As previously reported, Bruce Springsteen's Springsteen On Broadway live album will be released on December 14, followed two days later by the launch of the accompanying concert film on Netflix.
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
You can now watch a trailer for t...
As previously reported, Bruce Springsteen’s Springsteen On Broadway live album will be released on December 14, followed two days later by the launch of the accompanying concert film on Netflix.
So for anyone who's missed this morning's news, here's a date for your diary: July 12, 2019. On this auspicious date, Bob Dylan and Neil Young will share the bill at BST Presents Hyde Park; you can read more about this wildly exciting business here. It goes without saying, we'll see you down the fro...
So for anyone who’s missed this morning’s news, here’s a date for your diary: July 12, 2019. On this auspicious date, Bob Dylan and Neil Young will share the bill at BST Presents Hyde Park; you can read more about this wildly exciting business here. It goes without saying, we’ll see you down the front.
By happy coincidence, I can now also reveal to you the latest instalment of the Uncut family: our Ultimate Genre Guide to singer-songwriters. Both Bob and Neil have had some impact here – but as you’ll discover, our Guide is a broad church, encompassing Joni Mitchell, Elton John, Nick Drake, James Taylor, Judee Sill, Leonard Cohen, Carole King, Tim Buckley and many more.
The Guide is on sale now in the shops – or you can order it direct from our online store by clicking here
Here’s John Robinson, who edited the UGG, to tell you more about it…
My first meeting with a giant in the field of singer-songwriting wasn’t in an LA canyon, but somewhere on a hill outside San Francisco. Tasked 20 years ago with interviewing Neil Young for NME, myself and a photographer took a long taxi ride outside the city and up to what was then apparently one of Neil’s incognito hangs – a homey restaurant within a wooded area called the Mountain House. As we pulled up and stepped out of the taxi in our unCalifornian black clothing, we were greeted by a genial voice: “Great,” it announced, wryly. “The English are here!”
This, of course, was Elliott Roberts, Neil’s manager and legendary to us at this stage as much by misunderstanding of his CV as anything else, We were under the impression that he had managed the Byrds. “Actually no,” he said, “but I did preside over their break-up.”
We were then meeting him 30 years into a role which he has now occupied for over half a century, and has grown out from those early manoeuvres into a lifetime spent quietly influencing the careers of the most single-minded and ungovernable artists in music history: Neil Young of course, but also Crosby, Stills and Nash, and our cover star, Joni Mitchell. These artists, their contemporaries, kindred spirits and fellow travellers like James Taylor, Carole King, Judee Sill and Jackson Browne are at the heart of this publication.
They are also what we think of when we talk about the art of the singer-songwriter: the song as an investigation of the self, a discovery of emotional truths. Geographically and metaphorically it was an escape from the crowd: the old bands, and the old ways of doing things. As much as it was about the individual writer, it was also about a wider empathy: a tuneful and engrossing pursuit which won its musicians millions of fans all over the world.
In this magazine, you will of course read about the Canyon artists – the mismatch between turbulent life and melodious, easy-listening music of James Taylor which you can find on pp is a particularly extraordinary treat – but you will also read in-depth reviews of artists who didn’t easily sit within the west coast songwriter circle.
There’s impressive new and recent writing on the resolutely east coast Laura Nyro, whose work so enraptured the young David Geffen, and helped point his road ahead. Present also are new opinions on unclubbable visionaries like Van Morrison and Tim Buckley, and the quietly spectacular Paul Simon. Joni Mitchell connected Leonard Cohen to the Laurel Canyon scene, but his troubled relationship with his muse was destined to sit uneasily within it, despite the best efforts of David Crosby. You’ll find an all-too-rare reminiscence from Croz at the back of the magazine.
Among British artists, here you’ll read about the early work of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and also about Nick Drake, and of Sandy Denny. The recordings of Drake and Denny both bear witness to how a mark of the singer-songwriter was to take elements of the folk revival – the harmony; the emphasis on song construction; the great guitar playing – and develop them in utterly unexpected directions.
As Graeme Thomson implies in his writing about Van Morrison, it’s this magical confluence of structure and freedom which may ultimately be the point. It’s not about where you start from. It’s about where you take it.
The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster has announced that his new solo album Inferno will be released on March 1, 2019.
Inferno was recorded in Berlin in summer 2018 with producer/engineer Victor Van Vugt, who previously engineered Forster’s debut solo album Danger In The Past. As with Forster’s previ...
The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster has announced that his new solo album Inferno will be released on March 1, 2019.
Inferno was recorded in Berlin in summer 2018 with producer/engineer Victor Van Vugt, who previously engineered Forster’s debut solo album Danger In The Past. As with Forster’s previous album Songs To Play, it features Brisbane-based multi-instrumentalists Scott Bromley and Karin Bãumler, while new recruits are drummer Earl Havin (Tindersticks, Mary J. Blige) and keyboardist Michael Muhlhaus (Blumfeld, Kante).
Says Forster: “I had nine songs I believed in, and I wanted to take them out of hometown Brisbane and record them somewhere else. Somewhere exotic. And producer/engineer Victor Van Vugt had a studio in Berlin. Perfect. The album title relates to Brisbane, as the summers are getting brutal hot. Inferno fits that and the fevered mood of the LP…”
Forster will tour Inferno will a full band in the spring. UK and Ireland dates are as follows:
May 2019
14 LONDON Union Chapel
15 BRISTOL The Fleece
16 MANCHESTER Band On The Wall
17 GLASGOW King Tuts
19 DUBLIN Button Factory
20 CORK Cyprus Avenue
Bob Dylan and Neil Young have been announced as co-headliners for 2019's Barclaycard Presents British Summer Time Hyde Park.
The two musical behemoths will play the London festival on Friday July 12.
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
Neil Young will be backed o...
Bob Dylan and Neil Young have been announced as co-headliners for 2019’s Barclaycard Presents British Summer Time Hyde Park.
The two musical behemoths will play the London festival on Friday July 12.
Neil Young will be backed on this occasion by Promise Of The Real, featuring Lukas and Micah Nelson. Bob Dylan will appear with his regular current touring band. Support acts are yet to be revealed.
There is a Barclaycard pre sale from 9am today (November 27), more details here.
Tickets go on general sale at 9am on Friday (November 30) from here.
The various ticket options are as follows:
General Admission – £75.00
Primary Entry – £85.00
Gold Circle – £169.95
Barclaycard VIP Summer Garden – £249.95
The Terrace – £299.95
Diamond – £299.95
Despite growing up in the spotlight, Sean Lennon has turned out to be rather a reluctant singer-songwriter. His breezy debut album Into The Sun was released in 1998 on the Beastie Boys' uber-cool Grand Royal label, but he's only released one more solo album since – 2006's downbeat and quietly impr...
Despite growing up in the spotlight, Sean Lennon has turned out to be rather a reluctant singer-songwriter. His breezy debut album Into The Sun was released in 1998 on the Beastie Boys’ uber-cool Grand Royal label, but he’s only released one more solo album since – 2006’s downbeat and quietly impressive Friendly Fire.
Instead, Lennon is a serial collaborator, lending his wide-ranging talents to a dizzying range of projects down the years: starting out as a teenager in his mum’s band, he spent the second half of the 90s playing bass for postmodern pop outfit Cibo Matto. Since then he’s worked with everyone from Lana Del Rey to Lady Gaga, Albert Hammond Jr to The Moonlandingz, metal band Soulfly to childhood friend Mark Ronson, as well as releasing three albums of gauzy psych-funk with Charlotte Kemp Muhl as The Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger.
However, it may be that Lennon has finally found his ideal sparring partner in the unlikely form of Primus’s Les Claypool. The duo are about to release their third album in four years as The Claypool Lennon Delirium, a lavish nu-prog operation, melding cosmic exploration with political satire.
Ahead of the release of February’s excellent South Of Reality, Lennon has agreed to answer your questions for our regular Audience With feature. So what do you want to ask the man who counted David Bowie as a father figure, and who in turn has acted as a mentor to those wayward young tykes Fat White Family?
Email your questions to us at uncutaudiencewith@ti-media.com by Wednesday (November 28) – the best ones will be put to Sean, with his answers published in a future issue of Uncut.
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. ...
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. “By January I was thinking this sounds really bad…”
It must have been daunting remixing ‘The White Album’ – but in a very different way to working on Sgt Pepper…
It’s weird, ‘The White Album’ – I had this view of it, before I started work on it, that stemmed from my dad. A lot of people in America, ‘The White Album”s their favourite album. But my dad, it wasn’t his favourite album – not by any stretch of the imagination. Because the lunatics had taken over the asylum. He’d lost the classroom. I always had this view it was this dark, unhappy project. But I don’t think it was. Paul came in, and we listened to it. We sat and listened to “Julia” – he was there when John recorded “Julia”, famously John and Paul would go off together and work on a track, “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” for instance. Which wasn’t on ‘The White Album’, but that sort of era. I think it’s more of a solo song record than the previous albums were, but there’s still this collaboration there – you can hear the rest of the band in the background. When Paul’s doing “Mother Nature’s Son”, you can hear John’s in the control room.
There are two comments from George Harrison when he’s talking about Marmite!
I was looking for a Beatles sponsorship deal from Marmite… yes, it’s funny, I haven’t done a rose-tinted job on this. I’ve been through all the tapes and selected outtakes, and I was looking for the arguments. But there’s no sort of editorial control with The Beatles. As you can tell from Paul’s recent interviews, he’s quite happy to go to dark places, especially nowadays. So I think from what I can tell, they generally had a pretty good time. I think they made my dad and other people around them’s lives a bit miserable – because they were just like this is our world, this is our record, bog off.
Geoff Emerick quit the sessions, didn’t he?
I read Geoff ‘s book and it didn’t make a lot of sense. He claimed “A Day In The Life” was an edit, which it wasn’t, God bless him. But [he was] an amazing engineer. I wasn’t there, but I know they wouldn’t let the engineers mess around too much with sounds, for instance, and I know they worked really strange hours. it became normal in the ’70s and the ’80s, but in the ’60s you’d start at 11 and finish at 5. At the time I heard you’d draw straws to not be on a Beatles session. Of course these days you’d write a book about being on a Beatles session. But I think from what I can tell – you’d go through something like “Sexy Sadie”, or “Cry Baby Cry”, something there were a lot of takes of. Or “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, John says “it’s not fun but it’s getting better” and then George says “it’s getting better and it’s fun”. They’re strangely supportive of each other, and I expected to hear them throwing their toys out of the pram. That was the strangest revelation to me.
It must be very different source material compared to Pepper.
I was surprised actually. I always thought Pepper – I was asked to look at it the year before last, I’m not going to do it before I’ve heard a few tracks, and I started doing it and thought this is good, I’m not going to destroy it. But ‘The White Album’ I thought, it’s going to be a breeze – this trashy record, I bet we can make it sound bigger and brighter. But actually the nuance of it is on tape, it’s very much recorded in that way. You have to be careful with these sorts of records that you don’t take away the character – the dirt, the distortion. Because that’s what makes it such an interesting record. It was a more challenging mix for that reason.
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
Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!
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...
Originally published in Uncut’s September 2015 issue
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 wax figures, the Great Pyramid, Iceland, leylines, Wizards with tattooed faces, Paul McCartney, immensely powerful music… and the restoration of antique furniture.
_______________________________
Jaz Coleman is late. This isn’t unusual for a man who once absconded to Iceland without telling his band, forcing Killing Joke to appear on Top Of The Pops with a roadie in a beekeeper’s suit pretending to be the singer. In fact, as recently as 2012, he disappeared for a couple of weeks before resurfacing in the Western Sahara, having decided to go off-grid to write a symphony.
Admittedly, given his history, a 20-minute wait in the Columbia Hotel bar in Lancaster Gate might hardly seem quite so dramatic. The previous evening, Coleman gave a two-and-a-half hour talk in London on some of his favourite subjects – geometric energy, self-education, Rosicrucianism, islands – and when he eventually arrives at the hotel, he’s still full of energy and good cheer, carrying with him a heavy bag full of esoteric literature purchased from Atlantis, his favourite occult bookshop. Coleman – along with the other original members of Killing Joke – is meeting Uncut to look over the band’s extraordinary 36-year career ahead of the release of Pylon, their latest studio album. “Killing Joke is how we process our world,” explains Coleman, peering through his beetle-black fringe. “It’s exorcism, therapeutic. There are times in my career when I’ve wondered if it’s been a force for good, but I believe it’s had a beneficial effect on everybody that’s been involved in it.”
That hasn’t always been apparent, of course. Killing Joke were founded in the squats of Notting Hill, where they perfected a heady, nihilistic blend of punk and dub. Their commitment was intense, and some of the band barely escaped with their sanity. As Killing Joke’s bassist, Martin ‘Youth’ Glover, admits later, “There’s been overdoses, alcoholism, violence, nastiness and betrayal upon betrayal of Shakespearean proportions. But it’s a priceless legacy. Such pure energy uncompromised by commercial concerns. It’s challenging, it’s difficult, everything rational says don’t do it. Which is precisely why I do.”
Glover’s belief is shared by his colleagues – Coleman, guitarist Kevin ‘Geordie’ Walker and drummer ‘Big’ Paul Ferguson. Even though the original lineup have occasionally taken a break from one another – to write symphonies, record with
Paul McCartney or pursue a secondary career as an antique restorer – they have always returned to Killing Joke.
“You rarely see a band come back together and still be as powerful,” says producer Chris Kimsey. “A lot is about Geordie’s guitar, the chord shapes, the tone. And Jaz has tremendous musical knowledge of harmony and melody, but keeps it very primitive with Killing Joke. There’s immense power. They are also four of the most opinionated people ever. But they don’t argue about music, they argue about everything else.”
Indeed, it is unusual to find four equally strong figures in a single band. “They are unique,” agrees The Orb’s Alex Paterson, who worked as Killing Joke’s road manager during the ’80s. “They come from four different corners of the universe creating this massive sound and versed in the finer arts of darkness.”
Throughout our interview, Coleman doesn’t deny the darkness – the fights, the run-ins with police, the maggots – but insists the Killing Joke message is a positive one. “Every song is about freedom. We want to confront fear. The idea of laughter connects us all, because when you laugh, you have no fear.”
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.
