Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i UNCUT

“Frank’s talent was he managed to strip away your celebrity and get to the raw you”BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IT has taken Bruce Springsteen an unusually long time to settle down into regular work, “a real job”. This month, at the 960-seat Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, the dauntless singer-songwriter has begun clocking on every day, five nights a week for five months, to perform a one-man show called Springsteen On Broadway. “This is my first real job, I think,” he told the New York Times in September. “That’s the one thing I’m going into with a certain sense of faith.” He may not have experienced the daily grind before, but of course Springsteen has always been a master at empathising with the working man. Witness the unforced camaraderie as he…

“She sang her ass off. This record definitely didn’t come from any sense of fear or sadness”NEAL SUGARMAN How were Sharon’s health and spirits during the recording? NEAL SUGARMAN: This was of course a hard record to make, because we were working around a very unusual situation. Not only were we trying to find the right times to record because of Sharon’s health, but also Sharon – being a live act who worked right up ’til the end of her life – was always very concerned with making sure she was well rested for whatever shows or tours she had coming up. But the band loves the studio and it has always been a place where we can be loose, enjoy being together and create. Whenever we were all playing…

BAND Of Holy Joy have been a heartwarming beacon of DIY bohemian values for over 30 years. This ramshackle London collective’s latest LP, Funambulist I Love You , is vintage on many levels, an urban folk opera drunk on dashed hopes and inflamed passions. “We vacillate between a traditional indie band and an art band,” explains singer, lyricist and sole remaining founder member Johny Brown. “We keep the faith with indie ideals but we’re also quite experimental.” Brown left his native Newcastle for London 35 years ago, sharing a New Cross squat with industrial noise-punks Test Department and future comedy star Vic Reeves. Signing to Rough Trade in the late 1980s, BOHJ enjoyed indie acclaim, but never quite cracked the charts. “We knew we had something unique,…

If All I Was Was Black ANTI- 8/10 A DECADE ago, Mavis Staples recorded an album with producer Ry Cooder in which she performed soulful cover versions of 1960s Civil Rights anthems. At the time, tracks like her brooding blues version of the funereal dirge “In The Mississippi River” or her thrilling Southern-fried funk upgrade of “Eyes On The Prize” were presented as historic pieces from a discrete period in US history – performances that were revisited for reasons of aesthetics rather than out of political urgency. Flash forward to 2017 and, as they say, shit got serious. As the current occupant of the Oval Office claims that a rally of white supremacists contains “good people”, and blames “both sides” for the murder of an anti-racist protestor, this collection of…

PETER OREN Anthropocene WESTERN VINYL 8/10 Poetic dispatches from the Midwest. ON a record that turns hopelessness into hymn, named after a term for ecological disaster, it’s no surprise that things should appear disordered. Still, it is a little disquieting to get to the end of Oren’s second solo LP – 10 austere, poetic incantations – and find the scene-setting “Welcome/ Goodbye”. It’s a slight thing, campfire folk with sombre strings, and it begins with the singer directly addressing the listener. “Hey there, hello,” he says in his half-spoken Bill Callahan croon, “can I talk with you?” The song proceeds in its pretty, funereal way: “I don’t know what to do/See, shit is fucked up/ Even Elon Musk seems to think the coming storms could be too much.” That mention…

A delirious Buckley seems hellbent on locating every note in his four-octave range… It’s an astounding feat Venice Mating Call/ Greetings From West Hollywood MANIFESTO/EDSEL 8/10 / 8/10 SOME live albums document a tour. Others are souvenirs of a single, magnetic performance. And then there are others, like a Tim Buckley album issued in 1994 by the LA-based Manifesto label, that seem to chronicle not so much an event as an essence. Connecting us to the voice and vision of a long-departed cult hero, Live At The Troubadour 1969 shone a light on two September evenings when Buckley forged new directions in folk-jazz at a West Hollywood nightclub. Receiving some good reviews, the album joined two prior live releases, Peel Sessions and Dream Letter: Live In London 1968, in his…

PETER HOWELL & JOHN FERDINANDO A Game For All Who Know: The H&F Recordings Box GRAPEFRUIT 8/10 THE ‘prologue’ to the liner notes for A Game For All Who Know, a boxset collection of uber-rare private press psych-folk from the UK, is subtitled ‘Joy In The Finding’, which just about sums up the thrill of encountering limited-edition, self-released LPs: they often show up in thrift stores or local flea markets, and every discovery contributes to an alternative history of modern music making, where quiet DIY communities create music for love, not money. Bunkering down in the Home Counties, the songwriters at the heart of H&F Recordings, Peter Howell and John Ferdinando, weren’t exactly primed to become a record collectors’ cult: there’s something unassuming about the songs they wrote and recorded,…

CHRIS BELL The Complete Chris Bell OMNIVORE 8/10 CHRIS Bell is the rock’n’roll equivalent of a posthumously exalted painter who failed to sell any canvases during his lifetime. Making matters worse, Bell’s considerable contributions to Big Star’s landmark debut album, 1972’s #1 Record, have long been overshadowed by those of Alex Chilton, who joined Big Star months after Bell founded the band and went on to make two more revered Big Star albums following Bell’s departure. Thus, it’s been left to dedicated archivists to unearth and piece together the music Bell put on tape before and after his time with Big Star into a coherent narrative. The initial breakthrough was Rykodisc’s I Am The Cosmos, a compilation of Bell’s post-Big Star work that surrounded the majestic title song and the…

“I FIRST met them when I did pictures for the sleeve of ‘Losing My Religion’. For the Automatic… shoot, we were north of Miami. I stayed in a house where Michael was staying, on the beach. I was up really early, and the light was beautiful, so I woke Michael up and suggested we try a few photos. He got in the water and I took some shots. What I like about those pictures most is that the horizon is not straight and it looks like he’s surrounded by waves. I shot maybe seven pictures with my bulky Hasselblad camera – it was unusual for someone to go into the water with a Hasselblad! I was very happy when I got back home and saw the…

THE Headley House Of Industry, nestling in a remote corner of Hampshire, was built in 1795 as a poorhouse. It was turned into a private residence in 1870 and by the 1960s had become a hostel for students from Farnham School Of Art. Eventually record companies heard that Headley Grange was available to rent and it became a residential base for bands to profitably get it together in the country. Led Zeppelin arrived in 1970. “Headley Grange was somewhat rundown,” Page told Uncut in 2009. “The heating didn’t work. But it had one major advantage. Other bands had rehearsed there and hadn’t had any complaints. That’s a major issue, because you don’t want to go somewhere and start locking into the work process and then have…

“I WAS still living at home, and Phil Spector came over for a spaghetti dinner,” recalls Nino Tempo. “We went into the piano room after dinner and he said, ‘This is a song I’m gonna record.’ He played and sang it, and he looked up and said, ‘I know it doesn’t sound very good, but it will…’ I said, ‘It sounds terrible with you doing it, but OK!’” The song the producer had played was “Be My Baby”, freshly penned by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Spector, and destined to be recorded in summer 1963 as the Philles label debut by Spanish Harlem group The Ronettes. The Wrecking Crew cut the music, while backing vocals were provided by The Blossoms (featuring Darlene Love), Nino Tempo, Cher and Sonny Bono; but…

Her understated songs continue to endure decades later THIRTY years ago, Suzanne Vega found herself at pop’s head table, largely due to the unexpected success of “Luka”, a song about child abuse that became a monster global hit. Parent album Solitude Standing did platinum-selling business, too, positing her as the commercial face of neo-folk, the likes of Shawn Colvin, Edie Brickell and Nanci Griffith in her wake. Vega was a somewhat unlikely candidate for stardom. Pale, unshowy and bookish, Vega seemed to be the antithesis of ’80s flounce, a diarist of the vulnerable and the damaged, loading her outsider songs with poetic detail and a detached wistfulness. A gift for observing life through panes of glass was most famously, and literally, illustrated by “Tom’s Diner”, written while seated in a…

“Big Star’s music held little interest to me. I was interested in Bach”WILLIAM EGGLESTON IT is early morning in Memphis and already the photographer William Eggleston is planning his next project. “I’ll be in Paris very soon,” he explains. “I work with people at Cartier. Right now, I’m working on a book of all their commissions throughout the years, which would be a 10- or 15-year acquaintance between us. I’m very much looking forward to it. It’ll be a very fine book, I’m sure.” This, it transpires, is a typical conversation with Eggleston. At 78, he has an international vision, his dealings in many instances taking place at the higher end of the artistic spectrum. When he speaks, his voice has a satisfyingly leathery creak. His sentences unfold impressively, with…

“USUALLY when we talk to people my parents’ age about our music we just mumble until the subject’s changed,” says bassist Sophie Moss, struggling to put the truculent splendour of Girl Ray into words. The biggest thing to come out of Muswell Hill’s Fortismere School since “Rather Be” hitmaker Jess Glynne, the C86-literate three-piece – Poppy Hankin (vocals, guitar), Iris McConnell (drums) and Moss (bass) – are 19 going on 20, and combine sleepy teenage with the music tastes of a middle-aged record shop worker. Girl Ray dig Orange Juice, The Pink Floyd, Mac DeMarco, the Marine Girls, Father John Misty and Afro-harp queen Dorothy Ashby, though the comparison thrown their way most often is with melancholy Welsh mystics Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. “We love Gorky’s,” says Moss. “My brother showed…

“To be like Him is what I long to do” Soul Of A Woman DAPTONE OF the many emotions that will be elicited by Sharon Jones’ final recordings with the Dap-Kings, a feeling of gratitude may be the strongest in a good many of us. After all, it’s extraordinary that she regained the strength she exudes in nearly every moment of Soul Of A Woman, in light of the battle with pancreatic cancer that began in 2013. It’s hard to comprehend how she found the power that pours out of her in the widescreen melodrama of “These Tears (No Longer For You)” or in the more tender-hearted “Pass Me By”, though a church-going woman like herself would’ve had a confident answer to that question. As documented to poignant effect in…

The Animal Spirits BORDER COMMUNITY 8/10 IT’S taken almost two decades, but James Holden has finally reached a musical domain where he feels completely at home. At the turn of the millennium and barely out of his teens, the skyscraping thump of his early tracks “Horizons” and “Nothing” made him a star on the trance and progressive house scenes, where he rubbed shoulders with Sasha and Tiësto. But with a maths degree from Oxford, Holden was always more of a thinker than a raver. Gradually retreating from the superclub sphere, he started his own label Border Community, putting out techno and electronica with a bucolic feel. His own debut, 2006’s The Idiots Are Winning, introduced a strong element of Aphex-style wibbliness to the equation. It would be another seven years…

Out Of Range PARADISE OF BACHELORS 8/10 YOU might want to pick up a guide to ancient myths before listening to the latest Gun Outfit album, which includes songs about Orpheus and Cybele as well as references to “monads”, “viridian”, “hierophants” and “syrinxes”. From Ancient Greece to contemporary California, there’s a fascination with myth and legend on Out Of Range, due in part to co-songwriter Dylan Sharp’s job as a security guard in an art gallery, time that allowed him to gaze upon visual art for six hours a day, and also to contemplate ways of incorporating what he self-mockingly calls “pretentious” references into the band’s fifth LP of cosmic Americana. Opening song “Ontological Intercourse”, a rough-necked samba, is in part about Orpheus, the Greek “father of songs” who made…

Eskimo RALPH, 1979 An eerie crater-scape of chants, low-blown drones and arctic ambience, Eskimo was The Residents’ first serious step sideways, a collection of long, slowly evolving pieces loosely based around indigenous American culture. It’s conceptually rigorous and politically engaged, yet smartly, slyly playful. Chris Cutler of Henry Cow and Don Preston of The Mothers Of Invention guest. 8/10 The Commercial Album RALPH, 1980 It was one of The Residents’ smartest gambits: record an album of one-minute songs and buy advertising slots on San Francisco radio station KFRC to broadcast them all. They rose, brilliantly, to their own occasion with a set of 40 uneasy miniatures; proof that The Residents had a knack, however skewed, for pop melody. 9/10 Animal Lover MUTE, 2005 During the…

WHILE punk began in London in 1975, it took a little longer to filter into the provinces. “There was a timelag,” says Mitchell Edmond. “I’m pretty sure that if I’d been in London, not Swansea, I’d have gone to the Roxy and the Vortex, probably seen the Pistols at least once and the Clash multiple times in 1976, and yet May 1977 was the first time we saw a punk band in Swansea. The Clash gig was the point where you saw people your age dressed similarly and became aware that there were like-minded people at a different school on the other side of Swansea. Everything was 18-24 months behind. It took another year or so for people to go from thinking they could do that to actually buying a…

“I WAS invited to play a Lead Belly tribute for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in November 2004. Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Gatemouth Brown were also on the bill. I’d been typecast as this other guy, the guy that knows no end to ‘Baby, baby, baby…’. So to be in the middle of that with all those different players, I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do this!’ I called up the guys from Los Lobos and said, ‘Would you like to come and join me on this tribute to Lead Belly, and we’ll see what we can do.’ I contacted Alison and invited her to sing in it with me. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Neither was Alison. It was a step into the unknown for both of…

1 BUDDY & JULIE MILLER (WITH ROBERT PLANT) What You Gonna Do Leroy Chosen by Robert Plant Our CD kicks off with this bawdy roots-rocker from the Nashville-based husband-and-wife duo, featuring a cameo from Percy himself. Taken from 2009’s Written In Chalk, the second and most recent album by the duo, the song was penned by veteran country writer Mel Tillis. 2 BERT JANSCH Go Your Way My Love Chosen by Robert Plant Co-written with folk enigma Anne Briggs, “Go Your Way My Love” first appeared on Jansch’s fourth album, Nicola. The full record is a strange mix of stripped-down folk and syrupy orchestrations, but this pensive lost gem finds Jansch alone with, unusually, a 12-string guitar. 3 DANIEL LANOIS/ ROCCO DELUCA Satie Chosen by Robert Plant If all-round polymath…

“With George Clinton, everyone – anyone who walked in – was invited to the party. That spirit fuelled everything…” “I’M on it!” yells Bootsy Collins down the line from Cincinnati. He always has been. Starting out in late-’60s teen band The Pacemakers, Collins and his bass have, as he puts it, been “setting the controls for the heart of the funk” for almost half a century. Following a military-style apprenticeship with James Brown, he spent a decade alongside George Clinton in Parliament-Funkadelic, a period that proved hugely productive – and influential – despite many a chemical diversion along the way. “There was a lot going down,” says Collins. “We were either on the road or in the studio – and we were up all night, partying. I look back and…

“I SUPPOSE I wanted to be God,” writes Richard Lloyd in Everything Is Combustible , the Television guitarist’s eccentric, episodic memoir, which feels at times like stumbling into an unmapped and somewhat inhospitable foreign land. Lloyd’s life has been scarred by mental illness, drug abuse, alcoholism and prostitution. “I have a huge tolerance for pain,” he writes, not unreasonably, having been hospitalised several times since his teens, in places that “made One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest look like kindergarten”. As a child, he takes refuge in “sacred silences” and “magical thinking”, bending reality to fit his will. It seems to work. During an unanchored adolescence he talks “space dribble” with Hendrix, gets a guitar lesson from John Lee Hooker, and projectile vomits in Buddy Guy’s dressing room. He plays…

FROM OUR HEARTBROKEN CORRESPONDENTS I saw Tom Petty play live with either The Heartbreakers or Mudcrutch in the neighbourhood of 50 times. Best live performer I’ve seen – a true musician. Of all the memorable shows, the 2005 Indianapolis one will always stand out. During “Refugee”, lightning struck near the stage and knocked the power out. Everything went dead. The audience kept singing the song and, after around 10 to 15 seconds, the power kicked back in. Tom and the band jumped right back in to where the audience was singing – truly amazing. The following summer, in 2006, he returned to Indy to play again. He commented during the show that he’d spent the past year telling people that story and what a cool moment it was. Indeed. He…

Uplifting communiqués from Georgia-based polymath JIM WHITE Waffles, Triangles & Jesus LOOSE 8/10 JIM White hasn’t exactly been idle in the five years since his last solo release, Where It Hits You. His striking visual collages continue to gather in art galleries across the States, there’s been production work for various roots singers, and he’s also won the Pushcart Prize for Superwhite, a book of short fiction. Sixth solo album Waffles, Triangles & Jesus marks the welcome return of White the singer-songwriter, unpacking reassuringly odd, skewed narratives that offer a surrealist’s view of Southern life. White has jokingly called it “the soundtrack for the end of the world”, but it’s noticeable that his songs have become breezier as he’s gotten older (he’s now 60), as if to gradually dispel the…

“I first met Thighpaulsandra when Wire were recording Change Becomes Us at Rockfield in Wales”, Edvard Graham Lewis recalls, of the first encounter that would gradually lead to the formation of his latest collaboration, the mutant rock/ electronics of UUUU. With Lewis and Thighpaulsandra joined by guitarist Matthew Simms, and percussionist Valentina Magaletti, the group’s self-titled debut album is a strong, surprising collection of song thoughts sculpted from exploratory recording sessions. With Thighpaulsandra playing with Lewis and Simms when on tour with Wire, and Magaletti’s band Tomaga touring with Wire in 2015, UUUU’s constituent parts came together through experiment and circumstance. This has defined their practice since, with the material on UUUU varied in structure, but joined by the collective voice that…

“When you thought they were America’s greatest hardcore band, they were busy inventing alternative” PRESUMABLY the compiling of Savage Young Dü involved a certain amount of diplomacy – how was it piecing it together, and what did it involve to get everyone on the same page? I knew from the start it was going to be a difficult process, and as a result picked the person that I’d been told would be the most difficult to convince. Grant certainly made it interesting from the jump, testing knowledge, connections, and chops. But once I was in, it was more a matter of when than if. Bob didn’t take a phone call from me for a year, choosing to defer to his long-time adviser Josh Grier. BMG’s acquisition…

Folk, Blues & Beyond… (reissue, 1964) Large As Life And Twice As Natural (reissue, 1968) BREAD AND WINE 8/10 / 8/10 WHEN it was first noticed in the 1990s that a large talent like Davy Graham was keeping a very low profile, one assumption was that he had gone on an ultimate walkabout – some folk-based factfinder to the ends of the earth. He had after all, been around a bit in his time. As he told his Decca producer Ray Horricks for the sleevenote of his second solo album, Folk, Blues And Beyond…, he had busked in France, holed up in Malaga and, when his money ran out, taken a job in a Tangier restaurant specialising in hash cakes. It possibly speaks to our literal natures and appetite for…

The Party’s Over/It’s My Life (reissues, 1982, 1984) PARLOPHONE 7/10, 8/10 GIVEN how often their final, genre-melting albums, 1988’s Spirit Of Eden and 1991’s Laughing Stock, are referenced nowadays, it’s easy to overlook Talk Talk’s origins. 2012’s Spirit Of Talk Talk book delivered praise from artists as varied as Karl Hyde, Nils Frahm and Robert Plant, but this was almost exclusively aimed at those brave but commercially disastrous collections, with which it’s undeniably difficult to reconcile their more marketable, early-’80s releases. The The’s Matt Johnson compared their decade-long evolution to The Beatles’, and even if one navigates the divide with 1986’s The Colour Of Spring, which became their biggest album (but contained two of their most abstract compositions), it’s true that these contrasting epochs seem to be – in more…

FOR Peter Buck, success was a hard quality to quantify. “We were living in the same houses, driving the same cars,” he says, thinking back to 1991, the year Out Of Time broke REM. “So it didn’t occur to us that things had changed substantially – and they hadn’t, in a lot of ways.” Exhausted after 1989’s intense Green World Tour, the group decided not to perform live in support of Out Of Time, and so were insulated from the waves they were making. “We were walking away from the performing-in-big-basketball-arenas side of our nature,” the guitarist adds. “Instead I’d get home and play on the front porch.” With touring off the agenda, the four-piece now had a rare luxury, time; to spend in Athens, Georgia, finessing songs for their…

SHORTLY after 2.30pm on Christmas Eve, a tour bus rolled into Peterborough, catching the eye of a group of teenagers hanging around outside a local chip shop. “It was the Sex Pistols,” says Joe MacColl, the drummer in Peterborough’s first punk band, The Now. “Sid Vicious came out and told us they were playing at Cromer at the Links Pavilion and put us on the guest list. Sid was very friendly. He said, ‘I didn’t know there were any punks in Peterborough.’” But there were punks in Peterborough. Not too many in 1977, but enough to cause a stir in the town centre with their strange appearance. Similar pockets of punk were slowly breaking out in small towns, villages and suburbs all over the country as teenagers were drawn to…

“I’m pleased and I’m in touch. I feel good about everything”ROBERT PLANT THE only reason I do this – create music, that is – is that I must burn and smoulder until the very end,” says Robert Plant, reflecting on a career stretching back over five decades. “That’s my deal. I have to make it shudder within me.” It is a quiet Tuesday afternoon and Plant is sitting in his local pub in a leafy north London suburb. He has kept a home here since the 1980s; a demure metropolitan alternative to the wild and woolly Welsh Marches, his other base of operations in the UK. Today, the landlord warmly greets Plant as he wanders into the pub; there are further amiable halloos to a handful of regulars positioned around…

IN October 2016, Plant joined a special 11-city Lampedusa tour, which aimed to raise awareness about the global refugee crisis. “I’m not making a political statement,” said Plant at the time. “The organisation that is receiving these funds is a religious one, but this is a totally secular mission. This appeal is trying to help on the ground wherever it can.” The lineup also included Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin. “I landed in St Louis, Missouri, at midnight,” says Plant. “I was picked up by a strange bloke – in the nicest possible way – and woke up the next day in a soundcheck with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, the Milk Carton Kids and Buddy Miller. We played 11 dates for the Lampedusa tour. It was…

“We wanted to put together a band where no-one had to practise”STU MACKENZIE THE bandmates only travel about 30 feet from the door of the venue before they’re spotted. Then again, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are not the most inconspicuous bunch. Here on a scorching September afternoon in Nashville, it’s hard to miss a mob of lanky, midtwentysomething, mostly long-haired Aussies in black shorts and Blundstones. They are eight in number – seven musicians plus Jason Galea, the friend responsible for the band’s artwork, videos and trippy live projections. Two fans call out and come over. “We drove 11 hours to see you!” says one clutching an empty bottle of bleach for reasons unknown. He’s thrilled to show the band a new addition to his pale forearm: a…

TOM Petty made his finest album under incredible duress. During the sessions for 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes, he was suing Shelter Records and his friend/mentor/ producer Denny Cordell to secure a better contract and to obtain publishing rights to his own songs. Some days he was in the studio with the Heartbreakers, laying down vocal tracks; other days he was in the courtroom with his lawyers, testifying to the conditions of his record deal. In a strategic measure, he and the other band members declared bankruptcy, as it was decided the meagre proceeds from their previous two albums — 1976’s self-titled debut and 1977’s You’re Gonna Get It! – could not cover the expenses for their third. And it wasn’t far from the truth: Petty, his wife and their young…

“Perth” rides a military rhythm, overlaid with crunching guitar MIDWAY through the first of Bon Iver’s two Edinburgh shows, Justin Vernon finally speaks. He recounts a trip the previous day to John Lewis to procure “socks and undies”, during which he met a fan who professed astonishment that Vernon performs such mundane tasks for himself. It’s a funny story, but a moral is left hanging in the air – something to do, you suspect, with the way success fatally warps even the most humdrum human interaction. Postponed from February, the brevity of Bon Iver’s idiosyncratic UK tour – one night in Blackpool; two in Edinburgh – seems to underline the reticence that Vernon has expressed regarding his measure of fame. The disorientating textures of his latest album – the lovely,…

Pattinson is now a long way from Twilight’s Edward Cullen GOOD TIME It is certainly a good time to be Robert Pattinson. It’s hard to think of another young actor who has moved so far – and at such velocity – away from the long shadow cast by a breakthrough role. By now, Pattinson is a long way from Twilight’s Edward Cullen. There have been two fruitful collaborations with David Cronenberg – Cosmopolis and Maps To The Stars – and more recently he was good in enterprising supporting roles for Brady Corbet (The Childhood Of A Leader) and James Gray (The Lost City Of Z, where he was almost unrecognisable beneath a Garth Hudson-style beard). There is also High Life, for Claire Denis, to come. For…

BESIDE BOWIE: THE MICK RONSON STORY MVD 8/10 Giving a rock’n’roll alchemist his due. By Mark Bentley Does Mick Ronson need critical rehabilitation? The contention of this slick, single-issue documentary is that down-to-earth, unassuming Ronno never received his due, and that his contribution to Bowie’s rise and rise has languished – in the words of the film’s PR messaging – “virtually uncelebrated”. Sure, he was a genius guitarist, but that’s underselling matters. Mick Ronson should instead be viewed as Bowie’s multi-skilled creative director, the man who designed and built Ziggy’s architecture, transformed Lou Reed’s Transformer, and alchemised his boss’ impossible vision into rock’n’roll gold. And all for £50 a week. The case is presented skilfully by music industry insider/film director Jon Brewer, who worked with the Bowie camp…