Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 #271 i UNCUT

“I’VE just hit earth!” says Hannah Peel, as she readjusts to reality after returning from the Emmy Awards in LA, where she was nominated for her soundtrack to Games Of Thrones documentary The Last Watch. It’s been a hectic period for the producer, composer and synth specialist; last year, while in the midst of making an album about the chalk landscapes of southern England with the poet Will Burns (Chalk Hill Blue, released to acclaim this March), she also found herself arranging and conducting the orchestra for Paul Weller’s Royal Festival Hall performances. “I had never scored for an orchestra before,” she reveals. “I don’t know if I would have pushed myself to do it if he hadn’t asked and encouraged me.” The Emmy nomination she says was “huge –…

“THE band name comes from a nickname I was given by a couple of German perverts,” says Clams Baker, the 45-year-old frontman of south London reprobates Warmduscher. “It’s a pathetic insult – a warmduscher is someone who’s too much of a pussy to take a cold shower – but I like the way it sounds and it looks good written out.” Now on their third album, the freak-funk of Tainted Lunch, Warmduscher are the latest act from the sprawling scene centred around Brixton venue The Windmill to stumble into something approaching professionalism. The band share a member (guitarist Adam Harmer) with The Fat White Family, as well as an Epicurean outlook on life. “We all make sure to give a fuck without actually giving a fuck, if that makes sense,”…

Spring PARADISE OF BACHELORS 8/10 IN the fall of 2017, Kayla Cohen left her home in Los Angeles for a sabbatical in the high desert of New Mexico. The Southwestern state has a long lineage of expats drawing inspiration from its scenery. The American painter Georgia O’Keeffe most famously made her home here, trading the flowers of Upstate New York for the red hills and cow skulls of the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. 4AD co-founder Ivo Watts Russell settled in Santa Fe in 2002. Judy Chicago, Agnes Martin, Peter Hurd, Henriette Wyath and countless other musicians, writers and visual artists have all felt the mysterious, primordial pull of The Land Of Enchantment. For her part, Cohen holed up in a 100-year-old adobe-style home, an architectural signature of the area drawn…

MIRANDA LAMBERT Wildcard VANNER/RCA 8/10 The singer’s many-splendoured shades of country “LOCOMOTIVE” is one of the punkiest songs Miranda Lambert has ever recorded. With a breakneck tempo and some crunching guitars, it sounds as if she’s invited members of X over for a backyard crawfish boil. About halfway through, just as the song sounds like it’s about to jump the rails, she declares, “He gives me wings!” It’s a subtle allusion to her 2016 album titled The Weight Of These Wings, which was generally understood to chronicle her divorce from Blake Shelton. So that “he” likely refers to her new husband, New York City cop Brendan McLoughlin, who’s the one frying chicken while she writes songs on the porch. Chronicling romantic contentment on one disc rather than romantic conflict on…

“WE were definitely going for a warmer sound with this record,” says Omni guitarist Frankie Broyles. “Early on in the recording process we knew we wanted things to sound a bit more organic and less harsh. There is more low-end on this one, so that’s exciting.” The shift on Omni’s third album Networker makes for the most engaging and fully realised album yet for the Atlanta post-punk trio, who signed to Sub Pop last April after earning much love for two albums on Chicago’s Trouble In Mind. The more intricately arranged yet still eminently melodic likes of “Moat” and “Skeleton Key” also mark a further departure from a sound that hewed more closely to the template set in Postcard Records’ salad days. Instead, Omni’s idiosyncrasies are now very much their…

SESSA Grandeza LIGHT IN THE ATTIC 8/10 ON first listen, Sessa’s debut solo album feels like a pure, blissful album of Brazilian-influenced folk pop, featuring songs in Portuguese with simple arrangements, inventive percussion and glorious backing vocals from an all-female choir. It’s only when you read the translated lyrics that you get a sense of the album’s rather lustier sensibilities. “Gata Mágica [Magical Babe]” has the imploring cadence of fado, but rather than entreaty an absent lover, Sessa is urging, “Magical babe, fuck me for good”, while on “Flor Do Real [Flower Of Reality]” Sessa engages in a call-and-response with his choir. They sound like nuns but their lyrics linger around the refrain, “Fucking is the pleasure of sound... Let my mouth live in your mouth/ Let my sex live…

Monster: 25th Anniversary Edition WARNER/CRAFT 8/10 MONSTER was cursed. On the first day of recording at Kingsway Studio in New Orleans – one of four studios REM booked for their ninth album – Mike Mills was hospitalised with an intestinal disorder. In short order all the other band members fell ill. Michael Stipe mourned the deaths of friends Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix. And during the world tour for the album, drummer Bill Berry suffered a brain aneurysm on stage. He left the band in 1997. The album itself suffered a similarly ignominious fate, selling quadruple platinum but sold back to used CD stores around triple platinum. Even a quarter-century later, Monster remains divisive, with fans either decrying REM’s turn away from the more sombre sound of Automatic For The…

What was the original idea for the Dukes? When I was 13 I thought, ‘Yeah, when I grow up I’m gonna be in a band just like Pink Floyd or Tomorrow or The Beatles!’ I grew up and I was in a band, but they weren’t like those people. I was forever hankering to make the kind of music I loved as a kid, those bands that were making my school days a bit purple round the edges. Of course XTC never had time [for a psych side-project] while we were touring, but this idea just burned away at my soul. We were putting the finishing touches to [1984’s] The Big Express and I remember humming away into a cassette machine, thinking, ‘I’m gonna do this…’ The first song I…

Before The Beginning 1968-1970 Rare Live & Demo Sessions SONY LEGACY 8/10 “CAN blue men sing the whites?”, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band sang in 1968, satirising the strange journey of the music of black sharecroppers from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the heart of ’60s British pop culture. By the late 1960s, British bands playing the music of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker et al were everywhere. Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin all plundered the blues repertoire, yet their wider musical vision meant they stood outside the crusading zeal of the ‘British blues boom’, in which 12 bars was the only true gospel and music from the Deep South was revered as possessing a kind of spiritual purity. The leading bands in this ‘crusade’…

Next time around, we take a close look at Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album, Thanks For The Dance, completed by his son Adam Cohen with help from the likes of Beck and Feist. Lee “Scratch” Perry teams up with Adrian Sherwood for Heavy Rain, including an appearance from Eno, while there are exciting new LPs from Craven Faults and Headland. Archivally speaking, there are a bunch of promising boxsets and reissues, including Only After Dark, which catalogues Mick Ronson’s underrated early solo work, and the 40th-birthday edition of The Clash’s London Calling. Jimi Hendrix’s Songs For Groovy Children is also coming, featuring four complete 1969 and 1970 performances from the Fillmore East. TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

“ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER” JIMI HENDRIX, ELECTRIC LADYLAND TRACK, 1968 Hendrix amplifies Dylan’s simmering sense of dread to turn a low-key three-chord strum into an articulated apocalyptic howl, powerful enough to eclipse the original. Dylan agreed, writing in Biograph, “Since he died, I’ve been doing it that way.” “I’LL BE YOUR BABY TONIGHT” LINDA RONDSTADT, HAND SOWN… HOME GROWN CAPITOL, 1969 A loose-limbed, all but definitive country-rock reading from Ronstadt’s debut album: drawling steel guitar, mountain-man fiddle, laid-back drums and a typically spectacular vocal performance. “WICKED MESSENGER” THE FACES, FIRST STEP WARNER BROS, 1970 Rod Stewart’s Bob Dylan obsession was evident from as far back as the  opening track on the Faces’ 1969 debut. It’s a thick, heavy reading of Dylan’s…

EVEN for an artist renowned for his spontaneous creativity, to find inspiration in a cheesy TV special on the predictions of Nostradamus seems almost too far-fetched. Yet this is indeed how one of Prince’s signature songs sparked into life. As he later recalled: “We were sitting around watching a [TV] special about 1999, and a lot of people were talking about the year and speculating on what was going to happen. I just found it real ironic how everyone that was around me whom I thought to be very optimistic people were dreading those days… I just wanted to write something that gave hope.” The result was a burst of joyously apocalyptic pop-funk that covered all bases. With its slickly insistent groove, bubblegum pop chorus, and lyrics that alchemised cold…

“WHEN we were submitting ideas for Wish You Were Here , I happened to be in Iceland shooting something else – I’d got an idea of two men looking at a map, with their shadows reflected on the map. So I shot this in black and white, and it had a really great atmosphere to it. But no-one even saw it, because the idea of two men shaking hands and one of them’s on fire was so strong that it got pushed to one side. About 18 months ago I thought, ‘I’ve always loved this picture, but I’ve never blown it up.’ And it looked bloody incredible! I thought, ‘This is classic Hipgnosis.’ So that’s the front cover of the highlights album. It sums it all up: two men looking…

RICHARD THOMPSON Royal Albert Hall, London, October 1 Full house for folk-rock introvert’s birthday bash AT the end of a massed finale of Fairport Convention’s anthem for doomed youth, “Meet On The Ledge”, MC Jack Thompson leads the audience in a chorus of “Happy Birthday”. His father responds with a bewildered-looking bow. Billed as a “celebration of friendship, nepotism and music”, Richard Thompson’s lavish 70th-birthday shindig provides a showcase for a myriad of talented friends and family members (his children Teddy and Kami perform, as well as his grandson Zak Hobbs). However, as the 3,000-plus audience sing his praises, there seems little doubt from his body language that Thompson would gladly trade this moment of vindication for an evening in with the Times crossword. Bright lights – tonight or any…

DEBBIE HARRY leaves nothing behind when she checks out of hotels, flushing away incriminating hair and toenails, and (whenever possible) wiping away any traces of her saliva from around the sink. “I get anxious at the mere thought of my secret identity being found out,” she writes in her “somewhat morose memoir”, Face It . The queen of late-’70s pop is adamant that “‘Blondie’ was a role I created” – an uber-femme drag act that ensured the real Debbie Harry was kept well hidden. Born Angela Trimble and adopted at a young age, Harry was pushing 30 when she formed Blondie, and had already lived several lives by the time their debut single, “X Offender”, was released in 1976. A would-be hippie pop star, her adventures in pre-gentrification New York…

MARTHA High vividly recalls the night James Brown dropped by, some time in 1965. She and her all-girl R&B group, The Jewels, had just performed at the Howard Theatre in Washington DC when there was a knock at the dressing room door. “We asked who it was and he went, ‘It’s me, James Brown – how y’all doin’?’” says High, doing an uncannily gruff approximation of Brown’s voice. “We were all speechless. He came in, started checking his hair in the mirror and told us how much he’d enjoyed our show. Four months later, at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, he turned up again and said he wanted us to join his live revue. From then on it was amazing.” The other Jewels returned home 18 months later, but High…

THE good news is that in the last year I have felt intensely connected to my writing. For a year it had been difficult to work out how to write, because the centre had collapsed and Susie [Cave’s wife, Susie Bick] and I had been flung to the outer reaches of our lives. We were outlanders floating in deep space. But what had collapsed? What is at the centre of our lives? In an artist’s case I would say it is a sense of wonder. Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered. We all…

Vols 11 & 12 MATADOR 7/10 THE days when Queens Of The Stone Age fitted the ‘desertrock’ descriptor, like Kyuss before them, are long gone. Logically, then, that baton might have been picked up by Josh Homme’s sessions at Rancho De La Luna studio in Joshua Tree, through which a load of diverse talent has passed in the past 20 years – PJ Harvey, Mark Lanegan and Dean Ween included. But the notion of legacy has no place in this revolving-door jam; the idea is that invited players clear out their institutional cobwebs and cut loose, serving the music, rather than their egos or careers. As Homme recently stated: “All it’s doing, really, is asking a question. And that is: ‘Do you remember why you started playing?’ Because there’s nobody…

Psurroundabout Ride APE HOUSE 9/10 WITH The Beatles’ later work being steadily remixed from the multi-tracks, it’s fitting that the Fabs’ psychedelic counterparts The Dukes Of Stratosphear are now getting the same forensic treatment. A four-piece who dabbled in garage, beat-pop and music hall, all liberally sprinkled with psychedelic fairy dust, the Dukes’ two albums are fine specimens of the mind-expanded pop that sprung up in Revolver’s tyre tracks. Except, as you well know, the Dukes were a fantasy, created in the mid-’80s by XTC and producer John Leckie. By 1985, Andy Partridge (aka the Dukes’ Sir John Johns) and Dave Gregory (Lord Cornelius Plum) had eagerly been injecting psychedelic textures into their day job for a few years – see the bad-trip black mass of 1980’s “Travels In Nihilon”…

JIM SULLIVAN If The Evening Were Dawn/Jim Sullivan LIGHT IN THE ATTIC 8/10, 7/10 Lost and neglected treasures from tragic LA singer-songwriter JIM SULLIVAN’S sudden disappearance remains a puzzle to this day. In March 1975, having left Los Angeles to try out for session work in Nashville, the singer-songwriter was last seen at a mobster-affiliated ranch in New Mexico. Police found his abandoned car at the property, with all his belongings inside. There were search parties, door-to-door enquiries and plenty of speculation, but no trace of the 34-year-old was ever found. The son of a Nebraskan farmer, he and his wife Barbara had moved west in the late ’60s. While she found secretarial work at Capitol Records, Sullivan hung out with Lee Marvin and Harry Dean Stanton at a Malibu…

“THERE is no such thing as a ‘definitive’ history of The Cure,” laughs Robert Smith. “There are facts and figures, but each one of us has completely different memories about what’s happened. We were talking about a show from last week and each one of us had a completely different version of events. None of them are invalid. Obviously to me, there’s only one true story and that’s mine!” The story of The Cure is entering its latest, remarkable chapter. It has already been a long, strange trip from the pubs of Crawley to becoming one of British rock’s most enduring and fascinating musical institutions – accompanied on that journey by an uncanny bestiary of love cats, cannibal spiders and hungry ghosts. Now Smith is finally readying himself with the…

IT is May 1, 1969, and Bob Dylan is launching his new album, Nashville Skyline, with a taped appearance on the inaugural episode of The Johnny Cash Show. He hasn’t appeared on American television since The Steve Allen Show in February 1964. The five years that have since passed resemble a compressed lifetime in which Dylan has morphed from folk prince to generational spokesman; from Judas rocker to enigmatic recluse. Later this year, Rolling Stone will describe him as “the most secretive and elusive person in the entire rock and roll substructure”. On The Johnny Cash Show he emerges from a period of hibernation as an amiable country crooner, singing simple songs of heart and homestead in a mellifluous voice a million miles from the accusatory snarl of old. The…

ACCOMPANYING the release of I Have Made A Place are two songs that aren’t quite singles but aren’t really album cuts either. “At The Back Of The Pit” is a rollicking, almost silly tune about what you bring down into the bunker with you during the apocalypse. “I love it,” says Oldham, “but I felt like it wasn’t meaty enough.” Much more memorable is “In Good Faith”, which he’s been working on for years. “A friend of mine said he was working on a Mavis Staples record and asked me if I wanted to write something for her. He ended up not making that record, but he mentioned that he had been approached to make a record with Emmylou Harris. So I changed a bunch of things around so that…

A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON ANDY JACKSON: “Momentary Lapse was an oddity. It was just approached in a very different way that removed a lot of the organic stuff that happened between them. A lot of that has returned now, with us putting Rick’s playing back on. On tour he’d play a lot of Hammond, which isn’t on the record, and we’d put it back on and think, ‘Ah, that sounds a lot more like Floyd.’ Most of the drums have been done again with Nick, and we used a more classic Pink Floyd approach to the drum sound and to the playing. ‘Sorrow’ was a weird hybrid – the drums were electronic pads, so it has a sort of machine feel to it. We changed the sounds to be…

The Beach Bum is a wilfully naïve premise yet Korine still finds a way to make it debauched THE BEACH BUM It’s staggering that gonzo director Harmony Korine was given money to make a film again after 2009’s near-unwatchable Trash Humpers, but the unexpected critical success of 2012’s Spring Breakers salvaged his reputation. The Beach Bum follows in a similar vein, being a surprisingly enjoyable stoner comedy with a ridiculously eclectic Hollywood cast and an even more promiscuous soundtrack, mixing Jimmy Buffett, gangster rap, Christian metal and The Cure. Matthew McConaughey stars as Moondog, a once-great writer who has gone to seed, having a wild time in the Florida Keys while his rich wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher), lives in their Miami mansion. Just when it seems the film is going…

MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL OPENS OCTOBER 18 Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning return in the dark fantasy sequel. NON-FICTION OPENS OCTOBER 19 Juliette Binoche stars in a French comedy about publishing in the digital age. ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP OPENS OCTOBER 19 Woody Harrelson leads the charge in a ten-years-later horror/comedy sequel. TERMINATOR: DARK FATE OPENS OCTOBER 23 Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger finally reunite in the long-running sci-fi franchise. BLACK AND BLUE OPENS OCTOBER 25 Naomie Harris plays a rookie cop caught up in the murder of a drug dealer. MONOS OPENS OCTOBER 25 Surreal tale of child soldiers in Latin America, with a haunting score by Mica Levi. THE ADDAMS FAMILY OPENS OCTOBER 25 The creepy, kooky and all-together ooky clan get a kid-friendly animated reboot. DOCTOR SLEEP OPENS…

WHERE THERE’S A WILCO… When I saw that your November issue would feature a disc of covers of Wilco songs I was elated, as the CD attached to the mag is usually related to the cover subject. So I was disappointed to see Jimmy Page on the cover instead. Nothing against Mr Page, who, of course, has far greater a legendary status than Jeff Tweedy’s scruffy crew from Illinois, but he’s been on your cover a number of times and Wilco have never graced your cover (except for some text) and it seemed about time for that to happen. Oh well, maybe on the next album and tour, they’ll finally make it. Daniel Johnson, via email Hey, Daniel. Thanks for writing. To be honest, we’d had Jimmy lined up for…

IN contrast to his heavily denim-clad appearance in Western Stars , Bruce Springsteen is sauntering casually through a Toronto mall in a slim-fitting black jacket and shirt. As a result, the crowds of local students queuing for film festival tickets at the Yonge-Dundas Cineplex on this warm September morning fail to recognise him. But Springsteen is OK with that; he’s clearly just thrilled with the film, which he is presenting with his co-director, Thom Zimny, to a small coterie of press on the morning of its world premiere. Shot in his barn at Colts Neck, New Jersey, it features live, orchestrated performances of all of Western Stars’ 13 tracks – SoCal country-pop operas telling stories of dying stuntmen, fading stars and lovelorn truckers – as well as a bonus encore…

1 BOB DYLAN Drifter’s Escape (Take 1) Taken from Travelin’ Thru, 1967 – 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol 15, “Drifter’s Escape (Take 1)” jumps thrillingly into life, and clatters messily to a close – what happens in between is as magical as you might expect. Check out our cover feature on p58. 2 OMNI Courtesy Call Networker, the third album from this Atlanta post-punk trio, mixes the arch coolness of US garage with the off-kilter angularity of XTC; “Courtesy Call” is one of its finest tracks. 3 FENELLA Rotation Wells Jane Weaver’s newly formed trio with her live band members Peter Philipson and Raz Ullah have worked up a delightfully discreet soundtrack to Marcell Jankovics’ Fehérlófia, and “Rotation Wells” is one of its brooding highlights. 4…

WHO POLYDOR 9/10  “THERE has always been a synergy between The Who and our audience,” said Pete Townshend at the time of their 50th-anniversary bash at Hyde Park in 2015, and for all the mind-boggling stats – 100 million album sales in a career spanning six decades – it’s this connection which makes them unique. From the pill-popping inarticulacy of “I Can’t Explain” to the search for identity central to both Tommy and Quadrophenia, The Who have always provided fans with the thrill of recognition, forging a bond which sees them still sell out stadiums despite the loss of rock’s most mercurial rhythm section and an almost pathological aversion to entering the studio. It’s been 13 years since their last studio album, and a whopping 37 since its predecessor, 1982’s…

JR BOHANNON grew up in Louisville, Kentucky – a centre of Appalachian folk music, but also the breeding ground for a string of groups, from Palace Brothers to My Morning Jacket, out to put a skew on old traditions. This is very much Bohannon’s style. Now resident in Brooklyn, he makes ambient music as Ancient Ocean and plays in the band of Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres. He’s also been quietly labouring on Dust – an accomplished album of fingerstyle for six- and 12-string guitar that touches on Latin and Greek music, Brazilian fado and the influence of classical minimalism. “My introduction to a lot of this music was through film,” explains Bohannon. “Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score to Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, Marcel Camus’ Black…

“It’s an incredibly exciting time for pop music, and young women have a really large part to play,” says Girl Ray singer and guitarist Poppy Hankin. Along with Ariana Grande – the chief inspiration for Girl, the north London trio’s second album – Rankin cites Rosalia, Lizzo, Carly Rae Jepsen and Lana Del Rey as just a few of the artists who are redefining how young women express and portray themselves in a realm that used to be far more reductive to their kind. “It’s progressed from the super shiny pop of the ‘00s (which of course I absolutely love) onto something a little bit more refined and sophisticated,” says Hankin. “But what’s good is that they don’t compromise on hooks – they’re still just as catchy as early Britney…

When did you first hear No Other? What are your memories of your initial encounter with the album? I first heard No Other when it came out. I was already a long-time Gene Clark fan. I thought the album a tad over-polished and I thought the cover was absurd. The outtakes John Wood and I mixed have, to my ears, as good or better a vibe than the finished product. No Other has quite a reputation. What has contributed to this? I tend to think, as with Big Star, the This Mortal Coil cover [of “Strength Of Strings”] really helped get the word out there. This Mortal Coil as influential tastemakers? If you say so. No Other was, alas, a total flop commercially. It did not sell and Gene’s live…

Producer Scott Litt on undoing what he overdid in the first place Your remix is really bold and irreverent. Why did you want to take another shot at Monster ? I didn’t like the mixing I had done on it originally, and I didn’t understand why until I readdressed it. I discovered that I overdid it. I don’t think I achieved a good soundscape with the guitars and the loops and effects. They all piled on top of each other. Instead of letting the vocal just sit above it all, I ended up burying Michael a bit. It was such a difficult record to make, and I made it more difficult than it needed to be. What were you trying to accomplish? I wanted to restore the original three-piece instrument…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital Of The West 1940-1974 BEAR FAMILY 9/10 Goodbye Dust Bowl, hello Golden State: 300 songs, 164 mini-bios, countless fuzzy tales finally unfolded WHILE Ken Burns’ recent documentary series on country music, strong as it is, winds its way through the music’s finest influences and tragic moments, the Bear Family label, in its decades-long commitment to twang, steel and honky-tonk, routinely draws listeners deep into country & western’s crawlspace. Here, music is unearthed, famous and not-so-famous artists explored, and finely detailed history springs forth. Scores of Depression-damaged originators, rambling away from desolate Oklahoma and its tributaries to California in the 1930s and ’40s, sought new lives good or bad. Among them, young musicians latched onto western swing, rockabilly and hillbilly boogie, Okie-folk harmonies, boy-girl…

“THERE’S a guy in the Dylan office called Parker Fishel who has done a spectacular job in organising the files. It has become a cross between what’s in the Dylan vaults and what’s in the Sony vaults. We gather them together and see what they are. “About a year ago, Dylan’s representative Jeff Rosen said, ‘Let’s focus on ’69 and Nashville.’ So Parker and I went through everything. Over the years regular review and tape maintenance goes on. ‘Do we have this, do we have that? Where is it, can we hear it?’ There are various vaults, physical and virtual. Sony has a vault in Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania. It’s like The Planet Of The Apes. It’s a super dome way below the ground, fire- and air- and pressure-controlled. They’re…

DISC 1 JOHN WESLEY HARDING SESSIONS – ALTERNATE VERSIONS 1 Drifter’s Escape – Take 1 2 I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine – Take 2 3 All Along The Watchtower – Take 3 4 John Wesley Harding – Take 1 5 As I Went Out One Morning – Take 1 6 I Pity The Poor Immigrant – Take 4 7 I Am A Lonesome Hobo – Take 4 NASHVILLE SKYLINE SESSIONS – ALTERNATE VERSIONS AND OUTTAKES 8 I Threw It All Away – Take 1 9 To Be Alone With You – Take 1 10 Lay Lady Lay – Take 2 11 One More Night – Take 2 12 Western Road – Take 1 13 Peggy Day – Take 1 14 Tell Me That It Isn’t True – Take 2…

“THE punchline comes first!” Will Oldham exclaims to the small crowd that has gathered in Morehead, Kentucky, to hear him read and sing from a new book of lyrics, Songs Of Love And Horror, and perhaps drop some hints about his new album, I Made A Place. “What’s the biggest problem with time travel jokes?” It takes a few beats for the audience to respond, but he gets a few chuckles. “I told that joke to my wife a few days ago, and she still hasn’t laughed. But the benefit of time travel is one day she will laugh, and it will have been a successful joke.” Oldham is on stage at Coffee Tree Books, an unusual space that suits the artist known to many fans as Bonnie “Prince” Billy.…

MOST drivers choking up the A308 near Hampton Court are probably unaware of the musical artefact moored on the Thames riverside just a few metres to their south. Hidden away near Tagg’s Island, the Astoria houseboat was built for music-hall impresario and Chaplin mentor Fred Karno in 1911, with an interior bursting with prime Edwardiana and enough space on the roof for a full orchestra. Whether David Gilmour, who’s owned the Astoria since the mid-’80s, has tried out that last feature is unclear; yet we do know he’s used the boat, below decks, to develop much of his and Pink Floyd’s work over the past 35 years. “The boat is moored at the bottom of a beautiful, sort of Capability Brown garden,” explains Floyd collaborator Anthony Moore, “with a tunnel…

YOU can understand why Matador baulked when Stephen Malkmus first handed over the tapes of Groove Denied. Instead of the avuncular jangle and quizzical riffage of recent Jicks efforts or his eponymous 2001 solo debut, they were confronted with “Belziger Faceplant”, the sound of a curious middle-aged man lurching unsteadily around a hip Berlin nightclub. Yet when the album was eventually released in March – actually containing some pretty great songs, amid the wonky drum-machine experiments – it soon became clear what Malkmus was up to. Despite their eventual acceptance into the rock canon, Pavement were always a thrillingly awkward proposition: lyrical non sequiturs, melodies never quite going where you expected, unreadable tensions on stage, the blunders left in. Groove Denied certainly felt like an attempt to reconnect with that…

THAT’LL BE THE DAY/ STARDUST STUDIOCANAL 8/10, 7/10 DAVID Essex’s career-best two-parter about the rise and fall of rock superstar Jim MacLaine was never intended to be about music. That’ll Be The Day, directed by David Puttnam, started as a simple coming-of-age drama, but after EMI offered extra cash if the producers could work 40 songs into the soundtrack, the action was relocated to the funfair and holiday camp, where ’50s rock provided a natural soundtrack. The film (and soundtrack) was a smash, leading to a sequel, Stardust, directed by Michael Apted. Both films had a string of rock cameos: Ringo Starr, Billy Fury and Keith Moon in That’ll Be The Day; Moon again, Marty Wilde, Dave Edmunds and a faultless Adam Faith in Stardust. But these are odd…