Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i UNCUT

“I FIRST met Keith at the Warwick Road squats, which even by the druggy standards of the day were pretty hardcore. It was late ’75 or ’76, so I was 17 or 18 and he would have still been a teenager, maybe 19. He had charisma and a great sense of humour, very intelligent. He was a Jewish guy from North London, privately educated, and I was coming out the East End, but he was more than happy to deal with me. There was lots of mad energy, we were probably both speeding. But we became friends. “At the time, everyone in the squats was doing the same archetypal punk thing, imitating the Ramones. I wasn’t bothered about punk music – I wanted to merge Tangerine Dream with heavy dub…

“I love the music world too much to reform Felt” “A MORE serious name for serious times,” says Lawrence, explaining the recent switch from Go-Kart Mozart to Mozart Estate as he shuffles into the Barbican with his takeaway cuppa. “I love novelty records but I wanted to hit a bit harder this time.” Indeed, there’s a more prominent seam of mordant social commentary on his latest effort, as well as an unexpected dalliance with what he calls “singer-songwriter stuff”, not heard since the final days of Felt. But the album still has a defiantly daft title – Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! And The Possibilities Of Modern Shopping – and kicks off with a song called “I’m Gonna Wiggle”. “Everyone’s done a wiggle song,” he protests. “Lou Reed’s done one, Bob Dylan’s done…

OHIO quartet The Shootouts have roped in some choice names for third album Stampede SOUNDLY MUSIC, out in late February. Ray Benson handles production, while he and his fellow Asleep At The Wheel bandmates pop up on “One Step Forward”. Other guests include Marty Stuart, Buddy Miller, Jim Lauderdale and The Mavericks’ Raúl Malo. Guitarist and lead singer Ryan Humbert guides the cast through a lively mix of Americana, honky-tonk and Western swing. Not to be outdone, Nashville-based singer-guitarist Sunny War has some seriously impressive help on her NEW WEST label debut, Anarchist Gospel. Overseen by Andrija Tokic, the album features Jim James, Allison Russell, David Rawlings, Micah Nelson and members of The Raconteurs and The Deslondes. Sunny moves through gospel, folk, country-blues, rock’n’roll and experimental music to fashion what she describes…

What’s the relationship of this work to The Sacrificial Code and Living Torch? Kali Malone: It’s a long-durational ensemble piece I have always wanted to make. It is the natural continuation of my fascination for tuning and the perceptual transformation of time – both of which themes are prominent in The Sacrificial Code and Living Torch. The instrumentation and structure are different than those records, but the music’s spirit, sonic palette and effect all resonate in a place that feels like home to me. How did things evolve working with Lucy and Stephen? Kali Malone: Working with Lucy and Stephen is a precious gift of collaboration and friendship. While we all come from different musical backgrounds, we also share a significant amount of references and vocabulary. The piece has taught…

Perú Selvático: Sonic Expedition Into The Peruvian Amazon 1972-1986 ANALOG AFRICA SONIDO VERDE DE MOYOBAMBA Sonido Verde de Moyobamba ANALOG AFRICA 9/10, 8/10 ONE of the great things about an album like Perú Selvático is how it proves that the world is not just a more complicated place than one may presume, but a more surprising one too. Even devotees of the adventures in global crate-digging by Analog Africa – the Frankfurt-based reissue label that grew out of a clubnight in Dakar hosted by a peripatetic collector named Samy Ben Redjeb – will be delighted and possibly disoriented by the (re)discoveries to be made on the label’s latest compilations. With Perú Selvático, Redjeb provides a new wealth of detail and texture to a story he began several releases ago, as…

“WE’VE always had the two voices, mine and Alan’s, I guess those have maybe been the constants in Low,” Mimi Parker told Uncut in 2018. She was discussing the band’s 12th album, Double Negative – an astounding reinvention that blasted the band’s trademark harmonies with gales of sound and distressed electronic textures. Uncut’s Album Of The Year, this most radical departure in a career defined by exploratory detours nevertheless sounded like Low, precisely because it featured those two voices. “We realised that we’re always going to have those, which means we’re always going to be recognised as Low.” When Parker died in November after a two-year battle with ovarian cancer, it was not just the passing of a beloved vocalist, but perhaps it also marked the end of one of…

“TO NIGHT’S The Night was us working through the deaths of our friends, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, both gone from drugs. It was kind of a concept album, and kind of a wake album. It didn’t take all the pain away. But it was a journey that helped get through a lot of it. “When it came out, Neil took it on the road. We went to the UK, we did the Rainbow Club in London. He stuck to his guns and just played the album. The audiences were yelling for his hits – they were throwing stuff at us. We had 16-inch glitter boots tacked to the piano and we had a palm-tree roadie with a light bulb on a palm tree. Neil was doing a lot of rapping…

O2 Arena, London, November 8 THE lights dim and, after support sets from Tanna Leone and Baby Keem, the audience at the madly cavernous O2 is at fever pitch. It’s a wonderfully diverse crowd: teenage white kids moshing; older black guys nodding, ready to follow the intricate flow word-for-word; women decked out in their finery, dancing ecstatically. The screen to the side of the stage lights up to reveal… an ad for a mobile payment app, with Kendrick Lamar sagely relating business advice from old white billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dallio. “Slow money wins the race,” he nods. “Invest in yourself…” It’s not the last time tonight in a triumphant, beautifully conceived and above all immensely controlled show that Lamar defies expectations. There’s none of the bloodshed or glittering…

PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED “THEME” (from Public Image/First Issue, 1978) “Public Image” was the clarion call to the post-punk revolution, but the first track of PiL’s debut album was the full Levene manifesto: nine minutes of viciously beautiful futuristic guitar assault, like endless sheets of glass smashing on a concrete floor. The Edge, Thurston Moore, Kevin Shields and pretty much every alt.rock guitarist you care to name was taking notes. PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED “POPTONES” (from Metal Box, 1979) PiL’s finest and most disturbing moment, Levene wrapping barbed-wire guitars around Jah Wobble’s momentous bassline. He also ejected the original drummer and played the psychotically lurching rhythm himself. “When you’re both in dysfunctional worlds and you find this moment of absolute clarity, you’re out of time and space,” says Wobble of the song’s…

Two thumbs up for our deluxe, updated Ultimate Music Guide to Paul McCartney. Celebrating Paul’s 80th birthday year, and his 60th as a recording artist, it covers all his solo work from McCartney to McCartney III, with selections from our archive of classic Macca interviews. It’s in shops on December 15, but buy direct from us at Uncut.co.uk/single to receive an exclusive McCartney gift… Still on sale is our quarterly special, The 500 Greatest Albums Of The 1960s…. Ranked!. It’s not only an impressive list to debate, it’s an indispensable guide to how music was made in that decade… A new Teardrop Explodes boxset is coming on March 24. Culture Bunker 1978-82 compiles all the great Liverpool group’s singles and B-sides, plus four additional discs of demos, outtakes and live tracks……

YO LA TENGO This Stupid World MATADOR Everything you’d want from a Yo La Tengo record at this stage: noise, tunes, tenderness, regret, sage advice, goofiness, smudgy motorik jams… and yoyo moves! SPENCER CULLUM Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2 FULL TIME HOBBY Nashville’s Essex expat trundles further down his idiosyncratic folk-jazz path, with contributions from Rich Ruth, Erin Rae, Caitlin Rose, and a verse in Japanese from Yuma Abe. H HAWKLINE Milk For Flowers HEAVENLY “With the elegance of Nero/Made divine by feeling zero” – Witty knockabout pop, glumly sung, in the vein of the album’s producer, Cate Le Bon. MODERN STUDIES “Cassandra” EP FIRE Experimental follow-up to February’s rousing We Are There LP, working “parallel to the myth” – but still with great songs. Grab the limited-edition cassette! YOUNG…

There’s a strong sense of wistfulness and loss on this album. Is that something you feel more keenly as you get older? Oh yeah, of course. Everything becomes more beautiful and more sad. You do lose more and more people closer and closer to you, it’s just a fact of how things go. So there’s a fair bit of memorialising in this record. And the bulk of it was written and recorded prior to the ‘shelter in place’ orders [of the pandemic] so it was almost like a vessel that kept absorbing even more of that. On the other hand it sounds like you were having fun in the studio, pulling out the shakers and the claves… Yeah, it was very fun. Sometimes my music might not seem that fun!…

What are the strengths of this band? An uncanny ability to assimilate every nuance, including mistakes, of my rough demos into their interpretive contributions. Ninety per cent of the time it’s right on as to what I expect or blows me away even further. They’re fast and efficient. I do the vocals in about three hours. Is there any time or place you can’t write a song? No. At least not an idea for a song. When I’m out drinking or whatever I always have someone recording my outbursts and ramblings. Sometimes the ideas are interesting and sometimes ridiculous, but I don’t worry or think about it. That’s the secret. I write when I feel inspired and then I let go with as many ideas as I can. Fragments, sections, full…

Why does that particular phrase “every acre” stand out as an album title? My relationship to the natural world has long felt like a spiritual mentorship. The album title came from a buried lyric in “Turpentine”. I found the simplicity of those two small words so powerful and relevant in summing up this collection of songs – from my personal experience, while also offering enough space for outside interpretation. How did North Carolina inspire these songs? After almost a decade of living along the Eno River on the same property, I recently had to relocate. My experience in spiritually navigating my final year there inspired an enthusiastic deep dive into the subject of land ownership. Every Acre, in many ways, is a long goodbye. I extensively researched ancestral land in…

Tokyo, 1985 (DVD 1) Previously released as Pumped Full Of Drugs, this show from the band’s first tour of Japan finds them battling new gear and unanticipated cultural differences, as the audience claps politely after each song, then sits in complete silence until the next. But the mounting frustration feeds a demonic energy. Opener “Confusion” rarely sounded better. Manchester, 1985 (DVD 1) Filmed as a live drop-in for the BBC’s weekly music show Whistle Test, this is only three tracks (and the last is partially reconstructed from un-broadcast footage), but it’s an invaluable snapshot of New Order playing at home in their club, the Haçienda, in its pre-acid days. The Velvets-y “As It Is When It Was” wouldn’t be released until the following year’s Brotherhood. Toronto, 1985 (DVD 2) There…

How did you meet Daevid? In spring 1968, I saw a Soft Machine concert at Palais de Sport, as a trio with Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Mike Ratledge, and the next day I met Daevid. A German actor called Hans who was in the Living Theatre introduced me. We went to a camping place in Paris and Daevid told me a lot of stories about Planet Gong, and the Submarine Captain and the Pot-Head Pixies, and I came over with my flute and we played music together for a few hours – it was brilliant. Magick Brother was recorded in Autumn 1969; do you consider it a Gong album? It’s not a Gong album; it’s a Daevid Allen album. It’s kind of Gong, but Gong was not properly open yet.…

How did Lightships differ from your work with Teenage Fanclub? I was consciously trying to write in a different way. I knew I’d be playing guitar rather than bass, so I would have more control over the textures. I wanted to create a texture record, really. What were the records that informed the sound? Kind of soft psychedelia. There was a side project by one of the guys from Beachwood Sparks, Chris Gunst. It was called Mystic Chords Of Memory. They released two albums. One of those albums he made with Nobody, a remixer guy, and it was quite textured. When can we expect new work from you? I’ve tentatively booked some time in a studio in February. I’ve started doing shows playing songs from my past in a soft setting,…

When you were working on the label’s earlier compilations of Peruvian cumbia, did you know you were just beginning your own Amazonian expedition? The first time I went to Peru I didn’t even know what I was looking for and ended up in the Amazon by coincidence after seeing the silkscreen cover of a certain Ranil from the city of Iquitos. My education in “Cumbia Amazonica” started there and continued a year later during my second trip to Peru when I discovered most of the bands on the compilation. Why do you think Cumbia Amazonica developed so differently from what was happening in Lima and the coast?  While the West proclaimed itself as the navel of the musical world, the musicians down below were brewing a potpourri that most didn’t know…

AS ’23’s releases keep hotting up, we’ll be looking at fine new records from Robert Forster, Lisa O’Neill, Sunny War, The Waeve, Quasi, Juni Habel, Andy Shauf, Mary Elizabeth Remington and more. In the world of archival releases, Laraaji and Mogwai’s early years are each chronicled, The Rolling Stones are in mono, Booker T & The MGs are in the kitchen and Bob Dylan’s unveiling his Fragments, the Bootleg Series chapter covering the sessions for stone-cold classic Time Out Of Mind. Catch you then. EMAIL: TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

PART rock bio, part country-music picaresque, and part exploration of grief and motherhood, Price’s first book, Maybe We’ll Make It, chronicles her life leading up to her mid-2010s, as she left the family farm to find her fortune in Nashville, met her husband, lost a child, and wandered the States playing shows for whoever turned up that night. “When I wrote the book, initially I didn’t have any chapters,” Price says. “I just wrote a long, 530-page manuscript with no chapters and no ending. It was like Jack Kerouac — all on one scroll. I just had to get it out. “I was refining the book while recording Strays. They mirror each other, with similar themes. There’s a song and a chapter called ‘Hell In The Heartland’. The book is…

FOR much of the past 60 years, the four musicians who make up The Meters have been a constant thread in New Orleans musical history. While still in their teens, all four – Art Neville (piano and organ), Zigaboo Modeliste (drums), George Porter Jr (bass) and Leo Nocentelli (guitar) – were the house band in Allen Toussaint’s studio, playing on big singles by Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Betty Harris and Professor Longhair, and touring with Otis Redding. Initially known as Art Neville And The Sounds, they renamed themselves The Meters in 1965 and built up a following as the hottest funk band on the circuit. Paul McCartney and Led Zeppelin hired them to play private parties; The Rolling Stones enlisted them as a support act for six months; and they…

NEIL Young and Crazy Horse first hooked up with producer Rick Rubin a quarter of a Ncentury before they made World Record together, back in 1997, when they assembled at the historic Ocean Way studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood for a few days of sessions that have remained locked away ever since. “I haven’t heard the recordings since then,” Rubin says. But he remembers some details vividly. “Neil accidentally cut off a piece of his finger a few days before the session, so he couldn’t play guitar. I assumed we would cancel the sessions – but Neil had an idea to play harmonica through his guitar amp! I can’t remember what it sounded like, but I do know I never heard anything else quite like it before or since.”…

EVEN for fans who know just how conscientiously Young has documented his activities across his entire career, the sheer wealth and detail of the footage that makes up the two-hour documentary accompanying the 50th-anniversary edition of Harvest is astonishing. Shot between January and September 1971, the film captures every aspect of the recording of the album in close-up: following Young and his ragtag family of cohorts from the famous sessions conducted in the barn at his bucolic Broken Arrow ranch in Northern California, across the ocean to a grey London for his collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra, musicians separated by a common language as they attempt to capture “A Man Needs A Maid”. Finally, it lurches back to Nashville, for further tracking and overdubbing sessions amid a cast of…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Neil Young. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win a prize. Closing date: Wednesday, January 11, 2023. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 An Arcade Fire album please. That’ll be all for the present (10-3) 9 (See 19 across) 10 Drags mat on somehow for Suede to perform album (3-3-4) 11 (See 4 down) 12 Sleepy John _____, US bluesman who influenced Robert Plant and John Lennon (5) 13 “I’m giving you a _____ call to tell you how I feel”, London Grammar (5) 15 Pete _____, former man in The Loft who recently spent some…

1 FRAN Palm Trees We begin this month with a slow-burning triumph from Chicago’s Maria Jacobson and her band. Taken from their second album, Leaving, it’s an existential, atmospheric waltz that finds the songwriter lamenting, “How can I give it away?/Wanting it to last another day…” 2 THE BAD ENDS Thanksgiving 1915 If getting REM’s Bill Berry back behind the kit wasn’t impressive enough, the debut album by Mike Mantione’s Bad Ends is excellent in its own right. Here’s a sprightly piece of chiming, heartland garage rock, a highlight of The Power And The Glory, reminiscent of the Truckers, The Replacements and – of course – their drummer’s old band. 3 THE MURDER CAPITAL Ethel Gigi’s Recovery is the second album by this Dublin five-piece, and a massive evolution from…

BLACKACETATE EMI, 2005 2003’s HoboSapiens was strong, but this was Cale’s best in decades, a dynamic, experimental exercise in guitar-driven rock. “In A Flood” is his brilliant take on Americana, complete with slide guitar, Dylan phrasing and spare Fender Rhodes, while “Sold Motel” is greasy grunge the way only Cale could do it. 8/10 SHIFTY ADVENTURES IN NOOKIE WOOD DOUBLE SIX, 2012 Dystopian funk was the name of the game here: a departure of sorts at the time, but compared with Mercy, Shifty Adventures… today sounds shockingly breezy and commercial. Perhaps a sign of Cale, not for the first instance, being way ahead of his time. 8/10 M:FANS DOUBLE SIX/DOMINO, 2016 This reworking of 1982’s Music For A New Society allowed Cale to ‘correct’ one of his most legendary and…

P24 GUIDED BY VOICES P26 GAZ COOMBES P28 WHITEHORSE P29 LADYTRON P30 KALI MALONE P34 HC McENTIRE P35 DAVE ROWNTREE ABRACADABRA Shapes & Colors MELODIC 7/10 Bay Area duo find playful new noises in the post-punk avant-funk toybox Oakland-based duo Hannah Skelton and Chris Niles weave a rhythmically rich, junk-shop art-pop DIY racket using vintage synthesisers, woozy vocals, congas, cowbells and more. The fusion of post-punk, Afro-funk and tropical percussion elements on their second album inevitably invokes vintage Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, especially on the semi-rapped, booty-shaking number “At The Zoo”. Welcome hints of prickly sarcasm counter all this sunny sweetness, notably the blank-voiced disdain of “Don’t Like U”, while more dub-infused tracks like “Impactor” could almost be Stereolab mixed by King Tubby. For all its knowingly retro signifiers,…

What is “protest music” in contemporary South Africa? In isiZulu, “Sphila” is about South Africa’s central political and spiritual issue, which is the ownership of land. Our 13 per cent minority white population owns close to 87 per cent of our land. And the majority’s push for land is not a purely capitalist one but spiritual, in that our cosmology is a circular one which requires us to bury our elders close to us. How do we do so while still being constricted to the same concentration camps known as townships? So protest music is still protest music as the conditions have not changed, with few being given a seat at the table. Economic apartheid is rife. What is the band’s writing process? Once you bring a song to the circle…

P44 CLUSTER P45 LIGHTSHIPS P46 GIRLSCHOOL P46 PEGGY LEE P48 THE METERS P50 YOKO ONE P50 MARTIN REV P51 BOZ SCAGGS ALABAMA SHAKES Boys & Girls: 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition ROUGH TRADE 10/10 Expanded reissue of the group’s dynamite debut Who can forget the thrill on first hearing Brittany Howard’s voice on “Hold On”, the explosive opening track on Alabama Shakes’ 2012 debut? Sounding like an implausible, intense amalgam of all the best bits of Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, it’s one of those visceral moments that lives forever – and a decade on, Boys & Girls still sounds like a contender for the best soul-blues-rock-boogie record of the millennium so far. Extras: 9/10. A second disc featuring a ferocious 2012 live performance on the LA radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic.…

PETER GABRIEL TITLE: i/o LABEL: Real World RELEASE DATE: 2023 At last! Two decades in the planning, the rightful heir to 2002’s Up SPEAKING to Uncut in 2020, Peter Gabriel suggested that new music may not be too far away. “Although I’ve been writing a lot, I’ve had various other distractions and other projects, so I’m very slow in actually finishing things,” he admitted. “There’s a big backlog of ideas that are unfinished but I’m now getting enough lyrics done, which is often where I slow down. I’m looking forward to getting an album out.” Gabriel had been dropping hints about his activities for some time, usually via his social media channels. As far back as 2002, not long before the release of Up, Gabriel announced that another album of…

“I FELT up to the task of producing Raw Power while we were making the music,” Iggy recalls. “But as soon as we finished I became drained and unsound. So it was going to be impossible for me to mix that thing correctly. I was carrying these two giant boxes of 24-track tapes around London. Later, I carried them to America. I became obsessed. The treble couldn’t be trebly enough. The bass couldn’t be low enough.” Instead, Bowie took the helm in a rushed, violently treble-heavy mix which left the Ashetons almost inaudible. This became Raw Power’s most distinctive feature. “That toppy, screechy sound with hardly any bottom end was what punk was all about,” argues Jim Reid. “A lot of weird things going on in it sonically are accidental…

“SEE-THROUGH” LONG DIVISION, 1995 A perfect example of Low’s musical economy, as they craft a powerful performance with only a few notes and even fewer lyrics Kramer: “Through a glass wall at Noise New Jersey, I watched in utter amazement as Mimi laid her soul bare on this song. First take. Flesh and blood. Mathematicians often describe the rapturous understanding of how the universe works as ‘knowing the mind of God’. Once or twice in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, there are similar raptures of understanding. True euphoria is so very rare in the recording studio, but on that day I heard the simultaneous sounds of bliss, sadness, elation, and perhaps even a modest understanding of the mind of God.” “NOTHING BUT HEART” C’MON, 2011 A true family affair, with…

MONG the two dozen or so archive projects Young has confirmed are already “in the can” and ready to be released, some of the most mouthwatering are: THE DUCKS FLYIN’ HIGH A multi-disc set devoted to the thrown-together band with whom Young performed a series of unannounced hit-and-run shows in small, sometimes seedy clubs and bars around Santa Cruz in 1977. NEIL YOUNG & THE SANTA MONICA FLYERS UNDER THE RAINBOW A warts-and-all recording of Young and the raggedy outfit known as the Santa Monica Flyers when they brought the Tonight’s The Night tour to London’s Rainbow Theatre in the winter of 1973 (see panel p97 for Nils Lofgren’s recollection of that memorable outing). NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE EARLY DAZE A collection gathering unreleased live and studio recordings made…

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER RELEASED DECEMBER 16 In the first of what are promised to be a further three much-delayed sequels, James Cameron returns to Pandora to find Jake Sully and the Na’avi defending their homes from a terrifying new threat. WILDCAT RELEASED DECEMBER 23 Unexpectedly moving story of a young US army veteran who finds relief from PTSD by travelling to an Amazonian wildlife rescue centre, where he’s entrusted with an orphaned baby ocelot. THE PALE BLUE EYE RELEASED DECEMBER 23 Christian Bale and Gillian Anderson star in a murder mystery set in 19th-century New York, featuring a youthful Edgar Allan Poe. I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY RELEASED DECEMBER 26 Naomie Ackie stars in this Whitney Houston biopic directed by Harriet’s Kasi Lemmons. Stanley Tucci plays Clive Davis…

BOB DYLAN Blonde On Blonde COLUMBIA, 1966 The first song I ever remember being moved by was “Blowin’ In The Wind”. But it wasn’t Bob Dylan’s version, it was Val Doonican’s – I was about five or six years old and it was on the TV. I don’t know why it moved me, but I suppose that’s the power of poetry. I came to Bob a few years later when a student of my mother’s played me Blonde On Blonde. My favourite song was “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” – the sway of the rhythm, the romance of the organ, the buttoned-down emotion of the players that was so strong in Nashville music in the ’60s. As an 11-year-old I didn’t understand any of that, I just recognised something that…