Innehållsförteckning för April 2023 från UNCUT

JIM McCARTY: “I first saw Jeff at a Yardbirds rehearsal at the Marquee on Wardour Street. I remember thinking he looked like a wild man. He had very long greasy hair and wore these horrible dirty jeans, like he’d been working under a car. Eric [Clapton] had been completely the opposite – very stylish, with the latest Ivy League clothes. So it was different with Jeff and he was quite rough with it too. But he turned out to be great fun, and he was very bright, very intelligent, not at all how he first appeared. “The Yardbirds became more experimental after Jeff joined us. He was very broad in what he liked as a guitarist. He loved Les Paul and all that doubletracking stuff. And he liked jazz, people…

SOUTHWEST Londoner Anthony Topham caught the blues bug early, taking up the guitar in his teens after hearing Jimmy Reed, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Boy Fuller. Teaming up with fellow art student Chris Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty, he formed Suburbiton R&B in early 1963. By May, the trio had been joined by local singer Keith Relf and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. Now calling themselves The Yardbirds, the new band debuted a month later at Eel Pie Island, supporting Cyril Davies’ All-Stars. Before long they were regulars on the R&B circuit. “We were passionate about playing blues and wanted to get better,” Topham told interviewer Larry Manch in 2013. “It all took off so quickly.” The Yardbirds’ speedy ascent ultimately became Topham’s undoing. Having taken over The Rolling Stones’ residency…

WHEN the pioneering experimental rock group The United States Of America split acrimoniously in the spring of 1968, they had only been going for a year – but such was their impact, those 12 months would come to define the life of the band’s singer Dorothy Moskowitz. “We probably would have lasted another two or three years,” says Moskowitz, a sharp and sassy 82, over Zoom from her home in Piedmont, California. “There was new music coming and we knew how to put it out there. We’d all gotten more charismatic on stage as well. When we first started we were quite stiff – artsy-fartsy students from UCLA – but we’d loosened up a lot.” Moskowitz’s partner at the time, the guitarist and Fluxus associate Joseph Byrd, was the driving…

NORTH AMERICANS Long Cool World THIRD MAN Ambient Americana stalwarts pare back the twang even further for minimalist cosmic folk that leaves big questions hanging in the great universal stillness. BOYGENIUS “$20” INTERSCOPE “It’s a bad idea and I’m all about it…” Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker are born to run on this stirring sighter for their much-anticipated first LP together. SISSOKO SEGAL PARISIEN PEIRANI Les Égarés NØ FØRMAT Recorded in the French Alpine town of Gap, a uniquely beguiling and unforced fusion of chamber music, West African folk and jazz. DUR-DUR BAND INT. The Berlin Session OUTHERE The first new studio recording by a full group from Somalia since the early 1990s, featuring the country’s exiled ‘King Of Pop’ Xabiib Sharaabi. Miraculous stuff. EL MICHELS AFFAIR & BLACK…

Moving On Skiffle VIRGIN 8/10 THE great reset has arrived. After two exhausting albums of political ranting, Van Morrison appears to have got everything off his chest and gone back to basics. Moving On Skiffle sees him working through 23 covers of early country, gospel, folk and blues numbers that he first encountered at Belfast’s Atlantic Records during the skiffle craze of 1956–57. Whether his own versions can be considered skiffle is a moot point, despite the constant buzzing presence of Alan Wicket on washboard. Van Morrison first talked about recording a skiffle album in the late 1970s, and in 1998 he recorded The Ski ffle Sessions in Belfast, a live album (released in 2000) that featured skiffle maestros Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber, plus Wicket on washboard in a…

FRESH from producing wife Connie Smith’s comeback The Cry Of The Heart, Marty Stuart returns in April with Altitude, his first album since signing to SNAKEFARM. He’s backed by his longtime band The Fabulous Superlatives – guitarist Kenny Vaughn, drummer Harry Stinson and bassist/steel guitar player Chris Scruggs – who help steer the songs between country, bluegrass and fiery rock’n’roll. Stuart’s directive is made pretty clear on teaser “Country Star”: “Glad to be alive/All I need is a motor in my car/Crank it up, hit the road/Be a country star”. At the other end of the career spectrum, promising newcomer Nate Smith offers up his self-titled debut ARISTA NASHVILLE/SONY MUSIC NASHVILLE that same month. The Californian native, now resident in Nashville, deals in an engaging mix of Southern soul and classic…

Bitches Brew is quite an intangible album, isn’t it? It’s about moods and feelings and moments. It’s why Martin [Terefe] wanted us to recreate the process that led to the album, the mindset of creativity. We spent a lot of time talking about the album before we started recording, what we liked about it. There were about nine of us and we initially worked by breaking down into smaller ensembles of two, three or four. And, from those smaller sessions, you might end up with an idea, and then we’d bring that to the main recording session and we’d improvise around it. How does the process of improvisation work in this context? It’s about hearing the music in its entirety, and understanding your role and your position in it, almost like…

“I USED to go the Troubadour; I started singing on open-mic night on Monday nights. It was a place we could sneak into – we knew the guy on the back door, so we’d spend a lot of time there. I started hanging out with Roger and Gene, and we’d sing together. I was just a folkie going there to get noticed, and all of a sudden I’m in a band. Roger and Gene were singing these songs that Gene had written after he’d listened to The Beatles. Roger could figure out how to play them in a Beatle-ish fashion and then I sat down with them and started singing harmonies. It was completely organic. Gene had no clue what the rules were, so he would just do it in…

“THE community we established in Laurel Canyon wasn’t visible from the outside. It was at people’s houses that everything happened. That’s how Stephen, Graham and I realised our voices gelled, when we were singing at Joni’s place – right there in the kitchen. We started singing, ‘In the morning when you rise’, from [Stills’] ‘You Don’t Have To Cry’, which went on our first album. We knew what we had was different. Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton were building these giant thunderstorms with their electric guitars and here we were poking our heads out from the corner with our acoustic guitars. We were singing about the things and people we loved – our thing was always about love and politics. Graham and I both wrote a song about…

SOLO PIANO CHILLY GONZALES “I feel confirmed by it; when I turn it on, I’m living.” “AXOLOTL” JULIO CORTÁZAR The Argentine novelist’s short story is “a delightful little jewel” to Horn. THE LOVER MARGUERITE DURAS Horn quotes from the novel: “Very early on, it was too late”. “SO LOW” JIMMY GIUFFRE The song “awakens the dreams of the clarinet sleeping in my closet. One day…” INVISIBLE CITIES ITALO CALVINO The book advises us to “…seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”.…

“TWO short years in Wümme,” is how Faust’s bassist and vocalist Jean-Hervé Péron summarises this fabled krautrock group’s early years, living in an abandoned schoolhouse, south-west of Hamburg, Germany. “Intense and creative.” The story of Faust is one of surprising coincidence, methodical planning and a good, strong dose of experimentation. Formed in 1969, taken under the wing of music journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, their first run of albums, recorded across the first half of the ’70s, plotted a new and distinctly German form for rock music. Since then, Faust have fallen apart and come back together many times: across the late ’90s and into the 2010s there were two coexistent Fausts: one headed by Péron and drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, another by organist Hans-Joachim Irmler. Another recent split has led to…

NINA SIMONE AT TOWN HALL COLPIX, 1959 Recorded at the historic Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, Simone’s first live album showcases her emphatic piano playing, her expressive vocals, and most of all her adventurous repertoire. She moves fluidly from showtunes (the exquisitely sad “You Can Have Him”) to traditional folk numbers (the haunted “Cotton Eyed Joe”) to Afro-Cuban instrumentals like “Return Home” and “Under The Lowest”. 8/10 NINA SIMONE AT NEWPORT COLPIX, 1960 Thanks to her rising popularity, Simone made her debut at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960, playing on a bill that included Pete Seeger and Muddy Waters. Anchored by her early hit “I Loves You Porgy”, it was an unusual set, as she stepped out from behind her piano to sing the traditional “Little Liza Jane”. 9/10…

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME Led Zeppelin had reached the mountain top and realised there is nowhere higher to go, but it’s like they are liberated by their status. There’s a lot of darkness in their mythology, but this is a very friendly album. Calling it Houses Of The Holy is a reference to their concerts, the people gathering in an almost religious way, and the first and last tracks are about music and touring and the power of a crowd. On “The Song Remains The Same” they are talking about life as an adventure, it’s very optimistic but they are already being playful speeding up the vocal. They are trying to wig people out. THE RAIN SONG The backstory about George Harrison is nice, and Page went full-tilt into…

Concorde 2, Brighton, January 20 “NICE sunset this evening,” Emma Pollock pauses to reflect, midway through this deeply emotional set. “It’s just wonderful walking about, knowing you’ve got a show after 18 years tonight, in a band you were once in…” The Delgados split in 2005 following bassist Stewart Henderson’s departure, exhausted by a decade of effort without ever quite getting the “attention or respect” he felt they deserved. Chemikal Underground, the label they founded in a Glasgow tenement flat in 1994 (and still run to this day), seemed to outshine the band at first, as it launched the careers of Mogwai, Arab Strap and Bis. The Delgados’ songcraft may have seemed conventional next to Mogwai’s artful thunder or Aidan Moffat’s debauched monologues, but by the time of 2000’s Mercury-nominated…

BROKER Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda Starring Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong Won, Bae Doona Opens Feb 24 Cert 12a 9/10 THE INSPECTION Directed by Elegance Bratton Starring Jeremy Pope, Raúl Castillo, McCaul Lombardi Opens Feb 17 Cert 15 7/10 WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Directed by Shekhar Kapur Starring Lily James, Shazad Latif, Shabana Azmi Opens Feb 24 Cert 12a 5/10 LUNANA: A YAK IN THE CLASSROOM Dir by Pawo Choyning Dorji Starring Sherab Dorji, Ugyen Norbu Lhendup Opens March 10 Cert To be confirmed 7/10 NEXT EXIT Directed by Mali Elfman Starring Katie Parker, Rahul Kohli, Rose McIver Opens February 20 Cert 15 4/10…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Led Zeppelin. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win a prize. Closing date: Wednesday, March 8, 2023. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 Kinks song performed on the road gets them absolutely nowhere (4-3-6) 8 “I’m not saying it was your fault, although you could have done more”, The Kooks (5) 9 Dry Cleaning getting jobs as wicket keepers (9) 11 “Over bridge of sighs, to rest my eyes in shades of _____”, opening line to the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” (5) 12+30A A hit for Tracey Ullman, but some others are unaware it was written by…

PAUL SAMWELL-SMITH: “Jeff alarmed me when he first joined the Yardbirds. He seemed slightly dangerous and unpredictable. But I quickly saw he was a lovely big softie at heart, very generous. And funny. He came into the band and just gave his music without conditions. He was challenging convention and taking us off into experimental territory, but never threatening the stability or performance of the band as a professional entity. I’d say Jeff was a playful disrupter, whereas Eric was a purist and perfectionist. “It’s a complete travesty that Jeff didn’t get a songwriting credit on ‘Shapes Of Things’, but times were very different then. We were advised that the only criteria for the credits were who wrote the words and who wrote the melody. But listen to that solo!…

1 JANA HORN Leaving Him Our CD opens with this hushed, hypnotic ballad from the Texan’s new album. “I wrote it with some women in my life in mind,” she tells us. “I had this daydream that they would get out of their situations with men. It’s a song of wishful thinking.” Read more on p60. 2 SHANA CLEVELAND A Ghost What’s always made La Luz intriguing is the dark undertow to their short, lo-fi surf jams. For her second solo album, Cleveland has embraced those quieter, eerier qualities – ably demonstrated on this beguiling song about a spectral guest seeking to “come through” and connect with the living. 3 MAC DEMARCO Crescent City These instrumental recordings were made while on a road trip around America last year. Built on…

Just Before Music DUST-TO-DIGITAL, 2012 Holley’s debut (aged 62) is an entirely improvised set of studio recordings for keyboard and vocals which typifies his impressionistic, deeply autobiographical and – thanks largely to his bluesy vibrato – hugely poignant style. It features just seven tracks, but Van Morrison-ish piano raga “Planet Earth And Otherwheres” runs to 25 minutes, mixing cosmic questing with detailed narrative. 8/10 MITH JAGJAGUWAR, 2018 Though it was recorded over five years, titles like “I’m A Suspect”, “I Snuck Off The Slave Ship” and “I Woke Up In A Fucked-up America” point to a more urgently purposeful and politically agitated Holley on his third release. Black Lives Matter plays its part, but tracks like “How Far Is Spaced-Out?” and “Down In The Ghostness Of Darkness” speak to more…

Was it an emotionally trying time, moving the band forward without Tom Stevens? It was hard, because he was always such a vital presence in the studio. He was never the most voluble member of the band, which is why he’s referred to as the quiet one in “Tom Tom”, but when he did speak he was always worth listening to and taking notice of. Throughout the making of the record our mantra was, “What would Tom do?” “Elmer Gantry Is Alive And Well” may be a bygone cultural reference, but it’s clearly a song for modern times. I recently found myself in a Twitter spat with about 20 people – someone said something stupid and I just couldn’t bear it, so that’s where the song comes from. Donald Trump is…

What does California mean to you? I always dreamed of coming here. Sometimes it’s hard to be here, with the wildfires every year, and it seems inevitable that climate disasters are going to become more common. But I want to be here as long as I can, because it still seems like a dream. I always feel like it’s the American dream – growing up, I read the Beats and totally bought into the California fantasy. It hasn’t disappointed me. There is such an eeriness to your work – as if dark spirits are coursing through some of your songs… Yeah, I think that’s true. I’m always surprised, when I zoom out after a record is done, at how haunted they all seem to feel. I love writing songs, and…

How did you come to play on the album? “I was invited to sessions at Real World, where the majority of the album was recorded. Van literally shouted out the key of each song and away we went. It was on the fly, a full improv session. We’d do one song, get through it, and then go on to the next. We didn’t play any song twice. There might be a fluffed start, but when we did it once we went straight on to the next. The band had chord sheets, but I was very impressed. It’s not really skiffle, is it? Not so much. It’s Van delving into the songs he grew up listening to. I only know skiffle through Billy Bragg’s book, but it sounds like a very exciting time…

Otis Redding: Live In Europe VOLT, 1967 Redding recorded his first live album during the legendary Stax/Volt tour of Europe in 1967, with Booker T & The MG’s backing him on some of his most popular songs. It reveals him to be a supremely charismatic showman who could draw audiences into the intense drama of his songs. Closer “Try A Little Tenderness” may be his finest moment. 10/10 Albert King: Live Wire/Blues Power STAX, 1968 Following big hits with “Crosscut Saw” and “Born Under A Bad Sign”, Albert King recorded this set in 1968 at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Opening with a bawdy, nearly unrecognisable cover of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”, the short set is crammed full of gnarly blues riffs and mind-bending solos, but the highlight might…

The relationship between you and Burt seems incredibly harmonious. Did you ever disagree about anything? Would you have the chutzpah to quibble with his ideas? If you X-rayed these songs like they do old paintings, you’d be surprised that some ‘Bacharachian’ passages were actually my compositions. When I sketched a bridge that I thought we needed in “This House Is Empty Now”, Burt replaced it with even more dramatic music. In your sleevenotes, you quote Burt describing himself as “an extremist”. Can you explain? Making Painted From Memory, Burt told me, “I don’t demand 110 per cent any more, I settle for 98.” Listen to the music in the bridge of “Alfie”, for which Hal David wrote: “Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing.” Burt is an extremist for…

Guitar bands made a major comeback in the Noughties, do you believe that was largely down to The Strokes? “I would like to say it was entirely down to The Strokes. They suddenly got so popular and made it look so fun that a lot of people who hated rock’n’roll the year before, especially their older brother’s rock’n’roll, suddenly got skinny jeans and guitars and started bands. It was very visible, especially in the East Village and in London.” Why did Is This It became such a huge hit album? “They sounded so nonchalant, like they just didn’t care about anything, but they worked so hard and they were so meticulous about every note they played. And then they looked great. They were so young and stylish, that just resonated across…

AS the release schedule really starts to heat up, we’ll be assessing new albums from The Hold Steady, Natalie Merchant, Everything But The Girl, Baaba Maal, The Smashing Pumpkins, Willie Nelson, A Certain Ratio, Boygenius, Mudhoney, James Holden, Jana Horn, Lankum, Metallica and many more. In the Archive section, look out for a definitive review of Pink Floyd’s 50th-anniversary boxset of The Dark Side Of The Moon, plus intriguing reissues from the likes of Chris & Cosey, Hawkwind and The Cinematic Orchestra. EMAIL: TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

“DAVID was a very pure and innocent human. I don’t mean innocent as in ‘without sin’; he was innocent in that he let life flow through him, like a child, in a very pure way. There was no filter. I don’t blame anybody that got upset with him, or had a bone to pick, because it was a very strong personality. I met him at a time when he’d chilled out a lot. He used to say, ‘You’re so lucky you met me now, I don’t know if you’d have liked me 30 years ago!’ He also used to say, ‘The worst thing you can do to an 18-year old kid is make them a millionaire rock star.’ He was a beautiful guy. Really one of the most generous, thoughtful…

BY1970, Lenny Kaye was working at Village Oldies record store in New York’s Greenwich Village. He was holding down other jobs too – as a fledgling rock critic and as a freelance talent scout at Jac Holzman’s Elektra records. In the autumn of that year, Holzman came to Kaye with an idea: to collect tracks by bands that might otherwise have been lost or overlooked at the time. Kaye took inspiration from his own formative musical experiences in the Vandals and the Zoo – just two of the countless bands switched on by The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. The ripples of this Big Bang moment spread across the States, mutating and amplifying into primitive garage rock, proto-punk and baroque psychedelia, leaving in…

Early ’70s: Maggie and Terre Roche start singing as a duo. In 1973 they appear on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon by Paul Simon, who helps get them a record deal 1975: The duo release Seductive Reasoning and retreat from the industry 1976: Maggie Roche writes “Hammond Song” while spending time at a kung fu temple in Hammond, Louisiana 1977: Suzzy Roche joins her sisters to form The Roches. They begin playing the folk clubs of New York City 1978: The Roches sign to Warners. Robert Fripp sees the band in New York Late 1978: They record “Hammond Song” for their first album at The Hit Factory, New York April 1979: Eponymous debut album released, containing “Hammond Song” 1997: The Roches split after releasing their ninth album, Can We Go Home Now, in 1995…

“WHEN I first met with her, I made it a point to speak French with her. Before I went in, I saw a couple of other producers come out shaking their heads. But I greeted her in French and gave her a customary European hug. As she was checking me out, I was checking her out, too. I liked her. Later, I flew to her home in Aix-en-Provence. We were running through some songs. She started playing ‘The Folks Who Live On The Hill’ and she fell to her knees weeping. I got down on the floor beside her and put my arm around her. I guessed that it was the favourite song of Earl Barrow, the prime minister of Barbados. They had been lovers. She said she could feel him in the room whenever she played…

“Lisa Robinson called me. I was doing a lot of work with her for Rock Scene. She asked if I could get to Pittsburgh to see Led Zep. I said, ‘Sure, but how do we get to Pittsburgh?’ She told me they had their own plane. They were playing the Three River Stadium, which surprised me – nobody was playing stadiums then. We were flying from Teterboro in New Jersey, just over the river. Somebody suggested we get a shot of the band with the plane. What I like about it is that the band are standing by the engine and the plane is so big, it doesn’t fit in the picture. You can see the name of the band and they look as if they own the plane even…

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA RELEASED FEBRUARY 17 According to director Jeff Loveness, the Quantum Realm is “Jodorowsky’s Dune within Marvel”. Whether Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly are up for a 14-hour romp with Salvador Dalí in their third outing in the ant suits remains to be seen. COCAINE BEAR RELEASED FEBRUARY 24 A 500-pound black bear ingests a sack of smuggled cocaine and embarks on a drug-fuelled rampage through Georgia: the premise alone makes Cocaine Bear one of the most anticipated new films of 2023. Directed by Elizabeth Banks and starring The Americans ’ Keri Russell, it looks unmissable. JOYLAND RELEASED FEBRUARY 24 Initially banned on its release in Pakistan last year, Saim Sadiq’s tale of a young man getting a job as a dancer at an erotic theatre…

RUN-DMC “Rock Box” PROFILE 1984 We can talk about anything by Run-DMC: “My Adidas”, “Peter Piper” “Rock Box”, “Sucker MC’s”… but if I had to choose one to be the most influential, it’s “Rock Box”. It showed that hip-hop and rock could really work. Run-DMC was a big thing – there was nothing like it. They were able to take the elements of everything that had gone before, from 1973 to 1983. They were like a synopsis or a culmination of the whole 10 years of hip-hop before that. The unbelievable aspect of Run-DMC is that they compressed a decade into a recording act: two dudes and a DJ. Run-DMC made me seriously know that hip-hop can be as big as rock’n’roll. STEVIE WONDER “Fingertips” TAMLA, 1963 I come from…

THE TRIDENTS “NURSERY RHYME” (1964) Eventually released on 1991’s Beckology, this Bo Diddley cover found a young Beck pulling out all the stops. Dissonance, mayhem, high-speed runs, bells, whistles – it’s all there. THE YARDBIRDS “SHAPES OF THINGS” (1966) A monument of UK psych. The mid section is a freakout that gave Beck – layering one solo on top of another – 29 seconds to stun the world. THE YARDBIRDS “THE NAZZ ARE BLUE” (1966) The famously moody Beck – who, in a rare move, sang this Elmore James-inspired number – played his solo entirely on one note while glaring at the other Yardbirds through the control-room window. JEFF BECK GROUP “YOU SHOOK ME” (1968) Wah-wah to the fore, Beck brings heavy metal to the blues. Months later, to his…

Inflate the dragons and get your skates on! As Rick Wakeman unleashes a new album and limbers up to play live, the keyboard lord provides an exclusive foreword to our expanded and updated Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to Yes. Expect a trove of classic interviews and in-depth album reviews, including solo projects from Olias Of Sunhillow to Fish Out Of Water. It’s available from February 23… Already in shops is the first of this year’s quarterly special editions, The Complete David Bowie… Ranked!. It’s a crash course for the ravers: everything Bowie, in order! You can also buy direct from us at Uncut.co.uk/single… Time to start dreaming of peacocks and afternoon beers – the lineup for this year’s End Of The Road festival is out! Wilco, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, King…

“Out of all of the records I put out, maybe you could make one good EP” SADLY it seems like there will be no third coming for American Music Club, the group Mark Eitzel describes as “truly the best band in the world for about two years. Until of course we came off stage, and then we were the most self-defeating people in the world.” Perhaps nothing much has changed: Eitzel is still writing devastatingly beautiful songs with impressive frequency, and he’s still hilariously talking them down. When we speak, 2023 is only a week old, but he’s already penned four new songs for an off-Broadway musical called Cornelia Street, “which they’re gonna cut, probably!” What’s it like to see his songs on stage, performed by other people? “It’s actually…

How did you start making music? I just had a karaoke machine and an old keyboard that I found at a flea market and I had a station set up so I could practise and practise. I practised at a certain time of day. Then I moved from that to my paintings. I remember it well: I moved from the painting to my sandstone sculptures. I moved from that to my found objects. I did a song called “In My Garden”, and in that garden there was so much for me to contain and attend to and the music kind of grew out of that. I made hours and hours of cassette tapes, but a lot of my earlier materials were destroyed when my property got bulldozered in Birmingham. One…

ALGIERS Shook MATADOR 7/10 Politically charged gospel-punks seek out new collaborators Anglo-American agit-rockers Algiers dig deep into their Atlanta roots with this operatic, panoramic, maximalist meditation on trauma in all its forms. Enlisting an army of collaborators include Rage Against The Machine’s Zack de la Rocha, Future Islands singer Samuel T Herring and veteran rapper Ruben ‘Big Rube’ Bailey, the band’s core duo of Franklin James Fisher and Ryan Mahan deploy their signature “Lenin-McCartney dynamic”, layering political polemic and spoken-word sermons over pulverising beats, jazz-metal grooves and post-punk textures. Some of these experimental mash-ups feel ungainly, but when their chemistry ignites, Algiers sound indestructible. STEPHEN DALTON ALTIN GÜN Aşk GLITTERBEAT 7/10 Wild fifth album in as many years from Turkish psych-rockers During lockdown the prolific, Amsterdam-based sextet released two homemade…

So much of the music on V is steeped in summery pop of the ’70s and ’80s. What were some of the qualities you wanted to capture? I definitely prioritised feeling above meaning in lyrical terms. I was very influenced by a lot of songs I don’t understand. Everyone understands the feeling of a song like “Eye Of The Tiger”, but I don’t think many really bother to look into that phrase too deeply. It’s just a song to accompany your montage, so looking into it might ruin the song’s function. How did you come to recognise what you do within this longer tradition of hapa-haole music in Hawaii? Hapa-haole is the name for a musical tradition but also for a kind of racial identity. It translates to “half-white”, which happens to be what I am…

Had you been planning a solo album for a while? No, that’s what’s so crazy! But I found I’d collected lots of ideas, little stories like “Big Mouth”. A few years ago on stage I’d tell stories about shoes that I wore. And in the chorus I’d just go, “I’ll never wear stilettos!” Then I kind of developed that. I’d had “Feminist Song” for 10 or 12 years and played it with The Raincoats, so I wanted to record that too. How did Youth help shape these songs? He plays bass on several tracks and a lot of wacky guitar. I knew what I did and didn’t want, and Youth always enabled that to happen, then pushed the songs a bit further sometimes. He was always there as a very kind…

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO Les Stances À Sophie (reissue, 1971) PLAY LOUD! PRODUCTIONS 9/10 Cult classic free jazz soundtrack More than 50 years since their inception, The Art Ensemble Of Chicago are a jazz institution, still releasing new music and performing across the world. Recorded during a 13-month stay in Paris, their soundtrack for Moshé Mizrahi’s 1971 film Les Stances À Sophie is an essential document of early Art Ensemble, featuring core members Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman (reeds/winds), Malachi Favors (bass), Lester Bowie (trumpet) and Don Moye (drums), along with powerhouse soul vocals from Bowie’s wife, Fontella Bass. “Theme De Yoyo” is the most well-known of these cuts for a reason, Bass’s voice beaming out poetry while the band plays furiously catchy, funk-inflected free jazz. “Theme Amour Universel” and…

“I DON’T think looking at myself the way other people do is smart,” David Crosby told Uncut in 2016. “I’m a bozo, man. I have a talent and I’m grateful for it, but I’ve made such egregious mistakes in my life that it’s given me a perspective where I do not look at myself the way other people do. It’s not a healthy thing to do. If somebody else wants to tell me, ‘Well, man, you influenced a whole generation of songwriters.’ Fine. It’s not good for me to think that or say that. All it does is aggrandise my own ego and it doesn’t advance me at all, doesn’t teach me anything and I don’t like it.” Crosby, who died on January 18, aged 81, found a kind of…

“THE appeal of hard drugs for people is to shut out pain in their lives, to not be who they were or where they are. I have given it some hard thoughts over the years. Drugs have probably been the single most destructive force in music. I tried writing a list of drug casualties on a legal pad, and when I got to the end of the second page I stopped, it just became too fucking grim. There is a specific group of drugs which are absolutely, totally and nothing but destructive – all the hard drugs have no redeeming value whatsoever. I don’t think pot goes in that category. It’s much better than alcohol. It helps me at night, eases my shoulders – I’ve got two very bad shoulders…

FOR Jana Horn, Armaggedon is never far from her thoughts. When you were raised in a Baptist household in Glen Rose, Texas – population 2,500 – the end of everything has a way of creeping into conversation. “What you learn as a kid is so much of who you are,” she says. “I spent so much of my childhood doing Bible drills – literally drilling scripture into my head – that it’s unforgettable, however many years it’s been since I’ve gone back to those words. I’ve seen the Left Behind series and you can’t forget those scenes – people flying off to heaven leaving their clothes and underwear on the floor. I don’t seek to draw from those images, but they are just a part of my thinking process.” Right…

“CAN you feel it?” Nina Simone asked the crowd of 40,000 gathered on a muddy soccer field in St. Jude, Alabama, a suburb of Montgomery. “Can you see it?” Those were lines from a song she’d written, “Mississippi Goddam”, but on this night in March 1965, the questions she posed sounded more optimistic. This was, she understood, a pivotal event for the Civil Rights movement and she was excited to be part of it. Many in the audience had endured violence and abuse to march the 50 miles from Selma to the state capital and their perseverance galvanised Simone. She may have shared the bill with more established acts like Sammy Davis Jr, Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett, but most agreed that her short set reflected the conflicting emotions of…

“IT WAS LIKE AN EARTHQUAKE, THEY WERE GOING CRAZY”EDDIE KRAMER JULY 29, 1973. Inside Madison Square Garden, the ground was shaking. It was the final night of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 tour of the United States and Eddie Kramer was recording the show behind the stage in Wally Heider’s Mobile Studio Truck. The three sold-out nights at the Garden marked the climax of a gargantuan trek in support of March’s multi-million selling album Houses Of The Holy. Over three months, Zep blazed across the States, playing to crowds that eclipsed The Rolling Stones’ huge American tour the previous year and breaking box office records held by The Beatles. From packed stadiums and surreal album covers to trashed hotel rooms, Zeppelin crafted a new reality, one that could even make the earth…

“IT was a bit like buying a second-hand car in the back streets of Wolverhampton. You spent a lot of time and cheer and good intention and you may come out with a gem or you might come out with a right old banger. They were like elite surrealistic door-to-door troubadours. The double act was amazing, the good guy and the bad guy: the charming amiable bonhomie of Aubrey and the sharp, snappy, ‘Do I have to deal with this scum musician?’ approach that Storm had. It was marvellous. “They had a bagful of ideas, and sometimes when things got desperate and we weren’t impressed and we started putting our own ideas into it, they’d reach further into the bag and out would come a couple of ideas that unfortunately,…