Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i UNCUT

THIS MONTH’S REVELATIONS FROM THE WORLD OF UNCUT WITH… Buzzcocks | Les Cousins | Charlie Parr | Arushi Jain WHEN photographer Dennis Morris went on tour with Bob Marley in November 1973, the Wailers were finding England tough going. It was freezing, venues were half-empty and the band couldn’t get food that met the vegan-like restrictions of the Rastafari I-tal diet. The last straw was a gig in Northampton where it snowed – something Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer told Morris was an ominous sign. The tour was abandoned, but not before Morris took several portraits of Marley, such as the one opposite, shot backstage before a show in Bournemouth. “He always had a quiet moment where he sat with a spliff meditating, getting ready, working out how he would…

THREE years ago, the Delhi-born, US-based composer Arushi Jain quit her comfortable tech job in San Francisco and headed to New York to become an artist full-time. Since then, it’s not gone too badly. Jain, who styles herself the ‘Modular Princess’ after her musical practice, released Under The Lilac Sky in 2021, a beautiful meditation rooted in the Indian classical tradition that also veers into seriously mind-expanding psychedelia. The album fell victim to the pandemic but has since come to resonate with a growing audience who appreciate transportive synth jams, including James Holden, Arooj Aftab, Floating Points and Suzanne Ciani. “I think I’m finally over ‘San Francisco Arushi’ and entering a different version of me that’s craving human connection a bit more,” says Jain, 30, from her Brooklyn apartment a…

SAVE £52.65* & GET A PAIR OF JLAB IN-EARS!** THE SPIRITUAL HOME OF GREAT MUSIC UNCUT is a place where readers the world over can share our passion for the finest sounds of the last 60 years – old and new, beloved and obscure. Each issue is packed full of revelatory encounters with our greatest heroes, trailblazers and newcomers from across a multitude of genres, lavishly illustrated with iconic photography, while our comprehensive reviews pages guide readers through the month’s best releases. Our free CD – available with every copy – is your guaranteed soundtrack to the month ahead. Join us, where music matters. 5 REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE 1 Pay lower than the shop price 2 FREE CD with every issue 3 Receive an EXCLUSIVE Subscriber-only CD**** 4 Get every issue…

Playing Favorites THIRD MAN 8/10 FOR a while there Sheer Mag were the last great American indie band, releasing singles, EPs, compilations and at least two classic albums on their own shoestring Wilsun RC imprint based out of Fishtown, Philadelphia. But it’s only fitting that they finally signed on the dotted line with Jack White’s Third Man. Though they’re not quite ready for the label’s hand-crafted, lathe-cut, heavyweight vinyl treatment – the quintessential Sheer Mag format you feel might still be a busted-up, unspooled old cassette you find at the side of the road outside a gas station somewhere on I-10 – you could say that Sheer Mag are the true spiritual heirs of The White Stripes. If the Stripes’ artfully homespun, high-concept primitivism was the perfect expression of the…

Liam Gallagher John Squire WARNER 7/10 IMAGINE the Stone Roses with an immeasurably better singer modelled on Ian Brown, or Oasis with a dazzling lead guitarist. Liam Gallagher and John Squire have, and the resulting album plays to their strengths. Though coming almost out of the blue, it’s the most logical team-up among the remnants of Manchester’s old indie-rock empire, currently awash with severed partnerships, searching for completion. When Oasis split in 2009 after a backstage altercation in Paris, Liam’s songwriting was vestigial (though he had penned a couple of the group’s hit singles), and Noel’s vocals were largely reserved for sensitive, doubting songs Our Kid couldn’t sing (or didn’t want to). Innately cautious, Noel’s albums have nudged at the edges of Oasis’s formula, finding on last year’s Council Skies…

Underdressed At The Symphony SECRETLY CANADIAN 8/10 FAYE WEBSTER is most at home in her own head. Every song on her fifth album puzzles over the way her brain works, how it worries over certain details, how it fixates on certain unpleasant feelings, how it works so often against her. She recalls the smell of her old apartment on “eBay Purchase History”, and she thinks she’s figured out why she’s so self-conscious on “Wanna Quit All The Time”. She tries in vain to evict an ex from her brainpan on, well, pretty much every song. That’s not to say she’s an introvert – Webster is active in the Atlanta arts scene as a photographer and collaborator, and that album title suggests she does get out of the house occasionally –…

“Melting the sky through a hole in your eye where the magic comes” Singing A Song In The Morning Light – The Legendary Demo Tapes 1967–1970 CHERRY RED THE making of Alan Hull as a songwriter was not the hours sitting hunched over his guitar in his bedroom with only his introspection for company, but the three years he spent working as a trainee nurse in a Tyneside psychiatric institution. “That’s what changed me and the things I was writing about,” he said of his time working with patients at the St Nicholas hospital in Gosforth in the late 1960s. “It made me think about a lot of things and made the songs go deeper.” For a while the experience threatened his own equilibrium, but the troubled souls in his…

Électronique Guérilla (reissue, 1974) BUREAU B 8/10 HIS name may not resonate as widely as those of Germany’s kosmische luminaries, but Richard Pinhas is now acknowledged as a significant player on the European electronic-rock scene of the 1970s, through both his solo work and with his band, Heldon. Named after the republic in Norman Spinrad’s bizarre, science fantasy/metafiction work The Iron Dream, the group have always been essentially a solo project with changing guest lists. Between 1974–’79 they released eight albums, before Pinhas was plunged deep into depression in 1983 and all but disappeared for a decade. However, 1992 marked the start of an intensely prolific and ongoing creative streak, featuring many recordings under his own name as well as collaborations with later generations of experimental musicians, including Merzbow, Wolf…

BLOOD LIKE MINE Like Wandering Shade, Middleman’s guitar trio with Kryssi Battalene and Sarah Louise, this long-running free-improv duo lived in the moment and is lost to time. ROSALI Middleman has released four albums of songs under her name, progressing from the lo-fi Out Of Love to the polished Bite Down over the past decade. LONG HOTS Middleman’s garage-rock band burned briefly but brightly in the late 2010s with a self-released tape, Monday Night Raw, and a seven-inch single on Third Man Records. MONOCOT This guitar-and-drums duo with Jayson Gerycz of Cloud Nothings has released two albums of glimmering psychedelic dronerock, Direction We Know (2020) and Leave To Cool (2023). EDSEL AXLE Middleman’s new experiments with guitar and looping pedal led to Variable Happiness, a solo symphony of sun-baked landscapes…

“FAHEY could be difficult, but he could also be warm, loyal, exceedingly generous and funny. That was the Fahey I knew. Mostly. Our friendship of nearly 20 years fractured during the recording of The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones – Fahey’s title – a collaboration between my band, Cul De Sac, and John, in 1996. I had distinct ideas about how to make this album, but the sessions ran aground almost immediately. Fahey didn’t see eyeto-eye with me and refused to take part. It was only after I opened myself up to Fahey’s notions that the logjam broke. The finished album, which I’m enormously proud of, was intuitive, open-ended, exploratory. “It was part of John’s playful nature that he’d try to make what had become an exercise in frustration fun. He…

PERFECT DAYS RELEASED FEBRUARY 25 Following last year’s 3D extravaganza documentary about Anselm Kiefer, Wim Wenders returns to a smaller canvas with this portrait of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, featuring a Cannes award-winning performance from Koji Yakusho. TIGER STRIPES RELEASED FEBRUARY 25 Cronenberg for tweens: Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu’s debut about a carefree 12-year-old girl who starts to experience terrifying physical changes is like an 18-rated take on Pixar’s Turning Red. WICKED LITTLE LETTERS RELEASED FEBRUARY 25 Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley and Timothy Spall star in this tale of poison pen letters scandalising a small town in 1920s England. DUNE PART 2 RELEASED MARCH 1 Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Florence Pugh saddle up the sandworms for the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s space opera, with Paul Atreides (Chalamet) joining…

CAMBRIDGE AUDIO MXN10 £449/cambridgeaudio.com CAMBRIDGE Audio knows all about delivering big sonic performance for a relatively small asking price. And with the MXN10 music streamer, it’s also managed to deliver big sonic performance in a relatively small box. Here’s a streamer that’s all about nailing the essentials and forgetting everything else. So the MXN10 is a compact, almost featureless box in the company’s usual ‘lunar’ grey… but it’s got it where it counts. If you’re looking to introduce some streaming smarts to your cherished system without breaking the bank or adding another shelf to your kit-rack, you can’t go wrong here. The feature-set is bigger than the product, or so it seems. Dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 (with SBC and AAC compatibility), an Ethernet socket and a USB-A slot are your…

WHEN he sat down to write a biography of Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks, Paul Hanley hit a problem. His enthusiasm for the subject was getting in the way of his objectivity. “I was a massive Buzzcocks fan at the age of 14. It was quite a process to keep stepping back. I thought, ‘A lot of people could write a biography. It’s only me could write about my relationship with the band.’” As a former drummer with The Fall, Hanley is well placed to write about one of the most significant Manchester bands. The beauty of Sixteen Again: How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music (And Me), is the way it renders an adult view of Pete Shelley’s genius with teenage enthusiasm. The biographical details of Shelley’s life are…

1 ROSALI Rewind On her fourth album, Bite Down, Rosali Middleman has created one of the first great LPs of 2024, a wildly inventive breakup record. Head to page 54, where we catch up with the singer-songwriter in her new home of North Carolina. 2 SHEER MAG Moonstruck After years on their own label, the Philly gang have signed to Third Man for their new album, Playing Favorites. As our lead review reveals, on page 22, it’s an eclectic, bounding journey of a record with Tina Halladay in fine voice over the group’s garagey amalgamations of punk, country and disco. 3 THE HANGING STARS Disbelieving Straight from Edwyn Collins’ studio in the Highlands comes On A Golden Shore, the latest from London country group The Hanging Stars. There’s a cosmic…

“This version of love I can dwell on in the musing” Something In The Room She Moves  DOMINO POP music used to be the preserve of the autodidacts, the highschool dropouts who taught themselves a few chords on the guitar and worked things out instinctively. The odd classically trained figure would sometimes crop up here and there – a Mick Ronson scribbling string arrangements on the back of a cigarette packet, a Donald Fagen writing out complex extended chords for his session musicians to improvise over, a Sean Moore from the Manic Street Preachers playing the occasional trumpet flourish over a punk track – but, by and large, pop and rock musicians would eschew formal learning and play by ear. But something odd seemed to happen around the millennium, when…

More Than Words Can Tell JUDEE BOP 8/10 THE classically trained Victoria Liedtke isn’t known for her country chops, having served as longstanding member of NYC covers collective The Loser’s Lounge, and as Ginger Wildheart’s power pop foil in Hey! Hello!. But More Than Words Can Tell displays a rich appreciation of Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner’s back catalogue, leaning into the music they made together in Nashville between 1967-’75. Oklahoma-born Liedtke, now resident of Yorkshire, approached Jason Ringenberg to help reanimate these vintage duets, the prolific former Jason & The Scorchers leader buying into her vision immediately. Co-produced by Liedtke and backed by mostly UK-based players, the pair strike a fine balance between reverence and renewal. Some of these songs stay fairly faithful to the source, while others are…

SEEMING at once intricately crafted and free-flowing, the music on Francis Plagne’s Into Closed Air strikes a careful balance between fixed ideas and the more improvisatory mode its creator has often pursued in Melbourne’s new-music circles. As Plagne tells Uncut, “The sense of airiness or space is very important to me, and I love trying to bring a kind of meandering, searching quality I enjoy in a lot of jazz and improvised music into something that is basically a song.” That quality also points to the influence of Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and their Canterbury cohorts, another well of sound that’s long been dear to Plagne. “The openness in the form, silliness mixed with earnest instrumental detail, the relaxed, undemonstrative singing, airy melodies – it all really resonates with me…

Going Home DRAG CITY 8/10 BEFORE Josephine Foster was an idiosyncratic solo singer she was a member of short-lived folk duo The Children’s Hour. Here, Foster’s taut, strange voice and occasional harp, piano, ukulele and harmonium playing was paired with Andy Bar’s loose and scratchy guitar. The duo recorded an EP and one excellent, underlooked album, SOS JFK, which came out in 2003 on Rough Trade and featured Tim Daisy on drums. But The Children’s Hour recorded a second album not long after, this time as a fully fledged trio with Dave Pajo. That record, Going Home, is finally getting released on Drag City after being rediscovered in the vaults. The creation story of Going Home is part of the fun. Even though The Children’s Hour were a strictly minority…

Mode For Joe/Power To The People (reissues, 1966, 1969) BLUE NOTE/CRAFT RECORDINGS & JAZZ DISPENSARY 9/10, 9/10 BEGINNING in the early ’60s, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson recorded over 20 reliably excellent albums as leader, in addition to playing with some of the greatest names in jazz: Herbie Hancock, Alice Coltrane and Chick Corea, among others. As a young man he was active in the Detroit scene before spending two years in the army, after which he headed straight for the jazz mecca of New York City. An early notable position was in the band of pianist Horace Silver, where he provided a memorable solo on the original recording of “Song For My Father”, now a standard. Though Henderson’s career began primarily in hard bop, his work always held plenty of…

“A LOT of people romanticise what New York was like in the 1980s, but it was tough,” says Kim Gordon as she stands across the street from 84 Eldridge – the red brick tenement building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side where she lived from 1980 until 1990 with her then-partner and bandmate, Thurston Moore. Unlike most places in the ever-changing metropolis, this address has escaped gentrification. A ghost sign awning printed with faded Chinese characters hangs unevenly over the front door; the façade is pockmarked with rusty protruding husks of ancient airconditioning units. The apartment, Gordon recalls, had a cockroach problem. It looks like it probably still does. “The main thing I remember is having to throw our keys out of the window whenever somebody came over, so that we…

MATTHEW Houck is lost in the Christmas lights. “Where the fuck am I?” he mutters to himself as he squints at the map on his phone. He’s standing on a bridge over a fake river, next to a busy ice-cream parlour. Every surface in every direction is covered with lights, blinking and fading in different rhythms. The effect is disorienting, almost psychedelic. Houck has been here many times since moving to Nashville a decade ago, but he still doesn’t know his way around the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. “I love this place, how fake everything is,” says Houck. “It’s weirdly beautiful.” Rather than some of the old Nashville haunts – like Robert’s Western World or Brown’s Diner – Houck appreciates the inauthenticity of this weird, sprawling theme park, which houses multiple…

ON September 11 last year, at the Toronto International Film Festival, all four members of Talking Heads were photographed together for the first time in more than 20 years. It was only for a Q&A session, but this seemingly routine get-together was greeted with widespread jubilation because it seemed to iron out a nagging wrinkle in the fabric of the music universe. Namely, how could a band who brought the world so much joy hold so much animosity towards each other? “Which is why us getting together around Stop Making Sense was so great for our fans,” says Chris Frantz. “Because they can say, ‘At least these people are willing to be in the same room again.’” “They didn’t realise that we didn’t hate each other,” adds Tina Weymouth. “We…

BFI 8/10 IT’S 1973 and a black British band have just gone to the States where, with little promotional budget, they score a Top 50 single and a hit album. They play arenas and stadiums while supporting the likes of Al Green, Mandrill and Ramsey Lewis; they also became the first UK outfit to appear on Soul Train and headline the Harlem Apollo. You’d expect them to come home to a hero’s welcome – the all-conquering black Beatles, a band who’ve added a peculiarly south London twist to the vocabulary of R&B. Yet they return to utter indifference. There is little radio play and no invitations to appear on TV. In the five years that they’re active, Cymande never headline any UK venue larger than Ronnie Scott’s. Across the British…

ANNIE NIGHTINGALE Pioneering DJ and broadcaster (1940–2024) ALREADY a respected print journalist and presenter on local TV in southern England, Annie Nightingale’s first BBC appearance was on Juke Box Jury in 1963, but she was made to fight before becoming Radio 1’s first female presenter. Nightingale applied for a job on the station’s launch in September 1967, only to receive an appallingly sexist rebuttal. “They came out with this wonderful line: ‘Our disc jockeys are husband substitutes,’” she recalled on Desert Island Discs in 2020. “That set up an awful lot of assumptions that all the women pop fans were housewives… They would say to me: ‘Why would a woman want to be a DJ?’” Nightingale refused to give up. She was finally offered a trial run of Sunday shows…

Julia Holter: “A lot of it is about life and death” Is there a unifying theme to this album? The only albums where I had a definite theme were Tragedy and Loud City Song – they were albums where I had an initial poetic inspiration. But often the unifying theme only really becomes apparent while I’m finishing it. With this album, a lot of it was written and recorded under lockdown, and while I was pregnant, and after the birth of my daughter in 2020. So a lot of it is about life and death, about the body, about me being fixated with lungs, with breathing, with the process of transformation, of seeing your body transform. Dev Hoff’s fretless bass seems to be a very strong linking theme… Absolutely, his…

Where’s My Utopia? ISLAND 8/10 WHATEVER you say they are, that’s what they’re not. It’s a natural impulse of any band who have experienced sudden acclaim, and the reductive hype that goes with it, to kick hard against it creatively. Sometimes that’s to the point of commercial self-harm. So when Yard Act’s follow-up to their 2022 debut, the Mercury-nominated, No 2 album The Overload, is peppered with sardonic self-referential asides, you’re immediately struck by the suspicion that this is their stab at leaving every party that would have them as members. The disagreeable second album, if you will. “I was hot property once but now the promise has gone”, James Smith sneers on opening track “An Illusion”, and the inward focus continues on the biz-baiting anti-anthem “We Make Hits” (“and…

WHEN Odetta Hartman was a student, she wrote her thesis on Alan Lomax’s 1935 expedition to record traditional songs in Florida and Georgia. Her own music, including new album Swansongs, can sometimes feel like such a journey, a slip in time that combines folk and found sounds with contemporary beats. “Music is itself a sacred technology, spanning generations, cultures and dimensions,” she says. “Thus, the cosmology of sound will always be passed down in the folk vernacular, even as it evolves. Blossoming from that place of authenticity, I feel emboldened to explore sonic textures ranging from orchestras to futuristic frequencies, with the hope of discovering the overlapping magic in the middle.” Hartman began writing Swansongs while touring 2018’s Old Rockhounds Never Die, and the pandemicallowed her to work more deeply…

Astral Gold BASS RITUAL 8/10 ON an album rich with strange presences, there is perhaps none more curious than the Ilkley Alien, the ‘inspiration’ behind “The Second Message”, the penultimate song on Dean McPhee’s Astral Gold. “The Ilkley Alien is one of the few examples we have of a supposed photo of an alien,” McPhee says, picking up the thread of the story, explaining the incident that is said to have occurred on Ilkley Moor, in McPhee’s home county of West Yorkshire, on December 1, 1987. “The grainy and blurred image was photographed by an anonymous off-duty policeman before he was allegedly levitated into a spacecraft and shown a series of moving images detailing scenes of environmental destruction, war and famine. “He then received a message telling him that humankind…

Alive In New York City 8/10 + Daniel Johnston In The 20th Century (scores in panel, right) SHIMMY-DISC DANIEL JOHNSTON was often described as an outsider musician, but was there ever an outsider who left such an imprint on popular culture at large? A musician and illustrator who emerged from Austin, Texas in the mid-1980s, Johnston’s songs have been covered by everyone from Tom Waits to Spiritualized to Beck, while his artwork has graced galleries from New York to London. He’s been the subject of biographies, photo books and documentaries – Jeff Feuerzeig’s film The Devil And Daniel Johnston won the Director’s Award at Sundance – while Kurt Cobain was photographed wearing a T-shirt bearing the cartoon frog Johnston drew for the cover of his 1983 album Hi, How Are…

Masaki Batoh: “Police tried to stop our shows” ASK Ghost’s Masaki Batoh about the time he spent Aliving in the original Ghost House, a converted space on the outer rim of Tokyo that the legendary psychedelic collective made their home between 1979 and 1992, and he’s sparing with the details: “[It was] an old wooden building we had,” he explains, “though not all of Ghost lived there… It was kind of our community spot in Tokyo.” It was there that the first few Ghost albums fermented, though those records, due for imminent reissue on Drag City, also drew from Batoh’s itinerant spirit. “Sun Is Tagging”, from their debut, reflects time spent in Morocco – “It was a tune inspired by the desert and oasis of North Sahara” – while the…

AW COME AW WRY (MISRA, 2005) Houck recorded his second album while living in Athens, Georgia, with members of Elf Power and Drive-By Truckers contributing to its frayed folk sound. It’s a dark song-cycle featuring different versions of the title track, but it sounds claustrophobic compared with the expansive country-rock sound he’d pioneer on later albums. 7/10 TO WILLIE  (DEAD OCEANS, 2009) Rarely does a covers album loom so large in an artist’s catalogue. Houck puts his stamp on 11 Willie Nelson songs, obsessing over both the creative and the self-destructive possibilities of a troubadour’s life. Beautifully ragged, it marks a shift away from eccentric bedroom folk.  8/10 HERE’S TO TAKING IT EASY (DEAD OCEANS, 2010) After his Willie album, Houck kicked off his beer-soaked, hard-touring, harder-living phase with…

Mississippi Studios, Portland, Oregon, January 11 WHEN speaking about The Third Mind, Dave Alvin keeps returning to a single phrase like a mantra: “We don’t know what’s gonna happen!” According to the former Blasters guitarist, he and his all-star band of musical explorers – including Camper Van Beethoven bassist Victor Krummenacher, Counting Crows’ David Immerglück and singer-songwriter Jesse Sykes – don’t rehearse when they get together. They pick a song and the key to play it in, and then let it fly. It’s a practice that’s served them remarkably well on the two albums they’ve released to date, 2020’s The Third Mind and last year’s The Third Mind 2. Both feature loose, spacious takes on an impressively wide range of material, from Alice Coltrane to the 13th Floor Elevators, as well…

THE PROMISED LAND In his ability to span the realms of big-budget franchise farragos – weeping terror financier Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (2006), glam rock sorcerer Kaecilius in Dr Strange (2016), Death Starchitect Galen Erso in Rogue One (2016) – and austere Danish psychological thrillers like The Hunt, Mads Mikkelsen may be the true heir to Max Von Sydow. “I don’t believe in God,” he declared matter-of-factly, back in his first Bond venture, “I believe in a reasonable rate of return.” As rewarding as playing dandified Nazis in the latest Indiana Jones sequel must be for his bank balance, it rarely gives Mads the actor much to work with. So it’s a relief to find him front and centre of The Promised Land, raring to sink those delectable eye-teeth…

YOU ARE THE QUARRYMEN Many thanks for a great Quarrymen article [Feb issue, Take 322]. The whole tone was much appreciated and I was very impressed by the accuracy of the detail – something which we have not come to expect as a matter of course. The photos were also used very well. One tiny detail – from a serious nitpicker – there were no Morris Dancers in the 1957 procession or at the Garden Fête. I know that you did not get this detail from me, but I have seen it reported elsewhere. However, I think I have seen some film of a St Peter’s Garden Fête from another year at which there were indeed Morris Dancers, so maybe that’s how it became current. I think I remember seeing…