Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i UNCUT

Lightning strikes itself! The latest Ultimate Music Guide is our authoritative look at Television, featuring in-depth reviews of all Tom Verlaine’s albums with and without the band, as well as those of associated acts like Richard Hell & The Voidoids and The Heartbreakers. It’s in shops on October 19 or available to order now from shop.kelsey.co.uk/Uncut… On sale now is the latest in our Archive Collection series, The 500 Greatest Albums Of The 1970s… Ranked! Sticky Fingers or Unknown Pleasures? Hejira or Hunky Dory? Find out where they all place inside… Anthony Foutz’s lost 1970 sci-fi movie Saturation 70, starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips and Brian Jones’ son Julian Jones-Leitch, is the subject of a new book by journalist Chris Campion. It will feature never-before-seen images of Parsons, plus on-set…

BILL RYDER-JONES Iechyd Da DOMINO The first great album of 2024 is ready for departure from West Kirby: casually classic songwriting, kids’ choirs, disco strings and Mick Head reciting Ulysses… NIECY BLUES Exit Simulation KRANKY Stunning ambient neo-gospel debut from the South Carolina singer and producer, joining the dots between Julianna Barwick and Jamila Woods. SLEAFORD MODS “Big Pharma” ROUGH TRADE Jason Williamson fires a righteous bile missile at anti-vaxxers, Punk IPA and the commodification of dissent: “Even my dark disregard for anything is now monetised…” JAMES ELKINGTON Me Neither NO QUARTER Delightful crop of instrumental bagatelles that beg to be used to introduce the characters in a quirky European documentary about a remote mountain village. UNDERWORLD “Denver Luna (acapella)” VIRGIN Proof that the key rhythms were always in Karl’s…

“I was erratic, impetuous, prone to getting in trouble. But I feel quite well-balanced these days” WRECKLESS Eric’s recently released Leisureland is a concept album of sorts about a stagnant English seaside town where “Asbo supermarkets” are opened by inane local radio DJs and “methane gas seeps silent to the breeze”. Having grown up in Newhaven, Eric Goulden knows the territory, though it feels like he’s spent most of his life trying to escape it. Following stints in London, France and Germany, he’s spent the last 11 years living in upstate New York with his American partner, singer-songwriter Amy Rigby. It’s therefore a surprise to discover that he’s in the process of moving back to an English seaside town – Cromer to be precise. “We’ve always liked it,” says Goulden,…

ELLEN ARKBRO Sounds While Waiting W.25TH 8/10 New hallucinatory organ works, deep and droning The core factor that distinguishes the work of Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro from the softer, more poetic compositions of many of her peers, is steely-eyed focus: her music is almost brutal in its clarity and simplicity. So it is, again, with Sounds While Waiting, where she returns to the organ, and explores the possibilities of sustained chords on multiple organs, played in the resonant space of a church in Unnaryd, Sweden. Simple gestures, clearly explored, but what heaven is the outcome: the five pieces here are dense vibrations of spirit, the thrum and huff of organs divinely detailed. JON DALE MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON Les Jardins Mystiques Vol 1 BRAINFEEDER 8/10 Four-LP introduction to the magical world of…

Did you have a specific landscape in mind for the new LP? I always look at songwriting and recording like record collecting. There are certain sounds, structures and resolutions that create a physical reaction in me when I hear them in other people’s records, so I want to be able to recreate that with the records I make. Trees, Fairport and Pentangle will always be a starting point, as well as the weirder sides of psych rock, jazz and hip-hop. Also, newer US West Coast artists like Weyes Blood, Marina Allen, Sam Burton and Sylvie are influencing my writing and recording now. What are your lyrical springboards? Either stories or relationships – the normal stuff. With “The Thorn”, I wanted to write a riddle song almost like “Scarborough Fair” or…

BRIAN AUGER’S OBLIVION EXPRESS Complete Oblivion SOUL BANK MUSIC 8/10 All aboard for a rewarding journey into jazz prog After 1960s chart success with Julie Driscoll and Trinity, keyboardist Auger sidestepped the mainstream for the progressive jazz flavours of his next band. This boxset brings together all six albums Oblivion Express released between ’70 and ’75, all lovingly remastered, allowing listeners to follow the path Auger navigated through jazz fusion, with stops along the way to test the waters of Latin rhythms and disco. The group’s evolving lineup (including guitarists Jim Mullen and Jack Mills, and drummers Robbie McIntosh and Steve Ferrone) enabled him to switch horses wherever inspiration led him, be it to the celebratory soul of “Fill Your Head With Laughter” (from A Better Land), the lean and…

What was it about Dorothy Parker’s poetry that had such an effect on you? I didn’t know much about her when I came across Not So Deep As A Well in a Montreal bookstore. When I read the first poem, “Threnody”, I heard a song, and as I turned the pages it kept happening. I hadn’t written music before, but it seemed like a fun thing to try so I bought the book. But the more I worked on the songs, the more emotional it became. Channeling all that sadness was very powerful. It helped me grow as a person. Did you have an audience in mind? I was just doing it for fun! I recorded the songs mostly to remember them. I think it was about halfway through that I…

AS we near the end of the year, we’ll be taking a look at new releases from Raze Regal & White Denim Inc, Iron & Wine, Bar Italia, Kacey Johansing, Black Grape, Smoke Fairies, OMD, Hilary Woods, Chris Stapleton and many more. Over in the Archives section, there’ll be Jimi Hendrix live, Scritti Politti, The Move, Oasis and Unknown Mortal Orchestra reissued, early-21st-century Caribbean recordings unearthed, and a host of other audial treats. EMAIL TOM.PINNOCK@KELSEY.CO.UK…

EVERY band from the underground at that time had a lot of common experiences. We’d played all the same clubs, we knew all the same people, we had hung out at all the same shitholes, and so I understood them intuitively. I’ll admit, I wasn’t a diehard Nirvana fan. But after seeing them at work in the studio and the way the band interacted with each other – the trusting nature that Kurt had with the other guys and the frankness that they shared as a band – I immediately warmed to them and I grew to admire them tremendously while I was working on that record. Kurt was a unique thinker, and his aesthetic was more refined than a lot of his peers. He made himself more vulnerable and…

I WAS hired [as Geffen’s in-house PR] about five or six weeks before the album came out, and I was sent straight out to Seattle to oversee a New York Times interview. My band had played in Seattle in the summer of 1990, so I had this immediate bond with Kurt because we’d slept on the same floors. I was like, ‘This is an easy job, I don’t know why everyone says they’re so difficult!’ But once he saw me within the record label, it became a bit more distant. I remember hearing In Utero for the first time and being like, ‘Jesus, this is abrasive! It’s really not Nevermind, is it?’ So I was nervous about sending it out, I was expecting some hostility. But actually that didn’t happen…

IT wasn’t until 2013’s Southeastern that Jason Isbell began to work out who exactly he was writing for. The Georgian had been in the business for a decade – first with the Drive-By Truckers and then as a solo artist, but on Southeastern the newly sober Isbell began to focus on a single imaginary individual and make them his audience. “You can’t write for everybody in the audience because then you get Big Macs,” he explains. “So you write for one person – and that person has to be kind of an asshole, this one imaginary audience member who wants to enjoy the song but has heard an awful lot of them.” Thus armed, Isbell embarked on the illuminating, Grammy-strewn second half of his career, releasing a string of richly…

“I’M not really a photographer,” Henry Diltz tells Uncut. “I just hang out with my friends and take pictures!” As modest statements go, this is up there with the best of them. Diltz’s friends include ’60s and ’70s rock royalty, while his photographs have graced more than 250 album covers, from James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James to The Doors’ Morrison Hotel. He shot Hendrix at Woodstock, Paul and Linda McCartney for the cover of LIFE magazine and Joni Mitchell at home. But for Diltz, it is his relationship with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young that runs the deepest – and is the focus of a new photographic book, CSN&Y: Love The One You’re With. “I first picked up a camera in 1966,” says Henry Diltz. “That…

I WROTE George Clinton’s memoir with him in 2013/’14, and then George’s camp connected me to Sly’s camp. But for years, it was a non-starter, firstly due to his condition – he was still using – and also the people around him were nice and enthusiastic, but they couldn’t really put together a structured understanding of what it’d take to write a book. Then after trying for five years, Arlene [Hirschkowitz] called me. She was his former girlfriend who had come back into the camp and was managing him. Suddenly I thought, ‘This has a chance of happening’, as she was able to do all the things that couldn’t be done before to keep him focused. She decided that there was no way he could go forward while he was…

QED PERFORMANCE 3.5MM EXTENSION CABLE (1.5M) £36/qed.co.uk If you’re using your cans in wired mode with a mobile, that’s one thing. But if you’re using them with a hi-fi, you’ll often find the cable just isn’t long enough. QED’s extensions are some of the best you can get. TIDAL HI-FIPLUS SUBSCRIPTION TIDAL’s ‘Hi-Fi Plus’ tier remains the source of the biggest, most high-resolution and best-sounding streams around – to put it bluntly, it wipes the floor with the sound of Spotify’s free tier. Once you’ve heard it, you’ll never go back. IN ASSOCIATION WITH…

LATE November sees the long-awaited return of outlaw country royalty Jessi Colter. Produced by Margo Price and mixed by Colter’s son, Shooter Jennings, Edge Of Forever (APPALACHIA RECORD CO) covers a lot of ground, from honky-tonk and gospel to re-recorded works, collaborations with daughter Jenni and unheard songs written during the ’70s with late husband Waylon Jennings. One such example is “I Wanna Be With You”, featuring Price, whose band also serve as backup throughout. Another album with strong family connections lands that week: North Mississippi Allstars’ Luther Dickinson issues Magic Music For Family Folk (NEW WEST), mostly consisting of covers of favourite songs from his childhood by The Meters, Staple Singers, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson and others. Dickinson’s mother and daughters make an appearance, as do…

Tell us about the cabin you recorded in… About two or three years ago it was like a raw shell of a building and I helped to restore it. It’s an incredible place to record now. It’s in a really beautiful area, it sits right on the edge of Shenandoah National Park, right next to some of the most popular hiking trails on the East Coast of America. It’s pretty wild. It’s got good views, it’s really quiet, really comfortable. I think as long as we live in this area, I’m going to use it to record in, because you just can’t beat it. You used to make this kind of experimental collage-y music when you were younger, didn’t you? When I was a teenager, I was interested in making…

HAROLD BUDD The Pavilion Of Dreams OBSCURE, 1978 Written over the course of six years while Budd was lecturing at the California Institute For The Arts, The Pavilion Of Dreams – recorded quickly in London and released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label – is a window onto the composer’s early adventures in classical minimalism. “Bismillahi ‘Rrahman ‘Rrahim”, featuring languid alto saxophone from Marion Brown, demonstrates Budd’s early debt to jazz, while the magical “Juno” shows the genesis of his distinct “soft pedal” piano style. 8/10 HAROLD BUDD & BRIAN ENO WITH DANIEL LANOIS The Pearl EDITIONS EG, 1984 Budd and Eno’s first true collaborative record was 1980’s Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror, but equally worthy of investigation is The Pearl. Recorded in Hamilton, Ontario, with assistance from Canadian producer…

“IT was like the eye of the storm,” says Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, with stoic understatement. “Things were kinda calm, but there was a lot of stuff swirling around. People talk about those things, but it boiled down to this band that managed to keep making music and keep the eye on the prize.” That, in a nutshell, is the story of In Utero. For much of the year leading up to its recording at Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studios in February of 1993, it seemed unlikely that Nirvana would ever make a third album. There were periods when Kurt Cobain was practically estranged from his bandmates, focused on trying to kick heroin – itself an attempt to self-medicate for a crippling stomach complaint – and trying to be a good father to…

I’D just learned to drive, so I would have bought In Utero on tape so I could listen to it in the car. I loved it – it was just really heavy. My first band used to cover “Heart-Shaped Box”. Even with Mogwai, who started a couple of years later, there are obvious influences of Nirvana in what we do: the dynamics, the big jumps in volume, and hopefully the spirit as well. I wasn’t too interested in the celebrity/drug stuff, because it was getting a bit tabloidy, a bit soap opera-ish. In fact I think I stopped reading the interviews. I got a sense that [Cobain] was bored of being famous and was talking crap for a laugh. And because I was young, I probably didn’t quite understand the…

JUST a few months before he released Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, Will Oldham debuted it for the public as a film. “I remember listening to the album with my wife and remarking that I wished other people could hear it in a room with a great sound system. I wanted them to listen uninterrupted and hear all of these amazing contributions.” He asked a local filmmaker named Ryan Daly to assemble a film, which they debuted in April at the Speed Museum. “Ryan is a collector of what he calls ‘orphan footage’, which are found reels. With my gentle suggestions here and there, he put together a full film using different archival collections for each song. There are shots from A-bomb tests, houses being disintegrated in the desert, and…

GREG Errico was a 14-year-old Bay Area student when he started drumming for local dance band the VIPs, before graduating to Freddie And The Stone Souls, led by Sly’s younger brother. When Sly joined what became Sly & The Family Stone’s first rehearsal in December 1966 – Errico found himself a willing participant in Stone’s sonic quest. “‘Dance To The Music’ was a conscious effort to write something people could relate to,” says Errico. “Once they were listening, he could talk about what want he wanted. That’s when he became very prolific.” Errico’s drumming brought rhythmic pulse to Stone’s creative vision, including two American No 1 singles, “Everyday People” in 1969 and “Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin)” the following year. But in 1971, Errico walked out of…

UNDERDOG (1967) The debut single on the band’s first album, A Whole New Thing, could be a microcosm of what was to come – saxophonist Jerry Martini plays the melody to the children’s song “Frère Jacques” before the track bursts into a full psych-rock jam, filled with martial horns and socially conscious lyrics. DANCE TO THE MUSIC (1967) Their ebulliently dancefloor-friendly second single – also the title track from their second album – was effectively the band introducing themselves to the audience, instrument by instrument, in the style of “Memphis Soul Stew”, “Tighten Up” or “The Intro And The Outro”. It turned out to be their breakthrough international hit, going Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic and ushering in the age of psychedelic soul. EVERYDAY PEOPLE (1969) The…

DAVE Chisholm seems uniquely placed to write a graphic novel about Miles Davis. Not only is he an acclaimed cartoonist – with numerous sci-fi and detective titles in his CV, as well as a graphic novel about Charlie Parker – but he’s a trained jazz trumpeter who’s been obsessed with Davis’s music since his early teens. “He’s always been an artistic North Star for me,” says Chisholm, from his home in Rochester, New York. “I was listening to his quintet albums like Miles Smiles in high school, which made me learn the trumpet. I was constantly painting pictures of Miles in my teens. So this project really is a dream come true.” Miles Davis And The Search For The Sound starts with Davis recovering from his stroke in the mid…

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Some late-period classics A Bigger Bang VIRGIN, 2005 Released eight years after Bridges To Babylon – then the longest gap between Stones albums, which seems a trifle compared to the 18 years between A Bigger Bang and Hackney Diamonds – this is blessed with some late Stones classics (“Rough Justice”, “Driving Too Fast”) and a pleasingly rough and rowdy vibe. 8/10 Sweet Summer Sun POLYDOR, 2013 While their studio output may have taken second place to the tours, in the years between A Bigger Bang and Hackney Diamonds the Stones released a slew of live albums – including this enjoyable set from London’s Hyde Park during their 50th-anniversary tour. Settle in for Mick Taylor on “Midnight Rambler”. 7/10 Blue & Lonesome POLYDOR, 2016 Recorded in three days, this set of…

What’s the concept here? I’d been reading about the theatre of the absurd, surrealness, Beckett and these French plays that were just gobbledygook, about how nobody could communicate with each other anymore. That hit a note about what was going on around us. The whole process of lockdown had been theatrical, like some mad play. We tried to divide it into different acts but there’s not a plot as such. There’s a vague thread but you can project your own ideas on to it. It’s quite a melancholy album? Not that many songs we’ve written are out-and-out jolly-ups, they often have some undercurrent. Pathos is the best word, happiness and sadness running alongside each other and things falling apart at the edges. What about music hall? That’s something we often…

When did you realise your demos were the sound you were looking for? It was three or four in the morning. I’d just recorded a take of “Garden”. I took a walk to a park near my house to clear my head and gave it a few listens. It felt like the song didn’t need anything else. It was exciting to think I could make the whole record at home, in this little plywood shack, around two ultra-budget condensers. After that, it was full steam ahead. What was your home recording schedule? I spent near every night for a month in the shack from 10 pm to 4am, because those were the only hours the neighbourhood was quiet enough to record. Even then, it was a gamble each night if…

What are your memories of making music during the ’90s, with groups like Containe and The Pacific Ocean? I remember how different rehearsal rooms smelled and certain recording studios. And the cold of winter rehearsals, where your fingers stopped feeling the strings. Walking out into late-night air at the end of playing for hours. All the physical memories of that. It’s got to be one of the best ways to spend time. How did the songs for Coconut Mirror come together? I had a rough time after giving birth in 2011. I developed elements of postpartum syndrome. Insomnia was the central devil. The PTSD of suffering from it leaves you altered. I eventually got some hours to myself in the afternoon. I started singing melodies and recording them on my…

Acetone’s spiritual kin MAZZY STAR So Tonight That I Might See CAPITOL, 1993 Much like Acetone, Mazzy Star were a band that blurred the lines between genres, blending dream pop, neo-psych and alt.rock into something unique and eerily timeless. This all collided with perfection on their second album. Many years later, Mazzy Star singer Hope Sandoval would perform with Lightcap and Hadley. 9/10 GALAXIE 500 On Fire ROUGH TRADE, 1989 Another band who in many ways took the template of The Velvet Underground and spun it into something distinctly their own. They produced three stellar albums but their second may be the one; a record as quiet as it is noisy, and as wonky and jagged as it is melodic and pretty. 9/10 SPIRITUALIZED Lazer Guided Melodies DEDICATED, 1992 The…

You were a manager, producer and promoter working with the likes of Phil Ochs and Rus. What were you doing in Jamaica in spring 1973? I was with writer Michael Thomas, who was writing a long piece for Rolling Stone called ‘The Wild Side of Paradise’, a portrait of the island and its music, and so we met Bob and his cohorts. He was very open and welcoming, he drove us round town in Chris Blackwell’s mini-Moke and took us to Trenchtown, which could be a dangerous place. He was mischievous, and whenever he saw me would always intone “Rolling Stone”. Your photographs all show Bob beaming, effortlessly charismatic. He hadn’t learned to sneer yet [laughs], to do ‘screwface’. At that point no-one knew what the story would be, but his…

How has it been revisiting Earth 2? How has it been revisiting Earth 2? It’s been interesting. We’re rehearsing to play a couple of Earth 2 live shows. We’re being as faithful as possible, although we’re doing it as a five-piece, with three guitars, a bass and then Adrienne [Davies, drummer] doing gong and cymbal stuff. It’s forced me to relearn that material, which is kind of hard because I write so differently now. It’s been kind of like: ‘What the fuck was I thinking back then?’ [laughs] I’m realising it was really a prog record. As well as the metal stuff, I was also into [King Crimson’s] Starless And Bible Black. There’s a lot of ‘Instead of playing this bit four times I’m going to play it five times’. At…

THERE was so much going on from Nevermind to April of 1994. When I look back, it seems like that was like 10 years of time, it’s just so compressed. [Kurt] had issues, and I was just dealing with the situation with the skills I had at the time. If I only knew then what I know now… And you know what resulted, so that was a total disaster. But somehow, for In Utero, amidst all that, the band came together. We just really liked to play, and we played well together. We would do a lot of rehearsals and just play and make up songs on the spot. Dave had a riff for “Scentless Apprentice” – that was one of those jams. Other songs, Kurt would hole himself up…

THE audiences at those In Utero shows were just nuts. You have to understand that when Nevermind came out, Nirvana did a six-week tour of 800-capacity clubs. And then the record sold 20 million copies, and they didn’t tour again for another year-and-a-half. So those In Utero shows were the first time people got to see them after Nevermind blew up. The audiences were totally pumped. We would walk out on stage and they were already crowd-surfing and throwing all this shit. I thought it was really intense and kind of uncomfortable. A lot of those songs on In Utero, he just sounds so anguished and it was really weird to hear that in a 10,000-capacity room for a bunch of very healthy-looking teenagers. You felt like, ‘This person needs…

THE LAST WORDS OF THE GREAT EXPLORER (1981) TV Smith’s Explorers usher in synths, keyboards and musical sophistication. The antiwar “Tomahawk Cruise” (a single, but included on reissues of the album) is as great as anything he’s done. IMMORTAL RICH (1985) Championed by superfan Henry Rollins, a fine set which suggests an acoustic Adverts: rich in social commentary and tunes. MARCH OF THE GIANTS (2000) After short-lived bands the Explorers, High and Cheap, Smith breaks a decade’s silence to show that his fire has not gone out. USELESS (2001) Excellent best of package including Adverts songs re-recorded with Die Toten Hosen. I DELETE (2014) Smith’s 16th solo LP affi rms his passion, fury and lifelong belief that a song is a “thing of beauty”.…

LYNCHED Where Did We Go Wrong? 2003 The first recorded evidence of the band that would become Lankum is this 2003 curio, the only widely circulated release by the anarcho-punk duo Lynched, comprising the brothers Ian and Daragh. Indebted to Nirvana, Crass, and most peculiarly on “Cosmic Crusader”, very early space cadet David Bowie, it’s by turns bracing and whimsical, notable chiefly for the withering scorn of “The Most Misanthropic Song I Have Ever Written” – a kind of folk cousin of the Specials’ “Too Much Too Young”. LYNCHED Cold Old Fire 2014 Though originally credited to Lynched, this was in fact the first blossoming of Lankum proper, with the recruitment of multi-instrumentalists Radie Peat and Cormac Mac Diarmada from the Dublin trad scene. The tracklisting is testament to the…

RAISED in Northern California, Sylvester Stewartbecame a Bay Area radio DJ and in-house producer for San Francisco’s Autumn Records, before forming the Family Stone in 1966 – the core lineup finally settling around brother Freddie (vocals, guitar), sister Rose (vocals, keyboards), Cynthia Robinson (trumpet), Greg Errico (drummer), Jerry Martini (sax) and Larry Graham (bass). The group released their first album the following year: A Whole New Thing was an amazing and unprecedented amalgam of folk-rock, driving Stax soul and mind-expanding production. The Family Stone’s psychedelic sound coalesced with the miraculous title track of 1968’s Dance To The Music. Along with Life – their second album of 1968 – the band were developing as a blazing collective and Stone as a songwriter with the melodic gifts of Paul McCartney. That year,…

“Chemicals had come in, took things way out of perspective”GREG ERRICO SLY & The Family Stone’s triumphant Woodstock performance found Sly and the band at their peak. But as Errico recalls, they had to rouse the crowd first… “We were supposed to go on at 8pm – primetime,” Errico says. “[Woodstock organiser] Mike Lang came up maybe five times and said, ‘We need another hour guys, so sorry, things are running behind…’ Now it’s past 3am, and it had started raining again, and people were in their sleeping bags and pants. They’d already been beat up by the last two days of sunshine, rain and wild music, and they were done. We just realised at the last minute, as we formed a circle and grabbed hands, that all we could…

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Directed by Martin Scorsese Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone Opens 18 October Cert 15 8/10 TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING Directed by Carol Morley Starring Monica Dolan, Kelly Macdonald, Gina McKee Opens 27 October Cert 12a 8/10 TIME ADDICTS Directed by Sam Odlum Starring Freya Tingley, Charles Grounds, Joshua Morton Opens 27 October Cert 18 8/10 FOE Directed by Garth Davis Starring Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan, Aaron Pierre Opens 20 September Cert 15 6/10 NANDOR FODOR AND THE TALKING MONGOOSE Directed by Adam Sigal Starring Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd Opens 20 October Cert 12 6/10…

BOWERS & WILKINS PX8 £599/go.stuff.tv/Px8 YOU might think the technology limited the amount of performance you could eke out of a pair of wireless headphones. You might think that value could only be added by employing more luxurious materials, or a better standard of finish, or by incorporating a whistles-and-bells control app. But Bowers & Wilkins disagrees – and with the Px8 it’s demonstrated what can be done within the confines of wireless streaming technology. In style. At a glance, the Px8 aren’t all that different from the recently launched Px7 S2. But look a little closer and you’ll notice the diamond-cut earcap edges, the elegantly reflective company logo running down each one, and the indulgent texture (and, let’s not be coy, smell) of the Nappa leather elements of the…

JIMMY BUFFETT King of Margaritaville (1946–2023) “I’D like to make a career out of being uncategorisable,” Jimmy Buffett told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2000. “I want people to say, ‘He did this and he did that, but what did he really do?’ That sort of fits me.” Buffett certainly did his damnedest to achieve that goal. Whatever he turned his hand to – songwriter, musician, author, actor, sailor, entrepreneur – Buffett was invariably successful. He saw himself as an entertainer rather than a first-rate singer or guitar-player, popularising his own tropical rock genre (often referred to as ‘Gulf and Western’) that fused elements of country, folk and Caribbean music. A Top 10 hit in the US, 1977’s “Margaritaville” became his signature song, a beach-fronted celebration of the laidback lifestyle…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Sly & The Family Stone. 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, November 8, 2023. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 Bob Dylan chucked everything off his album Nashville Skyline (1-5-2-3-4) 9 Indie band’s guitar sound to keep us “Wide Awake” (5) 10 Seen short version of a Cocteau Twins’ performance (9) 11 Keep quiet as REM return album to XT (6) 12 Compared to the present of an album from Paul Weller (2-2-3) 14 Aim to make a comeback with female rapper (1-1-1) 15 Muse album, but in a…

X Under The Big Black Sun ELEKTRA, 1982 I was a teenager living in this small town in Massachusetts. My older brother decided to join the army and his girlfriend moved in with us. She became the cool older sister I never had, and her record collection was an important education. One day she put on the X song “Motel Room In My Bed” and I thought it was the most exciting, glorious sound I’d ever heard. It made me realise that I was looking for something much more raw and weird and tough than the pop stuff on the radio, but without losing any of the melody. I didn’t really understand that they’re singing about sex and poverty and death, but somehow I still related to the angst underneath.…