Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2021 i UNCUT

“I’ll be your mirror/Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know” IT seems several lifetimes ago now, but last March, shortly before the first lockdown began, I was lucky enough to see the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern. Inside Room 6, the curators gamely attempted to replicate the sensory rush of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: Warhol films and still images were projected on top of one another, with coloured gels and strobe lights swirling and flickering, and the music of The Velvet Underground playing at full volume. With a slew of Velvets activity coming over the summer, we’ve decided to celebrate the band’s many musical revolutions with their first Uncut cover for 12 years. What’s new? Plenty. There are vivid recollections of Factory life from John Cale –…

WORKING in the City of London during the day and frequenting the Roxy or Vortex by night, The Members’ chief songwriter JC Carroll lived an odd double life in 1977. “It was like Superman,” he tells Uncut. “Mild-mannered bank clerk turns into crazy punk rocker.” Seeking excitement, the guitarist had moved up to London from Camberley, initially working for the Queen’s bankers, Coutts, before punk rock took over. His new memoir, (Still) Annoying The Neighbours, details how he was drafted into The Members by singer Nicky Tesco, before penning the two brilliant singles that would define their legacy – 1978’s “Solitary Confinement” and 1979’s “The Sound Of The Suburbs” – in his bedsit in Kilburn. “I was singing about my life: alienation, desperation,” explains Carroll. “A window had opened where…

IN October 2019, Natalie Bergman’s world was turned upside down. She received a call saying that her father and stepmother had been involved in a head-on road traffic collision. A drunk driver had been travelling the wrong way down the highway and crashed into the taxi they were in, killing them and both drivers instantly. Natalie and her brother Elliott – otherwise known as psych-pop duo Wild Belle – cancelled their imminent show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall and travelled back to the family home in Chicago. It’s a moment Bergman recalls with harrowing, pinpoint detail on the devastating “Last Farewell”, the final track of her first solo album, Mercy: “It all ended with the crash/Tell me, heaven, where was your grace?” “It was a crucial part of…

“Antenna has changed its air from shortwave to ballistic cruise” LOAD a promotional copy of Ryley Walker’s fifth solo album into iTunes and the descriptor “prog fucking rock” appears beneath the title and his name. It’s a slyly humorous detail that speaks volumes; most obviously, about his deep, oft-declared love for that music, which has a role here, but also his habit of self-mocking. Whether it’s in interviews, onstage chat or his Twitter feed, Walker is always ready with a pin, to prick truth’s painful swelling or any hint of pretentiousness. If there’s a place where that self-consciousness falls away and Walker roams (almost) free, it’s in the authentic present of his music. It was the absence of what he called “smoke and mirrors” that first drew him to Bert…

NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS Carnage GOLIATH 8/10 Balconies, kingdoms in the sky… Cave and Ellis create widescreen wonder from enforced confinement. By John Robinson COMETH the hour, cometh the man – and if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about carnage it’s Nick Cave. Some of this he’s historically created himself. Some has been cruelly thrust upon him. But whatever the situation, this is someone who doesn’t shy away from what’s happening; who plays the cards as they fall. Now, locked down like the rest of us (maybe not quite like the rest of us – he makes a couple of mentions of a balcony where he vaults into the imagination and back while reading and notating Flannery O’Connor), he presents something like his own lockdown album.…

“I’M an 80-year-old sex symbol!” roars Tom Jones with a big, lusty laugh. The Welsh Elvis loves playing up to his priapic playboy image, even though he has just made one of the most reflective, emotionally rich, stylistically daring albums of his career in Surrounded By Time , his fourth collaboration with producer Ethan Johns. “The first three were basically American roots music,” says Jones. “But Ethan and I both agreed this one should sound different, the songs should be more personal to me. Songs take on a different light when you’re older; I read more into lyrics now. When you’re young, you are full of piss and vinegar; it’s all about big songs. I’m a more tender singer now.” Grounded by Covid restrictions for the past 12 months, Jones…

WALTERSMETAK Smetak/Interregno (reissues, 1974, 1980) BUH 7/10 Brazilian avant-gardist’s curious sonic experiments WALTER SMETAK is one of those curious, genre-fluid figures who seem unique to Brazil: a conceptual artist and avant-garde musician, a sculptor and a scientist, at once bafflingly highbrow and childishly lowbrow. Born in Zürich in 1913, the son of Czech parents, Smetak trained as a cellist in Salzburg and Vienna (even taking lessons from the great Pablo Casals) before moving to Brazil in 1937. He joined a symphony orchestra in Porto Alegre and, when it dissolved, spent the next decade freelancing in various São Paulo and Rio De Janeiro radio orchestras and dance bands (accompanying Carmen Miranda, among others). He joined a mystical association called the Brazilian Theosophical Society and became fascinated by the way in which…

THE JB’S Food For Thought/Doing It To Death/ Damn Right I Am Somebody PURPLE/CHERRY RED 9/10 The world’s funkiest band do it to death on two-CD set of crowning glories SINCE no measurement device can calculate the full magnitude of what Bootsy Collins dubbed “The One”, we have no objective means of determining the funkiest music ever recorded by The JB’s, perhaps the funkiest band to ever strut across the Earth. Some experts point to the snaky line sketched by Fred Wesley’s trombone over the airtight groove in the final minute of “Pass The Peas”. Others favour the gale-force blast that opens “The Grunt” before the players lock into the rhythm that became a fundamental hip-hop building block. Of course, no discussion is complete without the formidable combination of squelchy…

BRUCE LANGHORNE THE HIRED HAND SOUNDTRACK (1971) Langhorne, long rumoured to be the inspiration for Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man”, composed the austere score for Peter Fonda’s 1971 western The Hired Hand , about a cowboy who returns home after years of wandering the range. It’s a quietly subversive reimagining of western soundtracks, using guitar, banjo, fiddle and even sitar not to capture the grandeur of Monument Valley but to create intimate, life-size backdrops. 9/10 BRIAN ENO APOLLO: ATMOSPHERES & SOUNDTRACKS (1983) “Zero-gravity country music,” Eno called it. For their most popular collaboration, Eno and Daniel Lanois added a touch of twang to their ambient soundscapes, all the better to soundtrack a film about the Apollo space mission. “Deep Blue Day” remains their most popular track, but Lanois’ pedal-steel sounds like…

UNCUT: You’ve been interviewed for Todd Haynes’ new documentary on the Velvet Underground. Where did those interviews take place? JOHN CALE: The gentrified warehouse section near the Brooklyn Bridge, before the pandemic began. Has participating in the documentary made you reassess any part of The Velvet Underground at all? It’s made me appreciate the personalities and the disparate confluences we laid bare in the Factory and through the development of what would become The Velvet Underground. They came from all over the world and opened this Welsh boy’s eyes to the rest of mankind beyond the European experience. It took all these characters to fuel the furnaces. It’s important for everyone to understand the entirety of this band, warts and all, but most importantly the organic nature of its honesty.…

“OKAY, what was the difference between The Velvet Underground with John Cale and with Doug Yule?” Well, they were two different bands, and some of this had nothing to do with them. By the summer of 1968, Lou Reed was thinking of a different direction for the band – appealing to a wider public for one thing – and was making new songs that were more melodic, and less antisocial. Cale did not just quit. He was ousted. And not everyone in the band was happy about it. But they decided to press on and so would need a replacement on bass and keyboards for Cale. I’d say that for their emerging sound, Doug Yule was a very good choice and helped them create a new and unexpected sound as…

UNCUT: You saw The Velvet Underground play before you joined the band. What were they like live? DOUG YULE: The first time I saw them was at Harvard University. John was sick and so all I saw was Lou, Sterling and Maureen. They were playing in a dark room. I remember Lou was wearing black leather. They had presence – and substantial volume! You joined the band, then in a matter of weeks you went into the studio to record the third album. That must have been quite an intense experience… The first weekend we played together, I was trying to learn everything. “What chords for this song? What do I play in this song? What do I sing in this song?” That, over and over. By the time I…

AS grim as it was, 2020 wasn’t entirely without good news. Case in point: the utterly unlikely return of the fabled independent label Postcard Records, which, as the year ended, broke a 25-year silence to announce it was back in some kind of business, via an enigmatic, characteristically off-kilter Twitter feed (@dubh185). The most inspirationally DIY of the UK’s original post-punk indie wave, Postcard was dreamed into life in the Glasgow of 1979 by Alan Horne, then an ambitiously bored 20-year-old, who famously ran the business out of the sock drawer in his tenement bedroom. Under the banner of its impudent logo – the mischievous kitten banging a toy drum – Postcard was low on resources, audaciously high on insolence and ideas. Spearheaded by Edwyn Collins, Horne’s co-conspirator in setting…

“Yoko fixed lunch for us, and we sat around drinking tea and chatting”RICHARD DILELLO IN 1967, British Pathé News described it as “£4,000 worth of gaily painted rolling stock” – a gypsy caravan bought as a fourth-birthday present for Julian Lennon, decorated with the Sgt Pepper ‘drum’ logo. Three years later, Apple employee Richard DiLello found it in the garden of the Lennon estate at Tittenhurst Park and thought it would make a great background for a portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “On a bleak English January day, it was perfect,” DiLello remembers. “It was the only colour there. We spent the day going around the property, doing some pictures. Yoko fixed lunch for us, and we sat around drinking tea and chatting.” Today you’ll be able to…

WITH the passing of Bunny Wailer, one of the great founding acts of Jamaican music – The Wailers – is no more. Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer (born Neville Livingston) tore up Jamaica as a teenage vocal trio in the mid-1960s, swiftly scoring a string of hits that included “Simmer Down”, “Love And Affection”, “Put it On” and “Rude Boy”. Initially signed to Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One label, The Wailers typified the exuberance of their newly independent nation in the era of upbeat ska; they would later reflect the rebellious “rude boy” phase of rocksteady, and later still reggae’s defiant doctrine of Rastafari. The Wailers were always leaders. Bob and Bunny were boyhood friends, meeting Peter Tosh after their families moved from the country to Kingston’s Trenchtown. Mentored…

Azita Youssefi on a deeply human album THERE were almost nine years between the release of Azita’s new album, Glen Echo , and its predecessor, Year . Always deeply engaged with the challenges of the creative process, Azita embraced some significant changes on her new suite of gorgeous soul-pop songs. “I felt like there were things in the demos that I wasn’t willing to lose for the final recording,” she reflects. “Also, David Berman insisted that I needed to learn to play the drums so I could have the whole thing be me. That made me finally decide to work with my original demos instead of retracking everything anew with a band.” The resulting album feels deeply human; it’s a sinewy set of tracks, one that’s both personal and expansive.…

“It was part of trying to get some distance. I would really love to be able to do that now” It’s almost 40 years since the release of Big Science – how does it sound to you now? It does feel fresh to me, it’s weird. But the passage of time has got so abstract over the past year. I hardly know how to talk about it. In many ways this past year has been a very ecstatic period for me, I’ve been able to do so many things that I’ve always wanted to do – one of them is just read every book that I’ve felt like reading. And not have to go places. Not that I don’t love going places. Fortunately in New York many, many museums and…

There’s a bunch of exciting May releases for us to check out next time, from Paul Weller’s Fat Pop Volume 1 and Marianne Faithfull & Warren Ellis’s She Walks In Beauty to Rose City Band’s Earth Trip and Iceage’s Seek Shelter. There are also promising LPs from Reigning Sound, Mdou Moctar and Toumani Diabaté & The London Symphony Orchestra. Archivally speaking, there’s Can’s stellar Live In Stuttgart 1975 , Sun Ra’s Lanquidity , reissues from the underrated Seefeel and a load of other prime cuts yet to be announced. EMAIL:TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

MY first encounter with The Velvet Underground was probably in my first year of college, around 1980. It was a profound discovery for me. I was already into Bowie and a lot of the artists who were so influenced by The Velvet Underground – it’s hard to think of artists who were not influenced by The Velvet Underground! – so I was in a prime spot for their music to really matter. I think there’s something about that first record that describes a kind of sensibility – it’s in the content of the music, it’s in the sound of the music, it’s in the dirtiness of the music – that I associate with creative possibility. This music immediately makes you think about the frailty of identity and the fact that…

IT WAS all Jerry Dammers’ fault. When The Specials found themselves short of a second track for their debut single, “Gangsters”, Dammers asked fellow Coventry musician Neol Davies if he could use “The Selecter”, a song written and recorded by Davies a year previously with drummer John Bradbury. The double A-side single went Top 10, and Davies quickly realised he needed a band. He poached organist Desmond Brown from his previous group, The Transposed Men, brought in four musicians from local reggae outfit Hard Top 22 and added singer Pauline Black as a final flourish. A multiracial, mixed-gender septet firing out a vibrant blend of ska, soul, calypso and pop, The Selecter was never easy – “It was all quite volatile!” says Black – but always exciting. The deal The…

THE BLACK CROWES THE SOUTHERN HARMONY AND MUSICAL COMPANION DEF AMERICAN, 1992 After the success of their debut, the Crowes came off tour and straight back to the studio, knocking out this masterpiece in just eight days. Featuring new guitarist Marc Ford, it’s a little more confident than its predecessor, the band having found a mutual groove on the road. Includes future Crowes classics “Remedy”, “Sometimes Salvation” and “Thorn In My Pride”. 9/10 THE BLACK CROWES THE LOST CROWES AMERICAN, 2006 Double album consisting of two records, Tall and Band . The former featured versions of songs that later appeared on 1994’s Amorica , but the latter is the standout: an unreleased album recorded at the height of the band’s late-’90s power and dysfunction and a thrilling demonstration of their…

“IT’S a common fallacy that great writers, bands and footballers ‘go soft’ with extreme fame,” wrote Mark E Smith in a letter on August 11, 1980. “I contradict this and say the people love a decline and become very vampiric towards their heroes.” Given that he proudly stated that he burned his copy of The Fall(en), Dave Simpson’s book about tracking down all the ex-members of The Fall, one can only imagine what Prestwich’s favourite son – who died aged 60 in 2018 – would have thought of the mere pseud mag eds picking over his bones in Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall. Edited by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and Wire writer Tessa Norton, this collection of ephemera and essays strives to pin down the mightiest…

PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME STREAMING FROM MARCH 19 Alluringly enigmatic Hungarian thriller about a woman who returns to Budapest from the US for romantic reasons, then questions her sanity. Lili Horvát directs, Natasa Stork dazzles as the elusive heroine. GODZILLA VS KONG STREAMING FROM MARCH 26 Two big-time bruisers face off in the latest of the ‘MonsterVerse’ revival series. Alexander Skarsgård, Rebecca Hall and Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown are among the humans risking neck ache to follow the action. CRISIS STREAMING FROM MARCH 26 Multi-strander drug drama from director Nicholas Jarecki, following multiple characters’ experience of the US opioid epidemic. Classy cast includes Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly and rapper turned actor Kid Cudi. SIX MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT STREAMING FROM MARCH 26…

CHICK COREA Jazz fusion innovator (1941-2021) IT didn’t take long for pianist Chick Corea to shun formal education in favour of something more experiential. He briefly attended New York’s Columbia University and the Juilliard School but dropped out to investigate the city’s vibrant jazz scene. “I got a chance to listen to Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks,” he told NY Daily News in 2011. “It was a great education. There was my university, man.” Corea began with the likes of Mongo Santamaria, Blue Mitchell and Herbie Mann in the early ’60s, before making his solo debut with 1968’s Tones For Joan’s Bones (actually recorded in ’66). Miles Davis provided a gateway into jazz fusion when he hired him to play…

What ever became of your original plan to make “a double LP prog epic”? I don’t think I have the capacity to write 13-minute songs about a toad on a quest to eat a magic mushroom grown in a faraway land. Plus, double LPs are expensive. These days I’m all about efficiency and reality. That being said, my hairline is rapidly receding, there’s grey in my beard and I keep buying synths. In the future, a double LP might be the absolute minimum. Why did you choose John McEntire as producer? I had known John from Chicago. In my mind, I was always friendly with him, but I realise now I was a total punisher and just cornered him at bars to ask about Gastr Del Sol records. We got…

TODD SNIDER First Agnostic Church Of Hope And Wonder THIRTY TIGERS 9/10 East Nashville renegade expands his virtual revival tent TODD SNIDER didn’t plan on becoming a bullshit preacher. As the pandemic bit hard into his busy touring schedule last year, he also found himself processing the recent deaths of various musician friends – among them early mentor John Prine and sometime collaborator Jeff Austin, formerly of Yonder Mountain String Band. To counter his despondency, Snider conceived the idea of a virtual church or tent revival, performing a livestream show on Sunday mornings. Starting last October, these weekly events, in which Snider would play his fairly extensive back catalogue in sequence, were billed as The First Agnostic Church Of Hope And Wonder. Now he’s used the title as a repository…

NEIL YOUNG These may be relatively new compositions but they sound like classics Young Shakespeare REPRISE 7/10 A bard in fine form. By Tyler Wilcox YOUNG SHAKESPEARE, the latest in Young’s ongoing Performance Series (this is vol 3.5 for those crazy enough to keep track), captures the songwriter at the cusp of solo superstardom. He was still best known as the Y in CSNY but he’d packed several lifetimes’ worth of activity into a very brief span of time: from the break-ups and make-ups of Buffalo Springfield to the dangerously unstable Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, from the lukewarm reception of his debut 1968 solo LP to the formation of Crazy Horse. Now, as he walked on stage at Stratford Connecticut’s Shakespeare Theatre in January of 1971, he was alone…

ASSEMBLY is not the first Joe Strummer compilation of recent years – it follows the 32-track 2018 collection Joe Strummer 001 . “There’s definitely a different idea with Assembly ,” says Lucinda Tait, Strummer’s widow and executive producer of the set. “001 was conceived because we came across a lot of archival material [ for ] the die-hard fans. But Assembly is a collection of Joe’s better-known songs, which have been remastered to celebrate this part of his career.” Strummer’s post-Clash years didn’t strictly comprise a solo career. There was almost always a band, whether Latino Rockabilly War, The Pogues or The Mescaleros. “Joe was definitely a ‘band’ man,” says Tait. “He was a collaborative artist. The lyrics were his, but the musical influences came from everyone.” Strummer would have…

SURING the Super Bowl back in February, Bruce Springsteen starred in his first ever television commercial, a solemn clip called “The Middle” that found him driving a vintage Jeep through rural Kansas. Over shots of empty plains and close-ups of sturdy automotive parts, he pontificated about Middle America and the rapidly eroding political and cultural middle ground. “We need that connection,” he intoned solemnly to American football fans. “We need the middle. We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.” To soundtrack this mythic Centre, Springsteen and producer Ron Aniello deployed a faint shimmer of pedal-steel, performed by guitarist Greg Leisz, which suggested both a vast expanse of prairie as well as a fixed perspective from which to view it. This sound is new…

1. SUSS Drift Our roadtrip through the cosmic pastoral landscape begins with this nocturnal tune from the New York band SUSS, who evoke an empty desert on “Drift”, from last year’s album Promise. Pat Irwin’s soaring guitar parts mingle with what sounds like cicadas in the brush. 2. STEVE GUNN Way Out Weather Steve Gunn may be better known for his folk- and rock-oriented albums than for his forays into ambient music, but the title track to his 2014 album is all vibe, with smears of pedal-steel morphing into a crisply picked guitar theme. 3. WILLIAM TYLER Four Corners William Tyler’s 2020 EP “New Vanitas” gravitates toward the spacey, especially on its fourth track ,“Four Corners”. Inspired by the spot in the southwestern United States where the borders of four…

ALL TOMORROW’S PEOPLE ● The Legacy by John Cale ● TheDocumentary by Todd Haynes ● John Cale vs Doug Yule by Jonathan Richman ● A New Age by Doug Yule ● Max’s Revisited by Lenny Kaye ● Velveteens Over London by Richard Williams ● Deep Cuts by Tyler Wilcox…

ARE you aware of this battle? About what we call equal temperament? You see, guitars, pianos… in fact any keyboard instrument or any instrument with fixed frets* is made so you can play it in any key without having to adjust it with each change of key. This is great. But this “equalizing” of pitches that in pure sound are not quite so equal is a compromise in any scale you play on such an instrument. And this compromise bugs some musicians. I now quote from Stephen Walsh’s book Debussy: A Painter In Sound : “Debussy sat at the piano and started talking temperament, that is, the different possible tunings of the notes in the octave. Everyone knew instinctively that when you sing, or play the violin or the flute…

BY the time The Velvet Underground finally arrived in Britain, they were unrecognisable from the group whose first album, released only four and a half years earlier, had proposed an entirely new direction for rock music. Just about the only thing they had in common with the original band was the name. In some eyes, that was more than they deserved. Danny Fields, the New York scenemaker and sometime manager of the Stooges and the Ramones, christened them the Velveteens, which seemed to fit pretty well because whatever they were, it wasn’t the real thing. No Lou Reed, who had left the band during the recording of Loaded just over a year earlier. No Sterling Morrison, who had withdrawn from the fray to teach medieval literature at the University of…

JUDY COLLINS The Town Hall, New York, February 12 Poignant recreation of her 1964 concert in the same venue from ageless folk marvel JUDY Collins left the Greenwich Village folk clubs to make her concert debut at New York’s Town Hall on March 21, 1964, aged 24. The resultant album, The Judy Collins Concert, opens with her lone guitar strum gaining focus and shape, ’til it becomes Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Winter Sky”. “And I feel like something’s gonna die”, she sings, letting syllables glide, then fade and fall to the ground. You could call her lovely soprano crystalline, but its purity is tougher than that, as she turns art-folk into a blues incantation. It was a daring opening then. Fifty-six years later, Collins stands on the same stage, facing a…

NOMADLAND Chloé Zhao will soon have a blockbuster hit on her hands with the Marvel superhero film Eternals. Let’s hope that it does extremely well, so that it enables the Beijing-born filmmaker to continue making the kind of insightful realist pictures she’s sublimely good at, such as 2017’s The Rider and now Nomadland, for which Zhao was recently crowned Best Director at the 2021 Golden Globes. The Rider was a powerfully spare drama about the South Dakota rodeo world; Nomadland explores similar terrain, again working with non-professionals to explore a largely unseen dimension of contemporary American life. This time, however, Zhao has a well-known lead, Frances McDormand. She plays Fern, from a Nevada town that has effectively shut down along with its gypsum plant. Fern sells her possessions, buys a…

MICK FLEETWOOD AND FRIENDS CELEBRATE THE MUSIC OF PETER GREEN AND THE EARLY YEARS OF FLEETWOOD MAC BMG/MAN OF THE WORLD PICTURES 7/10 Mick Fleetwood rounds up a distinctly varied set of guests for a well-timed tribute to his Mac co-founder. By Nigel Williamson THERE’S a slyly self-deprecating moment when Mick Fleetwood walks on stage at the start of this film of the tribute concert he organised for Peter Green at the London Palladium, just a month before the world went into lockdown last year. “I’m going to be reading some stuff off the teleprompter here and I’ll do my dyslexic best, so bear with me through the evening,” he says – and everyone gets the reference as minds flash back to the Brit Awards in 1989 when Fleetwood…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine EVERYDAYJOE Belated thanks for Rob Hughes’ eyewitness account of The Clash residency at Bond’s in 1981 [March issue]. I hope Don Letts talks the record company into releasing a full-length recording of what hasn’t been destroyed. The article has a great cross-section of movers and shakers in the band’s orbit, but they were always amazingly inclusive to their fans too – as illustrated by this photo with Joe. This was taken at a charity event at Tower Records, Piccadilly Circus about a year before Joe died. Joe was such a generous bloke that he invited me to the green room to hang out with him and the other celebs, including Gary Kemp, Karl Wallinger and Keith Allen. They wondered who the fuck is…