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 ...
“JUST RAW, ALWAYS REALLY RAW.”
Four key records that influenced Sound & Color
DAVID AXELROD
Songs Of Innocence
CAPITOL 1968
Axelrod’s sumptuous orchestral funk is not an immediately obvious influence on Sound & Color, but Brittany Howard’s focus on the likes of “Holy Thursday” tends to be beyond the extravagant strings. “The bass tone is so exciting, the drum tone,” she says. “And the guitar tones are always amazing,” adds Heath Fogg. “Just raw, always really raw.”
CURTIS MAYFIELD
Curtis
CURTOM 1970
Howard appropriates Mayfield’s lissom falsetto for “Guess Who”, and has been studying everything from early Impressions sides to the Superfly soundtrack: “Some of the material can be really dark and far-out. Whilst I was writing songs I thought I wanted to do that, but then I went elsewhere. You can be inspired by something and take it somewhere completely different.”
FUNKADELIC
Maggot Brain
WESTBOUND 1971
“I like Funkadelic because they blurred the lines of genre, a funk band with shredding, weird, fuzzed guitar solos that are super spaced-out. A good groove, and laser beam keyboards. It makes me wanna dance and it also makes me think.”
ERYKAH BADU
New Amerykah Part Two (Return Of The Ankh)
MOTOWN 2010
Disorienting nu-soul opus that’s a clear precursor of liquid Sound & Color songs like “Over My Head”. “Love Badu,” says Howard. “I’ve been listening to Badu for years. If you look at my record stack, she’s like Number Two.” A quick glance at her record stack suggests, at least today, Number One is Miles Davis.
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...
1 THE BEACH BOYS SMILE Recorded 1966, Los Angeles – now mostly released as The Smile Sessions… Words: David Cavanagh
An impossible dream has become reality. Smile, the great lost Beach Boys album, finally received an official release on Capitol Records in 2011. The musical jigsaw that Brian Wilson couldn’t quite piece together in 1967, has, thanks to the wonders of digital editing, been assembled 44 years behind schedule. It may only be a version of Smile – using the 2004 album Brian Wilson Presents Smile as a template – but that’s good enough for Wilson. “Yes, Smile is now a finished piece of work,” he tells Uncut. “I think it’s a great piece of music, and the public is ready for it.”
Pet Sounds (1966) had been a symphonic, heart-tugging album about adolescent love and the coming of age. The intention with Smile – briefly called “Dumb Angel”, a title soon jettisoned – was to explore America’s landscape and history in a theatrical (but also cinematic) style, executed in a spirit of gaiety and fun. “Brian was consumed with humour at the time and the importance of humour,” his friend David Anderle later recalled. “He was fascinated with the idea of getting humour onto a disc and how to get that disc out to the people.”
“We wanted to try something different with music,” says Brian today. “We wanted to do something a little more advanced. We wanted to try and top Pet Sounds.” Wilson and his lyricist Van Dyke Parks conceived Smile as a journey across America from east to west; a movie in widescreen Surreal-O-Vision, featuring pioneers and frontiers, cantinas and log cabins, railroads and “waves of wheat”. Wilson began recording Smile in earnest in October 1966, a week before the release of the spectacular No 1“Good Vibrations”. As Wilson and his musicians – some of LA’s leading session players – worked on the new songs (tackling them in individual sections to be linked together later), his fellow Beach Boys embarked on their second European tour. On October 27, to pick a date at random, Brian was in Western Studio at 6000 Sunset, directing sessions for “Heroes And Villains” and “I’m In Great Shape”, while his stripey-shirted comrades performed on a bill with Peter & Gordon in Ludwigshafen, oblivious to their leader’s visionary activities back home.
Smile was given a catalogue number (T-2580) by Capitol and scheduled for release in December 1966. In mid-December, its release date was put back to January 1967. Artwork depicting a Smile ‘shop’ was created, and Capitol printed around 400,000 booklets for the album. Smile missed its January release, but Brian told the NME’s Keith Altham, in an article published on April 29, that the 12-song album was at last ready. Brian was filmed singing “Surf’s Up”, a particularly poignant moment on the LP, for a CBS TV doc, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, which aired on April 26. However, on May 6, Beach Boys’ publicist Derek Taylor broke the news that Smile had been “scrapped”. Though Wilson continued to record until May 18, he formally abandoned work on the album later that month. “We junked it,” he says now, curiously adopting the royal ‘we’. “We didn’t like where we were coming from. It was too advanced. We were taking drugs. We just decided not to do it any more.”
Various problems had combined and conspired to send the Smile project – and Brian Wilson as a human being – off the rails. He was smoking hashish and ingesting uppers on a regular basis, and had started experimenting with LSD. An enormous musical backlog had built up as he attempted to edit down more than 30 hours of music into the 36-minute confines of a vinyl LP. In a classic case of a man under stress, he worked obsessively on details (“Heroes And Villains”, a proposed single, ran to some nine sections), losing sight of the overall picture. He became paranoid that tapes of Smile had fallen into the hands of The Beatles. He daily faced the implacable opposition of his father, Murry, and he’d seen Van Dyke Parks quit the sessions twice (in March 1967, and again in April), offended by Mike Love’s mockery of his lyrics.
Some months later, in September, a new Beach Boys album, Smiley Smile, emerged. Consisting of re-recordings of tracks intended for Smile, it was a vastly reduced, whimsically simple outline of Brian’s grand vision. Sessions for Smiley Smile had begun, tellingly, on June 3 – two days after the release of Sgt Pepper, the conclusive proof that Brian’s race with The Beatles for artistic supremacy had been lost. Despite the presence of “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes And Villains”, Smiley Smile was savaged by critics for being hopelessly anti-climactic. “There was no purpose to it,” says Brian. “We just wanted to make something peaceful. Like ‘aaaaah… peace of mind’.”
For some years afterwards, The Beach Boys excavated elements of Smile periodically. “Cabinessence” and “Our Prayer” featured on their 1969 album 20/20. “Cool Cool Water” (previously known as “Love To Say DaDa”) appeared on Sunflower (1970). “Surf’s Up”, combining original Smile recordings with a new lead vocal from Carl Wilson and new ensemble vocals at the end, was the finale of the 1971 album Surf’s Up. Indeed, as their record sales declined, plans were even concocted for The Beach Boys to finish Smile as a matter of urgency. Capitol circulated an internal memo in late 1967 promising a forthcoming album of 10 unheard Smile tunes (and, for good measure, the release of the 400,000 booklets). The insurmountable obstacle, though, was that Brian was in no fit state to revisit the tapes. The Beach Boys released Wild Honey instead, and the Smile booklets were pulped.
A second attempt to revive Smile was made in 1972. The Beach Boys had left Capitol and were now signed to Reprise. Their contract, intriguingly, demanded that they deliver a master tape of Smile to the record company by May 1, 1973. “When The Beach Boys started courting underground radio in the early ’70s, it was almost like they had to pull Smile out of the hat,” says Domenic Priore, author of Smile: The Story Of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece. “It was as if Smile gave them legitimacy in the eyes of the counterculture.” Carl Wilson, along with the group’s manager Jack Rieley and recording engineer Stephen Desper, sifted through the tapes – and quickly realised that, sans Brian’s input, they were lost. The tapes were returned to the vaults.
In the summer of 1975, a three-part article was published in NME, written by Nick Kent. Armed with bizarre stories of ‘meditation tents’ and pianos in sandboxes, Kent delved deep into the genius and insanity of Brian, the dysfunction of The Beach Boys and the enigma of Smile. He revealed that, following a hashish-fuelled recording session for a song called “Fire”, Brian had flown into a panic on hearing that a fire had broken out in another part of LA at the same time. He was convinced his music had become witchcraft.
There was a further twist that proved crucial to Smile’s mystique. When Kent wrote his story, Smile was so rare, so forgotten, that people couldn’t even find it on bootleg. “The first tape that started circulating of Smile – in very limited circles – was in about 1979, 1980,” explains Andrew G Doe, curator of the online Beach Boys archive Bellagio 10452, “when an official biography of the band was written by Byron Preiss. He was given Smile tapes by a member of Brian’s household, and they got into the hands of collectors. Those tapes circulated for two or three years before we began to see, in 1983, the first vinyl bootlegs that you could go into a shop and buy.”
In ’85 came a second bootleg, with improved sound quality. Evidently, a Beach Boys insider had obtained access to the vaults and, as Doe puts it, “liberated very good cassette copies”. In the late ’80s, Smile bootlegs began to creep out on CD. One of the most popular, believed to have emanated in Japan, bore the album’s original Capitol catalogue number (T-2580) and opened with a 15-minute “Good Vibrations”. The reason it sounded so good, reputedly, is because first-generation Smile tapes had been given to a collaborator on Brian Wilson’s 1988 solo album, who made copies and passed them to a DJ, who distributed them among friends. After that, the vaults opened wide. “Bootlegs of Smile came out left, right and centre,” says Doe. A 20-volume series of high-quality Beach Boys CD boots (Unsurpassed Masters) was made available in the late ’90s by the Sea Of Tunes label, which took its name from the publishing company founded by Murry Wilson.
Volumes 16 and 17 were dedicated to Smile sessions copied directly from original tapes. Other CD bootlegs included a 5CD set (Archaeology – The Lost Smile Sessions 1966-1967) on a German label, Picaresque; Heroes And Villains Sessions One & Two, on Wilson Records; and a 2CD edition of Smile on the renowned bootleg label Vigotone, in 1993. Vigotone released a follow-up, Heroes And Vibrations, in 1998, examining the sessions for “Heroes And Villains” and “Good Vibrations” in detail, and planned a multi-disc Smile box set before being raided by the authorities and closed down in 2001.
Bootlegs of Smile, as a rule, contain familiar Beach Boys songs (“Good Vibrations”, “Heroes And Villains”, “Surf’s Up”, “Cabinessence”) performed in rather haunting, and at times halting, fragments. Some tracks have vocals, some don’t. As it became clear that Wilson had been working on up to 20 songs, fans speculated about which ones he’d earmarked for the LP – and in what versions, and in which order, they might have appeared. Nobody has ever been able to ascertain the truth. But one thing was inescapable. The music on the bootlegs lived up to the description of Smile as something exceptionally ambitious. How does Wilson feel today, Uncut wonders, about people first hearing Smile on bootlegs? “Well, I don’t know if they liked them or not,” he replies uneasily. “I mean, do you think they did?” Oh, absolutely! “Are you sure? Really?” Yes, really – they loved them. “OK, then.” Besides, didn’t the bootlegs help to establish Smile’s ‘specialness’, creating the romantic notion of a long-lost masterpiece that would blow people’s minds if it ever came out? “No!” he guffaws, and pauses. “But I guess it did, though, right?”
From the mid-’80s onwards, there have been occasional tantalising glimpses of Smile in an official capacity. Excerpts were used in a 1985 documentary, The Beach Boys: An American Band, including the notorious “Fire”. In 1990, edited highlights of sessions for “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes And Villains” were issued as bonus tracks on Smiley Smile/Wild Honey, a Capitol twofer CD. As interest in The Beach Boys’ legacy grew, a 5CD box set in 1993, Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys, found room for almost 40 minutes of music from Smile. Finally, on the 1998 anthology Endless Harmony Soundtrack, fans were treated to a recording of Brian and Van Dyke running through three Smile songs for an LA-based radio presenter in November 1966.
In the meantime, there had been another attempt (in 1988-’89) to prepare the Smile tapes for an official release, but things went awry when a cassette compiled for Capitol executives leaked into the public domain, causing Brian to lose interest. In the mid-’90s, yet another attempt was made. Capitol announced plans for a Pet Sounds boxset (The Pet Sounds Sessions), to be followed by a 3CD Smile box. But the latter failed to materialise. An 18-month delay in the release of The Pet Sounds Sessions – allegedly due to Mike Love’s unhappiness about the way he was portrayed in the sleevenotes – made the relevant parties unwilling to risk a repeat performance.
A few years passed. Brian made a recovery and was persuaded by his wife Melinda to perform live again. His Pet Sounds tour played to packed houses in 2000-2002. Then, in 2003-’04, aided by Van Dyke Parks and musician Darian Sahanaja, work began on Brian Wilson Presents Smile, a modern-day recreation of Smile. “I will be honest with you,” Sahanaja told interviewer Lindsay Planer, “at first he was not into doing it at all. Remember, this was emotionally taxing for him back in 1967. So much so, he abandoned it. Bringing it all back to him was unsettling to say the least.” Brian Wilson Presents Smile was received warmly on its release in September 2004. Seven months earlier, amid scenes of extraordinary praise (the Evening Standard compared it to the comeback of King Lear), Wilson performed Smile live for the first time at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Even so, few people expected an official release of the original 1966-’67 recordings. Al Jardine let the cat out the bag in February 2011: “Smile is the Holy Grail for Beach Boys fans… I’m happy to see it finally come out. Brian’s changed his mind about releasing the material, but it was inevitable, wasn’t it?” True to form, Smile still missed its scheduled release date (July 12), then its next one (August 9), then the one after that (October 4). It seems amazing it came out at all. Domenic Priore: “When Smile ended, it wasn’t pretty. All of them had their hearts broken in 1967. But I always believed this day would come. I always thought the music on Smile would overcome the inhibitions and the inertia about releasing it.”
Within days of being listed on Amazon, it was the fifth best-selling music title on pre-orders alone. Not bad for a bunch of 44-year-old songs recorded in mono. Uncut broke the happy news to Brian Wilson. “Are you sure, man?” he says, uncertainly. “Really? It’s gonna sell? What market, though? Who’s going to buy it?” Bless him.
But don’t assume that the release of Smile has rendered the bootlegs obsolete. Collectors don’t think like that. “Bootlegs will still have a place,” remarks Andrew G Doe. “People will look at the Smile box and say, ‘It hasn’t got this 30-second snatch of “Cabinessence”, or it hasn’t got the 1967 Capitol promo disc.’ It’s extensive, but it won’t make the bootlegs redundant. I’m sure there’s stuff to be unearthed. New tapes will turn up.”
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.”
Members of the Grateful Dead are apparently planning an October tour with John Mayer.
Billboard reports that Mayer and "select members of the group" are already in rehearsals. The Billboard story specifically cites Bob Weir as one of the musicians.
The Grateful Dead are due to play five shows in t...
Members of the Grateful Dead are apparently planning an October tour with John Mayer.
Billboard reports that Mayer and “select members of the group” are already in rehearsals. The Billboard story specifically cites Bob Weir as one of the musicians.
The Grateful Dead are due to play five shows in total on their Fare Thee Well tour, scheduled for June 27 and 28 in Santa Clara, California and July 4, 5 and 6 in Chicago.Billboard estimates a potential haul of $50 million from ticket sales for the five shows.
The band have recently announced plans to broadcast the Fare Thee Well shows on pay-per-view and also via online streaming.
Bob Dylan has announced a run of UK tour dates, including three nights at London's Royal Albert Hall.
He will play:
October 21; Royal Albert Hall, London
October 22; Royal Albert Hall, London
October 23; Royal Albert Hall, London
October 27: 02 Apollo, Manchester
October 28; 02 Apollo, Manches...
Bob Dylan has announced a run of UK tour dates, including three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Pete Townshend discusses his relationship with Roger Daltrey, retirement and the future of The Who in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2015 and out now.
The guitarist and songwriter admits that he’s not “particularly excited” about heading out on tour with The Who - who are reportedly the f...
Pete Townshend discusses his relationship with Roger Daltrey, retirement and the future of The Who in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2015 and out now.
“The shows? I don’t like them. I don’t find them fulfilling. But I’m brilliant at it. I find it incredibly easy. I drift through it.
“I get out the other end and the next day, somebody comes up to me and says, ‘You were fucking amazing yesterday!’
“It’s like being able to make a pair of shoes and knowing that you’ve got to a point that whenever you make a pair of shoes for somebody they’re going to last them for life. I don’t get particularly excited about it, but I do find it easy.”
White Denim are not a band you can accuse of sticking with a formula. Beginning life as a wily, Hendrixy garage trio, they have matured into freewheeling rock’n’soul groovers, via profitable diversions into windmilling prog, blue-eyed soul, jazzy post-rock and Afro-Cuban funk. There are still a ...
White Denim are not a band you can accuse of sticking with a formula. Beginning life as a wily, Hendrixy garage trio, they have matured into freewheeling rock’n’soul groovers, via profitable diversions into windmilling prog, blue-eyed soul, jazzy post-rock and Afro-Cuban funk. There are still a few genres, however, they have yet to explore – which is where Constant Bop comes in.
While his bandmates Austin Jenkins and Josh Block have recently been helping to nurture the more conventional talents of retro soulman Leon Bridges, White Denim frontman James Petralli has been quietly cultivating his alter-ego, Bop English. In the amusingly deadpan promo photo accompanying this release, he can be seen playing a banjo with a snake on his lap while sporting a 1990 England football tracky top. If that suggests a foolhardy fusion of bluegrass and Britpop, then the truth isn’t <so> far removed. At least, Petralli’s usual rootsy raw materials are refracted more strongly than ever through an arch, Anglophile filter: witness the impish Bolan boogie of “Dani’s Blues (It Was Beyond Our Control)” or the way that “Long Distance Runner” playfully subverts classic songwriting conventions in a manner reminiscent of 70s Macca at his best.
On the other hand, Petralli hasn’t diverged too drastically from his previous body of work: “Sentimental Wilderness” resembles one of D’s more serene moments (distinguished by subtle use of a vocoder); “Fake Dog” harnesses some the frenetic daftness of “I Start To Run”; and “Trying” sounds like a frisky cousin to Corsicana Lemonade’s “Pretty Green”. It’s no surprise to learn that the three other members of White Denim are among the dozens of contributors to Constant Bop, though they were never in the room at the same time, hence the priority of taut song structures over virtuosic flourishes and extended jams. Yet the album still rollicks and rolls like a White Denim record, with the addition of ribald brass and jaunty piano, giving the impression of having been recorded during a boozy studio all-nighter rather than on a sun-dappled Texan porch.
Certainly, Petralli hasn’t fallen prey to the usual indulgences afflicting solo side-projects. There are no half-finished experimental sketches here, nor clumsy forays into world music or electronica. He’s even managed to resist the opportunity for faux-humble soul-baring. In fact, Bop English – the moniker given to Petralli by a former roommate – turns out to be quite a slippery character: a skilled raconteur and dispenser of crooked homilies (“There ain’t nothing free that didn’t cost somebody something”) whose waggish manner isn’t always appreciated (“My intended hyperbole goes unnoticed at the counter”) and who suffers from paranoid visions of his own demise (“I like to imagine a killing spree where every victim is me”). By inhabiting this garrulous and charming yet over-analytical and secretly vulnerable character, Petralli actually reveals more about himself than a straightforward confessional singer-songwriter record might have done. These quirky and compelling vignettes are clearly the work of a man constantly trying to balance his pragmatic and creative sides, his duties as a new father with those of a good-time rock’n’roll ringleader.
Handily, Bop can also do love songs, or at least songs that remind us that love requires constant, careful tending. If the psych-country shuffle of “Falling At Your Feet” is a teensy bit sentimental, then “The Hardest Way” – a hint of Nick Drake and even Bernard Butler to this one – is gloriously honest about the daily battle to suppress our own pride and pettiness so that love can prevail. He may dress like a cross between Davy Crockett and David Seaman, but when it comes to affairs of the heart, it turns out that Bop English knows exactly what he’s talking about.
A fast-paced, multi-faceted, furiously entertaining record that gradually reveals hidden emotional depths? Chalk another one up to the man in White Denim.
Q&A
James Petralli
Why did your college roommate dub you Bop English?
It’s obvious, but I was studying English Lit and listening to a lot of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. Which technically is post-bop. But I was just happy to have a nickname.
Did you write these songs specifically for the album or have you been amassing them over a longer period?
It’s been an ongoing process for a long time. Some of the tunes were written for White Denim, but something wasn’t right about them for the band. I didn’t have a grand scheme or anything. It was actually 28 songs when I handed it into the label. They just said, ‘Hey man, you can’t put this out, nobody’s going to listen to that!’ It was going to be a double album where the first half was really trippy and haphazard and the second half was more straightforward and romantic. So the final album is just selected works from the double I was making. I’ll probably do a ‘complete edition’ in a very limited run at some point.
What did you learn from the acid trip described on “Struck Matches”?
It was actually salvia. I was handed a pipe and it turned out to not be pot, so it blindsided me… It was a really intense out-of-body experience where I saw these little snapshots of my life. But my biggest takeaway was to be much more cautious about what I’m smoking in future.
Is there going to be a live Bop English show?
Yeah, we’re coming over in May. I have a pretty cool band of freaky musicians. It’s not quite as groovy as White Denim has gotten over the last few years – it’s a little more aggressive and we do a lot of heady improv, which is fun.
INTERVIEW: SAM RICHARDS
Ryan Adams has covered Bryan Adams' song, "Summer Of '69".
Adams performed the song on April 28, 2015 during the first of two nights at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni_-e5Mb3hU
As Rolling Stone reports, Adams once had an audience member ejected from a show at the ...
Ryan Adams has covered Bryan Adams’ song, “Summer Of ’69”.
Adams performed the song on April 28, 2015 during the first of two nights at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
As Rolling Stone reports, Adams once had an audience member ejected from a show at the same venue for repeatedly heckling him to play the Bryan Adams’ song.
Alabama Shakes have released a video for the title track of their current album, Sound & Color.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faG8RiaANek
Meanwhile, the band play the UK in May, with one date also confirmed for November.
Birmingham O2 Academy (May 13)
Brighton The Dome (15)
Manchester O2 Ap...
Alabama Shakes have released a video for the title track of their current album, Sound & Color.
Meanwhile, the band play the UK in May, with one date also confirmed for November.
Birmingham O2 Academy (May 13)
Brighton The Dome (15)
Manchester O2 Apollo (16)
London O2 Academy Brixton (November 18)
The tracklisting for Sound & Color is as follows:
‘Sound And Color’
‘Don’t Wanna Fight’
‘Dunes’
‘Future People’
‘Gimme All Your Love’
‘This Feeling’
‘Guess Who’
‘The Greatest’
‘Shoegaze’
‘Miss You’
‘Gemini’
‘Over My Head’
Morrissey has written an open letter to the American politican and climate change activist Al Gore.
In the letter, Morrissey urges Gore to serve a vegan menu at Live Earth, the forthcoming climate change event which is scheduled to place on June 18 at venues around the world.
The letter, which has...
Morrissey has written an open letter to the American politican and climate change activist Al Gore.
In the letter, Morrissey urges Gore to serve a vegan menu at Live Earth, the forthcoming climate change event which is scheduled to place on June 18 at venues around the world.
The letter, which has been published on Rolling Stone, was addressed to Gore and his co-organiser Kevin Wall on behalf of PETA.
Morrissey compares “serving meat and dairy products at an event to combat climate change is like selling pistols at a gun-control rally” and that it is Gore and Wall’s “moral duty” to promote a vegan diet at Live Earth.
“If you choose to serve animal flesh at Live Earth, you’ll be making a mockery of the very concept of the event, in which case it should be renamed “Dead Earth: We Contributed!’,” Morrissey adds.
The letter in full:
Dear Mr. Gore and Mr. Wall,
I am writing to ask you to do the one thing that will do the most good for the planet and the majority of its inhabitants: not serve meat or dairy products at Live Earth 2015. I don’t mean offering a vegan option-I mean not serving animal products at all. Otherwise, the event will make no sense-it’ll be “greenwashing.” Serving meat and dairy products at an event to combat climate change is like selling pistols at a gun-control rally. Your responsibility is to alert people to a crisis, not sell out to the vendors responsible for it.
Not only is it possible for venues to provide a 100 percent meat-free menu-as is done now at every concert venue in which I perform, including Madison Square Garden, where I have a show at the end of June-it’s also a moral duty.
We already know that raising animals for food is a leading cause of climate change and that moving toward a vegan diet is necessary to combat climate change’s worst effects. Animal agriculture severely affects the world’s freshwater supply and is a major contributor to global greenhouse-gas emissions, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and air and water pollution, among many other harmful effects.
Since you can’t miss the fact that meat consumption is killing the planet-your own sponsor organization, the United Nations, states this-and since venues can and will cater vegan food for events, if you choose to serve animal flesh at Live Earth, you’ll be making a mockery of the very concept of the event, in which case it should be renamed “Dead Earth: We Contributed!”
Don’t be a denier of the causes of climate change. You know the facts. Make the right choice.
As you might have already noticed, it's shaping up to be a strong year for music documentaries. We're already had films on the Dave Clark Five, Kurt Cobain and the Chilean Woodstock; on the horizon, there's Lambert & Stamp, the Elliott Smith film Heaven Adores You and also docs on Wilko Johns...
As you might have already noticed, it’s shaping up to be a strong year for music documentaries. We’re already had films on the Dave Clark Five, Kurt Cobain and the Chilean Woodstock; on the horizon, there’s Lambert & Stamp, the Elliott Smith film Heaven Adores You and also docs on Wilko Johnson, The Wrecking Crew and The Last Poets’ Hustler’s Convention. And, it should be noted, all these are due out before summer.
Add to that burgeoning pile What Happened, Miss Simone?, a handsome new trailer for which has just been released.
The film, directed by Liz Garbus [Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib; Bobby Fischer Against The World], weaves together Simone’s story from extensive audio tapes recorded over the course of three decades, as well as concert footage and archival interviews, diaries and letters.
The film launches on Netflix on June 26, with a full release soon after.
To mark Willie Nelson's birthday today [April 29], I thought I'd post my interview with him for our regular An Audience With... feature. This originally appeared in Uncut's Take 208 [November 2014].
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner
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A few days before Uncut speaks to Willie Nelson, hi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnU2Tmqqv9g
When did you become interested in the Martial Arts? Angus Stewart, Glasgow
In Abbot, there wasn’t a lot to do but fight and throw rocks. I got into it from the comic books judo and ju-jitsu, Charles Atlas and Bruce Lee. I got into that pretty early. It’s something that I’ve been interested in and enjoy doing. Then later on I got into kung fu when I was in Nashville. For the last 20 years, I’ve been into taekwondo in Austin. It’s a lot of fun. It’s probably good for you. I’ve got a fifth degree black belt. I think a lot of it is honorary, more than anything else. I’m fairly familiar with the Korean mixed martial arts, Gongkwon Yusul and the various martial arts techniques. You know, talking of sports, I’m a good friend of Muhammad Ali. I think Kris Kristofferson introduced us. A year or so ago, he gave me a pair of his boxing gloves. I met him a few years back. I’ve always been a fan, all the way back to when he was Cassius Clay. I was really glad to get to meet him. He came on my bus one time. I’ve got a punch bag in the back of the bus and I got him back there punching my bag. I was thrilled to be able to know him.
What do you remember about working with The Highwaymen?
Bea Sheridan, Farnborough
Some of the best memories I’ve had in my life was working with the Highwaymen, Kris, John and Waylon. We went around the world a couple of times on tours, had a couple of albums together. I had a whole lot of fun working with those guys. Bonnie Carr, who did the travel for us when we were on I guess the last tour that we did around the world, we went to Singapore, a lot of different places, Brazil. We all took our families and everything with us when we travelled. Bonnie was telling me, she handled all the luggage and the ticket co-ordinations, and we had 278 pieces of luggage every day that she had to keep up with.
Do people mythologise your marijuana intake?
Toby Speller, Essex
It’s probably not exaggerated a lot. I enjoy smoking. But I use a Vaporizer these days. If you’re a singer, they’re better for your voice and your lungs. There’s no smoke and no heat on the Vaporizer. Even though marijuana smoke is not as dangerous as cigarette smoke, any time you put any kind of smoke in your lungs it takes a toll of some kind.
