Articles by Allan Jones

Nick Cave - The Ultimate Music Guide, on sale this week!

Allan Jones — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:03:19 +0000

“I think I was reaching quite high from the beginning. I may not have had any right to be, but I was. I was always interested in people that were older than me and I looked up to them – people really from a different era to me: Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, even writers like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I wasn’t particularly influenced by my contemporaries. They weren’t very good.”

Willie Nelson and friends, including Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Paul Simon and Merle Haggard

Allan Jones — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:14:33 +0000

There’s a great video on uncut.co.uk at the moment of Neil Young singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in affectionate celebration of Willie Nelson, who was, astonishingly, 80 last month.

'Blame it on Jack White...' Introducing BP Fallon & The Bandits

Allan Jones — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:04:56 +0000

The last time I had occasion to write about my old friend BP Fallon in Uncut was in March, 2010, when he’d just released his debut single, produced by Jack White and released by Jack’s Third Man Records as the first in the label’s new Spoken Word-Instructional record Series. “Fame #9” was backed with “BP Fallon Interview By Jack White” and “I Believe In Elvis Presley”, on which White played some viperish slide guitar, with The Raconteurs’ Patrick Keeler on drums. There was also a video, featuring some of BP’s many friends, including Kevin Shields, Bobby Gillespie and Gemma Hayes.

Uncut at the Great Escape 2013

Allan Jones — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:57:41 +0000

The full line-up for this year’s Great Escape festival in Brighton was announced today and along with it the line-up for the Uncut Stage at the Pavilion Theatre, where we’ll be hosting three nights of great music from May 16-May 18, with four bands each night. It’s probably our strongest-ever Great Escape bill and includes several of my own current favourites, among them Phosphorescent, Allah-Las, Lord Huron and Mikal Cronin, although there’s no one I’d really want to miss.

Saying the unsayable: Elvis Costello, 'Tramp The Dirt Down' and Margaret Thatcher

Allan Jones — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:32:51 +0000

“To make true political music,” the great American critic Greil Marcus wrote nearly 25 years ago, “you have to say what decent people don’t want to hear; that’s something that people fit for satellite benefit concerts will never understand, and that Elvis Costello understood before anyone heard his name.”

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:28:34 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:58:40 +0000

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!

Allan Jones — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:44:29 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:48:20 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:33:58 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:21:19 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:09:52 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:01:35 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:09:23 +0000

“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

Allan Jones — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:55:04 +0000

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.

A Little Bit Of Bruce For Christmas

Allan Jones — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:36:49 +0000

Here we are at the end of another year, finishing off our first issue of 2013 and looking forward to the Christmas break, which starts for us on Friday. We’re off then until January 2, when we will no doubt return refreshed to face the New Year. This is therefore the last newsletter for a couple of weeks, so I’ll take the opportunity now to thank you for all your support and enthusiasm over the last 12 months, which has been much appreciated by everyone at Uncut. We hope all our readers enjoy their own Christmas holidays and wish you all the best for the coming year.

The Allah-Las, London Shackleworth Arms, December 11, 2012

Allan Jones — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:46:49 +0000

The Allah-Las make their UK debut in the back room of a north London pub on a freezing December night, the inhospitable weather not something familiar to in their native Los Angeles, where it probably only gets this cold in disaster movies, palm trees turning brittle with frost, the ocean becoming ice, CGI snow drifts on Sunset Strip and Denis Quaid in a parka and Bermuda shorts standing square-jawed and wrinkled-kneed against the elements.

More thoughts on The Rolling Stones. . .

Allan Jones — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:37:18 +0000

On my way home last week from The Rolling Stones at the O2, still a-buzz with excitement, I ended up chatting to a group of similarly exhilarated fans, who between them didn’t have enough fingers to count the number of Stones shows they’d been to, Brian Jones still a Stone the first time a couple of them had seen them.

The Rolling Stones, London 02, November 29, 2012

Allan Jones — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:26:38 +0000

After all the hoo-ha, huff, hysteria and hot air, here, finally, are The Rolling Stones doing what they do even better than raising the collective temperature with impertinent ticket prices, something they seem to have been doing at least since their 1969 American tour, nothing new in the Stones being accused of commercial banditry and the cynical exploitation of their fans, on whose behalf so many complaints have been indignantly voiced since the 50 And Counting dates in London and New York were announced. Why don’t they celebrate their half-centenary with, say, a free concert, the cry went up in some quarters, and let more people have a chance to see them, and for nothing too? Well, when they tried that in 1969, look where it got them: Altamont.

Getting ready to see the Stones. . .

Allan Jones — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 15:15:10 +0000

I’m off to see the second of the Stones’ 50th anniversary shows at the O2 on Thursday, and pretty excited about it. This morning, rummaging through some back issues of Uncut, I came across something I’d written about going to see them at Wembley Stadium in 1982, when they were touring in celebration of their 20th anniversary, amid much speculation that surely this would be their last go-around, retirement their next stop, which is very much what people have thought every time since then that they’ve toured. And yet here they are, 30 years further down the line, and no hint yet that we have seen the last of them.
Anyway, here’s the piece I came across earlier today. Have a good week.

Bruce Springsteen, Black Keys, Bryan Ferry, Paul Weller, Ty Segall plus The Top 75 Albums Of The Year in the new Uncut

Allan Jones — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:38:00 +0000

The new issue of Uncut will be on sale from Friday. Subscribers, of course, those sensibly organised people who plan ahead and have their lives in probably perfect order, may already have started receiving their copies. Lucky them! We’re actually still waiting for ours, but not yet fretting that they’ve been re-routed, sent via some staging post on a distant tundra where passing yaks may end up feasting upon them, the chomp-chomp-chomp of their distracted munching the only sound in that vast space, the hairy ruminants quite indifferent, of course, to what’s actually in the issue. Which is a lot, and includes in the grand annual tradition of these things, our review of the year, a 30-page special, featuring our Top 75 Albums Of 2012, plus the best reissues and box sets, films, DVDs and books, as voted for by over 40 Uncut contributors.

The John Lennon Lettters

Allan Jones — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:45:01 +0000

Hunter Davies, who in 1968 wrote the first authorised biography of The Beatles and now more than 50 years on has compiled and edited The John Lennon Letters, admits in his introduction that he has for the purposes of the book ‘rather expanded the definition of the word letter’, which immediately sounds bit slippery, especially when he also describes some of the material he has unearthed as ‘notes and lists and scraps’. This sounds rather unpromising, as if Davies is preparing the reader for disappointments to come.

Allah-Las on their way, praise the Lord!

Allan Jones — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:34:56 +0000

You catch us on a pretty busy day, deadlines fast approaching for our last issue of 2012. That’s the one, of course, that traditionally carries our end-of-year lists of best albums, reissues, films, DVDs and books. This means we’ve all been recently asked to nominate our personal Top 20s, from which John has been compiling the definitive countdown, the full list to be published when he’s finished his painstaking calculations in the Uncut that comes out at the end of November.

John Murry And Arbouretum For The 'Uncut Sessions'

Allan Jones — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:54:23 +0000

News from Oliver Gray, who runs The Railway in Winchester, where he has promoted the Uncut Sessions, as a kind of Club Uncut in exile since we quit our original home at London’s Borderline. The Uncut Sessions started a couple of years ago when Oliver booked Richmond Fontaine for two special shows. The first, on what I remember was a rather damp and windswept Saturday afternoon, saw Richmond Fontaine play their brilliant Post To Wire album in its entirety. Their second show, that evening, featured just about every other song the band had ever played, written, recorded, covered or merely just heard, possibly once, blasting out of the radio of a passing car, whistled by a waitress, hummed by a barman or otherwise brought to their passing attention in vague and possibly unremembered ways. The set went on for what people later reckoned was about four hours, although by its end the crowd had in all likelihood have lost all sense of time and the band could have carried on well into the following week without complaint from anyone there.

Squeeze Down Under

Allan Jones — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:35:36 +0000

Did you see that terrific BBC4 Squeeze documentary, Take Me I’m Yours, on Friday night? I was more than a little taken aback by the currently be-whiskered Glenn Tilbrook, but I’m sure there’s a plausible explanation for wanting to look like that and otherwise the programme was a timely reminder of the many great songs he and Chris Difford have written over the years. It also put me in mind of an eventful few days I spent with the band in 1980, when they were rather unhappily touring Australia, where I caught up with them in inhospitable Brisbane before we headed for the sunny beaches of Surfer’s Paradise. Here’s a piece I wrote for my old Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before column in Uncut.

John Cooper Clarke, London Queen Elizabeth Hall, October 4 2012

Allan Jones — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:16:58 +0000

It was National Poetry Day last week, a date I’m sure you found your own ways to celebrate. I was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where John Cooper Clarke was in residence for the evening, headlining a show that also featured appearances by fellow poets Mike Garry and Luke Wright, a couple of sharp young wordsmiths who by the look of them may not have been capable of joined-up writing when Clarke was in his glorious early pomp and may possibly not even have been born then, Wright especially looking like he’s only just stopped being looked after by baby-sitters and cooed over in a crib.

The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour And The Ghosts Of Christmas Past

Allan Jones — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:51:47 +0000

Boxing Day, 1967, and The Beatles’ new film, something called Magical Mystery Tour, is about to be shown for the first time, broadcast by the BBC, fans looking forward to what surely will be a highlight of the Christmas television schedules, a welcome respite to those of a certain age from the usual seasonal fare of old movies and light entertainment, all that stuff that they usually show to keep the old folks happy over the holidays.

More On the Byrds in Uncut

Allan Jones — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:22:16 +0000

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.

Dylan 'pops up' in Soho

Allan Jones — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:22:52 +0000

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.

Paul Weller – The Ultimate Music Guide

Allan Jones — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:45:34 +0000

Please excuse the wholly shameless plug, but I thought you might like to know that the next in our series of Ultimate Music Guides goes on sale tomorrow (September 6) and this one is dedicated to Paul Weller.

Neil Young, First Man On The Moon?

Allan Jones — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:28:40 +0000

How many fans were aghast over the weekend to hear via the American broadcaster NBC that Neil Young had just died and unknown to many of them had also been the first man to set foot on the moon? Neil has been many things down the years, of course, but his secret history as an astronaut would have been news to everyone, including him.

Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead in the new Uncut

Allan Jones — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:54:34 +0000

We’ve just had our copies of the new issue dropped off in the office, ahead of it going on sale later this week. Nick Cave’s on the cover, glowering menacingly. John Robinson went down to Brighton, where, as John memorably tells us, Nick lives in a house that’s ‘large and white, much as Russia in winter is large and white’. The occasion for Uncut dropping in on Cave was the release of Lawless, the terrific – and terrifically violent - new movie directed by Nick’s long-time collaborator, John Hillcoat, for which Cave has written the snappy screenplay.

Lou Reed, Royal Festival Hall, London, August 10 2012

Allan Jones — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:51:49 +0000

Lou Reed at 70 arrives onstage at the Festival Hall to do his bit for Antony Hegarty’s Meltdown programme dressed like a stroppy teenager in a baggy black basketball vest, gold medallions around his neck and what looks like a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He looks frail these days, though tonight slightly less so than last year at the Hammersmith Apollo, and perhaps no wonder when you consider what he’s put his body through over the years before he embraced his current sobriety.

Interview: John Murry

Allan Jones — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:30:58 +0000

John Murry first entered Uncut airspace in 2006 with World Without End, the bleakly brilliant album of country death songs he wrote and recorded with Bob Frank. Six years on, Murry has just released his first solo album, The Graceless Age, an album of almost symphonic emotional turmoil, co-produced by late American Music Club drummer Tim Mooney. The songs on the record deal sometimes explicitly with Murry’s heroin addiction, specifically the 10-minute ‘Little Coloured Balloons’, a harrowing account of a near-fatal OD. I reviewed The Graceless Age for the current issue of Uncut and emailed Murry some questions, to which he replied in detail and at illuminating length, as you will see from the fascinating transcript that follows.

Nick Cave's Lawless

Allan Jones — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:54:09 +0000

I don’t have any more information on the new Bob Dylan album, Tempest, following last week’s newsletter and blog on Friday confirming the track listing, so apologies to all the readers who have written in, hungry for further details about the record. The absence of anything further I can tell you at the moment about Tempest gives me, however, the opportunity to briefly sing the praises of Lawless, the new movie from director John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, who’s written the screenplay, as he did for The Proposition, Hillcoat’s savage outback Western.

Bob Dylan’s Tempest: Full Track Listing Revealed, Including Tribute To John Lennon

Allan Jones — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:22:03 +0000

Just a follow up to my post earlier this week about the new Bob Dylan album, around which a certain excitement seems to be accumulating. As I mentioned, the album features ten new Dylan songs that I can now give titles to, including “Roll On John”, the album’s closing track, a wistful tribute to John Lennon that quotes lines from several Beatles songs, including “Come Together” and “A Day In The Life”.

The New Bob Dylan Album, "Tempest": A First Listen

Allan Jones — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:27:14 +0000

Don’t spread it about, but, yes, I’ve heard the new Dylan album. And four or five tracks in, what I was thinking was: how much better is this thing going to get?

That New Bob Dylan Album, Bruce and Macca unplugged....

Allan Jones — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:16:41 +0000

There was exciting news this morning about the release on September 10 of a new Bob Dylan album, which if you haven’t seen the official announcement is called Tempest. There was much talk of the record a few weeks ago, backstage at the Hop Farm Festival, where one or two people rather teasingly inferred they had heard it, or knew someone who had.

Bob Dylan, Hop Farm, June 30, 2012

Allan Jones — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:33:13 +0000

When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.

American Music Club's Tim Mooney: RIP

Allan Jones — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:46:27 +0000

One of the records I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of these last couple of weeks is The Graceless Age, the new album by John Murry, who Uncut regulars may remember from World Without End, a sensationally bleak 2006 collection of contemporary murder ballads he made with the Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank. The Graceless Age, like World Without End, produced by Tim Mooney, the former American Music Club drummer, at Closer Recording, the studio Tim owned in San Francisco, at 1441 Howard Street. The more I played it, the more The Graceless Age sounded like one of the best things Mooney had been involved in, as either producer or musician, a dark and festering masterpiece.

Uncut's Bruce Springsteen App, The Sex Pistols' Jubilee Boat Trip

Allan Jones — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:24:24 +0000

Some news first of all on our iPad app version of ‘Bruce Springsteen: The Ultimate Music Guide’, which is finally on sale.

Patti Smith, Levon Helm, Alabama Shakes, King Crimson, Jimmy Page and Neil Young in the new Uncut

Allan Jones — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:09:13 +0000

Mick Ronson once fell asleep on me during an interview, the glam rock guitar god nodding off towards the end of what had become quite an emotional late night outburst on his part about how he had been betrayed by David Bowie after thanklessly contributing so much to Bowie’s success.

Notes From The Great Escape Festival

Allan Jones — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:04:36 +0000

Things aren’t due to kick off for a couple of hours at the Pavilion Theatre where throughout this year’s Great Escape Festival Uncut is hosting a splendid line-up. So early Thursday evening I’m at the Dome, where Australian psyche rockers POND are making enough noise to wake the long-time dead.

Playing Bass With Elvis, Dylan, The Doors & More…

Allan Jones — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:43:02 +0000

Jerry Scheff is surely not an unfamiliar name to readers of Uncut. I’d wager a horse most of you have more than one album in your collection that feature him on bass. Among the highlights of a lengthy and illustrious CV, he can count gigs with Elvis Presley, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, Richard Thompson, Bette Midler, Crowded House, Johnny Cash, T-Bone Burnett, Roy Orbison, Suzanne Vegas and Jimmie Dale Gilmour.

The John Peel Archive

Allan Jones — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:33:03 +0000

Like many music fans of a certain age, John Peel turned me on to a lot of music I may otherwise only have stumbled upon much later, if at all. I remember, for instance, in July 1969, listening to his Top Gear show one weekend and hearing something that lit me up like a burning house. It didn’t sound like much else he played that afternoon and as I recall he was afterwards not altogether enthusiastic about it, as if he as wondering why, beyond the fact that it was new and wouldn’t have yet been widely heard, he’d even bothered playing it.

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

Allan Jones — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:07:47 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:55:45 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:08:08 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:30:24 +0000

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

Allan Jones — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:10:55 +0000

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.