Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i UNCUT

MALCOLM Young was never carried aloft on Bon Scott’s or Brian Johnson’s shoulders. The audience chanted his brother Angus’ name, not Malcolm’s, in the intro to “Whole Lotta Rosie”. Standing at the back with his long hair and his battle-hardened Gretsch Jet Firebird, Malcolm seemed as peripheral to AC/DC’s $450 million-grossing live spectacle as Cliff Williams, their bassist, symmetrically positioned on the other side of the drumkit. Yet it was Malcolm, AC/DC’s rhythm guitarist, who gave them their groove, their boogie, their primal shake-and-shimmy. While everyone watched Angus, what they were hearing was Malcolm. Keith Richards, who championed AC/DC in 1978 after falling under the spell of their Powerage album, paid tribute to a man he would have recognised as a confrère and a challenger. “Malcolm was one of the…

IN 1977, over three days in three different Minneapolis locations, a 19-year-old musician takes his first lessons in image-making. Soon, he will become a master of the art – but he’s not quite there yet. In one photograph, he struts down the street with a makeshift belt hanging down between his legs; the first inkling, perhaps, of many more provocations to come. In others, he stands bare-chested in the studio, lounges with a dog in his manager’s apartment, and plays piano with a rapturous smile. These earliest sightings of Prince, captured by Twin Town photographer Robert Whitman, portray him as a callow youngster, uncharacteristically unguarded and authentic. “This was really Prince before Prince,” says Whitman, who has gathered together every last frame from these shoots in a handsome book titled…

TY SEGALL Freedom’s Goblin DRAG CITY The garage wunderkind’s magnum opus. Nineteen killer tracks, including an insane take on Hot Chocolate… BRIGID MAE POWER The Two Worlds TOMPKINS SQUARE Second beguiling album from the Irish singer. Tim Buckley and Karen Dalton vibes abound. DESERTION TRIO Midtown Tilt SHHPUMA/CLEAN FEED On the run from Chris Forsyth’s Solar Motel Band, Nick Millevoi and band essay a set of classic downtown, free jazz and twang-tinged jams. RED RIVER DIALECT Broken Stay Open Sky PARADISE OF BACHELORS Cornish Buddhist folk rock, anyone? David Morris’ fine band navigate the neglected space between Six Organs Of Admittance and The Waterboys. GWENNO Le Kov HEAVENLY And how about an entire album of Broadcast-style space-pop sung entirely in the Cornish tongue? HAILU MERGIA Lala Belu AWESOME TAPES FROM…

“It’s a wild world that will make you believe/in a kingdom full of mercy and faith” Lionheart MERGE Mt Moriah’s frontwoman embraces her country roots on an album of sensibility and sexuality. By Jason Anderson WHEN it comes to the Bible’s weirdest contents, The Book Of Revelation has the heaviest rep, and not only thanks to the unholy volume of heavy metal songs it’s inspired. Yet the Song Of Songs almost certainly counts as the steamiest passage in what Americans in HC McEntire’s neck of the woods call the Good Book. Written as a dialogue between two lovers, it’s long been interpreted by religious scholars and holy men as an allegory about the relationship between Christ and the church. Yet that’s always seemed like a stretch given verses…

DRAG CITY 8/10 THE best rock bands can feel a little like caricatures, and so it was with No Age when they emerged from LA’s DIY venue The Smell around the close of the last decade. Randy Randall and Dean Spunt were the Wayne and Garth of the city’s punk-rock underground, two charismatic young slacker dudes playing a sunny, scuzzy rock’n’roll that scrawled lines between the hook-laden hardcore of Hüsker Dü, the fuzzy four-track invention of Guided By Voices and the under-the-underground sound of drone and noise music. In a crowded alternative rock field, the pair somehow distinguished themselves through sheer effervescent energy. If you liked hardcore punk, but couldn’t relate to all the anger – or if you liked shoegaze and dream-pop, but wished it was played with a…

CALEXICO co-leaders Joey Burns and John Convertino’s reasons for heading from Tucson to Marin County to make The Thread That Keeps Us wasn’t just the extreme heat of their longtime base; the partners, who’d moved from LA in the mid-’90s, also needed a break from Arizona’s sociopolitical climate. “Returning to California was helpful in that it felt like being in one of the more forward-thinking parts of the States,” Burns explains, “but there are ghosts and hurdles like anywhere else that reminded me that we’re constantly repeating cycles in life, which eventually crept into the music and stories on this album.” The material, written during sessions at the Panorama House in Stinson Beach, provided the bandmembers with plenty of latitude to display their firepower and versatility.…

The Visitor REPRISE 7/10 An unpredictable force throughout his five-decades-so-far career, Neil Young’s 2017 felt fairly quiet, by his own standards, at least until the appearance of 1976’s The Hitchhiker in September. A great reminder of what the man is capable of with just an acoustic guitar for company, it seemed to refocus attention on Young’s history, perhaps to the detriment of what he’s up to now. The release of the anomalous “Children Of Destiny” in June, another collaboration with Lukas Nelson’s group, Promise Of The Real, felt like an outlier. His past few albums have been all over the shop, from the reveries of Peace Trail to the stomping protest songs of The Monsanto Years. Evasive at the best of times, it’s been particularly hard to get a grip…

AS a glammed-up quartet of LA youngsters in thrall to The Runaways, Nirvana and Ozzy Osbourne, Starcrawler seem like a band Kim Fowley concocted from beyond the grave. Yet the band developed in more organic circumstances after frontwoman Arrow De Wilde and guitarist Henri Cash – two students at the same high school in Echo Park – discovered a mutual love of raw rock’n’roll and some highly productive afterschool rehearsals ensued. “Once we hit the stage, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do,” says Cash, who, at 17, is the self-professed “baby” of the band. Starcrawler’s wild shows are the main reason for the band’s sudden rise, though some family connections haven’t hurt. De Wilde’s mother is photographer Autumn De Wilde, who has shot album…

THE first time you heard a playback of Blank Generation , did you think you’d be talking one day about a 40th-anniversary deluxe reissue? The process of making an album takes place song by song. I doubt if I listened to it in sequence until after it came out. It all mattered to me so much back then that my assessment of what we’d done just wildly fluctuated. Sometimes I thought it was brilliant. Sometimes I thought we’d completely failed. That’s fairly typical of my own view of my own work. I never know what to expect when I’m put in a position where I have to experience it again. I never know whether I’m going to be horrified or elated. I envy people who can be…

STACK WADDY So Who The Hell Is Stack Waddy? CHERRY RED 8/10 Manchester’s filthy R&B powerhouse reassessed Called down from Manchester to woo Elektra boss Jac Holzman into licensing more commercial disasters from John Peel’s Dandelion Records, Stack Waddy blew it fast. Bricklayer-turned-singer John Knail mounted the stage to start the band’s set, only to take what Peel’s business partner Clive Selwood recalled as “a long and noisy piss”. Disgusting, unprofessional, and true to type. Formed in Timperley and named after a Mad magazine character, Stack Waddy lurched through two unsaleable albums for Peel, disintegrating before the release of 1972’s elegantly titled Bugger Off!. The hairy recidivists’ mix of Beefheart and beer farts bridged a sawn-off R&B gap between Nuggets garage and the proto-punk of Dr Feelgood, with a four-skinner’s…

24 THE TALLY HO LONDON 1970-72 The home of pub rock According to Uncut’s founding editor Allan Jones, “It would be pretty fair to describe the Tally Ho as the CBGB of pub rock.” Located in Kentish Town, across the road from what is now the Forum, the Tally Ho was “a great big Irish gin palace,” remembers Nick Lowe, another regular. Ostensibly run as a jazz pub, it became a local haunt for Eggs Over Easy, an American band who’d arrived in the UK in 1970 to record with producer Chas Chandler. They approached the Tally Ho’s landlord, who paid them to perform on the pub’s quietest night – Monday. “They had three-minute songs,” recalls Lowe. “Rhythm and blues – very raw, very simple. But soon they had people…

LOOKING back now, the Buffalo Springfield were at our best in the early days. The five of us played every night – Stephen, Neil, Bruce, Dewey and myself. We were only together two years and there was something like nine people in and out of the band during that time. So to me, that was when that Buffalo Springfield was truly the Buffalo Springfield. After that, the changes just kept coming – Bruce got deported, Neil coming and going, all of that. We got Jimmy Fielder, Jimmy Messina – great musicians, man, but the five of us, the original band, the chemistry couldn’t be there with other musicians. It was magic, I don’t know how else to describe it. “We were playing these bills with The Doors, Love…” RICHIE FURAY…

PAUL WELLER Title True Meanings Released Autumn Expect acoustic vibes and collaborations “ESSENTIALLY, it’s voice and acoustic guitar, though there’s different colours and sounds coming in. There’s going to be strings and brass on some tracks, but it’s quite sparse. At the moment, we’re working on 14 songs. There’s a few collaborations. I’ve written three songs with Erland Cooper from The Magnetic North and Erland & The Carnival. Hannah Peel, also from The Magnetic North, has done strings on a few tracks. Little Barrie’s played some guitar. Then I’ve done another song with Villagers, and Conor O’Brien sang and on some of it as well. Lucy Rose is going to come and sing on one song and we’ve got a sitar player and an Indian violinist coming down. I’m doing…

1 HC McENTIRE Baby’s Got The Blues This month’s CD opens with a standout track from our Album Of The Month, a rootsy mix of candid songwriting, Americana and gospel from the former Mount Moriah leader. “Any separation I thought there was between social justice and art is completely gone for me at this point,” McEntire tells us on page 18. 2 LA FÉLINE Comité Rouge When she’s not writing for French newspaper Libération, Agnès Gayraud makes sublime motorik pop as La Féline. “Comité Rouge”, taken from her second album Triomphe, neatly sums up her sound, pairing her gamine tones with the Gallic drive of Air or Stereolab. 3 NO AGE Soft Collar Fad LA garage-punks Randy Randall and Dean Spunt have spent the past decade pushing at the boundaries…

Ruins COLUMBIA 7/10 IF it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In musical terms, the old maxim mostly holds firm on the fourth First Aid Kit album. The follow-up to 2014’s major-label breakthrough Stay Gold, Ruins tweaks rather than overhauls Klara and Johanna Söderberg’s brand of pop-savvy Americana – yet the trademark harmonic couplings and rolling romantic surges can’t disguise a troubled undertow. Tucker Martine, the Portland producer who has helmed records by My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens, takes over the reins from Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis, and proves an empathetic foil. Front and centre, as ever, are those glorious sibling harmonies and the sisters’ keen ear for soaring, melancholic melodies, but Martine brings a meatier rhythmic kick to these 10 songs. The brass and drums, in particular,…

Twinkle, Twinkle MOTHER JINX 8/10 REVERENCE be damned. Johnny Dowd’s approach to traditional song is pretty much in line with his usual methodology. His 16th solo effort in just over 20 years, Twinkle, Twinkle finds the prolific miscreant sifting through some of the keystones of American blues, folk and jazz and giving them a radical makeover. “The songs flow together like a soundtrack for a movie about an electronic musician flung back to the 19th century,” he reasons. “Lots of synth. Lots of singing. Lots of dope beats.” Those familiar with Dowd’s recorded catalogue – from the mutant blues of 1997 debut Wrong Side Of Memphis to the skittery beat-hop of 2016’s Execute American Folklore – will lap up the blithe cross-pollination of styles here. Indeed, it feels very much…

TYLER CHILDERS Purgatory THIRTY TIGERS 8/10 Kentuckian country with metamodern twist, says Alastair McKay DEPENDING on how you calibrate these things, Purgatory is actually the second debut album by the 26-year-old country singer from Lawrence County, Kentucky. When he was 18, Tyler Childers and his bluegrass band the Highwall – the name refers to what remains when hill summits are blasted away during mountaintop mining – released Bottles And Bibles. The album, says Childers, “did about as good as you’d expect from a kid coming out of nowhere coming out with an album from nowhere right outta high school could do”. Following Bottles And Bibles, Childers did two EPs from live sessions recorded for Red Barn Radio in Lexington, Kentucky. Later, he rolled the EPs into one. Since…

Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith/HQ/Bullinamingvase (reissues, 1967, 1975, 1977) SCIENCE FRICTION 8/10, 9/10, 7/10 HALF a century ago, Roy Harper – then very much a beautiful, rambling mess, to paraphrase one of his songs – accidentally wrote what could be a perfect epitaph. “They all tried to make a someone out of me,” he sang on “Circle”, “and never saw that I could only be me.” Few songwriters, it seems, have embodied our ideal of the driven, tortured artist quite as closely as Harper, a man whose talents are matched only by his self-assurance and extreme aversion to compromise. To escape an unhappy adolescence, he joined the Air Force but, being allergic to rules and structures, soon feigned insanity. This strategy succeeded in getting him discharged, though with the added…

Spirit LIGHT IN THE ATTIC 9/10 THE 1990s were a strange time for Willie Nelson, as they were for many of his country music contemporaries. He started the decade with a raid by the Internal Revenue Service, which seized his assets and handed him a bill for $16 million in back taxes. He arranged to pay the debt through a revenue-sharing agreement with the government, which kept him constantly out on the road or back in the studio. While he was never as deep in the wilderness as Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings during that time, he bounced back and forth between major labels and small indies, with only one record even going gold: 1993’s Across The Borderline – a covers-and-cameos collection best remembered for his tender duet with Sinéad…

FELA KUTI Vinyl Box Set #4 KNITTING FACTORY 8/10 Erykah Badu-curated box collects seven albums from the Afrobeat chieftain “WITH Fela, it just seems to have spilled out of him,” writes Erykah Badu in the sleevenotes to this set. “We instantly get the feeling that we are connected to those tones and vibrations.” The evidence bears that out. In his lifetime, the Nigerian bandleader fronted something like 50 releases, and pretty much none of them are bad: grab one at random and you can be fairly sure of getting two sides of scorching Afrobeat. Still, Fela’s tireless profligacy means there are a number of routes through his catalogue, so as well as its extensive CD reissue campaign, New York’s Knitting Factory Records is preparing a number of curated vinyl boxes…

MAY 11, 1964 is a small but significant date in The Rolling Stones’ history. It’s when Mick Jagger found himself refused admission to the restaurant attached to Bristol’s Grand Hotel, despite being a guest there along with the rest of the Stones. It transpired that Jagger – “wearing sports shirt, sweater and jeans” – was not adequately dressed for service. The incident made national news the next day – the Daily Mirror , for one, carried a story titled “No-Tie Rolling Stone Is Told ‘No Lunch’”. With hindsight, we can see it marked a moment where the Stones moved out of the entertainment pages and became properly newsworthy. “It’s amazing the effect little things like that can have,” laughs Richards now. “It’s like hair or something. ‘They’re…

PERMANENTLY under threat of closure yet somehow clinging on while everything is demolished around it, the 100 Club’s survival seemingly defies all logic. It’s been hosting music since October 24, 1942, when tailor Robert Feldman had a cup of tea in an Oxford Street basement and decided it would perfect for jazz. At first it was called the Feldman Swing Club and became a popular spot for American GIs, but it switched to the catchier 100 Club in 1964. Never the hippest venue in town – which might in part account for its endurance – the100 Club has had the occasional moment of zeitgeist surfing, such as in September 1976 when it was the location of the first punk festival with all the major first-wave punk bands. It also hosted…

“IT was a real battle,” says Sweet guitarist Andy Scott of the band’s biggest hit. “But the results speak for themselves.” Released in January 1973, “Block Buster!” is the tale of a mysterious ne’er-do-well – part Scarlet Pimpernel, part Droog – wreaking havoc on the city streets. It took a day to record and spent five weeks at No 1, besting David Bowie in his glam-rock pomp: “The Jean Genie”, released in December 1972, peaked at No 2 in January, just before “Block Buster!” hit the top spot. The rivalry was sharpened by the fact that both acts were signed to RCA, and both songs shared the same chugging blues riff – which initially caused much consternation in the Sweet camp. “We thought we were fucked,” says Scott evenly. A…

It’s still unnerving to see a man who looks like a middle manager wildly gesticulating EIGHT hours after his last beer of Saturday night, Craig Finn cracks open his first of Sunday lunchtime. The Hold Steady’s frontman is hoarse after four extraordinary, euphoric shows, but back at the same bar he and the rest of the extended Hold Steady family have visited after each of the gigs, this time to watch the Minnesota Vikings play the Atlanta Falcons. His brew of choice is a very lightly flavoured Mexican lager called Tecate. That’s fitting, given Tecate’s role in one of the surprise songs The Hold Steady released before the shows, “Entitlement Crew”, in which Finn talks of a “tequila takeoff, Tecate landing”. It’s the ideal beer, he suggests, for first thing…

SUBTITLED ‘On Parents & Children, Exes & Excess, Death & Decay, & A Few Of My Other Favorite Things’, Loudon Wainwright III’s Liner Notes is in many ways a history of the singer-songwriter’s failures: as a son, husband, father, actor and musician. Thankfully, it rarely reads that way. Wainwright writes prose with the same wit and honesty that distinguish his songs. The product of a well-to-do father from “Great Gatsby country” and a hard-drinking “cracker chick” from south Georgia, Wainwright guides us – episodically – through his boarding-school days, a childhood friendship with Liza Minnelli, his pursuit of Eastern religious studies in Summer Of Love San Francisco and, most troublingly, his membership of a “macrobiotic cult”. Eventually, he “stumbles into a career as the new Bob Dylan, the Charlie Chaplin…

“I LIVED through this whole big culture change: hair, fashion, music,” says Leslie Cavendish. “It was grey skies before The Beatles came along, then suddenly everything burst into colour. People were liberated.” The 70-year-old is looking back fondly at the ’60s, a time that saw him graduate from junior stylist with Vidal Sassoon to coiffeur to the stars, becoming The Beatles’ personal hairdresser and running his own Apple-funded salon on the King’s Road. It’s a journey well documented in The Cutting Edge: The Story Of The Beatles’ Hairdresser Who Defined An Era, in which Cavendish describes life in the Fabs’ inner circle. He’s privy to the gestation of Sgt Pepper… (sharing “spiced-up cigarettes” with Paul McCartney in his music room; attending the session for “She’s Leaving Home”), goes on The…

AFTER three albums with Mount Moriah, does it feel very different making music under your own name? It does. It’s a new thing for me so I’m still processing how it feels. I avoided going under my own name for a really long time, but I just couldn’t hide anymore. I’ve always written pretty autobiographically, but this feels personal in a way that I don’t think I was even prepared for. That’s in a good way. I love collaborating with people, but it’s been really empowering to do something on my own completely. It still feels terrifying too, so it’s a good mix! Was there a song that set you on the path to Lionheart ? I started writing “A Lamb, A Dove” a few years…

I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life 4AD 8/10 IN 2013, Merrill Garbus wrote for Talkhouse about her trip to Haiti to take drumming lessons, and folkloric and contemporary dance classes. In the piece, there’s an aside that speaks not only to Nikki Nack, her album of the following year, but also to a clear future path: “I am not a dancer so much,” she admits, “but these days I will dance harder than I ever have in my whole life.” What was then a simple commitment to participate fully in that programme (despite some reluctance), now reads like a passionate affirmation of her belief in dance music as a connecting life force. Rhythm is certainly the core strength of I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private…

“I REALLY hate that term ‘side-project’: music happens and when it does it’s front and centre,” says John Reis of Hot Snakes, as he contemplates that band’s origins ahead of reissues of the three albums they released between 2000 and 2004. Reis formed Hot Snakes during a break from Rocket From The Crypt, recruiting as singer his old friend and former bandmate Rick Froberg from Drive Like Jehu. “I remember feeling that things did come together really fast,” he says. “We made a record, then we made the band. That’s not the way I had ever done things before.” On Automatic Midnight and Suicide Invoice , Hot Snakes initially drew from punk acts like Suicide, Wipers, Crime and The Saints. The final…

37 HAÇIENDA MANCHESTER 1982-97 Legendary house of Wilson FAC51 – The Haçienda’s catalogue number – was the white elephant that defined a city’s music scene, a cool and stylised venue built in a former yacht showroom that was launched by Bernard Manning and later helped usher in acid house. A warehouse with red-brick curved frontage and chic metal-and-concrete industrial interior, The Haçienda was on a grand scale and occupied the attention of the kings of the Manchester scene – Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson and Peter Saville – with New Order footing the bill. “Tony had a great vision, but he wasn’t interested in the mechanics of the decisions,” says Peter Hook. “With The Haçienda, he made the decision to open the biggest club in England in Manchester and then, when…

The set affirms her place among the best that America has to offer THE last time Rhiannon Giddens played west London, she was with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, entertaining an audience of a few hundred at the delightful Bush Hall. What a difference two solo albums make. She bounds onstage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire before a sell-out crowd of 2,000, assorted musicians in tow, to deliver a set that affirms her place among the best that modern America has to offer. While her material is steeped in history – both her own songs and those borrowed from forerunners such as Nina Simone and Sister Rosetta Tharpe – Giddens is a real original, from the urgent way she totes a banjo and the barefoot ease of her onstage moves, to…

Clapton admits with 12-step candour to being “unstable and screwed up” ERIC CLAPTON: A LIFE IN 12 BARS Early on in Lil Fini Zanuck’s documentary, Eric Clapton recalls the first time he heard the blues. “Without me even being aware of it, it took all the pain away,” he says. Until the age of 9, Clapton believed that his grandparents were his parents; the shock of this revelation cannot be understated. “It felt as if my life had been a lie,” he says, drawn then to the founding myth of blues: “One man with his guitar against the world”. This solitary impulse meant Clapton never settled: not with The Yardbirds, nor with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream or Blind Faith. Prone to introspection and melancholia, Clapton admits with 12-step candour to…

TWIN PEAKS: A LIMITED EVENT SERIES PARAMOUNT/CBS 10/10 Agent Cooper et al in a damn fine return. By John Robinson A master of unlikely comebacks in life, David Bowie can still evidently pull them off after death too. Having made an appearance in the Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me , Bowie, a longtime Lynch fan (his stated hope for 1980 was to “own a personal copy of Eraserhead”) now appears again in this latest David Lynch project – a third series of his macabre, mystical soap opera Twin Peaks , 25 years after the last season aired. Both for Bowie and for the show, it’s a remarkable achievement. For Bowie’s character Phillip Jeffries, it means some fleeting appearances devised from archive footage and via a number…