Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i UNCUT

“Snake it, take it/Panther princess you must stay” ONE of my favourite moments of the new David Bowie boxset, covering the birth of Ziggy Stardust, is the demo of “Soul Love” recorded at Haddon Hall in November 1971. This has evidently been made for Mick Ronson and, after playing the song through, Bowie leaves a message for his co-conspirator. “I think we should work on that as a single, Mick,” he begins, going on to list ideas for arrangements he has in mind for the song, based around a “heavy, warm sax lineup”. Bowie’s ideas are clear, precise and detailed, revealing a lot about his ability to imagine how a finished song might sound. After this, there’s a pause, then Bowie signs off in the kind of cute parentese he…

1 MINT MILE Sunbreaking Silkworm’s Tim Midyett returns with the second Mint Mile album, Roughrider, mixing up the sounds of his old band with the ragged swing of Pavement and Crazy Horse, plus some gorgeous chamber accompaniment. Read more from Tim on page 14. 2 JESSICA PRATT World On A String Here In The Pitch, the long awaited follow-up to 2019’s Quiet Signs, is our Album Of The Month on page 24. Here’s a highlight of this seductive, velveteen folk record, with Pratt’s strummed nylon-string acoustic and echoing voice gradually joined by a haze of Mellotron synths, keys and sparse drums. Truly magical. 3 MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND Ambrosia Another masterclass in songwriting from Michael Head, and a highlight of his new LP Loophole, produced by Bill Ryder-Jones.…

“Time is time and time and time again” Here In The Pitch CITY SLANG IN 1979, Joan Didion published The White Album, a selection of essays that captured California on the brink of the 1970s, its counterculture dream beginning to curdle. “A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community,” as she described it. “The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.” There is something of Didion’s description in Jessica Pratt’s fourth album, Here In The Pitch. The singer draws on the seedy history of her Los Angeles home, that peculiarly West Coast sense of an American utopia on the turn, to create her finest set of songs to date. Tales of sins and crimes…

FOR most of the 2010s, Tracyanne Campbell didn’t know if her band Camera Obscura would make music again. They were mourning the 2015 death of their keyboardist Carey Lander, a profound loss but especially for a band that Campbell describes as a “weird family”. She and Lander were close: “We joked that we were like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. We were going to be mad old grannies. When she died, the city wasn’t the same. I struggled with who I was in the world.” Camera Obscurawent on unofficial hiatus, with everyone feeling adrift. Then Belle & Sebastian invited them to play the 2019 Boaty Weekender fest, which prompted the band to rehearse and write new songs. Their comeback, Look To The East, Look To The West, picks up where they…

THEY stopped short of following Joni’s “back to the garden” directive, but with their new LP, Khruangbin have in some sense returned to the source. “In 2010 when we first started playing together, we were making music in a barn to a bunch of cows,” says bassist and vocalist Laura Lee. “We never knew we’d get a record deal, tour the world and get messages from listeners on how we’ve impacted them. Over the past decade, it’s continued to grow: the stages got bigger, our team expanded, our catalogue no longer consists of a couple of handfuls of songs. None of that feels off-course but creatively, we felt it was important to remind ourselves of that simpler time.” A La Sala, then, sees the trio’s familiar dreamy lushness manifesting as something…

“The trees full of new leaves offering green tears to the earth” Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006–2009  WARP BROADCAST always attracted plenty of speculation and intrigue when they were active, but since the death of singer Trish Keenan at the age of 42 in January 2011, the band’s enigma – and reputation – has only grown. Eleven years after their final album – an eccentric soundtrack to Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, completed by remaining member James Cargill – Broadcast are more popular than ever. Their 750,000 monthly listeners on Spotify hammer the Birmingham group’s first three long-players – The Noise Made By People, Haha Sound and Tender Buttons – which Warp have kept repressing since 2015 to meet demand. Walk into any coffee shop in Brooklyn, anecdotal evidence suggests,…

The Carnegie Hall Concert IMPULSE! 9/10 THE John & Alice Coltrane Home, Impulse! and Verve Label Group are calling 2024 the Year Of Alice, but for a growing contingent of jazz fans, it’s been her year for some time now. The stature of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, harpist, pianist, composer, spiritual leader and wife of John, has only increased after her death in 2007 at the age of 69. Her career as a jazz pianist began in her hometown of Detroit in the 1950s, but her life was forever changed when she met Coltrane in 1963. Two years later, they were married and the following year, she replaced McCoy Tyner in his classic quartet. She recorded, performed, started a family, and walked the spiritual path with John until his untimely death…

RECLINING on the sofa in her grand Edwardian hotel suite, Annie Clark seems immaculately composed as she recalls the first strange stirrings of her seventh album. “I had a sense that I wanted to be pummelled by music,” she says matter-of-factly, holding Uncut’s gaze. “Who knows if I was reacting to things I’ve done in the past, or things that are around in the culture, but I wanted to be just pummelled. Shaken like a rag doll.” She pauses for a moment, maybe for effect, maybe considering her words carefully, possibly pondering Brian Eno’s maxim that art is a safe space for violent experiment, a plane you can crash then walk away from. “I really wanted to explore that feeling of digging your fingernails into your thigh,” she concludes. “You…

A ROUND midnight most evenings, Kamasi Washington will sit down at the piano in the living room of his home in Inglewood, Los Angeles, and begin to compose. Despite being synonymous with the saxophone, he only ever writes on piano, which goes some way towards explaining the harmonic richness of his music. “The piano is so much more versatile as far as being able to play the different parts and hear the song in its entirety,” he explains. “I played piano before I played saxophone, so it was always the logical choice. The saxophone is the racehorse, but the piano is the workhorse.” He never tends to get much written during the day. “When the world gets quieter, it’s easier to focus. There’s rarely something I have to do at…

you’re having a picnic lunch, that’s when shit gets real,” says Dan Auerbach with a laugh. The Black Keys singer and guitarist is recounting the lengthy sessions for the band’s 12th album, Ohio Players, which the duo partly recorded with Beck, acting as an unofficial third ’Key. Whenever spirits or energy levels flagged, they’d order out from Zankou Chicken, a popular LA restaurant, and then spread everything out in the control room buffet-style. “You’ve got to have patience because this stuff takes time. Food helps.” That’s a picnic lunch 20 years in the making. The two acts have been circling each other for decades, bound by their shared love of blues, funk and soul. After touring together in 2003, the three musicians often talked about jamming, recording or just hanging…

BBC IPLAYER 9/10 AN on-screen caption early in The Clock Comes Down The Stairs starkly adumbrates the film’s essential narrative. “Microdisney,” it reads, “made some of the finest music of the ’80s. That nobody ever bought.” That both of these statements are accurate remains a damning indictment of everyone alive at the time. Julie Perkins’ tremendous documentary tells Microdisney’s story, from the initial meeting, circa 1980, of Corkonian misfits Cathal Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan. Their apparently contradictory sensibilities – Coughlan’s relish for hyper-literate lyrical violence, O’Hagan’s easy way with a lushly orchestrated melody – resulted in a sequence of still-astonishing albums which delivered Microdisney little beyond the poisoned chalice of the cult following. There is, very arguably, something about such groups which attracts a certain kind of fan: a Venn diagram…

Members of The Clash, Steel Pulse and The Rich Kids protest outside the National Front HQ in Teddington, March 1978 “Rock Against Racism was a reaction to the rise of the National Front. I decided to go and interview their leader, Martin Webster, who named all the musicians he thought should be deported. So I organised for all of us to come the next day with our placards and demonstrate outside his house, the fascist headquarters. It was extraordinary to have this unicultural demonstration, black and white, in the middle of Teddington. We felt we were making a mark in history, that we weren’t going to allow this racism to persist. It’s still going on, but it was a lot worse in the ’70s, and all the people in these…

TIM Midyett is one of the most undersung voices in American indie rock. Formerly the frontman of Silkworm, now at the helm of Chicago’s Mint Mile, Midyett has presided over four decades of music while never quite breaking out of the category of cult concern. What’s important, though, is that Mint Mile’s new album Roughrider is up there with his best: an emotionally resonant rock record that sets his rich, ruminative baritone front and centre. “It comes out of the same working method that any of my bands have ever had, which is do what comes naturally and don’t overthink,” says Midyett. “We hardly ever talk about anything conceptual – it’s all feel.” After releasing 11 albums through underground institutions like Matador and Touch And Go, Silkworm splintered in 2005…

It’s been five years since your last record, and it took you three years to make the new one. What does this longer stretch of time give you? I think honestly it just comes down to the fact I need to stew in things for a while. It’s not necessarily a matter of putting the work in, because we were working pretty steadily in that time. You may write three to five songs in a given timeframe but they might not necessarily have the correct feeling. I wasn’t obsessed with trying to make something cohesive, it’s more that when you know, you know. It’s either right or it’s not. And I think that that process of honing in on things tends to elongate the process. Where did the idea of…

Defiance Part 2: Fiction  SUN 7/10 FEW song writers have written as many songs about rock’n’roll as Ian Hunter. With Mott The Hoople there were “All The Way From Memphis”, “One Of The Boys”, “Ballad Of Mott The Hoople” and “Saturday Gigs”, and the habit continued when he left the band in 1974. Drop into almost any Hunter solo albums and there seems to be a song about music, from “I Get So Excited” on Ian Hunter to “Still Love Rock And Roll” on 2001’s Rant. That’s true right up to the present day when partway through excellent new album Defiance Part 2: Fiction, Hunter, now 84, declares “This Ain’t Rock And Roll”. The song is a whistlestop tour of musical history, set to a Bo Diddley beat, that ends…

Only God Was Above Us  COLUMBIA 9/10 CLEVERNESS gets you only so far in life, and its limits become clearer with age. Vampire Weekend’s first album in roughly five years deals with that kind of reckoning. Its opening line: “Fuck the world” – spoken in context of a lovers’ sparring match, a geopolitical negotiation, maybe both. Ezra Koenig’s vocals are dirty with distortion, draped in coiled feedback, and they build to a panic attack of galloping drums, presto orchestral strings and guitar squeals amid talk of soldiers, police, war and weaponised language. The song, “Ice Cream Piano” (note the “I scream” homophone), is bunker-mentality neorealism, and quite a way from the scenes of privileged youth “in the colours of Benetton” on the band’s 2008 debut, blithely spilling kefir on an…

I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore ROCK ACTION 8/10 DEEP into a second-act comeback that began in 2016, Falkirk’s poet laureates of sweary filth are now 50-year-old family men and prolific, prize-winning, kelpie-sized fixtures on the Scottish cultural landscape. Indeed, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton are in danger of becoming national treasures, albeit national treasures who write hilariously bleak confessionals about outsized cocks, sordid carnal obsessions, apocalyptic hangovers, degrading online porn and the inevitable decay that consumes all human flesh. Thankfully, middle age has not mellowed the duo too much, just lent an extra world-weary wisdom to Moffat’s self lacerating, brutally honest lyrics and Middleton’s increasingly rich, eclectic compositions. It may be flippantly titled after a text sent by the duo’s live drummer, but I’m Totally Fine…

High Voltage/Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap/Powerage/Highway To Hell/Back In Black/For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)/The Razor’s Edge/Live/Who Made Who COLUMBIA/SONY LEGACY WHERE would we be without AC/DC? Their libidinous bar-room blues might seem – at the very least – anachronistic in 2024, but the thirst for their primal boogie remains unquenchable: 2020’s Power Up debuted at No 1 in 21 countries. By continually honing this base metal formula, AC/DC have achieved sonic gold: a sound uniquely their own The touring lineup for their latest stadium jaunt may boast only the indefatigable Angus – 68 years, erm, Young – from the lineup for their first-ever gig at Sydney’s Chequers nightclub on December 31, 1973, but 200 million album sales later, their gonzo appeal is if anything stronger than ever…

Live In France: The 1966 Concert In Limoges DEEP DIGS/ELEMENTAL MUSIC 9/10 STANDING on the platform of a disused railway station in south Manchester one cold and damp day in the spring of 1964, wearing a voluminous winter coat, a curly blonde wig and a white Gibson SG guitar, Sister Rosetta Tharpe attempted to repel the elements by delivering a rousing version of the gospel song “Didn’t It Rain” to an audience of young white people seated, appropriately enough, on the other side of the tracks. The presence of a Granada TV crew, for whom her performance in the American Folk Blues Festival – along with those of Muddy Waters and the Reverend Gary Davis – was mounted, provides later generations with a lasting record of how Tharpe, born in…

THERE are at least six Washingtons involved in the creation of Fearless Movement. Kamasi’s dad Rickey plays flute on the album, while his infant daughter contributes the melody to “Asha The First”. She also appears on the album’s cover, a blur of excitable motion at Kamasi’s feet as he stands, imperious, in front of a huge Basquiat-inspired modernist painting by his sister Amani, in an outfit designed by his niece Korynn (in collaboration with Ramiro Perez). His brother Sol was involved with editing the photo. “It’s meant to be like a space suit and a straitjacket, to represent Fearless Movement,” he explains of his impressive get-up. “To be fearless, you gotta almost seem a bit insane. And who moves more than an astronaut?” Fearless Movement is the second of Kamasi’s…

INCONSPICUOUS in a black leather coat and cap, Richard Thompson remains undisturbed as he windowshops on London’s Denmark Street. For one of Britain’s most revered guitarists and songwriters, though, this particular road holds temptations and regrets at every turn. “Roger McGuinn left his Rickenbacker behind in the UK, because the neck was broken,” he says, eyeing a 12-string in one shop window. “Somebody fixed it and I bought it. I’m divorced from it now, but it was good while it lasted. Now I’ve got a Telecaster 12-string, which is great – Jeff Tweedy has three!” Further along the street, past a display fortuitously presenting two models from his past – a Gibson ES-175 and a vintage sunburst Stratocaster – he pauses to peer into the industrial interior of a chic…

Theater Des Westens, Berlin, March 4 THERE’S often something contradictory at the heart of Air’s music. It is as ineffably breezy as their name suggests, yet weighty enough to endure prolonged consideration, confirmed by the double-platinum British success of their 1998 full length debut, Moon Safari. It draws frequently on once-derided 1970s instrumental easy listening, though its supplementary nods to the likes of Serge Gainsbourg and Francis Lai lend it an enviable sophistication. It’s dependent on vintage synths, too – there are various Moogs and Korgs on stage tonight, not to mention a Mellotron – but it still sounds human and strangely timeless. Moreover, it was once, and likely remains, as much a lifestyle choice as a musical one, soundtracking fashion stores and beach bars, tender make-outs and late-night, blim-holed…

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL My predecessor on this column, Jonathan Romney, has suggested that Laure Calamy – the retroussé-nosed Noémie from Netflix’s delightful Call My Agent! – is the French Olivia Colman, a beloved TV fixture now showing her range in more expansive roles. Last year she took the lead in Éric Gravel’s Full Time as an exhausted single mum on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Now she relishes the opportunity to sink her teeth into the role of Nathalie, a fishpacker and fantasist with big plans and few qualms. The poster suggests that The Origin Of Evil is being marketed as a French twist on Knives Out: a scabrous yet picturesque portrait of a wealthy patriarch in decline, surrounded by wives, daughters, granddaughters and servants, all bleeding him…

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 past 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 and get these subscriber-only benefits. SAVE MONEY* – Pay lower than the shop price and save on postage Free CD with every issue delivered direct to your door SENT WITH ONE ISSUE A YEAR Receive…

Loophole  MODERN SKY 9/10 RACK up a few turntable miles with the new album by Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band and it’s tempting to suppose that you’re privy to a period of unprecedented calm in the life of its creator. The truth is slightly more complicated. Calmness is one of Head’s defining characteristics, but the extremes to which he’s gone in order to protect the fertile dreamscape of his creativity have long since become the stuff of myth, in particular, his 1998 album The Magical World Of The Strands. His method-style attempt to see the world as Coleridge, Coltrane and The Velvet Underground saw it yielded a masterpiece, but within a few years, the compulsion to score saw him busking in Liverpool City Centre, playing “Scarborough Fair” to…

BIG|BRAVE’S sixth album since forming in Montreal in 2011, A Chaos Of Flowers, has enough rumble and force to satisfy any devotee of drone and doom. Yet there’s also room for the band’s gentler qualities to come more strongly to the fore. “We approached this album with the desire to write something more subdued and ‘quiet’,” singer and guitarist Robin Wattie tells Uncut before adding that it is “not quiet at all!” Nevertheless, these bruising and brooding songs still constitute further steps in a new direction. “We wanted to pare down to explore something softer, so to speak.” That shift also gives Wattie a greater chance to explore the properties of her voice, the singer using quieter but equally compelling means of expression than the anguished howls that fill the…

The One & Only Scott H Biram BLOODSHOT 8/10 BIRAM has made a career from his pugnacious take on beat-up blues, punk, bluegrass and outlaw country, barking out songs with an urgency that suggests every living moment counts. “I view my albums as collages,” he explains. “They reflect the diverse aspects of life – it’s not a concept but an expression.” There have been plenty of them too, from the early holler of 2000’s This Is Kingsbury? to the gnarly terrain of Graveyard Shift (2006) and, more recently, 2020’s Fever Dreams, on which he ran the full gamut of guitars, keyboards and shakers’n’bells percussion. Nearly a quarter of a century since his solo debut, Biram sounds no less immediate on The One & Only…. These are mainly portraits of people…

Dark Matter MONKEYWRENCH/REPUBLIC 8/10 WHERE Pearl Jam albums are concerned, there is very often a clue in the name. Pearl Jam’s second, 1993’s Vs, was the sound of a suddenly immensely successful yet bewildered and furious young band demanding of the world what it thought it was staring at. 1996’s No Code was a rejection and subversion of most of what might be expected of a heavy rock group, a fitful meander through previously unexplored musical realms. 1998’s Yield could be heard as a resignation to the idea that Pearl Jam were actually, on mature reflection, a pretty good heavy rock group, and there might not be anything much wrong with that. 2020’s Gigaton was more or less self-explanatory. The title of Dark Matter is a partial guide to its…

Vol 1: Already Now/Vol 2: Spread Silk On My Heart/Vol 3: My Heart (My Soul Is A Wasteland) (reissues, 1977, ’78, ’78) + Evening Breeze GUERSSEN 8/10, 9/10, 9/10, 8/10 THE story of Korean pop group Sanullim is a curious one. Formed in 1976 by the Kim brothers – Chang-wan, Chang-hoon and Chang-ik – they seemed to stumble upon both their sound, and their fame, as if by accident. With no plan to become professional musicians, the early Sanullim story – documented by these reissues of their first three albums, and Evening Breeze, a judiciously selected compilation from their next five albums – is one of teenage energy turning, slowly but surely, into a long-standing career: the group would last until 2008, when brother Chang-ik passed away, and release 17…

IT is November 2023 and Uncut is sitting in the plush confines of London’s AIR studios listening to David Bowie’s demo for “Starman”. A late addition to The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, “Starman” was released as the album’s lead single on April 28, 1972, where it played a critical role in helping Bowie reshape the cultural landscape. But it’s unlikely that the song would have proved so vital to Bowie’s – and Ziggy’s – success if it had stayed close to its original form. Originally recorded at his home in Haddon Hall, Beckenham in January 1972, this nascent “Starman” finds Bowie exploring other directions. As well as his acoustic 12 string guitar, there is an overdubbed slide guitar, which gives the song a…

“Ziggy wasn’t playing a stolen guitar…”MARK PRITCHETT MARK Pritchett was at home in Beckenham when there was a knock at the door. It was David Bowie asking for a favour. That wasn’t too unusual, as Bowie often popped around to borrow Pritchett’s portable Revox reel to-reel recorder to listen to tapes from Trident. But this time he wanted something else. “David knew my guitars and there was one I used on the Arnold Corns session that was bright red, a Gibson Les Paul I bought in Lewisham High Street,” says Pritchett. “He said he couldn’t stop but could he borrow my red Les Paul for a photo shoot. I said he could if he looked after it. Then he disappeared into the night.” When Bowie returned the guitar the following…

Beacon Theatre, Bristol, March 6 LIKE faded aristocrats fallen on hard times, Echo & The Bunnymen can no longer muster the same levels of glamorous mystique, psychedelic alchemy and motormouth charisma they once routinely delivered live. Even so, they retain something of their old regal swagger. At 64, Ian McCulloch still cuts a convincing rock god silhouette, even if he is dressed down in dad jeans and scruffy trainers, spending most of this performance hiding under crepuscular purple stage lights. Famously unburdened by modesty, McCulloch talks the talk more than he walks the walk. Indeed, he spends far too much of this show veering off into barely coherent Partridge-esque musings about Bargain Hunt, Jan Mølby, his schooldays, fluffy towels and other seemingly random topics. He rambles so much that exasperated…

JBL L100 CLASSIC MKII £3,995 (pair)/go.stuff.tv/L100 THE JBL L100 holds a special place in the hearts of seasoned audiophiles. Propelled to mainstream fame with a special blend of ace performance, standout looks and an appearance in a legendary Maxell cassette ad, it was one of the best-selling speakers of its era — a time that lasted from its 1970 conception all the way up to the mid-’80s. Revived in recent years as the L100 Classic, the modern version now has a MKII – and this latest successor to the waffle-foam-covered speaker that won over so many music fans still rocks. Available in a trio of panel finishes (namely orange, black and blue), the L100 Classic MKII, like the original, is a large, hulking box that makes no effort to hide.…

HEADS UP I loved seeing Talking Heads on your March cover [Take 323]. It brought back so many happy memories: of seeing them with my sister the last time they toured the UK in July 1982 at Wembley Arena (my first concert and what a first concert!); of lugging with my friend Dom two huge hardboard ex-display hoardings of Little Creatures to our rooms while at university; and of my daughter coming into the world to “Road To Nowhere” (anaesthetist’s choice of music, not mine!). Hoping I may finally get to see them play again, this time with my daughter, who also happens to be a huge fan! Thanks, as always, for the monthly treat Uncut always is. Tom Austin, via email SOUND AND VISION It is with great pleasure…