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Garbage’s Shirley Manson says Beautiful Garbage album nearly ended her career

Damian Jones
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Garbage’s Shirley Manson says Beautiful Garbage album nearly ended her career
Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has admitted that she thought the band's 2001 album Beautiful Garbage was "the end of my career". ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut The record, which was recently reissued to mark its 20th anniversary, "died on a vine" when...

Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has admitted that she thought the band’s 2001 album Beautiful Garbage was “the end of my career”.

The record, which was recently reissued to mark its 20th anniversary, “died on a vine” when it was first released according to the singer despite landing at Number Six in the Official UK albums chart.

“I honestly thought that was the end of my career and that we were never going to recover,” she told Classic Rock magazine. “It took a long time for us as a band to regain our equilibrium and our confidence and our joy.”

She added: “Joy is of monumental importance when you’re an artist, particularly in an industry that has become so hard. So to realise that you’ve regained something at this late stage in your life and career feels like unexpected treasure.â€

Manson also said even now, the band always “expect the worst†when they release new material.

She continued: “We are always quite surprised when we get a positive reaction. It’s not something we really expect or are accustomed to.â€

This year saw Garbage release their seventh studio effort, No Gods No Masters.

Without Getting Killed Or Caught

Andrew Mueller
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Without Getting Killed Or Caught
Guy Clark’s death in 2016, aged 74, was widely and correctly mourned not merely as the passing of a titan of modern country music, but as something like the end of an era. Though Clark had never become massively famous, he’d written a lot of songs that had, while those who knew of him revered hi...

Guy Clark’s death in 2016, aged 74, was widely and correctly mourned not merely as the passing of a titan of modern country music, but as something like the end of an era. Though Clark had never become massively famous, he’d written a lot of songs that had, while those who knew of him revered him as a flame-keeper of a particular sort of country – literary and wry, with gentle iconoclastic tendencies. Clark may, more than anyone else, have invented what we now think of as Americana and alt.country.

Without Getting Killed Or Caught – the title is a line from Clark’s song “LA Freewayâ€, a 1972 hit for Jerry Jeff Walker – chronicles Clark’s life and times, along with those of his two most important partners. One is Susanna Clark, Guy’s wife, a songwriter and painter – her best-known work may be the cover of Willie Nelson’s umpty-selling Stardust. The other is Townes Van Zandt, Clark’s friend, who died in 1997, aged 52. He was certainly no less and no more than Clark’s equal as a songwriter, but acquired a heftier legend via an uncompromisingly dissolute lifestyle. Among the many testaments to Clark’s sagacity from his peers and protégés collected in the film, none rings quite so truly as an old clip of Van Zandt complaining that “He will not let me driveâ€.

The film draws from director Tamara Saviano’s 2016 book of the same title and Susanna Clark’s diaries, which are narrated by Sissy Spacek. The story is illustrated with personal photos, recordings of Guy Clark interviews, Susanna Clark’s sketches and pictures and cute animations by Mel Chin. It’s as much a story of a complex yet surprisingly robust relationship at least as much as it is a story of either Guy or Susanna’s careers: when the pair first met, Guy was dating Susanna’s sister, Bunny Talley, whose eventual suicide inspired Guy’s “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhereâ€; after they were married, it was Van Zandt, their best man, who Susanna often described as her soulmate.

None of the contemporary interviewees are in much doubt that Guy Clark, though promoted and remembered as a solo artist, was really one half of two duos. One, with his wife (“We learned to write songs from Guy and Townes,†says Steve Earle, one of Clark’s acolytes, “but we learned to carry ourselves as artists from Susannaâ€). The other, with his best friend and sparring partner Van Zandt, who clearly drove Clark to his greatest artistic heights, and (not infrequently) to distraction.

But in the film as in his songs, it’s his Clark’s dry humour and stoic wisdom that radiates. “If I knew how to write the next Garth Brooks hit, I would do it in a second,†he says in one recording, before continuing, with an audible smile, “I’m just cursed with artistic integrity.â€

Titane

Jonathan Romney
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Titane
Truly deranged films don’t often come along these days – and when they do, you don’t expect them to win the exalted Palme d’Or in Cannes. That’s why Julia Ducournau’s Titane stands out as a wild exception; she’s also only the second woman to win the prize, 28 years after Jane Campionâ€...

Truly deranged films don’t often come along these days – and when they do, you don’t expect them to win the exalted Palme d’Or in Cannes. That’s why Julia Ducournau’s Titane stands out as a wild exception; she’s also only the second woman to win the prize, 28 years after Jane Campion’s The Piano. Titane is the French director’s follow-up to her acclaimed, all-out feral Raw, a cannibal coming-of-age story. Heroine Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) has had a titanium plate in her head since childhood and now works as an erotic dancer at motor shows, while exploring a sideline in casual homicide. On the run after a sexual encounter with a car (this is all making perfect sense so far, right?), she disguises herself as a boy and forms a strange quasi-familial bond with Vincent (Vincent Lindon), the obsessive, muscle-building captain of a firefighting squad.

Ducournau’s film is an electrically aggressive meltdown of violence, visual delirium, sexual fluidity, outré humour and Cronenbergian body horror, with a soundtrack that ranges from The Kills and Future Islands to a wildly unlikely use of perennial holiday hit “Macarenaâ€. This is a wildly arresting creation, not least because of newcomer Rousselle, laser-eyed and androgynous with an angular facial geometry that’s positively Vorticist. Then there’s Alexia’s tender, polymorphous relationship with her adoptive firefighting daddy – played by French screen stalwart Lindon, here stepping audaciously far from his usual zone of careworn Everyman roles.

Not that a nightmare movie like this should be neatly manageable – but as Titane barrels furiously from psychodrama to De Palma-esque murder farce to machine nightmare and beyond, you feel that there are at least three different films here, with Ducournau playing a dizzy game of narrative pinball. You can’t stop watching, though – but be warned, one moment of impromptu facial surgery is cinema’s most wince-inducing moment of nasal brutality since Polanski’s Chinatown.

Various Artists – Sacred Soul of North Carolina

Erin Osmon
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Various Artists – Sacred Soul of North Carolina
Since Thomas A Dorsey made a business of gospel music soon after the turn of the 20th century, myriad black religious musical traditions have been studied, recorded, compiled and packaged, from the Sacred Harp singing of tiny churches lining the deep South, to highly sample-able gospel funk emanatin...

Since Thomas A Dorsey made a business of gospel music soon after the turn of the 20th century, myriad black religious musical traditions have been studied, recorded, compiled and packaged, from the Sacred Harp singing of tiny churches lining the deep South, to highly sample-able gospel funk emanating from Churches Of God In Christ in major Rust Belt cities. Two years ago, footage of Aretha Franklin recording “Amazing Grace†at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in 1972 was released, drawing renewed attention and appreciation for the black church among secular audiences, for its music and the hope that its people and songbook transfers.

The appeal of black gospel music – a reimagining of popular sonic forms through a sacred lyrical lens, soul without the sex, funk without the foreplay – centres on its unselfconscious jubilation, the marvel that an unseeable force can elicit such demonstrative joy, unity and lightning-in-a-bottle musicality. Even the gnarliest of heathens would find it hard to dismiss the infectious glee of The Edwin Hawkin Singers’ “Oh Happy Day†or the core-rattling power of Mahalia Jackson’s “Move On Up A Little Higherâ€. Gospel not only calls on believers, it captivates those moved by the unwavering fortitude, the unyielding optimism of its congregants.

Because recorded gospel music has always been influenced by modern sonic forms, the sounds of its peak in the 1960s and ’70s – soulful call-and-response situated among handclaps and analogue instrumentation – is waning among the rise of digital production. But in a tiny pocket of the American Southeast, the classic sounds of gospel live on.

Sacred Soul Of North Carolina casts in amber a decades-long tradition. Recorded over eight days in a no-frills storefront in Fountain, North Carolina, about an hour due east of the state capital Raleigh, the 18-song collection features area gospel groups that are locally celebrated but little known outside of their homeland, family singers by blood or by the faith that implicitly binds them.

The stripped-back quality of the production has the effect of a collection of field recordings, a couple of mics hovering invisibly among these musicians’ day-to-day, unimposing and in service of capturing their natural selves. Producers Bruce Watson and Tim Duffy centre the voice on each track, whether it’s soaring over basic drum beats, a cappella or out in front of a celestial organ. And the care and attention they render is palpable, each breath, each vibrato, each rasp or sustained note floating with elegant imperfection, like a scrap of velvet in the wind.

The album opens with two blues-soaked numbers by the Dedicated Men Of Zion, perhaps the most visible of the groups collected here, particularly for their recent appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert Series. But it is the Glorifying Vines Sisters’ “Tell It All to Jesus†that packs the first real punch, their dynamic, homespun harmonising driven by bass drum and hi-hat thumping. It’s the kind of thing you’d picture in a tent-revival meeting, its celebratory singing and minimalist, easily transportable instrumentation an earnest and effective call to a higher power in any setting.

Big James Barrett & The Golden Jubilees bring a smooth R&B influence, the group’s frontman having come up in that scene, and their second track on the album, “Use Me Lordâ€, is as much a steppers anthem as it is a call for salvation. It’s a highlight that ushers in a more meditative though no less soulful moment, allowing the listener to groove to the word before Faith & Harmony, The Johnsonairs, Bishop Albert Harrison & The Gospel Tones and Little Willie & The Fantastic Spiritualaires blow the door open with organ-laced full-band exaltation.

Some of the album’s most salient performances omit instrumentation altogether. Faith & Harmony’s “Victory†fuses a coterie of powerful female voices for a declaration of divine assurance, while Bishop Albert Harrison & The Gospel Tones’ “Stand Up†updates doo-wop’s template for a call-and-response that doubles as a call to action. Melody Harper’s a cappella version of “Amazing Graceâ€, which closes the album, leaves the listener with a sense of resolve for its burden-lifting quality. If there was any doubt that these folks’ faith is what fuels their hope, their evident peace amid hardship, then Harper’s stirring interpretation of the standard makes it abundantly clear.

Though it was recorded a month before the world locked down, Sacred Soul Of North Carolina doubles as a soothing balm for what ails our inner and outer worlds. In a time of great uncertainty, unwavering belief in anything is a rare and delightful thing to behold.

Big Thief: “We need each other to surviveâ€

Sam Richards
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Big Thief: “We need each other to surviveâ€
July 2020 at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud studio in the Catskill mountains. It’s only a few months since Big Thief’s world tour to promote their albums UFOF and Two Hands was dramatically curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic, with the band forced to play their final show in the street outside Cop...

July 2020 at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud studio in the Catskill mountains. It’s only a few months since Big Thief’s world tour to promote their albums UFOF and Two Hands was dramatically curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic, with the band forced to play their final show in the street outside Copenhagen’s Vega concert hall before hightailing it back to America in a state of panic. While the rest of the western world stockpiles toilet roll and adjusts to working from home, Adrianne Lenker chooses to lock down in a remote one-room cabin in western Massachusetts, where – processing the heartbreak from her break-up with Australian singer-songwriter Indigo Sparke – she writes and records a pair of twin solo albums called simply Songs and Instrumentals. She also sends a series of songs in the form of voice memos to the rest of Big Thief, working to a new, mystical album title they’ve already decided upon: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You.

At Flying Cloud, the songs keep coming, appearing to Lenker like “a wind blowing through†her. “Annie can just wake up from a dream and go play a song that was in the dream,†marvels Big Thief bassist Max Oleartchik. “I’m in awe about how quickly it happens.†One night, a huge thunderstorm knocks the power out. Sat around a candle on the kitchen table, the band can hear Lenker on the porch with her Martin acoustic, playing a song they’ve never heard before. Buck Meek is out there too, helping to mould it into shape, intuitively adding harmonies and a second guitar part. “My certainty is wild, weavingâ€, they sing. “For you I am a child, believingâ€.

Instinctively, everyone realises they have to capture this moment. Evian manages to connect a four-track tape recorder to the battery of his old Ford F-150 truck via the cigarette lighter. Drummer James Krivchenia sets up a minimal kit in front of the dishwasher while Oleartchik plays bass through a battery-powered speaker perched on the hob. Lenker and Meek come inside and lean against the fridge. Evian plays tambourine and his partner Hannah Cohen adds another layer of harmony as their puppy Jan barks his encouragement. They manage three takes before the fuse to the cigarette lighter blows. The song is called “Certaintyâ€, and it’s so simple and perfect that you can’t believe anyone hasn’t written it before.

“When the power goes out, the inspiration goes up,†laughs Oleartchik. “We’re a group that loves curveballs. It’s not like anyone’s going, ‘Ah, are you sure that’s quality enough?’ It was a very memorable moment.†Lenker talks about it with the wonder of a rookie superhero still coming to terms with their special powers. “It’s like being able to drink water right out of the stream,†she says. “Just this feeling of, ‘Wow, we’re here right now – we’re alive’.â€

David Byrne’s American Utopia resumes with modified show amid Omicron surge in New York

Rhian Daly
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David Byrne’s American Utopia resumes with modified show amid Omicron surge in New York
David Byrne’s American Utopia is returning to Broadway in modified form due to the surge in Omicron COVID-19 cases in New York. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: David Byrne’s American Utopia review The show started its second run in Manhat...

David Byrne’s American Utopia is returning to Broadway in modified form due to the surge in Omicron COVID-19 cases in New York.

The show started its second run in Manhattan earlier this year but was forced to cancel dates after a rise in cases and company members testing positive for the virus.

Byrne has announced that American Utopia has resumed on December 28, albeit not in its usual form. “Most nights I’m on this stage performing American Utopia On Broadway,†he said in a Facebook video. “However, several members of our company, band and crew – who are fully vaccinated – have tested positive for COVID.

“Fortunately, these band members and crew don’t have severe symptoms and are following the CDC guidelines. We hope that they’ll be back with us in a few weeks. Unfortunately, though, they can’t come to the theatre and they can’t help us make this show. So rather than us cancelling our shows, we’re looking at this as a kind of opportunity to, well, honour our commitment to the audiences who are coming in the coming weeks and creating something special.â€

LIFE DURING CHRISTMASTIME: David Byrne offers American Utopia fans a surprise with all-new set list including some beloved old favorites.THIS WEEK ONLY. DAVID BYRNE'S AMERICAN UTOPIA: UNCHAINED. TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/David-Byrne-and-the-AMERICAN-UTOPIA-Band-Will-Return-With-Unchained-Performances-20211227

Posted by David Byrne's American Utopia on Broadway on Monday, December 27, 2021

Byrne spun a positive light on the show being short-staffed, calling it “our opportunity to make lemonade from COVID lemonsâ€. “You could call this ‘unplugged’, you could call this ‘unchained’ if you like,†he said. “It will be something unlike anything we’ve done before. It’s not quite the show but it’s gonna be something special.â€

He continued to say that he didn’t think the adapted production would happen again beyond this next few weeks. The new, temporary version of the show will feature Talking Heads songs, Byrne’s solo material and tracks from American Utopia.

“We’re having a great time learning this stuff and a lot of fun doing it,†he added. “It’s gonna be amazing. I’m excited about it. I think it shows that we can adapt and persevere.â€

American Utopia is held at Broadway’s St. James Theatre. Tickets are on sale now for shows until the end of April 2022.

Sea Power head for the trees in “Lakeland Echo” video

Rhian Daly
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Sea Power head for the trees in “Lakeland Echo” video
Sea Power have shared "Lakeland Echo", another new track from their upcoming album – scroll down the page to watch the video for it now. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut The band, formerly known as British Sea Power, shared the new song and visuals on Dec...

Sea Power have shared “Lakeland Echo”, another new track from their upcoming album – scroll down the page to watch the video for it now.

The band, formerly known as British Sea Power, shared the new song and visuals on December 27.

The clip features footage of nature, including hills, snow-topped mountains, dense patches of forest and clouds rolling across the sky, as well as grainy footage of an elderly man interspersed between the scenery.

The six-minute song is made up of minimal instrumentation, layers of brass, piano and more building and falling at different points. “We went to the river / Down by the old canal,†the band sing. “We went to deliver / The Lakeland Echo / Ce n’est pas la musique.†Watch the video below now.

It follows “Folly”, the previous preview of the band’s forthcoming album Everything Was Forever. That track was released in October and was “the tradition of singalong Sea Power apocalyptic anthemsâ€, according to the band.

Everything Was Forever will be released on February 11 and will be the band’s first album since dropping the word “British†from their name. Announcing the change in August, they described it as a “modest gesture of separation from the wave of crass nationalism that has traversed our world recentlyâ€.

Meanwhile, Sea Power will hit the road in April 2022 in support of the new album. The dates will kick off in Southampton on April 12 before visiting Birmingham, London, Bristol, Sheffield, Glasgow and Manchester. You can find more information and buy tickets here.

Patti Smith has been honoured with the key to New York City

Matt Doria
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Patti Smith has been honoured with the key to New York City
Ahead of her 75th birthday on Thursday (December 30), Patti Smith was bestowed with the key to her adopted home of New York City. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: Patti Smith: “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done†She received the h...

Ahead of her 75th birthday on Thursday (December 30), Patti Smith was bestowed with the key to her adopted home of New York City.

She received the honour yesterday (December 27) at a press conference held by outgoing mayor Bill De Blasio, who, in the last week of his tenure, also gave keys to filmmaker Spike Lee and senator Chuck Schumer. Noting his personal affinity for the 1970s’ punk movement, De Blasio praised Smith for having “an authenticity that you just don’t find [in] that many other places†and an “ability to cut through all the swirl around us and speak some more profound truthsâ€.

“Some have called Patti Smith the godmother of punk,†De Blasio continued in his speech, “[and] I think it’s a fair phrase because she inspired so many people, helped shape a whole artistic movement, and in many ways a political movement as well.

“Her work as a musician, as a singer, as a lyricist, as an activist – so many elements influenced so many people and showed people a way. And when we honor people, I particularly think about the pathfinders – the people who show the way to so many others. There’s a lot of artists out there who realise what they could do and what they could say because they heard the works of Patti Smith.â€

In her own speech, Smith touched on her origins in New York, having moved from “a rural, rural area of South Jersey†in 1967 with “just a few dollars in my pocket, nowhere to stay [and] no real prospectsâ€. She explained that  when she moved back to New York in 1994, 15 years after she’d moved to Detroit with her late husband, the city “embraced me again [and] gave me another chance to rebuild my life and continue to evolve as an artistâ€.

“I wish I could give New York City the key to me,†she joked, “because that’s how I feel about our city. With all its challenges and difficulties, it remains – and I’m quite a traveler – the most diverse city, to me, in the world.â€

Also present at the conference was the longstanding Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, with whom Smith has played since her band’s inception in 1974. Together they performed an acoustic rendition of “Ghost Dance” (a deep cut from Smith’s 1978 Easter record), which De Blasio noted was “unbelievably powerful to me and among so many othersâ€, and “one that I am, to this hour, moved byâ€.

Take a look at the press conference – with Smith receiving the key at 26:20, and her performance of “Ghost Dance” at 40:15 – below:

Back in August, Smith released an EP of live recordings minted at New York’s iconic Electric Lady studio. It marked her first release since 2012, when the multi-hyphenate dropped her most recent full-length effort, Banga. In addition to five of her own tracks, the Live At Electric Lady record features covers of tracks by Bob Dylan (“One Too Many Mornings”) and Stevie Wonder (“Blame It On The Sun”).

Ahead of her headlining performance at this year’s Cop26 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference) in Glasgow, Smith opened up about her continuing fears for the environment. Smith recalled meeting the Dalai Lama with Adam Yauch, when the late Beastie Boys member asked the spiritual leader: “What’s the number-one thing that young people can do to make a better world?â€

According to Smith, the Dalai Lama replied: “Look after the environment.†She continued: “I thought it was so beautiful. That was his number-one preoccupation. Not to free Tibet, but to take in hand a global concern that was going to affect us all, on a scale we haven’t seen before.â€

Henry Rollins tells Rick Rubin why he stopped making music: “There’s no more toothpaste in the tubeâ€

Rhian Daly
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Henry Rollins tells Rick Rubin why he stopped making music: “There’s no more toothpaste in the tubeâ€
Henry Rollins has told Rick Rubin why he stopped making music in a recent episode of the producer’s podcast, Broken Record. Rollins quit making new music over a decade ago, turning to podcasting, writing, acting, comedy and more instead. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest...

Henry Rollins has told Rick Rubin why he stopped making music in a recent episode of the producer’s podcast, Broken Record.

Rollins quit making new music over a decade ago, turning to podcasting, writing, acting, comedy and more instead.

In a September episode of Broken Record, which has recently gained attention online, Rollins discussed his decision to step away from music. “The smart thing I did as a younger man was one day I woke up in my bed and I went, ‘I’m done with music. I don’t hate it. I just have no more lyrics. There’s no more toothpaste in the tube’,†he told Rubin.

“Luckily, I had enough movies, voiceover, documentary work, writing, talking, where that just filled in, and now I’m busier than ever. But I walked away before I had to start saying, ‘Hey, kids, remember this one?’ So I didn’t have to put it on and go up there and put on the dog and yelp for my dinner.â€

He continued to say that he had spoken with other “major rock stars†who have chosen to continue in music about why they carry on playing “those same songs every night†decades later. When one such musician told Rollins it was “what people want†and they wanted to make people happy, he responded: “You do? Huh. I never thought of that. That never once occurred to me.â€

Instead, Rollins said: “If [fans] happen to like what I’m doing, cool. If they don’t, they can bite me.†Listen to the podcast in full above.

Meanwhile, the musician will bring his Good To See You tour to the UK next year. The dates will take the form of a “talking show†in which Rollins will “faithfully recount the events of his life in the brief pre-COVID period since the last tour and when things got even stranger over the last several monthsâ€.

The shows are currently scheduled to begin in Bexhill-on-Sea on February 18 and conclude at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall on February 28. You can find more information and buy tickets here.

Elvis Costello: “My conscience is clear!”

Michael Bonner
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Elvis Costello: “My conscience is clear!”
It is mid-afternoon and Elvis Costello is in full cry. A fast talker – and a fast thinker – he is currently winding up a typically digressive anecdote about his performance, the previous night, at the Royal Variety Show. “You know I was born in the same fucking hospital as the Royal Family?â€...

It is mid-afternoon and Elvis Costello is in full cry. A fast talker – and a fast thinker – he is currently winding up a typically digressive anecdote about his performance, the previous night, at the Royal Variety Show. “You know I was born in the same fucking hospital as the Royal Family?†He says. “Yeah, St Mary’s. But I was baptised in Birkenhead and our family’s from Liverpool, so I belong to both places. I don’t really belong to London. I left a long time ago. I never felt at home here. I lived out in the suburbs. I relate to Hounslow and Richmond and Twickenham and Liverpool and Birkenhead. You find places that you fall in love with when you travel. Nowadays, we all travel virtually. But I’ve been travelling for 40 years, making friends and having adventures.â€

We’re in Costello’s hotel room in West London. Today he is dressed in a dark suit and tie which, combined with his glasses and greying beard, gives him a distinguished if slightly bohemian appearance – more affable Humanities professor than rock’n’roll veteran. His voice still carries a soft, Liverpool brogue, with a slight mid-Atlantic lilt occasionally making its presence felt. Costello’s latest adventure is The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories) – a characteristically diverse album anchored by the kind of pell-mell rock’n’roll songs Costello has long specialised in. Made in cahoots with trusted lieutenants Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve and producer Sebastian Krys, its release marks an intriguing congruence in Costello’s career.

During the pandemic he oversaw four releases: a new studio album, Hey Clockface, an EP of French adaptations and remixes from Hey Clockface called La Face De Pendule A Coucou and two archive projects – a deluxe boxset of 1979’s Armed Forces and Spanish Model, a reimagining of This Year’s Model, using the Attractions’ original 1978 backing tracks with current Latin American and Spanish artists adapting the lyrics into Spanish. Conspicuously, Armed Forces and Spanish Model brought into focus Thomas and Nieve’s ongoing roles in animating Costello’s expansive songbook, as either Attractions or Imposters, along with bassist Davey Farragher. Costello speaks highly of the three musicians, particularly how they rose to the challenges presented by the last few years. “I’m proud of the way we went about doing this record,†he confirms. “You have a choice between hunkering down and doing mopey, whey-faced ballads about isolation or you can kick a hole in the box you’re in.â€

Restless, passionate, involved – these appear to be Costello’s preferred working methods. You can hear the excitement in his voice as he talks about the band’s most recent American tour, during October and November, accompanied by Dylan’s long-serving guitarist Charlie Sexton. But these recent positive experiences have come with their share of upheavals. Costello lost his mother in January – “the last time I saw her was on FaceTime, 90 minutes before she passed; when it came it came quickly, and for that I’m grateful†– while over the summer Costello, his wife Diana Krall and their twin boys relocated from Vancouver Island to New York. “We moved from Vancouver the week that the wind direction changed,†he says. “The interior of Vancouver was on fire for like, four weeks, right? It was 47 centigrade in Kamloops. That’s how hot is in the Mojave fucking desert. I was in New York four days, then there was a hurricane. Two weeks later, there was another one. Three days after that, as COP26 write some mealy-mouthed words about coal emissions, the whole of British Columbia nearly gets washed away. Don’t fucking come round here telling me your problems. We better get it together otherwise we’re all gonna fucking die.â€

Neil Young releases ‘lost’ album Summer Songs

Matt Doria
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Neil Young releases ‘lost’ album Summer Songs
Neil Young gave fans of his Archives project an extra-special Christmas gift this year, dropping the eight-track Summer Songs record that he first teased last month. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: Neil Young & The Crazy Horse – Barn revi...

Neil Young gave fans of his Archives project an extra-special Christmas gift this year, dropping the eight-track Summer Songs record that he first teased last month.

The archival album was initially recorded in 1987, tracked at the Broken Arrow Ranch in Redwood City, California. It’s unclear who Young made the album with – if anyone – but every instrument played on it was played by Young himself. The version released on Saturday (December 25) was produced by the Volume Dealers and mastered by Tim Mulligan.

Take a listen to Summer Songs in its entirety below:

As seasoned fans will note, most of the tracks on Summer Songs would eventually pop up elsewhere in Young’s discography. “American Dream”, for example, made it to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s titular ’88 record (as did “Name Of Love”).

“Someday”, “Wrecking Ball” and “Hangin’ On A Limb” all appear on 1989’s Freedom, while “One Of These Days” went to Harvest Moon in ’92, and “For The Love Of Man” appeared on Young’s 2012 album with Crazy Horse, Psychedelic Pill.

As Young noted with the record’s announcement, however, many of the lyrics featured on these demos “are significantly different from their subsequent master album releasesâ€, with tracks sporting “several completely new and unheard versesâ€.

Summer Songs comes as the first chapter of Neil Young Archives Volume III. The second volume of the project was issued last year, covering unreleased music recorded between 1972 and ’76. Among the records shared was Homegrown, which – made up of recordings from ’74 and ’75 – languished as an unheard album for decades before its release in June 2020.

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time

Stephen Deusner
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Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
It’s a small miracle this film exists. In October 2018, a fire destroyed the Woodstock home of folk guitarist Peter Walker and with it the entire archive of his old friend Karen Dalton – her journals, handwritten lyrics, poetry and artwork. The loss is incalculable, but fortunately, just months ...

It’s a small miracle this film exists. In October 2018, a fire destroyed the Woodstock home of folk guitarist Peter Walker and with it the entire archive of his old friend Karen Dalton – her journals, handwritten lyrics, poetry and artwork. The loss is incalculable, but fortunately, just months before, he’d had everything digitised, allowing directors Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz to draw from these artifacts and paint the clearest picture yet of this mysterious and troubled – yet oddly influential – artist.

A free spirit from Oklahoma who had two kids and two ex-husbands by the time she turned 20, Dalton left the Midwest and arrived in New York City at the start of the folk revival. She stood out thanks to her fluid picking style and especially her stunning voice: in timbre it recalls Billie Holiday, but in phrasing and cadence it suggests no-one other than Dalton. The black-and-white footage of her early Greenwich Village performances is a highlight in the film, showing how she rearranged old, familar songs to sound fresh. Eschewing the populism associated with folk music at the time, Dalton sang everything as though it held some personal confession unique to her life. Her peers were awed, especially Bob Dylan (who thought she was the female Woody Guthrie).

Dalton was ambivalent about a career in music. On one hand, she wanted the attention and affirmation, not to mention the financial security, and she envied the success of her Village peers. On the other hand, she was unwilling to pursue an audience or make any kind of concession to the industry. She didn’t release her debut, It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You Best, until 1969, long after folk had been thoroughly revived and mutated into folk-rock. Her follow-up, 1971’s In My Own Time, updated her sound with a small country band, but she felt it was impersonal and unrepresentative. (It’s not!) A thankless gig opening for Santana effectively ended her career. “The joy of it escaped her,†recalls Hunt Middleton, her boyfriend during that time.

Dalton had always been a casual drug user, but she quickly graduated to harder drugs in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving her homeless and forgotten. She died of Aids in 1993, with Walker caring for her in her final days. To its credit, the documentary offers no personal redemption, no deathbed revelation, nothing to suggest her story is anything but a tragedy. In fact, it might undersell the magnitude of her critical reassessment in the 2000s, when a series of reissues introduced her to a new generation of artists (including Angel Olsen, who reads from her journals). She emerges with all of her contradictions intact: confident in herself as an artist, relatably conflicted as a human being.

Bola Sete – Samba in Seattle : Live at the Penthouse

Nigel Williamson
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Bola Sete – Samba in Seattle : Live at the Penthouse
In the pantheon of guitar gods, from Delta blues sliders and ferocious rock gunslingers to fingerpicking folk stylists and bold American primitives, the gentle maestros of the Brazilian nylon-stringed acoustic (violão in Portuguese) too often get forgotten. The likes of Joao Gilberto, Luiz Bonfa an...

In the pantheon of guitar gods, from Delta blues sliders and ferocious rock gunslingers to fingerpicking folk stylists and bold American primitives, the gentle maestros of the Brazilian nylon-stringed acoustic (violão in Portuguese) too often get forgotten. The likes of Joao Gilberto, Luiz Bonfa and Heitor Villa-Lobos all deserve recognition, but perhaps the finest of them all was Bola Sete. John Fahey called him his “favourite guitar player†and signed him to his Takoma label, while Carlos Santana likened him to a nylon-stringed Hendrix and said to hear him play was to be in the presence of “something multi-dimensionally divineâ€.

You can hear what both of them meant on these three generous discs of previously unreleased live recordings, made between 1966–68 during his annual visits to Seattle’s Penthouse club.

Bola Sete was born Djama De Andrade in Rio in 1923 and took his stage name from the black seven ball in when he became the only non-white musician in his first professional jazz ensemble. Classically trained, his early guitar heroes were , and , whose influence he combined with the traditional samba and bossa rhythms of Brazil. He made his first recordings for EMI’s Brazilian imprint Odeon in the mid-1950s before he left the country of his birth in 1959. He never returned before his death from lung cancer in California in 1987. Settling in the US, he played in hotels in New York and San Francisco, where he was discovered by Dizzy Gillespie, who took him on tour and got him a showcase at the Monterey Jazz Festival.

These trio recordings with Sebastião Neto on double bass and Paulinho Magalhães on drums capture him at a crossroads. His next studio album, 1970’s Working On A Groovy Thing, boasted a more expansive production and instrumentation with pop and rock covers and has since provided much sample fodder for hip-hop. Here, however, he’s still in classic 1960s acoustic instrumental bossa/samba/jazz mode, mixing his own compositions with Brazilian standards by Jobim, Bonfa, Villa Lobos and Marcus Valle plus weightless covers of Johnny Mandel’s “The Shadow Of Your Smile†and Duke Ellington’s “Satin Dollâ€. The virtuosic precision is self-evident in his mix of rhythmic chording and breath-taking soloing. Yet it’s the mood he creates which is every bit as striking as his technical skill, as he takes an over-familiar tune such as “Garota de Ipanema†(The Girl From Ipanema) and, with his imaginative improvisations, makes you feel you’re hearing it with new ears.

Fahey once said that Bola Sete’s music came from a time “when people were closer to themselves, God and each otherâ€. It oozes forth on these recordings from every scintillating note.

Bush Tetras – Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best Of the Bush Tetras

Lisa-Marie Ferla
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Bush Tetras – Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best Of the Bush Tetras
When Bush Tetras drummer Dee Pop died unexpectedly in October, plans were already well underway for this career-spanning retrospective. Confirming they would press ahead, bandmates Pat Place and Cynthia Sley noted that much of what went into Rhythm And Paranoia came from Pop’s own collection: the ...

When Bush Tetras drummer Dee Pop died unexpectedly in October, plans were already well underway for this career-spanning retrospective. Confirming they would press ahead, bandmates Pat Place and Cynthia Sley noted that much of what went into Rhythm And Paranoia came from Pop’s own collection: the band’s most passionate historian, he kept an archive of their recordings and supplied many of the flyers and photos reproduced in an accompanying book.

Formed in 1979, Bush Tetras emerged from the no-wave scene in New York: they were contemporaries of Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth, and Place had played guitar in The Contortions. They split up a few years later with three 7†singles and an EP, produced by Topper Headon of The Clash, to their name. Reforming temporarily in the late 1990s, they released Beauty Lies, their debut album, and recorded another which, as a casualty of the sale of PolyGram, was put on ice until 2012. They have reconvened sporadically ever since, first raising money when ill health forced original bassist Laura Kennedy to quit the band and then later, after her death, recording a brace of new EPs.

Rhythm And Paranoia tracks each incarnation of the band, from debut single “Too Many Creeps†to 2019’s “There Is A Humâ€. The former, perhaps their best-known track, could have been written last week, Sley’s opening chant of “I just don’t wanna go out in the streets no more†a dispiriting precursor to the latest wave of weaponised misogyny and debates over women’s safety. The song is lauded by a new generation of punks in a series of ‘micro-essays’ that accompany the boxset: Victoria Ruiz, of Sub Pop’s Downtown Boys, describes its repetitive “it’s the worst†refrain as “both a sword and a shield†in the way it both rages and affirms – the same could be said of Place’s jagged riff and Pop’s propulsive drumming.

Presented chronologically, the collection shows a band always evolving, but never unrecognisably so. Early B-sides “Snakes Crawl†and “Punch Drunk†eschew melody yet remain irresistible ear-worms thanks to Pop’s infectious grooves, a focus on rhythm which, by 1981’s Rituals EP, channels Talking Heads and The B-52s (sneers Sley, “you can’t be funky if you haven’t got a soulâ€). Though a muddy live cover of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkeyâ€, culled from a Stiff Records compilation, is probably one for completists only.

But elsewhere among the rarities are some real treats, including an alternative version of Beauty Lies track “Mr Lovesongâ€, from Pop’s own archives. The drummer’s preferred take, it’s as raw and brutal as their best, but with soulful backing vocals by Darlene Love and Nona Hendryx of Labelle, the album’s producer. It’s just one example
of Bush Tetras’ determination to do things their own way.

Uncut’s Best Music Books Of 2021

Uncut
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Uncut’s Best Music Books Of 2021
10 Chaise Longue Baxter Dury (Corsair, £17) Not unlike Ian Dury’s nuanced musical portrait of his own father, “My Old Manâ€, Chaise Longue fathoms Baxter Dury’s complicated upbringing in the company of his dad and minder Pete Rush, a “six-foot-seven malodorous giant†better known a...

10 Chaise Longue Baxter Dury
(Corsair, £17)

Not unlike Ian Dury’s nuanced musical portrait of his own father, “My Old Manâ€, Chaise Longue fathoms Baxter Dury’s complicated upbringing in the company of his dad and minder Pete Rush, a “six-foot-seven malodorous giant†better known as the Sulphate Strangler. “There was no school, there were no rules about drinking, there was no dinner,†Baxter writes. No boots, no clean panties.

9 Beeswing Richard Thompson
(Faber, £20)

Not a soul-barer by nature, Richard Thompson inches a tiny way out of his shell to give his account of his years with Fairport Convention and working as a duo with his first wife Linda. The narrative is familiar, but his accounts of the car crash that killed his girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn and Fairport drummer Martin Lamble, as well as his relationship with Nick Drake, offer brief glimpses into Thompson’s inner world.

8 Bunnyman Will Sergeant
(Constable, £20)

Julian Cope’s breathless Head On remains the most exciting pre-history of the second Mersey boom, but Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Sergeant’s more autumn-toned take on his formative years offers a fine counterpoint, as he and Bowie nut Ian “The Duke†McCulloch reinvent themselves as psychedelic troubadours. It ends just before the Bunnymen sign their first recording contract; roll on volume two.

7 Nina Simone’s Gum Warren Ellis
(Faber, £20)

A glorious piece of object fetishism, this joyful volume documents how the Nick Cave sideman and Dirty Three maestro elevated a piece of chewing gum stuck to a piano in the course of Nina Simone’s triumphant 1999 gig at the Meltdown festival into a near-sacred artefact. Marvel as Ellis’ collection of eccentric personal mementos morphs into a celebration of the intangible wonder of music.

6 A Furious Devotion: The Authorised Story of Shane MacGowan Richard Balls
(Omnibus, £20)

Informed by a series of conversations the author had with the head Pogue, A Furious Devotion presents a profoundly sobering portrait of the boy genius turned raggle-taggle punk tearaway. Friends, family members and his first English teacher bear witness to his brilliance and uncontrollable self-destructive urges.

5 You Are Beautiful And You Are Alone: The Biography Of Nico Jennifer Otter Bickerdike (Faber, £20)

Nettled that Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico was continually written off as a heroin-addicted hanger-on, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike responded with this superbly researched biography. Nico’s solo work remains unfathomable – John Cale said 1968’s The Marble Index was not “a record you listen to; it’s a hole you fall into†– but here at least is a solid sense of a person behind the icon.

4 Last Chance Texaco Rickie Lee Jones
(Grove, £20)

“I was living a life enchanted by impossible connections, narrow escapes, and the perfect timing of curiously strong coincidence,†writes RLJ of her sudden ascent from Tom Waits hanger-on to global sensation with 1979 radio staple “Chuck E’s In Loveâ€. Her drive-it-like-you-stole-it memoir eases around the jagged curves of her life with a pleasing bemusement and a stylish tilt of the beret.

3 Rememberings Sinéad O’Connor
(Sandycove, £20)

Simultaneously tough and horribly vulnerable, O’Connor’s scattershot version of her life story explains with disarming good humour some of the contrary drives that led her to shave her head, tear up a picture of the Pope on live TV and – more recently – retrain as
an end-of-life health assistant. Ridiculed and mistreated in her prime, she says her piece with admirable eloquence.

2 Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall Edited by Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton
(Faber, £25)

A collection of ephemera and essays, this book strives to pin down the mightiest post-punk phenomenon. There’s plenty of egghead insight, but nothing more uncanny than when Mark E Smith appears undiluted. In one of the must-see homemade press releases for his earliest records, he sums up his art perfectly: “Maybe Johnny Cash’d sound like this if they’d kept him in San Quentin.â€

1 From Manchester With Love: The Life And Opinions of Tony Wilson Paul Morley
(Faber, £20)

“Oh, that was amazing,†Anthony Wilson told his first wife Lindsay Reade after being hailed with phlegm, abuse and beer as he introduced bands at Manchester punk venue Electric Circus in 1977, a true-to-form response from a man his protégé-turned-biographer Paul Morley describes as “a genius†who would also “do anything to get attentionâ€. A dizzying, digressive tour de force, From Manchester With Love mapped Wilson’s stoned adventures in TV, music and city planning against a backdrop of feuds and broken marriages. It also showed how his idealistic ventures and ego trips led to the success of Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, the founding of the pivotal Haçienda nightclub and – ultimately – the reinvention of a whole city.

Uncut’s Best Films Of 2021

Uncut
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Uncut’s Best Films Of 2021
20 Dune Director: Denis Villeneuve Frank Herbert’s space epic returned to cinema, sleeker and saner than David Lynch’s version, although you still wonder what lurid extravaganza Alejandro Jodorowsky would have made of it. By contrast, Denis Villeneuve treated the material with stately, hyp...

20 Dune
Director: Denis Villeneuve

Frank Herbert’s space epic returned to cinema, sleeker and saner than David Lynch’s version, although you still wonder what lurid extravaganza Alejandro Jodorowsky would have made of it. By contrast, Denis Villeneuve treated the material with stately, hyper-grandiose sobriety. It still felt like the intro to a bigger film, but Charlotte Rampling, Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet contributed gravitas to sway your scepticism, while Patrice Vermette’s designs were dazzling.

19 The Power Of The Dog
Director: Jane Campion

Campion returned with a modern western that unpicks the male codes of a genre. Based on Thomas Savage’s superb, long-overlooked novel, it starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons as rancher brothers, whose lifestyle changes when one brother’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) moves in with her decidedly unmacho son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Shot in New Zealand, this was a magnificent landscape film that also mapped dark inner territory.

18 Quo Vadis, Aida?
Director: Jasmila Žbanić

Set in 1995, this Oscar-nominated war drama from Bosnian writer-director Žbanić was about a schoolteacher working as a translator for the United Nations in Srebrenica and trying to save her family when her city was taken over by the Serbian army. Jasna Djuricić gave an animated performance as a heroine of action and conscience and compassion, counterpointing what Žbanić showed as the shocking ineffectualness of the United Nations command.

17 Promising Young Woman
Director: Emerald Fennell

This black comedy deserved attention for its ruthless gender polemic. Carey Mulligan plays a woman on a mission, testing men’s propensity to abuse and confronting enablers in positions of power. Writer-director Fennell scored this reputation-making hit between gigs as showrunner on Killing Eve and writer on Lloyd-Webber’s Cinderella.

16 No Time To Die
Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Daniel Craig’s Bond finally returned, but not for long – taking his leave of the role in a movie that worked some radical twists on the legend. This was the most earnest 007 outing in a while – a Bond in search of closure! – but it had intelligence, energy and daring and was worth it just for Ana de Armas stealing the show in a Cuban fight number.

15 The Many Saints Of Newark
Director: Alan Taylor

Many were divided on this belated prequel to TV’s The Sopranos, but it had all the ingredients to signify authenticity – including direction by series regular Alan Taylor, a script co-written by originator David Chase and a winning lead by Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James, playing a young, up-and-coming Tony Soprano. Ray Liotta made up for his recent rarity by playing twin Moltisanti brothers.

14 Last Night in Soho
Director: Edgar Wright

The best film ever to be named after a number by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. Detective mystery, ghost story and retro pop musical, this dazzlingly executed paean to the glitzy, murky past of London’s once-bohemian hotspot pitched Anya Taylor-Joy
and Thomasin McKenzie as alter egos in different eras, in a film that felt like Absolute Beginners and Polanski’s Repulsion colliding in a glare of neon.

13 Censor
Director: Prano Bailey-Bond

A British meta-chiller that looked back to the Video Nasty moral panic. Enid worked as a censor at a thinly veiled BBFC, trimming horror films’ grislier moments but fascinated by their extremes – and haunted by the disappearance of her sister. Fully paid-up genre buff Prano Bailey-Bond makes an inventive debut, with Niahm Algar hitting an unsettling note as Enid, while – as a cut-price schlock merchant – Michael Smiley was sublimely slimy.

12 Judas And The Black Messiah
Director: Shaka King

This depiction of a notorious episode in modern American history starred Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther militant Fred Hampton and Lakeith Stanfield as William O’Neal, recruited by the FBI to infiltrate Hampton’s circle. Recounting a story that has renewed urgency in the Black Lives Matter era, this compellingly evoked its era, while the two leads were terrific, playing men who are both opponents and brothers in arms.

11 Annette
Director: Leos Carax

French cinema’s most elusive auteur returned with a sumptuous fantasy, co-written and scored by Sparks’ Ron and Russell Mael. It elicited every reaction from ecstasy to infuriation, via pure bewilderment. The story of a doomed showbiz couple and their very strange daughter, it may not have been the finest hour of either Carax, Sparks, Marion Cotillard or Adam Driver, but taken all together, it was undeniably, extravagantly one of a kind.

10 The French Dispatch
Director: Wes Anderson

Some feel that a little Wes goes a long way, and this one went a very long way indeed – from Liberty, Kansas, to Paris, or rather the imaginary town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Anderson celebrated all things Gallic and the vintage years of the New Yorker in an all-star fantasy that took his OCD sensibility into the realms of wild overload. No-one else could conceivably have attempted it, though.

9 New Order
Director: Michel Franco

Previously downbeat Mexican director Franco upped his game with this intense, confrontational drama that imagined a popular uprising in Mexico and its ruthless quashing by the establishment. Executed with an icy rigour worthy of Michael Haneke, New Order was widely attacked in its native country and elsewhere, but offered a chilly vision of precarious privilege and social collapse that was just crying out to be remade in Beverly Hills.

8 Gunda
Director: Viktor Kossakovsky

The year’s best pig film, not to be confused with Nicolas Cage vehicle Pig. This was a depiction of life through porcine eyes, a portrait of a sow and her litter (plus the odd cow and some intrepid chickens). Russian documentarist Kossakovsky placed a roaming camera at ground level to offer a view of four-legged life that was poetic but totally unsentimental – and quietly revealing about the drama of animal emotions.

7 A Cop Movie
Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios

A documentary that was not what it seemed, this introduced us to Mexico City police officers Teresa and Montoya – professional and romantic partners – and recreated the ins and outs of their daily beat. Then the fourth wall is whisked away as we met the actors who play them. Slippery but revealing and dazzling in its stylistic pastiche, with echoes of Scorsese, Serpico – even the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage†video.

6 The Sparks Brothers
Director: Edgar Wright

The Mael brothers returned with their second entry in our poll, here whipping off their masks to explore one of the longest, strangest adventures in pop history – mapping their progress from late-’60s art experiment, through ’70s stardom, to their current rebirth as revered doyens of hyper-literate wit. Whether discussing their transatlantic glory or the years of outsiderdom, the Maels mixed dry humour with candour in one of pop’s smartest, most celebratory documentaries.

5 Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Director: Robert Yapkowitz, Richard Peete

A few years ago, the world at last began to catch up with the extraordinary voice and career of a neglected folk original and a central figure in the early-’60s New York music scene. This documentary portrait puts the seal on Dalton’s rediscovery, with Nick Cave among those paying tribute to a voice like no other and Angel Olsen reading from Dalton’s diaries.

4 Nomadland
Director: Chloé Zhao

After her superb The Rider – and before pumping up on Marvel steroids to direct Eternals – Chloé Zhao offered a poetic vision of American crisis, with Frances McDormand as a woman leaving her hometown to join the armies of mobile-home nomads searching for work. A contemporary Grapes Of Wrath, it was as close as screen drama gets to documentary, with McDormand joined by a host of real-life American travellers memorably playing themselves.

3 First Cow
Director: Kelly Reichardt

The poet of low-key US realism (Certain Women, Old Joy), Reichardt delved into the past to offer a melancholic-comic vignette of early American capitalism, as two drifters in 19th-century Oregon teamed up to make a living selling hot cakes – using stolen milk from the first cow in the territory. Starring Orion Lee and John Magaro – plus a magisterially pompous Toby Jones – it was 2021’s most tender male love story.

2 The Velvet Underground
Director: Todd Haynes

After Velvet Goldmine and Dylan fantasy I’m Not There, Haynes offered a documentary that places New York’s greatest in the context of a tempestuous ’60s art scene – the world of Warhol and musical experimenters like La Monte Young. We learned a lot about Lou Reed’s painful, prickly youth, but it’s also very much John Cale’s film – plus you got the legendary “The Ostrich†in its full deranged glory.

1 Summer Of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Director: QuestLove

Many suspected that in 2021 cinema would limp back ruefully, energies depleted, from lockdown. It couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Damage was done, yes, and it still remains to be seen whether theatrical releasing can rally after a year in which we all got morbidly locked in our streaming habits. After all, Tenet didn’t – despite hopeful predictions – save the box office in 2020. But it looks as if No Time To Die, Dune, even the critically unloved Venom: Let There Be Carnage might now be doing just that.

Then there was the cornucopia of films premiered at festivals: Berlin, Cannes and Venice offered their best editions in years, and that was just the European events. A-list auteurs like Jane Campion (The Power Of The Dog), Paolo Sorrentino (The Hand Of God), Paul Verhoeven (Benedetta) and Leos Carax (Annette) were all on aggressive form, although no-one was quite as aggressive as French breakthrough star Julia Ducournau, whose surprise Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane proved that midnight-movie outrage could conquer the respectable red carpet. It was also a vintage year for music documentary, with titles on Karen Dalton, Sparks, The Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin – and the fact that four music titles have made this Top 20 perhaps signals how much we’ve missed live music.

Nothing captured the live experience like Summer Of Soul, in which Amir “Questlove†Thompson of The Roots revives the magic of a long-overlooked event once famed as the “Black Woodstockâ€. Archive footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival features electrifying performances by, among others, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly & The Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson and The Chambers Brothers. The film was a vital celebration of music and of political consciousness, but it was also an all-out sartorial fiesta, epitomised by the Afro-psychedelic threads of The Fifth Dimension. It’s been acclaimed as one of the best concert movies ever and watching it – especially with a live audience – felt as close as you could get to being there. In 2021, little could have felt more welcome, or necessary.

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck recalls his stolen favourite guitar being retrieved by a Finnish biker gang

Will Richards
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R.E.M.’s Peter Buck recalls his stolen favourite guitar being retrieved by a Finnish biker gang
R.E.M.'s Peter Buck has recalled how his favourite guitar was stolen by an associate of the band, only to be returned by a Finnish biker gang. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: Michael Stipe and Mike Mills reveal the secrets of R.E.M.’s “El...

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck has recalled how his favourite guitar was stolen by an associate of the band, only to be returned by a Finnish biker gang.

Buck has been synonymous with Rickenbacker guitars across his career with R.E.M. and beyond, and speaks in the December 22 edition of the Daily Express about the iconic guitar brand, sharing a story about his favourite guitar.

In the new interview, conducted ahead of the release of new book Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo by Martin and Paul Kelly, Buck revealed that his beloved Rickenbacker Jetglo 360, which he played on every single R.E.M. album, was kidnapped by an associate of the band’s during a 2008 gig in Finland.

“It was an inside job and I was furious,” Buck said, revealing that the associate had held the guitar for $1million ransom.

Going on to explain how the guitar found its way back to his possession, with help from a local biker gang, the guitarist said: “While our legal team were working it out, some fearsome fellows were riding around on motorbikes, explaining to people we thought connected to the theft, ‘Somebody knows something and we’re going to find out.'”

R.E.M.
R.E.M. in 1996. Image: Christopher Bilheimer

Buck’s story continued: “We explained to the idiot who stole the guitar, ‘If you “find” this guitar, you get to be the good guy and you can have €10,000. But if you press on, that’s extortion and you’ll get up to 30 years in prison.’

“He took the €10,000,” Buck remembered. “When I got [the guitar] back, I felt bad about that black Ricky for a few days. I had to play it and sweat on it again, as I’d been thinking, ‘Some real scumbag has held this for a week.'”

When reunited with his guitar in 2008, Buck didn’t reveal the true reason behind the kidnapping and subsequent return, but said it was returned by an “anonymous source,” adding: “It’s great to have it back in my hands.”

R.E.M.’s manager Bertis Downs added: “We were always hopeful it would turn up, and thanks to the efforts of a lot of people, we are thrilled to have it back in Peter’s possession. We are grateful and very happy that it worked out this way.”

Elsewhere, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe has confirmed that the band will never reunite. During an interview with radio station WNYC to discuss the new Velvet Underground tribute compilation, Stipe responded to a 2019 Rolling Stone article that speculated over the likelihood of R.E.M. reforming, describing it as “wishful thinking at bestâ€.

“We will never reunite. We decided when we split up that that would just be really tacky and probably money-grabbing, which might be the impetus for a lot of bands to get back together. We don’t really need that, and I’m really happy that we just have the legacy of the 32 years of work that we have,†he told All Of It host Alison Stewart.

Watch Carole King and James Taylor live in new documentary trailer

Matthew Neale
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Watch Carole King and James Taylor live in new documentary trailer
A new concert documentary, Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name, will showcase the two musical icons as they perform a section of hits from their respective back catalogues, as well as interviews exploring their career – watch the first trailer below. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller ...

A new concert documentary, Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name, will showcase the two musical icons as they perform a section of hits from their respective back catalogues, as well as interviews exploring their career – watch the first trailer below.

The concert documentary will feature setlist highlights from King and Taylor’s 2010 “Troubadour” reunion tour, including “You’ve Got A Friend”, “It’s Too Late”, and “Sweet Baby James”.

The trailer also shows performances of “So Far Away” and “Fire and Rain” from King and Taylor respectively. Joint live shows from 1970 and 2007, including previously unseen footage, will provide additional live material.

Directed by Frank Marshall and commissioned by CNN Films and HBO Max, the show also includes footage of the pair being interviewed in July 2021 at the Southern New Hampshire University Arena in Manchester.

The documentary explores the story behind King and Taylor’s friendship, as well as detailing a number of song stories, including “You’ve Got a Friend”.

Taylor explained that he first heard King play the then new song – which she said “purely came through me” – at soundcheck before their debut Troubadour show together in 2010, and details how he came to cover it. Additional commentary comes from Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, and Lee Sklar, as well as musician and producer Peter Asher.

Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name will premiere on January 2 at 9pm Eastern Time in the US (2am GMT) via CNN and will livestream via CNNgo. It will be available on demand from January 3 – 9 via cable and satellite providers, CNNgo, and CNN mobile apps. There is currently no information for audiences streaming from the UK.

You can watch the trailer here via Rolling Stone.

ZZ Top sell publishing rights and back catalogue for undisclosed fee

Elizabeth Aubrey
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ZZ Top sell publishing rights and back catalogue for undisclosed fee
ZZ Top have sold all their publishing rights and back catalogue for an undisclosed fee. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: ZZ Top – Album By Album The group have sold both to BMG and investment firm KKR. While financial details for the dea...

ZZ Top have sold all their publishing rights and back catalogue for an undisclosed fee.

The group have sold both to BMG and investment firm KKR.

While financial details for the deal were not disclosed, it’s expected to have attracted a multi-million dollar deal with the group having sold over 50million albums.

The deal will cover all the “music interests” of ZZ Top. The group’s manager, Carl Stubner said in a statement: “We are proud to continue working with and expand our long-standing relationship with BMG. This new deal ensures ZZ Top’s remarkable legacy will endure for generations to come.â€

BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch added: “This deal is a testament to the success, staying power and continuing musical relevance of ZZ Top, but also to the power of our partnership with KKR.

“This agreement furthers our vision of providing artists and songwriters not just a financial exit, but also a vehicle committed to respecting and treasuring their artistry.â€

This year, BMG have acquired the rights to the back catalogues of Mick Fleetwood, Tina Turner and Mötley Crüe.

Other artists who have sold their rights elsewhere include Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

Back in July, ZZ Top‘s Billy Gibbons confirmed that the band will continue on following the death of Dusty Hill.

“We are saddened by the news today that our Compadre, Dusty Hill, has passed away in his sleep at home in Houston, TX,†remaining ZZ Top members Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard said in a statement in July.

“We, along with legions of ZZ Top fans around the world, will miss your steadfast presence, your good nature and enduring commitment to providing that monumental bottom to the ‘Top’. We will forever be connected to that ‘Blues Shuffle in C.’â€

They added: “You will be missed greatly, amigo.â€

The Marvelettes singer Wanda Young has died, aged 78

Matt Doria
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The Marvelettes singer Wanda Young has died, aged 78
Wanda Young, a former lead singer of the classic R&B group The Marvelettes, has died at age 78. Her passing was confirmed on Friday (December 17) by former Motown labelmate Claudette Robinson (of The Miracles), who posted on Instagram: “A very sad day for our [Motown] family and music fans ...

Wanda Young, a former lead singer of the classic R&B group The Marvelettes, has died at age 78.

Her passing was confirmed on Friday (December 17) by former Motown labelmate Claudette Robinson (of The Miracles), who posted on Instagram: “A very sad day for our [Motown] family and music fans all over the world. Wanda was a star on Earth and now she is a star in Heaven. Put on some Marvelettes and turn it up.â€

No cause of death has been made public at the time of writing.

In a statement posted on Twitter, the Classic Motown label wrote: “We are so saddened by the news of Wanda Young of the Marvelettes passing. What an impact she has had on the world of Classic Motown and the lives of so many. Her legacy will continue to live on.â€

Born in Michigan on August 9, 1943, Young grew up with aspirations to become a nurse. However after founding member Georgia Dobbins left The Marvelettes (then called The Marvels) in 1961, Young was recruited by co-singer Gladys Horton – who herself passed away in 2011 – to audition for the role. She was successful, and helped the group make their mainstream breakthrough with “Hey Mr. Postman”.

The song was an immediate hit for The Marvelettes (and later The Beatles, then The Carpenters), becoming Motown’s first Number One single in the later months of 1961. It held the top spot on the Billboard R&B Chart for seven weeks.

Young’s singing role in the band was split with Horton, who often took the lead on their radio singles. The pair would duet on some tracks – such as hits like “Locking Up My Heart” and “Too Many Fish In The Sea” – and Young made her solo lead debut on a single in 1964 with “You’re My Remedy”.

Although not as successful as much of their prior catalogue, it paved the way for Young to sing on the 1965 dance hit “I’ll Keep Holding On”, galvanising her as The Marvelettes’ full-time lead vocalist. Among the group’s biggest singles under her lead was “Don’t Mess With Bill”, a million-selling soul tune that peaked at Number Seven on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Marvelettes formally disbanded in 1970, although the following year, Motown released Young’s solo album with the title The Return Of The Marvelettes. Young’s former bandmates refused to be involved, and in 1972, the singer parted ways with Motown and went on a lengthy hiatus from recording.

The group’s legacy refused to wane, though – in 1995, The Marvelettes were inducted into The Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s Hall Of Fame. In 2004, they were inducted into The Vocal Group Hall Of Fame.

In a 1999 interview with Goldmine, Stevie Wonder made note of Young’s caring nature: “[She] would always tell me when she thought I was eating too much candy,†he joked. “I wish kids today could have the same kind of caring expressed and shown to them.â€

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