Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 #275 i UNCUT

THE day after Kluster performed at the Fehmarn Love + Peace Festival – Germany’s answer to Woodstock – in September 1970, Hans-Joachim Roedelius stayed on to watch one of his heroes in action. Jimi Hendrix won over a restless crowd, but his all-action show was a letdown for the ambient pioneer. “It made me very sad to see him doing the same thing again, smashing his guitar,” Roedelius tells Uncut. “He was so tired and seemed to be much bored by the situation. Always doing the same – that’s deadly boring of course. And about a week later he died.” “Always doing the same – that’s deadly boring” Now 85, Roedelius’s long life at the outer limits of pop may owe something to avoiding repetition. His new memoir-cum-philosophical-tract, The Book,…

“I THOUGHT Juniore would be a funny name for the band because when we started we were all old, in our thirties, and I thought we would always be beginners,” says Anna Jean, leader of these typically chic Parisian retro-rockers. “It was not a very subtle joke.” Today, the band Jean formed seven years ago with her equally unskilled friends – “We were bad; we sounded like The Shaggs” – are slowly getting used to things going their way. As French as a gilets jaunes roadblock, Juniore’s smouldering blend of surf rock, blues, ’60s chanson and nouvelle vague ennui has already seduced the likes of David Holmes, who used their music in the last series of Killing Eve, and Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys. Since 2013, their singular releases have…

Out Of My Province is an album of reflection and rebirth Out Of My Province SPACEBOMB 8/10 WITH Out Of My Province, Nadia Reid has created a folk-rock symphony from a spartan seed. Writing amid the alternate freedom and isolation she felt during extensive touring for 2017’s breakthrough Preservation, Reid channels the personal to universal effect. “They say that suffering will make a woman wiser/I have been asked if I am some sort of survivor,” she sings on “High & Lonely”, just one in a series of portraits where conflict gives way to enlightenment, and wisdom is revealed in an economical few lines. “All I know is I have kept myself steady/I walk that line between the darkness and the ready,” she concludes. Hers is just one woman’s journey, but…

Williams Good Souls ’ long Better -promised Angels , follow Lucinda -up to 2016’s The Ghosts Of Highway 20 , is due in April. Williams calls it “grungy, edgy, bluesy and rock. Very political.” A memoir is due later in the year. Watkins Family Hour, comprising siblings Sara and Sean Watkins, return that same month with Brother Sister . The former Nickel Creek duo (Sara is also one third of I’m With Her, alongside Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan) balance a bunch of originals with covers of Warren Zevon’s “Accidentally Like A Martyr” and Charley Jordan’s pre-war classic “Keep It Clean”, with David Garza, Gaby Moreno and John C Reilly on vocals. Look  latest out, too from , for Pokey Rock Bottom LaFarge Rhapsody . Out in April , the…

Heavy Light 4AD 8/10 MEG REMY has described the first songs she made under her US Girls alias in 2007 as “completely free of any inhibitions”. Yet they were the result of musical naivety, not supreme self-confidence: Remy smothered the voice she was unsure of in a fog of effects and, in place of drums, used a popcorn tin with pedals attached. Fast-forward to her eighth album and Remy is all but unrecognisable: her expression is no less singular but it’s now focused, compellingly articulate and – rather than glancing off her identity like sunlight off a mirror – self-directed, the focus of mise en scènes that tap ’70s orchestral funk, disco soul and ’60s girl-group pop. Heavy Light presents like the album the Illinois native (who’s based in Toronto)…

Recording Is The Trip: The Karen Dalton Archives Box Set MEGAPHONE SENT out to support Santana on a 1971 European tour, Karen Dalton may have realised that mainstream success was never going to be her thing. Having spent the previous decade playing for change in the folk clubs of Boulder, Colorado and Greenwich Village, the Texan-born singer with a voice like a battered trumpet had never been much inclined to perform for audiences who weren’t prepared to listen. Faced with impatient crowds, tight schedules, less-than-rapt attention, she struggled. “She had a stellar backup band and great support, but she was difficult to travel with,” remembered Peter Stampfel from East Village dirtbags the Holy Modal Rounders. “By the end of the tour, she had missed at least one date by simply…

CLANNAD In A Lifetime BMG 7/10 Celtic New Age legends’ career compiled DEEP in County Donegal, in the tiny village of Meenaleck by Ireland’s wild Atlantic coastline, sits a pub called Tabhairne Leo – Leo’s Tavern. Modest but welcoming, the walls of the bar are adorned with gold and platinum discs, for it was here that the offspring of the pub’s owners, Leo and Baba Brennan, played their first gigs as Clannad 50 years ago. Fronted by the ethereal voice of Moya Brennan and backed by siblings Ciarán and Pól and twin uncles Noel and Pádraig Duggan, the family band that emerged from the craic of those sessions went on to record 16 studio albums and sell an estimated 15 million records. Along the way they also launched the career…

“MY company specialises in music podcasts. Robert wanted to look back and back catalogue, do it properly Ze record in a room above a pub in Primrose i ll It’s somewhere he knows and feels comfortable with. Robert can talk about the songs he wants to – some might not be songs people are incredibly familiar with, some of them might be. He has the freedom to wonder off talking about these songs. “The ‘Battle Of Evermore’ episode was about Sandy Denny and how she and he fit into the folk idiom and the traditional English storytelling tradition – which isn’t what you might read about in the books. He’s approaching his legacy in his own way. The ›Dchilles Oast Stand’ episode was ust about going to orocco ›Ze were…

IQDecember , Robert Plant visited SprC Theatre, in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, with his friend and local musician Jeoff Jrimes Plant, it transpired, was looking for intimate venues for a new proect – Saving Jrace few weeks later, the band made their live debut there, on January , Subseuently, they played more than shows around the XN – including three dates with Iairport Convention in Iebruary and an appearance at ZOD in July Their itinerary largely stayed clear of familiar touring routes, preferring instead smaller cities and towns such as Cheltenham, Stroud, Carmarthen and r ome The musicians are all local to Plant’s part of the world Juitarist att Zorley, a pub landlord in Stourport by day, has also played with Robbie Blunt’s band; Birminghamborn guitarist Tony Nelsey is a veteran…

LOVE “False Start is not supposed to be a cool record by Arthur Lee. It’s when he’s supposed to be done, but it’s actually really good. It has Jimi Hendrix on ‘The Everlasting First’, and it’s got some other good songs on it – he was ust really good” RICHARD DAWSON “I like him a lot. I was talking to Dan Bejar from Destroyer about the things we liked from last year, and we both agreed that Richard Dawson and King Krule – in the song-based, white-dude realm, anyway – were cool. His guitar playing is amaing” KING KRULE “I just heard his new song [‘(Don’t Let The Dragon) Draag On’] and it’s really fucking cool – just basic jazz chords with a snare and a cymbal, and he’s rapping…

PRINCIPAL recording for both The Idiot and Low took place at the Château d’Hérouville, northwest of Paris. It was, perhaps, perfect for Bowie and Iggy for being so remote Though not a long drive from the r ench capital, it’s si miles from the nearest town (Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent and Theo Yan Jogh are buried, and it takes hard work to find mischief there Bowie had previously recorded Pin Ups there – and apparently complained about the frequency of rabbit and potatoes on the studio menu – but its musical heritage stretched back into the previous century, when r dric Chopin was believed to have conducted his affair with Jeorge Sand there. It entered rock history in 1962, when the composer Michel Magne bought it and converted it into a…

I CAN still vividly remember the first time I went on stage with Elton John. It was in Glasgow, in 1972, and it was extraordinary. It always has been! With Elton and I, it’s never been business as usual, because this is not an occupation for either of us – it’s a preoccupation. We really can’t do anything else. I was a classically trained percussionist turned session musician. I was also playing in Blue Mink, a sweet, dear band featuring myself, Herbie Flowers, Alan Parker and Barry Morgan. Elton had asked me to join his live band a couple of times. I was very happy in Blue Mink, but when he asked me again I said, “I’ll come and see a show.” It was in Bristol. Everyone had the long…

STOPPING off in Gibraltar in 1967 en route to Tangier, The Rolling Stones’ in-house muse Anita Pallenberg may have decided to transfer her affections from Brian Jones to Keith Richards when she witnessed the troubled founding Stone playing a tape of some of his songs to the local barbary macaques. According to She’s A Rainbow: The Extraordinary Life Of Anita Pallenberg, the apes were unimpressed. “The monkeys don’t like my music,” Jones bellowed. “Fuck the monkeys! Fuck the monkeys!” Smart, worldly and not inclined toward gauche monkey business, Pallenberg was – in the words of Stones court photographer Gered Mankowitz – part of an “edgy, pseudo-intellectual, glamorous, cliquey and elitist group of Europeans” that colonised groovy 1960s London. First meeting Jones in 1966, the Italian-born model pushed aside the Scalextric…

“I REMEMBER going into the rehearsal room that we shared with Gang Of Four, sometime in 1976,” remembers Kevin Lycett of the Mekons, who came up alongside them in the incendiary late-’70s Leeds post-punk scene. “I had no idea whatsoever how to process what they were doing. I had heard nothing like it, ever. It may as well have been from Venus.” “His playing was magical, unpredictable”HUGO BURNHAM Few guitarists have made such an impact on music as Andy Gill, whose fractured, staccato style and controlled feedback defined his band’s enormously influential jerky punk-funk sound. Artists paying tribute after his death from pneumonia on February 1, aged 64, ranged from Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello to Gary Numan, REM’s Mike Mills to Big Black’s Steve Albini, Blur’s Graham Coxon…

THRILL JOCKEY ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 IT might be because of the album’s frequent references to water, but there are moments during Let It All In where Arbouretum gain momentum and start to sound like a river flowing steadily towards the sea, growing in speed and size. The Baltimore band have a unique cadence. They swagger heavily like an elephant doing the boogaloo, and on tracks like “Headwaters II” or the immense title track, they seem to be descending from the hills through the rapids towards the sea, unstoppable but always in control, like the outpour from a broken dam: fast, deep, majestic. Arbouretum are led by vocalist Dave Heumann, who plays guitar and writes most of the songs and lyrics. Since 2011’s The Gathering, the band have featured…

Sorry You Couldn’t Make It JOYFUL NOISE RECORDINGS 8/10 IN 1970, a songwriter from Virginia called Jerry Williams, along with his friend Gary US Bonds, wrote a heart-wrenching number called “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got)”. It was initially recorded in January 1971 by the Southern soul singer Freddie North, whose punchy, horn-assisted version (produced by Williams) made the Billboard Top 40 and the R&B Top 10. A few months later, the outlaw country singer Johnny Paycheck picked up the song, added some Nashville vocal harmonies and a touch of bottleneck guitar, and took it to the top of the country and western charts. Before long it had been covered by everyone from Loretta Lynn to Conway Twitty, from Tanya Tucker to George Jones, and transformed into a country…

Chicago’s Califone are syncretists: imagine Beefheartian blues meeting free-form folk and heady electronics. This year’s Echo Mine has them working with choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams. “She’s an incredible artist,” says Califone’s Tim Rutili. “I have no understanding of dance, but I immediately had an emotional reaction to her work.” The process was haunted by loss – both Williams’ partner on Echo Mine , Claire Bataille, and Rutili’s father passed away while Williams and Califone worked on the piece. “That was brutal,” Rutili sighs. “This work became therapeutic and their strength and grace inspired this music.” The end result is an album that’s both expansive and intimate,a deep and empathic exploration amid the pain of bereavement. Echo Mine’s experimental edges are re›ected in Rutili’s recent project with producer Craig Ross, Guitars…

Growing up in Atlanta, William Fussell heard country everywhere – “in the chain restaurants we’d go to after church, in my parents’ car when we’d drive to the hardware store.” He loved the hat acts of the 1990s – especially Garth Brooks – but as a teenager he became disillusioned by the South and what country represented. “When I was 17, my dad took me to Nashville and we went to the Country Music Hall Of Fame, where my discovery of Patsy Cline and Eddie Arnold started to soften my resolve.” After playing in a shoegaze band called Mood Rings, Fussell moved to London, where he and his wife, Alana Pagnutti, dreamed up a “celestial honky-tonk” project called Honey Harper. Kis first full length, fittingly titled Starmaker , combines ambient…

Superstar finds Caroline Rose increasingly sure-footed as a wry chronicler of life’s absurdities, following 2018’s Loner , which presented an artist unrecognisable from her previous incarnation as an earnest singer-songwriter. “Loner is an introduction to who I am as a person, like a series of short films that together form a whole”, the 30-year-old musician and producer explains. “Superstar builds off this idea, but this time I wanted to make one narrative, like that of a film1 Stylistically, it picks up where the song ‘Jeannie Becomes A Mom’, the last song I wrote for Loner , left off. That’s where my ears and heart were starting to go.” Rose’s current signifiers are the whimsical red outfits she wears in her provocative videos and the record-making chops she’s mastered working in…

I, Plant conceived an interesting idea for a group called the Honeydrippers. It would comprise a few core players like guitarists Robbie Blunt and Dndy Sylvester and travel round local  pubs and small clubs, with Plant’s name absent from the billing. Dccording to Plant, the band arrived at each venue and sent their driver – “Big Dave” – ahead to ask who was playing that evening Lf Plant’s name was mentioned, they’d pile back into their van and drive on. The music they played was a return to Plant’s RB roots – Puddy Zaters, i llie Di{on, lvis Presley, Buddy olly, Carl Perkins, Jene incent During spring , you could have caught the Honeydrippers at the Retford Porterhouse, the Jranary in Bristol, the Sheffield imit Club, o ttingham Boat Club…

WAVES crash angrily into the pebbled beach of the South Coast’s least glamorous holiday resort as a surprising number of hardy souls fight their way along the promenade, determined to get their restorative gulp of sea air, even if it blows them off their feet. Bognor Regis in January might sound like a cruel, unusual punishment but actually its Butlins is surprisingly plush these days, and it turns out to be the perfect venue for a festival – now in its fifth year – celebrating a peculiarly British strain of black-clad indie perversity. The bill features a number of influentially grizzled old bands – but also some grizzled young ones too. The seven members of Black Country, New Road are probably less than half the age of most people in…

DARK WATERS Mark Ruffalo is the shuffling, dogged Ohio lawyer at the heart of this moody legal drama about one man who’s determined to expose the criminal failings of a major chemical corporation. You might think you’ve watched it all before: Erin Brockovich, The Insider, All The President’s Men – American cinema loves a paranoid tale of one man versus The Man. This latest conspiracy thriller – based on real events – fits squarely into that mould, but it also feels urgent and necessary, and avoids grandstanding speeches and melodramatic showdowns. It also works hard to show the effect of these crimes at ground level, on ordinary people, not least one coughing, wrenching farmer whose every ache and groan you feel. Ruffalo is Robert Bilott, a lawyer who has just…

GREED OPENS FEBRUARY 21 Steve Coogan plays a tacky, partying retail billionaire for Brit director Michael Winterbottom. DOWNHILL OPENS FEBRUARY 28 Remake of the Swedish film Force Majeure with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell. THE INVISIBLE MAN OPENS FEBRUARY 28 Elisabeth Moss stars in this update of the HG Wells novel as a woman convinced her dead husband is haunting her. THE PHOTOGRAPH OPENS MARCH 6 A New York-set romance taking place in the past and present, with a cast headed up by LaKeith Stanfield. MILITARY WIVES OPENS MARCH 6 Comedy from the director of The Full Monty, about women forming a choir while their husbands are in Afghanistan. ONWARD OPENS MARCH 6 Disney animation about two teenage elf brothers on a fantasy quest – voices include Chris Pratt and…

IVAN KRÁL AS a refugee in America, Ivan Král seemed ideally suited to the Patti Smith Group. “Ivan fit in perfectly, because all of us were slightly o›eat and felt somehow alienated from the mainstream of society,” Smith told journalist Dave Thompson. “Ivan was a part of what we were as a group.” Anticipating the Soviet invasion, Král and his family had relocated to New York from their native Czechoslovakia in 1966. His musical career began in the early ’70s, as guitarist in glam-leaning bands Luger and Spike, before a brief sojourn in LA to back Shaun Cassidy. Král passed through an early incarnation of Blondie in late 1974, but soon found a more permanent home with Patti Smith. His versatility proved a key asset as he alternated between bass…

WHEN Justin Vernon was contemplating where to record Bon Iver’s 2019 album i,i, one name kept coming up: Sonic Ranch. “It’s one of those places you’ve heard about for years and years and years, from different engineers, from people in all sorts of different corners of music,” he says. “The whole setting, the West Texas thing in general – it was such a good place for us to go, just to gain new perspective.” It was the same story for Big Thief, who decamped to Sonic Ranch to record Two Hands, their second LP of 2019 and strongly influenced by the studio’s desert location on the Mexican border. “Sonic Ranch is a magical place,” says John Dwyer of Oh Sees, who have made several albums there, including last year’s Face…

1 JOHN MORELAND Terrestrial On his new record LP5, the Tulsa songwriter adds subtly experimental touches to his classic tales of struggle and rejuvenation. It’s our Americana Album Of The Month on p26. 2 BAXTER DURY I’m Not Your Dog With The Night Chancers, Dury introduces a cast of evocative characters: sleazy, silly and often hilarious. This opening track finds the bard of west London mixing synth-pop with luscious strings and profane poetry: “I’m not your fuckin’ friend…” 3 NADIA REID Heart To Ride For this austere Kiwi singer-songwriter, the irrepressibly groovy Spacebomb production team might seem an odd choice of collaborator. Yet the experiment is a successful one, as demonstrated by this highlight from Out Of My Province. 4 ARBOURETUM How Deep It Goes The…

The whole songwriting process and perfecting our arrangements is something that requires regular practice. We recorded this in late summer and we had been getting together weekly for at least a year before that to work on songs and arrangements. If you are only getting together once a week you don’t make much progress, it’s pretty slow going. It’s not like we are having these marathon rehearsals for four or five hours. We work on two or three songs each time and might only play them two or three times. For this record, we had a critical mass of songs and material. We had three songs from the previous record and these new ones that were more recently written. With “Let It All In” having been tracked and us liking…

JOHN MORELAND LP THIRTY TIGERS 8/10 Singer-songwriter banishes the bad times on captivating fifth JOHN MORELAND was eager to dispel his “sad bastard” reputation with 2017’s Big Bad Luv, on which he expanded his sound and used a full band for the first time. LP5 takes a similar approach, but, if anything, feels even more assured. The Tulsa-based songwriter went through a mini-crisis to get here, overcoming writer’s block and eventually discovering “mindfulness and being kinder to myself”. This seems to have allowed him the freedom to address certain issues from his past. The outstanding “A Thought Is Just A Passing Train”, with its swampy groove and accents of warm Southern soul, makes oblique references to a church upbringing and feelings of self-loathing. “Shame is a cancer/Go easy on your…

England Is A Garden AMPLE PLAY 8/10 WHEN Tjinder Singh’s father told him, “There will come a day when they want to chuck you out,” these words had a profound bearing on the person he would become. “I’ve always lived with that in my background. This has made the group political,” he said in a recent interview, before adding: “It’s always nice to have something other than love to write about.” While England Is A Garden is by no means Cornershop’s Brexit album – the band have addressed issues of race, immigration and multiculturalism since they first appeared at the start of the 1990s – it was written and recorded while the mad fog of Brexit descended, and now that a divided UK has formally left the EU, the band’s…

Circles Around The Sun RKINR / RR\AL PRTATR APIL\ 6/10 CIRCLES Around The Sun was never meant to be a band at all. Nor did they plan to release any official music. The supposed one-off project began in 2015, when guitarist Neal Casal was approached by video-maker Justin Kreutzmann – son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill – to create intermission music for the Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows in Santa Clara and Chicago. Casal promptly sought help from keyboardist Adam MacDougall, his bandmate in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood. Together they brought in drummer Mark Levy and bassist Dan Horne, an old acquaintance of Casal’s from his association with Beachwood Sparks. The quartet repaired to the studio for two days, improvising some instrumental jams in the free-spirited ethos of the Dead,…

The Main Thing DOMINO 7/10 SINCE they formed in 2008, Real Estate have stood for an ideal of sweet, bucolic guitar pop, equally informed by British jangle-pop from the ’80s (think Felt, East Village, early Primal Scream), the lo-fi explorations of NZ’s Flying Nun brigade, and a more ornate, folksy classicism, following a throughline from Nick Drake to The Clientele. There’s an autumnal gait to their music: centred and wistful, it’s a specific vision of what the pop song can do. With every album a variation on that theme, for Real Estate the devil is very much in the details; what will they have done to draw something new and poignant out of their music this time? In 2020, Real Estate are breathing out. The Main Thing feels luxuriant, particularly…

Sophie Allison is refreshingly unaffected regarding her initial aims for the follow-up to Clean . “I just wanted to make something bigger and better, I guess,” she says. “Sonically, I wanted to take what I had learned about production and bring cool, strange ideas that contradicted my sound a bit.” While they’re not exactly contradictory in the context of her new set, “Lucy” and “Night Swimming” do betray a more experimental bent, although neither was a stretch for Allison, either thematically or musically: “I actually felt like ‘Night Swimming’ was one of the more comfortable ones for me. It feels like a piece that re›ects on who was in the past when some of the other troubles I deal with on the album first started ›Oucy’, on the other hand,…

Trouble No More: 50th Anniversary Collection IVLANG PHRCUR\/UNIYHRVAL 8/10 IT began with a jam. Fresh off a tour with pop star Tommy Roe, Chicago-born bass player Berry Oakley settled down in Sarasota and embedded himself in the local music scene. In the late 1960s he began hosting unrehearsed concerts every Sunday at Willow Branch Park. Free to the public and open to anybody with an instrument, these events gave young musicians from Central Florida an opportunity to play together, share notes, possibly form bands, and of course jam for as long as they liked in whichever directions the music took them. Most weekends Duane Allman, a burnout on the LA rock scene and a lauded session guitarist looking to launch a solo career, would make the four-hour drive from Jacksonville…

THE DISTRACTIONS Nobody’s Perfect MAN IN THE MOON 8/10 Unknown pleasures from forgotten Manc band 1979 was a musically fertile time for Manchester, and Factory Records were at the centre of it all. That year they put out records by the likes of Joy Division, OMD and A Certain Ratio, and also a 7” by a significantly less fêted group, The Distractions. If “Time Goes By So Slow” today sounds like a connecting bridge between post-punk and the jangly indie that followed, in 1979 the group’s focus on hooks and melody over discordance and atmosphere was somewhat antithetical to the post-punk rhythm of the times. Swiftly signing to Island, the group, led by vocalist Mike Finney and guitarist Steve Perrin, released their debut album the following year. Despite some critical…

“I FISH, and my wife’s pretty good at it too These are dry ›ies They’re really small, so you have to put on glasses like an old man to tie a knot. The poles are really long, and it’s hard, especially on a rushing river, because there are trees on the side and you can get stuck – also you can fall in when the water’s rough You look for little rif›es where you imagine the fish is sitting waiting for the food to come, and then you whip it across upstream – hopefully it’s also cloudy, because then they can’t see that the ›y is fake They have plenty of people after them, so once they’ve been caught a couple of times, because we throw them back, they get…

Diawara’s electric guitar chops mark her out as a true trailblazer “AS you know, Africa is not all about problems,” Fatoumata Diawara reminds us, two songs in. “It is our job to introduce the real Africa.” On the evidence of this impassioned show, the Malian singer-songwriter and her band are seasoned ambassadors, with fine-tuned communication skills. Diawara launched her career as a backup singer with Oumou Sangaré and was hailed as a rising star of African music on the release of her 2011 debut album, Fatou. She’s since become a universally acclaimed voice, unique to her generation. It’s still rare for Malian women to play any instrument – traditionally, they only sing – so Diawara’s electric guitar chops mark her out as a true trailblazer, even more so when shredding…

ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON AND THE BAND DVD LABEL 7/10 Fresh new perspectives on a tightly knit Band. By Jason Anderson As befits the title of Daniel Roher’s reverential doc about The Band, Once Were Brothers is filled with talk of the fraternal relationships between the four Canadians and one American from their earliest days in the rock clubs of Toronto onwards. The bond they shared, we hear again and again, was a beautiful thing, even an enviable one to Eric Clapton, who admits he longed to join that brotherhood. And it stayed beautiful until – as Robbie Robertson ruefully notes – “it went up in flames.” The Band’s guitarist and chief songwriter delivers the line in a way that suggests the fire was an act of…

GREEN WITH GRATITUDE Thank you for the respectful and sensitive article about the truly great Peter Green in your March 2020 edition. In November 2002, I was lucky enough to witness his Splinter Group playing a supporting role to Mayall at Wolves Civic Hall. The beginnings weren’t promising. An apparently pretty average blues band took to the stage and struck up a rolling blues with the “lead” guitarist – I think an American guy – widdling wildly 10 to the dozen. After an eternity of this, a little old guy shuffled on wearing a battered hat and a mint-green Strat, plugged in and, at the appropriate moment, touched the strings. Ice-cold water ran down my spine and tears came to my eyes. I’d been listening to him caressing similar guitars…