption of this skinny Aussie goth to assume their orphic mantle. But now the robes finally fit, with Cave returning from the drag of hell to ascend to the heavens like… a prehistoric bird? An awestruck frog? A joyful rabbit? Never mind, never mind. Wild God was Nick Cave’s latest, great, indisputable masterpiece. Amen.


Uncut’s Best Reissues, Live Albums and Compilations of 2024

Uncut Staff
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Uncut’s Best Reissues, Live Albums and Compilations of 2024

30
ROYAL TRUX
Twin Infinitives
FIRE
Diving straight in at the deep end, Fire kicked off their Royal Trux vinyl reissue series with this synapse-mangling 1990 double LP which found America’s most gloriously fucked-up rock’n’roll band careering wildly toward the outer limits of convention, taste and sanity. A work of deviant high art or the sound of two people having a breakdown? Let’s say both. 

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29
JOHN LENNON
Mind Games: The Ultimate Collection
CAPITOL/UMe
In 1973, Lennon’s fourth album – which he himself described as “an interim record between being a manic, political lunatic to back to being a musician again” – failed to make the UK Top 10. Half a century later, it was refreshed by this sumptuous box set comprising multiple new mixes, unreleased outtakes, instrumentals, studio chatter and a lavishly detailed coffee-table book.

28
OASIS 
Definitely Maybe (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
BIG BROTHER
As an aperitif for the forthcoming reunion tour, Oasis’s swaggering debut was reissued with bonus material telling the full messy story of its creation, including eight tracks from the 1993 Monnow Valley sessions and another seven from the January 1994 sessions in Cornwall. A 1992 home demo of “Sad Song” with Liam on vocals was an uncanny reminder of the lightning they were trying to capture.

27 
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Southern Rock Opera (Deluxe Edition)
NEW WEST
The Truckers’ great 2001 concept album, an epic tale loosely based on the myths around Lynyrd Skynyrd and the American South, was richly documented on this impressive and timely reissue: a double-turned-triple LP with added outtakes, unreleased overflow songs, live cuts and a meaty new essay by Truckers ringleader Patterson Hood.

26
ROBERTA FLACK
Lost Takes
ARC
Across two days in November 1968, Roberta Flack sat down at a piano in RCA Studios and demoed 39 songs for potential inclusion on her debut album. Many of those that didn’t make the cut – including terrific versions of “Afro Blue” and “To Sir With Love” – languished unheard until the 2020 deluxe edition of First Take. Here, 12 of those songs received their first-ever vinyl release, working perfectly as an enchanting standalone album.

25
PAUL MCCARTNEY & WINGS
Band On The Run (50th Anniversary Edition)
CAPITOL
The definitive album of Macca’s post-Beatles career was given an anniversary makeover, complete with an expanded half-speed remaster and ‘underdubbed’ companion version. Mixed by Geoff Emerick from the original Lagos recordings, before George Martin and Tony Visconti added orchestration, it revealed the unvarnished rock’n’roll roots of songs like “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five” and “Let Me Roll With It”.

24
LOU REED
Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed At Pickwick Records 1964-1965
LIGHT IN THE ATTIC
The latest fruits of the ongoing trawl through the Lou Reed archive revisited his time as staff writer for the Pickwick International label/sweatshop in Long Island, specialising in surf, R&B and girl-group knock-offs for budget compilations. There were real jewels amid the hackwork, the pick of the bunch being “Oh No Don’t Do It”, recorded by Ronnie Dickerson – a weird glimpse of Lou’s untravelled path as a Brill Building princeling.

23
EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM GEBRU
Souvenirs
MISSISSIPPI
Ethiopia’s ‘honky-tonk nun’ lived an incredible life before finally passing on last year, just shy of her 100th birthday. This collection of home-recorded demos from 1977-85 was the first to feature her fragile but defiant singing voice as she reminisced about life before the Red Terror and pondered her future exile in Jerusalem. Sad but hopeful, beautiful and unique.

22
AIR
Moon Safari (25th Anniversary Edition)
PARLOPHONE
Air’s return to the stage – the French duo as suave as ever inside their sleek white box – was one of this year’s live highlights. It was all to celebrate a quarter-century of their swooning, retro-futuristic touchstone Moon Safari, reissued as a 2CD+Blu-Ray package. Among the highlights: an astonishing live synth version of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”. 

21
SUEDE
Dog Man Star 30
DEMON MUSIC
When anyone tries to tell you that Britpop was all about Blur v Oasis and lager lads in Ben Sherman shirts – and there’ll be a lot of that next year – just play them this: a fabulously grandiose vision of seedy proclivities and love on the dole amid the rapidly fading glamour of England’s capital. As the bonus discs proved, Suede’s B-sides of the time were almost as good as the singles – witness Brian Eno’s eldritch 16-minute remix of “Introducing The Band”.

20
KEVIN AYERS
All This Crazy Gift Of Time: The Recordings 1969-1973
CHERRY RED
The essential works of Herne Bay’s wizard of whimsy, neatly packaged in a 10-disc box set along with lashings of bonus material. Even if you already own all the studio albums, there was plenty here to astound and delight, from a brilliantly haywire 1970 Hyde Park show with The Whole World band (Mike Oldfield, Lol Coxhill et al) to a host of mildly slicker BBC sessions and a suggestive poem about a banana.

19
APHEX TWIN
Selected Ambient Works II (Expanded Edition)
WARP
As we all know, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was a high-water mark for British electronic music, but it wasn’t strictly ambient. Richard D James rectified that with his 1994 follow-up, two discs of atmospheric yet increasingly sinister pieces with blurry photos of random stuff for names. Bonus tracks on this expanded edition included a stunning orchestral version of “#3” (AKA “Rhubarb”).

18
GALAXIE 500
Uncollected Noise New York ’88​-​’​90
SILVER CURRENT
A fantastic shadow history of the short-lived but hugely influential dream-pop trio, across two LPs of non-album tracks, outtakes, alternate versions (“Blue Thunder” with bonus wailing sax!) and cover versions; in their trembling hands, both Joy Division/New Order’s “Ceremony” and The Rutles’ “Cheese And Onions” sounded equally spellbinding.

17
SONIC YOUTH
Walls Have Ears
GOOFIN’ RECORDS
In a year when great new albums by both Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore continued the Sonic Youth mission, it was intriguing to be thrust back to 1986, when the band began to transcend their downtown art-scuzz beginnings for a more universal kind of teenage riot. A former bootleg barely cleaned up for this official release, it’s not the live album Sonic Youth themselves would have sanctioned, but it’s a compelling document nonetheless.

16
ELVIS COSTELLO
King Of America & Other Realms
UMe
Much more than just a remaster of Costello’s pivotal 1986 album King Of America, this mammoth six-disc box set ventured both inward and outward to take in everything from original solo demos to unreleased collaborations with Allan Toussaint and duets with Lucinda Williams  and Emmylou Harris. A new habanera version of “Brilliant Mistake” brought it right up to date.

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15 
ANNE BRIGGS
Anne Briggs
TOPIC
A stone-cold British folk classic, rendered all the more precious by Briggs’ reluctance to add to her slender catalogue down the years. As a result, the four unreleased recordings included as a bonus 7” with this remastered vinyl reissue – including typically spare, devastating takes on “The Cruel Mother” and “Bruton Town” – were something of a holy grail. 

14
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Congo Funk! 
ANALOG AFRICA
James Brown’s visit to Kinshasa in 1974 inspired bands on both sides of the mighty Congo River to pick up electric guitars and incorporate American funk moves into their rambunctious, rumba-derived rhythms. This terrific comp showcased the unfailingly uplifting results.

13
MARGO GURYAN
Words And Music
NUMERO GROUP
Margo Guryan sadly left us in 2021, her uniquely sophisticated soft-pop compositions never properly celebrated in her lifetime. This deluxe three-disc boxset, collecting her slender but essential complete recorded output – plus sundry demos and curiosities – recorded her journey from Bach devotee to jazz wunderkind to gently psychedelic baroque pop magician. A fitting tribute at last.

12
THE WATERBOYS
1985
CHRYSALIS

This enthralling 6CD trawl explored every stage in the creation and performance of The Waterboys’ ‘big music’ statement This Is The Sea, unpacking the panoramic visions of Mike Scott and the musical innovations of Karl Wallinger (who sadly passed away in March). The cherry on top was a fast version of “This Is The Sea”  with elemental guitar breaks by Tom Verlaine.

11
DOROTHY ASHBY
Afro-Harping (Deluxe Edition)
VERVE/UMR
In a great year for jazz harp reissues, Dorothy Ashby’s once-obscure and now highly-prized 1968 LP – expect to pay £200 for an OG copy – finally received the deluxe treatment. The vibe was more swinging than spiritual, evidenced by two (arguably superior) alternate takes of “Theme From Valley Of The Dolls” and a slower, sultrier version of the much-sampled “Soul Vibrations”, with bonus theremin freakout.

10
GASTR DEL SOL
We Have Dozens Of Titles
DRAG CITY
Both David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke have become prolific contributors to the musical avant-garde over the last few decades; here was a chance to revisit their inquisitive, influential work together in the 1990s as post-rock duo Gastr Del Sol. Rounding up rare and unreleased material, including their last ever live performance from 1997, this 3LP set was an endearing study in how to gently wriggle free from convention.

9
NICO
The Marble Index 
DOMINO
“A weird excursion into atonality that will appeal only to a selective audience,” sneered a contemporary review quoted in the liner notes of this reissue. Forbidding and foreboding it may be, but in the intervening 56 years, Nico’s second solo album – her harmonium locked into a death spiral with John Cale’s gnawing viola – has become an essential part of the Velvet Underground story. Some versions came with a bonus 7”, the first time on vinyl for key outtakes “Roses In The Snow” and “Nibelungen”.

8
BOB DYLAN & THE BAND
The 1974 Live Recordings
COLUMBIA
If you ever felt shortchanged by Before The Flood’s anthology of Dylan and The Band’s barnstorming 1974 arena tour, here was a colossal 431-track, 27-disc collection, capturing the full force gale of the concerts from Chicago through to LA. It found Dylan on his own career precipice, returning from the commercial wilderness, The Band at the peak of their powers. The box vividly demonstrates how Dylan’s songs change as he looks for fresh treatments.

7
DOROTHY CARTER
Troubadour
DRAG CITY
This masterful reissue of the 1976 private press album by nomadic dulcimer visionary Dorothy Carter revealed a mesmerising tapestry of medievalism, folk, new age and ambient music. Ahead and out of her time, Carter connected ancient psalms, hymns and carols from across Europe and Asia to the burgeoning US counterculture and avant-folk underground.

6
JONI MITCHELL
Archives Vol 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980)
RHINO
Joni’s archive series reached the most fascinating phase of her career, as she hitched a ride with the Rolling Thunder Revue and ended up consorting with Charles Mingus. As well as offering a glimpse into the creative processes behind Hejira and Don Juan…, there was a real sense of joy to these many unreleased live performances, whether Mitchell was road-testing an a capella version of “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines” (“one more verse!”) or pausing “A Case Of You” halfway through to extol the medicinal virtues of Canada Dry.

5
NEIL YOUNG
Archives Vol III (1976-1987)
REPRISE
Across 17 discs, 198 tracks plotted the turbulent tale of Neil’s unhinged late ’70s and wild ’80s, including a series of glorious live sets from 1976, an entire set of songs recorded in Linda Ronstadt’s kitchen and the full shitkicking country set from his mid-’80s International Harvesters tour. For extra ragged glory, a deluxe edition (sadly only available in the US) added five Blu-Ray discs of live shows and gonzo cinema.

4
BROADCAST 
Distant Call / Spell Blanket
WARP
Billed as the last ever Broadcast releases, these two demo collections – the latter destined for their tragically unfinished fifth album – turned out to be as magical as anything in their catalogue. As Trish Keenan trilled these embryonic (yet often still perfectly structured) songs, as if to herself, it’s clear that Broadcast would have been otherworldly and transportive even without their banks of antique synths. 

3
CAN
Live In Paris 1973
SPOON / MUTE
The only release in Can’s revelatory live series to feature the impish presence of Damo Suzuki, and therefore instantly essential. As with the band’s other concert recordings, recognisable ‘hits’ like “Spoon” and “One More Night” were subsumed into longer, mesmeric jams, surging into the stratosphere with maximum countercultural force. A couple of excellent 1977 recordings (from Aston and Keele universities) completed Can’s invigorating archive trawl.

2
DAVID BOWIE
Rock ‘N’ Roll Star!
PARLOPHONE
“I don’t mean heavy loud but heavy sweet,” intoned the unmistakable voice of David Bowie, gently instructing Mick Ronson as to how many saxophones he wanted on “Soul Love”. Not every recent collection of Bowie demos have been essential, but this one was a revelation, offering you a ringside seat as a generational pop genius knocked together his game-changing Ziggy Stardust… project in real-time. 

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1
ALICE COLTRANE
The Carnegie Hall Concert
IMPULSE!
Finally, it appears that Alice Coltrane has taken her deserved place at the top table of 20th century musical icons, alongside her trailblazing husband. Rifle through Uncut’s best albums of 2024, and her influence is everywhere – not just on harpists like the amazing Nala Sinephro and Brandee Younger (who makes several key contributions to Shabaka’s recent album) but on artists as diverse as Julia Holter, The Smile, Arooj Aftab and Dirty Three. 

Naturally, the Impulse! archivists have been furiously trawling the vaults to see if there might be anything from Alice’s early ’70s heyday to match the jaw-dropping discovery of John Coltrane’s lost album Both Directions At Once a few years ago. With The Carnegie Hall Concert, they hit the jackpot. 

Recorded live in New York in the same month as the release of her spiritual jazz touchstone Journey In Satchidananda, it featured the first two tracks from that album blissfully spun out to more than twice their original length with the help of an expanded ‘double quartet’, including the likes of Jimmy Garrison and Clifford Jarvis. But it’s on an incredible version of John Coltrane’s “Africa” – with Alice having switched from harp to piano – where dual saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp really earned their corn, trading blazing solos for almost half an hour with no let-up in intensity. 

“The spirit was there at all times,” recalled bassist Cecil McBee in the liner notes. “I’ve never heard anything that I played that was more intense… It was absolutely amazing.” Listening back today, it’s hard to disagree.

Ringo Starr joins Paul McCartney onstage at London’s O2 Arena

Sam Richards
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Ringo Starr joins Paul McCartney onstage at London’s O2 Arena

Ringo Starr joined Paul McCartney onstage at the London’s O2 Arena last night (December 19) for the final 2024 date of Macca’s Got Back tour. The former Beatles bandmates teamed up in the encore for a run through “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club (Reprise)” and “Helter Skelter”.

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Earlier in the show, McCartney had welcomed Rolling Stone Ron Wood onto the stage to play “Get Back”.

There was a third surprise special guest: McCartney’s long-lost Hofner 500/1 bass guitar, which was stolen from him in 1972 but returned earlier this year. “And here to make its first stage appearance in 50 years… is my original bass!” declared McCartney. “I haven’t played it in 50 years.”

Read Uncut’s review of Paul McCartney’s Got Back tour in Manchester (December 14) here.

Send us your questions for Vashti Bunyan!

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Vashti Bunyan!

It’s fair to say that Vashti Bunyan’s musical career hasn’t followed a conventional path. After a faltering attempt to make it as a pop singer in Swinging London, she dropped out of the rat race and journeyed by horse-drawn wagon to the Isle Of Skye, an experience that informed her startling 1970 debut Just Another Diamond Day, recorded with assistance from members of Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band.

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It proved to be Bunyan’s last recording for more than 30 years, until her rediscovery by freak-folk luminaries such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective prompted a remarkable renaissance, leading to her 2005 Max Richter-producer comeback album Lookaftering and its 2014 follow-up Heartleap.

Lookaftering is about to be reissued for its 20th anniversary, augmented by a host of demo versions, alternate takes and live performances. But before that, Vashti has kindly agreed to undergo a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a wandering soul? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Friday January 3 and Vashti will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – Still Barking

Nigel Williamson
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Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – Still Barking

Hedonism and angst, heartbreak and rapture, bombast and tenderness – rock music does them all with an often startling brilliance. Humour? Not so much. Randy Newman – possibly the whip-smartest, funniest songwriter who has ever lived – was once asked by this reviewer why rock’n’roll has such an under-developed funny bone. His answer was simple: rock stars take themselves far too seriously and want to be remembered for saving the world rather than playing it for laughs. 

Buy Still Barking here

Hedonism and angst, heartbreak and rapture, bombast and tenderness – rock music does them all with an often startling brilliance. Humour? Not so much. Randy Newman – possibly the whip-smartest, funniest songwriter who has ever lived – was once asked by this reviewer why rock’n’roll has such an under-developed funny bone. His answer was simple: rock stars take themselves far too seriously and want to be remembered for saving the world rather than playing it for laughs. 

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There are exceptions that prove the rule, of course – Frank Zappa managed to be a serious musician and to inject a caustic wit into the Mothers Of Invention’s early records. Yet no rock’n’roll band has ever set out with quite such an endearingly eccentric, consistent and overarching objective to make us laugh as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Over 17 CDs and three DVDs this extravaganza of countercultural hilarity is the ultimate guide to the Bonzos’ unique mix of highbrow surrealism, lowbrow smut, seaside postcard humour with a psychedelic twist, slapstick, vaudeville and mordant satire, all spiced with a delicious silliness that traces its legacy back to The Goon Show and helped to beget Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As such it represents a vast upscaling on the previously definitive Bonzos collection, the 1992 triple disc set Cornology, which was reissued in 2011 as A Dog’s Life and which compiled the five original Bonzos studio albums plus singles and a sprinkling of rarities.

The full title, We Are Normal But We Are Still Barking, was dreamt up by the band’s guitarist, co-writer and unofficial musical director Neil Innes, who passed away during the seven painstaking years it took to put the project together while masters were tracked down, rare and previously unreleased material was sourced and cleared and a court case that threatened to kibosh the entire enterprise was fought and won. Two other Bonzos, Vernon Dudley Bowhay-Nowell and Martin “Sam Spoons” Ash, were also sadly lost in action during the long haul.

The first half of the box consists of the five original albums remastered, with the first two presented in mono and stereo iterations. Needless to say, it’s all essential stuff, but if you were forced to cram the dog’s bollocks on to a single ‘best of’ disc there are certain landmarks we can probably all agree on. From their 1967 debut Gorilla you would need “Cool Britannia”, Viv Stanshall’s unforgettable Elvis impersonation on “Death Cab For Cutie” and the mind-bendingly wonderful “The Intro And The Outro” (“and looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler on vibes – nice!”). From the 1968 follow-up The Doughnut In Grany’s Greenhouse you’d want “Can Blue Men Sing The Whites” and the hysterically ridiculous “My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe” and from 1969’s Tadpoles it would be impossible to live without the hit single “I’m The Urban Spaceman”, produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym Apollo C Vermouth. When it comes to 1969’s Keynsham you’d surely take Innes’ “You Done My Brain In”, and from 1972’s posthumous Let’s Make Up And Be Friendly the nine-minute “Rawlinson End” – the first official appearance of Stanshall’s famous Sir Henry character – is a must.

After that, though, we take a deeper dive into a cornucopia of outtakes, demos, rehearsal tapes, BBC sessions and concert recordings plus vintage TV and film footage. Not included in the latter is the magnificently bonkers nightclub performance of “Death Cab For Cutie” from The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, which was the wider world’s first exposure to the Bonzos when the film premiered on BBC 1 on Boxing Day, 1967. Never mind, for the rest of the visual content we get over three DVDs is wonderfully evocative, from an improbable performance of “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey” on Blue Peter in early 1966 when the Bonzos were still a trad jazz combo to appearances on ITV’s New Faces in 1967 and on BBC 2’s short-lived Colour Me Pop the following year. Perhaps best of all, though, is the disc compiling the Bonzos’ appearances on the anarchic comedy series Do Not Adjust Your Set, which launched the TV careers of future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.

The first episode – on which the group performed the music-hall song “Jollity Farm” – was broadcast on ITV on the same day as Magical Mystery Tour premiered, which meant the Bonzos outdid The Beatles that Christmas by appearing on both main channels. As regulars on the weekly show, they went on to perform such favourites as “The Intro And The Outro”, “Death Cab For Cutie” and the splendid “Harvey The High School Hermit”, which they never recorded, and which features Stanshall and Roger Ruskin Spear debating the respective merits of using cooking fat or porridge as hair gel.

The outtakes expand on the Bonzos’ love of a preposterous cover, first heard on the “Sound Of Music” piss-take on Gorilla, and include an inscrutable take on Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang” and a ridiculously mannered “Blue Suede Shoes”.

Among the demos are numerous songs that never saw the light of day including “The Boiled Ham Rhumba” (“Cat meat, cat meat in your tin, did you once walk around like me?”), “Boo”, a comedic ghost story with references to Macbeth and Hamlet, and the doo-wop pastiche “The Mr Hyde In Me” (“two gins will set him free”).

The concert material suggests the Bonzos’ spontaneous musical mayhem translated sometimes messily to the live stage – or as Legs Larry Smith proudly puts it, their improvs were “never knowingly over-rehearsed”.

A tendency to swap instruments and throw in gratuitously mad deconstructions of tunes such as “I’m For Ever Blowing Bubbles” and the “Dragnet” theme might have been amusing if you were there; invariably they work less well on playback. On the other hand, it’s impossible not to love a band that when supporting The Who in their post-Woodstock pomp at the Fillmore East in November 1969 dared to follow a riotous version of saxophonist Spear’s “Trouser Press” with an outrageous piss-take of “Pinball Wizard”. The Bonzos were never the sort to worry about upsetting fragile rock star egos.

Almost 60 tracks from 15 BBC Radio One sessions between 1967 and 1969 offer a better representation of their unique ability to do irony with a warm-hearted mix of affection and affectation. Peel loved them, of course, and they kept some of their best japes for his shows, including a side-splitting cover of “The Monster Mash” and the splendiferous “The Craig Torso Show” and its seasonal sequel “The Craig Torso Christmas Show”.

Needless to say, they also sent up Peel mercilessly. “The other day I was collecting shells on the seashore to stick on a coffee table that I’d made into a hamster when suddenly a Tyrannosaurus Rex attacked a woman and pulled her leg off”, Innes deadpans in a perfect imitation of the DJ’s voice by way of introducing the country spoof “I Found The Answer”, yet another song that never made its way on to a studio album.

There was simply nothing quite like the Bonzos and there’s more than enough intro here to keep you smiling all the way to the outro and beyond.

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Bridget Hayden And The Apparitions – Cold Blows The Rain

Rob Young
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Bridget Hayden And The Apparitions – Cold Blows The Rain

The Yorkshire moors, wrote the novelist Emily Bronté, were a place to walk where your own nature would lead you. If only Emily could had lived in the age of Spotify and earbuds, she could have had the ideal soundtrack as she hiked away from the shadowy region, whose unsustaining vastness waxes drear. That soundtrack being Cold Blows The Rain, the first album which prolific vocalist and freeform avant rocker Bridget Hayden has released with this trio, The Apparitions.

Buy Cold Blows The Rain on vinyl here

The Yorkshire moors, wrote the novelist Emily Bronté, were a place to walk where your own nature would lead you. If only Emily could had lived in the age of Spotify and earbuds, she could have had the ideal soundtrack as she hiked away from the shadowy region, whose unsustaining vastness waxes drear. That soundtrack being Cold Blows The Rain, the first album which prolific vocalist and freeform avant rocker Bridget Hayden has released with this trio, The Apparitions.

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It’s difficult to escape the shadowy regions of the Calder Valley, as the prevailing climate – as the album title implies – is in a mostly minor mode. Fretting drizzle and moky fogs. About a half hour’s drive south west of the Bronte village of Haworth, just on the other side of the untamed moor that Emily took as the setting for her novel Wuthering Heights, lies Todmorden. It’s here in West Yorkshire that Hayden, and the Todfellows’ Hall where these songs were recorded in 2022, and the Basin Rock label that’s now releasing them, are based. Tod-morden: death and murder appear to be woven into the ancient cloth of its very name. And while there isn’t exactly a murder ballad among this batch of eight English and Irish traditional songs, there are plenty of wounded souls suffering terrible loss, and restless spirits whose graves were not dug deep enough.

The Apparitions are well named. The arrangements, sparse but never parched, are an ethereal blend of Hayden’s banjo, cello and synth; Sam McLoughlin’s harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill’s violin. On tunes like “When I Was In My Prime” and “Factory Girl”, plucked banjo stalks across vibrating strings and squeezed air, like a skeleton tiptoeing through a field of windblown grass.

The opening “Lovely On the Water”, a song originally collected by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1908, sets the tone for the rest. It’s a lament for a pair of young lovers ripped apart. A last, tearful embrace before he must set sail for a distant war. The incomplete song’s last lines describe the collective mourning on Tower Hill of bereaved mothers, wives and lovers. The Apparitions take the song at a steady, funereal pace, adding dignity to devastation. Next comes “Blackwater Side”, a tale told from the woman’s perspective of a love betrayed. It’s a familiar entry in the English folk canon, but where earlier versions by everyone from Anne Briggs to Sandy Denny and Oysterband tend to enhance its rhythmic perkiness, here Hayden drapes the song in a shroud of despond.

On “She Moved Through The Fayre”, a lyric mostly written by a pair of Irish folk collectors just over 100 years back, Hayden’s gentle vocal swoops and glides. It’s a milder nod to a signature technique familiar from singers like Maddy Prior. Mostly, though, Hayden’s plays her vocal straight and unmannered. In this way she comes across as an inheritor of Shirley Collins’ mantle: a vessel pouring these old songs out in a neutral English timbre.

Another key figure is Margaret Barry, the Irish singer who recorded “The Factory Girl” three times in the 1950s with key folk figures Peter Kennedy, Ewan MacColl and Bill Leader. Hayden and the Apparitions’ version of the same song is quietly heart-rending. A wealthy man falls in love with a goddess he sees trudging off to work in a factory. It’s an enigmatic ballad where myth collides with the harsh realities of the industrial revolution, although the trio abandon the narrative in mid-lyric, just as he is trying to tempt her to leave her place of work. She gets to exercise her blue notes in “Red Rocking Chair”, a traditional tune channelled from Dock Boggs in the 1920s via the New Lost City Ramblers in the post-war folk revival. This track includes some satisfyingly deep-throated tones dredged from the bottom end of McLoughlin’s harmonium.

Hayden has a long, peerless pedigree in the broad realm of British underground experimental music. She cut her teeth in the Leeds avant rock/improv/free folk collective Vibracathedral Orchestra, and as a sometime collaborator with US outsiders Sunburned Hand Of The Man and British alternative veterans The Telescopes. These are all groups whose MO involves jumping off a rock face and embracing the free fall, however sticky the end may be. Since her 2011 solo album An Indifferent Ocean, she has become adept in sculpting intimate drone/noise artefacts, notched and pitted like potsherds pulled from the Yorkshire earth. Her more recent contributions to Folklore Tapes (including several collaborations featuring Apparitions member Sam McLoughlin) have refined this approach. In the past few years Hayden and McLoughlin have teamed up with Richard Chamberlain in Schisms. Their ultra-lo-fi fuzzball psychedelic improv can be exhilarating, but exists on a very different planet (or at least in a far muggier climate) than the exquisite acoustic snowglobe of Cold Blows The Rain.

By their nature, folk songs are like ghosts. They keep insisting on being sung, again and again, returning to haunt the singers who voice them, and we who listen. They seem to know us, adapting to our own times and our current ways of hearing. It’s only when they remain bogged down in customs and traditions that they seem smaller, under control, exorcised of their power. Perhaps it’s this that makes “The Unquiet Grave” such a perfect end note to this album. Appearing in the Child Ballads published in 1860, “The Unquiet Grave” is one of those archetypal works of folk art whose central mythology can be traced back to ancient Greek, Roman and Norse folklore. A dead woman’s spirit returns to tell her abandoned lover to pipe down after a year of wailing. Otherwise she can’t rest in peace. And he can’t join her in death, as he wishes, because then their hearts would wither away. Perversely, this mordant lyric is as much about living the earthly life to the full, even as it focuses on the minutiae of grief and loss. Scores of artists have recorded this song since the Second World War, yet by suppressing all sense of melodrama and focusing on the pure emotion of the situation, Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all.

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