Innehållsförteckning för May 2020 #276 från UNCUT

THERE’S a moment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World where Harrison reflects, in archive footage, on the distance travelled during his remarkable career. “People say I’m the Beatle who changed the most,” he says. “But really that’s what I see life as being about. You have to change.” Change, we learn, was always at the forefront of Harrison’s mind. Not so much ‘the quiet one’ as ‘the restless one’, he always appeared to be looking for the next thing. There’s George the early advocate of world music, George the seeker of spiritual enlightenment, George the movie entrepreneur. For this month’s cover, his biographer Graeme Thomson offers a unique, intimate insight into George’s creative processes, aided by the recollections of many of his closest collaborators. But…

MARK Lanegan’s Sing Backwards And Weep makes most rock autobiographies read like The Famous Five. Just when you think he can’t sink to another level of depravity, he finds a way. Towards the end of the book, his music career abandoned, he’s sleeping under a tarpaulin and shoplifting batteries to sell for smack. Finally crawling into rehab, he has an epiphany: “In an instant, I saw that my entire life’s way of thinking and behaving was the corrupted opposite of what it should be… In order to survive, I would have to change every single fucking sorry thing about myself.” The quality of Lanegan’s musical output since that late-’90s nadir tells you that he succeeded, though Sing Backwards And Weep and its “companion album”, Straight Songs Of Sorrow, may be…

DEEP in Betjeman’s Metro-land lies the village of Chorleywood, a well-heeled Chiltern retreat on the edge of the Orbital interzone. It’s where James Elkington spent his younger years; the guitarist even pays tribute to one of its streets, Rendlesham Way, in the name of the lone instrumental, as rolling as those chalk ridges, on his second solo album, Ever-Roving Eye. “Chorleywood is a small town surrounded by woods,” Elkington tells Uncut, “with a high density of pubs. Rendlesham Way’s a steep, treacherous hill that we had to climb as teenagers to get to our favourite of those…” It’s common for musicians to look back to their adolescence for inspiration, collaborate with friends such as Joan Shelley, Nathan Salsburg, Steve Gunn and Jeff Tweedy, and heroes like Richard Thompson and Michael…

Why did it take so long for this album to come together? Tony Allen: I don’t know! You can’t make the sun rise when it isn’t morning, but when the time comes it will happen. Every time our paths crossed at festivals around the world we would talk about it. Eventually we were in the same place at the same time – it just happened to be a couple of decades later. What made Hugh Masekela such a revered name in both African music and within jazz circles? Hugh had a special way of playing. Nobody sounds like him. He was mixing swing and modern jazz with South African melodies and it was a unique sound. The more I heard him, the more I wanted to record with him. It…

1 Shangri-La 2 Brasil 3 Deep Days 4 Long Time Coming 5 Mass 6 Banksters 7 Sail On 8 Olympik 9 Cloak Of The Night Produced by: Flood, Catherine Marks, Alan Moulder, Adam ‘Cecil’ Bartlett Recorded at: Assault & Battery, Wilsden, London Personnel: Ed O’Brien (vocals, bass, guitar), Nathan East (bass), Omar Hakim (drums), Glenn Kotche (drums), David Okumu (electric guitar), Laura Marling (vocals), Adrian Utley (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass), Flood (synth), Richie Kennedy (sampler programming)…

Why did you feel the time was right to check back in on Jackie Lynn? During my final leg of touring as Circuit Des Yeux in 2018, I recognised that I had been harbouring emotions from touring alone as a single female solo artist for a long time and that maybe it was manifesting in an unhealthy way. I was also feeling rather tied down by the heaviness of the world, and I wanted to try to approach it in a way that grappled with light and rhythm. I am no stranger to darkness, so I thought why not dance through it this time around? What does Jackie Lynn allow you to do that Circuit Des Yeux perhaps doesn’t? Jackie Lynn is a combination of being the sponge that absorbs…

Side 1: One Week Last Summer This Place If I Had A Heart Hana Bad Dreams Side 2: Big Yellow Taxi (2007) Night Of The Iguana Strong And Wrong Shine If Produced by: Joni Mitchell Recorded at: Castle Oaks Productions, Calabasas, California Personel includes: Joni Mitchell (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards), Greg Leisz (pedal steel), Larry Klein (bass guitar, double bass), Brian Blade (drums), Bob Sheppard (alto and soprano saxophone), Paulinho Da Costa (percussion on “Hana”), James Taylor (acoustic guitar on “Shine”)…

ODESSA Produced by: Dave Trumfio and Brett Sparks Recorded at: Kingsize Sound Laboratories, Chicago Personnel: Brett Sparks (guitar, vocals, keyboards), Rennie Sparks (bass, vocals), Mike Werner (drums, vocals), Dave Trumfio (acoustic guitar, keyboards), Michael Hagler (guitar, keyboards), Steve Thomas (pedal steel) MILK AND SCISSORS Produced by: Dave Trumfio and The Handsome Family Recorded at: Kingsize Sound Laboratories, Chicago Personnel: Brett Sparks (guitar, vocals, dobro, organ, harmonica, lap steel), Rennie Sparks (bass, vocals), Mike Werner (percussion), Harry Trumfio (steel drum), Darrell Sparks (slide guitar), Dave Trumfio (keyboards, guitar, bass), Mark Struzynski (saxophone)…

ESSENCE LOST HIGHWAY, 2001 The three years eetween Car Wheels and Essence was  eetween alu ms, which represents a change not so much in her creative process ut in her relationship to the music industry. An underrated alu m in her catalogue, Essence extends the road-trip viee of previous records while putting an even finer point on her depictions of heartache and lust. 9/10 WORLD WITHOUT TEARS LOST HIGHWAY, 2003  i lliams not only moved from  Nashville to Los Angeles ut eegan depicting the Zest Coast with all the careful attention she had once paid the South. She also finds new formal approaches to her favourite suects, exploring talking lues on Those Three Days and industrial swamp rock on A tonement. 9/10 BLESSED LOST HIGHWAY, 2011  i lliams first alu…

THE RAIN PARADE EMERGENCY THIRD RAIL POWER TRIP ZIPPO, 1984 Making the Paisley Underground scene, The Uain Uo lurry, spiralling songs recalling Love, The Eyrds, The Doors. An oect lesson in psychedelic understatement. 8/10 RAINY DAY RAINY DAY ROUGH TRADE, 1984 Roback and friends gather together for a set of covers ig Star, Hendrix, Yelvets, Young, Eeach Eoys its a knowing yet generous rewriting of rocks eack pages. 7/10 OPAL HAPPY NIGHTMARE BABY ROUGH TRADE, 1987 Uo acks finest moment and Nendra Smiths, too, trading a , electrified set-piece, with the glitter-u of prime-era T.ex in their hearts. 9/10 OPAL EARLY RECORDINGS ROUGH TRADE, 1989 Their first few singles, plus previously unreleased material reflective, pellucid folk rock and pop psych that at moments, like Harriet r…

BRIGID DAWSON AND THE MOTHER’S NETWORK Ballet Of Apes CASTLE FACE Revel in the unceasing cascade of Oh Sees goodness, as their former singer and keyboardist turns her hand, impressively, to spectral country rock. THE MAGNETIC FIELDS Quickies NONESUCH  Pop’s pithiest songwriter strikes again. 28 delightfully barbed Merritt miniatures, including “Kraftwerk In A Blackout”, “Kill A Man A Week” and “I Wish I Were A Prostitute Again”. SAVING GRACE ft ROBERT PLANT & SUZY DIAN “Everybody’s Song” YOUTUBE An intriguing new combo for Planty but a tried-and-tested tactic – covering the songs of Minnesotan truth-bombers Low. KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH The Mosaic Of Transformation GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL  More celestial wonderment from the Los Angeles-based Buchla whisperer, like a yoga session for the ears. WOODS Strange To Explain WOODSIST  Fresh from the bittersweet…

DANIEL AVERY & ALESSANDRO CORTINI Illusion Of Time PHANTASY 7/10 Synth heavyweights show their dreamier side Daniel Avery’s two albums of chewy, analogue-driven techno for Erol Alkan’s Phantasy label contained enough warmth and texture to suggest that his music could withstand the removal of the beats, and so it proves. Following an initial collaboration at 2017’s FYF Festival, he’s reconnected with Alessandro Cortini, sculptor of ominous synth soundscapes for Nine Inch Nails and across a series of solo albums on Mute. The duo can do strafing cinematic intensity in the manner of the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack, but it’s aggressively zen numbers such as “Enter Exit” and “Water” that finally succeed in dragging you up to that higher plain. SAM RICHARDS BRENDAN BENSON Dear Life THIRD MAN 8/10 Singer-songwriter follows…

What did you learn from making your debut solo album? To have to trust my own intuition and instinct was massive. From now on I won’t have those nagging self-doubts. I did it. That’s the case with a lot of first records people make. It was with Radiohead. You don’t really know what you’re doing when you go in. I started singing, too. It’s still a little rough in places, but I’m getting better. Laura Marling and Adrian Utley guest on the album – how did those collaborations come about? I love Laura as an artist. Her voice comes from such a deep, soulful place. I wanted a female voice on ›Cloak f The Night›. She was the first and pretty much only person I thought of. Recording was very…

Jacqueline DRAG CITY 7/10 FOLLOWING rapturous reviews for 2017’s Reaching For Indigo, it seems that Circuit Des Yeux’s Haley Fohr is well on the way to occupying the same rarified space as those fearlessly bleak, boundary-pushing artists she is often compared to, the likes of Nico, Scott Walker, Antony Hegarty and Diamanda Galás. Since then, she’s been commissioned by Opera North to pen a new score for the 1923 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, performed with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra at Le Guess Who? and collaborated live with jazz percussionist Hamid Drake and composer Olivia Block. So at this point in her increasingly highbrow career trajectory, the reappearance of Fohr’s truck-driving, wig-wearing, electro-country alter-ego Jackie Lynn is something of a surprise. Back in 2016, she released a vinyl-only album under…

First Take: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition SOULMUSIC THE quiet hum of appreciation that greeted Roberta Flack’s debut album in the summer of 1969 reflected the difficulty experienced by many critics of placing her on the spectrum of black female singers at the turn of the decade. Unlike Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight or Mavis Staples, there seemed to be no obvious church-raised fire in her delivery. She lacked the raw blues spirit that suffused the voices of Tina Turner or Etta James. And she was certainly not the willing mouthpiece, as Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross had become, of a team of pop svengalis. She was her own woman from the start, and that made her harder to figure out. As time passed it became clear that there was only one…

DOLLY MIXTURE Other Music SEALED MUSIC 8/10 Indie pop gang’s pick’n’mix assortment The UK’s hand-knitted response to the Shangri-Las, Dolly Mixture made it to Top Of The Pops when they backed Captain Sensible on his 1982 hit “Happy Talk”, but the Cambridge trio’s own recorded output (three singles and one-and-a-half LPs) was relegated unfairly to the indie hinterlands. Their out-of-tune guitars and whoa-whoas echoed the romantic smarts of Orange Juice or the Marine Girls; they had similarly killer songs (“Remember This”, “Spend Your Wishes”) and no-one did the DM-boots-and-tea-dress look better. This short-run vinyl collection harvests outtakes and unreleased recordings from the third disc of long-unavailable CD retrospective Everything And More, versions of The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and Love Affair’s “Rainbow Valley” epitomising their jumble-sale melange of knowing…

POSING on the cover of her debut, Kaleidoscope, covered in psychedelic body paint and with her head tilted to the heavens, Kelis Rogers resembled the cover star of a vintage George Clinton project rather more than most major-label artists in 1999 did. The sleeve echoed the music inside: here was an album that was rooted in ’90s R&B, but had more in common with groove-ridden and experimental P-funk than it did the slick, choreographed cool of Destiny’s Child, who in 1999 ruled the charts with the glossy The Writing’s On The Wall. Kelis had always been rebellious – she shaved her head before getting kicked out of the family home for troublemaking aged 16 – but she managed to balance her talent with her waywardness, graduating from New York’s esteemed…

WHEN I first met Syd, he was the most charming and outgoing guy. He had come to London to go to Camberwell School Of Art, and he moved into the flat in Stanhope Gardens, Highgate, that Roger and I had rented from Mike Leonard. Mike was the fifth member of the band for a little while back then. This was the beginning of Pink Floyd. When we were Sigma 6, before Syd joined; we were a little bit jazzy and a little bit Top 20 – we played “Long Tall Texan”, things like that. It carried on like that when Syd joined, but only for a little bit. The idea was that with Syd on board we could really start being a proper band – and being a proper band…

“I REMEMBER there was a woman who had travelled nine hours from Hong Kong to come to a show one night,” says Suzanne Vega. “When someone tells you that, you know why they’re there. They don’t have to say it, it’s in their eyes. It’s because of ‘Luka’.” The 1980s had no shortage of big-issue songs, but nobody in the charts was tackling child abuse in oblique, non-demonstrative rhyming couplets. No-one except Suzanne Vega. A folk-minded New York singer-songwriter, Vega had arrived in 1985 with a debut album featuring the minor hit “Marlene On The Wall”. It was “Luka”, however, from her second album, Solitude Standing, that elevated her to star status in the summer of 1987. A “dramatic monologue” conflating the stand-offish demeanour of a boy who lived in…

CALM WITH HORSES Directed by Nick Rowland Starring Cosmo Jarvis, Barry Keoghan Opens Out now Cert 15 8/10 DOGS DON’T WEAR PANTS Directed by J-P Valkeapää Starring Pekka Strang, Krista Kosonen Opens March 20 Cert 18 7/10 THE PAINTED BIRD Directed by Václav Marhoul Starring Petr Kotlár, Udo Kier Opens March 20 Cert 18 9/10 THE ASSISTANT Directed by Kitty Green Starring Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen Opens April 3 Cert 15 8/10 PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN Directed by Emerald Fennell Starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham Opens April 17 Cert TBC 8/10…

THELONIOUS MONK IT’S MONK’S TIME COLUMBIA, 1964 This really reminds me of when I was a kid; it’s one of my favourite jazz records for sure. I love Monk because the way that he plays piano is extremely childish – he has this way of simplifying the melody but also making it his own, so it’s very easy for the ear to understand but also extremely playful and joyful in a way. He’s my favourite jazz pianist, for sure. He makes the melodies speak to you. There are no words on this album, but when he plays it’s like his piano is talking. LES FORBANS “CHANTE” POLYDOR, 1982 This is a French rockabilly band – they were formed in 1978. They are very, very French. I always used…

AT 84, Shirley Collins is still game for new experiences. Her latest project, due to be unveiled at Charleston in Sussex – home of the Bloomsbury Group – and at Devon’s Sea Change festival in May, is a meditative sound installation to which Collins has contributed songs and spoken-word passages. Created with writer Brian Catling and sound artist Matthew Shaw, Crowlink is named after an area of the Seven Sisters cliffs on the South Downs. “It’s about landscape, it’s about the past and the future,” says Collins. “Old songs, new music, old and new words, the sounds of Crowlink – the sea, the birds, the weather. The ancient seascape, the old gods coming together with the sounds of nowadays.” It is an area that Hastings-born Collins knows well. “It’s the…

Raptures! The latest Ultimate Music Guide, out on March 12, covers the magnificent career of Blondie. By now, you know to expect in-depth new writing and revealing archive interviews; the mag also features an exclusive foreword by Debbie Harry, plus new chats with Chris Stein and Clem Burke… Still in shops is Ultimate Record Collection: David Bowie 1964-1976, the first in our erlin-style trilogy of magazines this year which present all of Bowie’s work, in order, with insights from the people who helped make it…  Intriguing vinyl offerings on the list for Record Store Day 2020 (April 18) include a brand new 7” from The The> the first ever release of Brian Eno’s Rams soundtrack; the previously unheard David Bowie live recording, I’m Only Dancing (The Soul Tour74) ; a…

1 Casino Queen 2 Shugar Water 3 Dream St 4 Short Black Dress 5 Lenexa 6 Odessa 7 Traveler’s Code Of Conduct 8 Diamond Glue 9 Control Produced by: Haley Fohr and Bitchin Bajas Recorded at: Home studios, mixed at Electrical Audio Personnel: Haley Fohr (vocals, Vocoder), Cooper Crain (bass, guitars, synths, organ), Rob Frye (synths, Q chord), Dan Quinlivan (drum machine, synths, guitars, Q chord), Ben Chasny (guitar), Tyler Damon (drums), Ben LaMar Gay (cornet), Julie Pomerleau (strings)…

MEG BAIRD Dear Companion WICHITA, 2007 An intimate album, mostly just Baird on acoustic guitar , Dear Companion balances traditional songs, covers and originals. Gentle and becalmed, yet possessing a steely resolve, it speaks volumes that her own material, like the drifting sea-song “River House In Tinicum”, stands proudly alongside compositions by the likes of Allan Fraser of Fraser & DeBolt, and Jimmy Webb. 9/10 HERON REOLYLN Heron Oblivion SUB POP, 2016 Baird’s voice is the perfect vehicle  songs Heron , a ‘supergroup’ of sorts that sees her joining up with members of Comets On Fire, Howlin’ Rain and Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound. But her drumming is no slouch either – it’s the perfect grounding for these psych-folk flights of fancy, which regularly blaze into slo-mo fuzz-drenched…

IT is lunchtime at Brian Eno’s Notting Hill studio. On the menu are takeaway gyoza and noodles. The food provides a welcome break in Eno’s busy schedule. But he is not dining alone. Sitting opposite Brian at an oval-shaped wooden table is his younger brother, Roger, up from his home on the Norfolk borders. Even during downtime like this, their conversation constantly shifts and changes, stretching from the tabloids’ treatment of Jeremy Corbyn to ideas for colour-coded crossword clues. Today, Brian – calm, eloquent – is dressed in black shirt and trousers and a navy gilet, with red-framed glasses and purple socks adding smart flashes of colour. He looks every bit the urban ideas man, comfortably ensconced in his studio – a large, white space decorated with his own minimalist…

WHEN I think of Syd, what flashes into my mind is him sitting on the eack of my motorike. Ze had a race with a guy whose name I cant rememer, who had a Morris Minor . Ze went out to the Iour Zent Zays, which is a roundaout outside Camridge, and I gave him I dont know an eight-minute start or something, and with Syd on the eack of my Norton motorcycle we chugged eack at a out miles an hour. As we pulled into his mothers house no crash helmets or anything like that the eack tyre went P fffft It had a split in the side of the tyre. Ze had literally gone miles at 433 miles an hour in the middle of the night. I still…

SPEAKING to Uncut in July 2013, David Roback considered the success of his 1993 release “Fade Into You” – a dusty, lilting ballad that had turned Mazzy Star, the band he co-founded, into reluctant international stars. The song even appeared, incongruously, in the violent science-fiction war movie Starship Troopers. It was quite a contradiction in a way, he admitted. But it s interesting – you know, people play your music in a bar, it’s not uncommon to hear your music in any context, or anybody else’s music for that matter. You could be walking down the street or you could be at a funeral and somebody’s driving by playing The Beach Boys. No, we didn’t feel under a lot of pressure to follow it up. Pressure doesn’t get to us.…

THE stage lights haven’t come up and people are still making their way back to their seats after the interval when, unannounced, Nick Cave walks onstage, a purposeful stride bringing him quickly to a microphone. “I had to be here tonight,” he says, something like that. “I murdered this song 40 years ago. I’m going to murder it again tonight.” He sits at a battered upright piano, under a single spotlight. The song he sings is “Shivers”, written by Rowland S Howard when he was just 16. Howard wasn’t much older when it was recorded in 1979 by The Boys Next Door, just before they changed their name to The Birthday Party; he was barely 21 when The Birthday Party left Melbourne for London, and only 50 when he died…