Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2017 i UNCUT

“Each small candle lights the dark side of every human mind” UNLIKE my illustrious predecessor Allan Jones, my reserves of rock’n’roll anecdotes are pretty skimpy, mostly involving one of Uncut’s castlist this month, Evan Dando. I once interviewed Dando in the storied environs of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, sat late at night by the deserted swimming pool. If this weren’t decadent enough, the whole process was farcically hampered by the fact that Dando couldn’t actually speak, and had to respond to all my questions by scrawling his answers on a legal pad. In the throes of finishing Come On Feel The Lemonheads, his doctor had advised Dando to completely rest his voice, following damage done by smoking crack and heroin. “I don’t think I would want to die…

 You recorded Peasant in the middle of last year. How do you feel about it now, with a bit of remove? I think I feel more involved than I would typically feel at this stage. I usually move on quite quickly, but it’s a bigger piece of work, this one, and I still feel excited about getting it out there. I still feel quite engaged with it, in a way. “I wanted this album to be wooden, sinewy sounding… almost like some creaking animal or a ship falling to bits” How did the album’s recording differ from your earlier work? It was a lot more involved. There were some key differences, often in quite small ways. I wanted this album to be very wooden, sinewy sounding… almost like some kind…

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie WARNER BROTHERS 8/10 THE Fleetwood Mac family tree has so many branches, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there couldn’t be a single gnarled knot or sturdy off-shoot left unexplored. Then along comes a duo LP by Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie, providing timely proof that the venerable old oak just keeps on growing. It’s an intriguing combination. McVie is Mac’s most direct and assured melodicist; Buckingham the band’s appointed experimentalist, the man who harried Tusk to the edges of lunatic invention. She sings of love with an airy sweetness; he explores existential turbulence with a tight, nervy urgency, synapses forever snapping. The pair have written before within the band – “World Turning”, “Mystified” and “You And I Pts I & II” are among the results –…

CHRIS STAPLETON From A Room: Volume One DECCA/MERCURY NASHVILLE 8/10 Nashville’s latest crossover star makes a winning return SOLO success landed late and hard for Chris Stapleton. After years as a jobbing songwriter in Nashville – creating mainstream country hits for the likes of Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw and Dierks Bentley – he was in his late thirties by the time of 2015 debut, Traveller. The album went double platinum in the US, due in no small part to a duet performance with Justin Timberlake at the CMA Awards that tore the roof off. Stapleton went on to win armfuls of gongs, including two Grammys, as Traveller topped the Billboard charts. All of which means that its follow-up has plenty to live up to. Thankfully, the first volume of From…

Planetarium 4AD 8/10 FIRST created as a theatrical event by its four illustrious creator-composers five years ago, Planetarium is a head-spinning musical tribute to the cosmos that might have awed even Carl Sagan. In fact, the 75 minutes of music here may very well contain every sound in the known universe save for one. That’s the noise made by the clunky, enormous laser projectors traditionally found inside the celestially themed theatres that inspired the album’s title. True, there’s not much room left over when this music is at its densest, like in the suitably huge-sounding climax of “Jupiter”, as Sufjan Stevens’ falsetto dissolves into fragments and bursts of programmed drums slam against a barrage of brass. Yet there’s still a little space if listeners want to imagine the groan of…

Twin Infinitives DRAG CITY, 1990 Whereas Hagerty and Herrema’s ’88 self-titled debut was a semi-logical if anarchic extension of Hagerty’s past work in Pussy Galore, its double-album successor is a mindfuck supreme. Arranged in four clusters of short tracks, the polarising contents are split between exercises in noise and experimental music and less abrasive glimmers of the hard-rocking glories to come. 9/10 Thank You VIRGIN, 1995 The fact Virgin could see Royal Trux as a viable prospect points to just how strange things got during the post- Nevermind gold rush. Even though this performed far below expectations, the duo’s teaming with producer David Briggs seems prescient for its sleazy, savage take on the blues tropes that The White Stripes and The Black Keys would take to…

The Authorized Bang Collection SONY LEGACY 8/10 BURIED in the green grass of his breakthrough solo hit, “Brown Eyed Girl” – a reflection on a relationship that, even at 21, seems to have happened a painful forever ago – Van Morrison lets out a quiet yelp. “So hard to find my way,” he sings. “Now that I’m all on my own.” His 1967 in essence. While many fellow Brit R&B refugees were enjoying the new possibilities of that gilded psychedelic summer, the former Them frontman was stranded in America, brooding over the release of an embarrassing debut album, panicking about being deported back to Belfast, and worrying that his producer, label boss and mentor Bert Berns had permanently cramped his style. To make things more fraught, Berns died aged 38…

“There are no rules. If it feels right, it’ll feel right…”EVAN DANDO “YOU wanna hear a new song?” Without even waiting for an answer, Evan Dando pulls out a guitar and strums a few leisurely chords. “Mosrite,” he says. “The fucking Flintstones guitar from hell. So good. Fred Smith played one in the MC5, and Johnny Ramone.” Even with lines around his eyes and a thick beard obscuring the cheekbones that made him a pin-up in the early 1990s, he doesn’t look or act like he’s 50 years old. Today he’s wearing white pants and a threadbare T-shirt with a faded tie-dye pattern, an unseasonably bulky blue coat and a grey cap that barely contains his long hair. He looks a bit like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski: laidback,…

“It’s not much of a leap from ‘Is This The Life We Really Want?’ to ‘Money’. ‘Us And Them’, or ‘Welcome To The Machine’.They’re all interconnected in ways that are… unsubtle ” “LET’S have some wine, shall we?” It is midafternoon in New York City and Roger Waters is playing the genial host. At present, he has taken up residence in a discreet post-production studio in Midtown, close by the American offices of his record label. The main studio space is busy – a German television crew is taking down lights and a backdrop – so we opt for the calmer surroundings of a modestly sized edit suite. Waters takes stock of the available furnishings – a faded green sofa or an orange armchair – before parking…

“THIS tour bears a similarity to Desert Trip, but it’s an indoor version. The Desert Trip show was clearly based on the Animals record, which Pink Floyd had never done like this before. But the grandeur and stature of the show felt very much like a step they would have followed, I hope. “The images of Trump at Desert Trip [ wearing lipstick or with his head attached to a pig’s body ] during ‘Pigs’ felt like a big exhale. Before Desert Trip, we did some test shows in Mexico. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this in front of 30,000 people. This is crazy!’ But it needed to be said. There were a couple of things we reeled back in before…

Live Aid is the moment “rock fell in love with itself” “THE age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. The idea of the rock star, like the idea of the cowboy, lives on.” As with Never A Dull Moment , his erudite polemic on the merits of the year 1971, in Uncommon People writer and broadcaster David Hepworth takes a neat thesis as the launching point for an extended rumination on the big beasts of music culture. Hepworth contends – not terribly controversially – that the era of the rock star began in the mid-’50s and ended in the ’90s. To trace this arc, he writes about, and around, a notable day in the life of a different musician for every year between 1955…

LONG STRANGE TRIP AMAZON PRIME 9/10 THE definitive is not a concept which sits easily with the Grateful Dead. How do you tell the all-encompassing story of a band who embraced chaos as a guiding principle; whose legacy rests in myriad bootlegs rather than canonical albums; whose songs reinvented themselves, every night, for 30 years? “I don’t see the sense in doing the same thing over and over again,” Jerry Garcia tells an interviewer at some point deep into the new Amazon Prime series, Long Strange Trip. “For me, being alive means always changing.” It’s a heroic stance, but also an exasperating one, as articulated by Sam Cutler, a cosmic English geezer who tour-managed the band between 1970 and ’74. “It took me 18 months,” he says, “to get the…

“We try to get the details right – the nods and winks, the foot gestures”STEVE WHITE THE concept of the tribute band was effectively invented by The Bootleg Beatles in 1979, and now the latest incarnation of that ever-regenerating act will be performing one of the more spectacular gigs of the summer, demonstrating how serious the tribute business has become. In tandem with the 70-piece Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and presented by Roger McGough, the Bootlegs plan to recreate Sgt Pepper in a series of Summer Of Love-themed shows to mark the 50th anniversary of the album’s release, including a performance at the Royal Albert Hall on June 1. These are the shows the real Beatles never played, and the band are taking them so seriously, the current Bootleg George…

Crack-Up NONESUCH 8/10 ON the evening of February 9, Robin Pecknold ambled into one of those strange controversies that blow up on social media and, for a few hours, consume the music world’s chattering class. Talking to the Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth on Instagram, Pecknold became embroiled in a droll, quasi-academic discussion about the precarious state of (his quotes) “indie rock”. “I feel,” he wrote, “like 2009, Bitte Orca/Merriweather/Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of ‘indie rock’ that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse.” Opprobrium, inevitably, was swift. Pecknold’s comments were taken as a lament for a time when records by Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear – and, by extension, Fleet Foxes – had greater cultural traction. In the mainstream nowadays, it tends…

Deep into the fourth decade of her wildly eclectic pop career, Alison Moyet has never sounded more arty and experimental. Her latest album, Other , is her second collaboration with sometime Björk/Madonna producer Guy Sigsworth and her most adventurous, starkly electronic work since Yazoo. “Guy really gets me,” says the 56-year-old Moyet. “We need very little dialogue, I don’t have to explain myself. He’s not frightened about making a non-mainstream record with someone who’s been part of the mainstream. With middle-aged women there’s an assumption of this asinine, edgeless presence that people expect from you. I’ve had to fight that for a long time. But Guy gets the artist in me... without wanting to sound like a poncy cunt. Ha!” Darkly poetic in tone,…

Capacity SADDLE CREEK 8/10 ADRIANNE Lenker had an eventful childhood. She was raised in a religious cult before her parents fled its grasp, then she almost died after she was hit on the head by a railroad spike. Themes of surrender, escape and sudden violence run throughout Capacity, the second album from Lenker’s four-piece Big Thief, but one which is ultimately about the capacity of humans to love each other, sometimes suffocatingly, as partners, parents and children. The band formed after Lenker arrived in NY from the Midwest and teamed up with guitarist Buck Meek. The duo recorded a pair of folky albums before recruiting a rhythm section and releasing 2016’s excellent Big Thief debut, Masterpiece. Lenker, however, is chief songwriter and spiritual core. Her voice is the dominant instrument,…

A true classic: U2 would never sound this fruitfully innocent again… The Joshua Tree – 30th Anniversary Edition ISLAND 8/10 IT was almost called “The Two Americas”. Later, briefly, “Desert Songs” was a contender. But U2 finally settled on The Joshua Tree for their fifth LP, a smart title that perfectly encapsulated its cinematic mix of widescreen landscapes and thirsting, quasi-Biblical lyricism. It elevated the Irish quartet into global superstars, sold a staggering 25 million copies and remains an unsurpassed career peak. The aim, according to guitarist The Edge, was to “follow the blues and get into America”. After almost a decade as rootless post-punks with awkward Christian leanings, U2 finally baptised themselves in the mighty star-spangled river of gospel, blues, folk, country, rock and soul. Tightening up their open-ended…

Beyond The Sun ONE LITTLE INDIAN 8/10 THERE are many stories, some funnier than others, about how unmanageable Billy MacKenzie was. The Rolls-Royce that he couldn’t drive; the hotel room for his whippets. Each absurd extravagance contributes to a picture of the singer as a quixotic, uncontrollable character with a consistent disregard for convention. That, of course, was his approach to music, and when working with Alan Rankine in The Associates, those impulses were mirrored in tunes which stretched pop into extraordinary shapes. Things were less satisfactory after MacKenzie and Rankine parted company in 1982. The singer’s subsequent career was an erratic collection of missed opportunities, some prompted by record companies unsure how to coax the best from a singer for whom retreat was the best form of attack. It…

“I FIRST met Roger a few years ago. Sean Evans suggested calling me, with the endgame of us working together. I helped them out on the score for the film they made of The Wall show. Then Sean called me about this record. I wasn’t sure what to think, to be honest. Roger hadn’t made a record for a long time. He had got all these demos together. It was a bit of a mixed bag; it didn’t really speak to me. But there was one song that was very strong. He said that was the last thing he’d done. I thought, ‘Do I take this on or not?’ He’s an interesting guy, I’m interested in what he’s got to say. Why not? “We recorded one song, ‘If I’d Been…

WHILE in the UK, shoegaze’s imperial phase only really lasted for two years, it found a longer, healthier life in the States as ‘dream pop’. “Sometimes Galaxie 500 were referred to as ‘proto-shoegaze’,” admits guitarist/vocalist Dean Wareham. “But honestly we didn’t really listen to those bands – aside from Spacemen 3, who I loved.” The first wave of American bands roughly contemporaneous to My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3 included Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star. Later, into the early ’90s, bands like Bowery Electric and Medicine continued to explore similar territory charted by their UK shoegaze counterparts. Wareham thinks “‘dream pop’ is a term that has been applied retroactively. I don’t think I heard it till 2003 or so, when I started seeing it in reviews of my own albums.…

“I’M getting more into writing prose. I take a lot of photos too, and I would love to release a mixed-media thing, short stories and photos. Maybe I’ll make that happen. I have a few Yashicas, these 35mm point-shoots. But I always forget film, so I pick up those disposable cameras. What are my stories like? You can tell that I’m from the Midwest. I’m influenced by authors like James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor, stuff like that. Which is all kind of moral. I like Raymond Carver a lot. My stories are simple stories, a lot of tragedy, naturally. I think if you’re a fan of my music they would make a lot of sense. I’ve only got about three or four completed, but there’s always a bunch in the…

Any funeral vibes can’t compete with the truth that it is hard to be sad during a Prince song AMONG many other effects, the music legend death march of 2016 fertilised a flourishing strain of the live music industry: the memorial tour. Where the deceased of pop were once eulogised with a simple award-show medley or all-star tribute, there’s now any number of roadshows offering funeral services for artists long gone (Elvis, Hendrix) or recently departed (Bowie, Prince), most featuring as many former collaborators as possible for authenticity. Inevitably, these performances raise questions of taste (a hologram of Ronnie James Dio?) and legitimacy over just who is entitled to professionally celebrate the dead and provide their fans with the closure they crave. The case of Prince is especially fraught –…

Alien: Covenant knowingly replays many hit scenes of the original film ALIEN: COVENANT “Always different, always the same”: John Peel’s famous description of The Fall applies equally well to the Alien franchise. The series has run across eight films – if you count two woeful crossovers with the Predator films – seldom straying too far from the formula of grisly body horror. Bad things happen on dimly lit spaceships, androids are never quite as benevolent as they first appear, and as a rule, it is best to stand as far away as possible from large, prehistoric-looking ovoid shapes. Even Ridley Scott’s return to the series for the first time since 1979, to direct the prequel Prometheus, hinted at a bold reinvention of the series – only to capitulate…

BRUCE LANGHORNE Folk guitarist and Dylan collaborator (1938-2017) BRUCE Langhorne was less than impressed on first exposure to Bob Dylan, at Gerde’s Folk City in New York in 1971. “I thought he was a terrible singer and a complete fake,” he stated in David Hajdu’s document of the Greenwich Village folk scene, Positively 4th Street. “I didn’t really start to appreciate Bobby as something unique until he started writing.” The pair went on to share what Langhorne called a telepathic musical relationship, the session guitarist adding his silvery call-and-response to Dylan’s 1963 version of “Corrina, Corrina” and several key songs on 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home. Forging a link between acoustic folk and electrified folk-rock, the album was elevated by Langhorne’s rhythmic leads on “Subterranean Homesick Blues”,…

“We were never Nirvana. We weren’t even the Lemonheads”BILL JANOVITZ When Buffalo Tom released their third album, in 1992, they were only one of countless American bands poised for a breakout in the wake of this new thing called alternative rock. Although its creators hailed from the other side of America – Boston, as opposed to Seattle – Let Me Come Over sounded angst-ridden but radio-friendly, with singles like the harrowing “Taillights Fade” and the breakneck “Velvet Roof” marrying the urgency of punk with the precision of pop and the swagger of classic rock. “I’m not going to lie to you and say there weren’t times when we thought, ‘Why aren’t we as big as this band or that band?’” says frontman Bill Janovitz, as the group plot the celebrations…

“I’D say 90 per cent of my life has been spent listening to obscure weirdness,” says Paul Major, with a chuckle which suggests it’s been time well spent. Described by one friend as “a wizard of vinyl”, long before he formed his churning jam band Endless Boogie in the ’90s, Major was “a fanatical vacuum cleaner” sucking up the world’s oddest records. Looking for a homemade album of Jackson 5 covers by a bunch of 15-year-olds from Arkansas, or a backwoods Billy Joel wannabe who gets it “wonderfully wrong”? For 40 years Major has been the source. His obsession started as a teen in ’60s Louisville, fascinated by the bizarre records he’d find in the 25-cents sections of stores, particularly private pressings. “Back then, somebody had to make a huge…

1 JASON ISBELL & THE 400 UNIT Hope The High Road “Last year was a son of a bitch for nearly everyone we know,” sings Jason Isbell on this month’s rousing opener, from his stirring Nashville Sound LP. Something of a rallying cry for the disenfranchised and enraged in 2017, Isbell heroically grapples towards a better future: “I hope the high road leads you home again/To a world you want to live in.” He takes your questions on page 14. 2 DAN AUERBACH Shine On Me Another proponent of the Nashville Sound, the Black Key launches his new label with this breezy, charming slice of buckskin pop. The Traveling Wilburys and Dave Edmunds’ “Queen Of Hearts” are strongly recalled. Additional twang comes courtesy of one Mark Knopfler. 3 SAINT ETIENNE…

“A WALK through the thickets of the imagination, a personal mythology of sounds and visions and characters,” is how Sam Amidon describes the first LP of his own compositions in a 10-year recording career that has until now found him either reworking traditional folk material or creating high-and-lonesome reinventions of songs by contemporary artists as diverse as Mariah Carey and Tim McGraw. ”But it is still linked to the Appalachian music I love and a few lyrics draw on traditional sources, as well as beats and improvisation and stuff like Don Cherry,” he adds. Raised on Irish fiddle tunes and antique Americana by folk-singing parents, he also describes himself “a complete jazz nerd” and explains that the album is the result of two distinctively separate creative processes. First he spent…

Since forming in 2007, The Helicocentrics have specialised in intense, mystical grooves that have won praise from Madlib and the late David Axelrod, and seen them collaborate with a range of artists from DJ Shadow, to Sun Ra’s Arkestra and jazz theorist Dr Lloyd Miller, “a genius musician, who would not let us use anything but acoustic instruments”. New LP A World Of Masks is notable for a new addition to the band – vocalist Barbora Patkova. Drummer Malcolm Catto explains: “We’d been looking for a permanent vocalist for quite a while, because the ones we’d worked with found it difficult to navigate long stretches of spontaneously improvised music. We found Babs through a friend who had randomly heard her singing one day on a barge…

Waiting On A Song EASY EYE SOUND 7/10 DAN Auerbach’s second solo album opens not with a lurching guitar riff or a rumbling drumbeat, but with a buoyant bassline, some shimmery bells and a low, insinuating flute, all of which quickly bloom into a full-blown soul-pop symphony. Drawing heavily from the stately orchestrations of classic Motown and the breezy grooves of ’70s AM radio, “Waiting On A Song” sounds like nothing else in his catalogue, a compelling change of pace from the blues-rock attack of The Black Keys. That opening track might not give it away, but Waiting On A Song is actually Auerbach’s Nashville album. He penned a handful of tunes with John Prine and recorded with a group of seasoned session players, including bassist Dave Roe (Loretta Lynn,…

Home Counties HEAVENLY 9/10 IT’S relatively rare that writing about an album is going to lead you to the metaphoric door of the family home, but Saint Etienne’s ninth album, Home Counties, had this writer remembering dinner table conversations about parents growing up in Surrey. Passing mention of some of the album’s song titles – “Whyteleafe” (a village in Tandridge), “Woodhatch” (a suburb of Reigate) – opened the door to all kinds of reminiscence: about my mother growing up in a house between the airport and the railway (when the latter was bombed during WWII, the windows all blew out); working at the Coffee Bean, on the high street of Wallington, the first coffee lounge in the home counties; bunking off with friends to catch jazz in local halls in…

AFTER leaving Edinburgh, Anne Briggs was rarely in one place long. In the mid’60s, her summers were spent in Ireland with Sweeney’s Men singer Johnny Moynihan, travelling by horse and cart and VW van. Later in the decade, home was a caravan on a Suffolk heath. In 1971, she finally signed a record contract, with CBS, and released two albums: Anne Briggs and The Time Has Come . A third, Sing A Song For You , was unreleased until 1997. Life took over. She married Pat, a forestry worker, and had two children. They moved to Sutherland and then to Lincolnshire. In the ’90s she returned to Scotland, running a bunkhouse on the Isle Of Cara. She now lives near…

THE guest list, remembers one visitor, featured the cream of the ’80s pop charts. The venue was Stocks, a sprawling Georgian mansion in the Hertfordshire countryside then owned by Playboy executive Victor Lownes. There, one evening in July, 1984, members of Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and many more were invited to drink champagne, take a dip in the largest Jacuzzi in Europe or even place a bet at the roulette tables. The occasion? A very exclusive party to celebrate the ongoing success of the latest album by the Thompson Twins, Into The Gap. Record Mirror estimated the “Gatsby-style shindig” cost “a cool 20 grand”. Among the attendees, meanwhile, were two 16-year-old friends, Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi, who had recently struck up an unlikely friendship with…

“After taking that much Xanax, I think I have an aversion to drugs” IN 2010, returning to New York with a dog-eared $1,000 in his pocket after a tour with The Babies, Kevin Morby made an important, symbolic decision. “I could have paid three months rent with it,” he explains, “but I decided I was gonna buy a nice guitar. It was like putting a tattoo on my forehead or something – ‘I’m gonna have to keep pursuing music because I’ve bought this nice thing.’” After managing to convince a shop in Manhattan’s Union Square that the scrappy dollar notes were real, Morby walked away with a new red Fender Jaguar, which he named Dorothy after his grandmother. Four excellent solo albums later, and the 29-year-old is still deeply committed…

“BECAUSE of my health problems, I never expected to be here for long,” says Richard Jobson. “You start to think, ‘Well, I’d better have the best experience I can possibly have out of this.’ That’s what the Skids’ live performances were imbued with.” Before the band were formed, however, when he was 16, Jobson condensed his intense worldview into a poem inspired by death, Tennyson’s “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” and the brutal experiences of friends who had served in Northern Ireland. “Tennyson’s poem had all the things you love as a young guy – heroism and tragedy and loss,” says Jobson, as he and the Skids prepare to return for a 40th-anniversary tour. “They were the very same qualities I tried to imbue in what was to become…

The tragic is often just a hair away from the absurd in Mann’s songs AIMEE Mann makes no bones about the kind of songs she came here to play: “Slow and sad, depressing, possibly even creepy.” However, she tells her audience in Toronto, “I feel that kind of song is a song I’m familiar with.” On the page, her words lose something, just as the humour in Mann’s lyrics may be too caustic without the leavening effect of her warm, wry alto. Yet she delivers the evening’s opening joke with the precision of a seasoned stand-up, her gold lamé dress adding another unexpected element of Vegas stagecraft to the proceedings. There are many more laughs over the course of a 90-minute set of songs that may return again and again…

1967 AND ALL THAT… I enjoyed your feature, announced on the cover as the 50 Best Psychedelic Songs Of ’67 [Uncut, June 2017], not least because I remember buying and listening avidly to so many of your choices. But can we have a think before bandying the word ‘psychedelic’ about? There has to be some sort of definition. Perhaps: a little surreal, a little spacey, some reference to or inference of mind expansion, drug-fuelled or otherwise. Maybe a little phasing or other distortion. That lets in many of the 50 selections, which variously advise us to feed our head, blow our little mind, listen to our mind, carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of our mind, only to split when day is done, nothing being real, tuning in, turning…