Features

A month or so back, I sent Lee Bains III a few questions for a Q&A to run alongside my review of the Glory Fires’ “Dereconstructed” in Uncut. Bains’ answers turned out to be more thoughtful, interesting and extensive than pretty much any email interview I’ve previously conducted, so I’m pleased to run them in their entirety here…

About ten years ago, I had a series of conversations with some people preparing a new edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Music. Their aim, it seemed, was to take the 84 tracks originally compiled from Smith’s collection of 78s, and subject them to a vigorous digital clean-up. How much better would these songs sound, was their reasoning, if all the grit and static was removed, leaving the performances unsullied and sharp?

I was reminiscing with an old friend over the weekend about The Specials, his favourite band. Our chat brought us to the great 1979 2-Tone Tour that featured The Specials, supported by Madness and The Selecter, a snapshot of which now duly follows.

Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.

Gruff Rhys and Huw Bunford take us through their back catalogue

There is something to be said for the shoe-string budget movie. Recent films like Locke (Tom Hardy having a meltdown while travelling in a car from Birmingham to London) proved to be a refreshing and inventive corrective to the seasonal trudge of blockbusters. Blue Ruin is a similarly impressive low-budget affair, showcasing two emergent talents: writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and lead actor Macon Blair.

As Damon Albarn prepares to release his debut solo album, Everyday Robots, on Monday, and 20 years since the release of Parklife is celebrated, we delve back into the Uncut archive (July 2009, Take 146) and go behind the scenes of the sessions that produced Blur’s classic albums and reveal the conflicts that nearly destroyed the band… Interviews: Nick Hasted

Beyond the Ebay landfill mountains of luminous “Ghostbusters” singles, there were a weird few days this week when it seemed as if no-one had actually located a copy of Neil Young’s “A Letter Home” on Record Store Day. After everything, did it actually exist? Had Neil, in his current capricious mood, personally had it removed it from the stockrooms of record stores on Friday night?

The live album of LCD Soundsystem's final gig at Madison Square Garden is finally being released tomorrow (April 19) for this year's Record Store Day, in full, as a 5LP set. Back in Uncut's November 2012 issue (Take 186), we met LCD's James Murphy to hear his thoughts on their farewell concert, his reasons for breaking up the band, and the plans he has for a post-LCD career: “I don’t,” he says. “And it’s terrifying!” Words: Stephen Troussé _____________________________

As Robert Gordon reminds us in Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion, his terrific account of the rise and fall of the great Memphis soul imprint, the Stax story is more than a record-label history. “It is an American story,” Gordon writes,” where the shoe-shine boy becomes a star, the country hayseed an international magnate. It’s the story of individuals against society, of small business competing with large, of the disenfranchised seeking their own tile in the American mosaic.”