Innehållsförteckning för November 2020 #282 från UNCUT

“IT felt like we’d been transported back to a piece of history – there was this constant sense we were in the presence of greatness.” John Darnielle, creative linchpin of North Carolina’s Mountain Goats, is struggling to conceal his joy about his band’s new album, Getting Into Knives, in particular the involvement of one of soul music’s most respected names. Hammond B3 organist Charles Hodges was one of three Memphis-born brothers in the group who backed Al Green on his classic 1970s hits, assembled by producer Willie Mitchell at the city’s Royal Studios, and who also featured on tracks by several of Green’s Hi Records labelmates (Ann Peebles, Syl Johnson). Still a locally based gun for hire at the age of 73, Hodges’ alliance with the Goats was brokered by…

IN this strangest of years, musicians have had to find new ways to fill the void left by the lack of live activity. Chris Hillman has helped pass the time by playing Trivial Pursuit with his former colleague in The Byrds, Roger McGuinn. “There are a few couples who play every Friday, across the country on Zoom,” Hillman explains. “What are the old Byrds doing now? They’re playing trivia! At least we haven’t all started playing bridge yet.” It was during one of these trivia evenings that McGuinn asked Hillman how many different bands he’d passed through. After thinking for a moment, he realised it was as many as eight. “Roger told me that was amazing but I just said, ‘Maybe I was the problem!’ They kept putting me in…

1 SONGHOY BLUES Barre The Mali outfit’s new album Optimisme (reviewed on p32) is even more ferocious than their previous work, as “Barre” demonstrates. With Matt Sweeney producing, they’re pairing distorted guitar riffs with genuine rebellion, railing against organised marriage and armed insurgency or, here, celebrating the youth of Mali. 2 ADRIANNE LENKER Anything Last year was a busy one for Big Thief, but their chief songwriter is nonetheless about to release two new solo albums: one’s instrumental and experimental, while the other contains fragile, mirage-like delights such as this, woven with acoustic guitar and hallucinatory lyrics. 3 MAGIK MARKERS Find You Ride The noise-rockers return with their long-awaited new album, 2020, and “Find You Ride”, with its incantatory vocals and drifting drones set…

It could be churlish to ask Andy Bell why it’s taken him so long to release his first solo album given he’s released two albums with Ride in recent years, but even Bell admits he’s been promising to do this since the 1990s. He was eventually jolted into action by the death of David Bowie, producing 15-20 backing tracks, and then lockdown, which allowed him to whittle it down to an album, The View From Halfway Down . “With Bowie in mind, and definitely feeling more aware of my own mortality, I felt spurred on to create something that was… I guess something a bit more personal than a band album,” he says. “I think at a basic level I felt none of us are here for ever. If not…

“None of us know where the songs are going at any moment, and none of us is in charge,” say Loma, when asked what sets the trio’s work apart from their other creative projects (they ask for their words here to be credited to the band, rather than individuals). “It’s exciting but risky, and sometimes the songs hit the rocks, but we make choices together we’d never make on our own.” Reconvening after a gruelling tour in support of their self-titled debut, Emily Cross and Jonathan Meiburg joined bandmate Dan Duszynski at his home in rural Texas to work on instrumentals while “trying not to care if what we were making was Loma or not”. Their second album gradually revealed itself over the course of a “year of trial and…

As the title of Jim White’s eighth solo album suggests, Misfit’s Jubilee is a raucous pageant of waifs and strays from across 20-plus years of creative endeavour. “I’m 63 now and I’m not going to be able to make a weird, rock-style record for much longer, without being out-of-hand dismissed,” he explains from his home in Athens, Georgia. “These are songs that I’ve written over the years that I thought had some merit and value. But labels kept saying: ‘That’s not really your brand. You need to do what you’re good at.’ So I wanted to realise them properly. I’m calling it Geriatric Rockucana.” Recorded in Antwerp with regular drummer Marlon Patton and ace Belgian duo Geert Hellings and Nicolas Rombouts, Misfit’s Jubilee also departs from White’s usual storytelling mode.…

Keyboard player and foundingHeartbreaker Benmont Tench: “It was a drastic change…” This was Rick Rubin’s first album with Tom Petty, after Jeff Lynne had worked on Into The Great Wide Open and Full Moon Fever . What was Tom hoping the change of producers would bring about? Tom had probably heard something Rick had recorded and liked it. I’d been working with Rick for a little while as a session musician, on a Mick Jagger solo record and a few others. So I knew Rick, but I didn’t introduce Tom to Rick. I was working on a session with Rick one day and he said he’d be working with Tom, and I said “Great”, and he said, “Who’s a good rhythm section?” and I said, “Our rhythm section.”…

BARBARA LEWIS Don’t Forget About Me: The Atlantic & Reprise Recordings SOULMUSIC 8/10 Smooth soul diva with alluring jazz motifs TO a large degree, even the biggest songs that brought Barbara Lewis to the fore of record buyers’ attention were overshadowed by subsequent cover versions. The R&B bounce of “Someday We’re Gonna Love Again” reached the UK Top 10 after a beat group makeover by The Searchers in 1964, Yvonne Elliman’s carbon copy of soul smoocher “Hello Stranger” (penned by Lewis) was a US million-seller in 1977, and the Goffin & King track that gives this three-disc collection its name is arguably better known from its inclusion in Dusty Springfield’s iconic Dusty In Memphis album. However, Lewis remains an important and versatile figure in the development of soul music in…

MOST days during lockdown, Matt Berninger took long walks down back roads and along river paths in Los Angeles – exploring “strange places where nobody goes,” he says. Often, he’d go fishing. Packing up his rods and a tackle bag, he’d head to a remote jetty, alone save for the occasional fisherman or drug dealer. A Midwesterner by birth, Berninger found the space and solitude out here soothing. For Berninger, his travels around town have been revelatory. He’s lived in California for seven years – having spent the previous 18 in Brooklyn – but it’s only during lockdown that he’s got around to exploring his adopted home town in more detail. “It’s like being in Oz,” he laughs. “I love being by the ocean and the sun.” By rights, Berninger…

WHEN David Bowie was asked what he was listening to in 1995, he was quick to praise both PJ Harvey and her touring partner Tricky. Shortly afterwards, Bowie invited Harvey to perform a duet of “The Man Who Sold The World” on an awards show. Harvey interrupted her tour to take part in rehearsals, but on her return told her band she hadn’t much liked the slick performance from Bowie’s backing band. Her group were asked to learn and record a dirge-like version of “The Man Who Sold The World”. “We recorded it at a soundcheck and she went back to Bowie with the tape,” says Feldman. “She told him, ‘My band does it so much better. We should use this.’ The next thing we heard was that Bowie had…

YOU don’t look to Idles for harmony and calmness. Even the members of Idles admit that. Sitting outside his favourite cafe in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol on a hot August day, the band’s frontman, Joe Talbot, acknowledges his own significant part in their combustibility. “The universe isn’t doing bad things to you,” he says. “You can only choose how to react to your anger and change that. I was the band’s biggest problem, even though I was the main pusher of everything. Now, the band has now come past those problems, but you wouldn’t know it when you see us. We’re cunts to each other, but that is our love.” As emotionally honest in life as in song, for Talbot the Idles story is one of hard work…

“REAL WORLD” (“METAL CIRCUS” EP, 1983) Hardcore’s “Positively 4th Street” as Mould rejects punk’s rules and ideals, declaring: “People talk about anarchy... I lock my doors at night.” “PINK TURNS TO BLUE” ( ZEN ARCADE ,1984) A highlight from Hüsker’s rock opera, this ballad from Hart describes, with Lou Reed-style candour, a young woman who gets addicted to drugs, overdoses and dies. “FIND ME” ( FLIP YOURWIG ,1985) Spooked harmonies and eerie guitar lines reveal Mould’s post-punk tendencies in this mysterious and melancholic song. “DIVIDE AND CONQUER” ( FLIP YOUR WIG ,1985) Mould rails against Reagan-era iniquities, while the band deliver punk rock mayhem at its finest. “BOOKS ABOUT UFOS” ( NEWDAY RISING ,1985) Fuzzed-up, loping country…

LANKUM Abbey Theatre, Dublin, August 15 Intense music for troubled times: a stunning immersive livestream from the drone-folk band OUR night out in Dublin town begins with a taxi ride to the historic Abbey Theatre, where there are buskers on the pavement outside and we are personally welcomed by an usher who directs us to our seat in the stalls. No, we’re not flouting public safety rules. Our visit is virtual and entirely Covid-compliant for an event billed as not just another internet lockdown concert but a “fully immersive experience”. We’re even requested to switch off our mobile phones before the curtain rises and we begin our journey with Lankum into a “warped, dream world of musical performance, theatre, drones and existential uncertainty”. Since signing to Rough Trade for 2017’s…

“The bands recognised you were part of the scene and you just wound up getting access”MICHAEL GRECCO “IT was definitely a wild time,” says Michael Grecco of the five or so years he spent on the Boston post-punk and new wave scene, as both hedonistic club kid and photographer for local mags like Boston Rock. The city was a jumping-off point for British bands hoping to break America, and Grecco was there when The Police launched their first US tour with four shows at The Rathskeller, nicknamed The Rat – a “dirty shithole that smelled of puke, smoke and old beer”. Despite its off-putting aroma, The Rat was where Grecco would hang with local bands such as The Del Fuegos and Human Sexual Response, as well as visiting dignitaries like…

WHEN Uncut speaks to Yousra Mansour at her home in Lyon, it’s the day after Bab L’ Bluz’s first live show since lockdown and she’s clearly still riding the high. “It was amazing,” she enthuses, of their al fresco set. “We really needed to play and so there was lots of energy.” As the band’s singer and lyricist, Mansour is the conductor of that surging energy, which also characterises their debut album, Nayda! – a mix of traditional gnawa music, funk-rock and psychedelic blues. The title is a reference to the push in her native Morocco for a more progressive youth culture and translates roughly from the Arabic dialect Darija as “waking up”. Despite that – and the fact that several songs address the exploitation of Africa’s people and resources…

What was the band’s initial intent with Nightcap At Wits’ End ? When we were going in to record it, the original idea was to have a lot of acoustic material, but then it just gets layered in with the electric guitars. I think a lot of the songs were written with the intention of being Pentangle-esque, so that was a new approach for us. But when we’re in the studio together and we’re rocking, we’re just… all right, let’s do it like this! In writing and talking about the songs there were a lot that were fingerpickingbased, but they took on their own life as we brought them to the full band. At least four of the songs have acoustic guitar on them, but mostly we don’t bring our…

DIANA JONES Song To A Refugee PROPER 9/10 Moving song cycle from US singer and folk guitarist Diana Jones has Emma Thompson to thank for shifting her writer’s block. While recovering from a long illness caused by a gas leak in her New York apartment, her creativity already numbed by the last presidential election, Jones kept bumping into the British actor around town. This, in turn, led to a friendship that resulted in Jones becoming interested in Thompson’s work with the Helen Bamber Foundation, which supports refugees and asylum seekers. Song To A Refugee gathers together the songs that subsequently poured out. Driven by the need to rehumanise those who’d been reduced to statistics by governments and media, Jones wrote from a wealth of different viewpoints. As with her previous…

KATE Stables certainly timed the recording of Off Off On well, completing a week at Real World Studios just as lockdown kicked in. Working for the first time with producer Josh Kaufman, of Bonny Light Horseman and Muzz, brought new layers to the album. “Josh is really good at sculpting the sound of a song and knowing what’s fun to try,” explains Stables. “He’s a really good musician too. Whatever he touches he can play.” Kaufman has utilised that skill onstage with The National, most recently on a 2019 tour that also featured Stables in the ensemble. As well as providing the singer-songwriter with a look at how other bands do things, touring as a guest allowed her the time and space to finesse her new songs. “I do things…

“Let me get to the point/Let’s roll another joint” WILDFLOWERS was not the first Tom Petty album to have had its initial ambitions thwarted somewhat between conception and release. A decade or so earlier, Petty had set about Southern Accents, intended as a double-album state of the nation address surveying the Deep South, commemorating its music and contemplating its contradictions. The finished product was certainly far from bad, but it was nevertheless also a stretch from where Petty had once envisioned it taking him, and his listeners. Wildflowers, similarly, was originally sketched as a 25-song double album, before being trimmed, at the suggestion of a nervous record label, to a nevertheless generous 15. The entry-level version of this reissue is that aborted 25-track double, scaling up to a 5CD Super-Deluxe…

LOU REED NewYork RHINO 8/10 As relevant today as it was over 30 years ago. By Michael Bonner FOR anyone wondering what Lou Reed would have made of the 45th President of the United States, you’ll find the answer on New York. “They ordained the Trumps/And then he got the mumps/And died being treated at Mt Sinai,” he sings on “Sick Of You”, before, later in the song, imagining Rudy Giuliani getting run over by a taxi. Released in 1989, much of New York still resonates over 30 years on. Beyond the cameos from Trump and Giuliani, the album’s themes of environmental collapse, cultural toxicity and political oppression feel deeply familiar from today’s headlines. “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on them,” Reed says on “Dirty…

VARIOUS ARTISTS The Harry Smith B-Sides DUST›TO›DIGITAL 9/10 The flipside of the legendary Anthology Of American Folk Music, finally compiled HARRY SMITH’s Anthology Of American Folk Music has good claim to being the totemic collection of early-20th-century American blues, country and folk song. There have been other compilations and series that have tilled similar ground, but none of them have had quite the scope or impact as Smith’s three double-LP set, originally released in 1952. That’s partly down to Smith’s perverse, sideways logic. Smith was irascible, a gadfly and a polymath, whose experimental films blew the possibilities of cinema wide open, combining mythology and magick with some seriously pre-psychedelic third-eye vision. It stands to reason, then, that his listening ear was as acutely tuned, and singular, as his seeing eye.…

ALL THE WINE ( THE NATIONAL, “CHERRY TREE” EP, 2004) Berninger the drunken romantic, banishing his insecurities with a boozy wink: “I’m put together so beautifully… I’m a perfect piece of ass.” MR NOVEMBER ›THE NATIONAL, ALLIGATOR , 2005› Grandstanding album finale and one of Berninger’s most exhilarating, cathartic vocal turns: “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders!” FAKE EMPIRE ( THE NATIONAL, BOXER , 2007) Berninger’s lyrics offer a searing critique of a generation lost to poltical apathy. Later used in Barack Obama’s campaign video. TERRIBLE LOVE ( THE NATIONAL, HIGH VIOLET , 2010) A claustrophobic study in paranoia (“And I can’t fall asleep/Without a little help”), with Berninger at…

THE reissue of To Bring You My Love comes with a full set of album demos, showing Polly Harvey’s rough drafts for the album. As with the demos for Rid Of Me and Dry , these are fully realised creations from which the final album barely deviates. Where other artists might use a demo to sketch the outline of an idea or capture a melody on piano or guitar, Harvey’s contain all the musical elements found on the final songs. They are meticulously thought-out, brilliantly recorded and then delivered with exactly the same energy and vocal inflections she would bring to the studio. “She is the master of the four-track,” admits an admiring Parish. Harvey knows her demos are good. She released the Dry demos as Demonstrations , while…

From first steps to peak power… “WELCOME” EP (2012) A hesitant first step, with seeds of promise, but too generic in sound to mark Idles out as future contenders. “MEAT” EP (2015) The beginnings of the modern Idles are evident on their second EP, but it’s no surprise “Meat” didn’t attract wide attention. “META” EP (2015) “Meat”’s remix companion was a mixed bag, but it foreshadowed their willingness to open their music to others, which would become a theme. BRUTALISM (2017) At last, Idles had a unified identity and sound. Brutalism became something of a word-of-mouth sensation, and proof that developing away from the spotlight works. JOY AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE (2018) The breakthrough album: Brutalism II , to all intents and purposes. “Danny Nedelko” was the “hit” –…

PUSH THE BUTTON The band convene in Minnesota during the late ’70s. Stolen food, broken toes, “Vietnam vets and heroin” are all integral to their early ascendancy… MUSIC has always been the most important thing in my life. I grew up in a violent household and music was a healing tool for me as a child. My grandmother took me to the drug store twice a year to buy me the album of my choice. It would always be a Beatles album, then sometimes The Monkees. Along with the singles I bought then, this was the music that made a lasting impression on me. In high school during the early ’70s, I became a huge Kiss fan. During Winter Carnival one year, me and some friends dressed up as Kiss…

MEMORIES OF MURDER OPENS SEPTEMBER 11 Parasite fans can revel in a re-release of this superb 2003 drama by Korean maestro Bong Joon-ho: the story of a seemingly unsolvable crime investigation that maps out uncertainty and terror along not dissimilar lines to the later Zodiac . Also re-released on September 18: Bong’s debut feature Barking Dogs Don’t Bite . WONDER WOMAN 1984 OPENS OCTOBER 2 DC’s Amazon warrior goes retro, as Gal Gadot swings her lariat into the shoulderpads era, and faces Kristen Wiig as villain the Cheetah. SUMMER OF ’85 OPENS OCTOBER 2 Unpredictable, wildly prolific French auteur François Ozon returns with his 19th feature, revolving around a gay teenage romance with a dark mystery undertow. ETERNAL BEAUTY OPENS OCTOBER 2 Submarine star Craig Roberts offers his second film…

MORGAN Howell is an artist who, quite literally, turns pop singles into works of art. Using a variety of mediums – acrylic paint on canvas, paper, ink, sticky tape and actual vinyl – he recreates every crease, rip and scratch to transform these 7” miniatures into three-dimensional, ultra-realistic sculptural paintings. His art has proved hugely popular with many of his heroes. Neil Diamond commissioned Howell to make a supersized copy of “Sweet Caroline”. A reproduction of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” hangs on the wall of Ozzy Osbourne’s Los Angeles home. Ian Brown and Johnny Marr both own T.Rex’s “Metal Guru”, as recreated by Howell. “It was a record I thought was so beautiful,” says Marr. “It looked and sounded like it came from another world.” Howell’s artworks have been displayed in…

“Oh, my sweetest muse/The flowers of our love will thrive” IT takes a particular kind of confidence to name your band, however obliquely, after a primary influence and ignore the fact that it might forever define you. When guitarists and singer-songwriters Danny Arakaki and Tom Malach, plus drummer Cesar Arakaki, got together as Garcia Peoples in New Jersey over 10 years ago, they were youngsters knocking out Misfits and Minutemen covers, also very much on board with the Grateful Dead. But it wasn’t that band’s sound per se that made them fans, rather a shared interest in the power and possibilities of the longform jam, twinned with a commitment to their music’s perpetual evolution. Garcia Peoples – who’ve gradually grown from a trio into a sextet featuring three guitarists and…

SUFJAN STEVENS The Ascension ASTHMATIC KITTY 7/10 First solo LP in five years. By Laura Barton IT’S now five years since the release of Carrie & Lowell, an album of such exquisite intimacy that felt perhaps the record Sufjan Stevens had been carrying all his life. In the years between there have been other projects – film soundtracks, singles and collaborations, including this spring’s Aporia, made in partnership with his stepfather, Lowell Brams. But The Ascension is Stevens’s first full-length solo recording since 2015, and it is a very different creature to its predecessor: banjoed-prettiness given way to experimental electro-pop; precise and particular lyricism set aside for broad, swathing choruses. This feels an anxious, urgent record – intended to reflect, one suspects, this anxious, urgent age. It’s there in the…

Having most recently ploughed their energies into a series of Elvis Costello covers on EP, My Darling Clementine – aka British couple Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish – will round them all up on Country Darkness CRS, due in November. The collaboration with ex-Attractions member Steve Nieve (who also co-produces) comes with a new MDC tune, “Powerless”. Ontario’s Jennifer Castle returns that month with sixth album, Monarch Season PARADISE OF BACHELORS. Named after the rare butterfly, its nine songs were recorded under moonlight in Castle’s coastal kitchen, accompanied only by crickets and inspired by the wish to “see the wings in everything”. Coloured by guitar, piano and harmonica, the minimalist approach, she says, was ideal for writing “this simple suite on these big complexities” – namely aloneness, the observation…

Elvis Costello returns with Hey Clockface , the follow-up to 2018’s ace Look Now , Cabaret Voltaire break a 26-year dry spell with Shadow Of Fear , and there are also newies from Blue Öyster Cult, Lydia Loveless, Tunng and Eels. The world of archival releases heats up as we get closer to Christmas, with promising boxset highlights including Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump , Trees’ complete works and Pylon’s Pylon Box , and reissues from Mort Garson. TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

BERNINGER and younger brother Tom have been planning a sequel to 2013’s tour documentary of The National and sibling relations, Mistaken For Strangers . “I think we both wanted to keep telling this story,” Berninger explains. “Tom started ramping up the filming a year or so ago. He and another filmmaker, Chris Sgroi, had cameras in the studio every day when I was making Serpentine Prison , so they’ve been slowly cooking Mistaken For Strangers 2 . The story is similar in that it’s centred around family, art and conflict. “Mistaken For Strangers was Tom in a crisis of self-discovery and me giving him guidance. But maybe the roles are reversed a little in this one. I’ve been going through a lot of shit – burnout from finishing Sleep Well…

“A COUPLE of The Beatles were at our Royal Albert Hall show,” says Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, recalling Creedence’s first landmark performances in the UK. “I was pretty excited about that. It was great for us to finally be over in The Beatles’ home country.” When, four days earlier, Paul McCartney had officially announced the breakup of the Fabs, Creedence Clearwater Revival were on the Continent, preparing to travel across the Channel to set foot in Britain for the first time. With hindsight, and perhaps a little dramatic licence, it was as if they’d turned up to take on the mantle of the world’s biggest band, now that the ruling group had abdicated. “We were young, so everything was so meaningful,” says John Fogerty, looking back on the group’s pivotal 1970.…

FIFTEEN years ago, David Hinds visited the house in Handsworth, Birmingham his parents had owned and where, in the basement, his band Steel Pulse had once practised. “I was hoping that one day I’d buy the house back and use it as a museum of some kind,” he says. “But the cellar doesn’t exist any more. They’ve completely blocked it off.” It was in that space that the group developed their reggae sound, inspired by Jamaican heroes, jazz musicians and Jimi Hendrix. “We listened to the Pointer Sisters too,” says Hinds. “That improved our harmonies a lot! We were oblivious to all the variables that make a song a hit; we just did it because it felt right. We were as green as it comes. But we had substance, energy…

THE forthright politics of Idles were evident as soon as “Mother” started penetrating listeners’ consciousness in 2017: “The best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich ,” Joe Talbot instructed the world. He’s insistent, though, that he won’t become a party political campaigner – he votes Labour as a lesser evil. What matters to him, though, is that his words have an effect. “I’ve definitely, 100 per cent changed the way people think or see themselves or voted for,” he says. “I had a message recently where some guy said, ‘I used to be quite right-wing, and I’ve been going to the shows, and I’ve changed the way I think about things. And now I’m on the left.’ It sounds made up, doesn’t it? It’s not.…

ZEN Arcade was preceded by a standalone single: a cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” with the original’s neat Rickenbacker 12-string lines replaced by whipping sheet-metal electric guitar and the pace raised to heart-bursting level. “I was already a Byrds fan,” Mould explains. “But I really dived deep into them when I was down in Athens, Georgia, hanging out with my friend Peter Buck. Peter said, ‘You’ve really got to listen to this stuff a little deeper.’ That was where I really started to get what The Byrds were doing: what Crosby’s role was and McGuinn’s and Gram’s, so they were no longer just a band that had great singles, they became individual people that had ideas. But covering ‘Eight Miles High’ was not this global statement of intent…

I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS His script for Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich gave Charlie Kaufman a reputation as an inspired comic mind – the most individual and outré in American cinema. He consolidated that impression with Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – but then came his own unrelentingly sombre debut feature, Synecdoche, New York, which contemplated the agonies of creation in a style that suggested Fellini brainstorming with Franz Ka›a. It was suddenly clear that effervescence wasn’t Kaufman’s natural register, and that when he was downbeat, he could be as down and deep as the best of them. His follow-up, Anomalisa, co-directed with animator Duke Johnson, pushed that melancholia even further, and now I’m Thinking Of Ending Things takes that same sombre drift to new limits.…

ROGER WATERS US + THEM SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT 7/10 Powerfully choreographed rock polemics from a master of the art. By Mark Bentley METICULOUSLY scripted, beautifully shot, and driven by an unmissable narrative: it’s appropriate that Us + Them  had its premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. A brief theatrical release followed, and this superior cinematic concert film was praised for many of the things we’ll earmark here – crisp visuals, Waters’ powerful performance, and, around him, some exceptional musicianship. But, like 2014’s Grammy-nominated The Wall – also directed by Waters and his co-pilot Sean Evans – it faced flak for its shock-and-awe politicising, directed at the establishment generally, and the 45th president of the US specifically. Stateside, the MAGA crowd – from whom Pink Floyd undoubtedly draw a…

THOMPSONGUNNERS Thanks for the excellent coverage of the Richard and Linda Thompson compilation [Uncut, Take 281]. It brought back a few memories, some of which may be unreliable, so I stand to be corrected! I saw several Thompson gigs in the Sheffield area in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly recall a Richard and Linda show at the Crucible in 1982, where Linda was kicking Richard’s shins during guitar solos and poor Simon Nicol was having to act as a UN peace-keeping buffer zone. They encored with a particularly vituperative “The Price Of Love”. Your review mentioned their final appearances being a contractually obligated tour of the US in 1983; I think that tour was actually in 1982, and that the show I saw in Sheffield was their last appearance…