Peter Gabriel has recorded a new song and score for a forthcoming film, Words With Gods.
It will be Gabriel's first new material since "Down To Earth", which written for the Pixar film, WALL-E.
Gabriel - who has also written scores for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ and Phillip No...
Peter Gabriel has recorded a new song and score for a forthcoming film, Words With Gods.
It will be Gabriel’s first new material since “Down To Earth”, which written for the Pixar film, WALL-E.
Gabriel – who has also written scores for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence – hasn’t released a new album of original material since Up in 2002.
His last album, 2011’s New Blood, comprised orchestral reworkings of his own material.
Words With Gods is an anthology of nine short films centered on religion and spirituality and set for release next year. The films directors include Mira Nair, Guillermo Arriaga and Hideo Nakata.
Meanwhile, Gabriel’s Back To Front tour, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the So album, reaches the UK in the autumn.
Roy Harper has confirmed details of his new album, Man And Myth, which includes a guest spot from Pete Townshend.
The seven-track album is Harper's first studio album since The Green Man in 2000 and will be released by Bella Union on September 23.
The track listing for Man And Myth is:
1. The Ene...
Roy Harper has confirmed details of his new album, Man And Myth, which includes a guest spot from Pete Townshend.
The seven-track album is Harper’s first studio album since The Green Man in 2000 and will be released by Bella Union on September 23.
The track listing for Man And Myth is:
1. The Enemy
2. Time Is Temporary
3. January Man
4. The Stranger
5. Cloud Cuckooland
6. Heaven Is Here
7. The Exile
“The Enemy”, “Time Is Temporary”, “The Stranger” and “Cloud Cuckooland” were recorded with Jonathan Wilson at his studio in Laurel Canyon; the remaining three were recorded in County Cork, Ireland, where Harper has lived since the late 1980s.
Pete Townshend has added lead guitar to “Cloud Cuckooland”.
Other musicians who appear on Man And Myth include Jake Blanton (bass), Richard Chard (drums), Omar Valesco (clavinet and melatron) and Jason Crosby (keyboards) on “The Enemy”, “Time Is Temporary”, “The Stranger” and “Cloud Cuckooland”.
On “The Stranger”, “Heaven Is Here” and “The Exile”, Harper is joined by John Fitzgerald (bouzouki, engineering), Tony Franklin (bass), Bill Shanley (guitar) and Neil Morgan (percussion).
Meanwhile, in addition to two festival shows in August, Roy Harper will tour the UK in October:
Saturday 17 August – ESCOT PARK – Beautiful Days Festival
Robby Krieger has announced that he and John Densmore are planning a live tribute to Ray Manzarek, who died in May aged 74.
Krieger says there will be at least one performance, with potential for more. He told Rolling Stone: "We're going to do at least one show for Ray and have a big send-off. That...
Robby Krieger has announced that he and John Densmore are planning a live tribute to Ray Manzarek, who died in May aged 74.
Krieger says there will be at least one performance, with potential for more. He told Rolling Stone: “We’re going to do at least one show for Ray and have a big send-off. That’s either the start or the end of it, I don’t know.”
It marks a healing in the pair’s relationship. They fell out in 2002 when Krieger and Manzarek began touring as The Doors Of The 21st Century, leading to a lawsuit over the use of The Doors name, and a £25 million countersuit against Densmore for his refusal to sign off on multi-million-dollar licensing of band songs for commercials.
“That’s what you do – if someone sues you, you sue them twice as hard back and hope that they drop the suit,” Krieger said. “It was a very stupid idea. We had the worst lawyers.” The row has now ended, but the lawsuit is the subject of Densmore’s new book, The Doors Unhinged.
Krieger, who admitted to reading about half of the book, said: “He’s the one that got me in the Doors. What am I going to do? I can’t hate him forever. I just wish he had wanted to play with Ray and I back before all this started. That’s when things went bad. We’re talking about it.” A memorial with 150 family and friends took place up in June in Manzarek’s adopted home of Napa, California. Krieger added: “He had a good run. For a rock & roller, 74’s a pretty good age.”
The new issue of Uncut, out today (July 4), features The Band, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Nico.
The Band are on the cover, and inside Robbie Robertson and others explain how the group created the seminal Music From Big Pink.
Moving to Woodstock and taking inspiration from rootsy American folk, country and gospel, the group jammed with Bob Dylan in their basement and made one of rock’s seminal debut albums, all while rejecting the hippy movement and dressing like they were “from another planet”.
The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Hyde Park gig is also remembered in the issue – a host of those who were there, including performer Greg Lake, promoter Peter Jenner and journalists Keith Altham and Chris Welch, recall the “almost Biblical” event.
We review Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s London O2 gig, and show an amazing selection of candid photos taken on the group’s world tour, while John Cale reveals how Nico created her dark masterpiece, The Marble Index, while struggling with heroin, an out-of-tune harmonium and "being blonde and beautiful"…
Elsewhere, Richard Hell answers your questions, Johnny Marr takes us through his life in pictures, and we hear more about the new 18-disc John Martyn boxset.
The key players reveal how they made Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s “The Message”, while Devendra Banhart shows us the records that changed his life.
Otis Redding, Nilsson, Big Star, Grant Hart, Mavis Staples, The Teardrop Explodes, Cheap Trick and Alela Diane are some of the artists featured in the 40-page reviews section, while Siouxsie, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and The Strypes are in our live section.
The DVD and film section takes a look at the new Tropicália film, Portlandia and Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England, among others.
The CD, This Wheel’s On Fire, features 15 excellent new tracks, from Grant Hart, Oblivians, Alela Diane, Guy Clark, Daughn Gibson and more.
The new issue of Uncut, dated August 2013, is out now.
The new issue of Uncut, out today (July 4), features The Band, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Nico.
The Band are on the cover, and inside Robbie Robertson and others explain how the group created the seminal Music From Big Pink.
Moving to Woodstock and taking inspiration from rootsy American folk, country and gospel, the group jammed with Bob Dylan in their basement and made one of rock’s seminal debut albums, all while rejecting the hippy movement and dressing like they were “from another planet”.
The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Hyde Park gig is also remembered in the issue – a host of those who were there, including performer Greg Lake, promoter Peter Jenner and journalists Keith Altham and Chris Welch, recall the “almost Biblical” event.
We review Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s London O2 gig, and show an amazing selection of candid photos taken on the group’s world tour, while John Cale reveals how Nico created her dark masterpiece, The Marble Index, while struggling with heroin, an out-of-tune harmonium and “being blonde and beautiful”…
Elsewhere, Richard Hell answers your questions, Johnny Marr takes us through his life in pictures, and we hear more about the new 18-disc John Martyn boxset.
The key players reveal how they made Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s “The Message”, while Devendra Banhart shows us the records that changed his life.
Otis Redding, Nilsson, Big Star, Grant Hart, Mavis Staples, The Teardrop Explodes, Cheap Trick and Alela Diane are some of the artists featured in the 40-page reviews section, while Siouxsie, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and The Strypes are in our live section.
The DVD and film section takes a look at the new Tropicália film, Portlandia and Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England, among others.
The CD, This Wheel’s On Fire, features 15 excellent new tracks, from Grant Hart, Oblivians, Alela Diane, Guy Clark, Daughn Gibson and more.
The new issue of Uncut, dated August 2013, is out now.
Rare recordings made by David Bowie as a member of The Riot Squad has been released as a four-track EP by record label Acid Jazz as part of their Rare Mod series.
"The Toy Soldier EP" features recordings made when Bowie was a member of the band in 1967. The group - who were initially managed and produced by Larry Page and later Joe Meek - rehearsed at The Swan in Tottenham, with Bowie on vocals, and played live together for approximately nine weeks. There were also six recording sessions, at which Bowie recorded the four titles featured here.
The track listing for "The Toy Soldier EP" is:
Toy Soldier
Silly Boy Blue
I’m Waiting For My Man (Velvet Underground cover)
Silver Treetop School For Boys
"The Toy Soldier EP" is available now.
Rare recordings made by David Bowie as a member of The Riot Squad has been released as a four-track EP by record label Acid Jazz as part of their Rare Mod series.
“The Toy Soldier EP” features recordings made when Bowie was a member of the band in 1967. The group – who were initially managed and produced by Larry Page and later Joe Meek – rehearsed at The Swan in Tottenham, with Bowie on vocals, and played live together for approximately nine weeks. There were also six recording sessions, at which Bowie recorded the four titles featured here.
Bob Dylan has reportedly changed the line-up of his band mid-tour.
Guitarist Duke Robillard, who has been playing with Dylan since April 2013, has been replaced by Charlie Sexton.
Robillard, who has also toured with Tom Waits, first played with Dylan on tracks from 1997's Time Out Of Mind album. H...
Bob Dylan has reportedly changed the line-up of his band mid-tour.
Guitarist Duke Robillard, who has been playing with Dylan since April 2013, has been replaced by Charlie Sexton.
Robillard, who has also toured with Tom Waits, first played with Dylan on tracks from 1997’s Time Out Of Mind album. His arrival on the Dylan tour earlier this year marked the first change to Dylan’s touring band since Sexton replaced guitarist Denny Freeman in October 2009.
Although Robillard’s departure from the tour has yet to be officially confirmed, the guitarist hinted at trouble in the Dylan camp on several Facebook posts. According to The Bob Dylan Examiner, Robillard posted on June 30:
“For sale Bob Dylan CD and record collection for sale slightly used.”
Followed by:
“I will be selling a lot of guitars and amps soon. I’ll keep you posted…”
The first post is no longer on Robillard’s Facebook page.
Robillard was originally brought in to Dylan’s touring band as a replacement for Charlie Sexton. Sexton first played with Dylan’s band between 1999 and 2002. He returned in 2009 and played through until the end of 2012. When Dylan started touring again in April this year, Sexton was rumoured to be unavailable to play.
Although no formal reason has been given for Robillard’s departure, according to a poster – tom thumb – on the message boards for Dylan fan site Expecting Rain, “At Bob’s show in Atlanta last night [June 29], Dylan got visibly upset 2 or 3 times when Duke came in at the wrong time – for instance, apparently inserting a guitar solo, or lick, right over Dylan’s harmonica or the next verse of a song.”
Writing about the same show, another poster, unclejohn, said: “duke snatched a guitar solo in simple twist of fate last night, bob stopped playin and turned around and just watched, he was kinda pissed……. and in highwater bob just turned around and faced the drums for a while and did not seem happy, duke was steepin on the harmonica spots.”
Sexton played at last night’s [July 2] show in Memphis, Tennessee – the fifth date of the current AmericanaramA tour with Wilco and My Morning Jacket.
Before we get onto the list, a big thank you to everyone who engaged with the Mumfords/class/hate/Glastonbury 2013/Stones/etc blog yesterday, and a quick plug for the new issue of Uncut, out tomorrow in the UK (Alongside all the marquee stuff, I’ve written a piece about the new Tropicalia doc). As for this week’s new music, I suspect a few of you might be interested in Number Two…
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
1 Factory Floor – Factory Floor (DFA)
2 Bill Callahan – Dream River (Drag City)
3 Neko Case – The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love (Anti-)
4 Mulatu Astatke – Sketches Of Ethiopia (Jazz Village)
5 Zachary Cale – Blue Rider (Electric Ragtime/All Hands Electric)
6 Roky Erickson – The Evil One (Light In The Attic)
7 Speedy Ortiz – Major Arcana (Carpark)
8 Nathan Salsburg – Hard For To Win And Can't Be Won (No Quarter)
9 Jon Hopkins – Immunity (Domino)
10 Wilco/Bob Weir – Dark Star>American Stars>Dark Star (Bootleg)
11 Samuel Purdey – Musically Adrift (Tummy Touch)
12 Houndstooth – Ride Out The Dark (No Quarter)
13 King Khan & The Shrines – Idle No More (Merge)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdxRh07X9A
14 Ty Segall – Sleeper (Drag City)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp0RyAJJYfI
15 Kandodo – k2o (Thrill Jockey)
16 The Chills – Molten Gold (Fire)
17 Julia Holter – Loud City Song (Domino)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmT7GKPsxto
18 Richard Buckner – When You Tell Me How It Is (Merge)
19 Blondes – Swisher (RVNG INTL)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAkQ6su1CN0
20 El-P & Killer Mike – Run The Jewels (Fools Gold)
Before we get onto the list, a big thank you to everyone who engaged with the Mumfords/class/hate/Glastonbury 2013/Stones/etc blog yesterday, and a quick plug for the new issue of Uncut, out tomorrow in the UK (Alongside all the marquee stuff, I’ve written a piece about the new Tropicalia doc). As for this week’s new music, I suspect a few of you might be interested in Number Two…
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
1 Factory Floor – Factory Floor (DFA)
2 Bill Callahan – Dream River (Drag City)
3 Neko Case – The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love (Anti-)
4 Mulatu Astatke – Sketches Of Ethiopia (Jazz Village)
5 Zachary Cale – Blue Rider (Electric Ragtime/All Hands Electric)
6 Roky Erickson – The Evil One (Light In The Attic)
7 Speedy Ortiz – Major Arcana (Carpark)
8 Nathan Salsburg – Hard For To Win And Can’t Be Won (No Quarter)
9 Jon Hopkins – Immunity (Domino)
10 Wilco/Bob Weir – Dark Star>American Stars>Dark Star (Bootleg)
11 Samuel Purdey – Musically Adrift (Tummy Touch)
12 Houndstooth – Ride Out The Dark (No Quarter)
13 King Khan & The Shrines – Idle No More (Merge)
14 Ty Segall – Sleeper (Drag City)
15 Kandodo – k2o (Thrill Jockey)
16 The Chills – Molten Gold (Fire)
17 Julia Holter – Loud City Song (Domino)
18 Richard Buckner – When You Tell Me How It Is (Merge)
19 Blondes – Swisher (RVNG INTL)
20 El-P & Killer Mike – Run The Jewels (Fools Gold)
21 Sebadoh – Defend Yourself (Domino)
22 Wolfgang Voigt – Zukunft Ohne Menschen (Kompakt)
"They're bad people, they deserve to be punished," notes one character in Ben Wheatley’s second film, Kill List.
It's an observation you could extend to nearly all of the characters that feature in Wheatley's films: gangsters, hit men and serial killers, who have have met their fate in grisly circumstances, from his 2009 debut Down Terrace onwards. And now it’s the turn of 17th century deserters, both Roundhead and Cavalier, to experience – quite literally – a very bad trip in latest film - his fourth as director, and scripted by his wife Amy Jump. A Field In England is a psychedelic freak out, shot in black and white, set during the English Civil War. Folk horror connoisseurs will be familiar with the period from Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan’s Claw – as well as Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s docu-drama Winstanley, about 17th century radical Gerrard Winstanley. The film follows three deserters who find themselves caught in a scheme by an alchemist, O’Neil, involving treasure of some description buried somewhere in a field in Monmouthshire. There are magic mushrooms, scrying mirrors and stolen manuscripts. As you'd expect, slumbering demonic forces are disturbed.
Along with Berberian Sound Studio's Peter Strickland, Wheatley is becoming one of Britain’s most important young filmmakers. Such is the anticipation about A Field In England, that it will be the first ever UK film released simultaneously this Friday in cinemas, on DVD and Blu_ray and Video on Demand...
UNCUT: Can you tell us about the films that influenced A Field In England.BEN WHEATLEY: Witchfinder General is obviously an influence in terms of it’s a film that you have to look at if you’re making a film about the Civil War. But it’s not necessarily one that’s at the top of my list of general movies that I like. Winstanley and Peter Watkins' Culloden that are the two movies that we looked at before making A Field In England, more specifically. In terms of other stuff that's influenced by generally, I’d say it’d be Threads, the BBC drama about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, from the 1980s. The War Game is another one about nuclear war in Britain, also by Peter Watkins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
There was a similar American series to Threads, starring Jason Robards.
That’s right, The Day After. Threads is much scarier. I think The Day After seemed to soft peddle it. But I watched bits of it on YouTube the other day, and it still packs quite a punch. I watched Threads, the whole thing, the other day. I bought it on DVD. I watch it every ten years or so. There’s something about the Eighties that’s so miserable anyway, so the shots of Sheffield before it blows up are almost as terrifying as afterwards. I think that is the thing that scares me… do you remember the Radio Times cover on Threads? It’s one of the scariest covers ever. It’s a picture of a traffic warden with a bag over their head with an eyehole poked out of it and blood all over their face holding a machine gun. It’s an indelible image, that. So I’d say Threads is my favourite British horror. The others I’d go for are Children On The Stones and The Owl Service. The Owl Service is quite close to my heart. I came to it quite late, to be honest, because it was the first colour ITV broadcast for children, that was the big claim to fame. But it’s like David Lynch. I watched it about five or six years ago, and I was just stunned by it. You wouldn’t even fathom showing that to children now. That’s what would pass as adult drama now, even quite difficult adult drama…
There’s a whole sub-set of children’s television programming in that part of the 1960s and Seventies that's very odd, very caught up in the occult history of Britain.
Do you remember a show with Phil Daniels? I saw an episode on YouTube. It’s like a kid’s version of Penda’s Fen, or something. Raven, I think it is.
Yes, it's part of that same strand, like Children Of The Stones…
It’s mind boggling! The conceit of Children Of The Stones. That they’re struck in a time loop, worshipping an alien that communicates with them through light and the stone circle is a massive satellite dish… And it was shown at five in the afternoon! You’d barely get that commissioned now if you were Stephen Poliakoff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwT0wLnT7Rc
And there's a great Doctor Who folk horror story, The Dæmons...
All the Doctor Who stuff is really scary around that period. I’ve been re-watching a lot of the Tom Baker stuff with my son, and it’s so spooky. They’re actually shooting on location in nuclear power stations, running around inside these reactors… I’m ready to be proved wrong by legions of Whovians, but it certainly looks like it to me, it looks dangerous wherever they are. I was watching Genesis Of The Daleks this morning. It’s so moody!
I always particularly remember the visual design on that story, these low angles and the ground level lighting were extraordinary…
Yeah. The other one I got for my kid which we stopped watching because it was too heavy was Blake’s 7. I remember it as a sci-fi romp, but the first episode is moody. They fit him up for being a paedophile, and they broadcast all this manipulated footage of him being a paedophile… what is this? Brilliant, brilliant stuff!
So how does all this fit into your work?
The stuff I remember as a kid – Threads particularly, and Alan Clarke’s stuff – was really indelible. I think what it was, talking about those other Seventies shows is that they’re not afraid to put you through the emotional wringer. They were really impactful in a way that drama doesn’t seem to be any more. There was no politeness about it. You felt your mind being scarred and you were never the same again afterwards. You can see it in some of Scorsese’s earlier stuff, like Taxi Driver. But seeing a show like Threads affected how I made films subsequently. Things like Children Of The Stones and The Owl Service I came to as an adult more being interested in getting into folk horror. When I was a kid, I grew up in Essex next to some woods, and I always had nightmares about the woods and things that would happen to you in the woods. There was something going on there definitely. I remember finding all these strange bottles and stuff there. It was real Blood On Satan’s Claw stuff. I had very vivid nightmares about the surrounding area, I’d have a recurring nightmares about a farm building that was near to us – and I still have them now. All the stuff that’s not mediated, that’s not about watching a film and being scared and incorporating it into your own imagination – for me, it was primal terror about the environment I lived in. I think over time that mutated into an interest in why the countryside is scary, or why England is scary.
Your films do scratch away, looking for something under the surface.
What is the underpinning of it? There’s something kind of sinister about it. Even when I moved to London when I was about ten, once you start reading about London it’s quite a scary place. Amy and I ended up working on Charing Cross Road, near Centre Point, and we discovered it was apparently where the Black Death began. You could feel the vibe of it; really bad, bad news. This was down Denmark Place. And that was at that point a shooting gallery for heroin addicts. That was bad, but when you read the history of the area that had been going on for hundreds of years, bad things happening in that little bit of London. You know Primrose Hill was designated as the burial area in the case of some cataclysm, like a nuclear war? But at the same time, through the history of London, people would gather on Primrose Hill waiting for the end of the world. This would be announced quite often, every 20 years or so, and they’d all gather on Primrose Hill. That kind of thing that’s all around you… that was in Kill List and in Sightseers as well. The blood in the earth. But maybe I’m just morbid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqkqF--v1tg
You have an interesting relationship with landscape in your films – is that connected to the ‘blood in the earth’?
Well, we always try and let stuff breathe and have its day in court a bit. Things tend to give up their meaning if you look at them longer. We’ve always been the enemies of exposition. That is dead time to me. When people are explaining, it’s just boring. Information is going in, but it’s losing its meaning by being explained. But when you’re just looking at someone’s face, or a landscape, for a little bit too long – that’s the moment you get the meaning. If you’ve got a good image, then why do you let it go? You don’t want to clatter through that stuff just to get some guy explaining the plot.
So, back to A Field In England. Why did you set it during the English Civil War?
I think it’s the beginning of a lot of stuff. The beginning of western history almost. You could make a case for it being one of the two moments when we did something really major – that and the Industrial Revolution are things that bent the whole shape of the history of western civilization. The things that were set up in the Civil War, we’re still in the post-Civil War world, the way that the whole of commerce and democracy are set up. That was really important. And it was the point where a lot of the trouble in Sightseers and Kill List and Down Terrace comes from. A Field In England is almost like a prequel to those movies.
I’d like to talk about the music in your films. You’ve always used traditional folk songs in your movies – there’s "The Fields Of Athenry" in Down Terrace and "Baloo My Boy" in A Field In England. But A Field In England also has this very unsettling electronic score. Can you tell us about what you were trying to achieve with this.
The idea is that the music in the first half of A Field In England is stuff they could play or sing themselves, then it meets a Moriccone twang and then goes into full synth as the film becomes psychedelic. It almost time travels. It’s coming out as double white vinyl. We get really excited about putting out things like that. it’s a weird thing – you don’t feel as much ownership on the DVD, because so many people have had their hands in it, and it has to have logos and stuff all over it. But making the records, because they’re such limited runs, it’s quite unique to us.
It’s part of ‘the Ben Wheatley brand’. Like the stock company of actors you’re developing, and your working practices. Are there any specific filmmaking models you’re following here?
Everybody’s careers are very different and it’s really a vaguery of when you were born. If you look at all the old Hollywood masters who worked in every genre, like John Ford or Howard Hawks, it’s not possible that you could do that any more. Their movies are brilliant because they made so many movies, they got to exercise those muscles a lot. But that won’t happen again. Even the career of Steven Soderbergh would be difficult to do now, because the industry changes all the time. All I’m trying to do is develop projects and write as much as possible – and Amy’s writing loads as well – and we just see what people will finance. But I don’t want to go too long without making a film, because you just atrophy if you’re not doing stuff. I’m not in this to be in endless meetings about financing, I’m here to make films. At the other end of it is this idea that low budget stuff isn’t as good as the high budget stuff in terms of an experience, but as a director it’s almost the best experience because you have complete control over it. It maybe that the story you tell is a little smaller than you might of if you had loads of money, but not necessarily. There’s plenty of movies that cost a packet that are just people standing around in rooms talking. Down Terrace was a really nice experience for us. We weren’t cursing every day that we didn’t have proper money. We just thought it was fucking great that we were making a film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6LAmcXSDmU
What’s next?
There’s a number of projects we’re developing. I’m writing a script for HBO. They’ve commissioned a prequel script. It’s called Silk Road. They came to me after they saw Kill List and said they wanted something like this, with a similar vibe. It’s a bit scary doing stuff for them, and I’m such a massive fan of their shows.
A Field In England opens in the UK on Friday July 5; for more information about special screenings, Q+A, and such click here.
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.
“They’re bad people, they deserve to be punished,” notes one character in Ben Wheatley’s second film, Kill List.
It’s an observation you could extend to nearly all of the characters that feature in Wheatley’s films: gangsters, hit men and serial killers, who have have met their fate in grisly circumstances, from his 2009 debut Down Terrace onwards. And now it’s the turn of 17th century deserters, both Roundhead and Cavalier, to experience – quite literally – a very bad trip in latest film – his fourth as director, and scripted by his wife Amy Jump. A Field In England is a psychedelic freak out, shot in black and white, set during the English Civil War. Folk horror connoisseurs will be familiar with the period from Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan’s Claw – as well as Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s docu-drama Winstanley, about 17th century radical Gerrard Winstanley. The film follows three deserters who find themselves caught in a scheme by an alchemist, O’Neil, involving treasure of some description buried somewhere in a field in Monmouthshire. There are magic mushrooms, scrying mirrors and stolen manuscripts. As you’d expect, slumbering demonic forces are disturbed.
Along with Berberian Sound Studio’s Peter Strickland, Wheatley is becoming one of Britain’s most important young filmmakers. Such is the anticipation about A Field In England, that it will be the first ever UK film released simultaneously this Friday in cinemas, on DVD and Blu_ray and Video on Demand…
UNCUT: Can you tell us about the films that influenced A Field In England.
BEN WHEATLEY: Witchfinder General is obviously an influence in terms of it’s a film that you have to look at if you’re making a film about the Civil War. But it’s not necessarily one that’s at the top of my list of general movies that I like. Winstanley and Peter Watkins’ Culloden that are the two movies that we looked at before making A Field In England, more specifically. In terms of other stuff that’s influenced by generally, I’d say it’d be Threads, the BBC drama about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, from the 1980s. The War Game is another one about nuclear war in Britain, also by Peter Watkins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
There was a similar American series to Threads, starring Jason Robards.
That’s right, The Day After. Threads is much scarier. I think The Day After seemed to soft peddle it. But I watched bits of it on YouTube the other day, and it still packs quite a punch. I watched Threads, the whole thing, the other day. I bought it on DVD. I watch it every ten years or so. There’s something about the Eighties that’s so miserable anyway, so the shots of Sheffield before it blows up are almost as terrifying as afterwards. I think that is the thing that scares me… do you remember the Radio Times cover on Threads? It’s one of the scariest covers ever. It’s a picture of a traffic warden with a bag over their head with an eyehole poked out of it and blood all over their face holding a machine gun. It’s an indelible image, that. So I’d say Threads is my favourite British horror. The others I’d go for are Children On The Stones and The Owl Service. The Owl Service is quite close to my heart. I came to it quite late, to be honest, because it was the first colour ITV broadcast for children, that was the big claim to fame. But it’s like David Lynch. I watched it about five or six years ago, and I was just stunned by it. You wouldn’t even fathom showing that to children now. That’s what would pass as adult drama now, even quite difficult adult drama…
There’s a whole sub-set of children’s television programming in that part of the 1960s and Seventies that’s very odd, very caught up in the occult history of Britain.
Do you remember a show with Phil Daniels? I saw an episode on YouTube. It’s like a kid’s version of Penda’s Fen, or something. Raven, I think it is.
Yes, it’s part of that same strand, like Children Of The Stones…
It’s mind boggling! The conceit of Children Of The Stones. That they’re struck in a time loop, worshipping an alien that communicates with them through light and the stone circle is a massive satellite dish… And it was shown at five in the afternoon! You’d barely get that commissioned now if you were Stephen Poliakoff.
And there’s a great Doctor Who folk horror story, The Dæmons…
All the Doctor Who stuff is really scary around that period. I’ve been re-watching a lot of the Tom Baker stuff with my son, and it’s so spooky. They’re actually shooting on location in nuclear power stations, running around inside these reactors… I’m ready to be proved wrong by legions of Whovians, but it certainly looks like it to me, it looks dangerous wherever they are. I was watching Genesis Of The Daleks this morning. It’s so moody!
I always particularly remember the visual design on that story, these low angles and the ground level lighting were extraordinary…
Yeah. The other one I got for my kid which we stopped watching because it was too heavy was Blake’s 7. I remember it as a sci-fi romp, but the first episode is moody. They fit him up for being a paedophile, and they broadcast all this manipulated footage of him being a paedophile… what is this? Brilliant, brilliant stuff!
So how does all this fit into your work?
The stuff I remember as a kid – Threads particularly, and Alan Clarke’s stuff – was really indelible. I think what it was, talking about those other Seventies shows is that they’re not afraid to put you through the emotional wringer. They were really impactful in a way that drama doesn’t seem to be any more. There was no politeness about it. You felt your mind being scarred and you were never the same again afterwards. You can see it in some of Scorsese’s earlier stuff, like Taxi Driver. But seeing a show like Threads affected how I made films subsequently. Things like Children Of The Stones and The Owl Service I came to as an adult more being interested in getting into folk horror. When I was a kid, I grew up in Essex next to some woods, and I always had nightmares about the woods and things that would happen to you in the woods. There was something going on there definitely. I remember finding all these strange bottles and stuff there. It was real Blood On Satan’s Claw stuff. I had very vivid nightmares about the surrounding area, I’d have a recurring nightmares about a farm building that was near to us – and I still have them now. All the stuff that’s not mediated, that’s not about watching a film and being scared and incorporating it into your own imagination – for me, it was primal terror about the environment I lived in. I think over time that mutated into an interest in why the countryside is scary, or why England is scary.
Your films do scratch away, looking for something under the surface.
What is the underpinning of it? There’s something kind of sinister about it. Even when I moved to London when I was about ten, once you start reading about London it’s quite a scary place. Amy and I ended up working on Charing Cross Road, near Centre Point, and we discovered it was apparently where the Black Death began. You could feel the vibe of it; really bad, bad news. This was down Denmark Place. And that was at that point a shooting gallery for heroin addicts. That was bad, but when you read the history of the area that had been going on for hundreds of years, bad things happening in that little bit of London. You know Primrose Hill was designated as the burial area in the case of some cataclysm, like a nuclear war? But at the same time, through the history of London, people would gather on Primrose Hill waiting for the end of the world. This would be announced quite often, every 20 years or so, and they’d all gather on Primrose Hill. That kind of thing that’s all around you… that was in Kill List and in Sightseers as well. The blood in the earth. But maybe I’m just morbid.
You have an interesting relationship with landscape in your films – is that connected to the ‘blood in the earth’?
Well, we always try and let stuff breathe and have its day in court a bit. Things tend to give up their meaning if you look at them longer. We’ve always been the enemies of exposition. That is dead time to me. When people are explaining, it’s just boring. Information is going in, but it’s losing its meaning by being explained. But when you’re just looking at someone’s face, or a landscape, for a little bit too long – that’s the moment you get the meaning. If you’ve got a good image, then why do you let it go? You don’t want to clatter through that stuff just to get some guy explaining the plot.
So, back to A Field In England. Why did you set it during the English Civil War?
I think it’s the beginning of a lot of stuff. The beginning of western history almost. You could make a case for it being one of the two moments when we did something really major – that and the Industrial Revolution are things that bent the whole shape of the history of western civilization. The things that were set up in the Civil War, we’re still in the post-Civil War world, the way that the whole of commerce and democracy are set up. That was really important. And it was the point where a lot of the trouble in Sightseers and Kill List and Down Terrace comes from. A Field In England is almost like a prequel to those movies.
I’d like to talk about the music in your films. You’ve always used traditional folk songs in your movies – there’s “The Fields Of Athenry” in Down Terrace and “Baloo My Boy” in A Field In England. But A Field In England also has this very unsettling electronic score. Can you tell us about what you were trying to achieve with this.
The idea is that the music in the first half of A Field In England is stuff they could play or sing themselves, then it meets a Moriccone twang and then goes into full synth as the film becomes psychedelic. It almost time travels. It’s coming out as double white vinyl. We get really excited about putting out things like that. it’s a weird thing – you don’t feel as much ownership on the DVD, because so many people have had their hands in it, and it has to have logos and stuff all over it. But making the records, because they’re such limited runs, it’s quite unique to us.
It’s part of ‘the Ben Wheatley brand’. Like the stock company of actors you’re developing, and your working practices. Are there any specific filmmaking models you’re following here?
Everybody’s careers are very different and it’s really a vaguery of when you were born. If you look at all the old Hollywood masters who worked in every genre, like John Ford or Howard Hawks, it’s not possible that you could do that any more. Their movies are brilliant because they made so many movies, they got to exercise those muscles a lot. But that won’t happen again. Even the career of Steven Soderbergh would be difficult to do now, because the industry changes all the time. All I’m trying to do is develop projects and write as much as possible – and Amy’s writing loads as well – and we just see what people will finance. But I don’t want to go too long without making a film, because you just atrophy if you’re not doing stuff. I’m not in this to be in endless meetings about financing, I’m here to make films. At the other end of it is this idea that low budget stuff isn’t as good as the high budget stuff in terms of an experience, but as a director it’s almost the best experience because you have complete control over it. It maybe that the story you tell is a little smaller than you might of if you had loads of money, but not necessarily. There’s plenty of movies that cost a packet that are just people standing around in rooms talking. Down Terrace was a really nice experience for us. We weren’t cursing every day that we didn’t have proper money. We just thought it was fucking great that we were making a film.
What’s next?
There’s a number of projects we’re developing. I’m writing a script for HBO. They’ve commissioned a prequel script. It’s called Silk Road. They came to me after they saw Kill List and said they wanted something like this, with a similar vibe. It’s a bit scary doing stuff for them, and I’m such a massive fan of their shows.
A Field In England opens in the UK on Friday July 5; for more information about special screenings, Q+A, and such click here.
Rod Stewart says he is keen to reform The Faces with Ronnie Wood, and suggests a reunion could happen if and when The Rolling Stones decide to retire.
The band previously reformed in 2009 for a one-off charity show with guest vocalists replacing the absent Rod Stewart, and also subsequent tours wit...
Rod Stewart says he is keen to reform The Faces with Ronnie Wood, and suggests a reunion could happen if and when The Rolling Stones decide to retire.
The band previously reformed in 2009 for a one-off charity show with guest vocalists replacing the absent Rod Stewart, and also subsequent tours with Mick Hucknall on vocals. Stewart also missed the Faces and Small Faces induction into the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame in 2012.
Speaking to The Express, Stewart said that he is interested in getting the band back together, if they are not too old when a window of opportunity presents itself. “I’d like to return with The Faces. Ronnie and I talk about it, and when the Stones finish – Mick is several years older than me – we’ll have a window of opportunity, if we’re not on Zimmers,” he said. “Mick’s a fine blues singer – but technically not as good as me. He’s made the best of what he’s got. But I don’t think he could do standards – he may not want to.”
A new library has opened in London this week stocked only with vinyl.
The Vinyl Library, set up by two London based DJs Sophie Austin and Elly Rendall, is run by volunteers and will operate on a not-for-profit basis. Its stock is comprised of vinyl records donated by the public, with donations already having been made from as far away as New Orleans.
Speaking about the idea behind the venture, Austin told The Guardian: “We were DJing UK garage sets and we wanted to build up our vinyl collection. We didn’t have the budget to buy a whole new collections, there’s no vinyl in libraries any more and we have quite eclectic tastes so we thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a vinyl library?’
She continued: “People can share their knowledge with people who are new to vinyl[...] We like the idea of getting people tactile with a piece of vinyl and getting everyone connected to that again.”
The pair also plan to hold DJ lessons in the library, with a particular view to attracting female DJs to the library, and have said events like screening music documentaries could happen in the future.
The library is open from 11am-9pm Monday to Sunday and is based on Foulden Road in the Stoke Newington area of London. Joining up costs £1 with further charges applicable when borrowing up to a maximum of five records.
A new library has opened in London this week stocked only with vinyl.
The Vinyl Library, set up by two London based DJs Sophie Austin and Elly Rendall, is run by volunteers and will operate on a not-for-profit basis. Its stock is comprised of vinyl records donated by the public, with donations already having been made from as far away as New Orleans.
Speaking about the idea behind the venture, Austin told The Guardian: “We were DJing UK garage sets and we wanted to build up our vinyl collection. We didn’t have the budget to buy a whole new collections, there’s no vinyl in libraries any more and we have quite eclectic tastes so we thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a vinyl library?’
She continued: “People can share their knowledge with people who are new to vinyl[…] We like the idea of getting people tactile with a piece of vinyl and getting everyone connected to that again.”
The pair also plan to hold DJ lessons in the library, with a particular view to attracting female DJs to the library, and have said events like screening music documentaries could happen in the future.
The library is open from 11am-9pm Monday to Sunday and is based on Foulden Road in the Stoke Newington area of London. Joining up costs £1 with further charges applicable when borrowing up to a maximum of five records.
Beck has unveiled a brand new, stand-alone single called 'I Won't Be Long'.
The single, which you can stream in full above, follows another new Beck song, "Defriended", which he unveiled last month. "I Won't Be Long" will be released on July 8 as a 12" single, with a 14-minute-long remix also set t...
Beck has unveiled a brand new, stand-alone single called ‘I Won’t Be Long’.
The single, which you can stream in full above, follows another new Beck song, “Defriended”, which he unveiled last month. “I Won’t Be Long” will be released on July 8 as a 12″ single, with a 14-minute-long remix also set to be made available to fans.
Speaking exclusively to NME about his latest project, Beck said that although he’ll be releasing plenty of new material in the near future, he has no firm plans to make an album. “For 10 years I’ve been talking about putting out a series of 12-inch singles, one at a time. But I was holding them back ‘cos I wasn’t sure what I was doing with them. And I just wanted people to hear them.”
Later this week, Beck will be heading up a special Song Reader night at London’s Barbican on July 4, in which songs from last year’s sheet music-only album will be performed. The line-up for the night will include Beck himself alongside Jarvis Cocker, Franz Ferdinand and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Beth Orton, Joan Wasser, Villagers frontman Conor J O’Brien, The Staves, Guillemots, Michael Kiwanuka, James Yorkston and The Pictish Trail will also perform.
Johnny Marr examines his life in pictures in the new issue of Uncut (dated August 2013, and out on July 4).
The guitarist recalls his teenage years, his time with The Smiths, and his work with Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse and The Cribs, as well as his recent solo career, in the piece.
Talki...
Johnny Marr examines his life in pictures in the new issue of Uncut (dated August 2013, and out on July 4).
The guitarist recalls his teenage years, his time with The Smiths, and his work with Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse and The Cribs, as well as his recent solo career, in the piece.
Talking about a photograph of The Smiths taken in Manchester in 1987, Marr says: “We transcended being a pop band by then. We meant something different. I’ve always been very proud of the fact that we were heavy, lyrically and musically, and live. And you can tell in that photo.
“It was a shame the way things ended. But we were all very young, still. There was a lot at stake, and it’s understandable.”
The new issue of Uncut is out on Thursday (July 4).
When it's announced that The Rolling Stones are planning a free concert in Hyde Park on July 5, 1969, we decide we have to be there. There are four of us, 16-year-old school friends, music a common bond between us.
We get an early train from South Wales to London and by mid-morning we're at Padding...
When it’s announced that The Rolling Stones are planning a free concert in Hyde Park on July 5, 1969, we decide we have to be there. There are four of us, 16-year-old school friends, music a common bond between us.
We get an early train from South Wales to London and by mid-morning we’re at Paddington. We don’t have to ask for directions or try to make navigational sense of the A-Z one of us has, a tatty thing rescued from the back of a drawer that looks like it might date back to before the Great Fire, last referred to by someone in a periwig and bloomers.
No, we just join a huge crowd with whom, by the look of them, we share a common destination. Many thousands of us walk through Sussex Gardens, onto the Bayswater Road. The crowd gets bigger as we move along, people pouring into it from side streets, coming up from the tube stations at Marble Arch, Lancaster Gate and Queensway. There are hardly any police around, just a few Bobbies in shirt sleeves looking a bit stunned by this enormous drift of people towards the Serpentine, which is now in sight. We can see a stage, a banner over it, the whole thing rickety compared to what you see at such events today. There are speaker stacks on either side of it, some sparse decoration, what looks like a palm tree.
In the pictures I’ve just been looking at, you can clearly see where we ended up, slightly to the left of the stage as we’re looking at it, under the first bank of trees, the ground in front of us sloping gently down towards some makeshift barriers manned by Hells Angels, who look less the strutting desperadoes of legend than a motley bunch of lags in fancy dress. The crowd continues to grow around us. Every time you turn to look, the audience seems to have doubled, more and more people arriving by the minute, no end to them. The crowd goes on for what seems like forever and if it isn’t quite the quarter of a million of popular estimate, it’s still a lot of fucking people.
We’re all sitting down, of course, because that’s what you did in those days. You went to a gig anywhere and sat cross-legged on the floor and, you know, dug the music. There’s none of the shrill hysteria that these days attaches itself to festival crowds, no mosh-pit full of flailing bodies, no heaving surges, jostle or crush. There’s a marked absence of drunken loutishness, too, since there’s nowhere to buy booze. There’s nowhere to buy anything, in fact. There are no facilities at all, including toilets, which I strangely don’t remember being a problem. It’s blisteringly hot, because back then we had actual summers, and the prevailing mood speaks of nothing but good vibes, which on reflection may have had a lot to do with the amount of dope being smoked. Whatever, it’s all very groovy.
In many versions of the day’s narrative, as told to Peter Watts in the terrific feature he’s contributed to this month’s issue, the Stones when they appear are an anti-climax. This doesn’t seem to me to be the case at all. They are admittedly ramshackle at times and often the guitars are out of tune, but who really cared? This is the first time they’ve played since the police persecution that almost saw Mick and Keith behind bars, Mick Taylor is making his debut and Brian Jones has just died. In the circumstances I am inclined to think they are positively heroic, even if it is slightly creepy to see Keith Richards in daylight.
In Peter’s article, Mick is ridiculed for his reading of Shelley’s poem Adonaïs – “Peace, peace! He is not dead…” – in tribute to Brian. But to me this seems a genuinely emotional moment, nothing ridiculous or pretentious about it at all, a highlight of an amazing day.
If you were there, tell me about it at the usual address.
“When it came out people were like, ‘Where in the world did this come from? What kind of music is this?’” Robbie Robertson tells Uncut in an exclusive interview for this month’s cover story celebrating the 45th anniversary of The Band’s landmark debut album, Music From Big Pink.
“People acted like we were from another planet,” Robertson goes on, and looking at pictures of them from the time you’d have to say The Band looked at least like they belonged to another century, if not another world. And the way they looked was as ruggedly different as the album they had just made in the isolation of the Catskill Mountains where they had relocated with Bob Dylan after Dylan’s 1967 motorcycle accident.
The look for most rock bands at the time was rather more exotic and usually involved long flowing hair, lots of silk, leather and velvet, bracelets, bangles, bell-bottoms, capes, the occasional Cossack hat or something broad-brimmed with a feather in it, a kind of psychedelic dandyism, typified by, say, Jimi Hendrix. Alternatively, you had the brooding black leather and wraparound shades favoured by The Velvet Underground and eternally popular thereafter with sulky teenage malcontents.
What bands at the time generally didn’t look like were members of outlaw gangs from the Old West, characters from something like Daniel Woodrell’s Woe To Live On or the pages of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. In other words, no one else at the time looked like they’d ridden into town to rob a bank, raise hell at the local saloon or otherwise seemed to have stepped out of a sepia portrait of frontier life.
The music they made on Big Pink similarly made you think of times gone by or quickly vanishing, the album’s songs drawing on the richest traditions of America music - “from the Ozarks to the Mississippi Delta to the dustbowl,” as Robertson remarks. The album was a brilliant mix of gospel, spirituals, roadhouse blues, Southern soul and early rock’n’roll, out of which they created a magical new strain of American music.
Given their preference for sober threadbare suits, down-home threads, sharecropper waistcoats, battered hats and whiskers, it’s impossible to imagine, say, Garth Hudson or Levon Helm decked out in the kind of Mr Fish frock that a year later Mick Jagger wore when The Rolling Stones played their free concert in Hyde Park, an outfit you suspect they would have found more than a little outlandish and certainly not the kind of thing a man would be encouraged to wear in the sorts of taverns, bars and dance halls where The Band had served a gruelling apprenticeship.
Ahead of their return to Hyde Park this weekend, we revisit the Stones first appearance there in 1969, for eye witness accounts of the event from the people who put the show on, the bands who supported the Stones and members of the audience that day.
Elsewhere in the issue, we report on Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s recent UK tour, a series of dates that have divided Neil’s audience and led to much debate and comment on www.uncut.co.uk, John Cale recalls the making of Nico’s The Marble Index, an album that went as far out as rock has ever gone and Johnny Marr makes a special appearance in our regular Changes feature, for which he personally provided a picture of himself looking very sweet indeed at the age of 14.
We also have news of a massive John Martyn box-set, celebrate the return of The Scud Mountain Boys, confirm the line-up for the Uncut stage at this year’s End Of the Road festival, uncover an unheard album of very strange comedy by the late Andy Kaufman, while Richard Hell hosts this month’s An Audience With and Michael Chapman is the subject of this month’s Album By Album, while we also look at the making of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s pioneering “The Message”. There’s plenty, too, in the Uncut Review – with new albums from Grant Hart, The Beach Boys, Mavis Staples and Alela Diane, plus reissues form Otis Redding, Harry Nilsson, Big Star, The Teardrop Explodes and Cheap Trick.
The new issue of Uncut is on sale from Thursday, July 4. Write to me at the usual address with any comments, complaints and the like. Have a great week.
“When it came out people were like, ‘Where in the world did this come from? What kind of music is this?’” Robbie Robertson tells Uncut in an exclusive interview for this month’s cover story celebrating the 45th anniversary of The Band’s landmark debut album, Music From Big Pink.
“People acted like we were from another planet,” Robertson goes on, and looking at pictures of them from the time you’d have to say The Band looked at least like they belonged to another century, if not another world. And the way they looked was as ruggedly different as the album they had just made in the isolation of the Catskill Mountains where they had relocated with Bob Dylan after Dylan’s 1967 motorcycle accident.
The look for most rock bands at the time was rather more exotic and usually involved long flowing hair, lots of silk, leather and velvet, bracelets, bangles, bell-bottoms, capes, the occasional Cossack hat or something broad-brimmed with a feather in it, a kind of psychedelic dandyism, typified by, say, Jimi Hendrix. Alternatively, you had the brooding black leather and wraparound shades favoured by The Velvet Underground and eternally popular thereafter with sulky teenage malcontents.
What bands at the time generally didn’t look like were members of outlaw gangs from the Old West, characters from something like Daniel Woodrell’s Woe To Live On or the pages of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. In other words, no one else at the time looked like they’d ridden into town to rob a bank, raise hell at the local saloon or otherwise seemed to have stepped out of a sepia portrait of frontier life.
The music they made on Big Pink similarly made you think of times gone by or quickly vanishing, the album’s songs drawing on the richest traditions of America music – “from the Ozarks to the Mississippi Delta to the dustbowl,” as Robertson remarks. The album was a brilliant mix of gospel, spirituals, roadhouse blues, Southern soul and early rock’n’roll, out of which they created a magical new strain of American music.
Given their preference for sober threadbare suits, down-home threads, sharecropper waistcoats, battered hats and whiskers, it’s impossible to imagine, say, Garth Hudson or Levon Helm decked out in the kind of Mr Fish frock that a year later Mick Jagger wore when The Rolling Stones played their free concert in Hyde Park, an outfit you suspect they would have found more than a little outlandish and certainly not the kind of thing a man would be encouraged to wear in the sorts of taverns, bars and dance halls where The Band had served a gruelling apprenticeship.
Ahead of their return to Hyde Park this weekend, we revisit the Stones first appearance there in 1969, for eye witness accounts of the event from the people who put the show on, the bands who supported the Stones and members of the audience that day.
Elsewhere in the issue, we report on Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s recent UK tour, a series of dates that have divided Neil’s audience and led to much debate and comment on www.uncut.co.uk, John Cale recalls the making of Nico’s The Marble Index, an album that went as far out as rock has ever gone and Johnny Marr makes a special appearance in our regular Changes feature, for which he personally provided a picture of himself looking very sweet indeed at the age of 14.
We also have news of a massive John Martyn box-set, celebrate the return of The Scud Mountain Boys, confirm the line-up for the Uncut stage at this year’s End Of the Road festival, uncover an unheard album of very strange comedy by the late Andy Kaufman, while Richard Hell hosts this month’s An Audience With and Michael Chapman is the subject of this month’s Album By Album, while we also look at the making of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s pioneering “The Message”. There’s plenty, too, in the Uncut Review – with new albums from Grant Hart, The Beach Boys, Mavis Staples and Alela Diane, plus reissues form Otis Redding, Harry Nilsson, Big Star, The Teardrop Explodes and Cheap Trick.
The new issue of Uncut is on sale from Thursday, July 4. Write to me at the usual address with any comments, complaints and the like. Have a great week.
Lou Reed has been treated in hospital for severe dehydration.
The 71-year old singer was released yesterday (Monday July 1) from Long Island's Southampton Hospital after an ambulance was called to his house early on Sunday morning.
"Everything's fine," a source told the New York Post.
Last mont...
Lou Reed has been treated in hospital for severe dehydration.
The 71-year old singer was released yesterday (Monday July 1) from Long Island’s Southampton Hospital after an ambulance was called to his house early on Sunday morning.
“Everything’s fine,” a source told the New York Post.
Last month (June 1), Reed’s wife, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson, revealed that he had been recovering from a life-saving liver transplant but suggested that he might not “ever totally recover” from the surgery. Reed later posted a message on Facebook, where he described himself as a “triumph of modern medicine” and announced that he is looking forward to playing live again.
Reed returned to the stage on June 20, after canceling a string of live dates “due to unavoidable complications”. He appeared at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “The other day I was 19,” he told the crowd. “I could fall down and get back up. Now if I fall down you are talking about nine months of physical therapy. Make sure you take your vitamins.”
A fictional film is set to be released following Nick Cave on the 20,000th day of his life, reports The Guardian.
Directed by multi-media artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who first worked with Cave on the music video for his 2008 single "Dig, Lazarus Dig!", the film features abstract, unrehearsed scenes and was completely unscripted. Narrated by Cave, it also features cameos from Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue.
Work began secretly on the film - called 20,000 Days On Earth - when Cave and his band The Bad Seeds started writing sessions for their latest album 'Push The Sky Away'. The title for the movie was inspired by the Australian frontman having worked out he had been alive for exactly 20,000 days at the start of the sessions.
Speaking about the project, Cave revealed: "They filmed everything. They had a camera set up in my office when I'm just writing the first lines of things, picking out the first melodies on the piano."
He continued: "That's kind of why I let this go in the first place because you just don't have cameras on bands doing the actual thing. In the past, I've let cameras into the studio, but we've basically already finished the record. So you get shots of people sitting around in the control booth, listening to music."
A fictional film is set to be released following Nick Cave on the 20,000th day of his life, reports The Guardian.
Directed by multi-media artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who first worked with Cave on the music video for his 2008 single “Dig, Lazarus Dig!”, the film features abstract, unrehearsed scenes and was completely unscripted. Narrated by Cave, it also features cameos from Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue.
Work began secretly on the film – called 20,000 Days On Earth – when Cave and his band The Bad Seeds started writing sessions for their latest album ‘Push The Sky Away’. The title for the movie was inspired by the Australian frontman having worked out he had been alive for exactly 20,000 days at the start of the sessions.
Speaking about the project, Cave revealed: “They filmed everything. They had a camera set up in my office when I’m just writing the first lines of things, picking out the first melodies on the piano.”
He continued: “That’s kind of why I let this go in the first place because you just don’t have cameras on bands doing the actual thing. In the past, I’ve let cameras into the studio, but we’ve basically already finished the record. So you get shots of people sitting around in the control booth, listening to music.”
Leonard Cohen has rescheduled two dates on his forthcoming UK arena tour for religious reasons.
Cohen, who will play live in the UK this August and September, has rearranged dates in Leeds and London after realising that they were scheduled on days of solemn religious observance, including the Jewi...
Leonard Cohen has rescheduled two dates on his forthcoming UK arena tour for religious reasons.
Cohen, who will play live in the UK this August and September, has rearranged dates in Leeds and London after realising that they were scheduled on days of solemn religious observance, including the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur.
The Leeds date was originally due to take place on September 5 and will now happen on September 7.
A date at London’s 02 Arena on September 14 will now take place a day later.
All tickets remain valid for the rescheduled dates.
The guitar Bob Dylan played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is to be sold at auction.
The 1964 sunburst Fender Stratocaster will be auctioned later this year after Dawn Peterson, who has owned the guitar for 50 years, decided to part with the iconic musical memorabilia. Peterson appeared with the instrument on US TV show History Detectives earlier this year and has been informed that she is likely to make a minimum of £333,000 from the sale.
Following Peterson's TV appearance there was dispute between herself and Dylan as to who was the legal owner of the guitar. However, the legal dispute has since been settled though it is not known if the singer will make any money from the proceeds of the sale. "One term of the agreement that I obviously can disclose is that Mr. Dylan will participate in the sale to the extent that he will be signing off on any ownership interest after the sale," Peterson’s lawyer Christopher DeFalco said. "The person who buys it will receive a bill of sale that will be signed both by the Petersons and Mr. Dylan or his representatives."
Peterson herself hopes the guitar will find a home which allows the public to view it, telling Rolling Stone; "I would have to pay to keep it locked up, and I want somebody else to enjoy it. I’m hoping it goes to a museum so it can be shared with everybody."
In addition to the guitar, the auction lot will also will include handwritten Dylan lyrics found hidden in the guitar case. These lyrics, which show the early stages of songs including "Just Like A Woman", "Temporary Achilles" and "Medicine Sunday" are expected to raise a further £25,000.
Meanwhile, Bob Dylan has announced a string of UK tour dates set for this November. He will play three shows at Glasgow Clyde Auditorium, three at Blackpool Opera House and three at London Royal Albert Hall, starting on November 18 in Scotland.
Bob Dylan will play:
Glasgow Clyde Auditorium (November 18, 19, 20)
Blackpool Opera House (22, 23, 24)
London Royal Albert Hall (26, 27, 28)
The guitar Bob Dylan played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is to be sold at auction.
The 1964 sunburst Fender Stratocaster will be auctioned later this year after Dawn Peterson, who has owned the guitar for 50 years, decided to part with the iconic musical memorabilia. Peterson appeared with the instrument on US TV show History Detectives earlier this year and has been informed that she is likely to make a minimum of £333,000 from the sale.
Following Peterson’s TV appearance there was dispute between herself and Dylan as to who was the legal owner of the guitar. However, the legal dispute has since been settled though it is not known if the singer will make any money from the proceeds of the sale. “One term of the agreement that I obviously can disclose is that Mr. Dylan will participate in the sale to the extent that he will be signing off on any ownership interest after the sale,” Peterson’s lawyer Christopher DeFalco said. “The person who buys it will receive a bill of sale that will be signed both by the Petersons and Mr. Dylan or his representatives.”
Peterson herself hopes the guitar will find a home which allows the public to view it, telling Rolling Stone; “I would have to pay to keep it locked up, and I want somebody else to enjoy it. I’m hoping it goes to a museum so it can be shared with everybody.”
In addition to the guitar, the auction lot will also will include handwritten Dylan lyrics found hidden in the guitar case. These lyrics, which show the early stages of songs including “Just Like A Woman“, “Temporary Achilles” and “Medicine Sunday” are expected to raise a further £25,000.
Meanwhile, Bob Dylan has announced a string of UK tour dates set for this November. He will play three shows at Glasgow Clyde Auditorium, three at Blackpool Opera House and three at London Royal Albert Hall, starting on November 18 in Scotland.
Uncut reconstructs the story of The Band’s landmark Music From Big Pink, with the help of its surviving players, in the new issue (dated August 2013, and out on Thursday, July 4).
Guitarist Robbie Robertson explains how the group moved to Woodstock, NY, and fell into daily jam sessions, many with Bob Dylan, in the basement of their home, while many contemporaries and admirers of the band, including Al Kooper and Richard Thompson, give their take on the impact of the legendary record.
“When it came out people were like, ‘Where in the world did this come from? What kind of music is this?’” says Robertson.
“People acted like we were from another planet. That shocked me, but it was a good thing, because it made me feel that we were doing something that had our own character to it. It taught us a lesson: you need to take your own vibe with you. That idea had a tremendous influence.”
We also take a look at Bob Dylan’s album cover artwork, what became of the Big Pink house, and the effect The Band had on the town of Woodstock itself.
The new issue of Uncut is out on Thursday (July 4).
Uncut reconstructs the story of The Band’s landmark Music From Big Pink, with the help of its surviving players, in the new issue (dated August 2013, and out on Thursday, July 4).
Guitarist Robbie Robertson explains how the group moved to Woodstock, NY, and fell into daily jam sessions, many with Bob Dylan, in the basement of their home, while many contemporaries and admirers of the band, including Al Kooper and Richard Thompson, give their take on the impact of the legendary record.
“When it came out people were like, ‘Where in the world did this come from? What kind of music is this?’” says Robertson.
“People acted like we were from another planet. That shocked me, but it was a good thing, because it made me feel that we were doing something that had our own character to it. It taught us a lesson: you need to take your own vibe with you. That idea had a tremendous influence.”
We also take a look at Bob Dylan’s album cover artwork, what became of the Big Pink house, and the effect The Band had on the town of Woodstock itself.
The new issue of Uncut is out on Thursday (July 4).
At some point on Sunday night, it seems as if quite a few restless people watching the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage started Googling “threw”, “bottle” and “Mumford & Sons”. For the past 36 hours, the most popular page on www.uncut.co.uk has been an old news story from 2010, in which The Fall’s Mark E Smith articulated his dislike for Mumford & Sons, mistook them for “a load of retarded Irish folk singers," and claimed he threw a bottle at them during a festival in Ireland.
Judging by a bunch of comments that have been tagged to this story on social media, you’d be forgiven for reinventing Mark E Smith, possibly unsteady curmudgeon and long-rehearsed provocateur, as some noble embodiment of public dissent: the man who flung a bottle on behalf of the seething millions. Mumford & Sons are currently one of the most popular rock bands in the world, but the most striking thing about their success, at least in the UK, has been the energy expended by those who hate them. What, exactly, is their problem?
For my part, a dislike of Mumford & Sons’ music is relatively straightforward. They seem to be another band in the anthemic strain of Coldplay, Snow Patrol et al, whose music evidently provides a sort of consolatory hug on an epic scale. It’s hard to hear much folk in what they do; rather, they toy with what many grasp as signifiers of folk – banjos and waistcoats chiefly, as far as I can tell – and give themselves a vague bucolic air. It’s a set dressing, a point of difference, no more critical to their sound than the daft paint-spattered outfits or ragged vintage uniforms that Coldplay wore so assiduously for their last two campaigns.
This set dressing, though, seems to be what so many of Mumford & Sons’ detractors focus upon. They are not, as a consequence, just one more stadium indie band with a slight twist on the tearful mass dynamics patented by U2. They are, instead, portrayed as the shock troops for twee rusticity, flagbearers for the complacency and traditions of the Tory shires; part of an apparent axis of evil alongside Boden clothing, Country File and Kirstie Allsopp.
At the heart of this contempt, perhaps, is a residual belief shared by many British people of a certain age that, if a rock band are middle-class, they should have the good grace to pretend otherwise (though we’ll then ridicule say, Damon Albarn, for his studied estuary vowels), or at least to behave so appallingly that they implicitly renounce their ‘nice’ upbringing. I’m not sure whether Marcus Mumford has ever made any clear political statement, but it’s interesting that one middle-class Glastonbury headliner – Sir Mick Jagger – has spent decades consorting with British gentry, and recently admitted to some degree of Conservatism and to meetings with Margaret Thatcher.
Yet Jagger and The Rolling Stones are still cartoonified as anti-establishment, and their quintessentially Conservative insolence and greed are contextualised, with tacit approval, as a decadence and a glamorous, countercultural immorality. If Mumford & Sons are characterised as Tories, it seems to be, weirdly, down to what people perceive as an invidious politeness and gentility; neither attributes that more nuanced opponents of the Conservative Party would recognise in David Cameron’s ideological dismantling of the Welfare State.
The strange thing, of course, is that plenty of people seem to think it’s more satisfying and productive to attack Cameron, George Osborne et al for their social backgrounds rather than their policies; that to ridicule them for going to Eton or for the provenance of their burgers is more politically useful than to indict them for the glaringly evident inequalities caused by their decisions. It’d be naïve to imagine that their privileged backgrounds haven’t influenced their political outlook in some way, but it’s also reductive to bind the two inexorably together: not all hardline Tory ideologues – David Davis springs easily to mind - come from the upper echelons of English society; not quite all of those born to land and title – Tony Benn, of course – follow a path of Conservatism.
It’s a pretty facile point to make, but it seems salient, not least because I’m not convinced that creating elite stereotypes is the best way of criticising either a government or, somewhat less importantly, a rock band. Maybe so many people hate Mumford & Sons because it’s easier to take offence at their aesthetic coding, rather than try and articulate exactly why they don’t like what is, when all’s said and done, the kind of bland and nebulous music that is often quite hard to critically spear. Maybe we can’t be bothered to engage with deeper issues because they’re not as much fun. Maybe it’s a sport to lambast caricatures of poshness, and to fetishise equally shallow ideas of rebellion. Or maybe we should have switched off the Glastonbury coverage, and put on a record we actually enjoyed. Got any Frank Turner?
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey
Picture credit: Rebecca Miller
At some point on Sunday night, it seems as if quite a few restless people watching the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage started Googling “threw”, “bottle” and “Mumford & Sons”. For the past 36 hours, the most popular page on www.uncut.co.uk has been an old news story from 2010, in which The Fall’s Mark E Smith articulated his dislike for Mumford & Sons, mistook them for “a load of retarded Irish folk singers,” and claimed he threw a bottle at them during a festival in Ireland.
Judging by a bunch of comments that have been tagged to this story on social media, you’d be forgiven for reinventing Mark E Smith, possibly unsteady curmudgeon and long-rehearsed provocateur, as some noble embodiment of public dissent: the man who flung a bottle on behalf of the seething millions. Mumford & Sons are currently one of the most popular rock bands in the world, but the most striking thing about their success, at least in the UK, has been the energy expended by those who hate them. What, exactly, is their problem?
For my part, a dislike of Mumford & Sons’ music is relatively straightforward. They seem to be another band in the anthemic strain of Coldplay, Snow Patrol et al, whose music evidently provides a sort of consolatory hug on an epic scale. It’s hard to hear much folk in what they do; rather, they toy with what many grasp as signifiers of folk – banjos and waistcoats chiefly, as far as I can tell – and give themselves a vague bucolic air. It’s a set dressing, a point of difference, no more critical to their sound than the daft paint-spattered outfits or ragged vintage uniforms that Coldplay wore so assiduously for their last two campaigns.
This set dressing, though, seems to be what so many of Mumford & Sons’ detractors focus upon. They are not, as a consequence, just one more stadium indie band with a slight twist on the tearful mass dynamics patented by U2. They are, instead, portrayed as the shock troops for twee rusticity, flagbearers for the complacency and traditions of the Tory shires; part of an apparent axis of evil alongside Boden clothing, Country File and Kirstie Allsopp.
At the heart of this contempt, perhaps, is a residual belief shared by many British people of a certain age that, if a rock band are middle-class, they should have the good grace to pretend otherwise (though we’ll then ridicule say, Damon Albarn, for his studied estuary vowels), or at least to behave so appallingly that they implicitly renounce their ‘nice’ upbringing. I’m not sure whether Marcus Mumford has ever made any clear political statement, but it’s interesting that one middle-class Glastonbury headliner – Sir Mick Jagger – has spent decades consorting with British gentry, and recently admitted to some degree of Conservatism and to meetings with Margaret Thatcher.
Yet Jagger and The Rolling Stones are still cartoonified as anti-establishment, and their quintessentially Conservative insolence and greed are contextualised, with tacit approval, as a decadence and a glamorous, countercultural immorality. If Mumford & Sons are characterised as Tories, it seems to be, weirdly, down to what people perceive as an invidious politeness and gentility; neither attributes that more nuanced opponents of the Conservative Party would recognise in David Cameron’s ideological dismantling of the Welfare State.
The strange thing, of course, is that plenty of people seem to think it’s more satisfying and productive to attack Cameron, George Osborne et al for their social backgrounds rather than their policies; that to ridicule them for going to Eton or for the provenance of their burgers is more politically useful than to indict them for the glaringly evident inequalities caused by their decisions. It’d be naïve to imagine that their privileged backgrounds haven’t influenced their political outlook in some way, but it’s also reductive to bind the two inexorably together: not all hardline Tory ideologues – David Davis springs easily to mind – come from the upper echelons of English society; not quite all of those born to land and title – Tony Benn, of course – follow a path of Conservatism.
It’s a pretty facile point to make, but it seems salient, not least because I’m not convinced that creating elite stereotypes is the best way of criticising either a government or, somewhat less importantly, a rock band. Maybe so many people hate Mumford & Sons because it’s easier to take offence at their aesthetic coding, rather than try and articulate exactly why they don’t like what is, when all’s said and done, the kind of bland and nebulous music that is often quite hard to critically spear. Maybe we can’t be bothered to engage with deeper issues because they’re not as much fun. Maybe it’s a sport to lambast caricatures of poshness, and to fetishise equally shallow ideas of rebellion. Or maybe we should have switched off the Glastonbury coverage, and put on a record we actually enjoyed. Got any Frank Turner?
