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John Mayall has died aged 90

Michael Bonner
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John Mayall has died aged 90

John Mayall, the pioneering Blues musician, has died aged 90.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Mayall came to prominence in the ’60s with his band, the Bluesbreakers, which acted as a finishing school for the future stars of the British blues boom – including Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Mick Taylor.

A statement on Mayall’s Instagram page announced that the musician died on Monday at his home in California. “It is with heavy hearts that we bear the news that John Mayall passed away peacefully in his California home yesterday, July 22, 2024, surrounded by his loving family. Health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career have finally led to peace for one of this world’s greatest road warriors. John Mayall gave us ninety years of tireless efforts to educate, inspire and entertain.”

Born in Macclesfield in 1933, he discovered jazz and blues through his father’s record collection. After spending three years in Korea for his National Service, Mayall studied at art college, working as a graphic designer before turning professional musician in 1963.

As part of the emerging London blues scene, encouraged by Alexis Corner and Cyril Davis, he played with the Powerhouse Four before forming the Bluesbreakers in 1963.

“There was a lot of driving,” Mayall told Uncut in 2017. “If it was within reach, we’d play it. You’d do a Friday night gig at the Flamingo, a Saturday early show, a Saturday late-night show. We’d rack up eight or nine shows a week. It was a lot of hard work, mostly just get in the van and drive to where we’re playing. But the reward comes once you get onstage and start playing.”

Famously, the Bluebreakers provided opportunities for future stars. “Everybody was given total freedom in my bands and that’s one of the things that attracts musicians to me,” he told us. “So if someone leaves, it is no big deal, it’s a natural process, and you get someone else.”

Mayall moved to California at the end of the 1960s, where he moved away from straight blues towards acoustic music and then into jazz and funk as the ’70s progressed.

He broke-up and then reformed the Bluesbreakers, releasing over 50 albums in a career spanning seven decades and continuing to tour. When Uncut spoke to Mayall, who was then 83, he was still playing 100 shows a year around the world.

“You get up onstage and you play,” he told us. “Is there much room to improvise? Yeah, of course. That’s the blues.”

Jack White – No Name

Peter Watts
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Jack White – No Name

Even before he formed Third Man Records, Jack White had perfected the art of the guerilla record drop – he once hid a bunch of seven inches inside re-upholstered sofas. But he’ll have to go some way to top the release strategy for his surprise sixth album – his first new music since 2022’s Fear Of The Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive. An anonymous white label, No Name was given away free with any purchase at White’s Third Man stores on Friday while a very limited number of copies were also sent to customers at random in the mail. Its mysterious grooves contained 14 tracks of raw, fresh, fierce garage blues – seven on each side. There were no official song titles, no hint at the artist – but there was no doubt that this was the work of Jack White himself.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Although the opening song, a menacing “Killing Floor” style blues, includes the tongue-in-cheek line that “nothing is this world is free”, customers who got a copy of No Name were encouraged by Third Man to “rip it” and the album is now freely available on You Tube. Any thoughts that this might be a gimmick are dispelled before the end of the first side, with the psych rattle of “Side One, Track Six”. By the time you reach the majestic “Side Two, Track Five”, with cool Hammond and an amazing R&B Graham Bond Organisation groove, it’s clear that this is one of the best albums of the year.

No Name has some of White’s most memorable riffs since Blunderbuss and is his most red-blooded rock record since Elephant. White has released great solo records since then and his live shows are a blast, but he’s never sounded quite as unshackled and delirious as he does here, pounding out the sort of wild garage blues that made his name. “I’m on a mission baby,” he roars on “Side Two, Track Six” – and suddenly it’s 2001 all over again.

As well as referencing his beloved number seven on the brilliant “Side One, Track Five”, a song that manages to combine spoken word, Sabbath, Hendrix and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, White has rifled through the White Stripes equipment warehouse. Here are some of the greatest guitar sounds heard on any record in 2024, from the new wave solo of “Side One, Track Two”, the frantic Cream-style riffs of “Side One, Track Four” and the distorted slide guitar of “Side Two, Track Two”.

Several tracks have a hard rock feel. “Side Two, Track One”, which starts like Dr Feelgood before building into a speaker-thrashing AC/DC-inspired crescendo, or the Miller’s Crossing-referencing “Side One, Track Seven”. Led Zeppelin are a major reference point, but always filtered through a punk-garage lens. The closing number, “Side Two, Track Seven”, sees White and his band (perhaps Dominic Davis on bass and Daru Jones on drums?) explore “Kashmir”-style Zep territory, while dogs howl and bark, enjoying the show. Like all great artists, White has a fear of repetition, but looking back doesn’t have to mean regression. On No Name, he’s done something special on his own terms, delighted and surprised his audience, and provided one of the great rock moments of the year.

Watch the video for Brian Eno’s “Stiff”

Michael Bonner
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Watch the video for Brian Eno’s “Stiff”
Buy Eno on vinyl here

To coincide with the release of the Official Soundtrack to Gary Hustwit’s generative film Eno, a new video has been released for the track “Stiff“, made from footage newly unearthed during the making of the documentary.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Watch the video below.

“Stiff” was originally included on the Eno album My Squelchy Life, which was due for release in 1991, but never saw the light of day in 2015.

The vinyl edition of the Official Soundtrack album comes as 2LP recycled black vinyl and 2LP pink & white vinyl (only available from Eno’s website), and a 73-minute long CD with an illustrated 16 page booklet.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Toumani Diabaté – Album By Album

Graeme Thomson
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Toumani Diabaté – Album By Album

As tribute to Toumani Diabaté, who has died aged 58 following a short illness, here’s our Album By Album interview with the Malian kora master from Uncut’s February 2011 issue [Take 165].

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Born into the griot bloodline of West African storytellers and poets, Toumani Diabaté is the 71st generation in his family to play the kora, the 21-string harp with which he creates a dazzling kaleidoscope of musical colours. The Malian is a man of many parts. A Goodwill ambassador for the UN and a bosom buddy of Damon Albarn, he has collaborated with everyone from Bjork to Herbie Hancock, and is as comfortable playing ATP as WOMAD. “There is too much misunderstanding between people, between nations and cultures,” he says. “We need to come together and play together.” Delving into the highlights of his remarkable career, it’s clear he puts his music where his mouth is.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ

Kaira

HANNIBAL, 1988. PRODUCED BY LUCY DURAN

Diabaté makes an immediate impression with his first album, a haunting collection of solo kora improvisations recorded in London in a couple of hours when he is just 22.

Kaira is the name of the movement that took care of our culture when the French came to colonise Mali. My mum and dad walked around playing our music, from town to town. My father Sidiki was the king of the kora and his technique was putting the three functions together: bass line, melody and improvisation. When you listen it’s like three men playing at the same time, and I learned the kora that way. So Kaira was saying, “Here is my style and my family’s kora style.” It was like my ID card: “OK, this is the Toumani passport for the Malian style on the kora.” I did it for Joe Boyd at Hannibal Records. He dropped me off at Firehouse studio and went to get something to eat for me. It was a lovely autumn day in London, and before he came back I’d recorded these five songs. To me that was only the beginning of the album. I wanted to overdub, but Joe came back with the food and said, “No, no, it’s finished.” I was frustrated, I didn’t understand – let me play! But he said he loved it like this. It was done in one take, no overdubbing. He had rented the studio for three days, but in two and a half hours the record was done. I wasn’t happy that day, but later on I understood he was right.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ

Djelika

HANNIBAL, 1995. PRODUCED BY LUCY DURAN, JOE BOYD

Named after his daughter, on Djelika Diabaté collaborates with veteran balaphonist Keletigui Diabaté and young ngoni player, Basekou Kouyate, as well as two bass players: the legendary Danny Thompson and Javier Colina from Ketama, the Spanish flamenco band who worked with him on Songhai I and II. The results are rich, inventive and playful.

It was like: “On Kaira you’ve listened to Toumani solo with the kora, now you’re going to listen to the kora in the middle of all the traditional Malian instruments.” Ngoni and balaphone are all very important to the griot sound. What we play isn’t written. It’s not like orchestral music, and people don’t always understand that. It’s natural and fresh, but at the same time it’s very old and talks about our history from 700 years ago. It’s older than Mozart, older than Bach. We’ve been listening to it for a long, long time! We started this album in December 1993 in London at the BBC Maida Vale studios and finished in Brussels. It was all recorded live. Danny Thompson and Javier from Ketama played double bass, just to have two different styles on the record. Javier is from a flamenco gypsy family, and Danny is totally different, he’s a jazz-blues musician. I wanted that mix. Danny and me, we had a very good time together! We have a great admiration. When Danny plays I love it, and he loves my music. We had a deep connection between us, like father and son.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ AND BALLAKÉ SISSOKO

New Ancient Strings

HANNIBAL, 1999. PRODUCED BY LUCY DURAN  

In 1970, two of Mali’s greatest exponents of the kora – Toumani’s father Sidiki Diabaté and his friend Djelimadi Sissoko – made the landmark Ancient Strings album. Nearly 30 years later, the sons of both men unite to play the same songs in a series of magical new improvisations.

I wanted to record a duo kora album. I need to thank [producer, ethnomusicologist and Radio 3 presenter] Lucy Duran. She gave me lots of good ideas about my job, and she brought this idea to me to make an album of ‘new’ Ancient Strings, although she didn’t suggest doing it with Ballaké. My father and Ballaké’s father were always playing together, and when I asked my mum who could I play with, she said, “Call Ballaké.” It was recorded in Mali with Lucy and engineer Nick Parker. Finally, we decided to record in the marble hall of the Palais de Congres in Bamako, a very grand building. It was late in the night [of September 22, 1997], and in two hours the record was done. No rehearsing or anything. Lucy and Nick were there for two weeks, but it was done in a night so they had a holiday! I come from a Muslim family, and all of these improvisations are God willing. The kora is about divine inspiration coming to us. When I play the divine inspiration comes through my body and goes through to the strings. It can be fast or slow, but I’m lucky – always the inspiration seems to come fast.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ WITH DAMON ALBARN, KO KO KAN SO SATA DOUMBIA, AFEL BOCOUM & FRIENDS

Mali Music

HONEST JON’S, 2002. PRODUCED BY DAMON ALBARN

This spirited, experimental and heartfelt meeting between Mali and the West is based on recordings made by Albarn on an Oxfam-organised trip in 2001, travelling around the country armed with a melodica and a DAT tape. Modern textures are later overdubbed back in London.

Oxfam called me and advised me about Damon’s visit. I really didn’t know him before, but they told me he was a great British superstar and they wanted me to take care of this project, talk to Damon and introduce him to different musicians, show him around. He came with lots of media people, but he was great. Our song “4am At Toumani’s” was like a joke. He came to my place late at night and we drank lots of tea, Damon played his melodica and I took a kora. In my family we build the kora. This was a new one, it wasn’t really finished, and it wasn’t really in tune. I didn’t know our jam was being recorded for release or I would have done it with more seriousness. One year later Damon called me and said, “OK, the record is going to be released.” I was in Sydney, and I asked him to send it. I listened to it and I wanted to do it properly, but he thought it was good like that. So, no problem! I respect Damon. He’s my brother. He’s the only one in all UK who really connected with Malian music, and he’s tried to do some positive things for the musicians and Mali.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ AND ALI FARKA TOURÉ

In The Heart of the Moon

WORLD CIRCUIT, 2005. PRODUCED BY NICK GOLD

A ground-breaking collaboration between Diabaté and one of Africa’s most celebrated musicians, killer guitarist Ali Farka Touré. Ry Cooder adds the occasional lick, but the real joy lies in hearing these two musicians from opposite ends of Mali’s cultural spectrum conversing through their music. Won the 2006 Grammy for Best Traditional World Music Album.

I was the first Malian musician to come and live in the UK. I was living at Lucy Duran’s house in Camden Town and Lucy was always inviting people for dinner. I got a chance to meet a lot of friends, including people from the BBC and Anne Hunt [from the World Circuit record label]. Anne decided to come to Mali to meet Ali. He was a friend of my father’s, they worked together at the national radio in Mali although they didn’t play music together. To help Anne, I went back to Mali and put them together, and then Ali came to England. He wanted to record one song with me, so we went to the studio. When we played that song together the idea of doing a full album came from Nick Gold [founder and producer at World Circuit].

We recorded the entire album in Mali in two or three days at the Hotel Mandé. Very quick, very nice, relaxed. Everything was clear, simple, easy. I’ve had a chance to play with a lot of musicians in my life, but playing with Ali Farka Touré was something different. It was the first meeting between musicians from the north of Mali, where he was from, and the south. Ali was not a griot, and I am, and the music from the griot people is very old music. Ali was from a different background: different concepts, different tradition of musicians. He is a unique voice from his mountain, and Toumani is a unique voice from his mountain. I never thought that he could play griot, but he was so intelligent. He knew a lot about music in Mali. I still remember the respect that he brought to me, and he loved my kora playing style.

Ali never, ever practised. He wanted to keep the natural things in the music, and I’m the same. I like to play in a soft way, ready to give and ready to learn. That’s what I’m always doing. It’s not from the head, it’s from the heart. To produce that kind of great music you need to have a good soul. Ali had that. When you met him for the first time, you felt like you met him 20 years ago. That love we had for each other and the people is what Mali is like. It’s the tradition and the culture here. The ambience in the music, the feeling coming from it, you can feel that. And it won the Grammy, which was great!

TOUMANI DIABATÉ AND THE SYMMETRIC ORCHESTRA

Boulevard De L’Independence

WORLD CIRCUIT, 2006. PRODUCED BY NICK GOLD

The culmination of a decade of weekly jam sessions held at Diabaté’s Hogon club in Bamako, featuring a mighty 50-piece big band hailing from all over west Africa. A riot of horns, percussion, strings and the blinding vocal power of Kasse Mady Diabaté, the album covers everything from Senegalese salsa to old Mandé empire tunes, tied together by Diabaté’s kora.

In the 80s I started building this band to rebuild Manden Empire in a cultural way, to play at different ceremonies in Mali, especially at the President’s Palace. The musicians are all from west African Manden countries. I took the best from Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mauretania, and I put them all together. When I was in Mali every Friday night I would play with them at my club Hogon. It was great. Playing with them is like a laboratory! We prepared all the songs for the record like that and recorded them at the Hotel Mandé. The kora is in the middle of the project, it gets shared with the band. So, for example, the bass player plays the kora bass line. It’s a meeting between old and modern. My dream is to keep this band. Computers can do the job of 40 musicians in the studio, but they don’t have any emotion. When the bass player or drummer is happy he can give you a new song; the computer can’t do that. So it was dream to do this. It’s not easy, but it’s great when you see them all together.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ

Mandé Variations

WORLD CIRCUIT, 2008. PRODUCED BY NICK GOLD

Diabaté returns after two decades to the haunting solo acoustic kora sounds of his first album. A mixture of visionary interpretations of classic themes and new improvisations, the results are simply sublime.

It was to get back to Kaira with 20 years worth of experience, playing with different musicians and doing my kora style. I get a lot of fans playing with Bjork, with Damon, with Taj Mahal, with Ketama, with Danny Thompson, but sometimes people might think: “This man has forgotten where he comes from.” So I go back to solo kora. It’s really a very emotional album, but very quick, recorded in Livingston studios with Nick Gold and [engineer] Jerry Boys. It was only me, so there wasn’t much to do. It’s an education for Western people to know how far the kora can go. When you say “African music” in western countries they think about percussion and dance, they don’t understand that there’s more to learn than this. We have everything: we have classical, we have music from different traditions. Western people don’t really know about variations. The song “Jarabi” is also on Kaira. Listen to both and you can hear exactly what level I went to with the variation. Two songs – “El Nabiyouna” and “Ali Farka Touré” – I just tuned the kora and played. Just played, one time – ping, that’s it. I wanted to keep this idea and this instinct, to keep everything fresh. To compose and record it right away. It’s not easy to do that.

TOUMANI DIABATÉ AND ALI FARKA TOURÉ

Ali & Toumani

WORLD CIRCUIT, 2010. PRODUCED BY NICK GOLD

Recorded in London over three days in 2005, just a few months before Farka Touré succumbed to bone cancer in March 2006 at the age of 66. This poignant context only makes the spellbinding music all the more powerful.

After the success of the first one I talked to Nick Gold, without telling Ali, and said I wanted to record more with Ali Farka Touré. Ali was suffering with his health. He was sick and it was difficult sometimes. We had to stop the recording when he was in pain, but he wanted to continue. I remember one thing: he was always laughing, and when we asked him, “Are you all right?”, he’d say: “Yes, Toumani, I’m OK!” He never complained. He didn’t want people to feel he wasn’t happy, he was always in the middle of things. I will never forget that. He was always happy to play with me, you know. And I’m very, very happy today that Ali and me had a chance – thank God – to record together for the world. Ali & Toumani is like a book. It’s an education about music, about tradition, about a culture. I think the world needs that today. When you listen to this music you can learn the past, you can learn the present, and you can learn the future also. I prefer it more than the first one. We had more time, it wasn’t recorded in a hurry, and the sound and the idea is clearer than the first.

AFROCUBISM

AfroCubism

WORLD CIRCUIT, 2010. PRODUCED BY NICK GOLD

Originally intended to take place in 1994 but scuppered when the Malian contingent never arrived, this beautiful collaboration between members of Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club and many of Mali’s most revered musicians finally took place in 2009 in Madrid.

When I play with other musicians, I don’t play their music. I play my music. And I don’t let them play my music! I say, “Play your music and I’ll play mine.” We put it together and it becomes a new music, from the heart. So on this record we didn’t play Cuban music and they didn’t play Malian music. We just played and put it together, and now it’s new music called AfroCubism. There’s no direct connection between Mali and Cuba, but one thing is true: although they are both very poor countries financially, they are number one culturally, which is very important. The only problem is that we couldn’t communicate. The Cubans didn’t speak French or English, and the Malians don’t speak Spanish, but music creates it’s own language. The G, the A, the C on the guitar is the same in Cuba as it is in Mali, the same in Senegal, South Africa and Japan. You don’t need to speak English to play with Ali Farka Touré. Toumani didn’t need to speak English to play with Bjork. I don’t need to speak American to play with Herbie Hancock or Damon Albarn. With the Cubans, away from the music there was no real communication: just “Hi! Hola! Bien!” That’s all we could say, but we still made this fabulous record together.

Exclusive! Inside a new collection of unreleased Arthur Lee songs: “The music covers his wide-ranging taste and adeptness…”

Rob Hughes
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Exclusive! Inside a new collection of unreleased Arthur Lee songs: “The music covers his wide-ranging taste and adeptness…”

Exclusive! High Moon Records boss George Wallace on a tantalising new collection of unreleased Love songs

GEORGE WALLACE: “This unprecedented collection of Arthur Lee/Love recordings were made during the last 15 years of his life – from 1990 until Arthur’s final studio recording, in the summer of 2005. In a Memphis hospital in 2006, after a long battle against leukaemia, Arthur gave his wife, Diane, two CDs he’d compiled and asked her if she would oversee the release of the songs after he was gone. Arthur Lee Is Love Just To Remind You is comprised of the songs that Arthur put on the CDs.

“Sourced from Arthur’s trove of tapes, the music covers his wide-ranging taste and adeptness, from Forever Changes-style, haunting strings and brass-adorned productions, to Arthur at the piano, playing Ray Charles-inspired licks and singing with glorious, soulful abandon.

READ THE MAKING OF LOVE’S “SHE COMES IN COLORS” HERE

“Baby Lemonade, who Arthur anointed as his ‘new Love’ in 1993, contribute their stellar musicianship to half of the album’s tracks. Earlier this year, in March, we booked the current band, led by Johnny Echols, into LA’s Sunset Sound, Studio A – the very same studio where Love recorded their first three albums – to record a final instrumental track for one of the songs on the CDs that Arthur gave to Diane. Joe Blocker, who played drums with Love in the mid-’70s, and was a lifelong friend of Arthur’s, was brought in to produce this unconventional session. The band was recording live to an Arthur vocal track (recorded the year before they joined up with him) and a lovely orchestral arrangement created by David Angel, who arranged and orchestrated Forever Changes. The session marked the 60th anniversary of Arthur and Johnny’s first studio collaboration: Arthur Lee and The L.A.G’s single, ‘The Ninth Wave’ b/w ‘Rumble-Still-Skins’, on Capitol Records.”

Hear “Five String Serenade” from Arthur Lee Is Love Just To Remind You below…

High Moon Records will release Arthur Lee Is Love Just To Remind You

Hear Gillian Welch and David Rawlings new track, “Empty Trainload Of Sky”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Gillian Welch and David Rawlings new track, “Empty Trainload Of Sky”

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are releasing a new album, Woodland, on their own Acony Records label on August 23.

You can hear “Empty Trainload Of Sky” from the album below.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Woodland was named for and recorded at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, TN. Of the album and studio and studio, Welch and Rawlings said, “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last twenty some years. The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”

The album is available to pre-order here.

The tracklisting for Woodland is:


Empty Trainload Of Sky

What We Had

Lawman

The Bells And The Birds

North Country

Hashtag

The Day The Mississippi Died

Turf The Gambler

Here Stands A Woman

Howdy Howdy

Suede / Manic Street Preachers – Alexandra Park, London, July 18

Mark Beaumont
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Suede / Manic Street Preachers – Alexandra Park, London, July 18

“I am a selection of dismantled almosts” reads the Anne Sexton quote emblazoned across screens erected in a glade beneath the imposing frontage of Alexandra Palace as Manic Street Preachers take the stage, exposing perhaps one of the unspoken stigmas of the co-headline tour. As much as they can be blockbuster money-spinners – Elton duelling pianos with Billy Joel; Jay-Z and Beyoncé cashing in on the world’s most famous marriage – they can also act as a means to muster joint fanbases for acts that only scraped the stadium league by themselves.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Nothing feels “almost” about the Manics and Suede’s joint tour, mind. Both of these iconic ’90s bands – swapping the headline spot and playing a tight 75 minutes apiece – are back in the ascendent. The Welsh rock insurrectionists bagged their first UK No 1 album since 1998 with 2021’s The Ultra Vivid Lament, while London’s suave indie sleaze originators are riding high on acclaim for 2022’s raw-edged Autofiction album. This joint tour, begun in North America in 2022 and revived for the UK this summer, is no Britpop cash-in charabanc – both bands would balk at the tag anyway. It’s simply an uncynical celebration of some of the most euphoric and exciting music the ’90s ever produced.

It feels bizarre to hear era-defining showstoppers like “You Love Us”, “Everything Must Go” and “Motorcycle Emptiness” knocked out in quick succession not long past seven o’clock. But such is the hit-heavy nature of such occasions. Recent Manics albums have ventured into chamber rock grace (2013’s Rewind The Film) and grief-stricken bombast (The Ultra Vivid Lament) but, drawing the first-on straw, they swerve such indulgences to go in two-footed on their formidable singles catalogue.

It’s difficult to imagine a finer, better-balanced Manics set. Their glory punk early era (“From Despair To Where”, “Little Baby Nothing” with a pink-clad The Anchoress taking Traci Lords’ defiant part) merges masterfully with the mid-period grandeur of “A Design For Life” and “No Surface All Feeling”, adorned with a snippet of Smashing Pumpkins‘ “Today” as if in honour of another recent alt-rock double header, Pumpkins versus Weezer.

When they dip into relative rarity, it’s only to pluck out refined treats: the sumptuous glide rock of “This Is Yesterday” or the polka-infused “Walk Me To The Bridge”. They’re battling a soundsystem so weedy it makes All Points East sound like AC/DC, rendering “Orwellian” and “To Repel Ghosts” airy, incorporeal affairs. But with Nicky Wire glamorously high-kicking his way through “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough” and James Dean Bradfield spinning on the spot through his quicksilver solos, they’re a god-tier band at any volume.

“Enjoy Suede, they’re gonna give you hell,” declares a departing Bradfield. And they do. Bold behind their readjusted critical armours, Brett Anderson’s black-clad rock Baudelaires open with the adrenalised noir of Autofiction track “Turn Off Your Brain And Yell” and chance several more of the record’s motorik rock moments in “Shadow Self” and “She Still Leads Me On”, a roaring tribute to Anderson’s late mother.

“We Are The Pigs” gets a new metal intro and they even dare a brand-new track, Anderson adopting a Lydon snarl for the punkish “Antidepressants”. But every corner of their music, draped with Anderson’s salacious melodies and Richard Oakes’ cumulonimbus atmospheres, is inherently magnificent, and Anderson has aged into a transfixing onstage beast.

He’s never been more Bowie than when straddling “New Generation” tonight, more celebratory than during a full-throated “Trash” or leaping into the crowd for “The Drowners”, or more heartfelt than when spilling gigantic torch songs like “Still Life”, “The Wild Ones” and “Saturday Night” down the hill to encompass all the seedy romances of North London. A life-affirming night.

Suede setlist
Turn Off Your Brain And Yell
Trash
Animal Nitrate
The Drowners
We Are The Pigs
The Only Way I Can Love You
Still Life
New Generation
Filmstar
Antidepressants
Saturday Night
She Still Leads Me On
Shadow Self
The Wild Ones
So Young
Metal Mickey
Beautiful Ones

Manic Street Preachers setlist
You Love Us
Everything Must Go
Motorcycle Emptiness
This Is Yesterday
You Stole The Sun From My Heart
To Repel Ghosts
Little Baby Nothing
Your Love Alone Is Not Enough
Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier
A Design For Life
La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)
Walk Me To The Bridge
Kevin Carter
Orwellian
From Despair To Where
No Surface All Feeling
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Daniel Dylan Wray
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Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Retaining mystery in the digital age is a difficult thing. And even more difficult in this time of over-saturation is releasing a record through entirely unconventional means and having it make a dent, let alone a meaningful impact. On Diamond Jubilee – the seventh album from Patrick Flegel’s alter-ego drag artist persona – Cindy Lee manages to achieve both.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

This album is not available to buy on any physical format yet. Nor is it on Spotify, Bandcamp or Apple. It is available only to download (for free, with donations encouraged) via the web 1.0 hosting site Geocities or to stream, ad-free, via YouTube. There is no accompanying press or liner notes, no artist bio, no interviews; just a sprawling two-part, two-hour record that has dropped in from nowhere like a parachute from the sky containing precious cargo. Although rather than disappearing into the ether as it lands, ignored by the algorithms, playlists and radio stations who have no access to the tracks to promote it, the album has instead landed to fervent hype.

Although, remarkably, such buzz appears genuinely justified. Diamond Jubilee feels like the work of an artist operating at the peak of their powers who is able to harness and crystallise all that potency and charge into a record that, on the surface, should be far too large, messy and stretched out to contain such a cohesive body of work.

Flegel has always shown chops as a songwriter; in their previous band Women they potently blended art-rock with flourishes of both pop and noise, while their previous records as Cindy Lee have shown promise by equally straddling the lines between experimentation and accessibility. However, Diamond Jubilee sounds like a record on which everything has come together and moved into another realm.

It blurs genres with glee, gliding between ’50s doo wop, ’60s girl groups, psychedelic pop and lo-fi indie, all delivered with a woozy, dreamy, occasionally crepuscular tone. “Always Dreaming” sounds like new-age dream-pop filtered through a busted four-track; “Demon Bitch” comes across as exactly the kind of thing you’d be delighted to hear on an album of outtakes from the self-titled Velvet Underground album, while “Glitz” recalls early Tame Impala if they really amped up the glam but wound down the production.

There is an inescapable feeling of duality to the record, in that it feels tender yet raw, immersive yet fractured, varied yet coherent. Given that Cindy Lee is a drag persona of Flegel, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that they are someone who is in a prime position to inherently understand the psychology, nuances and expressive capabilities of having, and exploring, dual identities and personalities. While there is not a stark night and day difference between the two parts of the album, there is a shift in shade, a subtle tweaking that seems to unlock another side to Cindy Lee. Tracks like “Gayblevision” feel like moving from the bedroom to the nightclub, as synths shimmer and an almost 1980s darkwave sheen moves in, completely shifting the tone, pace and punch of the album. These dualities often exist within single songs too. “What’s It Going To Take” feels like it owes as much to the bucolic and progressive sounds of the Canterbury Scene, as it does to avant-funk and bedroom pop. The vocals – as is generally the case throughout the record – are sparse, ethereal and minimal, often feeling more like a ghostly presence that swings by from time to time than a constant narrator.

But ultimately, where Cindy Lee thrives is not necessarily existing in one particular place or genre – or part of the album – but existing in the in-between, operating in blurred lines, misty shadows and the cracks. There is an inherently dreamy, almost Lynchian quality to this record that allows for a deeply and richly immersive listen that seems to float endlessly between varied places while losing little of its flow. Which is all the more impressive to achieve over a whopping 32 tracks.

While tonally, structurally and thematically it’s vastly different, there is something of a similar feeling and result here to The Magnetic Fields’ classic 69 Love Songs. Both manage the incredibly difficult feat of feeling vast and scattered across bountiful tracks, yet also complete, connected and the embodiment of a songwriter capable of tapping into a broad range of music seemingly on a whim.

Diamond Jubilee is a rare beast of an album in many ways. A genuine bolt out of the blue wrapped in mystery that unfurls with unpredictable dream-like logic. Everything about it – from its production to its delivery – feels distinctly analogue and from another era, adding to its almost alien-like landing. Here, Cindy Lee has managed to buck just about every trend, convention and expectation of what releasing music in the digital age is supposed to look and like. And, even more crucially, it sounds just as refreshing.

Tom Verlaine – Warm And Cool / Songs And Other Things / Around

Jon Dale
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Tom Verlaine – Warm And Cool / Songs And Other Things / Around

By the time Tom Verlaine stepped into the studio to record his first instrumental album, Warm And Cool [1992], he’d pretty much burned out on the endless cycle of record-release-tour dynamics that goes with life on a major label. Having played the game long enough, Verlaine had taken stock, and was keen to redraw the parameters of both his artistic and his everyday life. He’d long entertained a desire to record an instrumental collection, and there did seem to be something particularly appropriate about one of the most idiosyncratic and individual of guitar players going the instrumental route. For anyone who’d listened to the ecstatic flight of Verlaine’s bird-like guitar over the preceding two decades, Warm And Cool was no surprise; it was simply good to hear Verlaine in this new setting, one that so neatly suited his aesthetic.

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There were other things going on, of course. Warm And Cool was released in the same year as Television’s third, ‘comeback’ album. This self-titled set was received curiously; like everything Verlaine had done to this point, it suffered from living under the shadow of the band’s debut album, 1977’s Marquee Moon, by any measure an extraordinary rock album, and one that was already considered an iconic statement by critical and cultural consensus alike. Listening back, that third Television album works differently to what came before – as you’d expect, given the 14-year gap between it and its predecessor, Adventure – but it’s an album that doesn’t compromise, that doesn’t stint on great songs and playing, and that stands proud alongside Marquee Moon. It’s neither better nor worse, just different.

Television gave listeners their fill of Verlaine in songwriting mode, and in that respect, it also felt an extension of his run of superlative solo albums through the ’80s. Warm And Cool was its other side. It also set Verlaine on a new path, one where his music could nestle tidily within numerous different contexts. While the most obvious line you can sketch from Warm And Cool is to its instrumental 2006 successor, Around, it also points toward Verlaine’s work in soundtracking, and his improvisatory guitar duos with the likes of Jimmy Rip, including their performances playing alongside screenings of early 20th-century experimental film. Warm And Cool opened doors to experiences that Verlaine would chase for decades to come, all while letting the Television machine play out in slow motion – the odd tour here and there; some inconclusive recording sessions for a fabled, and never released, fourth album.

For anyone who thinks Warm And Cool would be an ambient drift, a collection of meanders and longueurs, though, listening back, it’s surprising how spiky it is at times. Recorded across two sessions, taking two days altogether to track – though mostly done on one night – Warm And Cool is a masterpiece in threading, where Verlaine seems to be grabbing hold of a simple melody, or cluster of chords and notes, throwing them to his fellow musicians to see what they make of them, and then capturing the wild, sometimes flustered ride of the moment. It helps, of course, that those fellow musicians are excellent players – on almost the whole album, it’s Patrick Derivaz on bass and Television’s Billy Ficca on drums. A song like “Ore” sparks with incandescence, Verlaine’s guitar shard-like as Ficca accents Verlaine’s playing with rumbling, clattering drums, Derivaz leaving notes hanging.

It’s also a welcome reminder that Verlaine wasn’t influenced by guitarists so much as he was free jazz saxophonists – John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and suchlike – and it’s that logic he pursues across much of Warm And Cool (the only guitarist that really seems a considered influence on Verlaine might be Mike Bloomfield). Sometimes things get subdued – the following “Depot (1958)”, or the spiralling, flinty “Saucer Crash” – and occasionally Verlaine’s guitar threads notes, like hints, across analogue silence, laying a trail of blinking lights through a darkened studio. The gently swinging “Harley Quinn” sits outside the general mood of Warm And Cool – satellited in from another session, it features Fred Smith of Television on bass, and Jay Dee Daugherty from Patti Smith’s band on drums.

It took Verlaine another 12 years to release Warm And Cool’s instrumental sequel, Around; on the same day in 2006, he also released Songs And Other Things, an album predominantly of vocal songs. Around seems lighter in the air than Warm And Cool, made up of a string of fleeting impressions, slippery statements for guitar. It’s rare for Verlaine’s music to sound like anyone else’s, but moments on Around recall the dustbowl laments of Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack, or the more stripped-back moments on Roy Montgomery’s albums – a similar psychic space is being explored here, perhaps.

Around was recorded across two days in December 1996, but Verlaine sat on the recordings for a decade. Ficca and Derivaz are in tow, again, though they are less present than on Warm And Cool – with Around, Verlaine fully embraced a less-is-more aesthetic, and the guitar playing here often shivers in its intimacy, its nakedness. But there’s also playfulness, as on the slow-mo highlife of “Meteor Beach”, where slide guitar and chiming riffs play against string scrape, and one of the most ridiculous muffled wah tones you’ll hear (it sounds like Verlaine was aiming for muted trumpet on the guitar).

Ficca and Derivaz also appear on Songs And Other Things, the album that is perhaps the real revelation of this reissue series. This was Verlaine’s first collection of songs since 1990’s underrated The Wonder; what’s particularly impressive about Songs And Other Things, though, is how convincing it sounds, how Verlaine seems to have reached a new level with his songwriting. The lyrics oscillate between suggestive poetry, evasive asides, chuckling character profiles and excerpts from unfilmed crime series – there’s a gaggle of different Verlaines in here, and they’re all wry and smart.

Most importantly, though, the songs are ecstatic things: from the simple, one-chord mantra of “The Day On You”, to the bleary-eyed, mystical waltz of “Blue Light”, and the elevated, rapturous bliss-out of “The Earth Is In The Sky”, the latter a virtual masterclass in Verlaine guitar playing too – spindly filigrees carved into the finely rendered sides of a glorious chord change that’s heaven-sent – Verlaine’s songs here are never less than lovely, and often mesmerising. The guitar across the album, too, feels particularly inspired, and the intimacy in the playing is so singular you feel you can hear Verlaine’s hands, fingers, nails, sinew, the blood pumping through veins: a masterclass in touch, a haptic listening experience.

In her liner notes to Sonic Youth’s 1993 reissue of Daydream Nation, artist and writer Jutta Koether quotes Verlaine, her life partner: “There are moments, rare on any record, where the wild searchings of the guitarists collide in what might be described as a ‘radiance’. It’s like being caught in the rapids, bumping off rocks, then going over the waterfall – and really liking it.” It’s a beautiful quote that sums up much of what made Verlaine’s guitar playing, both in interplay with Richard Lloyd and Jimmy Rip, and solo, so glorious and unpredictable. On these final three albums, Verlaine captured that radiance to its fullest, and unassumingly reached heightened states through the seemingly simple interface of one man and his guitar. It’s hallucinatory in effect – and revelatory.

Samantha Morton – My Life In Music

Sam Richards
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Samantha Morton – My Life In Music

The actor, director and now singer on her essential aural companions: “When you’re lonely, music becomes your friend”

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BOB MARLEY

Exodus

ISLAND, 1977

My father, my real Dad, was into music in a big way. We had a huge wooden sideboard in the front room with a few records in, that we were not allowed to touch! I remember him playing Bob Marley over and over again, and this particular album was one of his favourites, so by default it was the soundtrack to playing out on the streets where I lived. Nottingham was a very multicultural place, so it was common to hear reggae on stereos. As a child, I didn’t really understand the lyrics, so I wouldn’t have realised that these were political songs – songs of freedom, if you like. But if anything, the lyrics are even more relevant today. And it’s just incredible music, so thanks Dad!

THE BEATLES

Abbey Road

APPLE, 1969

The next one, again, I have to thank my father for. He’d had the Beatles records since he was a kid and they were his everything. I just have these memories of being really little and peering over the record player and seeing the little apple cut in half in the middle of the vinyl. If Dad played a record it was an event, because we weren’t allowed to touch them. And we would sit in the same way as he would read books to us, Lord Of the Rings and The Hobbit. It was almost like, ‘This is your education, guys!’ I can’t go for too long without listening to The Beatles – it’s like oxygen, isn’t it? It’s in our DNA.

BOOGIE DOWN PRODUCTIONS

By All Means Necessary

JIVE, 1988

My brother was in the military. When he went away to the first Iraq war, he left behind a couple of tapes, one of which was By All Means Necessary. So I started listening to Boogie Down Productions and became an enormous hip-hop fan, especially of KRS-One’s lyrics. I suppose some of the hip-hop I’d heard on the radio felt quite misogynistic, but this blew my mind with the level of intelligence. I didn’t really go to school, which was quite sad. So music was an education – listening to people talk about their feelings and how they’re handling situations or just telling incredible stories through music. The message of American movies like Big or The Goonies was that everything’s rosy, but rappers were talking about their lives.

EMMYLOU HARRIS

Wrecking Ball

ELEKTRA, 1995

Growing up, my Mum – my real Mum – really loved country and western music. I used to have to get up and do Patsy Cline in the pub! There was an album by Emmylou Harris called Wrecking Ball that Daniel Lanois produced. I knew I recognised the sound, and it was only years later when I started really listening to U2 that I realised, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s the same person!’ The songs make me cry just thinking about them, they’re incredibly poignant. I think that album will stay with me for the rest of my life. It’s very important in my development as a musician, but also just as a creative. I would listen to it over and over again – it’s very healing.

RY COODER

Paris, Texas OST

WARNER BROS, 1985

I was about 19, and I’d been in this movie called Under The Skin. It had a really bad review that was so scathing of me as an actor and I thought, ‘Well, I’m obviously not going to work again – I’m fucked.’ I was not happy with how acting was going, so I decided to get rid of my agent and move to Bali. I only took a few CDs, and this was one of them. Weirdly, I hadn’t seen the film at that point, I just knew I liked Ry Cooder. I listened to it over and over again, and it’s so evocative of that time. Obviously I wasn’t in a desert, but I was travelling and I was alone and I was searching for something. So it was just perfect.

GLENN GOULD

Bach: The Goldberg Variations

COLUMBIA, 1956

I didn’t know very much about classical music growing up, so the first time I heard that piece of music was in Silence Of The Lambs. Then I saw a documentary about him [Glenn Gould] and that was my first introduction to seeking out classical music and who’s playing it and why. I don’t have words eloquent enough to describe how that music makes me feel. My understanding is that when classical music is recorded, it’s the music that’s important. Often, they don’t want to bring in the person. But his energy and his interpretation of that piece of music is incredible, it had never been played like that before. I feel like I’ve got a connection with the person, as opposed to listening to perfectly performed music.

SQUAREPUSHER

Ultravisitor

WARP, 2004

I’d moved back from New York to the UK and bought a house in North London. I didn’t have any London friends, I was really lonely. And when you’re lonely, music becomes your friend – it makes you feel safe or not alone. There’s a song called “Iambic 9 Poetry” which is epic in its scale, but yet it retains this level of personal intimacy. It seems so big and so wide and so beautiful, like looking at city skylines. It has that feeling of something’s gonna happen, like the future is coming and it’s really fucking good! It’s not exactly Ballard, but there’s certainly a connection between the architecture of a city and dance or electronic music.

COCTEAU TWINS

Garlands

4AD, 1982

I got out of London around 2007 or 8. I was trying to create this haven for my new baby, so we moved to this farm in the Peak District. It was a really special time living in this amazing Bronte-esque landscape, quite isolated but feeling really powerful. I’d heard the Cocteau Twins a lot growing up but hadn’t really had their records. So I bought the CD and I totally immersed myself, walking on the moors for hours with my baby, being taken to these other worlds. The music and the landscape seemed to fit so perfectly. Her [Elizabeth Fraser’s] voice is very spiritual to me. It’s almost as if you’re listening to choral music in a church, it’s on that level.

Sam Morton’s debut album Daffodils & Dirt is out on June 14 via XL Recordings

Introducing the new Uncut: Springsteen, The Police, Low’s Alan Sparhawk, Sturgill Simpson and more

Michael Bonner
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Introducing the new Uncut: Springsteen, The Police, Low’s Alan Sparhawk, Sturgill Simpson and more

Change – very much in the headlines here in the UK at the moment – is something of a recurring theme in this month’s issue of Uncut. We have Alan Sparhawk reflecting on his first new music since the death of Mimi Parker, his wife and creative partner in Low; Sturgill Simpson expressing his desire to move forward creatively from one project to the next; Beachwood Sparks on the way that change can sometimes only be achieved through an incremental refinement of familiar processes and shared histories.

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For our cover star, change came at a cost. Released 40 years ago in June, Born In The USA catapulted Bruce Springsteen into arenas – but the album was also among his most deeply misunderstood, from the title track down to the other, increasingly anxious laments for disappearing youth, misinterpreted by his new fans as good-time floor-fillers, primed for MTV. You’ll hear about the different shades of the album – its politics, Springsteen’s songwriting, his characters and more – from admirers including Kurt Vile, Lucinda Williams and Tom Morello.

There’s more, of course! The Police recording their best-selling album just in time to fall apart (and props here to Stewart Copeland, who is massively good value as an interviewee), plus the sagas of Little Feat’s Lowell George and The Sound’s Adrian Borland, who both left us too young. It’s perhaps astonishing, but this is the first time we’ve run a proper Lowell piece in Uncut – and the first time we’ve revisited The Sound since 2002. You’ll also find new interviews with Steve Diggle, Laurie Anderson, Nick Lowe, The Flirtations, The Jesus Lizard, John Murry and X, among others, as well as a free 15-track CD showcasing the month’s best new music.

As ever, let us know what you think…

Uncut – September 2024

Uncut Staff
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Uncut – September 2024

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Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Sturgill Simpson, Alan Sparhawk, Beachwood Sparks, Lowell George, Adrian Borland and The Sound, Buzzcocks, X, Mavis Staples, Manic Street Preachers, The Jesus Lizard, Laurie Anderson, Dawn Landes, The Specials, Bob Dylan, Mark Lanegan, Brian Eno and more all feature in Uncut‘s September 2024 issue, in UK shops from July 19 or available to buy online now.

All print copies come with a free, 15-track new music CD featuring MJ Lendeman, Nathan Bowles Trio, Spiral Galaxies, Mercury Rev, Moon Diagrams, El Khat, Nick Lowe, Harlem Gospel Travelers, Amy Rigby, Krononaut and more!

INSIDE THIS MONTH’S UNCUT:

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: BORN IN THE USA may be BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’s most successful album – but it is also his most misunderstood. As this landmark record turns 40, we investigate how The E Street Band spun stadium rock gold from Springsteen’s unflinching studies of alienation, self-doubt and the American dream gone sour. Meanwhile, long-term admirers KURT VILE, LUCINDA WILLIAMS, TOM MORELLO and ADAM GRANDUCIEL celebrate an album of relatable characters, surprisingly raw performances and “total Boss music”.

THE POLICE: At the peak of their success, THE POLICE went into battle… with themselves. But between the screaming matches and crisis meetings, they created their final album, Synchronicity: an epic, international hit that brought into focus their unwavering commitment to the music, even while the band fell apart.

STURGILL SIMPSON: The restless country music outsider has moved to Europe and adopted the alter ego Johnny Blue Skies for a new album of freewheeling love songs, influenced by Serge Gainsbourg, Gerry Rafferty and Homer’s Odyssey….

ADRIAN BORLAND & THE SOUND: A new biography and a brace of reissues finally gives this great, undervalued band and their brilliant but troubled singer the recognition they richly deserve.

BEACHWOOD SPARKS: After a 10-year hiatus, BEACHWOOD SPARKS return with Across The River Of Stars, a new studio album that brings pathos to their sun-dappled brand of country rock. From their Ventura HQ, California’s psych cowboys look back to move forward – on enduring friendships, poignant losses and anthems of cosmic love.

LOWELL GEORGE: A graduate of both Hollywood High School and Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, LOWELL GEORGE’s gifts were boundless: singer, songwriter, producer, arranger, frontman, slide guitarist supreme… now, 45 years since his untimely death, his former LITTLE FEAT bandmates and assorted collaborators hymn their fallen comrade.

AN AUDIENCE WITH… STEVE DIGGLE: The Buzzcocks bosun talks acid, existentialism, accidental genius and missing Pete Shelley

THE MAKING OF “NOTHING BUT A HEARTACHE” BY THE FLIRTATIONS: Most Northern Soul staples began l life in the States, but not this one: “We were all excited to be coming to London…”

ALBUM BY ALBUM WITH X: Exene Cervernka and Joe Doe reflect on four decades-plus of punk, pop, roots rock and metal

MY LIFE IN MUSIC WITH HORACE PANTER: The Specials’ bassist on his journey to the Dirt Road Band: “I knew that there was a new world somewhere”

REVIEWED: Alan Sparhawk, Nick Lowe, Laurie Anderson, Nilüfer Yanya, Shovels & Rope, Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman, Krononaut, El Khat, Mark Lanegan Band, Ten Years After, Stuart Moxham, Dorothy Carter, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Outlaw Festival, Mavis Staples, Brian Eno, Steve Wynn and more

PLUS: Early Manics, John Murry & Michael Timmins, Dawn Landes, The Jesus Lizard and… introducing MJ Lenderman

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Slowdive and Ride to play Sonic Cathedral’s 20th birthday

Sam Richards
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Slowdive and Ride to play Sonic Cathedral’s 20th birthday

Shoegaze institution Sonic Cathedral will mark its 20th birthday this autumn with a series of four special gigs in London.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER A COPY HERE

Slowdive will play one of their final Everything Is Alive shows at EartH in Dalston on October 4, supported by dream-pop disciples Whitelands and Deary.

Meanwhile, Ride will recreate their triumphant set from the 1992 Reading festival at Hackney Church on October 12, supported by Bdrmm, Pye Corner Audio and Moon Diagrams.

The 20th birthday celebrations kick-off with a show by A Place To Bury Strangers, Three Quarter Skies and Mildred Maude at Hackney’s Number 90 on September 24.

There is also a special edition of Sonic Cathedral’s regular Sunday Service events at The Social on October 13, with very special guests to be revealed on the night.

Tickets for all shows go on sale on at 10am on Friday (July 19) from here.

Bob Dylan announces UK and European dates

Michael Bonner
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Bob Dylan announces UK and European dates

Bob Dylan returns to the UK and Europe later this year, including three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall in November.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER A COPY HERE

The shows have been announced on Dylan’s website; tickets go on sale July 19. They include Dylan’s first UK shows since the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour in 2022.

Read our reviews from the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour here:

Bob Dylan, The London Palladium, October 20, 2022

Bob Dylan, SEC Armadillo, Glasgow, October 30 & 31, 2022

Bob Dylan, New Theatre, Oxford, November 4, 2022

Dylan’s currently on tour in the States as part of the Outlaw Festival.

Meanwhile, Dylan’s 1974 tour with The Band is celebrated in an enormous 27-CD boxset, including 417 previously unreleased performances, which will be released by Columbia Records / Legacy Recordings on September 20.

The new batch of dates are…

OCTOBER 4 2024: Prague, Czech Republic, O2 universum

OCTOBER 5 2024: Prague, Czech Republic, O2 universum

OCTOBER 6 2024: Prague, Czech Republic, O2 universum

OCTOBER 8 2024: Erfurt, Germany, Messehalle

OCTOBER 10 2024: Berlin, Germany, Uber Eats Music Hall

OCTOBER 11 2024: Berlin, Germany, Uber Eats Music Hall

OCTOBER 12 2024: Berlin, Germany, Uber Eats Music Hall

OCTOBER 14 2024: Nürnberg, Germany, Frankenhalle

OCTOBER 16 2024: Frankfurt, Germany, Jahrhunderthalle

OCTOBER 17 2024: Frankfurt, Germany, Jahrhunderthalle

OCTOBER 18 2024: Frankfurt, Germany, Jahrhunderthalle

OCTOBER 21 2024: Stuttgart, Germany, Porsche Arena

OCTOBER 22 2024: Saarbrücken, Germany, Saarlandhalle

OCTOBER 24 2024: Paris, France, La Seine Musicale

OCTOBER 25 2024: Paris, France, La Seine Musicale

OCTOBER 27 2024: Dusseldorf, Germany, Mitsubishi Electric Hall

OCTOBER 29 2024: Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, Rockhal

NOVEMBER 1 2024: Bournemouth, UK, BIC Windsor Hall

NOVEMBER 3 2024: Liverpool, UK, M&S Bank Arena

NOVEMBER 5 2024: Edinburgh, Scotland, Usher Hall

NOVEMBER 6 2024: Edinburgh, Scotland, Usher Hall

NOVEMBER 8 2024: Nottingham, UK, Nottingham Arena

NOVEMBER 9 2024: Wolverhampton, UK, Civic Hall

NOVEMBER 10 2024: Wolverhampton, UK, Civic Hall

NOVEMBER 12 2024: London, UK, Royal Albert Hall

NOVEMBER 13 2024: London, UK, Royal Albert Hall

NOVEMBER 14 2024: London, UK, Royal Albert Hall

Stevie Nicks – BST Hyde Park, London, July 12

Piers Martin
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Stevie Nicks – BST Hyde Park, London, July 12

Things were different the last time Stevie Nicks played Hyde Park. That was in 2017, when she opened for her best friend Tom Petty and joined him during his headline set for a run through “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”, the hit the Heartbreakers wrote for her in 1981.

Petty is no longer with us, and nor is Christine McVie, Nicks’ soulmate in Fleetwood Mac, who’d become a fixture in that band again after years in the wilderness. “Whenever I’ve been hurt in my life, I’ve always run to the stage – and it’s always helped me,” says a visibly moved Nicks at the end of tonight’s set, before gesturing to the crowd: “You’ve always helped me.”

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The stage is all Nicks has known for the past 50 years – and this sell-out Friday at British Summer Time is all about her. Her corner of Hyde Park is a sea of tasselled jackets, lace dresses, Stetsons and cowboy boots. A Nicks performance, or one by Fleetwood Mac, has been a rite of passage for millennials in the 21st century, and such occasions are becoming increasingly rare. 

These days, Nicks is a strangely ageless cosmic diva whose look, like her material, has remained unchanged since her mid-’80s prime. At 76, her voice is a little hoarser, and it was touch and go whether this show would even go ahead after she postponed earlier dates in Manchester and Glasgow following minor leg surgery. 

Nicks has been on the road pretty much full-time for two years, playing more or less the same 15-song set each show, but such is her charisma and the mythology of her songbook that you want to believe that she’s not going through the motions. She talks us through her famous shawls, and rambles endearingly about the circumstances that led to Stephen Stills writing “For What It’s Worth”, which she gives a political slant here by urging us to use our vote, maybe unaware the UK had an election last week. 

Her seasoned band, led by her longtime guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who’s flanked by the equally capable Carlos Rios, are well-oiled and more than happy to lay it on thick during a combustible “Gold Dust Woman”. They tear into “Stand Back”, “Edge Of Seventeen” and “Free Fallin’” as if they’re fresh out of college. Nicks’ mystical heartland pop is still best realised in the Mac’s “Dreams” and “Gypsy”, the latter a 1982 love-letter to her nomadic self of the late-’60s. In many ways she’s been chasing that feeling ever since, which explains why the songs she performs span that golden period from 1975 to 1983, when everything went right, and which resonate so deeply with her fans. 

She brings out her voice coach, Steve Real, for “Leather And Lace”. He sings Don Henley’s part beautifully on the Bella Donna ballad, each looking into the other’s eyes, the purity in his voice contrasting with her coarser vocal.

For the encore, it’s genuinely thrilling when Harry Styles walks onstage with a guitar to play rhythm and sing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with Nicks, and after that “Landslide” – songs they’ve played together before but which here elevate what would have been a decent run-of-the-mill concert to an event that will be hard to forget. 

Dressed in a loose dark suit and light green shirt, a colourful songbird brooch on his lapel, Styles is a class act and seems a little overwhelmed at first, but helps Nicks deliver an emotional “Landslide” as a montage of images of Christine McVie roll across the huge screens. Today would have been her 81st birthday, Nicks points out. “Time makes you bolder, even children get older – and I’m getting older, too,” she sings in “Landslide”. Let’s hope she’ll be back for one last dance. 

Setlist
Outside The Rain
Dreams
If Anyone Falls
Gypsy
For What It’s Worth
Free Fallin’
Wild Heart
Bella Donna
Stand Back
Leather And Lace
Gold Dust Woman
Edge Of Seventeen
Encore
Rhiannon
Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around
Landslide

Eiko Ishibashi – Evil Does Not Exist

Tom Pinnock
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Eiko Ishibashi – Evil Does Not Exist
Buy Evil Does Not Exist here

Watch Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, and you’ll see the countryside that Eiko Ishibashi and her partner Jim O’Rourke call home: the snow-capped extinct volcanoes, the dense forests and grassy meadows, frozen lakes and icy mountain streams. Yet it’s not by chance that the setting of Evil Does Not Exist matches the area west of Tokyo where the composer lives – in fact, the film is deeply interlinked with Ishibashi’s work and life, the visuals and the music both serving as inspirations to each other.

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After Hamaguchi heard Ishibashi’s 2018 LP The Dream My Bones Dream, the pair began working together on 2021’s Drive My Car. It picked up an Oscar for Best International Feature Film, and Ishibashi’s jazzy, verdant soundtrack – at once accessible and experimental – was a big part of its success. When she then asked Hamaguchi to create visuals she could perform to onstage, he came to the area where she and O’Rourke live and began to film, initially inspired by a handful of electronic instrumentals she had created. The director enjoyed what he’d filmed so much, though, that he turned it into a full film, with dialogue and storyline, and requested more musical material that Ishibashi then wrote to the finished edit.

The final version of Evil Does Not Exist isn’t exactly full of Ishibashi’s music – you’ll need to search out Ishibashi’s live shows featuring the shorter, silent version, entitled Gift, for that – but when it does appear it’s the most bewitching, powerful element of the film. The more electronic pieces are those that Ishibashi wrote first, inspirations for Hamaguchi’s visuals and story: “Hana V.2”, for instance, is all gently pulsing electronic tones that slowly form shifting chords, like shapes glimpsed in clouds. Vaporous strings and the kind of harsh cymbal drones heard in Neu!’s “Sonderangebot” briefly appear, alongside the sounds of the film’s troubled protagonist Takumi chopping wood.

“Smoke” and “Fether” are perhaps the most familiar pieces here, faintly reminiscent of the Drive My Car soundtrack or Ishibashi’s 2022 release For McCoy, and also to O’Rourke’s masterful music for Kyle Armstrong’s Hands That Bind. The former is driven by fluttering drums and Ishibashi’s layered flute, once again demonstrating her love for the measured, quicksilver jazz found on the ECM label, while the latter briefly mixes granulated textures with leaf-falls of piano. The longest piece here is the most ambient, the 12-minute “Missing V.2”, which begins with what seems like a Japanese train announcement; the film, however, reveals this to be a chilling public information message about a young girl lost in the forest as night begins to fall. Low strings hum and ominous piano chords toll, as important as the abstract electronics; gradually, clattering cymbals and a warped, synthetic heartbeat raise the tension, almost unbearably. The effect is stunning and enveloping.

The remaining three tracks are the most striking, both in the film and on the album. These were composed for the completed film, and find Ishibashi writing for strings (in fact overdubbed by two performers to simulate a lush orchestral ensemble). Her albums have included strings for years, but not like this: here, huge suspended chords hang like rock buttresses, showing Ishibashi’s childhood love of Bach and her more recent appreciation of modernist pioneer Charles Ives. At times, though, the harmonies seem to stall and, as if caught in the gravity of some unseen body, they spin off into eerie discord, before finally returning to the theme. It’s a stunning trick, and the power is all in the flow: these pieces snake as organically as the streams in Evil Does Not Exist, or twist like the antlers of the stag that plays such a mysterious, pivotal part in the film.

Quite how these pieces will exist as a live soundtrack to Gift will be revealed, but as a standalone soundtrack Evil Does Not Exist is a fine addition to Ishibashi’s singular work – the mood is darker and eerier than her feted Drive My Car, but it’s the stronger album nonetheless. What’s more, this astonishing record perfectly lays the groundwork for the song-based follow-up to The Dream My Bones Dream, due to float out of those deep forests in the tantalisingly near future.

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Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Laura Barton
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Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer
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When Cassandra Jenkins released her second album, 2021’s An Overview On Phenomenal Nature, it was in the spirit of a last hurrah. A little lost, a little disheartened, its collection of songs spoke to the dislocation of that particular time in Jenkins’ life when, following the death of David Berman, there came keen grief, a cancelled tour with Purple Mountains, a questioning of whether music was really the career for her.

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She half-sang, half spoke, her voice slow and dusky and beguiling, and wound her storytelling with richly drawn characters and field recordings: birdsong, a guided meditation, a security guard discussing a Mrinalini Mukherjee exhibit at The Met Breuer. The effect was beautiful, intimate, inquisitive, wise; a record that felt so complete, one wondered how she might ever devise a follow-up.

Jenkins wondered the same thing. My Light, My Destroyer was not an easy album to make. The success of its predecessor had led to a gruelling tour schedule and a surge of media attention, all of which left the songwriter physically and emotionally drained. Still, there came a first attempt in the studio, an effort to recreate the magic of the previous recording. And then disappointment, and a rethink. A few months later, somewhat replenished, Jenkins opted to reassemble her collaborators, among them producer, engineer and mixer Andrew Lappin, Josh Kaufman and Palehound’s Ed Kempner, and take a second shot at the new songs. This time, something bloomed.

The result is a record that confirms …Phenomenal Nature was no fluke. This is the sound of Jenkins hitting her stride – less disembodied than its predecessor, more grounded, its tone ranging from the easy warmth of Tom Petty to the steady discernment of Aimee Mann, via a little Laurie Anderson.

Jenkins draws, too, on the influence of prose writers such as Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson, whose work gathers together disparate threads — the personal, the political, the observational, to create something profoundly illuminating. On …Phenomenal Nature, and perhaps even more on My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins gives us a musical version of this essayistic approach: insights reached through studied songwriting, snippets of conversation, bursts of instrumentals (most notably the exquisite album closer, “Hayley”).

While comparisons to others are helpful, in reality Jenkins is quite distinctly her own thing, and the only true resemblance is to her previous record – there in My Light…’s field recordings, sonic turns and the subtle unfolding of these tracks. From the first lines of opener “Devotion”, Jenkins’ voice is a cool balm: “I think you’ve mistaken my desperation for devotion,” she sings, low and soft. It’s an arresting start: intriguing and elliptical and hopeful, in much the same way that …Phenomenal Nature began: “I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I got.”

As with last time, the listener instinctively leans in closer. Close enough to catch the spoken word of “Delphinium Blue” and “Attente Telephonique”, and the sensuous yearning of “Omakase” ­– a song named for an expensive lab-grown strawberry, and from which the album takes its title: “My lover/My light/My destroyer/My meteorite.”

At this proximity it’s easy, too, to revel in Jenkins’ observational humour – there in the casting of Sisyphus in “Only One”’s sorry tale of heartbreak, with its repeated, rolling refrain, “You’re the only one I’ve ever loved/The only one I know how to love”, in the unexpected appearances of William Shatner, and perhaps most of all in the curious details of “PetCo”, in which Jenkins wanders through a pet shop, trying to be less alone.

Most of all what infuses My Light, My Destroyer is a sense of cosmic awe. The record begins and ends at break of dawn, and at various points Jenkins looks up towards the heavens – to the ceiling, to the aeroplanes and the rocket ships and the meteorites. At others, she’s contemplating nature through glass – delphiniums and narcissus in the flower shop, the blue of earth viewed from space, the sky from a tour bus window, those laboratory strawberries and pet shop lizards.

At the album’s heart lies “Betelgeuse”, a song of lugubrious brass and rippled piano, in which a stargazing Jenkins is joined by her own mother, a science teacher, as they admire the brightness of Mars, Venus, Betelgeuse. “It’s fun to look at the moon through binoculars,” her mother says, unwittingly drawing together some of the record’s themes.

Over and again, one feels Jenkins breaking through the glass to touch the beauty of what lies beyond. “Don’t mistake my breaking open/For broken,” she sings on “Devotion”. It’s a thought that governs the record: this is the sound of an artist quietly, rapturously coming to life.

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Sean Ono Lennon: “Mind Games is my dad getting back on track”

Peter Watts
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Sean Ono Lennon: “Mind Games is my dad getting back on track”

The August 2024 issue of Uncut is packed full of goodies for the discerning John Lennon fan. As well as our cover story – a deep dive into Lennon’s creative but turbulent 1973/’74 – there’s a stunning Collector’s Cover, a mini Ultimate Music Guide to all Lennon’s solo albums and a unique, ultra-collective CD featuring new mixes, outtakes and more from the upcoming Mind Games deluxe edition box set.

We also spoke to Sean Ono Lennon about his work on the Mind Games release, but due to space restrictions could only run part of the interview. Here it is now in full…

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UNCUT: Can you start by giving me your personal overview of Mind Games, the period in which it was recorded and where you feel it stands in your father’s canon? 

SEAN ONO LENNON: Mind Games was always one of my favourite of dad’s albums. I grew up listening to it without realising it had to some degree been overlooked when it came out. So to me it has always been one of his strongest records. The title track alone lives on the very top shelf of my favourite John Lennon tunes. It’s an absolute masterpiece. 

To me it sounds like he was working very hard to make a more polished record after what had been a period of raw rock n roll activism with Sometime In New York City, (an album that was difficult for some fans to appreciate). The fact that he was producing himself, and doing an incredible job without Phil Spector’s help, while in the midst of a separation with my mother — it must of been a difficult time for him, and I think he really stepped up to the plate and did an amazing job. The music may not have been in sync with where the world was at commercially, but the songs stand for themselves and after all these years have come to represent some of his best work to many fans. I had an amazing time overseeing the mixes, and was really struck by the level of musicianship throughout. The band is exceptional, and you can tell (perhaps unlike on Sometime In New York City), that the musicians are really trying their best at every moment, and working hard to bring as much musicianship and beauty to each song as they can manage. My father famously made the album cover himself, an amazing collage with my mother as a mountain hovering over him as he recedes into the distance — a visually striking image that says a lot about the time period and what they were going through personally.

Unlike his previous solo albums, I think Mind Games strikes a beautiful balance between being raw and personal, speaking to his political philosophy, while also inserting a much needed feeling of fun and humour throughout. I think the chemistry of these elements is well balanced on this album, making for an extremely moving, while also extremely enjoyable musical journey.

What are the album’s biggest strengths?

The biggest strength of the album are his production and his singing. He’s really at his best. Some of the his best vocal performances are on this record. Especially the outro of Mind Games, he slides up effortlessly to a falsetto on the word ‘love’ that is as haunting and inspiring as anything he ever sang with the Beatles.

There’s a sense this record has been unfairly overlooked – why do you think that might have been?

There was a sense at the time that the album was overlooked. I think that kind of thing happens a lot for whatever reason. Rolling Stone didn’t like Led Zeppelin. The Beatles never really winning any Grammys for best album. Sometimes the world isn’t ready to give certain music a chance, or even understand it. I don’t think that’s a reflection of the music’s quality, but more about where the world is at. My parents had just confused a lot of people between Two Virgins and Sometime In New York CIty, they had thrown people off a bit—and frankly had thrown themselves off too, getting mixed up with some questionable characters (Jerry Rubin), and getting surveilled by the FBI, and then realizing many of the so called revolutionaries they had linked up with were actually not the best people. It was a strange time and I think the music and the reception of it were connected to the changes that were happening. But I do think Mind Games is clearly my dad getting back on track, after what was a very experimental, and volatile period that was very creatively fruitful, but at times went a bit out of control. Plus it was a very competitive time, with a whole new generation of talented young artists dominating the charts. But what does that say about Mind Games as an album? Not much in my view. People for whatever reason were not in the right mood for it. But looking back and listening I think we can all see it for the incredible album that it is. I do consider it a masterpiece.

What were your objectives for Mind Games when you began working on the reissue?

Well for me it’s about trying to find the most interesting and creatives ways I can of revisiting the music. If I’m going to spend time working on Dad’s music I want to work as hard as I can to innovate and be creative. So I had all sorts of potentially out-there ideas: launching citizenofnutopia.com launching the meditation mixes with Lumenate, working on the deluxe and super deluxe sets for 2 years trying to making them something memorable, something you’d never seen before. Now more then ever an artist like my dad is competing against a whole new world of music and entertainment. In order to get him the attention he deserves I feel I have to really work hard on trying new things. I want to get as much attention for his music and make it as fun as humanly possible for the fans. We have a lot of other stuff coming too that are in the works this year for Mind Games. To me there’s no point in rereleasing his music if I don’t try and push it as far as I can in terms of creativity.

As you worked on Mind Games did you learn anything new, or did anything surprise you, about this period in your parents’ life?

Listening to Ken Asher’s tracks really blew me away. I’m such a big fan of his work with Jim Henson, it was really amazing realising all the little tricks he pulled with the keys. The musicianship generally speaking is truly stellar on this album throughout. And truthfully I didn’t realise what a good song Aisumasen was until I worked on bringing out the best bits. Suddenly the song sounds like one of the best tracks off Plastic Ono Band. So I have to admit remixing did make me rediscover some songs I’d never paid as much attention to.

The Mind Games box is out-of-this-world – please tell me how this came about, which elements you are most proud of and if there is anything you wanted to do that didn’t quite make it….

We’ve been working on the box set for years now. Initially I thought, Mind Games… game, what if we ‘gamified’ mind games? So that’s all I’ll say but there are many levels to this launch including and far beyond the box set that I hope will potentially entertain and engage fans for possibly years to come. My main goal was to just do something really different. To blow minds so to speak. I think when people actually see how far we went with it, they will understand how it all fits together, and why they are as they are. The websites. The box sets. The music. They all intertwine in a way that is ready to be discovered.

What was your favourite part of the process?

My favourite part is mixing. I love getting to be that intimate with my dad’s music. It feels like an honor, but also I’ve spent my whole life getting good at that type of thing, and it’s a great feeling to be able to put those skills to work while spending time in my father’s world. I really enjoy and feel very lucky.

We are very excited to have nine exclusive Mind Games tracks on our covermount CD from the Mind Games CD. Could you please introduce this for our readers in around 100 words?

This Uncut mix shows examples of the types of mixes we’ve included. I think listening to these mixes will give you a sense of the broad scope you can expect from the box sets. From very polished and what I would consider ‘ultimate’ mixes, to raw elements, and outtakes. We’ve really tried to include everything we possibly can. Really looking forward to hearing people’s feedback. I’m very proud of the work we’ve done on an album that has always meant a lot to me personally.

Send us your questions for Steve Cropper!

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Steve Cropper!

As one of the greatest and most influential guitarists of all-time, Steve Cropper hardly needs any introduction. Suffice to say, as in-house guitarist, songwriter and A&R man at Stax during the 1960s, Cropper’s fingerprints are all over numerous indelible classics by the likes of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett and many more.

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As well as being a prominent member of Booker T & The MGs and The Blues Brothers band, the ludicrously in-demand Cropper has worked with almost everyone in music, from Neil Young to Dolly Parton, Rod Stewart to Frank Black.

A couple of Cropper’s many famous admirers – namely Brian May and Billy Gibbons – turn up on his new album Friendlytown, due for release on August 23 via Mascot Label Group/Provogue.

But before that, Cropper has kindly agreed to submit to a gentle grilling from you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a giant of the game? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Monday (July 22) and Steve will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to…Rod Stewart and the Faces

John Robinson
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Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to…Rod Stewart and the Faces

Wouldn’t you?

A legendary story about the footballer George Best concerns a room service delivery of caviar and the English papers to his Spanish hotel room. The waiter wheels his trolley into a suite where he discovers the sportsman reclining on a bed, where he is sipping a glass of champagne in the company of the recently-crowned Miss World. The bed is covered with large denomination banknotes, the result of the previous night’s substantial win at the casino. The headline on one of the papers is: “Best: where did it all go wrong?”.

As you’ll read in this latest Ultimate Music Guide, in shops a week tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a stretch to retell this anecdote replacing George Best with Rod Stewart. After all, Rod’s career brought him a similar level of massive success – and many of the same fringe benefits. The incredible 60 years of his life in music so far have also been characterised by an exceptional talent, glamorous companions and untold wealth – but as with the footballer, there has always been a small constituency who feel Rod has acquitted himself in a manner which is not quite what they had in mind for him.

Rod, to his credit, has paid them no mind, and in this magazine we hitch a ride in a selection of expensive cars to enjoy the music, and the journey. From the uproarious rock ‘n’ roll of the Faces (there’s a free poster with every issue!), to the nostalgic anthems and Dylan covers of his early solo successes, to tax exile, disco, and the rewards he has found in the Great American Songbook (a destination where Dylan has recently followed him). Even to the (brief) Faces reunion. Along the way we meet supporters, the doubters, and the gentlemen of the tabloid press. We also meet the director of his most recent pop video, the artist Jeremy Deller, who tells us about Rod and his unwavering commitment to the rock star calling.

There might have been some occasional missteps along the way, but the times on balance, have really all been good. “I enjoyed being Jack The Lad…” Rod tells Uncut in 2018, rounding off his sentence with a rhetorical question. “…Wouldn’t you?”

Well, wouldn’t you? Have yourself a real good time, and enjoy the magazine.  You can get one here

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