Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i UNCUT

Fresh from the 24/7 publishing machine that is Uncut : our latest Ultimate Music Guide is all about Genesis – solo careers included. Meanwhile, the History Of Rock has reached 1985; Tom Waits is our dapper cover star. Both on sale now. The lineup for this year’s End Of The Road festival is as Uncut-friendly as ever. Among those gracing the Larmer Tree Gardens in Wiltshire, Aug 31–Sep 3, will be Mac DeMarco, Father John Misty, Bill Callahan, Lucinda Williams, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Amadou & Mariam, Ty Segall, Real Estate, The Lemon Twigs, Ryley Walker, Michael Chapman, Julie Byrne, Nadia Reid, Shovels & Rope, Xylouris White and, of course, Uncut . Tickets:…

“I’VE been surprised for sure,” says Brian D’Addario of the attention that the Lemon Twigs have received since his band’s suitably flamboyant appearance on the scene last October. “I knew we were trying to make pop songs, but I didn’t know that people would pay attention as much as they do.” The Lemon Twigs’ backstory certainly enhanced their curiosity value, what with the band’s two principals being brothers from Long Island who’d amassed Hollywood and Broadway credits as child actors before diving deep into their musical ambitions while still in high school. (Brian turns 20 later this month; the fashionplate of the two, with his flares and feathered mullet, brother Michael has just turned 18.) Yet none of that would’ve mattered if the duo’s debut wasn’t so thrilling. Produced by…

“I said to Dennis, ‘Why are you so uptight?’ He said, ‘I was just out at the ranch and I saw Charlie Manson take an automatic and blow a guy in half and stuff him down a well…’” Interview by MICHAEL BONNER MIKE Love has returned to his Lake Tahoe home from The Beach Boys’ latest run of Australian dates to find it has been snowing. “I’ve had this property since 1981, but I’ve never seen this much snow,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. We’re not down on the lake, we’re at a very high elevation – 1,000 feet up – and there must be 20 feet of snow on either side of my driveway. We have snow ploughs going just so we can drive in and out. Our road over…

Willie Nelson has referred to you as his “secret ingredient”. What do you think he means by that? We’ve done quite a few records together, and he likes the process that we’ve come to. I understand where he’s coming from and where he’s going with his music, and I always have. It’s a comfort-zone thing with Willie. It’s kind of like riding a bicycle now. In “Delete And Fast Forward”, Willie sings, “ The elections are over and nobody won .” Were you influenced by the political climate in America as you wrote the album? We didn’t set out to write a protest song. That title is something Willie always says – we just made a song out of it. It ended up having a few lines that…

How did you figure out what the album would sound like? You just start and you go from there. My idea going into it was like a Krautrock Fifth Dimension, just to have a different vibe. What effect did changing drummers have? Our old drummer had a pretty fierce idea of how things should be, which was often great. Going into this record, though, we realised we could do whatever we wanted. Joe [Seiders] is an amazingly positive force, and he’s up for trying anything. Hey, why don’t we put a robotic kick drum in there? The drums don’t all have to be live. I think that adds to the vibe of the record. Adaptability is important, especially for a band that maybe didn’t plan to be around this long.…

What was the guiding factor in choosing the songs on What In The Natural World ? A lot of the fun is going out and discovering these things. For me, the process is large part intuitive and small part intellectual, so what I’m doing is hearing and finding songs that I feel I can legitimately sing or work with in a way that might be interesting. The personal, emotional part always comes first, but that’s also hard to separate from whatever’s intriguing you, intellectually. So it’s a difficult balance between scholarly and playful? The priority is always to service the song, but my so-called academic interest sort of reinforces that. I don’t really separate the two; they’re wrapped up together. I don’t call myself a scholar.…

GLORIA JONES Share My Love, MOTOWN Jones’ second solo LP could have been a proto-disco contender had she not elected to abandon its promotion to link up – musically, then romantically – with Bolan (“I sent my management a telegram saying: ‘Sorry, I’m in love’.”) Her uncompromising presence gives the teetotal Faces stumble of Zip-Gun its soulful veneer, and breathes fire into Futuristic Dragon . BOB DYLAN Bringing It All Back Home COLUMBIA, 1965 His art was his own, but Bolan’s hunger for transfixing images – meaningful or otherwise – spoke volumes of his debt to Dylan. “My idea of rock’n’roll is that ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ feel,” he said in 1975. “Surrealistic rock’n’roll… that’s what I’ve always wanted to do.” In that respect,…

DISC: 1 1. James Brown – Talkin’ Loud And Saying Nothin’ (Pt 1 & Pt 2) 2. Funkadelic - Red Hot Mama 3. Fugi - Mary Don’t Take Me On No Bad Trip 4. Eugene Mc Daniels - Cherrystones 5. The Isley Brothers - Ohio/ Machine Gun 6. The Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today 7. Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction To Your Mind 8. Keith Jarrett - Have A Real Time 9. William S Fischer - Patience Is A Virtue 10. Miles Davis - Willie Nelson (Take 3) 11. Warlock - Thrills Of Love 12. The Meters - Liar DISC: 2 1. Eddie Hazel - California Dreamin’ 2. Buddy Miles - Down By The River 3. The Undisputed Truth - Like A Rolling Stone 4. Lightnin’ Rod &…

1. June 2, 2000! Lillienthal Studio 2. Pure Energy 3. Talk 4. Mayday 5. Untitled, September 12, 2000! 6. Midsummer 7. Thank You All! Produced by: Klaus Dinger Recorded at: Dinger's Zeeland Studio, Netherlands; Lilienthal Studio, Düsseldorf Personnel includes: Klaus Dinger (vocals, guitar), Maki Umehara (vocals), Kazuyuki Onouchi (piano, drums, bass, synth), Masaki Nakao (vocals, percussion, harmonica), Viktoria Wehrmeister (vocals), Andreas Reihse (keyboards), Thea Djordjadze (vocals)…

WORKING from a quiet enclave in Brussels, composer Dominique Lawalrée released 10 albums between 1975 and 1985 that traced out a personal take on minimalism and the ‘ musique d’ameublement’ of Erik Satie. “I was trained as a classical musician and I’ve always been interested in avant-garde composers,” Lawalrée recalls, “I was very influenced by them.” Brussels offered other artistic fields to work alongside: “I also had close relations with painters and writers,” he continues. “At the end of the ’70s, there was in Brussels a creative scene and a bright opening from press and listeners.” Lawalrée helped foster this community with the release, on his Editions Walrus imprint, of a double LP featuring music by himself, Robert Fesler, Eric De Visscher and sound artist Baudouin Oosterlynck,…

NEXT month, we take a look at albums out in late April and May, including returns from Blondie, back with Pollinator featuring guests including Johnny Marr, and Ray Davies, releasing his long-awaited Americana album. Mac DeMarco also unleashes his third LP, This Old Dog , Argentina’s Juana Molina releases Halo , her first album in four years, and Thurston Moore lets us into his Rock’n’Roll Consciousness . Hawkwind, At The Drive-In and Kevin Morby are also promising new albums for May. In the world of archival releases, The Turtles’ back catalogue is reissued, Leftfield’s influential Leftism returns expanded, and pivotal albums from Swans and Disco Inferno receive the deluxe…

ON January 21, 2017, a photograph of Matthews, Holland and Welch appeared online, prompting frenzied speculation the band were about to announce their return. In fact, they had all assembled at Abbey Road Studios to listen to a new cut of the debut album for Record Store Day. “We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves,” says Welch. “I’m still involved in music, but for the others, they’ve got on with their lives. I see Annie quite a lot, because I’m down in Brighton. But the last time I saw Donna was when she turned up onstage at a Forum show [ April 13, 2000 ]. She walked on, played on one song and left. “I’d been trying to put the record together with everyone’s help, but it’s been…

“MARRAKESH Express” became a vital song for Graham Nash’s career, but his first attempt to record it with The Hollies was a failure. “Somewhere in the bowels of EMI is an attempt by The Hollies to do it,” says Nash. “It wasn’t great. It’s never been released, I don’t even think there were vocals on it. We tried and they weren’t into it.” Nash later took the song to America, where he found more success. David Crosby, in particular, identified with the song’s spirit of adventure and hippy mystique. “Crosby got it,” says Nash. “He saved my ass. The worst thing you can do to an artist is give them self-doubt and that’s what happened to me in The Hollies. They weren’t into it, but Crosby heard it and said,…

LINDSEY Buckingham and Christine McVie returned to familiar territory when they recorded their duets album – namely, the Village Studios in West Los Angeles. Located at 1616 Butler Avenue, the former Masonic temple was used by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a center for Transcendental Meditation in the 1960s. In 1968, Geordie Hormel, scion of the Hormel meatpacking business, purchased it and remodelled the building as one of the first studios with 24-track recording capabilities. In nearly 50 years it has hosted sessions by an array of artists, including The Rolling Stones, BB King, Snoop Dogg, Talking Heads, the Grateful Dead and Elvis Costello. The Village also hosted the notorious sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk . “They built Studio D for us in ’78 or ’79,”…

MORE THAN A NEW DISCOVERY VERVE FOLKWAYS, 1967 Behind the schmaltz, Nyro’s world view takes shape. Wise to cads and the myth of poetry in suffering, she knew from the disparity she’d seen on New York’s streets that life was rarely as simple as good versus evil. ELI & THE THIRTEENTH CONFESSION COLUMBIA, 1968 Nyro’s first New York paean, where the city’s grimy streets are lifelines and love is a renewing force. Sensory wonder infused her language, as if she saw promise steaming from every dirty grate. NEW YORK TENDABERRY COLUMBIA, 1969 Heaven and hell. Contrasting “Save The Country”’s guileless optimism is “Gibsom Street”, where “ they hang the alley cats” . Still, “ You look like a city, but you feel like a religion to me,…

THE FREAKS SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH I just picked up the Freak Out! issue [Uncut March], the cover of which boldly states: “101 Weirdest Albums Of All Time”. Having been an avid collector of so-called weird music since the late ’70s, I couldn’t wait to see the list. However, with a few exceptions (Wild Man Fischer, for example, whose ‘music’ is weird by anyone’s standards,) I’d consider the majority of the titles to be avant- rock – rock music with elements of avant-garde. I can think of 101 more albums I’d consider considerably more weird than the ones you selected – in fact, I’ve already compiled a list for my own amusement. Having said that, it’s a great article and a good introduction into the world of ‘out there’ music.…

THERE are some heads who argue that San Francisco reached its psychedelic peak in January 1967, when 30,000 people invaded Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In. By the spring, they reckon, the most significant cultural moment had passed, no matter how many aspirant hippies were now flocking into Haight-Ashbury in unmanageable numbers. Nevertheless, the idea of the Summer Of Love retains its grip on our imaginations, and it’s fitting that San Francisco is marking the 50th anniversary with a major exhibition in Golden Gate Park. The de Young museum will be home to light shows, interactive music exhibits, a proliferation of tie-dye and, of course, magnificent poster art. As you can see, local heroes the Grateful Dead figure prominently in these works by Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and many…

“It’s a bit daunting when you help out on an idol’s tune”ERIC PULIDO THOUGH Midlake’s Eric Pulido only stepped into the role of frontman for their fourth album, 2013’s Antiphon, after years recording and touring with the band he needed to try something new. “I was getting a bit tired of the cycle of ‘write, record, tour, repeat’,” he explains, “and wanted to break it up with something musical, though foreign to what the past 15 years had focused on.” His solution was BNQT, an indie supergroup whose debut album, Volume 1, is released by Bella Union this month. Inspired by Pulido’s “past collaborations in the studio or onstage”, it finds him, alongside bandmates Joey McClellan (guitar), Jesse Chandler (keyboards) and McKenzie Smith (drums), joined by Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Travis’…

FLEET FOXES Crack-Up NONESUCH Pecknold and co’s triumphant comeback: an elaborate, inventive, tuneful expansion of their indie-folk formula. ENDLESS BOOGIE Vibe Killer NO QUARTER America’s most self-explanatory band return, still fixated on the heaviest of grooves. Frontman (and record dealer) Paul Major has a fine book coming, too. ANTHONY PASQUAROSA WITH JOHN MOLONEY My Pharaoh, My King FEEDING TUBE High-flying guitar and drums jams; a wild and free avant-folk homage to the genius of Pharaoh Sanders. BILL MacKAY Esker DRAG CITY A covert Chicago mainstay takes his turn in the spotlight, for an atmospheric set worth filing alongside William Tyler. SLOWDIVE Star Roving DEAD OCEANS Busy times for shoegaze fans, as both Ride and Slowdive return with new material. “Star Roving”’s hooks, dreamy melodies and surprisingly muscular rhythm section lead…

“Hate to say it, but each other’s all we’ve got…” ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 SOMETIMES you just have to let it all out. And, appropriately for a record that skewers alienation, entertainment and escapism, while scratching obsessively at questions of existence, Josh Tillman’s third album as Father John Misty arrives in a righteous torrent of words and emotions. There’s a bit of godlessness, too. Quite a lot of it, actually. First impressions are overwhelming. Pure Comedy is 75 minutes long. “Leaving LA” – the fulcrum on which this novelistic rumination turns – runs on for 13 of those minutes. The song itself took four years to write, and was edited down from around 40 verses. Lyrically, it sprawls and nags. The verse is not so much a manifesto as…

7/10 SHOULD there be anyone on earth still harbouring doubts that Bob Dylan is no longer a protest singer, his decision to release a triple album of saloon-bar standards two months after the accession of President Trump ought to seal the deal. At 75, the contrary old cove remains as mercurial as ever, radical in his non-radicalness. The tendency with contemporary ‘pop’ takes on songs from the Great American Songbook is to give ’em the old razzledazzle: stick a metaphorical bow-tie on them, throw in a few finger-snapping Jack Jones licks and send them off to Vegas. Which can be fun in a Saturday-night TV kind of way, but risks fundamentally undermining the melancholic impetus that lurks in their soul, not to mention the beautiful, ornate interplay between language, mood…

You’ve started using more electronic instruments in recent years. Has it changed the way you write and work? I started messing around with synths on Field Songs back in 2001. By the time I made Blues Funeral in 2012 it had become a major element of my music. It has changed the way I write in that now I don’t always start a song with guitar. Sometimes it begins with organ or synthesiser, sometimes drum machine. What attracted you to Rob Marshall? Rob is an artist. I love his songwriting and attention to detail. Your producer, Alain Johannes, seems to play a more important role than usual on this record… Alain has played a huge role on my records since 2004. He…

Before we get to business, Uncut offers congratulations to Sturgill Simpson , who recently won the Best Country Album Grammy for A Sailor’s Guide To Earth . The occasion, which saw him perform “All Around You” backed by The Dap-Kings, also saw the much-touted Sarah Jarosz make off with Best Folk Album for the exceptional Undercurrent . On the release front, expect a new studio effort from Chris Stapleton in May. No further details are available at the time of writing, but the follow-up to 2015’s huge-selling Traveller is likely to include “Broken Halos”, the song he premiered on Dolly Parton’s benefit telethon for victims of Tennessee wildfires last December. Elsewhere, Jason Isbell has been recording…

What’s it like recording and living in Nashville? Where I am, you feel like punk is yet to happen – it all feels like it’s before summer 1976, a lot of hairy blokes. You feel like Zuma has just come out, or maybe Grievous Angel . It’s pretty good because it’s not very big yet but it’s quite affordable and it feels international; it feels like Los Angeles or New York. But having said that, I’m the only Brit that I see around. I think Steve Winwood has a place here, but I haven’t seen him buying Marmite in the local Whole Foods. I can see why Dylan came to record here. What you’re getting for your money is a really confident band,…

A Salty Dog REGAL ZONOPHONE, 1969 After a pair of mostly awesome albums marred by missteps, Procol get their considerable individual strengths in perfect balance on this semi-thematic opus: singer/ pianist Gary Brooker’s eloquent soulfulness (the title track), Matthew Fisher’s liturgical organ (“A Pilgrim’s Progress”), guitarist Robin Trower’s bluesy snarl (“Crucifiction Lane”) and BJ Wilson’s ecstatic drumming. 9/10 Home REGAL ZONOPHONE, 1970 Fisher’s departure clears space for Trower and Wilson to kick out the jams, and producer Chris Thomas captures their inspired playing in explosive detail on standouts like the ferocious rocker “Whiskey Train”, the Band-like “About To Die” and the majestic “Whaling Stories”. Fisher later told biographer Henry Scott-Irvine that he regretted leaving because “they’d become truly epic” on Home . 9/10 Procol’s Ninth CHRYSALIS,…

DEAD MOON What A Way To See The Old Girl Go VOODOO DOUGHNUT 8/10 Live 1994 set from Portland garage gods While too raw or too real for the mainstream, Dead Moon carried themselves like one of the all-time great rock’n’roll bands. Their backstory alone reads like a slice of history. Singer-guitarist Fred Cole played in ’60s garage bands The Lords, The Weeds and The Lollipop Shoppe. The seeds of Dead Moon were laid when Fred met his wife and future bandmate, Toody, while fleeing the Vietnam draft, although Dead Moon didn’t debut until 1988’s In The Graveyard, a raw collision of country, Crazy Horse and punk rock, shot full of gothic dread. Dead Moon would quickly grow into a Portland institution, and this newly unearthed recording finds the band…

8/10 In a career that spanned most of the 20th century, Ella Fitzgerald sold more than 40 million records, helped to define the American Songbook, became the first African-American woman to win a Grammy, and sang with almost all of her peers. And yet, 20 years after her death, she remains a strangely underappreciated jazz singer, perhaps because she lacks the Rat Pack mythology of Frank Sinatra or the miseries of Billie Holiday. Or perhaps it’s simply because she sounds so happy. Her vocal tone is bright and clear, her phrasing so fluid and breezy that the songs become playgrounds, but that ebullience of voice should not suggest a lack of depth or a dearth of soul. Fitzgerald can sound melancholy, even lonely, but there’s always a hardy optimism lurking…

WHEN Graham Nash flew to Morocco in 1966, he was taking a trip into the unknown. From the perspective of a young European who had barely left home, Tangier felt like a portal to another world. Its disorientating otherness fascinated writers, artists, drifters and musicians including The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, who appropriated the more attractive and unusual aspects of Moroccan culture and assimilated them into rock’n’roll. Nash was one of many who was inspired by what he found across the Mediterranean. “I was reading the American Beats, especially Burroughs and Ginsberg, and what they seemed to be doing was going down to Morocco, smoking incredible amounts of dope and writing poetry. I thought that sounded like an interesting idea, so I flew down to Casablanca, went through the…

IN September 2004, six years after retiring from Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie released her third solo album, In The Meantime. It was a casual affair, helmed by her nephew Dan Perfect and featuring contributions by former Fleetwood Mac member Billy Burnette, ex-husband Eddy Quintela, and singer-songwriter Robbie Patton (with whom she wrote “Hold Me” in the early 1980s). Recorded entirely in her garage in rural Kent, In The Meantime features some of her strongest songs in decades, including the sweet opener “Friend”, the globe-trotting travelogue “Bad Journey” and the devastating meta-love song “So Sincere” (“ Didn’t you like my love song, darling? I was so sincere”) . “It’s a great little record,” she says. “My nephew happens to be pretty handy with ProTools, and…

YING YANG (2010) Available on Bandcamp, Makeout Videotape’s unreleased album is a proudly lo-fi delight even if DeMarco buries some of his prettiest melodies under noise and fuzz. ROCK AND ROLL NIGHT CLUB (2012) Does humour belong in music? In the case of DeMarco’s woolly debut mini-album for Captured Tracks – on which he plays havoc with his vocals, using his four-track’s pitch control to deepen his voice for fake radio-DJ shtick and Vegas-lounge balladry – the   answer is: sure, what the hell. 2 (2012) DeMarco’s first album establishes his wonky brand of “jizz jazz” with future set-list staples such as “Cooking Up Something Good” and “Ode To Viceroy”, a bittersweet tribute to his favourite brand of cigarette that Mac caps off with a hacking fit. SALAD DAYS (2014)…

“I’VE thought about doing a Nyro biopic. I love how she was able to capture New York. But most of all, how she went from writing perfectly crafted pop songs to bringing elegance, depth - her own idiosyncrasy - to songwriting. She’s never recognised alongside Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. If I ever were to do something, it would be about shining a light on her brilliance. She’s one of very few artists that Joni will tell you is a master. “She awakened my love of the singer-songwriter because it felt so personal. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I was a member of the Columbia Records Music Club. ‘Save The Country was the A-side of a free flexidisc sampler. I was hooked forever. When you…

KEY PLAYERS WHEN John Lydon spent a weekend in 1979 playing reggae to a young friend of a friend, he surely didn’t imagine that this 19-year-old, Neil Barnes, would end up introducing him to the dance world 14 years later. “I don’t often make excursions out of my own world,” Lydon explains today, “but when I do, I know it’s always for the right reason, and Leftfield are the right reason. Friends for life, they won’t do me no wrong.” Lydon had previously experimented with dub and hip-hop alongside Afrika Bambaataa on Time Zone’s “World Destruction”. But Leftfield’s 1993 hit “Open Up” saw him try out cutting-edge techno, with the duo of Barnes and Paul Daley meticulously combining countless Eastern samples and breakbeats to create the fiery, high-powered track. We…

AFTERMATH OPENS APRIL 7 Arnold Schwarzenegger is the man grieving after his family is killed in a plane crash. They won’t be back. THE BOSS BABY OPENS APRIL 7 From DreamWorks. Alec Baldwin leads the voice cast in this animated yarn about sibling rivalry. CITY OF TINY LIGHTS OPENS APRIL 7 Crime thriller with Riz Ahmed and Billie Piper tangled in dark dealings in London. GOING IN STYLE OPENS APRIL 7 Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin are three senior gentlemen plotting a bank heist. Zach Braff directs. A QUIET PASSION OPENS APRIL 7 Terence Davies’ latest charts the life of Emily Dickinson, played in her later years by Cynthia Nixon. THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS OPENS APRIL 14 These guys! Back again, wrecking cars. Vin Diesel, the Stath…

PRIMUS Sailing The Seas Of Cheese 1991 I heard this when I was nine or ten years old. It was the first record from a modern band that I liked that my older brother didn’t turn me on to. It was definitely the weirdest thing I’d ever heard at that point. There was a lot of humour, which is what I bonded with at that age. It has moments that are almost like Monty Python! I listened to it over and over and over again. None of my friends understood what I was listening to, and it wasn’t until I was 18 that I realised how technically brilliant it is. This flipped my brain in a really weird way to modern music. GRAVEDIGGAZ 6 Feet Deep 1994 This was Prince…

ELTON JOHN Goodbye Yellow Brick Road DJM, 1973 Reg Dwight’s most popular album may not seem an obvious point of reference for Father John Misty, but there are clear vocal similarities between Elton and Josh Tillman. Plus, Elton managed to smuggle some pretty sombre sentiments into his opus, not least “Candle In The Wind”, which mourns Marilyn Monroe. NEIL YOUNG On The Beach REPRISE, 1974 Young famously followed his crossover success with Harvest by releasing an album that was considered to be unrelenting in its bleakness. The title track muses grimly on the downside of fame. Over the years, critical opinion has evolved, so that the resilience within the songs is now more widely appreciated, and the set is considered one of Young’s strongest. CHRIS BELL…

1982 Chromola HUBRO 8/10 Backward-looking name, forward-looking album With The Necks pulling notable crowds across Europe, perhaps the idea of a Nordic trio drawing on avant-garde jazz and folk, and inspired by late 20th-century minimalist composers, isn’t so intimidating. 1982’s fourth album was recorded in a Bergen church, and finds them adding its organs to their armoury of violin, drums and harmonium. Often these provide a droning bedrock for Nils Økland’s extravagant fiddle playing and Øyvind Skarbø’s cavernous drum rhythms, but there’s also a slightly proggy feel to these nuanced, improvised excursions. WYNDHAM WALLACE JOSHUA ABRAMS & NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY Simultonality TAK:TIL 9/10 Chicago jazz/post-rock veterans find a new, cosmic groove Students of Chicago post-rock, jazz and its diaspora will recognise Josh Abrams’ name from sundry LP credits including Will…

8/10 TO SAY Willie Nelson is old-fashioned is an understatement. As country music and the country it represents have shifted and evolved, Willie’s love songs and laidback workingman’s laments have fallen in and out of fashion. But even now, at 83, Nelson is operating precisely how he did back in the ’60s. He’s constantly on the road and releasing multiple albums a year, alternately trying out different styles and returning to his roots. In the time since his last collection of original songs, 2014’s diverse Band Of Brothers, he has recorded full-length tributes to both George Gershwin and Ray Price, sung on songs by Kacey Musgraves and Cyndi Lauper, and released an entire album of new collaborations with the late Merle Haggard. All the while, he’s toured his ass off…

9/10 GIVEN the experience of his formative years, Jake Xerxes Fussell is better qualified than most to tackle traditional American song. As son of Georgia-based folklorists Fred and Cathy Fussell, he would often accompany his father on cultural field trips across the rural Southeast, absorbing the dialects and rhythms of old-time music. Fussell had mastered fingerpicked guitar by his teens, undertaking weekly visits to the home of family friend and Piedmont blues stylist Precious Bryant, who proved a prime influence. Alongside Appalachian musician Etta Baker and Alabama veteran George Daniels, Bryant was one of a number of singer-guitarists with whom Fussell jammed and performed. The music he picked up along the way – allied to his research at the University Of Mississippi’s Southern Studies course – fed directly into the…

“Deep beneath an ancient shadow/Stunned with age and too much wisdom” REISSUE OF THE MONTH 7/10 WHEN Donovan popped in to see Marc Bolan in his Munich hotel room in spring 1975, he was a little taken aback by the 28-year-old’s expanding waist and excitable demeanour as he lurched around his suite with a massive breakfast. “At one point, a doctor arrived,” he remembered in 1992. “Marc dropped his pants, the doctor took out a giant needle and gave him a shot of B12 in the arse. Marc didn’t stop talking once.” Sounds journalist Geoff Barton met the erstwhile Warlock Of Love later the same year and found him similarly wobbly, writing: “His mind seemed to be travelling in a million different directions at the same time.” Barton told the…

8/10 ACCORDING to George Clinton, the roots of his psychedelicised funk can be traced back to a Vanilla Fudge concert, of all places. In 1967, Clinton’s formative band The Parliaments were playing a show at a college in upstate New York, on a bill with Vanilla Fudge and The Box Tops. “We had to use the Vanilla Fudge’s equipment, because we didn’t have any,” Clinton told Rolling Stone in 1990. “Goddamn! That shit was so bad. It was extremely loud. So I went out and bought Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, Cream’s album, a Richie Havens record and Sly’s A Whole New Thing. I gave them to Eddie [Hazel, guitarist] and Billy [Nelson, bassist] in the band. They were just 15, 16 at the time. And the second night we…

8/10 THE legend of the late, great Krautrock drummer, guitarist, singer and lyricist, Klaus Dinger, rests on the three albums he made with Michael Rother as Neu!, and particularly in the hypnotic repetition at the heart of Dinger’s eternal, flash-free rhythms – he preferred to call it the Apache beat, or the Dingerbeat. Songs like “Hallogallo” seemed to point outward to visionary rock yet to be made; “Hero” was punk before it happened. Bowie and Eno were listening, as Low and “Heroes” both attest. The three albums Dinger subsequently made with brother Thomas and collaborator Hans Lampe, as La Düsseldorf, reconciled that motorik drive with a glam pop sensibility – they’re still underrated gems, especially the heavenly melancholy of 1978’s Viva. Dinger’s music after Neu! and La Düsseldorf is much…

Now you can hear our debut album as it was meant to sound, says guitarist Kim Thayil SOUNDGARDEN have never been content with the sound of their 1988 full-length debut – that’s partly why they called it Ultramega OK – so the band were happy to remix the original tapes when it was slated for reissue. “Everyone in the Soundgarden camp, SST Records, Sub Pop, and nearly all of our peers, friends and fans have wanted to hear the album remixed,” says guitarist Kim Thayil of the new Ultramega OK . “The consensus was that the album did not capture the warmth and heaviness of the band’s sound. There are numerous differences in this remixed version. Most noticeably it is much warmer and…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Jilala TRANCE RECORDS, 1966 Ira Cohen released this recording made by Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles of Sufi trance musicians, reissued on CD in 1998. It’s one of the first physical records of Moroccan music. THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion ELEKTRA, 1966 Recorded after Robin Williamson spent six months in Fez and featuring many of the instruments he brought back from his travels. “TANGIERS” Donovan EPIC, 1968 Gorgeous and evocative Moroccan drone, written by Gyp Mills and with guest guitar from Bert Jansch. Was used several years later on the soundtrack of the Oliver Reed film Castaway . “MARRAKESH EXPRESS” Crosby, Stills & Nash ATLANTIC, 1969 Nash’s song about his train ride through Morocco in 1966 was…

“WORLD TURNING” (1975) Buckingham and McVie’s first co-write was based loosely on “The World Keeps On Turning”, a Peter Green tune on the first self-titled Fleetwood Mac album. “Lindsey had this lick and didn’t know what to do with it,” says McVie. “We knocked around some vocal ideas and it happened very quickly – about half an hour.” “ISN’T IT MIDNIGHT” (1987) One of three co-authored tracks on Tango In The Night , this single started as a slow, moody number about missing someone on the other side of the world (possibly Beach Boy Dennis Wilson). Buckingham quickened the tempo, bolstered the arrangement and added a mysterious hook: “… the face of a pretty girl” . “MYSTIFIED” (1987) The B-side to “Isn’t It Midnight” allowed…

BUCKINGHAM McVie is a one-off project, and Fleetwood Mac has no plans to record in the near future, which means the next music from these two musicians may be solo albums. Lindsey Buckingham has been working on a new LP between tours and other sessions, which he hopes will be out by the end of the year, along with a compilation of songs from his previous solo projects, including 1981’s Law And Order and 2008’s Gift Of Screws . “I started going through those albums and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s some pretty cool stuff on here.’” McVie’s plans aren’t quite so far along, but she knows what she’d like to do next. “If I do another solo album, it’ll be a…

YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA Those Japanese guys in YMO are still all I listen to. I first got into them through “Rose And Beast” [ from Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 solo LP, Hosono House ], which is so funky and weird. Then I got into his band Happy End – that’s folkier but psych-rock, more jammy. Then he got obsessed with Hawaiian music and tropical culture so he started making these steel-drum records. That’s when Ryuichi [Sakamoto] got in there and they had a band called Yellow Magic Band before YMO. Synth was just another piece of the puzzle for them. Kraftwerk is that root of electronic music where it’s very cold, very compu-tah . YMO was trying to make very human synthesiser music – fun-loving, poppy,…

ROY AYERS Stoned Soul Picnic FROM STONED SOUL PICNIC, ATLANTIC, 1968 The acid-jazz pioneer created the version of “Stoned Soul Picnic” you’d actually want to hear at such an event: a groovy, sunny conversation between flute and horns, vibraphone and woodwind. THE 5TH DIMENSION Wedding Bell Blues SOUL CITY, 1969 Nyro’s most prolific coverers weren’t afraid of the track’s novelty value: Bones Howe suggested Marilyn McCoo sing it to her boyfriend and bandmate Billy Davis Jr - playing the single’s “Bill”. HONEY LTD. Eli’s Coming LHI RECORDS, 1969 The Detroit four-piece extracted the girl group DNA of “Eli’s Coming”, turning it into a menacing groove that would have fit an early James Bond soundtrack. BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS He’s A Runner FROM BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS 3, COLUMBIA, 1970 The…