Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i UNCUT

“You can see our faded punk trash glamour and devotion to each other”NICKY WIRE WHEN Valerie Phillips was sent to Pontllanfraith in the Welsh Valleys to photograph Manic Street Preachers for a Vox magazine feature in March 1991, she didn’t know what to expect. The magazine had a vague notion that Phillips might return with photos akin to The Clash in Belfast. “They literally sent me off on a train to the middle of wherever in Wales,” Phillips recalls. “I arrived at the doorstep of James [Dean Bradfield]’s family home. I came back with pictures of boys in bunk beds.” Phillips followed the Manics for the next 20 months, joining them in B&Bs as they toured the country, on video shoots, and in Black Barn studios in Surrey where Richey…

You’ve certainly been keeping yourself occupied, musically… Yeah, between a few different bands and local things and just people asking, “Hey, can you do this?” “Yeah, I suppose I could do that. Let’s just get this band going…” It’s pretty fun. It keeps me on my toes and keeps me playing, and engaged. I’m better if I have deadlines and things coming up, it helps shape my motivation, figuring out each day what I need to do. The last couple of years since Mimi passed away can’t have been easy. It’s a wild process… There’s of course the grief, the loss, the shock of this thing that was so, so real being gone, but you really do find out how deeply you are just one part of a whole, that…

ENUMCLAW is a small town in Washington state. “It’s white and a farm town,” says the band’s vocalist Aramis Johnson. “Very beautiful, though.” Enumclaw the band are not from Enumclaw the town, but from nearby Tacoma. And though they sound very much sons of the Pacific Northwest – loud guitars, sweet melodies, unselfconscious angst – it wasn’t always that way. “I grew up listening to rap and R&B until I was 17, and didn’t really get into Pacific Northwest music until college,” says Johnson. “I thought if I was in a band it’d sound like King Krule.” Enumclaw’s debut album, 2022’s Save The Baby, attracted deserved attention for both the strength of its songwriting and the breezy confidence of its creators, who declared themselves predestined for greatness. Johnson, not altogether…

Something Is Working Up Above My Head DUALTONE 8/10 MARRIED couple Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent have been recording together as Shovels & Rope since 2008, reshaping folk, country and punky blues to their own spec, driven by a predilection for rural music with an amplified kick. Seven albums in – not including three volumes of their riotous, guest-studded Busted Jukebox series – they’ve set themselves new parameters: everything they record must be directly workable in a live setting as just a two-piece. “That’s always seemed to be when we’re at our best,” they reckon. “Or most twitchy.” Shorn of embellishments, Something Is Working… certainly carries an elemental power that justifies the approach. It’s their noisiest record to date, twin vocals high in the mix, distorted guitars vamping beneath,…

How did the hotel sessions come about? TROY VAN LEEUWEN: Mark was in a good place with sobriety at that time. He was never really a social guy, so anytime there would be any sort of downtime it was always late at night when all the festivities were done for the day. He had all these ideas, and on that Big Day Out tour [of Australia] PJ Harvey was on the bill too, so that’s how Mark got her involved on a couple of [Bubblegum] tracks. Honestly, there was no idea even that these things were happening – these were just basic demo ideas to present to whoever was working on the record when he went into the studio, so he could craft them more. When Mark passed, I had…

IN January 2024, Simpson made only his second significant live appearance since losing his voice in 2021, at the Dead Ahead Festival in Cancún, Mexico, playing with Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and various Dead compadres. “I wasn’t doing anything and I was asked, did I want to go to Mexico for a couple of days and play guitar for the Grateful Dead?” he recalls. “I wasn’t really familiar with them, because in my early twenties in Kentucky there was a jam band scene which I dismissed as unstructured noodling, and I lumped the Dead into that. Then when Bob sent me 60 songs I had to learn, I thought, why is this so easy? It’s almost like I could anticipate where Jerry was going. And it was because Jerry played…

WHILE touring with The Jayhawks in early 2000, Beachwood Sparks were invited to a house party in St Louis by some local fans. After the festivities ended in the wee small hours, the band found themselves sleeping beneath a large aquarium. Peering through the glass walls for the first time, they saw its occupant up close: a piranha. “They had all these books on top of the aquarium,” says Farmer Dave Scher, whose moustache and conductor’s hat reinforce his deadpan prankster stare. “The guy whose house it was said the piranha had punched through the top. He found it flopping around on the floor, so he put some books on top to hold the lid down. But I just knew I was going to wake up with that fish in…

WITH its punchy intro, unrelenting energy and glorious vocal harmonies, “Nothing But A Heartache” sounds like it was born in the soul hothouses of Memphis or Muscle Shoals. That’s certainly what many fans of Northern Soul thought when they took this minor US hit by The Flirtations from 1968 into their hearts in the mid-’70s. But “Nothing But A Heartache” was written by a pair of Liverpudlians and recorded in London by some of Britain’s best sessions musicians, among them Herbie Flowers and arranger Johnny Harris. Those voices, though, are unmistakably American. The Flirtations are sisters Earnestine and Shirley Pearce and Vie Billups (aka Pearly Gates). In conversation, the trio are every bit as vivacious as they appear on record. There’s good-natured teasing, overlapping chat and a lot of laughing…

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: I moved out to LA in ’84 and I remember hearing the Born In The USA singles on the radio. I was already a big fan. When I lived in Austin in the ’70s, he came through and played at the Armadillo [World Headquarters, a legendary outlaw country venue]. I remember I loved his songs and voice and everything. I was completely infatuated with his talent, but also his energetic stage presence. So 10 years later, when all these great songs of his were on the radio, I was already a fan and I already considered him an early influence and inspiration for me. I don’t know how he couldn’t have been, since his music was everywhere. One of the reasons why I probably connected with him so…

NATIONWIDE ARENA, COLUMBUS, OHIO, APRIL 21 DAVE ERICKSON: “I’ve been blessed to have attended many E Street Band shows with my 24-year-old daughter and this one proved to be every bit as joyful, energetic and life-changing as any. Maybe even a tad more. We brought two friends who had never been to a show. The guy had told me that his remaining bucket-list item in life was to see Bruce because Bruce ‘sings for the people’, so we made the trek from Minnesota to Columbus. To start the show off with the epic version of ‘Youngstown’ would have been enough to leave my friend satisfied for life, but the rest of the show was equally incredible. “There was a man standing in front of us who was obviously struggling with…

Union Chapel, London, June 24 SOME wars are never fully won. “I’m a soldier and I’m gonna keep on fighting,” Mavis Staples tells the rapt audience in her “second home” of Islington’s Union Chapel, site of numerous Mavis shows, including the one that yielded her 2019 Live In London album. “Y’all come with me, we’re gonna fix this thing.” These days, the 84-year-old sole survivor from legendary gospel-soul troupe The Staple Singers conducts her crusades less oft en from the frontline than from a stool next to the drum kit, sipping tea (“That’s hot!” she cries, meaning her cuppa rather than the bassline). But her history as a focal voice in the civil rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s remains the source of great reverence, and she’s still a…

FILM FIRST / TIGERLILY DIRECTOR: GARY HUSTWIT 9/10 IN the opening scene of this hugely enjoyable Brian Eno film, we find the composer/polymath bopping around in his home studio, thinking about a composition like an ecosystem. As he works, we see him add weather, and even an animal population to his piece. Eventually he tweaks some controls on the screen to alter the prospect of change – how probable it is that an event will occur again. Eno’s “generative” – evolving, infinitely changeable – way of making music has been the guiding principle for Gary Hustwit’s film. Rather than a whistlestop life doc taking in glam rock and ambience via Fripp, “Heroes” and the Bush Of Ghosts, the idea is that the movie is itself pretty much infinitely variable, being…

“I DIDN’T even know we were making a record,” John Murry admits of his new collaboration with Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins for A Little Bit Of Grace And Decay, which accompanies an extraordinary documentary, The Graceless Age: The Ballad Of John Murry. “I’d been working on the score here in Toronto,” explains Timmins, who’d previously produced Murry on 2017’s A Short History Of Decay, “then John happened to be in town to do some filming for the documentary. So we got together, with me recording him playing songs acoustically, for no real reason. But I thought there were some very interesting, full and honest performances, so I got the idea of combining them with this soundscape I’d done, and have them feed off each other.” Aside from Timmins’ ambient pieces,…

“WE haven’t mellowed,” proclaims Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow, with more than a hint of pride. “My wife makes fun at how dark and menacing it is, but I don’t see it that way. We write what we write because that’s what we write.” Although the band reunited in 2009 to play live, forthcoming album Rack will be their first for 26 years. “We pick up right where the last record left off,” says guitarist Duane Denison. “Some of the songs are even based on ideas we had from that era.” Rack sees The Jesus Lizard maintain an approach – riffs, dissonance, freaky lyrics – that made them one of the most acclaimed cult bands of the 1990s. They formed in Austin in 1987, but really got going when they…

1 ENUMCLAW Not Just Yet This young group from Tacoma, Washington state, summon up an almighty noise to kick us off this month. Taken from their second album Home In Another Life, “Not Just Yet” careens along like a thrilling amalgamation of Drive-By Truckers and Nirvana. 2 MJ LENDERMAN She’s Leaving You Still just 25 years old, Lenderman’s reputation has been growing for years now, most notably with his 2022 album Boat Songs and his work with Wednesday. Manning Fireworks is his latest record, and it’s full of literate, lilting indie-rock like this delight. 3 NICK LOWE Different Kind Of Blue Indoor Safari is the first Lowe album in a decade, a set of new songs and reworked demos recorded with his loyal Los Straitjackets band. Here’s a sultry, lush…

“Heaven, it’s a lonely place if you’re alone” White Roses, My God SUB POP ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 LIKE many who are dealing with loss, Alan Sparhawk has been trying to keep himself busy. He’s had a lot to grieve: the death of his wife Mimi Parker in November 2022, aged just 55, wasn’t only the end of a marriage, but also the end of Low, the group they formed in Duluth, Minnesota, back in 1993. What to do? For starters, he’s been keeping his vegetable garden blooming and then quietly enthusing about it on his regular Instagram livestreams. He’s also dipped into a host of diverse musical projects: there’s been Damien, fronted by his friend Marc Gartman; Derecho Rhythm Section, a funk group also featuring his son Cyrus…

Indoor Safari YEP ROC 9/10 WHEN Nick Lowe toured America to promote Quality Street, his 2013 album of Christmas songs, his backing band was Yep Roc labelmates Los Straitjackets, retro rockers whose own albums suggested they hadn’t heard any new music since about 1965, their records awash with twanging instrumental rock’n’roll, rockabilly, surf music, teen ballads, some Tex-Mex and country. Nick, meanwhile, had been reversing into tomorrow, to borrow an old Stiff sales slogan, for most of his career, plausibly even earlier. They were a perfect musical match. And what a spectacle they offered! Four burly Americans in black hitman suits festooned with gold Aztec medallions, each sporting a lurid Mexican wrestling mask. The dapper Nick out front in crisp white shirt and black slacks, relaxed as a Rat Pack…

Amelia NONESUCH 8/10 AMELIA EARHART was the pioneering American aviator who, among her many achievements, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, in 1932. She led the way in other areas too, using her fame to champion women’s rights, including the Equal Rights Movement, endorse commercial air travel, write bestselling books, take on sponsorship deals and, more broadly, promote her passions in public. She had the ear of President Roosevelt and blazed a trail for women in an industry where female pilots and mechanics are still woefully underrepresented. On Amelia, Laurie Anderson tells the story of Earhart’s life as she makes her fateful attempt, in 1937, to circumnavigate the world in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra plane. It’s a riveting tale anyway, straight out of an Indiana…

My Method Actor NINJA TUNE 8/10 THERE have yet to be reports of Nilüfer Yanya refusing to answer to her own name, terrifying production assistants, or exhibiting any of the demanding off-camera behaviour once expected of Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis and other master thespians. Nevertheless, the notion of the method actor is a potent one for the London singer-songwriter. She’s spoken of the kinship she feels with these counterparts’ determination to ground performances in personal experiences and memories of trauma, essentially reliving those emotions in order to lend authenticity and urgency to present-day expressions. She sees her songs as a potential means to do the same. Another anxiety well-known to actors – or, indeed, to anyone who spends too much time on social media – surfaces throughout her third album…

YOU might know Leo Abrahams (above right) as a long-term accomplice of Brian Eno and a producer for artists as diverse as Wild Beasts, Imogen Heap, Brett Anderson and Regina Spektor. But Krononaut draw from very different musical sources. “Partly it’s inspired by this ritual Sufi music, maddoh, from the Tajik/Uzbek borders – rhythmic music that people improvise over,” says Abrahams. “And partly it’s the composer Morton Feldman, who used ideas of cellular repetition.” Krononaut released a self-titled album just before lockdown, featuring Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, Chicago saxophonist Matana Roberts and British jazz drummer Martin France. But the second instalment is a much more stripped-back work, featuring just Abrahams and France playing live, with no overdubs. All basslines, drones or harmonies are actually being generated in real time. Is…

“Did you call for the night porter/Smell the blood running warm” Bubblegum XX BEGGARS ARKIVE REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10 THE urge to disentangle certain charismatic artists from the mythos that clings to them is as eternally irresistible as it is futile. Interviews and memoirs are useful for this only if the subject/narrator is 100 per cent reliable; the internet, teeming with wild opinions and purported truths, is no place to look for verification. Which is why a combination of cultural romanticism and institutionalised trust still has us looking to an artist’s songs for clues as to who they “really” are. As someone drawn to the dark side – well documented, not least in his unflinching autobiography Sing Backwards And Weep – Mark Lanegan is often the subject of “authentic…

Woodstock 1969 CHRYSALIS 7/10 WHEN this reviewer first saw the Woodstock movie at a midnight showing in the summer of 1970, the wildest reaction from those crammed into Bromley’s Astor cinema came not as Hendrix, Sly Stone and The Who exploded across the screen but when Alvin Lee announced, “This is a thing called ‘I’m Going Home’… by helicopter.” A machine-gun burst of notes flew from his cherry red Gibson, and by the time the screen split into triplicate with close-ups of Lee’s fingers flying over the frets at the speed of light, we were all headbanging in the aisles. Perhaps it was because Ten Years After were so relatable. We’d seen them just down the road at the Greyhound in Croydon, and their 1968 live album Undead, which included…

Fabstract TINY GLOBAL 7/10 THEY have a strange legacy, Young Marble Giants. Everything Stuart Moxham has done since – his subsequent band The Gist; any number of collaborations – is overshadowed by that weird, under-developed album from 1980, Colossal Youth. That record was a masterpiece of understatement and introversion. The modest ripples it made reached far and wide, but it remains a small miracle that anyone heard it amid the scratchy chaos of post-punk. Listen to Hole’s over-carbonated assault on YMG’s “Credit In The Straight World” with the word “die” stretched over several syllables, and you quickly appreciate what made Young Marble Giants great. They made no rock gestures. They were a lo-fi experiment, glacial and muted. They cared little about production. Their sound is based on drum machine rhythms…

Real Life And The Movies, Volume 1 (reissue, 1982) UNSEEN WORLDS 8/10 ROBERT SHEFF, better known as “Blue” Gene Tyranny, was one of those quiet but garrulous all-rounders who became part of the infrastructure of a scene or a genre. In Tyranny’s case it was largely the avant-garde, or modern classical, that most benefited from his presence, particularly composers like Robert Ashley – who once cast Tyranny in one of his operas as ‘The World’s Greatest Piano Player’ – and Jacques Bekaert. But Tyranny also crossed over into rock, new wave and avant-disco, working with the likes of Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra and Jill Kroesen; later, he’d guest with Laurie Anderson. It’s tempting to think Tyranny’s flexibility was smelted via his membership of The Prime Movers, the mid-1960s…

CO-FOUNDED by bassist Brent Rademaker, Curation Records has become a hub for an expanding community of folk-rock and psych-pop acts from California and beyond, including Those Pretty Wrongs (featuring Big Star’s Jody Stephens), Triptides and the George Harrison tribute act George Is Lord. “We called it Curation because it’s a pun on Creation Records, which is one of my favourite labels,” says Rademaker. “I wanted to run it with the same ethos: why don’t we curate from what we’ve experienced and what we’ve lived?” It’s a miracle the label survived its tragic start. One of its first signings, Beachwood guitarist Neal Casal, died in 2019. Meanwhile, the label picked the worst possible time to throw a launch party. “It was the night the mayor of Los Angeles shut the city…

SEPTEMBER 29, 1977 was an auspicious date for the 19-year-old Adrian Borland. His band, The Outsiders, were supporting Radiators From Space at the Roxy – the infamous early London punk club which hosted some of the first shows by The Clash, X-Ray Spex and The Damned. For a joke, among the names Borland added to The Outsiders’ guest list that night were Iggy Pop and David Bowie: his musical heroes. At the time, The Outsiders were being sort-of-managed by Jock McDonald, the colourful promoter and DJ who later fronted the Bollock Brothers. He told his young charges that not only was Iggy in town, he would be coming to the show later. “We thought, ‘Yeah right, tell us another one’,” remembers Graham Bailey, Borland’s oldest childhood friend. “Iggy was Adrian’s…

PLUS 2024 LIVE SPECIAL! PAGE 100 WHEN Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band toured behind his seventh album Born In The USA in 1984 and 1985, they knew they had to open each show with the title track. Its opening fanfare was too loud, too massive, too new to fit anywhere else in the setlist. Roy Bittan had recorded those towering chords on his new Yamaha CS-80, which at the time was a state-of-the-art analogue synthesiser, and he had programmed it to sound strange and vaguely Asian: a new colour in the E Street palette. Weinberg smacked his snare drum as hard as he could, then boosted it in the final mix, so that it sounded like bombs dropped from an aeroplane. Those two sounds together were meant to…

TOM MORELLO: I came to Bruce Springsteen late in the game. I was deeply immersed in metal, punk and emerging hip-hop, so when Bruce came on my radar for the first time it was the “Dancing In The Dark” video, which I didn’t understand at all. It all came into focus when I saw a broadcast of the Amnesty International tour in 1988. Bruce played “Born In The USA” and then I really understood what the song was about. I saw the breadth and depth. Bruce has explained many times that because that song was misunderstood, he became a stadium artist. It is part of the beauty, wonder and irony of his career. It speaks to the universality of the artist that he can play that song in countries all…

The Ultimate Record Collection ranks the 500 Greatest Albums of the decade, as voted for by Uncut’s team of experts SUBSCRIBE TODAY! Order online at shop.kelsey.co.uk/UCP624RC Or call 01959 543 747*** and quote ref: UCP624RC SCAN ME TERMS AND CONDITIONS UK Direct Debit and Continuous Card Payment offer only. *You will pay £33.80 every six months and will save £55.90 in your first full year (13 issues) if you do not cancel your continuous payment. Savings based on the standard Basic Annual Rate of £123.50 which includes the cover price (£6.75) plus Kelsey Media’s standard packing and postage price per single issue (£2.75) for one full year (13 issues). Offer ends 30th September 2024. Your subscription will start with the next available issue and you will receive 13 issues in…

TWO years ago, when North Carolina singer-songwriter Dawn Landes was first inspired to make an album based on a 1971 book of feminist folk songs and poems dating back across two centuries, her first thoughts concerned how best she could interpret them. Her next task was to decide who she might enlist to help her put her own contemporary yet timeless stamp on them. By the time she had collaborated with producer Josh Kaufman and singers such as Rissi Palmer, Emily Frantz of Watchhouse and The Lone Bellow’s Kanene Pipkin to create The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, released in March of this year, she was already planning to take the project to a whole new level – presenting the album in a live setting. There was always going to be plenty…

WHEN Jake Lenderman’s dad would ferry his son around their hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, in the family van, he’d play his favourite music: Neil Young, Son Volt, My Morning Jacket, Band Of Horses, Drive-By Truckers. “That was the stuff that stuck with me,” says Lenderman, who records as MJ Lenderman when he’s not playing guitar in alternative rockers Wednesday. “I remember my dad had the Truckers’ Gangstabilly CD in the van and that album cover spooked me so much as a kid.” Traces of all those artists can be heard on Manning Fireworks, his fourth solo album. Lenderman recorded most of the parts himself during breaks from touring with Wednesday, with that band’s Karly Hartzman (his girlfriend) and Xandy Chelmis contributing vocals and pedal steel respectively. Lenderman is a…

Another Tide, Another Fish BASIN ROCK 8/10 HAVING toiled in the shadows for much of his long, varied career, Michael Chapman enjoyed a well-deserved renaissance in his later years. Before passing away at the age of 80 in September 2021, some of his best records were reissued by the tastemaking Light In The Attic label; Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done, a 2012 Tompkins Square tribute album, saw his songs lovingly covered by such diverse talents as Lucinda Williams, Thurston Moore and Maddy Prior; and he toured relentlessly, sharing stages with younger musicians like Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, Bill Callahan and more, who looked to Chapman not just as a link to the past, but as a still-vital creative entity. Indeed, 2017’s 50 and 2019’s True North, both produced by…

Mute GLITTERBEAT 8/10 BOTH Jewish and Arab, musically omnivorous but unmistakably Middle Eastern, globe-trotting trio El Khat are a fascinating hot mess of sounds and influences. Their founder, frontman and primary songwriter Eyal El Wahab is part of the huge Yemeni-Jewish population in Israel, mostly children of refugees who fled persecution in Yemen in the late 1940s, a diaspora now numbering over 400,000. Named after the plant famous for inducing mind-bending euphoria, El Khat’s mission is to keep the unsung cultural heritage of their ancestors alive, but on their own terms, adding a healthy dollop of DIY attitude, psych-rock energy and noisy experimentalism. El Wahab grew up on sober classical and sacred Jewish music. Indeed, his unlikely apprenticeship for El Khat was teaching himself the cello in his twenties, then…

Troubadour (reissue, 1976) DRAG CITY 9/10 THAT elderly lady in the loft, who had no shower or kitchen, who threw parties for the bohemian crowd, where she played strange, ringing, twanging instruments with a faraway look in her eyes? Around New Orleans they said she lived in a hippy commune before hippies existed, or worked her passage as a cabin girl on a Mississippi steamboat, or ran away to a monastery in Mexico with an anarchist priest. They said she had two kids, that she had studied in Europe and travelled all over the world; some said she was secretly involved in a famous pop group over there, though none knew which; others warned not to speak ill of her, lest she cause her hammers to bludgeon the dulcimer of…

“OUR new album has the energy of our past,” says Exene Cervenka of X’s ninth and reputedly final album, Smoke & Fiction. “Because we tour constantly, that past is alive in us anyway. We’re still doing what we’ve always done, it’s just a continuous line. I don’t feel like there’s that much distance between Los Angeles and Smoke & Fiction.” Released in 1980, X’s debut Los Angeles was an uncommonly literary punk landmark, combining the talents of Baltimore bohemian John Doe, Florida poet and non-musician Cervenka, punk rockabilly guitarist Billy Zoom and jazz-minded drummer DJ Bonebrake. The album went on to define LA’s nascent punk scene. Striving for success to match their acclaim, subsequent records tried on pop styles and rough-hewn Americana. “I think at some point we bought our…

THE POLICE REGGATTA DE BLANC A&M, 1979 The Police’s second album was the major breakthrough, containing two No 1 singles (“Message In A Bottle” and “Walking On The Moon”). Tracks like “On Another Day” and rocker “Deathwish” showed the band’s variety as Copeland and Summers still enjoyed almost-equal billing with Sting. 10/10 THE POLICE GHOST IN THE MACHINE A&M, 1981 The band’s first visit to Montserrat saw them expand their sound with sax and keyboards while Sting continued to pump out the hits – in this case the inevitable “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”. 9/10 ANDY SUMMERS AND ROBERT FRIPP I ADVANCE MASKED A&M, 1982 Summers’ solo career is largely punctuated by his love of jazz, but this early collaboration with Robert Fripp is a great, sometimes overlooked,…

KNEECAP Even Uncut readers, secure in the belief that rock’n’roll and the movies are the two most vital cultural forms of the last 70 years, have to concede that the overlap between the two is vanishingly small. Although everyone from Dylan to Prince has chanced their arm, you can count the number of good rock films on the fingers of one hand: A Hard Day’s Night, Head, Slade In Flame and 24 Hour Party People. And, you might have thought, there was precious little prospect of any more coming down the line. Amazingly, Kneecap – an origin story of the Belfast hip-hop trio of the same name, starring and co-created by the band themselves – is a bona fide addition to the slim canon. It’s a riotous, fearless, honest-to-goodness modern…

JOHN & YOKO IN IRELAND What a wonderful spread on John Lennon and the expansive reissue of his Mind Games album in August Uncut [Take 328]. Although the writing was spot on, what I found astonishing was the photos on show. Most, if not all, I had never seen before and this has prompted me to send you a photo that you will not have seen before either. This photo clearly shows John, Yoko Ono, a man to the right of John that I recognise but fail to name, and a little blonde girl. This girl’s name is Eileen O’Sullivan. The photo was taken in County Mayo by her father around 1967 when John was either buying or had recently bought Dorinish Island off its coast. I went on to…