Features

To Matthew E White’s first London show tonight, all being well, but in the meantime this week’s playlist, with a few things to listen to and watch, as is becoming a hopefully useful habit.

A quiet office these past few days, as members of the Uncut team have dispersed to the States, Morocco and Portugal on various missions and holidays. Yesterday, the rest of us finished the next issue, which goes on sale January 31, and which features, among many other things, a piece about David Bowie and Tony Visconti, relating to something happening in March which isn’t “The Next Day”…

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy discusses his band’s upcoming new album in the current issue of Uncut (dated February 2013, Take 189), out now – but here, in this piece from Uncut’s August 2009 issue, Tweedy answers questions from fans and famous admirers, and discusses Bob Dylan’s beard, hanging with Neil Young and the recipe for the perfect burger (clue: use cranberries)… __________________________

Couple of plugs this morning before I get into the list. First off, a quick reminder that we have an exclusive stream of the whole new Arbouretum album, “Coming Out Of The Fog”; click this link. Well worth a listen, if you haven’t already.

I don’t have any tattoos, for many reasons, but one of the best I can think of is that I don’t trust my aesthetic tastes to remain constant. I don’t feel confident that the art I like now will all, necessarily, be the same things that I like a few years down the line.

Quentin Tarantino came to a crossroads in his career when he made Jackie Brown in 1997. Coming after the lary carnage of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, his third film, adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, was an unexpectedly poignant and subtle account of middle-aged people doing whatever they have to do to survive. The guns, double-crosses and gangsters were there, of course - but there were other things, too: warmth, character and nuance.

If you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms after the glut of end-of-year charts last month, I cooked this up for the latest edition of Uncut…

At the end of November 2012, Low released a short video trailer for their forthcoming tenth full album, “The Invisible Way”. There is some static, and Mimi Parker talking about some “exceptional peaches”, then a cascading piano line fades in. After 44 seconds, and before the clip has revealed much of a shape as a song, the clip ends.

“The one thing that saved Mick at this point was Dylan,” Mick Ronson’s wife, Suzi, recalls in a terrific feature on her late husband by Garry Mulholland in the new issue of Uncut. She was talking about the shambles Mick’s career had become after he was dumped by David Bowie and his first two solo albums, Slaughter On 10th Avenue and Play Don’t Worry, had both flopped. Things hadn’t really worked out with the Hunter-Ronson Band, either, and you wondered where Mick might go from here when he unexpectedly hove into view as a member of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

In Part 4 of this exclusive interview from Uncut’s October 1999 issue, David Bowie looks back on 30 years of genius, drugs and derangement. Words: Chris Roberts