The new issue of Uncut arrives in UK shops on Thursday, though perhaps a few subscribers, with a prevailing wind, might have already received their copies. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including new interviews with The National, Laura Marling, Deborah Harry and Todd Rundgren; The Eagles, The Waterboys, Deep Purple, Mark Mulcahy, Kurt Vile; reviews of Fleetwood Mac, Vampire Weekend, REM, Van Dyke Parks and Jandek; respects paid to Jason Molina, Andy Johns and Phil Ramone; and a brief exchange with the now notorious Michelle Shocked.
“The one thing that saved Mick at this point was Dylan,” Mick Ronson’s wife, Suzi, recalls in a terrific feature on her late husband by Garry Mulholland in the new issue of Uncut. She was talking about the shambles Mick’s career had become after he was dumped by David Bowie and his first two solo albums, Slaughter On 10th Avenue and Play Don’t Worry, had both flopped. Things hadn’t really worked out with the Hunter-Ronson Band, either, and you wondered where Mick might go from here when he unexpectedly hove into view as a member of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.
This month’s issue of Uncut (September 2012, Take 184) features Joe Strummer on the cover – inside is an in-depth exploration of his secret history, after The Clash split up to his redemption in the late ’90s. To complement this, our archive feature this week finds Strummer looking at the demise of The Clash – from their epic Sandinista! album to their bitter disintegration. This excerpt is taken from a longer piece in the September 1999 (Take 28) issue of Uncut. Words: Gavin Martin
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Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.”
