Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i UNCUT

“The world is going on outside, the night is gaping open wide” AT time of writing, Tom Pinnock, Sam Richards and Mark Beaumont have just made it back from this year’s End Of The Road festival, where they’ve been braving the elements to bring you regular reports over on our website. As you might have noticed from the chatter on our socials, Tom hosted our regular Q&As, which this year were with Matt Berninger, Kristin Hersh and Christopher Owens. All in all, a very busy weekend – so huge thanks to all three of them for all their hard work (and to Marc Jones for all the behind the-scenes support). End Of The Road, of course, marks the end of the festival season – of which there were many highlights,…

JARVIS COCKER: “Rough Trade have been our managers since the beginning of the 1990s. For the first time in Pulp’s history people seemed to quite like us. u Wewereinthisnever-endingdealwith Fire who we never spoke to, so it was all very messy and we were worried the goodwill we’d built up would dissipate. I spoke to Geoff Travis and he introduced me to Jeannette [Lee], and they said they’d like to help, but weren’t sure how. They managed to dig us out of that hole, so we have been involved with the label for decades. I talk to Jeannette about once a day. She was the first person I played the songs for More to, and we didn’t have a deal, so they agreed to release it. It felt like the…

“Her voice is like some melody/That’s always on some tune” THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES Saving Grace NONESUCH FROM West Midlands clubs to cavernous American stadiums, from the wasted land of the Sahara to the glitz of Nashville – not to mention the darkest depths of Mordor and over the hills where the spirits fly – Robert Plant has been on quite the journey. When globe-trotting gets old, though, the only thing to do is to come home. Plant’s new album, his first with his current group Saving Grace, is a return to the promised land, located around Kidderminster and the Wyre Forest. It’s a reconnection for Plant with the musicians of the region and a rediscovery of some of the songs of his youth. It also…

Twilight Override DBPM 8/10 IT was novelist and critic John Berger who first posited that “calm is a form of resistance”. Who knows if Jeff Tweedy was channelling that sentiment while creating the gentle behemoth that is Twilight Override, but he has certainly responded to the maelstrom of paranoia and inhumanity unleashed by the second Trump term – what the Wilco frontman has dubbed “a bottomless basket of rock bottom” – with disarming composure, and a big batch of tunes for his fifth solo outing. Twilight Override is a 30-song triple album of mostly mellow consolation, insightful rather than intimidating. In the studio performance video for “Feel Free” – one of four tracks released in advance of the album – there is a glimpse of a sign on the wall…

THE seeds for Here And Nowhere were planted in T2020, when Wilco multiinstrumentalist Pat Sansone started his radio show on WYXR in Memphis, playing 1960s and ’70s music with orchestral embellishments, from The Left Banke to The Chi-Lites. Sansone sent his discoveries to bassist John Stirratt, who reciprocated. “We were sharing music like we did when we first became friends,” says Sansone. “And those conversations led us back into the Autumn Defense headspace. It made us realise this is what we love. It’s what The Autumn Defense does and we should get back to it because it brings us joy.” They had first bonded in the late ’90s, by blending their voices on songs they loved in Stirratt’s New Orleans apartment. “We had a good harmony thing going on,” Sansone…

WHAT are your memories of developing The Lamb… at Headley Grange? We were all enthralled by the drum sound that John Bonham got there, at the bottom of the stairwell, so we were keen to take it over for a few months after Led Zep left. The rumours were that the place was haunted, and I can see why, because the noises at night were unbelievable. I can only assume it was rats, scurrying around inside the air ducts, which made it very difficult to get any sleep. It was also falling to pieces. On my last day there, I used a toilet on the top floor, washed my hands, and as I left the room, the floor collapsed. I was inches from falling to my death! We then moved to…

IT took the Cardiacs collective a few years to even begin to regroup in public after the loss of their leader. But in 2024, one of their most lasting side projects, Tim Smith’s Spratleys, announced Sing To Tim, where members from across Cardiacs’ rich history banded together to play material from the Tim Smith songbook. A run of three shows in May was followed by an October mini tour that took in performances in Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle and Brighton. For Jim Smith, what had initially seemed fraught would prove extremely rewarding. “They felt brilliant. Absolutely amazing,” he says. “It was just like you’d found your leg again. Imagine someone had chopped your leg off and then someone came by and said, ‘I’ve found it!’, and put your leg back on.…

Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh, August 21 “WE’RE gonna play some rock’n’roll, have a party,” says Brian Johnson, setting out his stall as the chords of tonight’s opener “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” fade away. “Come on, let’s go!” A successful rallying cry for the 70,000-strong audience in Murrayfield, it is also emblematic of how AC/DC have operated for over 50 years. After all, it’s hard to think of a band who’ve previously denied the passage of time quite as vigorously as AC/DC. But can such rugged defiance last forever? Angus Young’s trademark school uniform is in evidence – but so is a shock of pure white hair. Johnson, dressed in newsboy cap and sleeveless shirt, still looks the part, although some upper-register notes are harder to reach. Unsubstantiated rumours…

ELAC DEBUT CONNEX ADSUM £529 NO-one really thought there was much wrong with the DCB41 powered stereo speaker system… but Elac has decided it could do with a little more glamour anyway. So it’s got the Brooklyn fashion house Adsum involved and this is the result. In spec terms, it’s the same as before – which is an entirely good thing. A primary speaker is packing 100W of Class D power, of which it sends half to its partner – driving each cabinet’s 0.75in soft-dome tweeter and 4.5in mid/bass driver. It’s got a switchable RCA input that can operate at line or phono level, a digital optical socket, plus USB-B and HDMI ARC for use with a TV. And it takes care of aptX Bluetooth wireless connectivity too. Adsum’s influence…

ACKLES UP Thank you so much for the article about the magisterial David Ackles in the October 2025 [Take 343] issue of Uncut. I’ve been captivated by David Ackles’ albums since I first heard “Subway To The Country” way, way back. To my mind his songs are the epitome of Midwestern American Gothic and encapsulate the feel of the famous 1930 painting by Grant Wood. I am so looking forward to Mark Brend’s forthcoming biography Down River and thus has been on order since I heard about it. With any justice your article (and the book) will keep his name in the spotlight. You never know, we may hear “Montana Song” on the radio, though I won’t hold my breath! Thank you once again for being one of the very…

AS co-founder of legendary King’s Road boutique Granny Takes A Trip and one half of graphic design/avant-rock duo Hapshash And The Coloured Coat, Nigel Waymouth was at the epicentre of the ’60s revolution, selling clothes to rock stars and creating posters for Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. He’s just been coaxed out of retirement to design his first poster in decades, for the 2026 Okeechobee Festival in Florida. “I just put it together in the same style I always have done, in the spirit of the music and art,” says Waymouth, who worked with London’s Jealous Print Studio to produce a series of limitededition screenprints, having been given free rein by the festival organisers. “It was exactly what Hoppy [John Hopkins] and Joe Boyd had done all those years before…

ALICE COOPER 1973 tour poster, pillowcase and napkin “My parents forbade me to go to see Alice Cooper’s legendary Billion Dollar Babies tour in 1973 – I was 11, so this was good parenting! I’ve been obsessed with all things Alice since then, and have ended up directing a number of Alice’s tours over the years. This is the poster for the 1973 tour, along with the pillowcase and napkin from the Starship plane, which Alice and the band used on that tour.” THE ROLLING STONES It’s Only Rock ’N Roll in-store display “This is the in-store stand-up display for the It’s Only Rock ’N Roll album, created by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert. I found it at a small family-owned record store in Tulsa, Oklahoma.” DAVID BOWIE Scary Monsters mobile…

Touch INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM 8/10 IT’S only been nine years since Tortoise released their last album, but it feels a lot longer. The quintet were closely associated with the Chicago post-rock scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and when that scene ran its course, they seemed unmoored from their original context and anchored to something in the past. On 2016’s The Catastrophist they sounded like a band out of time, an impression bolstered by the fact that the album had been commissioned by the City of Chicago to highlight the scene that had birthed the band nearly 20 years prior. But they kept the subject matter at arm’s length, which made the music sound slick and cursory. Now, in 2025, Tortoise have an all-new context. They are back in…

Nobody’s Girl ATO 7/10 IN March this year, Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell finalised their divorce after a decade-long marriage. Isbell’s Foxes In The Snow, released the same month, was partly informed by the split, as well as a new relationship. Now it’s Shires’ turn, only with a different focus. Nobody’s Girl, she points out, “isn’t a break-up record. It’s a survival record.” Shires initially wrote 30-odd songs for the album, but shelved a number of them because they were judged to be too bitter and pointed. It’s intriguing to know exactly where she decided to draw the line, given that a couple of pieces here are almost uncomfortably candid. Set against a deep, mournful fiddle, “The Details” speaks of discarded wedding rings, failed promises and being used to cash…

YOU may have seen Tom Skinner playing Y drums with dozens of different outfits over the years – with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood in The Smile, with Shabaka Hutchings’ Sons Of Kemet, with the punk-jazz outfit Melt Yourself Down or with Alabaster DePlume, Beth Orton, Floating Points or Jarvis Cocker. “This is really the first time I’ve been able to take time off and work on my own music,” he says. “I’m not a guitarist, but I wrote much of the album on guitar, as it’s a useful and mysterious tool for writing.” Skinner’s compositions are processed via the unorthodox cello/reeds/double-bass lineup that he pioneered on his 2022 debut, Voices Of Bishara. But where the first LP flirted with free improv, this moves into contemporary classical territory, inspired by…

“I got sunshine in my stomach/Like I just rocked my baby to sleep” REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway: 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition (reissue, 1974) RHINO APUERTO Rican gang member from New York called Rael emerges from a subway station, sees a vision of a lamb lying on Times Square and tumbles into some kind of nightmarish phantasmogorical realm. Locked in a supernatural dungeon, Rael realises he must save the life of his brother (who may or may not be a figment of his imagination). There is an orgy where Rael has sex with, and then eats, three mythical snakes; there is a dream in which his heart is ripped out, and an operation where his genitals are removed by a…

Brigitte Fontaine Est… Folle (reissue, 1968) WEWANTSOUNDS 9/10 FIVE years ago, Benjamin Barouh, Saravah label archivist and son of label boss Pierre, stumbled across something remarkable in the basement of his late father’s house in the French countryside; a bande magnétique, or recording tape, of the demos that Brigitte Fontaine recorded for her second solo album, Brigitte Fontaine Est… Folle – in English, Brigitte Fontaine Is… Mad. When Barouh presented the tape to Fontaine, she agreed the material should be released, under one condition: it had to be named ‘Brigitte Fontaine Est… Non Folle’. Things have turned out slightly differently, of course, with those demos appended to this most welcome reissue of Fontaine’s surrealist psychedelic-pop gem. But you can understand why she’d be so unhappy with the album’s original title,…

THOUGH Spain are known for their lethargic pace, this wasn’t always Josh Haden’s style. He’d previously been singer and bassist for Treacherous Jaywalkers, a punk act signed in the late ’80s to SST that he now describes as “boundlessly energetic, in a negative way”. Nonetheless, a constant staple of his teenage years was John Lee Hooker’s 1966 LP, It Serves You Right To Suffer, which provided the inspiration for his next band. “It was completely opposite to all the other music I was listening to, but, as I got older, I felt like I could, or should, be open to writing differently.” Fuelled by his newfound independence and habits – “I'm out of my parents’ house,” he laughs, “and I can finally wake up and smoke a bongload before breakfast”…

“WE’RE a band for hire,” explains Cooper Crain, musing on his group’s tendency to collaborate. “There’s a nice flow amongst us, I think. So if anyone has an idea for a record, just let us know…” Bitchin Bajas – pronounced “ba-has”, Spanish-style – are a versatile unit: over their 15-year existence, the trio have worked with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Natural Information Society and Chicago jazzer Mike Reed among others, but have found time to craft their own mighty mix of kosmische, synth and drone on albums such as 2014’s Bitchin Bajas, 2017’s Bajas Fresh and the new Inland See. “Rob [Frye] and I live in the same building,” says Dan Quinlivan, explaining the band’s self-sufficient setup. “Our Labranza USA rehearsal studio is there. And Cooper’s just a couple of blocks…

CAT Stevens’ ’60s pop career was peaking when he found himself on an unlikely package tour with the Walker Brothers, Engelbert Humperdinck and Jimi Hendrix in April 1967. Among this diverse crew, he found the privately shy Hendrix the most simpatico. “We were soulmates in some way,” says Stevens. “I could sit down very easily with him. We were avoiding the camera-flashes and everything and it was personal, but of course in concert it was another matter. He blew everybody off the stage. The first night of the tour, I heard this shout down the hallway saying, ‘There’s a fire on stage!’ [as Hendrix torched his guitar]. I was too busy worrying about my set and thinking what I’m gonna sing, pacing about in my dressing room. But that was…

“BEING in a band does something strange to your sense of time,” says Jarvis Cocker as he reflects on the peculiar symmetries of 2025. He’s talking about the way that the past and present have collided this year for Pulp – and specifically, their annus mirabilis of 1995. There were No 1 albums (2025’s More; 1995’s Different Class) and ecstatically received performances at Glastonbury. “We wanted to play Glastonbury because that concert in 1995 was the first show we played since we were kind of famous, a bit,” he says. “Then we had 30 years of ups and downs and were coming back. It felt right. I could tell the concert was going to be good, but I didn’t think about it too much, I just did it – which…

EARLY in Amy Berg’s moving portrait of Jeff Buckley, the singer’s former girlfriend Rebecca Moore expresses her concerns about being seen as a “pathetic figure”. She’s wary of the stereotypes that women usually occupy in the histories of iconic male musicians who died too young. But Moore – a theatre artist in New York who met Buckley at the fateful tribute concert to his father Tim in 1991 and remained close to him after they split in 1993 – needn’t have worried Berg would reinforce any such clichés. Instead, the director gives centrality to the women who impacted Buckley and were impacted in turn, using these relationships as a means of conveying his music and his humanity in all their fullness. That approach lends It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley a…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Pulp. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win £50 of Rough Trade vouchers to spend online. Closing date: Thursday, October 9, 2025. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 Soon after being “Down On The Corner”, Creedence Clearwater Revival moved in the opposite direction (2-6-3-4) 9 “So what’s the use between _____ and glory?” from Babyshambles’ “Fuck Forever” (5) 10 Primal Scream album to put them into first place (4-5) 11 “I sat on the ____ and kicked off the moss’’, from Elton john’s “Your Song” (4) 12 Not such a Rotten name (5) 13+3D Protest singer’s All…

WE’RE NEW HERE SONGWRITING was never part of the plan. For Alex Pianovich – performance artist, former herpetologist and New Orleans musician-about-town – Greazy Alice was supposed to be “an artist’s rendition of a bar band”, a winking take on the sleazy, honky-tonk twang that springs to mind when you think of a certain kind of smoky, Big Easy dive bar. But much like the movie Casablanca – a pivotal scene from which Pianovich rewrites on his band’s first EP – some of the best stories begin in dive bars. “It was all very tongue in cheek, until it wasn’t,” he says, recalling early shows as Greazy Alice with whichever musician friends were around at the time. “We’d run the gamut from straight-up honky-tonk to full freakout, throw in the…

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YOU’VE been keeping yourself busy, with a new group, a new album, tours coming up… You work on things, you have ideas, and it becomes something you didn’t expect, then you go with it. It’s like a magnificent courtship, creating a new musical situation. Enthusiasm never hurt anybody, really. It’s just all constantly in motion. This is very much a band – would you prefer it to be billed as just Saving Grace, without your name? Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If I go all the way back to 1980, ’81 or ’82, well, then I definitely was RP, but as time’s gone on I’ve moved into these relationships with musicians, where they’re all contributors, mostly to the same degree. We can get probably a little bit more leverage sticking my…

Begging The Night To Take Hold CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND 9/10 HOW to explain the nine years that have passed since In Search Of Harperfield, the self-acknowledged “best received” album in Emma Pollock’s 30 years at the vanguard of the Scottish underground? In her own words: “Start at the beginning until you sing sunlight”. This oblique, poetic fragment encapsulates a tumultuous journey of self-discovery, captured in all its light and shade on the songwriter’s fourth solo album. Recorded in safe spaces during and after pandemic lockdowns, Begging The Night To Take Hold was shelved while The Delgados – the band formed by Pollock and three friends in ’90s Glasgow, who, through their Chemikal Underground label and studio, continue to underpin much of the city’s music scene – embarked on a triumphant reunion…

Mulatu Plays Mulatu STRUT 8/10 SOMEWHERE around the close of the 1950s, a 16-year-old Ethiopian boy arrived at Lindisfarne College, a boarding school in the Wrexham countryside. The young Mulatu Astatke had come to earn a qualification in aeronautical engineering. But around his more formal studies, he picked up a trumpet and, encouraged by Lindisfarne’s headmaster, learned to play. His journey from there was meteoric – from rural Wales to London’s Trinity College of Music and into the city’s flourishing jazz underground, where he graced the stages of Ronnie Scott’s and Soho’s Metro Club, rubbing shoulders with other musicians from Africa and the Caribbean. Arriving in America in 1963, Astatke became the first African musician to enrol at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he studied vibraphone and percussion. But…

Neon Grey Midnight Green ANTI- 8/10 “THERE’S too much life for just one lifetime”, sings Neko Case with characteristically emphatic soul on her eighth album’s “Winchester Mansion Of Sound”. Though the song is an elegy for her friend and early inspiration Dexter Romweber, of psychobilly band Flat Duo Jets, that line sums up its author’s own duende as well as her creative thirst. In a 35-year career, she’s released seven solo LPs, started her own label, Lady Pilot, made an album with kd lang and Laura Veirs and recorded with kindred spirits including Nick Cave, Giant Sand and Calexico. If her latest feels overdue – Hell-On was seven years ago – it’s worth noting that Case is also still very much a member of The New Pornographers, who released a new…

Power To The People UNIVERSAL 8/10 BEFORE we get to Elephant’s Memory, let’s tackle the elephant in the room. Power To The People covers the period John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to the US and recorded Some Time In New York City. Chronologically, it falls between Imagine and Mind Games, both of which have already received lavish boxsets. So why is Power To The People out of sync? In short, because of “Woman Is The N***** Of The World”. The song title was controversial enough in 1972 – indeed, that was the very point – but by the 2020s was deemed beyond the pale and Mind Games was shuffled ahead in the queue. Now Power To The People has emerged with the problematic song excised – not even acknowledged…

WHEN Yusuf Cat Stevens began his set to 60,000 people at Hyde Park’s BST festival in July this year, he did so with just his voice and acoustic guitar. It was a return to his early-’70s peak, when the titanic success of Tea For The Tillerman heralded a run of hits including “Wild World”, “Moonshadow” and “Peace Train”. But anyone expecting a mellow, hippy minstrel would have been surprised by Stevens’ introduction to “The Little Ones” at Hyde Park. Rising to righteous anger, he reminded the vast crowd of the “innocent souls of children” now dying in Gaza. On a bill between Van Morrison and Neil Young, it was Stevens who cut through the good vibes with a jolting, contemporary edge. “You’ve go to try and make yourself real, one…

WHEN Steve Marriott left the Small Faces to form Humble Pie, he was determined to do things differently. That was clear from the band’s debut single, “Natural Born Bugie”, released in August 1969 on Andrew Loog Oldham’s ailing Immediate label. Where fans might have expected to hear Marriott’s powerful voice front and centre to introduce the new group, the opening verse was instead sung by bassist Greg Ridley, once of Spooky Tooth. Next came a verse from Peter Frampton, followed finally by Marriott before all three sang together in gorgeous harmony. “For us to each to sing a verse and then share the chorus – and what a chorus – was a real statement,” says Frampton. “It was fantastic. When you get those three voices sounding so good together, it…

ON November 19, 1994, Dave Grohl appeared with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live, performing Wildflowers tracks “You Don’t Know How It Feels” and “Honey Bee”. Drummer Stan Lynch had quit earlier that year, while new boy Steve Ferrone (yet to become an official Heartbreaker) had another session booked. So Petty extended a full-time invite. “Kurt Cobain had just died and I really discussed Dave joining the band,” he told author Paul Zollo. “But Dave had his own career going. He’d just done his Foo Fighters album, so it clearly wasn’t going to work.” “We all loved Nirvana, so when Dave came in for SNL I was in heaven,” says Benmont Tench. “Talk about bringing in some spirit. However, right around that time, he gave me a…

Larmer Tree Gardens August 28-31 THANKFULLY, End Of The Road is not the hardest festival to reach, but it always feels like you’ve arrived somewhere extraordinary and exotic, even in the drizzle. Much of this can be ascribed to the adventurous programming, interspersing indie, folk and post-punk with intriguing sounds from around the world, as an antidote to generic, nostalgiafuelled festival bills. Daraa Tribes hail from deepest Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara, and their mesmeric polyrhythms, call-and-response vocals and liquid guitar runs make for an invigorating start to the festival. Rogê’s elegant melodies couldn’t be from anywhere other than Rio, but shorn of the soaring Arthur Verocai strings of his recent Curyman albums, he sensibly opts here for a tougher sound. His band sport more plaid per square…

STEVE One hundred years after Proust, Joyce and Woolf first sought to chart the streams, gyres and eddies of modern consciousness, filmmakers still struggle to bring much of the rich and strange quiddity of the interior life to the screen. Hot Milk, released just a couple of months ago, was a case in point. In Deborah Levy’s novel, the narrative soared and swooped through a free-associative cosmos, from an Almería beach out to the Milky Way and down to the depths of the Mediterranean, via Greek myth, late capitalism and feminist theory, with mordant wit. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s sullen, torpid adaptation lost so much of this cargo that even Vicky Krieps on horseback in the Spanish sun was scant consolation. The really striking literary adaptations of recent years – Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor…