Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från UNCUT

“You treat me badly, I love you madly” ONE of my last jobs this issue has been proofing our field report from the End Of The Road festival, which Uncut was proudly involved with again this year. I’m hard-pressed to find another festival which reflects so much of what we do here at Uncut – mixing familiar names (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Slowdive, Lankum, Yo La Tengo) with upcoming faces (Kassi Valazza, Sanam, Florence Adooni, Snõõper) across a variety of genres and styles. By way of evidence, please look no further than this issue of Uncut. Among many highlights, Laura Barton profiles the remarkable redemption story of Christopher Owens, the former frontman with indie-rock classicists Girls, and whose new album I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair is one of my…

CRAIG Whittle vividly recalls his first encounter with Hannah Merrick. One evening in 2012, the guitarist went to a gig at the Liverpool Institute Of Performing Arts which was, he admits, “a terrible night of music”. However, there was one significant saving grace. “Hannah got up and played one of her own songs on an acoustic – a folksy, ’70s-style song that I can still remember even though I’ve only ever heard it once. I couldn’t believe her voice, the song was great and she had such a presence on stage. It just blew me away.” Fate took its time bringing the two together, but when Whittle landed a job in a Liverpool bar it happened to be where Merrick worked. At the time, she was looking for a guitarist…

Five Dice, All Threes DEAD OCEANS 8/10 IF you’ve never understood or attempted the Yahtzee-adjacent dice game Threes, the first 100 seconds of Five Dice, All Threes should see you more or less right. This opening fanfare, the near-title track “Five Dice”, consists of a clearly experienced Threes player explaining it to some new mark: in the background, radio static punctuates the flicking of channels between opera, rock, old-timey music and old-school radio dramas. The suspicious listener may, by this point, already be forming concerns to the effect that Five Dice, All Threes is some sort of concept album. Such misgivings are likely to be both reinforced and ameliorated as Five Dice, All Threes proceeds. This preamble is not the last we hear of clattering dice. There are, also, recurrent…

FAT Dog singer Joe Love had been making tunes in his bedroom during lockdown but wanted to play live with some real people. The first member of the band was Johnny Hutch on drums. “Johnny was born with a plastic dog mask on and has worn it his whole life, so it made sense for him to join a band called Fat Dog,” explains Love. Now signed to Domino, Fat Dog have released their debut album, Woof, a wild fusion of dance, punk, klezmer and jazz that is like an even more unhinged version of Black Midi or BCNR. With the band including a saxophonist, keyboard player and bass player – “there were plans to get to 100 musicians but it stopped at saxophone” – Fat Dog have turned chaos…

GEORDIE GREEP started recording his debut solo album almost by accident last year. “Black Midi had a few days off in Brazil,” he explains, “and a week before we got there, I asked the only guy I knew in Brazil if he knew any musicians and studios, and he put it all together. It was a really good vibe.” Greep and the crack session musicians recorded four songs in a day and a half, including single “Holy Holy”, nailing the bizarre fusion of Latin and experimental rock and jazz that he was looking for. “Exactly!” says Greep when Uncut brings up Steely Dan and their use of session musicians. “[I love] the atmosphere in Steely Dan’s music, the characters in the songs, definitely their musical approach.” Throughout the record’s 63…

A DRIANNE Lenker discovered Tucker Zimmerman through his 1980 album Square Dance, a record that she listened to while she was driving trucks across America. Zimmerman had recorded his first album in the UK in 1969 with Tony Visconti – once one of David Bowie’s 25 favourite LPs – and then decamped to Belgium where he wrote books and released albums. Zimmerman was invited to tour the US with Big Thief and when the band played Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2022, Zimmerman joined them on stage. “After the show, Adrianne said she and the band would like to record an album of my songs,” says Zimmerman. For Dance Of Love, Zimmerman wrote a batch of new songs ahead of sessions in the US that he says were “wonderful, beautiful, transcendent,…

The 1974 Live Recordings COLUMBIA LEGACY 8/10 IN Toronto’s Maple Leaf Stadium on January 9, 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band delivered a concert including a brutally ugly “Lay Lady Lay” and a version of “Like A Rolling Stone” that didn’t so much end as collapse in a heap. Barely a week after making a solid and warmly received start to their reunion tour of 21 US cities, they had arrived in Canada, the birthplace of four members of The Band, and perhaps celebrated the homecoming not wisely but too well. At the next concert, in Montreal two nights later, Dylan was halfway through the first verse of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” when he forgot the words. At that point the tour’s promoter, the legendary Bill Graham, may have…

Faces At The BBC – Complete BBC Concert And Session Recordings 1970-1973 RHINO 9/10 “OUR second group this evening is the excessively rowdy Faces,” promises John Peel, whose voice introduces this set of (almost) complete BBC sessions from the Faces. It’s an appropriate start. When the Faces released their debut single, “Flying”, the Beeb didn’t take them seriously. It took John Peel to step in as an early champion, recording their first BBC session in March 1970. Peel pops up throughout this 8CD/1Blu-ray box that has rescued almost every Faces BBC session from archives and private collections – there’s just one set of three songs missing, believed wiped. It includes the Faces playing outstanding versions of “You’re My Girl”, “Oh Lord I’m Browned Off”, “Stay With Me” and “Miss Judy’s…

“I’M losing my way with words,” laments Peter Perrett. “I find I can’t express myself with any satisfaction. The last 10 years, my memory has completely fallen off a cliff. I get frustrated in conversation. This is the last dying embers! The only time I can find the words is when I’m constructing lyrics for the songs. And that’s why it means so much to me. I’ve got these brief moments of terminal lucidity…” He needn’t apologise. Sitting on a sofa in his tiny north London studio – the place where, once upon a time, The Damned recorded “New Rose”, Elvis Costello made My Aim Is True and Madness laid down “The Prince” – he’s a model of eloquence and charm. Though he moves gingerly, thanks to emphysemic lungs and…

IT was already a bleak year by the time Christopher Owens lost everything. There had been a relationship breakdown, a new apartment had fallen through and now for some while the singer had been living in his camper van in San Francisco. The good times – of music and merriment and modelling for major fashion labels, seemed very far away. What he remembers most is the strange rhythm of those days; the moving from place to place, the constant hunt for somewhere to charge his phone. “Communicating with my manager about how we were going “Communicating with my manager about how we were going to get out of this situation would be something I would do a lot,” he says. “On the days I had nothing to do, I would…

AS Pan Am flight 101 from London Airport began its descent into New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, The Beatles gazed out of the windows and wondered what awaited them in America. Expectations were high – “I Want To Hold Your Hand” had been No 1 in the Billboard chart for a week as North America finally caught up with Beatlemania. But on February 7, 1964, at the start of their first visit to the States, there were also some nerves. “As we got nearer, they began to get apprehensive,” recalls Harry Benson, a photographer for The Daily Express who was accompanying The Beatles. “This is no bullshit, but because John Lennon had talked about civil rights, they were worried about what kind of reception they might get as…

Nature rites and spartan wisdom from two modern-day prophets “UNDER this peaceful moon”, PJ Harvey murmurs late on, looking reverently at the red-hued satellite far above Gunnersbury Park. This distant wonder suits a night of nature rites, folk tales and turning seasons, as Harvey focuses on her song-cycle I Inside The Old Year Dying, while personally chosen support act Big Thief proffer Adrianne Lenker’s own lyrical concern with skin, bone and human nature’s raw, unmediated corners. This one-day festival in a remarkably civilised spot on the edge of Ealing draws an accommodating crowd for bands who are resolutely playing in the present tense. The new songs Big Thief debuted earlier this summer still dominate a set in which only two choices pre-date their most recent album, Dragon New Warm Mountain…

“I never worried I’d lose David as a friend but I was worried the business might eat him up”GEORGE UNDERWOOD IN 1994, David Bowie was one of several musicians who donated artwork to Little Pieces From A Big Star, an auction created by Brian Eno to raise money for the War Child charity. So when Bowie’s lifelong friend George Underwood was invited to contribute to War Child’s latest art auction, Sound & Vision, he didn’t need to think twice – particularly as the theme of the exhibition was Bowie’s lyric, “We like dancing and we look divine”. “I took a detail of two figures dancing from a painting I did in 2010 called Dancing With Giants,” explains Underwood. “I then put them in new outfits inspired by David’s show at…

Paul McCartney’s bass “My idea for the exhibition was to tell the stories of famous recordings through the equipment that made them. I met Mary McCartney at Abbey Road and she asked me to photograph Fela Kuti’s master tapes. Rather than money, I asked to be introduced to her father’s guitars. To stand next to these objects was amazing, it’s why I call them Holy Relics. These pictures are ultra-focal comps – lots of images stitched together to create a pin-sharp composite that isn’t possible to achieve with the naked eye. I then blow them up to about two metres so you can see every mark.” Abbey Road diary page “Lester Smith has worked at Abbey Road since the late 1960s, and he showed me an old appointments diary. This…

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100% Sahara Guitar SAHEL SOUNDS 8/10 IN the historic city of Agadez, in northern Niger, a wedding can last three or four days. And Etran de L’Aïr are the most in-demand band on the city’s thriving wedding circuit, as well as performing for baptisms, anniversaries and political events. They mix songs of romance with songs of spiritual ecstasy, songs of heartbreak and fear, and even songs of solidarity and regional pride. Etran de L’Aïr, which translates as Stars of the Aïr (a region in Niger), are a family band, founded in 1995 by Aghaly Migi. He no longer plays with them, but has passed on his skills to three younger brothers – Moussa “Abindi” Ibra (lead guitar and main songwriter), Abdourahamane “Allamine” Ibrahim (rhythm guitar) and Abdoulaye “Ilia” Ibrahim (bass).…

Below A Massive Dark Land SUB POP 8/10 THAT an artist might choose to simplify on their second LP says much about their maturing artistic vision. The standard progression is to augment and amplify. Sparer and more considered might look like under-achievement from a distance, but it’s a bold move with a differently emphatic effect. That’s how Naima Bock has chosen to play it for her follow-up to 2022’s Giant Palm, her solo launch after quitting as bassist with clattering London post-punks Goat Girl. It saw her staking out a metaphysical space that was measured and calm, as opposed to voluble and generally hectic. Now, Below A Massive Dark Land carves out more of that space. In the run up, Bock had been doing a lot of solo touring and…

“Coyote’s in the coffee shop/He’s staring a hole through his scrambled eggs” Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol 4: The Asylum Years (1976–1980) RHINO THE 1930s schoolbus that Ken Kesey bought for the Merry Pranksters’ phantasmagorical 1964 road trip across the USA had a simple destination: FURTHUR, painted in psychedelic Playbill script above the windshield. It’s not clear that the Phydeaux III, the reconditioned Greyhound that Dylan hired from Frank Zappa in 1975 for the Rolling Thunder Revue, ever declared its own destination so boldly, content instead to circle round the New England backroads and creative dead-ends of Bob’s own mid-’70s malaise. But right up front on the Phydeaux, sat next to the driver so that her eagle eyes could mainline the fine white lines of the freeway, Joni Mitchell seemed to…

Afro-Harping (reissue, 1968)  UMR/VERVE 8/10 ALICE COLTRANE’S fairly recent canonisation by music fans seemingly kickstarted a long-overdue reassessment of some wonderful female jazz instrumentalists. From the emergence of the art form until very recently, female vocalists have long been accepted, albeit within the confines of an overwhelmingly sexist and exploitative industry; great instrumentalists and composers such as Carla Bley, Hazel Scott and Dorothy Ashby, however, were (and are) thin on the ground and predictably unappreciated. As well as being a woman, Ashby was African-American and played an instrument that was strongly associated with classical music, the harp. Ashby was drawn to jazz saying, “I always had the hangup on jazz. The challenge was so much greater.” Not only did she become one of jazz’s great soloists, she used the unique…

STRANGE DARLING This doesn’t exactly arrive trailing clouds of glory. The director’s biggest claim to fame is that he’s part of the family who run the Freakling Bros chain of Las Vegas haunted house attractions (“Rated #1 scariest haunt in the country by USA TODAY!”). Its two stars, Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner, are both journeyman alumni of the sprawling transmedia Scream franchise (though real heads will recognise Gallner’s name, if not his adult form, from his role as Beaver Casablancas in Veronica Mars some 20 years ago). It is shot, as it over-proudly announces in the opening credits, “entirely on 35mm film” by Giovanni Ribisi, probably still best known for his part as Frank, Phoebe’s weird little brother in Friends. But somehow, by some B-movie alchemy, these very modest…

The pick of the latest multiroom streamers SONOS ERA 300 Price £430 YOU buy a speaker because you want to listen to it, not look at it, right? That’s just as well in the case of the Era 300, because this is a speaker that sounds great but looks… well, less than great. This being Sonos, the specifics of power output, driver size and so on are an inexplicably closely guarded secret. But what we know for sure about the Era 300 is that it uses six drivers arranged around its weirdly shaped cabinet to create a convincing impression of spatial audio. There are four tweeters – one faces forwards, one right, one left, and one upwards to reflect sound from the ceiling and create a sense of height; then…

ELECTRIFYING EXPERIENCE As a lifelong Jimi Hendrix fan, it is always a pleasure to read any new articles of interest about the man. Peter Watts’ superb piece in Take 330 [October 2024] is the best I have read in capturing the zeitgeist of those turbulent months in 1970, when Hendrix was facing so many challenges but against a backdrop of genuine optimism about the future (in my humble opinion), not least because of the possibilities that lay ahead with the opening of Electric Lady. The basic story itself is well set out and complemented by interesting contributions from the likes of Bob Adcock – his recollections of being in the helicopter with Jimi before and after the Isle Of Wight gig are fascinating and not something I’d read before. Coincidentally…

GRUFF RHYS: Just by coincidence, we put records out at the same time. He’s touring a Welsh language album, and I’m touring an English language album so [a joint tour] makes complete sense. Bill toured Europe with me in 2018 – we had a tour manager who kept everyone in soup, so everyone was in a good place. BILL RYDER-JONES: It was the healthiest I’ve ever been on tour! What I’m buzzing for is that I think we share fans anyway. My writing is informed by growing up listening to Gruff’s writing – the people who follow me are largely Gruff fans and his audience know me as well through association. It’s not a ‘let’s build an audience’ thing, it’s just going to be dead special gigs. We’re gonna have…

2022 was a crisis year for Californian roots veteran Chuck Prophet. Diagnosed with stage four lymphoma, the ex-Green On Red guitarist was kept waiting on his chances of survival. “After they discovered I had a mass in my intestines, I was in a kind of no-man’s land for about 14 days,” he explains. “That was real fear, like a wooden stake being driven into me. Eventually I was told there were options in terms of treatment, and things lifted from there. But it was music that got me out of my head.” Stretching back three decades, Prophet’s highly eclectic solo work tends to involve surf, punk, rock’n’roll, folk and country. Yet it was the hitherto unexpected delights of cumbia music that guided him during his illness and recovery from chemotherapy.…

1 THE CLEARWATER SWIMMERS Valley This new Maine four-piece weave a thread between some of America’s finest music: the stoned clatter of Crazy Horse, the tightly controlled intensity of Codeine or early Low, and the romantic grandeur of Red House Painters. Here’s the opener of their self-titled debut, a beautiful Neil Young-ish storm. The LP’s reviewed on page 42. 2 BARRY ARCHIE JOHNSON Vanishing Hours Raised in Ohio and now based in LA, this acoustic guitarist has made a fine new record of down-tuned fingerstyle instrumentals. He plays the flute too, which really elevates his earthy compositions. “One of the most original and vital voices in the meditative music of his time,” reckons none other than William Tyler. 3 PETER PERRETT I Wanna Go With Dignity The Cleansing is the epic…

“Everything you want is in your reach right now/And anything that’s not I have to teach somehow” Patterns In Repeat CHRYSALIS/PARTISAN IN 2020, Laura Marling released Song For Our Daughter, a metaphoric discourse with, and about, her fictional offspring. “I drew pictures of you/Long before I met you/Just a fragment of my mind”, she sang on the wistful “For You”. And so it went on: “Now that I have you/I will not forget/What a miracle you are”. Conceptually at least, it was slightly out of step with her previous albums, which tended to map the emotional chorography of her journey from teenage nu-folk ingénue to singer-songwriter of serious repute. Yet there was more at play than pure imagination. For all its acoustic delicacy and gentle percussive touches, Song For Our…

Mighty Vertebrate INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM 8/10 ‘JAZZ’. It’s a funny old word, isn’t it? Encompassing over a century of music, it conjures a mass of styles, from Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop to Ornette Coleman’s freeform extemporisation to Nubya Garcia’s afrofuturism, and all stops inbetween. Even Jamiroquai is classed as, of all things, ‘acid jazz’, and like ‘classical’, and indeed, ‘indie’, ‘jazz’’s almost limitless scope has rendered the word strangely meaningless. Indeed, the genre’s become such a broad church its associations can seem bewildering, contradictory and even off-putting. These days it’s often used as a mere nod to instrumentation, but to some it’s a signal of free-thinking improvisation, to others technical discipline, while it’s as good as a red flag to those whose prejudices are based on limited experience (or The Fast Show).…

Bastion HICKMAN HOLLER / THIRTY TIGERS 8/10 NINE albums in, and for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious, Wayne Graham are still something of an undiscovered treat. Kentucky brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles form the band’s axis, the product of a musical upbringing in smalltown Whitesburg, where they began as rhythm section in their father’s church. Born to a coal mining family, tradition is clearly a crucial part of their MO – the siblings learned to play by watching relatives; Wayne Graham is a composite of both their grandfathers’ Christian names – but their music is hardly old-time throwback fodder. Indeed, the outstanding Bastion is primarily concerned with shifting notions of identity, what it means when the place you call home no longer feels like it. The album’s musical vocabulary is…

The Clearwater Swimmers  NEW MARTIAN 8/10 WHEN guitarist and songwriter Sumner Bright began experimenting with one-take acoustic demos as a grounding exercise, he wasn’t necessarily imagining that they would lead to the formation of a new band. Born and raised in Maine, Bright has been playing music for at least a decade, whether in bands with friends or releasing his own solo works under the name Twitches. After relocating to New York, Bright found himself in need of said grounding, which led him to record some raw demos that he secretly published online. They caught the attention of guitarist Sander Casale, Bright’s good friend as well as past and future bandmate, who approached him with the suggestion to jam on these pieces, and maybe expand them into full-band songs. The…

Chain Of Light REAL WORLD 8/10 WHEN Peter Gabriel signed Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Real World in 1989, the Pakistani-born singer was already a superstar in the Islamic world – yet almost totally unknown outside it. By then he was in his early forties and had only another eight years to live, but in that brief time he recorded a handful of albums that introduced the soulful Sufi style of devotional singing known as qawwali to a wider audience that extended far beyond the WOMAD hardcore. Among those who fell under his spell were not only Gabriel but also Jeff Buckley, who called him “my Elvis”, and Eddie Vedder, who duetted with him on the soundtrack to Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking. Other movie directors who featured his voice…

MAT Osman doesn’t think Suede have ever written a better song than “The Wild Ones”. That’s quite a claim for a band that have barely put a foot wrong during two glorious eras: their initial comet-like rise and fall through the 1990s and then the years since their return in 2010, where rich, complex albums combine with age-defyingly visceral live performances. It’s even more impressive when you consider that “The Wild Ones” was released at a time when Suede’s career seemed to be over. Bernard Butler had walked out on the band in the middle of recording Dog Man Star and, as the gaudy fireworks of Britpop exploded around them, it was difficult to envisage a place for Suede in the musical landscape. Into this, Suede dropped one of their…

Richard Dawson, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Slowdive, Idles, Lankum, Sam Morton, Yo La Tengo and many more help to restore faith in humanity IN a gentle introduction to the weekend, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier is here to provide, in her own words, “sonic balm to aid the evolution of Earth’s traumatised civilisations”. Her plan for humanity’s ascendence involves much of her trademark spare Gallic lounge-pop, but also a fair bit of star-seeking. If Sadier envisions a cosmic future for mankind, Richard Dawson predicts an earthbound doom. Once he picks up a guitar and salutes the people of Newcastle who “stood up to the arseholes” during the recent right-wing riots, he’s straight into “Museum”, his psych-folk tour of the first AI museum dedicated to humanity, centuries after we’ve made ourselves extinct. As he…