Nick Cave has shared his new single “Letter To Cynthia” in full online – listen to it below.
The track originally appears on Cave and Warren Ellis’ new seven-inch release titled Grief, based on a letter sent to Cave’s Red Hand Files website.
READ MORE: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds...
Nick Cave has shared his new single “Letter To Cynthia” in full online – listen to it below.
The track originally appears on Cave and Warren Ellis’ new seven-inch release titled Grief, based on a letter sent to Cave’s Red Hand Files website.
“Letter To Cynthia” appears alongside another song, “Song For Cynthia”, and both tracks were inspired by a question that a fan named Cynthia had sent to The Red Hand Files, a site where Cave responds to letters from his audience.
“I have experienced the death of my father, my sister, and my first love in the past few years and feel that I have some communication with them, mostly through dreams,” she wrote in October 2018. “They are helping me.”
Referring to the death of Cave’s teenage son in 2015, she continued: “Are you and Susie feeling that your son Arthur is with you and communicating in some way?”
In a description under the new single, Cave wrote: “In Fall 2018 Cynthia sent this question to The Red Hand Files.
“My reply was the first time I was able to articulate my own contradictory feelings of grief. Letters like Cynthia’s have helped bring me and many others back to the world. I recorded ‘Letter To Cynthia’ and ‘Song For Cynthia’ with Warren in November 2020 at Soundtree Studios in London. They are beautiful pieces and I hope you like them.”
In other Nick Cave news, Cave and Ellis will head out on a European tour with The Bad Seeds across the summer of 2022 – new dates were announced last week.
To celebrate the imminent arrival of Welcome 2 America, the latest issue of Uncut takes a fascinating trip inside Prince's archives. Our mission? To piece together some of rock'n'roll's most legendary lost albums.
ORDER NOW: Read the full list of lost Prince albums in the July 2021 issue of Un...
From his earliest releases in the late 1970s until his untimely death in 2016, Prince was obsessed with recording. On tour he recorded every show; at home he was in Paisley Park Studio A as much as possible. He might be trying to assemble his next album or he might be taking notes, writing songs, goofing off, or practising his own purple brand of mad science. That work ethic means he left behind a legendarily massive vault crammed full of alternate takes, false starts, cul-de-sac jams and more than a few “lost” records.
Because he thought one and sometimes two albums ahead, he might abandon a project on a whim – no matter how far along he was in the process. His motives for scrapping an album were often never known or now forgotten, but in most cases Prince simply moved on to the next big idea. He created albums faster than he could release them. But those lost albums continue to provoke endless what-ifs and conjure countless alternate timelines. Here are some of his most notorious albums that never made it out of Paisley Park…
The Second Coming (1982)
Prince filmed every show on the Controversy tour in 1981 and 1982, usually on a fairly primitive VHS camera set up next to the soundboard. “We would watch the tape every night on the bus,” recalls keyboard player Matt Fink. “He would point out mistakes or things we did well. That’s how we learned and improved the shows.”
Their stop at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, stands out because, unexpectedly, there were real cameras there and a professional film crew to capture their performance. It transpires they were recording a live album and a concert film – ‘The Second Coming’, a remarkable, if lost, snapshot of a transitional period in Prince’s career.
At the time, Prince and his band were playing some of their best shows as they upgraded to bigger venues. “Even when we were playing in clubs, we played like it was a coliseum,” says Dez Dickerson, Prince’s touring guitarist. “So the span between Controversy and 1999 was an age unto itself. It wasn’t just two different planets, it was two different galaxies!”
A fully edited version of the concert film was created – but Prince scrapped it to focus on 1999 and another film project that became Purple Rain. “There was so much time and effort put into it,” says Dickerson. “It was a fully polished, meticulously thought-through live album and a well-executed film. Prince never wanted us to be frontman and sidemen. He wanted us to bea rock band. The album and the film really captured that.”
Image: Joe Stevens
The Flesh (1986)
Prince loved to jam with whoever was around and could keep up with him. “He’d jam in the studio and then jam some more at rehearsals,” recalls Susan Rogers, who worked as a studio engineer for Prince in the early to mid-1980s. “He spent hours playing these instrumental jams – and at some point he started labelling them ‘The Flesh’.”
Rogers believes the name may have come from his father. “I learned that when Prince was young – 13 or so – his father would get really angry at him for bringing girls over to the house. They’d be listening to records in his room and his father would come in and say, ‘How dare you bring the flesh into this house?’ Prince always had that religion/sex dichotomy.”
Eventually he handed some of these recordings over to Eric Leeds, his saxophone player, to see if there was enough material for an album. “A lot of those jams might have gone on for 15 or 20 minutes,” Leeds explains. “So he gave me an opportunity to mess around with them, maybe do some overdubs or some edits. There was one song called Junk Music that I cut down from maybe 40 or 45 minutes. I gave him something and he said, ‘Yeah, cool.’ That was pretty much the end of it. I was under no illusions that any of it would ever be released.” Says Rogers, “Prince had so much fun playing them that I think he wanted to release them, but he was astute enough to realise it was a half-baked idea.”
Dream Factory (1986)
Following the success of Purple Rain and the box office disappointment of his follow-up movie Under The Cherry Moon, Prince was trying to figure out what to do next. “He was experimenting with what his next vision would be,” says Susan Rogers. “This took a long time because he was in a period of flux. There were a lot of things changing. His engagement to Susannah Melvoin was breaking up, and he was about to turn 30.”
‘Dream Factory’ was one of several potential albums he was working on simultaneously, all of which eventually coalesced into 1987’s Sign O’ The Times. “Dream Factory was conceived of and put together earlier than the rest, back when The Revolution were still around,” says Rogers. Astonishingly, they were working on Dream Factory as early as 1982, when the band recorded a trio of songs that included an early version of I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man.
“There was a piece by Wendy Melvoin called Colors, as I recall,” continues Rogers. “There was a piece by Lisa Coleman called Visions. He got to the point where he was thinking about album art and Susannah drew something that looked a bit like her art for Around The World In A Day.”
Just as ‘The Second Coming’ was meant to showcase his former touring band, Dream Factory was intended to foreground The Revolution. But when The Revolution broke up, inevitably the album fell apart. Prince scrapped their recordings and redid most of the parts himself – although by that time he was no longer thinking of it as a standalone album…
Camille (1987)
Camille was one of Prince’s gutsiest endeavours, one compelling enough that it got a catalogue number from Warner Brothers and an initial vinyl pressing before it was yanked. The androgynous character was a studio creation, devised when Prince began using varispeed techniques to change the timbre of his voice.
“He was very comfortable with his falsetto,” says Susan Rogers. “But he wanted to sing whole songs as a character with a higher voice – not quite an octave higher, but still feminine.” Susannah Melvoin had made some drawings of stick figures with X’s for eyes – “creepy but cool”, according to Rogers – which further piqued Prince’s imagination. Inspired, he turned them into a single mysterious character, who first appeared in the song Shockadelica. “You were never sure if Camille was alive or dead – a ghost maybe, or a zombie character. Camille might have been male or female.”
Born in the studio, Camille struggled to find life on the stage. “Not only was he searching for what his next album would be, Prince was also thinking about his opening act,” says Rogers. “I don’t know how he thought he was going to pull off Camille live. He would have had to find somebody who was very androgynous and had a low voice for a woman but a high voice for a man. That may be the reason he shelved it.” Nevertheless, most of the songs on Camille – including Housequake and If I Was Your Girlfriend – ended up on Sign O’ The Times, complete with the androgynous vocals.
Crystal Ball (1987)
“I remember vividly us recording the song ‘Crystal Ball’ at his home studio in Chanhassen,” says Susan Rogers. “He was still living with Susannah. He’d given her this blank wall in his downstairs den. She was sketching a mural on the wall with fairies and nymphs – slender, lithe female nude bodies with wings. He wrote a line in the song that went, ‘While soldiers draw their swords of sorrow, my baby draws pictures of sex all over the walls in graphic detail!’ There was nothing graphic about this mural, but that was Prince.
He would take something like that and extend it to something a little more vivid.”
Drawing heavily from the Dream Factory and Camille projects – but adding a handful of new tracks – Crystal Ball was intended to be a triple album, but Warner Brothers demanded it be condensed into a more manageable form. It was trimmed to 15 tracks and retitled Sign O’ The Times, with the remaining tracks showing up on B-sides and subsequent albums. One purported highlight called In A Large Room With No Light was a holdover. “That was one of Wendy and Lisa’s songs,” recalls Eric Leeds. “I’m hard pressed to think of anything else in Prince’s catalogue that sounds like it. Sheila E plays her ass off on it. There’s an out vamp and she’s does these drum fills that are just terrific. I suspect Prince never did anything with it at that time because it was around the time when Wendy and Lisa left the band.”
A new documentary detailing The Beatles’ time in India has been announced. Its release will come alongside a companion album that features notable Indian musicians interpreting Beatles tracks.
READ MORE: Klaus Voormann on George Harrison: “The Quiet One? He wasn’t quiet at all…”
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A new documentary detailing The Beatles’ time in India has been announced. Its release will come alongside a companion album that features notable Indian musicians interpreting Beatles tracks.
The BeatlesAnd India features rare archival footage, recordings and photographs, eye-witness accounts and location shoots across India.
A statement about the film describes it as “the first serious exploration of how India shaped the development of the greatest ever rock band and their own pioneering role bridging two vastly different cultures”.
The film is directed by Ajoy Bose, who also wrote the book Across The Universe – The Beatles In India, with co-director Pete Crompton also serving as “cultural researcher”.
The documentary’s accompanying album, The Beatles And India: Songs Inspired By The Film, will feature interpretations, by contemporary Indian artists, of Beatles songs that they had been inspired to write from their time in India. The artists include Vishal Dadlani, Kissnuka, Benny Dayal, Dhruv Ghanekar, Karsh Kale, Anoushka Shankar, and Soulmate.
You can hear the lead single, a cover of “India, India“, below.
The documentary will premiere on June 6 at the BFI as part of the Tongues On Fire UK Asian Film Festival ahead of a full release in autumn.
See the full tracklist of the album below:
Tomorrow Never Knows – Kissnuka Mother Nature’s Son – Karsh Kale / Benny Dayal Gimme Some Truth – Soulmate Across The Universe – Tejas / Maalavika Manoj Everybody’s Got Something To Hide (Except Me And My Monkey) – Rohan Rajadhyaksha I Will – Shibani Dandekar Julia – Dhruv Ghanekar Child Of Nature – Anupam Roy The Inner Light – Anoushka Shankar / Karsh Kale The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill – Raaga Trippin Back In The USSR – Karsh Kale / Farhan Ahktar I’m So Tired – Lisa Mishra Sexy Sadie – Siddharth Basrur Martha My Dear – Nikhil D’Souza Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) – Parekh & Singh Revolution – Vishal Dadlani Love You To – Dhruv Ghanekar Dear Prudence – Karsh Kale / Monica Dogra India, India – Nikhil D’Souza
Thurston Moore has been announced as the headliner for Rockaway Beach’s Grand Day Out – see the full line-up below.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
The event will take place at The Clapham Grand in London on August 29 ahead of the three-day Rockaway being held at Butlins in Bogn...
Thurston Moorehas been announced as the headliner for Rockaway Beach’sGrand Day Out – see the full line-up below.
The event will take place at The Clapham Grand in London on August 29 ahead of the three-day Rockaway being held at Butlins in Bognor Regis in January 2022.
Grand Day Out, which is being put on in lieu of this year’s cancelled Rockaway, will also feature performances from The Orielles, I See Islands, Life, Sink Ya Teeth and Moderate Rebels.
“It’s our total pleasure to announce that Thurston Moore will be headlining this year’s Rockaway Beach’s Grand Day Out 2021,” organisers wrote on Twitter, hailing the musician as “arguably the most influential guitar player of the past 20 years”.
See the full lineup here:
? It’s our total pleasure to announce that Thurston Moore will be headlining this year’s Rockaway Beach's Grand Day Out 2021.@nowjazznowpic.twitter.com/YbjRL5Q3dg
Also on offer will be a late-night aftershow, a selection of street food, karaoke, vinyl and quizzes – tickets are available now from here.
The announcement comes after Thurston Moore released a surprise album of 10 abstract and ambient instrumental pieces, Screen Time, back in February. His latest studio album, By The Fire, came out last September and featured Moore’s former Sonic Youth bandmate Steve Shelley and My Bloody Valentine‘s Debbie Googe.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have added more dates to their 2022 European tour – see the full schedule below.
READ MORE: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Album By Album
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
The band announced the first round of dates for their upcoming tour earlier ...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have added more dates to their 2022 European tour – see the full schedule below.
The band announced the first round of dates for their upcoming tour earlier this month, after being forced to cancel a 2021 tour of Europe and the UK due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions.
After announcing initial dates in Greece, Germany, Sweden, Norway and more, the band have now announced further shows in Spain, Poland, France and beyond, including a headline slot at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival.
See the full list of dates below, with tickets on sale here. Details of more shows are promised soon.
June 2022
4 – Barcelona, Primavera Sound
6 – Lyon, Les Nuits de Fourviere
7 – Lyon, Les Nuits de Fourviere
15 – Athens, Release Athens Festival
21 – Zagreb, INmusic Festival
23 – Prague, Metronome Festival
27 – Cologne, Lanxess Arena
29 – Berlin, Waldbühne
July 2022
1 – Belfort, Les Eurockennes de Belfort
7 – Trencin, Pohoda Festival
August 2022
3 – Rastatt, Residenzschloss
5 – Klam, Castle Clam
7 – Gilwice, Arena Gilwice
8 – Gdansk, Ergo Arena
11 – Oslo, Øya Festival
12 – Gothenburg, Way Out West Festival
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ original 2021 European tour dates were set to be focused around the band’s 2019 album Ghosteen.
During the coronavirus pandemic, though, Cave and bandmate Warren Ellis teamed up to write and record the surprise album Carnage, which arrived in February.
Canterbury scene standard-bearers Caravan have announced a comprehensive 37-disc box set, containing all their studio and live albums on CD, plus 11 discs of previously unreleased live recordings.
Who Do You Think We Are? will be released by Madfish on August 20 in a limited edition of 2,500 copi...
Canterbury scene standard-bearers Caravan have announced a comprehensive 37-disc box set, containing all their studio and live albums on CD, plus 11 discs of previously unreleased live recordings.
Who Do You Think We Are? will be released by Madfish on August 20 in a limited edition of 2,500 copies worldwide.
The box also contains Steven Wilsons 5.1 surround sound mix of In The Land Of Grey And Pink, a DVD of European TV performances from 197181, two books featuring rare Caravan photos and memorabilia, photos signed by the three surviving members of the original Caravan line-up – Pye Hastings, Richard Sinclair and David Sinclair – a Caravan-centric map of Canterbury, a Caravan family tree poster and two replica 1970s gig posters.
Watch a trailer for Who Do You Think We Are? below and pre-order here.
IDLES have given their spin on Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods" for an upcoming tribute album celebrating the post-punk legends and late guitarist Andy Gill.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
The Bristol outfit's version stays relatively faithful to the original – taken from Gang of F...
IDLES have given their spin on Gang of Four‘s “Damaged Goods” for an upcoming tribute album celebrating the post-punk legends and late guitarist Andy Gill.
The Bristol outfit’s version stays relatively faithful to the original – taken from Gang of Four‘s 1979 debut Entertainment! – with frontman Joe Talbot’s distinctive vocals lending some grit to their rendition.
“IDLES does not exist without Gang of Four,” the band commented in a statement. “‘Damaged Goods‘ still sounds new and exciting after the millionth listen. We jumped at the chance to just to play it, let alone record it. It was an honour, a joy and a privilege.”
Listen to IDLES‘ cover of “Damaged Goods” below:
The Problem of Leisure: A Celebration of Andy Gill and Gang of Four is set to arrive June 4, with a star-studded list of contributors. The compilation was announced earlier this year alongside a cover of “Natural’s Not in It” by Serj Tankian and Tom Morello.
Other artists confirmed to appear on the compilation include Gary Numan, La Roux and Red Hot Chili Peppers bandmates Flea and John Frusciante.
IDLES released their latest album, Ultra Mono, in September of last year.
Remarkably, given their long shadows and proximity to one another around Nashville, good friends John Hiatt and Jerry Douglas had never recorded together until now. They chose to mark the occasion in style by commandeering RCA’s fabled Studio B – birthplace of the late-’50s Nashville Sound and...
Remarkably, given their long shadows and proximity to one another around Nashville, good friends John Hiatt and Jerry Douglas had never recorded together until now. They chose to mark the occasion in style by commandeering RCA’s fabled Studio B – birthplace of the late-’50s Nashville Sound and once home to Elvis, Dolly, the Everlys, Roy Orbison and more.
The place is referenced, by way of Waylon Jennings, in the evocative The Music Is Hot, a love letter to the sounds of Hiatt’s formative years. But Leftover Feelings travels deeper and wider through his psyche, taking us through a whole spectrum of emotion. Douglas and his rootsy band prove ideal companions, seasoning these discerning songs with well-judged doses of violin, lap steel and, of course, Douglas’ trademark dobro. Hiatt and co are at their most playful on the spirited Keen Rambler and Long Black Electric Cadillac. The latter, an eco-charged upgrade on the models of rock’n’roll legend, is a countrybilly frolic with real zip. And the playful electric blues of Little Goodnight, first cut by Hiatt in the early ’90s, turns as choppy as its protagonists’ dizzying experience of parenthood.
At other times, Hiatt gets more directly personal. Mississippi Phone Booth alludes to the tipping point of his boozing and drugging days, stuck on the end of a line, looking for some kind of human contact. Similarly, the self-admonishing Buddy Boy – “You can’t drink yourself out of this one/You’re gonna need some help” – feels like a page ripped from a diary.
Most moving of all is Light Of The Burning Sun, which details the suicide of his older brother, aged just 21, and the trauma that subsequently tore Hiatt’s family apart. “Shook the life out of us all”, he sings, over gentle acoustic guitar and Christian Sedelmyer’s mournful violin. At 68, Hiatt is producing some of the best work of his career, mapping his inner life with an eloquence that most can only aspire to.
For John Lennon’s 30th birthday, Yoko Ono presented him with a sensory box. Fingers could be inserted into holes containing different materials: liquid, say, or a spike. It was a hit, though you’d be forgiven for thinking the birthday boy might’ve preferred something less surprising.
ORDE...
For John Lennon’s 30th birthday, Yoko Ono presented him with a sensory box. Fingers could be inserted into holes containing different materials: liquid, say, or a spike. It was a hit, though you’d be forgiven for thinking the birthday boy might’ve preferred something less surprising.
After all, it’d been a turbulent old year. The Beatles were over. Lennon and Ono had embarked on primal scream therapy, during which Lennon had examined his feelings of abandonment and his grief over his mother’s death. To top it all, he had been unexpectedly reunited with his estranged father Alfred; they celebrated his 30th at Tittenhurst Park, an event that ended with Lennon Jr threatening to kill Lennon Sr.
By that point he was halfway through the recording of his first solo album: a visceral monument to his pain, it marks the peak of the confessional songwriting style he’d dabbled with since 1964’s I’m A Loser, and which had now become his sole métier. At points it feels closer to modern art than music. That’s not just down to the presence of Yoko Ono on “wind”: this is a record you delve into occasionally, when you need to feel something. It wouldn’t be seen dead hanging around withMcCartney.
Fifty-one years after its release, it’s now reincarnated as an eight-disc super deluxe boxset comprising 11 hours of material, all newly mixed and a huge tranche of it previously unreleased. The ultimate mix CD presents the original in all its tenebrous beauty, leavened at times by a soulful feel, like deconstructed gospel on God and Mother. Then there’s the following set of themed CDs, all with the standard album tracklisting plus previous singles Give Peace A Chance, Cold Turkey and Instant Karma!: outtakes, elements (new mixes highlighting a key part or two), demos, raw studio mixes and, finally, collages showing the evolution of the songs.
Fascinating changes can be charted: Hold On begins as just guitar and vocals, before Take 2 introduces a double-time beat from Ringo Starr and some nifty fills, and bass chords from Klaus Voormann. “OK, that’ll do,” says Lennon, “we don’t want to get… berserk.” Mother seems to have been the most difficult song to perfect – Take 61 features the familiar piano and wracked vocals, but by Take 91 Lennon is back strumming guitar before eventually returning to piano. “It’s hard to believe [the lyrics] all the way through without being on junk,” laments Lennon to Starr after one aborted take.
From its acoustic-blues demo, more Southern porch than Tittenhurst terrace, “Well Well Well” is consistently thrilling – “Fucking hell!” says Lennon as the wild Take 4 dissolves into avant-garde racket, while the “elements” mix is as cacophonous and exciting as Revolution. Look At Me is also tried in a variety of ways, solo and strummed, as a full band version, and then finally in the familiar picked White Album style à la Julia.
Instant Karma! appears in a few iterations with its blanket of slapback echo absent; most enlightening is the rootsy, Stax-like studio demo with George Harrison on nimble lead guitar. The elements mix of Cold Turkey, meanwhile, foregrounds a stunning feedback drone throughout the taut funk. Such is the volume of material here, one can forgive the low points, such as the seven practically indistinguishable versions of My Mummy’s Dead.
Despite its dark subject matter, sessions seem to have been relaxed, with rapport beautifully portrayed in the evolution documentary mixes: “You’re talking to folk-blues from the north of Liverpool, you know,” Lennon jokes when he’s asked to count in a track, “you’re not talking to fackin’ Mantovani…” Later, to Phil Spector, “They’re all very slow, except for the fast ones”; and during work on “Isolation”, “We’ll go and hear what we’re doing shall we, gang, before we turn into Edmundo Ros and his jazz quartet.” Particularly touching is Lennon’s scream of “George!” when Harrison enters the studio on his birthday.
The rarest jewels, though, lie in the two outlying discs. The “jams” disc presents, in chronological order, between-take improvisations from Lennon, Starr and Voorman, from a hilarious parody of three Elvis Presley songs to snippets of Get Back and I’ve Got A Feeling.
Of course, Yoko Ono also made her own Plastic Ono Band record – Lennon told Rolling Stone it was “20 years ahead of its time”, but it’s even further out than that – and the final disc, a packed Blu-ray, presents the epic October 10 sessions in full. Eighteen minutes long, Why is electrifyingly modern, predicting Funkadelicand Neu!, while the 16-minute Touch Me and 21-minute Why Not find Lennon showing off what he called his “cinéma vérité” slide guitar style and Ono conjuring up the most otherworldly sounds to whip on Lennon, Starr and Voormann. Unreleased jams Life, Omae No Okaa Wa and the freeform I Lost Myself Somewhere In The Sky are also prescient, the former eerily Can-like in its cyclical beat, high bass guitar and echoed, abstract wails. Unlike Lennon’s anguished record, Ono’s work here is life-affirming, her pain reborn as transcendence.
Honesty would, for better or worse, remain Lennon’s policy for the rest of his career, but he would never make anything quite like John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. As much of a sensory box as a pop record, it remains as arresting and difficult as it was 51 years ago. And, as the man said, that’s reality.
The night before recording their 1978 album Lanquidity, Sun Ra and his Arkestra filmed a brief live spot for Saturday Night Live. Given a window of only four minutes, Sun Ra crammed three classics into the performance: Space Is The Place, The Sound Mirror, which featured a typically cosmic monologue...
The night before recording their 1978 album Lanquidity, Sun Ra and his Arkestra filmed a brief live spot for Saturday Night Live. Given a window of only four minutes, Sun Ra crammed three classics into the performance: Space Is The Place, The Sound Mirror, which featured a typically cosmic monologue from Ra himself, and Watusa. With their membership in double figures, the Arkestra couldn’t help but look cramped on the small SNL stage, but the kaleidoscopic whirl they brought to America’s TV sets – spinning dervish dancers, multicoloured robes and shawls, glittering headdresses – still feels uncontainable, even watching four decades later on a low-resolution upload of grainy VHS.
This appearance on SNL, and the subsequent Lanquidity sessions, came after a few years of international exploration for the Arkestra. In 1977 they travelled to Lagos for the FASTEC festival (the World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture), where Sun Ra refused a visit to Fela Kuti’s nightclub; on their way back home, they toured Egypt again. In 1978, Sun Ra also took a quartet to Italy for a brief tour. As John Szwed notes in his book Space Is The Place, Sun Ra had also started to focus on solo piano, at the urging of fellow pianist Paul Bley, resulting in some of the former’s most idiosyncratic, surprising recordings.
Lanquidity, though, feels like a particularly emboldened album in Sun Ra and the Arkestra’s history. If you come to it expecting the mystical free-jazz blowouts of ’60s classics like Heliocentric Worlds and Atlantis, you might be taken aback by the slack groove of the five songs here, the group vamping on riffs that draw from funk and R&B. The strangeness in Lanquidity works at a cellular level – at no point does anything feel like ‘business as usual’, even as this album, and some of its immediate peers (see also the minimal, drum-machine grooves of Disco 3000), reference recent developments in music in a more concrete and codifiable manner.
The sessions themselves were typically Arkestran. Tom Buchler, the owner of Philly Jazz, the label that originally released Lanquidity, had travelled out to Germantown a few times to try and organise a deal with Sun Ra; he was met, instead, with Arkestra rehearsals and hours of Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophies. When they finally arrived at Blank Tapes, a studio run by Bob Blank, who’d soon become known for landmark productions with the likes of Arthur Russell, Lydia Lunch and James Blood Ulmer, Sun Ra immediately asked the studio technicians to pull down the pyramid they’d built over the mixing console: “You cannot harness this music,” he said. “I’m dealing with the omniverse.”
The label’s small budget meant the Arkestra only had one night to record what became Lanquidity. Never mind – the resultant album is one of the strongest, most affecting of the group’s ’70s run of albums, a time when they were in a particularly expansive mood. The title song opens the album with a gentle, lambent melody from the keyboards, soon picked up by a phalanx of wind instruments sighing in unison. Guitars are fed through echoplexes, rendering them pliable as plasma; the percussion is a slow martial stroll. At times it sounds a little like the roiling funk of Miles Davis’s He Loved Him Madly era, dialled down in intensity, eddying and swirling with understated psychedelic heft.
Lanquidity’s gentle radiance gives way to Where Pathways Meet, a slick strut that strikes out on a seesawing two-note brass riff, with a needle-sharp guitar spitting gobs of arpeggios around the song’s unrelenting groove. That’s How I Feel creeps into view, with Sun Ra tangling keyboard lines around exploratory sax, before Richard Williams’ bass propels the song, fixating on another simple yet deeply effective phrase to keep everything afloat. It’s here that you realise the album’s minimalism-with-variations, its deep focus, is its greatest achievement – the slow builds of these songs load them with tension, and as much as the title Lanquidity, with its portmanteau of “languid” and “liquidity”, suggests an almost fusion-y laid-back vibe, the Arkestra takes these songs to less peaceable places.
Lanquidity’s offhand edginess builds through Twin Stars Of Thence and There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of). The former is astringent, sharp, riding a rhythm that’s as wobbly as a slinky sliding downstairs. Fractured yet funky, it’s no surprise Azealia Banks sampled it for Atlantis on her Fantasea mixtape. There Are Other Worlds… is peak Sun Ra, though, with a moon chorus of chanting voices swinging and swooping over suspended synth vamps, deconstructed blues piano, a waterlogged field reflecting the night stars. Surprising in both its funk-tionality and its underhand threat, Lanquidity is a psychedelic pleasure, the Arkestra at yet another peak.
Robert Plant has revealed that he has assembled a large personal archive, including unreleased music from a number of personal projects, that will only be released after his death.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
Plant made the revelation during the first episode of the fourth season...
Robert Plant has revealed that he has assembled a large personal archive, including unreleased music from a number of personal projects, that will only be released after his death.
Plant made the revelation during the first episode of the fourth season of his Digging Deep podcast, in which he told his co-host, Matt Everitt, the recent lockdown had allowed him to “put my house in order”.
“All the adventures that I’ve ever had with music and tours, album releases, projects that didn’t actually get finished or whatever it is, I just put them, itemised them all, and put everything into some semblance of order,” he explained. “So I’ve completely changed the setup.”
He added: “I’ve told the kids when I kick the bucket, open it to the public free of charge. Just to see how many silly things there were down the line from 1966 to now. It’s a journey.”
Alongside the unreleased music, Plant revealed that this archive also includes personal items from his collection. “[I] found a letter from my mum that said: ‘Look, you’ve been a very naughty boy, why don’t you come back, because Sue wants to know where you’ve gone. And also, the accountancy job is still open in Stourport-on-Severn. Why don’t you just come back home and we’ll just pretend all this stuff didn’t happen?’
“And I hadn’t opened the letter until about three months ago!” he said.
Another correspondence Plant has included are notes sent by the late Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun. One was a fax sent when John Bonham had “won this really serious musician award alongside Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett and stuff like that, in Playboy magazine.”
Plant reflected: “Isn’t it amazing how, despite all the kind of rumpus that was Led Zeppelin, this guy transcended it? Bonzo went right across everybody’s appreciation of music. You could cut away all the clamour and just listen to how he was contributing his part to what we used to do.”
Damon Albarn has joined the line-up for this year’s Manchester International Festival (MIF).
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
The event takes place between July 1 and 18, and will see its participating artists reflect on ideas such as love and human connection in a post-coronavirus ...
Damon Albarn has joined the line-up for this year’s Manchester International Festival (MIF).
The event takes place between July 1 and 18, and will see its participating artists reflect on ideas such as love and human connection in a post-coronavirus world. Last month, organisers announced Patti Smith and Arlo Parks as performers.
MIF 2021 confirmed yesterday (May 27) that the Blur and Gorillazmusician will present his TheNearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows project on July 13, accompanied on stage by a string quartet.
Rema will headline the festival’s Homecoming Live showcase on July 17, joining the likes of Midas The Jagaban, Anz and Julie Adenuga. Meanwhile, Billy Nomates, The Lounge Society, Pip Millett and more have been added to MIF’s Festival Square bill of free events.
According to a press release, Manchester International Festival 2021 will offer up “a unique snapshot of these unprecedented times” while playing “a key role in the safe reopening of the city’s economy”. You can find tickets here.
MIF’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, John McGrath, explained: “I am thrilled to be revealing the projects that we will be presenting this year – a truly international program of work made in the heat of the past year and a vibrant response to our times. Created with safety and wellbeing at the heart of everything, it is flexible to ever-changing circumstances, and boldly explores both real and digital space.
“We hope MIF21 will provide a time and place to reflect on our world now, to celebrate the differing ways we can be together, and to emphasise, despite all that has happened, the importance of our creative connections – locally and globally.”
Ladyhawke has announced her new album Time Flies and shared her latest single "Mixed Emotions" – you can hear the track below.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
The follow-up to 2016's Wild Things will be released on October 8 via BMG.
Ladyhawke previewed the forthcoming record y...
Ladyhawke has announced her new album Time Flies and shared her latest single “Mixed Emotions” – you can hear the track below.
The follow-up to 2016’s Wild Thingswill be released on October 8 via BMG.
Ladyhawke previewed the forthcoming record yesterday (May 27) with the track “Mixed Emotions”, which was co-written with Jono Sloan and Empire of The Sun‘s Nick Littlemore in Los Angeles.
“Sloan had come up with a really cool bass groove which Nick and I riffed over to get the lyrics and melody,” Ladyhawke said about “Mixed Emotions“, which you can hear in the Britt Walton-directed video here:
“The song is about all the things you can feel with one person, sometimes all in a single day,” she added. “Ups and downs, confusion, highs, and lows. And everything in between!”
Time Flies also includes contributions and collaborations with the likes of LA songwriter and producer Tommy English, Auckland-based Josh Fountain and Sydney’s Chris Stracey.
Sleater-Kinney have shared a new track called “High In The Grass” – you can listen to it below.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
The heavy, guitar-driven single serves as the second taste of the band’s upcoming 10th album Path Of Wellness (to be released on June 11) and follow...
Sleater-Kinney have shared a new track called “High In The Grass” – you can listen to it below.
The heavy, guitar-driven single serves as the second taste of the band’s upcoming 10th album Path Of Wellness (to be released on June 11) and follows lead single “Worry With You”.
Writing on Twitter, the group explained that “High In The Grass” “touches on the fragility and beauty of mortal life”. The song arrives with a colourful filtered video directed by Kelly Sears – watch it below.
Sleater-Kinney wrote Path Of Wellness, which is the follow-up to 2019’s The Center Won’t Hold, over the course of spring and summer last year while “holed up in Portland” before recording sessions took place at the end of 2020. “It’s the first S-K record we’ve produced ourselves,” they explained.
Path Of Wellness will be the first full-length to be released by the group since the departure of their drummerJanet Weiss in 2019. She had played in the band for 24 years prior to leaving.
Mdou Moctar has brought three tracks from his latest record Afrique Victime to the laid-back setting of NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
READ MORE: Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime review: a mesmerising meld of Tuareg folk tradition and modern rock
The se...
Mdou Moctar has brought three tracks from his latest recordAfrique Victimeto the laid-back setting of NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts.
The series, still being filmed remotely under the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert name, welcomed Moctar and his band (Ahmoudou Madassane on rhythm guitar, Souleymane Ibrahim on a calabash, and Mikey Coulton on bass) sat crossed-legged playing the tracks “Ya Habibiti”, “Tala Tannam” and “Afrique Victime”.
Watch the performance below.
In Uncut‘s 9/10 review of Afrique Victime, we said: “An exhilarating band set that mixes electric and acoustic instrumentation, it’s at once fiercely modern and as ancient as the Niger river”.
Bobby Gillespie has been taking stock recently. Primal Scream’s inveterate rabble-rouser has written a memoir about his early life and recorded an album of heartworn duets inspired by the country greats. He’s even – finally – come to terms with his early records. But where is all this soul-s...
Bobby Gillespie has been taking stock recently. Primal Scream’s inveterate rabble-rouser has written a memoir about his early life and recorded an album of heartworn duets inspired by the country greats. He’s even – finally – come to terms with his early records. But where is all this soul-searching heading? “People want us to take their heads off,” he tells Uncut in our latest issue, out now. “But I don’t know if that’s the kind of music I want to keep on making.”
Most days during lockdown, Gillespie left his home in north London and walked two miles to the studio owned by his wife, the fashion stylist Katy England. There, he wrote. As a musician who has spent almost 40 years in bands – first as drummer with The Jesus And Mary Chain and then with Primal Scream – these sessions proved to be an unusually solitary, not to say quiet, creative experience. For the most part, Gillespie was working on Tenement Kid – a memoir that follows him from childhood in Glasgow up to the release of the Screamdelica album in 1991.
“I want to give a good account of myself and my life,” Gillespie explains. “I didn’t know what it took to write a book. I’ve just written rock’n’roll songs – three, four or maybe five verses, which is a very condensed, disciplined way of writing. So it’s a different way of expressing myself – which I enjoyed, I have to say.”
Reflection has never been Gillespie’s preferred state. Primal Scream’s career has been characterised by a unique and impressive sense of restlessness – whatever the outcome. “We always wanted to keep ploughing ahead. Sometimes you go sideways, sometimes you sink, but you always want to do the next thing and see where it ends up,” he explains. “We were self-righteous speed freaks! The speed just accelerated the intensity of my point of view. But the point of view was already there. I guess there comes a time when you realise it’s OK… It’s like being embarrassed at old photographs of yourself. When you get older you look at them and think, ‘Aw, that’s all right.’”
Such ruminations have led in other, surprising directions, too. Just as Gillespie has carried out some stocktaking on the first half of his life for Tenement Kid, he has also conducted a managerial audit of Primal Scream. This process of recalibration has been ongoing for a few years now, beginning with the release of the original, long-lost recordings made for 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up album and continuing with the Maximum Rock’n’Roll greatest-hits album and tour, an expanded edition of 2006’s Riot City Blues for this year’s Record Store Day and a proposed deluxe edition of the band’s 1987 debut, Sonic Flower Groove. Gillespie has looked back on the band’s strengths – and, perhaps, also their weaknesses – and hit reset.
The first fruits of this are Utopian Ashes – a striking duets album recorded with Savages’ Jehnny Beth. The album’s musical touchstones include Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris and George Jones and Tammy Wynette; the subject matter, meanwhile, is the fathomless psychological drama of a marriage in crisis.
“I thought it was a very adult record and it should be presented as an adult record,” says Gillespie. “Maybe people expect a certain thing from Primal Scream and by presenting it in the way that we have they maybe have to consider it differently. If we did a hardcore, electro-punk record then I couldn’t write about these subjects in a tender, humanistic, empathetic way. You know [mimics electronic sound] – it’s too paranoid and claustrophobic. That was me, 20 years ago. I’m a different person now.”
This interrogation of what Primal Scream means in 2021 is at the heart of a wide-ranging conversation that takes in fallen comrades, the recent Alan McGee film and the levelling qualities of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Meeting on Zoom, Gillespie looks well and happy, sporting the kind of open-neck shirt also favoured by Nick Cave. As with Cave, Gillespie has survived numerous creative shifts and close shaves, arriving now in his late fifties with an artistic career behind him that seems to have developed intuitively. “I’ve got no complaints,” he confirms. “I’ve got my wife, my kids, my dogs, I’m very happy.” A smile spreads across his face. “Who’d have thought?”
The new issue of Uncut includes a candid interview with Klaus Voormann about his encounter with a 17-year-old George Harrison, during The Beatles’ formative residencies in Hamburg. The German artist and Plastic Ono Band member tells Graeme Thomson tales involving fish finger diets, late-night phon...
The new issue of Uncut includes a candid interview with Klaus Voormann about his encounter with a 17-year-old George Harrison, during The Beatles’ formative residencies in Hamburg. The German artist and Plastic Ono Band member tells Graeme Thomson tales involving fish finger diets, late-night phone calls from “Herr Schnitzel”, and the making of George’s very own masterpiece…
The first time I saw George he was only 17 years of age. He was very different to how he was later. He was a cocky little boy! This band he was with was completely unknown. It was the autumn of 1960. In this club in Hamburg, the Kaiserkeller, they played for people to dance. George was singing all those funny songs, which he did later on a little bit, when he sat around and played ukulele. He was into songs like I’m Henry The Eighth, I Am, singing it all cockney. He would sing all those Eddie Cochran numbers too, like Twenty Flight Rock.
It took some time to get to know them. We had gone to concerts and jazz clubs, but this scene was completely new to us. We went many times. They had started looking over to us – “There they are again, those Existentialists!” – and we were looking at the stage all the time, seeing all the details. “Look at George, he’s got big ears, hasn’t he! And he has funny teeth – he has those Dracula teeth!”
They were talking on stage in English and our English was not so hot. Eventually [Astrid and Jürgen] said to me, “Klaus, you speak English. Why don’t you make contact so we can meet them?”
John was standing by the stage, and I went over and took the record cover I had designed with me, which was Walk… Don’t Run – by The Typhoons, not The Ventures. I showed it to John, and he said, “Go to Stuart, he’s the artistic one.” Because John was the rock’n’roller, he didn’t want anything to do with art. So I went over to Stuart [Sutcliffe] and we got on like the world on fire. It was amazing, we talked about everything. It was only natural then that in the breaks between shows we went out with Stuart and the others came along, and we’d watch them eat their cornflakes.
We became friends. All of them were very much into music. Rock and roll was the most important thing. The list of songs they were able to play was the largest of all the bands in Hamburg. They were so busy and eager, listening to the records again and again until they got it down. At this stage, all you could see is that they played those songs really well. They were a great rock and roll band, with three great voices. I didn’t know anything about them writing songs, that came much, much later.
BUY THE COMPLETE BOB DYLAN HERE
The Complete Bob Dylan. Sounds like we’re setting ourselves up to fail here, doesn’t it?
There have, after all, been 39 Bob Dylan studio albums, nearly 100 singles, 15 volumes of the Bootleg series, and 11 live albums. There have been movies, acting roles, c...
The Complete Bob Dylan. Sounds like we’re setting ourselves up to fail here, doesn’t it?
There have, after all, been 39 Bob Dylan studio albums, nearly 100 singles, 15 volumes of the Bootleg series, and 11 live albums. There have been movies, acting roles, countless collaborators and sidemen (and women). Many, many books. Uncut itself has presented detailed Dylan covers (and, recently, exclusive Dylan-related covermount CDs). The man, as we’ve lately had confirmed for us on his most recent album, contains multitudes.
But amid all the stories and scholarship, it seemed to me that there was still room for another piece of work; something providing a succinct ranking of all of it. Perhaps you want to know if your next exploration outside the core of acknowledged classics should be Street-Legal, or Tempest, or even Self Portrait? Maybe you have interest in the hidden treasures, the magnificent songs hiding in plain sight on albums otherwise more sand than pearl. Where, in the 100 plus hours of the Theme Time Radio Hour, do you start?
Uncut’s crack team of Dylan people (top 5 Dylanologists? We’ve listed them…) have gone deep down into it, methodically scanning for the best. The hope is that we’re not only providing something like a buyers’ guide, but also a sideways alternative history. It’s a place which the polka dot shirt, the hidden details on the album sleeve, the song title translations on worldwide EPs, the cultural allusions and the hairstyles might all be helpful signposts on a map to enjoying the wealth of Bob Dylan. All round, we hope it’s a guide in the spirit of Dylan himself: enduring but playful, crafted but innovative, a channel to further investigation. Dylan tends to try things one way, then try a completely different approach, and we can see the appeal in that ourselves.
One thing it hasn’t set out to be is the last word. It might be tempting to think that the release of his great Rough And Rowdy Ways album in 2020, and the recent sale of his song rights – along with his 80th birthday, which this mag celebrates – mark a point where Dylan has now tied up all his loose ends, and where the job is now done.
If we’ve learned one thing about Dylan, though, it’s that what you expect, or what might seem to you to be logical might not necessarily be any clue to what’s coming next…
Wilco have announced the lineup for the second edition of their own festival, Sky Blue Sky.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
BUY NOW: Wilcovered 2LP – 17 Wilco covers by the band’s artists and friends
The destination festival will come to the Hard Rock Hotel in Riviera Maya, Me...
Wilco have announced the lineup for the second edition of their own festival, Sky Blue Sky.
The destination festival will come to the Hard Rock Hotel in Riviera Maya, Mexico from January 17 to 22, 2022, and feature Stephen Malkmus, Waxahatchee, Thundercat and more. Also playing the festival are Spoon, Kurt Vile & The Violators and Wilco themselves, who will play three shows over the course of the event.
See the full lineup for Sky Blue Sky below, and get tickets here from May 27.
Elsewhere, Tweedy is set to appear on The Awesome Album, the forthcoming album from fictional band Mouse Rat, Chris Pratt‘s band from TV show Parks and Recreation.
David Crosby has announced a new record entitled For Free, and shared its first single “River Rise”, which you can hear below.
ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut
READ MORE: Review: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
Joining Crosby on t...
David Crosby has announced a new record entitled For Free, and shared its first single “River Rise”, which you can hear below.
Joining Crosby on the record, which is slated for release on July 23, are Michael McDonald, Donald Fagen, Sarah Jarosz and his son James Raymond, who also served as the album’s producer. For Free also features a few of the musicians who had joined Crosby on 2017’s Sky Trails, including saxophonist Steve Tavaglione and drummer Steve DiStanislao. Joan Baez painted the cover artwork.
The album’s title comes from Joni Mitchell’s “For Free”, a track that Crosby covers on the record. “Joni’s the greatest living singer-songwriter, and ‘For Free’ is one of her simplest,” Crosby said in a statement. It’s one of my favourite songs because I love what it says about the spirit of music and what compels you to play.”
The album opener, “River Rise”, features Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, who co-wrote the song with Raymond.
“‘River Rise’ came from wanting to write something very evocative of California, but almost with a country-song perspective – something that speaks to the empowerment of the everyman or everywoman,” Raymond said in a statement.
