Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2021 i UNCUT

BY now most of us, I guess, will have a view on ‘lost’ albums. Should an album that has been deliberately withheld from release – in some instances for several decades – finally be given its moment in the sun? Does the excitement of hearing, say, Neil Young’s Homegrown – only 45 years late! – somehow rob it of its mystique? Or, with hindsight, can a once lost album now help us understand more clearly the motives of an artist during a certain period in their career? There are tantalising counter-narratives to consider – what if Springsteen had released the electric band version of Nebraska instead of the sparse, haunted acoustic one? There’s a lot of thinking to be done, in other words. David Bowie’s Toy, from 2001, is remarkable…

“The Dead were big fans, so we used to get high and hang out” CHARLES LLOYD “I FIRST came to your country in ’64,” notes Charles Lloyd, the veteran saxophonist who returns to play the London Jazz Festival in November. “There was a group called The Beatles, and they came to America, and the unions had a reciprocity thing. So I played the Royal Albert Hall with Cannonball Adderley.” This exchange trip at the height of Beatlemania typifies the saxophonist’s career. He knew Elvis when he was a truck driver, was at Big Pink for The Basement Tapes, and it’s his sax and flute you can hear on The Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows”. But far from being some lucky Zelig figure, rock royalty sought Lloyd out. Robbie Robertson remembers watching…

DOWN the line from her home in Bristol, Tor Maries – better known as deadpan DIY post-punk welterweight Billy Nomates – is discussing the process of writing her second album. “There’s a lot of getting it wrong, I’ll be honest about that. But actually I’ve realised getting it wrong is so important. You have to try everything and ask, ‘What is the record I want to make?’” This year, Maries followed her punchy 2020 debut No with the “Emergency Telephone” EP, displaying a rapidly evolving sound that veers towards The Gossip or Le Tigre. Along the way she has skewered trust fund hippies, protein shakes, class structure and depilation while being fêted by Florence Welch, Sleaford Mods (she guests on their song “Mork n Mindy”, they on her “Supermarket Sweep”)…

WHEN Paul “Top Dollar” Major promises to “go full condor” in Admonitions’ opener “The Offender”, he doesn’t need to explain what he means. Besides recasting Endless Boogie’s sexagenarian frontman as an ’80s action-movie hero about to open a can of whup-ass, the line serves as a handy description for the many moments when he and his bandmates launch out of their signature motorik-choogle groove, spread their ragged wings and soar toward the sun. A gesture that seems majestic, foolhardy and potentially a little ridiculous, it’s fundamental to the mission this ragtag crew set for themselves every time they’ve jammed on stage or in a studio in their almost 25 years together. It’s hardly surprising to learn they toyed with the idea of calling the new album ‘Full Condor’ before opting…

Mark Stewart and Dennis Bovell on Y In Dub and haunted studios “Ridge Farm is such a spooky place,” Mark Stewart recalls, reflecting on The Pop Group’s sessions for their 1979 album, Y . “I think it’s a portal.” The group bunkered down with dub legend Dennis Bovell, who was, as he recalls, looking for “a chance to prove that I was capable of a non-reggae production”, to record one of post-punk’s most feverish, elemental debuts. “There were stories of a willo’-the-wisp there and demented hauntings in the pond,” Stewart continues, reflecting on the studio’s ghostliness. They got this atmosphere down on tape, an apparitional force about to be unleashed again by Bovell’s recent reworking of the album, Y In Dub , premiered live at Terry Hall’s Home Sessions, where…

FOURTEEN years on, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss follow-up Raising Sand with their second album together, Raise The Roof . We’ll also be taking a look at new releases from Lana Del Rey, Richard Fearless, Houeida Hedfi and some enticing others that are, as we go to press, unannounced. Meanwhile, in the archive section, we’ll be casting an eye over deluxe reissues of The Doors’ LA Woman , Air’s 10,000Hz Legend , Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts , Pretenders’ first two albums, and much more. EMAIL: TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

MAZES ORES & MINERALS FATCAT, 2013 The group’s second album pushed the  boundaries of their distorted sound, from the seven-minute opener “Bodies” to the instrumental miniature “Significant Bullet”. 7/10 ULTIMATE PAINTING ULTIMATE PAINTING TROUBLE IN MIND, 2014 Epitomised by  Cooper’s title track/band theme, this is a 10-track gem of lazy garage-pop, organic and easygoing. Very Chills, and very cool. 8/10 JACK COOPER SANDGROWN TROUBLE IN MIND, 2017 The beginning of the songwriter’s  work with conceptual themes, his sole solo album examines his youth near Blackpool over chiming, slightly jazzy guitars. 7/10 MODERN NATURE HOW TO LIVE BELLA UNION, 2019 The start of something special, with Tobias’s  saxophones floating above synths, organ and picked guitars, sometimes weightless, sometimes driven by motorik beats. 8/10 MODERN NATURE ANNUAL BELLA UNION, 2020 The label…

WHEN Ellie Goulding took “How Long Will I Love You” to No 3 in 2013, it felt like a long-delayed vindication for Room To Roam’s purest pop song. At the time, Chrysalis had overlooked its potential. “I had a meeting with Chris Wright and he told me, ‘Oh, there aren’t any singles on the album,’” says Mike Scott. “It’s a record company classic, that one! I said, ‘There are two singles on the album. They were designed as singles, they’re on side two: “How Long Will I Love You” and “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy”.’ And he hadn’t fucking heard them! He’d listened to side one and made up his mind. There was never a [ British ] single from Room To Roam .” The Magnificent Seven includes the remixed version…

TEN years to the day since REM announced they were splitting up, it seems fitting that Mike Mills and Michael Stipe are on the line from Athens, Georgia to discuss a song about endings. The elegiac closing track on their 1996 album New Adventures In Hi-Fi, “Electrolite” is suffused with the kind of fin-de-siècle wistfulness which defined earlier REM classics “Perfect Circle” and “Nightswimming”. Based around a lilting piano motif which Mills composed in his girlfriend’s apartment while “goofing around”, “Electrolite” viewed the coming millennium through the lens of Los Angeles, the quintessential 20th-century city. A happy-sad hymn to the notion of LA as an avatar of surface brilliance and inner emptiness, Stipe’s lyrics reference Mulholland Drive and three shining lights of Hollywood: James Dean, Steve McQueen and Martin Sheen.…

A FAULTY generator means that Genesis take to the stage 75 minutes behind schedule. “Sorry about the delay,” says Phil Collins, “but shit happens.” It isn’t the only obstacle to slow the trio’s progress recently. Never mind that the pandemic has already pushed back The Last Domino? tour twice. Collins has been suffering from severe nerve damage, amid other health issues, which means that he can no longer play drums. Walking is difficult too, requiring him to shuffle out with the aid of a stick. But Genesis refuse to be denied; with Collins’ 20-year-old son Nic now convincingly manning the drumkit, the band deliver an epic set befitting the broad scope of their impressive 53-year career. Unsurprisingly, the running order sticks close to that of The Last Domino? – The…

LOOKING back, there have always been clues. The Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues”, with its 15-year-old protagonist. Ted Nugent’s “Jailbait”. Iggy Pop’s “Look Away” – the lyrics referencing the relationship between teenage model Sable Starr and the New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunders. There are “countless” instances of what Runaways co-founder and songwriter Kari Krome calls “little girl songs”. So many, she says, that “it’s become a thing that’s normalised”. The music industry has yet to experience a #MeToo movement of the size and scale of that which hit Hollywood and other industries in 2017. For Krome and the other women interviewed in Look Away, this normalisation is partly to blame. Of the stories that anchor director Sophie Cunningham’s narrative, none are new – Cunningham told Sky News that “money and power”…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine WATTS COOKIN ’ Thanks for your great feature on Charlie Watts in the November issue [Take 294]. It brought back memories of an evening at the Marquee Club in 1964. I had gone to see Long John Baldry and his band. There was a crowd of about a couple of hundred. I walked into the bar and who should be sitting at a table there but the Stones drummer. He was on his own browsing through Melody Maker. I was a bit wary of speaking to him, but he acknowledged me so I sat down a chatted to him. He was so warm and friendly and absolutely made my evening. So sad he has passed and we all will miss him. David M…

“I was going at a million miles per hour” JIMMYPAGE ANYONE hearing Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album would be forgiven for thinking that they exploded into the world fully formed. In fact new documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin, recently premiered in Venice, maps out a pre-Zeppelin back story of dogged dues-paying on the club circuit for Robert Plant and John Bonham; and of copious session work for Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. But when they did get together, says director Bernard MacMahon, they started from scratch at their first rehearsal: “These guys essentially all met for the first time in a basement.” How they came to effectively invent a whole musical genre within a single year is chronicled in a film crammed with early-years anecdotes and rare concert footage, the…

“I’m not supposed to sing the song/I must be doing something wrong” CONSISTENCY can be a curse. Now into his fourth decade in action, Dean Wareham has a catalogue that contains unimpeachable masterpieces – Galaxie 500’s On Fire and the one-two mid-1990s punch of Luna’s Bewitched and Penthouse among them. But truth be told, he has yet to make a bad record. Luna’s less-ballyhooed later albums are understated but sparkling gems, and Dean’s duo records with his longtime partner Britta Phillips update the Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra template to marvellous effect. He’s nothing if not reliable. But that steadiness means that, at this stage, even longtime fans might be guilty of taking Wareham for granted. We shouldn’t do the same with I Have Nothing To Say To The Mayor…

I’ve been looking at beautiful photos of Panoramic House where you recorded your new album. How’d you end up in Stinson Beach? [Producer] Jason Quever had worked there before. It’s kind of on the downlow – even if you go to their website, you can’t really tell that there’s a recording studio there. You have to know someone, and [the owner] knows Jason. It’s got all kinds of great gear, and it’s a nice place to record, up there in northern California. It was kind of misty and rainy when we were there and it was just good to get away from LA. Recording at home, it can be hard to focus. This is your first solo record in seven years. Have these songs been gestating for a while? “The…

ONE encouraging byproduct of the recent jazz resurgence is the number of singer-songwriters who have recruited more adventurous musicians to open up their sound. Listen to the saxophones billowing all over The Weather Station’s Ignorance or Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview Of Phenomenal Nature, to name two of this year’s finest – not to mention Modern Nature’s gradual co-option of the entire British free jazz scene. The idea of combining confessional songwriting with jazz freedoms is hardly a new phenomenon – Van, Tim and Joni, among others, might have something to say about that – but it’s certainly unusual to find an artist approaching this fertile ground from the opposite direction. Saxophonist Linda Fredriksson is a product of Helsinki’s thriving contemporary jazz scene, epitomised by the label We Jazz. Their playful…

“All these years I’ve been wandering around/Wonderinghow come nobody told me” Let It Be (Special Deluxe Edition) APPLE CORPS LTD/CAPITOL/UME WHEN the album and film that shared the title Let It Be appeared in the spring of 1970, they were not greeted with the usual warmth. As the arrival of a new decade consigned the ’60s to history, they seemed an unwanted reminder that an era responsible for so much pleasure had ended badly. It felt like these final Beatle documents had been sanctioned by people who no longer recalled nor cared what had been on their minds when they got together in the film studios at Twickenham at the beginning of the previous year, even then unsure whether they were rehearsing for a stage show or putting together the…

Is Let It Be your biggest Beatles undertaking so far? It’s certainly one of the most technically challenging projects, because of the varied source material. We decided we were going to mix it the same way as we’d done the previous ones – Sgt Pepper, the ‘White Album’ and Abbey Road – but Let It Be is weird because not all four Beatles were involved by the end of it. Famously, Paul was unhappy with it. Ringo, John, George and Allen Klein got Phil Spector in and took the recordings from the Get Back sessions. I phoned up Paul and said that, even though we’ve already had Let It Be… Naked [2003], it didn’t make sense not to touch the album that everyone knows. And he went, “You’re absolutely right.”…

A Love Supreme – Live In Seattle IMPULSE 10/10 HE was large and gentle, Melody Maker reported, most unlike his music. Rather than busy and animated, the John Coltrane who played host to the musician and writer Mike Hennessey in a French hotel room was placid, devotional and calm. He unselfconsciously rehearsed his music for an hour. He ate a meal of egg yolks, soup, peaches and water, and spoke of “rediscovering” God. His still waters hid strong currents. A month before, Coltrane and a cast of 10 additional players had recorded the freeform Ascension album, a fierce unison blowout based on a simple bluesy reveille. The previous night, meanwhile, Coltrane and his quartet had baffled the audience at the Antibes Jazz Festival by playing his piece A Love Supreme…

Crocodiles/Heaven Up Here/Porcupine/ OceanRain (reissues, 1980, ’81, ’83, ’84) RHINO 8/10, 8/10, 8/10, 9/10 IN late 1985, Echo & The Bunnymen released a singles compilation, Songs To Learn & Sing. The album provided a glorious summary of the band’s fertile early years: anthemic choruses, haunting vocals, big hair. But Songs To Learn & Sing also included one new song, “Bring On The Dancing Horses”, whose shimmering but static synthesiser lines hinted at something else: creative paralysis. By 1985, the Bunnymen had nothing left to give. The trajectory of the band’s previous five years had been uphill and steep: having described 1984’s grand Ocean Rain as “the greatest album ever made”, they’d set themselves an impossibly high bar. Where could they go from there?Veterans of Liverpool’s punk scene, The Bunnymen simultaneously…

LEO NOCENTELLI Another Side LIGHT IN THE ATTIC 9/10 Previously unknown 1971 recordings by The Meters’ pioneering guitarist resurface THOUGH every cratedigger dreams of such moments, few enjoy the exhilaration Mike Nishita, Money Mark’s brother, felt in January 2018 after his latest visit to The Roadium, a swap-meet in Gardena, California. Digging through a haul of reel-to-reel tapes, he noticed many came from Sea-Saint Studios, the New Orleans establishment co-owned by legendary songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint. Plenty of this material, Nishita discovered, was rare, some entirely unreleased. Among its most precious treasures were recordings marked with the name Leo Nocentelli, founding member and lead guitarist of Toussaint’s house band, The Meters. Contacted by The LA Times 18 months on, Nocentelli was shocked. “Those,” he said, “are tapes I thought…

WE emerge from the woods onto Jack Cooper’s favourite field. It’s a golden slope of freshly harvested wheat, with a thicket of dark pines on the south side. On the other a hidden brook, a tributary of the River Cam, slowly runs. “It looks American to me, somehow,” says Cooper, as he guides Uncut on one of his regular walks. “When we moved up here in December, it was just mud. Just over there they were growing flax and it was a sea of blue. That must be the point when they harvest it, because within a couple of days of it being blue, they cut it down.” This area of north Essex seems to be something of a rural idyll for Cooper, the latest stage in the songwriter’s slow…

ANYONE lucky enough to see The Waterboys in 1989 was in for a wild ride. Building on the momentum of the previous year’s Fisherman’s Blues album, the band had evolved into a supercharged roots-and-rock collective, tearing through Ireland, Britain, Europe and North America. On a good night, the new seven-piece seemed almost mystically attuned to a higher musical plane. The title of one song summed it up: further up, further in. “It was amazing to be part of,” says fiddler and longstanding Waterboy Steve Wickham. “I remember talking to Donal Lunny, the great Irish trad musician, who came to a gig we played way down the country in one of those funny little ballrooms. Donal came up to me afterwards and said it was like looking at a juggernaut heading…

AMBIENT pioneer, New Age trailblazer, street musician, serial collaborator, zither-player extraordinaire, sound healer and teacher of “laughter meditation”, Laraaji’s uniquely spiritual music has been soothing, entrancing and transporting his listeners to another place for more than 40 years. Born Edward Larry Gordon some 78 journeys around the sun ago, the story of how Brian Eno discovered Laraaji playing in a New York park has entered rock’n’roll folklore, while the music they made together launched a quiet but profound revolution. His latest album, Circle Of Celebration, in collaboration with composer Christopher Bono’s NOUS ensemble and his partner and fellow sound healer Arji OceAnanda, has just been released. “With Laraaji, I instantly felt like he was as present as space or wind or water,” Bono says. “You can’t really know Laraaji in…

BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE 1993 Bowie reunites with Nile Rodgers for his most commercial work in decades, securing a Top 10 hit with “Jump They Say”, his first since “Absolute Beginners”, even though the song is about the suicide of his half-brother Terry. THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA 1993 Bowie wrote the soundtrack for this BBC adaption of Hanif Kureishi’s Bromley-set, Bowie-based coming-of-age classic. The theme tune is stunning, while the rest represents an absorbing but low-key return to more experimental music. “An art record, not a money record,” says Reeves Gabrels. 1. OUTSIDE 1995 Dense, difficult, dystopian concept album with echoes of Diamond Dogs . Musicians improvised in the studio while Bowie painted their portraits - Eno and Bowie then pieced together a record from the sessions. “I told people…

HALLOWEEN KILLS OPENS OCTOBER 15 Masked maniac Michael Myers marauds again. The second episode of the recharged slasher series, with David Gordon Green again stepping into John Carpenter’s old gore-stained sneakers. SEVEN SAMURAI OPENS OCTOBER 15 A revival for Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece. The Japanese epic that wowed the world, and Hollywood – remade as The Magnificent Seven , it also informed the mythology of Star Wars . But Toshiro Mifune could eat Han Solo for breakfast. AZOR OPENS OCTOBER 15 A Swiss banker delves into nefarious financial dealings in 1980s Argentina, in a hypnotically sinister thriller that feels like a boardroom version of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness . SPENCER OPENS NOVEMBER 5 Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana, grinding her teeth through a very bad Royal Family Christmas. Timothy Spall plays…

WHEN Primal Scream were still a feeble indie band playing in half-empty rooms above pubs, Bobby Gillespie was asked by Creation Records boss Alan McGee who he wanted to produce the band’s debut LP. Not untypically, the spectacularly unmusical singer showed ambitions way beyond his station. “I suggested Jimmy Page or Prince,” he writes in his Walter Mittyish memoir Tenement Kid. “I was one hundred per cent serious.” Self-belief, dumb luck and an inability to stay in his musical lane have taken Gillespie a long way from his austere upbringing in Glasgow, his wonky, psychedelic-infused conception of punk rock helping him to become the Mick Jagger of the acid house generation. Having left school at 16, Gillespie followed his trade unionist father into a job as a printer, before he…

“I do write about relationships a lot, but there’s no age limit to that” DAVID GEDGE THIRTY years ago, David Gedge of evergreen indie icons The Wedding Present had a lightbulb moment. By releasing a limited-edition vinyl single every month throughout 1992, these gruff-voiced Yorkshiremen could transform themselves from marginal Peel Session perennials into unlikely chartbusters, an audaciously rare feat in pre-Britpop days. Three decades later, Gedge is reviving his Hit Parade concept with 24 Songs, another 12-single sequence set for monthly release across 2022. During lockdown, besides allowing his black-dyed hair to turn fully white in Tom Jones style, Gedge has been writing prolifically and stockpiling songs with the latest Wedding Present lineup, which now includes Sleeper guitarist Jon Stewart. “I’ve always liked 7” singles,” Gedge explains. “When I…

“IT’S truly amazing to see your life story in a book,” marvels Toody Cole of Portland DIY garage-rock legends Dead Moon, “something like the most killer family photo album and war stories all wrapped up in one.” She’s reflecting on the newly updated Off The Grid, an oral history and photobook documenting Dead Moon’s two-decade glory ride. Loaded with great stories, it’s testament to the sustaining power of rock’n’roll beyond the reach of music industry interference. “Stripped-down, straight-ahead, in-your-face music... We were a bit of fresh air” TOODY COLE The group were formed in 1987 by Toody (bass) and her late partner Fred (guitar and vocals), releasing 10 albums of primitive, high-energy thrills. Their vision was one of duelling forces and malevolent energy, darkness and light, riven with catharsis on…

1 COURTNEY BARNETT Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To Barnett’s new album, Things Take Time, Take Time, might be her finest yet – and here’s a pivotal track, the first thing she wrote for it, and a blueprint for the record’s mix of nimble melodies, lockdown blues and appreciation for the small things in life. 2 MODERN NATURE Performance The second full-length from Jack Cooper’s collective is a jazz-tinged work of rare ambition and beauty. Channelling Can, this is Island Of Noise’s most rhythmically driven track. Read our feature on page 50. 3 ENDLESS BOOGIE Disposable Thumbs At almost six minutes, this is one of the shorter, punchier tracks on the group’s new double album, Admonitions. The result could be a supercharged Crazy Horse,…

He sings about being “imprisoned on this island” FOR more than 20 years, Damon Albarn seems to have been desperate to escape the suffocatingly restrictive straitjacket of Britpop and engage with a wider world. There have been collaborations with musicians from Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, Syria, Japan, Cuba and Iceland; charity projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Chinese operas commissioned in Paris; hook-ups with everyone from Bobby Womack to Lou Reed, from De La Soul to Erykah Badu. As a routine example of Albarn’s rootless cosmopolitanism, his second solo LP – and his 28th album, or thereabouts, as a leader across sundry outfits – was commissioned by a festival in Lyon and started in Iceland, taking inspiration from the house Albarn built outside Reykjavík 20 years ago. “I always…

ON Curtis Harding’s third solo album, music is a fundamentally hopeful medium. “Now in this present darkness, all ears just listen,” he raps on “Hopeful”, his flow nimble and bouncy and slightly rushed out of excitement. “A mass has formed to cure the common condition.” The song demonstrates Harding’s expansive approach to songwriting – to forming that mass – and shows how he deploys such disparate musical styles to create new textures. On the song’s chorus he’s joined by a gospel choir joyously chanting that title and pushing him along his righteous path. The jazz-fusion bridge melts into a cacophonous outro, driven by a thundering drumbeat, a wailing psych-rock guitar and great swoops of cinematic strings. Even as the distortion at the edges of the music threatens to unravel the…

WHEN Richard Dawson picked his favourite records for Uncut in 2017, his choices provided an unusually deep insight into his music. Mix Éliane Radigue, Orchestra Baobab and Sun Ra and you may, if you’re as talented and hard-working as the Newcastle songwriter, end up with records as special as Peasant or its 2019 follow-up, 2020. Dawson’s first choice for that list, however, his earliest mind-blowing moment, was Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut. Their influence has always been present in his music, from his bellows and screeches, and Peasant’s dissection of medieval matters, to the chugging gallop of 2020’s “Jogging”. Henki, however, is Dawson’s first actual heavy metal album. He’s long been a huge fan of Circle, and described being invited onstage with them at Helsinki’s Sideways Festival in 2019 as “like…

Two decades on, Kid A stands up as a boldly ambitious experiment Kid A Mnesia XL 9/10 IDING high on their R career-crowning post-rock masterpiece OK Computer, Radiohead could have gone anywhere. And they did. Partly in reaction to the depression, writer’s block and nausea that Thom Yorke experienced in the wake of huge critical and commercial acclaim, the Oxford quintet radically changed their writing methods and sound palette. Guitar-centric rock songs were out, replaced by avant-jazz mood pieces and electro-classical soundscapes. Melody was deconstructed, rhythms scrambled, vocals mangled and manipulated, lyrics spliced into cut-up collages. No longer seeking to emulate Scott Walker, Björk, Jeff Buckley and DJ Shadow, Radiohead were now aiming for a plateau beyond rock: to Aphex Twin and Arvo Pärt, Mingus and Messiaen, Can and Eno…

Radio DJ Jim Wilke recalls the concert How come you were at this show? I was at KING-FM in Seattle, working a variety of programming – billed as a “showcase of the lively arts”. One of the features was a weekly live broadcast from a club called the Penthouse. It was a long, narrow room, the stage on the left as you come in, a step up with a mirrored ceiling over the bandstand. Basically it was devoted to seating around cocktail tables. How was the playing? Trane never spoke to the audience, he just stood up and played. When I did the live introduction, and Pharoah Sanders made the first sounds, he was squeaking and squawking and I turned to him and said, “Man, I don’t know what you’re…

JOËL VANDROOGENBROECK Far View DRAG CITY 8/10 Intriguing library music comp from the Brainticket leader THE early years of this Belgian multi-instrumentalist and composer, who made his first public appearance on classical piano at the age of six, just 14 years before touring Europe with the Quincy Jones Orchestra, point to a long and productive career. He enjoyed both, but rather than taking the straight highway, Vandroogenbroeck chose the exploratory side roads. He’s best known as the leader of Brainticket, the experimental band he founded in 1969 whose sound was a fusion of jazz, kosmische and cosmic rock/prog, with his flute and keyboards paramount and electronics added. He steered Brainticket through various incarnations and lay-offs until his death in 2019, aged 81, but it wasn’t Vandroogenbroeck’s entire life’s work. In…

MICHAEL’S exit was incredibly sad and shocking. I’m really feeling for all the people that are close to him, but at the same time there’s a beauty in the way he left. You know, he went his way. He lived such an incredibly full life. He just kept going and going and going. I think there was no way for him to stop. He was never in need of someone to take care of him – of course, he and Andru had this incredible companionship, and they took care of each other – but he played guitar until the end, he was thinking about gigs until the end, he probably was listening to his favourite jazz record before he went to bed, you know? I met Michael when Jack Rose,…

BUILT in the early 1800s, with further additions made in 1910, Spiddal House was formerly the seat of Lord Killanin, President of the International Olympic Committee, before being taken on by Mavis Buckley, who rented it to The Waterboys. “It was an amazing place,” says Steve Wickham. “There was something a bit William Morris about it, that arts and crafts vibe; sculpted panels and sculpted stone around the garden. It just felt otherworldly, and out of our scope. Most of us lived in urban flats and houses, and now we were working in this completely new environment looking out over Galway Bay. It was really beautiful, but kind of spooky. It was faded, decrepit, but at the same time magical. It informs the music, totally. I believe that music is…

ON April 19, 1971, Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson were still essentially students in “ratty jeans”, being suspiciously eyeballed by the seasoned jazz and soul vets who had gathered to record their first album of proper songs at RCA Studios in New York City. On bass was Ron Carter of Miles Davis’s second great quintet; on drums was Aretha Franklin’s musical director Bernard “Pretty” Purdie; on flute, established bandleader Hubert Laws; and conducting them all was The Impressions’ arranger, Johnny Pate. “Terrifying, that’s the best way I can describe it,” says Brian Jackson today. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute – who am I, what am I doing here?’ I hadn’t even turned 19 and here are some of my biggest heroes all assembled in one place to play the…

“IT all started when Roger Waters and Nick Mason saw a film I’d done in 1971 called Long Drawn Out Trip, which was shown on BBC2. They both decided that they wanted me on board, because, as Roger told me, they thought I was ‘fucking mad’. I was a bit befuddled initially because I didn’t really know their music – I was a political cartoonist. But I bought a leather jacket and some jeans, which was about as rock’n’roll as I ever got, and met them at Nick’s house in Kentish Town. All four of them were there. It was a slightly awkward meeting because I didn’t know what they wanted from me. But they didn’t look like hotel room destroyers! They were charming and bourgeois. Then I went to…

MANHATTAN Center, New York, August 1999. David Bowie is coming face to face with one of his former selves. But it’s not the Thin White Duke, Halloween Jack or Ziggy – but an earlier incarnation of Bowie, one almost nobody knows or has long since forgotten. The occasion is VH1 Storytellers, a show in which songwriters talk about and perform choice moments from their back catalogue. Among hits like “Life On Mars?” and “China Girl”, Bowie suddenly pulls out one of the first songs he wrote: an R&B thumper called “Can’t Help Thinking About Me”. He prefaces it with a lengthy impression of Steve Marriott – before confessing that the song contains “two of the worst lines I’ve ever written”. The audience laugh appreciatively. What no-one – perhaps not even…

WHEN New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris were in Joy Division, they played Halifax’s Good Mood club in 1978 to an audience of just one person. There were only around 20 more people in attendance when they returned the following year, the now legendary band comically billed as “JOY DEVISION – top Manchester attraction” (admission 50p before 10.30pm). It’s a very different story now. After being forced off the road by the pandemic, New Order are making their live return in what must be one of the most visually stunning venues in the country. Halifax’s Piece Hall is a 7,500-capacity Georgian quadrangle, the last of the famous cloth halls from that era. An adjoining spire points at the sky behind the stage, lit up by a succession of computer…

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO While property prices make even the Soho of the 1990s a distant memory, the district in its older bohemian prime really is a long-lost Atlantis. But it resurfaces vividly in Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho, a cinematic séance with the spirits of the West End’s bygone glory. A love song to ’60s fashion, pop and glamour – while peeling back the dust covers over a squalid past – Last Night is a ghost story about a retro-loving ingénue, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), who comes to the big city to study fashion. Alienated, anxious and alone, she is haunted by visions of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer in the 1960s who falls in with a dashing king of clubland (Matt Smith). Sharing Sandie’s adventures as she…