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Boards Of Canada, “Tomorrow’s Harvest”: first listen

John Mulvey
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Boards Of Canada, “Tomorrow’s Harvest”: first listen

If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary. But Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin’s work has always been about landscape and inference rather than specifics, and the pervading influence of this, their fourth album and first in eight years, is once again uneasy, but attractive. Those eight years do not appear to have been spent radically reassessing their musical choices. If anything, swathes of “Tomorrow’s Harvest” feels like a retrenchment into the dense, sometimes oppressive soundworld of “Geogaddi” after the comparatively sunny, at least superficially more organic, designs of their last album, “The Campfire Headphase”. Dedicated followers of BOC (and the band have long, albeit slyly, encouraged their own cult with codes and mysteries; with the artful weaving of nostalgia, the uncanny and higher mathematics) saw this coming, of course, some time before the video for “Reach For The Dead” was leaked last night. With hindsight, the pre-release campaign for “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, involving one-off 12-inches, strings of significant numbers, inexplicable broadcasts and so on, feels a bit botched and unfulfilled. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jTg-q6Drt0 But the excitement it generated was palpable, even in the shadow of the monolithic operation being carried out simultaneously by Daft Punk, and the resonances of number stations and shortwave espionage, heavily suggested a return to darker terrain (was that old story about them recording in a disused nuclear bunker ever proved?). “Tomorrow’s Harvest” begins with a perky callsign fanfare, though it is closer to a ‘70s TV channel ident than one of those deployed by the numbers stations on The Conet Project. There are numbers here, most notably in “Telepath”, though the way they run in sequence from one to ten, before being fragmented, seems to suggest dislocation more than code. It’s an obvious risk, though, to jump to any kind of conclusions about a BOC record after three or four listens: it’s not just the likely proliferation of hidden meanings, but also the way the brothers’ music works so gradually and insidiously. As a consequence, opinions here come with even more caveats than usual… After the fanfare, “Gemini” moves into what will become one of the default settings for much of “Tomorrow’s Harvest” – a sort of menaced abstraction, that on first couple of listens fractionally recalls Goblin dabbling in ambience. Again, the closest back catalogue reference point remains “Geogaddi”, but this time it often feels as if the passages that were once used as interludes have been extended and become the focus: the murky, skittering beats and devil voices of “Split Your Infinities” runs to four and a half minutes; “White Cyclosa” takes up three minutes when, on “Geogaddi”, one suspects it would’ve been compressed into a third of that time. These are not easy tracks to crack, and the fanatical layering of sound means that it’s hard to come to a fast conclusion about them (there’s a real serendipity that one of BOC’s true peers, My Bloody Valentine, should stealthily resume operations in the same year). I don’t envy Louis Pattison, who put together a piece for the new issue of Uncut after a playback at Warp, but his detection of a semi-buried John Carpenter influence, that I haven’t picked up on previous records, seems apposite (especially on “Collapse”). With the more immediate tracks, there’s a not-unpleasant sense that Boards Of Canada’s aesthetic, their palette of dulled breakbeats, melodies that are redolent of old documentary soundtracks bent and submerged, muffled voices and so on, is now so distinctive that it could be taken as self-parody. The listening stream uses fake track names, which are no more or less daft/plausible than the actual ones: a sequence of BOC songs titled “Split Your Infinities”, “Uritual”, “Nothing Is Real” (the ur-BOC track, perhaps), “Sundown”, “New Seeds” and “Come To Dust” could have been fabricated by a mischievous impersonator, such is its occult closeness to cliché. As ever with this sort of thing, though, if you’ve been satisfied with BOC’s style in the past, it seems churlish to criticise them for sticking with it. “Reach For The Dead”, as you already know, is the clear evidence of that, but “Cold Earth” is the first real, swift classic on “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, one of those fragile, beautiful headnodders in the vein of “Music Is Math” (it occurred to me this morning that I saw a few BOC live shows around the cusp of the millennium that consisted of almost entirely unreleased tunes, and wondered whether any of those have belatedly ended up on this collection?). Gradually, the album moves to a comparative clarity: the graceful love theme that emerges from the murk of “Sick Times”; “Palace Posy”, with a directness and leftfield bounce building into mechanistic, haunted funk, reminiscent of both “Music Has The Right To Children” and their Warp contemporaries, Plaid. “Palace Posy”, too, finds the sampled voices unusually deployed to harmonic ends – it’s not exactly a BOC track with singing on it, but they haven’t really been much closer, as far as I can remember, to such a whimsical concept (maybe “1969”?). Then, tracks 15 and 16, make for a fantastic ending (undermined, predictably, by one ominous drone, “Semena Mertvykh”, in their wake). “Come To Dust” is an end-titles, widescreen resolution of all that has gone before, the Carpenter-style arpeggiators pushed into the background as one of Sandison and Eoin’s grandly portentous melodies moves into focus. And “New Seeds”, as the title flags, is a rare flickering of optimism; upbeat, vague kin to “Dayvan Cowboy” and, after about four minutes, blessed with one of those covertly ecstatic gear-shifts at which they’ve always excelled. Strangest of all, though, “New Seeds”’ first riff is a jittery, rattling thing that reminds me of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”; not something I expected. Perhaps, the hidden resonances and black ops of Boards Of Canada have greater depths than even the most assiduous conspiracy theorist can conceive… Check this: an interview I did with Boards Of Canada circa Geogaddi. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary.

But Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin’s work has always been about landscape and inference rather than specifics, and the pervading influence of this, their fourth album and first in eight years, is once again uneasy, but attractive. Those eight years do not appear to have been spent radically reassessing their musical choices. If anything, swathes of “Tomorrow’s Harvest” feels like a retrenchment into the dense, sometimes oppressive soundworld of “Geogaddi” after the comparatively sunny, at least superficially more organic, designs of their last album, “The Campfire Headphase”.

Dedicated followers of BOC (and the band have long, albeit slyly, encouraged their own cult with codes and mysteries; with the artful weaving of nostalgia, the uncanny and higher mathematics) saw this coming, of course, some time before the video for “Reach For The Dead” was leaked last night. With hindsight, the pre-release campaign for “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, involving one-off 12-inches, strings of significant numbers, inexplicable broadcasts and so on, feels a bit botched and unfulfilled.

But the excitement it generated was palpable, even in the shadow of the monolithic operation being carried out simultaneously by Daft Punk, and the resonances of number stations and shortwave espionage, heavily suggested a return to darker terrain (was that old story about them recording in a disused nuclear bunker ever proved?).

“Tomorrow’s Harvest” begins with a perky callsign fanfare, though it is closer to a ‘70s TV channel ident than one of those deployed by the numbers stations on The Conet Project. There are numbers here, most notably in “Telepath”, though the way they run in sequence from one to ten, before being fragmented, seems to suggest dislocation more than code.

It’s an obvious risk, though, to jump to any kind of conclusions about a BOC record after three or four listens: it’s not just the likely proliferation of hidden meanings, but also the way the brothers’ music works so gradually and insidiously. As a consequence, opinions here come with even more caveats than usual…

After the fanfare, “Gemini” moves into what will become one of the default settings for much of “Tomorrow’s Harvest” – a sort of menaced abstraction, that on first couple of listens fractionally recalls Goblin dabbling in ambience. Again, the closest back catalogue reference point remains “Geogaddi”, but this time it often feels as if the passages that were once used as interludes have been extended and become the focus: the murky, skittering beats and devil voices of “Split Your Infinities” runs to four and a half minutes; “White Cyclosa” takes up three minutes when, on “Geogaddi”, one suspects it would’ve been compressed into a third of that time.

These are not easy tracks to crack, and the fanatical layering of sound means that it’s hard to come to a fast conclusion about them (there’s a real serendipity that one of BOC’s true peers, My Bloody Valentine, should stealthily resume operations in the same year). I don’t envy Louis Pattison, who put together a piece for the new issue of Uncut after a playback at Warp, but his detection of a semi-buried John Carpenter influence, that I haven’t picked up on previous records, seems apposite (especially on “Collapse”).

With the more immediate tracks, there’s a not-unpleasant sense that Boards Of Canada’s aesthetic, their palette of dulled breakbeats, melodies that are redolent of old documentary soundtracks bent and submerged, muffled voices and so on, is now so distinctive that it could be taken as self-parody. The listening stream uses fake track names, which are no more or less daft/plausible than the actual ones: a sequence of BOC songs titled “Split Your Infinities”, “Uritual”, “Nothing Is Real” (the ur-BOC track, perhaps), “Sundown”, “New Seeds” and “Come To Dust” could have been fabricated by a mischievous impersonator, such is its occult closeness to cliché.

As ever with this sort of thing, though, if you’ve been satisfied with BOC’s style in the past, it seems churlish to criticise them for sticking with it. “Reach For The Dead”, as you already know, is the clear evidence of that, but “Cold Earth” is the first real, swift classic on “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, one of those fragile, beautiful headnodders in the vein of “Music Is Math” (it occurred to me this morning that I saw a few BOC live shows around the cusp of the millennium that consisted of almost entirely unreleased tunes, and wondered whether any of those have belatedly ended up on this collection?).

Gradually, the album moves to a comparative clarity: the graceful love theme that emerges from the murk of “Sick Times”; “Palace Posy”, with a directness and leftfield bounce building into mechanistic, haunted funk, reminiscent of both “Music Has The Right To Children” and their Warp contemporaries, Plaid. “Palace Posy”, too, finds the sampled voices unusually deployed to harmonic ends – it’s not exactly a BOC track with singing on it, but they haven’t really been much closer, as far as I can remember, to such a whimsical concept (maybe “1969”?).

Then, tracks 15 and 16, make for a fantastic ending (undermined, predictably, by one ominous drone, “Semena Mertvykh”, in their wake). “Come To Dust” is an end-titles, widescreen resolution of all that has gone before, the Carpenter-style arpeggiators pushed into the background as one of Sandison and Eoin’s grandly portentous melodies moves into focus. And “New Seeds”, as the title flags, is a rare flickering of optimism; upbeat, vague kin to “Dayvan Cowboy” and, after about four minutes, blessed with one of those covertly ecstatic gear-shifts at which they’ve always excelled.

Strangest of all, though, “New Seeds”’ first riff is a jittery, rattling thing that reminds me of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”; not something I expected. Perhaps, the hidden resonances and black ops of Boards Of Canada have greater depths than even the most assiduous conspiracy theorist can conceive…

Check this: an interview I did with Boards Of Canada circa Geogaddi.

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

Bon Iver: “Man, you can take yourself too seriously…”

Uncut
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0
Bon Iver: “Man, you can take yourself too seriously…”
For this week’s archive feature, we delve back into Uncut’s July 2011 issue (Take 170) – just before the release of Bon Iver’s second album – to find Vernon sunning himself in California, consorting with Kanye and shaping up as “the Neil Young of our generation”. What happened? “For ...

For this week’s archive feature, we delve back into Uncut’s July 2011 issue (Take 170) – just before the release of Bon Iver’s second album – to find Vernon sunning himself in California, consorting with Kanye and shaping up as “the Neil Young of our generation”. What happened? “For Emma… is the past,” he says. “This is the present, and it’s more colourful and inviting.” Words: Alastair McKay

________________

The road to Justin Vernon ends in a bungalow, at the shady end of a desert cul-de-sac in California. From the street, looking past the house, there are views to the mountains, where tourists can ride the Palm Springs Aerial tramway from the floor of Coachella Valley to the top of San Jacinto Peak. The view from the back door is less majestic. When I arrive at the bungalow that is serving as his base for the Coachella Festival, Vernon is pulling himself out of the pool. He is here with Gayngs, the sprawling soft-rock band formed by his old friend Ryan Olson, who is poolside in tight trunks, smoking a cigarillo. Har Mar Superstar, another Gayng member, can be seen, patting his belly fondly as he considers making an entry into the afternoon. Indoors, on the sofa, an unidentified man in Y-fronts snores, while someone else sings a Mexican lament. The scene, says a voice from the kitchen, is “dude soup”.

Last night, Gayngs headlined Coachella’s Mojave stage – quite an achievement for a group that was perceived by many as a joke. But that’s not the only reason Vernon is here at Coachella. Tomorrow, he will join his old friends The National for a beautifully measured performance of “Terrible Love”, while Duran Duran’s “Rio” echoes out from the adjacent stage. He is also rumoured to be guesting with Kanye West, reprising his collaboration, “Lost In The World”, from the rapper’s 2010 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Then there is the small matter of Bon Iver’s self-titled second album, a startling record that will surprise those who had pigeonholed Vernon as a rural folkie, a hairshirt backwoodsman, on the basis of 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago.

Showered, and now wearing a shirt with an embroidered duck on the breast, Vernon ushers me to a shady corner by the pool. It is not entirely peaceful. Palm Springs airport is nearby, so the reflective mood is punctured by jet engines. Vernon’s voice is a low rumble, a result, perhaps, of the previous night’s exertions. The Gayngs show, he says, will be his last for a while, but he has enjoyed the experience.

“Man, you can take yourself too seriously,” he explains. “I don’t know if I ever did. But Gayngs is just not about fixing your problems. My dad always said: ‘There’s three rules in life.’ The first rule is: ‘Be a good person.’ The second one is about materialism, it’s something like: ‘If you can’t get something for nothing, you haven’t got anything.’ The third rule is: ‘Throw a good party.’ With Gayngs, I feel like I get to throw on sunglasses and fuck around.”

The point is well made, but it’s still slightly jarring to encounter Vernon in these surroundings. This desert bungalow is far removed from the remote cabin where Vernon recorded For Emma… during a bout of self-imposed isolation. The cabin has become the founding myth of Bon Iver, and while Vernon politely gives every indication that he would be happy if he never heard tell of it again, he is keen to correct a few misapprehensions. To understand what happened afterwards, he suggests, you have to appreciate what happened before. Growing up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Vernon had ingested his parents’ musical interests: blues and zydeco, jazz, John Prine, Dylan and Neil Young. When he started developing his own tastes, he was attracted to the energy of Primus and Fugazi. “I was a bit starstruck when I saw Ian MacKaye [of Minor Threat and Fugazi] at catering yesterday,” he reveals. “I was like ‘Oh shit, that guy’s my fucking hero.’” He liked Phish, and gospel. At college, he gravitated towards electronic experimentation – Steve Reich, Eno, David Tudor.

“The biggest change was in North Carolina when my band, DeYarmond Edison, did a residency at this art gallery. We did four months. Each month was curated by a different member. We each tried different things – we had 20-minute keyboard phase pieces, à la Eno, or we had nights where we played only Appalachian music. Sometimes we did gospel stuff, sometimes freakout punk.

“My residency was the human voice, so we did old slave spirituals. It was a weird concept for us to attempt, but you learn a lot about aches and pains and what pushing a voice can do. It was then that our band realised we needed to dissipate, but also during that time I started to sing in falsetto, doing Mahalia Jackson songs. That was when I started making demos.”

The haunting opening song on For Emma…, “Flume”, was the first time Vernon felt he had an identity for his own music. “I knew I was talented, but I did struggle with not feeling unique. I tried for a really long time – 15 years of writing songs – and I was thinking I might have to think about not doing this. ‘Flume’ was the catalyst for my life right now. I recorded it, not at the cabin, but I was there already. I was ready.”

Vernon was unwell, too. He had spent three months in bed with a liver infection. He had poison ivy on his face, his spine was out of alignment. It only recovered fully six months ago. “It’s like a weird metaphor for where I’m finally at now. I’m feeling better; because it was really fun for the record to take off, but it was also really hard, because my back was out the whole time. I feel like I’m on the other side of it now.”

Vernon has a habit of talking in metaphors, even when describing real events. I point this out, and he looks momentarily perturbed. “Maybe that’s because I don’t remember. If I was to try and remember the first day I went to the cabin I’d probably say it was fucking cold and I started a fire, I drank a few beers and then I maybe took a nap. I don’t think I played music for three weeks. I was just up there splitting wood, or nothing. It wasn’t despair or anything. It was just like boredom. Whatever you do, it takes a lot of time to get to a place where you can do it, still. Some people meditate – that’s not for me.”

Later, I ask Vernon’s brother (and tour manager) Nate to describe Justin’s mood back then. “It wasn’t misery. We would hang out during that time – and there were good times, and dark spots and turmoil. It was just a time when he was figuring a lot of stuff out, and escaping from it made it a lot easier.”

So the truth about the log cabin is not (as is popularly thought) that Vernon broke up with a girl, rushed off in despair, and spewed out a record?

“No,” he says with a note of finality. “Fuck, that is the most boring version of the story possible. Who hasn’t broken up with somebody? Who hasn’t broken up with somebody because they were still thinking about somebody else? Who hasn’t wrote a fucking song about it? I’m not bitter: I’m proud of this – the reason For Emma… took off is because the record’s good. It’s not about what I did.”

If the truth about For Emma… was obscured by the myth of the cabin, so was the subtlety of the music. Listen again, and it’s a record full of textures and ghostly moods.

“When I heard For Emma…, I think people were hearing something different than what I was hearing,” says Thomas Wincek, who collaborated with Vernon in Volcano Choir. “He got that comparison to Iron & Wine, but I always thought there was something weirder and more atmospheric about Justin’s stuff.”

If Gayngs gave vent to Vernon’s playful side, Volcano Choir was more experimental. A collaboration with Milwaukee post-rockers Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, it showcased Vernon’s vocals. “It was a weird chance just to be a lead singer,” says Vernon. “Not having to do anything on the guitar, and not having to write any of the music, just sitting on top of music feels really good.”

“They weren’t normal songs,” says Wincek. “So you would approach them more like a puzzle. For Justin it was more like ‘What kind of thing can I add to this with my voice as an instrument?’”

If collaborations with friends from Wisconsin were to be expected from a musician who enjoys the community spirit of his hometown, Vernon’s work with Kanye West came from leftfield. After enquiring about sampling Vernon’s vocal on “Woods” from 2009’s “Blood Bank” EP, West invited him to his Hawaii studio.

“The Kanye thing was surprising,” says Sean Carey, who drums in Bon Iver. “I didn’t doubt Justin would do something amazing. The surprise really was that he’d got to the level where people like Kanye were interested in his music.”

Vernon obviously relishes the fact that he is confounding expectations. “That’s the most interesting thing. I haven’t spent a lot of time with the new Neil Young record, but I love that he did it. I love that it’s a record of tape delays, and he did it with Daniel Lanois and he called it Le Noise. That is fucking awesome. And Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks, that’s fucking Gayngs. That’s like, ‘Fuck you, everybody, I’m going to do a rockabilly band.’ It’s really a lot like Gayngs, actually.”

So it shows that you’re not a country boy making folk records?

“No, and I never was. My house is next to farmers, and I like being outside, splitting wood, mowing the lawn, or hauling shit around. But following a pattern for a pattern’s sake is like bad death for me.”

The following morning, I meet Vernon at the King’s Highway, an “artisanal” diner. He is starting to flag. Far from living it up in Palm Springs, he went to bed at 9.30pm. He orders chilaquiles, and just as we are about to talk, the hostess rings a bell and sings a showtune. “When I was in here yesterday and she started singing, I said ‘Well, there’s something that doesn’t happen every day,’” says Vernon. “Evidently, it does.”

Vernon talks enthusiastically about the new Bon Iver record, and in particular the mood he was trying to convey in this new batch of songs. “For Emma… was this black-and-white thing; it’s a record of an event in time, and it’s past, it’s forever ago. This is like the present – it feels more colourful and inviting.”

Recorded at Vernon’s own April Base Studios, based in an old veterinary clinic in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, just a few miles from the house he grew up in, Bon Iver is a dense, oblique record. “It’s a little bit like taking a drug. It starts out and it’s kind of disarming in [opening track] ‘Perth’, and by the time you get to the end you’re just kind of glad to be on coast mode.”

That closing song “Beth/Rest” will be the most startling to listeners expecting a reprise of For Emma’s spartan aesthetic. It’s built on a 1980s’ synth sound, deliberately styled after Bruce Hornsby, with those oddly sterile sounds cocooning an autobiographical lyric. “During this whole process, I was like, whatever feels good is just right. Gayngs definitely helped with that. It doesn’t have anything to do with irony. Those sounds – they just feel so good to me. It’s like a song I would have written when I was 18. It’s about inviting love into your life, and not being afraid.

“People run away from relationships because they’re afraid of losing their independence. It doesn’t have to be that way. For me it’s about trying to get rid of the insecurity that caused me to think those things. There’s a death in that, but it’s beautiful. It’s like I’m saying goodbye to the days of dread, and the reasons I had to make For Emma. It was self-referential, it was self-loathing. It was important, I guess, but you don’t have to be afraid of linking up with another person and having faith that they’re not going to try to change who you are. That’s the ‘rest’ part. I’m talking about true love. I’d given up on it.”

Back at Coachella, waiting for Kanye West to come onstage, I run into The National’s Bryce Dessner, who offers this tribute to Vernon. “I think Justin’s the Neil Young of our generation. I’d go further, because he’s combining good songwriting and very adventurous sonic production in a way that I don’t think anyone else is doing. Usually, bands that are good at the sonic envelope are missing something in terms of writing actual songs. Justin does both things incredibly well.”

Coachella closes with an extraordinary performance from Kanye, full of operatics, dance, and pyrotechnics and Kanye lowered in on a crane. It peaks with “Lost In The World”; Kanye hogs centre stage, while Vernon, dressed in white, is mounted high on a plinth, looking like an angel and sounding like a robot. It’s a moment as beautiful as it is strange, and Vernon looks comfortably out of place.

Watch rare footage of Morrissey performing live with former Smiths members

Uncut
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Watch rare footage of Morrissey performing live with former Smiths members

Footage of a rare gig Morrissey performed with former Smiths members after he left the band to go solo has emerged online. Watch it below. The gig took place at Wolverhampton Civic Hall on December 22, 1988. An Uncut feature from 1998 uploaded to Morrissey-Solo.com fills in the background to the show. "Exactly 365 days after he'd last worked with them, Morrissey (or rather his lawyer) phoned Marr, Joyce and Rourke and suggested a gig. The result was a triumphant experience for all concerned, with feverish members of the audience gaining admission with a Smiths or Morrissey T-Shirt. "The band played the material they'd recorded with Morrissey a year earlier (such as 'The Last Of The Famous International Playboys') and a handful of Smiths songs never played live. However, the backstage environment brought the curious occasion of a group whose entire membership was suing the singer. According to Joyce, 'It wasn't mentioned'." Opening with 'Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before', the 40-minute long set includes Morrissey solo tracks such as 'Suedehead' and 'Sister I'm A Poet' as well as The Smiths' 'Sweet And Tender Hooligan'. The gig was announced on John Peel's radio show with only fans wearing a Smiths or Morrissey T-shirt allowed entrance. Johnny Marr did not perform on the night, replaced on guitar instead by Craig Gannon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azmOjnTg3Zg

Footage of a rare gig Morrissey performed with former Smiths members after he left the band to go solo has emerged online. Watch it below.

The gig took place at Wolverhampton Civic Hall on December 22, 1988. An Uncut feature from 1998 uploaded to Morrissey-Solo.com fills in the background to the show. “Exactly 365 days after he’d last worked with them, Morrissey (or rather his lawyer) phoned Marr, Joyce and Rourke and suggested a gig. The result was a triumphant experience for all concerned, with feverish members of the audience gaining admission with a Smiths or Morrissey T-Shirt.

“The band played the material they’d recorded with Morrissey a year earlier (such as ‘The Last Of The Famous International Playboys’) and a handful of Smiths songs never played live. However, the backstage environment brought the curious occasion of a group whose entire membership was suing the singer. According to Joyce, ‘It wasn’t mentioned’.”

Opening with ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’, the 40-minute long set includes Morrissey solo tracks such as ‘Suedehead’ and ‘Sister I’m A Poet’ as well as The Smiths’ ‘Sweet And Tender Hooligan’. The gig was announced on John Peel’s radio show with only fans wearing a Smiths or Morrissey T-shirt allowed entrance. Johnny Marr did not perform on the night, replaced on guitar instead by Craig Gannon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azmOjnTg3Zg

Watch trailer for new Bruce Springsteen documentary

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Watch trailer for new Bruce Springsteen documentary
Springsteen & I, a new fan-made documentary celebrating 40 years of Bruce Springsteen's music, is set to be broadcast around the world this summer. Scroll down to watch the trailer now. Taking place on July 22, the film will be screened at cinemas across the globe by Arts Alliance Media. The fo...

Springsteen & I, a new fan-made documentary celebrating 40 years of Bruce Springsteen’s music, is set to be broadcast around the world this summer. Scroll down to watch the trailer now.

Taking place on July 22, the film will be screened at cinemas across the globe by Arts Alliance Media. The footage will include unseen performances from throughout the star’s career as well as his most loved songs and comes with the full backing of Springsteen, and his management and label. According to a statement, the documentary aims to show how Springsteen “became the soundtrack to so many lives.”

Producer Ridley Scott said: “This beautifully crafted film provides a unique insight into the powerful bond between a recording artist and those who connect so profoundly with his music.”

Tickets for the screenings will go on sale on June 4. Meanwhile, fans are being given the opportunity to star on the official Springsteen & I poster. Details of the locations of screenings and other information will be revealed in the coming weeks. For details on the competition and the film’s release, visit the official website.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are currently in the middle of the 34 date Wrecking Ball world tour, which makes 10 stops in the UK and Ireland in June and July.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will play:

London Wembley Stadium (June 15)

Glasgow Hampden Park (18)

Coventry Ricoh Arena (20)

London Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (30)

Limerick Thomond Park (July 16)

Cork Páirc Uí Chaoimh (18)

Belfast King’s Hall (20)

Cardiff Millennium Stadium (23)

Leeds Arena (24)

You can read more about Bruce Springsteen in this month’s Uncut, which is in shops today.

Pic credit: Jo Lopez

R.E.M – Green 25th Anniversary Edition

Uncut
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R.E.M – Green 25th Anniversary Edition

The Georgians' major-label debut - even more thrilling and subversive a quarter of a century on... Pointedly released on Election Day 1988, REM’s sixth album – and the group’s major label debut – completed the college-rock band’s improbable rise to the top of the rock pyramid alongside U2, who were then coming off the monumental Joshua Tree. That the Athens foursome pulled off this feat without compromise or calculation bespeaks an era when mass appeal and artistic adventurousness went hand in hand. The climb had been gradual but steady for the band, initially triggered by 1983’s strikingly original Murmur, REM’s first long-player, released by Los Angeles indie IRS Records a year after they signed the then little-known group. Their recipe stirred Michael Stipe’s dreamlike, allusive lyrics and mumbled vocals into a style derived from the stately jangle of the Byrds and spiced up with a shot of punk’s DIY energy. From that spellbinding debut, which captivated the critics on both sides of the Atlantic, the band made two more self-defining LPs in 1984’s Reckoning and the following year’s Fables Of The Reconstruction before enlisting John Mellencamp’s producer Don Gehman, who scraped off the murk, pushing them toward greater clarity and scale on 1986’s widescreen Lifes Rich Pageant. REM’s sonic evolution continued with 1987’s Document, co-produced by Scott Litt, which became the band’s first million-seller in the US, even with its preponderance of politically charged songs. Document yielded their first US Top 10 single in the creepy, widely misconstrued “The One I Love”, as well as one of their signature songs, the exuberant if irony-laced anthem “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. When the band reunited with Litt to begin recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis (where their heroes Big Star had cut their obscure masterpieces), they brought with them a brace of new songs shaped by the experience of playing basketball arenas on the Document tour – big, churning rockers like “Pop Song 89” and “Orange Crush” (the latter as martial and militant as U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”) seemingly designed to lift crowds of 20,000 out of their seats while flicking their Bics. These behemoths required suitably earthshaking treatments, and Litt was up to the challenge. The engineer turned producer – who’d come to REM by way of their spiritual big brothers the dB’s – put a particular emphasis on recording the drums, thickening Bill Berry’s muscular hits with snare samples so that they erupted like mortar shells. This aural aggressiveness courses through the album like a high-voltage charge, animating the menacing “Turn You Inside-Out” and “I Remember California” on the one hand, the resolutely positive “Get Up” and “Stand” on the other. The physicality of the latter two tracks is set off by decorative pop arrangements – a swelling chorale overhanging Peter Buck’s deadened-string power riffs on “Get Up”, plinking piano and percussion on “Stand” – which serve to coat the urgency of their message of resiliency with a layer of sweetness. Cut from the same cloth as “It’s The End Of The World…”, “Stand” is part election year protest song, part throwback novelty tune – one that in hindsight perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the late ’80s. It would also become REM’s biggest hit to date and their second biggest ever (behind only “Losing My Religion” from the subsequent Out Of Time), climbing to No.6 on the US charts. These arena-ready rockers may have drawn most of the initial attention when Green was released – Rolling Stone went so far as to compare “Turn You Inside-Out” to Led Zeppelin – but they were just one aspect of what REM had cooked up. Equally unprecedented, if less assaultive, was the featured appearance of the mandolin, the foreground instrument on the signature REM ballads “You Are My Everything” (paired with Mike Mills’ accordion, another newly introduced instrument), “The Wrong Child” and “Hairshirt”. Just as inspired, and even more striking than these Stipean reveries are the lush “World Leader Pretend”, ornamented by cello and pedal steel, and the closing “Untitled”, a rhapsodic piece anticipating the profound compassion of “Everybody Hurts”, on which Buck drums and Berry plays bass, as UNCUT Editor Allan Jones points out in his notes for the reissue. The bonus disc – which contains 21 of the 29 songs from REM’s concert at North Carolina’s Greensboro Coliseum, the 129th show on the 130-date Green World Tour – doesn’t merely provide historical context, it captures the band (expanded to a five-piece with the addition of the dB’s Peter Holsapple on guitar and keys) at its live performance peak. In a sustained burst of inspiration, REM deliver the hooks for the punters who’d come to them by way of “Stand”, while still giving the core cultists all the subtle detail they’d come to expect from their favorite band in the world. After opening the Greensboro show with their oppositional pop hits, “Stand” and “The One I Love”, they strategically place Green’s roof-raisers through the performance, and each supercharges the momentum, the cudgeling power of “Orange Crush” sweeping along the paired Lifes Rich Pageant jangle-fests “Cuyahoga” and “These Days” in its wake, the nightmare vision of “I Remember California” doubling the exhilaration of “Get Up”. Pulling mostly from the three most recent LPs, the band cherry-picks a handful of gems from their early days, most satisfyingly the quintessential jangle-rocker “Good Advices” from Fables…, sped up for the occasion, and Murmur’s “Perfect Circle”, which closes the CD (though not the actual set, which ended on the night with covers of Syd Barrett’s “Dark Globe” and the Velvets’ “After Hours”). They also introduce “Belong” and “Low”, which would appear on 1991’s Out Of Time, arrangements already locked in. It seems ludicrous in retrospect, but when Green came out, more than a few REM purists were taken aback. Some hardcore fans went so far as to accuse their heroes of selling out, the presence of overtly commercial touches confirming their suspicions that the band had turned its back on artistic purity, lured by the multimillion-dollar deal they’d signed with Warner Bros. But hearing the record anew reveals an abundance of riches in the details, the product of the same artistic restlessness and unwillingness to stand pat that had motivated this one-of-a-kind band every step of the way. Together, the studio and live discs serve as a thrilling reminder of what a brilliant band REM was a quarter century ago – fearless in pursuit of their vision, masterful in realising it. Bud Scoppa

The Georgians’ major-label debut – even more thrilling and subversive a quarter of a century on…

Pointedly released on Election Day 1988, REM’s sixth album – and the group’s major label debut – completed the college-rock band’s improbable rise to the top of the rock pyramid alongside U2, who were then coming off the monumental Joshua Tree. That the Athens foursome pulled off this feat without compromise or calculation bespeaks an era when mass appeal and artistic adventurousness went hand in hand.

The climb had been gradual but steady for the band, initially triggered by 1983’s strikingly original Murmur, REM’s first long-player, released by Los Angeles indie IRS Records a year after they signed the then little-known group. Their recipe stirred Michael Stipe’s dreamlike, allusive lyrics and mumbled vocals into a style derived from the stately jangle of the Byrds and spiced up with a shot of punk’s DIY energy. From that spellbinding debut, which captivated the critics on both sides of the Atlantic, the band made two more self-defining LPs in 1984’s Reckoning and the following year’s Fables Of The Reconstruction before enlisting John Mellencamp’s producer Don Gehman, who scraped off the murk, pushing them toward greater clarity and scale on 1986’s widescreen Lifes Rich Pageant. REM’s sonic evolution continued with 1987’s Document, co-produced by Scott Litt, which became the band’s first million-seller in the US, even with its preponderance of politically charged songs. Document yielded their first US Top 10 single in the creepy, widely misconstrued “The One I Love”, as well as one of their signature songs, the exuberant if irony-laced anthem “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”.

When the band reunited with Litt to begin recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis (where their heroes Big Star had cut their obscure masterpieces), they brought with them a brace of new songs shaped by the experience of playing basketball arenas on the Document tour – big, churning rockers like “Pop Song 89” and “Orange Crush” (the latter as martial and militant as U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”) seemingly designed to lift crowds of 20,000 out of their seats while flicking their Bics. These behemoths required suitably earthshaking treatments, and Litt was up to the challenge. The engineer turned producer – who’d come to REM by way of their spiritual big brothers the dB’s – put a particular emphasis on recording the drums, thickening Bill Berry’s muscular hits with snare samples so that they erupted like mortar shells.

This aural aggressiveness courses through the album like a high-voltage charge, animating the menacing “Turn You Inside-Out” and “I Remember California” on the one hand, the resolutely positive “Get Up” and “Stand” on the other. The physicality of the latter two tracks is set off by decorative pop arrangements – a swelling chorale overhanging Peter Buck’s deadened-string power riffs on “Get Up”, plinking piano and percussion on “Stand” – which serve to coat the urgency of their message of resiliency with a layer of sweetness. Cut from the same cloth as “It’s The End Of The World…”, “Stand” is part election year protest song, part throwback novelty tune – one that in hindsight perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the late ’80s. It would also become REM’s biggest hit to date and their second biggest ever (behind only “Losing My Religion” from the subsequent Out Of Time), climbing to No.6 on the US charts.

These arena-ready rockers may have drawn most of the initial attention when Green was released – Rolling Stone went so far as to compare “Turn You Inside-Out” to Led Zeppelin – but they were just one aspect of what REM had cooked up. Equally unprecedented, if less assaultive, was the featured appearance of the mandolin, the foreground instrument on the signature REM ballads “You Are My Everything” (paired with Mike Mills’ accordion, another newly introduced instrument), “The Wrong Child” and “Hairshirt”. Just as inspired, and even more striking than these Stipean reveries are the lush “World Leader Pretend”, ornamented by cello and pedal steel, and the closing “Untitled”, a rhapsodic piece anticipating the profound compassion of “Everybody Hurts”, on which Buck drums and Berry plays bass, as UNCUT Editor Allan Jones points out in his notes for the reissue.

The bonus disc – which contains 21 of the 29 songs from REM’s concert at North Carolina’s Greensboro Coliseum, the 129th show on the 130-date Green World Tour – doesn’t merely provide historical context, it captures the band (expanded to a five-piece with the addition of the dB’s Peter Holsapple on guitar and keys) at its live performance peak. In a sustained burst of inspiration, REM deliver the hooks for the punters who’d come to them by way of “Stand”, while still giving the core cultists all the subtle detail they’d come to expect from their favorite band in the world. After opening the Greensboro show with their oppositional pop hits, “Stand” and “The One I Love”, they strategically place Green’s roof-raisers through the performance, and each supercharges the momentum, the cudgeling power of “Orange Crush” sweeping along the paired Lifes Rich Pageant jangle-fests “Cuyahoga” and “These Days” in its wake, the nightmare vision of “I Remember California” doubling the exhilaration of “Get Up”. Pulling mostly from the three most recent LPs, the band cherry-picks a handful of gems from their early days, most satisfyingly the quintessential jangle-rocker “Good Advices” from Fables…, sped up for the occasion, and Murmur’s “Perfect Circle”, which closes the CD (though not the actual set, which ended on the night with covers of Syd Barrett’s “Dark Globe” and the Velvets’ “After Hours”). They also introduce “Belong” and “Low”, which would appear on 1991’s Out Of Time, arrangements already locked in.

It seems ludicrous in retrospect, but when Green came out, more than a few REM purists were taken aback. Some hardcore fans went so far as to accuse their heroes of selling out, the presence of overtly commercial touches confirming their suspicions that the band had turned its back on artistic purity, lured by the multimillion-dollar deal they’d signed with Warner Bros. But hearing the record anew reveals an abundance of riches in the details, the product of the same artistic restlessness and unwillingness to stand pat that had motivated this one-of-a-kind band every step of the way. Together, the studio and live discs serve as a thrilling reminder of what a brilliant band REM was a quarter century ago – fearless in pursuit of their vision, masterful in realising it.

Bud Scoppa

Win tickets to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse

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Win tickets to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Neil Young Journeys is released on DVD on June 10 - and to celebrate we have a great competition. We are delighted to be able to offer a pair of stall tickets to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Alchemy Tour on August 19 at London's 02 Arena. Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Neil...

Neil Young Journeys is released on DVD on June 10 – and to celebrate we have a great competition.

We are delighted to be able to offer a pair of stall tickets to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Alchemy Tour on August 19 at London’s 02 Arena.

Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Neil Young Journeys is shot during the last two nights of Young’s 2011 Le Noise world tour by long-time collaborator Jonathan Demme and captures Young both on stage and off.

To enter our competition, just tell us:

Who directed Neil Young Journeys?

Send your entries to uncutcomp@ipcmedia.com. Please include your full name, address and a daytime phone number.

The winner and four runners-up will also receive a copy of the DVD.

Winners will be notified by August 1. The editor’s decision is final.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse tickets are still available for:

MONDAY JUNE 10: Newcastle Metro Radio Arena

SUNDAY AUGUST 18: at the Liverpool Echo Arena

MONDAY AUGUST 19: at the London 02 Arena

Tickets are available here or by calling 0844 844 0444.

Competition tickets courtesy of International Talent Booking.

Paul McCartney writes to Russian officials in support of hunger striking Pussy Riot member

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Paul McCartney writes to Russian officials in support of hunger striking Pussy Riot member
Paul McCartney has written a letter in support of Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina, who has announced that she is going on hunger strike after being refused the right to attend her own parole hearing. McCartney has also written another letter in support of jailed Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikov...

Paul McCartney has written a letter in support of Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, who has announced that she is going on hunger strike after being refused the right to attend her own parole hearing.

McCartney has also written another letter in support of jailed Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was last month denied parole. The letters have been sent to Russian officials, asking them to consider releasing the two incarcerated women.

Excerpts from the letters have been posted at PaulMcCartney.com. His letter concerning Alyokhina reads:

“My personal belief is that further incarceration for Maria will be harmful for her and the situation as a whole, which, of course, is being watched by people all over the world. In the great tradition of fair-mindedness which the Russian people (many of whom are my friends) are famous for, I believe that you granting this request would send a very positive message to all the people who have followed this case.”

Regarding Tolokonnikova he wrote: “I have had a long relationship with the Russian people, and, with this in mind, I am making the following request in a spirit of friendship for my many Russian acquaintances who, like me, believe in treating people – all people, with compassion and kindness.”

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were jailed for two years in August 2012 for breach of public order motivated by religious hatred after staging their infamous ‘punk prayer’ protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. A third woman, Yekaterina Samutsevich was released on a suspended sentence last October.

Watch Arctic Monkeys perform brand new song “Do I Wanna Know?”

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Watch Arctic Monkeys perform brand new song “Do I Wanna Know?”
Arctic Monkeys played a brand new song called "Do I Wanna Know?" at their first live show in almost a year, which took place at the Majestic Ventura Theater in Ventura, California last night (May 22). The band opened their set with the new track. Click below to watch fan-shot footage of the perform...

Arctic Monkeys played a brand new song called “Do I Wanna Know?” at their first live show in almost a year, which took place at the Majestic Ventura Theater in Ventura, California last night (May 22).

The band opened their set with the new track. Click below to watch fan-shot footage of the performance. Sporting a silver tuxedo jacket, Alex Turner then led the band through a run of classic tracks from throughout their career.

The show marked the band’s return to the live stage, as it was the first time they’ve performed in public since appearing at the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in July of last year after finishing up the ‘Suck It And See’ tour, which ended at Metallica’s Orion Music + More festival in June 2012.

The band, who play Sasquatch Festival in Washington on Friday (May 24) will play six more US dates before starting their run of European festival dates, which includes a headline set at Glastonbury Festival on June 28.

The band are expected to release their fifth album later this year.

Arctic Monkeys played:

‘Do I Wanna Know?’

‘R U Mine?’

‘Dancing Shoes’

‘Brianstorm’

‘Brick By Brick’

‘Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair’

‘Evil Twin’

‘Old Yellow Bricks’

‘The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala’

‘Crying Lightning’

‘Pretty Visitors’

‘Do Me A Favour’

‘Cornerstone’

‘She’s Thunderstorms’

‘The View From The Afternoon’

‘Fake Tales Of San Francisco’

‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’

‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’

‘Suck It And See’

‘Fluorescent Adolescent’

‘505’

Photo credit: Pieter M Van Hattem

First Look – Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England

Michael Bonner
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First Look – Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England

It seems as if a month doesn’t go by without the release of a new Ben Wheatley film. I'm exaggerating, of course, but Wheatley is certainly becoming one of Britain’s most prolific film makers, with four full-length features since 2009 – as well as two series of Johnny Vegas’ sitcom, Ideal – under his belt. Wheatley’s strategy seems to be to shoot fast and cheaply using a small cast. His debut, Down Terrace, was filmed in eight days on location in a house belonging to one of the cast, who included professional actors Wheatley had befriended while working on Armando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet and first-time actors. It’s a tactic that has self-evidently proved successful for Wheatley, and one that he repeats in his latest film, A Field In England. The film is written by Amy Jump – Wheatley's wife, who also co-wrote her husband’s last film, the excellent black comedy, Sightseers. The cast totals five, and Wheatley shot in black and white on location over 12 days in – as the title suggests – a field in England. The biggest name on the marquee is Reece Shearsmith from The League Of Gentlemen, who plays one of three deserters from the English Civil War caught in a scheme by an alchemist, O’Neill, involving treasure of some description buried somewhere in the field. The film is basically a psychedelic historical drama, interpolating elements of folk horror and shot with an attention to landscape and natural lighting that, on occasion, recalls Terrance Malick. But under Wheatley’s gaze, even a pastoral idyll like his field at first appears to be contains cruel and unusual dangers. The score - a mix of discordant electronica, traditional 17th century songs and eerie acoustic plucking - does much to enhance the film's more hallucinatory passages. Interestingly, A Field In England is also getting a pretty heavy duty release, which illustrates Wheatley’s growing stature as a film maker. It’s due to be the first film in the UK to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD, on freeview TV and on VoD. If you think that’s a little too jazzy, then you might like to know that Sightseers is screening at the Pencil Museum in Keswick on August 3, as part of a Forestry Commission season called Picnic Cinema which shows films in unusual locations – Coppola’s Dracula Lowther Castle, Cumbria, Apocalypse Now in Gisburn Forest, Clitheroe, that kind of thing. There’s more information here. Anyway, here’s the first trailer of A Field In England: "Open up and let the Devil in," as the man says. I’ll be reviewing it in the next issue on Uncut, out in July. Incidentally, July is shaping up to be a pretty strong month for films – there’s also Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, The World’s End from the Shaun Of The Dead team and, hopefully, Springsteen & I. A Field In England is released in the UK on July 5 Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRRvzjkzu2U

It seems as if a month doesn’t go by without the release of a new Ben Wheatley film. I’m exaggerating, of course, but Wheatley is certainly becoming one of Britain’s most prolific film makers, with four full-length features since 2009 – as well as two series of Johnny Vegas’ sitcom, Ideal – under his belt.

Wheatley’s strategy seems to be to shoot fast and cheaply using a small cast. His debut, Down Terrace, was filmed in eight days on location in a house belonging to one of the cast, who included professional actors Wheatley had befriended while working on Armando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet and first-time actors. It’s a tactic that has self-evidently proved successful for Wheatley, and one that he repeats in his latest film, A Field In England.

The film is written by Amy Jump – Wheatley’s wife, who also co-wrote her husband’s last film, the excellent black comedy, Sightseers. The cast totals five, and Wheatley shot in black and white on location over 12 days in – as the title suggests – a field in England. The biggest name on the marquee is Reece Shearsmith from The League Of Gentlemen, who plays one of three deserters from the English Civil War caught in a scheme by an alchemist, O’Neill, involving treasure of some description buried somewhere in the field.

The film is basically a psychedelic historical drama, interpolating elements of folk horror and shot with an attention to landscape and natural lighting that, on occasion, recalls Terrance Malick. But under Wheatley’s gaze, even a pastoral idyll like his field at first appears to be contains cruel and unusual dangers. The score – a mix of discordant electronica, traditional 17th century songs and eerie acoustic plucking – does much to enhance the film’s more hallucinatory passages.

Interestingly, A Field In England is also getting a pretty heavy duty release, which illustrates Wheatley’s growing stature as a film maker. It’s due to be the first film in the UK to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD, on freeview TV and on VoD. If you think that’s a little too jazzy, then you might like to know that Sightseers is screening at the Pencil Museum in Keswick on August 3, as part of a Forestry Commission season called Picnic Cinema which shows films in unusual locations – Coppola’s Dracula Lowther Castle, Cumbria, Apocalypse Now in Gisburn Forest, Clitheroe, that kind of thing. There’s more information here.

Anyway, here’s the first trailer of A Field In England: “Open up and let the Devil in,” as the man says. I’ll be reviewing it in the next issue on Uncut, out in July. Incidentally, July is shaping up to be a pretty strong month for films – there’s also Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, The World’s End from the Shaun Of The Dead team and, hopefully, Springsteen & I.

A Field In England is released in the UK on July 5

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

The 20th Uncut Playlist Of 2013

John Mulvey
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The 20th Uncut Playlist Of 2013

Another week, another new issue to plug: after last week’s launch of our Nick Cave Ultimate Music Guide, I should flag up that this month’s Uncut goes on sale in the UK tomorrow, featuring Boards Of Canada, The Source Family, Mississippi Records, These New Puritans, Mark Kozelek, Thee Oh Sees and the “Origins Of American Primitive Guitar” alongside the marquee names. Kind of obsessed with Alela Diane this week, and Houndstooth. New Ty and Fuck Buttons are good, though, and the Honey Ltd is pretty nice, too. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey 1 Alela Diane – About Farewell (Rusted Blue) 2 The Allah-Las – Tell Me (Live on the Andrew Marr Show, before an audience of Jeremy Hunt and Peter Mandelson) 3 Ty Segall – Sleeper (Drag City) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp0RyAJJYfI 4 Honey Ltd – The Complete LHI Recordings (Light In The Attic) 5 Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus (ATP Recordings) 6 The Oblivians – Desperation (In The Red) 7 These New Puritans – Field Of Reeds (Infectious) 8 Various Artists – Turn Me Loose : Outsiders of Old-Time Music (Tompkins Square) 9 Otis Redding – The Complete Stax/Volt Singles Collection (Shout! Factory) 10 Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (Columbia) 11 Jagwar Ma – Howlin’ (Marathon) 12 Houndstooth – Ride Out The Dark (No Quarter) 13 The Doors – LA Woman (Elektra) 14 The Cairo Gang – Tiny Rebels (Empty Cellar) 15 Date Palms – The Dusted Sessions (Thrill Jockey) 16 Date Palms – Honey Devash (Mexican Summer) 17 Naam – Vow (TeePee) 18 Daft Punk – Horizon (Japan bonus track) (Columbia) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF_QVNfyRY8 19 Smith Westerns – Soft Will (Mom+Pop) 20 μ-Ziq – Chewed Corners (Planet Mu) 21 Valerie June – Pushin’ Against A Stone (Sunday Best) 22 Grim Tower – Anarchic Breezes (Outer Battery)

Another week, another new issue to plug: after last week’s launch of our Nick Cave Ultimate Music Guide, I should flag up that this month’s Uncut goes on sale in the UK tomorrow, featuring Boards Of Canada, The Source Family, Mississippi Records, These New Puritans, Mark Kozelek, Thee Oh Sees and the “Origins Of American Primitive Guitar” alongside the marquee names.

Kind of obsessed with Alela Diane this week, and Houndstooth. New Ty and Fuck Buttons are good, though, and the Honey Ltd is pretty nice, too.

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

1 Alela Diane – About Farewell (Rusted Blue)

2 The Allah-Las – Tell Me (Live on the Andrew Marr Show, before an audience of Jeremy Hunt and Peter Mandelson)

3 Ty Segall – Sleeper (Drag City)

4 Honey Ltd – The Complete LHI Recordings (Light In The Attic)

5 Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus (ATP Recordings)

6 The Oblivians – Desperation (In The Red)

7 These New Puritans – Field Of Reeds (Infectious)

8 Various Artists – Turn Me Loose : Outsiders of Old-Time Music (Tompkins Square)

9 Otis Redding – The Complete Stax/Volt Singles Collection (Shout! Factory)

10 Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (Columbia)

11 Jagwar Ma – Howlin’ (Marathon)

12 Houndstooth – Ride Out The Dark (No Quarter)

13 The Doors – LA Woman (Elektra)

14 The Cairo Gang – Tiny Rebels (Empty Cellar)

15 Date Palms – The Dusted Sessions (Thrill Jockey)

16 Date Palms – Honey Devash (Mexican Summer)

17 Naam – Vow (TeePee)

18 Daft Punk – Horizon (Japan bonus track) (Columbia)

19 Smith Westerns – Soft Will (Mom+Pop)

20 μ-Ziq – Chewed Corners (Planet Mu)

21 Valerie June – Pushin’ Against A Stone (Sunday Best)

22 Grim Tower – Anarchic Breezes (Outer Battery)

Keith Richards admits to owing 50 years worth of library fines

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Keith Richards admits to owing 50 years worth of library fines
Keith Richards has admitted he owes library fines going back 50 years. Richard told The Sun that hanging out by the bookshelves was one of his favourite pastimes as a teenager. "It was a place where you get a hint there was a place called civilization," he said of the library in Dartford, Kent. "I...

Keith Richards has admitted he owes library fines going back 50 years.

Richard told The Sun that hanging out by the bookshelves was one of his favourite pastimes as a teenager. “It was a place where you get a hint there was a place called civilization,” he said of the library in Dartford, Kent. “I still owe fines from about 50 years ago.”

According to the newspaper, the cost could be as much as £20,000.

The Stones return to the UK for their Glastonbury headline set on June 29 and a pair of massive gigs in London’s Hyde Park on July 6 and 13.

George Clinton: “I just sent a request to President Obama to save the funk”

Uncut
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George Clinton: “I just sent a request to President Obama to save the funk”
Parliament and Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton lets us into his P-Funk world in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out on Thursday, May 23). Clinton discusses Parliament, Funkadelic, the Mothership (the stage version of which is now housed in the Smithsonian Institute), drugs, worki...

Parliament and Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton lets us into his P-Funk world in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out on Thursday, May 23).

Clinton discusses Parliament, Funkadelic, the Mothership (the stage version of which is now housed in the Smithsonian Institute), drugs, working with Primal Scream and Sly Stone, and his early years as a high-earning hairdresser.

Talking about his current battle for royalties and ownership over many of his songs, Clinton reveals: “The entire band is having [copyright problems], my entire family, we just sent a request to the President of the United States to save the funk.

“We got a list of names, my entire family, to BMI requesting all our cheques. Other artists are involved in it, too. We gonna have us a Twitter Army! You can bet we know how to use the media, and the stage.”

Despite being one of the most sampled artists in music, especially among hip-hop musicians, Clinton claims he has received little money from the sampling parties.

The new issue of Uncut, which features Bruce Springsteen on the cover, is out on Thursday (May 23).

Trevor Bolder dies ages 62

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Trevor Bolder dies ages 62
Trevor Bolder has died at the age of 62. He passed away from cancer yesterday (May 21), according to reports. He had been suffering from the disease for four years. Bolder joined David Bowie's backing band in 1971, playing on four of Bowie's key early Seventies albums - Hunky Dory, The Rise And Fal...

Trevor Bolder has died at the age of 62. He passed away from cancer yesterday (May 21), according to reports. He had been suffering from the disease for four years.

Bolder joined David Bowie‘s backing band in 1971, playing on four of Bowie’s key early Seventies albums – Hunky Dory, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups alongside guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey.

Bowie has released a brief statement of his own, saying: “Trevor was a wonderful musician and a major inspiration for whichever band he was working with. But he was foremostly a tremendous guy, a great man.”

After his work with Bowie, Bolder joined Uriah Heep in 1976 and most recently appeared on their 2011 album, Into The Wild.

He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer earlier this year, and had hoped to be well enough to join Uriah Heep for their performance at Download Festival next month.

A statement from Uriah Heep said: “It is with great sadness that Uriah Heep announce the passing of our friend the amazing Trevor Bolder, who has passed away after his long fight with cancer.

“Trevor was an all-time great, one of the outstanding musicians of his generation, and one of the finest and most influential bass players that Britain ever produced.

“His long time membership of Uriah Heep brought the band’s music, and Trevor’s virtuosity and enthusiasm, to hundreds of thousands of fans across the world.”

Lead guitarist Mick Box said: “Trevor was a world-class bass player, singer and songwriter, and more importantly a world-class friend.”

Bolder also performed with Wishbone Ash and Cybernauts.

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

This month in Uncut!

Uncut
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0
This month in Uncut!

The new issue of Uncut, out today (May 23), features Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, Rodriguez and George Clinton. Bruce Springsteen is on the cover, and inside, his colourful time spent touring the UK is recalled by veteran rock writer Richard Williams, who raved about Springsteen in print over a year before Jon Landau’s famous piece. Sprinkled throughout are choice cuts from Williams’ interviews with The Boss, where Bruce discusses responsibility, crowdsurfing and taking control of his career. John Fogerty answers your questions on The Black Keys, his brother Tom and Woodstock, Rodriguez looks back at his extraordinary comeback and announces he’s running for mayor of Detroit, and George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic reveals why he’s asking President Obama to “save the funk”. Elsewhere, Uncut editor Allan Jones meets Tame Impala in the Californian desert, musicians pay tribute to late country star George Jones, and The Charlatans recall the euphoric and tragic making of “One To Another”. Sparks look back over their life in pictures, and Robyn Hitchcock recalls the creation of his greatest albums, from The Soft Boys to this year’s Love From London, while Chic’s Nile Rodgers remembers the records that have soundtracked his life. In the front section, Gregg Allman talks Muscle Shoals, as a new documentary on the legendary studios is released, Mavis Staples discusses working with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy again, and we look into Boards Of Canada’s enigmatic return. Black Sabbath, These New Puritans, Queens Of The Stone Age, The Shouting Matches, Scott Walker and ZZ Top all feature in the 40-page reviews section, and Prince, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Loudon Wainwright III are in our Live section. The CD, Glory Days, includes songs from Parquet Courts, Thee Oh Sees, The Handsome Family, and Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle. The new issue of Uncut is out today (Thursday, May 23).

The new issue of Uncut, out today (May 23), features Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, Rodriguez and George Clinton.

Bruce Springsteen is on the cover, and inside, his colourful time spent touring the UK is recalled by veteran rock writer Richard Williams, who raved about Springsteen in print over a year before Jon Landau’s famous piece.

Sprinkled throughout are choice cuts from Williams’ interviews with The Boss, where Bruce discusses responsibility, crowdsurfing and taking control of his career.

John Fogerty answers your questions on The Black Keys, his brother Tom and Woodstock, Rodriguez looks back at his extraordinary comeback and announces he’s running for mayor of Detroit, and George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic reveals why he’s asking President Obama to “save the funk”.

Elsewhere, Uncut editor Allan Jones meets Tame Impala in the Californian desert, musicians pay tribute to late country star George Jones, and The Charlatans recall the euphoric and tragic making of “One To Another”.

Sparks look back over their life in pictures, and Robyn Hitchcock recalls the creation of his greatest albums, from The Soft Boys to this year’s Love From London, while Chic’s Nile Rodgers remembers the records that have soundtracked his life.

In the front section, Gregg Allman talks Muscle Shoals, as a new documentary on the legendary studios is released, Mavis Staples discusses working with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy again, and we look into Boards Of Canada’s enigmatic return.

Black Sabbath, These New Puritans, Queens Of The Stone Age, The Shouting Matches, Scott Walker and ZZ Top all feature in the 40-page reviews section, and Prince, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Loudon Wainwright III are in our Live section.

The CD, Glory Days, includes songs from Parquet Courts, Thee Oh Sees, The Handsome Family, and Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle.

The new issue of Uncut is out today (Thursday, May 23).

Bruce Springsteen, Tame Impala, Rodriguez, George Clinton, John Fogerty, Prince and George Jones in new Uncut

Uncut
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0
Bruce Springsteen, Tame Impala, Rodriguez, George Clinton, John Fogerty, Prince and George Jones in new Uncut

I would have bought the issue of Melody Maker in which I first read about Bruce Springsteen on my way into the art school in Newport, where in March 1973 I was in my last term, only a few months away from moving to London and not long after that fetching up on MM as a junior reporter/feature writer, a turn of events that was wholly unexpected and still seems somewhat unreal. Anyway, that was all to come. That Thursday morning, as ever in those days, I picked up a copy of MM at the paper shop at the top of Stow Hill, then eagerly devoured it on the bus into town. By the time I got to the art school, I'd usually be going through the issue for a second time, re-reading everything including Jazz News and Folk Forum. These were musical territories that for a long time would remain pretty alien to me, but in those days I hung on every word that appeared in MM, which was where more often than not I found out about a lot of the music I still listen to, turned on to all kinds of great sounds by the writing especially of its deputy editor, Richard Williams. In my perhaps raw opinion, he seemed the equal of any of the heavyweight American critics then making names for themselves in the pages of Rolling Stone. He was the first UK writer, I’m sure, to champion The Velvet Underground, wrote pieces I cherished on Tim Buckley and turned me on to Can and Roxy Music, who had sent him a tape of their early demos mainly because Bryan Ferry had rather correctly determined Richard was the one British music writer who would absolutely ‘get’ what he was aspiring to with Roxy without the need for an accompanying pamphlet explaining it all as if to a nitwit, which would have been Ferry’s likely opinion of most of Williams’ contemporaries. Richard a few years earlier had also written a review of Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry that was so typically persuasive I was convinced before I'd even heard it was going to be an album I’d be listening to for the rest of my life, which duly turned out to be the case. He was someone whose opinions it was not difficult to trust and you took notice of everything he wrote for a clue to what you should be listening to next, which is why I was immediately drawn to a review he’d written in the March 31, 1973 issue of MM. It was a few hundred words on the debut album by a young American songwriter I’d never heard of, whose music Richard excitingly compared to hearing Dylan’s Freewheelin’ for the first time, the Van Morrison of “Domino” and “Wild Night” also mentioned as a handy reference point. The young American songwriter’s name was Bruce Springsteen and the album was called Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. It was the first major write-up of Springsteen in the UK music press and the kind of review that makes careers. I bought the album on my way home that night and played it a few days later to my friend Woody, who you will know better as Joe Strummer, who seemed lit up by what he heard in ways he rarely was by other records I tried to turn him on to, by, among others, the Velvets, Stooges, Roxy and Bowie. Richard left MM before I turned up there, for what sounded like a pretty swanky gig as head of A&R at Island Records. I didn’t meet him until a couple of years when he started writing a regular weekly column. By then he’d left Island and was editing Time Out, the London listings magazine. He returned to Melody Maker full-time, as editor, in 1978. Unfortunately, his plans for MM’s rejuvenation as an equivalent to New York’s Village Voice with a redesign by Pearce Marchbank, a recent contributor to our cover story on The Who and the great days of The Marquee, were scuppered in disgraceful circumstances. He was charged with bringing out a scab issue of MM during a memorably bitter strike. He refused and walked, a departure marked by the chucking of several typewriters through the office windows by a seriously inebriated and furious member of staff, whose anonymity for several reasons is best preserved. Subsequently, Williams became a highly-ranked editor at The Times and the editor of The Independent On Sunday’s terrific Sunday Review before a much longer stint as Chief Sports Writer on The Guardian, a position from which he stood down earlier this year. I mention all this, because when we were recently discussing how to both celebrate the 40th anniversary of Greetings From Asbury Park and also Springsteen’s forthcoming UK dates, we approached him to write something for us, which turned into this month’s cover story. When you’ve read that, you may want to check Richard’s music blog at thebluemoment.com, named after his 2009 book on the recording of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue. I’d also recommend his collection, Long Distance Call. Elsewhere in the new issue, we interview Rodriguez, George Clinton, John Fogerty, Tame Impala, Robyn Hitchcock and Thee Oh Sees. We also bid farewell to the great country singer George Jones and Richie Havens and talk to Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy about the second album they’ve recorded together. In a typically busy reviews section, we turn our attention to new releases by These New Puritans, the new Justin Vernon project, The Shouting Matches, Black Sabbath, Guy Clark, Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle and Mark Mulcahy, plus reissues from Scott Walker, Bobby Whitlock and ZZ Top. Prince, meanwhile, leads off our live reviews, and Richard Hell’s autobiography I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp is our Book Of The Month. Enjoy the issue, and as ever if you have anything to say about it, address your comments to me at allan_jones@ipcmedia.com. It’s always good to hear from you.

I would have bought the issue of Melody Maker in which I first read about Bruce Springsteen on my way into the art school in Newport, where in March 1973 I was in my last term, only a few months away from moving to London and not long after that fetching up on MM as a junior reporter/feature writer, a turn of events that was wholly unexpected and still seems somewhat unreal. Anyway, that was all to come. That Thursday morning, as ever in those days, I picked up a copy of MM at the paper shop at the top of Stow Hill, then eagerly devoured it on the bus into town.

By the time I got to the art school, I’d usually be going through the issue for a second time, re-reading everything including Jazz News and Folk Forum. These were musical territories that for a long time would remain pretty alien to me, but in those days I hung on every word that appeared in MM, which was where more often than not I found out about a lot of the music I still listen to, turned on to all kinds of great sounds by the writing especially of its deputy editor, Richard Williams. In my perhaps raw opinion, he seemed the equal of any of the heavyweight American critics then making names for themselves in the pages of Rolling Stone.

He was the first UK writer, I’m sure, to champion The Velvet Underground, wrote pieces I cherished on Tim Buckley and turned me on to Can and Roxy Music, who had sent him a tape of their early demos mainly because Bryan Ferry had rather correctly determined Richard was the one British music writer who would absolutely ‘get’ what he was aspiring to with Roxy without the need for an accompanying pamphlet explaining it all as if to a nitwit, which would have been Ferry’s likely opinion of most of Williams’ contemporaries.

Richard a few years earlier had also written a review of Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry that was so typically persuasive I was convinced before I’d even heard it was going to be an album I’d be listening to for the rest of my life, which duly turned out to be the case. He was someone whose opinions it was not difficult to trust and you took notice of everything he wrote for a clue to what you should be listening to next, which is why I was immediately drawn to a review he’d written in the March 31, 1973 issue of MM.

It was a few hundred words on the debut album by a young American songwriter I’d never heard of, whose music Richard excitingly compared to hearing Dylan’s Freewheelin’ for the first time, the Van Morrison of “Domino” and “Wild Night” also mentioned as a handy reference point. The young American songwriter’s name was Bruce Springsteen and the album was called Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. It was the first major write-up of Springsteen in the UK music press and the kind of review that makes careers. I bought the album on my way home that night and played it a few days later to my friend Woody, who you will know better as Joe Strummer, who seemed lit up by what he heard in ways he rarely was by other records I tried to turn him on to, by, among others, the Velvets, Stooges, Roxy and Bowie.

Richard left MM before I turned up there, for what sounded like a pretty swanky gig as head of A&R at Island Records. I didn’t meet him until a couple of years when he started writing a regular weekly column. By then he’d left Island and was editing Time Out, the London listings magazine. He returned to Melody Maker full-time, as editor, in 1978. Unfortunately, his plans for MM’s rejuvenation as an equivalent to New York’s Village Voice with a redesign by Pearce Marchbank, a recent contributor to our cover story on The Who and the great days of The Marquee, were scuppered in disgraceful circumstances. He was charged with bringing out a scab issue of MM during a memorably bitter strike. He refused and walked, a departure marked by the chucking of several typewriters through the office windows by a seriously inebriated and furious member of staff, whose anonymity for several reasons is best preserved. Subsequently, Williams became a highly-ranked editor at The Times and the editor of The Independent On Sunday’s terrific Sunday Review before a much longer stint as Chief Sports Writer on The Guardian, a position from which he stood down earlier this year.

I mention all this, because when we were recently discussing how to both celebrate the 40th anniversary of Greetings From Asbury Park and also Springsteen’s forthcoming UK dates, we approached him to write something for us, which turned into this month’s cover story. When you’ve read that, you may want to check Richard’s music blog at thebluemoment.com, named after his 2009 book on the recording of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue. I’d also recommend his collection, Long Distance Call.

Elsewhere in the new issue, we interview Rodriguez, George Clinton, John Fogerty, Tame Impala, Robyn Hitchcock and Thee Oh Sees. We also bid farewell to the great country singer George Jones and Richie Havens and talk to Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy about the second album they’ve recorded together. In a typically busy reviews section, we turn our attention to new releases by These New Puritans, the new Justin Vernon project, The Shouting Matches, Black Sabbath, Guy Clark, Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle and Mark Mulcahy, plus reissues from Scott Walker, Bobby Whitlock and ZZ Top. Prince, meanwhile, leads off our live reviews, and Richard Hell’s autobiography I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp is our Book Of The Month.

Enjoy the issue, and as ever if you have anything to say about it, address your comments to me at allan_jones@ipcmedia.com. It’s always good to hear from you.

July 2013

Ipclee
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July 2013
ARE WE ROLLING? Before meeting him for the first time recently for the feature in this month's issue, I read a lot of interviews with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker in which he was variously cast as a brooding outsider, a sullen introvert, generally moody, an outcast, someone on the edge of things, incl...

ARE WE ROLLING?
Before meeting him for the first time recently for the feature in this month’s issue, I read a lot of interviews with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker in which he was variously cast as a brooding outsider, a sullen introvert, generally moody, an outcast, someone on the edge of things, inclined to solitary misery.

In at least one magazine article, the words “tortured” and “genius” appeared in close proximity to describe him. I kept imagining him in the studio, sitting in a sandbox, like Brian Wilson, sadly damaged.

Of course, Parker turned out to be nothing like the lonely soul of journalistic legend, a view of him that had evidently been encouraged by not much more than a song he’d written called “Solitude Is Bliss” and the titles of Tame Impala’s two albums, Innerspeaker and Lonerism. He barely recognised this version of himself, and neither did his Tame Impala bandmates, Jay Watson and Nick Allbrook, who also happen to be two of his oldest friends.
“Kevin is one of the least troubled people I know and not tortured at all,” Jay told me, backstage at the Coachella festival, out there in the California desert, where Tame Impala were playing the weekend I met them. “It’s funny how people want people in bands to be like cartoons. Like, Nick Cave’s The Devil. Kevin’s The Loner. It’s all kind of true and all kind of bullshit, really. Everybody in a band becomes a generic personality eventually, even the most amazing and talented people.”

“He’s not done too badly out of it as an image, though,” Nick said, tongue somewhere close to his cheek. “Almost as well as Jethro Tull did with their woodland aesthetic.”

Jay and Nick, of course, have their own band, Pond, who last year released their fourth album, Beard, Wives, Denim, which Kevin produced and drummed on. I saw them at last year’s Great Escape festival in Brighton, when they were truly mind-blowing, a head-spinning mix of Hendrix, MC5, early Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, loud enough to wake the long-time dead. “Kevin’s always had a knack for writing catchy songs,” Nick said. “We’ve always been more interested in making people’s ears bleed.”

It turned out they have a new album – Hobo Rocket – set for June release and have also already written its follow-up, the wonderfully titled, Man, It Feels Like Space Again. How would they describe Hobo Rocket?
“Half an hour of pummelling feedback,” Jay said.” If you liked the live show, you’ll love it.”
Tame Impala’s schedule means they won’t be able to tour behind the album, which turned out to be not much of a problem for them.
“We’ve thought of a way around that,” Nick said. “We’re going to film a set of us playing the whole album in our garage with a flag from a different country behind us for each song. We’ll put it up on YouTube as Pond’s 2013 World Tour.”

I was thrilled to hear there was a new album due, but just as eager to find out more about Pond backing former Can singer Damo Suzuki last year in Perth. “It was absolutely fucking awesome,” Jay recalls. “One of the guys wanted to rehearse, but you’re apparently not allowed to rehearse. He hates it. We barely even had a sound-check. He just turns up and does his thing. Kevin was playing drums with us that night and he said, ‘Why don’t we do that thing we were doing at the sound check?’ Damo was appalled. It all had to be entirely improvised.”
How did he come to be in Perth, which is a bit mind-boggling in itself? “He’s been to Australia a million times,” Jay says. “He’ll go anywhere. All you have to do is book him, pick him up somewhere and cook him dinner.”

“Actually,” Nick says, “he cooks you dinner. He’s a better chef than he is anything else. That’s no blight on anything else he does. It’s just that he’s an amazing fucking chef. Tempura watermelon for entrée, that sort of thing. It was fucking incredible.”

ISSUE ON SALE FROM THURSDAY 23 MAY

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Nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, personal revisionism and one last sort-of review of Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories”

John Mulvey
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Nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, personal revisionism and one last sort-of review of Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories”

A couple of months ago, I was staying with an old friend, whose teenage daughter was heading out to an ‘80s movie all-nighter. Before she went, she listed what they were going to watch; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the kind of John Hughes films that are now routinely used as exemplars of that decade. Her father and I were talking, and we realised we hadn’t actually seen any of them. A week or two later, my eight-year-old went to a birthday party at a roller disco in South London. The theme was, again, the 1980s, and he came home with Day-Glo wristbands. And again, I was left somewhat in the dark: my 1980s were spent at school and university, and none of these things really mattered to me. It would be easy, and probably accurate, to see these gaps in my adolescence as evidence, maybe, of a certain cultural snobbery, though a diet of The Smiths, Pixies, Sonic Youth and The Go-Betweens, of Martin Scorsese, Bill Forsyth, Steve Martin and all those foreign-language student-bait movies of the time (Betty Blue, Diva, Wings Of Desire) doesn’t seem particularly elitist or transgressive this far down the line. Most of those records and films have become to some degree canonical (or were canonical, for a while at least). Reminiscences and reconstructions of the 1980s, though, often tend to fixate on a more reductive set of signifiers: synthpop, neon, gated reverb, conspicuous consumption. It’s this world that Daft Punk’s much-discussed “Random Access Memories” seems to emerge from; a late ‘70s/early ‘80s milieu of Hollywood superstudios, an aesthetic universe which seemed anathema to a teenager schooled in indie culture, notwithstanding the mediated eclecticism of the NME (at 17, I had an improbable number of Courtney Pine and Andy Sheppard records). One of the things that, I hope, a long career as a music journalist encourages is an unsentimental perspective on the records of your past: just because I thought “George Best” was some sort of masterpiece in 1987 doesn’t mean I’ve had the slightest urge to play it for over 20 years; I don’t look back with much pride on my early journalistic boostering for The Frank & Walters, at the tip of a distressingly large iceberg. Tastes change; that’s OK. Most of my positive musical responses aren’t dictated by nostalgia, otherwise I’d be playing Showaddywaddy’s “Under The Moon Of Love” more than something else from 1974 like, say, “Court And Spark”. Salient to today, it took me a long time to appreciate The Doors, chiefly because I so thoroughly disliked the people who were into them at college. Some prejudices, though, remain tough to budge, and while the brilliance of Chic and Giorgio Moroder might have been personally understood and accepted a long time ago (I’m not convinced I have anything to add to discussions about the excellence of “Giorgio By Moroder” and “Get Lucky”, other than to restate that, for all their obvious influences, they are steely but idiosyncratic hybrid beasts rather than precise facsimiles), there are textures on “Random Access Memories” that set off a few alarms. It is simpler, it transpires, to grow out of C86 than it is to grow into soft-rock. “Touch”, for all the critical anxiety targeted towards it, isn’t so much of a problem for me, beyond Paul Williams’ brief and histrionic vocal interludes: much of it reminds me, serendipitously, of something by Air, polished to an even greater and more ethereal degree. I love the jazz interlude, too, possibly because it recalls something I do remember from those ‘80s with a degree of fondness; Ze Records, and August Darnell. The bigger problems come in some of those ballads like “The Game Of Love” and “Within”, that seem infused with what hipper music journalists than I often call Yacht Rock; that luxe ‘80s AOR promulgated by the likes of Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald; the power ballads without the power. I’ve seen a good few comparisons between these tracks and Steely Dan (a band, contrarily, I’ve always loved; evidence, I guess, that there are always glitches and inconsistencies in your personal aesthetics, no matter how scrupulously hardline you perceive yourself to be). Apart from a bit of “Beyond” and “Fragments Of Time”, though, I don’t really see the similarity. Steely Dan’s music might have always been smooth, but it also had an edge, a fastidiously-managed jumpiness that seemed to reflect the snark of the lyrics. One of the defining elements of “Random Access Memories” is its phenomenal lack of snark; Chilly Gonzales’ piano line on “Within” attracts a vocabulary that would have never suited Steely Dan: “plangent”, “lachrymose”, “earnest”. And maybe this is the key to coming to terms with Daft Punk’s re-imagining and repurposing of the 1980s: that unlike so many of their contemporaries (and unlike a good few other projects involving Gonzales, come to think of it), they appear completely untainted by irony. I’m wary of suggesting that their earnestness somehow makes their music more “real” and “authentic”, since those labels appear less relevant than ever to a meticulous audio confection like “Random Access Memories”. Nevertheless, there’s something about listening to “Random Access Memories” that feels less like eavesdropping on an in-joke than most records which root themselves in this particular 1980s. Maybe that, as well as the insidious power of the tunes, is what is making it such a success. And maybe it’s that which makes it a more rewarding album with each listen: one which takes itself, and a culture of uninhibited decadence, with an uncommon degree of seriousness. I’m glad, incidentally, that I didn’t try writing this piece a week ago. With multiple listens, a core value of “Random Access Memories” presents itself: those uncomfortable sounds and textures and references remain, but the turnover of ideas is so slick and fast that there’s always something interesting and stimulating and exciting just round the corner. I hope I’m not one of those music journalists who disdain and dismiss snap judgments; they’re an integral part of the pleasure of responding to records, and it’s somewhat disingenuous of some music journalists to imply that all album reviews are – or need to be - crafted after a dozen-plus close listens. Nevertheless, for all its high-concept 21st Century unveiling, “Random Access Memories” is built on a classic old conceit: the most immediate of singles, ushering in an album which repays deep listens. Free streaming might encourage the world to play it once and leap to their conclusions, but it also means that millions can get used to its idiosyncracies, warm to them, before they buy. It’s worked, and it’s an increasingly fine album. Oh, and the drums are the best bit. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

A couple of months ago, I was staying with an old friend, whose teenage daughter was heading out to an ‘80s movie all-nighter. Before she went, she listed what they were going to watch; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the kind of John Hughes films that are now routinely used as exemplars of that decade. Her father and I were talking, and we realised we hadn’t actually seen any of them.

A week or two later, my eight-year-old went to a birthday party at a roller disco in South London. The theme was, again, the 1980s, and he came home with Day-Glo wristbands. And again, I was left somewhat in the dark: my 1980s were spent at school and university, and none of these things really mattered to me.

It would be easy, and probably accurate, to see these gaps in my adolescence as evidence, maybe, of a certain cultural snobbery, though a diet of The Smiths, Pixies, Sonic Youth and The Go-Betweens, of Martin Scorsese, Bill Forsyth, Steve Martin and all those foreign-language student-bait movies of the time (Betty Blue, Diva, Wings Of Desire) doesn’t seem particularly elitist or transgressive this far down the line. Most of those records and films have become to some degree canonical (or were canonical, for a while at least). Reminiscences and reconstructions of the 1980s, though, often tend to fixate on a more reductive set of signifiers: synthpop, neon, gated reverb, conspicuous consumption.

It’s this world that Daft Punk’s much-discussed “Random Access Memories” seems to emerge from; a late ‘70s/early ‘80s milieu of Hollywood superstudios, an aesthetic universe which seemed anathema to a teenager schooled in indie culture, notwithstanding the mediated eclecticism of the NME (at 17, I had an improbable number of Courtney Pine and Andy Sheppard records).

One of the things that, I hope, a long career as a music journalist encourages is an unsentimental perspective on the records of your past: just because I thought “George Best” was some sort of masterpiece in 1987 doesn’t mean I’ve had the slightest urge to play it for over 20 years; I don’t look back with much pride on my early journalistic boostering for The Frank & Walters, at the tip of a distressingly large iceberg. Tastes change; that’s OK. Most of my positive musical responses aren’t dictated by nostalgia, otherwise I’d be playing Showaddywaddy’s “Under The Moon Of Love” more than something else from 1974 like, say, “Court And Spark”. Salient to today, it took me a long time to appreciate The Doors, chiefly because I so thoroughly disliked the people who were into them at college.

Some prejudices, though, remain tough to budge, and while the brilliance of Chic and Giorgio Moroder might have been personally understood and accepted a long time ago (I’m not convinced I have anything to add to discussions about the excellence of “Giorgio By Moroder” and “Get Lucky”, other than to restate that, for all their obvious influences, they are steely but idiosyncratic hybrid beasts rather than precise facsimiles), there are textures on “Random Access Memories” that set off a few alarms. It is simpler, it transpires, to grow out of C86 than it is to grow into soft-rock.

“Touch”, for all the critical anxiety targeted towards it, isn’t so much of a problem for me, beyond Paul Williams’ brief and histrionic vocal interludes: much of it reminds me, serendipitously, of something by Air, polished to an even greater and more ethereal degree. I love the jazz interlude, too, possibly because it recalls something I do remember from those ‘80s with a degree of fondness; Ze Records, and August Darnell.

The bigger problems come in some of those ballads like “The Game Of Love” and “Within”, that seem infused with what hipper music journalists than I often call Yacht Rock; that luxe ‘80s AOR promulgated by the likes of Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald; the power ballads without the power. I’ve seen a good few comparisons between these tracks and Steely Dan (a band, contrarily, I’ve always loved; evidence, I guess, that there are always glitches and inconsistencies in your personal aesthetics, no matter how scrupulously hardline you perceive yourself to be).

Apart from a bit of “Beyond” and “Fragments Of Time”, though, I don’t really see the similarity. Steely Dan’s music might have always been smooth, but it also had an edge, a fastidiously-managed jumpiness that seemed to reflect the snark of the lyrics. One of the defining elements of “Random Access Memories” is its phenomenal lack of snark; Chilly Gonzales’ piano line on “Within” attracts a vocabulary that would have never suited Steely Dan: “plangent”, “lachrymose”, “earnest”.

And maybe this is the key to coming to terms with Daft Punk’s re-imagining and repurposing of the 1980s: that unlike so many of their contemporaries (and unlike a good few other projects involving Gonzales, come to think of it), they appear completely untainted by irony. I’m wary of suggesting that their earnestness somehow makes their music more “real” and “authentic”, since those labels appear less relevant than ever to a meticulous audio confection like “Random Access Memories”.

Nevertheless, there’s something about listening to “Random Access Memories” that feels less like eavesdropping on an in-joke than most records which root themselves in this particular 1980s. Maybe that, as well as the insidious power of the tunes, is what is making it such a success. And maybe it’s that which makes it a more rewarding album with each listen: one which takes itself, and a culture of uninhibited decadence, with an uncommon degree of seriousness.

I’m glad, incidentally, that I didn’t try writing this piece a week ago. With multiple listens, a core value of “Random Access Memories” presents itself: those uncomfortable sounds and textures and references remain, but the turnover of ideas is so slick and fast that there’s always something interesting and stimulating and exciting just round the corner. I hope I’m not one of those music journalists who disdain and dismiss snap judgments; they’re an integral part of the pleasure of responding to records, and it’s somewhat disingenuous of some music journalists to imply that all album reviews are – or need to be – crafted after a dozen-plus close listens.

Nevertheless, for all its high-concept 21st Century unveiling, “Random Access Memories” is built on a classic old conceit: the most immediate of singles, ushering in an album which repays deep listens. Free streaming might encourage the world to play it once and leap to their conclusions, but it also means that millions can get used to its idiosyncracies, warm to them, before they buy. It’s worked, and it’s an increasingly fine album.

Oh, and the drums are the best bit.

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

Bruce Springsteen: “I get roughed up crowdsurfing… people try to pull chunks out of me”

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Bruce Springsteen: “I get roughed up crowdsurfing… people try to pull chunks out of me”

Bruce Springsteen's colourful time in the UK is examined in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out on Thursday, May 23). Veteran rock writer Richard Williams, who raved about Springsteen in print a year before Jon Landau's famous piece on The Boss, looks back over the time he has spent with the singer and songwriter, and at the huge impact his many performances in Britain have had. Fascinating interviews with Springsteen are included, including one from 1981 with Williams, during which The Boss explains how he feels a sense of responsibility to his fans. “I’ve always felt that if you’re fortunate enough to be up there onstage, it’s your responsibility to try and close the gap with the audience, to give them the sense that there are other possibilities than the ones they may be seeing,” Springsteen explained. On his enthusiastic crowdsurfing, he said: “I get roughed up sometimes, when people try to pull chunks out of me, but mostly it’s OK. It’s vital to stay close to those people.” The new issue of Uncut is out on Thursday (May 23).

Bruce Springsteen’s colourful time in the UK is examined in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out on Thursday, May 23).

Veteran rock writer Richard Williams, who raved about Springsteen in print a year before Jon Landau’s famous piece on The Boss, looks back over the time he has spent with the singer and songwriter, and at the huge impact his many performances in Britain have had.

Fascinating interviews with Springsteen are included, including one from 1981 with Williams, during which The Boss explains how he feels a sense of responsibility to his fans.

“I’ve always felt that if you’re fortunate enough to be up there onstage, it’s your responsibility to try and close the gap with the audience, to give them the sense that there are other possibilities than the ones they may be seeing,” Springsteen explained.

On his enthusiastic crowdsurfing, he said: “I get roughed up sometimes, when people try to pull chunks out of me, but mostly it’s OK. It’s vital to stay close to those people.”

The new issue of Uncut is out on Thursday (May 23).

Laura Marling streams new album ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ ahead of official release

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Laura Marling streams new album ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ ahead of official release
Laura Marling is streaming her new album, Once I Was An Eagle, online a week before its official release. Listen to the follow-up to 2011's A Creature I Don't Know via The Guardian. Her fourth album, it was recorded at the Three Crows Studio owned by producer and solo musician Ethan Johns (Kings o...

Laura Marling is streaming her new album, Once I Was An Eagle, online a week before its official release.

Listen to the follow-up to 2011’s A Creature I Don’t Know via The Guardian.

Her fourth album, it was recorded at the Three Crows Studio owned by producer and solo musician Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ryan Adams, Vaccines), with Dom Monks on engineering duties. It is set for release on May 27.

She plays London’s Royal Albert Hall on August 12 as part of the BBC 6 Music Prom. Tomorrow night (May 21) she also plays a special show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

The tracklisting for Once I Was An Eagle is:

‘Take The Night Off’

‘I Was An Eagle’

‘You Know’

‘Breathe’

‘Master Hunter’

‘Little Love Caster’

‘Devil’s Resting Place’

‘Interlude’

‘Undine’

‘Where Can I Go?’

‘Once’

‘Pray For Me’

‘When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)’

‘Love Be Brave’

‘Little Bird’

‘Saved These Words’

Queens Of The Stone Age stream full ‘…Like Clockwork’ video – watch

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Queens Of The Stone Age stream full ‘…Like Clockwork’ video – watch
Queens Of The Stone Age have compiled all their recent animated videos into a 15 minute long promo for their forthcoming new album, …Like Clockwork. Click below to watch the video, which starts with the previously released clip for 'I Appear Missing' before segueing into 'Kalopsia', 'Keep Your Ey...

Queens Of The Stone Age have compiled all their recent animated videos into a 15 minute long promo for their forthcoming new album, …Like Clockwork.

Click below to watch the video, which starts with the previously released clip for ‘I Appear Missing’ before segueing into ‘Kalopsia’, ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’ and ‘If I Had A Tail’, finishing up with ‘My God Is The Sun’, which was the very first track to be revealed from the band’s sixth album, after being played live at Lollapalooza Brazil in March.

All the videos feature artwork by UK artist Boneface and animation from Liam Brazier. …Like Clockwork is due out on June 3. The album is made up of 10 tracks and was produced by frontman Josh Homme and the band at Pink Duck in Burbank, California. It was recorded by Mark Rankin with additional engineering by Justin Smith. It contains a list of guest stars, including Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner, Dave Grohl, Elton John, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters.

The band’s only confirmed live UK date this year is at Download Festival (June 14-16) at Donington Park. They will be playing a last minute show at The Wiltern in Los Angeles on May 23.

The ‘…Like Clockwork’ tracklisting is:

‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’

‘I Sat By The Ocean’

‘The Vampyre Of Time And Memory’

‘If I Had A Tail’

‘My God Is The Sun’

‘Kalopsia’

‘Fairweather Friends’

‘Smooth Sailing’

‘I Appear Missing’

‘…Like Clockwork’

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