Features

A bit frustrating this week, since I can't really talk about a couple of the most significant musical arrivals here, due to record label embargoes and so forth. Sorry, as ever, about the teasing: I'll reveal more as soon as I can.

At the conclusion of Se7en, his second film as director, David Fincher memorably gave us Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head in a box. In many respects, he has been producing heads from boxes ever since.

“We were like Fleetwood Mac without the drugs,” recalls Isobel Campbell…

Instant albums do not, as a rule, encourage reflection. There is surprise, sometimes indignation, a social media flame war, a lot of static about delivery systems. Once the 38 minutes of, say, Thom Yorke's "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes" have passed, it can all suddenly be over. What happens next?

As AC/DC announce Malcolm Young's retirement and the release of a new album, Rock Or Bust, we look back at the life of former frontman Bon Scott in a piece taken from Uncut's December 2013 issue (Take 199). A street poet who’d been inside for ‘carnal knowledge’? A teenybop idol and hippy seer? A tearaway who swam with jellyfish and rode motorbikes naked? “A fantastic guy, a real human, so different to what people thought…” Words: Peter Watts _________________________

No point in messing about this week: scroll down to hear new music from, among others, Neil Young, Cool Ghouls, Bryan Ferry, Frazey Ford, Kendrick Lamar, Joan Shelley and the extremely promising D.D. Dumbo, plus a couple of amazing full gigs from Hiss Golden Messenger and a Purling Hiss/Spacin' supersession, both courtesy of the invaluable www.nyctaper.com.

With the remastered “fictional documentary” Feast Of Friends set to be released properly for the first time on November 11, here’s a piece from the Uncut archives (February 2007 issue, Take 117) – a look at how The Doors created the epic closer to their final studio album, LA Woman, which would prove to be Jim Morrison’s haunted, spiritual swansong. Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore tell the story… Words: Mick Houghton

Weird serendipities aplenty this week: versions of "O, Death" on two albums I downloaded one after another, by Mike & Cara Gangloff and Bessie Jones; dovetailing into Sea Island overlap between Jones and Loscil. It makes for a nice blurring between time and genre with, say, the Gangloffs using esoteric strategies to achieve a similar kind of transcendence that Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers reach through more orthodox, albeit uncommonly raw, Gospel routes in these Lomax recordings from the early '60s.

All Leonard Cohen wants for his 80th birthday is a cigarette. He smoked, he estimates, for around 50 years, before he gave up a decade or so ago. “I think a lot about smoking,” he reflects. “I’m thinking about it right now.”

When Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she brought into focus her gifts for music, controversy and self-publicity in one fairly explosive package.