Features

With the new Uncut out tomorrow, it just occurred to me that I'd forgotten to post this review from the last issue. I did at least put up the full transcript of my email exchange with Ben Chasny, which you can check out by following this link. "Ascent" is on sale now, by the way.

A couple of notable absences here, I guess, since there remains no sign of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Psychedelic Pill” (as we’re currently assuming it’s called), and only the editor has heard Bob Dylan’s “Tempest”, in some kind of fortified panic room at the Sony offices.

This month’s issue of Uncut (September 2012, Take 184) features Joe Strummer on the cover – inside is an in-depth exploration of his secret history, after The Clash split up to his redemption in the late ’90s. To complement this, our archive feature this week finds Strummer looking at the demise of The Clash – from their epic Sandinista! album to their bitter disintegration. This excerpt is taken from a longer piece in the September 1999 (Take 28) issue of Uncut. Words: Gavin Martin __________________________________

Twenty mostly new records for your delectation this week, with particular emphasis on: the Michael Chapman full and free download from Black Dirt Studios’ consistently excellent “Natch” project; Cody ChesnuTT’s plush, upscale return; Corin Tucker tapping back into the punch of earlyish Sleater-Kinney; Jeff Lynne’s weird forensic re-recordings of his greatest hits; that Crazy Horse boot I wrote about yesterday; and Rangda, of course.

Lou Reed at 70 arrives onstage at the Festival Hall to do his bit for Antony Hegarty’s Meltdown programme dressed like a stroppy teenager in a baggy black basketball vest, gold medallions around his neck and what looks like a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He looks frail these days, though tonight slightly less so than last year at the Hammersmith Apollo, and perhaps no wonder when you consider what he’s put his body through over the years before he embraced his current sobriety.

John Fogerty’s show supporting Bruce Springsteen at London's Hyde Park is reviewed in the new issue of Uncut, out now (dated September 2012). So, for this week’s archive feature, we delve back to March 2006 (Take 106), when the Creedence singer, guitarist and songwriter talked Uncut through all of his legendary band’s singles. Interview: Bud Scoppa __________________________

A few cool things to play and/or download on the playlist this week, kicking off with a couple of free new tunes from the characteristically profligate White Denim, which come highly recommended.

The shouts begin in earnest around the first encore – most of them are calls for specific songs, accompanied by a smattering of “We love you”s, but the one that raises the biggest cheer is simply: “Where have you been?”

“I find it faintly ridiculous that anyone would want to make a film about me,” says Luke Haines at the start of Niall McCann’s documentary, currently touring film festivals. Haines has spent much of his career as both a musician and, latterly, an author, raging splenetically and repeatedly against Britpop and those musicians he considers of lesser creative stature – which is most of them.

John Murry first entered Uncut airspace in 2006 with World Without End, the bleakly brilliant album of country death songs he wrote and recorded with Bob Frank. Six years on, Murry has just released his first solo album, The Graceless Age, an album of almost symphonic emotional turmoil, co-produced by late American Music Club drummer Tim Mooney. The songs on the record deal sometimes explicitly with Murry’s heroin addiction, specifically the 10-minute ‘Little Coloured Balloons’, a harrowing account of a near-fatal OD. I reviewed The Graceless Age for the current issue of Uncut and emailed Murry some questions, to which he replied in detail and at illuminating length, as you will see from the fascinating transcript that follows.