It apparently took Johnny Rogan more than 30 years to write Ray Davies: A Complicated Life. Potential readers made faint-hearted by its imposing bulk might wonder if it will take as long to read, while Kinks fans of a certain age will be especially concerned that if they start it they might not live...
It apparently took Johnny Rogan more than 30 years to write Ray Davies: A Complicated Life. Potential readers made faint-hearted by its imposing bulk might wonder if it will take as long to read, while Kinks fans of a certain age will be especially concerned that if they start it they might not live long enough to finish the thing. The book is a little shy of 800 pages. Rogan’s notes, acknowledgements and a discography alone run to over 100 of them, rolling on interminably like the credits at the end of a Michael Bay film.
This is brevity itself for Rogan, however. His last book, Byrds: Requiem For The Timeless, weighed in at over 1200 pages, with more to follow in a still unpublished second volume. He’s the kind of biographer for whom no character in the story he is telling is too minor to be overlooked, no incident too small to be described at the fullest possible length, no anecdote, recollection, set list or song too insignificant to be duly logged, documented and discussed. A Complicated Life, therefore, teems with as much detail as a 19th century novel, an unbelievable early reference to Africa as “the Dark Continent” making Rogan more than ever sound like a fusty Victorian chronicler.
The Kinks’ story was well told by Nick Hasted in his 2011 biography, You Really Got Me, and more elliptically by Ray Davies in two memoirs, 1995’s X-Ray and 2013’s Americana: The Kinks, The Road and The Perfect Riff. Whatever’s been previously written about the band is rather overwhelmed, however, by Rogan’s book, with its illuminating interviews with Ray and Dave Davies and an abundance of supplementary testimony from usually deeply disgruntled former band members, managers, producers, agents, school friends, family and roadies, with especially telling contributions from Ray’s first wife, Rasa, a 16-year-old Bradford schoolgirl when Ray met her.
Whatever his regard for Davies as a songwriter of occasional genius, Johnny Rogan is unsparing about the flaws in Ray’s character that made him eventually insufferable to so many of the people who came into his ruinous orbit. At the heart of A Complicated Life is Ray’s lifelong conflict with his younger brother, a dismal history of largely pointless and destructive enmity, almost unreal in its relentless hostility and violence, and catalogued here in grim and exasperating detail. Their behaviour was not confined to incandescent fraternal dispute. It may even be that their greatest talent was bringing misery to themselves and everyone around them. However much you might love the best of their music, by the end of this enormous, gripping and hugely readable book, you are eventually glad to see the back of them and their toxic hatreds.
When a sprightly 56-year-old Bob Dylan released "Time Out Of Mind" in 1997, he inadvertently established a new paradigm for the first generation of rock superstars. While, at live shows, they were still expected to play the hits of their youth, they were no longer obliged to ignore the actual digits...
When a sprightly 56-year-old Bob Dylan released “Time Out Of Mind” in 1997, he inadvertently established a new paradigm for the first generation of rock superstars. While, at live shows, they were still expected to play the hits of their youth, they were no longer obliged to ignore the actual digits on their birth certificates. Now, their new music was often obliged to confront mortality; to admit, with appropriate gravitas, that they might soon, one way or another, fade away. “It’s not dark yet,” sang Dylan, “but it’s gettin’ there.”
Eighteen years on, however, as Dylan and his peers march resolutely into their seventies, many have realised that they probably shouldn’t approach each new project as if it may be their last; half a dozen rueful valedictory albums would be enough for even Leonard Cohen. As a consequence, these artists are finding new ways to grow older – Dylan’s peculiar revenant games, for example, or Neil Young’s belated mid-life crisis – and are working out how to deal with playing 50-year-old anthems for a few years more, at least.
On May 19, Pete Townshend, notably vituperative voice of that generation, will turn 70. As Michael Bonner discovers in this month’s new issue of Uncut, out today, however, Townshend shows little enthusiasm for even acknowledging the landmark. Instead, he will be busy continuing a life’s exceptional and complex work: performing incendiary but conflicted gigs with The Who; re-imagining the music that has haunted him for decades (a symphonic rescoring of “Quadrophenia”, in this case); dreaming up radical plots to upset expectation; and, of course, baiting Roger Daltrey.
There’s a lot of the latter in our cover story, one which proves yet again that Townshend remains the king of interviewees. “There’s a desire that I have sometimes to do a show which is just crap,” Townshend says. “Go out in front of a bunch of devoted Who fans and say, ‘Listen, you bunch of fucking cunts. Fuck off. Don’t come back. This is the last time I’m every going to fucking say anything that’s even slightly nice to you.’ Then what you do is plug your guitar into overdrive and walk off stage… I don’t mean deliberately play crap. I mean allow a degree of experimentation that would allow you to make the kind of mistakes that people might say, ‘This is crap.’”
When I was editing Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to The Who, I uncovered a great tranche of Townshend features, consistently remarkable for their intelligence and candour. Obligatory hype aside, I genuinely believe this month’s instalment is one of the most compelling.
The rest of the issue isn’t bad, either, I guess. We have interviews with the Boredoms, My Morning Jacket, Ron Wood, Nile Rodgers, several ex-members of Felt, Paul Weller, Richard Dawson and, in this month’s Fractiously Reunited Legends slot, The Violent Femmes. There’s a great piece on Doug Sahm, which has kept me replaying Sir Douglas Quintet’s “Are Inlaws Really Outlaws” for most of the month, plus an archive romp with those incorrigible Happy Mondays. We’ve also got tributes to Daevid Allen, John Renbourn and Andy Fraser, an investigation into the success of Joe Bonamassa, and a reviews section that involves Holly Herndon, Leonard Cohen, the Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Lead Belly, The Rolling Stones, Red House Painters and, by me, an extended piece about the Weather Station album I’ve been mentioning a lot these past few weeks. To recap: this…
Neil Young and Stephen Stills performed together on Saturday, April 25 at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles.
The pair reunited for a nine-song set as part of the third annual Light Up The Blues benefit concert in aid of autism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHCXUWWKEkc
The event w...
Neil Young and Stephen Stills performed together on Saturday, April 25 at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles.
The pair reunited for a nine-song set as part of the third annual Light Up The Blues benefit concert in aid of autism.
The event was hosted by Stills and his wife Kristen, and also featured sets from Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin.
The setlist from Young – who recently appeared onstage in New York to discuss his new album, The Monsanto Years – and Stills drew from their shared musical history, as well as new material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDBhjt2yRg4
Neil Young and Stephen Stills Light Up The Blues setlist: 1. Long May You Run (acoustic guitar) 2. Human Highway acoustic guitar) 3. I Don’t Know (acoustic guitar) [new Young song] 4. Virtual Here & Now (electric guitar) [new Stills song] 5. Don’t Want Lies (electric guitar) 6. For What It’s Worth (electric guitar) 7. Bluebird (electric guitar) 8. Mr. Soul (electric guitar) 9. Rockin’ In The Free World (electric guitar)
David Bowie has announced the latest in his ongoing 7″ anniversary picture disc series.
Bowie will release "Fame" as a limited-edition picture disc on July 24, 2015 backed by an alternate mix of the fellow Young Americans album track, "Right".
"Fame" was originally released as a single on Ju...
David Bowie has announced the latest in his ongoing 7″ anniversary picture disc series.
Bowie will release “Fame” as a limited-edition picture disc on July 24, 2015 backed by an alternate mix of the fellow Young Americans album track, “Right“.
“Fame” was originally released as a single on July 25, 1975.
The most recent in his anniversary picture disc series was “Young Americans“.
Recently, Bowie also released a blue vinyl 7” of the French-language version of “Heroes”, to mark the opening of David Bowie Is at the Philharmonie de Paris, and two 7″ singles on Record Store Day: a limited edition 7″ picture disc of “Changes” and a limited edition white/clear vinyl split 7″of “Kingdom Come” also featuring Tom Verlaine‘s version.
Jack White played the final night of his five-date acoustic tour last night [April 26, 2015].
The show took place in Fargo, North Dakota. The tour found White playing the five US states he had not previously performed in, including Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and South Dakota.
White's Fargo show was st...
Jack White played the final night of his five-date acoustic tour last night [April 26, 2015].
The show took place in Fargo, North Dakota. The tour found White playing the five US states he had not previously performed in, including Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and South Dakota.
White’s Fargo show was streamed live on Tidal, the newly-launched streaming music service, and it will be available on-demand at a later date.
According to Billboard, after closing the show with a cover of Leadbelly‘s “Goodnight, Irene”, White told the audience: “If you feel strongly about music and love music, tell people that. Tell people that music is sacred. Music is not disposable and worthless, it shouldn’t be treated that way”.
Jack White’s setlist at Fargo Theatre: 1. “Just One Drink” 2. “Temporary Ground” 3. “Hotel Yorba” 4. “Alone in My Home” 5. “Do” 6. “Love Interruption” 7. “Inaccessible Mystery” 8. “We’re Going to Be Friends” 9.”A Martyr for My Love for You” 10. “Blunderbuss” 11. “Carolina Drama” 12. “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known” 13. “You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket” 14. “Goodnight, Irene”
The Replacements have debuted a new song, "Whole Food Blues".
The band have been playing the song live on their current tour; their first since reuniting in 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDyGdTbkH2Y
The tour began at Seattle's Paramount Theatre on April 10; the band will play their first ...
The Replacements have debuted a new song, “Whole Food Blues“.
The band have been playing the song live on their current tour; their first since reuniting in 2013.
The tour began at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on April 10; the band will play their first UK shows in 24 years at London’s Roundhouse in June.
Last year, the band released a new song, “Poke Me In My Cage“, a 24-minute improvisational piece that appeared on the band’s Soundcloud.
Pete Townshend, Paul Weller, My Morning Jacket and Ron Wood feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2015 and out now.
The Who guitarist and songwriter is on the cover, and inside he comes clean on retirement, the future of the band and his still intense relationship with Roger Daltrey.
“Th...
Pete Townshend, Paul Weller, My Morning Jacket and Ron Wood feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2015 and out now.
The Who guitarist and songwriter is on the cover, and inside he comes clean on retirement, the future of the band and his still intense relationship with Roger Daltrey.
“There’s a desire I have to do a show which is crap,” he says. “Go out in front of a bunch of devoted Who fans and say, ‘Listen, you bunch of fucking cunts. Fuck off. Don’t come back…’”
Paul Weller discusses his new album, Saturns Pattern, and looks to the next chapter of his career – the epic LP also gets an extensive three-page review.
My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James answers your questions, revealing his thoughts on crème brûlée, meditation and the band’s new album, The Waterfall, as well as recalling snorkeling with the Grateful Dead and performing with Bob Dylan.
Ron Wood opens up his ’60s diary to reveal his formative years as a rock’n’roller in beat combo The Birds, and admits that he always wanted to be in The Rolling Stones.
“The Stones were simmering in the background,” he says, “they were the gauge for where I wanted to be.”
As the Violent Femmes return with new music, the original members tell us how they won a record contract worth zero dollars, wrote loser anthems and biblical freak-outs, and ended up one of the biggest cult bands of the 1980s. Also involved: Chrissie Hynde, The Modern Lovers, lawsuits, a special, near-naked performance for The Smiths.
Nile Rodgers takes us through the highlights of his recorded work, from Chic to Bowie and Daft Punk – “It sounds weird,” he laughs, “but when I run into young kids, they think Pharrell and I have a band called Daft Punk with robots behind us!”
Elsewhere, the incredible tale of the incomparable Texas cult hero Doug Sahm is told, and we delve into the archives to find an amazing Happy Mondays interview from 1990 – “we went drug potty!” – and Felt explain how they made their classic “Primitive Painters” single.
Our 40-page reviews section features Weller, The Rolling Stones, Joe Bonamassa, Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith and more.
Also in the magazine, Canyon troubadour JD Souther reveals the records that changed his life, and we hear all about the new Karen Dalton project, a rediscovered Tom Waits animation, and Boredoms’ latest drum extravaganza.
This month’s free CD, Uncut’s High Numbers, includes great new songs from Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Giant Sand, The Weather Station, Mikal Cronin, My Morning Jacket, Thee Oh Sees, Wire and more.
“This is when Captain found his ear!” In 1979, the reformed London punks were shunted off to a studio to “make some noise” – result: a hippy-baiting powerpop hit of complex proportions. The band tell Peter Watts how it all happened – originally from Uncut's May 2014 (Take 204) issue.
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“This is when Captain found his ear!” In 1979, the reformed London punks were shunted off to a studio to “make some noise” – result: a hippy-baiting powerpop hit of complex proportions. The band tell Peter Watts how it all happened – originally from Uncut’s May 2014 (Take 204) issue.
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When The Damned reformed in January 1979, after a nine-month break following the departure of original guitarist Brian James, nobody knew quite what to expect. James had been the band’s principal songwriter on their two albums to date, and it was unclear who from within the band’s ranks could replace him. Recruiting ex-Saint Algy Ward on bass (Lemmy had briefly held the job), the band signed to Roger Armstrong’s Chiswick Records, and were sent to a Croydon studio for a couple of weeks and told to “make some noise”, as Ward remembers. The results were impressive: Captain Sensible’s “Love Song” gave The Damned a Top 20 hit, and he followed it up with the poppy, hippy-baiting “Smash It Up”, which although effectively ignored by the BBC, became a minor hit in winter 1979 and subsequently the band’s unofficial anthem.
For such a simple powerpop song, “Smash It Up” was remarkably complex. For a start, Sensible had conceived it as the second section of a four-part suite, and although the first two sections appeared on 1979s’ Machine Gun Etiquette album, the last two didn’t surface until 2004. And then there was the question of influences. How did a tribute to Marc Bolan – with whom The Damned toured in 1977 – fit in with a song that had lyrics scolding “Krishna burgers” and “Glastonbury hippies”? What did Abba have to do with all this? And just how did The Clash’s grand piano come to be so important? We persuaded Rat, Captain, Algy Ward and Roger Armstrong to spill the beans about Clash-caricaturing condoms, car crashes and frothy lager. David Vanian declined to participate.
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CAPTAIN SENSIBLE: I was in a deckchair in my parents’ garden catching up on some sleep when I was awoken by my mum saying, “Your mate, what’s his name, Roley, Boley? He’s died in a car crash.” I hoped she didn’t mean Marc Bolan.
RAT SCABIES: We’d just been on tour with Marc. He looked after us. He was really good on the technical side of sound. I’m pretty sure he would have ended up producing us.
SENSIBLE: I locked myself in my room and picked up the guitar. The sad Part 1 of “Smash It Up” pretty much wrote itself and is a tribute to Marc. While other old-guard rockers like [Phil] Collins and [Keith] Richards loathed punk, he actually really dug it.
SCABIES: The day after Bolan died, I was sitting round Captain’s house, plonking around on the guitar and I came up with a few odd chords. Captain went, “Ooh, that sounds good.” And he and I wrote Part 1. That’s the instrumental bit. Captain had a great ear for melody and helped turn Part 1 into a complete thing.
SENSIBLE: It’s all a blur, but I thought Rat’s involvement was more on Part 2. I recall Rat twanging away on the guitar and he came up with a usable riff which became the chorus.
Florian Fricke was of the generation of West German musicians involved in the movement that would become known internationally as Krautrock. Yet the music he made in his group Popol Vuh between the years 1970 and his death in 2001 feels somewhat apart.
Groups like Can, Faust and Neu! were making mu...
Florian Fricke was of the generation of West German musicians involved in the movement that would become known internationally as Krautrock. Yet the music he made in his group Popol Vuh between the years 1970 and his death in 2001 feels somewhat apart.
Groups like Can, Faust and Neu! were making music for a modern Germany, exploring new techniques, technologies, and philosophies. In some ways Frickewas a modernist too. He was amongst the first Germans to own a Moog synthesizer, which powered Popol Vuh’s 1970 debut album Affenstunde, as well as the soundtrack he made for his friend Werner Herzog’s feature film about conquistadors searching for the mythical Inca city of El Dorado, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God. But Fricke would soon tire of the synthesizer, and albums from 1972’s Hosianna Mantra on would focus on a spiritual, devotional music, using piano and more exotic instruments such as the oboe, konga, and tamboura. The guiding principle was not progress, but peace – or as Fricke put it: “Popol Vuh is a mass for the heart. It is music for Love. Das ist alles.”
This new collection, sanctioned by Fricke’s family, draws from two sources. The first disc collects eight solo piano recordings, a mix of unheard improvisations and sketches of more developed Popol Vuh pieces (three “Spirit Of Peace” pieces are test runs for the title track of the 1985 album of the same name; others appear to be prototypes of tracks from 1972’s Hosianna Mantra). Fricke’s playing is minimal but purposeful. As a youth, he practised Bach and Schubert, and surely could have been a concert pianist had the mood taken him. Indeed, he released an album of Mozart pieces in 1991.
Perhaps more interesting, though, is the DVD and accompanying soundtrack disc, which contain the long-lost Kailash: A Pilgrimage To The Throne Of The Gods. A 53-minute film made by Fricke with Popol Vuh member Frank Fielder operating the camera, it’s a sort of travelogue charting the pair’s journey up the mountain of the same name, a 21,000-foot peak in west Tibet considered holy by Hindus and Buddhists alike. Its slow pans across remote encampments, wandering yak-herders, and pilgrims prostrating themselves as they make their ascent feel almost Herzogian in their craggy beauty. But the serenity of Fricke’s vision shines through, in large part thanks to the music. “Buddha’s Footprint” and “Valley Of The Gods” are billowing synthesizer pieces with subtle but effective ethnic flourishes that feel just one sheer face from the divine.
Very sad news overnight about the passing of David Roback. By way of a tribute, here's my career-spanning Mazzy Star interview which originally appeared in Uncut's October 2013 issue, around their then-new album, Seasons Of The Day.
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner
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Hope Sp...
Very sad news overnight about the passing of David Roback. By way of a tribute, here’s my career-spanning Mazzy Star interview which originally appeared in Uncut’s October 2013 issue, around their then-new album, Seasons Of The Day.
Seventeen long and sad years after Mazzy Star last released an album, Hope Sandoval and Dave Roback are back, magnificent and unchanged. What happened? Uncut charts the uncanny journey of the pair, from The Rain Parade to the quietly triumphant comeback, Seasons Of Your Day. “We’re not so concerned about the outside world,” admits Roback. “They’re not your normal rock’n’roll people,” understates one of their associates…
Steve Wynn remembers an unexpected phone call he received one day in 1991, from David Roback, the guitarist and co-founder of Mazzy Star. As Wynn remembers it, Roback said to him, “I’ve been thinking, I want to do some sort intense, jammy band like Cream or something like that, and I’d like to do it with you.” Wynn had long admired Roback, and readily agreed. “But I think my instant enthusiasm took him aback,” says Wynn. “He said, ‘I mean, just in theory, maybe some day, not right away, maybe down the line, I just want to see what you thought about.’ So I said, ‘Hey, it sounds really fun, I’d love to play with you so give me a call when you’re ready.’ That was the last time I spoke to David Roback.”
Wynn has known Roback for 30 years, from the earliest days of their careers among the Paisley Underground movement, when Wynn was frontman for the Dream Syndicate and Roback the co-singer and guitarist with the Rain Parade. “Of all the people in that scene, I’ve stayed close to just about everybody in one way or another over the years,” claims Wynn. “But David, he wasn’t that easy to know.”
David Roback
It’s tempting to ask, does anyone really know David Roback? Along with Hope Sandoval, his creative partner in Mazzy Star, Roback comes across as elusive, often cryptic. Questions about the length of time it’s taken to record Mazzy Star’s new album Seasons Of Your Day – released a full 17 years after its predecessor – aren’t answered as fully as you’d like. Asked, for instance, what the first song was that they recorded for the album, Roback replies: “Well, we really weren’t working on Seasons Of Your Day as it exists now, we were just recording various things. We never really stopped. We just kept writing and recording.”
Such is the degree of mystery Mazzy Star seem to cultivate around their work that one musician contacted for this article wasn’t even aware that his contribution to Seasons Of Your Day had been used; not surprising, perhaps, as he recorded it nearly 25 years ago. Meanwhile, Roback and Sandoval’s interviews with Uncut are conducted via Skype, peppered with awkward pauses and elliptical responses.
“They’re not your normal rock ‘n roll people,” explains Geoff Travis, whose label Rough Trade distributed Mazzy Star’s 1990 debut, She Hangs Brightly. “I think they really do live in their own worlds. It’s a very typical musician thing in a way, in that they’re so obsessed with music and doing what they do, that it kind of removes them slightly from normal social mores.”
Looking back over a quarter of a century of Mazzy Star, I ask Sandoval what’s she most proud of.
“I’m proud of the music, and I’m proud of our friendship,” she replies after a typical hesitation. And when is she at her happiest? Is it when she’s writing songs? Or in the studio? Or after a record is completed? “I’m happy with all of the different aspects of it,” she replies instantly, her voice taking on an unexpected urgency. “But I’m also miserable with all of the aspects. They’re nice, they’re gratifying, but at the same time they can be difficult and emotional. Every phase, there’s happiness in it, there’s enjoyment in it, but there’s also torture.”
David Roback has been refining a melancholy strand of American Gothic – steering a course between third-album Velvet Underground and The Doors of “The End – since the late Seventies. He grew up in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles. “There was constantly music on the radio,” he remembers. “The Beatles made a strong impression on me. The Doors. Love. Bands like that. I just thought they were speaking from a world I really wanted to be part of.”
Roback’s earliest collaborators included Steven – his younger brother by three years – and Susanna Hoffs, whose family lived across the street. “We all ended up at UC Berkeley at the same time,” explains Steven Roback. “Susanna and David were living together and they asked me to come and play with them. That’s the origin of a lot of things. It’s the origin of the Rain Parade in a way, and the origin of David’s focus on having a lead singer in a hypnotic, melodic context, the vision he had that ultimately ended up evolving into Clay Allison, Opal and Mazzy Star.”
After graduating, David Roback returned to Los Angeles, where he formed the Sidewalks with former school friend Matt Pucci, a guitarist and singer. They invited Steven Roback to join a few months later, on bass and vocals. The Sidewalks started out playing early Stones and Merseybeat covers before evolving, over a period of around six months, into the Rain Parade. “David was key in setting out the vision for the band,” admits his brother. “We all loved vintage instruments, the sounds of Richenbackers and Gretschs. We knew that they all sounded cool on their own and in context, and we put all those instruments together to see what we could get.”
“I think that there was some interesting music going on then, a lot of guitar interaction and electric organ,” says David Roback. “We were just experimenting with sounds and I was writing a lot of songs back then, singing with that band.”
The Rain Parade found themselves sharing both concert bills and artistic sensibilities (psychedelia, Nuggets, Big Star, the Velvet Underground) with a loose collection of bands on the fringes of the Los Angeles club scene during the early Eighties. “The Rain Parade were as Paisley as the Paisley Underground got,” remembers the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn. “Of all the bands on the scene – the Dream Syndicate, the Salvation Army, Green On Red, even the Bangs who became the Bangles – all of us were coming from a more punk rock background. But the Rain Parade weren’t like that. They were happy just to be floating and gentle and trippy. Pink Floyd and the Byrds. Who didn’t love that?”
Opal, Happy Baby Nightmare sleeve
Roback stayed with the Rain Parade precisely long enough to record a single – 1982’s “What She’s Done To Your Mind?” – and an album, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, the following year. Even before recording the album, Roback had already set in motion another musical project – Clay Allison, formed with his girlfriend and former Dream Syndicate vocalist, Kendra Smith.
“I remember the first Rain Parade tour, when we were in New York City, playing CBGBs with Green On Red,” pinpoints Steven Roback. “We had a couple of days off, and David did the first Clay Allison gig with Kendra at the Pyramid Club. It was David and Kendra, kind of acoustic, and Will [Glenn, Rain Parade’s keyboard player] was playing violin and I was playing piano.”
Clay Allison established the template for Roback’s subsequent work – a kind of dreamy psych-folk. After two EPs, Clay Allison quietly morphed into Opal, who recorded two EPs, Fell From The Sun and Northern Line, and an album, 1987’s Happy Nightmare Baby.
“Happy Nightmare Baby was a very electric record,” explains David Roback. “We were very orientated towards playing live at that point. What we’d been doing before that was very acoustic, and then we thought we’d make it very electric, so we went from being somewhat acoustic to very electric, like Happy Nightmare Baby.”
One admirer of both Roback and Smith’s work was a young music fan, Hope Sandoval, who Steve Wynn remembers “used to come to Dream Syndicate soundchecks, in like ’82, when I think she was like 14 or 15. Her mum would bring her. She couldn’t come to our shows because she was too young. We talked to her and she seemed nice, but I got the feeling that she was particularly mesmerised by Kendra. The beginning of the All About Eve saga!”
“I’ve always loved music,” begins Hope Sandoval. “I grew up with older brothers and sisters who were into music, played The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. I grew up in an area of East LA… I think it’s called Maravilla area. It’s Spanish. I had a project called Going Home with my good friend Sylvia Gomez, and when we met David and Kendra they knew that we had this little music thing we were doing, and they were interested in it. David asked us if we’d like to go into the studio and make a record. I thought David was shy. Yeah, and sort of mysterious. What do I think connected us? We liked each other’s music. That’s really what it was. We didn’t really communicate a lot other than just enjoying each other’s music. I was asked to do some live shows [with Opal] because Kendra didn’t want to be the front person, and I think it just got really difficult for her. It was during a tour that they were doing with the Jesus And Mary Chain, so I got a call from David asking me if I would fly out to New York and finish the tour. That’s what it was. That’s how I started working with his band.”If the creative union of Roback and Sandoval was borne out of pragmatic necessity – to finish the Jesus And Mary Chain tour – it began to take on a more solid shape in early 1988.
“I’d gone into the studio with David’s band, Opal,” explains Sandoval. “I wasn’t writing, I was just singing the songs that he had written and it wasn’t really working out for me. I don’t think for him, either. And I suggested that maybe we write together.”
“We were performing a lot of Opal material and one day we just thought, let’s just start something completely new and different, and that was Mazzy Star,” continues Roback. “We started to write a lot of songs together, that’s really what got us – we really got into that.”
“I asked David to send me some of his guitar ideas,” says Sandoval. “He sent me maybe five or seven beautiful rhythm guitar ideas. Did I have lyrics for them? No, I didn’t. Usually what I do is I write my vocal melody over guitar parts and then I come up with lyrics.”
The songs became Mazzy Star’s debut album, 1990’s She Hangs Brightly.
Mazzy Star, She Hangs Brightly sleeve
“The majority of that record was recorded in San Francisco at a place called Hyd Street Studios,” reveals Roback. “We were recording up there and a little bit in Los Angeles as well, we were back and forth between the two cities, between Berkeley and Los Angeles. We really were just experimenting with different pieces of recording, as we still do mostly. Live music in the studio.”
The album was released by Rough Trade – who had previously handled the UK distribution for Happy Nightmare Baby.
“I remember the first time I met them in person,” says Geoff Travis. “In Los Angeles at the Roosevelt Hotel. It’s got a remarkably lifelike statue of Charlie Chaplin in the entrance, and a pool designed by David Hockney. I met David and Hope together, they were sitting beside the side of the pool. Hope was very quiet. Probably slightly more in thrall to David at that point, than later when she exerted her own individuality. She’s a really good soul, Hope. She’s very queenly, in a way. I think of her as the Queen of East LA: softly spoken, but definite and intelligent and bright, lovely. David is a bit more of an elder statesman when it comes to music, but with immaculate musical taste. Again, he’s quite quiet, speaks quite quietly, but very much alive, great sense of humour. But quite an odd individual, really, David.”
For all its strengths, She Hangs Brightly is best summed up by its opening track, the quietly enfolding “Haleh”: a definitive Mazzy Star composition characterised by gently rolling rhythms, guitar reverb and Sandoval’s husky vocals. The album had been on sale for a year when Rough Trade went into receivership.
“We sat down with David and Hope and we made a deal with Capitol to move them from Rough Trade to Capitol to help avoid the bankruptcy,” explains Travis.
To support the album, Mazzy Star toured America in 1990 supporting the Cocteau Twins. “They were quite different,” remembers former Cocteaus bassist, Simon Raymonde. “David was quite serious, quite thoughtful, didn’t say an awful lot. I quite liked him. Hope was super shy. There was often a bit of tension between them. Sometimes she’d just storm of stage. I didn’t get the impression that she particularly enjoyed the live thing. It was never dull, that’s for sure.”
The period following She Hangs Brightly was one of transition for Mazzy Star. In 1993, they added to their line-up Jill Emery, former bassist with Hole, who remained with them until 1996. “I went to their rehearsal studio,” she says. “Everyone was so reserved. It was quite a shock, coming from Hole, with an aggressive Courtney Love. Strangely, their quietness matched Hole’s abrasiveness, just on a different level.”
1993 also saw the band settle in London around the time they released their second album, So Tonight That I Might See. Continuing the soft-focus, slow motion jams of its predecessor, the album featuring the band’s only hit single – a dusty, lilting ballad, “Fade Into You”.
“To their credit, Capitol worked ‘Fade Into You’ for about nine months in radio, which I’ve very rarely seen in America,” says Geoff Travis. “They sold a million copies of So Tonight That I Might See, which when you think about it today seems an extraordinary number.”
If it can be considered a barometer of the song’s success in the mainstream, “Fade Into You” has appeared in no less than five separate episodes of the CSI franchises. There are countless other appearances in films and TV shows – most recently, it’s been covered by J Mascis – but perhaps the song’s most incongruous appearance is in Paul Verhoven’s sci-fi shoot-em-up, Starship Troopers.
“It’s not our film, you know,” says Roback with a dry laugh. “Incredibly violent. Quite a contradiction in a way. But it was interesting. People play your music in a bar. It’s not uncommon to hear your music in any context, or anybody’s music for that matter you could be walking down the street or you could, you know, be at a funeral, and somebody’s driving by playing the Beach Boys.”
Characteristically, the question of how they’d follow-up a hit single and million-selling album never particularly seemed to concern Roback or Sandoval.
“We’re not so concerned about the outside world,” explains Roback. “It’s a very internal process that we’re involved in. The outside world is really not on our minds, in so far as the music is concerned. We’re really doing it in our own world for ourselves. We’re engaged in the stories of each individual song. It is its own world unto itself.”
Hope Sandoval
“I was always working with David,” says Hope Sandoval, as she looks back on the years between Mazzy Star’s third album, Among My Swan, and Seasons Of Your Day. “I think we thought maybe we’d release something, but we weren’t really so preoccupied with it. We were working on other things.”
Certainly, Sandoval has kept the highest profile since Among My Swan, contributing vocals to songs by the Jesus And Mary Chain, the Chemical Brothers, Death In Vegas, Massive Attack and Bert Jansch, and running a successful second band – Hope Sandoval And The Warm Inventions, with My Bloody Valentine drummer, Colm Ó Cíosóig. “I’m lucky, I’m very, very lucky,” she says. “I work with some of the most amazing artists.”
Roback, meanwhile, produced tracks for Beth Orton in the late Nineties and relocated to Norway, where he became involved with Norwegian artists and musicians including Mari Boine, Helga Sten and Guri Dahl, making experimental music for films and installations. He also acted – as himself – in Olivier Assayas’ film, Clean, for which he wrote four songs sung in the film by actress Maggie Cheung. Meanwhile, he and Sandoval continued working on Mazzy Star material. “She would come to Norway, or we would work in London, or we’d work in California,” he explains. “We really weren’t working on Seasons Of Your Day as it exists now, we were just recording various things.”
Mazzy Star, Seasons Of Your Day sleeve
Sandoval is quick to echo Roback: “We didn’t record songs for Seasons Of Your Day, we titled the collection of songs after one of the songs.”
“In the studio, I’m usually playing guitar or keyboards,” continues Roback. “We like to get a live version we like. That’s what really appeals to us. Someone asked me recently if we were perfectionists, and I think perfection in music is really a dull thing, the imperfections of music are what give it character. Live, things happen in the moment.”
Among the musicians credited on Seasons Of Your Day are longstanding collaborators drummer Keith Mitchell and keyboard player Suki Ewers – both Opal veterans – and the band’s old friend, Bert Jansch. Reinforcing how long Roback and Sandoval have been working on these songs, Rain Parade keyboard player Will Glenn is also credited on the album: he died in 2001. Steven McCarthy believes his credit on the album stems from a session he played with the band in the early Nineties. “They asked me to bring my steel guitar down,” he remembers. “So for maybe an afternoon, I did some demos. David gave me a cassette tape with that and then said, ‘Will you come and do some more recording with us later, we’re going into a real studio.’ I went and the only thing I can remember him saying to me was, ‘Can you do it like you did on the demo.’ I do recall David seeming like he didn’t know who I was, which was kind of confusing to me because we had played quite a bit. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. It’s one of those things.”
Hope Sandoval, meanwhile, is already looking beyond Seasons Of Your Day. “We’re planning to start touring around November in the US and we’ll come out to Europe and do a few shows,” she explains. “I’m excited about it. I’m looking forward to getting together with everybody and playing some of the old songs, and having dinner and wine, catching up with everybody.”
And her aversion of singing live?
“It hasn’t changed. It’s difficult, but it’s there.”
And are there more unreleased songs?
“Oh, yeah. There’s loads of songs,” she confirms.
Will we ever hear them?
“I don’t know,” she says after a pause. “Probably. Once our families inherit everything after we’re dead and gone, I’m sure people will hear everything…”
Pete Townshend is to be honoured for his charity work at a special benefit concert.
Rolling Stone reports that Townshend will also perform live at the event, with Joan Jett, Billy Idol and Foreigner's Mick Jones also scheduled to appear.
Bruce Springsteen will present Townshend with the Stevie Ray...
Pete Townshend is to be honoured for his charity work at a special benefit concert.
Rolling Stone reports that Townshend will also perform live at the event, with Joan Jett, Billy Idol and Foreigner’s Mick Jones also scheduled to appear.
Bruce Springsteen will present Townshend with the Stevie Ray Vaughan Award for his work supporting MusiCares, a charity that assists musicians with addiction recovery.
The event takes place at the Best Buy Theater in New York on May 28.
Meanwhile, Townshend will also participate in a tribute to The Who which takes place at Chicago’s Rosemont Theater on May 14.
Pete Townshend speaks exclusively to Uncut about the future of The Who, retirement and his current relationship with Roger Daltrey; all in our new issue, on sale Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Neil Young appeared on stage in New York to introduce a new documentary about the recording of his new album.
The Monsanto Years is reportedly due for release on June 16.
It was recorded with Promise Of The Real, a band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah.
The band debuted material f...
Neil Young appeared on stage in New York to introduce a new documentary about the recording of his new album.
It was recorded with Promise Of The Real, a band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah.
The band debuted material from The Monsanto Years at a small club gig in California last weekend. You can watch footage from the gig and read the set list by clicking here.
Speaking about the album, Young said: “It’s me with a bunch of people who are much younger than I am. I found some friends to play with and we had a great time doing it. It’s a movie about making a record. It’s a pretty simple thing. It’s just that the record is not about love and kisses and relationships, the pluses and minuses. It’s more about what we’re doing as a civilization.
“I don’t really have anything against the people at Monsanto or the human beings working for Monsanto. But the laws that they’re making have made Monsanto the perfect poster child for problems that we have with the corporate government.
So I wrote a bunch of songs about it. These kids I’m playing with all are with me on it.”
The occasion was a retrospective at the IFC Center called The Bernard Shakey Film Retrospective: Neil Young on Film, which also saw screenings of Journey Through The Past, Rust Never Sleeps, Greendale, Human Highway, Dead Man and Year Of The Horse.
A trailer has been released to accompany news of the forthcoming John Lennon vinyl box set.
You can watch the trailer below.
Titled Lennon, the box set will be released on June 8, 2015.
The set features all eight of Lennon's studio albums on 180-gram vinyl which have been remastered from the orig...
A trailer has been released to accompany news of the forthcoming John Lennon vinyl box set.
You can watch the trailer below.
Titled Lennon, the box set will be released on June 8, 2015.
The set features all eight of Lennon’s studio albums on 180-gram vinyl which have been remastered from the original analogue masters.
The tracklisting for John Lennon: Lennon is:
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) Imagine (1971) Some Time In New York City [2LP] (1972) Mind Games (1973) Walls And Bridges (1974) Rock ‘n’ Roll (1975) Double Fantasy (1980) Milk And Honey (1984)
Johnny Marr, The Fall and Spiritualized are among the first wave of acts confirmed for Rockaway Beach Festival.
The three day event is due to take place from October 9 - 12 at Butlins' Bognor Regis.
Festival Organiser, Ian Crowther of The Way of Music, says “The inspiration for Rockaway Beach co...
Johnny Marr, The Fall and Spiritualized are among the first wave of acts confirmed for Rockaway Beach Festival.
The three day event is due to take place from October 9 – 12 at Butlins‘ Bognor Regis.
Festival Organiser, Ian Crowther of The Way of Music, says “The inspiration for Rockaway Beach comes from the excitement of hearing great music for the first time. I wanted to bring together a selection of today’s leading alternative artists to showcase new music. Butlin’s Bognor Regis was the first choice location as all show venues are indoor with exceptional sound quality. On-site accommodation and access to great food and drink means that we can give festival-goers the best weekend experience. Rockaway Beach will be an intimate festival allowing audience and artist to get close and share their love of music.”
Other acts confirmed so far include The Telescopes, The Monchrome Set, The Band Of Holy Joy, Pinkshinyultrablast, Whyte Horses, Cult of Dom Keller, Lola Colt, St Deluxe, Matinee, Skinny Girl Diet and Miaoux Miaoux.
Early bird tickets are on sale now for a limited period only and include accommodation and access to all live music venues.
If you thought that the last word in folky period detail was offered by the Coen brothers in their movie Inside Llewyn Davis, then you’ll be fascinated by Chicago’s Ryley Walker. On the cover of his debut album for Tompkins Square, 2014’s agreeably low-key All Kinds Of You, the 25 year old sto...
If you thought that the last word in folky period detail was offered by the Coen brothers in their movie Inside Llewyn Davis, then you’ll be fascinated by Chicago’s Ryley Walker. On the cover of his debut album for Tompkins Square, 2014’s agreeably low-key All Kinds Of You, the 25 year old stood smoking a cigarette outside a warehouse, guitar case at his side – the image of the Phil Ochs-style workingman troubadour. On his great second album, he’s pictured in dappled sunlight holding wild flowers, very much the early 1970s Elektra artist, as styled by William S Harvey.
In some ways it’s a perfect representation of the artist – Walker’s new album crests warm currents of jazz, folk and rock as, say, Van Morrison or Tim Buckley did in the period. In others, it’s slightly misleading. While Walker has absorbed these admirably free-roaming influences, this is clearly someone reaching for their essence, on a mission to follow a philosophy rather than to slavishly recreate a mood. A musician whose formative years were spent playing noise in basements rather than perfecting his hammering-on in drop D tuning, there’s a sense that this record represents a snapshot of a restless artist in flux, an evolving creativity. Things weren’t like this last year, and seem highly unlikely to be like this next.
Walker is an appealing character to sign up with. A man able to hold his own among the current wave of instrumental solo guitar performers like Daniel Bachman (with whom he has collaborated), folk guitar is something he loves, but not unreservedly. His wry observation of a scene where guitarists play “with lamps on stage”, casts him as an irreverent, unclubbable character in a world which has its anointed, unchanging gods.
A comment he made on Twitter (“John Fahey still awful jack rose still God”) brought comment from nearly every working guitarist in his field (Nathan Bowles, Cian Nugent, Chris Forsyth and William Tyler), approving or otherwise, as near as any of them are likely to get to a chorus. The other day, he posted a supportive email apparently from John Renbourn, “The more I drink,” the elder statesman bibulously professed, “the smoker I get to enjoying you…”
Renbourn’s support tells its own story. A highly-technical player in his own self-articulated field of medieval folk, some of Renbourn’s best 1960s albums found him in folk/jazz after-hours conversation with another pole star for Ryley Walker: Bert Jansch. Jansch’s influence is maybe a little less pronounced on Primrose Green than it was on his superb single “The West Wind” of last year, where the influence could be read as much in Walker’s diffident delivery and his bucolic subject (mentioned: sparrows) as in his virtuosic guitar. Live performances of the tune found Walker pushing at its boundaries, finding unexpectedly noisy seams to mine within it.
As it turns out, that seems a signpost to Primrose Green, an album in which some courtly formality remains, but as a jumping-off point for more freewheeling development. The album is parenthesized by the bucolic charms of the title track and its sister, the closing “Hide In The Roses”, which ends the album on much the same note, though what takes place between them travels far and wide.
Wonderfully arranged, the album begins with Walker’s acoustic guitar joined by Danny Thompson-like double bass and snaky electric guitar. Encouraging the idea of rural retreat as analogy for lightly psychedelic away-break, Walker sings “Primrose Green, makes me high-high-high…” breaking with formal structure and launching the album’s wider trip. “Summer Dress”, with its sea-worthy gait and clavinet interventions, takes things further from terra firma, hitting on a simple lyrical idea much as Tim Buckley might, and encouraging it to give up all it can, over a rolling, jazzy funk.
The truly standout tracks on the album, like “Same Minds”, which follows, manage to hold both of these elements in position, retaining the best of both. Namely, a crisp sense of formal order, into which improvisation is poured until it looks like it might spill over the sides. “Same Minds” begins with a simple, trilling acoustic keychange, but Walker takes it much further than it ever looked likely to go. “We’ve got the same heart,” he sings, investing the line with everything he has. “We’ve got the same minds…” Like the later “Sweet Satisfaction”, (which brings John Martyn into the mix in its management of order and mounting emotional chaos), it’s spectacular, revealing the west coast of the mind the album has been hinting at: the intersection of LA Turnaround and Greetings From LA.
Walker says that parts of the album were wholly improvised, and “All Kinds Of You” late in the album seems a likely beneficiary of that policy. An electric roam through the city at night, Herbie Hancock joining the Doors, its lyric is minimal, but is delivered with such passion, it’s stretched nearly to breaking point under the weight it’s carrying. “Love Can Be Cruel”, in which John Renbourn guests on Miles Davis’s Get Up With It, is another free-radical. If the words don’t quite catch as well as you might hope, the song’s medieval science fiction gains additional texture at the close, where a J Mascis-like guitar buzz glowers over a pretty, Knights Of The Jaguar digital sequence.
Primrose Green is disorientating, casting new light on modes you thought you knew well. Wherever there are familiar elements, Walker and his excellent, jazzy, band take them to new places. “The High Road” has something of Nick Drake’s “Chime Of The City Clock” about it, with its strings and restless feel, but it seems characteristic that even when he’s on the road (“not a penny to my name…”), that romantic, metaphoric route of the questing beat or folkie, Walker wants to take things further. Rather than progressing to a chorus, the song keeps drifting on, returning only to the road, friendless, besieged by wild dogs and memories of the past.
Eventually, though, Primrose Green does come to rest, with the unadorned acoustic playing of “Hide In The Roses”, Walker taking us back to something like the simple statement which he started the album. It’s like returning home after a long journey away. Glad in some ways to be back, but irrevocably changed for the better by the experience.
Tell me a bit about the writing of Primrose Green. It’s pretty open-ended, wide-roaming kind of record.
It comes from a lot of jamming. The band are heavy jazz dudes in Chicago. The songs are like riffs, we play ‘em live and we improvise. It’s all built from improvisation, it’s immediate in the songs. It came together very quickly.
Who is on the record, and how do you know them?
They’re phenomenal musicians and some of my best friends. The electric guitar player Brian Supezio is my roommate and my best friend in the world – he has a Jerry Garcia meets Django Rheinhart sort of style, it’s super-far-out but super in at the same time, you know? Ben Boye who plays the keys is one of the most brilliant musicians – he plays with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, loads of other people. Anton Hatwich plays bass, he’s like a Chicago god of stand-up bass. Frank Rosaly plays drums, a very in-demand jazz guy.
How do you fit in that world as an acoustic guitar guy?
I don’t want some wussy-ass indie rock people playing with me. I want jazz guys. Chicago’s a really collaborative town, you play folk tunes, but my friends are in the jazz scene so I’ll play with them. All my favourite records have that: Pentangle, Tim Buckley, it’s people playing with heavy-duty jazz people. Every night the tune is different. With this kind of band you can take a different path with it each time.
How did the writing work?
I had a record out last year and I had a goal of when I went out to not play any of the songs on that record, just new stuff. I would sit backstage drinking a beer and smoking a doobie and come up with something, and say, that’s a new song, let’s play that tonight. Each night it kept growing. A song is an organic thing, it needs its food and its love – if you raise that shit and if you nurture it, it keeps growing and growing. All the songs on the record are pretty much first take. The whole record we made it and mixed it in about two days.
How did that tour go?
Nobody knows me so it wasn’t like people are going, “Come on man, you didn’t play ‘Stairway’?” No-one was super pissed off or anything. For me it’s really therapeutic. I like to try new things, keep it interesting.
“Same Minds” is a great track. Did that come about the same way?
Oh totally. You know Cian Nugent? We were on tour in the states last March. He’s a classic Irish dude, like, what the fuck is he doing in the deep south. No-one’s coming to the shows, we’re bombing every night. We’re just getting hammered before the gig and nobody’s coming. He’s like “What the fock am I doing?” Every night we’d be in some shitty motel next to truckers doing speed and jam every night. That came out of us jamming in a hotel, doing nothing, just playing. I really like that song.
Your voice is more of an instrument on this record…
I’m obsessed with John Martyn and people like that. It’s really important to write words on paper, but the voice is another instrument, I want to sing the way that John Coltrane plays sax. I don’t want to sing in a monotone vein.
You used to play noise – what was your eureka moment for this kind of thing?
I played noise when I moved to Chicago when I was 17. I played fingerstyle guitar growing up and listening to Zeppelin and the Beatles and shit, I was doing the two concurrently. The noise and punk people were like, ‘you should play your song stuff live.’ A lot of my support today comes from those people and that’s where I got my chops, doing that, playing non-stop.
What’s your relationship with the greats of this period?
John Martyn, Tim Buckley, Van…they’re huge, they’re folk musicians but they reached super-far. They weren’t just playing post-war blues, they reached far into jazz and Indian music and far-put stuff. They were songwriters but pushing it super-hard. I’m moved by that passion, how they reached so far. Then in the UK people like Bert and Wizz Jones and John Martyn – those people were super-far out and into all sorts of music, super far-out.
You got a funny email from Bert’s pal John Renbourn…
I played a show with him last summer, in this festival outside Birmingham in the UK – in Nick Drake’s home town. I met him backstage and he turned out to be the coolest guy in the fucking world, “Oh yeah, how’re you doing?” He parties super-hard. I got his email and sent him my new song with a gushing email like I owe you everything man. He got back, “I was going to send you an insulting drunk email but I kind of liked it…”
Where are you headed next?
I’m already writing stuff for the next record – I think it’ll keep evolving. I think the new songs are gaining in confidence. I never want to get a goddamn job again, just concentrate on playing guitar.
INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON
Michael Eavis has hinted at the identity of the final headliners to be confirmed for this year's Glastonbury festival.
Speaking at London's Victoria & Albert Museum on April 22, 2015, Eavis confirmed that the final Glastonbury headliner will be announced on 1 June.
It will consist of two arti...
Michael Eavis has hinted at the identity of the final headliners to be confirmed for this year’s Glastonbury festival.
Speaking at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum on April 22, 2015, Eavis confirmed that the final Glastonbury headliner will be announced on 1 June.
It will consist of two artists, who will “most likely” be British, reports The Guardian.
The remainder of the festival’s line-up was recently revealed, with Patti Smith, Alabama Shakes, Mavis Staples, Suede among the acts scheduled to play Worthy Farm.
The Grateful Dead's farewell shows will be available to watch on pay-per-view and also via online streaming.
The shows at Santa Clara, California on June 27 and 28 will be streamed live online, while the band's final shows, taking place at Chicago's Soldier Field on July 3, 4 and 5, will be a...
The Grateful Dead‘s farewell shows will be available to watch on pay-per-view and also via online streaming.
The shows at Santa Clara, California on June 27 and 28 will be streamed live online, while the band’s final shows, taking place at Chicago’s Soldier Field on July 3, 4 and 5, will be available to watch live via pay-per-view, reports The New York Times.
A webcast of all five concerts will be available for $79.95 starting May 1. You can find more details at Dead50.net.
Meanwhile, The Grateful Dead recently released a new compilation album, The Best Of The Grateful Dead, through Rhino on March 30 on CD and digitally.
A new book of rare and unseen photographs of Kate Bush is to be published later this year.
Titled Kate, the photographs have been taken by her brother, John Carder Bush.
The book follows on from Cathy, John Carder Bush's collection of photographs of his sister as a young girl.
Kate will be publi...
A new book of rare and unseen photographs of Kate Bush is to be published later this year.
Titled Kate, the photographs have been taken by her brother, John Carder Bush.
The book follows on from Cathy, John Carder Bush’s collection of photographs of his sister as a young girl.
Kate will be published by Little, Brown on October 22, 2015.
The book features alternative images and outtakes from album shoots – including The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love sessions – studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets.
It will also include two new essays by John Carder Bush: Inside The Rainbow, describing their shared childhood and the early days of Kate’s career, and My Sister, My Sitter, about his experience of photographing Kate.
A limited run of special editions will be available to pre-order; you can find more information by clicking here.
Cathy, which was published as a run of 500 copies in 1986, was reprinted in November 2014 by Little, Brown.
Jack White played the first of night of his five surprise acoustic shows last night [April 21, 2015].
The gig took place at the 900 capacity Wendy Williams Auditorium in Anchorage, Alaska.
It was the first of five surprise acoustic shows in states where White has never previously toured.
Rolling ...
Jack White played the first of night of his five surprise acoustic shows last night [April 21, 2015].
The gig took place at the 900 capacity Wendy Williams Auditorium in Anchorage, Alaska.
It was the first of five surprise acoustic shows in states where White has never previously toured.
Rolling Stone reports that White played acoustic guitar accompanied by Fats Kaplin on dobro, Lillie Mae Rische on fiddle and Dominic Davis on upright bass.
Jack White played:
“Just One Drink” “Temporary Ground” “Love Interruption” “Machine Gun Silhouette” “Offend in Every Way” “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known” “Alone in My Home” “You Know That I Know” “We’re Going to Be Friends” “Entitlement” “You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket” “A Martyr For My Love For You” “Goodnight, Irene”
Johnny Marr has criticised "eBay tossers" who are re-selling his Record Store Day 7" single for an inflated price.
Marr released a cover of Depeche Mode "I Feel You" backed with a live version of The Smiths' 1984 track "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want".
The Guardian reports th...
Johnny Marr has criticised “eBay tossers” who are re-selling his Record Store Day 7″ single for an inflated price.
Marr released a cover of Depeche Mode “I Feel You” backed with a live version of The Smiths’ 1984 track “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want“.
The Guardian reports that the single is selling for up to $50 (£33.44) on the auction site.
Marr has since taken to Twitter to voice his criticism of touts, offering to press an extra run of the single “so those who wanted it but didn’t get it don’t get ripped by the EBay tossers”.
I'll try to do an extra run of I Feel You 7" singles so those who wanted it but didn't get it don't get ripped by the EBay tossers. J
