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Graham Nash – This Path Tonight

Graeme Thomson
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Graham Nash – This Path Tonight
Fourteen years have passed since Graham Nash’s last solo album, Songs For Survivors, but as he tells Uncut, he has hardly been idle in the intervening period. Since 2002 Nash has released a mammoth retrospective boxset, Reflections, been involved in CSN and CSN&Y tours, and overseen compilatio...

Fourteen years have passed since Graham Nash’s last solo album, Songs For Survivors, but as he tells Uncut, he has hardly been idle in the intervening period. Since 2002 Nash has released a mammoth retrospective boxset, Reflections, been involved in CSN and CSN&Y tours, and overseen compilations of the band’s demos and greatest hits. He was also engaged in the writing of his 2013 memoir, Wild Tales, a process which appears to have brought about a period of intense and very personal reassessment.

Belying the time that has elapsed between solo releases, This Path Tonight was conceived in haste and born of compulsion. At 74, Nash was inspired by what he describes as “dramatic and traumatic changes” in his personal life – notably the end of his 38-year marriage to his wife, Susan. His response was to write 20 songs in a month with sometime CSN guitarist Shane Fontayne, and record the results in a little over a week.

The ten tracks chosen for the record cluster around themes of regret, separation, new love and an enveloping awareness of mortality (three excellent bonus tracks are more politically agitated in their themes, and were presumably sheared off to preserve the album’s sense of unity). Musically, the mood is warm and intimate. The styles range from hushed acoustic balladry to driving electric rock, but the performances share a spare and sinewy immediacy. Nash and his five-piece band recorded together live in the studio, and you can tell. Even when the prevailing mood of introspective understatement threatens to sink into the maudlin or overwrought, there’s an urgency about This Path Tonight which keeps things buoyant.

Many of these songs are set in the middle of the night, Nash eyes-wide awake and agonising over old choices and pressing new decisions. The solid, satisfying thud of the opening title track establishes the questioning tone, Nash hovering at the crossroads and wondering, “Where are we going?” On the twilit ruminations of “Myself At Last”, he asks “Is my future just my past?” as a lonesome harmonica wails out a warning. Bittersweet nostalgia is a recurring theme. The first verse of “Golden Days” gazes back fondly to The Hollies – “We sang with all our hearts and everything we had” – before taking in the somewhat more turbulent narrative of CSN&Y: “What happened to all you need is love?” Nash wonders. By the end, the good old days give way to a hard-won appreciation of the here and now.

“Cracks In The City”, a country-folk lament in waltz time, is a richly allegorical gaze on a crumbling world, where “all the king’s horses are dying of thirst”. Keening pedal steel sends a chill wind whistling through the alleyways. At this point, the thought occurs that This Path Tonight could be Nash’s very own Blood On The Tracks, but he’s too much the idealist to let darkness entirely overpower him, while his gentle, conversational voice – still with trace elements of no-nonsense Lancashire – has always leaned towards optimism.

It helps that his winning way with a good tune hasn’t deserted him. “Another Broken Heart” is Nash’s most direct comment on his marriage break-up and subsequent relationship with photographer Amy Grantham, but the soul-searching is leavened by the album’s sweetest and most instantly memorable melody. “Fire Down Below” is a crackling minor-chord rocker, with something of the prowl and punch of plugged-in Neil Young. Perhaps in acknowledgement of the fact that he’s inhabiting such familiar terrain, Nash surrounds his voice with a starburst of glorious harmony.

The most evocative and otherworldly vocal performance, however, is saved for the terrific “Back Home”. Subtitled “(For Levon)”, it’s a meditative and downright spooked take on mortality, concluding with a kind of cosmic acceptance. It’s followed by the closing “Encore”, nothing less than a rock valediction, a measuring out of what matters and what endures beyond the adulation and the acclaim. “What are you gonna do when the last show is over/What’re you gonna do when you can’t touch base,” Nash sings softly. “And what’re you gonna do when the applause is all over/And you can’t turn your back on what you face?” The answers provided by This Path Tonight to these thorny questions are conflicted and equivocal: take each day as it comes, face up to the burdens of the past, and embrace love where you may find it – and somehow keep on keeping on.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The Beatles’ press officer Tony Barrow dies aged 80

Tom Pinnock
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The Beatles’ press officer Tony Barrow dies aged 80
The Beatles' press officer Tony Barrow has died, aged 80. Barrow, who invented the phrase "the Fab Four" in one of his early press releases for the group, passed away on Saturday (May 14) in Morecambe, Lancashire. Through his job at Decca, Barrow secured Brian Epstein's charges an audition at the ...

The Beatles‘ press officer Tony Barrow has died, aged 80.

Barrow, who invented the phrase “the Fab Four” in one of his early press releases for the group, passed away on Saturday (May 14) in Morecambe, Lancashire.

Through his job at Decca, Barrow secured Brian Epstein‘s charges an audition at the label. Though they famously failed the trial, once they had signed to EMI, The Beatles’ manager took on Barrow full-time in 1963 to look after press for the roster of artists he managed at NEMS Enterprises. Barrow’s duties ranged from sometimes accompanying the group on tour and chairing press conferences, to writing album sleevenotes and editing the Magical Mystery Tour cartoon book.

He continued to work with The Beatles until late 1967, when the group set up Apple Corps to look after their affairs. Barrow then started his own business, Tony Barrow International, representing The Kinks, the Bay City Rollers, David Cassidy, The Monkees and more, before returning to writing, most notably with his 2006 memoir John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me.

Paul McCartney has paid tribute to Barrow, tweeting: “Tony Barrow was a lovely guy who helped us in the early years of The Beatles. He was super professional but always ready for a laugh. He will be missed but remembered by many of us.”

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Radiohead have “tarnished the brand” of Trumpton, says creator’s son-in-law

Tom Pinnock
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Radiohead have “tarnished the brand” of Trumpton, says creator’s son-in-law
Radiohead have "tarnished the brand" of Trumptonshire with their "Burn The Witch" video, according to the son-in-law of creator Gordon Murray. The band's video for the song, their first release from album A Moon Shaped Pool, featured stop-motion animation and settings seemingly inspired by Murray's...

Radiohead have “tarnished the brand” of Trumptonshire with their “Burn The Witch” video, according to the son-in-law of creator Gordon Murray.

The band’s video for the song, their first release from album A Moon Shaped Pool, featured stop-motion animation and settings seemingly inspired by Murray’s television trilogy, Trumpton, Chigley and Camberwick Green.

Speaking to The Mail On Sunday, William Mollett, Murray’s son-in-law, stated that they consider the video to be a breach of copyright: “Radiohead should have sought our consent as we consider this a tarnishing of the brand. It is not something we would have authorised. We consider that there is a breach of copyright and we are deciding what to do next.”

In the video, directed by Chris Hopewell, an outsider is shown around a small village, before being placed inside a giant effigy, a la 1973 film The Wicker Man, and burned. However, an epilogue shows him unharmed and escaping.

Mollett explained that he would not be showing Murray the video, saying: “Gordon would be appalled.”

A Moon Shaped Pool reached Number One on the UK albums chart on Friday (May 13), as well as in Ireland and Norway, Number Two in Australia and New Zealand, Number Three in the US, Holland, Sweden and Finland, Number Four in Italy, and Number Six in France.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Day Of The Dead reviewed!

John Mulvey
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Day Of The Dead reviewed!
In Heads, his new history of psychedelic America, Jesse Jarnow has a neat phrase for the Grateful Dead fans who have infiltrated the broader music world over the past 40-odd years. They are, he suggests, “an invisible contingency”, counter-cultural insurgents at the heart of "nearly every white ...

In Heads, his new history of psychedelic America, Jesse Jarnow has a neat phrase for the Grateful Dead fans who have infiltrated the broader music world over the past 40-odd years. They are, he suggests, “an invisible contingency”, counter-cultural insurgents at the heart of “nearly every white American musical scene, no matter how punk or country or electronic or classical” it might be. Jarnow’s book is full of revelations about the Dead’s reach, but the tasteful denizens of indie-rock are mostly conspicuous by their absence. For a generation of music fans and music-makers who came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s, an abiding disdain can be summed up in his quoting of one of Kurt Cobain’s old t-shirt slogans: “KILL THE GRATEFUL DEAD.”

And yet, even this demographic, so historically wary of hippies, turns out to have an “invisible contingent”. Day Of The Dead is a vast survey of covert Deadheads, corralled by Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National. In 2009, the Dessners put together Dark Was The Night, a compilation which raised funds for AIDS research, and provided a handy primer on the contemporary indie scene. The Day Of The Dead is very much a sequel to that, and a testament to how the Dessners, and indie-rock itself, have expanded their horizons in the interim.

At times, the prevailing spirit of The Grateful Dead is hard to locate, even though all 59 tracks here are technically covers of their songs (or of songs, like “Morning Dew”, which they adopted). There is precious little jamming, not much in the way of boogie, only the occasional foray into stranger musical dimensions, and a general understanding that it may be a mug’s game to try and match the guitar ambulations of Jerry Garcia.

What it does showcase is the robustness and multi-purpose potential of Grateful Dead songs. “Easy Wind” can be turned into a lugubrious campfire slouch by Bill Callahan, “Cumberland Blues” into snaking psych-funk by Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band. Fucked Up can repurpose “Cream Puff War” as bombastic post-hardcore, while Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab make Afro-Cuban intricacy out of “Franklin’s Tower”. Little here, though, will provoke bold and non-prejudicial new perspectives on the participants. Mumford & Sons, most pointedly, render “Friend Of The Devil” as something more or less indistinguishable from their own Wilder Mind album.

That album, of course, was produced in part by Aaron Dessner, and Day Of The Dead emphasises the National’s position at a rare musical nexus, with stadium-filling production clients on one side, avant-garde compadres on another, and the rump of this century’s most lucrative college rockers – Justin Vernon, Jim James, The War On Drugs et al – sat comfortably alongside them in the middle.

Their influence spreads beyond curation, since most of The National appear on nearly half of the 59 tracks. The Dessners and Devendorfs are at the core of a flexible and discreet house band who, nevertheless, seem to turn much of this transformative material into music which is decent and meticulous, but which rarely captures the spirit of risk, the high times and potential for disaster, critical to the Dead’s appeal. A case in point is the take on “Terrapin Station” fronted by Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, which Dessner and his cohorts recreate as orchestrated chamber-pop. It’s a rousing technical feat, and undoubtedly ambitious in scope. You fear, though, for the Grateful Dead neophyte who ventures forth into the band’s own catalogue and discovers a much messier and, at times, scarier world than the one manifested here.

Those brave newcomers also may be surprised by the swing and danceability of the Dead, an aspect frequently avoided by the staunch footsoldiers assembled by the Dessners. One wonders whether a fear of latterday jam bands like Phish, and the goofy funk which is part of their DNA, kept the grooves mostly at bay. The plasticky Prince affectation of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s “Shakedown Street” is, in context, a welcome outbreak of partying.

Still, Day Of The Dead contains multitudes, and each pass through reveals new pleasures: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Hiss Golden Messenger making rootsy capital out of “Ruben And Cherise” and “Brown-Eyed Women”; Terry Riley and his son Gyan finding a cosmic raga in “Estimated Prophet”; Kurt Vile and J Mascis being adorably faithful to “Box Of Rain”; Cass McCombs’ heroic exploration of “Dark Star”; Steven Malkmus having the guts to take a flurry of solos on the canonical Dead jam of “China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider”. These are wonderful efforts, and Day Of The Dead is an exemplary way of proving to a sceptic that at the heart of the Dead’s extravagant digressions are imperishably great songs.

A taste of what lies beyond comes, perversely, as an afterthought – a ragged live version of “St Stephen” in which guitars spiral ever upwards, sometimes haphazardly, and the harmonies are, as Dead fans will appreciate, at best approximate. The players are Wilco, a creative road band who currently might be the closest thing indie-rock has to a workable Grateful Dead analogue. And their guest? “Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills,” sings none other than Bob Weir, “One man gathers what another man spills.”

 

 

Bombino – Adez

Jon Dale
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Bombino – Adez
As a key voice in Tuareg music, Omara ‘Bombino’ Moctar carries a heavy weight, not that you would notice from the lightness he has traditionally brought to his songs. He first broke international cover thanks to the Sublime Frequencies label run by Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls – indeed, Bisho...

As a key voice in Tuareg music, Omara ‘Bombino’ Moctar carries a heavy weight, not that you would notice from the lightness he has traditionally brought to his songs. He first broke international cover thanks to the Sublime Frequencies label run by Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls – indeed, Bishop deserves greater recognition for his ongoing support of modern Tuareg rock, particularly through such series as Guitars From Agadez, of which Bombino’s debut album ‘proper’ was the second instalment.

While the romance afforded to Tuareg music belies a colonial impulse that tries to inscribe its specific tonal and rhythmic properties as a subset of the dreaded ‘world music’, there’s a lot more than generic constraint going on in the music of artists such as Bombino. It builds from specific structural conceits intrinsic to the Berber musical identity – there is not such a great leap from the call-and-response typical of Berber and Iberian song, and some of the rhythmic undertow isn’t too far from the spiralling percussives of Moroccan music.

The most recent wave of Tuareg music, though, politicised by uprising, has a feverish cast, something you can hear throughout Azel, even if Moctar’s voice weaves gently around the melodies, an instrument of grace skimming across the turbulent undercurrents of geopolitical address in some songs. It’s particularly pertinent given Adez’s introduction of his new, self-named sub-genre, ‘Tuareggae’, a development explored keenly by both the group and their producer, Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors.

Moctar’s reasoning is fairly simple: “I love reggae music,” he states, “it makes me instantly happy… it is just another influence that has come into my music as it evolves in the same way that Western rock music mixes with Tuareg music in other songs that I play.” But it’s also clear enough to see another level – the meeting of two musics of protest, the eschatological fervour of reggae, chanting down Babylon, delivered on the graceful wings of dub’s pressurised production, meeting the gracious heart and tangled melodicism of Tuareg desert rock.

Throughout Azel, the combination of the two genres allows for an even greater sense of uplift and collectivism in a music that always carried the communal at its core. Moctar’s guitar playing is often the focal point of Azel – a limber guitarist, he rarely gives in to flights of fancy: while he can charm the instrument through curlicues of melodic invention, each riff tightly woven, he never gives in to any tendency to showboat. The end result is an approach to the guitar that lets the instrument breathe, even as it’s being wound around itself with rare physicality.

As with other Bombino albums, Azel often feels like an ever changing same. For some artists, this would suggest one-trick pony: for Bombino – much like Marc Bolan, oddly enough, whose vocal lilt Moctar strangely reminds of – each repetition has incremental power, resulting in a sum greater than the parts. But certain songs do stand out, such as the album’s centrepiece, “Iyat Ninhay/Jaguar (A Great Desert I Saw)”, a six-minute monster that maintains a paradoxical ‘laidback intensity’ that, these days, feels peculiar to Tuareg music. It also shifts effortlessly between sections, from a luxurious, extended introduction that lets riffs fall from the guitar strings, to a low-slung middle section, Moctar teasing out a Lissajous-figure solo, before accelerating to a fever-pitch finale.

The following “Igmayah Dum (My Lover)” has Moctar on the acoustic guitar, his introductory string-tangle reflective, drifting between notes before landing on a dime, the song pivoting on a pedal note that’s insistent in its restatement. It’s one of Moctar’s most gorgeous melodies, too, for the way it threads through the central riff. His playing here accesses a wild freedom even as it stays pinned to the ground by the song’s hypnotism: it reminds of one of his statements, in an interview with Bob Baker Fish, when asked what it means for Moctar to play guitar: “Freedom. That’s it. Pure freedom.”

In some ways, this second half of Azel is where Bombino’s elemental power really accrues. This is often the case with Tuareg rock – a music of cumulative force, it can take a little while for albums by Bombino, or peers like Tinariwen or Tamikrest, to work their magic. The hooks are there, though, waiting for the moment of enchantment to sink into the skin. By the time you’ve reached the penultimate song on Azel, “Timidiwa (Friendship)”, whose guitar tone is just the right side of rough and ready, Moctar’s songs have located the tightly wound spring at the core of Tuareg music.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The 15th Uncut Playlist Of 2016

John Mulvey
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The 15th Uncut Playlist Of 2016
Hideously late here, but do especially check out Numbers 1, 2 and 19, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY STEVIE WONDER! Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey 1 Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids - We Be All Africans (Strut) https://soundcloud.com/philophon/idris-ackamoor-the-pyramids-rhapsody-in-berlin-part-1#t=0:00 ...

Hideously late here, but do especially check out Numbers 1, 2 and 19, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY STEVIE WONDER!

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

1 Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids – We Be All Africans (Strut)

https://soundcloud.com/philophon/idris-ackamoor-the-pyramids-rhapsody-in-berlin-part-1#t=0:00

2 Chris Robinson Brotherhood – Narcissus Soaking Wet (Silver Arrow)

3 Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool (XL)

4 Mendrugo – More Amor (Fire)

5 Moon Bros – These Stars (Western Vinyl)

6 Neil Young & The Promise Of The Real – Earth (Reprise)

7 Ian William Craig – Centres (Fat Cat)

8 Lubomyr Melnyk – Illirion (Sony Classical)

9 Paul Simon – Stranger To Stranger (Universal)

10 Mudcrutch – Mudcrutch 2 (Warner Bros)

11 Rhyton – Redshift (Thrill Jockey)

12 Plaid – The Digging Remedy (Warp)

13 Various Artists – Space Echo: The Mystery Behind The Cosmic Sound Of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed (Analog Africa)

14 The Monkees – Good Times! (Rhino)

15 The Stone Roses – All For One (EMI)

16 Super Furry Animals – Bing Bong (Strangetown)

17 Dylan Carlson – Falling With A Thousand Stars And Other Wonders From The House Of Albion (Self-Released)

18 Stevie Wonder – Don’t Know Why I Love You (Motown)

19 Thee Oh Sees – Live In San Francisco (Castleface)

Sturgill Simpson – A Sailor’s Guide To Earth

Jason Anderson
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Sturgill Simpson – A Sailor’s Guide To Earth
Sturgill Simpson has a few predictions about the reactions he’ll get for his third album. “I’m sure there’ll be all kinds of hyperbole and pontification,” he tells Uncut not long after A Sailor’s Guide To Earth was ready for outsiders’ ears. His tone contains a mixture of embarrassment...

Sturgill Simpson has a few predictions about the reactions he’ll get for his third album. “I’m sure there’ll be all kinds of hyperbole and pontification,” he tells Uncut not long after A Sailor’s Guide To Earth was ready for outsiders’ ears. His tone contains a mixture of embarrassment over the effusive praise he’s attracted over the last two years and exasperation over some of the claims made on his behalf since he was anointed as Nashville’s latest epitome of all that is good and true and real in country music, a heavy mantle he shares with fellow upstarts Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton. Simpson knows his new album – his first since signing with Atlantic last year – may not go down so well in more conservative quarters. “I’m sure I’ve ‘abandoned’ country,” he groans. “Whatever – I can’t worry about that shit.”

With A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Simpson has thrown one giant, loopy, gorgeous and wild curveball in the direction of anyone who thought they had him sussed out. Ranging far and wide from swampy, horn-heavy R&B to bucolic Moog-enhanced soundscapes to lush, strings-laden balladry to unbridled rock abandon – sometimes all in the space in the same song – it’s an album whose musically expansive nature is just as impressive as its conceptual ambition and emotional heft. Drawing heavily on his own experiences, feelings and fears, Simpson’s song cycle assumes the perspective of a lonely sailor who’s been away from home for far too long and who expresses his love and longing in letters to his son and wife. That nautical theme is further suggested by the occasional noises of birds, water and ship bells that recur between tracks and intermingle with the string and pedal steel parts to create an appropriately watery sense of flow in the album’s gentlest passages, like the graceful early moments of the opening track “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)”. “Hello, my son, welcome to the Earth/You may not be my last but you’ll always be my first,” Simpson croons in his sturdy baritone. It’s an achingly lovely moment yet the music here never stays placid for long – what starts as a moving ballad about the transformative experience of new parenthood takes a hard left turn to become an exuberant Stax-style showstopper.

Like any work with this level of ambition and scope, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth could’ve easily crashed on a reef if any single one of its elements went wrong. That may be why we don’t often get to hear genre-busting concept albums about forlorn seafarers. But it’s a telling indication of the degree of daring and sophistication at hand that artistic gestures which might have seemed contrived or ill-conceived in other contexts – like, say, transforming Nirvana’s “In Bloom” into a majestic country-soul ballad worthy of Charley Pride – yield some of the most startling results.

Of course, there were early indications that the 37-year-old Simpson was hardly on the path of a new traditionalist even if that’s what he most resembled at the time of 2013’s High Top Mountain, an engaging set of old-school C&W that garnered comparisons with Waylon Jennings but paid more fealty to Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley. Before Simpson made his belated breakthrough as a solo act, he wielded a Telecaster in Sunday Valley, a band with a knack for playing bluegrass at a volume and velocity more suited to speed metal (A Sailor’s Guide To Earth includes a touching revamp of “Oh Sarah”, an expression of devotion and a plea for patience that was one of the sweetest songs in the band’s repertoire).

As for High Top Mountain’s much-lauded 2014 follow-up Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, the references to Buddha and psilocybin in “Turtles All The Way Down”, the stately reinvention of When In Rome’s “The Promise” and the psych-rock flourishes of “It Ain’t All Flowers” demonstrated Simpson’s eagerness to venture beyond Americana’s established frontiers.

A grimy slice of ZZ Top-derived sleaze that serves as the theme for the HBO series Vinyl, “Sugar Daddy” was another harbinger of Simpson’s direction, even though that track was actually recorded several months after the new album was finished late last year. With Simpson serving as his own producer – largely the result of the jam-packed schedule for his friend Dave Cobb, who produced Sturgill’s first two albums before handling chores for Isbell and Stapleton, too – A Sailor’s Guide To Earth was recorded in an astonishing four-day sprint in Nashville’s Butcher Shoppe studio with engineer David Ferguson. Simpson spent two more days for horns and strings at Atlantic Studios in New York, enlisting the Dap-Kings. Their contributions add further punch to “Keep It Between The Lines”, a swaggering country-rocker in which Simpson’s surrogate sailor dispenses advice to his youngster (“Do what I say, don’t do what I’ve done/It don’t have to be like father, like son”). Elsewhere, they enhance the sweep of “All Around You”, a soul ballad with a grandeur befitting Otis Blue, and amplify the fury of “Call To Arms”, a crazed collision of Southern rock, hard funk and berserker bluegrass in which Simpson’s sailor angrily bemoans the state of the world his baby son will someday inherit.

Though that closer is the stormiest song on the album by a wide margin, even the most delicate moments on A Sailor’s Guide To Earth have traces of its bravado. Really, the whole endeavour is born of a drive to express himself in whatever musical ways befit his needs. Rather than seem unduly highfalutin, its overarching tale of a man at sea (in several senses of the phrase) provides a through-line for a series of musical settings and emotional sentiments that might’ve seemed excessively eclectic. Simpson’s sense of humour – especially in “Sea Stories”, a caustic account of his messy stint in the US Navy – further imbues his song-cycle with great warmth and humanity. And whatever the naysayers may say about the all-inclusive vision of American music he offers here, Simpson hasn’t abandoned country – he’s just made it big enough to contain all he wants to do. The man’s only boundary now is the horizon.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

U2 reveal iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE – Live In Paris

Michael Bonner
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U2 reveal iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE – Live In Paris
U2 have announced details of their new project. iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE - Live In Paris will be released on Blu-ray, DVD and digital download on June 10 on Island Records. The hour film, directed by Hamish Hamilton, includes guest performances by Eagles of Death Metal and, on the deluxe version, by...

U2 have announced details of their new project.

iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE – Live In Paris will be released on Blu-ray, DVD and digital download on June 10 on Island Records.

The hour film, directed by Hamish Hamilton, includes guest performances by Eagles of Death Metal and, on the deluxe version, by Patti Smith, which also features behind-the-scenes documentary, additional music videos and live tracks and a tour of the visuals narrated by Gavin Friday.

The Standard DVD features 30 tracks, the Deluxe DVD and Blu-ray formats come with bonus material including Gavin Friday’s guide to “Cedarwood Road”, a behind-the-scenes piece with director director Hamish Hamilton’s behind-the-scenes documentary, on-stage tour videos for “The Wanderer” and “The Troubles” as well as six music videos commissioned for single releases from Songs of Innocence.

A Super Deluxe Box collection include all of the above as well as an exclusive USB lightbulb, a 64-Page hardback book, dog tags, stencil set, pin badges and a download.

Tracklisting for the deluxe eversion is:

People Have The Power
The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)
Vertigo
I Will Follow
Iris (Hold Me Close)
Cedarwood Road
Song For Someone
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Raised By Wolves
Until The End Of The World
The Fly
Invisible
Even Better Than The Real Thing
Mysterious Ways
Elevation
Every Breaking Wave
October
Bullet The Blue Sky
Zooropa
Where The Streets Have No Name
Pride (In The Name Of Love)
With Or Without You
Stephen Hawking ‘Global Citizen’
City Of Blinding Lights
Beautiful Day
Mother & Child Reunion
Bad
One
People Have The Power (With Eagles Of Death Metal)
I Love You All The Time (Eagles Of Death Metal)

Bonus Material
Cedarwood Road – A Gavin Friday Narration
Out Of Control (December 6th 2015 – Paris)
The Future Better Hurry Up
The Electric Co. (November 11th 2015 – Paris)
i + e – Behind The Scenes With The Director
Bad / People Have The Power (With Patti Smith – December 6th 2015 – Paris)
The Wanderer
The Troubles

Music Videos
Ordinary Love
Invisible
The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)
Every Breaking Wave – A Film By Aoife Mcardle
Song For Someone (Directed By Vincent Haycock)
Song For Someone (Behind The Scenes)
Song For Someone (Directed By Matt Mahurin)

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Fleetwood Mac announce Mirage reissue

Michael Bonner
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Fleetwood Mac announce Mirage reissue
Fleetwood Mac have announced details of a deluxe edition for their 1982 album, Mirage. The release follows on from Rumours and Tusk. Released on July 29, this new edition expands on the original album with newly remastered sound, a selection of rare and unreleased recordings, as well as the storie...

Fleetwood Mac have announced details of a deluxe edition for their 1982 album, Mirage.

The release follows on from Rumours and Tusk.

Released on July 29, this new edition expands on the original album with newly remastered sound, a selection of rare and unreleased recordings, as well as the stories and pictures behind the album.

It will be available in the following formats:

Deluxe : Three CDs, DVD and LP. Original album remastered, plus b-sides and rarities; the original album on LP; live performances; and a 5.1 mix on DVD.

Expanded: Two CDs. Original album remastered, plus a disc of b-sides and rarities.

Remastered: Original album remastered.

A digital version will also be available.

The tracklising for the Deluxe edition is:

Disc One: Original Album – 2016 Remaster
“Love In Store”
“Can’t Go Back”
“That’s Alright”
“Book Of Love”
“Gypsy”
“Only Over You”
“Empire State”
“Straight Back”
“Hold Me”
“Oh Diane”
“Eyes Of The World”
“Wish You Were Here”

Disc Two: B-Sides, Outtakes, Sessions
“Love In Store” (Early Version)*
“Suma’s Walk” AKA “Can’t Go Back” (Outtake)*
“That’s Alright” (Alternate Take)*
“Book Of Love” (Early Version)*
“Gypsy” (Early Version)*
“Only Over You” (Alternate Version)*
“Empire State” (Early Version)*
“If You Were My Love” (Outtake)*
“Hold Me” (Early Version)*
“Oh Diane” (Early Version)*
“Smile At You” (Outtake)*
“Goodbye Angel” (Original Outtake)*
“Eyes Of The World” (Alternate Early Version)*
“Wish You Were Here” (Alternate Version)*
“Cool Water”
“Gypsy” (Video Version)
“Put A Candle In The Window” (Run-Through)*
“Teen Beat” (Outtake)*
“Blue Monday” (Jam)*
*Previously Unissued

Disc Three: Mirage Live 1982
“The Chain”
“Gypsy”
“Love In Store”
“Not That Funny”
“You Make Loving Fun”
“I’m So Afraid”
“Blue Letter”
“Rhiannon”
“Tusk”
“Eyes Of The World”
“Go Your Own Way”
“Sisters Of The Moon”
“Songbird”

Disc Four: 5.1 Surround Mix & 24/96 Stereo Audio of Original Album (DVD)

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The Stone Roses’ resurrection: Ian Brown, John Squire, Mani and Reni speak

Stephen Dalton
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The Stone Roses’ resurrection: Ian Brown, John Squire, Mani and Reni speak
Originally published in Uncut's June 2006 issue (Take 109). It’s the rock reunion fans crave more than any other: Brown, Squire, Mani and Reni together onstage again. But could it happen? We catch up with Manchester’s own Fab Four to pop the question, starting with Ian Brown, the Rose who went ...

Originally published in Uncut’s June 2006 issue (Take 109).

It’s the rock reunion fans crave more than any other: Brown, Squire, Mani and Reni together onstage again. But could it happen? We catch up with Manchester’s own Fab Four to pop the question, starting with Ian Brown, the Rose who went from washed-up icon to Godlike Genius for a new generation. Interviews by Stephen Dalton, additional reporting by Hamish MacBain.

_____________________________________

IAN’S STORY

March 2006, and King Monkey is swinging from the ceiling of his record label offices, grinning as he tapes over the smoke alarm for an illicit nicotine break. At the end of 12 months that have seen an acclaimed hits album, his biggest shows so far, and a cocksure comeback as Britrock’s prodigal prince, Ian Brown is on a high. For the first time in a decade, he seems like a man with nothing to prove.

In person, Brown is gangly, angular and super-lean. There may be flecks of grey stubble around those 43-year-old Bruce Lee cheekbones, but the Scally Superstar aura remains intact. Think young George Best meets anorexic Che Guevara. He also laughs more than you might expect for a self-confessed “belligerent northern bastard”.

And he talks. Boy, does he talk. About old friends and bitter enemies. About smack and crack. About prison and politics. About religion, racism and Roses reunion rumours. About all the highs and lows of two decades inside the filthiest business in the universe.

Ten years ago, The Stone Roses broke up in a slow-motion car crash of acrimony, ego and drugs. Following their disastrous Reading finale in August 1996, Brown was widely written off as a no-hoper. But four solo albums, one remix collection and a best-of later, he is back on world-beating form.

Suddenly, teenage bands like the Arctic Monkeys are namechecking him. Young fans who never knew the Roses are surfing his cosmic stoner frequencies. The NME has even conceded that Brown’s solo work now eclipses that of his former band, giving the singer its Godlike Genius award in February.

_________________________________

So how does it feel to be Ian Brown in 2006?
IAN BROWN: “Amazing. I used to think, how many LPs do I have to put out for them to say I’m a music-maker in my own right? But I feel I’m getting there now. Having all these new bands who were two- or three-years-old when the Roses came out telling me I’m their hero amazes me. It makes me feel like I must have done something right. I believe in that phrase anyway: your good works will follow you through.”

Do you feel like a Godlike Genius?
“It’s like when they chant my name at gigs, it goes in one ear and out the other. But if someone offers it, I’m not going to turn it down. I know ‘genius’ comes from the Arab word ‘djinn’, which means spirit.”

So you’ve noticed the tide turning in your favour?
“Definitely. I started managing myself in October 2004, and since then it’s gone up and up. I think the goodwill of all the years is just catching up. Maybe when I went to Strangeways, they thought I was a thug, and it’s taken a few years to prove I’m not. And I’ve got to shake off the love for the Roses. They’re never going to let it go about us reforming.”

Which takes us back, inevitably, to 1970s Manchester…

Various Artists – Kinked! Kinks Songs & Sessions 1964-1971

John Lewis
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Various Artists – Kinked! Kinks Songs & Sessions 1964-1971
There have been no shortage of major artists covering Kinks song over the years – from The Jam to The Fall, from The Stranglers to the Pretenders, from Bowie to Costello, Madness to Blur, Van Halen to Metallica, Big Star to Bruce Springsteen. Not to mention the Blue Aeroplanes, and Yo La Tengo, an...

There have been no shortage of major artists covering Kinks song over the years – from The Jam to The Fall, from The Stranglers to the Pretenders, from Bowie to Costello, Madness to Blur, Van Halen to Metallica, Big Star to Bruce Springsteen. Not to mention the Blue Aeroplanes, and Yo La Tengo, and Kirsty MacColl, and The Raincoats, and Jimmy Buffett, and Green Day… and on, and on.

However, less well known are the many Ray Davies songs that were barely even performed by The Kinks before being farmed out to other artists. By the start of 1964, even before “You Really Got Me” and “All Day And All Of The Night” had turned The Kinks into stars on both sides of the Atlantic, manager Larry Page was touting the Davies brothers around Tin Pan Alley. Dave’s rudimentary three-chord number “One Fine Day” was released in March 1964 by 17-year-old howler Shel Naylor – the recording is notable for featuring both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in the backing band. Released simultaneously came the girl-group the Orchids’ shouty version of “I’ve Got That Feeling”, a slightly more sophisticated Ray composition that The Kinks would later record on their debut album.

From this point on, it was Ray’s songs that Larry Page started to sell as he tried to break the States. “So Mystifying”, a simple, up-tempo, Rolling Stones-indebted thrasher from the first LP, was recorded in December 1964 by African-American doo-wop band The Olympics (best known for their version of the rock’n’roll standard “Hully Gully”). This wonderfully chaotic recording – featuring Glen Campbell, Don Randi and Sonny Bono among the stellar sessionmen – has remained unreleased until now, possibly because the vocals stray out of tune on more than a few occasions. Another Californian vocal outfit, The Cascades, performed Ray’s “I Bet You Won’t Stay” – a fine piece of baroque pop where their massed harmonies surf over an elegant harpsichord backing.

Even more prestigious was a commission from Peggy Lee: Davies provided the bel canto verses and precise, staccato chorus lines of “I Go To Sleep” with her in mind. Lee’s reading of this waltz sounds a little fast and flippant (especially compared to the Pretenders’ funereal 1981 hit) but it remains a fascinating example of how Davies wrote for other artists. “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”, for example, was written for the Animals, although the howling, proto-metal 1968 version by California’s Chocolate Watchband turned it into something of a garage rock standard.

Dave Berry’s version of “This Strange Effect” was a minor hit with in 1965, as was the Honeycombs’ “Something Better Beginning” (which has been replaced here by their version of Ray’s Beatle-ish “Emptiness”). But, surprisingly, little else made the UK chart. One rare success was “Dandy”, a jaunty music-hall number about a womanising cad, apparently inspired by Michael Caine’s Alfie and brother Dave in equal measure. Never released as a single in the UK, it was – much to Ray’s chagrin – a Top Five US hit for Herman’s Hermits, who add a rather wobbly string line to The Kinks’ own acoustic arrangement.

The Kinks sold well in France, and, in 1966, Petula Clark recorded a French-language version of “A Well Respected Man” (“Un Jeune Homme Bien”). Produced by Tony Hatch, it fits Frank Gérald’s lyric so comfortably that you’d barely imagine that it was anything but a French song. Other Ray Davies compositions also resemble Gallic chansons: the uncharacteristic “Oh What A Day It’s Going To Be”, is rendered as a dramatic Jacques Brel-style ballad by Mo & Steve (a budget-priced Walker Brothers from Manchester). Meanwhile, Davies’ art-school pal Barry Fantoni – a caustic TV presenter and Private Eye cartoonist – sings a wonderful obscurity called “Little Man In A Little Box” that sounds like one of Serge Gainsbourg’s low-key epics.

The removal of Ray Davies’ voice also forces us to see his songs as theatrical constructs, performed in character, not least when they’re being sung by female singers such as Marianne Faithfull. “End Of The Season”, here recorded by Brummie mods The Uglys, is sung in the character of a dissolute aristocrat. “I just can’t mix in all the clubs I go,” complains the gently reactionary narrator. “Now Labour’s in, I have no place to go.” Likewise, when Ray sang the boss-baiting “A House In The Country” – surely an unheralded precursor to Blur’s “Country House”? – he did so with a rather embattled fury; the Pretty Things here provide a Stonesy version that treats the protagonist with a gleeful envy.

There are other fine songs on this album, and equally fascinating stories. “All Night Stand”, for instance – here performed by Peter Beckett’s Scouse combo The Thoughts – was commissioned as the soundtrack to the movie adaptation of a racy piece of pulp fiction about the dark side of the music business. And there are dozens of other covers that didn’t make it: by the artists here along with the likes of Cher, Lesley Duncan, Ray McVay, Formula One, Majority, Lemmy and the Rockin’ Vickers, not to mention a whole LP of easy listening instrumentals from Larry Page’s Kinky Music. A volume two surely awaits…

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Has Jack White formed a new band?

Michael Bonner
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Has Jack White formed a new band?
Third Man Records have posted a photo on their Facebook page with the tantalising message, 'Which band is this?' The photo shows Jack White, Alison Mosshart, "Little" Jack Lawrence and Brendan Benson. White and Mosshart and both members of The Dead Weather, Benson partners White in The Raconteurs ...

Third Man Records have posted a photo on their Facebook page with the tantalising message, ‘Which band is this?’

The photo shows Jack White, Alison Mosshart, “Little” Jack Lawrence and Brendan Benson.

White and Mosshart and both members of The Dead Weather, Benson partners White in The Raconteurs while Lawrence is a member of both The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs.

Is this simply four friends snapped while hanging out; or is the message teasing yet a new music project from White and his resourceful musical friends?

Meanwhile, White will release a live album and DVD taken from his first acoustic tour.

The tour, which took place last year, consisted of several intimate shows in American states that he had never played before: Alaska, Wycoming, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Fargo. The set list consisted of solo material and White Stripes and Raconteurs covers.

It is being released as part of the Vault package series, released by his record label, Third Man Records.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Win tickets to see Carole King perform Tapestry live in concert

Michael Bonner
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Win tickets to see Carole King perform Tapestry live in concert
Carole King is playing her legendary album Tapestry in full this year as part of the annual Barclaycard presents British Summer Time Hyde Park festivities. King will play Hyde Park on Sunday, July 3 on a bill that also includes Don Henley and Louise Goffin, singer-songwriter daughter from her marri...

Carole King is playing her legendary album Tapestry in full this year as part of the annual Barclaycard presents British Summer Time Hyde Park festivities.

King will play Hyde Park on Sunday, July 3 on a bill that also includes Don Henley and Louise Goffin, singer-songwriter daughter from her marriage to songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin.

We’re delighted to give away TWO pair of tickets to the show.

To be in with a chance of winning, just answer this question correctly:

Who produced Tapestry?

Send your answer along with your name, address and contact telephone number to UncutComp@timeinc.com by noon, Monday, June 27.

A winner and a runner-up will be chosen from the correct entries and notified by email. The editor’s decision is final.

The winners tickets will be available to collect from our box office on the day.

You can find out more details about the show and other events by clicking here.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Ultimate Music Guide: Van Morrison

Charlotte Treadaway
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Ultimate Music Guide: Van Morrison
Venture into the slipstream! Available now: a lavish celebration of one of rock's most "moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright wilful" visionaries. Uncut's latest Ultimate Music Guide untangles the wild tale of Van Morrison, from fiery garage rock beginnings with Them, to the canonical hig...

Venture into the slipstream!

Available now: a lavish celebration of one of rock’s most “moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright wilful” visionaries. Uncut’s latest Ultimate Music Guide untangles the wild tale of Van Morrison, from fiery garage rock beginnings with Them, to the canonical high of Astral Weeks. From fervid sessions in Woodstock and California, through the mystical quests of the ’80s and beyond, into less feted but equally rewarding territory.

We’ve investigated every Van album anew, and rediscovered volatile old interviews from the archives of NME, Melody Maker and Uncut. Pieced together, they build up to a complete portrait of a man apart, unstinting of vision, and blessed with a voice like no other.

Join us – it’s too late to stop now!

Order Print Copy

Introducing… Van Morrison: The Ultimate Music Guide

John Mulvey
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Introducing… Van Morrison: The Ultimate Music Guide
The legend of Van Morrison is one of the richest and most complicated in musical history, but most often it boils down to a certain familiar portrait. According to one observer, he "sometimes throws his advisers into a frenzy of hair-tearing despair: moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright w...

The legend of Van Morrison is one of the richest and most complicated in musical history, but most often it boils down to a certain familiar portrait. According to one observer, he “sometimes throws his advisers into a frenzy of hair-tearing despair: moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright wilful — but always creative.”

These words bear the weight of long experience. They were, however, written in 1966, for the sleevenotes of “Them Again”, only the second album that Morrison was involved with. The youthful singer hadn’t even stepped out of the garage band ranks, hadn’t endured the harrowing business tussles that would mark the start of his solo career. Already, though, an indelible image was in place: the furious, inscrutable auteur, raging at industry machinations that conspired to sully the purity of his art.

It would have been impossible to compile our Ultimate Music Guide on Van Morrison – out in the UK on Thursday, though you can buy it from our online shop right now, along with the latest volume of our History Of Rock project – without reflecting this part of his story. Substantial chunks of his later albums, after all, revolve around such complaints, and virtually every one of his rare interviews end up tackling the subject. “I don’t really suit the music business,” he tells Uncut’s Jon Wilde in a revelatory 2005 piece. “Or, indeed, any business. I’m incompatible with the way things are done… It’s not easy doing what I do. It’s not easy being able to fight the fight with these people.”

To most fans, however, Morrison appears to have fought the music business with uncommon skill, tenacity and, ultimately, success. In this latest Uncut Ultimate Music Guide, serendipitously timed to coincide with a radically expanded reissue of his classic “It’s Too Late To Stop Now” live set, new reviews of his back catalogue track the progress of a rogue spirit, chasing his muse across musical genres and spiritual codes, always privileging the spontaneous and unfettered. Compromises are, to put it mildly, thin on the ground. Epiphanies are commonplace: from the canonical high of Astral Weeks, through fervid sessions in Woodstock and California, on to the mystical quests of the ’80s and beyond, into less feted but equally rewarding territory.

In a 1983 NME piece reprinted in the edition, Gavin Martin recalls meeting Morrison in the company of Kevin Rowland. “Unaware of my own occupation,” Martin writes,”[Morrison] dismissed the music press, resenting all the dumb egotistical hacks, and said he only gave interviews if he held the copyright. In America, he continued, they’d brought out books with old interviews in them and what he said then no longer applied to what he was doing. Plus, they were making mileage out of his name, his past, and it was a game he’d stopped playing a long time ago.”

One can only speculate, fearfully, about what the man himself would make of all our passionate analysis, our revisiting his past showdowns with the writers of NME, Melody Maker and Uncut. Nevertheless, what emerges is a consistent portrait of a man apart, unstinting of vision, blessed with a voice like no other. Listen in: it’s just you and him and nature, in the garden, wet with rain…

 

 

Prince: An Artist’s Life

Charlotte Treadaway
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Prince: An Artist’s Life
In a career that spanned nearly four decades, Prince captivated generations of audiences with not only his talent for songwriting and lyricism but his outré style and electrifying performances. His albums—a category-defying blend of rock, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, disco and pop—have i...

In a career that spanned nearly four decades, Prince captivated generations of audiences with not only his talent for songwriting and lyricism but his outré style and electrifying performances. His albums—a category-defying blend of rock, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, disco and pop—have inspired countless artists and influenced the sound and trajectory of music for years to come. His hits have been the soundtrack for so many touchpoints across the lives of millions of fans, including “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” “Kiss,” “Little Red Corvette,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Raspberry Beret,” “1999” and the landmark song “Purple Rain,” from the soundtrack of his semi-autobiographical movie.

Now, in a tribute to the late Grammy- and Oscar-winning legend, we present a lavishly illustrated special edition tracing Prince’s life story and career. This commemorative edition combines classic and rarely seen photographs and text from the Time Inc. archives, as well as the story behind the movie Purple Rain; a look inside Prince’s famed home and studio, Paisley Park; his unprecedented approach to the “business of Prince”; exclusive tributes from Sheila E., Seal and Lenny Kravitz; and a rundown of 25 essential Prince songs plus a handful of lesser-known gems.

Comprehensive and visually compelling, Prince: An Artist’s Life honors the life, legend and musical legacy of a creative icon and performer.

 

Order Print Copy

Radiohead release new album, A Moon Shaped Pool

Michael Bonner
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Radiohead release new album, A Moon Shaped Pool
Radiohead have released their ninth studio album, A Moon Shaped Pool. The tracklisting for the album is: BURN THE WITCH DAYDREAMING DECKS DARK DESERT ISLAND DISK FUL STOP GLASS EYES IDENTIKIT THE NUMBERS PRESENT TENSE TINKER TAILER SOLDIER SAILOR RICH MAN POOR MAN BEGGAR MAN THIEF TRUE LOVE WAITS ...

Radiohead have released their ninth studio album, A Moon Shaped Pool.

The tracklisting for the album is:

BURN THE WITCH
DAYDREAMING
DECKS DARK
DESERT ISLAND DISK
FUL STOP
GLASS EYES
IDENTIKIT
THE NUMBERS
PRESENT TENSE
TINKER TAILER SOLDIER SAILOR RICH MAN POOR MAN BEGGAR MAN THIEF
TRUE LOVE WAITS

The album was released digitally at 6pm BST.

The album will also be released in a number of formats, including a Special Edition which contains:

A case bound album, inspired by the albums for 78rpm shellac records in the library of La Fabrique, France
32 pages of artwork
The 11 track album on two heavyweight 12″ vinyl records
Two compact discs: one with the album and one with two extra tracks
Recording tape belly band applied
320kbit MP3 or 16-bit WAV of the 11 track album available to download now

radiohead_specialed

The album comes after the release of two singles which were both released last week.

“Burn The Witch” was released on May 4.

While “Daydreaming“, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, was released on May 6.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan: “The excess became the priority”

Stephen Dalton
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Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan: “The excess became the priority”
“People who romanticise the booze and drugs lifestyle should try living it,” says Martin Gore. Here, Basildon’s kings of electro-sleaze seem reinvigorated as they discuss 30 years of highs, lows and landmark LPs, and look forward to the release of a new one. “It’s a good time to be in this...

“People who romanticise the booze and drugs lifestyle should try living it,” says Martin Gore. Here, Basildon’s kings of electro-sleaze seem reinvigorated as they discuss 30 years of highs, lows and landmark LPs, and look forward to the release of a new one. “It’s a good time to be in this band,’” they tell us… Interview: Stephen Dalton. Originally published in Uncut’s May 2009 issue (Take 144).

________________________

SPEAK & SPELL
MUTE, 1981
Produced by Mute label boss Miller, the band’s debut was clean, chart-friendly synth-pop. And largely written by Vince Clarke, who left to form Yazoo soon afterwards.

MARTIN GORE, guitar, keyboards: It’s a different band, literally. Vince was at the helm and he wrote nearly all the songs. It sounds totally different to anything else we’ve done. Even the next album, A Broken Frame [1982], was a slight departure, though it still had its roots in bubblegum.
ANDY FLETCHER, keyboards: Vince was definitely still in charge at that time. I still have fond memories of being in the studio for the first time, being young and very naïve but luckily having Daniel to help us get through it. We were a boy band, basically. We were kids. But we were never groomed like these kids today. We didn’t go to stage school, we didn’t learn to dance from the age of two.
GORE: Vince told us before the actual release date that he was leaving. We never thought about stopping. It’s one of the luxuries of youth that you don’t worry too much about those things.
FLETCHER: When we started our accountant did a tax plan for us to last three years, and we’ve done that by 10 times now. But he was only going by what happens to most groups.
DAVE GAHAN, vocals: Speak & Spell is a solid album, whether you like it or not. I still think of it as Vince’s album – and all the records he’s made since sound exactly the same. Ha ha!

Radiohead release new track, “Daydreaming”, and confirm album release date

Michael Bonner
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0
Radiohead release new track, “Daydreaming”, and confirm album release date
Radiohead have released a new track from their forthcoming album, "Daydreaming". The video has been directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The song is taken from the band's new album, which is released digitally on May 8, 2016 at 7pm BST. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTAU7lLDZYU Special edition an...

Radiohead have released a new track from their forthcoming album, “Daydreaming”.

The video has been directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

The song is taken from the band’s new album, which is released digitally on May 8, 2016 at 7pm BST.

Special edition and standard pre-orders begin from www.radiohead.com.

“Daydreaming” follows “Burn The Witch“, which was released on May 4.

The June 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Blondie, plus George Martin, Brian Eno, Dexys, The Monkees, Graham Nash, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Spector, Tony Joe White, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, The Coral, Max Richter and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

The 14th Uncut Playlist Of 2016

John Mulvey
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The 14th Uncut Playlist Of 2016
A few diversions to fill the hours/days/weeks before Radiohead release more music: if you're taken with "Burn The Witch", incidentally, check out the old Michael Nyman tune below for an interesting comparison. Also here: Neil dusting down "Revolution Blues" for the first time in decades; a mighty l...

A few diversions to fill the hours/days/weeks before Radiohead release more music: if you’re taken with “Burn The Witch”, incidentally, check out the old Michael Nyman tune below for an interesting comparison.

Also here: Neil dusting down “Revolution Blues” for the first time in decades; a mighty live session from the Sunburned Hand Of The Man; a new song from William Tyler; and, though I don’t seem to be able to embed Bandcamp players, a fantastic Miles/Dead style jam on Eno’s “Music For Airports”. See what you think…

Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey

1 Christian Fennesz & Jim O’Rourke – It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry (Editions Mego)

2 Radiohead – The King Of Limbs (XL)

3 Terry Reid – The Other Side Of The River (Future Days/Light In The Attic)

4 Plaid – The Digging Remedy (Warp)

5 Neil Young & The Promise Of The Real – Revolution Blues (Whitewater Amphitheater, Canyon Lake, Texas, 26/4/2016)

6 Loren Connors – The Departing of a Dream Vol V (Family Vineyard)

7 Michael Kiwanuka – Love & Hate (Polydor)

8 Sunburned Hand Of The Man – March 26, 2016 Three Lobed Sweet Sixteen Spectacular, King’s, Raleigh, NC (www.nyctaper.com)

9 Radiohead – Burn The Witch (XL)

10 Michael Nyman – Car Crash (Virgin Venture)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAnGzbcQGbY

11 Alicia Keys – In Common (Audio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YwHRTCyrEo

12 Frazey Ford – Obadiah (Nettwerk)

13 Various Artists – Close To The Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984 (Cherry Red)

14 Brigid Mae Power – I Told You The Truth (Bandcamp)

15 Brigid Mae Power – Eee Tuts (Bandcamp)

16 Eric Copeland – Black Bubblegum (DFA)

17 Paul McCartney & Wings VS Timo Maas & James Teej – 1985 (Virgin)

18 Psychic Temple – Plays Music For Airports (Bandcamp)

19 Psychic Temple – Psychic Temple II (Asthmatic Kitty)

20 Mary Lattimore & Jeff Zeigler – Music Inspired By Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur (Thrill Jockey)

21 Neil Young & The Promise Of The Real – Earth (Reprise)

22 William Tyler – Modern Country (Merge)

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