Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i UNCUT

“He’llrekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy” THE last time I saw Nick Cave in concert was at the Royal Albert Hall, seven years ago. Billed as a solo show, it naturally featured Warren Ellis along with veterans from several Bad Seeds lineups. There was a piano, too. But for the most part, I remember Cave striding up and down the front of the stage, occasionally dragging microphone stands and sundry pieces of equipment into the crowd as he encouraged audience members to listen to his heartbeat. This was May 2015, since when a lot has happened both to Cave and elsewhere in the world. Cave and the Bad Seeds’ transformation over the course of Push The Sky Away, Skeleton Key and Ghosteen has been remarkable,…

How has the past year been? ALAN SPARHAWK: When quarantine hit, we’d just finished touring, and we were going to take a little time off and get ready for recording. It sort of fit into the cycle. We were in the trajectory of working on stuff, we had a few songs. That, and the Friday Instagrams helped us use the time to our advantage. What did you get out of the Instagram live performances? Was it a useful way of workshopping new material? SPARHAWK: For sure, we were able to work on the new songs and it kind of helped us stay in touch with what we were doing. For the last couple of decades, we’ve always been so dependent on having something coming up, you know? It would define…

The last year’s been a sort of limbo for everyone. But was that especially true for The Stranglers, with Dave’s loss, and wondering what happens next? Yes, very much so. I spoke to him three days before he passed away. When that happened, I thought, “That’s it.” But then I realised, the one thing I needed to do was to complete the record. How would you describe your friendship with Dave? We had five rows in 45 years, and the longest lasted 36 hours. That was when we were trying to mix a track and I could hear this tinkling behind me. I turned round, and it was Dave, sat in the armchair, making himself this fucking chainmail coat, in the studio! Because he was into Dark Ages re-enactments. I…

Did the VU always mean a lot to you? When I first heard them I was living in Tennessee. It made me miss New York. Literally within a year of me discovering The Velvet Underground in my early twenties, it spurred me into going back home. They gave me confidence as a musician, knowing it’s not having to have all this prior knowledge, it’s more about how you explore your instrument, and how you play off each other, and the passion behind it. How did you choose “Femme Fatale”? I always loved that song, especially living in New York, and having that image in my head, all in slow motion of Nico just walking down the street. I felt it was perfectly in my range – I did a tribute…

I’ve Been Trying To Tell You HEAVENLY 8/10 Trio drift back to the ’90s on contemplative 10th album. By Sharon O’Connell IF, as LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between has it, “the past is a foreign country”, then Saint Etienne have earned frequent flyer status. From their 1991 debut, Foxbase Alpha, which leaned on UK club culture, C86 and ’60s pop, through 2005’s Tales From Turnpike House, a David Essex-featuring, indie-disco set themed around a fictional high-rise, to their ninth album Home Counties, a titular paean to where all three grew up, the reimagining of places and times slightly removed has always been central. It’s defined them as very English stylists with a psychogeographic bent, whose name-checking of London’s Parkway, use of a voice clip from Countdown or train-station recordings has…

Local Valley CITY SLANG 8/10 Former acoustic moper finds a joyful new purpose. By Sam Richards FIFTEEN years on, José González is still primarily known, to the tune of 342 million Spotify plays, for his cover of “Heartbeats” by fellow Swedes The Knife. Much of its initial popularity was down to an appearance on Sony Bravia’s memorable ‘coloured balls’ TV ad – exactly the kind of ‘sync’ every emerging artist (and their publishing company) would kill for. The single duly made the UK Top 10 and its parent LP Veneer went platinum, yet the introverted González was never really cut out for mainstream success. Subsequent covers of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” and Kylie Minogue’s “Hand On Your Heart”, in which he masterfully extracted all of the earnest desolation not immediately…

“From what tooth or claw does murder spring?/From what flesh or blood does passion?” The Charisma Years 1970–1978 VIRGIN AS Mark E Smith once told Peter Hammill, it wasn’t Van Der Graaf Generator’s lyrics that sparked his love for the band, or the specifics of their music, nor even their academic complexity. It was the sheer power of the thing that drew him in. “He said, ‘You just have to go with the power,’” recalls Hammill today. “And I agree with that. Mark did like an aspect of noise, something Van Der Graaf have always liked. Sometimes that’s just noise brutality, and sometimes it’s noise in the musique concrète style.” Even Van Der Graaf Generator’s detractors would be hard-pressed to deny their intensity. Here was a four-piece with often no…

Rory Gallagher 50th Anniversary Edition UMC 8/10 WHEN Taste broke up in the autumn of 1970, Rory Gallagher went through the mixed emotions that follow any divorce. There was pride: their final festival appearance at the Isle Of Wight alongside Hendrix and The Who had been spectacular and their last studio album, 1970’s On The Boards, had fused Gallagher’s driving blues-rock with jazzier, more experimental influences and taken the band into the UK albums chart for the first time. Yet there was frustration and anger, too. There was enmity with Taste’s manager Eddie Kennedy, who had signed a recording deal with Polydor that gave him ownership of the band, with Gallagher and the other two members of Taste individually under contract to him as employees. There were also tensions within…

CHARLES MINGUS The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady/Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (reissues, 1963, 1964) IMPULSE! 9/10, 8/10 Prime Mingus back on primo vinyl WHERE Monk was mysteriously interior and Coltrane beatific, Mingus was volcanic, a big, turbulent man who notoriously punched the embouchure and prospects of his trombonist Jimmy Knepper to bits, and regularly blew his own career stormily off-course. His autobiography Beneath The Underdog saw his music subsumed by wild pornographic excess, even a composing sanctum in a plush New York pad paid for by the tortured pimping of willing lovers. Where smack and a wounded liver were the crosses Coltrane’s genius bore, libido and temper were Mingus’s, snagged at root on American racism’s barbed-wire, which sometimes made him feel that even playing jazz was a defeat,…

RY and I had known each other since the late ’70s. In 1997 we made End Of Violence together and it just so happened that Ry had come back from his first trip to Havana. I found him strangely unconcentrated while recording the score. He’d often just sit and look into the distance, so eventually I asked him what was wrong. He said, “In my mind I’m still in Havana. I probably just did the best work of my life there.” He gave me an unmixed rough tape of the first Buena Vista Social Club sessions. That evening I drove home and put the cassette into my car’s player. What I heard blew my mind. He invited me to join him with my camera  next time he went. A few…

SAME TRAILER, DIFFERENT PARK ( MERCURY NASHVILLE, 2013) While it’s not her debut – she self-released several albums as a teenager back in Texas – Same Trailer, Different Park is the album that established her as a new breed of Nashville outlaw. Co-produced with Luke Laird, it’s a breezy record full of sharply observed details and smart turns of phrase. Standout “Follow Your Arrow” is both a heartfelt LGBT anthem and a determined mission statement. 8/10 PAGEANT MATERIAL ( MERCURY NASHVILLE, 2015) Musgraves continued to define and distinguish herself as a Nashville artist with this follow-up, whose title track promises that she’s “always higher than my hair”. She rails against the country music “Good Ol’ Boys Club” that keeps her and other women artists off the airwaves and finishes up…

“CANTERBURY was an extraordinary place in those days because there were loads of pubs where you could see live bands playing,” says Pye Hastings. “It was very encouraging. Lots of blues bands, lots of R&B bands – and good ones too. Tony Coe and [ my brother ] Jim used to play in The Model Tavern, and various other pubs had jazz nights on.” There was also a popular folk club upstairs at The Seven Stars. The Beehive coffee bar opened in 1965, providing a place to play for The Wilde Flowers and the nascent Caravan; it later became a rock club called Blueys Playground. The University Of Kent welcomed its first students to the city in the mid-’60s, bringing a swathe of young music fans to the city, including…

LET LOVE IN (1994) The delicious malevolence of the Bad Seeds’ eighth record provided the setting for Ellis’s first outing with Cave. Playing violin on “Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore” and “Do You Love Me? (Part 2)”, he brought a taut new intensity to the band’s tales of violence and tragedy and ink-black wit. THE PROPOSITION (2005) Ellis’s violin leads us through this score to this Cave-written Australian western. It was the pair’s second collaborative score, and already it was possible to see their musical interplay: on the three “Rider” tracks, Ellis’s strings hover around Cave’s voice, a cloud of flies over raw meat. GRINDERMAN (2007) Seeking a rawness that seemed at odds with the Bad Seeds’ output, this side project’s debut record was a glorious, sleazy, theatrical turn that owed…

RECORDING “Heroes” in West Berlin in the summer of 1977, David Bowie and Brian Eno felt they’d been upstaged in their search for a new sound when they heard Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” on the radio. Years later, Bowie remembered Eno telling him that the minimalist disco classic was “going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years”. For once, the pop Nostradamus’s instincts may have been on the conservative side. Dave Thompson’s widescreen song biography I Feel Love shows how Moog sequencer squelches rustled up in Moroder’s Musicland studio set the pulse for musical evolutions that stretched well into the 21st century, synthpop, house, techno and beyond. “Yes, disco sucked,” Thompson writes acutely. “It sucked everybody in.” Italian-born, German-based producer Moroder was something of…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine FAB GEAR Imagine my reaction when your recent issue landed on my doormat… The Beatles! Again! Haven’t they been done to death? I mean, great band and all – but what on earth is there left to say about them? Well, that’s what I thought until I actually bothered to read the cover story. Richard Williams’ elegant introduction teed me up perfectly for this fresh take on such a famous album. I enjoyed reading what the likes of Johnny Marr, Roger McGuinn, Wayne Coyne and others had to say about their favourite tracks. But the most interesting comments to me came from Sean Ono Lennon and Dhani Harrison – who presumably know their fathers’ works inside out. Initial misgivings aside, this was a…

At 80, Dylan demonstrated he’s still way out there ALTHOUGH billed as his “first concert performance since December 2019” when the pandemic forced him off the road, Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom – which debuted via the Veeps livestreaming service on July 18 – was no simple recording of a live performance. Rather, Dylan and director Alma Har’el presented a carefully staged film special; practically a linked set of music videos. Shot in shimmering monochrome, the setting was a small roadside bar fallen out of time. Tattered tinsel and paperchains across the ceiling suggested they’d still to clear up after New Year’s Eve, or perhaps the end of the world. Dylan and his band were crammed onto a tiny stage, or shoved into the corner of the chequerboard floor, for an…

“I AM an improviser and I am the saviour,” declares Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, quickly getting on a roll as he tells Uncut about his exciting new project. “I’m the son of devils so I’m the blazing sun, the flaming sun, and I’m the son of God – the black sun.” “The themes of the album are really empowering”GREG VALOU Of these claims, we can unequivocally confirm that Perry is an improviser. The proof is in the Jamaican dub innovator’s collaboration with experimental Canadian duo New Age Doom on their new album Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Guide To The Universe, the follow-up to January’s unsettling drone classic Himalayan Dream Techno. “We wanted to work with a vocalist, and his name came up almost immediately,” says drummer Eric J Breitenbach, who first met…

ADIA Victoria is recalling the night Skip James saved her life. “I was sitting in my bed in Atlanta, aged 21,” she says animatedly, “and as soon as I heard his voice, I got up. It was ‘Hard Time Killing Floor’, and I felt spoken to in a way that my preacher, teachers and parents hadn’t. He had excavated this part of my Southern self I’d had to bury and deny. I knew what it felt like to be homeless, to be straggled out and unmoored in the Deep South. I knew what it felt like where it seemed like everything in the world was set out to destroy you. Skip James let me know, ‘You’re not crazy – I see it too.’” Five newborn kittens are bouncing in and…

“I gave more than what I should have lost/I paid more than what it would have cost” IT starts with a shudder – an exhalation of electronic noise, like the moan of a poorly grounded amp. There’s a lurch, a crunch, a seasick squall of feedback. And then Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s vocals swoop in, shadowed by a rasping, electronic beat that builds and builds in intensity. “Only a fool would have had the faith/Though it’s impossible to say I know,” the pair chorus. Just at that moment, the song tips over the line into cacophony before finally abating. The song is called “White Horses”. It’s the first track from Low’s 13th album Hey What, and it’s one of the most intense pieces of music you’re likely to hear…

After the snarling insensitivity, it’s reflective and poignant EVEN punk didn’t want The Stranglers: the movement for damaged outcasts drew the line at these Surrey brutes, seen as too thuggish, ancient, sexist and straight. Before that, pub-rockers too thought themselves above this glowering crew, with their corduroy-wearing biochemistry graduate singer, 37-year-old jazz drummer with a taste for home-brewing, a brooding bassist ever itching to use his karate skills, and a hippie keyboardist whose unfashionable solos inspired flashbacks of the verboten Doors, though he expressed a preference for Yes. Such faces certainly didn’t fit Malcolm McLaren’s Situationist programme, leaving them as uncomprehending rock press pariahs, blindly lashing out at their tormentors. This violence climaxed when bassist and karate master JJ Burnel punched main singer-songwriter Hugh Cornwell through a wall in 1990,…

POKEY LaFARGE In The Blossom Of Their Shade NEW WEST 8/10 Upbeat, sonically diverse gem from Jack White-endorsed singer-guitarist LAST year’s Rock Bottom Rhapsody partly detailed the existential crisis that befell LaFarge following his move from St Louis hometown to LA in 2018, a long dark night of the soul that brought out self-destructive tendencies. The follow-up, provisionally titled Siesta Love owing to its summery afternoon swing, is brighter in tone, charting his journey back to some kind of contentment. The pandemic, it transpires, worked in his favour, a cancelled tour giving him the space and time to fully recharge. Opening track “Get It ’Fore It’s Gone” typifies the more carefree musical approach, a warm-breeze moment set to a quasi-calypso rhythm. It’s a trick he repeats a few times during…

AUTUMN always brings a strong clutch of new LPs, so in the next issue we’ll be looking at promising returns from Clinic, Wild Beasts’ Hayden Thorpe, Yes, Grouper and Howlin Rain, plus La Luz’s self-titled album and Shannon Lay’s Geist . The cupboards are bulging in the archival section, too: highlights include Bob Dylan’s Springtime In New York: The Bootleg Series Vol 16 (1980-1985) , Faust’s 1971-1974 boxset and a 30th-anniversary deluxe reissue of Violent Femmes’ Why Do Birds Sing? . TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

KUDOS is a ritzy oriental restaurant situated just outside Canterbury’s historic city walls on sleepy Dover Street. Peering through its lime green frontage at the pink orchids and foo dog statues inside, it’s hard to imagine that this place was once the crucible of the famous Canterbury Sound. Only if you’re looking for it might you spot a small Banksy-style mural of Robert Wyatt, once the drummer and vocalist for local R&B trailblazers The Wilde Flowers, who played this venue many times in its former life as rock’n’roll den The Beehive. We’ve been led here today by Pye Hastings, whose time in The Wilde Flowers briefly overlapped with Wyatt’s. “It was a heaving little place in its day,” he insists. “Very low ceiling, jam-packed full of people, hot sweaty atmosphere,…

“TONIGHT,” Roger Eno announces, settling in behind his piano for this historic show, “Brian and I are playing to the gods.” His comment is understandable: the stage onto which they’ve walked was originally built in AD 161 on the slopes of Athens’ Acropolis; restored in the 1950s using Pentelic marble, this stunning open-air theatre overlooking the Greek capital lends events a solemnity that audience and performer alike cannot disregard. As the flagship venue for the Athens Epidaurus Festival, the ‘Herodeon’ has previously hosted the likes of Maria Callas and Frank Sinatra. Tonight, modern-day Greek hero Yanis Varoufakis is in the front row. It’s an auspicious setting for the Eno brothers’ joint live debut, following the release last year of their first fully collaborative album, Mixing Colours. It’s also the first…

It’s in the recreations of great musical moments that Respect comes alive RESPECT You expect biopics of musical legends to be awestruck, but this fictionalised life of Aretha Franklin suffers from reverence rather than respect. Starring Jennifer Hudson as the late soul legend, it depicts a woman struggling to find her true voice, and then, once she’s found it, to free herself from the oppressive men in her life – her authoritarian preacher father (Forest Whitaker) and abusive husband and manager Ted White (Marlon Wayans). Narratively, it comes across as melodrama, punctuated by earnest confrontations and scenes in which Aretha’s mentors impart sound advice (“Find the songs that move you”). Along the way, it has its share of ‘eureka it’s a hit’ moments: Aretha and her sisters perfecting “Respect” at…

WENDY OPENS AUGUST 13 A decade after Beasts Of The Southern Wild – a former Uncut Film Of The Year – director Behn Zeitlin returns with an equally wayward fantasy about kids exploring regions of dream, in a modern-day take on Peter Pan . I’MYOUR MAN OPENS AUGUST 13 German writer-director Maria Schrader offers a witty, brainy romcom variant. Maren Eggert plays a scientist testing out a romance robot – Downton’s Dan Stevens – designed to be the consummate dream date. Intelligent fun, ringing unexpected changes on a familiar format. CANDYMAN OPENS AUGUST 27 Long-delayed release for the revival of the beloved Chicago-set horror story, retuned for this decade’s boom in black horror, with Nia DaCosta directing from a script co-written by Jordan Peele. THE NEST OPENS AUGUST 27 Jude…

“THE English excel in dancing and music for they are active and lively. They are vastly fond of great noises that fill the air, such as the firing of cannon, drums and the ringing of bells. So that it is common for a number of them when drunk to go up into some belfry and ring the bells for hours together.” So wrote the German lawyer Paul Hentzner in 1598 in his Travels In England During The Reign  Of Queen Elizabeth, quoted in Simon Reynell’s short 1988 film about the scrapheap orchestra Bow Gamelan Ensemble. This grab bag of Arts Council Of England arts documentaries from the late ’70s to the mid-’90s aspires to capture the great noises of the second Elizabethan era. From Linton Kwesi Johnson filmed in Brixton…

“END Of The Road is one of the most beautiful festivals ever,” says John Grant, relishing his imminent return to Larmer Tree Gardens. “The crowd is really just heavy-duty music fans, and the setting is so special. I’m a tree freak, you know? I really love to be in amongst the trees. I know that might sound extremely basic but it’s an amazing thing.” Like everyone else, Grant is excited to be out in the wild again. He’s just debuted his new live show at Terry Hall’s Home Sessions in Coventry, which involves him getting more hands-on with the technology. “I can rearrange songs on the fly if I want to and remix them live. I’ve been working on a redo of ‘Queen Of Denmark’ which is really fun and…

KENNEY JONES is on a mission. The 72-year-old drummer has just launched his own label, Nice Records, in order to release rare and unheard recordings from his illustrious career with Small Faces, Faces and The Who, plus a wealth of material from session work with other artists at London’s Olympic Studios. The bulk of this mouth-watering trove comes from Jones’s private archive, though not exclusively. “I had lots in my possession as well as stuff other people had sent me, things they’d collected over the years,” he explains to Uncut. “Luckily some fans were very loyal and honest. They came to me and said, ‘We think you should have it.’ There’s some amazing stuff planned for Nice Records in the coming months. You want to try to be as honest…

1 THE LIMIÑANAS / LAURENT GARNIER Promenade Oblique We begin with a fruitful French collaboration between the Gainsbourg-ian garage-rock duo and the legendary DJ. A surprising team-up, perhaps, but the result is a rugged, propulsive slice of instrumental kraut-pop. 2 THE FELICE BROTHERS To-Do List Ian and James Felice return with their latest LP, From Dreams To Dust, in September. Recorded in a 19th-century church, it finds them tackling age-old issues while “the plague goes by”, as “To-Do List” puts it. 3 LOW More Hey What is our Album Of The Month on page 16, and sees Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker continuing to develop the sonic extremes of 2018’s Double Negative and 2015’s Ones And Sixes. “More” is a short, sharp shock, but as plaintive and…

“IDON’T think I’ve ever done an album of mostly original songs,” marvels Wanda Jackson, rockabilly’s original riot grrrl, who made her recorded debut in 1954. “This is the first one. And it’s the first with so many songs about my own life.” The 83-year-old pioneer is talking up Encore , the final album of a dazzling career. Produced by major fans Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna, it features a number of guests, including Angaleena Presley, Elle King and Jett herself. Additional help comes from various Nashville co-writers, though it feels like a very personal salute to Jackson’s husband and manager, Wendell, who passed away in 2017. “To me it’s about our marriage and how much I miss him,” she says. “And how we fell in love at first sight, even…

“HE never stopped working,” says Martha Rafferty of her father Gerry’s final years. “That was his lifeline. He always had a home studio set up and an engineer that he worked with. The engineer would come every day and they’d sit down and pull ideas together.” Hence, while the Scottish soft-rock legend’s final decade produced only one album – 2009’s Life Goes On – his alcoholism hadn’t robbed him of his muse; Martha discovered a batch of demos Gerry had been working on between 2006 and his death in 2011 and, with the help of Rafferty mainstays including guitarists Hugh Burns and Bryn Haworth, reworked them into Rafferty’s first posthumous album Rest In Blue . “The nine original tracks on there he’d had in some form or another since the…

IT took 13 years for Laura Stevenson to “finally put my name on something”. For the songs that would become her sixth album, the New York songwriter “took everything I had learned, about myself as a writer, and from just being a student of music history, and tried to stretch and challenge myself to go places I had never gone before - lyrically of course, but also melodically and structurally”. Recorded with producer John Agnello in November 2019 when Stevenson was five months pregnant, the album charts an earlier period of turbulence and trauma. Her daughter was born days after America’s first Covid stay-at-home orders were issued: the cosy domestic scene on the album’s cover, based on a photograph of Stevenson at home, shows “a sweet, human, quiet and calm…

MATTHEW E White is a collaborator by nature. But before he started working on his third solo album, he realised he’d been overly deferential to others on past projects, so he decided to take full control for the first time. “This record has only one agenda, and that’s for me to express myself and to make the art I want to make,” he says. He tracked the LP at Montrose Recording in Richmond rather than Spacebomb, the studio he’d co-founded, bringing Spacebomb’s house band, which he’d assembled, along for the ride. He then spent a month overdubbing lead and backing vocals by himself at K Bay. While he worked, White repeatedly sang “Judy”, his musical nickname for wife Merry, as a placeholder, but some of the mentions made the final…

WHIPPING BOY Heartworm NEEDLE MYTHOLOGY 8/10 Bleak and powerful reissue from Dublin’s lost boys ON the face of it, Whipping Boy could have been huge stars. Formed in Dublin during the late ’80s as Spacemen 3/Loop/ Mary Chain devotees, by the time of their second album, they had become accomplished songwriters and musicians, with a major label deal behind them. Heartworm presented a strong package – melodies, edge and verve – but what it didn’t have was timing. Released in November 1995, it got lost somewhere between (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and Different Class. Heartworm maps an inward trajectory, where narrators have “lost my faith in all things good”, childhood reveries are framed by “what might have been” and relationships have run aground, leaving them “a bitter love, a…

RY Cooder first came to Havana in the 1970s. Enchanted by the music he had heard while crate-digging in obscure New York record stores – “compilations put together from old performances, people who were either dead or not working any more” – he and his wife Susie travelled by boat to the Caribbean island. “I saw that music was such a big part of their daily lives,” Cooder tells Uncut, from his home in Southern California. “We saw Ñico Saquito in a park. He was really old by then, with his little trio – playing under a palm tree, for heaven’s sake! I thought, ‘OK, that means I could come here, see these people, and get to know them.’ It wasn’t too long after that trip that our son Joachim…

WHILE others used lockdown 2020 to learn baking, sewing or foreign languages, Terry Hall spent it pursuing more esoteric interests. In a year of plague and paranoia, Hall began collecting protest songs. He started emailing back and forth with Horace Panter and Lynval Golding, his fellow Specials, who were locked down in Warwickshire and Seattle respectively. By last summer, the trio had come up with a long list of around 50 songs. “Protest has been such a key word in the last two years,” says Hall from his garden in Islington. “I wanted to see what kind of impact they had. What you can achieve, what they mean. Do these songs change things? I’m not sure they do, but they do have a role in making people aware of issues.…

BETWEEN starting and finishing “Richard III”, Supergrass enjoyed a close encounter with Steven Spielberg. The director had plans to make a TV show with the band, envisioning the Oxford trio as ’90s version of The Monkees. By the time the interested parties met in Hollywood, however, Supergrass had already begun writing a fresh narrative for themselves. Even in its embryonic state, “Richard III” was dark, intense and abrasive. “I think there might have been a bit of, ‘We ain’t no Monkees! We ain’t no silly little pop band! Check this out!’” says singer and guitarist Gaz Coombes. “‘We’ve got more than that, and we’re heading in different directions.’” Released three weeks before the second, superlative Supergrass album, In It For The Money, “Richard III” evolved into a blistering statement of…

“FOR RICHARD” IF I COULD DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN, I’D DO IT ALL OVER YOU (1970) Technically a four-song medley (“Can’t Be Long Now”/“Francoise”/“For Richard”/ “Warlock”) that showcases the full range of Caravan’s broad skillset, moving from dreamy, flute-embellished reverie to gnarly organ stomp to folk-funk jam and back again. “NINE FEET UNDERGROUND” IN THE LAND OF GREY AND PINK (1971) All of side two is taken up by Dave Sinclair’s intense, keyboard-driven opus, written in hermit-like reclusion in the basement of jazz clarinetist Tony Coe’s house. The segment named “Disassociation” gives you an indication of Sinclair’s state of mind at the time. “It was amazing for me being that isolated,” he says. “I was disassociating myself from everything that was going on in the normal world.” “MEMORY LAIN,…

YOU can watch McCartney 3,2,1 in any order. It’s not sequential. But it just so happens that the exchange that takes place at the top of the first episode tells you what you can expect from Disney+’s six-part Maccamentary. Rick Rubin asks Paul McCartney, “Are you up for listening to a bit of music?” And Paul, sitting opposite him in a low-lit warehouse space where someone has conveniently left a mixing desk, says, “Yeah, what have you got?” And that, in essence, is the concept of McCartney 3,2,1. It sounds simple, but actually, it’s really not. While interviewing people might not be the hardest thing in the world, the really good ones make it look much easier than it is. In the case of Rick Rubin – whose Broken Record…