Innehållsförteckning för May-2018 från UNCUT

In shops now! The latest in our Ultimate Music Guide series is the definitive guide to the recordings of topographic titans Yes. The secret to their 50 eventful years? As guitarist Steve Howe tells us in his exclusive intro: “The group wasn’t just five blokes that go up in their Wellington boots and play”... Almost 56 years after their first gig, The Rolling Stones are back on the road for the second leg of their No Filter tour. The indefatigable rockers will visit stadia in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester; tickets are on sale now… This year’s Record Store Day on April 21 is shaping up to be bigger than ever. Among the intriguing releases announced so far are a limited yellow-vinyl Led Zeppelin 7in featuring unheard mixes of “Rock…

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER Rebound FRENCHKISS Soft synth washes and Aegean sunsets provide a bewitching backdrop for Friedberger’s digressive indie-pop. ’80s Mac vibes abound. RYLEY WALKER Deafman Glance DEAD OCEANS “I gave myself 22 days to come up with a masterplan…” The Chicago guitar prodigy urges himself on to greater heights on his dense, engrossing fifth. KALI UCHIS Isolation VIRGIN/INTERSCOPE Immaculate, retro-futuristic pop-soul from the talented Colombian-American newcomer. Damon Albarn and Bootsy Collins chip in. SONS OF KEMET Your Queen Is A Reptile UNIVERSAL The perfect antidote to Royal Wedding hysteria: nine blasts of righteous riot jazz. BEN FROST All That You Love Will Be Eviscerated EP MUTE A (relatively) more hospitable companion to last year’s fearsome, Albini-produced LP The Centre Cannot Hold ; features an unlikely…

““What’s in the gloom/In the thorns and briars?” LAST September, Laura Veirs and her husband, the producer Tucker Martine, took a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a family reunion. Their visit coincided with the city’s annual festival, which traditionally opens with the ritual burning of Zozobra – a 50ft-tall marionette that symbolises the hardships and despair of the past year. Inside the figure’s vast frame, Santa Fe’s residents stuff scrawled regrets, divorce papers, eviction notices and other bad memories that will be consumed in the fire. To Veirs – coming during a spell of personal and national upheaval – the burning of the giant effigy represented positive change. As she sings on “Zozobra”, the closing track of The Lookout, “The people’s hopes/ Rose with the fire.” It is…

1 Connected By Love 2 Why Walk A Dog? 3 Corporation 4 Abulia And Akrasia 5 Hypermisophoniac 6 Ice Station Zebra 7 Over And Over And Over 8 Everything You’ve Ever Learned 9 Respect Commander 10 Ezmerelda Steals The Show 11 Get In The Mind Shaft 12 What’s Done Is Done 13 Humoresque Produced by: Jack White III Recorded at: Third Man Studio, Nashville; Sear Sound, New York; Capitol Studios, Los Angeles Personnel: Jack White (vocals, guitars, drums, organ, synths) and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, NeonPhoenix, Dominic Davis, Joshua Gillis, Justin Porée, Bobby Allende, Louis Cato, Daru Jones, Carla Azar, DJ Harrison, Anthony Brewster, Ian Montone, Gianluca Braccio Montone, Neal Evans, Quincy McCary, Brooke Waggoner, Fats Kaplin, Justin Carpenter, Neil Konouchi, Kevin Smith, CW Stoneking, Ann McCrary, Regina McCrary, Esther Rose…

Late April sees the release of Last Man Standing , Willie Nelson’s new studio effort on Legacy. Issued two days before his 85th birthday, and co-written with longtime producer Buddy Cannon, the LP addresses a variety of concerns, among them his own mortality. “I don’t want to be the last man standing,” Nelson sings on the title track. “Or wait a minute, maybe I do.” The first week in May, meanwhile, welcomes Can’t Wake Up , Shakey Graves’ follow-up to his fine 2014 breakthrough, And The War Came . The 30-year-old Texan, real name Alejandro Rose-Garcia, offers over a dozen songs marked by personal experience, what he calls “different shades of every person’s life”. Expect ample helpings…

1 Dimensional People Part I 2 Dimensional People Part II 3 Dimensional People Part III 4 Foul Mouth 5 Aviation 6 Parliament Of Aliens Part I 7 Daylight 8 Tear To My Eye 9 Parliament Of Aliens Part II 10 Parliament Of Aliens Part III 11 Résumé 12 Sidney In A Cup Produced by: Jan St Werner, Andi Toma Recorded at: Paraverse 4, Berlin; Michelberger Hotel, Berlin; April Base Studios, Wisconsin Personnel includes: Jan St Werner (electronics, harmonica, piano), Andi Toma (electronics, guitar, bass) and various others…

You’ve named the album after the headland Dungeness, which some call “the desert of England”. What’s the attraction? I visited it with my band, who all found it unbearably bleak, but I thought there was a real poetry to the place. It reminded me of Carbeth, but more like its nocturnal equivalent. Like England dreaming of itself. What were the threads that you were drawing together when writing songs for the album? Many of the songs were inspired by films. I’m a big Bergman head, and many themes that rebound around his work also rebound around the crises of identity, self-exposure as creative nourishment, ageing and the diminishment of personal power, genetic destiny, the tyranny of co-dependency, the tyranny of shame; the use of your personality as a testing ground…

What made you adopt a full band for The Siren’s Song ? Touring our last LP, Strange Country , we wanted to play the electric songs, so we brought in Mike and Shuyler. Then Kacy and I just decided to make an album of that kind of material. We’re really big fans of garage rock and country from the mid-’60s. Were you listening to anything in particular during the writing process? Late-’60s Everly Brothers, especially Two Yanks In England [1966] and Roots [1968]. Plus Jerry Reed and the Bobby Fuller Four. And the British folk influence has been with us the whole time. We were listening a lot to [Lal & Mike Waterson’s] Bright…

AFTER her fruitful Kurt Vile collaboration, Courtney Barnett returns with her second proper solo album, Tell Me How You Really Feel , while Ryley Walker releases the sophisticated Deafman Glance . Simone Felice is back with The Projector , and Eleanor Friedberger unveils her most Fiery Furnaces-like solo LP yet, Rebound ; Okkervil River’s ninth album, In The Rainbow Rain , is also promised. Among the treasures plucked from the vaults are Ornette Coleman’s The Atlantic Years vinyl boxset, and Neil Young’s Roxy – Tonight’s The Night Live , an archival concert album recorded in LA in 1973. TOM.PINNOCK@TIMEINC.COM…

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL Creedence Clearwater Revival 1968 Bayou baby-steps, with Fogerty’s earliest blue-collar plaid-shirt material alongside crisp R&B covers, including the breakthrough epic guitar makeover of “Suzie Q”. CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL Bayou Country 1969 Statement of intent, with Fogerty’s first classics “Proud Mary” and “Born On The Bayou” buttressed by the terse riffs of “Bootleg” and “Keep On Chooglin’”. CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL Green River 1969 Fogerty’s own personal favourite Creedence album, littered with the likes of “Lodi”, “Bad Moon Rising”, “Wrote A Song For Everyone” and the title-track: the sound of a band aware of their own distinction. CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL Willy And The Poor Boys 1969 On which Fogerty indulges his Lead Belly influence with “Cotton Fields” and “Midnight Special”, reinvents skiffle with “Down On The Corner”, and still…

M ARR’S résumé is so extensive that Wikipedia devotes a standalone page, divided into 32 subheadings, to his guest appearances on other people’s records. Here are some from the past 15 years that you may have missed. LISA GERMANO Lullaby For Liquid Pig (2003) American singer-songwriter Germano, widely praised for Geek The Girl in 1994, was, like Marr, a member of Neil Finn’s collaborative project 7 Worlds Collide in 2001. Marr added some sensitive guitar to two songs on Germano’s sixth solo album, Lullaby For Liquid Pig , and did the same on her next one, In The Maybe World (2006). TWEAKER 2am Wakeup Call (2004) Marr entered a dark world on this project by Chris Vrenna, an alumnus…

“Dan’s on a different path right now. He has a different mission” PATRICK CARNEY IT is not long before midnight when Dan Auerbach finally walks into the backstage bar at LA’s Wiltern Theater. Forty or so admirers, friends and band members have already crowded into this small jewel-toned anteroom beneath the bowels of the city’s historic art deco venue. Among them, Beck, dressed in Buffalo plaid and black leather, squeezes through the throng on his way to the bar. Auberbach, meanwhile, hangs a little towards the back of the room, smiling for selfies as friends come up to deliver congratulations for his latest creative about-face. An hour earlier, Auerbach headlined the Easy Eye Sound Revue – an old-fashioned showcase featuring acts signed to his blossoming record label, Easy Eye Sound.…

PROBABLY did myself a favour by not struggling on with it too long,” says Shirley Collins, discussing her 38-year retirement, ended by the release of Lodestar in 2016. “Although I minded not being ‘Shirley Collins the singer’… but I’m that again now!” To celebrate the publication of Collins’ new book, All In The Downs, and the release of the soundtrack to the recent film about her life, Uncut joins the garrulous Sussex-born folk singer, now 82, for a pot of Earl Grey at her picturesque cottage in Lewes. Up for discussion are nine of her finest albums, her journeys around America with Alan Lomax and the time Hendrix came for tea, as well her work with Davy Graham, various Fairport members and, of course, with her late sister Dolly. “It’s…

“I DON’T need to collect skulls any more, because that’s what people give me as gifts. I have some treasures now. I have a human skull back in New Zealand, it’s really something – it was in the room when my son was born, which is pretty crazy. That’s different, though, because I wouldn’t just put that on display. I try not to talk too much about how quacky my beliefs really are, but some things are sacred. “I was really into the occult for a while – I got into it through Jimmy Page, and I have friends who are part of the Crowley religion. Now my interest in the occult has transformed into something else – I like there to be some plausibility to it. Say, with tarot,…

JOHN PRINE (1971) Prine was working as a mailman when he signed with Atlantic and recorded with Elvis Presley’s backing band. The result is one of the finest debuts ever recorded, packed with what constitute hits for Prine – including “Paradise”, about the industrial destruction of rural Kentucky. BRUISED ORANGE (1979) His first album for his second label, Asylum, was produced by his old friend Steve Goodman (who wrote “City Of New Orleans”) and is one of Prine’s finest meditations on solitude. Best is “Sabu Visits The Twin Cities Alone”, about an actor from India set loose in the cold Midwest. AIMLESS LOVE (1984) After floundering on majors, Prine started his own label. His first record for Oh Boy was something of a comeback, featuring co-writes with Shel Silverstein, Bobby…

NOT many bands get to play their own funeral; even if they do, the ‘farewell concert’ is often an occasion negotiated through gritted teeth. But Wild Beasts have always been the most conscientious of bands. Having announced their split last year after 10 years and five albums of eccentric, literate indie manoeuvres, this is very much a humane killing, carried out with the utmost respect for each other, their frequently terrific songs, and their modest but passionate fanbase. Equally, you can be sure that they are not merely teeing themselves up for a lucrative reunion tour a few years hence. This really is it. The emotion in the venue is tangible long before the band take the stage. Which all begs the question, why split in the first place? Hard-and-fast…

ISLE OF DOGS Directed by: Wes Anderson Starring: Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson Opens: March 30 Cert: 12A 9/10 120 BPM Directed by: Robin Campillo Starring: Arnaud Valois, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart Opens: April 6 Cert: 15 8/10 LET THE SUNSHINE IN Directed by: Claire Denis Starring: Juliette Binoche, Gérard Depardieu Opens: April 20 Cert: 15 8/10 ANTONIO LOPEZ 1970: SEX, FASHION & DISCO Directed by: James Crump Starring: Antonio Lopez Opens: April 6 Cert: tbc 8/10 UNSANE Directed by: Steven Soderbergh Starring: Claire Foy, Juno Temple Opens: March 23 Cert: 15 7/10…

“The mood I was in at that time was quite elevated, if you know what I mean”POWELL ST JOHN PRETTY much the antithesis of a professional musician, Powell St John didn’t make his first solo album until he reached retirement age. After a working life spent variously as a jewellery fabricator and a computer hardware guy, this gentle and inquisitive Texan decided that it was finally time to reconnect with his past. It’s the same past you’ll find examined now in a limited-run LP called The Sultan Of Psychedelia. Over the course of the album, whose sessions date from across the last decade, Powell and a crack pick-up band present a number of his compositions from the 1960s. Even if you don’t immediately know “Slide Machine”, “Monkey Island” or “Bye…

Carbon Glacier BELLA UNION, 2004 Named after the glacier on Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest, Veirs’ fourth album channelled the skewed folk of Nick Drake alongside the psych-pastoralism of The Incredible String Band. There are meditations on the region’s bitter climate (“Icebound Stream”, “Snow Camping”), while centrepiece “Rapture” reflects on the difficulties of creative endeavours, name-checking Monet, Basho, Kurt Cobain and Virginia Woolf. July Flame BELLA UNION, 2010 A former geology student (she also studied Mandarin Chinese), Veirs makes the most of her academic background on her seventh album, which is rich with references to the earth, its creatures and natural bounty. Named after a variety of peach, the album also includes a song adapted from a Rimbaud poem (“Sleeper In The Valley”). Highlights include the Fleet Foxes-y “I…

THREE used to be plenty for Jack White. Sure, there were only two people in The White Stripes, but the man otherwise held fast to his triplicates – the core sonic trinity of voice, guitar/keyboard and drums, the strict colour palette of black, white and red, the three-chord foundation stone of the blues. Just consider the title he chose for his Third Man empire or the “III” on his guitar picks and sometimes his name – since he was born John Gillis, there was no Jack White I or II. So here we are at album three in the solo career that White inaugurated in 2012, not long after officially ending the most famous of his many bands. Surely anyone with such pronounced numerological inclinations would use this occasion to…

A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS Pinned DEAD OCEANS 6/10 Brooklyn noise merchants still stand for decibels It’s a miracle of restraint for A Place To Bury Strangers frontman Oliver Ackermann to wait nearly three minutes into his trio’s fifth album before unleashing his customary waves of face-melting noise. Like the stormy contents of 2015’s Transfixiation, songs like “Never Coming Back” have no lack of velocity and ferocity, though APTBS often fall between two poles, being not quite able to deliver memorable songs yet unwilling to let the music dissolve into purer forms of turbulence. Nevertheless, there’s a gloomy majesty to “Too Tough To Kill”, one of many tracks that evoke the sonic murk of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and other UK indie mopers who filled the chasm between Closer and…

How did you meet and what do you like so much about each other? We met in Santa Monica many moons ago when White Fence opened for me. We were all frightened of Tim and equally enamoured by him. I swear he growled at us. A few years later when I moved to LA and we started hanging out I discovered to my horror that he was as sweet as pie. I love most things about Tim, but I especially love how generous of spirit he is (and his dedication to consuming beverages). What is your favourite bit of Hippo Lite ? The out-of-tune violins occupy a special place in my heart – I tried very hard to hit recognisable notes. There are sounds on the album…

There are a lot of songs here about being in a band. Was that something you were consciously writing about, or was that just where the songs led? When you’ve been in a band as long as I have, a lot of artistic expressions naturally come out meta. Most of these songs stem from a very personal and long-held affinity for America’s folk music canon. I think of my songs as westbound signposts when you’re driving in the eastbound lane — that is to say, road signs you see in the rearview mirror, saying much more about where you’ve been than where you’re bound. Is it difficult to play a song like “Homecoming Party” on the road? I don’t think I can stomach playing that one live. I wrote it…

Are you nervous about releasing an album featuring so many starry collaborators? In a way we play with fire because we made a record that has all these prolific names – but we like the challenge as well. Everyone knows we can fiddle with sounds and synthesisers and software, but can we deal with human beings? In the end it doesn’t matter. The next record could be a no-name record. Or it may just be an algorithm. Mouse On Mars switch between pop and experimental music quite smoothly now. Has that become easier? Much easier. For a long time people are not sure what Mouse On Mars really is. Are we an electronic group, an indie band, studio people? Are we jokers? Software developers? It doesn’t matter any more. Since…

A CERTAIN RATIO Good Together/ACR:MCR/Up In Downsville (reissues, 1989, 1990, 1992) MUTE 3/10, 6/10, 6/10 Three problematic Madchester-era LPs The problem with being a pioneer is that everyone eventually catches up with you. These three albums came at a time when Britain was finally embracing A Certain Ratio’s deadpan fusions of punk and funk, leaving them bereft of a USP. Their big-label A&M debut Good Together, from 1989, tried to surf the Madchester wave but ended up sounding like every other over-produced late-’80s band. The only highpoint is the pulsating title track – which sounded like something from New Order’s contemporaneous Technique – and “Good Together” is reworked on the much better 1990 companion album ACR:MCR. Guest vocalist and remixer Bernard Sumner helps them to play up the harsh synth…

“I’M USUALLY HELL-BENT ON TRYING NOT TO REPEAT MYSELF” WHEN we think of Johnny Marr, we rarely think of him alone. “It was good being one of a pair,” he writes in his autobiography, Set The Boy Free, remembering the arrival of his younger sister into the family household. And for the next 420 pages that’s pretty much what Johnny Marr is: one of a pair. His teenage romance with his birthday twin Angie Brown grows into – and remains – the epic love story of his life. His uncanny rapport with the self-absorbed misfit Steven Morrissey results in a passionate, prolific, five-year songwriting spree that can still, after so long apart, kindle a wry pride in both of them, though they are now virtually strangers. Giving a TED Talk…

MARR’s interest in psychogeography is something he’s often cited as an influence on his work. The precise meaning of psychogeography, however, differs from writer to writer. In his 1955 “Introduction To A Critique Of Urban Geography”, Guy Debord, one of the founding members of the Situationist International, defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”. The idea, as the Situationists saw it, was to reinvent one’s journey through the city, approaching it not as a tedious route to work, but as a landscape ideal for exploration and play. In Britain, psychogeography reached a wide audience with Iain Sinclair’s books Lights Out For The Territory (1997) and…

THE BLACK KEYS Rubber Factory (2004) Recorded in a disused tyre factory, the Keys hone their sparse, trashy blues aesthetic and up their songwriting game. DAN AUERBACH Keep It Hid (2009) Auerbach’s solo debut offers a more quiescent take on the blues, with expanded instrumentation on “Trouble Weighs A Ton”. THE BLACK KEYS Brothers (2010) After taking time off for their two individual solo projects — and rap collaboration BlakRok – the duo deliver their career high to date. THE BLACK KEYS El Camino (2011) The third collaboration with Danger Mouse adds structure and deliberation to the duo’s messy, gritty sound. DR JOHN Locked Down (2012) Auerbach coaxed Mac back to his blues roots and added the arrhythmic drumming of Max Weissenfeldt as well as his own snaky guitar work.…

WHEN Ruban Nielson comes to Madrid, he usually pays a visit to his favourite painting, hanging in the grand Museo Nacional Del Prado. “Last time I made the tour manager wait for us,” he whispers, gazing at the canvas of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. “Probably every time I come to Madrid now I’ll get some strange obsessive-compulsive need to check in with the painting.” The Spanish artist’s work depicts the deity Saturn, in the form of a crazed old man, tearing apart a child with his teeth; it’s a disturbing image, but it’s one that’s haunted the guitarist since he saw it in a book decades ago in his native New Zealand. “It’s just really extreme,” he says. Nielson is in Madrid on a sunny winter’s day to…

A STANDOUT on The Tree Of Forgiveness is a loping tune called “The Lonesome Friends Of Science”, which depicts an ageing Vulcan, Roman god of fire, watching over Birmingham, Alabama. “His head is full of bumblebees,” Prine sings, adding that he’s still nursing a broken heart after Venus left him “for some guy named Mars from Idaho”. “I’ve been playing that song here and there, and people like that verse but you can see by their faces that they don’t know what it’s about.” Vulcan really does look out over the Iron City, a 56-foot statue perched on Red Mountain. Built in 1904, it has been used to sell pickles, ice cream, and overalls. “For years he held a torch for traffic fatalities. If his torch was red, it meant…

RED SPARROW OPENS MARCH 1 Jennifer Lawrence’s former prima ballerina turns secret agent in action caper. PETER RABBIT OPENS MARCH 16 The little furry fella, out nibbling Mr McGregor’s carrots on the big screen. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING OPENS MARCH 23 Follow up to Guillermo Del Toro’s monster movie, with John Boyega battling creatures from the deep. WESTWOOD: PUNK, ICON, ACTIVIST OPENS MARCH 23 Viv herself, resplendent in this enthralling doc about her life and times. READY PLAYER ONE OPENS MARCH 29 One for the kids from Spielberg, here bringing a successful YA novel to the screen. Mark Rylance adds gravitas, we assume. DEATH WISH OPENS APRIL 6 Bruce Willis – of course! – stars in the Charles Bronson role in Eli Roth’s update of the Michael Winner revenge flick. GHOST…

MARK E SMITH R.I.P. Loved David Cavanagh’s Mark E Smith obituary feature in April’s Uncut. It brought a tear to the eye, his story of survival, and I agree, he did indeed begin to resemble Alex Hurricane Higgins in later life, another hard-living talent taken too soon. I saw The Fall many times, and met Mark backstage on one memorable occasion, when we shared a joke and a brew. S Thomson, via email …Thank you, David Cavanagh – and Uncut – for what I thought was a most insightful and meaningful tribute to Mark E Smith. I saw The Fall when I was 15, in 1984, at the Glasgow Penthouse (with Del Amitri in support!). It was the first of many live appointments with Smith and his band over the…

“The hologram looks incredible. We’re making history with suspended reality”ALEX ORBISON “SOME people don’t want to think about this seismic shift in technology we’re going through. But for the majority, this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for. The touring aspect of it is sensational.” Alex Orbison is talking up Roy Orbison In Dreams: The Hologram UK Tour, in which a 3D projection of his late father created by US company BASE Entertainment will perform ‘live’, backed by a core band and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “I don’t want to give away all the secrets of the show,” adds Orbison, president of Roy’s Boys LLC, the company that oversees his dad’s estate, “but we’re making history with suspended reality. The hologram looks incredible.” It’s the latest development in one of…

YOU will know Derek Smalls as Spinal Tap’s courgette-smuggling bassist, the lukewarm water to the fire and ice of Nigel Tufnel and David St Hubbins. But as “Jazz Odyssey” proved, Smalls has always harboured lofty musical ambitions of his own. Now, more than 43 years after his abandoned side project “It’s A Smalls World”, the lothario of the low notes is finally poised to release his debut solo album. Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing) is his valiant attempt to do a Johnny Cash or a Leonard Cohen, with songs about MRI scans and erectile dysfunction providing an honest perspective on the ravages of age (arguably, at times, too much fucking perspective). The appearance of the Hungarian Studio Orchestra on several tracks, not to mention a bulging guest list of bona…

1 Margaret Sands 2 Everybody Needs You 3 Seven Falls 4 Mountains Of The Moon 5 Watch Fire 6 Heavy Petals 7 The Lookout 8 The Meadow 9 The Canyon 10 Lightning Rod 11 When It Grows Darkest 12 Zozobra Produced by: Tucker Martine Recorded at: Flora Recording & Playback, Portland, OR Personnel includes: Laura Veirs (electric/acoustic guitars, lead vocals, piano), Tucker Martine (drums, perc, drum programming, bass harmonica, synth), Steve Moore (piano, keys, synth, elec harpsichord), Karl Blau (vocals, synth), Justin Chase (piano, eBow), Jon Hyde (pedal steel), Jim James (vocals, guitar), Eyvind Kang (viola), Oz Martine, Tucker Martine, Cora Reece (vocals), Jon Neufeld (archtop guitar)…

in an apartment building and I was just writing melodies with no instruments – I would just sit down and start singing. Then I’d record the vocal and try to add a guitar or piano over the melody without being loud enough so the neighbours could hear. When I got to the studio with that, I was like, “OK, let’s take a country song like this and play it with nothing but modern instrumentation – let’s just see what it’s like to have a country song performed with 808 drum machines and synthesisers.” Are you happy to throw people for a loop? With a lot of the great records in history, you have to be able to get past something in order to really understand the story and relate to…

MELODY MAKER , JULY 1, 1972 YOU’LL get reports of English bands doing ‘well’ in America, and the reports will be long. You’ll hear the Stones, Elton John and The Faces before you hear of Led Zep. Somehow somebody forgot Zeppelin when they were writing home. And yet for four years Zep have been slaying America. For four years they have met with the dooming criticism that they could never do as well again, and yet they’ve come back, and done better. This present tour will more than likely go down as their best ever. Strange how the Zep became unfashionable back home. Sure, they sell albums, and they can fill the Empire Pool – but where were all the trimmings, where was the real flash, the excitement? It was…

AS Brett Anderson contemplates the 25th-anniversary reissue of Suede’s stellar debut album, he recalls how hard it was for the band to reach that point. “We were rubbish at first,” he says. “We had to really work hard at it, me especially.” As the 4CD set demonstrates, by 1993 the hard work had fashioned a new identity and two dozen great songs. The set contains the LP, a live show and all their B-sides, outtakes, demos, BBC sessions and a DVD. “’The Drowners’ was the first time we’d gone through the looking glass,” says Anderson. “That hook ‘taking me over’ had that perfect blend of melody and darkness I was always trying to access.” He is still proud of the debut for representing where the band…

“MOST people would tell you that the pitcher is the most important guy – that’s why they get paid so much. But from way back, at four or five years old, for me it was always the centre fielder. Back then there were no major-league teams in California, so for me baseball at that level was kind of rooted in the past: I had learned about Babe Ruth, and Ty Cobb, who were both centre fielders; I had learned about the New York Yankees, and Joe DiMaggio, another centre fielder. Mickey Mantle was another. It seemed to me like the alpha male players were the guys who could hit the home runs, and more often than not they played centre field. So I sort of fabricated my own mythology about…

WHEN Johnny Marr saw Maxine Peake ( Shameless , Dinnerladies ) acting in a 2014 British thriller called Keeping Rosy , he was so impressed that he raved about her in public. She called to thank him. “I told her I had an idea for a different kind of music. Would she be interested in working on it? She said yes and off we went.” Last December, Marr and Peake released “The Priest”, a spoken-word piece performed to an atmospheric soundscape of guitars and keyboards. Peake took the text from a diary written by Joe Gallagher in The Big Issue , describing life as a homeless man in Edinburgh. “The Priest” – Gallagher’s nickname on the streets – was…

AS a musician, Marr made only a few public appearances during 2017. One was a Pet Shop Boys gig at the Albert Hall. One was a Hans Zimmer concert in New York. And one, surprisingly, was a globally live-streamed TEDxTeen event with Chic’s Nile Rodgers at the 02 Arena. “It might seem incongruous that me and Nile Rodgers would be sat together,” Marr allows, “but we have more in common than people think. He was an influence on me from 1977–78, those early Chic singles, and particularly in the years when I became a free agent. I’m talking 20-odd years ago. It wasn’t a matter of copying his guitar style. It was his influence in approach. Throughout the ’90s, I related to that hugely.” The rhythms and disciplines of funk…

HE’S my mum’s first cousin. He lived in NYC, and my parents made him sit down with me and play guitar. My parents told Robert’s mum – his mum’s name is Rosalie – and Rosalie told him, ‘Bobby, you have to sit down with him. You have to. He’s gonna be here at noon.’ Then I showed up and I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Fuck, this teenager’s coming over, you know. What the fuck? This Ohio teenager’s coming over.’ So I came over and I had my Junior Kimbrough records and my skin-tight jeans and my Martin guitars and he was overjoyed. We hung out for hours. “He was telling me all about how he was so excited that I was into the stuff he was into. He was cool…

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA FAT POSSUM, 2011 The spacious and sprightly debut, featuring the buzzy “Ffunny Ffriends”, the lo-fi Motown funk of “How Can You Luv Me” and the mutant surf-rock of “Boy Witch”. II JAGJAGUWAR, 2013 Featuring witch Janet Farrar as its cover star, II was heavier and more claustrophobic than the debut. There was still room, however, for the syncopated pop of “So Good At Being In Trouble”. BLUE RECORD JAGJAGUWAR, 2013 Though hardly essential, this EP of acoustic versions of II tracks, plus Dirty Projectors and Beck covers, is an excellent display of Nielson’s skills on guitar. MULTI-LOVE JAGJAGUWAR, 2015 The hi-fi funk opus – kind of. Nielson embraces synths and disco rhythms on this LP about all things amour,…

The sheer kinetic energy and imaginative power of this show is genuinely hard to fault IT is hard to remember a live event more ravenously anticipated than Kendrick Lamar’s first proper UK headline shows in five years. The background noise around this opening night, from social media buzz, to gold-dust tickets, to the excitable hordes surging the Genting Arena doors, has a rare kind of electricity. Maybe Prince at the O2 in 2007 comes close, but not much else. Lamar arrives in Britain soon after winning five Grammy awards for Damn and in the same week as Marvel’s record-smashing new superhero blockbuster Black Panther, for which he curated the soundtrack. So commerce plays a role here, of course. But on the ground, Kendrickmania also looks and sounds like a genuine…

PATTI SMITH Horses 1975 This was the first time I’d ever heard music that felt like it was representing the inside of me. For the first time, I felt all my rhythms and feelings and all my complications as a young woman were made real in sound. It was extraordinary, a huge moment for me. It was liberating how she looked, how she sang, that she let go. I was in my twenties, I was already trying to be in a band by then, but it didn’t come a moment too soon. I didn’t know then that you were allowed to make a noise during sex as a woman without seeming cheap or unfeminine. People think the ’70s were so trendy, but they were like the ’40s in England. DON…