Uncut Back Issues

June 2013

Looking through this month's review section, one of the albums we've written about caught my eye and took me back to somewhat lively events in February, 1979. Roxy Music are due to play the first date of their reunion tour somewhere in Europe. Melody Maker want me to cover it, wherever it is.

May 2013

Everybody we spoke to about Kevin Ayers following his lonely death in the South of France at the age of 68 had so much to say that trying to fit everything they told us into the tribute feature I've written for this month's issue was like trying to pour the Atlantic into a bucket.

April 2013

When towards the end of 1974, The Troggs announce their latest comeback single will be a cover of The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", it's an occasion for much mocking laughter in the offices of what used to be Melody Maker.

March 2013

In this month's Audience With Sinéad O'Connor, she's asked about her traumatic appearance at the all-star bash at New York's Madison Square Garden, put on by Columbia Records to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dylan's debut album for the label.

February 2013

Before Melody Maker swept me off the street in the manner of a benevolent old codger taking a pallid waif into his kindly, white-haired care in something written to make you weep by the venerable Dickens, I worked for a bleak season or two in the mail order department of a bookstore near Piccadilly Circus.

January 2013

This is the last Uncut of 2012, rather unbelievably. It barely seems 12 months since I sat down to write the column that introduced our final issue of 2011. How much faster can time go by?

December 2012

As an alternative to my usual wittering, I'm handing over this column to Matt Allan, one of the many readers who were moved to write in response to our recent cover story on The Byrds, a band for whom Uncut readers clearly have an uncommon affection.

November 2012

When it comes out in the autumn of 1974, Gene Clark's No Other seems to me like an album everybody should hear, nothing short of a masterpiece.

October 2012

The first time Melody Maker feels confident enough to send me abroad without fearing an international incident as a consequence, I'm dispatched to interview Frank Zappa in Paris, where The Mothers Of Invention are celebrating their 10th anniversary.

September 2012

Joe Strummer would have been 60 this month, but imagine him for a moment the way I remember him at 20.

August 2012

When Neil Young brings Crazy Horse to London in 1976, I'm four rows from the front of the stage at Hammersmith Odeon. It's late March, a Sunday night. I still have the tickets, somewhere, probably curled at the edges and yellow with age by now, a bit like most of us who were there at the time.

July 2012

The best I can say in pitiful mitigation of my frequently poor behaviour at the time is that in those days I was not easily embarrassed and usually up for anything, a sorry mix. Anyway, it's October 1976. Patti Smith's just released her new album, Radio Ethiopia.

June 2012

Excuse me for looking perhaps a little startled, but I've just been told in the slightly murmuring voice of someone similarly shocked by the turn of events that on May 1, just after this issue goes on sale, it will be 15 years since we put out the first Uncut.

May 2012

"It was madness," is how Gregg Allman describes his brief but spectacularly stormy marriage to Cher in this month's issue, sounding similarly horrified by what he remembers of the album he recorded with her, 1977's pretty lamentable Allman And Woman: Two The Hard Way.