Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i UNCUT

THE greatest Leonard Cohen song of the 1980s was one he never sang. “Summertime” was a delicate, yearning ballad tucked away on Diana Ross’s underperforming 1987 album Red Hot Rhythm & Blues. It was the first song Cohen wrote with Sharon Robinson, who’d initially been hired to sing back-up on the Field Commander Cohen tour of 1979. Robinson was a singer/songwriter/dancer, “with the emphasis on the slash”, she laughs. “You wore a lot of hats as someone trying to earn a living in the music industry back then.” She was working with Ann-Margret in Vegas at the time, and knew little of Cohen’s work, but sensed she could learn an awful lot from this charismatic Canadian. “We were at our hotel in Tel Aviv one day and I noticed the…

Everything Was Beautiful BELLA UNION 9/10 WHEN Jason Pierce surfaced during that sweltering summer of 2018 to promote the new Spiritualized album And Nothing Hurt – his first for six years – he spoke of its protracted gestation in gruelling terms, as if producing and mixing the record on his own had pushed him to the edge of madness. With typical candour, he was the first to admit that the ordeal was entirely self-inflicted and preventable, and that however pleased he was with the results – his best since Ladies And Gentleman…, some said – after what he’d gone through, even for such a perfectionist, he couldn’t guarantee that there would ever be another Spiritualized album. No-one really believed him – what else could Pierce do at this point, aged…

“B AS JAN is a no-harp band,” Serafina Steer tells Uncut firmly, having formed her all-female four-piece partly to get away from her go-to instrument. Classically trained, Steer has been making quietly spectacular solo records since 2007’s Cheap Demo Bad Science, Jarvis Cocker producing 2013’s The Moths Are Real before drawing her into his Jarv Is project. Bas Jan, though, are a different proposition. “It’s a bit of a kind of ‘yes you can’, DIY, ‘don’t be afraid to do what you want’ kind of thing,” she explains. Named after a Dutch conceptual artist, Bas Jan Ader, Bas Jan are masters of make-do-and-mend art rock and jumble sale disco, with Baby U Know – the follow-up to 2018’s Yes I Jan – recorded in lockdown at the empty Café Oto, with…

“I wanted to respectfully step away from the potential pigeonhole of folk without losing its core elements that I relate to,” says Keeley Forsyth of the evolution from her debut, Debris, to Limbs. “There was some sense that Debris was interrupted by the pandemic, so I wanted to bring some feeling of that through on this record, whilst also exorcising some other sound worlds that I’m interested in pursuing.” These sound worlds stemmed from mirroring the transformation of Debris’ central character. “I knew that there was more from this particular character to interpret,” she says. “A voice that was growing, and calling for an appropriate foundation to dwell – a harder, colder, more deliberate sound.” Forsyth worked with Matthew Bourne, as well as Ross Downes, on these icier and more drone-filled…

The Sea Drift DÉCOR 8/10 WHEN Willy Vlautin told Amy Boone about his new batch of songs set on the Gulf Coast, the singer wasn’t quite sure whether he was referring to The Delines’ next record or a screenplay in progress. Her confusion is understandable: when he was at the helm of Richmond Fontaine, Vlautin wrote strong, deceptively simple narratives about the lonely and dislocated, the dispossessed and the perennially let-down, and he carried this literary style over into The Delines. There he developed richer, more soulful songs with Boone’s knockout voice in mind – equal parts Bobbie Gentry and Chrissie Hynde, it became the carrier of his songs’ blue-collar melancholy. The Sea Drift is the band’s third album and, like their debut Colfax and several Richmond Fontaine records before…

We Are Ever So Clean/If Only For A Moment ESOTERIC “Hurry up sleep take me, or I’ll be late for tea” MARCH 2022 TAKE 298 1 BROADCAST (P42) 2 BIG MAMA THORNTON (P45) 3 THOMAS LEER & ROBERT RENTAL (P46) 4 WAYLON JENNINGS (P48) 5 THE WEATHER STATION (P49) REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10 AT Blossom Toes’ 1960s pad, a stone’s throw from Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, things could get pretty lively. “There were people coming and going all of the time,” guitarist Jim Cregan tells Uncut. “You’d go into the kitchen and there would be Eric Clapton hanging out with Stevie Winwood, then you’d have Captain Beefheart on acid in the living room flicking the lights on and off and going, ‘Oh wow!’ Then you’d have our manager Giorgio…

Maida Vale Sessions/Microtronics Vol 1 & 2/Mother Is The Milky Way WARP 8/10, 8/10, 9/10 FROM their earliest singles – a trilogy of beautiful EPs from 1996, compiled on the following year’s Work & Non-Work collection – Birmingham’s Broadcast, a group built around musical and romantic partners Trish Keenan and James Cargill, were voracious explorers and collectors, monstering a bric-à-brac soundworld out of constituent elements: Czechoslovakian new wave film; Italian library music; rural pop psychedelia; academic electronics. Keenan and Cargill knew well that the best music often hides in popular culture’s shadows, hence the significance, also, of the tour-only releases and radio sessions collected and/or reissued on these three sets. Taken together, they’re an object lesson in what can be achieved when pop’s sensuality meets the abandon of experiment. Perhaps…

LOUREED wasn’t known as the sentimental sort. And yet, he kept a memento of his earliest days as songwriter where he could see it every day. The demo tape he posted to himself to self-copyright in 1965 is one of the treasures in the Lou Reed Archive and the exhibition celebrating it, Caught Between The Twisted Stars, which opens on March 2, Reed’s 80th birthday. “We’d tried getting into a locked safe, thinking it was there,” curator Don Fleming recalls. “But it was right behind him at his desk in his office, on a shelf with a bunch of CDs, still unopened that whole time. It was so mind-blowing to me.” “Lou kept a lot of things, but never used the word archive,” Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson tells Uncut. “Signed…

WELCOME to Uncut’s free, 12-track CD personally curated by Johnny Marr. Marr has always been an avid music fan and this selection underscores his continuing passion and commitment. There are some old favourites here – as well as a trove of discoveries. “I wanted to give people a taste of what I have been listening to over the last few years, whether I’m driving, setting up in the studio or at home,” he says. “I’m often asked whether I think guitar bands are a thing of the past – and this selection is one of the reasons I can give why the answer is no!” 1 BABE RAINBOW “LOVE FOREVER” Woozy psych-pop and surf guitar from Australian three-piece. MARR: “They’re from Byron Bay, which is one of my favourite parts…

LICORICE PIZZA Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson reinvented himself as the new dark genius of American cinema, he’s been disinclined to let his hair down. Films like There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread are works of formidable brilliance – but they’re not what you’d call insouciant. So Licorice Pizza comes as a surprise, and a delight. A coming-of-age comedy set in Encino, Los Angeles in the mid-’70s, it stars newcomer Cooper Hoffman – son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman – as Gary, a 15-year-old former child actor branching out bullishly into entrepreneurship, while falling for Alana, a woman 10 years or so his senior. He basically sales-talks her into becoming his friend and companion, and while maintaining a platonic relationship, they sail together through a series…

HI Lucinda, we often ask people how they are at the start of interviews. Given your health issues [Williams suffered a stroke in November 2020], it seems more than just a pleasantry on this occasion… I feel pretty much back to my old self, thanks. I’ve been doing some rehabilitation, physical therapy and all that, so that’s helped. Because there was a point where I couldn’t even tie my shoes by myself. And then I couldn’t walk without a cane. And now I can, so, yeah, I’ve made quite a bit of progress. Have you had trouble playing the guitar as well? Yeah, because for some reason [despite the stroke being caused by a blood clot on the right side of her brain], it affects everything on my left side:…

Ants From Up There NINJA TUNE “I tried my best to hold you/Through the headset that you wear” MARCH 2022 TAKE 298 1 SPIRITUALIZED (P22) 2 ANAÏS MITCHELL (P24) 3 MODERN STUDIES (P30) 4 BEACH HOUSE (P33) 5 THE DELINES (P34) ALBUM OF THE MONTH 9/10 AS soon as music venues reopened their doors last summer, Black Country, New Road were pretty much the first band back out on tour, playing to audiences seated at tables in socially distanced bubbles. Sure, they had a critically acclaimed debut album to promote – For The First Time was released at the height of lockdown in February 2021 – but they seemed keen to quickly push beyond that. The setlist for that first show, at Bath Komedia on June 15, included only three…

Lighten Up THIRTY TIGERS 8/10 ERIN Rae has been quietly making strides around Nashville these past few years. 2015’s self-released Soon Enough – which found her fronting The Meanwhiles – brought her to the attention of John Paul White, who promptly signed her to his own Single Lock label for Rae’s solo debut, Putting On Airs, in 2018. For all their merits, however, neither of those albums quite prepare you for the major leap forward signalled by Lighten Up. Produced by Jonathan Wilson in his Topanga Canyon studio, Lighten Up is infused with the warm, spacious feel of Wilson’s previous work for Dawes or Father John Misty, with the latter’s frequent collaborator Drew Erickson creating sumptuous string arrangements that give these country-soul songs a semi-symphonic air. Rae’s measured, river-clear voice…

We Are There FIRE 8/10 PERHAPS it is the awareness, inescapable of late, that life is both precious and fragile, but the fourth album by Modern Studies exhibits a toughening of sinew, a quickening of intent. The sense of urgency marks a small but significant evolution from their last record, The Weight Of The Sun, released in early summer 2020. Since forming in 2015, the music created by this collaborative quartet has tended towards shiver, shimmer and murmur. Modern Studies blend into an unclassifiable whole elements of hazy, pastoral psych-folk and the slips and sighs of analogue electronica, alongside pickings from krautrock, Brubeckian jazz, blissed-out Cali canyon harmonies and the sweet tang of chamber pop. Instruments seemingly named after decommissioned weaponry or tools of torture (sub 37, ms10, clock gong,…

After Texas native Britt Daniel moved from LA back to Austin late in 2019, the band immediately started working on Lucifer On The Sofa at drummer Jim Eno’s Public Hi-Fi studio. “The idea this time was to record in a proper city, where we could soak up the music and energy,” Daniel recalls. “And it worked amazingly for the first four months or so, and then, of course, there was suddenly none of that. Though there was still an energy in Austin during lockdown; that’s the vibe I was feeling when I wrote the song ‘Lucifer On The Sofa’.” Their underlying impulse was to “make a record the way we used to, where we rehearse the songs a ton before recording”, Daniel explains. “We pushed our boundaries on Hot Thoughts, but…

The Bridge (reissue, 1979) THE GREY AREA OF MUTE 8/10 THE year 1979 was when synth-pop went overground. In May, Tubeway Army released their final single “Are ‘Friends’ Electric”, a Moog-powered track that propelled the band – and their pale cyborg of a lead singer Gary Numan – to the top of the charts and onto Top Of The Pops. That same month, another seminal synth-powered record hit shelves. That The Bridge is seeing its first vinyl reissue since 1979 would seem to indicate it’s more of a footnote in the history of electronic music than a foundation stone. But a listen from the vantage point of 2022 reveals it to be as striking as Numan’s music of the era. Eerie and unsettling, rough in a DIY way but buzzing…

London Coliseum, December 5 Gahan inhabits each song with yearning intensity and a splash of black humour HOW many times do you have to sing someone else’s song before you can call it your own? There’s no right answer, of course. But if the hat fits, keep it on and style it out. Dave Gahan has been performing Martin Gore’s material for 40 years in Depeche Mode and it’s only now, with the release of Imposter, his latest collaboration with Rich Machin’s gloom-rock troupe Soulsavers, that he admits to sometimes feeling like a fraud or an actor playing a role – particularly when compared to the greats he admires, the crooners and chameleons such as David Bowie, Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash. Perhaps, then, the singer we see this evening…

8/10 Touching new Brian Wilson film finds magic and loss on the freeway of memory NEAR the start of Brent Wilson’s modest, elliptical, ultimately desperately moving new documentary, the director sits Brian Wilson at a piano in his lambent Beverly Hills mansion and tosses him a few questions about his unexpectedly productive third act. “You’ve been working non-stop since your late fifties. Where did this sudden surge of creativity come from?” “Well,” says Brian, looking about as comfortable as a Californian black bear asked to explain exactly what goes on in the woods, “it starts from my brain, works its way out into the piano and then into the speakers in the studio.” “Is that something you can explain?” the director enquires, hopefully. “No,” responds Brian firmly, “I can’t.” At…

TOURING America in the early 1980s, Simple Minds’ faith in their krautrock-literate brand of post-punk was occasionally tested. After an audience of barely 25 rocked up for one of their shows, the well-intentioned promoter came to commiserate with singer Jim Kerr, saying: “That’s two bands I’ve had in this week with no-one here. They were Scottish guys as well: U2. Best thing I’ve seen for ages.” Boldly touted as “the first great modernist Scottish band” in Graeme Thomson’s excellent Themes For Great Cities, Simple Minds joined U2 in the stadium-rock major leagues when their rendition of producer Keith Forsey’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” – the theme tune for John Hughes’ 1985 teen monster The Breakfast Club – became a US No 1 single. However, it was a triumph that…

Anaïs Mitchell BMG 8/10 THE first phase of the Covid crisis brought a rude interruption to normal life for Anaïs Mitchell. She was living in New York, in the ninth month of her pregnancy with her second child. Mitchell’s creative life was dominated, as it had been for some years, by the demands of Hadestown, the juggernaut of a musical which has grown from her folk opera about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (also the basis for her 2010 album). It’s hard, with the world now stuck in a state of numbed alarm, to remember the fearful reality of the early part of the pandemic, but Mitchell reacted by quitting the city and going back to Vermont. Mitchell’s family moved into her grandmother’s old house, just along the driveway…

Once Twice Melody BELLA UNION 8/10 THERE are moments in Beach House’s eighth album so full of texture and detail, the effect can be overwhelming. In “Pink Funeral” – one of many songs on Once Twice Melody in which the Baltimore duo make startling use of arrangements by Beck and Adele collaborator David Campbell – that phenomenon begins to happen even before the strings kick in, adding scope and drama to music that may already seem improbably huge. “How sweet the sound,” Victoria Legrand coos ever so aptly as her voice enters the song and adds a further layer of sumptuousness. The first of Beach House’s albums to incorporate a live string ensemble as well as the first produced by themselves, Once Twice Melody is their biggest effort in more…

Forfolks INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM 8/10 IN his 1889 essay “The Decay Of Lying”, Oscar Wilde argued that, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” But the literary giant never lived through the shuttering of rock clubs, salons and hole-in-the-wall bars that are a sole source of promotion, incubation and performance for an artist and his work. That’s not to say Jeff Parker’s latest is a pandemic album, but it is one that effortlessly transmits the heart of a society in exile, just a man with a guitar in his house, improvising to no-one but himself and a friend who’s set up the mics. A man alone with his thoughts and hands. The premise is simple, but the result is remarkable – a multitudinous work of solo electric guitar that’s…

How did Blossom Toes come together? BRIAN GODDING: We started out as The Gravediggers when me and Brian Belshaw were apprentices at a scientific instrument factory in Finsbury Park. Jim joined the band when we were The Ingoes. Giorgio Gomelsky had sent us to France to improve, and when he came back he told us to change our guitar player, which was pretty contentious. Then the office decided that we should be called the Blossom Toes. JIM CREGAN: They were sort of a Tamla Motown rock and blues band when I joined. I was in The Dissatisfied Blues Band, who would open for bands at the Marquee, and somehow Giorgio thought I was of some interest. I might have been a bit better looking than the guitarist they had. The…

Love Of The Common People/Hangin’ On/Only The Greatest/Jewels (reissues, 1967/1968) CHERRY RED 7/10 ALONGSIDE his close friend and frequent collaborator Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings was at the forefront of the 1970s outlaw country movement that sought to upset the apple cart of Nashville norms. Seeds of rebellion had begun to take root during the latter part of the previous decade, however, while the Texan troubadour was, to the outside world, still a clean-cut figure playing Music City’s traditional game. Since his RCA Victor debut in 1966 (Folk-Country), the label had been marketing Jennings in the mould of their best-sellers George Jones, Jim Reeves and Marty Robbins but, four albums on, producer Chet Atkins was more amenable to taking risks, receptive to the singer’s wishes to embrace more politically minded material.…

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ROBBIE SHAKESPEARE Riddim twin (1953-2021) DROPPING into Kingston’s Tit For Tat reggae club one night in 1973 on the recommendation of Inner Circle’s Bernard ‘Touter’ Harvey, bassist Robbie Shakespeare was instantly taken with the seemingly effortless groove of drummer Sly Dunbar. The next day, Shakespeare approached producer Bunny Lee and suggested Dunbar join their in-house band, The Aggrovators. “The first thing we played, everyone started jumping up and down in the studio,” Shakespeare told United Reggae in 2012. “Sly & Robbie started right there and were well tight.” Their creative partnership spanned five decades, during which time they established themselves as reggae’s premier rhythm section, transcending the genre by incorporating elements of funk, R&B and electronica. They pioneered the harder-edged, syncopated ‘rockers’ beat, founded their own Taxi label and production…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine MOD ABOUT TOWN Great interview with Paul Weller in last month’s Uncut. He is clearly still a man in love with his day job, for sure. Interestingly, he was recently asked in a radio interview for his favourite song from the early days of The Jam. He said “In The City” is still very special to him. Their very first single. It reminded me of seeing them at Hammersmith Odeon when the In The City album had just come out. The set lasted just 40 minutes. They only had one album’s worth of material! Weller said sometimes they would play “In The City” two or three times in the same set. Sadly, that night we only got one airing, but it was still…