Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i UNCUT

“I’m a little bit older but I remain unchanged” Warm Chris 4AD NO stranger to the incomprehensible visual metaphor, Aldous Harding is wearing a blonde wig and a lizard’s tail in the video for “Lawn”, the skittish beach samba released to herald the arrival of her fourth album. “Can you imagine me just being out and free?” the 31-year-old asks. “Doors are the way you leave/Open it up to me”. Listening to the defiantly peculiar Warm Chris, it’s not easy to imagine how much more untethered the artist born Hannah Topp can get. The cryptic crossword lyrics and séance medium voices that defined 2019’s Art Deco-toned Designer are even more apparent on a record that welds the shape-shifting artistry of Cindy Sherman to the musical surrealism of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci,…

For The Sake Of Bethel Woods BELLA UNION 7/10 IT’S been well over eight years since their last album, 2013’s Antiphon, which is a high-risk absence even for a cultish band like Midlake. The interim, however, has been busy with family life and various members’ projects: guitarist Joey McClellan, keyboard player/flautist Jesse Chandler and vocalist/bandleader Eric Pulido all released solo LPs, as well as teaming up with Ben Bridwell, Fran Healy, Alex Kapranos, Jason Lytle and bandmate McKenzie Smith to record an LP as BNQT. If these experiences helped recalibrate and fortify a Midlake in limbo, it seems there was an extra, more personally meaningful push: Chandler’s late father appeared in a dream, telling him that Midlake should reunite. As Pulido explained to Uncut: “A great catalyst for our hiatus…

“WE have never fit squarely into any genre or scene,” says saxophonist Pete Wareham. “Now we’ve just embraced that and allowed ourselves to explore as much as we want without worrying as to whether people will get it.” The result is MYD’s most eclectic and exploratory record to date, yet also a deeply personal and emotional one. “This approach was liberating and enabled us to look deeper for our own sound,” Wareham adds. “We were very keen to find some new emotional territory too, and Kush [Gaya, vocals] had clear ideas of the different voices and singing styles he wanted to try.” The result is a record that takes the key foundations that the band has laid down and expanded on them. “We wanted to retain the best bits of our…

Feeding The Machine GEARBOX 8/10 BINKER GOLDING and Moses Boyd cut their first album Dem Ones back in 2015, when the talk of the UK jazz renaissance was just a gleam on the face of a neatly polished hi-hat. Both were alumni of Tomorrow’s Warriors, a London-based education programme dedicated to giving a young generation of multiracial jazz musicians a leg up, and both had carved out a reputation on the scene. Binker Golding was the senior of the pair, a skilful tenor saxophonist who had risen to a key role in the Warriors’ Soon Come Ensemble. Boyd, some six years his junior, was a young drummer-for-hire from south-east London who was studying at the prestigious conservatoire Trinity Laban, but also expressed his love for grime artists like Dizzee Rascal.…

Wires Turned Sideways In Time BASIN ROCK 9/10 WHEN an album’s press release promises a blend of two iconic Michaels – in this case Rother and Chapman – well, that’s promising a lot. But Wires Turned Sideways In Time, Duncan Marquiss’ debut solo album, manages to deliver the kosmische-folk goods throughout its seven expansive and inventive instrumentals. Marquiss occasionally treads upon familiar ground, but the Glasgow-based guitarist is an expert synthesist, finding new angles from which to approach classic sounds, layering one texture upon another until something brand new appears. You may recognise Marquiss’ name from Scottish rockers The Phantom Band, who recorded several LPs of underrated, experimental-leaning indie before going on hiatus in the middle of the last decade. If the six-piece group had a fault, it was an…

“WE lived together and experienced so much together,” says Renate Knaup. “If I had the money, I’d find a house where all of us could live again, with a huge rehearsal room. I would love that.” The Bavarian krautrock collective grew from the countercultural Amon Düül commune outside Munich, breaking away in 1968 when others became more interested in politics than mind-expanding psychedelic music. Still, the group lived together for the next five years – despite musical and personal tensions, police raids and even run-ins with the Baader-Meinh of Group – and the music they produced in that time was often phenomenal, from the improvisational grooves of 1970’s Yeti to the brighter, spaced-out songs of 1972’s Wolf City. “We tried to be a bit different,” says John Weinzierl, guitarist and…

THE day after The Dreaming was released, Kate Bush attended a record signing at Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street. Darrell Babidge was one of several hundred fans who attended, travelling up from Bournemouth with three friends. “I was 16 and hadn’t been to London much so it was quite a big event,” says Babidge, who now cohosts a Kate Bush podcast called Bush Telegraph. “There was a married couple behind us, Ian and Sue. They had a Sony Walkman and were playing The Dreaming and we all passed it round so we could listen to the album as we waited. I am still friends with them today, after all these years. “After an hour or so it was my turn. I’m not quite sure why, but I brought her a…

PARIS 13TH DISTRICT Usually associated with crime-related drama (A Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Dheepan), writer-director Jacques Audiard has been French cinema’s most consistent contemporary auteur. But he recently took a sidestep with an English-language Western, The Sisters Brothers, and for his latest film he’s trying something different again. The French title is Les Olympiades – after a high-rise project in southern Paris’s 13th arrondissement which provides the film’s setting. This is a comedy-drama of 21st-century sexual and social manners, set among the young local residents. Emilie (played by terrific newcomer No 1, Lucie Zhang) hails from a Taiwanese immigrant family, enjoying the single life but hating her dreary telesales job. Camille (equally terrific newcomer No 2, Makita Samba) is a literary teacher who becomes Emilie’s no-strings lover…

VENOM’S desire to be what singer Cronos called “the Kiss of Newcastle” led them to invest all their money in cheapo pyrotechnics at the start of the 1980s. At one early gig in a church hall in Wallsend, they were rendered invisible by smoke machines, while Tyneside headbangers would come to watch them rehearse in the hope that they might accidentally set themselves on fire. Again. Bathos turned up to 11, Michael Hann’s oral history Denim And Leather: The Rise And Fall Of The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal shows how a generation of backwater rock bands took on something of the back-to-basics spirit of punk. Effectively invented by a Sounds headline writer to accompany Geoff Barton’s review of an Angel Witch/Iron Maiden/Samson show at London’s Music Machine on…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine TOES TAPPING Thank you for the review of the reissues of the two Blossom Toes albums – especially as you sought out original Blossies Brian Godding and Jim Cregan to comment. Perhaps a little bit more could have been made regarding their contribution to the dawn of harmony guitar in rock. Pre Wishbone Ash/Thin Lizzy etc, I saw them supporting Family at Newcastle City Hall and had never heard the like. We left that night with the solos in “Indian Summer” buzzing in our heads. I immediately bought If Only For A Moment and still play my original vinyl copy regularly. If only they could be persuaded to reform and play some shows. Tom Noble, Whitley Bay DAMNED DANGEROUS Summer 1977, Syracuse, NY,…

ONE of the weirdest aspects of the Cold War was the way that it formed unlikely exchange programmes between far-flung nations. You’d find Ethiopian sailors training in Azerbaijan, Algerian engineers in St Petersburg and Cuban musicians playing residencies in Czechoslovakia. And when the African island nation of Cape Verde became independent in 1975, the fighters of its Soviet-backed revolution were sent off to be trained around the Communist world. One such Cape Verdean soldier was Domingos da Ressurreição Andrade da Silva Fernandes – known as Pascoal – who received his army training in Cuba, spent four years in Crimea, and eventually found himself serving in the East German security forces as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Pascoal is also a talented guitarist and singer, who was often called upon…

How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars FAT POSSUM 10/10 EARLY last year, Tamara Lindeman released Ignorance, her fifth album as The Weather Station, and the most celebrated of her career. It was forlorn, and it was furious; a lyrically arresting, synth-rich take on man’s desecration of the natural world. Uncut named it album of the year. At the time, Lindeman gave no hint that up her sleeve she kept a sister record – a collection of songs written in the same period as those on Ignorance, many near-contenders for that album. But these 10 songs she regarded as too soft and too internal to stand among their fierce, percussive siblings, and so she filed them away in her notebook, under the title ‘Ballads’, and wondered how,…

Flicker SONIC CATHEDRAL 8/10 THE cover of Andy Bell’s second solo album features an obscured portrait of Bell shot for Ride’s 1990 debut, Nowhere. This old image of distorted youth reflects the themes of Flicker, a record that sees Bell explore ideas of nostalgia and memory while re-engaging with the optimism and playfulness of youth from the perspective of a man of 50. The songs similarly cross time zones: some were written as far back as the 1990s and all were initially recorded in 2016 by Oasis’s Gem Archer before Bell completed them in lockdown in 2021, when it was hard to do anything but reflect. Bell has been coaxed into his late-blossoming solo career by the Sonic Cathedral label. It started with a 7” (“Plastic Bag”/“The Commune”) in 2019…

How did this come about? How did you come into possession of these tapes? I’ve got a friend who’s a blues enthusiast, and he’s actually the guy who helped me acquire Hound Dog Taylor’s guitar. He’s friends with Bruce Iglauer, who started Alligator Records, and with Dick Waterman, who managed a lot of those blues musicians in the 1960s. When Dick was thinking about selling these tapes that he had in his possession, of course I’m interested, but I really didn’t know quite what they were. And it turned out Dick didn’t really know what they were because it was essentially a cardboard box stacked with old reel-to-reel tapes from the ’60s that he hadn’t ever listened to. They were recorded when Dick was on the road with these blues…

Full Time Woman: The Lost Cotillon Album (reissue, 2014) REAL GONE 8/10 ONE of the truly great voices of Southern soul, New Orleans’ Irma Thomas never quite broke through and achieved the kind of success of peers like Aretha Franklin. It’s instructive to ponder why that’s the case: while she had chart hits in the USA during the ’60s, there was maybe something a little too left-field in some of Thomas’s song choices, and while she’s recently started to receive wider recognition for her achievements – her 1964 recording of Jerry Ragovoy’s “Time Is On My Side” was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame last year – there’s still much to discover in her back catalogue. Thomas was signed to Atlantic by label executive Jerry Wexler in the early…

“I’M realising recently that I feel suspended,” says Grian Chatten, sitting in the darkening light of an East London pub, in the early days of December. It is nearly two years since Chatten moved over from Dublin. “Fell in love with a girl from London,” he explains, “and chased her over.” But increasingly he has begun to think of home. Sometimes he finds himself picturing the streets of Ireland. “I can’t stop thinking about one road or one street,” he says. “A street I’ve never really paid much attention to, a road that you take for granted, because it’s between a place and a place.” Often he thinks of the north circular road in Dublin, “With all of its leaves and its wideness. I lay awake at night thinking about…

DURING the small hours of October 30, 1971, and again the following night, Nick Drake entered Sound Techniques studio in Chelsea to record his third, and final, album. Pink Moon was a quiet revolt. While Drake’s first two albums, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), were lush, orchestrated, beautifully arranged, Pink Moon was stripped bare. The only person present other than Drake during the sessions was Sound Techniques owner and engineer John Wood. Save for a brief, simple piano overdub on the title track, the album featured just Drake’s voice and guitar. The 11 songs spanned a mere 28 minutes. To describe Pink Moon as stark is to undersell its radical minimalism. “Five Leaves Left was very easy,” recalls Joe Boyd, who signed Drake to his Witchseason roster…

AS with many records that would go on to become touchstones for future generations, Slint’s Spiderland was largely misunderstood in its own time. After laboriously work-shopping the six strange, needling pieces that make up the album in Britt Walford’s parents’ basement throughout the summer of 1990, the four bandmembers – average age 21 but already 10-year veterans of Louisville’s thriving punk scene – showcased their new direction in front of an expectant hometown crowd at the Kentucky Theater. “It was really nerve-wracking because there were people there who I think all of us highly respected,” remembers Walford, the band’s driving force. “I had a sense that they wouldn’t like it – and they didn’t like it…” After quickly becoming disillusioned with the noisy antagonism of their first album, Slint focused…

DAVE Lawson, Synclavier player on The Dreaming, had been in the RAF before starting his musical career. In the military, he developed a skill for marksmanship as well as a secondary career as dealer in firearms. That fascinated Kate Bush, who had sampled rifles belonging to her brother Paddy on “Army Dreamers”. “I would sometimes visit Kate to discuss what we were doing,” says Lawson. “I went round once and saw Del Palmer in the garden with a Japanese longbow. We got talking and I promised to show him something next time I went over. “I took over a Dirty Harry – an 8 ¾-inch Model 29 Smith & Wesson as used by Clint Eastwood. She was fascinated and it started a pattern. Every time I went over, I’d take a…

Brixton Academy, London, January 19 IDLES might have filled Brixton Academy for four successive nights to kick off their UK tour, but Joe Talbot isn’t completely happy. “Some people have said that one’s clichéd,” he says after the band have unleashed anthemic mid-set snarler “Television” to a delighted response. “Well, it might be clichéd but it’s brought us together tonight.” Talbot returns to the theme of audience unity and critical disdain a little later in the set, after the rousing “Danny Nedelko” has been received with typical rapture by a crowd who bellow along to every word like it’s the alternative national anthem. “That one is clichéd and simplistic, apparently,” he says. “Maybe humanism is simplistic, you silly… sausage.” You can see his point. Idles have arrived at this mini-residency…

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IT’S been more than 30 years since Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey first considered starting their own label. Back in 1989, having just transitioned into Heavenly from C86ers Talulah Gosh, Fletcher recalls asking indiepop scenesters Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd of Sarah Records if they could share some advice for going it alone: “They said, ‘We can… but do you just want to sign to Sarah instead?’ We were like, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds easier!’” And so Heavenly became one of Sarah’s flagship bands, helping to define the label’s distinct MO of jangling guitars, lovelorn lyrics and anti-corporate attitude. Fast forward to 2020, and needing to find a home for new albums by their two current bands The Catenary Wires and Swansea Sound (a teamup with Huw Williams of The…

A LITTLE jealousy can be good for a marriage, especially one between two songwriters. Jeremy Ivey and his wife are always bouncing ideas off each other, always workshopping their latest compositions. “One of us will have a song that needs something, or we’ll have an idea that needs a little help developing, and the other person will chime in,” says the Nashville-based musician. “If something’s really good, the other person will get a little upset… They’ll want to help, because that means they own it, too. I’ve found that to be a constant feature of our collaboration, that little bit of creative jealousy.” Ivey’s wife, of course, is Margo Price – and they’ve been writing together for more than a decade, longer than either of them have been solo artists.…

What does the album title mean to you? Is Warm Chris a person? I was lying in the dark and it just came around the corner. It was three in the morning. I don’t have an explanation. I didn’t see its face. I said it out loud and it made me feel everything all at once. Like the work had finally arrived. It has its own individual culture. The culture will decide the meaning with time. Like “violin” or “basket”. It’s called that simply because that’s what I want to call it for the rest of its life. Is there anything you have been doing, listening to, watching, enjoying that will help us to understand the mood for this record better? I’m not an interesting person off stage. I like…

Still Life LOOSE 8/10 A VIVID presence on the Austin music scene for nearly a decade now, Carson McHone drew wider acclaim with 2018’s exceptional Carousel, issued on Loose the following year. And while subsequent tours of the UK and Europe furthered her reputation as a country traditionalist with leftfield leanings, Still Life feels altogether more ambitious. It’s certainly rockier in places, with McHone and producer/multi-instrumentalist Daniel Romano driving hard on tunes like “Hawks Don’t Share” and “Only Lovers”, punctuated by fat brass and gnarly guitars. Saxophonist David Nardi and Mark Lalama (piano, organ and accordion) are key to all this too, helping bring an intuitive sense of motion. There’s swishy R&B and some Southern soul as well, though McHone and her acoustic guitar remain squarely front and centre of…

The title of Raum –the second Tangerine Dream album since the passing of founder Edgar Froese – translates as “space”. A suitable name for music by a band that’s explored the kosmische outer reaches. But it also refers to the little studio in South Berlin where the group – now led by Thorsten Quaeschning, a Froese disciple who joined the band in 2003 – toiled on the record. Continuing after Froese’s death posed a conundrum. “How do we manage to have it sound like Tangerine Dream but also like a fresh record in 2022 – not something lost in nostalgia?” says new recruit Paul Frick. To answer that question, as the group composed, they dug into Froese’s sound archive, turning up and integrating old Cubase arrangements from dusty floppy discs. Quaeschning describes the…

“I wanna be a Baptist preacher, so I don’t have to work” Forever On My Mind EASY EYE SOUND WHEN Son House returned to performing in the 1960s, he played “Death Letter” so often it became his signature tune. It was a highlight of every setlist, and sometimes he’d run through it multiple times during a show, as though something within the song eluded him. He sang it like he had to puzzle something out or find some dark secret at the song’s core, which made every performance sound slightly different. He would invert the guitar riff, reorder the verses, change the lyrics, borrow from different sources, vary the tempo: sometimes fast and jumpy, sometimes slow and languorous. The most popular version, which he recorded in the 1960s, is a…

The Coral RUN ON/MODERN SKY 9/10 TIME has a way of smoothing the rough edges of songs, sanding down what was once shocking until it feels safe. Some moments are curiously resistant, though: The Beatles’ “Revolution”, say, its stinging fuzz still as unhealthily exciting as it must have been almost 54 years ago. The Coral’s “Skeleton Key”, too, has proved rather hardy: the first proper taste of their self-titled 2002 debut, it combined unhinged Beefheart clatter with shanty chants and a space-rock middle-eight seemingly beamed in from a post-Syd Floyd album. Oh, and a jokey disco-funk coda in which the band seem to shout-out kids TV series Byker Grove. The mixing of these elements isn’t noteworthy in itself, but the way the sextet managed to make the result feel so…

The Radio Tisdas Sessions/Amassakoul (reissues, 2001, 2004) WEDGE 7/10, 8/10 THE first ever review of Tinariwen in the UK media came 21 years ago in the March 2001 issue of Uncut, when this intrepid critic travelled to see them play at “the world’s remotest music festival” in the southern Sahara in Mali. It was not a journey for the fainthearted, involving a six-hour flight from Paris to Gao on the River Niger, followed by a long day’s 4x4 drive across the desert to Kidal, Tinariwen’s base. From there it was a further day’s drive deep into the Adrar des Ifoghas, an isolated region of rocks and more sand, nestling the borders with Algeria and Niger, and regarded by the Tuaregs as part of their ancestral nomadic lands. It was a…

Genesis Of Genius CONTEMPORARY/CRAFT 9/10 FOR years, Ornette Coleman was regarded by many critics and musicians alike as something of a fraud and a trickster. Miles Davis described his music as “unlistenable”; Roy Eldridge called him a charlatan; the critic Benny Green once memorably wrote: “By mastering the useful trick of playing the entire chromatic scale at any given moment, he has absolved himself from the charge of continuously wrong notes; like a stopped clock, Coleman is right at least twice a day.” So it’s something of a shock to hear quite how orthodox Ornette Coleman’s 1958 debut, Something Else!!!!, sounds now. The freaky duets with trumpeter Don Cherry hint at what was to come, but it is a pleasant surprise to hear Ornette playing bebop-inspired tunes (like the big-swinging…

“RONNIE and I were born two and a half years apart. She was like a big sister. We did everything together from being baptised together onwards. Ronnie was a little older than me and when she left junior high, I thought I would never recover. She was my breath – so when I was told she was dead, it took my breath away from me. I felt like somebody had put a vice around my chest. A part of my life came to my end. I had never before opened my eyes in a world where Ronnie was not living. She was the person who shared all my memories. “We started together from the age of about five or six. We had uncles at war in Korea, so our Aunt…

ON January 4, John McLaughlin celebrated his 80th birthday – but he shows no sign of slowing down. “I will not pass the day without meditation and yoga,” he tells Uncut. “It’s like eating breakfast. It’s as stimulating for me as working with Herbie or Miles.” McLaughlin is speaking to Uncut on Zoom from his home in Monaco, where he has lived since the 1980s, and where he still practises the guitar every day. “For me, playing electric guitar is like riding a motorbike – it comes easily. But the acoustic guitar, that’s like riding a pushbike in the Tour de France. It’s hard, physical work and I need to keep myself in shape. Since Covid, I’ve barely been able to play live, and I feel like an athlete preparing…

“IN ÁR GCROÍTHE GO DEO” A fierce-eyed bruiser of a song, inspired by the story of Coventry resident Margaret Keane, whose Irish gravestone inscription was deemed too political by the Church of England. “BIG SHOT” The lyrics here, a swaggering exploration of ego, were written by guitarist O’Connell and snarled into life by Chatten. “HOW COLD LOVE IS” Incantatory, doomish, a depiction of how readily addiction can sully love. “JACKIE DOWN THE LINE” One of the record’s most irresistible tracks, a sonic buoyancy countering its bad-natured narrator. “BLOOMSDAY” A slow, beautiful trudge of a song, this is Chatten’s farewell to Dublin and all the romance of his half-soaked, well-read youth. “ROMAN HOLIDAY” Faintly giddy and imploring, an appeal to understand what it is to be part of the Irish community…

“I WAS at Middle Earth with Fairport Convention in [February] 1968. People were sprawling all over the place, and I heard something different to everything else I’d heard that day, much of which was American based: blues, soul, freaky stuff. I heard the sound first. I was drawn closer to see what was happening, and I saw this very shy young man, playing and singing beautifully, obviously his own songs. His short set was greeted with a smattering of applause. I went to the side of the stage and said I really enjoyed it. We introduced ourselves, and he said he’d come down from Cambridge: ‘I hope people will like my music and something might happen.’ He was much more open than he was later, happy to talk. I said, ‘I…

KPM at 21 Denmark Street: a small basement studio on Tin Pan Alley usually used to record library music and jingles. On this afternoon, however, KPM hosts a very different kind of session. It is May 1981 and Kate Bush and her drummer Preston Heyman have taken up residence in the studio’s L-shaped recording room. Bush has used KPM’s facilities before – she recorded backing tracks here for her 1979 BBC TV special – but now she has specifically returned here to rehearse new music. At this point, Bush is basking in the recent success of Never For Ever – the first album by a solo female artist to enter the charts at No 1, which has given her three Top 20 singles. Her creative momentum is unstoppable and the…

Magazine, London, January 29 “THERE is a smile of love/And there is a smile of deceit…” The William Blake poem playing over the PA as the band shuffle onstage answers the question about how The Smile got their name, if not the one about why Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood didn’t just ring the other three and call it Radiohead. Still, you can see the advantages. There is anticipation and excitement in the air, but probably not the same degree of expectation and tedious scrutiny that would greet new Radiohead material. The Smile gives them a more agile vehicle in which to navigate uncertain times, with limber and subtly shape-shifting songs to match. Despite the heightened tension of a simultaneous livestream, Yorke seems in a relaxed mood, his baggy potato-picker’s…