Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i UNCUT

FROM inauspicious beginnings, as a scratch band of SEX shop denizens blagging their way onto the stage of the 100 Club for Malcolm McLaren’s 1976 punk festival, Siouxsie And The Banshees blazed a trail through the ’80s and beyond with one of the great post-punk discographies. Goth? Shoegaze? Trip-hop? They pretty much invented all that, while Siouxsie herself redefined what a frontwoman could be. As she embarks on her first proper tour since 2008, we celebrate her insurgent hits and seminal deep cuts. “METAL POSTCARD” (John Peel Session, 1977) Despite Siouxsie’s facile declaration that she was “more into high camp than death camps”, her penchant for swastikas cast a disturbing shadow over early Banshees gigs. Debuted on their first session for John Peel, and dedicated to Dadaist and anti-fascist artist…

“No-one’s hair is allowed to be longer than mine. We do a monthly measurement” FORGET your vaulted ceilings and your £800k Neve consoles. Adam Granduciel is happier recording in his own humble warehouse space in Burbank, north of LA. “I will argue that I have built maybe the greatest studio in the world!” he laughs. “I swear to God, it’s really dialled in right now. When you have your own place, everything is set up the way you want. It’s not like a pro studio, it’s right near the airport. But luckily the planes take off in the other direction.” At the moment, he’s there most days with his engineer, laying down initial ideas for what will become the new War On Drugs album on his beloved two-inch tape machine,…

Polly has been busier with poetry than music over the last few years – how did that influence her approach? As all of the songs are actually poems that she’s spent the last eight years writing, I would say this has been absolutely central to the concept of the whole record. It brings into strong focus whether a lyric is a poem or whether a poem can be a lyric. The lyrics come directly from the poems in Dorset, so they sometimes sound strange. That’s the beauty of it – there’s emotion there. People don’t need to sing in English – you can create an emotion from any words, sounds or language – look at Sigur Rós. Did Polly explain what she wanted to achieve with the songs? Yes, she…

PUTTING aside her recent collaborations with partner Francesco Turrisi, Rhiannon Giddens’ first solo album in six years arrives in mid-August. You’re The One NONESUCH is rooted in folk music, but filtered through her own uniquely diverse interests, with contributions from Turrisi, multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, bassist Jason Sypher, Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu and producer Jack Splash’s band. Special guest is Jason Isbell. Expect to hear conga, Cajun and piano accordions, guitars, a Western string section and Miami horns. “I hope that people just hear American music,” says Giddens. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock - it’s all there. I like to be where it meets organically.” On a more traditional tip, supergroup-of-sorts East Nash Grass issue Last Chance To Win MOUNTAIN FEVER that same week. The bluegrass sextet, comprising award-winning players…

DUSTER Stratosphere UP, 1998 Taking cues from Pavement’s Slanted And Enchanted and of course Codeine’s Frigid Stars, Duster are more popular than ever thanks to the mysteries of Spotify and TikTok’s algorithms. Why this music resonates so much nowadays is for the AI gods, but a more deserved resurgence is difficult to think of. 8/10 THE FOR CARNATION The For Carnation TOUCH AND GO, 2000 If Slint had anything as bold as a frontman, it was Brian McMahan. This took Spiderland’s broodier elements and used them as foundations for music that was even more spacious and detailed. The delicately poised “Grace Beneath The Pines” from the preceding “Promised Works” EP is McMahan’s finest hour. 9/10 LOW Things We Lost In The Fire KRANKY, 2001 Low’s music spans almost 30 years,…

HEIDI BERRY Firefly/Below The Waves (reissues, 1987/’89) GLASS MODERN 7/10, 9/10 A folk-rock introduction, followed by a lost treasure of modern song Across the late ’80s and ’90s, Heidi Berry recorded five albums for British independent labels Creation and 4AD. It’s a slender but profound body of work, yet to receive its due. Born in the USA, raised in Boston, she relocated to London in 1973; falling in with the Creation crowd in the mid-’80s, she recorded Firefly and Below The Waves. Firefly is a lovely folk-rock mini-album, six gorgeous, autumnal songs, played starkly with Martin Duffy, then of Felt, and members of The Weather Prophets, as her backing band. ButBelow The Waves is Berry’s first masterpiece. The ‘rock’ element of folk-rock has fallen away here, and the performances are…

THE Feminine Divine frequently employs a technique which characterises Dexys on record and stage, especially since Don’t Stand Me Down, with spoken-word dialogues used to dramatise a song’s themes or narrative conflicts. It’s a rarity these days, but as Rowland tells Uncut, on the records he grew up with, it was all the rage. “On soul records, there was always loads of talking,” he says, tracing its lineage. “Often a baritone like Barry White would come in, like Sean Read does on the new album’s ‘My Goddess Is’. The Chi-lites’ ‘Have You Seen Her?’ is a great example of how it works, first with speech. ‘One year ago today, I was happy as a lark’, Rowland recites from memory in an American accent. ‘Now I got to the movies, maybe…

BOLOGNA’S Festa dei Lavoratori, the Workers Day so passionately celebrated in Italy’s most socialist city, is quite literally a washout. Revellers and curious tourists should be packing out the Piazza Maggiore this time of the evening, loitering around the bars and the Fontana di Nettuno, but only a solitary road-sweeping van waits in front of the Basilica di San Petronio. On a grand stage in the square, the Bolognese soft-rock band Bertolli gamely perform to a dwindling huddle of umbrellas as the torrential rain pours down. It’s a dramatic setting for the final performance of Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi’s debut European tour as a duo. These dates – taking place in Paris, Dublin, Bern and a handful of Italian cities – are also O’Rourke’s first performances outside Japan for…

“SOMETHING characterises my work over and over again,” says Anohni. “There’s often an eight to 10-year gestation period between composition and release.” That unhurried arc between thought and expression might not apply to her crackling new album, the spontaneous soul stylings of My Back Was A Bridge For You, but over 25 years releasing music, the Britishborn, New York-formed transgender artist has very carefully curated a body of work of extreme beauty, vulnerability and unsparing emotion. Born in Chichester, replanted to the Netherlands and then California, she moved to New York in the early ’90s to study experimental theatre. There, as part of the avant-garde collective Blacklips, she started singing songs to backing tracks in nightclubs before forming the ensemble The Johnsons. Since then, fostering close associations with the likes…

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY Directed by Fyzal Boulifa Starring Abdellah El Hajjouji, Aicha Tebbae, Antoine Reinartz Opens July 7 Cert To be confirmed 8/10 LA SYNDICALISTE Directed by Jean-Paul Salomé Starring Isabelle Huppert, Grégory Gadebois, François-Xavier Demaison Opens June 30 Cert 15 7/10 INLAND Directed by Fridtjof Ryder Starring Rory Alexander, Mark Rylance, Kathryn Hunter Opens June 16 Cert 15 7/10 SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING Directed by Quentin Dupieux Starring Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anaïs Demoustier Opens July 7 Cert 15 7/10 SUNLIGHT Directed by Claire Dix Starring Barry Ward, Liam Carney, Maureen Beattie Opens June 16 Cert To be confirmed 8/10…

BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You DOMINO “Everyone dies in the end/So there’s nothing to hide…” Difficult truths joyously sung, with Louisville neighbour Dane Waters on empathetic harmonies. DOT ALLISON Consciousology SONIC CATHEDRAL Infusing the dewy folk-pop of 2021’s Heart-Shaped Scars with the swooning comedown grandeur of prime One Dove, aided by Hannah Peel and Ride’s Andy Bell. KIERAN HEBDEN & WILLIAM TYLER “Darkness, Darkness” PSYCHIC HOTLINE There have been many versions of The Youngbloods’ haunting folk-rock touchstone down the years, but this slow-burning sampladelic soul groover might just be the best. GUNN-TRUSCINSKINACE Glass Band THREE LOBED RECORDINGS The Gunn-Truscinski Duo become a trio with the addition of fellow traveller Bill Nace (of Body/Head). Elemental jams ensue. ÉROL JOSUÉ Pèlerinaj VILLAGE HUT The director of Haiti’s National Bureau…

How was it to work without the band? The main advantage is that it’s been incredibly quick. It’s usually quick when we make things as Fontaines, but [for this record] we’ve not really had to check in on anyone, there’s been no chance of anything being compromised by democracy and there’s never been too many cooks in the kitchen – not that we have that problem too badly in the band – but the speed at which you can write and produce as a solo artist is really nice. The disadvantage is that it’s fucking lonely, and I laugh an awful lot less when I’m on my own than I do when I’m with the lads. It sounds like you needed to exorcise some demons for “All Of The People” –…

In Times New Roman… MATADOR 9/10 JOSH HOMME is at his best when he’s on the ropes. Helpfully, at least for fans of Queens Of The Stone Age, that seems to be oft en. The group’s early success, culminating in their third album, 2003’s Songs For The Deaf, came out of the splintering of Kyuss and then of Screaming Trees, for whom Homme played live guitar in the Dust era; a certain fluidity in the lineup also complicated preparations for 2005’s Lullabies To Paralyze, especially the sacking of wild-card bassist Nick Oliveri the previous year. The spectres of trauma and bad behaviour have continued to linger: …Like Clockwork, released in 2013 and seen by many as the band’s greatest record, was inspired by a horrific health scare and long recuperation,…

This is only The Clientele’s second full-length album since 2009 – do you think your songs benefit from a longer germination period? Doing nothing is 99 per cent of the battle. The songs are actually done very quickly. Once there’s an idea for a song, it’s recorded immediately. The arrangements and production are what take the time. But not time spent fiddling around – it’s time doing nothing, just waiting for the right counter-melody or idea to arrive. Memories of the summer of 1997 are the basis for many songs here – what drew you back there? It was the summer my mother died. I’d just moved to London from Hampshire. This wonderful writer, Nick Papadimitriou, once told me I should “map out” the spaces I’m from – the M4 motorway,…

In the run-up to the new LP, what were your thoughts? It wasn’t preconceived – at my best, I try to be with the process and not too far ahead of it. How did you find the strength to finish the record? I’m not through grief, I live with my grief. But grief is more to me than sorrow – it’s collaboration, it’s love, it’s doing my best to convey what Eric stood for. It’s mystic and impossible to describe. It is important to me that our work is not defined by our losses. The Greater Wings is a memorial to our joy, our determination, our loyalty and the experiences we shared that were timeless and life-affirming. What prompted you to amend some of the lyrics? It was my way of…

You wrote a lot of this album while living and working on a farm in northern California. What was that like? We had to prepare the soil, take out all the weeds. A lot of it was just loading dirt to different parts of the area – real grunt work! But it was very meditative and I found it was really nice for creativity. You’d see the redwoods, you’d see green grass, the moon was huge in the sky and the stars were so clear. That really influenced me a lot. I wasn’t writing about nature per se, but it was definitely opening up my inner world. The title, Dear Departed, suggests some kind of elegy… A lot of my songs are about leaving, so I liked it because it works…

Índia (reissue, 1973) MR BONGO 9/10 IN the mid-’70s, in opposition to the repressive fist of the military junta, the Brazilian counterculture flourished, finding their métier in resistance through dropping out and turning on. The return of two exiled musicians and legends, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, had something to do with it; Veloso’s long hair and feyness was a defiant finger to conservative sensibilities, for example. But there was more going on here, with ragtag assemblages of ‘curtição’ and ‘desbunde’ (trip-outs and dropouts), artists, filmmakers and musicians, all gathering to get free on the beaches of Ipanema, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro. The figurehead for all this activity was Tropicálista singer and icon, the late Gal Costa. With her air of insouciant cool and her history as a…

NEXT time, Beverly Glenn-Copeland returns with The Ones Ahead, his first new album in almost 20 years, Bonnie “Prince” Billy is back with Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You and Dot Allison unveils Consciousology. There’s also PiL’s End Of World, Hiss Golden Messenger’s Jump For Joy, Osees’ Intercepted Message, Rhiannon Giddens’ You’re The One and more. Archivally speaking, we’ll be taking a look at Evenings At The Village Gate, a previously unheard set from John Coltrane & Eric Dolphy, reissues from Nick Lowe, proto-Super Furries Ffa CoffiPawb, Elephant Six gang Elf Power, and much more. TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

PELLICCI’S is an East London institution. Dating from 1900, this family-run café is an old-school, Art Deco hold-out amidst the nearby hipster joints. One regular customer attests to its status as a local cultural treasure: “It’s a valuable place,” says Kevin Rowland as he takes a seat at one of the Formica tables. Today Rowland is as well-dressed as ever – in a light-grey, checked soft cap, high turn-up blue jeans, blue-striped white Breton jersey, “fine-meshed”, he advises, “to keep out the rain”, and white shoes. Kevin Rowland in 2023 is surprisingly buoyant. There’s no evidence of the tense, isolated figure who struggled to deal with Dexys Midnight Runners’ success during the mid-’80s and his own cocaine addiction in the 1990s. He’s relaxed, friendly even, as he passes the salt…

TEAR DOWN THE WALLS (ELEKTRA, 1964) Jointly billed with fellow folkie Vince Martin, Neil’s agile guitar-playing and gift for harmony are much in evidence. The album highlight is Neil’s existential “Wild Child In A World Of Trouble”. BLEECKER & MACDOUGAL (ELEKTRA, 1965) Neil’s first solo album is a richly intense delight, from forlorn folk-blues ballads to spirited movers like “Candy Man”, originally written for Roy Orbison. As with its predecessor, John Sebastian and Felix Pappalardi are among the backup. FRED NEIL (CAPITOL, 1966) Arguably his greatest moment, featuring definitive takes of “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’”, plus the aching “Badi-Da” and a vivacious “Cocaine Blues” (both with Canned Heat’s Al ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson on harmonica). SESSIONS (CAPITOL, 1968) Producer Nick Venet frames Neil in simple acoustic surroundings (studio hands include…

LAST year, in their garden back in Japan, a camera was set up on a patch of earth sewn with seeds, and the picture beamed around the world to the Flowers In 20th And 21st Century Art exhibition in Dortmund. “I said, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to have an eight or 12-hour delay,’” says O’Rourke, “because it’s night in Japan when your gallery in Germany is open. And they were like, ‘No, it’s gotta be live.’ They asked us to set up these complicated LED lights, so for four or five months we had this one tiny area of our garden that was totally overlit. After a few months, everything else in the garden was fine, but this one flower that was supposed to be a worldwide sensation wasn’t coming…

In 2014, The Boss set up the Bruce Springsteen Archives to release official bootlegs – a boon for obsessive fans. Here are five essential instalments: THE AGORA, CLEVELAND, OHIO (1978) After a lengthy legal battle sidelined him for three years, Springsteen had to prove himself all over again on the Darkness Tour. This Cleveland show is the E Street Band at their most driven. 8/10 NASSAU COLISEUM, UNIONDALE, NEW YORK (1980) The tour behind The River is legendary for hours-long sets. Springsteen runs through nearly 40 songs, including Wilson Pickett and CCR covers, and his energy barely flags. 9/10 BRENDAN BYRNE ARENA, EAST RUTHERFORD, NEW YORK (1984) At the height of his popularity Springsteen played a 10-night stand at the Meadowlands. The setlists barely changed from one night to the…

“ONE day I got a call from my editor, Peter Knobler at Crawdaddy, asking me if I wanted to shoot this young kid who writes these amazing lyrics. I didn’t know who he was talking about, but Peter said he’s going to be the next Bob Dylan. The next Bob Dylan? There is no next Bob Dylan. There’s just Dylan. I was a huge Dylan fan, obviously, so I was curious. I went down to this club on Bleecker Street, and the sign out front read, ‘Tonight: Bruce Springstein’! I thought I was going to be shooting a nice Jewish kid from New Jersey. The lighting in there was terrible, but I did manage to get some good shots of Springsteen. “So I went down to New Jersey where he…

GREATEST DAYS RELEASED 16 JUNE The Take That jukebox musical comes to the big screen with Aisling Bea and Alice Lowe starring as teenage friends reconvening, 25 years after the greatest concert of their lives. THE FLASH RELEASED 16 JUNE DC belatedly enters the multiverse as Ezra Miller uses his super speed to travel back in time to save his mother, but inadvertently becomes trapped in an alternate reality along with General Zod (Michael Shannon), Batman (Michael Keaton) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle). ASTEROID CITY RELEASED 23 JUNE Wes Anderson returns with his latest immaculate 1950s moodboard, the tale of a Junior Stargazer convention that goes mysteriously awry, with his customary players joined by Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe and Steve Carell. THE SUPER-8 YEARS RELEASED 23 JUNE Nobel prize-winning…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine MADE HIS MARK I was both surprised and somewhat saddened to come across your obit on Mark Stewart [Take 314]. The Pop Group were a highly individual outfit, and I was fortunate to catch them live a couple of times. Firstly, a double-header with This Heat back in the day at the Place Theatre, Euston, and boy, you couldn’t wish for a more unique approach to sonics than these two outfits provided. Secondly, a few years ago at the tiny club Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar (now defunct) in Brighton, where they played a storming set that to my ears, was superior even to my initial experience of them. Mark Stewart was on fine form and a commanding presence, full of bonhomie and still…

KATE & ANNA McGARRIGLE Kate & Anna McGarrigle WARNER BROS, 1976 My mother’s first album. So obviously I discovered it because I was born! But it really is considered one of the classic records of that era, the ’70s. There’s certain schools of thought which put that record up there with Abbey Road and Exile On Main St – it has a similar iconic vibe. The more I listen to it now, the more I’m really impressed by the quality of the sound, the way it was recorded, the economy of the production that Joe Boyd achieved. And of course my mother’s voice with her sister Anna singing, it’s just so beautiful. It’s a very auspicious item to have in the family pantheon. EURYTHMICS Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)…

IN Quantum Criminals, writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay excavate the deep mysteries and myths of the Steely Dan extended universe. It’s not a straightforward band biog, though you’re likely to learn a new detail about the band on virtually every page. Instead, it’s a rich examination of the Dan’s legacy, with Pappademas’s keen and witty insight complemented beautifully by LeMay’s portraits of “the ramblers, wild gamblers, and other sole survivors” – both real and fictional – who populate the Steely Dan saga. From guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter to “Deacon Blues”’ Expanding Man, the book offers Dan-iacs a fresh and revealing look at what Pappademas calls “a cult band whose catalogue, paradoxically, includes at least a dozen enduring radio hits”. The timing couldn’t be better. Steely Dan are having…

What was it you wanted? In shops – and available at Uncut.co.uk/single – on June 15 is our fully updated, 148-page, Shadow Kingdom-embracing, Bootleg Series-wallowing Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to Bob Dylan. Every Dylan album reviewed in depth, alongside Bob’s key meetings with the UK music press. Contains multitudes!… Squaring The Circle, Anton Corbijn’s feature-length documentary about legendary sleeve designers Hipgnosis, is coming to cinemas and on-demand services from July 14 (via a premiere at Sundance London on July 7). The new trailer features pithy recollections from Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Robert Plant: “They’re hucksters!”… The Coral are set to return on Sept 8 with not one but two new LPs: Sea Of Mirrors is their 11th album proper, co-produced by The High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan and…

1 EIKO ISHIBASHI Drive My Car Uncut heads to Bologna to meet Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke on page 74, so we begin this month’s CD with a piece from the former’s superb Drive My Car soundtrack. Here, lounge and bossa nova meet melancholic strings within airy production. 2 CORY HANSON Wings Let’s gloss over the title of the Wand mainman’s latest album, Western Cum, and enjoy hard-rocking tracks such as this. As with his usual band, there’s a definite early Radiohead feel and Hanson’s guitar work is as sublime here as that comparison suggests. 3 THIS IS THE KIT Stuck In A Room Careful Of Your Keepers is the new album from Kate Stables’ collective. Produced by Gruff Rhys, tracks like “Stuck In A Room” showcase their polyrhythmic gallop and…

To Bring You My Love ISLAND, 1995 After the unbridled ferocity of her first two albums, Harvey switched gears, employing Flood as producer and bringing in John Parish and Bad Seed Mick Harvey to populate a gothic landscape which lost none of the ferocity, but understood the power of restraint. The title track, a swampy blues with biblical undertones, is a masterpiece of mood and menace. 9/10 White Chalk ISLAND, 2007 Flood and Parish are joined by Eric Drew Feldman and the Dirty Three’s Jim White in an abrupt change of style, as Harvey opts to play piano and sing quietly, near the top of her register. The mood is haunted and austere, closer to folk than blues. On the atmospheric “Grow Grow Grow”, she captures a mood of bruised…

TONY ALLEN & ADRIAN YOUNGE JID018 JAZZ IS DEAD RECORDS 7/10 Posthumous release from the legendary Nigerian drummer In August 2018, around 18 months before his death, Afrobeat titan Tony Allen entered an LA studio with producer/multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge to record a series of jam sessions. “Give me something that you think is really hard for me to follow,” instructs Younge at one point; Allen responds with a particularly lopsided Afrobeat groove that mutates into a track called “No Beginning”, completed by Younge’s syncopated bassline and some woozy, beautifully arranged horns. Elsewhere, Younge (multitasking on wonderfully filthy, distorted keyboards and wah-wah-heavy guitars) and his horn octet create some fine pastiches of Fela Kuti’s Egypt 80 band around Allen’s beats.JOHN LEWIS ANOHNI AND THE JOHNSONS My Back Was A Bridge For…

So you see this album as the final part of a trilogy? I do. Lullabies… and Era Vulgaris were like trying to find the open window to enter the next phase, and it felt that …Like Clockwork was [that]. Now this is the brutal truth of them all. That means you can start The Wizard Of Oz right now, and they should link up. It feels like you’ve taken what you learned from the last two – what works – onto this record… I always look for cycles of three, like I already had this Rated R concept when the first record was going down. The first record is stamping your ground for where you’re starting, the second one is the experiment and the third is encapsulating all you’ve learned.…

PERHAPS not surprisingly for a member of Black Sabbath, the forthcoming memoir by Geezer Butler has prompted a little controversy. As he has looked back on his life, the 73-year-old born in Birmingham as Terence Michael Joseph Butler has been reminded of good times – great success with Black Sabbath, for whose pivotal early albums he wrote the lyrics; finding true love and the consolations of family life – but also less good ones. Geezer’s struggles with the depression that led him to write “Paranoid” in a time when doctors were often ill-informed on matters of mental health are both troubling, and startlingly contemporary. The past is also filled with greyer areas. Black Sabbath’s commercial success in the early 1970s made them a great deal of money – but their…

KEVIN Rowland apart, trombonist Big Jim Paterson is the only constant across all six Dexys albums, having answered Melody Maker’s ad to join a “new wave soul band” back in 1978. “Whatever we do has got to always have Jim involved in some way,” says Rowland. “He gets it totally, so deeply. He really is my soul brother, and without that it’s not the same. He’s also a brilliant musician in that he’s music college-trained, so he can notate anything in a moment and communicate it to a session player. He’s the soul of Dexys.” “I can’t get a much better compliment than that,” Paterson says, talking to Uncut from his Aberdeen home. “It’s an incredible thing to say. I love the man so much that I’m starting to get…

1962 Howard Scott and Harold Ray Brown form The Creators in Long Beach, California Mid-’60s Having added more members, The Creators release several singles on Dore Records 1968 The Creators become Nightshift 1969 Eric Burdon spots Nightshift in an LA club and they begin playing and recording together as Eric Burdon & War 1971 Burdon leaves and War continue to perform and record as a collective Summer 1972 They start work on The World Is A Ghetto in their Long Beach rehearsal space, and record the album at Crystal Industries in Hollywood February 2, 1973 “The World Is A Ghetto”peaks at No 7 in the US 1990s Jordan reforms War with a new lineup. The remaining surviving original members form the Lowrider Band to play their versions of the band’s catalogue…

“IF you want to know who Fred Neil is, just listen to the lyrics of ‘Everybody’s Talkin’”, says his close friend Ric O’Barry. “I’m going where the sun keeps shining… Going where the weather suits my clothes’. He’s not making up some contrived song, it’s really him.” Neil’s disillusion with the music business, alongside his search for escape, is pressed deep into the grooves of his most famous song. Initially released on 1967’s Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin’” took on a whole other life when Harry Nilsson’s version soundtracked John Schlesinger’s Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy two years later. It earned Nilsson a Grammy and sold over a million copies. The scores of artists who covered “Everybody’s Talkin’” included Willie Nelson, Stevie Wonder, CSN, Bill Withers, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Bobby Womack and…

JIM O’ROURKE EUREKA DRAG CITY, 1999 O’Rourke’s first album of songs is a wry, sideways look at the lush pop of the ’60s and ’70s, dissected and put back into new shapes. JIM O’ROURKE INSIGNIFICANCE DRAG CITY, 2001 His ‘rock’ album, created with help from Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche, is enthralling and hilarious in its misanthropy. SONIC YOUTH SONIC NURSE GEFFEN, 2004 A peak for late-period SY, this progressive, noisy epic has O’Rourke’s fingerprints all over it. WILCO A GHOST IS BORN NONESUCH, 2004 O’Rourke got to live out his fantasies of being a big-shot ’70s record producer on Wilco’s expensive fifth LP. Here, classic rock and folk melt into motorik beats and drones. JIM O’ROURKE SIMPLE SONGS DRAG CITY, 2015 Probably his final singer-songwriter album, this is a…

ONE reason the book happened was because I taught a songwriting workshop with this group called School Of Song. It was all over Zoom. This was last January and February – before the tour started. I had the best time putting the lesson plans and the homework stuff together. It was such a fun experience to be thinking about music in that way, talking about chord progressions and contrary motion and how the bass relates to the vocal and melodic symmetry. All things that you don’t often talk about, and how engaged the other songwriters in the workshop were. I approach my own songwriting in the same way now as I ever have. Writing is a physical thing to me. I only write lyrics while singing. They have to be…

Electric Ballroom, London, May 15 IN recent decades, we’ve taken the electric guitar for granted. This is a weird, advanced piece of technology that hardly anyone on Earth had seen until the late 1950s. There are stories of Hank Marvin owning the first Fender Stratocaster in England and other budding guitarists travelling to his Finsbury Park flat from all over London to gaze at it in wonder, like they were viewing a relic of the True Cross. Mdou Moctar, who built his first guitar from broom handles and bicycle brake cables in his native Niger, still plays his Fender Strat like it’s an exotic, freakish machine. Before each song, he stares at his instrument with awe and wonderment. He strokes the strings and obsessively fiddles with the tuning pegs. He…

ANDY ROURKE The Smiths’ ingenious bassist (1964-2023) “THE bass sound in The Smiths came about from me trying to overcompensate,” Andy Rourke once explained to Bass Guitar. “Because there was only me and Johnny, in the early days, we both played overtime to make the biggest sound possible.” The seeds of The Smiths were nurtured in Rourke and Marr’s Manchester schooldays. Having first met in 1975 aged 11, the two aspiring guitarists would jam together on lunch breaks, their musical bond eventually reinforced in a series of local funk bands, among them Freak Party. The latter, crucially, saw Rourke switch to bass. Replacing The Smiths’ original bassist Dale Hibbert in late 1982, Rourke brought melodic invention and a supple groove to the band. Stanley Clarke and James Jamerson were among…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Bruce Springsteen. 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, July 12, 2023. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+8A We’re getting loads of requests to play an oldie by The Rolling Stones. Tough, I’m playing something else instead (3-4-6-3-4-3-4) 8 (See 1 across) 9 Identify a single by Paul McCartney (4-3) 11 Keith _______, originally keyboardist with The Nice (7) 12 Tommy ___, went “Dizzy” with ’60s chart-topper (3) 13 The ____, saw this Big Country album coming (4) 14+23A Welsh band whose only hit was “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They”…