Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i UNCUT

WELCOME to Uncut’s annual Review Of The Year. Across a special 31-page section in the magazine, we’ll run down our Top 75 New Albums, Top 30 Archive Releases, Top 30 Films and Top 20 Books. I’m pleased to report that the 49 contributors who took part in this year’s poll voted for a total of 431 new albums and 198 archival releases. These feel like remarkably healthy statistics – indicating that despite the challenges of the past 12 months, a lot of good music has made its way into the wild. Tied up with the poll, you’ll find new interviews with The Weather Station, Cassandra Jenkins, John Murry, Mogwai, Can’s Irmin Schmidt, Ryley Walker, The Beach Boys, Dry Cleaning and The Coral – all of whom have enjoyed a productive…

WHEN David Bowie was asked to contribute to Rolling Stone’s ‘Millennium Special’ in December 1999, he chose to shine a light on “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time… buried without trace. They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever.” That band was Fanny, one of rock’s first all-female outfits, who are subjects of a new documentary, The Right To Rock. “David was a loyal friend and loyal fan,” says Fanny’s lead guitarist, June Millington. “He understood the gravity of our situation, the preciousness and fragility of Fanny and our status in rock.” Fanny were formed in California in 1969, signing to Reprise and releasing five hard-rocking albums. 1972’s Fanny Hill – named after their communal house in LA – was recorded at Apple Studios…

“NOW that we have records out and are signed to a label, it’s hard to communicate just how casual the whole thing was,” says Florence Shaw, still with a faint note of wonder in her voice, four years on. The singer is considering the early days of London four-piece Dry Cleaning, whose deadpan name belies the driving post-punk tension in their music and the intimate nature of Shaw’s lyrics, as exemplified by their 2021 debut, New Long Leg. Shaw was – and still is – a visual artist with no prior band experience when she was invited by friend Tom Dowse (guitar) to join the kickabout weekend project he had with Lewis Maynard (bass) and Nick Buxton (drums). Buxton texted her links to tracks – including Grace Jones’ “Private Life”…

THERE’S a risk with any collaboration between players who each have a strong profile that it will be nothing more than the sum of those parts. Not so Springtime, which sees guitarist Gareth Liddiard, former helm of The Drones, now Tropical Fuck Storm, teaming up with pianist Chris Abrahams, best known for his work with The Necks and The Benders, and drummer Jim White, of Dirty Three and Xylouris White. Cultishly acclaimed figures all, albeit with different career histories, but mappers of broadly similar musical topographies and – crucially – all with improvisational chops. The three came together more out of curiosity than with any fixed purpose, simply “to see what happened when you make a Necks, Dirty Three, Tropical Fuck Storm/ Drones cocktail,” as Liddiard told Uncut. He’d known…

MORE than 50 years after “After The Gold Rush”, Neil Young still feels like getting high – Rocky Mountain high, that is. Barn, his latest album with Crazy Horse, was recorded way up in the Telluride, Colorado, area, 2,667 meters (8,750 feet) above sea level. Of course, the 10-song LP’s sessions took place in a restored 19th-century barn, pictured on Daryl Hannah’s evocative cover photo. The Rockies and the latterday Crazy Horse (now consisting of stalwart rhythm section Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, plus multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren) are a good fit: craggy, elemental, monolithic; imposing from a distance but teeming with life the closer you get. And both have been providing natural highs for quite some time Barn is Young and Crazy Horse’s follow-up to 2019’s Colorado, and it generally…

JASON BOLAND & THE STRAGGLERS The Light Saw Me THIRTY TIGERS 8/10 Space cowboy adventures from Austin-based troupe COUNTRY music has always been partial to a concept album, from Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash through to Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and beyond. But sci-fi concept works are thinner on the ground, a rare recent example being Sturgill Simpson’s imperious Metamodern Sounds In Country Music. Best associated with the Red Dirt scene of Oklahoma and Texas, Jason Boland is the latest to pick up the challenge. Tenth album The Light Saw Me traces the interstellar journey of a Texan cowboy abducted by aliens in the late 19th century and time-shifted into his home state a hundred years later. Boland and the Stragglers use this idea to examine wider themes of love,…

As a youth, Henry Parker’s favourite band was Black Sabbath, until he found a route into folk music via his discovery of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention in his dad’s record collection. It led to his debut LP, 2019’s Silent Spring , on which he paid homage to British folk music of the 1960s/’70s. On the follow-up he has developed those influences into his own singular style as trad folk ballads sit alongside his own “more personal songs of change and growth in my life”. The more bucolic aspects of his music are deeply rooted in the high open moors of Yorkshire’s Aire Valley, where he lives. “The landscape here is definitely ingrained into who I am as a person and as a musician,” he says. “Each song…

“There’llcome a time when the world won’t be singing/flowers won’t grow, bells won’t be ringing” What’s Going On: 50th Anniversary 2LP Edition MOTOWN/UME FIFTY years on from its initial release, Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece still sounds like an argument wrapped in a dream. Structurally, it has the shape and logic of a sermon, sounding both urgent and relevant to the turmoil of the moment. At the same time, its rhythms, and the timbre of Gaye’s voice, reach for something universal; a kind of peace, the reassurance of timelessness. The album is a religious thing, but also an inquiry into the notion of faith. Gaye had a lot of questions in 1971. Some of these were personal, some were political. Many of them inhabited the part of the Venn where the personal…

“I’m intense, but I’m fairly humble; I’m egotistical, but I need it to be what I am” NME : It must have been a tremendous pressure having to churn out hit after hit after hit in the ’60s, when you were part of the Motown machine. MARVIN GAYE: It was a tremendous pressure because the business is tremendously competitive – especially on the Chitlin circuit, which is what we’re now talking about, if you don’t mind me saying so, because blacks were not permitted to evolve to popdom. So as a chitlin circuit artist it’s most essential that you continue to churn out hit after hit or you don’t work. You’re only as good as your last record. There is very little chance of acquiring any major security as a…

BOLA SETE Samba In Seattle: Live At The Penthouse, 1966-1968 TOMPKINS SQUARE 8/10 Three-disc set of previously unreleased live recordings of the Brazilian guitar maestro IN the pantheon of guitar gods, from Delta blues sliders and ferocious rock gunslingers to fingerpicking folk stylists and bold American primitives, the gentle maestros of the Brazilian nylon-stringed acoustic (violão in Portuguese) too often get forgotten. The likes of Joao Gilberto, Luiz Bonfa and Heitor Villa-Lobos all deserve recognition, but perhaps the finest of them all was Bola Sete. John Fahey called him his “favourite guitar player” and signed him to his Takoma label, while Carlos Santana likened him to a nylon-stringed Hendrix and said to hear him play was to be in the presence of “something multi-dimensionally divine”. You can hear what both…

“AT SOUNDCHECK IT WAS LIKE, ‘WHAT IS THIS?!’ I COULDN’T BELIEVE THE SOUND COMING OUT” Q&A UNCUT: How was 2021 for you? BRAITHWAITE: We’ve had a really good year. We made the record, it’s been received really well, we got back to playing shows. It’s been a hellish couple of years for the planet but we’ve managed to make the most of it. To be honest, I can only really think of positives from lockdown. Obviously there has been a lot of tragedy involved, but as a band we managed to make the record in the middle of lockdown, which seems to me miraculous. Also having the record to concentrate on probably took my mind off the omnipresent sense of existential dread. Mogwai scored their first ever No 1 album…

1 THE WEATHER STATION Ignorance FAT POSSUM DESPITE yet another year of upheaval, good music has provided a balm for troubled times. And as our poll attests, the richness and possibilities of a vast musical world endure. Our end-of-year list includes old friends like Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Low, Courtney Barnett and St Vincent, returning heroes such as Robert Plant, David Crosby and Teenage Fanclub as well as a welcome batch of new faces: Arooj Aftab, Faye Webster, Black Country, New Road, Mdou Moctar, Valerie June, Chuck Johnson, Arlo Parks, Dry Cleaning, Little Simz and more. One record this year, though, has stayed with us longer than most. When we gifted subscribers a unique Weather Station career sampler at the start of the year, we were able to…

1 CAN Live In Stuttgart 1975 SPOON/MUTE FOR a band whose legendary propulsion derived from the almost telepathic interplay between its four main instrumentalists, it’s odd that an official single-show Can live album has never existed… until now. Live In Stuttgart 1975 is just the beginning of a whole Can Live series, for which we can thank bootlegger extraordinaire Andrew Hall, who recorded many Can shows in the mid-’70s with AKG mics concealed up the sleeves of his dufflecoat; when the band eventually rumbled this practice, rather than kick him out they invited him up to the sound console for improved fidelity. Sometimes Holger Czukay would even send Hall his own mixing desk recordings, including this one from Stuttgart’s Gustav-Siegle-Haus on Halloween night 1975. Buffed up by Irmin Schmidt…

1 FROM MANCHESTER WITH LOVE: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TONY WILSON Paul Morley (FABER, £20) “OH, that was amazing,” Anthony Wilson told his first wife Lindsay Reade after being hailed with phlegm, abuse and beer as he introduced bands at Manchester punk venue Electric Circus in 1977, a true-to-form response from a man his protégé-turned-biographer Paul Morley describes as “a genius” who would also “do anything to get attention”. A dizzying, digressive tour de force, From Manchester With Love mapped Wilson’s stoned adventures in TV, music and city planning against a backdrop of feuds and broken marriages. It also showed how his idealistic ventures and ego trips led to the success of Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, the founding of the pivotal Haçienda nightclub and –…

AFTER so long away, this is a rock’n’roll night blazing with meaning, community, history and humour: a ritual of undiminished potency. Patti Smith, who walks with ghosts of poets, rockers and artists at her shoulder, revering as much as she’s revered, understands such values with every sinew. She knows the resonance of standing in Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall, in Blakean London; with Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty by her side, her band also retains the majority of the makers of 1975’s Horses, most of which is played tonight. The crowd, many of whom have kept their tickets for nearly two years, give Smith a roaring ovation just for arriving. However, since the last album under her own name – 2012’s Banga – the literary Smith of her memoir M…

WITH live music only just returning to Canada, it was understandable that everyone in Toronto’s Meridian Hall seemed a tad tentative as Leslie Feist finished “After After Party”, the first of 11 new songs comprising her new show Multitudes. “Are we all a little bit out of practice doing this concert thing?” she asked, directing the question at herself as much as anyone else. But as the hour-long set unfolded, it became clear that this was not quite a return to normal. Developed by Feist with Rob Sinclair – the concert and lighting designer whose credits include David Byrne’s American Utopia – Multitudes subverted concert formats to create something both idiosyncratic and intimate. It was born of what she calls “a double reassessment”, both in terms of her identity as…

“DID I tell you the one about the bail bondsman who tried to hire someone to kill Ronnie Van Zant?” begins Alan Walden, with a mischievous glint in his eye. The 78-year-old was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s tour manager in the 1970s, which means he had his hands full. “Ronnie had beat this guy up, stole his girl, so he put some money down with a hitman. Well, it turned out that the guy he hired was a better friend to Ronnie, so he told the band to get the hell out of town for a while.” “Otis and I used to go squirrel hunting together” Walden had them drive up from Jacksonville to Macon, Georgia, where he ran a management and publishing company. “I spent the afternoon making dum dums –…

Since Cocteau Twins’ late-’90s split, Robin Guthrie’s amassed a significant catalogue of solo and collaborative work, with, among others, Harold Budd, John Foxx and Ride’s Mark Gardener. His comparatively low profile, however, suggests he doesn’t want to “play the game”. “You’re mistaking me for someone who actually knows what ‘the game’ is,” Guthrie laughs. “I just want to find a way to share my music with people who can appreciate it. The simple truth is that I work in complete isolation from, well, everyone. I write, play, record, produce, master, do the artwork, and send everything off to get manufactured and downloadable. My idea of just ‘releasing it and be damned’ is a coping skill I’ve developed to discourage the uncertainty I can experience when baring my emotional self. Paradoxically,…

TO hope for the impossible is a favourite pastime of anyone who ever loved The Wrens. True believers have remained steadfast through the New Jersey band’s decades-long saga. Yet the near-misses, bad luck and self-sabotage that fill this history make it absurd to keep dreaming they’ll ever get the love they’re due. That’s why the very existence of Aeon Station’s Observatory – the first solo album by Wrens bassist and vocalist Kevin Whelan, and ostensibly the band’s first new music in 18 years – may prompt grateful sobs. From the yearning opener “Hold On” through to the life-affirming ruckus of “Queens” and “Better Love” and to the final epiphanies in “Alpine Drive”, Observatory is a triumphant expression of resilience in the face of all the hard knocks and harder lessons…

The album tracks are just as striking as the chart hits Pretenders ( Deluxe Edition)/ PretendersII (Deluxe Edition) RHINO 10/10, 9/10 IN her 2015 memoir, Reckless, Chrissie Hynde described the pre-show ritual in the early days of her band, the Pretenders: the four of them, backstage, waiting, “like dogs at the gate”. As they took to the stage they would play Wagner’s “Ride Of The Valkyries”, then widely known for scoring a pivotal sequence in Apocalypse Now: the sound of helicopters, menace, pursuit. Among the young band members, Hynde said, it encouraged a feeling that they were all “chasing something”.Listen to the Pretenders’ first two records today, over 40 years since their release, and that coursing urgency is still startling. There are the blazing singles, of course – the cover…

“EARLY ON, THE BRITISH CROWDS REACTED MUCH MORE POSITIVELY THAN THE GERMAN ONES” Congratulations! Live In Stuttgart 1975 has been voted best reissue of the year by Uncut writers. How does it feel that Can is now an accepted part of the canon? It feels good being recognised like this. When we founded the group, we didn’t know where we will go, it was just spontaneously composing something with four people who came from so different directions. But if after 50 years we are recognised even more than in the beginning, it makes me feel like the group is part of a tradition that takes a lot from the past and gives it to other musicians in the future. What were your primary aims when embarking on this Can Live…

20 DUNE Director: Denis Villeneuve Frank Herbert’s space epic returned to cinema, sleeker and saner than David Lynch’s version, although you still wonder what lurid extravaganza Alejandro Jodorowsky would have made of it. By contrast, Denis Villeneuve treated the material with stately, hyper-grandiose sobriety. It still felt like the intro to a bigger film, but Charlotte Rampling, Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet contributed gravitas to sway your scepticism, while Patrice Vermette’s designs were dazzling. 19 THE POWER OF THE DOG Director: Jane Campion Campion returned with a modern western that unpicks the male codes of a genre. Based on Thomas Savage’s superb, long-overlooked novel, it starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons as rancher brothers, whose lifestyle changes when one brother’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) moves in with her…

IT is Sunday night in New Jersey. A crowd has gathered at Asbury Lanes – but they’re not here for bowling. Instead, the audience have come to hear two old friends talk about their glory days. “We were completely immersed in popular music,” says Bruce Springsteen, as he recalls how, as teenagers, he and Steve Van Zandt first bonded. “It was wonderful to have a friend that you could do that with. I wish that friendship on everyone, to have it last for our entire lives.” Asbury Lanes is a shrine to vintage rock’n’roll, with its ’50s diner and legendary stage – an ideal setting for Springsteen and Van Zandt to wax nostalgic about their youth on this mid-October evening. The event is a both a fundraiser for Van Zandt’s…

WHEN a band resorts to touring a classic album, it usually feels like a defensive move; a tacit admission that their new material isn’t worth the risk. But for Scritti Politti, the intricate studio pop of Cupid & Psyche 85 contains serious jeopardy. Last time Green Gartside tried to perform these songs, he cheerfully admits that he had a breakdown and didn’t play live for 20 years. Even since his return to the stage in the mid-2000s, Scritti live shows have been fairly rare events, giving this climactic tour show a real sense of occasion. “This song is 45 years old,” says an unexpectedly garrulous Gartside, kicking off proceedings with his proto-Cupid single “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”. “You’re right madam, I did write it in infant school!” Not quite, but despite…

KING RICHARD OPENS NOVEMBER 19 Will Smith pulls out all the acting stops as the uncrushably determined father to tennis titans Venus and Serena Williams. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green ( Monsters And Men ) brings a feelgood story a touch of BLM grit. THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN STREAMING FROM NOVEMBER 24 A sci-fi parable from Austria about the troubling relationship between a child android and the man she calls ‘Daddy’. Innovative, thought-provoking, bracingly strange. HOUSE OF GUCCI OPENS NOVEMBER 26 Nothing says ‘scandal story’ like crime in the rag trade, and this Ridley Scott feature promises exceptional juiciness. Adam Driver is Maurizio Gucci, Lady Gaga is Patrizia Reggiani, the woman they called ‘the Black Widow’. BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN  OPENS NOVEMBER 26 Romanian director Radu Jude won…

CONVINCED that Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album was “a landmark in rock’n’roll history”, producer Glyn Johns was amazed at how poorly it was received when he played it to his heavy friends. Mick Jagger “didn’t like it at all” while George Harrison was even less impressed, Johns recalling: “It wasn’t that he just didn’t get it – he thought it was awful.” Rolling Stone magazine was equally dismissive, citing “weak, unimaginative songs” and an “avalanche of drums and shouting” as it concluded that the proto-heavy metal motherlode was like Jeff Beck’s Truth, “but not as good”. As Bob Spitz’s thoroughly researched Led Zeppelin: The Biography asserts, the band thrived on the cognoscenti’s disapproval. A cut-and-shut of session men Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones with West Midlands warhorses Robert Plant…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine IRISH HIGHS The recent passing of The Chieftains’ frontman and founder Paddy Moloney brought many tributes from musicians who worked with him over the years. A most unassuming man for the limelight, Paddy accumulated a long list of collaborators throughout his long career. A running joke perhaps could be, “Who didn’t he work with..?” His vision for extending the possibilities of traditional Irish music was remarkable – especially on albums such as The Long Black Veil, which featured such notables as The Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder and Sting. The Chieftains’ 1988 release of Irish Heartbeat with Van Morrison leading on vocals was another of their career landmarks. Paddy’s legacy couldbe described as one of fearlessness to explore and expand boundaries that might not…

“I STARTED by looking at the music of the ’80s that Diana would have liked, but it’s a bit of a cul-de-sac…” Jonny Greenwood is explaining his crabwise approach to composing his latest soundtrack. Spencer, by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, is set across three unhappy days in the life of Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) one Christmas at Sandringham, and is, according to Greenwood, “weirdly like a horror film. It’s more claustrophobic and dark; all the things The Crown isn’t.” Greenwood’s looming, atonal string scores for films such as There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread have been rightly acclaimed, and his standalone compositions have even been performed at the Proms. Casting out the baggage of traditional orchestration from so many costume dramas, on Spencer he actively demolishes the sounds of…

“If I get killed, please don’t bury my soul” LL too often a star-crossed collaboration can end up diminishing both parties, but when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss came together for 2007’s multi-award-winning Raising Sand, it had the opposite effect. The record’s rich and subtle readings of deep blues and country cuts allowed Plant to finally slip the rock god shackles, paving the way to Band Of Joy and Sensational Space Shifters, while Krauss was exposed to an audience outside her bluegrass fanbase. Now, 14 years later, the pair have reunited with producer T-Bone Burnett for belated follow-up Raise The Roof, which burnishes the diamond, confirming that even if Raising Sand was serendipitous it was certainly no fluke. As with its predecessor, the magic of Raise The Roof comes with…

Why has it taken so long to follow Raising Sand ? RP: It was such a random idea in 2007. VH1 had this programme, Crossroads, which brought together two totally different style of entertainer. They did one, Kid Rock teaming up with Stevie Nicks, which one can only imagine. We did three or four songs and then left it a few days before going back and absorbing it, to see if it was going to work. And it did, instantly. We took that to the ultimate conclusion, then had an immediate shot on the rebound to see if there was something else there, but it was definitely time to take a break. The trouble with taking a break is it is 14 years. AK: We both had other musical things…

After a near four-year hiatus, Punch Brothers return in January with the poignant Hell On Church Street NONESUCH. The album pays homage to late bluegrass legend Tony Rice by reimagining his 1983 classic, Church Street Blues , itself a collection of songs from the likes of Bob Dylan, Norman Blake, Bill Monroe, Jimmie Rodgers and more. The band - guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, mandolinist/singer Chris Thile and fiddler Gabe Witcher – point out that, “No record, or musician, has had a greater impact on us.” Also back after a lengthy absence are Band Of Horses, whose Things Are Great BMG lands later that month. Founder member Ben Bridwell takes on a fuller production role this time around, with guest collaborators Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Dave Fridmann…

ALMOST a decade has passed since Pye Corner Audio made its debut on Ghost Box. At the time, the label was vaunted as the epicentre of something called “hauntology”. The term, borrowed from the philosopher Jacques Derrida, had come to refer to a distinctly English aesthetic sensibility – a kind of stillborn futurism that instead of looking forwards, harked back to the quotidian dread of ’70s public information films and the blurry, saturated sound and visuals of VHS technology. No-one talks that much about hauntology anymore. But rather than fading away with the waning of that movement, it’s possible to see how the influence of Ghost Box – and its carefully curated roster of sonic sorcerers immersing themselves in the analogue eerie – have percolated into the culture at large.…

10 000 Hz Legend (reissue, 2001) RHINO 8/10 SUDDENLY everyone had somewhere else to be – at least, that’s how Air remember the playback of their second album to Virgin’s UK executives. “After about 10 minutes, they were like, ‘Oh, we have a meeting we can’t postpone,’” says Nicolas Godin. “They were in panic. It was a big disaster for them… they were expecting ‘Moon Safari 2’.” Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel weren’t displeased by the reception. Their debut LP had been everywhere in 1998 and ’99 – from primetime radio to dinner parties – and they were keen to shatter preconceptions and prove what else they could do. It seems they succeeded: it’s tough to imagine them making a more alienating album than 10 000 Hz Legend, resolutely earworm-free and…

LA Woman 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition RHINO 10/10 THE portents weren’t good. Still reeling from a disastrous gig in New Orleans where Jim Morrison – overweight, heavily bearded and catatonically drunk – had smashed his microphone and stormed off stage during final song “Light My Fire”, The Doors assembled at their rehearsal room at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard in December 1970 to start work on a new record. With their singer potentially facing six months’ hard labour in a Florida prison, having been found guilty of “indecent exposure and profanity” at their infamous gig in Miami, long-term producer Paul Rothchild having quit, and short on new material, the odds seemed stacked against them. Yet the album which emerged from this seemingly hopeless situation is now widely considered to be The…

BUSH TETRAS Rhythm And Paranoia: The Best Of Bush Tetras WHARF CAT 8/10 WHEN Bush Tetras drummer Dee Pop died unexpectedly in October, plans were already well underway for this career-spanning retrospective. Confirming they would press ahead, bandmates Pat Place and Cynthia Sley noted that much of what went into Rhythm And Paranoia came from Pop’s own collection: the band’s most passionate historian, he kept an archive of their recordings and supplied many of the flyers and photos reproduced in an accompanying book. Formed in 1979, Bush Tetras emerged from the no-wave scene in New York: they were contemporaries of Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth, and Place had played guitar in The Contortions. They split up a few years later with three 7” singles and an EP, produced by Topper…

Q & A UNCUT: How has 2021 been for you? JENKINS: This has probably been the craziest year of my life. There’ve been so many unexpected joys and terrors alike. Mostly what I’m taking from 2021 is that life can change on a dime, in insanely beautiful ways. So how has your life changed this year? An Overview On Phenomenal Nature had a trajectory that I never imagined. I really made this record not expecting anyone to ever hear it. It’s put me in touch with people all over the world who are experiencing really tremendous things this year, a lot of pain. The fact that it’s become sort of a salve for people is such a beautiful aspect of making music that I’ve never experienced to this degree before.…

IT’S a chilly September night in Nashville and Yasmin Williams is sitting alone on stage at 6th & Peabody – an outdoor venue attached to a touristy moonshine bar and a gourmet hot dog stand. Behind her is a giant banner for Americana Fest, the annual roots music gathering. There are a handful of people seated at picnic tables and Adirondack chairs arrayed around the stage, all them watching closely as she rips through one guitar instrumental after another, most of them taken from her second full-length album, Urban Driftwood. When she plays, she plays with her whole body – which is why she’s quickly risen through the ranks of the solo guitar scene. She drums on the wood with her fist and elbow. She plucks and taps on the…

30 SUPERGRASS In It For The Money Remastered Expanded ECHO/BMG The Oxford quartet’s terrific second album returned on plush double vinyl, but also as a deluxe set featuring a host of previously unheard extras. Among the highlights were the power-driving “Charles II” and the smoky, Canterbury psychedelia of “Silver Lining”, fascinating early versions of album tracks such as “It’s Not Me” and “Late In The Day”, and a set of live tracks that captured the manic propulsion of Live At Leeds. 29 VARIOUS ARTISTS Edo Funk Explosion Vol 1 ANALOG AFRICA This essential collection documented the sounds emanating from Joromi Studio in Benin City, in Nigeria’s Edo State, during the ’80s – and in particular the pioneering work of Joromi’s founder Victor Uwaifo alongside Akaba Man…

1 SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED) Director: QuestLove MANY suspected that in 2021 cinema would limp back ruefully, energies depleted, from lockdown. It couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Damage was done, yes, and it still remains to be seen whether theatrical releasing can rally after a year in which we all got morbidly locked in our streaming habits. After all, Tenet didn’t – despite hopeful predictions – save the box office in 2020. But it looks as if No Time To Die, Dune, even the critically unloved Venom: Let There Be Carnage might now be doing just that. Then there was the cornucopia of films premiered at festivals: Berlin, Cannes and Venice offered their best editions in years, and that was just…

DRIVE MY CAR In art cinema circles, Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, having premiered two superb films in 2021. Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy, which reaches the UK next year, is a delicate, witty triptych of stories about emotion and confusion, with touches of Éric Rohmer. His three-hour feature Drive My Car is a deeper dive – and a narratively more slippery one – into the complexities of human feeling. Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, it starts off depicting the sex games between a Tokyo couple: he’s an actor and director, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), she’s a screenwriter, Oto (Reika Kirishima), who loves to tell ornate stories during sex. But after a while, we abruptly skip to the main body of the story,…

IT’S a small miracle this film exists. In October 2018, a fire destroyed the Woodstock home of folk guitarist Peter Walker and with it the entire archive of his old friend Karen Dalton – her journals, handwritten lyrics, poetry and artwork. The loss is incalculable, but fortunately, just months before, he’d had everything digitised, allowing directors Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz to draw from these artifacts and paint the clearest picture yet of this mysterious and troubled – yet oddly influential – artist. A free spirit from Oklahoma who had two kids and two ex-husbands by the time she turned 20, Dalton left the Midwest and arrived in New York City at the start of the folk revival. She stood out thanks to her fluid picking style and especially her…