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Julian Cope – Friar Tuck

Tom Pinnock
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Julian Cope – Friar Tuck

Rocking out in the margins, Julian Cope has been on a roll in recent years. 2020’s Self Civil War was his finest record in 25 years, and 2022’s England Expectorates was almost as good (bonus points for the melodic nail-bomb of “Cunts Can Fuck Off”). Then came last year’s Robin Hood, without Cope’s name on the packaging, and now Friar Tuck, also mysteriously cloaked. It appears, as all his music has since 1997’s Rite 2, on Cope’s own Head Heritage label (a vinyl edition is on its way too, his first since 2017’s Drunken Songs): that means home recordings and low production values on one hand, but direct and fluid expression on the other. Basically, he’s free to do what he wants, with all the good and bad that entails.

Rocking out in the margins, Julian Cope has been on a roll in recent years. 2020’s Self Civil War was his finest record in 25 years, and 2022’s England Expectorates was almost as good (bonus points for the melodic nail-bomb of “Cunts Can Fuck Off”). Then came last year’s Robin Hood, without Cope’s name on the packaging, and now Friar Tuck, also mysteriously cloaked. It appears, as all his music has since 1997’s Rite 2, on Cope’s own Head Heritage label (a vinyl edition is on its way too, his first since 2017’s Drunken Songs): that means home recordings and low production values on one hand, but direct and fluid expression on the other. Basically, he’s free to do what he wants, with all the good and bad that entails.

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Mostly, on Friar Tuck, that leads to an exhilarating 40 minutes. It doesn’t have the madcap range of 1991’s Peggy Suicide or the following year’s Jehovahkill, records on which Cope explored the rough and ready, first-take ethos he’d discovered on 1989’s Skellington and 1990’s Droolian, but these 12 songs are brimming with a breezy vitality that’s not always been present on Cope’s epic releases over the last couple of decades.

If you’ve heard any of those, you know in part what this record sounds like: distorted wah-wah guitars, DI’d electro-acoustic guitars, drum machines and Mellotrons armed with the very tapes used on Tangerine Dream’s Atem. And yet Friar Tuck also reaches out sonically to synth-string funk on “In Spungent Mansions”, chiming, Smiths-esque melancholy on “1066 & All That” and slow-burning drone-rock on the seven-and-a-half-minute “Me And The Jews”.

“The Dogshow Must Go On” is the earworm here, a sub-two-minute garage charmer that moves from a krautrock Stooges groove (reminiscent of 1995’s “Queen/Mother”) to the kind of post-punk Cope pursued on his own solo debut, World Shut Your Mouth, 40 years ago. In stupendous and hilarious Cope-ian fashion it references Crufts, the Gurteen Stones, Jesus Christ and “a new people critical of canine love”, but the overall meaning remains thrillingly slippery: is this a rallying pro-dog message from someone who’s owned miniature schnauzers named Smelvin and Iggy Pup? Or is that missing the point entirely? Cope similarly makes no attempt at accessibility on the closing miniature, “Will Sergeant’s Blues”, where he’s surely taking the piss out of Ian McCulloch’s vocal style, even as he sings about Eeyore selling off Thousand Acre Wood for fracking.

Elsewhere, Cope’s drift is clearer when he looks back from the vantage point of his late sixties. “I didn’t think I’d get to live this long,” he croons on “Done Myself A Mischief”, “I’ve been so many people/And I’ve been just one.” “In Spungent Mansions” takes a look at his Liverpool punk pal Pete Burns, who he always remained fond of: “Exquisite and otherly/And each one on the dole… And I had scabies…” On the organ-driven motorik of “Four Jehovahs In A Volvo Estate” he zooms into a moment from his childhood, when a friend’s religious family moved away, ruining Cope’s Subbuteo championship. “Now I’m stuck trashing my preteen little brother,” he laments. “I hope Jehovah finds your house and causes degradation…”

Yet what of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck? What about this myth has so intrigued Cope, a man usually interested in the more rock-solid monuments of prehistory? “It’s a secret,” he tells Uncut, and clues are few and far between here. “R In The Hood”, like “Eve’s Volcano (Covered In Sin)” put through a dub echo chamber, talks of “peace” in contradictory terms before concluding “everybody wants a peace of the action”. Inside the booklet there’s a map suggesting Tuck came from the north of Scotland, journeyed to Sherwood Forest and ended up heading to the Crusades via “the Jewish Port of Mara Zion” in Cornwall.

Perhaps Cope identifies with the Merry Men’s anti-authoritarian views, as echoed in a poem, “Flibberty Gibbet On The Jibbet”, in the album’s booklet, where he seems to call for the hanging of Liz Truss (then again, Truss would no doubt agree with Hood’s libertarian drive against taxation). Whatever Cope’s motivations, just head to the poem’s opening lines and luxuriate in his continuing garbled genius: after all, no-one else is going to rhyme “Keir Starmer” with “Martin Bramah”.

Q&A

JULIAN COPE

Three albums in three years… are you on a bit of a creative roll?

No, I’m working at a speed that is very comfortable to me. But I am somewhat reborn, yes. These past 30 years, I’ve felt an obligation to make art that is Useful.

“Four Jehovahs In A Volvo Estate” – is this a recollection from your childhood?

Duncan Gray, poor kid. We’re right in the middle of the season and he has to move to the Orkneys because his knobhead parents believe bullshit. Funnily enough, their Volvo estate had screamed stability until they sodded off.

What has specifically inspired the album, musically?

I just try to replicate sonically the current state of my Melted Plastic Brain. So I like Novelty a lot and I live in a world of Intense Melody. So I like to deliver my vocal messages over a heady brew of crusty Brechtian garage rock – wah-guitars, marching drums and two Mellotron 400s filled with tape frames from Tangerine Dream’s 1973 epic Atem. Proper musical necromancy. Three sounds per frame with handwritten descriptions, too. Even have the rare black cases for all three. On Robin Hood, I alluded to them when I played the “Atem” theme during “An Oral History Of Blowjobs”.

INTERVIEW: TOM PINNOCK

Brothers On The Clyde

Alastair McKay
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Brothers On The Clyde

Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake is awaiting a delivery of logs to his cottage in the Clyde Valley when Uncut catches up with him. “There’s no gas supply here,” he says. “Last year I had storage heaters, and they were really, really expensive. Hence the logs.” On the upside, Blake’s move to the countryside a year ago has yielded an album of glorious autumnal songwriting in collaboration with Love And Money frontman James Grant and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler. “Norman’s place is really lovely,” says Butler. “Every time I go there it’s just a peaceful few days.”

Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake is awaiting a delivery of logs to his cottage in the Clyde Valley when Uncut catches up with him. “There’s no gas supply here,” he says. “Last year I had storage heaters, and they were really, really expensive. Hence the logs.” On the upside, Blake’s move to the countryside a year ago has yielded an album of glorious autumnal songwriting in collaboration with Love And Money frontman James Grant and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler. “Norman’s place is really lovely,” says Butler. “Every time I go there it’s just a peaceful few days.”

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Now settled under the moniker Butler, Blake & Grant – “I think I’d like to be Steven Stills,” jokes Grant – the group have done everything in the wrong order. They went on tour before they had any new songs, after being thrown together for their initial shows by Creeping Bent label boss Douglas MacIntyre, who also curates live events in Scotland under the Frets banner. “Me and James had tentatively talked about doing something together,” says Blake. “And I’ve known Bernard from way back.”

“Bandwagonesque was my courting record with my wife,” reveals Butler. “We’ve always kept in touch with Norman. James I didn’t know until recently, but I knew what a fantastic songwriter he was.”

The live shows were a success, but the album arrived almost by accident after Blake invited Butler and Grant to his cottage. “We didn’t plan to record it,” says Butler. “We were just sitting in Norman’s living room in front of the fire. There’s a couple of sofas and we were facing each other. James had a song. Norman wrote and finished something really quickly, and then I wrote something. As the first song came out, I said to Norman, ‘Have you got any gear? You know, recording equipment?’ He appeared with some mics and a computer and we set it up on the table. We weren’t really listening back to anything. We just thought, ‘We’ll record everything that happens.’” 

“We all had fragments,” adds Blake. “I have loads of little fragments on my phone. A lot of these ideas wouldn’t work for the Fanclub, so it’s a great opportunity to be creative.”

“Some of the songs were written and recorded four hours later,” enthuses Grant. “For me, working like that was brilliant. It’s the antithesis of what my records have been about. It was like, ‘Yeah, sounds good. Let’s move on.’”

The cosy, collaborative fireside ethos might suggest Butler Blake & Grant have made a folk record, but Butler urges caution. “It’s not really about woolly jumpers and acoustic guitars. I’m not influenced by the type of songwriting, the style or format, I’m influenced by the fact that Norman and James are brilliant. They’re so talented and clever.”

On the other hand, “James has played with Capercaillie,” says Blake. “I’ve played with [fiddler] John McCusker a few times. And Bernard has his association with Bert Jansch. If you take all of our interests in music and the fact that it’s an acoustic record, it’s in the folk area.” “It’s definitely a 1970s-type sketch,” decides Grant. “There’s a track called ‘Bring An End’ – Bernard played a solo and he was like, ‘I think I’ve gone a bit Brian May here.’ There’s fuck all wrong with that! When you’re working with Norman and Bernard, it’s like having Ray Davies and David Gilmour in your band. They just do things that you like.”

Butler, Blake & Grant is released by 355 Records on March 28

Terry Riley – Shri Camel

Jon Dale
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Terry Riley – Shri Camel

For a while there, across the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s, Terry Riley became the friendly face of contemporary minimal composition. There he was, grinning amiably, superimposed over trees and sky on the cover of his best-known album, 1969’s A Rainbow In Curved Air, a countercultural goofball maverick with chops to spare, his music both spiraling in its hypnotic power, and remarkably easy to get on with. He crops up again in all kinds of contexts – an album with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who he also replaced in La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s ’60s drone-dream collective, the Theatre of Eternal Music; collaborations with free jazz legend Don Cherry; an inspiration for The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”; myriad versions of his masterpiece of cellular composition, In C.

Buy Shri Camel on vinyl here

For a while there, across the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s, Terry Riley became the friendly face of contemporary minimal composition. There he was, grinning amiably, superimposed over trees and sky on the cover of his best-known album, 1969’s A Rainbow In Curved Air, a countercultural goofball maverick with chops to spare, his music both spiraling in its hypnotic power, and remarkably easy to get on with. He crops up again in all kinds of contexts – an album with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who he also replaced in La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s ’60s drone-dream collective, the Theatre of Eternal Music; collaborations with free jazz legend Don Cherry; an inspiration for The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”; myriad versions of his masterpiece of cellular composition, In C.

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While contemporaries like Philip Glass and Steve Reich became more conservative as the years passed (Glass’s work started to echo the likes of Bartok), and Riley’s one-time colleague La Monte Young devoted his time to willed semi-obscurity, a relative disappearance in line with Young’s demands for cultural and financial recognition, Riley seemed to simply, well, get on with it. Perhaps the ace in his hand was his preternatural capacity for the little cells of melody that bob to the surface in most of his music; it’s charming stuff on the surface, as this first vinyl reissue of 1980’s Shri Camel makes plain, but with much depth, both musical and extra-musical.

Shri Camel summed up a body of work and a process of exploration for Riley. He began composing it in 1975 for Radio Bremen in West Germany and performed an early version of it there; the version documented on this album was recorded in 1978 in San Francisco, though it didn’t see release for several years. It was also his final album for the CBS Masterworks series, which chimes with a general decrease of interest in minimalism from major labels at around this point; artistically valid and gorgeous to listen to, the stuff just didn’t sell particularly well. It’s possible that Riley’s alignment with the stoned-out-of-our-gourds hippie consciousness of the late 1960s counterculture meant he was out of vogue at the time, too.

It all seems rather unfair, looking back, particularly given the rigour with which Riley approached his music. These weren’t the minimalist meanderings of a wasted chancer; Riley was a deeply in tune, widely studied composer-artist whose embrace of approaches like just intonation, the tuning of musical intervals such that they are ‘pure’, and not ‘equal temperament’ like Western tuning, meant the end result of his fiercely intelligent compositions was a cyclical, dizzying hall-of-mirrors where everything seemed to shiver and vibrate just outside of everyday consciousness. That hall-of-mirrors effect was amplified by Riley’s use of delay systems – for Shri Camel, he used a Yamaha organ modified with digital delay and tuned to just intonation.

That digital delay gifts Shri Camel its glissing slip-and-slide and its strange sense of sharp, attenuated dreaminess. You can hear it pretty much immediately, when the thin, reedy drone that underpins “Anthem Of The Trinity” has glittering arpeggios dancing across its wafer-like landscape, with Riley playing both his own melodies and patterns, and the various registers of the organ, off each other. If the drone is the bedrock of the composition, Riley’s organ playing, his extemporisations around a number of themes, gives Shri Camel not just its near-haptic sensuousness, but also its spirit of ascension, as though Riley’s pushing the listener through and beyond the clouds.

After all, Shri Camel is, in some ways, devotional music. By the time of its composition, Riley had already spent a number of years as a formal disciple of the Indian classical singer, Pandit Pran Nath, who trained and performed in the Hindustani ‘Kirana Gharana’ music apprenticeship tradition, a particularly rich and lyrical style: Pran Nath’s was an especially pared-back, slow, ascetic take on this tradition, which can be heard in the paced movements of some of Riley’s compositions, and the work of Young and Zazeela, as well. Riley’s fondness for Nath was simply expressed: he called Nath “the greatest musician I have ever heard.”

It is, perhaps, Nath’s precision that is so important to the music Riley makes on albums like Shri Camel. Even though there are playful moments on this album – the luxuriant, blissful trilling of “Celestial Valley”, for example, where the organ-and-delay sound both like pattering rain and a storm of hail, somehow at the same time – there’s an attention to detail here, particularly to the detail of tone, that’s clearly drawn from Riley’s lessons with Nath, and broader still, his knowledge and embrace of Indian classical music. Shri Camel emerges from a period in Riley’s life where he was deeply invested in the Indian classical tradition, turning his attention to just intonation and the deceptive simplicity of delay and repetition to make music that has a rich, resonant core, a sense of deep play, and a bravura mash of minimalism and improvisation.

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House music

Piers Martin
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House music

“At the time, I thought no one would listen to it,” says Haruomi Hosono of his fabled 1973 album Hosono House. In some ways, he was right: Hosono’s whimsical interpretation of Americana, loosely based on The Band’s Music From Big Pink, hardly made him a household name in Japan. That would come later in the ’70s after a run of eclectic solo albums and success as part of Yellow Magic Orchestra with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi.

“At the time, I thought no one would listen to it,” says Haruomi Hosono of his fabled 1973 album Hosono House. In some ways, he was right: Hosono’s whimsical interpretation of Americana, loosely based on The Band’s Music From Big Pink, hardly made him a household name in Japan. That would come later in the ’70s after a run of eclectic solo albums and success as part of Yellow Magic Orchestra with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi.

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But Hosono House – his solo debut following stints in the bands Apryl Fool and Happy End – set out his freewheeling approach to songwriting, taking in country-rock, calypso and funk. It has since become cherished by generations of Western musicians, who see Hosono as a visionary spirit for his unorthodox, light-hearted way of going about things. Only recently, Harry Styles named his 2022 album Harry’s House after encountering Hosono House in Japan.

“I was just influenced by new music from places like the UK and the US and was groping my way through it, so I didn’t have a strong sense of certainty,” says Hosono, who recorded the album in a house in Sayama, outside Tokyo, with different gear set up in each room. “In the 1970s, foreign countries felt far away, and I lived in a peaceful island nation. I was deeply immersed in movements like hippie culture and psychedelia and influenced by that music, and I practised ‘back to the country’ by leaving Tokyo.”

Now, arriving a year after the album’s 50th anniversary, comes Hosono House Revisited, an all-star tribute assembled by the Stones Throw label that features the likes of Mac DeMarco, Sam Gendel, John Carroll Kirby and Cornelius covering their favourite Hosono House tracks.

“Hosono and his music have been one of the only unwavering influences since I started putting out records – it’s hard to quantify how much his music means to me,” says super-fan Mac DeMarco, whose strip-backed version of “Boko Wa Chotto” is reassuringly faithful. “The song has this bittersweetness to it that I gravitate towards, maybe a bit of hopefulness too.”

DeMarco has met Hosono a few times and once sung “Honey Moon”, from 1975’s Tropical Dandy, with him onstage. LA-based pianist and producer John Carroll Kirby has also hung out with Hosono. “He’s a gentle, humble person who seems to not relish the ‘GOAT’ status he’s achieved,” says Kirby. “What I admire most about him is his sense of melody, his use of synthesisers, his sense of humour and his prolific output. When I look at his catalogue, I get the sense that his work is like a journal of where he’s at in life at any given period. Approaching music in that way is liberating.”

Kirby’s raucous take on “Fuku Wa Uchi Oni Wa Soto” with the Mizuhura Sisters – one of whom, Kiko, is Kirby’s partner – is a highlight of Hosono House Revisited. “Kiko and her sister Yuka are both friends with Hosono and have a deep understanding of his catalogue, so I knew we could make something great to honour the spirit of Hosono.”

And what does Hosono think of this rebuilding of Hosono House? “The first one I received was Sam Gendel’s cover of “Koi Wa Momoiro” [“My Love is Peach-coloured”] and I was amazed when I heard it. He translated the lyrics faithfully into English, and his completely different interpretation was refreshing.” Now 77, Hosono says that he keeps abreast of the latest cultural developments by watching videos daily on YouTube. And he remains a keen observer of the world around him. “Every day, I write down my ideas and thoughts like a diary.” However, he appears in no hurry to turn these thoughts into a new album. “Lately, I’ve been feeling my age more and more,” he admits, “so I just make sure not to overdo anything.”

Hosono House Revisited is out now on Stones Throw

Edwyn Collins announces new album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Michael Bonner
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Edwyn Collins announces new album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Edwyn Collins has announced details of his 10th solo album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, which is released by AED Records on March 14.

Edwyn Collins has announced details of his 10th solo album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, which is released by AED Records on March 14.

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You can watch the video for “Knowledge” below.

The 11-track album was recorded at Collins’ own Clashnarrow Studio in Helmsdale, North East Scotland and was co-produced by Collins with Sean Read and Jake Hutton, who all play on the album.

Also featuring James Walbourne on guitar, William Collins on bass, Carwyn Ellis on guitar, Lena Wright and Bianca White on backing vocals and including two co-writes – “The Mountains Are My Home” with Ellis and “Strange Old World” with Collins.

The tracklisting is:

Knowledge
Paper Planes
The Heart Is A Foolish Little Thing
The Mountains Are My Home
Strange Old World
Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation
Sounds as A Pound
The Bridge Hotel
A Little Sign
It Must Be Real
Rhythm Is My Own World

You can pre-order the album here.

Hear Jason Isbell’s new track, “Bury Me”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Jason Isbell’s new track, “Bury Me”

Jason Isbell has shared a new track, "Bury Me", which is taken from his first entirely solo acoustic album, Foxes In The Snow. You can hear "Bury Me" below.

Jason Isbell has shared a new track, “Bury Me“, which is taken from his first entirely solo acoustic album, Foxes In The Snow. You can hear “Bury Me” below.

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Foxes In The Snow is released March 7 on Southeastern Records. The album was recorded in New York City at Electric Lady Studios in October, 2024.

You can pre-order the album here.

The tracklisting for Foxes in the Snow is:

Bury Me

Ride to Roberts

Eileen

Gravelweed

Don’t Be Tough

Open and Close

Foxes in the Snow

Good While It Lasted

True Believer

Wind Behind the Rain

He is also due to play a handful of sold out solo shows, An Intimate Evening With Jason Isbell, including London’s Barbican on February 10.

Neil Young on Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young on Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown

Neil Young has declared that he is a fan of the “great” new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.

Neil Young has declared that he is a fan of the “great” new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.

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Writing on his Archives site on Saturday, January 11, Young says, “I love Bob Dylan and his music. Always have. He’s a great artist. Once he was on my bus and I didn’t recognize him and threw him off but that’s another story. This movie is a great tribute to his life and music. I think if you love Bob’s music you should see this great movie. I loved it.”

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR REVIEW OF A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Dylan himself has already aired thoughts on the film, writing on Twitter/X on December 4 last year:

“There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”

A Complete Unknown opens in the UK on January 17.

Bruce Springsteen leads tributes to Sam Moore

Michael Bonner
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Bruce Springsteen leads tributes to Sam Moore

Sam Moore has died aged 89. As a duo with Dave Prater, Moore enjoyed hits including “Hold On! I’m Comin'” and “Soul Man”.

Sam Moore has died aged 89. As a duo with Dave Prater, Moore enjoyed hits including “Hold On! I’m Comin’” and “Soul Man”.

Bruce Springsteen described Moore as “one of America’s greatest soul voices.”

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Born in Miami, Moore performed in gospel quartets before meeting Prater in 1961. The pair signed to Atlantic Records in 1965, before moving to Stax Records under the auspices of songwriting/production team Isaac Hayes and David Porter.

At Stax, Sam & Dave’s run of hits included “You Don’t Know Like I Know”, “Hold On! I’m Comin’”, “You Got Me Hummin’”, “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby”, “Soul Man” and “I Thank You”.

When Sam & Dave broke up in 1970, Moore continued as a solo artist, occasionally reuniting with his former duo partner – notably on the back of the The Blues Brothers’ cover of “Soul Man” in 1979.

Prater died in 1988 and Moore’s career continued. He toured with fellow Stax labelmates Booker T & the M.G.’s, Carla Thomas and Eddie Floyd in 1990 and in 1992, he recorded several songs with Springsteen for the Human Touch album. Springsteen contributed to Moore’s 2006 solo album Overnight Sensational, while Moore also joined the musician for covers of “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” and “Soul Days” on Springsteen’s album Only The Strong Survive. 

Paying tribute to Moore, Springsteen wrote, “There simply isn’t another sound like Sam’s soulful tenor in American music. Having had the honour to work with Sam on several occasions, he was a sweet and funny man. He was filled with stories of the halcyon days of soul music, and to the end had that edge of deep authenticity in his voice I could only wonder at.

“We offer our prayers to his wife Joyce and thanks for the immortal recordings Sam left us. God bless.”

The Small Faces: All Or Nothing

David Cavanagh
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The Small Faces: All Or Nothing

From Uncut's July 2011 issue (Take 170). We tell the story of the Mod legends and their complex, gifted front man Steve Marriott. From The Small Faces to Humble Pie, to his strange last days on the pub circuit, what was it that drove Marriott to self-destruct? "He was the most talented person I've ever known," recalls his Humble Pie bandmate, Peter Frampton, "but there was something in his psyche. Some huge problem."

From Uncut’s July 2011 issue (Take 170). We tell the story of the Mod legends and their complex, gifted front man Steve Marriott. From The Small Faces to Humble Pie, to his strange last days on the pub circuit, what was it that drove Marriott to self-destruct? “He was the most talented person I’ve ever known,” recalls his Humble Pie bandmate, Peter Frampton, “but there was something in his psyche. Some huge problem.”

“Nice”: that was their favourite word. And it’s true – musically, sartorially, psychedelically, The Small Faces were nice. But by the 1980s, they were a distant memory. Their singer Steve Marriott – the erstwhile Artful Dodger now more of an Arthur Daley – could usually be found in London boozers, playing gigs for cash, ducking and diving. While old rivals like Rod Stewart lived penthouse lifestyles, Marriott’s elevator was stuck in the basement. The oce immaculate Ace Face performed on stage in dungarees.

Then in 1991, came a chance to turn his life around. He was invited to LA to make an LP with Peter Frampton, his former Humble Pie bandmate. This unexpected reunion – it was the first time they’d recorded together since ’71 – was the 44-year-old Marriott’s chance to rejoin the major league. He stood to earn a small fortune in recording and publishing advances. It was an open goal: he couldn’t miss. Frampton was thrilled to help. “I was back with my idol,” he says. “It was my second chance to work with the greatest British singer of all time.” But Frampton, who’d heard stories about Marriott’s decline, laid down some ground rules. No alcohol in the studio. No going AWOL. Above all, no cocaine. Marriott agreed. Within days, he’d broken his promise. He was drunk, snorting coke, belligerent, demonic. Frampton stopped the sessions and sent Marriott back to England. He’d missed his open goal.

Flying home from LA, Marriott arrived jet-lagged at his cottage in Arkesden, Essex, in the early hours of April 20. A passing motorist, seeing flames billowing from the property at 6.30am, called the fire brigade. Marriott’s body was recovered from an upstairs bedroom. The inquest’s verdict was accidental death from smoke inhalation: he had probably fallen asleep with a cigarette burning. His funeral was held on April 30, on a rainy, stormy day in Harlow, while a posse of scooter boys stood guard outside.

Marriott left many unanswered questions, some merely intriguing, some downright chilling. What impulses drove him? Why did he sabotage a lucrative comeback? Had his downward spiral been deliberately engineered? “He was the most talented person I’ve ever known,” says Frampton sadly. “But there was something in his psyche. Some huge problem.”

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT JULY 2011/TAKE 170 IN THE ARCHIVE

Laurie Styvers – Let Me Comfort You: The Hush Rarities

Wyndham Wallace
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Laurie Styvers – Let Me Comfort You: The Hush Rarities

When Laurie Styvers died in 1998, aged 48, obituaries apparently entirely failed to recall her bohemian musical incarnation almost three decades earlier. No wonder, really. Recent years had been spent running an animal sanctuary in Texas, where she’d been born Laurette Stivers; her two albums, 1971’s Spilt Milk and 1973’s The Colorado Kid, were already long forgotten. Her one brush with success, her debut’s breezy, evergreen opener, “Beat The Reaper”, had also missed the charts even after British radio play, and despite Alan Freeman’s support, a follow-up 7”, The Colorado Kid’s playful, banjo-embellished “All American Long Haired Denimed Song-Writing Guitar Man”, joined her catalogue in obscurity.

When Laurie Styvers died in 1998, aged 48, obituaries apparently entirely failed to recall her bohemian musical incarnation almost three decades earlier. No wonder, really. Recent years had been spent running an animal sanctuary in Texas, where she’d been born Laurette Stivers; her two albums, 1971’s Spilt Milk and 1973’s The Colorado Kid, were already long forgotten. Her one brush with success, her debut’s breezy, evergreen opener, “Beat The Reaper”, had also missed the charts even after British radio play, and despite Alan Freeman’s support, a follow-up 7”, The Colorado Kid’s playful, banjo-embellished “All American Long Haired Denimed Song-Writing Guitar Man”, joined her catalogue in obscurity.

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That’s how things might have remained had music historian Alec Palao and New York’s High Moon Records not released Gemini Girl: The Complete Hush Recordings in 2023. Before their intervention, most investigating her work would have found little more than critic Robert Christgau’s mean-spirited review of Spilt Milk in Rock Albums Of The 70s. Deeming her an “LA airhead” – though she’d spent her late teens in London, not Laurel Canyon – he crucified her as “so trite and pretty-poo in her fashionably troubled adolescence that you hope she chokes on her own money”. That’s despite the record being licensed by Mo Austin just before he became Warner Brothers’ chairman, and her contributions to psych-folk act Justine’s sole eponymous 1970 album, which currently commands silly money.

Perhaps Christgau was offended by Styvers’ status as an oil engineer’s daughter whose family had relocated to England, where she was educated at the capital’s private American School. Certainly, he’d have relished how The Colorado Kid lacked a US release. Nonetheless, that 2CD set has ensured that those raised on, say, either Laura Nyro and Dory Previn or Weyes Blood and Angel Olsen would do well to add Styvers to their collection. Let Me Comfort You now extends that invitation to vinyl by compiling the set’s previously unreleased material.

Admittedly, her most consistent charms lie in her studio albums, produced by Shel Talmy protégé Hugh Murphy, who’d together set up Styvers’ home, Hush Recordings. Spilt Milk’s “All I Ever Had”, with double-tracked vocals, could be The Carpenters, and “Pigeons” – all hammered pianos and oompah brass – a “When I’m 64”-fixated Harry Nilsson; The Colorado Kid’s title captures her fondness for the state where her parents kept a cabin as much as its wide-eyed “Oh Colorado” distills her frequent pastoral leanings and kinship with Carole King. Her heart-on-sleeve gifts, meanwhile, are best encapsulated in the understated, unaffected innuendo of the latter’s “You Be The Tide, I’ll Be The Bay”, its candid desire for a “salty old man” – still 22, she and Murphy, five years older, were now lovers – matched by the cover shot’s babyfaced Drew Barrymore innocence.

Still, Let Me Comfor You’s 11 tracks showcase such qualities impressively, her straightforward sweetness evident in a scaled-back, piano-and-strings version of the extravagant Spilt Milk track that gave 2023’s compilation its name. It’s there, too, in “God Knows The Reason”’s sparse yearning and an “All I Ever Had” demo, one of the rare times she, not arranger Tom Parker – fresh from Mac and Katie Kissoon’s lesser known “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” – plays piano.

She’s at ease amid bigger arrangements, too, with the wise-beyond-her-years “The Way I Should Stay” lifted by brass. The title track, too, balances disheartened loneliness with affectionate embraces, its Karen Carpenter purity – “I wish I was someone else’s fool” – mirrored, despite an oddly cutesy vocal, in an early recording of The Colorado Kid’s “White Flowers”.

1972’s glossier “If You Don’t Write Me Soon”, brightened by chiming glockenspiels and a swaggering instrumental break, is similarly imbued with wide-eyed nostalgia, and “Crazy Rainy Spring”, fuelled by Henry Spinetti’s drums, even flirts with funk, though that’s nothing next to “Crazy Rainy Spring”’s split-stereo, fuzz-guitar flourishes.

Suitably, Let Me Comfort You concludes with the warm-hearted, gratifying “Now That The Rain Has Stopped”, its pragmatic romance – “We both came out OK, I think” – indicative of Styver’s levelheaded yet affecting craft. Naturally, she’s worthy of higher praise than either her own or Christgau’s, but, a quarter century after her demise, she now has another chance to beat the reaper at last.

James Blackshaw – Unraveling In Your Hands

Jon Dale
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James Blackshaw – Unraveling In Your Hands

It's been nine long years since English guitarist James Blackshaw released his last album, Summoning Suns. Up until that point, he’d been churning out music with almost alarming frequency, and between 2003 and 2015, he averaged at least an album a year, a gorgeous run of music that shifted from intimate guitar soli ritual to expansive, galaxy-swallowing, epic compositions. Not to mention collaborations with similarly quixotic artists like Pantaleimon and Lubomyr Melnyk, and appearances on albums by Current 93, Myrninerest, Peter Wright and Michael Gira.

It’s been nine long years since English guitarist James Blackshaw released his last album, Summoning Suns. Up until that point, he’d been churning out music with almost alarming frequency, and between 2003 and 2015, he averaged at least an album a year, a gorgeous run of music that shifted from intimate guitar soli ritual to expansive, galaxy-swallowing, epic compositions. Not to mention collaborations with similarly quixotic artists like Pantaleimon and Lubomyr Melnyk, and appearances on albums by Current 93, Myrninerest, Peter Wright and Michael Gira.

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But everything went quiet after Summoning Suns. As it turns out, Blackshaw was tiring of the long haul that was making a living through music; it was never the most secure and predictable of careers to start with. He started cooking professionally, eventually opening a Japanese pop-up restaurant, Sumisu Ramen, in Hastings, with his wife; this after a run of kitchen jobs, one of which led him near to mental breakdown. Then, in 2022, he lost his dog Dexter to liver disease, and his close collaborator John Hannon (dedicatee of this new album) passed away. He also broke his right shoulder after slipping on black ice.

It’s fair to say it’s been a rough run for Blackshaw. This made the sudden appearance of a new recording, “Why Keep Still?”, on Bandcamp in mid-2023 cause for celebration, not least because Blackshaw sounded renewed, revitalised; it was a beautiful performance that manifested the elegance he’d hinted at in his early playing, with an intense yet peaceable compositional spirit that suggested Blackshaw had come through a tough patch and used the lessons bound up in those struggles to disarm his occasional tendency towards the prolix. Everything here mattered. He promised an album in December 2023; 11 months later, here it is.

Blackshaw admits it was a tough one to finish, with a lot of “false starts”, finding it “difficult to get in the right headspace and concentrate”. But scheduling and expectation both be damned: there’s never any real reason to be bound by the temporal when it comes to guitar soli as tender and sensitive as Blackshaw’s. If Unraveling In Your Hands is possessed of hard-earned wisdom, that’s surely due to the multiple hurdles he’s faced down over the past few years, such that when he’s asked what the overarching threads are within the album, he firstly demurs – “I like the ambiguity and openness that instrumental music has” – before admitting, hesitantly, “for me personally, the overriding theme of the album is about loss – of loved ones, of sense of self – and coming to terms with that.”

That certainly describes the album’s opening title track, its centrepiece composition. It’s a bravura performance, at 27 minutes, that’s pieced together from constituent parts in a kind of modular construction that never admits to being Frankensteined together. There are a number of lovely themes that repeat through “Unraveling In Your Hands”, though its central phase – an unrelenting, hypnotic stream of shivering strings, tiny flecks of light dazzling as you plunge deep into the repetition, while following a snaky melody through the thickets – is certainly unforgettable.

Blackshaw hadn’t intended to write such a lengthy piece for the album but admits that everything ended up “snowballing” into its current form. “I’d end up writing new parts each time I sat down to play and then try to figure out ow they all belonged together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Eventually, I realised how long this thing was becoming and just decided to go with it, almost like a challenge or endurance test for myself.” The seeming effortlessness of the performance belies the intense craft behind it. More importantly, it seems entirely appropriate that Blackshaw should return, after nine years, with an album that opens with one of his most expansive and moving pieces for unaccompanied guitar.

If loss is a thread that runs through Unraveling In Your Hands, it’s perhaps at its most poignant on the following “Dexter”, which is named in tribute to Blackshaw’s late dog. Composed with his long-time collaborator Charlotte Glasson, it’s a breathy, soft-hearted hymnal for wheezing string drones, grounded by a simple, yet deeply affecting melody that meanders, on soft paws, throughout the song. From there, Unraveling In Your Arms concludes with “Why Keep Still?”, the taster that Blackshaw posted to Bandcamp back in 2023, settling tidily alongside the newer material, and another empathic, gently moving performance for guitar.

Unraveling… is currently only available at Blackshaw’s Bandcamp – a self-released project, it feels like he’s testing the waters, seeing how it feels to send his music back out there. But he’s also been interfacing with the public recently, having toured with Grails in Europe and the UK; here’s hoping there’s more, both recorded and live, to come. It’s very good indeed to have him back.

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.

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“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.

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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”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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