Lost minds

Just before Christmas, I heard word of a supergroup of sorts, Rangda, featuring Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny, along with Chris Corsano on drums. Rangda are named after a Balinese goddess, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, which makes sense given some of the esoteric concerns Bishop investigated during his long stretch in the Sun City Girls.

I interviewed Michael Mann for the current issue of UNCUT, ahead of the release of Public Enemies. Call it reader service, but I thought those of you who're interested in such things might like a chance to read the full transcript (it's about 3,200 words, of which we only ran 1,000 in the issue). Anyway, here it is. Hope you enjoy.

“It’s hot as a witch's tit in this room,” says Club UNCUT headliner Jesca Hoop. “I’m going to have to retune my guitar real quick… cos it sounds like a witch's tit. So if you’ve ever wondered what a witch's tit sounds like, then this is it.” Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in the capital. Despite the welcoming evening cool outside, temperatures in the newly-refurbished Upstairs At The Garage in north London are unforgivingly high. But in some respects, you couldn’t have wished for a better line-up at Club UNCUT in heat like this.

When I was writing about the Lindstrom & Prins Thomas album a while back, I mentioned there was more Scandinavian electronic goodness forthcoming from The Field. “Yesterday And Today” is Axel Willner’s second album in this guise and, risking one of those winsome climatic references, it works great walking to work on a bright spring morning like this one.

Uncut's film of the month, Clint Eastwood directs

Brandon Flowers and co start learning from Las Vegas on extravagant third album

They should have just started a 35-date European tour as guests of The Hold Steady, who pulled all their shows earlier this week due to the hospitalisation of guitarist Tad Kubler. Instead, Philadelphia’s War On Drugs find themselves stranded in London, where they were probably considering busking as an alternative to starving on the capital’s streets before being added at the last minute to tonight’s Club Uncut bill at the Borderline.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seemed to accumulate a pretty impressive bunch of folk and folk-rock reissues on my desk. The most recent to turn up is a straightforward reissue of Anne Briggs’ first self-titled LP, on the excellent Water label out of San Francisco.

'The Hustler' has lost his battle with cancer, aged 83

Click on the links for Part One, Part Two and Part Three of the interview. Is it fair to see the last three LPs of a piece? They seem to sit together as a sequence. Yeah I think what I found, funnily enough, is sometimes you get what you want when you stop trying to get it.