Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i UNCUT

“It’s about how the last five years relate thematically to Bowie’s whole career” IN early 2004, David Bowie’s tour bus pulled up at the Town Pump truck stop on Route 15, near Great Falls and Shelby, Montana. Camcorder recordings of this pit stop – during Bowie’s A Reality Tour – capture Bowie and guitarist Earl Slick engaged in a friendly battle to win a prize from an arcade claw machine. Later, Bowie truffles through the CD remainder bin and grimaces good-naturedly to the camera as he pulls out a copy of the first Tin Machine album. Uncut watches this footage – never publicly shown before – as part of a sneak preview of a new BBC documentary, David Bowie: The Last Five Years. The centrepiece of a series of programmes…

A FEW years ago Fran Keaney was travelling in Europe – far from his native Melbourne, but not exactly homesick – when his old friend and former bandmate Tom Russo sent him a few songs he’d recently written and demoed. “They struck a chord with me,” Keaney says. “They were tugging at some sort of familiarity. You felt like you’d heard them before, but you hadn’t. They were a voice from home.” That contradiction – familiar but fresh, old but new – defines Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, the band Keaney and Russo eventually formed with three friends. On their debut, the “mini-album” Talk Tight, released in early 2016, the quintet tinkered with pop touchstones from Australia and beyond: the bittersweet melodicism of Brisbane’s Go-Betweens and the surf-punk momentum of Sydney’s…

With Bernard Butler’s help, the end result, Eitzel says, is “the record I wanted to make all along – but didn’t think I could” 8/10 “THIS record is what it’s like to never know what the fuck happens next,” is Eitzel’s parting shot in our recent interview about his new album. It’s a psychological state that Eitzel’s often used as a starting point for his songs: his forensic eye turned towards the workaday reality of living with and through love. Eitzel’s understanding of the unpredictability of the interpersonal, positions him as one of today’s most curious writers, documenting the confusion of the human condition with rare candour. Hey Mr Ferryman was written during a complicated time for Eitzel. As he notes in our Q&A, he was shuttling between cities for…

8/10 IT’S not difficult to make a case for The xx as the most influential British band of the past decade. Their slow-burning 2009 debut (recorded in a garage, more than 1.67 million copies sold) tentatively joined the dots between indie, R&B and UK bass music, making it acceptable once again for shy white kids to sing the blues. James Blake, Jamie Woon, Alt-J, London Grammar, Låpsley, Jack Garratt, even The 1975 and Sam Smith – these staples of the Mercury Prize shortlist all owe a debt to The xx. But the band have been reluctant to cash in their steadily accumulating cultural stock. Second album Coexist was even more understated than their debut, to the point where it verged on boring. Since then they have kept a low-ish profile,…

8/10 CULTURAL perceptions of the solo female voyager depict a loner destined to meet her fate on the open road. Since 2010, a few giant leaps into the unknown have made small steps towards correcting the impression. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild both started as memoirs, and their respective film adaptations spurred hordes of women to go and find themselves in India, or seek enlightenment hiking through Oregon. They’re welcome (if whitewashed) remedies to the lack of constructive women’s road narratives, although they only ever suggest wandering as a salve for trauma or misdemeanour. But the second proper album from rootless songwriter Julie Byrne rejects the idea of the great outdoors as a limitless confession booth, and makes it into a legitimate source of desire. “I’ve…

6/10 THROUGHOUT their 30-year career, but especially in the last decade, the Flaming Lips have made self-indulgence a virtue. They’ve recorded a 24-hour song, covered full albums by The Beatles and Pink Floyd, released music via giant gummy skulls, and – perhaps most notoriously – recorded an album with Miley Cyrus, which they released for free but couldn’t give away. That playful unpredictability is compelling even when the music is not. And most of the time it’s not. These projects are probably more fun to create than they are to hear. But that only makes their studio albums somehow miraculous. Embryonic in 2009 and The Terror in 2013 stand among the band’s finest releases, each expanding the Lips’ candy-coated psychedelia while balancing the extreme whimsy and extreme melancholy that have…

Here, the flagship psychedelic band sounds urgent, direct, pithy 7/10 THE late ’60s are littered with lost proto-punk classics, bands who accidentally bashed their way into time travel through a combination of blues simplicity and amateur talent. Since Lenny Kaye’s seminal Nuggets in 1972, excavating these unsung heroes of the garage has been a favourite pursuit of rock’n’roll paleontologists, fuelling many a compilation and deluxe reissue. But one of these early transitional species might just have been hiding in plain sight all these years, on Warner Brothers, under the nameplate of a band that ended up about as far from punk rock as possible. The first of the Grateful Dead’s studio album reissue series – the extension of the band’s unending 50th anniversary self-commemoration – is possibly the most surprising…

8/10 KLEENEX weren’t Switzerland’s first punk band, not quite, but they were its oddest, and indubitably its best. Formed in Zurich in 1978, their music still sounds without peer: a kooky, exuberant guitar-pop embellished with wild blasts of sax and trilingual vocals that have the ring of both Dadaist performance art and schoolyard sing-song. For much of their existence, they were an all-female group – not for political or exclusionary reasons, but simply because the serious young men of the Swiss punk scene didn’t want to play music with them. “The guys were trying to become famous,” Kleenex’s guitarist/vocalist Marlene Marder told Perfect Sound Forever in 1998. “They had a record company that said, ‘No saxophones in a punk band.’ But they weren’t the ones who became famous!” Recognition came…

LEONARD was always trying to put people at ease. The last time I visited him at his house, his hospitality and his general bravery in the face of his poor health was inspiring. He was becoming very frail but he was still jovial, still cracking jokes, still offering you something to eat every few minutes. He was thrilled about having finished his new record and it was wonderful to see the same old Leonard, under the circumstances. He refused to be brought down by his health. It was a way of taking care of you, like he has always done. I first met Leonard when I auditioned with Jennifer Warnes for his 1979 tour. Jennifer brought me over to FIR, where they were rehearsing. I immediately noticed his cordiality. He…

Jones’ endless succession of quick fucks are recalled in grimy detail PETER Ames Carlin’s Homeward Bound: The Life Of Paul Simon is one of curiously few books about the songwriter. Hundreds, probably more, have meanwhile been written about his great ’60s rival, Bob Dylan. If he gave it any thought at all, is this the kind of discrepancy that might rankle, peeve or otherwise irk Simon? You bet. According to Carlin, the 75-year-old Simon is in many ways unchanged from the tubby Jewish kid from Queens, growing up sick with the knowledge he was never going to be Elvis. In other words, he’s still a mess of anxieties, insecurities and self-doubt unrelieved by years of therapy, awards, hit records, critical acclaim and largely pampered celebrity. In Carlin’s meticulously assembled portrait,…

Elektra made Fields “company freak” – hired, essentially, to stay up later than everyone else DANNY SAYS MAGNOLIA PICTURES 7/10 Beguiling portrait of the man behind the scenes, from The Doors to the Ramones. By Damien Love IF Danny Fields didn’t exist, it’s doubtful anyone would invent him – unless it was some hipster Woody Allen making a wild new musical version of Zelig, about an unlikely figure who somehow happened to just be there for 90 per cent of the most interesting moments in US rock’n’roll between 1965-’77. Unlike a Zelig, though, Fields wasn’t just simply there, blending in. Variously journalist, scout, PR man, manager, fixer and “underground mayor”, to quote Alice Cooper, he helped shape the scene. He’s hardly a household name, but his ears are responsible for…

DAVID Bowie, London, 1980. This reflective portrait comes from a new exhibition showcasing the creative relationship between Bowie and the photographer Brian Duffy (who shot, most famously, the covers for Aladdin Sane and Lodger ). Bowie By Duffy runs at Proud Chelsea, London, between January 6 and February 5, 2017. www.proud.co.uk…

IF INFLUENCE was measured in record sales, The Blue Aeroplanes would be living in a house made of gold discs. Bristol’s tangled folk-rock-and-poetry collective boasted a dancer, the mercurial Wojtek Dmochowski, back when Bez was familiar only to the Greater Manchester Constabulary. They were deploying mandolins years before the organic-rock boom of the late ’80s. After inviting the band to support REM on the Green tour and singing on their 1990 album, Swagger, Michael Stipe began writing distinctly Aeroplanian discursive pieces such as “Low” and “Belong”. In the ’80s, the Aeroplanes sounded like the missing link between Richard Thompson, The Velvet Underground and WH Auden. Back then, the poetic, half-rapped vocals of the band’s leader and wordsmith, Gerard Langley, were unique. Today, they feel pioneering. “There’s quite a few doing…

Vinyl mastering is a corner of the music industry that troubles few casual listeners, but for a certain stripe of audiophile, the words “Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin” will come as the highest possible recommendation. Becker has worked at D&M since the mid’90s, and today leaves his fingerprint on around 100 releases per year, ensuring recent LPs by Holly Herndon and Matmos come out as sharp as a tack. He has also struck up a relationship with Berlin label PAN, which now releases his second album, Traditional Music Of Notional Species II . Becker rejects the idea of crossover between his day job and his music. “Mastering is basically a service industry, while composing music carries very different aspirations,” he says. But…

“I TOOK a music class in high school and my teacher told me that I needed to first learn the rules before breaking them,” Half Japanese auteur Jad Fair tells Uncut . “Well, no, you don’t. The thing about learning something is that it’s difficult to unlearn it. It’s easy to fall into accepted patterns. It’s your music. Do whatever you want.” That philosophy has defined the 62-year-old’s free-wheeling musical career since he and brother David started home-taping lo-fi screeds in mid-’70s Maryland, Fair’s sideline in paper-cut art has yet to stem his prodigious musical output. A prolific collaborator, recordings with the Pastels, Teenage Fanclub and Yo La Tengo underlined his cutie-pop credentials, though he has interests beyond indieland. “I’m a huge fan of NRBQ,” he…

8/10, 9/10 A highlight of Slapp Happy’s 1972 debut, Sort Of, “Blue Flower” cobbles together bits and pieces of “Femme Fatale” and “I’m Waiting For The Man” in a manner that could have seemed contrived. Yet this cock-eyed impression of The Velvet Underground and Nico – complete with a German chanteuse, though Dagmar Krause was a far less chilly sort – bears the same air of happenstance that informed the trio’s highly disordered five-decade career. Like so much of Slapp Happy’s first recordings – now reissued to mark the latest resumption of activities by founding members Krause, Anthony Moore and Peter Blegvad – the song seems both crafty and utterly spontaneous. The latter quality is not surprising given Slapp Happy’s associations with Faust, the most anarchic of Krautrock’s original heavyweights,…

Cohen’s voice spoke of long experience… Entire countries fell under its spell THERE’s a scene towards the end of Leonard Cohen’s first novel, The Favourite Game, where he describes a jukebox. His Dedaluslike hero, Lawrence Breavman, haunted by the mental illness of his mother and the death of a young boy in his care, ducks into a restaurant on Saint Catherine Street, a crowded meeting place in 1950s Montreal. He orders a drink and feeds the Wurlitzer with the last of his loose change: The jukebox wailed. He believed he understood the longing of the cheap tunes better than anyone there. The Wurlitzer was a great beast, blinking in pain. It was everybody’s neon wound. A suffering ventriloquist. It was the kind of pet people wanted. An eternal bear for…

A DAY at Leonard’s always started the same way. He would greet you at the door and he would say, “Have you eaten?” At first I’d say, “Yeah, I just ate.” Then I realised that wasn’t the answer. The answer was, “No, I haven’t.” We would sit in the kitchen and he would make scrambled eggs or chop some salad or put a mozzerella ball in some chicken soup. We’d break bread before we worked, just to give us the chance to talk or to listen to what we’d done the day before. It was always really special to have Leonard cook something really simple and sit and eat. I met Leonard almost eight years ago. I had produced a record for his son, Adam, Like A Ma…

ROGER WATERS Title To be confirmed Label To be confirmed Release date May “It’s a song cycle…” WHEN Uncut met Roger Waters in a chilly hotel ballroom in Knightsbridge during November 2015, he outlined his plans for his new album. “I wrote a long, rambling piece about an Irishman sitting drinking Bushmills in a council house in Belfast,” he revealed. “It starts off with this speech. ‘It is the year of our fuckerish Lord 2013. The geese has gotten fat and been slaughtered more times that any of us can or care to remember. Our children and our grandchildren bend ceaseless over their i-This and i-FuckingThat. Time keeps slipping away.’ It turns out, he’s babysitting. The child wakes up. It’s having a nightmare. What’s the nightmare? ‘Grandpa, they’re killing the…

Wilco are a formidable live unit, each man locked into the flow of these wavering grooves IT’S been just over a week since the US decided on its next president, and feelings are still raw in the Wilco camp. Within days of Trump’s victory, Jeff Tweedy made an impassioned plea on Facebook, urging US citizens to forgo the rhetoric and actively begin helping those left most vulnerable by the fallout. A defiantly hopeful message, this call for decency also suggested “a new era of civic responsibility”. It was a rare public pronouncement from Tweedy. Since Wilco started their European tour in October, he’s been avoiding the press for the most part. This isn’t a particularly unusual tactic, given his routine dislike of the interview process, particularly its tendency to make…

La La Land is a blissful love letter to a golden age of Hollywood movies LA LA LAND There’s a scene in Damien Chazelle’s razzledazzle musical La La Land where Mia, an aspiring actress, reads her one-woman play to her boyfriend, Sebastian, a jazz pianist. “It feels really nostalgic to me,” she says. “Are people going to like it?” Flippantly, he replies, “Fuck ’em.” As with much of Chazelle’s well-upholstered genre renovation, it’s a knowing exchange. La La Land is a blissful love letter to a golden age of Hollywood movies, full of big emotions and unselfconsciously joyous romantic ideals. Characters burst into song during dance numbers that wouldn’t look out of place in an RKO musical. There are mobile phones and drum machines but, although no-one quite…

SHARON JONES Late-blossoming soul queen (1956-2016) SHARON Jones’ belated entry into the music business was testament to both her talent and resilience. She was employed as an armoured car guard for Wells Fargo when, in 1996, she answered a call from Daptone label head Gabriel Roth to sing back-up vocals on a New York session for The Soul Providers. Then aged 40, Jones had spent most of the previous 20 years performing funk and gospel music in church, entering talent shows, playing weddings and trying to catch a break. However, despite her powerhouse voice and commanding presence, she was overlooked by a plethora of record labels. One executive, as Jones painfully recalled in this year’s absorbing documentary Miss Sharon Jones!, dismissed her as “too fat, too black, too…

WHEN asked about their tribute to David Bowie at last year’s Brit Awards, each member of his former backing band shares a different memory. For Gerry Leonard, Bowie’s guitarist since 2001, the performance was therapeutic. “It provided a moment when we could meet with common purpose, do something heartfelt to honour David, rather than sit around swapping war stories,” he explains. Mike Garson, who joined Bowie in 1972, recalls lengthy rehearsals in London – “about four days – maybe 50, 60 hours just getting the medley together” with David Gilmour’s bass player Guy Pratt deputising for Gail Ann Dorsey. “I had a show in San Francisco that just allowed me to get in to London on the afternoon of the Brits,” Dorsey recalls. “I had one run-through. I had to…

“It took a lot of trial and error to break out of our comfort zone. There were no rules” After the Celebration Rock tour, you announced you needed “time to disappear into the ether for a while”. How did that pan out? When we finished touring Celebration Rock we realised we hadn’t really taken any time off from the band in five or six years. It was an awesome experience – we did 500 shows all around the world, we made two albums, but physically and mentally we were so burnt out. We’ve always loved what we do, but we just needed a break to get excited about it again. We took about six months off, the first half of 2014, and after that we were…

9/10 “I SING jokes/And call ’em songs/No-one knows where I belong,” Aaron Lee Tasjan offers in the opening lines of “On Your Side”, one of the more seemingly earnest songs on Silver Tears – but it’s hard to tell whether he’s making a confession or putting us on. That wry elusiveness is at the heart of a musically and thematically rich album that makes it clear this veteran back-liner is ready for his close-up. Initially renowned among his peers as a hot-shit guitarist, the Ohio-born musician did stints as a hired gun with the New York Dolls, Semi Precious Weapons, Everest, Alberta Cross and Drivin’ N’Cryin’ before forming his own Madison Square Gardeners. In his latest shape-shift, Tasjan has reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter with a stylistic range as far-reaching…

8/10 SCUTTLING down a pothole-scarred approximation of Chris Rea’s “Road To Hell” on the apocalyptic “Sometimes You Just Drive”, Yorkshire guitar maven Michael Chapman keeps returning to the same refrain: “I’m still waiting, waiting on my reward.” In a 50-year career that has brought little in terms of tangible success, this album may be it. Chapman turns 76 on January 24 having almost managed – following a transatlantic Mexican stand-off lasting several decades – to break America. Reinvented as an improv guitar maestro following collisions with Thurston Moore and the No Neck Blues Band, his glowering gifts as a songwriter now find sympathetic echoes in the works of Bill Callahan, Ryley Walker, Hiss Golden Messenger and Kurt Vile. All of a sudden – and for the first time – he…

INSPIRED by ’60s pop bands and guided by an “underlying minimalist philosophy”, The Molochs’ jewel of a second album, America’s Velvet Glory , was largely written by Lucas Fitzsimons (pictured, top right). “We love ’60s music and certain aesthetics about it,” says Fitzsimons. “But a lot of our favourite music from the ’70s up to the present day is by bands that were also heavily influenced by music from the ’60s – Nikki Sudden And The Jacobites, The Clean from New Zealand, the Go-Betweens from Australia, The Only Ones from England.” Fitzsimons himself was born in Argentina but raised in Los Angeles, and always felt like an outsider. “I think that experience put me in this sort of ethereal sphere of existence,” he says. “It was lonely…

“I’M a huge fan of Felt, who famously rounded everything up in 10 years,” says Glen Johnson of his decision to end Piano Magic, “but I think we only just got going 10 years ago, so 20 years was the next available junction to get off at.” Like Felt, Johnson’s band never matched critical acclaim with commercial success, despite a dozen records for some of the finest indies. Aside from a prematurely curtailed stopover at 4AD, however, Johnson has few regrets. “It was my dream label when Ivo Watts-Russell was there,” he recalls. “We sort of forced them to drop us because we wanted to be on the old 4AD, not the new one. That was quite naïve.” Their tendency not to play the game also cost them dear, he…

VERONICA ‘Ronika’ Sampson was nicknamed ‘the Madonna of the Midlands’ on the strength of her 2014 debut, the retro-flavoured Selectadisc . The Nottingham-born dance-pop diva’s second album, Lose My Cool , spans a much richer spectrum of R&B, disco and electronica. But she is not embarrassed by the M-word. “I was definitely giving a heavy nod to ’80s disco Madonna on Selectadisc ,” Ronika says. “She’s made some of the greatest pop music ever. But with Lose My Cool I wanted to change up my sound and draw on a different set of musical influences.” Ronika’s career so far reads like a DIY punk masterclass. She self-produces most of her own music and releases it on her…

“Jim used to be very shy, he wouldn’t even look at the audience – his back was turned”ROBBY KRIEGER BY the time of these recordings, you’d been in the group maybe six months, right? Was it that quick? When I got in the group they already had four or five songs and I added my guitar and changed them a bit. Then, Jim said, “Hey, we’re gonna need more songs, you should write some too.” It was the first time I thought about writing. I went home and wrote “Light My Fire”, which worked out pretty good, and the second was “Love Me Two Times”… “You’re Lost Little Girl”… This was all in a couple of months of joining the group. Tell me a bit more about writing “Light My…

9/10 “THEY stole my music, but they gave me my name,” Muddy Waters once said of The Rolling Stones. Mose Allison’s status as a white boy stealing the blues was somewhat more complicated, for he grew up not in Dartford but in the Mississippi Delta, where he picked cotton alongside black sharecroppers and learned to plough behind a mule, before heading for university to graduate in English and philosophy. He mocked the cultural complexity of his backstory with playfully self-deprecating humour in “Ever Since I Stole The Blues”: “Well have you heard the latest, are you in the know/It’s in the mornin’ papers and on the radio/It’s even gonna make the TV news: ‘White Boy Steals The Blues’.” Yet in the end, it was white boys who stole Mose’s blues…

WHEN Leonard first came to visit me in New York in 1973, I lived in a loft building – three or four of us up there. He was downstairs, and I threw him down the door key. At the same time, a neighbour was getting a pizza delivery. Leonard being Leonard paid for the pizza, came upstairs and knocked on my neighbour’s door. She was the biggest Leonard Cohen fan who’d ever lived and started screaming, because here’s Leonard Cohen delivering her pizza. He could be incredibly spontaneous and humble and generous and there was no big deal about. He touched people one way or another in that unexpected way. I met him in Montreal. I had put together a band for one of Leonard’s disciples, Lewis Furey. We were…

I MET Leonard in spring, 1979. I got a call from Henry Lewy, producer of Recent Songs , who was a fan of the band I was a member of, Passenger. He was looking for a bass player to work with Leonard. I left for Wally Heider Recording studio expecting I’d be working with a group of studio musicians, to find only Leonard, Henry and a second engineer present in the control room. Leonard pulled his nylon-string guitar out of its case and showed me a song called “The Smokey Life”. The session was successful, and Leonard suggested we get together again. “He has a whole band you know…” Henry offered. “Well then, next time bring them all,” said Leonard. At the end of recording, Passenger was…

It’s HGM’s insistent pursuit of a groove that’s most striking THE ironies of success, even on a small scale, have not often been so pointed. Here is MC Taylor, introducing a song about the emotional strain of being a father in a touring band, about the guilt of abandoning the school run for road jaunts across North America and Western Europe. The song is called “Cracked Windshield”, from the sixth Hiss Golden Messenger album, Heart Like A Levee, and since it was released last October the poignancies have multiplied. If Heart Like A Levee documented Taylor’s fraught attempts to balance domesticity with artistic fulfilment, subsequent acclaim has created more demand, and only made the situation more complex. Nevertheless, Taylor introduces the album’s most conflicted song with an emphatic statement of…

“SOMETHING HAPPENED ON THE DAY HE DIED…” The millions of us who mourn David Bowie will always miss him, but it is cause for exultation to see ★ at the summit of your 2016 albums list [Uncut, January]. It sits there on merit. Cynics may suggest mawkish motivation, and a vote based on sentiment. This ignores the substance of that last remarkable gasp of vital, tragic, frantic, sad and radical noise perpetrated by a master – the master – of his medium, raging against the dying of the light. Of course, the album is replete with lyrical clues to its meaning and intent. They became easy to spot with the almost immediate, shocked hindsight that arrived with news of his passing. I had taken “’Tis A Pity She Was A…