Wilco have cancelled a forthcoming show in Indiana in protest over the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The Act has already attracted widespread controversy across America for allowing business owners to discriminate against gay and lesbian patrons on religious grounds.
Variety reports t...
Wilco have cancelled a forthcoming show in Indiana in protest over the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The Act has already attracted widespread controversy across America for allowing business owners to discriminate against gay and lesbian patrons on religious grounds.
Variety reports that Wilco broke the news on their Twitter feed on March 30, 2015, with the band claiming the Act “feels like thinly disguised legal discrimination”.
We're canceling our 5/7 show in Indianapolis. “Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act” feels like thinly disguised legal discrimination.
When we think of music about London, it's often easy to fall back on certain archetypes: the jaded, the satirical, the post-modern music hall character sketches; the occasional snatches of melancholy located in the midst of a crowd; the long, clever shadows cast by Ray Davies and Damon Albarn, to na...
When we think of music about London, it’s often easy to fall back on certain archetypes: the jaded, the satirical, the post-modern music hall character sketches; the occasional snatches of melancholy located in the midst of a crowd; the long, clever shadows cast by Ray Davies and Damon Albarn, to name but two. When artists try and make music about London, it often seems as if they can’t help but try and articulate the urban extreme, all chaos and scale.
But London, of course, contains multitudes, and not all of it fits into such predictable categories. For a long time, I lived close to the banks of the River Lea in South Tottenham, and spent a lot of my spare time walking and cycling around the towpaths and marshes: an unusual, mostly-neglected artery that stretched from the Thames at Limehouse, through the fringes of Docklands, by the Olympic Park and the football pitches of Hackney Marshes, out past the filter beds and reservoirs and into Essex – to Cheshunt, Waltham Abbey, Broxbourne and beyond.
It’s this landscape which is described with great skill on a new album by the imaginative Lancastrian artist Rob St John. “Surface Tension” documents the course of the River Lea, and makes aesthetic and cultural capital out of both its context – decaying, gentrified, sometimes surprisingly bucolic – and its toxicity. The 31-minute piece begins with birdsong, lapping water and gentle chamber piano, but gradually takes in boats, locks, dogs, footballers and the conceptual use of the profoundly polluted Lea water.
According to St John’s notes, his field recording adventures extended to using “binaural microphones, underwater hydrophones and contact mics.” He also constructed tape loops of these recordings, soaked them in tubs of the vile river water for a month, then replayed them as they fell apart, creating an effect similar to that inadvertently engineered by William Basinki on his “Disintegration Loops”.
St John’s work is clearly political, in the way his process makes explicit the filth that has been routinely dumped into the Lea for generations (it seems salient to add here a link to the excellent Love the Lea campaign) He even took pollution readings made by Thames 21 and created “seven sonifications, each of which are odd, fizzing and twinkling reshapings of a piano line, ‘played’ (in a way) by the river” (I am quoting this because, to be honest, I don’t understand what he’s done well enough to put it into my own words).
Over 31 minutes, though, St John’s music is as interesting as the process which underpins it. It ebbs through passages of chamber piano and cello (reminiscent of post-classical ensemble, Rachel’s), analog kosmische and, at 18 minutes, eerily euphoric, Boards Of Canada-style techno – a reminder of how I used to stumble into the last rites of outdoor raves near Coppermill Fields after breakfast on Sunday mornings. It might not be quite as innovative as the manipulated field recordings – there’s a fair bit of the “Small Children In The Background” trick beloved of sundry post-rockers as well as BOC – but it does have a prettiness which potently transcends as well as complements the damaged river narrative. The music comes with a 48-page book of St John’s photographs, but they’re not integral to the enjoyment of the project (in fact, I haven’t actually seen them myself).
Essentially, the sound of “Surface Tensions” captures how the River Lea and its valley is a beautiful and at times tranquil place, where most days you can spot cormorants, as well as herons. A lot of art about the Lea is predicated on its otherness, and these past few years especially it’s been a magnet for aspriring psychogeographers drawn to what they would doubtless call its liminal qualities, its role as an interzone between city and nature, between old and new. There’s a lot of wishful thinking about the uncanny fixed onto it, too: those interested might enjoy the quasi-occult fictions in Gareth E Rees’ “Marshland: Dreams and Nightmares On The Edge Of London” more than I did (though I did once find a clean fox skull behind the ice rink, just after a fox had entered a house and attacked a child near Victoria Park).
“Surface Tensions”, though, can be enjoyed as a pastorale, as a celebration of an unlikely rural space, with its sombre cellos and piano lines. Much literature of the Lea Valley posits it as a hinterland, as an anomaly, but “Surface Tension” also soundtracks a plausible escape route. Every morning and evening now, I cross Walthamstow Marshes by train, and I miss being near the Lea more than anything else about living in London.
But I also realise, among much other more mundane and less poetic business, that the need for such an escape route was a critical reason why I actually left the capital. If the thing you like most about London is a place that reminds you of the countryside, maybe, in my case at least, it makes sense to get a little closer to the real thing.
Bob Dylan has personally approved the release of the MusiCares Person of the Year concert from February, 2015.
According to a report on Billboard, Dylan has signed off the DVD release of the concert, which featured Bruce Springsteen, Jack White and Neil Young among the line-up.
Billboard points ou...
Bob Dylan has personally approved the release of the MusiCares Person of the Year concert from February, 2015.
According to a report on Billboard, Dylan has signed off the DVD release of the concert, which featured Bruce Springsteen, Jack White and Neil Young among the line-up.
Billboard points out it is unclear whether the 35 minute speech Dylan delivered at the event will also be included in the DVD package.
As yet, no release date has been confirmed for the DVD release.
Previous recipients of the MusiCares Person of the Year include Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney and Neil Young.
A 1969 soundtrack by Serge Gainsbourg, presumed lost for 45 years, has been found in a suitcase.
Fact reports that the score for Les Chemins de Katmandou, by Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, was discovered up in an old suitcase by the daughter of Vannier’s former copyist.
The tapes have since...
A 1969 soundtrack by Serge Gainsbourg, presumed lost for 45 years, has been found in a suitcase.
Fact reports that the score for Les Chemins de Katmandou, by Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, was discovered up in an old suitcase by the daughter of Vannier’s former copyist.
The tapes have since been remastered and portions of the score will feature in the forthcoming expanded release of Le Cinema De Serge Gainsbourg, a five-CD box set due on April 20.
The box set spans 1959 to 1990, and will be released by EmArcy/Mercury/Universal France.
Les Chemins de Katmandou – titled The Pleasure Pit in the UK – was directed by André Cayatte and co-starred Gainsbourg along with his partner, Jane Birkin.
If you think Dylan going electric or the punk revolution caused a stir in the music press, you should have been around when John Coltrane brought his quintet to the UK to start a 27-city European tour in November 1961. Bob Dawbarn, the Melody Maker’s representative, returned from the opening show ...
If you think Dylan going electric or the punk revolution caused a stir in the music press, you should have been around when John Coltrane brought his quintet to the UK to start a 27-city European tour in November 1961. Bob Dawbarn, the Melody Maker’s representative, returned from the opening show at the Gaumont State in Kilburn, North London, with a piece that ran under a headline screaming: “WHATHAPPENED?”
Dawbarn was a knowledgable fan of modern jazz — including the music of Dizzy Gillespie, whose band topped the bill that night — but Coltrane’s new sounds had him “baffled, bothered and bewildered”, reflecting the opinion of a large chunk of the audience uneady for the changes jazz was starting to undergo.
Part of the problem was that Coltrane’s UK album release schedule lagged far behind the US. The fans who knew him from his work with Miles Davis and his own earlier records as a leader were expecting a tenor saxophonist who expanded the rulebook but did not rip it to shreds. They had not heard his latest Atlantic album, My Favourite Things, containing a version of the title song in which he used the major-to-minor shifts of Richard Rodgers’ harmless little melody (from The Sound Of Music) as the vehicle not only for his discovery of the soprano saxophone but for his assault on jazz’s established limits of harmony and timescale.
No fewer than six extended versions of the song are included in So Many Things: The European Tour 1961, a set of four CDs on the Acrobat label compiled from two shows each in Paris and Stockholm and one apiece in Copenhagen and Helsinki. The sound quality varies from patchy to excellent but the flame of discovery burns throughout, nowhere more thrillingly than on the second Paris version of “My Favourite Things”, where Coltrane attacks his long solo from a variety of different angles, with increasingly jaw-dropping results.
Other highlights include a gorgeous version of “Naima” featuring the bass clarinet of Eric Dolphy, who is also heard to advantage on alto saxophone and flute. McCoy Tyner (piano), Reggie Workman (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums) show themselves completely attuned to the rapidly evolving needs of a leader whowould die in 1967 without having visited the UK again. This diligently compiled set is as close as we’ll get to a souvenir of his profound effect on European listeners.
James Taylor has revealed details of his new album, Before The World.
Rolling Stone reports the album will be released on June 16.
It is Taylor's first studio album of original material since 2002's, October Road.
His most recent album, 2008's Covers, featured songs by artists including Leonard C...
James Taylor has revealed details of his new album, Before The World.
Rolling Stone reports the album will be released on June 16.
It is Taylor’s first studio album of original material since 2002’s, October Road.
His most recent album, 2008’s Covers, featured songs by artists including Leonard Cohen, Lieber and Stoller, Holland-Dozier-Holland and Buddy Holly.
“I got out of the habit of writing songs for about 10 years,” explains Taylor.
The album features regular musicians Steve Gadd on drums and Jimmy Johnson on bass, while songs include “Angels Of Fenway”, “Watchin’ Over Me” and “Stretch Of The Highway”.
“I have no idea what releasing an album even means anymore,” he says. “Friends of mine say, ‘James, you have to adjust your expectations. People don’t buy these things.’ Not to be presumptuous, but Vincent Van Gogh sold just two paintings while he was alive. If that’s what your medium is, you simply must do it.”
A Kickstarter campaign launched on Saturday, March 28, 2015 to raise funds for Tom Waits For No One: The Illustrated Scrapbook.
The scrapbook documents the making of Tom Waits For No One, a 1979 a rotoscoped short film starring Waits singing "The One That Got Away".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
A Kickstarter campaign launched on Saturday, March 28, 2015 to raise funds for Tom Waits For No One: The Illustrated Scrapbook.
The scrapbook documents the making of Tom Waits For No One, a 1979 a rotoscoped short film starring Waits singing “The One That Got Away”.
The 160 page hardback book will contain animation cells, rotoscope drawings, character studies and backgrounds.
Writing on the Kickstarter page, the film’s director John Lamb says, “At the video shoot. Tom drove up in his ’66 Blue Valentine T-bird and stepped out wearing a pork pie Stetson, an old wrinkled suit and carrying a bag, asking where the dressing rooms were. We’re thinking ‘Whew, he’s going to change that suit!’ Then he came out of the dressing room with the same hat and a different old wrinkled suit.
Tom Waits For No One
“For the shoot, we utilized 5 video cameras, 2 high, 2 low and 1 handheld. We did 6 takes with 2 separate dancers. We edited down 13 hours of video into to a 5 1/2 minute film, which was then traced frame by frame and turned into ‘Tom Waits For No One’.”
In September, 2014 Uncut first reported on the Kickstarter campaign to restore the Tom Waits For No One film.
It says records in the intro line, and that's pretty misleading most weeks. But it's especially with this list, since a bunch of the best stuff I've heard in the past few days has arrived in different digital ways: a live session from Steve Gunn and his band at folkadelphia.com; a Soundcloud comp of...
It says records in the intro line, and that’s pretty misleading most weeks. But it’s especially with this list, since a bunch of the best stuff I’ve heard in the past few days has arrived in different digital ways: a live session from Steve Gunn and his band at folkadelphia.com; a Soundcloud comp of beautiful Bitchin Bajas live jams, quaintly organised into a “Side A” and a “Side B”; a preliminary clip from the next Omar Souleyman album, produced here by Mideselektor; and maybe best of all, the quiet arrival of Heron Oblivion, a raging new psych band featuring Ethan and Noel from Comets On Fire, and fronted by the great Meg Baird (it’s kind of next level Espers, if that makes sense to some of you?).
Quick reminder, anyhow, that our new issue of Uncut is out and about now: Van Morrison, Replacements, Ride, Blur, Alabama Shakes, Motorhead, Xylouris White, Cannibal Ox, Adam Curtis and plenty more. Enjoy responsibly etc…
We’ve not reached the full-on Tupac/ Johnny Cash situation yet, perhaps, but a thriving mini-industry has sprung up in Joe Strummer heritage documentaries: Dick Rude’s snappy Mescaleros tour film, Let’s Rock Again (2004); Julien Temple’s possibly definitive profile The Future Is Unwritten (2...
We’ve not reached the full-on Tupac/ Johnny Cash situation yet, perhaps, but a thriving mini-industry has sprung up in Joe Strummer heritage documentaries: Dick Rude’s snappy Mescaleros tour film, Let’s Rock Again (2004); Julien Temple’s possibly definitive profile The Future Is Unwritten (2007); and now Nick Hall’s sweet, low-budget documentary, itself an inadvertent semi-sequel to Danny Garcia’s enlightening Clash Mark II doc, The Rise And Fall Of The Clash (2012).
Hall’s film zooms in on the end of the Clash II chapter to focus on a brief, lesser-known moment in Strummer’s story: when, in 1985, with that rebooted version of the group collapsing, the singer left the UK. As Clash II members Nick Sheppard and Pete Howard reflect, the sudden disappearance was a virtual repeat of the headline-making vanishing act Strummer had performed back in 1982, when he “went missing” on the eve of the Combat Rock tour – with one crucial difference. This time when he disappeared, no one cared enough to notice.
Sporting a bruised ego and the beginnings of a beard, Strummer went to ground in Spain – a country for which he’d felt a deep, obsessive romantic attachment even before he got around to expressing it in songs like “Spanish Bombs” – to lick his wounds and try to work out the way ahead.
The title of Hall’s film refers to the car Strummer bought while he stayed there, a boxy boat that became a legend among slack-jawed local punks as he cruised it around the streets and bars of Granada, “a miraculous apparition.” Strummer lost the car when he eventually returned to the UK and his then-partner Gaby Holford, just in time for the birth of their first daughter, Lola: he parked it somewhere, and forgot where.
Hall mounts a little attempt to find that long-lost Dodge again as a slightly gimmicky framing device. But the real worth of his documentary lies in the memories, diaries and fading photographs of the members of Radio Futura and 091, Spanish bands Strummer befriended during his sojourn, and, in the latter case, tried to produce an LP for, with disastrous results.
Strummer had many adventures, and made a lot of good, forgotten music between the end of The Clash and his critical rebirth with The Mescaleros. It’s easy to imagine more such films appearing: surely, the tale of his reconciliation with Mick Jones and the creation of BAD’s No 10 Upping Street album deserves the documentary treatment next? But future historians should bear in mind the words of Gaby, who has the best line in the film: “What do they call it: ‘The Wilderness Years’? That was our *life*!”
Portishead’s Geoff Barrow [left, in photograph] discusses his upcoming soundtrack and the current state of the band’s next album in the new issue of Uncut, dated May 2015 and out now.
Barrow has recently teamed up with composer Ben Salisbury to create the soundtrack to Alex Garland’s direct...
Portishead’s Geoff Barrow [left, in photograph] discusses his upcoming soundtrack and the current state of the band’s next album in the new issue of Uncut, dated May 2015 and out now.
Barrow has recently teamed up with composer Ben Salisbury to create the soundtrack to Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, and reckons that soundtracks are more vital right now than traditional groups.
“Not being funny, but soundtracks are more interesting than bands now,” says Barrow. “The people buying soundtracks are the same people that would buy a Godspeed record, a Boards Of Canada record.”
Barrow also shed light on the progress of Portishead’s next album, admitting that the band were “nowhere near” finishing the record, but that his other projects healthily feed into the band’s way of working.
“With Portishead, I’m massively over-analytical – it’s like being stuck in glue,” admits Barrow. “But then you go work on something else and think, this could be a good way of writing a Portishead record.”
“Ask me anything you want…” In this feature from Uncut’s February 2014 issue (Take 201), David Crosby discusses the shooting skills of Crosby, Stills And Nash, why Joni Mitchell is better than Bob Dylan, and the dangers of being a “wake-and-bake”… Interview: Andy Gill
________________...
The last time I met you, it was election season, and you were very bullish about John Kerry’s prospects. You were walking around with a T-shirt reading, “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot”.
That’s a very fair assessment! That man was an imbecile! Posing in a flight-suit saying, “Mission accomplished”! He didn’t have a clue! He did us a lot of harm. If that sonofabitch Clinton had just been able to keep his flies closed… I liked Clinton a lot, he was a Rhodes Scholar, very bright…
…and he played an instrument, too.
Yes. Not well, but the feeling was there. And America was in the black. Since then, we’ve been borrowing from the Chinese – now there’s a really smart idea! Nice people to owe money to – not! You know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna have an economic collapse, and default on China. And then the fur will fly. But they can’t nuke us, ’cos those subs are still down there, underneath the ice-caps, and if you nuke us, a week later they’ll surface, and turn your country to glass.
Are you still against gun control?
It all depends on where you come from, and how you got to guns. I was raised on a farm – we grew avocados and lemons and stuff – and in that milieu, when you got to be about 12, 13, you got a .22 rifle. And I got pretty good with it – I could take a lemon off a tree, y’know? I was taught how to shoot properly and safely, and it was all part of American life, a normal thing. Then guns became gang-bangers with 9mm with 50-shot clips and they’re spraying them around, braaaapp!, and guns got a bad rep. But all three of us [CSN] shoot, and we haven’t started a war all week!
Is the 1974 live album finally going to appear?
Oh yeah! It’s coming out, and I can tell you some good news: we have video! We have some amazing footage. And Neil finally approved it! We showed him two songs where he was so spectacularly good – “Pushed It Over The End” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” – he couldn’t deny it. We were, at that time, one of the best bands in the world.
Thanks to distinctive harmonies and hip characters, in the mid-’60s, The Byrds became known as the “American Beatles”, and as the most gregarious band member, Crosby quickly became close friends with his English counterparts.
“I watched them make Sgt Pepper,” he recalls. “I went to Abbey Road nearly every night. It was an astounding experience. I came in one night –blitzed, I admit – they were behaving very strangely, and they sat me down on a stool, in front of speakers the size of coffins in the middle of this huge room, then they go up to the control room and leave me all alone, and play ‘A Day In The Life’!
“They said I was the first person to hear it. It got to that piano chord at the end, and my brains ran out into a puddle on the floor, I just couldn’t believe it. Because you can’t do that, you can’t be in the middle of this beautiful song and then just stop and go, ‘Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head’ – McCartney, he’s so fucking good! I got to the end of that, and there was not much left of me!”
______________________
If I Could Only Remember My Name
Almost as soon as they had formed, the individual members of CSN were already busily beavering away on solo projects. This, Crosby confirms, was planned. Stills, possibly piqued to action by the prolific solo start made by his old Buffalo Springfield jousting partner Neil Young, was the first of the trio to release a solo album, in late 1970; but Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name followed just a few months later, a blissful, ethereal work featuring multi-layered vocal experiments. It remains a distinctive, sui generis album over four decades later, beloved in the most unexpected quarters – in 2010, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano pronounced it second (after Revolver) on a list of apparently papally approved favourites.
If I Could Only… was recorded at Wally Heider’s Studio in San Francisco, where Crosby had relocated to renew old friendships with such as Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Quicksilver’s David Freiberg. They both appeared on the album alongside Nash, Young, Mitchell and a Who’s Who of Bay Area musicians from the Airplane, the Dead and Santana. In particular, Crosby became fast friends with Jerry Garcia, the pair devising a casual performing band called either Jerry & The Jerks, or David & The Dorks, “depending on who got to the mic first”. Garcia proved a supportive figure to Crosby, when his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car crash. “A wonderful guy, one of the best,” says Croz. “When I was making my solo record, I was in terrible shape, because my girlfriend had just died. I didn’t know what to do, I had no way to deal with it, so I hid in the studio – it was the only place I felt comfortable. Jerry came by every night. Every night he’d show, and we’d tap away. I had a double handful of songs, and they were good. I was doing things nobody had heard before, like ‘Tamalpais High’ and ‘Song With No Words’, using your voice like a horn stack. They were loving that we’d do shit nobody else had done.
“God, I miss Jerry. I wrote a poem about him the other night. I always thought that if we had to have someone speak for musicians, I’d have had Jerry. ’Cos he’d have come at it differently.”
______________________
A BYRDS REUNION? “Not a chance!” says Crosby…
With 2014 marking the 50th Anniversary of the formation of The Byrds, hopes are high among fans for another Byrds reunion. The first reunion of the original lineup occurred in 1973, producing the lacklustre Byrds, whose bland tone Roger McGuinn blamed partly on the strength of Crosby’s pot: “Half a joint, you couldn’t do anything,” he claimed. Subsequently, late-’80s shows as The Byrds by Gene Clark and Michael Clarke prompted a legal challenge from McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman, who responded with reunion concerts of their own. This time, though, there is unlikely to be any fresh alliance of the remaining members. “Not a chance,” says Crosby. “I’ve asked Roger over and over. I’ve told him, ‘Roger, you don’t have to like me, just let me fly wing-man – you lead, I’ll follow, I just wanna make that music.’ He called me and said, ‘I hear you’re still telling people I hate you.’ I said, ‘Well, not exactly, though I’m probably not your favourite person…’ He said, ‘That’s not it. I don’t dislike you at all; I just love what I’m doing. I’m a folkie, I’ve played folk more times than rock, and I don’t want to be in a rock’n’roll band, I’d sooner join the army’! “That one got me! It’s a shame, as Chris and I would love to do it. You can lead a horse to water…”
Tributes have been paid to John Renbourn, whose death was announced yesterday [March 26, 2015].
Fairport Convention's Simon Nicol told Uncut, "Another light has gone out. John made a uniquely important contribution to guitar music and I first became aware of his playing when I picked up the guitar ...
Tributes have been paid to John Renbourn, whose death was announced yesterday [March 26, 2015].
Fairport Convention‘s Simon Nicol told Uncut, “Another light has gone out. John made a uniquely important contribution to guitar music and I first became aware of his playing when I picked up the guitar in my early teens. John influenced more people than he ever knew and he knew a lot of people. He was much-loved and will be much-missed.”
Meanwhile, online David Crosby hailed him as “a great musician”.
Other friends and fans including Gordon Giltrap, Riley Walker, Cerys Matthews, Andy Votel and Lauren Laverne also offered their condolences.
I'm still numb from the news that my old friend John Renbourn has passed away.
The news of Renbourn’s death was made public by Glasgow venue, The Ferry, where Renbourn, 70, had beem scheduled to play on Wednesday, March 25 as part of a UK tour with fellow musician, Wizz Jones.
Writing on their Facebook page, The Ferry said, “RIP John Renbourn. As his chosen Glasgow venue in recent years we are sad to announce the passing of our friend John Renbourn. All at The Ferry missed you last night, John!”
Speaking to Uncut, a member of staff at The Ferry confirmed Renbourn had failed to turn up for the March 25 show. “He didn’t show. nobody knew where he was. Wizz Jones was in the dark about what had happened. He did the show on his own. We tried to contact him. Wizz Jones called his agent [manager] this morning. He didn’t know what was happening so he called the police local to where he lived [Hawick, Scotland]. They went round to his house and found that he had died.”
Renbourn’s manager Dave Smith, who worked with him for 25 years, confirmed the news of his client’s passing to Uncut. It is believed the guitarist died from natural causes.
Pentangle
Renbourn enjoyed a wide-ranging career, as a solo artist, as a collaborator and also as a member of Pentangle.
Born in Marylebone in 1944, he became involved with the London folk scene in the early 1960s, where he met Bert Jansch. The two men recorded Bert And John in 1966.
Renbourn became a founding member of Pentangle the following year, along with Jansch, Danny Thompson, Jacqui McShee and Terry Cox.
The band’s first American tour included performances at the Newport Folk Festival and Fillmore West with the Grateful Dead.
This line-up of Pentangle stayed together until 1973, recording five albums: 1968’s The Pentangle and Sweet Child, 1969’s Basket Of Light, 1970’s Cruel Sister and 1971’s Reflection.
Renbourn also worked as a solo artist in tandem with his commitments in Pentangle.
He released his first, self-titled album in 1965.
During the 1980s, he received Grammy nominations for 1981’s Live In America with the John Renbourn Group, and Wheel Of Fortune, his 1983 collaboration with the Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson.
His last studio album was 2011’s Palermo Snow.
Renbourn also released books and video lessons for aspiring guitarists, beginning with Guitar Pieces in 1972, and ran a series of guitar workshops. This year’s workshop was due to take place in Spain during September.
What to expect from a Van Morrison concert, then? Morrison, of course, has a reputation as an unpredictable live performer. Anecdotal evidence gathered from around the Uncut office suggests he is just as capable of transcendent moments of sublime mystery as he is of turning in perfunctory, no frills...
What to expect from a Van Morrison concert, then? Morrison, of course, has a reputation as an unpredictable live performer. Anecdotal evidence gathered from around the Uncut office suggests he is just as capable of transcendent moments of sublime mystery as he is of turning in perfunctory, no frills sets. Will he favour the roaming spirit of his peerless Seventies albums, or the blues and R&B numbers from his youth that have become increasingly foregrounded in his live sets? Tonight, there are two additional elements that might inform the tone of tonight’s show. First, this is part of this year’s run of Teenage Cancer Trust shows; a cause that obliges the artist to ensure they’re at their best. Secondly, this show convenient falls close to the release date of his new album, Duets: Reworking The Catalogue, and there is in all likelihood an imperative to support that.
As it transpires, all these things become to some degree relevant. Critically, we get an avuncular Morrison. He is hardly an unstoppable raconteur – he says very little, in fact – but his demeanour suggests he is at the very least enjoying himself. Sauntering on stage a few minutes after his band have started playing the light, jazzy grooves of “Celtic Swing”, he joins in with an expansive saxophone solo. His five piece backing band are dressed soberly in blacks and greys; Morrison himself wears a black suit, hat and sunglasses. I’m reminded to some extent of Dylan’s current touring band: another group of well-drilled musicians who are sensitive and discretely responsive to both the material and the demands of a notoriously capricious frontman. Under Morrison’s current musical director Paul Moran, they hold the line admirably. Admittedly, it’s not that difficult in the early part of the show. No sooner have the band warmed up, than Morrison introduces his new album to the audience and brings on the first of tonight’s duet partners, Clare Teal, for “Carrying A Torch” and “The Way Young Lovers Do”. The vibes are a little Pizza Express Jazz Club; fortunately, Morrison moves on to a persuasive version of “Baby Please Don’t Go” before he is joined by Teenage Cancer Trust founder Roger Daltrey for “Talk Is Cheap”, which never quite lifts off. Perhaps they’re under-rehearsed, but instead of the fiery R&B thrill they’re presumably aiming for, the song feels sluggish where it should swing.
Personally, I find this section of the show a little difficult to get my head round. As he brings out PJ Proby for three songs, including one of Proby’s own and a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me”, it begins to feel suspiciously like two old mates have a laugh. Morrison dwells too long here and what could passably be considered a generous act of sharing the stage with a favourite contemporary begins to feel like an indulgence. Things pick up, though, when Georgie Fame sits in for a handful of songs. This seems to change the shape of the music; the songs become looser, jazzier, fuller. The night’s brief collaboration with Fame culminates in a warm, gently swaying version of “Centrepiece”, which seems to segue into Dylan’s “Corrina Corrina”, lubricated by Morrison’s extraordinary baritone and Fame’s evocative Hammond playing. Fame is followed by Mick Hucknall, who gives a pleasingly restrained and sympathetic reading of “Streets Of Arklow”.
By this point, it’s increasingly hard to guess where Morrison is going with his set. Is this a promo job for the Duets album, an opportunity to dust down some old R&B and soul covers or a leisurely trip through his capacious back catalogue? Or is it all three? And if so, is the balance of material right? But then he pulls out a final clutch of songs that showcase not only his most famous work but also mark a foray into the wild beauty of those Celtic landscapes. “Moondance” appears as its lightest and most delicate, lifted by some nimble sax work from Morrison. “Magic Time” continues to illustrate Morrison at his freewheeling best before we get a galloping “Brown Eyed Girl”. For a finale, he plays magical, meandering versions of “Into The Mystic” and “In The Garden”, rich in wonderment, that transport and elevate.
It’s arguable to a point that Morrison is at a place now where he is entitled to play what he wants, when he wants. Indeed, some might find the digressions into old soul and R&B pleasing in their own right. But there’s enough in Morrison’s own formidable back catalogue that he doesn’t need to dwell too long in other people’s music. We are here for the mystic; and when it finally arrives, it is a most astonishing thing.
As you may have gathered, there's a new Blur album on the way: The Magic Whip, the band's first as a four-piece for 16 years. My review of the album appears in the current issue of Uncut. But in the meantime, here's the full transcript of my interview with Graham Coxon; an excerpt of which you can f...
Blur, February 2015
What made you want to revisit the material?
Damon had been saying, “I don’t think anything will come of it. Lyrically, I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m so disconnected now to Hong Kong and when we were there.” Which was fair enough, but that made me more determined to really have a good look at it; at least, musically try to organize it. But I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, I needed someone to help. I went over to see Damon, I hadn’t seen him for ages. He went, “What do you want, then?” I said, “Well, these recordings…” He’s like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” I said, “I really want to take Stephen Street. I really think Stephen is the bloke. He loves us, he’ll have super respect for the recordings we made, he’ll really look through them, he’ll find all the good bits. Me and him will just organize it, like organizing someone’s sprawling diary into something you can publish.” That what I looked at that task. I thought, “Well, if nothing comes of it, at least I had a go.” It’s a complicated, emotional thing. I wanted to make amends and put things right for the ups and downs we’ve had over the years. If there was going to be one more chapter in Blur, I wanted to be part of making it good and mending it all. Our friendships have got better. We got back together and it was great to be friends again. The music side of it, I still thought I had some mending to do. But it was really weird, it went so bloody well. Stephen had it for a few days, and said, “I’ve been listening through. It’s great. Come on in, let’s do some graft on it.” Then about four working weeks later, working on it, writing new parts to it, writing new chord sequences for melody lines that had appeared… I just wanted to change some of the chord sequences at times but still support the same melody line, just so the songs had tension, dynamics, some sort of structure. It’s like this big fat sausage of sound. Thank God for ProTools, because you can go into it and mess it around and write new bits and slot it in here. So that’s what we did for about 12 songs. Then we went to play it to Damon…
When was this?
I had the idea last September. Then throughout October, Stephen had to go away to Belgium for a little while. Pretty much September, October, I was doing it then. End of September? I’m not really sure.
What did Damon think when you first played it to him?
We were all scared to death. I was looking forward to it. I thought what we’d done was really brilliant. I’d been leaving a lot of carrots within the music, not smothering it with myself and my own flavor so much. I was doing a bit of work with keyboards, not just putting guitars everywhere. I wanted to give it to Damon and I wanted him to feel that it was nearly finished and I was hoping that it would inspire him. After the first track, he started to warm up. Then he started swearing. Then he started dancing around a bit. Then it was like, “This is great!” So Damon thinks it’s great, and all the rest of it. Then Dave and Alex shoved some drums and bass on here and there where it needed to be redone because the sound wasn’t that brilliant, the Hong Kong recordings. Then Damon started, only a few weeks ago, on vocals. But not before dragging himself round Hong Kong for 48 hours on his way home from Australia to re-immersed himself in the city. It was a pretty amazing commitment. I don’t know whether I would have done that. I would have faked it. But he’s like that. He got himself there for 48 hours and he went on boats and he went on the same tube journey. He really the environment he was in really hard.
Where does The Magic Whip sit in the canon?
It was made with no pressure, which I think is a good thing. It’s experimental, not forcibly experimental. I got into this idea that it’s sci-fi folk music. That English thing of melancholia was there. So I had these ideas with “New World Tower” to make a sci-fi “Greensleeves” part in the middle. I think us English boys, at our age now, we’ve seen the music industry take this long dive over three decades, and also the world since we last made an album all together has changed radically. I think it reflects all of those things but also it reflect us at our age in this space and time. That’s what really excites me about this telepathic link with Damon, interpreting his words. I seem to channel it very easily and I’ve never really seen it that way before.
Is it the start of a new chapter? Or the end of one..?
I view it as a great big positive punctuation mark. I don’t know whether it’s the full stop at the end of a book or whether it’s a full stop at the end of a chapter. I don’t think any of us know that yet. That doesn’t mean any of us are going to stop making music. Music is a constant with us. Damon will make music whether it’s with Blur or doing other things, he’ll always be meandering along making music.
Damon is fully behind The Magic Whip?
Damon is? Yeah, yeah. He is. It was brilliant when Damon heard it for the first time, I would have loved to have had that experience. To hear it playing, the familiarity of it from Hong Kong, yet it had now been organized. I guess it was amazing for him.
What are your favourite tracks?
‘Thought I Was A Space Man’, just because I really got into the narrative of it. I really enjoyed making the song take off at the end, hearing the bits and bobs falling back down to the sea. I saw it very visually. “There Are Too Many Of Us”. I really like those big, weary ones. I like the melancholy ones. And “Pyongyang” and “My Terracotta Heart”. I love them because I get this real proper sense of who we are. I get this sense of quite an amazingly astute period of where we areas people in the world. I like them better than the punky ones!
I wish you’d do a gig when you just did the sad songs.
I’d like that, too!
The Magic Whip is released by Parlophone on April 27, 2015
Radiohead's album OK Computer has been selected for induction into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.
Each year, The Library of Congress selects 25 recordings that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and at least 10 years old.
Other recordings highlighted...
Radiohead‘s album OK Computer has been selected for induction into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.
Each year, The Library of Congress selects 25 recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and at least 10 years old.
Other recordings highlighted for the 2015 entries include Ben E King, The Doors, Joan Baez and Lauryn Hill.
BBC News quotes curator Matt Barton, who says of Radiohead’s inclusion, “I sort of see it as part of a certain ongoing phenomenon in rock music that maybe begins with the Velvet Underground but also The Doors, who are on the list this year.
“Pop music is not entirely positive in its outlook, shall we say. I think we can say that OK Computer really sums a lot of that up.”
The Replacements discuss their storied history and raucous reunion in the new issue of Uncut, dated May 2015 and out now.
Original members Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson tell the complete story of their reformation, a journey from member Slim Dunlap’s hospital bed to the megafestivals of North...
The Replacements discuss their storied history and raucous reunion in the new issue of Uncut, dated May 2015 and out now.
Original members Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson tell the complete story of their reformation, a journey from member Slim Dunlap’s hospital bed to the megafestivals of North America, from new recording sessions to imminent UK shows.
“We’re not broke,” Westerberg says, wryly acknowledging the many different benefits of the reunion, “but we’re badly bent.
“The reunion was the kick in the ass that I needed. It felt good to be part of a group again, to get back with Tommy and get someone else’s opinion… So strap around the guitar, you know…”
Graham Coxon has shed light on the making of Blur’s new album, The Magic Whip, speaking in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
The guitarist recalled the initial lo-fi recording sessions in Hong Kong, his later work finessing and expanding on the jams in London with Stephen Street, and his trepidati...
Graham Coxon has shed light on the making of Blur’s new album, The Magic Whip, speaking in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
The guitarist recalled the initial lo-fi recording sessions in Hong Kong, his later work finessing and expanding on the jams in London with Stephen Street, and his trepidation at playing what he had done to Damon Albarn.
“We were all scared to death,” Coxon says. “I wanted Damon to feel that it was nearly finished and I was hoping that it would inspire him.
“After the first track, he started to warm up. Then he started swearing. Then he started dancing around a bit. Then Dave and Alex shoved some bass on here and there where it needed to be redone because the sound wasn’t that brilliant, the Hong Kong recordings.”
The Magic Whip is reviewed in full in the new issue of Uncut, dated May 2015 and out now.
The “Woodstock Generation” was not confined just to North America and Europe. Across the world, counter-cultural ripples amongst the young caused ructions in societies normally bound by strict traditional ways. After the Woodstock film was screened in Chile, 19-year-old student Jorge Gomez was i...
The “Woodstock Generation” was not confined just to North America and Europe. Across the world, counter-cultural ripples amongst the young caused ructions in societies normally bound by strict traditional ways. After the Woodstock film was screened in Chile, 19-year-old student Jorge Gomez was inspired to put on a free festival, Piedra Roja, which would become an emblematic moment in the life of the nation. Taking place on a stretch of land in the hills outside eastern Santiago between the October 10 and 12, 1970, it seemed to presage the election the following month of Salvador Allende as President. “We had an intuition that the world could be different,” says actress/playwright Malucha Pinto, who attended the festival. “A world in which liberty, solidarity, community, understanding and justice existed.” Through copious interviews with participants and scraps of period footage, this fascinating documentary paints a picture not just of the festival but of the social conditions which spawned it, and the repercussions which followed.
In the late ‘60s, the Chilean music scene was on the cusp of change. Bands like Los Ripios, Trapos and Blops were beginning to explore the boundaries between pop, traditional Chilean music and more exploratory modes, producing a sort of local variant of Tropicalismo with flute-based folk-rock and harmonies. Los Jaivas ditched their bowties and gold-buttoned blazers in favour of a more freewheeling look, and changed their sound accordingly: within months, they had produced their first “symphonic” work, a Zappa-esque piece “based on sonic distortion”. And inspired by Lennon & Ono’s Two Virgins, the band Aguaturbia decided that they, too, would appear naked on their album sleeve. It was a sensation, instantly outselling every album in Chilean history. “We were young, naive, talented and marginalized,” laughs singer Denise Aguaturbia today.
The hippie scene in Santiago was split between two locations: rich, middle-class kids tended to stay in the upmarket suburb of Coppelia, whilst the more militant leftists, intellectuals and lower-class congregated in the Parque Forestal, across from the Military Academy, whose inmates would sometimes cause trouble for the hippies, notably in one brutal, bloody confrontation when hundreds of sword-wielding cadets put the peaceniks to flight. There was constant underlying tension: on other occasions, Blops would arrive to perform on the back of a flatbed truck, until the police turned up to disperse the crowd with water-cannon.
The establishment were genuinely scared of this new cultural shift, particularly the way rich, bourgeois kids were attracted to hippiedom. Engineer and astrologer Caroli Aparacio tells of how his professor recruited him as a spy, to infiltrate the burgeoning hippie movement and discover what its motives and aims were. It was the kind of request that, once made, can’t be refused. But when he infiltrated the hippies at Parque Forestal, he soon went native and joined them.
So when Jorge Gomez decided to stage a free festival, he was preaching to a swelling congregation – far bigger than he had anticipated. The naive teenager was fundamentally ill-equipped for the challenge. Sure, he was able to persuade Coca Cola to provide a stage (12ft x 20ft!) in return for the drinks franchise; and while his mother wrote blank cheques to cover local damage, and the cost of bringing electricity from a pylon 3km away, he was soon overwhelmed by events. There was no PA. The entire lighting system was one bulb in a coffee-can. The single cable couldn’t carry enough electricity to power bands’ equipment fully. Some performers could find neither the tiny stage, nor any organiser, and departed without playing. It was chaos.
But a kindly chaos. Bands jammed enthusiastically, the crowd eagerly expressed the peace and love vibe, and as at festivals throughout the years, youngsters had their first tastes of sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was front-page news, and by the second day, bus companies had organised trips for gawkers to come see the hippies. Spotting an opportunity, vanloads of booze-sellers and prostitutes arrived at the site. The following day, the police arrived and shut the festival down.
The repercussions were quick in coming. Questions were asked in parliament. There was widespread persecution. Hippies became outcasts, attacked by both sides – by the church and right-wingers as degenerates, by leftists as bourgeois. Jorge Gomez was expelled from school, and forced to leave home, escaping to establish a commune in the mountains. As Allende’s socialist policies began to bite, poverty spread. Suddenly, it got “hard, ugly and conflictive”.
A few years later, it got even harder and uglier. Surprised at the absence of traffic in the mountains, Gomez and a pal jumped on a motorbike and drove down towards Santiago, only to find machine-guns facing them in the road. The military coup had deposed and murdered Allende, and Pinochet was in power. Narrowly avoiding being killed or imprisoned, Gomez cut his hair and disappeared back into the mountains. Other musicians fled for Argentina or Ecuador or Europe, taking advantage of the junta’s immediate focus on hunting leftist activists rather than hippies. Those that didn’t get out got hurt. But the documentary closes on a more positive note, with young musicians, inspired by the legend of Piedra Roja, reviving the hippie spirit in a land now mercifully more open to change. “Piedra Roja occurs at a moment in which David confronts Goliath,” reflects Malucha Pinto. “And somehow, the weak won.”
The world's smallest record shop is due to re-open for Record Store Day in Stoke Newington, North London.
The pop-up shop is managed by record label Ample Play, run by Cornershop's Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres.
The store will be situated at 256 Albion Road, N16 9JP, and open from 11am-5pm on April ...
The world’s smallest record shop is due to re-open for Record Store Day in Stoke Newington, North London.
The pop-up shop is managed by record label Ample Play, run by Cornershop‘s Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres.
The store will be situated at 256 Albion Road, N16 9JP, and open from 11am-5pm on April 18.
Ample Play first opened the world’s smallest record shop in 2014.
Fact magazine reports that once the pop-up shop closes, the title of tiniest record shop is expected to revert to Peterborough’s Marrs Platinum Records.
The Elliott Smith documentary Heaven Adores You will receive a theatrical release in cinemas around the world during May 2015.
The Kickstarter-funded film originally premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2014.
According to a press release, "Heaven Adores You is an intimate,...
The Elliott Smith documentary Heaven Adores You will receive a theatrical release in cinemas around the world during May 2015.
The Kickstarter-funded film originally premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2014.
According to a press release, “Heaven Adores You is an intimate, meditative inquiry into the life and music of Elliott Smith (1969-2003). By threading the music of Elliott Smith through the dense, yet often isolating landscapes of the three major cities he lived in — Portland, New York City, Los Angeles — Heaven Adores You presents a visual journey and an earnest review of the singer’s prolific songwriting and the impact it continues to have on fans, friends, and fellow musicians.”
The film will screen in major cities during May, including New York, Los Angeles, Austin, San Francisco, Montreal and Tel-Aviv.
UK audiences can see the film at the Quad in Derby from May 5-14.
You can find full details about the UK screenings by clicking here.
Meanwhile, rare demos featuring Elliott Smith will be available on vinyl on Record Store Day.
