Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i UNCUT

In 2014, director Scott Crawford released Salad Days: A Decade Of Punk In Washington, DC (1980 - 90), a documentary that surveyed the US capital’s early DIY punk scene. Continuing his work on foundational music history, Crawford recently completed Kickstarter funding for his next film, Boy Howdy! The Story Of Creem Magazine, exploring “the seminal music magazine from its 1969 launch in Detroit to the untimely death of its publisher Barry Kramer in 1981”. The publication’s heyday predated Crawford’s youth in the DC scene, but he read its later years and back issues religiously. “Creem introduced me to so many great bands very early on – specifically Iggy and bands like the Dead Boys, Ramones, Television, The Clash,” he says. “It served as a history lesson and created context that…

“Cities are definitely too hectic and overstimulating for me,” says Oliver Perry, the sensitive Aussie one-man band otherwise known as DD Dumbo. After six years in Melbourne, he’s now resettled in his tiny hometown of Castlemaine, 100 miles to the north. “There’s more room to move and think,” he explains quietly. Contrary to the usual narrative of bands moving to the city to get signed, Perry was only spotted by 4AD when he returned to the countryside and circulated a video of himself performing alone in a local forest, looping guitar and live drums to mesmeric effect. A technique born of necessity – his former bandmates left to go travelling – became the signature DD Dumbo sound. “I had to limit the notes I’d use, so it made me write…

In his celebrity status as a poet, readings play like stand-up routines LISTENERS got a sneak preview of You Want It Darker’s title track when it slipped into an episode of Peaky Blinders, one of dozens of TV shows and movies that have used Leonard Cohen’s music to powerful effect. Yet the many documentaries about him – plus his own rare excursions into the film and TV worlds – give the widest view of the man and his art. Here are the must-sees. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN… MR LEONARD COHEN (1965) Though he was yet to begin his music career when he was profiled for this National Film Board of Canada documentary at the age of 30, Cohen revels in the celebrity status he’d already achieved as a poet in Canada…

WOVENHAND Star Treatment GLITTERHOUSE 8/10 Moody magnificence from alt.country stalwarts YOU won’t find a huge difference in tone between the past and present lives of David Eugene Edwards. When he wound up 16 Horsepower in 2005, after four studio albums of feverish force, Wovenhand were already a going concern, a nebulous outlet for his recurring themes of faith, conflict and salvation. The same gothic pall shrouded both bands’ music, a union of post-punk, leftfield country and galloping blues, Edwards dispensing lyrics with a restrained fervour in keeping with his status as grandson of a Nazarene preacher from Colorado. Fifteen years in, Wovenhand still sound blazingly alive. What began as a solo side-project has gradually coalesced into a five-piece band of apocalyptic power, armed with a withering intensity to rival that…

"We are both fascinated with rhythm,” says Joan Wasser, outlining how her style preferences chime and contrast with those of Benjamin Lazar Davis. “I love soul and R&B and Ben is more folk music-based. We share a love for music that has been made in, or originates, in Africa. I had no idea how well our collaboration would flow until we got working on what would become ‘Magic Lamp’ [ from the new LP ] and it all began to fall together. Ben mentioned that he’d been listening to the BaBenzélé pygmy people’s music – specifically, pieces played on a one-note whistle while simultaneously singing in complex rhythmic patterns. I’d also listened to these recordings in the past and we began to use them as templates…

Black Peak BELLA UNION WITH so much of what is labelled “world music”, the appeal is not always the lure of the Other. In many cases we are seeking a twist on the familiar, be it Tuareg musicians who sound like galloping heavy metal bands, Bollywood musicians making slightly wonky disco, or Nigerian dance bands making pulsating big-band funk. It is the everyday being put through an unfamiliar filter – like seeing ourselves reflected in a fairground mirror. This, in part, is the appeal of the Cretan lute player Giorgos Xylouris. He is a renowned exponent of traditional music from a noble family – his father and two of his uncles are celebrated exponents of the lyra, a bowed instrument with roots to the Byzantine Empire – and his Xylouris…

WEYES BLOOD Front Row Seat To Earth MEXICAN SUMMER Natalie Mering continues to uphold and subvert the conventions of folk music in equal measure, says Michael Bonner WEYES Blood’s Natalie Mering is no stranger to remote, secluded places. The daughter of musicians – her father briefly had a deal with Asylum/ Elektra in the late ’70s before becoming a pastor – Mering travelled extensively as a child and has continued this nomadic lifestyle. Six years ago, she found herself living in a tent in the New Mexico desert. For several months, she wildcrafted plants for a tincture company, using her knowledge of herbal medicine acquired while working on a farmstead in rural Kentucky. During a stint in Portland she toured with Jackie O Motherfucker; in Philadelphia, she became…

GAS Box KOMPAKT 8/10 It’s been 21 years since Wolfgang Voight released his first Gas EP, “Modern”, and in the 16 years since the project’s last album – 2000’s (at least partially) ironically titled Pop – the German has resurrected the moniker only once: for a 2014 remix of The Field’s “Cupid’s Head”. Axel Willner’s shoegazemeets-techno project may boast a more upbeat, melodic style, but the Swede shares the same love for dense, shifting soundscapes and rigid rhythmic cycles. Box now provides proof of their common methodology with this overdue chance to immerse oneself in three of Gas’ four LPs, plus long-out-of-print EP “Oktember”. This time, they’re just as Voight always wanted them heard, their 250 minutes of music spread generously – and unedited – over 10 LPs (and 4CDs).…

“Brad understood my depression. I miss that…”TERRY HALL FOR THE SPECIALS, 2016 began with a funeral. On January 11, around 200 friends, relatives and well-wishers gathered at Golders Green Crematorium to pay tribute to the group’s drummer, John Bradbury. His bandmates Horace Panter and Lynval Golding were among the pallbearers; during the service, Terry Hall, who was born two streets away from Bradbury in Coventry, delivered a eulogy and Golding sang Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” accompanied by a string quartet. Afterwards, mourners – who included Jerry Dammers, The Specials’ estranged co-founder – gathered to celebrate Bradbury’s life in the upstairs bar at the Roundhouse – the north London venue where, nearly 40 years ago, The Specials had rehearsed for their fabled 2 Tone tour. “With Brad, in the last three…

“THE Selecter honours our heritage and always has done,” says Pauline Black. “We were always primarily a black band and now from our perspective the thing that moves us most is probably Black Lives Matter.” On a hot day in high summer, Black is sitting in the bar of the Roundhouse with arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson, her co-vocalist in The Selecter. In 1981, the band shot a video for “Celebrate The Bullet” in the basement here. They are in London for the day from Coventry – Black moved there in the early ’70s from Romford, Essex (“a breeding ground for the National Front”) to study sciences at Lanchester Polytechnic, while Gaps grew up in Luton. “I found it much harder to get into bars and clubs in Luton,” he says. “But…

“I’ve wanted to do something like this for years. I kept it in my hip pocket” BOB WEIR JUDGING by the face staring from the cover of his new solo album, Blue Mountain, Bob Weir these days looks more like a member of the Grateful Dead than ever. Back in the band’s early days, he was the most youthful and athletic member of a group of grizzled dudes for whom grooming, diet and health were clearly secondary to the primal demands of the music. Despite a reliably wayward fashion sense, he retained that air of youthful vigour throughout the Dead’s long, strange trip. These days, though, the wrinkles and downturned eyes evoke a worldliness and melancholia, while there’s more than just a touch of grey to the beard and moustache.…

“I figured the album was going to be numbers… 22 is my thing” JUSTIN Vernon thought about playing air guitar at his own Eaux Claires music and arts festival. He wanted to debut 22, A Million, the new Bon Iver album, but wasn’t sure how to do it. “I didn’t want to play the songs live,” he says. “I just wanted to play this album that we had spent so many years making. How do we do this? Do we play in the morning? Should we just play the album and air-guitar it? In hindsight, we should have done that.” In August, thousands of fans made the trek into Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to see the city’s favourite son take the stage. Along with Bryce Dessner of The National, Vernon is…

“I’m finding my nerve again, I lost it for too many years”SHIRLEY COLLINS THE voice recorder has stopped running in the living room in Shirley Collins’ cottage in Lewes when she tells the most magical story of the day. Back in the late 1970s, she visited a fortune teller. “You are a Cancer?” she was asked. “Yes,” Collins replied. “Born in the first part of July?”; “Yes, the fifth.” “You have two children?”; “Yes.” “Do you ride a bike?”; “Yes, but I’m, not riding it today?” “Is one of the tyres punctured?”; “Yes.” “Don’t get it fixed.” So it was that Gipsy Anita Lee saved the life of the most fêted and fetishised of all the English folk singers, and ensured that Shirley Collins’ singing career would – eventually –…

Purveyors of sad truths and sensitive epiphanies… but also a hellish rock band! SETLIST 1 Country Boy 2 The Heart Is Attached 3 Out To Play 4 Storyteller 5 Snacks And Candy 6 Homer 7 Just Say Hello 8 Even Better 9 The Backyard 10 Mr Mingo 11 Gigantic Transatlantic Trunk Call 12 So Good 13 Sea Hag 14 Screamin’ 15 Velvetine 16 Everything Is Rosy 17 Will You Wait 18 All For The Best 19 Closer To The Wall ENCORE 20 Heart Disease Called Love TALKING to Uncut last November, Mark Mulcahy claimed that his old band never received the wider exposure they deserved. “Miracle Legion were this group who couldn’t sync up with whatever was supposed to be happening at the time,” he said of his tenure as…

A Nardent diarist, a fastidious collector, a discreet and talented photographer; one wonders how Bill Wyman had the time to play bass, during his 31 years in The Rolling Stones. Evidently, as a new exhibition proves, Wyman was a subtle genius of multi-tasking, camera always close to hand. On the occasion of the bassist’s 80th birthday, Around The World In 80 Years: Photographs By Bill Wyman (Proud Chelsea, October 19-November 27) delves into his fabled archives for a bunch of candid and unseen photographs. In the midst of sessions and tour chaos, Wyman became adept at taking the sort of intimate pictures that only occur when the subjects forget a photographer is even present. Exhibit A: this beautiful shot from December 11, 1968. As the Stones rehearsed for the filming…

“Will started singing lyrics from fortune cookies. It was beautiful…”JON LANGFORD, THE MEKONS “When The Mekons did their 30th anniversary lap around the United States a few years ago, they enlisted different singers during a couple of their sets,” recalls Kentucky maverick, Will Oldham. “I got invited to take part and it was one of the greatest honours of my life.” Oldham’s career has been peppered with references to The Mekons. In his guise as The Palace Brothers, “For The Mekons, Et Al” cropped up on label compilation Hey Drag City as early as 1994, the same year that he covered “Horses”, written by The Mekons twosome of Jon Langford and Sally Timms. He also invited Langford to appear on his 2009’s solo album, Beware, and, more recently, was one…

Taylor sings like a man who can’t quite believe his great fortune 9/10 MC TAYLOR recorded Hiss Golden Messenger’s second album sitting at his kitchen table, singing soft and low into an old mic so as not to wake his wife and newborn child. The austere, lo-fi sound of Bad Debt was worlds removed from the deep-woods arrangements of the band’s debut, Country Hai East Cotton, and pointed the way forward lyrically if not musically. Even as the band has grown more and more popular, graduating from a fledgling North Carolina indie label to a well-established North Carolina indie label, Taylor has continued to write eloquently about the joys and comforts of home and family, the staggering responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage. Consequently, Hiss Golden Messenger albums tend to sound…

22, A Million SECRETLY CANADIAN FOR Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon’s 2007 debut album as Bon Iver, was that most unlikely of things: an indie-folk record that penetrated deep into popular culture. Partly, that was to do with its colourful backstory: Vernon, traumatised by the break-up of his band and relationship, and recovering from glandular fever, holes himself up in a snowy cabin in rural Wisconsin with an acoustic guitar and pours his heart into a tape recorder. Partly, it was because it tallied with a very late-’00s zeitgeist – of Millennial males rejecting the trappings of modernity, growing beards, rediscovering roots music and finding value in the artisanal and handmade. But it turns out that For Emma, Forever Ago was just a phase. In the years since, Vernon has…

STEVE HILLAGE Searching For The Spark MADFISH 8/10 A long, strange trip: the Gong man’s futuristic past celebrated in style on 22 CDs! STEVE Hillage has always had one eye on the future, experimenting with genres such as ambient and dance before many of his peers, and creating extra-terrestrial guitar sounds throughout his career with Uriel, Khan, Gong and System 7. Now Hillage’s futuristic past is being celebrated with an elaborate limited-edition, career-spanning 22CD boxset that includes early albums with Uriel and Khan, eight solo studio albums for Virgin (with bonus tracks), his work with The Orb as System 7, two CDs of BBC performances and, taken from Hillage’s personal archive, eight CDs of previously unreleased material constituting four live albums and four Sparks volumes of outtakes and demos dating…

ARETHA FRANKLIN “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” (1967) By 1967, Aretha Franklin had made a handful of jazz albums for Columbia Records, none of which lived up to her potential creatively or commercially. So when she signed with Atlantic, she immediately travelled down to the Shoals for a session with house band the Swampers. She only recorded one song at FAME, but it’s a doozy: a slow seduction featuring an understated groove and some of Franklin’s most powerful vocals. A dust-up between her husband and a trumpet player cut the sessions short, but she did bring the Shoals musicians up to New York repeatedly throughout the late 1960s. BOBBIE GENTRY “Fancy” (1970) The Mississippi native and LA transplant enjoyed an enormous hit with her ’67…

Glam - era pop was “extreme and fantastical, silly and scary all at once…” REVIEWED THIS MONTH SHOCK & AWE: GLAM ROCK AND ITS LEGACY, FROM THE SEVENTIES TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Simon Reynolds FABER & FABER SUBSTANCE: INSIDE NEW ORDER Peter Hook SIMON & SCHUSTER IN the introduction to Shock & Awe: Glam Rock And Its Legacy, From The Seventies To The Twenty-First Century, a panoramic and appropriately dazzling history of glam, Simon Reynolds recalls one of his earliest pop memories: Marc Bolan on Top Of The Pops. It was 1971, and to the eight-year old Reynolds, Bolan was an extraordinary sight. “That electric frizz of hair,” Reynolds writes, “the glitter-speckled cheeks, a coat that appeared to be made out of metal – Marc seemed like a warlord from…

The tantrums and baleful glare attracted an audience hoping for a train wreck WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? RADICAL MEDIA/EAGLE VISION 8/10 The often harrowing life and times of a musical and political force. By Richard Williams “No fear,” Nina Simone replies when she is asked, during an archive interview included in Liz Garbus’ film of her life, what freedom means to her. “No fear.” Only a few minutes into the Oscar-nominated documentary, there is already a powerful awareness of what it meant to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, and how that pervasive fearfulness might have affected a hypersensitive and uncommonly gifted person lacking a full complement of the layers of mental cladding necessary to protect her against a sense of injustice and persecution. Simone…

RUDY VAN GELDER Engineer to the jazz greats (1924-2016) AT the height of his powers, engineer Rudy Van Gelder was in such demand that he was forced to assign each record label a specific day of the week for studio time. He was best known for his scrupulous work for Blue Note during the ’50s and ’60s, though he also accommodated Prestige, Impulse!, Verve, Savoy, Vox and more. Van Gelder’s appeal as a technician was manifold: meticulous attention to detail, textural richness, natural warmth, an ability to capture the intimacy of live music in a studio environment. The most revered names in jazz passed through his doors, from John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock to Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. The National Endowment For The Arts once…

NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES? THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT In a previous correspondence I expressed my incredulity at Ringo Starr’s refusal to sign an autograph because he was worried that it might not be for personal use, but instead obtained to sell on eBay. So it was beyond refreshing to meet a star of equal magnitude and longevity with, evidently, an opposite point of view. On July 13, in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, Mr Roger Daltrey launched a special edition Cuvée Champagne in conjunction with Hedonism Wines in London. Apparently Roger worked closely with the vintners and vineyards to produce a great-tasting champagne (and they succeeded), with bottle artwork appropriated from the Tommy album – which is no surprise given the interview that Uncut held with Roger [Uncut, August 2011] and…

“To have Dave Grohl do ‘Kick Out The Jams’ with us was fucking crazy”CHUCK D Prophets Of Rage shouldn’t have room for any more musical agitators, having stacked its ranks with members of Rage Against The Machine, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill. Yet there was space onstage for a guest rabble-rouser for the MC5 cover that closed the Toronto show on the incendiary supergroup’s current tour. As Chuck D tells Uncut , “To see Dave Grohl come in and we all go into ‘Kick Out The Jams,’ everyone was like, ‘This is fucking crazy!’” Even the Public Enemy frontman – who shares the mic with Cypress Hill’s B-Real – sounds surprised by the energy that’s been pouring out of Prophets Of Rage. This self-professed “elite task force of revolutionary musicians”…

1 CONOR OBERST Mamah Borthwick (A Sketch) Cue harmonica! A winter back in his Omaha hometown found the Bright Eyes frontman in a recuperative and reflective space, constructing a new stripped-back solo album that has turned out to be frail and intimate even by Oberst’s standards. Ruminations also pushes his maturing songcraft into even greater relief – as “Mamah Borthwick” proves so succinctly. 2 GOAT Alarms Fresh from a triumphant show amid much dramatic rain at this year’s End Of The Road festival, here’s Sweden’s ethnomusicological pranksters heading out on a surprising new desert trip: one as evocative of Nancy & Lee and Spaghetti Westerns, as it is of North African psych-blues. 3 LUKE ROBERTS Silver Chain Something of a folkish Nashville outlier, Roberts’ first album in four years gets…

8/10 AT 75, David Crosby is feeling frailer and more insignificant than ever. We should be thankful. Like Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen – you could also throw in Rembrandt and Matisse – Crosby has found that the various urgencies and indignities of old age have precipitated a remarkable creative spurt. Twenty years elapsed between his third solo studio album, Thousand Roads, and the fourth, 2014’s Croz. It has taken only two for the fifth to arrive, and a sixth is apparently imminent. The fact that CSN and CSNY appear to be on indefinite hiatus has no doubt concentrated his energies. Lighthouse was composed quickly and recorded with almost indecent haste, cut in 12 days with Crosby’s new writing partner, Snarky Puppy’s Michael League. And while Croz was polished…

“WE DON’t really know anything about any indigenous Indian music, folk or classical,” Nischay Parekh says of his and his colleague Jivray Singh’s anglicised debut album, Ocean . “Stereotypes are something we don’t really think about.” Though separated by six years – Parekh, at 23, is six years younger – both grew up in Kolkata’s Ballygunge neighbourhood sharing a love of wrestling, table tennis and their parents’ record collections, which offered “a healthy dose of classic pop, soul and R’n’B such as Marvin Gaye, Steely Dan, The Beatles”. Additionally, Singh reveals, his parents have played together since the 1970s: “They’re both pioneers in, and icons of, the Indian indie scene.” The duo first united around 2010 – Singh recalls “a few well-intentioned but clueless gigs” –…

Judging by his biographical projects on the likes of John Delorean and Welsh adventurer John Evans, it seems that Gruff Rhys is a musician who enjoys working within a concept. For his soundtrack to Set Fire To The Stars , then, he assembled a crack team of musicians, including Portishead bassist Jim Barr, to perform jazz-tinged pieces that suited the film’s early ’50s world. “I can’t remember what I was thinking at the time,” explains Rhys of his ‘aggro-jazz’ concept, “whether it was ‘aggro’ as in aggressive, or agrarian – like hicks playing jazz. It’s somewhere in between. It was really fun – we were in the studio for about four days, recording like crazy.” The score picked up a BAFTA Cymru award last September, but it’s…

“I never dreamed I’d be on Top Of The Pops and that my career would still be going strong after 35 years” WHAT would your expectations have been when starting out with Soft Cell – how would that person have felt about the career profiled in Trials Of Eyeliner ? Even though I was an obsessed music fan from a very early age and was in my first local band aged 17 playing rock and hits of the day, I thought my career would take me in a different direction – art and experimental theatre. I’d never have dreamed that I would have become a pop star, appeared on Top Of The Pops, had two No 1s and had a successful musical career,…

“I’VE always felt that if you thought of it all as a book, then you have the Great American Novel… You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel. It tells you all about me, of growing up in the ’60s, ’70s and now the ’80s. That’s what it was like for one person, trying to do the best he could, with all the problems that go along with everybody.” That’s Lou Reed, talking in 1984 in a quote reproduced in the handsome book accompanying this big black box, compiling most of the albums he released in his first 16 years as a solo artist. To stretch the analogy, the appearance of this set effectively breaks Lou’s lifelong novel into three…

“I think we bought awareness to the country at the right time,” says Ranking Roger, pausing over his lunch of egg, beans and chips at a greasy spoon near Euston station. Roger is considering the achievements of The Beat during their late ’70s-early ’80s peak. “Sometimes music can be more powerful than a politician.” Roger was 16 when the punk band he drummed with were supported by The Beat – “They blew us offstage!” He joined them and within nine months they were on Top Of The Pops performing their cover of “Tears Of A Clown”. But their most enduring song is from a double-A side from 1980 – “Stand Down Margaret”. “There was high unemployment, the women at Greenham Common were protesting against Trident, the…

“WHEN Brad died, we had to make a decision,” explains Terry Hall. “We’d arranged these dates in October last year. There were a lot of commitments and when he died it was like, should we fulfil them, or let everything grind to halt? But when you’ve got crew and everybody had agreed to do this, we asked ourselves, ‘Could we get somebody to step in for this tour?’ I’d known Gary for a while and I thought he would treat it with a certain amount of respect and he’d be cool with it and he has.” “I was quite petrified on my first day,” admits Powell. “Lynval made it easy – we had a chat while the rest of the guys were setting up.” “How do we go about playing…

BON IVER For Emma, Forever Ago (2007) The album that launched Bon Iver. Its mixture of indie folk and AutoTune still sounds timely and exquisitely melancholy. BON IVER Blood Bank EP (2009) At the time it sounded slight, but this disc’s experiments with layered vocals lay the blueprint for 22, A Million . VOLCANO CHOIR Unmap (2009) The first of two albums with the Minneapolis post-rock group Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, Unmap transforms Vernon’s voice into pure sound. KANYE WEST My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) ’Ye famously flew JVern out to Hawaii to add some thunderously layered vocals to “Monster” and “Lost In The World”. GAYNGS Relayted (2010) Ryan Olson’s one-off supergroup features Vernon in a marina-rock setting, crooning the neon-lit…

The fullest realisation of Khan’s Bride concept comes when a man proposes live onstage ELEANOR Friedberger begins her Friday afternoon End Of The Road set with a shameless and endearing overture to the crowd. “I’m gonna get this out of the way so you’ll be the most sympathetic audience in the world,” she says after her bassist and drummer follow her onto the leafy Garden stage. “It’s my 40th birthday and I couldn’t think of a better place to spend it.” Outside of one of indie rock’s finest celebrating a landmark birthday, End Of The Road’s 2016 edition offers much cause for celebration. While many mainstream festivals whine about how hard it is to find female artists to fill out their bills, the Wiltshire weekender has…

Viewers looking for ‘the full Liam’ will be amply rewarded by scenes described as “a big bunch of chaos” SUPERSONIC In August 1996, Oasis played two record-breaking shows in the grounds of Knebworth, a stately home in Hertfordshire. These shows bookend Mat Whitecross’ documentary – implying, perhaps inadvertently, that there is little to sustain the interest during the subsequent 13 years of Oasis’ career. But by focusing his docu-collage on the two and a half years leading up to Knebworth, Whitecross at least allows Noel Gallagher to frame Oasis’ rise in terms that are heroic and hackneyed: “We were grafters who came from nothing and took it all.” Both Noel and his brother Liam provide voiceovers, accompanied by a close inner-circle including former bandmates Bonehead and Guigsy, label boss Alan…