Audience

The new issue of Uncut arrives in UK shops on Thursday, though perhaps a few subscribers, with a prevailing wind, might have already received their copies. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including new interviews with The National, Laura Marling, Deborah Harry and Todd Rundgren; The Eagles, The Waterboys, Deep Purple, Mark Mulcahy, Kurt Vile; reviews of Fleetwood Mac, Vampire Weekend, REM, Van Dyke Parks and Jandek; respects paid to Jason Molina, Andy Johns and Phil Ramone; and a brief exchange with the now notorious Michelle Shocked.

A collaboration between filmmaker Michael Winterbottom and star Steve Coogan, where a lad from the north west of England makes good in unconventional circumstances, accompanied by a bunch of like-minded, but broadly eccentric characters. This is the story of Soho porn entrepreneur Paul Raymond, but it could just as easily describe the trajectory of Tony Wilson, the subject of Winterbottom and Coogan’s first collaboration, 24 Hour Party People – or even Coogan’s own back story, which stretches back to his working class origins in Liverpool.

Morrissey’s partial rewriting of his past proves grimly successful...

Ahead of the release of his long-awaited duets album Wrote A Song For Everyone, John Fogerty is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature.
 So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask him? What does he remember of the time he spent in the United States Army Reserve during the mid-Sixties? In 2011, he played two classic Creedence albums live in their entirely. What's his favourite Creedence album, and why?

Warp Films celebrated its tenth anniversary on Friday (April 12) with a special edition of Adam Buxton's BUG video showcase at the BFI Southbank. The showcase featured rare early music videos by a young Jarvis Cocker, including 'LFO' by LFO and Aphex Twin's 'On', which were produced between 1990 to 1993 in the years directly before Pulp's own meteoric rise to fame.

For the next issue of Uncut, I've reviewed Season 1 of Veep. In case you're not familiar with the show, it's basically Armando Iannucci's attempt to relocate The Thick Of It to the White House.

From Uncut, March 2009. 'Thirty years on from the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's reign of terror, Uncut revisits a tempestuous and invigorating period in British pop history. PAUL WELLER, THE SPECIALS, THE BEAT, UB40, SOUL II SOUL and THE FARM recall a time when mass unemployment energised a whole generation to learn one chord, learn another, form a band - and then make an insurrectionist statement on Cheggers Plays Pop...'

“To make true political music,” the great American critic Greil Marcus wrote nearly 25 years ago, “you have to say what decent people don’t want to hear; that’s something that people fit for satellite benefit concerts will never understand, and that Elvis Costello understood before anyone heard his name.”

Christine McVie has said that she would be keen to perform live with Fleetwood Mac when they play live in London later this year. The group will perform three gigs at London's O2 Arena in September as part of a world tour and McVie, who retired from the music industry in 1998, has gone on record as saying that she will "pop back on stage" if the opportunity arises. Speaking to Metro, McVie said: "If they wanted me to, I might pop back on stage when they’re in London just to do a little duet or something like that."

The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts has spoken about his memories of playing Hyde Park in 1969 as the band get set to return there for a show on July 6. The central London venue was the sight of the now-legendary concert that took place just two days after the death of Brian Jones. Mick Jagger sported a white smock and read a Shelley poem in tribute to Jones before thousands of butterflies were released from the stage.