To accompany this month’s Uncut (Take 181, June 2012), out now, which features the Bonnie “Prince” Billy/Palace icon fielding questions from fans and musicians, here’s an illuminating Album By Album piece with Will Oldham, talking to Andrew Mueller, from Uncut’s April 2009 issue. “I feel more confident about things now,” he says. “Which frees up space for me to feel insecure about a whole new range of stuff…”
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Fairport Convention founder, solo artist and folk-rock guitar legend Richard Thompson is featured in Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes in the latest issue of Uncut (May 2012, Take 181), out now. The songwriter appeared in My Life In Music in our February 2009 issue, speaking to Terry Staunton about his favourite cuts, from Les Paul to Klaxons…
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The First Record I Bought
Roy Rogers – A Four Legged Friend (1952)
Graham Coxon’s new album A+E is reviewed in the latest Uncut (May 2012, Take 180), out now – so we thought we’d revisit the last time the guitarist featured in our pages. In 2009, John Robinson met the guitarist at his Camden home to find out about his folk-infused solo album The Spinning Top, and hear all about the little matter of his old band’s reunion… Picture: Essy Syad
“I feel like a stand-up comic who’s not getting any laughs,” says Patti Smith self-deprecatingly, as she presents a playback of her new album, Banga, to a specially invited audience in London. This is the first time anyone has listened to the record, she tells us – not even the band or Patti's record company have yet had the privilege of hearing it. The venue for this auspicious event is the old Scotch Of St James club in Mayfair, the principal hang out for Swinging London’s finest.
As this month’s new Uncut (May 2012, Take 180) features Brian Fallon talking about The Gaslight Anthem’s upcoming new album, Handwritten, we thought it would be fitting to dig out this Uncut feature from January 2010 – in which Fallon tells Jaan Uhelszki how he became a rumbustious, show-stealing international phenomenon, beloved even by The Boss himself. Not bad for a tattooed punk kid whose “mother fed me Born To Run with my Cheerios”…
The clock was ticking yesterday afternoon as we approached the final deadlines for the next issue of Uncut. But we were finished early enough for me to rush hot-foot across London to The May Fair hotel, near Hyde Park, where Leonard Cohen was due to present a playback of his new album, Old Ideas, to a specially invited audience.
In the second week of May, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove from Los Angeles to Nashvillle. The journey took 31 hours, and Welch filmed a small portion of it on her iPhone. The clip is framed by an open car window, and outside you can see the flooded Mississippi stretching away from the edge of the road to the horizon: a new inland sea for the beleaguered American South.
The new issue of Uncut is out sometime this week, and among many other things it contains an interview I did a few weeks back with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings in Nashville.
