As we launch this new magazine, in the shops tomorrow, it’s exactly 31 years – almost to the minute – since Oasis first sauntered on to the NME stage at the Glastonbury Festival and into the consciousness of the wider world. Up until this point the band had been joyously heralded by the weekly music papers for six months, and available to witness at only around 30 gigs in provincial pubs and clubs. This, then – for a group who had released their debut single six weeks previously – was undoubtedly a big one.
Oasis play for 30 minutes, but from what I recall from watching them out in the field that day, it feels much longer. The performance is poised and spectacularly unhurried, as if they have everything completely under control and are proceeding, from “Shakermaker” to “I Am The Walrus”, at their own serene pace, according to their own plan.
There’s a point during the instrumental break of “Supersonic” where Liam Gallagher stands completely still and simply drinks it all in, for a moment the calm centre of the storm. He reviews the Manchester City T shirts, the massive gathering, the crowd surfing. If he was thinking that he’d arrived in style and on schedule, he wouldn’t have been wrong.
It’s this side of Oasis – the poise, the accomplishment, the bravura self-confidence – that we particularly celebrate in this 172-page definitive edition. There are insightful in-depth reviews of every Oasis album, and of Noel and Liam’s solo careers. There’s an introduction from Liam and an affectionate afterword from Bonehead – and an eight-page foldout miscellany and timeline to complement the story.
Maybe best of all are the archive interviews. Writers from NME and Melody Maker are there throughout the band’s career, but it’s the ones who are there at the start who have the privilege of witnessing the charisma, and accomplishment of a group the like of which they haven’t seen for quite some time.
“Nice one, see you later,” Liam says as he and Noel leave the stage that day. It’s admittedly quite a lot later, but we welcome them back now for all of the same reasons we welcomed them then.
Enjoy the magazine. You can reserve your limited edition hardback here.
Pete Townshend’s major rock operas – Tommy, Lifehouse and Quadrophenia – are a personal legacy he continues to wrestle with, repeatedly reviving and retranslating them into new forms. Quadrophenia (1973) was his attempt to remind The Who of their youthful Mod roots, and the music which lured him back to the band for 1996 performances of the album. After the 1979 film fleshed out and supplanted his liner note narrative, his wife Rachel Fuller’s orchestral arrangements for Quadrophenia Classical (2015) reconfigured the music. That recording, with additional soloists replacing vocals, soundtracks Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet. The title will provoke derision from Who fundamentalists, suspicious of Townshend’s sometimes overreaching penchant for high-art versions of his classic music. Working with his blessing and light touch consultation, though, this Sadler’s Wells production revives Quadrophenia’s fervid, youthful essence.
Pete Townshend’s major rock operas – Tommy, Lifehouse and Quadrophenia – are a personal legacy he continues to wrestle with, repeatedly reviving and retranslating them into new forms. Quadrophenia (1973) was his attempt to remind The Who of their youthful Mod roots, and the music which lured him back to the band for 1996 performances of the album. After the 1979 film fleshed out and supplanted his liner note narrative, his wife Rachel Fuller’s orchestral arrangements for Quadrophenia Classical (2015) reconfigured the music. That recording, with additional soloists replacing vocals, soundtracks Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet. The title will provoke derision from Who fundamentalists, suspicious of Townshend’s sometimes overreaching penchant for high-art versions of his classic music. Working with his blessing and light touch consultation, though, this Sadler’s Wells production revives Quadrophenia’s fervid, youthful essence.
A prologue sees Jimmy (Paris Fitzpatrick) poised on a jutting rock over stormy back-projected waves and the equally tempestuous, crashing brass of “I Am The Sea”. Four Mods emerge behind him to represent his four psychological sides, a narrative element likely lost on newcomers to Townshend’s story.
Act One then reverts to Jimmy’s London life, from office drone frustration to his idolatry of rock star the Godfather (Jack Widdowson), introduced with “My Generation”’s original violent guitar chords of as he rips open his Union Jack jacket. His tossing of Jimmy’s My Generation album in the Stage Door gutter is the first of several grim disillusions. Jimmy’s solo dance acts as a physical soliloquy in response, green parka trailing raggedly behind him, no match for the dazzling grace of his other hero the Ace Face (Dan Baines, looking more like Trainspotting’s cocky blond Jonny Lee Miller than Sting).
Director Rob Ashford and choreographer Paul Roberts ignore the cinema interpretation of the album’s story in these London scenes. Townshend’s concern with his parents’ war-traumatised generation and their impact on his own is movingly dramatised in Jimmy’s parents’ suburban home life. Mother (Kate Tydman) rouses from depressed sofa slumber to engage Father (Stuart Neal) in a desperate, half-violent erotic dance to “Love Reign O’er Me”, before slumping back to Valium and TV as Jimmy enters, ignorant of their roiling inner lives. Inter-generational anger simmers when he joins his dad in deadening factory work, explained by a flashback to Father surviving his friends’ wartime massacre on another coastal rock, the score dropping to hear their last gasps. A Soho café sanctuary and the exhilaration of Jimmy and the coveted Mod Girl’s rock club dance to “Can’t Explain”, pushing themselves to the limit as Yazz Ahmed’s Milesian trumpet gives the song a new, hip twist, counter these inherited horrors.
Act Two sends Jimmy to Brighton, where day-tripping Mods terrify packed commuter carriages to “5.15”, and he floats skyward amid swirling visions of pills and dream girls. A thrilling Mods and Rockers battle royal contrasts with Jimmy’s beach reunion with his family, a tantalising moment of happy unity with his childhood self. It all leads back to that jutting rock, though, where the crisis which sent Phil Daniels’ Jimmy’s scooter hurtling over a cliff is reached. The ocean churns under cosmic black sky, and Fitzpatrick’s acting matches his dancing as Jimmy shudders through his dark night of the teenage soul, finally achieving shattered transcendence as “Love Reign O’er Me” hits Gotterdammerung orchestral heights harder than any power chord. Alongside the young cast’s exuberant dancing and brightly coloured Paul Smith fashion, this ending’s hard-won optimism should speak to any new, young audiences who may be lured to Sadler’s Wells, giving The Who a fresh generation of fans.
Hope you like her new direction! Whether it’s called Lasso, The Right One Will Stay, Classic or something different entirely, Lana’s new album is said to moving in a country direction. Even if support group London Grammar don’t exactly set the tone for that, Lana’s pre-show playlist does – hitting the crowd with historic pop/country crossover hits like Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” (1961), “Jackson” by Johnny Cash and June Carter (1967) and Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” (1975).
Actual husband
Much as she did at Stagecoach in the spring, Lana opens the show with a new song, “Husband Of Mine”. Point of difference for Cardiff: her actual husband – alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene – is in the house! “It’s a long way to travel,” she explains as she sniffles a bit after embracing him mid-song. “These are good tears!”
“Happy Birthday Lana!”
There weren’t a load of signs commemorating Lana’s 40th birthday last Saturday, but the one caught by the roving crowd camera does raise a endearingly massive cheer when it’s shown on the big screen.
“57”
Maybe the best of the new songs we’ve heard so far – certainly the catchiest – “57” gets a huge welcome from Lana’s Welsh fandom, who are hip enough to have pre-learned the words from Stagecoach footage on YouTube. Featuring her Spotify stats as a chorus “I’ve got 57.5 million listeners on Spotify…”. It’s genius, because it’s true.
“Young And Beautiful”
Great song anyway but improved by Lana’s concession to the traditional “pier into the crowd” stadium gig strategy. Followed by a Lady Diana Spencer-style train of gauzy dress fabric, she performs the song from beneath the kind of floral arch under which American couples get married in idyllic locations. Do we take this theatre? We do.
A full review will appear in the next Uncut, on sale July 18
Evan Dando has confirmed that the new Lemonheads album Love Chant will be released by Fire Records on October 24. Hear new single “In The Margin” below:
Love Chant (pre-order here) was recorded in Brazil by Apollo Nove and features guest appearances from J Mascis, Juliana Hatfield, Erin Rae, John Strohm of the Blake Babies and Nick Saloman of The Bevis Frond. Other songs were co-written with Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches and Dando’s long-time collaborator Tom Morgan.
It will be released to coincide with Dando’s memoir, Rumours Of My Demise, which is published by Faber on November 6.
The Lemonheads tour the UK and Europe throughout August and September, see the full list of dates on the poster below:
Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist maestro’s enduring influence…
“The first time I heard Terry Riley would’ve been A Rainbow In Curved Air, when it first came out in 1969. I wasn’t particularly studying minimalist or electronic music, but I was experimenting and finding new stuff, and I happened upon him. I was playing with tape machines, which were central to Terry Riley’s method. It was how he got his delay loops. I also had two tape machines, but I used to bounce from machine to machine, rather than use them as a delay system.
“‘Baba O’Riley’ was an accident. It came out of the Lifehouse project, where I was working on creating music using computers. But I couldn’t get my hands on a music computer that was up to the job, and ended up drifting into synthesisers. I was working with the Lowrey Berkshire, which had a repetitive kind of arpeggio setting. Instead of precise mathematical beats, it had drop beats in between, with drop rhythms and repeated rhythms, so you got the effect of layering. And when I listened back, I went into a kind of meditative trance. I think I’d experienced some of that while listening to A Rainbow In Curved Air – a sense of being raised up and lifted, lost in the moment. So I just felt it was right to name it in honour of Terry Riley.
“After A Rainbow In Curved Air, I think everybody was hoping that he would do more, but he didn’t do anything like it. I think the closest he came was working with John Cale on Church Of Anthrax [1971]. I met him later on – it might’ve been the late ’70s/early ’80s – when he came to a Who gig in San Francisco. Terry was an experimenter. He wasn’t interested in [making] friends, he wasn’t interested in having hits – although he did say to me when we met, ‘I wish I’d made something out of my work as you have.’
“I think what a lot of people don’t know about Terry Riley is that he’s also a reed player. He plays saxophone on In C and did an album called Reed Streams [1966], which is really interesting because it demonstrates that he was drifting into more classical Indian modality scales. He also worked with the Kronos Quartet [1984’s Cadenza On The Night Plain and 1989’s Salome Dances For Peace] and that actually sounds like baroque music. So when you hear his diversions – his experiments, his adventures in tonal fields other than electronic music or organ music – you hear his baroque and Indian influences more clearly. But they’re actually there in everything that he does. He’s quite clearly an ascetic, he’s quite clearly an inheritor of the sincere San Francisco hippie movement of spirituality and Indian and Vedantic meditation and Buddhism and so on. “To be honest, I don’t know quite what I’m doing yet for the Barbican performance. I know that they’re doing In C, which I’ve performed myself when I did Lifehouse Chronicles at Sadler’s Wells in 2000. I also did an orchestral version of ‘Baba O’Riley’, which I might like to put up if I can gather the musicians. But I’m now in the process of getting out my old organs and tape loop systems and seeing if I can come up with something. It should be interesting.”
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Guitarist, singer and songwriter Mick Ralphs – founding member of both Mott The Hoople and Bad Company – has died aged 81 following a long illness.
He had been unable to perform since suffering a stroke in November 2016, not long after a Bad Company reunion tour culminated in a triumphant headline show at London’s 02 Arena.
Mick Ralphs co-founded Mott The Hoople in 1969, writing songs such as “One Of The Boys” and “Sucker”, often in collaboration with frontman Ian Hunter.
Ralphs left the band following 1973’s Mott to form supergroup Bad Company with former Free members Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke. He wrote or co-wrote most of their big hits, including “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” and US Top 10 single “Feel Like Makin’ Love”.
Ralphs also wrote “Flying Hour” with George Harrison, toured with David Gilmour and released three solo albums, before participating in various Mott The Hoople and Bad Company reunions.
“Our Mick has passed, my heart just hit the ground,” wrote Paul Rodgers in tribute. “He has left us with exceptional songs and memories. He was my friend, my songwriting partner, an amazing and versatile guitarist who had the greatest sense of humour. Our last conversation a few days ago we shared a laugh but it won’t be our last. There are many memories of Mick that will create laughter. Condolences to everyone who loved him. I will see you in heaven.”
It’s 8pm on the button when Neil Young ambles on stage wearing a grey baseball cap, Maple Leaf t-shirt, check shirt and jeans, straps on his acoustic guitar and harmonica rig to deliver the first surprise of tonight’s show. A song about the passage of the years and a changing world, “Comes A Time” – making its tour debut – introduces one of several themes that weave loosely through the setlist of Young’s first European tour since 2019. As with “Looking Forward” and “Old Man” much later on tonight, these songs have been waiting patiently for him to grow old enough to fully reveal their gifts. What once seemed like uncannily wise observations from a blossoming songwriter have taken on a pathos, humanity and warmth that comes with age. These are now songs of experience: “Look at how the time goes past,” he sings on “Old Man”; written by Young when he was 24 but now delivered by the man a few months’ shy of his 80th birthday.
Our venue, Tiøren, is a park by the beach to the south east of Copenhagen, where the vibe is more mini-festival than outdoor gig. Even the roar of an aeroplane taking off from the nearby airport can’t quite damped the atmosphere. The merch tent is doing a busy trade in t-shirts branded with ‘Make America Great’ and ‘Keep Freedom Free’ – but Young’s early start time clearly catches a lot of people unawares, causing both the merch tent and bars to clear pretty swiftly. As with the two previous shows in Sweden and Norway, the main set is locked, with only the first song and the encore changing. So tonight we get “Comes A Time” – a beautiful song for this warm evening, but it’s spoiled by a poor vocal mix. The problem persists unfortunately, even when he’s joined by The Chrome Hearts, kicking off a blazing electric run with Greendale’s “Be The Rain”, and is never satisfactorily fixed (the absence of video screens add further frustration for those towards the back of the site). For a set that otherwise leans heavily into Crazy Horse or Stray Gators material, these Greendale songs (“Be The Rain” and later “Sun Green”) are evident outliers – I can’t be the only person who wished Young had included “Ordinary People” in the tour setlist, after performing it in April for the first time since 1989. But “Be The Rain” and “Sun Green” at least allow for further head-to-head communion between Young, guitarist Micah Nelson and bassist Corey McCormick – and there is a lot of that on display tonight.
In fact, Young’s playing is incendiary, even by his lofty standards. There are multiple solos on “When You Dance I Can Really Love”, or he locks in riffing with Nelson and McCormick on “Cinnamon Girl”, moving through the grunge grind of “Fuckin’ Up” or the Sabbath-like heaviosity of “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)” and its freak-out ending with fierce purpose. You suspect “Like A Hurricane” could have gone on for another hour, say, as Young carries on soloing into infinity while Nelson plays the Stringman synth suspended on wires, rocking back and forth as if buffeted by Young’s playing. Nelson is a good lieutenant for Young – he’s a likeable and adaptable player, a less forceful personality than Poncho Sampedro, say, but capable of following in whichever direction Young leads. A momentous “Love And Only Love” finds the pair duelling, seemingly oblivious to the 5,000 people watching their every move, with McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo in dogged pursuit for the song’s 10-minute duration.
It’s moments like this where the Chrome Hearts cleave closest to the expansive dramas of Crazy Horse – the band that in some respects they are here to honour after the Horse’s abandoned 2024 tour. Mostly comprised members of the Promise Of The Real, the Chrome Hearts might lack the Horse’s ragged charm, but they more than compensate with the renewed energy they bring to their leader. Encouraged by Nelson, McCormick and LoGerfo, Young wrings solo after solo from Old Black, sending swathes of feedback into the midsummer night.
Changing pace for an acoustic section finally gives us a chance to hear Spooner Oldham, whose keyboards have largely been drowned out by Young at full pelt. “The Needle And The Damage Done”, “Harvest Moon” (which raises a collective, and rather sweet, “Ooooh” from the crowd) and a gorgeous arrangement of CSNY’s “Looking Forward” showcase Oldham’s warm, discreet playing.
The main set finishes with another CSNY cut “Name Of Love” and a rousing “Old Man”, with Young’s voice high and strong. As a setlist, you suspect it’s predicated around his Glastonbury headline shot this coming weekend: a hits set, after a fashion, with plenty of opportunity for Neil and his latest cohorts to dig in and only a handful of deep cuts. For tonight’s encore, we get a tour debut of “Down By The River”, wild and elemental, driven by LoGerfo’s pulverising drumming and Young’s monolithic solos and followed by an unexpected and entirely welcome “Rockin’ In The Free World” (only three false endings, mind).
Sound issues aside, there’s a lot to like in this set list and this latest grouping of musicians. Whether Young will get bored eventually and start swapping out songs remains to be seen – an unlikely move, I think, until after Glastonbury at least, as this set is bedded in too well to undo now. But this might just be my favourite Neil Young set since the Alchemy tour of 2013. There’s a lot of joyful playing and camaraderie – and as “Rockin’ In The Free World” finally melts away into the night air, there’s a lot of hope, too.
Neil Young And The Chrome Hearts setlist Tiøren, Copenhagen, June 22, 2025:
Comes A Time Be The Rain When You Dance, I Can Really Love Cinnamon Girl Fuckin’ Up Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) The Needle And The Damage Done Harvest Moon Looking Forward Sun Green Love And Only Love Like A Hurricane Name Of Love Old Man
Encore Down By The River Rockin’ In The Free World
On a night that Jeff Tweedy proclaims to be one of the best of his life, Wilco deliver a triumphant one-night stand at the Royal Albert Hall that confirms they are one of the most versatile and exhilarating bands around. The 23-song set, plucked imaginatively and democratically from across the band’s deep catalogue, ends with the crowd on their feet while Tweedy, flanked by guitarists Nels Cline and Patrick Sansone, laps up the crowd’s acclaim.
The band’s mastery of the occasion is confirmed with a thunderous “Quiet Amplifier” from Ode To Joy that comes just a couple of songs after the intimate “If I Ever Was A Child”. That contrast between two different flavours of intense has always been one of the most exciting things about Wilco, and it’s amplified in the live arena as they switch from quiet to deranged within the course of a few bars of the same song – “Handshake Drugs” and “Bird Without A Tail/Base Of My Skull” being prime examples. On “Via Chicago” they show they can even do both at the same time as Cline, keyboard player Mikael Jorgensen and drummer Glenn Kotche thrash wildly at their instruments while the other half of the band continue strumming placidly as if they are playing two completely different tunes.
Wilco don’t just offer a noise-melody dynamic, of course. On “Falling Apart (Right Now)” they deliver exuberant country, while “Muzzle Of Bees” introduces Floydian scale. “Hummingbird” brings a touch of the lounge music that was being piped round the auditorium before the show. But the band are at their most memorable when they escape into unsettling freak-outs. Cline particularly seems to relish these moments, when the undercurrent of anxiety in Tweedy’s lyrics is allowed to rise to the surface and dominate.
On “Impossible Germany”, the guitarist delivers an extraordinary performance of dazzling, aggressive technique that continues for several minutes while the rest of the group pretty much stop playing to watch him shred in awe. Impressive as it is, this is also the only moment when the musicianship is in service to the individual rather than the whole, something emphasised when the rest of the group join in to provide some shape and bring the song home.
Like many musicians before him, Tweedy initially seems a little disconcerted by the rococo interior of the Royal Albert Hall, a venue whose gaudy grandeur can overwhelm first-timers. Wilco ease themselves into the evening with regular opening numbers “Company In My Back” and “Evicted”, building momentum through “Handshake Drugs” and “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”. It’s around then that Tweedy admits he’s a little distracted by an empty seat in the front row, a situation that provides him with something of a running gag for the evening.
As the set continues, Tweedy gets more talkative. A euphoric “Meant To Be” is followed by the crowd-pleasing “Jesus, Etc”, when his voice seems to shed 25 years of experience, regaining some of the vulnerability of youth. That introduces an almost riotous home stretch, with Tweedy delivering perfectly timed set-ups and punchlines before every song, the best of which comes ahead of “Box Full Of Letters” when he surveys the crowd of grey-haired peers and deadpans: “This is a song off our first album. Looking around, I think you might remember it.”
The show ends with an ecstatic four-song encore, culminating in the greasy rock rave-up “I Got You (At The End Of The Century)”, although the absolute highlight of the set is the jubilant pre-encore singalong to “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”. This is one of the few Wilco songs to obey typical rock conventions with a gargantuan groove, elephantine riff and singable refrain, so Tweedy insists that the audience join in. “Participate!” he urges. “Do not postpone joy”. The Royal Albert Hall responds; joy is embraced and the smile on Jeff Tweedy’s face is bigger than the moon.
SETLIST Company In My Back Evicted Handshake Drugs Muzzle Of Bees I Am Trying To Break Your Heart One Wing Via Chicago If I Ever Was A Child Bird Without A Tail / Base Of My Skull Hummingbird Quiet Amplifier Either Way Impossible Germany Meant To Be Jesus, Etc Box Full Of Letters Annihilation Less Than You Think Spiders (Kidsmoke) ENCORE Falling Apart (Right Now) California Stars Walken I Got You (At The End Of The Century)
Evergreen punk pioneers The Damned have announced a special show at OVO Wembley Arena on April 11, 2026, to mark the 50th anniversary of their formation.
They’ll be supported on the night by The Loveless featuring Marc Almond, Peter Hook And The Light and The Courettes.
“Half a century on and who’d have thought The Damned would still be upright and breathing?” wrote the band in an accompanying statement. “We have shared some tragic losses along the way, but like a finely tuned engine, The Damned still has the power and finesse to excite, entertain and accelerate into our 50th year…
“We haven’t made up the set list as yet but with 50 years of catalogue to choose from, only the best songs from our chequered history will be performed – and with the passion and commitment all good music lovers deserve. You know we won’t disappoint… We never thought we’d make it this far and neither did you….”
The current line-up of The Damned features founding members Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies, plus longstanding bassist Paul Gray and Monty Oxymoron on keyboards.
You can sign up for the Wembley ticket pre-sale here.
The Deadheads have gathered in Hyde Park under the perfect blue skies of the Summer Solstice, a propitious prelude to Bobby Weir’s first UK gig in 22 years. While Weir and drummer Mickey Hart usually now maintain the legacy of the Grateful Dead as Dead & Company in residencies at the Vegas' high-tech Sphere, Weir’s Wolf Bros plot an alternate course, allowing the rhythm guitarist and deputy singer to perform to his own satisfaction. Tonight, this means making his debut at the Royal Albert Hall for the one-off spectacle of his first European orchestral show.
The Deadheads have gathered in Hyde Park under the perfect blue skies of the Summer Solstice, a propitious prelude to Bobby Weir’s first UK gig in 22 years. While Weir and drummer Mickey Hart usually now maintain the legacy of the Grateful Dead as Dead & Company in residencies at the Vegas’ high-tech Sphere, Weir’s Wolf Bros plot an alternate course, allowing the rhythm guitarist and deputy singer to perform to his own satisfaction. Tonight, this means making his debut at the Royal Albert Hall for the one-off spectacle of his first European orchestral show.
The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra take the stage first for Giancarlo Aquilanti’s “A Grateful Overture”, which sets familiar Dead themes in the tradition of Aaron Copland’s early 20th century Americana, summoning images of Western vistas with plaintive pastoral passages and rock’n’roll punch. As the orchestra start “Truckin’”, Weir enters at the head of his Wolf Bros trio – pianist Jeff Chimenti, drummer Jay Lane and double-bassist Don Was, sporting dreads, shades and Stetson. Weir’s black poncho resembles a schoolmaster’s cape, thrown over crumpled grey-black threads and Cuban-heeled shoes, while his full-bodied white hair and grizzled beard could be that of an old-time prospector from one of Robert Hunter‘s songs, or an unreconstructed hippie idealist – which he and many of tonight’s audience remain.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” Weir reflects, as “Truckin’” hymns the Dead’s former, footloose life. His leonine head leans into the orchestral headwinds, till he finds a pocket of space for his guitar. The potentially knotty problem of integrating improvisational rock’n’roll with classical musicians is solved by alternating passages purely given to Aquilanti’s orchestral arrangements with sections where the band interweave with the RPCO. “These guys are nothing short of a national treasure,” Weir says, frequently turning to watch them, beaming at the treatment of this material.
“Black Peter” is set to cinematic strings. Weir plays sultry slide, inhabiting the role of the wounded loner facing down death, at ease with the fatalism which shadows the Dead’s songbook as he wails, “One more day!” “China CatSunflower” enters Hunter’s more lyrically baroque realms over symphonic funk, as the strings floating dreamily up and away. “Brokedown Palace” concludes the first set with another existential American saga sung with unfussy, direct feeling, Weir concluding: “I love you more than words can tell.”
“Sugar Magnolia” starts the second half in country mode with classical violinists converted to hoedown fiddles. As Weir sings of an old ‘70s girlfriend, he plucks individual, ringing notes. The multi-generational crowd have been boisterously out of their seats for most of the night and now spin with delight at the start of the “Terrapin Station” suite. “His job is to shed light, not to master,” sings Weir of the song’s storyteller, and that is also his modest way, his expansive vocal turning introspective as he explains a sailor’s doomed romantic bargain and heads towards the titular destination, forever just out of reach.
Then the Wolf Bros exit, the orchestra quieten and Weir puts down his guitar to sing “Days Between”, the last song written by Garcia before his death. Weir’s gruff, strong voice summons Hunter’s lyric’s combination of chivalrous nobility and sorrow, appropriate in the encroaching twilight of the Dead’s story, with Weir standing ever more alone. “Those were days,” he sings three times. “The brightest ever seen… still tender, young and green… soft as velveteen.” This is a taste of Weir’s own power, apart from but still in service to the Dead’s tale.
Weir windmills his guitar on the home strait and boils down “Hell In A Bucket” to a hedonistic sentiment fully embraced by the dancing crowd: “Might as well enjoy the ride!” Finally, the orchestra retire and the Wolf Bros dig into Weir’s solo songbook. His fuzzed-up guitar is loud and clear on “She Said”, by his ‘90s band RatDog. Then “One More Saturday Night” brings this Saturday night to a close in party mode. With ferocious attitude belying his 77 years, Weir is happily howling by the end. Stripped of the Dead’s weight, he still simply wants to play rock’n’roll.
Bobby Weir & The Wolf Bros set list at Royal Albert Hall, London, June 21, 2025:
SET ONE: A Grateful Overture Truckin’ Black Peter China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider Brokedown Palace
SET TWO: Sugar Magnolia Terrapin Station Days Between Jack Straw Hell In A Bucket Sunshine Daydream She Says One More Saturday Night
The dark and involving albums. The slyly controversial singles. We’ve reviewed them all to bring you a definitive guide to the music of Lana Del Rey. Alongside, we’ve told the story of her journey from philosophy student and trailer home resident, the aspiring singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant, to globally influential artist. We’ll be unpacking the songs, and creating the definitive timeline as we go.
But that’s not all. We’ve scrutinised the livestream of her most recent show, and reviewed the new songs. We’ve gone deep inside Lana’s cultural references compiling the definitive A-Z from Slim Aarons to Frank Zappa, via new entry Morgan Wallen. We’ve also located the key Lana interviews, which chart her path from young singer facing down incorrect assumptions to a brilliant and self-assured artist. The mag’s in shops now – or you can get your copy here.
In this epic interview - originally published in Uncut's December 2004 issue - Neil Young talks us through the songs on his Greatest Hits album. "I wrote a lot of songs when I couldn’t talk…"
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Neil Young is just back from playing several dates on the “Vote For Change” tour...
In this epic interview – originally published in Uncut’s December 2004 issue – Neil Young talks us through the songs on his Greatest Hits album. “I wrote a lot of songs when I couldn’t talk…”
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Neil Young is just back from playing several dates on the “Vote For Change” tour and he’s still sporting the button badge and a custom-made “Canadians For Kerry” T-shirt to prove it. “Too bad you guys in Europe don’t get to vote. Then it would be a landslide, right?” he jokes.
Politically, Young has often appeared an ambivalent figure. He made potent early socio-political statements with songs such as “Ohio” and “Southern Man”, both of which have a prominent place on his forthcoming best-of compilation. But then in the ’80s he appeared to flirt with Reaganism. At the end of the decade, as the Cold War was coming to an end and global communism was collapsing, he wrote “Rockin’ In The Free World”. It’s also on the new ‘hits’ collection, and is one of those ambiguous songs claimed equally by both sides. To the right it’s a celebration of capitalism’s ultimate triumph. To the left it’s a critique of ‘freedom’ American-style, with its litany of victims who fall between democracy’s cracks.
On the Vote For Change tour, it’s become a ‘stop Bush’ anthem, Young performing the song with the likes of Pearl Jam and the Dave Matthews Band.
“It seems to be resonating again,” he says. “But it depends on how you cut it and what words you leave in and what you take out.”
He’s clearly pleased with the way Michael Moore adapted the song for the soundtrack of his recent Fahrenheit 9/11. “The way he edited in the film made it very topical for now,” he enthuses, and reveals that Moore has now made a four-minute video for the song. “I just saw it for the first time half an hour ago,” Young says. “He’s done a great job.”
There are two ways of viewing rock stars who pontificate about politics. On the one hand, there’s the ’60s notion that artists have a duty to “speak out against the madness”, as David Crosby put it on CSNY’s “Almost Cut My Hair”. The other holds that just because we enjoy the music of citizens Springsteen, Stipe, Vedder or Young, why should we care a hoot about their political views?
Uncut wonders where Young stands within this spectrum of opinion.
“At both ends, because they’re both right,” he says. “Half the people feel musicians should be listened to simply as artists and shouldn’t step outside their area as political spokesmen. But the other half feel what musicians have to say is meaningful. Maybe it’s not going to change your mind. But it’s going to reinforce what you feel if someone whose music you relate to agrees with you. It can be a very effective thing if people go and vote for whatever they feel the music says.”
Whether humanity has made any progress since the titanic social and cultural battles that rock’n’roll seemed to embody in the ’60s is a moot point.
“It’s 50:50 right now,” Young reckons. “I like to think things are getting better. But there are so many levels of control through the media. It’s confusing. You think you’re making progress. And then you see how strong the other side is and how they’re manipulating the media to change the meaning of things and put out their take on it. People have to learn to think for themselves.”
Away from his contribution to the campaign to oust Bush, Young has been busy readying his new compilation, his first career overview since Decade in 1977. A long-term obsessive about sound quality, typically the record comes in various formats, including not only standard CD but something he calls “super-saturated DVD-Stereo” and a new, enhanced vinyl format he claims is “the best ever”.
“Sound quality hit the dark ages in the early ’80s. But it’s starting to come back thanks to DVD-Stereo,” he enthuses. “There’s just no comparison between that and a regular compact disc or even 5.1 sound. It’s the difference between a true reflection of the music and a mere replica.”
In reality, Young has had very few ‘hits’ in the conventional sense; his only solo Top 30 single to date has been “Heart Of Gold” in 1972. Was the selection his or his record company’s, and what were the criteria?
“There was a large list that was created,” he explains. “Then we based it on sales and airplay and downloading. We took all the information that we could and came up with what would fit.”
The result is a collection on which all but two of the 16 tracks date from the period 1969-79, with only “Rockin’ In The Free World” and “Harvest Moon” to represent the last 25 years.
“Well, that’s when the hottest hits happened, or what you might call hits,” he shrugs. “So that’s real.”
A greatest hits album will hardly satisfy those who were hoping 2004 would see the release of the multi-CD Archives boxset (at various times rumoured to consist of anything between six and 20 CDs) that he’s been promising for years. But, he insists, the project is now “big and real close” and the hits album is intended to “set the bar” for the Archives release.
Yet he denies all this journeying through his past has put him in nostalgic mood. “Like Dylan said, ‘Don’t look back.’ I can only play the old songs if there’s also new material. Greendale is what gave me enough belief in myself to continue and to sing the old songs. If it wasn’t for things like Greendale, I’d just be replicating myself, travelling round the world doing things I’d already done. Which would be very depressing and probably life-threatening.”
At the moment he admits there are no new songs. “I don’t have anything. Greendale completely drained me, to the point where I’m just standing here, the wind is blowing and I’m waiting.”
Perhaps he could fill the time by giving us his literary version of events, like Dylan’s Chronicles?
“Boy, I hope I’ll be too busy doing something else to do that. It’d be a heck of a job. But maybe at some point in my life it will become a relaxing thing to do.”
If he ever does write the book, though, don’t expect too many insights on what inspired the songs.
“Fact is, when it comes to songwriting, it’s all just a bunch of information coming from the same place. And I don’t know how to relate to the thoughts behind it. I really don’t. The songs are on their own little trip, I go out and ride along with them and sing them and sometimes I won’t sing them because I don’t feel like it.”
Despite this protestation, he’s perfectly happy to range over the album’s track selection for Uncut’s edification, and reveals he’s still particularly enamoured of the trio of songs from 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which forged the Crazy Horse sound.
“That was the beginning of playing electric guitar and jamming and being able to play those extended instrumentals for me,” says Young. “That was a great band and Danny Whitten was a great guitar player. I love all those records that I made back then. Those tracks still kick ass.”
Then came the success of “Heart Of Gold” and 1972’s Harvest album, which categorised him in the minds of many as a lovelorn troubadour. Did he then make a conscious decision to subvert that image?
“That’s what success does – it will categorise you. But luckily I haven’t had that much success. That was the one time and the first thing an artist will do if he doesn’t want to be categorised is to react and fight back. There’s a spirit inside you that’s like an animal. And it’s cornered when it’s categorised. So we’re not dealing with thought here. It’s an animal reaction.”
And does he still believe it’s better “to burn out than to fade away”? He wrote the line when he was in his thirties. A quarter of a century on, he appears to have successfully avoided both fates.
“I was exactly 33 and a third when I wrote that so I was on long play,” he jokes. “It wasn’t a literal thing. It was a spontaneous description of a feeling rather than endorsing a way of life. But what a line like that means changes every time you sing it, depending on what’s going on in the world. If you really believe in something when you write it or you’re open to some channel and things comes through you, then that’s going to happen. What you write will reapply itself to whatever’s happening around you. And that’s the fun of what I do.”
Next year, Young will turn 60. With Greendale having left him “drained” and no new songs jostling for his attention, perhaps it will be the year that the long-awaited Archives boxset, with its treasure trove of unreleased tracks, finally makes its appearance. In the meantime, as a curtain-raiser, we give you the low-down on his new best-of…
Down By The River Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Released: May 1969
Recorded: Wally Heider’s, Los Angeles, Jan 1969
Dissatisfied with the sound of his debut album and bored and exhausted by the long hours in the studio that its endless overdubs entailed, Young determined “to be real instead of fabricating something” when it came to recording the follow-up. And the key turned out to be a band called The Rockets he found playing the clubs on LA’s Sunset Strip.
After sitting in with the band at a gig at the Whiskey A Go-Go in August 1968, he invited three members of the six-piece – Danny Whitten, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot – to help him record his next album. For reasons nobody can now remember, he renamed them Crazy Horse (after his initial suggestion, The War Babies, had been rejected) and by January 1969 they were in the studio recording Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
“Down By The River” defined the guitar sound Young perfected with Crazy Horse, played on a vintage instrument he called “Old Black”, a 1953 Gibson Les Paul that he’d bought in 1967 for $50. Years later, he was still recalling the excitement of the first time he played it through a vintage 1959 Fender Deluxe: “Immediately, the entire room started to vibrate. I went, ‘Holy shit!’ I had to turn it halfway down before it stopped feeding back.” The sessions for Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere were the first time he’d used the combination in the studio.
Despite being nine minutes long, “Down By The River” was edited down from a much longer jam. “We got the vibe, but it was just too long and sometimes it fell apart, so we just took the shitty parts out,” Young explained. “Made some radical cuts in there – I mean, you can hear ’em. Danny just played so cool on that. He was playing R’n’B kinda things. He made the whole band sound good.”
Bassist Billy Talbot confirms that it was “Down By The River” which patented the Crazy Horse sound: “At first we played it double-time, faster like the chorus is now. It was almost a jazz thing.” They then borrowed a James Brown-style beat, but slowed down to a more stoned pace.
According to drummer Ralph Molina, Young borrowed the chord sequence from a Danny Whitten composition called “Music On The Road”, although Young’s biographer Jimmy McDonough reckoned it owes more to “Let Me Go”, another Rockets song, which appeared on their only album (released in ’68).
Written in bed with a fever on the same day as “Cinnamon Girl” and “Cowgirl In The Sand”, once the sickness passed Young still didn’t seem to have much idea where “Down By The River” ’s lyric came from, with its “I shot my baby” refrain.
“No, there’s no real murder in it. It’s about blowing your thing with a chick. It’s a plea, a desperation cry,” he insisted in 1970.
Yet in a long preamble to the song at a 1984 concert in New Orleans, he told a different story, claiming it was about “a guy who had a lot of trouble controlling himself”. He went on to describe a very literal meeting by a river in which the man tells the woman she’s cheated on him once too often: “He reached down into his pocket and pulled a little revolver out and he said, ‘Honey, I hate to do this, but you’ve pushed me too far.’”
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Cowgirl In The Sand
Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Released: May 1969
Recorded: Wally Heider’s, Los Angeles, Jan 1969
The second of Young’s ground-breaking early guitar epics with Crazy Horse was written in bed with a fever on that same day as “Down By The River” – on an acoustic guitar, in which style it can be heard in a stunning take on 1970’s live CSN&Y album Four Way Street.
But it’s the electric version that remains the most memorable, and includes some of the finest guitar interplay between Young and Whitten.
“Nobody played guitar with me like that,” Young says of Crazy Horse’s main man, who died of a heroin overdose in 1972. “That rhythm, when you listen to ‘Cowgirl In the Sand’, he keeps changing. Billy and Ralph will get into a groove and everything will be going along and all of a sudden Danny’ll start doing something else. He just led those guys from one groove to another, all within the same groove. So when I played those long guitar solos, it seemed like they weren’t all that long, that I was making all these changes, when in reality what was changing was not one thing but the whole band. Danny was the key. A really great second guitar player, the perfect counterpoint to everything else that was happening.”
On another occasion, Young said of his style with Crazy Horse: “A lot of people think we play simple and there is no finesse. But we’re not trying to impress anybody; we just want to play with the feeling. It’s like a trance we get into.”
The trance-like quality is reflected in a dreamlike lyric, addressed to some idealised woman with intriguing references to sin and rust. In a much-bootlegged performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1971, Young obscured its meaning further by introducing the song as about “beaches in Spain”, a decidedly odd comment given that at the time he’d never even been to Spain.
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Cinnamon Girl
Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Released: May 1969
Recorded: Wally Heider’s, Los Angeles, Jan 1969
That day when Young took to his bed in early January 1969 with a debilitating dose of flu turned out to be one of the most productive of his career. Lying in his Topanga Canyon house with his mind in an altered state due to a fever that rolled up to 103 degrees, and with scraps of paper covering the bed, he composed his third classic of the day – “Cinnamon Girl”.
“Sometimes [when] I get sick, get a fever, it’s easy to write,” he explained. “Everything opens up. You don’t have any resistance. You just let things go.”
Within days of his recovery, he was trying the songs out with Crazy Horse. “Cinnamon Girl” was the first one to be recorded, and the euphoric marriage of crunching riffs and sweet melody made a dramatic album opener. Again the dreamy lyrics reflected his feverish state, and the mysterious effect was only enhanced by the hand-scribbled non-explanation that accompanied the song’s inclusion on the 1977 compilation Decade: “Wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Ochs’ eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife.” Or anyone else, come to that.
The guitar sound was based on an open tuning, which he had first used on Buffalo Springfield’s “Bluebird”. “We discovered this D modal tuning around the same time in 1966,” he told Nick Kent. “That was when ragas were happening and D modal made it possible to have that droning sound going all the time. That’s where it started, only I took it to the next level, which is how ‘The Loner’ and ‘Cinnamon Girl’ happened.”
A version with a slightly different vocal performance was released as a single in America, where it charted at No 55. “The parts are switched, Danny is on the bottom and me on top,” Young explains. “That was so you could hear my voice clearly, which Reprise wanted for the single. We left the album version alone because it was better and we knew it.”
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Helpless
Album: Déjà Vu
Released: March 1970
Recorded: Wally Heider’s, San Francisco, Oct 1969-Jan 1970
When Stephen Stills took David Crosby and Graham Nash to Young’s house in Topanga Canyon in the early summer of 1969 to persuade them that his old Buffalo Springfield colleague should join the group, “Helpless” was allegedly the song that convinced them. “By the time he finished, we were asking him if we could join his band,” David Crosby recalled.
This doesn’t fit with Young’s own claim in the sleevenotes to the Decade anthology, in which he insists the song was written in New York in 1970. But the simple chronology of the recording of the Déjà Vu album suggests Crosby’s account is more likely.
During the sessions for the album, Young stayed in the sleazy Caravan Lodge Motel in San Francisco’s run-down Tenderloin district, possibly because it was the only place that would tolerate the presence in his room of his two pet bush babies Harriet and Speedy.
Young also attempted to record “Helpless” with Crazy Horse at Sunset Sound around the same time, but when he and the band had completed what he believed to be the perfect take, he turned around to the control room to find the tape machine hadn’t been running.
“We were doing it live, everybody playing and singing at once and we did an eight- or nine-minute version of it with a long instrumental in the middle. And the engineer didn’t press the button down,” he says. “I took that as an omen. That’s why I did it with CSN.”
But it took CSN some time to get the song right, with Young consistently complaining that they were taking it too fast. “I had to play it with them until four in the morning, doing it over and over again to get everybody tired enough so that they would stop doing this extra stuff where everyone was playing too much,” he said in a 1989 radio documentary. “We kept on going for a long time. Finally we got one where they were half-asleep and they didn’t know they were doing it.”
The song gave Young more trouble when he performed an inept version in November 1976 at The Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz. His appearance was not helped by the cocaine binge he had been on for the previous 48 hours and a large rock of the white stuff, which was horribly visible in his nostril, had to be rotoscoped away from the scene in the film at a cost of several thousand dollars.
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After The Gold Rush
Album: After The Gold Rush
Released: Sept 1970
Recorded: Topanga, early 1970
“After The Gold Rush” shared its title with a screenplay by Dean Stockwell for a disaster movie in which Young had entertained hopes of making his acting debut. In the event, the movie failed to secure financial backing, and was never made.
Stockwell was a neighbour of Young’s in Topanga, and the plot of his proposed film involved the flooding of the canyon by a tidal wave following an earthquake. The screenplay then followed the effect of the disaster on a number of residents, including a local folk singer – a part that was tailor-made for Young.
Performed solo at the piano, accompanied only by a mournful French horn, the title song opened with an apocalyptic vision of ecological catastrophe. But then it took off into the realms of science fiction, with extra-terrestrials arriving in silver ships to save life on earth by transporting it to start a new colony in space. According to producer David Briggs, the song was written within half an hour.
Many years later, Young claimed the track to be an exercise in time travel, with scenes set in past, present and future: “There’s a Robin Hood scene, there’s a fire scene in the present and there’s the future. The air is yellow and red, ships are leaving, certain people can go and certain people can’t. I think it’s going to happen.”
To biographer Jimmy McDonough, he elaborated: “Civilisations. Dropping seeds. Races. Blending. Species getting stronger. Like plants do. I see it all as the same thing. Who knows how big the fucking universe is?”
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Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Album: After The Gold Rush
Released: Sept 1970
Recorded: Topanga, early 1970
“Only Love Can Break Your Heart” might sound heart-breakingly self-confessional and have helped to cement the early-’70s image of Young as a forlorn, lovesick troubadour, but the song was actually written for Graham Nash, whose relationship with Joni Mitchell had just hit the rocks.
As such, it contributes to the soap opera that was the CSN&Y axis at the time, for Young became the third songwriter to document the relationship, Nash having written the sentimental “Our House” for Déjà Vu and Mitchell including “Willy” (her nickname for Nash) on Ladies Of The Canyon.
Coincidentally, the same Mitchell album included “The Circle Game”, written for Young in response to his “Sugar Mountain”. In turn, Young would write another, unreleased song about Mitchell called “Sweet Joni”, which he played several times in concert during 1972-73. It was also rumoured – probably unfairly – that “Stupid Girl” on Young’s 1975 album Zuma was also about her.
Not to be left out of the tangled web, Stephen Stills recorded “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” on his 1984 album Right By You – and Crosby and Mitchell had been lovers before Nash even arrived on the scene.
Released as a single, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” gave Young his first solo Top 40 hit in America in December 1970.
Southern Man
Album: After The Gold Rush
Released: Sept 1970
Recorded: Topanga, early 1970
A scathing indictment of racism and bigotry, “Southern Man” had its roots in an incident that took place during a Buffalo Springfield tour of the Deep South with The Beach Boys in early 1968. Beating up longhairs was at the time a popular sport in certain parts of the South and, sitting in a diner one night with members of the tour retinue after a gig, Young heard a bunch of rednecks planning to attack them.
A quick phone call to summon reinforcements from the road crew prevented an Easy Rider-type scenario. But Young was left both angry and shaken by the event. Dennis Dragon, one of The Beach Boys’ backing line-up, recalls: “Neil was really upset. Just the vibration, the ignorance, the stupidity. He’s a very sensitive guy. That did it. He went straight to work writing ‘Southern Man’.”
Young tells a more confused story. “This song could have been written on a civil rights march after stopping off to watch Gone With The Wind,” he joked later. Then he claimed, “Actually, I think I wrote it in the Fillmore East dressing room in 1970.” Even later, he told McDonough he had written it in his home studio in Topanga.
Certainly CSN&Y were playing it live by May of that year, and an epic version appears on Four Way Street. But the studio recording is more indignant and angry, although, according to Young, this had as much to do with marital strife with his wife Susan as his hatred of racism. “Susan was angry at me for some reason, throwing things. They were crashing against the [studio] door. We fought a lot. There’s some reason for it, I’m sure. It was probably my fault.”
He revisited the theme of the South on his 1972 Harvest album with the song “Alabama”, which provoked Lynyrd Skynyrd to respond with “Sweet Home Alabama”, in which they chided: “I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.”
Young later announced that he had stopped singing the song: “I don’t feel like it’s particularly relevant. It’s not Southern Man. It’s White Man. It’s much bigger than Southern Man.”
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Ohio
Single: with CSN&Y (B-side “Find The Cost Of Freedom”)
Released: May 1970
Recorded: Los Angeles, May 1970
On May 4, 1970, four student protesters were gunned down and killed by National Guards at Kent State University, Ohio. At the time, Young was hanging out with David Crosby at road manager Leo Makota’s place in Pescadero. When Crosby expressed his outrage, the far less political Young picked up a guitar and wrote “Ohio” on the spot.
The pair then took a plane to LA, rounded up Stills and Nash and went straight into the studio to cut the song live. According to Crosby, the tape was delivered to Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun that same night. Within little more than a week it was in the stores, with Stills’ “Find The Cost Of Freedom” as the B-side. Banned by various radio stations, it nevertheless climbed to No 14 in the US singles chart.
“It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song,” Young observed in 1977 when he included “Ohio” on the retrospective Decade. “It’s ironic that I capitalised on the death of these American students. Probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning.”
Crosby, whose voice can be heard towards the end of the song emotionally yelling, “Why? How many more?”, broke down in tears after they had finished. “I was so moved, the hair was standing up on my arms. I freaked out because I felt it so strongly,” he recalled.
The track remains Young’s proudest moment as part of CSN&Y. “That’s the only recording where CSN&Y is truly a band,” he says. “It felt really good to hear it come back so fast – that whole idea of using music as a message and unifying generations and giving them a point of view. That song gave the band a depth. Aside from that one thing, I was a hindrance to their progress.”
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The Needle And The Damage Done
Album: Harvest
Released: March 1972
Recorded: UCLA (live), Feb 1971
The inspiration behind Young’s stripped-down junkie lament, which stood in stark contrast to the other tracks on the bucolic Harvest, was the descent into heroin addiction of Crazy Horse’s Danny Whitten. It’s less dark than some of the drug songs that would subsequently appear on Tonight’s The Night (1975), for by then Whitten was dead. In 1971, Young still hoped that he could save his friend, whose addiction had already led him to sack Crazy Horse in March 1970 after Whitten had reputedly nodded off onstage at the Fillmore East.
Young began playing the song live during his solo tour in early 1971. He introduced the cautionary tale by telling the audience: “This is a serious song I’d like to do about some people you know, some people I know and some people that neither one of us knows. It’s about heroin addiction. Somewhere in the universe there’s probably a place where all the great art is that didn’t get out. A museum of incredible lost art that didn’t get out because of heroin.”
Hearing that Whitten had cleaned up, Young took him back into the fold in the fall of 1972, when he invited him to rehearsals for the forthcoming Time Fades Away tour at his Broken Arrow ranch. When it turned out Whitten was as wasted as ever and barely able to hold a guitar, Young sacked him for a second time on November 18, giving him $50 and a ticket back to LA. He used the money to score, and died of an overdose later that same night. The following day Young wrote “Don’t Be Denied”, which would later appear on 1973’s Time Fades Away album.
“I loved Danny. I felt responsible,” he later told Cameron Crowe.
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Old Man
Album: Harvest
Released: March 1972
Recorded: Nashville, Feb 8, 1971
Never a great one for literal explanations of his songs, Young made an exception over “Old Man” when even his own father, Scott, a well-known Canadian sports writer/broadcaster, came to believe the song was about him. In fact, as Young took to making clear when introducing the song onstage, the inspiration was Louis Avila, a foreman who worked on his Broken Arrow ranch at La Honda.
“When I bought the place there was this old man who was working there for the people I bought it from. He was about 70 years old. He was a cattleman and that’s like something that’s never going to happen again, so I wrote a song about it,” he explained.
Recorded one weekend in Nashville in early February 1971, Young had in mind a sound similar to Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, and asked producer Elliott Mazer to recruit similar personnel. In the end, he got Dylan’s drummer Kenny Buttrey, supported by Ben Keith on pedal-steel and Tim Drummond on bass. They became the nucleus of the band Young would call The Stray Gators. James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, who were in Nashville as Young’s fellow guests on a Johnny Cash TV show the day before, added harmony vocals. Taylor also contributed the six-string banjo picking – the only time he has ever played the instrument on record.
Released as a follow-up to the US No 1 single “Heart Of Gold”, “Old Man” was to prove less successful, only reaching No 31 on the Billboard chart.
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Heart Of Gold
Album: Harvest
Released: March 1972
Recorded: Nashville, Feb 8, 1971
“This song put me in the middle of the road,” Young remarked of “Heart Of Gold” – before he famously added that’s when he decided it was time to head for the ditch. A No 1 single in America and a Top 10 hit in Britain, the song has been dividing his fans ever since, with music writer Sylvie Simmons – otherwise one of Young’s most fervent supporters – claiming in her book on the man that she winces every time she hears it.
Critics point to a trite lyric and simplistic rhyming scheme. But those present in the studio knew instantly they had a hit on their hands. The first track tackled during the same Nashville session which spawned “Old Man” in February 1971, producer Elliott Mazer recalled: “We all knew there was something very special going on. When Neil played ‘Heart Of Gold’, Kenny [Buttrey] just looked at me and raised one finger in the air to say, ‘That’s a No 1.’”
The melody was allegedly inspired by “Love Is Blue”, once recorded by Jeff Beck. After the basic track had been laid down, Taylor and Ronstadt then added harmony vocals, just as they did to “Old Man”.
“I’d happened to be in the right place at the right time to do a really mellow record that was really open because that’s where my life was at the time,” Young later remarked. “I was in love when I made Harvest. So that was it. I was an in-love and on-top-of-the-world type of guy.”
That he then added, “Good thing I got past that stage,” is indicative of how swiftly he came to regard the success of “Heart Of Gold” as a mixed blessing. “I thought the record was good. But I knew something else was dying,” he observed.
There’s an interesting postscript in the decidedly odd reaction the song produced in Bob Dylan. “I used to hate it when it came on the radio,” he complained. “I always liked Neil Young but it bothered me every time I listened to ‘Heart Of Gold’. I’d say, ‘Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.’ I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away and turn on the radio and there I am. But it’s not me. It seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it and, you know, I never got over it.”
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Like A Hurricane
Album: American Stars ’n Bars
Released: June 1977
Recorded: Broken Arrow, La Honda, autumn 1975
One of Young’s most ferocious guitar epics, “Like A Hurricane” came together in typically unpredictable Young fashion. “We’d been trying to record it with two guitars, bass and drums and Neil was giving up on it,” recalls guitarist Frank Sampedro, who had replaced Danny Whitten in Crazy Horse. “We kept playing it two guitars and Neil didn’t have enough room to solo. When he started walking out of the studio I started diddling with this Stringman [keyboard] and he decided to pick up his guitar.
If you listen to the take on the record, there’s no beginning, no count-off, it just goes voom! They just turned on the machines when they heard us playing because we were done for the day. We played it once and at the end of the take he said, ‘I think that’s the way it goes.’ And that’s the take on the record. The only time we ever played it that way.”
Young later attempted to describe the song’s hypnotic power on a promotional interview disc. “If you listen to that, I never play anything fast,” he said. “All it is is four notes on the bass. Billy [Talbot] plays a few extra notes now and then, and the drumbeat’s the same all the way through… Sometimes it does sound as if we’re really playing fast, but we’re not. It’s just everything starts swimming around in circles.”
The song was written in July 1975 after Young had just undergone an operation for nodes on his vocal cords. He couldn’t sing, so he partied instead, and “Hurricane” was written after a cocaine-fuelled night with friend and La Honda neighbour Taylor Phelps in the back of his car, a Desoto Suburban.
“We were all really high, fucked up,” Young recalls. “Been out partying. Wrote it sitting up at Vista Point on Skyline. Supposed to be the highest point in San Mateo County, which was appropriate. I wrote it when I couldn’t sing. I was on voice rest. It was nuts – I was whistling it. I wrote a lot of songs when I couldn’t talk.”
It was premiered live with Crazy Horse in Britain in March 1976, a full 14 months before it appeared on record on the American Stars ’n Bars album.
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Comes A Time
Album: Comes A Time
Released: November 1978
Recorded: Florida and Nashville, 1977
“Comes A Time” and the rest of the album that bears its name was originally recorded as a solo acoustic record in Florida, but when Young played it to Warner Brothers label boss Mo Ostin, he suggested the sound needed filling out. For once Young, who usually greeted such record company interventions with truculence, took the advice.
“I decided, ‘Hey, that sounds like fun. I’ll try that – go to Nashville, have ’em all play on it at once,” he recalls. “So I got all these people out there to play along with these existing tracks of me. Bobby Charles was like our guru. He was at all the sessions.”
The band included Drummond and Keith from The Stray Gators, augmented by, among others, Spooner Oldham and Rufus Thibodeaux, who plays the Cajun-style fiddle on the title track and went on to play with Young in his Hawks & Doves band (1980). According to Keith, Charles’ role was to “roll the joints”, which, given Young’s smoking habits, certainly qualified him for ‘guru’ status.
Also appearing on the sessions was Nicolette Larson. At the time she and Young were having a brief romance, and as they harmonise on the title track you have to imagine they’re thinking about their own situation, as they sing, “You and I we were captured/We took our souls and we flew away.”
“We sang on the same mic. I could look in his eyes and keep up with him and that’s as much rehearsal as he wants,” recalled Larson, who died in 1997.
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Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
Album: Rust Never Sleeps
Released: July 1979
Recorded: The Cow Palace, San Francisco, Oct 28, 1978
The idea of Neil Young as a punk, of course, was ludicrous. By the time the Sex Pistols arrived to consign rock’s bloated dinosaurs to the dustbin, he was a 31-year-old superstar millionaire. Nevertheless, when he first witnessed the gathering punk explosion on tour in Britain during 1976, he immediately identified with its ethos. He liked punk’s rejection of pomposity, saw in it a resurrection of the original rebel spirit of rock’n’roll, and proudly sported a Never Mind The Bollocks T-shirt.
Young expanded on his enthusiasm for punk in an LA radio interview: “When you look back at the old bands, they’re just not that funny. People want to have a good time. That’s why the punk thing is so good and healthy. People who make fun of the established rock scene, like Devo and The Ramones, are much more vital to my ears than what’s been happening in the last four or five years.”
In turn, the punks recognised in Young a true maverick, and exempted him from the brickbats they hurled at his CSN&Y bandmates.
“Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)”, with its name-checking of Johnny Rotten, encapsulated Young’s sympathy with the punk zeitgeist, and its insistence that “it’s better to burn out” sounded like a sentiment Sid Vicious would have subscribed to.
Some, including John Lennon, criticised Young for glorifying rock’n’roll’s self-destructing casualties. But Young stood by the song, and when challenged in a 1979 radio interview, he explained: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away or rust because it makes a bigger flash in the sky.”
The words returned to haunt him in April 1994 when Kurt Cobain made a sizeable flash by blowing his brains out. Near the body was found a suicide note which quoted the line from Young’s song. Young then wrote “Sleeps With Angels” about Cobain and his widow Courtney Love, and was (mis)quoted as saying he would never perform “Hey Hey” again. In fact, he sang it on his second live appearance after Cobain’s death. “It just made it a little more focused for a while,” said Young. “Now it’s just another face to think about while you’re singing it.”
Love responded by including the line “It’s better to rise than fade away” on Hole’s 1998 album Celebrity Skin, and Oasis have also played the song live, dedicating it to Cobain’s memory.
The Rust Never Sleeps album opened with an acoustic version of the song listed as “My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)” and closed with the dramatic electric version, recorded live with Crazy Horse at the Cow Palace, San Francisco on October 28, 1978. Somewhat hilariously, Frank Sampedro reckons that Crazy Horse based their approach to the song on the stomping beat of Queen’s “We Will Rock You”.
The song is co-credited to Jeff Blackburn, part of the ’60s San Francisco duo Blackburn & Snow and who later toured with The Ducks, the incognito band Young put together to play local bars in the Bay area. The line “It’s better to burn out than it is to rust” first appeared in one of Blackburn’s songs. Young reports: “I called him up after I’d written the song and said, ‘Hey, I used a line from your song. Want credit?”
________________________
Rockin’ In The Free World
Album: Freedom
Released: October 1989
Recorded: LA/San Francisco, summer 1989
As the 1980s came to a close, the post-WWII international settlement was crumbling. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had ushered in the era of “perestroika” and “glasnost”. Soon the old communist regimes were crumbling all over eastern Europe, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. The Berlin Wall was about to be torn down and Germany reunited. The Cold War was over. The free world had won.
Many of these events were yet to happen when Young recorded “Rockin’ In The Free World” but they were already in train, and the song found Young astutely tapping into a moment of world-shattering change. Indeed, when the Berlin Wall did come down, television footage was often accompanied by the strains of the song.
Yet like Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”, “Rockin’ In The Free World” is misunderstood if it’s regarded as some kind of celebratory anthem to the triumph of Western capitalism, for its lyric actually focuses on the heavy price which can accompany democracy, painting a nightmarish picture of a free world populated by derelicts, burnt-out cases and junkie mothers.
As a father, Young admitted he was particularly worried about the availability of drugs on the streets. “The lyrics are just a description of events going on every day in America. Sure I’m concerned for my children, particularly my eldest son, and he’s a Guns N’Roses fan,” he told Nick Kent in Vox. “He has to face drugs every day in the school yard that are way stronger than anything I got offered in most of my years as a professional musician.”
“This is like the Bible. It’s all completely out of control,” he went on. “The drugs are gonna be all over the streets of Europe. We’ve got a lot to deal with here.”
Asked if the song was intended to be a celebration or an indictment, Young answered: “Kinda both, you know? You asking the question means you got the song.”
As with “Hey Hey” on Rust Never Sleeps, two versions of “Rockin’ In The Free World” were used to bookend the Freedom album. The acoustic take which opened the LP was recorded live at Jones Beach, Long Island, while the electric version which closed it contained an additional verse.
The ghost of Harvest, the most commercially successful album of Young’s career, had haunted him ever since its release in 1972, creating what he regarded as a false impression of him as a gentle singer-songwriter to rank alongside the likes of James Taylor and Jackson Browne.
Although there had been further acoustic records, notably 1978’s Comes A Time, he spent much of the next 20 years attempting not to follow-up his most successful release. It was a considerable surprise, therefore, when he let it be known in 1992 that he was assembling an album that he openly referred to as “Harvest II”.
“There’s nothing angry or violent about this new music. It’s about relationships and feelings. There’s a lot of love in it,” he told Nick Kent prior to the album’s release. “It certainly sounds like the sequel to Harvest. I have no problem with that, though. I’m not backing away from that side of me any more. When’s the next Harvest coming out? Farmers have been asking me that for years.”
He even reassembled The Stray Gators and arranger Jack Nitzsche, along with James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, who’d provided backing vocals on Harvest.
Yet by the time Harvest Moon was released, Young had grown more wary of the comparison. “This is not ‘Harvest II’, ” he insisted to Johnnie Walker on Radio 1. “They only compared it to Harvest because Harvest was a big success and this has Harvest in the title. There are obvious things to connect up the two. But without Harvest this would still be Harvest Moon and stand on its own.”
The title track typified the album, an acoustic collection of songs about relationships, but written from the perspective of someone in their forties rather than their twenties.
“The idea is I sang about the same subject matter with 20 years more experience,” Young explained. To Allan Jones, he added: “Harvest Moon is about continuance, about trying to keep the flame burning. It’s about the feeling that you don’t have to be young to be young.”
The following works were also invaluable in preparing this article: Shakey – Neil Young’s Biography by Jimmy McDonough (Jonathan Cape); Neil Young – Zero To Sixty by Johnny Rogan (Calidore Books)
The phrase “difficult second album” might have been coined specifically for Mike Oldfield, such was the enormity of his Tubular Bells debut in 1973. A soon to be iconic calling card, it squatted in the UK Top 10 for close to a year, its longevity partially due to a signature passage featuring prominently in The Exorcist that same year; a high profile that (initially, at least) sat awkwardly with its reclusive maker.
The phrase “difficult second album” might have been coined specifically for Mike Oldfield, such was the enormity of his Tubular Bells debut in 1973. A soon to be iconic calling card, it squatted in the UK Top 10 for close to a year, its longevity partially due to a signature passage featuring prominently in The Exorcist that same year; a high profile that (initially, at least) sat awkwardly with its reclusive maker.
His paymasters at Virgin Records were still counting the not-inconsiderable cash from their out-of-leftfield runaway success when Oldfield jumped in his car and drove off to find somewhere conducive to writing a follow-up. He alighted upon Kington, a Herefordshire town of 3,000 inhabitants close to the border with Wales, and in the shadow of the elongated hill that would ultimately give the new LP its title.
The label might have been happy with more of the same, but for Oldfield the intention was perhaps to escape the hullabaloo that went hand-in-hand with being flavour of the month, to turn his back on the noise of it all. In a rare interview for Melody Maker shortly after the second record’s release, he described music industry hub London as “lots of confusion and lots of nasty overtones; things going bang, crash. Hergest Ridge, on the other hand, is smooth, uncluttered. There are no tube trains, very few car doors, lots of open countryside, smooth hills, a general feeling of well-being and non-hysteria.”
Yet there are obvious parallels to be drawn between Tubular Bells and Hergest Ridge; both are split into two “movements”, each occupying the full side of a vinyl LP, both employ repeating motifs, and both feature a “wash” of sound achieved by multi guitar overdubs. The latter, though, is a more of an exercise in serenity, more of a dream-like, bucolic sonic adventure.
Having mapped out the new album’s compositions at his hillside retreat, Oldfield eventually returned to The Manor, the Oxfordshire studio where Tubular Bells was birthed, for the recording process, after shelving initial sessions in London studios. Unlike the overdub frenzy of going it alone on Tubular Bells, his thoughts turned to the debut’s subsequent concert performance and he opted for additional musicians to fully realise the next stage of his career.
Consequently, the pastoral, more atmospherically melancholic passages are achieved by enlisting oboe, flute and trumpet players, and a “choir” (in practice, two multi-tracked voices, one of which is his sister, Sally). Oldfield adds vintage Farfisa and Lowrey organs to the many instruments he plays himself, resulting in warmer textures than were evident on the record’s more precise and clinical forebearer.
Overall, the modus operandi of Hergest Ridge is less concerned with earlier triumphs than it is in expressing Mike’s own inner peacefulness via an elegant collage of sound that largely evokes images of the English landscape, of a paradisaical safe space for fellow souls of an introspective bent. In that respect, the album could be interpreted as a form of autobiography.
There’s a greater accent on melody here as well, with sections of “Part Two” floating into mood movie music territory, as if A-list film score composers the stripe of Elmer Bernstein or Jerry Goldsmith have been filtered through traditional English folk mores. The shift towards electric guitars and synths around the eight-minute mark sounds jarring at first, but it’s indicative of Oldfield’s desire to surprise or even wrong-foot the listener.
This anniversary edition, in its deluxe incarnation, brings together the original LP mix, the ’76 mix for quadrophonic hardware, Oldfield’s own 5.1 Surround Sound mix from 2010, and a brand new Dolby ATMOS mix by DJ/producer David Kosten, whose own releases under the name Faultline have included collaborations with The Flaming Lips, Michael Stipe and Chris Martin.
In truth, the variations on offer might result in a game of frustratingly futile ‘spot the difference’ for more casual listeners, but there are intriguing pockets revealed by Oldfield’s 2010 return to the source material. A palpable separation of specific instruments comes to the fore, elements that were arguably obscured due to available technology when the original album was being readied for public consumption.
Inevitably, maybe, the juggernaut of Tubular Bells means Hergest Ridge will always be seen as the lesser sibling, the exercise in consolidation that builds on its predecessor by adding a few new flourishes while mindful that a modicum of familiarity is a wise path to follow. As expected, it was a huge success, although its three weeks at Number One in the UK were ended when Tubular Bells returned to the top of the charts, casting the shadow that still exists today.
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There's a lot here, so I hope there'll be something for everyone. Some returning favourites - Steve Gunn, Cass McCombs, Margo Price, David Byrne - as well as some relative newcomers like Ethel Cain and Wednesday. Thanks to Sam for a bunch of suggestions, too.
There’s a lot here, so I hope there’ll be something for everyone. Some returning favourites – Steve Gunn, Cass McCombs, Margo Price, David Byrne – as well as some relative newcomers like Ethel Cain and Wednesday. Thanks to Sam for a bunch of suggestions, too.
While I’m here, a small plug for the new issue of Uncut which goes on sale tomorrow: Bruce, Sly, Neil, Scott, Wet Leg, Booker T, B-52s, Sade, Blondie, John Fogerty, Billy Idol, Caroline and plenty more.
I’m off to see Neil in Copenhagen on Sunday – very excited, as you’d imagine – so please come and say hi if you spot me. Man, that ‘Take America back’ t-shirt…
The drama stars The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen with Stephen Graham also starring as his father, Douglas Frederick “Dutch” Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as manager Jon Landau.
The film is directed by Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper and is based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book.
Deliver Me From Nowhere will be released in October.
Meanwhile, Springsteen is on the cover of the new Uncut, as we go deep inside his archives – accompanied by collaborators, confidants and the Boss himself. “He’s never shown you more of his cards than he does here…”
The first lot to be revealed is a 7” test pressing of Queen’s legendary single “Bohemian Rhapsody”, donated by David Munns OBE, who in 1975 was in charge of marketing at EMI and was involved with the Queen campaign. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was initially released on October 31, 1975, so the auction coincides with its 50th anniversary.
Further lots for the White Label Auction will be revealed in due course. Previous auctions have raised well over £160,000 for The Brit Trust, which works to improve lives through the power of music, and supports hundreds of causes across the UK that promote education and wellbeing, including The BRIT School, Nordoff And Robbins, ELAM, Music Support and Key4Life.
EVERY PRINT EDITION OF THIS ISSUE OF UNCUT COMES WITH A COPY OF HOPES AND DREAMS – 15 TRACKS OF THE MONTH’S BEST NEW MUSIC FEATURING GWENNO, ALICE COOPER, US GIRLS, GINA BIRCH, GOLOMB AND MORE!
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: To celebrate the release of Tracks II: The Lost Albums, Uncut takes a revelatory trip inside the archives of Bruce Springsteen – with help from collaborators, confidants and the Boss himself. “If you want to understand how Springsteen works, he’s never shown you more of his cards than he does here…”
NEIL YOUNG:Zuma at 50! Crazy Horse tell all. Plus Neil heads – including Evan Dando, MJ Landerman and Blake Mills – go deep on the album’s musical marvels. “It is the arrival of an band that would anchor an era and influence generations…”
SLY STONE: Uncut looks back on life of an inspirational rock’n’soul icon.
WET LEG: The Isle of Wight noisemakers return – emboldened by love and new sounds: “It’s nice to live in the space somewhere between fantasy and reality…”
BOOKER T: The teenage prodigy who helped shape the sound of Stax on his path from “Green Onions” to Drive-By Truckers. “You have to be able to speak through your instrument…”
SCOTT WALKER: Thirty years after the startling experiments of Tilt defined Walker’s latter-day career, we uncover his transition from teen idol to avant garde hero. “It was a rejection of his past…”
CAROLINE: South-east London’s confoundingly brilliant eight-piece, fusing choral folk with fractured post-rock. “There has to be a vulnerability of some sort. Or what’s the point?”
BILLY IDOL: The Bromley veteran on Television, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Terminator 2.
SADE: How punk attitude and minimalist soul grooves took the smooth operator from London’s club scene to global success.
WAR: The ground-breaking LA band’s triumphant passage through rock, soul, jazz, funk and beyond.
REVIEWED: New albums by Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, Mark Stewart, The New Eves, Ben LaMar Gay, Rebecca Shiffman, Murry Hammond, Shelley Burgon, His Lordship, Mike Polizze; archive releases by The B-52s, Jackie O Motherfucker, Mickey Newbury and Miles Davis; Iggy Pop live; David Cronenberg and Wes Anderson on Screen; Genesis P Orridge on Screen Extra and Budgie and The Beatles in books.
PLUS:Blondie unseen; John Fogerty reclaims; Wilko Johnson – the play; Geoff Barrow x Jason Williamson; Dave Davies‘ favourite albums… and meet the effortless three-part harmonies of Folk Bitch Trio.
The news broke of Sly Stone's death hours before this issue of Uncut was due at the printers, so huge thanks to the team for some frantic but ultimately successful work remaking the issue to honour his memory.
The news broke of Sly Stone‘s death hours before this issue of Uncut was due at the printers, so huge thanks to the team for some frantic but ultimately successful work remaking the issue to honour his memory.
What constitutes a ‘lost’ album? It’s a question we routinely ask ourselves, as record companies empty their cupboards of old tapes in the hope of finding unreleased gold. As countless Uncut features attest, Neil Young has been steadily releasing caches from his fabled repository of ‘lost’ albums – the most recent, Oceanside Countryside, arrived in March. Now Bruce Springsteen has opened his vault to unveil unreleased full-length records of his own. For this issue’s cover story, Peter Watts’ research and interviews reveal the unexpected nature of Springsteen’s shadow discography: for an artist so closely associated with a specific band, it’s fascinating how much of this music has either been recorded solo or in the company of musicians other than his doughty lieutenants in the E Street Band. Critically, though, while Young’s ‘lost’ records have been the subject of intense speculation for decades, it transpires that the contents and extent of Springsteen’s archival motherlode were largely unknown, even among the most die-hard Bruce Tramps.
Did I mention Neil? Not long after this issue of Uncut goes on sale, he is due to begin his first European tour since 2019, including stopoffs at Glastonbury and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, we take a trip back to 1975 to celebrate Zuma, his first album with the new lineup of Crazy Horse. Elsewhere, we discover the secrets of Scott Walker, War, Booker T and Sade; untangle a bumper month of albums that includes releases from Wet Leg, Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, Marianne Faithfull, Mark Stewart, The New Eves, the B-52s and Mickey Newbury; witness Iggy Pop live; discover all about the Wilko Johnson play; meet Caroline, Folk Bitch Trio and plenty more.
Incidentally, if you’re going to see Neil over the summer, we’ll see you there.
Writing in the latest instalment of his Red Hand Files newsletter, Nick Cave has revealed that he turned down an invitation from Morrissey to perform “slightly silly anti-woke screed” on new track.
Writing in the latest instalment of his Red Hand Files newsletter, Nick Cave has revealed that he turned down an invitation from Morrissey to perform “slightly silly anti-woke screed” on new track.
“We had a few pleasant email exchanges last year in which Morrissey asked if I’d sing on a new song he had written.
“I would have been happy to do so, however, while the song he sent was quite lovely, it began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro.
“It also seemed that he didn’t want me to actually sing on the song, but deliver, over the top of the bouzouki, an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written.
“Although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn’t my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve.
“So… I politely declined. I said no.”
More positively, Cave also wrote that “Morrissey is probably the best lyricist of his generation – certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle.”
Other musicians on the record include early Bay Area cohorts Jason Quever (Papercuts) and Chris Cohen, as well as regular collaborators Matt Sweeney and Mike Bones.
You can pre-order Interior Live Oakhere and peruse the tracklisting below:
Priestess
Peace
Missionary Bell
Miss Mabee
Home At Last
I’m Not Ashamed
Who Removed The Cellar Door?
A Girl Named Dogie
Asphodel
I Never Dream About Trains
Van Wyck Expressway
Lola Montez Danced The Spider Dance
Juvenile
Diamonds In The Mine
Strawberry Moon
Interior Live Oak
Cass McCombs will cross the Atlantic for some live shows later in the summer. Check out his updated tour itinerary below and grab tickets here.
13 Aug – Porto, PT @ Paredes de Coura ^ 17 Aug – Crickhowell @ Green Man Festival ^ 19 Aug – Bristol @ Lantern Hall ^ 20 Aug – London @ Bush Hall ^ 21 Aug – Manchester @ YES ^ 23 Aug – Galway, IE @ Leisureland * % 24 Aug – Dublin, IE @ Wider Than Pictures Festival * % 25 Aug – Belfast, IE @ Ulster Hall * % 26 Aug – Cork, IE @ City Hall * % 28 Aug – Glasgow, SCT @ Barrowland * % 29 Aug – Glasgow, SCT @ Barrowland * % 10 Sep – San Diego, CA @The Casbah ^ 11 Sep – Los Angeles, CA @ Shrine Expo Hall & ^ 12 Sep – Riverside, CA @Farmhouse ^
* with Father John Misty & with MJ Lenderman, Nap Eyes % Solo ^ Full Band Performance
