Mark Stewart tended to confound expectations wherever he went. Not because he wanted to – he just couldn’t help it. His innate curiosity, sense of humour and gently provocative nature, coupled with his enormous charisma and sharp mind, meant that while he dedicated his life to making intensely powerful music, he didn’t take himself too seriously. Spend even a couple of minutes in his company and he’d be ribbing you left, right and centre, barking ten to the dozen in his rich Bristolese; this towering post-punk prophet, all six and a half foot of him, had a touch of Tommy Cooper about him.
Stewart died unexpectedly in April 2023 at the age of 62, a force of nature suddenly silent, but he’d completed what would become The Fateful Symmetry, his eighth solo album, before his death. Looking back at what he worked on during the last decade or so of his life – two new albums with the reformed Pop Group and versions of their classic 1979 debut Y reissued through Mute, plus a couple of industrial dub solo releases that brought together the likes of Bobby Gillespie, Richard Hell, Kenneth Anger, Penny Rimbaud and Keith Levene – it’s tempting to assume that this new record would continue in the vein of his collaborative solo material: jagged, whacked-out dubstep and menacing funk fusion united by Stewart’s theatrical pronouncements on an array of conspiracy theories and political topics. In that mode, it was often too easy to dismiss Stewart as the strange man with the megaphone on the street corner who’d been ranting about the same thing for 40 years, even though, deep down, you know he’s cottoned on to some essential truth.
Not that The Fateful Symmetry, despite its eerily prescient title, is some kind of warning from beyond the grave – far from it. In fact, knowing that Stewart has gone, it comes across more like a love letter to life, full of arrestingly beautiful songs in which Stewart revels in the glorious absurdity of humanity. In a final twist he’d no doubt relish, Stewart has produced the most accessible album of his career, one that mashes together swooning chanson and smouldering ballads, new-wave grooves and candy-striped dub, while he offers a relatively restrained performance, crooning through the likes of “Neon Girl” and “This Is The Rain” in the manner of modern-day Nick Cave, a singer who once claimed that Stewart in his unhinged Pop Group prime “changed everything”.
Mute boss Daniel Miller, who began working with Stewart in the early ’80s, suggests that Stewart wanted this album to be more appealing so that he might reach a wider audience – and once he’s snared them with the sweet stuff, they might come to appreciate Stewart’s gnarlier heavyweight gear. Either way, there’s a level of quality control on this project, overseen by Miller, that still allows Stewart to probe and provoke but this time the medium of his message is more palatable. The noirish electronic disco of opener “Memory Of You”, produced with regular foil Youth, is almost deceptively straight, with Stewart singing, “I could’ve wrote a love song” while he pours his heart out, craving a better world.
Stewart was known for his generosity. In Bristol, he opened doors for the Wild Bunch and Massive Attack, helped Tricky record his breakthrough “Aftermath”, and championed new outfits like Ishmael Ensemble and Young Echo. Similarly, here he brings together a bunch of disparate producers whose mongrel mix of styles complement each other. After the pulsing doom-step of the 23 Skidoo-produced “Crypto Religion” – “This is how I live now – some days are better than others,” he mooches – comes the atmospheric post-punk of Belgian act Mugwump’s “Blank Town” (“You’re not alone on this hill of bones”). On Youth’s “Neon Girl”, which features The Raincoats’ Gina Birch and descends into boozy schlager, he asks: “Is it too late, too late for me?” He sounds even more exposed on “This Is The Rain”, a bruised piano ballad produced with his Pop Group bandmate Gareth Sager, as he speaks stirringly of “a world upside down and backwards – this is the rain that washes and heals in glory.”
In some ways it’s fitting that Stewart comes full circle on The Fateful Symmetry with an endearing cumbia-style dub, mixed by Adrian Sherwood, of “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime”, originally a hit in 1980 for The Korgis, who would have been contemporaries of The Pop Group, although their approaches differed, to put it mildly. “Change your heart, it will astound you,” Stewart sings through distortion, but the message – and his enduring positivity – could not be clearer.
Live At The Circus Maximus, Rome – which is released via Sony Music Vision and Trafalgar Releasing – will be shown in cinemas & IMAX worldwide on September 17, for a limited time only. Tickets go on sale from August 6 at 2pm BST/ 9am EDT / 6am PDT. Full screening details will be available here. The film will also be released on 2 Blu-Ray and 3 DVD sets with bonus unseen footage on October 17.
Also on October 17, Sony Music release The Luck And Strange Concerts, featuring 23 tracks spread across 4LPs or 2CDs, recorded at selected shows from the tour and blends solo tracks from Gilmour’s most recent album alongside classic Pink Floyd tracks. The super deluxe edition of the album features all the formats as well as a 120-page hardback book featuring Polly Samson’s photographs taken on the tour. Pre-order here.
DAVID GILMOUR THE LUCK AND STRANGE CONCERTS 4 LP SET WITH 24-PAGE BOOK LP 1 A 5 A.M. Black Cat Luck and Strange
LP1 B Breathe (In The Air) Time Fat Old Sun
LP2 A Marooned A Single Spark Wish You Were Here
LP2 B Vita Brevis Between Two Points – with Romany Gilmour High Hopes
LP3 A Sorrow The Piper’s Call A Great Day For Freedom
LP3 B In Any Tongue The Great Gig In The Sky A Boat Lies Waiting
LP4 A Coming Back To Life Dark and Velvet Nights Sings
LP4 B Scattered Comfortably Numb (Encore)
DAVID GILMOUR THE LUCK AND STRANGE CONCERTS 2CD SET WITH 24 PAGE BOOK CD1 5 A.M. Black Cat Luck and Strange Breathe (In The Air) Time Fat Old Sun Marooned A Single Spark Wish You Were Here Vita Brevis Between Two Points – with Romany Gilmour High Hopes
CD2 Sorrow The Piper’s Call A Great Day For Freedom In Any Tongue The Great Gig In The Sky A Boat Lies Waiting Coming Back To Life Dark and Velvet Nights Sings Scattered Comfortably Numb (Encore)
DAVID GILMOUR LIVE AT THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS 2 BLU-RAY SET WITH 24 PAGE BOOK & BLACK CAT STICKERS DISC 1 LIVE AT CIRCUS MAXIMUS 5 A.M. Black Cat Luck and Strange Breathe (In The Air) Time Fat Old Sun Marooned Wish You Were Here Vita Brevis Between Two Points – with Romany Gilmour High Hopes Sorrow The Piper’s Call A Great Day For Freedom In Any Tongue The Great Gig In The Sky A Boat Lies Waiting Coming Back To Life Dark and Velvet Nights Sings Scattered Comfortably Numb (Encore)
142-min concert film with audio in Stereo 96/24, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos
DISC 2 THE LUCK AND STRANGE CONCERTS (AUDIO) Audio only in Stereo 96/24, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos VIDEO EXTRAS LUCK AND STRANGE TOUR REHEARSALS Rehearsals for the Luck And Strange Tour at King Alfred Leisure Centre, Brighton, September 2024 Between Two Points – with Romany Gilmour Breathe (In The Air)/Time Dark and Velvet Nights Luck and Strange
DOCUMENTARIES Rain in Rome Backstage at the Royal Albert Hall Backstage in America 8:55 The Making of Luck and Strange
MUSIC VIDEOS A Single Spark Live Between Two Points (Official Music Video) Between Two Points – GENTRY Remix – Editor’s Cut (Official Music Video) Wesley On Patrol The Piper’s Call (Official Music Video) The Piper’s Call Live from Around the World (Official Music Video) Luck and Strange (Official Music Video) Dark and Velvet Nights (Official Music Video) Dark and Velvet Nights (Animated Official Video)
DAVID GILMOUR LIVE AT THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS 3 DVD SET WITH 24 PAGE BOOK & BLACK CAT STICKERS DISC 1 LIVE AT CIRCUS MAXIMUS PART 1 5 A.M. Black Cat Luck and Strange Breathe (In The Air) Time Fat Old Sun Marooned Wish You Were Here Vita Brevis Between Two Points – with Romany Gilmour High Hopes
DISC 2 LIVE AT CIRCUS MAXIMUS PART 2 Sorrow The Piper’s Call A Great Day For Freedom In Any Tongue The Great Gig In The Sky A Boat Lies Waiting Coming Back To Life Dark and Velvet Nights Sings Scattered Comfortably Numb (Encore)
142-min concert film with audio in Stereo 96/24 & 5.1
DISC 3 VIDEO EXTRAS LUCK AND STRANGE TOUR REHEARSALS Rehearsals for the Luck And Strange Tour at King Alfred Leisure Centre, Brighton, September 2024 Between Two Points – with Romany Gilmour Breathe (In The Air)/Time Dark and Velvet Nights Luck and Strange
DOCUMENTARIES Rain in Rome Backstage at the Royal Albert Hall Backstage in America 8:55 The Making of Luck and Strange
MUSIC VIDEOS A Single Spark Live Between Two Points (Official Music Video) Between Two Points – GENTRY Remix – Editor’s Cut (Official Music Video) Wesley On Patrol The Piper’s Call (Official Music Video) The Piper’s Call Live from Around the World (Official Music Video) Luck and Strange (Official Music Video) Dark and Velvet Nights (Official Music Video) Dark and Velvet Nights (Animated Official Video)
DAVID GILMOUR THE LUCK AND STRANGE CONCERTS LIVE AT THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS SUPER DELUXE EDITION 120-page hardback book “David Gilmour Luck and Strange Live” Polly Samson photographs taken on the tour. Disc 1 CD1 – The Luck and Strange Concerts, Part 1 Disc 2 CD2 – The Luck and Strange Concerts, Part 2 Disc 3, 4, 5, 6 – The Luck and Strange Concerts 4 x LPs Disc 7 – Blu-ray Live at the Circus Maximus in stereo, 5.1 and Atmos Disc 8 – Blu-ray The Luck and Strange Concerts in stereo, 5.1 and Atmos & Video Extras Disc 9 – DVD David Gilmour Live at the Circus Maximus Disc 10 – DVD David Gilmour Live at the Circus Maximus Disc 11 – DVD Video Extras Memorabilia in dedicated envelope with embossed stamp 2 perforated postcard sheets with 2 postcards each 1 sheet of black cat stickers 1 sheet of Luck and Strange figure with outstretched arms stickers Set list sheet 930mm x 620mm double-sided 4-colour poster 8-page credits book
News reached us earlier this month that British rock original Terry Reid has sadly been forced to postpone his upcoming European tour due to an ongoing battle with cancer. Now his friends have set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money for his treatment – click here to read more and donate.We wish Terry a speedy recovery.
Below, you can read our Audience With Terry Reid from the October 2023 issue of Uncut (Take 317): from helping to assemble Led Zeppelin, to getting loaded with Bowie, to Chuck Berry stealing his amp, Superlungs has seen it all…
Terry Reid is sanguine about being forever known as the man who turned down Led Zeppelin. But he’d rather be known as the man who put together Led Zeppelin. “Jimmy [Page] asked me what he should do with the band,” explains Reid, Zooming in from his home in Indio, California. “He needed a singer who could sing around those guitar licks, and not everybody could do that. I’d seen Robert with John Bonham, so I said to him, ‘Not only is Robert perfect, you’ve got to get the drummer – he’s an animal!’”
It turns out that Reid might be the greatest rock matchmaker of all-time. The Jimi Hendrix Experience? That was him too. “Mitch [Mitchell] called me up and said, ‘Hey Terry, you know this guy who’s around town – big afro hair and he wears all this women’s’ clothing? He’s putting a band together and he wants me to audition for him.’ Now, I’d heard Jimi [play], so I went, ‘Get your arse down there right now!’ And the rest is history.”
With his infectious laugh and warm ‘Los Anglian’ burr, you can see why Terry Reid was mates with everyone. He may not have joined a big band himself, but he’s got no regrets. “When you’re in a band, you’re committed to that style. You’re not gonna be able to play any of that Brazilian music you like, cos they don’t do that. And all those folk things you like, well forget that.” So Reid ploughed his own furrow, making a couple of terrific 1970s solo albums that have only recently begun to get their dues. And he’s still playing and singing with whoever he likes, in whatever style he fancies, collecting amazing stories along the way…
What was Hendrix like as a friend? Andrew Verne, Berwick-upon-Tweed
A very sweet guy. Misunderstood by everybody, really. He was the quietest, calmest guy, but you would never think that when he hit the stage. He was always trying to outdo somebody! He had an apartment in London and he’d throw parties. All these hangers-on would turn up at his place and drink all his drinks, do all his drugs. I went over one night and it was so full of people that they were out of the door and in the street. Jimi couldn’t handle it, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell them to leave, so he came over to my place and crashed over there. Everybody just horded on him, because he really was that great. I still haven’t heard anybody who can play that good, emotionally. I never heard him play a wrong note – he’s so fluid when he’s playing that he doesn’t hit wrong notes, everything fits together. Before he passed, he was working on an album with Miles Davis. Boy, I would be really interested to hear what came out of that. Because I was [with Jimi] in New York one time and Miles came round. They were in the other room playing, and it was nothing like “Purple Haze”…
You played every date on The Rolling Stones’ 1969 US tour, joined on alternating dates by either BB King, Ike & Tina Turner or Chuck Berry. What was the scene like backstage before these performances? Diane Strauss, via email
Have you got a week?! We’d arrive at a hotel and there were already parties going on. Keith [Richards] had parties going on all over the planet! And playing with BB King was just amazing – what a gentleman. You realise where he came from and the years he put in and what he actually stood for. And that the blues was not a miserable thing, it’s a sign of hope. And then you’ve got Chuck Berry. Now you’re talking about a whole different ball of wax! One night he said to me, “Oh man, I got another gig tonight – let me go on before you.” I wasn’t too comfortable with having to follow Chuck Berry but you can’t say no, can you? Anyway, he comes off-stage, gets in his car and he’s taken my Twin Reverb with him! I never did see it again. But we had a lot of fun on that tour.
You’re probably sick of talking about missing out on the chance to front Led Zeppelin. But how do you think you’d have fared amid the subsequent madness surrounding them? Tim Lidyard, Macclesfield
There’s a lot of different bands we all could’ve been involved in. And, you know, [Led Zeppelin] did well! Five billion people can’t be wrong. So I figured that we actually did a real good job putting it together. I would still be interested in working with Jimmy [Page], because he’s got a lot more to offer guitar-wise than Zeppelin licks, and he works really well with people. Maybe we could get a piano player. He’s been to a couple of my gigs, so you never know what’ll happen next.
What do you remember about your night in the Worthy Farmhouse with David Bowie and Linda Lewis at 1971’s Glastonbury Fayre? Christophe T, via email
I don’t remember a hell of a lot, we were all so hammered. David was talking, talking, talking about the summer solstice and all sorts of things are gonna happen. Almost on the verge of being scary! [During my set] I’m playing this rhythm, and I’m leaving the ground by 12 inches. I’m very loaded, so I’m going, “Wow, what the hell is going on?” Suddenly it dawned on me that the people on the side of the stage are stomping their feet. The stage is built out of these scaffolding boards, which are flexible. So as they’re doing that, they’re flipping me up in the middle. I told David about it, that it was the people at the side of the stage, and he said [in a conspiratorial whisper], “It’s more than that…” We had such a good time. I got on great with David, he was a real sweetheart. He was very interested in everything. Everything was possible.
Were you disappointed that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s recording of your song “Horses Through A Rainstorm” [aka “Without Expression”] was replaced by “Carry On” on the final Deja Vu tracklisting? Grahame Reed, Wiltshire
Yeah. I mean, ker-ching! They had recorded it, but I know what happened: when it comes to the last cut, you’ve got four songwriters. And even if it’s a double album, you aren’t getting all their songs on there. Crosby was really behind that song, same with Graham – The Hollies had done it, originally. I went to rehearsals when they put the band together, and I heard them briefly running it through. But it didn’t make the final cut. Hey, it’s their album! But then when they did the boxset, they went in and mixed it and put it on that. It’s an honour to be in that company.
What did you learn from hosting Gilberto Gil during his exile from Brazil in the early 1970s? Maria Sanchez, via email
I’d heard from my attorney, Bernard Sheridan, that England had given asylum to Gilberto Gil. I kept thinking to myself, “I’d love to meet this guy, now he’s over here in England.” We did the Isle Of Wight festival, which was 500,000 people, and I’m looking out into the audience and I see this beaming, smiling face looking back at me, with this big afro kinda haircut. I kept thinking, “Wow, what a happy guy.” Afterwards he came backstage and went, “Terry, it’s Gilberto Gil.” So we became best friends. He came and lived with me in the countryside up in Huntingdonshire. That woke the neighbourhood up! We had 10 Brazilian percussionists in a little thatched cottage. My poor neighbour daren’t shave with a straight razor, with all these Brazilian drums going. It was so much fun. Gil taught me so much just by listening to him, his attitude to music. But it took me years to figure some of them chords out.
Thanks for coming to record an EP with us in Paris in 2009 – you’re the most inspiring artist we ever met. What do you look for in a song or a musician that makes you want to collaborate? Guillaume Simon, Shine/Indolore, Paris
When you’re working with somebody, there’s two ways to go: either they tell you what they want, or they say, “Do whatever you want.” But if they ask you to do whatever you want, and then you turn up to the studio the next day and they go, “Well…”, you end up getting nowhere. [On this occasion] they sent me the songs that they had in mind for me to sing. I learnt all the songs religiously, because I don’t like messing around in the studio too much. They said, “We’ve got 10 days booked in the studio,” but we finished in three. I said, “D’you wanna do another song?” They said, “No, we’re gonna party!” That was a lot of fun – it was great to hang out with the young generation of Paris.
Are you currently working on new music? Joe McCall, Aberdeen
Yes, I am. I haven’t got an album planned but I’ve got lots of tunes. As they come up, I always hear them with different arrangements. I’m working on one tune here that’s a very Spanish/Mexican kind of song, somewhere between that and a samba, and I want to do it with a whole mariachi band. It’ll probably cost me more in tequila than I’ll make from it!
Today (July 25) sees the release of the highly anticipated new Nick Drake boxset, The Making Of Five Leaves Left, which tells the story of how his stunning debut album came together across four discs of demos, studio outtakes and previously unheard songs.
Today (July 25) sees the release of the highly anticipated new Nick Drake boxset, The Making Of Five Leaves Left, which tells the story of how his stunning debut album came together across four discs of demos, studio outtakes and previously unheard songs.
Here is Uncut’s guide to the most revealing tracks from the new boxset, which shine new light on one of the most mythologised albums of all-time:
“TIME HAS TOLD ME” (1st SOUND TECHNIQUES, MARCH 1968) Drake’s second ever studio recording fully unpacks the rich voice, complex guitar progressions and mysterious lyrics that will forever characterise him.
“STRANGE FACE” (ROUGH MIX WITH GUIDE VOCAL, SEPTEMBER 11, 1968) A studio experiment whose overdubs build into an artificial-sounding, proto-motorik groove, with Drake’s voice and guitar unperturbed at its heart.
INSTRUMENTAL (CAMBRIDGE, LENT TERM 1968) Only 1:40 long, this unknown guitar fragment taped in Robert Kirby’s room sounds packed with possibilities, forsehadowing Bryter Layter’s penchant for instrumentals.
“MICKEY’S TUNE” (CAMBRIDGE, LENT TERM 1968) The set’s new Drake song, supposedly named after his friend Micky Astor, is breezy and bossa nova-like. “When I played it at an event last year,” says Drake biographer Richard Morton Jack, “it hadn’t been heard publicly by anyone before – including Micky Astor, who was in the audience.”
“MADE TO LOVE MAGIC” (CAMBRIDGE, LENT TERM 1968) Dropped from Five Leaves Left, this lightly sung declaration of faith in the childlike and supernal now sounds like a major song. “Celestial,” Drake insists.
“STRANGE FACE” (TAKE 1, NOVEMBER 12, 1968) Danny Thompson’s bass gives Drake’s quicksilver, chiming guitar supple rhythmic backing.
“MAYFAIR” (TAKE 5, JANUARY 4, 1969) The outro features Drake and Thompson’s most telepathic improvisation, belying the former’s rep for repetition.
“’CELLO SONG” (TAKE 4, JANUARY 4, 1969) “Strange Face” reconfigured and retitled: Drake’s wordless humming and guitar arpeggios meet Clare Lowther’s titular instrument.
“RIVER MAN” (TAKE 1, JANUARY 4, 1969) Five Leaves Left’s greatest song arrives in solo acoustic form, with Drake’s guitar already suggesting its orchestral possibilities.
“RIVER MAN” (TAKE 2, APRIL 1969) Drake discarded the string middle section on this take for the rewrite heard on Five Leaves Left. But this version has its own wild power.
With the best progressive rock albums, you were on pretty safe ground judging the book (actually the record) by its cover. As you’d probably hope, with someone behind so many such covers, the artist Roger Dean has a very good take on how the whole progressive rock album package – the music, the logo, the futuristic icescape on the sleeve – all fitted together.
In a field so often criticised for excess, Roger sees the offering more in terms of generosity. “What we were doing was making an integrated and holistic gift,” he told me in 2019. “The LP cover was a fantastic gift to give and receive. If an album came with a plastic toy it was seen as an important icon.”
In this boom time for the music business, the package, and the music within it expanded – and this is where our latest Ultimate Record Collection takes its place. The 200 Greatest Progressive Rock Albums…Ranked!is filled with new innovations, and widened horizons. Finding themselves lacking the charisma and traditional beauty and showmanship of a Mick Jagger, a progressive musician might more comfortably retreat behind his futuristic artwork, logo, or banks of keyboards, the better to concentrate on developing the music.
This music now accommodated a huge new range of influences beyond rock’s traditional base in rhythm and blues. Literary inspirations. Classical motifs. Conceits like the Genesis double The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. While a listener’s mind wandered into the fantastic landscape of a Hipgnosis or Roger Dean sleeve (bonus Roger fact: he was at art college with the Hipgnosis guys and shared a flat with Syd Barrett), musicians stretched themselves into strange new shapes beyond the map of traditional songs. You engage with a progressive album less like a record and more like a book: prepared for a journey and expecting the unexpected. No wonder it was a genre that thrived on the university circuit.
“It was nearly always brilliant fun,” Roger went on to tell me, still enjoying his recollections of this expansive period for music. “There hadn’t been a theatrical stage before. There were a lot of firsts.”
Enjoy the magazine. It’s in shops now. Or you can get yours from us here.
On September 12, Led Zeppelin will continue to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Physical Graffiti with an updated deluxe vinyl edition of the album, complete with bonus replica promotional poster.
But perhaps more interestingly, they will also release a new EP featuring four rare live recordings: “In My Time Of Dying” and “Trampled Under Foot” from Earl’s Court, 1975, alongside “Sick Again” and “Kashmir” from Knebworth, 1979. It will be the first time these performances have appeared on CD or vinyl, having only ever been previously released on the 2003 Led Zeppelin DVD.
Watch the video for “Trampled Under Foot (Live At Earl’s Court)” below:
Pre-order the Live EP and the new deluxe poster edition of Physical Graffitihere. You can read the full, fascinating story of the making of Physical Graffiti in the April 2025 issue of Uncut, which is still available from our online store.
Paul Weller is the star of our latest free CD, Movin On, available with the September 2025 issue of Uncut, in shops now.
Paul Weller is the star of our latest free CD, Movin On, available with the September 2025 issue of Uncut, in shops now.
The 10-track album includes rarities, deep cuts and B-sides, including blistering six-minute closer “I Work In The Clouds”.
There have been few artists who have had a career quite like Weller’s – not least in his stunning move into kaleidoscopic experimentation in his middle age. After last year’s impressive 66, he’s now returned with Find El Dorado, a covers album that’s much more than that: a “deeply personal new album of reinterpretations”, it shines a light on some of Weller’s own favourite songs, from the well-known – The Kinks’ “Nobody’s Fool” to the Bee Gees’ “I Started A Joke” – to the obscure – especially “Lawdy Rolla”, by French studio group The Guerillas.
To mark the new record, we’ve put together, in conjunction with the man himself, this survey of rarities and album tracks from one of his golden periods of exploration. It spans the eclectic, overdriven funk and fuzz rock of 2015’s Saturns Pattern, his gritty 2017 soundtrack to Jawbone and the psychedelic soul and jazz of the same year’s A Kind Revolution, and the acoustic, elegiac True Meanings (2018), drenched in strings.
Along the way, we’ll hear tender balladry give way to motorik frenzy, electronic gospel melt into dub, and much more. Plus, there’s a taste of the new Find El Dorado, courtesy of the superb “Lawdy Rolla”. Dig in.
1 Glide (Instrumental) We begin with this version from the deluxe expanded edition of 2018’s True Meanings, a waltzing acoustic reverie as gorgeous as anything Weller’s ever put his name to. As the fingerpicked notes from two acoustic guitars entangle, harp and pastoral strings blossom, before the whole thing’s done in just over two minutes.
2 The Ballad Of Jimmy McCabe Hard to believe, but Jawbone (Music From The Film) is the first ever soundtrack Weller has tried his hand at. It’s not to be slept on, though: one of the highlights is this robust acoustic ballad, hinting at the desperation and struggles of the film’s lead character. The music suggests an ancient folk ballad, which works to place McCabe’s struggles in a long line of hard times for the working classes.
3 I Spy This slice of lilting folk-rock debuted as the B-side of Saturns Pattern’s “Going My Way”, but also appeared on 2022’s collection of rarities, Will Of The People. It’s perfectly poised, reminiscent of the bucolic psychedelia of Traffic with its lazy sway, prominent bass guitar, ’60s organ, piano, Echoplex effects and – of course – Weller’s peerless soulful vocals.
4 Sun Goes The B-side to Saturns Pattern’s title track, “Sun Goes” is another demonstration of Weller’s melancholic, acoustic side – and yet, there’s a deeply lovely touch of cosmic Scouse psychedelia to it, from the sea shanty chords and the wandering electric lead guitar to the spaghetti western choir. It’s proof, should it be needed, that Weller’s muse flourishes within almost any style.
5 Hopper (White Label Remix) A reworking that first appeared on the deluxe version of 2017’s A Kind Revolution, this remix turns the New Orleans shuffle of the original into a piece of atmospheric dub. It proves to be a fine accompaniment to Weller’s vocals, hymning the magic of Edward Hopper’s late-night, nightlife paintings. “In late night bars the ghost of Hopper/Paints in such melancholy colours…”
6 The Soul Searchers (Richard Hawley Remix) Opening True Meanings, this co-write and collaboration with Villagers’ Conor O’Brien came on like Pentangle collaborating with Ennio Morricone; in its remix by the Sheffield songwriter and guitarist Richard Hawley, it’s given a pulsing disco workout. Over tight drums and looping bass, Weller’s vocal echoes serenely before lush, sour strings flood the dancefloor.
7 Movin On The lead single from True Meanings is one of the most heartfelt, pure songs Weller has written. There’s no time for experimentation here, no room for genre collisions that would blunt the focused lyrics: “I’ve got love all around/I don’t need nothing else…” Instead, his soaring vocals are backed by acoustic guitar, jazzy drums and the kind of ornate strings and horns that surrounded Nick Drake on Bryter Layter (no wonder, then, that Weller worked with Drake’s arranger Robert Kirby on 2000’s Heliocentric).
8 Praise If You Wanna Taken from the deluxe edition of A Kind Revolution, this brief snippet – a mantra meets jam, like something from the third LP of All Things Must Pass cut down to its essence – is written by Weller and all of his band, including longtime lead guitarist Steve Cradock. A bluesy gospel shuffle, scattershot with some deliciously retro guitar runs, it builds and builds until a rising synth note brings it to a premature close.
9 Lawdy Rolla Seemingly cat-nip for Weller, this obscure single by French group The Guerillas mixed jazz, soul and rock before vanishing into cult obscurity. Weller has brought it back into the light on his new covers album, Find El Dorado, and toned down its more fractious chants into a rolling, swinging groove. At key moments, especially the transcendent coda, London-born saxophonist Awoifaleke (Kevin) Haynes weaves spiritual, sinuous lead lines.
10 I Work In The Clouds A hard to find rarity, only available currently on the Japanese edition of Saturns Pattern, this barnstorming krautrock epic (spanning almost six minutes) deserves to be heard more widely. Again written with all of Weller’s regular band, it pirouettes between two chords, the spoken-word verses painting a faintly dystopian picture of disconnection in a high-rise office. Unhinged lead guitar spits and sparks over the relentless drums and bass, thrillingly raw.
15 months before they were invited to join Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve 1974, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks released the duo album Buckingham Nicks.
Although it was a commercial flop, the song “Frozen Love” persuaded Mick Fleetwood to get in touch, and the rest is history. Yet despite Buckingham Nicks’ burgeoning reputation as a cult classic, the album has never been officially reissued, until now.
“[We] knew what we had as a duo, two songwriters that sang really well together. And it was a very natural thing, from the beginning,” recalls Stevie Nicks, in the new liner notes.
Adds Buckingham: “It stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work.”
Newly remastered from the original analogue tapes, Buckingham Nicks will be released on vinyl, CD and hi-res digital by Rhino on September 19. A special high-fidelity LP version (limited to 2,000 copies) is available to pre-order here, including two replica 7-inch singles featuring the original single mixes of “Crying In The Night” b/w “Stephanie” and “Don’t Let Me Down Again” b/w “Races Are Run”.
The last time Kendrick Lamar was in London – back in 2022 with The Big Steppers Tour – he came on like no one so much as David Bowie in his Thin White Duke era, bringing a stark, expressionist theatre of ego to the soulless bowl of the O2. It was a fabulous display of force and control, but it left you wondering whether he was ready to evolve – to create a show that seduced as much as it impressed, and to prove he truly was a bona fide 21st-century superstar.
Tonight, as blowtorches send blue smoke rings into the north London sky and 60,000 fans chant along to every bar, he delivers – in spades. The Grand National Tour, staged at the state-of-the-art Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, feels like the apotheosis of 21st-century pop: choreography, pyrotechnics, cinema and music, fused with peerless technical excellence into a scintillating spectacle.
The pre-show mix leans heavily on Prince, whose unholy blend of genres, modes and registers may well be the presiding spirit of the evening. Co-headlining with the sensational alt-R&B siren SZA transforms what could have been a devastating but one-dimensional rap show into a full-spectrum stadium phantasmagoria, thrilling not just the teenage boys in backwards caps filming themselves miming every line, but also the twentysomething women harmonising with every SZA rhapsody – and even the mums and dads swaying to Black Panther ballad “All The Stars” as the duo duet from towering platforms across the glittering stadium.
Astonishingly, for a set that runs close to three hours and features around 50 songs, the evening is impeccably sequenced. Kendrick and SZA alternate (and occasionally overlap) with sets that draw on the full range of their discographies. Kendrick, fulfilling his manifest destiny as the undisputed champion of 21st-century rap, takes us from last year’s GNX back through his Compton roots (though “M.A.A.D City” now comes mashed up with Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love”). SZA, meanwhile, dives into her ballads of romantic dysfunction, riding a giant antm – “my preferred mode of transport,” she drawls – and ascends into the sky on glittering butterfly wings.
The whole production is interspersed with surreal, stunning visuals: big-screen interrogations and insectoid transformations, like a Hollywood noir scripted by Franz Kafka and directed by Busby Berkeley.
The obvious precedent is the Beyoncé/Jay-Z On The Run tours of the last decade – though The Grand National has reportedly outgrossed even those icons. But where On The Run presented a power couple ascending into showbiz royalty, Kendrick and SZA keep each other at a deliberate distance, creating a kind of split-screen, schizophrenic spectacle.
While “All the Stars” provides the requisite Hollywood climax, the highlight is inevitably the full-stadium eruption for “Not Like Us”. SZA had already teased the crowd with a lubricious rendition of her Drake collaboration “Rich Baby Daddy”, possibly extending an olive branch to Drake, whose Wireless Festival set apparently fizzled into disarray at Finsbury Park last week. But Kendrick takes no prisoners, leading the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in scenes not witnessed since Ange Postecoglou brought the Europa League home.
As he leads his dancers through a merciless evisceration of Drake’s jabroni ass, the screens behind him erupt with neon Afrofuturist frescoes of black diaspora expression: sphinxes, pyramids, palm trees, Motown stars, jheri curls and grills. It’s a world away from the black-and-white austerity of his show three years ago. Maybe it’s taken the sauce and spectacle of SZA to bring about the full flourishing of Kendrick Lamar.
Johnny Marr has announced that he’ll release a new 22-track live album via BMG on September 19.
Look Out Live! was recorded at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2024 during his Spirit Power tour. A special guest that night was Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, and you can hear their versions of Electronic’s “Getting Away With It” (Tennant’s first collaboration with Marr back in 1989) and David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” below:
Look Out Live! is available on limited edition orange double vinyl (previously only available in indie stores as a Record Store Day exclusive release), on black double vinyl, limited edition 2CD and digitally. Both double vinyl formats include 18 songs, with tracks 19-22 available on the 2CD and digital editions of the album.
Check out the tracklisting below and pre-order the album here. For all of Johnny Marr’s upcoming North American and European tour dates, go here.
To celebrate the incredible life and reassuringly heavy music of Ozzy Osbourne, we revisit a classic Black Sabbath interview from the July 2014 issue of Uncut (Take 206). Riding high on the success of their chart-topping reunion album 13, Ozzy, Tommy and Geezer took us through the formidable Sabbath...
To celebrate the incredible life and reassuringly heavy music of Ozzy Osbourne, we revisit a classic Black Sabbath interview from the July 2014 issue of Uncut (Take 206). Riding high on the success of their chart-topping reunion album 13, Ozzy, Tommy and Geezer took us through the formidable Sabbath cannon, album-by-album.
Ozzy Osbourne is in high spirits as he calls from Los Angeles. “I’m having the time of my life,” he says, revelling in the success that has greeted the reformation of the classic Black Sabbath lineup for a new album and tour. “We’re having a fucking blast,” he adds. “We played the Hollywood Bowl last Sunday. The last time we played there it was a fucking disaster. It was 42 years ago: we had to cut the show short because we were all going to pass out from drug overdoses.”
BLACK SABBATH Vertigo, 1970 The black and blues. The newly christened Sabbath rock out, pretty much live.
OZZY OSBOURNE: We were made by Jim Simpson… he used to have a club, Henry’s Blues House. We used to carry our equipment around in case someone didn’t turn up, and say, “We’ll play”. We started off as a blues/jazz band like Ten Years After, or Jethro Tull: the hip crowd.
TONY IOMMI: “Black Sabbath” was the second song we’d written, so we called ourselves that.
GEEZER BUTLER: The first time we played “Black Sabbath” was in this tiny pub in Lichfield near Brum. The whole pub went mental.
OZZY: The first one was a live album with no audience. The manager said, go to this place Regent Sound… we’d never been into a studio before. We did the album in about 12 hours and then went to do a residency in Switzerland…
GEEZER: [Producer] Rodger Bain was like a fifth member of the band. We’d been to six different record companies and producers, and they’d all told us, “Come back when you can write proper music.” Rodger was the first person on the business side who understood what we were trying to do. He just said, “Play what you do live.”
OZZY: When we come back from Switzerland, Jim said, “Come in and I’ll play you your finished album.” It had a gatefold sleeve and started with all this thunder and lightning – it blew my mind.
GEEZER: I loved the cover – but I didn’t like the inverted cross on the inside. It was the first time we’d had something to take to our parents and show we were doing something constructive.
PARANOID Vertigo, 1971 The classic second album. An apogee of Iommi riffing, a whiff of Satan, and a hit single, too…
OZZY: Paranoid went from four tracks to 16 tracks. 16 tracks! The temptation was to fuck around with effects: we thought we were Pink Floyd meets The Beatles meets acid, y’know?
TONY: There was no-one doing this sort of thing. A lot of people were honestly frightened of us in the early days. We weren’t allowed to do interviews either, which made it more interesting in some ways. The image was built up by people talking… this satanic sort of thing.
GEEZER: We’d written “War Pigs” already. It was called “Walpurgis” back then. When the label wanted to know what the next LP would be called, we said we’d got a song called “Walpurgis” and we wanted to call it that. They said, “What does that mean?” And we said, “It’s Satan’s Christmas.” They said, “No, thank you.”
TONY: You get labelled as a black magic band and all that rubbish, but it was a more about what was going on in the world. “War Pigs” came up when we were playing at this club in Zurich and we had to play seven 45-minute spots a day. We hadn’t got enough songs, so we used to just make stuff up. And “War Pigs” was one of the things I just made up. Gradually, through the six weeks we were at the club, it took shape and we ended up with the song.
GEEZER: The very last thing we did in he studio was “Paranoid” – we had three minutes to fill for it to be a legal album. Tony wrote the riff, I quickly did the lyrics. Then the record company heard it and changed the whole title to Paranoid.
TONY: The album wasn’t long enough, and that’s how “Paranoid” came about. We’d never written a two-and-a-half minute song. I started picking around, had it in a couple of minutes, we learnt it and recorded it. I didn’t think for a minute it was going to be a hit.
GEEZER: After Top Of The Pops, we were getting teenage girls coming to the gigs. They were climbing onstage and molesting us while we played. That was the good part. But we knew that if we carried on like that, we’d just be another pop band. So we said, “No more singles.”
OZZY: I could afford to have a bath and put some smelly stuff on. It was just a great period of my life. The early days are always the best. I remember being in a club in Birmingham and posing around like the new child of rock, then the manager comes up to me and says, “Your album’s going in the charts at 17 next week.” I said, “Pull the other one!”
MASTER OF REALITY Vertigo, 1971 The band’s last with Rodger Bain. Slow, heavy – a downtuned stoner’s choice.
TONY: We had to come up with stuff on the spot – we’d been touring so much on the Paranoid album, by the time we’d got to the studio we’d not had much time to come up with stuff.
OZZY: By that time, we were all so stoned I can’t really remember it. People often say to me, what advice would you give to young bands? I always say write as much shit as you can. If you get a hit – you’ve then never got enough time to write any stuff.
GEEZER: We were all doped out of our heads by then. That’s how we formed. When I first met Tony and Bill, Bill asked me, “Do you know where I can get any dope?” and I said, “It just so happens I’ve got a big lump of it in my pocket.”
TONY: Ever since I had my finger accident, I’ve had to experiment to develop things. So downtuning was another example of that. I went through a period of trying different tunings. It was a bit of a breakthrough.
GEEZER: The third album took us about 10 days to record. I thought it was the heaviest album we’d done so far. We knew we were accepted: we were big in the States, big in the UK. It just gave us more confidence.
OZZY: We used to smoke dope before we became successful – a five-bob deal, and we’d just go behind the shed and smoke a joint. But we all tried to stay away from heroin, cocaine and all that.
VOLUME 4 Vertigo, 1972 The band set up shop in America. Contains the mighty “Supernaut” and scenes of drug use.
TONY: We’d moved out to California. We had all the gear set up in the bar and we just had a great time playing and doing lots of coke. It was very much influenced by the coke.
GEEZER: It was a bit nuts at the house. We had all these mad fights with hoses and stuff. It was the first time we’d all lived together, and the first time we’d got into cocaine.
OZZY: Drugs became a part of Sabbath. We had the Egon Ronay map of cocaine dealers.
GEEZER: It was all the top dealers we were getting, so they’d come with bodyguards, armed with machine guns. They’d come up with these soap powder boxes filled with cocaine.
OZZY: We were originally going to call that album ‘Snowblind’ – if you look in the sleeve you can see we thank the “COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles”. People think it was a spelling mistake. I look back on it, and say, “Why am I still alive?” When you write on cocaine, you think everything you write is magic, but there was so much of that shit we never used.
SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH World Wide Artists, 1973 The band stretch scaly wings: castles, funk, riffs… Rick Wakeman!
TONY: We’d done the same thing – we went to the same house, the same studio, but it just wasn’t working out.
GEEZER: We thought it might be the end. We got to LA, and they’d changed the studio. Stevie Wonder had bought half of the studio and put a synth in there. What you do on your laptop now took a whole studio then.
TONY: We ended up starting again in England. We went to Clearwell Castle in Wales. We wanted to create a vibe, so we rehearsed in the dungeons.
OZZY: We used to play tricks on each other, and pretend the castle was haunted. We’d have a few beers and then plant a bug in someone’s room and start making noises, like fucking schoolkids.
GEEZER: Tony said, “Let’s give it one more try.” And he came out with the “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” riff, and we just went, “Yes!” We stretched ourselves a bit on that one… we needed to. We’d learned a lot more musically. Rick Wakeman’s on it.
OZZY: In my opinion we should have folded after that. By this time, we’d realised the manager was ripping us off: we had lawsuits, and people serving us. That was our last joint effort.
SABOTAGE NEMS, 1975 A legal matter, baby. Great album, marred completely by m’learned friends.
TONY: It was a funny period for us. We had a lot of legal trouble: we were switching over from being managed by Patrick Meehan. In the court in the day and at night in the studio. The frustration came out in the music: we had a track called “The Writ”.
OZZY: By Sabotage we had proof we were being ripped off. Every quid he gave us, he had 20,000 himself. I remember us doing a tour for God knows how many months and he gave us a £1000 cheque. If you’ve never had £1000, you go, “Wow! A grand!”
GEEZER: One day he said I can’t write you any cheques, there’s no money in the bank – I’ve put it all “in Jersey” for you. Then we got the tax bill for the money he’d taken. So we’d not only lost the money, we had to pay the tax on money we didn’t have. Then we found out all our houses were in his name.
OZZY: I remember him saying to me one day, “Do you know how much I’m worth, Ozzy? Eight million pounds.” That was a lot of money. I should have said, “Most of that’s ours, you cunt.”
GEEZER: Dealing with the business side of things kind of ended the band from then on. Sabotage took 10 months to record – it wasn’t any fun any more. We were all turning to drugs and getting stoned the whole time. It was horrible. Luckily the tours still did incredibly well – so we made money off that.
TECHNICAL ECSTASY Vertigo, 1976 Recorded at Criterion in Miami, scaring the Eagles along the way.
OZZY: We tried to march forward but we didn’t know how. We’d been beaten up by our own drug abuse and alcoholism, and the music was paying off our tax demands.
GEEZER: It was getting harder and harder to come up with something new and different. It’s not like now: if you’re a heavy metal band, you put out a heavy metal album. Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive and we felt that our time had come and gone.
TONY: It was the first time that we asked a keyboard player to join us: Gerald Woodroffe. Then we shipped all the stuff to Florida and recorded it. The Eagles were recording next door, but we were too loud for them – it kept coming through the wall into their sessions.
GEEZER: Before we could even start recording we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board. I think they’d left about a pound of cocaine in the board. But we we had a good laugh on that album.
TONY: It was like paradise there. You’d be on the beach and you’d say, “Are you coming down the studio?” and they’d say, “In a couple of hours.”
GEEZER: The nearest pub was a strip bar: a lot of old blokes with dirty macs on hanging around outside in the 90° Florida heat. It was walking distance from the studio so we’d go down and have a beer. There’d be completely nude women dancing in front of you. It seemed quite weird to us. That’s where “Dirty Women” came from.
NEVER SAY DIE Vertigo, 1978 Winter is coming. Ozzy returns, to a freezing reception.
GEEZER: It should have been called Say Die. Ozzy quit, we got in this other singer, Dave Walker, who wasn’t the right choice for the band. We’d booked this studio in Toronto, The Stones had just done their album there and were saying it was the best place in the world, so we thought maybe that would inspire us.
TONY: Ozzy came back but wouldn’t sing any of the songs we’d done with Dave Walker. So we had to go to Toronto with no songs. We had to hire a cinema, freezing cold in the winter, to write songs to record that night.
OZZY: We wrote the songs up where the screen was. Yeah, you really want to get into some heavy metal at nine in the morning.
GEEZER: The label had given up on us. The first night in Toronto we went into this restaurant and no-one had any cash. I’d brought $20, and paid for the food. We had one cent left and left it for the waiter. He chased us down the street.
TONY: I’m amazed we managed to pull anything out of the hat. With “Never Say Die” we ended up on Top Of The Pops, something we never thought we’d do again. But the writing was on the wall for the band. Ozzy just lost interest.
OZZY: When I was sacked, I thought I’m gonna go back to the hotel room and have the biggest party for as long as I got the dough, and go back to the real world. Then along the way Sharon comes along and says, “We want to manage you.” I said, “You want to manage me?” And she said, “We believe in you.”
13 Vertigo, 2013 It is risen! Rick Rubin reconnects Sabbath with its younger self.
GEEZER: We did have a few worries at first. But the difference between this time and the last time we tried to do an LP in 2001 was that Tony had about 80 riffs written. So it gave us a great starting point. When we met with Rick Rubin he gave us the direction.
OZZY: I’ve known Rick for many years and every time I see him, he says, “If you do a Sabbath album with the original guys, I want to be the producer.” So he says to me, “I don’t want you to think about heavy metal.” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? We invented it!”
TONY: Rick wanted to go back to the basics of the raw sound, with few overdubs. We were up for a go at that, but it’s hard to go back when you’ve tried to get a new sound going.
OZZY: We’d say, “We’re just warming up.” He’d say, “That’s what I’m after!” One time I wasn’t even singing words, just filling the holes – that’s what ended up on the album. He used ProTools like we used to use a four-track – he didn’t load it up with fake effects. What you get is what we played, with just a few overdubs. He captured the spirit of early Sabbath.
RIP Ozzy Osbourne, that most fun-loving of dark princes. Back in our May 2010 issue (Take 156), he kindly consented to answer questions sent in by Uncut readers – and a few famous fans, including Frank Skinner, Sparks and Aston Villa legend Gordon Cowans…
Who was your musical hero growing up, a...
RIP Ozzy Osbourne, that most fun-loving of dark princes. Back in our May 2010 issue (Take 156), he kindly consented to answer questions sent in by Uncut readers – and a few famous fans, including Frank Skinner, Sparks and Aston Villa legend Gordon Cowans…
Who was your musical hero growing up, and what are you getting me for my birthday?
Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses
What am I getting you for your birthday? Same as you got me, you cunt, which is fuck all. Ha ha! My musical heroes? Well, it’s The Beatles, obviously. That’s why I did those Lennon covers. A few people have said they’re the worst songs ever made, but they come from the heart. I fucking mean them! I can still remember first hearing The Beatles. I was walking down the street in Birmingham with this battery-operated radio, and “Please Please Me” came blaring out. It was one of those moments where the world seems to shift a bit. Nothing was the same again. I used to fantasise about meeting McCartney. Now I’ve met him several times, and every time I still can’t believe I’m talking to him. Me and bloody Paul McCartney! Bloody hell!
Sharon’s recent autobiography talks about her being terrible at gambling, but says you’re a lucky gambler, especially on the slot machines. What’s the most you’ve won or lost?
Simon, Middlesbrough
I never got the gambling bug, really. You go into a casino and you get these silly bastards taking notes, making mathematical equations, like they can guess what’s going to happen. Oh, fuck off. My one and only experience of getting hooked was in Vegas. Everyone else was going to the blackjack tables and roulette wheels. I saw the flashing lights of the fruit machines and thought, oh, I like that. I remember putting in a few dollars and the machine started belching out all these chips. I thought, hello. Then I put in all my winnings and I won even more. It was fuckloads. Tens of thousands of dollars. And I actually thought, this is good. Instead of pumping all the chips back into the machine, I decided to cash them in, have a few drinks, and keep the rest of the money. It was the most sensible decision I’ve made in years.
If you could watch any two celebrities having sex, who would it be?
Frank Skinner
Fucking hell. What kind of question is that, Frank? Two celebrities? I suppose it’d have to be Frank Skinner and… Dawn French. There you go, Frank. You happy with that?
Has it really taken you 35 years to pass your driving test?
Nicky Reid, Brisbane
Seriously, it fucking has. I took it in California, which was a fucking joke. You barely have to reverse a few yards and they pass you. You also have to do this written test, which is piss easy. But I never managed to pass one in England. There was one time when I passed out during the test, slumped over the steering wheel. I woke up and the instructor had left a note on the dashboard saying: “You have failed your test. Do not attempt to move this car. Please contact someone to pick you up.” I get very nervous. I needed a drink. Mind you, Sharon’s not much better. She pranged some car in Beaconsfield the other day. We’re a disaster when it comes to cars.
What made you want to wear a tap round your neck as an item of jewellery?
Shaun Turner, Cardiff
I was a fucking idiot, that’s why. It was just the top of a hot tap, you know, the cross shape, with an “H” in the middle, and the four hands coming out. I tied a chain around one of the arms and wore it around my neck like a crucifix. Ha ha! I used to wear all sorts of rubbish. I wore a blue-and-white striped pyjama top as a shirt. I walked around Birmingham barefoot for years.
Both Ron and I are getting antsy: would you recommend solo careers, as you’ve done? PS from Ron: Do you need a keyboard player? Have own equipment, nice van, and no bad habits?
Russell and Ron Mael, Sparks
Sparks, eh? They’re nice fellas. I’ve met them a few times. You’re all right with the keyboards, Ron, I think I’m all right there. Going solo – well, it worked for me, I guess. I was up shit creek when Black Sabbath sacked me. I was angry about it. Still am, sometimes. But I was lucky. I had Sharon, who took care of everything. Without her, I’d be sitting in a pool of me own piss, smoking a joint. If it wasn’t for Sharon, who got me in touch with guys like Randy Rhoads, going solo would have been a very, very bad idea.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Ian Gough, Newcastle Upon Tyne
I had lots of shit ones back in Birmingham. There was the car factory, the loudest place I’ve ever been in – noisier than the loudest metal gig you’ve ever heard. There was this old fella next to me, driven deaf by spending nearly 20 years in the factory. He said if he stayed there another few months he’d get his gold watch. I said, if you want a gold watch that much you should put a fucking brick through a jeweller’s window. If he got caught, he’d get less than 20 years. Looking back on it, working in an abattoir was pretty awful, although I grew to enjoy that. I had to slice open the cow carcasses and get all the gunk out of their stomachs. I used to vomit every day; the smell was something else. It didn’t put me off meat, though, but I do think every meat eater should spend a few days in an abattoir. Meat doesn’t come in little sealed packets, cut into dinosaur-shaped nuggets. It’s fucking brutal work.
How come you mumble words in interviews, but at shows and on record you speak clearly?
Stephen Gwynne, London
I fucked myself up pretty badly when I had that accident on me quad bike [in December 2003]. What did I break? What didn’t I break? A collarbone, a bunch of ribs and one of the vertebrae in my neck. Still, it did mean that I missed Christmas, which was a fucking relief. But that injury has affected lots of things. I can’t remember things so well, I can’t talk so quickly. And my hearing’s not so good. And I was diagnosed with another thing not long before that, a bit like Parkinson’s. So I’m fucked. Ha ha! Thing is, when I get on stage and sing, it must use a different part of the brain. I’m much more confident. Well, I’m terrified before I go on stage, but once I’m there it’s fine. No mumbling, no hesitation, nothing.
Why did you agree to invite cameras into your house to follow your every move? Are you mad?
Smokey Robinson
Well, the whole thing started after we did this one-off show for Channel Five. That won an award and got repeated every bloody week. Then MTV did an episode of Cribs at our house in Beverley Hills, which went down better than any other episode they’d made. They thought it would be good to turn it into a series. It hadn’t really been done at that point. I said yes because I didn’t think it would ever happen. Maybe I was fucking mad. But then it did bloody happen. Thing is, I genuinely didn’t notice the cameras being there. But when the show was broadcast and became a hit, I suddenly became more famous than I’d ever been. Was it scripted? No! If you film anyone’s home for long enough, you will come across lots of crazy shit. You have five cameras following you around all day; soon enough they’ll catch you slipping on dogshit, or falling off a chair, or getting confused with a remote control. You realise that it’s all in the editing. With those reality TV shows, I watch how it’s been edited and I think, ‘Hmm, I can see what you’ve done there…’
What was your scariest drug-related experience?
Marcus Mendes, Brazil
Jesus, there’s been a few. Heroin was fucking horrible. I only did it a few times – too much vomiting. But the worst was Rohypnol. I was offered it as a sleeping pill. I’d heard about it as a date-rape drug, but I thought it was all bollocks. So I took it – I wasn’t likely to rape myself. So I tried it with a bit of brandy, waited a while, thought, ‘What a load of crap’, and then suddenly it kicked in. Fucking hell – I was totally paralysed. All my muscles seized up, and I ended up rolling off the bed and banging my head on the bedside table. It hurt like fucking hell. You can still feel everything, it’s just that you’re paralysed. It was like being dead and haunting yourself, some hellish out-of-body experience. I was trapped there for four or five hours before it wore off. Never again.
What is the most memorable game or experience you’ve had at Villa Park?
Gordon Cowans, Aston Villa FC legend
Me and my mates used to hang around Villa Park on match days. We’d look after cars for a few bob, make sure no-one nicked or scratched them. I remember standing on the Holte End a few times. It was always fucking great fun. I had some favourite players – Peter McParland, Jimmy MacEwan, Alan Deakin – I had posters of them on me wall as a kid. But I was never as big a fan as [Black Sabbath bassist] Geezer Butler. Whenever Villa lost, he’d lock himself in his fucking room for a day, turn out the lights and draw down the blinds. He’d be in a depression for ages. I never got that carried away about it.
“What does magic mean to me?” wonders an indomitable Genesis P-Orridge, puffing on the oxygen tubes that sprout from h/er reconstructed nose at the start of David Charles Rodrigues’ loving, curious, partial documentary. “The only real answer to any question you have is: the sum total of my life so far.”
S/he Is Still Her/e doesn’t quite give us that sum total, and feels very much like the authorised story (a large part of it is told by h/er delightfully nonchalant Californian daughters, Genesse and Caresse). But then any proper reckoning with this queer, relentless, experimental life might run to several hours, in many media and be seized by police in most countries.
In some ways, Rodrigues gives us the fairy story: how a sickly, sullen boy from Middle England heard voices in the hedgerows, dived headlong into the 1970s transgressive art scene and eventually, through the power of unconditional love, transformed themselves into a fabulous pandrogynous international art monster.
It includes various fairy godmothers and fathers (notably William Burroughs who, over a couple of bottles of whisky, advises the young GPO that “your job is to learn how to short-circuit control”), some very wicked witches (the police, censors and politicians who eventually force the P-Orridge family to flee to California in the early ’90s) and a string of beautiful princesses – Cosey Fanni Tutti, Paula Brooking and finally Jaye Breyer, who Gen seems to perceive as Blakean emanations of some primal goddess, Cosmosis.
The film is based on a series of interviews that Rodrigues conducted in the last months of h/er life, as GPO was ailing with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. We see h/er holding court in New York, still funny, philosophical and topless, as s/he sits for one last portrait. “The body is a cheap suitcase for consciousness,” s/he proclaims, telling the story as the camera and paintbrush roams over every tattoo and scar, the stickers the vessel has collected on its manifold travels through time, space and more psychic realms.
As the pendulous breasts and fulsome lips indicate, the suitcase is in fact not so cheap, having been the recipient of the better part of half a million dollars in cosmetic surgery (thanks largely, we discover, to a lawsuit against Rick Rubin, following a fire at the producer’s LA mansion). There is something unearthly, uncanny about h/er presence – part Sea Witch, part Marianne Faithfull, part (in Morrissey’s words) “nightmare teenager of 70”, and Rodrigues’ film has the distinct feel of a hagiography: the life and times of a latter-day post-gender saint.
The disparity between the loving, compassionate philosophy GPO espoused, and the brutal, industrial forms this sometimes took in h/er art and life comes to a head when the film covers the Throbbing Gristle years. One-time COUM member Les Maull tells of GPO’s frightening temper and tantrums. For a couple of minutes, this relentless, flickering film goes silent and dark, and onscreen text says: “In a 2017 memoir Cosey accused Genesis of controlling aggressive behaviour. Genesis denied all accusations. Cosey politely declined to comment.”
The refusal certainly feels pointed and is a sickening abyss in the story, but the film proceeds regardless, heading onwards through the ’80s of Psychic TV, the north Californian rave ’90s and the 21st-century renaissance, where in an East Side BDSM dungeon, Gen meets the funny, charming dominatrix Lady Jaye, the muse and love s/he had been always searching for.
There are other more detailed investigations of the “magic approach to sound” of COUM and Throbbing Gristle (notably the 2020 BBC oral history Other, Like Me), but as a portrait of a unique, unrepeatable individual this is hard to beat. In a paradox Gen might have enjoyed, it is ultimately touching: detailing a very charmed life where every disaster – exile, imprisonment, life-threatening injury – is somehow turned to advantage, and our hero/ine persistently escapes certain doom to land magically on their feet. As our leaders diminish our liberties daily, this relentless dedication to a life lived experimentally and without fear feels particularly and profoundly timely.
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now and available to order online by clicking here – features a wide-ranging and candid interview with Paul Weller touching on movie acting, King Charles’ coronation, the travails of Kneecap, the revived Sex Pistols, and the musical discoveries behind his new covers album, Find El Dorado. He also looks back at the early days of The Jam, prompted by the recent death of his bandmate, Rick Buckler.
“I’m just really sad,” says Weller, to Uncut’s Pete Paphides. “I mean, Rick’s passing was a real shock; it was a real fucking … perspective-changing moment. Because even though we weren’t close and we hadn’t spoken for decades, nevertheless, we were intrinsically joined together and always will be, really, the three of us. So that was a real moment of, ‘Fuck, man, one of us has gone’, do you know what I mean?”
“It made me realise how ridiculous it is not to speak to someone, right? Just before Rick’s passing, I thought, ‘Maybe, I think I’d really like to go and see him,’ even though we hadn’t seen each other or spoke for 40 years or whatever it’s been. But then I was like, ‘Maybe it’d be awkward, maybe he doesn’t want to see me.’ Later, I heard from a mutual friend that he had the same conversation with Rick, saying, ‘Should I tell Paul? Do you want Paul to come and see you?’ Rick was like, ‘Oh, I dunno, could be awkward.’ So we were both saying the same fucking thing, man.
“I regret that, because I should have… I wish I’d have done that, just to see him one time. Because even though, like I said, we weren’t best of mates and all that… when he passed, I was just transported back to me little bedroom in Stanley Road with all four of us rehearsing in there, and just starting off and making a fucking racket at first and then gradually getting better, and doing more shows and all that stuff. It just took me back to all those times, you know?
“Sometimes I forget about those days until something like that happens, then all of a sudden, you’re transported back into that moment, and… yeah, I mean, just coming from nothing, at the time four of us, then [after Steve Brookes left] it was three of us, just coming from nothing; just a bunch of kids trying to get it together, then from playing pubs and working men’s clubs and all the rest of it, to getting a record deal. It’s just mad, really. I mean, I always thought we were going to make it, but only in a really pretentious teenage way, you know? I didn’t know what that really entailed.
“When we made our first album In The City, the A&R man said we should put two albums out a year like The Beatles and all that – I was just like, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve got to write another 12 songs?’ I didn’t realise I had to do that! So some of it is naivety, as well. But we went beyond our wildest dreams, man, really, where we got to, and our legacy continues… for lots of generations and all subsequent generations as well.”
‘‘Imagine,” Fred Schneider tells Uncut, “one week I’m washing dishes to make ends meet because I’d quit my job to do the band, and then the next week we’re flying to Nassau to record…”
At the Bahamas’ luxurious Compass Point Studios over three weeks in early 1979, The B-52s laid down their self-titled debut album. These five skint musicians were a bold signing for Island and Warners, even amid the excitement of post-punk: a deeply strange and subtly transgressive group, they shared as much DNA with the avant-garde, from Sun Ra to Yoko Ono to Captain Beefheart, as with surf music, girl group pop, disco and punk.
Formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1976, The B-52s had been nourished by the city’s unique environment. This was a farm town of eccentrics, led by the likes of Jeremy Ayers (later of Limbo District) and record shop owner William Orten Carlton, a place that welcomed outsider art and queerness.
From the start, The B-52s were unusual. They were a collective with no leader, a five-piece with three singers and no bassist (vocalist Kate Pierson handled keyboard bass along with organ) that sculpted songs via group improvisations, with a postmodern eye on the past. This was clearest in their look – all atomic bouffant wigs, shiny fabrics and garish makeup, a dazzling forerunner to the seedy Lynchian Technicolor of Wild At Heart or Blue Velvet – but also in their music, which blended surf, punk and underground experimentation with the novelty weirdness and outer-space obsessions of the 1950s.
They were kitsch, certainly, but surreal and absurdist rather than camp or ironic; an American response to Roxy Music’s high-art trash aesthetic. Yet these were the days when bands as bizarre as The B-52s could find a home on major labels, and Island and Warners’ bet paid off.
To say that their catalogue – now being reissued in this 9LP or 8CD box, minus 2008’s Funplex – starts strong would be an understatement: The B-52’s is a stunning debut, a hermetic manifesto that appeared out of the ether. Its first side in particular is near-perfection: from the ragged space-garage of “Planet Claire”, with its “Peter Gunn” riff, and the breakneck, proto-Strokes “52 Girls”, to the swinging chaos of “Dance This Mess Around”.
Side One’s closer, “Rock Lobster”, is the album’s crowning glory. Seven minutes of demented garage built around a detuned surf riff, with absurdist lyrics about a beach party, it evolves into a savage outro showcasing guitarist Ricky Wilson’s genius. Involving detuned, missing and unison strings, his novel technique – part Ventures, part Magic Band’s Zoot Horn Rollo, part Sonic Youth before Sonic Youth – allowed him to play slashing parts that still sound like little else, and hit harder than most punk or no wave. With Schneider handling declamatory spoken word, The B-52’s, especially “Rock Lobster”, shows off Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s Ono-esque vocal experimentation, and famously inspired John Lennon to call Ono from Bermuda to tell her that her “time had come”. Double Fantasy was the result.
Producer Chris Blackwell sensibly kept the arrangements minimal and the sound dry on The B-52’s, mimicking the band’s shows, which gives the record a beautifully crisp feel. Rhett Davies was similarly strict on the follow-up, 1980’s Wild Planet. Despite songs about poodles called Quiche and demonic cars, there’s plenty of edge: “Party Out Of Bounds” is interspersed with eerie discord, the raunchy “Dirty Back Road” doesn’t hide very hard behind its driving metaphor, and single “Private Idaho” is consumed with paranoia, Schneider warning over one of Wilson’s finest riffs: “Don’t let the chlorine in your eyes/Blind you to the awful surprise/That waits for you at the bottom of the bottomless blue, blue, blue pool…”
The B-52’s and Wild Planet used up their pre-fame material, and now the group needed fresh songs. To buy some time, in July 1981 they released Party Mix!, a pioneering yet inessential remix album that squashed three songs from both LPs into side-long medleys. In the meantime, they were recording with David Byrne, but various difficulties meant the results were trimmed to a mini-album, 1982’s Mesopotamia. Their attempts to fill out their sound with horns, synths and the like don’t always succeed, but the Levantine disco title track remains a fine example of their interlocking vocal parts, overflowing hooks taking the place of traditional choruses.
The group changed their process for 1983’s Whammy!, with Ricky Wilson and drummer Keith Strickland handling all the music on drum machines, synths and guitars. Jamaican engineer Steven Stanley, one of the sonic wranglers on Party Mix!, produced the delightfully out-there results. While they embraced electronics, this wasn’t your usual mid-’80s sound: the frantic likes of “Whammy Kiss” and “Butterbean” are more akin to Suicide covering Beefheart at Black Ark.
“Song For A Future Generation” was a bizarre, brilliant single, each of the group delivering a spoken verse about themselves, then coming together to trill “let’s meet and have a baby now”. Whammy! originally included a cover of Ono’s “Don’t Worry…”, unfortunately replaced with the inferior “Moon 83” on subsequent pressings, including this one.
Things began to go wrong for The B-52s about now. Ricky Wilson became ill with AIDS, keeping it a secret from all but Strickland, while relationships in the band fractured. When Wilson passed away in 1985, Bouncing Off The Satellites was practically finished and was released the following year with no active group and little promotion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only the joyous, rockabilly-powered “Wig”, reworked from a decade-old jam, captures their usual zest.
No-one could replace Wilson, so the new songs the group wrote when they reunited later in the decade were less manic, less experimental, but more soulful and in tune with the times. As a result, 1989’s Cosmic Thing became a huge hit, one of the best-selling albums in the US that year. It was a warm, welcoming record: the group looked back fondly on their Athens days on “Deadbeat Club”, and indulged their interstellar fixation on “Topaz” and the title track, even while “Channel Z” took shots at political “disinformation”. Granted, the snare sounds were gargantuan, but that was hard to avoid in 1989.
Similarly inescapable was “Love Shack”: if it suffers somewhat from overfamiliarity these days, it’s nevertheless a playful piece of Southern groove, with Schneider, Wilson and Pierson’s vocals freeform and vital.
1992’s Good Stuff has its moments – “Is That You Mo-Dean?” was another space classic – but suffered from the absence of Cindy Wilson, overlong tracks and increasingly slick production from Don Was and Nile Rodgers. The B-52s would later perform the title song for 1994’s The Flintstones – a peak in visibility, a dip in quality – tour extensively and, in this decade, enjoy residencies in Las Vegas.
While there’s something very B-52s about Nevada’s atomic testing sites, casinos and tacky Strip, Vegas is still an unexpected destination for a group so conceived in the underground; yet it’s perhaps no weirder than Bryan Ferry, a fellow explorer of the kitsch and the curious, staking out his patch on Smooth Radio.
The B-52s have been calling themselves “the world’s greatest party band” for years now. They’re not entirely wrong, of course, but the Athens troupe are so much more than that. For one, the way they’ve lived their lives and presented themselves has long been an example to marginalised outsiders, whether queer or otherwise. And the music collected here – especially their effervescent debut – has inspired acolytes from Beat Happening to Boy George, Sleater-Kinney to Stephen Malkmus, not to mention Lennon and Ono. As this box charts, they’re one of those rare groups who can genuinely claim to have launched the counterculture gloriously into the mainstream.
Robert Plant has announced that his new album Saving Grace – named after the band he’s been touring with over the last few years – will be released by Nonesuch Records on September 26.
Hear the first single, a cover of Low‘s “Everybody’s Song”, below:
Saving Grace was recorded between April 2019 and January 2025 in the Cotswolds and on the Welsh Borders, with vocalist Suzi Dian, drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, and cellist Barney Morse-Brown.
“We laugh a lot, really. I think that suits me. I like laughing,” Plant says. “You know, I can’t find any reason to be too serious about anything. I’m not jaded. The sweetness of the whole thing… These are sweet people and they are playing out all the stuff that they could never get out before. They have become unique stylists and together they seem to have landed in a most interesting place.”
As well as the Low cover, Saving Grace includes songs by Memphis Minnie, Bob Mosley (Moby Grape), Blind Willie Johnson, The Low Anthem, Martha Scanlan and Sarah Siskind. Pre-order the album here and check out the tracklisting below:
Speaking to Uncut in 2006, Brian Wilson explained the recording process for “Good Vibrations”. The song, he told us, “took six weeks to record, in five different studios. I wrote out each musician’s part on music paper then they all played it together. I found I could work out each part without it being too difficult. It did get tedious, though. The musicians understood it all more or less straight away. Hal Blaine was always right on my wavelength.”
Although a relatively understated view of events, all the same it signalled towards Wilson’s meticulous, if exhaustive, creative processes. For further evidence, there’s black and white film on YouTube showing Wilson bringing his pocket symphony to life in the studio. When he’s not issuing orders like a benign general to Blaine – “Play hard and strong all the way” – you see Wilson in the vocal booth with the rest of The Beach Boys, singing high harmony with his eyes closed, caught up in some deeply private inner rhapsody. “He was very unfiltered, very brilliant and very humble at the same time,” Al Jardine tells us elsewhere in this issue. “He was a miracle, a walking miracle. There’ll never be another one like him. Everybody loved Brian.” You can read more about Wilson in our definitive tribute from Stephen Troussé which begins on page 52.
If Wilson – for whatever reasons – never quite eclipsed his ’60s songwriting genius, then our cover star never seems to wane, as Paul Weller’s ongoing purple patch attests. Print readers can get a flavour for it – if you need such a thing – thanks to a rather special, exclusive free CD that rounds up a hefty selection of deep cuts, B-sides and rarities, encompassing bucolic psychedelia, cosmic shuffles and even a 10-minute krautrock epic. All of this complements an excellent new interview with Pete Paphides which finds Weller in surprisingly emotional form, reflecting on his father and former manager John Weller, fallen Jam comrade Rick Buckler and a very funny encounter with Ronnie’s pet lion.
There’s plenty more, of course – enough, we hope, to last a month…
EVERY PRINT EDITION OF THIS ISSUE OF UNCUT COMES WITH A FREE COPY OF MOVIN ON – A 10-TRACK CD OF PAUL WELLER RARITIES AND DEEP CUTS!
PAUL WELLER: The Modfather returns with covers album Find El Dorado, the making of which turned into a revelatory experience for Weller. Over multiple meetings, he takes Uncutthrough his present, future and past: from a pivotal viewing of That’ll Be The Day, the early days of The Jam and sharing the tour van with a lion, right up to King Charles’ coronation – and why he shook up his sound with 2008’s 22 Dreams onwards. “Music? What can I tell you? It’s how I work and it’s how I relax.”
PAUL WELLER CD: Free with this issue is Movin On, an album of Paul Weller rarities and deep cuts, spanning the lush orchestral folk of the title track to the epic krautrock fury of “I Work In The Clouds”, via dub, cosmic sea shanties and more.
BRIAN WILSON: Collaborators and friends Al Jardine, Van Dyke Parks,Sean O’Hagan and Darian Sahanaja remember the late Beach Boys genius – while we also pay tribute in an extended feature. “There’ll never be another one like him. Everybody loved Brian…”
KEVIN ROWLAND: With a memoir about to be published, we catch up with the Dexys mainmain to discuss Duran Duran versus the young Dexys Midnight Runners, haircuts and his perfectionism in everything he does: “It’s quite hard to live with. You’re never happy…”
ROY HARPER: An audience with the iconoclastic songwriter, 84 years young, fielding questions on the joys of jamming with Jimmy Page, his jazz days in Copenhagen, the dangers of AI and why one corner of Soho will always feel like home.
MARGO PRICE: Back with a new album, Hard Headed Woman, the country singer-songwriter returns to Nashville to reclaim her outlaw roots. Uncut tags along to hear tales of psychedelics, the magic of Joshua Tree and why she doesn’t get invited to industry parties…
MAC DeMARCO: The former enfant terrible of slacker pop takes us through his excellent work to date, from recording in Montreal flats, Brooklyn squats and remote motels to the way he writes these days: “When a song appears it’s literally a miracle!”
MODERN NATURE:Jack Cooper and co leave free folk and jazz drift behind for a new album of straight-ahead songcraft and guitar-driven optimism. “This feels like a new band,” he tells Uncut. “A line in the sand.”
AVERAGE WHITE BAND: The Scottish soul brothers on their relocation to the States, tragedy and an enduring classic.
BIG THIEF: The nomadic group also take us through the creation of their new album Double Infinity – our Album Of The Month, and their biggest, boldest record yet.
REVIEWED: New albums by John Fogerty, Cass McCombs, Sanam, Half Man Half Biscuit, Superchunk, Cory Hanson, Patty Griffin, Saint Etienne, Steve Gunn and more; archive releases by Be-Bop Deluxe, Allen Toussaint, Dr Feelgood, Galaxie 500, The Who, Talking Heads, Sun City Girls, Jackie Mittoo and others; Lana Del Rey live; Eddington and Gazeron Screen; The Zombies on Screen Extra and The Everly Brothers, Budgie and Justin Currie in Books.
PLUS:Oasis return; Elliott Smith reinvented; Dry Cleaning and Cate Le Bon record together; Peter Asher on surviving Beatlemania; Os Mutantes‘ favourite albums… and meet the punchy country-rock (complete with Wilco connection) of Case Oats.
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy has announced that his new (triple) solo album Twilight Override will be released by dBpm Records on September 25.
Hear four songs from it – “One Tiny Flower”, “Out In The Dark”, “Stray Cats In Spain” and “Enough” – below:
Twilight Override was recorded and self-produced by Tweedy at his Chicago studio, The Loft, with musicians including James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart, Liam Kazar, and Tweedy’s children Spencer and Sammy.
“When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself with something that other people call God,” writes Tweedy. “And when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy. Creativity eats darkness.
“Sort of an endless buffet these days – a bottomless basket of rock bottom. Which is, I guess, why I’ve been making so much stuff lately. That sense of decline is hard to ignore, and it must be at least a part of the shroud I’m trying to unwrap. The twilight of an empire seems like a good enough jumping-off point when one is jumping into the abyss.
“Twilight sure is a pretty word, though. And the world is full of happy people in former empires, so maybe that’s not the only source of this dissonance. Whatever it is out there (or in there) squeezing this ennui into my day, it’s fucking overwhelming. It’s difficult to ignore. Twilight Override is my effort to overwhelm it right back. Here are the songs and sounds and voices and guitars and words that are an effort to let go of some of the heaviness and up the wattage on my own light. My effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime (nightmare) of the soul.”
Pre-order Twilight Overridehere and peruse the tracklisting below:
Disc 1
One Tiny Flower
Caught Up in the Past
Parking Lot
Forever Never Ends
Love Is for Love
Mirror
Secret Door
Betrayed
Sign of Life
Throwaway Lines
Disc 2
KC Rain (No Wonder)
Out in the Dark
Better Song
New Orleans
Over My Head (Everything Goes)
Western Clear Skies
Blank Baby
No One’s Moving On
Feel Free
Disc 3
Lou Reed Was My Babysitter
Amar Bharati
Wedding Cake
Stray Cats in Spain
Ain’t It a Shame
Twilight Override
Too Real
This Is How It Ends
Saddest Eyes
Cry Baby Cry
Enough
Jeff Tweedy has also announced a show at London’s Islington Assembly Hall on Feburary 20, 2026, as part of a European solo tour – full dates and ticket details here.
Now that the European leg of Neil Young And The Chrome Hearts’ Love Earth 2025 tour has come to a triumphant close, we’ve compiled a cornucopia of facts and figures about this historic jaunt.
This was Young’s 16th major European tour (of ten dates or more) and the final night in Paris marked his 322nd European show out of a lifetime total of 2634 gigs since the beginning of Buffalo Springfield.
Number of shows on this tour: 13 Number of countries visited: 10 Longest show: 125 minutes (The Lake Stage, Montreux, Switzerland; BST Hyde Park, London) Largest (non-festival) attendance: 22,000 (Waldbühne, Berlin)
Confoundingly, Neil Young And The Chrome Hearts didn’t play any songs from their only album together, 2025’s Talkin To The Trees. So which albums did they draw on most for the Love Earth 2025 European tour set lists?
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969) 3: Cinnamon Girl, Down By The River, Cowgirl In The Sand After The Gold Rush (1970) 3: When You Dance, Southern Man, After The Gold Rush Harvest (1972) 3: The Needle & The Damage Done, Heart of Gold, Old Man Ragged Glory (1990) 3: Fuckin’ Up, Love & Only Love, Love To Burn Zuma (1975) 2: Cortez the Killer, Don’t Cry No Tears Greendale (2003) 2: Be The Rain, Sun Green On The Beach (1974) 1: Ambulance Blues American Stars’n’Bars (1977) 1: Like A Hurricane Comes A Time (1978) 1: Comes A Time Live Rust (1979) 1: Sugar Mountain Rust Never Sleeps (1979) 1: Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) American Dream (CSNY) (1988) 1: Name Of Love Freedom (1989) 1: (Keep On) Rockin’ In The Free World Harvest Moon (1992) 1: Harvest Moon Mirror Ball (1995) 1: Throw Your Hatred Down Looking Forward (CSNY) (1999) 1: Looking Forward Silver & Gold (2000) 1: Daddy Went Walkin’
And here are those setlist choices arranged as a pie chart by decade:
Diving for deep cuts has often been a highlight for many of hardcore fans following Neil Young from show to show. There haven’t been any really rare songs played (as in less than 10 live outings ever), but there’s some interesting stats to be had around a few of the core songs that have entertained audiences this past month…
“Sugar Mountain” Neil Young has played this familiar song over 450 times but it hasn’t featured often at all in the latter years of Young’s live career. After a run in 2019 and a Covid appearance (on the Fireside Sessions) in 2020, “Sugar Mountain” resurfaced once in 2024 and then showed up in four of the first six shows on the current tour.
“Be The Rain” This underrated eco-blast was a cornerstone of both the acoustic and electric Greendale shows in 2003 and 2004 but hadn’t been played since, save for three surprise showings on the 2014 Crazy Horse European tour. The distinctive arced metallic Greendale mic set-up was an instant clue to long-time aficionados that it was back in favour, and indeed “Be The Rain” was played on every show of the Love Earth European tour, along with another Greendale song, “Sun Green”.
“When You Dance, I Can Really Love” An After The Gold Rush song that’s drifted in and out of NY sets over the last 25 years but again was a feature of every Love Earth European show.
“Looking Forward” Here’s one that no one saw coming. Debuted late in 1998 as a gentle solo acoustic song, it was rejigged to fit the CSNY album of the same name, coated in harmonies that didn’t really enhance the song (many didn’t think it worked in the band format). The Love Earth tour gave it a new lease of life, with gentle band harmonies and smart second acoustic picking from Micah Nelson.
“Name Of Love” Written during the mid-1980s, this song was debuted on the infamous Crazy Horse Muddy Track tour of Europe in 1987. Recorded for the disappointing CSNY reunion record American Dream in 1988, the song was only played once by the reformed supergroup, and was shelved until the uninspiring 2014 Horse tour of Europe. It then lay dormant once more until this year, Young playing a not-seen-before electric piano for the opening show in Sweden, then the upright piano in Bergen, before settling on pump organ for the rest of the tour’s performances of the song.
“Throw Your Hatred Down” Recorded and debuted live with Pearl Jam in 1995, “Throw Your Hatred Down” fell away from setlists as the millennium approached. It featured twice in 2006, once in 2014 and then popped up on several European dates with Promise Of The Real in 2019. It returned for the solo Coastal tour in 2023 before becoming part of the encore at Glastonbury and Hyde Park this year.
“Ambulance Blues” One of the most lauded, revered works in the sprawling Neil Young canon. First coming to prominence on the famous Bottom Line bootleg of May ’74, it resurfaced later that year across eight dates of the CSNY stadium tour. For 24 years it was left as a mythic creature, unplayed live until REM agreed to play the Bridge Benefit shows in 1998, but only on the proviso that they could back Neil Young on “Ambulance Blues”. It featured throughout his 1999 solo tour and enjoyed sporadic appearances throughout the 2000s, but usually as a solo song. So fans were stunned and overjoyed when it suddenly reappeared in Groningen and established itself as a set-opener from then on.
“Daddy Went Walkin'” You can guarantee that this curio from Silver & Gold was on absolutely no-one’s radar. In the grand scheme of things, it isn’t a rare Neil Young song (77 performances now) but those were mostly on Young’s stellar solo tour of North America in 1999 and the following year’s Friends & Relatives tour. Since then, the song has been performed on just two occasions – at Bridge in 2009, and in a Fireside Session during the 2020 Covid pandemic – before resurfacing at Montreux this year, and again at the final date in Paris.
