Here's a longer version of our Giles Martin Q&A that accompanied Louis Pattison's lead review of The Beatles' self-titled epic in our issue dated December 2018. Martin, of course, remixed the album for this new version, and sifted through hundreds of hours of outtakes, demos and studio chatter. ...
It’s so weird that they double-tracked them.
It is quite weird – I guess it’s what they did. They were incredibly tight at double-tracking, it’s incredibly hard to do. I said we’d mix them, but I tried to make it as much like we were pressing play on a tape machine. I really think they sound great.
There’s another version of “Let It Be” here – that hasn’t been out before has it?
I think it’s from the session of “Guitar Gently Weeps”. The other thing about The Beatles, they wrote songs all the time. Most bands have to think about their next album. The Beatles had to think about the next time they could get in the studio to record the songs they’ve already got.
Will there be more of this kind of thing?
I don’t know. It’s very disorganised the way we work. But I think that we’ll see how things go with this. With Sgt Pepper there was a mono-stereo question. With this there were all the studio outtakes and the Esher demos. I always think we have to find something that’s not just a repackage to make it worthwhile. I get people asking, “When are you going to remix Revolver?” It’s down to The Beatles. They ask me to do it, so I go off and do it.
The concept of union via agreement is what underpins any collaboration; but particularly in the case of a duo, where without majority rule the individuals’ energies, aims, intents and methodologies must match up if they’re going to get anything at all off the ground. It’s a simple truth – an...
The concept of union via agreement is what underpins any collaboration; but particularly in the case of a duo, where without majority rule the individuals’ energies, aims, intents and methodologies must match up if they’re going to get anything at all off the ground. It’s a simple truth – and one that holds for singer-songwriter Meg Baird and harpist Mary Lattimore. In fact, they’re so much on the same creative page – and long-term friends to boot – you wonder why recording an album together has taken them this long.
Respectively the co-founder of Espers and Heron Oblivion and creator of three solo albums, and the go-to harp player for Thurston Moore and Sunburned Hand Of The Man, among others, who’s released two solo full-lengths, Baird and Lattimore are compellingly articulate explorers of the psych-folk and instrumental-improv hinterlands. They were fixtures on Philadelphia’s leftfield music scene for many years and first met after Lattimore moved to the city from Rochester in 2005, following her friends Greg Weeks and Otto Hauser of Espers. Inevitably, the women’s orbits intersected, also pulling in creatively compatible locals such as Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn and Jeff Ziegler for their own projects. Both have since shifted west – Lattimore lives in LA, Baird in San Francisco – and as it seems to do on so many non-native Californians, the state has made its mark. On Ghost Forests, it’s both backdrop and bit part.
Baird spoke recently about the “mind-boggling” beauty of California and in particular its extremes of light and dark. That’s a pool of dramatic possibilities that has been tapped so heavily across music genres that it’s assumed tics and tropes of its own, especially in regard to LA, but potent manipulations of darkness and illumination – their power to calm or transport, unsettle or sadden and ability to evoke other eras/realities – have long been a feature of both Baird’s and Lattimore’s work. Baird told Uncut that a major inspiration for Ghost Forests was the location of the Headlands Center For The Arts near Sausalito, where her friend worked on her recent solo album Hundreds Of Days during a term there as artist in residence.
“I came up to visit sometimes from the city, and her giant, dreamy redwood studio is where the first sketches for the collaboration were made,” she said, adding that “the way we were meeting up again in this heartwarming but heartbreaking, terrifying but gentle, beautiful coastal place” made a deep impact. These six tracks, then, are a record of reconnection and shared memories.
Recorded over four days and running at just 35 minutes, the album risked sounding slight, but there’s satisfying emotional weight, not to mention great beauty in its mix of acoustic and electric guitars, harp, synths, Baird’s vocals and some piano. Opener “Between Two Worlds”, which borrows the title of a group art exhibition on uniquely Californian themes the women saw together last year, begins as a thing of tremulous beauty, a braid of single, plucked harp and finger-picked guitar notes, pure and free and sweet, but builds steadily from around the halfway point to a peak of shrill harp trills and clanging six-string in feverish apocalyptic counterpoint, underpinned by an ominously thrumming synth.
“Damaged Sunset” is more subdued, dropping back from its initially urgent acoustic strumming to a simple chord pattern that’s a perfect vehicle for Baird’s mournfully sweet vocal, the whole rising and falling in a hypnotic rhythm over soft synth pillows. Her lyrics, though, poke at darkness and anxiety: “Blame the way the sky looked when those planes fell down…/ Set the towers on fire just to feel the space beyond, you won’t rest again here.”
For “In Cedars”, Lattimore’s harp takes the lead, cascading over treated guitar while both Baird’s vocals – multi-tracked for divine choral effect – and synth manifest as gaseous exhalations, the whole conflating images of deep earth with near space in seven knockout minutes. As their take on a Scottish traditional (after Beverly Woods’ 1983 rendition), closer “Fair Annie” is the record’s most straightforward track, its surge-and-retreat rhythm carried by Baird’s lyrical finger-picking and Lattimore’s sturdy piano style as if in conversation, her harp the dulcet overlay.
Ghost Forests is a sensual record where the spaces in between the sounds assume a corporeality all their own – and although it has the power to untether the listener, it isn’t “romantic” or “sublime” in the conventional aesthetic sense. Yes, there’s dreamy hush by the yard in its enigmatic snapshots, but they were taken in the very real world.
The world of muzak has changed immeasurably since the ’70s. Offensively bland music is rarely heard in public spaces, and even the brand name itself was retired in 2013; instead, the issue is now intrusively mastered pop, perfect for being blasted out of phones on public transport or, in the infam...
The world of muzak has changed immeasurably since the ’70s. Offensively bland music is rarely heard in public spaces, and even the brand name itself was retired in 2013; instead, the issue is now intrusively mastered pop, perfect for being blasted out of phones on public transport or, in the infamous ongoing case of Jess Glynne’s “Hold My Hand”, maddeningly repeated multiple times on a certain airline’s every flight.
Our environments are noisier than ever, then, which means escape into the reflective spaces provided by Brian Eno’s early ambient works is more necessary than when he first created them. By design, then, or by chance, Eno’s first four ambient records are now being reissued, mastered at half-speed and split across double LPs (singles are also available) for superior sound quality; this same process so benefitted Eno’s first four vocal albums on their vinyl reissue last year.
The story goes that Eno was inspired to first create unobtrusive, environmental music after hearing an album of harp pieces, partly drowned out by the sound of rain, while recovering from a car accident and thus unable to turn up the stereo. But he’d already ventured into this world with (No Pussyfooting), his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp, and the first LP he released after leaving Roxy Music earlier that year. Discreet Music slipped out quietly a couple of months after his third “pop” album, 1975’s Another Green World; one of four LPs that Eno’s Obscure label released on the same day, its second side featured an orchestral collaboration with Gavin Bryars queasily reworking Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’, while Side One showcased “Discreet Music” itself, a 30-minute piece that consisted purely of Eno’s VCS3 synth slowly looped through two tape machines – not much happens, but beautifully. David Bowie, of course, took notice.
Of all Eno’s ambient works, except perhaps 1993’s Neroli, Discreet Music stays closest to his original concept of a subtle music designed to alter the listener’s environment. The rest of his ambient records are lusher, especially 1978’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports: a reaction to the muzak in Cologne airport, and recorded just a year or so after Eno’s collaborations with Bowie, Cluster and Harmonia, it remains a feather-light masterpiece, its intersecting loops of bucolic piano (by Robert Wyatt), flowing synth tones and processed vocals as impressive as the finest filigree.
Along with the other LPs in the Ambient series, Music For Airports’ cover is adorned with detail from a map, which is a crucial clue to Eno’s intentions. As with a map, the idea of these records being purely functional is in fact a little off; after all, cartographers tell a story through their inclusions and exclusions, rendering every map partway between the useful and the beautiful, just like Eno’s ambient work. These records are also imbued with a sense of place, none more so than 1982’s Ambient 4: On Land, more pioneering illbient than relaxation tape. Most of its eight tracks are named after places, some from Eno’s childhood, including “Lantern Marsh” and “Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills)”, and they reverberate with low drones, swampy synth pads and disquieting field recordings. At times it’s as if the listener is lost in East Anglian fog, desperately trying to locate civilisation via the tolling of a muffled church bell.
The remaining LP, Music For Films, is more of an outlier here, being a collection of miniatures designed to show off Eno’s work to music supervisors. Phil Collins, Fred Frith, Robert Fripp and Dave Mattacks all appear, and there are some vivid moments – the melodramatic “Slow Water”, the limpid “Strange Light” – but the overall effect is of a less cohesive Another Green World.
Viewed from 2018, these four LPs appear to have inspired swathes of innovative music in the past 40 years – from Bowie to Boards Of Canada – but they’ve also led in part to the soporific, neo-classical mulch that clogs up myriad Spotify ‘chill-out’ playlists. Much of this streamed music is purely functional – music for sleeping, say, or music for pressure-washing – and acts as little more than beige wallpaper, useful only to block out unwelcome thoughts or the hum of distant traffic. In comparison, these four Eno records are like William Morris designs, ornately wrought and continually fascinating.
This is the best they’ve ever sounded too – compared with the original pressing. On Land’s “Lizard Point”, for instance, is louder and bassier and feels like a living 3D landscape compared to the flatter first master. For music so detailed, these new versions are worth the expense. “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” Eno concluded in his original sleevenotes for Music For Airports. “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Judged on that first criteria, then, these LPs fail, for they’re far too beautiful to just float by, overlooked. This is music to help you temporarily transcend the physical world, not just soundtrack it.
In new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – Elvis Costello writes exclusively about the making of some of his classic albums, from My Aim Is True to this year's masterful Look Now.
Recorded at a troubled time, 1981's Trust targeted Costello's pop contempor...
In new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – Elvis Costello writes exclusively about the making of some of his classic albums, from My Aim Is True to this year’s masterful Look Now.
Recorded at a troubled time, 1981’s Trust targeted Costello’s pop contemporaries. Read what the man himself says about it below:
“Every one of the 45rpm records that we issued between late 1977 and mid-1980 made some kind of showing on the UK hit parade. My face was suddenly on the cover of teen magazines, as unlikely as that may sound now. It’s a sad and predictable story that too much attention can turn a young man’s head. I thought myself above all temptations but wrote a lot of songs about the debris that surrounds them and anything else that flew by my window. That’s what filled Armed Forces and Get Happy!!.
“After some hits, some inexplicable catastrophes and producing The Specials under a laundromat in the Fulham Palace Road, I felt like driving the car into a ditch or at least to Sunderland, so, with stupefying arrogance, we set about showing our contemporaries what could be done with their winning formulas. “Clubland” was supposed to be “Message In A Bottle” with a middle eight, “You’ll Never Be A Man” was “Brass In Pocket” with more chords and some ideas hijacked from The “Detroit” Spinners, while “White Knuckles” was like hearing several XTC songs through a haze of scrumpy, gin and sherbet dabs. I doubt any of them were better songs than their models, but it was a lark.
“I wish I could say it kept us out of trouble. Somewhere along the way The Attractions managed to cut what I think of as their most original ensemble performance, “New Lace Sleeves”. Around this time, my publisher told me the song I’d just written on a newly purchased piano reminded him of something by Erik Satie, so I went to a music shop to find out what he was talking about and discovered that I could actually play the opening bars of a few of his deceptively simple piano pieces. However, I absolutely needed Steve Nieve’s fingers to make sense and music out of my sketch for “Shot With His Own Gun” and then I straightened up long enough to co-produce Squeeze’s East Side Story.”
You can read Elvis Costello’s complete Album By Album feature in the current issue of Uncut, out now.
The V&A's touring exhibition David Bowie Is – which visited 12 cities over the course of five years before closing permanently in the summer – will now live on as a mobile app.
The David Bowie Is augmented reality mobile app will be available for iOS and Android from January 8, 2019 (which ...
The V&A’s touring exhibition David Bowie Is – which visited 12 cities over the course of five years before closing permanently in the summer – will now live on as a mobile app.
The David Bowie Is augmented reality mobile app will be available for iOS and Android from January 8, 2019 (which would have been Bowie’s 72nd birthday). It grants access to the show’s hundreds of costumes, videos, handwritten lyrics, original works of art and more.
According to a press release, it “mirrors the physical exhibition through a sequence of audio-visual spaces through which the works and artifacts of Bowie’s life can be explored. 3D renderings preserve and present his costumes and treasured objects such as musical scores, storyboards, handwritten lyrics, and even diary entries – all in 360-degree detail, enhanced by an immersive audio experience featuring Bowie’s music and narration, best experienced with headphones.”
The app will feature dozens of items not featured in the original exhibition – including some entirely new and exclusive to this AR version. For more information, visit the official David Bowie Is site.
Why Negative Capability?
Marianne Faithfull: It’s a phrase from a Keats letter that I’d known about for a long time, and I think it’s a wonderful, strong thing to call something. Not even an album, necessarily.
The album has allegory, reportage, personal issues. How did you want it to w...
Why Negative Capability? Marianne Faithfull: It’s a phrase from a Keats letter that I’d known about for a long time, and I think it’s a wonderful, strong thing to call something. Not even an album, necessarily.
The album has allegory, reportage, personal issues. How did you want it to work? MF: It’s about certain things, obviously. First of all it’s about love. It’s also about loneliness. But it’s also about the fact that in the last two years so many of my dearest friends have died. It’s very straightforward. I don’t write as therapy; it isn’t about working through anything. There’s been such sadness and pain, but I loved them very much and so I am trying to honour them and love them as much as I can.
Among them Anita Pallenberg, of course… MF: Not just Anita – Heathcote Williams, Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, Gareth Brown… So many of my very dearest friends. It’s been what one would call a blue period. They were happening all the time, one after the other; I wrote and I wrote and wrote. And where I ended up was not just bereavement – where I ended up was love.
What do you feel about mortality? MF: I really don’t think about it. I don’t think about it at all. A lot of my friends croaked in the last few years and I felt I had to write about it. I always write about what’s going on.
How did the record evolve? Rob Ellis: It started out maybe two to three years before we recorded it. It was intended to be more of a folk album, of songs that her dad had sung to her and that led naturally into a slightly more nostalgic overview. We’d just finished a tour celebrating Marianne’s 50th year in the business. Then she lost a couple of close friends and it became a reflective record. We steered things in a direction that we would look at some things from earlier in her career that were fresh as a daisy and are now filled with that incredible life. I guess that’s where the concept came from. I think we realised what we were doing towards the end. The folk thing kick-started the idea, but we ended up writing songs that were more personal in nature.
Tell me about working with Nick Cave again… MF: I was looking for a song Nick Cave would love to write. At first he said no, because he was so busy. I wrote back saying don’t worry about it, then he replied saying, well actually, he would write it, “The Gypsy Faerie Queen”. It was incredibly nice of him. With Nick I send him my lyrics – he likes my writing. He likes not having all the responsibility.
You also have Warren Ellis… MF: Ah, Warren! It was Warren’s idea to re-record “As Tears Go By” and “Witches’ Song”. I didn’t think it was a very good idea, but he really wanted to and, as it turns out, he was right. I don’t listen to the old versions as I don’t like to compare things. I’ve always performed it [“As Tears Go By”]. People love it: so I do it.
That’s a potent song for the listener. What power does the song have over you? MF: For a long time I didn’t really like it, actually – it seemed to me to be the start of all the trouble, but in fact it’s a really wonderful song. Trouble? Well, I got famous and I became a little pop star and blah blah blah.
Which was a bad thing? MF: It set me off in the wrong direction, also known as drugs.
And in an odd way, set you off on the recording path you’ve followed since. Your recording persona is as a survivor. MF: I don’t really like the word survivor. To me a survivor is someone who went to Auschwitz and survived that, you know? Anything I survived is very minor compared to that.
Were you in Paris at the time of the attacks? That must have been a horrific night. What effect did that have on you? MF: Yes. It was happening and I saw it on the news and I was so upset and shocked I sat down and wrote “They Come At Night”. [Producer] Hal Willner has a theory that every 70 years the Nazis come back in one form or another, and on that night they did, in the form of the people shooting those kids.
“In My Own Particular Way” makes something beautiful out of loneliness… MF: I love that one. The love song. It’s not about loneliness – it was in the beginning, but then a friend said to me, “Why don’t you send out a loud call to the universe to send you someone to love?” – and so I did. And they did.
Congratulations! It’s a heavy record, though. Is this your last? MF: No. I hope there will be a few more.
What sort of direction do you imagine them taking? MF: I haven’t got a fucking clue. That’s not quite true – we did say that we might like to make more of a jazzy record, but that might not happen. It’s a long time in the future.
Do you feel you convey the wisdom of experience? MF: No, not yet, no. I’m still learning, you know?
You'll have hopefully noticed that the latest issue of Uncut is now on sale, which Jack White heading up our extensive Review Of The Year. Snuck inside, in the albums pages, is my review of Neil Young's latest archival release, Songs For Judy - based around a live recording made by Joel Bernstein, t...
You’ll have hopefully noticed that the latest issue of Uncut is now on sale, which Jack White heading up our extensive Review Of The Year. Snuck inside, in the albums pages, is my review of Neil Young‘s latest archival release, Songs For Judy – based around a live recording made by Joel Bernstein, the photographer turned guitar tech and archivist. Joel was kind enough to help us out with some beautiful artefacts – including a scan of his original cassette case and 1976 tour itinerary.
I spoke to Joel for a Q&A to run with the review, which I thought I’d post here while we wait for Neil’s Archives subscription service to finally open for business…
How did you first meet Neil?
Joni Mitchell asked me to be her photographer when I was 16. She invited me to her first concert at Carnegie Hall in February 1969, where I met David Crosby and Graham Nash. The next weekend, I met Laura Nyro when she was writing New York Tendaberry at David Geffen’s apartment. The weekend after that, Elliot Roberts asked me to photograph Neil and Crazy Horse playing at the Bitter End. It was a very heady month!
What were your first impressions of Neil?
He was a very intense guy, very focused… I was very impressed that he could play so well on electric and acoustic. That was the first 20-minute “Down By The River” I heard. I next saw Neil at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. That’s when I took the gatefold picture for the inside of After The Gold Rush.
How did you come to be on the ’76 tour?
I’d tuned his Martin D guitar at the Electric Factory. Three years later, I was photographer on the Time Fades Away tour and he asked me tune his guitars one night – and I tuned them for him before each show. After that, I became Bob Dylan’s guitar tech on the second Rolling Thunder Revue in spring ’76 and then guitar tech for Crosby and Nash through Europe in August and September. I joined Neil in November.
What impressed you most about his performances on this tour?
Having seen several of the solo shows in 1971 and been on my first long tour with Time Fades Away, I was very attuned to Neil’s songwriting. To me, Zuma was a fantastic advance; he was just moving so far ahead. I thought his focus in his solo sets, too, was incredible.
Can you tell us about the tapes you made?
On Time Fades Away, I remember thinking, ‘God, wouldn’t it just be great to have even just a PA mix as a souvenir!’ I was friends with Bob Sterne, Neil’s sound mixer, and Tim Mulligan, his PA mixer, so I asked if I could record the shows. Here’s some quick context. On the European and Japanese tour earlier that year, Neil had made multi-track recordings of Crazy Horse both in London at Hammersmith Odeon and in Tokyo at the Budokan. I believe the Odeon-Budokan album was finished and a release was planned. So a mono PA cassette is nothing to do with nothing. Neil’s already officially done what he set out to do on the tour. Tim Mulligan was recording the tapes as well, which would have been far superior to mine. There were multi-tracks from the shows in New York, Boston and Atlanta. I made a C90 and a C60; the acoustic set on one and the electric set on the other. I recorded 16 shows on a Uher CR 134 portable recorder; so 32 cassettes.
How did the Judy Garland rap came about?
On the last night of the tour, there were two benefit concerts for the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. I think it was 9pm and 12pm. Neil and the band had imbibed and were on a particular plane, so the midnight show started around 1am in the end. It was an extremely rambling affair; I don’t think any of the Tonight’s The Night shows I saw were as drunken as this one. This is where the Judy Garland rap comes in. It was so special to me, it was so out there, that I put it on that tape.
What happened at the end of the tour?
I got word that Neil was going to play at the last concert for The Band at Winterland and could I do guitars for him and for Bob and Joni. I set up rehearsal for Bob and The Band at their hotel through the afternoon, which was stunning. I was the only person who got to hear it until Neil came in, hours and hours later. I can remember them playing “Forever Young” and Neil sitting in the corner, punching the air on the word “Young”. “Forever YOUNG!”
So what happened to the tapes?
After Winterland, I started editing the cassettes. Cameron [Crowe] and I spent close to a week finalising the sequence, just what felt right. I made four copies – Neil had one, Cameron had one and two went to the crew members who got me the PA feed in the first place. Five or six years later, one of them lost or had their tape stolen. Bad copies of copies of that tape started circulating first as a vinyl bootleg called Days Of Gold And Roses and then on CD. I was interviewed in the ’80s by the Broken Arrow fanzine, who wanted to know about the cassette – I told them and it became known as The Joel Bernstein Tape.
When did you first discuss giving an official release to the tape?
When I was still Neil’s archivist, he asked me in the early 2000s to make a list of possible live albums that had not been released. It was a specific-to-Volume 2 discussion, so it covered autumn ’72 to the end of Live Rust. There’s his ’74 tour, the bar dates in ’75 and ’76, and then there’s this one. At the time, he said Boston and New York were recorded multi-track. I said, “Here’s my cassette.” Later, he called me up and said he loved it and it’s going to come out somehow.
The running order is different, though…
Neil has reordered it chronologically. It looks like he’s also divided the album into two sets, one of which is my original mono PA cassette. For the songs that were in my tape from New York and Boston, they’ve gone back to the multi-tracks.
You touched on Archives 2 earlier. Neil’s website teases several tantalising releases for that period, like the May 1978 live recordings from The Boarding House in San Francisco…
What about Live At The Rainbow from ’73 or the tape from the Bottom Line in ’74? Neil has a body of work that any artist would have been proud of. It’s headspinning.
Mott The Hoople’s demented mentor, Guy Stevens, claimed that during a typically intense studio session he telepathically sent the lyrics to the anguished “When My Mind’s Gone” – from 1970’s Mad Shadows – to singer Ian Hunter, live in the studio. It is a possibility that the perma-shade...
Mott The Hoople’s demented mentor, Guy Stevens, claimed that during a typically intense studio session he telepathically sent the lyrics to the anguished “When My Mind’s Gone” – from 1970’s Mad Shadows – to singer Ian Hunter, live in the studio. It is a possibility that the perma-shaded frontman could not entirely rule out as he listened back to the tape. “It didn’t sound like me, it hadn’t come from me,” he recalls in true believer Kris Needs’ sleevenote to this 6CD cornucopia of Mott’s early years. “It was totally Guy. It frightened me to death.”
Long before David Bowie took them to Top Of The Pops with “All The Young Dudes”, Mott knew how it felt to be a pawn in someone else’s musical game. Scenester, soul guru and president of the Chuck Berry Appreciation Society, Stevens had imagined a band that fused The Rolling Stones and electric Bob Dylan while serving time for cannabis possession in Wormwood Scrubs. On his release, the Island Records house crazy saddled Herefordshire wannabes Silence with 30-year-old ex-road digger Hunter as their new singer, and named the group of his dreams after a 1966 Willard Manus novel – “hoople” being US slang for “loser”.
If Stevens’ rock Frankenstein was not monstrously successful early on, Mott’s primal thud had significant echoes – a dedicated fan as a teenager, The Clash’s Mick Jones said: “If it hadn’t been for Mott, there would be no us.” After Stevens just about produced the kaleidoscopic London Calling, Joe Strummer called him “the ultimate cure for musical constipation”.
Mott benefited from Stevens’ pop colonic in their early days, Hunter saying, “He’d get us drunk, we’d play a load of rubbish and he’d be going, ‘It’s great!’” That optimistic A&R technique led to the giddy mess that is 1969’s Mott The Hoople, Hunter’s Blonde On Blonde-ing on “Backsliding Fearlessly” and “Half Moon Bay” co-existing awkwardly with guitarist Mick Ralphs’ yen for bludgeoning rock.
Mad Shadows is more coherent, though Hunter’s marital problems and Stevens’ intensifying mania account for its OTT edge. Hunter’s wounded-bull bellow on “No Wheels To Ride” and the gospel-toned “I Can Feel” express that torment, and even if Mad Shadows isn’t all anguish, there is darkness at its heart, Hunter channelling Stevens’ imploding ego on “When My Mind’s Gone”: “What once was clean is now unclean/What once was straight is now unstraight.”
It all proved too fraught. Stevens was benched for 1970’s countrified Wildlife, but maturity did not suit Mott: “We used to call it ‘Midlife’,” Ralphs joked. Hunter’s spindly “Angel Of Fifth Avenue” and the mournful “Waterlow” are Byrds-soft and Sandy Denny-spry, but Mott liked life wilder, recalling Stevens for 1971’s scattershot Brain Capers, touted rather hopefully here as proto-punk.
However, the “I don’t care what the people may say” refrain on New York Dolls-y opener “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” is more bruised bravado than year-one nihilism. “I feel neglected, feel rejected, living in the wrong time,” Hunter yowls on the moody “The Moon Upstairs”, though metaphysical centrepiece “The Journey” – The Band on Broadway – rises above the impotent fury, rebranding failure as life-enriching experience. It might have been Mott’s closing statement; the band resolved to call it quits during the subsequent tour, only for a sprinkle of Bowie stardust to change everything.
That, however, is another story. In a revealing passage, Needs remembers encountering a morose Stevens ahead of an October 1972 gig by his newly successful former protégés: “The former human dynamo was now a slobbering drunk, that wild-eyed stare melted into red-eyed alcoholism as he seethed with acrimony, disgust and probably envy that Bowie had achieved everything he couldn’t.”
Heavy without being metal, lyrical with nary an acoustic guitar in sight, the Mott of Mental Train were a madman’s unworkable vision. Bowie’s Mainman team bashed them into a commercial shape Stevens never could, but the 1.0 Mott’s blundering, steamroller charm was their own. The producer died a drunk’s death, aged 38, in 1981. Hunter paid tribute with a dedication on his 1983 solo album, All Of The Good Ones Are Taken: “You gave your heart – you gave your soul. God bless you, Guy – rock’n’roll!” If that wasn’t the epitaph of his dreams, one can only hope Mental Train is.
In 2012, Twitter was briefly united in mirth around the subject of Ecce Homo, a fresco of Jesus Christ found in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain. An elderly parishioner, troubled by Christ’s faded and flaking visage, decided to restore the image herself – a fix that came out so poor...
In 2012, Twitter was briefly united in mirth around the subject of Ecce Homo, a fresco of Jesus Christ found in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain. An elderly parishioner, troubled by Christ’s faded and flaking visage, decided to restore the image herself – a fix that came out so poorly that, at first, authorities suspected vandalism. That the story resonated was probably down to two lessons: good faith doesn’t necessarily make for good decisions; and that just because something’s old, doesn’t necessarily mean it requires a refresh.
These sorts of thoughts must have troubled Giles Martin – son of George – as he sat down to remix Sgt Pepper from the original master tapes on its 50th anniversary. But Martin’s new stereo mix, released last year, gave to the world a brighter, sharper Sgt Pepper – the instruments crisper, the mixes neater, bells and whistles polished and gleaming. Perhaps you needed it, perhaps you didn’t, but the important thing was that no-one yelled sacrilege.
Next stop, then, ‘The White Album’. But of course, The Beatles’ 1968 double LP is a very different beast, and in many ways, one perhaps resistant to the boxset treatment. For starters, there are obvious questions of scale. Sceptics have long maintained that ‘The White Album’ might have worked better pruned down to a single album; God only knows what they might make of the prospect of it expanded across seven CDs, encompassing 107 tracks, some five-and-a-half hours of music, and a 164-page hardback book. (If the Super Deluxe version sounds a bit ambitious, it’s also available in Deluxe form – over three CDs or four LPs – or as the classic 2LP vinyl in faithfully replicated gatefold sleeve.)
Perhaps more fundamentally, Martin had concerns about the prospect of remixing an album as cryptic and truculent as this. Sgt Pepper revels in its explosions of space and colour. ‘The White Album’, by contrast, is a labyrinth through which dark currents run, beauty and surrealism mingling with absurdity and recrimination. Clean it up, blow away the murk, and you risk spoiling whatever it is that makes it magic.
Luckily, Martin’s new stereo mix succeeds, principally through lightness of touch. As with Martin’s take on Pepper, this is a subtle revision rather than a bold remake. Come to it unawares and you might not notice any difference. But listen closely on headphones and the magic of the new mix becomes clear. Where once the opening guitar chimes of “Dear Prudence” felt fixed, now they gently amble across the stereo field. The layers of “Glass Onion” – Lennon’s mischievous vocal, Ringo’s thunking drums, those strings that sweep in like a chill down the spine – boast a new, crisp separation. In particular, an overhaul of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is a quiet revelation, showing off little details you had never heard previously.
Augmenting the new stereo mix on Deluxe and Super Deluxe versions is The Esher Demos. Long circulated as a bootleg but here collected in far better fidelity, these 27 tracks were captured on an Ampex reel-to-reel at George Harrison’s house in May 1968, shortly after The Beatles returned from their stint in India with the Maharishi. These are simple recordings, just acoustic guitars and group vocals. But the mood is jovial, and there is a palpable sense of collective endeavour. A raucous “The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill” features handclaps, drumming on tables and animal noises.
Lennon alludes to the group’s disillusion with the Maharishi on the ad-libbed outro of “Dear Prudence” (“All the people around were very worried about the girl, because she was going insane… So we sang to her”). And there’s also a glimpse of a new preoccupation: “Yoko Ono, oh no/Yoko Ono, oh yes,” he choruses on “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”. Much of ‘The White Album’ gets its first outing here, but there are also glimpses of songs that would emerge much later on. “Polythene Pam” and “Mean Mr Mustard” would see the light on Abbey Road. McCartney’s “Junk” emerged on his first solo album. Lennon’s “Child Of Nature” was eventually scrapped, but its melody and basic structure would one day re-emerge as “Jealous Guy”.
The Beatles would never again sound as together as they did on The Esher Demos. As they entered Abbey Road to begin recording in earnest, fault lines opened within the band. Sessions took place in irregular hours, band members would begin recording alone with tracks completed by overdub, and the creative friction even spread to the production team: engineer Geoff Emerick quit some six weeks into the sessions.
‘The White Album’’s Super Deluxe version lines up 50 chronologically assembled recordings from the original studio sessions, much previously unheard, and all freshly mixed from the four-track and eight-track tapes. You enter it expecting simmering tensions and recrimination. And while we can’t entirely rule out that some of the dirty laundry has been respectfully jettisoned, it’s perhaps a shock to find much evidence of a band not only gelling, but working hard to nail increasingly diverse and difficult material. Check out an 11-minute take on “Revolution 1”, recorded on the first day of sessions with Yoko Ono present. In band histories, this is often depicted as a tense scene. But the result is endearingly groovy, and ends with Ono reciting poetry and toying with tape loops. “That’s too much?” she asks at the end, nervously. But everyone’s laughing, and the mood is good.
‘The White Album’ is a smorgasbord of sounds and styles, and elsewhere we see just how far songs progressed from their starting point. An early take on “Helter Skelter” finds the group jamming out 13 minutes of lumbering caveman blues, hunting for moments of inspiration. Come “Second Version Take 17”, McCartney’s unlocked its deranged tenor, dispatching a version that, if anything, is wilder than the final version (“Keep that one… mark it fab,” he declares). “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (Take 3)” sounds a little saccharine; it’s only when Lennon adds the vicious, almost parodic piano line that the song comes to life. Harrison’s second take on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is a frail but pretty acoustic number, some distance from the Eric Clapton-assisted rocker that’s unveiled a dozen tracks later. By way of contrast, McCartney has “Hey Jude” there right from its joyful first take, even if he hasn’t yet got the orchestra in place.
Along the way, we get Macca puzzling over “Blackbird”, some endearing random chat (Harrison is partial to a cheese, lettuce and Marmite sandwich), and casual takes on standards “Blue Moon” and “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care”. There are moments of play – bossa nova oddity “Los Paranoias” is proof that The Beatles were still close enough to entertain in-jokes, while a glimpse of the group cracking one another up as they record the backing vocals for “Lady Madonna” is warming.
Over 107 tracks, we learn that the making of ‘The White Album’ was not quite the frigid stand-off that we might have been led to believe. But nor does this glimpse behind the curtain diminish ‘The White Album’’s mystique. Keep peeling the glass onion and you just discover more and more layers, its possibilities multiplying, its depths unfathomable.
Thom Yorke might have made his debut as a film composer a lot earlier than this, it seems. During the late ’90s, shortly after Radiohead had completed OK, Computer, Yorke was approached by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt to score Fight Club. If ever there was a film that dovetailed perfectly with Radi...
Thom Yorke might have made his debut as a film composer a lot earlier than this, it seems. During the late ’90s, shortly after Radiohead had completed OK, Computer, Yorke was approached by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt to score Fight Club. If ever there was a film that dovetailed perfectly with Radiohead’s own take on atomisation, alienation and crises, this was it.
In the end, Yorke rejected Norton and Pitt’s offer – and since then, of course, his bandmate Jonny Greenwood has gone on to become a highly successful soundtrack composer. Radiohead, too, have made their own foray into film music – their shelved Bond theme, “Spectre”, is now a highlight of Yorke’s live sets. Even Yorke’s external projects like the PolyFauna app and his Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes LP have featured the kind of subtly involving music you might expect to hear in a movie.
So at last – a mere 20 years on from Norton and Pitt’s offer – Yorke has finally got round to making his first film soundtrack. This, then, is Suspiria – Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s horror classic about a coven of witches operating out of a ballet school. It is not, as you might imagine from PolyFauna or Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, slow-moving, electronic and ambient – as it transpires, Suspiria finds Yorke stepping in a new direction.
The setting for Guadagnino’s film – Berlin, 1977 – is evidently a critical factor in all this. Yorke has made an album that draws partly from the krautrock armoury – modular synths, repetition, pulseless drones. Among the acts most associated with that era, Can, Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze all worked on film scores – while Argento’s original Suspiria was soundtracked with swarthy, demonic intent by the Italian progressive rock band Goblin. All these elements, somehow, find their way into Thom Yorke’s Suspiria.
The critical point is this, though: what exactly is Suspiria? Is it a solo album? Is it a film soundtrack? To an extent, the answer is a fudge: it’s a bit of both. Pieces like “Suspirium”, “Unmade”, “Has Ended”, “Open Again” or “Suspirium (Finale)” are evidently full-length songs. But of the album’s 25 tracks, some of them – like the 44-second “A Soft Hand Across Your Face” or the 25-second “An Audition” – feel more like cues, designed to enhance the drama as it unfolds on screen. Even some of the longer pieces – “The Hooks”, “Olga’s Destruction”, “The Conjuring Of Aneke” – are titled after specific narrative events in Guadagnino’s film.
Having said that, though, Yorke’s aesthetic is sustained throughout; even the shorter pieces reflect something of their creator’s intent. Clocking in at 59 seconds, “Synthesizer Speaks” might appear like a minor cue, for instance – but its weird, electronic shrieking feels part of a favoured Yorke obsession: technological fear and breakdown. I’m reminded of a line in “The Axe” where Yorke sings, “Goddam machinery, why won’t it speak to me? One day I’m going to take an axe to it.” Not so much a paranoid android, perhaps, as a seriously spooked synth.
In one final revelation, Yorke is not working here with his usual collaborator, Nigel Godrich. Instead, Suspiria has been co-produced by Sam Petts-Davies, recording engineer on A Moon Shaped Pool and Jonny Greenwood’s Junun project as well as the Godrich-produced Roger Waters album, Is This The Life We Really Want?.
One of the pieces that works best both on and off screen is “Volk”. Named after a legendary avant-garde ballet that is performed in the film as part of a demonic incantation (yes, yes), its simple five-note refrain becomes the starting point for a prolonged and substantial sonic exploration. In its eldritch route through discomforting Moog lines and deviant effects, it displays the kind of wry contempt for conventional rock’n’roll that has informed almost every artistic move Yorke and his band have made in the past 20-odd years.
The opportunity to do something entirely unconnected to songwriting in any form evidently appeals to Yorke – and for the most part, these experimental compositions for Suspiria work. But that’s not to ignore the moments were Yorke does consent to contribute songs – and they’re really very good. At first, “Suspirium” recalls “The Daily Mail” in its rawness and piano style. Then, as Pasha Mansurov’s flute pirouettes through the song’s second half, it is possible to detect the delicate orchestral filigree of A Moon Shaped Pool. These are made more explicit by a second, longer version, “Suspirium (Finale)”, which brings a wide-angled, cinematic quality to the song. Incidentally, the strings on Suspiria are provided by the London Contemporary Orchestra, who delivered such strong work on A Moon Shaped Moon. “Has Ended” is unsettling kosmische, built around slow, clattering drums (apparently played by Yorke’s son, Noah) and circular organ drones. At first, Yorke’s lyrics appear to refer directly to the film. There is a city, returning soldiers – presumably partitioned Berlin – “the witches were all singing”. Then, though, he makes an unexpected narrative leap. “We won’t make this mistake again,” he sings, suggesting the fascists and “their dancing puppet king” are, once again, on the rise. “We won’t make this mistake again…” he sings, somehow connecting a gruesome period horror to more genuinely disturbing contemporary events.
“Unmade” is one of those beautiful, melancholy piano ballads at which Yorke excels, the repetition in melody and chordal changes recalling Eric Satie. It offers respite from the heavy drones and sinister atmospheres generated elsewhere. Meanwhile, “Open Again” weaves, spell-like, around a cycling guitar motif – one of the few times a guitar appears on the soundtrack.
As a creative exercise, it feels useful for Yorke to have made this record. Another electronic solo album along the lines of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes would have felt like a step backwards. This project allows him to engage with the broader collaborative experience of filmmaking while also presenting a work that stands on its own terms. Rather like Guadagnino’s film, Thom Yorke’s Suspiria might not be to everyone’s tastes – but it feels enough, for now.
The Rolling Stones have announced another leg of their ongoing No Filter tour, visiting 13 stadiums across the USA between April and June 2019.
See the full list of new dates below:
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
April 20, 2019 Miami Gardens, FL...
The Rolling Stones have announced another leg of their ongoing No Filter tour, visiting 13 stadiums across the USA between April and June 2019.
April 20, 2019 Miami Gardens, FL Hard Rock Stadium
April 24, 2019 Jacksonville, FL TIAA Bank Field
April 28, 2019 Houston, TX NRG Stadium
May 7, 2019 Glendale, AZ State Farm Stadium
May 11, 2019 Pasadena, CA The Rose Bowl
May 18, 2019 Santa Clara, CA Levi’s®️ Stadium
May 22, 2019 Seattle, WA CenturyLink Field
May 26, 2019 Denver, CO Broncos Stadium at Mile High
May 31, 2019 Washington, D.C. FedExField
June 4, 2019 Philadelphia, PA Lincoln Financial Field
June 8, 2019 Foxborough, MA Gillette Stadium
June 13, 2019 East Rutherford, NJ MetLife Stadium
June 21, 2019 Chicago, IL Soldier Field
Or if you prefer, watch Mick Jagger set them to music:
Tickets for these dates will go on sale Friday, November 30 – more details here. There is a pre-sale for American Express® Card Members beginning Wednesday, November 28 at 10am local time.
The first batch of names have been announced for 2019's Cambridge Folk Festival, taking place at Cherry Hinton Hall on August 1-4 2019.
Lucinda Williams will headline the festival on the Saturday night, while Richard Thompson will play a solo acoustic set. Other acts confirmed include Ralph McTell,...
The first batch of names have been announced for 2019’s Cambridge Folk Festival, taking place at Cherry Hinton Hall on August 1-4 2019.
Lucinda Williams will headline the festival on the Saturday night, while Richard Thompson will play a solo acoustic set. Other acts confirmed include Ralph McTell, José González, Tunng, Lisa O’Neill, Fisherman’s Friends, Karine Polwart and Lil’ Jimmy Reed. Friday and Sundays headliners are yet to be revealed.
The Chemical Brothers have announced that their new album, No Geography, will be released in Spring 2019.
It includes recent single "Free Yourself", the video for which you can watch below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wzR_BVFsUU
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your...
The Chemical Brothers have announced that their new album, No Geography, will be released in Spring 2019.
It includes recent single “Free Yourself”, the video for which you can watch below:
As well as headlining the All Points East festival in London’s Victoria Park in May, The Chemical Brothers have also announced a UK arena tour for November, dates below:
21st November 2019 Leeds First Direct Arena
22nd November 2019 Manchester Arena
23rd November 2019 Glasgow The SSE Hydro
28th November 2019 Cardiff Motorpoint Arena
29th November 2019 Birmingham Arena
Tickets go on general sale at 9am on Friday November 30, although anyone who pre-orders No Geography from here will gain access to a pre-sale starting at 9am on Tuesday November 27.
Originally published in Uncut's September 2015 issue
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The mind-bending saga of Killing Joke. Involves maggots, burned flats, gay brothels, police raids, black magic, electric shock therapy, pig’s heads, self-harm, decapitated w...
Martin Atkins, once of PiL, drummed on 1990’s heavy Extremities, Dirt And Various Repressed Emotions, and then the band took a break. Coleman moved to an island off New Zealand – he still lives there half the year – and began a second career as a classical composer. “I taught myself,” he says. “I made a list of people I admired and went to seek them out. I was a pain in the arse but people like Philip Glass were very kind.” Another ally was Jimmy Page. “He’s like our granddad,” says Coleman. “I copied out my first symphony at his house.”
In 1992, Geordie began working on a greatest hits LP, Laugh? I Nearly Bought One, and re-established contact with Youth. The band fired up again. “I felt there was unfinished business,” says Youth. “We hadn’t made the great record we could have made. I had leverage, a label imprint and the band were on a low, they’d almost split up. So I suggested signing them to my label and producing.”
Two strong LPs resulted, Pandemonium (1994) and Democracy (1996), with the band exploring world music and electronica among the more familiar metal/industrial rock. Youth even persuaded Coleman to record vocals in the Great Pyramid. “I was into Earth energy, leylines, and on one DMT experience I saw a lattice of energy lines around the world and wanted to work in those places and turn the recordings into ceremonies. Jaz was interested. Doors open in the cosmic coincidence zone.”
They do indeed. In an unlikely turn-up, Coleman and Youth were handed the keys to the pyramid for three days for “meditation purposes”. Coleman explains: “We met three beautiful archaeologists. They introduced us to the minister responsible and we handed over a bribe. We took my engineer Sameh [Almazny] and he fell asleep in the King’s Chamber and dreamed that all these alien eyes were watching him. He woke up screaming, banged his head on the lintel and ran out. Then these three Egyptologists turned up as we were doing this ritual. They’d dressed up like Isis. Youth didn’t know who they were and says, ‘Here, who are those weird birds at the back?’ When we came out there were hundreds of Bedouin, chanting.” Coleman and Youth thought the experience was magical; Geordie merely notes drily that “They spent 24 grand for a couple of vocal tracks. That was an expensive holiday.”
Killing Joke were barely holding together. They lacked a drummer and Youth was in and out. “Jaz and Geordie were drinking too much, they were aggressive and bitter,” he says. “I didn’t want to tour, as I had kids.” He played on 2003’s belligerent self-titled album, produced by Andy Gill, but then ducked out of 2006’s Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell. In October 2007, Raven died of a heart attack. Ferguson, Youth, Coleman and Geordie attended the funeral and then went back to work. “It had been a thorn in my side,” says Ferguson. “Whenever they released a record it would irk me. I was just starting to get over it when Raven died. It was the first time I’d seen Jaz and it was healing. Rejoining was a hard decision, but the curiosity would have killed me.”
The reunited quartet has since cut a triptych of LPs – 2010’s Absolute Dissent, 2012’s MMXII and Pylon. “It’s a blessing to write about how fucked up I think the world is, then it ends up in a song with Jaz and Geordie,” says Ferguson. “I love listening to them play and I love playing drums. It doesn’t work without me. It’s good, but it’s like the sex is gone. What I do has a backbeat that resonates.”
Youth also gets something out of Killing Joke that his many other interests don’t provide. “We are all very opinionated, uncompromising people,” he says. “It’s rare to have all four members like that, and we have to find the harmony within that dissonance. It means I have to up my game. I might be mixing Pink Floyd, but then I’ll play something for Jaz and he calls me a wanker. It keeps me grounded. You leave the dignity at the door.”
The last word comes, inevitably, from Coleman. “Killing Joke gives me hope,” he says. “We have such different opinions, but if we can find common ground, there’s hope for the world. When I talk to most people in bands, they are aliens to me. That whole sociology, their culture, I don’t understand it. After Killing Joke, they seem so dull.”
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – features our comprehensive look-back at the music (and films and books) that defined 2018.
There's also a revealing new interview with Paul Weller in which he discusses the year in music – covering both his ow...
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – features our comprehensive look-back at the music (and films and books) that defined 2018.
There’s also a revealing new interview with Paul Weller in which he discusses the year in music – covering both his own True Meanings album and the other artists who continue to inspire him – as well as his thoughts on turning 60 and what’s next for this restless songwriter. Read an extract from the Q&A below:
I suppose you’re already halfway through your next album…
I’ve got tunes! I’m at the demo stage. I’ve got eight pieces on the go – whether they’ll all make it or not, I don’t know. But I can’t stop writing. It’s been pretty consistent since 22 Dreams. In some ways, I think it’s fair to say I’m probably more prolific than I’ve ever been. I seem to have more ideas these days. I don’t know why that should be.
How much does having a young family change your working methods?
Me now, I’d be quite happy if I was going in the studio next week to start working on a new album. But I can’t, for family reasons. So it’s about finding a balance. Trying to stay on the creative tip but at the same time, doing my family duties as well. It’s plate spinning.
I’d have thought you’d have had a routine by now.
I play almost every day anyway, just to keep my chops in. So every night, when everyone’s gone to bed, I’ll keep chipping away at these songs, write a new thing, whatever it may be. I keep all these ideas stored on my phone until I’ve got time to go in and get them out.
The iPhone is a gift to musicians, isn’t it?
I wish I’d had it years ago! I didn’t have anything to record on back in the day. I used to keep playing the songs over and over until I had the sequence in my head. I always thought if they’re good enough, I’ll remember them next day.
How much did turning 60 overshadow the year?
I don’t think it overshadowed anything, but it was quite monumental. It made me extremely reflective. I’ve taken stock of a lot of things about myself, as a person.
What did you learn about yourself?
I behaved badly in the past, when I was pissed or out of it. It makes me cringe, thinking back to when I’ve been rude or aggressive towards people. I like to think I’m getting better as a person, but I’ll probably only know that for sure in 10 years’ time. It’s all about self-improvement for me, life. Not just as a writer, but as a person and a father. All those things, man. Be true to yourself. Find yourself, be at peace with yourself – which I think I finally am. You can’t make up for past mistakes, you can only hope to learn from them and move on. All of that fed into the making of True Meanings.
Did you have a good party?
I went out with the kids and my family to a little Ethiopian restaurant near us. That was good enough for me. I was going to do a joint party with my mate Steve Brookes. I’ve known him forever, we started The Jam together. His birthday is the day after mine. But we didn’t fancy it in the end.
So how autobiographical is True Meanings?
Some of it might start off being autobiographical, but I have to broaden it out to make it appeal to other people. I wouldn’t have an interesting enough life to write about myself all the time. Most of the time I’m just going up to Tesco’s or down the park. There’s always grains of me in it.
Do you have an example of anything on the LP?
Funnily enough, “White Horses”. Although Erland Cooper wrote the words, it struck a chord about the cycle of life: what you’ve inherited from your parents and pass on to your kids. That could have been me writing about myself. But it wasn’t. It was someone else doing it, which I thought was really interesting.
You can read much more from Paul Weller, in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – features our comprehensive look-back at the music (and films and books) that defined 2018.
The issue is headed up by Uncut's Artist Of The Year Jack White, who takes stock of what, for him, has been a hectic and...
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – features our comprehensive look-back at the music (and films and books) that defined 2018.
The issue is headed up by Uncut’s Artist Of The Year Jack White, who takes stock of what, for him, has been a hectic and wildly successful – but also somewhat controversial – year.
March’s Boarding House Reach, White’s third solo album, gained him an American No 1, but it also left a few people scratching their heads. Even friends were conflicted. “They would come by when I was mixing,” White recalls. “They’d say ‘Holy shit, that’s amazing!’ Then five minutes later, ‘Oh my God… are you really putting that on the record?’”
“I knew this record would be divisive,” he continues. “There would be songs that people didn’t like. There were three spoken word songs. It was a way of making things harder for myself, putting hand grenades in front of myself… People think I’m some kind of control freak. But I’ve never stood and told a song what to do – you are going to be this kind of song, and then put stuff in, force it to emulate some kind of song from the past. People want to put you in the box, it’s easier for them, and so I became Mr Old-Timey Analogue Guy. Then you do something different, as I always have, and they are thrown.”
White’s drummer, Carla Azar, gives an indication of his recording style. “He loves throwing people together and making a situation,” she says. “He’ll never stop an idea before he’s heard it through. He can always press delete at the end – that’s where he has the control.” White works fast – sometimes completing a take before Azar has settled on the part she wants to play. So she’s learnt to make deliberate mistakes, forcing him to go back and do another take. “I trick him into playing what I really want to play,” she grins. “I’ve never told him that – put it in, he’ll love it.”
Although White seems to have extraordinary self-belief, he admits he has moments of self-doubt. When he’s recording new songs, he says, he likes to pretend he’s doing a cover. “I’m more comfortable covering other people’s music so I pretend my song has been written by somebody else a long time ago,” he says. “I started that in The White Stripes and have carried it in all my projects. I used to write my own songs and think they were OK, but then cover somebody else’s and find the chord changes amazing and felt so alive, more comfortable. So I began to pretend I was covering my own songs and it frees me up.”
In his constant battle against complacency, White loves to set himself challenges. This year, he has been playing with three guitars designed by musicians, including one by St Vincent intended for women. “It’s about putting myself in uncomfortable places and seeing what happens,” he says. “People think that as you gain more freedom, things become easier – somebody will tune your guitar, they’ll find you nicer mics – but that doesn’t make it easier. If you are a painter, you can’t have somebody else mix your paints, you can’t delegate the heavy work to somebody else. You need to find ways to make things harder. Paint on a jagged rock. Paint on dirt.
“I’m not a pop star, so I don’t have to come up with hits to stay alive,” he continues. “I’m very glad I don’t have that sort of pressure, because that wouldn’t be interesting. I get to serve the song rather than any image. That’s something people might not know about me, but it’s always about the song. Whatever it takes to keep the song alive. It’s not about, ‘This is who I am, or this is who people think I am, or this is what people expect so I’m going to give them what they expect or be contrary.’ That’s a lot of work that doesn’t interest me. With me that would turn into comedy.”
You can read much more from Jack White, his band and fellow Third Man insiders in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
The KLF's latest wheeze is a plan to build a pyramid from 34,592 bricks, each containing the ashes of a dead person.
Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, now trading as K2 Plant Hire Ltd, are inviting people to sign up for a process call 'MuMufication', pledging that when they die – and following crem...
The KLF’s latest wheeze is a plan to build a pyramid from 34,592 bricks, each containing the ashes of a dead person.
Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, now trading as K2 Plant Hire Ltd, are inviting people to sign up for a process call ‘MuMufication’, pledging that when they die – and following cremation – 23 grams of their ashes will be fired into a brick and added to the pyramid.
MuMufication costs £99, with discounts for those aged over 80 or under 23. You can sign up here.
The scheme will be launched at Liverpool’s Toxeth Town Hall on November 23, as part of The KLF’s ‘Toxteth Day Of The Dead’ celebrations. The K2 Plant Hire website states that: “Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond will mark the 2018 instalment by revealing an Unexpected Item in Toxteth Town Hall. This Unexpected Item will be available for inspection by the public between the hours of noon and 9pm on Friday 23 November, 2018. In order to gain entrance to Toxteth Town Hall during these hours, members of the public must present security staff with one full sized supermarket shopping trolley. The shopping trolley is non-returnable.
“Meanwhile, 399 living people will be enlisted on a journey to forge Toxteth Day Of The Dead traditions that will withstand the next thousand years. The 399 may be casual bystanders or they may have taken part in Welcome To The Dark Ages in August 2017. Either way, they will be expected to report to the entrance of Toxteth Town Hall at 15:00 precisely on Friday 23 November. There will be free tea and mince pies served at Toxteth Town Hall, which will last as long as we all shall live or until they run out. Whichever occurs first. There may be other occurrences throughout the day and night.”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O has made a joint album with Gnarls Barkley and Black Keys producer Danger Mouse, for release on BMG next year.
Hear the first song from it, "Lux Prima", below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_rV49e7hI
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home...
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O has made a joint album with Gnarls Barkley and Black Keys producer Danger Mouse, for release on BMG next year.
“’Lux Prima’ is the first song we wrote for the record,” says Karen O. “After making music for the past twenty years and embarking on making this record with Danger Mouse I knew a couple things: one was that the spirit of collaboration between us was going to be a pure one, and two was that the more I live the less is clear to me. When you create from a blurry place you can go places further than you’ve ever been. I think we both were excited to go far out.”
“With ‘Lux Prima’, we were really looking for a place rather than a sound,” adds Danger Mouse. “It was our first shared destination so we thought we’d take our time getting there. The song itself is a bit of a journey, but all the parts felt like they needed each other. So it became our blueprint in a sense. We wrote the album in deliberate isolation. Along the way asking ourselves lots of questions. We didn’t find many answers, but found it was more about the questions themselves.”
“Lux Prima” will be released as a limited-edition white 12″ with etched b-side on December 14.
Mercury Rev have announced the release of Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited, on February 8 via Bella Union.
The record is a "reimagining" of Gentry’s 1968 album The Delta Sweete and features an impressive cast of guest vocalists including Norah Jones, Hope Sandoval, Beth Orton, Lucind...
Mercury Rev have announced the release of Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited, on February 8 via Bella Union.
The record is a “reimagining” of Gentry’s 1968 album The Delta Sweete and features an impressive cast of guest vocalists including Norah Jones, Hope Sandoval, Beth Orton, Lucinda Williams, Rachel Goswell, Vashti Bunyan, Marissa Nadler, Susanne Sundfør, Phoebe Bridgers, Margo Price, Kaela Sinclair, Carice Van Houten and Laetitia Sadier.
Peruse the tracklisting for Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited below, and pre-order the album here:
1. Okolona River Bottom Band ft. Norah Jones
2. Big Boss Man ft. Hope Sandoval
3. Reunion ft. Rachel Goswell
4. Parchman Farm ft. Carice van Houten
5. Mornin’ Glory ft. Laetitia Sadier
6. Sermon ft. Margo Price
7. Tobacco Road ft. Susanne Sundfør
8. Penduli Pendulum ft. Vashti Bunyan with Kaela Sinclair
9. Jessye Lisabeth ft. Phoebe Bridgers
10. Refractions ft. Marissa Nadler
11. Courtyard ft. Beth Orton
12. Ode To Billie Joe ft. Lucinda Williams**
Paul Simonon is a genuine punk icon. Not only did he play bass for The Clash, learning on the job in true DIY fashion, he designed their whole striking visual aesthetic, stencilled shirts and all.
Forging a close bond with Joe Strummer, he stuck with The Clash through 10 years of white riots and c...
Paul Simonon is a genuine punk icon. Not only did he play bass for The Clash, learning on the job in true DIY fashion, he designed their whole striking visual aesthetic, stencilled shirts and all.
Forging a close bond with Joe Strummer, he stuck with The Clash through 10 years of white riots and combat rock, writing “Guns Of Brixton” and providing one of the defining images of the punk era with his bass-wrecking antics on the cover of London Calling.
But since The Clash disintegrated in 1986, Simonon has spent most of his time as an artist, exhibiting his figurative paintings of Thames landscapes and biker jackets at galleries such as London’s ICA. He made a return to music in 2006, when invited to join Damon Albarn’s supergroup The Good, The Bad & The Queen (alongside Tony Allen and Simon Tong). Now that group have reconvened for a second album, the Brexit-bemoaning Merrie Land – out on Friday – with Simonon again creating the artwork and the stage backdrops for their upcoming UK tour.
So what do you want to ask one of the coolest men in rock (and art)? Send your questions to us at uncutaudiencewith@ti-media.com by Friday (November 16) and the best ones will be published in a future issue of Uncut – along with Paul’s answers, of course.
