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Billy Childish on his best albums: “Musicians are ten-a-penny – I’m not one of them!”

Tom Pinnock
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Billy Childish on his best albums: “Musicians are ten-a-penny – I’m not one of them!”
“My favourite criticism of what I do is that I only do one thing and it’s all the same,” laughs Billy Childish. “But I write novels and poetry, do blues, country, punk rock, rock’n’roll, some vague psychedelia, and I’m a painter. Just because I’m interested in the elemental in all as...

“My favourite criticism of what I do is that I only do one thing and it’s all the same,” laughs Billy Childish. “But I write novels and poetry, do blues, country, punk rock, rock’n’roll, some vague psychedelia, and I’m a painter. Just because I’m interested in the elemental in all aspects of life doesn’t mean that it’s one element, it’s the elemental within anything. It’s like cooking – if your basic ingredients are good, you don’t need fancy sauce.”

42 years into his career, the Chatham singer and guitarist is currently rehearsing his CTMF group for gigs in Margate and the US, and working on short stories and a novel (“I’ve done about 18 drafts over the last few years”), but he takes a couple of hours out to talk Uncut through nine of the finest albums from his vast discography. From Troggs-inspired rock’n’roll and Great War song cycles to the very fine new CTMF record, Last Punk Standing, these selections are raw, vital and in line with his favoured musical traditions.

“Musicians are ten-a-penny – I’m not one of them!” he says. “I can appreciate musicianship, but there’s something else that needs to be found. I’m not saying that we’ve found it, but that’s what I’ve wasted a lot of my life looking for!”

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THE MILKSHAKES
IN GERMANY
WALL CITY, 1983
Childish’s second group, after the punky Pop Rivets ­– heavily inspired by The Beatles’ Star Club set

 

BILLY CHILDISH: Big Russ [Wilkins, bass] used to work at a television repair shop and they had an old garage out the back where we used to rehearse. We’d often record backing tracks onto our Revox half-track machine, then take them to the studio and pop some vocals on. It circumnavigated the difficulties of working in studios at the time – they all had this obsession with ‘proper recording’, which meant making everything sound as processed as possible, with very little life or energy left. The obsession we’ve always had is with sound. That’s what I’m interested in in music ­– not so much songs, but sound. Our friend Hansi [Johann ‘Hansi’ Steinmetz], who The Milkshakes met out in Germany, was inspired by the way we did things, so when he moved to Berlin he set up his own one-man label, Wall City Records. As a favour to him we let him release this. [‘Producer’] Karl Valentin is a real person, I think he was a German comic from the ’20s. Because we always listed the producers on our records as British comedians, like Tony Hancock, we needed a German comedian for this one, so we asked Hansi for someone from back in the day! “Love Can Lose” was one of the very first songs I ever wrote. Me and my girlfriend at the time used to be really into these teenage angst comics for girls. One story was called ‘Love Can Lose’, I seem to remember.

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THEE MIGHTY CAESARS
ACROPOLIS NOW
MILKSHAKES, 1987
This heavy trio’s finest moment is arguably this raw LP, with “You Make Me Die” especially ferocious

Acropolis Now, haha! You can take that back to one of my favourite books, Heart Of Darkness. The Troggs were a big influence on Thee Mighty Caesars – I’ve always loved The Troggs and I used to love winding up Beatles fans by arguing that the great band of the ’60s were The Troggs and not The Beatles. By this time we were solely using the Revox G36 to record in the very small basement of the terraced house I was living in. I was using this strange talkback mic for the guitar, and the drums and bass are being recorded on one other microphone on the other track. Then we’d just drop a vocal in on top of that. We’d often put really good guitarists in on drums, because we didn’t really want to showcase people’s dexterity or ability, we were just trying to get the energy of the song across. People told us we weren’t utilising our best strengths, but what we were trying to do was serve the song. You’re meant to serve the song, not impose yourself on it or show the next-door neighbour how clever you are. That solo on “You Make Me Die”, I like that. Steve from Mudhoney asked if I could show him how I played it. I said, “Well, it’s quite difficult…” I play very heavy-handed with a heavy plectrum – the most strings I ever broke in one hit was four – so in “You Make Me Die”, I hit the E and B strings off the bridge [by accident]. And that good part of the solo is me trying to hook the strings back on the bridge! I try and impersonate it sometimes when we play live, but it’s a masterstroke, never to be repeated, up there with the best of Jimi Hendrix…

BILLY CHILDISH & SEXTON MING
YPRES 1917 OVERTURE – VERDUN OSSUARY (FOR PIANO AND HARMONIUM)
HANGMAN, 1988
A lo-fi poetry/concept piece, inspired by Ivor Cutler and the First World War

This was recorded on the Revox, in the kitchen of this slummish house I used to rent for £20 a month. I bought a harmonium off someone for £30 and we had that in there. Sexton and I were working on our nursery rhymes, we both liked absurd poetry, Edward Lear and that sort of thing, and Sexton was into Ivor Cutler which I’d never heard. I think I was messing around on the pump organ and I probably thought that some of it sounded quite doomish. And I had bought this book published in the ’20s, a book of photographs of the World War One dead and the ossuary where all the dead are kept in Verdun; I thought, ‘Well, Verdun Ossuary is a very good title for an album, and this organ is definitely channelling the dead, so let’s make a record.’ I think a couple of other people wandered in – Jamie Taylor down the road played some piano and I played a broken cello he had. Kyra [De Coninck, Childish’s then partner] was doing the washing-up while we were recording, and we had all of these weird noises coming from the sink, so we thought, ‘That doesn’t matter, that’s part of the Great War as well!’ The foot pedals on the pump organ sounded like lungs sucking, which is where we got the idea for the gas theme – it sounded like someone dying because the bellows were so shot!

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THEE HEADCOATEES
GIRLSVILLE
HANGMAN, 1991
A female counterpart to Childish’s ’90s group The Headcoats, covering The Beatles and The Kinks

 

Sarah [Crouch, aka Lubella Black], who was in The Delmonas, the sort of girlfriends group of The Milkshakes, did some backing vocals with the Caesars. When Thee Headcoats were going, I said, “Why don’t we have a girl version of the group?” Holly [Golightly] was dating Bruce the drummer, so we said, “Well, we’ve got Sarah, Holly can sing…” And then we got Kyra, who was my girlfriend, who’d never sung before. Then Johnny, who was playing bass, was dating Debbie [Green], so she was in the group by default as well. We booked a studio, learnt some tunes and took them in. If you want to get a lift when you’re hitchhiking, it’s best to hide in the bushes and send your girlfriend out, and the cruel reviewing world suggested that’s what we were doing [with this album], but I’m not sure! They only slated us for not sounding like The Smiths… Covering The Beatles’ “Run For Your Life”, that would almost certainly have been Sarah’s idea, if she’s singing it. Sarah realised she could do that Nancy Sinatra thing on it.

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UNCUT CLASSIC
THEE HEADCOATS
THE MESSERSCHMITT PILOT’S SEVERED HAND
DAMAGED GOODS, 1988
Recorded in a day, this late Headcoats efforts is a dark, aggressive set which includes a humorous jab at the NME

 

We were going in to record an album at a studio down the road, but the fella’s wife went into labour so we couldn’t go. So I just took the Revox into the little rehearsal space at the back of the house, and scribbled out some lyrics and some little tunes that we recorded as we went along. Unusually, I put the vocals on live too. Virtually every album I’ve done has been recorded on a Selmer 15 amp I bought a million years ago, and that had to take both the vocal and the guitar through it, which means you have to have a very low level on the guitar to make the vocal audible. I’m very interested in having low levels on the guitar, being unimpressive – and people would probably say that I’d achieved that quite successfully [laughs]! It’s got quite violent, weird lyrics, some of this album. [The title track is] based on a story from my father when he was a boy: he saw some kids playing football with a Messerschmitt pilot’s severed hand. I also used to be into archaeology round here when I was 14 – out in the marshes we found some bits of an old Heinkel engine, and some older guys I knew had seen this plane blown up over the Medway. This thing got a direct hit in the bomb bay and was blown from lower Gillingham to Sheerness, and they said that dogs were bringing in bits of human flesh for a good few weeks afterwards. When we released “We Hate The Fuckin’ NME”, we got really slated by a couple of NME journalists, namely Johnny Cigarettes, but we had other people who put the song on their answerphones. I consider that we were on the side of the NME workers, not against them! I found it amusing. Everything we put out into the world, it’s nothing to do with what people want, it’s what I think is classy behaviour – like, if I heard that someone else had done it, would I think it was funny? That’s the rule of thumb.

BILLY CHILDISH & HOLLY GOLIGHTLY
IN BLOOD
WABANA ORE, 1999
Channelling the drones of John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley, this collaboration is an overlooked one-chord classic

 

There were a couple of songs I was writing towards the end of Thee Headcoats which were inspired by Bo Diddley’s “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut”, where you’ve got 12-bar music that doesn’t even bother [changing chord]. I got really into the idea of how you could do a song without having a key change or doing the 12-bar. Then I probably thought of the [slogan] for the album, ‘One Chord! One Song! One Sound!’, which harkens back to some dodgy ideologies, as does the title In Blood in a way. I think this has got two or three really good songs on it, which is actually what I aim for with every record – it doesn’t matter how hard you work, that’s all you can ever get out of a record, so it’s not worth sweating it. When I was a kid I was in charge of thinking up games, so when I’m changing group names and projects, that’s the next game. Really it’s just entertainment for myself and my friends, there’s no other goal. And with In Blood, I thought, ‘I really want to do this.’ This was recorded on the Revox too, at May Road, a little terrace half a mile from where I am now.

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WILD BILLY CHILDISH & THE CHATHAM SINGERS
HEAVENS JOURNEY
DAMAGED GOODS, 2005
A spirited country-blues excursion, featuring Graham Coxon and Childish’s wife Julie Hamper

 

The Chatham Singers were based around my interest in early blues. I thought, ‘Well, Jim [Riley, engineer at Ranscombe Studio] is a phenomenal harmonica player, my wife’s really into country music which I don’t know a lot about, she can sing a few songs…’ Graham Coxon’s on two or three tracks on this, like “Angel Of Death”. That was recorded at Boundary Road in the kitchen. I did annoy Graham a bit – I said, “You can play this bit because it’s a bit country.” We had a go, and then we recorded it, and Graham would do it a bit better each time. I said, “No! Stop letting me know you can play guitar, I don’t want to know.” I think he got a bit peeved with me hamstringing him. I’ve always liked Graham. Julie [Hamper, Childish’s wife] and I have been discussing going in and doing a blues-country album again. I’ve got to knock together a couple of blues tunes first, at least get some lyrics down. The great thing about the way we work is that we’re not making anything for any particular audience, there’s no-one to please.

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WILD BILLY CHILDISH & THE SPARTAN DREGGS
TABLETS OF LINEAR B (The Siege Of Thebes, Prologue Part The 1st)
DAMAGED GOODS, 2012
Childish teams up with one of his favourite singers, Neil Palmer, for this album – free with coupons from two others

 

Neil was in The Fire Dept, who are my favourite group. We wanted to get him recording again, so we did The Vermin Poets with him, but that wasn’t working because I didn’t get enough control. So I said to Neil, “We’ll do Billy Childish & The Spartan Dreggs. I’ll write the stuff with you, you’ll be the singer and it’ll be all about you, but I’ll be doing the arranging and decision-making.” So we did a few albums, and this is some of my favourite stuff we’ve done. Then I said to Neil, “Nobody wants another Spartan Dreggs album, so why don’t we do three?” My idea was that if you bought the first two and cut off the corners you’d get a free album. I was doing this as a favour to record collectors who want rare things, which of course meant that we could never make any money because you’ve got to give everyone a free album. It was a thankless endeavour! The songs were written in the studio, mainly – we’d bat out some lyrics or I’d get chunks of The Iliad or corrupted versions of Housman poems and we’d bat them back and forth until it looks like lyrics. It’s classics for the everyday man, educational rock’n’roll! “The Sir John Hawkins Memorial Car Park” is named after the Sir John Hawkins car park in Chatham… it’s a really horrible car park, they destroyed a big central part of the town, and then named it after this famous Elizabethan slaver! [laughs] That’s where we park my old Volvo.

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CTMF
LAST PUNK STANDING
DAMAGED GOODS, 2019
Wah wah! The Velvet Underground! The latest from Childish’s current outfit is 14 tracks of streamlined, psychedelic punk

 

I had quite a serious nervous breakdown last year, which made me put the breaks on everything. I was on drugs for a little while, but I quickly got off the medication and got painting and writing songs again. I think this might be one of the strongest albums we’ve done. We recorded about three albums’ worth – usually I go for uniformity, so it all sounds like it was done in one go, but this time I decided to go for the opposite and have these real changes of mood and feeling. One track even sounds like The Velvet Underground, which is not something I’ve been interested in or even listened to. It’s usually like, ‘Well, we’ve got to go in the studio the next day, so I’d better write a song’, so I sit down in the evening when Julie goes up to bed, and then in the morning we go down the studio and I play the song to them and we record it. I wrote a couple of love songs for Julie, like “You’re The One I Idolize”, and I don’t do too many of them. “Everything Intensifies” has a very strong resemblance to “The Plan”, by Richard Hell, who I really admire. Ideally I like ideas to sneak up on me, but sometimes you have to slog away – some songs take six months to write. When we’ve been playing live recently we’ve done “We’re Gone”, from Thee Headcoats’s 1990 album, and that’s got wah-wah on it. Seeing as I’d bought one I thought I may as well use it on [new song] “Like An Inexplicable Wheel”. But you wouldn’t believe the fooling around we do in the studio, and how I annoy Jim with my requirements. It can sometimes take a lot of messing about to make something sound like it’s not been messed about with.

 

 

Aoife Nessa Frances – Land Of No Junction

Jim Wirth
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Aoife Nessa Frances – Land Of No Junction
“I’ve been dreaming of better times,” sings Aoife Nessa Frances on “Here In The Dark”; a standard response to the vicissitudes of the universe as the world tiptoes into 2020, wary of the ground disintegrating under its feet. However, faced with chronic uncertainty, the Dubliner’s debut a...

“I’ve been dreaming of better times,” sings Aoife Nessa Frances on “Here In The Dark”; a standard response to the vicissitudes of the universe as the world tiptoes into 2020, wary of the ground disintegrating under its feet. However, faced with chronic uncertainty, the Dubliner’s debut album offers a radical alternative to troubling reality: a determined retreat into fuzzy, blanket-warm abstraction. “Moonlight over me,” the 28-year-old sings in woozy reverie on its meandering title track. “Leave me with this dream and wake me after dark.” Close your eyes, in other words, and all the bad things really do go away.

More linear, coherent records will be released this year, but with its half-submerged psychedelic landscapes, and dark, shadowy lyrics, Land Of No Junction may offer a more lasting challenge than any of them. Those familiar with Jessica Pratt’s Quiet Signs, Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising, the Broadcast records or the closing bars of Pink Floyd’s “Jugband Blues” will recognise some of its component parts – echoey electric guitars, Mellotrons, the occasional bongo – but Land Of No Junction is so determinedly inward-focused that it struggles to sound like anything but itself.

From a bohemian background – mother an actor, father a fiddle maker – Frances was unable to pursue her first calling as a flamenco guitarist, drifting towards folk and psychedelia while playing in bands as a teenager (recorded evidence of her previous vehicle, experimental rock band Princess, still exists on the internet). Her collaborator and co-producer, Ryley Walker associate Cian Nugent, gave her moral support and practical guidance as she hacked her debut album together piecemeal over the last two years, and accidentally supplied its central premise too.

Nugent was talking about a childhood holiday in Wales, and Frances misheard Llandudno Junction as the more expansive Land Of No Junction. That nebulous Neverland became increasingly compelling as Frances began to put these songs to tape. The land of no junction was, she says, “a dark vast landscape to visit in dreams… A place of waiting where I could sit with uncertainty and accept it, rejecting the distinct and welcoming the uncertain and the unknown.”

The pitter-patter of synthesised drums provides the gateway into this mysterious realm, opening track “Geranium” coming across like scribblings from a Jungian therapist’s notebook. “A light in an empty room, opens call through your chest,” sings Frances, forever somewhere between blissed out and possessed. “You can enter through a trapdoor.”

A hypnotic combination of clip-clop rhythms and Nugent’s snaking, Richard Thompson-like guitar lines wind around Frances’ portal into the subconscious. She tells Uncut that her many of her lyrics start out as nonsense words, phatic chatter, congealing into something more coherent as her songs take shape, but “Geranium” is a sign that her mission is not to be understood; the words tumble out, the images flash by, everything and nothing is revealed.

However, if they lack hard edges, Frances’ depictions of inner states remain compelling for their vagueness. “Here In The Dark” is typically light on detail, but depicts the transcendental joy of sleep with a Judee Sill-ish twinkle. A stately, Mellotron-lit voyage into unconscious space, it finds Frances eagerly pushing open a door into this other world where the rules of earthly engagement no longer apply (“eyes closed it’s something else,” she sings with a tinge of rapture). It also comes with a luminous instrumental coda, titled “A Long Dress”. A two-note rhapsody, it firms up the links between Land Of No Junction and Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom; the former Soft Machine drummer’s surrealist response to the 1973 accident that confined him permanently to a wheelchair. Both records have a twilit otherworldliness, and a similar conception of the inner world as a widescreen alternative to shrunken circumstances.

The daytime world Frances depicts is certainly one filled with compromises and disappointments. “The Girl From Ipanema” with a weird metallic aftertaste, “Blow Up” is a consideration of female vulnerability that dates back to before the Republic Of Ireland voted to legalise abortion in 2018, a time when women could find themselves left to fend for themselves in a hostile world. As she puts it: “Scared of the tide, no-one but you can swim.” Her response to this injustice is not rage, though, but weary resignation: a despair that battles of the sexes ever needed to be fought. “Tired of being human,” she sings. That existential gloom also swirls around the lugubrious “Less Is More”. Her most explicit homage to 1990s experimentalists Broadcast, it finds Frances (who worked as a PA in the film industry to fund the recording of the album) bridling against the strictures of nine-to-five normality, resentfully shrinking to fit the tiny space laid out for her (“talk not shout,” she mutters, a little reminder to keep her voice and her expectations low).

However, if the waking world tends to be a slightly washed-out disappointment, then the relatively sprightly “Libra” – a close cousin of The Notorious Byrd Brothers – at least offers hope of something better to come, Frances’ CTRL+ALT+DELETE refrain of “all of our answers have disappeared” a disorientating shock to the system and a thrilling challenge to restart from scratch.

However, Land Of No Junction isn’t really a record that yearns to fight for a brighter tomorrow, Frances’ questing more than anything else for the freedom to explore her own private Narnia in peace. The chiming “In The End” stalks back into the middle of the night for another dose of the delicious dark stuff, and while it suggests a belief in the redemptive power of love “that will transcend in the end”, starry fantasy beats flesh and blood every time. “I’m passing through the window and not the door,” she murmurs, space (outer or inner) very much her place.

Her natural pull towards the unreal, the insubstantial, might explain why the Angel Olsen-ish “Heartbreak” – the most conventionally structured “song” on Land Of No Junction – rings slightly false. The languid title track states her deliberately ill-defined case much more clearly. A loose tangle of Syd Barrett guitar infused with a touch of Broadway schmaltz, it finds Frances woken in the middle of the night by some dazzling vision, and waiting “breathless, restless” to fade back into uncomplicated oblivion again. “Take me to the land of no junction before it fades away,” she sighs. “Where the roads can never cross but go their own way.”

A place of quiet certainty – no choices; endless possibilities – it’s a compelling landscape to ponder in a treacherous age, though where all those lonely roads lead is another matter. As a kind of millennial Astral Weeks, Land Of No Junction feels like a complete statement, and Frances’ plans seemed fairly sketchy when Uncut asked her to consider her next move: “I’m looking forward to writing more music and finishing it and getting to record it again and maybe doing it a little faster this time.”

Fine detail, however, is not her thing, Land Of No Junction veering determinedly toward the vague as it searches for comfort from somewhere within. Call it a quiet protest against reality; a one-woman bed-in. One way and another, it works like a dream.

Hear a previously unreleased Simon & Garfunkel live EP

Sam Richards
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Hear a previously unreleased Simon & Garfunkel live EP
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Simon & Garfunkel's final album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Legacy/Sony will release a special gold vinyl edition of the album on February 14 (pre-order that here). But today, they have also released a digital-only Simon & Garfunkel EP en...

This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Simon & Garfunkel’s final album, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Legacy/Sony will release a special gold vinyl edition of the album on February 14 (pre-order that here). But today, they have also released a digital-only Simon & Garfunkel EP entitled Live At Carnegie Hall 1969, featuring four previously unreleased recordings captured live in New York two months before the release of Bridge Over Troubled Water, including a unique take on “The Boxer” with its original, additional verse. Listen below:

Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to Simon & Garfunkel is in shops now – read more about it and order a copy online here.

Introducing… Sounds Of The New West Volume 5

Sam Richards
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Introducing… Sounds Of The New West Volume 5
Free with this month's Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online here – is the latest in our famous Sounds Of The New West compilation series, rounding up 15 tracks of the best new Americana. Here's some more detail on all the featured songs: 1 JEREMY IVEY Diamonds Back To Coal We ...

Free with this month’s Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online here – is the latest in our famous Sounds Of The New West compilation series, rounding up 15 tracks of the best new Americana.

Here’s some more detail on all the featured songs:

1 JEREMY IVEY
Diamonds Back To Coal
We start off our latest Sounds Of The New West compilation with this Neil Young-esque gem from Jeremy Ivey. Once part of Southern soul gang Buffalo Clover, Ivey recently stepped out with his debut solo album, produced by his wife Margo Price.

2 ERIN RAE
Love Like Before
Erin Rae McKaskle’s subtle songs and smooth voice can’t disguise the emotional complexity at the heart of much of her work. “Love Like Before”, taken from the Nashville songwriter’s second album, Putting On Airs, pairs Laurel Canyon folk with the kind of circular, infectious songwriting Jeff Tweedy excels at.

3 JAMES ELKINGTON
Ever-Roving Eye
British-born but US-based, Elkington has so far been best known for his work on records by the likes of Michael Chapman and Joan Shelley. His latest upcoming solo album, a stunning mix of Americana and psychedelic folk, is likely to change that.

4 COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS
Downtown Train
With her customary vocal prowess, Andrews takes on one of Tom Waits’ best-loved songs with this plush, dynamic track from the new tribute album, Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits.

5 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Armageddon’s Back In Town
New album The Unraveling finds
the Drive-By Truckers as furious as ever about the state of America, politically and socially, while the anthemic velocity of their heartland rock remains as potent. “There’ll be no healing from the art of double-dealing,” sings Patterson Hood.

6 HAYES CARLL
I Will Stay
With more than a touch of Townes Van Zandt about him, this Texan singer-songwriter created his finest album yet with 2019’s What It Is. “I Will Stay” is the record’s closing track, Carll’s plaintive ballad swathed in simple strings.

7 KELSEY WALDON
Anyhow
White Noise/White Lines was our Americana album of the month a couple of issues back, and “Anyhow” is one of its highlights; a gently rolling song of defiance, it demonstrates just why John Prine decided to sign Waldon to his Oh Boy label.

8 SAARISELKA
Void
The Ground Our Sky is the debut album from this duo of ambient pedal-steel maestro Chuck Johnson and keyboardist and vocalist Marielle Jakobsons. The most structured track on the LP, “Void” is five minutes of drifting bliss, akin to Beach House remixed by Daniel Lanois.

9 FRANKIE LEE
Bad Love
This previously unreleased exclusive from the peripatetic, Minnesota-born artist, who won over hearts with 2019’s Stillwater,
is a shiny, catchy piece of War On Drugs-style electro-boogie, Lee’s fine songwriting clearly on show.

10 OHTIS
Pervert Blood
There’s no-one quite like Sam Swinson: hailing from the wonderfully named Normal, Illinois, he kicked hard drugs in time to release Ohtis’s excellent debut Curve Of Earth last year. “Pervert Blood” is a perfect example of the damaged yet life-affirming songs Swinson concocts.

11 TYLER CHILDERS
Country Squire
The opening title track of the Kentuckian’s third album, “Country Squire” is a piece of lively, romantic honky-tonk from one of country’s most quietly enigmatic performers. The perfectly poised production from Sturgill Simpson and David R Ferguson only elevates it further.

12 CARSON McHONE
Don’t You Think I Feel It Too
Here’s a tender cover of David Ball’s song, recorded by Austin rising star McHone. 2018’s Carousel was a strong second album, yet her interpretation here suggests that even better is to come.

13 BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN
The Roving
Consisting of Eric D Johnson, Anaïs Mitchell and Josh Kaufman, Bonny Light Horseman are something of a deluxe folk collective. Their self-titled debut is a special record, its easy, melancholy vibe as important as Mitchell’s voice or the traditional songs, like “The Roving”, that the group perform.

14 IAN NOE
Letter To Madeline
Noe’s debut album, 2019’s Between The Country, marked the Kentucky singer-songwriter as one to keep an eye on. “Letter To Madeline” is a particular delight, matching the outlaw sounds of Noe’s forebears with his own twilit, Dylan-esque imagery.

15 GILL LANDRY
Trouble Town
Skeleton At The Banquet is the fifth solo album from Landry, formerly of Nashville’s much-loved Old Crow Medicine Show, and “Trouble Town” – written, as with the rest of the LP, in rural France – is a masterful slice of jazz-
influenced noir.

Sounds Of The New West Volume 5 comes free with the new issue of Uncut, in shops now with Kate Bush on the cover.

James Taylor announces new album of American standards

Sam Richards
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James Taylor announces new album of American standards
James Taylor has announced that his new album, American Standard, will be released by Fantasy Records on February 28. It features 14 reworkings of American standards by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Billie Holiday and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Hear his version of Gene De Paul and Sammy Cahn's “Te...

James Taylor has announced that his new album, American Standard, will be released by Fantasy Records on February 28.

It features 14 reworkings of American standards by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Billie Holiday and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Hear his version of Gene De Paul and Sammy Cahn’s “Teach Me Tonight” below:

“I’ve always had songs I grew up with that I remember really well, that were part of the family record collection – and I had a sense of how to approach, so it was a natural to put American Standard together,” explains Taylor. “I know most of these songs from the original cast recordings of the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, including My Fair Lady, Oklahoma, Carousel, Showboat and others.”

He adds, “In terms of how they were performed and recorded before, we paid attention to the chords and melody, but we were interested in doing something new, and in bringing something new to it, we’ve reinterpreted the songs, that’s what makes it worth doing.”

Pre-order American Standard here and peruse the full tracklisting below.

1. My Blue Heaven (Walter Donaldson-George A. Whiting)
2. Moon River (Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer)
3. Teach Me Tonight (Gene De Paul-Sammy Cahn)
4. As Easy As Rolling Off A Log (M.K. Jerome-Jack Scholl)
5. Almost Like Being In Love (Frederick Loewe-Alan Jay Lerner)
6. Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ The Boat (Frank Loesser)
7. The Nearness Of You (Hoagy Carmichael-Ned Washington)
8. You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught (Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II)
9. God Bless The Child (Billie Holiday-Arthur Herzog Jr.)
10. Pennies From Heaven (Arthur Johnston-Johnny Burke)
11. My Heart Stood Still (Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart)
12. Ol’ Man River (Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II)
13. It’s Only A Paper Moon (Harold Arlen-Yip Hardburg-Billy Rose)
14. The Surrey With The Fringe On Top (Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II)

Jeff Lynne’s ELO announce European tour

Sam Richards
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Jeff Lynne’s ELO announce European tour
Following the UK No. 1 chart success of recent album From Out Of Nowhere, Jeff Lynne's ELO have announced a European arena tour for the autumn. The ELO spaceship will touch down in the following cities: September Sat 19th NO, Oslo, Telenor Arena Mon 21st ...

Following the UK No. 1 chart success of recent album From Out Of Nowhere, Jeff Lynne’s ELO have announced a European arena tour for the autumn.

The ELO spaceship will touch down in the following cities:

September
Sat 19th NO, Oslo, Telenor Arena
Mon 21st SE, Stockholm, Ericsson Globe Arena
Wed 23rd DK, Herning, Jyske Bank Boxen
Fri 26th DE, Hamburg, Barclaycard Arena
Sat 27th DE, Berlin, Mercedes-Benz Arena
Wed 30th DE, Munich, Olympiahalle

October
Mon 5th UK, London, The O2
Tues 6th UK, London, The O2
Sun 11th UK, Birmingham, Arena Birmingham
Fri 16th UK, Manchester, Manchester Arena
Sun 18th UK, Belfast, SSE Arena
Mon 19th IE, Dublin, 3Arena
Wed 21st UK, Glasgow, The SSE Hydro

Tickets go on sale next Friday (January 31) at 9am from here.

Hear Stephen Malkmus’s new single, “Xian Man”

Sam Richards
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Hear Stephen Malkmus’s new single, “Xian Man”
Stephen Malkmus will release his new album Traditional Techniques – his third in three years – via Domino on March 6. Hear the first single to be taken from it, "Xian Man", below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LU4rS7XOxw Conceived while recording Sparkle Hard at Portland’s Halfling...

Stephen Malkmus will release his new album Traditional Techniques – his third in three years – via Domino on March 6.

Hear the first single to be taken from it, “Xian Man”, below:

Conceived while recording Sparkle Hard at Portland’s Halfling Studio, Traditional Techniques was recorded with engineer/arranger-in-residence Chris Funk (The Decemberists), while Matt Sweeney (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Chavez) plays guitar throughout. The album also features a variety of Afghani instruments.

Malkmus will embark on a North American tour this spring with an entirely new band, comprising Funk (pedal steel, keys), Sweeney (guitar), Brad Truax (bass), and Jake Morris (drums), joined at times by Qais Essar (rabab) and Eric Zang (kaval, udu, daf). Tickets for the dates below go on sale on Friday (January 24) at 10am local time. Further dates will be announced soon.

Tue. March 31 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Ave
Wed. April 1 – Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall
Thu. April 2 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
Fri. April 3 – Louisville, KY @ Headliners
Sat. April 4 – Nashville, TN @ Cannery Ballroom
Sun. April 5 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West
Tue. April 7 – Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel
Wed. April 8 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle
Thu. April 9 – Richmond, VA @ The National
Fri. April 10 – Washington, DC @ Black Cat
Sat. April 11 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
Mon. April 13 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
Wed. April 15 – Boston, MA @ Royale
Thu. April 16 – Montreal, QC @ L’Astral
Fri. April 17 – Toronto, ON @ Danforth Music Hall
Sat. April 18 – Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom
Sun. April 19 – Detroit, MI @ St. Andrew’s Hall

Monty Python’s Terry Jones has died, aged 77

Sam Richards
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Monty Python’s Terry Jones has died, aged 77
Terry Jones, co-founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus and director of Life Of Brian, has died aged 77. He was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2015. After befriending Michael Palin while studying at Cambridge, the pair went on to write and perform for TV shows such as The Frost Report ...

Terry Jones, co-founder of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and director of Life Of Brian, has died aged 77. He was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2015.

After befriending Michael Palin while studying at Cambridge, the pair went on to write and perform for TV shows such as The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set before teaming up with John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam to create Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1969.

When the team moved from TV into film, Jones assumed the director’s chair, co-directing Monty Python And The Holy Grail with Gilliam, and directing 1979’s Life Of Brian himself.

Post-Python, Jones collaborated with Palin on Ripping Yarns and directed films including Personal Services and Erik The Viking, the latter based on his own children’s book. He wrote a number of other books for children and presented TV history shows such as Barbarians. Jones also worked closely with Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman on a ‘heavy metal’ stage version of The Nutcracker, although the project never came to fruition.

“Farewell, Terry Jones,” wrote Stephen Fry on Twitter. “The great foot has come down to stamp on you. My god what pleasure you gave, what untrammelled joy and delight. What a wonderful talent, heart and mind.”

New touring Ian Dury exhibition to launch in March

Sam Richards
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New touring Ian Dury exhibition to launch in March
A new exhibition of Ian Dury-related art and ephemera will open at London's Stash Gallery on March 24, before touring various venues around the south-east of England for the remainder of 2020. It's called All Kinds Of Naughty, after an unrecorded Ian Dury song which was recently rediscovered by f...

A new exhibition of Ian Dury-related art and ephemera will open at London’s Stash Gallery on March 24, before touring various venues around the south-east of England for the remainder of 2020.

It’s called All Kinds Of Naughty, after an unrecorded Ian Dury song which was recently rediscovered by former Kilburn & The High Roads keyboard player Rod Melvin in his personal archive. Dury’s handwritten lyrics to the song will be on display in the exhibition, alongside the recreation of a knitted stage glove that Melvin made for Dury in the 1970s.

The bulk of the exhibition will be comprised of Ian Dury-inspired artworks by the Thames Group of artists, who include painters, photographers, designers, writers and milliners among their number.

In addition, Ian’s wife Sophy Dury has created a polychrome terracotta relief plaque entitled Ian Dury Laughter, while his daughter Jemima has produced a limited edition print of one of Ian’s paintings, Alice Capone (for which there will be a blind auction, with all proceeds going to Teenage Cancer Trust). Former Stiff Records press officer Kosmo Vinyl will be showing a work entitled A Bit Hard To Swallow, featuring Ian Dury eating jellied eels outside Tubby Isaac’s famous East End Pie & Mash shop.

Another former Kilburn & The High Roads member, renowned painter and current Royal Academy Professor of Perspective Humphrey Ocean, will also be contributing to the exhibition.

See below for the touring dates of All Kinds Of Naughty. Entry is free at all venues.

STASH GALLERY
Aldgate, London
March 24 – April 11

QUEENS THEATRE
Hornchurch, Essex
April 15 – May 2

GALLERY 286
Earls Court, London
May 7 – May 28

LILFORD GALLERY
Canterbury, Kent
June 11 – June 25

DONT WALK WALK GALLERY
Deal, Kent
June 30 – July 12

BEECROFT GALLERY
Southend-on-Sea, Essex
August 29 – Oct 3

Pixies, Angel Olsen and King Krule to headline End Of The Road

Sam Richards
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Pixies, Angel Olsen and King Krule to headline End Of The Road
This year's End Of The Road festival, taking place at Dorset's Larmer Tree Gardens from September 3-6, will be headlined by Pixies, Angel Olsen and King Krule. Other enticing names on the bill include Big Thief, Aldous Harding, The Comet Is Coming, Little Simz and Bright Eyes, who recently announ...

This year’s End Of The Road festival, taking place at Dorset’s Larmer Tree Gardens from September 3-6, will be headlined by Pixies, Angel Olsen and King Krule.

Other enticing names on the bill include Big Thief, Aldous Harding, The Comet Is Coming, Little Simz and Bright Eyes, who recently announced their reunion after nine years away.

There are returns for perennial Uncut favourites such as Richard Hawley, Richard Dawson, Field Music and Nadia Reid, while further down the bill there’s room for a host of exciting new and leftfield names including 75 Dollar Bill, Vanishing Twin, WH Lung, Itasca, Trash Kit, Aoife Nessa Frances, Sarathy Korwar, Squid, Jake Xerxes Fussell and Black Country, New Road.

Tickets for End Of The Road 2020 are on sale now, priced at £199 plus booking fee, available from the official festival site.

Kendrick Lamar unveiled as latest BST Hyde Park headliner

Sam Richards
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Kendrick Lamar unveiled as latest BST Hyde Park headliner
Kendrick Lamar has been unveiled as the latest headliner for American Express Presents BST Hyde Park. He'll play the London park on Sunday July 5 supported by James Blake and Brittany Howard, with more acts to be announced. Tickets start at £65 plus booking fee and go on general sale on Frida...

Kendrick Lamar has been unveiled as the latest headliner for American Express Presents BST Hyde Park.

He’ll play the London park on Sunday July 5 supported by James Blake and Brittany Howard, with more acts to be announced.

Tickets start at £65 plus booking fee and go on general sale on Friday (January 24) at 10am from here. An American Express pre-sale is open now, more details here.

Last week it was reported that Lamar has completed his follow-up to 2017’s Damn, and that the rapper is “pulling in more rock sounds this time”.

The National announce “unique” London shows

Sam Richards
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The National announce “unique” London shows
The National have announced two new London shows, at the O2 Academy Brixton on June 1 and 2. The dates are billed on the poster as "two nights only, two unique shows". No other details have been revealed as yet, although the band previously announced that they would play "two unique shows" at May...

The National have announced two new London shows, at the O2 Academy Brixton on June 1 and 2.

The dates are billed on the poster as “two nights only, two unique shows”. No other details have been revealed as yet, although the band previously announced that they would play “two unique shows” at May’s Homecoming festival in Cincinatti to celebrate the tenth anniversary of High Violet.

Tickets go on general sale on Friday (24 January) at 10am from here.

Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher and Chic for Teenage Cancer Trust shows

Sam Richards
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Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher and Chic for Teenage Cancer Trust shows
This year marks 30 years since the founding of the Teenage Cancer Trust charity and 20 years since they started putting on their annual concert series at the Royal Albert Hall. The line-up for 2020's anniversary shows has now been unveiled, featuring headline shows from Noel Gallagher's High Flyi...

This year marks 30 years since the founding of the Teenage Cancer Trust charity and 20 years since they started putting on their annual concert series at the Royal Albert Hall.

The line-up for 2020’s anniversary shows has now been unveiled, featuring headline shows from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Nile Rodgers & Chic, Groove Armada and Stereophonics. The latter concert will also feature a special acoustic set from Paul Weller.

Check out the dates below. Tickets go on sale from here on Friday (January 24) at 9.30am.

Stereophonics + Very Special Guest Paul Weller
Wednesday 25th March

Groove Armada
Thursday 26th March

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
Friday 27th March

Nile Rodgers & Chic
Sunday 29th March

Additionally, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds will play two shows at Manchester’s O2 Apollo on March 24 and 25. Tickets for those also go on sale on Friday at 9.30am, from here.

Watch Bruce Springsteen play a surprise charity show in Asbury Park

Sam Richards
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Watch Bruce Springsteen play a surprise charity show in Asbury Park
Bruce Springsteen was a surprise special guest as this weekend's Light Of Day charity concert at Asbury Park’s Paramount Theater, which raises funds and awareness to fight Parkinson's disease. As Rolling Stone reports, Springsteen was first brought onstage by sometime collaborator Jesse Malin t...

Bruce Springsteen was a surprise special guest as this weekend’s Light Of Day charity concert at Asbury Park’s Paramount Theater, which raises funds and awareness to fight Parkinson’s disease.

As Rolling Stone reports, Springsteen was first brought onstage by sometime collaborator Jesse Malin to perform their 2007 duet “Broken Radio” before staying on to play Malin’s “Meet Me At The End of the World”.

Springsteen later returned for the headline slot, backed by Joe Grushecky And The Houserockers. As well as several of Grushecky’s songs, they played “The Promised Land”, “Atlantic City”, “Darkness On The Edge Of Town”, “Pink Cadillac” and “Savin’ Up”. For the encore, all the night’s performers reassembled onstage to sing “Light Of Day” before Springsteen closed the night with a stripped-back “Thunder Road”. Watch the footage below:

Frank Zappa – The Hot Rats Sessions

John Robinson
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Frank Zappa – The Hot Rats Sessions
You might well conclude that in 1969 the mere presence of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart could turn the trees purple. Pedants will insist their records of that year looked the way they did because of the use of infra-red film, key to the otherworldly appearance of both Beefheart’s Trout Mask Re...

You might well conclude that in 1969 the mere presence of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart could turn the trees purple. Pedants will insist their records of that year looked the way they did because of the use of infra-red film, key to the otherworldly appearance of both Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica (produced by Zappa) and Zappa’s Hot Rats (featuring Beefheart). The more sensible, however, know all this was more the result of personal chemistry than photographic alchemy.

Zappa in 1969 seemed to be re-evaluating his relationship with chaos. Having disbanded the original Mothers Of Invention – the satirical Dadaist garage band he had fronted since 1965 – he was now enjoying a role as musician without portfolio. In March he recorded Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, a work that sounded abstract but betrayed great discipline. Around the same time released on his Bizarre label was a double album by outsider artist Wild Man Fischer, which sounded abstract and betrayed no discipline, though it did share some of Trout’s blend of audio verité and studio post-production. In November he road-managed Beefheart’s trip to the Amougies festival in Belgium.

At the event, he jammed with Pink Floyd on something a bit like “Interstellar Overdrive”, laying down modal runs with the glassy-eyed band as drenched Europeans looned damply in huge coats. He also met Archie Shepp, whose tenor sound he describes in an archive snippet here as sounding like “pre-heated rats”.

But if he liked unstructured as a place to visit, it wasn’t somewhere that Zappa – a meticulous archivist and editor; a micromanager and painter of the bigger picture – was ever going to want to live. Having voyaged with the Mothers to some strange locations on the fringes of classical, jazz and experimental performance, Hot Rats (his first 
proper solo album) was made with 
a tighter agenda.

He retained from the Mothers their keyboard player and musical polymath Ian Underwood (thanked extensively in the notes), but elsewhere he uses a session-hardened personnel. Violinists Jean-Luc Ponty and Don “Sugarcane” Harris, guitarist Shuggie Otis, Max Bennett on bass, the drummers John Guerin, Ron Selico and Paul Humphrey are all on hand to help fulfil his vision.

According to the sleeve, Hot Rats was a “movie in sound, directed by Frank Zappa”. In its original completed form (not included here, but in a 1987 remix on Disc Five, which tells its own weird and echoing story), it’s a succinct flick with some cheesy moments. There are powerfully stated jazz rock themes (like the opening “Peaches En Regalia”), strong guitar action sequences (the sleazy groove of “Willie The Pimp”, voiced by Beefheart; the hard-rocking instrumental “The Gumbo Variations”). There is courtly jazz fusion (“Son Of Mr Green Genes”) and seasick groove (“Little Umbrellas”). It’s fiddly, and proggy, but the rhythm section hold it all together, bringing baseline dirt to material which otherwise might skirt close to telephone hold music. Zappa’s wife referenced the record’s “aroma”, which nails it.

As this new set shows, Zappa’s movie has been waiting for an extended cut, and the six discs here make a documentary-style dive into the album’s development and promotion. It includes tracks recorded, but which didn’t make it (that’s all of Disc Three and also “Natasha”, and the groovy “Bognor Regis”, a cousin of “Willie”). As we get deeper (Discs Five and Six), we reach wacky radio commercials, in-jokey banter with Zappa’s associates the GTOs, as well as “quick mixes” of completed tracks, all of which testify to the inspirational efficiency of Zappa’s working practice. The isolated take of Beefheart’s “Willie” vocal, meanwhile, has the capacity to terrify commuters as a ringtone.

The meat of the thing is on the first two discs, though, as we effectively stand in the room to witness the tracks in development, the jam unbounded. Zappa clearly envisions “Peaches…” as a kind of magic trick, all flourish and misdirection from the song’s compelling piano vamp. “More fills!” he advises the drummer. “Get loose!” We’re listening to someone willing to pursue a glimmer of an idea, but also with an exactingly precise idea of what he wants. A sound you will get used to is Zappa calmly requesting “another, please”.

The musicianship is of such high calibre that the hours of jamming never pall, whether it’s drum solos or a bluesy take – our pre-knowledge of the finished article means that we hear this extra instrumental work as a dynamic pursuit of musical quarry, and not superfluous ornament. Zappa’s infinitely resourceful guitar playing comes out especially well in this regard. The two unedited takes of “Willie The Pimp” find him fiery in his exchange with Don “Sugarcane” Harris, while the half-hour of “Big Legs” – an important stop en route to “The Gumbo Variations” – is filled with bluesy grit as well as jazzy upper-register flourish.

An artist given to precise classifications of his musical universe, Zappa often worked at an ironic distance, designating whole strands of his work as “uncommercial” – mindful of the cultural norms into which his work would land. What’s so engaging about Hot Rats, and about The Hot Rats Sessions in particular is of Zappa working without that frame of reference. They sound as Zappa seldom does: not over-thinking it, and guilelessly lost in the moment, and in the exuberant joy of the playing.

Field Music – Making A New World

Sharon O'Connell
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Field Music – Making A New World
World War I understandably casts a long shadow over this country’s psyche, but its reach has been particular and direct for Field Music; their latest album is a song suite commissioned for two live performances in January this year by the Imperial War Museum, as part of their Making A New World se...

World War I understandably casts a long shadow over this country’s psyche, but its reach has been particular and direct for Field Music; their latest album is a song suite commissioned for two live performances in January this year by the Imperial War Museum, as part of their Making A New World season.

Peter and David Brewis have used the most cataclysmic of world conflicts as raw material before, of course: they co-wrote the score for Esther Johnson’s 2017 documentary Asunder, which used archival footage to explore Sunderland’s connection to the Somme. But this time around the pair used a very particular tool to pull history into focus, namely a photo of the record – made via sound ranging – of artillery fire on the American front during the 60 seconds either side of the 11am armistice. The nerve-shattering horror and subsequent silence that were the project’s springboard are referenced in the album’s two brief opening instrumentals, while the former is reiterated in the muffled booms that punctuate “From A Dream, Into My Arms”. However, Making A New World isn’t a WWI concept record as such, although it’s obviously more tightly bound to its content than say, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, the nearest point of comparison.

Originally, the brothers planned to write mostly instrumentals but as David Brewis told Uncut, “The research led us to subjects we couldn’t help but write songs about. With each song, we had a moment of realising who should be telling that particular story and that led us away from something academic and into something much more personal. We were also conscious that at the Imperial War Museum shows, this would be the first time anyone had heard any of this music so it needed to be either accessible or dramatic.” Field Music being Field Music, pop immediacy won the day, which isn’t to say that these songs are all surface dazzle and deaf to nuance – they deliver on narrative particularity and interpretive abstraction as well as emotional resonance, while the pair’s writing/arranging smarts and the dominant, switchback guitar style are on peak form. The set clocks in at just under 40 minutes, with the basics recorded in two run-throughs by the Field Music live band plus Peter and David Brewis on guitar and drums respectively, in a single day.

The suite starts with the end of the war, then moves through events connected to it. Included are the signing of the armistice agreement on a private train in a siding near Compiègne (“Coffee Or Wine”), the pioneering skin-graft work done on wounded servicemen and later female-to-male gender reassignment surgery (“A Change Of Heir”), the use decades later of marine ultrasound technology to monitor foetal development (“From A Dream, Into My Arms”) and the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France to divide the Middle East (“An Independent State”). Crucially, these narratives with serious historical heft are adapted to a human scale: there’s the officer in “Coffee Or Wine” wondering of his family back home, “Will I recognise you all?/Or have you grown away from me since I’ve been away so long?”; the narrator of “Change Of Heir” who reasons, “if the mind won’t fit the body, let the body fit the mind”; and the mother who sees her unborn in its “primordial bath”, on a monitor (“From A Dream, Into My Arms”).

That all this is delivered with Field Music’s customary artful intelligence and funk-pop verve, repping for Genesis/Peter Gabriel, Steely Dan, “Fame”-era Bowie, Talking Heads, Robert Wyatt and Kraftwerk, rather than using a load of self-consciously solemn signifiers, is another point in the record’s favour. There aren’t too many bands who could channel talk about war reparations into Chic’s trebly funk (“Money Is A Memory”), connect the British use of tanks at the Somme with the unidentified lone protestor in Tiananmen Square via a watery bloom of Animal Collective and XTC (the two-part “Nikon”) or, most strikingly, deliver a song about women’s learned shame of menstruation and the unfair tax on sanitary towels (“Only In A Man’s World”) as a Talking Heads-style disco banger.

Making A New World may have started life as a gleam in the eye of a special projects director, but rather than act like temporary caretakers tiptoeing around WWI’s vast, eternally resonant themes, Field Music have sensibly moved in and made them their own. Not a memorial, then, so much as a remix of history.

Watch Elton John play “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” live in Moscow

Sam Richards
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Watch Elton John play “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” live in Moscow
On January 24, Elton John will release Live In Moscow, 1979 – the recording of a historic concert performed at Rossiya Hall, Moscow, in 1979 with percussionist Ray Cooper and originally broadcast by BBC Radio 1. Watch a video of "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)" from that very same show...

On January 24, Elton John will release Live In Moscow, 1979 – the recording of a historic concert performed at Rossiya Hall, Moscow, in 1979 with percussionist Ray Cooper and originally broadcast by BBC Radio 1.

Watch a video of “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” from that very same show:

Speaking about the concert, Elton John said: “I can honestly say it has been one of the best experiences of my life. It was one of the most memorable and happy tours I have been on. The last show was probably one of the best concerts I’ve ever given in my life. Working with Ray, with just the two of us on stage, was both exhilarating and challenging.”

Live In Moscow, 1979 – which now appears on 2xLP, 2xCD and digital formats – was originally released as limited pressing for Record Store Day 2019. Check out the LP tracklisting below:

Side 1
Daniel
Skyline Pigeon
Take Me To The Pilot
Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)

Side 2
Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Candle In The Wind
I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Side 3
Funeral For A Friend
Tonight
Better Off Dead
Bennie And The Jets

Side 4
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
Crazy Water
Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting) / Pinball Wizard
Crocodile Rock / Get Back / Back In The U.S.S.R

Watch a trailer for The Band documentary, Once Were Brothers

Sam Richards
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Watch a trailer for The Band documentary, Once Were Brothers
As reported in Uncut's interview with Robbie Robertson last year, director Daniel Roher has completed a new documentary entitled Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson And The Band. It will be released in US cinemas on February 21; a UK release date is yet be set. Watch a trailer for Once Were Brot...

As reported in Uncut’s interview with Robbie Robertson last year, director Daniel Roher has completed a new documentary entitled Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson And The Band.

It will be released in US cinemas on February 21; a UK release date is yet be set. Watch a trailer for Once Were Brothers below, featuring Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton among the talking heads:

Other famous names interviewed for the film, which is based on Robertson’s 2016 memoir Testimony, include Van Morrison, Taj Mahal, Peter Gabriel and Martin Scorsese.

Inside Kate Bush’s hidden world

Sam Richards
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Inside Kate Bush’s hidden world
45 years ago, Kate Bush made her first professional recordings at AIR studios. To celebrate this anniversary, the new issue of Uncut features a in-depth exploration of Bush's early years, unearthing the roots of her enduring, incandescent power. Peter Watts speaks to many of Bush's friends, colla...

45 years ago, Kate Bush made her first professional recordings at AIR studios. To celebrate this anniversary, the new issue of Uncut features a in-depth exploration of Bush’s early years, unearthing the roots of her enduring, incandescent power.

Peter Watts speaks to many of Bush’s friends, collaborators and champions from those pre-fame years, building up an intimate portrait of a young but determined songwriter who charmed everyone she met, as well as a staggeringly original artist on the cusp of something great.

The story begins in August 1973, with Bush’s first ever recorded session at David Gilmour’s home in rural Essex. Cathy Bush – as she was then – first met Gilmour earlier that year. The guitarist had received a demo tape from a mutual friend and, intrigued, visited her parents’ house, East Wickham Farm in Welling, Kent, to hear Bush first-hand. Accompanying herself on the piano, Bush had played well enough for Gilmour to arrange this informal recording session with bassist Pat Martin and drummer Pete Perryer of the folk-rock band Unicorn. The session fee was a meatloaf made by Gilmour’s then wife, Ginger.

“Cathy was very shy,” says Martin. “She went to the piano crossed her legs as she sat down. All she had ever done was write songs in her bedroom. She’d never played with other musicians. We said, ‘Look, just play your songs. We’ll join in when we get what is going on and if you don’t like what we are doing, tell us.’ She started on the first number and you could see her grow. She went from looking down at the floor to really getting into it. She’d never experienced before what you got from playing with other musicians.”

“Scared?” Bush later admitted to Martin. “I was bricking it.”

Neither Martin nor Perryer were experienced session players, but like Bush they relaxed into the informal setting and recorded what Martin thinks was around five tracks, including “Davy” (also known as “Maybe” and “Humming”), “The Man With The Child In His Eyes” and “Passing Through Air”. Bush mostly played Wurlitzer although she moved to piano for “Passing Through Air” – later released as the B-side to “Army Dreamers”, the earliest Kate Bush recording to be released officially.

“She played them to us, then we did them a couple of times to get the arrangements but it was only one or two takes,” recalls Martin. “I didn’t think she was stunning, but the songs were interesting and the way she wrote was unusual. We didn’t need to arrange them, as that had already been done. She was really just getting off on playing with musicians. It was clear that she already had in her mind an idea of what she wanted the songs to sound like.”

Brian Bath, who later joined the KT Bush Band, remembers another auspicious early encounter. He first met Cathy Bush when he was jamming with Paddy and a 12-year-old girl burst into the room trying to hide from her violin lesson. “The family asked me over to hear Kate playing,” he says. “We were in the room at the back of the farmhouse which had all these rugs, like tigers and lions, really weird Victoriana. She was playing this most amazing music. I couldn’t work out what she was doing, so I had to go over to look at her hands. I went home and thought, ‘Hang on a minute, I need to get better.’ This was something different, another realm.”

The feature goes on to explore the influence of Bush’s artistic family, rowdy pub gigs with The KT Bush Band, the recording of The Kick Inside and that memorable Top Of The Pops performance of “Wuthering Heights”, with contributions from Roy Harper, Joe Boyd and many others who passed through Bush’s orbit in those formative years. Plus there’s a rare Q&A with Kate herself from 2011, looking back at some of her early influences and obsessions.

It’s all in the new issue of Uncut, in shops today or available to buy online by clicking here.

Real Estate announce new album, The Main Thing

Sam Richards
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Real Estate announce new album, The Main Thing
Real Estate have announced that their new album The Main Thing will be released by Domino on February 28. Watch a video for the first single “Paper Cup”, featuring Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTOvg00AZWc “Paper Cup is a song about getting older...

Real Estate have announced that their new album The Main Thing will be released by Domino on February 28.

Watch a video for the first single “Paper Cup”, featuring Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, below:

“Paper Cup is a song about getting older and realising that this thing that I fell into doing over ten years ago – being a musician, writing songs, being a guy in a band – this may end up being my life’s work,” says Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney. “Watching the people around me change and evolve, take on new challenges, and feeling sort of stuck in a rut, in a way. Feeling uncertain of the validity of being an artist in an age of climate change and general political and social unrest around the world.

“It’s a song about questioning your chosen path in life and searching for meaning in what you do. Those questions don’t really get resolved in this song, but ironically, the process of making this record – really diving deep and trying to make it the best thing we’ve ever made – reaffirmed in me, and I think in all of us in this band, why we are doing this.”

You can read Martin Courtney talking about his favourite formative records in the new issue of Uncut, in shops tomorrow – more about that here.

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