Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-2018 i UNCUT

I see a little silhouetto of a mag! Just in time for the new Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – and accordingly bulging with new and updated content – is our Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to Freddie Mercury and co. Expect forensic analysis of the band’s recorded output and classic yarns aplenty... In shops on October 22 is our celebration of the legacy of the New Musical Express . NME: The 100 Greatest Covers explores 60 years of music through the lens of some of the greatest photography, magazine design and journalism in the business… Music writing festival Louder Than Words returns to Manchester’s Principal Hotel over the weekend of November 9-11. Speakers include punk legend Jordan, OMD’s Andy McCluskey, Wedding Present majordomo Dave…

“THIS morning I woke up at 5.30 or 6am,” says Jeff Goldblum, “and I went down to the hotel lobby before anyone was there and used their beautiful Steinway piano. I felt like I played better than I ever have…” For any of us not lucky enough to be woken by a Hollywood star playing jazz piano, fear not – Goldblum, at the age of 66, is releasing his debut album in November. Recorded live with his band, The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, at the historic Capitol Studios in LA, with guests including Imelda May and Sarah Silverman, it’s a laidback set of classic jazz, as stylish and charismatic as the man himself. “It feels amazing,” he says, considering his debut LP. “Mmm, yes yes, well, I love music. I was…

MARIANNE FAITHFULL Broken English ISLAND, 1979 Marianne checked out in one era and woke up in another, a fact unconcealed by the gritty material and unflinchingly modern production here. Contributors include the late Heathcote Williams, while classics include “Witches’ Song” and her take on Shel Silverstein’s “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan”. 8/10 MARIANNE FAITHFULL Dangerous Acquaintances ISLAND, 1981 Thought disappointingly accessible on release, tunes such as “Sweetheart” – first among a more substantial proportion of co-writes – have dated surprisingly well, as reggae-influenced synthpop goes. Closer “Truth Bitter Truth” is certainly no sellout. 7/10 MARIANNE FAITHFULL Before The Poison ANTI-, 2005 Catches some major talents in a collaborative mode, for an album that plays to everyone’s strengths. Nick Cave and Damon Albarn are among the marquee names, but it’s the…

Disc: 1  1 A Storm That Took Everything 2 The Hooks 3 Suspirium 4 Belongings Thrown In A River 5 Has Ended 6 Klemperer Walks 7 Open Again 8 Sabbath Incantation 9 The Inevitable Pull 10 Olga’s Destruction (Volk tape) 11 The Conjuring Of Anke 12 A Light Green 13 Unmade 14 The Jumps Disc: 2  1 Volk 2 The Universe Is Indifferent 3 The Balance Of Things 4 A Soft Hand Across Your Face 5 Suspirium Finale 6 A Choir Of One 7 Synthesizer Speaks 8 The Room Of Compartments 9 An Audition 10 Voiceless Terror 11 The Epilogue Produced by: Thom Yorke & Sam Petts-Davies Personnel includes: Thom Yorke (vocals, various instruments), Noah Yorke (drums), Pasha Mansurov (flute), London Contemporary Orchestra…

Why a covers album? I’ve always loved doing a cover, especially one that’s not standard for somebody who plays my kind of music. It’s an opportunity to do something you shouldn’t do or might not seem a good idea. I didn’t want to do a bunch of garage songs or psych songs. That would be boring. It’s all fun – it’s not a serious record. What do you like about covers? It raises the questions of what makes the song. Is it the lyric, the melody, the voice, the arrangement, the instruments? These are all questions you think about when doing a cover. You can rebuild a song and make it sound completely different, but because the lyrics are the same, you can call it a cover. Is it about…

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit (Isbell, right) were the big winners at the recent AmericanaFest Awards in Nashville. Not content with receiving the best album gong for The Nashville Sound , they made off with Song Of The Year for “If We Were Vampires”. Elsewhere, Tyler Childers was voted Best Emerging Artist, Rosanne Cash took home the Spirit Of America/Free Speech In Music Award and there were Lifetime Achievement nods for Buddy Guy and Irma Thomas. And there was universal approval when the main prize – Artist Of The Year – went to the great John Prine. As for studio business, January 2019 sees the UK release of Kaia Kater’s follow-up to the astounding Nine Pin . Newly signed to SMITHSONIAN…

The Beatles (‘The White Album’) APPLE CORPS LTD./CAPITOL/UME REISSUE OF THE MONTH 9/10 IN 2012, Twitter was briefly united in mirth around the subject of Ecce Homo, a fresco of Jesus Christ found in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain. An elderly parishioner, troubled by Christ’s faded and flaking visage, decided to restore the image herself – a fix that came out so poorly that, at first, authorities suspected vandalism. That the story resonated was probably down to two lessons: good faith doesn’t necessarily make for good decisions; and that just because something’s old, doesn’t necessarily mean it requires a refresh. These sorts of thoughts must have troubled Giles Martin – son of George – as he sat down to remix Sgt Pepper from the original master tapes…

THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS CBS, 1980 The eponymous Roxy-meets-Pistols debut in post-punk’s class of 1980, a driving, dark and majestically sensual document of the self-styled “beautiful chaos”. TALK TALK TALK CBS, 1981 Richard Butler’s favourite Furs album. “She Is Mine” and “All Of This And Nothing” introduced vulnerability alongside hurtling sexual anthems and, of course, “Pretty In Pink”. FOREVER NOW COLUMBIA, 1982 Tim Butler prefers their Todd Rundgrenproduced third. The slimmed-down quartet recalibrated alt-rock for the US market and scored a breakthrough hit with “Love My Way”. MIRROR MOVES COLUMBIA, 1984 With producer Keith Forsey’s drum machines replacing Vince Ely, the Furs’ mighty fourth takes UK alternative (Sisters Of Mercy/The Chameleons) onto US FM radio. MIDNIGHT TO MIDNIGHT COLUMBIA, 1987 Loved or hated by both fans and band, the ’80s big…

ONLY five test pressings are known to exist of the version of Blood On The Tracks that Dylan pulled from release at the eleventh hour. Its New York takes of “Simple Twist Of Fate”, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, “Meet Me In The Morning”, “Shelter from the Storm” and “Buckets Of Rain” remained on the refashioned album. But within weeks of this official release, the excised versions of its other five songs also reached record stores’ shadier racks. The bootleg Joaquin Antique (a pun on the “She Belongs To Me” lyric “ walking antique” ) boasted a pen-and-ink drawing of Dylan in profile. Listeners heard a rawness to these New York tracks that had been scattered between…

“I NAMED it after a Mark Rothko painting. I just liked the colours! I saw some Rothko pieces in the Tate Modern, there’s a Rothko room and it’s so beautiful. For a lot of people my music is really serene, music that they go to sleep to, or have sex to, which is weird… but there’s a lot of violence in there, I think, and that’s interesting to me. And it’s the same with Rothko. “Both ‘Call-To-Arms’ and ‘Rank & File’ are in 7/8 time. ‘Call-To-Arms’ is very Brazilian-inspired, I wanted to make a very Brazilian song and then I wanted to make a rock song, so then I wanted to make it both. I was listening to a lot of Milton Nascimento when I wrote that song – I’ve…

FAHRENHEIT 11/9 OPENS OCTOBER 19 Michael Moore – for it is he – takes on Trump, the far right and gun control in his latest doc. ORPHEÉ OPENS OCTOBER 19 Cocteau’s mesmerising riff on the myth of Orpheus, restored and back in cinemas. Honestly, go and see it. VS. OPENS OCTOBER 19 UK battle-rap as a method for redemption in Ed Lilly’s hard-hitting debut, set in Southend. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY OPENS OCTOBER 24 Scaramouche! The much-delayed Freddie/Queen biopic arrives. POSSUM OPENS OCTOBER 26 British chiller, where a disgraced children’s puppeteer returns home. Sean Harris and Alun Armstrong star. PRINCE OF DARKNESS OPENS OCTOBER 26 John Carpenter’s Nigel Knealeinspired horror reissued alongside They Live and The Fog . SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ OPENS OCTOBER 31 Kula Shaker’s…

GEOFF Emerick, who has died of a heart attack aged 72, was a recording engineer whose skill and foresight enabled one of the greatest leaps forward in pop history. He was just 15 when he secured a job as assistant engineer at EMI, in the same week that The Beatles first rocked up at Abbey Road studios. Promoted to first engineer in 1966, Emerick’s first task was to make John Lennon’s voice sound like the chanting of distant Tibetan monks on “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which he achieved by processing the singer’s voice through a revolving Leslie speaker. “He used to do really weird things that were slightly illegitimate, with our support and approval,” said George Martin in The Beatles Anthology. After helping to realise the revolutionary soundworld of Sgt Pepper’s…

Negative Capability PANTA REI ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 THE poet John Keats couldn’t have kept pace with Marianne Faithfull for long. Dedicated to immortalising in art the fleeting nature of beauty, he was himself not destined to stick around for long. In an imagined Rolling Stones of romantic writing, he was no Mick (Wordsworth) or Keith (De Quincey), still out pleasing the crowds with 80 in their sights. Instead, he left the party early, checking out at the altogether more Brian-like age of 25. In his short time, though, Keats wrote not only enduring poems but also a considerable correspondence, during which he coined a phrase that concerns us here: “negative capability”. It was a quality he found in the best writers, who resisted simple answers and could conjure…

THE AINTS! The Church Of Simultaneous Existence ABC MUSIC 8/10 A new album of old Saints songs The Aints began in the early ’90s as a vehicle for former Saints guitarist Ed Kuepper to revisit the punky furies of his youth. The version of the Aints with the exclamation mark added were formed by Kuepper last year in celebration of the 40th anniversary of The Saints’ influential debut album, (I’m) Stranded. The Church Of The Simultaneous Existence is a defrosting of songs Kuepper wrote at the time, and they’re outstanding. The Saints’ patented punk/soul sound swaggers afresh on “Red Aces” and the title track, and “Country Song In G” is one of Kuepper’s finest ballads under any name: high praise. ANDREW MUELLER DAVID ALLRED The Transition ERASED TAPES 6/10 Stripped-back…

Ghost Forests THREE LOBED 8/10 THE concept of union via agreement is what underpins any collaboration; but particularly in the case of a duo, where without majority rule the individuals’ energies, aims, intents and methodologies must match up if they’re going to get anything at all off the ground. It’s a simple truth – and one that holds for singer-songwriter Meg Baird and harpist Mary Lattimore. In fact, they’re so much on the same creative page – and long-term friends to boot – you wonder why recording an album together has taken them this long. Respectively the co-founder of Espers and Heron Oblivion and creator of three solo albums, and the go-to harp player for Thurston Moore and Sunburned Hand Of The Man, among others, who’s released two solo full-lengths,…

How did you become so enthralled by Dionysus? To be honest, my prior viewpoint of Dionysus was very much steeped in Christian morality. It’s very negative – it’s all about hedonism. So my view was tainted until I read Nietzsche’s The Birth Of Tragedy . Then I read several books and realised, “Wow, Dionysus is a very complicated deity.” So it’s been a wonderful journey researching this. In combining all the musical traditions here, did you hope to show how many cultures have their own versions of the Dionysian rites? That certainly was a consideration. If you travel a great deal and immerse yourself in different cultures, you do pick up on those patterns that exist, especially in terms of the ways we celebrate life and death.…

Fleet Foxes 12” Sun It Rises White Winter Hymnal Ragged Wood Tiger Mountain Peasant Song Quiet Houses He Doesn’t Know Why I Heard Them Stirring Your Protector Meadowlarks Blue Ridge Mountains Oliver James Sun Giant EP 10” Sun Giant Drops In The River English House Mykonos Innocent Son The Fleet Foxes EP 10” She Got Dressed In The Hot Hot Rays Anyone Who’s Anyone Textbook Love So Long In The Headstrong Icicle Tusk B-Sides and Rarities 10” False Knight On The Road Silver Dagger White Lace Regretfully Isles Ragged Wood (transition basement sketch) He Doesn’t Know Why (basement demo) English House (basement demo) Hot Air (basement sketch)…

NIRVANA All Of Us, 1968 Pop-psych sophisticates Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos made rock’s first concept album (1967’s The Story Of Simon Simopath) for Island, but went one better second time out. All Of Us’s first three tracks – “Rainbow Chaser”, “Tiny Goddess” and “The Touchables” – are gentle giants. SPOOKY TOOTH It’s All About, 1968 Carlisle’s only gift to psychedelia, Art sold pitiful quantities of their Island LP Supernatural Fairy Tales and regenerated as the harder-hitting Spooky Tooth. Their debut – kicking off with a hysterical rethink of Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” – recasts them as Traffic with dials turned to 11. WHITE NOISE An Electric Storm, 1969 BBC Radiophonic Workshop boffins Delia Derbyshire, David Vorhaus and David Hodgson put Britain’s first synthesiser of note, the VCS3, through its…

There are new albums from Jean-Michel Jarre, Josephine Foster and The Bevis Frond to explore, but the real treats next time round come from the archives. Massive Attack’s Mezzanine gets the fancy reissue treatment, alongside the likes of Calexico’s The Black Light and Be Bop Deluxe’s Sunburst Finish , while David Bowie’s excellent Glastonbury 2000 headline set gets a full release for the first time. Meanwhile, The Moody Blues and Big Brother & The Holding Company celebrate 50 years of, respectively, In Search Of The Lost Chord and Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills . TOM.PINNOCK@TI-MEDIA.COM…

“THE last two Mavis Staples records – and the Pops record that we did – are very similar to this batch of records that we’ve been talking about. It’s mostly Spencer and I doing a lot of the recording. The building of my ability to work in the studio in that solitary fashion is more closely related to the Mavis records. But in general I see those artists as all having strong, fully formed identities. My desire is to make a record when you can hear that as clearly as possible and you hear as little of me as possible. “That’s what sets those artists apart, truthfully. They can be put in a room without anything other than their instrument. They don’t need a specific backing. They’re elemental. It’s always…

INITIALLY a single from 1981’s Talk Talk Talk , “Pretty In Pink”’s curious second life began after it found a superfan in actor Molly Ringwald. “She really liked that album, and ‘Pretty In Pink’ in particular,” Richard Butler explains. “She’d just made Sixteen Candles [ 1984 ] with John Hughes and went back to him and said, ‘Listen to this song. You’ve got to write a movie about it.’” Thus, the song inspired Pretty In Pink , the screenplay, but with a twist. “To me, the girl in the song is fairly promiscuous and thinks it’s cool, but people are talking behind her back and laughing about her,” the singer says. “But the plot of the film bears…

“WE started to do tape research on More Blood, More Tracks a number of years ago, probably in 2015. The tapes were in excellent shape. The multi-tracks, for the most part, had not been touched since the original mix in 1974. “We’ll be talking about the New York tapes mostly because there are so many more of them. The only tapes that surfaced from the Minneapolis sessions are the five tracks that were included on the original released record and those are the five multi-tracks we had access to for this set. “This box is a very different set from The Cutting Edge , which unfolds right in front of us. When you listen to that, you realise that Take 1 isn’t necessarily…

IT was David Zimmerman who confirmed his elder brother’s suspicion that Blood On The Tracks could be improved. David also convinced him that the necessary remedial work could be done in Minneapolis, and was in the control room and consulted by Dylan throughout the session. “David was a music teacher, a choir leader, and a manager,” recalls Kevin Odegard. “He signed a Columbia artist, Sleep Faster I Need The Pillow, that didn’t go anywhere, and he was managing me. David is outgoing, warm, generous, kind to a fault. He speaks quietly, and always wants you to be comfortable.” The crucial help he gave his elder brother on Blood On the Tracks changed both siblings’ lives. “He was struggling against impossible odds to…

WE have one Deluxe edition of More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol 14 to give away to a lucky reader. This is the full, six-disc, 87-track behemoth... To enter, please answer the following question correctly. One winner will be chosen at random from the Uncut office hat. What’s the complete title of the first track on More Blood, More Tracks ? Is it: A) “If You See Her, Say Hello (Take 1)” – solo B) “You’re A Big Girl Now (Take 1)” – solo C) “Simple Twist Of Fate (Take 1)” – solo Send your answers to UncutComp@ti-media.com  by Wednesday, November 21. ... and good luck!…

“MID-CITY ISLAND” SELF-RELEASED, 2014 Recorded on Dave Sitek’s four-track, this five-song cassette captures Sumney still working out his edgy post-soul sound. “Plastic” is a clear highlight, though. 7/10 “LAMENTATIONS” SELF-RELEASED, 2016 Now worth a pretty penny online, this second EP was a step on; “Ascension” is like Curtis Mayfield on the Kranky label, while “Lonely World” comes on like Grizzly Bear snoozing on a tropical beach. 7/10 AROMANTICISM JAGJAGUWAR, 2017 The long-awaited album, a hi-fi meditation on love and solitude, runs together as a unified, 36-minute journey. “Quarrel” is perhaps the highlight, while “Make Out In My Car” is a sublime Lynchian slow-jam. 8/10 “BLACK IN DEEP RED, 2014” JAGJAGUWAR, 2018 Sumney has never sounded this energised, in both the tempos and his subject matter. Its three songs are all…

THE Small Faces were the second band to feature on Colour Me Pop , a show created to show off the use of colour on BBC2. Presenter Steve Turner was also director, producer, booker, vision mixer and special effects expert. “I went round the clubs to find pop groups who could hold a half-hour programme together,” he says. “I had a budget of about £100 and three cameras. I needed music I could do a few effects to. I’d heard Ogdens’ and it told a story, and I liked that idea.” Turner persuaded Stanley Unwin to appear as he was a BBC radio engineer, so could do it for free. The band mimed, and the show went out live – Unwin was still…

1950s: The four Sledge sisters are born into a showbiz family. Their grandma Viola Williams was an opera singer, their mother an actress, their father a tap dancer. 1971: Sister Sledge form in Pennsylvania, as a vocal group featuring the four sisters. January 22, 1979: “Thinking Of You” appears as the fourth track on We Are Family . The sisters’ third album reaches No 3 on the Billboard chart. April 4, 1979: Released as the B-side of the “Lost In Music” single, it becomes a No 1 on the US dance charts, and reaches No 17 in the UK. May, 1984: Issued in the UK as a single for the first time, “Thinking Of You” reaches No 11 and re-establishes the band, who…

SAINT-SAËNS CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS 1886 My mother used to put this on while I went to sleep when I was about three. It’s beautiful classical music, but it also tells the story of the animals. It taught me how you can use music to create the atmosphere you want in people’s heads, to transport people to different dimensions and different environments. I have synaesthesia, so when I see colours I hear sound, and vice versa. I thought it was really normal! As a child I was very able to visualise when I heard music, and I think that shaped me incredibly deeply. CAROLE KING TAPESTRY 1971 When I was seven or eight, I went to day camp in the summer in LA, up in Topanga Canyon. The camp counsellors…

“I think I’m singing better than I ever have in my life…” WHAT immediately strikes you about Roger Daltrey’s new autobiography, Thanks A Lot Mr Kibblewhite: My Story, is the sheer bruising physicality of it all. The book begins with a broken back and ends with Daltrey making a full recovery from a life-threatening bout of viral meningitis. In between, the narrative is peppered with car crashes, fistfights (“I could become a monster when the red mist came down,” Daltrey admits), flying drumsticks and explosions, all recounted matter-of-factly as occupational hazards of fronting The Who, a band with destruction hardwired into their DNA. “The way we used to play together, it was like putting the key in the ignition of a jet engine,” he reflects. “I don’t know whether it…

“We didn’t want to just make a nostalgia album” DENISE KAUFMAN IF you’re familiar with Ace Of Cups, it’s probably from a poster, not their music. The late-’60s all-female San Francisco band turn up on plenty of collectable vintage bills from the era, opening for the likes of the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and The Band’s first performance. But during their brief hippie flash, they never made a proper studio album. That will change this November when Ace Of Cups release their self-titled debut, 51 years after their formation in the Summer Of Love. Four of the five original members, each now in their seventies, reunited for a studio session that yielded two albums’ worth of material, recorded with a long list of famous friends. At 26 tracks, the…

RICHARD SWIFT The Hex SECRETLY CANADIAN Brilliant final album from the recently departed singer-songwriter only compounds the sense of loss. Heartbreakingly frank and musically soaring, it’s a fitting swansong. ROSALI Trouble Anyway SCISSOR TAIL/SPINSTER Slow-burning motorik country from a new Philly talent, ably abetted by Mary Lattimore, Nathan Bowles and members of The War On Drugs and Purling Hiss. HEN OGLEDD Mogic WEIRD WORLD Not enough wyrd medieval synth-pop about AI and “tiny witches” in your life? Right that wrong, courtesy of Richard Dawson and friends. AMOR Sinking Into A Miracle NIGHT SCHOOL On which the Glasgow avant-disco supergroup imagine what LCD Soundsystem would sound like fronted by Robert Wyatt. Pretty great, as it turns out. THE SCORPIONS & SAIF ABU BAKR Jazz Jazz Jazz HABIBI…

1 Misunderstanding 2 The Gypsy Faerie Queen 3 As Tears Go By 4 In My Own Particular Way 5 Born To Live 6 Witches’ Song 7 It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue 8 They Come At Night 9 Don’t Go 10 No Moon In Paris DELUXE VERSION  11 Loneliest Person 12 No Moon In Paris (Radio Edit) 13 They Come At Night (Alt Version) Produced by: Rob Ellis, Warren Ellis and Head Engineered and mixed by: Head Recorded at: La Frette Studios, Paris, January 2018 Personnel includes: Marianne Faithfull (vocals), Nick Cave (vocals, piano, backing vocals), Warren Ellis (violin, alto flute, drums, keys, synth bass, piano, handclaps, backing vocals), Ed Harcourt (bass, piano, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, organ, baritone guitar, backing vocals), Rob McVey (guitar, piano, synth, backing vocals), Rob Ellis (drums,…

Suspiria (Music For The Luca Guadagnino Film) XL 8/10 THOM Yorke might have made his debut as a film composer a lot earlier than this, it seems. During the late ’90s, shortly after Radiohead had completed OK, Computer, Yorke was approached by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt to score Fight Club. If ever there was a film that dovetailed perfectly with Radiohead’s own take on atomisation, alienation and crises, this was it. In the end, Yorke rejected Norton and Pitt’s offer – and since then, of course, his bandmate Jonny Greenwood has gone on to become a highly successful soundtrack composer. Radiohead, too, have made their own foray into film music – their shelved Bond theme, “Spectre”, is now a highlight of Yorke’s live sets. Even Yorke’s external projects like…

Why has it taken so long to make an LP together? As close as we are as friends, we aren’t in the same place and time very often. Also, Mary is very much more of an improviser than I am. She really helped me cross over into that world a bit for this record. It’s an intimidating leap and I’m grateful for it. I brought even more boring rehearsal time into Mary’s process. I’m very sorry, Mary! What’s the glue that makes your connection stick? It’s about listening and quick response time at its core. And knowing what each other likes musically. I think strings and tension are embedded pretty deeply in the DNA of how we both express ourselves. Stretched guts, metal and wood. There is a deep, long…

How does this album connect with Brushes With Happiness ? Laurie [ Sherman, engineer ] bought an old reel-to-reel and wanted to learn how to record with it. So we did Brushes for him to practise. I wanted to do a totally improvised record, so we did that, but then we decided to release it, as we were so happy with it. But we had 20 or 30 songs for a proper LP, so we went back in again and did Look Inside Your Heart . I wanted to release them both on one day. I thought that would be the ultimate showoffy thing to do! But the label wanted to stagger it a bit. You always record…

The Richard Swift Collection Vol 1 SECRETLY CANADIAN, 2005 Bolting together his first two LPs –2003’s The Novelist and follow-up Walking Without Effort , both essentially one-man operations – this sublime entry into Swift’s peculiar world crosses genres with restless abandon, from old-school cabaret and ragtime to Nilsson-like piano pop and skittish electronica in the vein of ’60s auteur David Behrman. 7/10 Dressed Up For The Letdown SECRETLY CANADIAN, 2007 Swift’s crestfallen tales of personal and artistic struggle are tempered by a doleful romanticism that’s hard not to love. There are echoes of Elliott Smith and Emitt Rhodes on “Buildings In America” and “The Songs Of National Freedom”, while “Artist & Repertoire” sums up his experience in the biz: “Sorry Mr…

ACE OF CUPS Ace Of Cups HIGH MOON 5/10 Senior citizens’ ’60s flashbacks Fifty-one years in the making, the debut of the lost, all-female Summer of Love band Ace of Cups takes a kitchen-sink approach. With 26 tracks of archival stage banter, special guests, medleys and genre sampling, the quartet of seventy-somethings attempt to backfill their lost history in one giant-sized session. The result is endearingly scattershot, but also finds Ace of Cups jumping straight to the same conundrum as their better-documented peers – modernising the well-worn tropes of rock’s ’60s and ’70s heyday. While the album’s studio gloss, provided by pop producer Dan Shea, wards off easy nostalgia, it also renders some of their original material mannered by comparison with the raw archival versions included on 2004’s It’s Bad…

Essential: The Very Best Of Terry Callier UNIVERSAL, 1999 In the early 1970s Callier recorded a trio of fine albums for Chess’s Cadet imprint – What Colour Is Love, Occasional Rain and I Just Can’t Help Myself. This collection compiles 17 of the best tracks from the era. Producer Charles Stepney knew how to get the best out of Callier’s supple voice, but Chess had no idea how to market the results and dropped him. 7/10 Timepeace VERVE/TALKIN’ LOUD, 1998 The ethereal eight-minute cornerstone track on Callier’s first album after two decades away was appropriately tiled “Lazarus Man”, for his comeback was indeed a miraculous resurrection. Fusing the elegant soul of Curtis Mayfield, the acoustic wistfulness of Nick Drake and the jazz-folk of Tim Buckley, Callier’s liquid lead guitar lines…

DISC: 1 1. More Than A Hammer And Nail 2. He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands 3. My Jesus Is All 4. This Train 5. Praying Time 6. Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw 7. Samson And Delilah 8. Nobody’s Fault But Mine 9. Mary Don’t You Weep 10. As An Eagle Stirreth Her Nest 11. Do Something For Yourself 12. Amen 13. It’s Been A Change 14. Waiting For My Child 15. How Great Thou Art 16. Wish I Had Answered 17. Tramp On The Street 18. When Was Jesus Born 19. Pray On 20. Glory, Glory Hallelujah 21. The Lord’s Prayer 22. Had No Room 23 John Brown DISC: 2 1. Freedom Highway 2. What You Gonna Do 3. Take My Hand Precious Lord 4.…

For over 40 years, the sessions for BOB DYLAN’s Blood On The Tracks album have been surrounded by much myth and conjecture. With the release of More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol 14, the full, astonishing story of Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece can finally be told. An acoustic solo album! More songs! Mick Jagger! Over the next six pages, Michael Bonner examines the latest revelations from the Dylan archives… Meanwhile, on p70, Nick Hasted talks to the key players on the Blood On The Tracks sessions. “Something was flowing through him,” we learn… PLUS! Our exclusive Bob Dylan CD revealed! Turn to p74, where Allan Jones guides you track by track through Uncut’s The Best Of The Bootleg Series WHEN Bob Dylan arrived at A&R Recording Studios in New…

THE New York tapes are finally complete, but More Blood, More Tracks still lacks any outtakes from Dylan’s Minneapolis sessions – which remain missing. “We searched for the outtakes for a long time,” Kevin Odegard explains. “They’re lost to history. [ Columbia producer and A&R ] Don DeVito was really administering both the New York and Minneapolis sessions from New York, and my theory is that he had them. He died [ in 2011 ], and from that point they were lost. That’s the last point that they were known to exist.” Is there any other music from the session that still sticks in Ogden’s mind? “No! All the bad stuff went away. People say to me the New York sessions were…

BACKSTAGE at Gothenburg’s Pustervik venue, a staff member has a burning question for Uncut . “What kind of music is this?” she asks, after Moses Sumney comes offstage. “I’ve never heard anything like it…” We explain: words like soul, rock, electronic, experimental tumble out, but no one description seems entirely accurate. Later on, Sumney is delighted to hear all this. “That’s what I want!” he says. “I get so excited when I hear that, just because I feel like people don’t say that enough to me, to be honest, for what I think I’m trying to make.” He has a point. Over the past five years, Sumney has mixed up all manner of genres, from post-rock to R&B, to create something very much his own, all tied together by his…

“I DON’T really think of myself as a songwriter, I think of myself as a rock’n’roller,” says Jon Spencer, surveying his life’s achievements. Not that he ever set out to ‘achieve’ anything. “The way I approach playing in a band or making a record is not so lofty. Maybe I’m still the same person I was when I was dropping out of university, just thinking, ‘Fuck – all I wanna do is play in a band!’ Is that wrong?” It’s not wrong. In fact, Spencer’s instinctive, act-first attitude has carried him further than most, through 30-plus years of electrifying, genre-bending garage-rock action with Pussy Galore, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Boss Hog, Heavy Trash and numerous other side projects and spontaneous throwdowns. Pondering the threads that tie them all together,…

NICK Tweddell and Pete Brown had played in The Muleskinners with art-school pal McLagan. In spring 1968, they were approached by Mac to work on Ogdens’ elaborate packaging. “The guys had this idea of using a tobacco tin because of the spliff thing,” says Tweddell. “We were asked to put something psychedelic in the middle. We spent a day and a half doing it. Most of my time was spent on the black-and-white landscape in the background, where I was copying Victorian engravings. Pete did the little painting of the chap smoking the pipe, which reflects back to the pot element. We were heavily into Alphonse Mucha, and that whole circle and fantasy thing was inspired by Mucha.” The colourful montage of butterflies and flowers came…

SUSPIRIA Directed by Luca Guadagnino Starring Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson Opens Nov 16 Cert 18 7/10 DON’T WORRY, HE WON’T GET FAR ON FOOT Directed by Gus Van Sant Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara Opens Oct 26 Cert 12A 7/10 COLUMBUS Directed by Kogonada Starring John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson Opened Oct 5 Cert 12A 8/10 A STAR IS BORN Directed by Bradley Cooper Starring Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga Opened Oct 3 Cert 15 6/10 BAD REPUTATION Directed by Kevin Kerslake Starring Joan Jett, Iggy Pop Opens Oct 26 Cert 15 6/10…

CHAS HODGES Cockney rocker (1943–2018) JERRY Lee Lewis had a profound influence on the course of Chas Hodges’ career. When Lewis played the Edmonton Regal in May 1958, the attendant 14-year-old Hodges, mesmerised by his charisma, vowed to become a serious piano player. His original instrument of choice was guitar, having joined a local skiffle outfit the previous year, and he became a proficient bassist with The Outlaws, who made their reputation as the resident band at Joe Meek’s Islington home studio during the early ’60s. Among Hodges’ credits were John Leyton’s “Johnny Remember Me” and Heinz’s “Just Like Eddie”. He was able to study his idol up close when he toured the UK and Europe with Lewis in 1963, after which he became Gene Vincent’s musical director…