Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i UNCUT

1 BIG JOANIE Confident Man We start this month with a punky, synthy cut from Back Home, the new album from London’s righteous feminist trio – on Thurston Moore’s own Daydream Library Series label, of course. We review the album and speak to Stephanie Phillips on page 30. 2 MACIE STEWART Maya, Please Mouthful Of Glass is the debut album from Stewart, serial Chicago collaborator and half of Finom (formerly known as Ohmme). A spiky acoustic lament, like much of the record it’s enhanced by stellar, sweeping strings. Read more on page 34. 3 PERSONAL TRAINER Texas In The Kitchen Hailed by Stephen Malkmus, this Amsterdam septet transmit from some parallel-universe ’90s to thrilling effect on new album Big Love Blanket. Wonky, angular and noisy, this mini-epic finds frontman Willem…

I’m In Your Mind Fuzz HEAVENLY, 2014 Hyperspeed drone, slow jams, harmonica, explosive guitar solos, horses neighing – it’s all in the mix on KG’s fifth, released in the US on (no surprise) John Dwyer’s Castle Face label. Mind control is the album’s concept, hammered home in the first four songs, where choogling psych, post-punk and ’60s beat pop are underpinned by an identical groove. 8/10 Polygondwanaland HEAVENLY, 2017 “Make tapes, make CDs, make records,” exhorted the note accompanying KG’s fourth album of the year, whose master tapes they uploaded. “We do not own this record. You do.” The set marks a diversion from “straight” psych rock and is a deep wade into prog à la Yes and ELP, with the odd satisfying dump of sludge metal, too. 8/10 Omnium Gatherum KGLW,…

THE 1975 Being Funny In A Foreign Language DIRTY HIT 6/10 Matty Healy’s pop mavericks play it safe Being Funny… is the 1975 album for those who always found their sprawling pretension a bit much, the band knuckling down with Jack Antonoff and delivering 11 well-behaved tunes in 45 minutes. It might have been credited to The 1986 – songs like “I’m In Love With You” belong on a Gary Davies playlist between Curiosity Killed The Cat and Bruce Hornsby. Though there are tantalising hints of adventure on the sumptuous “Part Of The Band” and the LCD-ish piano of the eponymous opening track, the overall mix of MOR and torturous wordplay recalls no-one so much as Robbie Williams.…

THE LAST SHADOW PUPPETS The Age Of The Understatement DOMINO, 2008 Early sign of Alex Turner’s retro-orchestral ambitions, as part of the turtlenecked supergroup with Miles Kane. 8/10 ALEX TURNER Submarine OST DOMINO, 2011 Richard Ayoade’s awkward teenage rom-com demanded that Turner park the raised-eyebrow rock for a set of low-key acoustic charmers. 7/10 ARCTIC MONKEYS Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino DOMINO, 2018 On which the band elegantly uncoupled themselves from the guitar-bass-drums format to side-eye the 21st century via the rantings of a washed-up playboy. 8/10…

Back Home DAYDREAM LIBRARY SERIES 8/10 BY all rights, Big Joanie shouldn’t have enough spare time to sound as good as they do. Formed in 2013 as the result of a chance encounter – when drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone noticed that guitarist and singer Stephanie Phillips was carrying a Raincoats tote bag – this London trio of committed, creative women have built something truly remarkable over the past nine years, becoming a formidable force in principled DIY music. Philips, a music writer as well as a musician herself, started the collective DIY Diaspora Punx, which then founded Decolonise Fest, an event by and for DIY musicians of colour that is still thriving. She also wrote a book, Why Solange Matters, for University of Texas Press. Bassist Estella Adeyeri is a member…

Poolside KITH & KIN 7/10 ONE ELEVEN HEAVY were something of a transatlantic supergroup when they formed a few years ago. James Jackson Toth – aka Wooden Wand, the singer-songwriter behind numerous “New Weird America” outfits like Dunza, Grim Jim, Hassara and James And The Giants – met Bradford-born musician Nick Mitchell Maiato at a Manchester gig in 2010 and instantly bonded over a shared love of Neil Young, Little Feat and the Grateful Dead. After forming a band with assorted members of Royal Trux, Hiss Golden Messenger and Solar Motel Band, they started wearing these influences on their sleeve; the kind of connoisseurs who sonically curate half a century of leftfield Americana. On Poolside, you can hear shades of everything from Gram Parsons to Willie Nelson, from Michael Hurley…

Macie Stewart on new music, emotions and garter snakes Why did the time feel right for a solo album? I had a couple of songs that didn’t feel like they fit on the last Finom album, but I didn’t have time to do anything with them – and then the pandemic happened. I was living by myself, kind of having a hard time and it felt good to put my energy into making new music. I also wanted to know what it would sound like if it was just me spearheading a project, because so many of the things I work on are often very collaborative. Were there things you could do with this album that you couldn’t in your other work? I often use songwriting to understand my own emotions…

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band APPLE CORPS LTD./PARLOPHONE/CAPITOL/UME, 2017 The psychedelic triumph, packed with delights: the various takes of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, later combined, and “A Day In The Life” are highlights. 10/10 The Beatles APPLE CORPS LTD./CAPITOL/UME, 2018 Here’s ‘The White Album’ in a lovely, woozy new mix, plus great early takes and the essential acoustic Esher demos (including Lennon’s “Child Of Nature” and Harrison’s “Sour Milk Sea”), rescued from bootleg hiss. 9/10 Abbey Road APPLE CORPS LTD./CAPITOL/UME, 2019 Perhaps the most popular Beatles album today, the final LP they recorded is here enhanced by great chat and some surprisingly upbeat moments. The early “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is the one. 10/10 Let It Be APPLE CORPS LTD./CAPITOL/UME, 2021 Their hodge-podge album/soundtrack/memorial still sounds raw and strangely…

This month… CACTUS Evil Is Going On: The Complete Atco Recordings 1970-1972 CHERRY RED 6/10 Short-lived blues rockers’ entire output in one tidy box Although only a going concern for less than three years, the post-Vanilla Fudge outfit headed by bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice nonetheless put out four albums, and the addition of a plethora of live recordings means there’s enough material to fill eight discs on this boxset. Stylistically, it’s a more streamlined version of the Fudge’s rock grandeur, with erstwhile Amboy Dukes singer Rusty Day upping the blues elements, most notably on covers of Willie Dixon and Mose Allison. Of the original LPs, 1971’s One Way Or Another stands out, especially the grit and grind of “Hometown Bust” and the Allmanslike strut of “Rock’n’Roll Children”,…

AS an esteemed football journalist and a longrevered craftsman of baroque pop, Philippe Auclair is evidently capable of many things. Yet he readily admits the special task of putting together a compilation from the songs he created as Louis Philippe between 1993 and 2007 was better placed in other hands. “I hate listening to my own music,” he tells Uncut. “I’m always working on the songs that are being developed right now so revisiting what I’ve done in the past is not something I would naturally do.” Being a fan, a sometime collaborator and a close friend since the mid-1980s, the High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan thankfully had no such reservations about making the deep dive. “He understands me completely,” notes Auclair, who couldn’t be more pleased about the musical portrait that…

Conor Oberst “It’s a little – how d’you say – cheeky?” You said when it came out that Digital Ash was about “fear of death and oblivion”. Was the Iraq War feeding into that subject matter? Well, I feel that death is a constant in all my records! I was alive for the first Iraq War, as a kid. And it felt real, I knew kids from Nebraska that went over there. It was the first time I really saw it for what it was. You transpose the albums’ styles on these new EPs. The EPs with the first three albums’ reissues were easy to make different from the originals, because they were so old. With these, I thought I’d do Digital Ash… in Wide Awake…’s style, and vice versa.…

FOR an artist who has sold in excess of 55 million albums worldwide, Alan Parsons is not a face you’d immediately recognise. “It’s because we never played live, so no-one ever saw me!” he says. “Frankly, I was pretty happy not being recognised. I saw what other artists had to deal with, and it was madness. Poor old Paul [McCartney] couldn’t go to restaurants or clubs. He couldn’t even be in his own house in Sussex – he’d have fans breaking through the fences to get a look at him!” Parsons has always been comfortable as a backroom boy. After dropping out of school at the age of 16 he embarked on an EMI training scheme before working as a “balance engineer” at Abbey Road studios, where he assisted on…

LIVE AT THE COUNTER EUROVISION 79 (PEOPLE UNITE, 1979) The legendary (live) debut: mellifluous roots reggae at its finest. Currently out of print and highly collectable, especially on CD. WISE AND FOOLISH (PEOPLE UNITE, 1981) An enforced lineup change brings a mellower, horns-led roots reggae sound to anthems such as “Bail Out”. Another rarity. FORWARD (KAZ, 1989) In come electronic drums and a lighter, more soulful lovers’ rock feel. “The Midas Touch” and “Jah See Jah Know” are particularly sublime. THE JOHN PEEL SESSIONS (STRANGE FRUIT/BBC, 1995) Assembles 13 tracks from the nine sessions Misty In Roots recorded for Peel’s Radio 1 show between 1979 and 1986. ROOTS CONTROLLER (REAL WORLD, 2002) After a decade-long sabbatical, MIR recorded new tracks and revisited a couple from Counter Eurovision for this fine career overview.…

• Sheffield City Hall – April 30, 1965 RICHARD WILLIAMS catches Dylan in his first incarnation A HANDFUL of folk-club appearances during a stay in London in December 1962 to record the BBC TV play Madhouse On Castle Street and a sold-out concert at the Royal Festival Hall in May 1964 were Bob Dylan’s only British appearances before he stepped on stage at Sheffield’s City Hall on the evening of April 30, 1965, opening a seven-date UK concert tour. None of us present that night knew was that this was our last chance to see a full-length exposition of Dylan in his first incarnation: the solo troubadour on stage with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a bunch of harmonicas. There was no support act. With no preliminaries, he…

LENNY KAYE hymns Dylan’s most shocking transformation BOB came to see us when Patti and I were hanging out in the West Village around ’75. He invited Patti to audition for the Rolling Thunder Revue. But we were working on integrating Jay Dee Daugherty and preparing to record our album that September, so she didn’t feel there was enough time to go off and be part of Bob’s traveling medicine show. In 1980, I was in Spokane quite randomly, visiting my wife-to-be who lived there. When I arrived, I saw Bob was there on his Slow Train Coming tour. I had seen him a couple of times before – Madison Square Garden in ’74 was one – but in Spokane, the concert was awesome. He was so committed. He wasn’t…

BENMONT TENCH on Dylan’s live comeback with the Hearbreakers EVERYBODY in The Heartbreakers loved Bob Dylan. Nobody had to think twice about us becoming Bob’s band for those tours. Everybody knew half the songs. Although sometimes he’d teach them to you in a different way. Bob had ideas about what songs he wanted to do, and he had a lot of covers for us to learn. We learned a massive amount of songs, a million old blues songs. I don’t remember how much sets actually changed night to night, but we could throw these things in at any time. Bob had us learn “All My Tomorrows”, the Sinatra song. Then we never played it – actually, we played it once, one night in a hotel bar – but we never played…

DAMIEN LOVE in fine voice for a rare sing-along-with-Bob SINCE 1989, when he returned for the first time since the 1966 tour with The Hawks, Dylan’s customary Glasgow haunt has been the cavernous SECC conference centre. He played there again the night before this – an impromptu extra date at Barrowland, the legendary, lived-in former dancehall in the east end. Until he actually stepped onto the chest-high stage and ripped into a ferocious “Drifter’s Escape”, it still seemed too good to be true. Barrowland looked, magnificently, like it was last decorated in 1963, and on this sweltering summer’s night held 1,900 elbow-to-elbow. It’s almost certainly the smallest venue Dylan has played in the UK since he turned up in London folk clubs in 1962, an intimacy that works an alchemy.…

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN Directed by Martin McDonagh Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon Opens Oct 21 Cert To be confirmed 7/10 TRIANGLE OF SADNESS Directed by Ruben Östlund Starring Thobias Thorwid, Dolly De Leon, Woody Harrelson Opens Oct 28 Cert 15 6/10 VESPER Directed by Kristina Buožytė, Bruno Samper Starring Raffiella Chapman, Eddie Marsan, Rosy McEwen Opens Oct 21 Cert 15 8/10 NEPTUNE FROST Directed by Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams Starring Cheryl Isheja, Bertrand Ninteretse Opens Nov 4 Cert To be confirmed 7/10 A BUNCH OF AMATEURS Directed by Kim Hopkins Starring Colin Egglestone, Harry Nicholls, Joe Ogden Opens Nov 11 Cert 12a 8/10…

CONFIRMED Kate Bush fan John Lydon can remember the reaction when he played her debut single “Wuthering Heights” to his mother: “Oh Johnny, it sounds like a bag o’cats.” The 19-year-old Bush’s strident vocals and taste for interpretive dance divided opinions, Melody Maker not far off the mark when it described her 1978 debut album The Kick Inside as “a cross between Linda Lewis and Macbeth’s three witches”. However, Tom Doyle’s excellent compendium, Running Up That Hill, shows how the wide-eyed hippie came to be fêted as a great pop visionary. As with Craig Brown’s Beatles extravaganza One Two Three Four, Doyle eschews a straight narrative, instead capturing Bush’s essence through 50 fragments. There’s a memorable appearance on Saturday-morning kids’ show Swap Shop, eyewitness insight into her recording process, details…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine STRUMMER LOVIN’ Very persuasive and tempting review of the new Strummer boxset and book by Damien Love in your November issue. Unlike the predominantly unreleased and rare tracks on Joe Strummer 001, volume 2 is three old albums, all excellent in their own right, and just one disc of unreleased rarities. I’ll hold out for the 2023 RSD single disc, fingers crossed. I know Damien had a lot of ground to cover, but I’m surprised there’s no mention of the 20-minute “Minstrel Boy” that ends Global A Go-Go in some style. The Mescaleros show their musical chops in a magnificent display of repetition that builds into a groove that definitely does not outstay its welcome. Think Dylan & The Band down in the…

“For me, life veers between the inane and profound, the banal and the terrifying” EVEN on London’s teeming Commercial Street, Robyn Hitchcock cuts a conspicuous figure: imposingly tall and clad in a brightly patterned Paul Smith shirt, today he’s joined by his partner, singer-songwriter Emma Swift, and their Cavalier puppy Daphne. Basking in the late summer sun, fresh from a trip to his usual home in Nashville, he’s delighted to be back in the UK. “I’d prefer to go over the waterfall here than in the States,” the former Soft Boy muses. “The great thing about here is we don’t have Jesus and we don’t have guns, but it’s the same mindset really – Britain and America swap insanities. I never pursued it, but America was where I caught on,…

ICE, DEATH, PLANETS, LUNGS, MUSHROOMS AND LAVA 1 Mycelium 2 Ice V 3 Magma 4 Lava 5 Hell’s Itch 6 Iron Lung 7 Gliese 710 Produced by: Stu Mackenzi Recorded at: KGLW’s studio, Melbourne LAMINATED DENIM 1 The Land Before Timeland 2 Hypertension Produced by: Stu Mackenzie Recorded at: KGLW’s studio, Melbourne CHANGES 1 Change 2 Hate Dancin’ 3 Astroturf 4 No Body 5 Gondii 6 Exploding Suns 7 Short Change Produced by: Stu Mackenzie Recorded at: Various studios, home studios, buses, hotel rooms, green rooms, planes, parking lots, etc… Personnel (all albums): Stu Mackenzie (piano, bass, guitar, vocals, organ, Mellotron, vibraphone, synth, keys, percussion, flute, Clavinet), Joey Walker (bass, keys, guitar, synth, vocals), Nicholas Craig (bass, keys, synth, guitar, vocals), Ambrose Kenny Smith (keys, saxophone, percussion, harmonica, vocals), Lucas…

Step On My Travelator: The Imagined Career Trajectory Of Superstar DJ & Dance-Pop Producer, Melvin Harris ZEN FC 7/10 Moonlandingz mastermind enlists Richard Hawley, Maxine Peake and more for retro-rave project Yet another project from the endlessly prolific Adrian Flanagan of International Teachers Of Pop, Moonlandingz, Eccentronic Research Council and more, the debut Acid Klaus album is a catchy collection of electro and acid throwback tracks featuring multiple star guests including Richard Hawley, Sink Ya Teeth’s Maria Uzor and regular Flanagan collaborator Maxine Peake. The album’s loosely conceptual narrative chronicles the rise and fall of a hedonist rave DJ, but any background plot is skimpy and superfluous. Kinetic, nimble, jitter-funk bangers like “Party Sized Away Day”, sardonic electroclash robo-chant “Crashing Cars In Ibiza” and the eerie Peake-voiced coda “Eulogy To…

Stephanie Phillips: “There was a lot of pushing boundaries” How was Decolonise Fest 2022? It was great. It was our first one since before the pandemic, and we didn’t get any funding and relied on donations. But we had great crowds and the bands were happy. It felt like people have been missing the space Decolonise Fest creates to be a person of colour into punk and alternative music. What new sides did you want to represent on this album? We were more aware of what recording an album was about. We knew we could work with more elements, build up more of a scene for each song. There was a lot of trying to push the boundaries of what Big Joanie could be. I’d written “Your Words” years ago on…

Nick Mitchell Maiato “I hope it’s uplifting" Is it a challenge being in a transatlantic band? It can be but, to be honest, I had similar problems when I was living near Manchester and in a band with people who were two miles down the road from me! Now my main collaborator lives 4,000 miles away but we speak on the phone pretty much every day, and we’re both fanatically enthusiastic about what we do. Obviously Covid put a damper on things – a tour and a session were both cancelled in early 2020. How influential was the writer Richard Brautigan on this album? I’ve been re-reading The Hawkline Monster, a gothic western he wrote in 1974. There’s a shape-shifting Native American character called Magic Child in it that reminds…

B-Sides, Demos & Rarities ISLAND 8/10 LET’S start at the end. The final track on this exhaustive trawl of the ditches and crossroads of PJ Harvey’s oeuvre is “Red Right Hand”, the signature song of Harvey’s one-time collaborator Nick Cave. It is a song about devilry, written in blood; subsequently reshaped as the theme of the haircut gangster drama Peaky Blinders. For Cave, “Red Right Hand” is a chance to embrace rock’n’roll at its most bloodraw. It is a tent-revival song in which fear and belief are locked in hideous quickstep. Since its subject is Hell and its declining suburbs, no performance of it can be too extreme. PJ Harvey, of course, is no stranger to shock and awe. Her early career was constructed from fragments of spit, feather and…

Infamous Angel (reissue, 1992) YEP ROC 9/10 SEVERAL years before she recorded her first album, Iris DeMent was driving through a small town in Oklahoma and noticed the place was largely abandoned. There were homes and businesses and all the signs of civilisation, but no people anywhere. Imagining herself in such a place, she wrote an upbeat, downcast song called “Our Town”, which gives listeners a tour of where she met her first boyfriend and where she bought her first car (“It rolled over once but then it never went far”). It’s a final glance backwards as her character leaves for good, and DeMent understands that everyone leaves a town like this for good. “Go on now and kiss it goodbye”, she sings, “but hold on to your lover ’cause…

I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning/Digital Ash In A Digital Urn (reissues, 2005) + “I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning: A Companion”/“Digital Ash In A Digital Urn: A Companion” DEAD OCEANS 9/10, 8/10, 7/10, 7/10 CONOR OBERST’S life came in a rush around now. He had moved to New York City from his home in Omaha, Nebraska, found relative fame with Lifted, Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground (2002, also reissued this month), dated Winona Ryder, and been profoundly affected by the Iraq War. Then I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash In A Digital Urn were released on the same day in 2005, alchemising his mordant political and personal fears and his life’s hard-partying imbalance into intimate generational statements, which became international hits.…

JULIE TIPPETTS Sunset Glow (reissue, 1975) CHERRY RED 9/10 Avant-garde masterpiece from the artist formerly known as Julie Driscoll BY her early twenties, Julie Tippetts, or Julie Driscoll as she was known then, was something of a pop star. She had emerged from London’s rhythm and blues community in the mid-’60s, finding fame as the singer with Brian Auger’s Trinity. Chart success came when their 1968 take on Rick Danko and Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes number “This Wheel’s On Fire”, arguably the song’s best-known version, reached No 5 in the UK. Her sparkling, controlled voice, meanwhile, was showcased particularly well on their 1969 version of “Let The Sunshine In”. Tippetts continued to record with Auger throughout the ’70s and became an in-demand session singer, working with Robert Wyatt and Carla…

“YOSHIMI… had been out and we were touring with Beck – that’s a whole ’nother chapter right there! Anyway, we’re in Detroit and Jack White came to the show, and he brought us this weird little gift, a light-up Jesus thing. You probably don’t have them so much in England, but in America you see them in people’s front yards around Christmas time. Wayne just wrote a song about it called ‘Thank You Jack White (For The Fiber-Optic Jesus That You Gave Me)’. The song is literally about Jack White giving us that gift and that’s all there is to it. It’s a pleasant song, you know? “The next year, we were playing T In The Park – I think Jack White had broken a finger or something, so they…

FOLK, BLUES & BEYOND (DECCA, 1965) Two years after jazz-centric debut The Guitar Player, Graham returns with a Westmeets-East masterclass that showcases the full range of his ability. Songs like Blind Willie Johnson’s “I Can’t Keep From Cryin’ Sometimes” are breathtaking. FOLK ROOTS, NEW ROUTES (DECCA, 1965) Rich, deep and powerfully emotive, Graham’s sole collaboration with Shirley Collins is often quietly spectacular, not least on “Nottamun Town” and “Reynardine”, igniting the charge of the British folk-rock boom that followed. LARGE AS LIFE AND TWICE AS NATURAL (DECCA, 1968) Bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Jon Hiseman are among the musicians on Graham’s fourth solo LP, at its scintillating best on the traditional “Bruton Town” and his own open-ended instrumental, “Sunshine Raga”. ALL THAT MOODY (ERON ENTERPRISES, 1976) Arguably Graham’s most underrated album, issued…

“IN the spring of 1979, I was working through my charity, Double O, to help community studios in deprived areas. Brent Black Music was one of them and I think Misty In Roots may have worked there. But the main connection was through The Ruts. They were friends with Misty In Roots and shared some of their music. The Ruts had supported The Who on a UK tour, and we hung out a bit. “Around the same time, Blair Peach had been battered by the police in Southall after attending an anti-racism march and died. Southall was close to where I grew up, and where I had many friends and knew some Indian families. I couldn’t get my head around why the police were being so outwardly racist, even though…

• Forest Hills Stadium, Queens, New York – August 28, 1965 HARVEY BROOKS, bassist on Highway 61 Revisited, recalls one of Dylan’s most infamous concerts WE rehearsed for Forest Hills for a couple of weeks, at Carroll’s Rehearsal Hall. That’s when I found out Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm were going to play along with Al Kooper and me in the band. It was just after Dylan had played Newport, but there hadn’t been much talk about any possible craziness – except for the day of the show, when we got there in the afternoon for the soundcheck, and it really became a topic. Dylan just said, “Y’know, it’s gonna be a little nuts out there. So be ready.” And he was right. It was a cold and windy August…

THE hardest thing about being bandleader on Rolling Thunder was that it was so… administrative. It was nominally a musical job, but you know that metaphor, “herding cats”? It was like herding cats, man. This was a rambling, freewheeling bunch, and they liked to party. Everybody had a professional attitude. But they were also having too much fun. It was hard to get them to rehearse, polish up. Every night, everybody’s out partying after the show, you know what I’m doing? I’m in my room, listening to the night’s tape, making notes about what we’ve got to tighten. I’d call rehearsals – often to no avail. This one would be out horseback riding; this other one would be on a bender; this one would be hungover. If I could get…

WHEN we went out on that first gospel tour at the end of ’97, everyone was on the same page. We were all doing everything we could to promote Bob’s mission. We were definitely playing religious music and it was a chance to just concentrate on doing that. We got a combination of responses. It was like a circus, sometimes. We had Madalyn O’Hair, the famous American atheist, picketing outside some places we played back East. At the same time, there was a guy dressed up like Jesus, carrying a cross up the street. The best thing I saw was when we were playing the Warfield in San Francisco: there was a guy sitting in the front row, and he’d made this big sign: JESUS LOVES YOUR OLD SONGS TOO.…

After a brush with mortality Dylan was never more alive, reports NIGEL WILLIAMSON IN May 1997, Dylan was hospitalised with a potentially fatal chest infection. Although he won the fight, it had been touch and go: “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he later said. To seasoned Dylan watchers, it seemed as if the Never Ending Tour, then in its ninth year, might finally reach the end. Yet just months after his brush with mortality, Dylan was back on tour in the UK. The event was like a thanksgiving for his survival, a ripe and pensive appreciation of the fragility of life. As if offering prayers of his own, Dylan had performed three songs days before the tour began – including “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” – for the…

I PLAYED guitar in Bob’s band eight years, from 1997 to the end of 2004. If I had to single out one tour, there was a run in 2002 when the band was just kicking it. We were doing “Brown Sugar” by the Stones, we did a Neil Young tune, a Warren Zevon tune or two, and we were doing all these rootsy tunes and all these Bob Dylan tunes, and we had all just arrived at a place where we were a band. It was really working. I remember feeling good about every show. Bob was in good spirits, you could feel him having a good time. Which wasn’t always the case. You can tell when Bob’s having a good time. It’s in his performance. Sometimes he would just…

A magical weekend of peacocks and Pixies, Bright Eyes and Magnetic Fields “WHEN I first came out, there was nobody here – just a peacock,” says Rosali Middleman, gazing out across the idyllic lawns of the Garden Stage on Friday lunchtime. A sigh: “Quite magical.” It’s an image that captures End Of The Road’s unique vibe, and after a Thursday-night amuse-bouche from Sudan Archives and Khruangbin, Rosali makes the quintessential music to lull us into the weekend proper. Alone with her electric guitar, she weaves chiming alt.folk full of quiet agonies. Naima Bock strips back the orchestral layers of tracks such as “Giant Palm” and “Working” to expose soft pastoral folk songs adorned with sax and peppered with blasts of Celtic chorale. Anaïs Mitchell picks up the beatific baton with the…

RAMSEY LEWIS Crossover jazz pianist (1935-2022) AFTER hearing Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd” on the radio in May 1965, jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis opted to lead his trio through an instrumental version of the song that evening in Washington DC. The response from the audience at the Bohemian Caverns nightspot was overwhelming. Lewis and bandmates Eldee Young (bass) and Issac “Red” Holt (drums) injected it with a cool soul-jazz swing, setting a precedent for their recordings that followed. Their live version of “The ‘In’ Crowd” duly went Top 5 in the US, shifting over a million copies and winning a Grammy. The Ramsey Lewis Trio consolidated their crossover success with another couple of hits: a funky reworking of “Hang On Sloopy” and the old gospel spiritual “Wade In The Water”.…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Bob Dylan. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win a prize. Closing date: Wednesday, November 9, 2022. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+34A A single from ELO that wasn’t a hit, but I’m thinking of the tune all the time (4-3-2-3-2-2-4) 9+8A Guitarist whose solo albums include Empty Glass (4-9) 10 Email gang he confused with Van Morrison’s The _______ ____ (7-4) 14 The Alarm were unprepared to release this title track from album (3) 16 “And in my ____ of darkness, she is standing right in front of me”, from The Beatles’ “Let It Be”…

THE MURDER CAPITAL “A Thousand Lives” HUMAN SEASON From their forthcoming second LP, Gigi’s Recovery, the Dublin quintet deliver meaningful big-room rock with none of the bombast. Exciting times ahead… NATHAN SALSBURG Landwerk No 3 NO QUARTER Another collection of uncanny, time-travelling reveries, Salsburg adding crystalline guitar work to scratchy loops of century-old 78s. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” COLUMBIA The Boss goes full “Rosalita” on a storming version of Frank Wilson’s northern soul staple, a highlight of his new covers album Only The Strong Survive. MONTPARNASSE MUSIQUE Archeology REAL WORLD Congotronics evolves again, with members of Konono No 1, Kasai Allstars and Mbongwana Star blessing this beat-driven blowout. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM “New Body Rhumba” COLUMBIA/DFA “I need a bit of shape and tone” complains James Murphy…

“Exploding golden sun/Bursting radiation/Get on your feet and run for the shelter” KGLW 2022’s third, fourth and fifth from the prolific psych rockers. By Sharon O’Connell IN a challenge to name the undisputed overlords of modern psych rock, two heavyweight contenders spring to mind – Osees and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Both bands have a lot in common: their resistance to said definition, for starters, along with their omnivorous musical appetites and protean vision. They also share a ferocious work ethic, releasing an avalanche of records in what seems like an urgent and endless artistic venting. It’s hard not to boggle at King Gizzard’s stats. This month the Melbourne sextet release three albums of new material, bringing 2022’s tally to five. So far. Since their 2012 debut, they’ve…

The Ruby Cord DOMINO 9/10 RICHARD DAWSON is on quite some creative streak. The past 12 months have already seen one great album from the Tyneside bard – Henki, a collaboration with the Finnish metal alchemists Circle. Now here’s another: The Ruby Cord is framed as the conclusion to a trilogy of albums that Dawson began back in 2017. The first of the three, Peasant, surveyed a number of colourful characters living in the Middle Ages kingdom of Bryneich back circa the 6th century AD. It was followed by 2020, which cast an empathetic eye across the lives of those occupying familiar early 21st-century spaces – the football field, the local pub, the Amazon fulfilment centre. Where next? To the future, of course – specifically 500 years into the future,…

The Car DOMINO 8/10 THE car is one of the most potent symbols in rock’n’roll. Typically it stands for freedom, escape, personal agency and a mysterious, no-strings sexuality. But where rock’n’roll symbolism is concerned, Arctic Monkeys like to have their cake and eat it: whatever you think it is, that’s what it’s not. In lead single and album opener “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball”, the car is not the beginning of a new adventure but the end of one, the place to walk someone when giving them the ultimate brush-off: “‘Baby, it’s been nice’”. This is a different Alex Turner to the one we’re used to hearing. Wrong-footed for once, he’s desperately trying to “throw the rose-tint” on a failing relationship, pleading poignantly for the slow-dance scene we all know…

Cazimi NAMES 8/10 THE Stand-In, Caitlin Rose’s third release in five years, placed her at the top of Nashville’s list of essential young artists back in 2013. But it appears she wasn’t quite ready for all the attention. She found the spotlight debilitating rather than enabling, its unwanted glare suggesting the prospect of imminent burnout. Rose did eventually return to the studio in early 2020, only to be scuppered by the pandemic. Now, after a few readjustments, she’s back in earnest, brighter and more assured after what she calls “this 10-year streak of doom and disappointment”. Named after an ancient astrological term that relates to a planet being consumed by the sun, Cazimi acknowledges her past experience while proposing a fresh set of terms. It feels like the work of someone…

Mouth Full Of Glass FULL TIME HOBBY 8/10 “FINALLY,” sings Macie Stewart, on the opening track of their debut album, “I tell the truth to myself, to you.” The songwriter, singer and composer is much-loved in the jazz, improvisational and indie music scenes of their native Chicago, but Mouth Full Of Glass offers up a deeply intimate, skilfully crafted, alternative portrait of their inner world. You’ve probably heard Stewart’s work without knowing it: on strings for artists as diverse as SZA and Whitney, as a touring multi-instrumentalist with The Weather Station and Claire Rousay or, most likely, as one half of art-rock duo Finom (until recently, Ohmme) with Sima Cunningham. There are parallels to be drawn between all of those and Stewart’s first music under their own name – but…

CD1: New stereo mix 1 Taxman 2 Eleanor Rigby 3 I’m Only Sleeping 4 Love You To 5 Here, There And Everywhere 6 Yellow Submarine 7 She Said She Said 8 Good Day Sunshine 9 And Your Bird Can Sing 10 For No One 11 Doctor Robert 12 I Want To Tell You 13 Got To Get You Into My Life 14 Tomorrow Never Knows CD2: Sessions One 1 Tomorrow Never Knows (Take 1) 2 Tomorrow Never Knows (Mono mix) 3 Got To Get You Into My Life (First version) – Take 5 4 Got To Get You Into My Life (Second version) – Unnumbered mix 5 Got To Get You Into My Life (Second version) – Take 8 6 Love You To (Take 1) 7 Love You To (Unnumbered rehearsal)…

CD Disc One 1 Dry – Demo (previously unreleased) 2 Man-Size – Demo (previously unreleased) 3 Missed – Demo (previously unreleased) 4 Highway 61 Revisited – Demo (previously unreleased) 5 Me-Jane – Demo (previously unreleased) 6 Daddy 7 Lying In The Sun 8 Somebody’s Down, Somebody’s Name 9 Darling Be There 10 Maniac 11 One Time Too Many 12 Harder 13 Naked Cousin 14 Losing Ground 15 Who Will Love Me Now 16 Why D’ya Go To Cleveland (previously unreleased) CD Disc Two 1 Instrumental #1 2 The Northwood 3 The Bay 4 Sweeter Than Anything  5 Instrumental #3  6 The Faster I Breathe The Further I Go (4 Track Version) 7 Nina in Ecstasy 2  8 Rebecca 9 Instrumental #2 10 This Wicked Tongue 11 Memphis 12 30 13 66…

1 Let The Mystery Be 2 These Hills 3 Hotter Than The Mojave In My Heart 4 When Love Was Young 5 Our Town 6 Fifty Miles Of Elbow Room 7 Infamous Angel 8 Sweet Forgiveness 9 After You’ve Gone 10 Mama’s Opry 11 Higher Ground Produced by: Jim Rooney Recorded at: Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa, Nashville Personnel: Iris DeMent (vocals, guitar), Flora Mae DeMent (vocals), Jeff Black (vocals), Jerry Douglas (dobro), Stuart Duncan (fiddle, mandolin), Emmylou Harris (vocals, guitar), Mark Howard (guitar), Jeff Hushkins (bass), Roy Husky Jr (bass), Hal Ketchum (vocals), Al Perkins (dobro), Jim Rooney (vocals), Pete Wasner (piano)…

I’M WIDE AWAKE, IT’S MORNING 1 At The Bottom Of Everything 2 We Are Nowhere And It’s Now 3 Old Soul Song (For The New World Order) 4 Lua 5 Train Under Water 6 First Day Of My Life 7 Another Travellin’ Song 8 Land Locked Blues 9 Poison Oak 10 Road To Joy DIGITAL ASH IN A DIGITAL URN 1 Time Code 2 Gold Mine Gutted 3 Arc Of Time (Time Code) 4 Down In The Rabbit Hole 5 Take It Easy (Love Nothing) 6 Hit The Switch  7 I Believe In Symmetry  8 Devil In The Details 9 Ship In A Bottle  10 Light Pollution 11 Theme To Pinata 12 Easy/Lucky/Free…

Back To The Woodlands FREEDOM TO SPEND/RVNG INTL 8/10 Beautiful zither-led audio snapshots, quietly unearthed THE 2019 rediscovery of Neighborhoods, the 1975 private press album by Portland, Oregon composer, musician and broadcaster Ernest Hood, was a high point of the recent wave of crate-digging reissue mania. A glorious, out-ofnowhere audio documentary, its oneiric magic also begged the simple question – what more? Freedom To Spend has answered with Back To The Woodlands, a similarly gorgeous collection of unreleased Hood compositions that spans the decade between 1972 and 1982. A quiet, homely visionary, Hood’s creative history proves instructive. Growing up in Portland, an early interest in big-band jazz had him learning guitar and joining a jazz band, before his performing career was cut short by polio. He’d subsequently take up the…

COYNE: One day we discovered a four-track cassette with this 24-minute meandering psychedelic instrumental that sounds like it’s doing “The Hypnotist” and then veers towards something else, and parts of it would be backwards and forwards at the same time. It sounded cool but I didn’t have much recollection of it, and nor did Steven. So we thought it’s probably something Dave Fridmann did while Steven and I were grabbing coffee. But he had no idea either. DROZD: We would use a four-track for demos. We’d let these things go on for long periods of time and just trip out or create a weird cloud of sound. It wasn’t even intentionally kept. Not a lot of thought went into saving or keeping these things. COYNE: The engineer that we’re working…

DAVY Graham interviews from the initial phase of his career are scarce. But he did agree to an a udience with Melody Maker in April 1970, the first of three that year. Invited into his basement flat in Camden Town, where they drank wine in front of a silent TV, interviewer Karl Dallas found Graham in doleful, reflective mode. “I’m very tempted after this last LP to say it’s the last,” offered Graham. “Then I shall just stay at home and teach guitar, G or perhaps join in the background of jazz. After all, it’s a terrible strain getting up on your own to sing and play. It’s all right for The Beatles, there are four of them – which makes them a force. But it’s only me, and I’m not…

THE OUTSIDE ROOM MEXICAN SUMMER, 2011 Natalie Mering’s first album proper (as Weyes Blud) is witchy and ancient, uneasy and atonal. She wrote, played, and produced everything on this avant-pop offering of minor-key unrest, summoning restless ghosts and generational isolation over six songs that borrow Nico’s chilly spirit to create an album of uncommon beauty and anxious grace. “Romneydale”, with its clanging chains and abject sadness, points at what’s to come. THE INNOCENTS MEXICAN SUMMER, 2014 The first hint of her burgeoning activism appears on “The Land Of Broken Dreams”, but most of Mering’s second album is rooted in her tales of romantic idealism dashed, first love lost and found, and the scars left behind. Her lovely voice is more ascendent in songs that skirt the edge of folk ballads,…

PLUS! Dylan’s former bandmates tell wild tales of near-riots, massed singalongs and on-stage epiphanies, revealing a man of contradictions, a man of many moods. “Yeah. He’s complicated…”…

Bobstats! SINCE he first started performing in New York City in 1961, Bob Dylan has played around 4,000 shows in 55 countries. ● Since 1988 alone – when Dylan launched the Never Ending Tour – he’s played over 3,090 shows with 26 different band lineups, and clocked up over 1,000,000 miles on the road. ● The most gigs Dylan has played in a single year is 117 in 1999. ● His longest show took place on January 12, 1990, when he played for four hours at Toad’s Place, a 1,000-capacity club in Connecticut. ● Dylan’s website calculates he’s sung 727 different songs live. “All Along The Watchtower” is the most performed, at 2,268 outings, with “Like A Rolling Stone” second at 2,075. ● Several dozen songs have been performed once or twice…

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR August 28, 1963 Dylan performed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC when Dr King led the March On Washington, the high-water mark of the 1960s civil rights struggle. “I was up close when King was giving the ‘I Have A Dream’ speech,” Dylan recalled in No Direction Home. “It still affects me in a profound way.” FRANK SINATRA November 19, 1995 Most performers at Sinatra’s 80th birthday concert sang songs associated with Sinatra. Dylan played his own “Restless Farewell” at Frank’s request – only the second time he’d ever performed the song live. POPE JOHN PAUL II September 27, 1997 Dylan played for His Holiness at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna. In his sermon, the Pontiff quoted “Blowin’ In The Wind”. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA…

IN the late-1980s, I was playing guitar with Cajun accordion player Jo-El Sonnier in downtown Manhattan, and Bob came to see Jo-el’s show. Afterwards, I was talking with Tony [Garnier], who’d just started playing bass with Bob. He said, “Hey, Bob asked for your number, he liked your playing.” Two years later, I get this call. Bob asks if maybe I’d like to join his band. I went for rehearsal, this was the end of January 1991, we rehearsed about four days, then took off straight for Europe. I played with Bob until 1997. To begin, it was the most stressful gig I’ve ever done. Trial by being thrown into it. You’re just there, and you’re gonna play whatever Bob wants to play. Even on that first tour, we’d be…

This band’s on fire! By MICHAEL BONNER “You Brits need an injection!” raged the Australian in the gents’ toilet. As it transpired, he was unhappy with what he believed to be a lacklustre response from the crowd to this show. It’s slightly odd, because what I remember most about the audience who’ve turned out for the first of three nights at the Albert Hall is how enthusiastic they appeared, from the person close to us who volubly and repeatedly called for “Lay Lady Lay”, to the huge cheers that erupted when Dylan started a new song. Dylan himself arrived on stage at 7.30, dressed in his Civil War uniform, standing at the microphone for a brisk rendition of “Things Have Changed”, one hand rakishly at the hip, a little jig…

Pioneer of La Nouvelle Vague (1930-2022) ARGUABLY the most influential French filmmaker of his generation, Jean-Luc Godard came to the fore with 1960’s Breathless, upending the tenets of traditional cinema by making use of bold jump-cuts, semi-improvised dialogue, handheld camerawork and a fluid narrative. Ostensibly a crime caper, the film made stars of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, holding true to Godard’s assertion that “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun”. It marked the beginning of a golden period in his artistic life. Wife Anna Karina took the lead in “neorealist musical” A Woman Is A Woman (1961), followed by the episodic It’s My Life (1962) and 1964’s Band Of Outsiders, which included a memorable dance routine later used as a template for Uma…

PAUL ROBESON “An Eriskay Love Lilt” HIS MASTER’S VOICE, 1938 When I was a kid, my parents had a gramophone. Sometimes when they were getting really drunk, we’d put on some old stuff, and I remember Paul Robeson singing “An Eriskay Love Lilt”. Something about the peaceful enjoyment of sadness has stuck with me. It’s a Scottish tune but it’s pentatonic – I use a lot of pentatonic shit on my tunes and people have said it sounds Ethiopian, but it’s just pentatonic scales. Paul Robeson was persecuted under McCarthyism, and that’s what killed him really. He was an astonishing talent that we’ve not heard about enough as he was a black communist in the States, a dangerous combination. MELT-BANANA Teeny Shiny A-ZAP, 2000 Some of their songs are five…