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.
Jack White’s on the cover, to coincide with the release of his first solo album, Blunderbuss, which is a good thing to call an album that finds Jack firing, as they say, on all cylinders, on the kind of record fans of The White Stripes will be thrilled to hear following the diversionary turns his career since Icky Thump has taken with The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather.
Our interview took place in New York, a few weeks ago, when White was in town to debut his two new bands – one all-male, the other all-female – on Saturday Night Live. It was, as you’ll see come Thursday, a lively encounter, Uncut’s John Mulvey, an early champion of The White Stripes in a former incarnation as a writer on NME, meeting White for the first time in quite a few years. The pair squared up for a couple of what John’s described as “a couple of pretty intense one-on-ones, the first of which became a fairly epic grapple of sorts”.
John’s previewed Blunderbuss in his Wild Mercury Sound blog on www.uncut.co.uk, which you can read here.
In 1969, the Rolling Stones made their live comeback in America with a tour that ended notoriously at Altamont, when a free festival intended to celebrate their return and also everything that was supposed to be so wonderful about the 60s counter-culture and the hippy utopianism of that far away era turned into a bloody tragedy, far removed from the largely blissful vibes of Woodstock, which had been held only four months earlier.
The young American writer Stanley Booth was with the Stones on that eventful tour and wrote about it in his brilliant book, The True Adventures Of the Rolling Stones. It’s been out of print, scandalously, for over a decade, but is being re-published in a new edition next month. Booth’s truly scary description of the violent chaos of Altamont and the havoc wrought there by the Hell’s Angels, is the dramatic centre-piece of his book and we have a major extract from it in the new issue. You can remind yourself of the seething pandemonium that attended the event in this clip of the band struggling through “Sympathy For The Devil” which you can see here.
Elsewhere in the issue, we have an Album By Album special with Pete Townshend, David Cavanagh looks at the post-Big Star career of Alex Chilton, Graeme Thomson recalls the seismic impact of Public Enemy’s debut UK tour. There’s also An Audience With Gregg Allman, unpublished pictures of Bruce Springsteen from the Born To Run album cover shoot, Brian Fallon introduces the new Gaslight Anthem album, the return of fabled folk singer Nic Jones and plenty more.
In our new expanded reviews section, meanwhile, we look at new releases from Dr John, Graham Coxon, Jack White, M Ward, Alabama Shakes, Spiritualized and Simone Felice. There’s also a great new Dr Feelgood box set, a deluxe edition of T Rex’s Electric Warrior, a reissue of Morrissey’s solo debut, Viva Hate, and a handsome four-disc Jerry Lee Lewis collection.
And if that isn’t enough reading for one month, you may also want to get hold of a copy of our latest Ultimate Music Guide, this one dedicated to REM, which is on sale now and also available online from www.uncut.co.uk/store. Look out too for the iPad edition of our Ultimate Music Guide to David Bowie, which will shortly be joined by an equally nifty iPad edition of our Bruce Springsteen Ultimate Music Guide, which is coming soon to iTunes.
Have a good week.
Allan