Byrds

A weirdly deserted Uncut office today, so it falls on me to break off from my usual arduous routine - tooling around on Twitter, listening to Hiss Golden Messenger bootlegs, wondering what time the cricket starts – and write this week’s newsletter blog.

The tumultuous making of The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers is examined in the new issue of Uncut (November 2012), out on Friday (September 21). David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn are all interviewed about this pivotal period, 1967-68, in the band’s history, which left only Hillman and McGuinn remaining from the original five-piece. Talking about being sacked during the sessions, Crosby tells Uncut: “As for Notorious, it was, for me, obviously much better that I left.

The groaning noise behind me is coming from shelves that have recently started to buckle from the almost daily addition to them of new music books, the majority of them typified by their common bulk, a shared enormity of pages, as if no band’s career can be documented in less pages than might otherwise be devoted to the history of mankind itself, from the beginning, with footnotes, anecdotal asides and a brief biography of everyone who’s ever lived.

Chris Hillman joins Tom Waits, Jerry Lee Lewis and Lorretta Lyn

From the archives: Clarence White shines on live set, Q & A with Roger McGuinn

First unreleased album features the band at the Albert Hall in '71

Check out this clip of 'You Ain't Going Nowhere'

Uncut navigates you to today’s YouTube treasure

They're living it up in the Hotel California

Uncut navigates you to today’s YouTube treasure