Articles by Allan Jones - Uncut.co.uk

Simone Felice Band, London Bush Hall, April 27, 2012

Simi Stone was a member of the now apparently retired The Duke & The King, alongside Simone Felice. Tonight she’s opening for Simone at the Bush Hall, a solo turn that starts with Simi on fiddle, playing a lament that sounds like it may have been first heard a century ago, a keening in the Appalachians or somewhere similarly remote and steeped in mystery and drizzle.

Dexys, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, John Lydon, Neil Young in new Uncut

The new Uncut is on sale from Thursday, and we’re blushingly pleased with it. Dexys are on the cover, and we have an exclusive interview with Kevin Rowland in advance of their keenly-awaited comeback album, the astonishing One Day I’m Going To Soar.

Dave Alvin & The Guilty Ones, London Jazz Café, April 20, 2012

When he first toured the UK with The Blasters, in 1981 or thereabouts, Dave Alvin was a swaggering young yahoo in rockabilly duds with a 50s quiff, attitude to spare and the unblemished good looks of someone still fairly new to what the rest of his life would become, the bulk of it since spent mostly on the road, playing whatever bar, club, juke joint, tavern, theatre, festival, hootenanny or hoe-down that would have him.

No Last Waltz: A Tribute To Levon Helm By Simone Felice

A couple of years ago when I was in Woodstock to interview Simone Felice and his band, The Duke & The King, Simone drove me around the mountains where he’d grown up, pointing out places of local and historical interest. These included Big Pink, the house on Parnassus Lane in West Saugerties, where Dylan and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes.

Chuck Berry makes a mark on Uncut

If you can't quite make it out, that’s Chuck Berry’s signature, top left in the picture above of a couple of pages from the April issue of Uncut. It was sent to me by Uncut reader Scott Ford, who lives in St Louis, Missouri, home of course to the immortal Chuck, and was accompanied by a great email that I’ve copied below.

Dave Alvin And The Blasters

Dylan at the Hop Farm Festival, Springsteen and Paul Simon in Hyde Park, the Great Escape Festival in Brighton, as mentioned last week, a ton of great bands at the No Direction Home and End Of The Road festivals, which have line-ups straight out of the pages of Uncut. There’s certainly no shortage of great gigs on the horizon, looming and inviting. There’s one among them, though, that I may actually be looking forward to more than anything else coming up: Dave Alvin at the London Jazz Café on April 20.

Uncut At The Great Escape Festival With Beth Jeans Houghton, EMA, Willy Mason, Hans Chew

This year’s Great Escape Festival in Brighton is almost upon us, running from May 10-12 at a 30 venues across the town and featuring somewhere in the region of 300 new artists.

The new Uncut, Jack White, the Stones, Pete Townshend

The new Uncut isn't on sale until Thursday, which is March 29. But here’s a quick run-down on what’s in it, which is a lot, so you may want to pull up a chair.

The Byrds, Will Oldham, Gregg Allman, Townes Van Zandt and other music tomes

The groaning noise behind me is coming from shelves that have recently started to buckle from the almost daily addition to them of new music books, the majority of them typified by their common bulk, a shared enormity of pages, as if no band’s career can be documented in less pages than might otherwise be devoted to the history of mankind itself, from the beginning, with footnotes, anecdotal asides and a brief biography of everyone who’s ever lived.

Dr Feelgood, Dexys and more

I can’t believe it, either, but we seem to be already at that point in the month when I start by telling you that we’re hard at work finishing off the next issue of Uncut, buffeted by deadlines, flinching at the hungry caw of our steely-eyed taskmasters on the production desk, greedy for final copy as the last pages are put together to be sent to the printers.