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Introducing the new issue of Uncut

John Mulvey
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Introducing the new issue of Uncut
The action captured in this month's Uncut - on sale today in the UK - takes in a wide range of locations. There is a castle in Hollywood, and a place down the road in Malibu Canyon, where a housekeeper burns sage in deference to the tastes of an auspicious house guest, Neil Young. We interrupt Kenne...

The action captured in this month’s Uncut – on sale today in the UK – takes in a wide range of locations. There is a castle in Hollywood, and a place down the road in Malibu Canyon, where a housekeeper burns sage in deference to the tastes of an auspicious house guest, Neil Young. We interrupt Kenney Jones’ tractor driving at his polo club, and learn some useful FBI tips from Jeff Beck on how to make your London flat secure from prying eyes. There is a long train journey to Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel, San Antonio, where Robert Johnson once recorded, and a return visit to Hansa Studios, and the debauched West Berlin of the 1980s.

Perhaps most potently, though, the estimable new guitar virtuoso, Steve Gunn, takes Uncut’s Rob Mitchum to that most sacred of spaces: a second-hand record fair. Gunn, it transpires, is very much a man after our own heart, an insatiable record collector whose devotions range from the canonical to the most eclectic obscurities. He becomes fannishly shy when spotting Lenny Kaye across the stalls at the WFMU Record Fair in Brooklyn, then goes on to buy a diverse clutch of albums by Ian A Anderson, Brij Bhushan Kabra, Anthony Braxton and Joshua Burkett (I can strongly recommend the last of these, but you can read Gunn’s enthusiastic footnotes to all his purchases in the new issue).

As ever, then, this issue of Uncut shapes up as a selection of new angles on and insights from our established heroes – Neil Young, Love, Jeff Beck, The Small Faces, Mick Harvey, Billy Bragg, Jimmy Webb among them – alongside new stars and lost voices who operate in a similar rich tradition. Who knew, for example, the story of how a shipload of synths turned up on one of the remote Cape Verde islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, in the spring of 1968? You can read the full story from Piers Martin, hear an example of the antic kosmische music they enabled – alongside Bat For Lashes, Plaid, Idris Ackamoor, The Julie Ruin, The Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Rhyton, Sara Watkins and loads more – on this month’s free CD .

Every month, the plan is to share a wealth of musical discoveries. Here’s the saxophonist Kamasi Washington talking about Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, from this month’s My Life In Music feature. “In popular music these days, the notion is that you have to be simple and bland to appeal to mass audiences,” Washington tells us. “I think this record is anything but that. It’s going to live beyond itself. It’s not just a great record, it’s an important record. Does it inspire me? Yes, it does.”

 

 

Watch the trailer for new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years

Michael Bonner
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Watch the trailer for new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years
The first trailer for the new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years, has been released; you can watch it below. Featuring rare and exclusive footage, the film is directed by Ron Howard and will focus on the time period from the early Beatles’ journey in the days of The C...

The first trailer for the new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years, has been released; you can watch it below.

Featuring rare and exclusive footage, the film is directed by Ron Howard and will focus on the time period from the early Beatles’ journey in the days of The Cavern Club in Liverpool to their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966.

The film receives its world premier at London’s Leicester Square on September 15, 2016; it will play in cinemas for one night only. It will also premier in France and Germany on the same date, in Australia and New Zealand September 16 and then on September 17 it will begin streaming on Hula in the United States.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

“The Beach Boys are trying to destroy me!”

John Mulvey
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“The Beach Boys are trying to destroy me!”
Today (June 20) is Brian Wilson's birthday, so it seemed like a good time to post this piece I did with him (and Van Dyke Parks and Andy Paley) back in 1995. Wilson has a latterday reputation as not the most rewarding of interviewees, but I'm pretty sure this is the most revealing piece I've ever be...

Afterwards, sitting outside Brian Wilson’s house, staring out over the valley, David Leaf says that Brian changes his opinions all the time, that what we just heard was only representative of what he thought and felt today, this lunchtime. “Later,” he says, “he might sit down and write a song specifically for The Beach Boys.”

Plainly, his indecisiveness is actually a tremendous volatility. And seeing someone still so patently talented being torn apart by what is, ultimately, fairly trivial shit, is awfully sad.

But then again, he is an ill man who appears, for once, to be being properly looked after. As Melinda said: “Basically, we call a spade a spade now; it’s Brian suffering from depression. Before, people tried to hide it. You don’t have to be afraid to tell somebody that you’re hearing a voice in your head.”

The old stories about Brian Wilson finding incredible solace in his music are all true, and the things he says shows that he has at least some perspective and a tenacious grip on reality; his own situation is far stronger than many people are prepared to give him credit for.

“If I’m scared, I’m gonna be good scared,” he says. “ I don’t wanna be fucking scared. Not this bullshit about I can’t do it, I can’t walk out my door, I’m afraid of The Rolling Stones, I’m afraid of Phil Spector. That’s bullshit. Life is a big scare test for me.”

“You wanna hear the tip of all tips? To hear it is to handle it. I figured that out. I was going through a lot of hell, a lot of confusion, a lot of sorrow, right? And I was hearing things, I’d hear a record on the radio or I heard someone talking and I said to myself: ‘To hear it is to handle it.’ I finally got that, ‘cos before’ I could hear it and I couldn’t handle it. So if I can handle what I hear, hey! Fuck you, I’m gonna be cool – that’s all there is to it. It’s a heavy-duty thing but, believe me, it doesn’t take much, man.

“It just takes a slight, little voice, a slight, little idea to make my whole fucking day… that’s all.”

Neil Young’s Earth reviewed

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young’s Earth reviewed
Neil Young’s latest album arrived trailed by a typically unconventional explanation. “We made a live record and every creature on the planet seemed to show up,” Young marvelled on his Facebook page. “Suddenly all the living things of Earth were in the audience going crazy… Earth's creature...

Neil Young’s latest album arrived trailed by a typically unconventional explanation. “We made a live record and every creature on the planet seemed to show up,” Young marvelled on his Facebook page. “Suddenly all the living things of Earth were in the audience going crazy… Earth’s creatures let loose, there were Bee breakdowns, Bird breakdowns and yes, even Wall Street breakdowns, jamming with me and Promise of the Real!”

Earth, then, is the latest broadside in Young’s lengthy, quixotic history of eco-activism that stretches back to 1970’s After The Gold Rush. It is also explicitly linked to last year’s studio album The Monsanto Years, which found Young railing at the bankers “too rich to jail” and the McCorporations who dominate the agricultural industry. He was joined in this latest skirmish by a new backing band, Promise Of The Real – led by Willie Nelson’s sons, Lukas and Micah – who subsequently joined Young on his Rebel Content tour that reaches Europe next month.

Earth is a document of the Rebel Content tour; though it comes with caveats. There are overdubs, Auto-Tune and, most conspicuously of all, songs have been overlaid with animal sounds. You’ll meet an army of frogs who croak contentedly at the end of “Mother Earth”, a flock of geese who rudely honk their way through “Country Home” and a swarm of bees buzzing enthusiastically during the breakdown in “People Want To Hear About Love”. The result pitches Young somewhere between King Lear and David Attenborough: a volatile, intransigent patriarch and doughty champion of the natural world, whose beloved landscape is gradually being eroded by the doctrines of the free market.

Critically, the Rebel Content tour found Young appearing so invigorated by the flexibility of his new charges that he dusted down a number of significant rarities from the cupboard: “Alabama”, “Here We Are In The Years” and “Time Fades Away” among them. Several, like “Vampire Blues”, had not been performed live since the early ’70s. Admittedly, few of these deep cuts make the album’s tracklisting. Instead, Earth loosely traces the arc of Young’s environmental concerns from the 1970s to the present day, corralling together like-minded songs from across the decades. “Vampire Blues” is an assault on the rapacious oil industry, “Country Home” extols the pleasures of rural living while Young’s dreamy sci-fi parable “After The Gold Rush” prophesies environmental catastrophe. Even the Crosby-baiting “Hippie Dream” evokes a bucolic time “when the river was wide and the water came running down”, before it reaches its grim denouement “in an ether-filled room of meat-hooks”.

Hearing a near-run of “Western Hero”, “Hippie Dream”, “Vampire Blues” and “Human Highway” – the deepest cuts here – is genuinely thrilling. Promise Of The Real are respectful of the source but not excessively deferential. They bring agility and a lithe muscularity to the songs. On “Wolf Moon”, they recall the folksy strum of the Stray Gators while on “People Want To Hear About Love” they get their heads down for a rugged Crazy Horse-style choogle. Young, clearly, is having a ball. He seems happy to allow some excitable squirrels nibble at “Vampire Blues” and he noticeably Auto-Tunes the backing vocals on “Western Hero”. It’s possible that Young is using Auto-Tune as a metaphor for genetic modification, artificially augmenting his own work to make a point.

Young has done this kind of thing before – Rust Never Sleeps (making its DVD and Blu-ray debut this month along with Human Highway) was heavily overdubbed in the studio after the initial shows at San Francisco’s Boarding House – but clearly not to this level. The new harmonies Young furnishes “After The Gold Rush” with are spectacular – serene and hymnal – while Young overdubs the original French horn part from the studio album before field recordings of a dawn chorus play the song out. That said, he’s like a kid at Christmas with the effects. Especially on “Big Box”, whose feedback-drenched climax gives way to birds cawing, the parp of a car horn, cattle lowing, wind whistles and the sound of rocket fire and explosions – all in the last 30 seconds. It feels like the aural equivalent of the onstage theatrics he used for the Alchemy tour – the scurrying scientists and technicians, the crumbled balls of paper blown across the stage like tumbleweed. You might wonder why Young would mess around with some of his best-loved songs in this way. But then you might similarly wonder why he decided to release an album recorded in an antique Voice-O-Graph booth at the same time as he was promoting a high-end 24-bit 192khz audio player. It’s Neil’s world, we just live in it.

The set ends with a propulsive 28-minute version of “Love And Only Love”. At one point, the song fades into soft, ambient tones before waves of feedback rise up and it resembles the apocalyptic live coda to “Walk Like A Giant”. Props to drummer Anthony Logerfo and bassist Corey McCormick for holding it together over such distance. The skills displayed by Promise Of The Real on this album tacitly query whether Young really needs to call again on his faithful old lieutenants, Crazy Horse. This younger, sprightlier outfit may not have the iconic heft of Crazy Horse but they offer Young the opportunity to cover more ground. It would be a shame if the Horse didn’t at least get the valedictory tour that guitarist “Poncho” Sampredro hoped would happen when we spoke to him for our January 2015 issue. “Most people turn a corner, Neil ricochets,” he told us. True, that. But as the farmyard chorus cluck, whinny, squawk and chirp their approval at the album’s close, it’s possible that Young is enjoying forward momentum with Promise Of The Real. Maybe the horse braying appreciatively during “Country Home” isn’t a metaphor, after all.

Neil Young is on the cover of the new issue of Uncut, which is UK shops from Tuesday, June 21

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Lera Lynn – Resistor

Rob Hughes
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Lera Lynn – Resistor
It’s remarkable how TV themes can transform an artist’s fortunes, especially when it comes to True Detective. The acclaimed first season of the HBO drama took “Far From Any Road”, an obscure Handsome Family tune that was already over ten years old by 2014, and hoisted the cult duo onto the i...

It’s remarkable how TV themes can transform an artist’s fortunes, especially when it comes to True Detective. The acclaimed first season of the HBO drama took “Far From Any Road”, an obscure Handsome Family tune that was already over ten years old by 2014, and hoisted the cult duo onto the international stage. Within months, and umpteen millions of social media hits later, the song had been co-opted by Guns N’Roses as intro music for their world tour and, altogether more impressively, achieved the ultimate pop culture accolade by fetching up on an episode of The Simpsons. For a band who align themselves to the decidedly uncommercial world of Doc Boggs and Harry Smith, it wasn’t bad going at all.

A similar fate befell Lera Lynn last year. She might not yet have made it to the fictional environs of Springfield, but the general consensus is that the Nashville singer-songwriter was the best thing about True Detective’s otherwise patchy second series. Her appearance as the resident turn in a near-empty bar, dispensing sad-slow songs through the creeping gloom of the Black Rose, brought her a fair chunk of mainstream attention. By September she was undertaking her first major headline tour of the US and had just signed a new global publishing deal.

Newcomers to her music might’ve been forgiven for thinking that Lynn had sprung from nowhere. In truth, she’s been around for a while. 2011 debut Have You Met Lera Lynn?, recorded while the Texas-born singer was still living in Georgia, where she’d been raised, was a bewitching set that adhered to the same old-school Patsy-and-Loretta values as fellow countryphiles like Neko Case or Caitlin Rose. Then it all went quiet as Lynn regrouped her thoughts and upped sticks for Nashville, casting around for new management and a fresh backing band.

Finally, in 2014, she emerged with an EP, “Lying In The Sun”, and an overdue second album, The Avenues. Both offered ample evidence that she’d lost none of her powers, allied to a newfound sense of dislocation in songs that twanged and cried steel with persuasive grace.

It’s tempting to think that the True Detective experience has, to some degree, fed its way into her latest opus, Resistor. Certainly, it’s rich in atmosphere, Lynn and co-producer Joshua Grange evoking the kind of torchy, spectral noir that informs the best work of Cowboy Junkies or Mazzy Star. But there’s also a less tangible, sinister element at play here, as if everything has been tilted slightly off centre. The house of shadows that is “Run The Night”, for instance, carries a cockeyed piano refrain that sounds like a backwards lullaby, serving as a neat signifier for the album itself. Many of these songs are similarly ambiguous, at least from a lyrical drift. Lynn often portrays romantic love as a scarred province where betrayal and deceit are as common as tenderness and lust. Hard metaphors drive home the point: gunpowder, arrows, blades, chains and the like.

The key musical flavours are Grange’s tremolo guitar, an agent of tone and mood rather than straight-up riffing, and Lynn’s expertly weighted voice. Between them, and in keeping with the spontaneous nature of the album sessions, they tackle every instrument on Resistor, with the exception of Robby Handley’s bass. This tends to keep things taught and economical throughout, a knobbly bassline enough to convey the tension of “What You Done”, with Lynn’s drawled words hinting at some terrible buried secret. “Slow Motion Countdown”, too, is an ominous waltz marked by the soft tick of guitar and a measured beat that feels like someone slapping a heavy fist at the door.

There are nimble changes of temperature as well. Opener “Shape Shifter” is a punchy piece of leftfield-ish rock with Lynn in strident mode. As is “Drive”, a highway song of escape whose baritone guitar and insistent groove echo the idea of wheels burning across cool midnight tarmac.

One of the most arresting moments is “For The Last Time”, which traces the passage through life of someone nearing their endgame. “They’ll roll her down the hall tonight/For the last time”, Lynn sings with open-throated abandon. “Nearly a century done/Love, life, gain, loss… It’s a rough road on this way out.” Accented by wordless harmonies, it was written, Lynn says, for her late grandmother. Like most everything on this beguiling album of minor-key pleasures, it’s blessed with both stoic resolve and real emotional heft. Not to mention a very singular, haunted allure.

Q&A
LERA LYNN
What made you go for a more experimental approach this time around?
The plan was to just try different things, which meant that the record ended up taking on a style and sound of its own. Joshua and I had a really clear vision of the production style and the approach to the instruments. For example, we didn’t want to use a drummer because we didn’t want the muscle memory of it. We wanted something that was very simple instead. So that was me in a lot of instances. I’m not a drummer, but I can lay down a beat.

There seems to be a lot of break-up songs with hard metaphors of guns and arrows…
I was thinking of the double-edged sword of love, these gifts that are meant to express admiration but which are cutting you and hurting you. It does feel like there are some similar sentiments being expressed along those lines, kind of hanging onto the last shred of hope and love. Am I writing from experience? Yes and no!

Has True Detective made a noticeable difference to your profile in the States?
It certainly has. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is in touring. Many more people are coming to the shows and I guess they’re buying records as well. It’s been really helpful for me, because not having a major label means it’s difficult to gain the level of exposure that you need to make this career sustainable. It’s inspiring to discover that there’s an appreciation of more introspective and unsettling music out there.
INTERVIEW: ROB HUGHES

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

End Of The Road Festival: latest news update

Michael Bonner
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End Of The Road Festival: latest news update
The End Of The Road festival have announced more details of this year's event, which runs from September 1 - 4 at Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset. Ezra Furman, Beak>, Teleman and John Johanna have been added to the bill. The Shins will open the festival and play their first UK show in over four yea...

The End Of The Road festival have announced more details of this year’s event, which runs from September 1 – 4 at Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset.

Ezra Furman, Beak>, Teleman and John Johanna have been added to the bill.

The Shins will open the festival and play their first UK show in over four years on The Woods Stage on Thursday night.

Animal Collective will headline The Woods Stage on Friday night, Bat For Lashes on Saturday while Joanna Newsom will close The Woods Stage on Sunday – playing her only UK festival this year.

Meanwhile Beak> headline the Big Top on Friday, Steve Mason on the Saturday and Teenage Fanclub on the Sunday.

Headliners on the Garden Stage are Cat Power (Friday), Ezra Furman (Saturday) and Thee Oh Sees (Sunday).

Uncut will be hosting events in the Tipi Tent Stage again this year; check back here for updates.

You can find more details about tickets and the line-up at the festival’s website.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Brian Eno and Johnny Marr urge UK citizens to vote against Brexit

Michael Bonner
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Brian Eno and Johnny Marr urge UK citizens to vote against Brexit
Brian Eno is among a number of musicians to urge British citizens to vote to remain in the European Union at Thursday's referendum. Posting on his Facebook page, Eno wrote, “I have a lot of misgivings about the way the EU is run, but they don’t make me want to ditch the whole idea. I feel the E...

Brian Eno is among a number of musicians to urge British citizens to vote to remain in the European Union at Thursday’s referendum.

Posting on his Facebook page, Eno wrote, “I have a lot of misgivings about the way the EU is run, but they don’t make me want to ditch the whole idea. I feel the EU is one of the only restraints on the kind of neo-liberal market fundamentalism that has seen inequality rising throughout the world. I feel that it has been a net force for good in promoting enlightened social and environmental agendas. It could and should be doing a better job at all these things, but to do any job at all it needs our support.”

He added: “The only good outcome of this referendum is that it might remind us what the original mission of the EU was, and might motivate us to actually make it happen.”

Meanwhile, Johnny Marr has spoken out about the tactics of the Leave campaign, comparing UKIP’s “breaking point” poster to Nazi propaganda.

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Morrissey berates Buzzcocks for McDonald’s ad

Michael Bonner
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Morrissey berates Buzzcocks for McDonald’s ad
Morrissey has launched a scathing attack against Buzzcocks for allowing their song "What Do I Get?" to appear on a TV commercial for McDonald's. A noted vegetarian, Morrissey took to his quasi-official website, True To You to criticise the ad. "Please, somebody, tell me it's just a bad dream ...,"...

Morrissey has launched a scathing attack against Buzzcocks for allowing their song “What Do I Get?” to appear on a TV commercial for McDonald’s.

A noted vegetarian, Morrissey took to his quasi-official website, True To You to criticise the ad.

“Please, somebody, tell me it’s just a bad dream …,” he wrote.

“Pete Shelley has allowed McDonald’s to use Buzzcocks’ What do I get? to TV advertise McDonald’s new Big Flavour (the flavour being sawdust) Chicken Wraps?!

“In the words of another Buzzcocks song: oh shit…”

The ad features on the website for Campaign.

According to the description, “The ad features a young man pulling up to a McDonald’s drive through, where he meets and becomes enamoured by the teen punk who serves him.”

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

David Bowie tribute to headline Glastonbury’s Park Stage

Michael Bonner
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David Bowie tribute to headline Glastonbury’s Park Stage
An orchestral tribute to David Bowie is set to headline the Park Stage at Glastonbury this weekend. In a special collaboration for the festival, Philip Glass’s Heroes Symphony will be performed by a classical ensemble featuring Army of Generals and members of the British Paraorchestra, conducted ...

An orchestral tribute to David Bowie is set to headline the Park Stage at Glastonbury this weekend.

In a special collaboration for the festival, Philip Glass’s Heroes Symphony will be performed by a classical ensemble featuring Army of Generals and members of the British Paraorchestra, conducted by Charles Hazlewood.

The performance will be complimented by an immersive light performance by light artist, Chris Levine.

Said Glass, “When Charles Hazlewood told me of his plan to take my Heroes Symphony to Glastonbury, I was delighted. It’s very exciting to think of it playing – at the midnight hour – out across the parkland, a true celebration of Bowie. I am so very pleased members of the British Paraorchestra and Chris Levine’s epic iy_project light performance will be part of it – what a spectacular collaboration.

“This is sound and vision Bowie-style!!”

Glass’ Heroes Symphony was composed in 1996.

“I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the seismic shock experienced by millions of us at the news of David Bowie’s death,” Hazlewood. “Literally the last thing anyone imagined, I mean, Bowie was forever, right? Speaking personally he was a cornerstone of my life, a fundamental, as important as Mozart, and for me, that is saying a lot.

“In wondering how to come to terms with it – and as a musician, what music I might play which reflected both my agonised numbness at his passing, and the sheer lust-for-life joy his music has always given me – I realised with a leaping heart that we must play Philip Glass’s Heroes Symphony! Here is a wonderfully intense symphonic journey, which takes the musical essence of Bowie’s Heroes, and re-expresses it through Glass’s un-mistakable and hypnotic brand of alchemy: a 45 minute symphonic meditation setting the ghosts of Bowie’s (and Eno’s) creation in poetic, shining relief, through the filter of another, equally iconoclastic and unique genius.

“Bowie was a huge fan of Glass, citing him as a primary influence. If Bowie had any interest in what might be played by all of us after he’d gone, then I reckon a world class orchestra breathing fire into Glass’s Heroes Symphony would make him very happy indeed. And with the added genius of laser virtuoso Chris Levine creating a visual counterpoint to Glass’s luminescent textures, this will be the most extraordinary sound and vision ever witnessed at Glastonbury.”

The August 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Neil Young, plus the Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Arthur Lee and Love, Jimmy Webb, Ultravox!, Radiohead, Steve Gunn, Mick Harvey, Fleetwood Mac, Ramones, William Burroughs, Bat For Lashes, Bruce Springsteen and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Peter Gabriel releases new song, “I’m Amazing”

Michael Bonner
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Peter Gabriel releases new song, “I’m Amazing”
Peter Gabriel has today released a new song, "I’m Amazing". The track, inspired by the life of Muhammad Ali, was published on Gabriel’s YouTube channel this morning (June 17). The 7-minute track is his first new material since “Show Yourself” appeared in the 2013 live album and film Bac...

Peter Gabriel has today released a new song, “I’m Amazing”.

The track, inspired by the life of Muhammad Ali, was published on Gabriel’s YouTube channel this morning (June 17).

The 7-minute track is his first new material since “Show Yourself” appeared in the 2013 live album and film Back To Front: Live in London.

“I wrote [I’m Amazing] a few years back, which was, in part, inspired by Muhammad Ali’s life and struggles,” said Gabriel in a press release. “At the time of his death, when so many people are celebrating his life and thinking about all he achieved, it seemed the right time to release it.”

On Tuesday, Gabriel embarks on a tour of the USA/Canada, performing together and apart with Sting. The pair last toured together with Amnesty International in 1986 and 1988. In a video announcing the tour dates, Gabriel promises fans “something unfamiliar as well as the hits”.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Wilko Johnson: “After Going Back Home, I would like to make more albums”

Tom Pinnock
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Wilko Johnson: “After Going Back Home, I would like to make more albums”
Wilko Johnson would love to make a follow-up to 2014's Going Back Home, recorded with The Who's Roger Daltrey, he tells us in the current issue of Uncut, dated July 2016 and out now. The guitarist and songwriter discusses the best albums of his career, from Dr Feelgood's 1975 debut, Down By The Jet...

Wilko Johnson would love to make a follow-up to 2014’s Going Back Home, recorded with The Who’s Roger Daltrey, he tells us in the current issue of Uncut, dated July 2016 and out now.

The guitarist and songwriter discusses the best albums of his career, from Dr Feelgood’s 1975 debut, Down By The Jetty, and Ian Dury & The Blockheads’ Laughter (1980), right up to Going Back Home.

“We’re doing a little tour at the moment,” Johnson says, “and the gigs have just been going so well. I’m having a really good time playing. I would like to make more albums in fact, though at the minute I have been rather preoccupied with writing that book [Wilko’s autobiography, Don’t You Leave Me Here: My Life].

“The feelings I got, the highs I got off it,” he explains, discussing the supposedly terminal cancer he was given the all-clear from, “thinking, ‘Wow, I’m going to leave this world’, and then looking at the world around you thinking, ‘Oh God! Ain’t it fantastic!'”

Don’t You Leave Me Here: A Life is out now on Little, Brown.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The National, Grizzly Bear and more on their all-star Grateful Dead tribute album

Rob Mitchum
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The National, Grizzly Bear and more on their all-star Grateful Dead tribute album
Five years in the making, The National’s mammoth all-star tribute to the Grateful Dead is finally complete. Uncut talks to the many and varied artists – among them My Morning Jacket, Lee Ranaldo, Yo La Tengo, Grizzly Bear and Dead outrider Bruce Hornsby – about the enduring power of Garcia and...

At five and a half hours – the length of a marathon late-’60s Dead show at the Fillmore – actually putting out Day Of The Dead presented a dilemma. After considering non-traditional release methods such as an App or mini-albums, the Dessners broke the collection into three volumes, “Thunder”, “Lightning” and “Sunshine”. Taken all together, the sequencing roughly follows the contours of a typical Dead show, with folkier material up front giving way to spacier excursions. The material will also get a one-off live celebration, at this summer’s Eaux Claires Festival in Wisconsin, where many of the participants will already be gathered for their own sets, from younger acts such as Lucius and Unknown Mortal Orchestra to one semi-official member of the Dead, Bruce Hornsby. He is the lone carryover from the last major tribute to the Dead, 1991’s Deadicated, which featured mostly mainstream rock peers of the band such as Elvis Costello and Los Lobos remaking their most radio-friendly material. On Day Of The Dead, Hornsby bridges the generational gap on a hazy sunset version of “Black Muddy River” performed with Justin Vernon’s reunited first band, DeYarmond Edison.

For Hornsby, who played over 100 shows with the Dead in the late ’80s/early ’90s, indie rock is just the latest frontier for the Dead’s influence, which he has already watched seep into Americana and jazz scenes. “Clearly the Dead music, the reach of it is broadening, it’s widening, more young artists are discovering it,” Hornsby says. “And really, it’s easy to see why… they have fully 50 great songs to me, and another 100-150 very good ones. I’m not surprised it’s catching on.

“The Dead were totally intellectually curious on a musical level, that’s what interesting to me,” Hornsby continued. “They are so broad and so deep and their influences ranged far afield from Reverend Gary Davis, to Milton Babbitt and electronic classical music. People just have no idea of the scope of it unless they really check it out.”

Certain performances suggest the Dead had already crept into the DNA of indie rock without anyone noticing. Kurt Vile And The Violators’ extra-faithful “Box Of Rain” and The War On Drugs’ ’80s-period-appropriate take on “Touch Of Grey” both could fit right into the bands’ recent albums with ease. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks’ giddy, sloppy “China Cat Sunflower”/“I Know You Rider” equally evokes the Dead’s brash early period and the ramshackle sound of indie legends Pavement – two bands that rarely share the same sentence. “Over the years, the Dead were often put down by punk rockers, indie rockers and later generations for being slack and for the long noodly jams at the shows,” says Lee Ranaldo. “But the thing that is often overlooked is what amazing songs they wrote – and how many. Hearing all these ‘youngsters’ covering their music brought home how amazing their songbook was.”

Whether Day Of The Dead will further crack open that window on the band remains to be seen. But in the aftermath of the Dead’s 50th anniversary celebrations, with yet another semi-reunion on the road (Dead & Company, with John Mayer in the Jerry role), and a cultural footprint that continues to resist erosion, the compilation comes at a propitious time to help establish the next chapter of the Grateful Dead’s legacy and following. “I think this could be a bridge in a way, to hear this stuff interpreted by artists and people that have spent a lot of time with the Dead’s music and hear it done with such love and care,” Dessner says. “All this is about the future of this music.”

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The Allman Brothers Band – Live From A&R Studios, New York

Bud Scoppa
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The Allman Brothers Band – Live From A&R Studios, New York
The Allmans became New York City’s adopted house band in 1971, thanks primarily to Bill Graham, who booked them into the Fillmore East whenever possible. On August 26, two months after headlining the venue’s closing weekend and a month after the release of their breakout LP At Fillmore East, the...

The Allmans became New York City’s adopted house band in 1971, thanks primarily to Bill Graham, who booked them into the Fillmore East whenever possible. On August 26, two months after headlining the venue’s closing weekend and a month after the release of their breakout LP At Fillmore East, the bandmembers set up as they would for a session in the big tracking room of Phil Ramone’s A&R Studios for a live broadcast on free-form New York station WPLJ, with the renowned producer personally recording the set to eight-track tape.

During the 67-minute performance, the road-tested, high-revving band were firing on all six cylinders, emphatically displaying their unique approach, a seamless fusion of tightly structured roadhouse blues and adventurous, musically elevated improvisation at once primal and sophisticated. The Allmans’ instrumental makeup – two guitars, two drum kits, bass and keys – and their ability to launch into epic explorations out of the song framework had been pioneered by the Grateful Dead, but nobody, not even the Dead themselves, could touch this heady, virtuosic crew on the concert stage, as denizens of the Fillmore East had discovered to their mind-blown delight during the previous year and a half.

The broadcast has been heavily booted from compressed off-the-air recordings, triggering endless debates among the fanatics as to whether the A&R Studios performance rivals or trumps the At Fillmore East and closing Fillmore shows. Now, with the first official release of the recording, newly mixed from the multi-tracks, we can finally compare them on a level playing field. Ramone’s sound is tighter and drier than Tom Dowd’s bright, reverberant Fillmore recordings, bringing a greater sense of intimacy to the interaction, and mix engineer Suha Gur has wisely placed Duane Allman and Dickey Betts’ guitars to the left and right channels, respectively, bringing enhanced drama to their enthralling give and take, and inviting headphone geek-outs. Unlike their stage setup, the players arranged themselves in a semicircle, enabling them to closely follow each other’s moves, rendering the interaction even more nuanced. The resulting performance is as close to perfection as the original lineup ever achieved.

Bandleader Duane Allman’s setlist for the broadcast mirrored what The ABB played in their live performances throughout 1971, but the climactic “Whipping Post”, which stretched to 23 minutes on At Fillmore East, was dropped because of time restraints. You can sense the players warming up their musical muscles on the standard set opener, Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues”, before kicking into gear on Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More”, with its strutting groove and howling dual slides, which leads into a taut and fiery take on Gregg Allman’s “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’”.

In the Layla-like money solo that propels the number to its wild-ass payoff, Duane pulls back hard against the beat as if he had stick-um on his Coricidin bottleneck, and the band slows the groove right in sync. Here you get the distinct sense, which continues through the rest of the performance, that Duane is conducting the band with his Les Paul and his body language. Gregg switches from B3 to piano on Elmore James’ “Trouble No More”, the combination of his barrelhouse plinking and the second-line groove transporting the song from Chicago to New Orleans. The guitar interplay is especially delectable on a scalding run-through of the James-penned “One Way Out”, as Betts progressively jacks up the establishing riff while Duane darts in and out like an agitated wasp.

At this point, the band further ups the ante. Berry Oakley provides the glue throughout a sublime take on Betts’ instrumental “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed” with a percolating bassline that’s mathematically precise, McCartney-like in its melodiousness and deeply funky, as the band seamlessly rolls through the instrumental’s shifts in tone, texture and intensity. For my money, this is the definitive live version of the piece.

Gregg’s vocal and Duane’s slide solo conspire to bring a captivating soulfulness to the T-Bone Walker slow-blues mainstay “Stormy Monday”, deepening the mood at a serendipitous moment, just before Duane steps up to the mic and spontaneously pours his heart out in tribute to R’n’B sax great King Curtis, who’d been stabbed to death in front of his Manhattan apartment two weeks earlier. Duane and his fallen friend had done a lot of session work together, and both had played with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends during a previous WPLJ broadcast.

After raving about Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder’s performance of Curtis ’64 classic “Soul Serenade” at the funeral, Duane decides on the spot to do the song and figures out on the spot to combine it with Willie Cobb’s “You Don’t Love Me”, which the Allmans regularly performed, though it hadn’t been part of the night’s setlist. Thus begins a stunning 19-minute musical exorcism during which Duane leads his bandmates through the stages of grief in a medley that stands as one of the most emotionally withering performances of his all-too-brief career. From there, they close the set with a rendition of the band-composed “Hot’ lanta”, reaching a free-jazz-like intensity in an ecstatic expression of release.

The A&R Studios set would be Duane’s final performance in the city where he’d cemented his greatness. Two months later, on October 29, the 24-year-old artist died when he lost control of his Harley back home in Macon, just after cashing his first ever royalty cheque.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The 20th Uncut Playlist Of 2016

John Mulvey
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The 20th Uncut Playlist Of 2016
Some songs that may, in a small way, act as a balm in these times of fear and derangement. Please especially check out the new tune from Scott Hirsch, who some of you may recognise as the regular bassist/engineer in Hiss Golden Messenger. Following William Tyler, Phil Cook et al, he's the latest mem...

Some songs that may, in a small way, act as a balm in these times of fear and derangement. Please especially check out the new tune from Scott Hirsch, who some of you may recognise as the regular bassist/engineer in Hiss Golden Messenger. Following William Tyler, Phil Cook et al, he’s the latest member of the extended Hiss family to branch out solo: if you liked the Golden Gunn collab with Steve Gunn, or indeed JJ Cale, this one may well be for you…

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

1 Ryley Walker – Golden Sings That Have Been Sung (Dead Oceans)

2 The Avalanches – Wildflower (XL)

3 Rosali – Good Life (Siltbreeze)

4 Tamam Shud – Evolution (Anthology)

5 Psychic Temple – Plays Music For Airports (Joyful Noise)

6 Head Technician – Zones (Ecstatic)

7 Marielle V Jakobsons – Star Core (Thrill Jockey)

8 Hans Chew – Unknown Sire (Divided By Zero)

9 Chris Abrahams – Fluid To The Influence (Room40)

10 Cass McCombs – Mangy Love (Anti-)

11 The Skiffle Players – Skifflin’ (Spiritual Pajamas)

12 Various Artists – Quiero Creedence (Decca)

13 Haley Bonar – Impossible Dream (Memphis Industries)

14 Teenage Fanclub – I’m In Love (PeMa)

15 Christine & The Queens – Chaleur Humaine (Because)

16 The Grateful Dead – Live At Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, CO 7/8/78 (Rhino)

17 Scott Hirsch – Blue Rider Songs (Scissortail)

18 Danny Brown – When It Rains (Warp)

19 Sarathy Korwar – Day To Day (Ninja Tune x Steve Reid Foundation)

20 Horse Lords – Interventions (Northern Spy)

21 Rafi Bookstaber – Late Summer (Woodsist)

22 Cool Ghouls – Animal Races (Melodic)

23 Sam Coomes – Bugger Me (Domino)

24 Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas – Autoimaginary (Drag City)

25 Hieroglyphic Being – The Discos Of Imhotep (Technicolour)

Anohni – Hopelessness

Louis Pattison
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Anohni – Hopelessness
As the 2016 US Election looms and the possibility of a President Trump draws closer like the clack of jackboots on a marble floor, the consensus from the centre-ground of American politics is that Barack Obama has done a reasonable job under difficult circumstances. But as the outgoing President vis...

As the 2016 US Election looms and the possibility of a President Trump draws closer like the clack of jackboots on a marble floor, the consensus from the centre-ground of American politics is that Barack Obama has done a reasonable job under difficult circumstances. But as the outgoing President visits Cuba and dances the tango with Michelle in Argentina, it pays to be reminded that, when considering the exercising of American might, a deeper and more nuanced story is there to be told.

On “Obama”, the sixth track on Anohni’s new album, Hopelessness, the artist formerly known as Antony Hegarty reads from the charge sheet: spying, execution without trial, the punishment and banishment of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. “Obama, Obama, Obama,” she chants. The backdrop is a miasma of pulsating bass and distorted radio static, but her tone is neither excoriating nor abrasive. Instead, “Obama” feels like a sort of contemporary spiritual: an aching lament for the optimism of 2008, and what happens when that collides with pragmatism and realpolitik. “All the hope drained from your face,” sings Anohni. “Like children we believed…”

Anohni is the new identity assumed by Antony Hegarty, the England-born, New York-based transgender artist and musician who came to wider attention when she won the Mercury Prize for I Am A Bird Now in 2005. The change in name coincides with a shift in style. Past records as Antony & The Johnsons have explored a sort of rich, operatic chamber music, but Hopelessness tears all that up like old linoleum, setting Anohni’s fluttering falsetto amid beats and electronic textures, hard and soft.

Assisting Anohni here are two new collaborators, Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke. Oneohtrix – real name Daniel Lopatin – is a Brooklyn-bred arch conceptualist whose avant electronica, influenced by philosophy and internet culture, has been dubbed “vaporwave”. Hudson Mohawke, meanwhile, is Ross Birchard, a Glaswegian producer who has ascended to the top table of hip-hop and R&B production, making beats for Kanye West and Azealia Banks, amongst others. This is, of course, not the first time Anohni has worked with electronic musicians: her friend Andy Butler invited her to sing on Hercules & Love Affair’s immaculate disco throwback “Blind”, a genuine UK Top 40 hit in March 2008. But Hopelessness seizes on this new sound palette of glimmering synths and boom-clap beats with gusto.

The first thing that hits you about Hopelessness is its sense of urgency. This is an album about rapacious consumerism, environmental destruction, the brutality of conflict, and our personal culpability in all of the above. But while you might fairly call some of Antony & The Johnsons’ past work introspective or esoteric, this album is bright and immediate, grabbing you by the lapels and demanding a response. Take opening track “Drone Bomb Me”. A whoosh of effervescent swells and snapping beats, it finds Anohni exploring images of masochism and Christ-like martyrdom. “Blow me from the mountains/And into the sea…” she sings. “Blow my head off/Explode my crystal guts/Lay my purple on the grass…” It is hideous and beautiful, both at once.

This sort of imagery – of extra-judicial killing, self-sacrifice and the brutal exertion of power – recurs throughout the album. “Execution” is a tenderly sung paean to state-sanctioned killing that finds Anohni pleading “have no mercy on me/Please don’t have mercy…” On “Watch Me”, a song about creeping surveillance, she serenades a Big Brother-like “Daddy” who has all her best interests at heart: “I know you love me/’Cause you’re always watching me.” Meanwhile, “Crisis” surveys the brutal recriminations of the War On Terror. In the hands of some, the breadth of its empathy might come across as naïve or facile: “If I tortured you brother, in Guantanamo/I’m sorry/Now you’re cutting heads off/Innocent people on TV…” But the song’s deeper message – that cycles of violence can only be broken by love and forgiveness – is difficult to fault, and it’s hard not to get swept up in those glittering plumes of electronics that guide the song to a gospel-tinged climax.

If sonically speaking, this feels like a clean break from Antony & The Johnsons, there are also plain points of continuity. On 2009’s The Crying Light, Hegarty drew lines between queer identity and the green movement, songs like “Everglade” and “Dust And Water” finding succor in the rhythms and geometries of nature. Hopelessness takes this affinity with the natural world and twists it into glossy trauma. “Why Did You Separate Me From The Earth” rages vainly against the forces that destroy our environment: oceans clogged with plastic, “the rotten bodies threaded gold”. On “Marrow”, human bodies are defiled: oil sucked from skin, hair burned, faces injected with chemotherapy. But perhaps the record’s most remarkable moment is “4 Degrees”. Taking its name from the amount climate scientists project that Earth will have warmed by the year 2100, it is deeply moving, conjuring terrible visions of animals “lying, crying in the fields” to an apocalyptic rhapsody of horns and booming war drums.

If the imagery employed on Hopelessness is often unflinching to the point of abhorrence, it merely highlights the terrible positions that we sleepwalk into daily. It also insulates the album’s message against accusations of finger-wagging or preachiness. If the world is fucked, Anohni is quick to acknowledge that she – and by virtue, all of us – are culpable. On “Drone Bomb Me”, calling down that firestorm she sings: “Let me be the first/I’m not so innocent/Let me be the one/The one that you choose from above/After all, I’m partly to blame…” The title track states its guilt more bluntly: “How did I become a virus?”

It may have been easy, in the past, to sideline or typecast the music of Antony Hegarty: this is niche music, outsider songs for safe spaces. But Hopelessness is bigger and bolder than that – an accessible album tabling the big questions, the sort that few artists and fewer politicians dare to tackle. Like all of Anohni’s music, it is a call for a shift in consciousness, to a warmer, more empathetic way of thinking – and one that feels more pressing than ever. Generous of spirit and cutting-edge of sound, Hopelessness is a statement for our times, and one that will not be easy to dismiss.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Robert Plant and Jimmy Page appear in court over “Stairway To Heaven” dispute

Michael Bonner
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Robert Plant and Jimmy Page appear in court over “Stairway To Heaven” dispute
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have appeared in court in California to deny plagiarising elements of their 1971 track “Stairway To Heaven”. Page and Plant are being sued by a trust representing a founding member of the band Spirit. Representatives of the Spirit guitarist Randy California, who died...

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have appeared in court in California to deny plagiarising elements of their 1971 track “Stairway To Heaven”.

Page and Plant are being sued by a trust representing a founding member of the band Spirit. Representatives of the Spirit guitarist Randy California, who died in 1997, claim that Led Zeppelin borrowed a distinctive down-picked guitar progression from the 1967 track “Taurus” when writing of “Stairway To Heaven”.

You can listen to the track below.

The BBC report that the band’s lawyer, Robert Anderson, claimed that the progression in question was a “descending chromatic line… something that appears in all kinds of songs”. It is a “commonplace” musical technique which “goes back centuries”.

Mr Anderson added: “[Page and Plant] created Stairway To Heaven independently without resort to Taurus or without copying anything in Taurus”.

The same BBC report describes Page and Plant as “relaxed and attentive” during the court case, stating that Page even “leaned back and closed his eyes, his head nodding gently” while the courtroom was played a recording of his 1971 track.

The trial is scheduled to last four or five days.

Robert Plant was forced to cancel his appearance at the Meltdown festival in order to attend the proceedings.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Bon Iver announce Hollywood Bowl show with Patti Smith

Michael Bonner
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Bon Iver announce Hollywood Bowl show with Patti Smith
Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver have announced a one-off headline date with Patti Smith at California's Hollywood Bowl. The show will take place on October 23, with Patti Smith & Her Band and Hiss Golden Messenger also on the bill. The show marks Bon Iver’s first headline gig in America since the ...

Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver have announced a one-off headline date with Patti Smith at California’s Hollywood Bowl.

The show will take place on October 23, with Patti Smith & Her Band and Hiss Golden Messenger also on the bill. The show marks Bon Iver’s first headline gig in America since the band’s appearances at the 2015 Eaux Claires Festival in Wisconsin.

This follows the band’s brief string of Asian dates, as well as four acoustic performances at the Sydney Opera House’s VIVID Live series. You can watch professionally shot footage of “Michicant”, “Heavenly Father”, and “Creature Fear” from these gigs below.

After announcing the news and details of a presale on Instagram, the band’s newly designed website seemed to crash with demand. The band tweeted: “sorry for any technical issues but everything is up and working now”.

Patti Smith, meanwhile, is currently on a world tour, performing her 1975 album Horses in full. On July 1, she will bring the performance to London’s British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Paul McCartney pays tribute to Wings guitarist, Henry McCullough

Michael Bonner
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Paul McCartney pays tribute to Wings guitarist, Henry McCullough
Paul McCartney has paid tribute to Wings guitarist Henry McCullough, who died aged 72. McCullough died on Tuesday [June 14] after a long illness. His live music agent Nigel Martyn said the guitarist never fully recovered from a severe heart attack suffered four years ago, reports The Guardian. In ...

Paul McCartney has paid tribute to Wings guitarist Henry McCullough, who died aged 72.

McCullough died on Tuesday [June 14] after a long illness. His live music agent Nigel Martyn said the guitarist never fully recovered from a severe heart attack suffered four years ago, reports The Guardian.

In an official statement, McCartney said, “I was very sad to hear that Henry McCullough, our great Wings guitarist, passed away today.

“He was a pleasure to work with, a super talented musician with a lovely sense of humour.

“The solo he played on ‘My Love’ was a classic that he made up on the spot in front of a live orchestra.

“Our deepest sympathies from my family to his.”

McCullough grew up in Portstewart, Northern Ireland. As a member of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, he performed at Woodstock and his later credits include work on albums by Roy Harper, Marianne Faithfull, Eric Burdon and Donovan; he also appeared on the original cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.

His 1975 solo album Mind Your Own Business was released on George Harrison‘s Dark Horse label.

McCullough’s voice can also be heard at the end of Pink Floyd’s song “Money” from The Dark Side Of The Moon.

He also briefly played with Dr Feelgood, following the departure of Wilko Johnson.

McCullough played with Wings from 1971 – 1973; among the songs be appeared on were “Live And Let Die”. He left just as the band were about to release Band On The Run following a disagreement with McCartney; though the two men later reconciled.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Introducing Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to The Beatles

John Mulvey
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Introducing Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to The Beatles
Early April, 1965. The Beatles are filming Help! at Twickenham Film Studios, South-West London. After a day’s work, John Lennon and the Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman lock themselves into the Beatle’s Rolls Royce. The road is blocked with fans, but the chauffeur cuts a swathe through the screaming...

Early April, 1965. The Beatles are filming Help! at Twickenham Film Studios, South-West London. After a day’s work, John Lennon and the Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman lock themselves into the Beatle’s Rolls Royce. The road is blocked with fans, but the chauffeur cuts a swathe through the screaming crowd as they take swings at the car. “The way I see it,” says Lennon, “is that they bought the car, so they’ve got the right to smash it up.”

It is hard – even now, over five decades after it all began, and 50 years since “Revolver” was released – to overestimate the impact, strangeness and delirium of Beatlemania. The pages of NME and Melody Maker are full of frequently mind-boggling stories, as Brian Epstein allows reporters to be embedded into the band’s entourage, engineering an intimacy that also ensures the Beatles’ charm will shine out of every issue. The band didn’t just make better and more inventive records than their contemporaries, they gave better and more inventive interviews, too. The Beatles didn’t just revolutionize music, they revolutionized the business of stardom, of how celebrities might behave, and how their audience might relate to them.

This is the substance of our revelatory Ultimate Music Guide to The Beatles: an incredible cache of features from the archives of Britain’s massively influential music papers. As is our current habit, we’ve upgraded the previous edition into this new deluxe model. It’s on sale in the UK on Thursday, but you can now grab a copy of The Ultimate Music Guide: The Beatles from our online shop. In there, you’ll find week-by-week reports from those epochal American tours: Chris Hutchins spends a day on Allen Klein’s yacht with the Stones (“Then Jagger played Bob Dylan’s latest single ‘pressed secretly for us eager maniacs’ and danced on deck in the extrovert style that identifies him onstage”), before heading over to Shea Stadium and the Beatles’ dressing room.

Alan Smith hitches a lift from Bedford with Paul McCartney and ends up having an all-night session in a random Bedfordshire village, needling Macca into describing himself as “pleasantly insincere”. And mere weeks before his death, Brian Epstein gives a remarkable interview to MM’s Mike Hennessey. Over a few swift years and a fistful of old magazines, you can trace the evolution of music journalism as well as the Beatles, as a new candour about drugs and sexuality gradually replaces the PR-controlled boosterism of old.

There is, of course, plenty more in these 148 pages, not least sizeable reviews of every Beatles album, filed by Uncut’s current team of writers. It’s a considerable challenge to find fresh perspectives on this most analysed of bands, but hopefully we’ve found some new angles to approach the preposterous riches of their catalogue. After all, as John Lennon complains in a 1965 interview with Melody Maker, “People talk a load of rubbish about us…”

 

 

 

“Chips” Moman dies aged 79

Michael Bonner
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“Chips” Moman dies aged 79
Lincoln “Chips” Moman, the songwriter, producer and studio owner responsible for countless hits that came out of Memphis in the 1960s, has died aged 79. According to a report on Memphis, TN news site The Commercial Appeal, Moman died at a hospice facility in his hometown of LaGrange, Georgia on...

Lincoln “Chips” Moman, the songwriter, producer and studio owner responsible for countless hits that came out of Memphis in the 1960s, has died aged 79.

According to a report on Memphis, TN news site The Commercial Appeal, Moman died at a hospice facility in his hometown of LaGrange, Georgia on Monday [June 13]. The news of his death was confirmed by Memphis Mafia member, Marty Lacker.

Born in 1937, Moman was discovered when he was 17 by Sun Records artist Warren Smith. Moman went on to become one of the architects of Stax Records, recording the label’s early hits by Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas and William Bell.

He split with Stax in 1962, and set up Memphis’ American Sound Studios.

Between 1962 and 1972, American Sound Studios produced more than 120 chart records. Under Moman’s guidance, the studio house band — guitarist Reggie Young, drummer Gene Chrisman, pianist Bobby Wood, organist Bobby Emmons and bassists Mike Leech and Tommy Cogbill — worked on hits for Dusty Springfield (“Son Of A Preacher Man”), Neil Diamond (“Sweet Caroline), Bobby Womack (“Fly Me To The Moon”) among many others.

Elvis Presley recorded “Suspicious Minds”, “Kentucky Rain” and the From Elvis in Memphis album at American Sound Studios with Moman.

Moman also co-wrote (with Dan Penn) Aretha Franklin’s “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street”.

After American Sound Studios closed, Moman relocated to Nashville and became a songwriter and producer. Among his credits, he produced the Highwayman, the supergroup comprised of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.

The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

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