Daevid Allen has died aged 77.
The Guardian reports that Allen's son, Orlando Monday Allen, confirmed the news earlier on Facebook.
Allen, the leader of the prog-jazz group Gong, had been suffering from cancer.
Orlando Monday wrote, "And so dada Ali, bert camembert, the dingo Virgin, divided alie...
Daevid Allen has died aged 77.
The Guardian reports that Allen’s son, Orlando Monday Allen, confirmed the news earlier on Facebook.
Allen, the leader of the prog-jazz group Gong, had been suffering from cancer.
Orlando Monday wrote, “And so dada Ali, bert camembert, the dingo Virgin, divided alien and his other 12 selves prepare to pass up the oily way and back to the planet of love. And I rejoice and give thanks… The gong vibration will forever sound and its vibration will always lift and enhance. You have left such a beautiful legacy and we will make sure it forever shines in our children and their children. Now is the happiest time of yr life. Blessed be.”
Allen was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1938. He moved to the UK in the early Sixties, where in 1966 he became founding guitarist of the Soft Machine, along side Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Mike Ratledge.
While in France in 1967, Allen was denied re-entry back to the United Kingdom following a visa complication; he stayed behind, effectively leaving the Soft Machine.
His next project, Gong, became Allen’s defining life’s work, reflecting many of the best qualities of the era in its warm embracing of psychedelia, prog, avant garde music and poetry.
Gong released their debut album, Magick Brother, in 1970.
Meanwhile, Allen released his solo debut, Banana Moon in 1971; the same year as Gong’s Camembert Electrique.
Between 1973 and 1974, Gong recorded their Radio Gnome Trilogy, made up of the albums Flying Teapots, Angel’s Egg and You.
Allen left Gong in 1975; although he resurrected the name in the late Eighties.
In 1992, the band released the Shapeshifter album, which Allen considered a continuation of the Radio Gnome project.
Allen continued to play with Gong until 2014. In February this year, he released a statement outlining the status of his health.
“The cancer is now so well established that I have now been given approximately six months to live,” he wrote, saying he was “not interested in endless surgical operations and in fact it has come as a relief to know that the end is in sight. I am a great believer in ‘The Will of the Way Things Are’ and I also believe that the time has come to stop resisting and denying and to surrender to the way it is.”
This Top 30 originally appeared in Uncut's December 2003 issue...
30 This Is England
Single A-side, September 1985, from the album Cut The Crap, November 1985
DON LETTS: I made a Clash documentary called Westway To The World. We stopped at Combat Rock, right? But to deny “This Is England” ...
1 (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais Single A-side, June 1978
JONES: Really? That’s Number 1?
SIMONON: I think this is the overall Number 1 for me, too. It was such a change from what we’d been doing, from what the audience was expecting. They thought we were just gonna charge along with another bunch of numbers and then we came out with this. It’s like a couple of songs in one. Same with “Complete Control” and “Clash City Rockers”. They’re almost like mini operas. It’s got that reggae element, but it’s also a rock song. It’s not a punk song but then again it is. It’s a combination of all those elements.
JONES: I knew the moment we came up with the music it was gonna be a big number. Then taking it home after we’d finished it and listening to it the next day thinking, “Wow!”
SIMONON: It became one of those sing-song sort of tunes, really, one where everyone sways along when they’ve had too much beer on New Year’s Eve. It’s a Hogmanay song!
JONES: I remember some years ago I was up in Liverpool at this party after The Farm did a gig. Suddenly all these guys started singing “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”. They knew all the words. I was so moved. It was so entrenched in them, y’know. That song really means something.
NORMAN COOK: This was very influential on me; the way the Clash used reggae, but were never a cod reggae band. I also identified with being the only white face in a crowd. Key line would be: “Ha you think it’s funny turning rebellion into money.” It came absolutely out of nowhere, it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. I was born in 1963, and I’d have been 15 or 16 when I heard this. My brother had brought home the first Damned album and “White Riot” and I’d bought them off him by the time the records finished playing. At school, you were either a Clash fan or a Jam fan, but I found the Jam a bit humourless and po-faced. The Clash had the swagger. If you were looking for rock’n’roll idols, they were it. I saw them 13 times, saw every line-up.
MOBY: It’s funny, with a lot of bands, people’s choice of favourite song tends to be very subjective, but with The Clash I feel there’s almost a universal consensus among friends I talk to as to what that best song is. And it’s “White Man In Hammersmith Palais”. It’s like, you get a bunch of Clash fans together, at the end of the day and, after one or two minor rows, everyone will probably agree that’s their finest hour.
It’s definitely their most EPIC song. If anything it’s almost like a weird prog rock number. In the sense that it begins one way, develops another way, and ends in another way again. It just has so many different facets. It starts out kinda light-hearted, then gets very intense and emotional, then has this big build, then ends quite, well, delicately. And it tells a great story.
RODDY FRAME: It’s the obvious classic Clash song. People like my brother, who was 10 years older than me and he hated the whole punk thing – he liked Bob Dylan – even he liked “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”!
It was the first time The Clash had actually been well-recorded. The first album was a bit tinny, but by the time they did this, they’d got their head round the recording process a bit better. It was so melodic, it had harmonies, a middle eight, a reggae beat. It was much slower than any punk record I’d ever heard up till then. It wasn’t really a punk record, but it seemed to encapsulate everything about The Clash and what they were gonna do.
Being in Scotland, of course, the whole London thing sounded exotic. God, I must have been about 13 at the time. We used to read the NME from cover to cover and backwards again. They had great writers in those days, people like Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons. So you’d be reading it and wishing you were in London the whole time. When you heard The Clash sing about “Hammersmith Palais” it did seem exotic – it seemed like London was the place where you wanted to be.
It’s funny now that I live in Notting Hill, I remember when I first came down in the early ’80s, when Aztec Camera were on Rough Trade, you used to see Joe Strummer walking around in the street. I used to think “Wow! That’s really weird!” I remember once having to restrain my dad when we saw him in the pub. “Oh look – it’s Joe Strummer, I’ll just go and have a wee word.” I went, “Nah, just leave him alone!” That was the great thing about Strummer. I can see him standing in the Earl Of Lonsdale pub wearing all that amazing Clash stuff – those cut-off sleeveless jackets with the epaulettes – it was fantastic. Joe Strummer looked like Joe Strummer wherever he went.
ED HAMELL: I once opened up for The Clash in some band I was in. It was the Cut The Crap era, no Mick Jones or Topper Headon, so I guess it doesn’t count, but Strummer was very cool, letting me play the “Question Authority” Telecaster during soundcheck, and I was in awe. But what was brutally apparent, particularly during the check where they were warming up and you could hear them playing solo and individually, was what a distinctive and unique bass player Simonon was. There were four forceful personalities in that band (when Topper was aboard), and Paul’s came through in his instrument. This song rocks hard and the bass player, amateur though he might have been at that time, carries the band. He also brought the reggae, and though I’ve always been suspect of white pop bands doing the reggae thing (read: The Police), these guys pulled it off. Some maintain that the morphing of the two styles was their greatest contribution, but I ain’t buying it.
CLINT BOON: The thing about “Hammersmith Palais” is that after Joe died, it seemed to become more poignant. It was the mood of the track. The week he died, that was The Clash record that I used to play out in the clubs. I’d stick it on at the end of the night. It was like “Fookin’ hell” – hairs on the back of your neck, y’know? It was like we all realised that we’d lost somebody really important. Certain people you don’t imagine ever dying, and Joe was one of them.
GARY CROWLEY: An incredible record, and one that always makes me think of being at school just off the Edgware Road. It was mainly all black kids so when we used to go away on organised trips, they’d bring their reggae albums and I’d bring some punk records to play ’em, and they really liked “White Man…” It was around this time that I actually got to interview them for the school mag, which I’d turned into a punk fanzine called The Modern World, after The Jam song, obviously. I used to go to Mickey’s Fish Bar every lunchtime, and one day I saw Joe over the road coming out of the Metropolitan Café. I thought, “Fucking hell, there’s Strummer!” So I went up to him, still in me school uniform, and asked if he’d give me an interview. He said “yeah” and told me to come down to Rehearsal Rehearsals in Camden the next day. About eight of us ended up going, me to do the interview and seven mates to hold the tape recorder! When we turned up, Roadent – a rather intimidating Clash roadie – took one look at us and said, “What the fuck is this? A school outing?!” “White Man…” just takes me right back there.
PETE WYLIE: The dynamic of the song, it’s almost like a novel. And that last bit – “I’m the all night drug- prowling wolf” – the lyrical imagery is great. Strummer could sing the telephone directory and throw in one line that made it stunning. In some ways, it sums up The Clash in one record. The reggae, Joe bringing in his Dylan thing with the bit with the harmonica, Strummer’s great yowl and Mick’s great backing vocals. A microcosm of everything there is to love about them. And what great lines. “If Adolf Hitler flew in today, they’d send a limousine anyway” – you could take them out and have them on Quote Of The Week on bloody Teletext.
JAKE BURNS: This isn’t just my favourite Clash song. It’s my favourite song, period. It’s the perfect record and I’d have killed to have made it. Because it’s unorthodox, because it’s a weird structure it holds your attention all the way through. I mean, there isn’t even a chorus as such, but it still manages to be big and anthemic. Even now, just that little guitar click at the beginning before they’ve even started playing and the “One, two, a one-two-three-four”, it just sends the hairs on the back of my neck shooting up. The lyrics are fantastic, they really evoke that whole era. I know exactly what he means because even though I never went to the Palais, I did go and see Dennis Brown at The Rainbow and I felt like the only white guy in there. The whole thing was so obviously written from the heart, y’know. And that was The Clash’s big strength. That honesty, that commitment.
MARK REFOY: I remember the first time I heard John Peel play this in the summer of ’78, saying, “Here’s the new Clash single,” and then on came this thing that at the time I thought was nothing like The Clash, but was still great. Then hearing the mouth organ and thinking, “Wow!” I know it sounds a cliché, but it was one of those musical epiphanies.
LAURENCE BELL: Reggae was such an enormous presence back then. If you were a punk rock kid, you’d normally end up at a blues dance or something where there’d be people toasting and everyone drinking cans of Red Stripe. It was a really cool period and “White Man…” seemed to sum it up. It’s very Dylan, very “Positively Fourth Street”. You’re so entranced by it that by the end of it, it’s your personal anthem. It’s a song without a chorus, but by the end of it you realise the whole song is the chorus.
MARK PERRY: It was the first proper attempt at punk reggae. I mean they’d done “Police And Thieves” before, which I thought was a bit half-arsed, but musically “White Man…” is just brilliant, that whole stuttery rhythm. Again, its great that they’re creating their own mythology, Strummer writing about being down the Hammersmith Palais at a reggae show. Lyrically it’s self-effacing, it’s humorous, it’s about a dilemma which we were all suffering at the time.
JOHNNY GREEN: A good tune always wins out and a good tune with a good message is always, always gonna win out. It was a kind of crummy recording to do when we made it. The studio was behind The Marquee, so we’d be slinking around in the dark, trying to avoid the crowds queueing up outside, crouching behind cars so as not to get noticed. But out of that came this terrific song. The way Joe turned what was a conversational anecdote into a song that touches everybody is a remarkable testament to the man. I thought it was very nice when they played it at Joe’s funeral, too.
ADAM SWEETING: Most of the Clash’s DNA was encoded in “White Man” – it was drenched in their west London roots. Musically, it was a perfect mix of garage-band racket and ramshackle reggae – the punks-meet-rasta lyrics amounted to a Clash manifesto, and it even has a classic “1-2-3-4” intro from Jonesy. Strummer, as usual, sang as though he’d got a Red Stripe bottle wedged in his oesophagus, but you couldn’t miss those blinding images of the “drug-prowling wolf who looks so sick in the sun”, or the piercingly acute observation that “If Adolf Hitler flew in today, they’d send a limousine anyway”. They had rrrrooots rrrrock rrrrebel to burn.
ALEX COX: We’ve all been in that situation, where we find ourselves the only punk present.
JON LANGFORD: A great-sounding, great-looking punk rock seven-inch I spied in the window of Jumbo Records in Leeds, took home on the bus and played to death at the threshold of aural pain. Around that time, The Mekons were doing gigs with Misty In Roots, The Ruts, local reggae bands and sound systems at the R.A.R. club at Leeds Poly, the West Indian Centre and Roots in Chapeltown, and for a while the whole punky reggae party thing made perfect sense, crystallised in the grooves of this single.
ALAN McGEE: Maybe the greatest song ever written by white men. The greatest lyrics ever. It’s why The Clash were a religion to people from Scotland or any other shithole the government has forgotten about.
SIMON MORAN: If people want to understand why The Clash were such a brilliant band they should listen to “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”. From what he said to me, I think it was one of Joe’s favourites, too. It was always a highlight of his solo sets.
JESSE MALIN: Phenomenal. It’s so raw, the guitars are so nasty. And the idea of mixing a reggae feel with a punk thing is just fucking genius. When I saw Joe play it, that was a special moment. But that was what Joe was all about. When I was in D Generation, I had a club in New York called Coney Island High and Bob Gruen, the photographer, brought Joe over and we hung out and talked about Scorsese movies and drank tequila until the sun came up. I watched Joe do that with so many people. He would sit and drink all night and talk to you and give a thousand per cent of himself and tell you every story behind every lyric. The Clash were so real with their fans.
MICKEY BRADLEY: Part of a trio of brilliant singles (along with “Complete Control” and “Clash City Rockers”) released within the space of exactly nine months – a run that only The Sex Pistols could match.
GIDEON COE: Inspired, of course, by Strummer’s trip to the venue now known as Poo Na Na, and it contains some of his finest, most pithy lyrics and clever couplets. It’s also the classic example of the way The Clash used backing vocals to such great effect.
I recently read something by Michael Stipe in which he said seeing the Clash showed him how well a band could use background vocals. R.E.M. do it well and now it makes sense, given their main source of inspiration. Jonesy’s “oh oh oh oh’s” never sounded better. What was the Palais now hosts The School Disco among other things. I’m thinking of going along and writing a pastiche entitled “Old Man at Poo Na Na” but I think I’ll leave it.
ALAN PARKER: From my first listen to this song, right through to this day, it’s still one of the most important slabs of vinyl in the world ever.
BOBBY GILLESPIE: A lot of bands pretend to be anti-authority and anti-capitalism, but they don’t actually do or say anything political. The Clash made a deliberate stance against the system and tracks like “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” remind people what a horrible, racist country ’70s Britain was. The Clash were – and still are – one of the genuine outsider bands, and their music was a force for good.
JAY FARRAR: The Plebes played this one, too. The lyrics were great from the observations of “turning rebellion into money” to the Keith Richards-meets-Charles Bukowski vibe of “I’m the all night drug-prowling wolf who looks so sick in the sun”. The song’s also a great primer for checking out Jamaican music. “Dillinger and Leroy Smart/Delroy Wilson, your cool operator”.
ROBERT ELMS: I’d grown up a reggae fan on a north-west London council estate, my mum and dad met at the Hammersmith Palais, I’d been the white boy at loads of reggae gigs and it just felt as if this song was part of me, the bass line of my life.
DON LETTS: This song is particularly poignant to me because I was the one that took Joe to Hammersmith Palais on that night. Like the song says, he was the only white man in the house. He went there expecting to see a roots reggae show, not realising that all the people down the ghetto in Jamaica, what are they trying to do? They’re trying to get out and be glamorous! So when he went there, instead of this roots ghetto rebel show, what he saw was more Las Vegas glamour, which I think threw him. That was his own misunderstanding, I think. As I often say to people, the ghetto isn’t something you get in to, it’s something that you get out of. That whole ghetto chic thing is a misconception for a lot of people, so I think it was an eye-opener for him.
It was a brilliant evening for me, because I was there to see all my reggae heroes like Dillinger, Jah Stitch and Leroy Smart. But Joe was going through a bit of a dilemma about what he was expecting and what he was seeing, which I think was something he came to understand later on, obviously. It was so unexpected for a band to do something like “White Man…” The groove was slower, it had that reggae feel, it was a complete left turn to what everyone thought they would have come out with, which was another great thing about The Clash. But, literally, when I hear this song I get goose pimples, every fucking time.
I’ll tell you one last thing about The Clash, and what made them special. Doing this poll for Uncut made me rethink about the whole thing, especially in light of music today, and it struck me that when we – Joe, Mick, myself, our generation – all got into music, it was really an anti-establishment thing. It seems to me nowadays that people seem to get into music today to be a part of the establishment. That’s the essential difference between a band like The Clash and all the shit that’s going on now. You don’t get bands like The Clash any more. Then again, they were a tough act to follow. Make that damn near impossible!
Dave Clark explains how the Dave Clark Five created their huge hit “Glad All Over” in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2015 and out now.
Clark and associates recall the mania that greeted them once they hit it big in the US, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show just after The Beatles, and becom...
Dave Clark explains how the Dave Clark Five created their huge hit “Glad All Over” in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2015 and out now.
Clark and associates recall the mania that greeted them once they hit it big in the US, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show just after The Beatles, and becoming the first British Invasion group to tour in America.
“We were selling between 120,000 and 180,000 copies a day [of ‘Glad All Over’] in the UK,” Clark recalls. “The record ended up selling over a million and a half to knock The Beatles off No 1. And the final tally was over 2,500,000.
“We were semi-professional, so the boys were still in offices and I was still doing stunt work. In fact, we were the only band in England where we actually topped the bill on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, and we were all still working. We didn’t even go professional when we had ‘Glad All Over’ at No 1. It was after that.”
Roger Daltrey has spoken out about the current state of music.
In a new interview with London's free newspaper, The Standard, Daltrey said, "There's not enough anger out there in the music," he said. "And theres not a lot of contemplation in the lyrics, it's all very sweet… but that's the iPhone ...
Roger Daltrey has spoken out about the current state of music.
In a new interview with London’s free newspaper, The Standard, Daltrey said, “There’s not enough anger out there in the music,” he said. “And theres not a lot of contemplation in the lyrics, it’s all very sweet… but that’s the iPhone generation.”
He continued to criticise the music industry, saying, “it’s been stolen. Nobody wants to put in any money on nurturing artists – if you don’t have the first hit, ‘Goodbye!’ In our days, people wanted to take chances and we were allowed to. The artists ran the business. Now, business runs the artists. You get accountants and lawyers basically deciding who’s going to make it and who’s not.”
The Who are scheduled to play London’s Hyde Park on June 26 as part of their The Who Hits 50 tour. Daltrey confirmed it will be their last tour of this magnitude. “We will always do shows for charity, when we can, because it’s of enormous value to people and Pete [Townshend] and I love to play. But we won’t do long, schlepping tours. It’s killing us,” he explained.
Meanwhile, The Who are to release a seven-inch boxset of their first seven singles in April.
Björk has released a video for "Lionsong", the latest track to be taken from her new album, Vulnicura.
The video has been directed by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.
Björk
"Björk’s character for 'Lionsong' had to be smooth like a spider waiting in her web and seductive like a Baline...
Björk has released a video for “Lionsong“, the latest track to be taken from her new album, Vulnicura.
“Björk’s character for ‘Lionsong’ had to be smooth like a spider waiting in her web and seductive like a Balinese dancer cast in bronze,” Inez and Vinoodh told Noisey. “She is seen as if under a microscope, baring her heart while luring us inside the bloody galaxy of her own wound.”
Meanwhile, Björk’s exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened earlier this week, on March 8. It runs until June 7.
A quick reminder, first, that our new Ultimate Music Guide on Kate Bush has arrived in the shops on this beautiful - in London, at least, -spring morning.
We have just done our inadvertent best to smash that mood of vernal optimism in the office by digging into the infernal drones of Jimmy Page's "...
We have just done our inadvertent best to smash that mood of vernal optimism in the office by digging into the infernal drones of Jimmy Page’s “Lucifer Rising” score, from his new, none-more-black “Soundtracks” collection. Plenty here, though, of sunnier intent, not least Rob St John’s lulling “Surface Tension”, drawn in part from sound recordings of the wonderful River Lea, and the dramatic, kinetic new Holly Herndon album. See what you can find from this selection…
A trailer has been released for The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson.
The new documentary, directed by Julien Temple, will premier tomorrow [March 13] at the SXSW festival.
Indiewire reports that the film documents what would've been Wilko Johnson's farewell tour; until he was given the all clear from can...
A trailer has been released for The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson.
The new documentary, directed by Julien Temple, will premier tomorrow [March 13] at the SXSW festival.
Indiewirereports that the film documents what would’ve been Wilko Johnson’s farewell tour; until he was given the all clear from cancer.
Wilko Johnson
Temple previously filmed Johnson for his documentary on Dr Feelgood, Oil City Confidential.
Morrissey cancelled a gig on Wednesday [March 10] in Holland due to ill health.
The show was due to take place at the Poppodium 013 venue in Tilburg.
The cancellation was confirmed by the venue, who issued the following statement:
"We regret to inform you that Morrissey is forced to cancel tonigh...
Morrissey cancelled a gig on Wednesday [March 10] in Holland due to ill health.
The show was due to take place at the Poppodium 013 venue in Tilburg.
The cancellation was confirmed by the venue, who issued the following statement:
“We regret to inform you that Morrissey is forced to cancel tonight’s appearance in 013, Tilburg. Our stage crew, as well as Morrissey’s touring party were already setting up stage and all requirements for tonight’s show when we were informed by management that Morrissey is unable to perform tonight due to flu. At the moment we are trying to reschedule the date for later this month and will advise all ticket holders as soon as possible.”
Morrissey had previously postponed the same gig in December 2014.
Meanwhile, Morrissey is scheduled to begin a UK tour this coming Friday, March 13.
Nottingham Capital FM Arena (March 13) Bournemouth International Centre (14) Cardiff Motorpoint Arena (18) Leeds First Direct Arena (20) Glasgow SSE Hydro (21) Birmingham Barclaycard Arena (27)
The first trailer for the forthcoming Kurt Cobain documentary, Montage Of Heck, has been released.
The documentary is released in the UK in April, following its premier at the Sundance Film Festival in January.It will receive an American television premiere on HBO on May 4 after showing at SXSW in ...
The first trailer for the forthcoming Kurt Cobain documentary, Montage OfHeck, has been released.
The documentary is released in the UK in April, following its premier at the Sundance Film Festival in January.It will receive an American television premiere on HBO on May 4 after showing at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Kurt Cobain in Montage Of Heck
The documentary is directed by Brett Morgen, whose previous credits include The Rolling Stones‘ Crossfire Hurricane, and executive produced by Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean.
The film’s soundtrack will consist of previously unreleased Cobain songs, including a 12 minute acoustic number.
Sufjan Stevens has released a new track, "Should Have Know Better", from his upcoming album, Carrie & Lowell.
Stevens has already released one track from the album, "No Shade In The Shadow Of The Cross".
Sufjan Stevens
Carrie & Lowell will be released March 30 on Stevens’ own Asthmatic...
Sufjan Stevens has released a new track, “Should Have Know Better“, from his upcoming album, Carrie & Lowell.
I interviewed Phil Manzanera in the current issue of Uncut for our regular An Audience With… feature. Among the questions he answered was one from a reader asking about the time he played with Bob Dylan in October 1991, when Manzanera was Musical Director of the Seville Guitar Legends festival. We...
I interviewed Phil Manzanera in the current issue of Uncut for our regular An Audience With… feature. Among the questions he answered was one from a reader asking about the time he played with Bob Dylan in October 1991, when Manzanera was Musical Director of the Seville Guitar Legends festival. We could only run an edited version of Manzanera’s reply, so I thought it would be fun to run the story here in its full glory…
I got asked, “Would you like to rehearse Bob Dylan for a week?” Because it’s 90 degrees, we were going to be underneath the stage in Seville, in an air conditioned room. I went out and bought all his albums, so I knew all the material. I got Jack Bruce on bass, I got the best drummer in the world, I got backing singers, I got everything you could possibly want. So Bob comes in with the manager. The manager says “Hi Phil, this is Bob…” Because I’m musical director of the whole bloody thing – and the tag is guitar legends – I had to say to him “We want to do ‘All Along The Watchtower‘. But we’re not doing your version we’re doing the Hendrix version.” So I held my breath. I’d read lots of instances of all these people like George Harrison working with Bob Dylan where they expect one thing and he doesn’t do it. So the manager says, “Bob might come on, he might not. If Bob doesn’t come on, then Jack, can you sing his song?” Jack Bruce is a fiery Scotsman and he replies, “Uh, fuck. I’m not bloody fucking singing songs.” So that was the way it progressed.
“All Along The Watchtower” has only got three chords. Dylan would rehearse with us, and he would wait and wait and while we’d play them over and over before he came in singing anything. He really was playing with us. At one point he said, “You know, I think we should all be acoustic…” Thinking about it now, he probably thought I was Mexican or something, because of my name, and he said, “Do you know that Tex Mex song from 1948 called blah blah…” I said “Mmmm, no. Jack do you know that?” Jack shakes his head and says, “No.” Then I asked our drummer, Simon Phillips. “Simon, do you know this song?” It turns out, he doesn’t either. I ask everyone, they all say no, they don’t know it. So I said, “I tell you what, Bob. You start playing it and we’ll just pick it up.” He played it differently every time. Soon, people started making excuses to leave the room. “I got to make a phone call, can I just…” I was left there with Bob. But I thought to myself, ‘You know he’s Bob Dylan he can do what the fuck he likes. I admire him so much, I don’t give a shit.’ I think Phil Ramone was in the truck. He had produced him, and over lunch one day he gave me a piece of advice. “Take whatever you can from him if he turns up.” It’s nothing personal.
I knew he liked Richard Thompson, so I rang up Richard who was playing in Holland or somewhere, and said “Richard, would you like to play with Dylan?” “Yeah sure!” He arrived, so I sent him in before the concert to find out what numbers Bob was going to do. He came out and said, “Right, we’re doing this and this…” So we went on stage. The manager had said, “If Bob does come on, make sure you introduce him.” So we went on stage – “It’s Bob Dylan!” – and of course he doesn’t play any of the numbers we rehearsed. We’re all looking at each other, wondering what key he was playing… But you know, he’s a genius. So who cares…
Tame Impala have released a taster for their forthcoming new album.
The track, "Let It Happen", is available as a free download from the band's website.
The eight-minute long track is the first music to be released from the forthcoming album, the follow-up to the 2012's Lonerism.
The band are due...
Tame Impala have released a taster for their forthcoming new album.
The track, “Let It Happen“, is available as a free download from the band’s website.
The eight-minute long track is the first music to be released from the forthcoming album, the follow-up to the 2012’s Lonerism.
The band are due to play some shows in the UK this coming September.
They will play at Glasgow Barrowland on September 8 and Liverpool Olympia on September 9 before heading to Bestival.
Bob Dylan, David Bowie, the White Stripes, the Jesus And Mary Chain, The Who, Bruce Springsteen and more are confirmed for this year’s Record Store Day.
This year, Record Store Day takes place on April 18.
You can find a full list of UK releases here.
In the meantime, here are some of the vinyl...
Bob Dylan, David Bowie, the White Stripes, the Jesus And Mary Chain, The Who, Bruce Springsteen and more are confirmed for this year’s Record Store Day.
This year, Record Store Day takes place on April 18.
Bob Dylan. “The Night We Called It A Day”/“Stay With Me”. 7”
Grateful Dead. Wake Up To Find Out: Nassau Coliseum, 3/29/90. LP
The Jesus And Mary Chain. Psychocandy. Live. Barrowlands. LP
Robert Plant. More Roar. 10”
Roxy Music. “Ladytron” / “The Numberer”. 10”
Small Faces. “Afterlow Of Your Love” / “Up The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshire” 7”
Bruce Springsteen. Born In The USA / Nebraska / The River / Darkness On The Edge Of Town / The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle / Greetings From Ashbury Park, NJ / Born To Run. All separate LP
Of all the iconic post-punk bands who have reformed in the last decade, the one least likely to do it well - to do it at all - were The Pop Group.
Formed in Bristol by boys so cool that they had embraced and rejected the Sex Pistols by the end of 1976 for being too rockist, they lasted just three y...
Of all the iconic post-punk bands who have reformed in the last decade, the one least likely to do it well – to do it at all – were The Pop Group.
Formed in Bristol by boys so cool that they had embraced and rejected the Sex Pistols by the end of 1976 for being too rockist, they lasted just three years, two albums (plus a compilation of early demos), a few dozen legendary shows and three singles that defined that puzzling but eternally underrated sub-genre called punk-funk even more perfectly than the Gang Of Four or James Chance. While Mark Stewart (vocals), Gareth Sager (guitar), Dan Catsis (bass) and Bruce Smith (drums) have all spent the last 35 years or so making worthwhile music, nothing came close to the legend of The Pop Group, whose sloganeering, conspiracy-theory socialism, manic free-jazz unpredictability and ironic band name gained a hipster frisson for simply being too perfect to last.
So the reunion for live shows in 2010 couldn’t help but provoke cynicism, none of which was helped by the news that super-producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay, Florence And The Machine, etc) was manning the helm on a comeback album. Nevertheless, from the opening testifying crackle and post-hip hop strut of the opener and title track, its clear that Mark Stewart’s life-long mission statement for The Pop Group – “uplifting, abrasive funk with something more weird and interesting than ‘I wanna shag you all night long’ going on over it” – is present and correct. “Your mind has been wiped clean,” Stewart’s distorted voice wails as “Citizen Zombie” drizzles to a standstill, the perennial Stewart theme of irrational denial of the system’s violence and injustice firmly re-established.
So, having been reassured that Citizen Zombie is less money-spinning nostalgia and more rabble-rousing surprise, it fits that the following “Mad Truth” is an altogether more forgiving beast, a joyous early ‘80s disco throwback where, as Sager does his best choppy Nile Rodgers impression, Stewart concedes, “Its hard to make a stand.” From there, any vague possibility that Citizen Zombie will be as dissonant as original albums Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder is banished by “Nowhere Girl”, a dubwise love ballad scorched by Sager’s as-close-to-rock-as-its-polite-to-get guitar.
But the most striking thing about Citizen Zombie is how young and naïve and happy it all sounds. The blissfully dancey “S.O.P.H.I.A.” is a case in point. Stewart still talks fondly of the Bristol scene that spawned The Pop Group, a tribe who spent 1975-77 enthusing about books, politics and the clothes and attitude of the Sex Pistols before going out to dance to soul and funk at the city’s multi-racial blues nights and discos. “S.O.P.H.I.A.” channels that teenage joy, the delight in being white bohemians who play disco ever so slightly wrong. And as always, Stewart is unashamedly, deliberately hilarious, crooning “You took me to the edge of the night” like a drunk at a bus stop before hitting the Situationist hook with relish: “Assume nothing!/Deny everything!”
The Pop Group have been given credit over the years for being original, subversive, prescient, clever, courageous… but rarely does anyone point out how funny they were. Epworth’s production – a perfect blend of 1979 surrealist angularity and 2015 machine-tooled gleam – emphasises and revels in this mischievous, celebratory side.
In other words, Citizen Zombie is The Pop Group album they were too at odds – with the world, with each other – to make 35 years ago. They were always inspired noise-mongers and sloganeers rather than great songwriters, and the likes of “Shadow Child”, “Box 9” and the obligatory anti-consumerist rant “Nations” probably won’t be making it into anyone’s Desert Island Discs. But Citizen Zombie has a coherence and warmth that only really surfaced, briefly and tantalisingly, first-time around, on the triptych of classic singles, “She Is Beyond Good And Evil”, “We Are All Prostitutes” and “Where There’s A Will”. In 2015, strangely, this makes The Pop Group finally sound like a pop group.
Q&A
Mark Stewart
Why did it take four years from the Pop Group live reunion in 2010 to releasing a new album?
“Me and Gareth had been writing the whole time while we got a five-year-plan together. Suddenly, out of the blue, I tweeted Paul Epworth because he’d been talking about us in an interview saying that we were a big influence. I asked him if he fancied doing anything with us and he came back in seconds and said it would be amazing. And the next week we were in the best studio in the world working on it. This was in September so it’s happening really, really fast… from four years to all engines go.” What did Paul Epworth add to The Pop Group?
“He’s what they call in psychiatry an enabler. Paul had only just opened this studio and wanted us in to baptize it, and he was so excited about plugging all the machines in backwards… he was like a little tiny kid. We were allowed to play with the big boys’ toys… and cut their heads off.” Your lyrics still demand revolution. You haven’t mellowed with age…
“Not at all. For me, it’s always about context. The fact that we’re using our own channels and distribution set-up means that at last we can do exactly what we wanna do. No censorship from outside capital. We’re more radical, to use an old word, than we ever were.”
With a new My Morning Jacket album The Waterfall due May 4 on ATO/Capitol Records, the band's Jim James is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular An Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the hirsuite frontman?
How did he end up on the Lo...
With a new My Morning Jacket album The Waterfall due May 4 on ATO/Capitol Records, the band’s Jim James is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular An Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the hirsuite frontman?
How did he end up on the Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes album?
Why did he become involved with the Woody Guthrie tribute project, New Multitudes?
What are his memories of playing with Bob Dylan and Wilco on the AmericanaramA tour?
Send up your questions by noon, Friday, March 20 to uncutaudiencewith@timeinc.com.
The best questions, and Jim’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine.
Please include your name and location with your question.
A previously unheard Kurt Cobain acoustic song is to appear on the soundtrack for the forthcoming documentary, Montage Of Heck.
Writing on Twitter, the film's director Brett Morgen said: "Listening to a mind blowing 12 minute acoustic Cobain unheard track that will be heard on the montage of heck s...
A previously unheard Kurt Cobain acoustic song is to appear on the soundtrack for the forthcoming documentary, Montage Of Heck.
Writing on Twitter, the film’s director Brett Morgen said: “Listening to a mind blowing 12 minute acoustic Cobain unheard track that will be heard on the montage of heck soundtrack.”
Morgen, whose previous credits include the Rolling Stones’ documentary Crossfire Hurricane, debuted Montage Of Heck at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film will be released in the UK on April 10.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Morgen revealed that the score for the documentary consists of “unreleased Cobain music.
“They don’t have titles. Before people saw the movie, there were these weird press releases focusing on the unreleased music. And it’s like: It’s a movie. We’re not going to stop it and play a song for four minutes,” Morgen said. “But nobody in Kurt’s life — not his management, wife, bandmates — had ever heard his Beatles thing [a snippet of ‘And I Love Her’]. I found it on a random tape. It’s a Paul [McCartney] song. How’s that for shattering the myth?”
As usual with these things, editing Uncut's new Ultimate Music Guide: Kate Bush dug up a lot of strange, revealing old business from the NME and Melody Maker archives, not least an autumn 1980 piece which found an over-excited MM journalist in a Munich TV studio, watching Kate Bush put a double bass...
As usual with these things, editing Uncut’s new Ultimate Music Guide: Kate Bush dug up a lot of strange, revealing old business from the NME and Melody Maker archives, not least an autumn 1980 piece which found an over-excited MM journalist in a Munich TV studio, watching Kate Bush put a double bass through its paces while she performed “Babooshka”.
Once the show – and the problematically ripe descriptions – were over, though, the interview with Bush is fascinating, as you can see if you pick up the Ultimate Music Guide (it’s on sale in UK stores on Thursday, but is already available here). Bush talks about wanting to tour again, about the books and films that have influenced her, about the permeable lines between confession and fiction.
“I rarely write purely personal songs from experience,” she says. “I worry about being too indulgent and giving too much away.” A little later, she is discussing the specifics of “Army Dreamers”, sung from the perspective of a mother mourning a son killed in action. “I seem to link on to mothers rather well,” she admits. “I find it fascinating about mothers, that there’s something in there, a kind of maternal passion which is there all the time, even when they’re talking about cheese sandwiches. Sometimes it can be very possessive, sometimes it’s very real.”
Even at her most elliptical, there is a clarity and consistency to Kate Bush which, looking back, seems a lot more obvious now than it might have done at the time. Latterly, for instance, the maternal fortitude implied in 1980 has become an explicit part of the most recent phase of her career, culminating in Before The Dawn – a theatrical spectacular inspired by her son Bertie McIntosh, and a showcase of his talents as a “very talented actor and beautiful singer,” as his mother wrote in her programme notes.
In the aftermath of Before The Dawn, it feels like the perfect time for us to consider, in depth, the whole story of Kate Bush. To that end, our latest Uncut Ultimate Music Guide features forensic new essays on every one of her albums, presented alongside a host of those long-unseen interviews. They show an artist who slowly gains the confidence to assert herself and – very slowly – gains the respect of the press. But also one whose idiosyncratic vision, and whose determination to bring that vision to fruition, has been there right from the start.
“There are always so many voices telling me what to do that you can’t listen to them,” she told another Melody Maker journalist in 1985, a genius on her own remarkable trajectory. “All I ever do is listen to the little voices inside me. I don’t want to disappoint the little voices that have been so good to me…”
The Pretties were one of the more dynamic proponents of the British R’n’B boom, perennially tipped for stardom, and admired by their peers: the young David Bowie, for one, was apparently so besotted with the band that he filed singer Phil May’s phone number under “God” in his address book....
The Pretties were one of the more dynamic proponents of the British R’n’B boom, perennially tipped for stardom, and admired by their peers: the young David Bowie, for one, was apparently so besotted with the band that he filed singer Phil May’s phone number under “God” in his address book. But their course was pitted with missteps and misfortune, mostly self-imposed by their anarchic reputation. May was famously reputed to possess the longest hair in the country, which helped make the band prime tabloid targets; and drummer Viv Prince was so drunkenly uncontrollable that he seemed to court antagonism everywhere he went – Fontana’s head of A&R head refused to have anything to do with the band after Prince puked over his drums in the studio.
Other decisions proved ill-judged. Their singles weren’t included on their albums. Their first original song, “We’ll Be Together”, was about prostitution. Another was called, somewhat bluntly, “LSD”. And due to one of their most potent singles, “Don’t Bring Me Down”, including the line “And then I laid her on the ground”, it was effectively denied the chance of widespread airplay, especially in America. Then, when they should have been capitalising on early inroads into the American market, they were instead shipped off to tour that hotbed of rock’n’roll fever, New Zealand – where they triggered such a riotous response that they were promptly shipped right back, banned from ever entering the country again. At every turn, it seemed The Pretty Things were determined to sabotage their own career.
Given which, it’s astonishing that they managed to come up with several of the most thrilling pieces of primal UK R’n’B, before going on to invent the rock opera, following one of the more creatively intriguing examples of ’60s pop’s transition from mod to psychedelia.
Their position in pop history is undeniable. Guitarist Dick Taylor founded The Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, before hooking up with fellow art student Phil May to form the Pretties. They would subsequently share a house – in Belgravia, no less – with Brian Jones; their raucous lifestyle there was celebrated in the song “13 Chester Street”, a “Not Fade Away” soundalike whose rhythm track featured Viv Prince’s leather belt being whipped against a chair. Prince’s avalanche drums were a crucial element of early successes like their visceral debut single “Rosalyn”, the musical embodiment of a primal urge with the waspish appeal of the early Stones. It’s one of the era’s emblematic recordings, as is its follow-up “Don’t Bring Me Down”, a blast of feral momentum periodically arrested by a sexually frustrated stop/start structure.
Their eponymous debut album was mostly R’n’B covers by the likes of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed, lusty plaints given a pulsing pep-pill throb by the band’s whipcord-thin sound and May’s louche, laconic vocal sneer. The follow-up Get The Picture? featured more of their own material alongside covers of Ike Turner and Solomon Burke songs, but was mostly notable for the broadening of their approach, with fuzz-guitar effects, reverbed harmony vocals and odd chord-changes featured on some tracks. But when Fontana, frustrated at the failure of singles like “Midnight To Six Man” and “Come See Me” (both of which sound stunning half a century on), saddled them with string and brass arrangers and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich’s producer, the Pretties lost interest in the subsequent Emotions album, never playing any of its tracks live. By that time, anyway, they were a completely different band, in terms of outlook and lineup. Viv Prince had long since tried the others’ patience and been ditched in favour of Skip Alan, while further changes saw the recruitment of keyboardist Jon Povey and May’s childhood friend, multi-instrumentalist Wally Waller, both from The Fentones, who brought with them a love of West Coast harmonies that fed into the band’s broadening sound as the Pretties made the move from mod to an eclectic psychedelia.
The first declaration of this new intent came with the landmark single “Defecting Grey”, a multi-sectioned psychedelic extravaganza of rasping guitar, electric sitar, backward guitar and looming bass. Helmed by the inventive Beatles/Pink Floyd engineer/producer Norman Smith, “Defecting Grey” is the Pretties’ “Lazy Sunday”, their “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and an indication of the untapped reserves of musical ambition and imagination that would bear fruit on SF Sorrow, the world’s first rock opera. Somehow, SF Sorrow failed to hoist the band into the first rank of psych-rockers, remaining instead a cult classic, but it stands up better nearly half a century on than most of their contemporaries’ efforts. Based on a Phil May story following the titular Sorrow from cradle to grave, it’s a densely textured work woven from threads of layered guitars, keyboards, horns and gorgeous harmonies, with Mellotron and sitar “borrowed” from The Beatles’ studio down the hall, and Smith ladling on all manner of bespoke effects. But compared with the single-minded R’n’B approach that the band were famed for, it was perhaps too confusingly diverse, with tracks like the martial, rhythmic “Private Sorrow”, the ebullient “SF Sorrow Is Born” and the soaring prog-scape “The Journey”flying off at disparate tangents.
The follow-up, Parachute, a pastoral-psych album themed around the contrast between urban and rural lifestyles – a voguish concern at the time, with hippies intent on getting back to the land – proved similarly outré, despite again featuring intelligent material, ambitiously treated. It’s at this point that the band’s career started to drift seriously off course, with the slick cover to Freeway Madness signalling the desperate urge to please American punters that would take up the Pretties’ next decade. There were occasional highlights – the blend of jaunty, offbeat piano interspersed with darker intimations gave Silk Torpedo’s “Dream/Joey” something akin to the ambivalence of The Doors – but the hook-up with Led Zep’s SwanSong label inevitably led to a coke-fuelled hedonism that gradually eroded the group’s integrity. Following several further personnel changes, even Phil May was moved to quit, displeased at how money was becoming the driving force behind creative decisions.
Without him, the band collapsed – though there’s a certain poetic justice in their eventual reformation resulting from the other Pretties joining him on a solo project. And there’s something heroically noble at their continued existence, intermittently performing and releasing LPs like 2007’s Balboa Island, whose “The Beat Goes On” offers an autobiographical overview of the life and times of those “dirty Pretty Things… back in the day we stole the blues”. The fame has gone, they concede, but regardless, “the beat goes on inside me and you”. And always will, no doubt.
Albert Maysles, the documentarian, has died aged 88.
He passed away on Thursday, March 5 from natural causes.
Along with his brother David, Albert Maysles was one of the great documentary filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies.
The Maysles brothers' filmed both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones...
Albert Maysles, the documentarian, has died aged 88.
He passed away on Thursday, March 5 from natural causes.
Along with his brother David, Albert Maysles was one of the great documentary filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies.
The Maysles brothers’ filmed both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, among many other subjects.
In 1964, the Maysles followed The Beatles on their first American tour for a documentary titled What’s Happening! The Beatles In The U.S.A.
Gimme Shelter, meanwhile, they followed the Stones on the band’s infamous 1969 tour of the States, which culminated with the free concert at Altamont Speedway.
Outside of music, Albert and David Maysles shot documentaries on Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and, in 1975, Grey Gardens, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale who were aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
A restored version of Grey Gardens has recently been released in American cinemas.
Following David’s death in 1987, Albert continued to make documentaries, including 2001’s Oscar-nominated LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy Of Cotton, about an impoverished African-American family living in the souther, of the United States.
The Flaming Lips teamed up with Julianna Barwick to cover The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home'' and David Bowie's "Warszawa" at a benefit show in New York City on March 5 – watch videos of their versions below.
The group were performing at the annual Tibet House Benefit Concert, at the city's Carnegi...
The Flaming Lips teamed up with Julianna Barwick to cover The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” and David Bowie’s “Warszawa” at a benefit show in New York City on March 5 – watch videos of their versions below.
The group were performing at the annual Tibet House Benefit Concert, at the city’s Carnegie Hall, according to The Future Heart via Pitchfork. The evening also saw an appearance from Patti Smith, who performed her own “People Have The Power”, joined by Debbie Harry, Dev Hynes, Philip Glass and Miley Cyrus.
Julianna Barwick has form with the Lips – she performed on Wayne Coyne and co’s studio version of “She’s Leaving Home” on their Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover album, With A Little Help From My Fwends, released last year.
The Tibet House Benefit Concert is a yearly fundraiser in support of the institution, which works to preserve and celebrate Tibetan culture.
