Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i UNCUT

IT WAS A long time ago now, but I dimly recall part of my English degree involved comparing the various quirks and emendations of Shakespeare’s plays in the Folio version and the Quarto version; scholarly anal retention at its finest, I guess. Weirdly, though, I was thinking about that process the other day in the office, while we were working our way through The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol 12 – or at least the 6CD version of this new Bob Dylan boxset that Allan Jones reviews on page 84. It’s a strange experience, listening again and again to “Like A Rolling Stone” (there are 20 versions of it here), hearing the microscopic adjustments in tempo, the distinctions in guitar tone, the presence and absence of organ lines.…

RICHARD HELL WROTE some of punk’s most concise anthems with Television, The Heartbreakers and The Voidoids, but in conversation there are many ums and errs as he considers his reasons for compiling Massive Pissed Love, a new volume of non-fiction writing. “I hoped I might earn a little respect from it,” he eventually chuckles down the line from New York. “I thought it might be something you don’t expect from a guy with my history.” Hell’s history often crops up in his writing, as he explores cinema, sex, photography, poetry, drugs and, inevitably, rock’n’roll. “It covers a lot of subjects, but the taste and sensibility seem consistent,” he says. He writes about the Stones, Velvet Underground, Lester Bangs and, on several occasions, punk rock. “I end up writing about punk…

KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD Shockingly prolific psych seven-piece Barnett: “They’re a great band. They do like four LPs every year, it’s crazy. I first heard about them through my friend Fraser [A Gorman]; they grew up together, some of them. I worked in a bar with some of them and everyone just jumps in on each other’s bands. It’s nice to go be part of that and share all that stuff.” BATPISS A ferocious Collingwood rock trio featuring Bones’ brother Courtney Barnett: “We saw them the other week. They’re great. Yeah, Bones’ brother Thomy Sloane plays bass for them. For a couple of gigs, they opened for The Drones, who are also a really good Melbourne band.” TOTAL CONTROL Formed by members of the Eddy Current Suppression Ring…

I CAN’T STAND STILL (ASYLUM, 1982) Don’s solo debut was a moderate success, helping establish him as a singer-songwriter with serious interests – witness his song about illiteracy, “Johnny Can’t Read”, and his media critique “Dirty Laundry”, which predated the Hacked Off campaign by three decades, while also acknowledging the role of reader demand in determining media coverage. BUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST (GEFFEN, 1984) Roughly divided between one side of wistful ruminations on love and loss – notably the hit “The Boys Of Summer” – and a second dealing with socio-political issues like US foreign policy, genetic engineering and urban dystopia, the multi-platinum Building The Perfect Beast was written and recorded with a host of LA chums, including Lindsey Buckingham, Randy Newman, Danny Kortchmar, JD Souther…

KURT COBAIN NEVER released a spoken-word record in his lifetime, but he did play on one. A long-time fan of William Burroughs, Cobain contacted the counterculture author – then in his eighties – in 1992, suggesting a collaboration. Cobain had wanted Burroughs to appear in Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” video. Burroughs wasn’t interested, but sent Cobain a reading of a story originally published in his Exterminator! collection in 1973 – a tale of a junkie searching for a fix – and to accompany it Cobain recorded a squall of guitar noise. It was released as a 10in called The “Priest” They Called Him on Tim/ Kerr Records in July 1993, but the pair wouldn’t meet until that October, when Nirvana’s tour manager…

NIRVANA ARE OFTEN thought of as a Seattle band, but between the years 1986 and 1991, Kurt Cobain lived in Olympia, a port town and the Washington State capital, 60 miles from Seattle. A world away from white-trash Aberdeen, Olympia was a liberal enclave and a college town. “Very radically intellectual,” says Bruce Pavitt. “In large part that was because of Evergreen State College – a very progressive, free-thinking university. Some of the professors were very philosophically feminist – and Kurt was definitely profoundly influenced by some of the women who were going to Evergreen.” Cobain was friends with Kathleen Hanna and dated Tobi Vail, who in October 1990 formed the riot grrl group Bikini Kill. But he left Olympia for Los Angeles in 1991, and later decried Olympia as…

WRITER TOM WOLFE (above) documented the story of Kesey and the Pranksters in 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , which became one of the early benchmarks of the New Journalism. “He did a really good job of not making us seem like savages with feathers in our hair,” says Lee Quarnstrom. “He made us look more like seekers after the truth. It was the first book written about LSD and the first book about the San Francisco scene. I don’t think it would’ve been any better if he’d taken LSD and gotten right down into the mosh pit, as it were.” Adds Carolyn Garcia: “He did an amazing job of capturing the vibe. I don’t think he ever got high in…

“LUCKILY, I WAS born with a creative mind,” says Spooner Oldham. “Typically I don’t like to practise, I like to just make up stuff as I go…” The keyboardist’s ability to come up with stunning yet subtle parts on the hoof has made him a highly regarded session musician for more than 50 years, contributing piano, organ and Wurlitzer to Southern soul and rock classics all the way from Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” and Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” to Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and Cat Power’s Jukebox. What’s more, Oldham has had a parallel career as a hit songwriter for the likes of Sledge, The Box Tops and James & Bobby Purify, usually in collaboration with producer and songwriter Dan Penn. Born in Center Star, Alabama,…

HOW IS YOUR health these days? I still have hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver and I don’t appear to be eligible for the new treatments or a transplant. But I’m taking better care of myself now that there are opportunities to make new music. So the future is still uncertain, but I feel more positive. Does Silver Bullets feel to you like it has been (nearly) 20 years in the making? Not really. There have beßen various other recordings along the way and I never stopped coming up with ideas for songs. Although there are basic riffs and concepts on Silver Bullets that go back many years, the bulk of the album was written in a little over a year once I was given…

RYAN ADAMS 1989 PAX-AM Heartbreaker takes Taylor Swift’s Tunnel Of Love to Nebraska Make no mistake: Ryan Adams’ sad-bastard cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 does not highlight anything about the latter’s ironclad craft that wasn’t already obvious to the millions that loved it pre-alt.rock makeover. But there are worthwhile curiosities here: his “Bad Blood” is utterly tuneless, but “Blank Space” is appealingly tremulous. He may add a Sonic Youth reference to “Style” to remind you that he is Very Authentic, but his sad take on Swift’s “Shake It Off” highlights the absurdity of the abuse she fields for simply being a 25-year-old with a public love life. LAURA SNAPES CHRISTOPHER BISSONNETTE Pitch, Paper & Foil KRANKY Canadian modular synthesis, finely detailed Christopher Bissonnette’s taken…

When she became a mother, Yael Naim resolved not to write drippy songs about the experience. Although the emotional transformation dominates Older , she’s kept her promise. “I didn’t write about motherhood or my child,” she says, “I wrote about my feelings, as I always have done. But it made me go through so many different unknown motions that I needed to write it down, so I didn’t become totally insane keeping it all inside of me.” During the making of the album, she also lost a much-loved relative and the title “expressed so many things, the cycle of change – to lose people, to give life, getting older”. Co-produced with her Caribbean husband, David Donatien, musically Older is “fed by our multi-cultural…

What do you think it is that draws you to the deeply melancholic? When I write, I’m writing for myself, to the very core. And I write most when I’m sad or reflecting, or going through something hard or weird, and the songs are my attempt to make sense or purge. When I think of my favourite songs, they are absolutely, heart-wrenchingly, devastatingly sad. Sad songs make me happy. What was your aim with the track, “Reaching Through”? There wasn’t really an aim. I don’t write a lot of songs that have that pop factor, but sometimes they just slip out of nowhere. It was written in a hurricane time of my life – things were changing, for the good, [ there was ] a lot…

How scary was it to be making an album without the security blanket of a band? The lads’ opinions were always in my mind, but there are many areas where Elbow’s tastes don’t meet. So it was exciting to try new things and, in the end, I didn’t consider the record finished until they had all heard it and loved it. Five songwriters working together means each decision is pored over, which is what makes Elbow’s music so intricate, often challenging and ultimately very grand. This record was made quickly and impulsively and it feels a bit more from the hip as a result. Vanity project is precisely the right phrase. Could you throw some light on the album’s title? In the context of the song it is taken from,…

“People thought I let the punk side down but I thought everyone should be doing stuff like that,” Mark Perry tells Uncut as he recalls Alternative TV’s 1977-’80 metamorphosis from punk prime movers to dog-on-a-string Sun Ra, as documented in their new boxset. The former Sniffin’ Glue editor’s music dissolved via rickety Krautrock into a mélange of free jazz, musique concrète and extreme confessional with their second LP, ’79’s Vibing Up The Senile Man , which proved too far-out for Neanderthal punkers. “It got violent,” Perry recalls of ATV’s attempt to tour the LP. “Audiences had only just caught up with Stiff Little Fingers and The Clash, and we turn up with The Pop Group. We look like hippies…

If you’re looking for some early Christmas ideas, then we’d steer you towards the fully upgraded and updated edition of our Bruce Springsteen: The Ultimate Music Guide, available now in shops and to buy digitally. And the next issue of our History Of Rock project focuses on 1969; it’s on sale from November 5. Expect the Stones, Zeppelin, Fairport and more… Log on to www.uncut.co.uk  for more details. Keep an eye out for a new Arthur Lee And Love four-disc box, Coming Through To You: The Live Recordings (1970-2004) , which includes five unreleased live tracks. Meanwhile, Love Revisited – Lee’s final backing band, Baby Lemonade, plus Love’s original lead guitarist Johnny Echols – tour the UK next summer to coincide with the…

SHYE BEN TZUR, JONNY GREENWOOD & THE RAJASTHAN EXPRESS Junun NONESUCH Greenwood teams up with Israeli Ben Tzur and some fine qawwali musicians. The ecstatic, rhythmic sessions yielded a doc by Paul Thomas Anderson. JENNYLEE Right On! ROUGH TRADE Jenny Lee Lindberg continues on Warpaint’s enigmatic trajectory with her solo debut, channeling early ’80s New Order and Cure on the angular “Never”. ALEX BLEEKER & THE FREAKS Country Agenda SINDERLYN The third from Real Estate’s Bleeker. Now a fully collaborative group, Country Agenda sees the Freaks head to the West Coast for some sunny, mildly lysergic vibes. LUSH Chorus 4AD A comprehensive box from the returning shoegazers (featuring Uncut picture researcher Phil King on bass). Highlights include sessions, B-sides and a sympathetic…

‘‘IT’S A MERE shadow now… its glory days are over. It’s still there, but they’ve re-modelled the front of it, so it doesn’t look the same any more on the outside; and strange groups play there now. It’s not the warm scene of camaraderie it once was. It was a real place of foment for a while, a melting pot, we would all gather there. It was like our church: singer-songwriters would mingle and talk about songwriting and see the acts that were playing inside. You’d meet and hang out in the bar, have a few drinks, then go in and watch the acts, which were all in the same genre, singer-songwriter stuff. Monday night was ‘hoot night’, from the old folk word ‘hootenanny’. It was a showcase for new…

OUTCESTICIDE: IN MEMORY OF KURT COBAIN BLUE MOON, 1994 The first in the best-known Nirvana bootleg series lines up demos of Bleach cuts with Dale Crover on drums, covers of KISS, The Wipers and The Velvet Underground and, somewhat morbidly, Krist Novoselic and Courtney Love’s eulogies from Cobain’s funeral. INTO THE BLACK TRIBUTE, 1994 Unbelievably lavish by bootleg standards, this monstrous collection assembles 116 tracks over six CDs, housed in a glossy box. Includes the 1992 Reading Festival show, a soundboard recording from a 1991 Halloween show, and a recording of Nirvana’s last gig, at the Seattle Center Arena in January 1994. A SEASON IN HELL PART ONE BANZAI, 1994 Three-CD box, primarily of interest for disc one: an audience recording captured at The Off Ramp…

FOLLOWING COBAIN’S DEATH, Nirvana ceased to be an operational band and became a legal entity – the so-called Nirvana Limited Liability Company. For much of the following decade, Courtney Love – who retained full control over Cobain’s publishing – and Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl would via for mastery of Nirvana’s music and Cobain’s image. In 2002, after arguments over a planned box set, Novoselic and Grohl requested a court that Love undergo psychiatric evaluation (their request was refused). In 2011, Love was quoted as saying her late husband’s memory had been “raped” after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was used in the Muppets movie. But in 2010, Frances Bean Cobain turned 18, taking control of her trust fund, which represents more than a third of the…

ONE OF KURT COBAIN’S favourite artists was Lead Belly. Born in 1888, Huddie Ledbetter balanced his virtuoso skill on the 12-string guitar with a tempestuous personality – he killed a relative in a fight over a woman, and served time on Louisiana’s Angola Prison Farm. “It’s so raw and sincere,” Cobain told Michael Azzerad of Lead Belly’s music. “It’s something that I hold really sacred to me.” In 1989, he, Novoselic and the Screaming Trees’ Mark Pickerel and Mark Lanegan convened in a recording studio as The Jury, a Lead Belly tribute band. The record would stall – “It was as if both Mark and Kurt had too much respect for each other to tell the other what to do,” recalled Pickerel. But a version of “Where Did You Sleep…

KEN BABBS (AKA ‘INTREPID TRAVELLER’): A helicopter pilot in Vietnam prior to rejoining his ex-student friend Ken Kesey in the Pranksters, Ken Babbs was on the original 1964 bus trip from La Honda to New York. He was an integral part of the Acid Test experience, rigging up distortion-free sound systems at high volume. His website ( skypilotclub.com ) serves as a repository for many of the Pranksters’ experiences. CAROLYN GARCIA (‘MOUNTAIN GIRL’): Introduced to Kesey by Neal Cassady in 1964, New Yorker Carolyn Adams was one of the more voluble members of the group. She and Kesey were an item for a time (producing a daughter, Sunshine, in 1966), before she wed fellow Prankster George Walker. The union was short-lived, however, and Adams took up with Jerry…

‘‘IMET [ the Flying Burrito Brothers’] Chris Ethridge when he stopped by FAME on his way to Hollywood when I was playing there one day. Then years later we met up again, when I moved out there, and he introduced me to a lot of Southern Californian pop and rock artists and they in turn used me to play on their solo records – Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark and Gram Parsons. They were all nice guys and really creative people. “I remember going to Gene Clark’s house one night, and his wife cooked up a meal – Karen and I still talk about it! It was a simple dish, but it was really good. I toured and played on a record with Linda Ronstadt, and she, her…

The main winners at this year’s Americana Music Association awards in Nashville were two Uncut favourites. Lucinda Williams picked up Best Album for Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone , while Sturgill Simpson made off with Top Song (“Turtles All The Way Down”) and Artist Of The Year. The Lifetime Achievement Award In Songwriting went to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. On the studio front, veteran songwriter and Kris Kristofferson ally Donnie Fritts returns with Oh My Goodness , only his fourth LP in five decades. Produced by John Paul White (The Civil Wars) and Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes), the Muscle Shoals legend is joined by an impressive roster of guests that includes Jason Isbell, John Prine, Brittany Howard…

By the sounds of this album your connection to Manhattan holds strong. As someone born there, how do you reflect on the way the place has changed? At this point, the way I see it, the only neighbourhood in the world not in danger of becoming the next East Village is the East Village – it’s sort of safely dead and unhip, like the wave of gentrification has passed. It’s not even really trendy; it’s too passé. No hipster could afford to live here. So there’s a sort of calm in that, for those few of us still holding on here in whatever weird little ways. Is “Scowling Crackhead Ian” a way of looking back without succumbing to nostalgia? I hate nostalgia, I hate sentimentality, probably because I’m too susceptible…

“Honestly, it feels like everything else I’ve done was part of the training montage for this solo work,” laughs Monk Parker of his first album under his own name. “I believe in my work now in a way I didn’t before, so I’m willing to sign it honestly for the first time. I’m a late bloomer, apparently!” Having previously worked under the guise of Parker & Lily (“a sparse, lo-fi dreampop duo with ’60s soundtrack overtones, mostly just me and my then-girlfriend Lily Wolf”) and The Low Lows (“more of a downer-Americana trio, a post-Neil-Young thing with lots of feedback and druggy drones”), he broke up the latter after developing “a mysterious thyroid imbalance and hormone shift that stripped away my will, drive and focus”. Moving to Athens, Georgia, and…

Brad Truax, later of Interpol and Howlin Rain, dreamt up NYC indie supergroup Soldiers Of Fortune when he was “coming off some pretty heavy shit” in detox in 2004. “In my fucked state I had a hallucination of seeing an old Soldier Of Fortune magazine on the table in the day room,” he explains. “This thought came to me that if I ever got out, I would start a project of misfit musicians like a Dirty Dozen cracked outfit consisting of the best musicians (according to me) in New York,” he says. “A band that would not have any rules or preconceived notions of what it should be or sound like.” Initially intending to play one unrehearsed show a year, the band…

The Miraculous , Anna von Hausswolff’s fourth album, documents a profound love affair. “I fell in love with the pipe organ the first time I played it in 2012,” says the 28-year-old Swedish musician. “Once I sat down and started playing, I knew that this was going to be a longterm relationship.” Following 2013’s Ceremony , which dabbled with the instrument, von Hausswolff knew her next record would be constructed around it. She headed to Piteå to record on the Studio Acusticum concert hall’s unique pipe organ. The result is doomy and euphoric – testament to von Hausswolff’s increased fluency on the organ. The album is named for a magical place that von Hausswolff’s parents told her about when she was young, where traditional folk music…

SUCH IS THE significance of “Like A Rolling Stone”, an entire disc of both the Collector’s and Deluxe editions is devoted to it. We hear it first as a rickety waltz, with Dylan on piano and Paul Griffin on organ, recorded at a late-night session on June 14, when the band work out the tempo and chord changes. Al Kooper turns up the next day, sitting in on organ. Griffin moves to the piano. The track comes together quickly. They nail it on take four. “That sounds good ,” Wilson says, but Dylan insists on another ten takes. It’s like he’s in thrall to it. “It’s six minutes long, man!” he announces after one pass. The following takes are a bust, though “ That’s…

ABYSSINIANS Arise (reissue, 1978) UNIVERSAL Reissue of classic second, with dub versions The deluge of albums from Virgin’s reggae imprint Front Line in 1978 was a bold move, but one that blurred the identities of its acts. Abyssinians, for example, were competing with a slew of high-class vocal trios on Front Line – Culture, The Gladiators, The Mighty Diamonds and Twinkle Brothers – among whom their less punchy, more contemplative approach got overlooked. The kudos the group enjoyed for their anthemic, much-covered “Satta Massagana” didn’t help, proving a hard act to follow. Still, Bernard Collins and Lynford and Donald Manning made a decent fist of this second LP, dazzlingly attired on the cover, blending cool vocal harmonies inside. The material doesn’t always match the quality of their singing; “Jah Loves”…

RICO That Man Is Forward 2 TONE, 1981 Horn-heavy, jazz-inflected instrumental ska-reggae on the belated follow-up to his 1976 Island classic Man From Wareika . Recorded after Rico Rodriguez had joined the Specials, but with a bunch of top Jamaican sessioners at Joe Gibbs’ Kingston studio rather than with his new bandmates. THE SPECIALS Live At The Moonlight Club 2 TONE/CHRYSALIS, 1992 Allegedly taped without permission by Decca – whose offices were next door to the Moonlight – this live set predated the band’s debut studio album and captures them in raw-but-stonking form on the night before the 1979 General Election. Heavily bootlegged, it got an official release 13 years later. VARIOUS ARTISTS Dance Craze 2 TONE, 1981 The soundtrack of Joe Massot’s Dance…

Many fans thought we’d never see these Sun City Girls reissues… In January, Jimmy at Forced Exposure pointed out that 2015 was the 25th anniversary of the original release, and then Dave Segal at Seattle’s The Stranger wrote an article entitled, “When will Sun City Girls reissue Torch Of The Mystics ?”, so we did it, although I’d have rather waited for the 37th anniversary or something non-celebratory, but that’s just me. How did you respond to hearing this music from your former self? I heard it last year for the first time in a while and it always sounds good to me. One thing that struck me was how angelically beautiful Charlie [Gocher]’s voice came through on “Papa Legba”. What are your…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Colours Are Brighter: Songs For Children And Grown Ups Too ROUGH TRADE This agreeably eclectic 2006 comp was released to aid Save The Children’s education work in war-torn countries. It includes Four Tet’s fine “Go Go Ninja Dinosaur”, Franz Ferdinand’s counting song “Jackie Jackson” and Half-Man Half Biscuit’s cautionary tale about ill-fitting trainers, “David Wainwright’s Feet”. CORNERSHOP What Did The Hippie Have In His Bag? Cornershop’s back catalogue is full of child-friendly tunes (see “Brimful Of Asha”), but this 7in is specifically aimed at children. The song is ridiculously infectious, adding a childish sense of the absurd to Tjinder Singh’s beat sensibilities. Comes with a book illustrated by cover artist Nick Edwards. VARIOUS ARTISTS The Jungle Book DISNEY Aesthetes may wish to seek out the Stay…

ERIC CLAPTON Slowhand At 70 – Live At The Royal Albert Hall EAGLE VISION Landmark gig from May 2015, also out in 2CD format Recorded at his favourite haunt in celebration of his 70th birthday, and 50 years since first playing the Royal Albert Hall with The Yardbirds, Clapton looks trim as he navigates a pretty safe route through his catalogue, ably assisted by Paul Carrack, Andy Fairweather Low and more: “Cocaine”, “Wonderful Tonight” and “I Shot The Sheriff” included. Hats off, though, to a delicate, electro-acoustic “Layla”, recast as a soul-stricken ballad, and quakingly good versions of “Crossroads” and “High Time We Went”. EXTRAS: A 17-minute “Little Queen Of Spades”. ROB HUGHES THE CRAMPS At The Haçienda SAVOY Voodoo idols rip up 1984 Manchester There are relatively few complete…

BLACK MASS Director Scott Cooper Starring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Peter Sarsgaard Opens November 27 Cert 15 STEVE JOBS Director Danny Boyle Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen Opens November 13 Cert 15 CAROL Director Todd Haynes Starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler Opens November 27 Cert 15 STEVE McQUEEN: THE MAN & LE MANS Directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna Opens November 20 Cert 15 LOVE Director Gaspar Noé Starring Karl Glusman, Aomi Muyock, Klara Kristin Opens November 20 Cert 18…

“I HEARD THAT some guy has made a hole in his head and put cables in there,” says the erstwhile God Of Hellfire with an admiring chuckle. “All the sci-fi stuff is already here.” Arthur Brown has always been something of a technological pioneer, but making ‘brain music’ may be his most out-there expedition to date. It’s a project that dates to 1972 and the days of Kingdom Come, the experimental rock band he formed in the aftermath of the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown’s 1968 hit “Fire”. In Kingdom Come, Brown became the first musician to build a band around a drum machine. He also planned to use the electroencephalograph [EEG], a machine used in medicine and neuroscience to monitor brain activity via the transmission of data waves. “We…

“I’M A BIG one for learning,” says Noddy Holder. “I was in a rock’n’roll band for 30 years, and that was all I really knew. When you’re in a successful band, you get pampered. First-class travel, first-class hotels. Slade were four kids living in the Black Country; of course we had a great time. But when I left the band, I knew there was a big, wide world out there that I hadn’t even scratched the surface of.” At 69, Holder shows no signs of slowing down. Although his Slade days are far behind – but never far from his thoughts – he remains impressively active. “I’ve written two books,” he explains. “I had my own radio show for 18 years. I’ve been doing cameo roles for TV shows and…

Courtney Barnett: “I kind of knew Bones from when his brother and I worked in a pub, so we drank a bit together. But yeah, we all met properly through Immigrant Union.” Dave Mudie: “We played with Courtney in Immigrant Union for a year or two. It was a country-psych band; it started off with like eight members or something, and gradually went down to five of us.” Bones Sloane: “Courtney joined as the sixth member. Immigrant Union was always these three main guys, and then we were just the [ rhythm section ] behind it. They were the three Immigrant Union-ers, and then there was what became the CB3. I love ’em to death, they’re absolutely insane, but the three of us felt a bit left out…

‘‘MY DAD AND I used to listen to country in the car, a station called KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana. Back in those days there were about four national radio programmes like the Grand Ole Opry, called radio barn-dance programmes. I think there was one in Virginia, one in Missouri or Arkansas, the Opry in Nashville, and there was the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. The Opry was ‘proper’, and they wouldn’t allow Hank Williams on as he was too much of a bad one, so he went down to the Louisiana Hayride. Same thing with Johnny Cash, he was too much of a bad boy. And George Jones – anyone who had too much to do with drugs or drink, they didn’t want them up there. And Elvis – he was…

MTV UNPLUGGED IN NEW YORK DGC, 1994 MTV played Unplugged on a loop following Cobain’s death, and the covers-packed set was released as a live album in November 1994, including several songs played with guests The Meat Puppets, plus fine versions of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World” and The Vaselines’ “Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam”. FROM THE MUDDY BANKS OF THE WISHKAH DGC, 2002 Live album featuring Nirvana performances from between the years 1989 and 1994, compiled by Krist Novoselic. The flipside to Unplugged , renditions of “Aneurysm”, “Negative Creep” and “Tourettes” are tightly performed and in straight-from-the-soundboard quality, capturing the band at their raw, dynamic best. NIRVANA DGC, 2002 Conceived as a single-disc compilation of Nirvana’s greatest moments…

THE GRATEFUL DEAD were still billed as The Warlocks when they played an Acid Test at the Big Beat club in Palo Alto on December 18, 1965. Not only did Owsley Stanley introduce the band to manager Rock Scully that night, it’s also where Jerry Garcia acquired his ‘Captain Trips’ nickname. “The band was on a break and Jerry and I were in the parking lot,” recalls Denise Kaufman. “A police officer drove up, parked his car and walked towards us. He was a little aggressive, but there was something about Jerry that was so good-humoured and peaceful that the guy just had nowhere to go with that energy. They had a short conversation, then the cop turned around and walked away. As he did that, Jerry lifted up the…

May 1963: The Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers pass the audition at EMI and sign to HMV. Soon afterwards, at the suggestion of producer John Burgess, they become Manfred Mann Autumn 1963: The band record “5-4-3-2-1”, their third single, at Abbey Road’s Studio 2 January 10, 1964: With Tom McGuinness having replaced bassist Dave Richmond, the band make their second appearance on Ready Steady Go!, performing “5-4-3-2-1” for the first time on national TV February 19, 1964: “5-4-3-2-1” peaks at No 5 in the UK chart August 1964: Manfred Mann score their first No 1 with acover of The Exciters’ “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy”…

‘‘ONCE UPON a time I liked studio work better. I was lucky to have a lot of work there when I was younger. I wondered why anyone would want to do anything else but work on a record, go home, eat supper and go to bed, then come back and do it again tomorrow! In the ’70s they were starting to sign bands that wrote and played their own music, so there was less demand for a session player. When I got a call asking if I would do a tour with Dickey Betts I thought, ‘Well, I don’t think I want to, but I got to be smart. Maybe times are changing, maybe I need to do this and add touring to my resumé to continue working…’ I didn’t…

Kaleidoscope World FLYING NUN, 1986 Effectively The Chills’ debut album; actually a compilation of their early singles. Regarded as the Rosetta Stone of the Flying Nun sound, distilling its defining qualities – melody, wordiness, melancholy – into such exquisitely mournful pop as “Doledrums”, “Pink Frost” and “Rolling Moon”. Brave Words FLYING NUN, 1987 The Chills’ proper debut pitted sparkling songs against inexplicably murky production. The songs themselves were magnificent, not least “Wet Blanket” – a perfect unrequited love lament which someone should have sent to Roy Orbison while there was still time. Submarine Bells SLASH/LIBERATION, 1990 The breakthrough that wasn’t. The Chills’ major-label debut was bright and breezy, with a lead single actually entitled “Heavenly Pop Hit”, lest anyone miss the point. Pretty much everyone did, but the music still…

This is your first album of original material in 14 years. Have you been writing all the time? I’m in my studio most days, and I write all the time, usually on piano, sometimes on guitar. I write bits, rather than whole tunes – chord sequences, fragments of melody, odd lyrics. There are “bits” on this album that date back more than a decade. Your 2012 solo album, Long Wave , covered old jazz and early rock’n’roll classics. Do you think this album has a similarly nostalgic vibe? Yes. I’m trying to write nice songs in that classic style. When I started, old- fashioned was from the 1930s! Nowadays it’s ’60s, ’70s. Was it a Beatles tribute? Not really, but I can see why you’d ask that.…

“It’s for people who need a ‘first proper album’ from me,” explains Will Toledo, the songwriter behind Car Seat Headrest who, after releasing several home-recorded indie pop albums on the internet, has just recorded Teens Of Style for Matador. “I wanted to provide an entry point for people. If they like this album, then they can go through the back catalogue and get the whole story.” For Teens Of Style , Toledo revisited old songs from his large back catalogue, sometimes changing lyrics and adjusting melodies. “I did find it hard to sing some melodies, as my singing style has changed a lot since the time when I was writing these songs,” he explains. A studio album of new material will follow shortly.…

Invited by Chicago’s Museum Of Contemporary Art to perform one of David Bowie’s albums, experimental post-punkers Disappears rejected more obvious options in favour of the synth-heavy, Eno-associated Low , though founder Brian Case admits he never even asked his bandmates. “It’s the one I’d most like to see covered,” he laughs, “so it was pretty obvious. The balance for us was to be reverent, but also to interpret the material how we would any other music.” They spent a full four months preparing. “We knew if we didn’t commit to some kind of vision for the album, especially the B-side,” Case continues, “then it wouldn’t work.” Despite the time spent developing the show, they insist there was never any question of a studio recording. “We wanted…

With a name inspired by ee cummings, AE Housman and the architecture of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Liam Palmer’s experimental group HD Hausmann couldn’t be accused of taking a populist route. In a sense, they’re not a group at all; the musicians have never all been in the same room together, and the project exists in the margins of the London-based songwriter’s other band, Grass House. “The truth is,” says Palmer, “I didn’t want to be associated with it. Not through being ashamed, but because I wanted to see how it would be to build from nothing and leave the music to be the only outward projection.” The album marries Palmer’s work with Grass House and his experimental urges, some of which were explored in the Eno-esque side-project Ayppl. “I wanted to…

TO MAKE AN issue of an artist’s age when assessing their work is questionable wherever on life’s timeline they happen to be – not least of all because it’s no more useful a creative indicator than eye colour. But in Nadia Reid’s case, it’s unavoidable. The understated, alt.country-folk eloquence of this New Zealander’s debut, its deep, measured emotion and the seasoned richness of her voice are impressive, but even more so, given the fact that she’s 24. The Auckland-born Reid “stumbled into music” aged 14, made her first public appearance at a small folk festival when she was 15 and soon began playing at regular open-mic nights in Dunedin, chaperoned by her mother. She took weekly guitar lessons with Robert Scott, of Flying Nun standard-bearers The Clean and The Bats…

IT’S A QUARTER of a century since five friends from Bury formed a band called Elbow. Since then – and unusually for a group with such longevity – there have been no bust-ups or walkouts, no discernible aggro beyond, possibly, who should get the next round in. Instead they have presented an unbesmirched picture of northern grafters whose slow path to glory has been navigated with grace and equanimity. At the centre of it all is Guy Garvey, a lugubrious yet sweetly affable frontman who hardly passes for a pop star, but has nevertheless risen to become something of a national treasure. A contributing factor is his BBC 6 Music radio show, where his love for his job seeps from the speakers, and during which he touchingly introduces himself as…

CALIFORNIA THE DELUXE EDITION DISC 2 A piano-driven blues stomper originally recorded for Bringing It All Back Home that Dylan scrapped after one take. Originally mistaken for an early version of “Outlaw Blues”, but Dylan merely plundered a line from the earlier song. Weirdly, it turned up in 2009 in an episode of NCIS and featured on NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack – Vol 2 . MEDICINE SUNDAY THE DELUXE EDITION DISC 4 Notable as the first ‘song’ recorded with The Hawks, at New York’s Studio A, on October 5. It’s just a verse long and was never revisited, although, like “California”, had a line lifted for a later song – “Temporary Like Achilles”. LUNATIC PRINCESS THE DELUXE EDITION…

Damo Suzuki & Omar Rodríguez-López Please Heat This Eventually GOLD STANDARD LABORATORIES, 2006 Since Can’s dissolution, Suzuki has been a serial collaborator. Here he is live in Cologne with The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodríguez-López and a band including former Beastie Boys keyboardist Money Mark. A fiery, broiling jazz fusion, it’s as rhythmically tempestuous as Can’s best work. Holger Czukay Movies ELECTROLA, 1979 The Can bassist’s first solo album is a playful delight, adding shortwave radio sampling, goofy lyrics (“Cool In The Pool”) and ethnographic flourishes (“Persian Love”) to Can’s loose funkiness. Full Can reunion on “Oh Lord, Give Us More Money”, too. Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit Secret Rhythms 2 NONPLACE, 2006 The second collaboration between Can’s drummer and electronica experimentalist Friedman offers subtle polyrhythms and ghostly sketches of cocktail…

As the end of the year alarmingly approaches, it’s time for some Christmas albums next month, and so far Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings’ It’s A Holiday Soul Party looks like the pick of the bunch. “White Christmas”, “Silent Night” and, of course, “Funky Little Drummer Boy” are all tackled in the outfit’s inimitable style. Outside the seasonal market, Ethan Johns releases his third album, Silver Liner , recorded live in collaboration with his backing group The Black Eyed Dogs, including BJ Cole; drone metal pioneers Sunn O))) return with Kannon , a devastatingly heavy three-part epic; and Jonny Greenwood teams up with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and Indian qawwali troupe The Rajesthan Express for…

‘ELECTRIC CHURCH’ WAS one of the notional post-Experience formulations (see also: Gypsy, Sun And Rainbows) that Jimi Hendrix imagined for his music after the demise of the original Experience. In truth, his grander ideas of musical freedom went chiefly undeveloped as the artist was kept on the road, shackled to something like a version of his original trio. In such a context, Hendrix’s engagement at the second Atlanta Pop Festival on July 4, 1970, initially feels as if it may be unpromising material from which to draw a live album and doc. Sure enough, the film bears the shonky imprimatur of the Experience Hendrix organisation: directed by collector/ archivist John McDermott and beginning with an unintentionally psychedelic appraisal of Hendrix’s genius from persons living and dead, all presented with no…

STEVE MACKAY Stooges saxophonist (1949-2015) IGGY POP CAME to Steve Mackay for a specific reason. As the saxophonist recalled in an interview with French TV last year, Pop wanted him to play like Maceo Parker on LSD. “I knew what Iggy was talking about,” said Mackay. “We are free, and we are crazy, and we are a little bit afraid when we play.” Mackay was drafted into the Stooges’ set-up in May 1970, just days before the band were due to record their second LP, Fun House. His abrasive style, rooted in a love of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and King Curtis, proved an ideal fit for the band’s open-ended digression into free-form noise, mixing skronky jazz with distorted proto-punk. Mackay’s sax duly became a key texture of Fun House,…

An introduction to the blues Jimmy Reed Honey, Don’t Let Me Go 1957 I was probably five when I first heard this. We had a housekeeper that loved listening to the blues, and when our mom would go out of the house we’d beg her to stop at the record store. We would always ask the housekeeper which record to buy. She was very quick to point out the favourite blues number of the week. On the surface, this song sounds quite simple, but the interplay between the two guitars is very sophisticated. A huge inspiration The Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced 1967 Shortly after I heard this, I got a phone call that said, “There’s a new tour that’s going around, featuring a guy by the name Jimi…