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Pink Floyd to release The Early Years 1965 – 1972 box set as individual volumes

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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.

The individual collections are:

1965-1967 CAMBRIDGE ST/ATION
1968 GERMIN/ATION
1969 DRAMATIS/ATION
1970 DEVI/ATION
1971 REVERBER/ATION
1972 OBFUSC/ATION

The April 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Björk. Elsewhere in the issue, there’s interviews with Deep Purple, Chrissie Hynde, The Magnetic Fields and we look inside legendary LA clubhouse The Troubadour, while our free CD collects great new tracks from Grandaddy, Laura Marling, Real Estate, Hurray For The Riff Raff and more. The issue also features Alison Krauss on her best recorded work. Plus John Mayall, Jaki Liebezeit RP, Procul Harum, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Creation, Buena Vista Social Club, Elliott Smith, George Harrison, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Sleaford Mods and more, plus 131 reviews

April 2017

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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.

The new Uncut is out on Thursday, February 16.

Bob Dylan – No Direction Home 10th Anniversary Edition

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?

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Ennio Morricone’s score for John Carpenter’s The Thing gets deluxe vinyl reissue

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To mark the 35th anniversary of John Carpenter's horror film, The Thing, Ennio Morricone's score is to be given the deluxe vinyl reissue treatment. Due on February 24 from Waxwork Records, the soundtrack has been re-mastered from the original tapes and is available in two different editions: a delu...

To mark the 35th anniversary of John Carpenter‘s horror film, The Thing, Ennio Morricone‘s score is to be given the deluxe vinyl reissue treatment.

Due on February 24 from Waxwork Records, the soundtrack has been re-mastered from the original tapes and is available in two different editions: a deluxe “Trapped In The Ice” edition and a standard “Snow” edition.

The Thing is one of the very few films directed by Carpenter where the director didn’t also compose his own score.

In Uncut’s February 2015 issue, Carpenter explained how Morricone came to get the assignment. “Because he is a genius! First of all though, the studio didn’t even consider me for it, but then I got to have him! And it’s the same thing with Starman and Jack Nitzsche – God he is a genius. He was unbelievable – what a composer!”

“I knew that he was also a composer,” Morricone told Uncut. “He came to Rome to show me the film, and then as soon as I saw the film he went away. He never discussed anything with me at all, so I went to Los Angeles to record. He selected a piece that was unlike all the other pieces of music I recorded; it was an electronic piece of music. That was quite strange.”

Here’s the tracklisting for the two editions:

Deluxe “Trapped In The Ice” Edition

Heavyweight, Hand-Assembled, High-Gloss, Break-Away “Ice” Slipcase
180 Gram “Ice” Vinyl (Deep Blue with White Haze)
Satin Coated Old-Style Gatefold Jacket with UV Spot-Gloss
11” x 22” Poster
New Artwork By Justin Erickson of Phantom City Creative
Booklet Featuring Exclusive Interview with Director John Carpenter

Standard “Snow” Edition

180 Gram “Snow” Vinyl (True White)
Satin Coated Old-Style Gatefold Jacket with UV Spot-Gloss
11” x 22” Poster
New Artwork By Justin Erickson of Phantom City Creative

SIDE A
Humanity (Part 1)
Shape
Contamination
Bestiality
Solitude
Eternity

SIDE B
Wait
Humanity (Part 2)
Sterilization
Despair

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Introducing the new issue of Uncut

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There are some musicians who quietly get on with their work, and there are others who can somehow turn the business of making music into a heroic adventure, a physical exploration as much as a sonic one. They can be the source of some great stories and Björk, Uncut’s cover star this month, is no ...

There are some musicians who quietly get on with their work, and there are others who can somehow turn the business of making music into a heroic adventure, a physical exploration as much as a sonic one. They can be the source of some great stories and Björk, Uncut’s cover star this month, is no exception (We’re on sale in the UK on Thursday February 16, though subscribers should hopefully see issues a bit before then).

Anohni, for instance, has a good tale about recording Volta with Björk in New York, where the singer suddenly decided the whole operation should decamp to Jamaica for a few weeks. Anohni tells of how Björk went swimming out to sea one night. “I was so nervous about it,” she remembers. “[Björk’s] friend said, ‘Don’t worry, she does this all the time!’ I marvelled at her courage and sense of abandon.” In the studio, Anohni “couldn’t keep up, I felt like a little dog chasing a horse… It was like standing next to a volcano.”

Thirty years after the Sugarcubes’ “Birthday” first presented that astonishing voice and imagination to a worldwide audience, our investigation of Björk’s musical history – a study of her key albums, illuminated by her key collaborators – reveals an artist whose appetites have gained a kind of mythic potency. It inspired me, among other things, to revisit an interview I conducted in 1993, at the beginning of her solo career.  In a rehearsal studio in North London, she lamented how her old friends had lost their fearlessness. “People are really wild when they’re teenagers, and then they think either you stay like that, or you become conventional,” she said. “But you have to re-invent yourself every day, you have to re-invent every day what is wild.”

It’s a great manifesto, and one which is implicit in the maverick spirits which proliferate in Uncut every month. This issue, the determinedly independent voices include Chrissie Hynde, whose lateral thinking comes up with a powerful – and very unexpected – figurehead to oppose Donald Trump; Nick Cave, back on stage and re-inventing “The Mercy Seat” for a new world; Jack White, turning his idiosyncratic hand to the actual mechanics of making records; and Manuel Göttsching, a Krautrock original whose impulses remain pioneering, well over 40 years down the line. Plus, there’s Deep Purple, the return of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, an excellent piece about The Magnetic Fields, Jaki Liebezeit remembered,  an especially strong free CD of new music, an especially great album of the month from Hurray For The Riff Raff, and a long thing, by me, on the deluxe reissue of one of my favourite albums, Elliott Smith’s Either/Or.

“I make it all sound so easy, don’t I?” laughed Björk back in 1993. “It’s not that easy at all. ‘Björk, you should start a religious sect!”

Robert Fisher of Willard Grant Conspiracy has died

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Robert Fisher from Willard Grant Conspiracy has died. According to a Facebook post from his label Loose Music, he had been suffering from cancer. "He was busy still holding down his day job and recording tracks for his 11th album," they wrote. Fisher was one of the mainstays of the Willard Grant ...

Robert Fisher from Willard Grant Conspiracy has died.

According to a Facebook post from his label Loose Music, he had been suffering from cancer.

“He was busy still holding down his day job and recording tracks for his 11th album,” they wrote.

Fisher was one of the mainstays of the Willard Grant Conspiracy, a collective he formed with Paul Austin in 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts, which in total featured as many as 30 members over the years. “As Robert himself said ‘If someone says they play with us they probably do’,” wrote Loose Music. “But it was Robert who was the beating heart of the band, in fact many people thought he was called Willard.

“Robert Fisher sang as though he had already seen, understood and lived through the big picture. A booming baritone, capable of both immense power and heart-breaking subtlety.”

The band’s debut album 3am Sunday @ Fortune Otto’s was released in 1996; their most recent was 2013’s Ghost Republic.

The band’s Regard The End from 2002 was included in Uncut’s list of the 150 Greatest Albums Of The Decade.

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

New Motown Records documentary announced

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Filming has begun on The Story Of Motown, a feature-length documentary that chronicles the enormous success and enduring cultural impact of the Detroit label. The documentary is a join production between Fulwell 73, Motown Records and the newly-revived Polygram Entertainment. It is expected to be r...

Filming has begun on The Story Of Motown, a feature-length documentary that chronicles the enormous success and enduring cultural impact of the Detroit label.

The documentary is a join production between Fulwell 73, Motown Records and the newly-revived Polygram Entertainment. It is expected to be released in 2018.

The film will be told through new interviews with the label’s founder, Berry Gordy, and many of its artists, presumably including Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson, as well as rare performances and behind-the-scenes footage unearthed from Motown’s vaults and Gordy’s personal archives.

The film is being directed by Gabe and Ben Turner, whose credits include Class Of 92, I Am Bolt and One Direction: This Is Us.

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Moonlight reviewed

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Barry Jenkins film opens in Miami, just as crack is taking over the housing projects in the 1980s. It is there we first meet Chiron, a small, under-nourished schoolboy nicknamed ‘Little’ who falls in with Juan (Mahershala Ali), the local drug dealer, and his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). ...

Barry Jenkins film opens in Miami, just as crack is taking over the housing projects in the 1980s. It is there we first meet Chiron, a small, under-nourished schoolboy nicknamed ‘Little’ who falls in with Juan (Mahershala Ali), the local drug dealer, and his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). Rather than try and groom him, Juan assumes paternal responsibility for the boy. This offers a sharp contrast to Chiron’s relationship with his mother Paula (Naomi Harris); an addict whose erratic behaviour pinballs between neglectful and smothering. Over a meal one night at Juan’s, Chiron asks what a ‘faggot’ is; then asks if he himself is a ‘faggot’. It is one of several flashpoint scenes – but as he consistently proves through Moonlight, Jenkins avoids clichés. Juan’s reply is careful, measured; mature. It is also filled with a weary sorry about what awaits Chiron as he grows older.

Chiron is played by Alex Hibbert in these scenes – the film’s sections are titled ‘Little’, ‘Chiron’ and ‘Black’ – and when we meet him again, as a teenager (Ashton Sanders), he is still rake thin, withdrawn and lonely, hiding his sexuality in the perilous surroundings of high school. In the third act, Chiron is now a man (nimbly played by former athlete Trevante Rhodes), who has followed the path of the only father figure he has ever known – Juan – to become a drug dealer. In town, he reunites with a school friend Kevin (Andre Holland), with whom he had his only sexual encounter.

As befitting its stage origins – In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarrell Alvin McCraney – Moonlight is a relatively intimate piece. This works to its advantages, certainly, in the final quiet set-piece between Chiron and Andre. It also allows Jenkins to tackle big subjects with care and tact. Notably, family, the ties that bind, what it means to be a black, gay man in contemporary America.

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Prince’s Purple Rain reissue to contain previously unreleased music and concert films

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Prince's 1984 album, Purple Rain, is being reissued with previously unreleased music and other rare archival material. According to a press release from Warner Bros, quoted on Rolling Stone, the new edition is due on June 9 and features a remastered edition of the album along with "two incredible a...

Prince‘s 1984 album, Purple Rain, is being reissued with previously unreleased music and other rare archival material.

According to a press release from Warner Bros, quoted on Rolling Stone, the new edition is due on June 9 and features a remastered edition of the album along with “two incredible albums of previously unreleased Prince music and two complete concert films”.

“When we make any of Prince’s music available to fans – from the hits to unreleased gems – we are committed to upholding Prince’s high creative standards and we know fans will be thrilled when they hear these albums and see these films,” Warner Bros. Records CEO Cameron Strang said.

The exact contents of that bonus material have not yet been announced.

Meanwhile, the bulk of Prince’s catalogue has now returned to all digital music services.

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Julie Byrne – Not Even Happiness

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Cultural perceptions of the solo female voyager depict a loner destined to meet her fate on the open road. Since 2010, a few giant leaps into the unknown have made small steps towards cor-recting the impression. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild both started as memoirs,...

Cultural perceptions of the solo female voyager depict a loner destined to meet her fate on the open road. Since 2010, a few giant leaps into the unknown have made small steps towards cor-recting the impression. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild both started as memoirs, and their respective film adaptations spurred hordes of women to go and find themselves in India, or seek enlightenment hiking through Oregon. They’re welcome (if whitewashed) reme-dies to the lack of constructive women’s road narratives, although they only ever suggest wander-ing as a salve for trauma or misdemeanour. But the second proper album from rootless songwriter Julie Byrne rejects the idea of the great outdoors as a limitless confession booth, and makes it into a legitimate source of desire.

“I’ve been called a heartbreaker for doing justice to my own,” she sings on opener “Follow My Voice”. “I too been a fault-finder, but that life is broke.” Her unapologetic independence recalls that of Angel Olsen, another artist who arrived via incredibly lo-fi tapes dubbed by tiny regional labels. “No-one will ever be you for yourself”, Olsen sang on 2012’s Half Way Home. That same year, Byrne released You Would Love It Here and a self-titled tape, though it took a while for the Buffalo-born songwriter to arrive at a similar revelation. Her early work was domestic and tentative: “I test my aloneness against the weight and length of each day/I long for greener pasture, but they are not yet of what I am made”, she lamented on “Vertical Ray”. Her sound was equally intimate: her woolly guitar shading suggestive of enclosed, blanketed spaces, while she used vocal reverb as a cloak rather than a chorus.

That’s all changed on Not Even Happiness, which Byrne recorded at her childhood home in Buf-falo, NY, and documents her past few years as she “crossed the country and carried no key”. She strikes and picks at her acoustic guitar, unnerving the lilting melodies of “Sleepwalker” with stub-born bass notes, disturbing the cadence of “Morning Dove” to emphasise how someone’s lips “splashed my dull house with music”. She sings out, her velvety voice becoming saturated – some-times confrontationally so – and the production has opened up enormously. An airy synthesiser conjures panpipes whistling around mountaintops on “Melting Grid”, while a bright synth part twirls and ascends like a sycamore seed reversing heavenwards on “The Sea As It Glides”. Strings re-corded by Jake Falby at a cabin in Holderness, New Hampshire, enrich the immense atmosphere that stems back to the record’s title.

After a winter walk along The People’s Beach in Rockaway, New York, Byrne wrote to a friend that she wouldn’t change the “palpable sense of emergence” she felt for anything, “not even happi-ness”. The realisation lends her words confidence, even as she contemplates how love might fit into her vagabond life. “Would you ask my permission next time you absorb me?” she asks on “Melting Grid”, sounding like a more assured Cat Power. “Natural Blue” manages to marry the two disparate pulls within the record’s loveliest melody. “When I first saw you, the sky, it was such a natural blue”, she sings, her voice conveying otherworldly rapture and sublime comfort. There are untold doubts and allusions to “when darkness lived in me and sleep it was not near” on Not Even Happiness, which can skew a bit vague, but they’re balanced out by her captivating boldness. “I’ve been seeking God within”, she sings huskily at the start of the mellow, fingerpicked “All The Land Glimmered”. By its end, she’s found it: “I was in my heart and I answered me”.

Byrne’s determination comes to a head on closer “I Live Now As A Singer”, which clearly signposts where she might go next. Rather than fluttering acoustic, it’s made up of deep, reverberant synths that recall Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack, and – again – the leaps that Angel Olsen took with 2016’s My Woman. It’s as if Byrne has taken the pulpit to deliver a final missive over its glowering, holy tones. “There ain’t no use fighting for me,” she declares in the first line, singing like Sinéad O’Connor at her most tender: “My heart ain’t in the ring for you.” If there’s anything the un-requited party can do, she reveals, it’s “tell me what it feels like to be here now”. But going by Not Even Happiness, in which Byrne fully transmits her faith in mystery, they’ve got very high standards to live up to.

Q&A
JULIE BYRNE
When were these songs written?

Between winter 2013 and early spring 2016. Spanning those years, I lived in Chicago, Lawrence, Kansas, Seattle, briefly in New Orleans, and where I reside now, New York City. I lived without a fixed home from January 2014 ’til January 2015.

How does being rootless affect your creativity?
At that time, having no fixed home placed me at the mercy of my daily experiences and certainly at the generosity of other people. It also saw me to the end of a fantasy I had that I would find a ma-terial place where I’d live beyond the reaches of pain that I’d long felt. Part of choosing to travel came from a desire to be released from the past and to begin again unknown, reflecting the ways I’d felt I had changed. And though I was experiencing growth in travel, the immense difficulty I felt trying to stay in one place forged the realisation: the emptiness that had driven me and remained with me could not be satisfied by any external change. And although it’s not easy to confront, there’s a sense of victory in finally seeing it.

What happens to your work when you’re in the same place for a long time?
It depends on the place. The one I chose is vibrant chaos. The first year I was living in New York, I barely wrote at all. I eventually prioritised intention of the spirit and finding work that could provide purpose as well as financial stability before I had the mental/emotional energy to respond crea-tively to my experiences.
INTERVIEW: LAURA SNAPES

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

David Bowie, Bob Dylan and The Beatles win at the Grammys

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David Bowie has won Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical and Best Alternative Album for Blackstar, Best Recording Package for the design and Best Rock Performance for the album’s title track at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards. Previously, Bowie had only won Best Video, Short Form in 1985 and a Life...

David Bowie has won Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical and Best Alternative Album for Blackstar, Best Recording Package for the design and Best Rock Performance for the album’s title track at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards.

Previously, Bowie had only won Best Video, Short Form in 1985 and a Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2006.

Bowie’s son Duncan Jones Tweeted the picture below in tribute to his father’s wins.

Meanwhile, The Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years was named Best Music Film.

It is the third Beatles project to win in this category. They also claimed a Grammy for The Beatles Anthology in 1996 and The Beatles Love: All Together Now in 2009.

Bob Dylan’s The Cutting Edge 1965-66, the 12th edition in his Bootleg Series, won the Best Historical Album category.

Dylan’s new album, Triplicate, is released on March 31.

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Graham Coxon on Blur and pop: “It’s a strange, limiting form… but me and Damon are more receptive these days”

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Blur's guitarist answers your questions about jazz saxophone, his fear of screaming teenage girls and his favourite Oasis song… Originally published in Uncut's August 2012 issue (Take 183). _____________________________ Graham Coxon is telling us about his relationship with his Blur bandmate Dam...

Blur’s guitarist answers your questions about jazz saxophone, his fear of screaming teenage girls and his favourite Oasis song… Originally published in Uncut’s August 2012 issue (Take 183).

_____________________________

Graham Coxon is telling us about his relationship with his Blur bandmate Damon Albarn, when he breaks off, mid-sentence. “What’s the word that’s a bit like perceptive?” he ponders. “I think it begins with a P. And there’s V there somewhere too.”

Twenty minutes later, halfway into another question, the word suddenly occurs to him. “Receptive! That’s the word. Me and Damon are much more receptive these days. We’re both a bit older now, at a time in life where you have to start thinking about what you want to achieve after pop music. Pop music is a strange, limiting form. And if you put that aside, it’s a frightening and daunting prospect, but also quite exciting.”

Such befuddled behaviour seems typical of Coxon. But let’s not forget, like Albarn, Coxon has forged a rewarding career post-Blur. His eight solo albums, including the recent A&E, have covered folk and Krautrock, spiky indie and bubblegum pop. He also plays nearly everything on his records. “Drums, bass, guitar, vocals – everything except synthesisers,” he says. “I don’t really understand them.”

After promoting A+E, Coxon will play a few summer shows with Blur – including the Olympic closing ceremony. Beyond that, he isn’t certain of what the band’s future holds. He is, however, sanguine about Albarn’s suggestions that Blur’s Hyde Park show might be their last. “If that’s what Damon says, and what he really feels, then there’s no reason to think otherwise. But we’re getting on as friends better than we’ve ever done.”

_____________________________

What is your favourite Syd Barrett song and what music do you think he’d be doing today if he was still around?
Paul Weller
I really like that one that’s got tons of guitars on it and loads of distortion: [sings] “You hold your head up high/You even try” [“No Man’s Land”]. I read a Syd Barrett book which said that there were so many layers of distorted guitars that they stripped many of them away. I think that was a mistake, because that would have been 20 years ahead of its time. Hopefully, had he continued to make music, he’d have been allowed to do the mad stuff he wanted to do, like multilayering guitars. He might even be an old, mad jazzer, which would be even better.

What are your memories of being on Blue Peter as a child?
Barry Fawcett, Norfolk
Our school were doing a production of [Smetana’s] The Bartered Bride, and we were invited on to Blue Peter to do the tavern scene. I’d just discovered roll mops at the time, so I sat and ate loads of roll mops in the Blue Peter garden and then felt quite ill when we were doing it. Who was presenting it? It was Simon Groom, bless him. And the lovely Janet Ellis, and Peter Duncan. The classic ’80s power trio. I particularly liked Simon Groom ’cos he was from Derby. He was a really nice bloke.

What are the next songs you’d most like to cover, excluding, for the purposes of fairness, any more damnably excellent Mission Of Burma songs?
Clint Conley, MOB
Ha! Thing is, like the Burma songs I did, my covers are always very faithful to the originals, so they’re a bit… pointless. However, there was this tape I was given as a teenager by my friend Jeremy Stone and his flatmate, Oz. It contained really eye-opening stuff. “Dirty Blue Gene” by Captain Beefheart, “Hands 2 Take” by The Flying Lizards, “West One” by The Ruts, along with stuff by Sonic Youth and Big Black. I’ve always wanted to cover the whole cassette! I’ve also got an idea to cover Depeche Mode’s Speak And Spell, but with guitars and drums instead of synths. I’d probably ruin the album, though.

The Sixth Uncut Playlist Of 2017

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A long one this week. The new Endless Boogie album is here – “VIBE KILLER” - which has predictably been a major distraction. But please check out these new entries: Jim O’Rourke and Kassel Jaeger’s hypnagogic “Wakes On Cerulean”, if we can still use that word with a straight face; Nick...

A long one this week. The new Endless Boogie album is here – “VIBE KILLER” – which has predictably been a major distraction. But please check out these new entries: Jim O’Rourke and Kassel Jaeger’s hypnagogic “Wakes On Cerulean”, if we can still use that word with a straight face; Nick Hakim; that killer Ron Gallo garage rock jam; the latest elevated jangle from The Cairo Gang; another track from Jake Xerxes Fussell; and The Magpie Salute – Rich Robinson and Marc Ford from The Black Crowes, with a small army of new accomplices – doing Delaney & Bonnie. Also my regular reminder that the Tribe Called Quest is just the greatest.

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

1 Kassel Jaeger/Jim O’Rourke – Wakes On Cerulean (Editions Mego)

2 Joan Shelley – Joan Shelley (No Quarter)

3 Endless Boogie – Vibe Killer (No Quarter)

4 Michael Zerang & Spires That In The Sunset Rise – Illinois Glossolalia (Feeding Tube)

5 Boss Hog – Brood X (Bronze Rat)

6 Paul White Featuring Danny Brown – Accelerator (R&S)

7 Nick Hakim – Green Twins (ATO)

8 Wooden Wand – Clipper Ship (Three Lobed Recordings)

9 Porter Ray – Watercolor (Sub Pop)

10 Feral Ohms – Feral Ohms (Silver Current)

11 Arthur Verocai – Arthur Verocai (Continental)

12 Anjou – Epithymia (Kranky)

13 Yasmine Hamdan – Al Jamilat (Crammed Discs)

14 Ron Gallo – Heavy Meta (New West)

15 Arbouretum – Song Of The Rose (Thrill Jockey)

16 Ed Dowie – The Uncle Sold (Lost Map)

17 The Cairo Gang _ What Can You Do? (God?/Drag City)

18 Sampha – Process (XL)

19 Tara Jane O’Neil – Tara Jane O’Neil (Gnomonsong)

20 Robyn Hitchcock – Robyn Hitchcock (Yep Roc)

21 Various Artists – Running The Voodoo Down (Festival)

22 The Magpie Salute – Comin’ Home

23 Mac De Marco – This Old Dog (Captured Tracks)

24 Mark Lanegan – Gargoyle (Heavenly)

25 Dirty Projectors – Dirty Projectors (Domino)

26 Hiss Golden Messenger – Live At The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, 28/1/17

27 Jake Xerxes Fussell – What In The Natural World (Paradise Of Bachelors)

28 A Tribe Called Quest – We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (Sony)

 

Michael Chapman – 50

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Scuttling down a pothole-scarred approximation of Chris Rea’s “Road To Hell” on the apocalyptic “Sometimes You Just Drive”, Yorkshire guitar maven Michael Chapman keeps returning to the same refrain: “I’m still waiting, waiting on my reward.” In a 50-year career that has brought litt...

Scuttling down a pothole-scarred approximation of Chris Rea’s “Road To Hell” on the apocalyptic “Sometimes You Just Drive”, Yorkshire guitar maven Michael Chapman keeps returning to the same refrain: “I’m still waiting, waiting on my reward.” In a 50-year career that has brought little in terms of tangible success, this album may be it.

Chapman turns 76 on January 24 having almost managed – following a transatlantic Mexican stand-off lasting several decades – to break America. Reinvented as an improv guitar maestro following collisions with Thurston Moore and the No Neck Blues Band, his glowering gifts as a songwriter now find sympathetic echoes in the works of Bill Callahan, Ryley Walker, Hiss Golden Messenger and Kurt Vile. All of a sudden – and for the first time – he has a US label, with sometime Vile sideman Steve Gunn having assembled a young(ish) band to make 50, a resetting of a cluster of jewels from the second half of Chapman’s career with a clutch of new songs thrown in. Vindication here we come.

Lush and lively, 50 features Nathan Bowles’ chuckling banjos, a “railroad line”, a levee, a preacher and hobos, but the language of the blues – lovingly cribbed from Forces radio and long-lost vinyl – is one Chapman speaks with an unmistakably English accent. 50 reeks of rain-sodden Hunslet, fish-stinking Hull and wind-lashed Northumberland; it comes from – as Chapman puts it in “Winter In Memphis” – “beyond the edge of nowhere”, the only place he has ever felt musically comfortable.

A confessional songwriter who doesn’t really do personal detail; a John Fahey-spangled steel-string guitarist who sounds better plugged in; a folkie who doesn’t really like folk music – the former Leeds art student has fallen sullenly between a good few stools in his time. A latecomer to music after teaching art and photography, he was 28 (a year older than Paul McCartney, two years older than Bert Jansch) by the time his 1969 debut, Rainmaker, was released. He never moved to London (“I’m a Yorkshireman – I don’t waste money,” he told one interviewer), a reluctance to fit in that might explain why his most bankable musical foil, guitarist Mick Ronson, left him so readily for David Bowie. Soon afterwards, Chapman abandoned the bright lights of Humberside for an unheated farmhouse in the Hadrian’s Wall borderlands, where a trip into town means the fleshpots of Brampton. The hobbies that have sustained him during his lengthy exile? “Music, books and logging.”

However, while there are hacksaw marks here and there, 50 is a finely turned piece that surveys the looming thunderclouds of mortality and the biblical gloom of the times, and – quietly, unshowily – transcends both.
He hovers between duplicitous life and ignoble death on Bob Dylan-ish opener “A Spanish Incident (Ramón And Durango)”, his car being repaired by shifty mechanics as he prepares for a long journey across barren country, and lapses into fever delirium on “Sometimes You Just Drive”. An end-of-days riff inspired by the flood-ravaged streets of Carlisle post-Storm Desmond, his hot-headed visions (“Trees caught fire, skies turned red”) are cooled somewhat by feedback fog, sensitive percussion and an icy backing-vocal blast from Anglo-Nico Bridget St John.

Minor-chord gaunt, “Winter In Memphis” is darker still. Propelled by an ominous, foot-stomping rhythm, the John Cale-ophone Chapman goes all Deliverance as he warns: “Never go into the darkness, never, never leave my sight/There are just too many crazies and you can die just beyond the light.”

“The Mallard”, meanwhile, wistfully equates the fate of the mid-20th century’s star steam train with that of life and love, with a Prefab Sprout-ish twinkle from Gunn. Chapman gets the feeling he too is being shunted into life’s sidings on autumnal Nick Drake throb “Falling From Grace”, confessing in a voice like a battered suitcase: “I’m beginning to feel like that man in the park who can make the kids cry and the dogs start to bark/He’s lonely by day and no better by night.” However, he has not run out of steam, or hope.

CD and download buyers get two extra tracks – discursive instrumental doodle “Rosh Pina” and a sombre reworking of “Navigation” – but “Money Trouble” and “That Time Of Night” are 50’s proper closing salvo. The former celebrates the quiet victory of frugal survival with a loose, Band-style hoedown, while the latter – a third-age upgrade of Eric Clapton’s grisly “Wonderful Tonight” – finds wee-small-hours anxieties magically dispelled by love’s redeeming wonder. “We have left behind places others never get to,” the eternally husky Chapman drawls, the downhill trudge of declining years reimagined as a stately victory parade.

And that’s 50 in its essence. A lifetime ago, Chapman lamented “time passed and time passing” on John Peel fave “Postcards Of Scarborough”, sounding like a man with a long way to go. Suddenly in tune with his times, he sounds as if his ill-defined destination is finally in sight. “I love it when you want me,” he slurs on “That Time Of Night”. In this light, who wouldn’t?

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds announce European tour dates

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have announced an 8-week European tour beginning in the UK at Bournemouth’s International Centre on September 24. The band last toured Europe in 2014. Full dates are below, with tickets on sale from 9am on Friday 17 February and available here. Nick Cave & The ...

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have announced an 8-week European tour beginning in the UK at Bournemouth’s International Centre on September 24.

The band last toured Europe in 2014.

Full dates are below, with tickets on sale from 9am on Friday 17 February and available here.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ eight piece touring line up features Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, Thomas Wydler, Jim Sclavunos, Conway Savage, George Vjestica and Larry Mullins.

The Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds tour itinerary is:

September
24 Bournemouth UK Bournemouth International Centre
25 Manchester UK Arena
27 Glasgow UK The SSE Hydro
28 Nottingham UK Motorpoint Arena
30 London UK The O2

October
3 Paris France Zénith
6 Amsterdam Netherlands Ziggo Dome
7 Frankfurt Germany Jahrhunderthalle
9 Hamburg Germany Sporthalle
10 Luxembourg Rockhal
12 Düsseldorf Germany Mitsubishi Electric Halle
13 Antwerp Belgium Sportpaleis
16 Oslo Norway Spectrum
18 Stockholm Sweden Ericsson Globe
20 Copenhagen Denmark Royal Arena
22 Berlin Germany Max-Schmeling Halle
24 Warsaw Poland Torwar
26 Prague Czech Rep. O2 Arena
28 Belgrade Serbia Kombank Arena
30 Ljubljana Slovenia Dvorana Tivoli

November
1 Vienna Austria Stadthalle
2 Munich Germany Zenith
4 Padova Italy Kioene Arena
6 Milan Italy Forum
8 Rome Italy PalaLottomatica
12 Zurich Switzerland Hallenstadion
13 Geneva Switzerland Arena
16 Athens Greece Faliro Sports Arena (Tae Kwon Do)
19 Tel Aviv Israel Menorah Arena

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Bob Dylan announces London Palladium dates

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Bob Dylan will play a run of shows at the London Palladium. Supporting his forthcoming triple album, Triplicate, out on May 31, Dylan and his band will perform for three nights at the West End theatre in April. Tickets for Dylan's previously announced UK tour are mostly sold out, but the London da...

Bob Dylan will play a run of shows at the London Palladium.

Supporting his forthcoming triple album, Triplicate, out on May 31, Dylan and his band will perform for three nights at the West End theatre in April.

Tickets for Dylan’s previously announced UK tour are mostly sold out, but the London dates go on sale at 10.00am this Friday (February 10).

The 30-song Triplicate is the singer and songwriter’s third set drawing from the classic American songbook, following 2015’s Shadows In The Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels, and is divided into three themed discs.

Bob Dylan plays:

London Palladium (April 28, 29, 30)
Cardiff Motorpoint Arena (May 3) – SOLD OUT
Bournemouth International Centre (4) – SOLD OUT
Nottingham Motorpoint Arena (5)
Glasgow SECC Clyde Auditorium (7) – SOLD OUT
Liverpool Echo Arena (8)
London Wembley SSE Arena (9)

Ticket information is available at the London Palladium and Bob Dylan’s own site.

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Father John Misty, Jesus And Mary Chain, Lucinda Williams and more for End Of The Road Festival

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Father John Misty and Mac DeMarco have been confirmed as headliners for this year's End Of The Road festival. Also on the bill are The Jesus And Mary Chain, Lucinda Williams, Band Of Horses, Amadou & Mariam, Ty Segall, Real Estate and Parquet Courts. This year's festival runs from August 31 - ...

Father John Misty and Mac DeMarco have been confirmed as headliners for this year’s End Of The Road festival.

Also on the bill are The Jesus And Mary Chain, Lucinda Williams, Band Of Horses, Amadou & Mariam, Ty Segall, Real Estate and Parquet Courts.

This year’s festival runs from August 31 – September 3 at its usual home, Larmer Tree Gardens in south Wiltshire, England.

You can read the line-up below – with acts to be announced.

Mac DeMarco
Father John Misty
Lucinda Williams
Band Of Horses
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Amadou & Mariam
Ty Segall
Real Estate
Parquet Courts
Perfume Genius
Alvvays
Foxygen
Car Seat Headrest
Jens Lekman
The Lemon Twigs
Deerhoof
Gold Panda
Nadine Shah
Bill Ryder-Jones
Ryley Walker
Girl Band
Marika Hackman
Courtney Marie Andrews
All We Are
Julia Jacklin
Sinkane
Romare
Vaudou Game
Let’s Eat Grandma
Margaret Glaspy
Kelly Lee Owens
Michael Chapman
Brix & The Extricated
John Smith
Japanese Breakfast
Julie Byrne
OMNI
IDER
Nap Eyes
Aaron Lee Tasjan
Amanda Bergman
Nadia Reid
Tasseomancy
Pixx
Girl Ray
Ultimate Painting
Shovels & Rope
John Moreland
Gabriella Cohen
HMLTD
Gulp
Shame
Lisa O’Neill
Xylouris White
Goat Girl
Lankum
Scott Hirsch
W. H. Lung
The Honey Hahs
DUDS
J. Bernardt
Legends Of Country
Mega Bog
The Spook School
Creatures

Tier 3 tickets are now on sale at £179. There are no boking or transaction fees. A deposit scheme allows people to pay £45 now and the balance by 15 June. You can find more information by clicking here.

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Danny Says

If Danny Fields didn’t exist, it’s doubtful anyone would invent him – unless it was some hipster Woody Allen making a wild new musical version of Zelig, about an unlikely figure who somehow happened to just be there for 90 per cent of the most interesting moments in American rock and roll betw...

If Danny Fields didn’t exist, it’s doubtful anyone would invent him – unless it was some hipster Woody Allen making a wild new musical version of Zelig, about an unlikely figure who somehow happened to just be there for 90 per cent of the most interesting moments in American rock and roll between 1965–1977.

Unlike a Zelig, though, Fields wasn’t just simply there, blending in. Variously journalist, scout, PR man, manager, fixer and “underground mayor,” to quote Alice Cooper, he helped shape the scene. He’s hardly a household name, but his ears are responsible for a lot of the music played in all the coolest households over the past fifty years.

If you’re glad The Doors broke through, be thankful Fields, as their self-appointed publicist, was around to suggest “the song about fire” should be a single. If you ever shook to The Stooges or MC5, you owe him a drink – he got Elektra to sign both bands with a single phonecall to label boss Jac Holzman who, by that point, had made Fields “company freak,” hired, essentially, to stay up later than everyone else.

Ramones fans should know him as the man who discovered the band in 1975 and became their first manager. They parted in the early 1980s, but not before Da Bruddas wrote one of their most glorious songs in his honour, “Danny Says”. Scholars of American pop’s ripped underbelly might recognise Fields’s name from the footnotes through his associations with these bands, not to mention The Velvet Underground. But seeing it all laid out up front in director Brendan Toller’s documentary – that this one guy had his antenna up in a way that put him right in the middle of it time and again – is remarkable.

More startling yet are the other flashpoints the film uncovers. You know those giddy photographs of Bob Dylan meeting Patti Smith for the first time backstage in Greenwich Village in 1975? Fields was behind the camera. Before that, he was the one who first invited Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, two wide-eyed kids persistently hanging around, to join the backroom gang at Max’s Kansas City. Before that, in the same fabled New York hangout, he introduced David Bowie to Iggy Pop.

If that’s not enough, how about this: in 1966, as an editor on teen fan mag Datebook, he was the one who sensed a quote John Lennon had given months earlier without fuss to The Evening Standard was maybe worth highlighting. Thus the world got the “more popular than Jesus” furore that saw The Beatles’ US tour met with death threats, and fuelled their decision to stop playing live.

This all makes such a fantastic surface you can forgive Toller’s film for not going far beneath. We get a taste of Fields’s persona – dry, catty, sharp, simultaneously unimpressed yet in love with it all – but no idea of what might tick inside. In this respect, the opening is most poignant. Illustrated with glowing home movies, we glimpse a straight early life as a Jewish boy in suburban Brooklyn, where Fields was born Daniel Feinberg in 1939. Already, though, there are kinks: his doctor father left a bowl of amphetamines on the sideboard, like sweets, and Danny and his mother would help themselves.

Openly gay, Fields studied law, but was more interested in “hanging out with a bunch of dissolute faggots.” Dropping out, he met his destiny when he fell in with Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, forming close friendships with Edie Sedgwick, Nico (he was later responsible for bringing her and John Cale to Elektra for the magisterial Marble Index) and Lou Reed.

Shortly before his death, Warhol told Fields he’d like to film his story. Fulfilling the prophecy, Toller’s documentary is likely very different to anything Andy might have made, but he’s indebted to Warhol for lessons he taught Fields, who developed the habit of documenting his life, down to regularly tape-recording conversations.

Toller interviewed Fields over several years, and brings in Iggy, Alice, Jac Holzman and many others. But the gems come from Fields’s own archive, best of all his C-120 tape of Reed’s uncharacteristically enthusiastic reaction the night Fields first played him The Ramones: “That is, without doubt, THE most fantastic thing you’ve ever played me!”

It’s telling that the documentary ends on the Ramones adventure: there’s nothing about what Fields has done since. You sense he could say things about the past three decades, too. But, then, maybe those stories just aren’t as good.

EXTRAS: Great 1969 promo for Nico’s “Evening Of Light” featuring Iggy; Fields Q&A; more 1975 audio of Fields and Lou; interviews; trailer. 7/10

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Exclusive! Hear alternative versions of Evan Dando’s “Shots Is Fired” and “Rancho Santa Fe”

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Evan Dando's 2003 solo album, Baby I'm Bored, is due for reissue. Released in June as a 2CD/2LP and Limited Edition 2LP/2CD set, the reissue will include an extra disc of unheard and unreleased tracks, singles, b-sides and rarities - including alternative versions of "Shots Is Fired" featuring Liv ...

Evan Dando‘s 2003 solo album, Baby I’m Bored, is due for reissue.

Released in June as a 2CD/2LP and Limited Edition 2LP/2CD set, the reissue will include an extra disc of unheard and unreleased tracks, singles, b-sides and rarities – including alternative versions of “Shots Is Fired” featuring Liv Tyler and “Rancho Santa Fe”.

We’re delighted to be able to share both of these tracks with you – listen to them below.

The Extras disc includes:
Shots Is Fired (Alternative Version featuring Liv Tyler)
I Wanna Be Your Mamma Again
Tongue Tied
Whoops
Sucker Punch
The Same Thing You Thought Hard About… (Alternative Version)
Au Bord De La Seine
Rancho Santa Fe (Alternative Version)
A Walk In The Woods With Lionel Ritchie
Rudy With A Flashlight
Hannah & Gabi (Live Version)
The Same Thing You Thought Hard About… (Live Version)

The March 2017 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on The 101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time. Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Adams tells us about his new album, Greg Lake (in one of his last interviews) remembers Emerson Lake & Palmer, and our free CD collects great new tracks from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Duke Garwood, The Necks and more. The issue also features Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on his best recorded work. Plus Michael Chapman, Buzzcocks, Rick Parfitt, Paul Weller & Robert Wyatt, John Waters, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Tinariwen, Dirty Projectors, Cream, Lift To Experience, New Order and more, plus 131 reviews

Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide: Neil Young

“Roll another number for the road…” Neil Young’s vigorous workrate can be hard for even the most obsessive fan to keep up with: since 2000 alone, he’s managed two autobiographies, eight personally curated archive releases, one imaginatively conceptual live album, five films, an environment...

“Roll another number for the road…” Neil Young’s vigorous workrate can be hard for even the most obsessive fan to keep up with: since 2000 alone, he’s managed two autobiographies, eight personally curated archive releases, one imaginatively conceptual live album, five films, an environmentally friendly car and a new audio format, plus the small matter of 14 new studio albums. To navigate that amazing body of work, you’ll need a trustworthy companion – which is where our Ultimate Music Guide: Neil Young comes in.
This deluxe, updated edition tells the complete story of Young, right up to 2016’s Peace Trail. We’ve reviewed every single one of his albums, and rescued a wealth of interviews from the NME, Melody Maker and Uncut archives. “You can’t worry about what people think. I never do. I never did, really,” Young told Uncut in 2012. And here’s the proof: one of rock’s greatest runs, anatomised and celebrated in all its weird, ragged glory…