Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i UNCUT

BACK in the dim and distant days of 2024, Will Hermes emailed me from Woodstock, where he was interviewing Mercury Rev for us. After several stop-offs at sites of interest, they found themselves in the studio belonging to Aaron Hurwitz, “where they tracked Levon and Garth for Deserter’s Songs”, wrote Will. “Classic Woodstock, truly like stepping back in time. FYI, this was sitting on a coffee-table when we arrived unannounced…” Attached to the email was a photo of Uncut’s April 2005 issue, with The Band on the cover. As you can imagine, it’s deeply satisfying to find traces of our history lingering in such hallowed spaces. Of course, in 2005, Levon, Garth and Robbie were all still with us; now it’s only Garth. In fact, we started discussing a new…

IF you really want to get away from it all, Chale Abbey might be the spot. Situated on the southern tip of the Isle Of Wight, the studio is housed within a fabulous 16th-century barn, all original oak trusses and natural stone walls. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere and a 10-minute walk to the coast,” enthuses multi-instrumentalist Jordan Lehning, flipping his phone camera to give Uncut a virtual pan of the studio. “We’re in the control room now. It’s just beautiful, totally isolated. A great place to make a record.” Even if it means travelling all the way from Nashville, which is where Lehning, Andrew Combs, Dominic Billett and Romford-born Spencer Cullum are usually based. Their new group, Echolalia, is rounded out by bassist Eli Beaird, multi-instrumentalist Juan…

The Land We Knew The Best GLITTERHOUSE THIS fabulous album is a timely reminder that Chris Eckman has been making sometimes spectacularly singular music since at least the early ’90s, when The Walkabouts, formed in 1984 by Eckman with singer Carla Torgerson, famously became the first non-grunge band to sign with Sub Pop. The label was otherwise awash with bands of incredibly hairy young men in shorts who all sounded angry, frustrated, easily upset. There was a lot of tortured wailing set to loud, bulimic guitars; much monumental riffing. Compared to the heavy musical footprints left by grunge superstars like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden, The Walkabouts on their 1990 debut, Scavenger, stepped more lightly across a musical landscape they made increasingly their own that entertained as well as punk,…

The Purple Bird DOMINO 8/10 FRIENDSHIP. Concord. Openness and generosity. If folk is an innately community-minded music, then these are surely its cornerstones, not only practically but idealistically, too. They’re certainly qualities that have shaped Will Oldham’s career of 30-odd years. Though the title of his debut album may have conjured an enigmatic loner squaring up to life’s bleak truth, possibly from a backwoods shack in Kentucky, There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You was recorded with Slint’s Brian McMahan and Britt Walford, among others and released under the name Palace Brothers. In the four years following, Oldham teamed up with countless different musicians, using variations on the “Palace” theme. Despite a self-confessed tendency toward isolation, he’d started as he meant to go on. So to his umpteenth…

“I ’M bringing out more of my eclectic tastes and influences on Wasteland,” says Yorkshire songwriter and folk guitarist Jim Ghedi. “The bigger, more expansive arrangements have been brewing for some time.” From fine earlier works like A Hymn For Ancient Land and In The Furrows Of Common Place onwards, everything seems to have been pointing towards Ghedi’s latest studio creation. The album was recorded during a transitional period in his life that forced him to re-examine notions of home and identity: “I was moving around a lot, mainly between Ireland and Sheffield. Wasteland is about the idea of a place once known or familiar, now broken down and unrecognisable, exploring the process of watching someone’s surroundings and environment break down and collapse, and finding things to pull them through that.”…

Mr Luck & Ms Doom DECOR 9/10 “NOTHING good happens in a bar at night to a guy over 50. It’s just a fact,” an old soak named RJ tells Al, the narrator of Willy Vlautin’s seventh novel, The Horse. Al, an ageing songwriter, hiding out in an abandoned mine in central Nevada, takes the advice to heart and resolves to quit the bar life and spend his time listening to old jazz records and Ennio Morricone soundtracks and writing brooding folk ballads on his harmonium, songs with titles like “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”. It’s one of a handful of songs that show up on Mr Luck & Ms Doom, The Delines’ sixth and finest album to date. Vlautin has always worked on the fertile borderlands or fault lines…

Motor-Cycle (reissue, 1969) HIGH MOON ‘‘ASATANIC-BIKER motown-psych outsider drug-rock concept album…” “As if The Velvet Underground recorded for Motown…” These are two of the elaborate, bewildering descriptions offered over the years for Lotti Golden’s debut. Not that many are available. Few have heard it since the summer of ’69 – it’s only ever been reissued once as a limited-edition bootleg CD – so appraisals are hardly commonplace. Surprisingly, nonetheless, one needn’t hand over one’s first-born for a copy, even an original pressing. Motor-Cycle has been rumbling beneath the (speed) radar half a century, always hiding in plain sight. Here’s another rave from Richard Hell, who’s contributed liner notes to the new reissue of this intoxicatingly peculiar collection. “She’s all in, a psychedelic daughter of the Beat generation, among her equally…

Funk Or Walk (reissue, 1978) ACE 7/10 From the wild, weird world of Parliament and Funkadelic to the cool, smooth sounds of soulful sisterhood PERHAPS one of the minor, less explored planets of the George Clinton universe, the Brides started out as an offshoot of characters in the storyline of Parliament’s 1976 loose concept album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein. Featuring, for the purposes of this debut long player, the pairing of Dawn Silva and Lynn Mabry, the duo were marketed as a more radio-friendly prospect than typical P-Funk fare. It worked a treat on curtain-raising single “Disco To Go”, comfortably making Billboard’s R&B Top 10 chart and selling half a million copies in the process. Clinton co-wrote the track with Bootsy Collins and it occasionally featured in the latter’s…

“THERE was a real sense of now or never,” says Nadia Reid remembering her move from New Zealand to the UK a little over a year ago. “We just took a chance, you know? We got on the plane. I was 23 weeks pregnant. We had two suitcases, a car seat for my daughter and a one-way ticket to Heathrow. I mean, the whole thing’s been mad…” Today, sitting in a hipster café in central Manchester, she seems every bit the naturalised Brit. It’s a bright, chilly morning, and she meets us, acclimatised for the English winter, in that wardrobe staple of the school-run mum, the ankle-length leopard-print dryrobe. Her eldest daughter, now at preschool, has started cultivating a Mancunian drawl, while Reid herself is getting up to speed with…

AS The Moody Blues travelled across America during the late 1960s, they often encountered young men the same age as them at airports and bus stations, on their way home from Vietnam. These encounters inspired Justin Hayward to write “Question”, the single the band released in April 1970. While “Question” wasn’t an obvious candidate for a hit – subject matter aside, it lacked the richly orchestrated sound that The Moody Blues were known for since 1967’s “Nights In White Satin” – the single climbed to No 2, giving them their biggest chart success since “Go Now”. Later that year, “Question” was at the heart of the Moodies’ set at the Isle Of Wight Festival, helping to charm a febrile audience. “I had no thoughts about a single when I wrote…

ASWAD ASWAD ISLAND, 1976 Aswad’s essential debut highlighted their gift for combining reggae rhythms with poppy harmonies and melodies. There are even hints of jazz as well as dub. Highlights include “Can’t Stand the Pressure” and “Concrete Slaveship”. 9/10 BURNING SPEAR LIVE ISLAND, 1977 When the great Burning Spear came to the Rainbow to record a live album in 1977 he needed a backing band. Aswad stepped into the breach and went on to tour the UK with their labelmate. It’s an excellent live album, packed with energy while harnessing Burning Spear’s proselytising spirit. 9/10 ASWAD A NEW CHAPTER OF DUB ISLAND, 1982 After leaving Island, Aswad released two excellent albums – 1979’s Hulet and the soul-influenced New Chapter in 1981. The widely acclaimed A New Chapter Of Dub saw…

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN When the wild, rambling film of the Rolling Thunder Revue was released back in 2019, it came with the subtitle “a Bob Dylan story by Martin Scorsese”, in what felt like a nod to the endless stream of franchise extensions that come tagged as “a Star Wars story” or “a Mad Max saga”. It cutely suggested that, with the MCU floundering, the 2020s might see a full flowering of the Bob Dylan Extended Universe, with movies, miniseries and, eventually, collectable figurines dedicated to the lost highways, side quests and minor characters of His Back Pages. If so, then A Complete Unknown is the “New Hope” of the Bobiverse, telling our hero’s journey in time-honoured fashion. A young farmboy, raised in the wastelands of the Midwest, heeds the call…

“IT’S good to be back,” declared a remarkably youthful-looking Macca playing the first of two sold-out nights at Manchester’s Co-op Live on December 14. At his first UK performance since headlining Glastonbury in 2022, he barrelled straight into “A Hard Day’s Night”, Wings double “Junior’s Farm” and “Letting Go”, plus “Drive My Car”. “This opening is pretty good,” he admitted. “I’m going to take a little moment to enjoy it for myself.” A jubilant “Got To Get You Into My Life” played out against a backdrop of animated scenes from The Beatles’ career, while there was a UK debut for “Now And Then”, the restored Beatles tune that John Lennon first demoed around 1977. Following directly after 1982’s “Here Today”, written about McCartney’s relationship with the recently deceased Lennon –…

Every step they took, we were watching them. That’s right! With the huge Sting 3.0 world tour kicking off in the Americas this month, our latest Ultimate Music Guide provides an in-depth look at The Police: classic interviews, comprehensive reviews and one very good drummer joke. It’s in shops on January 17, or you can pre-order direct from us at shop.kelsey.co.uk… Also out this month from the same places, our new Ultimate Record Collection special counts down The 200 Greatest Goth Albums Of All Time… Ranked!, as voted for by Uncut’s panel of experts. Includes Bauhaus, Siouxsie, The Cure, Sisters Of Mercy and all manner of backcombed brilliance… Father John Misty, Caribou, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory and Self Esteem will headline End Of The Road 2025, taking…

I’M NEW HERE ‘‘To be honest, I originally thought that people would think it was really fucking weird,” says Greg Mendez, as he recalls his initial feelings about “Maria” – a slight, lilting song about getting arrested in a crack den that provided his unexpected breakthrough in 2023. Mendez had been writing and recording music since 2006, releasing a couple of low-key, melancholic singer-songwriter albums on cassette since 2017, but “Maria” and its self-titled parent album resonated far beyond his peers in Philadelphia’s DIY underground. It currently has 2.3 million streams on Spotify and led to a deal with Dead Oceans, who reissued Greg Mendez at the end of last year, along with a new EP, “First Time/Alone”. Mendez says “Maria” has changed his life, which isn’t bad for a…

Precious Bane FLUFF AND GRAVY 8/10 Alt.country veteran and multi-disciplinary artist pair up JIM WHITE has tended to favour collaboration over solo work since 2020’s M i s fi t s Ju b i l e e. He turned producer for albums by the likes of Ane Diaz and Ben De La Cour, then teamed up with Tucker Martine for 2023’s Permanent Stranger, billed as Mama Lucky. His latest venture is another leftfield pairing, this time with neurodivergent artist Trey Blake. Their association began some years back, when Blake – a longtime White fan – gifted him a copy of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, the story of a facially disfigured woman in rural Shropshire during the 1800s. They duly struck up a correspondence (Blake in Brighton, White in New York)…

Happy Apples SLAM 8/10 THE career of British singer and improviser Julie Tippetts is one of the great quixotic journeys of our musical times, a narrative where an artist climbs out of the pop spotlight, via the counterculture, and claws their way into the hinterlands. If all you know of Tippetts is her vocal turn, under her maiden name of Julie Driscoll, on an exemplary 1968 cover of Bob Dylan’s “This Wheel’s On Fire”, alongside her first significant collaborators, Brian Auger & The Trinity, then what she did over the subsequent decades proves revelatory, and deep with exploratory wisdom. While both organist Auger and Driscoll had worked in The Steampacket with Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry, and their few years working together with The Trinity created a small but…

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Radio Sessions 1980-1993 FIRE 8/10 BEING ahead of one’s own time may seem to be an enviable position. Trouble is, its benefits only surface in the long run. In the short term, it can be a trying business. So while Dan Treacy eventually received the veneration he was due as one of British music’s most singular talents – with everyone from Kurt Cobain to MGMT swearing allegiance to his cause – this compilation suggests that being Television Personalities must have been tough going during many points in their hard-luck story. Just consider the pressures that surround the first of the three radio sessions (four including the download EP from a 1993 visit to WFMU) collected on Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out. By the…

The Complete Mercury Recordings FLOATING WORLD 8/10 WHEN Jay Farrar was preparing Day Of The Doug, Son Volt’s 2023 tribute album to Doug Sahm, he turned to The Complete Mercury Recordings. The 5CD set covering Sahm’s work with the Sir Douglas Quintet from 1968–72 had a limited release in 2005, before sloping back into the vaults, along with Sahm’s reputation as an innovator and inspiration. It’s not that Sahm is unknown. His work with the Tejano supergroup The Texas Tornados (along with SDQ’s organ player Augie Meyers, Flaco Jiménez and Freddy Fender) helped define and expand the canon of Texas music. Musicians know. Uncle Tupelo covered “Give Back The Key To My Heart”. The Coward Brothers sang “Be Real”. Margo Price duetted with Doug’s son Shawn Sahm – the keeper…

BENEATH the unsparing glare of fluorescent lights in an unglamorous office room in the CBS building on 6th Avenue and 52nd St in New York, two groups of people face each other across an empty room. At one end, are five nervous musicians, who have bought with them their drums, amps and guitars. Opposite are representatives of Columbia Records, including president Clive Davis who is accompanied by singer Harry Nilsson and Bobby Colomby, the drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears. Nearby lurk the band’s entourage – including Patti Smith, then girlfriend of keyboard player Allen Lanier. Currently trading as the Stalk-Forrest Group, the band will soon become better known as Blue Öyster Cult. “This was around 1971,” recalls drummer Albert Bouchard. “We played a show the night before in Pennsylvania…

SKY ARTS/NOW TV 7/10 ‘‘THE most important and influential British rock band of all time,” declares this brisk new history of the Yardbirds. Define “rock”, discount the Fabs, append Zep, and it’s still a contentious claim. In this telling, which benefits from committed new interviews from most of the surviving principals and stellar fans including Brian May and Ronnie Wood, the band seems more like rock’s missing link, sparking crucial innovations from its sequence of extraordinary guitarists, who then took flight elsewhere. The Yardbirds themselves were hobbled by ruinous management and lacked the identity of the Stones or The Who, ending up almost as footnotes to music that would have been unrecognisable without them. This familiar story gains poignancy from being told again now. The original Yardbirds’ first and penultimate…

CAMBRIDGE AUDIO EVO ONE Price: £1,299 THE Evo One is a stunning all-in-one solution for the discerning tune-gobbler. With 14 drivers delivering 700W of crystal-clear sound, it can fill any room with immersive audio. Its sleek design cloaks a wealth of features, including hi-res audio support up to 32-bit/192kHz, built-in streaming capabilities for services like Spotify and Tidal, and a phono stage for vinyl. The customisable EQ and room optimisation settings also help ensure perfect sound in any space. It’s a true statement piece that packs a heck of a punch. WiiM ULTRA Price: £349 WiiM’s versatile and compact streamer features a 3.5in touchscreen interface, a swanky ESS Sabre DAC plus Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless connectivity to help elevate your tunes. With ‘room correction’ EQ tech and a…

GRANT US MORE GO-BETWEENS Thanks for featuring The Go-Betweens in last month’s Album By Album [January 2025; Take 334]. It was good to hear Lindy’s and Amanda’s voices in there, particularly their contrasting views on 16 Lovers Lane. The sadness and the joy they reflected on was very moving. You should do an Album By Album on the solo records made by Grant and Robert, if only to bring some much-needed attention to Grant’s work. The highlight would have to be Horsebreaker Star, one of the great lost albums, and his song “Coming Up For Air”, perhaps the best “Go-Between” song of them all. Ralph Bullivant, Birkenhead RE-REVVED My favourite concert was Mercury Rev in the Limelight, Belfast, over 25 years ago. As a fresh-faced student, I was blown away…

WHEN The Chills’ songwriter and sole constant Martin Phillipps died in July 2024, he left behind a last testament. His band’s eighth and final album, Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs, comprises fresh takes on demo tapes from the ’80s and ’90s. “These were things that he was supposed to record back in the day, but never got around to because he had so much material,” explains Todd Knudson, The Chills’ drummer since 1999. “He was not very well and struggling a bit, but I think he knew that with all the damage he’d done to himself, he only had a certain amount of time and he wanted to complete things. He was a bit of a completist anyway. And this album brings him full circle.” Formed in 1980 in…

THE figure of ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez looms large in Rolling Stones lore – as a friend, a fixer, a hard man and according to the title of his own memoir, Keith Richards’ drug dealer. But a recent series of exhibitions has reframed Sanchez’s legacy, revealing him to be a talented photographer and crucial Stones chronicler. “He always had a camera with him,” says Sanchez’s grandson Nicholas Dominguez, who remembers discovering suitcases full of his prints in an attic 20 years ago, though he only recently received his father’s blessing to make them public. “It’s quite impressive. You think of the stories of how they’re all on drugs, travelling to different places and out partying all the time, yet he still manages to find time to go into the darkroom and…

If a Walkabouts fan asked you to describe The Land We Knew The Best and what, if anything, makes it different from what you’ve done before, what would you tell them? The new album is definitely connected with what I have done before. I am still working in a certain tradition of narrative songs. But I also feel these songs have their own character. They feel less guarded and more intimate. In a way, more raw. And they have a spareness and economy that I didn’t completely grasp before. What land are you referring to in the title? America, where you’re from? Slovenia, where you now live? Or the past, that famously foreign country? The album title comes from a line in the song “Genevieve”: “the heart, the land we…

A Paradise In The Hold NIGHT TIME STORIES 8/10 TRUMPETER, flugelhornist and composer Yazz Ahmed has created her most exquisite sonic world yet on A Paradise In The Hold, 10 tracks of magnetic, boundary-transcending jazz that intricately blend influences from her British-Bahraini heritage. Drawn to storytelling, Ahmed writes compositions that tend to have a narrative flow. On this record, her approach is shaped by two traditional forms: joyful Bahraini wedding poems and the sorrowful work songs of the pearl divers. It’s a natural pairing of her interests, incorporating the cultural expressions of weddings with the pure folklore of the pearl divers, who no longer exist in terms of a workforce but remain enshrined in the memory of the uniquely Bahraini genre known as fidjeri, or sea music. The journey that…

Héritage TRANSGRESSIVE 8/10 WHEN Tinariwen popularised the idea of desert blues in the west, bandmembers’ earlier participation in Tuareg rebel warfare lent their music heroic romance, conjuring images of nomad players as comfortable with a machine gun as a guitar, and finally manifesting The Clash’s fanciful notion of combat rock. The blues’ feedback loop from West Africa through American slavery to Hendrix seemed satisfyingly complete in their dusty grooves. Songhoy Blues followed broadly in this musical tradition, but are from a different time and place, and tell a significantly different tale. The Songhoy people originate from the region around the River Niger in Northern Mali which was conquered first by Tuareg rebels and then music-loathing Islamists. Guitarist Garba Touré escaped to the capital Bamako in 2012, forming the descriptively named…

IT’S always been wise to expect the unexpected with IJean Claude Vannier; so his exchange of the trusty string ensemble for Vincent Beer-Demander’s massed mandolins on new album Jean Claude Vannier Et Son Orchestre De Mandolines somehow makes perfect sense. “What attracts me to the mandolin is its romantic, Mediterranean feel,” Vannier tells Uncut, “which inspires dreams, love and a traditional, almost Oriental feel, as if it held all sorts of secrets. Writing for the mandolin is different from writing for other instruments, each instrument has its own identity – you don’t write the same thing for the flute as for the bass drum.” Over the decades, most famously on Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 masterpiece Histoire De Melody Nelson and his own L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches the following year, Vannier has…

MAHINĀRANGI TOCKER The Maori singer-songwriter was New Zealand’s answer to Joan Armatrading, recording seven albums before her untimely death at the age of 52 in 2008. “She was so inspiring,” says Reid. “I don’t think she’s ever quite got the acclaim that she deserves.” MICHELLE SHOCKED The Texan punk-folk singer-songwriter scored an unlikely hit with her 1988 debut album Short Sharp Shocked and the plaintive single “Anchorage”. “That song is like a masterclass in storytelling and using place as an anchor for a song,” says Reid. “I tried to do something similar with ‘Oh Canada’. It’s using a real place as a metaphor for something else…” SUZANNE VEGA Updating Greenwich Village folk tropes for the 1980s, Suzanne Vega has gone on to record nine albums and scored an unlikely dance…

PARK Chapel is a former congregational church on the soft slope of Crouch Hill in north London. Today, one half of the grey stone building is home to Mount Zion Cathedral, part of the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim. The other half houses Church Studios, a recording complex that over several decades has hosted many of the music world’s great dignitaries: Dylan, Adele, U2, Depeche Mode, Annie Lennox, Nick Cave. On a sweltering day in midsummer, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory are in the cool of the Church’s main studio, finishing a vocal take. From a small anteroom outside, Van Etten’s voice is just about audible through the glass: a swan-necked, reedy sound, given to sudden flashes of strength and luminosity. A few minutes later, the…

IN late 1991, producer John Leckie was in limbo, waiting for The Stone Roses to get their act together. “I was out most nights in Camden, which was really buzzy back then,” he recalls. “You could literally go from place to place and see three or four bands. So I went to the Falcon, I don’t know who I was meant to see, and got there early.” On the low stage were a gang of wide-eyed longhairs from Wigan playing only their second ever London show. Leckie was already an industry veteran who’d witnessed first-hand the flowerings of psych, prog, punk and everything after, but the nascent Verve proceeded to blow him away. “They were phenomenal. It was cosmic, it was Sun Ra, it was Pink Floyd. Instead of playing…

HEARING The Band in their late-’60s prime could be a profound experience. Eric Clapton said it changed his life; George Harrison channelled their spirit into All Things Must Pass; Elton John was inspired to make Tumbleweed Connection; Fairport Convention imagined Liege & Lief as a British counterpart to Music From Big Pink. “The Band was a perfect blend of American roots: rock’n’roll, jazz, Appalachian, gospel, R&B, blues and country,” says Richard Thompson, an early and vocal supporter of their work. “Three great vocalists, rhythm section to die for, wonderful songs, killer guitarist, and a genius behind the keys.” From the gruelling bar circuit of the ’50s to Dylan’s explosive 1966 world tour, a Woodstock basement and on to The Last Waltz at Thanksgiving, The Band underwent an extraordinary journey. The…