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?
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.
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.
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.
Uncut presents Led Zeppelin: The Ultimate Music Guide Issue 10. Just as Robert Plant returns with a new band, and Jimmy Page releases his great lost album from the archives, Uncut celebrates their incredible band, Led Zeppelin.
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.
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.
"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.
