Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2016 i UNCUT

NOT TO OVERSTATE matters, but putting together a Best Albums Of The Year list, at least before autumn has fully blown through, seems an increasingly perilous business. Twelve months ago, for instance, Uncut’s extended family of staff and writers diligently submitted their favourites, unaware that an album which might have surpassed most of their choices – D’Angelo’s Black Messiah – would suddenly materialise on December 15. Something similar might happen again in the time between my writing this letter and this issue of Uncut arriving in the shops; these, I guess, are the gambles we have to take as part of putting together a monthly magazine. For a brief period of intrigue, possibility and anticipation, it even looked as if a new David Bowie album might sneak artfully into this…

Has the devil got a hold on you? With their headline slot at 2016’s Isle Of Wight now confirmed, the timing couldn’t be better for us to launch our Ultimate Music Guide to Queen. Usual format: deep new reviews, crazy archive interviews, and so forth. Our History Of Rock monthly series also continues apace: the 1969 edition has Mick Jagger on the cover and, like the Queen special, is in shops now. The bard of the Big Apple, Dion, returns next February with a new album, New York Is My Home . The title track, featuring Paul Simon, is available online. Jeff Lynne is taking the reconfigured ELO on tour in the wake of his recent Alone…

CIAN NUGENT Night Fiction WOODSIST Perhaps following the lead of fellow guitar adventurer Steve Gunn, Dublin-born Nugent steps up to the mic for the first time on this low-key, dusky set that at times recalls Cass McCombs backed by The VU. SAVAGES Adore Life MATADOR The London post-punks return with their stranger, slower second – Banshees influences reduced, eerie reverb turned up. CIRCLES AROUND THE SUN Interludes For The Dead RHINO A collection of Neal Casal’s epic jams, conjured up for the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows – time to “Hallucinate A Solution”, as the opening piece commands. TINDERSTICKS The Waiting Room CITY SLANG For their 10th LP, Stuart Staples and his crew expand into dub and even Afrobeat jams on the Fela-like “Help Yourself”. TORTOISE The Catastrophist THRILL…

I FIRST MET DAVID through Maria Schneider. I’ve been in her group for about 10 years or so. She and David were talking about collaborating. Then she called me up, looking for recommendations about different aspects of what they were doing. We did two small group workshops for “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)”, with David, Ryan Keberle – a trombone player from Maria’s band – myself and the rhythm section. I recommended the drummer from my band, Mark Guiliana, to play on it. This was June 2014. After the first workshop, David came with Maria and Tony Visconti to hear my band play at the 55 Bar, a local spot in New York. The next morning he emailed me and said that he had written a song based…

1997 BOB DYLAN Time Out Of Mind COLUMBIA 1998 MERCURY REV Deserter’s Songs V2 1999THE FLAMING LIPS The Soft Bulletin WARNER BROS 2000 LAMBCHOP Nixon CITY SLANG 2001 RYAN ADAMS Gold LOST HIGHWAY 2002 THE FLAMING LIPS Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots WARNER BROS 2003 WARREN ZEVON The Wind ARTEMIS/RYKO 2004BRIAN WILSON Smile NONESUCH 2005 ARCADE FIRE Funeral ROUGH TRADE 2006 BOB DYLAN Modern Times COLUMBIA 2007 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM Sound Of Silver DFA/EMI 2008 PORTISHEAD Third ISLAND 2009 ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Merriweather Post Pavilion DOMINO 2010 JOANNA NEWSOM Have One On Me DRAG CITY 2011 PJ HARVEY Let England Shake ISLAND 2012 LEONARD COHEN Old Ideas COLUMBIA 2013 MY BLOODY VALENTINE m b v MY BLOODY VALENTINE 2014 THE WAR ON DRUGS Lost In The Dream SECRETLY CANADIAN…

1ROLLING THE STONES Sticky Fingers UNIVERSAL CONTINUING THE BAND’S imperial phase, 1971’s Sticky Fingers found the Rolling Stones cherry-picking material recorded over the past couple of years at Olympic Studios, Barnes and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Exquisitely played and arranged, but brimming with sweat and feeling, the album defined the band’s raw sophistication, the air-conditioned, business-class R’n’B that delivered their most intoxicating music. Two Rolling Stones albums had been planned for 1969 – the material deriving from the seemingly ceaseless sessions the band embarked on before their Hyde Park appearance in July. Even before Let It Bleed, “Sticky Fingers” was being kicked around as a title for one of the collections. However, the band’s precarious circumstances (a tragical farce featuring appearances from Brian Jones, Allen Klein, Ned Kelly, various Hells Angels)…

10 I’VE ALWAYS KEPT A UNICORN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF SANDY DENNY Mick Houghton Faber & Faber Mick Houghton’s biography of the ill-fated Sandy Denny was the best account yet of a career of largely unrealised promise. There were many new and revealing interviews and great use of extensive access to the personal archives of Denny and her husband, the Australian folk musician Trevor Lucas, usually cast as an opportunistic womaniser but more sympathetically treated here. 9 ORIGINAL ROCKERS Richard King Faber & Faber Original Rockers drew evocatively on the years Richard King worked at Bristol’s Revolver Records, one of those incredible old record shops, now extinct, where the musically obsessed gathered in cult-like atmospheres to be introduced to exciting new sounds. The book was an extended elegy to such places…

STEVE CRADOCK Weller’s long-time guitarist and former drinking companion. A friendly and approachable Brummie exiled to the south-west, he plays in several bands including Ocean Colour Scene. ANDY LEWIS Tall, earnest bass player, serious about music, politics and clothes. Also plays in Spearmint and is a DJ and producer. ANDY CROFTS Shaggy-haired keyboard player from the Midlands. Performs with Gordelier in The Moons and also takes photographs and makes videos. STEVE PILGRIM Genial, dry-witted Scouse drummer, once of The Stands, who has also played with John Power and Cast. BEN GORDELIER Second drummer and sample player, who also plays in The Moons with Crofts. Joined the band in 2012 and started playing live this year. KEN WHEELER Weller sidekick for 37 years, having started as security and moved on to…

WELLER HAS WANTED to make a TV show at his studio for a while but believes this might finally come together early next year. “I’ve been trying to do a TV show for about two years,” he says. “At first, I wanted to do a series of half-hour shows and put them on the internet, but it would be a proper TV show with guests. Now we’re going to try to do a one-hour special early next year. We’ll use my studio [ Black Barn in Ripley in Surrey ], set up the gear, I’ll do a few songs and then we’ll get guests to play a few songs. I’ve got to make a list of people I want to ask – I’d ask Robert Plant and Paul…

Early 1974 Rocket From The Tombs form in Cleveland, Ohio – three members write “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” June 16, 1974 The group perform their first gig at the Viking Saloon in Cleveland, playing nearly all of the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams July 24, 1975 Rocket play their final show, and soon after split into the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, the latter taking “30 Seconds” and “Final Solution” Late 1975 Pere Ubu cut “30 Seconds” at Audio Recording, Cleveland. Released on Thomas’ own Hearthan label…

“I PLAYED IT BECAUSE Tom Morello (inset left) said that he would come and help me with the vets show and I said, ‘All right, what do you want to sing?’ He said, ‘This is the thing I did with Springsteen at the 25th anniversary of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. So I went, ‘OK, is it on YouTube?’ I had a look and went, ‘That’s great, let’s do that.’ I really like that song. It’s almost impossible to sing, there are so many words and they’re all jumbled in. It’s a weird piece of writing. It’s great.”…

DAVID BOWIE Outside 1995 While there are elements of Bowie’s classic era on Blackstar – from Aladdin Sane to Diamond Dogs – Outside , which saw Bowie and co-producer Eno fold elements of rock and electronica into their palette, foreshadows the new album’s bold engagement with jazz and dissonance. “I’m Deranged” would fit well on Blackstar . DAVID BOWIE The Next Day 2013 Although a more conventional ‘rock’ album than Blackstar , you can find the seeds of the latter’s wild experimentation in “If You Can See Me” – a breathless track that can barely keep up with its own contorted time signature – and “Heat”, whose dolorous tone…

How do you think Kannon compares with your previous albums? I was playing the mix to Oren Ambarchi, who plays on the record. He reacted by saying, “You know what? I think this is pretty accessible for Sunn O))) – it’s kind of like Sunn O)))’s pop album.” He was making a metaphor, obviously – it’s not pop. But for Sunn O))), there’s something about it that you can grasp a little bit more. This record is close to how the band really sounds live. Is the music on Kannon still steeped in the band’s more-is-more aesthetic? It’s not like it’s coloured by a lot of effects or crazy edits or stuff like that – it’s more the sound of our amps.…

New releases are stacking up for 2016. Chief among them is The Ghosts Of Highway 20 , the 12th studio effort from Lucinda Williams, due in early February. The Georgia-to-Texas stretch of Interstate 20 serves as a metaphorical link between the 14 songs, most of which were inspired by Williams’ own experiences. Veteran guitarists Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz flesh out the travelogue, plus bassist David Sutton and drummer Butch Norton. The record includes a cover of Springsteen’s “Factory” and a ‘lost’ Woody Guthrie song, “House Of Earth”, for which Williams composed the music. February also sees the return of gruff-toned singer Jake Smith ( pictured ), who, as The White Buffalo, is all over the soundtrack to Sons Of Anarchy .…

How did Junun come together? My wife introduced me to Shye’s music, and persuaded him (and me) that we could make a record together. The key moment was telling Shye that we could record anywhere at all. With Radiohead we were used to setting up studios in old, semi-abandoned houses. As long as there was at least one big room, we could make it work. Then, luckily, Shye met some Maharajahs at a polo ground – at some literary festival, I think – and the Maharajah of Jodhpur offered his palace as a recording location. Aside from endless power cuts, it went really smoothly. We were using every last piece of equipment we had – we brought everything from the Radiohead studio. These limitations were good…

Corrina Repp stopped making music completely in the 18 months following the demise of her band, Tu Fawning, in 2013. “I needed to take a break,” she says. “I’d split from my partner of eight years [Joe Haege], who was also my bandmate, so it felt like a good time to put shit in the closet for a while. When I came back to it, I realised I’d been hobbling around like half a person for a year and a half.” Despite the circumstances in which it was written, Repp insists The Pattern Of Electricity is “not a break-up album. It’s more about believing and surviving and being OK with living with sadness”. Her last solo outing, 2006’s The Absent And The Distant…

“I have a habit of just letting things happen,” Aaron Lee Tasjan laughs, describing his career to date. An award-winning teenage jazz guitarist from Ohio, he turned down a Berklee scholarship to play his own music at 19 in the “terribly named” Americana band Autumn Under Echoes. He moved to Brooklyn in 2006 and joined glam-rockers Semi Precious Weapons, briefly managed by ubiquitous scene-setter BP Fallon, who introduced him to the New York Dolls. Tasjan joined them in 2008 and “it changed my life and wardrobe for the very best”, he says. He was soon also “trying really hard to sound like Tom Petty” in The Madison Square Gardeners. By 2013, he was in Nashville, inspired by country songwriters such as Blaze Foley and Lucinda Williams, celebrated on “Lucinda’s Room”,…

69 LOVE SONGS originally occurred to you as a conceit to write 100 love songs. Do such concepts occur to you often? How many make it out of the notebook? Sure do. Possible albums, musicals, books and movies occur to me several times in a typical night, along with one-offs in other media. The vast majority never get beyond my little notebook. For example, I imagine writing a superhero comic with punningly named characters drawn from idiomatic clichés: the observant Jew, the vanishing middle class, white flight, the gay mafia, the yellow peril, the ugly American, etc, with the appropriate superpowers. If I thought I was going to get around to doing this, of course I wouldn’t tell you about it. What are your abiding memories of recording the album?…

E A Man Called E POLYDOR, 1992 Leaving behind a best-forgotten homemade 1985 LP– Bad Dude In Love – E left Virginia for LA to make his fortune, but was close to 29 when he finally struck upon a marketable songwriting persona. The first of his two pre-Eels Polydor LPs, A Man Called E , proved gauche but slightly loveable. EELS Blinking Lights And Other Revelations VAGRANT, 2005 Lacking a label when DreamWorks was bought out in 2003, Eels were picked up by another arm of Universal for this massive record: 2CDs or 4LPs on the absence of God and perverse beauty of existence. Very ’eavy, very ’umble. EELS Wonderful, Glorious VAGRANT, 2013 A conceptual triptych coinciding with the end of Everett’s marriage…

CLARENCE ASHLEY Greenback Dollar: The Music Of Clarence “Tom” Ashley COUNTY RECORDS, 2001 Ashley’s small, concentrated body of work is a powder keg. “House Carpenter”, “Little Sadie”, “Dark Holler”, all delving deep into the US psyche, aided by the clip-clop of Ashley’s astounding five-string banjo, are darkly gripping. DOCK BOGGS Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings (1927-1929) REVENANT, 1997 Spidery banjo blues forge fatalistic tales of crippling loss, deceit and murder – a paragon of the depths of human existence capable of being depicted in music. “Oh Death”, with the protagonist imploring for one more year on the planet, and “Pretty Polly”, a terrifying murder ballad, top an impeccable catalogue. CARTER FAMILY In The Shadow Of Clinch Mountain BEAR FAMILY, 2000 With their intricate harmonies, impeccable musicianship and seamless repertoire, the…

the Focus Group Hey Let Loose Your Love GHOST BOX, 2005 Sampladelic soundbites by Julian House are whipped into an angel’s  delight of bustling jazz drums, bass flutes and descents into grubby science-lab electronica. House is at his best when easy listening tips over into something menacing, as if some malevolent presence has hijacked your television set. Belbury Poly From An Ancient Star GHOST BOX, 2009 Jim Jupp’s music is also haunted by memories of junior sci-fi and the clash of folk and modernity in British culture. It comes out here as primal synth-pop with bucolic overtones, as on the the silicon rondel of “Widdershins”. Meticulous electronica. Roj The Transactional Dharma Of Roj GHOST BOX, 2009 Former Broadcast keyboardist Roj Stevens transforms vintage meditational library music into an aural heaven…

“WORKING WITH DAVID is a very collaborative process. He sees and is kept up to date with everything and there are many discussions about the direction and many roughs over a number of months. It is a very exciting, uncertain time, not only as I am one of the few in the world that has heard the album and have to keep it a secret, but also I am always unsure of how well I will respond to the music. It is a very rewarding process. David always gives you time to do ‘your thing’. As for how he responds through the project, he is serious as well as humorous at the right moments, respectful of people’s creativity, honest when he doesn’t like something, full of praise when he does,…

BOWIE IS NO stranger to the theatre – he attempted to mount a musical based on George Orwell’s 1984 in the early ’70s and played John Merrick in The Elephant Man in 1980/1 – but Lazarus is the first piece Bowie has written for theatre. A collaboration with Irish playwright Enda Walsh ( Once ), and directed by Ivo van Hove, the musical runs at the New York Theatre Workshop until January 17. It is a sequel of sorts to Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell To Earth (filmed by Nic Roeg with Bowie as the alien lead, Thomas Jerome Newton). Speaking to The New York Times ,…

JULIA HOLTER Have You In My Wilderness DOMINO AN ARTIST OF conceptual thinking and compositional rigour, Holter makes music that feels a lot less forbidding than that might sound. In her best work, you’ll hear her harmonised voice suspended in tuneful and melancholic electronic spaces. It’s chamber electronica: a place where nostalgia embraces the future, songwriting embeds with technology, Aphex Twin meets the Beach Boys. The path to fourth LP, Have You In My Wilderness, has been an interesting one. After classical study and music teaching work, Holter began recording at home, making the Euripedes-inspired Tragedy, and playing live with Linda Perhacs – another Cali musician knowing how to create a secular mass for multi-tracked voices. Holter’s breakthrough, 2012’s Ekstasis – again with the classical Greek reference – was a…

20 CARTEL LAND DIR: MATTHEW HEINEMAN A powerful study of civilian groups challenging the power of Mexico’s drug gangs, filmmaker Heineman’s documentary figuring strongly among a number of similarly themed projects to arrive this year, including Benicio Del Toro’s Escobar biopic and Netflix’s Narcos series. Heineman embedded himself with vigilante groups on both sides of the US-Mexico border, the result questioning the ethics of all parties. 19 MISTRESS AMERICA DIR: NOAH BAUMBACH The first sighting of Noah Baumbach in our Top 20. Shot on the hoof in the hiatus between Frances Ha and When We Were Young, this low-budget comedy might feel like one the writer/ director’s lesser works; but the spirited central performance from star and co-writer Greta Gerwig shines, as she plays a dynamic, fast-talking aspirant, navigating Baumbach’s…

1 GOT HOW FREE MUSIC Stephen Witt The Bodley Head HOW MUSIC GOT FREE was a history of digital music piracy and the technology that brought the music business to its knees. Such plain description makes it sound dryly investigative, with much baffling science and unfathomable discussion of international copyright legislation, little of which was likely to set the reader’s pulse racing. The result, however, was sensational: lucid, informative, with the pounding narrative tempo of a first-class thriller. The book was a fascinating guide to a dark subculture of digital pirate crews who reduced the record industry to parlous disarray. But in Witt’s damning final analysis, it wasn’t the MP3 or illegal file-sharers that ruined the music business. Its own intractability and greed saw to that.…

WELLER BEGAN work on his first film soundtrack two years ago, creating a sound collage for the boxing film provisionally titled The Ballad Of Jimmy McCabe . With filming set to begin in 2016, this soundtrack promises to be unlike anything he’s ever done before. “A mate of mine, the actor Johnny Harris ( pictured ), has been trying to get this film together for the last two years,” says Weller. “It’s a semi-autobiographical piece about a boxer who has it all, loses it and then gets it together again. “It’s my first complete soundtrack – I’ve done the odd song here and there – so I want to try something really different. We had the first meeting about two years ago, and I went…

ALTHOUGH WELLER doesn’t intend to tour next year, he imagines he will continue to play festivals. He has mixed feelings about the festival mania that has built over recent decades. “I’ve enjoyed them this year, but I don’t always, because you have no control over things. That can put you off. But we played some wicked shows this year: The Who at Hyde Park was great, Glastonbury was good, and we played a few in Europe. I do like having a roof on my gig, though. There are so many festivals and so many bands on each one. I liked the one yesterday [ Hardly Strictly Bluegrass ], I liked the size of the stages and the fact it was free. It’s nice to get the chance to…

DONNY McCASLIN Saxophone, flute, woodwind Berklee graduate, has played with Gil Evans and fusion pioneer Gary Burton, as well as Maria Schneider and others. Two-times Grammy nominee, for Best Instrumental Jazz Solo. Most recent album, Fast Future , was released on Greenleaf Music earlier this year. JASON LINDNER Piano, Wurlitzer, keyboards LaGuardia graduate, veteran of several big bands, trios, quartets and electric groups. First recorded with McCaslin on 2012’s Casting For Gravity , then Fast Future . TIM LEFEBVRE Bass Wide-ranging credits include David Holmes and Jamie Cullum alongside stints on Late Night With David Letterman and Saturday Night Live . He also plays in Tedeschi Trucks Band. MARK GUILIANA Drums, percussion Leader of…

ANY TROUBLE Present Tense CHERRY RED Clive Gregson’s Stiff veterans reunite once more Any Trouble were signed to Stiff Records in the late ’70s and, like many of their labelmates, they were a classy, well-established pub-rock covers band who were given the impetus to develop their songwriting chops by punk. Their second album since reforming in 2007 shows that frontman Clive Gregson (now based in Nashville) still has a knack for a sturdy verse, chorus and middle-eight. His soft, rather muffled voice is one of thwarted ambition, and it rather suits the bathetic Middle England persona of songs like “I Just Don’t Get It”, “Learning How To Lose” and “Missed That Train”. JOHN LEWIS ARCA Mutant MUTE Overwhelming if patchy second from Björk confidante Arca is the gender-bending 25-year-old Venezuelan…

It’s been 17 years since Joe Cassidy last released an album by Butterfly Child but it’s not like he ever stopped making music – far from it. “My day job is writing music,” explains the Belfast-bred Cassidy, who relocated to Chicago before making Butterfly Child’s third album, Soft Explosives , in 1998. He now works out of his home studio in Los Angeles. “I could be writing for a Japanese commercial on a Tuesday, doing a Lexus car ad on a Thursday and producing a band on a Friday. The nice thing about Butterfly Child is it’s about getting back to real music instead of feeling like I’m on autopilot.” Cassidy had amassed hundreds of unreleased songs by the time Dell’Orso Records convinced him to end the…

“Actually, there is no German ‘rock scene’ at all,” says Max Rieger, the guitarist and vocalist in Stuttgart’s visceral, dynamic Die Nerven, when Uncut ask about the health of Germany’s alternative scene. “Having a rock band in 2015 is a pain in the ass, to be honest. Compared to the huge amount of electronic artists, there are only a few rock bands left in Germany, many of them following a retromaniac approach to music that is already history.” Despite their ferocious sound and dark lyrical mood, though, the three-piece have racked up considerable acclaim in their home country, with 2014’s Fun featuring on many critics’ end of year lists. “It’s a very strange thing to get acceptance with such a weird, noisy…

Will Sheff readily admits that Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy was written and recorded as a possible last creative hurrah. “I felt like I’d hit a wall,” he explains. “I’d been grinding it out on tour to the point of endangering my health and sanity, but I wasn’t getting a sense that the work I was doing was having any effect on people. I figured if no-one paid any more attention to this album than they had to my previous two, I’d at least go out on what felt to me like an artistic high note.” As for using Tim Hardin’s song as conceptual glue, it wasn’t about love of the track, per se: “It was like I lived in a house that had a strange…

Melbourne’s Sunset Strip were formed by Warwick Brown in 1984. Guitar-focused, with a feel for slacker rock, they released one LP – Move Right In – before dissolving in 1995 due to “low self-esteem, depression, addiction”. Another record, Stone Lazy , had been shelved after their label went bust but now, after 20 years, it’s getting a welcome release. “We sent tapes off, but we never got that call,” recalls Brown. “So we put the band aside to get on with our lives. The record got forgotten about.” Stone Lazy is a glorious mix of “long, loud spontaneous work-outs and short, sweeter tunes”, and Brown says these were “songs we had no recollection of ever recording.” He’s delighted that their time…

With this year almost over, we examine the first batch of 2016’s releases in the next Uncut . On the white-hot new-release front, January sees Savages return with their second album, Adore Life , an altogether more atmospheric and nuanced listen than their debut, while former Fiery Furnace Eleanor Friedberger unveils her own strong third, New View . Suede are back with Night Thoughts , accompanied by a feature-length film, and Shearwater present the “loud” Jet Plane And Oxbow , while John Cale re-imagines his bleak Music For A New Society with the electronic M:FANS . Elsewhere, blustery Canadians The Besnard Lakes return with the grand…

BRIDGE OF SPIES Director Steven Spielberg Starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance Opens November 27 Cert 12A YOUTH Director Paolo Sorrentino Starring Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel Opens January 29 Cert 15 KEITH RICHARDS: UNDER THE INFLUENCE Director Morgan Neville Starring Keith Richards, Tom Waits Opens Now Cert U GRANDMA Director Paul Weitz Starring Lily Tomlin, Julia Garner Opens December 11 Cert 15 SUNSET SONG Director Terence Davies Starring Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan Opens December 4 Cert 15…

SET LIST 1 Bridges And Balloons 2 Anecdotes 3 Soft As Chalk 4 Divers 5 Goose Eggs 6 Emily 7 Sapokanikan 8 Leaving The City 9 Have One On Me 10 Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne Elite 11 Cosmia 12 Time, As A Symptom 13 A Pin-Light Bent ENCORE 14 Baby Birch 15 Peach Plum Pear AT JOANNA NEWSOM’S first London gig in five years, the whoops of recognition that greet her older material are out of control. You’d almost think she’d emerged from the wings in a plume of dry ice, dressed as Art Garfunkel and ready to do “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. It’s particularly leaden in the encore when she starts playing “Baby Birch”, a wrenching song about the loss of a child from 2010’s Have One On…

JUNE 9, 2014: First workshop for “Sue (In A Season Of Crime)” JUNE 18, 2014: Second workshop JUNE 24, 2014: “Sue…” recorded at The Magic Shop, New York NOVEMBER 14, 2014: “Sue…” released as a 10in for Record Store Day JANUARY 3- 8, 2015: First album sessions at The Magic Shop JANUARY 8, 2015: David Bowie turns 68 FEBRUARY 2–6, 2015: Second album sessions at The Magic Shop MARCH 20–24, 2015: Third album sessions at The Magic Shop APRIL, 2015: Overdubs, Human Worldwide, NYC NOVEMBER 20, 2015: “Blackstar” 45 released DECEMBER, 2015: “Lazarus” 45 released JANUARY 8, 2016: Blackstar LP released…

75 NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS Loin Des Hommes OST GOLIATH 74 KEITH RICHARDS Crosseyed Heart UNIVERSAL 73 PHIL COOK Southland Mission MIDDLE WEST 72 KILLING JOKE Pylon SPINEFARM 71 DRINKS Hermits On Holiday BIRTH 70 POND Man It Feels Like Space Again CAROLINE 69 MODEST MOUSE Strangers To Ourselves EPIC 68 DAVE ALVIN AND PHIL ALVIN Lost Time YEP ROC 67 MICACHU AND THE SHAPES Good Bad Happy Sad ROUGH TRADE 66 THE APARTMENTS No Song No Spell No Madrigal MICROCULTURES 65 BOP ENGLISH Constant Bop BLOOD AND BISCUITS 64 PIL What The World Needs Now… PIL OFFICIAL LTD 63 BADBADNOTGOOD & GHOSTFACE KILLAH Sour Soul LEX 62 TITUS ANDRONICUS The Most Lamentable Tragedy MERGE 61 VINCE STAPLES “Summertime ’06” DEF JAM 60 CHIP TAYLOR The Little Prayers Trilogy…

1 INHERENT VICE DIR: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON A BUSY YEAR for Anderson, who also directed music videos for Joanna Newsom and travelled to India with Jonny Greenwood. He opened 2015, though, with this woozy, inspired Pynchon adaptation, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a muttonchopped PI who finds himself out of his depth as he tried to solve a case. Anderson – and Pynchon – conjured up a crazy, out-of-whack California in the ’70s, where the funky hippy vibes of the previous decade have been replaced by Nixon, Mason, Vietnam, assassinations: anxiety and remorse are the principal emotions. The film has a sticky, faintly claustrophobic tone, with its talk of “karmic thermals” and heroin addicts, midday naps and shapeless days. As one character says in voiceover, “American life was something to be…

PAUL WELLER is sitting at a pavement bench outside a San Francisco coffee shop reminiscing about the first time he visited America. It was October 1977, and he was on a short tour to promote The Jam’s debut album, In The City. “We played LA, San Francisco, Boston and New York,” he recalls, as he sips at a coffee in the sunshine. “We played the Whisky and CBGB’s. This was when they were trying to sell UK punk to America. It was very frustrating because they didn’t get it. We were really looking forward to coming here because so many of our influences were American, but we were amazed at how musically backwards it was. It was still a hangover from the ’60s, especially here on the West Coast. We…

KEYBOARD PLAYER Crofts doesn’t just play notes onstage, he also presses buttons as an unofficial backstage photographer. “I’ve been taking pictures all my life,” he says. “But it was only when I got hold of a quality camera that had proper focus that I realised how much I loved it.” Crofts has also carried a video camera with him since he joined the band in 2008, and in the past year has been filming more studiously with the intention of creating an intimate tour film. “There hasn’t really been a Paul Weller fly-on-the-wall documentary before, so I’ve been shooting a video that and shows what nobody has seen before,” says Crofts, who has also shot videos for Weller’s recent singles, including “These City Streets”. “It won’t be Gimme…

KEY PLAYERS THE DEBUT SINGLE by Ohio’s Pere Ubu is an uncompromising listen: nearly seven minutes of apocalyptic synth storms, metallic guitars and unnerving, ranting vocals about a real-life bomber squad’s “suicide ride”. In fact, the 1975 single had originally been written by Rocket From The Tombs – the infamous Cleveland rock band who counted among their number future Ubu men David Thomas and Peter Laughner, alongside Cheetah Chrome, who would soon form the Dead Boys. Post-punk in sound, yet made in a pre-punk world, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” was unlike much else – perhaps the bluster of the MC5, the experimentalism of Beefheart and the doomy portent of Sabbath could be discerned in its sonic stew, alongside some more surprising inspirations. “Most people are startled by the fact that…

“I REMEMBER ONE TIME Syd was sitting on the back of my motorbike. We had a race with a guy who had a Morris Minor 1000. We went out to the Four Went Ways, which is a roundabout outside Cambridge, at the end of the Hauxton half-mile, and I gave him, I don’t know, an eight-minute start or something. With Syd on the back of my 350 Norton we chugged back at about 100 miles an hour. As we pulled into his mother’s house – no crash helmets or anything like that – the back tyre went ‘pfffft’. It had a split in the side. We had literally gone 25 miles at 100 miles an hour in the middle of the night. I still remember the ‘pfffft’. We looked at…

TRACKLIST 1 Blackstar 2 ’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore 3 Lazarus 4 Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) 5 Girl Loves Me 6 Dollar Days 7 I Can’t Give Everything Away WHEN YOU’VE COME back from the dead, as David Bowie effectively did with his surprise 2013 album, The Next Day, what exactly do you do for an encore? The sudden appearance of “Where Are We Now?” on the morning of January 8 – his 66th birthday – was a coup de théâtre even by the standards of an artist with a long history of dramatic entrances. The problem is, though, that when you’ve pulled off such an audacious stunt once – one to rival that of Lazarus, you could say – what do you do on…

Honolulu-born Jenny Lee Lindberg first picked up a bass when she was 19 – essentially because a friend had one, plus a practice amp. After moving to LA, in 2004 she co-founded Warpaint, her elastic style providing the dark undertow to their psych-pop dreamscapes. She’s been making music on her own for years, but is now going public with it for the first time. “I just got to a point where I was ready to share,” she explains. “Chris [ Cunningham, film/video director and JLL’s spouse ] was a big inspiration and my muse for the past four years. He was very encouraging, helping me realise I had more balls than I thought. In Warpaint, I am one quarter of the band. In my band I am 99…

Heart Of A Dog is deeply personal but also totally universal. It’s not really about me and my life and my childhood and getting to know me as such. It’s really about what stories are, why you have them and what you do with them. I like it when people make their own story from this, and I try to leave it open. How did you go about composing the music? I cut the film and showed it to some people with just a voiceover, no music at all, and they all said: please don’t put music on it. And I thought, well, wait a second, I am a musician, I can always take it off if I don’t like it. I did the music super-fast. One thing…

100,000 FIREFLIES DISTANT PLASTIC TREES, 1991 The Magnetic Fields’ debut album was an almost psychedelic album of synthetic art-song, which came into focus on this track, sounding like Terry Riley producing ABBA, with Susan Anway singing what may still be the quintessential Merritt lines: “ You won’t be happy with me/But give me one more chance/You won’t be happy anyway” . THE SADDEST STORY EVER TOLD THE WAYWARD BUS, 1992 Merritt’s second was a fresh take on the tired idea of perfect pop, reimagining the Phil Spector wall of sound as performed by an emphysemic synth orchestra. On this track, Anway once again proves herself the perfectly deadpan non-interpreter of Merritt’s magical nihilism. BORN ON A TRAIN THE CHARM OF THE HIGHWAY STRIP, 1994 From their superb Kraftwerk-go-country…

THE PRICE YOU PAY (Alternate) Not a radical reinvention, but featuring a subtly altered arrangement, a more full-blooded vocal, and a third verse excised from the River version: “ Some say forget the past, and some say don’t look back/But for every breath you take, you leave a track/ And it just don’t seem fair, but for every smile that breaks/A tear must fall somewhere .” NIGHT FIRE A dramatic tour de force, with strong echoes of “Because The Night”. Gentle minor piano chords lead to a wiry guitar motif. Negotiating a serpentine melody, Springsteen spells out a chilly warning to a woman running with a fast and dangerous new crowd: “ Do you really get used to being bought and…

ONE OF THE outcomes of an extensive research project, Bali 1928 – Anthology: The First Recordings WORLD ARBITER 8/10 pulls together highlights from five dedicated volumes of Balinese music, all taken from 78s released by Odeon and Beka. It’s an incredible glimpse into pre-WWII music from Bali: the compositions feel more rough-housing than the gamelan often circulating in ‘world music’ circles, and vocal performances such as Ni Lemon’s “Kidung Wargasari I”, an incredible example of Wargasari poetry, tease out a different narrative arc for Balinese music. Chekhov’s Band – Eastern European Klezmer Music From The EMI Archives 1908-1913 RENAIR 9/10 winds us further back, pre-WWI, and moves us across to the Russian Empire, where most of the recordings here were made. There’s something quietly remarkable about the work…

THE ONE. JAMES Brown was obsessed with The One. It signified the first and over-emphasised beat of the 4/4 rhythm of funk, the music that Brown and his band spawned between 1965’s “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” and 1967’s “Cold Sweat” – both numbers have a claim as funk’s founding charter. And, of course, The One signified Brown himself, Mr Dynamite, the amazing Mr Please Please, the Hardest Working Man In Showbiz, Soul Brother Number One! As an act of self-invention, Brown has few rivals in pop. Abandoned by his parents, he was raised by his aunt in the beer-joint-cum-brothel she ran in poverty-stricken Carolina. In his teen years he spent time in prison before music rescued him. A competent drummer, a supercharged vocalist and a dazzling dancer, Brown…

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN OPENS DECEMBER 3 Or Young Frankenstein: James McAvoy is the fledgling medical student and Daniel Radcliffe his youthful assistant, Igor. What could possibly go wrong? FUTURE SHOCK! THE STORY OF 2000AD OPENS DECEMBER 4 Long overdue doc charting the history of the legendary British sci-fi comic, home to Judge Dredd and friends. Zarjaz! BY THE SEA OPENS DECEMBER 11 Angelina Jolie Pitt directs; she and Brad co-star as a couple on vacation, trying to get their marriage back on track. HECTOR OPENS DECEMBER 11 Peter Mullan exposes his softer side as a homeless man heading from Scotland to London to a temporary Christmas shelter. PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: ART ADDICT OPENS DECEMBER 11 Documentary about the flamboyant art collector, based on interviews recorded before she died in 1979. THE FORBIDDEN…

My favourite holiday album Sly And The Family Stone There’s A Riot Goin’ On 1971 It’s the most positive album ever. We listened to this a lot when we were tracking the record [Natalie Prass]. We would put it on almost every morning and get pumped up, make a hard-boiled egg and drink coffee, and talk about the day. So There’s A Riot… and hardboiled eggs are the bread and butter of our record. It’s also the perfect album for Thanksgiving or Christmas – it has a really good spirit. A big influence on my album Mina Mazzini Il Cielo In Una Stanza 1960 Mina is an Italian singer, and she has the most powerful vibrato, very emotional and dramatic. I showed this song to Matt [E White, producer] before…