As The Unthanks return with their new album, Mount The Air, we delve back into the archives to unearth this piece from Uncut’s February 2010 issue (Take 153). From Morris dancing to moshing, here are Rachel Unthank’s most treasured tunes… Interview: Sharon O’Connell____________________________The record that turned me on to dancing
Various Artists – Morris On (1972)
One bright Sunday morning, MC Taylor is driving through his patch of North Carolina, past New Hope Creek and the Eno River, over the Chatham County Line and the James Taylor Bridge in Chapel Hill, near the Haw River and the valley that he has meditated upon in song these past few years. Through apparently endless forests, Taylor's destination is Saralyn, a kind of hippy settlement just outside of Pittsboro.
Weird serendipities aplenty this week: versions of "O, Death" on two albums I downloaded one after another, by Mike & Cara Gangloff and Bessie Jones; dovetailing into Sea Island overlap between Jones and Loscil. It makes for a nice blurring between time and genre with, say, the Gangloffs using esoteric strategies to achieve a similar kind of transcendence that Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers reach through more orthodox, albeit uncommonly raw, Gospel routes in these Lomax recordings from the early '60s.
Cian Nugent & The Cosmos’ “Born With The Caul” is one of my favourite albums of the year, as I tried to explain as part of this blog from a month or so back. The album came out this week, anyhow, so I thought it was worth posting this Q&A with Cian here. Some really nice stuff on his influences, especially…
Fairport Convention founder, solo artist and folk-rock guitar legend Richard Thompson is featured in Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes in the latest issue of Uncut (May 2012, Take 181), out now. The songwriter appeared in My Life In Music in our February 2009 issue, speaking to Terry Staunton about his favourite cuts, from Les Paul to Klaxons…
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The First Record I Bought
Roy Rogers – A Four Legged Friend (1952)
