Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i UNCUT

THIS MONTH’S REVELATIONS FROM THE WORLD OF UNCUT FEATURING… The Rolling Stones | Ryuichi Sakamoto | Ann-Margret “MARK was pretty intense but always very amusing. He had a great sense of humour, a great sense of fun right from a young age. Because he was much taller than anybody else he could get into nightclubs and all that sort of stuff when nobody else could. But because of that he also used to get picked on. He had a few nasty little beatings that he was always pretty brave in facing up to. One particular one, these guys were hitting him with pool cues and he was just shouting at them: ‘You’re pathetic! Can’t you do better than that?’ So he was pretty resilient. “He had a relentless energy and…

On Pain TAPETE 8/10 IN the autumn of 1984, abetted by his Commotions, Lloyd Cole coughed out a masterpiece called Rattlesnakes. In his black polo neck and corduroys, the video to “Perfect Skin” saw Cole looking and sounding like a man willing middle-age gravitas to come and get him. Meanwhile, he fetishised the dreams and disasters of the protagonists in stories by Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. On Easy Pieces, released a year later, he sang about characters who struggled to come to terms with the bad decisions of their ruthless youth. All of which is worth dwelling on because, in the intervening years, Lloyd Cole finally got to be the thing he so badly wanted to be from the outset. He got old – and when that happens to…

Weathervanes SOUTHEASTERN 8/10 JASON ISBELL’S first couple of solo albums after leaving Drive-By Truckers in 2007 had their moments – “Dress Blues”, “Streetlights” – but also sounded like someone trying to teach himself a trade he wasn’t altogether convinced he was cut out for: the hammer landed on the thumb nearly as often as the nail. But the period since Isbell hit his stride properly on 2011’s Here We Rest now demands to be considered one of the great decades (and a bit) assembled by a solo artist. It’s not fanciful, at this point, to invoke Bruce Springsteen from Born To Run to Tunnel Of Love, or Warren Zevon from his self-titled second LP to Sentimental Hygiene. Weathervanes is another imperious demonstration of Isbell’s signature ability to simultaneously project confidence…

“When I think of you/Everything goes crazy” REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS AR KANE AR Kive ROCKET GIRL DREAM POP, they called it. Given AR Kane’s Alex Ayuli once worked for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s no surprise that he and collaborator Rudy Tambala invented their own genre before critics could stick their oar in. It was a canny move, but more importantly, it was accurate: the music of AR Kane was made for dreamers, by dreamers, and its languor and longing made it particularly bewitching listening; their music is often smeared and blurry, happily lost in its own indefinable pleasures. “We wanted dream pop,” Tambala says, “that feeling of a dream where the rules are different. Dream logic.” The ARKane story is one of experimentation…

WALK down Farnham Road, past the village green, the Spar and The Mill (cask ales and “stunning riverside garden”), turn right onto Fulbrook Lane and eventually you’ll arrive at a handsome red-stone building partly obscured from the road behind a high wooden fence. Today, it is one of many similarly desirable period residences, tucked away in the heart of deep Surrey. But during the late ’60s and early ’70s, Brookfield House was a Home Counties outpost of Swinging London. In 1968, Ringo Starr bought Brookfield from Peter Sellers – it was here that The Beatles gathered to persuade George Harrison to rejoin the band after he walked out of the Let It Be Twickenham Studios sessions in January 1969. The following year, meanwhile, Brookfield passed into the hands of another…

NOBODY expected a bunch of Camden tearaways to make one of the defining cultural artefacts of the early 1990s. Yet somehow Flowered Up pulled it off with “Weekender”, an epic 12-minute stew of rock, dub and techno, book-ended with samples from Quadrophenia. As a song, “Weekender” was way out there, but with its accompanying video it became something else entirely, a brilliantly conceived celebration and critique of acid house, capturing the scene just as it imploded. This was a musical vision that epitomised Flowered Up’s rule-breaking approach to life. The five-piece – plus the band’s charismatic manager Des Penney and flower-headed mascot Barry Mooncult – had emerged from a north London estate, hyped as the capital’s answer to the Happy Mondays. After a couple of singles with Heavenly, they signed…

PATTERSON Hood is angry. It’s the fourth and final night of the Drive-By Truckers’ triumphant series of Homecoming shows in Athens, Georgia, when a scuffle breaks out near the stage at the fabled 40 Watt Club. The band abruptly halt a particularly intense version of their new song “The Driver” and Hood lambasts the perpetrator as security hauls him to the door. “Don’t bring that shit to a Drive-By Truckers show!” he yells as the five players on stage return to the final chords. “I hope this next song is your favourite song!” The scene is made only slightly humorous by the fact that Hood is wearing a dress. A black floral-print number, in fact, with princess sleeves and a hem that falls just below the knee, showing off bare…

THE idea that Nick Drake would have a legacy might have seemed unlikely in 1974, when only Nick Kent’s outspoken NME obituary marked his passing. But since Molly Drake’s death in 1993, Gabrielle Drake and Cally Calloman have worked diligently and sensitively to embellish his short life and slender body of work with archival albums such as A Treasury (2004) and Family Tree (2007) as well as 2014’s coffee-table volume, Remembered For A While. The latest attempt to deepen the possibilities of Drake’s music, The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs Of Nick Drake finds a disparate collection of artists radically reinventing his songbook. “I didn’t want to trouble artists who’d done great versions of Nick’s songs before,” says Callomon. “I wanted plunging contrasts, to show the elasticity of Nick’s songs.”…

THERE’S something different about the energy at Café Oto this evening. As the venue slowly fills to capacity, there are young children moving among the crowd of experimental music connoisseurs. When one of them grabs the microphone, it seems like a transgression of this generally reverential place. That is until he says, “Will you please welcome… Charles Bullen!” If this weekend’s Lifetones residency has the vibe of a family affair, then Bullen – a tall and thin sixtysomething with the appearance of a guerrilla leader – is its patriarch. Once of This Heat, first-wave post-punkers influential enough to have been mentioned in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”, his guitar deconstructions and plaintive vocals presided over a mysterious British musical space somewhere between Rock Bottom and Unknown Pleasures. There was improvisation…

HOW do you solve a problem like The Beatles? When everything is known and understood, what can you do to recapture the moment of impact, that blinding flash where novelty and inevitability collide to make history? On the face of it, Florida seems a strange place to look. However, in Good Day Sunshine State, Emmy-winning broadcast journalist Bob Kealing – who previously explored the Southern roots of Gram Parsons in his 2015 book Calling Me Home – has identified a few weeks in 1964 as a transition point, both for the band and for pop culture as a whole. In February 1964, The Beatles travelled to Miami Beach to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show for the second time. Their first appearance, a week earlier in New York, had been…

“I’M finding it difficult to approach music from where Low was,” admits Alan Sparhawk, understandably, following the tragic loss of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker to cancer last November. “Whether it’s the songs, or trying to even just imagine ‘What is this? Where am I?’” So rather than inhabiting Low’s headspace, Sparhawk’s current energies are focused on a very different project, fronted by his old friend and Ween covers band cohort Marc Gartman. After a year’s gestation in Duluth, Minnesota, jamming and recording in Sparhawk’s home studio, Damien emerged in March with a self-titled debut single – a dream-pop love song in Flaming Lips style, inspired by the selfless devotion of the nanny who hangs herself in The Omen declaring, “Damien, it’s all for you”. The macabre undercurrent continues…

“Drink to the family money/The chemtrails and the holy grails” THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES CALIFONE Villagers JEALOUS BUTCHER TWELVE years ago, indie filmmakers Solan Jensen and Joshua Marie Wilkinson attempted to make sense of Califone’s world with a tour documentary. Made A Machine By Describing The Landscape was compiled from studio sessions, interviews and live performances, following the band as they played modest venues across Europe and in the States, culminating in a bleary pre-dawn homecoming in Chicago. It’s a pretty illuminating piece of vérité. Drummer Joe scours a rubbish dump for anything that might make a decent noise; the band pass time in the van by painting childlike art to sell at gigs; live shows feature the repeated spanking of a piano, experimental black-and-white films,…

Dream From The Deep Well FIRE 8/10 THE self-titled record from singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brigid Mae Power landed in 2016 with the grace and tremulous beauty of a butterfly, but carried with it the uncertain air of a recent storm. An understated yet resonant, folk-edged set, it was built from guitar, piano, strings, a prominent pump organ and Power’s sweet, pure voice, all of which lent her songs of troubled relationships and maternal responsibilities an intense expression. Cultish acclaim followed – along with a degree of voyeuristic interest in her past, which she later laid bare in a distressing blog post. Subsequent recordings have included further articulations of her emotional states and agency (or perceived lack of it), borrowing from the classicism of Joni and Neil, Tim Buckley’s vocal style…

Just Like A Rose: The Anniversary Sessions PROPELLER SOUND 8/10 INITIALLY conceived as a 20th-anniversary nod to 2000 debut Not The Tremblin’ Kind, this first-rate studio return was derailed by the pandemic. Just Like A Rose is well worth the wait, though. Cantrell sees it as “more of a celebration than a traditional album”, the sum of myriad influences and styles that have defined her career thus far, from Peel favourite to Grand Ole Opry performer to successful radio host on Gimme Country. The protracted gestation of Just Like A Rose… also allowed her to bring in a wealth of guests, among them Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and rockabilly veteran Rosie Flores. The latter directly inspired the title track, a country-rock tribute to female singer-guitarists who continue to roar: “Her…

Although Chapman-Fox’s music may appear to represent a wistful journey back to synth music’s early days, it’s motivated by something more consequential: the UK politician’s invariably ineffectual commitment to social equality. “There’s a definite political undercurrent to all the albums,” he says. “The concept of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is that it’s nostalgic for a future that never happened. The new album got its name from a 1980s ad campaign from local property developer Eileen Bilton, which was accompanied by a slogan of “London’s moving our way” [another song title]. This touched on contemporary ideas of the north-south divide and government programmes of ‘Levelling Up’ or the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, all of which seem empty promises, which brought us back to the Thatcherite policy of ‘Managed Decline’ for Merseyside.” This certainly…

History Kinda Pales When It And You Are Aligned: The Days Of Wine And Roses 40th Anniversary Edition FIRE 9/10 “IS it recording yet?” a male voice asks at The Dream Syndicate’s first rehearsal. “Yeah,” Kendra Smith dryly replies. “Every gem.” Doubling the length of The Days Of Wine And Roses’ 2001 and 2015 reissues, this collection reconstructs the whole fervid world of the band’s first, short-lived incarnation, from that rehearsal on December 27, 1981, through early gigs, to the night their debut album was laid down, and onwards to a tape of a forgotten Tucson show where this great, firefly lineup achieve a wild, casual apotheosis. “The album itself is a small part of this boxset,” Steve Wynn notes, “which is more like a time-capsule of what it was…

Heavy Axe (reissue, 1974) JAZZ DISPENSARY 7/10 A STREET-fighting man who cheerfully scaled cocaine mountains with Sly Stone, and once sought by George Harrison for Apple Records, David Axelrod had barely worked for a decade when, in the mid-’90s, his name began circulating among crate-digging fans. Indeed, just a few years earlier, the former Capitol Records A&R and staff producer – who’d started his career in the late ’50s producing jazz records for the likes of Harold Land and Charles Mingus associate Buddy Collette – had been verging on homelessness. In 1993, however, De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate twice featured a prominent piano from his Lou Rawls production “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, while three years later DJ Shadow’s “Midnight In A Perfect World” lifted from Axelrod’s “The Human…

SIPPING PG Tips from a dainty blue-and-white teacup, David Johansen considers the long, strange journey that has taken him from high-heeled frontman of the New York Dolls to bouffant nightclub act, country-blues singer and beyond. “There are certain phases in the history of New York, especially in my life,” he says, “that I can look back and say, ‘Yeah, that was really something.’” This month, several of these glorious incarnations are celebrated in Martin Scorsese’s Personality Crisis: One Night Only – a documentary that covers the span of Johansen’s work, both before, during and after the Dolls. Speaking today over Zoom, Johansen very much inhabits the role of New York music’s grandee, a veteran player who’s navigated his way from downtown scenester to uptown habitué. Accompanied, off-camera, by his wife Mara,…

WHEN they formed in Long Island in 1988, De La Soul represented something of a paradigm shift in hip-hop. Their debut album, 3 Feet High And Rising, was a riot of bright, primary colours, ‘Daisy Age’ optimism, lyrics that explicitly pushed against hip-hop’s incipient gangster tendencies and whimsical samples from every area of pop history. It’s why the recent death of senior member David Jolicoeur – aka Trugoy The Dove, or Plug Two – prompted so much reflection from fans around the world. “I’m still in shock about Dave,” says co-frontman and high school friend Kelvin Mercer (aka Pos, Posdnuos or Plug One). “We knew he had heart problems – that was evident when we toured with Gorillaz – but no-one saw this coming. I’ve done a lot of mourning…

ON their recent tour the Drive-By Truckers added a new song to their setlist, a quiet, sad, squirrelly number called “The Ballad Of Cecil McCobb”. It’s a eulogy for their old friend Wes Freed, the Richmond-based artist and musician who had worked with the band for more than 20 years before his death in September 2022. He devised the band’s unofficial mascot, called the Cooleybird, a black squawking flamingo that haunts their album covers, tour posters, T-shirts, stage backdrops, and countless fan tattoos. Freed was also one of the Truckers’ earliest boosters, hosting them at shows in Virginia and giving them a platform to tour other regions of the country. Without him it’s likely the band wouldn’t have lasted into the 2000s. His death was both expected and sudden. He…

BEAU IS AFRAID Following the knockout one-two of Hereditary (2018) followed by Midsommar (2019), the most immaculately disturbing films of the 21st century, stakes were high for Ari Aster’s third – especially when word got out that it was going to be three hours long, feature a vast A-list cast, and was wryly described by the director as a “Jewish Lord Of The Rings”. Beau Is Afraid as it finally emerges may be many things: the longest Jewish mother joke ever told; a lurid and epic therapy session; and perhaps the most eccentric major release since Southland Tales. What’s without doubt is that it’s going to confound the hell out of any audience willing to stick with its full 179 minutes. Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau – a schlumpy midlife schlemiel,…

“I ALWAYS wanted to do everything,” says Ann-Margret of her long and varied career. “I had a lot of energy and I still do.” She isn’t kidding. At 82, the Swedish-American actress, singer, dancer and stage performer – who first shot to stardom in 1963’s Bye Bye Birdie, followed by a leading role opposite Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas – has just released Born To Be Wild, a forceful set of covers that taps into her reputation as Hollywood’s ageless dynamo. A lifelong biker, the sleeve features a vintage shot of her in silver racing gear, astride a Triumph Tiger. She still rides a Harley-Davidson around Los Angeles. “It’s gorgeous – lavender and white with daisies around the letters,” she enthuses. “And it’s fast. I’ve always liked speed. And a…

BEN Chasny and Rick Tomlinson have something incredibly specific in common: they both have photos of themselves as children wearing nearly identically constructed Halloween costumes. Chasny says, “It was like the past poking into the present and telling us, ‘Do you guys get it yet? You are supposed to make a record together.’” Naturally, these photos are the front and back cover of said record, six instrumentals recorded at Tomlinson’s house in Todmorden over three days. Their appreciation for each other’s skills is all over the fluid tangles of interlocking guitars on Waves. They had recorded more guitar duo material, but Tomlinson says the record was pulling in a different direction, one that led them to the lengthy drone of “Paths Of Ocean Currents And Wind Belts”. Chasny says, “We both…

Jarak Qaribak WORLD CIRCUIT 8/10 THE Middle East is, to put it lightly, a complex region; especially so if you expand your view to include Arabic North Africa and the land stretching across to the Oxus, most of which comprises the ‘Middle World’ according to writer Tamim Ansary. It’s an area that’s been crucial to humanity, historically a cradle of civilisation, culture and learning, yet in recent centuries it’s been repeatedly failed, pillaged and divided by poor rulers and imperialist outsiders. Yet one thing that vaguely unites the Middle East, despite its myriad peoples and cultural currents imprisoned in often arbitrary national boundaries, is music. Most strikingly, their strong modal sense, with melodies slipping fluidly between major and minor keys, and their use of quarter-tone tuning, can make conventional Western…

LaVette! JAY-VEE 9/10 IN 1972, Bettye LaVette cut Child Of The Seventies for Atlantic Records in Muscle Shoals surrounded by the most fabled of Southern session aces – only to have her hopes dashed when the label inexplicably chose to shelve it. The Detroit native spent the next three decades exiled in the farthest fringes of the music biz, singing for her supper in thousands of dives and lounges. LaVette received some much-deserved attention in classic-soul circles in 2003 when A Woman Like Me, her first album of newly recorded material since 1982, got her a WC Handy Award for blues comeback album of the year. Two years later, she got some serious R.E.S.P.E.C.T. for the critically acclaimed I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise, produced by Joe Henry –…

The Complete San Francisco Moog 1968–72 VG+ 8/10 IN the telling, it sounds a bit like make-believe: the West Coast hippie who borrowed one of the very first Moog Modular Series III synthesisers back in 1968, developed his own live improvisatory style, opened up the ill-fated Altamont Free Festival at sunrise with 20 minutes of deep progressive synth, and inspired some of the giants of German kosmische music before vanishing from the scene. Even if half of what’s been ascribed to Doug McKechnie is true, it constitutes a significant upset in the recognised timeline of electronic music. But if he’s slipped through the gaps of music history, it’s for a prosaic enough reason. McKechnie primarily thought of himself as a live performer, and for four or so years he hauled…

ON a typically damp March evening in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, Kassi Valazza is making unnecessary excuses. “I’ve been on tour a lot lately,” she tells 40 or so people who have packed into Lombard House, a tiny pub in the northern end of the city, to hear a short acoustic set from the singer-songwriter. “I’m super healthy when I’m on tour. But I’ve been home for a bit and when I’m here, I wanna smoke all the time and eat all the food I’m not supposed to. All of which affects the voice. Basically, you’re catching me in the middle of a breakdown.” Valazza punctuates the last sentence with a laugh and then a rendition of “Light Green Fellow”, a 1971 song by one of her musical idols,…

IN a small turreted room in Wenlock Priory sits a trunk of clothes that belonged to Nick Drake. Gabrielle Drake has o owned the prior’s 16th-century private apartments since the 1980s, where she has meticulously and painstakingly restored one room after another. One room, however, has been turned over to her late brother, Nick. Aside from the trunk of his clothes, the plain details of a life are laid bare: boxes with letters, school reports, university essays, bank statements, tax returns, his recording contracts, photo albums and old passports along with posthumous publishing and royalty statements. Among other sources, including his own new interviews with Drake’s friends and fellow musicians, this material has been of critical importance to author Richard Morton Jack, who has spent five years working on his…

THE breezy guitar strum of Eddie Cochran’s “Three Steps To Heaven” is not a sound you’d instantly associate with two men renowned for taking drugs to make music to take drugs to. However, it’s the first thing you hear as Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) and Animal Collective’s Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) step onto the stage in near darkness and tap into their samplers. Kember fell back in love with doo-wop and classic rock’n’roll a few years ago when he moved house and was able to access his full vinyl collection again. Sampling some of those records formed the basis of the pair’s 2022 collaboration Reset, created during lockdown in Portugal where they both live, having remained friends and collaborators since Kember produced Panda Bear’s 2011 album Tomboy. On…

IPLAYER 8/10 EVEN those who consider themselves aficionados of British popular music of the ’50s and ’60s might not be familiar with Ottilie Patterson, but for a few years – between the Suez Crisis and the rise of The Beatles – she was the biggest live draw on the London scene, a homegrown singer possessed of a soaring blues voice that seem to have been beamed in from a different space and time. This excellent BBC documentary, presented by the African-American blues singer Dana Masters and using previously unheard interview footage, attempts to restore her reputation. Born in rural Ulster, Ottilie Patterson came to London in 1954, aged 22, having saved up £21 from her job as an art teacher, and quickly started to earn a reputation as the finest…

SEYMOUR STEIN Sire Records visionary (1942–2023) ONE of Talking Heads’ fondest memories was of Seymour Stein exuberantly singing one of their songs during a breakneck taxi ride across New York City. “He was our champion,” they wrote. “Some people can spot a diamond in the rough and Seymour was one of them.” As co-founder of Sire Records, Stein offered to sign Talking Heads in 1975 on the strength of one show. He was prepared to wait another year for them to agree. A similar scenario played out with the Ramones. Tipped off by his wife Linda, who’d seen them at CBGB the night before, Stein auditioned the band in June ’75. They eventually joined the label seven months later. Both episodes served to illustrate Stein’s tenacity when it came to…