Innehållsförteckning för January 2021 #284 från UNCUT

“Maybe I’m amazed at the way you pulled me out of time” AT the end of a strange and difficult year, it’s reassuring to find that some things remain constant. Like Uncut’s Review Of The Year, for instance – which occupies 35 pages in this month’s issue. Within it, you’ll find our Top 75 New Albums and Top 30 Reissues, as well as Best Films and Books of 2020. This year’s list has been compiled from charts submitted by 52 contributors (a record number, I think), who’ve voted for 400 new albums and 170 reissues. There are also interviews with some of the artists who’ve helped shaped 2020: Elton John, Jarvis Cocker, Phoebe Bridgers, Afel Bocoum, Margo Price, Drive-By Truckers and Moses Boyd. What else? Well, OK, so we also…

“LOOK at their hair!” grumbled Saturday shoppers outside Leeds’ Queens Hall, observing punks and alternative types piling into the first Futurama festival over the weekend of September 8–9, 1979. “There were born-again Christians outside trying to save our souls,” remembers attendee Jan Alexander, who had ‘Dee Linkwent’ sprayed on her leather jacket. “They said the Devil was in the building.” Beelzebub wasn’t on the bill, but those early Futurama lineups now read like a who’s who of post-punk. Public Image Ltd, Joy Division, Echo And The Bunnymen and The Fall played the first event, the poster for which recently went on sale for £4,125. Its claim of being the “world’s first science fiction music festival” amounted to little more than a few lasers and someone dressed like a robot, but…

ISAAC WOOD, 22-year-old frontman of Black Country, New Road, makes for a thoughtful but guarded interviewee as he discusses his band’s expansive music and sharp lyrics. He takes his craft seriously, but the caution comes from lived experience. Wood’s previous band, Nervous Conditions, split after their lead singer was accused of sexual assault; the episode shaped BCNR, who formed from its ashes. “On a musical level, that band was the formation of our identity,” he says. “It’s when we learnt to communicate and play with each other. On a personal level, the pain of that experience brought us closer together. It made us determined to create something better, to find another way to express ourselves and separate ourselves from how that all went to shit.” On Black Country, New Road’s…

AC/DC Power Up COLUMBIA 8/10 Veteran hard-rockers flick the ‘on’ swich once more. By Andrew Mueller IT IS a line AC/DC are obviously pleased with: they’ve wheeled it out more than once. The gag runs that, during some or other promotional campaign, some upstart critic accused them of having made the same album 11 times. AC/DC retort to the effect that this is an outrageous, ignorant and insupportable calumny: they have, in fact, made the same album 12 times. The numbers vary with the telling, but AC/DC’s repeated deployment of this quip is itself almost a meta-commentary on the joke they’re telling against themselves. It’s also an assertion of the – correct – belief that they got everything absolutely and unimprovably right the first time, back on 1975’s High Voltage,…

LAST spring’s lockdown gave everyone rather too much time to think about things. For Norwegian singer-songwriter Ane Brun, one of those was the question of what to do with the 16 new songs she had begun recording the previous September. “It was actually meant to be one album,” she says of the work she eventually split into two. The trouble was that several songs didn’t suit the lusher production style she’d initially adopted. ”When the pandemic started,” she says, ”I had headspace and time to work through the three or four songs I wasn’t happy with, and they too became more intimate in their final versions. It was then obvious that this was two different albums, two different ’rooms’ to go into.” Having made that call, the next was how…

ON Playing With Water , avant-folk guitarist Mike Cooper paints a fever-dream waterscape – loops of field and wildlife recordings, and pliant electronic tones, function as a bed for his beautifully resonant playing. But it’s also music with a sharp political and ecological consciousness, Cooper working those angles at the level of sound itself. Reflecting on his use of field recordings – something he’s been doing since the 1970s – Cooper says, “I tried always to use them in a collaborative relationship; a co-habitation of the same space. I don’t manipulate them to make them something that they are not. Why would you? They are beautiful enough as they are and that’s what I am saying. Manipulating wildlife recordings is another form of colonisation in my view.” The album’s title,…

“SINCE Chavez was born out of a downtown NYC practice space that we paid for,” Matt Sweeney recalls, “the whole point was to make the most of playing together in a limited amount of time. And because other bands could hear us practising, we made a point of trying to sound good, just to not be ashamed that we were grown men spending time on rock music.” There were, however, further guiding principles at play. “We weren’t embarrassed about anything we liked,” he continues. “Clay [ Tarver ] wrote some of his riffs on that album with modern classical music in mind. German ’70s progressive rock bands – Amon Düül 2, Can, Neu! – were a big, big influence. Cheap Trick and Aerosmith’s Rocks was a big thing. Pretty Things’…

ENNIO MORRICONE Morricone Segreto DECCA 8/10 Lost gems from the innovative and prolific film composer ONE of the most prolific and accomplished composers of the 20th century, Ennio Morricone amassed a vast and unruly catalogue. There’s no accurate count of the films he scored between the early 1960s and his death in July 2020, but it’s around 500 – a staggering number that’s even more impressive given the range of movies mass produced by the Italian film industry. Some of his best and most innovative work was in service to genre fare, including giallo films, westerns, crime sagas, spy flicks, adventure yarns and sex comedies. Morricone never condescended to the material. Rather, his talent lay in elevating exploitation with sophisticated melodies, elaborate rhythms and imaginative arrangements. His work has been…

WHILE it’s been a highly challenging year for the music industry – particularly in terms of cancelled tours, venue closures and a disrupted retail market – there have been some positives. Online sales are on the increase, largely driven by resourceful sites keen to offer the listener an exclusive experience. Chief among them is Bandcamp, whose swift response to the financial impact of the pandemic led to them waiving their share of revenue for 24 hours on the first Friday of every month. Bandcamp Fridays quickly became a popular port of digital pilgrimage. It’s a journey that works both ways. Buyers spent $4.3m on music and merchandise during its launch date in March (15 times more than a normal Friday), the money going straight to the artists and labels involved.…

1 PRINCE Sign O’ The Times: Super Deluxe Edition WARNERS ACCORDING to the first of the newly unearthed ‘vault’ tracks, chronologically ordered on this abundant 8CD Super Deluxe Edition, Prince started work on Sign O’ The Times back in 1979. The early demo of “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” already sounds like a wiry new wave smash, although when it finally emerged eight years later at the end of Sign’s dazzling third side, it had been lavishly kitted out with an air-punching synth hook, a wailing guitar solo and a moody jazz-funk coda. On paper, it sounds fatally overcooked – but Sign O’ The Times is one of those rare occasions when more really is more. Prince scholars have long tried to impose an overarching…

1 PARASITE Director: Bong Joon-ho PARASITE premiered in Cannes in May 2019, scooped four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in February this year, and proved to be a commercial breakthrough worldwide. The seventh feature by South Korean maestro Bong Joon-ho seemed to have rewritten the rules for world cinema, opening up the field to possibilities far beyond the English-language status quo. That was until the world changed. Parasite’s success now seems to belong to the Great Before – before Covid shut down screens and forced the international film industry to rethink everything. As Cannes was cancelled and other festivals went online, we all became used to a seemingly endless flow of product on streaming platforms, while cinemas stayed dark for months – some of them promptly shutting again almost…

APPROXIMATELY two bars in to her rendition of Tom Petty’s 1985 song “Rebels”, one begins to wonder why anyone other than Lucinda Williams ever covers Petty. There is a similar consistency to their voices – a viscosity, almost, and a shared looseness to their demeanour. From their earliest meeting, she says in her opening monologue, “I was taken with him.” Subtitled Running Down A Dream: A Tribute To Tom Petty, this is the first instalment of Lu’s Jukebox – a series of six streamed-and-ticketed live performances organised by Williams, with proceeds going to independent venues struggling in the midst of the pandemic. Each instalment will be themed, with Williams playing (largely) covers of songs, as she explains it, that she has “connected with”. “I’m listening to the song thinking, ‘This…

Crock Of Gold barrels along with the same hectic passion as a Pogues number ANOTHER ROUND According to Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, humans have a blood alcohol level that is 0.05% too low, and we would function better if we raised it just a little. In Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, four male teachers in a Danish school decide that following Skårderud’s advice could enhance their performance and lift them out of mid-life inertia. The method works – then, spectacularly, it doesn’t, and the excruciating pleasure of Vinterberg’s film is in seeing how the process plays out both in the narrative and in the acting. The performances are the film’s key selling point, and not only if you’re a fan of Mads Mikkelsen, who plays science teacher Martin – suddenly winning…

IT’S the day that many die-hard Damned fans thought would never come. On a rainy afternoon in October, the four founding members of The Damned – Brian James, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies and Dave Vanian – are on stage together at London’s Roundhouse to announce their 2021 reunion tour, comprising four UK shows in July starting at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. Sensible and Vanian have successfully kept The Damned flag flying for years, but the notion of reforming the original 1976 lineup seemed impossible because of an ongoing feud between Scabies and Sensible. Just last year, Vanian told Uncut the relationship was a “powder keg”. So what’s changed? “We make an explosive sound together and I wanted to hear it again myself”CAPTAIN SENSIBLE “I wasn’t joking, it is a powder keg,…

JOSEPHINE FOSTER No Harm Done FIRE 8/10 Esoteric US songwriter in thoroughly captivating form TRADITIONALLY, Josephine Foster’s music refuses to be bound by time or place. No Harm Done offers precious few concessions to the here and now, the only oblique reference arriving in the midst of “The Wheel Of Fortune”, which addresses this spring’s enforced lockdown in Nashville: “Nowhere to go/No place to roam/Hard times to heal/Hard times to feel at home”. The rest of No Harm Done, much like her previous work, tends to deal with more abiding matters. These are songs of faith, love, carnal desire and spiritual communion, delivered in Foster’s trademark warble, a wavering soprano that invests things with a strange and beguiling beauty. Left-field guitarist Matthew Schneider, perhaps best known as leader of the…

“I love you so much I can hardly stand it/But everybody is alone” IT begins quietly in A&M Studios, Los Angeles, on November 15, 1972, and ends several thousand miles away on March 10, 1976 in a blaze of feedback at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall. The intervening years – those covered, no less, by this ambitious second instalment of the expansive Archives project – remains a critical period for Neil Young, not just for the stellar run of albums he made during this time, but for the way it continues to dominate our thinking about his long, capricious career. After The Gold Rush and Harvest made Young a solo star at the start of the ’70s, but his legend took shape during the turbulent, hugely productive phase that followed. It is…

“THIS was my first tour with Crazy Horse. When we landed in Japan, we could see these people with signs, pushing against this chain-link fence. We thought it was some political demonstration. It turned out it was for us! It was like The Beatles. We had to sneak out of the hotel. A couple of times we left to go maybe 100 feet to our cars, but got swarmed so badly we had to go back into the hotel and find another way out. I didn’t know what to think of it. ‘Is it always this way?’ “Billy and I took acid at the last show at the Budokan. I said, ‘Don’t tell anybody. Just me and you, dude.’ We walk in the door of the Budokan and Billy looks…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Sumer Is Icumen In GRAPEFRUIT 8/10 Three CDs of mysticism, pastoral romance and Arcadian myth GRAPEFRUIT have been on something of a mid-’60s-’70s folk roll in recent years, with 2015’s terrific Dust On The Nettles compendium and, two years later, the female-focused Milk Of The Tree anthology, which widened its net to include US artists. Subtitled “The Pagan Sound Of British And Irish Folk 1966–1975”, this 60-track stonker (which takes its name from a 13th-century round song) similarly pokes into myriad entertainingly dark corners while acknowledging leading lights. It lands, too, at the intersection of traditional folk and counterculture, a time when a movie about a Christian police sergeant who falls horribly foul of Celtic pagans was on general release and Mike Oldfield literally ran for the (Herefordshire)…

COLLECTIVE OPENS NOVEMBER 20 Fascinating Romanian documentary about investigative journalists opening up a Pandora’s box of corruption in the wake of a Bucharest nightclub fire. SUPERNOVA OPENS NOVEMBER 20 Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a gay couple facing an uncertain future as one of them battles early-onset Alzheimer’s. Fine-tuned acting in a tender if soft-focus drama from Brit writer-director Harry Macqueen. PATRICK OPENS NOVEMBER 20 A deadpan Belgian comedy-drama about the custodian of a naturist campsite, whose world turns upside down when he loses his hammer. Deadpan weirdness among the flabby flesh, with Jemaine Clement playing a narcissistic rock star. IL MIO CORPO OPENS NOVEMBER 27 Italian docu-fiction hybrid, showing the parallel lives of a Sicilian teenager and a young Nigerian immigrant. FALLING OPENS DECEMBER 4 Viggo Mortensen makes…

DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA DIGITAL PLATFORMS 9/10 Spike Lee shoots Byrne’s once-in-a-lifetime Broadway spectacular. By Stephen Dalton A DAZZLING blend of greatest-hits show, avant-garde ballet and timely political statement, David Byrne’s 2018 American Utopia tour was a natural candidate for an extended Broadway encore. Shot in late 2019 and premiered on HBO in October, Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s sold-out Hudson Theater run is respectfully faithful to the stage performance, with a few deft embellishments. Stripping the stage down to an artfully minimal art-space, Byrne is joined by a multinational ensemble of 11 bare-footed singer-dancer-musicians, all dressed in stylishly egalitarian grey uniforms. Played on portable wireless instruments in thunderously percussive marching-band arrangements, rebooted Talking Heads classics including “I Zimbra” and “Once In A Lifetime” sound kinetic and vital, while more…

LETTER TO BRUCE Good to see Bruce back on the cover of Uncut. The Boss has been with me since The Wild,The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle – except for a period towards the end of the last century when I discovered acid house. Alas, the five years that followed were spent moving to the increased repetitive E Street beat. Luckily, Bruce released Tracks during that time and catching up with its wealth of goodies made the comedown feel more bearable. So here I am now and living with Letter To You will no doubt knock my socks off and put them back on again. As long as I can find them in the first place... Tom Kinsella, Dublin Hey, Tom. Glad you enjoyed seeing Bruce on the cover…

Once in a lifetime! Uncut’s new Ultimate Music Guide offers the definitive steer on the music and influence of Talking Heads – as well as Tom Tom Club and David Byrne’s solo work. Alongside the in-depth reviews and entertaining archive features, there is a new interview with Chris Frantz and a two-page foreword written specially for us by David Byrne himself! And you may ask yourself – where do I buy this? It’s in shops now and available from uncut.co.uk … Also out on November 13 is the second volume of our Ultimate Record Collection: David Bowie special. It’s the glossy, pictorial timeline of every Bowie record from 1977 to 1989, with comment from the people who made them. If you missed the first one, which came out around the start…

“Is it a secret worth revealing/What I’m feeling for you?” LIKE the rest of us, Marlon Williams heard Kacy Lee Anderson sing and thought she was from a different time. While on tour in Europe, the Kiwi singer-songwriter was listening to the radio and hearing lots of new music, but one song stood out: “Springtime Of The Year”, by Anderson and her cousin/musical partner Clayton Linthicum. He was entranced by the sound of Kacy’s voice, by the melody of the song, by Clayton’s studied guitar playing, by the warm production. Marlon assumed it must be an unearthed track from the 1960s, recorded by a contemporary of Sandy Denny or Joni Mitchell, but when he discovered that it was actually new, he wasted no time reaching out to the Canadian duo…

What struck you about them when you first heard Kacy & Clayton’s music? MW: I heard “Springtime of the Year” off their album Strange Country, and it’s got this melody that you hear and you think, I’ve known this melody my whole life, but you’ve never heard it before. In Kacy’s voice you’ve got eternal youth but complete timelessness. The music has that perfection combination of elements. I immediately reached out and said, “I’d love to make music with you guys.” You traded songs back and forth. What kind of feedback were you giving each other? KLA: Truly there was no feedback, because we didn’t really know each other. It’s hard to tell strangers what to do, but once we became friends in the studio, we played around with the…

On the yellow brick road with Zoe Randell What’s behind the in Wizard “Emerald Of Oz City allusions ”? It’s been an inspiration since I was a child. Dorothy’s trials – the journey and the battles – are such a great rendering of so much of what you can deal with in life. In a quite subconscious way, the history of that inspiration came out in the chorus lyric and in turn inspired the song’s title. How has your creative relationship with Aaron Dessner shifted over the years? Passerby is the only record of ours where we spent significant time collaborating with Dessner in the studio, but we’ve been very close since then and we’ve always shown each other what we are working on. When he invited us to the…

WEST COAST veteran Dave Alvin has been rooting through the cupboards to prepare From An Old Guitar: Rare And Unreleased Recordings (Yep Roc). Due out in January, it features songs recorded down the years by the Grammy-winning ex-Blaster, either for his own records or various tribute albums, or “for no other reason at all than the sheer kicks of going into a recording studio to make some joyous noise”. Expect a lively mix of originals and covers of the likes of Peter Case, Chris Smither, Willie Dixon, Doug Sahm and Marty Robbins. Pennsylvania’s Langhorne Slim returns the same month with Strawberry Mansion (Dualtone Music). His most intimate offering to date, it examines his struggles with anxiety and depression, as well as chronicling his journey to recovery. The songs burst forth…

BRIXTON harmonica ace Errol Linton started his music career in the late ’80s, as a busker. “Busking basically paid for my first four albums,” he says. “Kept the band, when I finally had one, on the road.” From the start, he mixed a new-found love of blues with the reggae he’d grown up with. “A friend sold me a harmonica. That took me into the blues. It was another world. The music just spoke to me.” His career to date – six albums, including the new No Entry – has been almost entirely self-financed, no hint of major-label investment. “When I did my first album in 1998, I took it to all the major UK blues labels. They didn’t want to know. So, I just did it on my own.…

TRISTAN PERICH is all about connections. He’s comfortable being associated with terms like New Classical, he says, “because they hint that there’s a direct path from the past to the present. That’s where I like to think of my own work. The alignment with ‘popular’ genres is a reflection that people’s ears become more open over time. Our listening switches genres non-stop. We’re at a point where we are all islands with bridges to every other island.” His experiments with 1-bit electronics are, he suggests, another way of making unusual links. “1-bit sound crudely switches back and forth between full-on and full-off, like an extreme version of the 8-bit sound of early video games. I love its raw aesthetic, and its connection to the language of digital info.” His approach,…

THE GUN CLUB Miami BLIXA SOUNDS 9/10 Jeffrey Lee Pierce and company’s blues-steeped punk rock soars to new heights. By Erin Osmon AMID THE drawly landscape of America’s swampland floats a mysterious spectre. Famously channeled by Charley Patton, Dr John and Creedence Clearwater Revival, the spirit of Southern Gothic didn’t quite penetrate the rock underground until Jeffrey Lee Pierce dosed his punk outfit The Gun Club with the area’s country, blues, voodoo and hoodoo. With Miami, the quartet of Pierce, guitarist Ward Dotson, bassist Rob Ritter and drummer Terry Graham took those influences to create a nexus of sound and energy, which endures as the outfit’s finest statement. The band previewed their fusion of punk rock and roots music on their debut, Fire Of Love, a raucous and well-received 11-song…

Samy Ben Redjeb of Analog Africa Records on an “amazing” find How did you find out about this label? Me and my mate Carlos Estrada were on a routine visit to Calle Caldas, a street in Barranquilla where you’ll find great sugarcane juice and vinyl records. There, beside hits by Fruko Y Sus Tesos and The Latin Brothers we found this CD with an amazing song. Carlos eventually found it for me on vinyl, a record called “Calambre” by Conjunto Barbacoa. But it was a disc that prompted more questions than answers. Lucas Silva, the founder of Palenque Records, told me more about Discos Machuca and became the driving force of this project. Did you spend a lot of time in Colombia as research? Between 2007 and 2012 I was…

IT is mid-October 2020, and Paul McCartney has a lot on his mind. At present, he is considering the serendipity that has presented itself, often at unexpected moments, during his 60-year career. “So much of what I’ve done in my life I didn’t particularly mean to do,” he explains, almost by way of an apology. “When you analyse it, people might say, ‘That’s a clever move!’ But, no, it was really just… luck really, like the music that The Beatles just ended up arbitrarily making. When I write songs, I don’t know where they’re going. I’ve not got it on the GPS, I’ve not got my destination locked in. I’m following the route, just seeing where I end up.” “I FIND FREEDOM CREATIVELY VERY LIBERATING” Where, then, has Paul McCartney…

IF you wanted to put a precise date on Paul McCartney’s introduction to the world of the avant-garde, you could pin it on August 28, 1964. That’s when Bob Dylan gave him a joint in the Delmonico Hotel at Park Avenue and 59th in New York. McCartney was already a fan of the Beats, but the experience instantly placed him on one side in the decade’s conflict between straights and squares, one that he would occupy with increasing self-assurance and excitement. McCartney’s intellectual curiosity had been piqued during his relationship with Jane Asher. After he moved into the Asher family home on Wimpole Street in late 1963, he became part of their politically liberal and artistically curious household. Mother Margaret was a teacher at the Guildhall School of Music and…

IF it is true that turbulence, trauma and upheaval are reliable inspirations for great art, then no artist could gripe that 2020 didn’t give them plenty to work with. Another common and reasonable complaint of musicians – that keeping the touring hamster-wheel spinning deprives them of writing time – was also brutally addressed. Few if any artists made more of the material, and the opportunity to contemplate it, than Sault. Between June and September, the obstinately anonymous British operation turned around two (officially untitled) double albums that furnished both an articulation of, and soundtrack to, the global Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death in police custody of Minneapolis man George Floyd on May 25. In the United States, responses to BLM and the times that aroused it ranged…

1997 BOB DYLAN Time Out Of MindCOLUMBIA 1998 MERCURY ’ REV Deserter s SongsV2 1999 THE FLAMING LIPS The Soft BulletinWARNER BROS 2000 LAMBCHOP Nixon CITY SLANG 2001 RYAN ADAMS GoldLOST HIGHWAY 2002 THE FLAMING LIPS Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots WARNER BROS 2003 WARREN ZEVON The WindARTEMIS/RYKO 2004 BRIAN WILSON SmileNONESUCH 2005 ARCADE FIRE FuneralROUGH TRADE 2006 BOB DYLAN Modern TimesCOLUMBIA 2007 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM Sound Of SilverDFA/EMI 2008 PORTISHEAD ThirdISLAND 2009 ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Merriweather Post PavilionDOMINO 2010 JOANNA NEWSOM Have One On MeDRAG CITY 2011 PJ HARVEY Let England ShakeISLAND 2012 LEONARD COHEN Old IdeasCOLUMBIA 2013 MY BLOODY VALENTINE m b vMY BLOODY VALENTINE 2014 THE WAR ON DRUGS Lost In The Dream SECRETLYCANADIAN 2015 JULIA HOLTER Have You In My Wilderness DOMINO 2016 DAVID BOWIE Blackstar ( H…

20 THE LIGHTHOUSE Director: Robert Eggers The director of The Witch offered another exercise in period Gothic with a maritime nightmare in black and white that brought new meaning to the concept of self-isolation. With dialogue channelling Herman Melville and 19th-century mariners’ journals, it starred Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two men coming to loggerheads at a remote ocean outpost. 19 CALM WITH HORSES Director: Nick Rowland From debut director Rowland, this tough, feral story of rural Irish gangland starred Cosmo Jarvis – the discovery from Lady  Macbeth – as a boxer turned enforcer to a crime clan, with Barry Keoghan as the young scion who keeps him on a tight leash. Scripted by Joe Murtagh, a steely drama of violence and troubled loyalties. 18 VITALINAVARELA Director:…

1 ONE TWO THREE FOUR: THE BEATLES IN TIME Craig Brown FOURTH ESTATE, £20 INTRODUCED to The Beatles after the November 1963 Royal Command Performance, the Queen Mother asked the moptops where they would be playing next. “Slough,” came the reply. “Oh,” she said. “That’s near us.” The other side of the greatest story ever told, One Two Three Four rode the Beatles slipstream as they streamrolled through the 1960s, mindful that the standard Hamburg-Beatlemania-Maharishi-rooftop concert narrative was only the top 10 per cent of their cultural iceberg. Private Eye columnist Brown captured The Beatles’ reflection in a thousand mirrors, from Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams’ diaries to Ronnie Spector and William Burroughs’ memoirs. It celebrated The Beatles’ boundless creativity and charisma, but also marvelled at the chancers and…