Innehållsförteckning för October 2020 #281 från UNCUT

ELLIOTT Smith was never the most obvious candidate for rock deification. Back in 1994 he was merely one-third of Heatmiser, indistinguishable from every other Portland alt.rocker in his regulation plaid shirt and baseball cap. When Kill Rock Stars co-founder Slim Moon was invited to join a tour of the West Coast featuring various indie frontpeople doing solo turns, he didn’t even bother to watch Smith on the first night. Alerted to his mistake, Moon made sure to catch Smith at the next date in San Francisco. “I was floored,” he says. “I’d never seen somebody playing solo acoustic be that powerful, where it’s both beautiful and gritty.” The pair became friends, with Moon eventually releasing Smith’s second (eponymous) solo album on Kill Rock Stars. Now the subject of a deluxe…

DIANA DeMuth has always been travelling through, ever since her visual-artist parents repeatedly upped sticks in Massachusetts when she was a child. She has led a Kerouac-esque existence ever since, and a sense of movement propels the songs on her new album, Misadventure. Both intimately acoustic and rousing, as when she busts out of town with “nothing left to lose” in “Hotel Song”, the glorious escape of “Born To Run” (one of her favourite songs) comes to mind. “Yeah, there’s a lot of movement in the lyrics,” says DeMuth, speaking with Uncut early one morning as she sits by the sea in Cape Cod. “Even if it’s not saying, ‘I wanna get out’ – it kind of is. The album always makes me want to get in and drive to…

The Aral Sea has been a central Asian landmark for at least the last 140,000 years. But the 20th century changed that. Soviet irrigation works re-routed rivers across the region, and much of the Aral is cold, dry desert. “Many people now born in the area have never known the sea that once was, but live with the sand-covered villages of fishermen and destroyed homes,” says Galya Bisengalieva. A violinist and composer of Kazak heritage, Bisengalieva has made the Aral disaster the subject of her debut album, Aralkum . “I work a lot with drone, electronics and multi-layered strings, so finding the voice of the Aral came quickly to me,” she explains. “My style suited the simplicity of the barren desert, as well as the flowing of the water.” It’s…

Richard & Linda Thompson: “We were prepared to be musical footnotes forever” Early on, was there a moment when you both realised youwere creating something special? LINDA THOMPSON: When we first started, Richard was quite shy about singing. We fooled around with Everly Brothers songs and country songs. Sounded OK, so we gave it a go! RICHARD THOMPSON: I thought we were writing and singing some good songs, and that it was a unique direction in popular music, but we were so far from the mainstream that I just saw songs, and indeed albums, as stepping stones to something that would have a wider appeal – without sacrificing our integrity. I think we were prepared to be musical footnotes forever! What do you think of I Want To now…

Britt Daniel: “I had to dig through a lot of drawers” Why did itseem like a good time for a reissue campaign? When we started working with Matadorforourlastrecord,weended up talking to them about re-releases. A lot of our records came out and did well in the States but not abroad. The idea was to get everything in one place all nice and tidy. It took a long time to find all the artwork again – I had to dig through a lot of drawers and boxes I hadn’t seen in a long time. How did it feel to be going through your back pages? I’d never done it before I did the greatest-hits album last summer. Even when the idea has come up to tour an old album, I’ve…

JACK NITZSCHE Jack Nitzsche HANKY PANKY/MAPACHE 5/10 A singular, strange record finally out on vinyl JACK NITZSCHE, who died in 2000 at the age of 63, had a remarkable four-decade run as an arranger (Phil Spector, Neil Young), sideman (The Rolling Stones, Crazy Horse), film scorer (Performance, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), songwriter (“Needles And Pins”, “Up Where We Belong”) and producer (Mink DeVille, Graham Parker). But the gifted eccentric was also responsible for one of the most bizarre albums in rock annals. We pick up the story in 1971, during the making of Harvest, for which Nitzsche wrote the orchestral arrangements and recorded them with the London Symphony Orchestra. While he had the LSO in the studio, he cut the classical album St Giles Cripplegate on Neil’s dime;…

PATTI Smith, like most of us, has spent the majority of 2020 sitting still. This state of affairs is anathema to Smith’s peripatetic nature – the arc of travels she has traced so eloquently in her memoirs, Just Kids, M Train, and Year Of The Monkey. “I’m a person who likes to be in motion,” she says, sipping coffee in her downtown Manhattan apartment. “I was slated to do a world tour this year, so I had the mindset to be in performance mode. I still have my little suitcase all packed.” Smith’s latest album, Peradam is also devoted to travel, albeit a journey of the imagination. The third instalment of her collaborative Perfect Vision trilogy with Soundwalk Collective, Peradam is inspired by the work of a French poet. The…

MICK Jagger has a room with a view. It is mid-afternoon in Tuscany and the sun is overhead. Thankful for the breeze, Jagger works through a problem that has been bugging him lately. “A couple of days ago, I was working on this ballad,” he confides. “The reading of it is quite difficult to do. It’s not technically difficult, but it’s not an easy song to interpret. I’m very aware I’ve got to get it over in the right way. It’s got to come out like you mean it!” This ballad is the latest evidence of new music from a resurgent Rolling Stones. In April, at the height of lockdown, they released the trim, muscular “Living In A Ghost Town” – their first new material for eight years. Dating from…

WHEN Mick was going out with Marianne Faithfull, he used to come round to mine and Storm [ Thorgerson ]’s flat at Egerton Court in South Kensington. He was very friendly with another Cambridgeite, a film director called Nigel Gordon. “A few years later, Marshall Chess called Hipgnosis studio and said, ‘We’d really like to do something for the new album together.’ So Storm and I went round to Keith’s house in Cheyne Walk and talked with him and Mick. The album was going to be called Goats Head Soup , but they had no ideas about what they wanted. So we did some drawings based on centaurs with horses’ bodies and goats’ bodies. We showed them to Mick and Keith, who said, ‘Yeah, that’s it, that’s it, let’s do…

”I CAN see the Eno from here.” Sitting on her couch with two dogs at her feet, Heather Cecelia McEntire cranes her neck and peers out of the window to the vast lawn and garden outside and to the slow-flowing Eno River just beyond. “I live on top of a small hill, and I can see the pond that feeds the Eno. It’s an easy jaunt down there. I take my dog Lou for walks down by the bridge most days. This house is surrounded by state parks, so everything is green and lush.” Situated at the end of a long gravel road, McEntire’s house is only a 15-minute drive from downtown Durham, North Carolina, but it’s so secluded that she could be in the middle of the country. She…

IF you play video games you’ll perhaps have heard it on Guitar Hero 3, or Freestyle BMX 2. Enjoy films? It’s shown up in everything from Dazed And Confused to Suicide Squad, even the Angry Birds Movie. If you’re either of a certain age or a fan of archival British pop shows, you may even have witnessed its appearance on Top Of The Pops, and marvelled at a long-haired band at sea within a bopping studio audience, a hard-rocking albums outfit, quite unused to this kind of thing. Such was and remains the peculiar reach of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”, two and a bit minutes which helped unlock new worlds for the band: the singles charts, television, instant recognition. Pedants have suggested the song doesn’t stand up to clinical evaluation, but…

LAST NIGHT I had a dream. I was at a party. The music was loud, the light was sickly and in the air was the smell of swamp gas. But there was something not quite right. I sidled up – cool as an ice-cube – to a cute little thing with a pair of luminous slacks and three eyes. “Hey, sister,” I whispered. “What's the name of that exercise you're getting?” She looked at me like I wasn’t even there. I woke up in a cold sweat and found it waiting for me. It looked real enough. Outside, the sky was humming and there were scorch-marks on the ground, and when I looked back, it was still there. But it had moved. Yes, just a fraction, towards the record player.…

WHITE RIOT In the year of Black Lives Matter, White Riot might seem an awkward title for a documentary about ’70s organisation Rock Against Racism. The point made by Clash members seen explaining the song’s title is that in the mid-’70s, black people were rioting in Britain, so why couldn’t whites? The problem, as Rubika Shah’s film shows, is that plenty of white kids were in a rioting mood, but in the wrong cause: the National Front was highly visible in Britain and commanding substantial support. The time was right for a movement that mobilised the music scene against fascism, and one that could unite black, Asian and white bands and fans. Hence RAR, with its house ’zine Temporary Hoarding and its gigs mixing punk with UK reggae talent such…

“His music is reassuring in a way that resonates deeply in these uncertain times”DAN SNAITH, CARIBOU ON May 31, a fundraiser was launched to help the 76-year-old musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his wife Elizabeth, who were on the verge of homelessness after Covid-19 wiped out his touring income for the year. Ten days later donations were disabled, having far exceeded expectations by raising $92,000, with Moses Sumney, Caroline Polachek and Romy Madley Croft of The xx among those contributing. This outpouring of love for Glenn-Copeland, until recently a relatively unknown figure, illustrates the degree to which his enchanting music, recorded years ago in obscurity, has struck a chord with a new global audience. “People are very generous at heart – we’d have been grateful for $5,000 but the amount that…

EVEN before the coronavirus pandemic began in earnest in the US, Nashville was reeling. In early March, a series of vicious tornadoes whipped across Tennessee with winds of up to 175mph. In a frighteningly short time, ancient trees were uprooted, sturdy buildings and homes were reduced to rubble and 25 lives were lost. In Music City, USA’s Five Points neighbourhood, the historic Woodland Studio, built in 1967 and the site of countless classic sessions, had its roof peeled off like a can of sardines, exposing the interior to a torrential downpour. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who have owned the studio for close to 20 years, spent the night and morning desperately trying to salvage whatever they could – recording gear, master tapes, rare guitars, lyric notebooks. Remarkably, though the…

Gillian Welch weathers the “double whammy” storm of a tornado and a pandemic How’s Nashville doing right now? We definitely have had a rough time. Things are starting to come back. But it’s super weird here. It’s basically been like living in a war zone since the first week of March. Just like bombed out buildings and we had no street power for months. The only lights in our neighbourhood were cop lights. And then the pandemic made it so there was no push to come back in and fix stuff. So it just really got weird and post-apocalyptic. Now we’re seeing the mental, emotional and economic strain on everyone. Things are getting sketchy. Crime is on the rise and people are really disquieted and in a bad place.…

NATIVE HARROW Closeness LOOSE 8/10 Expansive, cloud-chasing fourth from Pennsylvanian folk duo ONE of last year’s unexpected treats was Happier Now, the third album – and debut European release – from Native Harrow, wherein real-life couple Devin Tuel and Stephen Harms evoked the temperate spirit of Laurel Canyon’s heyday with seemingly effortless strokes. Twelve months on, the pair have cleverly expanded their repertoire without sacrificing any of the intimacy that forms much of their appeal. At the heart of Closeness, again recorded with engineer/drummer Alex Hall, is a need for lasting connections. If Happier Now was about Tuel’s turbulent journey through her twenties, its successor finds refuge from anxiety and the uncertainties of our times through love and companionship. “It seems unfair how much we don’t know/About the ways we…

Seamus Taylor: “It’s important to keep tradition alive” For Pacific Range, it all started in Normal St. That was the name of the house singer/songwriter Seamus Taylor shared with drummer Nate Ward in Chico, CA, after they met via their state university campus radio station. A writing/playing partnership evolved into various bands with frankly unpromising names, Salty Spittoons included, before settling as the quartet who made High Upon The Mountain . Taylor credits “jamming with people cut from different types of cloth” for the development of their sound, along with listening to the likes of Elmore James and Django Reinhardt as well as the Allman Brothers, The Band and the Dead. “The sound that we had was always influenced by the nature of Southern California,” he says, “from the oceans,…

LINDA PETERS and Richard Thompson’s partnership began with a dreadful conversation in a Chelsea restaurant, and ended with the ‘tour from hell’, car theft and an arrest. In between, there were those experiences common to most relationships. You know the sort: marriage, children, six poorly selling albums and more than a year in a couple of intense Sufi Muslim communities. Hard Luck Stories attempts to catalogue, across eight CDs, this fragile decade the Thompsons spent together and all that they created in that tumultuous time. Inside there’s one masterpiece and three very fine records, all remastered. There are also two albums disowned by their creators and reissued here for the first time in almost 30 years, along with demos and live tracks. The Thompsons came from folk-rock, of course, with…

PRINCE Sign O’ The Times WARNER 10/10 His most ambitious release – plus wildly eclectic extras. By Stephen Deusner IT’S jarring to hear Prince’s speaking voice at the beginning of “Power Fantastic”, one of the many vault tracks included with this reissue of Sign O’ The Times. “Just trip,” he instructs the assembled musicians, his voice low and casual. There are no mistakes this time. This is the fun track. Might not be the one we keep, but we’ll just have fun playing it.” What follows is a floridly psychedelic meditation on the power of music, as Prince documents his own compulsion to create. A slightly edited version of the song appears on the 1993 comp The Hits/The B-Sides, but this version is much more intriguing for having this introductory…

AFRICAN JAZZ Spirited sounds from opposite ends of the continent THE HESHOO BESHOO GROUP Armitage Road (reissue, 1970) WE ARE BUSY BODIES 8/10 SHARHABIL AHMED The King Of Sudanese Jazz HABIBI FUNK 7/10 JAZZ can mean any number of things depending on where you land in Africa. There’s no one narrative to follow, and no dominant aesthetic – indeed, to suggest there is would risk homogenising the history of deeply creative music and thinking across the continent. Legends have been constructed around players like Mulatu Astatke and his Ethio-jazz stylings, the jazz-funk hypnotism of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, or South African sextet the Blue Notes; extraordinary artists all, they represent just the tip of the iceberg, one that is still being steadily explored through reissues and archival releases. In 1969 in…

NEARLY 50 years on, Goats Head Soup has had long enough to marinate – so how does it taste now? Certainly, the album shares the raw atmosphere with the best Stones early-‘70s output. But the album’s exotic, funky grooves are a step away from the American roots music that fired up Let It Bleed , Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street . Some of that sound comes from Billy Preston’s clavinet – the instrument de nos jours in 1972 – but a lot of Superfly energy comes from Mick Taylor’s wah-wah action, especially on the thrilling “Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” and the explosive second half of “100 Years Ago”. Taylor, incidentally, is at his most lyrical on Goats Heap Soup , sprinkling his guitar solos with magic dust.…

CALLAHAN pays tribute to the slide-guitar zelig on Gold Record , with “Ry Cooder” an affectionate portrait of an artist who has been in constant motion since the 1960s. “He was a somewhat recent discovery for me,” Callahan says. “I went through a huge period of finding as many records of his as I could and listening to them a lot and finding out what a fantastic dude he is.” Cooder played alongside Captain Beefheart and Neil Young among others, venturing out into soundtracks and world music – most successfully with Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club – in recent decades. “He’s just played with so many people and his personality always came through,” says Callahan. “Also, I really like just reading interviews with him – he seems to be a…

JONATHAN Wilson sees an unusual comparison between Bright Eyes and other, storied members of rock’s aristocracy. “Phil Lesh said the Dead stayed together so long basically because they cracked each other up the whole time,” he explains. “That’s how Conor rolls as well. Everyone who works with him falls in love with his sense of humour. He’s gentle but always has a sense of what he wants in the studio, and also when to let go of the reins and let others shine. That’s the key.” Wilson first worked with Oberst on 2014’s Upside Down Mountain – “It was a different sound for him, I really loved making that one” – and is quick to draw distinctions between the various iterations of Oberst’s musical career. “I think Bright Eyes operates…

Idiot Prayer is a beautiful and painterly film in which little has been left to chance Alexandra Palace, London, July 23 Pre-recorded but streamed ‘as live’, Cave’s stately Idiot Prayer raises the bar for isolation performance AT the beginning of Idiot Prayer, we watch Nick Cave make a long walk to the stage while (in narration) he reads the words to “Spinning Song”. He walks from a green room lined with stacked chairs and across a painted concourse, as a story unfolds about “the king of rock’n’roll” and his wife. He descends a gleaming staircase, and walks across the historic Main Hall. As he saunters to the door of the building’s West Hall, the king is dead but the feather of his creativity is still spinning. Most of us entered…

FROM their scuzzy early days with Royal Trux, Smog, Palace Brothers and Pavement, to their more expansive roster today – though Bill Callahan and Will Oldham remain constants – Drag City has released music by many of Uncut’s favourite artists over the past three decades. To celebrate their continuing stellar form, and Callahan’s new Gold Record, we asked the Chicago crew to compile their own favourite releases from the past 12 months. Here then is a survey of Drag City today, an eclectic and global sonic stew: one can drop in on Ty Segall in Laurel Canyon, eavesdrop on Masaki Batoh in Tokyo or hang out with Alasdair Roberts in Glasgow. There’s also a very fine taster from Callahan’s new LP, a modern classic from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s 2019 album…

When we meet again we’ll be looking at new releases including Laura Veirs’ My Echo , Matt Berninger’s Serpentine Prison and, yes, Sufjan Stevens’ new one. We’ll also be cranking up the distortion for Ty Segall’s Fuzz, back with III , and then drifting away with Alex Maas’ Luca . In the archival realm, Black Sabbath are releasing a 50th anniversary Paranoid boxset, The Replacements are doing the same for Pleased To Meet Me after a less rounded 33 years, and there’s a promising TwoTone box on the way. TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

HE noise can be overwhelming. Bill Callahan is in suburban Austin, Texas, sitting in the new place he moved into with his wife and son about a year ago, but given the squawks and cackles outside his window, he could easily be in the heart of the Amazon. “Yeah, there’s tons of birds where I live,” he says. “There are some woodpeckers. Lots of them. There’s grackles and morning doves; blue jays and robins – those are the noisiest. There’s morning doves and pigeons living in the eaves of our house and having babies. It seems quiet here to me, but I’m kind of used to it.” One way and another, late-onset love, marriage and parenthood have brought Callahan to a place teeming with life. Once a glowering introvert who…

IT makes a certain kind of sense to close out an album set largely in sacred spaces, whether it’s a church or a forest, with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses Of The Holy” from 1973. McEntire has been singing the song for a few years now, first recording it by herself on GarageBand and releasing it digitally in January 2019. Then she took it out on the road with her, where night after night her band transformed it into the graceful gospel waltz that appears on Eno Axis . “There’s some imagery in there that’s pretty sexual, talking about gardens and all. ‘Let the music be your master .’ One thing we did was change the chord progression, so that it’s not dark. It’s the opposite of what the…

ON February 15 this year, Conor Oberst turned 40. It is, he admits, hard for him to imagine he’d reach that landmark age. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d be here,” he laughs, sounding more bemused than amused. “I didn’t think I’d be anywhere so I’m stoked… but it is weird.” It’s not as if Oberst is especially self-destructive; to the contrary, he had a fear of dying on a par with Woody Allen. Listen to his early canon, beginning with 2000’s Fevers And Mirrors, and you’ll find evidence of his dark fears in such songs as “Something Vague”, “When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass” or “I Don’t Want To Die In A Hospital”. There’s even a playlist on Spotify playfully titled “Bright Eyes Songs That Aren’t (All)…

NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS MARCH 29 1980 The normally mild-mannered offstage figure of Lux Interior twists and writhes his face in a rare show of angry emotion… If looks could kill. Lux looks like he could spit a bucket of blood. All him and Poison Ivy Rorschach did was to walk into the buffet bar on York Station and within seconds the entire room is staring at them. Lux is wearing his habitual black undertaker’s coat, plastic trousers and a shiny top hat. Ivy trails him lovingly in gold lamé pants and a pair of severe diamanté spectacles. For some reason the combination has tickled the imagination of all the other occupants of the buffet. They gawp over cheese rolls, their mouths a perfect question mark. Some people titter and nudge.…

IT’S quite a shock to realise that on the other side of the world life has pretty much returned to pre-coronavirus normal. New Zealand is now at Alert Level 1, the lowest, which means gigs are back on – with no enforced social distancing. This show, then, is happening in front of a (small) real-life audience, who aren’t visible on the livestream but can be heard fuzzily applauding. “I know this might be the first show since lockdown for many of you,” starts Nadia Reid, “and I’m grateful that you’ve decided to come – and that we can be here together.” The setting is rather eccentric – once a Victorian grain house, it looks like an antique shop, complete with canopied four-poster bed and a confusion of bric-a-brac – but…

AVA STREAMING FROM AUGUST 21 Teenage rebellion, Iranian-style: Sadaf Foroughi’s intense, impressive autobiographical debut is about a girl facing the music after some decorous dating with the boy who accompanies her in violin class. BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC OPENS SEPTEMBER 1 Everybody’s favourite slacker dorks return after nearly 30 years, older but probably not wiser, on a new mission to save the world and be excellent. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves reunite, Dean Parisot ( Galaxy Quest ) directs. LA HAINE OPENS SEPTEMBER 11 The film that gave French cinema its hardest edge in years, re-released 25 years on. Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmaoui play three guys from the Paris projects caught up in unrest in Mathieu Kassovitz’s taut drama, more vital now than ever. MAX…

PG TOPS Many thanks for another great issue and in particular the Peter Gabriel pieces [Take 280]. Graeme Thomson’s comprehensive article on the making of PG 3 took me straight back to 1980. In interviews from the time, Gabriel did mention the Atlantic label A&R guy who came to listen in on the sessions and who actually told him to make it sound “more like The Doobie Brothers”. Now that would have been a totally different album! I saw Peter live for the first time at Sheffield City Hall in February 1980. The tour was intended to support the release of the album, but of course the label had refused to release it at that point. That didn’t stop him from playing nine tracks from an album nobody had yet…