Features

"Glastonbury!" beams Debbie Harry. "Nowhere else like it!" Just past midday on Friday in the Vale of Avalon, and the world’s largest voluntary refugee camp is already on the move.

Metallica headline Glastonbury this weekend, and “Enter Sandman” will most likely be a highlight of their set. So we delved into the archive, back to Uncut’s March 2007 issue (Take 118), to discover how the group created The Black Album’s anti-lullaby. Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and producer Bob Rock spill the beans to Stephen Dalton…

Lots to dig into this week, not least a song to sample from the Hiss Golden Messenger album that I’ve been alluding to for so long. Strong Ronnie Lane vibes there, perhaps. Among some biggish new entries here, some lesser known names to check out, too: Jennifer Castle; 75 Dollar Bill’s weird adaptation of desert blues; the new Blonde Redhead album that increasingly feels like their strongest in an age; and Hurray For The Riff Raff, magnificent on Letterman.

For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of Belle and Sebastian songwriter Stuart Murdoch, God Help The Girl – his debut as a writer and director – will hold few real surprises.

“Welcome to an evening of country and eastern,” smiles Robert Plant as he gestures expansively round this fabled Paris venue, taking in not just the lively capacity crowd gathered here tonight but also to his latest musical collaborators, The Sensational Space Shifters.

Edwyn Collins has just performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London as part of this year’s Meltdown festival – here, in a fascinating feature from Uncut’s April 2010 issue (Take 155), the tale of Collins’ Orange Juice is told by the man himself alongside the group’s other members. Get ready for a tale of wilful perversity, vicious in-fighting, pant-wetting on TV and how Edwyn Collins “traded in all our equity for a funny bassline”… Words: Alastair McKay ___________________

I suspect I wasn’t the only one who, last night, came out of the World Cup rabbit hole to discover that Gerry Goffin had died. As has become a slightly weird but nonetheless heartfelt tradition – a public display of mourning and taste, I suppose – I posted a favourite song onto Twitter: the Byrds’ version of “Goin’ Back”.

It’s not a situation I could have predicted 20 years ago, I’ll admit, but there’s a point I reach quite often on Friday afternoons when all I really want to hear is The Grateful Dead. As default, I’ll cue up something from 1972 – the Wembley Empire Pool set from that year, say – mention it on Twitter, then receive a lot of static from my Dead friends who see me as something of a lightweight for clinging so conservatively to that year.

As an artist, Nick Cave has mastered many different disciplines – musician, novelist and screenwriter among them – but arguably his greatest accomplishment has been the on-going management of ‘Nick Cave’.

After the Best Albums Of 2014: Halftime Report business earlier in the week, it’s good to push on today with a bunch of very fine new arrivals, many of which you can hear at least tracks from below.