Subscribe
Home Blog Page 154

Hear Lambchop’s “A Chef’s Kiss” taken from their new album, Showtunes

Michael Bonner
-
0
Hear Lambchop’s “A Chef’s Kiss” taken from their new album, Showtunes
Lambchop return with a new studio album, Showtunes, on May 21 via City Slang. You can hear "A Chef's Kiss", the first taster for the album, below. Kurt Wagner describes the track as "a reflection on the temporal nature of life and ultimately of song itself. A 'chef’s kiss', being a gesture towa...

Lambchop return with a new studio album, Showtunes, on May 21 via City Slang.

You can hear “A Chef’s Kiss“, the first taster for the album, below. Kurt Wagner describes the track as “a reflection on the temporal nature of life and ultimately of song itself. A ‘chef’s kiss’, being a gesture toward something perfected or well done, even loved.”

The band have also released a trailer for Showtunes, which is here also.

The follow up to 2019’s This (is what I wanted to tell you), Showtunes also features Ryan Olson, Andrew Broder, CJ Camerieri and Yo La Tengo’s James McNew; the album has been co-produced by Jeremy Ferguson.

Uncut – May 2021

Tom Pinnock
-
0
Uncut – May 2021
CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR The Velvet Underground, The Black Crowes, Bunny Wailer, Richard Thompson, Rhiannon Giddens, Laurie Anderson, Blake Mills, Nick Cave, Postcard Records, Mogwai and The Selecter all feature in the new Uncut, dated May 2021 and in UK...

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

The Velvet Underground, The Black Crowes, Bunny Wailer, Richard Thompson, Rhiannon Giddens, Laurie Anderson, Blake Mills, Nick Cave, Postcard Records, Mogwai and The Selecter all feature in the new Uncut, dated May 2021 and in UK shops from March 18 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the finest ambient Americana.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: With a motherlode of activity planned for this year, we’ve assembled a collection of untold stories and compelling insights on the band who changed everything – those taking part include John Cale, Jonathan Richman, Lenny Kaye, Todd Haynes, Doug Yule and Richard Williams… “Blueprint?” says Cale. “We didn’t want to know…”

OUR FREE CD! Sounds Of The New West Presents: AMBIENT AMERICANA: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the cosmic pastoral world, including William Tyler, Steve Gunn, North Americans, Michael Chapman, Chuck Johnson, Dean McPhee, Mary Lattimore, Luke Schneider 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:

THE BLACK CROWES: Now reunited, Chris and Rich Robinson look back at their band and the good and bad times around Shake Your Money Maker. But can they keep from falling back into old ways? “This is so important to us – we don’t want to fuck it up…”

BUNNY WAILER: We remember a reggae pioneer who eschewed international stardom with Bob Marley to follow his own spiritual path

RICHARD THOMPSON: The songwriter introduces an exclusive extract from his stunning memoir, Beeswing, as he recalls Fairport Convention‘s transition from a living room in Fortis Green to the stage of the UFO Club

RHIANNON GIDDENS: Locked down in Limerick, the singer and songwriter tells Uncut how her latest album reminds her of home and generations past. “I am the sum of everything that I do…”

LAURIE ANDERSON: With a vinyl reissue of Big Science coming, Anderson discusses lockdown, the joy of “spatial listening” and the new topicality of “O Superman”

AMBIENT AMERICANA: We investigate the growing tide of artists transforming the tools of country music to create innovative, genre-defying sounds, from Chuck Johnson and William Tyler to, even, Bruce Springsteen

BLAKE MILLS: Album by album with the master guitarist and producer

THE SELECTER: The making of “On My Radio”

POSTCARD RECORDS: Alan Horne presents his scrapbook of artefacts and ephemera from the label’s history

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

In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, Ryley Walker, Teenage Fanclub, Sarah Louise, Floating Points with Pharaoh Sanders & The LSO, Samba Touré and more, and archival releases from Neil Young, Bobby Womack, Joe Strummer, Tame Impala, The Who, Ali Farka Touré and others. We catch Mogwai and Judy Collins live online; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Nomadland, He Dreams Of Giants and Mick Fleetwood & Friends’ Peter Green celebration; while in books there’s The Fall, Nick Cave and Alan Warner’s Kitchenly 434.

Our front section, meanwhile, features unseen John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Guy Clark, The Members, Natalie Bergman and an audience with Peter Murphy while, at the end of the magazine, Steve Cropper 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.

For more information on all the different ways to keep reading Uncut during lockdown, click here.

Inside the new Uncut: The Velvet Underground and our latest Sounds Of The New West CD

Michael Bonner
-
0
Inside the new Uncut: The Velvet Underground and our latest Sounds Of The New West CD
It seems several lifetimes ago now, but last March, shortly before the first lockdown began, I was lucky enough to see the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern. Inside Room 6, the curators gamely attempted to replicate the sensory rush of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: Warhol films and still ima...

It seems several lifetimes ago now, but last March, shortly before the first lockdown began, I was lucky enough to see the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern. Inside Room 6, the curators gamely attempted to replicate the sensory rush of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: Warhol films and still images were projected on top of one another, with coloured gels and strobe lights swirling and flickering, and the music of The Velvet Underground playing at full volume.

Have a copy sent straight to your home

With a slew of Velvets activity coming over the summer, we’ve decided to celebrate the band’s many musical revolutions with their first Uncut cover for 12 years. What’s new? Plenty. There are vivid recollections of Factory life from John Cale – his line about “loners clinging onto the vapours of others, in the hopes of being seen for the first time” is basically “All Tomorrow’s Parties” – as well as an in-depth interview with Todd Haynes on his hotly anticipated new documentary about the band. There’s Doug Yule, Lenny Kaye, Brian Eno, too, while Richard Williams revisits his own encounter with the band in a rented flat in, of all places, Knightsbridge. The high point (for me, at any rate) is a splendid, lengthy piece from Velvets superfan Jonathan Richman, who goes deep on the transition from the Cale era to the Doug Yule era. “Was Doug Yule a more conventional player than Cale?” Jonathan asks, in his own inimitable way. “Yes. But, Jimi Hendrix was a more conventional player than Cale!”

Meanwhile, eagle-eyed readers will spot that the free CD this month is part of our ongoing Sounds Of The New West series – this latest, excellent compilation showcases an emerging strand of expansive, mainly instrumental music that joins the dots between country and post-rock, experimental soundscapes. Hopefully, you’ll find Stephen Deusner’s investigations into ambient Americana a useful companion piece to the CD.

There’s more, of course. A rare audience with Postcard Records supremo Alan Horne, Rhiannon Giddens, Blake Mills, The Selecter, Peter Murphy, Steve Cropper, The Black Crowes, The Members, Natalie Bergman, Ryley Walker, Laurie Anderson, Sarah Louise, Teenage Fanclub, Tom Jones, Samba Touré and Jenny Hval, an extract from Richard Thompson’s autobiography, Neil Spencer on his memories of Bunny Wailer, a new Guy Clark documentary and the best new albums and reissues.

It’s a busy month – let us know what you think, either at letters@www.uncut.co.uk or visit us at https://forum.www.uncut.co.uk/.

Take care, as ever.

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

Valerie June – The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers

Laura Barton
-
0
Valerie June – The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers
In late Autumn, the Tennessee-born songwriter Valerie June took to YouTube, live from her home in Brooklyn, NY. Seated fireside, and cross-legged, with an acoustic guitar, June wore two pink carnations in her dreadlocked hair and played “Stay”, the first track from her new record. Midway thro...

In late Autumn, the Tennessee-born songwriter Valerie June took to YouTube, live from her home in Brooklyn, NY. Seated fireside, and cross-legged, with an acoustic guitar, June wore two pink carnations in her dreadlocked hair and played “Stay”, the first track from her new record.

Midway through the performance, still strumming, she told how her father had passed away on this very date four years earlier. “He died on the largest supermoon of the year!” June said, beaming, before taking a more philosophical turn: “As we think about impermanence, I’d like to invite all the lights and the spirits that are all around… Invite that energy!”

As album campaign launches go, it was unusual. But The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers is an unusual record, one that draws together a diverse array of influences – guided meditation, Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Memphis soul, racial oppression, pedal steel and Tony Visconti among them, and somehow weaves them into one of this year’s most exceptional offerings.

June never was wholly predictable. Her first two records – 2006’s The Way Of The Weeping Willow, and its 2008 successor, Mountain Of Rose Quartz, were downhome Appalachian-tinged recordings, trad tales of ramblers, gypsies, crawdads, strung over banjo, guitar and lap-steel. Their freshness came in June’s quite singular voice: an instrument that is somehow radiant yet dusky, sweet yet briny, a marriage of contradiction and delight.

It was 2013’s Pushin’ Against A Stone, produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, that first showed the full scope of June’s voice, setting it against brass, soul, blues, bluegrass and girl-group cadency, and finding she sounded equally at home in all of them. Four years later, The Order Of Time was a more intimate, half-conversational affair, that voice muted and meandering, but oddly all the more heart-rending for its new restraint. The album drew wide critical acclaim and the admiration of Bob Dylan.

The Moon And Stars feels a more fully realised project, more wide-ranging and self-assured than its predecessors. Its 14 tracks offer a loose lyrical narrative of the path of the ‘dreamer’ – the conjuring of self-belief, the setbacks, the sorrows, the strength to rise again. In and between, June introduces moments of sonic contemplation that on first listen prove unexpected; it is a brave album that follows its opening track with a 55-second wordless meditation – a wind-chimed, otherworldly deep breath before the heart-thumping, percussive scurry of “You And I”.

If this seems like mere affectation, it should be noted that June regards this album as something of a personal manifesto; a statement about her own dream of making music, and the sheer determination it has at times taken to continue. Accordingly, she sought to imbue the recording process with a sense of ritual – the studio bedecked with fresh flowers (a nod, apparently, to the writer Clara Lucas Balfour’s claim that flowers are “the stars of the earth”), sessions booked to coincide with the full moon, and any number of other attempts to bring an air of poetic ceremony.

It’s not wholly outlandish to say that these acts of blessing can be heard on these songs. There is a startling iridescence to this record, there in its shimmers of flute, organ, mbira, Mellotron; in the bright guitar of “Fallin’”, the incantatory quality of “Within You”, in the transcendental tones that Jack Splash (Alicia Keys, Kendrick Lamar, John Legend), co-producing with June, brought to its palette.

At the heart of the album a brief track named “African Proverb” presents the adage “Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet”. The line is delivered by Stax legend and Queen of Memphis Soul, Carla Thomas, who provides guest vocals on the song that follows, “Call Me A Fool”. The meeting of June and Thomas’s voices is one of the album’s great treasures; one Tennessee singer handing the baton to another, perhaps, or Thomas’s presence at the very least suggesting that at one point she made a young, black, Memphis woman’s dream of musical success seem more tangible.

June has previously noted her admiration for Oprah Winfrey, and close examination of the lyrics here might seem to suggest a familiarity with the Winfrey school of self-empowerment: “The thought is the intention”, she sings on “Stay”, or as she states on “Home Inside”: “Earth is a school/To shine is why you came”. Such is June’s gift, however, that her voice is capable of turning the potentially platitudinous into the profound.

In the past, June’s singing has been likened to that of Wanda Jackson, Shirley Goodman, Erykah Badu, but if there is a more obvious vocal comparison it is arguably Van Morrison; June and Morrison’s voices share a similar mingling of the sour and the sublime, a scattish propensity for dismantling a word, finding each catch and elongation, the better to convey its emotion. On previous records she captured, both vocally and musically, something of the Saint Dominic’s Preview-era Morrison. On The Moon And Stars, there is more of the sense of wonder and fiery vision of Astral Weeks.

Certainly it shares much of that record’s multi-instrumentalist experimentation. June’s album begins with warm, bright piano and ends in singing bowl, mockingbird, Native American flute, along the way drawing on the string arrangements of Lester Snell (Isaac Hayes, Al Green, Solomon Burke) and the extraordinary percussive talents of Humberto Ibarra. To listen to it feels at once mind-expanding and all-encompassing.

Its idiosyncratic rhythms, moments of density and sudden space, also carry some of the strange tempos of these times: a year in which life seems to move in fits and starts, when there has been world enough and time for contemplation, rumination, dreams.

The album captures, too, some of the tectonic cultural shift of the past year. June, who in the lead-up to the US election curated a voter mobilisation livestream featuring Brittany Howard, Rhiannon Giddens and Black Pumas, has said that the track “Smile” is a statement of how, as a black woman, she believes that “positivity can be its own form of protest” – something that can never be taken from the oppressed.

Certainly, releasing an album about a return to the importance of dreaming just as the American dream stands at its most tarnished seems something of a radical act. Make no mistake, these songs are beguiling, comely, sweet; but beneath their resonant beauty, June has given us an album that is powerfully, elegantly subversive.

Bob Dylan With Special Guest George Harrison – 1970: 50th Anniversary Edition

Richard Williams
-
0
Bob Dylan With Special Guest George Harrison – 1970: 50th Anniversary Edition
On his return from the Isle Of Wight festival in September 1969, Bob Dylan moved himself, his wife and their three children – Sara was heavily pregnant with a fourth – from Woodstock to Greenwich Village. Settling into a townhouse on MacDougal Street, he tried to reconnect with the sort of life ...

On his return from the Isle Of Wight festival in September 1969, Bob Dylan moved himself, his wife and their three children – Sara was heavily pregnant with a fourth – from Woodstock to Greenwich Village. Settling into a townhouse on MacDougal Street, he tried to reconnect with the sort of life he had known after first arriving in New York from Minnesota. Early in 1970 he began recording the tracks that would not only complete Self-Portrait in time for a June release but provide the material for New Morning, which made its appearance in October. There would be enough left over for Columbia Records to issue a rag-bag album called Dylan in 1973 in response to his defection to David Geffen’s Asylum label.

All that activity, achieved in 10 sessions between March and August, resulted in some of his most widely reviled music. He even reviled it himself, with brisk thoroughness, in the pages of Chronicles Vol 1: “I just threw whatever I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it.” So much for Self Portrait. He was barely kinder to New Morning, even though it was hailed in some quarters as a return to the truth path: “Maybe there were good songs in the grooves and maybe there weren’t – who knows? But they weren’t the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kind of songs were like and these weren’t them.”

In that mood, goodness knows what he would make of this latest archival trawl. Collecting further offcuts and floor-sweepings from those sessions in a compilation originally given a very limited release as part of his management’s continuing exercise in extending his copyright holdings, it acts as an appendix to Vol 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), released in 2013.   

The more perspective we gain on the long arc of Dylan’s career, the more clearly we understand his lifelong habit of trying things out, discarding some discoveries, metabolising others. This is his own process, beholden to no-one, enabling him not just to converse with the spirits of all those who went before but to commune with himself, reshaping his gleanings into 60 years’ worth of self-expression.

The 74 tracks included in these three CDs, recorded at 10 separate sessions between March and August, are not the work of a man gripped by inspiration. In scale they range from isolated fragments to several absorbing takes of a song – “Went To See The Gypsy” – on its way to near-greatness. There are covers, from a single verse of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” to a mercifully truncated stab at Jay And The Americans’ “Come A Little Bit Closer”, via an ardent version of Eric Andersen’s “Thirsty Boots”, an intense but sludgy “Long Black Veil”, a likeable “Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies”, “Can’t Help Falling In Love” touchingly crooned against Al Kooper’s funeral-parlour organ, and a cheerful “Jamaica Farewell” that most clearly reveals the presence of the heavy cold that affected his singing throughout the New Morning sessions. “Spanish Is The Loving Tongue”, with David Bromberg on guitar, sits somewhere between the sublime voice-and-piano take used on the B-side of “Watching The River Flow” and the kitsch flourishes of the band-and-voices version on Dylan.

He takes another look at some of his own older songs. “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” is recast as a slow blues over a “Smokestack Lightnin’” riff, its wistfulness replaced by raw hurt. Other novelties include a harmonica intro to “Winterlude” and a lolloping Nashville-style full-band arrangement of “Song To Woody”. His inveterate fondness for trying songs in different time signatures reaches a bizarre peak in a version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, which he sings in 6/8 over a 4/4 rhythm section.

Those looking forward to the results of the May 1 session with George Harrison had better restrain their excitement. Lively versions of two Carl Perkins rockabilly songs, “Matchbox” and “Your True Love”, are the highlights of a session that it would be a kindness to describe as informal. There’s a Harrison guitar solo on “Time Passes Slowly” and his harmony can be heard on “All I Have To Do Is Dream”. Dylan’s respectful treatment of McCartney’s “Yesterday”, although marred by a missed chord change, is also from the Harrison session, but the guitar solo may be by an uncredited Ron Cornelius.

The return to New York turned out to be a mistake. “It was a really stupid thing to do,” Dylan said 15 years later. The hippie stalkers who had made the young family’s life a misery in Woodstock were now laying siege to his MacDougal Street home and the egregious AJ Weberman was rooting through his garbage. “Everything had changed,” he concluded. This music – transitional and provisional, both tentative and revealing, such a puzzle at the time – was his response.

A Velvet Underground playlist

Tyler Wilcox
-
0
A Velvet Underground playlist
With the new issue of Uncut upon us we are delighted to bring you a Velvet Underground playlist of deep cuts to soundtrack this month's cover story - a veritable Exploding Publishing Inevitable, no less. Have a copy sent straight to your home. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3xD0012eDxbRZ5v6...

With the new issue of Uncut upon us we are delighted to bring you a Velvet Underground playlist of deep cuts to soundtrack this month’s cover story – a veritable Exploding Publishing Inevitable, no less.

Have a copy sent straight to your home.

“Prominent Men”
Peel Slowly And See (Polydor, 1995)
Lou Reed would often downplay Dylan’s influence in later years, but this early acoustic Velvets number certainly bears the unmistakable imprint of Bob. Recorded in mid-1965 at John Cale’s Ludlow Street Loft, it’s practically a Freewheelin’ outtake, with wheezy harmonica, earnestly anti-establishment lyrics and a Reed vocal that earns the Dylan-esque sobriquet. Despite its deeply derivative nature, it’s more charming than you’d expect, offering up a weird alternate universe where Reed never met Cale or Warhol and became just another Greenwich Village folkie.

“Miss Joanie Lee”
Velvet Underground and Nico, 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition (Polydor, 2012)
“One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.” Reed took his minimalist ethos to its logical extreme with “Miss Joanie Lee”, a brutal thud that makes “Run Run Run” sound like Steely Dan. The 10-minute boogie was captured during a rehearsal in early 1966 at Warhol’s Factory and then never heard from again. But it’s a blast, occupying that no man’s land between Bo Diddley and Sonic Youth, with impossibly raw guitars crashing up against Reed and Cale’s lusty harmonies.

“Melody Laughter”
Velvet Underground and Nico, 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition (Polydor, 2012)
“Twenty-nine minutes of torture” is how Moe Tucker described this freeform excursion, recorded live by an audience member in Ohio in late 1966. Her pain is our pleasure, however. “Melody Laughter” is a thrilling example of the VU at their most sonically adventurous, with Tucker’s proto-motorik thump providing a sturdy bedrock for the rest of the gang (Nico included) to make some terrific noise. When it all comes together towards the end, it’s as beautiful as it gets — the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in all its bizarro glory.

“It Was A Pleasure Then”
Chelsea Girl (Verve, 1967)
A disquieting, skeletal drift, “It Was A Pleasure Then” sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the lush flutes-‘n’-strings of Nico’s Chelsea Girl debut. It’s not officially a part of the VU canon, but it may as well be; Nico’s accompaniment here is none other than John Cale and Lou Reed. As her comrades rumble menacingly behind her, Nico sings obliquely of lost innocence and “shattered minds.” A preview of her darker work to come — and a tantalizing glimpse of unrealized collaborations between this combustible trio.

“I’m Not A Young Man Anymore”
White Light / White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition (Polydor, 2013)
Recorded at NYC’s Gymnasium during a long 1967 residency, “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore” was unknown to all but the most hardcore of VU fanatics until it surfaced on a bootleg in the mid-2000s. It’s definitely a rough draft, with Reed repeating a simple lyric over and over, perhaps waiting for inspiration to strike. But despite this sketchiness, the Velvets transform it into something magical and hypnotic, a rough-edged R&B number bolstered by Sterling Morrison’s monomaniacal guitar figure, going round and round into infinity.

“Guess I’m Falling In Love”
White Light / White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition (Polydor, 2013)
The VU attempted “Guess I’m Falling In Love” during the White Light / White Heat sessions but for some reason Reed neglected to record his vocal. This live version, also taped live at the Gymnasium, will do nicely, though, offering righteously heavy choogle from start to finish. Once again, Morrison is the star, stepping out from the shadows to deliver two absolutely ripping (yet somehow quite elegant) solos, landing somewhere between Chuck Berry and Steve Cropper. If Verve had released it as a single, this tune might’ve been the Velvet’s mainstream breakthrough.

“Countess From Hong Kong”
Peel Slowly and See (Polydor, 1995)
A slinky and seductive number from late 1969, “Countess From Hong Kong” got lost somewhere between the band’s self-titled third LP and Loaded, only existing as a hazy demo. But it’s well-worth discovering, thanks to Reed and Morrison’s delicately interlocking guitars and a coy vocal from Lou. The song also features the return of the harmonica to the VU arsenal — a surprisingly successful addition that adds to the dreamy atmosphere. If that riff sounds familiar, it’s because Beck borrowed it lock-stock-and-barrel for his “Beautiful Way” 30 years later.

“Over You”
The Matrix Tapes (Polydor/Universal, 2015)
Like “Countess”, “Over You” is the rare Velvets cast-off that Reed didn’t eventually dust off for his solo career. It’s hard to see why he left it behind; with its chiming guitars, sugary melody and lovelorn lyrics, Lou could’ve slotted it somewhere on Transformer or Coney Island Baby. As it stands, we only have a few live recordings to go by, all of which include sparkling Morrison solos. Reed often introduced it as his “Billie Holiday song” and you can imagine Lady Day singing along.

“Follow The Leader”
The Quine Tapes (Polydor/Universal, 2001)
We have guitarist Robert Quine to thank for this one. As a young Velvets fanatic, he lugged a tape recorded to a number of the band’s late 1969 San Francisco club dates, preserving several unique moments for posterity. While it may have been performed on the west coast, the positively danceable “Follow The Leader” sees Reed looking – as always – towards his beloved NYC. “New York! New York City!” he chants over a proto-disco groove that stretches out hypnotically over the course of 17 minutes.

“Friends”
Squeeze (Polydor, 1973)
Is it sacrilege to include a song from Squeeze, the much-maligned post-Lou VU album? Maybe. A Doug Yule solo effort in all but name, the LP has a bad rep — deservedly in some cases. But this bittersweet McCartney-esque ballad is a keeper, with Yule singing about puppy love in his soft, quivery “Candy Says” voice. It’s a million miles away from “Sister Ray”, but that’s alright. There’s even a Squeeze reappraisal in the works: Velvets disciples Luna recently covered “Friends”, giving it an appropriately lovely soft rock sheen.

Hear a track from Tony Allen’s final studio album, There Is No End

Sam Richards
-
0
Hear a track from Tony Allen’s final studio album, There Is No End
Tony Allen's final studio album There Is No End will be released by Decca France on April 30 – a year to the day after his passing. It features rappers such as Danny Brown, Jeremiah Jae and Sampa The Great laying down their rhymes over beats recorded by Allen before he died. “Tony's idea was ...

Tony Allen’s final studio album There Is No End will be released by Decca France on April 30 – a year to the day after his passing.

It features rappers such as Danny Brown, Jeremiah Jae and Sampa The Great laying down their rhymes over beats recorded by Allen before he died. “Tony’s idea was to give rappers the space to breathe and freely create,” says producer Vincent Taeger. “He wanted really not to just do Afrobeat, but rather something new and open, with very different sounds for the drums for each song and feels and tempos that were really grounded to the core in hip-hop.”

The one song on the album that was recorded live with all the main instruments playing together was the single “Cosmosis”, featuring Damon Albarn, Skepta and novelist Ben Okri. Listen below:

Ben Okri wrote the lyrics “in a way as a tribute to Tony because it was written to ask, ‘How do you absorb a cosmos or integrate a cosmos, enrich a world, infiltrate in the highest possible way and change the mentalverse, the spiritverse – it’s by cosmosis.’

“This man could have lived another 150 years and kept creating new worlds,” continues Okri. “He had become the master shaman of his art. He knew himself and his mind. He wanted the album to be open to the energies of a new generation… but like a great mathematician or scientist who found a code of for a new world, with just a few beats, he created this extraordinary canvas.”

Paul McCartney announces McCartney III Imagined

Sam Richards
-
0
Paul McCartney announces McCartney III Imagined
Paul McCartney has announced the release of McCartney III Imagined, featuring the likes of Beck, Josh Homme, Damon Albarn, St Vincent, Massive Attack, Phoebe Bridgers, Khruangbin and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien covering or reworking songs from last year's McCartney III. Watch a video for Dominic Fike'...

Paul McCartney has announced the release of McCartney III Imagined, featuring the likes of Beck, Josh Homme, Damon Albarn, St Vincent, Massive Attack, Phoebe Bridgers, Khruangbin and Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien covering or reworking songs from last year’s McCartney III.

Watch a video for Dominic Fike’s version of “The Kiss Of Venus” below:

Peruse the full tracklisting and artwork for McCartney III Imagined below:

1. Find My Way (feat. Beck)
2. The Kiss of Venus (Dominic Fike)
3. Pretty Boys (feat. Khruangbin)
4. Women And Wives (St. Vincent Remix)
5. Deep Down (Blood Orange Remix)
6. Seize The Day (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
7. Slidin’ (EOB Remix)
8. Long Tailed Winter Bird (Damon Albarn Remix)
9. Lavatory Lil (Josh Homme)
10. When Winter Comes (Anderson .Paak Remix)
11. Deep Deep Feeling (3D RDN Remix)
12. Long Tailed Winter Bird (Idris Elba Remix)*
* Physical release exclusive track

McCartney III Imagined is released digitally on April 16 via Capitol Records, with physical versions to follow in the summer. Pre-order here.

Crystal Palace Bowl to reopen with shows by Supergrass and Max Richter

Sam Richards
-
0
Crystal Palace Bowl to reopen with shows by Supergrass and Max Richter
Famous outdoor London venue the Crystal Palace Bowl is to be reactivated this summer with a series of 12 concerts in August. The first headliners for South Facing Festival include Supergrass, Max Richter, The Streets, Dizzee Rascal & The Outlook Orchestra and English National Opera (performing To...

Famous outdoor London venue the Crystal Palace Bowl is to be reactivated this summer with a series of 12 concerts in August.

The first headliners for South Facing Festival include Supergrass, Max Richter, The Streets, Dizzee Rascal & The Outlook Orchestra and English National Opera (performing Tosca), with more to be announced soon. The festival will also include a series of free midweek events for the whole community.

Over the years, Crystal Palace Bowl has hosted memorable outdoor shows by the likes of Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart, The Cure, Pixies, Ian Dury and Curtis Mayfield. However, the oxidised steel structure overlooking a lake in Crystal Palace park had lain dormant for most of this century before being revived by a crowdfunding campaign.

See the full dates for the first wave of South Facing Festival shows below and sign up to the ticket presale here. Early bird tickets start at £35 plus booking fee.

SATURDAY 14 AUGUST
Dizzee Rascal & The Outlook Orchestra

FRIDAY 20 AUGUST
Supergrass

SATURDAY 21 AUGUST
The Streets

SATURDAY 28 AUGUST
Max Richter

FRIDAY 27 & SUNDAY 29 AUGUST
English National Opera (performing Tosca)

Pink Floyd to release Live At Knebworth 1990

Sam Richards
-
0
Pink Floyd to release Live At Knebworth 1990
Pink Floyd's headline set from 1990's Silver Clef Award Winners charity concert at Knebworth will be released as an album by Warner Music on April 30. The show was previously released on 2019’s Later Years box set, but is now available as a standalone album on double vinyl, CD and digital platf...

Pink Floyd’s headline set from 1990’s Silver Clef Award Winners charity concert at Knebworth will be released as an album by Warner Music on April 30.

The show was previously released on 2019’s Later Years box set, but is now available as a standalone album on double vinyl, CD and digital platforms for the first time, entitled Live At Knebworth 1990.

The Knebworth concert, which was broadcast globally on MTV at the time, found Pink Floyd topping an all-star bill that included Paul McCartney, Dire Straits, Genesis, Phil Collins, Mark Knopfler, Robert Plant (with Jimmy Page), Cliff Richard, Eric Clapton and Tears For Fears.

“There is something special about Knebworth,” says Nick Mason. “We all still have fond memories of playing there in the ’70s, and this show was no different. As a North London boy this was almost a home game, but with the added delight of being the re-assembly of the band after a fairly mega tour that had lasted for well over a year. It was also an opportunity to get  the wonderful Candy Dulfer to play – I had been a fan of hers for quite a while, and it was just a shame we didn’t have an opportunity to utilise her for more. We also had our dear friend Michael Kamen guesting. Michael had contributed so much to PF over the previous ten years, it’s great to have something of his playing on the recording.”

David Gilmour and Andy Jackson have remixed the audio for all seven tracks performed on the day, and the album features new artwork shot by Floyd collaborator Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell of Hipgnosis and designed by Peter Curzon of Storm Studios.

Check out the artwork and LP tracklisting below, and pre-order here.

Disc 1 Side A
1 Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 1-5
2 The Great Gig In The Sky
Disc 1 Side B
1 Wish You Were Here
2 Sorrow
 
Disc 2 Side C
1 Money
Disc 2 Side D
1 Comfortably Numb
2 Run Like Hell

Courtney Barnett launches online archive of live shows

Sam Richards
-
0
Courtney Barnett launches online archive of live shows
Courtney Barnett has launched an extensive online archive, featuring previously unreleased video and audio of numerous live performances. The archive documents every show she's ever played, going all the way back to an open mic night at The Lark Distillery in Hobart in 2007. Many of the gig list...

Courtney Barnett has launched an extensive online archive, featuring previously unreleased video and audio of numerous live performances.

The archive documents every show she’s ever played, going all the way back to an open mic night at The Lark Distillery in Hobart in 2007. Many of the gig listings are accompanied by posters, photos or free-to-view video footage. Browse the archive here.

It also includes the premiere of Barnett’s only full-band show of 2020, an Australian bushfire fundraiser at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel. Watch that below:

Exclusive! Watch a video for Israel Nash’s new single, “Southern Coasts”

Sam Richards
-
0
Exclusive! Watch a video for Israel Nash’s new single, “Southern Coasts”
Israel Nash's Uncut-approved new album Topaz is due out this Friday (March 12) on Loose. Watch a video for the track "Southern Coasts" below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJbRNq18PmU Nash describes “Southern Coasts” as both "driving and lazy, like the waves that keep coming but also ...

Israel Nash’s Uncut-approved new album Topaz is due out this Friday (March 12) on Loose.

Watch a video for the track “Southern Coasts” below:

Nash describes “Southern Coasts” as both “driving and lazy, like the waves that keep coming but also urge us to relax.” Along with the rest of Topaz, it was recorded in the Quonset hut studio he built about 600 feet from his house in the Texas Hill Country. “It’s allowed me to capture sounds and ideas, to really get stuff out of my head and into the world so quickly,” he says.

You can read much more from Israel Nash across six pages in the April 2021 issue of Uncut, which is still in shops now or available to order online by clicking here.

Bobby Gillespie announces memoir, Tenement Kid

Sam Richards
-
0
Bobby Gillespie announces memoir, Tenement Kid
Bobby Gillespie has announced that his memoir Tenement Kid will be published by White Rabbit on October 28. Structured in four parts, the books focuses on Gillespie's early years growing up in Glasgow, forming Primal Scream and joining The Jesus And Mary Chain. It concludes with the release of th...

Bobby Gillespie has announced that his memoir Tenement Kid will be published by White Rabbit on October 28.

Structured in four parts, the books focuses on Gillespie’s early years growing up in Glasgow, forming Primal Scream and joining The Jesus And Mary Chain. It concludes with the release of the epochal Screamadelica and its subsequent tour.

“The publisher Lee Brackstone has been hassling me for years to write a book,” says Gillespie. “I always rebuffed him with some excuse or the other. At the beginning of 2020 I wanted to challenge myself creatively and do something I had never done before. I didn’t want to write another rock record, I’d done plenty of those, so I decided to write a memoir of my early life and worked on it all through the summer, Autumn and Winter of 2020 and here it is. It is titled Tenement Kid as I spent the first ten years of my life living in one. I am very proud of it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.”

Tenement Kid will be published by in hardback, ebook, White Rabbit Collector’s Edition and audio.

Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to The Fall

John Robinson
-
0
Introducing the Ultimate Music Guide to The Fall
Buy the Ultimate Music Guide to The Fall here – with no delivery charge to the UK! Shortly before I am introduced to Mark E Smith in early 1998, his press officer tells me that whatever I might have heard lately, The Fall is still in robust professional condition. He does this by clapping me ro...

Buy the Ultimate Music Guide to The Fall here – with no delivery charge to the UK!

Shortly before I am introduced to Mark E Smith in early 1998, his press officer tells me that whatever I might have heard lately, The Fall is still in robust professional condition. He does this by clapping me round the shoulder and saying, in an approximation of Smith’s north Manchester accent, words which have endured longer than anyone might ever have expected. Musicians come and go, Smith has recently told his PR, but “if it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s a Fall gig.”

It’s hung around, this line – speaking perhaps to the affection Fall fans have for the idea of Smith as a person of singular will, and his comic disdain for the other musicians in The Fall. There was also something about it which suggested he was indestructible, that whatever happened, he would always be around: a new Fall LP in the works, a new set of lyrics to revel in, and new cultural irritations to be despatched in a free-roaming pub interview.

All of which made Mark’s death in January 2018 particularly sad; the passing too soon of an utterly original talent, whose music – surprising, dense, literate, tuneful, impenetrable, funny – was so much a direct result of this personality and charisma. Mark and the music press were a gift to each other, and in this latest Ultimate Music Guide, alongside deep new appreciations of The Fall’s records, you’ll find a selection of some of his best interviews.

As time went on, he remained on his guard in these, wary that his witheringly unique take on the world could turn him into a known quantity. “Don’t think you’re talking to Paul Weller or somebody,” he said to me at one point when we first met. He also made a couple of remarks about what I looked like and what I was wearing, which at the time possibly obscured for me the point he was trying to make.

Namely that he was always one step ahead; eager to deflect from himself, and too smart to be imprisoned by his public image. For all his forthright opinion, Mark kept the important part of himself to himself. When we met again years later, I wondered, given his interest in prose writing, if there would ever be a Mark E Smith memoir. He was dismissive of the idea. “They’ll never get a true book out of me,” he said, proudly.

That enigmatic fog feels key to what Smith and The Fall did. His best work didn’t deal in fantasies, but processed the world to leave it with the magic of an espionage story – codes and aliases, locked doors, missing pieces. Everyone has their own Fall. And as someone told me when I was preparing this magazine, there’s always the fear that someone knows more about it than you.

This latest Ultimate Music Guide is an effort to make sense of, and revel in The Fall’s extraordinary world. Fall scholarship extends to vast online libraries of footnotes, talk and conjecture, which proliferates like tangential thoughts within MES’s brain. Though he himself was apparently no fan of the speculations of, as he put it, “old Fall fellas”.

Uncut met MES for the last time in autumn 2017, but if he was embattled (ex-wife Brix was playing with ex-Fall members), he remained inspired by his earliest influences: the Vorticists, original thinking, noise.

“In their own heads,” Mark told Uncut’s Tom Pinnock about Fall members past, “Mark’s just the drunken singer who didn’t know what he was doing. They seriously believe it!”

We only have this excerpt. But hopefully, this magazine will help you piece together what really went on there.

It’s in shops from Thursday (March 11) or you can buy a copy online by clicking here – with free P&P for the UK.

The Fall – The Ultimate Music Guide

Uncut
-
0
The Fall – The Ultimate Music Guide
Check the record! Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to the visionary genius of The Fall. Every album reviewed! Guest appearances rated! Featuring encounters with hip priest Mark E Smith! The complete guide to the wonderful and frightening world of Britain's most original band. Buy a copy here!...

Check the record! Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to the visionary genius of The Fall. Every album reviewed! Guest appearances rated! Featuring encounters with hip priest Mark E Smith! The complete guide to the wonderful and frightening world of Britain’s most original band.

Buy a copy here!

Send us your questions for Jason Pierce

Sam Richards
-
0
Send us your questions for Jason Pierce
Next month, Spiritualized will launch the The Spaceman Reissue Program with a half-speed remaster of their 1992 debut, Lazer Guided Melodies. While bandleader Jason Pierce is in retrospective mode, we've managed to collar him to answer your questions for Uncut's next Audience With feature. Ove...

Next month, Spiritualized will launch the The Spaceman Reissue Program with a half-speed remaster of their 1992 debut, Lazer Guided Melodies.

While bandleader Jason Pierce is in retrospective mode, we’ve managed to collar him to answer your questions for Uncut’s next Audience With feature.

Over the course of 35 years in music, Pierce’s unyielding psychedelic vision has provided us with numerous moments of spiritual and emotional enlightenment, first with the perfect prescriptions of Spacemen 3, then with the celestial majesty of Spiritualized, not to mention various solo excursions into free jazz and soundtracks. He’s walked with Jesus, he’s floated in space and he’s survived an actual near-death experience as documented on 2008’s Songs In A&E… but as 2018’s mighty And Nothing Hurt proved, he’s still here, making soul-stirring, transformative music – a perfect miracle.

So what do you want to ask the dedicated musical cosmonaut otherwise known as J Spaceman? Send your questions to audiencewith@www.uncut.co.uk by Monday (March 15), and Jason will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

Tom Petty’s Finding Wildflowers to get standalone release

Sam Richards
-
0
Tom Petty’s Finding Wildflowers to get standalone release
Tom Petty's Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) will get a standalone release from Warner Records on April 16. The tracks were previously released on the Super Deluxe 9-LP version of 2020’s Wildflowers & All The Rest – read Uncut's review of that here – but will now be available on lim...

Tom Petty’s Finding Wildflowers (Alternate Versions) will get a standalone release from Warner Records on April 16.

The tracks were previously released on the Super Deluxe 9-LP version of 2020’s Wildflowers & All The Rest – read Uncut’s review of that here – but will now be available on limited-edition gold vinyl, CD and on all digital streaming platforms for the first time. A black vinyl release will follow on May 7.

Hear “You Saw Me Comin’ (Alternate Version)” below and pre-order the album here.

Hiss Golden Messenger announce new album, Quietly Blowing It

Sam Richards
-
0
Hiss Golden Messenger announce new album, Quietly Blowing It
Hiss Golden Messenger will release new album Quietly Blowing It via Merge Records on June 25. Watch a video for the track "If It Comes In The Morning" below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jwycSCbRik&t=2s “‘If It Comes In The Morning’ was a song that was written in the spring and ea...

Hiss Golden Messenger will release new album Quietly Blowing It via Merge Records on June 25.

Watch a video for the track “If It Comes In The Morning” below:

“‘If It Comes In The Morning’ was a song that was written in the spring and early summer of 2020,” says Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor. “The country was on fire, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘What comes next?’ Initially, I didn’t know how much hope to include in the song — I wasn’t feeling particularly hopeful myself in that moment — but I felt that it was important to remember that whatever happened, most of us were going to be fortunate enough to be given another day in which to enact what I feel are the most important and fundamental parts of being alive: joy, love, peace, the willingness to keep moving forward whether the cards fall in our favor or not. And in remembering, at least, that these feelings exist, I suppose it became a song of hope.

“The Staple Singers and Curtis Mayfield were very good at writing these kinds of songs, and I suppose I was looking to their music as inspiration for ‘If It Comes In The Morning.’ When I got stumped on a verse, I called my friend Anaïs Mitchell, and she got me straightened out. I’m very thankful for her help.”

Quietly Blowing It also features Griffin and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, Zach Williams of The Lone Bellow, Nashville guitar great Buddy Miller and Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman.

You can pre-order Quietly Blowing It here on CD, LP and metallic blue Peak Vinyl (which also includes an exclusive Hiss Golden Messenger newsprint poster).

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché

Stephen Troussé
-
0
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
Of all the strange blooms to flourish in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ first tour across the infernal English summer of 1976, the boldest and brightest was Poly Styrene. A mixed-race child of a sad-eyed Somali stowaway dad and fierce white south London mum, she walked into their gig on Hastings Pie...

Of all the strange blooms to flourish in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ first tour across the infernal English summer of 1976, the boldest and brightest was Poly Styrene. A mixed-race child of a sad-eyed Somali stowaway dad and fierce white south London mum, she walked into their gig on Hastings Pier (supporting Welsh metallers Budgie) on her 19th birthday as Marianne Joan Elliott-Said and skipped out a transformed woman.

“The world is still playing catch-up with Poly,” says Pauline Black towards the end of this artful, lyrical, moving film. And after a journey taking us from a coalfire flat in Brixton to the squalor of the Roxy, from the hipster cellar of CBGBs to 80,000 at the Rock Against Racism festival in Victoria Park, from a dayglo UFO in the sky above Doncaster to a psychiatric ward in the Maudsley Hospital and from George Harrison’s Krishna temple near Watford to the banks of the Yamuna river in India, you can’t help but agree. While so much punk has now been comfortably recuperated into the cosy, mad parade of English heritage, Poly Styrene still feels like a character from a stranger, more unsettling future.

The film was crowdfunded by Poly’s daughter Celeste Bell, and she pieces together the story with a complex, compelling mix of pride, regret and curiosity. By the time she was born her mum had already been sectioned and misdiagnosed with schizophrenia (later reassessed as acute bipolar disorder) and she grew up shuttling between relatives and the Krishna temple, before finally crawling out of a bedroom window one afternoon to go and live with her nan. The film begins with Poly laughing at the idea of being “a good mum” – “How banal!” But it’s clear that the pride with which Celeste now tells the story is born out of years of neglect and trauma.

It’s an exemplary production in so many ways: Poly’s diaries and archive interviews are brought to vivid life in readings by Ruth Negga, who captures the mischief and dismay of a young woman finding all her best dreams and worst nightmares coming true at once. The supporting cast is terrific. It’s a story astutely told largely by women, and in particular women of colour: specifically Pauline Black of the Selecter, Rhoda Dakar of The Bodysnatchers and Neneh Cherry, who credits Poly’s clarion caterwaul as her inspiration to sing herself.

They’re present purely as voices – unusually for a music doc, this isn’t a series of talking heads but a richly visual experience, drawing on a wealth of stunning archive footage of Poly and the band (including a teenage beanpole Thurston Moore, moshing in the front row at CBGBs).

But Bell and co-director Paul Sng lyrically weave a variety of sources. While Poly recalls the inspiration for writing “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” there’s a breathtaking montage, dissolving from suffragette newsreels to Bowie, slomo in scarlet leather, to footage of African chain gangs, to a Hollywood biblical epic, Moses leading the Israelites through the desert.

There are some gaps in the story: Poly’s pre-punk reggae singles are glossed over and Falcon Stuart, who became her lover and manager while she was 17 and he was twice her age, remains a shadowy figure. But the best compliment you can pay this film is that it’s as compelling, mysterious, moving and inspiring as Poly’s own pop art. As a briefly glimpsed found flyer with an imperious portrait says: “In a world of Kardsashians, be Poly Styrene”.

Find out how to watch the film here.

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Carnage

John Robinson
-
0
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Carnage
Cometh the hour, cometh the man – and if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about carnage it’s Nick Cave. Some of this he’s historically created himself. Some has been cruelly thrust upon him. But whatever the situation, this is someone who doesn’t shy away from what’s happening; wh...

Cometh the hour, cometh the man – and if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about carnage it’s Nick Cave. Some of this he’s historically created himself. Some has been cruelly thrust upon him. But whatever the situation, this is someone who doesn’t shy away from what’s happening; who plays the cards as they fall. Now, locked down like the rest of us (maybe not quite like the rest of us – he makes a couple of mentions of a balcony where he vaults into the imagination and back while reading and notating Flannery O’Connor), he presents something like his own lockdown album.

As anyone who has seen his quote-unquote livestream from Alexandra Palace will tell you, however, there are ways of maintaining normality in lockdown (running, working, “booking a slot”) and then there’s Nick Cave’s way of doing them: interior monologue, swoosh of mane, lingering shot of journal containing “the work”. So it is, in a way, here.

Undoubtedly there are a set of circumstances where this might simply have been Cave and Ellis in some version of a garage, banging out a record. There are hints of it on the great “Old Time”, which finds the duo as the doctoral thesis version of Alan Vega and Martin Rev, on a Lynchian road trip, complete with dive-bombing synths and things with horns in the bushes. In his Red Hand Files, Cave has mentioned his disappointment at the postponement of touring plans and how he misses the “recklessness” of The Bad Seeds, and here “Albuquerque” wistfully evokes stasis, while “Carnage” itself suggests if we’re going anywhere anytime soon, it will be a journey in our imagination.

In the meantime, Cave and Ellis employ their own recklessness. The album appears as if it is going to begin in a familiar ballad mode before the mix sucks the piano and violin down into the depths of some sophisticated techno club. Opener “Hand Of God” becomes an extraordinary Bond theme of the mind. It’s Grinderman does Portishead, and Cave is swimming in the deepest part of creativity’s river, at the mercy of its current: “Let the river cast its spell on me…” As the chorus builds to include more voices, it’s tempting to think that this might be some kind of video-conferenced contrivance, families and neighbours lending their voices to a lo-fi project.

As ever, though, there’s slightly more going on behind the scenes. This might not be a Bad Seeds album (although drummer Thomas Wydler is on there), but nor is it one of Cave and Ellis’s minimal excursions into the film soundtrack wilderness. Recorded between late November 2020 and January 2021, there’s a proper team on board here. The two highly accomplished multi-instrumentalists themselves, of course. Then there’s a five-piece choir and a string section.

The world provides the rest. Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. In “White Elephant” he references the Black Lives Matter protests, specifically the Bristol ones, and builds a cumulative image of a boiling world hatred, a suspicious and violent conservatism: “I’ll shoot you in the fucking face/If you think of coming around here”. It’s a piece so toxic that at the end it needs its own hymn of hope to try to heal it in the last few minutes. You’ll find this somewhere between Primal Scream’s “Movin’ On Up” and “All You Need Is Love”, beaming a positive message to the world.

In the beautifully arranged “Lavender Fields”, meanwhile, Cave ponders his own blessed, lavender-tinged place in the creative world (sidebar: some believe Christ to have been anointed with lavender oil), where he now finds himself travelling a “singular road” and doing so “appallingly alone”. Once he was “running with my friends/All of them busy with their pens”. Now (is he perhaps thinking of his ’80s contemporaries Mark E Smith and Shane MacGowan?) he finds himself in a field of one – as others have fallen away, or behind, while he continues the journey. At the end of the song, the “hymn” lyrics are repurposed in a calming Spiritualized-like coda. “Shattered Ground” is terrifying: imagining the singer literally in pieces, atomised at the end of a relationship, while “Balcony Man” finds the singer flirting with sanity but ultimately consoled by the beauty of the morning and the world.

If nothing else, there is a particular type of business that has thrived in these times – pivoting to online, “making lemonade” from the vile ingredients the world has lately been served. Nick Cave is far too human and empathetic a musician to respond by using them as a pretext for a change of gear into pure experimentation. Instead, he has met them honourably with a great record on its own terms: recognisably himself, aspiring to rise above, much like the rest of us, doing the best he can.

1...153154155...1,270Page 154 of 1,270

SHOP UNCUT