Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i UNCUT

THE Band’s inspired merger with The Staple Singers on “The Weight” for The Last Waltz is generally regarded as the finest ever iteration of that eternal classic. It was fitting, then, that Levon Helm and Mavis Staples should team up to perform it again in 2011 on one of Helm’s final recordings. Staples’ set at Helm’s Woodstock barn, one of his famous Midnight Ramble shows, is finally being released this month as Carry Me Home. “The Weight” is the album’s emotional climax, particularly as Helm once feared that throat cancer would mean he’d never sing it again. “The place just went wild when Levon sang,” Staples recalls. “It was a real fullcircle moment to be performing that song together again.” Helm’s daughter Amy – who is also Staples’ god-daughter – sung…

AFTER the amiable twang of their 1995 debut A.M. and the more ambitiously conceptual rock’n’roll of 1996’s Being There, Wilco went straight-up pop on 1998’s Summerteeth, trading the pedal steel for an orchestra and treating The Beach Boys as their new Gram Parsons. Country, even alt. country, was far too restrictive, too conservative both musically and culturally, for many bands identified with that movement, and some of the biggest acts – The Old 97s, Joe Henry, The Jayhawks – were toying with power pop and art rock. Few, however, went as far or as hard as Wilco, who by the 2000s were embracing noise and krautrock to capture something essential about America at the turn of the century. It’s probably a coincidence that the upcoming 20th anniversary of Wilco’s 2001…

“My world expanded,” explains the songsmith Bruce Hornsby’s range has always been broad, spanning jazz, classical and pop alongside collaborations with Bob Dylan, Chaka Khan, the Grateful Dead and many more. But the 67-year-old veteran’s most recent album trilogy, all developed from his archive of soundtrack work for Spike Lee, has pushed his experimental side to the max. His latest collection, ’Flicted, is his richest and strangest yet. “Glad to hear that,” Hornsby tells Uncut. “I wasn’t sure if it was weird enough! I’m generally trying to make a sound I haven’t heard before, in this late career period. So you have EDM loops, you have Ethan Grusko playing his iPad, all these crazy sounds. I love modern record-making, I want to avail myself of all the techniques available.” Working with…

Jerry JeffNEW WEST 8/10 Fine set of Jerry JeffWalker covers completes Earle’s tribute trinity IN 1971, 16-year-old Steve Earle arrived at gigs with a battered guitar, long hair and a cowboy hat, often half-pissed, and trying more than anything to be like Jerry JeffWalker. He eventually caught up with the “Mr Bojangles” writer in Nashville, becoming a student and friend as he had with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, in progressive country’s febrile heyday. Walker was the last of that pantheon to die, in 2020, and Jerry Jeff completes Earle’s trilogy of homages, after Townes (2009) and Guy (2019). Walker began as a Greenwich Village folkie down from upstate New York, then played psychedelic rock before changing his name and becoming the hitchhiking, careless country troubadour the teenage Earle…

If A City Is Set Upon A Hill HOUSE OF MYTHOLOGY 8/10 EVEN if you were to set aside the four decades of music he has made at the helm of his group Current 93, David Tibet has played a quietly pivotal role in underground music circles, a shepherd to all manner of creative waifs and strays. It was Tibet who tempted the English folk singer Shirley Collins back to the stage after three decades of silence; Tibet who befriended the New York singer-songwriter Anohni, releasing the first couple of albums by Antony And The Johnsons. Those who enter Tibet’s circle often become musical collaborators. Björk and Marc Almond, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Nick Cave, recalcitrant horror writer Thomas Ligotti and Tony McPhee, guitarist for incendiary ’60s blues-rock group The…

MICHAEL NESMITH Tantamount To Treason Vol1 (reissue, 1972) 7A 8/10 Country-rock kickstarter’s charming fourth turns 50 THERE’S added poignancy in this reissue of Nesmith’s fourth post-Monkees album, following his death in December last year. Yet rather than being a sentimental salute, Tantamount To Treason underscores Nez’s status as a countryrock forefather of a rather idiosyncratic bent. Produced by Nesmith himself, Tantamount To Treason was his only recording with the Second National Band, a sextet featuring just him and pedal-steel guitarist Orville “Red” Rhodes from the first incarnation, plus session musicians including bassist Johnny Meeks, who did time as lead guitarist with the Blue Caps, and noted jazz drummer Jack Ranelli. In the run-up to release, Nez had been feeling the impact of diminishing market returns on his First National Band…

SEVERAL years ago, singer Amy Boone was in her garage apartment in Austin, Texas, when she got a letter from the songwriter Willy Vlautin. Boone knew Vlautin well – the pair had toured together in their respective bands, The Damnations and Richmond Fontaine, and bonded over late-night green room conversations and a shared love of Tony Joe White records. The letter from Vlautin was hand-written and several pages long. “‘I just wrote a bunch of songs that I specifically wrote for your voice and for you,’” Boone quotes today, walking around her new home in Portland, Oregon. “‘And here they are. You pick what you like, and what you don’t like, don’t do.’” Boone still has the letter. At the time, Boone had put music to one side and was…

FOR The Clash, the question in 1982 was:where next? 1980’s Sandinista! had covered a lot of ground across its six sprawling sides. Now, as sessions for The Clash’s fifth studio album moved from London to New York’s Electric Lady studio in November 1981, their recently reappointed manager Bernie Rhodes anticipated a return to straight-ahead rock’n’roll. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Covering dub, funk and hip-hop, and with guest spots from Allen Ginsberg and NY graffiti artist Futura 2000, Combat Rock was almost as diverse as its predecessor. “The city found its way into the music,” says singer Ellen Foley, who was also Jones’ partner at the time. Mixed by Glyn Johns back in the UK, singles “Rock The Casbah” and “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” were punched…

ROBERT Fripp welcomes Uncut into his study with a friendly wave, and an alarming haircut. From his customary all-one-length trim, the 75-year-old King Crimson guitarist has lately detoured into full Mohican:razored close at the sides, what remains of his distinguished white hair now running like a skunk’s stripe down the centre of his head. And this, he continues, only represents the style in repose. “It was spiked up yesterday!” he says, before confiding that his genteel residential location cannot always permit this. “Here where we live in the heart of a Georgian market town, we have a very large elderly population,” he says. “We have the highest average age of any town in England. And were I to go out on the street in full spike there might be some…

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Meddle winners! The early-Floyd revivalists expand their repertoire “THE first time Pink Floyd played here was at an Oxfam benefit in 1966,” says Nick Mason, addressing the crowd. “Were any of you there? I think some of you were, but you were so out of it that you’ve probably forgotten.” The 5,200-capacity Royal Albert Hall might be a modest-sized venue on a usual Pink Floyd tour – a lot smaller than the arenas and enormodomes that Nick Mason has sold out with David Gilmour and Roger Waters over the years – but it is, by some distance, the biggest date that this motley crew have played since bassist Guy Pratt and guitarist Lee Harris dragged Mason out of retirement four years ago. In 2018, their first Saucerful Of Secrets gigs…

Les Racines WORLD CIRCUIT 8/10 IMAGINE being Jimi Hendrix’s son, and forging your own path as a musician. Vieux Farka Touré has carried that weight, wrestling with the legacy of his father Ali Farka Touré, the Malian guitarist whose ’90s albums with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder introduced western audiences to the blues’ diasporic loop, from the slave ships to the USA and back to Africa, where young Ali heard John Lee Hooker and shivered with recognition. Touré Senior closed that circuit of influence, defining what came to be termed desert blues. Vieux Farka Touré, meanwhile, went his own way. Blessed with similarly virtuosic guitar talent, he defied Ali’s initial disapproval to become a musician. Starting his professional career in 2006, the year his father died, he explored different collaborative…

Welcome 2 Club XIII ATO 8/10 AS musicians mature, they tend to travel diverging paths. There are those who defy the sentimental haze of their pasts, who refuse to be the thing they were before; and then there are those who rest on their laurels and play the hits. Most alluring, however, are those who meditate on the journey: from humble origins and regional memory, to defining relationships and unshakable loss, creating salient new work rooted in their past. From Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” to Tom Petty’s “Southern Accents”, memory as song, as a tribute to home, becomes a welcome milestone in an artist’s body of work. With Welcome 2 Club XIII, Drive-By Truckers’ principle songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley have craft ed a vivid acclamation of their…

JULY 2022 TAKE 302 1 FRANK SINATRA (P40) 2 BARBARA KEITH (P42) 3 ARTHUR RUSSELL (P45) 4 MICHAEL NESMITH (P46) 5 RICHARD THOMPSON (P49) The Admiralty Lights:The Complete Studio, Live And Rare 1964–2009 MADFISH REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10 RIDING high in the US charts at the start of punk rock’s annus mirabilis, Al Stewart was eager to make clear to an NME interviewer exactly how well he was doing. “Only two albums from the British folk scene have ever got into the American Top 30,” said the 31-year-old, who had moved to California a few months earlier. “Out of Steeleye Span, Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Ralph McTell – you know the list – only two albums have ever made it. They’re Modern Times and Year Of The…

IURY LECH Música Para El Fin De Los Cantos (reissue, 1990) WAH WAH SUPERSONIC SOUNDS 8/10 Ukrainian-Spanish artist’s post-minimalist gem, restored to its visionary beauty IURY LECH’S second album, Música Para El Fin De Los Cantos (‘Music For The End Of The Songs’), has taken a while to reach its audience. Originally released by Spanish label Hyades Arts, which was run by writer and director Antonio Diaz and musician DrHéctor, its understated beauty eventually attracted a wave of bloggers who were interested in albums that slipped between genres, sitting as it does between minimalism, New Age and Fourth World musics. Reissued five years ago by CockTail d’Amore, with altered artwork, for this reissue, Wah Wah and Lech have gone back to the master tapes and restored the original cover. Lech,…

AMUSICIAN with a mindbending CV, Rieflin initially displayed his supreme technical ability in his work drumming with industrial rockers Ministry and the Revolting Cocks. He also played with Nine Inch Nails, with REM on their final tour in 2008, and worked in the studio with Robbie Williams. He joined King Crimson in 2013, retiring from drums in 2016. He returned after a sabbatical to focus on keys, Mellotron and “fairy dusting”. After taking an “indefinite sabbatical” in 2019, he was not replaced in King Crimson. ROBERT FRIPP:Bill was true. If you’re looking at the issue of is there anything we would rather not put out in public, in terms of filming with Toby, Bill took Toby through all the chemicals, chemo pills he was taking at the time. He was…

IN 2001, Whitfield announced that he had been working on an album with The Four Tops for five years – and it was “the greatest thing anybody’s ever heard”. But no-one’s heard it yet. It was the Tops’ management’s idea, Whitfield’s right-hand man Duane Moody remembers, intriguing the producer, as they had been Holland-Dozier-Holland charges while he was at Motown. Whitfield funded, wrote and produced the result which proved to be a final hurrah both for Whitfield and the original Four Tops. “It’s a very powerful, completed album,” Moody reveals. Its title, 911, after the US emergency number, indicates the socially radical direction Whitfield intended to pursue. “The title track is the twin brother to ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’,” Moody explains. “It tells that kind of a story. Norman Whitfield…

PLUS! THE RHAPSODY WORLD TOUR REVEALED! PAGE 98 EVEN for a band as seasoned as Queen, a new tour presents certain tribulations. For example, as they resume their Rhapsody World Tour – including a 10-date residency at London’s O2 Arena – Brian May, Roger Taylor and Adam Lambert are facing a familiar conundrum. Just how do you adequately represent Queen’s capacious back catalogue in a single live set? “We do just over two hours, which is time for just over 30 songs,” says Taylor. “There’s that constant challenge – to fit in big hit singles alongside slightly deeper cuts. God help anyone trying to whittle our back catalogue down to a Top 30!” As it transpires, both Taylor and May are fascinated by Uncut’s entirely impartial and scientific list of…

Home leg of the #Nowhere30 tour yields a resounding win THE cover and title of Ride’s 1990 debut attempted to project a cool detachment, but the reason Nowhere chimed with so many is because those blank sheets of guitars failed to conceal its essential vulnerability and naive teenage idealism. Can the ur-shoegazers still connect with those sentiments in middle age? Interestingly, Andy Bell’s recent solo album Flicker comes closer to doing so than either of Ride’s two post-reunion efforts; its timely appearance in February has helped build anticipation for this delayed Nowhere 30th Anniversary Tour. While the atmosphere tonight might not compare to Ride’s original comeback show at this same venue seven years ago, the sense of goodwill is palpable. As soon as “Seagull” takes flight, powered by Loz Colbert’s…

PISTOL DISNEY+ 6/10 Steve Jones’s book becomes a sixpart TV series. By Alastair McKay In Steve Jones’s splenetic autobiography, Lonely Boy, the Sex Pistols’ guitarist does his best to puncture the fables which have grown up around the group. He admits to being hazy about the facts – relying on a radio interview he did with manager Malcolm McLaren in 2005 for the chronology of how the band evolved. Jones’s tenure as the frontman of Kutie Jones And His Sex Pistols ended when McLaren was urged by Vivienne Westwood to look out for a good-looking boy called John. John Lydon is hired, though it transpires that the John that Westwood had in mind was John Ritchie, the future Sid Vicious. And the rest is history, or at least myth. Pistol…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine ROXY RULES OK! I was off to Bracknell Sports Centre, 1973 to see Roxy just as they broke big. It was back in the day when you sat cross-legged on the floor. I’d managed to get right by the stage, Eno to my left, all boa feather and oozing the exotic. I’d made a transfer of the Roxy Music logo from the first album (still the best and most adventurous of the eight, ahead of its time) and got my mum to sew it onto a T-shirt in pink silk thread. I really wanted the Bryan Ferry toreador jacket so got my friend Christine, a fashion design student, to create one, but she said, “Go further, let me create it in red leather.”…

I’M NEW HERE SG Goodman swears she doesn’t write concept records, but there is a consistent theme running through the songs of her second album that explains its visceral title. Teeth Marks, the Kentucky songwriter says, is a reflection that “whether love, or empathy, is present or not, it leaves its mark”. Empathy is something that Goodman has in plentiful supply. She is a proud Southerner (“Oh honey, why would you ever take that trip down south?” she sings on “The Heart of It”, “I’ll let you visit for free each time I open my mouth”), quick to highlight the diversity of an oft-pigeonholed part of the USA. While Teeth Marks’ 11 songs are drawn from life, Goodman lends her voice to different perspectives: a lovestruck queer couple catching eyes…

“Hear the child arriving/Heaving heart’s first cry” JULY 2022 TAKE 302 1 WILCO (P22) 2 ANGEL OLSEN (P28) 3 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS (P32) 4 CURRENT 93 (P35) EALBUM OF THE MONTH 9/10 ARLIER this year, speaking to Uncut about her love of Nick Drake, Joan Shelley expressed a preference for “the more intimate recordings, that strippeddownness. When somebody is that good at being the whole band, I want to be as close to the guitar as possible. It has certainly had an influence on my own record making.” The heart of Shelley’s music since her 2015 breakthrough, Over And Even, is located in the warm, unshowy, close-mic’d interplay between voice and acoustic guitar. So compelling is that sound, any additional textures can feel like minute calibrations, delicate but inessential brushstrokes. Yet…

A Light For Attracting Attention XL 9/10 “THERE was a point a year and a half ago when I wondered whether I would be doing this again,” admitted Thom Yorke on stage at the Albert Hall last October. “I’m a British musician, and I was told during the pandemic, like all British musicians, that I should consider retraining. And after we finally left [the EU] they told us we didn’t really need to tour around Europe anyway, did we? So perhaps I’m one of a dying breed… who knows?” That classic Radiohead sense of embattled, paranoid defiance was only amplified by Mark Jenkin’s video for The Smile’s “Skrting On The Surface”, released in March, which cast Yorke as a miner, 200 feet beneath Cornwall, his face grimy with soot and…

Elizabeth Fraser and Damon Reece on the unlikely influences that fed into their long-gestating debut EP The songs took shape in a cottage we rented near Stroud,” says Damon Reece, explaining the unlikely beginnings of Sun’s Signature, his project with life/musical partner and one-time Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. “I was playing The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and Selling England By The Pound. I’ve loved these albums since I was 12. Elizabeth really tuned into them, so Steve Hackett seemed to be the obvious man to approach…” Hackett brought his Optigan organ and the Gizmotron, a bizarre guitar attachment originally devised by Godley and Creme. “They were very unreliable. Fortunately Steve has an original Gizmotron and enough spare rubber wheels to get a tune out of it.” But his key contribution…

Watertown FRANK SINATRA ENTERPRISES/UME 8/10 SHOULD you ever feel like being shredded, head to YouTube and seek out Nina Simone’s performance of “For A While” at Ronnie Scott’s club in 1984. Cowritten by The Four Seasons’ Bob Gaudio and singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, the song is a simple and bottomless one that fits a loose lineage running from Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” through to Bob Dylan’s “Most of The Time” – songs about how, when you suffer devastating loss, the world still just keeps turning around you, life goes on, and you gradually get pulled back into going along with it; until, suddenly, the memory of your loss comes rising up out of the everyday, raw as ever, to stun you all over again. Simone’s entire…

Calling Out Of Context/Instrumentals (reissues, 2004, 2017) ROUGH TRADE 9/10, 8/10 THIRTY years after his Aidsrelated death, aged just 40, Arthur Russell’s music still has a luminous freshness and richly emotional power. The cult composer, cellist and downtown New York scene-hopper amassed a vast body of work spanning avant-classical chamber pieces, disco and dub, experimental electronica, folksy Americana and Buddhist bubblegum pop, but he released very little solo material in his lifetime. Russell’s radical queerness and genreblurring musical promiscuity confounded peers and record labels, but he also stifled his own potential with painstaking perfectionism, endlessly hoarding and reworking pieces that deserved a public airing. Russell’s posthumous reputation has blossomed over the last two decades, his legacy celebrated in books and films, his songs sampled by Kanye West and covered by…

1972–75 JOHN WETTON-ERA MANY of the best King Crimson recordings arise from this period, in a lineup featuring Bill Bruford and bassist/singer John Wetton. Some slightly fruity and regrettable lyrics around this time, it’s true, but the albums Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Starless And Bible Black and Red are classics. 1981–84 DISCIPLINE King Crimson are dead, long live Discipline! Or for a little while, anyway. Reconvening a new band in New York with Bruford and Adrian Belew (lately touring guitarist for Talking Heads), the addition of Tony Levin sealed a new stage in the life of King Crimson. Today’s listener might well hear “Frame By Frame” and think, “Radiohead meets Afrobeat? Count me in.” 2013–22 “DOUBLE QUARTET” Subverting the traditional rock band format, Fripp in 2013 assembled some very heavy…

“I THINK it was shown on MTV once, maybe twice,” says bassist James McNew, of the video for Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube”. “As far as I know, that’s it. That’s all.” In the 25 years since, however, the promo has racked up millions of views on YouTube, no doubt helped by the presence of its stars David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, the latter now better known as lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He has, it turns out, been a Yo La Tengo fan since the early ’90s. “We were all fans of Bob’s from The Larry Sanders Show,” explains Ira Kaplan. “Then Georgia and I were on vacation out in LA and we saw that Bob was doing stand-up at a bookstore, so we went…

VORTEX Put Dario Argento and Gaspar Noé together and you assume you’re in for something demonic. Argento is the revered maestro of the Italian giallo horror cycle, the director of febrile chillers like 1977’s Suspiria; Noé (Irreversible, Enter The Void) is the linchpin of France’s ‘extreme cinema’, a tireless explorer of film as Bad Trip. Especially with a title like Vortex, you can expect to be in for a bad time, and that is indeed the case. Yet Vortex is not at all the Noé film you expect. It’s a mature departure from him, his simplest, realest film yet:a portrait of an elderly couple (played by Argento and veteran French actress Françoise Lebrun) whose lives unravel as dementia starts to affect the wife. That’s lives, rather than “life”, because their…

PLOTTING his path to pop glory in one of his mother’s old school exercise books, the pre-teen Jarvis Cocker decided that his imaginary band would “work its way into the public eye by producing fairly conventional, yet slightly offbeat, pop songs” before beginning “to subvert and restructure both the musicbusiness and music itself”. Pulp did not quite complete that mission, but Cocker’s grand theorising did take the Sheffield misshapes from the charity shops to the top of the charts, with the singer’s insightful Good Pop Bad Pop illuminating the lengthy wilderness years that preceded his 1990s assault on the mainstream. A “keep or cob” rummage through his attic disguised as a memoir, it focuses on Cocker’s painstaking act of self-realisation. A gangly, short-sighted youth whose mother famously sent him to…