At the end of Sightseers – the grisly, humourous film Alice Lowe and co-star Steve Oram made for Ben Wheatley – we left Lowe standing on the Ribblehead Viaduct. When Prevenge opens, we once again meet Lowe in a vertiginous, exposed location: on Beachy Head. What unfolds in flashback is a story e...
At the end of Sightseers – the grisly, humourous film Alice Lowe and co-star Steve Oram made for Ben Wheatley – we left Lowe standing on the Ribblehead Viaduct. When Prevenge opens, we once again meet Lowe in a vertiginous, exposed location: on Beachy Head. What unfolds in flashback is a story every bit as black as Sightseers – but Prevenge is a more ghoulish and overtly violent film. There are no whimsical detours to the Keswick Pencil Museum here.
In Prevenge – which Lowe also wrote and directed while she was seven months pregnant – she plays Ruth, a single mother-to-be who believes that her baby is telling her to kill people. “People think that babies are sweet, but I’m bitter,” her little bundle of joy tells her in its icky, sing-song baby voice.
A Cambridge graduate alongside David Mitchell, Robert Webb and Richard Ayoade, Lowe has been working for years principally in TV comedy – Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh, Horrible Histories – but also in live comedy, where she met Steve Oram. The pair spent seven years working on the characters that eventually fed into Sightseers. Since then, she starred in Black Mountain Poets as a con artist on the run who hides out at a literary retreat in Wales.
Prevenge, then, is a major step up for Lowe. She finds dark humour in the condescending advice dished out by a midwife (“Baby will tell you what to do… baby knows best”) but behind the film’s barrage of macabre assaults, there is a strangely moving portrait of a woman discombobulated by her condition. Indeed, we gradually discover the circumstances behind the absence of the baby’s father; it is clear that Ruth is burdened by more than her fair share of grief. The bumpy synth score recalls ‘70s slasher films and helps underscore the tension between the drabness of the film’s suburban setting and the brutality of what takes place there.
When they emerged in the late 1990s, Texas’ Lift To Experience seemed less like a conventional rock band and more like a wild, hirsuite Millennial cult. Although the band was only active for five years, their slim body of work – 15 songs in total, spread across one EP, a split 7” and a double ...
When they emerged in the late 1990s, Texas’ Lift To Experience seemed less like a conventional rock band and more like a wild, hirsuite Millennial cult. Although the band was only active for five years, their slim body of work – 15 songs in total, spread across one EP, a split 7” and a double album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads – vividly detailed the end of the world, with their home state positioned as the battleground for the coming apocalypse. After the band collapsed in 2002, frontman Josh T Pearson retreated to Tehuacana, Texas – population: 283 – only resurfacing again in 2011 to document the break-up of his marriage on an album of melancholic country-noir, Last Of The Country Gentlemen. In Lift’s absence, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads has assumed a mythic status – an original vinyl pressing is currently on sale for $1,000 on Discogs –its reputation stoked in part by well-placed admirers like Elbow’s Guy Garvey. When Garvey curated last year’s Meltdown Festival on London’s South Bank, he invited the band to reunite. But increasingly, that show – the band’s first for 15 years – feels like a McGuffin, a trigger for a more substantial reappraisal of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads.
Over the summer, the band returned to the Echo Lab in Denton – scene of the original recording sessions for the album – with engineer Matt Pence to remix the album. Pearson believes the original mix – by their then-label boss, Simon Raymonde, at Bella Union – didn’t fully capture the band’s dramatic sound. To be fair to Raymonde – whose original version is included in the deluxe box set alongside the enhanced 2016 mix – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads is a vast and uncompromising project for anyone to tackle. The album’s impressive musical palette veers from intense, pummeling riffs to quieter passages that float by like a lucid dream, full of twinkling harmonics and spidery guitar lines. Such striking contrasts frequently create a compelling friction within the songs themselves; a masterful use of volume and dynamics that calls to mind the nascent Led Zeppelin. “Just As Was Told”, for instance, pinballs between gutsy and urgent guitar arpeggios and atmospheric swirls of sound; transcendent and tense. No surprise then that nine of the 11 tracks on The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads stretch beyond five minutes – there’s simply too much going on to contain them in a shorter, more traditional format.
The album was originally recorded live to tape, and Pence was able to create his new mix from those original recordings. There are few eye-catching initiatives, but what Pence’s mix achieves is to reflect the energy of the band playing together in the room. The way Andy “The Boy” Young’s drums suddenly crash into “Just As Was Told” at the 48 second mark like a cannon volley, or hearing Pearson’s hands moving along his guitar fretboard during the hushed introduction to “Down Came The Angels” are gripping. The new mix is an immersive experience – where before it was perhaps enough to be impressed by the swoop of the music.
The deluxe box set also gathers together their first EP – limited to 500 copies, released in 1997 on local label Random-Precision – and a John Peel session dated April 15, 2001, one of three they recorded for the DJ in the space of four months. It’s often a fascinating piece of archeology, tracking the arc of Lift To Experience’s development, as demonstrated by three versions of “Falling From Cloud 9” here. All three tell very different stories. The earliest – from their 1997 EP – is rough and rudimentary. The vocals are buried deep in the fuzzy mix, while the heavy use of tremelo and feedback call to mind the gothier end of shoegaze – Catherine Wheel, perhaps. The song itself is fully formed, but there are subtle differences to the later editions. A friend, Brian Smith, was helping out on drums and it’s not until they recruited Andy Young that the song comes fully into focus. The process by which the song morphs from the EP to the album version is highlighted on Pence’s new mix. He foregrounds Young’s drums – giving the song a muscular momentum – and polishes Pearson’s vocals, so his arcane tale about fallen angels fits more clearly with the album’s narrative. Pearson’s vocal builds, drops and peaks – ascendant flights of singing that recall Jeff Buckley – are cleanly delineated here. The Peel version, recorded at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios, sits somewhere between the two. Clocking in at nine minutes, it stretches out to twice the length of the album version, closer to the band’s sprawling live incarnation. The second half of the song showcases the band’s expansive playing – particularly Pearson’s guitar playing, which glides between feedback-drenched soloing and enormous, distorted chords.
A key selling point of the deluxe edition is that EP and the Peel session also round up all but one of the band’s remaining songs. Chief among these is “With The World Behind” – a short (3:03 minute) hymnal featuring a plaintive guitar motif from Pearson. It has historical significance, too. When LA-band The Autumns recorded at Raymonde’s September Sound studio in Twickenham, they covered “With The World Behind”, introducing Raymonde and his then-partner Robin Guthrie to Lift To Experience. The Peel session version is especially low-key, but it’s all the better for it: the sparse backing allows Pearson his most tenderhearted vocal cadences. An intimate song about suicide, it throws forward to Pearson’s solo work on Last Of The Country Gentlemen. The other two songs on the EP, “Arise And Shine” and “Liftin On Up”, revert to the widescreen blowouts familiar from The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads.
A hushed mood, then a noise-rock cacophony. On reflection, it’s possible to see why The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads was overlooked in America when it first came out. Released in June 2001, the same summer as the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells and the Strokes’ Is This It, apocalyptic space rock struggled for air at a time when short, spiky songs prevailed. Astonishingly, the album wasn’t even released in the States. Which is partly why the band’s decision to revisit The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads represents a second chance to get their legacy right. In 2001, George W Bush had just entered the White House, engendering all manner of dire imprecations. In 2017, as a Trump presidency begins to take shape, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads seems, again, a suitable soundtrack to uncertain times.
Q&A
JOSH T PEARSON
What made you want to revisit Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads?
The mixing. Through very complicated reasons we weren’t there for the original. It’s always bothered us. We were a pretty punk gut-wrenching sonic assault. The old mix was safe and sound. We were neither. The label was just getting started. They’d put out their solo records, which weren’t doing so hot. They were going bankrupt, getting evicted from their studio. They told us they couldn’t afford for us to mix it in Texas, but they could do it at their studio in the week or two they had left, and they’d put it out. We took it. We’d been sitting on the record a year, no one wanted touch it. The new mix was even sped up. Weirdest thing. The tunes clocked in faster than they were recorded. It just felt like there’s been a veil over it. I owed the Texas studio money for the tracking. All my gear was in pawn, but we were happy anyone was interested at all.
What was your original intention with the album?
To ask forgiveness for sins I hadn’t committed. I wanted to make something beautiful enough that God would hear me. Still hasn’t.
What do you remember about the original recording sessions for the album?
We’d run the stuff so much before, it was only a point of hitting ‘record’. Everything was mapped out, no accidents. It wasn’t experimental music. It was straight hard composition & muscle. We were a little nervous about tracking it all in what space we’d allotted because we had no money to pay for even that. Two or three takes at most. At some point I realized the train bridge behind the studio was one where the first love of my life and I had spent one summer afternoon together years prior walking the lines in bliss. The first love whose subsequent breakup forever bent me on the track called music. It meant a great deal to me then because trains were such a theme on the record. Invisible tracks of unmarked paths somehow secretly guiding us. After recorded, it took a year to find someone to touch it, then another for it to come out. (We’d also done a version a year prior which I canned, because it wasn’t good enough. Which just goes to show you, if you do something long enough, eventually you’ll stop sucking at it.)
Whose decision was it to reform – or did you never really split up in the first place?
We never really split up, we basically just fell apart. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were kids. No help. You couldn’t Google stuff. It wasn’t even like someone could give you a thumbs up on MySpace and you’d feel better about your day. America didn’t care. And I didn’t wanna do that much work again on something if no one cared, so I moved out to the middle of nowhere Texas and went a little nuts for a couple of years. I wouldn’t leave the house for a month, and never the village. The inward journey. That’s the real trip. It took a year to come down after that one. I wouldn’t recommend it. Had to fight tooth & nail for the mind to come back. There was nothing to fall back on. It wouldn’t have been like a cute Brian Wilson story with your own private doctor. It would have been me at the state run funny farm with no possible outcome toward recovery. That or end on the street, which now that I think about it, I guess I did.
Do the themes on Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads feel more relevant today?
The quest for transcendence is just as relevant now as it was back then, so I don’t know exactly what you mean unless it’s that. Time is relative, but I guess it’s probably safe to say we’re closer to the physical in the metaphysical metaphor I was swinging. Twenty more years is where it will really get interesting. Mystery’s dead, God has flown. There are no great pilgrimages to art. Not when it’s a double click. How could there be? Romance is over the way of the dodo. We’ll never be lost again. It undermines the whole ‘I once was lost, now I’m found’ paradigm. Music has changed so much. Nothing is threatening now sonically. Uniqueness is gone. The price for tolerance is mediocre art. Small price to pay… Obsolete. The kids don’t need it anyway. They’ve got enough great art. Click it. We just wanted to uncover this one piece for the digital dig before it turns from dust to dust, just to say FU, some boys born before the internet web did something good with their lives before being all tangled up.
For you, what was the highlight of the show at Meltdown?
Not fucking it up. My right hand man and manager Peter Sasala running backstage screaming “Yeeeeah!” right after, and I knowing we’d done alright. Pressure was tight for not letting the old school fans down. Didn’t wanna disappoint ‘em. It was such an artful band, it seemed like putting on a good gig was authentication for the entire way of life chosen. Like, if it wasn’t as special as was embedded, it would call the whole aesthetic choice into question. We needed to be better than we used to be. We weren’t, but it was good enough to pass inspection. Was neat when the lights kicked on too. We’d never had a proper light show. The crew at Southbank were real gentlemen, treated us like kings. We’d never had roadies before either. It was neat to not have to move Marshall stacks after playing your balls off for an hour. That always sucked. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why I went country. Acoustic. No load out.
What’s next for Lift To Experience? More shows? New music?
We have literally no plans. We had the opportunity to do Meltdown and we took it. We didn’t know if we’d ever have the chance again for someone to offer enough where three men who live thousands of miles apart could quit their money gigs for 2-3 weeks, get in a room long enough to relearn the tunes, fly us over, pay for gas, food, lodging etc and break even. It’s not like people were writing us letters. We aren’t the Pixies or My Bloody Valentine. We are nuthin’. Not even a rumor.
INTERVIEW: MICHAEL BONNER
Blondie have shared their new collaboration with Johnny Marr, "My Monster". You can hear the song below.
"My Monster" is taken from their new album, Pollinator, which is released on May 5.
The album also features collaborations with Sia, Charli XCX, The Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi and Dev Hynes...
Blondie have shared their new collaboration with Johnny Marr, “My Monster”. You can hear the song below.
“My Monster” is taken from their new album, Pollinator, which is released on May 5.
The album also features collaborations with Sia, Charli XCX, The Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi and Dev Hynes.
The band have also announced plans to play London’s Roundhouse later this year.
They will perform at the venue on May 3. Tickets go on general sale at 10am on Friday (February 24).
In 1997, a group of musicians from Glasgow travelled to Mauron, France to play a festival. 18 years later, they have returned – this time with a film crew in tow. That these musicians include members of Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai and the Delgados means that we’re in for some wide-ranging chatter as...
In 1997, a group of musicians from Glasgow travelled to Mauron, France to play a festival. 18 years later, they have returned – this time with a film crew in tow. That these musicians include members of Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai and the Delgados means that we’re in for some wide-ranging chatter as well as strong tunes. “Is this us peering back to the past or gazing hopefully into the future?” asks the Delgados’ Stewart Henderson.
Niall McCann’s film offers a number of different narrative strands. On one hand, it is a historical piece about the social and cultural backdrop that gave rise to the Chemikal Underground label and associated bands. On another, it is a Proustian reverie as these musicians tug their luggage round sites in present day northwest France, revisiting hazy memories.
But perhaps most thrillingly, it is an archival reconstruction of the trip itself from Glasgow to Mauron itself, assembled through archive footage, photographs and fresh interviews. In a time before low-cost airlines, this involves managing 54 people on a lengthy, alcohol-fuelled journey involving assorted modes of transport. A coach, for instance, from Glasgow to the ferry terminal at Portsmouth: “It was bawbaggery times ten,” reveals Arab Strap’s colourful former manager, Tam Coyle. David Sosson, the festival organizer, describes it succinctly as, “Fire, stealing, missing people.” The 1997 trip climaxes with a football match between the visitors and the locals that could have been taken straight from an Irvine Welsh story.
In the present day, there is an emotional speech from Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, Alex Kapranos bring his most Alan Partridge-esque jumper while, at the film’s climax, a ‘supergroup’ named the Maurons is formed involving some of the participants. McCann’s film is a significant step-up from his 2012 Luke Haines doc, Art Will Save The World. This is a warm, rich business.
Elliott Smith may have been a romantic, after a fashion, but it seems unlikely he would have chosen to be memorialised as a tragic hero. “I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that if somebody plays music they must be fucked up or crazy,” he told me in Austin in March, 2000. “I don’t think...
Elliott Smith may have been a romantic, after a fashion, but it seems unlikely he would have chosen to be memorialised as a tragic hero. “I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that if somebody plays music they must be fucked up or crazy,” he told me in Austin in March, 2000. “I don’t think it’s glamorous in the least. It winds up being another part of your cartoon costume, because then it’s supposed to stand in for actual life.”
In Smith’s short life and brilliant music, opposites often seemed to be pitted against one another, not least the strains of romance competing for traction with a heartfelt scepticism. While that latter instinct could have self-sabotaging consequences, it also made Smith fiercely cynical about rock mythologies and martyrdoms. He wrote about dependency and fragility out of something akin to journalistic accuracy, not for transgressive cachet.
It’s worth remembering this, nearly 14 years after Smith’s likely suicide, as a deluxe edition of his finest album looks destined to be greeted not just with acclaim, but with the full gamut of doomed poet clichés. “Either/Or Reissue Shines New Light On Tormented Singer Elliott Smith,” read a headline on the New York Times website as the 2CD set was announced and, in fairness, it’s easy to accentuate the negative: the intimations of mortality on every album stretching back to his solo debut, 1994’s Roman Candle; the fatalism intertwined with his beautiful melodies. “When they clean the street,” he sings on “Rose Parade”, “I’ll be the only shit that’s left behind.”
I first met Smith in spring 1998, as Either/Or was being belatedly released in the UK, and he was sweet, funny, solicitous, and not quite as shy as his increasingly formidable reputation suggested. With a similarly unexpected candour, he was swiftly talking off the record about how he’d been institutionalized a few months earlier. At his side was his former girlfriend, Joanna Bolme, who had come along to London to look after him. Smith’s career was blooming, with a recent Oscar nomination for Best Song, a major label debut (XO) in the works, and a move from the hometown security of Portland, Oregon, to New York. In the midst of such upheaval, he seemed to require significant care and reassurance.
But, as Bolme says in Autumn de Wilde’s book, Elliott Smith, she and her friends always saw Smith as a practical, capable man; “A smart guy, not just some creative genius… He could do all sorts of other shit. He was a really well-rounded person. When he started being surrounded by fans and people who would do everything for him, he lost that need to use the part of his brain that could figure things out or be organized.”
Such complexity, an unstable blend of strength and insecurity, is key to understanding Smith’s work, and Either/Or in particular. The album title was borrowed from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843), and it’s easy to find clues in the original text – “If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it” – that reinforce a certain dark perception of Smith. But while the Danish philosopher may have alluded to suicide, his existential point was more sophisticated; about how, whatever dilemma one faces, it’s hard to be satisfied with any binary option. “The true eternity,” Kierkegaard continues, “lies not behind either/or but ahead of it.”
Smith probably never reached that point of transcendence, but his Either/Or can be interpreted as a determined attempt to try and get there. While his previous two solo records had been seen as adjuncts to the career of his substantially rockier band, Heatmiser, now it became apparent that this music – a silvery, whispered folk-pop, always more ornate and complicated than it was given credit for – should be his main focus. For all the protests of self-deprecation, it’s the sound of a singer-songwriter clearly aware that his gifts demand a bigger stage. The reissue credits list the houses in Portland where these songs were first recorded, but at the same time Either/Or acts as a farewell to that city, and to home recording.
One of Smith’s old Portland associates, Larry Crane, has remastered the dozen songs on Either/Or, scurfing off some of the lo-fi muffle and adding new zing to, for instance, the steady clip of the drums on “Alameda”. It’s a process of clarification that tends to enhance the album’s air of intimate engagement instead of diminishing it, while at the same time pointing up the fact that, albeit on a tiny scale, Either/Or’s songs are meticulously arranged confections. XO and Figure 8 might have expanded Smith’s canvas, but the likes of “Angeles” are already elaborately layered masterpieces of folk-baroque.
“It was just absurd,” co-producer Rob Schnapf told Pitchfork for an excellent oral history in 2013. “The guitar stuff isn’t even easy. It was ridiculous that he was able to just nail a vocal and guitar performance live, and he was able to double it live again…. It sounds so natural, and so simple — then you try to play it.”
Understated virtuosity proliferates on this expanded set. If anything, a solo version of “Angeles”, one of five live performances from the Yo Yo A Go Go Festival in Olympia, 1997, is even more intricate than Schnapf and Tom Rothrock’s studio take. Similarly, an alternative version of “I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out” (the original cropped up as the B-side to “Speed Trials” in 1996) is so adroit in its fingerpicking one suspects Smith would have enjoyed comparisons with John Fahey, had his taste for Beatlesy toplines not masked those folk-blues foundations.
Beatlesy toplines, of course, provided an entrée into the mainstream, and “Angeles” itself, along with the palpably angry “Pictures Of Me” (an indication, along with the spiralling “Cupid’s Trick”, of where Smith’s sound would go next), capture a songwriter railing against the vicissitudes of fame before they have even impacted on him. Again, though, there’s a hint of ambiguity about what kind of career he really wants: “All your secret wishes could right now be coming true,” he sings in “Angeles”, alluding to his own covert ambitions hidden beneath so much indie-rock contempt.
“Say Yes”, meanwhile, is melodically all lightness and charm – a McCartney hovering on the safe side of whimsy – while simultaneously graphing out the end of Smith’s relationship with Joanna Bolme. The prognosis on love seems gloomy – “Situations get fucked up and turned around sooner or later” – but the duality is there once more, as Smith ends the album at least trying to assert how the relationship has made him a better person: “Now I feel changed around and, instead of falling down,” he claims, “I’m standing up the morning after.” “I wish the circumstances in which it was delivered were a little bit more ideal,” Bolme would note, ruefully, in the 2014 documentary, Heaven Adores You.
“Everybody pretends they’re more coherent so that other people can pretend they understand them better,” Smith said in 2000. “That’s what you have to do. If everybody really acted like how they felt all the time, it would be total madness.” Either/Or takes that principle of emotional inconsistency, and turns it into a symphony of mixed messages. The theme extends into the second CD of this 20th anniversary edition, featuring plenty of gorgeous music that shouldn’t be underestimated as marginalia. A Yo Yo A Go Go live version of the unreleased “My New Freedom” presents the aftermath of his relationship with Bolme in less mediated and much more bitter terms than on “Say Yes”.
“I Figured You Out”, meanwhile, is a critical discovery, dating from 1995: Smith’s demo for a song he gifted to another Kill Rock Stars artist, Mary Lou Lord, for her “Martian Saints” EP (1997). Recorded at the Heatmiser house, with that band’s Neil Gust on drums, it still sounds like a fully-arranged, finished piece of work, notable for a wheezing organ carrying the lovely melody rather than the acoustic guitar. There is also a first stab at “Bottle Up And Explode”, which eventually appeared on XO (1998), featuring an unlikely synth line, a slightly wobbly pace and completely different lyrics in which the theme of frustration seems to be targeted at the cold, claustrophobic environs of Portland: “Everything around here happens so slow.”
Once “Bottle Up And Explode” finishes, the album ends with a brief reprise of “Pictures Of Me”, rescored for fairground organ. How should we understand such a version, after all that has gone before, and after? As a sarcastically jaunty way for Smith to articulate his hatred for showbusiness? Or as a cute, goofy exploration of musical possibilities – an innocent pleasure, from a man whose legend would mitigate against him having such things? The true answer, perhaps, lies not behind either/or, but ahead of it…
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney have been photographed together after the two men connected in the studio.
Starr posted the photo on his Twitter feed, “Thanks for coming over and playing Great bass. I love you man peace and love".
https://twitter.com/ringostarrmusic/status/833502973204459520
Sta...
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney have been photographed together after the two men connected in the studio.
Starr posted the photo on his Twitter feed, “Thanks for coming over and playing Great bass. I love you man peace and love”.
Thanks for coming over man and playing Great bass. I love you man peace and love. ?✌️???☮ pic.twitter.com/Z5kpyLLlkO
Starr’s publicist later confirmed to Billboard that McCartney was there to contribute to Starr’s new album, his follow-up to 2015’s Postcards From Paradise.
McCartney and Starr last recorded together for Starr’s 2010 album, Y Not. McCartney played bass on “Peace Dream” and sang on “Walk With You”.
Other guests who have appeared on the album include Peter Frampton, Joe Walsh and Benmont Tench.
Come 1970, Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou was on course for rock’n’roll’s event horizon. A founder member of the Greek progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child, his grand and apocalyptic musical visions were the guiding force for the group’s third album, 666 – a musical retelling of th...
Come 1970, Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou was on course for rock’n’roll’s event horizon. A founder member of the Greek progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child, his grand and apocalyptic musical visions were the guiding force for the group’s third album, 666 – a musical retelling of the Biblical Book Of Revelations, inspired by Sgt Pepper and The Who’s Tommy. All this was too much for the group’s other members, and the band dissolved shortly afterwards.
By now, though, Vangelis was already on another path. His next project was the soundtrack to Frédéric Rossif’s 1970 wildlife documentary L’Apocalypse Des Animaux, and its sound – a set of poignant, symphonic pieces for Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes and trumpet – give a glimpse of what was to come. Come the early ’80s, the Greek composer would be one of the most sought after in all of Hollywood, thanks to his scores for Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire – the latter of which won an Oscar in 1981. Now, Delectus, a beautifully presented 13CD boxset, collects remasters of Vangelis’ early work for Vertigo and Polydor, freshly remastered under the supervision of the composer himself.
The breadth here may surprise the newcomer. The first CD here, 1970’s Earth, is still firmly rooted in progressive rock, from “Come On” – a call to arms featuring furious lead guitar from Argiris Koulouris – to more meditative excursions like “We Are All Uprooted” and “He-O”, a sort of Mediterranean take on the spiritual Krautrock that Florian Fricke was pursuing in Munich with his group Popol Vuh. Deeper in, we find fine and varied examples of Vangelis’ wandering muse. 1979’s China captures the composer in tourist mode, balancing simmering synthesizers with gong, harp and zither. The likes of “Chung Kuo” and “Yin & Yang” are far from authentic, but have a relaxed, faintly regal quality it is easy to love. Mask, meanwhile, strikes a mood of dark drama, summoning the English Chamber Choir to boom mightily over racing synth arpeggios – or, on “Movement 4”, an eerie, hypnotic gamelan.
The material collected on Delectus is not faultless. Three albums made with Yes vocalist Jon Anderson skirt kitsch, the pick probably being 1983’s Private Collection, thanks to the pristine 23-minute “Horizon”. Its central score aside, Chariots Of Fire feels padded with filler. Nor is this quite the full survey of Vangelis’ early period. Missing from the collection is the Blade Runner OST and perhaps the composer’s first great solo work, 1975’s Heaven And Hell. Still, as a broad survey of a musician sometimes dismissed by his proximity to the new age movement, this broad collection should be a necessary corrective.
EXTRAS 7/10: 64-page booklet, four bonus tracks including the previously unreleased “Neighbours Above”.
Ahead of a run of Beach Boys European tour dates kicking off at London's Royal Albert Hall on May 18, Mike Love will be answering your questions as part of our regular An Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’d like us to ask the legendary Beach Boy?
When did he start practising Tra...
Ahead of a run of Beach Boys European tour dates kicking off at London’s Royal Albert Hall on May 18, Mike Love will be answering your questions as part of our regular An Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’d like us to ask the legendary Beach Boy?
When did he start practising Transcendental Meditation?
What’s his favourite memory of Dennis Wilson?
What’s life like today as a Beach Boy?
Send up your questions by noon, Friday, February 24 to uncutaudiencewith@timeinc.com.
The best questions, and Mike’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine.
You can find the Beach Boys upcoming tour dates by clicking here.
Leftfield have announced details of Leftism 22 - a reissue of their debut album, Leftism.
They will also embark on a UK tour where they will perform the record in full.
Leftism 22 arrives 22 years on from the release of the original, in a remastered version overseen by Leftfield’s Neil Barnes an...
Leftfield have announced details of Leftism 22 – a reissue of their debut album, Leftism.
They will also embark on a UK tour where they will perform the record in full.
Leftism 22 arrives 22 years on from the release of the original, in a remastered version overseen by Leftfield’s Neil Barnes and Paul Daley. It will be available in a limited edition 3xLP vinyl, mirroring the original release, as well as digital and 2xCD editions that will feature the original album remastered, as well as all 11 original tracks remixed by artists including Adrian Sherwood, totalling 22 tracks.
Leftism 22 is available to download and buy from 5 May via Sony CG.
Leftism 22 tour dates are:
11 May – Bristol, Motion
12 May – London, O2 Academy Brixton
19 May – Birmingham, O2 Institute
20 May – Manchester, O2 Apollo
26 May – Glasgow, Barrowlands
Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer for James Brown whose solo on "Funky Drummer" became a cornerstone of hip hop sampling, aged 73. Rolling Stone reports that he died of kidney failure.
Stubblefield performed on Brown tracks including "Ain't It Funky Now", "I Got the Feelin'" and Brown's landmark albu...
Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer for James Brown whose solo on “Funky Drummer” became a cornerstone of hip hop sampling, aged 73. Rolling Stone reports that he died of kidney failure.
Stubblefield performed on Brown tracks including “Ain’t It Funky Now”, “I Got the Feelin'” and Brown’s landmark albums Cold Sweat and Sex Machine.
His drum break on the 1970 song, “Funky Drummer“, has been sampled by Public Enemy (“Fight the Power”), N.W.A. (“Fuck tha Police”), LL Cool J (“Mama Said Knock You Out”), Dr. Dre (“Let Me Ride”) and many other artists.
We lost another Pillar Stone that held up the Foundation of Funk. Mr.Clyde Stubblefield has left our frequency. I… https://t.co/JV2JVfRJkn
"I do OK, I fool a lot of people,” says Mick Harvey, discussing his reputation as a multi-instrumentalist. “But I’m not as much of one as people imagine. Double bass? Nah! I can’t play it like someone who’s good at it…” Since his breakthrough work in The Birthday Party in the early ’...
“I do OK, I fool a lot of people,” says Mick Harvey, discussing his reputation as a multi-instrumentalist. “But I’m not as much of one as people imagine. Double bass? Nah! I can’t play it like someone who’s good at it…” Since his breakthrough work in The Birthday Party in the early ’80s, though, Harvey has made a career out of his flexibility; from a continuing role as one of PJ Harvey’s most trusted collaborators, to his decades as musical director, drummer, guitarist and songwriter for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, right up to his solo career and lauded, English-language versions of Serge Gainsbourg songs, the third volume of which is imminent. “I’ve produced an LP for a band that’s sold about 500 copies,” Harvey marvels, while he waits for a rehearsal for PJ Harvey’s live shows to begin. “Then I’ve headlined festivals with Nick, and I’ve played solo shows in clubs. But I’ve enjoyed all those different levels because they’re all challenging in different ways.” Originally published in Uncut’s August 2016 issue (Take 231). Interview: Tom Pinnock.
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The Birthday Party Junkyard 4AD/Missing Link, 1982 The final, ferocious LP from Cave and Harvey’s group, recorded in Australia and the UK.
MICK HARVEY: “We recorded most of Junkyard in Melbourne, but I think we needed a couple more songs, so we went into the studio in London and did a couple of extra ones. We recorded live. I mean, most of my bands still play live in the studio. I rarely do a ‘one instrument at a time’ recording, it’s not really my style. In early ’82, we were meant to go to San Francisco and play three gigs in the Bay Area, but then Tracy [Pew, bassist] got incarcerated, so I think we just went straight on to London, where Barry Adamson played bass. Tracy was really important in that band. He didn’t write much of the music but he was kind of the centrepiece. He was pretty unreliable, as well, he could be quite out of it at some shows and falling over on his back [laughs]. But he was an important part of the whole thing. That gets a bit lost in time, because Tracy passed in ’86, so of course he hasn’t gone on to do other things. It’s a bit like Dave Alexander from The Stooges. The album still sounds extreme? Yeah, that’s what we were going for. We’d come through a process of finding what we wanted to do as a band, through 1980 and the recording of Prayers On Fire, and I suppose Junkyard is an attempt to take those ideas as far as we could – too far, if necessary – so it’s intentionally visceral and violent, that’s what we were going for. For all the wild, aggressive nature of The Birthday Party, we were never a ‘hard rock’ group, we were an ‘art rock’ group. That was our statement at the time. It stands up.”
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Your Funeral… My Trial Mute, 1986 Relocating to Germany in ’85, the Bad Seeds, decimated and debauched, create what is still one of Harvey and Cave’s favourites.
“It was very cheap to live in Berlin. We had lots of friends there, it was easy to have a nice, busy social life. There was lots of interaction with different kinds of artists from different disciplines, so it was a very healthy place, creatively, for us to be spending time. Hansa Studios was there, too, which we used for many of those recordings. We just used the room at Hansa for reverb – we didn’t really add reverb as such, there’d just always be a mic in the middle of the room and a couple of big mics about five metres in the air. Everyone would be playing in the room, and everything would be going into those mics, and that made the sound what it was. I played a lot of the instruments on this album and, in fairness, so does Nick. Obviously, there were problems at this point: Barry [Adamson] left on the eve of the recording, or after we’d done the first two tracks when the tapes for Kicking Against The Pricks didn’t turn up. He just sort of bailed. He’d obviously been intending to move on once we’d finished Kicking…, but found himself caught up in recording a couple of songs. So we found ourselves without a bass player, and then Tommy [Wydler, drummer] had tendonitis, and he’d also injured his other arm, which is why I had to play half the drums as well. So, it was essentially a one-armed drummer, me and Nick, and Blixa [Bargeld, guitarist], who isn’t technically a musician. We’ve often seen this album as us finding our sound, but in a different way to where we got to with Junkyard – it was a kind of template for what we would continue doing. Somehow the seed of how we could go about playing the music of the Bad Seeds became clear to us through that recording. It all came into focus in a way. The first couple of albums were experimenting with different ideas about how to record stuff – From Her To Eternity was us just experimenting in the studio trying to get a sound together, and The Firstborn Is Dead used the idea of pretending to make a blues album, which obviously we were incapable of doing. But Your Funeral… My Trial, with the variety of songs and the way we went about the arrangements, really gave us a template to go forward with. And we basically used a very similar process right through until the Murder Ballads album.”
Very excited this morning to get hold of the amazing new Natural Information Society, parts of which might usefully, if simplistically, be described as a jazz take on “In C”. One of the best things I’ve heard this year so far, anyway; looking forward to sharing a track when I can.
Lots I can ...
Very excited this morning to get hold of the amazing new Natural Information Society, parts of which might usefully, if simplistically, be described as a jazz take on “In C”. One of the best things I’ve heard this year so far, anyway; looking forward to sharing a track when I can.
Lots I can share now, anyhow. Significant new entries this week: another Thundercat track, albeit without Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald; Steve Gunn covering The Smiths; Aldous Harding; Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever; another El Michels take on the Wu Tang Clan; Prince on Spotify; and a live track from the expanded Either/Or, which I got to grips with in the new Uncut, out now: full details here.
The Sun Kil Moon album I would describe as a challenging listen, by the way…
Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey
1 Oumou Sangare – Mogoya (No Format
2 Zeitkratzer – Performs Tracks From The Albums Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 (Zeitkratzer Productions)
It’s not difficult to make a case for The xx as the most influential British band of the past decade. Their slow-burning 2009 debut (recorded in a garage, more than 1.67 million copies sold) tentatively joined the dots between indie, R&B and UK bass music, making it acceptable once again for s...
It’s not difficult to make a case for The xx as the most influential British band of the past decade. Their slow-burning 2009 debut (recorded in a garage, more than 1.67 million copies sold) tentatively joined the dots between indie, R&B and UK bass music, making it acceptable once again for shy white kids to sing the blues. James Blake, Jamie Woon, Alt-J, London Grammar, Låpsley, Jack Garratt, even The 1975 and Sam Smith – these staples of the Mercury Prize shortlist all owe a debt to The xx.
But the band have been reluctant to cash in their steadily accumulating cultural stock. Second album Coexist was even more understated than their debut, to the point where it verged on boring. Since then they have kept a low-ish profile, preferring small bespoke residencies – such as their painfully intimate shows in the round at 2013’s Manchester International Festival – to attention-grabbing headline tours.
Last year, Jamie xx’s club-oriented solo album, In Colour, which featured guest vocals from his bandmates, offered a hint of what the group could achieve if they threw open the shutters, especially on the gospel-tinged “Loud Places”. Finally, then, The xx are ready for their big pop moment.
Except they’re not, quite. Lead single “On Hold” might throb with a previously unexplored disco pulse, pivoting on a shameless sample of Hall & Oates’ classic guilty pleasure “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”, but it still never fully unfurls, never quite abandons its puttering rhythm for an uninhibited dancefloor throwdown. Disco is a genre built on heartbreak, but it tends to be of the more dramatic “how do I live?” variety. “On Hold”, as its title suggests, is all about inertia and mixed signals, rather than definite endings. It’s those in-between emotions that The xx mine so successfully; they don’t write break-up songs so much as fizzle-out songs.
“Performance” is another devastating example, perhaps their most powerful yet. “If I scream at the top of my lungs/Will you hear what I don’t say?” sings Romy Madley Croft, her voice noticeably fuller and more assured than before. Sparse and drum-less, the song is very much of a piece with the first two albums, save for the furiously bowed strings that add an additional layer of drama.
This, broadly, is the template: rather than drift towards more conventional, radio-friendly arrangements, The xx have instead fleshed out their introspection more inventively, weaving in treated acoustic instrumentation, unexpected samples (post-minimalist composer David Lang, soft-rockers the Alessi Brothers) and bursts of found-sound noise that sometimes recall Björk’s work with Arca on Vulnicura.
There is an immediacy, even a hint of aggression, to some of these arrangements, if not necessarily the sense of release that In Colour partly foreshadowed. The trumpet fanfares and insistent Afro-garage beats of “Dangerous” make for an exhilarating opener, yet the melody retains a minor-key melancholy, the lyrics a defiant fatalism. On the glorious “Say Something Loving”, a celebration of new love is haunted by the spectre of past insecurities (“I almost expect you to leave,” “Am I too needy?”) so the final “Don’t let it slip away” contains a hint of desperation.
“Test Me” begins in familiar territory, with Croft and Oliver Sim whispering in unison, “Just take it out on me/It’s easier than saying what you mean.” But via some distant muted trumpets, a submerged choir and an eerie burst of theremin, it ends up somewhere very strange indeed. The easy yacht-rock glide of “Replica” is the only hint that the band recorded part of this album in California, but even then Sim’s lyric is freighted with doubt and regret.
There’s still an occasional sense of frustration that The xx are holding something back, deliberately swerving the big chorus or euphoric breakdown, their innate reserve preventing these songs from realising their full potential. But their cautiousness is also what prevents them from ever slipping into sentimentality or songwriting cliché. On I See You, The xx have expanded their horizons without sacrificing any of the emotional intimacy that makes them one of the most compelling acts around.
Nigel Godrich has shared footage of Radiohead working on "Ful Stop" from A Moon Shaped Pool in the recording studio.
The producer posted the 45-second clip on Twitter as a #TBT or “throwback Thursday”. “ahh memories…” he wrote in the caption.
https://twitter.com/nigelgod/status/832344052...
Nigel Godrich has shared footage of Radiohead working on “Ful Stop” from A Moon Shaped Pool in the recording studio.
The producer posted the 45-second clip on Twitter as a #TBT or “throwback Thursday”. “ahh memories…” he wrote in the caption.
Ryan Adams has announced a run of UK tour dates.
He'll play five indoor shows, including the Royal Albert Hall on September 22.
Adams is also scheduled to appear at the Green Man Festival on August 17.
His latest album, Prisoners, is released today on Pax-Am/Blue Note Records.
Adams will play:
...
Ryan Adams has announced a run of UK tour dates.
He’ll play five indoor shows, including the Royal Albert Hall on September 22.
Adams is also scheduled to appear at the Green Man Festival on August 17.
His latest album, Prisoners, is released today on Pax-Am/Blue Note Records.
Adams will play:
September 14: Manchester – Apollo
September 15: Edinburgh – Usher Hall
September 17: Gateshead – Sage 1
September 18: Leeds – O2 Academy
September 22: London – Royal Albert Hall
Björk, Deep Purple, Chrissie Hynde and Nick Cave all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2017 and on sale now.
Björk is on the cover, and inside the issue her closest collaborators reveal the secrets behind her greatest albums. “It was like standing next to a volcano,” says Anohni....
Björk, Deep Purple, Chrissie Hynde and Nick Cave all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2017 and on sale now.
Björk is on the cover, and inside the issue her closest collaborators reveal the secrets behind her greatest albums. “It was like standing next to a volcano,” says Anohni. “I couldn’t keep up.”
While warming up for a final tour and album, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, Roger Glover and Ian Paice recall their wild career in rock, while Chrissie Hynde reveals all about the Pretenders, the ideal candidate to take on Donald Trump and dinner with Morrissey.
Uncut catches Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in Australia to hear them perform Skeleton Tree live in Warren Ellis’ hometown, while The Magnetic Fields‘ self-confessed “megalomaniac” Stephin Merritt discusses his autobiographical, epic album, 50 Song Memoir: “It should serve as a warning to everyone not to do confessional songwriting.”
We also look at the story of Los Angeles’ Troubadour club – how The Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Elton John and the Eagles made an old Hollywood car showroom the clubhouse for a host of musical superstars.
Alison Krauss takes us through the finest albums of her career, while The Creation look back on their freakbeat classic “Making Time”.
John Mayall answers your questions, and Laetitia Sadier picks eight influential albums, while we meet Nashville garage newcomer Ron Gallo, The Shins, Ash Ra Tempel and Procol Harum in our Instant Karma section.
In our mammoth reviews section, we look at new albums from Hurray For The Riff Raff, Jarvis Cocker, Laura Marling, Sleaford Mods, Spoon and The Jesus And Mary Chain, and archival releases from Elliott Smith, George Harrison and more.
This month’s free CD, Hypermusic, includes new tracks from Craig Finn, British Sea Power, Laura Marling, The Magnetic Fields, Grandaddy, Laetitia Sadier, Real Estate and more.
The late ’60s are littered with lost proto-punk classics, bands who accidentally bashed their way into time travel through a combination of blues simplicity and amateur talent. Since Lenny Kaye’s seminal Nuggets in 1972, excavating these unsung heroes of the garage has been a favourite pursuit o...
The late ’60s are littered with lost proto-punk classics, bands who accidentally bashed their way into time travel through a combination of blues simplicity and amateur talent. Since Lenny Kaye’s seminal Nuggets in 1972, excavating these unsung heroes of the garage has been a favourite pursuit of rock’n’roll paleontologists, fuelling many a compilation and deluxe reissue. But one of these early transitional species might just have been hiding in plain sight all these years, on Warner Brothers, under the nameplate of a band that ended up about as far from punk rock as possible.
The first of the Grateful Dead’s studio album reissue series – the extension of the band’s unending 50th anniversary self-commemoration – is possibly the most surprising of their discography. Here, what would become the flagship band of long, psychedelic improvisation sounds urgent, direct, pithy, and a variety of other adjectives you’d never use to describe their later career. Packaged with similarly-frenzied live material from the 1966 Vancouver Trips Festival, the reissue argues the case that the Dead initially had the fuzz-and-Farfisa sound that would still get them on the hippest garage-rock compilations today.
When the Grateful Dead entered the studio in January 1967, the psychedelic scene was still a blank slate, blindly feeling its way from the mind-cracking anomalies of the Acid Tests to a paisley worldwide wave. Before the Summer of Love codified the hippie aesthetic, there was a volatile mixture of concurrent countercultures, appropriately represented in the original Dead lineup by the biker bard Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the folk-bluegrass licks of Jerry Garcia, the avant-garde classical-jazz of Phil Lesh, the maximum R’n’B clatter of Bill Kreutzmann, and the beat music brashness of Bob Weir. Throw these seemingly incompatible parts into a California blender of new sounds and new drugs, and what came out sounded – at least initially – a hell of a lot like punk rock.
With about a hundred shows’ experience by the time they got to the studio in 1967, the Dead were rapidly building their sterling live reputation. But as songwriters, they were still prepubescent, as reflected by their debut’s 7-to-2 ratio of covers to originals. While drawing mainly from prewar country blues and folk of the Harry Smith variety, the early Dead was hardly a throwback act, electrifying their roots and playing them at breakneck speed.
Of course, the drugs helped – though in the case of the self-titled LP, it wasn’t acid, but the more mundane Ritalin, taken by 3/5ths of the band to help complete recording in the four days allotted. The resultant high tempo might be the most jarring feature of the debut for seasoned Deadheads, with stately classics such as “Morning Dew” and “Cold Rain And Snow” played at double the bpm of later versions.
Nearly as disorienting might be the democracy of the early Dead. Pigpen’s early frontman status was more of a live thing than displayed here, where he only gets a single lead vocal (on a characteristically skeevy “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”). But his generally unheralded organ stands toe-to-toe with Garcia’s lead guitar, swirling merrily through the serpentine middle-eight of “Cold Rain And Snow” and pumping the beat through Weir’s lead shouting turns “Beat It On Down The Line” and “New New Minglewood Blues”.
Despite the preponderance of covers, the two originals that made the debut are no slouches. “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” probably sounded dated by the time the ’60s ended, but its ragged harmonies and carnival swirl were a more accurate depiction of early acid test euphoria than the genteel contemporaneous psychedelia of your Donovans and Byrds. “Cream Puff War” is the true lost gem, with jagged strums and a rope-a-dope rhythm that predict absolutely zero about the future of the Grateful Dead, but maybe a little about the fussier hybrid of post-punk.
The bonus 1966 show reveals a less successful songbook of early originals – “Cardboard Cowboy” and “You Don’t Have to Ask” were mercifully euthanized soon after – but just as much gusto. Played in a front of a less-than-enthusiastic crowd (“Our fame has preceded us,” Lesh comments after their introduction draws awkward silence), and upstaged by the light show, they nevertheless throw themselves into their set with abandon, stretching out “Cream Puff War” and tearing through early arrangements of “I Know You Rider” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.
If you’re looking for true prophecy on the Dead to come, it’s found on both the album and live set in “Viola Lee Blues”, a lengthy update of a 1928 jugband 78. Even here though, the improvisatory vibe is much less interstellar exploration as hard-charging blues explosion, with a gradually building tempo manoeuvre honed over dozens of sweaty Fillmore nights that starts straining EQs by its last couple minutes. In a matter of months, they’d have a song called “Dark Star” that would launch them into a different orbit altogether, dramatically expanding the band’s sonic canvas and audience.
But given how those late-’60s jam epics became synonymous with psychedelic rock as we still know it today, it’s a thrill to hear the primordial ooze that preceded those more mature stages. Like any band or scene taking its first wobbly steps, it’s a hot mess in good ways and bad, an overflow of unrefined ideas that occasionally lap the abilities of the personnel on hand. That enthusiasm and ambition makes The Grateful Dead a historical document worth revisiting, even if it sometimes seems like a page from the wrong history book.
Q&A
BOB WEIR
What memory sticks out the most from the recording of the first album?
It was all new to me, so it all stuck out.
One striking element about the debut is how *fast* everything is played, which some biographers have attributed to Ritalin provided by the record company. Is there a better explanation? First-album nerves?
Most of the band was cranked up on Ritalin for just about the whole four-day process. I wasn’t, as I was on a macrobiotic diet at the time, so all the tempos seemed a *bit bright* to me.
The band was already starting to stretch songs live by the time you recorded the debut, how much of that did you want to capture in the studio? Was there record company pressure to keep songs shorter?
I think the prevailing wisdom was that we would try to keep the tunes at least kind of concise, as we didn’t want to put out something that no-one could relate to. It didn’t seem at the time like records were the best place to stretch out. These songs were just what we thought were our strongest tunes to offer on a record. We hadn’t gotten all that fully into writing yet; this was before we hooked up with Robert Hunter, for instance.
Do you remember anything notable about the Vancouver Trips Festival gigs included here?
I had taken LSD pretty much once a week, every week, for about a year at that point, and that was the last time for me. I thought it was getting to be time to try something new, so I got into the macrobiotic diet for a couple years. I also remember Michael McClure’s poetry reading, really powerful…
INTERVIEW: ROB MITCHUM
Pink Floyd will release a series of book-bound individual collections of the band’s music from 1965 - 1972 on March, 24, 2017.
The 6 individual collections were first released as part of The Early Years 1965 - 1972 box set last year.
The stand-alone packages will be broken down by years 1965-19...
Pink Floyd will release a series of book-bound individual collections of the band’s music from 1965 – 1972 on March, 24, 2017.
The 6 individual collections were first released as part of The Early Years 1965 – 1972 box set last year.
The stand-alone packages will be broken down by years 1965-1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 and finally 1972. Outtakes and demos from the band’s early albums including The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, A Saucerful Of Secrets, Meddle and Atom Heart Mother are included in these packages.
Björk, Deep Purple, Chrissie Hynde and Nick Cave all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2017 and on sale on Thursday, February 16 and available to buy digitally by clicking here.
Björk is on the cover, and inside her closest collaborators reveal the secrets behind her greatest albums....
Björk, Deep Purple, Chrissie Hynde and Nick Cave all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2017 and on sale on Thursday, February 16 and available to buy digitally by clicking here.
Björk is on the cover, and inside her closest collaborators reveal the secrets behind her greatest albums. “It was like standing next to a volcano,” says Anohni. “I couldn’t keep up.”
While warming up for a final tour and album, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, Roger Glover and Ian Paice recall their wild career in rock, while Chrissie Hynde reveals all about the Pretenders, the ideal candidate to take on Donald Trump and dinner with Morrissey.
Uncut catches Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in Australia to hear them perform Skeleton Tree live in Warren Ellis’ hometown, while self-confessed “megalomaniac” Stephin Merritt discusses his autobiographical, epic album, 50 Song Memoir: “It should serve as a warning to everyone not to do confessional songwriting.”
We also look at the story of Los Angeles’ Troubadour club – how The Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Elton John and The Eagles made an old Hollywood car showroom the clubhouse for a host of musical superstars.
Alison Krauss takes us through the finest albums of her career, while The Creation look back on their freakbeat classic “Making Time”.
John Mayall answers your questions, and Laetitia Sadier picks eight influential albums, while we meet Nashville garage newcomer Ron Gallo, The Shins, Ash Ra Tempel and Procol Harum in our Instant Karma section.
In our mammoth reviews section, we look at new albums from Hurray For The Riff Raff, Jarvis Cocker, Laura Marling, Sleaford Mods, Spoon and The Jesus And Mary Chain, and archival releases from Elliott Smith, George Harrison and more.
This month’s free CD, Hypermusic, includes new tracks from Craig Finn, British Sea Power, Laura Marling, The Magnetic Fields, Grandaddy, Laetitia Sadier, Real Estate and more.
Running three-and-a-half hours and still only reaching the electrifying climax of 1966, Martin Scorsese’s magnificent Dylan documentary, pieced together around interviews conducted by Dylan’s own office, is a five-star piece of work, of course. The question for fans who already own the two-disc ...
Running three-and-a-half hours and still only reaching the electrifying climax of 1966, Martin Scorsese’s magnificent Dylan documentary, pieced together around interviews conducted by Dylan’s own office, is a five-star piece of work, of course. The question for fans who already own the two-disc DVD released in 2005, however, is whether this deluxe edition adds anything essential…
The answer depends on how much of a Dylan completist you are. While also available as a new DVD, the biggest draw is the film’s Blu-Ray debut. The visual upgrade isn’t revelatory when it comes to the interview segments, largely shot on video. But the archive film, culled from Festival, Murray Lerner’s documentary on the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963, 64 and 65, and from reels DA Pennebaker shot for both Dont Look Back, his chronicle of the 1965 UK tour, and Eat The Document, Dylan’s own subsequent, aborted film on tour 1966, is grainily eye-popping.
In terms of new material, the anniversary edition offers the full unedited versions of two of the original film’s most memorable interviews: a roaring 30 minutes in the pub with the force of nature that was Liam Clancy; and a 40-minute audience with Dave Van Ronk. Both are wonderful. Equally delightful is a (slightly) extended (two minutes) version of the “Apothecary scene” shot in the UK in 1966, as a speedy Dylan improvises Beat cut-up nonsense poetry from words on a shop sign. (“I wanna dog that’s gonna collect and clean my bath…”) Also exclusive to this release is a 20-minute interview with Scorsese, discussing how he came to make the film, and his design and intentions for it.
That’s it as far as new material, though. The other extras – mostly (excellent) performance clips drawn from 1963-66 – were previously included on the 2005 double DVD. This is slightly frustrating, given the mouthwatering cache of relevant footage Dylan’s archivists are surely sitting on. The deluxe No Direction Home is being released simultaneously with The 1966 Live Recordings, the incredible 36-CD box chronicling the ’66 tour, but there’s nothing included here that’s half as significant as the 12-minute film Sony posted online to advertise that set, utilising previously unseen and meticulously restored footage shot during that fabled Judas! jaunt. (Search YouTube for 1966 Live Recordings: The Untold Story if you haven’t seen it.) But if it’s disappointing not to have more of that gold dust included here, we can draw comfort from the obvious conclusion: plans for a full 1966 concert film must surely be underway. Surely?
