Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i UNCUT

FEATURING… Tom Verlaine | House Of All | The Mission| Elliott Landy’s The Band Photographs 1968-1969: Volume 2 will be published later this year. Sign up for Kickstarter rewards or pre-order the book at ElliottLandy.com…

WHEN Uncut speaks to Tim Wold, guitarist for Aussie psychonauts Brown Spirits, it’s coming up to 10pm in Melbourne but it’s still 41 degrees outside. “It’s not worth leaving the house, to be honest,” he tells us. “You just sort of fry.” Nevertheless, the Coburg suburb where he and his bandmates reside is a hotbed of musical activity. It’s currently the stomping ground of the absurdly productive King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “They’re about as big as it gets in Australia, I’ve never seen anything like it” – and their record label Flightless, home at various times to Tropical Fuck Storm and Amyl & The Sniffers. Courtney Barnett’s Milk! label is also headquartered nearby: “Her record shop is just up the road; it’s a real focus for a…

Your daughter’s birth and your father’s passing clearly had a profound effect on your life in countless respects. What was it like coming back to making music? Songwriting felt simultaneously superfluous but also necessary. The times were so tight, with a new infant in my arms and lockdown all around us. The idea that music would be shared or a communal experience again felt very faint, so writing became an even more inward-facing task – it gave me somewhere to go with my mind when I couldn’t go anywhere with my body. It was a relief to focus on something ephemeral, maybe a bit escapist. The paradox in speaking about my dad is that my dad was an extremely private person. All I can really say about losing him is…

Reflections Vol 1: Let The Moon Be A Planet RVNG INTL 8/10 LACK of a universal grand design means that two highly empathetic musicians can spend years in an orbit of mutual admiration without once connecting – even if they live in the same city. So it was with Steve Gunn and David Moore, respectively the guitarist/songwriter of an airy, modern, auteurist bent and the minimalist pianist/composer best known as the leader of Bing & Ruth. Both are based in NYC and eventually met through a mutual friend. They have serious collaborative form: Gunn has released four albums with drummer John Truscinski, joined Black Twig Pickers for a couple and also recorded with Mike Cooper, Kurt Vile and Ryley Walker. Moore is very much an ensemble player, leading anything up…

A mbient Americana has been on the rise for a while now; it’s a genre that pedal-steel player Barry Walker is happy to be associated with. “I don’t listen to a lot of modern music,” he explains, “but I’m happy to have these folks as my peers. I think it’s cool that there’s this nexus now.” While the pieces on their sublime Long Cool World have the organic quality of improvised music, it was in fact thoroughly composed, with initial ideas often stemming from guitarist Patrick McDermott. “Usually they come very quickly. I record them, forget about them and then revisit them. We’re never demoing back and forth or heavily labouring over the structure of the music.” “I did a lot of constructing of melodies on this record,” adds Walker, “while walking…

Different Game COOKING VINYL 8/10 THE ZOMBIES were outliers even in the futuristic surge of the ’60s. Rod Argent wrote their debut, smash single “She’s Not There”, after digging up John Lee Hooker’s “No One Told Me” from a pile of blues records for his lyrical spark, but drew its unusual chords from Bryan Hyland’s Bach-based “Sealed With A Kiss”. Its central conceit, meanwhile, conjuring a girl by her absence, was worthy of American songbook masters such as the Gershwins. The other hallowed achievement of their four-year professional run, Odessey And Oracle (1968), was dressed up in a psychedelic sleeve and title, but occupied its own realm of quiet, inward thoughts and chamber arrangements. The haunted pastoral dream of bassist Chris White’s “Beechwood Park” came closest to the season’s altered…

Put it to Valentine that Billy Valentine & The Universal Truth is a Civil Rights album for the Black Lives Matter era and he’s not going to argue. “It felt like the ‘60s all over again,” he says. “George Floyd’s presence was in the studio at the time we were recording and I would say it’s a statement of the times we’re living in and of history repeating itself.” Valentine is old enough to have lived through the first Civil Rights era, and many of the songs he revisits on the album date from that earlier struggle and have equal resonance today. “Those songs became a part of me. They gave me a voice to say something about the times, then and now.” He adds that “social commentary is something I…

“Fly to the Moon on the curve of a spoon” Complete Studio Albums 1965-2020 MADFISH THE PRETTY THINGS are the character actors of British rock – a Brian Glover or Richard E Grant to the Michael Caine or Roger Moore of the Stones/Beatles/Who. While the Pretties occasionally got the chance to play the leading man, their usual role has been as craggy-faced secondary players, present at many of the key moments in British music – friends of the Stones, covered by Bowie, signed to Led Zeppelin’s own label, shared a manager with Pink Floyd – and always delivering noteworthy moments when it was their cue before returning to the shadow of the big shots. Madfish’s limited-edition box of the 13 studio albums recorded by The Pretty Things between 1965 and…

Eden’s Island (reissue, 1960) EVERLAND 8/10 IT wasn’t until 1995 – the year Eden Ahbez died – that his only album reappeared in print, 35 years after its initial release. Bob Keane, Del-Fi Records’ founder, had already had eight years to reissue it since revitalising his label, and his hesitancy spoke volumes. While Ahbez had scored actual hits with his songs, others had performed them, notably “Nature Boy”, a 1948 No 1 for Nat ‘King’ Cole, and now an endlessly recycled page in the Great American Songbook. Eden’s Island, meanwhile, a conceptual curio, had sold only a few hundred copies, and although Ahbez’s unconventional lifestyle brought media attention, he’d also insisted on touring the album on foot. Once bitten, twice shy: Keane’s more commercial catalogue was his priority. Times change,…

The Dark Side Of The Moon (50th Anniversary Deluxe Boxset) EMI 10/10 THE announcement of this elaborate, expensive boxset was followed by news that Roger Waters will shortly be releasing a completely new re-recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon. This is the strange situation Floyd’s most famous album finds itself in, 50 years after release. It’s the fourth best-selling LP of all time, with an estimated 45 million copies sold, but it remains a difficult record to pin down. The magic at work in these 10 songs, the reason why it captured the attention of the wider world, has long flummoxed even its greatest experts; namely Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason. Having spent years arguing over perceived influence, power and credit, the feeling is…

DECEMBER 7, 2022, Senegal. Driving after dark from the sleek, futuristic new airport on the outskirts of the capital, Dakar, we pass barbers and bars still trading in the nighttime heat, oases of light between baobab trees. We’re on our way to the nearby coastal town of Toubab Dialaw, to pay our respects to one of African music’s greatest names, Baaba Maal. Maal has invited Uncut to attend Blues Du Fleuve, a major African music festival, which he has curated since 2005 in his remote hometown, Podor, a day’s drive north by the River Senegal. You can spot Maal’s home by the queue of people waiting patiently outside. Instead of music fans, Maal’s exalted status here is such that he gets supplicants hoping for an audience – like a president…

“THIS is happening without your permission”, sang Huggy Bear on their inspiring 1993 single, a call to arms that also summed up their approach to music, politics and popular culture. The assorted band members met haphazardly – at school, college and C86 shows – before forming a group based on their shared love of American indie and a desire to create an alternative culture rooted in new means of expression. They wanted to upset the old order – setting themselves a three-year time limit to achieve this. Setting out their stall early on, the band’s three women and two man lineup sang about the “boy-girl revolution”, refused interviews and photographs, recorded their music – a combination of punk and avant-garde – under pseudonyms. “We were so drawn to and inspired…

CAN you tell us about your first meeting with Peter?July 1976 in Toronto, at the studio where Peter was to do his first solo album. I didn’t know of Genesis’s music, so it was a revelation hearing the unusual style he has of writing, and great singing, and great guy on top of that. And he had a notable attraction to ‘alternative’ ways to play each part on the tracks - so that helped set me on a path to being the musician I am. It was a memorable day for me, and on the same day, I also met Robert Fripp. Now, many years later, I’m very fortunate to be making music, and good friends, with both of them. Talk us through a typical day in the studio with…

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MARQUEE Moon loomed large over everything Tom Verlaine did in the decades that followed – and, it could be argued, rightly so. Television’s epochal 1977 LP is that rare and precious thing: a perfect debut. But it meant that Verlaine’s subsequent work, both with Television and on his own, was often overlooked and undervalued. As we mourn the death of a unique songwriter and visionary guitarist, it’s a good time to celebrate his entire career, one that is filled with untold gems. “The shadow of Marquee Moon is receding,” says The Clientele’s Alasdair MacLean. “We can forgive that he didn’t do the impossible twice and look at Verlaine’s other records without that filter. They’re all interesting and often magnificent.” “LITTLE JOHNNY JEWEL” (Ork Records single, 1975) What a strange thing Television’s…

Multitudes POLYDOR “It’s a poor skill to get good at/Making wrong what’s all right” LESLIE FEIST finished her first public performances of the music on Multitudes with her audience sitting rapt (if somewhat bewildered) on the stage and the singer playfully escaping through the back of the auditorium. A daunting trick to pull off, it was the Canadian singer-songwriter’s means of capping off the “egalitarian theatre experiment” that she concocted with Rob Sinclair – designer for equally unorthodox concerts by David Byrne and Peter Gabriel – and initially presented in Hamburg, Toronto and Ottawa in 2021 and then in Los Angeles and other US cities the following year. Besides being a thrilling piece of stagecraft, this climactic reversal of the usual positions for performer and listener was an emblematic expression…

False Lankum ROUGH TRADE 9/10 AMONG these little islands to the northwest of the European mainland, the sea has always claimed a large slice of national mythologies. For hundreds of years England has brandished its thalassic geography as a treatise of power: the scepter’d isle that never never shall be enslaved. But as England now cheerfully hoists itself by its own petard, disrespecting its own maritime coastline by defiling it with its own internal bowel movements, the sea arguably looms even larger in Ireland’s national story. From the arrival of St Patrick over the waves to Cromwell’s invasion across the waters; the waves of 19th-century emigration; arguably the nation’s greatest literary creation named for Ulysses, that seafaring hero; and now the contested ‘border down the Irish Sea’ of the botched…

Memento Mori COLUMBIA/MUTE 8/10 MAYBE Depeche Mode were always destined to assume their final form as a synth duo. Way back in their early days, after they formed at a Basildon school concert in June 1980, they felt a little like a rock band who hadn’t quite completed their electronic evolution, and had been left with vestigial members, guys who might have once been bass players or drummers, and now were simply required to prod monosynths while looking moody on Top Of The Pops. Vince Clarke certainly seemed to think so, jumping ship as soon as possible to form Yazoo and Erasure. But maybe the other guys – Alan Wilder, recruited as a kind of in-house musical director after Clarke’s departure, and Andy Fletcher, the dependable Basildon soul of the…

Love In Exile VERVE 8/10 WHEN Arooj Aftab scooped a pair of nominations at the 2022 Grammys, walking home with a gong for Best Global Music Performance, it felt not so much like a shock victory as recognition that was long overdue. Born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, now resident in Brooklyn, New York via a stint at Berklee College of Music, the vocalist and composer’s two most recent albums – 2018’s Siren Islands and 2021’s Vulture Prince – marked her out as a rare, generational talent. This music was deliberately eclectic, blending Qawwali and Hindustani classical music with jazz, ambient electronics and the influence of vocalists from Jeff Buckley to Rosalía. But it was also deeply personal. Vulture Prince was dedicated to the memory of her late brother,…

DISCOVERED Searching out the best albums new to Uncut Rat Saw God DEAD OCEANS 9/10 “CHOSEN To Deserve”, a knotty relationship anthem on Wednesday’s third album, features one of the more unusual ODs described in a rock song. “My friends all took Benadryl ’til they could see shit crawlin’ up the walls”, guitarist/vocalist Karly Hartzman sings, her voice twisting into a slurred twang. “One of those times my friend took a little too much/He had to get his stomach pumped”. It’s a complicated moment, funny but also harrowing, and she sounds simultaneously embarrassed by her juvenile escapades, impressed by their wildness, and relieved that she and her friends survived long enough to put the memory into a song. A sharp lyricist with a keen eye for revealing details, and a…

Tied Down NUMERO GROUP 8/10 THIS 14-track highlights reel of the catalogue of Joyce Street is first and foremost a collection of great country songs – smart, spirited, wise, funny and lustily sung in a voice pitching somewhere between the throaty croon of Patsy Cline and the snappy sass of Loretta Lynn. But it’s also a bracing reminder of what a cruel and arbitary racket popular song can be. Mississippi-born – with the accent to prove it – Street spent the late ’60s and ’70s in particular following a guitar-shaped star all over the United States and Canada without ever quite fetching up in the right place at the right time. There were no hits, little airplay, maddening silence from the managements of established artists whose singers could have blown…

CAN you tell us about your first meeting with Peter? The first time I met Peter was at his studio, which was located in a dark barn near Bath. It had flooded overnight and he was helping his crew guys, Albert and Dave, dig a drainage channel around the back to stop the water ingress. He was covered in mud. I was with the band I was in, Random Hold, to work on some demos for Peter Gabriel 3/Melt. Peter had come to see us play at The Rock Garden in London a little while before. When he had come to the show, our keyboard player had spoken with him. We spent a few days working on some of the tunes. The old carpets lying around were wet and stinky.…

Chalk, Brighton, February 14 IT’S only mid-February, but a balmy breeze seems to have brought spring early to the south coast – and with it, the soft rock sounds of Laurel Canyon circa 1972. With his sad eyes, tousled hair and high keening voice, Sam Burton could be a young Jackson Browne, while Haylie Hostetter, joining him on harmonies, is his very own Linda Ronstadt. On his second album, due out later this year, his songs have been given the benefit of a big Jonathan Wilson production, a marvel of sumptuous string arrangements and session band chops. Tonight, however, he struggles to make his songs heard above the hipster hubbub and only a lovely, faithful cover of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Didn’t Want To Have To Do It” really cuts through.…

RYE LANE It’s something of a national embarrassment that the country that produced Shakespeare and Jane Austen has failed to muster a half-decent rom-com in over 100 years (let’s draw a discrete veil for now across the work of Richard Curtis). So the fizzing, funny, irresistible spree of Rye Lane is cause for hats in the air. Following the freshly single Yas and Dom from their meet-cute in some art gallery loos, through the streets, markets, parks and bars of Peckham and Brixton, Raine Allen-Miller’s debut feature does for south London what Jacques Demy did for Cherbourg, what Richard Linklater did for Vienna, what Spike Lee did for Bed-Stuy. Though not a musical as such – though tracks by A Tribe Called Quest and Terence Trent D’Arby among others feature…

BFI 8/10 IT’S been much bootlegged on low-quality prints, but this documentary film of Britain’s six biggest 2 Tone bands – The Specials, Madness, The Beat, Selecter, Bad Manners and The Bodysnatchers – playing live to excitable audiences in 1980 is an audio-visual treat that works best on the big screen. The director’s credit goes to Joe Massot, the big-name American filmmaker behind Wonderwall (soundtracked by George Harrison) and Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains The Same, though the real creative force behind the project was British cameraman Joe Dunton, ascribed with “visual concept and photography”. He insisted that Dance Craze should not be what he described as “a third-row film”, a passive recording. A pioneer of assorted camera gizmos, Dunton had trained dozens of cameramen to use a…

GLENN MERCER, THE FEELIES: “I saw the original lineup of Television at one of their earliest shows and they were very loose, they didn’t particularly knock me out. My opinion changed when I heard the “Little Johnny Jewel” 45. It might not be their best song, but the guitar playing really spoke to me. I also loved the intimate sound of the production, with Tom’s guitar plugged direct into the tape deck.” STEVE GUNN: “The ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ mono 45 on Ork is my favourite Tom Verlaine document. I don’t usually buy 45s, but I found this a few years ago in London and had to get it. It was funny to find this so late in my deep appreciation of Verlaine, and worth carrying around with me on weeks…

Altitude SNAKEFARM 8/10 HAVING spent 50 years in Nashville, 30 of them as member of the Grand Ole Opry, Marty Stuart is fast approaching Music City royalty. He’s more active than most though, primarily on the board of the Country Music Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of country, not only in the traditional sense, but as part of a constantly evolving artform. And while Stuart’s various endeavours have not quite distracted him from his recording career of late, it’s been a good six years since his previous studio offering, Way Out West (2021’s Songs I Sing In The Dark being a digital-only release in which Stuart issued each tune at a rate of one per month). All the more reason, then, to dig out the bunting for Altitude. It’s a…

“There’s nowhere like it, so it leaves an indelible impression upon you,” says Elisabeth Elektra of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where Silver Moth’s debut was written and recorded in one miraculous week in early 2021. “It feels wild, there’s something ancient about it. It hasn’t been meddled with by humans. The feeling when you’re there is a combination of a sacred stillness and intensity.” Elektra’s original connection to Lewis came via her husband, Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai, who has family there. Then, during lockdown, she was taking part in an online tai chi class run by Matthew Rochford of the band Abrasive Trees when she discovered that he too had a family connection to Lewis: his father, Gerard Rochford, once published a book of poems about the island. They realised…

How would you summarise The Pretty Things in 1964? We were an R&B band that wanted to be popular but didn’t want to be a pop group. We wanted to be a bit different and true to our artistic principles. We had ambition and incompetence. What we didn’t want to do, and Phil was very hot on this, was to try and reproduce somebody else’s work. We wanted to do Bo Diddley songs but in our own way, which was rough and ready. We wanted to put our own mark on things. When did you and Phil start writing together? It took a while for the partnership to develop. “Rosalyn” was by Jimmy Duncan, one of our managers with Bryan Morrison. We should have got an arrangement royalty because we…

Live At Fabrik Hamburg 1980 JAZZLINE CLASSICS 8/10 PHAROAH SANDERS, who died last year at the age of 81, was the last great survivor of spiritual jazz, a saxophonist who filtered the teachings of his mentors Sun Ra, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane into his own distinctive voice. He’s best known for his unorthodox “extended techniques”: making noises from the tenor saxophone in ways it wasn’t designed for. His most distinctive was overblowing – honking into his mouthpiece so hard that the instrument would massively distort, creating multiple notes, as if playing through a distortion pedal. It was never a gimmick: these shrieks and howls seemed to be part of a mystical quest, a constant need for exploration. It’s why Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points, who collaborated with Sanders on…

EMI STUDIOS, ABBEY ROAD, LONDON, JULY 1, 1963 “I WAS the youngest photographer on Fleet Street. One day, my editor said to me, ‘There’s a new young band recording at Abbey Road, and we want you to go over and take some pictures.’ “I knew a lot of the bands and the club scene in London, but this one was down in London from Liverpool recording at Abbey Road. Well, that band turned out to be The Beatles.” “I went over to the studio and these four lads – a few years younger than me – were recording with George Martin. It was unionised then; technicians in brown work coats, shirts and ties, who had to be paid overtime and took tea breaks. I didn’t like the light in the…

“ANDY and I had a practice of sharing things that we found interesting. When Tony Wilson told me that a demo tape had come in from some people calling themselves Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, that chimed immediately with a book I had about avant-garde music scores. That led to the score diagram on ‘Electricity’. The title for Architecture & Morality came from a book my then girlfriend was reading by David Watkin, called Morality And Architecture. With Dazzle Ships, I had a gallery catalogue of the work of [early 20th-century Vorticist] Edward Wadsworth. One of the images was Dazzle-ships In Dry Dock At Liverpool. The combination of ‘dazzle ship’ and Liverpool made me mention it to Andy, and the concept of the title slipped in at that point. The…

CAN you tell us about your first meeting with Peter? The very first time I met Peter was at Ashcombe House, his personal studio in Bath, where the So album was recorded. I got there in the evening, and different people were present – David Rhodes, Tony Levin, maybe someone else, Peter and the cook. I went straight to the kitchen, where dinner was ready. Peter was very nice, wanted to know if my trip from France had been fine. I felt comfortable with him, but the only difficult thing for me was the language. I didn’t speak English as I do today, so I was very concentrated on what everybody was talking about. Then, at the end of the dinner, Peter said that he would show me my bedroom,…

Summerhall, Edinburgh, February 3 SUMMERHALL is a former veterinary school, and this L-shaped performance space once presided over countless dissections. There’s nothing clinical, however, about tonight’s proceedings, which fold us in the warm embrace of generous spontaneity. The recently released The Great White Sea Eagle is James Yorkston’s second collaboration with Swedish improv troupe The Second Hand Orchestra, following 2021’s The Wide, Wide River. This time, the Fife-based troubadour signed up The Cardigans’ Nina Persson as covocalist. The union might look a little odd on paper – and on stage, too, occasionally – but overall it works beautifully. Tonight they play all of the new album, aside from the title track, and much of The Wide, Wide River. At first it’s just Yorkston at the keyboard and Persson on vocals,…

THE great songwriter, pianist and producer Leon Russell changed the shape of popular music in 1970, when the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour he devised for Joe Cocker provided the blueprint for Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. But as Russell acolyte Bruce Hornsby recounts, by 1993 – for many reasons, some of them self-inflicted – his career was becalmed. Hornsby visited Russell at his farm in Sideview, Tennessee, where he found two huge barns stuffed with detritus, including two or three buses in some disrepair, old mixing boards from the 1960s; a gold record here, a platinum disc there, a trophy, some old posters. “Residue,” Russell explained, “from the fast lane.” Leon Russell is a wild tale, rendered in great detail by Buffalo Tom’s Bill…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine MEETING JEFF AND JIMI In 1968, my girlfriend and I went to see the original Jeff Beck Group – Beck, Rod Stewart on vocals, Ronnie Wood on bass, Micky Waller on drums – at Steve Paul’s Scene, a small club in New York’s Times Square area. We had seen them once before at the Fillmore East and knew they were a fiery, exciting live group, whose two albums don’t quite do them justice. At the end of the gig, Beck announced that he was bringing a friend out to play with them, who turned out to be Jimi Hendrix. My girlfriend and I sat enthralled at the foot of the stage as they jammed. Following the gig, we spotted Beck sitting alone at…