Subscribe
Home Blog Page 819

Paul Weller, Franz Ferdinand and Kings of Leon To Headline Benicassim 2009

Uncut
-
0
Paul Weller, Franz Ferdinand and Kings of Leon To Headline Benicassim 2009
Paul Weller, Franz Ferdinand and Kings of Leon have been announced as headliners for this year's Benicassim festival in Spain in July. The ever expanding festival, celebrating it's 15th anniversary in 2009, will run from July 16 - 19, with capacity for 150, 000 music fans. The full line-up will be ...

Paul Weller, Franz Ferdinand and Kings of Leon have been announced as headliners for this year’s Benicassim festival in Spain in July.

The ever expanding festival, celebrating it’s 15th anniversary in 2009, will run from July 16 – 19, with capacity for 150, 000 music fans. The full line-up will be revealed over the coming months.

Benicassim 2008 saw sets from the likes of Leonard Cohen, My Bloody Valentine and Morrissey and 2007’s headliners included Arctic Monkeys and Muse.

Until January 15, discounted tickets priced £140 are available from

seetickets.com, ticket price includes camping from July 13-21.

Benicassim festival details are available from: fiberfib.com

For more music and film news click here

13th Floor Elevators and Eddy Current Suppression Ring

John Mulvey
-
0

Apologies for the long hiatus; I tried to stay away from computers for as long as possible over the holidays. Not a complete break from music, though, thanks to a four-year-old alternating between his versions of “Barbie Girl” and various Joanna Newsom songs, and a bunch of records I kept close to me for the fortnight. A couple that worked particularly well were “Primary Colours” by the Eddy Current Suppression Ring and the sampler of the forthcoming 13th Floor Elevators box set. “Primary Colours” is one of those records I’ve come to rather late, in spite of being tipped off about the band by our man in Australia, Jon Dale, something like a year ago. It’s also one of those records which initially seems to be kind of disposable fun, daft thanks to the names of the band (Brendan Suppression, Eddy Current, Rob Solid, Danny Current), but becomes tenaciously insinuating after a few plays. Ostensibly, it’s Aussie garage rock played with energy and precision by four men who met at a vinyl-pressing plant, in the bug-eyed and skinny tradition of all those bands on the “Do The Pop!” comp. But there’s a lot more going on there besides that kind of wired Nuggets/Doors/proto-punk thing, however much Brendan Suppression might leer and drawl. There’s a lot of “Blank Generation” bones and indignation, perhaps more Hell-era Television than the Voidoids, especially on the opening “Memory Lane”. Better still, the band go into these scrambled unravellings from time to time that put them into more of an avant-garage continuum rolling back through The Fall in their mid-‘80s pomp to Malcolm Mooney-period Can. Check out “Colour Television” or “I Admit My Faults” (neither if which figure on their myspace, somewhat inevitably) – the best new garage band I’ve come across in a good while, I think. And one which sounds very nice when played next to this 13th Floor Elevators sampler. “Sign Of The 3 Eyed Men” looks like a monstrous and desirable object, being a 10-CD anthology of the sainted psych-punks. As usual, I can’t pretend to be a scholar of bootlegs and marginalia, so you’ll have to forgive me for not analysing what is authentically unreleased here; I know there have been fidelity issues around some Elevators repackages in the past, which don’t seem to be the case here if the 13 tracks on the sampler are anything to go by. What’s most striking, perhaps, is that while it’s easy to get distracted by the erratic mythology of Roky Erickson, the basic truth about his band was that they were remarkable for their menace and vigour, not least live – killer versions of “Roller Coaster” and “You Don’t Know” attest to as much here. Hopefully someone at International Artists will bless me with the full thing. If and when, I’ll report back. In the meantime, happy new year, and a belated thanks for all of your comments and insights through 2008 – apart from the dorks screaming for me to leak the Animal Collective album, of course. That’s out in a week I think (and finally leaked too, I believe); please let me know what you think, after all the hyperbole I’ve slung its way over the past couple of months or so.

Apologies for the long hiatus; I tried to stay away from computers for as long as possible over the holidays. Not a complete break from music, though, thanks to a four-year-old alternating between his versions of “Barbie Girl” and various Joanna Newsom songs, and a bunch of records I kept close to me for the fortnight.

Continue

Che – Part One

Uncut
-
0
Che – Part One

DIRECTED BY Steven Soderbergh STARRING Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, Rodrigo Santoro, Ramon Fernandez *** No one said revolution comes easy, and Steven Soderbergh’s account of the Communist uprising in Cuba in 1956 is not for the faint-hearted. Save for a brief episode in New York, when Guevara addresses the United Nations, the film is entirely in Spanish, and essentially on a combat footing. Soderbergh gives us a map of Cuba early on and you would be well advised to pay attention, because from then on we’re on the ground with the Companeros, in the thick of it, fighting our way foot by foot. Che – and incidentally, Benicio Del Toro is superb – is in every scene, a naturally authoritative figure, a perfect field commander with an uncanny grasp of the lie of the land. Yet we learn precious little else about the man, or even what he’s fighting for. Soderbergh is obsessed with the “how”, not the “why”, and by the end – after long, pitched street battle for the town of Santa Clara – you’ll feel like you’ve earned your stripes. Land And Freedom might be a useful starting point, except that Soderbergh makes Loach look like a Hollywood liberal. Part Two – scheduled for February – takes us to Bolivia and replays these same tactics to grim in-effect. There’s no real excuse for splitting them, except you might need a month’s R&R to recover. TOM CHARITY

DIRECTED BY Steven Soderbergh

STARRING Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, Rodrigo Santoro, Ramon Fernandez

***

No one said revolution comes easy, and Steven Soderbergh’s account of the Communist uprising in Cuba in 1956 is not for the faint-hearted. Save for a brief episode in New York, when Guevara addresses the United Nations, the film is entirely in Spanish, and essentially on a combat footing. Soderbergh gives us a map of Cuba early on and you would be well advised to pay attention, because from then on we’re on the ground with the Companeros, in the thick of it, fighting our way foot by foot.

Che – and incidentally, Benicio Del Toro is superb – is in every scene, a naturally authoritative figure, a perfect field commander with an uncanny grasp of the lie of the land. Yet we learn precious little else about the man, or even what he’s fighting for. Soderbergh is obsessed with the “how”, not the “why”, and by the end – after long, pitched street battle for the town of Santa Clara – you’ll feel like you’ve earned your stripes.

Land And Freedom might be a useful starting point, except that Soderbergh makes Loach look like a Hollywood liberal. Part Two – scheduled for February – takes us to Bolivia and replays these same tactics to grim in-effect. There’s no real excuse for splitting them, except you might need a month’s R&R to recover.

TOM CHARITY

Black God White Devil

Uncut
-
0
Black God White Devil

You might imagine that by now the history of cinema would be a written book, done and dusted. But there seem to be endless directors from the past left to be discovered - or, if they’ve had the misfortune to be forgotten, rediscovered. One such is Glauber Rocha, a pioneer of the Cinema Novo movement that galvanised Brazilian cinema in the 1960s. In Brazil, Glauber Rocha is anything but forgotten: there the Bahia-born director, who died in 1981 aged 43, is still revered and widely-screened, and his 1964 film Black God White Devil has been voted the greatest Brazilian film of all time. Outside Brazil, though, Glauber Rocha’s name has been largely neglected, his films generally associated with the wave of radicalism and sometimes visionary cinematic practice that emerged from Third World cinema in the 60s. But watch Black God White Devil today for the first time, and you’re in a shock - and you understand why Luis Buñuel, no less, declared the film “the most beautiful thing I have seen in a decade, filled with a savage poetry.” Black God is a startling piece of work, and savage indeed: it’s part Biblical myth, part epic ballad, part political drama, part Latin American Western. It’s also a great figures-in-a-landscape film, to equal those of another great 60s filmmaker currently being rediscovered, Hungary’s Miklos Jansco. Black God White Devil is set in the 1940s, although the feeling of timelessness is such that the action could easily be taking place in some pre-Columbian era, or in Old Testament times. The film’s anti-hero is Manuel (Geraldo del Rey), a poor farmer in the sertao, the arid plains of Brazil’s Northeast. Inspired by a vision of St George, Manuel strikes down an exploitative boss, then heads out across the plains, accompanied by his sceptical wife Rosa (Yona Magalhaes). In the film’s first hour, Manuel attaches himself to the peasant army following Sebastiao (Lidio Silva), a charismatic preacher of decidedly apocalyptic tendencies. Then, after an extremely brutal explosion of ritualistic violence of which they are the only survivors, Manuel and Rosa join the camp of Captain Corisco (Othon Bastos), a demented, demonic freebooter with a split personality, who rechristens Manuel ‘Satan’. The film’s second hour becomes a bizarre, haunting piece of Absurdist theatre, with the sertao’s sun-baked expanses as a stage. Hovering in the background of all this is the legendary hired killer Antonio das Mortes (Mauricio do Valle), a rifle-toting figure in a vast black hat and huge overcoat, who could have walked straight out of a Sergio Leone western - no coincidence, since Leone was a huge admirer of Rocha, and incorporated elements of his imagery into his own Man With No Name cycle. Shot by Waldemar Lima in stark black and white, the film certainly has the epic desolation of a Leone western, underwritten by a Marxist view of historical and political conflict that is straight out of the Eisenstein book. The film feels at once like a sprawling, spasmodically bloody nightmare, and like an allegory, with Manuel and Rose standing for the Brazilian people caught between the twin temptations of the Church and the Army. The cactus-studded sertao itself - disturbingly claustrophobic, for all its spaciousness - becomes as resonantly mythical a location as John Ford’s Monument Valley, while the scenes early on, as Sebastiao’s followers crowd around their idol on top of a mountain, has the exalted intensity of a Cecil B. de Mille Biblical drama, shot on a Poverty Row budget. Poverty is the word, in fact: in 1965, Glauber Rocha composed a manifesto proclaiming his “Aesthetic of Hunger”, and calling for a revolutionary cinema to express the rage of the dispossessed: he called his work, “these sad and ugly films, these desperate films where reason doesn’t always possess the loudest voice.” Black God White Devil certainly vaults way beyond reason, with the multiple-voiced Captain Corisco - bandit, clown, Napoleon figure - proving one of the most unsettlingly excessive figures in film. The film contains a pure streak of the Theatre of Cruelty prophecied by French writer Antonin Artaud, the Sebastiao story coming to a head with an exceptionally unnerving child sacrifice. The same spirit of Artaudian extremity would later inspire Latin American film visionaries such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, a more mystical and surrealistic kindred spirit to Glauber Rocha. The twin registers of the epic and the intimate are underpinned by Glauber Rocha’s use of contrasting musics: on one hand, a rudimentary narration provided by Sergio Ricardo’s folk balladry, on the other, the sweeping, sometimes bombastic orchestrations of the great Brazilian classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Before his untimely death, Glauber Rocha went on to complete a trilogy, the other episodes being Terra em Transe and Antonio das Mortes, as well as other films including the wonderfully-titled study of African politics, Der Leone Have Sept Cabezas (1970). But he made Black God White Devil at the remarkable age of 25, and while the film is full of youthful fury, it also embodies a cinematic confidence and complexity beyond the director’s years. It is visionary cinema at its rawest. EXTRAS: None. JONATHAN ROMNEY

You might imagine that by now the history of cinema would be a written book, done and dusted. But there seem to be endless directors from the past left to be discovered – or, if they’ve had the misfortune to be forgotten, rediscovered. One such is Glauber Rocha, a pioneer of the Cinema Novo movement that galvanised Brazilian cinema in the 1960s. In Brazil, Glauber Rocha is anything but forgotten: there the Bahia-born director, who died in 1981 aged 43, is still revered and widely-screened, and his 1964 film Black God White Devil has been voted the greatest Brazilian film of all time. Outside Brazil, though, Glauber Rocha’s name has been largely neglected, his films generally associated with the wave of radicalism and sometimes visionary cinematic practice that emerged from Third World cinema in the 60s.

But watch Black God White Devil today for the first time, and you’re in a shock – and you understand why Luis Buñuel, no less, declared the film “the most beautiful thing I have seen in a decade, filled with a savage poetry.” Black God is a startling piece of work, and savage indeed: it’s part Biblical myth, part epic ballad, part political drama, part Latin American Western. It’s also a great figures-in-a-landscape film, to equal those of another great 60s filmmaker currently being rediscovered, Hungary’s Miklos Jansco.

Black God White Devil is set in the 1940s, although the feeling of timelessness is such that the action could easily be taking place in some pre-Columbian era, or in Old Testament times. The film’s anti-hero is Manuel (Geraldo del Rey), a poor farmer in the sertao, the arid plains of Brazil’s Northeast. Inspired by a vision of St George, Manuel strikes down an exploitative boss, then heads out across the plains, accompanied by his sceptical wife Rosa (Yona Magalhaes). In the film’s first hour, Manuel attaches himself to the peasant army following Sebastiao (Lidio Silva), a charismatic preacher of decidedly apocalyptic tendencies.

Then, after an extremely brutal explosion of ritualistic violence of which they are the only survivors, Manuel and Rosa join the camp of Captain Corisco (Othon Bastos), a demented, demonic freebooter with a split personality, who rechristens Manuel ‘Satan’. The film’s second hour becomes a bizarre, haunting piece of Absurdist theatre, with the sertao’s sun-baked expanses as a stage. Hovering in the background of all this is the legendary hired killer Antonio das Mortes (Mauricio do Valle), a rifle-toting figure in a vast black hat and huge overcoat, who could have walked straight out of a Sergio Leone western – no coincidence, since Leone was a huge admirer of Rocha, and incorporated elements of his imagery into his own Man With No Name cycle.

Shot by Waldemar Lima in stark black and white, the film certainly has the epic desolation of a Leone western, underwritten by a Marxist view of historical and political conflict that is straight out of the Eisenstein book. The film feels at once like a sprawling, spasmodically bloody nightmare, and like an allegory, with Manuel and Rose standing for the Brazilian people caught between the twin temptations of the Church and the Army. The cactus-studded sertao itself – disturbingly claustrophobic, for all its spaciousness – becomes as resonantly mythical a location as John Ford’s Monument Valley, while the scenes early on, as Sebastiao’s followers crowd around their idol on top of a mountain, has the exalted intensity of a Cecil B. de Mille Biblical drama, shot on a Poverty Row budget.

Poverty is the word, in fact: in 1965, Glauber Rocha composed a manifesto proclaiming his “Aesthetic of Hunger”, and calling for a revolutionary cinema to express the rage of the dispossessed: he called his work, “these sad and ugly films, these desperate films where reason doesn’t always possess the loudest voice.” Black God White Devil certainly vaults way beyond reason, with the multiple-voiced Captain Corisco – bandit, clown, Napoleon figure – proving one of the most unsettlingly excessive figures in film. The film contains a pure streak of the Theatre of Cruelty prophecied by French writer Antonin Artaud, the Sebastiao story coming to a head with an exceptionally unnerving child sacrifice. The same spirit of Artaudian extremity would later inspire Latin American film visionaries such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, a more mystical and surrealistic kindred spirit to Glauber Rocha.

The twin registers of the epic and the intimate are underpinned by Glauber Rocha’s use of contrasting musics: on one hand, a rudimentary narration provided by Sergio Ricardo’s folk balladry, on the other, the sweeping, sometimes bombastic orchestrations of the great Brazilian classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Before his untimely death, Glauber Rocha went on to complete a trilogy, the other episodes being Terra em Transe and Antonio das Mortes, as well as other films including the wonderfully-titled study of African politics, Der Leone Have Sept Cabezas (1970). But he made Black God White Devil at the remarkable age of 25, and while the film is full of youthful fury, it also embodies a cinematic confidence and complexity beyond the director’s years. It is visionary cinema at its rawest.

EXTRAS: None.

JONATHAN ROMNEY

Franz Ferdinand – Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

Uncut
-
0
Franz Ferdinand – Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

When Franz Ferdinand strode purposefully into the Top Ten in January 2004 with “Take Me Out”, they were welcomed like liberating forces to a besieged town. Clever but not too clever, posh but not too posh, rambunctious but not too edgy, brand new but retro – a flash of those glimmering white teeth and we were theirs. Not since Blur ten years earlier had there been a gang of art school boys with the wit and the gumption to trouble the hit parade. We shouldn’t have cared about these things, but we did: we wanted to see our boys in there sparring with Pop Idol winners and Black Eyed Peas. Even better, Franz were signed to righteous indie institution Domino. And their sleeve designs referenced Russian constructivism! And they were a bit like a slicker Orange Juice! Somebody give these chaps a Mercury Prize! Since then, a whole gaggle of Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads, Arctic Monkeys and Maximo Parks have nonchalantly bowled through the door Franz Ferdinand blasted open, making what they do seem commonplace. A hasty second album, 2005’s You Could Have It So Much Better, failed to sustain the momentum in quite the way they’d hoped. Recently Franz Ferdinand appear to have been taking tips from Damon Albarn on how to successfully negotiate your way out of a creative cul-de-sac. They’ve backed platinum US rapper TI in New York and jammed with Baaba Maal as part of the Africa Express. They built their own studio from scratch in an old drug rehabilitation centre in Govan, blooded a hot young producer in Dan Carey and roadtested their new songs at a series of secret gigs everywhere from Fort William to Glastonbury. So after all that, the fact that Tonight: Franz Ferdinand sounds so dry and superficial is a nagging disappointment. There’s no need to call in the receivers just yet: lead-off single “Ulysees”, is actually rather terrific, its louche shuffling beat complemented by vampiric synth snarls and a particularly devilish Kapranos vocal (“C’mon, let’s get hiiiiigh!”) before exploding into a typically contagious Franz chorus. The alarm bells only start to ring when you realise that you can comfortably sing “Take Me Out” over the top of it. Squirty vintage synth lines pervade the album. This is hardly a revolutionary move at a time when kids are wigging out to the abrasive electronic squall of Crystal Castles, but they do add an impish zip to “What She Came For” and “Bite Hard”. Eno-era Roxy Music is the obvious stylistic template, but just as often the addition of keyboards simply makes Franz Ferdinand sound a bit more like the Kaiser Chiefs. Only on “Lucid Dreams”, as Tonight enters its fourth quarter, are their new toys employed as anything more than a novelty turn, the song eventually surrendering to a shuddering acid house freakout in the manner of LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah”. It’s exhilarating, although as with “What She Came For”’s pell-mell motorik coda, it does feel bolted on. Meanwhile, Alex Kapranos still sounds like he’s singing with a permanent wink. You can understand his eagerness to avoid the grim self-reflection that traditionally plagues the third album of any band on the treadmill, but he’s over-compensated, his lyrics now existing almost solely of quivering come-ons. By the time he gets to the queasy “Twilight Omens” – “I typed your number into my calculator/ Where it spelled a dirty word when you turned it upside down” – you’re ready with a jug of icy water. He’s like a bad Terry Thomas character, tipsily attempting to crack onto girls half his age by offering them a spin in his Triumph. “Turn It On” does appear to deliberately blur the line between seduction and stalking, but Kapranos is no Jarvis Cocker. You’re willing him to ditch his roué’s routine or for the band to loosen their rigid backbeat but when they do, as on lightweight psychedelic pastiches “Send Him Away” or “Dream Again”, the results are limp. The inescapable feeling is that we could have had it so much better. For all their adroitness, most of the songs on Tonight sound too similar to each other (and to existing Franz Ferdinand songs). It all feels so contained – there’s precious little cutting loose, no ambiguity, no vulnerability. Emotionally, it’s as plastic as the songs pumped out of the Xenomania hit factory where this album was nearly recorded. Franz Ferdinand would apparently rather be swashbuckling cartoon pop stars than risk-taking, soul-baring artistes. Which is fair enough – but even cartoon pop stars have to keep reinventing themselves to hold our attention. On Tonight, the trousers are still tight but the grins are in danger of wearing thin. SAM RICHARDS For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

When Franz Ferdinand strode purposefully into the Top Ten in January 2004 with “Take Me Out”, they were welcomed like liberating forces to a besieged town. Clever but not too clever, posh but not too posh, rambunctious but not too edgy, brand new but retro – a flash of those glimmering white teeth and we were theirs.

Not since Blur ten years earlier had there been a gang of art school boys with the wit and the gumption to trouble the hit parade. We shouldn’t have cared about these things, but we did: we wanted to see our boys in there sparring with Pop Idol winners and Black Eyed Peas. Even better, Franz were signed to righteous indie institution Domino. And their sleeve designs referenced Russian constructivism! And they were a bit like a slicker Orange Juice! Somebody give these chaps a Mercury Prize!

Since then, a whole gaggle of Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads, Arctic Monkeys and Maximo Parks have nonchalantly bowled through the door Franz Ferdinand blasted open, making what they do seem commonplace. A hasty second album, 2005’s You Could Have It So Much Better, failed to sustain the momentum in quite the way they’d hoped.

Recently Franz Ferdinand appear to have been taking tips from Damon Albarn on how to successfully negotiate your way out of a creative cul-de-sac. They’ve backed platinum US rapper TI in New York and jammed with Baaba Maal as part of the Africa Express. They built their own studio from scratch in an old drug rehabilitation centre in Govan, blooded a hot young producer in Dan Carey and roadtested their new songs at a series of secret gigs everywhere from Fort William to Glastonbury.

So after all that, the fact that Tonight: Franz Ferdinand sounds so dry and superficial is a nagging disappointment.

There’s no need to call in the receivers just yet: lead-off single “Ulysees”, is actually rather terrific, its louche shuffling beat complemented by vampiric synth snarls and a particularly devilish Kapranos vocal (“C’mon, let’s get hiiiiigh!”) before exploding into a typically contagious Franz chorus. The alarm bells only start to ring when you realise that you can comfortably sing “Take Me Out” over the top of it.

Squirty vintage synth lines pervade the album. This is hardly a revolutionary move at a time when kids are wigging out to the abrasive electronic squall of Crystal Castles, but they do add an impish zip to “What She Came For” and “Bite Hard”. Eno-era Roxy Music is the obvious stylistic template, but just as often the addition of keyboards simply makes Franz Ferdinand sound a bit more like the Kaiser Chiefs.

Only on “Lucid Dreams”, as Tonight enters its fourth quarter, are their new toys employed as anything more than a novelty turn, the song eventually surrendering to a shuddering acid house freakout in the manner of LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah”. It’s exhilarating, although as with “What She Came For”’s pell-mell motorik coda, it does feel bolted on.

Meanwhile, Alex Kapranos still sounds like he’s singing with a permanent wink. You can understand his eagerness to avoid the grim self-reflection that traditionally plagues the third album of any band on the treadmill, but he’s over-compensated, his lyrics now existing almost solely of quivering come-ons.

By the time he gets to the queasy “Twilight Omens” – “I typed your number into my calculator/ Where it spelled a dirty word when you turned it upside down” – you’re ready with a jug of icy water. He’s like a bad Terry Thomas character, tipsily attempting to crack onto girls half his age by offering them a spin in his Triumph. “Turn It On” does appear to deliberately blur the line between seduction and stalking, but Kapranos is no Jarvis Cocker.

You’re willing him to ditch his roué’s routine or for the band to loosen their rigid backbeat but when they do, as on lightweight psychedelic pastiches “Send Him Away” or “Dream Again”, the results are limp.

The inescapable feeling is that we could have had it so much better. For all their adroitness, most of the songs on Tonight sound too similar to each other (and to existing Franz Ferdinand songs). It all feels so contained – there’s precious little cutting loose, no ambiguity, no vulnerability. Emotionally, it’s as plastic as the songs pumped out of the Xenomania hit factory where this album was nearly recorded.

Franz Ferdinand would apparently rather be swashbuckling cartoon pop stars than risk-taking, soul-baring artistes. Which is fair enough – but even cartoon pop stars have to keep reinventing themselves to hold our attention. On Tonight, the trousers are still tight but the grins are in danger of wearing thin.

SAM RICHARDS

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

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Uncut
-
0
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Animal Collective's new album is named after the Frank Gehry-designed ampitheatre in Maryland where as highschool kids they saw the bands – notably the Grateful Dead - that first blew their minds. Choosing such a title (which they now share with a Jerry Garcia Band live album), might suggest tha...

Animal Collective‘s new album is named after the Frank Gehry-designed ampitheatre in Maryland where as highschool kids they saw the bands – notably the Grateful Dead – that first blew their minds. Choosing such a title (which they now share with a Jerry Garcia Band live album), might suggest that the AC are simply acknowledging that, for all their outsider art beginnings and freaky enthusiasms, their burgeoning cult now places them, after the Dead and Pavement, quite squarely in the grand tradition of American jam-bands.

“In The Flowers”, the first track on Merriweather Post Pavilion, could even be a memory of some distant “Dark Star” freak out. It starts out, with the psychfolk shimmer and swirl of last album but one Feels, as a kind of fried reverie, envying the rapturous abandon of a girl dancing in a field, “high on her own movement”. But then, as Avey Tare wistfully sings “If I could just leave my body for a night…” the track erupts into an astonishing, galloping Phillip Glass flamenco-techno reel. Eventually, when the boom of the bass and the drums subsides, the track comes back down with the early hours walk home as “the ecstasy turns to rising light…”

Understandably in light of such lines, people are already talking up MPP as the AC’s E album – the moment when the wild-eyed animists of alt.folk start raving. But with the group’s long-standing ritualistic interests, you could just as easily interpet their ecstasy in the etymological, ancient Greek sense of frenzied transcendence, of “standing outside oneself”.

Whether this bliss is chemical or shamanic, what’s clear is that Animal Collective have truly surpassed themselves. MPP isn’t just an advance on Sung Tongs and Feels – it feels like that moment in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon jumps into hyperspace and all the stars go wild.

Though they’ve been filed as part of the freak-folk fold, the band have long maintained they’ve more in common with electronic acts – the sumptuous minimalism of Luomo or the pop-ambient of the Kompakt label. And on earlier records, and particularly Panda Bear’s sublime Person Pitch, you could sort of imagine them as a kind of bizarre Amish techno act – emulating digital dance music without electricity, but with acoustic guitars, vocal harmonies and tape loops. On MPP they now sound electrified: AC fully plugged into the DC, anchoring their fluttering reverbed chants with seismic beats and bass.

Second track, “The Girls”, is the perfect demonstration of their new resources. Rippling waves of synths are pounded by Aaron Copland bass drums as Panda Bear/Noah Lennox multitracks his voice into a call and response choir. In what almost seems like an apology for the song’s irresistable pop momentum, he sings about how he doesn’t care for material things and just wants four walls for wife and daughter.You suspect the song could quite easily become a huge crossover hit on the scale of say, “Born Slippy” ten years ago – in which case the girls won’t have to worry too much about holes in the roof.

The wonders keep coming. “Summertime Clothes” is a delirious number about walking the streets on nights when it’s too hot to sleep, with Avey singing “I want to walk around with you!”, in a way reminiscent of the plain, profound joy of Arthur Russell’s “Let’s Go Swimming”. Indeed at times, MPP feels like the AC have managed to shake all of the fugitive fragments of Russell’s remarkable career – from fragile folkpop to disco trance and buddhist bubblegum – into a brilliant kaleidoscopic design of their own.

The infatuated “Bluish” meanwhile manages to synthesise the dazzled awe of Mercury Rev circa “Carwash Hair”, the lucid languor of Primal Scream’s “Higher Than The Sun” and the sun-spangled melody of Brian Wilson. And yet listing references almost seems beside the point; there’s no sense of pastiche, everything feels utterly, unmistakeably absorbed into the Animal Collective universe.

There’s not a weak or wasted track here, but the final two are magnificent: “No More Runnin”, a more down-tempo, dreamy number, comes on like a tropicalized Beach Boys, transposing their harmonies from the California coast to a lazy river meandering through some Rousseau-esque rainforest. And the closing “Brother Sport” is sensational, exploding like a psychedelic carnival parade, culminating in a polyphonic spree of endless chattering loops.

It’s hard to overstate Animal Collective’s achievement on this record. They’ve made a dance record, out of evident love of the latest digital developments , but it’s a dance record with an odd, distant hint of Sousa marching bands. They’ve made a blissed-out rave record, but one with touches of Terry Riley’s all-night minimalist trances. It’s a rare contemporary album that sounds like it couldn’t have been made at any other time or by any other band.

Maybe the overwhelming, full-throated joy of it all sounds particularly radiant in the fluey gloom of winter, but right now Merriweather Post Pavilion doesn’t just seem like one of the first great records of 2009, it feels like one of the landmark American albums of the century so far.

STEPHEN TROUSSÉ

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

Simon & Garfunkel – The Collection

Uncut
-
0
Simon & Garfunkel – The Collection

A dumpy little poet with worried eyebrows. A tall tenor with Harpo Marx hair and a Tefal forehead. If they auditioned for American Idol, the pair would be sent packing before they’d got past “Hello dark–” in “The Sound Of Silence”. And what an unfortunate judges’ error that would be, because Simon & Garfunkel – the bookish Odd Couple of ’60s pop – sold 50 million albums by applying an age-old practice (harmony in song) to mankind’s ultimate yearning (harmony in life). As Simon’s bobble-capped, moustachioed ‘image’ on the cover of Greatest Hits confirmed, sometimes what you look like isn’t the point. Simon & Garfunkel sang of subtle, probing themes; without screaming or shouting, their heroic hits (“Homeward Bound”, “Mrs. Robinson”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”) helped America through divisive times, much as another little-‘n’-large ampersand duo, Laurel & Hardy, had done in the Depression. That, at any rate, is the kinder of the two critical views. There’s a less charitable opinion that says Simon & Garfunkel represent cosy, easily accessible emotion – a sort of go-to poignancy – which is why they’re found in the record collections of people who read Booker Prize-shortlisted novels and live alone. I might as well confess that as a student in the early ’80s, I got into the habit of putting on Sounds Of Silence whenever I moved house, ‘christening’ the empty room or bedsit with sweet voices and folk-rock reassurance. Not being American, and not having recollection of the ’60s, there was no earthly reason why songs like “Leaves That Are Green” and “Kathy’s Song” should have touched me. They just did. I suppose, whether you’re the world’s greatest superpower or a teenager in an unfamiliar post-code, the melancholy elegance of Paul Simon’s writing (“My mind’s distracted and diffused, my thoughts are many miles away…”) seems to be two steps ahead of your situation. And from what we know, Simon could write a line that travelled directly to the heart and solar plexus (“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”, “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike”, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”) – lines that could make an entire population catch its breath. (When DiMaggio, the 1940s baseball legend, succumbed to cancer in 1999, the headlines all but read: “Simon & Garfunkel man dies.”) Remastered in 2001, the S&G catalogue is never going to struggle for listeners. If anything, fear of an imminent world recession might send people sprinting to the last remaining record shops to stock up on ‘you’re-not-alone’ classics like Bookends and Bridge Over Troubled Water. Meanwhile, for those who like doing their panic-buying early, The Collection – a 5”x5” black cardboard box (with slide-action lid), containing CDs of all five studio albums (in repro LP sleeves), plus a DVD of The Concert In Central Park (1981) – is an attractive, tasteful addition to any shelf, mantelpiece and/or glove compartment. The least-known S&G work is their 1964 debut, Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. An acoustic folk album, made by childhood friends who’d been singing together since the mid-’50s, it was a commercial flop, only getting attention once producer Tom Wilson’s ‘electrified’ version of “The Sound Of Silence” had stunned S&G by hitting No. 1 in America. Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. is a decent record within its genre, but its earnest war allegories and love-thy-fellow-man supplications are a bit like two Baptist ministers coming into your primary school with acoustic guitars and being groovy. Much more impressive are Sounds Of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme (both 1966), where the haunting presence of English folk – Simon had toured there in ’64 and ’65 – is rhapsodically perfect for the singers’ close, feathery harmonies. (According to Roy Halee, who engineered or co-produced their work, one reason their voices sounded so symbiotic was because they sang together into the same microphone.) Of the two ’66 albums, Parsley, Sage… has an especially delicate mood, not to mention a title track that spelled ‘come hither’ for Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Tower Bridge will perish before its beauty does. Bookends (1968) – often called a concept album – and Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) are more overtly ‘produced’, and as a result can come across as portentous where their predecessors are quiet as libraries. Bookends raises eyebrows even now with its synthesisers and sound collages, but the voluptuous directions taken by Simon’s lyrics (in “America”, particularly) can leave you gasping. Listen to “Old Friends”: it’s one thing to observe that two people on a park bench look like bookends. It’s another to notice the “round toes” of their “high shoes”. Dominated by its legendary title track (whose softly-stroked line “Sail on, silver girl” is the most spine-tingling moment in the S&G canon), Bridge Over Troubled Water dances here and there to the rhythms of Simon’s future solo career (“Cecilia”; the old Peruvian tune “El Condor Pasa”). He and Garfunkel soon opted for a painful divorce, saddening millions. But do not fret: they can be instantly reconciled by watching the Central Park DVD, which is more than can be said, alas, for most marriages. DAVID CAVANAGH For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive Pic credit: PA Photos

A dumpy little poet with worried eyebrows. A tall tenor with Harpo Marx hair and a Tefal forehead. If they auditioned for American Idol, the pair would be sent packing before they’d got past “Hello dark–” in “The Sound Of Silence”. And what an unfortunate judges’ error that would be, because Simon & Garfunkel – the bookish Odd Couple of ’60s pop – sold 50 million albums by applying an age-old practice (harmony in song) to mankind’s ultimate yearning (harmony in life). As Simon’s bobble-capped, moustachioed ‘image’ on the cover of Greatest Hits confirmed, sometimes what you look like isn’t the point.

Simon & Garfunkel sang of subtle, probing themes; without screaming or shouting, their heroic hits (“Homeward Bound”, “Mrs. Robinson”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”) helped America through divisive times, much as another little-‘n’-large ampersand duo, Laurel & Hardy, had done in the Depression. That, at any rate, is the kinder of the two critical views.

There’s a less charitable opinion that says Simon & Garfunkel represent cosy, easily accessible emotion – a sort of go-to poignancy – which is why they’re found in the record collections of people who read Booker Prize-shortlisted novels and live alone. I might as well confess that as a student in the early ’80s, I got into the habit of putting on Sounds Of Silence whenever I moved house, ‘christening’ the empty room or bedsit with sweet voices and folk-rock reassurance. Not being American, and not having recollection of the ’60s, there was no earthly reason why songs like “Leaves That Are Green” and “Kathy’s Song” should have touched me. They just did. I suppose, whether you’re the world’s greatest superpower or a teenager in an unfamiliar post-code, the melancholy elegance of Paul Simon’s writing (“My mind’s distracted and diffused, my thoughts are many miles away…”) seems to be two steps ahead of your situation. And from what we know, Simon could write a line that travelled directly to the heart and solar plexus (“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”, “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike”, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”) – lines that could make an entire population catch its breath. (When DiMaggio, the 1940s baseball legend, succumbed to cancer in 1999, the headlines all but read: “Simon & Garfunkel man dies.”)

Remastered in 2001, the S&G catalogue is never going to struggle for listeners. If anything, fear of an imminent world recession might send people sprinting to the last remaining record shops to stock up on ‘you’re-not-alone’ classics like Bookends and Bridge Over Troubled Water. Meanwhile, for those who like doing their panic-buying early, The Collection – a 5”x5” black cardboard box (with slide-action lid), containing CDs of all five studio albums (in repro LP sleeves), plus a DVD of The Concert In Central Park (1981) – is an attractive, tasteful addition to any shelf, mantelpiece and/or glove compartment.

The least-known S&G work is their 1964 debut, Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. An acoustic folk album, made by childhood friends who’d been singing together since the mid-’50s, it was a commercial flop, only getting attention once producer Tom Wilson’s ‘electrified’ version of “The Sound Of Silence” had stunned S&G by hitting No. 1 in America. Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. is a decent record within its genre, but its earnest war allegories and love-thy-fellow-man supplications are a bit like two Baptist ministers coming into your primary school with acoustic guitars and being groovy.

Much more impressive are Sounds Of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme (both 1966), where the haunting presence of English folk – Simon had toured there in ’64 and ’65 – is rhapsodically perfect for the singers’ close, feathery harmonies. (According to Roy Halee, who engineered or co-produced their work, one reason their voices sounded so symbiotic was because they sang together into the same microphone.) Of the two ’66 albums, Parsley, Sage… has an especially delicate mood, not to mention a title track that spelled ‘come hither’ for Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Tower Bridge will perish before its beauty does.

Bookends (1968) – often called a concept album – and Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) are more overtly ‘produced’, and as a result can come across as portentous where their predecessors are quiet as libraries. Bookends raises eyebrows even now with its synthesisers and sound collages, but the voluptuous directions taken by Simon’s lyrics (in “America”, particularly) can leave you gasping. Listen to “Old Friends”: it’s one thing to observe that two people on a park bench look like bookends. It’s another to notice the “round toes” of their “high shoes”.

Dominated by its legendary title track (whose softly-stroked line “Sail on, silver girl” is the most spine-tingling moment in the S&G canon), Bridge Over Troubled Water dances here and there to the rhythms of Simon’s future solo career (“Cecilia”; the old Peruvian tune “El Condor Pasa”). He and Garfunkel soon opted for a painful divorce, saddening millions. But do not fret: they can be instantly reconciled by watching the Central Park DVD, which is more than can be said, alas, for most marriages.

DAVID CAVANAGH

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

Pic credit: PA Photos

Various Artists – Factory: Communications 1978-1992

Uncut
-
0
Various Artists – Factory: Communications 1978-1992

Factory’s catalogue has become drowned out by the clatter of mythologies: stories of contracts signed in blood, of producers falling asleep under mixing desks, of shitfaced singers taking master tapes hostage. For Paul Morley, in his 2000 memoir Nothing, Factory was not so much a record company, “as a state of mind, an organisation in constant graceful disarray, a company of free-thinking sub-maniacs… a combination of villain, pantomime dame, benefactor, wicked stepmother, clown, love, butler, coach, pervert and performance artist”. So it comes as a surprise to find that Factory also managed to release rather a lot of fine records, and not just by Tony Wilson’s successes Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays. Many of them are collected on this handsome 4-CD set. Box sets are usually linked by a single voice or genre. Here, the link is that every track inhabits a similar sonic space, one pioneered by producer Martin Hannett. Hannett helmed most of the tracks on disc one of this box set and his presence has hovered over much music made in Greater Manchester since punk. Where, say, Liverpool’s music of this period seemed to respond to recession by clinging to the security blanket of the 1960s, Manchester’s leapt into the future, leaping on the innovations of black music and putting them through a drizzly Mancunian prism. The basslines were wiry and hypnotic; the drums neurotic and soaked in gated reverb; the vocals deadpan; the guitars edgy and brittle. Even Factory’s non-Mancunians (Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, Birkenhead’s OMD, Glasgow’s The Wake, Tyneside’s Crawling Chaos and Benelux outfits Minny Pops and The Names) seemed to succumb to the Hannett sound after a few hours in Strawberry, Revolution or Cargo studios. This box shares about a third of its tracks with Palatine, the 1991 box set that was Factory’s last throw of the dice before going under. This time, curator Jon Savage has arranged tracks chronologically, starting with Joy Division’s brutal “Digital” and closing with the Lionrock remix of Happy Mondays’ 1992 swansong “Sunshine And Love”. Like Palatine it is weighted towards Factory’s success stories; of the 63 tracks here, seven are by the Happy Mondays, four by Joy Division and eight by New Order (plus four more from solo projects Electronic, Revenge and The Other Two). But it doesn’t ignore the more bijou names airbrushed out of the 24 Hour Party People version of history: A Certain Ratio are represented by five tracks, Durutti Column four, plus there are two each from Section 25, Cabaret Voltaire, Quando Quango and Northside. Labels often seek to replicate their most successful acts, and many on the Factory roster represent alternative interpretations of the Joy Division/New Order continuum. You could be forgiven for thinking that ACR’s drummerless debut “All Night Party” (before Donald Johnson transformed them into an industrial jazz-funk outfit) was some rare Joy Division session; likewise Section 25’s “Girls Don’t Count” or Tunnel Vision’s “Watching The Hydroplanes” (imagine Ian Curtis’s dour baritone pitch-shifted up an octave). The mutating time-signatures and whooping siren sounds of Crispy Ambulance’s extraordinary “Deaf” suggests Joy Division stuck in a studio with Henry Cow; and Quando Quango’s “Love Tempo” sounds like New Order produced by Stock Aitken & Waterman. Even the stranger tributaries never stray that far from the Hannett template, such as the verbose, anarchist hip hop of The Royal Family And The Poor, or the rain-soaked Latin-jazz of the Swamp Children and Kalima (described, by Wilson, as “Sade two years too early”). Interviewed not long before his death, Wilson ruefully opined that “nothing has ever come out of Manchester in terms of black music and that’s a tragedy”. Even ignoring the obvious exceptions (the Johnson brothers from ACR and Quando Quango), the black Manchester represented here more than holds its own. 52nd Street’s “Cool As Ice” is a fantastic slice of electrofunk that predates acid house by several years; while “English Black Boys” by X-O-Dus is an interesting retort to Rastafarianism’s “back-to-Africa” rhetoric. Best of all is Marcel King; 11 years after his New Faces group Sweet Sensation topped the charts with “Sad Sweet Dreamer”, the Michael Jackson of Moss Side recorded “Reach For Love”, a proto-house masterpiece that Shaun Ryder declared Factory’s finest release. One obvious oversight is ESG, whose Hannett-produced single “You’re No Good” was FAC 34. However, all other key omissions – the dreamy pop of The Wendys, the Latin-gospel of Jazz Defektors, the thrilling digital rai of Fadela, and the Factory Classical releases by Graham Fitkin and Steve Martland – are forgiveable as a necessary streamlining of the Factory narrative. As a result, this collection flows perfectly, and indie connoisseurs can enjoy all four discs without once resorting to the fast-forward button. JOHN LEWIS Q&A: Stephen Morris from New Order Is there anything you don’t like on this box set? Amazingly not. There’s some stuff I hated at the time – like Miaow – but even that sounds great now I’m not so cynical. Actually, I’d completely forgotten much of this stuff existed. I’d forgotten that Cabaret Voltaire were signed to us! I’m also reminded that nearly everyone here supported us at some point. I love box sets – it’s an old bloke thing, isn’t it? – especially all those West Coast American ones that Rhino do, like Nuggets, So to see all this stuff, which passed me in a blur at the time, so beautifully packaged is amazing. Did Factory ever consciously sign bands who sounded like you? No! I think they got a lot of tapes from bands who thought they sounded like New Order or Joy Division, but we never signed them. It’s a complete and utter mystery how we signed people. Rob [Gretton] and Alan [Erasmus] sometimes spotted bands, but we never went looking, really. Often they were friends. Sometimes bands would turn up outside the offices on Palatine Road and Tony would let them make a record to get rid of them. Is Praxis going to get a FAC number? Ha! You had to go to Tony to get your FAC number. If there’s one thing he WAS in charge of it was giving out numbers! Without Tony’s seal of approval maybe it’d be bogus. It is a shame that he didn’t live to see this. But then he was always looking forward. He was never into exploiting Factory as a historical thing, he felt it was something that was always going onwards with him. For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Factory’s catalogue has become drowned out by the clatter of mythologies: stories of contracts signed in blood, of producers falling asleep under mixing desks, of shitfaced singers taking master tapes hostage. For Paul Morley, in his 2000 memoir Nothing, Factory was not so much a record company, “as a state of mind, an organisation in constant graceful disarray, a company of free-thinking sub-maniacs… a combination of villain, pantomime dame, benefactor, wicked stepmother, clown, love, butler, coach, pervert and performance artist”.

So it comes as a surprise to find that Factory also managed to release rather a lot of fine records, and not just by Tony Wilson’s successes Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays. Many of them are collected on this handsome 4-CD set.

Box sets are usually linked by a single voice or genre. Here, the link is that every track inhabits a similar sonic space, one pioneered by producer Martin Hannett. Hannett helmed most of the tracks on disc one of this box set and his presence has hovered over much music made in Greater Manchester since punk. Where, say, Liverpool’s music of this period seemed to respond to recession by clinging to the security blanket of the 1960s, Manchester’s leapt into the future, leaping on the innovations of black music and putting them through a drizzly Mancunian prism. The basslines were wiry and hypnotic; the drums neurotic and soaked in gated reverb; the vocals deadpan; the guitars edgy and brittle. Even Factory’s non-Mancunians (Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, Birkenhead’s OMD, Glasgow’s The Wake, Tyneside’s Crawling Chaos and Benelux outfits Minny Pops and The Names) seemed to succumb to the Hannett sound after a few hours in Strawberry, Revolution or Cargo studios.

This box shares about a third of its tracks with Palatine, the 1991 box set that was Factory’s last throw of the dice before going under. This time, curator Jon Savage has arranged tracks chronologically, starting with Joy Division’s brutal “Digital” and closing with the Lionrock remix of Happy Mondays’ 1992 swansong “Sunshine And Love”. Like Palatine it is weighted towards Factory’s success stories; of the 63 tracks here, seven are by the Happy Mondays, four by Joy Division and eight by New Order (plus four more from solo projects Electronic, Revenge and The Other Two). But it doesn’t ignore the more bijou names airbrushed out of the 24 Hour Party People version of history: A Certain Ratio are represented by five tracks, Durutti Column four, plus there are two each from Section 25, Cabaret Voltaire, Quando Quango and Northside.

Labels often seek to replicate their most successful acts, and many on the Factory roster represent alternative interpretations of the Joy Division/New Order continuum. You could be forgiven for thinking that ACR’s drummerless debut “All Night Party” (before Donald Johnson transformed them into an industrial jazz-funk outfit) was some rare Joy Division session; likewise Section 25’s “Girls Don’t Count” or Tunnel Vision’s “Watching The Hydroplanes” (imagine Ian Curtis’s dour baritone pitch-shifted up an octave). The mutating time-signatures and whooping siren sounds of Crispy Ambulance’s extraordinary “Deaf” suggests Joy Division stuck in a studio with Henry Cow; and Quando Quango’s “Love Tempo” sounds like New Order produced by Stock Aitken & Waterman. Even the stranger tributaries never stray that far from the Hannett template, such as the verbose, anarchist hip hop of The Royal Family And The Poor, or the rain-soaked Latin-jazz of the Swamp Children and Kalima (described, by Wilson, as “Sade two years too early”).

Interviewed not long before his death, Wilson ruefully opined that “nothing has ever come out of Manchester in terms of black music and that’s a tragedy”. Even ignoring the obvious exceptions (the Johnson brothers from ACR and Quando Quango), the black Manchester represented here more than holds its own. 52nd Street’s “Cool As Ice” is a fantastic slice of electrofunk that predates acid house by several years; while “English Black Boys” by X-O-Dus is an interesting retort to Rastafarianism’s “back-to-Africa” rhetoric. Best of all is Marcel King; 11 years after his New Faces group Sweet Sensation topped the charts with “Sad Sweet Dreamer”, the Michael Jackson of Moss Side recorded “Reach For Love”, a proto-house masterpiece that Shaun Ryder declared Factory’s finest release.

One obvious oversight is ESG, whose Hannett-produced single “You’re No Good” was FAC 34. However, all other key omissions – the dreamy pop of The Wendys, the Latin-gospel of Jazz Defektors, the thrilling digital rai of Fadela, and the Factory Classical releases by Graham Fitkin and Steve Martland – are forgiveable as a necessary streamlining of the Factory narrative. As a result, this collection flows perfectly, and indie connoisseurs can enjoy all four discs without once resorting to the fast-forward button.

JOHN LEWIS

Q&A: Stephen Morris from New Order

Is there anything you don’t like on this box set?

Amazingly not. There’s some stuff I hated at the time – like Miaow – but even that sounds great now I’m not so cynical. Actually, I’d completely forgotten much of this stuff existed. I’d forgotten that Cabaret Voltaire were signed to us! I’m also reminded that nearly everyone here supported us at some point. I love box sets – it’s an old bloke thing, isn’t it? – especially all those West Coast American ones that Rhino do, like Nuggets, So to see all this stuff, which passed me in a blur at the time, so beautifully packaged is amazing.

Did Factory ever consciously sign bands who sounded like you?

No! I think they got a lot of tapes from bands who thought they sounded like New Order or Joy Division, but we never signed them. It’s a complete and utter mystery how we signed people. Rob [Gretton] and Alan [Erasmus] sometimes spotted bands, but we never went looking, really. Often they were friends. Sometimes bands would turn up outside the offices on Palatine Road and Tony would let them make a record to get rid of them.

Is Praxis going to get a FAC number?

Ha! You had to go to Tony to get your FAC number. If there’s one thing he WAS in charge of it was giving out numbers! Without Tony’s seal of approval maybe it’d be bogus. It is a shame that he didn’t live to see this. But then he was always looking forward. He was never into exploiting Factory as a historical thing, he felt it was something that was always going onwards with him.

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

Pamela Des Barres On Jimmy Page

Uncut
-
0
Pamela Des Barres On Jimmy Page

In the January issue (on sale now) of Uncut , we celebrated the career of rock's greatest and most mysterious guitar hero through the first hand accounts of the people who know him best. Here at www.uncut.co.uk, we'll be posting the full and unedited transcripts from those interviews, including words from Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Roy Harper, Steve Albini and more. Part 8: PAMELA DES BARRES The groupie supreme and member of the GTO's. Despite her relationship with Page, her husband, Michael Des Barres, fronted Detective - the first band signed to Zeppelin's Swan Song label. Pamela Des Barres: Some people just have it. Jimmy obviously has insane charisma and his talent is unsurpassed, innovative and majestic. Not to mention he was the epitome of what a British Rock God should look like: delicate, mysterious, androgynous, sensuous. And he made sure you never really knew what was on his mind. He loved being in control of every situation, still somehow remaining an elegant, intense gentleman. One wild night, he gave me a dose of mescaline and didn't take any himself. He enjoyed being my provider, lover, teacher. It went on for hours, all night long. And I was a joyous, blissed-out basketcase when the sun came up. UNCUT: Can you tell me about Jimmy's interest in Aleister Crowley? What did he particularly admire about him and how deeply do you think Jimmy immersed himself in that "black vibe"? There’s the story of you helping him buy a Crowley manuscript once for $1700. First of all, Crowley's vibe isn't 'black.' He was a seeker of things beyond our five senses and so was Jimmy. He was fascinated with the search into all things occult and hidden, but not necessarily dark or evil in any way. Crowley was actually attempting to bring understanding to what people deemed 'dark.' Jimmy liked living very close to the danger zone, curious about secrets that most of us haven't even heard about. I knew an old gentleman bookseller on Hollywood Boulevard, also entranced with Crowley, and I found a handwritten manuscript of Crowley's tucked away on a high shelf. I remember getting that huge sum of money and being honoured to be sending Jimmy something so important to him. I imagined him reading that thing deep into the night, roaming around in Crowley's castle in Scotland, flapping around in his cape. Before we met, I was afraid of Jimmy and determined not to fall for his charms when Led Zeppelin hit LA. Deserved or not, their reputation as debauched naughty boys preceded them. But he was intent on getting me to fall for him, and it didn't take much. He sent me notes, got hold of my phone number and easily convinced me he would be worth the trouble. He did keep whips coiled up in his suitcase on the road, but never attempted to use them on me. He definitely had a wicked sexual side, which made him a transcendent lover. Even when you were intimately involved with him, he held back, which made you want to delve into him even deeper. And he didn't disappoint in any way until he broke my baby heart. He did that to a lot of adoring females. I have no regrets, and I treasure that heady time with Jimmy and being a part of all that was Led Zeppelin. There was never any soul-selling to the devil or anything like that - ever. It's part of the mythology though and fans seem to want to believe it. What did I make of his dark side? He was very focused and powerful and played with it, played with people in his midst. He relished and enjoyed his heightened place in the rock pantheon immensely. He had a supreme gentleness masking a deceptive strength and determination. Indeed, in some ways, Jimmy was unattainable. Watching Led Zeppelin on stage, I was one of the lucky few to be sitting atop Jimmy's amp, with a groupie's eye view of his violin bow coming apart in the shimmering air, sashaying backstage with him and Robert while Bonzo thrashed away on “Moby Dick”. Besides the magnificence of the music, just being a part of that formidable, unparalleled scene was an enervating, indescribable feeling. When they went back to England after a long tour here, the let down was very troubling to say the least. They split open and shredded previous musical boundaries and other musicians happily took advantage of it. I was very aware I was in the middle of musical history being made and in awe of each moment. It was like being wrapped up in a thunderous hurricane of expanding, contracting holy sound. Aaahhhhhh.... ROB HUGHES

In the January issue (on sale now) of Uncut , we celebrated the career of rock’s greatest and most mysterious guitar hero through the first hand accounts of the people who know him best.

Here at www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be posting the full and unedited transcripts from those interviews, including words from Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Roy Harper, Steve Albini and more.

Part 8: PAMELA DES BARRES

The groupie supreme and member of the GTO’s. Despite her relationship with Page, her husband, Michael Des Barres, fronted Detective – the first band signed to Zeppelin’s Swan Song label.

Pamela Des Barres: Some people just have it. Jimmy obviously has insane charisma and his talent is unsurpassed, innovative and majestic. Not to mention he was the epitome of what a British Rock God should look like: delicate, mysterious, androgynous, sensuous. And he made sure you never really knew what was on his mind. He loved being in control of every situation, still somehow remaining an elegant, intense gentleman. One wild night, he gave me a dose of mescaline and didn’t take any himself. He enjoyed being my provider, lover, teacher. It went on for hours, all night long. And I was a joyous, blissed-out basketcase when the sun came up.

UNCUT: Can you tell me about Jimmy’s interest in Aleister Crowley? What did he particularly admire about him and how deeply do you think Jimmy immersed himself in that “black vibe”? There’s the story of you helping him buy a Crowley manuscript once for $1700.

First of all, Crowley’s vibe isn’t ‘black.’ He was a seeker of things beyond our five senses and so was Jimmy. He was fascinated with the search into all things occult and hidden, but not necessarily dark or evil in any way. Crowley was actually attempting to bring understanding to what people deemed ‘dark.’ Jimmy liked living very close to the danger zone, curious about secrets that most of us haven’t even heard about. I knew an old gentleman bookseller on Hollywood Boulevard, also entranced with Crowley, and I found a handwritten manuscript of Crowley’s tucked away on a high shelf. I remember getting that huge sum of money and being honoured to be sending Jimmy something so important to him. I imagined him reading that thing deep into the night, roaming around in Crowley’s castle in Scotland, flapping around in his cape.

Before we met, I was afraid of Jimmy and determined not to fall for his charms when Led Zeppelin hit LA. Deserved or not, their reputation as debauched naughty boys preceded them. But he was intent on getting me to fall for him, and it didn’t take much. He sent me notes, got hold of my phone number and easily convinced me he would be worth the trouble. He did keep whips coiled up in his suitcase on the road, but never attempted to use them on me. He definitely had a wicked sexual side, which made him a transcendent lover. Even when you were intimately involved with him, he held back, which made you want to delve into him even deeper.

And he didn’t disappoint in any way until he broke my baby heart. He did that to a lot of adoring females. I have no regrets, and I treasure that heady time with Jimmy and being a part of all that was Led Zeppelin. There was never any soul-selling to the devil or anything like that – ever. It’s part of the mythology though and fans seem to want to believe it.

What did I make of his dark side? He was very focused and powerful and played with it, played with people in his midst. He relished and enjoyed his heightened place in the rock pantheon immensely. He had a supreme gentleness masking a deceptive strength and determination. Indeed, in some ways, Jimmy was unattainable.

Watching Led Zeppelin on stage, I was one of the lucky few to be sitting atop Jimmy’s amp, with a groupie’s eye view of his violin bow coming apart in the shimmering air, sashaying backstage with him and Robert while Bonzo thrashed away on “Moby Dick”. Besides the magnificence of the music, just being a part of that formidable, unparalleled scene was an enervating, indescribable feeling. When they went back to England after a long tour here, the let down was very troubling to say the least. They split open and shredded previous musical boundaries and other musicians happily took advantage of it. I was very aware I was in the middle of musical history being made and in awe of each moment. It was like being wrapped up in a thunderous hurricane of expanding, contracting holy sound. Aaahhhhhh….

ROB HUGHES

John Paul Jones On Jimmy Page

Uncut
-
0
John Paul Jones On Jimmy Page

In the January issue (on sale now) of Uncut , we celebrated the career of rock's greatest and most mysterious guitar hero through the first hand accounts of the people who know him best. Here at www.uncut.co.uk, we'll be posting the full and unedited transcripts from those interviews, including words from Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Roy Harper, Steve Albini and more. PART 7: JOHN PAUL JONES Zep's bassist and arranger whose friendship with Page extends back furthest of all: to session work in Swinging London. *** UNCUT: Well, firstly, what did it feel like to be playing with Jimmy again at the O2 Arena? JPJ: “Pretty damn good. We put a lot of work into it – I had done quite a lot of playing with him, obviously, in the months preceding up to it – and it was really, really enjoyable. It was good fun revisiting the numbers and just playing with a really good player again.” What’s your assessment of how good he is these days? Is he as good as the Page of old? JPJ: “Yeah, he really is. He really is. He was always one of my favourite guitarists – I know it sounds obvious, but he was – and as soon as we started in rehearsal, I was just amazed to hear how he’d kept everything and actually improved, I thought. He seemed to have grown since I saw him last.” It’s difficult for him, isn’t it, because some of those songs have upwards of five or six tracks of guitar on the original recordings – particularly things like “Achilles Last Stand”. So in order to be able to perform them live, at his age, he’s really got to have all his musical wits about him. JPJ: “He has, yeah, and he certainly did have. Obviously we always used to do songs that had a lot of extra, overdubbed parts, and we used to have to come to some arrangement about doing them live. So we’re kind of used to it, but yeah, you’ve got to be pretty nimble to cover all the important parts so that the song makes sense. And he did it without a second thought, it seemed.” He came on wearing shades. Is that because he was nervous? JPJ: “Ha! No, he seems to like wearing shades… for pictures and things like that. It’s a look he seems to go for.” I know that Ahmet Ertegun was the reason for the reunion talking place, but what do you think it actually meant to Jimmy himself? JPJ: “Well, obviously Ahmet Ertegun meant a lot to us all. We all wanted to be on his record label in the first place, and so, yes, it was a tribute to a very important man. But the fact that we did a full Zeppelin show, almost… albeit a short one, at two hours… I mean [Jimmy] was very, very happy to do it. I guess it probably… I don’t know, I’m trying to think of your question, it’s a bit open-ended… It’s probably similar to what it meant to all of us, which is: it’s nice to be able to do it, to prove to yourself that you can do it.” Should we read anything into the fact that Jimmy oversees the releases of things like How The West Was Won and the DVD? Does that mean that he cares more about the Zeppelin legacy than you and Robert? JPJ: “No, it’s not true that he cares more about it. It’s true that he certainly puts more work into it. I mean, he was the producer in the band, and so it’s more a continuation of those duties, I suppose. But it was his original vision, the band, and it obviously holds a very special place in his heart. But it holds a special place in all of our hearts.” Can you remember meeting Jimmy for the first time? JPJ: “It was… I can’t remember what the session was, but it was probably about 1964 and we were booked on the same session. Decca or somewhere like that, up in Broadhurst Gardens [in West Hampstead] where it used to be. I was just really happy to see another young face.” Oh, right, was it all old hands? “It was all old hands. I think he was the youngest session musician until I came along. We were always really glad to see each other on the sessions, because it meant that you had a young, hip rhythm section. The drummer would be older, I suppose, and [guitarist] Big Jim Sullivan was older, but we were relatively young compared with all the other session musicians.” Did he have any kind of reputation, the way that Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck did? JPJ: “Oh yeah. I mean, I remember him having a reputation almost before I turned professional [in early 1963], when he was with Neil Christian & The Crusaders. It was always, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy.’ In fact, I never actually heard him before we worked together, but yes, I knew of his reputation.” So why was he doing this session work, rather than being in a band himself and travelling up and down the M1 doing gigs? JPJ: “Well, he did that first. I’m not quite sure how he got into sessions – I got into them via Tony Meehan – although I think one of [Jimmy’s] early sessions was on ‘Diamonds’ [by Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, recorded late ’62]. He’s on rhythm guitar on ‘Diamonds’. I wasn’t on that, but I was in Jet and Tony’s road band in 1963. In those days, to be a session musician was considered the pinnacle of your professional music career. If you got a foot in, at that early age, you kind of held on to it.” He’s been quite evasive over the years about what exactly he played on – The Kinks, The Who, the Stones. Do you think it’s because he genuinely can’t remember in a lot of cases, or does he like there to be a bit of mystique, a bit of speculation? JPJ: “Ha! Well, a little bit of mystery is not such a bad thing. But to be honest, we played hundreds and hundreds of sessions, so it’s quite reasonable not to remember. I can’t remember three quarters of the sessions I was on.” He’s often described as a very softly-spoken chap, perhaps a bit withdrawn. What were your first impressions of him? JPJ: “He was very passionate about music, which is why I immediately took to him. Very knowledgeable about music, too. About old records. He was always very interested in recording. We were kind of geeks in those days, in a way. At the end of a session, most of the musicians would sit back and read their golf magazines, but we would always go into the control room to listen to playbacks and to watch the engineers, watch the producers. We both wanted to know how things were done. He was quiet, and he was reserved…” Is he shy, in the classic sense? JPJ: “He is. Yeah, he is. He’s happier in a music environment than in any other environment, I think.” But does it make sense that he got two boisterous characters – Robert Plant and John Bonham – into Led Zeppelin? Does he like surrounding himself with louder, more gregarious people? JPJ: “They were just perfect for the band. I don’t know if he actually surrounds himself with louder people. I mean, I was in his band and I’m not particularly loud and gregarious… No, it was good because he had this vision for the band after he’d been with The Yardbirds. He knew what he wanted to… he knew what it wanted…” He knew what he wanted it to be. JPJ: “What he wanted it to be. Thank you so much.” And how much did he know? How much did he have worked out in his head in advance? JPJ: “Well, as I say, he’d been with The Yardbirds. He had this whole thing about ‘a dynamic rock band… a whole light-and-shade thing.’ Which was pivotal, and it informed every musical decision that he made. I mean, there weren’t dynamic rock bands in those days. Everything was either a soft, folky-rock type thing, or just blasting all the time. It was very important to him.” Did he have a sense of humour? Was he a funny guy to be around? JPJ: “Oh yeah, of course. We had a lot of fun times.” I’m just intrigued by the idea of the quietest guy in the room being the one with the most dominant personality. Was that the case in the studio? Was he giving orders and instructions? JPJ: “No, no, in the studio it was very democratic. Basically, it’s like, if you buy a dog you don’t bark yourself. The band was made up of people who were good musicians and good performers, and he let us get on with it. We would all make a lot of decisions. But he was in charge of the overall sound.” I guess when you worked together on sessions, you would have seen him playing his guitar either sitting down, or standing on one spot. And yet he developed into one of the most flamboyant stage performers that rock has probably ever known. Did you know he was going to do that, or did it just evolve, or what? JPJ: “No, I didn’t know he was going to do that. Visually, he was fantastic. It soon became obvious once we started doing a few shows. But he gets totally immersed in it. It’s not sort of ‘worked out’. He just does it. That’s how the music comes out and that’s how he plays.” So the music is sort of playing him, in a way? JPJ: “It’s all part of the same thing. He’s not really thinking about anything else. He’s very, very focused onstage.” So he’s not thinking, “I’ll probably look pretty cool if I stand like this…” JPJ: “Not really, no. I don’t think so. I mean, the focus is very intense in a Zeppelin show, onstage. I don’t really notice what else is going on. But he’s more intense than anybody, I think.” Was there a time when you started to think of him as a very good producer? “Whole Lotta Love”, perhaps? JPJ: “Yeah, absolutely. The backwards echo stuff. A lot of the microphone techniques were just inspired. Using distance-miking… and small amplifiers. Everybody thinks we go in the studio with huge walls of amplifiers, but he doesn’t. He uses a really small amplifier and he just mikes it up really well, so that it fits into a sonic picture.” Was recording an easy process? With Led Zeppelin in the studio, that’s a lot of creativity flowing around, so surely some people’s ideas must have been rejected in favour of other people’s? JPJ: “Well, yeah, but generally that was done as a band. We seemed to know which ideas would work and which ones wouldn’t. You’d try an idea, and if it didn’t work, everybody just went, ‘Nah’. And then, okay, let’s try something else. We didn’t have to be told. It’s the professional way of working, and it’s very easy to do it like that, and nobody’s feelings are hurt.” When Zeppelin formed, did Jimmy already have a close relationship with Peter Grant? JPJ: “Yes.” How did that relationship work? They seem, from what I’ve heard, such complete opposites as human beings. JPJ: “No! [sounds puzzled]” Were there a lot of places where their personalities were in sync? JPJ: “Well, yeah… [even more puzzled].” You know what I mean, though. A big, huge, East End hard-man and a sort of waif-like, Byronic rock guitarist… JPJ: “[Laughs] Yeah… yeah… Well, Peter Grant used to share this office with Mickie Most, which was like fifty foot long, and Peter was up one end and Mickie was up the other. I was the musical director for Mickie Most, so that was how I met Peter. Peter was a very sensitive man. He was a very, very smart man. People just think of his size and his reputation, but actually he never had to use his size. He could out-talk anybody, you know. And I think [he and Jimmy] got along intellectually. They both had this great love of art, as well. Art deco, art nouveau… that whole sort of period. They used to spend a lot of time touring antique shops together when we were on the road. They were both collectors. So yeah, they had a lot of things in common. I know Peter trusted Jimmy’s vision. When Peter trusts you, he doesn’t question you. He just decides that you’ve got the right idea, so he’s going to put all his resources behind you. And that’s what he did with Jimmy and with Zeppelin.” And what did Jimmy get out of the relationship, apart from having a very shrewd manager? JPJ: “Yeah, well, [laughs] that’s the biggest thing… He had somebody who he could talk through things with. A confidant, I suppose. But a very shrewd manager, if I may say so, is not a bad thing to have.” Did Jimmy in the ’70s, when Zeppelin must have been a totally surreal experience to go through, would you say he was someone who lived in the real world? Did he read newspapers? Did he know what was going on with Watergate or whatever? JPJ: “Sure. Yeah, yeah. We all did. We all lived in the real world as much as you can. I mean, it is a bit of a bubble that you travel around in, but we were all pretty well informed.” When did you find out, and how did you find out, that he had an interest in Aleister Crowley and the occult? JPJ: “Quite early on. He was always talking about it. I didn’t actually have the interest in it, so I kind of left it to him. I knew he’d bought a house [Boleskine House, Crowley’s former country manor seat, which Page purchased in 1970]. He didn’t talk about it much with the band. It was a private thing.” You didn’t go to Boleskine House? JPJ: “No, no, I never went up there.” But I mean, did you have a mental picture of him wearing a cape and casting spells and things? JPJ: “[Laughs] Now that you’ve put it in my mind… No, I basically didn’t really give it any thought. That was his business. It was not an interest of mine.” I know that he and Robert Plant became very close at one stage, and shared the cottage in Wales and wrote the third album and so on. Did you have a completely different kind of friendship with Jimmy? JPJ: “Yes, I guess so. A lot of their friendship came out of the fact that they travelled around together during times when we were not on tour. That’s actually what happened. And whereas John Bonham and I went home to our families, [Jimmy and Robert] went off writing or whatever. I had more of a professional relationship, I suppose, with Jimmy. I saw him on the road, basically. I didn’t see him much between tours and studios.” Were you all the more impressed, then, when he’d bring in a new piece like “Kashmir” or “Ten Years Gone” or “The Song Remains The Same” – these increasingly elaborate, almost tapestry-like productions? JPJ: “[Coldly] They were all worked on by the group. It’s not as if he just came in and said, ‘This is how it all goes. You do this, you do that.’ We all worked on those tunes. It’s Zeppelin music.” Is Physical Graffiti perhaps the best place to hear Jimmy Page in all his various guises? JPJ: “Yeah, I’m a big fan of Physical Graffiti. I’m a big fan of all of it, to be honest. But that is quite a high point.” When did Jimmy’s drug use become a problem? JPJ: “[Laughs] Everybody’s drug use became a problem. We were all going off the rails in the late ’70s, one way or another.” Were his problems not noticed for a while, perhaps? JPJ: “Well, in those days, it wasn’t the thing to comment on anybody else’s habits or proclivities. In this day and age, everybody knows what to do. As I said, none of us were in any position to tell any of the others what to do. And what not to do.” Were you friendly enough with him to call him up, or go round his house, or socialise with him? Or did you only see each other when Zeppelin had work to do? JPJ: “Oh yeah, I’d turn up at his house and he’d turn up at mine. Yeah…” But eventually you got to the situation where you wrote more of In Through The Out Door than he did, because he was scarcely in the studio… JPJ: “Well, mainly because I had a new toy. I had this big new keyboard. And Robert and I just got to rehearsals early, basically, and as I said… [pause] actually, I’m not sure if I did say it in this interview… [laughs]… With Zeppelin writing, if you came up with good things, and everybody agreed that they were good things, they got used. There was no formula for writing. So Robert and I, by the time everybody turned up for rehearsals, we’d written three or four songs. So we started rehearsing those immediately, because they were something to be getting on with.” Jimmy has talked about the fact that the next album – if there had been one – would have been more of a return to rock’n’roll. Was he offended or bothered by the fact that punk rock had dismissed Zeppelin as being terribly old-fashioned? JPJ: “Well, it’s a bit irritating when they slate you for being old-fashioned and then you listen to them and you think, ‘Wait a minute, they’re doing what we were doing ten years ago.’” The reason I ask is because, in the ’80s, Jimmy’s work was nowhere near on a par with his work in Zeppelin. I wondered whether that was because he was still depressed by John Bonham’s death and the end of Zeppelin, or whether it was because it was a new decade and Page’s time had gone. JPJ: “No, no. It was very depressing, the end of Zeppelin. I mean, it happened really quickly. It also happened at the beginning of a new lease of life, to add to the tragedy. We were all in particularly good spirits. It happened on an ‘up’, so it hit us all very hard. It certainly hit Jimmy very hard.” It seems to have taken the wind out of his sails almost for a whole decade. JPJ: “Yeah. Well, it did.” Were you in contact with him very often? JPJ: “Not very often, no. I’d moved to Devon – moved out of town – thinking it would be nice to spend ‘between tour’ times out in the country, well away from London. And my family was growing up, so I hardly saw [Jimmy] at all.” When he’d make an album with somebody like David Coverdale or Paul Rodgers, did it seem like he was attempting to recapture something that Zeppelin had had? JPJ: “It was an attempt to start playing again, and do some work, and get back into it. I know he told me that he couldn’t touch the guitar for quite a long time after Zeppelin ended. He said, ‘I didn’t want to.’ And that’s not unreasonable. I could see that. I didn’t play bass for years.” He got back together with Robert Plant for the ‘Unledded’ thing. I know you weren’t involved in that, but was there a part of you that was at least glad to see Jimmy working with Robert again? JPJ: “[Doubtfully] Yeah… I wasn’t particularly glad for anybody at that point. [Laughs] But yeah… it was kind of mitigated by that thought. At least he was playing. It was probably good for him.” Do you and Jimmy joke about that now, or has it not quite reached that stage? JPJ: “We don’t actually joke about it. It was quite a hard time for me. But we’re past it, if you know what I mean.” Is he a difficult man to reconcile with, if you’ve fallen out with him? JPJ: “I don’t know, I suppose it’s basically just spending time together. It’s been really nice over these last few months, to get to know him again, the way I got to know him in the first place, which was through music. Yes, I suppose it does take a little time.” It’s quite interesting that he’s not dyeing his hair any more, he’s not pretending that he’s still in his early 30s. He seems to have accepted that he’s in his 60s now. JPJ: “Well, we all have to.” But do you think he’s comfortable now with his life, with what he’s achieved in the past… and could there be more music from him in the future? JPJ: “I hope there’s more playing. For him as well as me [laughs].” Would you like to make another Led Zeppelin album? JPJ: “Errr… I’d have to think about that.” Really? JPJ: “Led Zeppelin’s a… I mean, it was really good to do the [O2] show. It was great. And I spoke to him just afterwards, a few days afterwards, and we both thought the same – that it felt like the first night of a tour. You think, ‘Oh, I could do that a bit better, or change something in that song.’ And we didn’t get a chance to do any more.” Would it be hard for that momentum to be built back up again? Because Robert Plant’s off on tour with… JPJ: “[Interrupting] Yeah. Yeah.” So do you think the Zeppelin reunion might actually have begun and ended at the O2? JPJ: “It’s possible. It is possible.” You don’t sound too certain about the prospect of an album. JPJ: “No. I’m not sure. I’m not too certain about anything, to be honest, right at the moment. I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen. But I’d certainly like to play with Jimmy again.” DAVID CAVANAGH

In the January issue (on sale now) of Uncut , we celebrated the career of rock’s greatest and most mysterious guitar hero through the first hand accounts of the people who know him best.

Here at www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be posting the full and unedited transcripts from those interviews, including words from Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Roy Harper, Steve Albini and more.

PART 7: JOHN PAUL JONES

Zep’s bassist and arranger whose friendship with Page extends back furthest of all: to session work in Swinging London.

***

UNCUT: Well, firstly, what did it feel like to be playing with Jimmy again at the O2 Arena?

JPJ: “Pretty damn good. We put a lot of work into it – I had done quite a lot of playing with him, obviously, in the months preceding up to it – and it was really, really enjoyable. It was good fun revisiting the numbers and just playing with a really good player again.”

What’s your assessment of how good he is these days? Is he as good as the Page of old?

JPJ: “Yeah, he really is. He really is. He was always one of my favourite guitarists – I know it sounds obvious, but he was – and as soon as we started in rehearsal, I was just amazed to hear how he’d kept everything and actually improved, I thought. He seemed to have grown since I saw him last.”

It’s difficult for him, isn’t it, because some of those songs have upwards of five or six tracks of guitar on the original recordings – particularly things like “Achilles Last Stand”. So in order to be able to perform them live, at his age, he’s really got to have all his musical wits about him.

JPJ: “He has, yeah, and he certainly did have. Obviously we always used to do songs that had a lot of extra, overdubbed parts, and we used to have to come to some arrangement about doing them live. So we’re kind of used to it, but yeah, you’ve got to be pretty nimble to cover all the important parts so that the song makes sense. And he did it without a second thought, it seemed.”

He came on wearing shades. Is that because he was nervous?

JPJ: “Ha! No, he seems to like wearing shades… for pictures and things like that. It’s a look he seems to go for.”

I know that Ahmet Ertegun was the reason for the reunion talking place, but what do you think it actually meant to Jimmy himself?

JPJ: “Well, obviously Ahmet Ertegun meant a lot to us all. We all wanted to be on his record label in the first place, and so, yes, it was a tribute to a very important man. But the fact that we did a full Zeppelin show, almost… albeit a short one, at two hours… I mean [Jimmy] was very, very happy to do it. I guess it probably… I don’t know, I’m trying to think of your question, it’s a bit open-ended… It’s probably similar to what it meant to all of us, which is: it’s nice to be able to do it, to prove to yourself that you can do it.”

Should we read anything into the fact that Jimmy oversees the releases of things like How The West Was Won and the DVD? Does that mean that he cares more about the Zeppelin legacy than you and Robert?

JPJ: “No, it’s not true that he cares more about it. It’s true that he certainly puts more work into it. I mean, he was the producer in the band, and so it’s more a continuation of those duties, I suppose. But it was his original vision, the band, and it obviously holds a very special place in his heart. But it holds a special place in all of our hearts.”

Can you remember meeting Jimmy for the first time?

JPJ: “It was… I can’t remember what the session was, but it was probably about 1964 and we were booked on the same session. Decca or somewhere like that, up in Broadhurst Gardens [in West Hampstead] where it used to be. I was just really happy to see another young face.”

Oh, right, was it all old hands?

“It was all old hands. I think he was the youngest session musician until I came along. We were always really glad to see each other on the sessions, because it meant that you had a young, hip rhythm section. The drummer would be older, I suppose, and [guitarist] Big Jim Sullivan was older, but we were relatively young compared with all the other session musicians.”

Did he have any kind of reputation, the way that Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck did?

JPJ: “Oh yeah. I mean, I remember him having a reputation almost before I turned professional [in early 1963], when he was with Neil Christian & The Crusaders. It was always, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy.’ In fact, I never actually heard him before we worked together, but yes, I knew of his reputation.”

So why was he doing this session work, rather than being in a band himself and travelling up and down the M1 doing gigs?

JPJ: “Well, he did that first. I’m not quite sure how he got into sessions – I got into them via Tony Meehan – although I think one of [Jimmy’s] early sessions was on ‘Diamonds’ [by Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, recorded late ’62]. He’s on rhythm guitar on ‘Diamonds’. I wasn’t on that, but I was in Jet and Tony’s road band in 1963. In those days, to be a session musician was considered the pinnacle of your professional music career. If you got a foot in, at that early age, you kind of held on to it.”

He’s been quite evasive over the years about what exactly he played on – The Kinks, The Who, the Stones. Do you think it’s because he genuinely can’t remember in a lot of cases, or does he like there to be a bit of mystique, a bit of speculation?

JPJ: “Ha! Well, a little bit of mystery is not such a bad thing. But to be honest, we played hundreds and hundreds of sessions, so it’s quite reasonable not to remember. I can’t remember three quarters of the sessions I was on.”

He’s often described as a very softly-spoken chap, perhaps a bit withdrawn. What were your first impressions of him?

JPJ: “He was very passionate about music, which is why I immediately took to him. Very knowledgeable about music, too. About old records. He was always very interested in recording. We were kind of geeks in those days, in a way. At the end of a session, most of the musicians would sit back and read their golf magazines, but we would always go into the control room to listen to playbacks and to watch the engineers, watch the producers. We both wanted to know how things were done. He was quiet, and he was reserved…”

Is he shy, in the classic sense?

JPJ: “He is. Yeah, he is. He’s happier in a music environment than in any other environment, I think.”

But does it make sense that he got two boisterous characters – Robert Plant and John Bonham – into Led Zeppelin? Does he like surrounding himself with louder, more gregarious people?

JPJ: “They were just perfect for the band. I don’t know if he actually surrounds himself with louder people. I mean, I was in his band and I’m not particularly loud and gregarious… No, it was good because he had this vision for the band after he’d been with The Yardbirds. He knew what he wanted to… he knew what it wanted…”

He knew what he wanted it to be.

JPJ: “What he wanted it to be. Thank you so much.”

And how much did he know? How much did he have worked out in his head in advance?

JPJ: “Well, as I say, he’d been with The Yardbirds. He had this whole thing about ‘a dynamic rock band… a whole light-and-shade thing.’ Which was pivotal, and it informed every musical decision that he made. I mean, there weren’t dynamic rock bands in those days. Everything was either a soft, folky-rock type thing, or just blasting all the time. It was very important to him.”

Did he have a sense of humour? Was he a funny guy to be around?

JPJ: “Oh yeah, of course. We had a lot of fun times.”

I’m just intrigued by the idea of the quietest guy in the room being the one with the most dominant personality. Was that the case in the studio? Was he giving orders and instructions?

JPJ: “No, no, in the studio it was very democratic. Basically, it’s like, if you buy a dog you don’t bark yourself. The band was made up of people who were good musicians and good performers, and he let us get on with it. We would all make a lot of decisions. But he was in charge of the overall sound.”

I guess when you worked together on sessions, you would have seen him playing his guitar either sitting down, or standing on one spot. And yet he developed into one of the most flamboyant stage performers that rock has probably ever known. Did you know he was going to do that, or did it just evolve, or what?

JPJ: “No, I didn’t know he was going to do that. Visually, he was fantastic. It soon became obvious once we started doing a few shows. But he gets totally immersed in it. It’s not sort of ‘worked out’. He just does it. That’s how the music comes out and that’s how he plays.”

So the music is sort of playing him, in a way?

JPJ: “It’s all part of the same thing. He’s not really thinking about anything else. He’s very, very focused onstage.”

So he’s not thinking, “I’ll probably look pretty cool if I stand like this…”

JPJ: “Not really, no. I don’t think so. I mean, the focus is very intense in a Zeppelin show, onstage. I don’t really notice what else is going on. But he’s more intense than anybody, I think.”

Was there a time when you started to think of him as a very good producer? “Whole Lotta Love”, perhaps?

JPJ: “Yeah, absolutely. The backwards echo stuff. A lot of the microphone techniques were just inspired. Using distance-miking… and small amplifiers. Everybody thinks we go in the studio with huge walls of amplifiers, but he doesn’t. He uses a really small amplifier and he just mikes it up really well, so that it fits into a sonic picture.”

Was recording an easy process? With Led Zeppelin in the studio, that’s a lot of creativity flowing around, so surely some people’s ideas must have been rejected in favour of other people’s?

JPJ: “Well, yeah, but generally that was done as a band. We seemed to know which ideas would work and which ones wouldn’t. You’d try an idea, and if it didn’t work, everybody just went, ‘Nah’. And then, okay, let’s try something else. We didn’t have to be told. It’s the professional way of working, and it’s very easy to do it like that, and nobody’s feelings are hurt.”

When Zeppelin formed, did Jimmy already have a close relationship with Peter Grant?

JPJ: “Yes.”

How did that relationship work? They seem, from what I’ve heard, such complete opposites as human beings.

JPJ: “No! [sounds puzzled]”

Were there a lot of places where their personalities were in sync?

JPJ: “Well, yeah… [even more puzzled].”

You know what I mean, though. A big, huge, East End hard-man and a sort of waif-like, Byronic rock guitarist…

JPJ: “[Laughs] Yeah… yeah… Well, Peter Grant used to share this office with Mickie Most, which was like fifty foot long, and Peter was up one end and Mickie was up the other. I was the musical director for Mickie Most, so that was how I met Peter. Peter was a very sensitive man. He was a very, very smart man. People just think of his size and his reputation, but actually he never had to use his size. He could out-talk anybody, you know. And I think [he and Jimmy] got along intellectually. They both had this great love of art, as well. Art deco, art nouveau… that whole sort of period. They used to spend a lot of time touring antique shops together when we were on the road. They were both collectors. So yeah, they had a lot of things in common. I know Peter trusted Jimmy’s vision. When Peter trusts you, he doesn’t question you. He just decides that you’ve got the right idea, so he’s going to put all his resources behind you. And that’s what he did with Jimmy and with Zeppelin.”

And what did Jimmy get out of the relationship, apart from having a very shrewd manager?

JPJ: “Yeah, well, [laughs] that’s the biggest thing… He had somebody who he could talk through things with. A confidant, I suppose. But a very shrewd manager, if I may say so, is not a bad thing to have.”

Did Jimmy in the ’70s, when Zeppelin must have been a totally surreal experience to go through, would you say he was someone who lived in the real world? Did he read newspapers? Did he know what was going on with Watergate or whatever?

JPJ: “Sure. Yeah, yeah. We all did. We all lived in the real world as much as you can. I mean, it is a bit of a bubble that you travel around in, but we were all pretty well informed.”

When did you find out, and how did you find out, that he had an interest in Aleister Crowley and the occult?

JPJ: “Quite early on. He was always talking about it. I didn’t actually have the interest in it, so I kind of left it to him. I knew he’d bought a house [Boleskine House, Crowley’s former country manor seat, which Page purchased in 1970]. He didn’t talk about it much with the band. It was a private thing.”

You didn’t go to Boleskine House?

JPJ: “No, no, I never went up there.”

But I mean, did you have a mental picture of him wearing a cape and casting spells and things?

JPJ: “[Laughs] Now that you’ve put it in my mind… No, I basically didn’t really give it any thought. That was his business. It was not an interest of mine.”

I know that he and Robert Plant became very close at one stage, and shared the cottage in Wales and wrote the third album and so on. Did you have a completely different kind of friendship with Jimmy?

JPJ: “Yes, I guess so. A lot of their friendship came out of the fact that they travelled around together during times when we were not on tour. That’s actually what happened. And whereas John Bonham and I went home to our families, [Jimmy and Robert] went off writing or whatever. I had more of a professional relationship, I suppose, with Jimmy. I saw him on the road, basically. I didn’t see him much between tours and studios.”

Were you all the more impressed, then, when he’d bring in a new piece like “Kashmir” or “Ten Years Gone” or “The Song Remains The Same” – these increasingly elaborate, almost tapestry-like productions?

JPJ: “[Coldly] They were all worked on by the group. It’s not as if he just came in and said, ‘This is how it all goes. You do this, you do that.’ We all worked on those tunes. It’s Zeppelin music.”

Is Physical Graffiti perhaps the best place to hear Jimmy Page in all his various guises?

JPJ: “Yeah, I’m a big fan of Physical Graffiti. I’m a big fan of all of it, to be honest. But that is quite a high point.”

When did Jimmy’s drug use become a problem?

JPJ: “[Laughs] Everybody’s drug use became a problem. We were all going off the rails in the late ’70s, one way or another.”

Were his problems not noticed for a while, perhaps?

JPJ: “Well, in those days, it wasn’t the thing to comment on anybody else’s habits or proclivities. In this day and age, everybody knows what to do. As I said, none of us were in any position to tell any of the others what to do. And what not to do.”

Were you friendly enough with him to call him up, or go round his house, or socialise with him? Or did you only see each other when Zeppelin had work to do?

JPJ: “Oh yeah, I’d turn up at his house and he’d turn up at mine. Yeah…”

But eventually you got to the situation where you wrote more of In Through The Out Door than he did, because he was scarcely in the studio…

JPJ: “Well, mainly because I had a new toy. I had this big new keyboard. And Robert and I just got to rehearsals early, basically, and as I said… [pause] actually, I’m not sure if I did say it in this interview… [laughs]… With Zeppelin writing, if you came up with good things, and everybody agreed that they were good things, they got used. There was no formula for writing. So Robert and I, by the time everybody turned up for rehearsals, we’d written three or four songs. So we started rehearsing those immediately, because they were something to be getting on with.”

Jimmy has talked about the fact that the next album – if there had been one – would have been more of a return to rock’n’roll. Was he offended or bothered by the fact that punk rock had dismissed Zeppelin as being terribly old-fashioned?

JPJ: “Well, it’s a bit irritating when they slate you for being old-fashioned and then you listen to them and you think, ‘Wait a minute, they’re doing what we were doing ten years ago.’”

The reason I ask is because, in the ’80s, Jimmy’s work was nowhere near on a par with his work in Zeppelin. I wondered whether that was because he was still depressed by John Bonham’s death and the end of Zeppelin, or whether it was because it was a new decade and Page’s time had gone.

JPJ: “No, no. It was very depressing, the end of Zeppelin. I mean, it happened really quickly. It also happened at the beginning of a new lease of life, to add to the tragedy. We were all in particularly good spirits. It happened on an ‘up’, so it hit us all very hard. It certainly hit Jimmy very hard.”

It seems to have taken the wind out of his sails almost for a whole decade.

JPJ: “Yeah. Well, it did.”

Were you in contact with him very often?

JPJ: “Not very often, no. I’d moved to Devon – moved out of town – thinking it would be nice to spend ‘between tour’ times out in the country, well away from London. And my family was growing up, so I hardly saw [Jimmy] at all.”

When he’d make an album with somebody like David Coverdale or Paul Rodgers, did it seem like he was attempting to recapture something that Zeppelin had had?

JPJ: “It was an attempt to start playing again, and do some work, and get back into it. I know he told me that he couldn’t touch the guitar for quite a long time after Zeppelin ended. He said, ‘I didn’t want to.’ And that’s not unreasonable. I could see that. I didn’t play bass for years.”

He got back together with Robert Plant for the ‘Unledded’ thing. I know you weren’t involved in that, but was there a part of you that was at least glad to see Jimmy working with Robert again?

JPJ: “[Doubtfully] Yeah… I wasn’t particularly glad for anybody at that point. [Laughs] But yeah… it was kind of mitigated by that thought. At least he was playing. It was probably good for him.”

Do you and Jimmy joke about that now, or has it not quite reached that stage?

JPJ: “We don’t actually joke about it. It was quite a hard time for me. But we’re past it, if you know what I mean.”

Is he a difficult man to reconcile with, if you’ve fallen out with him?

JPJ: “I don’t know, I suppose it’s basically just spending time together. It’s been really nice over these last few months, to get to know him again, the way I got to know him in the first place, which was through music. Yes, I suppose it does take a little time.”

It’s quite interesting that he’s not dyeing his hair any more, he’s not pretending that he’s still in his early 30s. He seems to have accepted that he’s in his 60s now.

JPJ: “Well, we all have to.”

But do you think he’s comfortable now with his life, with what he’s achieved in the past… and could there be more music from him in the future?

JPJ: “I hope there’s more playing. For him as well as me [laughs].”

Would you like to make another Led Zeppelin album?

JPJ: “Errr… I’d have to think about that.”

Really?

JPJ: “Led Zeppelin’s a… I mean, it was really good to do the [O2] show. It was great. And I spoke to him just afterwards, a few days afterwards, and we both thought the same – that it felt like the first night of a tour. You think, ‘Oh, I could do that a bit better, or change something in that song.’ And we didn’t get a chance to do any more.”

Would it be hard for that momentum to be built back up again? Because Robert Plant’s off on tour with…

JPJ: “[Interrupting] Yeah. Yeah.”

So do you think the Zeppelin reunion might actually have begun and ended at the O2?

JPJ: “It’s possible. It is possible.”

You don’t sound too certain about the prospect of an album.

JPJ: “No. I’m not sure. I’m not too certain about anything, to be honest, right at the moment. I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen. But I’d certainly like to play with Jimmy again.”

DAVID CAVANAGH

Ask Robert Wyatt Your Questions!

Uncut
-
0
Ask Robert Wyatt Your Questions!
Uncut is interviewing Robert Wyatt for our regular 'An Audience With' feature, and we’re after your questions! So, is there anything you’ve ever wanted to ask this most regarded of English musicians..? About his lengthy associations with Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd..? Quite how he feels abou...

Uncut is interviewing Robert Wyatt for our regular ‘An Audience With’ feature, and we’re after your questions!

So, is there anything you’ve ever wanted to ask this most regarded of English musicians..?

About his lengthy associations with Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd..?

Quite how he feels about inspiring the verb, “Wyatting”..?

Or perhaps you’d simply like to know quite what Brian Eno’s “direct inject anti-jazz ray gun” was on Truth Is Stranger Than Richard.

Send your questions by January 5, to uncutaudiencewith@gmail.com.

The best questions and Wyatt’s answers will be published in a future edition of the magazine.

Get A Pair of Free Tickets To See Slumdog Millionaire!

Uncut
-
0
Get A Pair of Free Tickets To See Slumdog Millionaire!
Danny Boyle’s award-winning, Golden Globe nominated and the critically acclaimed, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is released nationwide on January 9, 2009 but www.uncut.co.uk is giving you the chance to see it for first and for free so you can make sure you’ve got all the answers on one of the years most t...

Danny Boyle’s award-winning, Golden Globe nominated and the critically acclaimed, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is released nationwide on January 9, 2009 but www.uncut.co.uk is giving you the chance to see it for first and for free so you can make sure you’ve got all the answers on one of the years most talked about films!

Directed by Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) and written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival, as well as three BIFA awards (for best director, best newcomer and best film) earlier this year and stars British actor Dev Patel (from Channel 4’s Skins), along with lead actress and former Indian model, Frieda Pinto, Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor and is produced by Christian Colson (The Descent).

Jamal Malik (Patel), an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India’s ‘‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ Arrested on suspicion of cheating, he tells the police the incredible story of his life on the streets, and of the girl he loved and lost. But what is a kid with no interest in money doing on the show? And how is it he knows all the answers?

To coincide with this highly anticipated release we’re giving you a chance to see the film before it’s released at venues across the UK on January 6, 2009. Simply enter the unique Uncut code 285175 and get your free pair of tickets now at www.seefilmfirst.com!

Tickets will be distributed on a first come first served basis. So be quick!

For more information on Slumdog Millionaire please visit www.slumdogmillionairemovie.co.uk

Cinemas taking part in the Uncut screening programme are as follows:

Empire, Basildon, Essex

Empire, Birmingham, Warwickshire

Empire, Bishop’s Stortford, Herefordshire

Empire, Clydebank, West Dunbart

Empire, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire

Empire, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

Empire, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear

Empire, Poole, Dorset

Empire, Slough, Berkshire

Empire, Sunderland, Cumbria

Empire, Sutton, Surrey

Empire, Swindon, Wiltshire

Empire, Wigan, Lanarkshire

For more music and film news click here

The Who – At Kilburn 1977

Uncut
-
0
The Who – At Kilburn 1977

When Pete Townshend spoke to Uncut last year to promote the new Who documentary movie Amazing Journey, he spent more time inadvertently promoting a film made about the band 30 years earlier. “I still like to refer to The Kids Are Alright to remember who I used to be,” he said, a tad perversely. “[It] was made when The Who, Keith mainly, felt as though we were finished.” If the drummer and the group thought themselves on the verge of extinction, it was not evidently a thought they allowed to affect their work. Filmed here at a Kilburn show in 1977 convened specifically to add new live colour to The Kids Are Alright, the band are observed to be battling gamely against Dr Moon’s worrying prognosis. Having struggled to get going on some better known – to be honest, just plain better – songs, here, the band hit their stride on, of all things, a John Entwistle composition, “My Wife”, the band’s primitive chemistry finally providing what we need from The Who: a satisfactorily loud explosion. It’s one of the moments that make this set, rather against the odds, a worthwhile addition to the abundant audio-visual materials already on offer from this enduringly multi-platform band. Certainly, this is not visually exciting stuff, being in part an utterly no-frills filming of a live show (the Kilburn part) and in another a poorly lit home movie shot by the band’s then managers (the chronologically earlier, London Coliseum 1969 part). What makes it interesting is the hands-off nature of the presentation. Given that The Who’s entire career has been characterised by Pete Townshend’s urge to edit and re-edit, to explain and theorise about his work, this is remarkably unadorned. Strangely for a Townshend project, without footnotes or Extras, we are left to simply draw our own conclusions. The result, it should be re-emphasised, is not likely to be thrilling to the neophyte. However, for the fans who have long urged for this footage to be released, the package does end up casting considerable and valuable light on how The Who went about their business. The Coliseum footage – a partial recording of a show shot when the band took rock opera Tommy to the home of the ENO – is a neat encapsulation of this group’s schizophrenic character. For some of the show – “Substitute”, “Young Man Blues”, etc – they are the wild rock band of legend. At other times, say, their rendering of “A Quick One While He’s Away”, you wonder how such fragile conceits as these could ever have lived under one roof within such a noisy family. Those wanting such answers should be careful what they wish for, however. Here, after all, Townshend is, with several toe-curling minutes of explanation of exactly what the band are up to, complete with excruciating inter-ruptions from his drummer. It is, of course, this drummer (even if the sound mix of that show bizarrely favours, of the four Who members, John Entwistle) who looms largest in this set. As Townshend recalled it in 2007, though he was in a terrible state when he returned from the US, the band had high hopes for the Moon’s eventual recovery in rehab, (even if Moon couldn’t see it himself) and even thought it possible that this rejuvenated figure could contribute to what would be an eventual “genuine renaissance” for The Who. As it was, the 1977 Kilburn gig was destined to be the penultimate appearance by the drummer, the hoped-for renaissance never quite taking place. Moon, evidently, was unable to change his ways – and if that applied to his lifestyle, this proves it went double for his music. When Moon went into that good night, here there’s proof he did so very far from gently. JOHN ROBINSON

When Pete Townshend spoke to Uncut last year to promote the new Who documentary movie Amazing Journey, he spent more time inadvertently promoting a film made about the band 30 years earlier. “I still like to refer to The Kids Are Alright to remember who I used to be,” he said, a tad perversely. “[It] was made when The Who, Keith mainly, felt as though we were finished.”

If the drummer and the group thought themselves on the verge of extinction, it was not evidently a thought they allowed to affect their work. Filmed here at a Kilburn show in 1977 convened specifically to add new live colour to The Kids Are Alright, the band are observed to be battling gamely against Dr Moon’s worrying prognosis. Having struggled to get going on some better known – to be honest, just plain better – songs, here, the band hit their stride on, of all things, a John Entwistle composition, “My Wife”, the band’s primitive chemistry finally providing what we need from The Who: a satisfactorily loud explosion.

It’s one of the moments that make this set, rather against the odds, a worthwhile addition to the abundant audio-visual materials already on offer from this enduringly multi-platform band. Certainly, this is not visually exciting stuff, being in part an utterly no-frills filming of a live show (the Kilburn part) and in another a poorly lit home movie shot by the band’s then managers (the chronologically earlier, London Coliseum 1969 part). What makes it interesting is the hands-off nature of the presentation. Given that The Who’s entire career has been characterised by Pete Townshend’s urge to edit and re-edit, to explain and theorise about his work, this is remarkably unadorned. Strangely for a Townshend project, without footnotes or Extras, we are left to simply draw our own conclusions.

The result, it should be re-emphasised, is not likely to be thrilling to the neophyte. However, for the fans who have long urged for this footage to be released, the package does end up casting considerable and valuable light on how The Who went about their business.

The Coliseum footage – a partial recording of a show shot when the band took rock opera Tommy to the home of the ENO – is a neat encapsulation of this group’s schizophrenic character. For some of the show – “Substitute”, “Young Man Blues”, etc – they are the wild rock band of legend. At other times, say, their rendering of “A Quick One While He’s Away”, you wonder how such fragile conceits as these could ever have lived under one roof within such a noisy family. Those wanting such answers should be careful what they wish for, however. Here, after all, Townshend is, with several toe-curling minutes of explanation of exactly what the band are up to, complete with excruciating inter-ruptions from his drummer.

It is, of course, this drummer (even if the sound mix of that show bizarrely favours, of the four Who members, John Entwistle) who looms largest in this set. As Townshend recalled it in 2007, though he was in a terrible state when he returned from the US, the band had high hopes for the Moon’s eventual recovery in rehab, (even if Moon couldn’t see it himself) and even thought it possible that this rejuvenated figure could contribute to what would be an eventual “genuine renaissance” for The Who.

As it was, the 1977 Kilburn gig was destined to be the penultimate appearance by the drummer, the hoped-for renaissance never quite taking place. Moon, evidently, was unable to change his ways – and if that applied to his lifestyle, this proves it went double for his music. When Moon went into that good night, here there’s proof he did so very far from gently.

JOHN ROBINSON

This Sporting Life

Uncut
-
0
This Sporting Life

When Lindsay Anderson was making This Sporting Life, he must have felt like he was at the start of something important. Later – after the 1960s had exploded in the face of Austerity Britain - he would make his reputation with If…, where Malcolm McDowell applied the revolutionary spirit of 1968 to the public school system. But in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse was invented, he arrived as a film-critic-turned-theatre-director, waving the banner of the Free Cinema movement, watching and wondering about the possibility of a British New Wave. Culturally, this was a serious moment. It was the time of the Angry Young Men and the kitchen sink drama. Free Cinema used documentary techniques in the service of truth. And the Angry Young Men, though diminished by their nickname, were a group of playwrights who sought to amplify the drama of ordinary lives. Anderson had directed plays in London’s Royal Court while his colleagues applied a new grammar to British cinema in Room At The Top, Look Back In Anger, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Gone were the clipped accents and theatrical demeanor that had characterised British film, replaced by blunt urgency and Northern vowels. It was a matter of class, and a question of pride. Or, as Richard Harris puts it here: “It’s about time you took that ton of rock off your shoulders.” This Sporting Life is all about Harris. Anderson originally wanted Sean Connery for the lead, but was dissuaded by the studio, so he fetched Harris from Mutiny On The Bounty and gave him free rein. Anderson’s diaries show the director was infatuated by the actor, who is allowed – or possibly encouraged – to dominate proceedings. Harris won Best Actor at Cannes for his brooding portrayal of Frank Machin, a miner whose life changes when he signs on as the star of a rugby league team. With his Caesar haircut and his introverted rage, Frank is a transatlantic cousin of Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. But watch him examining his features in the mirror, and it’s the face of Travis Bickle you see staring back. This isn’t a story about sport. Rugby league is employed as a symbol of upward mobility, and the violence that is required to achieve it. Frank is a tragic figure. He starts out modestly suggesting that “we don’t have stars in this game,” but quickly succumbs to the temptations of instant wealth. Still, he never looks comfortable in the world of money. So far, so kitchen sink. But This Sporting Life is really a love story in which love is stifled. Frank is infatuated with his landlady, the widowed Mrs Hammond (Rachel Roberts). There is a terrible claustrophobia in the scenes when they are together, and when Frank finally succumbs to his instincts, he uses violence. There’s no nudity, but Anderson cuts the sex scenes in a way that makes them shocking - even now – and terribly ambiguous. Frank’s idea of romance looks awfully like rape, and he isn’t above knocking a woman in the face. You could speculate about Anderson’s attraction to a story about forbidden love, but the shape of the film does nothing to encourage such a literal interpretation. With its flashbacks and its slow dissolves into Frank’s troubled psyche, it remains a cinematic manifesto. Anderson wanted a British film language that was as inventive as the French new wave, but with a stronger social conscience. Instead, he documented the beginning of the end of the post-war social hierarchy. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and This Sporting Life failed commercially, sending Anderson back to the theatre for much of the 1960s. He didn’t start a movement, he ended one. The new wave was over before it began, and the kitchen sink was replaced by a more marketable symbol of social aspiration. Step forward Sean Connery’s 007. EXTRAS:2* Trailer, photos. ALASTAIR McKAY

When Lindsay Anderson was making This Sporting Life, he must have felt like he was at the start of something important. Later – after the 1960s had exploded in the face of Austerity Britain – he would make his reputation with If…, where Malcolm McDowell applied the revolutionary spirit of 1968 to the public school system. But in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse was invented, he arrived as a film-critic-turned-theatre-director, waving the banner of the Free Cinema movement, watching and wondering about the possibility of a British New Wave.

Culturally, this was a serious moment. It was the time of the Angry Young Men and the kitchen sink drama. Free Cinema used documentary techniques in the service of truth. And the Angry Young Men, though diminished by their nickname, were a group of playwrights who sought to amplify the drama of ordinary lives. Anderson had directed plays in London’s Royal Court while his colleagues applied a new grammar to British cinema in Room At The Top, Look Back In Anger, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Gone were the clipped accents and theatrical demeanor that had characterised British film, replaced by blunt urgency and Northern vowels. It was a matter of class, and a question of pride. Or, as Richard Harris puts it here: “It’s about time you took that ton of rock off your shoulders.”

This Sporting Life is all about Harris. Anderson originally wanted Sean Connery for the lead, but was dissuaded by the studio, so he fetched Harris from Mutiny On The Bounty and gave him free rein. Anderson’s diaries show the director was infatuated by the actor, who is allowed – or possibly encouraged – to dominate proceedings.

Harris won Best Actor at Cannes for his brooding portrayal of Frank Machin, a miner whose life changes when he signs on as the star of a rugby league team. With his Caesar haircut and his introverted rage, Frank is a transatlantic cousin of Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. But watch him examining his features in the mirror, and it’s the face of Travis Bickle you see staring back.

This isn’t a story about sport. Rugby league is employed as a symbol of upward mobility, and the violence that is required to achieve it. Frank is a tragic figure. He starts out modestly suggesting that “we don’t have stars in this game,” but quickly succumbs to the temptations of instant wealth. Still, he never looks comfortable in the world of money.

So far, so kitchen sink. But This Sporting Life is really a love story in which love is stifled. Frank is infatuated with his landlady, the widowed Mrs Hammond (Rachel Roberts). There is a terrible claustrophobia in the scenes when they are together, and when Frank finally succumbs to his instincts, he uses violence. There’s no nudity, but Anderson cuts the sex scenes in a way that makes them shocking – even now – and terribly ambiguous. Frank’s idea of romance looks awfully like rape, and he isn’t above knocking a woman in the face.

You could speculate about Anderson’s attraction to a story about forbidden love, but the shape of the film does nothing to encourage such a literal interpretation. With its flashbacks and its slow dissolves into Frank’s troubled psyche, it remains a cinematic manifesto. Anderson wanted a British film language that was as inventive as the French new wave, but with a stronger social conscience. Instead, he documented the beginning of the end of the post-war social hierarchy.

It wasn’t a pretty picture, and This Sporting Life failed commercially, sending Anderson back to the theatre for much of the 1960s. He didn’t start a movement, he ended one. The new wave was over before it began, and the kitchen sink was replaced by a more marketable symbol of social aspiration. Step forward Sean Connery’s 007.

EXTRAS:2* Trailer, photos.

ALASTAIR McKAY

Richard Swift To Headline Club Uncut

Uncut
-
0
Richard Swift To Headline Club Uncut

Richard Swift has just been announced as the headliner of February’s Club Uncut. The feted singer-songwriter will grace the stage of our monthly club night on February 24, when he’ll doubtless be 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.

Richard Swift has just been announced as the headliner of February’s Club Uncut.

The feted singer-songwriter will grace the stage of our monthly club night on February 24, when he’ll doubtless be 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.

Glasvegas – A Snowflake Fell (And I Felt Like A Kiss)

Uncut
-
0
Glasvegas – A Snowflake Fell (And I Felt Like A Kiss)

Part-recorded in a Transylvanian church for extra downbeat effect, Glasvegas’ Christmas mini-album (downloadable and tagged on a reissue of their self-titled debut) chimes halfway between the festive season’s familial warmth and the snow-biting bleakness of a Glasgow winter. It’s a bittersweet balance songwriter James Allan is becoming a master of – the bombastic (if rather un-Christian) lurch of “Fuck You It’s Over” could slot onto their debut. The title track and “Cruel Moon”’s deft piano presses, meanwhile, show Glasvegas still strike the heart-strings, even without noisy guitars. JAMIE FULLERTON For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Part-recorded in a Transylvanian church for extra downbeat effect, Glasvegas’ Christmas mini-album (downloadable and tagged on a reissue of their self-titled debut) chimes halfway between the festive season’s familial warmth and the snow-biting bleakness of a Glasgow winter.

It’s a bittersweet balance songwriter James Allan is becoming a master of – the bombastic (if rather un-Christian) lurch of “Fuck You It’s Over” could slot onto their debut. The title track and “Cruel Moon”’s deft piano presses, meanwhile, show Glasvegas still strike the heart-strings, even without noisy guitars.

JAMIE FULLERTON

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

Album Reissue: Graham Nash – Songs For Beginners

Uncut
-
0
Album Reissue: Graham Nash – Songs For Beginners

C1971 In 1971, Graham Nash found himself in reflective mood after his split from Joni Mitchell. His 33-minute solo debut is a sweet, sometimes naïve set, with three songs about Joni (including “Better Days”). There are protest songs – “Military Madness” and “Chicago” (a plea to Stills and Young to get involved), and the self-effacing country plodder “Man In The Mirror” with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel, and Young on piano. Remastered, it all sounds lovely, while the set also includes an interview with Nash, with some affectionate sideways glances to Crosby, Stills and Young. ALASTAIR McKAY For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

C1971

In 1971, Graham Nash found himself in reflective mood after his split from Joni Mitchell. His 33-minute solo debut is a sweet, sometimes naïve set, with three songs about Joni (including “Better Days”).

There are protest songs – “Military Madness” and “Chicago” (a plea to Stills and Young to get involved), and the self-effacing country plodder “Man In The Mirror” with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel, and Young on piano. Remastered, it all sounds lovely, while the set also includes an interview with Nash, with some affectionate sideways glances to Crosby, Stills and Young.

ALASTAIR McKAY

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

Mark E Smith/ Ed Blaney – Smith And Blaney

Uncut
-
0
Mark E Smith/ Ed Blaney – Smith And Blaney

Prolific as The Fall’s output may be, it evidently fails to satisfy all of Mark E Smith's creative aspirations. This entertaining, sonically diverse partnership with former Fall member, manager, co-writer and producer Ed Blaney often gravitates to found and acoustic sounds (the spooky “Mettle Claw”, the wintry “When We Were Young”). Conversely a cover of Nervous Norvus “Transfusion” emerges as an autopsy (seemingly performed with an electric rotor blade) on vintage Fall favourite “Rowche Rumble”. A cover of The Velvets’ “Real Good Time Together” completes a varied picture. GAVIN MARTIN For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

Prolific as The Fall’s output may be, it evidently fails to satisfy all of Mark E Smith‘s creative aspirations. This entertaining, sonically diverse partnership with former Fall member, manager, co-writer and producer Ed Blaney often gravitates to found and acoustic sounds (the spooky “Mettle Claw”, the wintry “When We Were Young”).

Conversely a cover of Nervous Norvus “Transfusion” emerges as an autopsy (seemingly performed with an electric rotor blade) on vintage Fall favourite “Rowche Rumble”. A cover of The Velvets’ “Real Good Time Together” completes a varied picture.

GAVIN MARTIN

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

Elbow To Perform Mercury Prize Winning Album At Abbey Road

Uncut
-
0
Elbow To Perform Mercury Prize Winning Album At Abbey Road
Elbow have announced that they are to perform a one-off gig at Abbey Road Studios in the New Year. The band will perform their Mercury Music Prize winning album 'The Seldom Seen Kid' accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra on January 17. The concert will be broadcast live on the night on BBC Radi...

Elbow have announced that they are to perform a one-off gig at Abbey Road Studios in the New Year.

The band will perform their Mercury Music Prize winning album ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra on January 17.

The concert will be broadcast live on the night on BBC Radio 2, however 75 pairs of tickets are being made available to fans too.

To apply, click here. Closing date for applications is December 20.

For more music and film news click here

Pic credit: Andy Willsher

The 51st Uncut Playlist Of 2008

John Mulvey
-
0

With the Uncut issue out at the start of January put, as we say, to bed, and the mildly Sisyphean Top 75 project limped to a resolution, I’ve had a look for some new stuff over the past couple of days. Welcome for the impending new year, then, the excellent new Bill Callahan album, the debut from Brody Dalle’s new incarnation, Spinnerette (now palpably embedded in the Queens Of The Stone Age family; there’s a link to the video below), the return of Oumou Sangare, and a Youtube teaser for March’s Neko Case album involving a lot of partially-wrecked upright pianos in a barn. Oh, and the state-of-the-alternative-nation comp for Red Hot, “Dark Was The Night”, featuring David Byrne & The Dirty Projectors, Feist, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer, Antony Hegarty, Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket, Dave Sitek, Yo La Tengo, Cat Power, Stuat Murdoch, Conor Oberst & Gillian Welch and quite a few more Adult-Oriented Indie-Rock grandees. And rest. 1 Zomes – Zomes (Holy Mountain) 2 Max Ochs – Hooray For Another Day (Tompkins Square) 3 13th Floor Elevators – Sign Of The 3 Eyed Men (Sampler) (International Artists) 4 The Alps – A Manh Na Praia (http://www.myspace.com/thealpssf ) 5 The Long Lost – The Long Lost (Ninja Tune) 6 The Soft Pack – Nightlife (Caspian) 7 Harmonic 313 8 Various Artists – Dark Was The Night (4AD) 9 Various Artists – Rough Trade Counter Culture 08 (V2) 10 Oumou Sangare – Seya (World Circuit) 11 Endless Boogie – Focus Level (No Quarter) 12 Girls - Hellhole Ratrace (http://www.myspace.com/girlssanfran) 13 Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic – Dawn Of The Cycads (Cuneiform) 14 Novalima – Coba Coba (Cumbancha) 15 Neil Young – Zuma (Reprise) 16 Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City) 17 Spinnerette - Ghetto Love (http://www.spinnerettemusic.com/ghetto-love-hi) 18 Neko Case – Middle Cyclone EPK (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nbjnS_RTj_o) 19 Death - . . . For The Whole World To See (Drag City) 20 Tim Hardin – 1 (Water) 21 King Tuff – Was Dead (Colonel) 22 Six Organs Of Admittance – RTZ (Drag City)

With the Uncut issue out at the start of January put, as we say, to bed, and the mildly Sisyphean Top 75 project limped to a resolution, I’ve had a look for some new stuff over the past couple of days.

Continue

1...818819820...1,269Page 819 of 1,269

SHOP UNCUT