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Neil Young releases new album A Letter Home on Record Store Day

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Neil Young releases new album A Letter Home on Record Store Day
Neil Young has released his long-awaited new album A Letter Home on Record Store Day [April 19, 2014]. The album, which was produced by Jack White is available now from Third Man records and select record shops. A Letter Home was recorded at White's Third Man studios and consists entirely of cover...

Neil Young has released his long-awaited new album A Letter Home on Record Store Day [April 19, 2014].

The album, which was produced by Jack White is available now from Third Man records and select record shops.

A Letter Home was recorded at White’s Third Man studios and consists entirely of cover versions.

The idea for the album appears to have been hatched after Young recorded a version of Bert Jansch‘s “Needle Of Death” for Record Store Day 2013 in White’s 1947 Voice-o-Graph booth at the Third Man store in Nashville.

The tracklisting for A Letter Home is:

A Letter Home Intro

Changes (Phil Ochs)

Girl From The North Country (Bob Dylan)

Needle Of Death (Bert Jansch)

Early Morning Rain (Gordon Lightfoot)

Crazy (Willie Nelson)

Reason To Believe (Tim Hardin)

On The Road Again (Willie Nelson)

If You Could Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot)

Since I Met You Baby (Ivory Joe Hunter)

My Hometown (Bruce Springsteen)

I Wonder If I Care (Everly Brothers)

LCD Soundsystem: “That guy who cared? He quit! Now you get me!”

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LCD Soundsystem: “That guy who cared? He quit! Now you get me!”
The live album of LCD Soundsystem's final gig at Madison Square Garden is finally being released tomorrow (April 19) for this year's Record Store Day, in full, as a 5LP set. Back in Uncut's November 2012 issue (Take 186), we met LCD's James Murphy to hear his thoughts on their farewell concert, his ...

The live album of LCD Soundsystem’s final gig at Madison Square Garden is finally being released tomorrow (April 19) for this year’s Record Store Day, in full, as a 5LP set. Back in Uncut’s November 2012 issue (Take 186), we met LCD’s James Murphy to hear his thoughts on their farewell concert, his reasons for breaking up the band, and the plans he has for a post-LCD career: “I don’t,” he says. “And it’s terrifying!” Words: Stephen Troussé

_____________________________

James Murphy is straight off a transatlantic flight, installed in a corner of the London offices of the production company behind Shut Up And Play The Hits, the film about the last days of his band, LCD Soundsystem. He is crumpled, unshaven and nursing a painfully gammy foot.

“Ultimate fighting injury?” Uncut enquires, referring to the mixed martial art for which he’s an unlikely evangelist. “Ultimate drinking injury,” he groans. Nevertheless, even an under-the-weather James Murphy is a force to be reckoned with. Shut Up And Play The Hits centres around LCD’s spectacular swansong at Madison Square Garden in April last year. It’s ironically titled because, through backstage chatter, frontman humility, TV interviews and post-show hangover, Murphy just can’t stop justifying, eulogising, wisecracking, pondering the peculiar history of his band. He was well into his thirties before forming LCD, with years of life experience as provincial punk, literature student, indie scenester, jobbing engineer. Consequently, when success eventually called, he was thoroughly prepared.

His three albums – LCD Soundsystem, Sound Of Silver and This Is Happening – add up to something like the Great New York Novel of the noughties, incorporating the desperate hedonism, high anxiety, self-conscious snark, whipsmart wit and post-Imperial melancholy of that curdled decade. Still fulfilling promotional obligations 18 months after he supposedly quit, Murphy occasionally plays at being jaded, but his beautiful, lively mind is relentless. In the course of an hour’s conversation, he’s part-Louis CK schlubby idealist, part-Lester Bangs gonzo philosopher and part-Sam Lipsyte scabrous cynic. The epigram to Shut Up And Play The Hits says, “If it’s a funeral… let’s have the best funeral ever.” Does it feel like it’s turning into the longest wake ever? “Holy shit, yes,” he says with a wry smile. “It’s a very long march to the barrow ground.”

_____________________________

Is it weird, having to obsessively rake over the embers of the last day of your band?

It’s not that weird. Everything weird really happened early on in the band. And everything after that, that’s supposed to seem weird, just never seems weird, relative to the band happening at all. Raking over it? This is my job! My job is fucking weird.

What were the weird things about LCD Soundsystem?

Just the band being successful. Or before the band started, the things that prompted me to start writing “Losing My Edge” were so weird. Being a DJ suddenly, being invited to parties, and having something to lose. After playing music and being involved in music my whole life, and failing comically. Or not even failing grandiosely – just sinking. Failing mediocrely! Nothing prepared me for having my moment in the sun. Which I considered to be before the band. New York likes art stars. It doesn’t like movie stars. So I was an art star, and we were weird and cool and ephemeral. That was so weird that everything that subsequently happened has seemed like a tiny ripple effect of that big bang, that cataclysmic event.

You played your first gig in London. Did you ever have an inkling that this might be, if not a career, an ongoing project?

I don’t know. I was pretty aggressive then and pretty crazy. Yeah, fuck it! We’re going to do things weird, we’re going to do things our way! I’m not working a tour, we’re doing some weird shows. Let’s do it! Then I made an album, gave it to the Soulwax guys and they were like, “Your life is over, dude.” And I was like, “Why?” They said, “It’s good. You’re going to be on tour.” So I said, “I’m not going to fucking do that.” “You say that. But we don’t want to DJ, and here we are.”

In the movie, the author Chuck Klosterman wonders what the defining failure of the band was. Was it that you couldn’t escape that treadmill or bend it to your will? Is quitting a way of getting the craziness back?

Yeah, it definitely is. I try to take people equally seriously. I try to take fans seriously, even if they’re fucking crazy. I try to take people at the record company seriously, sometimes though they behave in ways that prohibit you from taking them seriously. So I always try to err on the side of “We-ee-eelll… maybe you have a point.” That makes a lot of things difficult. It’s one of those jobs like being a triage doctor. What you want to do is perform microsurgery to save that knee… but that guy over there was just SHOT! In the FACE! So you have to know that you can’t give 100 per cent ever. You’re just running around trying to save lives.

And you never get the satisfaction of saying, “The last stitch – can we take that off?”

“Oh, beautiful scar, Dr White.” “Thank you!” That wore me out. Leaving the record company meeting and they’re saying, “OK, well, there’s no extra tracks? You’re only going to make one video? Is there anything three-and-a-half-minutes long? The song people respond to most is almost nine minutes long and it’s got a three-minute, almost inaudible, intro? Ugh.” You’re just like: arghhh. You go on tour and people are emailing: “Why aren’t you in Des Moines, Iowa? You only play where people think you’re cool?” You’re constantly disappointing people. That wears you out, if you care. If the other alternative is that you don’t care, I can’t do that. People say, “Well, don’t do Facebook, don’t look at it, let the people do their job!” But I can’t. This represents me. LCD Soundsystem represents me. No person is going to answer questions for me on the email interview! No-one’s going to post things on my website that are supposed to be from me! Because then you’re like, what’s the fucking point? If I start complaining, I should quit. So we quit. Because it was too much.

How did the movie come about?

Before the decision to end the band, someone told me, “Oh, the BBC wants to do something on you, they have these directors who did a Blur thing.” So we met up with them a couple of times and I really liked them. The BBC thing didn’t work out, so we decided to do it ourselves. At one point we thought, let’s just do a fiction movie. The movie was called What It’s Like To Make Things. It would just be all these weird dream sequences. I was trying to get Kanye to be in all my dreams. I didn’t want to see the band play, I just wanted one scene from the concert, the shot of the balloons dropping. And we were like, cool, let’s get a permit to shoot in Madison Square Garden. But the permit was, like, the budget. For the whole movie. We’re like, “OK, if we’re going to spend this money, let’s shoot the concert at least.” We wanted something that could be the whole arc if we needed it to be. Rather than trying to shoot a movie but only having half of it, and because of budget pressures having to cobble something together and release it.

How much input did you have?

Nothing in the narrative. I was really there for the concert footage and the concert itself. I know who plays what, what’s important to me. Naturally, the editor is picking a few shots that seem a little too rockstarry for me. I don’t like those. I like it to look like a street fight. And I think it does a good job of looking like a street fight! There are moments that are quite beautiful. I like early ’70s American films and I think they’re beautiful in a rough way, and when the beauty happens you’re unprepared for it.

Is there a danger that the movie replaces your memories?

That’s not even a danger, it’s totally replaced my memory. I don’t remember the show. I remember polaroids. The moment when I first crinkled up a lyric sheet and threw it away. I always have my lyrics in a pile in case I get stuck. Very rarely actually looked at them. The first time I was about to put it under I thought I will never, ever have to sing that again. I’ll never sing this again! To have these beat-up, five-year-old lyric sheets which have notes on, to know that you’re destroying something that might be important to someone else. Or it might be important to you later… I remember when I threw out my school yearbooks. I knew – ‘I’m going to regret this.’ I threw out all my Smiths shirts – this is a regret in the making. You should do stuff you regret. Don’t look back? A little bit. More like look back in anger!

When you think of bands quitting at the top, you think of Ziggy Stardust or The Jam. Rarely American bands…

No, because we don’t fucking stop. We keep chasing the paycheck. The Rolling Stones took more than the blues from America. I just wanted to have all the bad ideas fully realised. Why don’t we do a balloon drop? Or why don’t we build a spaceship made out of cardboard and make shitty video visuals with models on strings? Why not? That’s like 15 bucks, let’s do that. I loved fully blowing out all the dumb ideas we’d never had time to do. If we’d done that at the beginning of the tour we would have had all these beautiful set pieces that would have made economic sense. Instead we burned almost all the money we made that year. We lost everything! It was brutal. That show lost so much money. People on the internet are like – oh, I get it, you’re going to cash in at Madison Square Garden. You have NO IDEA how this business works. You don’t make anything for playing at Madison Square Garden! They keep all the money because they’re Madison Square Garden. What are you going to do? Go to the OTHER Madison Square Garden? To put on a show like that there are 1,500 union guys. That’s going to a 1,000 bucks per head. You get the balloon truck – the balloon truck held my landing dock hostage for hours and took us for an extra $5,000 on the day! We couldn’t get our gear. Shit like that – hilarious. We barely got a soundcheck and then I pulled the band off early so Liquid Liquid could get a soundcheck because they played first. I was so angry and then I was like – that’s our band! Our band doesn’t get a soundcheck for our last show at Madison Square Garden and I drag us off because Liquid Liquid – who we love – has to get a soundcheck. That’s a pretty big eulogy for us.

Do you have your post-LCD career as carefully planned as the farewell?

That’s the beauty of it, I don’t, and it’s terrifying. I felt like the band was born out of a weird miasmic sludge of time and influence and fucking around and all this stuff. Ironically, the band born out of this created less craziness and more and more order. Then I was like: what if I go and make a fourth record and I don’t know what to do? That’s not a big deal. But what’s the point? Why don’t I just go back to that chaos? That mass of energy. The only fears you have when you get bigger are – what if you fail? That’s boring. Now I’m like – who knows? People tell me people are going to remember your band forever! No, they’re not! People barely remember Kurt Cobain. He was in a huge band and he killed himself? That’s the way you never die. People won’t say, hey, remember that guy who was sad so he quit, but maintained friendships with the people he worked with? What an epic tragedy! It’s almost Greek!

You seem busier than when you were in the band…

I am. It’s been an unexpectedly difficult year. I’m building a new studio. I’m trying to open a store. It’s time-consuming. It’s also expensive. I have found no-one is willing to do construction for free. So I am DJing a LOT. It’s my job now – I DJ. I have the jumpsuit to prove it.

So what happens if you wake up with an awesome idea for an LCD song?

I just write a song. What’s the difference, man? This is the epic joke! LCD is a bunch of things. It’s me in the studio making a record. Two: it’s that group of people touring. Thirdly, it was the thing signed to EMI. And four, it was an entity that fans had varying relationships with and understandings of. I wanted to stop the train of the mass of those things. So I’m no longer signed. I’ve said “I’m done!” so we can memorialise that this is the end of LCD. It’s like I have a manufacturing plant but I don’t want to make plastic bags anymore. But I still have this plant. I’ll make music. I still DJ with Pat [Mahoney]. I see all my friends. Nothing happened. I just wanted to get off the train. A friend asked me to cover a song for a movie recently, and I was calling everyone up and said, you wanna do this? One guy was like – you’d do that? Use the LCD name? But if it’s the same group of us covering a song? If I call it James Murphy And The Murphtones, is that better? Who cares? And they’re like, people will get upset! Um, that’s the beauty of quitting! I don’t give a shit! That guy who cared? He quit! Now you get me!

_____________________________

I Can Change: five post-LCD career options, by the man himself

1: Novelist

Is writing the ultimate freedom? More like the ultimate nightmare. I have no delusions about looking out of the window wistfully and jotting my thoughts while someone brings me tea. I said once that I was working on something and that’s been turned into I’m writing a novel. I take “I’m writing a novel” as a phrase very seriously. I am not Writing A Novel. I am working on something, sporadically taking notes. I’ve written scenes out. I know what the principal themes are. I know the settings and characters. But I think it’s a big ’un.

2: Soundtrack composer

Working on Greenberg was great but people say “Do you want to do more?” and I say NO. I did it because Noah and I had a good relationship and he was working across the street from my studio. So I dealt with Noah. I could put my ego aside because it’s like I’m helping him paint his house. At the same time, I don’t have eight people saying, “I think it’s too mauve. What do you think?” Most of that job, you have one note from the producer saying make it more lively. One note from the music supervisor saying mellow it out a little. One note from the director saying don’t listen to those guys. Nuh-uh. I have no interest in that world. If someone asks me to make a soundtrack I will make music. If you would license that for your film, please do.

3: Mom and pop store owner

We’re going to open this store in Brooklyn. What’s it going to sell? Stuff my girlfriend and I like! Coffee. Old ’50s and ’60s wristwatches. It’s going to be a personality store. There might be a record store downstairs. A coffee shop out front. But it’s expandable. Sometimes it’ll be tiny, it’ll just be a coffee shop and magazines. Other times it might be a showroom. Just a space to do stuff. I want to be able to make things and design things and have space for that.

4: Ultimate fighter

I really almost did it. I put some money away, I live cheaply. I can train. I’m quick. I’m flexible. My problem’s going to be my weight-to-strength ratio. I’m hypermobile, which means my ligaments are too long, so I use a lot of muscle to stabilise myself. So I can’t get any lower than 170lbs and survive. 170lbs is still a big fighter.

5: Watchmaker

I really want to do a watch. I’m not kidding myself that I’m going to make the fucking watches. I’m not a fucking idiot. But I’m fascinated by those guys who sit at the tables with the magnifying glasses. I know that I can’t do it. But if I can make one watch with some help – and say, look at this! The watch I made! That would be so cool!

Gruff Rhys: “Super Furry Animals have done too much to not do more stuff”

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Gruff Rhys: “Super Furry Animals have done too much to not do more stuff”
Gruff Rhys tells Uncut about his new American Interior venture – a film, book and new album – and the future of Super Furry Animals, in the new issue, dated May 2014 and out now. “I think we’ve done too much to not do more stuff,” says Rhys of SFA. “We’ve all got kids and I’ve been ...

Gruff Rhys tells Uncut about his new American Interior venture – a film, book and new album – and the future of Super Furry Animals, in the new issue, dated May 2014 and out now.

“I think we’ve done too much to not do more stuff,” says Rhys of SFA. “We’ve all got kids and I’ve been at home for two years – I’ve hardly had to tour, happily. I hadn’t been off tour since I was 16. It’s healthy to not be part of an industrial touring life.

“But we’re all extremely close and it’s bizarre because we’ve never made a load of money, so it’s not as if we can retire.

“It seems to be an indefinite hibernation, God knows when we’ll start again,” Super Furry Animals’ drummer Dafydd Ieuan says. “Everybody needed a break, the chance to try their own things out.”

“I certainly hope we’ll play again soon, I’m sure we will,” bassist Guto Pryce adds, more encouragingly. “We’ll do something in a while, but I wouldn’t like to say when.”

The new Uncut, dated May 2014, is out now.

Photo: Chris McAndrew

The Rise And Fall Of The Clash

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The Rise And Fall Of The Clash

...but mostly, the fall. An awkward, insightful account of how it all went sour for Strummer & Co... We don’t need another Clash documentary. There will never be a better profile than Don Letts’s superb Westway To The World. The story has been told and retold to death. All the same, every year some new Clash cash-in pops up. Here’s another. Miraculously, it turns out to be vital. The first directing effort by Spanish Clash fan Danny Garcia, The Rise And Fall… scores because it’s about the messy, inconvenient part of the story Letts’s great film shies away from. Specifically: the end. And, more specifically, after the end, when that other Clash thing staggered on zombielike for a while, releasing Cut The Crap, the awful 1985 album which, true to stubbornly contradictory form, contained the last great Clash song, “This Is England”. Garcia’s film is no great shakes as a cinematic experience. Mostly, it’s meat-and-potatoes rock doc stuff, low-budget talking heads interviews, interspersed with archive footage. It should also be noted it is no place for your Clash neophyte to begin. Those unacquainted with names like Kosmo Vinyl, or unfamiliar with the elusive ways of Svengali-like manager Bernie Rhodes, may find it heavy going. For those who know, though, Garcia’s film overcomes its rudimentary style because the substance becomes so involving. He begins in 1981, with Rhodes being begged to return to manage the band he’d helped create, having been sacked in 1978. In his absence, The Clash had recorded arguably their greatest album, London Calling, and their most ambitious, Sandinista. With America beginning to break, they stood poised to become one of the world’s biggest groups – but they also, it’s claimed, were half-a-million dollars in debt. The pressing issue became how to make money, while still talking the radical talk. The new Rhodesian era began in triumph, with the fabled Bonds residency in New York, but soon fell apart, first with the sacking of Topper Headon, then, as the group tried to reconcile their espoused beliefs with the realities of playing Shea Stadium alongside The Who, the notorious ousting of Mick Jones, for “rock star tendencies.” This is well-worn territory, but Garcia teases life from it, focussing on the band’s inner split: Joe and Paul Simonon in a Bernie-led Stalinist bootcamp on one side; Mick on the other, in a huff. Of the surviving members of the classic line-up, only Jones agreed to be interviewed, and, while funny, careful and gentlemanly, he gives away something of the bad moods and division. Not to mention his balking at Rhodes’s plan for them to start playing “New Orleans music.” Rhodes refused to participate, but he can be heard in enigmatic audio clips, and his presence is everywhere, as contributors debate whether he is a maverick pop Situationist genius, or, as Clash security man Ray Jordan suggests, “an asshole.” It’s the second half that becomes compulsive, as Garcia builds a sobering, nightmarish picture of life in the post-Jones The Clash Mk II, through the weary, vivid testimony of drummer Pete Howard and Nick Shepherd and Vince White, the hapless guitarists drafted to fill Mick’s shoes. We learn details of Rhodes’s heavy manners management, and Strummer’s curious willingness to go along with it, despite rising despair about where it was going. While public bollocks were spouted about getting “back to basics” and the new band being all for one, White recalls the new members being treated by “The Clash machine” as hired help, there to “sweep the floors,” and handed weekly wages of £150. As rhetoric and hypocrisy flew about their heads, and Rhodes issued diktats on approved rebel rock attire (“A checked shirt, what do you think this is, Big fucking Country?”), Howard recalls how he and White secretly shared the love that dared not speak its name in Clashland, by both being fans of Yes. How did it happen? Ever-insightful Strummer biographer Chris Salewicz points to Joe being in crisis – his father had died, his mother was dying – and clinging to Rhodes’s manifestos and manipulations as the pressure of his own legend mounted, hoping against hope it was the right thing. “Joe was naive,” Salewicz sums up, nailing a simple truth often unrecognised, one that explains as much about why Strummer was great as it does his flaws. Garcia ends with a brief account of how, following Strummer’s departure, Rhodes seriously considered keeping a Clash going, putting together new bands under the brandname, and running things like a football manager. None of this is official Clash history; Cut The Crap itself was airbrushed from existence on the canonical Sound System box set. But Garcia’s film is a useful supplement to Westway To The World. It’s important to remember this thorny, shabby, sad and stupidly funny flameout. It was never slogans or even ideals that mattered, so much as The Clash’s very human passion, the messy confusion that drove them to try, to fall, and to try again. EXTRAS: None. Damien Love

…but mostly, the fall. An awkward, insightful account of how it all went sour for Strummer & Co…

We don’t need another Clash documentary. There will never be a better profile than Don Letts’s superb Westway To The World. The story has been told and retold to death. All the same, every year some new Clash cash-in pops up. Here’s another. Miraculously, it turns out to be vital.

The first directing effort by Spanish Clash fan Danny Garcia, The Rise And Fall… scores because it’s about the messy, inconvenient part of the story Letts’s great film shies away from. Specifically: the end. And, more specifically, after the end, when that other Clash thing staggered on zombielike for a while, releasing Cut The Crap, the awful 1985 album which, true to stubbornly contradictory form, contained the last great Clash song, “This Is England”.

Garcia’s film is no great shakes as a cinematic experience. Mostly, it’s meat-and-potatoes rock doc stuff, low-budget talking heads interviews, interspersed with archive footage. It should also be noted it is no place for your Clash neophyte to begin. Those unacquainted with names like Kosmo Vinyl, or unfamiliar with the elusive ways of Svengali-like manager Bernie Rhodes, may find it heavy going.

For those who know, though, Garcia’s film overcomes its rudimentary style because the substance becomes so involving. He begins in 1981, with Rhodes being begged to return to manage the band he’d helped create, having been sacked in 1978.

In his absence, The Clash had recorded arguably their greatest album, London Calling, and their most ambitious, Sandinista. With America beginning to break, they stood poised to become one of the world’s biggest groups – but they also, it’s claimed, were half-a-million dollars in debt. The pressing issue became how to make money, while still talking the radical talk.

The new Rhodesian era began in triumph, with the fabled Bonds residency in New York, but soon fell apart, first with the sacking of Topper Headon, then, as the group tried to reconcile their espoused beliefs with the realities of playing Shea Stadium alongside The Who, the notorious ousting of Mick Jones, for “rock star tendencies.”

This is well-worn territory, but Garcia teases life from it, focussing on the band’s inner split: Joe and Paul Simonon in a Bernie-led Stalinist bootcamp on one side; Mick on the other, in a huff. Of the surviving members of the classic line-up, only Jones agreed to be interviewed, and, while funny, careful and gentlemanly, he gives away something of the bad moods and division. Not to mention his balking at Rhodes’s plan for them to start playing “New Orleans music.”

Rhodes refused to participate, but he can be heard in enigmatic audio clips, and his presence is everywhere, as contributors debate whether he is a maverick pop Situationist genius, or, as Clash security man Ray Jordan suggests, “an asshole.”

It’s the second half that becomes compulsive, as Garcia builds a sobering, nightmarish picture of life in the post-Jones The Clash Mk II, through the weary, vivid testimony of drummer Pete Howard and Nick Shepherd and Vince White, the hapless guitarists drafted to fill Mick’s shoes. We learn details of Rhodes’s heavy manners management, and Strummer’s curious willingness to go along with it, despite rising despair about where it was going.

While public bollocks were spouted about getting “back to basics” and the new band being all for one, White recalls the new members being treated by “The Clash machine” as hired help, there to “sweep the floors,” and handed weekly wages of £150. As rhetoric and hypocrisy flew about their heads, and Rhodes issued diktats on approved rebel rock attire (“A checked shirt, what do you think this is, Big fucking Country?”), Howard recalls how he and White secretly shared the love that dared not speak its name in Clashland, by both being fans of Yes.

How did it happen? Ever-insightful Strummer biographer Chris Salewicz points to Joe being in crisis – his father had died, his mother was dying – and clinging to Rhodes’s manifestos and manipulations as the pressure of his own legend mounted, hoping against hope it was the right thing. “Joe was naive,” Salewicz sums up, nailing a simple truth often unrecognised, one that explains as much about why Strummer was great as it does his flaws.

Garcia ends with a brief account of how, following Strummer’s departure, Rhodes seriously considered keeping a Clash going, putting together new bands under the brandname, and running things like a football manager. None of this is official Clash history; Cut The Crap itself was airbrushed from existence on the canonical Sound System box set. But Garcia’s film is a useful supplement to Westway To The World. It’s important to remember this thorny, shabby, sad and stupidly funny flameout. It was never slogans or even ideals that mattered, so much as The Clash’s very human passion, the messy confusion that drove them to try, to fall, and to try again.

EXTRAS: None.

Damien Love

Bob Dylan: ‘racial hate’ lawsuit dropped

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Bob Dylan: ‘racial hate’ lawsuit dropped
Bob Dylan will not face charges of incitement to hatred in France following comments he made about Croatians in a 2013 interview. The charges were initially brought forward by French judges and related to an interview Dylan gave in the French version of Rolling Stone magazine. In the article, he m...

Bob Dylan will not face charges of incitement to hatred in France following comments he made about Croatians in a 2013 interview.

The charges were initially brought forward by French judges and related to an interview Dylan gave in the French version of Rolling Stone magazine. In the article, he mentioned Croatia in the same sentence as the Nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan.

However, Wall Street Journal reports that Dylan is no longer the focus of the charges with French law officials turning instead to the publication for publishing the remarks. Rolling Stone‘s France publisher Michael Birnbaum still faces anti-discrimination charges and could be sentenced to up to one year in jail and a fine of €45,000 (£37,000).

Dylan’s quotes came in response to a question about whether he sees parallels between Civil War-era America and the US of today. “This country is just too fucked up about colour. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different colour. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighbourhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that.

“If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

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’

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