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Brian Eno – the doctor will see you now

Tom Pinnock
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Brian Eno – the doctor will see you now
Eno’s sublime new album, Lux, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (December 2012, Take 187) – so we’re delving back to December 2010’s issue to meet the time-travelling conceptualist himself, a man who’s into ecstatic food cults, Music For Maternity Wards – and trying to remember h...

Eno’s sublime new album, Lux, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (December 2012, Take 187) – so we’re delving back to December 2010’s issue to meet the time-travelling conceptualist himself, a man who’s into ecstatic food cults, Music For Maternity Wards – and trying to remember his own past. “One of the big driving forces for Roxy Music,” he says, “was that we hated hippies…” Words: Stephen Troussé

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Walk down a gentrified West London side street, turn into a slightly twee mews of old artisan cottages and find an unassuming front door. The doorbell isn’t working so you have to knock. You’re escorted into a room that seems impossibly, vastly larger on the inside than it seemed from the outside. West African music is booming from an impressive sound system. Mirrorballs hang from the ceiling, the room seems to be carpeted with astroturf, and a spiral staircase leads up to a second floor which could well house a gallery, absinthe bar or holodeck. In a library area, full of books about chaos theory, modern architecture and pragmatist philosophy, a scholarly figure, some dandyish don wearing a mauve velvet jacket with elbow patches, is hard at work.

Here is Brian Eno, glam philosopher, cybernetic crooner, generative conceptualist, and this is his studio, his TARDIS, the craft he’s piloted through time and space, in one form or another, since 1971 when he first operated a Revox tape machine for the nascent Roxy Music. Or 1973, when he first invited Robert Fripp round to help conceive ambient music on (No Pussyfooting). Or maybe even since that afternoon in his 1950s Suffolk childhood when an uncle first showed him a slide projector, and he became besotted with luminous windows into other worlds…

He’s here to tell us about his new record, his first for Warp, an album of imaginary soundtracks and cosmic soundscapes – the kind of music, sounding like a modern-day collaboration between the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Neu! and the Aphex Twin, that would provide a much better soundtrack for a 21st Century Timelord than the current dismal bluster…

Now in his sixties, he’s still possessed by the purpose and prophecy of music, how conceptual gestures might remap worlds. Indeed he’s seen strands of his thought become part of the fabric of the modern life.

“It’s great when something takes on a life that not only did you not suspect but you didn’t even know about,” he grins. “It’s like when I discovered that my music was used in a lot of maternity wards in England. I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music.’” A perfectly judged pause. “They always have very weird eyes, those people…”

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UNCUT: A question you famously ask musicians you work with: what is your new record for?

ENO: That’s a good question! To me the most interesting question in the world really is “What is art for?” In the sense of why do we do it, why do we like it? So that’s kind of a local version of that question. I’ll talk about film music, which I’ve always used as a kind of code for “unfinished music”. You know, the thing about film music is that it’s music without the central element there. It’s supposed to be the wrapping around an experience, but the experience isn’t there if you’re just listening to the music. When I first started listening to film music in the early ’70s, it was a complete revelation to me, that you could have a music that was deliberately incomplete, and what that did to a listener was to call upon them to complete it in some way.

Quite a lot of the music I’d been involved with at that time seemed similarly incomplete. The music was very much based around a concept. And if you weren’t aware of what the concept was, then the music didn’t mean a whole lot. This was particularly true of late ’60s music like The Scratch Orchestra, which I belonged to, and Portsmouth Symphonia. If you didn’t know what the Portsmouth Symphonia was, how it was comprised, then the music would strike you as completely ludicrously out of tune, senseless! More and more I was becoming familiar with music that deliberately left a hole, was built around a vacuum of some kind.

With this album, what I think I’m saying is: here’s an invitation to imagine some particular worlds. Here’s the music that surrounds those worlds. Now imagine that world. And I think that’s what a lot of music is doing really. Even songs which seem to be about something… “Da Doo Ron Ron”: it seems to be something to do with a girl meeting a boy. In fact, that’s really just the surface foam. What it’s really about is a feeling – I dunno, joie de vivre, excitement or thrill! All the things that young people like!

How has your conception of music changed since the mid ’70s? In a sense, all music has become ambient now…

It’s quite true! If you have ideas that are adopted by a lot of other people then you cease to look original, actually. The same thing happened to Beckett, his writing style was so revolutionary. Or a better example might be John Osborne who really pioneered a way of writing and a type of subject to write about, that people hadn’t really thought about before. But it’s a very attractive idea, and everyone thought, that’s really good – I’ll do that as well.

But it’s not necessarily ambient music people are listening to. All kinds of music are now an accompaniment to your day – when you’re driving, commuting…

I find that rather spooky. It’s the end of a certain type of process. From music being an entirely communal activity. Recording completely changed that – I call it the materialisation of music. But what’s happened since then is what you might call the liquidation of music, where it’s suddenly stopped being just physical, it’s become entirely pervasive and liquid. And it’s interesting to see what effect that has on composers. I don’t yet know if anyone’s come up with the response to the liquidation – the liquidisation – of music.

Having worked on actual soundtracks, including Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones [2009] does that affect what you want to do with imaginary soundtracks?

In fact there’s quite a connection between Lovely Bones and this record, because some of the stuff on here was proposed for the film and was either used in a different form or wasn’t used at all. The experience of working on a film, I have to say, is never as enjoyable as imagining a film you’d like to make music for. It’s much better as an abstract activity. I’m never asked to do the right films. I’m always asked to do these big-budget films. What my music would naturally suit is low-budget, obscure arthouse films that hardly anyone gets to see.

Nino Rota is a soundtrack composer you’ve mentioned. Are there others?

Ennio Morricone is a great one. I love his stuff. All the Clint Eastwood series. Again there’s a sort of minimalism about both composers. Nino Rota’s Juliet Of The Spirits has two tunes in it, and they keep reappearing in different guises. That’s very economical. Because you, as a listener, start to register slight differences in the way that tune reappears. Slightly more vague, sometimes more strident, triumphant, then sad… You can make very subtle shades if the basic core of the music is the same.

At which point did the new album become a Warp record? Was it finished and then you found a home for it?

It was mostly finished. It always helps for someone to say, actually we’re going to release this, and to give you a date. Because otherwise you never finish anything! I have an archive of several thousands of pieces of music that have never been released. I suppose I’ve released three or four per cent of the music I’ve made. And I won’t release something until someone says here’s the date it’s got to be delivered.

Do you ever listen to your old stuff for fun? Or is the process the important part and then you can forget about it?

I don’t listen to that much. If I want to hear something I normally want to sing along, in which case I put gospel songs on. Or I want to dance, in which case I put West African music on. The only record of mine I listen to with any regularity is On Land. Which I still find very interesting, because I don’t really know how I made it. I can’t remember how I made it. I can’t actually remember the decision process within it.

Is that true of all your old music in a sense? It’s so long ago, it feels like someone else made it?

Especially in terms of lyrics I get that feeling. When I listen to the lyrics of my early records I think sometimes – that’s really brilliant! Or sometimes I think – that’s really dumb! I have a range of opinions about them. But I can’t put myself back into the mind of the person who wrote them. I can’t remember writing them. I know I did because I’ve still got my notebooks where they’re written down. I can’t remember ever thinking about them. Whereas, with the music I think, oh yes, that’s how it started, and then, oh yes, I did that. And then I made a little breakthrough there. I can generally piece together the history of a piece of a music. But the lyrics, it’s as if they were messages that were posted into my brain. And I just copied them out.

Any lines in particular?

Most of them! I just don’t know where they came from. It was like automatic writing, I just copied them out. It’s a mystery! I don’t know who did them. Whoever it was, I never paid him royalties!

Has titling music become more important as the other elements of music – sleeve art, videos and so on – have been stripped away?

Titles have always been a very big thing for me. Especially with instrumental music. The only lyric is the title, and that’s the only thing that gives a hint to the listener about where they might start thinking, where they might start going. So I have to say, I think Music For Airports was an absolutely brilliant title! I could have called that record anything. But that title in its day was sort of surprising. Because it made people think that music was for something these days.

I remember one of the early reviews saying: no beat, no rhythm, no melody. As a criticism. And I thought: I’m quite proud of that! I’ve managed to leave out nearly everything!

You’ve tried to rationalise various aspect of making music – through lyric generators, modular composition and so on. But one of the distinguishing features of a lot of your records is melody – is it possible to rationalise this element of music?

I agree, that’s a problem area. In fact there are a lot of problem areas like that. Why are we interested in one melody over another, which to a Martian might be imperceptibly different? I think this is to do with the way we apprehend artworks in general. I think when you hear something new, or hear something you haven’t heard before, what you’re really doing is listening to the whole of your musical history up to that point. It’s like the latest phrase in the conversation. Some artwork does that to an extreme, it’s like the punchline to a joke. If you don’t know the rest of the joke it won’t make any sense at all.

Pop music knows that it’s contingent. You know that context is constantly flowing round it and things make sense… “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” made sense right then and there. And probably never again! This is one of the big advances that pop culture has made. It fundamentally understands that the time that something is set in is part of the work. You can’t separate the thing from the time. It successfully weaves itself into the time, and it then becomes part of the context for other work to be dropped into.

For your Pure Scenius performance at the Brighton Festival, with The Necks and Karl [Hyde] from Underworld, you imagined you were ethnomusicologists of the future, reconstructing music of the past. How is reconstructing a future music easier than simply imagining a future music?

I needed a conceit whereby everything we needed to construct had disappeared. So we couldn’t play it perfectly. What we were doing was sort of hypothetical. What I wanted was to create a frame of mind from which one would be playing. I’ve done this experiment quite a lot. I used to do it working with Bowie sometimes. I would give the players characters. I would say – you’re a drummer, it’s 2025, you’re playing in a nightclub on the outskirts of Tripoli which is now a very large pharmaceutical capital. And I tried to describe the kind of personality you would be, the kind of music you’d want to play. And then we would improvise, and you would improvise in character as it were. A bit like theatre groups do, actually, when they generate scripts by improvisation. And that sometimes led to very, very different things that nobody would ever have played otherwise. The biggest problem with group improvisation is that nobody bloody well stops! So I had to think of other ways of sculpting it somehow or allowing it to sculpt itself. So I had a lot of techniques. One of them was the words SHUT UP. I had an overhead projector onstage, and everybody on stage had a screen, so I could slip notes underneath, some of which said quite mysterious things: IKEBANA NOISE CLUB, or WARM LIKE BLOOD. PLAY AT THE EXTREMES. And some of them were quite conceptual. They would say things like SLOWLY MORE DISTURBED. When people came into the auditorium, they were given a badly printed piece of paper, explaining the seminar. I loved writing it, making up the titles: ECSTATIC FOOD CULTS? Well, that’s where we are now really, with Heston Blumenthal and so on.

Have you seen that online supermarkets now have a section for Ambient Food?

I’ve heard about this!

Sadly, it’s just food that can be stored at room temperature. Like Pot Noodle.

Oh, and I was thinking – background food, what does that mean?!

Now in your sixties, do you still feel subversive or radical? When you were asked to produced Coldplay, at a perilous time for EMI, were you seen as a safe pair of hands?

EMI were not very pleased that I was going to be the Coldplay producer – though I don’t think they did anything actively to stop it happening! I think they would have preferred a safer pair of hands. I don’t know… I haven’t ever tried to be a rebel for its own sake. At art school it came about because what I was interested in wasn’t what the school was interested in. It was very much a painting school. And I was interested in happenings and performance and music, as well as visual arts. They just thought I was one of those people who couldn’t focus properly. Which actually is true, as it turns out!

Is that lack of something to kick against a problem for you?

I can remember that one of the big driving forces for Roxy Music was that we hated hippies. We didn’t want to be like that! In fact, punk was the same way. One of the big driving forces for punk was that they hated us! They had something very strongly that they wanted to draw an alternative to. And certainly when I was at art college I hated everything! Everything to do with painting, except for very few painters, I couldn’t bear. So one of the ways you find yourself is to find what space to you is left. You’ve cancelled everything else out as being ideologically corrupt or for whatever reason not possible. And there’s a little hole left.

Jessica Pratt: “Jessica Pratt”

John Mulvey
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Jessica Pratt: “Jessica Pratt”

As the first song of Jessica Pratt’s first album begins, you could be forgiven for believing it was a private press folk album from the early ‘70s. The work of a lost canyon comrade of Linda Perhacs, perhaps, or the implausibly lovely efforts of a “Blue” disciple from some one-horse town in the mid-west. In fact, Pratt is from San Francisco, and her self-titled debut has only just been released on a new label, Birth Records, operated by the estimable Tim Presley, who’s made a good few fine records of his own in the past couple of years as White Fence. Presley was quoted on Pitchfork a couple of days ago as having launched Birth purely to put out Pratt’s record. She reminded him, Presley said, of "Stevie Nicks singing over David Crosby demos." That’s a nice way of putting it, but it only goes some way to articulating the loveliness of this close-miked, low-lit album. Mostly, it sounds like it was recorded solo, in small rooms, though the closing “Dreams” features a harmony vocal, quite possibly provided by Pratt herself. That one sounds a little more like a lost Fred Neil song than a Crosby one, though Presley’s comparison is still valid even here: there’s a prevailing distrait wooziness, a sense of songs coming together in a satisfying form as they’re being performed, that is like “If I Could Only Remember My Name”. A couple of contemporary reference points might help, too. One would be Meg Baird, whose records away from Espers – especially the one she made this summer with her sister, “Until You Find Your Green” – have a similar kind of uncanny calm; a certain atmosphere which could be called vintage, but might be better described as timeless. Pratt’s voice is a gently agile one, at times with a fleeting huskiness that recalls Nicks, or some of the languid and forlorn gymnastics of Karen Dalton. It’s hard, though, to avoid a comparison with Joanna Newsom circa “The Milk Eyed Mender”. Pratt isn’t so idiosyncratic, but there are moments – “Bushel Hyde”, for example, which briefly threatens to turn into “Bridges And Balloons” – when there’s a comparable small, fresh sense of wonder to these jewel-like songs; as if, again, they were being recorded at the moment of creation. A really special find, I think, and an artist who promises much, too. The album’s out now – or at least it is a download – but you could start by having a listen to that opening track, “Night Faces”. See what you think… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6snZYt7sTh8 Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

As the first song of Jessica Pratt’s first album begins, you could be forgiven for believing it was a private press folk album from the early ‘70s. The work of a lost canyon comrade of Linda Perhacs, perhaps, or the implausibly lovely efforts of a “Blue” disciple from some one-horse town in the mid-west.

In fact, Pratt is from San Francisco, and her self-titled debut has only just been released on a new label, Birth Records, operated by the estimable Tim Presley, who’s made a good few fine records of his own in the past couple of years as White Fence. Presley was quoted on Pitchfork a couple of days ago as having launched Birth purely to put out Pratt’s record. She reminded him, Presley said, of “Stevie Nicks singing over David Crosby demos.”

That’s a nice way of putting it, but it only goes some way to articulating the loveliness of this close-miked, low-lit album. Mostly, it sounds like it was recorded solo, in small rooms, though the closing “Dreams” features a harmony vocal, quite possibly provided by Pratt herself. That one sounds a little more like a lost Fred Neil song than a Crosby one, though Presley’s comparison is still valid even here: there’s a prevailing distrait wooziness, a sense of songs coming together in a satisfying form as they’re being performed, that is like “If I Could Only Remember My Name”.

A couple of contemporary reference points might help, too. One would be Meg Baird, whose records away from Espers – especially the one she made this summer with her sister, “Until You Find Your Green” – have a similar kind of uncanny calm; a certain atmosphere which could be called vintage, but might be better described as timeless.

Pratt’s voice is a gently agile one, at times with a fleeting huskiness that recalls Nicks, or some of the languid and forlorn gymnastics of Karen Dalton. It’s hard, though, to avoid a comparison with Joanna Newsom circa “The Milk Eyed Mender”. Pratt isn’t so idiosyncratic, but there are moments – “Bushel Hyde”, for example, which briefly threatens to turn into “Bridges And Balloons” – when there’s a comparable small, fresh sense of wonder to these jewel-like songs; as if, again, they were being recorded at the moment of creation.

A really special find, I think, and an artist who promises much, too. The album’s out now – or at least it is a download – but you could start by having a listen to that opening track, “Night Faces”. See what you think…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6snZYt7sTh8

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

Ask Van Dyke Parks

Uncut
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Ask Van Dyke Parks

He's worked with Brian Wilson, Joanna Newsom and The Byrds. With such impeccable credentials, you wonder what else life has to offer to a multi-talented composer, arranger, producer and singer like Van Dyke Parks. Well, now Van Dyke is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature. So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask him? Why did he really turn down an invitation to join The Byrds? How did he earn the nickname "Pinocchio" from Frank Zappa? His first paid gig was arranging "The Bare Necessities" for The Jungle Book soundtrack. How on earth did that come about? Send up your questions by noon, Monday, November 5 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com. The best questions, and Van Dyke's answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine. Please include your name and location with your question.

He’s worked with Brian Wilson, Joanna Newsom and The Byrds. With such impeccable credentials, you wonder what else life has to offer to a multi-talented composer, arranger, producer and singer like Van Dyke Parks. Well, now Van Dyke is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature.

So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask him?

Why did he really turn down an invitation to join The Byrds?

How did he earn the nickname “Pinocchio” from Frank Zappa?

His first paid gig was arranging “The Bare Necessities” for The Jungle Book soundtrack. How on earth did that come about?

Send up your questions by noon, Monday, November 5 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com. The best questions, and Van Dyke’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine. Please include your name and location with your question.

Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce: ‘Festivals are the death of art’

Uncut
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Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce: ‘Festivals are the death of art’
Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce has described music festivals as "the death of art" and says they've "gotten straighter as the years have gone on". Speaking to Drowned In Sound, the singer also hits out at other bands' egos. Pierce says: "I know everyone has started thinking that [festivals ...

Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce has described music festivals as “the death of art” and says they’ve “gotten straighter as the years have gone on”.

Speaking to Drowned In Sound, the singer also hits out at other bands’ egos.

Pierce says: “I know everyone has started thinking that [festivals are] the way you see bands now, but I’ve always said bands are the least important part of a festival. What’s important is standing around and seeing who you live with and what your world is why you’re there. Bands have always been a side issue to that, but now more so. And everybody is compromised as a result. The audience are, and the bands are because they get short time slots and no sound check.”

He continues: “Yet bands, in their wisdom still soak up the glory, like they’re worth THIS many people. Or worse, when you get those awful singalongs, and a band’s ego kicks in when the crowd sings their words back. It’s as if they’re standing on stage thinking ‘This is what we’re worth’ and really the audience would sing ‘We’ll Meet Again‘ if it was playing. There’s something about a communal sing-song that’s inherent in people. People love it. So yeah, it’s been a long old summer playing festivals. I felt more and more a part of the entertainment industry as it went on. And I’m not part of the entertainment industry. I’m an artist and I want to feel like an artist. It’s important that I push where I want to go and the audience goes with that if they want to, or doesn’t if they don’t. Festivals are the death of that. And they’ve gotten straighter as the years have gone on too. They’re less about drugs and rock and roll now. They’re more about community.”

Pierce also spoke about his plans for his next album, the follow-up to this year’s Sweet Heart, Sweet Light. He says he’s been influenced by the improvisational performances he’s seen at London’s Café Oto. “I want to do something freer,” he says, adding that the album is likely to be more collaborative.

“I want to follow through on some of the collaborative ideas I had for the last album that I never pursued… Rather than having an existing band that you try to get to go with you, I figured I would find musicians who were already working in an area that I wanted to go to, that I found interesting. So if I wanted to do something that sounded like Thurston [Moore], and I’m not talking about Sonic Youth, I mean the freer stuff he does, I would go to him rather than finding a way there with my band. I’m full of ideas at the moment. I haven’t really got a solid plan. I really feel this whole phase is a step on the way somewhere, but I’m not sure where that is. I’m trying to get the tools in place so I can get there.”

Depeche Mode add extra UK date for May 2013

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Depeche Mode add extra UK date for May 2013
Depeche Mode have announced an extra night at London's O2 Arena in May 2013. The electronic band will now play the venue on Wednesday, May 29 as well as the previously publicised May 28. These are currently the only UK dates the band have announced as part of a wider European tour next year. Depec...

Depeche Mode have announced an extra night at London’s O2 Arena in May 2013.

The electronic band will now play the venue on Wednesday, May 29 as well as the previously publicised May 28. These are currently the only UK dates the band have announced as part of a wider European tour next year.

Depeche Mode’s 34-date European tour kicks off on May 7 in Tel Aviv and features stop-offs at the Rock Werchter Festival in Belgium (July 7), BBK Festival in Spain (July 11) and Optimus Alive Festival in Portugal (July 13). A North American tour will follow later in the year.

The tour is in support of the follow-up to 2009’s Sounds Of The Universe, which is, according to band sources, due out in Spring 2013. The album will be their 13th studio LP.

Gahan has previously said that the recording sessions for the new album were “very different” to the way they had worked in the past. The singer also thanked Fever Ray producer Christopher Berg for his work on the album and his “fantastic ideas”.

Earlier this year, meanwhile, founding member Martin Gore collaborated with the band’s former keyboardist and songwriter Vince Clarke under the moniker VCMG. They released their debut album, ‘Ssss’, in March.

The Rolling Stones play another secret show in Paris

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The Rolling Stones play another secret show in Paris
The Rolling Stones played another secret gig in Paris on October 29. The Stones played 12 tracks at the 1,800 capacity venue le Théâtre Mogador, including "Tumbling Dice", "It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (But I Like It)" and "Honky Tonk Women". They also played new single "Doom And Gloom". Watch fan-fil...

The Rolling Stones played another secret gig in Paris on October 29.

The Stones played 12 tracks at the 1,800 capacity venue le Théâtre Mogador, including “Tumbling Dice”, “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)” and “Honky Tonk Women”. They also played new single “Doom And Gloom”. Watch fan-filmed footage of them arriving at the venue below.

The gig follows the band’s first performance in over five years last Thursday (October 25) at the tiny 600-capacity La Trabendo venue.

Ronnie Wood previously revealed to NME that the band would perform tiny warm-up gigs under their Cockroaches guise during their breaks from rehearsing in Paris.

“There’s going to be little club gigs that we’re gonna surprise ourselves to do,” he said. “We’ll bung a few in next week or the week after, so look out for any Cockroaches gigs or whatever! I don’t know who we’ll be billed as but we’ll turn up somewhere and put a few to the test. Tiny, 200, 300 people kind of places.”

The Rolling Stones are set to play two dates at London’s O2 Arena on November 25 and 29 to celebrate the their 50th anniversary. They will also be playing two nights at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey in the US on December 13 and 15.

To coincide with the dates, the The Stones will release a brand new greatest hits compilation in November titled GRRR!

Bob Dylan’s high school yearbook up for auction

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Bob Dylan’s high school yearbook up for auction
Bob Dylan's high school yearbook, containing a personal message written by him to a friend, will go up for auction at Christie's in London on November 29. The yearbook, from 1958, features a photograph of the young Robert Zimmerman pictured as a high-school student at the age of 17, before he left ...

Bob Dylan‘s high school yearbook, containing a personal message written by him to a friend, will go up for auction at Christie’s in London on November 29.

The yearbook, from 1958, features a photograph of the young Robert Zimmerman pictured as a high-school student at the age of 17, before he left Minnesota for New York. In the yearbook he has written: “Dear Jerry, Well the year’s almost all over now huh. Remember the ‘sessions’ down at Collier. Keep practicing the guitar and maybe someday you’ll be great! A friend, Bob Zimmerman.”

The book is expected to go for up to £6,000.

Other items scheduled to be sold at the auction include a sleeveless white velour jumpsuit made for Mick Jagger by Ossie Clark for the Rolling Stones’ US tour in 1972, which has been valued between £8,000 and £12,000, and the bass guitar which was smashed up in the music video for Nirvana‘s 1991 single “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. The battered instrument is estimated to fetch £15,000 – £25,000.

Cat Power may cancel European tour

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Cat Power may cancel European tour
Cat Power has said she may have to cancel her European tour. The singer was due to come to the UK for a one-off show later this year to headline London's Roundhouse on December 12. It would be her first UK gig in over four years. The show is part of a full European run of shows that also includes g...

Cat Power has said she may have to cancel her European tour.

The singer was due to come to the UK for a one-off show later this year to headline London’s Roundhouse on December 12. It would be her first UK gig in over four years. The show is part of a full European run of shows that also includes gigs in Amsterdam, Koln, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Milan, Bologna, Zurich, Paris and Brussels.

Earlier today, she posted a photo onto her Instagram, with the message: “I may have to cancel my European tour due to bankruptcy and my health struggle with angioedema. I have not thrown in any towel, I am trying to figure out what best I can do.”

She added: “Heart broken. Worked so hard. Got sick day after ‘Sun‘ came out and been struggling to keep all points of me in equilibrium: mind, spirit, body healthy, centered and grounded. I am doing the best I can. I fucking love this planet. I refuse to give up. Though I may need to restrategise for my security and health.”

John Murry And Arbouretum For The ‘Uncut Sessions’

Uncut
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John Murry And Arbouretum For The ‘Uncut Sessions’

News from Oliver Gray, who runs The Railway in Winchester, where he has promoted the Uncut Sessions, as a kind of Club Uncut in exile since we quit our original home at London’s Borderline. The Uncut Sessions started a couple of years ago when Oliver booked Richmond Fontaine for two special shows. The first, on what I remember was a rather damp and windswept Saturday afternoon, saw Richmond Fontaine play their brilliant Post To Wire album in its entirety. Their second show, that evening, featured just about every other song the band had ever played, written, recorded, covered or merely just heard, possibly once, blasting out of the radio of a passing car, whistled by a waitress, hummed by a barman or otherwise brought to their passing attention in vague and possibly unremembered ways. The set went on for what people later reckoned was about four hours, although by its end the crowd had in all likelihood have lost all sense of time and the band could have carried on well into the following week without complaint from anyone there. Anyway, not for the first time, I digress. Oliver actually wrote with what I presume they still call somewhere a ‘heads-up’ about a couple of forthcoming Railway shows, neither of which if you are within reasonable travelling distance of Winchester you won’t want to miss. The first is coming up pretty soon, on November 4, actually, and features long time Uncut favourites, Baltimore’s Arbouretum, whose new album, Coming Out Of The Fog, has been getting a lot of airplay in the office here ahead of its January 2013 release on Thrill Jockey. The second show, in the New Year, is a rare UK show by the amazing John Murry (above), exciting news for anyone as thrilled as I was by his recent album, The Graceless Age, a record high on my list of the best albums of 2013, a personal favourite of the last 12 months, second only to Bob Dylan’s Tempest. Murry plays The Railway on January 30. For more details, go to http://www.railwaylive.co.uk. As you’ll have seen from the new issue, I’ve recently been nose deep in new autobiographies by Neil Young, Pete Townshend and Rod Stewart, and I’m currently just finishing a new Mick Jagger biography by Philip Norman, who’s previously written at length about Mick and the Stones. There’s not much in the book Stones’ fans will be unfamiliar with, but, by God, it’s still an amazing story, despite Norman’s oddly condescending tone and the many instances in which Mick’s behaviour is truly appalling. I’m also working my way through The John Lennon Letters, a hefty collection of Lennon’s correspondence, including hand-drawn postcards, apparently drunken rants, acrimonious screeds, various fragments and scraps and even shopping lists, edited by Hunter Davies, who published the first biography of The Beatles, authorised by the band themselves, in 1968. There’ll be more on both in next month’s Uncut. Have a good week.

News from Oliver Gray, who runs The Railway in Winchester, where he has promoted the Uncut Sessions, as a kind of Club Uncut in exile since we quit our original home at London’s Borderline. The Uncut Sessions started a couple of years ago when Oliver booked Richmond Fontaine for two special shows. The first, on what I remember was a rather damp and windswept Saturday afternoon, saw Richmond Fontaine play their brilliant Post To Wire album in its entirety. Their second show, that evening, featured just about every other song the band had ever played, written, recorded, covered or merely just heard, possibly once, blasting out of the radio of a passing car, whistled by a waitress, hummed by a barman or otherwise brought to their passing attention in vague and possibly unremembered ways. The set went on for what people later reckoned was about four hours, although by its end the crowd had in all likelihood have lost all sense of time and the band could have carried on well into the following week without complaint from anyone there.

Anyway, not for the first time, I digress. Oliver actually wrote with what I presume they still call somewhere a ‘heads-up’ about a couple of forthcoming Railway shows, neither of which if you are within reasonable travelling distance of Winchester you won’t want to miss.

The first is coming up pretty soon, on November 4, actually, and features long time Uncut favourites, Baltimore’s Arbouretum, whose new album, Coming Out Of The Fog, has been getting a lot of airplay in the office here ahead of its January 2013 release on Thrill Jockey.

The second show, in the New Year, is a rare UK show by the amazing John Murry (above), exciting news for anyone as thrilled as I was by his recent album, The Graceless Age, a record high on my list of the best albums of 2013, a personal favourite of the last 12 months, second only to Bob Dylan’s Tempest. Murry plays The Railway on January 30. For more details, go to http://www.railwaylive.co.uk.

As you’ll have seen from the new issue, I’ve recently been nose deep in new autobiographies by Neil Young, Pete Townshend and Rod Stewart, and I’m currently just finishing a new Mick Jagger biography by Philip Norman, who’s previously written at length about Mick and the Stones. There’s not much in the book Stones’ fans will be unfamiliar with, but, by God, it’s still an amazing story, despite Norman’s oddly condescending tone and the many instances in which Mick’s behaviour is truly appalling. I’m also working my way through The John Lennon Letters, a hefty collection of Lennon’s correspondence, including hand-drawn postcards, apparently drunken rants, acrimonious screeds, various fragments and scraps and even shopping lists, edited by Hunter Davies, who published the first biography of The Beatles, authorised by the band themselves, in 1968. There’ll be more on both in next month’s Uncut.

Have a good week.

Woody Guthrie – Woody At 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection

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Woody Guthrie – Woody At 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection

Hard to believe that Woody Guthrie, conceivably, could still be alive in 2012, given that he’s been gone for 45 years. Yet his incomparable work, especially circa 1939-1949, and the indomitable spirit of that work, a Big Bang of social-consciousness-in-song that set off reverberations down through history – from Dylan and Ochs and the whole early ’60s folk revival and on to Joe Strummer’s righteous punk rebellion – resonates still, as long as repression, corruption, and abuse of power still flourish. Guthrie himself would no doubt get a chuckle at how his legacy has played out, especially the seemingly endless stream of “product” gleaned in his name, stemming from what amounts to a hard-hitting but ragtag set of field recordings and radio transcriptions. The lavish, coffee-table artifact Woody At 100 is a different animal, though, compared to the plain-jane documents that have cropped up in the copyright-free era. A three-disc set featuring some newly discovered recordings, its centerpiece might be the stylish, 150-page scrapbook, collecting original Guthrie artwork, contemporary paintings and drawings, photos, lyric manuscripts, record sleeves, and more, plus detailed notes by Guthrie scholars Robert Santelli and Jeff Place, bringing the artist’s life and times into sharp focus. As you might suspect, the first two discs here represent a kind of glorified best-of-Woody: “This Land Is Your Land”, “Pastures Of Plenty”, “Jesus Christ”, “Hard Travelin’”, “Pretty Boy Floyd” – along with Guthrie’s mythical, insinuating mix of ramblin’ songs, labour ballads, kids’ tunes, and historical narratives. Sparks fly on the third disc, which features 21 previously unheard performances and six heretofore undiscovered songs culled from five separate radio programs. Centrepiece of the new material is a four-song Los Angeles “Presto-disc” radio broadcast from 1939 (or 1937, as its origin is in some question). In any case, Guthrie is sprightly on these recordings, which now stand as the earliest-known recordings of his career, bringing out the Carter Family cadences on an almost-jaunty “I Ain’t Got No Home”, leading into “Do Re Mi” with a honking train-track harmonica run. “Skid Row Serenade” and “Them Big City Ways”, previously unheard originals both, are sharply drawn caricatures, the latter sporting a line that surely resonates in 2012: “The finance company right next door, got his paycheck and then got some more.” And therein lies the hook: those who would willfully write off Guthrie as a relic, locked into musty history, might take a look at the state of the world circa 2012, then listen hard: “The gambling man is rich, and the working man is poor” (“I Ain’t Got No Home”); “Some will rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen” (“Pretty Boy Floyd”); “Every good man gets a little hard luck sometimes” (“New York Town”); “You will never find peace with these fascists” (“Jarama Valley”). On and on it goes – in fact, you can play this game all day long, pulling random Guthrie lyrics out of thin air, fully out of context, then realising it’s as relevant, somewhere, somehow, in the here-and-now as it was the day that it was written. That’s the hallmark of a visionary, a seer: the lines between rich and poor, capital and labour, power and the unprivileged, good and evil, Guthrie explored them all with an insistent moralistic bent. But when he dug even deeper, as in the dark poetry of “1913 Massacre”, an account of the Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan in which scores of striking copper miners and their families died (and the melody of which Bob Dylan borrowed for his tribute, “Song To Woody”), Guthrie zoomed past mere narrative, grasping at the uncanny that sometimes accompanies wickedness – in this case, by juxtaposing joy with suffering, the innocence of children with the evil of greed – reckoning the event’s tragic consequences, disturbingly, with chilling aplomb. Luke Torn Rating: 9/10

Hard to believe that Woody Guthrie, conceivably, could still be alive in 2012, given that he’s been gone for 45 years. Yet his incomparable work, especially circa 1939-1949, and the indomitable spirit of that work, a Big Bang of social-consciousness-in-song that set off reverberations down through history – from Dylan and Ochs and the whole early ’60s folk revival and on to Joe Strummer’s righteous punk rebellion – resonates still, as long as repression, corruption, and abuse of power still flourish.

Guthrie himself would no doubt get a chuckle at how his legacy has played out, especially the seemingly endless stream of “product” gleaned in his name, stemming from what amounts to a hard-hitting but ragtag set of field recordings and radio transcriptions. The lavish, coffee-table artifact Woody At 100 is a different animal, though, compared to the plain-jane documents that have cropped up in the copyright-free era. A three-disc set featuring some newly discovered recordings, its centerpiece might be the stylish, 150-page scrapbook, collecting original Guthrie artwork, contemporary paintings and drawings, photos, lyric manuscripts, record sleeves, and more, plus detailed notes by Guthrie scholars Robert Santelli and Jeff Place, bringing the artist’s life and times into sharp focus.

As you might suspect, the first two discs here represent a kind of glorified best-of-Woody: “This Land Is Your Land”, “Pastures Of Plenty”, “Jesus Christ”, “Hard Travelin’”, “Pretty Boy Floyd” – along with Guthrie’s mythical, insinuating mix of ramblin’ songs, labour ballads, kids’ tunes, and historical narratives. Sparks fly on the third disc, which features 21 previously unheard performances and six heretofore undiscovered songs culled from five separate radio programs.

Centrepiece of the new material is a four-song Los Angeles “Presto-disc” radio broadcast from 1939 (or 1937, as its origin is in some question). In any case, Guthrie is sprightly on these recordings, which now stand as the earliest-known recordings of his career, bringing out the Carter Family cadences on an almost-jaunty “I Ain’t Got No Home”, leading into “Do Re Mi” with a honking train-track harmonica run. “Skid Row Serenade” and “Them Big City Ways”, previously unheard originals both, are sharply drawn caricatures, the latter sporting a line that surely resonates in 2012: “The finance company right next door, got his paycheck and then got some more.”

And therein lies the hook: those who would willfully write off Guthrie as a relic, locked into musty history, might take a look at the state of the world circa 2012, then listen hard: “The gambling man is rich, and the working man is poor” (“I Ain’t Got No Home”); “Some will rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen” (“Pretty Boy Floyd”); “Every good man gets a little hard luck sometimes” (“New York Town”); “You will never find peace with these fascists” (“Jarama Valley”). On and on it goes – in fact, you can play this game all day long, pulling random Guthrie lyrics out of thin air, fully out of context, then realising it’s as relevant, somewhere, somehow, in the here-and-now as it was the day that it was written.

That’s the hallmark of a visionary, a seer: the lines between rich and poor, capital and labour, power and the unprivileged, good and evil, Guthrie explored them all with an insistent moralistic bent. But when he dug even deeper, as in the dark poetry of “1913 Massacre”, an account of the Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan in which scores of striking copper miners and their families died (and the melody of which Bob Dylan borrowed for his tribute, “Song To Woody”), Guthrie zoomed past mere narrative, grasping at the uncanny that sometimes accompanies wickedness – in this case, by juxtaposing joy with suffering, the innocence of children with the evil of greed – reckoning the event’s tragic consequences, disturbingly, with chilling aplomb.

Luke Torn

Rating: 9/10

US college students apologise to The National for using their track in pro-Mitt Romney video

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US college students apologise to The National for using their track in pro-Mitt Romney video

The Ohio University student group responsible for using a track by The National in a pro-Mitt Romney video have apologised to the band. The group, called Ohio University Students For Romney, used the band's track "Fake Empire", from their 2007 album Boxer, as the soundtrack to an advert promoting the Republican politician's candidacy. The clip was previously able to be viewed via YouTube, but has since been removed by the group after coming under-fire from The National. An apology, via Spin, read: "We apologize for offending The National and their fans by using a cover/remix of the band's melody for 'Fake Empire'. We were attempting to reinvigorate and unite the disgruntled fans wary of supporting the President as they did in 2008 with 'Signs of Hope and Change', with a new movement of people who believe in real recovery and reform in supporting Mitt Romney." It continued: "Unfortunately we've learned that partisan divide exists on YouTube and in music as much as it does in Washington…we respectfully took down the video, and will repost with music representing a better future with Romney & Ryan in Washington." The National have long been supporters of current US President Barack Obama and, unsurprisingly, reacted with disdain to their music being used in the video. Frontman Matt Berninger posted a comment on YouTube in response to the advert, writing: "Our music was used without our permission in this ad. The song you're using was written about the same backward, con game policies Romney is proposing. "We encourage all students to educate themselves about the differences between the inclusive, pro-social, compassionate, forward-thinking policies of President Obama and the self-serving politics of the neo-conservative movement and Mitt Romney," he added. "Every single person involved in the creation of the music you're using is voting for President Obama." Earlier this month (October 6), The National revealed that they have received hate mail for supporting Obama's campaign for four more years in the oval office, with guitarist/keyboardist Aaron Dessner claiming that they were sent insulting messages on Facebook for playing a Democratic campaign rally for the incumbent President in Des Moines in September.

The Ohio University student group responsible for using a track by The National in a pro-Mitt Romney video have apologised to the band.

The group, called Ohio University Students For Romney, used the band’s track “Fake Empire”, from their 2007 album Boxer, as the soundtrack to an advert promoting the Republican politician’s candidacy. The clip was previously able to be viewed via YouTube, but has since been removed by the group after coming under-fire from The National.

An apology, via Spin, read: “We apologize for offending The National and their fans by using a cover/remix of the band’s melody for ‘Fake Empire’. We were attempting to reinvigorate and unite the disgruntled fans wary of supporting the President as they did in 2008 with ‘Signs of Hope and Change’, with a new movement of people who believe in real recovery and reform in supporting Mitt Romney.”

It continued: “Unfortunately we’ve learned that partisan divide exists on YouTube and in music as much as it does in Washington…we respectfully took down the video, and will repost with music representing a better future with Romney & Ryan in Washington.”

The National have long been supporters of current US President Barack Obama and, unsurprisingly, reacted with disdain to their music being used in the video. Frontman Matt Berninger posted a comment on YouTube in response to the advert, writing: “Our music was used without our permission in this ad. The song you’re using was written about the same backward, con game policies Romney is proposing.

“We encourage all students to educate themselves about the differences between the inclusive, pro-social, compassionate, forward-thinking policies of President Obama and the self-serving politics of the neo-conservative movement and Mitt Romney,” he added. “Every single person involved in the creation of the music you’re using is voting for President Obama.”

Earlier this month (October 6), The National revealed that they have received hate mail for supporting Obama’s campaign for four more years in the oval office, with guitarist/keyboardist Aaron Dessner claiming that they were sent insulting messages on Facebook for playing a Democratic campaign rally for the incumbent President in Des Moines in September.

Hear Jack White rap on new song “Blues On Two Trees”

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Hear Jack White rap on new song “Blues On Two Trees”
Jack White's new song "Blues On Two Trees" featuring the former White Stripes frontman rapping. The track, which will be released as the b-side to new single "I'm Shakin'", starts off as a typically bluesy garage track White is famous for before the deadpan rhyming starts. “Three trees lying on t...

Jack White‘s new song “Blues On Two Trees” featuring the former White Stripes frontman rapping.

The track, which will be released as the b-side to new single “I’m Shakin’“, starts off as a typically bluesy garage track White is famous for before the deadpan rhyming starts. “Three trees lying on the side of the road/ One tree barks, ‘Where the hell do we go?’” White raps. Scroll down the page to hear a preview of the song.

White has previously dabbled in hip-hop, having recorded tracks with both Insane Clown Posse and Black Milk. “Blues On Two Trees” will be available in full from the Third Man Records store today (October 30). ‘I’m Shakin’ is the latest single to be taken from White’s critically acclaimed solo album Blunderbuss.

Rolling Stones to broadcast New Jersey show on Sky Box Office

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Rolling Stones to broadcast New Jersey show on Sky Box Office
The Rolling Stones have confirmed that they will be broadcasting one of their two New Jersey shows live on Sky Box Office in December The band, who are reuniting for two London shows and a further pair of dates in America, will make their December 15 date at Newark's Prudential Centre available to ...

The Rolling Stones have confirmed that they will be broadcasting one of their two New Jersey shows live on Sky Box Office in December

The band, who are reuniting for two London shows and a further pair of dates in America, will make their December 15 date at Newark’s Prudential Centre available to fans in the UK who will be able to pay £14.95 to see the band on TV. The Sky Box Office broadcast will start at 2AM (GMT) on December 16 with viewers also able to download the show to their Sky planner for viewing at a more convenient time.

Speaking about the broadcast of The Rolling Stones US gig, Ian Lewis, director of Sky Box Office said: “Sky is thrilled to be able to offer our customers The Rolling Stones’ 50th Anniversary Concert live in their living room. Whether live or on demand, customers will be able to enjoy the gig exactly at a time that suits them. And with the whole gig available in HD and in Dolby Surround Sound, it’s the next best thing to being there.”

The decision to charge fans to see a broadcast of the reunion show may well anger fans already left smarting at being priced out of the band’s London shows. Tickets started at around £95 each and rose to around £375 for the best seats, meaning many people could not afford to attend. Despite this, tickets for both O2 Arena dates are making thousands of pounds on secondary ticketing sites online.

The Rolling Stones warmed up for their comeback shows with a tiny date in Paris last week. Just 600 lucky fans got to watch the Stones in full glory as they played a string of hits including “Tumbling Dice”, “It’s Only Rock And Roll”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Brown Sugar”. They also debuted new track “Doom And Gloom”.

The Stone Roses announce London and Glasgow dates

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The Stone Roses announce London and Glasgow dates
The Stone Roses have announced three UK shows in June 2013. The group will play two nights in London’s Finsbury Park on June 7 and 8 followed by a single show at Glasgow Green on June 15. The supports for the Glasgow show are Primal Scream, Jake Bugg and The View. Supports for London will be ann...

The Stone Roses have announced three UK shows in June 2013.

The group will play two nights in London’s Finsbury Park on June 7 and 8 followed by a single show at Glasgow Green on June 15. The supports for the Glasgow show are Primal Scream, Jake Bugg and The View. Supports for London will be announced shortly.

The band’s only London appearance since reuniting was a secret gig at the tiny Village Underground venue. Glasgow Green was the scene of one of The Stone Roses’ best-regarded live appearances, taking place on 9 June 1990. “When we were on stage that day, we all looked at each other, and then just went up another level,” bassist Mani has said.

The Stone Roses recently revealed that they will carry on playing together next year, announcing a series of shows at the Future Music Festival in Australia next March.

The band recently entered the Guinness World Book Of Records for the fastest selling rock concerts in UK history. The 220,000 tickets for their Heaton Park comeback gigs at the end of June and beginning of July sold out in 68 minutes.

Allah-Las – Allah-Las

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Allah-Las – Allah-Las

Los Angeles quartet the Allah-Las have the most perfect of backstories for a group making such informed, articulate pop music. Three of the group’s members met while serving time at the legendary LA record store, Amoeba, one of the best ways to learn your craft and do your listening, all while getting paid to schlep CD cases and LP sleeves into the aisles and across the counter. They’ve been playing together since late 2008, slowly chipping away at a vision that’s equal parts genteel psychedelia, ’60s beat movement, and softly strummed, post-Byrdsian jangle-pop. You’d be correct in thinking that’s not an under-populated field right now. One of the more surprising things about underground music at the moment, particularly in America, is the rise of fragile gangs who pledge allegiance to the fundamental tenets of the garage. Whether it’s Sic Alps with their fractured pop poetics, Ty Segall’s riotous beat mantras, the schizoid styles of Thee Oh Sees, or the more DIY/punkish takes of the likes of TV Ghost and Tyvek, this music’s on the rise again. (The connection is more than aesthetic – Segall, very much the poster boy for this ’60s re-up going down in the American underground, plays drums on the first album for Allah-Las producer and R’n’B revisionist Nick Waterhouse.) More and more, this move feels like a response to the fly-by-night hype stylings of blog culture; an oppositional turning back of the clock, similar to the way groups like The Fuzztones, The Barracudas, The Stems and The Pandoras mined the ’60s for base material, to counter the plastic aspirationalism of the ’80s mainstream. Waterhouse’s presence is crucial here, producing the album, recording the group at the Costa Mesa recording studio The Distillery, and getting these 12 songs down with period-piece perfection. If other artists, like Segall or Sic Alps, dirty up the signal with blocks of fuzz and noise, often recording primitively to allow for all kinds of happy accidents, the Allah-Las are more stylised, less about the incidental. Everything here feels adeptly placed and paced, just the right production touches to drop the listener down in some surf/garage-rock haven. There’s a risk this kind of devotion can dovetail to parody, and there are already interviews out there where the group talk about needing to use the right microphones from the era to accurately capture their sound. This way lies Lee Mavers of The La’s and his need for “’60s dust” on studio equipment. It’d all be annoying if the songs weren’t so unrelentingly great. If Allah-Las have learnt one thing, it’s how to capture the essence of the times they’re so besotted with, how to distil (no pun intended) the art and craft of the songwriting of that era. “Vis-A-Vis” starts by channeling the purist jangle of the feyest of the C86 groups, who were themselves gesturing back to The Byrds and Love, before glinting tambourines and softly pattering cymbals and snares guide a sun-kissed melody off into the water. Elsewhere it’s even more blatant: the opening trio of “Catamaran”, “Don’t You Forget It” and “Busman’s Holiday” feel like they’ve dropped straight from a Pebbles, Rubble or Teenage Shutdown compilation, the dinkiest of guitar solos clamouring for attention among clipped barre chords, foot-shuffling maraca, honeyed harmonies, and spindly, reverbed-out guitar riffs. There’s always a chance that this kind of willful revisionism can go poorly: bad songs, bad production, the wrong feel, the wrong ideas. But the Allah-Las get things right, and beyond that, they’d be great songwriters even if you stripped everything back to its core, without the of-their-time production flourishes. The only real concern is that these kinds of records are often one-shot deals – groups make a statement with, and channel all their energies and ideas into their first album, and then things get real tired real quick by the second effort. The test for Allah-Las will be what they do next. For now, though, this self-titled debut is a joy. Jon Dale

Los Angeles quartet the Allah-Las have the most perfect of backstories for a group making such informed, articulate pop music. Three of the group’s members met while serving time at the legendary LA record store, Amoeba, one of the best ways to learn your craft and do your listening, all while getting paid to schlep CD cases and LP sleeves into the aisles and across the counter. They’ve been playing together since late 2008, slowly chipping away at a vision that’s equal parts genteel psychedelia, ’60s beat movement, and softly strummed, post-Byrdsian jangle-pop.

You’d be correct in thinking that’s not an under-populated field right now. One of the more surprising things about underground music at the moment, particularly in America, is the rise of fragile gangs who pledge allegiance to the fundamental tenets of the garage. Whether it’s Sic Alps with their fractured pop poetics, Ty Segall’s riotous beat mantras, the schizoid styles of Thee Oh Sees, or the more DIY/punkish takes of the likes of TV Ghost and Tyvek, this music’s on the rise again. (The connection is more than aesthetic – Segall, very much the poster boy for this ’60s re-up going down in the American underground, plays drums on the first album for Allah-Las producer and R’n’B revisionist Nick Waterhouse.) More and more, this move feels like a response to the fly-by-night hype stylings of blog culture; an oppositional turning back of the clock, similar to the way groups like The Fuzztones, The Barracudas, The Stems and The Pandoras mined the ’60s for base material, to counter the plastic aspirationalism of the ’80s mainstream.

Waterhouse’s presence is crucial here, producing the album, recording the group at the Costa Mesa recording studio The Distillery, and getting these 12 songs down with period-piece perfection. If other artists, like Segall or Sic Alps, dirty up the signal with blocks of fuzz and noise, often recording primitively to allow for all kinds of happy accidents, the Allah-Las are more stylised, less about the incidental. Everything here feels adeptly placed and paced, just the right production touches to drop the listener down in some surf/garage-rock haven. There’s a risk this kind of devotion can dovetail to parody, and there are already interviews out there where the group talk about needing to use the right microphones from the era to accurately capture their sound. This way lies Lee Mavers of The La’s and his need for “’60s dust” on studio equipment.

It’d all be annoying if the songs weren’t so unrelentingly great. If Allah-Las have learnt one thing, it’s how to capture the essence of the times they’re so besotted with, how to distil (no pun intended) the art and craft of the songwriting of that era. “Vis-A-Vis” starts by channeling the purist jangle of the feyest of the C86 groups, who were themselves gesturing back to The Byrds and Love, before glinting tambourines and softly pattering cymbals and snares guide a sun-kissed melody off into the water. Elsewhere it’s even more blatant: the opening trio of “Catamaran”, “Don’t You Forget It” and “Busman’s Holiday” feel like they’ve dropped straight from a Pebbles, Rubble or Teenage Shutdown compilation, the dinkiest of guitar solos clamouring for attention among clipped barre chords, foot-shuffling maraca, honeyed harmonies, and spindly, reverbed-out guitar riffs.

There’s always a chance that this kind of willful revisionism can go poorly: bad songs, bad production, the wrong feel, the wrong ideas. But the Allah-Las get things right, and beyond that, they’d be great songwriters even if you stripped everything back to its core, without the of-their-time production flourishes.

The only real concern is that these kinds of records are often one-shot deals – groups make a statement with, and channel all their energies and ideas into their first album, and then things get real tired real quick by the second effort. The test for Allah-Las will be what they do next. For now, though, this self-titled debut is a joy.

Jon Dale

Paul McCartney: ‘Yoko Ono didn’t end The Beatles’

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Paul McCartney: ‘Yoko Ono didn’t end The Beatles’
Paul McCartney has said Yoko Ono did not split up The Beatles. The singer told David Frost, in a new interview to be aired next month, that Yoko Ono's relationship with John Lennon was not the main reason why the band split up, reports The Guardian. The newspaper, which has seen extracts from Fros...

Paul McCartney has said Yoko Ono did not split up The Beatles.

The singer told David Frost, in a new interview to be aired next month, that Yoko Ono’s relationship with John Lennon was not the main reason why the band split up, reports The Guardian.

The newspaper, which has seen extracts from Frost’s exclusive interview, reports that McCartney admits he had found Yoko sitting in on The Beatles’ recording sessions very difficult but did not blame her for the group’s demise.

Speaking to Frost, McCartney said: “She certainly didn’t break the group up, the group was breaking up. When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him. So it was time for John to leave, he was definitely going to leave one way or another.”

McCartney goes on to say that without the support of Yoko Ono, he believes Lennon would not have written songs such as “Imagine”, adding: “I don’t think he would have done that without Yoko, so I don’t think you can blame her for anything.”

However, the singer placed more of the blame of The Beatles break-up on businessman Allen Klein, who succeeded manager Brian Epstein following his death in 1967.

Mock punching a photograph of Klein, the 70-year-old added: “I was fighting against the other three guys who’d been my lifelong soul buddies. I said I wanted to fight Klein.”

The Frost/McCartney interview will be screened on TV channel Al Jazeera English next month. The series of 60-minute interviews begins on November 6.

Guy Garvey: ‘Elbow’s UK arena tour will be a farewell party’

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Guy Garvey: ‘Elbow’s UK arena tour will be a farewell party’
Guy Garvey has said that Elbow's upcoming UK arena tour will be the last we hear from the band for a while. The singer revealed to The Sun that the group plan to head off to do other things after the November and December tour, and said they will treat the UK tour as a "farewell party". Garvey sai...

Guy Garvey has said that Elbow’s upcoming UK arena tour will be the last we hear from the band for a while.

The singer revealed to The Sun that the group plan to head off to do other things after the November and December tour, and said they will treat the UK tour as a “farewell party”.

Garvey said: “We’ve got our arena tour this November and December, which will be like a farewell party. We’ve already done six songs for the next album, then we’ll come back to finish it next year.”

The frontman is taking a break from Elbow for most of 2013 to concentrate on writing music for a new stage musical adaptation of King Kong, after he was asked to join the writing team by Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja.

“As soon as the tour ends I’m off to New York for six months,” he confirmed. “Where better to write songs for a King Kong musical than the place it’s set?”

Elbow’s UK arena tour kicks off at Nottingham’s Capital FM Arena on November 26, the band will then play Wembley Arena on November 27 before they head to Birmingham NIA on November 28 and then Liverpool’s Echo Area on November 29, before heading to their Manchester hometown on December 1. They will finish up at London’s The O2 on December 2.

Elbow will play:

Nottingham Capital FM Arena (November 26)

London Wembley Arena (27)

Birmingham National Indoor Arena (28)

Liverpool Echo Arena (29)

Manchester Arena (December 1)

London O2 Arena (2)

Singer-songwriter Terry Callier dies

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Singer-songwriter Terry Callier dies

The American guitarist and singer-songwriter Terry Callier has died at the age of 67, reports Chicago Sun Times The Chicago-born performer was found dead at his home on Sunday (October 28). Terry Callier's 50-year career began when he signed to Chess Records in 1962, aged just 17. Leaving behind the doo-wop sound of his teenage years, his most famous trio of albums – 1972's Occasional Rain, 1973's What Color Is Love and 1974's I Just Can't Help Myself exemplified the hybrid of funk, soul and jazz that he created. Callier quit music to study computer programming and sociology in the 1980s, but his cult grew through the patronage of the UK's Acid Jazz label and a younger generation of singer-songwriters, and he was eventually lured back to performing and recording. He collaborated with British singer-songwriter Beth Orton in 1997, appearing on her Best Bit EP, and worked with writers and producers Massive Attack on his 2009 comeback album Hidden Conversations. Earlier this year, Mercury Music Prize-nominated singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka described the appeal of Callier's music. "Those nuances, colors, times and chords inspire me so much I want to make a mish-mash of all that. I knew Terry's first album very well," Kiwanuka told the Sun Times In 1996, Callier told the same newspaper: “People respond to me because I’m a throwback to an older tradition that believed you should do more than sing a song for an audience, that you should make people feel something. You can make accessible music and still sing about love and peace and truth and life and death. In the end, those are the only things that matter.”

The American guitarist and singer-songwriter Terry Callier has died at the age of 67, reports Chicago Sun Times

The Chicago-born performer was found dead at his home on Sunday (October 28).

Terry Callier’s 50-year career began when he signed to Chess Records in 1962, aged just 17. Leaving behind the doo-wop sound of his teenage years, his most famous trio of albums – 1972’s Occasional Rain, 1973’s What Color Is Love and 1974’s I Just Can’t Help Myself exemplified the hybrid of funk, soul and jazz that he created.

Callier quit music to study computer programming and sociology in the 1980s, but his cult grew through the patronage of the UK’s Acid Jazz label and a younger generation of singer-songwriters, and he was eventually lured back to performing and recording. He collaborated with British singer-songwriter Beth Orton in 1997, appearing on her Best Bit EP, and worked with writers and producers Massive Attack on his 2009 comeback album Hidden Conversations.

Earlier this year, Mercury Music Prize-nominated singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka described the appeal of Callier’s music. “Those nuances, colors, times and chords inspire me so much I want to make a mish-mash of all that. I knew Terry’s first album very well,” Kiwanuka told the Sun Times

In 1996, Callier told the same newspaper: “People respond to me because I’m a throwback to an older tradition that believed you should do more than sing a song for an audience, that you should make people feel something. You can make accessible music and still sing about love and peace and truth and life and death. In the end, those are the only things that matter.”

Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Nirvana for Record Store Day “Black Friday”

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Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Nirvana for Record Store Day “Black Friday”
Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Nirvana are among the artists who're releasing exclusive limited editions on November 23 as part of Record Store Day's "Black Friday". A full list of this year's release is available here. Among the highlights are: David Bowie - "The Jean Genie". 7" picture disc in adv...

Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Nirvana are among the artists who’re releasing exclusive limited editions on November 23 as part of Record Store Day’s “Black Friday”.

A full list of this year’s release is available here.

Among the highlights are:

David Bowie – “The Jean Genie”. 7″ picture disc in advance of the 40th Anniversary reissue of Aladdin Sane. The b-side is “The Jean Genie (BBC Top of the Pops 1973)”.

Bob Dylan – Duquesne Whistle 7″: “Duquesne Whistle”, a song Dylan wrote with Robert Hunter on his latest album Tempest, backed with a previously unreleased version of “Meet Me In The Morning” from the Blood On The Tracks sessions. Limited to 5,000 copies. The appearance of this unreleased version of “Meet Me In The Morning” adds to speculation that a forthcoming edition of Dylan’s Bootleg Series will focus on Blood On The Tracks.

Nirvana – 20th Anniversary Edition of Incesticide 45RPM Edition: Recompiled and remastered from the original analog master tape and recording sources, this limited edition audiophile edition of Incesticide was pressed by Analogue Productions on two 180gram virgin vinyl discs and cut at 45 RPM vinyl for superior audio quality to past 33 1/3 RPM reissues. The faithful recreation of the jacket designed by Kurt Cobain includes the lyric sheet art and for the first time comes housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve. Gold foiled stamped and individually numbered. Limited to 4,000 copies.

The Rolling Stones – The Rolling Stones EP. 7″ vinyl EP (originally released in 1964) now available in its original format for the first time since the original release.

Joe Strummer – Live at Action Town Hall: Vinyl recording of Strummer’s historic reunion with Mick Jones in 2002. Limited to 1,800 copies.

The Velvet Underground – Velvet Underground & Nico – Scepter Studios Acetate: The rare April 1966 Scepter Studios recordings captured on acetate featuring early, alternate versions of songs later issued on The Velvet Underground & Nico available now for the first time ever on 180g vinyl, gold foil stamped with individual number. Limited to 5,000 copies.

The White Stripes 7″ singles: Three early 45RPMS singles from the band repressed on red vinyl: “Fell in Love With a Girl” b/w “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”; “Hotel Yorba” (Live at the Hotel Yorba) b/w “Rated X” (Live at the Hotel Yorba); “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” b/w “Stop Breaking Down”

The Rolling Stones’ Paris show set-list

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The Rolling Stones’ Paris show set-list
The Rolling Stones played an hour-long gig in Paris last night as a warm-up for their forthcoming dates in London and New Jersey. The group made the announcement on Twitter yesterday morning [October 25], writing: "The Rolling Stones are playing a short warm-up gig tonight, Thursday 25th Oct, in Pa...

The Rolling Stones played an hour-long gig in Paris last night as a warm-up for their forthcoming dates in London and New Jersey.

The group made the announcement on Twitter yesterday morning [October 25], writing: “The Rolling Stones are playing a short warm-up gig tonight, Thursday 25th Oct, in Paris.” The show took place at La Trabendo, a small, 600-seat club in the Parc de la Villette area of Paris. Tickets cost 15 Euros and were available from noon yesterday at the Virgin Megastore on Paris’s Champs Elysees.

According to the band’s Twitter feed, they took the stage at around 9pm.

The Rolling Stones played:

Route 66

It’s Only Rock n Roll

Shattered

When The Whip Comes Down

Champagne and Reefer

Doom & Gloom

Miss You

Start Me Up

Midnight Rambler

Tumbling Dice

Jumping Jack Flash

Brown Sugar

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