Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 i UNCUT

“Feel the power of the rain/Making the garden grow” AS someone born at the end of 1967, I could, at a push, be described as a child of the Summer Of Love. But in this special issue of Uncut , to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that profound cultural uprising, we speak to many architects of peace and love who really were there – and who can, contrary to cliché, remember everything that happened. Eric Burdon, for instance, recalls the splendour of the Monterey Pop festival from that June. “It was so beautiful,” Burdon tells us. “People with facepaint, wearing flowers, and flags with peace. The colours alone were revolutionary. The smell of sage and marijuana was all around. It was the vibe of acceptance, grooving with one another. Old,…

“I was living in extremes and everything that that means” IT may seem unforgivably hackneyed to suggest that the air on Leslie Feist’s new album is thick with tension, but it certainly sounds thick with something. Like a new LP that somehow comes pre-equipped with scratches and crackle, Pleasure is likely to cause audiophiles to fret over their high-end Scandinavian equipment due to the cloud of hiss that often surrounds the deliberately unvarnished performances here. Thankfully, its origins are authentic rather than contrived or accidental. It’s the product both of the natural reverb in the studio where the majority of the new songs were first recorded – a converted church in Woodstock, NY – and of Feist’s preference for singing and playing unencumbered by the headphones and vocal booths she…

8/10 GREAT artists will often fall into two camps. On the one hand are the precocious types – the likes of Orson Welles, Mozart or Rimbaud – who create their best material in the white-hot intensity of their youth before burning out. On the other hand are the plodders and perfectionists – the Cézannes, the Hitchcocks, the Mark Twains – who work at their craft, getting better with age, always tinkering and experimenting with new ideas. Weller is one of those rare types who is both a Welles and a Hitchcock, a Rimbaud and a Twain. He released his angry, precocious debut LP – The Jam’s In The City – 40 years ago this month, and had penned half a dozen deathless national anthems before his 21st birthday. Yet here…

8/10 ANXIETY has always pervaded the work of Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas. “Your heart will break whatever you do,” he trembled on 2010’s “You Won’t B Here”, while the delicate vignettes of his early career involved suicides, disappearances and hints of abuse. In documenting the demons of queer adolescence and existence, Hadreas’ oblique poetry also positioned him in the lineage of so-called “confessional” artists such as Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, whose intensity in mining emotional wounds simultaneously resonated and discomfited. The fear hasn’t entirely gone away on No Shape, his fourth LP as Perfume Genius. Midway through its running time, “Choir” finds him confessing, “I can’t dream/ Something keeps me locked and bodied,” in a theatrical, strangulated whisper as though his words are being dragged out of the music.…

MARK MULCAHY The Possum In The Driveway MEZZOTINT 9/10 Belated solo sequel tones things down to fine effect FOR someone who tends to keep a fairly low profile, Mark Mulcahy has been unusually visible of late. First came his reunion shows with Polaris, initially conceived as house band for ’90s US TV show The Adventures Of Pete & Pete, followed by last year’s surprise return of Miracle Legion, who continue to tour on the back of the 20th anniversary reissue of swansong, Portrait Of A Damaged Family. Now comes the resumption of his solo career, offering a belated sequel to 2013’s Dear Mark J Mulcahy, I Love You. The Possum In The Driveway doesn’t quite take up where its predecessor left off, at least from a textural standpoint. Mulcahy largely…

8/10 IT may seem slightly fanciful to suggest that recording studios have a personality, but when it comes to The Loft, Wilco’s Chicago base, the aura of the place does seem to make its presence known. It is not a conventional studio space. The recording takes place in one corner, there are bunks in another, there is a small lounge area with a television set, and there’s a kitchenette. When Mavis Staples recorded there, she was impressed by the atmosphere of homeliness, and found herself agreeing, against her instincts, to venture into the freezing stairwell to record “Wonderful Saviour”. Tweedy thought the acoustics of the stairs would add something, and they did. But mostly, the impression Staples had of the recording process was that she was left to her own…

A FEW years back, Thurston Moore was new to London and writing songs like “Detonation”, a fiery paean to ‘70s “urban guerrillas” the Angry Brigade. But new album Rock’n’Roll Consciousness comes from a quite different place. This is a serene and spiritual record, replete with references to mystics, oracles and sacred energies. “It was recorded with this group of musicians whom I feel are at this point telepathic and connected to me,” Moore tells Uncut . “Steve Shelley is a brother, obviously – we’ve grown up together in Sonic Youth. His relationship to Deb Googe has been nothing short of psychic. James is the youngest member, but I feel is an old soul. We’ve established a sound now which I feel is…

8/10 “LOVE’S a violent word, don’t you forget it,” John Moreland cautions on “Old Wounds”, one of several standouts on his fourth solo LP, Big Bad Luv. This Oklahoma singer-songwriter writes songs that hurt. He wrings poetry from commonplace words and wisdom from dusty Midwestern country rock, chronicling tangled relationships and dead-end small towns, crushing regrets and dying hopes. These songs form a roadmap of emotional scars and bruises, but remarkably, Moreland never sounds grim or cynical. Like so many of his heroes, he finds some transcendence in heartache. “If we don’t bleed, it don’t feel like a song.” Moreland has been spilling blood for most of his life. Born in Texas, raised in Kentucky, and based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he spent his teenage years in a series of DIY…

9/10 From the start, listeners expecting an update of Coltrane’s cosmic jazz will be in for a shock LARGE studio complexes can often contain multitudes, but rarely can there have been stranger neighbours than the occupants of Rumbo, in Los Angeles, in 1987. In Studio A, a local hair-metal band were reaching some kind of apotheosis of rock decadence. In Studio B, the bright-eyed devotees of a local ashram would turn up each day to make delirious music, chanting prayers to the Hindu gods over transporting synths. The product of Studio A, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction, would sell 30 million copies and become one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. The product of Studio B, Alice Coltrane’s Divine Songs, would be sold only as a cassette through…

“EYES Of Man” is the final song on Chuck Berry’s final album, simply titled Chuck , and it’s a doozy. As his band pounds out a slow and supremely lowdown blues vamp, as his guitar struts with the strong legs of a man at most one-third his age, Berry unspools his own personal philosophy, the sum wisdom of his 90 years, truths he’s been mulling since he was carrying his guitar around in a gunny sack. His language is grandiose, with talk of temples and pillars and empires, perfectly apropos for one of the most joyously self-mythologising first-generation rock’n’roll stars. Berry dispenses deep thoughts like Halloween candy: “Those who do not know and do not know that they do not know… are foolish. Avoid them.”…

“I was trying to be a different person making this record”ROBIN PECKNOLD “I’M all that I need,” Robin Pecknold sings, low and hushed, gently picking the first few guitar notes from the first song on Fleet Foxes’ first record in six years. Even in this grey Seattle practice room – windowless and anonymous, chock-a-block with music instruments, criss-crossed with cords, littered with empty salmon jerky packets – the moment is starkly and powerfully intimate, full of weight and portent. The five other musicians in the room become in very quiet, awaiting the beat when they all join in the song together. And then Pecknold is flattened by a train. More accurately, by a sample of a train, which chugs along in the background of “I Am All That I Need”/“Arroyo…

PETE Townshend is not necessarily rock’s most sentimental spirit, but even he looks back on the Monterey International Pop Festival with fondness. “This was my first time in California, and that in itself was quite a high,” he recalls. “It was the weather, the easy atmosphere of everyone who lived there, the sense that this was the beginning of an adventure. There were lots of very beautiful people backstage, obviously high on acid, gazing into each other’s eyes, dancing like twats.” At Monterey, The Who introduced themselves to America via noise and fury: their lively set culminated in the band destroying their instruments. Startled audiences thought they’d seen everything... until Jimi Hendrix, following The Who, set fire to his guitar. The event, co-organised by The Mamas & Papas’ John Phillips,…

IT’S 90 minutes before Bob Dylan begins his 2017 European tour at Stockholm’s Waterfront Auditorium. He’s chosen April Fools’ Day for his first show in six months, and the first since his controversial Nobel Prize For Literature was celebrated – equally controversially – in his absence, here in the home city of the prize’s Academy. Dozens of diehard fans are already milling outside the entrance of the Waterfront’s 21st-century building, the upper storeys of which bristle with a porcupine quill design. Although many are veterans of over 100 Dylan shows, there’s still a frisson of anticipation. Word has spread that Dylan has finally agreed to receive his Nobel medal and diploma in a “private, intimate” ceremony at some point today. Staff inside the venue suggest that it happened right here…

“EXCALIBUR Sound was the darkest, dingiest place imaginable,” says composer Angelo Badalamenti, recalling the Manhattan studio where he and David Lynch produced much of Twin Peaks’ music. “The lights would flicker, the electricity would go in and out, like something from a David Lynch movie. When we went to see it, there was a terrible odour to the room. It was tiny, the mice were even running around hunchback. But David loved it – he said, ‘This place creates such a beautiful mood for us, Angelo, doesn’t it?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess…’” From such humble surroundings came a wealth of beautiful and dark music; both for Julee Cruise’s dream-pop masterpiece, 1989’s Floating Into The Night, and for Twin Peaks, Lynch’s maverick TV series, which returns for its third season…

THE concert at London’s Royal College Of Art on November 5, 1976 was billed, aptly, as A Night Of Treason. It was the kind of night mythologised as a crucible of revolution, when The Clash and The Subway Sect began to make good on the promises of British punk. One of the key early dissemblers of these myths was a journalist called John Ingham (though in those days he spelt his name Jonh). Besides writing for Sounds, Ingham had also begun taking colour photographs of the bands he loved, capturing the action-painted splendour of Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon and the soon-to-depart Terry Chimes. Black-and-white newspapers, however, meant that Ingham’s vibrant shots were never used and have remained unseen until now, with the arrival of Spirit Of 76: London…

“This is a random free-for-all of songs we’re excited just to hear again”JENNIFER HERREMA “IT was totally the money,” says Neil Hagerty, with refreshing candour, when asked what finally convinced him and Jennifer Herrema to reanimate Royal Trux after resisting – despite numerous offers – for 14 years. The Trux’s set at Santa Ana’s Berserktown II festival in 2015 was a reunion that no-one believed would ever happen. Hagerty and singer Herrema were defined almost as much by their combustible relationship (not for nothing was one album titled Cats And Dogs) and struggles with addiction as their music – an art-abraded synthesis of vintage boogie and scuzz/noise rock that set them entertainingly apart from their ’90s grunge peers. But the California appearance proved to be no one-off cash-in. Since then,…

8/10 BRAIN Records was founded in 1972 by Bruno Wendel and Günter Körber, former A&R men for the legendary Ohr. Home to early albums by Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, Ohr had set the template for Krautrock: sonically adventurous, politically dissident, intensely psychedelic. But Ohr founder Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s scattershot approach to artist management and increasing interest in LSD set the label on an uneven keel, and Brain was Wendel and Körber’s attempt to take this nascent German counterculture, add a splash of business acumen and build a new label that might stand alongside the likes of Island, Harvest or Vertigo. Brain might never quite have become a household name outside of Germany, but this lavish eight-CD box of label highlights, remastered by Eroc of psychedelic rockers Grobschnitt, suggests they…

“I FIRST heard Chuck Berry in 1955. In high school we had these house parties and dances and we would play Chuck Berry, Big Joe Turner, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and all those guys. I started a band in 1956 – just a local band. We never went anywhere, and I played in a few groups until I got in with [St Louis R&B singer/ guitarist] Billy Peek. We played a lot of Chuck Berry tunes. In 1976 Billy went with Rod Stewart, and Chuck said, ‘Why don’t you play bass for me?’ How could you refuse? “On my first show with Chuck, I played the songs the way I had played them with Billy Peek. Chuck would come over and say to me, ‘Can you play this figure?’ And…

WITH frontman Robin Pecknold chasing other pursuits both musical and academic, the remaining members of Fleet Foxes turned their attention to other projects. After moving to New York, Skyler Skjelset toured as a sideman with a number of bands, notably The Walkmen and Beach House, and released a handful of tracks, including the epic instrumental jam “Caul” in 2014. Under the name Poor Moon, Christian Wargo recorded an EP and an LP of Fleet Fox-y folk-rock, both released in 2012 via Sub Pop. More recently, he relaunched his indie-pop band Crystal Skulls with a new lineup. Casey Wescott played in Poor Moon and contributed to Fear Fun , the 2012 debut album by Father John Misty (aka former Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tillman). Morgan Henderson recorded…

TO celebrate the return of Fleet Foxes, we asked Robin Pecknold to compile this month’s musical accompaniment. This is the gripping and eclectic 15-track odyssey that he came up with. “These songs were among our guiding lights during the writing and recording of Crack-Up,” Pecknold says, “either stylistically or holistically, the notes the artist chose or the worldview evident in their music, an expansiveness or an energy or a humour or a particular kind of beauty.” To listen to our exclusively compiled playlist, visit bit.ly/Uncut_FleetFoxes 1 TODD RUNDGREN International Feel The baroque chamber pop of Rundgren and Van Dyke Parks has long been detectable in the music of Fleet Foxes, so it makes sense for Robin’s selection to begin with the anthemic weirdness of “International Feel”. From the Runt’s 1973…

THE Beach Boys were due to headline the Saturday night, but pulled out late on, largely as Brian Wilson wasn’t in the right state of mind. Even now, Mike Love struggles to explain why. “There was incredible dysfunctionality within our group at that point in time,” he says. “I think we all had our reasons for not coming together to do that. Carl was concerned about his draft status and Brian was on the board of the show, but he was in no shape to do anything. It was not a great moment in our career. We missed out on a cultural event.” The Beach Boys weren’t the only band who failed to appear. Dionne Warwick double-booked and couldn’t break her commitment, and no-one seems to know quite why The…

DYLAN’S autobiography, Chronicles , makes clear the importance of Greenwich Village’s Folklore Center to the singer’s early growth. It was a “citadel of Americana folk music”, he recalled, “a shoe boxed sized institute”, whose irascible proprietor, Izzy Young, helped him on his way. Young moved to Stockholm in 1973 where he still presides over the Center’s Swedish incarnation. Folk-related books, pamphlets and papers are piled high in a way Dylan would recognise. A sardonic old-timer, born in the Bronx, Young still connects the Dylan of 1961 – when Young put on his first public concert at Carnegie Chapter Hall – to the Dylan who visits Stockholm in 2017. But his thoughts on his former protégé are bittersweet. “I still get free tickets for everything he does,” he…

Live, the timbre of her voice is rich, strong, and almost fruity LAURA Marling glows under a spotlight in the middle of the stage. She is wearing a full-length cream gown, her hair is bright white and her skin is the colour of milk. Green leaves creep up her microphone stand and stage equipment. Is she a bride? Surely that would be too traditional for a writer keen to upend female archetypes. A spectre? Like the cloaked ghoul and her band of bushbabies in surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s The Ancestor, one of Marling’s ‘Holy Trinity’ of inspirations? Nope, too bleak; Marling strives to rewrite the idea of the ‘tragic woman’. Well, then, perhaps she’s an archangel, but of the old-school variety, neither male nor female. Her latest, sixth, album…

IT WAS 5O YEARS AGO TODAY! THE BEATLES’ SGT PEPPER & BEYOND Anyone looking for a quick take-out about the recording sessions for Sgt Pepper, here’s one from Tony Bramwell, the former head of Apple Records. “It was the most boring time you ever had in your life,” he says in Alan G Parker’s new documentary. It’s a welcome moment of levity in Parker’s long film that has much to say and takes its time in telling it. For the large part, it is a familiar story – The Beatles stop touring in 1966, retire to the comparatively stable environs of Abbey Road Studio Two, expand their collective creative consciousness, Sgt Pepper arrives. But Parker’s intention is not to find a fresh spin on a well-told tale but instead to…

THE ROLLING STONES Olé Olé Olé! A Trip Across Latin America EAGLE ROCK 8/10 FOLLOWING a limited theatrical release and a Christmas airing on Channel 4, this companion piece to last year’s Havana Moon finds a home on DVD and Blu-Ray. A relatively straight recording of the Stones’ historic Cuban concert of March 25 2016, Havana Moon placed the viewer onstage and in the audience. Paul Dugdale’s documentary, on the other hand, offers a glimpse behind the scenes as the band’s small army of fixers battle to pull together the Cuban show while Jagger, Richards & co sweep regally through nine Latin American cities. Olé Olé Olé! follows the Stones from the final day of rehearsals in Los Angeles – “there’s always a bit of rust to rub off,” reckons…

JAMES COTTON Mississippi bluesman (1935-2017) IT’S fair to surmise that James Cotton understood the blues from an early age. Raised in a Mississippi cotton plantation, he was orphaned at nine years old, at which point his uncle introduced him to Sonny Boy Williamson. Cotton had learned to play harmonica by listening to Williamson’s theme tune on King Biscuit Time. “I walked up and played it for him,” Cotton recalled. “And I played it note for note.” Williamson took the youngster under his wing and the pair soon became inseparable, touring the juke joints of the South. When Sonny Boy eventually left to join his estranged wife in Wisconsin, Cotton gigged with Howlin’ Wolf and made his recording debut at Sun Records in 1953, with “Straighten Up Baby”. His…

“We had to play all the Western pop songs, but with an Ethiopian twist”HAILU MERGIA IF you’re flying into Washington DC, check out who is picking you up from the airport. If he’s blowing a plastic melodica while he’s waiting in the taxi rank, the chances are that he’s Hailu Mergia, a legend of Ethiopian music. “I’ve been driving cabs part-time ever since I came to America in the early 1980s,” he says. “I do airport jobs, where you often have to wait half an hour between fares. It’s why I keep a Yamaha keyboard in my trunk and a melodica on the dashboard, to practise while I’m waiting!” Born in 1946, Mergia has spent half his life in the States, where he’s combined cabbing with live dates and recordings.…

“Supertramp were a faceless band. I had to work hard to forge an identity”ROGER HODGSON ROGER Hodgson is calling from a hotel room in Brazil, where he is touring before he plays two nights at the Royal Albert Hall in May. The former Supertramp songwriter still marvels at the doors that remain open almost 40 years after Supertramp’s mega-selling Breakfast In America album. “It’s amazing that I can tour everywhere and get an audience and it gets more amazing each year to see how these songs have lasted,” he says. “It’s gratifying to come back now and play two shows at the Albert Hall. It’s very emotional playing my home country after all this time and to still have an audience that is growing.” It wasn’t always easy for Hodgson,…

After touring in support of Metals for three years, did you feel the need to take a step back from music and reassess where you were at? Absolutely. I’d felt I’d made an achievement and, though I felt that achievement was done at my own pace and with my own timing, I had to climb back down the ladder and it had gotten a lot higher than I was comfortable with. So I descended it in a dignified manner until I felt safe again to take a breath. I really was thinking, “Do I want to continue?” I did spend a couple of years waiting to be struck by lightning and to feel as compelled to do something else just like I was to play music…

BETWEEN filming a video in some woods near Slough with his muse Jesse Kanda, DJing in Milan and performing at the Ceremonia festival in Toluca, Mexico with Björk, the flamboyant producer Alejandro Ghersi has enjoyed a fairly typical week as he prepares to release his latest album, Arca . It is self-titled as, after two albums of shape-shifting electronics, we hear his singing voice for the first time as he lays himself bare. “It wasn’t a calculated decision, more of a drive inside of me that I decided to honour,” says Ghersi of this new direction. “This path I chose feels like one that would most lead to my growth as a musician, and it’s healing as a person.” A cult figure on London’s club scene,…

“IN a non genre-relating sense of the word,” Irma Orm says of the description ‘gothic’, “it brings to mind the notion of something that is both dark and beautiful. This is to me the definition of beauty: the surrender to, and elevation of, imperfection.” The reclusive Swedish songwriter is quick to question the adjective’s negative connotations, however, arguing it’s “used by some as an attempt to diminish expressions of darkness coming from a woman, or anything that is both feminine and dark, to control it. From my perspective, the low status of the term relates to the low status of feminine expressions in general. It has a misogynist ring to it in that way.” Her argument is as powerful as her debut album, mixed and mastered by Greg Chandler of…

“RECONNECTING with musician friends and building new relationships on the backs of these new songs has been deeply fulfilling to say the least,” says Land Of Talk leader Elizabeth Powell, as she returns seven years after the superb Cloak And Cipher . The hiatus was a tough one, Powell having been occupied by family matters after her father’s stroke – it wasn’t until last year that she could start writing and performing again. The new songs that make up Life After Youth come from “a more meditative place, where to soothe and reassure is the aim,” says Powell. “[ But ] it always takes me seven years to figure out what any song is about.” The road to Life…

FOLLOWING six albums of jolly cosmic wig-outs, Pond frontman Nick Allbrook figured it was time to consider his place in the world. “It’s a strange and separated and highly privileged life, being a white male between the ages of 25 and 45 living in Perth, Western Australia,” he admits, a position he reflects on with honesty and sarcasm throughout terrific new album The Weather . “We’re befuddled, ignorant onlookers, just trying to live good lives.” It’s accompanied by Pond’s poppiest batch of songs to date. “We’ve been digging pop music for ages, but we kept getting distracted and veering off into industrial noise or some shit. We were in a good zone this time and it just came out cleaner and more concise.” The Weather…

“On tour, the songs continue to evolve and shift, sometimes dramatically…”JIM SCLAVUNOS UNCUT: The trajectory of the Bad Seeds is a complicated story. What was the hardest part of telling it over the course of just two (or three, on the deluxe version) discs? Warren Ellis: What to leave out is always difficult the bigger the catalogue becomes. That was part of the idea behind making the compilations different for the two- and three-set editions. The band has changed sound so often and hopefully that’s reflected on Lovely Creatures. As is the variety of songs Nick has written over the years. It’s by no means definitive. The DVD collects some incredible live footage – some looks to be transferred from VHS and others from YouTube. How does the Bad Seeds’…

8/10 HAVING come through the same secondary school – Shawlands Academy – as Moors Murderer Ian Brady, John Martyn was wont to present himself as a Glasgow tough in his darker days, a mask that suited him well as alcohol and drug use exacerbated his meanest tendencies. The bumbling “curly-haired child” that contemporary Michael Chapman recalled meeting in Les Cousins in the late 1960s morphed into a carousing monster as his musical reputation grew. This unplugged two-CD remix of Martyn’s career shows that he wrote some of the most luminously beautiful love songs of his age (“Couldn’t Love You More”, here stripped of its One World varnish, for a start), but it is a truth that sits uneasily alongside his reputation as one of jazz-folk’s most notorious ratbags. His first…

“I PLAYED with a lot of the older guys here in St Louis, including Oliver Sain, Ike Turner and Mr Johnnie Johnson, who played piano with Chuck Berry. That was what got my career going. I started playing with Chuck when I subbed in for one of his regular drummers one night. That was 11 years ago. I went home and studied a lot of his stuff that was from before my time. I remember “My Ding-A-Ling”. That would have been ’72 or ’73. My momma kept asking me, Why do you like that song? Well, he’s talking about my ding-a-ling. I got one of those! No, not that kind, boy! “Chuck – I always called him Mr B – always knew what he wanted, and that’s what I liked…

AMETICULOUSLY crafted album, Crack-Up is loaded with literary and musical references. Pecknold explains some of the allusions: Igor Stravinsky The title track closes the album with a sharp blast of ambient brass that he describes as “a straight Stravinsky rip. The horns are from Symphonies Of Wind Instruments , which I was really into.” Composed in 1920, the nine-minute piece was dedicated to Stravinsky’s mentor, Claude Debussy. Gnawa Pecknold was heavily influenced by this Islamic spiritual music from North Africa. “I heard about it from Morgan and I went to Morocco and visited the main guild for this music. Gnawa songs are long, usually 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes longer. Sometimes they’ll play a song for an entire evening.…

“My first experience of UFO was on acid; it was wonderful”JENNY FABIAN FOR Joe Boyd, the highpoint of the 1960s came at 3am on Saturday July 1, 1967 in the basement of an Irish club in central London. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Robert Fraser had been sentenced for possession of drugs and the freaks were revolting. Boyd co-ran the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road in the capital, and that evening a procession of protestors left the club to march on the offices of The News Of The World, whom they held responsible for the bust. Point made, they returned to the UFO to watch psychedelic band Tomorrow perform “Revolution”. “Twink, their drummer, led the parade and when we got back Tomorrow played the most amazing set,” says Boyd.…

IN spring 1967, Bernie Krause and Paul Beaver were trying to interest the music scene in the new Moog synthesiser. “We pooled our funds to make it happen and we were nearly broke when the idea of setting up a booth at the festival – as a kind of last stand – occurred to us,” says Krause. This proved to be their saving, with a number of rock stars including Monkee Micky Dolenz being sufficiently impressed by the Moog to snap one up. “A few artists came by for demos and we sold a few. Some came in disguises so they wouldn’t be noticed. Those who bought the Moog were often so stoned that they couldn’t figure out how to patch the sounds so we ended up covering lots of…

The two sets pile sonic layers onto songs rather than redrawing them SINCE Yo La Tengo turned 30 in December 2014, the band have spent a lot of time pretending to be someone else. Their most recent LP, 2015’s Stuff Like That There, was mostly acoustic covers in the style of 1990’s Fakebook. Since then, they’ve played limited-run gigs as The Velvet Underground, as the backing band for Robyn Hitchcock, and as performers of experimental composer Alvin Lucier. A late March evening in Manhattan’s Town Hall finally presents the indie-rock perennials with an opportunity to turn their reinterpretative powers selfward. Billed as And Then Yo La Tengo Turned Itself Inside Out, the night promises an expanded ensemble and an improvisational approach to songs from their voluminous back catalogue. Stocked with…

“NOBODY EVER PLAYED AIR HAMMOND?” I’ve read Uncut for long enough to know that “nobody ever played air Hammond” [Uncut, April 2017] wasn’t meant to be at all disrespectful to Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, the man who made the most thrilling noise in rock music. Thing is, it’s not entirely true… Hammersmith, Joe Lynn Turner-era Purple, and a perfectly good gig that has never quite ignited. It’s an all-seater; a bunch of newish, OK-ish material, and Ritchie Blackmore is in full glowering mode. Having played their set, the band troop off to a respectful reception, before reappearing for the inevitable planned encore of “Smoke On The Water”. Except that Ritchie doesn’t reappear. So the band just shrug and play it anyway. They play “Smoke On The Water”, but without the…