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STRANGE POWERS – STEPHEN MERRIT & THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

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STRANGE POWERS – STEPHEN MERRIT & THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

A product of Boston’s ’80s post-punk scene, Stephin Merritt created the Magnetic Fields in his own image. Wry, prickly, bookish, occasionally tender, he has carved out a prominent niche writing arch anti-confessionals that “emphasise beauty over convention”. The 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs made him a doyen of perennially heartbroken, New York Times-reading arts grad scenesters. In this 85-minute documentary, filmed over several years but primarily covering the mid-noughties period where the Magnetic Fields made i and Distortion, Merritt emerges as a kind of American Morrissey: guarded, lugubrious, emotionally distant yet attracting real devotion, and seemingly always in character. “I had a bad experience with an acupuncturist in my youth,” he drawls, eyes rolling theatrically. We see him pottering around Manhattan with his Chihuahuas, cycling like a drunk Jacques Tati, introducing the world’s campest CD collection – “Disco Ethel Merman?” – and “sitting in dark gay bars listening to thumping disco music that I don’t particularly like” in order to write. In his appealingly chaotic apartment studio dutiful band members play whisks and chimes fashioned from plastic cups while arguing over time-signatures. This is not …Spinal Tap. You have to buy into Merritt’s persona to love The Magnetic Fields, and this is a fans’ film. It lacks an objective, questioning external voice. Instead, famous admirers are recruited but under-used. Peter Gabriel lauds his “conversational simplicity – these are great words”; Sarah Silverman babbles about the “poet inside with a mean outer shell”, while author Neil Gaiman (Merritt wrote the score for a musical version of Coraline) reveals he was so grumpy he “made Lou Reed look like little orphan Annie”. Merritt’s methods are pored over but his motives are largely left unexplored. Beneath the carefully controlled exterior the film glosses over private turbulence. His childhood was peripatetic and hippiefied – his mother’s friend once tried to fix a radiator “by rubbing a green banana on it” – while Merritt has never met his father, Scott Fagan, a folk singer who has released several records. There is, oddly, also no mention of the hearing condition (hyperacusis) which to some extent dictated the anti-rock bent of his music. Ultimately what drives Strange Powers isn’t Merritt but Claudia Gonson, who’s worked with him since the early ’80s and now combines the role of band mate, manager, “fag-hag, wife and mother”. The film gradually becomes a document of their odd-couple love story. It ends with Merritt leaving New York for LA to seek out soundtrack work, a move which leaves Gonson pondering “losing a huge chunk of my identity. Midlife crisis!” Her disarming honesty and obvious love for Merritt brings a welcome emotional charge to this entertaining but – perhaps aptly – rather aloof, narrow-focus documentary. EXTRAS: None. GRAEME THOMSON

A product of Boston’s ’80s post-punk scene, Stephin Merritt created the Magnetic Fields in his own image. Wry, prickly, bookish, occasionally tender, he has carved out a prominent niche writing arch anti-confessionals that “emphasise beauty over convention”.

The 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs made him a doyen of perennially heartbroken, New York Times-reading arts grad scenesters. In this 85-minute documentary, filmed over several years but primarily covering the mid-noughties period where the Magnetic Fields made i and Distortion, Merritt emerges as a kind of American Morrissey: guarded, lugubrious, emotionally distant yet attracting real devotion, and seemingly always in character. “I had a bad experience with an acupuncturist in my youth,” he drawls, eyes rolling theatrically.

We see him pottering around Manhattan with his Chihuahuas, cycling like a drunk Jacques Tati, introducing the world’s campest CD collection – “Disco Ethel Merman?” – and “sitting in dark gay bars listening to thumping disco music that I don’t particularly like” in order to write. In his appealingly chaotic apartment studio dutiful band members play whisks and chimes fashioned from plastic cups while arguing over time-signatures. This is not …Spinal Tap.

You have to buy into Merritt’s persona to love The Magnetic Fields, and this is a fans’ film. It lacks an objective, questioning external voice. Instead, famous admirers are recruited but under-used. Peter Gabriel lauds his “conversational simplicity – these are great words”; Sarah Silverman babbles about the “poet inside with a mean outer shell”, while author Neil Gaiman (Merritt wrote the score for a musical version of Coraline) reveals he was so grumpy he “made Lou Reed look like little orphan Annie”.

Merritt’s methods are pored over but his motives are largely left unexplored. Beneath the carefully controlled exterior the film glosses over private turbulence. His childhood was peripatetic and hippiefied – his mother’s friend once tried to fix a radiator “by rubbing a green banana on it” – while Merritt has never met his father, Scott Fagan, a folk singer who has released several records. There is, oddly, also no mention of the hearing condition (hyperacusis) which to some extent dictated the anti-rock bent of his music.

Ultimately what drives Strange Powers isn’t Merritt but Claudia Gonson, who’s worked with him since the early ’80s and now combines the role of band mate, manager, “fag-hag, wife and mother”. The film gradually becomes a document of their odd-couple love story. It ends with Merritt leaving New York for LA to seek out soundtrack work, a move which leaves Gonson pondering “losing a huge chunk of my identity. Midlife crisis!” Her disarming honesty and obvious love for Merritt brings a welcome emotional charge to this entertaining but – perhaps aptly – rather aloof, narrow-focus documentary.

EXTRAS: None.

GRAEME THOMSON

PJ HARVEY – LET ENGLAND SHAKE

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PJ HARVEY – LET ENGLAND SHAKE

The first of Polly Harvey’s eighth studio album was heard in April 2010, when she made a memorably peculiar appearance on The Andrew Marr Show. Wrapped in a black feather boa, equipped with an autoharp, watched by an audience consisting of the titular BBC commentator and the then-Prime Minister, Harvey performed a hauntingly jaunty ditty called “Let England Shake”, backed by a looped sample from The Four Lads’ 1950s novelty hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”. Even by Harvey’s formidable standards for presentational incongruity, it was one for the scrapbook. She knew what she was doing when she chose the forum, however (Harvey, one of the more deliberate and intelligent artists to have strapped on a guitar in the last couple of decades, always knows what she’s doing). In an interview on the same programme, she explained that the new songs she was working on were more outward-looking than the soul-scrabbling ruminations which had filled her records to date, that she’d been thinking about her country, and its role in the world, and her role in it. “I know,” she said, “that the music that I make is formed out of the landscape I’ve grown up in, and the history of this nation.” The American journalist David Remnick once made the unimprovable observation that the English were distinguished among the world’s peoples in exhibiting schadenfreude towards themselves. Harvey’s survey of her homeland observes that tendency, evoking the awkward grimace with which most middle-class English people react to the hoisting of their own flag. Let England Shake is in this respect a throwback to the more personal torments that have so far dominated Harvey’s records: her country, like the vexatious lovers who inspired Dry and Is This Desire?, is something with which she can live neither with nor without. “You leave a taste,” she informs her homeland in “England”. “A bitter one.” Let England Shake leads with its as-heard-on-The Andrew Marr Show title track, adding a toytown symphonia of saxophone, trombone, xylophone and Mellotron to Harvey’s autoharp, and dropping the Four Lads sample. Harvey perhaps felt it was too obvious a cue for what follows. Her album-length consideration of her nation is, as it turns out, set almost exclusively in those forever English corners of foreign fields – with particular reference to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, a misbegotten, grotesquely botched attempt by the allied forces to seize Constantinople, now Istanbul. Three of the twelve tracks (“All And Everyone”, “On Battleship Hill”, “The Colour Of The Earth”) are explicitly placed amid what Harvey accurately describes as this “death’s anchorage”, and several others could be. It’s an odd choice of setting. The Gallipoli disaster has been so completely subsumed into the founding mythologies of Australia and New Zealand that the British contribution to the body count – somewhere north of 30,000 – is largely forgotten. Harvey’s focus on it might, perhaps, be the influence of her long-time Australian collaborator, former Bad Seed Mick Harvey – who, to judge by the lyrical command of locations and detail, may have pressed upon Polly a copy of Australian writer Les Carlyon’s magisterial history, Gallipoli (Mick takes a turn at lead vocals on closing track “The Colour Of The Earth”, inhabiting a veteran mourning a friend lost charging from “the Anzac trench”). It’s just as likely, though, that Harvey perceived Gallipoli’s echoes in more recent misconceived military adventures in the Middle East. The thread she picks up unravels to “This Glorious Land”, in which a citizen of some modern-day host of imperial hubris laments their lot (“Our land is ploughed by tanks, and feet marching”) and “Written On The Forehead”, a skilful evocation of the chaos of conquest (“Date palms, orange and tangerine trees, and eyes were crying for everything.”) Musically, Let England Shake has in common with all other PJ Harvey albums that it doesn’t sound like any other PJ Harvey albums, which have lurched from the punky indie rock of Rid Of Me to the gothic piano balladry of White Chalk. On this one, Polly, Mick Harvey, career-long foil John Parish and producer Flood have conjured a febrile, electrified take on English folk, touched up with more straightforward rock touches. Pixies are a recurring motif, with distinctly Joey Santiago-like lead riffs lighting up “The Last Living Rose” and “In The Dark Places”. Harvey’s falsetto trills and the electric edges of the sound also remind of Cocteau Twins at their less skittish. Though The Four Lads haven’t made the cut, there are a couple of moments where Harvey flaunts the aptitude for borrowing that she first exhibited when she helped herself to South Pacific’s “Gonna wash that man right outta my hair” on “Sheela-Na-Gig”. The aforementioned “The Glorious Land” is introduced with a sounding of the charge, introducing the looming occupiers feared by its narrator. More jarringly, but much more effectively, “The Words That Maketh Murder” spends most of its span resembling a straight-forward frontline lament, its elegantly brutal language redolent of the poetry of The Trenches, before cribbing from, of all things, Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”: in the context that Harvey has established, of terrified men cringing amid flyblown viscera, the question “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?” is a splendidly gruesome irony. The album’s near six-minute centrepiece, “All And Everyone” may be the single most astonishing thing this consistently astonishing artist has yet recorded. Planting herself in the bloodsoaked dirt of Bolton’s Ridge, which trundles beachward from the Gallipoli battlefield of Lone Pine, Harvey summons the spectre of an overworked Reaper hovering over the remains of fallen Light Horsemen (“Death hung in the smoke and clung/To 400 acres of useless beachfront/A bank of red earth, dripping down death”). This is brave writing: many are the musicians who have beclowned themselves fearfully by attempting to describe war while knowing nothing of it. Harvey triumphs, in this and many other respects, by disdaining the temptations of omniscience: her writing is, as it has always been, and as most great writing is, an attempt to understand something. Let England Shake is the sound of someone as maddened as they are enthralled, aglow with anger and passion. While Harvey has been known to make albums which are more likely to be admired than loved, this is assuredly one of the latter. ANDREW MUELLER

The first of Polly Harvey’s eighth studio album was heard in April 2010, when she made a memorably peculiar appearance on The Andrew Marr Show. Wrapped in a black feather boa, equipped with an autoharp, watched by an audience consisting of the titular BBC commentator and the then-Prime Minister, Harvey performed a hauntingly jaunty ditty called “Let England Shake”, backed by a looped sample from The Four Lads’ 1950s novelty hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”. Even by Harvey’s formidable standards for presentational incongruity, it was one for the scrapbook.

She knew what she was doing when she chose the forum, however (Harvey, one of the more deliberate and intelligent artists to have strapped on a guitar in the last couple of decades, always knows what she’s doing). In an interview on the same programme, she explained that the new songs she was working on were more outward-looking than the soul-scrabbling ruminations which had filled her records to date, that she’d been thinking about her country, and its role in the world, and her role in it. “I know,” she said, “that the music that I make is formed out of the landscape I’ve grown up in, and the history of this nation.”

The American journalist David Remnick once made the unimprovable observation that the English were distinguished among the world’s peoples in exhibiting schadenfreude towards themselves. Harvey’s survey of her homeland observes that tendency, evoking the awkward grimace with which most middle-class English people react to the hoisting of their own flag. Let England Shake is in this respect a throwback to the more personal torments that have so far dominated Harvey’s records: her country, like the vexatious lovers who inspired Dry and Is This Desire?, is something with which she can live neither with nor without. “You leave a taste,” she informs her homeland in “England”. “A bitter one.”

Let England Shake leads with its as-heard-on-The Andrew Marr Show title track, adding a toytown symphonia of saxophone, trombone, xylophone and Mellotron to Harvey’s autoharp, and dropping the Four Lads sample. Harvey perhaps felt it was too obvious a cue for what follows. Her album-length consideration of her nation is, as it turns out, set almost exclusively in those forever English corners of foreign fields – with particular reference to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, a misbegotten, grotesquely botched attempt by the allied forces to seize Constantinople, now Istanbul. Three of the twelve tracks (“All And Everyone”, “On Battleship Hill”, “The Colour Of The Earth”) are explicitly placed amid what Harvey accurately describes as this “death’s anchorage”, and several others could be.

It’s an odd choice of setting. The Gallipoli disaster has been so completely subsumed into the founding mythologies of Australia and New Zealand that the British contribution to the body count – somewhere north of 30,000 – is largely forgotten. Harvey’s focus on it might, perhaps, be the influence of her long-time Australian collaborator, former Bad Seed Mick Harvey – who, to judge by the lyrical command of locations and detail, may have pressed upon Polly a copy of Australian writer Les Carlyon’s magisterial history, Gallipoli (Mick takes a turn at lead vocals on closing track “The Colour Of The Earth”, inhabiting a veteran mourning a friend lost charging from “the Anzac trench”). It’s just as likely, though, that Harvey perceived Gallipoli’s echoes in more recent misconceived military adventures in the Middle East. The thread she picks up unravels to “This Glorious Land”, in which a citizen of some modern-day host of imperial hubris laments their lot (“Our land is ploughed by tanks, and feet marching”) and “Written On The Forehead”, a skilful evocation of the chaos of conquest (“Date palms, orange and tangerine trees, and eyes were crying for everything.”)

Musically, Let England Shake has in common with all other PJ Harvey albums that it doesn’t sound like any other PJ Harvey albums, which have lurched from the punky indie rock of Rid Of Me to the gothic piano balladry of White Chalk. On this one, Polly, Mick Harvey, career-long foil John Parish and producer Flood have conjured a febrile, electrified take on English folk, touched up with more straightforward rock touches. Pixies are a recurring motif, with distinctly Joey Santiago-like lead riffs lighting up “The Last Living Rose” and “In The Dark Places”. Harvey’s falsetto trills and the electric edges of the sound also remind of Cocteau Twins at their less skittish.

Though The Four Lads haven’t made the cut, there are a couple of moments where Harvey flaunts the aptitude for borrowing that she first exhibited when she helped herself to South Pacific’s “Gonna wash that man right outta my hair” on “Sheela-Na-Gig”. The aforementioned “The Glorious Land” is introduced with a sounding of the charge, introducing the looming occupiers feared by its narrator. More jarringly, but much more effectively, “The Words That Maketh Murder” spends most of its span resembling a straight-forward frontline lament, its elegantly brutal language redolent of the poetry of The Trenches, before cribbing from, of all things, Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”: in the context that Harvey has established, of terrified men cringing amid flyblown viscera, the question “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?” is a splendidly gruesome irony.

The album’s near six-minute centrepiece, “All And Everyone” may be the single most astonishing thing this consistently astonishing artist has yet recorded. Planting herself in the bloodsoaked dirt of Bolton’s Ridge, which trundles beachward from the Gallipoli battlefield of Lone Pine, Harvey summons the spectre of an overworked Reaper hovering over the remains of fallen Light Horsemen (“Death hung in the smoke and clung/To 400 acres of useless beachfront/A bank of red earth, dripping down death”). This is brave writing: many are the musicians who have beclowned themselves fearfully by attempting to describe war while knowing nothing of it.

Harvey triumphs, in this and many other respects, by disdaining the temptations of omniscience: her writing is, as it has always been, and as most great writing is, an attempt to understand something.

Let England Shake is the sound of someone as maddened as they are enthralled, aglow with anger and passion. While Harvey has been known to make albums which are more likely to be admired than loved, this is assuredly one of the latter.

ANDREW MUELLER

The White Stripes split up

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The White Stripes split up
The White Stripes have announced they have split up. A statement posted yesterday (February 1) on their official website, Whitestripes.com, explained that the Detroit duo would make "no further new recordings or perform live". The statement read: "The reason is not due to artistic differences or l...

The White Stripes have announced they have split up.

A statement posted yesterday (February 1) on their official website, Whitestripes.com, explained that the Detroit duo would make “no further new recordings or perform live”.

The statement read: “The reason is not due to artistic differences or lack of wanting to continue, nor any health issues as both Meg and Jack [White] are feeling fine and in good health.”

In 2007 the band cancelled world tour dates as drummer Meg was suffering from acute anxiety. They have not played live since that year.

The statement continued: “It [the split] is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way.”

The band also left a personal message to their fans on the site. “The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore,” they wrote. “The White Stripes belongs to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to.”

They also explained that music from the band, including unreleased material, would continue to be put out by Jack White‘s record label, Third Man Records.

The blues-rock pair released their first, self-titled album in 1999 then made a mainstream breakthrough in 2001 with their third album, ‘White Blood Cells’. Their last full album release was 2007’s ‘Icky Thump’ and they released a live album, ‘Under Great White Northern Lights’, last year.

Jack White currently fronts The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, whose second album, ‘Sea Of Cowards’, came out last year.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

The Rolling Stones deny 2011 tour plans

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The Rolling Stones deny 2011 tour plans
The Rolling Stones have said they have no "firm" plans to play live, following news of a potential new tour being made public via a lawsuit. Yesterday (February 1) details of a suit between promoters Live Nation and the company's former chairman Michael Cohl revealed that a tour could have been on ...

The Rolling Stones have said they have no “firm” plans to play live, following news of a potential new tour being made public via a lawsuit.

Yesterday (February 1) details of a suit between promoters Live Nation and the company’s former chairman Michael Cohl revealed that a tour could have been on the cards.

Although they stopped short of denying that they would play live this year, the band released a statement saying no dates were confirmed. “The Stones confirmed today they have no firm plans to tour at this time,” their spokesperson said.

Clarifying their association with the lawsuit, they added: “Following the end of the 2007 A Bigger Bang world tour The Rolling Stones became free from any contractual arrangements or agreements with Michael Cohl. He is neither their representative nor their tour promoter.”

Cohl is countersuing against Live Nation, who filed against him in 2008 in relation to a contract between them. He claims the company attempted to “interfere” and “destroy” his bid to gain promotional rights to a 2011 tour.

Last November guitarist Keith Richards said the band were in fact likely to tour this year.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Blur to release new material?

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Blur to release new material?
Blur look to be a step closer to recording new material – Graham Coxon has tweeted that they're meeting up today (February 3). The guitarist, writing on his Twitter page, Twitter.com/grahamcoxon, wrote that the four-piece were getting together for a hot drink and could end up recording. "Now of...

Blur look to be a step closer to recording new material – Graham Coxon has tweeted that they’re meeting up today (February 3).

The guitarist, writing on his Twitter page, Twitter.com/grahamcoxon, wrote that the four-piece were getting together for a hot drink and could end up recording.

“Now off to see the Blur boys and have coffee and maybe switch a tape recorder on!” he wrote.

When asked for more details he added: “We are having a meet-up, might get a guitar out.”

Last November Blur frontman Damon Albarn said the band planned to reconvene in early 2011, but that firm plans were not locked down.

The band last released a single, ‘Fool’s Day’, in April 2010 as a limited-edition vinyl one-off for Record Store Day. Their last gig was headlining T In The Park in Scotland in July 2009.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Hayvanlar Alemi: “Guarana Superpower”

John Mulvey
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A few years ago, I came across an album called "Love, Peace & Poetry 9: Turkish Psychedelic Music", one of those compilations that suddenly opens up a new corridor of musical investigation. At around the same time in the late ‘60s as British and American bands were appropriating vaguely Eastern influences into their music, it revealed that a bunch of Turkish artists were taking the trip in reverse. On these tracks, Anatolian folk influences and traditional instruments – like the saz, a kind of Turkish bouzouki – became electrified and thrown into battle with blazing rock, and some extraordinary musicians emerged, notably Erkin Koray (whose "Elektronik Turkular" I can wholeheartedly recommend). As is the way with some of these things, however, it can be hard to work out how these musical scenes moved on, and what their local legacies are today. Like the Brazilian Tropicalia uprising of the same time, it’s embarrassingly convenient for us to fence a scene off, consign it to history, or concentrate on how it influenced UK and American artists (Beck and Devendra Banhart in the case of Tropicalia; Voice Of The Seven Thunders with the Turkish stuff). At the end of last year, however, an album turned up in the Uncut offices from a new band called Hayvanlar Alemi (“Animal Kingdom” in translation, apparently), which logically suggested that a psychedelic scene had continued to develop in Turkish over the intervening three or four decades. "Guarana Superpower" is released on the Sublime Frequencies label, the Sun City Girls’ outlet for putting out a frequently intoxicating mix of field recordings, informal ethnomusical surveys, and artist albums by the likes of Group Doueh (from the Western Sahara) and the frenetic Syrian bandleader, Omar Souleyman. Initially, it’s easy to imagine that Hayvanlar Alemi are a prank concocted by the fertile minds of Alan and Richard Bishop. If the Sun City Girls raided countless musical traditions with a certain vigorous irreverence, Hayvanlar appear to operate in an uncannily similar way. Guarana Superpower draws on North African jams and Far-Eastern pop as well as an Anatolian psych tradition, while the likes of “Mega Lambada” have very strong affinities with the Sun City Girls themselves circa "Torch Of The Mystics" – or, indeed, with Richard Bishop’s current unit, Rangda. Occasionally, too, the guitarist Ozum Itez seems to be channelling the wild desert twang of Dick Dale (“Snakesurfing”, especially, is pure Tarantino catnip). It’s a great record and, once you’ve penetrated Sublime Frequencies’ customary haze, it proves to be the tip of an iceberg. A few minutes on www.myspace.com/hayvanlaralemi reveals Sun City-esque levels of productivity, twinned with a demystifying spirit of generosity. "Guarana Superstar" is their second “proper” album, mostly culled from a bunch of low-key releases that are available to be downloaded for free. Hayvanlar Alemi’s 2006 debut, "Gaga", on sale at iTunes, is revealed to be a brooding, post-rockish salvo. Of the others, I can only suggest caution with regard to "Visions Of A Psychedelic Ankara", which looks promising but actually consists of crusty dub reggae, which may provoke mildly distressing flashbacks to a far-flung corner of the Glastonbury Festival in about 1992. Here, though, is a band with a rich hinterland, and a musical agenda that reflects but, ultimately, transcends their cultural origins. And if we need any final proof that they’re not a Bishop brothers hoax, Hayvanlar Alemi are set to play at London’s Barbican on May 13, supporting Group Doueh.

A few years ago, I came across an album called “Love, Peace & Poetry 9: Turkish Psychedelic Music”, one of those compilations that suddenly opens up a new corridor of musical investigation.

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Citigroup takes ownership of EMI

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Citigroup takes ownership of EMI
EMI has been taken over by US bank Citigroup. The bank had been the major record label's creditor as it racked up debts of £3.4 billion. Now, after taking ownership of the company, the bank has reduced the debt to £1.2 billion, reports BBC News. Lily Allen, Pete Doherty, Katy Perry, Robbie Willi...

EMI has been taken over by US bank Citigroup.

The bank had been the major record label’s creditor as it racked up debts of £3.4 billion. Now, after taking ownership of the company, the bank has reduced the debt to £1.2 billion, reports BBC News.

Lily Allen, Pete Doherty, Katy Perry, Robbie Williams and Gorillaz are among the artists signed to EMI.

Citigroup plans to sell on the label, which will continue under its current management.

In 2007 EMI was taken over by the Terra Firma company, with Citigroup loaning the money to allow its chairman, Guy Hands, to spearhead the takeover.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Ringo Starr reportedly moves into making video games

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Ringo Starr reportedly moves into making video games
Ringo Starr has filed for a trademark for the name 'Ringo' to apply to video game software and downloadable computer games. The ex-Beatle registered the name next to the "computer game software" and "downloadable computer games via the internet and wireless devices" categories in his application, r...

Ringo Starr has filed for a trademark for the name ‘Ringo’ to apply to video game software and downloadable computer games.

The ex-Beatle registered the name next to the “computer game software” and “downloadable computer games via the internet and wireless devices” categories in his application, reports Uk.gamespot.com. This has led to speculation that he’s branching out further into the video and mobile game world.

The drummer has kept tight-lipped about the possible new venture, and has not responded to enquiries for clarification.

Any new move into the industry wouldn’t be his first. In June 2009 [url=http://www.nme.com/news/the-beatles/45034]he and Paul McCartney appeared at Microsoft’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in California to promote ‘The Beatles: Rock Band'[/url].

That game has sold over two million copies worldwide since its launch.

Starr released his most recent solo album, ‘Y Not’, last year.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

U2 to release next album in May?

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U2 to release next album in May?
U2 will release their new album in May - according to one online retailer. Although no official release date for the record has been announced, the German version of retailer Amazon, Amazon.de, has listed a new release for the band for May 27. U2's spokesperson told Uncut's sister-title NME: "As h...

U2 will release their new album in May – according to one online retailer.

Although no official release date for the record has been announced, the German version of retailer Amazon, Amazon.de, has listed a new release for the band for May 27.

U2‘s spokesperson told Uncut‘s sister-title NME: “As has been widely reported U2 are in the studio working on a new record but no release date has been set.”

Frontman Bono said last year that the band had been working on songs for the album with Brian ‘Danger Mouse’ Burton on production duties. He had also claimed shortly after the release of their last record, 2009’s ‘No Line On The Horizon’, that the group had made another album called ‘Songs Of Ascent’ during the same recording sessions, but this has yet to see the light of day.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

March 2011

Ipclee
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0
March 2011
16 tracks of the wildest New Orleans soul and R'n'B, featuring Dr John, Allen Toussaint, Fats Domino, Bobby Charles, Professor Longhair and more I was rummaging on YouTube looking for something else when I came across some footage of Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder at an Iraq Veterans Against The War conc...

16 tracks of the wildest New Orleans soul and R’n’B, featuring Dr John, Allen Toussaint, Fats Domino, Bobby Charles, Professor Longhair and more

I was rummaging on YouTube looking for something else when I came across some footage of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder at an Iraq Veterans Against The War concert. Eddie in the clip ends up playing a song the audience may think he’s actually written, perhaps for the event he’s appearing at, but actually hasn’t. My guess is, though, that even if he’d introduced it as a version of a 1964 protest song by Phil Ochs called

Fleet Foxes: “Helplessness Blues”

John Mulvey
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0

Perhaps you’ve already picked this up, but the title track from Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” has popped up as a free download at the band’s website in the last day. Will save my powder until I write about the whole album, but I think this is terrific: all the charm of the first record, but with a new depth and elaboration (less whimsical, perhaps). It feels like a very comfortable evolution, and one that places Robin Pecknold and his bandmates in a kind of serendipitous middle ground between Grizzly Bear and Joanna Newsom. Give it a play or three and let me know what you think.

Perhaps you’ve already picked this up, but the title track from Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” has popped up as a free download at the band’s website in the last day.

Continue

The Fourth Uncut Playlist Of 2011

John Mulvey
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A few more nice things this week, not least the new Chris Forsyth album, which features some assistance from various bits of the Helix/Hans Chew axis. I think I might tackle them both for my next magazine column, but bear with me. Not everything here I’m keen on, I should say. Also, it may not be a good idea to keep asking me about the REM album… 1. Low – C’Mon (Sub Pop) 2. Big Blood & The Bleedin’ Hearts – Big Blood & The Bleedin’ Hearts (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Big_Blood/) 3. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang – Island Brothers/ New Wonder (Domino) 4. EMA – The Grey Ship (Souterrain Transmissions) 5. Daughters Of The Sun – Ghost With Chains (Not Not Fun) 6. Chris Forsyth – Paranoid Cat (Family Vineyard) 7. Apache Dropout – Apache Dropout (Family Vineyard) 8. Cults – Go Outside (Columbia) 9. Bibio – Mind Bokeh (Warp) 10. Derrick Carter – Fabric 56 (Fabric) 11. Metal Mountains – Golden Trees (Amish) 12. The Sand Band – All Through The Night (Deltasonic) 13. Deaf Center – Owl Splinters (Type) 14. Big Blood – Dark Country Magic (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Big_Blood/) 15. Josh T Pearson – The Last Of The Country Gentlemen (Mute) 16. Mystery Record, I’m Afraid 17 D Charles Speer & The Helix – Leaving The Commonwealth (Thrill Jockey) 18. Cornershop Featuring Bubbley Kaur – Cornershop & The Double O Groove Of (Ample Play)

A few more nice things this week, not least the new Chris Forsyth album, which features some assistance from various bits of the Helix/Hans Chew axis. I think I might tackle them both for my next magazine column, but bear with me.

Continue

MUSIC DVD: LEMMY

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MUSIC DVD: LEMMY

“Don’t tell anyone, but Lemmy’s a really nice guy,” says Mike Inez from Alice In Chains, but it’s part of Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister’s charm that his really-niceness is buried, albeit fairly close to the surface. I should know. I interviewed him in the 1980s in his splendid terraced house in Willesden, every inch of ceiling space taken up with model WWII aircraft, where he got me drunk on vodka and we had our photo taken in the garden together. And then, six weeks later, when I decided, perhaps foolishly, to introduce myself to him again in the Limelight Club when he was talking to some women, Lemmy strangled me. For quite a long time. Things like that tend to stick in the mind. But who, one wonders, is the real Lemmy? This is a man who’s on good terms with one of his sons but has never met the other one. A man who’s “really nice” but has a collection of Nazi memorabilia and has said some odd things about the Holocaust. A confirmed bachelor (no, not that kind) who’s had sex with 1,000 women (“It’s not that many when you consider that I’m 64,” he explains) who also seems entirely gentlemanly with the ladies. And a member of the ultimate hippy group, Hawkwind – he sings, let’s never forget, on their sole hit, “Silver Machine” – who formed a heavy metal group whom the punks loved. Motörhead are a truly great rock band, sometimes underrated because of their cartoony persona. Their best music, from Ace Of Spades to the mournful 1916, is as good as anything in rock music, but most of that greatness is relegated to the second DVD. This documentary – as the title suggests – is, for once, about Lemmy rather than his band. And it looks at its subject by, as it were, walking around his life, spending time with him in Los Angeles and with many and various rock star fans. Along the way we meet Lemmy’s son Paul (“What’s the most precious thing in this apartment?” asks the interviewer and Lemmy replies, “My son”) and various fans. There’s Dave Grohl trading anecdotes about the crapness of The Darkness, Billy Bob Thornton and Lemmy discussing country music, and a slightly unexpected cameo from Jarvis Cocker concerning Hawkwind (sadly, Lemmy and Jarvis do not meet and record an album together). Also on hand are members of Lemmy’s three great bands: The Rockin’ Vickers, Hawkwind and Motörhead. It’s a DVD crammed with moments. There’s Lemmy’s appearance in Californication, Lemmy and son playing onstage, and Lemmy and his Nazi daggers (he has other swords, it’s only fair to point out, only not as many without swastikas on). The Extras DVD is stuffed with music, more interviews and yet more music. There’s plenty here, and access to Lemmy is both total and well-used. And the real Lemmy? Sometimes it looks to be rather bleak being Lemmy, a man in his sixties living alone in a foreign country, someone with more admirers than friends, someone who’s never married and is estranged from one of his own children. His interests – sex, war and rock, essentially – are teenage (there’s an oddly charming scene where Lemmy meets some Americans who own a WWII German tank and he gets all the technical specs wrong, like your dad admiring a sportscar but not actually being a qualified mechanic). You do feel, as a friend of mine who visited Lemmy in his apartment to interview him told me, that he may well be a lonely man, held together with his obsessions, his Jack and Coke and his collection of (admittedly brilliant) rock anecdotes. That said, the presence of son Paul in his life is clearly an important and humanising one, and he has no shortage of admirers, male and female, queueing up to be with the great man. In the end, this is a man who’s cultivated the Lemmy persona – aggressive on the outside, gruffly warm on the inside – for so long that it’s hard to tell Lemmy from the caricatures and action figures of himself he shows off to the camera. Probably, that’s the way he likes it – although you do feel oddly protective off him as LA rocker after LA rocker lays claim to “Lem” as though we hadn’t had him playing our fruit machines and touring with our punk bands long before Sebastian Bach and The Offspring were thought of. And in the end, underneath that leathery, warty, speed-freak biker persona, there is an intelligent, contradiction-filled, witty, bluff and extraordinary man. Whoever he is. EXTRAS: Plenty. Motörhead live, plus many extended interviews, outtakes and offcuts. DAVID QUANTICK

“Don’t tell anyone, but Lemmy’s a really nice guy,” says Mike Inez from Alice In Chains, but it’s part of Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister’s charm that his really-niceness is buried, albeit fairly close to the surface.

I should know. I interviewed him in the 1980s in his splendid terraced house in Willesden, every inch of ceiling space taken up with model WWII aircraft, where he got me drunk on vodka and we had our photo taken in the garden together. And then, six weeks later, when I decided, perhaps foolishly, to introduce myself to him again in the Limelight Club when he was talking to some women, Lemmy strangled me. For quite a long time. Things like that tend to stick in the mind.

But who, one wonders, is the real Lemmy? This is a man who’s on good terms with one of his sons but has never met the other one. A man who’s “really nice” but has a collection of Nazi memorabilia and has said some odd things about the Holocaust. A confirmed bachelor (no, not that kind) who’s had sex with 1,000 women (“It’s not that many when you consider that I’m 64,” he explains) who also seems entirely gentlemanly with the ladies. And a member of the ultimate hippy group, Hawkwind – he sings, let’s never forget, on their sole hit, “Silver Machine” – who formed a heavy metal group whom the punks loved.

Motörhead are a truly great rock band, sometimes underrated because of their cartoony persona. Their best music, from Ace Of Spades to the mournful 1916, is as good as anything in rock music, but most of that greatness is relegated to the second DVD. This documentary – as the title suggests – is, for once, about Lemmy rather than his band. And it looks at its subject by, as it were, walking around his life, spending time with him in Los Angeles and with many and various rock star fans. Along the way we meet Lemmy’s son Paul (“What’s the most precious thing in this apartment?” asks the interviewer and Lemmy replies, “My son”) and various fans. There’s Dave Grohl trading anecdotes about the crapness of The Darkness, Billy Bob Thornton and Lemmy discussing country music, and a slightly unexpected cameo from Jarvis Cocker concerning Hawkwind (sadly, Lemmy and Jarvis do not meet and record an album together).

Also on hand are members of Lemmy’s three great bands: The Rockin’ Vickers, Hawkwind and Motörhead. It’s a DVD crammed with moments. There’s Lemmy’s appearance in Californication, Lemmy and son playing onstage, and Lemmy and his Nazi daggers (he has other swords, it’s only fair to point out, only not as many without swastikas on). The Extras DVD is stuffed with music, more interviews and yet more music. There’s plenty here, and access to Lemmy is both total and well-used.

And the real Lemmy? Sometimes it looks to be rather bleak being Lemmy, a man in his sixties living alone in a foreign country, someone with more admirers than friends, someone who’s never married and is estranged from one of his own children. His interests – sex, war and rock, essentially – are teenage (there’s an oddly charming scene where Lemmy meets some Americans who own a WWII German tank and he gets all the technical specs wrong, like your dad admiring a sportscar but not actually being a qualified mechanic). You do feel, as a friend of mine who visited Lemmy in his apartment to interview him told me, that he may well be a lonely man, held together with his obsessions, his Jack and Coke and his collection of (admittedly brilliant) rock anecdotes. That said, the presence of son Paul in his life is clearly an important and humanising one, and he has no shortage of admirers, male and female, queueing up to be with the great man.

In the end, this is a man who’s cultivated the Lemmy persona – aggressive on the outside, gruffly warm on the inside – for so long that it’s hard to tell Lemmy from the caricatures and action figures of himself he shows off to the camera. Probably, that’s the way he likes it – although you do feel oddly protective off him as LA rocker after LA rocker lays claim to “Lem” as though we hadn’t had him playing our fruit machines and touring with our punk bands long before Sebastian Bach and The Offspring were thought of. And in the end, underneath that leathery, warty, speed-freak biker persona, there is an intelligent, contradiction-filled, witty, bluff and extraordinary man. Whoever he is.

EXTRAS: Plenty. Motörhead live, plus many extended interviews, outtakes and offcuts.

DAVID QUANTICK

GREGG ALLMAN – LOW COUNTRY BLUES

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GREGG ALLMAN – LOW COUNTRY BLUES

A liver transplant is a hell of a way to celebrate your 63rd year on the planet, but Gregg Allman had the good sense to make a great album before he went under the knife. Perhaps his face-off with mortality, while not his first, helped energise this roaring return to form. Allman certainly sounds like he’s singing for his life on a set of masterfully played blues classics, drawn from the artists that first excited the pubescent Gregg and his big brother Duane back at the dawn of the 1960s, when the pair would sneak into the shows of BB King in a still-segregated South. King is one of the luminaries represented in a perfectly chosen repertoire that embraces country man Sleepy John Estes, urban bandleader Louis Jordan, Chicago stalwart Magic Sam and – Gregg’s all-time hero – Southern crooner Bobby Bland. The solitary original, “Just Another Rider”, is a defiant but nondescript “I’m still standing” rock-blues. The choice of T Bone Burnett to produce his first solo album in 14 years was surely a no-brainer. Burnett’s prodigious output has included some major refits for stars of a certain age in search of a tasteful upgrade of their still-active talents. Robert Plant/Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand and Elton John/Leon Russell’s The Union are recent cases in point. Low Country Blues has touches of the Americana that Burnett brought to those records – a rolling semi-acoustic “Believe I’ll Go Back Home”, with dancing mandolin for example – but the heart of the album lies in an altogether different place; the roadhouses and ballrooms of 1950s black America. Records from the golden age of rhythm and blues still dazzle, but their sound is compressed and muddy. Here we have a top-class band reproducing the sound one would have actually heard at a Bobby Bland show back in his prime; wickedly spiky electric guitar, big, purring brass section, rhythm section dragging behind the beat, and up front, a man pouring out his soul. Burnett’s wizardry – an anorak knowledge of vintage analogue equipment with a great ear for atmosphere – lends Low Country sonic charm, and a five-star band do the rest. Alongside Burnett’s usual rhythm section there’s Dr John, whose teasing piano is a constant, background presence, while Doyle Bramhall II proves he’s the young axeman to watch (Doyle I is also a guitar slinger of eminence). His playing, say on Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied” has an unusual grace. Allman takes to the spotlight with the assurance of a man who’s been singing the blues for half a century. The Allman Brothers Band may have helped originate the bragging Southern boogie of Lynyrd Skynyrd et al, but their allegiance to the blues always gave them a spine others lacked, even if the band never recovered from the loss of the trailblazing Duane. Low Country Blues reshapes Allman’s personal narrative into that of modern bluesman, craggy and besuited on the cover. It’s a record some distance from the jam band aesthetic and dogged rock of 1969’s The Allman Brothers Band and its ‘Gruntin’ Gregg’ vocals, further still from Gregg’s various midlife follies, though the toll of failed marriages (Cher! Twice!) is there in Gregg’s testimony on Amos Milburn’s “Tears Tears Tears”; “I believed it when she told such sweet and lovely lies”. Gregg and T Bone vary the pace and style with aplomb. After the opening, over-inflated “Floating Bridge” we go to the country moan of “Devil Got My Woman” with dobro and slide. “Blind Man” is big band blues plucked from Bobby Bland’s heyday. “Please Accept My Love” is lesser-known BB King given a sumptuous horn coda. Magic Sam’s “My Love Is Your Love” and Otis Rush’s “Checking On My Baby” take us to West Side Chicago for slow, hard lessons in love. The closing “Rolling Stone”, with Allman’s B-3 organ up front, is a southern swamp thing, with Rebennack’s gris-gris piano and Bramhall’s slide helping cook up an atmosphere. Like the opener, it promises more than it delivers, but pretty much everything in between rings the bell. NEIL SPENCER Q+A GREGG ALLMAN You made the record before you got your new liver. What kind of shape were you in? I was feelin’ pretty damn good. The music lifted me up. Everything fell right into place. I expected to be in the studio at least three weeks, and we cut 15 tracks in 11 days. I put a pilot vocal on every one of ’em, but a couple of ’em were keepers, and there wasn’t no denyin’ it. “Please Accept My Love” was a first take. It came across nicely – I was stone in the mood. How did this experience differ from your band and solo projects? When you have just the head chef and the very professional cats he’s workin’ with, you all get together and they say, “How do you want this”? The communication was just so right-fucking-on. They seemed to know just what I wanted, and I wasn’t totally sure myself, because it was different songs, different settings and they had access to every instrument anybody could want. It was a big sandbox with all the toys, and it was a whole lot of fun. Everybody kept smilin’, and there was no sign of any bullshit. Everything on the album seems authentically vintage. It sounds like it should be on a scratchy old 78, with the stylus buried down in the record, hitting potholes in the grooves [laughs]. It was really happening, I’ll tell ya. I can’t wait to do another. You’ve said you want T Bone to produce the next Allman Brothers album. I don’t know if it’d work or not. I don’t know if T Bone would be into it, or if anybody’d be into it. But the Brothers wanted to learn “Just Another Rider” yesterday when we was at rehearsal. INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

A liver transplant is a hell of a way to celebrate your 63rd year on the planet, but Gregg Allman had the good sense to make a great album before he went under the knife. Perhaps his face-off with mortality, while not his first, helped energise this roaring return to form. Allman certainly sounds like he’s singing for his life on a set of masterfully played blues classics, drawn from the artists that first excited the pubescent Gregg and his big brother Duane back at the dawn of the 1960s, when the pair would sneak into the shows of BB King in a still-segregated South.

King is one of the luminaries represented in a perfectly chosen repertoire that embraces country man Sleepy John Estes, urban bandleader Louis Jordan, Chicago stalwart Magic Sam and – Gregg’s all-time hero – Southern crooner Bobby Bland. The solitary original, “Just Another Rider”, is a defiant but nondescript “I’m still standing” rock-blues.

The choice of T Bone Burnett to produce his first solo album in 14 years was surely a no-brainer. Burnett’s prodigious output has included some major refits for stars of a certain age in search of a tasteful upgrade of their still-active talents. Robert Plant/Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand and Elton John/Leon Russell’s The Union are recent cases in point.

Low Country Blues has touches of the Americana that Burnett brought to those records – a rolling semi-acoustic “Believe I’ll Go Back Home”, with dancing mandolin for example – but the heart of the album lies in an altogether different place; the roadhouses and ballrooms of 1950s black America.

Records from the golden age of rhythm and blues still dazzle, but their sound is compressed and muddy. Here we have a top-class band reproducing the sound one would have actually heard at a Bobby Bland show back in his prime; wickedly spiky electric guitar, big, purring brass section, rhythm section dragging behind the beat, and up front, a man pouring out his soul.

Burnett’s wizardry – an anorak knowledge of vintage analogue equipment with a great ear for atmosphere – lends Low Country sonic charm, and a five-star band do the rest. Alongside Burnett’s usual rhythm section there’s Dr John, whose teasing piano is a constant, background presence, while Doyle Bramhall II proves he’s the young axeman to watch (Doyle I is also a guitar slinger of eminence). His playing, say on Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied” has an unusual grace.

Allman takes to the spotlight with the assurance of a man who’s been singing the blues for half a century. The Allman Brothers Band may have helped originate the bragging Southern boogie of Lynyrd Skynyrd et al, but their allegiance to the blues always gave them a spine others lacked, even if the band never recovered from the loss of the trailblazing Duane.

Low Country Blues reshapes Allman’s personal narrative into that of modern bluesman, craggy and besuited on the cover. It’s a record some distance from the jam band aesthetic and dogged rock of 1969’s The Allman Brothers Band and its ‘Gruntin’ Gregg’ vocals, further still from Gregg’s various midlife follies, though the toll of failed marriages (Cher! Twice!) is there in Gregg’s testimony on Amos Milburn’s “Tears Tears Tears”; “I believed it when she told such sweet and lovely lies”.

Gregg and T Bone vary the pace and style with aplomb. After the opening, over-inflated “Floating Bridge” we go to the country moan of “Devil Got My Woman” with dobro and slide. “Blind Man” is big band blues plucked from Bobby Bland’s heyday. “Please Accept My Love” is lesser-known BB King given a sumptuous horn coda. Magic Sam’s “My Love Is Your Love” and Otis Rush’s “Checking On My Baby” take us to West Side Chicago for slow, hard lessons in love. The closing “Rolling Stone”, with Allman’s B-3 organ up front, is a southern swamp thing, with Rebennack’s gris-gris piano and Bramhall’s slide helping cook up an atmosphere. Like the opener, it promises more than it delivers, but pretty much everything in between rings the bell.

NEIL SPENCER

Q+A

GREGG ALLMAN

You made the record before you got your new liver. What kind of shape were you in?

I was feelin’ pretty damn good. The music lifted me up. Everything fell right into place. I expected to be in the studio at least three weeks, and we cut 15 tracks in 11 days. I put a pilot vocal on every one of ’em, but a couple of ’em were keepers, and there wasn’t no denyin’ it. “Please Accept My Love” was a first take. It came across nicely – I was stone in the mood.

How did this experience differ from your band and solo projects?

When you have just the head chef and the very professional cats he’s workin’ with, you all get together and they say, “How do you want this”? The communication was just so right-fucking-on. They seemed to know just what I wanted, and I wasn’t totally sure myself, because it was different songs, different settings and they had access to every instrument anybody could want. It was a big sandbox with all the toys, and it was a whole lot of fun. Everybody kept smilin’, and there was no sign of any bullshit.

Everything on the album seems authentically vintage.

It sounds like it should be on a scratchy old 78, with the stylus buried down in the record, hitting potholes in the grooves [laughs]. It was really happening, I’ll tell ya. I can’t wait to do another.

You’ve said you want T Bone to produce the next Allman Brothers album.

I don’t know if it’d work or not. I don’t know if T Bone would be into it, or if anybody’d be into it. But the Brothers wanted to learn “Just Another Rider” yesterday when we was at rehearsal.

INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

Marvelettes co-founder Gladys Horton passes away

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Marvelettes co-founder Gladys Horton passes away

Marvelettes co-founder Gladys Horton has died at the age of 66. The singer's son Vaughn Thornton confirmed that she passed away on Wednesday (January 26) at a nursing home in Sherman Oaks in California. She had been recovering from a stroke, reports BBC News. Horton formed the Marvelettes, who were signed to Berry Gordy's Motown label, with her schoolfriend Georgia Dobbins in 1960. They had their only US Number One single a year later with 'Please Mr Postman', which was also the first chart-topper for the label. The Beatles later covered the track, as did The Carpenters who took it to the top of the US charts again in 1974. Horton left the band in 1967 to get married, having been replaced as the group's lead singer by bandmate Wanda Young Rogers. Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk. Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Marvelettes co-founder Gladys Horton has died at the age of 66.

The singer’s son Vaughn Thornton confirmed that she passed away on Wednesday (January 26) at a nursing home in Sherman Oaks in California. She had been recovering from a stroke, reports BBC News.

Horton formed the Marvelettes, who were signed to Berry Gordy‘s Motown label, with her schoolfriend Georgia Dobbins in 1960. They had their only US Number One single a year later with ‘Please Mr Postman’, which was also the first chart-topper for the label.

The Beatles later covered the track, as did The Carpenters who took it to the top of the US charts again in 1974.

Horton left the band in 1967 to get married, having been replaced as the group’s lead singer by bandmate Wanda Young Rogers.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour’s son charged over student riots

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Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour’s son charged over student riots

The son of Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour has been charged with violent disorder in relation to last year's student protests in London. Charlie Gilmour, 21, was pictured swinging from a Union flag on the Cenotaph in Whitehall on December 9 while protesting about student fees. The Cambridge University student has also been charged with the theft of a mannequin leg during the protests, reports the Press Association. He will appear London's City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on February 10 to face the charges. Speaking in reaction to his December arrest, Gilmour described his actions as a "moment of idiocy" and claimed not to know the significance of the Cenotaph, which commemorates Britain's war dead. Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk. Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

The son of Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour has been charged with violent disorder in relation to last year’s student protests in London.

Charlie Gilmour, 21, was pictured swinging from a Union flag on the Cenotaph in Whitehall on December 9 while protesting about student fees.

The Cambridge University student has also been charged with the theft of a mannequin leg during the protests, reports the Press Association.

He will appear London‘s City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court on February 10 to face the charges.

Speaking in reaction to his December arrest, Gilmour described his actions as a “moment of idiocy” and claimed not to know the significance of the Cenotaph, which commemorates Britain’s war dead.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

TRUE GRIT

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TRUE GRIT
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen Starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld The new Coen brothers film is a remake of the popular 1969 Western that starred John Wayne as cantankerous, one- eyed US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, a role played here by Jeff Bridges. Wayne won his only Best Actor Os...

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld

The new Coen brothers film is a remake of the popular 1969 Western that starred John Wayne as cantankerous, one- eyed US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, a role played here by Jeff Bridges. Wayne won his only Best Actor Oscar for his rowdy turn as Cogburn, playing the part broadly, cheerfully sending himself up. But this is very much Bridges’ carefully nuanced take on Rooster Cogburn, and he brings his own piss, vinegar and grumpy bluster to the part.

We hear plenty about Reuben Cogburn before we finally meet him. According to the sheriff at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Cogburn is “a pitiless man, double tough, fear don’t enter into his thinking”. But still, he “loves to pull a cork”.

Cogburn is being sought out by Mattie Ross, a 14 year-old girl who’s after retribution for her father’s murder – “robbed of life, a horse and two California gold pieces he carried in his pocket”. Mattie eventually finds Cogburn on the toilet.

It’s hardly an auspicious introduction.

Craggy and irascible, marinated in whisky, he sleeps in a rope bed in a room behind a Chinese grocery. “A love of decency does not abide in you,” were, we learn, the parting words of his second wife. As a US Marshal, he claims to have killed “12, 15, stopping men in flight or defending myself et cetera”, but the count is far higher. Jeff Bridges looks fantastic, incidentally. His Cogburn is a solid, meaty man, like an elderly grizzly bear, with his one eye blazing away from behind an impressively shaggy grey beard. Unlike Wayne’s burlesque take on Cogburn, there’s an undercurrent of darkness in Bridges’ performance; a cumulative sense of what he’s done and what he’s seen having taken its toll. Bridges has previously done much excellent work in Westerns – Bad Company, Rancho Deluxe and Heaven’s Gate among them. But the most pertinent here might well be Walter Hill’s tremendous Wild Bill, where he played James Butler Hickok with the kind of gruff intransigency he also displays as Marshal Cogburn.

Mattie hires Cogburn to pursue her father’s killer, farm hand Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), who’s fled into Indian country, where the law at Fort Smith has no jurisdiction. “It will not be a daisy-picking expedition,” Mattie is told. So she also hires a Texas Ranger, LeBoeuf (Matt Damon, mercifully obliterating the memory of Glen Campbell’s wooden performance in the original), who’s been chasing Chaney himself for several months. LeBoeuf is pompous, condescending: “I have lapped filthy water from a hoof print, and been glad for it.”

The Coens are often drawn to such mismatched couplings – the Dude and Walter in The Big Lebowski, Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare’s hitmen in Fargo, the triple bill of stupids in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?. And typically, they enjoy the friction between Cogburn and LeBoeuf as they head deep into the Choctaw Nation with Mattie in tow. It’s true, too, that the Coens have always made splendid use of language in their films – the regional dialects in Fargo spring to mind, or the rich Southern idioms to be found in O Brother… Here they roll around in Portis’ courtly, old-fashioned vernacular, particularly relishing the fractious back-and-forth between Cogburn and LeBoeuf. “I am a foolish old man,” howls Cogburn, “who has been dragged into a wild goose chase by a harpy in trousers and a nincompoop.”

The trek into Indian country moves into wild stretches of woodland and open plains experiencing the first dustings of winter snow – all beautifully shot by the Coens’ regular cinematographer Roger Deakins in earthy, rustic tones. There’s an unsettling encounter with a man dressed in a bear skin who practises dentistry for the Indians, and a fatal one with two outlaws holed up in a shack, before they finally catch up with Chaney. He has taken up with ‘Lucky’ Ned Pepper (played with admirable menace by Barry Pepper, channelling Robert Duvall in the 1967 original) and his gang – “a congress of louts” with impressively bad teeth. Inevitably, this is where we finally learn who really has true grit.

In many ways, True Grit might appear to be an unusually straight-faced genre exercise for the Coens. If their Oscar winner No Country For Old Men felt like a contemporary Western, then True Grit seems very much the real deal, with the high country locations redolent of, say, Anthony Mann’s films. Conspicuously, there is none of the brothers’ usual up-ending of their chosen genre – none of the sly spin they brought to, say, film noir in Miller’s Crossing or vintage screwball comedies in The Hudsucker Proxy. The film has the Coens’ wintry humour, sure – but that was always a major attribute of Portis’ novel. If anything, True Grit feels very much part of the Coens ongoing exploration of times and places in American history. And, as with Marge Gunderson in Fargo, the Coens locate at the heart of True Grit a feisty, morally upstanding female character.

Hailee Steinfeld is tremendous as the tenacious Mattie – “You give very little sugar with your pronouncements,” LeBoeuf admonishes her rather sourly. “I admire your salt,” she is told approvingly elsewhere, and you certainly have to give props to a character who spends one night early on in the film sleeping in an undertaker’s office surrounded by corpses: “I felt like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones,” she admits unwaveringly. Matt Damon is equally fine here on his first outing for the Coens. “Never doubt the Texas Ranger, ever stalwart,” he crows. But the peacock preening aside, Damon gradually, unshowily reveals LeBoeuf to be a staunch ally for Mattie and Cogburn.

Of course, you may conclude that True Grit is really about Jeff Bridges, giving another peerless performance for the Coens – his first since The Big Lebowski. It’s true enough that Bridges is currently enjoying a long-deserved purple patch – his Oscar for Crazy Heart last year, while last month, incredibly, he toplined a major studio blockbuster, Tron: Legacy. Without sounding churlish, one invariably wishes these successes had come instead for many of the frankly better films he’s made in the past 40 years. But certainly, with True Grit he’s done great work in a great film. When we see Cogburn in full flight – riding against four armed men – this is rousing stuff. You’d like to think the Duke himself would be applauding the Dude from afar.

MICHAEL BONNER

The Psychic Paramount, Daughters Of The Sun, Metal Mountains

John Mulvey
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Plenty of interesting psych stuff accumulated here over the past few weeks, while I’ve been distracted by a bunch of other things. A bit of a roundup today, kicking off with Daughters Of The Sun, whose “Ghost With Chains” is forthcoming on Not Not Fun. The label’s significant, because NNF seem to have found a sub for the recently-demised Pocahaunted, given that “Ghost With Chains” draws from the same well of strung-out, washed-out, groan-heavy hypno-dirge. Not sure they’ll be making cute indie-pop in a couple of years like Best Coast: Daughters Of The Sun come from Minneapolis (two Minnesota bands in two days must be a record, and this is my 801st post, incidentally) and appear to have been around a while. Good band; if anyone has more info/knowledge, please share. I’m on safer ground, I guess, with Metal Mountains and “Golden Trees”, out about now on Amish. Metal Mountains are essentially three survivors of the ‘90s band Tower Recordings, often – and justifiably – cited as key precursors of the latterday proliferation of homebaked underground bands on a, for want of a better phrase, acid-folk trip. Maybe the best known of the three Metal Mountains players, alongside Helen Rush and the much-employed violinist Samara Lubelski, is Pat Gubler, whose records as PG Six have been very important to me these past few years. It’s Rush here, though, who seems to be taking the lead, pulling the band through some pleasingly-adjusted, brackish reveries that bear comparison, perhaps, with Espers. From “Structures In The Sun” on, there’s a great feel of tempered, candlelit freakout, maybe a fraction heavier on atmosphere than tune, but that’s not a problem. Not much tempered about The Psychic Paramount, as you might imagine from the name. “The Psychic Paramount II”, on No Quarter (home of Endless Boogie, among other things) begins with a great eruptive roar, and initially seems kin to the blast and flail tradition of Monoshock and early Comets On Fire. Soon enough, though, a plot emerges, locating the trio (from New York, I think) as closer to Yamamotor-era Boredoms, when the chaos took on the form of ecstatic ritual circa “Super Æ”. If anything, there might actually be a tiny bit too much form for my taste in places, where the Psychic Paramount’s hard-driving spacerock takes on a mathematical aspect, a little more like, say, Kinski or Mugstar. But this is pretty cool; wonder how it works live?

Plenty of interesting psych stuff accumulated here over the past few weeks, while I’ve been distracted by a bunch of other things. A bit of a roundup today, kicking off with Daughters Of The Sun, whose “Ghost With Chains” is forthcoming on Not Not Fun.

Continue

Tori Amos pens musical

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Tori Amos pens musical

A musical written by Tori Amos is set to debut at London's National Theatre next year. No details of the musical have been officially announced yet, but in 2007 it was revealed that the singer was working on a theatre adaptation of The Light Princess, an 1864 fairy tale by George MacDonald. The new production is set to open at the Southbank venue's Lyttelton auditorium in April 2012, reports BBC News. See Nationaltheatre.org.uk for venue information. Tori Amos' last album, 'Midwinter Graces', was released in 2009. Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk. Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

A musical written by Tori Amos is set to debut at London‘s National Theatre next year.

No details of the musical have been officially announced yet, but in 2007 it was revealed that the singer was working on a theatre adaptation of The Light Princess, an 1864 fairy tale by George MacDonald.

The new production is set to open at the Southbank venue’s Lyttelton auditorium in April 2012, reports BBC News.

See Nationaltheatre.org.uk for venue information.

Tori Amos‘ last album, ‘Midwinter Graces’, was released in 2009.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Trent Reznor set to continue film score work

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Trent Reznor set to continue film score work
Trent Reznor has said he would like to continue to his film score work by getting to grips with the music for more traditional Hollywood films. The Nine Inch Nails man is celebrating an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score for his work on the The Social Network, an accolade he has described as...

Trent Reznor has said he would like to continue to his film score work by getting to grips with the music for more traditional Hollywood films.

The Nine Inch Nails man is celebrating an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score for his work on the The Social Network, an accolade he has described as “surreal, amazing and flattering”.

Speaking to Hollywoodreporter.com, Reznor said of the film: “I didn’t realise it would resonate with people as much as it has. It’s been amazing and flattering to see what’s happened.”

He said he would “absolutely” be interested in composing for more mainstream Hollywood films. “I’m interested in the discipline and I’m interested in the challenge of working in the more traditional sense,” he said. “I look at working with [a traditional orchestra] as something I haven’t done yet and I’ve always been intrigued by it. I would be up for that challenge.”

He and co-composer Atticus Ross are currently writing the score for the Hollywood remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

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