Innholdsfortegnelse for Review of the Year 2024 i UNCUT

TOM Pallant: “I captured this photo during the second of Blur’s two monumental concerts in July 2023. Documenting these events was an incredible experience, and it was also my first time shooting at Wembley. Having photographed the previous night’s show, I had the rare luxury of planning the perfect live shot. Anticipating the exact moment when Graham would hurl his guitar 20 feet into the air, I positioned myself on stage and managed to capture the guitar soaring toward the roof. There’s a real thrill when you know you’ve got the ‘money shot’, and this was definitely one of those moments. I rarely have time to reflect on what I’ve shot during a show, as there’s not much time to review before moving on to the next moment. But I…

“Tried standing up, started following down” 12 BELLA UNION ALBUM OF THE MONTH 9/10 WHITE DENIM have always been a difficult band to pin down. Since their 2008 debut album Workout Holiday, they’ve run the gamut from raucous garage rock to taut indie via touches of psychedelia, prog, soul and Southern boogie. However, on 12 they have arrived at something else altogether. Sucking up aesthetic in­ uences from the UK new wave scene via groups like Scritti Politti, Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, while absorbing the masterful dub productions of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Dennis Bovell, along with studying the songwriting chops of Nick Lowe and Jonathan Richman, they have come up with an album of shimmering pop, slick art-rock, sunshine funk and eccentric soul. “Some will see it as…

Mahashmashana BELLA UNION/SUB POP 8/10 IS this the end for our plucky hero Josh Tillman? Since Father John Misty’s era-skewering classic Pure Comedy, Tillman has trampolined between stripped-back (God’s Favorite Customer) and lush orchestration (Chloë And The Next 20th Century), without quite nailing the landing either time. Both were good, often great, albums, but ones that seemed a little too in thrall to concept – concepts that Tillman didn’t explain to anybody as he has largely refrained from doing interviews for the past six years. That’s a shame, as Tillman is smart, engaging and funny, more than capable of articulating his position and exploring the vulnerabilities he hides behind black humour. But it meant that nobody could really get a handle on the over-arching conceit of Chloë – a series…

American Railroad NONESUCH 9/10 WHEN cellist Yo-Yo Ma conceived the non-profit Silk Road Project in 1998, he did so as a vehicle for cross-cultural collaboration, using the historic Eurasian trade route as a metaphor for the borderless exchange of ideas and traditions across the arts, education and social initiatives. Rhiannon Giddens took over as Artistic Director in 2020, leading the Silkroad Ensemble, a fluid collective with a multi-national cast. Their latest endeavour aims to highlight the untold stories of those who built the Transcontinental Railroad – mainly labourers of Indigenous, African-American, Irish, Chinese and Japanese origin – to deliver a more accurate version of US expansion. Hosted by Giddens, a five-episode podcast begins this month via PRX, its arrival coinciding with American Railroad, recorded live over two nights in California…

The Way Out Of Easy INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH 8/10 JEFF PARKER is best known to rock fans as a key member of the Chicago post-rock ensemble Tortoise, someone who adds a rigour, virtuosity and high-gloss to their proggy instrumentals. But he’s also spent more than three decades exploring many different types of music. The Chicago scene from which Parker emerged in the 1990s was characterised by unusual collaborations between musicians from different genres, all playing together in odd combinations. As well as working with Tortoise, Parker would find himself playing regular sessions with the minimalist gumbri player Joshua Abrams, electronic explorers Isotope 217 and various free jazz musicians, including the likes of trumpeters Rob Mazurek and Jaimie Branch, saxophonist Matana Roberts and drummers Hamid Drake, Chad Taylor and Makaya McCraven. Parker…

Small Changes POLYDOR 9/10 DURING his first decade as a recording artist, Michael Kiwanuka did so much to expand his musical parameters and upend expectations of what he ought to do and ought to be, that he most definitely earned the right to be a little more measured about his moves. In other words, smaller steps and gestures can reap as many dividends as the grander ones. That’s not to suggest the man’s ambitions have grown too modest or that the songs on his fourth album are any less rich, moving and inventive. Yet Small Changes is clearly the work of an artist who finds himself at a different stage in his life, looking at his work with a keener focus. Whereas the album’s celebrated predecessors – 2016’s Love &…

The BBC Sessions UMR 8/10 DUSTY SPRINGFIELD is hardly alone in this, but over time her marker on the music landscape has been brutally abridged. The signpost now reads: blonde beehive, bisexuality, Bacharach & David. Even the widely acclaimed splendour of her soul-pop voice has had her cast as “the British Dionne Warwick” (though certain Springfield covers, as well as Cilla Black’s and Sandie Shaw’s, famously rankled the US star). Her songwriting, arranging and production work is largely overlooked, as is her role as a champion of American R&B and soul – in April 1965 she presented a Ready Steady Go! special featuring acts from the touring Tamla-Motown Revue – while the air of tragedy that clings to her memory has taken deeper root. This double album of Springfield’s recordings…

“IT is my odyssey through these towns and adventures I’ve had in the company of T Bone, Allen Toussaint, The Imposters, on my own and with The Sugarcanes, who were an incredible group to play with night to night. “I found a tape in my archive, which I realised had an entire alternate version of the King Of America repertoire, which included three songs that were then later recorded differently for Blood And Chocolate and songs that didn’t make it onto the album and verses that changed the meaning. When I first put the tape on I went, ‘Oh, OK. Maybe we don’t release this. It’s all the same songs that’s on the album.’ And I go, ‘Wait a minute, that verse isn’t in it, neither is that line or…

AS Cassandra Jenkins makes a quick circuit from her hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon and back again, she bristles visibly at the clamour that greets her every turn. There’s the nearby building construction that woke her up that morning, the clatter of mass transit trains passing by, and worse yet, an agitated gent very loudly banging on random rubbish bins and street signs with two large wooden sticks. Not the best environment to be in when trying to be heard clearly while discussing how she’s dealt with all the attention that has come her way since the release of her stunning breakthrough 2024 album, My Light, My Destroyer. “I think it’s different every day,” she says, as we cross a highway overpass. “I’m just a human with emotions changing every…

Exclusive, 5-track CD sampler My Light, My Destroyer is out now on Dead Oceans Subscribe by 21ST November to receive this exclusive subscriber-only CD! PAY £19.99 FOR YOUR FIRST 6 MONTHS AND SAVE £37* Subscribe online at shop.kelsey.co.uk/UCP1324CD Or call 01959 543 747 and quote ref: UCP1324CD SCAN ME Terms and conditions: UK Direct Debit and Continuous Card Payment offer only. *You will pay £19.99 for your first 6 months and then pay £29.99 every 6 months. Saving based on the cover price of £6.75 and Kelsey standard postage price per issue of £2.75. Offer ends 21st November 2024. Your subscription will start with the Jan-25 issue and you will receive 13 issues in a year plus a free weekly e-newsletter from which you may unsubscribe. Prices correct at time…

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT The extraordinary music of Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou was born out of an acute homesickness. Raised in a wealthy family in 1920s Addis Ababa, she was displaced from Ethiopia first by the Italian fascists and then by the revolutionary strife of the 1970s and ’80s. She lived out the second half of her long life in exile, a nun in a Jerusalem monastery. Advertisers have long realised this, with everyone from Walmart to Amazon exploiting her uncanny power to finger the mystic chords of memory. But her music has never found such a sympathetic home as on the soundtrack to Payal Kapadia’s glorious debut feature. Kapadia made her name as the director of dreamy documentaries rooted in very real struggles (she won at Cannes in 2021…

GLADIATOR II RELEASED NOVEMBER 15 Sadly not the Nick Cave-scripted sequel that Russell Crowe commissioned back in 2006, involving a warrior sent from purgatory to kill Christ, but nevertheless Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington look to be relishing the battle in Ridley Scott’s belated sequel. JOY NOVEMBER 15 Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie and James Norton star in this Jack Thorne-scripted story of the nurse and scientists who indefatigably developed the research that led to the world’s first test tube baby. WICKED NOVEMBER 22 Cynthia Erivo (Odette in Luther, Harriet Tubman in Harriet) stars as Elphaba, the green-skinned young woman who grows up to be the Wicked Witch of the West, in the first instalment of a two-part Wizard Of Oz prequel. MOANA 2 NOVEMBER 29 The best Disney original of…

PHIL LESH Grateful Dead bedrock (1940–2024) THE most anticipated moment in any Grateful Dead concert came when, emerging out of some wildly freeform improvisation, Phil Lesh would pick out the opening notes of “Dark Star” on his bass and launch the band into the most vivid and celebrated vehicle for their mind-bending cosmic jamming. They didn’t play it every night; it was as if “Dark Star” was too holy to become part of a routine. But according to the definitive Deadheads database, Lesh’s bass motif telepathically propelled “Dark Star” into uncharted territory on 243 occasions between 1967 and 1994, most of them recorded and available via one source or another, revealing how the track was never played the same way twice. Indeed, it was Lesh who came up with the…

BARRETT Martin was 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, recording an album with an indigenous Alaskan tribe, when Rich Robinson called his cellphone in 2019. “Rich approached me about doing a band,” Martin recalls. “During the conversation, he said we needed a really good acoustic guitar player. I told him, ‘The best player I know is Peter Buck. He just nails it every time.’ That’s how it all started.” “I had an idea for a show to pay homage to one of my favourite artists, Nick Drake,” explains Robinson, during a break from touring with The Black Crowes. “I reached out to Barrett because I knew he was good friends with Peter. I wanted to see if Peter would be into this idea. Barrett connected us and we started…

The 7” and 12” barns “Every time a barn got too full, they’d have to build something… So it was just a constant thing, piles of records travelling all around the house at a snail’s pace, and then occasionally, if five or six hundred records sat somewhere and someone forgot where they were on the journey, we’d have to listen to all of them again, like, ‘What’s going on with these?’ It was pretty chaotic.” Nirvana, “Love Buzz” “We all lived in constant fear that we would be blamed at some point down the road when he found out that something was missing. All of his Nirvana and Sonic Youth records and his grunge-era stuff would suddenly disappear overnight, and we all got bollocked for it. But I suspect it’s…

LAST year’s Bureau B compilation Gespensterland – the title translates as Ghost Land – shone a light on a microscene of German musicians who had largely been left to practice their rather strange and unheimlich music in obscurity. A central figure in this underground movement is Johannes Schebler – one third of the hauntological group Freundliche Kreisel, and the lone presence behind Baldruin. “In my teenage years, I became very keen on discovering unique concepts, especially in abstract electronic music and transcendental sounds,” explains Schebler. But the music he makes as Baldruin is anything but synthetic, steeped in the pastoral and folkloric – qualities he attributes to his upbringing in a village in rural Bavaria. “Our family lived in a rectory attached to a church, where the loud resonance of…

WITH their lysergic, cinematic, largely instrumental audioscapes, fraternal US duo Trees Speak pay devoted homage to a lost era of cosmic vibrations, psychotronic oscillations, and Tangerine dreamscapes. But while the Arizona-born brothers, Daniel Martin Diaz and Damian Diaz, are clearly connoisseurs of vintage krautrock and analogue synthtronica, they also cite Stockhausen, Satie, John Cage and Klaus Schulze. “It’s about how they treated sound,” says Daniel, “like sculptors shaping something out of nothing.” The latest Trees Speak album, TimeFold, is the first to feature spoken-word artist Ashley Christine Edwards. “She brings a fearless, experimental edge that pushes us in new directions, especially live,” Damian explains. “Her openness to explore any idea, no matter how out there, has been important for us.” The album also boasts a typically gorgeous sci-fi sleeve designed…

How involved were you in putting together the boxset? Legs Larry Smith: I don’t know anything about it. They’re keeping it a secret from me because when it comes out they’re going to film me and Rod [Slater] and Roger [Ruskin Spear] opening it together and being surprised! How did you meet Viv Stanshall and come to join the Bonzos? I was at the Central School of Art in London and was upstairs in graphics and heard rumours about this crazy guy downstairs in the illustrations department. He was Mr Cool and I was the other guy. One day we both found ourselves in the street outside in a gale-force wind and we helped each other over the road. We went for a drink and just hit it off. We…

Snow Beneath The Belly Of A White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings TOMPKINS SQUARE 8/10 DURING the decades he was a performer, before his sudden and unexpected death at age 45, Robbie Basho struggled to find his home, artistically speaking. A guitarist of eloquence and insight, with a broad, rich singing voice, there’s something mysterious about him, a haunted quality to this most curious of guitar soli artists. Featuring five discs of hitherto unheard live material, Snow Beneath The Belly Of A White Swan is both tribute to a great artist and snapshot of a man out of time, looking for – and never quite finding – his audience. It’s not too much of a surprise, sadly. While some of Basho’s interests aligned, fleetingly, with the surface concerns of the…

30 ROYAL TRUX Twin Infinitives FIRE Diving straight in at the deep end, Fire kicked off their Royal Trux vinyl reissue series with this synapse-mangling 1990 double LP, which found America’s most gloriously fucked-up rock’n’roll band careering wildly toward the outer limits of convention, taste and sanity. A work of deviant high art or the sound of two people having a breakdown? Let’s say both. 29 JOHN LENNON Mind Games: The Ultimate Collection CAPITOL/UMe In 1973, Lennon’s fourth album – which he himself described as “an interim record between being a manic, political lunatic to back to being a musician again” – failed to make the UK Top 10. Half a century later, it was refreshed by this sumptuous boxset comprising multiple new mixes, unreleased outtakes, instrumentals, studio chatter and…

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DAVID Gilmour is someone who has made a career out of letting his guitar do the talking. Rather than emerging onstage in a blaze of laser light to sing a song everyone knows – that does happen, but much later – he begins his instantly sold-out run of six nights at the Albert Hall with an arguably more characteristic motion. He shuffles slowly backwards in the dark, and plays two back-to-back instrumentals from his two most recent solo albums. If at first it seems odd, there may be more wisdom in this move than is immediately obvious. You might not have a particularly deep relationship with “5AM” and “Black Cat”, but there’s a larger point being made here. Even if those songs are minor, they are instantly recognisable as being…

BLU-RAY, DVD & DIGITAL 8/10 FIRST things first: three-and-a-half hours is a long time for a film. But such is the scope and the subject matter of this film – the life of America’s most successful living songwriter across more than 60 years, the nature of creativity, the shadow of mortality and spirituality – that you could easily have enjoyed a lot more of it. The director Alex Gibney apparently has a six-hour cut of this film, which streaming services would presumably lap up. Gibney is a veteran documentary maker, probably best known for his heavyweight films on Enron, Wikileaks, 9/11 and Scientology as well as his ruminative biogs on the likes of Lance Armstrong, David Chase, Steve Jobs, Ken Kesey, James Brown and Hunter S Thompson, many of which…

BOSE SOUNDLINK MAX Price £400 THE SoundLink family of wireless speakers has been pretty successful up to now – so it’s no surprise to see Bose deliver a bigger, pricier model to top the range. And what else would it be called but the Max? Available in blue or black, the SoundLink Max is big and heavy by the standards of portable Bluetooth boomers. But it’s so carefully designed, notably in its rope and silicone handle, that it doesn’t feel like any kind of burden: its battery, which is good for 20 hours of playback at moderate volumes, will be exhausted before you are. And even if you happen to be careless with it, the aluminium, silicone and steel construction means it’s more than capable of absorbing the odd knock…

REVOLUTION 5 Thanks for an excellent MC5 feature in Take 332 [December 2024 issue]. It got me revisiting the old vinyl and CDs and I look forward to hearing the MC5’s last album when it is released! I discovered the MC5 in 1981 when a chance purchase from the legendary 1UP records in Aberdeen led to a lifetime of fandom of this tremendous band. They opened my ears to lots of music which has been with me for 40-odd years, from Sun Ra and John Coltrane to the likes of the Stooges, Radio Birdman and Mick Farren’s Deviants. I fondly remember the first time I played “Kick Out The Jams”, not quite sure what I was letting myself in for. What was this: metal, punk or what? It didn’t really…

FIEVEL Is Glauque’s Rong Weicknes is one of 2024’s most fascinating curveballs. A lush and maximalist experimental pop record grafting together influences from French chanson to South American jazz to saxophone-powered ’70s soft rock, every one of its 14 songs feels filled to the brim, with excess hooks, melodies and riffs spilling over the sides. “There is some deliberate attention to messes,” explains multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips. “Making a mess, and not cleaning it up, but trying to make it beautiful.” Phillips was introduced to his future collaborator in Fievel Is Glauque, vocalist Ma Clément, back in 2018, shortly after he’d moved from New York to Brussels to pursue a Masters in cultural anthropology. On paper at least, the pair didn’t have a lot in common. She was a former nursing…

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It sounds like this was a record born out of circumstance – new location, lockdown etc? This was definitely a record born of changing circumstances over a four-year period. When I started writing the bulk of it my intention was that it wouldn’t be for me at all. I’ve long aspired to find a way to continue to earn a living in music while sort of stepping away from the light. I’ve written for and produced a number of artists over the years and figured that leaning into that work during the pandemic would allow me to more fully transition into that sort of career. I had an imagined artist in mind at the start of some of these songs and that compartmentalisation oddly made me feel much freer to…

The Shovel Dance AMERICAN DREAMS 8/10 THE folk music of the British Isles is just as much of a contested zone as its landscape. What has survived or been preserved as a ‘tradition’ is largely the result of a last-ditch attempt, by late Victorians and early 20th-century collectors, to save an unofficial culture before it disappeared. The people’s music was being pressed out of service in the aftershock of the Industrial Revolution. But in saving the songs and dances of old, the music changed. It was never meant to be performed in drawing rooms, not arranged for acoustic guitars or electric bands, and never used to be the subject of entire festivals or genre playlists. It existed at ground level. Which all goes to show that, so often in musical…

Seed Of A Seed MAMA BIRD RECORDING CO. 8/10 HALEY HEYNDERICKX opens her first album in six years with an odd kind of ghost story called “Gemini”. Rather than some brush with the unknown or an encounter with a dead loved one, she spies “a woman in the corner claiming she is just the former one of me and I am her just out of context”. She sees her doppelganger everywhere and realises that she herself – the Haley who is singing – is merely a puppet to the other Haley, who stops her doomscrolling and makes her admire the wildflowers along the highway. She’s a benign ghost, more akin perhaps to a guardian angel, yet there is some menace to the song, a clenched tension in Heynderickx’s taut guitar…

WHEN they began recording their exquisite joint album Dear Alien, experimental chamber-pop duo Lili Holland-Fricke and Sean Rogan had to shake off the burden of their classical training. Both are graduates of the Royal Northern College of Music, and Holland-Fricke previously played cello with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. As she was making semi-improvised, electronically mangled, glitch-folk compositions with Rogan, the imagined disapproval of her former teachers began ringing in her ears. “I’ve left that way of thinking behind, but it’s definitely in my fingers and in my muscle Discovering cellist Arthur Russell’s 1986 album World Of Echo was a liberating revelation for Holland-Fricke. “I was writing my own music already, but I was scared to explore the solo cello thing,” she says. “That was quite a big…

BOBBY GILLESPIE had settled into a method for making records which, he recalls, served Primal Scream well for a while. “It was about Andrew [Innes]’s atmospheres and soundscapes, and then I’d write lyrics that would go with the mood. That really worked from Vanishing Point in ’96 to maybe 2002 [Evil Heat], and after that, I’m not so sure. We had to reinvent ourselves.” Writing his autobiography Tenement Kid and the ambitious lyrics for his 2021 Jehnny Beth collaboration Utopian Ashes provided the confidence to reverse this rote process for the first Scream album in eight years, Come Ahead. “I felt that I had more to say. I’d sit with the acoustic guitar first, and whole sets of lyrics would come to me.” Innes similarly switched from focusing on sequencers…

“Cool Britannia, Britannia you are cool, take a trip/Britons ever ever ever shall be hip” Still Barking MADFISH REISSUE OF THE MONTH 10/10 HEDONISM and angst, heartbreak and rapture, bombast and tenderness – rock music does them all with an often startling brilliance. Humour? Not so much. Randy Newman – possibly the whip-smartest, funniest songwriter who has ever lived – was once asked by this reviewer why rock’n’roll has such an underdeveloped funny bone. His answer was simple: rock stars take themselves far too seriously and want to be remembered for saving the world rather than playing it for laughs. There are exceptions that prove the rule, of course – Frank Zappa managed to be a serious musician and to inject a caustic wit into the Mothers Of Invention’s early…

Living In The Material World: 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe DARK HORSE/BMG 10/10 THE rebirth of Richard Alpert is one you can imagine George Harrison being more than a little envious of. Born in Boston, Alpert was an associate of Timothy Leary and deeply entrenched in the American psychedelic counterculture of the ’60s, until he returned after a protracted stay in India reinvented as Ram Dass, a spiritual guru set on popularising eastern teachings in the west. Harrison, however, was a Beatle, and no-one was going to let him forget it. Around the time he wrote and recorded his second proper solo album, 1973’s Living In The Material World, he was being pulled between two poles; on one hand, he was deeply exploring spirituality and continuing the inner journey that had…

Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music Vol 1/Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music Vol 2 TANGERINE 10/10, 9/10 RAY CHARLES was, among other things, stubborn. In the early 1960s, when he took his idea for an album of country covers to execs at ABC-Paramount Records, they scoffed at the idea of treating lowly country songs like American Songbook standards. But Charles knew the genre well: he’d played in hillbilly bands in his youth, and he’d even tested the concept a few years earlier when he cut Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On”. Plus, he had plenty of leverage: he was up to renew his contract, so he made this ambitious project a condition of re-signing with the label. Released in April 1962, Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music…

BILLY Swan has a vivid memory of the first time he heard Kris Kristofferson’s “Me And Bobby McGee”. It was around 11pm on a Nashville night and the singer-songwriter was on the back steps of a publishing company of Music Row, when Kristofferson swung by in his old car. Kristofferson had an apartment nearby. He slept there when he was in town trying to hawk songs, though he also had a job in Morgan City, Louisiana, taxiing oil workers by helicopter to the rigs in the Gulf. “But here he comes,” Swan recalls. “He says, ‘I got a song you got to hear’, and it was ‘Me And Bobby McGee’.” The two men worked up a demo overnight, Swan says, “and we thought it was just the greatest thing. “But,”…

“I’VE got to deliver this at some point to rehearsals,” says Elvis Costello as he eases a much-loved Gibson acoustic out from its guitar case. As he explains, the instrument is destined to join the company of A Face In The Crowd – playwright Sarah Ruhl’s musical adaption of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film about a drifter turned demagogue for which Costello has written the songs. “I was up all night doing these,” he says, pointing to an intricate lattice of diamante stickers decorating the Gibson’s strap. “Do you think I’ve gone too deep into this…?” When Uncut meets Costello during late August at London’s Young Vic theatre, A Face In The Crowd is a few weeks away from opening. Three days previously, meanwhile, Costello turned 70, though he remains characteristically…

A WELL-RECORDED live performance is a portal to another dimension, the transcendence of time and space trapped in the sonic amber of magnetic tape. In the case of Alice Coltrane’s February 1971 performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall, the tapes remained undisturbed for over 50 years, though not for lack of trying on the part of producer Ed Michel, who worked at Impulse! at the time. “Recording improvised music – freezing a performance which happens once and then is gone – depends on one’s being able to count on the likelihood of something important, some unique combination of elements worthy of being captured and frozen, taking place,” Michel says. This couldn’t be more true of the music documented at Carnegie Hall that evening. The promoter Sid Bernstein (best-known for bringing…

ONE of Britain’s greatest living songwriters finally disclosed his secrets on, of all places, an episode of Soccer AM. “I came clean!” says Michael Head. “It was early in the morning and Tim Lovejoy asked me if I had any tips for young songwriters. I had to be honest – I said, ‘Just interpret your dreams.’ People do it in painting – Goya, you know – or in literature, like Shelley. I’ve found that within dreams I’ve got the whole essence of the song, the title, what it’s about, where it’s going, and then it just needs finishing.” To celebrate another great year for Head, he’s taking Uncut through nine of the finest albums he’s made, starting with The Pale Fountains’ debut. “All that was in the house was country…

“BEING in that role of supporting another artist’s vision is something I love deeply. I love having a very clear purpose. For anyone who is a little bit of a control freak or who is in the driver’s seat all the time with their own project, to have someone tell you, ‘Hey, I need you to sing this part and express it in this way,’ means I can just relax and do my job. When I was performing with Craig, I knew those songs, but seeing him perform them live, I was hearing the meaning behind the lyrics a little bit differently every night. I was learning about lyricism every night. I was taking it in, but I also got to be on stage and participate. “What a sweet spot…

WHEN The Troggs played their first gig – 60 years ago this year – at the Jockey Club in Andover, the audience were too drunk to register what was happening. Andover’s loss, however, was the world’s gain. As the band celebrate their Diamond Jubilee, Pete Staples and Chris Britton, the two surviving Troggs, look back at their defining moment: “Wild Thing”, a primitive evocation of the carnal power of music, captivated everyone from Jimi Hendrix to The Muppets and Oliver Reed. Introduced by a distinctive bent guitar note and followed by a thundering riff and Reg Presley’s growled vocal delivery, “Wild Thing” subsequently proved an inspiration for garage rock and punk. Astonishingly, the song was written by a man best known for country music: Chip Taylor. Born and raised in…

BEYOND the unlikely lies the miraculous. When Joni Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm that left her in a coma in 2015, it seemed doubtful that one of our greatest singer-songwriters would ever walk or talk comfortably again, let alone return to the stage. A few years later, her friend Brandi Carlile began hosting ‘Joni Jams’ at Mitchell’s home, where groups of musicians would gather to serenade her with her own songs. Gradually Mitchell began to join in, slowly finding her voice once more. In 2022 the ‘Joni Jams’ went public, with an unannounced performance at the Newport Folk Festival and then a headline show at The Gorge in Washington last year, but there was still a sense of Mitchell needing to lean on the support of Carlile and the other…