Our new issue of Uncut should be arriving for subscribers over the weekend, and in UK shops by Tuesday. You can look forward to: 1 A genuinely new Pink Floyd story by Tom Pinnock. 2. A radical free CD compiled by Lambchop. 3. The definitive review of Desert Trip by Stephen Deusner, featuring Bob Dyl...
Our new issue of Uncut should be arriving for subscribers over the weekend, and in UK shops by Tuesday. You can look forward to: 1 A genuinely new Pink Floyd story by Tom Pinnock. 2. A radical free CD compiled by Lambchop. 3. The definitive review of Desert Trip by Stephen Deusner, featuring Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who. 4. Wyndham Wallace’s in-depth look at the new classical movement (or whatever we decide to call it)with Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Bryce Dessner, Ólafur Arnalds, Dustin O’Halloran etc. 5. Very fine pieces by John Robinson on C86 and Peter Watts on The Damned. Plus Julia Holter ,David Pajo, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Norah Jones and, as ever, much more.
Moving on this week’s playlist: much love for these Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia jams, and the new CRB EP, among the new arrivals. Also please check out the footage of Pharaoh Sanders from 1982, and Kaia Kater, a new name to me, who sounds great…
Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey
1 Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia – Keystone Companions: The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings (Fantasy)
2 Oren Ambarchi – Hubris (Editions Mego)
3 Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker (Columbia)
4 Michael Chapman – 50 (Paradise Of Bachelors)
5 Gillian Welch – Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg (Acony)
6 Jim James – Eternally Even (ATO/Capitol)
7 Solange – A Seat At The Table (RCA)
8 Various Artists – Extra Added Soul: Crossover, Modern And Funky Soul (J &D)
9 Chris Robinson Brotherhood – If You Lived Here, You Would Be Home By Now (Silver Arrow)
Interviewed alongside William Burroughs in 1973 for Rolling Stone, David Bowie unveiled his ambitious plans for two new projects, both musicals. One, for television, was to be based on his Ziggy Stardust album while the other was an adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, 1984. For the latter, Bowie ...
Interviewed alongside William Burroughs in 1973 for Rolling Stone, David Bowie unveiled his ambitious plans for two new projects, both musicals. One, for television, was to be based on his Ziggy Stardust album while the other was an adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, 1984. For the latter, Bowie envisioned a full-blown West End spectacular, where he would not only write the songs but also play the beleaguered protagonist, Winston Smith. Alas, Bowie would have to wait over 40 years until he finally got his wish to mount a musical. As it transpires, it was also the final work he completed before his death earlier this year: Lazarus.
Inevitably, the Lazarus cast recording comes freighted with a sense of pathos. Recording began on January 11 – the day after Bowie died – at The Magic Shop, the New York studio where he had laboured fruitfully on his last two studio albums, and then at Avatar Studios, formerly The Power Station, where, decades previously, Bowie cut Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) and Let’s Dance. Lazarus represents an unlikely coda to Bowie’s career. Its songs – sailors fighting in the dance hall, no more free steps to heaven – are familiar. They are chosen and sequenced by Bowie himself from the full span of his catalogue, but performed by others. They are accompanied by the last three songs he ever finished: “No Plan”, “Killing A Little Time” and “When I Met You”, which also appear in Lazarus. Originating from the same sessions as his ★ album – and also anchored by saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s watertight jazz ensemble – these three songs inevitably share some stylistic and textural flourishes, although they feel more like friendly cousins than long lost siblings.
Certainly, compared to the melodic wizardry evident on ★, “No Plan” is relatively traditional; closer perhaps to ★’s closing tracks, “Dollar Days” or “I Can’t Give Anything Away”. A reflective, melancholic song, its melody is carried by McCaslin’s sax line and Jason Lindner’s gentle synth bursts, underpinned by Mark Guiliana’s shuffling drum beat. It feels strangely unassuming – more about creating atmosphere than breaking new ground, sonically speaking. Then Bowie’s voice kicks in, soaring above McCaslin’s sax in a high-flying moment of grand theatricality – perfect, you might think, for an off-Broadway production. But it is reminiscent, too, of vintage Bowie: the warm, soulful tones recall “Word On A Wing” or even the vocal sweep of “Loving The Alien”. “There’s no music here, I’m lost in streams of sound,” he croons, beautifully.
“Killing A Little Time”, meanwhile, feels akin to the harmonic instability of “Sue (In A Season Of Crime)”. Led by a chunky guitar riff – the kind of thing Earl Slick might have ground out for The Next Day – it pushes deeper and deeper towards chromatic hinterlands. Built from dense, arrhythmic layers – from which McCaslin’s malevolent skronking is often the only discernible instrument – it underscores the solid collaborative work accomplished between Bowie and McCaslin’s ensemble and the questing nature of Bowie’s own compositional ambition. “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing, to sting your soul, to fuck you over,” he exclaims haughtily.
Although Tim Lefebvre’s walking bass-line on “When I Met You” offers a more convivial rhythmic foundation, things soon change. Bowie multi-tracks himself, singing a melody in counterpoint; there are processed drums, synth washes, with Bowie himself on guitar and a furious, foot-stomping chorus. This tumultuous backing is matched by his increasingly deranged vocal performance. “The marks and stains could not exist when I met you,” Bowie sings, “Now it’s all the same, now it’s all the same, the sun is gone, it’s all the same”. And then he, too, is gone.
Perhaps because they exist to fulfil a different creative purpose, these three songs don’t feel quite as layered or allusive as their ★ counterparts. Rather, these songs were always intended for Lazarus: a different entity altogether from ★, where ambient-prog-electronic-soul marathons or inscrutable lyrics are not necessarily the order of the day. Impressively, Bowie juggled these two wildly different projects simultaneously: by day working with McCaslin’s ensemble on some of the most far-reaching and experimental music of his career and by night working with arranger Henry Hey – a compatriot of McCaslin – retooling old hits for a jukebox musical.
What, then, are we to make of the Lazarus album? Historically, Bowie has always made his best music with his eyes fixed straight ahead, yet here he is looking back – to old songs and an old character, Thomas Jerome Newton, the man who fell to Earth. Admittedly, without seeing the play – which officially opens in London on November 8 – the soundtrack feels an incomplete experience. At its most successful, Lazarus finds new ways of presenting well-known songs; an unenviable task for Hey and his seven-piece band. A minimalist take on “The Man Who Sold The World” is rendered in lithe bass strokes and ambient synths, while “This Is Not America” is bathed in delicate, autumnal tones. There are some surprises, too: a pleasingly light-footed “Absolute Beginners” emphasizes the original’s upbeat qualities, “All The Young Dudes” has a loose, greasy vibe while “Always Crashing In The Same Car” feels pleasingly strange and imperious.
Sometimes it doesn’t work. “Changes” starts off as a ghastly piano ballad – think John Lewis Christmas ad – before bursting into an all-singing, all-dancing chorus line number. Elsewhere, “Lazarus”, “It’s No Game (No 1)” and “Where Are We Now?” are played with a straight bat, faithful to their studio originals (although it takes two guitarists, Chris McQueen and JJ Appleton, to replicate Robert Fripp’s demon runs on “It’s No Game”).
The most theatrical song here is “Life On Mars?” – coincidentally, the current Legacy compilation includes a new mix of the song by producer Ken Scott, which removes the drums and guitars and makes explicit its suitability as a future showtune. The closing track “Heroes” is understated and melancholic, driven by a typically modest vocal performance from Michael C Hall, playing Newton. Hall shares vocal duties with several other key cast members – principally Cristin Milioti and the 15 year-old Sophia Anne Caruso – although Hall cleaves closest to Bowie’s baritone: not an impersonation, but he captures Bowie’s inflections and phrasing.
If Nic Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell To Earth featured Bowie but none of his songs, Lazarus has the tunes while the man himself is absent. In some respects, it’s an appropriate exit: the body of work endures beyond its creator. Back in 1973, a suitably appreciative William Burroughs listened as Bowie outlined his thrilling new ventures. Backs were slapped, a mutual appreciation was born. It was a catalytic encounter that launched Bowie into a new set of creative arrangements that saw him become more disengaged, more alien: a trajectory eventually captured in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Recognising in Burroughs a kindred spirit who saw the world much as he did, Bowie exclaimed: “Maybe we are the Rogers and Hammerstein of the Seventies, Bill!” Imagine that.
The Flaming Lips have released a new song, "The Castle".
The track comes from their forthcoming album, Oczy Mlody.
The album is reportedly due for release in January; it's the band's first studio album since The Terror in 2013.
Here it is...
https://open.spotify.com/track/7zElmHYvqSbBMlq78JPExB
...
The Flaming Lips have released a new song, “The Castle“.
The track comes from their forthcoming album, Oczy Mlody.
The album is reportedly due for release in January; it’s the band’s first studio album since The Terror in 2013.
According to Will Sheff, the songs on Away tell a kind of “death story”. Since he wrote them, he presumably knows what he’s talking about. But even if two of its finest songs are about the perishing end of things, including Will’s own band on misty requiem, “Okkervil River RIP”, Away isn...
According to Will Sheff, the songs on Away tell a kind of “death story”. Since he wrote them, he presumably knows what he’s talking about. But even if two of its finest songs are about the perishing end of things, including Will’s own band on misty requiem, “Okkervil River RIP”, Away isn’t an album about death in the manner of dark and fatalistic early OR albums like Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You Meet (2002) and Rivers Of Golden Dreams (2003) with their gory murder ballads and songs about dead dogs. Nor is it eventually much in the morbid cast of 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, Sheff’s gloomy suite of songs about self-destructive ’60s singer-songwriter Tim Hardin.
Better to think of Away, really, as an album about letting go – of the past, people and places you’ve known and loved, the career that hasn’t taken you as far as you thought it would, the someone you thought by now you’d become and have not – as a prelude to rebirth and renewal, sometimes euphoric. It may be OR’s best album yet, even if it doesn’t much sound like the albums immediately preceding it. I Am Very Far (2011) and The Silver Gymnasium (2013) were big, bold rock records that bored into musical seams reminiscent of Bowie and Springsteen, Sheff on parts of The Silver Gymnasium finding the place where “Young Americans” meets “Born To Run”.
Recorded in three days with musicians culled from New York’s jazz and avant-garde music scenes, with orchestral arrangements by composer Nathan Thatcher, played by the yMusic classical ensemble, Away is more decoratively subdued. The album visits unhappy places, but its reflective musical poise puts it closer to On The Beach, say, than Tonight’s The Night, whose “horrible sloppy wrongness” and harrowing urgencies were such an influence on the Hardin song-cycle. The lovely, introspective drift and implorations of songs like “Call Yourself Renee”, “She Would Look For Me” and “Mary On A Wave” recall the slow unfoldings and ruminative narrative shifts of “Motion Pictures” and “Ambulance Blues”, songs written by Neil Young at a time of similar grave personal and professional reassessment. The skittering “Days Spent Floating (In The Halfbetween)”, meanwhile, may make you think of Tim Buckley’s “Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway)” or the nomadic extemporisations of San Francisco poet-minstrel, Dino Valenti.
Jonathan Wilson’s sonic signature is all over these tracks, enhancing a sense of brilliant discovery as Sheff finds new ways of writing and making music. His songs are still spectacularly wordy – “Mary On A Wave” finds him trying to fit all the words in the world into a Scrabble sack – but the looser, more spontaneous song structures allow his melodic gifts to flourish. Not that the album’s dynamic range is limited to acoustic guitars, upright bass, mellow brass, strings and brushed drums. “Judey On a Street” is a tremendous mix of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” and throbbing motorik pulses, while “Frontman In Heaven” reaches a rhapsodic crescendo reminiscent of “Rock’N’Roll Suicide”, Sheff all but imploring anyone listening to give him their hands.
The Stand-Ins (2007) and The Stage Names (2008) were darkly sardonic meta-fictions about fame and what the famous do when fame is taken from them, full of arch conceits, Okkervil River cast as the stars they did not in fact become. Here Sheff confronts the reality of the band’s slow disintegration on the wry, heartfelt “Okkervil River RIP”, basically the sound of a dream evaporating. “The Industry” is Will’s “Idiot Wind”, a recriminatory broadside aimed at everyone who let the band down, including themselves, full of gathering desperation. Unconditional tenderness replaces sour rancour on regal album highlight, “Comes Indiana Through The Smoke”, a song about his grandfather, Will’s hero, TH “Bud” Moore. When he was dying in a New Hampshire hospice that Sheff attended daily, the old man’s thoughts turned often to his wartime service on the American battleship, the USS Indiana, which saw action at Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The song is a hugely moving hymn to both, richly imaginative, powerfully evocative, unbearably poignant, a vanishing point.
When Sheff started Away, beset by various confusions, he wasn’t sure if it would come out as an Okkervil River album, but now it’s apparently his favourite Okkervil River album. Mine, too.
Q&A
Will Sheff
You’ve described Away as a ‘death story’, which sounds a bit cheerless.
I guess I don’t really think of death as cheerless. I don’t think I’m very often talking in these songs about literal death. I’m talking about allowing some way you’re living to die, so that you can figure out a new way to live. I think a lot of the ways I was living had become unsustainable or had just stopped yielding any kind of reward. I realised a lot of my illusions, bad habits, hang ups, assumptions and goals had to be let go of.
And that included what Okkervil River had become?
Okkervil River had stopped feeling, to me, like “me”. It became this outside idea that almost seemed to belong to other people. But I just wrote these songs and recorded them quickly with an improvised group of musicians and I found myself feeling more free than I’d felt in decades. When I tried to remember the last time I’d felt this good, I recalled the earliest days of Okkervil River, when I’d moved to Texas and thrown myself head-first into a band nobody had heard of and that was all I cared about. I realised I was basically the last man standing from that band, after so many lineups and reiterations had risen and died, and that it was time to die again so what was meaningful about the band, to me, could rise again.
INTERVEW: ALLAN JONES
Radiohead are the first confirmed headline act for Glastonbury 2017.
The band will top the bill on the Pyramid Stage on Friday, June 23.
This will be the band’s third time headlining the Pyramid Stage following previous appearances in 1997 and 2003.
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played a surpr...
Radiohead are the first confirmed headline act for Glastonbury 2017.
The band will top the bill on the Pyramid Stage on Friday, June 23.
This will be the band’s third time headlining the Pyramid Stage following previous appearances in 1997 and 2003.
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played a surprise set at the festival in 2010, and the band themselves also played a ‘secret set’ on Glastonbury’s small, outlying Park Stage in 2011.
Speculation that the band were to play Glastonbury 2017 grew after the band’s logo appeared as a “crop circle” in front of the Pyramid stage earlier this week.
Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering is no stranger to remote, secluded places. The daughter of musicians – her father briefly had a deal with Asylum/Elektra in the late ‘70s before becoming a pastor – Mering travelled extensively as a child and has continued this nomadic lifestyle into adulthood. S...
Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering is no stranger to remote, secluded places. The daughter of musicians – her father briefly had a deal with Asylum/Elektra in the late ‘70s before becoming a pastor – Mering travelled extensively as a child and has continued this nomadic lifestyle into adulthood. Six years ago, she found herself living in a tent in the New Mexico desert. For several months, she wildcrafted plants for a tincture company, using her knowledge of herbal medicine acquired while working on a farmstead in rural Kentucky. During a stint living in Portland she toured with Jackie O Motherfucker; in Philadelphia, she became involved with the city’s improvisatory noise rock scene, self-releasing Strange Chalices Of Seeing, an 11-track CD-R, under the name Weyes Bluhd in 2007. Since then, her music has continued to develop from the ghostly drones of her debut and its witchy follow-up, 2011’s The Outside Room, gradually revealing Mering’s striking gift for otherworldly folk, lysergic experimentation and baroque melodicism.
Inspired by her restless, peripatetic spirit, she recorded part of 2014’s album The Innocents in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while last year’s Cardamom Times EP was captured on reel-to-reel in her own basement apartment in Far Rockaway, NY. Between February and April this year, she worked on Front Row Seat To Earth in a garage studio in Lincoln Heights. Although the Los Angeles suburbs might seem disappointingly innocuous compared to her previous wonderings, nevertheless her eerie, forlorn songs remain reassuringly intact. This latest collection is still tinged with the melancholia familiar from her early recordings, but here they are surrounded by sympathetic arrangements that manage to be both time-honoured and contemporary.
It transpires that the knotty tensions between the old and the new are the defining qualities in Mering’s work. The sounds of traditional instruments – piano, guitar, flutes, horns – are often accompanied by bubbling electronic undercurrents. Mering plays most of these instruments herself, joined occasionally by collaborators including fellow travellers from Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti (Mering guested on Mature Themes): bassist Kenneth Gilmore, keyboard player Shags Chamberlain and Front Row Seat To Earth co-producer, Chris Cohen.
The album’s opening track, “Diary”, begins quietly, with Mering accompanied only by a piano, rising to a melodious crescendo of synth washes and harp arpeggios before finally fading out in a blur of distortion. The strange, stuttering breakdown in the middle of “Do You Need My Love” sounds like Portishead (in fact, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out Of Season album is another good reference point for Front Row Seat To Earth). The affecting acoustic refrain of “Generation Why” is discretely dusted with electric organ motifs and soft, sussurating vocal samples.
More radically, “Can’t Go Home” finds Mering’s vocals pillowed by harmonies consisting of her own voice, sampled, multi-tracked and treated: a 21st century chorale, if you like, that demonstrates Mering’s love of early music. “Can’t Go Home” also showcases Mering’s remarkable alto – part Judy Collins, part Nico – that lies somewhere between folk and torch singing. There is a dignity and otherness at work here: her voice sweeps robustly over swelling horns on “Used To Be” while on “Seven Words” finds her delivery softer and more intimate. The album closes, meanwhile, with “Front Row Seat”, a musique concrete style sound collage that invokes Mering’s heady, improvisatory sound trips in Philadelphia.
Thematically, much of Front Row Seat To Earth concerns the business of the heart. “Seven Words” finds her candidly revealing, “I want you mostly / In the morning / When my soul / Is weak / From dreaming”. On “Be Free”, Mering laments: “How do I get through to you / Tried to do / The best I could / Loved you just like a girl should”. But for all the introspective, confessional qualities in these songs, most come loaded with an exhilaratingly dramatic sensibility – as in “Can’t Go Home”, where Mering declares grandly, “Fighter / Do the right thing / Can you suffer more / Let the world / Carve at you heart”. Elsewhere, resolve is delivered with husky resignation, as on the crystalline 60s folk of “Away Above” where Mering confides, “Somethings you / Just gotta run away from / But that doesn’t change us”.
As with most of the songs on this album, there’s a thrill to “Away Above” in hearing Mering both uphold and subvert the conventions of folk music. Where does her voice end and where does some studio manipulation imperceptibly come in to play? It is this methodical exploration of the ancient and modern that makes Weyes Blood such a seductive proposition and the ambitious Front Row Seat To Earth – intimate and enveloping, romantic and psychedelic – marks a significant progression in Mering’s increasingly impressive career.
Q&A
Natalie Mering
How did the title come about?
The long explanation:
The title came about while I was trying to describe whats going on with our perspectives in this day and age.. especially my perspective, in a first world country, theoretically on the forefront of modernity… it’s like I’m witnessing the theater of our planet on a stage, detached from the experience.. not from any fault of our own, it’s just how our mind works. It seems like the changes that are about to take place are catastrophic, insane–the more I thought about our detachment from the environmental realities of our planet, the more I saw it as a symbol for the human experience. We anthropomorphize the world around us, as a stage, a theater, this is the way we understand cataclysmic change, until its immediately in front of us, affecting us… then it’s just sublime violence.
Because the issues at hand seem so insurmountable I think its important as a person to pay respect to the microcosm of their personal experience of the world, to see its relationship to the macro as well– we all fall in love with each other, what happened if we fell in love with the world? We all need to leave each other, to say sorry, to change.. what if we could leave, say sorry, and change our world? The songs on the record are personal, but also pay respect to the bigger theater in which this is all taking place, our planet, humanity.. the colossal world we have more information about than ever before, but still can’t quite seem to grasp outside of our subjective anthropomorphic reality.
Heady stuff…
In what ways do you think this album is a step on for Weyes Blood from The Innocents?
The Innocents I worked with some producers/ mixing engineers that had very strong ideas about my music that I gently acquiesced to–for FRSTE I didn’t have anybody on board like that. I just worked with friends, produced the record myself with the help of Chris Cohen, who has a very similar philosophy as me, and spent a lot of time keeping things within this personal range. The Innocents was made slowly over the course of three years in a variety of different head spaces, FRSTE was made in three months in a small vault of a studio– both records in comparison are very polar, which is nice.
I’ve gotten to sing so much more in the last year then I ever had in my life, touring nine months out of the year traveling minstrel style–I think this really helped me hone in on my voice in a way that I haven’t before. Felt good to produce my own voice in a small room, versus recording in a bigger studio. The songs are ones that I’ve been waiting to record for a long time, lots of experiences to sing about.
Conceptually FRSTE is the departure from youth–this realization that the entire world is around you, in front of you and you must interact or understand the symbolism of your inability to interact–you can no longer be the victim of innocence.
You recorded Cardamom Times on a reel-to-reel in your home in Rockaway NY. Tell us a little about the recording process for Front Row Seat To Earth. Whereabouts did you record it, what time of day, and what was the view from the window like?
Chris Cohen engineered this record–he had a small garage studio in the back of a couple’s house in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. The couple were very fond of cats and fed a lot of strays in the neighborhood so there were always lots of strange cats around. Lincoln heights is a very hilly neighborhood too– lots of paths and views of the city. We had no windows, though. We were locked in a vault basically in that garage, you couldn’t tell what time of day it was at all, and the air would get very thick in there. Usually we’d work everyday starting around noon till the evening, only stopping to eat.
You’ve worked with Jackie O Motherfucker, Ariel Pink and Nautical Almanac. How have these experiences shaped Weyes Blood music?
I am, truly, deep down, a fan of music. Especially the fringes– the parts that are more taboo, less accessible. Playing with/in those bands was always an elated experience for me but didn’t really shape my own musical practice. I’ve always had my own thing and have played with others for fun if I am asked. Nepotism doesn’t get you anywhere, anytime I perform with a band it is about them, the music of the moment.. JOMF and Nautical were both so improvisatory…it was free music. Ariel is a legend, singing with him was about tuning into what resonates about us together.
The experiences that have shaped Weyes Blood music the most are more personal events of my life that have forced me into focus. After focusing in specifically on songs and singing, I definitely miss the more experimental/ free aspects of those times when CDRs ruled and Jackie O Motherfucker made up a new set every night…I haven’t peacefully reconciled all of my musical fantasies into one record and my deepest dream is to do so someday in a way that gracefully deceives its audience into thinking it is…beautiful!
…and who knows, there’s still a chance I’ll go rogue and switch back to improvisatory noise music. I daydream about it a lot. But songs are addicting.
Phil Chess, the co-founder of Chess Records, has died aged 95.
Chess' nephew Craig Glicken confirmed his uncle's death to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Born Fiszel Czyż, he and his family emigrated to America from Poland in 1928. After a stint in the army, Phil joined his brother Leonard at Aristocrat ...
Phil Chess, the co-founder of Chess Records, has died aged 95.
Chess’ nephew Craig Glicken confirmed his uncle’s death to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Born Fiszel Czyż, he and his family emigrated to America from Poland in 1928. After a stint in the army, Phil joined his brother Leonard at Aristocrat Records, which they eventually renamed Chess.
Chess Records signings included Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Sonny Boy Williamson, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and Buddy Guy.
Speaking to the Sun-Times, Buddy Guy said, “Phil and Leonard Chess were cuttin’ the type of music nobody else was paying attention to – Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Jimmy Rogers, I could go on and on – and now you can take a walk down State Street today and see a portrait of Muddy that’s 10 stories tall. The Chess Brothers had a lot to do with that. They started Chess Records and made Chicago what it is today, the Blues capital of the world. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
A new featurette going behind the scenes of the forthcoming Twin Peaks series has been released.
The two-minute clip includes contributions from cast members Kyle MacLachlan and Miguel Ferrer.
Filming has now finished on the series and Showtime CEO, David Nevins, has confirmed that the first of th...
A new featurette going behind the scenes of the forthcoming Twin Peaks series has been released.
The two-minute clip includes contributions from cast members Kyle MacLachlan and Miguel Ferrer.
Filming has now finished on the series and Showtime CEO, David Nevins, has confirmed that the first of the new episodes will debut in the “first half of 2017”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxg-LDjUrQI
Aside from MacLachlan and Ferrer, the clip also features Kimmy Robertson, Dana Ashbrook, Jim Belushi, Amy Shiels, James Marshall, Robert Knepper, Chrysta Bell and Harry Goaz – although David Lynch can be seen in stills.
REM have shared a previously unreleased live version of "World Leader Pretend" as part of the anti-Trump campaign, 30 Days, 30 Songs.
REM described the track as "A perfect song for these strange times", according to Rolling Stone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFIlkh5pjA
30 Days, 30 Songs was ...
REM have shared a previously unreleased live version of “World Leader Pretend” as part of the anti-Trump campaign, 30 Days, 30 Songs.
REM described the track as “A perfect song for these strange times”, according to Rolling Stone.
30 Days, 30 Songs was devised by author Dave Eggers and Noise Pop Festival producer/artist manager Jordan Kurland and has so far featured contributions from Jim James, Franz Ferdinand, Death Cab For Cutie and Aimee Mann.
Angel Olsen has suffered the disservice of being pegged as a tragic figure more than most songwriters who happen to be women. Her voice beams a raw, natural power that seems to pre-date electricity, flickering like an oil lamp. Her lyrical references to Hank Williams cement the perception of her as ...
Angel Olsen has suffered the disservice of being pegged as a tragic figure more than most songwriters who happen to be women. Her voice beams a raw, natural power that seems to pre-date electricity, flickering like an oil lamp. Her lyrical references to Hank Williams cement the perception of her as an old-timey figure ill-equipped to deal with the demands of the present, and the knowledge that she was adopted only adds to the assumed pain and fragility in her work.
While it’s true that Olsen, 29, can match Leonard Cohen for gravity (see “White Stars”, from 2014’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness), and that she cut a spectral figure on her earliest cassette releases, she is in fact funny and self-aware, mocking assumptions to the contrary on her sparsely populated Twitter account. “And don’t forget to add ‘complicated mess of being a woman’ to your article because your editor told you to,” she wrote recently, citing the press release for her third studio album.
The Missouri-raised songwriter unveiled My Woman with no fanfare or context; just a video for a song called “Intern”, in which she wears a silver wig and plays a celebrity going through superstardom’s hammy spectacle. Over dewy synths and a glowering bassline, she sings about the pressure to be someone, and to make lasting connections, declining to clarify whether she’s singing about a relationship or her own work (or, indeed, both). But she does outline the steadfast motive behind her work that’s been there since her 2012 debut, Half Way Home: “I just wanna be alive/Make something real.” For Olsen, “real” is different from tweedy “authenticity”, a distinction she wields to great effect. She sings about picking up the phone and falling in love, breathily swearing “it’s the last time”. But there’s seldom a last time, as she knows: Burn Your Fire’s misanthropic “Unfucktheworld” found only emptiness after what she assumed was her final relationship. “Intern” turns out to be the first song on My Woman, and sets the stage for a spirited melodrama about the search for meaning.
Each of Olsen’s records to date has forged a giant leap from what came before. She brought the shadowy melodies of 2011 tape Strange Cacti out into the light on Half Way Home, and pushed into rockier territory on the garage-inflected Burn Your Fire. My Woman is, in spirit and often in sound, Olsen’s glam record. She employs a campy swagger to make clear that she’s not necessarily the people in her songs, who are hopelessly devoted to feeble men – and maybe an unengaged public. “I would watch you fold my heart away,” she sings on “Never Be Mine”, whose brisk Hank Marvin stateliness harks back to when deference to men was par for the course. But no matter how much her heroines prostrate themselves, Olsen’s sincere quest is still clear: for love that’s “never lost or too defined to lose the feeling of an endless searching throughout”, as she puts it so beautifully on “Not Gonna Kill You”, a Morricone-inspired Western that plays like a race to outrun cynicism.
Olsen pushes her voice further than ever before on My Woman, which plays like an actress’ showreel. “Shut Up Kiss Me” is a sexy, screwball garage song that could be sung by Blanche DuBois at breaking point, Olsen gritting her teeth as she declares, “at your worst I still believe it’s worth the fight”, before vamping through her ultimatum: “Shut up! Kiss me! Hold me tight!” On “Give It Up,” she seems to dramatically raise a hanky to her brow as she describes the pain she feels in proximity to the guy who has denied her, against guitar that recalls Courtney Barnett’s burly softness. She sounds possessed by the end of “Not Gonna Kill You”, pushing into non-verbal transcendence that sails over a churning psychedelic groove. It bridges the first half of the album – shorter, poppier songs – with its second half, where Olsen stretches out into wilder forms and unexpected textures.
“Sister” is the record’s centrepiece, an almost eight-minute declaration of Olsen’s belief in love’s transformative potential. “I want to go where nobody knows fear,” she yearns, sounding anxious and bold: “I want to follow my heart down that wild road.” Her gentle country ballad lilts with an outlaw twang, but cracks wide open as she repeats the line, “all of my life I thought had changed.” It’s unclear whether she’s powered by regret or relief, but it’s deeply affecting either way; as she unleashes meteor showers of wordless incantations, she sounds like Stevie Nicks fronting Crazy Horse, riding a rugged solo. The (pre-Stevie) Fleetwood Mac vibe continues into “Those Were The Days” and “Woman”, which share the voluptuous R’n’B shimmer of “Albatross”: all lightly jazzy drums and Rhodes groove, with Olsen singing high and gauzy. “I dare you to understand what makes me a woman,” she challenges on the latter, heralding another self-possessed solo.
My Woman is also a dare to understand Olsen as an artist: one who challenges assumptions about female artists as confessional autobiographers; who – like all the best country singers – uses humour to bolster sincerity. Her ambitious third record marks another giant progression in an already distinguished career, and offers provocative thoughts on sacrifice and identity that should long outlast its 48-minute runtime. “Baby, don’t forget, don’t forget it’s a song,” she sings on final song “Pops”, to a distant piano. “I’ll be the thing that lives in the dream when it’s gone.”
Q&A
Do the wigs connote a particular character?
I went with the silver one as a nod to Bowie, glam rock. Friends have told me how my genuine self is more present in these films. There has been a curiosity about the wig, which got me thinking people really don’t pay attention to your poetic intent. But that’s what makes it fun: finding hilarity in statements I didn’t know I was making. It was really out of a need to make light in visuals what could be so heavy in words.
How do you interpret the title?
It’s more of an attitude. It’s flirtatious and possessive, maybe even degrading but also it could be very empowering and less about womanliness and more about owning up to your actions and thoughts.
What mindset were you in while making it?
On Burn Your Fire I thought I learned what isolation was and could reflect it, and maybe I did some of that… This record feels like actual change. Maybe part of the struggle was that I just wasn’t sure if this whole indie country glam thing was my gig because it’s not always the dream to sit within the structure I’ve created. Then I realised I couldn’t stop it, not yet. And what a pleasure, to be transparent and unashamed and to write. Even if the audience misunderstands my intent sometimes, and I gotta redefine it – or embrace the fact that I don’t need to, it’s a blessing to insert some catchy melody with something that’s real to me, that might reach someone else, and remind them that they’re not the only one.
INTERVIEW: LAURA SNAPES
In just a few days, our next issue of Uncut should be rolling out for our subscribers, arriving in UK shops a week today. If you're desperate for some reading matter in the interim, we've put our History Of Rock volume for 1967 back in the shops; it's the one with the beautiful Hendrix cover, which ...
In just a few days, our next issue of Uncut should be rolling out for our subscribers, arriving in UK shops a week today. If you’re desperate for some reading matter in the interim, we’ve put our History Of Rock volume for 1967back in the shops; it’s the one with the beautiful Hendrix cover, which neatly complements ourJimi Hendrix Ultimate Music Guide, if you haven’t already picked that one up. Click on those links and you can grab both of them from our online shop.
As regard that forthcoming Uncut, I’m going to be cagey about a bunch of the contents for a day or two yet, but I can reveal that we’re pleased to welcome Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner as the curator of this month’s free CD. Lambchop have been a key band for Uncut since the mag’s inception, and as anyone who’s heard Lambchop’s recent single, “The Hustle”, will probably testify, their journey to making something new and ambitious out of the raw materials is a mission fundamentally shared by our magazine. As a consequence, Kurt seemed like a nice choice to put together a genre-defying mixtape for us. More details, again, in a few days.
Rapidly looming deadlines mean that we’re already deep into the production of our pre-Christmas issue, which also means I’m up to my neck in the Top 20s submitted by our contributors for the Uncut end of year poll. A bit early to start all the speculation, perhaps, but it struck me I should post something about one of my personal favourite albums of 2016: 75 Dollar Bill’s amazing “Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock” on their own Thin Wrist label.
If Tinariwen and their compatriots reclaimed American blues and transformed it into something dusty, trance-inducing and redolent of their Saharan home, New York’s 75 Dollar Bill are an astonishingly potent next stage in an ongoing cultural exchange. The duo’s second album (this is actually quite a tricky one to enumerate, since their Bandcamp page has a bunch of tapes/downloads that make counting hard) comprises four deep desert blues jams, pivoted on the rattling percussion of Rick Brown and the serpentine guitar lines of Che Chen, who could plausibly sub for Ali Farka Toure in a duet with Toumani Diabate. He’s actually studied for a time with the ace Mauritanian guitarist Jeiche Ould Chigaly, who plays with his wife Noura Mint Seymali on what I think might be my favourite African album of the year, “Arbina”.
Horns and violas add further textural levels of drone, but it’s the interplay between the core duo, and between the American and African influences, that gives “Wood/Metal…” its hypnotic pull. “I’m Not Trying to Wake Up”, in particular, is magnificent; like a gnawa ritual that’s been convened by Junior Kimbrough. See what you think…
Mother Love Bone, the short-lived by influential Seattle band, are to be celebrated with a new box set which brings together their studio album alongside B-sides, demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs.
Mother Love Bone was formed in 1988 by Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Bruce Fairweather, And...
Mother Love Bone, the short-lived by influential Seattle band, are to be celebrated with a new box set which brings together their studio album alongside B-sides, demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs.
Mother Love Bone was formed in 1988 by Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Bruce Fairweather, Andrew Wood and Greg Gilmore. They released an EP, Shine, and one studio album, Apple. The band ended after Wood died from a heroin overdose. Ament and Gossard subsequently formed Temple Of The Dog with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell as a tribute to Wood, before ultimately joining Eddie Vedder for Pearl Jam.
Mother Love Bone: On Earth As It Is will be available in both a vinyl and CD/DVD set on November 4 via UMC/Stardog. The DVD set includes bonus features of unseen live performances.
The 3 CD/ 1 DVD set includes: Apple / Shine CD: This Is Shangrila
Stardog Champion
Holy Roller
Bone China
Come Bite The Apple
Stargazer
Heartshine
Captain Hi Top
Man Of Golden Words
Capricorn Sister
Gentle Groove
Mr. Danny Boy
Crown Of Thorns
Thru Fade Away
Mindshaker Meltdown
Half Ass Monkey Boy
Chloe Dancer / Crown Of Thorns
B-sides / Alt Versions CD: Holy Roller
Bone China
Hold Your Head Up
Capricorn Sister
Zanzibar
Lady Godiva Blues
Red Hot Shaft
Seasons Changing (Live at the Plant)
Stardog Champion (Live at the Plant)
B-sides / Alt Versions CD:
Lubricated Muscle Drive
Savwhafair Slide
Jumpin Jehova
Showdown
Bloodshot Ruby
Elijah
Chloe Dancer (Demo)
Have You Ever Kissed A Lady
Otherside
These R No Blues
Made Of Rainbows
Bloody Shame
One Time Fire
Stardog Champion featuring Chris Cornell and Pearl Jam (Live from Alpine Valley)
Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, although he has yet to get in touch with the Swedish Academy, or indicate whether he will attend the celebrations.
“Right now we are doing nothing. I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly ...
Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, although he has yet to get in touch with the Swedish Academy, or indicate whether he will attend the celebrations.
“Right now we are doing nothing. I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough,” Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, told state radio SR on Monday.
Traditionally, Nobel prize winners are invited to Stockholm to receive their Nobel Diploma from King Carl XVI Gustaf on December 10 – the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death – and to give a speech during a banquet.
Despite Dylan’s lack of communication to date, Danuis says: “I am not at all worried.”
“If he doesn’t want to come, he won’t come,” she continued. “It will be a big party in any case and the honour belongs to him.”
Dylan has received the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Based in southern Colorado, the Drop City commune of artists was one of many radical collectives that pockmarked both the cultural and geographical terrain of 1960s America. Set up by filmmaker Gene Bernofsky and several arts students, Drop City spent much of their time building habitable structures...
Based in southern Colorado, the Drop City commune of artists was one of many radical collectives that pockmarked both the cultural and geographical terrain of 1960s America. Set up by filmmaker Gene Bernofsky and several arts students, Drop City spent much of their time building habitable structures based on the revolutionary designs of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, all on the seven-acre plot of land they’d purchased, giving shelter to ‘drop outs’ from mainstream culture. It’s no surprise they were working around the same time the Woodstock generation was forming, wanting to ‘get back to the garden’, embracing both the mystical and the quotidian elements of nature.
In another artistic intervention, Drop City created wildly psychedelic paintings on acrylic, one of which, ‘Ultimate Painting’, inspired the London duo of James Hoare and Jack Cooper. It’s telling that “Lead The Way”, from Ultimate Painting’s third album, Dusk, features the lyric, ‘turn your back on society’ – they seem driven by a similar impulse to reduce and simplify. Both Cooper and Hoare have prior form in indie groups: the former with Mazes, and the latter with Proper Ornaments and Veronica Falls. If some of those groups access the creative energy of the ’60s through the refracting prism of ’60s independent music, Ultimate Painting return to the source direct, but they avoid the slavish copyism of any number of romanticising nostalgia acts, from Mod revivalists to limp psych-rockers, by tightening the focus, sketching the mise-en-scène with just the bare necessities.
Initial listens to Dusk, the duo’s third album, are similar to encounters with their other two (the self-titled 2014 debut, and last year’s Green Lanes); first impressions, of a muted slightness, give way to increasing wonder at the evocative qualities of the songs’ mindful minimalism. It’s uncluttered, spare, and open, and the production and arrangement has the feel of a group breathing together in the same room, capturing the recording space’s architectural and acoustic qualities, and playing only the essential notes, the better to let the room sing in tandem with the interactions between buzzing strings and humming valve amplifiers. It’s always telling when an album reads first as homogeneous, but calls for immediate repeat listening, as though you’ve been welcomed into a very unique psychological space by a set of songs that work their magic en masse.
It kicks off with deceptive diffidence – “Bills” comes across, at first, like a paper-cut version of the crystalline excellence of Television’s third, oft-underrated comeback album from 1992; it’s a nudge away from the latter’s “1880 Or So”. But it soon blossoms, finding its own community of sound, and quietly ascending into a mantric chorus, as a huffing organ buzzes out the back of the studio. The pointillism of the guitar playing is particularly seductive – one guitar trebly and warbled by tremolo, the other lightly distorted but still pin-sharp, their relationship is one of mutual fascination, tiptoeing around each other and respectfully finding ways to weave around each other’s tonal spectrum. The jangling charm of the following “Song For Brian Jones” hymns the titular character via guitars that toll in consort with the gentle psych-folk of The Byrds circa Fifth Dimension; “Lead The Day”’s chiming piano positions the gracefully understated melody on an early solo McCartney album.
If we’re naming the big names here, it’s because Cooper and Hoare have no qualms about drawing from some of pop and rock’s most canonical: as Cooper once said, “We accepted the fact that we’re influenced by the biggest bands that have ever been, because a lot of them are really good.” That kind of comfort with the canon is writ across Dusk, but it also risks games of spot-the-reference: it’d be pretty easy to draw a Venn diagram of, say, the gentler climes of psychedelic pop from the ’60s, the click and fizz of the quieter end of ’70s power-pop, and the pastoral lilt of the Flying Nun label in the ’80s, and locate Ultimate Painting at their intersection.
But there’s a surprising sturdiness of personality here. By minimising their arrangements, Ultimate Painting maximise the capacity for the warmth of their slyly observational songs to shine. On songs like “Who Is Your Next Target?” and the closing “I Can’t Run Anymore”, the moist melancholy of the album gives way to more intangible emotions, as though the duo are haunted by collective imaginings. It’s touches like these – the suggestiveness of the pauses, the silences, the miniature worlds between the painterly notes Cooper and Hoare play – that makes Ultimate Painting, for all its influences and its rear-view-mirror vision of classicist pop, such a seductive album.
Q&A
ULTIMATE PAINTING
I’ve always liked the reference to the Drop City commune in the group’s name. Can you explain the appeal of that era to you both? Jack: Learning about Drop City struck a chord because society has moved so far away from that communal way of thinking and I think the early ’60s is so fascinating because everything was possible for such a tiny window of time. It was a glimpse into what might have been and I think that’s why people gravitate towards it. James: The ’60s were such an intensely creative period. In seven years The Beatles went from “Besame Mucho” to Abbey Road. Everything moved forwards at such a high speed. The appeal of [the] decade is so strong for me. The quality of the music, the fashion, the cinema, Andy Warhol.
Your songs are minimal by design… James: We have a clear idea of what works well… One of us will come with the main part of the melody/lyric but everything else is written/pieced together in my home studio in East London. Jack: James talks a lot about ‘less is more’ and I’ll talk about ‘economy’ but it’s essentially the same idea. I think a lot of music needs to remember certain frequencies and simplicity. We record no more than eight tracks on tape… I don’t think the human brain can process a song that has hundreds of digital instrument tracks. I think there’s a simplicity to our recordings that resonates with people… There’s comfort in order.
INTERVIEW: JON DALE
The Last Shadow Puppets have covered Leonard Cohen's "Is This What You Wanted" for a new EP.
The version of Cohen's 1974 song features on an upcoming EP from the band, The Dream Synopsis, which is due in December.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8LtrwbEUow
The EP was recorded live in one day at ...
The Last Shadow Puppets have covered Leonard Cohen‘s “Is This What You Wanted” for a new EP.
The version of Cohen’s 1974 song features on an upcoming EP from the band, The Dream Synopsis, which is due in December.
The EP was recorded live in one day at Future-Past Studios, Hudson NY and features new versions of tracks from the band’s current album, Everything You’ve Come to Expect, alongside several covers.
Tracklisting: Aviation
Les Cactus – original by Jacques Dutronc
Totally Wired – original by The Fall
This Is Your Life – original by Glaxo Babies
Is This What You Wanted – original by Leonard Cohen
The Dream Synopsis
Phil Collins has announced his first live dates for 10 years.
In June next year, he will perform a 5 night residency at London's Royal Albert Hall, as well as shows in Paris and Cologne.
Collins made his live return at an event for his own Little Dreams Foundation last year, before performing at t...
Phil Collins has announced his first live dates for 10 years.
In June next year, he will perform a 5 night residency at London’s Royal Albert Hall, as well as shows in Paris and Cologne.
Collins made his live return at an event for his own Little Dreams Foundation last year, before performing at the opening of the US Open tennis in New York in August.
“I thought I would retire quietly,” says Collins, “But thanks to the fans, my family and support from some extraordinary artists I have rediscovered my passion for music and performing. It’s time to do it all again and I’m excited. It just feels right.”
Phil Collins – Not Dead Yet: Live 2017 tour dates are:
June 4, Royal Albert Hall, London
June 5, Royal Albert Hall, London
June 7, Royal Albert Hall, London
June 8, Royal Albert Hall, London
June 9, Royal Albert Hall, London
June 11, LANXESS Arena, Cologne
June 12, LANXESS Arena, Cologne
June 18, Accor Hotels Arena, Paris
June 19, Accor Hotels Arena, Paris
Jack White appeared as the live guest on Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion over the weekend.
White led bassist Dominic Davis, fiddler/backing vocalist Lillie Mae Rische and pedal steel guitarist Fats Kaplin though a four-song set that included renditions of The White Stripes' "City ...
Jack White appeared as the live guest on Minnesota Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion over the weekend.
White led bassist Dominic Davis, fiddler/backing vocalist Lillie Mae Rische and pedal steel guitarist Fats Kaplin though a four-song set that included renditions of The White Stripes’ “City Lights” and The Raconteurs’ “Carolina Drama“.
White was joined for a duet performance of The White Stripes’ “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” by Margo Price.
You can watch all three performances below.
White also played country song, “(Margie’s At) The Lincoln Park Inn“.
“City Lights” and “Carolina Drama” both feature on the recently released album, Acoustic Recordings 1998 – 2016. Click here to read Uncut’s review.
The second leg of the inaugural Desert Trip festival took place in Indio, California over the weekend.
As with the previous weekend, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, The Who and Roger Waters all performed.
There were a few changes to the band's set lists.
Dylan - recentl...
The second leg of the inaugural Desert Trip festival took place in Indio, California over the weekend.
As with the previous weekend, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, The Who and Roger Waters all performed.
There were a few changes to the band’s set lists.
Dylan – recently awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature – performed “Like A Rolling Stone” for the first time in nearly three years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqDzOTXZGOk
The Rolling Stones honoured Dylan’s award, with Mick Jagger announcing, “I want to thank Bob Dylan for an amazing set. We have never shared the stage with a Nobel Prize winner before. Bob is like our own Walt Whitman.”
According to the LA Times, Jagger also continued his strong line in between song banter. After describing last weekend’s leg as “the Palm Springs retirement home for genteel musicians”, he announced on Friday (October 14), “Welcome to Desert Trip two! They say that if you remember Desert Trip one, you weren’t really there.”
The Stones also substantially mixed up their set from last week, changing seven songs. They also debuted another track, “Just Your Fool“, from their forthcoming album, Blue & Lonesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0WhDACKlGk
On the Saturday night – October 15 – Neil Young and the Promise Of The Real also changed their set around, introducing “Helpless”, “Alabama”, “Cowgirl In The Sand” and “Like A Hurricane” for this second weekend’s show.
Young once again joined Paul McCartney for a medley of “A Day In The Life” and “Give Peace A Chance” and a ferocious “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” that – Forbes reports – saw Young break all his guitar strings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I5Vt-5ZtsY
McCartney himself made a few amendments to his set from the previous week, notably an outing for “Got to Get You Into My Life” early on and Little Richard‘s “Rip It Up” during his encore. Apart from Young, McCartney also brought on Rhianna to sing “FourFiveSeconds”, the song they recorded together with Kanye West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfzZ7OysQGI
The Who and Roger Waters played on night 3 (October 17), with The Desert Sun reporting that The Who’s set remained unchanged from the previous week. The paper also reports that a pro-Israel group, StandWithUs, announced it would hire a plane to pull a lit banner during Waters’ set saying, “Support Israeli-Palestinian Peace, Not Hateful Boycotts.”
“No fear”, Nina Simone replies when she is asked, during an archive interview included in Liz Garbus’s film of her life, what freedom means to her. “No fear.” Only a few minutes into the Oscar-nominated documentary, there is already a powerful awareness of what it really meant to grow up o...
“No fear”, Nina Simone replies when she is asked, during an archive interview included in Liz Garbus’s film of her life, what freedom means to her. “No fear.” Only a few minutes into the Oscar-nominated documentary, there is already a powerful awareness of what it really meant to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, and how that pervasive fearfulness might have affected a hypersensitive and uncommonly gifted person lacking a full complement of the layers of mental cladding necessary to protect her against a sense of injustice and persecution.
Simone became as famous for her erratic behaviour on stage as for the talent that might have made her the first black female classical pianist to play at Carnegie Hall – her childhood ambition – but instead brought her acclaim as one of the finest popular singers of the 20th century, the peer of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. The occasional public tantrums and the baleful glare with which she often transfixed her listeners brought her a gruesome brand of celebrity, the sort that can encourages an audience to buy tickets to watch a train wreck.
Eventually, in her mid-fifties, Simone was told by a doctor in Holland that she suffered from bi-polar disorder (formerly known as manic depression). Her friends were informed that the prescribed medication, an anti-psychotic drug known as Trilafon, would eventually impair her motor skills, including her ability to play the piano: just another of the tragedies, great and small, that punctuated a life of the woman who was born Eunice Waymon in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, a community in the Blue Ridge Mountains where one of the churches still includes windows and furnishings from a slave chapel, and who died 70 years later in her villa among the pines in Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside town in the south of France.
Garbus’s Netflix film was made with the assistance of Lisa Stroud, the singer’s daughter, who is credited among the executive producers. Now known in her own performing career as Lisa Simone, she speaks candidly about a mother whose capacity for love was never in doubt but whose parenting skills fluctuated with her moods. Other valuable testimony comes from the guitarist Al Schackman, Nina Simone’s long-time accompanist and musical director; the promoter George Wein, who presented her at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960; and, in an interview recorded in 2006, Andy Stroud, the NYPD detective who married her in 1961, when her career was taking wing, and handed in his badge in order become her manager. “He knew what he wanted and he just took over,” she says.
They settled in a 13-room mansion with four acres of land in Mount Vernon, New York, where Lisa was born. But Stroud is notorious for an incident in which, as recounted here by Simone, he beat up his wife in the street before taking her indoors, tying her up and raping her. “Andy protected me against everybody but himself,” she says. Although the singer’s handwritten diaries are used to provide eloquent evidence for the turbulence that undermined her life, there is nevertheless a sense of veils sometimes being drawn, particularly over her liaisons after leaving the US for exile in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland and ultimately France. But then two hours is nowhere near enough to tell the full story of a complicated life with so many interrelated personal and professional facets.
Apart from evidence of her incomparable musical gifts, the film is strongest on Simone’s relationship with the civil rights movement, which provided a channel for the feelings first aroused when she was denied – on racial grounds, she believed – a place to study classical piano at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and in which her friendships spanned the spectrum from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael. “How can you be an artist,” she asks, “and not reflect the times?” No one did more than her, in responding to the Birmingham church bombing of 1964 by writing “Mississippi Goddam”, and in subsequently adapting the words of the poet Langston Hughes for “Backlash Blues” and the playright Lorraine Hansbury for “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, to give the movement its anthems.
Stroud describes her as having been “sidetracked” by these new concerns during the latter years of their marriage. “She was putting down white people like a barking dog,” he says dismissively, “but she still wanted the good things.” To which, at this end of this often harrowing film, one can only reply, why the hell not?
Extras: 6/10 Interviews with family, friends and colleagues including Lisa Simone, Al Schackman and Dick Gregory.
The breakthrough film for British director Andrea Arnold was Wasp, an Oscar-winning short about a single mother struggling with her four children in a dull dormitory suburb.
Arnold’s latest film, American Honey, follows another teenager whose life is at a dead end – Star (Saska Lane) – who an...
The breakthrough film for British director Andrea Arnold was Wasp, an Oscar-winning short about a single mother struggling with her four children in a dull dormitory suburb.
Arnold’s latest film, American Honey, follows another teenager whose life is at a dead end – Star (Saska Lane) – who anticipates freedom and excitement when she joins a crew of college-age kids travelling across America selling magazine subscriptions. “We do more than work,” Star is told. “We explore America, we party!”
Their foreman is the charismatic Jake (Shia LaBoeuf), and Star is immediately drawn to him. For the next three hours, Arnold follows her gang of hard partying hustlers as they freewheel their way round motels and car parks in the Midwest.
The film’s first hour is the most cohesive – at times, American Honey resembles social documentary, as the Dartford-born Arnold lets her camera linger on stray dogs pawing the ground outside a motel on the outskirts of Kansas City, or frames middle-aged, overweight couples line dancing in Oklahoma.
Despite a spirited performance from Lane as Star – whose outward defiance masks a deep-rooted vulnerability – there is little to anchor the film. Conflict between Star and Jake’s tough-as-nails white trash boss Krystal (Riley Keough; Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) is strung along. The cycle of travelling, selling and partying becomes repetitive It is best, perhaps, to enjoy the dynamic cinematography by Robbie Ryan, who brings colours to life with burning intensity; his night scenes, particularly, find Arnold’s feral brood whooping it up round ad hoc bonfires, wild things caught in silvery moonlit tones.
