Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i UNCUT

IT’S HARD TO imagine two more disparate musical figures than Rod Stewart and Joanna Newsom, but this month Jaan Uhelszki paid LA house calls on both of them to file a couple of noteworthy exclusives for Uncut. Among other things, we learned that Newsom enjoys two breakfasts, one of them involving fennel pollen mayonnaise, and that Stewart doesn’t know what Americana is. “I’ve never quite understood what that term means,” he admits. “It was a name that people were bandying around this time last year. I’d be, ‘What the fuck’s that?’” In fairness, a similar question has probably been asked in the Uncut office a few times over the years, given the elastic possibilities of what Americana can represent – a music that in some artful way taps into the…

DON VAN VLIET last appeared in public in 1995, to mark the opening of a major solo exhibition in Los Angeles. “That was the last time he left his house,” claims Gordon VeneKlasen, director of the Michael Werner Gallery. In 1982, Werner told Van Vliet that in order to be respected as an artist, he would have to stop making music as Captain Beefheart. Frustrated by the music industry and the way his genius was presented in terms that deterred anyone from actually listening, Van Vliet jacked it in. He pursued art with the unabashed seriousness that he had once masked with absurdity, extracting himself from society as he did so. This autumn sees the opening of two major Van Vliet exhibitions by the Michael Werner Gallery – only the…

JOHN GRANT IS at home in Iceland eating cheese on toast when Uncut calls. “It’s this weird Norwegian stuff called gudbrandsdalen,” he explains. “It’s a gjetost, caramelised goat cheese. They have it here in Iceland, too, but it costs like £10 a chunk or something. No, it sure isn’t cheap.” Grant moved to Reykjavík nearly three years ago, though he’d harboured plans to relocate to Iceland since the ’80s. “I discovered the Sugarcubes in ’87,” he explains. “Then, when I first went to Germany in ’88, I saw a slideshow of a friend’s trip to Iceland and I was shocked by the beauty of this place. Twenty-five years later, I got an invitation to play here. I fell in love with the language and the people, the landscape and the…

‘‘I WASN’T anything like Sortilège, but I was basing her on people I knew. I was also basing her on the way that records from the early ’70s make me feel. I think there’s a parallel between what was happening in music and what was happening in culture in the early ’70s. The reviews about Inherent Vice talked about how it marked the cultural space when everything was falling apart, the 1960s’ dream of innocence dying. The end of free love, the Manson family. I do think there was a little element of a hivemind around the ’60s free love thing and it was very painful culturally and involved a lot of cynicism and heartbreak to have it end. But at the same time such amazing…

“We were very much trying to manage a lifestyle that was hard to get to grips with, because you had to know certain people. Tamworth had dealers but they were all mental. The only people that they dealt to were mentalists. There’s a story I can remember about my brother buying a piano off [ Tamworth scenester ] Vince Watts, and when he went round to Vince Watts’ house, Vince had chopped the piano up. My brother said, ‘Vince, I brought a van.’ And Vince looked at him and he said, ‘Shit, I thought you’d come in your little Citroën, so I thought I’d make it easier.’”…

IN THE EARLY days of his career, Stewart was brought in as a session singer to add vocals to “In A Broken Dream”, a song by Australian rock band, Python Lee Jackson. All but forgotten by Rod himself, the song enjoyed an unexpected revival earlier this year, when American rapper A$AP Rocky sampled it for his song, “Everyday”. Stewart has now re-recorded the original for his new album, Another Country. “When I did it, I hadn’t broken through with ‘Maggie May’,” explains Stewart. “I did it for a set of carpets for me car. It was my mate who convinced me to do it. He ran a car showroom, and he said, ‘I’ve got this group come from Australia, but the singer’s not very good. Can you do a demo…

SINGER AND GUITARIST Johnny Jenkins (1939-2006) remains the nearly man of the Otis Redding story. It was Jenkins who auditioned for Stax – Otis was just the driver, valet and backing singer who ended up getting signed over his bandleader. And, after Redding’s death, Jenkins would occasionally let rip about his former protégé. “I knew about the prostitutes and the whores,” he said, “but nobody wants to hear none of that.” Jenkins was the star on Macon’s club scene when Otis emerged. “I thought my entire world rotated around Johnny Jenkins’ guitar,” said Phil Walden, who managed both Jenkins and Redding. “I was convinced he could have been the greatest thing in rock’n’roll.” Even Jimi Hendrix, who had relatives in Macon and would often visit the town, was impressed by…

LINDA RONSTADT CAPITOL, 1972 Her third album, a commercial failure, is now seen as a country-rock classic. And in assembling her backing band, Ronstadt inadvertently put the Eagles together, too… I had a hand in forming the Eagles, yes! But it was their talent and their mutual interaction that really did it. I asked my friend John Boylan if he’d help me put a band together. So we walked to The Troubadour one Monday night, and heard this band called Shiloh onstage. They were playing my version of “Silver Threads And Golden Needles” exactly off the record, including the guitar solo. So I thought, ‘Maybe I can just hire this band, they already know the arrangements!’ But I had some players already, so we went and asked Don Henley, the…

THOUGH FULL CIRCLE didn’t register much in popular culture, one track, “The Mosquito”, has become one of the band’s most enduring tracks across the globe. “I was on vacation down in Mexico,” remembers Krieger of the song, released as a single in 1972, “and these three local musicians came down out of the hills. They would sing mariachi stuff, and they had this one song about a mosquito and that inspired me. That was actually our biggest-selling single after Jim died because it was in Spanish and it did very well around the world. Not only in Latin countries, but in Europe. In fact there were a lot of covers, and some of them are pretty good.”…

JACK WHITE Lazaretto XL, 2014 White spent 18 months on his eccentric masterpiece, the second movement from his imperial blue period, even editing the compositions on a computer, to fully capture the nuances and range of emotion he sought to convey. Raucous, dense and dazzling, it became the biggest-selling vinyl album since 1994. THE KILLS Blood Pressures DOMINO, 2011 After her two-LP baptism of fire with The Dead Weather, Alison Mosshart returned to the relative normality of The Kills a more confident singer no longer afraid to reveal her uncertainties. This is snake-hipped garage-rock business as usual, but with a human heart under the icy exterior. QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE …Like Clockwork MATADOR, 2013 Outside Ver Wevver, multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita passes his time in The Raconteurs and QOTSA. Although…

!!! As If WARP Knock-kneed dancefloor moves on eclectic sixth outing !!! [commonly pronounced “Chk Chk Chk”] have always landed a few steps from greatness: with each album, some of their moves are right, but they’re just as likely to cock things up big-time. Certainly, they’re a group that like to take risks; but six albums in, they’re now coming across as though they’re seriously indecisive, unable to take their upbeat dance-punk to its extremes. Tellingly, As If takes off when the group remove their vocals from centrestage – the highlights here are the chicken-scratch disco thud of “Funk (I Got This)”, and the woozy, plasmic funk/house hybrid of “All The Way”. JON DALE CHANTAL ACDA The Sparkle In Our Flaws GLITTERHOUSE Sweet vulnerability from inventive Dutch singer-songwriter A partner…

Joe Jackson’s records have often had a deep, city-specific resonance – on I’m The Man , it was London, with Night And Day and Night And Day II , New York. But Fast Forward is themed around four different cities. “They’re all familiar and meaningful places to me,” explains Jackson of his choices, “but it really started with the songs. I had too many and I was looking for a way to organise them, so I decided to do a series of EPs and tackle four songs at a time. There were musicians I wanted to work with in all of these cities and they all said ‘Yes’, so that was exciting. And it ended up…

It’s 16 years since Minneapolis’ Frankie Lee began performing country songs in his hometown, but it’s taken until now for him to make his first album, American Dreamer . What took him so long? “I’ve had offers, but I wanted to live and go where life took me before I committed to this huge thing,” he explains. “I wanted experience to pull from.” Now he has it in abundance: after five years playing in local bars, he left school and “moved to the places where the music I liked came from”. First stop was Nashville where he immediately ran into Merle Haggard. Next came Memphis and then Austin, Texas, where he stayed for seven years, doing carpentry by day and watching bands and performing by night.…

What effect did the car accident and your recovery have on the making of Fading Frontier ? Any time something unexpected like that comes along out of nowhere and knocks you on your ass, you find a lot of time to re-evaluate your priorities. I had a broken pelvis and was bedridden. I had lots of time to catch up on reading and listening to piles of music. There was a lot of worry I’d suffer long-term consequences, and I’m very blessed that that was not the case. I found organising and arranging songs for the record to be a good distraction from the physical pain and discomfort. You’ve been saying that Fading Frontier is your favourite of Deerhunter’s albums – what do…

DOUG HREAM BLUNT My Name Is Doug Hream Blunt LUAKA BOP Lessons in love from San Francisco dream-funk outsider Championed by David Byrne and tipped by Ariel Pink, Doug Hream Blunt is the latest internet cult sensation to have his career kickstarted late in the day. That’s the story being peddled by Byrne’s label Luaka Bop, who found success with William Onyeabor, and there’s some truth in the tale. The British artist Dean Blunt, for example, took Blunt’s name after encountering Doug’s work and sampling his best-known track, “Gentle Persuasion”, in 2010. A Jimi Hendrix fan, Blunt appears to be an easygoing, regular guy who taught himself music at the age of 35 in evening classes in the late 1980s, then formed a band with his classmates and later recorded…

Envisioned as a three-piece, Trader Horne saw out their short lifespan as a duo after third man (Rod Stewart associate) Pete Sears made the introductions and went to the US. Remaining pair Judy Dyble (above right) and Jackie McAuley soon found common musical cause. “Opposites attract,” recalls McAuley. “I was a bit moody and felt Judy was a little vulnerable. But she put up with me.” The setup was a contrast to McAuley’s background in the rough and tumble Irish R’n’B scene, playing with Van Morrison and others. “Since I was a child, I could play several things, so it was delightful to have all the instruments around the studio when we recorded.” John Peel gave them their name – and Judy’s electric autoharp. “There wasn’t…

BY OUR SELVES OPENS OCTOBER 2 Andrew Kötting retraces the footsteps of poet John Clare through the English countryside, accompanied by Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and Toby Jones. OPENS OCTOBER 7 Michael Fassbender plots to be king hereafter with Marion Cotillard as his wife. MACBETH THE WHO: LIVE IN HYDE PARK OPENS OCTOBER 7 From the band’s show earlier this year, with backstage interviews and testimonials from famous fans, Paul Weller included. OPENS OCTOBER 9 Alejandro Amenábar’s first film since 2009’s Agora finds Ethan Hawke as a detective investigating a sexual abuse case during the 1990s. REGRESSION SUFFRAGETTE OPENS OCTOBER 12 Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep head up the suffrage movement during the early 20th Century. CRIMSON PEAK OPENS OCTOBER 16 Gothic fantasia…

MAY 12, 1973. Outside the Earl’s Court Arena in London, a young David Bowie fan shows off his T-shirt to a photographer from the German magazine, Bravo. Two days earlier, the boy – known, at the time, as John Ritchie – had celebrated his 16th birthday. One of his fellow students at Hackney Technical College, John Lydon, described Ritchie, with his Bowie mullet, as a “clothes hound of the worst kind”. “He’d do silly things to get his hair to stick up, because it never occurred to him to use hairspray,” Lydon told Jon Savage in his book, England’s Dreaming. “He’d lie upside down with his head in an oven.” This “poser”, as Lydon called him, grew up of course to become Sid Vicious, the apotheosis of what many saw,…

‘‘I TELL YOU WHO I took great encouragement from in my earlier days,” says John Cooper Clarke. “Pam Ayres. When I used to say I was going to make money out of poetry, it was, ‘You’re crazy. Nobody made anything out of poetry.’ But her victories on Opportunity Knocks proved them all wrong. She won week after week after week for about a year. Which was good going in those days.” It transpires that Clarke is in an unusually reflective mood when he speaks to Uncut. “I am not much of a looker-back,” he says. Today, though, Clarke is considering the first recorded collection of his work, Anthologia, which stretches back to John Peel sessions and Old Grey Whistle Test appearances from the late ’70s. “I can’t believe how nasal…

THUNDERBITCH Thunderbitch WWW.THUNDABETCH.COM Not content with making one of the albums of 2015, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard returns with a heavier, greasier and just about as much fun side project. FLOATING POINTS Elaenia PLUTO A DJing associate of Four Tet stretches way beyond the dancefloor. Radiohead remixed by Teo Macero, anyone? THE NECKS Vertigo RER MEGACORP/NORTHERN SPY Latest longform perambulation from the world’s greatest jazz/minimalist freestyle trio, at their most diffuse and unsettling. BILL MacKAY & RYLEY WALKER Land Of Plenty WHISTLER A further embarrassment of riches from 2015’s premium guitar tyro, here duelling with MacKay on a set of meditative and elaborate instrumental jams. WEYES BLOOD Cardamom Times MEXICAN SUMMER Natalie Mering, uncanny bard of Rockaway Beach, returns with a career-topping EP, operating in the exalted space…

EAST OF THE Hollywood sign and a mile and a half straight downhill from the three imposing Art Deco orbs of the Griffith Observatory lies Los Feliz. It’s a town whose history is stowed discreetly beneath the lacy purple jacaranda and ancient pepper trees that line its well-scrubbed sidewalks. This is where Walt Disney drew his first sketches of Mickey Mouse and where Courtney Love first showed her “Celebrity Skin”, stripping off at Jumbo’s Clown Room for the lordly sum of $300. Since 2008 or so, the hipster glitterati have been increasingly congregating here in their hoodies, yoga pants and cross-bodies, clutching paper cups from The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and sharing counter space with the likes of Ryan Gosling, Scarlett Johansson and Dakota Johnson. But Los Feliz wasn’t…

‘‘THE MUSIC I listen to tends to influence the music I’m making,” Newsom says. “As a result, I haven’t listened to anything in about five years. I’m finally listening to records again. It’s been a hard time for my husband as he is one of those people who wants music on all the time, and we’ve had to negotiate that. But now he’s allowed to put on records constantly. I listened a little to things that I wanted to have in my mind as references or touchstones, but nothing just for pleasure. I have a list of songs that were connected specifically to what I was doing, which was mixing the record. The songs didn’t connect to the songwriting or the arrangements, but I did deep listening to those records…

AN OLD RAINCOAT WON’T EVER LET YOU DOWN MERCURY, 1970 Stewart’s solo debut, released the year after he joined the Faces. Guests include bandmates past (Steam Hammer and Jeff Beck Group alumni) and present (Wood, McLagan). A strong mix of originals and covers (“Street Fighting Man”, “Dirty Old Town”, “Handbags & Gladrags”). GASOLINE ALLEY MERCURY, 1970 Released only four months after… Raincoat , Gasoline Alley was the first album to feature early key collaborator Martin Quittenton, as well as all four of Stewart’s Faces bandmates. EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY MERCURY, 1971 Rod’s first solo No 1 album, buoyed along by “Maggie May” (a co-write with Quittenton) and Stewart’s own “Mandolin Wind”. Again, all the Faces contribute their own brand of blurry, ragged…

I KNEW ROD The Mod was a great singer. I’d seen him with Jeff Beck. Once, I bumped into him on the stairs at Immediate. We smiled at each other and that was it, not knowing that we’d have a lifetime friendship. But I first met Rod formally at rehearsals after The Small Faces split up. Mac, Ronnie [Lane] and myself used to get together once a week at the Stones’ warehouse on Bermondsey Street. We didn’t quite know what we were going to do, but we felt really close to each other so we decided to play once a week and see where we’d go. Ronnie Lane brought down his new neighbour, Ronnie Wood, who was playing bass for the Jeff Beck Band, but he switched to guitar. We…

THE STAX STUDIO, on 926 East McLemore Avenue, was resurrected a decade ago with help from a $30million gift from an unnamed philanthropic Memphis businessman. But, like every other musical landmark in Memphis – Sun Studios, Graceland, even Beale Street – it’s now a museum. “The building was torn down in 1989,” says Steve Cropper, “but they found some architectural blueprints and recreated it, almost brick for brick.” Amid the arcana – an Otis Redding stage shirt, Isaac Hayes’s gold-trimmed Cadillac, Booker T’s old Hammond – is an eerily accurate representation of the recording studio. The building – a long-disused 1920s cinema called the Capitol Theater – was discovered in late 1959 by staff producer Chips Moman (who later left Stax to found the nearby American Sound Studio). “Chips was…

THE SUCCESS OF Otis Blue , and the growing fees that he could command for a live show, had made Redding a wealthy man. Even as early 1963, Otis was taking $2,000 for a gig. Two years later, he was getting five times that – big money in those days, especially for someone often playing four times a week. By 1964 he’d moved his young family into the Shurlington section of East Macon, the most upscale area available to blacks in a segregated town. By the release of Otis Blue in late ’65, he’d instructed realtors to scout Georgia to find a 300-acre plot where he could build his dream home. That plot of rolling green farmland in Round Oak, Jones County,…

AFTER THE RELEASE of An American Prayer , Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek reunited a few more times… DECEMBER 8, 1978 LE PALACE, PARIS To promote the release of An American Prayer , the trio performed a short set in the city where Morrison died. Opening with “Love Me Two Times”, they also played “Light My Fire”, “Close To You” and Prayer’s “The Ghost Song”. JUNE 16, 1980 WHISKY A GO GO, LOS ANGELES Performing with guest vocalists, including Michael Des Barres and Charles Duncan, The Doors reunited to promote the release of Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive . Songs played include “LA Woman”, “Twentieth Century Fox” and “Roadhouse Blues”. JANUARY 12, 1993 CENTURY PLAZA…

HOW DID THIS album come about? Well, making this Dead Weather record was a very fast experience. We wrote four songs for this two years ago and put those out as singles, and then we thought we could do that every time we get together, and at the end of that journey we’ll have a record. But it didn’t happen. Then, all of a sudden a couple of months ago, we had four or five days when we were all in the same town [Nashville] together and went in and wrote eight more songs, mixed it and recorded it, everything. It all happened so fast. Then we were faced with the dilemma of what to do with it. Can’t tour ’cos we’re all so busy. Shall we sit on it,…

WHEN JOHN GRANT was nominated for “Best International Act” at last year’s Brit Awards, it seemed like the latest improbable chapter in an increasingly surreal biography. Here was an unorthodox, confessional singer-songwriter and pianist, raised in Colorado and now based in Reykjavík; a gay man who looks like a rather benign Viking; a recovering alcoholic and coke-addict who speaks five languages; a middle-aged man who announced his HIV-positive status at a Royal Festival Hall gig; who co-wrote a Eurovision Song Contest entry, who toured the UK with a symphony orchestra. And here he was, at a major award ceremony, on a shortlist with Bruno Mars, Justin Timberlake, Eminem and Drake. It seems even more improbable given that Grant was well into his forties before he’d reached any kind of success.…

After 2013’s successful debut hook-up Love Has Come For You , Steve Martin and Edie Brickell (pictured left) return at the back end of October with So Familiar . The release of the album, which was partly inspired by the pair’s recent collaborative musical Bright Star , coincides with Martin picking up a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association. The following month sees the return of roots legend Joe Ely, whose Panhandle Rambler marks his first studio effort for over four years. Ely calls it an audio painting of his home territory of West Texas, for which he’s joined by longtime sidemen Lloyd Maines (acoustic slide), Gary Nicholson (acoustic guitar)…

Was the record made remotely? About 95 per cent of it, which is not unlike the way I’ve been working for a while – even on The National’s last record, I did all my vocals out here in LA. You’ve said it’s your most personal record. It has the most autobiographical foundation to it. It’s the most I’ve dug into my past. One of the perspectives is of a Cincinnati teenager who’s falling in love with music and maybe a person – they’re falling in love together through music. Why reflect on your teenage years? I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff from the ’80s. There are a lot of Minutemen references on this record: their documentary We Jam Econo was an inspiration, mostly because…

Biblical of name and of beard, Israel Nash fits a kind of psychedelic frontiersman template almost too perfectly. The creation myth of this, his fourth album, is full of elemental interventions and manly responses: a homemade studio in a place called Dripping Springs; a cataclysmic flood, just as recording sessions were about to begin; a staunch, all-hands-to-the-pump rescue and repair operation. Nash, though, is adept at making a romance out of a crisis, and so much of Silver Season pitches him as a cosmic soul, toughing it out with nature. These are songs packed with fire and flood and “vim and vigor”, where Samhain bonfires burn beneath Hill Country stars, and where our hero can present himself, with a more or less straight face, as a noble visionary. There’s a…

To the four members of Promised Land Sound, still in their early twenties, Kings Of Leon are the elder statesmen of Nashville’s indie-rock scene, while Jack White, whose Third Man issued a PLS single in 2013, is an inspirational role model. In various combinations, guitarists Sean Thompson and Peter Stringer-Hye, lead singer/bass player Joe Avery and his drummer brother Evan have been playing music in Nashville underground bands since they were teenagers. “Back then, if you were somewhat ‘weird’ and ‘alternative’, the only fun thing was playing music,” Thompson recalls. “There was a vibrant house-show circuit while we were in high school, which set the tone for the next few years. The Nashville show scene is wonderfully inclusive and encompasses a ton of different genres.” So does the band’s range…

Californian psychonauts Wand are anything but slackers – in fact, they’ve now made three albums in a year. “It wasn’t intentional,” says songwriter Cory Hanson. “I hate the idea of us being a band that makes records ‘in a hurry’. We make records whenever we feel like making them.” Wand’s latest is 1000 Days , a deeply trippy LP that has a poppier touch than March’s dense Golem , which reproduced their live performance on record – “really loud and fuzzy and thick”. A different approach was taken for 1000 Days . “We wanted to make ourselves available to chance, chaos, lack of control, and give ourselves permission to have no idea what we were doing,” says Hanson. “Writing and recording…

You caught a few of those Velvet Underground shows at Max’s Kansas City… It was a residency – I believe it started in the last week of June through to the middle of August, and they played five nights a week, I guess. They were just the house band. Truly local. My memory of dancing to The Velvet Underground upstairs in Max’s is certainly a cherished one. It’s hard to emphasise how informal it was. You’d go to your local, have a beer and watch The Velvet Underground. What could be better than that? When it was released, you reviewed Loaded for Rolling Stone , and were somewhat critical of the production. As a young, impressionistic rock critic… [ laughs ]…

“There’s always been a bleak undercurrent in all my songs,” former Strawberry Switchblade singer Rose McDowall tells Uncut . “Even – and often especially – the poppier ones. People always ask me what ‘Since Yesterday’ is about – it’s about the day nuclear war breaks out and destroys the world. I am both the Strawberry and the Switchblade, happy and sad at the same time.” McDowall’s roots lie in the same Glasgow punk-rock undergrowth that nurtured the Postcard Records scene – ‘Strawberry Switchblade’ was the title of an unreleased Orange Juice song – but her overground pop career did not stop her exploring darker corners. She lent her voice to records by Coil, Current 93 and Psychic TV, sharing their enthusiasm for practical magic – while…

As we head towards the end of the year, new albums traditionally give way to more archival releases. That’s not to say there’s not some promising new stuff to look forward to in November, of course. For one, Elbow’s Guy Garvey releases his first solo album, the 10-track Courting The Squall , while Rod Stewart returns with Another Country . Elsewhere, Jeffrey Lewis returns with Manhattan , his first album in four years, Dave Gahan is back in collaboration with Soulsavers, and Australian psych adventurers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard follow up May’s jammy Quarters with the totally acoustic Papier Mâché Dream Balloon . In our archive section, there are deluxe reissues of…

The first album I got into The Damned Damned Damned Damned 1977 I was in the Damned fan club, they sent me a rubber bat and a giveaway single, “Stretcher Case”. I went to see The Damned a lot. I used to sort of stare up at Dave Vanian and think, ‘You know, maybe I could have a go at that.’ I was talking to a mate of mine recently, and I brought up The Damned. He said, “Ah right, now it all makes sense. What you do up there is more Dave Vanian than Mick Jagger.” And I was like, “Yeah, it kinda is.” A record I’ve played repeatedly David Bowie David Live 1974 Both Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs had a big impact on me, but this live…

Two more mags for your shopping list this month. There’s a new Uncut Ultimate Music Guide out now, this one dedicated to the entire chaotic career of Fleetwood Mac. And this month, our mammoth History Of Rock project reaches 1967, Sgt Pepper , The Monkees and the immaculate Jimi Hendrix. For more details, visit www. uncut.co.uk Jerry Lee Lewis bade farewell to London on Sept 6, as part of a valedictory tour leading up to his 80th birthday on Sept 29. The London Palladium show climaxed with Ringo Starr and Robert Plant arriving onstage with a birthday cake, leading the assembled in a heartfelt rendition of “Happy Birthday”. In other farewell-based news, Black Sabbath’s The End tour is scheduled to…

SOME BANDS SIMPLY move too fast. So it proved with Britain’s first, and possibly last, all-female ska septet, The Bodysnatchers. “Within six months we’d gone from rehearsing in a Camden Town basement to being on Top Of The Pops,” reflects former lead singer Rhoda Dakar. “It was insane.” Energised, politicised, wildly enjoyable, The Bodysnatchers came and went so quickly, they neglected to leave an album behind, an oversight partially rectified 35 years later with the release of Rhoda Dakar Sings The Bodysnatchers. Dakar joined the band in ’79, aged 20, not long before they signed a two-single deal with 2-Tone. Their first release, the upbeat skank of “Let’s Do Rocksteady”, hit the Top 30 in March 1980, leading to that sole TOTP performance. The same year, The Bodysnatchers joined The…

1 ISRAEL NASH LA Lately To begin this month, an epic swoon from one Israel Nash, a Texas-based singer-songwriter whose fourth album, Silver Season, confirms him as a major practitioner of what we refer to as Cosmic American Music. The next player on a continuum that stretches from CSNY and Gene Clark to My Morning Jacket and Jonathan Wilson. 2 LOS LOBOS Made To Break Your Heart There’s plenty of variety on the East LA wolfpack’s latest album, Gates Of Gold, their first in five years. “Made To Break Your Heart” is a masterful assertion of core strengths, right down to David Hidalgo’s gritty and expansive guitar break. Oddly reminiscent of Stealer’s Wheel’s “Stuck In The Middle With You”, too. 3 PROMISED LAND SOUND She Takes Me There The young…

IF YOU’D TUNED into Top Of The Pops one night in September 1981, you might have seen a performance by Liverpool’s The Teardrop Explodes. Their single, “Passionate Friend”, was rising up the charts on the way to its No 25 peak and, to celebrate, the band’s singer and songwriter gyrated on top of a white grand piano, clad in voluminous leather trousers and with an equally voluminous blond hairdo. On top of that piano, Julian Cope looked the very picture of an early ’80s teen idol. In reality, though, he was tripping on acid and terrified that his feet were sinking into the syrupy piano lid. Come 1983, Cope wasn’t on TV anymore. “I had this game I used to play with [then-girlfriend, now wife] Dorian in ’83 that really…

“In the mid-’80s, there weren’t many rock’n’rollers playing fragile-sounding songs. If there was any fragility in a song, it was often bust up by an electronic production, but I was offering something that was restricted musically. That was the problem with a lot of the ’80s; people didn’t have to accept restrictions, the new keyboards offered so many sounds, but it’d be exhausting to work out which one you’d use. ‘So, that’s awe-inspiring… oh, but that sounds like the fall of Saigon… oh, but this sounds like the fall of Singapore… Yeah, well, how about the one that sounds like the fall of the local corner shop because somebody’s raided it? Can you keep it down a bit!?’ That’s why I turned to toy keyboards.”…

‘‘ICAN’T SPEAK highly enough of Jeff. We’ve never seen eye to eye. We’ve never been close mates. But we’re close as musicians and in respect for each other. We tried to make an LP together before I did Time , a blues album, but it didn’t quite work out. But I haven’t given up on him. He’s got some demons. I think what it was with Jeff – and I hope he takes this the right way, and I’m sure he’s changed now – he wasn’t a good bandleader. He never looked after me and Ronnie. He may have just been a bit envious of Woody and my brotherly relationship. I think he fired Ronnie about three times, and got him back again. There were some…

Easter 1973: Michael Rother, then of Neu!, travels to Forst to jam with the Cluster duo of Moebius and Roedelius January 1974: Now called Harmonia, the trio release their debut album, Musik Von Harmonia . Before their next album, Cluster record Zuckerzeit with Rother producing, while the guitarist returns to Neu! for their Neu! 75 record June 1975: Harmonia record Deluxe at their studio in Forst with Conny Plank’s mobile recording equipment August 1975: The Deluxe album is released, accompanied by a severely edited single of “Deluxe (Immer Wieder)” backed by a cut-down “Monza (Rauf Und Runter)”…

“YOU DON’T GET to meet many actual geniuses in the music industry,” says Steve Cropper. “But Tom was one of them.” Tom Dowd was the link between Stax and its parent label, Atlantic Records. “Tom put me under his wing,” says Cropper. “He taught me how to engineer sessions, how to read a VU meter, how to mix, where to place microphones, and so on. He’d say, ‘I like the way you write, but I’m gonna give you a coupla tips…’ and within a few months I’d written about half a dozen hits! “He was recording stereo sessions before anyone had the equipment to play them on! When stereo took off, he had a catalogue of old sessions by the likes of John Coltrane and Lionel Hampton, all recorded on…

IN 1994, The Lost Paris Tapes: The Private Tapes Of James Douglas Morrison circulated among bootleggers, purporting to contain the very final recordings made by Morrison. Apparently, two reels of tape were found in Morrison’s apartment on Rue Beautreillis. The first featured a 37-minute poetry session recorded by producer John Haeny at Elektra Sound Recorders in Los Angeles. Material from this recording was incorporated on An American Prayer . The second reel is more mysterious. Running to 15 minutes, it features a drunken Morrison improvising a jam of “Orange County Suite”, accompanied by two unknown musicians. The story was broken by a German fan publication, The Doors Quarterly Magazine , where the magazine’s founder, Rainer Moddemann, reported he had been…

Bright Lights EP WARNER BROS., 2010 Clark’s major label debut, after a couple of albums on his own Hotwire Unlimited set-up, serves as a four-song introduction to his fierily descriptive guitar licks and impassioned voice. The title track is a spectacular homage to bluesman Jimmy Reed, though the real keeper is a live, acoustic extrapolation of “When My Train Pulls In” that roams freely for eight minutes. Blak And Blu WARNER BROS., 2012 Seemingly wary of being consigned to the blues ghetto, Clark creates a dashing hybrid of R’n’B, garage-rock, hip-hop and soul, peppered with smart grooves and erudite solos. “Ain’t Messin’ ’Round” is infused with a great Staxy vibe, “Please Come Home” picked up a Grammy and “Next Door Neighbour Blues” is a classic exemplar of slide guitar. Gary…

“Making this record was excruciating at times,” says Katie Monks, who fronts Toronto’s fierce, intoxicating, guitar-bashing alt.rockers Dilly Dally. “The last eight months, I gave up everything in my life in order to focus on this project. I gave up my job, broke out of a beautiful relationship, moved out of my apartment, even said goodbye to my cats.” Monks and Dilly Dally co-founder Liz Ball have been working together since 2009, but only when drummer Benjamin Reinhartz and bassist Jimmy Tony Billy Rowlinson joined last year did they muster the “super energy blast” required to fully coalesce as a band. Now they have a terrific debut album, Sore , which combines contemporary noise-pop elements with echoes of classic ’80s alternative bands like Pixies and Sonic…

Can you tell us about the creek breaking and how it affected the studio and the album? The entire state of Texas has been in drought for a number of years, but that’s not the case any longer. The day we were to start tracking, the 100-year flood rolled in. The first four days of our recording session were devoted to digging French drains, sandbagging and cleaning out the studio where a wet-weather creek erupted from the flash flood and ripped through the building. So that was the beginning of Silver Season . Those situations make an album and you can hear those things all over the record. But besides the music, and at a greater level even, it was a great showing of the dedication…

IT’S HARD NOT to hear a glimmer of gratitude in Bradford Cox’s voice as, not long into his band’s thrilling and unexpectedly affirmative seventh album, he sings, “I’m living my life, I’m living my life.” The idea that Deerhunter’s frontman has a stake in the here and now also seems to elicit a measure of surprise – he repeats the phrase as if he’s trying to convince himself that it’s true. Then again, a life-threatening encounter with a swiftly moving hunk of steel and glass is bound to make anyone consider their place in the world. Though Cox has been reluctant to divulge details about the car accident that left him hospitalised last December, the effect has clearly been profound. As he put it bluntly in an Instagram message while…

Describe the mood while you were making ‘Melt’. The album is very dark and when you listen to it, you get How did that famous ‘gated’ drum sound emerge? The Townhouse had this amazing stone room, plus the new SSL desk had compressors on them. It was a perfect storm. Peter will say he invented that drum sound, Hugh will say he did, and I will say I did. It was a group effort, but I had been using that idea before. Amazing to think his US record company, Atlantic, refused to release the album and dropped him… His A&R man at Atlantic would come to the studio to listen, and we would turn the air-conditioning to freezing just before he arrived because we didn’t want him to be comfortable…

Band Of Gypsys CAPITOL, 1970 Jimi dumps the Experience for the earthier rhythm section of Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. The result was a tougher, funkier sound, its R’n’B leanings forcing more focus to Jimi’s playing on “Message Of Love” and “Power To Love”. In contrast comes the explosive 12-minute improvisation of “Machine Gun”, bringing the Vietnam War to the Fillmore East. BBC Sessions MCA, 1998  Not strictly a live LP (the audience were tuned to the radio) this is what the Experience sounded like without the Marshall stacks. It’s Jimi as pop star, playing Dylan, The Beatles, Cream, plus tough versions of “Hey Joe”, and a “Killing Floor” that nails the blues to the floor. Live At Woodstock MCA, 1999 Released as a single LP in 1994, the 1999…

Discipline EG, 1981 On its release, the first Crimson LP in eight years – and the first of a trilogy of questing releases including 1982’s Beat , and 1984’s Three Of A Perfect Pair , feat. Adrian Belew and Tony Levin. Experimental, angular and immersed in new wave, free jazz and post-punk, it remains an essential exploration of rock’s outer limits. The Power To Believe SANCTUARY, 2003/DGM 2008 The 1990s/2000s saw a spate of live releases, including the King Crimson Collector’s Club archive sets. But for Crimson’s 13th (and most recent) studio album, Fripp – now flanked by Belew, Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto – paid homage to the mighty riff. It’s big, accessible, and totally rocking. A Scarcity Of…

TRACEY THORN Solo: Songs And Collaborations 1982-2015 CAROLINE EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL Walking Wounded/Temperamental (reissues 1996, 1999) EDSEL Trace elements: ex-Marine Girl’s fall and rise Adjusting her make-up in a compact mirror on the back seat of a limousine on the front cover of Everything But The Girl’s 1996 bestseller Walking Wounded, Tracey Thorn was at a peak of sorts. Her star turn on Massive Attack’s “Protection” in 1994 and the Todd Terry remix of EBTG’s “Missing” the following year had given the jangle-pop sophisticate an unlikely dancefloor makeover. Since she and partner Ben Watt had been in fashion limbo since the late 1980s, she had every right to milk her moment, but – as her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen detailed – she was happy to get out while she…

THE LOBSTER Director Yorgos Lanthimos Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C Reilly Opens 16 October Cert 15 7/10 SICARIO Director Denis Villeneuve Starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro Opens 8 October Cert 15 9/10 THEY WILL HAVE TO KILL US FIRST: MALIAN MUSIC IN EXILE Director Johanna Schwartz Opens October 23 Cert 15 6/10 THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION Director Stanley Nelson Jr Opens October 23 Cert tbc 7/10 BEASTS OF NO NATION Director Cary Fukunaga Starring Idris Elba, Abraham Attah, Richard Pepple Opens 16 October Cert 18 9/10…