Chuck Berry is to be awarded the 2014 Polar Music Prize, said to be the musical equivalent of a Nobel prize.
"Chuck Berry was the rock’n’roll pioneer who turned the electric guitar into the main instrument of rock music,” the jury said in its citation.
“Every riff and solo played by rock g...
Chuck Berry is to be awarded the 2014 Polar Music Prize, said to be the musical equivalent of a Nobel prize.
“Chuck Berry was the rock’n’roll pioneer who turned the electric guitar into the main instrument of rock music,” the jury said in its citation.
“Every riff and solo played by rock guitarists over the last 60 years contains DNA that can be traced right back to Chuck Berry.”
The 87-year-old Berry is one of two recipients of this year’s Polar Music Prize, following the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Peter Sellars, the American opera and theatre director, will also receive the accolate in a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden on August 26 in the presence of King Carl XVI of Sweden.
The million kronor prize (£82,000) was founded 25 years ago by Stig ‘Stikkan’ Anderson, the publisher, lyricist and manager of Abba.
The first Polar Music Prize laureate was Paul McCartney.
As Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney prepare to release their new album, Turn Blue, on Monday, we delve back into the Uncut archive and take a look at this album by album from the Ohio duo (originally printed in January 2013, Take 188). “We’ve always left things relatively unadorned,” Auerbach ...
As Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney prepare to release their new album, Turn Blue, on Monday, we delve back into the Uncut archive and take a look at this album by album from the Ohio duo (originally printed in January 2013, Take 188). “We’ve always left things relatively unadorned,” Auerbach tells Uncut, “so this is warts’n’all music. We’re pretty blessed that things have worked out the way they have. Ever since we’ve started it’s never stopped building.” Interview: Rob Hughes
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The Big Come Up
(Alive, 2002)
The Keys’ debut, recorded before they’d even played a live show, drew on the raw power of the blues and the insouciant grooves of soul and hip-hop.
Dan Auerbach (vocals, guitar): It was just the sound of me and Pat and a four-track in his basement. We weren’t really aiming for anything, there was no great plan or aesthetic. We had nothing except a pure love of making music. The idea of the blues is a turn-off for hipsters. But for people for whom blues music is for life, I think there’s something deeper there. That’s something we understood from the get-go. And most people realised that we weren’t copyists. We were heavily influenced by certain sounds and wore our influences on our sleeve. This wasn’t an artistic statement, this was literally who we were.
Patrick Carney (drums): I’d bought this little digital Akai multi-track [recorder] with my credit card and it sounded like shit. The only way to make it sound right was just to plug in every single microphone I could lay my hands on, so it acted like a fuzz pedal. So we set it up for recording and we’d work on it every day, for four or five hours a day most weekdays. We made it up as we went along. The whole thing only cost about $1,100. I grew up listening to a lot of fucked-up indie rock and we really wanted this record to sound as fucked-up as we could make it without it being unlistenable. We wanted the whole thing to sound like it was made in the basement.
Thickfreakness
(Fat Possum, 2003)
Recorded in a single 14-hour session, again in Patrick Carney’s basement, their second album includes terrific covers of songs by blues hero Junior Kimbrough and “Louie Louie” writer Richard Berry.
Auerbach: When we began doing shows we only had 20 minutes of material. So we worked up some new tunes and started playing them on tour. And by the time we made the record, all the songs were pretty much nailed. So Thickfreakness is pretty much just one long day’s recording. The cover of [Richard Berry’s] “Have Love Will Travel” came from The Sonics’ version, which we really loved. And we did Junior Kimbrough’s “Everywhere I Go”. I loved his music because it was so weird and I never thought of it as the blues. I see it as North Mississippi soul music. There was something about it that was more primal and hypnotic.
Carney: We were talking to some bigger labels who were interested in signing us, but they kept dragging their feet. And Fat Possum had been talking to us on the phone pretty much every day for five months. We were supposed to get a contract from some label, but it never happened. So we phoned up Matthew [Johnson, co-founder] and told him we’d have the album ready for Fat Possum by the end of the week. After this record came out it was the first time we got to tour Europe. We got an opening slot for Sleater-Kinney because of Thickfreakness. It opened up a lot of doors.
Magic Potion
(Nonesuch, 2006)
Following 2004’s Rubber Factory, Magic Potion found the Keys hooking up to a major for their first album of all-original songs, including the moaning freak-blues of “Strange Desire” and the Zeppelin-like “Just A Little Heat”.
Carney: Of all our records, and I don’t know if Dan feels this way as well, I think this is our transitional album. It was the fourth album that we’d made on our own and we both had ideas of how we wanted it to sound, but we didn’t really know how to do it yet. We’d been working with such crappy equipment. It was a frustrating album to make. I think we were hoping it would turn out better than it actually did, but were just so against having people help us out. That’s when we decided to turn the corner on the next album and go into an actual studio.
Auerbach: We went with Nonesuch in the end because they have to be the most artist-friendly major-label subsidiary in the world. And when we were looking for a jump-up to a major, I had our manager contact them. There were a bunch of labels sniffing around us, but none who we thought were going to give us a great deal and the artistic control that we wanted. We still felt very independent and actually being in control of our records was really important to us. Pat says he thinks it’s a transitional album? No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what transition that would have been. It was just another week in our lives.
Attack & Release
(Nonesuch, 2008)
Enter go-to producer Danger Mouse, and Tom Waits alumni Marc Ribot and Ralph Carney (Patrick’s uncle) for an expansive set of soulful psych-blues.
Auerbach: Going to a proper studio for the first time really helped us. When we started we just didn’t how to communicate with studio people. We didn’t speak the language, which is why we kept to ourselves and recorded in the basement. So here we really just went for it and let it all hang out. We first met Brian [Burton, aka Danger Mouse] when he contacted us about doing the music for an Ike Turner record. We recorded a few demo tapes, took them down to Ike’s house and worked on them. It was just going on for ever and ever, with no end in sight. And then Ike passed away. But we’d created this relationship with Brian. We didn’t know any other producers, so when it came to make Attack & Release we called him. He ended up coming to Ohio, which is a place he’d never wanted to be. We were literally in the middle of nowhere, up in the woods in North Eastern Ohio. Brian was going stir crazy after a week.
Carney: This was a real fun record to make, because we got to learn how things work. We weren’t just doing homemade stuff any more. We approached this album like we were a four-piece band. I think we wanted to liberate ourselves from the idea that we could only really play guitar and drums.
Dan Auerbach – Keep It Hid
(Nonesuch, 2009)
With Carney off concentrating on his own project, Drummer, Dan Auerbach made full use of his own newly built Akron Analog studio to pursue a winning hybrid of swamp-rock and trippy psychedelia.
Auerbach: It wasn’t like I needed time away from Pat, but I’d always recorded things on my own, playing guitar and singing to my family. So when there was a break in the Black Keys action, I had all these songs that were already recorded. There I was with all these buddies who wanted to play on it and these family members who wanted to sing. The sound on this record was born from being in love with certain records from the ’60s, with a certain studio style. A lot of the songs were just me and my friends experimenting with microphones and recording stuff. I love that Jon & Robin tune [“I Want Some More”] and had been meaning to cover it for some time. I’d been obsessed with fuzz bass for a long time too. It was me just being in love with American studios and old recordings.
Carney: I think we probably needed some time apart, and it worked out for the best. We both went off and did our own thing for a few months and ended up becoming better musicians because of it. And also more focused on The Black Keys when we got back together. I’ve never met someone it’s easier to make music with than Dan.
Blakroc – Blakroc
(V2, 2009)
A rap-rock supergroup with the Keys laying down the riffs and the likes of RZA, Mos Def, Q-Tip and Ol’ Dirty Bastard busting the rhymes.
Auerbach: [Co-producer] Damon Dash got hold of us, completely out of the blue. He had a couple of personal assistants who were fans of ours, so he just phoned and said: “Hey! You wanna do somethin’?” It was very direct. So went about making this record. No hip-hop record has ever been made like this. Pat and I would get there in the morning, record the instrumental, then the MC would arrive late afternoon or in the evening, hear the music for the first time and have to write on the spot. That’s how we made the entire record and it was recorded and finished in 11 days. Again, there wasn’t any grand idea and we got to meet some of our heroes, like RZA. He’s an absolute genius and is one of the reasons that we started playing music in the first place, because we loved the way his records sounded. Especially how he got those sounds on the drums and bass. It was amazing to meet those guys. Making this record was just a free-for-all and a lot of fun.
Carney: It was really exciting because we got to play with a lot of musicians that we admired and were really big fans of. But more importantly, for us, it was almost like a giant rehearsal for Brothers. We were just focusing only on rhythm, which actually makes a big difference.
Brothers
(Nonesuch, 2010)
Cut at the legendary Muscle Shoals Studio in Alabama, this triple Grammy-winner is the most fully realised Keys album thus far, all scorched guitars and killer hooks on standout tunes “Tighten Up” and “Howlin’ For You”.
Auerbach: We wanted to go to Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis, but ended up in Muscle Shoals. It wasn’t really a studio anymore, it was a cinderblock building. We just brought a load of equipment down and had Mark Neill [designer of London’s Toe Rag Studios] with us. He’s a real genius and I still think Brothers is the best-sounding record we’ve done. We didn’t see any of the huge sales and Grammys coming, but it was the first time the sound we heard in our heads was there. Finally we got the lo-fi, fucked-up sound we loved, but hi-fi at the same time. Honestly, if you wanted to have a hit, you wouldn’t go to Muscle Shoals. Muscle Shoals hadn’t put out any albums of significance for 20 fucking years. But as usual, we went for what we felt was right and it worked. Pat had got divorced, he wasn’t in a good place. So this record was probably more uplifting for him. When he was down there, finally he could breathe a sigh of relief. He wasn’t stuck in Akron, surrounded by all that nonsense. He was completely separated, out of the state and able to relax a little. Most importantly it felt like the songs were good. I came prepared with a whole bunch of songs that we had fun with.
Carney: Dan and I had taken a break of about four months apart, while he did his solo stuff. The last show we played before he left for his solo tour was a homecoming gig in Cleveland. We got stiffed for a shitload of money by the local promoter. All in all, it was kind of a dark few months. The day after we finished Blakroc, I went back to Akron, loaded the car full of instruments and drove down to Muscle Shoals to start on Brothers. We were isolated from our friends and families, so were able to concentrate a lot better. I think it’s our best album. I didn’t think “Tighten Up” would make it onto the radio, but when the album came out we could feel something going on. Even now, Brothers sells 2,500 to 5,000 copies a week in the US. It’s crazy.
El Camino
(Nonesuch, 2011)
Buzzing with invention, this platinum-seller – co-produced and co-written with Danger Mouse – elevated the duo to stadium status in the US and Europe.
Auerbach: If we’d wanted to have the same success we’d had on Brothers we would’ve used the same formula, but we did completely the opposite. We always just do what we want to do and hope it works out. This was the first time we’d ever co-written with someone else. The idea was to keep it as simple as we could. We were influenced by stuff we were listening to at the time – rock’n’roll records from different decades, the Johnny Burnette Trio, Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, The Cramps.
Carney: After the success of Brothers, I was freaked out going into this album. I’d been used to the way things were, but all of a sudden we were on the radio and in magazines. So I felt the pressure. Everything had started going crazy in the summer of 2010. Things kept building and building and we’d won a couple of Grammys for the last album, which was really bizarre. Going into this one, we all agreed we wanted it to be fast and more upbeat. Halfway through making it, Brian sat down and said: “Why don’t we make the whole album like this and see what happens?” Maybe the three of us were trying to one-up each other all the time. That’s why there’s more hooks on El Camino than any other album.
Dr John – Locked Down
(Nonesuch, 2012)
Producer Auerbach meets N’Awlins’ gris-gris king for a rewarding night trip into R’n’B and voodoo rock.
Auerbach: It was a great experience. I got to work with a legend and some of the greatest musicians of all time. The drummer [Max Weissenfeldt] and bass player [Nick Movshon] are among my favourite musicians. Those drums are some of the coolest fucking drums ever. After the first couple of days Mac [Rebennack, aka Dr John] realised there was something special going on and totally rose to the occasion. I wasn’t trying to get him to do a certain sound, I just wanted to make a really good record. When you have all these guys in a room, it’s really hard to mess that up. I’d hang out with Mac every day, from sun up to sundown. We ate all our meals together in the studio and hung out on the back porch, smoking Dominican cigarillos and talking shit about life and music. He’s been there, done that and his stories are otherworldly. Mac had never made a record like this before. Usually he had the lyrics and the melodies first and he’d bring them to the studio for the session musicians. But this was the exact opposite. We came up with all the music first, which took about a week and a half, then the musicians left and Mac and I worked on the vocals alone together. It was a weird way of making an album but it worked incredibly well.
Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin is back with a new band, a female singer and a rich collection of songs...
There’s a Colfax Avenue in Denver, in a notorious heyday the haunt of prostitutes, barflies and junkies. Jack Kerouac wrote about it in On The Road. Now the delinquent strip appears to have given its name to the title of this often-sublime suite of Americana heartbreak, written mostly by Willy Vlautin, as well-known these days as a prize-winning novelist as a songwriter, who’s no stranger to places like Colfax Avenue. And if the one in Denver isn’t the one he’s writing about, there are many more like it that could be the setting for his songs, which across 10 albums since 1996 with Richmond Fontaine have been mostly located in places where a certain kind of American washes up, lonely, sour and lost.
The band’s last album was 2011’s ambitious song-cycle The High Country. Continuing a drift away from the country rock template perfected on much-admired 2006 album Post To Wire, the music was dark, fractious, frequently undercut by turbulent distortion. Even by the glum standards of records before it like The Fitzgerald, Thirteen Cities and We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River, it was unforgiving, austere and intimidating enough at times to make you think about how much more of this kind of charred cheerlessness could reasonably be endured. There was also a sense of something here reaching the end of the line, much like the characters in so many of Willy’s songs, that made you wonder where he could go next that wouldn’t seem quite so much like somewhere he’d been before.
The answer is The Delines, a new band that retains only drummer Sean Oldham from Richmond Fontaine, and a set of songs - soliloquies, almost – written as a showcase for the terrific voice of Amy Boone, singer with Austin’s The Damnations, whose sister Deborah Kelly appeared on Post To Wire and The High Country. Boone’s got the kind of voice you might hear in a bar that hasn’t seen daylight since the roof went on, where it’s always a long time ago on a jukebox that plays only country and western, five cents a teardrop. She can put as much hurt into a song as it can stand and then find room for more.
What a vehicle she turns out to be for Vlautin’s new material, which casts her in a series of roles, most of which you can imagine being played by, say, Karen Black in an early-70s New Hollywood road movie directed by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson, something downbeat and drizzly, full of wintery light; trailer parks, gas stations, motel rooms, truck stops and drab diners part of the film’s frayed topography. The disparate characters to which Boone gives such plaintive voice are linked by loneliness and their fear of it. Their lives have all been diminished by the evaporation of hope, drugs, liquor, men of uneven temperament and unpredictable scary moods.
By turns, she’s convincing as the young wife making a run from the dire circumstance her marriage has become on “The Oil Rigs At Night”, and the middle-aged unmarried woman of “State Line”, whose serial attempts to flee an oppressive family home only ever get her as far as the beckoning boundary of the song’s title. You’ll believe in her, too, as the feckless teenage fuck-up delivering the probably empty promise of “I Won’t Slip Up”, the pleading lover of “Wichita Ain’t So Far Away”, which reduces the widescreen romanticism of Jimmy Webb to grainy close-up, and the older woman who falls for a useless violent drifter on “He Told Her The City Was Killing Him”.
Musically, this is probably the richest collection of songs Vlautin has written. The country rock of so many great Richmond Fontaine tracks is reassuringly intact, with some wonderful work by steel guitarist Tucker Jackson and Decemberists’ keyboardist Jenny Conlee-Drizos, who shines particularly on the closing-time piano that accompanies a tender reading of Randy Newman’s “Sandman”, possibly the least reassuring lullaby ever written. The album is further enhanced by a greater melodic sweep and the very becoming country-soul settings of songs like the wonderfully languid “Flight 31”, the confessional “I Got My Shadows” and the smouldering atmospherics of “Calling In” and the closing “82nd Street”, on which the song’s narrator watches the sun come up alone on a new life that unlike her old one won’t kill her. “I ain’t riding through the night,” as she sings, “in broken down cars with skinny friends with dying eyes, in the violence of a losing streak,” Boone’s voice carrying the sad news that as bad as things are, they have been worse and likely will be bad again.
Allan Jones
Q&A
Willy Vlautin
What was it like writing songs for someone else to sing?
It was great. I was writing songs for a real singer. I don’t have a lot of confidence as a singer and I write songs around my voice and what it can do. It’s limiting. Amy’s voice has all the things I like. It’s beautiful, weary, tough, worn and pure. When she sings I just believe what she’s singing, I always have. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s a seriously damn cool woman, and that comes out in her voice too. .
There's a lot of country soul here, which you don't hear so much elsewhere in your music.
I’ve written a handful of songs like that over the years, but mostly I’ve just kept them at home. I’ve always wanted to play more stuff like that but honestly I’ve never had the confidence to sing those types of songs. Paul Brainard, the steel player in RF, turned me onto so much country/soul stuff when we first got going but I was just too intimidated and embarrassed to sing them myself.
You formed a new band to record and tour these songs. Where does that currently leave Richmond Fontaine?
We all needed a break after The High Country. I was in the middle of my novel, The Free, and it was such a hard novel I needed some time off. The truth is taking breaks is what has kept us together and kept us being such good friends for so many years. But now we’re back at it and we’ve just begun rehearsing again. I have a lot of songs lined up and we’re just beginning to go through them. My heart is always with RF so until those guys shoot me and drop me off on the side of the road somewhere they’re stuck with me.
INTERVIEW: ALLAN JONES
Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin is back with a new band, a female singer and a rich collection of songs…
There’s a Colfax Avenue in Denver, in a notorious heyday the haunt of prostitutes, barflies and junkies. Jack Kerouac wrote about it in On The Road. Now the delinquent strip appears to have given its name to the title of this often-sublime suite of Americana heartbreak, written mostly by Willy Vlautin, as well-known these days as a prize-winning novelist as a songwriter, who’s no stranger to places like Colfax Avenue. And if the one in Denver isn’t the one he’s writing about, there are many more like it that could be the setting for his songs, which across 10 albums since 1996 with Richmond Fontaine have been mostly located in places where a certain kind of American washes up, lonely, sour and lost.
The band’s last album was 2011’s ambitious song-cycle The High Country. Continuing a drift away from the country rock template perfected on much-admired 2006 album Post To Wire, the music was dark, fractious, frequently undercut by turbulent distortion. Even by the glum standards of records before it like The Fitzgerald, Thirteen Cities and We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River, it was unforgiving, austere and intimidating enough at times to make you think about how much more of this kind of charred cheerlessness could reasonably be endured. There was also a sense of something here reaching the end of the line, much like the characters in so many of Willy’s songs, that made you wonder where he could go next that wouldn’t seem quite so much like somewhere he’d been before.
The answer is The Delines, a new band that retains only drummer Sean Oldham from Richmond Fontaine, and a set of songs – soliloquies, almost – written as a showcase for the terrific voice of Amy Boone, singer with Austin’s The Damnations, whose sister Deborah Kelly appeared on Post To Wire and The High Country. Boone’s got the kind of voice you might hear in a bar that hasn’t seen daylight since the roof went on, where it’s always a long time ago on a jukebox that plays only country and western, five cents a teardrop. She can put as much hurt into a song as it can stand and then find room for more.
What a vehicle she turns out to be for Vlautin’s new material, which casts her in a series of roles, most of which you can imagine being played by, say, Karen Black in an early-70s New Hollywood road movie directed by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson, something downbeat and drizzly, full of wintery light; trailer parks, gas stations, motel rooms, truck stops and drab diners part of the film’s frayed topography. The disparate characters to which Boone gives such plaintive voice are linked by loneliness and their fear of it. Their lives have all been diminished by the evaporation of hope, drugs, liquor, men of uneven temperament and unpredictable scary moods.
By turns, she’s convincing as the young wife making a run from the dire circumstance her marriage has become on “The Oil Rigs At Night”, and the middle-aged unmarried woman of “State Line”, whose serial attempts to flee an oppressive family home only ever get her as far as the beckoning boundary of the song’s title. You’ll believe in her, too, as the feckless teenage fuck-up delivering the probably empty promise of “I Won’t Slip Up”, the pleading lover of “Wichita Ain’t So Far Away”, which reduces the widescreen romanticism of Jimmy Webb to grainy close-up, and the older woman who falls for a useless violent drifter on “He Told Her The City Was Killing Him”.
Musically, this is probably the richest collection of songs Vlautin has written. The country rock of so many great Richmond Fontaine tracks is reassuringly intact, with some wonderful work by steel guitarist Tucker Jackson and Decemberists’ keyboardist Jenny Conlee-Drizos, who shines particularly on the closing-time piano that accompanies a tender reading of Randy Newman’s “Sandman”, possibly the least reassuring lullaby ever written. The album is further enhanced by a greater melodic sweep and the very becoming country-soul settings of songs like the wonderfully languid “Flight 31”, the confessional “I Got My Shadows” and the smouldering atmospherics of “Calling In” and the closing “82nd Street”, on which the song’s narrator watches the sun come up alone on a new life that unlike her old one won’t kill her. “I ain’t riding through the night,” as she sings, “in broken down cars with skinny friends with dying eyes, in the violence of a losing streak,” Boone’s voice carrying the sad news that as bad as things are, they have been worse and likely will be bad again.
Allan Jones
Q&A
Willy Vlautin
What was it like writing songs for someone else to sing?
It was great. I was writing songs for a real singer. I don’t have a lot of confidence as a singer and I write songs around my voice and what it can do. It’s limiting. Amy’s voice has all the things I like. It’s beautiful, weary, tough, worn and pure. When she sings I just believe what she’s singing, I always have. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s a seriously damn cool woman, and that comes out in her voice too. .
There’s a lot of country soul here, which you don’t hear so much elsewhere in your music.
I’ve written a handful of songs like that over the years, but mostly I’ve just kept them at home. I’ve always wanted to play more stuff like that but honestly I’ve never had the confidence to sing those types of songs. Paul Brainard, the steel player in RF, turned me onto so much country/soul stuff when we first got going but I was just too intimidated and embarrassed to sing them myself.
You formed a new band to record and tour these songs. Where does that currently leave Richmond Fontaine?
We all needed a break after The High Country. I was in the middle of my novel, The Free, and it was such a hard novel I needed some time off. The truth is taking breaks is what has kept us together and kept us being such good friends for so many years. But now we’re back at it and we’ve just begun rehearsing again. I have a lot of songs lined up and we’re just beginning to go through them. My heart is always with RF so until those guys shoot me and drop me off on the side of the road somewhere they’re stuck with me.
Led Zeppelin have hinted they may release more compilations of unheard material, following forthcoming expanded versions of their first three albums.
The band release Deluxe Editions of their first three albums, Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, on June 2. Each has a second disc f...
Led Zeppelin have hinted they may release more compilations of unheard material, following forthcoming expanded versions of their first three albums.
The band release Deluxe Editions of their first three albums, Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, on June 2. Each has a second disc featuring unheard live tracks and previously-unreleased studio songs. Jimmy Page, who oversaw the expanded albums, says he may work on future compilations of unavailable material.
“There’s certainly more things that can be done,” Page told here” target=”_blank”>Rolling Stone. “But these reissues took a lot of time, and I don’t want to start proposing another project, because it’ll take me another six months or a year. I’d rather spend time practicing my guitar and going out to play.”
Page stated he intended the unheard songs to focus on tracks that weren’t already widely available as bootlegs. “I was pretty diligent with my detection work,” he said. “I asked a guy that runs one of the fanzines if he’d heard any of this material before, and he told me hadn’t. That was a good feeling.” The unheard songs include a cover of blues standard “Keys To The Highway” and out-takes of “Immigrant Song” and “Whole Lotta Love”.
Bob Dylan's archive has recently been digitised, according to reports.
A story on C-Ville, a news and arts site in Charlottesville, Virginia, says software company Bluewall Media has recently helped Dylan and his staff archive and digitalize more than 60 years worth of music, photographs, written d...
Bob Dylan‘s archive has recently been digitised, according to reports.
A story on C-Ville, a news and arts site in Charlottesville, Virginia, says software company Bluewall Media has recently helped Dylan and his staff archive and digitalize more than 60 years worth of music, photographs, written documents, video, and film footage using the company’s Starchive software program.
Company founder Peter Agelasto said there were more than 100,000 pieces of audio, print, video, and still images. “It’s a mind-blowingly unending river of material,” said Agelasto. “They could probably have a million things because Dylan was at the epicenter of American culture.”
According to the C-Ville story, Bluewall’s executive vice president Jim Fishel – a former senior employee at CBS Records – introduced the company to Dylan’s management team in 2002; soon after Agelasto proposed the idea of a comprehensive digital archive.
“They said, ‘That’d be great, but you’ll be working on it for the rest of your life because we have so much material and it’ll never possibly get organized,’” recalls Agelasto. “Dylan’s got 50-plus years of rich awesome analog material. But there wasn’t this super simple way to actually build an archive.”
A month or so back, I sent Lee Bains III a few questions for a Q&A to run alongside my review of the Glory Fires’ “Dereconstructed” in Uncut. Bains’ answers turned out to be more thoughtful, interesting and extensive than pretty much any email interview I’ve previously conducted, so I’m pleased to run them in their entirety here…
UNCUT: Can you explain the meaning behind “Dereconstructed”?
LEE BAINS III: This LP is, in part, an attempt to dismantle the overarching, linear, teleological narrative that, to my mind, has worked to keep the Southerner stuck between a rock and a hard place: this dichotomy of reconstructed/unreconstructed. It is an attempt to smash that narrative's definition of what constitutes a Southerner.
In that old monolithic story, where are the black, Native American, Tejano, multiracial and female Southerners who have been integral to our region's development since before the notion of the South as a place of its own even arose? Where are the Greek Orthodox of Birmingham, the Chinese-Mississippians of the Delta, the recent Central and South American immigrants that are revitalizing the communities of the rural South? What about LGBT and politically leftist Southerners?
Because the dominant narrative of Southern history still centres on Appamattox, is still so strongly identified with a failed 19th-century insurgency, the identity itself becomes, in some sense, tied to finality and defeat. The narrative is fixed; it is a play whose plot has been set to follow an exact course, a study whose conclusion is predetermined, its methodology arranged merely to prove it. All that said, this record is deeply personal, and is intended to represent nobody but myself: one person's struggle to take apart and inspect his personal cultural inheritance. And, believe me, I've got a ways to go in that regard -- miles to go before I sleep.
Do you get frustrated with people’s stereotypes of the American south? Do you try and address that in your songs?
Not nearly as frustrated as I get with Southerner's stereotypes of the American South.
What do you love about Alabama? What do you hate about it?
I feel about Alabama the way I do about a family member; I love it completely, and with a great sense of duty. We disagree about plenty, but I am secure enough in that love to talk about it civilly and honestly. But, most of the time, I just shut up, eat my supper, talk football, and enjoy the good company.
Your songs are loaded with religious imagery, but at the same time you seem very critical of the way faith is deployed in the States (especially in “Flags”)? Is that a fair interpretation; and are you actually religious?
I think that's very fair to say. Just like Southernness, Protestantism has been appropriated by very loud, aggressive personalities for myopic, reactionary, right-wing purposes, and I, as a Southern Christian, take great offence, not only at the snake-oil they're selling people, but also, and particularly, at the fact that they're doing so in the name of things that I hold very sacred: my faith, my home, my culture.
Despite the bigotry we often heard slung around in the name of God outside of our home, we were very fortunate to be from a family that believed in the Jesus of the sermon on the mount, the Jesus who admonished the warmongers and jingoists, challenged the money changers and legalists, the Jesus of Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King Jr. My mama was actually dismissed from teaching Sunday School for voicing her dissent against our church's decision to secede from the national Episcopal Church over the election of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. She told her students that she saw the decision to secede as being antithetical to the nonjudgemental, non-legalistic love that Jesus asks us to show one another. After 15 years of teaching Sunday School, she was fired for it.
My brothers and I were raised to learn about and respect others' beliefs and ideals; just because people believed differently didn't mean that they believed wrongly. All the same, our family was Christian, and I was damn-sure supposed to be dressed and ready to get to church early for choir practice at 8:00 every Sunday morning. And I know plenty of people down here who had similar religious upbringings. Despite the sound and the fury that flew around the churches and the media, they came home to parents or grandparents who practiced a simple, quiet faith that emphasized an open-hearted compassion, forgiveness, helpfulness and humility.
I have always had friends of different faiths, friends who are atheist and agnostic, and it's never been an impediment to those relationships. I say glory in their spark; whatever works for them is great. This is just what works for me. I am a church-going, Bible-believing Christian that is neither an evangelical nor a so-called literalist. We do still exist.
“Flags” and “The Concrete And The Kudzu” also seem to point up the punk/hardcore undercurrent to your music (they remind me of that reference to the “Ramones t-shirt” on “Everything You Took”). Is that accurate?
Being exposed to the punk/hardcore/independent scene as a teenager galvanized me in a way that has only intensified over time. Seeing bands of people living out of vans, screaming to be heard through busted shitty PA's, playing songs about things that at the moment felt more important than anything else in the world, being paid in wadded-up ones and fives, sleeping on people's floors. It completely knocked the pedestal out from under rock music, and I loved that about it. And that was just the ethos of it.
There were bands playing down here all the time that lit me on fire with these ebullient, drunken, sloppy, joyful, hollering, catchy-as-fuck songs: Against Me!, Hot Water Music, Avail, Strike Anywhere, Plate Six, Blue-Eyed Boy Mr Death. Then I moved to New York, and saw these Northeastern bands that married really aggressive, artful, challenging music with highly intellectual lyrics concerned with politics and the philosophers I was reading in school, bands like Ampere, Transistor Transistor, Sinaloa, Saetia.
And then I also got old enough to start seeing music in bars (legally anyway), and started seeing the dirty Alabama bands that brought another type of energy and intensity to beer-slinging, snarling, lean rock'n'roll that sounded exactly like home: Immortal Lee County Killers, Dexateens, Model Citizen, Black Diamond Heavies. I guess punk impressed upon me the notion of personalising all this theory to the point of shaping my own ethos and artistic mission, and I discovered that being myself was, in large part, being Southern, for better or for worse, and that, if I was going to really take any of what I'd learned further than surface-deep, I'd better start facing that shit and doing something with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUyKkyNjXq4
What do you think of that line in your old biog that compares you to “Ronnie Van Zant under the tutelage of Noam Chomsky”? Are intellectual and left-wing interests still so unusual in the South?
They aren't unusual. Unfortunately, "liberal" is still a four-letter word in a lot of circles down here, but that's a topic for another day. The same people who would never dream of voting democrat are the grandchildren of people who would have rather voted for a yellow dog than a republican. (Hence why so many Southerners proudly wore the label "yellow-dog democrats.") But, no, they are not unusual. I'd be a lonely dude if they were.
Still, there is a long Southern tradition of being annoyed by over-intellectualism, and I, for one, am glad for it; it's a way of keeping nerds like me from getting their heads too far into the clouds, or bumming everybody out. Flannery O'Connor, you can tell, really cherished that about the South. I've read in criticism that her sullen intellectual characters are autobiographical; their intelligence is always bested by the people they deem to be common or dumb.
What do you think of a band like Blackberry Smoke, who keep being referenced as figureheads of a Southern rock revival? They strike me as being somewhat more unreconstructed than the Glory Fires?
I'm actually not familiar with that band. I don't identify with the notion of being unreconstructed at all. I am very much a product of the reconstructed South; I grew up in absolute awareness of the sins of the white South, and grew up taking full cultural responsibility for them, feeling deeply ashamed of them. I thought that, because I took issue with so much of what the South was widely defined to be about, that I wasn't really Southern.
So, that's the legacy of reconstruction. And that was in the mind of a white, Protestant, heterosexual, eighth-generation-Alabamian son of college-educated parents with very nuanced and well-read understandings of Southern history and culture. So you can imagine what people with more conflicted identities and backgrounds have to think about all of that as children.
I know plenty of people who might describe themselves as "unreconstructed," but I would posit that being unreconstructed is impossible. The "unreconstructed" person is defined by his difference; he is merely a reaction to the "reconstructed" person. Since the "reconstructed" person is really just the manifestation of a concocted narrative, the "unreconstructed" person is, too. The "unreconstructed" person is just somebody who says, "Fuck reconstruction!" Okay, well, like it or not, it happened, and you know it.
The reconstructed/unreconstructed question forces folks to dig in their heels over a game of tug-of-war without a rope. And, meanwhile, because all of this is based on the Civil War, the question is leaving out millions of contemporary Southerners who are either the descendants of slaves (and damn glad the War turned out the way it did), or of people who didn't have a dog in the fight to begin with.
I guess that's why I want to deconstruct that reconstructed/unreconstructed false duality; because it only leaves us stuck in the mud. A surefire way to kill Southern culture once and for all is to pass the mic to a few old white people arguing between the Emancipation Proclamation and states' rights while generations are being born not saying "yes ma'am" and "no sir," and not knowing the difference between pot-likker and corn liquor, between Hosea Williams and Tennessee Williams.
Which album is more important to you, and why: “Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd” or “Southern Rock Opera”?
Both were profoundly important. As conflicted a Southerner as I was growing up, my daddy was just as conflicted in his youth, and found great solace and inspiration in the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. So, he raised me on them, explaining what they meant to him and lots of other Southern kids at the time. I always loved that about Skynyrd: that they so easily evoked in me a pure love for my home and culture without stirring any of those nasty feelings about the extraneous bullshit. Even considering how much I loved them, though, a line of faceless, n-bomb-dropping, rebel-flag-waving dudes blaring 'Sweet Home Alabama' from their trucks made Skynyrd lose their lustre in my teenage years.
One day, when I was 16, I think, I snuck into the Five Points Music Hall in Birmingham with a fake ID, and saw Drive-By Truckers on the Southern Rock Opera tour. Slobberbone was opening. There weren't a ton of people there. But I looked around and saw some scuzzy rocker dudes in cowboy boots and ballcaps hollering along to words about the duality of the Southern identity, and George Wallace burning in Hell. I remember feeling a sense of solidarity, and thinking, maybe this is what daddy experienced with those bands when he was in high school.
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PICTURE: Wes Evans
A month or so back, I sent Lee Bains III a few questions for a Q&A to run alongside my review of the Glory Fires’ “Dereconstructed” in Uncut. Bains’ answers turned out to be more thoughtful, interesting and extensive than pretty much any email interview I’ve previously conducted, so I’m pleased to run them in their entirety here…
UNCUT: Can you explain the meaning behind “Dereconstructed”?
LEE BAINS III: This LP is, in part, an attempt to dismantle the overarching, linear, teleological narrative that, to my mind, has worked to keep the Southerner stuck between a rock and a hard place: this dichotomy of reconstructed/unreconstructed. It is an attempt to smash that narrative’s definition of what constitutes a Southerner.
In that old monolithic story, where are the black, Native American, Tejano, multiracial and female Southerners who have been integral to our region’s development since before the notion of the South as a place of its own even arose? Where are the Greek Orthodox of Birmingham, the Chinese-Mississippians of the Delta, the recent Central and South American immigrants that are revitalizing the communities of the rural South? What about LGBT and politically leftist Southerners?
Because the dominant narrative of Southern history still centres on Appamattox, is still so strongly identified with a failed 19th-century insurgency, the identity itself becomes, in some sense, tied to finality and defeat. The narrative is fixed; it is a play whose plot has been set to follow an exact course, a study whose conclusion is predetermined, its methodology arranged merely to prove it. All that said, this record is deeply personal, and is intended to represent nobody but myself: one person’s struggle to take apart and inspect his personal cultural inheritance. And, believe me, I’ve got a ways to go in that regard — miles to go before I sleep.
Do you get frustrated with people’s stereotypes of the American south? Do you try and address that in your songs?
Not nearly as frustrated as I get with Southerner’s stereotypes of the American South.
What do you love about Alabama? What do you hate about it?
I feel about Alabama the way I do about a family member; I love it completely, and with a great sense of duty. We disagree about plenty, but I am secure enough in that love to talk about it civilly and honestly. But, most of the time, I just shut up, eat my supper, talk football, and enjoy the good company.
Your songs are loaded with religious imagery, but at the same time you seem very critical of the way faith is deployed in the States (especially in “Flags”)? Is that a fair interpretation; and are you actually religious?
I think that’s very fair to say. Just like Southernness, Protestantism has been appropriated by very loud, aggressive personalities for myopic, reactionary, right-wing purposes, and I, as a Southern Christian, take great offence, not only at the snake-oil they’re selling people, but also, and particularly, at the fact that they’re doing so in the name of things that I hold very sacred: my faith, my home, my culture.
Despite the bigotry we often heard slung around in the name of God outside of our home, we were very fortunate to be from a family that believed in the Jesus of the sermon on the mount, the Jesus who admonished the warmongers and jingoists, challenged the money changers and legalists, the Jesus of Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King Jr. My mama was actually dismissed from teaching Sunday School for voicing her dissent against our church’s decision to secede from the national Episcopal Church over the election of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. She told her students that she saw the decision to secede as being antithetical to the nonjudgemental, non-legalistic love that Jesus asks us to show one another. After 15 years of teaching Sunday School, she was fired for it.
My brothers and I were raised to learn about and respect others’ beliefs and ideals; just because people believed differently didn’t mean that they believed wrongly. All the same, our family was Christian, and I was damn-sure supposed to be dressed and ready to get to church early for choir practice at 8:00 every Sunday morning. And I know plenty of people down here who had similar religious upbringings. Despite the sound and the fury that flew around the churches and the media, they came home to parents or grandparents who practiced a simple, quiet faith that emphasized an open-hearted compassion, forgiveness, helpfulness and humility.
I have always had friends of different faiths, friends who are atheist and agnostic, and it’s never been an impediment to those relationships. I say glory in their spark; whatever works for them is great. This is just what works for me. I am a church-going, Bible-believing Christian that is neither an evangelical nor a so-called literalist. We do still exist.
“Flags” and “The Concrete And The Kudzu” also seem to point up the punk/hardcore undercurrent to your music (they remind me of that reference to the “Ramones t-shirt” on “Everything You Took”). Is that accurate?
Being exposed to the punk/hardcore/independent scene as a teenager galvanized me in a way that has only intensified over time. Seeing bands of people living out of vans, screaming to be heard through busted shitty PA’s, playing songs about things that at the moment felt more important than anything else in the world, being paid in wadded-up ones and fives, sleeping on people’s floors. It completely knocked the pedestal out from under rock music, and I loved that about it. And that was just the ethos of it.
There were bands playing down here all the time that lit me on fire with these ebullient, drunken, sloppy, joyful, hollering, catchy-as-fuck songs: Against Me!, Hot Water Music, Avail, Strike Anywhere, Plate Six, Blue-Eyed Boy Mr Death. Then I moved to New York, and saw these Northeastern bands that married really aggressive, artful, challenging music with highly intellectual lyrics concerned with politics and the philosophers I was reading in school, bands like Ampere, Transistor Transistor, Sinaloa, Saetia.
And then I also got old enough to start seeing music in bars (legally anyway), and started seeing the dirty Alabama bands that brought another type of energy and intensity to beer-slinging, snarling, lean rock’n’roll that sounded exactly like home: Immortal Lee County Killers, Dexateens, Model Citizen, Black Diamond Heavies. I guess punk impressed upon me the notion of personalising all this theory to the point of shaping my own ethos and artistic mission, and I discovered that being myself was, in large part, being Southern, for better or for worse, and that, if I was going to really take any of what I’d learned further than surface-deep, I’d better start facing that shit and doing something with it.
What do you think of that line in your old biog that compares you to “Ronnie Van Zant under the tutelage of Noam Chomsky”? Are intellectual and left-wing interests still so unusual in the South?
They aren’t unusual. Unfortunately, “liberal” is still a four-letter word in a lot of circles down here, but that’s a topic for another day. The same people who would never dream of voting democrat are the grandchildren of people who would have rather voted for a yellow dog than a republican. (Hence why so many Southerners proudly wore the label “yellow-dog democrats.”) But, no, they are not unusual. I’d be a lonely dude if they were.
Still, there is a long Southern tradition of being annoyed by over-intellectualism, and I, for one, am glad for it; it’s a way of keeping nerds like me from getting their heads too far into the clouds, or bumming everybody out. Flannery O’Connor, you can tell, really cherished that about the South. I’ve read in criticism that her sullen intellectual characters are autobiographical; their intelligence is always bested by the people they deem to be common or dumb.
What do you think of a band like Blackberry Smoke, who keep being referenced as figureheads of a Southern rock revival? They strike me as being somewhat more unreconstructed than the Glory Fires?
I’m actually not familiar with that band. I don’t identify with the notion of being unreconstructed at all. I am very much a product of the reconstructed South; I grew up in absolute awareness of the sins of the white South, and grew up taking full cultural responsibility for them, feeling deeply ashamed of them. I thought that, because I took issue with so much of what the South was widely defined to be about, that I wasn’t really Southern.
So, that’s the legacy of reconstruction. And that was in the mind of a white, Protestant, heterosexual, eighth-generation-Alabamian son of college-educated parents with very nuanced and well-read understandings of Southern history and culture. So you can imagine what people with more conflicted identities and backgrounds have to think about all of that as children.
I know plenty of people who might describe themselves as “unreconstructed,” but I would posit that being unreconstructed is impossible. The “unreconstructed” person is defined by his difference; he is merely a reaction to the “reconstructed” person. Since the “reconstructed” person is really just the manifestation of a concocted narrative, the “unreconstructed” person is, too. The “unreconstructed” person is just somebody who says, “Fuck reconstruction!” Okay, well, like it or not, it happened, and you know it.
The reconstructed/unreconstructed question forces folks to dig in their heels over a game of tug-of-war without a rope. And, meanwhile, because all of this is based on the Civil War, the question is leaving out millions of contemporary Southerners who are either the descendants of slaves (and damn glad the War turned out the way it did), or of people who didn’t have a dog in the fight to begin with.
I guess that’s why I want to deconstruct that reconstructed/unreconstructed false duality; because it only leaves us stuck in the mud. A surefire way to kill Southern culture once and for all is to pass the mic to a few old white people arguing between the Emancipation Proclamation and states’ rights while generations are being born not saying “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and not knowing the difference between pot-likker and corn liquor, between Hosea Williams and Tennessee Williams.
Which album is more important to you, and why: “Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd” or “Southern Rock Opera”?
Both were profoundly important. As conflicted a Southerner as I was growing up, my daddy was just as conflicted in his youth, and found great solace and inspiration in the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. So, he raised me on them, explaining what they meant to him and lots of other Southern kids at the time. I always loved that about Skynyrd: that they so easily evoked in me a pure love for my home and culture without stirring any of those nasty feelings about the extraneous bullshit. Even considering how much I loved them, though, a line of faceless, n-bomb-dropping, rebel-flag-waving dudes blaring ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ from their trucks made Skynyrd lose their lustre in my teenage years.
One day, when I was 16, I think, I snuck into the Five Points Music Hall in Birmingham with a fake ID, and saw Drive-By Truckers on the Southern Rock Opera tour. Slobberbone was opening. There weren’t a ton of people there. But I looked around and saw some scuzzy rocker dudes in cowboy boots and ballcaps hollering along to words about the duality of the Southern identity, and George Wallace burning in Hell. I remember feeling a sense of solidarity, and thinking, maybe this is what daddy experienced with those bands when he was in high school.
Monty Python have revealed a previously unheard track titled "Lousy Song" – click below to listen.
The track will be included on the comedy group's forthcoming re-release of their Monty Python Sings album, and is a collaboration between Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.
Speaking previously, Idle s...
Monty Python have revealed a previously unheard track titled “Lousy Song” – click below to listen.
The track will be included on the comedy group’s forthcoming re-release of their Monty Python Sings album, and is a collaboration between Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.
Speaking previously, Idle said that ‘Monty Python Sings (Again)’, which will be released on June 9, would feature five new tracks alongside some of Monty Python’s best known comedy songs. The album was first released in 1989 and features tracks from the group’s films and TV work, including “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”.
Monty Python, meanwhile, will play a series of reunion shows at London’s O2 Arena this July. Although they were originally scheduled to play only one covert, they had to add an extra four dates after tickets for the first show sold out in 43.5 seconds. Idle will be directing the show. The show will contain new material as well as some “greatest hits” and material they’ve never performed live onstage before, plus animation from Terry Gilliam.
The troupe last performed live at the Hollywood Bowl in July, 1980. They last performed in London at Drury Lane Theatre in 1974.
Ahead of the release of R.E.M. Unplugged 1991 & 2001 - The Complete Sessions, we're delighted to carry this exclusive clip of the band playing "The One I Love" from their 2001 appearance on MTV's Unplugged programme.
The two CD box set and digital download is released on May 19 and is available to pre-order here.
Ahead of the release of R.E.M. Unplugged 1991 & 2001 – The Complete Sessions, we’re delighted to carry this exclusive clip of the band playing “The One I Love” from their 2001 appearance on MTV’s Unplugged programme.
The two CD box set and digital download is released on May 19 and is available to pre-order here.
Jack White has unveiled a special vinyl 'Ultra' version of his forthcoming new album, Lazaretto.
The 180 gram release will feature two vinyl-only hidden tracks, which will be situated under the labels on the record, with one playing at 78 rpm and one at 45 rpm, making the release a three speed albu...
Jack White has unveiled a special vinyl ‘Ultra’ version of his forthcoming new album, Lazaretto.
The 180 gram release will feature two vinyl-only hidden tracks, which will be situated under the labels on the record, with one playing at 78 rpm and one at 45 rpm, making the release a three speed album.
The mix of the album will also be different from the digital and CD release and have a different running order. Click below to watch White talk through the LP alongside Ben Blackwell of Third Man Records, who says the record has “all kinds of tricks and chicanery hidden inside of it”. The album is released on June 9.
“While we were mixing the record I started to get ideas about the design of the LP and what we could do differently that hadn’t been done before,” says White, before demonstrating how Side A of the record plays from the inside out before a locked groove on the outside of the record continually plays.
White explains that his favourite feature of the album is on Side B, where depending on where the needle is dropped, listeners will either hear an acoustic or an electric introduction to the first song. “Both of those intros, acoustic and electric, all come together in the middle of the song and become one groove for the remainder of the song. This is something that’s never been done before,” says White.
In the dead wax of Side A is a hand-etched hologram of an angel by Tristan Duke of Infinity Light Science. “This is a really beautiful component to the Ultra LP,” says White.
About ten years ago, I had a series of conversations with some people preparing a new edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Music. Their aim, it seemed, was to take the 84 tracks originally compiled from Smith’s collection of 78s, and subject them to a vigorous digital clean-up. How much better would these songs sound, was their reasoning, if all the grit and static was removed, leaving the performances unsullied and sharp?
Would songs like Charley Patton’s “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” really sound better without their ancient blanket of fuzz, though? Wasn’t part of the charm of these recordings, memorably classified by Greil Marcus as relics of “the old, weird America”, that they actually sounded both old and weird? Perhaps this is a reason why the reupholstered Anthology was never released. The patina of age is easy and tempting to fetishise, and sometimes it can be used for dubious ends, not least when African-American musicians are patronised for the superficially “primitive” aura of their recordings. But crackle can make the simple act of listening to a song feel like a historical adventure. CDs and MP3s suddenly seem more tactile, less sterile. A frisson of rawness and unmediated authenticity is invested in even the most cynical of commercial endeavours.
This, one suspects, is something Neil Young understands very well. In last month’s Uncut, he described the crackle-saturated A Letter Home as “an historic art project”: a collection of songs, by contemporaries like Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and Tim Hardin, performed and cut in a 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. The booth is owned by Jack White, no stranger himself to conceptual art projects that take inspiration and mischief from our ideas about authenticity, about how we can tamper with, remake and at the same time still respect musical history.
A Letter Home, though, is also part of a larger, all-encompassing project: Neil Young’s ongoing attempt to memorialise and catalogue his own past through a patchwork of new songs, covers, films, autobiographies and upgraded reissues. Sometimes it can all feel like ornery sport, a way for Young to avoid releasing the historical artefact that his fans actually want – the ‘70s motherlode of Archives Volume Two.
This latest delaying tactic is very much in the marginalia of Neil Young’s discography, tossed-off by design. The suspicion remains that music, old or new, is not his greatest priority at the moment, falling some way behind the more pressing business of biofuel cars, science fiction novels and, of course, revolutionary new audio players (the key moment in Young’s last Uncut interview came when he cut short a discussion of music and barked, “More Pono questions!”).
Nevertheless, this sequel of sorts to Americana is an endearing little document, made more interesting by Young’s decision to render a predominantly ‘60s playlist in a way that would’ve been anachronistically low-fi in the 1940s. “Recorded live to one-track, mono, the album has an inherent warm, primitive feel of a vintage Folkways recording,” the press release trumpets, and the unsteady sonics turn out to complement Young’s wavering voice rather well. Young’s schtick is to use the Voice-O-Graph like a time machine, mapping wild trajectories between eras and dimensions, so that each side of the vinyl edition begins with a hokey “letter home” to his mother in the afterlife, much like the sentimental vinyl missives that were the usual two-minute product of Voice-O-Graph machines. “I’ll be there eventually. Not for a while, though - I still really have a lot of work to do here,” he notes, pointedly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H47jI6xanA
For the most part, the songs Young chooses are strong enough to withstand the rudimentary treatments. Bert Jansch’s “Needle Of Death”, transparent inspiration for “Ambulance Blues”, is as a consequence the ideal song to use in an exercise about how folk songs are curated and reinvented over time. Wedged into a studio the size of a telephone box with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, the tight focus gives an edge to “Girl From The North Country”, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” and “Crazy”. For Side Two, though, the team at Third Man in Nashville dragged a piano over to the Voice-O-Graph, leaving the booth’s door open. And while “Reason To Believe” comes out as odd, poignant honky-tonk, Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and the Everlys’ “I Wonder If I Care As Much” are rickety, front parlour-style singalongs, with Jack White on piano and distant harmonies.
It’s a lot of fun, but the prevailing air is one of reflection, and an understanding that – from the 18-year-old Elvis Presley recording “My Happiness” for his mother in a similar machine, to Young’s tremulous take on Springsteen’s “My Hometown” here – cheap novelties can have unexpected emotional valency. Like Tonight’s The Night and many other Neil Young albums, A Letter Home illustrates that vagaries of sound quality can sometimes enhance the drama of a record, and rarely undermine the potency of a good song. How strange, then, that it arrives at a time when so much of Young’s energy is concentrated on promoting Pono. While hyping the ultimate in studio-quality audio players, what else could such a seasoned contrarian do but release the most eloquent argument against their usefulness?
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
About ten years ago, I had a series of conversations with some people preparing a new edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Music. Their aim, it seemed, was to take the 84 tracks originally compiled from Smith’s collection of 78s, and subject them to a vigorous digital clean-up. How much better would these songs sound, was their reasoning, if all the grit and static was removed, leaving the performances unsullied and sharp?
Would songs like Charley Patton’s “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” really sound better without their ancient blanket of fuzz, though? Wasn’t part of the charm of these recordings, memorably classified by Greil Marcus as relics of “the old, weird America”, that they actually sounded both old and weird? Perhaps this is a reason why the reupholstered Anthology was never released. The patina of age is easy and tempting to fetishise, and sometimes it can be used for dubious ends, not least when African-American musicians are patronised for the superficially “primitive” aura of their recordings. But crackle can make the simple act of listening to a song feel like a historical adventure. CDs and MP3s suddenly seem more tactile, less sterile. A frisson of rawness and unmediated authenticity is invested in even the most cynical of commercial endeavours.
This, one suspects, is something Neil Young understands very well. In last month’s Uncut, he described the crackle-saturated A Letter Home as “an historic art project”: a collection of songs, by contemporaries like Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and Tim Hardin, performed and cut in a 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. The booth is owned by Jack White, no stranger himself to conceptual art projects that take inspiration and mischief from our ideas about authenticity, about how we can tamper with, remake and at the same time still respect musical history.
A Letter Home, though, is also part of a larger, all-encompassing project: Neil Young’s ongoing attempt to memorialise and catalogue his own past through a patchwork of new songs, covers, films, autobiographies and upgraded reissues. Sometimes it can all feel like ornery sport, a way for Young to avoid releasing the historical artefact that his fans actually want – the ‘70s motherlode of Archives Volume Two.
This latest delaying tactic is very much in the marginalia of Neil Young’s discography, tossed-off by design. The suspicion remains that music, old or new, is not his greatest priority at the moment, falling some way behind the more pressing business of biofuel cars, science fiction novels and, of course, revolutionary new audio players (the key moment in Young’s last Uncut interview came when he cut short a discussion of music and barked, “More Pono questions!”).
Nevertheless, this sequel of sorts to Americana is an endearing little document, made more interesting by Young’s decision to render a predominantly ‘60s playlist in a way that would’ve been anachronistically low-fi in the 1940s. “Recorded live to one-track, mono, the album has an inherent warm, primitive feel of a vintage Folkways recording,” the press release trumpets, and the unsteady sonics turn out to complement Young’s wavering voice rather well. Young’s schtick is to use the Voice-O-Graph like a time machine, mapping wild trajectories between eras and dimensions, so that each side of the vinyl edition begins with a hokey “letter home” to his mother in the afterlife, much like the sentimental vinyl missives that were the usual two-minute product of Voice-O-Graph machines. “I’ll be there eventually. Not for a while, though – I still really have a lot of work to do here,” he notes, pointedly.
For the most part, the songs Young chooses are strong enough to withstand the rudimentary treatments. Bert Jansch’s “Needle Of Death”, transparent inspiration for “Ambulance Blues”, is as a consequence the ideal song to use in an exercise about how folk songs are curated and reinvented over time. Wedged into a studio the size of a telephone box with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, the tight focus gives an edge to “Girl From The North Country”, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” and “Crazy”. For Side Two, though, the team at Third Man in Nashville dragged a piano over to the Voice-O-Graph, leaving the booth’s door open. And while “Reason To Believe” comes out as odd, poignant honky-tonk, Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and the Everlys’ “I Wonder If I Care As Much” are rickety, front parlour-style singalongs, with Jack White on piano and distant harmonies.
It’s a lot of fun, but the prevailing air is one of reflection, and an understanding that – from the 18-year-old Elvis Presley recording “My Happiness” for his mother in a similar machine, to Young’s tremulous take on Springsteen’s “My Hometown” here – cheap novelties can have unexpected emotional valency. Like Tonight’s The Night and many other Neil Young albums, A Letter Home illustrates that vagaries of sound quality can sometimes enhance the drama of a record, and rarely undermine the potency of a good song. How strange, then, that it arrives at a time when so much of Young’s energy is concentrated on promoting Pono. While hyping the ultimate in studio-quality audio players, what else could such a seasoned contrarian do but release the most eloquent argument against their usefulness?
Father and son entwine koras in a cross-generational celebration...
Over recent years we have become to used to pop as a dynastic calling, as assorted musicians with surnames like Dylan, Sumner, Simon, Thompson, Wainwright, Carthy, and Cohen seek to emulate the success of their esteemed parents. In West Africa, such generational transference has long been the norm, enshrined in the role of the griot, who functions as musician, bard, song-keeper, social historian and praise singer. Griots take pride in their ancestry; kora maestro Toumani Diabaté for example, traces his calling back some 70 generations, though ironically his father, himself a fêted kora player, didn’t bother teaching his son the instrument. Nonetheless, Toumani took up the 21-stringed African harp at the age of five, quickly proved himself a prodigy, and has gone on to become its most famous exponent both at home and on the international stage, trailing an impressive roster of albums and cross-cultural collaborations (with Spanish group Ketama, Björk and Damon Albarn among others). In prestige, his younger brother Mamadou, another kora genius, isn’t far behind.
It’s no surprise, then, to find Toumani’s son Sidiki (named after his grandfather) continuing the family trade. In Mali he’s already celebrated in his own right as accompanist to Iba One, the country’s leading hip-hop star, an example of how the role of griot is mutating with new times. “We’re modern griots,” says Toumani, “we live in the city, we’re connected to the world.”
Still, all but one of the 10 pieces on Toumani & Sidiki are traditional numbers, some of them dating back a century or more to Gambia, where grandfather Sidiki grew up (West Africa’s ancient Mande empire crosses current national borders and its griots do likewise). Most are songs, but are delivered here as instrumentals, part improvised during sessions in London in the autumn of 2013.
Confusingly but also appropriately for modern griots, the original pieces have been renamed, so that a wedding song called “Chung Kamaba” now bears the title “Toguna Industries” in honour of an agricultural company that helped Mali’s farmers during the recent incursion of Islamic militants into the country’s north, an event that has provoked and coloured an outpouring of recordings by Mali’s rich supply of musicians – Rokia Traoré and Vieux Farka Touré for instance. “Dr Cheikh Modibo Diarra” is named in honour of a Malian astrophysicist and politician, while “Tijanyi” is a salute to the Sufi strain of Islam to which Toumani and Sidiki are committed. “Tolerance is what’s important,” says Toumani, “Islam came to Mali centuries ago, we don’t need lessons.”
The mood of the album is mostly reflective. It’s a very different creature to Toumani’s celebrated outings with the late guitarist Ali Farka Touré, where the two men sparred in contrasting styles – Toumani’s rippling kora playing against Touré’s clanging, bluesy lines. Father and son play in much more similar fashion, though Sidiki’s lines are usually the more staccato. As on any album of twin guitars, there’s fun to be had deciphering who is playing which part, and in catching the response of each kora to the other’s initiative, and when each kora has said what it wants, the pair are quite prepared to close the conversation; tracks that clock in at three minutes (there are three here) are scarce on modern African albums.
Though everything is touched by a profound sense of melody and the sheer loveliness of its kora cascades, the temper of the pieces shifts subtly. “Rachid Ouigini” (the name of an Algerian historian) is spritely, “Bansang” relies on an almost funk rhythm (“It really grooves,” reckons Toumani), while “Claudia And Salma” (the names of Toumani’s manager’s daughters) is a stately mix of sweetness and farewell.
The stand-out track is the one original, “Lampedusa”, written in commemoration of the 300 African migrants who perished off the Italian island of that name in late 2013. As one would expect, it’s a slow, poignant affair, whose delicate melody is underpinned by the slow tolling of bass lines. A hushed lament to the lost, its four and a half minutes pass by like a whisper. A subtle, unshowy set it may be, but Toumani & Sidiki shows that this particular family affair will endure…perhaps for another 70 generations.
Neil Spencer
Father and son entwine koras in a cross-generational celebration…
Over recent years we have become to used to pop as a dynastic calling, as assorted musicians with surnames like Dylan, Sumner, Simon, Thompson, Wainwright, Carthy, and Cohen seek to emulate the success of their esteemed parents. In West Africa, such generational transference has long been the norm, enshrined in the role of the griot, who functions as musician, bard, song-keeper, social historian and praise singer. Griots take pride in their ancestry; kora maestro Toumani Diabaté for example, traces his calling back some 70 generations, though ironically his father, himself a fêted kora player, didn’t bother teaching his son the instrument. Nonetheless, Toumani took up the 21-stringed African harp at the age of five, quickly proved himself a prodigy, and has gone on to become its most famous exponent both at home and on the international stage, trailing an impressive roster of albums and cross-cultural collaborations (with Spanish group Ketama, Björk and Damon Albarn among others). In prestige, his younger brother Mamadou, another kora genius, isn’t far behind.
It’s no surprise, then, to find Toumani’s son Sidiki (named after his grandfather) continuing the family trade. In Mali he’s already celebrated in his own right as accompanist to Iba One, the country’s leading hip-hop star, an example of how the role of griot is mutating with new times. “We’re modern griots,” says Toumani, “we live in the city, we’re connected to the world.”
Still, all but one of the 10 pieces on Toumani & Sidiki are traditional numbers, some of them dating back a century or more to Gambia, where grandfather Sidiki grew up (West Africa’s ancient Mande empire crosses current national borders and its griots do likewise). Most are songs, but are delivered here as instrumentals, part improvised during sessions in London in the autumn of 2013.
Confusingly but also appropriately for modern griots, the original pieces have been renamed, so that a wedding song called “Chung Kamaba” now bears the title “Toguna Industries” in honour of an agricultural company that helped Mali’s farmers during the recent incursion of Islamic militants into the country’s north, an event that has provoked and coloured an outpouring of recordings by Mali’s rich supply of musicians – Rokia Traoré and Vieux Farka Touré for instance. “Dr Cheikh Modibo Diarra” is named in honour of a Malian astrophysicist and politician, while “Tijanyi” is a salute to the Sufi strain of Islam to which Toumani and Sidiki are committed. “Tolerance is what’s important,” says Toumani, “Islam came to Mali centuries ago, we don’t need lessons.”
The mood of the album is mostly reflective. It’s a very different creature to Toumani’s celebrated outings with the late guitarist Ali Farka Touré, where the two men sparred in contrasting styles – Toumani’s rippling kora playing against Touré’s clanging, bluesy lines. Father and son play in much more similar fashion, though Sidiki’s lines are usually the more staccato. As on any album of twin guitars, there’s fun to be had deciphering who is playing which part, and in catching the response of each kora to the other’s initiative, and when each kora has said what it wants, the pair are quite prepared to close the conversation; tracks that clock in at three minutes (there are three here) are scarce on modern African albums.
Though everything is touched by a profound sense of melody and the sheer loveliness of its kora cascades, the temper of the pieces shifts subtly. “Rachid Ouigini” (the name of an Algerian historian) is spritely, “Bansang” relies on an almost funk rhythm (“It really grooves,” reckons Toumani), while “Claudia And Salma” (the names of Toumani’s manager’s daughters) is a stately mix of sweetness and farewell.
The stand-out track is the one original, “Lampedusa”, written in commemoration of the 300 African migrants who perished off the Italian island of that name in late 2013. As one would expect, it’s a slow, poignant affair, whose delicate melody is underpinned by the slow tolling of bass lines. A hushed lament to the lost, its four and a half minutes pass by like a whisper. A subtle, unshowy set it may be, but Toumani & Sidiki shows that this particular family affair will endure…perhaps for another 70 generations.
I was reminiscing with an old friend over the weekend about The Specials, his favourite band. Our chat brought us to the great 1979 2-Tone Tour that featured The Specials, supported by Madness and The Selecter, a snapshot of which now duly follows.
__________
October, 1979.
There are 43 alarm calls booked for this morning and – woe, pitiful woe! – they’ve started going off already, one of them heading this way.
The shrill exclamatory shrieks of the alarms is usually followed by weary grumbling moans and the thud of people rolling out of beds in rooms all along this wing of Swindon’s Crest Motel, where the cast of the 2-Tone Tour are beginning now to assemble in the lobby, pale-faced and hungover. The motel staff in startling contrast are, meanwhile, crisp and morning-bright, with gleaming toothpaste smiles and the brisk efficient manner of people with things to do.
Specials’ singer Terry Hall is here to see off his girlfriend, who’s going home to Coventry. And here comes The Specials’ unlikely mastermind, Jerry Dammers, lumbering into view, an awkward shambling figure in a shabby raincoat. He manages a smile, briefly. Woody, the young drummer with Madness, who looks about, I don’t know, 12 or something, lights his first fag of the day and immediately starts coughing like a Kentucky miner, stricken with Black Lung or something similarly serious.
“My body’s had enough of me,” he splutters, doubling up in a fit of coughing and hacking away so violently I wouldn’t be surprised to see his eyebrows fly across the room, followed possibly by his teeth. He finds a chair and collapses into it, his face drained of colour.
We’re only three days into the tour and some of the people in the lobby around me, which has taken on the look of a field hospital in a 19th century war, look like they won’t see the end of it.
Of course, it was all very different just a few short days ago when on a gloriously sunny autumn afternoon I’d arrived at The Roundhouse, up there in Chalk Farm, where The Specials, Madness and The Selecter had spent the previous week rehearsing for the 40 date tour ahead of them. When I get to there, The Roundhouse is as they say buzzing, the place noisy with chat and laughter. The coach that’s been hired to take us all to Brighton for the tour’s opening night is already an hour late, which means before we’ve even started we’re behind schedule. No one seems to care.
The three bands are strung out across the Roundhouse bar. The Selecter and Specials mingle, wander and joke. Madness are quaffing light and bitters, being noisy. They look like a gang of spotty kids waiting to be taken on a day trip to the seaside, yelping and impatient.
A friend of mine named Kellogs who works for Stiff as a tour manger is standing at the bar, watching them. When Stiff signed Madness, they were put in his paternal care. He’s just finished a fortnight on the road with the rascals, and they’ve nearly brought him to his knees.
“They make me feel so old,” he says wearily. “They just don’t stop. Up till four every morning, boozing. Look at them. . .”
We look at them. Down the hatch go another seven pints.
“They’re fucking loving it,” says Kellogs. “They’re on top of the fucking world. A hit single, on the telly, on the road away from mum, drinking, smoking – all yobbos together. They’re having the time of their lives.”
“Annuver 300 pints of light and bitter,” cry Madness in unison as the coach finally pulls up outside The Roundhouse.
There are 40 of us on the bus and Madness inevitably are making most of the noise - shouting, swearing, clambering over the backs of seats, drinking, making ridiculous faces at the crowds on Oxford Street. Woody is especially boisterous, swigging from a half bottle of Scotch, one hefty slug after another, red-faced and increasingly wild-eyed.
Steve English, who’s providing one-man security for the tour, is sitting across the aisle from him. Steve, who’s worked as a bodyguard for, among others, Marvin Gaye, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and boxer John Conteh and is built like a Sherman tank, looks at Woody grappling with the deleterious effects of the whiskey and laughs, the sound he makes like a drain being sucked clear by complicated mechanical equipment.
“Silly little fucker,” he says of Woody. “If he carries on like that for the next six weeks, we’ll have to carry him off this fucking tour in fucking casket.”
The coach is outside Brighton Top rank now, where dozens of skinheads are waiting for Madness, led by Prince Nutty, whose mug beams also from the centre of the inner sleeve of One Step Beyond, Madness’ debut album. Prince Nutty is surrounded by a gang of fearsome-looking cronies.
“Remember me?” one of them asks Suggs. “I danced on stage wiv yer at the Rock Garden. Remember?”
“Yeah, ‘course I remember you,” says Suggs, who clearly doesn’t, pushing his way into the Top Rank, where we find a place to talk and are joined by a rather wobbly Woody. Kellogs had told me earlier that when Madness played Brighton Polytechnic recently on a brief warm-op tour for the current trek, a mob of British Movement supporters had turned up at the gig, threatening trouble.
“They didn’t do nuthin’, though,” Woody says. “They just stood around in the bar talking very loudly about Adolf Hitler.”
In Oldham, Kellogs had also said, a security check on the audience as they arrived at the gig led to the confiscation of a number of weapons – knives, even a home-made mace among them. There’d been a riot in Huddersfield, the group’s van trashed and a film crew terrorised. Suggs is sensitive on the subject of the band’s skinhead fans, but abhors the BM and the idea that Madness are a focal point for their politics.
“There’s no way we’re political,” he argues. “We’re certainly not fucking fascists. If we were fascists, what would we be doing playing ska and bluebeat? If we’d wanted to talk about politics we’d have formed a debating society, not a fucking band.”
The Brighton show is sensational. By the time The Specials play “A Message To You, Rudi”, most of the audience appear to be on stage with them, and those that aren’t are dragging the ones who are back into the crowd so they can take their brief place in the spotlight.
The group fight their way off stage through this demented rabble but find the safe haven of their dressing room picketed by a group of angry feminists who’ve been incensed by some off-colour remarks by Terry Hall and the description of the Melody Maker journalist Vivien Goldman, who’d unenthusiastically reviewed their debut album, as “a stupid cow”.
They now berate the unapologetic Hall at rowdy length. Their ring-leader notices Dammers, standing behind Terry, a bemused witness to the women’s wrath.
“And what have you got to say for yourself?” she loudly demands.
Jerry looks at her, grins gummily.
“Would you like to come to a party with me?” he asks her, ducking the blow he knows is coming.
Photo credit: Clare Muller/PYMCA /REX
I was reminiscing with an old friend over the weekend about The Specials, his favourite band. Our chat brought us to the great 1979 2-Tone Tour that featured The Specials, supported by Madness and The Selecter, a snapshot of which now duly follows.
__________
October, 1979.
There are 43 alarm calls booked for this morning and – woe, pitiful woe! – they’ve started going off already, one of them heading this way.
The shrill exclamatory shrieks of the alarms is usually followed by weary grumbling moans and the thud of people rolling out of beds in rooms all along this wing of Swindon’s Crest Motel, where the cast of the 2-Tone Tour are beginning now to assemble in the lobby, pale-faced and hungover. The motel staff in startling contrast are, meanwhile, crisp and morning-bright, with gleaming toothpaste smiles and the brisk efficient manner of people with things to do.
Specials’ singer Terry Hall is here to see off his girlfriend, who’s going home to Coventry. And here comes The Specials’ unlikely mastermind, Jerry Dammers, lumbering into view, an awkward shambling figure in a shabby raincoat. He manages a smile, briefly. Woody, the young drummer with Madness, who looks about, I don’t know, 12 or something, lights his first fag of the day and immediately starts coughing like a Kentucky miner, stricken with Black Lung or something similarly serious.
“My body’s had enough of me,” he splutters, doubling up in a fit of coughing and hacking away so violently I wouldn’t be surprised to see his eyebrows fly across the room, followed possibly by his teeth. He finds a chair and collapses into it, his face drained of colour.
We’re only three days into the tour and some of the people in the lobby around me, which has taken on the look of a field hospital in a 19th century war, look like they won’t see the end of it.
Of course, it was all very different just a few short days ago when on a gloriously sunny autumn afternoon I’d arrived at The Roundhouse, up there in Chalk Farm, where The Specials, Madness and The Selecter had spent the previous week rehearsing for the 40 date tour ahead of them. When I get to there, The Roundhouse is as they say buzzing, the place noisy with chat and laughter. The coach that’s been hired to take us all to Brighton for the tour’s opening night is already an hour late, which means before we’ve even started we’re behind schedule. No one seems to care.
The three bands are strung out across the Roundhouse bar. The Selecter and Specials mingle, wander and joke. Madness are quaffing light and bitters, being noisy. They look like a gang of spotty kids waiting to be taken on a day trip to the seaside, yelping and impatient.
A friend of mine named Kellogs who works for Stiff as a tour manger is standing at the bar, watching them. When Stiff signed Madness, they were put in his paternal care. He’s just finished a fortnight on the road with the rascals, and they’ve nearly brought him to his knees.
“They make me feel so old,” he says wearily. “They just don’t stop. Up till four every morning, boozing. Look at them. . .”
We look at them. Down the hatch go another seven pints.
“They’re fucking loving it,” says Kellogs. “They’re on top of the fucking world. A hit single, on the telly, on the road away from mum, drinking, smoking – all yobbos together. They’re having the time of their lives.”
“Annuver 300 pints of light and bitter,” cry Madness in unison as the coach finally pulls up outside The Roundhouse.
There are 40 of us on the bus and Madness inevitably are making most of the noise – shouting, swearing, clambering over the backs of seats, drinking, making ridiculous faces at the crowds on Oxford Street. Woody is especially boisterous, swigging from a half bottle of Scotch, one hefty slug after another, red-faced and increasingly wild-eyed.
Steve English, who’s providing one-man security for the tour, is sitting across the aisle from him. Steve, who’s worked as a bodyguard for, among others, Marvin Gaye, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and boxer John Conteh and is built like a Sherman tank, looks at Woody grappling with the deleterious effects of the whiskey and laughs, the sound he makes like a drain being sucked clear by complicated mechanical equipment.
“Silly little fucker,” he says of Woody. “If he carries on like that for the next six weeks, we’ll have to carry him off this fucking tour in fucking casket.”
The coach is outside Brighton Top rank now, where dozens of skinheads are waiting for Madness, led by Prince Nutty, whose mug beams also from the centre of the inner sleeve of One Step Beyond, Madness’ debut album. Prince Nutty is surrounded by a gang of fearsome-looking cronies.
“Remember me?” one of them asks Suggs. “I danced on stage wiv yer at the Rock Garden. Remember?”
“Yeah, ‘course I remember you,” says Suggs, who clearly doesn’t, pushing his way into the Top Rank, where we find a place to talk and are joined by a rather wobbly Woody. Kellogs had told me earlier that when Madness played Brighton Polytechnic recently on a brief warm-op tour for the current trek, a mob of British Movement supporters had turned up at the gig, threatening trouble.
“They didn’t do nuthin’, though,” Woody says. “They just stood around in the bar talking very loudly about Adolf Hitler.”
In Oldham, Kellogs had also said, a security check on the audience as they arrived at the gig led to the confiscation of a number of weapons – knives, even a home-made mace among them. There’d been a riot in Huddersfield, the group’s van trashed and a film crew terrorised. Suggs is sensitive on the subject of the band’s skinhead fans, but abhors the BM and the idea that Madness are a focal point for their politics.
“There’s no way we’re political,” he argues. “We’re certainly not fucking fascists. If we were fascists, what would we be doing playing ska and bluebeat? If we’d wanted to talk about politics we’d have formed a debating society, not a fucking band.”
The Brighton show is sensational. By the time The Specials play “A Message To You, Rudi”, most of the audience appear to be on stage with them, and those that aren’t are dragging the ones who are back into the crowd so they can take their brief place in the spotlight.
The group fight their way off stage through this demented rabble but find the safe haven of their dressing room picketed by a group of angry feminists who’ve been incensed by some off-colour remarks by Terry Hall and the description of the Melody Maker journalist Vivien Goldman, who’d unenthusiastically reviewed their debut album, as “a stupid cow”.
They now berate the unapologetic Hall at rowdy length. Their ring-leader notices Dammers, standing behind Terry, a bemused witness to the women’s wrath.
“And what have you got to say for yourself?” she loudly demands.
Jerry looks at her, grins gummily.
“Would you like to come to a party with me?” he asks her, ducking the blow he knows is coming.
R.E.M's Peter Buck and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney are recording with Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic, it has been revealed.
It was recently announced that Buck and Tucker had formed the band Super-Earth alongside guitarist Scott McCaughey (Minus 5), drummer Bill Rieflin (Swans, Ministry) and guitarist Kurt Bloch. That line-up of the band made their live debut in Portland last week (April 30).
However, since that date, it has come to light that super-Earth have been recording with Novoselic. A tweet sent by American filmmaker, documentarian, and music video director Lance Bangs shows an image of all three members together for the first time.
Bangs captioned the image, "Ex-REM, Sleater-Kinney, Nirvana, Flipper, Swans, Ministry, Young Fresh Fellows studio session."
Super-Earth's gig at the Secret Society Ballroom on April 30 saw the band performing twelve new songs of "soon-to-be-album-sized new compositions". There is no current news as to when, or if, the band will release an album, or if Novoselic will perform live with them in the future.
Buck and Tucker have collaborated in the past with Tucker providing backing vocals on Buck's self-titled 2012 solo album. Similarly, Buck was on stage when Sleater-Kinney briefly reunited for a live performance in late 2013.
Photo credit: Lance Bangs
R.E.M’s Peter Buck and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney are recording with Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic, it has been revealed.
It was recently announced that Buck and Tucker had formed the band Super-Earth alongside guitarist Scott McCaughey (Minus 5), drummer Bill Rieflin (Swans, Ministry) and guitarist Kurt Bloch. That line-up of the band made their live debut in Portland last week (April 30).
However, since that date, it has come to light that super-Earth have been recording with Novoselic. A tweet sent by American filmmaker, documentarian, and music video director Lance Bangs shows an image of all three members together for the first time.
Bangs captioned the image, “Ex-REM, Sleater-Kinney, Nirvana, Flipper, Swans, Ministry, Young Fresh Fellows studio session.”
Super-Earth’s gig at the Secret Society Ballroom on April 30 saw the band performing twelve new songs of “soon-to-be-album-sized new compositions”. There is no current news as to when, or if, the band will release an album, or if Novoselic will perform live with them in the future.
Buck and Tucker have collaborated in the past with Tucker providing backing vocals on Buck’s self-titled 2012 solo album. Similarly, Buck was on stage when Sleater-Kinney briefly reunited for a live performance in late 2013.
It's been a busy few days for fans of Wes Anderson.
About a week ago, an audio-visual remixer going by the name of Eclectic Method - aka London-based Jonny Wilson - released a Wes Anderson Mixtape, an ingenious five-minute clip drawing from the director's films including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou: there is plenty of Bill Murray on display.
But that's not all. It transpires that Anderson himself is celebrating the continued success of his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, with a seven-day themed cruise on board the Queen Mary 2. Anderson himself will be in attendance, along with two of the film's stars, Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman, and frequent collaborator Roman Coppola.
Cruise festivals are pretty common these days - from country music cruises round the Bahamas to Motörhead's terrifying-sounding MotörBoat excursion. This, though, is the first film cruise I can think of. Wes and co set sail from New York on 13 June and arrive in London a week later. Tickets begin at £1,099, and can be bought here.
The whole notion itself sounds particularly Anderson-esque (Andersonian? Andersonish?), and one wonders whether or not the experience might make its way into a future project from the master director. Insert your "life aquatic" puns here...
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.
It’s been a busy few days for fans of Wes Anderson.
About a week ago, an audio-visual remixer going by the name of Eclectic Method – aka London-based Jonny Wilson – released a Wes Anderson Mixtape, an ingenious five-minute clip drawing from the director’s films including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou: there is plenty of Bill Murray on display.
But that’s not all. It transpires that Anderson himself is celebrating the continued success of his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, with a seven-day themed cruise on board the Queen Mary 2. Anderson himself will be in attendance, along with two of the film’s stars, Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman, and frequent collaborator Roman Coppola.
Cruise festivals are pretty common these days – from country music cruises round the Bahamas to Motörhead’s terrifying-sounding MotörBoat excursion. This, though, is the first film cruise I can think of. Wes and co set sail from New York on 13 June and arrive in London a week later. Tickets begin at £1,099, and can be bought here.
The whole notion itself sounds particularly Anderson-esque (Andersonian? Andersonish?), and one wonders whether or not the experience might make its way into a future project from the master director. Insert your “life aquatic” puns here…
Sonic Youth will reissue their 1988 album Daydream Nation next month [June].
The band confirmed a series of reissue plans via a post on their official website on May 5.
The original 2xLP and CD editions of Daydream Nation will be released on June 10 alongside the CD edition of Ciccone Youth's The ...
Sonic Youth will reissue their 1988 album Daydream Nation next month [June].
The band confirmed a series of reissue plans via a post on their official website on May 5.
The original 2xLP and CD editions of Daydream Nation will be released on June 10 alongside the CD edition of Ciccone Youth’s The Whitey Album via the band’s own label distributed by Revolver/Midheaven. Ciccone Youth is a Sonic Youth side project with Minutemen/Firehose member Mike Watt, who released their one and only album in 1988.
Daydream Nation and The Whitey Album will be followed on undisclosed dates by LP and CD editions of Sonic Youth’s currently out-of-print pre-Geffen catalogue including Bad Moon Rising, EVOL, Sister, Confusion Is Sex and a DVD edition of Screaming Fields of Sonic Love with bonus material.
A trailer for the forthcoming reissue of Led Zeppelin's second album'Led Zeppelin II has been released.
Click below to watch the clip, which is soundtracked by the previously unreleased rough mix of "Whole Lotta Love". New song "La La" will appear on the second disc of Led Zeppelin II and the album's companion audio will also include alternate mixes of five songs from the album plus backing tracks to "Thank You" and "Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)". On June 2 the deluxe editions of Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III will all be released. The new trailer follows a similar promo clip released to trail the new version of 'Led Zeppelin', which you can watch here.
"The material on the companion discs presents a portal to the time of the recording of Led Zeppelin," said Jimmy Page. "It is a selection of work in progress with rough mixes, backing tracks, alternate versions and new material recorded at the time." All tracks have been remastered by Page and all nine of the band's studio albums are due to be reissued in the same style.
The additional audio disc accompanying Led Zeppelin III will feature "Jennings Farm Blues", "Bathroom Sound" and "Keys To The Highway/Trouble In Mind". All of these songs have been previously available on bootlegs but the new reissue of the three albums will mark the first time the tracks have been made widely available.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGpW8GlBtVU
A trailer for the forthcoming reissue of Led Zeppelin‘s second album’Led Zeppelin II has been released.
Click below to watch the clip, which is soundtracked by the previously unreleased rough mix of “Whole Lotta Love“. New song “La La” will appear on the second disc of Led Zeppelin II and the album’s companion audio will also include alternate mixes of five songs from the album plus backing tracks to “Thank You” and “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)”. On June 2 the deluxe editions of Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III will all be released. The new trailer follows a similar promo clip released to trail the new version of ‘Led Zeppelin’, which you can watch here.
“The material on the companion discs presents a portal to the time of the recording of Led Zeppelin,” said Jimmy Page. “It is a selection of work in progress with rough mixes, backing tracks, alternate versions and new material recorded at the time.” All tracks have been remastered by Page and all nine of the band’s studio albums are due to be reissued in the same style.
The additional audio disc accompanying Led Zeppelin III will feature “Jennings Farm Blues”, “Bathroom Sound” and “Keys To The Highway/Trouble In Mind”. All of these songs have been previously available on bootlegs but the new reissue of the three albums will mark the first time the tracks have been made widely available.
Post-rock's crowning glory beautifully remastered, with bonus tracks, a film... and its mystery intact...
Come the 1990s, amongst a certain constituency of alternative musicians, there was the increasing feeling that rock music was played out. Post rock, a term coined in Melody Maker by Simon Reynolds, was used to describe a variety of diverse bands pushing at the edges of traditional rock form. In the UK, groups like Stereolab and Pram were reintegrating the lessons learned in electronic and Krautrock. In Chicago, Tortoise, The Sea And Cake and Gastr Del Sol were experimenting with dub production techniques, or drawing on the city’s experimental jazz traditions. Before all of this, though, there was a band of teenage punk kids from Louisville, Kentucky. They were named after drummer Britt Walford’s goldfish, and they were called Slint.
Slint, who existed between the years of 1986 and 1992, made two records. The first, the Steve Albini-produced Tweez, was released in 1989 on the local Kentucky label Jennifer Hartman. But it’s the second, Spiderland, that they’re remembered for. Six tracks of nocturnal guitar wanderings slowly twine around hushed, evocative tales of fairground fortune tellers, vampire princes and bloody shipwrecks.
By the time it was released on Touch And Go in 1992, the band had already broken up, and rumours persisted some, or all, had checked themselves into a psychiatric hospital. The band’s strangely abrupt end, coupled with a relative shortage of evidence testifying to their existence, meant that Spiderland took on the quality of urban myth: an eerie mystery passed on like whispers in the schoolyard, of something awful that happened to some young men in the town just down the way.
Afterwards, the participants moved onto other bands: Walford (as “Mike Hunt”) drummed on The Breeders’ Pod; co-vocalist/guitarist Brian McMahan founded The For Carnation; guitarist David Pajo has pursued a fruitful solo career and played in groups including Tortoise, Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs; and all, including bassist Todd Brashear, have played with their childhood friend Will Oldham. When trying to put your finger on the essence of Slint, you’re still drawn back to Spiderland’s cover: a black-and-white shot of the four fresh-faced participants floating in a quarry, part submerged, as if about to sink into the inky depths.
Slint reformed in 2005 at the behest of Barry Hogan of concert promoters All Tomorrow’s Parties, and have found a second life recreating Spiderland live, in crystal clarity, without ever stepping near a recording studio. They have, however, worked up this: a lavish triple-vinyl box set that collects the album, affectionately remastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston, with demos, outtakes and practice tapes, plus a booklet of photos and ephemera and Breadcrumb Trail, a 90 minute documentary by filmmaker Lance Bangs.
The remastered Spiderland material aside, it is the documentary itself that is the most remarkable part of this box: a fastidiously researched piece that blows away the smoke but somehow leaves the mystique intact. There are childhood photos, extensive interviews with band members and fellow travellers (Steve Albini, James Murphy, friends and former bandmates such as Sean "Rat" Garrison of pre-Slint outfit Maurice and Jon Cook of Rodan), live footage from a Louisville Battle Of The Bands, and most unbelievably, VHS recordings of the band jamming away in the Walford family basement, mere slips of lads crouched on the lino, already playing this strange, uncanny music note-perfect.
There is fascinating trivia – look close at the cover of Tweez, that’s Will Oldham in the front seat wearing a crash helmet. And there is vivid sense of the intensity of the group’s partnership, particularly between Walford, mischievous and uninhibited, and McMahan, bookish and intense. Ian Mackaye of Fugazi, who hung out with Slint during a stay in Louisville, has a neat summation: “People from Louisville, they’re just fucking crazy… they’re insane.”
For all that Slint have been an influence on groups such as Shellac and Mogwai, it is pleasing to note that Spiderland has only got richer with age. In large part, this is thanks to their preternatural technicality. Pajo is already a hugely skilled guitarist, his style still steeped in hardcore, but radically pared down in a manner suggesting the influence of American Primitive guitarists like John Fahey, and employing all manner of curious tunings and fretboard tricks. Opener “Breadcrumb Trail” floats by like a lucid dream, queer twinkling harmonics shadowing McMahan as he drifts around a rickety fairground, befriending a fortune teller and taking a trip on a rollercoaster that commences a lurch of squealing riffs and roaring distortion. Walford, meanwhile, is the engine of the band, behind the unsettling 5/4 chug of “Nosferatu Man”, and taking up guitar for the spare, skeletal “Don, Aman”, the tale of a weird drifter that cuts off just before its moment of dramatic realisation.
McMahan, meanwhile, is the knot in Spiderland’s stomach, trying to put words to the fearful sensations conjured into being by these cryptic guitar tangles. On the slow downward spiral of “Washer”, he sings in a thin tremble, first threatening to leave, then begging his lover not to go, and declaring: “Every time I ever cried from fear/Was just a mistake that I made”. The climactic “Good Morning Captain”, loosely based on Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, offers an emotional climax is one of the most wrenching in all indie rock: “I’m sorry… I miss you,” mutters McMahan, and as guitars rise to a clamour he repeats the words at a bellow. In Breadcrumb Trail, Walford recalls McMahan returned to the control room having thrown up on himself.
Completing the Spiderland box is a collection of outtakes, offcuts and demos, much of which confirms just how great Spiderland sounded, how diminished it would have been sans vocals. Essential, though, is “Pam”, a brooding instrumental headbanger, presumably excised for reasons of mood and pacing (it also appears as a vocal demo with some somewhat daft lyrics); a take on “Glenn”, slightly slower and more pensive than the version that made it onto their posthumous 1994 EP; and a fairly reverent live take on Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer” recorded in Chicago in 1989 that neatly approximates the original’s craggy endurance.
Intriguing but frustrating, meanwhile, is a pair of demos, titled “Todd’s Song” and “Brian’s Song”. The former is a comparatively evolved, yet still unfinished instrumental that strikes a slightly lighter note than Spiderland; the latter, an arcane guitar scrawl to primitive boom-clack drum machine pointing ahead to McMahan’s work with The For Carnation. Both are a reminder that Slint have work unfinished. Yet nine years since their reformation, they remain a zombie band, recreating past glories but collectively unwilling – or unable – to step back into the land of the living. This is a remarkable document of a remarkable band. Is it churlish to ask for more?
Louis Pattison
Post-rock’s crowning glory beautifully remastered, with bonus tracks, a film… and its mystery intact…
Come the 1990s, amongst a certain constituency of alternative musicians, there was the increasing feeling that rock music was played out. Post rock, a term coined in Melody Maker by Simon Reynolds, was used to describe a variety of diverse bands pushing at the edges of traditional rock form. In the UK, groups like Stereolab and Pram were reintegrating the lessons learned in electronic and Krautrock. In Chicago, Tortoise, The Sea And Cake and Gastr Del Sol were experimenting with dub production techniques, or drawing on the city’s experimental jazz traditions. Before all of this, though, there was a band of teenage punk kids from Louisville, Kentucky. They were named after drummer Britt Walford’s goldfish, and they were called Slint.
Slint, who existed between the years of 1986 and 1992, made two records. The first, the Steve Albini-produced Tweez, was released in 1989 on the local Kentucky label Jennifer Hartman. But it’s the second, Spiderland, that they’re remembered for. Six tracks of nocturnal guitar wanderings slowly twine around hushed, evocative tales of fairground fortune tellers, vampire princes and bloody shipwrecks.
By the time it was released on Touch And Go in 1992, the band had already broken up, and rumours persisted some, or all, had checked themselves into a psychiatric hospital. The band’s strangely abrupt end, coupled with a relative shortage of evidence testifying to their existence, meant that Spiderland took on the quality of urban myth: an eerie mystery passed on like whispers in the schoolyard, of something awful that happened to some young men in the town just down the way.
Afterwards, the participants moved onto other bands: Walford (as “Mike Hunt”) drummed on The Breeders’ Pod; co-vocalist/guitarist Brian McMahan founded The For Carnation; guitarist David Pajo has pursued a fruitful solo career and played in groups including Tortoise, Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs; and all, including bassist Todd Brashear, have played with their childhood friend Will Oldham. When trying to put your finger on the essence of Slint, you’re still drawn back to Spiderland’s cover: a black-and-white shot of the four fresh-faced participants floating in a quarry, part submerged, as if about to sink into the inky depths.
Slint reformed in 2005 at the behest of Barry Hogan of concert promoters All Tomorrow’s Parties, and have found a second life recreating Spiderland live, in crystal clarity, without ever stepping near a recording studio. They have, however, worked up this: a lavish triple-vinyl box set that collects the album, affectionately remastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston, with demos, outtakes and practice tapes, plus a booklet of photos and ephemera and Breadcrumb Trail, a 90 minute documentary by filmmaker Lance Bangs.
The remastered Spiderland material aside, it is the documentary itself that is the most remarkable part of this box: a fastidiously researched piece that blows away the smoke but somehow leaves the mystique intact. There are childhood photos, extensive interviews with band members and fellow travellers (Steve Albini, James Murphy, friends and former bandmates such as Sean “Rat” Garrison of pre-Slint outfit Maurice and Jon Cook of Rodan), live footage from a Louisville Battle Of The Bands, and most unbelievably, VHS recordings of the band jamming away in the Walford family basement, mere slips of lads crouched on the lino, already playing this strange, uncanny music note-perfect.
There is fascinating trivia – look close at the cover of Tweez, that’s Will Oldham in the front seat wearing a crash helmet. And there is vivid sense of the intensity of the group’s partnership, particularly between Walford, mischievous and uninhibited, and McMahan, bookish and intense. Ian Mackaye of Fugazi, who hung out with Slint during a stay in Louisville, has a neat summation: “People from Louisville, they’re just fucking crazy… they’re insane.”
For all that Slint have been an influence on groups such as Shellac and Mogwai, it is pleasing to note that Spiderland has only got richer with age. In large part, this is thanks to their preternatural technicality. Pajo is already a hugely skilled guitarist, his style still steeped in hardcore, but radically pared down in a manner suggesting the influence of American Primitive guitarists like John Fahey, and employing all manner of curious tunings and fretboard tricks. Opener “Breadcrumb Trail” floats by like a lucid dream, queer twinkling harmonics shadowing McMahan as he drifts around a rickety fairground, befriending a fortune teller and taking a trip on a rollercoaster that commences a lurch of squealing riffs and roaring distortion. Walford, meanwhile, is the engine of the band, behind the unsettling 5/4 chug of “Nosferatu Man”, and taking up guitar for the spare, skeletal “Don, Aman”, the tale of a weird drifter that cuts off just before its moment of dramatic realisation.
McMahan, meanwhile, is the knot in Spiderland’s stomach, trying to put words to the fearful sensations conjured into being by these cryptic guitar tangles. On the slow downward spiral of “Washer”, he sings in a thin tremble, first threatening to leave, then begging his lover not to go, and declaring: “Every time I ever cried from fear/Was just a mistake that I made”. The climactic “Good Morning Captain”, loosely based on Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, offers an emotional climax is one of the most wrenching in all indie rock: “I’m sorry… I miss you,” mutters McMahan, and as guitars rise to a clamour he repeats the words at a bellow. In Breadcrumb Trail, Walford recalls McMahan returned to the control room having thrown up on himself.
Completing the Spiderland box is a collection of outtakes, offcuts and demos, much of which confirms just how great Spiderland sounded, how diminished it would have been sans vocals. Essential, though, is “Pam”, a brooding instrumental headbanger, presumably excised for reasons of mood and pacing (it also appears as a vocal demo with some somewhat daft lyrics); a take on “Glenn”, slightly slower and more pensive than the version that made it onto their posthumous 1994 EP; and a fairly reverent live take on Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer” recorded in Chicago in 1989 that neatly approximates the original’s craggy endurance.
Intriguing but frustrating, meanwhile, is a pair of demos, titled “Todd’s Song” and “Brian’s Song”. The former is a comparatively evolved, yet still unfinished instrumental that strikes a slightly lighter note than Spiderland; the latter, an arcane guitar scrawl to primitive boom-clack drum machine pointing ahead to McMahan’s work with The For Carnation. Both are a reminder that Slint have work unfinished. Yet nine years since their reformation, they remain a zombie band, recreating past glories but collectively unwilling – or unable – to step back into the land of the living. This is a remarkable document of a remarkable band. Is it churlish to ask for more?
Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired anim...
Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.
This is Damon stripped bare, we must believe, as he embarks on a journey through his past on his solo debut, Everyday Robots (what happened to 2003’s Democrazy?). Though many of his songs have been laced with personal experiences, this is the first time Albarn has mined his past so candidly. Appropriately enough, he has chosen to debut Everyday Robots in venues that have significance to his own story. The previous night, Albarn played the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, just over a mile away from Goldsmith’s College where he met the other members of Blur. Tonight’s venue, the Great Hall at Queen Mary University, is not only close to Mile End Stadium, the site of Blur’s triumphant (if wet) gig during Britpop’s high summer, but, Albarn tells us from the stage, he was born in the nearby Royal London Hospital up the road at Whitechapel.
Arguably, such rich personal resonances add an additional level of detail to what is, for a performer as charismatic Albarn, a conspicuously low-key show. Albarn has always been good at songs that privilege a kind of minor chord melancholia, and tonight he weaves together songs from throughout his illustrious catalogue that share that sensibility. In many respects, Everyday Robots feels closest musically to The Good, The Bad And The Queen project: the sound is spacious, dubby and the tone wistful (Blur’s “Death Of A Party” is another reference). By assembling these songs from his different bands together in one set, it’s possible to discern recurring patterns and themes in Albarn’s best music. Many of these songs take place towards the end of the day – “twilight”, “sunset”, “Friday night”. The Everyday Robots themselves are “in the process of going home”, evening beckons. Elsewhere, weather can be a concern – “there’s a low in the high forties” – while often water is involved: “Up the Thames to find a taxi rank” or “A ship across the Estuary”, “Oily Water”, “Hollow Ponds” and “Heavy Seas”. It is appropriate, perhaps, that the actual weather conditions outside Queen Mary University are suitably grey and drizzly.
To help bring all this to life are Albarn’s newest musical cohorts, the Heavy Seas, who comprise four other members, and a string quartet. Albarn is keen to make clear that this is a group effort, rather than Albarn plus a backing band; an endearingly self-effacing sentiment, but it’s still Albarn’s name alone on the ticket rather. That said, while these musicians may not carry the impressive musical weight of Blur, the ex-Clash or Afrobeat legends he worked with in The Good, The Bad And The Queen or many of the storied guests on Gorillaz, they are nonetheless more than capable of carrying the night. As sharply dressed as Albarn, they are relaxed, sympathetic players. It is possible to lose yourself watching bassist Seye, string-bean thin in his faintly oversized suit and hat, as he sways, crouches, or bounces round the stage. But then, you’d miss watching the equally animated drummer Pauli Stanley-McKenzie, who plays much of the set standing up, leaning over his kit, and swaying from side to side in time to the rhythm. Both Stanley-McKenzie and guitarist Jeff Wootton featured in Gorillaz, while keyboard player Mike Smith is a long standing live collaborator of Albarn’s in all his various guises. Albarn presides over the proceedings, alternating between standing at the microphone or sitting at the piano; occasionally, he straps on a guitar.
Although the set is subdued, that’s not to say it’s not without fiery moments. “Kids With Guns” builds into a messy, noisy climax, “Kingdom Of Doom” morphs into what sounds like a ferocious take on “London Calling”, while “Beetlebum” b-side “All Your Life” rekindles the demented hurdy gurdy spirit of Blur at their most forceful and the appearance of Kano for a swaggering version of “Clint Eastwood” raises the temperature considerably. Even “Mr Tembo” – a song I must confess I can’t bear on the album – works well live, augmented by a choir, and successfully recast as a clapalong for the audience.
There are some unscripted digressions, too. Albarn (and Smith) have a recurring conversation with a friend in the audience called Nelson (who might be Nelson de Freitas, who provided the ‘spoken voice’ for 2D). Elsewhere, when Albarn starts talking about the involvement of Brian Eno on Everyday Robots’ track “You And Me”, the audience pick up a football-style chant of “Eno! Eno!” which Albarn ends up joining in. But, perhaps inevitably, the night’s stand out moments are simple, mesmerising versions of “Out Of Time” and “This Is A Low” performed by Albarn at the piano. Having seen Albarn live for well over 20 years now in his various guises, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching him present songs from all aspects of his career together in one set. Let’s hope there’s more to come like this.
We reach back into the Uncut archives to find Rhys and guitarist Huw Bunford taking us through the creation of each of the Super Furry Animals’ excellent albums (from Take 131). “We were bragging about how we were going to make loads of albums in interviews back in 1996,” recalls Gruff… Inte...
We reach back into the Uncut archives to find Rhys and guitarist Huw Bunford taking us through the creation of each of the Super Furry Animals’ excellent albums (from Take 131). “We were bragging about how we were going to make loads of albums in interviews back in 1996,” recalls Gruff… Interview: Piers Martin
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FUZZY LOGIC (Creation, 1996) The band’s Creation debut arrived with Britpop in full swing, to their amusement. Notable, too, for launching its cover star, drug-dealing raconteur Howard Marks, on the student circuit.
Gruff Rhys (guitar, vocals): We’d signed a deal and we were sort of blagging it a bit. We could ask Creation for a tank and they’d say, “Yeah, no problem.” We’d heard about Rockfield Studios and we wanted to record there because they had jacuzzis and you got three meals a day, all the wrong reasons for going to a studio. So we went there for three weeks and had Jacuzzis every day and ate loads of food and we were usually too full to be arsed to record anything. We were reacting to Britpop in a way – we just hated the idea of making parochial music. We felt Britpop represented a conservative, backwards movement in music. But then when we started recording Fuzzy Logic, we were in this old ’70s studio making this ’70s rock album! We got in touch with Howard Marks because we did a song about him. He was back in Wales after being in jail and he came to see us in Pontypridd. He turned up wearing leather trousers and a cloak with a big entourage. We were very ambitious, you know, and we thought we could make a Never Mind The Bollocks and have lots of jacuzzis and hang out with our version of Ronnie Biggs.
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RADIATOR (Creation, 1997) Released just four days after labelmates Oasis’ colossal Be Here Now, the Furries found their feet on their warmer, poppier, sadly overlooked second.
Rhys: After making a record with jacuzzis, we recorded this in Gorwel [Owen, long-standing SFA producer]’s house near Anglesey, to be able to make contemporary sounds again, and use computers. So we went to his house for three months solid and the Hale-Bopp comet was in flight, I remember. We’d been touring solid for a year and had completely wrecked any personal relationships, in tatters, and his house is quite small. So we were in this bungalow at the end of an RAF runway and the shed had been destroyed a few years earlier when a US jet hadn’t taken off properly. Apparently a ghost of a US airman was in the house. So there was no distractions. We asked if we could go back to Cardiff for the weekend because Beck was playing and Gorwel’s going, “No way! What are you thinking? We’re trying to make an album!” It was so intense. But he had Atari computers, and banks of old vintage synths, so musically it was much more adventurous. And we made much more interesting music.
Huw ‘Bunf’ Bunford (guitar, vocals): Gorwel’s sister cooked for us and she put different styles of carrots out every night. They lived next to the biggest carrot field in Anglesey.
GUERRILLA (Creation, 1999) Blossoming into unusually fine songwriters, they took risks on this satisfying, experimental third.
Rhys: Guerrilla’s one of our most ambitious albums and we hired all sorts of instruments and recorded a lot more electronic stuff.
Bunford: Yeah, I think we worked out how to use the sampler with this album. We’d bought it with the advance and hadn’t had a chance to take it out of its box.
Rhys: We were writing conceptual pop songs like “Wherever I Lay My Phone That’s My Home” around the ringtone of a phone. And the rhythm section, we were sort of jamming in the studio and [bassist] Guto tripped over the lead and landed over a table and Bunf hit a guitar note and that became the rhythm track. I think if any of our records could’ve sold a lot, this is the one. I don’t think any of the others have been proper pop albums, but I think Guerrilla could have been. “Northern Lites” could have been bigger but it didn’t have a video. The guy who was supposed to do it got offered a Red Stripe commercial in Jamaica. We met him later and were like, “We understand, we’d have done the same.” Creation was coming to an end, just as Nostradamus predicted, so they weren’t bothered.
Bunford: They said, “We could make this a huge hit, but I don’t think you really want that to happen.”
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MWNG (Placid Casual, 2000) The Furries’ Welsh language album, released on their own label. Reached No 11 in the charts.
Rhys: We recorded that extremely quickly in a session over a weekend in Cardiff. Then we went to Gorwel’s house for a week to do the other songs and mix it. Probably took a couple of weeks. Radiator and Guerrilla took ages, months to make. The recording process had become a bit frustrating and we thought, ‘Oh let’s make a really immediate record.’ The batch of songs at the time happened to be Welsh language. It was going to come out on Creation, who were putting out their last records at the time, and we bought it back from Creation for six grand or something. In terms of contracts and stuff, we were in limbo and we didn’t want to get some label who didn’t understand us pushing a Welsh language album, and putting flags on it or something, it could’ve been horrific. So we did it ourselves. It was coming off the back of some records that had sold well and Creation had spent a fortune on advertising and Mwng came in that slipstream. We had a tiny marketing budget and we got to do our own adverts. We got all the worst quotes from the reviews – it was quite well received, but we found some negative quotes – and put them on two adverts. The Jewish Chronicle called it “career suicide”. I think it’s a really pure record.
RINGS AROUND THE WORLD (Epic, 2001) Not so much an album as a wildly ambitious, mind-expanding multi-platform investigation into the possibilities of digital entertainment – and the band’s most coherent musical statement to boot.
Rhys: We started recording Rings Around The World without a label because Creation had finished and we’d done Mwng, so we started recording another record. We’d started playing in surround sound and did a concert in Cardiff in 5.1 broadcasting for the BBC. DVD technology was coming on at the time, so we thought we’d make an album on DVD in surround sound with films and remixes. Sony came and said they’d take the project. Now we can make DVDs and surround sound things for nothing, but at the time we had to go to an editing suite to mix the record. We spent seven months in London in the most expensive studios in the world. We went to Woodstock, to Bearsville, where The Band used to record.
Bunford: Sony were just leaking money.
Rhys: But we were actually doing stuff with the money. It was a very ambitious project and we were on the right label to spend those amounts of money. They were taking the risk. We weren’t a secure commercial proposition, so it’s a longshot for them. You get people with nightmare stories with major labels but we got it really easy and they were very understanding. We were trying to make a blockbuster album that was going to be like the Eagles, but we left the tracks that sounded like the Eagles off. We had big debates about the line-up, but it ended up being a 50-minute album; it was going to be an hour-and-a-half. I was into the excess of it, that was the whole point. We had Chris Shaw, who’s produced records for Bob Dylan and makes a huge sound, engineering the record. We were trying to make a kind of utopian pop music that had pretensions of being progressive and exciting. I think Guerrilla maybe represents that kind of idea best because it’s more concise than Rings Around The World, but the process was amazing. The making of it was epic and the music represents that, with really over-the-top arrangements. By that point in Britain people knew about us already and were maybe getting bored. We were releasing a weird plastic soul record at the height of a garage rock revival. And then XL put Rings Around The World out in America and that became our breakthrough album there. We were doing sell-out shows coast to coast. People threw eggs at us in Baltimore because of the contents of the DVD, really crazy. And with Rings… we were reborn in Europe. We toured properly and got on easy listening channels in Sweden. We’d always gone down well in Japan. “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck” was on heavy rotation in Australia – it had loads of swearing.
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PHANTOM POWER (Epic, 2003) After the success of Rings… another multimedia opus. A case, perhaps, of too much information…
Rhys: Gorwel came back. He’s like, “Go on, one last job.” We recorded the warm-sounding live songs like “Hello Sunshine” with Gorwel. We were trying to tone down the big glossy production of the last record. We worked with our dear friend from Scotland, Tony Doogan, who’s done records with Mogwai and Belle And Sebastian, and he bought an element of danger to the recordings. Loads of guns. We were in Mono Valley studio near Monmouth and he arranged for this guy to come down and bring an Uzi and an AK-47 because we were recording a lot of sound effects. We had a kind of mock battle in the garden and I think he got arrested on the last day. We invented a new game called fire golf where we’d hollow out a golf ball and fill it with inflammable material and set it alight and shoot golf balls at each other…
The idea behind the DVDs was they’d be used like platform games where you’d go into the album and with every song there’s different options for the mixes. On Phantom Power there’s two sets of films for every song and everything was in 5.1 cinematic sound which is far superior as an experience to stereo. But no one gave a shit because people just want to rock’n’roll!
LOVE KRAFT (Epic, 2005) Gorging at Sony’s heaving table, the Furries’ sumptuous seventh found them blissfully adrift from their audience after the greatest hits effort, Songbook: The Singles Vol.1.
Rhys: Love Kraft is the most beautiful record we’ve made. Where some records have had potential to have a cultural impact, like Mwng or Guerrilla, which are of their time in a positive way, I think Love Kraft isn’t. I think it’s a beautiful record, really orchestral and fairly timeless, but it certainly doesn’t fit in any cultural scheme. Sony were dishing out quite a lot of money for us to make really mental records but we were actually spending it on real things; it was amazing in a way. We recorded it in Spain and mixed it in Brazil because our mixer, Mario Caldato Jr [producer for Beastie Boys and Beck, among others], who lives in Brazil, wanted to be close to his family. We had a really good experience with Mario when he mixed Phantom Power and asked him to do the next record and he insisted on doing it in a warm climate because last time he’d come to London in February and the rain. I think we took him to Cardiff for a night out to see Wales play Bosnia in a friendly. He was there in his woolly hat, freezing. Rio was amazing. We were going out to funk bars and really dodgy hip-hop clubs. I bought a hell of a lot of records. Loads of random vinyl. I think they had a big boom in the ’80s of international music in South America where they embraced Phil Collins and The Alarm. There are just mountains of weird ’80s rock records. They stopped making vinyl in 1993.
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HEY VENUS! (Rough Trade, 2007) SFA play it straight on their debut for new label Rough Trade, breezing through 11 soulful pop numbers in 37 minutes. Safe, but utterly sound.
Rhys: Rough Trade sort of poached us. With them it’s the most interactive interest we’ve had from a label since Dick Green at Creation. Bit of a shock having people listen to your demos. We left a song off the album and they said, “Why are you not keeping the single on?” Hey Venus! is a straight-up collection of songs. At the same time we recorded 30 improvised songs, and also a lot of harder, groovier music. We were going for a recording of a band playing live, more or less. I suppose we were trying to make some kind of pop record and kept the other stuff for the next album. We have got another batch of songs and I see Hey Venus! as part of a song cycle. In that context it makes sense. With “The Gift That Keeps Giving” we tried to make an AOR Christmas single. Last December we were in Japan, and they celebrate Christmas as a commerical holiday with all the decorations. Over there it’s a love holiday, like Valentine’s Day. And there in one store they had Santa on a cross hanging from the wall. Perfect. So the Christmas single was just an excuse to have Santa on a cross on the cover.
Roddy Frame talks about his new album, Seven Dials, and why he takes so long to make albums, in the new Uncut, dated June 2014, and out now.
The Aztec Camera man’s forthcoming Seven Dials album is the follow-up to 2006’s Western Skies, and only his fourth album as a solo artist.
“People ar...
Roddy Frame talks about his new album, Seven Dials, and why he takes so long to make albums, in the new Uncut, dated June 2014, and out now.
The Aztec Camera man’s forthcoming Seven Dials album is the follow-up to 2006’s Western Skies, and only his fourth album as a solo artist.
“People are asking why I’ve got gaps in my CV, but I didn’t think making music was ever about working to a schedule,” explain Frame. “Frankly, with some of the people I love, I wish they’d take more time and not make so many records.”
