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Win tickets to Ginger Baker’s 75th birthday gig!

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Win tickets to Ginger Baker’s 75th birthday gig!
Ginger Baker will celebrate his 75th birthday with a very special concert at London's Islington Academy in London on May 3. We're delighted to be able to offer a pair of tickets to the show. To enter, just tell us: What was the name of the first band to feature both Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce? ...

Ginger Baker will celebrate his 75th birthday with a very special concert at London’s Islington Academy in London on May 3.

We’re delighted to be able to offer a pair of tickets to the show.

To enter, just tell us:

What was the name of the first band to feature both Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce?

Send your entries to uncutcomp@ipcmedia.com. Please include your full name, address and a daytime phone number. The competition closes at noon GMT on Friday, April 25, 2014. The editor’s decision is final.

Baker is also releasing a career-spanning anthology called A Drummer’s Tale. You can find more about it here.

Tickets to Ginger Baker’s show at the Islington Academy are on-sale now priced £30.00 (subject to per-ticket charge plus order processing fee) and are available from www.livenation.co.uk or www.ticketmaster.co.uk.

Reviewed: Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon

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Reviewed: Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon

As Robert Gordon reminds us in Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion, his terrific account of the rise and fall of the great Memphis soul imprint, the Stax story is more than a record-label history. “It is an American story,” Gordon writes,” where the shoe-shine boy becomes a star, the country hayseed an international magnate. It’s the story of individuals against society, of small business competing with large, of the disenfranchised seeking their own tile in the American mosaic.” The success of Stax in its heyday was astonishing. Between 1960 and 1975, it released 800 singles and 300 albums, a huge proportion of them major hits on both the R&B and pop charts, the label making international stars of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, Booker T & The MG’s, Wilson Pickett and The Staple Singers, the label growing from homespun beginnings to a major money-making conglomerate with breath taking velocity. For Gordon, who grew up in Memphis as Stax was establishing its commercial supremacy, it remains nothing less than miraculous that a label that recognised no racial boundaries, whose founders were white but whose talent pool was largely drawn from the local black communities, should have flourished in a place where deep into the 20th century “plantation prejudices still prevailed”. As was the case with so many cities in America’s Deep South, racism in Memphis was deeply institutionalised. US President Lyndon Johnson may have introduced the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but Memphis simply ignored it, as if federal legislation had no legitimacy here and would therefore not be heeded or obeyed. The black population of Memphis thus remained unrecognised and unrepresented in local government, and was allowed no municipal voice. Its grievances and claims for equality were routinely brushed aside, an unwelcome chorus of complaint. In the converted cinema at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis where Stax built the legendary studio where in time it cranked out hit after hit after hit, young black and white musicians worked together freely. But outside, they were separated by the imperatives of strict and unforgiving segregation. In the circumstances, Stax, in Gordon’s words, became “an accidental refuge that flourished… nourished by a sense of decency” whose music “became the soundtrack for liberation, the song of triumph, the sound of the path toward freedom”. Such aspirations were not paramount in Jim Stewart’s ambitions when he modestly started Satellite Records in 1957. Stewart was 27 years old, working in a bank, studying law at night on the GI Bill and playing fiddle in a country band at weekends. Encouraged by the recent local example of Sam Phillips, a former mortuary assistant and radio technician who had made such a spectacular success of Sun Records, Stewart launched his own label as a side line that quickly became an obsession, an opportunity to make a few quick bucks that within a few years became the all-conquering Stax juggernaut. With crucial investment from his sister, Estelle Axton, Stewart moved Satellite from the rural garage where he recorded the label’s first records to the site of the old Capitol movie theatre on McLemore Avenue, changing the label’s name to Stax (a conflation of Jim and Estelle’s surnames, STewart/AXton) in the process. Gordon warmly relates the label’s initial rise, as Stewart and Axton, with vital initial input from engineer Chips Moman (subsequently ousted in an early power struggle), attracted and encouraged what turned out to be a torrent of interracial local talent, a seemingly inexhaustible tide of gifted songwriters, arrangers and musicians, including The MG’s, who became the Stax house band, most of whom were still in high school when the label started. Drawing on a vast archive of vivid interviews originally conducted for a PBS documentary on Stax, Gordon allows us to relive these exciting times. The fledgling label’s early success brought it to the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, whose distribution network brought Stax product to a national audience as part of a production deal that would eventually cost the Memphis label dearly. When the hits started coming, there seemed to be no end to them. The company grew quickly, many of its major artists discovered by its open door policy, aspiring talent often just walking in off the street, into the studio and onto the charts. These were heady times, with hits for Sam and Dave, Booker T & The MGs, William Bell, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett and, of course, Otis Redding, who after his incendiary performance at the Monterey festival introduced him to a huge new white audience was on his way to becoming an international superstar when he was killed in a plane crash that also claimed the lives of most of his backing band, The Bar-Kays. Many would later claim that Stax never recovered from the loss of Otis and it was further deeply demoralised when Warner Bros bought out Atlantic who it now turned out owned their entire back catalogue, the result of an overlooked clause in their original agreement of which Wexler later unconvincingly argued he had no knowledge. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis early the following year further soured the atmosphere between black and white employees at Stax who previously had given no thought to race. Former Memphis DJ Al Bell had been brought to Stax by Jim Stewart in 1965 as national promotions director now became increasingly influential, introducing a bold new programme of expansion that included the almost-instant creation of a whole new catalogue, funded by heavy duty loans that put the company hugely in debt but made a superstar of Isaac Hayes, who briefly brought Stax even greater riches, even as the label’s original creative core began to splinter, in often bitter circumstances as Bell brought in his own people, including the gun-toting enforcer Johnny Baylor, whose criminality presaged the widespread corruption revealed in the company’s subsequent fall from grace amid a tsunami of litigation and unpaid debts, the label’s decline as spectacular in every instance as its brief but incredible ascendency.

As Robert Gordon reminds us in Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion, his terrific account of the rise and fall of the great Memphis soul imprint, the Stax story is more than a record-label history. “It is an American story,” Gordon writes,” where the shoe-shine boy becomes a star, the country hayseed an international magnate. It’s the story of individuals against society, of small business competing with large, of the disenfranchised seeking their own tile in the American mosaic.”

The success of Stax in its heyday was astonishing. Between 1960 and 1975, it released 800 singles and 300 albums, a huge proportion of them major hits on both the R&B and pop charts, the label making international stars of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, Booker T & The MG’s, Wilson Pickett and The Staple Singers, the label growing from homespun beginnings to a major money-making conglomerate with breath taking velocity. For Gordon, who grew up in Memphis as Stax was establishing its commercial supremacy, it remains nothing less than miraculous that a label that recognised no racial boundaries, whose founders were white but whose talent pool was largely drawn from the local black communities, should have flourished in a place where deep into the 20th century “plantation prejudices still prevailed”.

As was the case with so many cities in America’s Deep South, racism in Memphis was deeply institutionalised. US President Lyndon Johnson may have introduced the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but Memphis simply ignored it, as if federal legislation had no legitimacy here and would therefore not be heeded or obeyed. The black population of Memphis thus remained unrecognised and unrepresented in local government, and was allowed no municipal voice. Its grievances and claims for equality were routinely brushed aside, an unwelcome chorus of complaint. In the converted cinema at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis where Stax built the legendary studio where in time it cranked out hit after hit after hit, young black and white musicians worked together freely. But outside, they were separated by the imperatives of strict and unforgiving segregation. In the circumstances, Stax, in Gordon’s words, became “an accidental refuge that flourished… nourished by a sense of decency” whose music “became the soundtrack for liberation, the song of triumph, the sound of the path toward freedom”.

Such aspirations were not paramount in Jim Stewart’s ambitions when he modestly started Satellite Records in 1957. Stewart was 27 years old, working in a bank, studying law at night on the GI Bill and playing fiddle in a country band at weekends. Encouraged by the recent local example of Sam Phillips, a former mortuary assistant and radio technician who had made such a spectacular success of Sun Records, Stewart launched his own label as a side line that quickly became an obsession, an opportunity to make a few quick bucks that within a few years became the all-conquering Stax juggernaut. With crucial investment from his sister, Estelle Axton, Stewart moved Satellite from the rural garage where he recorded the label’s first records to the site of the old Capitol movie theatre on McLemore Avenue, changing the label’s name to Stax (a conflation of Jim and Estelle’s surnames, STewart/AXton) in the process.

Gordon warmly relates the label’s initial rise, as Stewart and Axton, with vital initial input from engineer Chips Moman (subsequently ousted in an early power struggle), attracted and encouraged what turned out to be a torrent of interracial local talent, a seemingly inexhaustible tide of gifted songwriters, arrangers and musicians, including The MG’s, who became the Stax house band, most of whom were still in high school when the label started. Drawing on a vast archive of vivid interviews originally conducted for a PBS documentary on Stax, Gordon allows us to relive these exciting times. The fledgling label’s early success brought it to the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, whose distribution network brought Stax product to a national audience as part of a production deal that would eventually cost the Memphis label dearly.

When the hits started coming, there seemed to be no end to them. The company grew quickly, many of its major artists discovered by its open door policy, aspiring talent often just walking in off the street, into the studio and onto the charts. These were heady times, with hits for Sam and Dave, Booker T & The MGs, William Bell, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett and, of course, Otis Redding, who after his incendiary performance at the Monterey festival introduced him to a huge new white audience was on his way to becoming an international superstar when he was killed in a plane crash that also claimed the lives of most of his backing band, The Bar-Kays. Many would later claim that Stax never recovered from the loss of Otis and it was further deeply demoralised when Warner Bros bought out Atlantic who it now turned out owned their entire back catalogue, the result of an overlooked clause in their original agreement of which Wexler later unconvincingly argued he had no knowledge. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis early the following year further soured the atmosphere between black and white employees at Stax who previously had given no thought to race.

Former Memphis DJ Al Bell had been brought to Stax by Jim Stewart in 1965 as national promotions director now became increasingly influential, introducing a bold new programme of expansion that included the almost-instant creation of a whole new catalogue, funded by heavy duty loans that put the company hugely in debt but made a superstar of Isaac Hayes, who briefly brought Stax even greater riches, even as the label’s original creative core began to splinter, in often bitter circumstances as Bell brought in his own people, including the gun-toting enforcer Johnny Baylor, whose criminality presaged the widespread corruption revealed in the company’s subsequent fall from grace amid a tsunami of litigation and unpaid debts, the label’s decline as spectacular in every instance as its brief but incredible ascendency.

Malcolm Young to take break from AC/DC due to ill health

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Malcolm Young to take break from AC/DC due to ill health
AC/DC's Malcolm Young is to step down from the band due to ill health. Rumours have circulated in the past few days that the band might be forced to call it quits, with Choirboys frontman and friend of the band Mark Gable saying that the guitarist is seriously ill and will not be able to perform an...

AC/DC‘s Malcolm Young is to step down from the band due to ill health.

Rumours have circulated in the past few days that the band might be forced to call it quits, with Choirboys frontman and friend of the band Mark Gable saying that the guitarist is seriously ill and will not be able to perform any more.

A statement published on AC/DC’s Facebook page yesterday afternoon (April 16) confirms that Young will take a break from the group after four decades as a member.

“After 40 years of life dedicated to AC/DC, guitarist and founding member Malcolm Young is taking a break from the band due to ill health,” it reads. “Malcolm would like to thank the group’s diehard legions of fans worldwide for their never-ending love and support. In light of this news, AC/DC asks that Malcolm and his family’s privacy be respected during this time. The band will continue to make music.”

Yesterday, Brian Johnson also denied rumours suggesting the band would split but did confirm that a member of the band was ill and revealed that the band hope to record new music in May.

Nirvana approached PJ Harvey for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony

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Nirvana approached PJ Harvey for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony
Dave Grohl has revealed that Nirvana approached PJ Harvey and a number of male rock stars to fill in for Kurt Cobain at the band's Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony. The event, which took place at Brooklyn's Barclays Center on April 10, saw four female performers stand in for Cobain: St...

Dave Grohl has revealed that Nirvana approached PJ Harvey and a number of male rock stars to fill in for Kurt Cobain at the band’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony.

The event, which took place at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on April 10, saw four female performers stand in for Cobain: St Vincent, Joan Jett, Kim Gordon and Lorde.

But Grohl told Rolling Stone that a number of A-list male rock stars were originally in the frame. “Some of them were nervous,” he said. “I think some of them were maybe apprehensive because of how heavy the whole thing is.”

After Joan Jett signed up, the band next approached PJ Harvey. Grohl said: “Kurt loved PJ Harvey. We had always imagined playing our song ‘Milk It‘ from In Utero with her. It’s a twisted song, almost like something that could have been on her record Rid Of Me, which was also produced by Steve Albini. It just seemed to pair up so well. Unfortunately, she couldn’t make it.”

It was at that point, Grohl said, that the idea to use only female singers was hatched.

This wasn’t the first time PJ Harvey has been invited to join the remaining Nirvana members on stage. In February 2013, Harvey was invited to join the band’s surviving members at a concert in London for a performance of “Milk It”. The event was a show by Grohl’s freeform supergroup, Sound City Players.

“We were thinking about musicians that we could invite,” Grohl told NME. “Someone came up with the idea of doing a Nirvana song with PJ Harvey. Kurt loved her and we love her and we thought, ‘Yeah, what would we do?'”

“I said: ‘God, what if we were to do ‘Milk It’ from In Utero, with Polly singing?'” he recalled. “We all looked at each other, like, ‘Whoa, that would be amazing!’ … And then she couldn’t do it!”

The 15th Uncut Playlist Of 2014

John Mulvey
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The 15th Uncut Playlist Of 2014

One of the books I’ve enjoyed most in the past couple of years is “Pulphead”, a collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s longform, creative and not always entirely reliable journalism. The much-cited pieces on Michael Jackson and Axl Rose aren’t Sullivan’s best music work there, for me; he’s better, deeper and more revealing, I think, about Bunny Wailer and the blues. As I started reading Sullivan’s new piece, “The Ballad Of Geeshie And Elvie” in the New York Times this week, though, the essay I immediately thought of was a complex, mostly plausible one on a war between humans and animals that’s substantially better than its title, “Violence Of The Lambs”. “The Ballad Of Geeshie And Elvie” is about old blues music and the myths that accumulate around it. It’s about how we preserve and interrogate those myths, and about the obsessive, proud and difficult people who notionally try to crack them. And it has such a dynamic, gripping story to tell, with a thriller-like structure of startling revelations opening up after trails have apparently gone dead, that it feels, in the same way as “Violence Of The Lambs”, like a very artful brand of fiction. It isn’t, though. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I should say no more if you haven’t read it already, but “The Ballad Of Geeshie And Elvie” is by some distance the best thing I’ve read in months; please take the time to enjoy it over Easter, and we can talk about it next week. One other reading recommendation (I’ll save plugging the forthcoming issue of my own actual magazine ‘til next week), since I’ve linked to it yet again this week: I visit no blog as often as Doom And Gloom From The Tomb, and as a considered and curated resource for much of the music I love, old and new, there’s nowhere better on the internet that I’ve found. Here, meanwhile: new tracks to hear from Grandma Sparrow, Fennesz, Four Tet and The Reigning Sound, plus a nuts 8-bit take on Slint and Dylan Howe’s beguiling jazz rethink of Berlin-era Bowie. Not a bad week really. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey 1 Grandma Sparrow - Grandma Sparrow & his Piddletractor Orchestra (Spacebomb) 2 Steve Gunn & Mike Cooper – FRKWYS VOL 11: Cantos De Lisboa (RVNG INTL) 3 Jessica Lea Mayfield – Make My Head Sing (ATO) 4 Lana Del Rey – West Coast (Interscope) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3SqUUoJjW8 5 Martin & Eliza Carthy – The Moral Of The Elephant (Topic) 6 Dead Moon – In The Graveyard (Mladys) 7 Fennesz – Bécs (Editions Mego) 8 Dylan Howe – Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie's Berlin (Motorik) 9 [REDACTED] 10 The Pierces – Creation (Polydor) 11 Leon Russell – Life Journey (Universal) 12 8-Bit Version Of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVgWDpmN9TI 13 Four Tet – Percussions/Blatant Water Cannon (Text) 14 The Reigning Sound – Falling Rain (Merge) 15 Geeshie Wiley – Last Kind Words Blues (New York Times) 16 Nelly – Country Grammar (Motown) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5qKNlcUwKs 17 The Secret Sisters – Put Your Needle Down (Decca) 18 The Felice Brothers – Favorite Waitress (Dualtone) 19 Alexis Taylor – Await Barbarians (Domino) 20 Julie Byrne – Rooms With Walls And Windows (Orindal) 21 Various Artists – DJ Kicks: Brandt Brauer Frick (!K7) 22 Cian Nugent & The Cosmos – The Houses Of Parliament (Doom And Gloom From The Tomb) 23 Hurray For The Riff Raff – Small Town Heroes (ATO)

One of the books I’ve enjoyed most in the past couple of years is “Pulphead”, a collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s longform, creative and not always entirely reliable journalism.

The much-cited pieces on Michael Jackson and Axl Rose aren’t Sullivan’s best music work there, for me; he’s better, deeper and more revealing, I think, about Bunny Wailer and the blues. As I started reading Sullivan’s new piece, “The Ballad Of Geeshie And Elvie” in the New York Times this week, though, the essay I immediately thought of was a complex, mostly plausible one on a war between humans and animals that’s substantially better than its title, “Violence Of The Lambs”. “The Ballad Of Geeshie And Elvie” is about old blues music and the myths that accumulate around it. It’s about how we preserve and interrogate those myths, and about the obsessive, proud and difficult people who notionally try to crack them. And it has such a dynamic, gripping story to tell, with a thriller-like structure of startling revelations opening up after trails have apparently gone dead, that it feels, in the same way as “Violence Of The Lambs”, like a very artful brand of fiction.

It isn’t, though. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I should say no more if you haven’t read it already, but “The Ballad Of Geeshie And Elvie” is by some distance the best thing I’ve read in months; please take the time to enjoy it over Easter, and we can talk about it next week.

One other reading recommendation (I’ll save plugging the forthcoming issue of my own actual magazine ‘til next week), since I’ve linked to it yet again this week: I visit no blog as often as Doom And Gloom From The Tomb, and as a considered and curated resource for much of the music I love, old and new, there’s nowhere better on the internet that I’ve found.

Here, meanwhile: new tracks to hear from Grandma Sparrow, Fennesz, Four Tet and The Reigning Sound, plus a nuts 8-bit take on Slint and Dylan Howe’s beguiling jazz rethink of Berlin-era Bowie. Not a bad week really.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

1 Grandma Sparrow – Grandma Sparrow & his Piddletractor Orchestra (Spacebomb)

2 Steve Gunn & Mike Cooper – FRKWYS VOL 11: Cantos De Lisboa (RVNG INTL)

3 Jessica Lea Mayfield – Make My Head Sing (ATO)

4 Lana Del Rey – West Coast (Interscope)

5 Martin & Eliza Carthy – The Moral Of The Elephant (Topic)

6 Dead Moon – In The Graveyard (Mladys)

7 Fennesz – Bécs (Editions Mego)

8 Dylan Howe – Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie’s Berlin (Motorik)

9 [REDACTED]

10 The Pierces – Creation (Polydor)

11 Leon Russell – Life Journey (Universal)

12 8-Bit Version Of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVgWDpmN9TI

13 Four Tet – Percussions/Blatant Water Cannon (Text)

14 The Reigning Sound – Falling Rain (Merge)

15 Geeshie Wiley – Last Kind Words Blues (New York Times)

16 Nelly – Country Grammar (Motown)

17 The Secret Sisters – Put Your Needle Down (Decca)

18 The Felice Brothers – Favorite Waitress (Dualtone)

19 Alexis Taylor – Await Barbarians (Domino)

20 Julie Byrne – Rooms With Walls And Windows (Orindal)

21 Various Artists – DJ Kicks: Brandt Brauer Frick (!K7)

22 Cian Nugent & The Cosmos – The Houses Of Parliament (Doom And Gloom From The Tomb)

23 Hurray For The Riff Raff – Small Town Heroes (ATO)

Brian Johnson: AC/DC are not retiring

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Brian Johnson: AC/DC are not retiring
Brian Johnson has debunked rumours that AC/DC are about to retire. Speaking to The Telegraph, Johnson revealed that the band are planning to get together and write material for a prospective new album, despite the ill-health of one of their members, believed to be rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young. "...

Brian Johnson has debunked rumours that AC/DC are about to retire.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Johnson revealed that the band are planning to get together and write material for a prospective new album, despite the ill-health of one of their members, believed to be rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young.

“We are definitely getting together in May in Vancouver,” Johnson told the Telegraph. “We’re going to pick up some guitars, have a plonk, and see if anybody has got any tunes or ideas. If anything happens, we’ll record it.”

“I wouldn’t like to say anything either way about the future,” he continued. “I’m not ruling anything out. One of the boys has a debilitating illness, but I don’t want to say too much about it. He is very proud and private, a wonderful chap. We’ve been pals for 35 years and I look up to him very much.”

Reports broke yesterday [April 15] that the band were due to retire when an anonymous source known as ‘Thunderstruck’ told Australian radio station, 6PR: “I have extremely good contacts in Europe that are very close to AC/DC. I have it on very good authority that one of the band members is quite ill and has returned to Australia with his family.”

The source continued: “AC/DC members have previously made a pact that no band members will be replaced should someone need to leave the band. No more is currently being said, however the particularly ill member of AC/DC’s son has stated that AC/DC may well be over.”

It is rumoured that Malcolm Young has suffered a stroke. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Mark Gable, the frontman of fellow Australian band Choirboys, told ABC Radio: “”From what I understand, and it’s even been confirmed in part by his son Ross (Young), that it would appear Malcolm is unable to perform anymore. It’s not just that he is unwell, it’s that it is quite serious. It will constitute that he definitely won’t be able to perform live. He will probably not be able to record.”

However, Johnson’s new interview with The Telegraph is the first time a band member has addressed the rumours, although Billboard reported that the group’s management and Columbia Records, its current label, had chosen not to comment on the matter.

The Secret Sisters complete unfinished Bob Dylan song

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The Secret Sisters complete unfinished Bob Dylan song
The Secret Sisters have completed an unfinished Bob Dylan song from the 1980s. The track, called "Dirty Lie", appears on their new album, Put Your Needle Down, which was produced by T Bone Burnett. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Laura Rogers from The Secret Sisters said, "We were in the middle of our ...

The Secret Sisters have completed an unfinished Bob Dylan song from the 1980s.

The track, called “Dirty Lie“, appears on their new album, Put Your Needle Down, which was produced by T Bone Burnett.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Laura Rogers from The Secret Sisters said, “We were in the middle of our recording session with T Bone and he said to us, ‘Bob sent over some songs for you guys to listen to and choose one to finish.’ It was the weirdest thing ever to even be considered to finish it in a way that even remotely measures up to what he is known for. So we looked at four or five demos he’d sent, and [‘Dirty Lie’] really spoke to us.”

Dylan’s “Dirty Lie” dates from the mid-Eighties and exists in a bootleg rehearsal recording from the Arena di Verona on May 27, 1984.

Put Your Needle Down also includes a cover of PJ Harvey‘s “The Pocket Knife”.

It will be released by Decca/Republic on May 26.

Photo credit: Autumn de Wilde

Robert Plant plays church charity concert

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Robert Plant plays church charity concert
Robert Plant stunned village goers in the rural town of Northlearch, Gloucestershire last weekend when he performed at the town's local church. Plant was joined by Steve Winwood, Bill Hunt from Wizzard and Tony Kelsey from The Move at the St. Peter and St. Paul church on April 13 with all proceeds...

Robert Plant stunned village goers in the rural town of Northlearch, Gloucestershire last weekend when he performed at the town’s local church.

Plant was joined by Steve Winwood, Bill Hunt from Wizzard and Tony Kelsey from The Move at the St. Peter and St. Paul church on April 13 with all proceeds of over £5,000 going toward The Children’s Society, Christian Aid and Open Doors.

Over 400 villagers crammed into the church for the annual charity event, which usually only attracts around half that number.

Organiser of the event, 71-year-old retired gardener Gordon Jackson, discussed the performance with the Gloucestershire Echo, saying: “I had his contact details, so I sent him an email asking him if he fancied playing, and got one back within an hour saying yes. Robert performed ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine‘, and he asked Steve if he wanted to sing a verse or two. So they duetted, I don’t think they’ve ever done that before.”

He continued: “I’ve been putting on a concert since 1991, I started in Bourton-on-the-Water where I ran a youth group, and Steve Winwood has been taking part since the start. We’ve had all sorts of people, Ruby Turner has played for three years.”

Jackson went on to comment that next year’s event would have to be even bigger, joking he would need to get Elvis Presley to perform.

Hear new Paul Weller track, “Brand New Toy”

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Hear new Paul Weller track, “Brand New Toy”
Paul Weller has announced he will release a new single for Record Store Day. You can hear the track, "Brand New Toy", below. Weller has also revealed details of a new compilation album More Modern Classics, featuring tracks from the past 15 years of the singer's solo career. The album will be re...

Paul Weller has announced he will release a new single for Record Store Day.

You can hear the track, “Brand New Toy“, below.

Weller has also revealed details of a new compilation album More Modern Classics, featuring tracks from the past 15 years of the singer’s solo career.

The album will be released on June 2 and acts as the follow up to 1998 compilation Modern Classics.

In support of the album release, Weller will play two London gigs in May. Venue details for the “unique and intimate” live shows have yet to be announced but fans can gain access to an exclusive pre-sale when they pre-order More Modern Classics. Tickets will be limited to two per person. Once a pre-order is made at the PaulWeller.com official store, fans will receive information on how to enter the pre-sale).

The More Modern Classics tracklisting is as follows:

‘He’s The Keeper’

‘Sweet Pea My Sweet Pea’

‘It’s Written In The Stars’

‘Wishing On A Star’

‘From The Floorboards Up’

‘Come On Let’s Go’

‘Wild Blue Yonder’

‘Have You Made Up Your Mind’

‘Echoes Round The Sun’

‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)’

‘Push It Along’

’22 Dreams’

‘No Tears To Cry’

‘Wake Up The Nation’

‘Fast Car/Slow Traffic’

‘Starlite’

‘That Dangerous Age’

‘When Your Garden’s Overgrown’

‘The Attic’

‘Flame-Out!’

‘Brand New Toy’

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: latest tour news

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Neil Young & Crazy Horse: latest tour news
Neil Young & Crazy Horse have announced an additional live date to their European tour itinerary. They will now play at Monte-Carlo Sporting Summer Festival in Monaco, France on August 7, 2014. The Europe tour dates for Neil Young and Crazy Horse so far are: July 07, Laugardalshöllin, Reykja...

Neil Young & Crazy Horse have announced an additional live date to their European tour itinerary.

They will now play at Monte-Carlo Sporting Summer Festival in Monaco, France on August 7, 2014.

The Europe tour dates for Neil Young and Crazy Horse so far are:

July 07, Laugardalshöllin, Reykjavík, Iceland

July 10, Live At The Marquee, Cork, Ireland

July 12, Hyde Park, London, England

July 13, Echo Arena, Liverpool, England

July 15, KüçükÇiftlik Park, Istanbul, Turkey

July 17, Yarkon Park, Tel-Aviv, Israel

July 20, Münsterplatz, Ulm, Germany

July 21, Collisioni Festival, Barolo, Italy

July 23, Wiener Stadthalle, Wien, Austria

July 25, Warsteiner Hockeypark, Mönchengladbach, Germany

July 26, Filmnächte am Elbufer, Dresden, Germany

July 28, Zollhafen – Nordmole, Mainz, Germany

July 30, København Forum, København, Denmark

August 1, Bergenhus Festning – Koengen, Bergen, Norway

August 5, Lokerse Feesten, Lokeren, Belgium

August 7, Monte-Carlo Sporting Summer Festival, Monaco, France

August 8, Foire aux Vins de Colmar, Colmar, France

Meanwhile, Young’s Pono Kickstarter campaign has raised over $6 million since it launched last month.

According to Billboard, PonoMusic is now the third most funded campaign in Kickstarter history.

The campaign closed out at over $6 million on April 15. Rolling Stone reports that 18,220 people backed the campaign, pledging $6,225,354. Rolling Stone also reports that the player has a suggested retail price of $399 and contains 128 gigabytes of memory, which can store between 1,000 and 2,000 high-resolution songs. The device will also accept memory cards to hold more music and playlists.

Young recently concluded a run of four solo acoustic shows at the Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles.

His proposed Record Store Day reissue of Time Fades Away has also been postponed.

Dave Edmunds at 70! Happy birthday, boyo!

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Dave Edmunds at 70! Happy birthday, boyo!

First of all, there was the somewhat staggering recent news that Captain Sensible was about to turn 60. Then a few weeks ago, Nick Lowe was 65. And today, it turns out, Dave Edmunds, Nick’s former best mate and partner in Rockpile, is 70. Back in what is commonly if sometimes vaguely called ‘the day’, I spent a lot of time with Nick and Dave, much of it involving a fairly spectacular amount of drink and assorted nonsense, all of it hilarious, including a Rockpile tour in 1979, a moment from which is recalled below. Have a good week. Midnight, in a hotel room in Leicester, thick with cigarette smoke and laughter, several bottles of wine, a couple of them already empty, on a small table besides the bed where Nick Lowe is stretched out, like a garrulous corpse, an ubiquitous Senior Service dangling rakishly from his lips. Dave Edmunds is at the foot of the bed, uncorking another bottle of plonk, and struggling to remember when he first met Nick. “I can remember meeting you,” Nick, prone to sentimentality in his cups, tells Edmunds. “You were my hero. I was in total awe of you. I remember when I was first in a group and I heard Dave with Love Sculpture on the John Peel show. I thought it was the most fan-fucking-tastic thing I’d ever heard in my life. Dai was my absolute hero.” “Please, Nick. . .” Edmunds says, embarrassed. “You were, man,” Nick gushes. “I remember one night, the Brinsleys were recording at Rockfield and we’d done a version of a Chuck Berry song. . .” “’Don’t Lie To Me’. I remember that.” “You thought it was great, and we really got off on that, because you were such a mystery figure, and you actually mixed that track, and another one, ‘Home In My Hand’. It sounded fantastic. We couldn’t believe it.” “I don’t even remember it coming out,” Edmunds confesses, a bit baffled. “Oh,” Nick says, trying to light a fag. “We never released it. We thought, ‘It doesn’t really sound like us.’ And we dumped it.” Nick pours himself another half pint of wine. “We didn’t really become friends, though, until I produced that Brinsleys’ album,” Edmunds says, trying to plot a chronological course to the present, which finds Dave back with Nick in Rockpile after a spat on an American tour with Bad Company had seen Nick walking out on the band. “New Favourites, yeah,” Nick remembers. “But we still weren’t chums. It was only when you moved to London from Rockfield that we started knocking about together.” “That’s when the shit really hit the fan,” Edmunds recalls. “I was going through a divorce and I came to London and I was really down. I was drinking a hell of a lot. Some people breeze through a divorce, but some people end up in a mental hospital. I didn’t get that bad, but it was still a huge upheaval. I was really hitting the bottle.” “Dai’s problem,” Nick interrupts, “was that he had no real mates. He’d been living in, like, seclusion at Rockfield, never came out of the studio. People were rather in awe of him. There was no one close to him who could say, ‘Look here, Edmunds, old chap, you’re really fucking up your life, pull yourself together, man.’ People were scared to say anything to him.” “At least you called me up and asked if there was anything you could do to help.” “Basically, that was because I wanted to learn things from you, Dai,” Nick laughs, spilling his wine and dropping his cigarette on the floor, where it burns a small hole in the carpet. “I was always coming up with things like, ‘’Ere, Dai, you know that handclap sound on that version you did of ‘Needle In A Haystack’? How did you do that?’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, it’s a delay spring, a very short delay spring.’ “And I’d go, ‘Oh, yeah. Of course it is.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the next time I was in the studio pretending to produce someone, I’d turn suddenly to the engineer and say, ‘HEY! Give me some delay spring on this!’ And I’d just sit there and hope to God I hadn’t just made a complete idiot of myself. And the engineer would say, ‘Fine, yeah.’ And sure enough, out would come the same handclap sound. “I must say,” Nick goes on, “that I basically wasn’t much help at all to Dai. When he was telling me about his divorce and all his endless problems, I was just trying to nick all his fucking ideas.” “We never had any real plans to work together,” Edmunds says, moving things along, “until I got a deal with SwanSong and we were out drinking, standing at a bar somewhere. . .” “It was The Nashville, a Graham Parker gig,” Nick suddenly recalls. “I remember I had a terrible hangover and I said to Nick, ‘I’ve got to make an album, have you got a song for me?’ And he just said, ‘Let’s write one.’ I’d been trying to write songs for years, and I’d never been able to. So we were at the bar of The Nashville, trying to come up with an idea for a song. I said, ‘No one’s written a song about the weekend since Eddie Cochran, let’s do one about the weekend.’ We were at the bar, actually writing it. We went into the dressing room, the quietest place we could find, and Nick scratched it out on the back of a cigarette packet. By the end of Graham’s set, we had ‘Here Comes The Weekend’. I’d been trying for years to write a song, you know, and suddenly I was doing it.” God knows what time it is by now, but I notice there’s only one bottle of wine left and Nick, very squiffy by now, is pouring most of that into his glass and having a groan about not being what he calls ‘fashionable’, citing criticism of his new album, Labour Of Lust as evidence. “Nobody thinks I’m hip,” he says, somewhat sorry for himself. “Get a grip, Nick,” Edmunds advises sagely. “But it’s true,” Nick blearily laments. “The album was terribly slagged. But who cares?” he asks, trying to put a brave face on things. “The only people who read reviews of my records are the people who write them, me and my mum.” “The album’s still selling,” Dave tells him. “Oh, yeah,” Nick laughs bitterly. “It’s crawling up the charts with a fucking anvil around its neck. But I still think I’m streets better than most people making records today. There are all these very serious people trying desperately to look thin. They’re all crap. I mean, whenever I hear Siouxsie And The Banshees, I think, ‘Come back, Curved Air, all is forgiven.’ I’m much better than any of them, whatever anyone else says.” “That’s telling them, boyo,” Edmunds roars, almost falling off the end of the bed. “It’s true, Dai, don’t fucking laugh.” “But that’s the point, Nick,” Edmunds says, grappling with Nick for the wine, Nick reluctant to let go of the bottle. “What it all comes down to is this: if you can’t laugh, fuck it. And if you can’t fuck it, laugh.” Nick looks at Dave, stunned, as if he has just been told one of the secrets of the universe, a truth imparted from the invisible lips of God. “Dai,” he says, incredulous. “You’re fucking marvellous. I love you, man.” “Easy, Nick,” Edmunds says, finally wrestling the wine from Nick’s white-knuckled grip. “Easy.” Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds pic: George Rose/Getty Images

First of all, there was the somewhat staggering recent news that Captain Sensible was about to turn 60. Then a few weeks ago, Nick Lowe was 65. And today, it turns out, Dave Edmunds, Nick’s former best mate and partner in Rockpile, is 70.

Back in what is commonly if sometimes vaguely called ‘the day’, I spent a lot of time with Nick and Dave, much of it involving a fairly spectacular amount of drink and assorted nonsense, all of it hilarious, including a Rockpile tour in 1979, a moment from which is recalled below.

Have a good week.

Midnight, in a hotel room in Leicester, thick with cigarette smoke and laughter, several bottles of wine, a couple of them already empty, on a small table besides the bed where Nick Lowe is stretched out, like a garrulous corpse, an ubiquitous Senior Service dangling rakishly from his lips. Dave Edmunds is at the foot of the bed, uncorking another bottle of plonk, and struggling to remember when he first met Nick.

“I can remember meeting you,” Nick, prone to sentimentality in his cups, tells Edmunds. “You were my hero. I was in total awe of you. I remember when I was first in a group and I heard Dave with Love Sculpture on the John Peel show. I thought it was the most fan-fucking-tastic thing I’d ever heard in my life. Dai was my absolute hero.”

“Please, Nick. . .” Edmunds says, embarrassed.

“You were, man,” Nick gushes. “I remember one night, the Brinsleys were recording at Rockfield and we’d done a version of a Chuck Berry song. . .”

“’Don’t Lie To Me’. I remember that.”

“You thought it was great, and we really got off on that, because you were such a mystery figure, and you actually mixed that track, and another one, ‘Home In My Hand’. It sounded fantastic. We couldn’t believe it.”

“I don’t even remember it coming out,” Edmunds confesses, a bit baffled.

“Oh,” Nick says, trying to light a fag. “We never released it. We thought, ‘It doesn’t really sound like us.’ And we dumped it.”

Nick pours himself another half pint of wine.

“We didn’t really become friends, though, until I produced that Brinsleys’ album,” Edmunds says, trying to plot a chronological course to the present, which finds Dave back with Nick in Rockpile after a spat on an American tour with Bad Company had seen Nick walking out on the band.

“New Favourites, yeah,” Nick remembers. “But we still weren’t chums. It was only when you moved to London from Rockfield that we started knocking about together.”

“That’s when the shit really hit the fan,” Edmunds recalls. “I was going through a divorce and I came to London and I was really down. I was drinking a hell of a lot. Some people breeze through a divorce, but some people end up in a mental hospital. I didn’t get that bad, but it was still a huge upheaval. I was really hitting the bottle.”

“Dai’s problem,” Nick interrupts, “was that he had no real mates. He’d been living in, like, seclusion at Rockfield, never came out of the studio. People were rather in awe of him. There was no one close to him who could say, ‘Look here, Edmunds, old chap, you’re really fucking up your life, pull yourself together, man.’ People were scared to say anything to him.”

“At least you called me up and asked if there was anything you could do to help.”

“Basically, that was because I wanted to learn things from you, Dai,” Nick laughs, spilling his wine and dropping his cigarette on the floor, where it burns a small hole in the carpet. “I was always coming up with things like, ‘’Ere, Dai, you know that handclap sound on that version you did of ‘Needle In A Haystack’? How did you do that?’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, it’s a delay spring, a very short delay spring.’

“And I’d go, ‘Oh, yeah. Of course it is.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the next time I was in the studio pretending to produce someone, I’d turn suddenly to the engineer and say, ‘HEY! Give me some delay spring on this!’ And I’d just sit there and hope to God I hadn’t just made a complete idiot of myself. And the engineer would say, ‘Fine, yeah.’ And sure enough, out would come the same handclap sound.

“I must say,” Nick goes on, “that I basically wasn’t much help at all to Dai. When he was telling me about his divorce and all his endless problems, I was just trying to nick all his fucking ideas.”

“We never had any real plans to work together,” Edmunds says, moving things along, “until I got a deal with SwanSong and we were out drinking, standing at a bar somewhere. . .”

“It was The Nashville, a Graham Parker gig,” Nick suddenly recalls.

“I remember I had a terrible hangover and I said to Nick, ‘I’ve got to make an album, have you got a song for me?’ And he just said, ‘Let’s write one.’ I’d been trying to write songs for years, and I’d never been able to. So we were at the bar of The Nashville, trying to come up with an idea for a song. I said, ‘No one’s written a song about the weekend since Eddie Cochran, let’s do one about the weekend.’ We were at the bar, actually writing it. We went into the dressing room, the quietest place we could find, and Nick scratched it out on the back of a cigarette packet. By the end of Graham’s set, we had ‘Here Comes The Weekend’. I’d been trying for years to write a song, you know, and suddenly I was doing it.”

God knows what time it is by now, but I notice there’s only one bottle of wine left and Nick, very squiffy by now, is pouring most of that into his glass and having a groan about not being what he calls ‘fashionable’, citing criticism of his new album, Labour Of Lust as evidence.

“Nobody thinks I’m hip,” he says, somewhat sorry for himself.

“Get a grip, Nick,” Edmunds advises sagely.

“But it’s true,” Nick blearily laments. “The album was terribly slagged. But who cares?” he asks, trying to put a brave face on things. “The only people who read reviews of my records are the people who write them, me and my mum.”

“The album’s still selling,” Dave tells him.

“Oh, yeah,” Nick laughs bitterly. “It’s crawling up the charts with a fucking anvil around its neck. But I still think I’m streets better than most people making records today. There are all these very serious people trying desperately to look thin. They’re all crap. I mean, whenever I hear Siouxsie And The Banshees, I think, ‘Come back, Curved Air, all is forgiven.’ I’m much better than any of them, whatever anyone else says.”

“That’s telling them, boyo,” Edmunds roars, almost falling off the end of the bed.

“It’s true, Dai, don’t fucking laugh.”

“But that’s the point, Nick,” Edmunds says, grappling with Nick for the wine, Nick reluctant to let go of the bottle. “What it all comes down to is this: if you can’t laugh, fuck it. And if you can’t fuck it, laugh.”

Nick looks at Dave, stunned, as if he has just been told one of the secrets of the universe, a truth imparted from the invisible lips of God.

“Dai,” he says, incredulous. “You’re fucking marvellous. I love you, man.”

“Easy, Nick,” Edmunds says, finally wrestling the wine from Nick’s white-knuckled grip. “Easy.”

Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds pic: George Rose/Getty Images

First Look – Fargo: The TV Series!

Michael Bonner
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First Look – Fargo: The TV Series!

In the opening voiceover for their debut, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers established the methodology that has driven their films ever since: “I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, president of the United States, man of the year, something can always go wrong.” Across 16 movies, they have exercised this philosophy without impunity on a range of characters including a playwright, a car salesman, a professor of physics and most recently a folk singer. This same spirit of cruelty pervades Fargo, the small screen spin-off from their 1996 film, that similarly finds an insurance salesman experiencing first hand the ways in which “something can always go wrong” in the Coens universe. As we have seen in the last 10 years, television has largely overtaken cinema as the destination for must-see drama and comedy: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men or Game Of Thrones. While many directors, actors and behind the scenes personnel have made their way from the movies to television, the same isn't necessarily true of the material they produce (although the culinary activities of Dr Lecter have made a successful transition to the television via Hannibal, which is entering its second series, while a small screen spin-off from the Marvel Universe, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D, has also been rolled out). While this series of Fargo, on Fox in the States and Channel 4 here in the UK, has the small screen very much in mind, it thankfully doesn't stray too far from the Coens' original vision. As with their 1996 film, the series follows the attempts of a man to extricate himself from a calamitous situation involving some bad dudes from out of town. In both, the action unfolds against the bleak, snowy landscape of Minnesota. But there are subtle differences. Whereas the film found William H Macy as incompetent car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, who hired a pair of criminals to kidnap his wife for a share of the ransom, here Martin Freeman plays incompetent insurance salesman Lester Nygaard, who finds himself involved with a stranger, Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton): as with Jerry, Lester has no idea who or what he is dealing with. The setting in the TV series is Bemidji, Minnesota; as with the film, Fargo itself is some distance away, where bad things seem to happen. In the Coens film, it’s where Jerry meets his prospective kidnappers, while here, it is the home of a crime syndicate, with whom Lorne Malvo may likely be involved. The series includes a heavily pregnant woman but, unlike the Coens film, she’s not the chief of police but his wife. There is a sheriff’s deputy, Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), who superficially at least resembles Frances McDormand’s police officer Marge Gunderson. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmuoMw7Gamk This isn’t the first attempt to adapt the Coens film for television. In 1997, Kathy Bates directed a pilot, with Edie Falco cast as Gunderson; it eventually aired as a TV movie in 2003. For this version, showrunner Noah Hawley has wisely decided not to incorporate any characters directly from the film, although the Minnesota manners and a Coens-esque ear for peculiar vernacular remain intact. If Northern Exposure (a useful reference point) was about eccentric characters living in the wilds of Alaska, then Fargo finds gentle humour among the ordinary comings and going of small town life in the Midwest. When Larry and his wife arrive for dinner at his brother’s house, as his sister-in-law opens the front door his she delivers the deathless line: “Come on in, Chris is working the ham.” One character, delightfully, is described as being “dumber than a dog’s foot.” For those of us who have recently bade farewell to True Detective’s stellar double act Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, it seems possible that Freeman and Thornton will more than adequately fill their places. Freeman’s Larry channels a little of Tim's mildness from The Office: he refuses to react when is insulted by his brother ("Sometimes I tell people you're dead") or by his wife and is still picked on by the old high school bully. Thornton’s Malvo, meanwhile, continues a Coens tradition of villains with bad hair: here, the wig and dyed beard make him look like a demonic Paul Rodgers. As he gradually insinuates his way into Bemidji, the story begins to resemble some kind of medieval tale, where the Devil comes to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting population of a remote village. Freeman and Thornton aside, as the show’s 10 week run progresses, I suspect we’ll see more of Tolman’s Molly and another policeman Colin Hanks’ Gus, who has his own chilling encounter with Malvo, and hopefully Molly’s father, seen at the end of the first episode, played by Keith Carradine. So far, though, I'm unhappy to report, there's no sign of the woodchipper. Fargo begins on Channel 4 on Sunday, April 20 Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

In the opening voiceover for their debut, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers established the methodology that has driven their films ever since: “I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, president of the United States, man of the year, something can always go wrong.”

Across 16 movies, they have exercised this philosophy without impunity on a range of characters including a playwright, a car salesman, a professor of physics and most recently a folk singer. This same spirit of cruelty pervades Fargo, the small screen spin-off from their 1996 film, that similarly finds an insurance salesman experiencing first hand the ways in which “something can always go wrong” in the Coens universe.

As we have seen in the last 10 years, television has largely overtaken cinema as the destination for must-see drama and comedy: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men or Game Of Thrones. While many directors, actors and behind the scenes personnel have made their way from the movies to television, the same isn’t necessarily true of the material they produce (although the culinary activities of Dr Lecter have made a successful transition to the television via Hannibal, which is entering its second series, while a small screen spin-off from the Marvel Universe, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D, has also been rolled out). While this series of Fargo, on Fox in the States and Channel 4 here in the UK, has the small screen very much in mind, it thankfully doesn’t stray too far from the Coens’ original vision. As with their 1996 film, the series follows the attempts of a man to extricate himself from a calamitous situation involving some bad dudes from out of town. In both, the action unfolds against the bleak, snowy landscape of Minnesota. But there are subtle differences. Whereas the film found William H Macy as incompetent car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, who hired a pair of criminals to kidnap his wife for a share of the ransom, here Martin Freeman plays incompetent insurance salesman Lester Nygaard, who finds himself involved with a stranger, Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton): as with Jerry, Lester has no idea who or what he is dealing with. The setting in the TV series is Bemidji, Minnesota; as with the film, Fargo itself is some distance away, where bad things seem to happen. In the Coens film, it’s where Jerry meets his prospective kidnappers, while here, it is the home of a crime syndicate, with whom Lorne Malvo may likely be involved. The series includes a heavily pregnant woman but, unlike the Coens film, she’s not the chief of police but his wife. There is a sheriff’s deputy, Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), who superficially at least resembles Frances McDormand’s police officer Marge Gunderson.

This isn’t the first attempt to adapt the Coens film for television. In 1997, Kathy Bates directed a pilot, with Edie Falco cast as Gunderson; it eventually aired as a TV movie in 2003. For this version, showrunner Noah Hawley has wisely decided not to incorporate any characters directly from the film, although the Minnesota manners and a Coens-esque ear for peculiar vernacular remain intact. If Northern Exposure (a useful reference point) was about eccentric characters living in the wilds of Alaska, then Fargo finds gentle humour among the ordinary comings and going of small town life in the Midwest. When Larry and his wife arrive for dinner at his brother’s house, as his sister-in-law opens the front door his she delivers the deathless line: “Come on in, Chris is working the ham.” One character, delightfully, is described as being “dumber than a dog’s foot.”

For those of us who have recently bade farewell to True Detective’s stellar double act Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, it seems possible that Freeman and Thornton will more than adequately fill their places. Freeman’s Larry channels a little of Tim’s mildness from The Office: he refuses to react when is insulted by his brother (“Sometimes I tell people you’re dead”) or by his wife and is still picked on by the old high school bully. Thornton’s Malvo, meanwhile, continues a Coens tradition of villains with bad hair: here, the wig and dyed beard make him look like a demonic Paul Rodgers. As he gradually insinuates his way into Bemidji, the story begins to resemble some kind of medieval tale, where the Devil comes to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting population of a remote village. Freeman and Thornton aside, as the show’s 10 week run progresses, I suspect we’ll see more of Tolman’s Molly and another policeman Colin Hanks’ Gus, who has his own chilling encounter with Malvo, and hopefully Molly’s father, seen at the end of the first episode, played by Keith Carradine.

So far, though, I’m unhappy to report, there’s no sign of the woodchipper.

Fargo begins on Channel 4 on Sunday, April 20

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

Miles Davis – Bootleg Series Vol 3: Miles At The Fillmore 1970

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Miles Davis – Bootleg Series Vol 3: Miles At The Fillmore 1970

Miles in 1970: expanded, and expanding all the time... The summer of 1970 was enlivened by the strong rumour that promised to be the supergroup to end all supergroups was about to make its debut: Eric Clapton and John McLaughlin on guitars, Jack Bruce on bass, Larry Young on organ, Tony Williams on drums and Miles Davis on trumpet. The potential fusion of Cream’s blues-rock with the jazz-rock explored by Davis’s groups over the previous couple of years promised to realise an ambition, shared by many, of linking the raw energy and audience appeal of one idiom to the intellectual richness and sophistication of the other. According to stories in Rolling Stone and the Melody Maker, the unveiling was due to take place at the Randall’s Island Festival in New York. But, like Davis’s long-mooted collaboration with Jimi Hendrix, it was destined never to happen, aborted not so much by the musicians’ own desires as by the conflicting interests of those who took care of their business. Clapton carried on with Derek and the Dominoes, Bruce joined McLaughlin and Young in Lifetime, under Williams’s leadership, and Miles accepted an offer from Bill Graham to return to New York for four nights at the Fillmore East, supporting Steve Miller (“a sorry-ass cat”, in Davis’s later estimation). He had played there earlier in the year, opening for Laura Nyro. At that point Wayne Shorter, his saxophonist for six memorable years, had been on the brink of quitting, and the band – increasingly under the influence of the pianist Chick Corea, the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Jack DeJohnette -- was edging closer and closer to free improvisation, making music that was magnificently risky but didn’t suit Miles’s intention to expand his audience rather than contract it. When they played original Fillmore in San Francisco a few weeks later, with the Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira added to the group and the teenaged saxophonist Steve Grossman replacing Shorter, their leader was pleased to encounter a warm reception not from the usual set of jazz fans encountered in clubs or at festivals but from five thousand young white hippies who had turned up to hear the bill-topping Grateful Dead. Some of them would never have heard of him, but others had the newly released Bitches Brew at home, stacked next to Aoxomoxoa and Volunteers. At a time when he was desperate to cast off the old image of a man who played “My Funny Valentine” while wearing an Italian suit, a new audience beckoned, and a successful appearance at the Fillmore East would confirm his transformation. In the meantime Keith Jarrett – a former bandmate of DeJohnette in the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the first jazz combo to play at the original Fillmore three years earlier - had been added to the line-up. Jarrett would be playing organ while Corea concentrated on electric piano, both men utilising echo devices and ring modulators to distort the timbre of their instruments, creating textures might have been produced by an adventurous guitarist, which was perhaps what Miles – who loved Hendrix and had failed to persuade McLaughlin to join the band - was after. Teo Macero, Davis’s producer, recorded all four nights before boiling down the results for release later that year on a double-album called Miles Davis at Fillmore. Each of its four sides was devoted to a 25-minute precis of one night’s music, labelled “Wednesday”, “Thursday”, “Friday” and “Saturday”, with no identification of the individual tunes that Macero had cut and pasted together to create a false unity. Now the four performances can be heard in full, restored to their unedited state, allowing us to share the enjoyment of audiences who experienced the way the music evolved over the course of each evening’s hour-long set. This was a band that never felt the need to begin or end its performances with conventional gestures. Davis’s young sidemen might be wearing hippie headbands, but they had taken their leader’s habits of behaviour on stage – affecting detachment by never acknowledging the audience and disappearing into the wings while other musicians took their solos -- as a template for a new, beyond-cool mode of self-presentation. But their full engagement in the creative task was never in doubt, and more than 40 years later the result compels close listening. Although they hack a straighter path through the jungle of sound created for Bitches Brew, there is no shortage of variety, from an oozing swamp of exotic electronic and percussion effects to a driving 4/4 funk rhythm anchored by jolting bass-guitar riffs, foreshadowing the evolution that would occur when Michael Henderson, with his grounding in the music of James Brown and Stevie Wonder, took over from Holland. After leading a quintet that went unchanged from 1964 to 1969, now Davis was supervising a band seemingly in constant transition. Grossman, who had joined up just after his 19th birthday, would be gone by the time the band played to 600,000 young white hippies at the Isle of Wight in August, but his solos here show character and inventiveness as he drives the music into late-Coltrane territory. As an ensemble, the musicians could swerve and drift with a deceptively offhand fluency through their repertoire -- a nightly permutation from “Sanctuary”, “Directions”, “Miles Runs the Vooodoo Down”, “Bitches Brew”, “Spanish Key”, “It’s About That Time”, “Footprints”, and an unexpected nod to former glories in the ballad “I Fall in Love Too Easily” – in order to create a series of mood-platforms on which their employer could display every facet of his genius, from squally high-note explorations to pensive balladry. For whatever was going on around him, whatever costume he chose to wear in the search for a bigger audience, he was still and always Miles Davis. Richard Williams Photo credit: Amalie R. Rothschild

Miles in 1970: expanded, and expanding all the time…

The summer of 1970 was enlivened by the strong rumour that promised to be the supergroup to end all supergroups was about to make its debut: Eric Clapton and John McLaughlin on guitars, Jack Bruce on bass, Larry Young on organ, Tony Williams on drums and Miles Davis on trumpet. The potential fusion of Cream’s blues-rock with the jazz-rock explored by Davis’s groups over the previous couple of years promised to realise an ambition, shared by many, of linking the raw energy and audience appeal of one idiom to the intellectual richness and sophistication of the other.

According to stories in Rolling Stone and the Melody Maker, the unveiling was due to take place at the Randall’s Island Festival in New York. But, like Davis’s long-mooted collaboration with Jimi Hendrix, it was destined never to happen, aborted not so much by the musicians’ own desires as by the conflicting interests of those who took care of their business. Clapton carried on with Derek and the Dominoes, Bruce joined McLaughlin and Young in Lifetime, under Williams’s leadership, and Miles accepted an offer from Bill Graham to return to New York for four nights at the Fillmore East, supporting Steve Miller (“a sorry-ass cat”, in Davis’s later estimation).

He had played there earlier in the year, opening for Laura Nyro. At that point Wayne Shorter, his saxophonist for six memorable years, had been on the brink of quitting, and the band – increasingly under the influence of the pianist Chick Corea, the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Jack DeJohnette — was edging closer and closer to free improvisation, making music that was magnificently risky but didn’t suit Miles’s intention to expand his audience rather than contract it.

When they played original Fillmore in San Francisco a few weeks later, with the Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira added to the group and the teenaged saxophonist Steve Grossman replacing Shorter, their leader was pleased to encounter a warm reception not from the usual set of jazz fans encountered in clubs or at festivals but from five thousand young white hippies who had turned up to hear the bill-topping Grateful Dead. Some of them would never have heard of him, but others had the newly released Bitches Brew at home, stacked next to Aoxomoxoa and Volunteers. At a time when he was desperate to cast off the old image of a man who played “My Funny Valentine” while wearing an Italian suit, a new audience beckoned, and a successful appearance at the Fillmore East would confirm his transformation.

In the meantime Keith Jarrett – a former bandmate of DeJohnette in the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the first jazz combo to play at the original Fillmore three years earlier – had been added to the line-up. Jarrett would be playing organ while Corea concentrated on electric piano, both men utilising echo devices and ring modulators to distort the timbre of their instruments, creating textures might have been produced by an adventurous guitarist, which was perhaps what Miles – who loved Hendrix and had failed to persuade McLaughlin to join the band – was after.

Teo Macero, Davis’s producer, recorded all four nights before boiling down the results for release later that year on a double-album called Miles Davis at Fillmore. Each of its four sides was devoted to a 25-minute precis of one night’s music, labelled “Wednesday”, “Thursday”, “Friday” and “Saturday”, with no identification of the individual tunes that Macero had cut and pasted together to create a false unity. Now the four performances can be heard in full, restored to their unedited state, allowing us to share the enjoyment of audiences who experienced the way the music evolved over the course of each evening’s hour-long set.

This was a band that never felt the need to begin or end its performances with conventional gestures. Davis’s young sidemen might be wearing hippie headbands, but they had taken their leader’s habits of behaviour on stage – affecting detachment by never acknowledging the audience and disappearing into the wings while other musicians took their solos — as a template for a new, beyond-cool mode of self-presentation. But their full engagement in the creative task was never in doubt, and more than 40 years later the result compels close listening. Although they hack a straighter path through the jungle of sound created for Bitches Brew, there is no shortage of variety, from an oozing swamp of exotic electronic and percussion effects to a driving 4/4 funk rhythm anchored by jolting bass-guitar riffs, foreshadowing the evolution that would occur when Michael Henderson, with his grounding in the music of James Brown and Stevie Wonder, took over from Holland.

After leading a quintet that went unchanged from 1964 to 1969, now Davis was supervising a band seemingly in constant transition. Grossman, who had joined up just after his 19th birthday, would be gone by the time the band played to 600,000 young white hippies at the Isle of Wight in August, but his solos here show character and inventiveness as he drives the music into late-Coltrane territory.

As an ensemble, the musicians could swerve and drift with a deceptively offhand fluency through their repertoire — a nightly permutation from “Sanctuary”, “Directions”, “Miles Runs the Vooodoo Down”, “Bitches Brew”, “Spanish Key”, “It’s About That Time”, “Footprints”, and an unexpected nod to former glories in the ballad “I Fall in Love Too Easily” – in order to create a series of mood-platforms on which their employer could display every facet of his genius, from squally high-note explorations to pensive balladry. For whatever was going on around him, whatever costume he chose to wear in the search for a bigger audience, he was still and always Miles Davis.

Richard Williams

Photo credit: Amalie R. Rothschild

Spiritualized, Beach House and Youth Lagoon’s ‘Space Project’ album streamed online – listen

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Spiritualized, Beach House and Youth Lagoon’s ‘Space Project’ album streamed online – listen

The Space Project compilation album featuring songs by a host artists including Spiritualized, Beach House and Youth Lagoon has been made available to stream online. The LP, which features 14 tracks and will be released on April 19 for Record Store Day, incorporates sounds recorded in space during the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. You can listen to the album courtesy of NPR here. Spiritualized, who appear under the name The Spiritualized Mississippi Space Program, streamed a new track called 'Always Together With You (The Bridge Song)', from the record earlier this year. The LP also features Mutual Benefit, The Antlers, Blues Control, Benoit & Sergio, Porcelain Raft, and others. It will be available on vinyl, CD, and as a seven-inch box set. The 'Space Project' tracklisting is: Jupiter A: Porcelain Raft, 'Giove' B: The Antlers, 'Jupiter' Miranda A: Mutual Benefit, 'Terraform' B: Anna Meredith, 'Miranda' Neptune A: The Spiritualized Mississippi Space Program, 'Always Together With You (The Bridge Song)'? B: The Holydrug Couple, 'Amphitrites Lost' Uranus A: Youth Lagoon, 'Worms' B: Blues Control, 'Blues Danube' Saturn A: Beach House, 'Saturn Song' B: Zomes, 'Moonlet' Earth A: Absolutely Free, 'EARTH I'? B: Jesu, 'Song of Earth' Io A: Benoit & Sergio, 'Long Neglected Words' B: Larry Gus, 'Sphere of Io (For Georg Cantor)'

The Space Project compilation album featuring songs by a host artists including Spiritualized, Beach House and Youth Lagoon has been made available to stream online.

The LP, which features 14 tracks and will be released on April 19 for Record Store Day, incorporates sounds recorded in space during the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. You can listen to the album courtesy of NPR here.

Spiritualized, who appear under the name The Spiritualized Mississippi Space Program, streamed a new track called ‘Always Together With You (The Bridge Song)’, from the record earlier this year.

The LP also features Mutual Benefit, The Antlers, Blues Control, Benoit & Sergio, Porcelain Raft, and others. It will be available on vinyl, CD, and as a seven-inch box set.

The ‘Space Project’ tracklisting is:

Jupiter

A: Porcelain Raft, ‘Giove’

B: The Antlers, ‘Jupiter’

Miranda

A: Mutual Benefit, ‘Terraform’

B: Anna Meredith, ‘Miranda’

Neptune

A: The Spiritualized Mississippi Space Program, ‘Always Together With You (The Bridge Song)’?

B: The Holydrug Couple, ‘Amphitrites Lost’

Uranus

A: Youth Lagoon, ‘Worms’

B: Blues Control, ‘Blues Danube’

Saturn

A: Beach House, ‘Saturn Song’

B: Zomes, ‘Moonlet’

Earth

A: Absolutely Free, ‘EARTH I’?

B: Jesu, ‘Song of Earth’

Io

A: Benoit & Sergio, ‘Long Neglected Words’

B: Larry Gus, ‘Sphere of Io (For Georg Cantor)’

Hear new Black Keys song, “Turn Blue”

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Hear new Black Keys song, “Turn Blue”

The Black Keys have shared a new song "Turn Blue". Scroll down to hear the track. "Turn Blue" is the title track of the duo's forthcoming eighth studio album. The record, which is set for release on May 12, follows their 2011 release El Camino. Turn Blue was produced by Danger Mouse alongside Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney and recorded at Sunset Sound in Hollywood last summer as well as at the Key Club in Benton Harbor, Michigan at the start of 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5a1Cl_JOJM The Turn Blue tracklisting is: 'Weight of Love' 'In Time' 'Turn Blue' 'Fever' 'Year In Review' 'Bullet in the Brain' 'It's Up to You Now' 'Waiting on Words' '10 Lovers' 'In Our Prime' 'Gotta Get Away'

The Black Keys have shared a new song “Turn Blue”. Scroll down to hear the track.

“Turn Blue” is the title track of the duo’s forthcoming eighth studio album. The record, which is set for release on May 12, follows their 2011 release El Camino.

Turn Blue was produced by Danger Mouse alongside Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney and recorded at Sunset Sound in Hollywood last summer as well as at the Key Club in Benton Harbor, Michigan at the start of 2013.

The Turn Blue tracklisting is:

‘Weight of Love’

‘In Time’

‘Turn Blue’

‘Fever’

‘Year In Review’

‘Bullet in the Brain’

‘It’s Up to You Now’

‘Waiting on Words’

’10 Lovers’

‘In Our Prime’

‘Gotta Get Away’

Led Zeppelin share rare live tracks from upcoming reissues

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Led Zeppelin share rare live tracks from upcoming reissues
Led Zeppelin have posted a rare live performance of "Good Times Bad Times" and "Communication Breakdown" online. The tracks, which you can listen to by clicking on the Soundcloud link below, were performed by the band live at Paris' Olympia Theatre on October 10, 1969. The full show is set to featu...

Led Zeppelin have posted a rare live performance of “Good Times Bad Times” and “Communication Breakdown” online.

The tracks, which you can listen to by clicking on the Soundcloud link below, were performed by the band live at Paris’ Olympia Theatre on October 10, 1969. The full show is set to feature on the companion disc that will come with the reissue of the band’s self-titled debut later this year.

Led Zeppelin will reissue their first three albums on July 9, with four previously unheard tracks set to accompany each release.

The reissues will be released on CD, vinyl as digitally on June 2, and all tracks are remastered by Jimmy Page. All nine of the band’s studio albums are due to be reissued in chronological order.

The Rolling Stones confirm rescheduled Australia and New Zealand tour dates

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The Rolling Stones confirm rescheduled Australia and New Zealand tour dates
The Rolling Stones have rescheduled Australia and New Zealand tour dates which were postponed following the death of Mick Jagger's partner L'Wren Scott on March 17. Shows in Australia and New Zealand have been rescheduled for October, with the band set to start in Adelaide on October 25. The initia...

The Rolling Stones have rescheduled Australia and New Zealand tour dates which were postponed following the death of Mick Jagger’s partner L’Wren Scott on March 17.

Shows in Australia and New Zealand have been rescheduled for October, with the band set to start in Adelaide on October 25. The initial seven date tour has also increased with additional concerts in Perth and the Hunter Valley announced. Jimmy Barnes will support in Adelaide while Hunters & Collectors will open in Auckland on November 22.

Yesterday The Rolling Stones released a video ‘postcard’ from their recent Asian live shows.

“A Postcard From Asia” features live performance, crowds, airport arrivals and behind-the-scenes footage from the Stones’ shows in Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, Macau, Shanghai and Singapore during February and March 2014.

The video arrives ahead of the band resuming their tour in Norway on May 26. The band will pick up their European dates in May at Oslo’s Telenor Arena. The run of gigs includes a headline slot at Roskilde festival in Denmark on July 3 plus slots at Pinkpop in Holland and Roskilde in Denmark.

The Rolling Stones will play:

Adelaide, Oval (October 25)

Perth Arena (29/ November 1)

Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena (5)

Hanging Rock, Macedon (8)

Sydney, Allphones Arena (12)

Hope Estate, Hunter Valley (15)

Brisbane, Entertainment Centre (18)

Auckland, Mt Smart Stadium (22)

Linda Perhacs – The Soul Of All Natural Things

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Linda Perhacs – The Soul Of All Natural Things

Psychedelic folk, eschatology, spirals and choirs: welcome back, Linda Perhacs... Of all the strange, unexpected records to slip through the cracks during the late 1960s, few have endured like Linda Perhacs’ 1970 album, Parallelograms. Quietly released by the Kapp label, and then lost to time, the album’s resurgence over the past decade has moved Perhacs out of the footnotes of psychedelic history and re-positioned her as one of the era’s more influential spirits. Daft Punk included “If You Were My Man” on the soundtrack of their 2006 film, Electroma; Julia Holter and Devendra Banhart adore her; the late Trish Keenan, of Broadcast, marvelled over Parallelograms’ titular epic, a dream-song split apart by electronics: “[the] simple idea of a list of shapes as a song… it’s really special.” Indeed it is. Perhacs’ own story is as unexpected and odd as the album itself. Working as a dental hygienist, she was quizzed by one of her patients, “I can’t believe this is all you do.” That patient happened to be film composer Leonard Rosenman, who, after hearing of Perhacs’ double-life as a Topanga Canyon songwriter, opened the doors for Perhacs to record Parallelograms. After the album’s disappearance, she returned to her dayjob, seemingly unfazed, though her slow-release discovery of her new millennial cult status has led her both back to the stage, performing with Holter and other collaborators in tow, and back into the studio. The Soul Of All Natural Things mostly captures the articulate mysticism of Parallelograms and beds it down with becalmed musicianship, and quietly gorgeous songs. These kinds of returns to visibility, the long-awaited follow-up, are fraught with risk. Lost in technology, and corralled by muso types, they often sell short the weirdness that built the myth, replacing it with ersatz easy listening. The Soul Of All Natural Things doesn’t entirely skirt this: there are a few moments where the performances are sickly-sweet, such as the astral muzak of “Intensity”, where the “living on the edge/Playing on the edge” sentiments of the lyrics are sold well short by glossy, smoothed-out production and ‘tasteful’ playing. But if The Soul Of All Natural Things, at times, courts lugubriousness, it’s just as often perfectly poised. The gentleness of the album’s acoustic ambiences suits Perhacs’ world-view (a kind of benign, elder-statesperson, post-hippy eco-politics), and on songs like the soft driftworks of “Freely”, or the stately, encircling guitar figures of “Children”, the combination of Perhacs’ simply stated songwriting and the chamber-music resonances of the arrangements sit together naturally. The voice is in fine fettle as well: Perhacs’ mature voice has a lighter cast, and what it lacks in stridency – the understated fierceness that made Parallelograms songs like “Paper Mountain Man” so starkly compelling – it gains in kindness. This tenderness plays to the Apollonian aspects of Perhacs’s music, and The Soul Of All Natural Things sometimes scans as deceptively gentle, feather-light, as though a few errant breaths would send it scuttling off its rails. But this reading of the album underestimates its powers, particularly the two songs that form the album’s core: “River Of God” and “Prisms Of Glass”. The latter, in particular, is a gem: reaching back to 1970’s “Parallelograms”, it very clearly echoes that song’s balance between acoustic filigree and electronic disturbance. On “Prisms Of Glass”, Perhacs spins out “spirals of windows and spirals of stairwells” in a surreal, eschatological vision. One of her guests, Holter herself, gives an equally bravura performance, her occasionally mannered voice disarmed and freed in such company, and even better for it. It’s no surprise that Holter informs the more widescreen visions of The Soul Of All Natural Things, given the ambitions of her own Loud City Song from last year, and the microscopically exploded pop songs of Michael Pisaro’s Tombstones, another album Holter was deeply involved with. Elsewhere in The Soul Of All Natural Things, there are a few moments of longueurs, where the songs come off a little too session muso. But this new, becalmed Perhacs reveals a clear eco-political message articulated with subtlety and nuance. For Linda Perhacs, the road back to the garden is gently lit. Jon Dale Q&A Linda Perhacs During the sessions for The Soul Of All Natural Things, you worked with other artists, such as Julia Holter. How do you feel these new presences changed the way you make and think about music? The recording sessions were pure magic. I loved how everyone brought their own thoughts and ideas to the table. The best answer I can give you is the same one I have seen in some of our performances and recordings. And that is, sometimes people are in your life and they make you feel clumsy, [and] then there are those rare moments when things are so harmonious and so good, the only thing you can do is say in amazement and gratitude that this has to be “sent and meant”… Much of the album suggests a ‘stepping out of the world’, not as retreat, but as a ‘step forward’. I feel the purpose of my music is to heal. Perhaps that is the forward step. My compositions come as an energy flow that starts above me and flows through me like a fast flow of rain. This only happens when I am grateful to the universe for all its beauty, when I am in a prayerful and thankful state of mind. Then it comes so quickly I can’t catch it fast enough to write it all down.

Psychedelic folk, eschatology, spirals and choirs: welcome back, Linda Perhacs…

Of all the strange, unexpected records to slip through the cracks during the late 1960s, few have endured like Linda Perhacs’ 1970 album, Parallelograms. Quietly released by the Kapp label, and then lost to time, the album’s resurgence over the past decade has moved Perhacs out of the footnotes of psychedelic history and re-positioned her as one of the era’s more influential spirits. Daft Punk included “If You Were My Man” on the soundtrack of their 2006 film, Electroma; Julia Holter and Devendra Banhart adore her; the late Trish Keenan, of Broadcast, marvelled over Parallelograms’ titular epic, a dream-song split apart by electronics: “[the] simple idea of a list of shapes as a song… it’s really special.”

Indeed it is. Perhacs’ own story is as unexpected and odd as the album itself. Working as a dental hygienist, she was quizzed by one of her patients, “I can’t believe this is all you do.” That patient happened to be film composer Leonard Rosenman, who, after hearing of Perhacs’ double-life as a Topanga Canyon songwriter, opened the doors for Perhacs to record Parallelograms. After the album’s disappearance, she returned to her dayjob, seemingly unfazed, though her slow-release discovery of her new millennial cult status has led her both back to the stage, performing with Holter and other collaborators in tow, and back into the studio. The Soul Of All Natural Things mostly captures the articulate mysticism of Parallelograms and beds it down with becalmed musicianship, and quietly gorgeous songs. These kinds of returns to visibility, the long-awaited follow-up, are fraught with risk. Lost in technology, and corralled by muso types, they often sell short the weirdness that built the myth, replacing it with ersatz easy listening. The Soul Of All Natural Things doesn’t entirely skirt this: there are a few moments where the performances are sickly-sweet, such as the astral muzak of “Intensity”, where the “living on the edge/Playing on the edge” sentiments of the lyrics are sold well short by glossy, smoothed-out production and ‘tasteful’ playing.

But if The Soul Of All Natural Things, at times, courts lugubriousness, it’s just as often perfectly poised. The gentleness of the album’s acoustic ambiences suits Perhacs’ world-view (a kind of benign, elder-statesperson, post-hippy eco-politics), and on songs like the soft driftworks of “Freely”, or the stately, encircling guitar figures of “Children”, the combination of Perhacs’ simply stated songwriting and the chamber-music resonances of the arrangements sit together naturally. The voice is in fine fettle as well: Perhacs’ mature voice has a lighter cast, and what it lacks in stridency – the understated fierceness that made Parallelograms songs like “Paper Mountain Man” so starkly compelling – it gains in kindness.

This tenderness plays to the Apollonian aspects of Perhacs’s music, and The Soul Of All Natural Things sometimes scans as deceptively gentle, feather-light, as though a few errant breaths would send it scuttling off its rails. But this reading of the album underestimates its powers, particularly the two songs that form the album’s core: “River Of God” and “Prisms Of Glass”. The latter, in particular, is a gem: reaching back to 1970’s “Parallelograms”, it very clearly echoes that song’s balance between acoustic filigree and electronic disturbance. On “Prisms Of Glass”, Perhacs spins out “spirals of windows and spirals of stairwells” in a surreal, eschatological vision. One of her guests, Holter herself, gives an equally bravura performance, her occasionally mannered voice disarmed and freed in such company, and even better for it.

It’s no surprise that Holter informs the more widescreen visions of The Soul Of All Natural Things, given the ambitions of her own Loud City Song from last year, and the microscopically exploded pop songs of Michael Pisaro’s Tombstones, another album Holter was deeply involved with. Elsewhere in The Soul Of All Natural Things, there are a few moments of longueurs, where the songs come off a little too session muso. But this new, becalmed Perhacs reveals a clear eco-political message articulated with subtlety and nuance. For Linda Perhacs, the road back to the garden is gently lit.

Jon Dale

Q&A

Linda Perhacs

During the sessions for The Soul Of All Natural Things, you worked with other artists, such as Julia Holter. How do you feel these new presences changed the way you make and think about music?

The recording sessions were pure magic. I loved how everyone brought their own thoughts and ideas to the table. The best answer I can give you is the same one I have seen in some of our performances and recordings. And that is, sometimes people are in your life and they make you feel clumsy, [and] then there are those rare moments when things are so harmonious and so good, the only thing you can do is say in amazement and gratitude that this has to be “sent and meant”…

Much of the album suggests a ‘stepping out of the world’, not as retreat, but as a ‘step forward’.

I feel the purpose of my music is to heal. Perhaps that is the forward step. My compositions come as an energy flow that starts above me and flows through me like a fast flow of rain. This only happens when I am grateful to the universe for all its beauty, when I am in a prayerful and thankful state of mind. Then it comes so quickly I can’t catch it fast enough to write it all down.

Roger Waters announces Amused To Death reissue

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Roger Waters announces Amused To Death reissue
Roger Waters is preparing to reissue his 1992 solo album, Amused To Death. The project contains brand new stereo and 5.1 mixes from Waters' long term collaborator, Pink Floyd’s sound engineer, James Guthrie, and will come with additional never before released content and new graphics. The album ...

Roger Waters is preparing to reissue his 1992 solo album, Amused To Death.

The project contains brand new stereo and 5.1 mixes from Waters’ long term collaborator, Pink Floyd’s sound engineer, James Guthrie, and will come with additional never before released content and new graphics.

The album will be reportedly released on both Super Audio CD and 200g vinyl.

No official release date has yet been given, although one site reports it is due out on September 23, 2014.

Guthrie will preview samples of these newly mastered stereo and 5.1 tracks at Pink Floyd: Sound, Sight, and Structure, the Pink Floyd interdisciplinary conference hosted at Princeton University on April 12, 2014.

Manic Street Preachers debut new song “Let’s Go To War” at Brixton gig – watch

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Manic Street Preachers debut new song “Let’s Go To War” at Brixton gig – watch
Manic Street Preachers played new song "Let's Go To War" for the first time as they ended their UK tour in London last night (April 11). The band offered up a taste of new album Futurology during their headline performance at O2 Academy Brixton with Nicky Wire introducing the track by saying: "Ple...

Manic Street Preachers played new song “Let’s Go To War” for the first time as they ended their UK tour in London last night (April 11).

The band offered up a taste of new album Futurology during their headline performance at O2 Academy Brixton with Nicky Wire introducing the track by saying: “Please excuse me if I fuck it up. This is a nice marching song, it’s called ‘Let’s Go To War’.”

The London show marked the final night of a tour which began in Leeds late last month. That show in Yorkshire also saw new tracks played with “Europa Geht Durch Mich” and “Futurology” featuring on the setlist.

Tweeting after the gig, a message from bass player Nicky Wire read: “As I sit here in a comforting yet painful ice bath I can only thank everyone who came to brixton tonight-TRULY STUNNING CROWD.”

Futurology will be the follow-up to 2013’s Rewind The Film.

Speaking previously about Futurology to NME, James Dean Bradfield said: “It’s a lot spikier and shinier. It’s much more band-based, a tiny bit of krautrock influence. It’s not like The Holy Bible but there’s a bit of the same intent and threat. Lyrically, it’s got a European fascination. The landscape of Europe, the malaise of Europe, the malaise of us Brits not feeling part of it.”

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