Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i UNCUT

“Terrablizza/whirlissimo/vanilla swarm/icyskidski/robber’s veil” BEFORE I dig into this, a couple of bits of housekeeping. Firstly, apologies to Nick Hasted, who we inadvertently omitted to credit for last month’s Nick Cave cover story. Secondly, a quick heads up to all print subscribers that this issue comes with a second CD – the latest instalment in our ongoing Selected Works series, this one celebrating Cassandra Jenkins. You might have noticed Cassandra’s recent album My Light, My Destroyer in our Albums Of The Year and we’re delighted to have been able to further support her work on this rather special, 5-track CD. If you’ve come to Cassandra’s music belatedly, this is a great way to catch up with some of her earlier recordings. There’s a lot going on inside this issue, of course…

I CAN’T believe it has now been over 20 years since a simple pub conversation about the vitriol of the early-’90s music press and some half-remembered sketches from Steve Wright In The Afternoon led to the first Sonic Cathedral night, which took place at The Legion in East London on October 23, 2004. It was supposed to be a one-off celebration of shoegaze (and all of its influences and inspirations), but ended up being the start of a journey that continues to this day. It was one of those gloriously messy, memorable nights. Emma Anderson and Phil King from Lush DJ’d, as did The Telescopes, while The Radio Dept played live. Andrew Weatherall was there; we swapped numbers and he’d DJ for us many times over the ensuing years, as…

THE four members of Slate realised they were on to something when they wrote “Remoter Heaven” at one of their first practice sessions. The Cardiff band formed in 2022, and within a couple of months they’d already set themselves a very high bar with the eight-minute monster that went on to open this year’s “Deathless” EP. “It made a lot of our other songs seem so small in comparison, they were almost overshadowed,” says singer Jack Shepherd. “But it gave us something to aspire to.” “Deathless” follows two earlier singles – “Tabernacl” and “St Agatha” – that collectively define the band’s epic, goth-tinged post-punk outlook, sitting somewhere between Fontaines DC and Echo & The Bunnymen. Slate have been astute enough to pace themselves and their listeners, holding back “Remoter Heaven”…

“For Tower Hill is crowded/With mothers weeping sore” Cold Blows The Rain BASIN ROCK THE Yorkshire Moors, wrote the novelist Emily Brontë, was a place to walk where your own nature would lead you. If only Emily had lived in the age of streaming and earbuds, she could have had the ideal soundtrack as she hiked away from the shadowy region, whose unsustaining vastness waxes drear. That soundtrack being Cold Blows The Rain, the first album prolific vocalist and freeform avant rocker Bridget Hayden has released with this trio, the Apparitions. It’s difficult to escape the shadowy regions of the Calder Valley, as the prevailing climate – as the album title implies – is in a mostly minor mode. Fretting drizzle and smoky fogs. About a half hour’s drive south-west…

Lights On A Satellite IN+OUT 8/10 ALTO saxophonist and bandleader Marshall Allen, member of avant-garde jazz ensemble Sun Ra Arkestra since 1957 and the group’s leader since 1995, turned 100 years old on May 25, 2024. Less than one month later, he entered the studio to record Lights On A Satellite with the full 24-member configuration. Pitched as a tribute to Allen and his remarkable tenure with the ensemble, the album is a fantastic ride along well-travelled spaceways, balancing Ra compositions with an eclectic mix of early 20th-century American music. The Arkestra was formed in the mid-1950s by pianist/keyboardist Sun Ra, who would make a name for himself as a seriously prolific composer, tightly disciplined bandleader, explorer of experimental music and philosophy, and pioneer of Afrofuturism. He claimed to be…

Cosmic Seeds SOUL JAZZ 8/10 YOU can make a compelling case that over the past 10 years or so Melbourne has been the most fertile city in the world for new music. In the past decade it’s given us not just Courtney Barnett and her Milk! label, but also cornucopian prog adventurers King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, jangling indie-rock ramblers Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and the riotous pub punkers Amyl And The Sniffers. Tim Wold, guitarist and synth ace in Brown Spirits, points to a 2011 gig by garage-psych juggernauts Thee Oh Sees in Melbourne’s neighbouring city of Geelong as being the scene’s year zero moment. “It was like our equivalent of the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall 1976,” he tells Uncut, laughing at the grandiosity…

WE’RE NEW HERE The NYC renegades on a fired up trilogy “WE always felt that the landscape of America felt haunted,” Straw Man Army tell Uncut. “Our music is a response to that eeriefeeling we had growing up. The information we have learned, looking into our history, is why we are political. It is impossible not to be enraged.” Owen Deutsch and Sean Fentress met at high school in Chicago and started jamming together, inspired by Can and Pink Floyd. But when they formed Straw Man Army in 2018, they wanted a medium suitable to express their rage. “Punk opened our minds to internationalism,” they write, now based in New York. “To networks of people trading music and ideas, and the politicisation of aesthetics to mobilise anger and frustration.” Debut…

Agartha: Personal Meditation Music (reissue, 1986) IMPORTANT 8/10 MEREDITH YOUNG-SOWERS didn’t exactly compose the tracks on Personal Meditation Music, her sprawling debut from 1986. Instead, she claimed that she acted merely as a conduit for a non-physical being known to her as Mentor, who had been communing with her since 1981 and passing along wisdom from a higher plane of existence. After moving her family to rural New Hampshire and founding a spiritual publishing company with her husband, she compiled Mentor’s teachings into a book called Agartha: A Journey To The Stars and later into this ambitious boxset of channeled music, which encompassed seven cassettes and was sold almost exclusively at New Age bookshops. Young-Sowers – or Agartha, as Mentor renamed her – was not really a musician and even…

JONATHAN BARNBROOK has worked with Damien Hirst and designed the sleeves for David Bowie’s last two albums, but even he was thrilled to get the opportunity to collaborate with Kate Bush. His role has been to create the typography for recent projects, starting with the logo for Bush’s record label Fish People and then lettering for the recent Illustrated Editions. “I was planning to take a sabbatical when Paul Simmons called to say Kate wanted to do a project. I love her music and a chance like this doesn’t come along very often, so I had to say yes. The initial project was the typography for the Fish People logo. I created a fantastical story for each idea and hidden in the website is one of the stories we wrote…

DISNEY + 7/10 “…HUSH li’l children, you’ll soon understand/The Beatles are coming, they’re gonna hold your hand…” That’s Bob Dylan, of course, stepping sly as Dr Seuss’s shadow into one of the most goosebumpy sections in the miasmic course of “Murder Most Foul”, his uncanny 2020 meditation on the psychic ruptures and sleights of hand set rippling by the assassination of John F Kennedy. For a promising minute as Beatles ’64 begins, with a montage of JFK’s most stirring speeches and newsreel clips depicting the nation sunk in mourning in the aftermath of his killing, all hope and shock, space race and segregation, it seems as if director David Tedeschi’s new documentary on the group’s first visit to the USA – provoking a new mania a scant 11 weeks after…

ROBIN Pecknold confessed to a case of nerves when kicking off his first ever solo tour in Woodstock’s Levon Helm Studios. This rustic barn – where Helm held court in his final years, hosting shows with many great musicians – is full of history, so it was fitting that Pecknold packed his set with covers: Judee Sill’s “The Kiss” and “Lopin’ Along Thru The Cosmos”, Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” and “The Silky Veils of Ardor” (marvelling aloud at Mitchell’s “wild” chords and tunings), as well as “Morning of My Life” (aka “In The Morning”), an early Bee Gees nugget Pecknold has made his own in recent years. It was fitting that Pecknold packed his set with covers He also played Arthur Russell’s “Close My Eyes” and the traditional “Silver Dagger”, recorded…

TEENAGE Fanclub’s Norman Blake is awaiting a delivery of logs to his cottage in the Clyde Valley when Uncut catches up with him. “There’s no gas supply here,” he says. “Last year I had storage heaters, and they were really, really expensive. Hence the logs.” On the upside, Blake’s move to the countryside a year ago has yielded an album of glorious autumnal songwriting in collaboration with Love And Money frontman James Grant and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler. “Norman’s place is really lovely,” says Butler. “Every time I go there it’s just a peaceful few days.” Now settled under the moniker Butler Blake & Grant – “I think I’d like to be Steven Stills,” jokes Grant – the group have done everything in the wrong order. They went on…

Friar Tuck HEAD HERITAGE 8/10 ROCKING out in the margins, Julian Cope has been on a roll in recent years. 2020’s Self Civil War was his finest record in 25 years, and 2022’s England Expectorates was almost as good (bonus points for the melodic nail-bomb of “Cunts Can Fuck Off”). Then came last year’s Robin Hood, without Cope’s name on the packaging, and now Friar Tuck, also mysteriously cloaked. It appears, as all his music has since 1997’s Rite2, on Cope’s own Head Heritage label (a vinyl edition is on its way too, his first since 2017’s Drunken Songs): that means home recordings and low production values on one hand, but direct and fluid expression on the other. Basically, he’s free to do what he wants, with all the good and…

Unraveling In Your Hands SELF-RELEASED 8/10 IT’S been nine long years since English guitarist James Blackshaw released his last album, Summoning Suns. Up until that point, he’d been churning out music with almost alarming frequency, and between 2003 and 2015, he averaged at least an album a year, a gorgeous run of music that shifted from intimate guitar soli ritual to expansive, galaxy-swallowing, epic compositions. Not to mention collaborations with similarly quixotic artists like Pantaleimon and Lubomyr Melnyk, and appearances on albums by Current 93, Myrninerest, Peter Wright and Michael Gira. But everything went quiet after Summoning Suns. As it turns out, Blackshaw was tiring of the long haul that was making a living through music; it was never the most secure and predictable of careers to start with. He…

Africanism  AFRICA SEVEN 8/10 FOR more than 55 years, The Last Poets have been documenting a dystopian world. Formed in the cultural mayhem that followed Martin Luther King’s murder in 1968, they quickly became legendary for their incendiary verses – from “Wake Up, Niggers” to “White Man’s Got A God Complex” – which are always cited as an early incarnation of hip-hop. They were filled with witty, shocking and provocative lines, but the presentation was often deliberately austere. If their early disciple Gil Scott-Heron would leaven his political diatribes with some soothing baritone crooning, The Last Poets denied us such bourgeois deviation: not once did they even hint at singing, and for a long time the only instrumentation that backed them was he stark sound of a conga or djembe…

“Makes no difference if you change my name/In my heart I’ll remain the same” Sufferer Sounds DISCIPLES HE went by many names. Blackbeard. The Dub Band. African Stone. The 4th Street Orchestra. Dennis Matumbi. Today, though, they simply call him Dennis Bovell MBE. Bovell was one of the central figures in the great flowering of homegrown UK reggae in the 1970s and ’80s, and surely the most adaptable. A multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, sound system selector, chart hitmaker, architect of lovers rock, and an in-demand producer for everyone from dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson to post-punk groups like The Pop Group and The Slits – Bovell did it all and has the box of dusty dubplates to prove it. Despite remix work for the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Animal Collective and The…

DEWAYNE “Blackbyrd” McKnight is preaching the Headhunters gospel. “Funk is a state of mind, funk is a way of life, and funk is also a feel,” says the band’s former guitarist. “‘God Make Me Funky’ is all the elements of what funk is, but it doesn’t stop there. It takes you into a realm of what is possible. Since its inception, the word funk didn’t identify in any way with jazz. Ours was one of the bands that changed that.” In 1973, Herbie Hancock released the avant-jazz album Sextant, his final recording with the experimental Mwandishi sextet. It was time for a change. He set about forming a new group to pursue a more commercially minded fusion of jazz, funk and rock. “The Sextant group was not bringing in the…

AS executive producer of Inkubus Animation Studio, GAYLE MARTIN has created the animation for Little Shrew (Snowflake), the short film Kate Bush directed to support the War Child charity with a soundtrack of “Snowflake”. Working from illustrator Jim Kay’s drawings, Inkubus helped Bush realise her vision. “Kate is a workaholic. Whatever she works on, whether it’s music or animation, it is 150 per cent. I’ve never worked with anybody like her before. She came to the studio through a friend, an animator called Teddy Hall, who her agent knew in the 1980s. She had been working with Jim Kay, who had established the overall look fo the Little Shrew and we took it from there. I was very excited as I am a huge Kate Bush fan and used to…

NICKEL BOYS Back in 2016, off the back of the breakthrough success of his novel The Underground Railroad, the last thing that Colson Whitehead felt like writing was another deep, dark book about the legacy of slavery. America, however, had other ideas. He channelled all his fear and loathing at the first election of Donald Trump into The Nickel Boys. For a postmodern fabulist, it was his most straightforward narrative yet – the tale of two black boys, Elwood and Turner, detained at the Nickel Academy, a barbaric reform school in 1960s Florida, closely modelled on the real life Dozier School, which only closed in 2011 and was subsequently found to be the site of hundreds of deaths. Now, as we embark on the fresh hell of the second Trump…

MISSING IN ACTION I have lived to the age of 63 without having ever been moved to write to a music publication to complain about an omission from a Best Of The Year list. But now I have succumbed. Not that I would want to complain about any of the LPs that made your list [Take 333, Review Of The Year issue], despite the horrible sound of Wild God. I’d like to know which Bad Seeds share my views on that, but I guess we’ll never know. The live gig at Leeds, though, was the best of my life, so fair enough. But another great gig was seeing Villagers at Wylam Brewery in Newcastle, following their terrific album, That Golden Time. This intimate, intelligent and captivating set of tunes fails…

THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF GREAT MUSIC Get 13 issues of Uncut delivered to your door plus… Save money on the cover price A free CD every issue plus an exclusive subscriber-only CD once a year Essential reviews of the month’s new releases, reissues, films, books and music docs Exclusive interviews with legendary musicians and valiant newcomers The latest news, happenings and apocrypha from the world of Uncut PAY JUST £14.99 SAVING £47* RECEIVE A WELCOME GIFT CELEBRATING THE GENIUS OF KATE BUSH WORTH £10.99 PLUS! RECEIVE A FREE CD WITH EVERY ISSUE EASY WAYS TO SUBSCRIBE Limited time only. Gifts available while stocks last Order online at shop.kelsey.co.uk/UCP125 Call 01959 543 747** and quote ref: UCP125 TERMS AND CONDITIONS *UK Direct Debit and Continuous Card Payment offer only.…

Forever NEW WEST 8/10 Sparkling sixth heralds a self-reckoning for Nashville-based songwriter ON 2021’s Lately, Lilly Hiatt attempted to deal with the enforced lockdown by confronting her fears head on, eloquently mapping her solitary experience in reflective songs that sought some kind of personal resolution. Since then, she’s fallen in love, got married and adopted a dog – “all the things I’d always dreamed of doing” – but found the prospect of finally going back out on the road completely overwhelming, leading her to retreat further. For someone who’s previously struggled with depression, anxiety and addiction, it represented another crisis. Hiatt’s ultimate decision to live in the moment, to accept change and nurture a degree of self-worth, lies at the heart of Forever. Produced by her multi-instrumentalist husband Coley Hinson,…

UNSURPRISINGLY, Simon Joyner’s grief over the death of his son was for some time too devastating to admit creativity – in fact, it took him over a year to reignite it. “At first I preferred to retire from music becauseI didn’t want to face writing about it,” he explains. “I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to write about anything else until I did. One morning I started playing guitar again, in a circular pattern, and sang Owen’s name for over an hour – somewhere between religious chant and primal scream. It unlocked me; I sat down and started writing and it all came very quickly.” Joyner describes his use of different perspectives on Coyote Butterfly as “hoping to get close to a truth but knowing it’s impossible. Grief…

Let Me Comfort You: The Hush Rarities  HIGH MOON 8/10 WHEN Laurie Styvers died in 1998, aged 48, obituaries apparently entirely failed to recall her bohemian musical incarnation almost three decades earlier. No wonder, really. Recent years had been spent running an animal sanctuary in Texas, where she’d been born Laurette Stivers; her two albums, 1971’s Spilt Milk and 1973’s The Colorado Kid, were already long forgotten. Her one brush with success, her debut’s breezy, evergreen opener, “Beat The Reaper”, had also missed the charts even after British radio play, and despite Alan Freeman’s support, a follow-up 7”, The Colorado Kid’s playful, banjo-embellished “All American Long Haired Denimed Song-Writing Guitar Man”, joined her catalogue in obscurity. That’s how things might have remained had music historian Alec Palao and New York’s…

Shri Camel (reissue, 1980) REAL GONE MUSIC 9/10 FOR a while there, across the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s, Terry Riley became the friendly face of contemporary minimal composition. There he was, grinning amiably, superimposed over trees and sky on the cover of his best-known album, 1969’s A Rainbow In Curved Air, a countercultural goofball maverick with chops to spare, his music both spiraling in its hypnotic power, and remarkably easy to get on with. He crops up again in all kinds of contexts – an album with The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who he also replaced in La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s ’60s drone-dream collective, the Theatre of Eternal Music; collaborations with free jazz legend Don Cherry; an inspiration for The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”; myriad…

LOS Angeles, 2020. Although the city is in lockdown, a coffee shop has been opened for the morning for the exclusive use of two illustrious customers. James Mangold, the director of Walk The Line, is there to meet Bob Dylan, who has been quarantining in town since his Never Ending Tour was mothballed due to the pandemic. Sitting opposite one another in a booth, they are there to discuss Mangold’s plans for a movie based on Dylan’s first years in New York. The implication is his decision to go electric will eventually be titled A Complete Unknown. “On that very first meeting, as we sat together drinking coffee,” one of the first things Bob said to me was, ‘So what’s this movie about?’” Mangold tells Uncut. “The gracious way he…

SITTING beneath the outdoor heater in the smoking area of his local pub in Brentford wearing at least three black overcoats, Rat Scabies has alighted on a fundamental principle of punk rock. “Here’s the thing,” he says, expertly rolling a herbal cigarette. “It falls into two camps. You’re funny or you’re not.” The Sex Pistols, he says, were funny. “The Ramones – funny. Patti Smith – not funny. Now, if you start applying that criteria, it works incredibly well. The Jam – not funny. The Stranglers, funny. “There are things that you can debate,” Rat continues, filing Television under not amusing at all and drifting into prog. “But King Crimson? Funny. You know that we did a single with Robert Fripp? He had me in stitches. I don’t know how…

“IT was a great tragedy that there weren’t more albums, but I am still very proud of our nine,” says Robert Forster, looking back at the studio records The Go-Betweens recorded over two spells – six in the 1980s and another three in the 2000s. The Go-Betweens only stopped recording in 2006 because of the death of Grant McLennan, the band’s other great songwriter. Formed by McLennan and Forster in Brisbane in 1977, The Go-Betweens were essentially a band of two distinct creative talents – a point underscored when drummer Lindy Morrison joined and suggested Forster and McLennan divide songs 50/50 for each album, leading to half-a-dozen gorgeous albums that defined a particular strand of ’80s indie music – melodic and clever but resolutely uncommercial despite several potential hits that…

PAUL SIMMONS founded the Timorous Beasties design studio in Glasgow in the 1990s. The company specialises in making luxury wallpaper and fabrics for brands but received a rare opportunity to work with Kate Bush on the programme for Before The Dawn, her 22-date residency at Hammersmith Apollo. Since then, Simmons had designed the logo for Bush’s record label Fish People and created new covers for the Illustrated Editions of The Dreaming, Hounds Of Love and the new Polar Edition of 50 Words For Snow. “I asked her once how she heard of Timorous Beasties and she said she really liked the wallpaper we designed but she couldn’t afford it. I said she must be joking, and she said, ‘Well actually it was because there was this huge wardrobe on the…

Hackney Church, London, October 31 “DAISY Glaze” is a song of two halves. The first “slow” part is a sumptuous acid-rock ballad, but what really gets Mike Mills excited is the second, ramshackle rock’n’roll segment. “The fast part is about as much fun as a musician can have,” he grins. “On stage.” Times of lives are had tonight, on stage and off. The massed congregation gathered in the grand cavern of Hackney Church might never have believed they’d hear Big Star’s seminal 1974 second album Radio City played in full – and with such affection and consummate punch – for its 50th anniversary, given that drummer Jody Stephens is the sole surviving member of Memphis’s revered power-pop outfit. But every player filling out the band around him has a Big…

KRAVEN THE HUNTER RELEASED DECEMBER 13 Sony continue to frack the meagre seam of their Spider-verse IP with this origin story of the murderous bounty hunter, directed by JC Chandor (All Is Lost) and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who also shows up later this month in Nosferatu). LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM RELEASED DECEMBER 13 Brian Cox plays one more hot-tempered patriarch struggling to ensure his succession, providing the voice of Helm Hammerhand in this Tolkien-verse anime prequel directed by Kenji Kamiyama. MUFASA: THE LION KING RELEASED DECEMBER 20 Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, The Underground Railroad) takes the Disney dollar, returning to the director seat for this CGI Lion King prequel about the early years of royal heir Taka, and Musafa, the young orphan his family adopt. BETTER…

BOWERS & WILKINS PI8 Price: £349 TAKING advice from human body researchers for the Pi8 buds really paid off for Bowers & Wilkins: these in-ears offer a secure and comfortable fit, much more so than their predecessors, for true all-day wearability. The redesign means they sit securely in a wider variety of ear shapes and sizes, and it’s all change on the inside too: B&W has ditched the dual-driver setup for a single speaker using carbon cone tech, as used in the excellent Px8 over-ears. As well as being impressed by the design, we were won over by just how clear these in-ears are. With three mics per bud and the same ANC algorithms as the PX8s, they do a great job of quietening the outside world without colouring the…