Andy Williams has died at the age of 84.
USA Today reports that the singer passed away at his home in Brnason, Missouri on Tuesday evening (September 25) following a lengthy battle with bladder cancer.
Williams revealed that he had been diagnosed with the illness in November last year and vowed to beat the disease and return to the stage, insisting that cancer was "no longer a death sentence". But a representative for the singer has now confirmed that he has succumbed to the condition.
The new Uncut’s only been on sale since the end of last week, but there’s already been a fair amount of correspondence about our cover story on The Byrds. Most of it’s been about our Top 20 countdown of The Byrds’s greatest tracks. You were broadly in agreement with what was included, but many of you wondered aloud at certain omissions – “Chestnut Mare” was particularly missed by many, including me it must be said.
AC/DC singer Bon Scott, who died aged 33 in 1980, is to have a monument honouring him erected in his birthplace.
Scott was born in Kirriemuir in Scotland in 1946, before his family moved to Australia when he was six, and a community group want to honour their local hero by erecting a statue.
DD8 Music, who are also behind the annual Bon Scott music festival in the town, have approached sculptor John McKenna to design a statue as a lasting tribute, reports The Daily Record.
It's now seven years since Damage, the last Blues Explosion album, a hiatus during which Jon Spencer got to indulge his psychotic rockabilly side with three albums with Heavy Trash, and also pursue a few other alternative musical endeavours with the likes of Andre Williams, Solex and Cristina Martinez. It was also a period during which the original punk-blues pioneers saw their influence put to more remunerative use not just by The White Stripes but by The Black Keys as well, as stripped-back roots riffage unaccountably became one of rock's more commercially potent modes.
Yoko Ono is set to give the biennial Lennonono Grant For Peace to five different activists and campaigners, including the partially imprisoned Russian punk collective, Pussy Riot.
As well as Pussy Riot, the award will be presented posthumously to peace activist Rachel Corrie, who died in 2003, and to the late writer Christopher Hitchens. Author John Perkins will also receive the award, as well as a fifth, to-be-announced person.
Calexico’s new album, Algiers, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (October 2012, Take 185) – so we thought we’d take a trip back to April 2003 (Take 71), when Uncut’s John Mulvey flew out to Tucson, Arizona to discover more about the duo’s redrawing of the alt.country map.
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Anyway, with the release of Bob Dylan’s Tempest looming, I was thinking the other morning about a time when albums just, you know, came out. What seemed to happen was pretty straightforward. There’d be a story in Melody Maker announcing a new album by one of your favourite bands that usually gave the record a title, track listing and release date. The week the album came out, there’d be a review, maybe an interview and perhaps a full-page ad somewhere in MM, often with tour dates attached.
On the day the album came out, you went to your local record shop – in my case, Derek’s in Water Street in Port Talbot – and you bought it. How simple it all seemed.
Of course, when I actually started working for Melody Maker in 1974, I found there was a bit more to it, although not much more usually than a launch party. This was basically an excuse for the band, their mates and assorted journalists to have a bit of a piss-up and could hardly be described as an integral part of a carefully-plotted promotional campaign, unless you were Led Zeppelin and the party was a debauched affair in Chislehurst Caves involving naked nuns and the like, in which case the event would get a bit of a write-up in the red tops.
