Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i UNCUT

“It’s been a long lonely time/And it’s funny, funny to see that I’m about to lose my mind mind mind” HAVING spent quite a lot of time at the end of last year poring over Peter Jackson’s Get Back films, it felt as though revelatory light had been shed on the final stages of The Beatles’ creative life. For this issue, meanwhile, Peter Watts has assembled the most detailed and revealing exploration of the other end of The Beatles’ career in this excellent deep dive into the Fabs’ 1962. Without spoilers, I should note that it’s remarkable how different things could have been if, say, George Martin had prevailed and The Beatles had recorded “How Do You Do It” as their debut single, or if John Lennon hadn’t pulled out…

HAPPY birthday, Richie! You’re 78 today, I believe… Yeah, but these numbers don’t really compute much any more. I’ll celebrate tonight with my family, but it’s not going to be a big production! The other cause for celebration is In The Country, your new album of covers. How did that come about? The idea was presented to me by [producer] Val Garay. I’ve known Val since just before the Buffalo Springfield days, back in 1965, then we recorded together in 1979 on I Still Have Dreams. I knew it was a challenge, because these songs are all so familiar to country music fans and I wanted to make them my own. After what everybody has been through in the last couple of years, I think the record has an uplifting…

Something More Than Love ICONS CREATING EVIL ART 8/10 LERA LYNN isn’t prone to repeating herself. Having moved further away from her countryish beginnings with 2018’s duets album, Plays Well With Others, she followed up with the self-made, and self-explanatory, On My Own. Now she’s shifted into an entirely different dimension with Something More Than Love. Co-produced with her partner Todd Lombardo, it’s an often moving, sometimes troubled, meditation on the joys and trials of new parenthood. Lynn gave birth to their first son at the start of the pandemic. Adjusting to being a mother while processing the internal and external changes in her life, she began suffering from postnatal depression. All of this played into the songs that took shape at the couple’s home in Nashville. As its title…

Hellfire ROUGH TRADE 8/10 FOR three young men in their early twenties, Black Midi have already covered a lot of musical ground. Their 2019 debut, Schlagenheim, embraced a twisted mutation of math-rock, jazz and post-punk, recalling Battles at their most discordant or a mutilated King Crimson. 2021’s Cavalcade was a more all-encompassing tonal affair; alongside the frenzied assaults was a softer, more melodic and often poignant side that showed they could veer into avant-folk territory as easily as they could pulverising noise-rock. They continue on this unpredictable route here, on their third album, seemingly on a crusade to sound like all genres yet also none. On the opening “Hellfire” they combine an almost rap-esque spitfire delivery of words – “a headache, a sore limb, an itchy gash, a mirage, a…

{REDISCOVERED Uncovering the underrated and overlooked} Flatboat River Witch ULYSSA 9/10 YOU probably haven’t heard of the schizoid zither. Or the buzzstick. Or the boing box. These are all names that semi-reclusive musician David Michael Moore has given to his homemade instrument, a wooden box with strings and keys that he describes as “a simple hybrid stringed instrument that combines experimental percussion and melody on the same soundboard. It can be plucked like a harp, played with sticks like a santur, set up to bend strings like a koto, or played with a slide and finger picks. It is basically an ornamental soundboard that one can set up and play in different ways.” Moore is an American original, a carpenter and artist who lives in a rundown house in rural Mississippi…

WHEN THE TRAIN COMES BACK (FORTY BLUE FINGERS, FRESHLY PACKED AND READY TO SERVE, 1968) Wistful 12-bar blues from Chicken Shack’s debut album, superior to the 7” release. McVie calmly bids farewell to an errant lover – “You got 20 other women, you know another one won’t do” – over her descending piano chords and Stan Webb’s quivering guitar. NO ROAD IS THE RIGHT ROAD (CHRISTINE PERFECT, 1970) McVie wrote five originals for her solo debut, of which this is the best. Opening with woozy, R&B-inspired horns, before McVie’s electric piano and a shuffle rhythm kick in. More reportage from heartbreak’s frontline: “You’re walking up a one-way street when you only love one man”. MORNING RAIN (FUTURE GAMES, 1971) McVie’s contributions to Fleetwood Mac preceded her formal arrival into the…

WRANGLIN’ ERNEST RANGLIN (ISLAND, 1964) “A versatile and melodic guitar player influenced by the early masters of electric guitar, Charlie Christian, Les Paul and Wes Montgomery. Also a skilful arranger. Ernest turned into my secret weapon, someone I could call upon to add virtuosity and Jamaican realness to any record.” THE LOW SPARK OF HIGH-HEELED BOYS TRAFFIC (ISLAND, 1971) “Traffic’s story was wrapped inside Steve Winwood’s constantly provisional nature, which he shared with the other members. Dave Mason left soon after Mr Fantasy, leaving the basic Winwood-Wood-Capaldi trio, where the real chemistry was, all three of them firing off each other’s current musical infatuations, whether it was Delta blues or classical.” EXODUS BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS (ISLAND, 1977) “The songs from Bob’s exile period became two albums: Exodus, a direct, militant…

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LIGHTYEAR OPENS JUNE 17 The current wave of prequelmania hits Toy Story’s astronaut hero Buzz Lightyear, with Chris Evans taking over as the voice of the Space Ranger in training. GOOD LUCK TO YOU LEO GRANDE OPENS JUNE 17 Emma Thompson stars in this Sundance hit as a retired widow who explores new avenues with a young sex worker, played by Daryl McCormack. EVERYTHING WENT FINE OPENS JUNE 17 Prolific French director François Ozon offers an uncharacteristically sober drama, with Sophie Marceau as a woman facing the prospect of assisted death for her ill father (doyen André Dussollier). MOON, 66 QUESTIONS OPENS JUNE 24 Brittle, stylistically inventive drama about a woman’s difficult homecoming, from up-and-coming Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou. THE BLACK PHONE OPENS JUNE 24 Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson…

CATHAL COUGHLAN Microdisney and Fatima Mansions firebrand (1960-2022) CATHAL Coughlan formed Microdisney with Sean O’Hagan in Cork in 1980. The title of an early album, We Hate You South African Bastards!, indicated a lack of appetite for compromise – but there was nothing difficult about Microdisney’s music. Quite the opposite: the melodies were sweet and the arrangements sumptuous, but Coughlan’s distinctively Corkonian snarl and singular lyrical sensibility were deliberately jarring counterpoints. After 1985’s The Clock Comes Down The Stairs was hailed an indie classic, Microdisney were signed by Virgin. The resulting albums, 1987’s Crooked Mile and 1988’s 39 Minutes, were astounding, but yielded no hits. Coughlan’s next project dispensed with the niceties. The Fatima Mansions, named after a Dublin housing estate, made music as furious as Coughlan’s words. In the…

WORLD Of Twist once built a volcano stage prop so vast it needed its own truck, only for it to be refused entry to London’s Astoria before disintegrating on the pavement. Such Spinal Tap farce was never far away for a self-destructive band who ambitiously reached for the stars. Best remembered for 1991’s trippy, dance-rock cover of the Stones’ “She’s A Rainbow”, World Of Twist were Madchester’s last gasp, idiosyncratically mixing ’60s Bowie, Northern Soul beats and prog theatricality, adored by fans including Jeremy Deller and the Gallagher brothers. Their tragicomedy is wryly recalled in their guitarist Gordon King’s new memoir, When Does The Mind-Bending Start? “It was all far greater in our heads than it was in reality,” he sighs when Uncut visits him at home in Hove. World…

Mr Morale & The Big Steppers PGLANG/TOP DAWG ENTERTAINMENT/AFTERMATH/INTERSCOPE 8/10 KENDRICK LAMAR is one of the finest instrumentalists of his era, although his instrument happens to be his own voice. On previous albums but especially on his latest, Mr Morale & The Big Steppers, he raps in many modes, varying his pitching and flow on nearly every song, switching up his cadence as though changing his identity. He sounds impossibly nimble and declarative on opener “United In Grief”, even as he warns the listener, “I’ve been goin’ through something/Be afraid”. He goes low and legato on “Crown”, then spry and playful on “N95”. He uses short, choppy lines on “Count Me Out” to unsettle the listener, then delivers “Auntie Diaries” in a near whisper, as though drawing you closer to…

“I wanted to create something with a bit more edge,” says Katy J Pearson of her second album, Sound Of The Morning. “Emotionally, it’s a journey of an album that goes through some happy, joyous moments, but it’s also reflective of genuine hard times and bad memories. It feels darker in places, but still has that bittersweet feeling to it.” This mixture of light and dark finds Pearson reflecting on an album that conjures up memories ranging “from a beautiful morning in Devon to a rowdy pub in London with assholes in it.” Influences were vast - from Cate Le Bon to The Byrds and from The Wicker Man to the words of Angela Carter - and collaborators included Morgan Simpson (Black Midi), Campbell Baum (Sorry), Orlando Weeks and H Hawkline. Ultimately,…

The Newcastle singer-songwriter on working with Ed Harcourt Kathryn Williams has dabbled increasingly in collaborations, whether with Laura Barnett on 2017’s Songs From The Novel ‘Greatest Hits’, last year’s Midnight Chorus with poet Carol Ann Duffy, or on 2015’s Hypoxia, a celebration of The Bell Jar, though, she laughs, “I don’t know if you can count that, as Sylvia Plath couldn’t chip in.” On Night Drives, she worked with producer Ed Harcourt, who co-wrote two songs on 2013’s Crown Electric and considers her “a true and pure poet”. The feeling’s mutual. “I’m a huge fan,” she says. “He’s the magic ingredient that makes this album so special. He’s crazy and cat-like in the best sense: unpredictable, wild, curious, but diligent, kind, full of ideas. He has these mad moments where you’re…

American Rituals FREEDOM TO SPEND 8/10 FISH around for a minute or two googling “Cheri Knight” and you’ll soon come across a song of hers on YouTube called “Dar Glasgow”. It’s the opening track on her second solo album, 1998’s The Northeast Kingdom. The cover is a painting of Knight in a dress of green leaves holding a guitar in a vegetable field, alluding to her two passions, music and farming. The song is a rural gothic folk tale, spun out over the drone of a harmonium, which slowly pulls the listener in. That harmonium is played by Steve Earle, whose label E-Squared released the album, and the song also features additional vocals by Emmylou Harris. In some respects, this is the pinnacle of Knight’s patchy career as a semi-professional…

MAY 22, 2022. The Mothership has just moored in a North London car park. It’s five hours before showtime at the Kentish Town Forum. Inside the smaller of two purple tour buses, 81-year-old George Clinton – Uncle Jam himself – is resting up, not to be disturbed. Tonight’s show is part of a ‘farewell’ tour – this may be P-Funk’s last ever spectacular in the capital – and Clinton is marshalling the strength to do it justice, one more time. It’s a blustery day, gusts of rain hitting the concrete expanse, as members of the latter-day P-Funk tribe stroll in and out of the soundcheck – where the funk is being fine-tuned. These include storied ’70s lifers – guitarist Michael “Kidd Funkadelic” Hampton, for instance, no longer a kid now…

“BASICALLY, I’m a music fan,” says Chris Blackwell. “It’s really that simple.” And perhaps it is. As the founder and chief visionary of Island Records in its heyday between the late 1960s and mid-’80s, Blackwell certainly appeared to guide the label with a fan’s enthusiasm. A gambler by nature, and an acute and generous judge of character, under Blackwell’s auspices Island signed people rather than sure-things or cash cows. Steve Winwood, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Roxy Music, King Crimson, Free, Grace Jones, U2 and Tom Waits are just some of the exceptional acts that benefitted from his open mind and impeccable taste. A Harrow-educated public school dropout, born to a scion of the Crosse & Blackwell family, Blackwell formed Island Records having undergone an apprenticeship…

“THE power of ‘Rebel Girl’ is that it’s about being a feminist pirate, being an adventurer,” says Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna. “It’s not about standing at the back and not participating. It’s about loving and defending your friends and the confusion between friendship and sexuality.” When Bikini Kill formed in 1990, sexism was rife. Hanna’s Riot Grrrl fanzine and the feminist-activist movement was one way to combat that; “Rebel Girl” was another. Over a glam drumbeat and three scuzzy chords, the song celebrated strong, defiant women. Written in late 1991, it quickly became a crowd-pleaser. When Bikini Kill toured the UK with Huggy Bear in 1993, the audience screamed for the still-unreleased song, latching on to this defiant expression of female identity and friendship where “dudes aren’t even mentioned”,…

JANUARY What next from Mersey Beat’s Best Band Of 1961? “We were terrible…” SHORTLY after midnight on January 1, The Beatles took to their beds at the Royal Hotel on Woburn Place. It had been a long day; the first of many in a hectic, transitional year. They’d spent December 31, 1961 travelling from Liverpool to London in Neil Aspinall’s hired van – a gruelling 10-hour trip as Neil had yet to familiarise himself with the route. When they arrived, they found the capital gripped by the coldest winter since 1887 – a chilling minus 16 degrees celsius. But the end of one year came wrapped in a beginning: on January 1, at 11am, they were booked to audition for Decca Records. The setting for this auspicious event was Studio…

ELVIS Of all the filmmakers who could have made an Elvis biopic, it had to be one whose aesthetic is more Vegas bloat than Sun Studios leanness. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis lives up to the swooning excess of his Moulin Rouge, even down to its digital diamanté-studded end credits. Less a narrative than a deluxe jukebox musical with touches of Douglas Sirk melodrama, Elvis is framed as a sort of Citizen Kane deathbed reverie from Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s Dutch-born, Mephistophelean manager. He’s played by Tom Hanks with a bizarre, undefinable European accent, in makeup suggesting a cross between the Penguin and a papiermâché effigy of Rupert Murdoch. How Parker ‘created’, or rather enslaved Presley is the narrative drift, but the film’s real pleasure lies in its full-tilt comic-strip stylistics and…

CRITERION 8/10 FRANCE has long had a particular way of processing American art. When it comes to jazz, the Gallic eye and ear for that music and culture has rarely been more acute than in Round Midnight. Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 drama pays tribute to the post-war generation of expat musicians who made Paris their base – including Bud Powell, Lester Young, Miles Davis briefly (he created the score to Louis Malle’s Lift To The Scaffold there) and tenor sax titan Dexter Gordon, the star of Tavernier’s film. The film is dedicated to Powell and Young, and in a sense, it’s really about them. Gordon is essentially playing a composite, in a story inspired by the memoirs of Francis Paudras, who befriended both players in their Paris years. Gordon plays saxophonist…

STRESSED out as she put the final touches to her debut LP, Naima Bock imagined herself being lifted away from earthly misery by a colossal hand. The result was the title track of the luminous, strange Giant Palm, a swirling two-note trundle with distinct sun-drunk Kevin Ayers vibes. “For a while I forget that I cannot fly/And I float high, high above it all”, sings the 25-year-old Londoner. “A giant palm felt like the place I needed to be,” she tells Uncut. “It’s warm and it lifts you up.” Quiet, melancholy and occasionally divinely uplifting, the burbling horns, sawing violins and soaring melodies of Giant Palm nod awkwardly toward the metaphysical marvels of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, The Raincoats’ Odyshape, and Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview On…

Tresor HEAVENLY 9/10 “IF we opened people up, we’d find landscapes,” said the French director Agnes Varda in 2009. Varda is one of many artists, musicians and filmmakers from around the world who inspired Tresor, the third album by the Cornish-speaking Welsh psychonaut Gwenno Saunders – and that quote is particularly beloved to a musician dedicated to mapping out the intersection of land, heritage, identity and potential. Like Gwenno’s last album, Le Kov, Tresor is written mostly in Cornish – a language she learned as an infant from her father, the Cornish poet Tim Saunders; her socialist-choir-singing mother made sure she was equally fluent in Welsh. Le Kov imagined a cosmopolitan city of modern-day myth, raised from beneath the waves like the revived Cornish tongue itself; Tresor now journeys inward,…

Fleeting Adventure BASIN ROCK 8/10 ANDREW TUTTLE’S fifth album begins with a sense of being untethered and adrift, washes of abstract sound floating through the mix, a feeling of disorientation dominating. You might be reminded of the famed opening sequence of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, with Popol Vuh’s uncanny soundtrack accompanying the misty visuals of 16th-century conquistadors trudging through a treacherous Amazon rainforest. Where are we? How did we get here? Tuttle isn’t one to let his listeners drown in a whirlpool of confusion, however. After a minute or so, his resonant, reassuring five-string banjo appears like a beacon in the night, grounding us, guiding us safely down to earth. For this particular adventure, we can rest easy. We’re in good hands. The banjo is a tricky…

Magic Sign DOMINO 8/10 SINNA NASSERI IT’S been seven years since Martin Courtney’s first solo album, the subtle delight of 2015’s Many Moons. Since then, he’s shepherded his group, Real Estate, through two more albums – In Mind (2017) and The Main Thing (2020) – and last year’s “Half A Human” EP. Change is incremental with a group like Real Estate, and the coordinates for the songs Courtney writes haven’t changed hugely over the 15-or-so years he’s been making music: while the production might be tighter, more robust, his melodies still sit as gently within the landscape of sound he sculpts as they did on the first, self-titled Real Estate album, back in 2009. That’s not to understate the art of Martin Courtney’s songwriting, though there is something understated about…

DISCOVERED Searching out the best albums new to Uncut Boat Songs DEAR LIFE 8/10 ASHEVILLE, North Carolina, native MJ Lenderman inhabits a crucial nexus of the Southern underground. The singer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist is a graduate of the local house-show scene, and of an important bygone venue called the Mothlight. He’s been releasing his own music since 2017, and is also a guitarist in the country-soaked alternative-rock band Wednesday, lead by his partner Karly Hartzman. While still only 23, Lenderman comes off more like a timeworn indie veteran than an eager newcomer. When a certain music website bestowed its coveted “Best New Music” designation on his latest album, Lenderman didn’t even acknowledge the coverage on his social media. He’s too busy, it seems, creating his own take on a classic…

You & Me: The Sun Studio Edition MARCATA RECORDING 8/10 OF all the bands that burst from New York in the early ’00s, The Walkmen were the least defined by locale. The city’s nervy post-punk heritage fed directly into the kind of music popularised by The Strokes, Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, just as its dynamic club culture motored LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture. The Walkmen, by contrast, seemed aligned to another place and time. This may be partly due to pure geography. All five members – Hamilton Leithauser, Paul Maroon, Walter Martin, Matt Barrick and Peter Bauer – had initially met at school and played in bands around Washington DC, 200-odd miles away. More pertinently though, there was a shared predilection for vintage gear and studio dynamics patented during…

Europe ’72: 50th Anniversary Edition/Lyceum Theatre: May 26, 1972 RHINO 10/10, 10/10 WHEN the Grateful Dead departed California for their first European tour on April Fools’ Day 1972, they did so with an entourage almost 50 strong. As the tour programme proudly told us, they were not just a rock’n’roll band but an entire “community”, rooted in a freewheeling hippie idealism that for band and fans alike was a core part of the Dead’s raison d’être. Yet among the hipsters, flipsters, lovers and others along for the ride, central to the travelling circus was the recording crew under Betty Cantor, who captured every one of the shows in 16-track glory for the live album that was intended to offset the trip’s huge expenses. The tour found the Dead at a…

“THIS is a beautiful day, it is a new day. We are together…” Back in 1991, Primal Scream captured the utopian spirit of the times with an album that magically dissolved genre boundaries to suggest that maybe we could all put aside our differences, get high and get along. It goes without saying that such utopianism is at a premium right now; even as the band take to the stage in Brockwell Park to play Screamadelica in its entirety, pictures are popping up on our phones of Liverpool football fans being tear-gassed by French police. At least Wide Awake is a festival that honours Screamadelica’s spirit of musical openness, showcasing the vitality and diversity of what organisers describe as the current “post-everything” scene. Ostensibly there’s a ‘dance day’ and an…

MILES APART I am not disposed to correspondence with publications, but I just wanted to compliment Tom Pinnock on his feature on Miles Davis in your June issue. It was a quite superb piece of journalism – one of Uncut’s best pieces ever. I thought I knew my way around Miles’ music, but Tom’s gift for integrating the changes in Miles’ musical avenues into a seamless timeline produced something extraordinarily insightful. It has made me revisit all of Miles’ output. Please thank Tom. Michael Green, via email Tom has been thanked! Cheers – Michael …Thank you so much for the Miles Davis cover feature in your June issue. I’ve been waiting for years to read something like this. The only (slight) disappointment was your list of Miles’ LPs from the…