Features

As Jack White’s second solo album, Lazaretto, is released on Monday (June 10), it seemed time to check out some of the White pieces in our archive. Here, in this article from December 2006’s Uncut (Take 115), Jack, Brendan Benson and Patrick Keeler celebrate the irresistible rise of their three-minute garage pop classic. Interview: Barney Hoskyns

I must confess that, until very recently, I hadn’t really heard of Mike Cooper; more evidence, I guess, of the apparently boundless reserves of records from the early ‘70s still to be reissued (the Bob Carpenter album, due to be released on No Quarter in the autumn, is another great example I should write about soon).

Deep into 2001’s Southern Rock Opera , there’s a point where Patterson Hood produces a mission statement for the Drive-By Truckers – and for an enlightened generation of bands from below the Mason-Dixon line. “You think I'm dumb, maybe not too bright,” he sings, “You wonder how I sleep at night/Proud of the glory, stare down the shame/Duality of the southern thing.”

How does it feel, to be pathologised? A few of you might wonder as much, picking up with some trepidation David Kinney’s “The Dylanologists: Adventures In The Land Of Bob”. For here is a book that purports to expose the eccentricities of Bob Dylan’s most obsessive fans, who – imagine! - spend all their money on bootlegs, rarities and ephemera, follow the Neverending Tour around the world, crowd the front rows of his gigs, meticulously work through his lyrics for meaning and echo. Not to be paranoid here, but is Kinney talking about us?

One of the things I wrote about in the new issue of Uncut is a review of the latest vinyl reissues from what was the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. For a panel to accompany the review, I had the good fortune to speak to composer Paddy Kingsland, one of the legendary studio boffins currently touring in the live iteration of the Workshop.

New documentary Pulp (A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets) hits UK cinemas on June 7 – in anticipation, we delve back to August 2010’s Uncut (Take 159) to discover the origins of Jarvis Cocker and co’s greatest hit. From three chords on a cheap Casio keyboard, via a headline slot at Glastonbury, to the huge summer anthem of 1995… Interview: Nick Hasted

Emotional times, as this is Allan’s last day as editor of Uncut. Before we get down to that, though, here are the records we’ve been playing in the office this week.

Revisiting some great YouTube footage of Bob in action...

Like everything else, Noel Gallagher had an opinion about debut albums. “Definitely Maybe was the young, eager, wanting to get out there and fucking blow the world away album,” he told Uncut in 2000. As Gallagher claimed on many occasions, he’d been strategising a debut album, in whatever form, since his teenage years. With such apparent forethought, it’s no wonder that when Definitely Maybe appeared in August, 1994 it redrew the parameters of indie rock, filling a void left by The Stone Roses and gave Alan McGee’s Creation Records a world-class act.

A new office this week, although a good few crates remain. These, though, are the tunes that’ve sensitively assisted our transition. Special props to Bob Carpenter’s rediscovered album from ’74, very much kin to “No Other”; to the Mauritanian desert rock of Noura Mint Seymali; to the reissue of an old Imaginary Softwoods ambient set from John Elliott, ex of Emeralds; and to the enduring usefulness of Pye Corner Audio and Girma Yifrashewa.