Features

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.

Tom Petty is a man of many guitars, most of which seem to make an appearance on stage at some point in tonight’s proceedings. Here’s a red Fender, a blonde Rickenbacker, a white Gibson, back to the Fender, and on. It seems fitting, I suppose: Petty’s first show in the UK for 13 years is very much about craft and musicianship.

An in-depth Uncut interview with Jack White from the time of Blunderbuss

Here we go, then: my 40 favourite albums of 2012 thus far. A very personal list, I should say, so please don’t think it constitutes any kind of canonical Uncut pronouncement.

Welcome back William Friedkin and Matthew McConaughey - both missing in action, it seems, for some years now - with the terribly funny Killer Joe. Typically, for the director of transgressive genre pieces like The Exorcist and Cruising, one of the first things we see here is Gina Gershon’s lower half, naked. “It’s a bit distracting, your bush in my face,” complains her step-son, Chris (Emile Hirsch).

The pianist, singer and songwriter Mac Rebennack, known better as Dr John, faces your questions in the latest Uncut (dated July 2012), out now – but back in October 2010 (Take 161), he took us on a fascinating journey through his most important, and interesting, releases, from Gris-Gris to Exile On Main St. "We went to a nudist camp somewhere, we made up a song called 'The Symphony Of Frogs'…" ______________________________

A busy few days, with No Direction Home last weekend, thenMikal Cronin in Dalston on Monday, and a lot of good records to play while we’re winding up the next issue (I’ve embedded a couple of choice Youtube links this week in the list).

I missed Mikal Cronin’s UK debut by a few hours, having to leave the excellent No Direction Home festival before he played. From a muddy field in North Nottinghamshire, though, to a hipster pub in Dalston, and the first London show for this Californian early-20something and his terrific band.

Beneath Welbeck Abbey, an expansive estate in North Nottinghamshire thus far untouched by any sort of National Trust daytripping, there is a vast network of underground tunnels, wide and stretching for miles around the roots of Sherwood Forest. Somewhere down there, according to my mother, there’s even a ballroom that she visited for a dance the best part of 60 years ago.