Edwyn Collins has just performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London as part of this year’s Meltdown festival – here, in a fascinating feature from Uncut’s April 2010 issue (Take 155), the tale of Collins’ Orange Juice is told by the man himself alongside the group’s other members. Get ready for a tale of wilful perversity, vicious in-fighting, pant-wetting on TV and how Edwyn Collins “traded in all our equity for a funny bassline”… Words: Alastair McKay___________________
This week’s excuse for briskness is I have a longish review of Real Estate to write for the mag, but some good news in here: not least the appearance of a mighty stash of Fela Kuti albums on Bandcamp and some predictably weird mixtapes, compiled by John Fahey, fetching up on Soundcloud.
Deluxe reissues of all of Orange Juice’s seminal albums are out on February 3 – to celebrate that, this week’s archive delves back to November 2007 (Take 126), when the band’s frontman (and, of course, successful solo artist) takes us through the records he L.O.V.E. loves… Interview: Stephen Troussé
There have been plenty of surprises and revelations in music during the last twelve months. Admittedly, perhaps not all of them have had the same impact as the sudden arrival of records by David Bowie or My Bloody Valentine; nevertheless, a Tweet on June 3 from Edwyn Collins’ label AED carried its own quietly momentous piece of breaking news. “A new @RoddyFrame record in the wind, on AED, early 2014. It’s a lovely thing, just wait til you hear it. Watch this space, popsters.”
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
The new issue of Uncut will be on sale from Friday. Subscribers, of course, those sensibly organised people who plan ahead and have their lives in probably perfect order, may already have started receiving their copies. Lucky them! We’re actually still waiting for ours, but not yet fretting that they’ve been re-routed, sent via some staging post on a distant tundra where passing yaks may end up feasting upon them, the chomp-chomp-chomp of their distracted munching the only sound in that vast space, the hairy ruminants quite indifferent, of course, to what’s actually in the issue. Which is a lot, and includes in the grand annual tradition of these things, our review of the year, a 30-page special, featuring our Top 75 Albums Of 2012, plus the best reissues and box sets, films, DVDs and books, as voted for by over 40 Uncut contributors.
