Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i UNCUT

CHRISTOPHER OWENS I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair TRUE PANTHER Loss, heartbreak, hospitalisation… the ex-Girls man has suffered a litany of personal tragedies over the last few years, but he’s emerged on the other side with a life-affirming new album. YASMIN WILLIAMS Acadia NONESUCH Folk guitar virtuoso sends her sound skyward with the occasional assistance of Rich Ruth, William Tyler and Aoife O’Donovan. THE HARD QUARTET The Hard Quartet MATADOR Stephen Malkmus sounds like he’s having an absolute blast piloting this new alt.supergroup through everything from powerpop to psych-folk to SST-style sludge-punk. GOAT Goat ROCKET RECORDINGS Masked Swedish marauders add block-rocking hip-hop beats to their psychedelic arsenal. HALEY HEYNDERICKX “Seed Of A Seed” MAMA BIRD First taste of the long-gestating follow-up to her stunning 2018 debut offers a hint…

“WE never intended to be labelled as a prog band,” insists Plantoid’s Louis Bradshaw. Glance at the fantastical sleeve of their 2024 debut Terrapath, or at guitarist Tom Coyne’s Zappa T-shirt, or listen to them in full flow as they zig-zag thrillingly between different styles and time signatures, and you wonder if they protest too much. But equally there is nothing grandiose about Plantoid, no conceptual gimmickry obscuring their candid lyrics. They can be technically dazzling but they also connect on a visceral level. The constant twists and turns in their songs are simply a result of their restless, inquisitive spirit. “There’s no bad ideas,” says singer and guitarist Chloe Spence. “If something comes up that’s a bit weird, we just try and go with it.” As teenagers, they bonded…

“There’ll always be people putting bands together” EVER since moving to the East Village in 1978 on the trail of Patti Smith and the Ramones, Thurston Moore has garnered a reputation for sniffing out the cool stuff – even when he’s not even trying. Relocating last year from Hackney to southwest London, Moore figured he was “leaving the rock’n’roll world”. But having lunch one day in a cafe in Barnes, “I turned around and was like, ‘Is this where Olympic Studios used to be?’” Moore couldn’t resist getting involved in the studio’s restoration, and now he’s gathering material for a book on the place where numerous Hendrix, Stones, Who and Zeppelin albums were made. “London reveals itself so personally to everybody, especially if you’re interested in culture or subcultures,” he…

Skeleton Tree 2016 The bleak, resilient Skeleton Tree was begun before the tragic death of Cave’s son Arthur, and can be viewed as prophetic, though the singer’s preoccupation with dark matter was nothing new. The Bad Seeds sketch a backdrop to Cave’s emotional explorations, flitting between electronic soundscapes (“Rings Of Saturn”) and operatic exhalation (“Distant Sky”.) 8/10 Ghosteen 2019 The peak of Cave’s grief cycle is an extraordinary feat of imagination in which the singer inhabits a mythic land of fairytale and rock’n’roll while performing a microscopic examination of his grief. It’s nobody’s idea of a party album, but miraculously, Cave manages to conjure cathartic optimism from the process. 9/10 Seven Psalms 2022 Cave’s often-overlooked lockdown project, liaising with Warren Ellis to write a daily epistle, reflecting the involuntary torpor…

BEAUTIFY JUNKYARDS Nova GHOST BOX 8/10 Guests assemble for Lisbon group’s phantasmagoric third The hole left by the late Trish Keenan’s hauntologic pop project Broadcast feels greater and more profound by the day. Unusually, the group who come closest to filling it is a band from Lisbon. On Nova, Beautify Junkyards lean further into the sampleadelic, accentuating their bleary psych with florid sound design and hallucinatory textures. Paul Weller brings a wistfully understated vocal to “Sister Moon”, while the closing “Turn The Tide” features the frail but still commanding voice of Dorothy Moskowitz, who as the vocalist for the ’60s psych troupe United States Of America, did much to spirit this sound into being in the first place. LOUIS PATTISON LOS BITCHOS Talkie Talkie CITY SLANG 7/10 London quartet let…

WAKE The Dead (YEP ROC) is Chuck Prophet’s first album in four years and his first since being cleared of stage-four lymphoma. Due in late October, and as the title suggests, it’s very much a reckoning with mortality. It also reflects a newfound passion for cumbia music, heard at San Francisco clubs during his illness and subsequent recovery. Alongside his regular band The Mission Express, Prophet is joined by ¿Qiensave?, a band of brothers from the Central Coast farming community of Salinas. Expect a lively meeting of cultures and traditions, strafed with elements of punk, surf, soul and rock’n’roll. “This record doesn’t shy away from darkness,” he explains, “but it always feels hopeful.” Out around the same time is Slipping Away (BLOODSHOT), the eighth solo effort from US writer, director, comedian…

You seemed to spend most of the ’80s at war either with your record company or your own fans. I knew what I was doing wasn’t what people wanted to hear. At the same time, I couldn’t give them what they wanted, so it didn’t really bother me. Why couldn’t you give them what they wanted? I didn’t want to give it to ’em. You mean, you wouldn’t simply satisfy their expectations? Hell, no, I hate that kind of attitude. I’d never do that. It’s not me. I’m not gonna do that. I know some people are convinced I’ve spent the last 10 years systematically destroying my career, taking this music my audience thought was so super-valuable it shouldn’t even be touched and just ruining it. But you have to…

AMADOU & MARIAM La Vie Et Belle BECAUSE 8/10 Career-spanning compilation plus unreleased extras When you’ve hit on a successful blueprint like the thrilling Afro blues-rock of the blind Malian duo, you always face the dilemma of whether to stick or twist. By and large, over more than a quarter century they’ve stuck with the tried and trusted combination of Amadou Bagayoko’s crunching guitar solos and Mariam Doumbia’s wailing vocals, as this fine collection shows. Where they have attempted to give the formula a swivel it has largely been via bringing in outside collaborators, and there are fine examples here featuring Manu Chao (who produced their best album, 2004’s Dimanche ÀBamako), Santigold, the Somalian rapper K’Naan and TV On The Radio. Extras7/10: A handful of previously unreleased tracks including a…

The new sleeve, featuring an empty version of the original room, has a strange poignancy to it. How do you go about reinterpreting a sleeve that is about as recognisable as it gets? I just assumed the cover was going to remain the same, but it was Noel’s idea to have the empty room and that was a narrative that wrote itself really. He never explained himself, but my takeaway was that it was a period in time and it’s been and gone. The people aren’t in that room any more, but the music is still here. What was it that set them apart from their contemporaries at the time? Well, Liam was brilliant, obviously. Bands around that time would pretend they didn’t care what people thought. Hand on my heart,…

FOR nearly 20 years, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have been trying to get their combined catalogue pressed on vinyl. “Believe it or not, the first thing we tried to press was Time (The Revelator) in the early 2000s,” Welch explained in 2017. “But it didn’t sound the way we wanted it to sound. We had something in mind for how our record are supposed to sound coming off a turntable, and we couldn’t seem to achieve it.” So far they’ve only managed to release a handful of albums, including The Harrow & The Harvest in 2017 and Soul Journey in 2018. While the campaign is ongoing, it’s been hampered by the tornado and the couple’s self-confessed perfectionism. “I’ve lost perspective completely as to how much energy you’re supposed to…

BOYS IN THE BETTER LAND (DOGREL, 2019) “If you’re a rockstar, pornstar, superstar, doesn’t matter what you are/Get yourself a good car, get outta here…” sings Grian, ventriloquising a bilious Brits-out cab driver, dreaming of escape from the rainy streets of Dublin to some better beyond. A HERO’S DEATH (A HERO’S DEATH, 2020) Recorded in London, and featuring a statue of the demigod Cú Chulainn on its sleeve, Fontaines’ second album saw their musical horizons expand to match the growth of their audience, notably on the title track, where the Strokesy garage-rock builds to a furious climax. I LOVE YOU (SKINTY FIA, 2022) Fontaines’ most ambitious and brilliantly achieved song yet, a bittersweet love song to a homeland hamstrung by corruption: “This island’s run by sharks with children’s bones stuck…

THE PLAYHOUSE BAR With a Gotham-esque cityscape stuck to the ceiling, this theatre pub and beer garden is the meeting point for Norwich’s arty-retro crowd, where everyone looks like a potential member of Brown Horse. THE ROSEBERY Brown Horse’s local, periodically playing host to their famous three-hour-long sets where they knock new material into shape or attempt weird and wonderful cover versions. NORWICH ARTS CENTRE One of the country’s best small venues, this is where Brown Horse played the show that got them signed to Loose Music. Naturally, they returned there earlier this year for their album launch party. THE WALNUT TREE SHADES Formerly the hub of Norwich’s open-mic scene, although it’s lost favour with Brown Horse since all the portraits of old rock’n’roll stars were replaced with a zany…

March 1971 While touring Scotland to promote The Yes Album, Yes find themselves driving round a lot of roundabouts. A little bit stoned and bored, the idea for a new song takes root August 1971 Yes begin rehearsing Fragile in London’s Mayfair. After Rick Wakeman joins the sessions, “Roundabout” is recorded at Advision studios in September January 1972 A few months after the release of Fragile, an edited version of “Roundabout” is released in the US and eventually climbs to No 13 on the Billboard chart. “Roundabout” becomes the band’s encore song April 2017 Anderson, Wakeman and Howe briefly reunite at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, where they play two songs, including “Roundabout” with Geddy Lee from Rush on bass…

MIKE Mills remembers the sad start of The Big Star Quintet in 2010. “I was heading down to South By Southwest to see Big Star, but Alex had his heart attack 10 days before the show. Jody [Stephens, Big Star’s drummer] called me up and said, ‘We’re going to do a memorial if you want to join us.’ Of course I did. That’s when I had to actually learn the songs. I’d never really sat down and tried to figure them out before. But we had such a good time that we thought we’d keep doing it.” The band was the brainchild of Chris Stamey, who had worked with Chilton in the late ’70s. He was joined by Jon Auer from The Posies, producer Mitch Easter and a revolving cast…

WHILE Mercury Rev get pretty far out on the records issued under their own name, Donahue and Grasshopper shift into full interstellar overdrive for their long-running side project, Harmony Rockets. “Jonathan and I both played Harmony Rocket guitars, which is where we got the name,” says Grasshopper. “We were listening to Miles Davis’s electric stuff with Pete Cosey and Don Cherry’s Symphony For Improvisers, and we wanted to mix that with Terry Riley/Steve Reich kind of stuff – do drones and repetitive things, but also riff on it and go crazy. The key and some of the tempos were always set; it was almost modal in that sense. There were parameters, parts where we would improvise, and themes we would go back to.” The first LP, Paralyzed Mind Of The…

THE CRY OF LOVE REPRISE/POLYDOR, 1971 The first posthumous Hendrix album focused on some of the tracks Kramer and Hendrix had completed and mixed before Hendrix left for Europe. It’s a valuable testimonial to his final recordings and future direction, including classics such as “Freedom” and “Angel”, but would have been improved if a couple of tracks hadn’t been held over for Rainbow Bridge. 9/10 RAINBOW BRIDGE REPRISE, 1971 Ostensibly a movie soundtrack, Rainbow Bridge doesn’t include any tracks recorded by Hendrix on Maui – for that, get 2020’s Live In Maui – but it does have some great songs that Hendrix had intended for his next studio album. “Dolly Dagger” and “Earth Blues” are the pick of these, while the set features songs from as far back as 1968,…

STARVE ACRE Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo Starring Matt Smith, Morfydd Clark, Erin Richards Opens September 6 Cert 15 7/10 BLACK DOG Directed by Guan Hu Starring Eddie Peng, Tong Liya, Jia Zhangke Opens August 30 Cert 12a 8/10 PARADISE IS BURNING Directed by Mika Gustafson Starring Bianca Delbravo, Dilvin Asaad, Safira Mossberg Opens August 30 Cert To be confirmed 8/10 MY FAVOURITE CAKE Directed by Maryam Moqadam, Behtash Sanaeeha Starring Lily Farhadpour, Esmail Mehrabi Opens September 13 Cert 12a 8/10 THE GOLDMAN CASE Directed by Cédric Kahn Starring Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié Opens September 20 Cert 12a 7/10…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Jimi Hendrix. 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: Thursday, September 12, 2024. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+1D I’ve got a job for you. Distribute this album by Primal Scream. No you can’t resign (4-3-3-4-4-2) 9 U2 getting dizzy up at No 1 in the charts with this single (7) 10 West Coast newspaper just delivered by Travis (1-1-5) 11 Point to an album by Elvis Costello (5) 12 Liz Phair is including a Goo Goo Dolls number (4) 13 “I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again?”, 1986…

CRITICALLY panned on release in 1971, David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name is now rightly acknowledged as a masterpiece, its hallucinatory psych-folk emblematic of the shifting West Coast spirit of the times. “I didn’t hear it until about 10 or 15 years ago,” admits The Waterboys’ Mike Scott. “But I loved its spontaneity. It captures a moment of freedom and stoned optimism.” This October, Scott will take his place alongside a number of artists – Hothouse Flowers’ Liam Ó Maonlaí, Kris Drever and The Staves – for the first ever live performance of Crosby’s signature solo album as part of Llais, Cardiff’s annual international arts festival. “If I Could Only Remember My Name holds a special place in my heart,” says musician and arranger Kate St John,…

UNCUTis a place where readers the world over can share our passion for the finest sounds of the past 60 years – old and new, beloved and obscure. Each issue is packed full of revelatory encounters with our greatest heroes, trailblazers and newcomers from across a multitude of genres, lavishly illustrated with iconic photography, while our comprehensive reviews pages guide readers through the month’s best releases. Our free CD – available with every copy – is your guaranteed soundtrack to the month ahead. Join us where music matters and get these subscriber-only benefits. Michael Bonner, Editor, Uncut 5 REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE 1 Pay lower than the shop price 2 FREE CD with every issue 3 Receive an EXTRA EXCLUSIVE subscriber-only CD**** 4 Get every issue delivered to your door 5…

WEDNESDAY RAT SAW GOD (DEAD OCEANS, 2023) Patrick Turner: “They’ve managed to blend rocking really hard with still having a clear country thing going on.” Phoebe Troup: “It’s good screaming-along music for when you’re driving at night and you’re trying to stay awake. But there are also really poignant, tender moments. It’s just beautiful and inspiring and gives you shivers.” FLORRY THE HOLEY BIBLE (DEAR LIFE, 2023) Emma Tovell: “It’s ramshackle, amazing, folky, rocky, crazy, energetic, lyrically really interesting songs… It just feels good.” Turner: “The priority is rocking out and having a good time, but the quality is there as well. The song ‘Drunk And High’ is one we play a lot in the van – it’s music that makes you happy to be in a band.” GREG FREEMAN…

TO make an essential Memphis record, Chris Bell had to leave his hometown and cross the Atlantic. A power-pop visionary in a city not yet known for that style of music, he was disillusioned and despondent over the failure of #1 Record – his now legendary 1972 debut with Big Star – and Bell began acting erratically, lashing out at friends, drinking heavily and flirting with harder substances. “I really wanted to get Christopher away from that environment in Memphis,” says David Bell, his brother. “I was living in Italy and we had talked about him coming over. We went down to Rome and Torino, then up through Switzerland to France. At one point we had a falling out and he took off on his own. By hook or by…

“IT’S dangerous having these kind of moments where you’re reflecting on all this work,” muses Cass McCombs. “Is the temptation to rely on it? But I don’t want to rely on the past, there’s nothing to rely on. It really is dangerous…” Nevertheless, this most hermetic and enigmatic of modern songwriters is game to take a look at his back catalogue, in celebration of 4AD’s vinyl reissues of his early work, 2002’s “Not The Way” EP, the following year’s A and 2005’s PREfection. “I squatted in the 4AD office back then, basically,” he recalls. “That alarm at the end of PREfection and the start of [2007’s] Dropping The Writ, that’s the building’s alarm.” The reissues have also sparked off a creative reunion with producer and multi-instrumentalist Jason Quever, and the…

“A LOT of people want to see Electric Lady because it is a special place and we wanted to make a film to show how this studio came about and all the highs and the lows of putting it together,” says Janie Hendrix about the documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. “We also wanted to highlight the great music that came out of it.” Director John McDermott previously made the Grammy-nominated Music, Money, Madness… Jimi Hendrix In Maui, about the Rainbow Bridge film and concert. Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision combines archive footage with fresh interviews from studio personnel such as Eddie Kramer, architect John Storyk and musicians Steve Winwood, Buddy Guy and Billy Cox to focus on the story of the studio until Hendrix’s death.…

DAVID BOWIE The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars RCA, 1972 I shared a room with my middle brother growing up, and this is one of the records that seeped through the walls of my oldest brother’s room into ours. It was just really different – it was on the edge of glam rock, I suppose, but it was also totally by itself. I had no idea what “Suffragette City” was, or “Moonage Daydream”, and Ziggy Stardust sounded like the name of a wrestler. But it was really exciting to watch it have influence over ordinary people. You could see quite hard lads in Sheffield trying to have their hair cut like Bowie and wearing these big stack heels. Some of the songs make no…

BLUES BREAKERS WITH ERIC CLAPTON (DECCA, 1966) Post-Yardbirds, Eric Clapton joins Mayall, John McVie and Hughie Flint on a blues boom classic, highlighted by Otis Rush’s scorching “All Your Love” and Mayall originals like “Have You Heard”. A HARD ROAD (DECCA, 1967) Twenty-year-old hotshot Peter Green takes up where Clapton let off, with another newcomer, Aynsley Dunbar, on drums. Mayall’s title track feeds into roadworn blues mythology, while Green excels on ravishing instrumental “The Supernatural”. CRUSADE (DECCA, 1967) Green had departed for Fleetwood Mac, but Mayall finds teenage wonderkid Mick Taylor to replace him, the pair dovetailing on co-write “Snowy Wood”. Elsewhere, Mayall salutes a hero on “The Death Of JB Lenoir”. BARE WIRES (DECCA, 1968) Mayall makes an incremental shift into jazz territory, enlisting Dick Heckstall-Smith, Tony Reeves and…

No quarter! Introducing the Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to the post-Zeppelin adventures of Page & Plant: classic interview encounters, in-depth new reviews of every solo album from Death Wish II to Raise The Roof, plus an exclusive introduction by Robert Plant. It’s in shops now or available to order direct from us at shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Also out now from the same places is our Ultimate Genre Guide to Soft Rock, featuring new reviews and archive interviews with Steely Dan, Wings, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Hall & Oates, Billy Joel and more: complex emotions, difficult chord changes and some very unmellow fallings-out… Two Roxy Music legends celebrate a half-century of solo ventures with mammoth box sets due out this autumn. The 5CD deluxe edition of Bryan Ferry’s Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023…

No Name THIRD MAN 9/10 WHEN Jack White dropped No Name on July 19, the shock didn’t just come from the manner of the release. That was drama in itself – the record, an anonymous white label, was handed to customers for free at White’s Third Man stores and posted to some Vault subscribers. But every bit as surprising was the music, which saw White revisit the ferocious garage blues with which he first made his name in The White Stripes. This was a pounding set of 13 songs that were as raw, fresh and fierce as anything he’d done for years, with some of White’s best riffs since Blunderbuss and his most unapologetic, red-(and-white) blooded rock album since Elephant. In fact, has White ever released an album that’s quite…

Quine/Maher reference aside, why BASIC? We like all the connotations to the word BASIC – the early computer language, a generic, utilitarian brand, the simplicity. The group’s development has been a very efficient, no-bullshit process and when we sit down to play together, it feels very fundamental, very “just the facts”. No noodling. Everybody is all in; it’s not exploratory – the aim is for the music to hit hard right out of the gate. What’s the relationship between the two albums? The Quine/Maher record was a useful kernel of an idea to mess around with – drum machine plus clean guitar sounds – but there’s no intentional mimicry. I’m trying to de-emphasise lead guitar heroics and focus on rhythm, but the crucial ingredients are not what we’re referencing. It’s…

Endlessness WARP 8/10 SPEAKING around the release of her debut album Space 1.8, Nala Sinephro recalled her first encounter with a harp, silently coveting a classmate’s instrument in the jazz department of her high school. “It felt like my language,” said Sinephro of the instrument. “Strong, but with a quiet voice.” Strong, with a quiet voice: frankly, it’s hard to think of better words to encapsulate the essence of Sinephro’s music. Like its predecessor, Endlessness is a so. and serene listen, a glowing nimbus of sound that feels somehow restorative; when listening to it, it feels like your breathing deepens, your vision brightens. But there is nothing lightweight or fragile about this music. Quite the contrary: Endlessness feels like an expression of something grand and deep, as if it’s drawing…

What was your response as a label executive when you heard Neil wanted Archives III to be a 22-disc set? I have to admit to taking a deep breath. It certainly raised eyebrows across the company. But, no, there was never any doubt Archives III would come out exactly the way Neil wanted it to come out. We could all agree that Neil is one of the very few artists who’ve earned the right to do whatever they like. And as soon as I heard the tracks they were putting together, I completely understood why it had to be exactly what Neil intended. It had to be that vast. There was so much ground to cover, so much music that had to be included. According to his manager Jeff Rosen,…

How did you first meet Harold Budd? I think Ivo [Watts-Russell] was pulling the strings on that one. Harold happened to be in London at that time so we met and we got on on a social level. I wasn’t aware of his music really. He was just some charming old guy. The album itself was cobbled together in Acton on a quarter-inch tape machine. The idea of remastering it at Abbey Road is kind of wild! The last track on the album, Harold didn’t even know it was on the record. The album wasn’t long enough, so we recorded another song after he’d gone. That adds to the charm of the record, I think. It lives there now. Were you surprised by the belated popularity of “Sea Swallow Me”?…

ON the night of March 3, 2020, Gillian Welch frantically gathered up her favourite belongings and found the safest spot in the house she shares with David Rawlings. “I was in the bathtub with our main guitars when the tornado hit,” she says. “We don’t have a basement, so that seemed like the place to huddle down.” The twister – which she has taken to calling “that ol’ March Third tornado” – passed her over and left their beloved guitars untouched, but down at the couple’s Woodland Studios, things didn’t look so good. “Our road manager called immediately and said he was at Woodland, but something was wrong,” she continues. “There was water coming in, because there was basically no longer a roof. Had he not been there, or had…

“FROM 1999 to 2004 / I was stealing horses…” It’s quite a claim to make as the opening line of your debut album, particularly when it’s demonstrably untrue. Seated around a picnic table in the beer garden of Norwich’s Playhouse Bar, the youthful members of Brown Horse were evidently still playing with Fisher-Price farm sets at the turn of the millennium. They don’t look like hardened horse rustlers either, although a couple of ’taches and a fair amount of denim and battered suede hints at their true calling as Norfolk’s premier country-rock band. Their startlingly assured debut album Reservoir, released earlier this year on Loose Music, has drawn comparisons to Lone Justice, Lucinda Williams, Uncle Tupelo, Purple Mountains and Songs: Ohia. Inevitably, it’s also stirred up thorny questions of ownership…

BIG STAR #1 RECORD ARDENT, 1972 Big Star was the culmination of Bell’s work at Ardent, with former Box Tops frontman Alex Chilton rounding out the quartet. Their debut is an explosion of Southern power pop, taking cues from across-the-Atlantic bands like The Beatles and The Kinks but filtering it through a Memphis mindset. Chris Bell was devastated by the album’s commercial failure, but it helped establish Big Star as a cult act decades later. 10/10 CHRIS BELL I AM THE COSMOS RYKODISC, 1992 Chris Bell’s first and only solo album was assembled from recordings he made around Memphis and in France, as he recovered from the disappointment of Big Star. He emerges as an artist who could express deep existential confusion and crippling emotional pain through plainspoken lyrics (“All…

YERSELF IS STEAM COLUMBIA, 1991 Fresh off psych-punk-noise boot camp with The Flaming Lips, Donahue launches Rev with college sidekick Grasshopper, vocalist Dave Baker, flautist Suzanne Thorpe and Lips producer Dave Fridmann. With a major-label deal secured the year grunge broke, they set their controls for the heart of the sun. 9/10 SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE BEGGARS BANQUET, 1995 Baker jumps ship and the guitar noise recedes, as horns and strings colour songs hinting at the radiant pop to come. 8/10 BOCES COLUMBIA, 1993 Named for the upstate-New York slang term for an under-achiever, this is Rev v1.0 in over-achiever mode. The 10+ minute opener “Meth Of A Rockette’s Kick” is a hallucinatory nod to the famed Radio City Music Hall dancers with raging guitar, chanting gnomes and…

TOUCH OPENS AUGUST 30 A widower retraces his youth in London and Japan to find his long-lost first love in this romantic drama from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur. AFRAID OPENS AUGUST 30 In this month’s ‘AI goes rogue’ horror, John Cho (from Harold & Kumar) and Katherine Waterston (Shasta in Inherent Vice) play a husband and wife whose smart home gets ideas above its station. SING SING OPENS AUGUST 30 Colman Domingo (soon to play Joe Jackson in next year’s Michael Jackson biopic) and Clarence Maclin discover the redemptive power of theatre in this refreshing real-life prison drama. CLOSE TO YOU OPENS AUGUST 30 In his first feature film since revealing his new gender identity, Elliot Page writes and stars in this story of a trans man reuniting with family…

THERE is a short bibliography at the end of Street-Level Superstar, Will Hodgkinson’s extraordinarily empathetic study of the cult musician Lawrence. The simplest approach is to take it at face value and assume that everything on it is real, if obscure. In which case, it is at least unsettling that a fly-on-the-wall biography of Twiggy and her manager/boyfriend Justin de Villeneuve (aka Christian St Forget) is listed alongside Jennifer Dawson’s poetic novel of mental illness, The Ha-Ha, or Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, in which bookish solitude is interrupted by a chess-playing dwarf. Some of the titles exist in a realm beyond the internet, so it’s hard to draw conclusions about the relevance of Neurotropic Drugs & Their Effects by Tap Tap Tap Tercher, or Tense Broccoli The 3rd’s 1969 publication Celanese…

TOUMANI DIABATÉ Malian kora master (1965–2024) “IT’S an education for western people to know how far the kora can go,” Toumani Diabaté told Uncut in 2011. “When you say ‘African music’ in western countries, they think about percussion and dance, they don’t understand that there’s more to learn than this.” The Malian virtuoso did more to advance the role of the kora – an ancient 21-string West African instrument, built from a gourd and covered with cow skin – than anyone of his generation. Diabaté’s elegant style, firmly rooted in his ancestral heritage, preserved griot tradition while also introducing modern influences, reflected in his love of jazz, blues, soul and flamenco. Having learned by watching his father, renowned kora player Sidiki Diabaté, Toumani broke through internationally with 1988’s solo debut…