Arbouretum

Tom Waits is staring back at me from the cover of the new Uncut, which goes on sale this Thursday, January 31. It’s a picture of the young Tom that I’m looking at, long before he ended up with a face that now makes you think a tractor tyre must recently have run over it, a corrugated look he shares with his friend, Keith Richards. He is in fact startlingly young in the picture, even though it would seem he hasn’t shaved for a week and for just as long has been sleeping in the clothes he’s wearing.

Couple of plugs this morning before I get into the list. First off, a quick reminder that we have an exclusive stream of the whole new Arbouretum album, “Coming Out Of The Fog”; click this link. Well worth a listen, if you haven’t already.

The next Uncut Ultimate Music Guide goes on sale on Thursday (January 17), hot on the heels of our special on The Kinks, and is dedicated this time to The Beatles. There’s the usual mix of brand new reviews of all The Beatles albums by our current team of writers alongside some truly remarkable interviews from the archives of Melody Maker and NME, for which the description ‘mind-blowing’ seems barely adequate.

If you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms after the glut of end-of-year charts last month, I cooked this up for the latest edition of Uncut…

There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying – turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many – booked Gram parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population when Gram died in September, 1973.

The last 25, then. A few of you have asked for some help as to what these records sound like. I’ll try and put some links into these lists over the next few days, and also a blog of favourite track clips that might help a bit. See you what you think, anyhow… Previously: 112-76 Previously: 75-51 Previously: 50-26

Nearly there now: the third instalment of my personal favourite albums of the year… Previously: 112-76 Previously: 75-51

That pretending-not-to-be-annoyed-by-the-Mercurys morning of the year. But as way of distraction, here’s this week’s rather late office playlist.

Usual excuses about too much work to do (currently: a forthcoming Ultimate Music Guide on The Kinks, and the dark mathematics of Uncut’s end-of-year charts, as well as the rest of the next issue) mean that I failed yesterday to write a review of the Six Organs Of Admittance show at Birthdays in Dalston.

Pretty busy trying to finish an issue here, but as usual, Neil Young is providing a distraction. Today there’s an opportunity to see why we’ve been making such a fuss about “Psychedelic Pill”: a video for the 16-odd minute “Ramada Inn”…