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Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime

Sharon O'Connell
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Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime
What’s known as “desert blues” by western music consumers clearly has a history aeons older than Tinariwen – but it’s fair to say that the sound was popularised by their second album, 2004’s Amassakoul, a hybrid of assouf and electric rock. If the Malian band have become the style’s le...

What’s known as “desert blues” by western music consumers clearly has a history aeons older than Tinariwen – but it’s fair to say that the sound was popularised by their second album, 2004’s Amassakoul, a hybrid of assouf and electric rock. If the Malian band have become the style’s leading ambassadors, they’re by no means its sole representatives: Songhoy Blues, Imarhan, Tamikrest and Kel Assouf each have their own identity and are some of the names now well established outside Africa. Mdou Moctar, maybe less so.

The songwriter and guitarist, born Mahamadou Souleymane, is from Agadez, a desert city in central Niger, and has four studio albums proper and one movie soundtrack (all on US label Sahel Sounds) under his belt, plus a live record for Third Man. He also has an interesting backstory, which has perhaps been advanced at the expense of his music: Moctar built his first guitar and taught himself to play; his early recordings became popular on Africa’s mobile MP3-sharing networks; he also wrote and starred in the first Tuareg-language film, a homage to Purple Rain that told his own life story. However, that emphasis should shift with Afrique Victime.

An exhilarating band set that mixes electric and acoustic instrumentation, it’s at once fiercely modern and as ancient as the Niger river. As with previous albums, its roots are in the country’s takamba style, which is played on the tahardent (three-stringed lute) and calabash, and is popular at weddings. But on Afrique Victime, ’70s psych and ’80s rock are defining elements, with wild solos a foil for hypnotic contemplation. It leans on the seemingly intuitive interplay between Moctar’s lead shredding – of a gutsy yet fluid kind that recalls Van Halen, Prince and fellow lefty Hendrix – and the vital pulses of his long-serving rhythm guitarist, Ahmoudou Madassane. Mikey Coltun – a musician from New York who’s played bass with Moctar for about three years and has also served in Steve Gunn’s band – produces. Songs were recorded while the group were on tour in 2019 promoting Ilana: The Creator, in various hotel rooms, apartments, backstage at venues, in Coltun’s mobile unit (Studio Moustique) and in the field in Niger, although the main tracking was done in studios in the US and Netherlands.

The album opens with “Chismiten”, a rooster’s crow and the crunch of footsteps signalling a new day before Moctar’s guitar rings out, clean, steel-tipped and sonorous. On a whooped cue, rolling drums and polyrhythmic string currents rush in and steadily accelerate, until the whole is an exultant tumble of glorious, interlocking harmonies. “Taliat” suggests a vast orchestra of guitars but its yearning choral work and see-sawing sweetness provide a breather, as does the hypnotic, handclap-punctuated “Ya Habibti”. It pays respect to Abdallah Oumbadougou, the late Nigerien guitarist who helped pioneer the Tuareg modernist style. The lyrical ebb and flow of the acoustic “Tala Tannam”, delicately cut across by Moctar’s mercurial guitar lines, is a potent reminder that West Africa is the blues’ deep crucible, while it’s impossible to listen to the mesmeric “Layla” and not think of John Lee Hooker as much as Ali Farka Touré.

The album’s showstopper, though, is the title track, seven-and-a-half intoxicating minutes of relentlessly surging rhythms, haunting vocals and muscular shredding that tips its hat to both Page and The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodríguez-López. It packs a powerful lyrical punch too, addressing the urgent need for Africans to stand up and speak out, and questioning why the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution failed to bloom across the continent. The title also speaks to Africa’s status as historically judged by the west.

“Africa is a victim of so many crimes”, sings Moctar, whose homeland may be a burgeoning democracy but is also an increasingly troubled part of the Sahel. “If we stay silent it will be the end of us/ Why is this happening?/What is the reason behind this?”

The closer is “Bismilahi Atagah”, which strikes a calmer, more dulcet note and makes it especially easy to understand why Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy asked Moctar to guest on their new Superwolves album. The acoustic fingerpicking, lullaby rhythm and his gentle, multi-tracked vocal are deceptive though – he’s calling on his god to save him from love’s torment. Those introductory footsteps reappear at the end, crunching their way into the distance. But this is the sound of advancement, not retreat. Afrique Victime may be Mdou Moctar’s sixth studio album but, in many ways, he’s just begun.

Sons Of Kemet – Black To The Future

John Lewis
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Sons Of Kemet – Black To The Future
The tuk-band is not one of the Caribbean’s more famous musical exports, but it is a relatively common sight at carnivals around Barbados, the island where Sons Of Kemet leader Shabaka Hutchings spent much of his childhood. It is a marching band featuring snare drums, bass drums and triangles, fron...

The tuk-band is not one of the Caribbean’s more famous musical exports, but it is a relatively common sight at carnivals around Barbados, the island where Sons Of Kemet leader Shabaka Hutchings spent much of his childhood. It is a marching band featuring snare drums, bass drums and triangles, fronted by one or two flutes playing military-style riffs and melodies. During festivals, tuk-bands are accompanied by dancing costumed figures – the Shaggy Bear, the Donkey Man, a man in drag called Mother Sally, and another man on stilts. What seems like a joyous, celebratory music actually has darker roots – it stems back to the establishment of plantations in the 17th century, when enslaved Africans were banned from using drums for fear they might use them to incite rebellions. So the islanders would imitate British military music, disguising ancient African rituals in a syncretic form that colonial authorities would not take offence at.

Over the last decade and four Sons Of Kemet albums, Shabaka Hutchings has taken this obscure Barbadian tradition and delved deep into its history, uncovering its subversive roots and plunging them way into the future, adding touches of dub, calypso and Afrobeat. In the hands of Hutchings, the tuk-band is a barely suppressed howl of rage, a clamorous carnival of protest. Sons Of Kemet’s last album, 2018’s Mercury-nominated Your Queen Is A Reptile, was an implicit attack on the notion of royalty, poking fun at the idea that birthright should define class and status. Now Black To The Future chimes with the spirit of the BLM movement that reached a crescendo in summer 2020, but – interestingly – the LP was done and dusted in May 2019.

“Black is tired,” sighs the poet Joshua Idehen on the final track, “Black”. “Black would like to make a statement. Black’s eyes are vacant, Black’s arms are leaden, Black’s tongue cannot taste shit.” As the backing music builds into a demented 5/8 chant, his poem gets angrier. “Black demands that no person who is trigger nervous deserves a gun, much less a badge. Black knows that one day its arms will be up, but its shadow will be reaching for something that isn’t there, but that will be enough.”

Some of the guest vocalists on this LP approach this level of militancy but, in places, Black To The Future is also poppier and more dancefloor friendly than anything Hutchings has ever released. “Hustle”, featuring a baritone-voice chant from rapper/poet Kojey Radical and sweet backing vocals from Lianne Le Havas, is a one-chord Afrobeat jam that would fit comfortably onto the BBC 1Xtra playlist. “For The Culture” is an upbeat, clattering piece of neo-soca featuring grime MC D Double E and some sweet horn harmonies.

On several tracks, like “Throughout The Madness, Stay Strong” and “In Remembrance Of Those Fallen”, Hutchings also overdubs various flutes and penny whistles to recreate the flute feel of the classic tuk-band, but here the riffs he plays are angular, chromatic, and slightly disorientating. They remind us of the parallels between the tuk-band and other related music from around the African diaspora – in particular those pennywhistle-led mento bands from Jamaica, or the African-American fife-and-drum combos from Mississippi (which sound like weirdly funky Loyalist marching bands). Effectively, Sons Of Kemet reimagines a world in which jazz might have sprung from the Caribbean rather than New Orleans. “Envision Yourself Levitating” is a remarkable example of this – a piece of freaky astral improvisation (featuring fellow tenor saxophonist Kebbi Williams) set to a mournful nyabinghi dub rhythm.

It can’t be stressed enough quite how significantly this new generation of British jazz musicians have succeeded in “de-Americanising” jazz. Trained at jazz conservatoires, they know their bebop and swing history backwards, but rarely choose to play in that vernacular. And Hutchings – who actually trained as a classical clarinet player, rather than a jazz saxophonist – is possibly the least American-sounding of the lot. He rarely bends his notes or plays “blues” scales – a staple of US jazz and R&B – instead his solos tend to use the distinctive modal scales you get in Ethiopian music. Sometimes his playing is more like a drummer or a rapper – he will blow percussive, syncopated rhythms based around one or two notes, often tonguing his reed to interlock with the hi-hats. Here his solos tend to be simple, forthright chants, using repetition. There is a curious militancy in his playing, which can be hectoring but also quite rhythmically compelling. It doesn’t demand love or affection. It increases your heart rate and forces you onto the dancefloor. And it’s taking Sons Of Kemet in a direction that is both more militant and more populist.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Peter Watts
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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
Sometimes, the only way to follow-up a best-selling critically acclaimed album is to do it all over again, only bigger. That’s the approach Crosby, Stills & Nash took in 1970 with their follow-up to May 1969’s Crosby, Stills & Nash. They enlisted Neil Young to expand the trio into a quar...

Sometimes, the only way to follow-up a best-selling critically acclaimed album is to do it all over again, only bigger. That’s the approach Crosby, Stills & Nash took in 1970 with their follow-up to May 1969’s Crosby, Stills & Nash. They enlisted Neil Young to expand the trio into a quartet and spent six months hammering out arrangements in the studio, but in most other ways they simply repeated their magic trick of combining “big personalities, pristine voices and achingly personal lyrics”, as Cameron Crowe summarises it in his liner notes. The same but bigger also describes this set, which comes either in a 4CD/1LP version or across five LPs. As well as the original album, there are 38 additional songs, many of which are previously unreleased.

These are divided into three categories, Demos, Outtakes and Alternates. They confirm two things about the sessions: firstly, that all four of the quartet were in the middle of a hot streak where songs were simply pouring out of them; and second, that Neil Young was divided from the rest of the group by more than just an ampersand. He’s always been a noncommittal presence on Déjà Vu, contributing his own two songs – “Helpless” and “Country Girl” – sharing a credit for “Everybody I Love You” with Stills, and adding the occasional guitar lick, but otherwise the junior partner. That feeling doesn’t change after exposure to this edition’s many extras, which again show Young ploughing a lone furrow. There’s a perfect “Birds” with Nash on harmony, which Young was in the process of recording for After The Gold Rush, an alternative version of “Helpless” with harmonica that has been released on Archives 1, and he adds occasional musical support to some of Stills’ compositions. But the bulk of the material comes from Crosby, Nash and especially Stills. These include early versions of several tracks that would soon appear on the trio’s own solo albums.

If Neil Young has always been elusive, Joni Mitchell has previously felt excluded. She was a ghost behind the machine of Déjà Vu, another massive talent only half-inside the tent as the inspiration for Nash’s “Our House” and the writer of “Woodstock”, which was memorably covered by Stills to close Side One. Here, delightfully, she finally has a physical presence thanks to one of two demos of “Our House”, which sees her singing a duet with Nash, giggling when he fluffs a line. It’s one of the highlights of the set, a real peek behind the corner into the soap-operatic personal lives that made Déjà Vu such a hit.

The CSNY sessions started in June 1969 with rehearsals at 3615 Shady Oak Road in Studio City, in a house that Stills had bought from Peter Tork. The trio needed an instrumentalist to fill out their live sound. John Sebastian, Steve Winwood and Mark Naftalin of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were all discussed before Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic, talked Stills into asking Young, who had walked out on Buffalo Springfield three times in two years.

The first studio session was on July 15 at Wally Heider’s in LA, with Young taking keyboard on a thrilling run through the feisty “Know You Got To Run”, which appears on this set for the first time. The song was later edited together with “Everybody We Love You” to become Déjà Vu’s closing number, “Everybody I Love You”. The next day they recorded two versions of Stills’ haunting “4 + 20”. The first take went on the finished record but the second – included here – is just as good, with a vocal that’s technically superior. Recording switched to San Francisco after CSNY’s appearance at Woodstock, with the final sessions taking place on December 28, 1969 – not quite the last day of the ’60s but close enough for those who enjoy a metaphor.

Stills was a perfectionist – that’s the main cause of his clashes with one-take Neil – so over time the band recorded multiple versions of every song. As well as alternative versions of every album track bar “Country Girl”, including a fab “Woodstock” with an earthshaking Stills vocal and a frantic, fragile “Déjà Vu”, there are numerous songs that would later appear on solo albums, future CSN records or, sometimes, disappear for good. These were often recorded as solo demos, but other members of the group are sometimes present. There’s Nash’s “Questions Why”, a fine lilting McCartney imitation in the classic Nash naïf style, which seems never to have been re-recorded, as well as an early version of “Sleep Song” that he recorded again for his 1971 solo debut, Songs For Beginners. Crosby gives us splendid early versions of “Laughing” and “Song With No Words” – two songs that he would later record for If I Could Only Remember My Name. Some of these were recorded in September for publishing demos by Crosby a few weeks before his girlfriend, Christine, died in a car crash.

Stills’ numerous contributions include the stellar “She Can’t Handle It”, which he recorded as “Church (Part Of Someone)” for Stephen Stills, but the progress of others is less easy to track such is his habit of rewriting and editing lyrics, or taking two fragments and making them into a single song. We know that “Bluebird Revisited”, for instance, later appeared on Stephen Stills 2, but a song like the organ-heavy “I’ll Be There” seems to have vanished. “30 Dollar Fine” is another Stills original that feels half-written – the vocal is unclear and the music is much more of a jam than you usually get with CSNY – but a version did turn up as “$20 Fine” on the posthumous Jimi Hendrix release Both Sides Of The Sky. Another song with a great guitar part is “Ivory Tower”, which was completely rewritten and recorded as “Little Miss Bright Eyes” by Manassas – Stills had written the original lyric about his bandmates and felt he’d been a little harsh, so took his eraser to it. There are more Stills rarities – “Same Old Song”, “Right On Rock’N’Roll” – and the musician accounts for seven of the eleven songs on the outtakes CD, making this something of a Stills mother lode.

Added to these are several completed CSN tracks, complete with the harmonies that brought them together in the first place. Nothing beats “Carry On”, which boasts one of CSN’s most miraculous harmonies. There’s a gorgeous alternative version here with a more pronounced guitar solo, but it’s the voices that compel. Even Neil Young was amazed, telling an interviewer: “There’s a new song called ‘Carry On’ that Stephen wrote,” he said. “And they do a vocal thing in the middle that is one of the best vocal things I’ve ever heard on record… It’s just incredible, man… It sounds like a choir. It’s unbelievable.”

Check out Gary Numan’s UK ‘Intruder’ tour dates for 2022

Tom Skinner
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Check out Gary Numan’s UK ‘Intruder’ tour dates for 2022
Gary Numan has announced a UK headline tour for 2022 – you can see the full schedule below. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut The synth-pop icon will hit the road next April in support of his new album Intruder, which is released this Friday (May 21). Tickets go on sale next Friday (...

Gary Numan has announced a UK headline tour for 2022 – you can see the full schedule below.

The synth-pop icon will hit the road next April in support of his new album Intruder, which is released this Friday (May 21). Tickets go on sale next Friday (May 28) at 9:30am BST – get yours here.

Kicking off in Cardiff on April 28, Numan’s Intruder Tour will also make stop-offs in Bristol, Brighton, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and other cities throughout May. A performance at London’s Wembley arena will take place on May 7, 2022.

“To say I’ve missed touring would be a colossal understatement,” Numan said in a statement. “It’s the life I chose when I was a teenager so not being able to tour the world has been very difficult.

“But now things are changing once again and the next UK tour has been announced and I am as excited as I was when all this started for me a lifetime ago. More so in fact.”

He continued: “I can’t wait to walk out onto a stage again, to hear the roar of the crowd, the ear shattering volume of the music, to be bathed in light and soak up that emotion. It’s what I’m here for.”

Fans who pre-order Numan‘s new record via his official website will be able to access a ticket pre-sale next Wednesday (May 26) at 9:30am BST.

Gary Numan will play:

Thu, April 28, 2022 – Cardiff, University Great Hall
Sat, April 30, 2022 – Bristol, O2 Academy Bristol
Sun, May 1, 2022 – Brighton Centre
Mon, May 2, 2022 – Birmingham, O2 Institute
Thu, May 5, 2022 – Bournemouth, O2 Academy Bournemouth
Fri, May 6, 2022 – Plymouth, Pavilions
Sat, May 7, 2022 – London, SSE Arena Wembley
Mon, May 9, 2022 – Edinburgh, Corn Exchange
Tue, May 10, 2022 – Glasgow, O2 Academy Glasgow
Wed, May 11, 2022 – Newcastle upon Tyne, O2 City Hall
Thu, May 12, 2022 – Leeds, O2 Academy Leeds
Sat, May 14, 2022 – Northampton, Royal and Derngate
Sun, May 15, 2022 – Norwich, UEA
Mon, May 16, 2022 – Nottingham, Rock City
Wed, May 18, 2022 – Manchester, Albert Hall
Fri, May 20, 2022 – Sheffield, O2 Academy Sheffield
Tue, May 24, 2022 – Dublin, Olympia

Mdou Moctar releases new single “Taliat”, announces US tour dates

Cillian Breathnach
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Mdou Moctar releases new single “Taliat”, announces US tour dates
Mdou Moctar has released a new single, "Taliat", and an accompanying music video ahead of the release of his second album Afrique Victime. You can watch the video below. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut Afrique Victime is Moctar’s second full-length album, and his first since signin...

Mdou Moctar has released a new single, “Taliat“, and an accompanying music video ahead of the release of his second album Afrique Victime. You can watch the video below.

Afrique Victime is Moctar’s second full-length album, and his first since signing to Matador last year. It is slated for release tomorrow (May 21).

Moctar said in a statement: “‘Taliat’ means woman. In our community, women are queens, they have a lot of power, that’s why I use the term taliat to talk about them. A woman in the Tuareg community has to be protected, but she also has to be treated as equal.”

Moctar’s bassist, Mikey Coltun said of the song’s video: “It’s a one-shot of Mdou, [myself] and [guitarist] Ahmoudou actually listening to the song in the car. If you look closely you can see Mdou singing along.”

Watch the video below.

Alongside the release of Taliat, Moctar has announced a tour of the USA, with tickets going on sale this Friday (May 21) at 10am local time. The full list of dates is below.

September

3 – Manchester, TN, Bonnaroo
5 – Durham, NC, Motorco Music Hall
7 – Baltimore, MD, Ottobar
8 – Philadelphia, PA, Johnny Brenda’s
10 ­– Brooklyn, NY, Music Hall of Williamsburg
11 – Holyoke, MA, Gateway City Arts
12 – Boston, MA, The Sinclair
14 – Pittsburgh, PA, Thunderbird Café & Music Hall
15 – Columbus, OH, Ace of Cups
17 – Chicago, IL, Lincoln Hall
18 – Minneapolis, MN, Cedar Cultural Center
20 – Denver, CO, Globe Hall
21 – Denver, CO, Globe Hall
22 – Salt Lake City, UT, Urban Lounge
23 – Boise, ID, Treefort Music Festival
24 – Seattle, WA, The Crocodile
25 – Portland, OR, Mississippi Studios
26 – Portland, OR, Mississippi Studios
28 – San Francisco, CA, The Chapel
29 – Oakland, CA, Starline

October

1 – Pioneertown, CA, Desert Daze Pre-Party
2 – Los Angeles, CA, Lodge Room

Watch: Jackson Browne enlists Phoebe Bridgers in his new “My Cleveland Heart” video

Sam Moore
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Watch: Jackson Browne enlists Phoebe Bridgers in his new “My Cleveland Heart” video
Phoebe Bridgers features in the new video from Jackson Browne for his latest song “My Cleveland Heart” – you can watch the clip below. ORDER NOW: In the July 2021 issue of Uncut: Jackson Browne on love, hope and defiance in new album Downhill From Everywhere The track is taken from Bro...

Phoebe Bridgers features in the new video from Jackson Browne for his latest song “My Cleveland Heart” – you can watch the clip below.

The track is taken from Browne’s forthcoming solo album Downhill From Everywhere, which will be released on July 23 via his own Inside Recordings.

Browne stars in the official video for “My Cleveland Heart”, which was released yesterday (May 19). The Alissa Torvinen Kouame–directed clip sees Browne undergoing robotic heart surgery in front of an audience of doctors, with Bridgers assisting in the procedure.

“I thought it was really appropriate to take out my worn-out, useless heart and hand it to Phoebe,” Browne said about the video to Rolling Stone. “Who better to hand [it] to than somebody young, strong and possibly as cynical as me?”

You can watch the unsettling video for Jackson Browne’s “My Cleveland Heart” below.

“What an honour to collaborate with Jackson,” Torvinen Kouame, who also directed Bridgers’ “I Know The End” video, said in a statement about the new Browne clip. “His creativity is inspiring, not solely in music, but in everything he puts his energy into.

“We came up with a script for the video very serendipitously, and Phoebe joining us was a wonderful surprise. The way she received Jackson’s heart and the shot of her watching from the wings… perfectly dark and poetic and Phoebe.”

The Complete Bob Dylan

Uncut
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The Complete Bob Dylan
A meticulous, left-field guide to Bob Dylan’s outstanding output since 1962. Inside: studio albums, singles, EPs, films, live albums, the Bootleg Series, deep cuts, hairstyles, books, and much more from the world of Dylan – all reviewed and ranked for your enjoyment. Warning: contains multitu...

A meticulous, left-field guide to Bob Dylan’s outstanding output since 1962. Inside: studio albums, singles, EPs, films, live albums, the Bootleg Series, deep cuts, hairstyles, books, and much more from the world of Dylan – all reviewed and ranked for your enjoyment.

Warning: contains multitudes!

Buy a copy here!

Listen: Billy Gibbons shares new single, “My Lucky Card”

Daniel Seah
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Listen: Billy Gibbons shares new single, “My Lucky Card”
Billy Gibbons has shared a new song, "My Lucky Card", from his forthcoming album Hardware – take a listen below. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut "My Lucky Card" is the third single from the ZZ Top guitarist’s upcoming third solo album, which follows 2015’s Perfectamundo and 201...

Billy Gibbons has shared a new song, “My Lucky Card“, from his forthcoming album Hardware – take a listen below.

“My Lucky Card” is the third single from the ZZ Top guitarist’s upcoming third solo album, which follows 2015’s Perfectamundo and 2018’s The Big Bad Blues. Hardware is due out 4 June via Concord.

The single was released alongside a music video directed by Harry Reese, who also shot the videos for Hardware’s first two singles, “West Coast Junkie” and “Desert High“.

The setting for the music video, Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, has hosted the likes of Paul McCartney, Lucinda Williams and Peaches. In a statement, Gibbons said the iconic location “reflects the rough-and-tumble high desert vibe that was the inspiration for the album”.

Besides Gibbons, drummer Matt Sorum (ex-Guns N’ Roses) and guitarist Austin Hanks play on Hardware.

The track listing for Hardware below:

  • My Lucky Card
  • She’s On Fire
  • More-More-More
  • Shuffle, Step & Slide
  • Vagabond Man
  • Spanish Fly
  • West Coast Junkie
  • Stackin’ Bones (featuring Larkin Poe)
  • I Was A Highway
  • S-G-L-M-B-B-R
  • Hey Baby, Que Paso
  • Desert High

John Lennon and Yoko Ono documentary ’24 Hours…’ is now available to stream

Tom Skinner
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John Lennon and Yoko Ono documentary ’24 Hours…’ is now available to stream
The mini-documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, titled 24 Hours: The World of John and Yoko, is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video US. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut The 30-minute film is available to watch in full for the first time since its initial release on the ...

The mini-documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, titled 24 Hours: The World of John and Yoko, is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video US.

The 30-minute film is available to watch in full for the first time since its initial release on the BBC back in 1969 through Amazon’s Coda Collection.

“Last seen more than 50 years ago, and having aired just once on TV, this intimate documentary – captured over a five-day period – shows a day in the life of John and Yoko while Lennon was still a member of The Beatles, controversies raged and activism became a central concern in the couple’s everyday reality,” an official description reads.

24 Hours… was directed by Paul Morrison and delves into Lennon and Ono’s creative process, with filming having taken place at London’s Abbey Road Studios, Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park estate and the HQ of Apple Records.

You can watch the full film here (a subscription or free trial is required).

Journalist Alan Light provided a new editorial to accompany the new release of 24 Hours: The World of John and Yoko, in which he describes the documentary as “a fascinating snapshot of a hugely transitional moment for John and Yoko” (via Rolling Stone).

“[It is] a portrait of two energised and inspired artist-activists, with a strong sense of purpose and a fearless attitude, even in the face of resistance and ridicule.”

Meanwhile, John Lennon’s debut solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was reissued for a new ‘Ultimate Collection’ box set last month. A special edition of Tim’s Twitter Listening Party also looked back on the 1970 record, with Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon and original Plastic Ono Band member Klaus Voormann among participating guests.

Send us your questions for Rodney Crowell

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Rodney Crowell
Last week, Texan singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell unveiled his powerful new single, "Something Has To Change". It's a pretty unequivocal statement from a songwriter who's never felt bound by the sentimental nostalgia of the country music establishment, on his lifelong mission to present the truth as...

Last week, Texan singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell unveiled his powerful new single, “Something Has To Change”. It’s a pretty unequivocal statement from a songwriter who’s never felt bound by the sentimental nostalgia of the country music establishment, on his lifelong mission to present the truth as he sees it.

Cutting his teeth in the honky-tonk bars of Houston, Crowell honed his songwriting chops as part of Guy Clark’s Nashville symposium, alongside the likes of Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle.

He caught his break when Emmylou Harris recorded his song “Bluebird Wine” before recruiting him to join her ‘Hot Band’. His songs were covered by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, and he helped launch the career of his then-wife Rosanne Cash in the early ’80s.

But it wasn’t until 1988’s Diamonds & Dirt that Crowell broke through as an artist in his own right, with all five of its singles hitting No 1 on the Billboard country charts.

Since then, Crowell has established himself as a godfather of Americana, reuniting with Harris for a pair of award-winning duet albums in the 2010s and dispensing wisdom across numerous solo records for the likes of Yep Roc, New West and more recently his own RC1 Records.

And he’s poised to dispense some more wisdom as he submits to interrogation by you, the Uncut readers, for our latest Audience With interview! Send you questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by Friday (May 26) and Rodney will answer the best ones in the next issue of Uncut.

REM to reissue 1981 debut single, “Radio Free Europe”

Sam Richards
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REM to reissue 1981 debut single, “Radio Free Europe”
To kick off their 40th anniversary celebrations, REM will reissue their 1981 debut single "Radio Free Europe" on 7" vinyl on July 23. Although "Radio Free Europe" was later re-recorded for REM's 1983 debut album Murmur and released as its lead-off single, this particular mix has not been availabl...

To kick off their 40th anniversary celebrations, REM will reissue their 1981 debut single “Radio Free Europe” on 7″ vinyl on July 23.

Although “Radio Free Europe” was later re-recorded for REM’s 1983 debut album Murmur and released as its lead-off single, this particular mix has not been available since its release on Hib-Tone 40 years ago.

The reissued single will be accompanied by a reproduction of REM’s 1981 three-song demo, Cassette Set, limited to 1500 copies worldwide.

Cassette Set features the songs “Sitting Still”, “White Tornado” and “Radio Free Europe”, recorded at Mitch Easter’s Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, NC – essentially his parents’ converted garage – on April 15, 1981, and has never been reissued until now.

Cassette Set’s version of “Radio Free Europe” did make it onto the REM compilations Eponymous and And I Feel Fine…The Best of The IRS Years 1982-1987, mislabelled as the ‘Hib-Tone Version’ – whereas the actual Hib-Tone version, remixed by Jonny Hibbert, hasn’t been available since that 7″ single release in 1981 – copies of which now sell for upwards of £100.

You can pre-order “Radio Free Europe” and Cassette Set here. More special REM 40th anniversary releases will be announced in due course.

Inside Uncut’s July 2021 issue – Prince, George Harrison, Jackson Browne, Liz Phair and more

Michael Bonner
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Inside Uncut’s July 2021 issue – Prince, George Harrison, Jackson Browne, Liz Phair and more
A quick note of thanks to everyone who’s been in touch about last month’s Bobfest – we’ve printed some of your letters further in this month's Feedback pages. Dylan, of course, is the owner of rock’s pre-eminent archive and for this issue’s cover story we have tried to work out what stil...

A quick note of thanks to everyone who’s been in touch about last month’s Bobfest – we’ve printed some of your letters further in this month’s Feedback pages. Dylan, of course, is the owner of rock’s pre-eminent archive and for this issue’s cover story we have tried to work out what still languishes in another legendary music vault – this one located beneath a certain Paisley Park complex in the suburbs of Chanhassen, Minnesota.

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The work done by Uncut’s crack team of archaeologists has unearthed numerous fresh insights and revelations that, combined, present a parallel history of Prince’s career – from his earliest days in Minneapolis up to the remarkable run of secret gigs he played in the UK during 2014. You will discover, among many eye-opening disclosures, the startling existence of symbol-branded toilet paper, his searching questions regarding late-’80s British indie bands and the truth about his formidable tea-making skills.

Elsewhere, please enjoy Klaus Voormann’s moving account of his long, fruitful friendship with George Harrison – who knew about the Fish Fingers? – as well as new interviews with Jackson Browne, Liz Phair, Lambchop, Bobby Gillespie, Kurt Vile, Tracey Thorn, Ann Peebles, Dot Allison and The Orb. There are also definitive reviews of new albums from Faye Webster, John Grant, BLK JKS, Red River Dialect’s David John Morris and Lucy Dacus, as well as reissues from the wonderful Spirits Rejoice, The Yardbirds and Joni Mitchell.

As you might have gathered, there’s a lot going on this issue. As ever, please let us know what you think, either over on the Uncut Forum or by writing to letters@www.uncut.co.uk.

Take care.

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Uncut – July 2021

Uncut
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Uncut – July 2021
CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR Prince, Liz Phair, Bobby Gillespie, George Harrison, Lambchop, Ann Peebles, Kurt Vile, Jackson Browne, Gary Bartz, Tracey Thorn, Faye Webster, BLK JKS, The Orb and Joni Mitchell all feature in the new Uncut, dated July 2021 and in ...

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR

Prince, Liz Phair, Bobby Gillespie, George Harrison, Lambchop, Ann Peebles, Kurt Vile, Jackson Browne, Gary Bartz, Tracey Thorn, Faye Webster, BLK JKS, The Orb and Joni Mitchell all feature in the new Uncut, dated July 2021 and in UK shops from May 20 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.

PRINCE: For decades, his vaults have been rock’n’roll’s own El Dorado – a mythical place filled with untold treasures. We carry out an extensive archaeological survey into this legendary archive and discover – via revelatory eyewitness accounts from 3rdeyegirl, Pepé Willie, Dez Dickerson, Shelby Johnson, Matt Thorne and Paisley Park Records’ manager Alan Leeds – a trove of lost albums, mysterious side-projects and secret gigs that amount to an entire parallel history stretching far back to his earliest days in Minneapolis.

OUR FREE CD! DIAMONDS & PEARLS: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the month’s releases, including songs by Liz Phair, Lambchop, Faye Webster, Lucy Dacus, Loscil, Billy F Gibbons, Anthony Joseph, Rose City Band and more.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

LIZ PHAIR: After an 11-year absence, she has returned to reclaim her title of fearless songwriting superstar. But how has a song about Lou Reed, a country-rap crossover hit and her own trailblazing debut helped prepare her to re-enter the fray? “I’ve had to pick myself up from being dead many times…”

BOBBY GILLESPIE: 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. But I don’t know if that’s the kind of music I want to keep on making.”

LAMBCHOP: The pandemic has brought back into focus the qualities that inspired Kurt Wagner to make music in the first place. But as a new album ushers in yet another new era for his band, there’s no danger of him dwelling on his many former glories. “Hopefully, I can live up to the future…”

JACKSON BROWNE: From Greenwich Village to LA’s Troubadour and beyond, Jackson Browne has always written songs about love, hope and defiance – but with his new album Downhill From Everywhere these themes have taken on a bold, new urgency. “I’ve always been connected with people who are trying to make things better…”

GEORGE HARRISON: He was a “cocky little boy” of 17 when he met Klaus Voormann during The Beatles’ formative residencies in Hamburg. They remained close confidants and Voormann enjoyed a ringside seat – as friend, flatmate and collaborator – during the Fabs’ imperial phase and, later, Harrison’s own blossoming solo career. Uncut listens as Voormann recalls tales involving fish finger diets, late-night phone calls from “Herr Schnitzel” and the making of George’s very own masterpiece…

KURT VILE: On his role in a brand new tribute to The Velvet Underground. “It was powerful as hell…”

TRACEY THORN: The Everything But The Girl star answers your questions on the New Romantics, working with Paul Weller and how her knitting is going…

ANN PEEBLES: The making of “I Can’t Stand The Rain”.

GARY BARTZ: Album by album with the lifelong sax explorer.

FAYE WEBSTER: New album I Think I’m Funny haha is reviewed at length, while the wunderkind sheds light on her favourite guitar, fake fadeouts and the beauty of Atlanta.

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In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Lucy Dacus, BLK JKS, John Grant, Faye Webster, Billy F Gibbons, Vincent Neil Emerson, David John Morris, Anthony Joseph, and more, and archival releases from Spirits Rejoice, Joni Mitchell, The Yardbirds, Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band, Squarepusher and others. We catch Tame Impala and Moses Boyd live online; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are First Cow, In The Earth, 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything and My Name Is Lopez; while in books there’s Buzzcocks, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers and Kristin Hersh.

Our front section, meanwhile, features Jim Morrison, Kurt Vile, Dot Allison and Cedric Burnside while, at the end of the magazine, The Orb’s Alex Paterson reveals the records that have soundtracked his life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

Paul McCartney documentary series ‘McCartney 3,2,1’ with Rick Rubin coming to Hulu

Ella Kemp
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Paul McCartney documentary series ‘McCartney 3,2,1’ with Rick Rubin coming to Hulu
Paul McCartney has teamed up with Rick Rubin for a new documentary series on Hulu. McCartney 3, 2, 1 will explore McCartney's musical history as a former Beatle, in a rare one-on-one interview with Rubin. The six-episode series will span McCartney's work with The Beatles and Wings as well as ...

Paul McCartney has teamed up with Rick Rubin for a new documentary series on Hulu.

McCartney 3, 2, 1 will explore McCartney‘s musical history as a former Beatle, in a rare one-on-one interview with Rubin.

The six-episode series will span McCartney‘s work with The Beatles and Wings as well as his 50-plus years as a solo artist. It is set to debut on Hulu on July 16.

“Never before have fans had the opportunity to hear Paul McCartney share, in such expansive, celebratory detail, the experience of creating his life’s work – more than 50 years of culture-defining music,” said Craig Erwich, president, Hulu Originals and ABC Entertainment, in a statement obtained by Deadline.

He continued: “To be an observer as Paul and Rick Rubin deconstruct how some of the biggest hits in music history came to be is truly enlightening. It is an honour that Paul chose to return to Hulu to share this one-of-a-kind series.”

McCartney 3, 2, 1 was directed by Zachary Heinzerling, while both McCartney and Rubin are among the executive producers on the project.

McCartney released his most recent solo album McCartney III last December, and released a reworking of it alongside an array of collaborators last month, as McCartney III: Imagined.

St Vincent – Daddy’s Home

Laura Barton
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St Vincent – Daddy’s Home
At last year’s Sundance, Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein premiered a mockumentary they named The Nowhere Inn. Playing augmented versions of themselves, the film cast Brownstein as a director trying to make a documentary that will reconcile Clark’s day-to-day self with her untouchable onstage p...

At last year’s Sundance, Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein premiered a mockumentary they named The Nowhere Inn. Playing augmented versions of themselves, the film cast Brownstein as a director trying to make a documentary that will reconcile Clark’s day-to-day self with her untouchable onstage persona, St Vincent. When the quotidian proves a little humdrum, the Clark character decides to heighten her St Vincentness for the sake of the movie, growing ever more spectacular, concocted and elusive. “I know who I am,” she notes. “What does it matter if anyone else does?”

The unknowability of St Vincent has provided much of her intrigue and also her appeal over the course of five albums (and one collaboration with David Byrne). Yes, there were Grammys, accolades, albums of the year, but the essential question of who really lay beneath the veneer has hovered over much of her career. Accordingly, the vocabulary used to describe Clark and her music has often suggested cleverness rather than emotional heft: arch, meta, provocative; complex, mischievous, ambitious. Critics described her work as if viewed behind glass, and at a distance.

The great surprise of Clark’s sixth album, Daddy’s Home, is its sense of proximity. These are songs that, long after first listen, you find under your fingernails, and scenting your jacket. “Gritty. Grimy. Sleazy,” as she puts it, their lyrics filled with characters wearing “last night’s heels on the morning train,” or turning up “at the holiday party red wine-lipped a little early,” carrying a Gucci purse like “a pharmacy.”

Clark has told how these songs were inspired by “music made in New York between 1971-1975” – a specificity of both time-frame and geography that might seem little more than an exercise in genre-dabbling, were the reason for the inspiration not so devastating.

Two winters ago her father was released from prison, having served time for his part in a multi-million-dollar stock manipulation scheme. Clark began writing this new collection of songs at that time, “closing a loop on a journey that began with his incarceration in 2010.” Her father’s imprisonment and subsequent release had, she explained, led her back to the vinyl he introduced her to in childhood. Records she believes she has “probably listened to more than any other music” in her entire life.

At points, Daddy’s Home can sound like a distant turn through a long-ago radio dial – half-heard flickers of half-remembered songs: “Pay Your Way In Pain”’s echoes of Bowie’s “Fame”, for instance, while “My Baby Wants a Baby” leans heavily on Sheena Easton’s 1980 release “9-5 (Morning Train)”. Throughout, the vocals of Lynne Fiddmont and Kenya Hathaway bob up like Thunderthighs backing Lou Reed.

The effect is not so much musical impersonation, but rather something more immersive; a plunge into the singer’s personal memory bank, a tangible, sensuous experience. The melding of saxophone, synths, Wurlitzer, horns, the extraordinary angles of Clark’s guitar, the stretch and snap of her voice, bring a sense of city heat: they press against your skin and wind round your legs, sultry and thirsty and fevered. Between them, three ‘Humming Interludes’ hang like a haze.

Much of Masseduction felt like a lost, lustful examination of inner emptiness – “the void is back and I’m blinking” as she memorably put it on “Hang On Me”. Daddy’s Home suggests a richer inner life, charged with internal desires: “Where can you run when the outlaw’s inside you?” she asks on the title track. “I can’t live in
the dream,” she notes elsewhere. “The dream lives in me.”

There are a lot of trapped people on this record, whether that is the incarcerated (the jelly-legged cabaret of the title track addresses her father’s jail time head-on), or those wanting to flee from a relationship (“You make a home I run away and the story starts again,” she sings on “My Baby Wants A Baby”), or the caged bird of “Candy Darling”. Others still explore all the ways we try to set ourselves free: pharmaceuticals, liquor, crashed cars, bodega roses, suicidal ideation. The result is something close, dark and airless.

And yet there is a deep and buoyant beauty here too: the combination of Clark’s voice, feathered and sweet, against surges of brass on “…At The Holiday Party”, for instance. The drowsy, inebriated drift of “Live In The Dream”. And throughout, the warm, buffering presence of Fiddmont and Hathaway. On previous records, Clark’s tales were told in a manner that was brittle and upright and shiny; here she sounds to have loosened her grip: the edges are softer, the layers are denser, the mood a little more mañana.

It would be wrong to mistake sonic warmth for knowability. Wrong, too, to suppose that these songs are any less rigidly devised and constructed. And yet, listening to Daddy’s Home brings a sense of exhalation, a filling out, an openness, that is as unexpected as it is wonderful. Yes she’s still arch and meta and provocative, still complex and mischievous and ambitious. But on this record, Annie Clark seems to stand just a little closer.

Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to Creedence Clearwater Revival

John Robinson
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Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to Creedence Clearwater Revival
Buy the Ultimate Music Guide to Creedence Clearwater Revival now! When I first picked up a copy of Willy & The Poor Boys in the 1980s, I’m not sure whether I ever got much further than “Fortunate Son”. The riff, the righteous self-definition, the rhythm driving the song forwards. It was exc...

Buy the Ultimate Music Guide to Creedence Clearwater Revival now!

When I first picked up a copy of Willy & The Poor Boys in the 1980s, I’m not sure whether I ever got much further than “Fortunate Son”. The riff, the righteous self-definition, the rhythm driving the song forwards. It was excellent, and it seemed – to someone then far too uptight to choogle – to give me all I needed to hear.

Over 30 years later, it’s not unreasonable to think John Fogerty didn’t need to get much beyond “Fortunate Son” either. It forms the title of his autobiography, of course, and was one of the key battlegrounds on which his recent conflict with the former president of the United States was fought. It’s an urgent and passionate rock ‘n’ roll record, but also a faintly misleading one – it might sound raw, but it was anything but thrown together. Fogerty didn’t just write the songs: he gave out the parts, woodshedded his band, and also produced the records.

As you’ll discover over these 124 pages of new and archival writing about Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival, this approach was the fuel for an 18 month hot streak in which many of his Creedence classics – “Bad Moon Rising”, “Proud Mary”, “Lodi”… the Dude-pleasing list goes on – were written. As contemporary reporters observe in these pages with a mixture of puzzlement and delight (“Bayou Beat” is one attempted definition of what the band are up to), the group became, in a world struggling to accustom themselves to their absence, a band as big as The Beatles were. As one contemporary observer has it in these pages: the place where The Beatles were trying to get back to is where Creedence started out.

How simple it all sounds. Fogerty’s relationship to his music, however, has proved a complex and conflicted one. As Creedence records sold in their millions, he jostled with other band members about his tight control of the music, and faced tough questions about his management of the group. His brother left the band. Having created joyful music, Fogerty began to question the terms he and the band were working under, the whole enterprise becoming intractably linked to poisonous business disagreements. After creating a one man bluegrass band, Fogerty effectively retired from music, not emerging until the triumphant Centrefield album in 1985.

His has been a unique journey, marked by periods of intense activity followed by long retreats and deep reflection on his work. In recent years, he has been revitalised by wife Julie and his family, which has lately culminated in his role as a rock Lord of Lockdown, and great Fogerty’s Factory record in which he revisits some of his Creedence classics in the company of his “family band”. His latest release, “Weeping In The Promised Land”, meanwhile, finds a blue collar American hero calling the powerful to account. As we speak, he is restless again, hard at work on preparing a new album.

Come with us, as we hitch a ride to the end of the highway.

The Ultimate Music Guide to Creedence Clearwater Revival is in shops now, or you can buy it directly from us by clicking here – with free P&P for the UK.

Paul Weller – Fat Pop (Volume 1)

Pete Paphides
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Paul Weller – Fat Pop (Volume 1)
Now into his seventh decade, Paul Weller has resisted any and all invitations to write his memoir. At the last count six biographies bearing his name have been published, but ever the modernist, Weller views his creative past rather like a motorist might look in the rear-view mirror – foot on the ...

Now into his seventh decade, Paul Weller has resisted any and all invitations to write his memoir. At the last count six biographies bearing his name have been published, but ever the modernist, Weller views his creative past rather like a motorist might look in the rear-view mirror – foot on the pedal, in constant forward motion.

However, for anyone seeking a set text to lead us to the existential essence of Wellerworld, there is one book that will get you further than the others. Published in 2007, Suburban 100 saw Weller select his favourite lyrics spanning his time with The Jam, plus The Style Council and his solo years. Included almost as footnotes at the bottom of every lyric were quotes from Weller himself, shedding light on the inspirations, circumstances and intentions that helped give life to modern standards “That’s Entertainment”, “Shout To The Top” and “Wild Wood”.

Let’s look at what Weller has to say about The Jam’s second No 1 single “Start!”: “I was thinking about the power of music and the power of a pop song, how two or three minutes could say so much to so many. And what’s it always meant to me. I was stripping words back to the bare minimum at the time, just getting to the point. Pop music, for want of a better term, is the only art form that can communicate directly and emotionally on that level.”

It almost certainly wouldn’t have occurred to Weller as he alighted upon the title of his new album that 40 years had elapsed since “Start!”; a proper modernist doesn’t dwell too long on these things. But the rest of us are not bound by those rules. And so it’s oddly touching to see the title track on his 16th solo album worshipping at the same thematic altar as its distant predecessor, albeit with a lolloping funk gate, the occasional smoke plume of woodwind and garnish of G-funk keyboard, with space between those constituent parts for Weller to navigate a familiar line of inquiry: “Who raised the game when the game was poor/And sent our heads in search of more/Made you question all you’d learnt before?/Ah, Fat – Pop!”

The existence of Fat Pop is proof that music can act as a lifeline even in the most turbulent of times. Had the world not ground to a halt in 2020, much of Weller’s year would have been spent promoting and touring On Sunset, its acclaimed predecessor. For the proprietor of Black Barn Studios, set in the Surrey countryside, not far from the Woking streets of his childhood, here was a chance to maintain his momentum – and to have fun in a world which, at times, seemed bereft of it. It’s there from the outset. Vocally and lyrically, “Cosmic Fringes” dips from the same inkwell as a young Ray Davies, refracted through a bolshy persona that recalls recent Baxter Dury albums. Over a krautrock groove, Weller recasts himself as a self-styled online warrior, omnipotent in front of his screen – “Stumble to the fridge/And back to bed again” – but impotent beyond the home he never leaves.

In the tradition of previous opening tracks “Green” (Sonik Kicks) and “Mirror Ball” (On Sunset), as well as the title track to Wake Up The Nation, you suspect “Cosmic Fringes” is there to shake up expectations, ruffle a few feather cuts. For all of that, though, what sits at the heart of the record is a cluster of songs that, for all their experimental flourishes, draw deepest and most audibly on Weller’s lifelong love of soul music. Turning in his most prominent guest vocal since Kate Bush asked him to help her on her 2011 song “Wild Man”, that’s sometime Amen Corner legend Andy Fairweather Low trading lines with Weller on “Testify”. If Curtis Mayfield or Jon Lucien were still around, it’s no great stretch to imagine them assisting on “That Pleasure” – a sun-soaked call to love that feels like a sublime companion piece to a handful of cosmic soul invocations from the Modfather’s canon, most notably On Sunset’s “Baptiste” and Wake Up The Nation’s “Aim High”.

It’s in this musical and emotional postcode that most of Fat Pop’s most stellar moments are to be found. In the days of The Jam and The Style Council, when Weller wanted to find a means of imparting spiritual uplift with gospel directness, he had to borrow songs by other singers – “Move On Up”, “Promised Land” – to do it. Not any more. “Can see the good things in your life?” he asks on “Cobweb / Connections”, as a sweet holding pattern of acoustic downstrokes and handclaps is blown into the blue by a chorus that beseeches its audience to revel in the miracle of their own consciousness. On “In Better Times”, he’s the paternal confidant, trying to make his own experiences meaningful to a lost young soul whose own lack of them has cast them adrift: “What you need is to see/It’s OK to be yourself/And that with belief/The world will do the rest.” He gets to the final verse without shedding a tear. You might not.

Would the teenage Weller have baulked at the sunny universality that beams out from so much of Fat Pop? Possibly, but then so would many of his fans in their younger years. The sense that these are truths earned merely by turning up to the job of being alive on the bad days as well as the good is the heat source of so many of Fat Pop’s greatest moments. To listen to “Glad Times” is to be reminded in an instant that he’s long since found the expressive tools to become the thing he once admired from afar. Listen to the way Weller sings, “We go for days without a word/Without a kiss/Both looking for something that we missed”, and it’s no stretch to imagine Bobby Womack inhabiting the same role, urging his lover to stay strong in the turbulent now so that they can be together later, when better days ensue. The regretful self-interrogations of “Failed” are measured out over a kinetic chug that calls to mind JJ Cale. There’s a palpable ache at play here that echoes the mood of the Wild Wood album: “If everything was different now/How different would I be?/If I could change one thing around/Would that pattern still be complete?”

The Weller of 2021 is happy to mainline his inspirations but stops short of being in thrall to them. To understand how he does that, note the celestial rush of strings that eddies around Weller’s vocals on “Glad Times” and “That Pleasure”. Both arrangements by fêted electronic expeditionary Hannah Peel confer upon these songs a sense of wonder that propels them beyond their constituent parts. If Weller likes your new record, you’ll soon know about it because there’s every chance he’ll invite you to do something on his. If you’re listening to the album’s second song, “True”, for the first time, you’re likely also receiving your introduction to Lia Metcalfe of Liverpool trio The Mysterines. That’s Weller’s daughter Leah on “Shades Of Blue”, who, with her own solo debut out shortly, seems to have been as productive as her dad during lockdown.

And here, as with every album since Wake Up The Nation, is engineer and co-producer Jan “Stan” Kybert. As resident de-clutterer of Weller’s sound-world of some 10 years’ standing, it seems to be Kybert’s presence that allows Weller to blur the boundary between experimentalism and enthusiasm without losing sight of the ultimate objective: to make something that scratches the same itch that first propelled him and his audience into a record shop. This is why he’ll never make the big legacy album or reform his previous bands. To keep that hunger alive, you need to feed it with new inspirations. What you can hear on Fat Pop is the reciprocation of that care. As some promising young songwriter once put it, “What you give is what you get”. That was the theory – 41 years later, here’s the proof.

Watch a trailer for Edgar Wright’s Sparks documentary

Sam Richards
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Watch a trailer for Edgar Wright’s Sparks documentary
Edgar Wright's documentary film The Sparks Brothers will premiere in the UK at Sundance Film Festival: London on July 29, before screening in selected cinemas across the country the following day. Watch the official trailer below, featuring testimonies from the likes of Beck, Flea, Jane Wiedlin, ...

Edgar Wright’s documentary film The Sparks Brothers will premiere in the UK at Sundance Film Festival: London on July 29, before screening in selected cinemas across the country the following day.

Watch the official trailer below, featuring testimonies from the likes of Beck, Flea, Jane Wiedlin, Thurston Moore and Todd Rundgren:

According to a press release, The Sparks Brothers unearths “many seldom-seen, or never-seen treasures, from childhood home movies to a Mother’s Day card written by Russell, to a glimpse of the Maels in the audience at The Big TNT Show in 1966, to Ron falling off his stool during the recording of ‘Something For The Girl With Everything.'”

Manic Street Preachers announce new album, The Ultra Vivid Lament

Sam Richards
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Manic Street Preachers announce new album, The Ultra Vivid Lament
Manic Street Preachers have announced that their new album, The Ultra Vivid Lament, will be released by Columbia/Sony on September 3. Listen to lead single "Orwellian" below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smImSentyaI According to the band, “The track is about the battle to claim meaning...

Manic Street Preachers have announced that their new album, The Ultra Vivid Lament, will be released by Columbia/Sony on September 3.

Listen to lead single “Orwellian” below:

According to the band, “The track is about the battle to claim meaning, the erasing of context within debate, the overriding sense of factional conflict driven by digital platforms leading to a perpetual state of culture war.”

The Ultra Vivid Lament was recorded over winter 2020/21 at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth and the bands’ own Door To The River studio in Newport with longtime collaborator Dave Eringa. It features two guest vocalists: Julia Cumming (Sunflower Bean) on “The Secret He Had Missed” and Mark Lanegan on “Blank Diary Entry”.

Anyone who pre-orders The Ultra Vivid Lament from the official Manic Street Preachers store will gain access to the pre-sale for the band’s upcoming tour – dates below. Tickets go on general sale on Friday May 21 at 10am.

New Dates
26 September, Newcastle, City Hall
28 September, Edinburgh, Usher Hall
29 September, Dundee, Caird Hall
1 October, Stoke On-Trent, Victoria Hall
2 October, Manchester, Apollo
4 October, York, Barbican
5 October, Glasgow, Barrowlands
7 October, Leeds, Academy
8 October, Portsmouth, Guildhall
10 October, Bournemouth, Academy
11 October, Cambridge, Corn Exchange
13 October, Bath, Forum
14 October, Bristol, Dome
3 December, London, Wembley Arena

Previously Announced
16 July, Cardiff, Arena (NHS workers show)
17 July, Cardiff, Arena (NHS public show)
30 July, Pikehall, Y Not Festival
7 August, Linlithgow, Party At The Palace
29 August, Alcester, Camper Calling Music Festival
10 September, Halifax, Live at Piece Hall
18 September, Jersey, Electric Park Festival

Stephen Stills on CSNY: “We were all quite full of ourselves”

Peter Watts
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Stephen Stills on CSNY: “We were all quite full of ourselves”
With CSNY's Déjà Vu reissue on sale any day now, here's an expanded version of the interview with Stephen Stills that appears in the June 2021 issue of Uncut. “Déjà Vu had the most expensive album cover in the history of album covers,” Stills reveals to Peter Watts. “And that was all my fa...

With CSNY’s Déjà Vu reissue on sale any day now, here’s an expanded version of the interview with Stephen Stills that appears in the June 2021 issue of Uncut. “Déjà Vu had the most expensive album cover in the history of album covers,” Stills reveals to Peter Watts. “And that was all my fault!”

Hi Stephen, are you doing?
I am just coming out of hibernation. I got my second shot yesterday and my hair didn’t fall out so I’m still in the game. It’s been like an extended sabbatical. The initial stress lifted gradually as I realised I was comfortable and I had a good safe house, and I just switched off. It was great actually, I got a bit of perspective on things. I live in the middle of LA in the Hollywood Hills between Sunset and Ventura, a bit over from Laurel Canyon. I like it here.

How are things in the US?
It all went nuts over here for a while. I hope you guys are doing well over there. Being English, you have a bit more discipline. I lived in London and then I bought a house in Surrey and I loved it. You do rather well with your eccentrics. You let people live. It’s true, right back to the Chelsea Arts Club.

Have you been making any music in hibernation?
I have got a working arrangement with my bass player, Kevin McCormick, and we have been plonking out a few songs. I’ve been recording because I have everything I had in the 70s in the studio right here in my house.

Enough for an album?
No, the older you get the slower the come. But eventually. Right now it is pretty raw. The vocals are good and the playing is good for the most part, though there have been instances where I get to the solo and I completely forget how to play the guitar. It’s frightening actually. So I probably have about six, nearly an album, we’ll see. I had to stop myself because they were all starting to sound like limericks, talking blues and all topical and all concerning King Me – Trump. I had to wait for that to die down. But I need to get some distance on it. When I am ready I will put them down but I have to make sure the lyric police shows up. It’s like there’s the vomit draft and then you get some discipline and try to clean it up. Sometimes they fall out fully formed but quite often there’s a bit of a rewrite.

Has the Déjà Vu reissue brought back a lot of memories?
I was just reading some of the press from back then and it was a lot of bollocks. We had all come to think quite a lot of ourselves. The bless of fame was wearing off. Some people get famous and the more famous they get the smarter they think they are and they know everything about everything – that was rampant among us, but judging by what I’ve been reading in the press of the time everybody was doing a great job of covering up just how prickly it was. We talked everything to death and that would take hours. It was the adjustment to working with Neil. For myself, I was already in the process of moving and had one foot in Europe. I was ready to make an escape to find new mates to pal around with, to discover England – freshly mowed grass and lager and guineas and all the usual stuff. That was great and a tremendous load off my mind.

How did Neil change the dynamic?
Neil was one of those who wanted us to sing it and play it at the same time and be done, and the first time you get it right – that’s the take. I like a bit more polish so I’m not actually that fond of these extra tracks in the reissue. I was thinking about this last night and for me it’s like seeing the mannequins undressed in the shop window. Why do you want to put these out there even though they sound great?

Isn’t there a raw honesty to them?
Yeah, if you say so. For me it sounds like we’d just got the words correctly in the right order. Some of it is good. It was odd. I had a knee replacement last year so I was flat on my back while these were being collected and a bit distracted. They sent me MP3 files that sounded like rancid shit, the worst car radio on an AM setting. That was very hard for me to listen so I didn’t realise they had taken such a deep dive into my vault. They went on this excursion, it was like this archaeological dig, so when the final set finally turned up I was, “Wait, what’s all this?” Neil has always been the smartest one of us, he gave us three songs and kept the rest. He’s now put together his own archive over the years, and I found that quite clever actually. It’s what I was supposed to be doing but with one thing or another it went out the way. So I have mixed feelings. I’ve often got my foot stuck in my mouth so I don’t want to make too much of it. But it’s nice to remember that time and this is very reflective of it.

Fans seem to always want more.
Well, they think they do.

Neil seems to release everything.
He releases everything in huge batches. I always thought it was excessive but he seems to do it very well. I’m happy for him and look forward to be playing with him now I am free to mix and mingle.

You were all writing so many songs in this era.
I know. It was a ridiculous amount. I don’t recall much argument about which tracks we agreed to use on Déjà Vu. I basically chose to absent myself until they made up my mind, but I knew which ones of mine I wanted to use and I couldn’t control anything else. The secret was to get the best ones and then stop.

Did you ever discuss making it a double album?
I don’t think we discussed making Déjà Vu a double. I think everybody had one foot in their solo project. I was planning mine and it turned out great because I could quickly differentiate between what was CSNY and what was solo. A lot of the stuff that’s on this record was recorded in the UK, and that’s where I recorded my first and part of my second solo albums.

How do you differentiate between solo and CSNY?
Well, it’s if it warrants harmony. Simple as that. It was e-harmony.com that brought us together.

Do any of the songs bring back particular memories?
When we first arrived in San Francisco, we went down to Wally Heider’s in the Tenderloin which is sort of like your East End. Graham and I quickly realised we didn’t have an opener, so we had this intense conversation. We were staying in this horrid motel and that’s where the lightning struck and I wrote “Carry On”. I played that for Graham the next day and said “Will that do?” and he was very happy. We were quite keen at the beginning of these sessions but then it seemed to drag on and on.

That song has an amazing harmony – did you write that?
I didn’t particularly know it was going to be those particular notes. That’s what we relied on Crosby for. He always came up with that stuff. As an aside, I am really happy that he got If I Could Only Remember My Name re-released because that is a great album.

You were all about to record great solo albums – were you holding stuff back from CSNY?
Not that I necessarily recall. There were things in pieces and you’d think, well that sounds more like a solo bit. It was logical choices like that rather than gaming it.

Did Neil offer you anything that appeared on After The Goldrush?
I’m not sure. I don’t recall him offering anything from that album which we turned down. Not that I recall, anyway. I’m not being evasive, this was 50 years ago and in the clouds of time….

Absolutely. Give me an idea of the working relationships.
For “Déjà Vu”, David insisted he could make the transition from the beginning into the really slow dirgy part, but we said just get the right one and we’ll cut it together. He kept trying and 100 takes later or something absurd, we finally heard one that worked after we’d basically exhausted him. It was close to right, but we’d heard the perfect first part a couple of takes before and the second part he’d just recorded picked up nicely, so we said, “That was great David, go home.” The minute he left the building we took it apart with razor blades and cut it together. The next day we said, “Do you like your car, we had it painted?” He surrendered once he heard it but there was a tension-filled few hours there.

What do you remember of your own out-takes that feature here?
There’s one track on here that everybody says I played all the parts, but it sounds to me like it’s all of us together. That’s the song “Ivory Tower”. It was eventually released under a different name with Manassas. I recorded it four or five times, this is the second one. Then I stepped back and thought the lyrics were kind of mean so I lightened up again and released it under the title “Little Miss Bright Eyes”. That song was originally about all of us. We were all quite full of ourselves and it was that teenage angst at almost 30.

David had lost Christine [Hinton] at this point – what do you remember about that?
He put all the energy into making the record but he was grieving mightily.

Would you have treated David differently now?
Shoulda woulda coulda – I dunno. I don’t think like that.

Was Joni Mitchell ever around during the sessions?
Joni wasn’t around but we cut “Woodstock”. I went and played her my arrangement and asked for her permission. We were isolating ourselves in the tradition of all self-indulgent rock bands, lock the door so we could do whatever the fuck we wanted. I played her my version of “Woodstock” and years later I regret not using more of her really good strange notes. I made the melody a little straighter and in retrospect I wonder… I played on Blue not long after this. I played any time she asked me. Some were used, some were forgotten but I didn’t care, it was Joan. What do I remember of Blue? Not a lot. Everything was moving very fast, so the minute I had a spare couple of weeks I was over recording with her. I’d come in, figure it out and when I got the thumbs up I was gone until the next time.

I’ve always loved “4+20” – it’s such a strange song.
“4+20” captured that mood and juvenile thought and laid it to rest immediately upon singing it. I like the take I did with the catch in my voice best of all but we did a second one for reasons unknown and then put both on here. I like the original best, the one with the catch. What do I like about it? I like I have a catch in my voice. It sounds like what it should be, a first take and very passionate, getting straight into that mood and then quickly extracting myself. We all liked that one but they made me do it again just in case 50 years later they wanted to cobble together a loosely associated amalgam of all the out-takes as a last gasp before the frigging copyright ran out. At this point, you have to laugh.

What was Neil’s contribution beyond his own two songs?
Neil played on “Woodstock” but fuck if I remember. It was that time, everything was going on. Neil was pretty hard to catch, but he’s still my best mate. We still have that ferocious thing we do when we play together but we never left any room for it on the records. We saved that for live, when we can play right over the top of each other so it starts chording and stuff. I haven’t done that for a while but we have this Light Up The Blues thing planned, that’s my wife charity for autism. We were going to do it live but we are going to do a Zoom cast, I guess. We’ve had to reinvent the wheel, but if the Democratic National Convention or the Colbert Show can do it, then it should be all right.

Are you talking to Graham and David?
I’ve talked to David and as I said I’m glad he got that album out because I’ve always thought that album was the bollocks. I haven’t spoken to Graham for ages. The proof is in the pudding. What’s the difference? I don’t care anymore. It was a long time ago. I had a good time, then I didn’t. We had our big stadium tour, that was fine and we kept going. The last tour we did of Europe was just the most fun. David and Graham were at each other’s throats, but I had a great time. Everybody was looking at me saying, “Oh, my God. Who knew? You turned out to be the sane one.”

Do you have plans to tour?
The last tour I did with Judy Collins about two years ago, I knew when I got off the bus I was so beat up I had a feeling that would be it for a while. Then I got my knee replaced and then the Pandemic hit. So I have basically been a lazy dog for quite a long time and I kind of like it. The road – I loved playing, but the travel with all these nagging injuries you get at this age? I dunno, I paid my dues.

Tell me something about Déjà Vu you’ve never told anyone.
Well, it had the most expensive album cover in the history of album covers and that was all my fault. Because I thought of that concept of the old picture and the old photo album and then the art director took it and made it perfect. Ahmet [Ertegun] never let me forget about it. He changed it back to a photo of the mock-up as quickly as they could. Couldn’t Atlantic afford it? Tell them that! I’m still trying to find out if they double billed for the sessions. I’m biting the hand that feeds, so I’d better stop before I talk myself into too much trouble.

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