Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i UNCUT

“But when I look in your eyes and see the harmonies/And the heartaches soften” ONE of the many satisfying aspects of my job is finding new tales to bring you each month. This issue alone, we have first-time features on Fugazi, Peggy Seeger, Scritti Politti and Israel Nash, while Jackie DeShannon and Toyah pop up in two of our key franchises. These artists also embody the wide span of music we strive to bring you every issue. Their stories are all great – but I’m especially proud of Jim Wirth’s Peggy Seeger feature. On one hand, the piece satisfyingly completes a trilogy of interviews Jim’s conducted for us with the grand dames of folk, following on from Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs. Also, much like Sonny Rollins in last month’s…

NOTHING stirs Graham Nash into action quite like politics. Ahead of last November’s presidential election, the campaigning CSNY legend released a new song, “Vote”, urging the US public to throw their weight behind Joe Biden. “I just thought it was really important to get that song out, because we were in real danger of losing our democracy,” he tells Uncut. “And it turned out to be pretty successful.” The same political directive underpins Nash’s latest songs. “I’ve been writing remotely with [guitarist and producer] Shane Fontayne and [keyboardist] Todd Caldwell,” he reveals. “There’s five or six currently in the works, as well as a few other ideas on the go. The working title of the album is Analysis In Wonderland. It’s just me commenting on the legacy of Trump and…

What was Lynn’s aim with this album? Loretta wanted to make an album of the best possible songs she could find: some she had written, some were new, some were old favourites from other songwriters. She had as much energy and spirit when we began working together back in 2007 as she ever did. That continues now, in heart and soul. She wanted to make the record in a comfortable environment and to follow her own specific vision. She felt she found that at the Cash Cabin Studio. How did the three of you realise that together? Like hearts and like souls follow like directions. Loretta is very much like my mother – in personality, charm, intuition and compassion. It is easy to work with her and easy to work…

Equally revered for her work in Nickel Creek, I’m With Her and The Watkins Family Hour, Sara Watkins unveils an unexpected new solo project at the back end of March. Under The Pepper Tree NEW WEST reaches deep into her own childhood to reimagine songs from yesteryear. The tracklist veers from vintage cowboy tunes to Rodgers & Hammerstein, The Beatles, Harry Nilsson and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory . Watkins, who wanted to create “a place of calm, imagination and relief”, has also brought in her brother Sean, Nickel Creek bandmate Chris Thile, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and I’m With Her’s Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan to help out. On a different tack, the prolific and ever-resourceful Todd Snider has been presenting a virtual tent revival for the past few…

Quiet Life feels like a bandfinallyworkingout whothey were. What do you think accounted for that? Thefirstalbum, and to a large extent the second, was the band’s opportunity to record material it had been touring for a number of years. We took a much more measuredapproachwhen recording Quiet Life . We were far more conscious of musicianshipandinterplay rather than simply a great song. Sayingthat, the songwritinghadstarted todevelopamore sophisticated‘poetic’or ‘romantic’flavourrather thanthepreviousangry, subversivecontent, and this in turn would have determinedamoresubtle, expressive approach to the instrumentation. Howimportant wasJohn Punter’s involvement? With his knowledgeandexperience in the studio we felt we had everything in place to really makesomethingwewere going to be proud of. We wereextremelykeentopush ourselveswithinthecreative process of recording. Whatwas the dynamic like in the studio? We couldn’t have been happier ormoreenthusiastic.Each person was focused on…

DRIVE west out of Austin on US-290 W and the highway delivers you to Dripping Springs, “Gateway To The Texas Hill Country”, population 3,000. Not exactly a fading dot on a map of nowhere, a ghost town with creaking doors, Morricone harmonicas on a hard wind. But already deep enough into the Hill Country to feel removed from the world’s dumb hustle. A place of birdsong and harmony. Hawks aswirl in a vast blue sky. Coyotes howling in canyons at night. Good enough vibes for a man to want to call it home. Let’s go there now. It’s a fine, bright morning, a couple of days before Christmas. Israel Nash is standing on the large wooden deck that fronts Plum Creek Sound, the studio he built on a hill overlooking…

THIS morning, Peggy Seeger has been out in her garden in Oxfordshire to inspect the bird tables. These, she explains, have now been squirrel-proofed and she was keen to see how successfully they were working. “Connecting with nature is something you do a whole lot when you get old,” she says, with a typically commanding blue-eyed stare. “I’m not a mature citizen, I’m not vintage, I’m old. Bloody old. You’ll soon be joining the whole of nature’s system and learning to understand it is what I’m doing now. And it is magical. Absolutely magical.” A leading figure in the most politically radical stream of the UK folk revival, Seeger has not morphed into an earth mother. There are no dreamcatchers on her living room wall, no obvious crystals. However, the…

LATELY, Pete Townshend has been plotting. It is, he says, one of the few positive side-effects of the national lockdown – the advent of which came as something of a relief after a splurge of activity that sapped his energy. “At the end of 2019, I put out my novel, The Age Of Anxiety, and did all the PR for Who,” he explains, referring to The Who’s first studio album in 13 years. “Roger had undergone vocal surgery and been told he couldn’t speak, so he wasn’t able to help me with promoting it. I was pretty shattered by the end of all that. Then the UK tour, which was supposed to start last March, was cancelled. And another tour in America afterwards. So I was glad that I didn’t…

GREEN is kind of blue. Talking to Uncut in the week before Christmas, the inquisitive mind behind Scritti Politti has spent the previous nine months almost completely housebound. Because Gartside’s wife has underlying health conditions, he made the decision early on in the pandemic to forgo the outside world. “I went out with Alexis from Hot Chip for one beer somewhere during the summer, and Rhodri [Marsden] from my band for another, and that’s been it,” he says. Other than the local pharmacist, “I haven’t seen a soul. It’s odd to be talking to someone again.” It’s not the first time during a career of what he calls “sporadic music making” that Gartside has lain low. In the past 40 years there have been long periods of silence spent dealing…

MALCOLM & MARIE Those sweet ‘M’s make Malcolm & Marie sound like a cosy romcom. In reality, Sam Levinson’s film is something you might consider even more off-putting – a film about Hollywood people having a moaning match in a Malibu mansion. But this Netflix comedy-drama is something really daring – a no-holds-barred one-set two-hander about a couple tearing each other to emotional shreds. It stars John David Washington and Zendaya as a couple who’ve just come back to their luxurious house where they’re staying, after the successful premiere of his new movie. He’s cock-a-hoop, dancing around in narcissistic euphoria; but she’s unhappy about something, and once that frayed loose end of discontent is tugged on, the whole fabric of their relationship unravels spectacularly. Writer-director Levinson made the flashy Assassination…

POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ DIGITAL PLATFORMS 9/10 Powerful, lyrical bio-doc of the original germ-free adolescent OF all the strange blooms to flourish in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ first tour across the infernal English summer of 1976, the boldest and brightest was Poly Styrene. A mixed-race child of a sad-eyed Somali stowaway dad and fierce white south London mum, she walked into their gig on Hastings Pier (supporting Welsh metallers Budgie) on her 19th birthday as Marianne Joan Elliott-Said and skipped out a transformed woman. “The world is still playing catchup with Poly,” says Pauline Black towards the end of this artful, lyrical, moving film. And after a journey taking us from a coalfire flat in Brixton to the squalor of the Roxy, from the hipster cellar…

IT was The Flaming Lips’ craziest scheme to date, but somehow they triumphed once again. On January 22 and 23, with live music shut down almost everywhere, they played a pair of euphoric Covidsafe shows at The Criterion in their hometown of Oklahoma City to an audience safely ensconced inside 100 plastic space bubbles. After 10 months of lockdowns and social distancing, Wayne Coyne describes the mood inside the venue as “a joyous eruption of, ‘This is really happening!’ I could see people losing their minds a little bit, like, ‘Oh, we don’t have to worry about getting contaminated – as long as we’re in this bubble, we can scream, we can sweat, we can do whatever we want, because it’s not affecting our neighbour.’” Each band member was also…

Why did you feel now was the time to record an album about dreams? Well, I have always been a dreamer. I was born a dreamer, and I was raised by two dreamers! I believe that everyone when they’re little has a dream, and as we get older we still have those dreams, but society isn’t really set up to support the dreamer. You can hear it in “Imagine” by John Lennon, where he has to say, “I’m not the only one”. And someone like Dr King, with “I have a dream”, that beautiful speech. After last year, with the rise of so many things coming to the surface with systemic racism and injustice across the world, and especially in our country [the US]. We see how much further we…

FOR over half a century, Trinidad-born drum maestro Fimber Bravo has been on a mission to prove the steel pan is every bit as versatile and expressive as any European classical instrument. Working with a huge range of collaborators, from pianist Winifred Atwell to Hot Chip, Blur and the Sun Ra Arkestra, Bravo has elevated this shimmering sunshine sound far beyond easy-listening cruise-ship novelty. “Steel pan is the creative heart of Trinidad,” Bravo says. “The heartbeat of the Caribbean.” Resident in London since 1971, Bravo signed his first deal in 1975 after his former nine-piece combo, the 20th Century Steel Band, appeared beside Lenny Henry on New Faces . The band’s biggest hit, “Heaven And Hell”, has since been sampled by dozens of superstars including Jennifer Lopez, Lauryn Hill and…

NOT for the first time in its history, Great Britain finds itself at a crossroads, pulled one way and another by opposing cultural and political forces. On one side stands an establishment dedicated to the consolidation of existing power; on the other, a movement to confront and atone for the more shameful aspects of the past, as a way of addressing them and moving forwards. Of course, Gang Of Four were there in 1979. As frontman Jon King sang on “Not Great Men”, the third track on their debut album Entertainment!: “The past lives on in your front room/The poor still weak, the rich still rule”. Sentimentally, semantically, sonically, it could have been written yesterday. “Your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour” Sifting through Gang Of Four 77–81, a…

How did the box come together? HUGO BURNHAM: We started talking vaguely back and forward in early spring of 2019. It came about, largely, because a couple years before that, we managed to extricate ourselves and our catalogue from Warner Brothers Records, who we signed to in 1980. A new copyright law came in for the US, the 35 years rule. It allowed us to say: you have to change our deal, or we’re out of here. And we went back and forth quite a lot with Warner Brothers and Rhino, and it didn’t come together. So we left them. And then in September, I think, Jon and I really started to get into the actual meat of putting the boxset together. JON KING: The contract, actually, that we have…

After recording his first four albums for Harvest, Michael Chapman signed to Deram, the progressive arm of Decca, in 1973. “I was disillusioned because I’d been to America on the tour from hell,” he explains. “I didn’t get two things on that tour: I didn’t get paid and I didn’t get shot. So I went to Decca quite happily and got some money, which I needed.” Exercising his right to total artistic freedom, he enlisted legendary Stax producer Don Nix for 1976’s Savage Amusement , recorded at a remote Cornish studio, Sawmills. The proud owner had just installed a new 24-track Dolby system. Recalls Chapman: “Don just looked at him and said: ‘Turn those motherfuckers off, they’re a Commie plot!’ There was a forest of microphones around the drumkit and…

HASAAN IBN ALI Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album OMNIVORE 8/10 IT’S hard to accurately parse where Hasaan Ibn Ali sits within the firmament of jazz pianists. A legend to some, with friend Odean Pope convinced he was the “most advanced player to ever develop” in Philadelphia, for others he’s little more than a rumour. During his playing career he only released one album, with drummer Max Roach and bass player Art Davis, 1965’s The Max Roach Trio Featuring The Legendary Hasaan. That title seems hubristic until you hear the album, where Hasaan’s intricate webs of notes spin out across Roach and Davis’s fluid, lyrical playing. Some say that Hasaan is the missing link between Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor; for others, he’s closest to Herbie Nichols, though far more abstract.…

NEW YORK TOWN (2009) Nash’s debut, an album that sounds like it was made by someone who grew up in the singer-songwriter section of his local record shop. 7/10 BARN DOORS AND CONCRETE FLOORS (2011) Recorded in a Catskills shed, Barn Doors… mixed Stones-inspired, driving country rock, hard-luck Springsteen narratives and a couple of ballads that wouldn’t have been out of place on Ryan Adams’ Gold . 8/10 BARN DOORS SPRING TOUR, LIVE IN HOLLAND (2011) Songs from New York Town and Barn Doors… were revisited in the manner of the Stones, CCR and Crazy Horse on this fiery live album. Includes a stunning version of Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues”. 8/10 RAIN PLANS (2013) Nash’s previous brawny country rock was here replaced by lysergic soundscapes and vintage LA folk-rock. The…

“WE made The Who Sell Out during a very vulnerable time for me. I was on probation [ with The Who ] and having to be a very good boy, because I’d had a row with Keith Moon and been thrown out of the band. We’d just come back from Hawaii, from touring with Herman’s Hermits and being in each other’s laps for three months on the road. The good thing was that the ego problems were starting to disappear and we were all starting to get on again. “As a band we were still finding our own niche, because it became very obvious, right from the early days, that Pete was very different to any other writer out there. My problem was finding the voice for those songs. I…

“I REALLY wish we were in-person,” says Michaela Anne, set up with her acoustic guitar in a light-and plant-filled corner of her living room. Last year’s AmericanaFest UK – one of the country’s last major music events before Covid hit – was “a special highlight” for the Nashville-based songwriter, who shouts out Hackney’s small venues and her “favourite vegan cafe” before performing her road song, “Child Of The Wind”. Dubbing its first online festival ‘Staying Connected’, the UK Americana Music Association has taken the brief seriously: two virtual stages to switch between, international partner showcases packed with guest performances, and a live chat ‘bar area’ in which artists – and, sometimes, their parents – pop up between streams. An hour-long showcase from Nashville’s Thirty Tigers Records is the perfect entry…

PHIL SPECTOR Pioneering ‘wall of sound’ producer (1939-2021) THE news of Phil Spector’s death by natural causes was confirmed not by a family member, but by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Spector was serving 19-years-to-life for the second degree murder of Lana Clarkson in 2003, a miserable endstop to a career in which his controlling and abusive behaviour had become as much of a signature as his famous ‘wall of sound’ techniques. Spector was still a teenager when his band The Teddy Bears reached No 1 in 1958 with a song he wrote, “To Know Him Is To Love Him”. Yet its swooning melody concealed a darkness; its title was a tribute to Spector’s father, who had killed himself nine years previously. The precocious songwriter soon…

WE used to rehearse in this old bicycle rental store near Central Park. In the wintertime, when there was no bicycle rental going on, the owner Rusty would set up a couple of broken-down amps and some drums so he could rent it out as a rehearsal space. Syl had been in Europe. I think he was in Holland and he didn’t have a visa, so he got deported. He literally came bouncing in straight from the airport with a carpetbag and a guitar case. I said, “Can you play that thing?” and as soon as he started playing with us I just thought, ‘We gotta have this guy in the band.’ This was probably our third rehearsal. The guy we had before that, he was very moribund. It wasn’t…

THE seeds for Blondie’s Cuban trip were planted way back in 1976 on their very first album, with the song “Man Overboard” and its endearing attempts to punk up a Fania-style groove. “Latin music has always been part of the feel of New York, so it’s a part of our roots too,” insists Debbie Harry. It’s an influence that has surfaced periodically over the years – think of “Maria” or “Sugar On The Side”, the 2011 collaboration with Colombian group Systema Solar – so the band jumped at the chance to play two shows at Havana’s beautiful art deco Teatro Mella in March 2019, supported by local artists Alain Perez, David Blanco and long-running jazz-fusion band Sintesis. Naturally some of the Cuban musicians ended up on stage with Blondie, and…

1 ESTHER ROSE Coyote Creek How Many Times, the latest release from this New Orleans-based singer-songwriter beloved of Jack White, is our Americana Album Of The Month on page 26. “Coyote Creek” is a low-slung desert-folk highlight, romantic and expansive. 2 SPENCER CULLUM Jack Of Fools A Nashville pedal-steel master, British-born Cullum is now stepping out with his own psych-folk record, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection. Nodding to Pentangle and Al Stewart, with blown-out tape saturation that Kevin Parker would approve of, here’s the record’s opening track. 3 ARAB STRAP The Turning Of Our Bones (Radio Edit) Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton return this month with As Days Get Dark, their first album together in 16 years. The opener, with its electronic beat and ominous, post-punk guitar, is…

LORETTALYNN Lynn’s voice has deepened through the years but lost none of its fire Still Woman Enough LEGACY RECORDINGS 7/10 Past, present and future combine on country trailblazer’s 50th album. By Sharon O’Connell PERSONAL narrative is the lifeblood of country music, and Loretta Lynn has a history more famously potent than most. One of eight children born to a Kentucky coal miner, she married at the age of 14 and endured a long, abusive relationship, became the first woman to win the CMA’s Entertainer Of The Year Award (in 1972) and is widely acknowledged as a pillar of the genre. It’s a story of struggle and success that’s sustained multiple retellings, whether in memoir, movie or album, and her 50th full-length is another iteration, with a slight twist. This year…

ESTHER ROSE How Many Times FULL TIME HOBBY 8/10 New Orleans-based singer-songwriter offers rich, reconciliatory third ESTHER ROSE has been quietly building a reputation these past few years. Her assured 2017 debut, the self-released This Time Last Night, found its way to Jack White, who was so taken with her voice that he invited her to sing on his latest solo effort, Boarding House Reach. Since then the Detroit-born songwriter (and Crescent City resident for the past decade) has found herself supporting Nick Lowe, Hurray For The Riff Raff and The Deslondes. Released by the ever-discerning Full Time Hobby, How Many Times should go some way to spreading the word further. It’s a record that documents a particularly painful break-up, with Rose diarising the experience at the point where she’s…

BOB DYLAN WITH SPECIAL GUEST GEORGE HARRISON 1970 – 50th Anniversary Edition COLUMBIA/LEGACY RECORDS 7/10 Offcuts with added George ON his return from the Isle Of Wight festival in September 1969, Bob Dylan moved himself, his wife and their three children – Sara was heavily pregnant with a fourth – from Woodstock to Greenwich Village. Settling into a townhouse on MacDougal Street, he tried to reconnect with the sort of life he had known after first arriving in New York from Minnesota. Early in 1970 he began recording the tracks that would not only complete Self-Portrait in time for a June release but provide the material for New Morning, which made its appearance in October. There would be enough left over for Columbia Records to issue a rag-bag album called…

NEW AGE STEPPERS Stepping Into A New Age ON-U SOUND 8/10 Ari Up and Adrian Sherwood’s post-punk adventures, boxed FOUNDED by visionary producer Adrian Sherwood and Slits singer Ari Up, aka Munich-born Ariane Daniela Forster, New Age Steppers were a loose collective featuring a rich talent pool: among them, Mark Stewart and Bruce Smith from The Pop Group, reggae crooner Bim Sherman, Aswad bassist George Oban, experimental improviser Steve Beresford, future pop queen Neneh Cherry, drummer Lincoln “Style” Scott and more. Notable for releasing both the first ever single and album on Sherwood’s long-running underground label On-U Sound, the Steppers relished the seemingly infinite new possibilities and fertile tensions opened up by post-punk, blending covers of obscure Jamaican imports with psychedelic dub sonics, free jazz, industrial funk and musique concète…

FOR a radio session in Los Angeles in January 1957, Peggy Seeger was asked to come up with “a happy new love song”. She phoned Ewan MacColl back in London, and – as she remembers it – “He said, ‘How about this?’ and just sang “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” over the phone. I took it down on music paper. He must have written it beforehand. I never heard him sing it again. He gave it to me. I think he wanted me to sing it to him, about the first time I ever saw his face.” First released on a 1962 collection, The New Briton Gazette Volume 2 , it was picked up by The Kingston Trio the same year, with the most significant version…

“DAVID Bowie was a friend, a house writer for Essex Music, the publishing company that hosted my own small company. He stopped me in the street once and said, ‘I’ve just heard a song of yours called “Join My Gang”!’ It was a demo I’d done for an artist that worked with Robert Stigwood, who called himself Oscar [ aka Paul Nicholas, 1966 ]. It came out and flopped, but David had heard the demo and went, ‘Yeah, it’s really good, a well-crafted song. You should get The Who to do it.’ “We exchanged ideas here and there along the way, but he kind of went off sideways. Then when The Who were doing Tommy at the Albert Hall in ’69, my little brother Simon, who was eight, came along.…

HARDCORE ROOTS TO REPEATER Making their own scene in DC, ripping up the punk rulebook and starting again… Dave Grohl, The Cramps, skinheads and Henry Rollins all make an appearance THERE was violence in the early ’80s Washington punk scene, for sure, but it was a defensive thing. We were protecting ourselves from outside forces. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it was true – people attacked punks then. We had seceded culturally from the nation, we were not a part of straight America, so we had actually put the target on our backs. It’s hard to really compare Washington now to the way it was back then. It’s certainly evolved. There are many Washingtons, but the true Washington was really black Washington, Chocolate City. The other…

MUSIC STREAMING FROM FEBRUARY 19 Sia makes her directing debut, with Maddie Ziegler – the dance phenomenon from her videos – starring as a young autistic woman named, yes, Music. Expect fanciful hoofing and unashamed emotion. JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH STREAMING FROM FEBRUARY 26 Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stansfield star in this fresh-from-Sundance drama about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and the man who betrayed him. THE DISSIDENT STREAMING FROM MARCH 5 Investigative documentary peeling the murky covers off the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NOBODY STREAMING FROM MARCH 5 The poster art features Bob Odenkirk under a rain of punches – does that make it ‘Better Maul Saul’? In this thriller, he plays a quiet family man standing up against a Russian mobster. Also starring Connie…