Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i UNCUT

“Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door” WELCOME to the new issue of Uncut – where we continue to celebrate the return of live gigs. This month, we have reports of shows by Eliza and Martin Carthy and Black Country, New Road – both, coincidentally, reviewed in Brighton. Meanwhile, in just a few months’ time, the Uncut team will be heading en masse to Wiltshire for the End Of The Road festival. More on that nearer the time – but suffice to say for all of us, End Of The Road will be an unmissable highlight after being deprived of live music for so long. Incidentally, you can find further updates and lineup information at endoftheroadfestival.com and on uncut.co.uk. Elsewhere in the issue, we also…

THE artist Edward Bell is one of a select band of collaborators who worked with Bowie twice: first on the iconic sleeve for Scary Monsters, then 10 years later producing the art for Tin Machine II. Now for the first time he’s assembled all his Bowie work and memorabilia for a retrospective and auction. “It was an extraordinary experience, the time I spent with him,” says Bell on the phone from his home in Shropshire. “But it wasn’t until he actually died that the penny dropped about how special he was, and that’s when I started to have another look at it all.” Bell is reminiscing on a friendship with Bowie that spanned some 33 years, beginning in a Neal Street gallery, continuing through Venice and LA, and producing some…

“I GREW up in the countryside and now I’m back in the countryside,” laughs 27-year-old Juni Habel, who’s crocheting a summer hat for one of her sisters in the old schoolhouse where she lives, in a village 50 miles south of Oslo. “I’m never going back to the city! You just go home to your apartment and there’s no fun stuff to do in an apartment. Living here I can work outside and go out in the woods and do practical things. I really like chopping wood, for instance.” Raised nearby in idyllic, kids’-movie circumstances on a farm with her six siblings – “a big, modern family with a lot of different fathers, very different from everyone else around” – Habel’s gentle, bucolic debut album All Ears would seem to…

Do you consider yourselves retro? SHANNON SHAW: It’s always irked me. It oversimplifies our art. However, I don’t know another single word that could sum up our sound and vibe. No-one wants to be painted with one colour, or wear the same patterned suit forever! I’ve never sat down and said to myself, “Ok, time to write a song that sounds like a throwback, retro tune!” No way! What were you going for in terms of the instrumentation and references? CODY BLANCHARD: Lately I’ve been attracted to glam, baroque pop, disco, non-Beatles ’60s and ’70s Brit pop – the period where psychedelia was no longer cutting edge and had been digested and infused more broadly into pop. African and South American ’60s and ’70s pop stuff – the unpredictable reimagining…

For Free BMG 8/10 THE renewed and reinvigorated Crosby’s twilight productivity continues apace as he approaches his 80th birthday this August. For Free is his fifth album since Croz, 2014’s comeback after a 20-year absence from the studio, again with the guiding hand of his multi-instrumentalist and producer son James Raymond and the same core of musicians, now dubbed the Sky Trails Band. Yet, while the record’s 10 tracks are elegantly shaped by players plucked from a younger generation, there are strong contributions of both pen and performance by more veteran figures from the main man’s past too, not to mention a sleeve portrait painted by Joan Baez. The title track first saw service on its writer Joni Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon, stripped back here as an…

A new Felice Brothers LP is always cause for celebration. Due in mid-September, From Dreams To Dust YEP ROC draws its unique ambience from being recorded in a renovated 19th-century church in Upstate New York. Led by siblings Ian and James Felice, the revamped quartet that debuted with 2019’s Undress are joined across 12 songs by Bright Eyes’ trumpeter Nathaniel Walcott and pedal steel player Mike Mogis. Earlier that month, Grammy-winning producer and engineer David Ferguson takes the mic for the first time on Nashville No More FAT POSSUM. Described by recent collaborator Sturgill Simpson as “a bona fide card-carrying legendary hillbilly genius”, Ferguson’s CV includes Cowboy Jack Clement, John Prine and Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series. Some big-name help is at hand for this 10-song set too, with Margo…

Willy Mason started working on what would become Already Dead , his first album since 2012, in Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2019, when it was “hot and crazy outside”. Starting with the lyrics and then adding layers of guitar and keyboard, he finally presented the songs to collaborator Noel Heroux in November 2019, who noted that Mason’s songwriting had “shifted significantly”, with more sonic complexity than Mason’s folk-inspired singer-songwriter origins. “Noel helped me expand its biological complexity,” says Mason. “His use of effects pedals and distinct editing style have a lot to do with the sound. I was also influenced in the arrangements because I’ve played in a lot of local bands since my last album and I wanted to make music that was fun to play with…

“You’re sittin’ in a dentist’s chair/And they’ve got music for you there” Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 CAPITOL/UME ON 15 August 1970, The Beach Boys repaired to Brian Wilson’s house in Bel-Air, setting up in the studio downstairs. Sunflower, their new album, was due out in a fortnight, but the band were already sketching ideas for a follow-up. Wilson laid down a basic track for “’Til I Die”, a song he’d been struggling with for some time but was yet to perfect. Mike Love, meanwhile, unveiled the quietly rapturous “Big Sur”. Trailed this June ahead of Feel Flows – a major compilation centred around Sunflower and its 1971 successor, Surf’s Up – “Big Sur” finds the band in their preferred milieu: hymning the glory of a…

How were things in The Beach Boys’ camp during the late ’60s? AL JARDINE: It was difficult being a Beach Boy in the years after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Tough, really tough. And of course there was increasing negativity with the Vietnam War. It wasn’t very cool to be a Beach Boy, it wasn’t “Fun Fun Fun” any more. So we were hitting a big wall of change. Things were definitely moving quite rapidly and we were just on the edge of it. How did the band deal with Brian’s withdrawal from leadership? BRUCE JOHNSTON: Brian was kind of peeling back a little. It’s kind of like a running track; you’re going to get tired out. You’re not going to win the Olympics every year. We had a…

BUCKINGHAM NICKS BUCKINGHAM NICKS ANTHEM/POLYDOR, 1973 The album that got the pair into Fleetwood Mac, when producer Keith Olsen played the epic “Frozen Love” to Mick Fleetwood. Still a “lost album”, very much in need of reissue. Says Buckingham: “10 years ago there was some optimism that Stevie would wanna play ball, but she apparently didn’t. So, yeah…” 8/10 LAW AND ORDER WARNER/ASYLUM, 1981 Amid the group backlash over Tusk’s experimentation and commercial ‘failure’, Buckingham responded with this unhinged, retro 11-song set, including the ornate doo-wop of “September Song” and the overwrought screamer “Johnny Stew”. 7/10 GO INSANE REPRISE/WARNER, 1984 Buckingham got serious about his solo career here, crafting this glossier second LP featuring the classic title track. He plays nearly everything including, in arch ’80s style, Linn drum machine…

AGED 14, Baxter Dury was expelled from his Chiswick school, prompting the deputy head to phone his father Ian at the squalid Hammersmith flat in which they both lived at the time. As Baxter remembers in Chaise Longue, his memoir of his complicated bohemian upbringing, it was a fairly short conversation: “Why don’t you fuck off, you snotty little maggot!” Left partially paralysed by a childhood case of polio, Ian Dury grew up devilishly smart but deeply angry. A pupil of Sgt Pepper sleeve designer Peter Blake at the Royal College Of Art, he became a fixture in grotty rock clubland with Kilburn And The High Roads, before The Blockheads helped to make him a punk-era star, with barroom funk banger “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” going to No…

THE WORLD TO COME OPENS JULY 23 Mona Fastvold’s film may be the sort of Lesbian Period Drama recently spoofed by Saturday Night Live but it’s one of the best of its kind – a compellingly staged story of 19th-century America, superbly acted by Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston. OLD OPENS JULY 23 M Night Shyamalan returns with a tale of weirdness on the beach, starring Gael García Bernal and Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps. THE SPARKS BROTHERS OPENS JULY 30 About to conquer the European arthouse with their Leos Carax collaboration Annette , Ron and Russell Mael’s six-decade career is celebrated in this documentary by Edgar Wright. THE GREEN KNIGHT OPENS AUGUST 6 Director David Lowery ( A Ghost Story ) goes grand-scale Arthurian in his version of the Gawain…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine FESTIVALOFDREAMS I was at the Newport festival that Michaelangelo Matos mentions in his fine article about Sly & the Family Stone [August issue]. Promoter George Wein had previously ran both folk and jazz festivals at the site, but with the growing popularity of rock music he decided to feature both jazz and rock acts in this first – and last – experimental Newport Jazz and Rock festival. The memories are hazy, but Miles Davis was definitely there, and possibly Herbie Hancock, Ten Years After and the Jeff Beck Group. As Matos relates, fans tore down the perimeter fence during Sly & The Family Stone’s lively set and stormed the site. Fearing more trouble, Wein announced that he was cancelling the next act –…

EVEN before the pandemic made the act of being in a functioning band close to impossible, Jason Sharp had been thinking about going at it alone. A saxophonist from Montreal, Sharp had put out a couple of albums on the city’s post-rock hub, Constellation Records – the first recorded as a trio, the second as a duo. But his third album was to be something new. “I had in my mind a solo record where I was influencing, triggering or directly controlling all the voices within each composition at the same time,” he says. On The Turning Centre Of A Still World, he plunges his rippling sax into a rich soundworld of modular electronics guided by his own heartbeat, captured by a bluetooth heart monitor. “If I felt a piece…

Steve Gunn: “I was able to break out of certain patterns and cycles” There’s a brightness in the sound of this record, a colour to match the album cover. Was that something you planned, or was it something the songs demanded? The whole idea for the album started with me really wanting to get back to who I was as an individual. As clichéd as that sounds – I’m sure everybody who makes an album says that – I was trying to reconnect with the openness of my music on previous albums. A big part of doing that was connecting with my friend Justin Tripp, who ended up co-producing the record. He’s known me since my early Philly days, and we worked together years ago. We made Way Out Weather,…

MARISA ANDERSON and William Tyler’s new LP Lost Futures is haunted by two cultural figures no longer with us. Both Anderson and Tyler played at Bike Chain Rain, a tribute concert to Silver Jews frontman David Berman in Portland in January 2020. “David was a mentor and friend and his passing was very hard and strange,” says Tyler. The pair hung out, played a little guitar, and resolved to make a record together. That record borrows its title from Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures , a book by the late writer and theorist Mark Fisher. “My manager and friend Ben Swank had given me the book based on my interest in how to integrate this whole concept of hauntology into more idiomatically folk and…

Psalms NO QUARTER 8/10 NATHAN SALSBURG lives on an old tree farm just outside Louisville, Kentucky, with his partner Joan Shelley, their newborn baby daughter, a cat, a couple of goats and a barnful of old 78s and roots reggae 45s. He has a dream day job working for the Alan Lomax Archive and a burgeoning reputation as an intrepid folk guitarist, having released three solo albums and backed up the likes of Shelley, The Weather Station, Shirley Collins and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. But there was still something missing. Since forgoing the synagogue for the church of hardcore punk as a teenager, Salsburg felt he had lost touch with his essential Jewishness. And so, over the last few years, he has taken to leafing through a book of Hebrew psalms…

Estonian composer, singer and violinist Maarja Nuut spent her globe-trotting childhood steeped in the classical and folk tradition, working with choirs and orchestras. But her eclectic albums have mostly taken a more experimental direction, blending acoustic and electronic elements, loops and beats and avant-world textures. The title of Nuut’s new album, Hinged , has a playfully bilingual double meaning. In Estonian, she explains, it invokes “departed spirits or souls of all living things, be it you or the old linden tree in my backyard.” The album was partly inspired by Nuut inheriting a farm from her grandmother, where she sampled the sounds of “local ghosts”, buzzing insects and a wild barn cat called Vanja. Nuut has a strong track record of collaboration, including with Scottish trip-hop producer Howie B, American…

Carl And The Passions – “So Tough” BROTHER/REPRISE, 1972 Bolstered by the addition of Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar from Carl Wilson protégés The Flame, The Beach Boys locate the sweet spot between West Coast pop and experimental daring. Of Brian’s minimal contributions, “Marcella” is the keeper, while two Dennis tunes (“Make It Good” and “Cuddle Up”) were rescued from an aborted solo album. Standout moment is “All This Is That”. 7/10 Holland BROTHER/REPRISE, 1973 Temporarily shifting base to record in the Netherlands only brought their homeland closer, as evinced by “California Saga”, a three-part eco suite written by Mike Love and Al Jardine, with contributions from American poet John Robinson Jeffers. Aside from “Funky Pretty”, Brian’s major offering is a revived “Sail On, Sailor”, co-written with Van Dyke Parks…

All Things Must Pass: 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition CAPITOL/UME 10/10 FOR a while now, 51 years maybe, there’s been talk of de-Spectorising All Things Must Pass, of wiping away the reverb like grime from a golden murti. Phil didn’t make it easy, though: rather than adding effects during mixing, the layers of echo that cloud this motherlode of songs and jams are often baked onto the tapes themselves. This 50th-anniversary edition, therefore, is not the clear and crisp version of All Things Must Pass that’s hovered in some people’s imaginations for decades like some audiophile Holy Grail, as sparse and dry as 1973’s Living In The Material World. On this new mix by Paul Hicks, the fog is very much there, but a little daylight (good at arriving at…

Gentle Giant VERTIGO, 1970 This shape-shifting introduction to Gentle Giant’s brand of prog still sounds rivetingly original. It neatly showcases their ability to smoothly segue from gutsy guitar rock riffing to moody impressionism and folk-informed harmonies via angular, synth-enhanced jazz-rock and wry, Beatle-esque retro pastiche. While you wonder what’s coming next, the hooks and unorthodox grooves get under your skin. 8/10 Three Friends VERTIGO, 1972 A concept album lyrically, but the musical contrasts again define the mood: gnarly riffs and dovetailing harmonies on “Prologue”; the faux-gauche sprawl of “Schooldays” (imagine an actual school prog band making it up as they go); the beautifully loose-limbed grooves of “Working All Day”; the howling, Zappa-ish jazz-rock of “Peel The Paint”, offset against the chamber-rock of the closing title track. 7/10 Octopus VERTIGO, 1972…

PLUS! Curtis by PAUL WELLER: “I think of him as a prophet” ON a freezing New York night in January 1971, Curtis Mayfield is performing with a new band for the first time. He is also recording a live album. Over four evenings at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, he beds in with the musicians while making Curtis/ Live – one of the most engaged and electrifying concert recordings of all time. Mayfield was a multi-faceted genius. Artistic courage was just one of myriad talents. “Curtis said, ‘We’re going to do a live album,’” recalls guitarist Craig McMullen, the last surviving member of that lineup. “I said, ‘Live album? Man, I don’t even know the names of the songs!’ He said, ‘Me neither! Don’t worry about it, we’ll just…

Is it any wonder that THE BEATLES nearly named their seventh studio album after a magical invocation? After all, no other word captures the feats of creative alchemy that transpired on REVOLVER… Fifty-five years on, Uncut has assembled a crack team of Beatles heads – including JOHNNY MARR, BRIAN WILSON, GRAHAM NASH, ROGER McGUINN, RICKIE LEE JONES, SEAN ONO LENNON, DHANI HARRISON, STEVE CROPPER, MARGO PRICE and WAYNE COYNE – to explore their favourite tracks from this, the Fabs’ finest body of work. Even PAUL McCARTNEY is on hand to tell Uncut about the origins of his experimental side. But first RICHARD WILLIAMS takes us back to EMI Studios on Abbey Road – where, on April 6, 1966, tape loops, drones and mystical incantations derived from The Tibetan Book Of…

ON a sunny spring day in 1966, midway through the Revolver sessions, The Beatles decamped to Chiswick House for an afternoon’s filming. The band had selected the landscaped grounds of this 18th-century stately home to film two promotional videos for their single “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”. Ready Steady Go! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had been recruited to film in colour and on location – creating striking standalone films that could be described as the first pop videos. This was the latest stop in the evolving cinematic relationship The Beatles developed in tandem with their musical careers. What started with Pathé newsreels, press conferences and A Hard Day’s Night continues in the band’s extended afterlife with Get Back – Peter Jackson’s three-part reimagining of Let It Be, which arrives in November. “They didn’t want…

THREE days prior to the global hosannas for Bob Dylan’s birthday, May 21 saw another folk icon turn 80 more quietly. Though less protean than Bob, Martin Carthy’s pursuit of the truths of traditional song has been broad-minded and modestly majestic, whether in his prolific solo output, with Dave Swarbrick, Steeleye Span, The Albion Band, Waterson: Carthy or, as tonight, with daughter Eliza. Eliza Carthy has meanwhile pushed at folk’s boundaries anew, considering Englishness in a multicultural, pop-minded country. Whereas Martin’s 70th birthday was marked by a star-studded concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight’s celebration is more fittingly communal; when Eliza leads the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday”, it feels both poignant and transgressive to clear our throats and sing aloud for the first time in 14 months. Tonight’s…

Behind that beard Mikkelsen is having as much fun as anyone RIDERS OF JUSTICE Mads Mikkelsen has long been Scandinavian cinema’s poster boy for maleness in crisis – from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher films to Thomas Vinterberg’s recent Another Round. In the latter, he depicted sensitive midlife ennui going boozily off the skids. But his latest film Riders Of Justice has him in a more traditionally macho role, with the Viking facial hair to prove it. Made by Anders Thomas Jensen, who previously directed Mikkelsen in the eccentric Men And Chicken, the film follows the aftermath of a subway bomb attack in which a woman is killed. Obsessive statistician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) examines the facts, connects the explosion with a neo-fascist biker gang and persuades the dead woman’s husband…

THROUGHOUT an acclaimed and award-winning film career, Karen Black always seemed to find an opportunity to sing. “She sang in Nashville, she sang in Cisco Pike... even if it’s just a tiny bit like in Five Easy Pieces, she found a way to sing when she and Jack Nicholson are in a car,” says self-confessed movie nerd Cass McCombs. “She snuck it in all the time, and I picked up on that.” McCombs has just compiled Dreaming Of You: 1971-1976, a startlingly good album of songs Black recorded in the 1970s with producers Elliot Mazer and Bones Howe that were never released. McCombs first tracked her down to collaborate on his 2009 album Catacombs, after which they had planned to record an album together. But when Black died in 2013,…

1 SON VOLT The Globe Jay Farrar’s latest album, Electro Melodier, is his strongest in a while, and “The Globe” is a perfect place to start this month: a hymn to faith in humanity over a raging rocker with nods to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. 2 LIAM KAZAR So Long Tomorrow This Chicago-born artist made his solo recording debut on Uncut’s Wilcovered CD a couple of years back, and now here comes his first LP, Due North. With help from James Elkington and Spencer Tweedy, Kazar’s created a record that’s at once classic and modern. Read more on page 34. 3 NATHAN SALSBURG Psalm 47 The master fingerstyle guitarist and Alan Lomax archivist turns singer-songwriter here – well, kind of – with this selection of…

Year Of The Spider EASY EYE SOUND 8/10 SHANNON AND THE CLAMS are part of a decades-long tradition of musicians who have channelled bygone sounds and imagery for new audiences. The best of these acts don’t engage in rote resuscitation or simple tributes. Instead, they bring a rough-hewn edge, a wild experimental spirit or – crucially – both of those things to the act of revivalism. Amy Winehouse, The White Stripes and The Black Keys may be the most visible examples, but bands like Shannon & The Clams, and The Detroit Cobras before them, offer an equally rich and punchy take on tradition – with gale-force women at the helm, no less. They deftly stitch together decades and genres with nary a visible seam. They’re specialists, but they are also…

SON VOLT Electro Melodier TRANSMIT SOUND/THIRTY TIGERS 8/10 Socio-political 10th from seasoned Illinois quintet HAD everything gone as planned, Jay Farrar might still be looking back rather than forwards. Last year marked 25 years since Trace, his debut album as leader of Son Volt, the band he founded after the demise of alt.country avatars Uncle Tupelo. But global events meant that the anniversary tour never happened, forcing the singer and guitarist to hole up and contemplate an uncertain future instead. The upshot of his new labour is Electro Melodier, a rich, impassioned set of songs that essay a global nation in flux. Farrar didn’t intend to follow one political record (2019’s Union) with another, but he says, “it always seems to find a way back in there”. These sentiments reach…

Nine FOREVER LIVING ORIGINALS 9/10 IN a 2019 interview, the singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka credits his producer and main collaborator Inflo for giving him the confidence to appear on camera. “I was always terrified of pushing myself and appearing in videos,” says Kiwanuka. “But Inflo told me how important it was for fans to see the artist they’re listening to. It helps them connect.” Would that Inflo took his own advice. Inflo is a producer and multi-instrumentalist based in London, whose real name (according to his label’s listing at Companies House) is believed to be Dean Wynton Josiah Cover. For all his deliberate anonymity he’s actually quite a big name in the biz: he’s won Mercury and Ivor Novello awards for co-writing and producing albums for Kiwanuka and the London rapper…

The Apple Drop MUTE 8/10 LISTENER expectation is something that most bands who have stayed the course must contend with, choosing either to acquiesce to it, meet it halfway or defiantly turn their backs and wear the consequences. Liars, however, seem to have never even acknowledged its existence. A luxury long afforded them by their record label, maybe, but far more an indicator of their protean constitution. Over 20 years, change really has been Liars’ only constant.› Their 2001 debut was as an NYC-based four-piece, whose They Threw Us All In A Trench And Put A Monument On Top was a set of pleasingly rowdy and abrasive tracks that cut Gang Of Four- and The Pop Group-style post-punk with US hardcore, but closed with a 30-minute, psych-doom raga. Singer Angus…

Due North WOODSIST/MARE 8/10 DURING lockdown, Liam Kazar found new ways to make a living. With his regular gigs playing in Jeff Tweedy’s live band on hold, Kazar opened Isfahan – a delivery-only kitchen, named after a Duke Ellington song, whose cuisine is inspired by his Armenian heritage. Such resourcefulness has been evident throughout Kazar’s career so far. As a teenager in Chicago, he was a member of Kids These Days, an eight-piece musical collective whose sole album Traphouse Rock was produced by Tweedy. Since then, Kazar has busied himself as a journeyman guitarist, performing with Tweedy, Steve Gunn, Chance the Rapper and Daniel Johnston. Before the pandemic, he and some friends put together a David Bowie tribute show. Inevitably, Kazar – born Liam Cunningham – arrived late to a…

Conor O’Brien finished recording backing tracks for the new Villagers album as Ireland’s national lockdown began in spring 2020. Recording had started in a spirit of collaboration at the end of 2019 as a series of full-band jams but were finished by O’Brien in relative isolation, working remotely with brass, woodwind and string players. Villagers’ fine sixth LP, Fever Dreams , bristles with ideas that emerged from both stages of this process. “I wanted to feel that collective sense of discovery with the musicians I’d been playing with for the previous few years,” he says of the initial recordings. “I think you can hear the excitement in the recordings. There were quite a few eureka moments – simplifying ‘So Simpatico’ springs to mind, as does sitting at my piano and…

Backwards & Forwards: The WEA Recordings 1984-1995 CHERRY RED 7/10 THERE are two ways of looking at this incomplete history of Roddy Frame’s time in Aztec Camera. You can gaze at the contents – everything except for the band’s two Postcard Records singles and then High Land, Hard Rain, the album that established Frame as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation – and come to the conclusion that a career-spanning boxset without High Land, Hard Rain is like, say, a Velvet Underground boxset without a banana. But, without that record, Backwards & Forwards – The WEA Recordings 1984-1995 tells an equally fascinating tale.› It’s not a story about Aztec Camera per se. It’s a story about independent music in the early ’80s; about a wave of literate, ambitious…

CHRISTINE PERFECT Christine Perfect (reissue, 1970) MUSIC ON VINYL 9/10 Life before Mac: the very underrated blues debut from Mrs McVie CONSIDERING Christine McVie’s huge success with Fleetwood Mac, penning songs that would stay in the UK and US charts for months on end, this treasure of a debut album is curiously unknown. In 1970, Christine Perfect – the maiden name by which she was still known, at least professionally – was performing with Chicken Shack, dabbling with her husband’s band Fleetwood Mac, then led by Peter Green, and also finding time to record and release this bluesy delight on, naturally, Blue Horizon. Christine Perfect›is full of sultry brilliance. Take “Crazy ’Bout You Baby”, which manages to be sexy and yet also perhaps the most clipped English delivery on record.…

I REMEMBER “Move On Up” from the early 1970s, hearing it at discos. But I only really got into Curtis’s music later, around the late ’70s/early ’80s. I was good friends with a great DJ called Ady Croasdell, who made me cassettes  of all Curtis’s solo stuff. That really set me off. The Jam doing “Move On Up” towards the end was probably me going through my full-on Curtis phase. Those solo records in the early 1970s are just one classic after the other. The first two, Curtis and Roots , are incredible. “The Makings Of You” is probably my favourite Curtis song. Johnny Pate’s orchestrations are incredible – he was also a fucking genius! With the Curtis/Live album, I love that you’re right in the room; Donny Hathaway Live…

“IN the mid-’60s, I was living in London, going to the theatres and art galleries, checking out some amazing stuff like John Cage and Stockhausen, hanging out with Harold Pinter and Bertrand Russell, making my own experimental movies,  forming my own ideas, which I started filtering into The Beatles’ records. “I was responsible for the tape loops for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. In the ’60s, I was mad for tape loops. I was going to do a tape loop symphony once. It might have taken a day or two because it’s quite a lengthy process. But after The Beatles stopped touring, the idea of having all the time in the world to do what you like doing was freeing and stimulating. If you dare to experiment a little bit, it’s good…

“IT’S been a super-weird year,” says Black Country, New Road drummer Charlie Wayne at the start of this socially distanced show. “A hard year for us. But weirdly, inexplicably, we’re back on the road…” In fairness, a healthy dash of inexplicable weirdness is all part of BCNR’s charmingly wonky hipster-geek appeal. Despite being free-jazzing, post-rocking, klezmer-infused maximalist misfits, this sprawling Cambridge seven-piece chamber orchestra have somehow found themselves crowned as one of Britain’s hottest young bands, releasing their rapturously acclaimed debut album in the depths of lockdown. As Covid restrictions begin to ease, it makes sense that they are keen to cement the hype by touring again, even if it means playing two back-to-back Brighton shows to masked, size-limited crowds. Newly liberated from lockdown, the group arrive in agreeably playful…