Innehållsförteckning för July 2020 #278 från UNCUT

WITH a broad smile and neatly parted hair, Schneider’s appearance embodied the droll outward normality with which Kraftwerk presented their high-concept electronic pop to the world. However behind his inscrutable humour, it was Schneider’s radical musical outlook that was a determining factor in their direction. Born Florian Schneider-Esleben, he grew up in Düsseldorf and studied flute at the city’s Robert Schumann Hochschule. Schneider’s first proper band was the protoindustrial Pissoff with future Kraftwerk live bassist Eberhard Kranemann. “His father was a very famous and rich architect and he had big rooms where we could play music,” Kranemann recalls. “He could feel some new thing happening here. This was the beginning of Kraftwerk.” On meeting architecture student Ralf Hütter at a jazz improvisation course, the pair began a definitive musical collaboration.…

IN the early 1990s, the small North Lanarkshire town of Bellshill became famous as the improbable epicentre of the Scottish indie scene, being home to three influential and mutually supportive bands: The Soup Dragons, Teenage Fanclub and The BMX Bandits. Impressively, the Bellshill scene is still bearing fruit: members of all three groups contribute to an enchanting new album by Snowgoose, the collective founded by ex-Soup Dragon Jim McCulloch, and fronted by Somerset native and longtime Glasgow resident Anna Sheard. “It still feels a bit like everyone lives next door to each other,” says Sheard of Glasgow’s fertile music scene. “It’s a small creative network and people are always willing to help each other out.” So it proved when McCulloch began seeking female vocalists for solo project The Green Peppers…

Neptune City was very much an album of place. The title suggests Italian Ice may be too… It wasn’t really intentional. I think because Neptune City was the first record I wrote, it was from a position of just really enjoying making music and being excited about it and this record is the first one I’ve made since then that wasn’t coming from a place of turmoil and struggle. I didn’t feel like I had anything to prove and I had a place to live, a good relationship and good friends. But in terms of Neptune City and Italian Ice, there’s something about New Jersey that I’ve always come back to with my writing. It’s just this beautiful, magical place in my mind. Goodnight Rhonda Lee was the first thing…

UNCUT: Were you still teaching when you wrote and recorded Alien Lanes ? I may have still been teaching, but if we were getting ready to sign with Matador I’m sure I had plans to quit. It was a weird time with a few mixed emotions. Pride and excitement. A little nervousness. Also anger because some – actually a lot – of the people I associated with at the time thought I had lost my mind or at the very least was being irresponsible to be leaving a good job with benefits. It’s understandable how they didn’t think it was possible at that stage in my life. Was this the moment where it all stopped feeling like a hobby? This was a second big turning point for us, being on…

THE ENTOURAGE MUSIC & THEATER ENSEMBLE The Neptune Collection (reissue, 1976) 8/10 CRAIG KUPKA Crystals: New Music For Relaxation 2 (reissue, 1982) 7/10 ANN McMILLAN Gateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal And Other Sounds (reissue, 1979) 8/10 SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS Three lost classics of exploratory music from the Folkways archive, remastered for vinyl IT’S easy to think of Moe Asch’s Folkways label primarily as a repository of traditional music. But as well as tending to a vast archive of folk, blues, jazz and ethnological song from the Americas and beyond, Folkways has quietly played patron to a strain of avant-garde music that sat comfortably in neither classical conservatories nor jazz concert halls. When Asch’s family donated his collection to the Smithsonian Center For Folklife And Cultural Heritage in 1987,…

NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS NOVEMBER 1, 1980 “GODDAMN THAT BEAT!” Don Van Vliet slams out a foursquare tattoo on the dashboard of his blue Volvo estate. “That mama heartbeat. That bom... bom... bom! Why do they do that? Don’t they know it’s bad for the heart? I would never treat my heart that way. I don’t want my heart to attack me! Don Van Vliet is railing against the evil monotonous mama heartbeat of what passes for music in a world of limited sensibility where he lives with his unlimited sensibilities. And he isn’t kidding. Where he hears a myriad symphony I hear only the wind whistling through the window. Where he sees a terrifying menace I see only a large, gleaming truck. But if his grip on reality is slack,…

BEASTIE BOYS STORY APPLETV 7/10 Rap pranksters reunite with long-time visual collaborator Spike Jonze on this bittersweet bio-doc. By Stephen Dalton A WARMLY nostalgic celebration with a side order of guilty confession, Beastie Boys Story is a testament to the goodwill that the New York rock-rap trio still enjoy today, eight years after the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch called time on their three-decade career. Directed by long-time Beasties insider Spike Jonze, this stylised documentary is essentially a spoken-word concert film based on Beastie Boys Book, the mammoth 2018 autobiography compiled by surviving members Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz. Shot at the King’s Theatre in Brooklyn over three nights last year, it was scheduled for a big-screen premiere at the SXSW festival in Texas back in March, before…

CDS TO COUNT ON So how are we all spending our time during this coronavirus hell? My 16-year-old son (who is in the high-risk category) and I are pretty much confined to the house while my wife goes out to work (she is in the NHS) and does the shopping (no change there). For my sins, I thought I’d start a list of every track that appears on the free CDs – by artist, track and original album. As you might imagine, this has been quite a task! Anyway, I thought your readers might be interested in a few observations I have made: firstly the opening track on the free CD is inevitably always a very strong one. The artist with the most tracks on Uncut CDs appears to be…

“Tony was one of the few complete drummers in the world”SEUN KUTI BORN in Lagos in 1940, Tony Allen was schooled in the jazz drumming of Art Blakey and Max Roach as well as local highlife sounds. In 1964 he joined Fela Kuti’s band Koola Lobitos, which morphed into Africa ’70, the outfit who helped Kuti realise his vision of a new, powerful, politicised sound – Afrobeat – predicated on Allen’s ability to play complex polyrhythms over a funk pulse, giving the illusion of constant, easy motion. Tiring of the turbulence surrounding Kuti, Allen quit in 1978 and moved to Europe six years later, settling in Paris, although heroin addiction stalled his career. He rallied in the late ’90s, becoming ever more prolific and forging an alliance with Damon Albarn…

TO describe Nicole Atkins as a woman out of time is in no way a criticism. She’s always spoken with love and admiration for classic soul, pop and rock, while her own music draws especially from the ’50s and ’60s. Indeed, covering songs by the likes of Harold Arlen and Marie Queenie Lyons points to a commitment that’s deeply felt, not driven by trends. But although her natural habitat is the past, it’s in a state of constant development, more a vehicle for her own ideas than a hallowed site of worship. The New Jersey singer-songwriter and guitarist, who now lives in Nashville, bedded into the evergreen greats early. She was introduced to the likes of The Drifters and Eddie Cochran via her mother’s Cruisin’ Classics album, and as a…

PAUL WELLER On Sunset POLYDOR 8/10 Weller’s 15th studio album finds the songwriter exploring worlds both new and familiar. By Peter Watts WHEN Paul Weller released the nostalgic ruminations of True Meanings in 2018, it might have suggested that having reached 60, the songwriter was ready to give up the sense of adventure that had informed his work since 22 Dreams. Perhaps he was going to ditch the krautrock and electronica for more albums crammed with string arrangements? Maybe he was about to knock out a big-band covers LP of American Songbook classics? The release of “In Another Room” this January scuppered that idea. This limited-edition EP of sound collages and sonic experiments came out on Ghost Box, the label that pioneered the concept of hauntology in music – atmospheric,…

The release of Pag r Suice’s much anticipated That’s How Rumours Get Started LOMA VISTA, co-produced by Sturgill Simpson and featuring Benmont Tench and guitarist Matt Sweeney, among others, has been bumped back to July. As has Willie Nelson’s First Rose Of Spring SONY LEGACY, his 70th studio album. The upshot is a small bottleneck of mouth-watering releases, given that The Jayhawks return that month with XOXO VKDP/TKLUTY TLJHUV. Spoils are even this time around, with de facto leader Gary Louris sharing songwriting and lead vocals with bandmates Marc Perlman, Karen Grotberg and Tim O’Reagan. “It was time to open things up,” he reasons. “The Jayhawks are a band where everyone’s equal.” Don’t expect any radical departures though. As Perlman points out: “After all these years of playing together, everything…

“I’ve just started an online course in the history of economics,” says Will Westerman, the singer-songwriter with the shaved head, sharp cheekbones and golden voice who’s making the most of his lockdown in west London by also teaching himself piano and the music program Logic. The 28-year-old was meant to be heading out on tour around Europe and the US this summer in support of his sublime debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead , but the coronavirus pandemic put paid to that. “Everything’s gone out the window,” he sighs. “It’s too vast a thing to wrap my head around so I’m trying to focus on things I can do here.” Westerman, a philosophy graduate who sang in choirs at school, spent a month on the Aojduyhdvw lqwhu hvklqj xw…

RUSH Permanent Waves ( reissue ,1980) UPC PHUCUUY DNTKHP 7/10 The Canuck prog metallers’ breakthrough album, reissued. By John Lewis OU can certainly see Y the appeal of Rush for a certain teenage rocker of the ’70s and ’80s. Here was a band who seemed to take all the hallmarks of prog rock – the technical proficiency, the slightly manic intensity, the fiddly time signatures, the switches in tempo, the bombastic fanfares, the poetic-sounding lyrics – and distil them into an easily digestible heavy metal format. This process of distillation was helped by the fact that there were only three members. Neil Peart played like Gene Krupa in a metal band, thumping furiously around every square inch of his enormous kit but never forgetting his overriding duty to groove. Alex…

“IPEED on the side of the road all the way home, and wore gloves to get gas,” says Courtney Marie Andrews. The 29-year-old singer-songwriter has recently returned to her home in Nashville from a week-long furlough in Upstate New York. The cross-country drive – amid the Coronavirus outbreak in America – felt precarious. “I was trying to be as cautious as possible, not only for my safety but for the safety of others,” she says. For one week, Andrews, Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson (aka The Tallest Man On Earth), singer-songwriter and producer Sam Evian and singer-songwriter Hannah Cohen gathered together as the United States began to lock down. Matsson and Andrews had just begun an American tour when, on March 13, amid increasing fear and uncertainty as the virus spread…

GIVEN that nobody’s going to want to brave a portaloo for a while yet, most summer festivals have already declared 2020 a write-off and rescheduled for next year, leaving a gaping hole in the cultural calendar. Thankfully Drift Records’ annual Sea Change shebang, which was due to take place this May at the Dartington Hall estate, has opted for a different approach, moving as much content as it can salvage into the digital realm. Tech firms have been trying to float the idea of the virtual festival since the dawn of the internet, to widespread indifference; some experiences you simply can’t recreate online. But needs must, and Sea Change has valiantly decided that some semblance of festival is better than none at all. Utilising all of the various streaming platforms…

NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS Eliza Hittman’s committedly feminist drama is an example of American realist cinema at its most unvarnished, and most emotionally powerful. Writer-director Hittman made a significant splash in 2017 with Brooklyn-set teen drama Beach Rats, and this year her follow-up won major awards in both Sundance and Berlin. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is about Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a 17-year-old high-school student from Pennsylvania who discovers she is pregnant. There’s the merest skeleton of a story: Autumn and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) take a bus to New York, nervously pass the time before Autumn can get an appointment in an abortion clinic, and reluctantly hang out with a pushy boy they meet on the bus. This exceptionally spare film has a documentary-like clarity that emerges from what…

SHORTLY after the Grateful Dead’s motorcade of station wagons pulled up in front of their Cambridge, Massachusetts, motel in May 1970, Jerry Garcia could be seen running around loudly proclaiming: “I’ve found the guy! I’ve found the guy!” That guy was Ned Lagin, a student at nearby MIT. A scientist as well as a musician, Lagin had written to Garcia earlier that year telling him about the electronic music he had composed. While in town, the Dead played a free concert, a ticketed show, and observed a Lagin tape recorder performance at MIT’s windowless round chapel. “People are studying in their dorm rooms with their doors open – and the Grateful Dead walks by,” Lagin chuckles today from his California home. “At the end of the concert that I gave,…

Uncut has joined the virtual gig revolution, in partnership with the consistently excellent Paradise Of Bachelors label. Four of their artists – Itasca, Jake Xerxes Fussell, James Elkington and Michael Chapman – have recorded exclusive ‘at home’ sessions, dropping weekly over at uncut.co.uk… Just as we were going to press, Bob Dylan announced his first album of new material in eight years. Rough And Rowdy Ways includes recent singles “Murder Most Foul”, “I Contain Multitudes” and “False Prophet” and will be released by Columbia on June 19… The Doc’N Roll op festival has launched an on-demand streaming service to help you through lockdown. Among the launch titles are films on Conny Plank, Robbie Basho, Sun Ra, Betty Davis and Twisted Sister… If Neil Young can curate an extensive online archive,…

Mike Hadreas feigns exasperation when asked what inspired his move toward accessibility with Set My Heart On Fire Immediately . “I think all my songs are accessible!” he insists. “I wouldn’t release them if they weren’t. I do think, though, that on parts of this album I was getting off on the idea of writing something ‘catchy' from start to finish. I'm just getting more comfortable and confident with all of that living together, the emotional and the technical. I left room for light and dark to exist together in the songs, but leaned toward the light whenever it felt right”. He readily acknowledges being influenced by Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley, explaining that “I’ve carried their songs with me my entire life-specifically their ballads. I wanted to see what…

Their brilliant eighth, condensing rock, pop, punk and psych into glittering chunks. FOR a brief time in the early ’90s, Guided By Voices were the coolest band in New York City. They weren’t Manhattanites, though, fresh out of Swiss finishing schools and into skinny jeans. Instead this was a gang of mid-thirties blokes from Dayton, Ohio, who liked sports and worked normal jobs – guitarist Mitch Mitchell, fantastically, in a sandpaper factory. They’d get together on the weekend, drink copious amounts of beer and live out their rock’n’roll fantasies with a four-track tape machine. Leading these informal sessions was their singer Robert Pollard, a schoolteacher with an obsession with writing songs; usually short snippets that went straight to the hooks. To borrow a title of theirs from 1993’s Vampire On…

DOC WATSON & GAITHER CARLTON Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS 8/10 Unheard live recordings from the father of roots music and his father-in-law TWO years after he was “discovered” by folklorists Ralph Rinzler and Eugene Earle in 1960, and two years before he released his landmark debut in 1964, Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson headed up to New York to play some of his first shows as a headliner. He’d performed in the city before as a member of clawhammer banjo pioneer Clarence Ashley’s band, but was only just taking his first steps to establish himself as a solo artist. For his performances at New York University as well as for the more intimate shows he booked at a West Village coffee house called Blind Lemon’s (which closed a…

IN AUTUMN 1979, Joy Division were on the verge of a breakthrough. Already a heavy live band, the austere, cavernous atmospheres of their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, released that June, took their intensity to new levels. That September, during a gig at Brussels’ Plan K, though, they debuted “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, a song that became bigger than anything they could possibly have imagined. Seemingly an old-fashioned ballad about lost love, the song’s lyrical starkness also reflected the short, chaotic life of Ian Curtis. Recording “Love Will Tear Us Apart” took several months, three studios, three engineers and numerous mixes, as the band’s producer Martin Hannett obsessively embarked on what drummer Stephen Morris calls “a quest for the perfect pop song. He already had it, but kept thinking, ‘It…

“THERE’S nothing harder than performing in front of no one,” says Angel Olsen, eyebrow cocked, as she introduces “Some Things Cosmic”. Olsen arranged this ticketed livestream concert to raise funds for her touring crew and band as well as the MusiCares Covid-19 Relief Fund, and it saw her coming to terms with the cognitive complexity of delivering a worthwhile performance to an empty room. Even her cat has stayed away, she notes with chagrin. However, it’s a situation that, all in all, plays to Olsen’s strengths. She can do vulnerable and intimate, but she can be adventurous and idiosyncratic as well; there’s nobody clamouring for an encore of “Shut Up Kiss Me” or getting up to go for a pee during the new songs. Olsen first dabbled with the format…

KRABI, 2562 STREAMING FROM MAY 29 British artist/film-maker Ben Rivers ( Two Years At Sea ) teams with co-director Anocha Suwichakornpong to uncover the secret histories behind a Thailand community. THE LAST FULL MEASURE STREAMING FROM JUNE 1 William Hurt, Ed Harris, Sebastian Stan and Samuel L Jackson are among the prestige cast in this true-life drama about a Vietnam rescue medic. THE UNCERTAIN KINGDOM STREAMING FROM JUNE 1 Twenty directors and a cast including Alice Lowe, Hugh Dennis and Sally Bretton offer an anthology-style portrait of contemporary Britain. CITIZENS OF THE WORLD STREAMING FROM JUNE 12 Gianni Di Gregorio – writer and star of  art-house comedy hit Mid-August Lunch – returns with the story of three Italian 70-year-olds planning to make the most of their retirement. THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM…