Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i UNCUT

“My smile is stuck/I cannot go back to your frownland…” WHAT was the first weird record you owned? For me, it was probably Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”, an uncanny avant-garde performance piece that somehow landed at No 2 in the British charts of October 1981, only kept off the top spot by Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin’s version of “It’s My Party”. 1981, it transpires, was an unusual year for hit singles, with a proliferation of creepy, sometimes racist novelty records – “Shaddap You Face”, “Japanese Boy”, “The Birdie Song” – stealing at least some of the limelight from the insurgent forces of new romantics and post-punkers. Even in this quixotic climate, though, it may have been a mistake to take “O Superman” to the school disco. Thirty-six years on,…

SHORTLY before Christmas, Graeme Miller and Steve Shill met for one of their occasional catch-ups. Friends since the late ’70s, as students at Leeds University, they spent the best part of a decade working together in experimental theatre before their careers diverged: Miller into art and lecturing while Shill, a TV director, moved to America. Their latest get-together, though, had a patina of nostalgia. The soundtrack they created 35 years ago for an English version of The Moomins – a series by Finnish writer Tove Jansson about a hippo-like family who live in an idyllic valley – is about to be released on Finders Keepers. Miller and Shill dug out their old instruments to celebrate. “I got the Casio VL Tone and the Wasp synth, and Steve got his bass…

ADRIANNE Lenker sounds a little sleepy when she answers her phone in New York, but she explains it’s because she’s recovering from her morning exercise routine. “I did half an hour of calisthenics and then we made miso soup,” says Lenker, frontwoman for folk-rockers Big Thief. “We try to eat as well as possible at home because it is pretty tough to do that on the road.” In February, Big Thief will be back on the junk food when they tour Europe in support of last year’s excellent Masterpiece album. When Masterpiece came out last spring, it sounded surprisingly fully formed for a debut, featuring lyrical depth and a sound that moved between genial homespun folk to something denser, heavier and less controlled, drawing equally from Buck Meek’s fiercely flashing…

“It’s about removing the ego, because once the ego gets involved, art suffers” Tomorrow Is My Turn had a very pronounced narrative. Was there a similar guiding idea behind this record? The idea was to show these different aspects of African-American experience, from a long time ago to not that long ago. When you make a record you have to be really careful not to over-theme it, especially if you’re a literalist like me. I’ve always been a crafter of things based on other things rather than making something up wholecloth, so my danger is to be too literal. I knew the next record after Tomorrow… was going to be a little more personal and use more of my original material. “Julie” was the focus for me in…

“I WAS always interested in singing but for a long time I didn’t have the confidence to write,” says Molly Burch, 25, born to movie industry parents in Hollywood but now resident in Austin, Texas via a spell in Asheville where she studied jazz vocal performance at the University Of North Carolina. She discovered her singing talent at school, doing Britney and Christina impersonations on demand for classmates during lunch break. At college she eventually began writing her own songs full of a romantic melancholia that aches with loss and yearning and yet is oddly soothing with what she calls “the freedom and lightness that comes with being alone and realising that you’re enough.” Her parents raised her on a diet of Hollywood musicals, but she soon began seeking out…

LONDON’S eldritch blues don Duke Garwood’s decision to calm the heaving disquiet of Heavy Love this time around chimed with his realisation that anger is a trap – one that needs to be avoided in 2017. “Anger leads to frustration,” he reckons. “Frustration leads to malaise, malaise leads to death of the spirit. We channel the fury into art, into music. When we get it right, the music will contain the power and energy of the fuel that spawned it, but instead of ranting and raving, it can become something beautiful. We need beautiful now.” Garden Of Ashes is a natural sequel to its predecessor in that “the raw ingredients” of love, sex and death are there, but it’s also “a different story in…

8/10 HOW should the first major hip-hop album of the Donald Trump era sound? Boisterous? Profane? Irreverent? Politically incorrect in all the right ways? Whether by fateful timing or intelligent design, alt.rap duo Run The Jewels have thrown down a gauntlet to 2017 and all the toxic implications of having a bloated blowhard vulgarian in the White House. They came to protest. But they also came to party. Bigly. “Killer Mike” Render and Jaime “El-P” Meline share the same braggadocious belligerence as Trump, the same living-large swagger, the same love of lewd language and weaponised wordplay. But their political agenda is opposed to everything the Twitter-loving troll-in-chief represents. Their longest and richest and angriest LP to date, Run The Jewels 3 is their Yeezus, their Lemonade, their To Pimp A…

8/10 IT’S been five years since Swing Lo Magellan, David Longstreth’s experiment in (relative) orthodoxy following a decade as a post-genre polymath, favouring restless conceptual manoeuvres over easy notions of authenticity. Following six albums featuring choral music, half-recalled Black Flag covers, agitated Afro-pop and Björk collaborations, Swing Lo Magellan came billed simply as “an album of songs”, though in the end it was a little more complicated than that. With Longstreth, things are seldom as they seem. On the follow-up, he toys with another established singer-songwriter trope. The blurb accompanying the eighth Dirty Projectors LP blares “THIS IS A BREAK-UP ALBUM”, referencing Longstreth’s split with former bandmate Amber Coffman. Yet this is no textbook exercise in backwoods blues, acoustic miserabilism and long shadows. He opts instead to express romantic pain…

8/10 IN many respects, Tim Darcy follows a well-trodden path with his solo debut. To wit: a precociously talented singer and guitarist (now 25, Darcy was 23 when these songs were recorded) takes a break from a band still in its ascendance (Montreal post-punk quartet Ought), taps a hidden reservoir of feeling and truly discovers his voice with captivating results. Though most of that is accurate enough, the wrinkle here is just how many different voices Darcy uncovers amid all that self-discovery. That’s a surprise given the impression he’s made since Ought formed in 2012, when four undergrads from the US and Australia met in Montreal and got fired up by the student protests then filling the city’s streets. On Ought’s two incendiary albums for Constellation – 2014’s More Than…

 8/10 The songs are all about playing in a band and relaxing, the joy of being young… IN 1966, Cream were a blues wolf in jazz clothing. An outfit with heavy individual reputations in their former bands (Eric Clapton with the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers; Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce with Graham Bond) their preparations for greatness took place under the radar. Prior to their low-key debut at the Windsor Festival, they rehearsed in a South London scout hut. “This is barely a third of the equipment,” they told Melody Maker’s already deafened correspondent. On record, likewise, there was as yet not much to suggest the freeform heaviosity that the band would develop over the next three years. Their debut single “Wrapping Paper” (a composition by Bruce and lyricist Pete…

“IT’S a nod to The Who when they were great,” Rob Symmons says, reflecting on his group The Fallen Leaves’ ‘minimum R&B’ motto, “all crazy pent-up energy and individualism. They lost it later, it all got complicated and over the top. We want to bring it back to the minimum, less really is more.” If you’re looking for an ethos for this decade-strong outfit, circling around the duo of Symmons and Rob Green, ‘less really is more’ nails it nicely. But there’s an intensive focus to their playing and writing, too: they may argue against linear development – when I ask Symmons about his great guitar playing, he argues, “It hasn’t developed at all. I don’t consider myself a ‘guitarist’” – but the Punk Rock For Gentlemen…

MOST people know Ryan Adams as a musician, but he works in visual art as well. He painted the cover image for Prisoner — which shows two people embracing, possibly bidding each other farewell, with a look of immense sadness on the only face shown — nearly a decade ago, in a style that resembles Dylan by way of Rauschenberg. He created and debuted it in 2009 at the Morrison Hotel Gallery, when he served as their first artist-in-residence. “It would have been perfect for the cover,” he says, but when it came time to photograph it, he couldn’t find the canvas. “All we had was this low-res picture from my art show. There was no way to blow it up for vinyl, and I didn’t…

75 THE BEATLES Love APPLE, 2006 PRIOR to 2006, there was no dispute about what the weirdest Beatles album was. It began with a song about Russia and ended with Ringo singing a lullaby after eight minutes of avant-garde hell. But at least ‘The White Album’, for all its bumpy continuity, gave its listeners a mere one song at a time. The concept of Love – 78 minutes of Beatle megamixes and mashups to soundtrack a Cirque du Soleil theatrical production in Las Vegas – is that the music is heard plurally, in collage form, creating around 25 pieces by blending together elements of 120 songs known and loved throughout the world. The brainchild of George Martin’s son Giles, it flew in the face of tradition by placing The Beatles…

23 COMUS First Utterance DAWN, 1971 WHEEZING, rattling and almost unrelentingly grim, the first album by David Bowie’s Beckenham Arts Lab pals Comus took an age to find its audience, but ended up the keystone of a genre, their sinister acoustic sound summing up the post-rationalised ethos of ‘acid folk’, and winning fans like pagan silly billies Current 93 and esoteric metal men Opeth. Contemporary reviewer Penny Valentine famously dismissed opening track “Diana” as “a cross between a frenzied version of the witches’ chorus from Macbeth and Marc Bolan being squeezed to death”. Time would come when that would be more an accolade than a criticism. A bongo-toting six-piece, hinging on the demonic sheep-bleat vocals of Roger Wootton, Comus were the Incredible String Band gone very bad indeed. A Dennis…

“IT WAS weird. I mean, he was in his ‘mime’ period and Lindsay Kemp was there. He was running the Beckenham Arts Lab, and I played there a few times. He was just a guy that was running things. The last time I saw David – we had the same publishers – and I was going in to try to borrow £300 to keep my band on the road. As I was coming out, he was coming in to borrow £30,000 to keep his band on the road. “I’ve always looked like a pile of laundry, but David was in his finery . ‘Hello Michael, how you doing?’, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m all right David, you doing all right?’ He said, ‘Yeah yeah yeah. Where you…

70 minutes of shiny, sharp, gargantuan hooks… “HERE’S one,” announces Roy Wood before each song. “Here’s one.” The audience has a little giggle at the tic, but otherwise, Guildford sits in respectful silence at what could be the most hit-crammed show this theatre has ever seen, 70 minutes of shiny, sharp and gargantuan hooks, melodies and choruses performed by a man who once possessed the finest pop instincts in the country – a knack for blending the incredibly strange with the extraordinarily popular. Supported by a four-piece brass section and singer Shell Naylor, Wood sticks largely to the singles he wrote for The Move and Wizzard between 1967 and 1974, supplemented by newer tracks written for his ’50s-inspired rock-and-horns band. There’s nothing unexpected, no deep cuts other than “Kiss Me…

RICK Parfitt, who died on Christmas Eve, might have laughed at the suggestion that he was Status Quo’s very own Keith Richards. But there were clear parallels. Over the course of 49 years, from “Pictures Of Matchstick Men” (1968) to his final live shows with Quo in summer 2016, Parfitt had the reputation of an unrepentant rocker – a perennial teenager who loved to go out and entertain – while Francis Rossi, like Jagger, played the role of the pragmatic businessman. While other hell-raisers of their generation slowed down or sobered up, Parfitt continued drinking, smoking and taking cocaine even after quadruple heart bypass surgery in 1997. “It’ll take more than death to kill me,” he boasted as recently as November, five months after his third heart attack. Six weeks…

“You can take my blood/But not my soul...” ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 REPRODUCED in the liner notes for Rhiannon Giddens’ second solo album, Freedom Highway, is an advertisement from a newspaper in Kingston, New York. The date is 1797, when slavery was still alive in the northern United States, and the item for sale is a “remarkable smart healthy Negro Wench”, who, the seller promises, is “about 22 years of age” and is “used to both housework and farming.” Reducing a woman to such utilitarian traits is horrifying enough, but the ad notes as well that “she has a child about 9 months old, which will be at the purchaser’s option”. This clipping is an ugly but revealing artefact of an era in Western history when human beings could…

The militancy has been replaced by a slow-burning, brooding sadness 8/10 FROM The Clash to Public Enemy, from Thin Lizzy to the Manic Street Preachers, there has always been a strain of rock’n’roll mythology that has fostered the metaphor of the rock band as military comrades – brothers in arms, outlaws, renegades, hunkering down behind enemy lines as they deliver volley after volley of sonic terrorism. Tinariwen – the Tuareg rock outfit from Mali – seemed to be the first band that actually brought this metaphor to life. They spent their formative years in the early 1980s training in Libya as military insurgents under the auspices of Colonel Gaddafi, who saw the Tuareg as useful allies in his quest for regional supremacy. In the years since the Libyan dictator’s downfall,…

8/10 WHEN alt.country pioneers Uncle Tupelo broke up in 1994, Jeff Tweedy persuaded most of the band’s cohorts to join him in Wilco. Meanwhile, Jay Farrar, the band’s other main songwriting force, stepped out into less charted terrain with an entirely new lineup which he named Son Volt. 1995’s Trace was the first of three albums in four prolific years that initially saw Son Volt outstrip Wilco in both critical acclaim and commercial success. But as Tweedy refocused Wilco in new and increasingly experimental directions that led all the way to the Grammys, Farrar seemed to opt for the back roads less travelled. He put Son Volt on hiatus and released a brace of solo albums, reformed the band with a new lineup, took time out again to record an…

NIKKI LANE Highway Queen NEW WEST 8/10 Bruising third from Nashville songstress GIVEN her remarkable voice and seemingly effortless way with a melody, it’s surprising to learn that Nikki Lane didn’t write her first song until she was in her mid twenties. The South Carolina native was then working as a designer and fashion stylist in New York, a vocation that eventually took her to Nashville, where she opened her own retro-clothing boutique, High Class Hillbilly. Walk Of Shame signalled the start of her recording career in 2011, after which the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, steamrollered by Lane’s vocal power, offered both his studio and production expertise for her follow-up, All Or Nothin’, issued three years later. Highway Queen feels like the kind of record that should bump Lane to…

7/10 AS Strand Of Oaks, he’s never been guilty of timidity or lack of vision, but two songs in particular on 2014’s Heal suggested that Tim Showalter’s epic rock expressionism had reached a giddy peak. One was “Wait For Love”, a towering fusion of Coldplay and the Afghan Whigs that was way more convincing than it had any right to be; the other was “Goshen 97”. A careering, grunge-pop flashback to its author’s Indiana hometown and teenage days spent “rotting in the basement”, it tapped Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr (J Mascis was guest shredder) and was as ruthlessly self-exposing in its detail as it was unashamedly nostalgic. On his fifth album, however, the Philly-based singer-songwriter has topped it with the similarly autobiographical “Radio Kids”. It’s an irresistibly surging, brazenly…

8/10 BACK when New Order were still anonymous, “Be Music” was the alter ego behind which they hid when they took on producing jobs for other acts on Factory and its associated labels. Peter Hook was the first to activate the tag, late in 1981, when he manned controls for “Death Is Slowly Coming”, the bleak B-side of Stockholm Monsters’ debut single. But it was after New Order split from Joy Division producer Martin Hannett, and split their own atom by becoming self-producers with “Temptation” in 1982, that Be Music productions bloomed. Between ’83-’85 (between “Blue Monday” and Low-Life), all four members of New Order would employ the pseudonym for a wild variety of projects, taking unpaid production jobs partly to help other Factory signings – offering technical knowledge of…

7/10 COME 1970 and Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou was on course for rock’n’roll’s event horizon. A founder member of the Greek progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child, his grand and apocalyptic musical visions were the guiding force for the group’s third album, 666 – a musical retelling of the biblical Book Of Revelation, inspired by Sgt Pepper’s and The Who’s Tommy. All this was too much for the group’s other members, and the band dissolved shortly afterwards. By now, though, Vangelis was already on another path. His next project was the soundtrack to Frédéric Rossif’s 1970 wildlife documentary L’Apocalypse Des Animaux, and its sound – a set of poignant, symphonic pieces for Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes and trumpet – gives a glimpse of what was to come. By the early ’80s, the…

“If I like a song by Staind, Creed or KoRn, I’ll admit it…”RYAN ADAMS RYAN ADAMS cocks a boyish half-smile and points out the second-storey window of Electric Lady Studios. “I used to live a block from here, over on 9th, for six years.” He sighs and considers the view for a moment, distracted by nostalgia but ignoring the row of film trailers lining the street below. A TV show is filming round the corner in Washington Square Park, but no one on the street or in the studio seems to care. It might as well be an everyday occurrence in this quiet Village neighbourhood. According to Adams, this is where the rootsy but rootless singer-songwriter feels most comfortable and relaxed – crucial after a long period of personal turmoil.…

“I FOUND out where their offices were. I wagged it from school and walked up and down the street outside hoping to bump into them. Steve Diggle came out and I said, ‘Oh, hello. What are you doing round here?’ I said I was a massive fan, and he said, ‘Do you want some badges?’ I was like, ‘DO I WANT SOME BADGES?’. “I found out where Shelley lived, and me and my mate went round there. I don’t think we knew what we were going to do, but we went round and knocked on the door. Somebody answered and they weren’t that happy about it, obviously. And me and me mate were like, ‘We just wanted to come and say hello…’. We were just intruding, really. “I remember on…

47 ROBERT MITCHUM Calypso Is Like So… CAPITOL, 1957 YOU could compile 101 peculiar albums by actors alone. Some are simply barking: William Shatner’s phasers-to-kill assaults on Dylan and the Beatles on his 1968 debut The Transformed Man remains the best known; but Jason King legend Peter Wyngarde’s eponymous 1970 LP will score you more dandy psych-groove cred. Some stick out because they’re blatantly bad, yet delivered with a brazen panache that demands respect: Anthony Quinn’s 1969 rumination In My Own Way…I Love You needs hearing, and anything bearing the name of Telly Savalas guarantees interesting conversations. Some are odd by dint of being unexpectedly good: David Hemmings’s 1967 Happens features Byrds Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman and a fine version of Gene Clark’s rare “Back Street Mirror”; Anthony Perkins’s…

11 CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & THE MAGIC BAND Trout Mask Replica STRAIGHT, 1969 HIS records remain right out there, a hip currency among deep listeners, and byword for alien and ungovernable rock. It’s why he’s on the cover of this issue of Uncut, which celebrates some of the remotest and most magnificent outposts on the rock’n’roll map. Still, Captain Beefheart had no time for what he saw as modish strangeness. On his second album Strictly Personal there was a song called “Beatle Bones And Smoking Stones” which mocked “Strawberry Fields” and to which John Lennon (formerly a Beefheart fan) apparently took offence. It also featured another tune called “Safe As Milk”, which unambiguously stated Beefheart’s position in its last line: “I may be hungry,” he glowered, “but I sure ain’t weird…”…

WITH their racks of modular Moogs and extended classical interpretations, Emerson, Lake & Palmer certainly embraced the decadence of progressive rock. Surprisingly, though, their biggest hit was recorded live on one microphone, resulting in a raw version the trio were unable to improve upon. “We jammed it in the studio, and the sound engineer had the good sense to record it,” says Greg Lake, speaking to Uncut in one of his final interviews before his death in December 2016. “It went down live on a two-track and that’s the record.” Lake, drummer Carl Palmer and keyboardist Keith Emerson, who passed away in March 2016, were setting up their gear in Switzerland’s Mountain Studios after a long hiatus when they spontaneously began jamming on Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare For The Common Man”.…

Ford shoots smack in the butt and gets crabs from Dee Dee Ramone LITA Ford was the guitar player in The Runaways, an “all-girl teenage band of rebellious jailbait rock-and-roll bitches”, to borrow her own description, recruited at 16 by notorious LA scene-maker Kim Fowley. The Runaways’ sharp rise and fall between 1975 and 1978 is recounted in Ford’s memoir, Living Like A Runaway, with a brisk nonchalance, as though it’s an everyday occurrence for teenage girls to be touring the world, or starring in Japanese TV specials. Names, events and anecdotes trundle off the page with a slightly wearying lack of purpose. There are amorous cameos from John Entwistle – “between wives” – Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Bon Jovi, Paul Cook, Eddie Van Halen, Nikki Sixx – “we had sex…

RETURN TO WATERLOO WIENERWORLD 9/10 Rediscovering Ray Davies’ sole work as a director, a witty attack on ’80s Britain set on a commuter train RAY DAVIES has turned his hand to most art forms during his career, but his sole foray into filmmaking, Return To Waterloo, has barely been seen since it was broadcast on Channel 4 one Sunday evening in November 1984. Conceived three years earlier, though, it is a clever and acerbic piece – largely dialogue-free, its narrative comes delivered in song – with a healthy contempt for the mid-1980s social and political landscape. A soundtrack LP even followed in 1985. Although billed as a Ray Davies solo album, it featured every member of The Kinks except Dave, and included three songs from the band’s 1984’s Word Of…

“We made a whole album in 12 hours from a dead stop... all Tuli songs”PETER STAMPFEL “IT’S taken six years of puttering this idea around,” says Jeffrey Lewis of his plans for a tribute LP to his late friend and mentor Tuli Kupferberg, legendary founder of 1960s counter-cultural pathfinders The Fugs. In December 2016, Lewis went into the studio with Peter Stampfel, 78-year-old veteran member of the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders, and cut 12 of Kupferberg’s songs in a single day. Stampfel, who was in The Fugs’ first lineup in 1964-’65, immediately took to social media to enthuse about the project. “We made a whole album in 12 hours from a dead stop,” he wrote. “All Tuli songs and all but one or two, I think, never recorded…

EVEN by modern standards it was an audacious undertaking, but back in 1970 no-one had seen anything like it. The plan was to fly an airliner packed with 150 journalists from London to New York to witness a live show by young hopefuls Brinsley Schwarz, opening for Van Morrison at the Fillmore, and what transpired became a rock’n’roll legend, of sorts. Flight delays, mechanical faults, several hours of uninterrupted drinking and a speeding motorcade of limousines rear-ending each other as they raced into Manhattan, conspired to make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Now the infamous catalogue of cock-ups is being developed into a partly fictionalised film, The Hype, based on chapters in writer and musician Will Birch’s acclaimed pub rock history, No Sleep Till Canvey Island. “For years, people…

PISSED JEANS have been playing punk rock together for 13 years, but show no signs of growing stale, something frontman Matt Korvette puts down to their semi-pro status. “I don’t think it will ever be our full-time livelihood, so every time we get together it’s fun and fresh rather than us feeling we have to get up and sing the same song for the 10th time that week to put food on the table.” The band’s fifth album, Why Love Now , features all Pissed Jeans’ trademark humour and rage, with Korvette bellowing funny, angry songs about office life and sleazy men. Lydia Lunch came in to produce, while another notable contribution came from author Lindsay Hunter, who delivers a spoken-word passage from the perspective of a…

SHORTLY before the release of the last Antlers LP, 2014’s Familiars , Peter Silberman was afflicted by total hearing loss in one ear, tinnitus and unbearable sensitivity to sounds. “I toured that album in a drastically different state, figuring out work-arounds – ear plugs, early nights and a healthier regimen,” he says. “By the end, I needed to step back and let this condition get better.” From retreat was born Silberman’s first solo album, Impermanence , conceived during months of silent recuperation in upstate New York. “The first music I played afterwards emerged out of quiet. I wanted to make a record that represented that time, where even the slightest hint of sound and music felt very nourishing. It wasn’t something I wanted to…

“I went a little nuts… I wouldn’t leave the house for a month”JOSH T PEARSON WHAT made you want to return to The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads ? The mixing. Through very complicated reasons we weren’t there for the original. It’s always bothered us. We were a pretty punk gut-wrenching sonic assault. The old mix was safe and sound. We were neither. The label [Bella Union]was just getting started. They’d put out their solo records, which weren’t doing so hot. They were going bankrupt, getting evicted from their studio. They told us they couldn’t afford for us to mix it in Texas, but they could do it at their studio in the week or two they had left, and they’d put it out. We took it. We’d been…

IT’S HARD to believe that it’s been nearly three decades since David Byrne’s Brazil Classics series for Luaka Bop sparked wider international interest in the renegades of MPB and Tropicália. It’s even harder to believe that these three albums by Erasmo Carlos remained so little known outside the usual circle of collectors and, of course, the country where he’s been an icon ever since he became one of Brazil’s first responders to Elvis and The Beatles. Born Erasmo Esteves in 1942 in a suburb of Rio De Janeiro, the singer and songwriter became a sensation thanks to the TV show Jovem Guardo (Young Guard). One of his smooth-voiced, sharp-suited co-stars was Roberto Carlos, the lifelong friend and collaborator whose surname Erasmo would adopt as his own stage moniker. Initially disregarded…

BLACK FLAG: Nervous Breakdown On “Rural Free Delivery”, the first EP by the short-lived North Carolina alt.country outfit Whiskeytown, Adams signaled his wide-ranging tastes with this folk-countrified update on the Black Flag classic. The band add some lonesome harmonica and swirling fiddle to inject a bit of rural romanticism to a couplet that sums up Adams’ entire career: “’Cos I’m crazy and I’m hurt/Head on my shoulders, going berserk.” HANK WILLIAMS: Lovesick Blues Shortly after debuting as a solo artist and signing to Lost Highway, Adams proved he could yodel with the best of them on this rootsy tribute to twang paterfamilias Hank Williams. Country may not be high on his list of musical obsessions these days, but he does a fine job making one of the genre’s…

WHAT is the strangest album you own? Something a little outré by The Beatles or Lou Reed? A fantasia of eccentricity from Todd Rundgren, Captain Beefheart or Sun Ra? Or something from the furthest reaches of recorded sound? In this celebration of the Weirdest Records Of All Time, Uncut’s valiant team have hunted down 101 extraordinary albums. They range from canonical classics to neglected curios; the work of street performers and space travellers, Canadian playboys and country superstars with identity crises, recorded everywhere from the Taj Mahal to the Siberian steppes. Over the next 18 pages, you’ll find a rapping Ramone, the reincarnation of Pope Adrian, a Chilean with a singing nose and a wide range of North American frogs. There is a 69-minute powerpop song,…

35 THROBBING GRISTLE 20 Jazz Funk Greats INDUSTRIAL, 1979 THROBBING Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats is surely one of the all-time best record sleeves. The Industrial group once dubbed “wreckers of civilisation” by the Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn here look anything but, their pastel pullovers and comfortable slacks the clothing du jour of young urbanites dressed for a day of leisure in the countryside. The twist being – and this is TG, so of course there’s a twist – the location itself: Beachy Head, a noted suicide spot on the Sussex coast that claims some 20 lives per year. “We made a day of it,” remembers the group’s Cosey Fanni Tutti, who on the day swapped out her army surplus for a modish mini-dress and strappy heels. “We hired that…

1 TODD RUNDGREN A Wizard, A True Star BEARSVILLE, 1973 IF you had to come up with a recipe for musical weirdness, you could do worse than go for an excess of ideas blended with an abundance of fearlessness – or, less charitably, a lack of editing. Few artists explored the variations of this formula like Todd Rundgren, and no Rundgren LP waved its freak flag quite like 1973’s A Wizard, A True Star. The preceding Something/Anything established the producer/songwriter’s soft-rock legend, but the follow-up brought that hit record’s marginal oddities to centre stage in a nearly seamless, genre-promiscuous 22-song suite. The record was so overstuffed, it carried an actual disclaimer; as a single platter clocking in at 55 minutes, listeners were advised to compensate for its thinner-than-normal grooves by…

“NICK Drake came to play in Hull. Me and Andru rounded up some friends and went to see him in this folk club. It was a yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum, tankard beer-swigging club, and he hated it. After the gig, we were standing on the pavement outside having a bit of a natter and Andru noticed him standing underneath a lamp with his guitar. So she said, ‘Ah, forget about those arseholes, we brought some musicians who know what’s what and they loved it.’ She asked if he was waiting to be taken to his accommodation, and he said ‘Nobody said anything about that…’ So Nick came back to our place, opened his guitar case, took out a guitar and three joints, and we were off. We got up the next morning and…

“I’m not here to get fucking angry. I’m here to play fucking music, you dick!” A COUPLE of days after he plays the Concert For Corbyn in Brighton, a hand-scrawled message, ‘A Quiet Revolution’, appears on Paul Weller’s social media sites. It’s his new album’s title, the possible meaning of which is made clearer by Weller’s place at the top of this bill in aid of the Momentum movement and associated causes. The combination of Weller and a left-wing Labour leader has lured Robert Wyatt out of retirement, in a one-off band also including his old compadre Danny Thompson on double-bass and regular Weller drummers Ben Gordelier and Steve Pilgrim (the latter in his other role as guitarist and singer-songwriter). With this acoustic lineup at least, the Quiet Revolution songs…

Best was a man with no support network to help him deal with enormous fame MOONLIGHT Barry Jenkins’ film opens in Miami, just as crack is taking over the housing projects in the ’80s. It is there we first meet Chiron, an undernourished schoolboy nicknamed ‘Little’ who falls in with Juan (Mahershala Ali), the local drug dealer, and his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). Rather than try and groom him, Juan assumes paternal responsibility for the boy. This offers a sharp contrast to Chiron’s relationship with his mother Paula (Naomie Harris), an addict whose erratic behaviour pinballs between neglectful and smothering. Over a meal one night at Juan’s, Chiron asks what a ‘faggot’ is; then asks if he himself is a ‘faggot’. It is one of several flashpoint scenes – but…

THE BEST OF 2016 REVISITED: UNCUT IN DENIAL? Thanks for all the hard work in 2016. Once again I discovered so much new music from your great magazine. I was very lucky to see Wilco twice last year and Schmilco was my favourite album of 2016. But it was female singers that mostly got under my skin in 2016. Laura Gibson, Jennifer O’Connor, PJ Harvey, Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast), Kristine Leschper (Mothers) and Adia Victoria. Then there were the outstanding debut albums of Julia Jacklin and Lucy Dacus. Great stuff. In future, I wonder would you consider, as part of your end of year review, having a Best Debut Albums list? I know there were some in your Top 75 [Uncut, January], but I think a…