The story of Drake as an uncompromising musical visionary is told by Joe Boyd, John Wood, Richard Thompson, Ashley Hutchings, Beverley Martyn and more who knew the singer-songwriter.
Robert Plant, Tom Petty, King Crimson and Bobby Womack all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated September 2014 (Take 208) and out tomorrow (July 29).
We track Plant, on the cover, from the Welsh Marches to the nightclubs of Paris to hear about bee colonies, mountain lions, altercations with Moroccan traffic cops, Bron-Yr-Aur, Jimmy Page, and Plant's extraordinary new solo album.
Dolly Parton and Harry Dean Stanton are both in this month's Uncut, a bit of a dream come true. I was scheduled to interview Dolly once myself, at a rodeo in Spokane, which seemed too good to be true.
We've got reviews in this issue of two Wreckless Eric albums that you may have missed when they were originally released, and which are now being re-released to coincide with Eric's 60th birthday in May,
The feature on William Burroughs in this month's issue by John Robinson made me think of some of the bands who took their names from Burroughs' books, most famously The Soft Machine, Steely Dan, and Grant Hart's Nova Mob
No-one who saw Little Feat at their peak will want to contest Jon Dale's description of them later in this issue as one of the greatest American bands of their era. Their records were great, but live they were sensational - at least until a not unusual mix of drugs and personality clashes ruined them.
His many fans will no doubt wonder at the absence of anything by Wayne County from the list of Top 50 American punk albums we've compiled as part of this month's cover story on the Ramones. After all, Wayne – who by 1980 was Jayne County, following the necessary surgery – was with his band Queen Elizabeth part of the same Max's Kansas City, Mercer Arts Center and Club 82 scene that nurtured the early New York Dolls.
The Making Of Robert Wyatt's "I'm A Believer" feature in this month's issue reminds me that when it was released in September, 1974, I made it Single Of the Week during a brief but lively stint as Melody Maker's singles reviewer.
If you were a fan, you probably watched with horror, incredulity and fretful concern at the things Lou Reed put himself through in the '70s, especially after the critical and commercial rejection of Berlin hardened an already cynical disposition into an unsparing bitterness and what seemed like a headlong pursuit of self-obliteration. Even more than Keith Richards at the time, Lou seemed the rock star most likely to become a casualty of his addictions.
