Articles by Allan Jones - Uncut.co.uk

The Who, Cream, Kevin Ayers, Matthew E White, Kurt Vile, Jeff Lynne in the new Uncut

When I first started reading what used to be Melody Maker, in a time now shrouded not so much in what are usually called the mists of time as they are in a fog as dense as anything that might gather over Dogger Bank, I used to accept its weekly delivery in the manner of some kind of jackal, cur or otherwise fanged and ravenous critter.

The Smiths - The Ultimate Music Guide! Uncut special on sale this week

Shameless plug coming your way! This Thursday, March 14, the next in our ongoing series of Ultimate Music Guides hits the shops. This one is dedicated to The Smiths.

The Replacements are back! Uncut rejoices!

The world and nearly everyone in it has been reduced to trembling excitement by the return of David Bowie, but for some of us there is another recent resurrection perhaps even more miraculous and just as unexpected, a comeback by The Replacements, who today release online the Songs For Slim EP, their first new recordings in more than 20 years.

David Bowie's The Next Day - The ultimate review and 10-page special in the new Uncut

David Bowie’s return to active service with The Next Day has been described as the greatest comeback ever and I’m sure every Bowie fan is hoping this will in fact be the truth of the matter when they finally get to hear the album, which is released on March 11, still a tantalising couple of weeks away at the time of writing.

Uncut at The Great Escape with Phosphorescent and Allah-Las

In his memoir, Prince Among Stones: That Business With The Rolling Stones And Other Adventures, which I’ve just reviewed for the next Uncut, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who was the band’s financial adviser for nearly 40 years, reflects at one point about how time as he gets older has started, as they say, to fly. Thinking about this, he is reminded of a famous quote by the grand old thespian, John Gielgud, who wryly remarked that in his old age time had started to speed by at such a pace that it seemed like breakfast was being served every 10 minutes.

Kraftwerk at Tate Modern, The Uncut Sessions 2013

There’s been a lot of excitement around the office over the last couple of weeks, with the imminent arrival of the first David Bowie album since what seems like the end of rationing causing a certain giddiness in the Uncut ranks, followed by the actual release of the long-promised new My Bloody Valentine album, a mere 22 years after Loveless.

Tom Waits, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Richard Thompson in the new Uncut

Tom Waits is staring back at me from the cover of the new Uncut, which goes on sale this Thursday, January 31. It’s a picture of the young Tom that I’m looking at, long before he ended up with a face that now makes you think a tractor tyre must recently have run over it, a corrugated look he shares with his friend, Keith Richards. He is in fact startlingly young in the picture, even though it would seem he hasn’t shaved for a week and for just as long has been sleeping in the clothes he’s wearing.

The Beatles - The Uncut Ultimate Music Guide on sale this week

The next Uncut Ultimate Music Guide goes on sale on Thursday (January 17), hot on the heels of our special on The Kinks, and is dedicated this time to The Beatles. There’s the usual mix of brand new reviews of all The Beatles albums by our current team of writers alongside some truly remarkable interviews from the archives of Melody Maker and NME, for which the description ‘mind-blowing’ seems barely adequate.

Mick Ronson on David Bowie and Bob Dylan

“The one thing that saved Mick at this point was Dylan,” Mick Ronson’s wife, Suzi, recalls in a terrific feature on her late husband by Garry Mulholland in the new issue of Uncut. She was talking about the shambles Mick’s career had become after he was dumped by David Bowie and his first two solo albums, Slaughter On 10th Avenue and Play Don’t Worry, had both flopped. Things hadn’t really worked out with the Hunter-Ronson Band, either, and you wondered where Mick might go from here when he unexpectedly hove into view as a member of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

Gram Parsons, Ray Davies, Mick Ronson, Simple Minds, The Rolling Stones, Family and Nick Drake's mum in the new Uncut

There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying – turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many – booked Gram parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population when Gram died in September, 1973.