Our man in a field reports back on his 5 highlights from this year's festival at Worthy Farm...
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Arctic Monkeys
Baffling the TV audience by opening with imposing The Car cut “Sculptures Of Anything Goes”, Alex Turner and t...
Our man in a field reports back on his 5 highlights from this year’s festival at Worthy Farm…
Arctic Monkeys
Baffling the TV audience by opening with imposing The Car cut “Sculptures Of Anything Goes”, Alex Turner and the Arctic Monkeys delivered a suave, low-lit and quasi-theatrical Friday night headline set that struck an engrossing balance between youthful urgency, beastly/sultry desert rock, grotesque carnival tones and post-modern lounge crooning.
The Pretenders
“Oh Glastonbury, how many memories?” sighed Chrissie Hynde from the Park Stage on Saturday evening, then set about making a few more. After an opening half hour of brash new wave, she introduced Johnny Marr to add his trademark gossamer licks to “Back On The Chain Gang”, Dave Grohl to drum on “Tattooed Love Boys” and Paul McCartney to wave at the end.
Tinariwen
“Welcome to the Sahara,” says Alhousseini ag Abdoulah, referencing both music and mercury. Ahead of The Pretenders, the Park Stage was lulled into a bliss state by the Malian desert blues of Tinariwen, merging eastern textures, North African rhythms and western psych and funk rock into a hypnotic, free-flowing hour. No Dave Grohl though, surprisingly.
Gwenno
In a flowing black frock, Gwenno draped her haunting and spacious atmospheres across Sunday afternoon tackling topics, in Cornish and Welsh, both whimsical (‘Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow was about “a land that time forgot”) and technological (‘Jynn-amontya’ concerned “AI and the battle for it not to forget human beings”). The leylines sang along.
Elton John
What “might be” the last UK show from one of its greatest showmen could only go one way – a cornucopia of hits from an opening “Pinball Wizard” to a closing “Rocket Man…”, dotted with special guest spots including Gabriels’ Jacob Lusk (“Are You Ready For Love”), Brandon Flowers (“Tiny Dancer”) and Rina Sawayama (“Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”). A celestial farewell.
The Jesus And Mary Chain have outlined details of a new double live album, Sunset 666, to be released by Fuzz Club on August 4.
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It was recorded live at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018, during their North American tour in support ...
The Jesus And Mary Chain have outlined details of a new double live album, Sunset 666, to be released by Fuzz Club on August 4.
It was recorded live at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018, during their North American tour in support of Nine Inch Nails. Hear the Sunset 666 version of “Sometimes Always” below, with Isobel Campbell in the Hope Sandoval role:
Pre-order Sunset 666here and peruse the tracklisting below. The Jesus And Mary Chain play South Facing Festival at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl on August 4, alongside Primal Scream and The Black Angels.
1 Just Like Honey
2 Sometimes Always (feat. Isobel Campbell)
3 Black and Blues (feat. Isobel Campbell)
4 Amputation
5 All Things Pass
6 Some Candy Talking
7 Head On
8 The Living End
9 Cracking Up
10 Teenage Lust
11 I Hate Rock ‘N’ Roll
12 Reverence
13 Blues from a Gun
14 Far Gone and Out
15 Between Planets
16 Halfway To Crazy
17 In A Hole
Modern Nature have shared a new track, "Murmuration", which you can hear below.
The track is taken from their new album, No Fixed Point In Space, which is released on September 29 through Bella Union.
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https://www.youtub...
Modern Nature have shared a new track, “Murmuration“, which you can hear below.
The track is taken from their new album, No Fixed Point In Space, which is released on September 29 through Bella Union.
No Fixed Point In Space is the third full-length album by Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature, following on from 2021’s Island Of Noise.
“With this record,” Cooper explains, “I wanted the music to reflect nature: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, process and chance. I wanted the music and the words to feel like roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, the unknown.
“The way you see or hear music in your head is abstract and magic… often more beautiful than what eventually appears on tape. When you sit down with an instrument and begin translating an idea, it quickly conforms. I’ve tried to develop this music without thinking in terms of set rhythms, time signatures, folk or pop structures, syntax; the devices you associate with the music world which I come from. I wanted to make music that was abstract, free and honest, whilst still being predominantly tonal and recognisably song based. It feels like time to make something that no one has heard before.”
Tracklisting for No Fixed Point In Space is:
Tonic
Murmuration
Orange
Cascade
Sun
Tapestry
Ensō
Additionally, Modern Nature have announced news of a UK tour in December as well as their very own new music festival, named Murmuration, which takes place on Saturday, September 30 at Newport Village Hall in Essex.
Tour dates are:
Monday, December 11 – Birmingham – Hare and Hounds
Tuesday, December 12 – Ipswich – The Smokehouse
Wednesday, December 13 – Lewes – Lewes Con Club
Thursday, December 14 – Bristol – Rough Trade
Friday, December 15 – London – Café Oto
Saturday, December 16 – London – Café Oto
Sunday, December 17 – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
Monday, December 18 – Glasgow – Glad Café
Tuesday, December 19 – Manchester – The Carlton Club
“I haven’t yet had my Joni Mitchell phase,” admits Nico Paulo, which for a singer-songwriter born in Canada might be considered close to sacrilege. But Paulo’s parents are Portuguese and they returned to Europe when she was two; instead, the lusophone sounds of Tropicália – Gal Costa in p...
“I haven’t yet had my Joni Mitchell phase,” admits Nico Paulo, which for a singer-songwriter born in Canada might be considered close to sacrilege. But Paulo’s parents are Portuguese and they returned to Europe when she was two; instead, the lusophone sounds of Tropicália – Gal Costa in particular – were the first to make a lasting impression. “I don’t come from a musical background. I’m still discovering it all.”
Paulo grew up in a small town an hour outside Lisbon, and while she sang in church choirs and school musicals it was something she only ever saw as a hobby, opting instead to study graphic design. It wasn’t until 2014, when she moved back to Toronto in search of a graduate internship, that she picked up a guitar for the first time, turning to songwriting as a way to deal with the “culture shock” of her new surroundings.
“I have dual citizenship but I felt this tension when I arrived in Canada, like I didn’t belong here,” she explains. “I didn’t grow up speaking English, and I was living in this big North American city – I felt a little lonely. In a way it was a blessing, because I got to spend a lot of time by myself, with music, and I began to understand that this passion that I have for it was not just a hobby. I do have something that I want to say.”
Paulo left her design job to begin making music full time in 2018, releasing her debut EP “Wave Call” in early 2020 ahead of a short European tour with collaborator and then-romantic partner Tim Baker, the former frontman of Newfoundland indie-rockers Hey Rosetta!. During lockdown in Toronto later that year, the pair decided to relocate to Baker’s childhood home in St John’s, where Paulo quickly found community in the island capital’s flourishing creative scene.
“I feel closer to myself here than I am anywhere else,” says Paulo. “I’m very easily distracted, and in Toronto there are so many things trying to grab your attention. Ultimately I feel more connected to this place: being by the sea, the slower pace of life and having more space to be outside.”
Her self-titled debut album was recorded in similarly idyllic circumstances, in a lakeside cabin on Nova Scotia’s South Shore with Baker and percussionist Joshua Van Tassel co-producing. Fellow St John’s musicians came down to contribute: clarinetist Mary Beth Waldram, singer Steve Maloney, and Baker’s Hey Rosetta! bandmate Adam Hogan on guitar. Kyle Cunjak, head of Paulo’s label Forward Music Group, added bass parts during a three-day recording session.
“The cabin wasn’t planned,” Paulo reveals. “Josh Van Tassel was setting up a studio in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, but a couple of things he needed wouldn’t arrive in time. As the date of the session approached, he suggested turning a family member’s cabin into a studio instead. We only used it as a recording space, so I was staying with some friends who also lived in the South Shore, and their little daughter. It really was magical.”
Pairing lyrics inspired by love, dreams and the passage of time with warm instrumentation and rhythms subtly influenced by those Tropicália records, the final album sounds both comforting and timeless. “I feel like I’m very young as a songwriter, so a lot of the writing that I’ve done is a conversation that I’m having with myself,” says Paulo. “It feels almost like therapy, like a meditation.”
Nico Paulo is available now from the Forward Music Group
In the autumn of 1984, abetted by his Commotions, Lloyd Cole coughed out a masterpiece called Rattlesnakes. In his black polo neck and corduroys, the video to “Perfect Skin” saw Cole looking and sounding like a man willing middle-age gravitas to come and get him. Meanwhile, he fetishised the dre...
In the autumn of 1984, abetted by his Commotions, Lloyd Cole coughed out a masterpiece called Rattlesnakes. In his black polo neck and corduroys, the video to “Perfect Skin” saw Cole looking and sounding like a man willing middle-age gravitas to come and get him. Meanwhile, he fetishised the dreams and disasters of the protagonists in stories by Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. On Easy Pieces, released a year later, he sang about characters who struggled to come to terms with the bad decisions of their ruthless youth.
All of which is worth dwelling on because, in the intervening years, Lloyd Cole finally got to be the thing he so badly wanted to be from the outset. He got old – and when that happens to songwriters, they get a different sort of pass to the one that allows you to ride buses for free. People project onto you the depth that comes with mere survival. It’s something Cole himself noticed in the last decade. After mid-life creative peaks such as Music In A Foreign Language came and went without much fanfare, 2013’s Standards elicited not so much a Proustian rush as a Mexican wave of déja vû from returning fans who rightly held it up as a sonic postscript to that 1984 debut. As it turned out, Standards was something of a red herring. Now that Cole had our attention, with 2019’s elegant, electronic Guesswork he set about creating music that couldn’t be further removed from his precociously florid early work.
And it turns out that when you’re pulling the weight of all that lived experience through life, the less you feel the need to elaborate. “You can’t believe it/It can’t be possible/But it’s happening now”, runs the entire lyric of “This Can’t Be Happening”, the sixth of the eight songs that comprise On Pain. Just those three lines over and over, occasionally accompanied by an impersonally unhuman female harmony, while tentative synth stabs search out a rhythm on which they might be able to ride out of this torment.
At moments like this, the space left by Cole turns the listener into collaborator. The shock of loss; the halogen glare of waiting rooms where people gather to hear the worst; a letter bearing unwelcome news. These are the scenes somehow implied here – and you can’t help but fill them in. On “You Are Here Now”, Cole begins like a man transmitting from a numbness that sits beyond emotion – “Every day the same as every day before” – before a slo-mo digital stampede vaults him into an apparent reconnection with the miracle of his existence. In these moments lies the validation of Cole’s assertion that the only thing about the record that he wanted to sound organic were the sentiments that brought the songs to life.
To which end, it’s an Auto-Tuned iteration of the careworn Cole timbre that takes centre-stage on “I Can Hear Everything”, the singer inhabiting the guise of a mildly exasperated God. It’s not the only song here rooted in a feeling of fin de siecle fatalism. “Warm By The Fire” sounds like a companion piece to Cass Elliott’s “California Earthquake”, which Cole covered on Standards – only this time, the disaster is man-made, hence Cole navigating his lyrical drone over the shopping malls of an Los Angeles being set alight by insurrectionary influencers. It’s good, but this rocky outlier doesn’t entirely sound like it belongs among the sparsely ornamented electronic meditations that surround it.
Much better are the songs that bookend the album: revealed in a sultry fug of nocturnal humidity, “Wolves” offers a dreamlike reversal of the werewolf trope, while the album’s exquisite title track finds Cole’s consolation patter mirroring the music’s cocooned queasiness. On a subdued celebration of Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s mythical German sabbatical, “The Idiots”, Cole sings, “We’ll move to Berlin/Stop being drug addicts/We’ll cycle and swim”. Cole has frequently hymned the effect the pair’s Berlin albums had on him, singling out that same unflinching minimalism he feels is so well-suited to writing from an older perspective.
Perhaps the most perfectly realised authentication of that claim comes with the penultimate song. Incredibly, seeds of “More Of What You Are” were sown in the same overheard conversation that spawned the Commotions’ “My Bag”, the observation that cocaine’s primary effect is to make you “more of what you are”. Over a balletically mesmerising tapestry of synths that evoke Trans-Europe Express’s quieter interludes, Cole extends that observation to the ageing process: the way the lines on our faces deepen and multiply with time, exaggerating the version of us that exists in the collective memory of our friends. Lloyd Cole is no exception. He, too, has become more of what he always was. And somehow he’s achieved that by paring his music down to its rawest essence.
Initially conceived as a 20th-anniversary nod to 2000 debut Not The Tremblin’ Kind, this first-rate studio return was derailed by the pandemic. Just Like A Rose is well worth the wait, though. Cantrell sees it as “more of a celebration than a traditional album”, the sum of myriad influences an...
Initially conceived as a 20th-anniversary nod to 2000 debut Not The Tremblin’ Kind, this first-rate studio return was derailed by the pandemic. Just Like A Rose is well worth the wait, though. Cantrell sees it as “more of a celebration than a traditional album”, the sum of myriad influences and styles that have defined her career thus far, from Peel favourite to Grand Ole Opry performer to successful radio host on Gimme Country.
The protracted gestation of Just Like A Rose… also allowed her to bring in a wealth of guests, among them Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and rockabilly veteran Rosie Flores. The latter directly inspired the title track, a country-rock tribute to female singer-guitarists who continue to roar: “Her colours are wild/Her ways are free”. Producer Flores and fellow guitarist Kenny Vaughan lock into a stinging rhythm, overlaid with Cantrell’s clear, assured voice. A similar sentiment guides the airy “Unaccompanied”, which revisits her formative days in New York City, riding the subway, catching gigs, immersing herself in music – “On my own/ Free to roam/All alone” – its wistful sense of autonomy accentuated by pedal steel from David Mansfield, previously a mainstay of Bob Dylan’s ’70s ensemble.
Earle appears on “When The Roses Bloom Again”, a majestic duet treatment of a vintage tune that Cantrell first cut for her second album, back in 2002, and which owes its arrangement to Jeff Tweedy (the Wilco leader had recorded it with Billy Bragg during the Mermaid Avenue sessions). It’s brightened further by Buddy Miller’s extended guitar break. “Bide My Time” is imbued with a satisfying twang, a gentle-ish paean to ramblin’ country tropes, though the antique vibe is most apparent on “Good Morning Mr Afternoon”. Written by Joe Flood and featuring Paul Burch and his WPA Ballclub, it’s a leisurely exercise in old-school honky-tonk. It finds its greatest contrast in “AWM – Bless”, a biting takedown of entitled, angry white maledom that couldn’t feel more 2023.
In Quantum Criminals, writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay excavate the deep mysteries and myths of the Steely Dan extended universe. It’s not a straightforward band biog, though you’re likely to learn a new detail about the band on virtually every page. Instead, it’s a rich examinatio...
In Quantum Criminals, writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay excavate the deep mysteries and myths of the Steely Dan extended universe. It’s not a straightforward band biog, though you’re likely to learn a new detail about the band on virtually every page. Instead, it’s a rich examination of the Dan’s legacy, with Pappademas’s keen and witty insight complemented beautifully by LeMay’s portraits of “the ramblers, wild gamblers, and other sole survivors” – both real and fictional – who populate the Steely Dan saga. From guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter to “Deacon Blues”’ Expanding Man, the book offers Dan-iacs a fresh and revealing look at what Pappademas calls “a cult band whose catalogue, paradoxically, includes at least a dozen enduring radio hits”.
The timing couldn’t be better. Steely Dan are having a “moment”, the subject of countless internet memes. Pariahs in the alternative rock era, millennials and zoomers now proclaim their love for the band unabashedly. So why are this band formed more than 50 years ago seemingly more relevant than ever? “I think the cynicism of Steely Dan maybe doesn’t feel as poisonous and acrid as it once did,” reckons Pappademas. “It feels sensible! These are dark and strange and cynical times, and there’s something about these songs that just sounds right. Younger generations are responding to that. They’re chasing a certain idea of the past that Steely Dan represents, some version of adulthood that they can live. Becker and Fagen are kind of like spiritual dads.”
The duo’s impeccable jadedness is indisputable. But one of the more surprising aspects of Quantum Criminals is how downright human many of their lyrical subjects come across. LeMay’s colourful, perceptive illustrations play a big part here, with many of her subjects gazing out at the reader in striking fashion. “I wanted them to have a whole lot of humanity,” she says. “A lot of them ended up being funny, but it wasn’t outright mocking. I don’t think the songs are doing that.”
Pappademas agrees. “As I worked on the book, something that came out was this weird empathy that exists in the band,” he says. “It’s veiled in irony, but I think they have a lot of compassion for these delusional people caught up in dreams of making it or imprisoned by their bad past decisions. Not in ‘Haitian Divorce,’ though. That one is just cruel…”
Quantum Criminals is out now, published by University Of Texas Press
To mark the 50th anniversary of her scorching self-titled debut, Light In The Attic will reissue four Betty Davis albums on August 25.
This includes the first-ever vinyl release of 1979's final 'lost' album Crashin' From Passion. Hear its title track below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1CI...
To mark the 50th anniversary of her scorching self-titled debut, Light In The Attic will reissue four Betty Davis albums on August 25.
This includes the first-ever vinyl release of 1979’s final ‘lost’ album Crashin’ From Passion. Hear its title track below:
All four titles were produced in close collaboration with Davis, who sadly passed away in 2022. Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different, and Crashin’ From Passion were remastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters and include rare photos from the era, plus new liner notes by Davis’ close friend, Danielle Maggio. They Say I’m Different also includes a fold-out 24×36 poster.
Is It Love Or Desire? was remastered by John Baldwin and includes liner notes from Oliver Wang.
Each album will be available on CD, black vinyl and a variety of exclusive colour variants, which you can pre-order here.
Put another dime in the jukebox, baby: after last year's acoustic album Changeup, Joan Jett And The Blackhearts are back to full power with a new EP called Mindsets. Featuring six tracks written by Jett and Blackhearts guitarist Dougie Needles, you can listen to it below:
https://open.spotify.com...
Put another dime in the jukebox, baby: after last year’s acoustic album Changeup, Joan Jett And The Blackhearts are back to full power with a new EP called Mindsets. Featuring six tracks written by Jett and Blackhearts guitarist Dougie Needles, you can listen to it below:
Jett is currently touring the US with Bryan Adams, but she’s kindly taken some time out for a Q&A session with you, the Uncut readers. So what do you want to ask a one-time Runaway and full-time rock’n’roll queen? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Friday (June 23) and Joan will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.
The Smile – Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner – have released a new standalone single called "Bending Hectic". The song was first debuted live last year and featured in their Live At Montreux Jazz Festival YouTube stream, although not the accompanying album.
"Bending Hectic" was pro...
The Smile – Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner – have released a new standalone single called “Bending Hectic”. The song was first debuted live last year and featured in their Live At Montreux Jazz Festival YouTube stream, although not the accompanying album.
“Bending Hectic” was produced by Sam Petts-Davies at Abbey Road studios, with strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Hear it below:
The Smile will be touring Mexico, Canada and the USA for the rest of June and July – full dates below. Following the tour, the band will return to the studio to continue working on new material.
21/06/23 – Mexico City, Mexico – National Auditorium
22/06/23 – Mexico City, Mexico – National Auditorium (SOLD OUT)
25/06/23 – Austin, TX – ACL Live at The Moody Theater (SOLD OUT)
26/06/23 – Austin, TX – ACL Live at The Moody Theater (SOLD OUT)
29/06/23 – Miami, FL – James L. Knight Center
30/06/23 – St Augustine, FL – The Saint Augustine Amphitheatre
02/07/23 – North Charleston, SC – North Charleston Performing Arts Center
03/07/23 – Asheville, NC – Thomas Wolfe Auditorium (SOLD OUT)
05/07/23 – Richmond, VA – The National (SOLD OUT)
07/07/23 – Forest Hills, NY – Forest Hills Stadium
08/07/23 – Philadelphia, PA – Franklin Music Hall (SOLD OUT)
10/07/23 – Pittsburgh, PA – Stage AE
11/07/23 – Cleveland, OH – Agora Ballroom (SOLD OUT)
14/07/23 – Quebec City – Festival d’été de Québec
15/07/23 – Laval, QC – Place Bell
16/07/23 – Ottawa, ONT – Bluesfest Festival
19/07/23 – Kansas City, MO – Midland Theatre
20/07/23 – Chesterfield, MO – The Factory
21/07/23 – Chicago, IL – Pitchfork Music Festival
It’s a trope of the mature artist to want to strip everything back in late career – to drop the production tricks and reveal the truth. Where, then, does that leave Peter Gabriel, whose career has been built on the power of theatrical presentation, at an arena show?
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It’s a trope of the mature artist to want to strip everything back in late career – to drop the production tricks and reveal the truth. Where, then, does that leave Peter Gabriel, whose career has been built on the power of theatrical presentation, at an arena show?
As mushrooms grow and strawberries rot on screens behind him, and works by favourite artists like Ai Wei Wei complement his performance, you’d maybe think that Gabriel was having none of it and sticking firmly to his position.
It turns out, though, from his initial Pythonesque appearance (strolling on in a flat cap), to his humorous digressions (“I grew up on a dairy farm – only the bull was worried about AI… artificial insemination”) it seems these days Gabriel’s mission is to enjoy the tricks of the performance trade, but also dismantle the power hierarchy and convention of a rock show.
The tone is conversational and intimate. There’s no big entrance. There’s a lot of talking and thanking the band, as he discourses on what concerns him: fake news, AI, the future, and the fate of the individual.
Which all has a charming father-in-law-reads-that-book-about-mushrooms quality, and is certainly a change from hanging upside down in a harness or dressing up as he has in the past but possibly preaching to the choir. For all his diverse interests, you couldn’t fail to get the idea from the songs (“Love Can Heal”, “Live And Let Live”) and the feeling in his voice – the man can still very much hit those soulful high notes, that Gabriel is a pretty right-thinking guy. In case you for some reason thought he might be content with a hits set, there’s a new song “Olive Tree”, from a forthcoming project. VR-themed? Need you even ask?
As the evening progresses Gabriel untethers from the conceptual, Brian Cox feel of the first set (highlights: “Growing Up” “i/o”, “Sledgehammer” which he had to fit in somewhere), to a second half more coherently-programmed for mood. Ayanna Witter-Johnson is our ersatz Kate Bush on “Don’t Give Up”, while the sumptuous “Red Rain” and “Solsbury Hill” end a second set which illustrates how well his funky and textural world pop has travelled.
Ultimately it’s testament to Gabriel’s charisma that as much as he tampers with the dynamics of a big rock concert (a campfire? An actual interval?), his performance – see his “Big Time” formation stepping with bassist Tony Levin and guitarist David Rhodes – can effortlessly bring it back. The encores are epic and expansive versions of “In Your Eyes” and “Biko”, which endorse again the eccentric and utterly unique figure which Gabriel cuts. This is someone who became a superstar using all the tricks of the 1980s, but who did it honourably and in his own way then. Clearly, he sees no reason to change that now.
Band:
Tony Levin (bass and stick) David Rhodes (guitar) Manu Katché (drums) Richard Evans (multi-i Ayanna Witter-Johnson (cello and piano) Marina Moore (violin and viola) Josh Shpak (trumpet, French horn and keys)
Setlist: Peter Gabriel – O2 Arena, London, June 19, 2023
Washing of the Water
Growing Up
Panopticom
Four Kinds of Horses
i/o
Digging in the Dirt
Playing for Time (with Tom Cawley) Olive Tree
This Is Home
Sledgehammer
Darkness
Love Can Heal
Road to Joy
Don’t Give Up (vocal by Ayanna Witter-Johnson) The Court
Red Rain
And Still
Big Time
Live and Let Live
Solsbury Hill
One of the first voices you hear in Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson’s documentary is Syd Barrett himself. Taken from a 1968 interview, Barrett discusses returning to the visual arts after his recent “break” from Pink Floyd. “If I want to say nothing, or if I want to act in an extraordinary...
One of the first voices you hear in Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson’s documentary is Syd Barrett himself. Taken from a 1968 interview, Barrett discusses returning to the visual arts after his recent “break” from Pink Floyd. “If I want to say nothing, or if I want to act in an extraordinary way, then I feel that is justified,” he says in his meticulous, if slightly stoned, BBC English tones. You could argue that he had already acted “in an extraordinary way”, as the leading light of Britain’s psychedelic underground. Now free of the pressures of commercial expectation, bright new possibilities presented themselves. But after two scruffy, endearing solo albums, Barrett chose instead “to say nothing”, absenting himself in the early ’70s until his death in 2006. While Have You Got It Yet? reminds us of Barrett’s many gifts, in doing so it also inevitably underscores what – and who – got lost along the way. “You couldn’t over-emphasise his importance,” says Nick Mason. “He was a creative genius.”
In this context, Barrett’s upbringing in 1950s Cambridge, among well-off academic families with bohemian tastes, provides favourable material from which to investigate his early promise. We hear from many of Barrett’s peers and school friends – of which Thorgerson was one – who remember a tall, handsome youth with good hair, so endowed that he even “smelled nice”. As fellow Cantabrigian Andrew Rawlinson sees it, “Everything he turned to worked. The girls worked. The painting worked. The music worked. The friendships worked.” In 1964, Barrett moved from a secure ecosystem in Cambridge into another, slightly less secure one in London, to study art at Camberwell College of Arts; many of his friends moved, too. Before long he was in a band with Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Rick Wright and Bob Klose; eventually he was earning £200 a week with The Pink Floyd and art took a back seat to his blossoming music career.
Appealing as David Gilmour’s assertion is that “Life was just too easy for him”, as it progresses, Have You Got It Yet? becomes a more subtle cautionary tale than anyone might have expected. This takes place at the affluent end of the counterculture, as Syd’s wider circle of friends head out from their flats in South Kensington to the increasingly popular acid-soaked rave-ups in the capital. “We thought we were moving in this wonderful direction to Utopia,” says Peter Wynne-Wilson, Floyd’s former lighting engineer. “We were fully engaged in the hip dream – and it was a dream. We had spiritual heights in our sights. And Syd, too.” As is often the way with gilded youth, everything seemed so effortless – until such time as it wasn’t. In footage, we see Barrett in the studio turning the dials on his Binson Echorec, interviewed alongside Waters on BBC2’s The Look Of The Week or on stage with the Floyd during their technicolour peak. But the pressures on Barrett became considerable. Co-manager Andrew King recalls the Floyd’s three-week stint performing “See Emily Play” on Top Of The Pops: “By the third week, we couldn’t find him anywhere…”
While this is a film about Syd, it’s also a film about Storm Thorgerson, who began the project with Bogawa in 2011 and died from cancer in 2013, before he could complete it. As much as Thorgerson is mining his old school friends for tales of Syd, there is a valedictory quality here, too. “This whole story depends upon the memories of people of our age,” acknowledges Roger Waters. At least five of the film’s talking heads have died since their interviews took place.
Thorgerson’s involvement opened a lot of doors – along with Gilmour, Mason and Waters, there are interviews with Barrett’s sister Rosemary, a string of his former flames, chums and admirers including Pete Townshend, Graham Coxon and Tom Stoppard. But while the vibe often feels like old friends reminiscing – “Jenny dear, tell me how you first met Syd” – the results are rather more candid and satisfying than you might otherwise expect. “We probably did as much as we could, but we were all very young,” says Gilmour. “I regret that I never went up to his house in Cambridge – in the ’80s, ’90s, ’00s. But none of us did.”
Have You Got It Yet? is part of a modest flurry of Barrett activity, along with the launch of an official Youtube channel and a BBC Radio 4 drama, The Ballad Of Syd & Morgan, about a fictional meeting between Barrett and EM Forster. Landing during Dark Side Of The Moon’s 50th anniversary year, these act as a welcome reminder of the fragile visionary who set the Floyd on their interstellar path. “Syd defined the whole of that moment in the ’60s,” says Townshend in Bogawa and Thorgerson’s documentary. “The colour, the vivacity of it. The psychedelic freedom.”
Essential, then, for lovers everywhere of gingerbread men, terrapins and mice called Gerald.
From inauspicious beginnings, as a scratch band of SEX shop denizens blagging their way onto the stage of the 100 Club for Malcolm McLaren’s 1976 punk festival, Siouxsie And The Banshees blazed a trail through the ’80s and beyond with one of the great post-punk discographies. Goth? Shoegaze? Tri...
From inauspicious beginnings, as a scratch band of SEX shop denizens blagging their way onto the stage of the 100 Club for Malcolm McLaren’s 1976 punk festival, Siouxsie And The Banshees blazed a trail through the ’80s and beyond with one of the great post-punk discographies. Goth? Shoegaze? Trip-hop? They pretty much invented all that, while Siouxsie herself redefined what a frontwoman could be. As she embarks on her first proper tour since 2008, we celebrate her insurgent hits and seminal deep cuts.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Metal Postcard” (John Peel Session, 1977)
Despite Siouxsie’s facile declaration that she was “more into high camp than death camps”, her penchant for swastikas cast a disturbing shadow over early Banshees gigs. Debuted on their first session for John Peel, and dedicated to Dadaist and anti-fascist artist John Heartfield, “Metal Postcard” hinted at a sophistication beyond their punk peers.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Hong Kong Garden” (Single, 1978)
Finally signed to Polydor in 1978, the Banshees recorded their debut single with Steve Lillywhite after initial sessions with Bruce Albertine went awry. The result was this striking (if naive) comment on British colonialism and the immigrant experience, the angular guitars topped with a bubblegum orientalist xylophone riff. It was the first post-punk single to reach the Top 10.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Suburban Relapse” (The Scream, 1978)
If the lead single had emphasised the Banshees’ pop chops, it was a gateway to the hard stuff of their debut album, The Scream: an uncompromising caterwaul of dismay. Most striking was “Suburban Relapse”, anatomising domestic violence like X-Ray Spex, but with John McKay’s guitars emulating Bernard Herrmann’s strings to take the song into Psycho territory.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Playground Twist” (Join Hands, 1979)
“If Ingmar Bergman produced records, they might sound like this,” proclaimed the NME on the release of the Banshees’ third single in June 1979. Somehow breaching the Top 30, “Playground Twist” is the first intimation of the band’s dawning, darkling psychedelia, like a bad-trip version of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Icon” (Join Hands, 1979)
Join Hands, the Banshees’ second album, was originally intended to have a creepily distorted image from a communion card on the cover. The religious overtones spooked Polydor, but were nevertheless abundant on “Icon”, with its images of self-mutilation, the stop-start Wire dynamics giving way to a more complex tumult.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Christine” (Kaleidoscope, 1980)
Following the departure of John McKay and Kenny Morris mid-tour in 1979, prospects for the Banshees seemed dim, but their defiant intransigence somehow produced the uncanny “Happy House”, aided by the expressionist guitar of John McGeoch. It was quickly bettered by “Christine”, McGeoch’s cascades of acoustic wonder providing the soundtrack to Siouxsie’s voyage into the kaleidoscope of the schizophrenic psyche, and the beginning of the band’s imperial phase.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Spellbound” (Juju, 1981)
Arguably the Banshees’ finest single, a furious soulstorm conjured by John McGeoch’s sublime 12-string guitar and Budgie’s booming drums. Though it failed to crack the Top 20 when released as a single in May 1981, thanks to its use in the finale of Stranger Things Season 4, it’s also now their most-streamed song.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Night Shift” (Juju, 1981)
Though its parent album Juju is in many ways the rock upon which the church of goth was founded, the tenebrous “Night Shift”, inspired by Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous trail through the red-light districts of late-’70s Yorkshire and Lancashire, is profoundly darker and more disturbing than anything that emerged from the Batcave.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Slowdive” (A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, 1982)
1982’s A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, a direct influence on the nascent Cocteau Twins, is shoegazing’s ground zero. But ironically the song that named one of that genre’s most languorous leading lights is the album’s most crazed, upbeat moment.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Melt!” (A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, 1982)
On …Dreamhouse, all the Banshees’ intimate, psychological horror exploded into a peerless, glittering neo-psychedelia, abetted by Mike Hedges’ production and strings recorded at Abbey Road. “Melt!” is its sumptuous pinnacle, like John Barry collaborating with Gustav Klimt.
THE CREATURES
“Miss The Girl” (Feast, 1983)
Conceived out of their growing romantic relationship, Siouxsie and Budgie first formed The Creatures in 1981 during a break in the recording of Juju. But their finest hour is Feast, an infatuated fever dream conjured up in Hawaii, combining exotica and JG Ballard. This eerie marimba lullaby, the album’s only single, reached No 21 in April 1983.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Tattoo” (“Dear Prudence” B-side, 1983)
The Banshees’ version of “Dear Prudence” became the band’s biggest British single, only kept off the No 1 spot by the combined forces of Culture Club and Tracey Ullman. But it’s B-side “Tattoo” that proved the stealth hit, its claustrophobic mood and insistent rhythm influencing the likes of Tricky, who covered the song on his Nearly God album in 1996.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Dazzle” (Hyæna, 1984)
The Bunnymen laid down the gauntlet with the swooning, orchestral Ocean Rain, but the Banshees rose to the challenge with “Dazzle”, the imperious opening track of their sixth LP, Hyæna. It was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, “Skating bullets on angel dust/In a dead sea of fluid mercury”.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Swimming Horses” (Hyæna, 1984)
Hinting at the surreal anthropological adventures that had begun on …Dreamhouse, this single was the Banshees’ first to be co-written with Robert Smith and features one of Budgie’s most astonishing rhythms.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Trust In Me” (Through The Looking Glass, 1987)
Covers album Through The Looking Glass felt like a band straining to get back in touch with the seedy, freaky, futuristic glamour of Iggy, Roxy, Bowie and Sparks that had sustained them as bored kids in early-’70s suburbia. However, the highlight was this sublime cover of Kaa the snake’s song from Disney’s Jungle Book.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Peek-A-Boo” (Peepshow, 1988)
The Banshees brilliantly reinvented themselves with 1988’s Peepshow, which refitted their slinky, transgressive soundworld to the era of Prince and Madonna, somehow coming out sounding both more pop and more transgressive than either.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“Kiss Them For Me” (Superstition, 1991)
The Banshees repeated the comeback trick with “Kiss Them For Me”. With the help of producer Stephen Hague, it combined a 909 beat from Schoolly D with the spirit of Hollywood Babylon to create a track that felt both up-to-the-minute and timeless, presaging the transglobal avant-dance of Björk.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
“The Double Life” (The Rapture, 1995)
The height of Britpop was not a congenial time to be a Banshee, and the group’s final album The Rapture was a lacklustre affair. But this eerie spoken-word track – looking back at centuries of “sin and aftermath” – proved to be a fitting swansong.
THE CREATURES
“2nd Floor” (Anima Animus, 1999)
The first Creatures LP to be conceived as a statement in itself rather than an interim side project, Anima Animus took the band’s early experiments in rhythm and voice to the electronic dancefloor – notably on the lead single, “2nd Floor”, which sounded like Underworld descending into the abyss.
SIOUXSIE
“Into a Swan” (Mantaray, 2007)
Siouxsie’s belated solo debut Mantaray felt like a victory lap, acknowledging her influence on acolytes from Curve to Björk, Suede to Goldfrapp. The lead single was typically commanding, channelling the spirit of T.Rex for a new millennium.
Siouxsie plays Wolverhampton Civic Hall, June 21; Tynemouth Priory And Castle, July 7; Latitude festival, July 23; Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow, July 25; Troxy, London, September 6 & 7
Bob Dylan covered Van Morrison's 1970 song "Into The Mystic" live last week.
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Dylan, who is currently in Europe on his Rough And Rowdy Ways World Tour, performed the Moondance track on Thursday, June 15 at Plaza de Toros in Ali...
Bob Dylan covered Van Morrison‘s 1970 song “Into The Mystic” live last week.
Dylan, who is currently in Europe on his Rough And Rowdy Ways World Tour, performed the Moondance track on Thursday, June 15 at Plaza de Toros in Alicante, Spain.
Dylan has previously included a number of covers into his setlists for the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour – including the Grateful Dead‘s “Brokedown Palace”, “Friend Of The Devil’ and “Truckin'”, Jerry Lee Lewis‘s “I Can’t Seem To Say Goodbye” and The Crickets‘ “Not Fade Away”.
Although this is the first time he’s covered Van Morrison on this current tour, Dylan has form in this department. As well as solo renditions of “Tupelo Honey” in 1984 and “Carrying A Torch” in 2002, Dylan and Van performed “Crazy Love”, “Foreign Window”, “One Irish Rover” and “And It Stoned Me” on the Philopappos (The Hill Of The Muses), Athens, broadcast in the programme Arena: One Irish Rover Van Morrison in Performance.
Speaking to Uncut, Van recalled, “I have a really good memory of the time Bob and I were out near the Acropolis in Athens . It was being filmed for Arena, in June 1989 and Bob happened to be touring Greece at that time. So it was just a very spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment thing for us to get together. I’d been telling the filmmakers about having been to Greece before and going to the Hill Of The Muses, so I’d suggested that Bob and I go up and do something. It was all very easy-going. Bob was so great to be around, very relaxed and amenable. He’s always been that way with me. We had a great time playing up there.”
A street-fighting man who cheerfully scaled cocaine mountains with Sly Stone, and once sought by George Harrison for Apple Records, David Axelrod had barely worked for a decade when, in the mid-’90s, his name began circulating among crate-digging fans. Indeed, just a few years earlier, the former ...
A street-fighting man who cheerfully scaled cocaine mountains with Sly Stone, and once sought by George Harrison for Apple Records, David Axelrod had barely worked for a decade when, in the mid-’90s, his name began circulating among crate-digging fans. Indeed, just a few years earlier, the former Capitol Records A&R and staff producer – who’d started his career in the late ’50s producing jazz records for the likes of Harold Land and Charles Mingus associate Buddy Collette – had been verging on homelessness.
In 1993, however, De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate twice featured a prominent piano from his Lou Rawls production “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, while three years later DJ Shadow’s “Midnight In A Perfect World” lifted from Axelrod’s “The Human Abstract”. Shadow even lured him out of retirement to remix UNKLE and Thom Yorke’s “Rabbit In Your Headlights” in 1998, before Mo’ Wax released an eponymous album of revised, unreleased tracks in 2001.
That same year, Dr Dre’s ubiquitous blockbuster “The Next Episode” hijacked the distinctive, dramatic opening of 1967’s “The Edge”, produced by Axelrod for actor David McCallum. When he died in 2017, Questlove declared, “He WAS hip-hop.”
Axelrod’s appeal is best encapsulated by his first two solo albums, 1968’s Song Of Innocence and 1969’s Songs Of Experience. That these suites were inspired by William Blake’s poetry speaks to their grand ambitions: his flamboyant, dynamic arrangements, all brass, strings and perfectly mic’d drums, with cavernous rhythms ideally suited to the breakbeat generation, were furnished with a luxury suggesting an unassailable urge to dwarf Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound. Such elements remain central to 1974’s Heavy Axe, but it’s telling that it’s provided less fertile ground for sample junkies, and that’s arguably not only because its likeminded production is credited to his friend Cannonball Adderley, himself a frequent beneficiary of Axelrod’s techniques.
Axelrod instead arranges and conducts here, as well as writing the four best tracks. The highlight is “Mucho Chupar”, whose percussive, soulful funk, enhanced by Minnie Riperton-style squeals and Donna Summer moans, hurtles towards a colossal climax, while “Everything Counts” lithely reinterprets Song Of Innocence’s revered “Holy Thursday”. Elsewhere, however, his selection of material is less gripping. Adderley’s own “Get Up Off Your Hands” offers an entertainingly overblown Las Vegas opener, but Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing” is reduced to incidental music for a Quincy episode, and Stephanie Spruill seems hellbent on caricaturing Millie Jackson’s worst excesses on a cabaret “You’re So Vain”. Faithful fans will celebrate this return to vinyl then, but even they will concede that ‘The Ax’ was capable of far heavier, more cutting-edge work.
The self-titled record from singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brigid Mae Power landed in 2016 with the grace and tremulous beauty of a butterfly, but carried with it the uncertain air of a recent storm. An understated yet resonant, folk-edged set, it was built from guitar, piano, strings, ...
The self-titled record from singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brigid Mae Power landed in 2016 with the grace and tremulous beauty of a butterfly, but carried with it the uncertain air of a recent storm. An understated yet resonant, folk-edged set, it was built from guitar, piano, strings, a prominent pump organ and Power’s sweet, pure voice, all of which lent her songs of troubled relationships and maternal responsibilities an intense expression. Cultish acclaim followed – along with a degree of voyeuristic interest in her past, which she later laid bare in a distressing blog post.
Subsequent recordings have included further articulations of her emotional states and agency (or perceived lack of it), borrowing from the classicism of Joni and Neil, Tim Buckley’s vocal style and dreamy, pastoral psychedelia. Folk traditionals have been a feature and in 2021 a covers EP paid homage to Patsy Cline and Dylan, among others. Now, shifting confidently between idioms and having made a kind of peace with her identity, Power looks poised to deliver to a wider audience.
There’s always been a hazy and reflective feel to her songs, but despite the title, her fourth is Power’s most resolute set yet. Though tidal drifting is still a feature and she’s again drawing on both traditional and modern song forms, suggesting kindred spirits from Vashti Bunyan and Judy Collins to Laura Veirs, there’s a new expansiveness in play. It’s as if she’s opened her chest to breathe deeper, all the better to vent emotions – disappointment, longing, quiet anger – but relate different stories, too. Production (shared with Peter Broderick, who’s also prominent on the playing front) is warm and in-the-room intimate.
Despite having eight new songs ready, Power has said she felt “very unprepared” in the run-up to Dream From The Deep Well, even writing some lyrics the night before recording. The process itself, though, sparked enough new ideas to complete the set, which was recorded mostly live to tape. Three of the tracks are from home recordings, while introducing accordion, harmonica and brass helped Power give the album what she described to Uncut as “a different colour scheme”. No loud primaries, of course, but some definite tonal brightening.
Belonging – ancestral, national, geographic – has long been a conflicted notion for Power, but here it’s more a source of inspiration. She opens the set with a slightly eerie interpretation of “I Know Who Is Sick”, an Irish traditional popularised in a much lustier form by The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, and closes with the haunting “Down By The Glenside”, an Irish Republican song from the ’20s chosen for personal rather than political reasons.
Unsurprisingly, the fresh breeze blows stronger through the originals: “Counting Down” nods unmistakably to “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” but adopts an irresistible, country-pop swing that recalls a leaner Julia Jacklin. The song is a tender ode to maternal longing and domestic routine that also addresses Power’s occupational dilemma: “I’m not sure this is what it’s cracked out to be/I’m meeting new friends that always have to leave/I’m considering a new career/But all I can do is play music by ear”. “Maybe It’s Just Lightning” is both personal and universal, inspired by the singer’s early years as a single parent and, more recently, time spent with a mother and daughter from Ukraine. Set to a deceptively light, see-saw rhythm, it addresses the vastly underestimated maternal burden of (child)care and responsibility: “Going through the unimaginable/Doubted, judged and blamed/But still devoting her time to keeping you safe”.
The woozy sea shanty that is “Some Life You’ve Known”, with pedal-steel, accordion and Mellotron, reflects on a sad parting and is an album highlight. Another is “The Waterford Song”, which concerns Power’s relationship with her father’s Irish home and is driven by a strong psych-folk undertow over which her voice rises in a dulcet, wordless incantation. The album’s other cover is of Tim Buckley’s guitar-and-vibes evergreen “I Must Have Been Blind”, a hushed, spell-binding version on piano, violin and synth, Power’s voice suggesting a sweeter Judee Sill.
The title track lands late as the singer’s rebuke to those whose actions don’t square with their advocation of “peace and love”. That “deep well” is an enduring religious metaphor for redemption but rather than drink, Power encourages them to dream from it, thereby realising the potential of the human spirit in this world. Tradition, yes – but 21st-century realism, too.
When Mark Linkous took his own life in 2010, he was in the midst of recording a fifth Sparklehorse album. Now, with the painstaking work of Linkous's brother and sister-in-law, that album has been completed.
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Linkous had alread...
When Mark Linkous took his own life in 2010, he was in the midst of recording a fifth Sparklehorse album. Now, with the painstaking work of Linkous’s brother and sister-in-law, that album has been completed.
Linkous had already provided Bird Machine with a title and tracklisting; a number of the songs were close to completion, while others required the addition of “subtle instrumentation and accompanying vocals”.
“It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” says Matt Linkous. “It’s difficult making a choice about someone else’s art, even if you’ve known them all your life and worked with them, even if they were your brother and best friend. We had long conversations about not wanting to take this into a different direction. We wanted to bring out what was there.”
Bird Machine will be released by Anti- on September 8, and is available to pre-order here. You can watch a video for the song “Evening Star Supercharger” below, featuring Linkous’s art and handwritten lyrics:
Paul McCartney has revealed that artificial intelligence has enabled a "final" Beatles song.
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He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning [June 13] that the technology had been used to "extricate" John Lennon's voice fro...
Paul McCartney has revealed that artificial intelligence has enabled a “final” Beatles song.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning [June 13] that the technology had been used to “extricate” John Lennon‘s voice from an old demo so he could complete the song.
“We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he explained, reports BBC News.
During work on Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, the technology was used to isolate Beatles’ voices to create “clean” audio.
“He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” McCartney told Radio 4’s Martha Kearney. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine. ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’. So when we came to to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”
The track in question is possibly “Now And Then“, an unfinished song by Lennon, recorded in 1978 as a demo, which was considered for inclusion on The Beatles Anthology, following “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love“.
We’re delighted to co-host the streaming premier of Naomi Yang’s directorial debut, Never Be A Punchbag For Nobody.
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Best known for her work with Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, for the last 10 years or so, Yang has been bus...
We’re delighted to co-host the streaming premier of Naomi Yang’s directorial debut, Never Be A Punchbag For Nobody.
Best known for her work with Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, for the last 10 years or so, Yang has been busy developing another strand to her career – directing promo videos for artists including Julia Holter, Steve Gunn and Meg Baird. Now she’s made the leap into full-length features with this documentary about forgotten histories in her Boston hometown.
In Never Be A Punchbag For Nobody, an East Boston boxing gym becomes a symbol of the resilience of people and places facing erasure from gentrification. Equally affecting are Yang’s reflections on the violence in her family growing up and the lessons she learns in that humble gym about claiming space and punching back.
The premier takes place this Friday – June 16 – at 19:00 GMT. Tickets cost £11.93 (or $15) for a 48 period. Click on Pre-Order in the top right hand of the screen below to find out more.
The comedian Stewart Lee has recorded an exclusive online Q&A with Yang, which will be available as a bonus along with the film.
Meanwhile, Yang’s soundtrack to the film is also available to digitally from Bandcamp. You can also hear “Boxing And The City“, from the soundtrack, on Now Playing – the free CD available with this month’s issue of Uncut.
As convivial the atmosphere, and starry the guestlist – that was Jimmy Page, but was that Patti Smith, or Polly Harvey’s mum? – and incredible the music, the defining moment from Bob Dylan’s four night stand at London Palladium in October last year was ultimately a visual one. After playing...
As convivial the atmosphere, and starry the guestlist – that was Jimmy Page, but was that Patti Smith, or Polly Harvey’s mum? – and incredible the music, the defining moment from Bob Dylan’s four night stand at London Palladium in October last year was ultimately a visual one. After playing several songs at the piano, Dylan – now 81 – stepped away from the instrument and into the centre of the stage, and jauntily placed a hand on his hip to receive some of his acclaim. Yes, he seemed to be saying, this is it: as Bob Dylan as it gets.
In this magazine we’re striking a pose of a similar nature. This is our first 172-page Definitive edition, and in it we review each of Dylan’s albums from the eponymous debut to the newly-released Shadow Kingdom, and reprise his most interesting encounters with the British press. We’ve also included a special eight-page fold-out chronology, taking a sideways look at the six ages of Dylan.
It should go without saying that on these pages we honour Dylan’s many indispensable past recordings, his influence on 20th Century culture and thought. But we’re also celebrating the beguiling work in his present, where he has not been idle. Since we last published something like this magazine in 2016 there has been a new, mildly demented Dylan film, a book, and five new volumes of the Bootleg series, in which we’re invited to walk with Dylan not only down the roads he took, but examine alongside him a map showing many of the routes he considered – and enter with him an entire alternative landscape of choice and song.
In that time we have also enjoyed Triplicate, the third instalment of Dylan’s exploration of the Great American Songbook. Then in early 2020, there arrived the event that we had been hoping for: Rough And Rowdy Ways, a double studio album of new Dylan compositions in which everything – ambition, music, and lyrics seemed to be stretching out for the horizon, rolling in rhythm and blues playing that was learned, gutsy and entertaining as the man himself.
At the Palladium and on the Rough And Rowdy tour, Dylan’s and his band seemed to have reached a point where it magnificently all came together: the continuity of the playing joining the music of his present and his past with the currents of older American song. The keyboard playing touched on blues and boogie-woogie. The guitar playing was as fiery as any on a Sun Session. The reinvention and re-arrangement of his own 1960s classics (“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” for example) uncovering new ways of hearing them.
As Dylan placed his hand on hip and the applause mounted in an evening of wry, entertaining and self-referencing music, you could possibly delude yourself that this was Dylan in plain sight, finally revealing his masterplan. As we write, though, and he releases an album of “early songs”, re-interpreted in his riverboat deluxe style, and we attempt to unravel the details of who is playing on the record, never mind why – to pick the lock of the Shadow Kingdom in fact – it’s clear he’s evaded capture once again.
Enjoy the magazine. You can get one here get one here.
