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Bruce Springsteen Announces Live Dates

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Bruce Springsteen Announces Live Dates
Bruce Springsteen has confirmed details for his European tour, which starts in Tampere, Finland on June 2. Springsteen recently released a new album 'Working On A Dream', and won a Golden Globe for the song 'The Wrestler' penned for the Mickey Rourke starring film of the same name. No UK dates hav...

Bruce Springsteen has confirmed details for his European tour, which starts in Tampere, Finland on June 2.

Springsteen recently released a new album ‘Working On A Dream’, and won a Golden Globe for the song ‘The Wrestler’ penned for the Mickey Rourke starring film of the same name.

No UK dates have been announced yet, although Springsteen will perfom in Dublin July 11 and is rumoured to be one of the headliners for this year’s Glastonbury festival.

Bruce Springsteen forthcoming live dates are as follows:

Tampere Ratinan Stadion (June 2)

Stockholm Stadium (4, 5, 7)

Bergen Koengen (9, 10)

Munich Olympiastadion (July 2)

Frankfurt Commerzbank Arena (3)

Vienna Ernst Happel Stadion (5)

Herning Herning MCH (8)

Dublin RDS (11)

Rome Stadio Olimpico (19)

Turino Olimpico di Torino (21)

Udine Stadio Friuli (23)

Bilbao San Mames Stadium (26)

Benidorm Estadio Municipal de Foietes (28)

Sevilla La Cartuja Olympic Stadium (30)

Valladolid Estadio Jose Zorrilla (August 1)

Santiago Monte Del Gozo (2)

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Pic credit: PA Photos

Mogwai Confirmed For Field Day

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Mogwai Confirmed For Field Day
Mogwai have been announced as the headline act for this year's Field Day festival, which will take place at London's Victoria Park on August 1. The Scottish post-rockers will be joined by Four Tet, James Yorkston and former Arab Strap multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton on the bill, with many m...

Mogwai have been announced as the headline act for this year’s Field Day festival, which will take place at London’s Victoria Park on August 1.

The Scottish post-rockers will be joined by Four Tet, James Yorkston and former Arab Strap multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton on the bill, with many more artists still to be revealed for the all dayer.

Tickets for the festival, now in its third year, are on sale now.

For more music and film news click here

John Carter Cash Talks About His Dad Johnny

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John Carter Cash Talks About His Dad Johnny
In last month’s issue of Uncut , we brought you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these intervi...

In last month’s issue of Uncut , we brought you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interviews.

And here’s the third transcript from the feature: JOHN CARTER CASH – Fellow musican, associate producer of the American Recordings series and only son of Johnny and June

For previous interviews with Rodney Crowell and Nick Cave. Click on the links in the side panel on the right.

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UNCUT: What do you identify as the difference between Johnny Cash, your father, and Johnny Cash, the peformer?

JOHN CARTER CASH: Well, my father definitely put on a stage person. My father was a unique man, but he had a shyness about him. It’s very much true that Cash onstage and the man at home, or the buddy at home that took me fishing, they were two distinct, different people. But they were elements of both of those in his personality all the time. But it wasn’t like he was multiple personalities, but it’s true that there were times when he was in his addiction, that it seemed like he might have been. But he himself in his autobiography wrote about Cash and JR. Cash was, basically, more selfishly oriented, more of an addictive personality. JR was just a good old boy who liked to laugh and have fun. So they were sort different people in some ways. But also, now that my father has passed on, it’s just as apparent that Johnny Cash hasn’t. He’s just as much alive, in the hearts of the fans, and in the music, as he was when the man was alive. So there is a sort of separation in my heart there, that I have to make, because, I’m in contact with Johnny Cash, the figure, the image, every day, but my dad’s gone. I have to make the separation.

Was there a time in your life where that was difficult, and were you ever jealous of the public taking hold of your dad?

I don’t know if I was so much jealous of the public taking hold of him, because I saw the separation, and I knew it from early on. But I did have some real struggles inside, with myself and who I was, as the child of a performer. As the child of a public figure. Defining my own identity was a journey, and at times definitely a struggle.

When first aware that he was a singer?

Oh gosh, I knew that from early. I knew from the moment that I could open my eyes probably because he… they took me on national television when I was an infant. They put me on stage. In almost every show from when I was small, from the moment I could walk they’d bring me out so I could take a bow. It was just part of my life every day.

Obv when you’re young, that seems natural and you don’t question it. Does there come a point where you think, hang on, what is this?

Yeah. Later on I realised for one that it was not necessarily par for the course for the rest of the world. It was a unique reality, but it was definitely a journey.

Have you had time to work out was special gift was?

My father’s special gift? I think for one it was his gentleness. The way that he could offer a heart in any given situation. There were many special gifts: one being his ability to fit in at the supermarket, or the coffee shop, or with the president of the United States, or foreign dignitaries. He wasn’t so much a chameleon as he was just magically accepted into the hearts of so many from different walks of life. There’s a lot there.

Rodney Crowell said that he was an elevated common man.

Yeah, through all that hard work, certainly. But the world around him also elevated him. They saw the magic within him. But he was. He was a gentle hearted common man. And he had many dear friends in different walks of life.

People talk a lot about his struggle against pain. Do you think that’s a key thing?

I think my dad’s greatest pain was interior pain. It was partially the way that he was made, and partially the pain of addiction, and the loss of his brother when he was younger. These struggles in life were probably his greatest. But in the last 10-12 years of his life, physical pain took over. And you don’t triumph over physical pain, but I’d say that, as much as my father, as a man, possibly could, he accepted it as his own. He had chronic nerve damage in his jaws, every day of his life he dealt with some sort of physical pain, and for the last ten years, he was an abusive addict for the most part, maybe the last five years. And we have a period in there where there were struggles. But he reached a plateau of understanding and spirituality that he carried with him until the end. Not that he every stopped using these substances, but something happened within his spirit that made things different. And that is part of how crossed that pain, how he carried it, and accepted it.

It’s interesting how frank people have been about the drug abuse in those later years, because that wasn’t so public before.

Well you know, it was through the course of his life. And that… I mean, there’s an image that my mother saved my father in 1968 and everything was a bed of roses and everything was fine after that. And that just wasn’t true. There were as many struggles in the 1980s and the 1990s as there were in the 1960s. they were just different drugs. But my father always went back to what was true. He went back to what was true, and he would turn his suffering around. I believe he learned from his lessons. But the very nature of addiction is that the addict is incorrigible. And my dad dealt with it all his life.

Someone said that he wanted to retire in the early 90s – that he’d had enough.

I don’t know. I never heard the word retire. I always heard my dad talk about playing music right through till the end. He may have talked in the early 90s about how he was ready to get off the road. But retirement, for my dad wasn’t part of his make-up. When he stopped playing music on the road he immediately began to work in the studio even more. And when he did retire in 97 he turned his focus into creativity, in the studio, in front of the microphone, with all the energy that he expended before when he was on the road. He never retired. Right before my dad died he was planning to go to New York City for the video music awards that he was nominated for, the MTV music awards. You couldn’t tell him he wasn’t going to go. It was going to happen. But he wound up having to check into the hospital there, and not too long later he died. But his spirit never gave up – his body did.

Nick Cave said he was very sick the day he recorded with him.

That was the typical day in the studio. I was there for that whole period in the studio. And to an outsider coming in you would see this sick man. When my father recorded most of the vocal for American V there were times when he would be in the hospital with pneumonia, I’d be sitting there talking to him, he could barely breathe, but he’d say “I want to go to the studio today.” He would literally fight the pneumonia out of his lungs and get in the studio and record, the next week. It happened over and over. And he’d still be very sick when he was in the studio. That’s that constitution – unstoppable nature. He just kept going. And you listen to most of those American Recordings, for IV and V, and on the upcoming VI, and that will be evident. But much more noticeable, and more beautiful… more apparent will be the fire of his nature.

Nick Cave said he couldn’t speak and he had to pray to get his voice back, but watching him as he sang it was like that was what he was made for.

Yeah. Exactly. He was made for it. he did it. He always would.

Some people question that Rick Rubin period – was it definitely good for him?

Oh yeah. He re-established his identity in the public eye. He came into his own creatively again once again. He reclaimed his space in music within his own spirit. And there was a great relationship between he and Rick. Rick is very open-minded about spiritual matters, they communed over prayer on a regular basis, over the phone usually. They were very close. So Rick’s support for my dad, both creatively and in the music world, and as a friend, were invaluable.

What does it mean to you when you see the video for “Hurt”?

It floors me every time. Its heavy. Well, my dad said it himself. My sister Cindy watched it and said “Dad, hey, this looks like you’re saying goodbye.” And he said, “Well, I am.” But he was like a kid about it. He like, “Check out the video!” He was – he wasn’t mournful or staring off in the distance. He was like: “Oh boy! This is gonna be huge!” Yeah, he loved it. He set it in motion. He knew the drama of it, but he knew the beauty and the honesty of it. He just said, I’m cool. The rest of the family was like, this is heavy dad, this is dark. All of us, you know, crying. And dad with a twinkle in his eye.

1980s – I saw the Cash show then when it wasn’t so cool to be a Cash fan then. You were on the show then.

Yeah. I may not have been that cool either! You know what – he was always searching for new things. He was always looking for creative energy. And I think he just followed his heart. And in the 1980s he was just doing that – he just followed his heart. And in the early 80s he was struggling with addiction, back and forth. There was a lot going on there behind the scenes. But I think he stayed true. He just followed his spirit, and what his heart told him to do. And in the end it wasn’t him that changed so much in the 1990s, it was that the world came back around to him. I just think it’s part of a natural progression.

Did your friendship get stronger at the end?

It modified. It changed. We went through a lot of struggles. But there towards the end it was very strong.

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY

First Look — The Thick Of It: The Movie

Michael Bonner
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“You sound like a fucking Nazi Julie Andrews!” Considering the grim fate that traditionally awaits many British sitcoms when they transfer to the big screen, you might be pleased to learn that In The Loop – essentially, The Thick Of It: The Movie – has successfully dodged a bullet. More, the cast of Machiavellian spin doctors, useless government ministers and their equally hopeless advisors have successfully been transplanted across the Atlantic, where they come face to face with what amounts to their American counterparts. But, of course, some things remain reassuringly familiar: the swearing is top notch. In fact, it might be disingenuous of me to call this The Thick Of It: The Movie. Certainly, you’ll recognise Peter Capaldi as Glaswegian spin-lizard Malcolm Tucker, and Paul Higgins as Jamie, his feral lieutenant. You’ll also recognise Chris Addison, James Smith, Joanna Scanlan and Alex MacQueen in the cast; but not as Ollie, Glenn, Terri and Julius, who they play in The Thick Of It. In some weird reality shift, these actors are essentially playing the same characters, but here with different names. You wonder whether the show’s creator, Armando Iannucci, is tacitly suggesting that there’s something interchangeable about Whitehall cannon fodder; the names can be altered, but the shit mountain is still the same. In The Loop is about the build up to war in the Middle East (presumably Iraq, though it’s never specified). British Minister for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, in essentially the Chris Langham role) inadvertently announces that war is “unforeseeable” in a radio interview, and so sets off a predictably farcical chain of events that leads from the offices of Malcolm Tucker to the US State Department and, finally, the United Nations. There are, of course, many laughs to be had watching Malcolm unleash baroque degrees of swearing at Foster’s puppyish new advisor, Toby (Addison), or Jamie stamping a fax machine to death. But these are familiar, if highly enjoyable, pleasures. Where In The Loop stands or falls is how successfully it integrates the American material. Here, Iannucci’s blessed with a particularly fantastic cast, including James Gandolfini as a three-star US general who seems against the march to war, Mimi Kennedy as an equally dove-like Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy and David Rasche (TV’s Sledge Hammer!, for those who remember such things) as her hawk-like opposite number. These are all welcome additions to Iannucci’s world, and, strangely, the third act showdown between Gandolfini’s General Miller and Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker reminded me of the face-off between De Niro and Pacino in Heat. In the wake of the success of the US version of The Office, which similarly deploys hand-held cameras, you’d think all this would translate very well. But it’s interesting that a pilot for an American version of The Thick Of It (directed by Christopher Guest) never made it to a full series. Also, I can’t help wondering quite how something so cynical and bilious as this will play in the States, currently basking in the warm glow of Obama’s election. All the same, In The Loop is brilliant, deliriously funny stuff. Now, if only they’d put out the Specials on DVD, I’d be happy. In The Loop opens in the UK on April 17

“You sound like a fucking Nazi Julie Andrews!” Considering the grim fate that traditionally awaits many British sitcoms when they transfer to the big screen, you might be pleased to learn that In The Loop – essentially, The Thick Of It: The Movie – has successfully dodged a bullet. More, the cast of Machiavellian spin doctors, useless government ministers and their equally hopeless advisors have successfully been transplanted across the Atlantic, where they come face to face with what amounts to their American counterparts. But, of course, some things remain reassuringly familiar: the swearing is top notch.

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The Killers and Coldplay To Play Intimate Gig Together

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The Killers and Coldplay To Play Intimate Gig Together
The Killers and Coldplay are to both play an intimate show in London, at the newly renamed O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire on February 18. Two of the biggest selling artists of 2008 will both play 45 minute sets at the West London venue for just 2,000 lucky fans, in celebration of War Child's 15th annive...

The Killers and Coldplay are to both play an intimate show in London, at the newly renamed O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on February 18.

Two of the biggest selling artists of 2008 will both play 45 minute sets at the West London venue for just 2,000 lucky fans, in celebration of War Child’s 15th anniversary.

The show will also launch the new charity compilation Heroes which is being released on February 16.

Commenting on playing the tiny show, Coldplay state: “In our eyes, War Child is one of the world’s most important charities, and The Killers are one of our favourite bands, so playing this concert is an absolute pleasure for us.”

The Killers responding with: “Coldplay were one of the bands that gave us hope when we were just four boys in a garage. To share the stage with them for the War Child cause is an honor.”

Tickets for the event will cost £50 and will only be available through a lottery system, to sign up go to www.warchildheroes.com from 9am on Friday (January 30).

Registration will close at 5pm on February 3. Fans who have won the chance to buy tickets will be notified by February 6. There is a maximum of 2 tickets per entry.

All profits will go to aid War Child’s work to protect the most marginalised children in war zones.

For more music and film news click here

Pic credit: PA Photos

Club Uncut: Crystal Antlers and The Delta Spirit, January 26, 2009

John Mulvey
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A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers. For the full review, please shoot over to our Wild Mercury Sound blog. Thanks!

A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers.

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Club Uncut: Crystal Antlers and The Delta Spirit, January 26, 2009

John Mulvey
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A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers, though annoyingly I managed to miss the first band (I was held up at a screening of Armando Iannucci’s Thick Of It movie, In The Loop, if that’s a good enough excuse). If anyone caught Banjo Or Freakout and fancies filing us a quick review at the bottom of this blog, that’d be great. I did arrive in time for The Delta Spirit, a decent college rock band from Califonia with some mildly subversive uses for a dustbin lid and a bunch of beaty, nagging songs – notably “Trashcan”, their first single over here – that’ll do alright if, as I imagine, they get a ride on the festival circuit this summer. Worth checking out, perhaps, if stuff like The Spinto Band is your bag. Stuff like Comets On Fire is much more my bag, of course, which makes Long Beach’s Crystal Antlers so alluring. I first wrote about this lot last autumn, when their debut EP reached us, and the anticipation for these first UK shows seems, this morning, to have been pretty justified. Crystal Antlers don’t quite have the deranged, virtuoso brutality of the Comets at full tilt, though this is still pretty hairy and charged psychedelic punk. They do have, though, an arsenal of songs that repeatedly surge and lunge intricately, and a singer, Jonny Bell, whose hoarsely bellowed imprecations are directly comparable to the shredded larynx of Ethan Miller. There’s a fair bit of prog-blues in all this, and a lineage stretching back to bands like Vanilla Fudge, thanks in part to the constant heavy organ swirl. First impressions of the album, “Tentacles”, which turned up yesterday, suggest that maybe the organ sometimes gets foregrounded at the expense of Andrew King’s frantic soloing, and that can be the case live, too. King is awesome, but he sometimes gets a bit lost in the clatter of percussion (there’s a drummer and a percussionist as well, who seems to be using his real name rather than calling himself Sexual Chocolate these days) and that overwhelming blanket of hum. It’s a small whinge, though, when the overall effect, especially on the monolithic likes of "Until the Sun Dies (Part Two)", is so impressive. Too short a set, perhaps, when you could get lost in these sci-fi freak-outs for days. But epics can wait ‘til next time, I guess.

A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers, though annoyingly I managed to miss the first band (I was held up at a screening of Armando Iannucci’s Thick Of It movie, In The Loop, if that’s a good enough excuse). If anyone caught Banjo Or Freakout and fancies filing us a quick review at the bottom of this blog, that’d be great.

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Coldplay To Headline Roskilde

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Coldplay To Headline Roskilde
Coldplay are the first headliners to be announced for this year's Roskilde festival in Denmark. The band who were awarded the title 'World's Best Selling Recording Act' for 2008 at the World Music Awards are to play only three European festivals this Summer; the other two being Werchter and Arras. ...

Coldplay are the first headliners to be announced for this year’s Roskilde festival in Denmark.

The band who were awarded the title ‘World’s Best Selling Recording Act’ for 2008 at the World Music Awards are to play only three European festivals this Summer; the other two being Werchter and Arras.

Coldplay return to headline the Danish festival after 6 years, having last played the Orange stage in 2003.

Roskilde takes place from July 2 – 5.

For more music and film news click here

First Look — Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End Of The World

Michael Bonner
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You might assume that Encounters At The End Of The World could be an agreeably apposite subtitle for many of Werner Herzog’s best known films. You could think, for instance, of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald taking Verdi’s music to the Peruvian jungles in Fitzcarraldo; the Conquistadors lost in the Andes in Aguirre: The Wrath Of God; Grizzly Man’s activist Timothy Treadwell and his bears in the wilds of Alaska. With this in mind, it seems perfectly natural for the 67 year-old Herzog to pitch up at the McMurdo Research Center in Antarctica. Here, summer is accompanied by five months of uninterrupted sunlight; where “you wake up in the night it’s so quiet” and the chatter of seals underwater “sound like Pink Floyd.” It’s a place of such incomporable isolation that even penguins can go mad, let alone the 1,000 strong community of scientists and researchers who come here to study the ice and the ocean beneath it. There's always something anthropological about how Herzog is drawn to document people in extraordinary circumstance. And, arguably, you can’t get much more extraordinary than living at the South Pole. Typically, Herzog finds McMurdo to be a repository for strangeness, drawing to the bottom of the world a community of travelers, scientists, weirdoes and drop-outs. Herzog finds a journeyman plumber who claims to be descended from an Aztec royal family; a biologist who’s been living in isolation among the penguins for so long he can barely hold a conversation; a cell biologist with a taste for science fiction who describes the ocean’s microscopic life forms as if they were monsters in a Cronenberg movie and who regularly shows his interns doomsday B-movies from the 1950s. As one character they meet, in the small hours of the morning in McMurdo’s hydroponic green house explains, “this place is full of PHDs washing dishes, linguists on a continent without languages.” But crucially, Herzog never mocks, and the film is more than just a study of these benign eccentrics. In Grizzly Man, Herzog famously claimed: “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” It’s perhaps strange, then, that Herzog finds beauty in the Oscar-nominated Encounters…, particularly the breathtaking underwater film shot by musician-cum-diver Henry Kaiser. All manner of eldritch sea creatures move gracefully below the frozen surface that itself resembles an alien landscape, the footage soundtracked by mournful chamber music. Above ground, the lingering shots of the frozen Antarctic wastes are imbued with a glacial elegance; elsewhere, footage of the Polar volcanoes echo some Blakean idea of the terrible beauty of nature. There is an ongoing theme here, too, of mankind’s own destruction. Herzog uses Frank Hurley’s footage of Shackleton’s 1914 Trans-Antarctic expedition, and particularly the sequence of the ship, Endurance, trapped in an ice floe, finally crushed by the pressure of the ice. With a kind of Teutonic pragmatism, Herzog predicts that nature will one day reclaim the planet. And then there’s the penguins. Herzog, who claims from the outset he doesn’t want to make a film about “fluffy penguins” eventually finds himself in the company of a colony of them, where he meets scientist David Ainley. Herzog endeavours to engage in conversation Ainley, who’s been out there with the fluffy little chaps for so long his grasp of language is beginning to falter. There is what initially appears to be amusing talk about whether penguins can turn gay, before Herzog asks: “Is there such a thing as… insanity among penguins?” You might think this borders on self-parody – until you see footage of one bird suddenly peeling off from its fellows and waddling off towards the mountains, a suicidal journey that will bring about certain death. Are we, too, Herzog implies, on a suicidal journey of our own..? The film ends with Herzog entering a manmade subterranean chamber. His voiceover wonders what, in the future when humans are extinct, alien scientists might make of the place. I’m briefly reminded of the end of Spielberg’s AI, where extraterrestrials find the android child David frozen below what was once Manhattan in the far future. In Herzog’s Polar tomb, there’s pictures of flowers surrounded by wreathes of popcorn and, curiously, a frozen sturgeon. That these strange, surreal souvenirs might outlive humanity provides a sombre comment on the frailty of all of us. Encounters At The End Of The World opens in the UK on April 24. You can watch the trailer here

You might assume that Encounters At The End Of The World could be an agreeably apposite subtitle for many of Werner Herzog’s best known films. You could think, for instance, of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald taking Verdi’s music to the Peruvian jungles in Fitzcarraldo; the Conquistadors lost in the Andes in Aguirre: The Wrath Of God; Grizzly Man’s activist Timothy Treadwell and his bears in the wilds of Alaska.

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Arbouretum: “Song Of The Pearl”

John Mulvey
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First off, a quick plug, since we have Crystal Antlers playing Club Uncut tonight (Tuesday January 27) in London. Tickets still available, apparently, and the supports (The Delta Spirit and Banjo Or Freakout) are worth a look, too. Secondly, we’ve just announced that March’s headliners (after Richard Swift next month) will be Baltimore’s excellent Arbouretum, so it’s high time I wrote something about their “Song Of The Pearl” album that we’ve been playing a fair bit for the past few weeks. There’s something in the ever-handy press-release that talks about “The expository yet emotionally resonant lyrics of [Arbouretum frontman] Dave Heumann at times recall songwriters such as Richard Thompson, Fred Neil and even Bob Dylan.” I can’t pretend to have studied the lyrics in depth, but there’s something of Thompson’s meticulously fraught melodic sensibility in a bunch of these songs, not least the opening “False Spring” and “Down By The Fall Line”. But while Heumann and Steve Strohmeier’s guitars sometimes have a spittly vigour to them which faintly recalls Thompson circa “A Sailor’s Life” (or, indeed, that song’s obvious fans, Television), much of the playing here is more smudged and grungy. “ “Another Hiding Place” reminds me, I think, of the last Arbouretum album, “Rites Of Uncovering”, and how it harnessed Crazy Horse’s chug and clang so much more effectively than similar-minded contemporaries like the irretrievably doleful Jason Molina’s Magnolia Electric Company. Arbouretum churn, for sure, but there’s a nuanced virtusosity to plenty of their playing, no little vigour and some fine tunes (all theirs, save Bob Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”) to keep them going. One thing we talked about the other day, playing “Song Of The Pearl”, was how much they sounded like Bob Mould; a mix, perhaps, of his fabulous “Workbook” solo debut with the first two Sugar albums. At that time, Mould, of course, was forcefully adept at taking wandering, Thompson-esque melodies, rooted in the cadences of British folk, and giving them the muscle and sonics of American rock. Heumann and Arbouretum seem to be doing something hearteningly similar: check out how rolling toms and raga fuzz bulk out a frail and lovely folk melody on “Thin Dominion” without ever smothering it, for instance. It’s a neat trick. And one which, I suspect, should work pretty awesomely live, if the staticky solos and incantations of “Infinite Corridors” is anything to go by. March 18 at Club Uncut, to recap.

First off, a quick plug, since we have Crystal Antlers playing Club Uncut tonight (Tuesday January 27) in London. Tickets still available, apparently, and the supports (The Delta Spirit and Banjo Or Freakout) are worth a look, too. Secondly, we’ve just announced that March’s headliners (after Richard Swift next month) will be Baltimore’s excellent Arbouretum, so it’s high time I wrote something about their “Song Of The Pearl” album that we’ve been playing a fair bit for the past few weeks.

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Arbouretum To Headline Club Uncut

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Arbouretum To Headline Club Uncut

Following yesterday’s news about Richard Swift and First Aid Kit playing Club Uncut on February 24, we can now reveal that March’s soirée will be headlined by Baltimore’s very fine Arbouretum. Arbouretum’s third album, the Crazy Horse-meets-Richard Thompson flavoured Song Of The Pearl, has been a big hit in the Uncut office this past couple of weeks, and it sounds like the band will be pretty awesome live. You can read more about Arbouretum by visiting our Wild Mercury Sound blog. Arbouretum are playing Club Uncut at the Borderline, Manette Street, London, on March 18. Tickets for this one are £7, available from seetickets. For more music and film news click here

Following yesterday’s news about Richard Swift and First Aid Kit playing Club Uncut on February 24, we can now reveal that March’s soirée will be headlined by Baltimore’s very fine Arbouretum.

Arbouretum’s third album, the Crazy Horse-meets-Richard Thompson flavoured Song Of The Pearl, has been a big hit in the Uncut office this past couple of weeks, and it sounds like the band will be pretty awesome live. You can read more about Arbouretum by visiting our Wild Mercury Sound blog.

Arbouretum are playing Club Uncut at the Borderline, Manette Street, London, on March 18. Tickets for this one are £7, available from seetickets.

For more music and film news click here

Oasis Confirmed To Headline Benicàssim

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Oasis Confirmed To Headline Benicàssim
Oasis have been confirmed as the fourth headliner for this year's Benicàssim Festival, joining previously announced bill toppers Kings of Leon, Paul Weller and Franz Ferdinand. The FIB Heineken Benicàssim Festival, celebrating it's 15th anniversary, takes place over four days from July 16 - 19, ...

Oasis have been confirmed as the fourth headliner for this year’s Benicàssim Festival, joining previously announced bill toppers Kings of Leon, Paul Weller and Franz Ferdinand.

The FIB Heineken Benicàssim Festival, celebrating it’s 15th anniversary, takes place over four days from July 16 – 19, near Valencia.

More major artists are still to be revealed.

Promoter for the festival Vince Power commented on the latest announcement, saying: “I’m really pleased to have Oasis play this year, especially as it’s the 15th Anniversary. This year looks to be one of the best years to date.”

Tickets for the festival are on sale now.

Aside from the festival slot, Oasis have also announced that the next single from the album ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ will be the Noel Gallagher sung ‘Falling Down’, due for release on March 9.

For more music and film news click here

Marianne Faithfull To Answer Your Questions!

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Marianne Faithfull To Answer Your Questions!
Ask Marianne Faithfull! Marianne Faithfull will soon be gracing us with her regal presence for our regular An Audience With... feature, and we’re after your questions to put to her. So, what could you possibly want to ask Marianne..? Who are her favourite collaborators..? What are her memories...

Ask Marianne Faithfull!

Marianne Faithfull will soon be gracing us with her regal presence for our regular An Audience With… feature, and we’re after your questions to put to her.

So, what could you possibly want to ask Marianne..?

Who are her favourite collaborators..?

What are her memories of Soho in the Sixties..?

And having played God, the Devil and an Archduchess of Austria, are there any other acting jobs she’d quite fancy..?

Send your questions to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com by Wednesday, February 7, 2009.

The best questions, and Marianne’s answers will lbe published in a future edition of Uncut .

For more music and film news click here

Paul McCartney and Radiohead To Perform At The Grammy Awards

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Paul McCartney and Radiohead To Perform At The Grammy Awards
Paul McCartney and Radiohead are today confirmed to be performing live at this year's Grammy Awards which are taking place in Los Angeles on February 8. Foo Fighters' frontman Dave Grohl, Jay Z and Kanye West are also set to appear live at the 51st annual ceremony. As previously reported, Radiohea...

Paul McCartney and Radiohead are today confirmed to be performing live at this year’s Grammy Awards which are taking place in Los Angeles on February 8.

Foo Fighters’ frontman Dave Grohl, Jay Z and Kanye West are also set to appear live at the 51st annual ceremony.

As previously reported, Radiohead are shortlisted in five categories including Album of the Year for last year’s ‘In Rainbows.’

Paul McCartney is expected to be accompanied by Dave Grohl on drums.

Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, T.I. and Kanye West are set to perform together for a version of their single ‘Swagga Like Us’.

Coldplay have received seven nominations for the 2009 ceremony, while Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen are also included in the awards’ expansive shortlist.

Robert Plant is up for Record Of The Year (“Please Read The Letter”), Album Of The Year (“Raising Sand”), Best Pop Collaboration Wih Vocals (“Rich Woman”), Best Country Collaboration With Vocals (“Killing The Blues”) and Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album (“Raising Sand”).

Neil Young is up for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for his turn on “Chrome Dreams II”‘s “No Hidden Path”.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” is nominated in the same category, while the same track is up for the Best Rock Song gong.

The Raconteurs‘ “Consolers Of The Lonely” is up against Coldplay and Kings Of Leon in the Best Rock Album category.

For more music and film news click here

Pic credit: PA Photos

Richard Swift To Be Joined By First Aid Kit At Club Uncut

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Richard Swift To Be Joined By First Aid Kit At Club Uncut
Richard Swift will be joined by young Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg who comprise First Aid Kit at next month's (February) Club Uncut at London's Borderline. First Aid Kit's influences range from Cat Power and Joanna Newsom to Fleet Foxes, The Beatles and Johnny Cash, so be sure to g...

Richard Swift will be joined by young Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg who comprise First Aid Kit at next month’s (February) Club Uncut at London’s Borderline.

First Aid Kit’s influences range from Cat Power and Joanna Newsom to Fleet Foxes, The Beatles and Johnny Cash, so be sure to get down to the show early on February 24.

Swift will previewing his forthcoming, eagerly-awaited follow-up to Dressed Up For The Letdown.

Tickets cost £10 and can be bought from www.seetickets.co.uk. As usual, the show is at the Borderline, on Manette Street, just off London’s Charing Cross Road.

And don’t forget there are tickets still available for our first show of 2009, a showcase for two of the most exciting new bands in America. Long Beach psych-punks Crystal Antlers and The Delta Spirit (kin to Cold War Kids and Dr Dog, perhaps) will be playing Club Uncut at London’s Borderline on January 27. Support comes from Italian-in-London noisepopper Banjo Or Freakout, and tickets are available for £7, again from www.seetickets.co.uk.

We’ll be announcing the headline act for the March Club Uncut tomorrow, so check back for details!

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Part Two: Texas Country Singer Rodney Crowell

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Part Two: Texas Country Singer Rodney Crowell
In this month’s issue of Uncut , we bring you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interview...

In this month’s issue of Uncut , we bring you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interviews.

And here’s the second one: Rodney Crowell

Houston, Texas born country singer songwriter, and one-time husband of Rosanna Cash, a nervous Crowell asked Cash to sing on 2001’s “I Walk The Line Revisited”. “It was like getting Da Vinci to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa,” he recalled.

***

UNCUT: When did you first meet Cash?

CROWELL: At the Beverley Hills Hotel when I was dating his daughter. Went to dinner in the Bungalow, just me and her and John and June. You can imagine – I was 27 years old. It was just a delightful dinner. And they treated me like royalty. They were just so charming. John and June were world-class charming human beings. I was a couple of feet off the ground. The next time, Rosanne and I were living together. John didn’t smile on that. He thought that was not right. So we received a summons – airline tickets to their sugar plantation down there [in Jamaica]. So I got drunk all the way. I drank bloody Marys to Miami and then switched to rum going down to Montego Bay, and then when we got there I was really way up in my cups. There was a confrontation between John and Rosanne about sleeping arrangements, so I with drunken bravura I cut into the conversation. I said, you know I’d be a hypocrite if I changed my lifestyle – trying to be a puffed-up man and hold my own with [chuckle] one of the world class icons – and he kind of looked at me, and he said: “Son. I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone.” He dismissed me in a heartbeat. Which instantly sobered me. And from that point on… he made a friend for life with me, because he just showed me what real strength is.

It must have been intimidating – these presumably are your musical heroes.

Certainly the second meeting was extremely intimidating. The first one was more a dream sequence. Just a really delightful dinner for four. A fireside dinner at the Bev Hills Hotel,. And for me, just getting my legs under me in the music business, it was huge.

Is JC somebody that, when you were bumming around with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, was up in the pantheon for you?

Yeah. Going way back. In Nashville in that day when Guy and Townes were two steps above the street, and the rest of us were still scrapping on the street, John with his compound out on the lake was the top of the ladder. I remember, Guy had a small house across the lake and his next door neighbour had a boat, and we’d be out there on a full moon night in the boat, putting by over the cove where John’s big house was. Looking at it, going ‘God! That’s pretty cool.’ Roy Orbison was next door.

You have this song, “The First Time I Heard Johnny Cash Sing I Walk The Line”/ I’ve heard you read the memoir of it – the way you describe his voice sounding like Abraham Lincoln looked – what did you mean?

It’s just that kind of gravitas. Deep gravitas. And also that iconic sense – that you could have his bust on Mt Rushmore. Put him and Dylan and Chuck Berry and Merle Haggard and Hank Williams up there.

Is the song literally true, that when you first heard “I Walk The Line” you were transported?

Yeah – well, I was trying to capture the poetry of the moment in the way I wrote that. But I think that when that particular experience was through with me – I mean, given my parents and my life, chances are I’d have been a songwriter – but hearing that when I was 5 years old and going that far away, it sort of sealed the deal.

Did you ever work together? I presume his vocal is dubbed onto that record.

Yeah it was dubbed on. I helped in the studio. I produced a record with him and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. A live record. It was recorded in Germany.

What was it like working with him?

Great. It was funny. My favourite thing about John was his wicked sense of humour. He was a kid. Whenever he suited up and was the Man In Black he was an imposing figure – this worldwide icon, but relaxed and away from that he was a prankster. He was a funny kid. And he really indulged his childish self. It was fun.

Did you consider him to be a genius?

Well you know that word is… that’s a tricky word. How do you define it? I think a song like “How High’s The Water Mamma”, that’s Faulkner. That’s genius. Or “I Walk The Line”, “I Still Miss Someone”, or “Big River”. There’s a poetic genius, for sure. I think the genius lies in being an elevated everyman. You don’t get to that place if you’re not somehow touched with that extra bit of charisma. And as my friend Stuart Smith would always say, he was a body language genius. We used to tour with him and we would open, and I remember doing this show at the Albert Hall, and my band would open, and we’re standing watching him from that little door by the stage, and Stuart turned to me and he said “There is no greater body language than that man on stage.”

Just from the way he stood?

Yeah – just you know, hey, I’m comfortable here. Like his most comfortable chair was on that stage, standing up singing for people.

This phrase you used – elevated everyman – it is a difficult position to be celebrated for being apparently like everybody else. And being above it.
It’s hard to do. It’s hard to be in both places at once. And I think he paid a price for it. He died a young man. He wore himself out doing it. He lived hard.

Was he conflicted about the responsibilities of that?

No I don’t think so. I think he was really comfortable. He was more conflicted about his own personal demons, that he struggled with. There was a part of John that I was aware of: he had currents swimming in two different directions. He struggled with drugs, most of his life. There was always that clean-up time, which he really had, where he had that really big turnaround with June, but he still struggled later on.

What was at the root of the drug problem? Was it a recreational thing that spiralled?

No. It was like he survived what Elvis didn’t survive. I talked to him about this. You know, when they came of age and they were out there, and those guys were making records and going on the road and trying to keep their schedule together, and somebody handed him amphetamines. And if you’re pre-disposed toward chemical dependency – we talked about this – they handed those guys the hard stuff from the get-go. At least when I came up people were handing you a beer and a joint. It was a gentler entry into that world. For those guys coming up in the Fifties – the Everlys and all of those guys – they handed them amphetamines, which is basically like plugging yourself into the light fixture. And scientifically there are those who are pre-disposed to struggle with introducing chemicals to the body. And you’re in for a long bout with that: amphetamines are rough. When you’re flying on it it’s like you can conquer the world, but coming down off it’s a really hard crash.

Is there one story which sums up what you think of John?

The one I told you about being drunk out of my mind and insinuating I was going to have my way with his daughter. He put me in my place with world class resolve. But there’s also another personal memory I have – that we were in the cabin that he and June had on their property, and he had a hammock on the front of it. Somebody had a video camera, and John was just laying in the hammock, just kind of swinging idly, really relaxed. And someone handed me the camera and said: shoot dad. So I put the camera on him, and I watched this relaxed man, this patriarch lying in a hammock, become Johnny Cash, through the camera. And it was so powerful. It was almost like this transformation. It wasn’t a Jekyll and Hyde thing, it was just ‘oh, the camera’s on’, and whenever it was time to go to work, even if it was just for a home movie, he became that icon. I just watched that icon inhabit that body. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Good God, it’s so strong.’

Was that a conscious thing with him?
No. I think he probably called on it consciously when he needed to. But this particular time, it was just the instinct of, ‘Oh, the camera, it’s on me, I’m who I am,’ and pfff, there it is! Going from just lying in a hammock enjoying a summer’s day. It was really profound, to be looking through a camera lens and see it. So I can imagine, a photographer, lurking – like Alan Messer shot Johnny Cash a lot – and we had this conversation, because he shot my new album cover and I told him that story and he said, oh yeah it was always that way whenever we would start to shoot. He said he would snap, take the picture, and the legend would assume itself right before his eyes.

You compared him to Will Rogers once – what did you mean?
It’s what we already talked about – the elevated everyman. It’s like the everyman as poet, you know? As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style. Will Rogers was a pundit, really, in a way. And John had that same kind of comfortable everyman – but the difference between him and the common man was his poetic brilliance. He was really a poet. At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast

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Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
Andrew Bird has a theory about whistling. Roughly speaking, he views it as the most efficient way to extract the music from his imagination. “It’s like sonic vapour escaping,” he says. “The melody’s in this cloud-like shape in your head.” So, when he whistles – which he does quite freq...

Andrew Bird has a theory about whistling. Roughly speaking, he views it as the most efficient way to extract the music from his imagination. “It’s like sonic vapour escaping,” he says. “The melody’s in this cloud-like shape in your head.” So, when he whistles – which he does quite frequently – he is getting to the music without thinking about how to translate it to an instrument. “There’s no frets, there’s nothing imposing it’s odour on it, so you end up with less conventional melodies.” These were not, its fair to speculate, the concerns of Roger Whittaker when he recorded The Mexican Whistler. But Bird is an unusual pop musician. As he has demonstrated over seven albums (as well as several informal live recordings), he is capable of channelling folk dance rhythms – as on his 1996 debut, Music of Hair, and with his previous band, The Squirrel Nut Zippers – and operating in the basements of the Chicago and Minneapolis undergrounds. His last album, Armchair Apocrypha, could have been filed alongside Wilco’s more experimental recordings, but Noble Beast is a step back towards a folkier sensibility.

A classically-trained violinist writing pop, Bird’s music exists in the airlock between theory and intuition. The air can be a bit dry in there, but when the vacuum is breached, there’s a magisterial quality to his melodies. He was trained in the Suzuki method, a “folk” approach, in which Mozart and Bach are learned by ear. He channelled this into an appreciation of jazz, and plays his violin in the style of a tenor saxophone.

He doesn’t appreciate comparisons – no wonder, since he has been compared with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Joanna Newsom – but if you put aside the plaintive echoes of Thom Yorke (on “Nomenclature”) or Paul Simon (on “Tenuousness”), you end up with a kind of clinical soul, a heartfelt music that takes time to release its charms, like Scott Walker channelling Sufjan Stevens. But “soul”, too, is misleading. As a vocalist, Bird is effortless. There is no sense of him sweating the emotional stuff. Lyrically, he wouldn’t have lasted past morning roll-call in the Brill Building. He favours an arcane vocabulary and a cryptic approach to meaning.

A song such as The Privateers could represent a heartfelt cheerio to the ethics of the Bush era, or it could be a snarky farewell to a lover. The singer favours the latter, but won’t exclude the former, as he doesn’t always know what his songs are about. When Bird wrote about songwriting in the New York Times, he took time out to explain why he had opted for the phrases “calcified arhythmatist” over “unemployed ex-physicist” in the album’s opening song “Oh No”. Not, you’d imaging, a choice that ever tormented Hal David.

Bird is aiming for a kind of pastoral simplicity on Noble Beast. Cinematic moments, where the sound goes widescreen, are almost an afterthought. On the lovely “Effigy”, the violin has a Ry Cooder-ish feel to it, like a campfire accordion, while the twanging guitar of Jeremy Ylvisaker evokes the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. Bird concedes that the reverb-heavy whistling is suggestive of spaghetti westerns, but claims he was aiming more for a 1960s Nashville feel – something with the sonic grandiosity of the Everlys, Roy Orbison or Kris Kristofferson. These influences are buried: while you might discern a folk memory of “Ghost Riders In The Sky”, it would be an age before you discerned any similarity to “Only The Lonely”. But “Effigy” is a lovely song, and sturdy enough to survive re-interpretation. You can imagine it in the voice or Lee Marvin or Leonard Cohen, and there’s no greater praise.

The Nashville inference is no accident. The songs were assembled with the assistance of Lambchop collaborator Mark Nevers, while drummer Martin Dosh added rhythm tracks in his Minneapolis basement. But this isn’t a genre piece. There’s a sense throughout that Bird’s head is engaged in a battle with his heart, as if aware that there’s a pop masterpiece squatting on the far horizons of his intuition.

As grand and controlled as it all sounds, there is something unbalanced about Bird’s pop. In the album’s bonus disc, “Useless Creatures” – a free-spirited, indulgent collaboration with Wilco’s Glenn Kotche – you can hear him rustling and scratching away from the melody. The pulsebeat of Noble Beast travels in the other direction, but the aim is the same. Except that when Bird plays pop, you can whistle it. And if you don’t, he will.

ALASTAIR McKAY

UNCUT Q&A With Andrew Bird:

Were you aiming for a pastoral sound?

Before I made this record, I sat down and said, now what do I want to hear? If I went into a record store, what’s missing? I decided I wanted to work more with acoustic instruments, getting this warm, rich, bubbly sound. I visualised a place on my farm in the country where there’s a spring coming out from underneath this tree, and everything’s covered in moss and in a state of decay, and it has a steamy fecund quality. That’s what I wanted to do sonically.

Have you moved beyond your jazz influences?

My influences are not as clearly visible. When you first start writing you have your record collection and you think this is as good as it gets. This Lester Young solo from 1956 – I can only hope to make music that cool. When you start writing you’re gonna naturally write that way. So instead of studying other violinists I tried to play like Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, and I still do play that way – like a phrase is a breath of air. But it’s just not jazz. It’s not stylistically specific anymore. On a tune like “Masterswarm”, there’s a bit of a guilty pleasure about just playing a violin solo. It was a thrill – like I had to give myself permission: it was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna rip this lead out here.’

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY

For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

The Rakes: “Klang!”

John Mulvey
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Not, perhaps, the sort of thing that I write about here very often, but The Rakes always sounded round these parts as one of the best bands to emerge from the whole post-Libertines/post-punk/Britpop Nouveau thing of a few years ago. They seemed to have a fair bit more wit and interesting angles than most of their contemporaries, and maybe a healthy affinity to Elastica. That said, I can’t pretend to remember much about The Rakes’ second album, so the arrival of their third didn’t initially cause that much fuss. It’s really good, though: it’s called “Klang!”, possibly due to it being recorded in the band’s new hometown of Berlin. “Klang!”, however, is not much like Krautrock, being instead a lean and determined reiteration of the Rakes’ skills: choppy riffs; bug-eyed social observation; very short songs. “Klang!” has ten songs, the longest of which comes in at less than three and a half minutes. The titles are pretty good value in themselves: “The Loneliness Of The Outdoor Smoker”, “Shackleton”, “Mullers Ratchet”, the last of which apparently refers to a genetic disorder which manifests itself in asexual populations and is not the sort of thing you get dealed with so catchily in, say, a song by The View. And as something like “That’s The Reason” belts past, the infectious bristling economy comes across as a neat rejoinder to the new Franz Ferdinand album, where their schtick seems so tired and needy. The price of success, maybe: if “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand” finds a band so anxiously trying to cling on to fame and overcompensating as a result, “Klang!” showcases one unburdened by any such expectations. Frankly, The Rakes’ time of hipness may have past, but the quality of these clipped dispatches – and the unglossy punch bestowed on them by Les Savy Fav producer Chris Zane – suggest a longevity uncommon in British bands of their generation. The best thing of many good things here is a song called “1989”, a roisteringly nostalgic knees-up which may have something to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which faintly resembles “Hong Kong Garden” with its gothic portent replaced by something at once blokey and somehow cerebral. Everything flies past in a blur, but occasionally you catch Alan Donohue’s blurry narratives through those precisely ringing and strutting guitars, that mathematically chundering bassline. In “Shackleton”, he seems to be comparing himself to “Harry Hill on happy pills”, and though I’m fairly sure there’s more erudite references in here, that one sticks out this morning. Good record.

Not, perhaps, the sort of thing that I write about here very often, but The Rakes always sounded round these parts as one of the best bands to emerge from the whole post-Libertines/post-punk/Britpop Nouveau thing of a few years ago. They seemed to have a fair bit more wit and interesting angles than most of their contemporaries, and maybe a healthy affinity to Elastica.

Continue

The Incredible String Band – Tricks Of The Senses

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The Incredible String Band – Tricks Of The Senses

Modern ears frequently can’t get past the more frivolous side of The Incredible String Band: the Gilbert & Sullivan silliness of “Minotaur Song”, or the fuzzy-felt folk of “Painting Box”. Which is a shame, because if you listen beyond the mimsy and screen out the velvet loon pants, you find a group whose trial-and-error traversal of world religions and alternative spirituality are conducted with such poetic fervour, it makes the music of most other late 60s mystics sound spiritually malnourished. This 16 track compilation of rarities and unreleased music, spanning six of the group’s eight years, leans relatively heavily on their questing and experimental side, with enough tomfoolery for light relief. Fans have long hoped for outtakes from their most celebrated album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. This definitive trawl of the Witchseason and Island warehouses by ace ISB investigator Adrian Whittaker turned up nothing from the 1968 classic. Instead he’s pulled together a mix of alternate studio takes, live recordings, an astonishing American radio session, and a Leadbelly song from the coveted, long-undiscovered ‘Balmore hoard’, the earliest home recordings by Mike Heron and Robin Williamson as a duo, on which they announce themselves as “poets and players, and prophets from the North”. “Lover Man”, left off 1967’s 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, shows the paradox that it was Heron, the rock ’n’ roller, who sang out like a trad hollerer, while Williamson, the Scots folknik, exploited the intimacy of the microphone for his bardic odysseys. In “The Iron Stone”, an alternate take of the acoustic raga from Wee Tam And The Big Huge (1968), Williamson describes finding a lump of meteorite that acts as a magic portal to a mental carnival of Atlantean beings. Much of the surrounding folk-rock – from Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” to Shirley Collins’s Anthems In Eden – contained similar time-travelling leaps, but few stage-managed the illusion with such arresting panache. The May 1968 session for WBAI’s Radio Unneameable show is a fascinating time capsule of the era: host Bob Fass clears the air with Tibetan gongs and drums, before Williamson recites his mystic poem “The Head”, backed by recorders and dippy flutes. This, and the “Poetry Play #1” which appears on CD2, is an experimental, freeform String Band that never made it to vinyl. “See All The People” shows off the duo’s deft, gossamer guitar interplay, while Heron’s “Douglas Traherne Harding” is a homily lodged in a parable secreted in a conundrum. CD1 closes with “Maya”, a gnomic paean to the Hindu goddess of illusion. Because the original Big Huge version cuts off in mid-jam, it’s one of the most hotly contested tracks in the canon. This radio version helps lay the controversy to rest; the saffron buzz of its agitated sitar is allowed to wind right down to an idling coda. The break between the two CDs effectively rings down the interval curtain between the String Band’s first and second phases. “All this world is but a play/be thou the joyful player”, they had chorused in “Maya”. After 1969 they awarded girlfriends Likky McKechnie and Rose Simpson full group membership; signed up to the Church of Scientology; joined forces with Stone Monkey, former prancers extraordinary at UFO and Middle Earth; and indulged a group passion for theatrics with U, an indulgent psychedelic mummery produced at London’s Roundhouse and across America in 1970. Culled from a noisy tape of their Roundhouse residency, U is represented by the camp swashbuckler “El Ratto”, whose punning text is declaimed with relish by Williamson, and the brief ballad “Long Long Road”, neither of which appear on the album of the show. Continuing the amateur dramatics, “Queen Juanita And Her Fisherman Lover” (a missing track from 1970’s I Looked Up) will either seem charming or drawing-room twee, depending on how high you’ve calibrated your threshold for briny 16-minute melodramas featuring Ondes Martenot, wave machine and giggling recitative. The compilation is wrapped up with two cuts from the 1972 Earthspan sessions. “Secret Temple”, written and sung by Likky, starts in Mo Tucker mode and develops into a serpentine roundelay for shenai and minimalist piano. “Curlew” is a crystalline chamber-folk instrumental whose Hardanger fiddle and penny whistles point towards Williamson’s destiny as a Celtic troubadour and storyteller. All in all, this collection of ones that got away is far from barrel-scraping stuff: a rarities collection to be savoured alongside Joe Boyd’s long-awaited remasters of the Incredible discography, due later this year. ROB YOUNG UNCUT Q & A With Robin Williamson UNCUT: Did you enjoy rediscovering these forgotten tracks? RW: Yes, the surprise for me is the rehearsal of “Relax Your Mind”, that’s come out of somebody’s back cupboard. That was never intended for issue, but it has got a nice, fresh, funky sort of feel to it. And the Likky song, “Secret Temple”, is very good. And so is the instrumental “Curlew”, which I’d forgotten about completely. “The Iron Stone” seems to have stayed with you throughout your career. I’ve recently re-recorded that again for ECM. I still have the iron stone – I think it’s a meteorite, I found it on the beach at Cramond, near Edinburgh. It had come from so far away, from outer space, and it seemed to be carrying this atmosphere of parallel worlds and possibilities. Did your theatricals with Stone Monkey reflect the madness of your own lives at the time? Actually it was quite like that, yeah. U was something that grew that winter. The loch froze solid, and you could drive a car over it, spinning round and round in circles. Do you still consider music a spiritual journey? At the age of 65, the notion of what we’re doing in the world at all, and the miracle of being alive, and our destiny as spiritual entities, is what concerns me more profoundly than anything else. Me and my wife Bina are working together doing seasonal programmes doing precisely that. And we’re having a tremendous time doing it. INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Modern ears frequently can’t get past the more frivolous side of The Incredible String Band: the Gilbert & Sullivan silliness of “Minotaur Song”, or the fuzzy-felt folk of “Painting Box”. Which is a shame, because if you listen beyond the mimsy and screen out the velvet loon pants, you find a group whose trial-and-error traversal of world religions and alternative spirituality are conducted with such poetic fervour, it makes the music of most other late 60s mystics sound spiritually malnourished. This 16 track compilation of rarities and unreleased music, spanning six of the group’s eight years, leans relatively heavily on their questing and experimental side, with enough tomfoolery for light relief.

Fans have long hoped for outtakes from their most celebrated album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. This definitive trawl of the Witchseason and Island warehouses by ace ISB investigator Adrian Whittaker turned up nothing from the 1968 classic. Instead he’s pulled together a mix of alternate studio takes, live recordings, an astonishing American radio session, and a Leadbelly song from the coveted, long-undiscovered ‘Balmore hoard’, the earliest home recordings by Mike Heron and Robin Williamson as a duo, on which they announce themselves as “poets and players, and prophets from the North”.

“Lover Man”, left off 1967’s 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, shows the paradox that it was Heron, the rock ’n’ roller, who sang out like a trad hollerer, while Williamson, the Scots folknik, exploited the intimacy of the microphone for his bardic odysseys. In “The Iron Stone”, an alternate take of the acoustic raga from Wee Tam And The Big Huge (1968), Williamson describes finding a lump of meteorite that acts as a magic portal to a mental carnival of Atlantean beings. Much of the surrounding folk-rock – from Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” to Shirley Collins’s Anthems In Eden – contained similar time-travelling leaps, but few stage-managed the illusion with such arresting panache.

The May 1968 session for WBAI’s Radio Unneameable show is a fascinating time capsule of the era: host Bob Fass clears the air with Tibetan gongs and drums, before Williamson recites his mystic poem “The Head”, backed by recorders and dippy flutes. This, and the “Poetry Play #1” which appears on CD2, is an experimental, freeform String Band that never made it to vinyl. “See All The People” shows off the duo’s deft, gossamer guitar interplay, while Heron’s “Douglas Traherne Harding” is a homily lodged in a parable secreted in a conundrum. CD1 closes with “Maya”, a gnomic paean to the Hindu goddess of illusion. Because the original Big Huge version cuts off in mid-jam, it’s one of the most hotly contested tracks in the canon. This radio version helps lay the controversy to rest; the saffron buzz of its agitated sitar is allowed to wind right down to an idling coda.

The break between the two CDs effectively rings down the interval curtain between the String Band’s first and second phases. “All this world is but a play/be thou the joyful player”, they had chorused in “Maya”. After 1969 they awarded girlfriends Likky McKechnie and Rose Simpson full group membership; signed up to the Church of Scientology; joined forces with Stone Monkey, former prancers extraordinary at UFO and Middle Earth; and indulged a group passion for theatrics with U, an indulgent psychedelic mummery produced at London’s Roundhouse and across America in 1970. Culled from a noisy tape of their Roundhouse residency, U is represented by the camp swashbuckler “El Ratto”, whose punning text is declaimed with relish by Williamson, and the brief ballad “Long Long Road”, neither of which appear on the album of the show. Continuing the amateur dramatics, “Queen Juanita And Her Fisherman Lover” (a missing track from 1970’s I Looked Up) will either seem charming or drawing-room twee, depending on how high you’ve calibrated your threshold for briny 16-minute melodramas featuring Ondes Martenot, wave machine and giggling recitative.

The compilation is wrapped up with two cuts from the 1972 Earthspan sessions. “Secret Temple”, written and sung by Likky, starts in Mo Tucker mode and develops into a serpentine roundelay for shenai and minimalist piano. “Curlew” is a crystalline chamber-folk instrumental whose Hardanger fiddle and penny whistles point towards Williamson’s destiny as a Celtic troubadour and storyteller.

All in all, this collection of ones that got away is far from barrel-scraping stuff: a rarities collection to be savoured alongside Joe Boyd’s long-awaited remasters of the Incredible discography, due later this year.

ROB YOUNG

UNCUT Q & A With Robin Williamson

UNCUT: Did you enjoy rediscovering these forgotten tracks?

RW: Yes, the surprise for me is the rehearsal of “Relax Your Mind”, that’s come out of somebody’s back cupboard. That was never intended for issue, but it has got a nice, fresh, funky sort of feel to it. And the Likky song, “Secret Temple”, is very good. And so is the instrumental “Curlew”, which I’d forgotten about completely.

“The Iron Stone” seems to have stayed with you throughout your career.

I’ve recently re-recorded that again for ECM. I still have the iron stone – I think it’s a meteorite, I found it on the beach at Cramond, near Edinburgh. It had come from so far away, from outer space, and it seemed to be carrying this atmosphere of parallel worlds and possibilities.

Did your theatricals with Stone Monkey reflect the madness of your own lives at the time?

Actually it was quite like that, yeah. U was something that grew that winter. The loch froze solid, and you could drive a car over it, spinning round and round in circles.

Do you still consider music a spiritual journey?

At the age of 65, the notion of what we’re doing in the world at all, and the miracle of being alive, and our destiny as spiritual entities, is what concerns me more profoundly than anything else. Me and my wife Bina are working together doing seasonal programmes doing precisely that. And we’re having a tremendous time doing it.

INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG

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Beirut – March Of The Zapotec

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Beirut – March Of The Zapotec
Zach Condon is the Tintin of modern American indie. Under the name of Beirut, armed only with his trusty ukulele and trumpet, the plucky cub musician has bravely journeyed Into The Land Of The Gypsies (on 2006 debut Gulag Orkestar), caroused in The Paris Of The Golden 20s ( 2007's The Flying Club Cu...

Zach Condon is the Tintin of modern American indie. Under the name of Beirut, armed only with his trusty ukulele and trumpet, the plucky cub musician has bravely journeyed Into The Land Of The Gypsies (on 2006 debut Gulag Orkestar), caroused in The Paris Of The Golden 20s ( 2007’s The Flying Club Cup) and now, in his latest double feature, takes brief soujourns in The Valley Of The Zapotecs and The Lair of the Laptop.

What buried treasure or fabulous secret is he on the trail of? It may be that every white bohemian seeks elective affinities with some romanticised cultural other. Punk seized upon the righteous dread of reggae, post-punk found salvation in the locked grooves of funk, and even indiepop divines ultimate romantic rapture in Northern Soul. You could argue that it’s the inescapable global ubiquity of modern US indie’s really Big Other – hip hop – that has driven young romantics like Condon to ever greater lengths in search of forms to idealize.

The backstory of the first half of the new record almost feels like a put-on: idly considering composing a soundtrack for a film based in Mexico, Condon became besotted with the funeral bands of the Oaxaca region. Determined to trace the music back to its source, the New Mexico gringo travelled down to the tiny Zapotec village of Teotitlan de Valle and, with the help of a trilingual translator, collaborated on 6 new tracks with the 19-piece Jiminez Band.

You half-hope this is all an elaborate fabulation, especially since it’s actually not as radical leap as you might expect. Banda, the traditional brass music of Mexico, developed in part from the polka music brought over by German and Polish immigrants in the 19th century, and is similarly founded on the relentless oompah of the sousaphone.

It’s a charmingly woozy picturesque postcard Mexico: full of inconsolably grieving mothers, carnivalesque town squares, bitter wives and death by bayonet. Just as Gulag was actually initially inspired by the films of Emir Kusturica and Flying Club existed in a snowglobe Jacques Demy-Monde, MZapotec feels like it could be the soundtrack to some fanciful Wes Anderson Mexican road movie. And, like Jason Schwartzman in the Darjeeling Limited, traveling across India, but seemingly locked within the world of “Where Do You To My Lovely?”, the fixed-point at the heart of it all remains Condon’s richly romantic, melancholy croon.

Funnily enough, the second half of the record, entitled Holland and credited to “realpeople” (an early pre-Beirut alias), was recorded at home but seems like a greater departure. Comprising five limpid electronic sketches, it reveals Condon’s hitherto shady roots as a teenage devotee of Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt. “My Night With a Prostitute From Marseilles”, originally commissioned by this generation’s Winona, Natalie Portman, could be one of the Magnetic Fields early formalist exercises in romantic synthpop.

The comparison does Condon few favours though: while Merritt is the most bleakly ingenious writer of his generation, the oddly uninspired electronic arrangements (“No Dice” feels like an interminable 80s computer game theme) only highlight Condon’s lack of interest in real songcraft. More worrying, when he’s working in a form you’re more familiar with, the purely generic music makes you wonder how much of a free pass he’s given on his more exotic homage-holidays.

Holland is at its best on “Venice”, where pale winter sunbeam synths, reminiscent of Boards of Canada, are played upon by a mournful breeze of brass. It’s wonderfully unexpected, as though Miles Davis was riffing with Vangelis on some post-bop Blade Runner. So much so that you kind of regret the entrance of Condon’s fruity voice, which brings the track firmly back down to the familiar terrain of Beirut. Nevertheless the beauty of those opening moments suggests that Condon’s future really does lie in soundtracks, where you can imagine him collaborating with and finding inspiration in the baroque visual inventions of an Anderson or a Gondry, and where his restless musical wandererings might yet chance upon the truly undiscovered countries of the imagination.

STEPHEN TROUSSÉ

UNCUT Q & A With Zach Condon

So this is very much a game of two halves?

CONDON: It’s a double EP, not an album. Each disc is vastly different so it’s to avoid confusion. March Of The Zapotec came about because I was approached to do a soundtrack to a movie about Mexican immigrants. For inspiration, the director showed me videos of traditional music from Oaxaca – not mariachi, more like funeral dirge music. The movie thing fell through but I ended up falling in love with the music. A band member of ours’ mother lives in Oaxaca six month of the year, so she helped us find these 17 musicians from a town called Teotitlan del Valle. They all play rusty, beaten-up brass instruments that have probably been passed down through a couple of generations. They’re Zapotec Indians, they don’t even speak much Spanish. We had to run our portable studio with solar power because the electricity is so spotty down there.

How about the synth pop half?

CONDON: Holland is the complete opposite. From the age of 15, before I started Beirut, all the music I made was electronic. It’s a dirty secret of mine that whenever I got stuck in a rut on the last two Beirut albums I’d slip off and record one of these synth-pop songs to have some fun and cleanse the palate. It’s some of the most straightforward stuff that I do. If was to compare it to anything, it would be early Stephen Merritt [The Magnetic Fields] material.

INTERVIEW: SAM RICHARDS

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