Features

When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.

Sun Kil Moon’s excellent Among The Leaves is Uncut’s lead review in the new August 2012 issue, out now. In this feature from September 2010 (Take 160), Mark Kozelek looks back over the highlights of his recording career, from Red House Painters to his current wrestling-indebted incarnation. Words: Graeme Thomson –––––––––––––––––––––––––

This month’s issue of Uncut (dated July 2012) features Suede recalling the writing and recording of their debut single, “The Drowners” – so it seemed a good time to revisit frontman Brett Anderson’s An Audience With… from Uncut’s December 2010 issue as this week’s archive feature. Expect questions and answers on Damon Albarn, Brett’s obsession with art and The Great War, and the lure of East London’s kebab shops… Interview: John Lewis –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Do opera-goers have low boredom thresholds? It certainly seems that way watching the production of Damon Albarn’s “Dr Dee” at the English National Opera – or at least that director Rufus Norris assumes they do.

Plenty of gold in this week’s haul, and not much better than the Duane Pitre album whose sleeve is posted above – a truly excellent record that I must admit I missed when it was released a few months back.

Hi there, I hope those of you who braved the abysmal weather last weekend to go to the Isle of Wight festival had a good time and made it back unscathed.

Speaking to Uncut around the release of The Proposition, Nick Cave conceded, “The whole thing was a struggle. So much effort was put into it. It’s the most agonising, frustrating business to be in. Years go by trying to get something off the ground – one idea! It’s unbelievable, the vision you have at the beginning is constantly chipped away at, and you haven’t even filmed anything.”

Pondering what to write about this morning, it occurred to me that there were more things to say about my favourite albums of 2012 so far, following up from this Top 40 that I posted last week. For a start, a bunch of records that I forgot to include:

A serene beginning this morning, with a new Terry Riley album, “Aleph”. Over on my 40 Favourites Of 2012 Thus Far blog, however, things became a little less genteel yesterday, as you can see in the comments thread at the bottom of the chart.

One of the records I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of these last couple of weeks is The Graceless Age, the new album by John Murry, who Uncut regulars may remember from World Without End, a sensationally bleak 2006 collection of contemporary murder ballads he made with the Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank. The Graceless Age, like World Without End, produced by Tim Mooney, the former American Music Club drummer, at Closer Recording, the studio Tim owned in San Francisco, at 1441 Howard Street. The more I played it, the more The Graceless Age sounded like one of the best things Mooney had been involved in, as either producer or musician, a dark and festering masterpiece.