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THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

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THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES
Directed by Juan José Campanella Starring Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Javier Godino The Secret In Their Eyes won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film – and that can be cause for suspicion. The prize is sometimes considered the safe option for conservative Academy voters when...

Directed by Juan José Campanella

Starring Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Javier Godino

The Secret In Their Eyes won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film – and that can be cause for suspicion. The prize is sometimes considered the safe option for conservative Academy voters when there’s tougher material in the running. Could Juan José Campanella’s genre piece – a very approachable thriller with a touch of middle-aged romance – really be worthy of beating heavyweight contenders The Prophet and The White Ribbon? Certainly, the Jacques Audiard and Michael Haneke films come across as the equivalent of hefty literary novels, where Campanella’s is more an upmarket genre beach read.

This ingenious police-procedural drama is elegantly crafted and more than watchable: it’s also a finely observed character study that, in its second hour, proves more politically charged than you might at first expect.

The story starts in Buenos Aires in 2000, where retired court investigator Benjamin (Ricardo Darín, likeably careworn) returns to his old office to see Irene (Soledad Villamil), a judge he hasn’t seen for decades. Benjamin can’t stop thinking about a rape and murder case they worked on in 1974. He has turned the episode into a novel, and would like Irene’s opinion, but all the evidence – in the two lawyers’ eyes, as the title says – suggests that what has inspired Benjamin is not the rape and murder, but the unresolved romantic tension between the duo.

Flashback to the much younger pair investigating an obsessive admirer of the dead woman. The suspect is tracked down, in an elaborately choreographed chase around a football stadium, the dazzling centrepiece of an otherwise quiet, largely interior-bound piece. Then Argentinian history itself plays a hand and we realise that, even in an ostensibly straight genre exercise, the horrors of the dictatorship years aren’t easily forgotten.

The drama leads – a touch laboriously in its final stretch – to a grim exposition of the way that private justice works itself out in the wake of political trauma. Meanwhile, the film is held together by the warm, somewhat spiky interaction of Darín and Villamil, seen at two different ages (the make-up, especially when making Darín a younger man, requires a leap of faith). One of Latin America’s few internationally recognised stars, Darín – best known here for con-game thriller Nine Queens – faintly recalls Al Pacino with a quizzical, impish streak, and he’s on arresting form here, perfectly matched by the razor-sharp Villamil.

Much of the film’s pleasure lies in this old-fashioned slow-burning romance between two maturely attractive, somewhat cerebral characters. The Secret In Their Eyes is one of those more-than-solid middle-brow foreign-language thrillers, like Tell No-One, that manage to combine genre thrills and upmarket mainstream pleasures to satisfying, if hardly ground-breaking effect.

Jonathan Romney

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE – RATED R

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QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE – RATED R

At times, sifting through a modern record collection, it can feel as if all roads lead eventually to Josh Homme. Entryist indie bands like the Arctic Monkeys employ him for extra rock muscle. Establishment figures of various generations – Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, say, in Them Crooked Vultures – form bands with him, and end up being overwhelmed by his musical aesthetic. A historically difficult marginwalker like Mark Lanegan can be reinvented, through Homme’s intercessions, as a maverick voice-for-hire. Side projects, extended families, hairy myths proliferate. Homme’s ubiquity in 2010 would be remarkable even if his trademark sound was less distinctive; a blocky, progressive crunch that draws on Neu! and Devo as much as Sabbath and Zeppelin. Ten years ago, however, many perceived Homme as one more Californian desert boy on the enjoyably parochial stoner rock scene. Homme, of course, had helped to define that scene in the ’90s as part of Kyuss, before the band disbanded and he marked time as an auxiliary guitarist with Lanegan’s Screaming Trees. The first, self-titled Queens Of The Stone Age album, a mix of psychedelic heavy rock and motorik rhythms, had been released in 1998, to only subcultural acclaim. Homme, though, possessed hitherto disguised levels of ambition and resolve. In one of many subsequent Queens reshuffles, he brought in his old Kyuss bassist, an orc-like berserker called Nick Oliveri, scored a deal with Interscope, and began to reconfigure his music for the mainstream. On its release in 2000, Rated R was already being fussed over in NME as “The best, most important rock album for years.” It did not, though, make Queens Of The Stone Age into the biggest band in America, as many had anticipated. Homme’s influence, it transpired, would be more covert and insidious: as the stern dictator of a musical cohort which everyone from PJ Harvey to ZZ Top would want to be associated with. The work of a man who talked a lot about guilt-free excess, Rated R still comes across as incredibly disciplined. From the opening student boast of “Nicotine valium vicodin marijuana ecstacy and alcohol… Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine,” delivered in such an absurdly authoritarian tone, there’s a sense of hedonism given a new, military imperative. Often on Rated R – and throughout his subsequent career – Homme sounds, in the best possible way, like a control freak. There’s an almost mathematical precision to the freak-outs like “Better Living Through Chemistry”. “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” has the kind of groovy insouciance that’s usually reached by rigorous drilling. Even the ‘free jazz’ blowing at the end of “I Think I Lost My Headache” – clearly designed to produce one – is methodically orchestrated. Two songs from Oliveri, “Tension Head” and “Quick And To The Pointless”, are comparatively unhinged, gleeful punk tantrums played out at Motörhead speed. Even these, though, feel calculated; as if General Homme letting his sidekick go crazy was an integral part of the grand design. As, no doubt, is the ongoing evolution of the live Queens. Judging by the Reading Festival show that features on CD2, the 2000 lineup was fractionally more ragged than those which followed: perhaps significantly, three linear, Tarmac-pounding jams from the debut (“Avon”, “Regular John” and “You Can’t Quit Me, Baby”) stand out. There are no unreleased tracks on this ‘deluxe’ reissue; two discs seem relatively parsimonious in the face of, say, the imminent 5CD expansion of Bowie’s Station To Station. A clutch of b-sides, though, flaunt rather iconoclastic influences for a hard rock band – covers of The Kinks and San Franciscan new wavers Romeo Void – and, in “You’re So Vague”, there’s a glimpse of the blasted, melodramatic terrain that Homme would visit, two years later, on the next and best Queens album, Songs For The Deaf. Rated R now sounds oddly like a pop record, notwithstanding its finely tooled clanks, Lanegan and Rob Halford cameos and Oliveri screams. With hindsight it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to see Homme’s career as a series of fiendish manoeuvres. As part of that plan, Rated R sits as the relatively concise, punchy album that bought him commercial clout, and a licence to stretch out. An LA album, before he headed back into the Californian desert, an endless band of acolytes trailing in his dust. John Mulvey

At times, sifting through a modern record collection, it can feel as if all roads lead eventually to Josh Homme. Entryist indie bands like the Arctic Monkeys employ him for extra rock muscle. Establishment figures of various generations – Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, say, in Them Crooked Vultures – form bands with him, and end up being overwhelmed by his musical aesthetic. A historically difficult marginwalker like Mark Lanegan can be reinvented, through Homme’s intercessions, as a maverick voice-for-hire. Side projects, extended families, hairy myths proliferate. Homme’s ubiquity in 2010 would be remarkable even if his trademark sound was less distinctive; a blocky, progressive crunch that draws on Neu! and Devo as much as Sabbath and Zeppelin.

Ten years ago, however, many perceived Homme as one more Californian desert boy on the enjoyably parochial stoner rock scene. Homme, of course, had helped to define that scene in the ’90s as part of Kyuss, before the band disbanded and he marked time as an auxiliary guitarist with Lanegan’s Screaming Trees. The first, self-titled Queens Of The Stone Age album, a mix of psychedelic heavy rock and motorik rhythms, had been released in 1998, to only subcultural acclaim.

Homme, though, possessed hitherto disguised levels of ambition and resolve. In one of many subsequent Queens reshuffles, he brought in his old Kyuss bassist, an orc-like berserker called Nick Oliveri, scored a deal with Interscope, and began to reconfigure his music for the mainstream.

On its release in 2000, Rated R was already being fussed over in NME as “The best, most important rock album for years.” It did not, though, make Queens Of The Stone Age into the biggest band in America, as many had anticipated. Homme’s influence, it transpired, would be more covert and insidious: as the stern dictator of a musical cohort which everyone from PJ Harvey to ZZ Top would want to be associated with.

The work of a man who talked a lot about guilt-free excess, Rated R still comes across as incredibly disciplined. From the opening student boast of “Nicotine valium vicodin marijuana ecstacy and alcohol… Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine,” delivered in such an absurdly authoritarian tone, there’s a sense of hedonism given a new, military imperative.

Often on Rated R – and throughout his subsequent career – Homme sounds, in the best possible way, like a control freak. There’s an almost mathematical precision to the freak-outs like “Better Living Through Chemistry”. “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” has the kind of groovy insouciance that’s usually reached by rigorous drilling. Even the ‘free jazz’ blowing at the end of “I Think I Lost My Headache” – clearly designed to produce one – is methodically orchestrated. Two songs from Oliveri, “Tension Head” and “Quick And To The Pointless”, are comparatively unhinged, gleeful punk tantrums played out at Motörhead speed. Even these, though, feel calculated; as if General Homme letting his sidekick go crazy was an integral part of the grand design.

As, no doubt, is the ongoing evolution of the live Queens. Judging by the Reading Festival show that features on CD2, the 2000 lineup was fractionally more ragged than those which followed: perhaps significantly, three linear, Tarmac-pounding jams from the debut (“Avon”, “Regular John” and “You Can’t Quit Me, Baby”) stand out. There are no unreleased tracks on this ‘deluxe’ reissue; two discs seem relatively parsimonious in the face of, say, the imminent 5CD expansion of Bowie’s Station To Station. A clutch of b-sides, though, flaunt rather iconoclastic influences for a hard rock band – covers of The Kinks and San Franciscan new wavers Romeo Void – and, in “You’re So Vague”, there’s a glimpse of the blasted, melodramatic terrain that Homme would visit, two years later, on the next and best Queens album, Songs For The Deaf.

Rated R now sounds oddly like a pop record, notwithstanding its finely tooled clanks, Lanegan and Rob Halford cameos and Oliveri screams. With hindsight it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to see Homme’s career as a series of fiendish manoeuvres. As part of that plan, Rated R sits as the relatively concise, punchy album that bought him commercial clout, and a licence to stretch out. An LA album, before he headed back into the Californian desert, an endless band of acolytes trailing in his dust.

John Mulvey

REM – FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

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REM – FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

“Over the years a certain misapp-rehension about Fables Of The Reconstruction has built up,” Peter Buck writes in his sleeve notes for the two-CD anniversary edition of REM’s third album. “For some reason,” he continues, “people have the impression that the members of REM don’t like the record. Nothing,” he hastens to add, “could be further from the truth.” This might well be the case and the album may indeed be the personal favourite Buck now claims it to be. It nevertheless still occupies a curious place in REM’s storied history, forever overshadowed by the two landmark albums that preceded it and many of the records that followed, that great run of albums that climaxed with Automatic For The People in 1992. A certain dismay, it seems to me, has always somehow been attached to Fables Of The Reconstruction, a feeling that something different had been tried and not quite pulled off, a view encouraged, despite Buck’s surely disingenuous bafflement, by the band’s own subsequently dour opinion of it. Of all their records, it’s sometimes seemed, this is the one they’d like to keep in the attic, like a troubled relative given to dribbling and public masturbation. It’s perhaps as much as anything else the apparently unhappy circumstances of its making that shaped the group’s somewhat jaundiced view of it. Michael Stipe’s first choice as producer was Van Dyke Parks, he told me when I spent four days with REM in Athens just before Fables’ release in June 1985. The year before, Parks had released Jump, an album based on the Uncle Remus folk tales popular in the post-Reconstruction Southern American states. Stipe thought Parks would be therefore sympathetic to the new songs he’d been writing, most of which were emerging as evocative vignettes drawing on the story-telling traditions of the Deep South, a palpable air about them of rural fable. He’d been listening, he told me, to a lot of Appalachian folk songs, field recordings, become fascinated by the oral tradition of legends being passed down from generation to generation. This notion would form the conceptual hub of the record REM would eventually record. But in the meantime, they passed on Parks. Elliot Mazer, who’d produced Neil Young’s Harvest, was briefly considered, as was Hugh Padgham, best known for his work with Phil Collins, The Police and Genesis. According to Bill Berry, Elvis Costello was desperate to produce them and was a serious contender before long-running friction between his manager Jake Riviera and REM’s then-label boss Miles Copeland ruled him out. The gig eventually went to Joe Boyd, the choice of Peter Buck, a long-time fan of the producer’s work with Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson, one of Buck’s great musical heroes. Buck, when we spoke in 1985, remembered Boyd arriving in Athens on a Monday, attending a session on the Tuesday where in four hours at Jim Hawkins’ Boulevard Garage Studio they recorded – live, with minimal overdubs – 14 of their new songs. They included the 11 that made the final cut, plus a version of “Hyena”, which would turn up on their fourth album, Life's Rich Pageant, and two additional tracks, “Bandwagon” and “Throw Those Trolls Away”, all of which are officially released for the first time as The Athens Demos, the second CD of the new deluxe edition. The following day, Wednesday, Boyd was confirmed as producer. By the Friday, at the producer’s suggestion, REM were on their way to London to record Fables Of The Reconstruction at Boyd’s north London studio. As they have reminded us regularly since, they had a grim time. It was winter, they had a long daily commute from their Mayfair digs to Wood Green and the weather was lousy. “It rained every day it wasn’t snowing,” Buck told me in 1985 and is still moaning about it in the sleevenotes here. Boyd recently recalled in Uncut that he found the band grumpy going on miserable throughout the sessions and there was further tension between him and the group about his painstaking approach. They’d been used to a more freewheeling studio atmosphere when they worked with Mitch Easter and Don Dixon on Murmur and Reckoning. Stipe admitted to me a particular frustration with Boyd’s meticulous perfectionism, the hours he spent mixing and re-mixing, which militated against the raw spontaneity he had originally envisaged for the album. In popular opinion, the band’s original intentions for the record were thus compromised by a producer they liked but weren’t happy with and the grim English weather, a mix that is somehow thought to have infused this album with an atmosphere of unanswerable gloom. Buck himself now describes it as “a doomy, psycho record, dense and atmospheric”. It’s a point of view, I guess. But Fables Of The Reconstruction doesn’t to any great respect sound to me doom-laden, fatally overcast or especially glum. There are fraught moments like the hallucinatory “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, slightly sinister “Old Man Kensey” and piercing “Auctioneer (Another Engine)” and there are hymns to a vanishing America like impressionistic travelogue “Driver 8” and the noble “Wendell Gee” that are not without a certain sadness. But elsewhere Fables’ contains some of REM’s most gorgeous and uplifting music, including “Maps And Legends” (which with added mandolin could have been the hit “Losing My Religion” became) and the gorgeous “Green Grow The Rushes” (which hints at the increased politicisation of Stipe’s songwriting on Document). “Life And How To Live It” and the horn-laden “Can’t Get There From Here”, meanwhile, are among the hardest-driving songs in their expansive repertoire, wholly exuberant. It’s fascinating, too, listening to these songs as they were demoed at Boulevard Garage Studios. Buck claims that after Murmur and Reckoning, REM had run out of songs and with the recording deadline looming had only written “Driver 8” and “Old Man Kensey”. He suggests, remarkably, that virtually the whole of the record was written and rehearsed in three weeks. It’s further remarkable how fully formed the songs were at the demo stage. Boyd seems to have altered very little about them in the final recording process, adding strings to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and horns to “Can’t Get There From Here”, but otherwise not messing with them at all. Things you thought must have been cooked up during the sessions in London with Boyd – Buck’s guitar intro to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, for instance, and all manner of felicitous instrumental touches and vocal harmonies – are already in place, waiting only for the amber glow Boyd would bring to them. Allan Jones

“Over the years a certain misapp-rehension about Fables Of The Reconstruction has built up,” Peter Buck writes in his sleeve notes for the two-CD anniversary edition of REM’s third album. “For some reason,” he continues, “people have the impression that the members of REM don’t like the record. Nothing,” he hastens to add, “could be further from the truth.”

This might well be the case and the album may indeed be the personal favourite Buck now claims it to be. It nevertheless still occupies a curious place in REM’s storied history, forever overshadowed by the two landmark albums that preceded it and many of the records that followed, that great run of albums that climaxed with Automatic For The People in 1992.

A certain dismay, it seems to me, has always somehow been attached to Fables Of The Reconstruction, a feeling that something different had been tried and not quite pulled off, a view encouraged, despite Buck’s surely disingenuous bafflement, by the band’s own subsequently dour opinion of it. Of all their records, it’s sometimes seemed, this is the one they’d like to keep in the attic, like a troubled relative given to dribbling and public masturbation.

It’s perhaps as much as anything else the apparently unhappy circumstances of its making that shaped the group’s somewhat jaundiced view of it. Michael Stipe’s first choice as producer was Van Dyke Parks, he told me when I spent four days with REM in Athens just before Fables’ release in June 1985. The year before, Parks had released Jump, an album based on the Uncle Remus folk tales popular in the post-Reconstruction Southern American states. Stipe thought Parks would be therefore sympathetic to the new songs he’d been writing, most of which were emerging as evocative vignettes drawing on the story-telling traditions of the Deep South, a palpable air about them of rural fable. He’d been listening, he told me, to a lot of Appalachian folk songs, field recordings, become fascinated by the oral tradition of legends being passed down from generation to generation.

This notion would form the conceptual hub of the record REM would eventually record. But in the meantime, they passed on Parks. Elliot Mazer, who’d produced Neil Young’s Harvest, was briefly considered, as was Hugh Padgham, best known for his work with Phil Collins, The Police and Genesis. According to Bill Berry, Elvis Costello was desperate to produce them and was a serious contender before long-running friction between his manager Jake Riviera and REM’s then-label boss Miles Copeland ruled him out.

The gig eventually went to Joe Boyd, the choice of Peter Buck, a long-time fan of the producer’s work with Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson, one of Buck’s great musical heroes. Buck, when we spoke in 1985, remembered Boyd arriving in Athens on a Monday, attending a session on the Tuesday where in four hours at Jim Hawkins’ Boulevard Garage Studio they recorded – live, with minimal overdubs – 14 of their new songs. They included the 11 that made the final cut, plus a version of “Hyena”, which would turn up on their fourth album, Life’s Rich Pageant, and two additional tracks, “Bandwagon” and “Throw Those Trolls Away”, all of which are officially released for the first time as The Athens Demos, the second CD of the new deluxe edition. The following day, Wednesday, Boyd was confirmed as producer. By the Friday, at the producer’s suggestion, REM were on their way to London to record Fables Of The Reconstruction at Boyd’s north London studio.

As they have reminded us regularly since, they had a grim time. It was winter, they had a long daily commute from their Mayfair digs to Wood Green and the weather was lousy. “It rained every day it wasn’t snowing,” Buck told me in 1985 and is still moaning about it in the sleevenotes here. Boyd recently recalled in Uncut that he found the band grumpy going on miserable throughout the sessions and there was further tension between him and the group about his painstaking approach. They’d been used to a more freewheeling studio atmosphere when they worked with Mitch Easter and Don Dixon on Murmur and Reckoning. Stipe admitted to me a particular frustration with Boyd’s meticulous perfectionism, the hours he spent mixing and re-mixing, which militated against the raw spontaneity he had originally envisaged for the album.

In popular opinion, the band’s original intentions for the record were thus compromised by a producer they liked but weren’t happy with and the grim English weather, a mix that is somehow thought to have infused this album with an atmosphere of unanswerable gloom. Buck himself now describes it as “a doomy, psycho record, dense and atmospheric”. It’s a point of view, I guess. But Fables Of The Reconstruction doesn’t to any great respect sound to me doom-laden, fatally overcast or especially glum. There are fraught moments like the hallucinatory “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, slightly sinister “Old Man Kensey” and piercing “Auctioneer (Another Engine)” and there are hymns to a vanishing America like impressionistic travelogue “Driver 8” and the noble “Wendell Gee” that are not without a certain sadness. But elsewhere Fables’ contains some of REM’s most gorgeous and uplifting music, including “Maps And Legends” (which with added mandolin could have been the hit “Losing My Religion” became) and the gorgeous “Green Grow The Rushes” (which hints at the increased politicisation of Stipe’s songwriting on Document). “Life And How To Live It” and the horn-laden “Can’t Get There From Here”, meanwhile, are among the hardest-driving songs in their expansive repertoire, wholly exuberant.

It’s fascinating, too, listening to these songs as they were demoed at Boulevard Garage Studios. Buck claims that after Murmur and Reckoning, REM had run out of songs and with the recording deadline looming had only written “Driver 8” and “Old Man Kensey”. He suggests, remarkably, that virtually the whole of the record was written and rehearsed in three weeks. It’s further remarkable how fully formed the songs were at the demo stage.

Boyd seems to have altered very little about them in the final recording process, adding strings to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and horns to “Can’t Get There From Here”, but otherwise not messing with them at all. Things you thought must have been cooked up during the sessions in London with Boyd – Buck’s guitar intro to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, for instance, and all manner of felicitous instrumental touches and vocal harmonies – are already in place, waiting only for the amber glow Boyd would bring to them.

Allan Jones

LOS LOBOS – TIN CAN TRUST

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LOS LOBOS – TIN CAN TRUST
Los Lobos recorded a bunch of Mexican folk songs for their 1978 debut LP, titling the collection Just Another Band From East LA. During the ensuing third of a century, singer/guitarists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, drummer/guitarist Louie Perez and bassist Conrad Lozano – joined in the early ’...

Los Lobos recorded a bunch of Mexican folk songs for their 1978 debut LP, titling the collection Just Another Band From East LA. During the ensuing third of a century, singer/guitarists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, drummer/guitarist Louie Perez and bassist Conrad Lozano – joined in the early ’80s by Philadelphia-born sax player and producer Steve Berlin – have put the lie to that description, cementing their status as one of America’s most reliably adventurous bands.

This is a band who have traditionally marched to a beat that’s entirely their own: a seamless amalgam of rock’n’roll, blues, R’n’B, country and Tex-Mex, all topped with Hidalgo’s achingly soulful vocals. When they scored a big hit with the theme to the Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba, the band followed it up with an album of traditional Mexican music. For this 14th album the band respond to new circumstances – as Steve Berlin puts it, “new label, strange times” – in a similarly powerful way. Los Lobos’ baseline is so high, when they surpass it, as they do here, their music is as good as it gets, period.

For Tin Can Trust, the band holed up in a funky studio in an East LA neighbourhood not far from where the four core bandmembers grew up, and built the album from scratch, having arrived without any completed songs or any particular course to pursue. Despite the lack of direction going in, the resulting LP is as sonically coherent and thematically unified as anything they’re done.

Reliably enthralling writers, Hidalgo and Perez have the ability to transport their band into the mystic, as they do here on “The Lady Of The Rose”, a magical-realist narrative about a visitation from the Virgin Mary. The metaphysical blues nocturne “Jupiter Or The Moon”, and the closing “27 Spanishes”, a fabulist take on the conquistadors’ invasion of what is now Mexico, perform similar high-quality work. The latter has an audacious kiss-off line: “Later they became muy friendly/and their blood was often mixed/Now they all hang out together/and play guitars for kicks”.

These are the album’s most atmospheric moments, along with the loping cityscape “On Main Street”. But the partners can also raise the temperature to Mojave levels, channeling a lifetime of desperation and defiance into the molten opener, “Burn It Down”, pushed along by the thick plunks of Lozano’s fingers on a stand-up bass. Susan Tedeschi’s harmony vocal echoes Hidalgo’s innate soulfulness – the track concludes with his guitar pyrotechnics. The title track, meanwhile, is built on a Perez lyric of resilience in the face of a world seemingly without hope, and the band gets to its pumping heart.

Rosas contributed a pair of originals en Español, and collaborated with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter on the minor-key lament “All My Bridges Burning”. Interestingly, the language of this seasoned writer, though thematically on-point, lacks both the colour and the lived-in credibility of Perez’s lyrics – but it’s saved by yet another breathtaking Hidalgo solo. Indeed, whatever else it is, Tin Can Trust is a kick-ass guitar record showcasing Hidalgo’s ability to fuse his virtuosity with the emotion at the core of each song.

Now in their mid-fifties, Los Lobos aren’t remotely close to losing their edge, in stark contrast to many of their tapped-out fellow veterans. Tin Can Trust is a masterful album from an undeniably great American band, at the peak of its considerable powers.

Bud Scoppa

Q+A Steve Berlin

What is the character of this record?

We’ve never really had any concept, with the exception of Pistola… [1988] and The Ride [2004], where we paid tribute to the artists who inspired us and played with them. In a weird way, this record is paying tribute to the music we grew up with. It was evocative to be back in East LA after 30 years. We weren’t trying to go retro, but it inevitably fell that way by virtue of where we were and because the songs were put together on the spot.

This is also a killer guitar album that shows what an underrated player Hidalgo is.

It’s not like we set out to change that mindset, but as the record unfolded, we realised he’d played some really tasty solos. On “Tin Can Trust”, as Dave was doing the vocal, he had his guitar in his hands, like a security blanket, and on one of those takes he let that solo rip. There were no mics in front of the guitar and the amp was across the room, so the sound of that solo is through his vocal mic. But it doesn’t get any better than that, so we had to use it.

How does Tin Can Trust stack up against the previous 13 LPs?

There was a lot more uncertainty going into this record – new label, strange times – and the fact that we came out with a really good record that really sounds like us, that’s what I’ll be taking away from this one. INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

Best Coast: “Crazy For You”

John Mulvey
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As discussed, I’ve been pretty slack of late, so I’m going to try and crack through some of my backlog over the next few days, beginning with this one, the debut album from Best Coast. Comically late on Best Coast, of course, since Bethany Cosentino seems to have become the hipster media pin-up of the summer. In the unlikely event you’ve missed “Crazy For You”, though, it’s well worth a go. I’m not over-keen on much of the C86-style revivalism that’s come out of the States over the past couple of years, but Best Coast seem vastly superior to most of their contemporaries – and, frankly, to their indie antecedents. It’d be very convenient to ascribe this to Cosentino’s leftfield past as part of Pocahaunted, when she was much keener on presenting herself as some psychedelic prankster witch rather than cute, cat-infatuated stoner. Out of an expansive backhistory, I can definitely recommend Pocahaunted’s “Passage”, featuring prominent collaborations with the fine Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw, Magic Lantern etc) and Bobb Bruno – the latter ostensibly the other half of Best Coast. The strength of “Crazy For You”, though, doesn’t come from any pagan drone just beneath the surface, or even buried deeper in its DNA. Instead, I think it’s predicated on the simple and excellent qualities of the songs, and the way Cosentino and Bruno manage to bypass a lot of the hairslide indie bullshit that has accumulated around this sort of music for the past 25 years, establishing instead a very warm and more direct connection with the ‘60s girl group and surf records. So it’s pretty easy to listen to something like, say, “Our Deal” or “I Want To” (since it’s playing as I write), and concentrate just on the elegaic way they have with a certain set of Californian adolescence images. Reverb probably has a lot to do with it, and also the unexpected heft of Cosentino’s voice. No-one on 53rd & 3rd or Sarah sang as well as this, if I remember right: perhaps the best contemporary match would be Jenny Lewis, another wry Los Angelean who’s successfully transcended indie-pop parochialism. A lovely record, anyhow.

As discussed, I’ve been pretty slack of late, so I’m going to try and crack through some of my backlog over the next few days, beginning with this one, the debut album from Best Coast.

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Midlake announce UK tour and ticket details

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Midlake announce UK tour and ticket details
Midlake have announced details of an new UK tour. Kicking off with a show in Exeter on October 31, the six-date jaunt ends in Cambridge on November 10. Midlake play: Exeter Lemon Grove (October 31) Norwich UEA (November 1) London Roundhouse (2) O2 Academy Oxford (5) O2 Academy Leicester (6) ...

Midlake have announced details of an new UK tour.

Kicking off with a show in Exeter on October 31, the six-date jaunt ends in Cambridge on November 10.

Midlake play:

Exeter Lemon Grove (October 31)

Norwich UEA (November 1)

London Roundhouse (2)

O2 Academy Oxford (5)

O2 Academy Leicester (6)

Cambridge Junction (10)

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.

Madness announce matinee shows to forthcoming UK tour

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Madness announce matinee shows to forthcoming UK tour
Madness have added a number of matinee shows to their upcoming winter UK tour. The veterans will now play afternoon gigs in Glasgow (November 27), Newcastle (28), Leicester (December 4), Leeds (5) and Birmingham (11). Madness will play the following dates: Blackpool Empress Ballroom (November 26)...

Madness have added a number of matinee shows to their upcoming winter UK tour.

The veterans will now play afternoon gigs in Glasgow (November 27), Newcastle (28), Leicester (December 4), Leeds (5) and Birmingham (11).

Madness will play the following dates:

Blackpool Empress Ballroom (November 26)

O2 Academy Glasgow (27, plus matinee show)

O2 Academy Newcastle (28, plus matinee show)

Manchester Apollo (30)

O2 Academy Sheffield (December 1)

Hull Arena (3)

Leicester De Montfort Hall (4, plus matinee show)

O2 Academy Leeds (5, plus matinee show)

Nottingham Rock City (7)

Bournemouth BIC (8)

Reading Rivermead (10)

O2 Academy Birmingham (11, plus matinee show)

Cardiff International Arena (13)

Plymouth Pavilions (14)

Brighton Centre (15)

London Earls Court (17)

Tickets for the matinee shows go on sale on Friday (August 6) at 9.30am (BST).

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Aretha Franklin breaks two ribs

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Aretha Franklin breaks two ribs
Aretha Franklin has been forced to cancel two free New York shows after breaking two ribs in a fall. She had been set to play two gigs in Brooklyn, at Wingate Park on August 9 and as part of the Annual Seaside Summer Concert Series on August 12, but has now shelved the concerts, reports the Detroit...

Aretha Franklin has been forced to cancel two free New York shows after breaking two ribs in a fall.

She had been set to play two gigs in Brooklyn, at Wingate Park on August 9 and as part of the Annual Seaside Summer Concert Series on August 12, but has now shelved the concerts, reports the Detroit News. As well as the two broken ribs the fall resulted in abdominal pain for the singer.

Franklin commented that she is planning to reschedule the shows soon, saying: “I was very much looking forward to being in Brooklyn and having a foot-long hot dog at Coney Island.” She added: “Hopefully, I will get it before the end of August.”

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Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang, Trembling Bells: London Shepherd’s Bush Empire, August 4, 2010

John Mulvey
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As a couple of you who’d seen earlier shows suggested yesterday, Will Oldham was on great form for the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang show in London last night. Not sure if anyone else who was there can corroborate, but did he wet himself during the encores? No matter, ultimately, though it could have put an interesting spin on the ribald vamping he was indulging in at the time. It was/is the last night of the tour, and Oldham is enthusiastically duetting with Lavinia Blackwall on one of her Trembling Bells songs, “Love Made An Outlaw Of My Heart”. It’s a suitably raucous conclusion, with the other members of Trembling Bells fetching up onstage, too. Strangely, though, it’s only the second song from the Bells’ “Abandoned Love” that is played all night: the band’s opening set begins with “Adieu, England” and then goes off on a new tangent with a bunch of songs that, I suspect, may figure on the tour CD someone mentioned yesterday (and which appeared to be sold out last night). While plenty of writers, not least myself, have pushed Trembling Bells as a profound new British folk-rock band, as a new Fairport Convention more or less, a lot of the stuff here suggests – even more so than on “Abandoned Love” – that they’re actually a kind of reverse Fairport. That’s to say: a band moving from a very British sound, back towards something rockier, more American, as if Fairport Convention debuted with “Liege And Lief”, then progressed to their self-titled album. It’s odd, but effective, with Blackwall’s mighty voice often buffeted by Michael Hastings’ surprisingly heavy riffing, and the whole thing often resembling Jefferson Airplane, perhaps. Of course, there’s still a very British base, with a tremendous a capella duet between the classically trained Blackwall and the heartily untutored Alex Nielsen. The finale, too, is remarkable: a frantically churning psych jam augmented by three cavorting female morris dancers. Blackwall and Nielsen reappear a few minutes later, along with Oldham and the Cairo Gang; Emmett Kelly and Shahzad Ismaily. The blend of Oldham, Kelly and Blackwall’s voices is immediately striking, and proves to be the crux of the whole show, whether on the sepulchral highlights of “The Wonder Show Of The World” (“With Cornstalks (Or Among Them)”, “Someone Coming Through”) or on fairly raucous new versions of “Easy Does It” and “No Bad News”). Those last two songs are among a very small selection of old material, which hardly constitutes Oldham’s ‘hits’ – apart from a grand rethink of “I See A Darkness”, the vocals tracked by a guesting D V DeVincentis on sax. (a man who, Google reveals, was the guy who wrote Grosse Pointe Blank, and who I believe I met, at Plush’s first London show, while he was over researching High Fidelity; weird). Perhaps it’s a measure of the respect and trust that Oldham’s fans have in him, that he can get away with playing so few favourites in a 100 minute show. But also, maybe it’s testimony to the strength of “The Wonder Show Of The World”, which increasingly sounds like one of his very best albums. “That’s What Our Love Is”, especially, is tremendous, with Kelly’s tender electrified acoustic, plentifully innovative rustle and zing from Nielsen at the kit, and those towering voices. Oldham is exceptional, often stepping away from the mic to give extra depth and echo to his increasingly powerful vocals. It seems, too, that as his voice loses more of its eccentricities, he assumes more and more physical quirks. There’s a lot of pogoing, as well as ceaseless theatrical fidgeting, tonight, and the odd flash of a knee as he reaches for a melodica or kazoo to punctuate these wonderful songs. As he leaps and thrashes through even his most medieval ballads, it’s the unstable mixture of solemnity and irreverence that makes a BPB show such a captivating spectacle, as well as a fine musical experience. So while “The Wonder Show Of The World” feels like a generally spectral affair, the whole show feels much more upbeat and, characteristically, perverse: “Beware Your Only Friend” is hugely hearty. Maybe he worked out his more ethereal side at Manchester Cathedral the other night? Here’s the setlist: MEDLEY: Where's The Show/Let Me Be A Man (Nelson) Troublesome Houses With Cornstalks (Or Among Them) EZ Does It Island Brothers Merciless Midday That's What Our Love Is I See A Darkness Where Wind Blows Teach Me To Bear You Beware Your Only Friend Go Folks Kinds ENCORE No Bad News Someone Coming Through Love Made An Outlaw Of My Heart

As a couple of you who’d seen earlier shows suggested yesterday, Will Oldham was on great form for the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang show in London last night. Not sure if anyone else who was there can corroborate, but did he wet himself during the encores?

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REM recording ‘old school’ style album

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REM recording ‘old school’ style album
The Posies' frontman Ken Stringfellow has revealed that REM are recording an "old school"-style album. The singer/guitarist - who in the past has toured and worked with the Georgia band - recently met up with bassist Mike Mills in his current home city of Paris, where he heard the rough recordings ...

The Posies‘ frontman Ken Stringfellow has revealed that REM are recording an “old school”-style album.

The singer/guitarist – who in the past has toured and worked with the Georgia band – recently met up with bassist Mike Mills in his current home city of Paris, where he heard the rough recordings of the proposed follow-up to 2008’s ‘Accelerate’.

“It’s sounding really great, very old school,” Stringfellow told Uncut‘s sister-title [url=http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/52296]NME[/url]. “The first track had vocals which were mixed super low which I couldn’t understand and I was like, ‘Yes, a return to form.’ Mike was on about pushing the vocals up and I was like, ‘No, don’t do it.'”

He added: “What’s cool about classic REM is that you have an electric and acoustic guitar coming along like The Byrds,” Stringfellow said. “There’s a lot of that in there, there’s some piano songs too, but I didn’t hear a lot of crazy, freaky keyboards and vintage drum machines in there like the period when I was with them.”

The album is expected to be released next year.

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Kings Of Leon confirm new album details

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Kings Of Leon confirm new album details
Kings Of Leon have confirmed the release details of their new album. They have named their fifth effort 'Come Around Sundown', and will release it on October 18 in the UK and October 19 in the US. Sessions for the album took place at New York's Avatar Studios, with the band once again teaming up w...

Kings Of Leon have confirmed the release details of their new album.

They have named their fifth effort ‘Come Around Sundown’, and will release it on October 18 in the UK and October 19 in the US.

Sessions for the album took place at New York‘s Avatar Studios, with the band once again teaming up with producers Angelo Petraglia and Jacquire King.

‘Come Around Sundown’ will be the follow-up to 2008’s big-selling ‘Only By The Night’.

Kings Of Leon are now set to return to the UK to headline V Festival on August 21-22.

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The 30th Uncut Playlist Of 2010

John Mulvey
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First up, if you’ve been enjoying the Nick Cave business in the new issue of Uncut, something useful showed up on our Twitter feed the other day: a Spotify playlist of our Top 30 Cave tracks compiled by Wavey Davey 001. Thanks for that. Second, apologies yet again for sketchy service here over the past month. Magazine work and a week off have conspired against me posting much, though I suspect it’s as much to do with getting out of a blogging rhythm as anything else. Trying hard to get back in the swing this week, and tomorrow I’ll do a review of tonight’s Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy/Trembling Bells show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, all being well. Today, though, a playlist, consisting in no small part of a bunch of, I guess, significant things waiting for me when I got back in the office on Monday. More than ever this week, it’s worth reiterating that inclusion does not necessarily equal approval, though the Wyatt collaboration is pretty nice on a couple of listens. Hopefully I’ll root out some less obvious stuff for next week’s round-up. 1 Robert Wyatt, Ros Stephen, Gilad Atzmon – The Ghosts Within (Domino) 2 Win – Freaky Trigger (RPM) 3 Brian Wilson – Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (Disney Pearl) 4 El Guincho – Pop Negro (XL) 5 Soul Center – General Eclectics (Shitkatapult) 6 Kurt Wagner & Cortney Tidwell Present KORT – Invariable Heartache (City Slang) 7 Twin Sister – Vampires With Dreaming Kids (Double Six) 8 Eric Clapton – Clapton (Reprise) 9 Manic Street Preachers – Postcards From A Young Man (Columbia) 10 Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms (Static Tongues) 11 Steve Mason – Am I Just A Man (Alexis Taylor Remix) (Double Six) 12 Lo Borges – Lo Borges (Water) 13 Gang Of Four – Content (Groenland) 14 No Age – Everything In Between (Sub Pop) 15 The Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (Sonovox)

First up, if you’ve been enjoying the Nick Cave business in the new issue of Uncut, something useful showed up on our Twitter feed the other day: a Spotify playlist of our Top 30 Cave tracks compiled by Wavey Davey 001. Thanks for that.

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New U2 song surfaces online – video

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New U2 song surfaces online – video

Footage of U2 rehearsing a new song has surfaced online. The short film was captured by fans camping out near the gates of the Stadio Olimpico di Torino in Italy, where the group are rehearsing ahead of their first gig of 2010 on Friday (August 6). The show will be the band's first since frontman Bono underwent back surgery, inadvertently forcing them to cancel a number of US shows as well as their headline slot at Glastonbury. As U2Tours.com reports, Bono and co have also been heard playing a number of other songs including 'Get On Your Boots', 'Magnificent' and 'Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me' during soundchecks. The latter song did not appear on any of the band's setlists during the first part of the tour last year. Watch footage of the new song here. 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.

Footage of U2 rehearsing a new song has surfaced online.

The short film was captured by fans camping out near the gates of the Stadio Olimpico di Torino in Italy, where the group are rehearsing ahead of their first gig of 2010 on Friday (August 6).

The show will be the band’s first since frontman Bono underwent back surgery, inadvertently forcing them to cancel a number of US shows as well as their headline slot at Glastonbury.

As U2Tours.com reports, Bono and co have also been heard playing a number of other songs including ‘Get On Your Boots’, ‘Magnificent’ and ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me’ during soundchecks. The latter song did not appear on any of the band’s setlists during the first part of the tour last year.

Watch footage of the new song here.

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.

Brian Eno to release new album on Warp Records

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Brian Eno to release new album on Warp Records
Brian Eno looks set to release a solo album on the Warp Records label. The album is said to feature guitarist Leo Abraham and electronic composer Jon Hopkins, reports Exclaim.ca. Speaking about the release, Abraham said that it "contains the fruits of several years of jams between the three of us"...

Brian Eno looks set to release a solo album on the Warp Records label.

The album is said to feature guitarist Leo Abraham and electronic composer Jon Hopkins, reports Exclaim.ca.

Speaking about the release, Abraham said that it “contains the fruits of several years of jams between the three of us”.

He added: “I’ve not heard anything quite like it – it sounds ‘live’ and ‘alien’ at the same time. Some things have been permitted to survive, which only Brian would have had the courage to let go, and it’s so much the better for it”.

Full details of the album are yet to be announced by the dance label, although a website, Brian-eno.net, has been set up where fans can sign up for updates.

Eno has worked as a producer in recent years, with the likes of U2 and Coldplay calling upon his services.

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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.

Guns N’ Roses announce UK tour

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Guns N’ Roses announce UK tour
Guns N' Roses have announced they are to play three UK arena gigs this October. Axl Rose and his band will headline the O2 Arena in London on October 13, the Birmingham LG Arena on October 17 then the Manchester MEN Arena on October 18. Tickets go on sale at 9am (BST) on Friday (August 6). Meanwh...

Guns N’ Roses have announced they are to play three UK arena gigs this October.

Axl Rose and his band will headline the O2 Arena in London on October 13, the Birmingham LG Arena on October 17 then the Manchester MEN Arena on October 18.

Tickets go on sale at 9am (BST) on Friday (August 6).

Meanwhile, the band are also set to headline the Reading And Leeds Festivals, which take place between August 27 and 29.

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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.

Josh Pearson and Sam Amidon join forces at Club Uncut

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Josh Pearson and Sam Amidon join forces at Club Uncut

Club Uncut’s week of shows at London’s Relentless Garage will feature, we’re pleased to announce, a joint headline show from Josh T Pearson and Sam Amidon. Pearson, legendary ex-frontman of Lift To Experience, and Amidon will play the Relentless Garage on Thursday, November 3. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti have already been confirmed as the first headliners of the Club Uncut season, on November 1. For more details of the Ariel Pink show, click here. Tickets for the Pearson and Amidon double bill, meanwhile, are on sale now for £10, available from Seetickets.com. 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.

Club Uncut’s week of shows at London’s Relentless Garage will feature, we’re pleased to announce, a joint headline show from Josh T Pearson and Sam Amidon.

Pearson, legendary ex-frontman of Lift To Experience, and Amidon will play the Relentless Garage on Thursday, November 3. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti have already been confirmed as the first headliners of the Club Uncut season, on November 1. For more details of the Ariel Pink show, click here.

Tickets for the Pearson and Amidon double bill, meanwhile, are on sale now for £10, available from Seetickets.com.

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.

Shit Robot: “From The Cradle To The Rave”

John Mulvey
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A slightly neurotic start to the biog which accompanies this one. “Next year,” it begins, “Marcus Lambkin, aka Shit Robot, will be 40 years old. If (which it shouldn’t) this fact bothers you, please stop reading now.” Of course, there are some of us who, if anything, are a bit biased in favour of musicians of a certain age. The first Shit Robot album reflects that, being dance music of a somewhat droll and mature stripe, strongly affiliated to that of James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem. Murphy, not coincidentally, is all over “From The Cradle To The Rave”: releasing it on DFA; providing a few lyrics, longstanding moral support, and even aerated chorus vox on “Triumph”, a finale which, with some very Rotherish strafed guitar, presses all the right kosmische buttons. For the most part, though, “From The Cradle…” revisits the key LCD trick of re-imagining electropop for a techno and house-savvy audience. It begins with “Tuff Enuff”, a kind of relative to “Sound Of Silver”’s title track, with Lambkin providing the stern, deadpan vocals. Soon enough, though, the guests are being bussed in at speed. The Juan Maclean are other obvious fellow travellers (though “From The Cradle…” outclasses their effort from last year by some distance), so it’s logical that both John Maclean and Nancy Whang show up. Whang fronts “Take ‘Em Up”, an ingenuous and super-catchy pop song that’d probably cross over if it was released by a band named anything other than Shit Robot. Maclean, meanwhile, takes the mic on “Grim Receiver”, the sort of menacing techno-rock – with fractured guitar solos – that Death In Vegas always claimed to, if not actually did, make. Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip shows how much his vocals are improving on the synthsoul “Losing My Patience”, and “I Got A Feeling” is especially terrific: chunky techno that gradually morphs into a big deep house tune, with serious vocals from Saheer Umar of House Of House (default LCD analogue is that “Love Can’t Turn Around” bit from “45:33”). Best of all, Ian Svenonius rolls up on “Simple Things” for one of his wired, priapic, Princely monologues, which eventually kicks off into a very old-school Italian house pounder, piano and all. Been playing this one a lot, actually.

A slightly neurotic start to the biog which accompanies this one. “Next year,” it begins, “Marcus Lambkin, aka Shit Robot, will be 40 years old. If (which it shouldn’t) this fact bothers you, please stop reading now.”

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Richard Ashcroft walks offstage during Australian festival gig

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Richard Ashcroft walks offstage during Australian festival gig
Richard Ashcroft pulled out of his Splendour In The Grass festival appearance in Queensland, Australia after just one song last night (August 1). The former Verve singer is currently on his first tour of the country with new outfit the United Nations Of Sound, and he walked offstage during opening ...

Richard Ashcroft pulled out of his Splendour In The Grass festival appearance in Queensland, Australia after just one song last night (August 1).

The former Verve singer is currently on his first tour of the country with new outfit the United Nations Of Sound, and he walked offstage during opening track ‘Are You Ready?’.

Some reports from fans online that the former Verve frontman was annoyed at the low turnout for his set, with Fasterlouder.com reporting that after Ashcroft had walked offstage the crowd began to chant “wanker” repeatedly. His 10pm (EST) performance saw him go up against Empire Of The Sun and Pixies on the bill.

A statement from Ashcroft‘s management posted on Richardashcroft.co.uk blamed the cancellation on his voice giving out. “After three gigs in two days, including a two-hour show in Sydney on Saturday night, we knew Richard would have to look after his voice for the Splendour In The Grass set so we cancelled all promotional activity for Sunday,” the statement said.

It continued: “It wasn’t until he got on stage on Sunday night at Splendour that he realised his voice wouldn’t make it through the set.”

Ashcroft has now reportedly been “ordered not to speak or sing for 72 hours” by a doctor.

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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.

Gary Numan tells critics to ‘fuck off’

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Gary Numan tells critics to ‘fuck off’
Gary Numan attacked people who label him pretentious, saying they should "fuck off". The electro icon also admitted that he doesn't think he's technically a good musician, in an interview with Uncut's sister-title [url= http://www.nme.com/news/gary-numan/52318]NME[/url]. "'Are 'Friends' Electric?'...

Gary Numan attacked people who label him pretentious, saying they should “fuck off”.

The electro icon also admitted that he doesn’t think he’s technically a good musician, in an interview with Uncut’s sister-title [url= http://www.nme.com/news/gary-numan/52318]NME[/url].

“‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’… it’s actually two songs stuck together,” he said of his 1979 chart topper. “Because I lacked the ability to finish either of them. I had a good verse, I couldn’t think of a chorus for it. One day I’m playing this one, started playing that one… I’ll put them together. You end up with a song five-and-a-half minutes long and it goes to Number One.”

Numan added: “I became successful because I couldn’t write songs very well. And I can’t play very well. My success is based on not being able to finish songs properly and playing badly. That’s going to keep you down to earth, isn’t it. People say I’m pretentious? Fuck off!”

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.

Morrissey takes tea with Katy Perry

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Morrissey takes tea with Katy Perry
Morrissey has advised pop singer Katy Perry not to marry comedian and actor Russell Brand. Perry revealed that she recently had tea with Morrissey, during which he told her not to tie the knot with Brand, to whom she is currently engaged. "He's Russell's mate and he is fascinating but he was givin...

Morrissey has advised pop singer Katy Perry not to marry comedian and actor Russell Brand.

Perry revealed that she recently had tea with Morrissey, during which he told her not to tie the knot with Brand, to whom she is currently engaged.

“He’s Russell‘s mate and he is fascinating but he was giving us a hard time about getting married. He swooned and sighed, ‘Oh, left hand third finger, don’t do it’. It was just so eloquent and poetic and like one of his songs,” said Perry, reports The Sun.

However, the pair have still invited Morrissey to their wedding, which is set to take place in India this autumn, though Perry admitted: “It would be great to have him at the wedding but I told him, ‘We can’t have a Mr Misery like you messing things up.'”

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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