My Morning Jacket’s Jim James answers your questions in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2015 and out now.
As well as discussing snorkeling with the Grateful Dead and performing with Bob Dylan, the singer, guitarist and songwriter tackles the subject of touring and the damage it’s caused him....
My Morning Jacket’s Jim James answers your questions in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2015 and out now.
As well as discussing snorkeling with the Grateful Dead and performing with Bob Dylan, the singer, guitarist and songwriter tackles the subject of touring and the damage it’s caused him.
“The physical beating your body takes when you’re on tour can be pretty extreme,” James says. “That, and isolation from people at home that you love. But we’re lucky we all get along really well and we’re super supportive, and the show itself is super fun.
“But the brutality of that constant travel, it’s really wrecked my health in a lot of ways. There’s some injury I’ve sustained from every portion of touring!”
My Morning Jacket’s seventh album The Waterfall has just been released.
Eric Clapton continues his 70th birthday celebrations this year with a seven-night residency at London's Royal Albert Hall.
The shows follow two sell-out concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden, for which Clapton drew on all aspects of his incredible history from his time in Cream to the prese...
Eric Clapton continues his 70th birthday celebrations this year with a seven-night residency at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
The shows follow two sell-out concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden, for which Clapton drew on all aspects of his incredible history from his time in Cream to the present day.
Clapton’s Albert Hall shows run from May 14 to 23 and coincide with the release of a new compilation, Forever Man which is in shops on May 11.
Forever Man is available on 2CD, 3CD and vinyl and spans three decades of Clapton’s Reprise Records years; it features classic studio tracks and a blues-themed disc. Forever Man can be pre-ordered by clicking here.
We have ONE pair of tickets to give away for Clapton’s Royal Albert Hall show on Thursday, May 21, as well as two copies of the 3CD set of Forever Man as runners up prizes.
To be in with a chance of winning, just tell us the correct answer to this question:
What is the opening track on Clapton’s debut solo album, Eric Clapton?
Send your entries to UncutComp@timeinc.com by noon, Monday, May 18, 2015. Please include your full name, address and a contact telephone number.
A winner will be chosen by the Uncut team from the correct entries. The editor’s decision is final.
In this month's Uncut, I reviewed the gorgeous new album by The Weather Station. I also conducted an email Q&A with Tamara Lindeman, who basically is The Weather Station. Her answers turned out to be as thoughtful and precise as her lyrics, and I'm happy to run the complete conversation here…
...
In this month’s Uncut, I reviewed the gorgeous new album by The Weather Station. I also conducted an email Q&A with Tamara Lindeman, who basically is The Weather Station. Her answers turned out to be as thoughtful and precise as her lyrics, and I’m happy to run the complete conversation here…
Can you tell us a bit about The Weather Station story so far? I guess, for a lot of Uncut readers, this will be the first time they’ve come across you.
Sure. I started recording music when I was 19. It was a sort of obsession – I wanted to make music – heavy things were happening that I wanted to express somehow. My roommate at the time was a rapper, and she lent me software she used to make beats – I rented an interface and mic and started recording my voice, household sounds, banjo (which I was learning at the time) and a bit of guitar (which I tuned like a banjo). I didn’t really know how to play or write songs – I’d always sang and played piano, but I didn’t know musicians or people to play with – but I cut and pasted my way into making music. I put my recordings up on the web rather anonymously under the name ‘The Weather Station’.
Over time, I learned my instruments and formed a band, and joined other bands as well. Over the course of four years I turned some of the recordings into a full length record – The Line – which I released in 2009.
In 2010, I met Daniel Romano, who encouraged me to drop the atmospheric backdrop and just focus on the song – he was the first person who told me that my songwriting was good – good enough to stand on its own. We made All Of It Was Mine together. From that point on I have put the focus on lyrics, and essentially been a solo singer songwriter – just I came to it backwards, I guess.
How did you end up recording the album in a 19th Century French mansion?
I was on tour singing backups with a band called Bahamas – led by my friend Afie Jurvanen. He had to record a song for a film soundtrack and booked time at La Frette Studio, in France, where we were on tour at the time. I came along to sing. The owner loved what we were doing, and invited us to come back in February, when the studio was often empty. I thought Afie would want the time, but he suggested we make a record for me.
La Frette is an interesting place – it really is a mansion – with a walled garden and big iron gates – a beautiful, majestic place. The owner, Olivier, bought it in the late 80’s, along with an unbelievable collection of analogue gear that studios were trying to get rid of at the time. The place – the gear – it was acquired when it was considered worthless – now it’s all priceless.
Being able to be there didn’t really seem like real life, just this wonderful gift that I could hardly believe was mine.
Do you think being an actor makes you more or less confessional in your musical work?
Hmm. More so, I suppose? If it has influenced at all. I mean, I so rarely do it – I don’t think being an actor has anything to do with me, let alone my music. It’s a job that rewards obedience – you’re paid to disappear into someone else’s vision, to say other people’s lines – if you’re good – you disappear completely.
But maybe it has influenced on some level, my interest in being scrupulously truthful. Because of my experiences in the film industry I guess I have very little interest in performance or artifice – I’m not interested in fantasy or wish fulfillment based storytelling. I love artists who do that, but I don’t want to myself. And maybe that is a reaction, a bit, to working as an actor – it makes me want to never act. I wanted to make music in some ways because it allowed me to be fully present in a way that’s difficult even in life, let alone in the film industry. It was the place I went to be honest.
Do you feel the Joni Mitchell comparisons (I am guilty of these myself) are just? I do worry a little that it is in part predicated on frozen lakes and road trips…
Ha! I do actually. It bothers me when every single female musician is compared to her – especially when the comparison is not apt – but in this case I think it’s pretty reasonable, and of course, I’m quite flattered.
I actually didn’t listen to Joni Mitchell for most of my life – in part because every time I sang somebody told me I reminded them of her. And the first few times I listened, I actually disliked her. But over the last couple years I’ve taken the time to dig deep and I’m glad I did. Now I’m a blushing fan just like everybody else. Court And Spark!
Anyhow, are these road trips real? And if so, can you tell us a little more about them?
Of course! “Way It Is Way It Could Be” is framed by a tour I did of Atlantic Canada in January – driving through Quebec towards New Brunswick along the south shore of the St Lawrence – where it looks like an ocean – in -40 weather. “Floodplain” is framed by the same tour route only in spring flood season – there are some epic rivers in New Brunswick, and they all flooded at the same time, that year. The city in “Loyalty” is Indianapolis, a place I’d never been to or even thought of till I pulled up there on tour – the strangeness of that city – the skyscrapers, the monuments, the emptiness of the streets, crept into the song I was writing at the time and became a metaphor. “Personal Eclipse” pulls on my experience of driving to and from California when I turned 20. I did that drive a couple times actually. But of course, the drive is just a canvas to talk about other things…
Are you shy in real life – and if so, in what way? In “Shy Women”, you seem to be talking about the weight of knowledge, and a certain discretion, rather than anything resembling timidity?
Interesting – shy really isn’t the right word in some ways, though I chose it.
I’ve been shy for most of my life, but it never really was timidity – I was reticent to speak because I actually had so much to say. I think that’s generally true for most ‘shy’ people. I’m less shy now, generally, though I’m constantly surprised by how deep some things are ingrained – that thing of not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to take up any space in a room, finding it difficult to express an opinion unless I am absolutely certain it is the right one. Saying things on the internet is still difficult.
In the song it is of course heavier and different than shyness – but in that way the flippancy of the word makes it more poignant. ‘Shyness’ is in many ways about smoothing social interactions, putting people at ease, which is kind of what women are conditioned to do too – but it’s also something that can cover up and perpetuate some very heavy and unjust things.
Discretion, actually, seems a guiding principle for the whole album. Do you generally prefer music that tends towards subtlety and understatement? Can you maybe give a few examples?
Totally. Totally. Bill Callahan is someone I always come back to. But really, I’m surrounded in by songwriters who are also very understated, the songwriters in my community – Ryan Driver, Steven Lambke, Michael Feuerstack, Sandro Perri…
To me though, it’s less about understatement and more about just reflecting reality – the way I experience things. Pop music is often based on these declarative statements – ‘I will always love you’ – and those songs are cathartic and helpful, I think. But in life, such moments of clarity are fleeting – it’s complexity that endures. I guess it’s natural to me to want to reflect that.
But it’s also about longevity. If I wrote big choruses, I don’t know that I could sing them every night, because they wouldn’t always be true. That’s why my big chorus in the love song is ‘I don’t expect your love to be like mine’, which is the same thing to me as ‘I will always love you’, but more exacting – more precise, I guess.
My first record was really heavy, and I can’t even sing those songs anymore – it would be impossible to sing them honestly at this point in my life. But All Of It Was Mine has held up for me – I can still find things in there to interact with, when I’m singing the songs every night.
I find it interesting that there have been a few great records lately by female musicians who do the same thing – Courtney Barnett for example, writes with a specificity that comes across as understatement but to me is actually just precision.
While Fairport Convention toiled, Fotheringay idled. While the band Sandy Denny left in the wake of 1969’s folk-rock landmark Liege And Lief gigged relentlessly, the group she put together with her boisterous Australian boyfriend Trevor Lucas swanned around in a vintage limousine. They retreated t...
While Fairport Convention toiled, Fotheringay idled. While the band Sandy Denny left in the wake of 1969’s folk-rock landmark Liege And Lief gigged relentlessly, the group she put together with her boisterous Australian boyfriend Trevor Lucas swanned around in a vintage limousine. They retreated to a Sussex farmhouse to ‘get it together’ but rehearsed only once and spent most of their time messing about and getting drunk. They spent stupid money on a gigantic PA system nicknamed ‘Stonehenge’ – and by all reports that didn’t work either.
Within a year, Denny, Lucas, his Eclection bandmate Gerry Conway, and co-conspirators Pat Donaldson and Jerry Donahue had frittered away a reported £30,000 advance and had only one half-cooked LP to show for it. “We’ve had a terrible deadline to meet,” Denny says with dog-ate-my-homework air introducing a BBC session on this surprisingly hefty document of Fotheringay’s brief career. “All that material we’ve been working on must go on the album ‘cause we don’t have anything else to put on it.”
The cupboards have been stripped bare for this four disc boxed set – 3CDs of studio recordings, demos, radio sessions and a live set, plus a DVD featuring un-broadcast TV footage – which features some of the best work of Denny’s maddeningly unfulfilled career. Indeed, the rendition of the Napoleonic bloodbath ballad “Banks Of The Nile”, which closed their self-titled album, released in June 1970, might well eclipse more celebrated Fairport classics like “A Sailor’s Life“, “Percy’s Song“, “Farewell Farewell“ or “The Deserter“.
Cursed with a voice of supernatural power, Denny knew when she walked out on Fairport at their peak that she did not want to spend the rest of her career belting out souped-up traditional songs. Her mentor and producer Joe Boyd was equally sure Denny could do better than retreating into a band whose easygoing style – a little bit country and little bit rock’n’roll – harked back to the early Fairport. However, while Denny (as she appears on German TV show Beat Club), a glowering thundercloud in a kaftan hunched over her piano, sounds like a solo star in waiting, she certainly doesn’t look like one. Her eagerness to cede the spotlight to Lucas, meanwhile, suggests she didn’t feel like one either.
Denny’s voice hugs every alpha-male curve of Lucas’s on Fotheringay’s live and studio versions of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel”, and by all accounts the monstrously insecure singer was utterly smitten with him. However, while Lucas’s spade-is-a-spade baritone has its charms – “Peace In The End” is cheery enough and Denny’s embellishments give his version of Bob Dylan’s “Too Much of Nothing” some heft – his contributions only paper over the cracks between the clutch of songs Denny brought to the new band. But when Denny was inspired, so were Fotheringay.
Fotheringay box set art
As with “The Banks Of The Nile”, the band provide a beautifully measured counterpoint on “Nothing More” – Denny’s attempt to reach out to her former bandmate Richard Thompson, quietly grief-stricken in the wake of the crash that killed his girlfriend Jeannie Franklin and Fairport drummer Martin Lamble. “My friend I know you’ve suffered, although you are still young,“ she sings. “Why was it you would not take help from anyone?”
The gentle swells that Fotheringay build under “The Sea” show a sympathetic subtlety, as the former nurse depicts the apocalypse coming to her home city: “Sea flows under your doors in London town, and all your defences are all broken down.” A distaff relative to Nick Drake’s “One Of These Things First”, its meaning is – like many of Denny’s songs – smoothed away by wave upon wave of obfuscating rewrites.
Fotheringay are at their unobtrusive best again on the “The Pond And The Stream”, Denny somewhat unfairly calling herself out for being an uptight urbanite compared to free-range folkie Anne Briggs. “Annie wanders on the land, she loves the freedom of the air,” Denny sighs. “She finds a friend in every place she goes. There’s always a face she knows. I wish that I was there.”
However, country living proved notably less inspiring when Fotheringay moved to Chaffinches Farm in Sussex, on a vague mission to log-cabin together their second LP. Fairport sparkled on their bucolic retreats – Liege And Lief came together at Farley Chamberlayne, near Winchester; Full House, their first post-Denny record, was born of communal living at the Angel, a former pub in Hertfordshire. Fotheringay’s rural idyll, by contrast, largely involved playing cards and going swimming.
An exasperated Boyd downed tools after the band returned to the studio that December. Functioning prototypes of “Late November” and “John The Gun” – both of which would appear on her first solo album – capture Denny in “Battle O Evermore” Valkyrie voice, but a surfeit of Lucas leads, and will-this-do covers of “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Silver Threads And Golden Needles” showed exactly how little Fotheringay had done on their holidays. Boyd told Denny she was wasting her time. He had a point.
Fotheringay were dissolved, but Denny’s solo career proved no more fulfilling. 1971’s North Star Grassman And The Ravens has a sullen charm, but no amount of string sections could cover up a shortage of top-class material as Lucas looked to steer her toward mainstream diva-dom on her final three LPs, Sandy, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. Drunk, drugged and disappointed, Denny unraveled, and motherhood only accelerated her decline. She died from a brain haemorrhage, aged 31, in April 1978, days after Lucas had spirited their baby daughter Georgia away to Australia – an extreme intervention which may have staved off further tragedy. Lucas died of a heart attack, aged 45, in 1989.
In light of that unhappy ending, many pinpointed the Fotheringay-era as the period when the rot set in. What Nothing More suggests, though, is that 1970 might have been Denny’s best year as a writer. The easy atmosphere and the security of having Lucas close by may not have eased her anxiety – Boyd wrote that Renee Zellweger’s Bridget Jones was an accidentally perfect Denny – but it gave her the space to create some startling songs. What came after seemed too much like hard work.
Q&A
Gerry Conway, drums Can you remember how Fotheringay first came about?
It was beginning to be the end of Eclection; we’d had several line-up changes and Trevor and I weren’t happy with the way it was going. Then there was a conversation one day in the kitchen of Sandy and Trevor’s flat in Chipstead Street in which the plan to form another band was hatched – the three of us were in it together. We just had to look for a bass player and a guitar player.
Was it Sandy’s band, Trevor’s band or everyone’s?
Sandy really wanted to have a vehicle for her own songs, so we did more or less concentrate on her material along with some traditional stuff and contributions from Trevor. Nobody cracked the whip. It was a friendly band. No one had any ambition of storming the charts are getting rich. Money didn’t come into it – there wasn’t any.
What was the dynamic between Trevor and Sandy?
I think they were just in love, and from love comes great things – but we were all mates together. Trevor was very much a party type person. There wasn’t going to be anything deep and meaningful going on – it was all going to be fun and we all got swept along on that sort of vibe.
They have been characterised as the Sid and Nancy of folk rock; was theirs a noticeably volatile relationship?
It did eventually become that way. Sandy did have quite a temper, bless her, so they would quarrel, but that never really included us – we just accepted that Sandy was that way. I remember backstage at a gig, Sandy was unhappy about something and I could hear her going on behind me, then suddenly she grabbed the bench I was sitting on, not spotting me, and threw it across the room with me on it. It was more funny than anything else.
Banks of the Nile is one of the performances of Sandy’s career: can you remember much about recording it?
I remember it like yesterday. We did a few takes of it and we weren’t happy, so we did what most people did in those days: stopped the session and went to the pub. And when we were a bit more refreshed we decided to come back and just jam it. It’s something that we just did blind. Did we realise it was a special moment? No. We were never happy. It always could have been better.
Is it true that Fotheringay had a Bentley?
What we had was a couple of very dodgy Austin Princesses, which we didn’t own. Our friend Jock had a car business and occasionally he would take us to gigs in one of his Austin Princesses, so we were arriving in style but usually breaking down halfway home. The nearest Fotheringay came to a Bentley was when Jock asked me to take one to Chipstead Street for Roy Harper to pick up – I had it for about an hour.
Is the talk about ‘Stonehenge’ – Fotheringay’s massive PA system – overstated?
It was true and it was silent. It was Trevor’s brainchild – he went to WEM, who were making PAs, and laid out a plan to build a big system. Sure enough, they built it and it was enormous. The only problem was that when set it up, you could put your head in it and you still wouldn’t hear anything. It was a bit of a white elephant.
Fotheringay’s country retreat to Chaffinches Farm seemed to involve more swimming than songwriting. True?
That’s fairly accurate. We did do one rehearsal, but the rest of the time Pat Donaldson and I were gardening. Then our roadie at the time – his brother had a motorbike shop – got a couple of BSAs for us and we had time trials up the side of the house or would ride them over the sand dunes in East Wittering. I’m not sure what we were preparing to do – we were just there.
Sandy split Fotheringay go solo. Can you remember how that came about?
Sandy came in in floods of tears to say that she had been persuaded to do the solo career and had to leave the band. After that we had a short meeting with the rest of us to decide whether we were going to carry on and get somebody else, but without Sandy it wasn’t a goer. The band only really survived for a year. This is a four disc set – I am amazed that there is that much material available.
Joe Boyd seems to have been fairly dismissive of Fotheringay.
He wanted either Fairport with Sandy or Sandy as a solo act, but what people failed to understand about Sandy was that her driving force in life was the sort of solidarity that came from being in a friendly band. She wanted to be successful – we all did – but I don’t think it was top of her list. First of all was that life should be nice, and that she should have nice people around her.
The Who have been officially announced as the final headliner for this year's Glastonbury festival.
Meanwhile, Paul Weller will play in the penultimate Sunday night slot on the Pyramid Stage.
The Who released a statement this morning [May 6, 2015] confirming reports that had appeared over the week...
The Who have been officially announced as the final headliner for this year’s Glastonbury festival.
Meanwhile, Paul Weller will play in the penultimate Sunday night slot on the Pyramid Stage.
The Who released a statement this morning [May 6, 2015] confirming reports that had appeared over the weekend [May 2, 2015] in a British tabloid that they were playing the festival.
Roger Daltrey said, “It’s great to be ending this part of a 50 year career at the most prestigious and respected music festival in the world. We’ll do our best to close this year’s event with a bang, unless of course the fireworks get get!”
The band will play their Hyde Park gig at the British Summer Time festival on Friday, May 26.
They will then close Glastonbury on Sunday, May 28. The band are currently scheduled to play a show in Paris that night, although the date will presumably be rescheduled.
The Who last played Glastonbury in 2007.
Other acts confirmed for this year’s Glastonbury festival include Patti Smith, Alabama Shakes, Mavis Staples, Suede and Motörhead will play, as well as Pharrell Williams, the Mothership Returns – which will feature George Clinton, Parliament, Funkadelic and the Family Stone – Father John Misty, Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett, Flying Lotus, Spiritualized, Super Furry Animals, Ryan Adams and more.
The Grateful Dead's final Fare Thee Well show will be shown in UK cinemas this summer.
The band announced they are to reunite to celebrate their 50th anniversary with five gigs.
They will play Santa Clara, California on June 27 and 28 and Chicago’s Soldier Field on July 3, 4 and 5.
As pr...
The Grateful Dead‘s final Fare Thee Well show will be shown in UK cinemas this summer.
The band announced they are to reunite to celebrate their 50th anniversary with five gigs.
They will play Santa Clara, California on June 27 and 28 and Chicago’s Soldier Field on July 3, 4 and 5.
As previously reported, these shows will be available to watch in the States on pay-per-view and also via online streaming.
The band have now revealed plans to screen their farewell gig at 250 cinemas across the UK on July 6.
Although these are billed as Fare Thee Well shows, there are reports suggesting that members of the band are planning a full-scale tour with John Mayer to take place during the autumn.
Meanwhile, George R.R. Martin, the creator of Game Of Thrones, has revealed the Grateful Dead as an influence on the series.
Robert Plant has paid tribute to Ben E King, who died last week.
Plant said, "His was the voice of my 'coming of age'... dramatic... imploring... pained... spectacular... I learned his every nuance. I lived in grief and joy in his songs and, crazily much later in time we became friends, in our "'At...
Robert Plant has paid tribute to Ben E King, who died last week.
Plant said, “His was the voice of my ‘coming of age’… dramatic… imploring… pained… spectacular… I learned his every nuance. I lived in grief and joy in his songs and, crazily much later in time we became friends, in our “‘Atlantic’ connection… A wonderful, kind man. A huge influence, loved and respected by so many. My thoughts go out to Betty….”
King died aged 76 from natural causes on April 30, 2015. He is survived by his wife, songwriter Betty Nelson, who he married in 1964.
Both King and Plant were signed to Atlantic Records. In 1984, Plant covered “Young Boy Blues” for his The Honeydrippers project, which had originally appeared on the B side of King’s 1961 single, “Here Comes The Night”.
There was something of a social media meltdown on the Uncut Facebook page at the back end of last week, after Michael posted this news story on www.www.uncut.co.uk. It reported one of those surveys guaranteed to rile people - specifically, in this case, people over the age of 33 who still engage wit...
There was something of a social media meltdown on the Uncut Facebook page at the back end of last week, after Michael posted this news story on www.www.uncut.co.uk. It reported one of those surveys guaranteed to rile people – specifically, in this case, people over the age of 33 who still engage with new music. Rarely, in fact, has there ever been a bigger provocation to Uncut’s indignant hardcore, than being told, “For the average listener, by their mid-30s, their tastes have matured, and they are who they’re going to be… Listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age – but which has since phased out of popularity.”
Of the several hundred responses from our readers, many limited themselves to an economical “bullshit”, or similar. Others, though, articulated their exasperation with being so reductively categorised. “I’m 55 and I still check out and buy new music,” wrote Mark Anthony Wyatt. “My musician son tips me off on new bands/artistes he thinks I will like, and I do the same for him, but it’s almost never chart/day time radio playlist stuff. These old farts who say ‘It’s not like it was in my day’….. open your ears!” Meanwhile Peter Geise, 65, pointed out, “I like all kinds of different music from ’30s jazz and blues to modern types. My latest purchases are Real Estate, Caribou and The War On Drugs.”
It all corroborated a fundamental suspicion we have about Uncut readers; that while many still treasure the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, the founding fathers and mothers, the gilded ’60s generation, they’re also hyper-attuned to new music. For the past few years, experts have told us that online music stores and streaming sites have collapsed the boundaries between notionally old and new music, but Uncut readers have mostly grasped this for decades. Music is a continuum, and good things keep turning up, if you have the appetite to keep looking.
For example: if you’ve enjoyed Goat these past few years, Chile’s Föllakzoid provide a similar kind of ritual psych with what seems, at least, to be an extra frisson of authenticity – the dank, post-rockish grooves are allegedly influenced by the ancient Armonic ceremonial rhythms of the Andes. It’s a usefully pungent backstory that enlivens “III”, a decent collection of head-nodders, occasionally prodded out of the dirge zone, as on “Electric”, towards a kind of grim, guitar-heavy techno. Useful assistance, too, from the German electronic maverick Atom TM, who adds astral texture and historical resonance to the jams with the aid of one of Kraftwerk’s old Korg synths.
In other psych news, connoisseurs of gloopy, lo-fi latterday jams have long gravitated to Philadelphia, thanks to the city harbouring bands like Bardo Pond, Birds Of Maya and Spacin’. Aye Aye are what passes for a supergroup in those parts, featuring the Gibbons brothers from Bardo Pond, current Purling Hiss drummer Ben Leapheart, and local scene mascot Harmonica Dan Balcer. Sludge blues are approximately their forte on their self-titled debut, with the self-explanatory likes of “Sleep Day” moving at the dirge pace of much Gibbons-related material. Balce’s forlorn harmonica leads, however, provide a relative sense of definition to these six instrumentals, executed as they are with a Cro-Magnon “grace” that makes Crazy Horse sound like sprightly technocrats.
Or how about Goran Kajfes’ Subtropic Arkestra, and their “The Reason Why Vol 2”? On 2013’s “The Reason Why Vol 1”, trumpeter Kajfes and his group applied rumbustious jazz-rock treatments to tunes by Tame Impala, Soft Machine and Cluster, revealing themselves as a prejudice-smashing big band akin to fellow Scandinavians Jaga Jazzist. This time, the songbook’s a little more obtuse, with vibrant attacks on Milton Nascimento (Brazil), Francis Bebey (Cameroon) and a clutch of old Turkish psych jams; Mahzar Ve Fuat’s “Adimiz Miskindir Bizim”, fuzztoned organ to the fore, is especially rewarding. Kajfes’ arrangements are consistently punchy and accessible. Nevertheless, a lyrical take on Grizzly Bear’s “Yet Again” is a neat point of entry for anyone daunted by the exotic range. Jose Gonzales guests, inconspicuously.
One of the stranger cultural by-products of the 2012 London Olympics was a starring role, in the opening ceremony, for the music of power-electronics duo Fuck Buttons, and the spin-off project of Benjamin John Power, Blanck Mass. An unlikely gig for supposed noise artists, it would seem, though in truth much of Power’s 2011 solo debut, “Blanck Mass”, felt purpose-built for stadiums: grandiose, martial techno, sometimes worryingly macho in its triumphalism. After such success, Power might plausibly have retreated into noise, and on “Dumb Flesh”, “Detritus” is, initially, cacophonous enough for Whitehouse. But generally, “Dumb Flesh” is more gleaming and monolithic than ever, with “Cruel Sport” an epic highlight. A full-time career soundtracking military pageants still beckons.
The music of Cecile “Colleen” Schott (French, but now based in San Sebastian) emerged in the early ’00s, through a series of albums so ineffably delicate that the most representative one (2006’s “Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique”) was constructed almost entirely using music boxes. Much of that atmosphere remains on her new one, “Captain Of None”, thanks to whispered vocals and a focus on the courtly pluck of a viola da gamba. “Salina Stars”, however, adds a melodica and some heavier dub frequencies into the mix, while the surprisingly urgent “This Hammer Breaks” layers vocal and percussive loops in such a way that suggests Colleen’s nearest contemporaries may now be Juana Molina and even Julia Holter.
John Dwyer has been at it so long now, maybe he stretches the definition of new music a way too far. Nevertheless, since he moved from San Francisco to LA, the wonderful Thee Oh Sees have become a more streamlined garage-rock vehicle, albeit one that retains the speed of a dragster and the heft of a juggernaut. “Mutilator Defeated At Last” is very much in the vein of 2013’s career-topping “Floating Coffin”: throbbing hypnorock predominates, sometimes – as in “Lupine Ossuary” – slashed apart by some notably wild guitar solos. The variety of last year’s “Drop” has been mostly sacrificed to bug-eyed momentum, while the backing vocals and keys of old are used sparingly. “Sticky Hulks” is an enterprising digression, being an organ etude that conjures up the tantalising notion of a dronerock Procol Harum.
Finally, there’s the odd artist who can bridge the divide in some unexpected way between a vintage generation and a new one. Todd Rundgren’s dilettantism and short-attention span have made for many frustrating records over the years. On “Runddans”, though, he’s forced to play an uncharacteristically long game by collaborating with the Norwegian prog-disco maestro Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen, from shoegazers Serena-Maneesh. “Runddans” is 39 minutes of continuous music, most closely related to the percolating grooves of Lindstrøm’s 2008 magnum opus, “Where You Go I Go Too”. Rundgren drops in and out of this spacious environment, working and reworking saturated melodic themes, finessing wordless, Beach Boy harmonies. “I have waited for this moment for what seems like nine lifetimes,” he sings, ecstatically; one suspects relieved Rundgren fans who’ve endured myriad sketchy experiments may feel likewise.
Blur have released a 30-minute documentary exploring the creation of the band's new album, The Magic Whip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gypc_n5knq0
Click hear to read the making of The Magic Whip...
The documentary features interviews and studio footage shot by the band.
The Magic Whip entere...
Blur have released a 30-minute documentary exploring the creation of the band’s new album, The Magic Whip.
George R.R. Martin, the creator of Game Of Thrones, has cited the Grateful Dead as an influence on the series.
In an interview streaming on Billboard, Martin reveals he has been to Dead shows, and he also addresses references to the Dead songs "Dire Wolf," "Cassidy" and "Dark Star" within his work....
George R.R. Martin, the creator of Game Of Thrones, has cited the Grateful Dead as an influence on the series.
In an interview streaming on Billboard, Martin reveals he has been to Dead shows, and he also addresses references to the Dead songs “Dire Wolf,” “Cassidy” and “Dark Star” within his work. He allegedly calls his home Terrapin Station.
“I have Grateful Dead lyrics rattling around in my head all the time,” he said, when questioned about the references. “’Ripple‘ is one of my favourite songs of all time … [quotes song] ‘There is a road, no simple highway.’”
He added that his wife, Paris, “is perhaps more of a fan of the Grateful Dead than I am”, and went on to confirm that the band influenced his rock’n’roll novel The Armageddon Rag.
Billboard also reports that the Weirwood trees in Game Of Thrones are named after guitarist Bob Weir.
Joni Mitchell may be discharged from hospital, possibly within the next few days.
Associated Press reports that her lawyer Alan Watenmaker told Superior Court Judge David S. Cunningham III on May 4, 2015 that Mitchell may be released from the hospital soon; but still cannot confer with doctors abo...
Joni Mitchell may be discharged from hospital, possibly within the next few days.
Associated Pressreports that her lawyer Alan Watenmaker told Superior Court Judge David S. Cunningham III on May 4, 2015 that Mitchell may be released from the hospital soon; but still cannot confer with doctors about her medical care or long-term treatment.
Watenmaker cited Mitchell’s impending release as one of the reasons why Leslie Morris, Mitchell’s friend for over 40 years, should oversee Mitchell’s medical decisions once she leaves hospital.
AP reports that Morris will not have any control over Mitchell’s finances.
Morris had filed a petition seeking to be named as Mitchell’s conservator, which had led to rumours suggesting that Mitchell was in a coma, after having been hospitalized on March 31, 2015.
A statement refuting the rumours was published on Mitchell’s website on April 28.
The Who are reportedly confirmed as the final headliner for this year's Glastonbury festival.
According to a story in The Sun today [May 2, 2015], the band will close this year's festival and that they will be joined on the line-up by either Noel Gallagher or Paul Weller, who will perform in the sl...
The Who are reportedly confirmed as the final headliner for this year’s Glastonbury festival.
According to a story in The Sun today [May 2, 2015], the band will close this year’s festival and that they will be joined on the line-up by either Noel Gallagher or Paul Weller, who will perform in the slot directly before them.
A “festival insider” is reported to have told the newspaper that: “The Who booking has been kept quiet because the band are also playing a Hyde Park gig for the British Summer Time festival so the announcement will be made in a few weeks. The band are still one of the best live groups and are currently on their 50th-anniversary tour, so it’s bound to be an amazing show.”
“There’ll also be support from an artist like Paul Weller or Noel Gallagher. It will be a dream night for rock fans.”
Neither The Who nor Glastonbury have officially commented on the report. The original story correctly asserts that The Who are booked to play a gig in Paris on the Sunday night of the Glastonbury weekend [June 28] but that they will look to rearrange that show.
Acts confirmed for this year’s festival include Patti Smith, Alabama Shakes, Mavis Staples, Suede and Motörhead will play, as well as Pharrell Williams, the Mothership Returns – which will feature George Clinton, Parliament, Funkadelic and the Family Stone – Father John Misty, Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett, Flying Lotus, Spiritualized, Super Furry Animals, Ryan Adams and more.
Brittany Howard's back yard stretches nine acres down through the forest to a creek, and is occasionally home to coyotes, armadillos, possums, foxes and owls, all of which she worries might one day attack her two pet cats. A family of deer pass through occasionally, by a pond that dries up for much ...
Brittany Howard’s back yard stretches nine acres down through the forest to a creek, and is occasionally home to coyotes, armadillos, possums, foxes and owls, all of which she worries might one day attack her two pet cats. A family of deer pass through occasionally, by a pond that dries up for much of the year.
When she was buying the house, in the wake of the first Alabama Shakes album selling over a million copies, Howard wanted somewhere secluded and quiet. She also bought a place in Nashville, 100 miles up Interstate 65, but could never envisage permanently moving away from her hometown of Athens, Alabama. “I’m pretty sure Nashville would kill me,” she says. “I’m the type of person who loves to be involved in everything going on. So I go up there, have my fun, and then when I can’t stand it anymore I come back here. There’s a duality to all of us. I think you gotta keep things in balance.”
The living room of Howard’s Athens house is calm and pastel-shaded. A few gold discs and French art deco prints are framed on the walls, and an acoustic guitar lies recently abandoned on an armchair. With characteristically informal diligence, she has been figuring out how to play Curtis Mayfield’s “Think”, from the Superfly soundtrack. When she enters from the porch, she stubs out her cigarette. Smoking inside is forbidden – “Otherwise my couch would smell weird.”
It is permitted, though, in the basement, a cold and expansive space that Howard has equipped as a rehearsal room and rudimentary recording studio. On one shelf, vinyl copies of Mayfield’s first solo album and James Brown’s Live At The Apollo are displayed next to an empty Jameson’s bottle. There is a drumkit, a $100 upright piano, a clutch of Xbox games, a vintage whammy pedal, a rack of guitars. Beneath a crude painting of a black panther, a large old hi-fi cabinet that once belonged to Howard’s grandfather has been playing “Future Primitive”, from Santana’s Caravanserai, at a selection of inaccurate and faintly disconcerting speeds.
Right now, Howard is reclining on a chair in front of her computer, a selection of cheap analog keyboards close at hand. On her chest, a cat extends itself languidly. She has cued up a series of demos that were recorded down here; spacey, Aquarian funk songs that, in their basic electronic form, recall Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information, or one of Sly Stone’s demos for his Stone Flower label – none of which, incidentally, Howard has ever heard. These are the songs that form the backbone of the excellent second Alabama Shakes album, Sound & Color, songs that retain a silvery otherworldliness even when they have been reconstituted with the guitar, bass and drums of her bandmates. Where a wallowing guitar solo sits on the finished version of “Gemini”, for instance, there is a sci-fi voluntary, played on an old synth. “Lasers!” Howard shouts, cracking up.
“Brittany’s probably the biggest influence on the experimental side of the band,” says Blake Mills, the producer who gave them room to manoeuvre on Sound & Color. “I got a strong Maggot Brain vibe from her demos, and also Curtis, because while she’s a rambunctious musician on whatever instrument it is she’s playing, the band don’t play like her. They end up executing it with a little more finesse than she puts into the demos. So what comes out has the spirit of that psychedelic, untethered force, from a group of musicians who really care about that and cherish that, but who might not necessarily come from that world.”
Howard’s mop of curls, so familiar from Shakes performances around Boys & Girls, have now been shaved and sculpted into a precarious quiff. She also has a fresh tattoo, two months old, to go with the one of Alabama on her right arm; Athens is marked on her map with a love heart. The new ink, mostly obscured by her glasses, traces two lines running straight and parallel away from her left eye. “I was just bored with my face,” she laughs. “I’d been looking at it for a really long time and I just wanted to switch it up.” She ponders for a moment the confluence of these adjustments to her image with the arrival of a new and surprising Alabama Shakes album; one that begins, appositely, “A new world hangs outside the window/Beautiful and strange.”
“Oh Jeez, so many changes,” she eventually sighs, theatrically. “People are gonna think I lost my damn mind…”
Ben E King has died aged 76.
The Telegraph reports he died of natural causes.
Born on September 28, 1938 in Henderson, North Carolina, King started his career in the late 1950s with The Drifters, singing on hits including "There Goes My Baby" and "Save The Last Dance For Me".
As a solo artist, hi...
Born on September 28, 1938 in Henderson, North Carolina, King started his career in the late 1950s with The Drifters, singing on hits including “There Goes My Baby” and “Save The Last Dance For Me”.
As a solo artist, his hits included “Stand By Me” and “Spanish Harlem”.
A Top 5 hit when it was first released in 1961, “Stand By Me” additionally enjoyed later success when it was used on the soundtrack for the 1986 River Phoenix film of the same name.
The song was extensively covered, including a version by John Lennon in 1975.
King continued to perform into his Seventies, most recently touring the UK in 2013.
A huge amount of amazing music by some of Uncut’s favourite artists remains unavailable – officially, at least. Here, then, are 50 remarkable bootleg recordings selected from our own private collections. We’ve favoured rare and unreleased studio recordings over that bootleg staple, the live sh...
A huge amount of amazing music by some of Uncut’s favourite artists remains unavailable – officially, at least. Here, then, are 50 remarkable bootleg recordings selected from our own private collections. We’ve favoured rare and unreleased studio recordings over that bootleg staple, the live show (though we couldn’t resist including a few). We wanted to present alternate histories of some of rock’s greatest bands, so over the next 18 pages you’ll discover entire LPs that never came out, abandoned hook-ups, unlikely covers, obscure radio sessions and lost nuggets. Oh, and what happens when you leave the tape running… Originally published in Uncut’s November 2011 issue (Take 174).
_____________________
50 THE TROGGS THE TROGGS TAPES Recorded 1970, London
In 1970, The Troggs entered the London studio of their label, Dick James Music, to work on a new song, “Tranquility” with producer Dennis Berger. But the band were critically under-rehearsed. With the tape running, the session deteriorated into an hilarious, 12-minute swearathon, the air blue with recriminations (“you fucking pranny!”), angry suggestions of how to improve the track (“put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard”) and Reg Presley’s priceless, interjections (“what about a fucking 12-string?”) – all delivered in the broadest ’ampshire vowels. We counted 93 uses of the word “fuck”; Presley claims he has a master tape with 137. By 1972, samizdat recordings had become a tour bus staple, and its influence extended to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Derek And Clive tapes, This Is Spinal Tap, The Comic Strip’s Bad News and a Saturday Night Live parody, where a medieval music troupe featuring Bill Murray, John Belushi and Harry Shearer replaced “fucking” with “flogging”. Part of The Troggs Tapes was released as a bonus CD with the 1992 Archeology box; Reg’s 137 f-word motherlode remains unreleased.
Sound quality: Excellent
See also: Oasis’ Wibbling Rivalry (1994) and Orson Welles’ frozen peas commercial
_____________________ 49 PAUL McCARTNEY & WINGS THE NASHVILLE SESSIONS Recorded June 1974, Nashville
Paul and Linda, Denny Laine and new Wings’ members Jimmy McCulloch and Geoff Britton arrived in Nashville on June 6, 1974, staying at the 133-acre ranch owned by Curly Putman, writer of “Green, Green Grass Of Home”. There ostensibly to rehearse, they soon entered the local Sound Shop Studios, but from these sessions only “Junior’s Farm” and “Sally G” were released, as Wings’ final Apple single that November. Some of Nashville’s top players play on this boot – including Chet Atkins, Lloyd Green and fiddlers Vassar Clements and Johnny Gimble, dubbed the Country Hams by McCartney. Their skills were wasted on the pleasantly trite “Hey Diddle” or “Walking In The Park With Eloise”, written years before by McCartney’s father James. This, and another cheesy instrumental, “Bridge On The River Suite”, eventually appeared on the 1989 edition of Wings At The Speed Of Sound. Denny Laine’s run-of-the-mill country rocker “Send Me The Heart” was later re-recorded for his 1981 album, Japanese Tears. Hastily leaving Nashville after a drunken McCulloch fell foul of local police, Wings were soon ensconced in Abbey Road filming the aborted TV doc, One Hand Clapping.
Sound quality: Excellent
See also: Cold Cuts Collection
Happy Mayday, everybody. Some interesting links below - new Loop, Adrian Younge & Laeticia Sadier, a track from Richard Thompson's Tweedy-produced album, Meg Baird and much more. A reminder, too, that the new issue of Uncut is out now. Please use wisely.
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Jo...
Happy Mayday, everybody. Some interesting links below – new Loop, Adrian Younge & Laeticia Sadier, a track from Richard Thompson’s Tweedy-produced album, Meg Baird and much more. A reminder, too, that the new issue of Uncut is out now. Please use wisely.
Ron Wood recalls his early days on the London beat scene in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
The Stones and Faces guitarist remembers his time with The Birds and seeing The Rolling Stones around on the London scene.
"You’d see the Stones around and my ambition was always to be one of them. I nev...
Ron Wood recalls his early days on the London beat scene in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
The Stones and Faces guitarist remembers his time with The Birds and seeing The Rolling Stones around on the London scene.
“You’d see the Stones around and my ambition was always to be one of them. I never thought The Birds would be the next Stones. They were just a stepping stone. The limitations were obvious and it was no surprise when it ground to a halt. It was a great learning curve… but I had higher ambitions.
“Sometimes I feel that my whole career with The Birds, Jeff Beck and The Faces was one long audition to join The Rolling Stones. I still think of myself as a fan as much as a bandmember. When I first heard their stirring music coming from the tent at the Richmond Jazz And Blues festival in 1963 something happened inside me and I knew that was the band I wanted to be in.
“The thought of being in the Stones is what gave me the drive to carry on. It was the atmosphere that lured me as much as the music, the raggedness, the glory, the image – it looked like a good job.”
Wood is releasing his diaries from the ’60s as How Can It Be? A Rock & Roll Diary, out in May in a limited run of 1,965 signed copies.
There is an instructive anecdote that video director Ross Harris tells in Heaven Adores You about the first time he worked with Elliott Smith. In 1995, Harris was commissioned by Smith’s manager to film a video for “Coming Up Roses”. After explaining that he didn’t want to make an “LA vide...
There is an instructive anecdote that video director Ross Harris tells in Heaven Adores You about the first time he worked with Elliott Smith. In 1995, Harris was commissioned by Smith’s manager to film a video for “Coming Up Roses”. After explaining that he didn’t want to make an “LA video”, Smith instead, he stayed with Harris and his family in the country north of Los Angeles for almost a fortnight. “We just shot a little bit every day,” explains Harris. “Certain days, we’d wake up and he’d be like, ‘I don’t really want to film today.’ And we’d just hang out.” The image of an artist who is creative on his own terms, supported by likeminded and sympathetic collaborators, is very much on-message with the rest of Nickolas Dylan Rossi’s strong if admittedly faintly precious documentary.
Rossi follows Smith from a suburban childhood in Texas, then on to the insular music scene in Portland, Oregon, his gradual success, move to New York and California and, finally, his death in October 2003 aged 34. Rossi makes strong use of the wealth of archival material he is granted access to: cassettes, photographs, handwritten lyrics, radio interviews, live recordings. He also has a cast list of Smith’s friends, collaborators and peers, including Smith’s sister Ashley Welch and former girlfriend Joanna Bolme. Admittedly, it’s a good haul. Although with no objective, critical voice it’s hard to see beyond the overriding view reinforced here of Smith as a troubled, saintly genius.
Heaven Adores You poster
There is, though, one revelation that suggests another side to Smith, as his friend and Jackpot! studio owner Larry Crane explains. “One day he [Smith] snuck Gus [Van Sant] in when I wasn’t there and played it [‘Miss Misery’] for him. Then they pretended he wrote it for the movie so it could get nominated.” It seems uncharacteristic behavior for a man who admits in one archive interview “I’m the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous.” But there are other disparities between what Smith says and does. When things get too hot in Portland, he moves to New York, apparently in pursuit of greater anonymity. Such behaviour seems at odds with his appearance at the Oscars, in front of a domestic audience of 57 million viewers, or on a high profile TV chat show like The Late Night With Conan O’Brien. We know the music is good. But essentially, this film could do with a little more rigorous investigation about who Smith was and what drove him.
A new online study claims that people stop listening to new music at 33.
The study was conducted using data from US Spotify listeners by Ajay Kalia of website Skynet and Ebert.
His results found that people, on average, stopped listening to new music at the age of 33. He writes, "While teens' musi...
A new online study claims that people stop listening to new music at 33.
The study was conducted using data from US Spotify listeners by Ajay Kalia of website Skynet and Ebert.
His results found that people, on average, stopped listening to new music at the age of 33. He writes, “While teens’ music taste is dominated by incredibly popular music, this proportion drops steadily through peoples’ 20s, before their tastes ‘mature’ in their early 30s,” continuing, “Until their early 30s, mainstream music represents a smaller and smaller proportion of their streaming. And for the average listener, by their mid-30s, their tastes have matured, and they are who they’re going to be.”
The study also shows that there’s a slight gender gap at play (“Women show a slow and steady decline in pop music listening from 13-49, while men drop precipitously starting from their teens until their early 30s, at which point they encounter the ‘lock-in’ effect”), also stating that becoming a parent “has an equivalent impact on your ‘music relevancy’ as aging about 4 years”.
Kalia attempts to explain the tendency to gravitate towards less mainstream, non-current music, writing, “Two factors drive this transition away from popular music. First, listeners discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank. Second, listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age – but which has since phased out of popularity.”
