Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i UNCUT

SINÉAD O’CONNOR |1966–2023 ‘‘I DON’T have the personality of a pop star,” Sinéad O’Connor told Uncut in 2014, discussing the global attention garnered by the success of 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, featuring her chart-topping version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”. “I found myself in a lot of trouble because I was suddenly expected to play a certain game, but no-one had told me the rules.” The Irish singer-songwriter instead forged a non-conformist path through an industry that she quickly came to distrust, her rebel spirit reflected in her diligently eclectic music over the ensuing decades. O’Connor moved freely between pop, jazz, reggae, electronica, blues and traditional Irish songs, the sole denominator being her extraordinarily impassioned voice. The flood of tributes that followed her passing,…

WHERE to start with Tymon Dogg? The songwriter and violinist born Stephen Murray is best known for his work with The Clash – he sang “Lose This Skin” on Sandinista! and played on Combat Rock. But his original forays into music saw him work alongside Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney and James Taylor. Later he recorded several solo albums, including 1982’s Battle Of Wills, which is being reissued in July. His unreleased 1983 album Hollowed Out (produced by Glyn Johns) may follow, along with a new album he’s recorded in Spain with a band who backed the flamenco singer Enrique Morente. “I like to keep myself entertained,” he says modestly. “I realised many years ago that commercial music doesn’t make much sense. That’s what attracted me to the folk clubs: you…

SVEN WUNDER Late Again PIANO PIANO The Swedish studio magician has done it again, conjuring an LP of fine twilit pop-jazz that’s the equal of any library music ‘holy grail’ selling for £800 on Discogs. PHAROAH SANDERS “Harvest Time Live 1977 – Version 2” LUAKA BOP From the forthcoming 2LP set of 1977’s highly prized Pharoah, a stunning live rendition of that album’s mellifluous lead track. WHITNEY K Vivi! MAPLE DEATH “No strangers among us…” Hear Konner Whitney’s vivid Loaded-esque vignettes as they’re meant to be heard, live in a room full of his Montreal mates. SONIC BOOM & PANDA BEAR Reset In Dub DOMINO Adrian Sherwood gets his mitts on the duo’s excellent Reset album from last year, extracting its irie-est essence. BEX BURCH There Is Only Love And…

AFTER the expansive psychedelic dreamscapes of his most recent work, Israel Nash circles back to his roots in smalltown Missouri on Ozarker LOOSE. Due in late October, the album is informed by the heartland rock he grew up with (Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bob Seger) and stories from his family history, including the title track, a hymn to Nash’s great-grandfather, a migrant worker who fell in love with an orchard owner’s daughter. “No matter where you come from or where you go, you’ll always carry your past with you,” he explains. Helpers include My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan. Foo Fighters lead guitarist Chris Shiflett has been nurturing a rootsy solo sideline for a few years now. Mostly recorded in Nashville, Lost At Sea SNAKEFARM is out in October and sees him team…

Can you talk a bit about what Jaimie brought to the trumpet? Jaimie was an extremely strong person, singular in her tastes but also really smart. Everything influenced her, but at the same time she had a unique personality and spirit that controlled all of it. Her self-awareness always ruled. She was never spoon-fed by anything. What should people know about this record that maybe you didn’t have the room to mention in the liner notes or elsewhere? She was visiting me a week or two before she passed and asking all these questions about the record, like if she should get a certain person to do this or do that. I remember telling her that it wasn’t a big deal, that she could do anything. To me, Jaimie fully…

This is very different to Two Saviors. That was a very lo-fi, intimate album and there were a lot of songs about loss. This album is really a collection of love songs – romantic love songs, motherly love, platonic love, the love of nature – and I wanted to capture the songs in a very high-fidelity environment. Mat [Davidson] wanted to play with a lot of space and capture that with detail. How did you collaborate with Jolie Holland? She has been one of my musical heroes since I was in high school. When I moved to New York she was teaching songwriting, and I took her what I thought was an unfinished song and she said it was done. That was a revelation and began our friendship. We wrote…

“WE were jazz musicians,” says Manfred Mann. “I was listening to Archie Shepp and Ornette Coleman when I started in the industry.” When the South African keyboard player joined forces with English pianist, vibes-man and drummer Mike Hugg to form the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers in 1962, the two musicians were grounded in jazz and blues. Morphing into Manfred Mann, their fortunes took a pop turn with the 1963 single “5-4-3-2-1”, the theme tune to Ready Steady Go! and the first of several Top 10 hits, including “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, “Pretty Flamingo” and “Ha! Ha! Said The Clown”. Having evolved through two incarnations of the band, featuring Paul Jones and later Mike D’Abo as lead vocalists, by the end of the ’60s Mann and Hugg were feeling creatively constrained. Resolving…

WITH Belly confirmed as special guests for The Breeders’ upcoming Last Splash US tour, it seems more than likely that one-time Breeder Tanya Donelly will join them onstage for a song or two. “I can’t imagine that won’t happen,” Donelly says. “Also, I can’t wait to hang out.” As Kim explains, they need redemption for “destroying” ‘Happiness Is Warm Gun’ – a song they originally covered on Pod – in Boston in 2013, a fiasco that can be viewed in all its amusing glory on YouTube. “Let me defend myself!” says Donelly. “They did surprise me by calling me up [on stage]. I ploughed forward as if it was the Beatles structure of that song, totally forgetting how much surgery we did on it. So it was a complete shitshow!…

ONE of the highlights of Franks Wild Years, the taut gospel-blues “Way Down In The Hole” was used as the theme to all five series of The Wire, each time performed by a different artist. “I looked for… things that were suggestive of the ubiquitous drudgery and pain of whatever you’re engaged in,” The Wire creator David Simon told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s when we found ‘Way Down In The Hole’.” Series one featured a rousing cover by The Blind Boys Of Alabama; series two featured Waits’ 1987 original. Series three had a version by the Neville Brothers, while series four featured a cover by DoJaMe, five Baltimore teenagers, arranged and recorded specially for The Wire. The theme in the final series was a reinterpretation by Steve Earle, who also acted…

FLOODLIGHTS IT’S perfect indie-pop from Australia: really catchy songs, great-sounding vocals. I don’t usually like music like that, but they make it work. There’s an honesty to their songwriting that feels very personal. They’re one of the new bands I got most excited about last year, and we booked them to come over before they were signed. I think this will be their first UK trip. JOHN FRANCIS FLYNN I saw him on The Boat stage last year and he really blew me away, so I went up to him straight away and he became the first act booked for this year, further up on the Garden stage. I guess he’s in that same world as Lankum. It’s almost as if Portishead were doing Irish folk music – he has…

Do it again! Our Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to Steely Dan has been painstakingly remixed and remastered from the original tapes, with new bonus content including a dispatch from their latest tour and the lowdown on newly unearthed nugget, “The Second Arrangement”. Plus every release reviewed, and their finest interviews selected from our archives. It’s in shops on August 17, or available to order from shop.kelsey.co.uk/Uncut… Still on sale from the same places is our Ultimate Genre Guide to classic Goth rock: the definitive story of how Siouxsie, Bauhaus, Nick Cave, The Sisters Of Mercy, The Cure and other back-combed idols bewitched the world… New additions to the lineup of the EFG London Jazz Festival (various venues, November 12-19) include Greg Foat & Gigi Masin, an 80th birthday show for…

SLOWDIVE Souvlaki CREATION, 1993 Slowdive’s extraordinary second album should have been their breakthrough, but the press backlash had begun, the band marooned between grunge and Britpop. Nevertheless, its gorgeous galactic dub (“Souvlaki Space Station”) and effervescent pop (“Alison”, “When The Sun Hits”), plus a Portishead-like Brian Eno collaboration, “Sing”, show they’d far outshone shoegaze. 9/10 SLOWDIVE Pygmalion CREATION, 1995 Kicked into the cold Britpop winter of 1995 by Creation – who were unable to abide Halstead’s languid ambient ballads – Slowdive’s first-phase swansong is a deep dive into bluesy dreamscapes also being explored by Spiritualized and Seefeel. NME called Pygmalion “career suicide”, but “Crazy For You” and “Blue Skied An’ Clear” smoulder eternally. 8/10 SLOWDIVE Slowdive DEAD OCEANS, 2017 Arriving a mere 22 years after Pygmalion – and three years…

The performances on Relentless feel relaxed, organic and very direct. It actually went through a surprisingly lengthy process. It started out very slow and subdued; there was talk about having vibraphone on it, like a Tim Buckley album. Happy Sad informed me at the age of 17 and still does. But the more we played it the more it rocked up. We were born to rock and there’s really no getting around it. On album opener “Losing My Sense Of Taste”, you’re singing about not caring about rock’n’roll, “all my favourites seem tired and old”, “feeling nostalgic and sad”. It’s almost a manifesto for how not to be? That song was more a take on the whole lockdown experience. Actually, it is called “Losing My Sense Of Taste” – which,…

LOOSE FUR Loose Fur DRAG CITY, 2003 The trio of Jeff Tweedy, Jim O’Rourke and Glenn Kotche had a huge impact on Wilco – not least Kotche taking up his spot on the drumstool – and the experimental, playful music on their self-titled debut still echoes through their work, right up to Cousin. 8/10 WILCO A Ghost Is Born NONESUCH, 2004 A lavish project, produced in New York by Jim O’Rourke, the Yankee follow-up had everything: 10-minute motoric tracks, ’70s classic rock and avant-garde drones. They’ve never quite repeated it, though some of Cousin gets close to A Ghost…’s unique, uneasy mood. 9/10 WILCO Star Wars DBPM, 2015 A short, sharp irreverent blast of noisy rock, Wilco’s ninth was a world away from 2011’s (overly?) epic The Whole Love. Thirty-three…

The title The Returner seems freighted with significance. What does it mean to you? It’s about coming back stronger from difficult things. It came to me when I was on stage with Joni Mitchell at the Joni Jam last year. She had been told she’d never sing again and I wrote a poem about it called “Joni, Our Lady Returner”. The idea grew from that. It’s survivor’s joy, which we don’t celebrate enough. In the past you’ve sung about pain and suffering – but there’s an incredible amount of joy in this record… Recording it was so joyful. I had 15 absolutely brilliant artists and women in creative communion in the studio fleshing out these songs. We recorded it in six days in the old A&M studio in Hollywood where…

Good Morning Spider CAPITOL, 1998 Though recorded after the near-fatal overdose that put him in a wheelchair for six months (among other problems), Sparklehorse’s second album is the first full flourishing of Linkous’s creative vision. Bristly, driving alt.rockers (“Pig”, “Ghost Of His Smile”) and bucolic folk-pop numbers (“Sunshine”) continually bump up against wild displays of his indefatigable eagerness to turn his ideas inside out. 9/10 It’s A Wonderful Life CAPITOL, 2001 Bowing to label pressures, Linkous ventured outside his home studio for the first time to make a Sparklehorse album, a task he completed with such luminaries as Tom Waits, PJ Harvey and Nina Persson. While Capitol certainly hoped for something they could serve up to alt. rock radio, Linkous delivers something far better: an alternately irascible, haunting and thrilling…

How do you feel about this album 35 years later? I still just absolutely love it. I’ve got so many vivid memories of making it. A lot of it was spent with Tim, Sarah and me. I’d pick them up at in Kingston and we’d drive up to Workhouse studios on Old Kent Road. We’d get there about seven in the evening, record all night, then leave at seven in the morning. I have fantastic memories of it. It was just exciting, euphoric. Rock folklore often depicts Tim as a crazed perfectionist genius in Brian Wilson mode. Is that accurate? That’s a bit of a caricature really, he just was an incredibly hard worker. Always sitting at the studio, he was just very focused. He wasn’t eccentric really; when you knew…

IAN SKELLY Drums (1996–) Founded the band with schoolfriend Paul Duffy. O’Hagan: “The way Ian hits a drum is unique. He sits high above the kit, uses the toms a lot, sometimes doesn’t use a snare drum at all and he’ll never do a fill where you’d expect it.” Solo albums Cut From A Star (2012) and Drifter’s Skyline (2020) showcase the self-taught percussionist’s many talents. PAUL DUFFY Bass, vocals (1996–) Co-founder and a crucial voice and component in the Coral sound. James Skelly rates his bandmates very highly. “They could have played in the Wrecking Crew and held their own. They’re that good.” JAMES SKELLY Lead vocals, guitar (1996–) During The Coral’s four-year hiatus, the singer fronted James Skelly & The Intenders, featuring (yup) brother Ian, Nick Power and…

FOR many years, Warren Zevon’s hellraising reputation preceded him. In 1974, he drove across the Nevada desert dosed on acid to marry his sweetheart Crystal Brelsford; he later arrived in Tangier, Morocco with only Valium, vodka and F Scott Fitzgerald books for supplies. After the failure of his 1970 debut, Wanted Dead Or Alive, Jackson Browne gave Zevon his break, producing Warren Zevon (1976) and Excitable Boy (1978), which included his sole hit, “Werewolves Of London”. The list of musicians who guested on those two albums reads like a who’s who of rock royalty: sundry members of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, an Everly Brother and a Beach Boy alongside a team of crack session players, but though socially close to the ’70s LA set, Zevon retained a…

WHEN Charles Lloyd was a child, Duke Ellington gave the aspiring musician some advice. “He told my mother, ‘No, he must be a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief, because being a musician is too hard.’ He meant the life, the travel all the time and what you have to deal with. But by then, I was bit by the cobra. There was no turning back!” Now 85 and living in the southern Californian hills, Lloyd – primarily a saxophonist, but also a singer and multi-instrumentalist – has an impressive career to look back on, despite Ellington’s wise words. There have been early masterpieces with Chico Hamilton, Cannonball Adderley and his own quartets, pioneering spiritual and psychedelic jazz, collaborations with The Beach Boys and his latest exploratory albums on Blue Note.…

“I WAS doing sessions in Paris and heard David was staying in the Château doing Low. I hadn’t spoken to Tony Visconti for years, but I found a number, called him and we had a chat. Then Tony called back and said David invited me to the studio to hang out. I hadn’t seen him since the Odeon show. When I got there, I didn’t recognise him. He had a beard and scruffy hair, check shirt and baggy jeans and hiking boots. I thought he was road crew until I heard his voice when he said, ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ “We had a meal and then he said let’s go somewhere quiet and talk. We talked it all through from the beginning and he said he wanted to…

BLIND LOVE (RAIN DOGS, ISLAND, 1985) Richards throws a fistful of signature country-blues licks onto this pretty and heartsick ballad, which eases along like a cross between “Sweet Virginia” and “Fool To Cry”. Is that our hero keening away in the background like a jilted bride? Indeed it is. THAT FEEL (BONE MACHINE, ISLAND, 1992) A rare co-write outside of the Waits/Brennan axis, Richards contributes guitar, vocals and compositional nous to the final song on Bone Machine. Something of a theme song for the pair, this hymn to the mysterious vibe to which both men are so betrothed – “Harder to get rid of than a tattoo” – casts Waits and Richards as two alley cats, out by the dustbins, mewling at the moon and musing on the nature of…

AN intensely theatrical production, the Rain Dogs tour kicked off – with “Underground” – with two nights at the Edinburgh Playhouse, on October 12 and 14, 1985. For those seeking a flavour of the tour, the ensemble’s performance on Channel 4 music show The Tube, taped in November 1985, is preserved on YouTube. Marc Ribot: “We did at least two weeks’ rehearsal in LA, eight hours a day minimum. By the end I had 60 or 70 tunes I sort of thought I knew. We didn’t know what would happen on opening night; it was rare that we got through a night with anything approaching a written setlist. I prefer to work that way. The musicians were used to improvisation, but not many performers have the guts to do that…

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IT can be hard, from a distance of several decades, to recapture the moment where inspiration struck. In Life’s A Gamble, Pauline Murray – whose tilt at punk immortality is rooted in the blunt assertiveness of Penetration’s 1977 single “Don’t Dictate” – makes a comparison with The Clash, who were writing about tower blocks, hate and war. Murray had never written lyrics before, and had to extract ideas from thin air. “Don’t Dictate” comprised one verse, repeated twice, and a simple chorus. “It was more of a personal than political statement,” Murray writes, “saying that I wanted to do things in my own way. I only realised a few years later that it was some form of double negative as I was dictating to you not to dictate to me.”…

JANE BIRKIN Singer, actor and style icon (1946-2023) IN 2021, recalling her first encounter with Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin told Uncut: “I think called him Serge Bourguignon. He was quite vexed that I didn’t know who he was, so not long after that he gave me a book called Chansons Cruelles, ‘cruel songs’. It was a little leather volume with some of his lyrics, and in it was written, ‘For Jane B., with whom I’ll write Histoire De Melody Nelson.’” The pair initially met in 1968, while co-starring in French comedy-drama Slogan. Having recently separated from composer husband John Barry, London-born Birkin duly embarked on an intense personal and artistic relationship with Gainsbourg, 18 years her senior. Their first musical endeavour was “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus”, an erotic duet that…

HELLO, CLEVELAND? Stewart Tray [Feedback, Take 316] writes about remembering a stellar lineup at Montreux Festival in 1975 featuring Mingus et al. It reminded me of attending the Cleveland International Jazz Festival in 1978, at Middlesbrough football ground, over three days. The lineup included George Melly, Bill Evans, Lionel Hampton, Georgie Fame, Buddy Rich, Dizzy Gillespie, Chris Barber, Art Blakey, Ella Fitzgerald, Marion Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, Oscar Peterson and more. Some lineup! I’ve still got the programme. Do any other Uncut readers remember this? There doesn’t seem to be any film of it anywhere. Barry Norman, Drighlington This reminds me of Snapshot – a regular feature we used to run many years ago in Uncut – where readers sent us in their stories of festivals gone by and we’d run…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Tom Waits. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win a prize. Closing date: Wednesday, September 13, 2023. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+4A+8A OK, so this is to be a track on a new album by a band called Radiohead? Some guy called Thom is singing? Drums, bass and keyboard sorted? Let’s not worry about the rest (6-3-4-6) 9 This was Garbage, I can promise you (3) 10 (See 18 across) 11 “If you see a faded sign at the side of the road that says ‘fifteen miles to the ____ _____’”, 1989 (4-5) 13 Frankie…

“There’s a lot of bands we all could’ve been involved in. But five billion Zeppelin fans can’t be wrong!” TERRY Reid is sanguine about being forever known as the man who turned down Led Zeppelin. But he’d rather be known as the man who put together Led Zeppelin. “Jimmy [Page] asked me what he should do with the band,” explains Reid, Zooming in from his home in Indio, California. “He needed a singer who could sing around those guitar licks, and not everybody could do that. I’d seen Robert with John Bonham, so I said to him, ‘Not only is Robert perfect, you’ve got to get the drummer – he’s an animal!’” It turns out that Reid might be the greatest rock matchmaker of all-time. The Jimi Hendrix Experience? That…

IDRIS ACKAMOOR & THE PYRAMIDS Afro Futuristic Dreams STRUT 8/10 Spiritual jazz guru explores Africa Since the early 1970s, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Ackamoor has been Chicago’s answer to Sun Ra, purveying an Afrocentric, mystical take on jazz. More recent albums have seen his backing band the Pyramids flirting with Afrobeat, and this new album sees him exploring wider notions of Africanness, from the Tinariwenish desert blues of the title track to the Fela Kuti-style protest of “Police Dem”; from the wonky Ethio-jazz of “Garland Rose” to the kaleidoscopic riot of kalimbas and woodwind on the closing track “Nice It Up”. Best of all might be the ecstatic, heavily orchestrated astral-jazz freak-out of “Thank You God”. JOHN LEWIS ANJIMILE The King 4AD 8/10 An innovative examination of distorted American life On…

It’s been 12 years since your last solo album proper. Why so long? I don’t really know why it took me so long. I had been doing PG Six as a four-piece band lineup for a few years in NYC and that just sort of fizzled out, due to all of us being busy in our lives… Also, I think I was kind of coming to grips with not being a very strong singer – I have trouble projecting over a rock band – so I needed to think about things. What were you looking for when recording Murmurs & Whispers? Honestly, my mantra for the making of the record was: “It doesn’t have to be perfect – it just has to get done!” Try to do a reasonably good job…

ABC The Lexicon Of Love (reissue, 1982) MERCURY/UMC 9/10 Slightly belated 40th-anniversary edition of a pristine ’80s pop classic The early promise of the Sheffield band’s taut, funk-tinged debut hit “Tears Are Not Enough” was given a considerable shot in the arm by Trevor Horn’s lush production techniques on their long-playing debut, resulting in a benchmark of sophisticated, articulate 1980s pop. The instrumentation is tightly arranged and elegantly played, providing a pulsating sonic bed for Martin Fry’s yearning voice to pivot back and forth between bruised romanticism and bitter invective on a succession of pocket portraits dissecting the debris of fiery affairs, the optimism of “The Look Of Love” undone by the rage of “Poison Arrow” and the resignation of “All Of My Heart”. It still sounds as pristine and…

“MOTHER TOLD HER MOTHER TOLD ME” From Valley Of Heart’s Delight Cilker explores her family history in the Santa Clara Valley where she grew up, taking advice and warnings from loved ones about her desire to uproot herself from the region. “BILBAO PRECIPITATION” From “California Dogwood” EP Cilker looks to her time living in Europe on this track from an early EP. Following the path she took in real life, the lyrics start in Cornwall before landing in the heart of Spain’s Basque Country. “I REMEMBER CAROLINA” From Valley Of Heart’s Delight A juke-joint stomper and a travelogue of Cilker’s restless days post-college as she wandered the US, playing shows, falling in love, and getting bitten by dogs “right down to the bone”. “BROKEN ARM IN OREGON” From Pohorylle Though…

The Coral (2002) With “Dreaming Of You” acclaimed as the best song from Merseyside since the La’s “There She Goes”, The Coral’s mercurial debut ships 300,000 copies and places them as UK indie’s hottest prospects. The Invisible Invasion (2005) The Merseysiders team up with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Adrian Uttley and mostly scale the sound back to guitars, bass and drums. Songwriting is paramount: the hauntingly lovely “In The Morning” reaches No 6. Roots And Echoes (2007) Strings, flutes and bongos colour one of The Coral’s most reflective and timeless albums. Nick Power and James Skelly’s sublime, jangling “Jacqueline” is still a live favourite. Butterfly House (2010) Stone Roses/Radiohead producer John Leckie helms a dazzling guitar-heavy collection once hailed by Mani as the best album since his own band’s seminal…

WARREN ZEVON ELEKTRA, 1976 After the failure of his 1970 debut, Zevon’s career began in earnest with this Jackson Browne-produced album. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” neatly summarised his lifestyle, while the string-soaked ballad “Desperados Under The Eaves” provided gorgeous balance. 9/10 EXCITABLE BOY ELEKTRA, 1978 While Zevon’s wild years peaked, Browne pushed on to perfect a winning formula. “Werewolves Of London” gave him a hit and “Lawyers, Guns And Money” channelled Hunter Thompson, while “Accidentally Like A Martyr” offered more in the way of soothing respite. 9/10 BAD LUCK STREAK IN DANCING SCHOOL ELEKTRA, 1980 Orchestral string interludes suggested Zevon harboured compositional ambitions. The songs, meanwhile, wrestle with his alcoholism and suffering marriage. “Swear to God I’ll change”, the title track pleaded, but “Play It All Night Long” maintained…

“I STARTED doing those solo 7" things, I just loved making those little 45s. But then I started collecting more and more songs, and now I’ve got a nice collection. Jim plays on some of them. Mondo, the bass player from the East Los Breeders lineup, is playing on some stuff I’ve done recently. “I’m always going up to [Steve] Albini’s to do recording. I recorded some things [at Candyland in Kentucky] where we recorded All Nerve, I’ve been there a few times over the years. There’s some stuff I did out in Los Angeles at a couple of different places. And so I’m just putting them together, just getting them all organised, you know? I’m always recording. “I think when I do something these four people aren’t on, there…

A chair dragged across a linoleum floor? A drum kit made out of kitchen utensils? A wooden drawer with a hockey puck glued to the end of it? A mysterious trombone player? In 1982, TOM WAITS was changing. Having backed himself into a corner with his bohemian nighthawk shtick, he instead gave into his most experimental impulses, reinventing himself with Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years – a groundbreaking trio of albums, full of devilled blues, crepuscular weirdness and moonstruck laments that are reissued this month. Here, we talk to Waits’ closest collaborators to discover the untold stories behind this audacious artistic year zero. “He would wrestle with the feel, the characters, and the tone of his voice. It was really an intense process for him,” learns Graeme Thomson. But…

ONE afternoon, during the Franks Wild Years run in the summer of 1986, the cast noticed a familiar face in the audience. “Bob Dylan came to see the show,” says Greg Cohen. “I could see him, off to the centre right of this small theatre. Dylan is a pretty laidback guy, he had both hands under his chin, leaning forward and checking out everything that Tom was doing, especially when he sang ‘Train Song’. It was really special.” A longtime Dylan aficionado, Waits first met Dylan in 1975. In On The Road, Dylan roadie Larry Sloman recounted a party where Waits introduced himself to Dylan, who responded by imitating Waits’ gruff voice; amusingly, Waits apparently didn’t notice.…

PASSAGES Directed by Ira Sachs Starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adèle Exarchopoulos Opens 1 September Cert 18 9/10 THE INNOCENT Directed by Louis Garrel Starring Louis Garrel, Noémie Merlant, Roschdy Zem Opens 25 August Cert 15 8/10 AFIRE Directed by Christian Petzold Starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel Opens 25 August Cert 12A 8/10 SCRAPPER Directed by Charlotte Regan Starring Harris Dickinson, Lola Campbell, Alin Uzun Opens 25 August Cert 12A 7/10 APOCALYPSE CLOWN Directed by George Kane Starring Pollyanna McIntosh, David Earl, Natalie Palamides Opens 25 August Cert 15 7/10…

MICHAEL JACKSON Thriller EPIC, 1982 The first record I ever bought was Thriller. I listened to it more than anything else from the ages of six to ten – I know every single note and every single word of the record, still. Unfortunately, Michael Jackson was charged with being a child molester. That tainted everything he’s done, in my mind. The day after I saw that documentary, I was in Home Depot and they were playing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”. I was like, ‘Oh my god, somebody’s gotta turn this off!’ But I still hold up “Billie Jean” as one of the greatest recordings ever made. The sound and the production is just perfect. It’s a lot easier to hate on Bad. EAZY-E Eazy-Duz-It RUTHLESS/PRIORITY, 1988 When I was younger,…