Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i UNCUT

TWO days after the vernal equinox, Fleet Foxes ushered in the new season at Los Angeles’ Belasco Theatre in the company of one very special surprise guest. The first indication of her identity came at 8pm, when a curtain revealed a piano and Newsom’s signature harp. Acting MC Robin Pecknold made a more formal confirmation: “Without further ado, I present the high priestess of acoustic music, Joanna Newsom.” This show, Newsom later revealed, had been planned since the autumn, when she approached Pecknold about testing out some new songs in a live setting. Ever obliging, Pecknold and his cohorts went one better, building the Belasco event around her, decorating the venue with flowers and violet lights. In her first live performance for three years, Newsom treated fans to no less…

WILLIAM TYLER & THE IMPOSSIBLE TRUTH Secret Stratosphere MERGE Barnstorming live album finds Tyler gleefully transmuting his own “Highway Anxiety” into a heavy extended jam on Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity”. “That’s our favourite Blue Öyster Cult song,” he quips. THIS IS THE KIT Careful Of Your Keepers ROUGH TRADE Scabby legs, pigeons on a ledge and “emotional Buckaroo” – the offbeat urban folk songs on Kate Stables’ sixth album are unglamorous but enthralling. DANNY PAUL GRODY Arc Of Day THREE LOBED Mesmeric 12-string splendour from northern California, shaded with clarinet and pedal-steel guitar, inspired by the migratory patterns of birds. CALIFONE Villagers JEALOUS BUTCHER “It’s only funny when you’re not afraid of everything…” A reminder that Tim Rutili is up there with Kurt Wagner and Cass McCombs when it comes to poignant,…

“I’m not a fan of edgy guitar. I’m more interested in subtlety” “THERE’S no training for this,” observes Natalie Merchant, reflecting on a singular career that’s taken her from the dive bars of Jamestown to the Library Of Congress, where she was appointed to the American Folklife Center’s board of trustees by Senator Chuck Schumer in November. “That was a great recognition. It doesn’t have the same kind of visibility as an award ceremony. But to me it was like winning a prize for a career of distinction.” Along the way there have been sodden sleeping bags, Bronx street parades and a trip to Berlin just as the wall was falling. Nothing was planned or mapped out in advance. “The first work that I did with 10,000 Maniacs, I had…

Is making a record a pleasurable process? SHIRLEY: Well, it’s always pleasurable, because of the musicians I’m working with. It’s a bit slower than it used to be, takes a bit of time. But it’s great fun, because the musicians are so wonderful. We’re all good friends and we have a good time together. Ian [Kearey, producer and musical director] is here right now – he comes up to see me every week, and we talk about music all the time. I choose the songs, but it’s very informal. We don’t get together for proper rehearsals. The band know the songs, and it’s not ’til we get in the studio that the songs get played and possibly changed. Ian’s the boss, he steers things in the right direction. Ian, are…

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT Darling The Dawn CONSTELLATION 7/10 Montreal experi-rock linchpins craft otherworldly soundscapes Efrim Menuck and Ariel Engle started playing together in the 2021 lockdowns with no particular idea in mind, but quickly settled their focus on “the different weights of [dawn’s] radiance”. This debut from the helm of both GY!BE and Thee Silver Mt Zion… and the Broken Social Scene mainstay, respectively, is itself luminous – seven soundscapes that shift across drone, ancestral chant, shoegaze and a forlorn take on sacred music, lent extra otherworldly heft by Engle’s beauteous vocals. Most striking are “Anchor”, which recalls the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen, and “We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun”, a kaleidoscopic, cosmically frazzled union of Patti Smith and Spiritualized. SHARON O’CONNELL BC CAMPLIGHT The Last…

This Is Flying Dutchman 1969-1975 ACE 8/10 ONLY a handful of producers ever create their own identifiable brand, and even fewer record labels establish a quality control so unerring you can safely buy its product unheard. When Bob Thiele set up Flying Dutchman, these two enviable attributes came together in a single package. As head of Impulse! during the 1960s, Thiele produced all of Coltrane’s great albums including A Love Supreme, as well as seminal recordings by Mingus, Pharoah Sanders and Ornette Coleman among others. However, tiring of the corporate machinations at ABC, which owned Impulse!, in 1969 he launched his own label with a mission to produce jazz-based records that would sell and be played on the radio without paying obeisance to the all-consuming godhead of rock’n’roll. The label’s…

“MICK Jones is a lovely chap. He was a Mott fan back in the day – you always recognised him in the crowd, he was a good dresser even when he was a kid. We had an army of fans, with lieutenants and stuff like that, and him and his mates went a lot of different places, jumping off the train before it got in the station. I thought punk was pretty awful when it started – to me, punk was Gene Vincent – but I see now that some great stuff came out of it. That was some band, The Clash. Somebody from Columbia Records took me up to Whitfield Street Studios one night to hear them. I didn’t know them, but I saw Mick and realised he was…

THE tide is out at Blackrock, giving the impression that you could walk all the way across Dublin Bay to the lighthouse on Howth Head. A hundred years or so ago, you might have spotted the famous Dublin writer, senator and carouser Oliver St John Gogarty riding his horse around the bay at dawn. “You can canter for five minutes before you meet [the waves] and watch them bearing rainbows and spreading on the tawny sands their exquisite treasures,” he wrote in As I Was Going Down Sackville Street. “We inhale the Atlantic vapours and they turn us into mystics, poets, politicians and unemployables with school-girl complexions.” Cian Nugent has long been inhaling those same vapours, even if he’s not usually up early enough to catch the rainbows. Most of…

JESSE MALIN “YOU’RE STILL STANDING THERE” TAKEN FROM STEVE EARLE’S ALBUM, FEEL ALRIGHT (1996) The first time I heard Lucinda was on Steve Earle’s song, “You’re Still Standing There”. It blew my mind and I needed to find out who she was! At the time I was good friends with Joey Ramone and I mentioned it to him. He said “Lucinda Williams? Oh, I know her.” He’d been in a songwriters circle with her and Graham Parker at the Bottom Line nightclub. He put us in contact and we’ve been great friends ever since. MARGO PRICE “CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD” TAKEN FROM LUCINDA WILLIAMS’ ALBUM, CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD (1998) I remember hearing this album during the summer of 1998 when it came out. Me and…

BANGLA DESH (APPLE, 1971) Written and recorded with haste in the leadup to the massive New York benefit concert organised by Harrison on August 1, 1971, this is Keltner’s first appearance on a Harrison track, alongside Leon Russell, Klaus Voormann and Jim Horn. Raw, spirited, rhythmically urgent, the emotion shines through. DON’T LET ME WAIT TOO LONG (APPLE, 1973) A top-tier pop song, it’s a mystery that this was never released as a second single from Living In The Material World. Keltner drives the irresistible beat – buoyed by Harrison’s acoustic guitar and trademark slide – providing Spectoresque Wall Of Sound fills for good measure. WHO CAN SEE IT? (APPLE, 1973) One of Harrison’s most beautiful ballads, and greatest vocals, Keltner’s elegant drums anchor the song as it switches between…

”CHERRY TREE” (2004) There’s something about …Frankenstein that recalls this EP from the band’s early days, back when Berninger’s vocals lay a little lower and more muttered, and the songs carried a sense of quiet dread. Out of the mud of them, a song like “About Today” could rise up — intricate, urgent, lovesick; like a musical lump in the throat. It would set the course for many of the standout tracks of the band’s career, among them, “New Order T-Shirt”. SLEEP WELL BEAST (2017) On their Grammy-winning seventh album, The National leaned (for the most part) further into subtle sonic experimentation. Programmed drum patterns and puttering electronics lay beneath Berninger’s lyrics, nuanced and well-knotted as ever, as they painted a portrait of relational ennui. The album cover shows Long…

IN 2019, The National curated a “friends and family” covermount CD for Uncut, drawing together tracks that highlighted their healthy and productive relationships with other artists – including Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten and This Is The Kit. To accompany this month’s Uncut cover story, The National have compiled a covermount CD that has their own music at its core. “It’s a mix of new, off-the-beaten-path and live versions, alongside some of our favourite tracks of the past few years made together and collaboratively with others,” they tell us. To open the CD, the band selected a track from their new studio album, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein. Accordingly, the 14 tracks that follow it feel very much like a summary of where The National are in 2023: apart from…

PAMFIR Directed by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk Starring Oleksandr Yatsentyuk, Stanislav Potiak Opens 5 May Cert To be confimed 9/10 LOVE ACCORDING TO DALVA Directed by Emmanuelle Nicot Starring Zelda Samson, Alexis Manenti, Fanta Guirassy Opens 28 April Cert 15 8/10 SICK OF MYSELF Directed by Kristoffer Borgli Starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther Opens 21 April Cert To be confirmed 8/10 ONE FINE MORNING Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve Starring Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud Opens 28 April Cert 15 8/10 LAKELANDS Directed by Robert Higgins & Patrick McGivney Starring Éanna Hardwicke, Danielle Galligan, Lorcan Cranitch Opens 5 May Cert 18 7/10…

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WAYNE SHORTER Tireless jazz innovator (1933-2023) “JAZZ shouldn’t have any mandates,” Wayne Shorter told NPR in 2013. “This music, it’s dealing with the unexpected. No-one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?” Shorter’s devotion to free expression, allied to an instinctive feel for harmony and matchless technique, made him a giant of improvised modern jazz. He first came to prominence in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1959, graduating to musical director, where he honed his gift for composition. In 1964, Shorter joined Miles Davis’s ‘Second Great Quintet’, taking his place alongside pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. Freed from the driving rhythms of Blakey’s group, he was encouraged to explore, his tenor sax pieces helping shape masterworks like ESP,…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by The National. 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, May 10, 2023. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+2D It’s Pink Floyd, but for a short while I was unable to say why (1-9-5-2-6) 9 Nick Cave and Warren Ellis made an absolute killing from this album (7) 10 (See 13 across) 11 “Eighteen, balding, star/Golden falling _____”, from The Kings Of Leon’s “The Bucket” (5) 12 ”Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me/No hope, no ____”, Morrissey (4) 13+10A A miserable couple of days spent with Wolf Alice (4-7)…

“IT was a leftfield idea, but I immediately got what they were doing,” Robert Forster says of Thank You For A Lovely Day, the new anthology adapting an album’s worth of songs from his old band The Go-Betweens into comic strips. “Grant [McLennan] and I weren’t great musicians, so lyrics were really important to The Go-Betweens, and set us apart. When this idea came up of 11 graphic artists’ visual representations of 11 songs, I thought our lyrics would work really well in this context. I found the results very moving, because I’d never seen songs interpreted in this way.” The Go-Betweens’ allusive, enigmatic songs about, as Forster wryly summarises, “foreign literature, movie stars and librarians”, inspire wildly diverse approaches. Noah van Sciver turns “Love Goes On”’s lovelorn “cat in…

Now BMG 8/10 LEGACY artists can sometimes become convinced that the past – and the sounds and lyrical themes that made them famous – should be left in the rearview mirror. Believing their best years, and best songs, are in front of them, such artists become subsumed in reinvention, trendy collaborations or mediocrity, which often renders them desperate or tepid. Think Joni Mitchell’s Dog Eat Dog or David Bowie’s Never Let Me Down for prime examples. At first glance, Graham Nash’s Now hints at these trappings, its title suggesting a preoccupation with the present that may mean so long to the past. In fact, the record doesn’t stray too far from the magic of his wheelhouse. Fans of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the singer’s first two ’70s solo works…

Why did you choose the Nine Standards at Hartley Fell to represent you on the album sleeve? They look amazing when you go up there. They’re earlier than most cairns – they date from possibly as early as the 14th century, but these that you see today are probably not the same ones, because they’re always being rebuilt. I suppose the music feels like it’s constantly in flux, and that it’s changing gradually. It has an unfinished quality to it, which I like. So perhaps the closest the music comes to reflecting various landscapes is that idea of slow change over time. Obviously the modular synth remains your primary tool, but you can hear a few different sounds emerge – the piano on “Idols & Altars” for example. Yeah, that’s a…

Rockin’ And Romance ROUGH TRADE, 1985 The second in the classic trilogy of albums Jonathan recorded for Rough Trade in the ’80s evokes simpler times, using the turbines of memory and melody to create something that could just as easily have emerged from smalltown America in the wake of rock’n’roll. 9/10 ¡Jonathan, Te Vas A Emocionar! ROUNDER, 1994 By 1994, Richman felt that his mastery of both Spanish guitar and the accompanying language warranted an album of its own – and listening to ¡Jonathan, Te Vas A Emocionar!, it’s hard to disagree, although on “The U.F.O. Man”, whether the Spanish language can throw up a rhyming couplet to match “hit a cactus”/“flying upside down for practice” is a moot point. 8/10 Ishkode! Ishkode! BLUE ARROW, 2016 Richman’s recent releases are…

Did Feast Of Wire seem like a landmark album when you made it? I never thought it would resonate with as many people as it did. Nor did I foresee doing a 20th-anniversary release and tour. We were just focused on making good songs and arrangements. It’s so super eclectic, I’m surprised when people say it’s their favourite Calexico album. Did you approach the album any differently to the previous records? We combined elements of both previous albums, brought in components of lo-fi home recordings and interspersed them with lush analogue studio tracks. We’d toured a lot prior to this album and the live shows influenced the character and vibe of this session. One thing that’s different is that we recorded a few tunes with a full band, live in…

DOUBLES (VHF, 2011) The uncompromising debut, with Nugent demonstrating his minimalist steel-string mastery across two intense, side-long instrumentals. 7/10 BORN WITH THE CAUL (NO QUARTER, 2013) Nugent switches on and fleshes out his sound with the aid of his band The Cosmos, making his tentative vocal debut midway through 23-minute reverie “Houses Of Parliament”. 7/10 NIGHT FICTION (WOODSIST, 2016) A skilled singer-songwriter emerges, transcending his influences to create a warm, dreamy sound that’s all his own, garnished with lyrics of casual profundity. 8/10 SHE BRINGS ME BACK TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING (NO QUARTER, 2023) Nugent’s long-gestating fourth demonstrates a rare ability to suspend time, his dreamlike vignettes often tumbling into hypnotic instrumental jams. 9/10…

February 1982 The Wild Swans release “Revolutionary Spirit” and record sessions for Radio 1’s Kid Jensen (broadcast March 23) and John Peel (broadcast May 13) April 1988 The Wild Swans release the Sire Records album Bringing Home The Ashes, featuring Simpson and Kelly, with Joe Fearon on bass and an unremembered drummer from Van Morrison’s band June 14, 1989 Pete de Freitas dies in a motorcycle accident in Staffordshire, en route to Liverpool August 2011 The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years album released, with Paul Simpson the last remaining original member. Artwork by Ged Quinn…

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS since The Orb’s emergence as chillout DJs fêted by John Peel, their relationship to dance music continues much as it began – in a room off to one side, happily doing their own thing. “If you’ve got a good ear, nothing can stop you,” says the group’s sole constant Alex Paterson, still a proud non-musician. “That’s something I’ve proven to all my contemporaries, that you should just go ahead and do it. If you’ve got belief, that’s half the battle won.” The Orb are generally thought of as a duo, with Paterson joined by a series of co-pilots: Jimmy Cauty, Kris “Thrash” Weston, Thomas Fehlmann and most recently Michael Rendell. But he prefers to view The Orb as a much broader collective, encompassing everyone from prog titans Steve…

THE two songs that frame The National’s ninth album — fragile opener “Once Upon A Poolside” and quiet finale “Send For Me” — govern this remarkable record’s tone. This is not The National in rhapsodic, quick-fire mode; the big choruses and sonic complexities have been dampened down and even guest turns from big names – Taylor Swift (“The Alcott”), Phoebe Bridgers (“This Isn’t Helping”, “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend”), Sufjan Stevens (“Once Upon A Poolside”) – feel like conversations held between glass. Instead this is a band subdued and half-submerged – programmed drums keep the music lower, like waist-high water that Matt Berninger’s voice must wade through, as he sings of alienation and detachment, of relationships disintegrating, worlds dismantling. For all his struggles to write …Frankenstein, this is perhaps…

RENFIELD RELEASED APRIL 14 Having served for centuries as snivelling minion to Dracula, Renfield moves to New Orleans to escape his servitude and find love. Nicholas Hoult stars as the long-suffering servant, with Nicolas Cage chewing scenery and much else as his vampire lord. HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE RELEASED APRIL 21 Andreas Malm’s sober polemic on the urgency of climate activism is given a fictional spin in this tale of a group of young activists intent on sabotaging the Texan oil industry. POLITE SOCIETY RELEASED APRIL 28 Part romantic comedy, part Bollywood martial arts epic, Nida Manzoor’s feature debut tells the story of a would-be stunt woman pulling out all the stops to prevent her sister’s arranged marriage. RODEO RELEASED APRIL 28 Julie Ledru is a teenage motorcycle…

Fahren, fahren, fahren! The latest Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide is a 148-page celebration of Kraftwerk, featuring entertaining new chat with Karl Bartos, Michael Rother’s reflections on Florian Schneider, the 20 best kosmische albums and more. It’s in shops now or available to buy directly from us at uncut.co.uk/single… Following on April 28, the latest of our Quarterly Specials is Curated By… King Crimson, in which the legendary band discuss their influences, legacy, favourite records and life-changing gigs. Includes the truth about Mellotrons and surprise appearances from Whitney Houston and Elton John. But just who are the “Campari Faction”?… The lineup for this year’s End Of The Road just keeps getting better, adding another tranche of acts much raved-about in these pages. You’ll be able to catch Fatoumata Diawara, Panda Bear…

… his 73rd album I Don’t Know A Thing About Love: The Songs Of Harlan Howard (out now on Legacy Recordings) celebrates his old friend and hero with 10 new covers. Howard wrote hits for Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings and Buck Owens – and more than 60 years ago, he gave a new-to-Nashville Willie his first songwriting gig at Pamper Music. … a new documentary Willie Nelson & Family is an upcoming five-part series directed by Oren Moverman and Thom Zimny. Mixing new interviews with archival footage, it recounts his triumphs as well as his tragedies, including the recent death of his beloved sister Bobbie Nelson. “Willie was completely open about everything,” says Zimny. … two birthday concerts Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90, which takes place on April 29…

SHIRLEY COLLINS & DAVY GRAHAM Folk Roots, New Routes DECCA, 1964 Released in the midst of the folk revival, Shirley Collins’ collaboration with globetrotting guitarist Davy Graham in fact pointed a number of ways forwards. The pair take up folk traditionals like “Reynardine” and “Nottamun Town” and transform them, Collins’ plainsung vocal the perfect foil for Graham’s spry fingerstyle, which draws on modal jazz and North African scales. 9/10 SHIRLEY & DOLLY COLLINS Anthems In Eden HARVEST, 1969 Anthems In Eden is perhaps the most ambitious of the albums Shirley made with sister Dolly. A song cycle conceived and arranged by Dolly, it drew on music stretching back to the renaissance, the pair assisted by musical director David Munrow and the Early Music Consort Of London. The use of instruments…

This record is quite personal. It seems that I’m always vacillating between being deeply in love and deeply pissed off, and the record shows it. The opening line ["I used to think that I would never love again"], a lot of people questioned me about it, but I think that’s an intriguing opening that, if you listen to it, you want to hear the rest of the record, because an album is really a journey. It continues the political nature of your work. I think it’s a duty of every artist to reflect the times in which we live. It’s important to talk about what’s going on politically throughout the world and to think about the environment and what we’re doing. Did you and David Crosby reconcile before he died? Fortunately,…

Did you ever worry about the gap between Get Well Soon and Joan Of All? I did worry about it, and I wish I could be someone who could just put out record after record after record. I just can’t do it. But if I needed to spend 10 years making a record to have this one, then I’m OK with that. How long were you actually working on this album for? Not that long. I’ve realised that even though I’m not sitting with a pen and paper, I think there’s always work being done [mentally]. Everything I see or feel goes in there and gets processed, and then these songs seemed to kind of arrive. I think that’s a result of your mind, your subconscious, doing all this work over…

EARLY June sees the welcome return of Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit with Weathervanes SOUTHEASTERN RECORDS/THIRTY TIGERS. Written and produced by Isbell at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, the album features guest appearances from his partner Amanda Shires on fiddle and background vocals, renowned harmonica player Mickey Raphael and strings wizard Morgan O’Shaughnessey, among others. The 13 tracks are thematically diverse, addressing ageing, nostalgia, regret and redemption. “There’s something about boundaries on this record,” explains Isbell. “As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love someone fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.” Later that month, This Far South THIRTY TIGERS marks the debut of Tommy Prine, 27-year-old son of the late great John. An existential diary of triumphs and tragedies…

You’ve collaborated with American musicians before: what was different this time? The idea was to bring Tinariwen’s music to Nashville and collaborate with country musicians as we feel there’s a strong connection. Fiddles, slide guitars and banjo are used in our music in the north of Mali and Algeria. The life of the first cowboys and the Tuareg are quite similar. But, because of the pandemic, we had to record them remotely. How did it work with Daniel Lanois? We met him in New York, where we played a show on the same night as him. He also did a remix of one of our songs. It’s a pity that we had to record remotely but we hope to play with him when we play America. You’ve recorded several pieces called…

What was your criteria? TOBY HAY: Jim and I work quickly and instinctively. The music tends to start with someone bringing a simple idea, which we then improvise around, before forming into some sort of structure. We wanted to focus on the energy of performances and to play like we would do live. Why are you so compatible? JIM GHEDI: I think we met each other at a very pivotal time, sharing our first tour together and being on the road for months, working and living together for long periods of time. Inevitably we influenced each other musically and personally. We have strong similarities but also differences, and those things somehow complement each other. Can you tell me about “Gylfinir”, the Keith How tribute? HAY: I met Keith though Jim. He…

10cc The Original Soundtrack (reissue, 1975) PROPER 8/10 Vinyl reissue series continues with pop subversives’ fate-changing third An early taste of “I’m Not In Love” was enough to convince Phonogram to sign up the song’s creators for a five-album deal in 1975, thereby much improving 10cc’s declining fortunes (alas, the band had hoped to sign to Virgin instead). Now reissued alongside 1978’s Bloody Tourists, the group’s third album marks a significant advance in several respects, with their experimental soft-rock smash pointing toward future subversions of form. Nine-minute opener “Un Nuit A Paris” remains the best realised of their stabs at prog-operetta, and the glam pomp of “Life Is A Minestrone” is equally exhilarating. That said, the racial epithet that mars “The Second Sitting Of The Last Supper” is one of…

Can you tell us about the saz-guitar? This instrument was invented because Irwansyah wanted to explore a more diverse tone colour, pitch and ambience, related to his attempt to fuse the sounds of various lute traditions in one musical instrument, particularly the western guitar (the first musical instrument he learned) and lutes from Middle Eastern tradition. Do you see your music as a preservation of culture, creation of something new, a mix of both or something else entirely? This is an interesting question yet difficult to answer. Our background study in ethnomusicology has influenced our music. We studied concepts, aesthetics, styles, musical instruments and vocal styles from different traditions of the world, including North Sumatra, where we come from. In Suarasama we created new music by fusing various idioms, aesthetics and…

When you recorded Tonight’s The Night, it was very spontaneous. You weren’t allowed to get to know songs too well. Did things develop when you started playing them live? We got to know the songs even better than when we recorded the album. Recording with Neil, we don’t like to do a song more than once or twice, anyway. On Tonight’s The Night, we’d do seven or eight in a row, straight through, and then a couple of hours later come back and do them all in a row again. That way, we could be more or less spontaneous, but we’d know songs a little better second time. Nils Lofgren described recording Tonight’s The Night as being like a wake. What was the mood on the road? Like a rolling wake. You…

IAN HUNTER CBS, 1975 The solo debut, the first of many co-produced by Mick Ronson, found the songwriter still in the major leagues; single “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” even reached No 14 in the UK. ALL AMERICAN ALIEN BOY COLUMBIA, 1976 The album that sent Hunter’s commercial stock tumbling, but revealed a new side to him. There’s a new soulfulness here, especially with Jaco Pastorius on bass and David Sanborn on saxophone, but “Restless Youth” is as rocking and sleazy as prime Mott. YOU’RE NEVER ALONE WITH A SCHIZOPHRENIC CHRYSALIS, 1979 A riotous, strutting tour de force, Hunter’s fourth album features Mick Ronson, members of the E Street Band and even John Cale. “Cleveland Rocks” has since become an anthem for the Ohio city, while the pretty, sad “Ships” was,…

FATOU (WORLD CIRCUIT, 2011) Taped in London and Paris with contributions from Tony Allen, John Paul Jones and Toumani Diabaté, Diawara’s acoustic debut showcases her softly soulful voice and gorgeous melodic gift. Its lilting charm slips in hard truths, such as “Sowa”, with its plea, born from experience, against the forced adoption of children. 8/10 FENFO (WAGRAM/MONTUNO, 2018) The title means “Something to say” in Bambara, and the single “Nterini” sympathetically follows a migrant’s journey. Co-producer Matthieu Chedid helps stir funk and dance elements into a sleeker, expanded pop sound, but the bereft ballad “Den Do”, with only Diawara’s electric guitar and Vincent Ségal’s cello, is as affecting as anything. 8/10 MALIBA (3ÈME BUREAU, 2022) The brief, brutal conquest of Northern Mali by Islamic State inspired Diawara’s urgent, Malian all-star…

“I SAW this documentary about Empress Sisi of Austria. She was a very unusual monarch in that I think she was quite rebellious to the court, and beloved by the people. She didn’t really play the game the way she was supposed to. But she ended up being murdered by an Italian anarchist, who stabbed her in the heart. He was a damaged person and he took it upon himself to assassinate a monarch as a political statement. But there was a tragedy to it, because he chose a monarch who was a victim of the monarchical system herself, rather than a representative of tyranny. I suppose I felt like there was an interesting shared experience between the two of them. He’d been a soldier and he was poor, life…

“I’VE learned so much about the human brain and the body,” says Lucinda Williams, sitting on a window seat in the ornate bar of a Bloomsbury hotel, bathed in early spring sunshine. “I mean, everything is controlled by your brain, you know? You never know what’s gonna be affected.” You wouldn’t consider it today, fresh from a triumphant European tour, but two years ago it seemed like Williams might never walk or pick up a guitar again. Back in November 2020, her partner Tom Oversby found her collapsed on the bathroom floor of their Nashville home. He rushed her to Vanderbilt Medical Centre where medics discovered a blood clot on the right side of her brain. The stroke affected the motor skills along the left half of her body; only…

THE album artwork for First Two Pages Of Frankenstein is by the design company Pentagram, with considerable input from the band – particularly Scott Devendorf, whose former role as a graphic designer led him to work on several sleeves, including those of High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me. The sleeve shows a photograph of a young boy, Lou Solimine, taken by John Solimine. In Lou’s hands is what looks like a bald mannequin head; on its forehead is a sticker reading ‘Hello My Name is Paul’. “It is not a phrenological head,” Devendorf explains, although he will not be drawn further on who ‘Paul’ might be. A little internet detective work, meanwhile, reveals that Solimine is a longstanding friend of Berninger, whom he met washing dishes at a restaurant…

DUKE ELLINGTON & JOHN COLTRANE “In A Sentimental Mood” IMPULSE!, 1963 That was the very first tune that, when I closed my eyes, I would forget what decade I was in. I had to be around 12 or 13 years old, but it made me feel like I’d lived on this planet before and I knew what this music was. I came across that record through my grandmother, who was a huge jazz fan. I was doing a black history project for school and she mentioned to me how my people, African-Americans, even though we didn’t have royalty, we created the Duke, we created the Count, we had the Queen Of Soul. That was one thing that she really wanted to express to me as a kid, to make me…