Features

News from Phil King on the Jesus And Mary Chain tour in Texas, yesterday, that Ty Segall was due to support them at a show. A pretty cool gig, one would imagine, and a useful prompt to remind me to write something about the latest release from Segall, especially since he’s promising – and it would be rash to disbelieve him, given his fecundity in the past two or three years – another couple of albums in the next few months.

I can’t believe it, either, but we seem to be already at that point in the month when I start by telling you that we’re hard at work finishing off the next issue of Uncut, buffeted by deadlines, flinching at the hungry caw of our steely-eyed taskmasters on the production desk, greedy for final copy as the last pages are put together to be sent to the printers.

Thanks for all your kind words over the past couple of weeks about the relaunched mag. I know this will undoubtedly read like self-justifying hype on our part, but we have been genuinely thrilled and overwhelmed by how positive the response has been.

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.

A lot on today, so I’ll have to be swift. But as you can see, a lot of exciting new things on the playlist this week, especially near the start. The Hans Chew track, incidentally, is a free download, and is hugely recommended.

A few weeks shy of a year ago, I was at the 12 Bar Club in London’s Denmark Street, the Tin Pan Alley of pop legend, to see a young Los Angeles-based band called Dawes. They’d been brought to my attention by an Uncut reader, who couldn’t recommend them highly enough. As an example of what they did in his opinion better than anyone he’d recently heard, he sent me a track called “When My Time Comes”, a rousing country rock thing that I hadn’t been able to stop playing.

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features a fascinating look at the history of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio, which brought the world Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and others. Elvis Presley was one future star who cut his debut recordings at the Memphis studio – and in this archive piece from the fourth ever issue of Uncut (September 1997), comedian Frank Skinner talks about the King’s early years and the huge impact the Sun recordings had on him.

Thanks to Damien Love for reminding me to blog about this. It's been on my radar for a couple of weeks, but it's only since Damien emailed me a Youtube link to a trailer earlier today that I've finally got something to write about.

They start with the tropical strum of “Buenos Aires Beach”, from their debut album Wagonwheel Blues, whose balmy unfolding might strike you as an inappropriate opener for a chilly night in Camden, far from the sun-kissed climes the song so breezily evokes.

Up to our necks in it here, finishing the first Uncut Ultimate Music Guide of 2012. Hopefully a good few of you will have now seen our relaunched new issue with Bowie on the cover: please let me know what you think, either in the Facebook Comments below or via Twitter - www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey.