Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i UNCUT

HI Suzi! It’s 60 years since you joined The Pleasure Seekers as a teenager, and you’re back on tour again. Do you still get the same buzz? I feel like now, at 74, I’m at the peak of my performing capabilities. I’ve morphed into the rock’n’roll entertainer I always wanted to be. Since my Unzipped show in 2014, I kept the same format, so it’s two hours, some clips, some talking, some playing. And that was what I always dreamed of. It takes you through the journey of my life. You get all the hits, but you get so much more. The word “iconic” is overused, but it surely applies to the photo of you in a jumpsuit? And I still wear it. In Act 2 of my show, I…

AMERICANA Album of the month Ramble & Rave On! COLEMINE/KARMA CHIEF 7/10 SOMETHING of an unknown quantity outside of his native Ohio, Gabbard made his reputation as guitar-toting frontman of Cincinnati garage-rockers Thee Shams and, subsequently, Buffalo Killers. Both bands featured his sibling Zach, with whom he now records as a duo, the brothers juggling their time between the studio and touring duties with The Black Keys, an association that dates back to Dan Auerbach handling production on Buffalo Killers’ 2008 effort, Let It Ride. In among all that, Andrew has also chosen to embark on a solo career. His particular brand of fuzz-pedal R&B has parallels with the Keys’ recent output (Gabbard appears on 2022’s Dropout Boogie and this year’s Ohio Players), yet Ramble & Rave On! allows him…

Too Cold To Hold STRAP ORIGINALS 7/10 LONG before the release of their debut album Khaki Tears in 2015, Warmduscher had won notoriety on the south London post-punk scene through the pumped, party-ready abandon of their (largely improvised) live sets, their ludicrous aliases – The Witherer, Quicksand and Mr Salt Fingers Lovecraft among them – and their decidedly grubby mien with its deliberately low-rent, showbiz veneer. Most bands gather a kind of ambient identity along the way but Warmduscher arrived with theirs fully formed: that their lineup at the time included Fat White Family’s Jack Everett and Saul Adamczewski (said band’s Adam Harmer now serves) is significant. Their enthusiasm for modern rock’n’roll sleaze and embracing of chaos à la Butthole Surfers and Royal Trux, with respect paid to Little Richard…

The Devil You Know (1992–1996) ARTS & CRAFTS 8/10 WHEN LA’s Idaho, two friends in their late twenties, dropped Year After Year in 1993, it landed hard and heavy. Opener “God’s Green Earth” began with a circular four-string guitar riff, triggering an earthquake after 45 seconds and collapsing into a dusty cloud of feedback and distortion. The technique was familiar from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, except this moved at a glacial pace, and while Kurt Cobain weaponised his rough, raw voice, Jeff Martin’s was, if deeper, a cracked, tranquilised drawl like Mark Eitzel’s on AMC’s Everclear. Most of their debut kept this mood, instruments pitched low, with the torpid “Gone”, a slo-mo “Sundown”, and the redemptive “Save” so deliberate they seemed to have been mastered at half speed. Others,…

DEBATES over song selection were common Dpractice whenever Petty and the Heartbreakers made an album, reveals keyboard player Benmont Tench. “[Long After Dark] was the third LP in a row we tried ‘Ways To Be Wicked’ and it still didn’t make the cut,” he says. “I wasn’t always party to the final decisions, that would be Tom and his co-captain Mike [Campbell, guitarist] or Jimmy [Iovine, producer], but I thought ‘Keeping Me Alive’ had hit written all over it. And ‘Never Be You’ is awesome, although A few of those left on the shelf lived to fight again when it came to touring the album, a record of which has now been unearthed in the rarely seen Cameron Crowe-directed road movie Heartbreakers Beach Party. “They were some of the best…

THE MC5 have been touring intermittently since Wayne Kramer revived the band in 2003, but the release this month of Heavy Lifting is the first new album to bear the band’s name since 1971’s High Time. The project came about when Kramer invited producer Bob Ezrin to work on songs written by Kramer with Oakland songwriter Brad Brooks for a proposed heist movie. But Ezrin had other ideas. “After listening to the music, I could hear the spirit of MC5,” says Ezrin. “It’s revolutionary but it’s danceable. Wayne was reluctant. Could he be MC5? I said that from the point of view of the United States, we all need to be MC5.” Ezrin had seen the MC5 in 1970 when he started working with Alice Cooper in Detroit. He caught…

“THOSE first few records really show The Cure realising the possibilities and then going deep, but Three Imaginary Boys was the doorway. When I first heard it, it would have been probably ’86, when I went first went to college. I searched out the very few wacky-looking people there and this was the music they were listening to – a lot of New Order, and The Cure. I had heard them a little bit before, but then I dived in. In college, bands I was in even covered a couple of their songs – I know how to play ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and I was in a band that was learning ‘10:15 Saturday Night’ too. “I like that Three Imaginary Boys is fragmented. They’re still a little bit all over…

“I got into The Cure with ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ on some punk compilation, then I got all their albums, I followed them. I really liked Pornography because it was a bit more depressing-sounding, a bit gloomy, it has a certain longing that was hitting my mood of teenage alienation at the time. It was getting more directly to the point with its dismal feeling. It’s probably their most fully realised depression session! Goth wasn’t quite a thing then, but that seems like an early goth record. It’s really reverby, but it’s also more rocking than their other albums, with a driving beat. “Robert Smith’s guitars have a washy sort of sound that encompasses you, and his voice has a great, pure tone. I related to the music. It made me…

Top bantz and dazzling acoustic brilliance “IT’S Friday night!” yells Ryley Walker, probably the first time anyone has ever done this in Dalston’s sacred temple of skronk, Cafe Oto. “Time to snort your ketamine and take your pills.” He goes on to reveal that the reason he’s taking the stage at the unusually early time of 7.30pm is to avoid a clash with a Ride gig across town. “Only in London could the economy bend around shoegaze,” he observes drily. “I’m a Swervedriver man myself.” But before all this frivolity, there’s a lovely solo set from Jack Cooper, airing a stash of new material destined for the next Modern Nature record. While recent albums have found him drifting further and further into the free-folk ether, the songs he debuts tonight…

THE FRONT ROOM RELEASED OCTOBER 25 In time for Halloween, a new A24 horror from Robert Eggers’ little brothers, about an expectant couple forced to take in an estranged stepmother who believes she harnesses the power of an otherworldly holy spirit. ANORA RELEASED NOVEMBER 1 The great Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project) was an unexpected Palme d’Or winner for this tale of a Las Vegas sex worker making an unlikely connection with a Russian oligarch. HERETIC RELEASED NOVEMBER 1 Hugh Grant stars as a dark theologian with a taste for Radiohead and Jar Jar Binks in this horror-thriller from the writers of A Quiet Place. BIRD RELEASED NOVEMBER 8 Franz Rogowski and Barry Keoghan star in Andrea Arnold’s latest, a magic social realist fable of extended families and hallucinogenic…

PRAISE HYMN, PRAISE HIM Now that I’ve played Wild God a few times, I think it’s already a strong contender for album of the year along with Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band’s Loophole, Bernard Butler’s Good Grief and Orlando Weeks’ Loja. A major record deserves a major review and Alastair McKay has delivered a knowledgeable article and interesting interview with Nick Cave. This does everything a good review should, dissecting each song and providing context. The shimmering piano arrangement and instrumentation of the gospel gorgeous “Joy” reminds me of Karl Blau’s 2017 definitive version of “Fallin’ Rain”. By the way, that’s an appalling pun at the end of the recommendation for Seven Psalms; “Play it again, psalm.” Redeemed slightly by the laugh-out-loud pun at the review coda, “Nick…

“THE Haçienda was like an adult playground,” remembers former New Order bassist Peter Hook, whose bestselling 2009 book The Haçienda: How Not To Run A Club told the eyebrow-rocketing tale of the iconic Manchester superclub’s mercurial rise and fall. Now his wife Rebecca, a one-time Haçienda regular, has published her own book, The Haçienda: Threads. Subtitled ‘A Celebration Of Music, Fashion & Friendship’, it focuses on the myriad artists, designers, staff and punters whose lives were transformed by the club. “Everyone knows about Oasis or whoever,” says Hook, who provided the book’s foreword, “but Becky found all these other people that used to go, from the director of [Italian fashion empire] Max Mara to designers like John Richmond. Even the CEO of Soho House in London was a Haçienda pot…

DECEMBER 2024 TAKE 332 1 MOUNT EERIE (P28) 2 ROGÊ (P30) 3 UNDERWORLD (P34) 4 WARMDUSCHER (P38) THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES Camelot PARADISE OF BACHELORS HISTORICALLY, pop music has often reached into Arthurian legend for a handy metaphor. It is, after all, a symbolist’s paradise – the enchanted vale of Van Morrison’s “Avalon Of The Heart”, for instance, or David Crosby’s Californian hippie dream reflected back as “Guinnevere”. The Moody Blues’ spellbound evocation of Camelot on “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”, perhaps. Or, more literally, Rick Wakeman’s preposterous chainmail folly on ice. This ongoing thread of references in song – from Nat King Cole to Nas, Stevie Nicks to The Streets – tends to follow a pattern. Much like its depictions in literature, television and film, Camelot…

Curyman II DIAMOND WEST 9/10 GREAT artists usually seek great teachers. Dylan visited Woody Guthrie at the Greystone Park psychiatric hospital; Patti Smith danced to The Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City. Sometimes, students and teachers even make great art together. Rogê – aka Roger José Cury – is a leading light of a new generation of Brazilian traditionalists, one who has built his career in part on inspired collaborations with teachers, or “older brothers”, as he calls them. His 2015 album with pagode giant Arlindo Cruz, Na Veia, won a Latin Grammy and put Rogê on the map internationally. It was followed by Seu Jorge & Rogê, a teamup with a fellow Rio De Janeiro carioca who also has a knack for collaboration (see his Bowie-crooning star turn in…

Strawberry Hotel SMITH HYDE PRODUCTIONS 9/10 ON “Black Poppies”, the striking yet serene opener to Underworld’s latest 68-minute odyssey, Karl Hyde’s conversational, electronically treated vocals, blanketed in little more than quietly pulsing synths, are layered like gospel harmonies. They’re akin to Brian Eno’s on “We Let It In” and “Garden Of Stars” from FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE two years ago. Where that record, however, presented a world in danger, this offers optimism. “You may feel a little strange at first, but keep changing”, Hyde reassures us, and that sentiment seems to sum up the duo’s dogged unwillingness to rest on their laurels, so crucial to Strawberry Hotel. Since ’94’s almighty Dubnobasswithmyheadman Underworld – like LCD Soundsystem – have soundtracked abandon with distinctive style, beckoning fans of many musical persuasions to cast aside fear…

REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973–2023 BMG REISSUE OF THE MONTH 9/10 JANUARY 1977. Bryan Ferry is in Oxford Street’s Air Studios, rushing to finish his new solo album, In Your Mind. With a release date looming and tour already booked, Ferry is still fussing over this mix and that, presently in a huddle with co-producer Steve Nye, plainly agonising over the new vocal he’s just recorded for a track called “Night Operator”, which from the production booth earlier had sounded nigh on perfect. Ferry is now suggesting subtle shifts in the mix, possibly imperceptible sonic adjustments that he nevertheless thinks are essential. Nye starts another remix of a track he’s possibly been remixing since the sun dial first came into fashion. For Ferry,…

666 – The Apocalypse Of St John: 50th Anniversary Boxset UNIVERSAL 9/10 IF The Rolling Stones’ notorious free concert at Altamont in December 1969 signalled the end of the ’60s’ hippie ideal, then Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 is the sacrificial ceremony where the hopes and dreams of that decade are finally turned to dust in a beautiful, cacophonous, ridiculous melange of progressive rock, psychedelic folk, Greek myth, Christian scripture, Monty Python… surrealism and countercultural conspiracy. The victims at this ceremony? Aphrodite’s Child themselves, whose four members went their separate ways long before this controversial 83-minute double-album based on the Book Of Revelations was released in June 1972, two years after the band had delivered it to their label, Mercury. Stewarded by the Greek maestro Vangelis Papathanassiou – the visionary behind the…

Tina Turns The Country On!/Acid Queen/Rough/Love Explosion (reissues, 1974, ’75, ’78, ’79) RHINO 8/10, 7/10, 6/10, 5/10 LIKE Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West before her, and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter after her, Tina Turner’s 1974 foray into country, Tina Turns The Country On!, is a refreshing illustration of the breadth of her talents. Already successful with her then-husband in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Tina’s solo career began not with the rock-infused R&B that made them famous, but country crossover instead. On its 50th anniversary, the album is ripe for reconsideration, thanks to a reissue with a brand new half-speed master vinyl and first ever CD release. In addition, her next three solo albums – 1975’s Acid Queen, 1978’s Rough and 1979’s Love Explosion – are also being reissued on…

DEEP in some of Watford’s thickest, most mosquito-plagued undergrowth is not, you might imagine, a natural location for Kim Deal. Yet here she is, miming on a borrowed Stratocaster for her first proper video as a solo artist. It’s a similarly unexpected place for her to be after years of playing in groups. “I never start out thinking I’m gonna do a whole record, because it’s too daunting to look at it,” she explains, apparently as surprised as anyone to be stepping out from The Breeders with her debut solo album Nobody Loves You More. “If I have a song that I think sounds pretty cool I want to make it sound good. So then that’s done. But it takes so fucking long…” Some 37 years after Pixies’ debut Come…

OCTOBER 2, 1977 was an inauspicious date for Manchester’s Electric Circus. A key venue for punk – the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Damned had all played there, among others – it had fallen foul of the city council and was now closing. For its final night, the promoters intended to give the Electric Circus a memorable send-off, lining up local bands the Drones, Slaughter And The Dogs, The Worst and – only a few months away from changing their name to Joy Division – Warsaw. But there was one other, unannounced addition to the bill – a new band, making their live debut. This was Magazine, a compelling and innovative project from former Buzzcock Howard Devoto. “The setlist was only three songs, ‘Shot By…

JOHN SINCLAIR: We submitted a demo to The Beatles when they started their record label, Apple. We sent a package to the motherfucking Beatles! It turns out they were just looking to sign some wimpy pop acts that sounded like Paul McCartney. ROB TYNER: We thought, ‘Wow, the Beatles would be perfect’, because we really liked those guys. We had this notion of, ‘Gee, they’ll sign us, and everything will be lovely and we’ll all get together and have tea.’ But they listened to it and sent it back and said, “Hey, man, this is not suitable for any kind of catalogue we’re ever gonna have.” SINCLAIR: Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley wrote a music column in East Village Other, which was one of the biggest underground papers in the…

“The first album in the US was called Boys Don’t Cry, and that was the first Cure album I got. I sat down and tried to play some of the riffs from that record. I think of Seventeen Seconds as a pair with Faith, they sound and look similar. Where the debut was uptempo, funny and crisp, Seventeen Seconds is very different. He plugged his guitar into a Hammond organ, so he could play all the parts for the demos. It is really stripped down in terms of instrumentation, with minimal drum patterns, one guitar and maybe a keyboard playing a spooky melody. “It starts with ‘A Reflection’ and it sounds as if you are stepping into a dystopian movie – it reminds me a little of Diamond Dogs. Then…

“The first Cure record I remember hearing was Pornography through the bedroom walls when I was about 12 – my older brother was a huge Cure fan. I was 16 when Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me came out and I went to see them at Wembley with my brother, three rows from the front. I still remember my giddy excitement. “I was the only goth in the village and music was my salvation. The whole aesthetic of The Cure really resonated. I found something in their music that was comforting. This album has such a wild mix, from upbeat pop songs and then songs like “The Kiss” or “Like Cockatoos”. There is real dark and light on this record and as The Cure became more established they took more…

THE CRIME IS MINE Between 1928 and 1948, working at the daft heart of the studio system in the golden age of Hollywood, Ernst Lubitsch directed 23 feature films (including all-time masterpieces like Trouble In Paradise, The Shop Around The Corner and To Be Or Not To Be). It’s a work rate (and hit rate) that feels unimaginable today. Until you realise that The Crime Is Mine happens to be François Ozon’s 23rd film since 1997’s See The Sea bridged the gap from short to feature and kickstarted his own poly-genre spree. Ozon’s personal pantheon is full of prolific maniacs (Buñuel, Fassbinder, Hitchcock) whose work he’s been inspired to revisit and refresh. But his first dalliance with Lubitsch – 2016’s Frantz – saw him rework the uncharacteristically sombre Broken Lullaby. With…

8/10 SOME way into Thom Zimny’s portrait of Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band’s world tour, the members of the horn section are given their moment to camera. Already we have watched the early days of the tour’s rehearsals, the re-convening, the slow re-heating, or what Springsteen describes as “shaking the cobwebs off the band”. “Bruce,” says trumpet player Curt Ramm, “likes the band to be a little off-balance.” Or as fellow trumpeter Barry Danielian describes it: “It’s the finding out how we’re going to play these songs now.” ‘Now’ is a subject Zimny’s film returns to often. This isn’t a definitive portrait of the artist as an older man, nor even a deep dive into E Street lore. Instead it offers a glimpse of the internal workings of…

ART Garfunkel (83) is on the phone singing “Old Friends” to his son, Art Garfunkel Jr (33). “The old men”, he whispers, easing into a gentle croon, “lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun. You know the little niceties, Junior? One of us sings waiting for the sun. The other sings waiting for the sunset…” Art Sr slides into the melody again: “The sounds of the city/Sifting through trees…” The voice is more seasoned than on Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 album, Bookends. Art Sr is singing to illustrate how the words have acquired a new inference on Garfunkel & Garfunkel’s collaborative album, Father And Son. “It’s challenging in the middle-eight,” Art Sr admits. “I won’t go for it now”. “Sharing a park bench quietly,” sings Art Jr, a high…

I’M NEW HERE TOM Fleming looks visibly uncomfortable. Wincing slightly and scratching his beard, he looks away from our video call before admitting with a rueful grin: “I’m still feeling a bit guilty about being a singer-songwriter. Do you know what I mean? It’s not something I feel is necessarily a viable art form.” As a magazine that features no shortage of such performers, we’re bound to ask: why ever not? “Well, it’s just the cliché of it. I am, you know, one guy with an acoustic guitar a lot of the time… I don’t want to be seen as another moaning white boy.” Male and Caucasian Tom Fleming may be, but moaning would be a criminally simplistic way of describing the compelling sounds he makes on his second solo…

Night Palace PW ELVERUM & SUN 8/10 NIGHT PALACE is a record full of contradictions. It is a vast, sprawling, epic album that spans 26 tracks, but it is also a record that embraces small moments, stripped-back simplicity and domesticity. Lyrically it contains heavy subject matter, both personal and political, but it also sometimes just literally depicts the weather outside. It is specific yet vague. It is raw and noisy, quiet and beautiful, melodic yet discordant. At times it feels angry and confused and at others calm and at peace. It is a record that beautifully and ambitiously embodies the messy world we live in and the deep complexities of human emotions that one goes through during periods of prolonged turbulence. And Phil Elverum has encountered more turbulence than most…

Given the constantly fizzing creativity of G songwriter and guitarist Nick Van Bakel, it was always unlikely that Bananagun’s second album would simply mirror their debut. Chief among the changes on Why Is The Colour Of The Sky? are the lower profiles of Tropicália and Afrobeat, and a new thread of British folk in its psych, jazz and prog mutations. “In some ways it’s an opposing stance to hypermodernity, and that’s where my nose has led me,” explains Van Bakel of the latter. “It has a lot to do with the idea of folk music being free of corporate ownership. It’s from a pure, natural place.” As to those genre drop-offs: “It gets impractical to tour with an extra horn section and all the extra percussion, so I tried to…

“I WANTED to tap into the excitement I had about buying a CD because it looked cool and had a creepy video,” Winston Cook-Wilson says of the inspiration behind his band’s new 72-minute album. “I was always dreaming about this CD called Enough with a pelican on it. Eventually I was just writing to that idea. I love the way people structured long CDs back in the day, which is so different than the Side A, Side B mode of thinking. I consciously stopped making the record when I’d gotten something that was roughly the same length as Sign O’ The Times, one of my favourite albums.” Prince isn’t the only artist of this era to whom Cook-Wilson and his Brooklyn-based band owe a curious debt. He talks enthusiastically of…

Talking Heads: 77 (Super Deluxe Edition) RHINO 8/10 ‘‘THE popular song is a very efficient and effective means of getting across ideas,” declares Talking Heads’ original typewritten ‘Statement Of Intent’, reproduced as part of this reissue package. “Without seeming pretentious, the band would like to think that music and the popular song (as a specific case) has the potential to inspire constructive feelings in the listener. The band hopes that their songs and presentation will inspire confidence in the audience. Words the band would hope can be associated with their ‘image’ are: sincerity, honesty, intensity, substance, integrity and fun.” These don’t sound like the ideals of a blank generation. Even among the supposedly iconoclastic denizens of CBGB, there was a widespread fixation with a well-established Stones/Stooges MO of leering, leather-clad…

HEARING the newly discovered tapes that Hcomprise CSNY’s Live At The Fillmore East, 1969 was something of a revelation for Graham Nash. “When you listen to the acoustic tracks particularly, you can really tell how much we loved each other and the music we were making,” he observes, 55 years on. “This was only weeks after Woodstock, which was only our second time appearing in front of people. It was so early in our career and we were still trying to figure it all out. CSNY is a much different band than CSN. The addition of Neil really kicked us in the ass.” Highlights of the show, CSNY’s fourth Fillmore gig in two days that September, include a thrilling version of Young’s “Down By The River” and Nash’s newly penned…

Even The Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971–1996 LIGHT IN THE ATTIC 7/10 THERE’S plenty to celebrate about Light In The Attic’s latest comp, Even The Forest Hums, which pulls together various threads of Ukrainian music over the second half of the 20th century. Perhaps its biggest achievement, though, is its welcome genre agnosticism: where a lot of comps double down on a historical or aesthetic moment, Even The Forest Hums is a reminder of music’s essentially mutant spirit, and listening through the 18 songs here is a trip: fusion jazz rubs up against synth-pop; swirling bells are subsumed by archaic drones; ambient piano ruminations are ghosted by weird avant-industrial. The way the compilers tell it, we’re lucky Even The Forest Hums exists. Part of this is down to geopolitics,…

‘‘THE untold, exotic riches of a life on the road with Radiohead, it’s all there,” says Colin Greenwood wryly, casting an eye over a photo of his brother’s open suitcase on the floor of a Blackpool dressing room, clothes exploding from all sides. “People wouldn’t believe it. To think I always wanted to be in Fleetwood Mac, like most sane people…” A keen photographer, the bassist is talking about his book, How To Disappear: A Portrait Of Radiohead, his first trawl through the shots of the band he’s taken over the last two decades. With most in artful black and white, and some dripping with colour, these photos candidly capture Radiohead in their Oxfordshire HQ, dug into makeshifts studios around the world or touring the globe between 2003’s Hail To…

“Like a lot of people of my age, the first Cure album I really got into was the singles compilation, Standing On A Beach. My older sister was a huge Cure fan and I went through her records one by one. I always found Faith to have a unique atmosphere. It’s a very melancholy record, quite ambient and ethereal. I loved it and I love the fact that ‘All Cats Are Grey’ is the only Cure song with no guitars on it – it’s one of my favourite songs. Faith has that analogue melancholy feel, like something from Side Two of Low with that eerie coldness. It has a very distinctive sound – brittle but glacial. “‘The Funeral Party’ is such a brilliant title for a Cure song, and it’s…

“It’s such a significant LP for that era, because it brought in this really artful take on isolationism. There were a lot of people coming of age at that time who felt Robert’s voice was dignifying something that was really hard to articulate. It wasn’t just rage, it wasn’t just perversity, it wasn’t just punk – it was really sensitive and genuine. It’s a bit of a harrowing record for young listeners to process, but it’s beautiful. “His great strength is the way he performs this truth of a world where, historically, a male is supposed to suppress emotions. His performance can be a little polarising because people can realise the truth of it, or they can make fun of it, the way I’ve seen other male performers do. But…

“You won’t get this at Wembley Stadium” – electrifying show makes the case for in-yer-face rock’n’roll JACK White is bullish. He bounds onstage and heads straight to the front to bait the audience, before booting over a guitar rack – all before the first song has even begun. You could gauge a sense of the mood from the pre-show music at Islington’s Assembly Hall, a medley of garagerock classics that included three numbers by The Stooges. From the moment he hits the stage, clad in black and with a shock of unkempt hair, White is an agitated, restless, domineering presence. And true to their leader’s ampedup approach, the band – the stoic Dominic Davis on bass, Patrick Keeler on drums and perma-shaded Bobby Emmett on keys – never stop playing,…

BEST BUY CAMBRIDGE AUDIO CXA81 MKII Price £999 SOME audio brands, when realising they have an authentic hit on their hands, leave well enough alone and let the product milk as many sales as possible until it gets knocked off its perch by something newer and better. Cambridge Audio isn’t having any of that: even though its CXA81 stereo amp was already the best around at its price, there’s now a MkII. Well, if something newer and better is going to come along, it might as well be another Cambridge. Visually, this is a pleasingly understated device and only comes in that silver finish Cambridge insists on calling ‘lunar grey’. Volume, input selection and speaker switching (it can power two sets at a time), plus a headphone socket and a…