Innehållsförteckning för May_2016 från UNCUT

THE IMAGINATIVE AND sometimes heroic mechanics of actually making a record is, in many ways, the lifeblood of Uncut. This month, for instance, we have the inside story of how PJ Harvey made her new album in an ad hoc studio deep in the bowels of Somerset House, by the Thames in London. The space had been previously used as a rifle range and gymnasium for tax office employees, and Harvey invited members of the public to watch the sessions from behind a glass screen. “It was a really brave step to do that,” recalls her co-producer and longtime collaborator John Parish, “because you’re accepting that people may see you fuck up in a major way. And we all did some howlingly bad things in the session.” Fucking up, of…

“We were rebelling against more or less everything” “MAKING ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS a more solitary activity than any other kind – rock, classical, or jazz,” considers Jean-Michel Jarre. “Being in your studio on your own, not able to share your secrets or weaknesses with anybody. But there is also that exciting moment, where, like a kid with your friends, you can finally say, ‘Yes, come up to my bedroom and I’ll show you my toys’.” For nearly 50 years, Jarre has pursued his creative muse in splendid isolation, from his phenomenally successful Oxygene and Equinoxe albums to his record-breaking live concert events. Recently, though, he has permitted himself the pleasures of collaboration. Last year’s Electronica 1: The Time Machine found him working with a range of artists including Edgar Froese,…

Bruce Hornsby Black Muddy River (w/Justin Vernon’s DeYarmond Edison) “Justin wanted to record ‘Black Muddy River’; he knew my version from our live 2001 record Here Come The Noisemakers . I love it, and there are so many fantastic GD songs. Through the years we’ve covered 10 to 15 of them, here and there. “[ This version ] was a bit slower and moodier – I played two keyboards, electric and acoustic piano, one hand on each, playing them together to create a different feeling.” Ira Kaplan Wharf Rat “I just love the song. I settled on a slow tempo, and I thought I’d sing an octave lower than Jerry Garcia. I’d say, if anything, I felt pressure not to [ imitate Garcia…

SEPTEMBER 2014 Covers Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” for second series of BBC TV series Peaky Blinders OCTOBER 12, 2014 Appears at the Observer Festival Of Ideas with Giles Duley at the Barbican, London OCTOBER 18, 2014 Performs “Wing” with Patti Smith during Ann Demeulemeester book event at Dover Street Market, London JANUARY 16 – FEBRUARY 14, 2015 Recording In Progress at Somerset House, London SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 Scores Eurydice And Orpheus play on Radio 4 OCTOBER 8, 2015 The Hollow Of The Hand released OCTOBER 9-10, 2015 The Hollow Of The Hand event at London Literature Festival APRIL, 2016  The Hope Six Demolition Project released…

THERE’S SO MUCH incredible Welsh music, it’s all so fucking different, and there’s a real authenticity to it because it’s in its own landscape. Datblygu are an example of that. There’s not a single person I’ve played their music to who hasn’t gone gaga for them. When Tim and I were sending songs to each other for the Drinks LP, I sent him Datblygu and he went on this wormhole of listening to everything they’ve ever done. I think they did more Peel sessions than anyone. Perfect band, y’know. I discovered them when when the Super Furry Animals did a cover of one of their songs, “Y Teimlad”, on Mwng . I struggle writing in Welsh, because it’s a difficult language to write…

“PEOPLE SEEM MORE OPEN TO LISTENING TO OLDER MUSIC THAT IS NOT THE BEATLES”MATT SULLIVAN A FEW YEARS AGO, Alan Bishop – a former member of the band Sun City Girls – met a man at a record shop in Indonesia. “He was a young kid, maybe 22,” says Bishop, who was himself on the lookout for more of the Asian, African and Middle Eastern sounds that are the focus of his label, Sublime Frequencies. “He was well-dressed and had a driver, too. He told me, ‘Yeah, I’m really into vinyl. I went to Japan and I bought a shipping container. There’s 35,000 soul and R’n’B LPs inside. It’s sitting at a port and waiting for my dad to ship it back here.” The man’s next stop was Cuba, where…

MASAMI AKITA & EIKO ISHIBASHI Kouen Kyoudai EDITIONS MEGO Noise meets prog in warped Jim O’Rourke production If you only know Eiko Ishibashi for the prog-pop, Steely-Dan-loving albums she’s recently been releasing on Drag City, Kouen Kyoudai lets you in on a whole other side of her personality. Here, she collaborates with Masami Akita, aka Japanese noise giant Merzbow, on two side-long explorations of sturm und drang. It’s particularly satisfying to hear Ishibashi illuminating Akita’s deep fug of noise with all kinds of new sparks of tonal energy: there are some thrilling moments in “Slide” where you can hear the two players tussling across the stereo spectrum, Ishibashi’s organ and piano storming through the haze. JON DALE APARAT Aparat EXIT Audacious four-handed keyboard wizardry When Rip Rig + Panic’s Mark…

Shortly after making his 2012 LP, Hands Of Glory , the Chicago-raised, LA-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird had his first child. What should have been one of the happiest moments of his life swiftly turned into one of the more traumatic when, not long after the birth, his wife contracted a serious illness that required long and intense treatment. “So this album came from what life threw at me,” Bird says. “It’s certainly my most emotionally direct work. When life gets real, you feel like you don’t have the time to agonise over the poetics. You just say it straight.” Are You Serious , his eighth LP, includes guest appearances from singer-songwriters Fiona Apple and Blake Mills, and was recorded at Los Angeles’ Sound City…

It is surely no coincidence that the arrival of The Comet Is Coming’s debut album chimes with the vernal equinox, for if anything seems destined to soundtrack the cosmic beauty of Mother Nature getting her groove on, it’s this London outfit’s blistering electronic space jazz. “I like people to see the potential for joy and possible salvation through the euphoric potential in music,” says Shabaka Hutchings, the band’s de facto leader and saxophonist, whose giddy riffs spill across Channel The Spirits . Named after a Radiophonic Workshop track for a 1981 BBC film of the same name, the trio formed when Hutchings came to jam with drummer Maxwell Hallett and synth doyen Dan Leavers’ short-lived Soccer96 in their North London studio. Freelance sax cat Hutchings is a…

Mark Smith still finds it strange to think that his group, formed with modest ambitions in 1999, have been so successful. “When we started playing 17 years ago, our only goal was to put out a 7-inch vinyl,” the guitarist says. “If you’d have told me back then that we would be able to sell out shows at the Royal Albert Hall or Radio City Music Hall or be on late-night TV shows, or soundtrack a big-budget war movie, all while continuing to play these instrumental songs that have elements of ripping distortion and atonality and pop music and classical and whatever else, I would have found it ludicrous.” As well as releasing their own albums, such as 2016’s The Wilderness , produced by John Congleton, the…

Since they emerged from Brooklyn with their 2007 debut, All Hour Cymbals , Yeasayer have spent close to a decade wrong-footing fans with unexpected hits tucked away on elaborate concept albums. “I have no idea what people like or see in our music,” says Chris Keating, the band’s frontman. “We always try to do something different with our records – I want every album to have its own identity – and that can be to our detriment in terms of maintaining a fanbase.” Fortunately, the band’s fourth album Amen & Goodbye is a return of sorts to the shaggy kaftan pop of their debut, and finds the philosophical Keating, whose family is half-Jewish and half-Catholic, grappling with religion. “The US is particularly consumed…

SCORING: THE ORIGINAL ALBUM 10 Masterpiece 1 Poor! SCORING: EXTRA MATERIAL 10 Untold riches 1 Barrel-scrapings TRACKLIST ON THE LEVEL DISC TWO: 1 Down Down (Single Edit) 2 Roll Over Lay Down (Live At The Kursaal, Southend/1975) 3 Gerdundula (Roll Over Lay Down EP Version) 4 Junior’s Wailing (Roll Over Lay DownEP Version/Live From The UK/1975) 5 Roadhouse Blues (Live At TheKursaal, Southend/1975) 6 Backwater (Live In Mainz,Germany/1975) 7 Just Take Me (Live In Germany 1975) 8 Claudie (Live In Germany 1975) 9 Little Lady (Live In Germany 1975) 10 Most Of The Time (Live In Germany 1975) 11 Bye Bye Johnny (Live In Germany 1975) 12 Down Down (Demo) IN DECEMBER THIS year, Status Quo will cease to exist as an…

The removal of Ray Davies’ voice forces us to see his songs as theatrical constructs TRACKLIST 1 King Of The Whole Wide World – Leapy Lee 2 I Bet You Won’t Stay – The Cascades 3 Look For Me Baby – Goldie & The Gingerbreads (PREVIOUSLY UNISSUED) 4 I Go To Sleep – Peggy Lee 5 This Strange Effect – Dave Berry 6 All Night Stand – The Thoughts 7 So Mystifying – The Olympics (PREVIOUSLY UNISSUED) 8 Un Jeune Homme Bien – Petula Clark 9 One Fine Day – Shel Naylor 10 Oh What A Day It’s Gonna Be – Mo & Steve 11 Little Man In…

“I had out-of-body experiences as a child that led me to explore my own psychic sensitivity,” Paul Roland tells Uncut , explaining his parallel careers as psychedelic fantasist and expert in the arcane and occult. “The more I experienced, the less fearful I became, and the more hungry I became to discover the significance of such phenomena.” Bewitched by Marc Bolan and the faerie queenishness of his early Tyrannosaurus Rex albums, Roland moved into the post-punk landscape with a series of indie releases, subtly masking his love of pastoral Anglicana and prog, mindful that even playing an acoustic was “a hanging offence at the time”. Letting his true, crushed velvet colours show, Roland flipped the switch on his musical Frankenstein’s monster in the mid-’80s, as exemplified…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Nomades Du Niger OCORA, 1965 Made in the Republic Of Niger’s northwest, Nomades Du Niger documents call-and-response songs of praise and healing from Tuareg women, accompanied by the tinde drum, and ornamented lyricism from the Tuareg men. Particularly thrilling is “Tekaleit”, an intricately woven solo performance for the one-stringed inzad . HAMZA EL-DIN Escalay: The Water Wheel NONESUCH EXPLORER SERIES, 1971 The late Nubian oud player Hamza El-Din’s Escalay is an object lesson in cumulative impact, the title track thrumming with heavy-lidded drones as El-Din plots the constellations via his instrument. It’s no surprise the Grateful Dead and Sandy Bull were acolytes. KHALIFA OULD EIDE & DIMI MINT ABBA Moorish Music From Mauritania…

BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS OPENS APRIL 1 Alice Lowe (last seen in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers ) and Dolly Wells play a pair of on-the-run sisters who find refuge at a poetry/camping weekend. EDDIE THE EAGLE OPENS APRIL 1 Biopic of British Olympic skier whose persistence in the face of failure earned him the epithet ‘much loved’. If we leave Europe, expect more of this kind of thing. RAN OPENS APRIL 1 Kurosawa’s late-period samurai epic based on King Lear . Remastered and restored. BOULEVARD OPENS APRIL 8 A final screen role for Robin Williams, as a married man whose real sexual identity emerges when he pays a male hooker (Roberto Aguire) for companionship. CRIMINAL OPENS APRIL 15 Kevin Costner is a convict implanted with the…

Reviewed this month... Heads: A Biography Of Psychedelic America Jesse Jarnow DA CAPO What Happened, Miss Simone? Alan Light CANONGATE Jesse Jarnow’s Heads: A Biography Of Psychedelic America is flat-out brilliant. But don’t, please, mistake it for a history of American psychedelia, that much-told story. The book is principally about the transformative impact of LSD on American society, and how across a half-century it shaped American art, music, movies, spirituality and technology (who knew so many of the original Silicon Valley cyber-geeks, including the Apple boys, were such dedicated trippers?) Music is part of its adhesive narrative, but almost exclusively the music of The Grateful Dead, which for their fans, the Deadheads of legend, was a portal to an unregulated psychedelic otherworld. This was a place best accessed by listening…

My first exposure to art-rock The Velvet Underground White Light/White Heat 1968 I heard this as a young teenager, and it was my first exposure to leftfield, wild, psychedelic art-rock. It blew my tiny mind. I’ve always been fascinated by it, especially the solo in “I Heard Her Call My Name”. “Sister Ray” was one of the first long songs I heard. It’s got a hypnotism to it. I didn’t imagine they were white, I’d never seen a photo – but I’m sure they’d have taken that as a huge compliment, given what I know of Lou Reed. The artist who got me into blues Blind Willie Johnson The Complete Blind Willie Johnson 1993 I first heard Blind Willie Johnson on John Peel’s show. I’d never heard a voice like…

More strong additions from our friends at End Of The Road, with Teenage Fanclub, Thurston Moore, Scritti Politti and many more joining Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective, Bat for Lashes and Cat Power at the Sept 2-4 festival. Visit endof the road. festival.com Going to press, the future of AC/ DC looks uncertain, with forthcoming US dates cancelled after doctors told Brian Johnson to stop touring at once or “risk total hearing loss”. www.acdc. com  reports the shows should be rescheduled “later in the year, likely with guest vocalist”. Having recently reconfigured Music For A New Society , John Cale has now focused on The Velvet Underground & Nico , which he’ll…

STEVE GUNN Eyes On The Lines MATADOR The discreet guitar god ventures further into the world of strong riffs and songs, now as labelmate to kindred spirit Kurt Vile. KENDRICK LAMAR Untitled Unmastered TOP DAWG The game-changing rapper harvests raw P-funk jams, deep jazz meditations and more from his archives. A brilliant appendix to To Pimp A Butterfly . BRIAN ENO The Ship WARP A beautiful and sombre meditation on war, in which Eno exposes the gospel heart of The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free”. CASE/LANG/VEIRS Case/Lang/Veirs ANTI- A mellifluous summit meeting of three great alt.country voices – a Parton/Harris/ Ronstadt, perhaps, for a subtler time. MARISSA NADLER Strangers BELLA UNION Customarily stark and beguiling seventh album from the ethereal singer, now safely ensconced as the heir…

SEPTEMBER 24, 2007 White Chalk released JULY 1-SEPTEMBER 13, 2008  Seamus Murphy’s A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan exhibition at Asia House, London MARCH 30, 2009 A Woman A Man Walked By released FEBRUARY 14, 2011 Let England Shake released JULY 31- AUGUST 2011 Kosovo trip JANUARY 21, 2012 Let England Shake tour ends in Hobart, Australia DECEMBER 2012 Afghanistan trip AUGUST 3, 2013 “Shaker Aamer” released DECEMBER 9, 2013 Awarded MBE DECEMBER 13, 2013 Participates in event First World War Poetry at the British Library, London JANUARY 2, 2014 Guest-edits Radio 4’s Today programme APRIL, 2014 Washington trip SEPTEMBER 10, 2014 Honorary degree from Goldsmiths University…

I AN RICKSON, WHO directed the Let England Shake tour and will also helm the autumn’s Hope Six Demolition Project shows, gives us a sneak preview of what we can expect… “We’re trying to find a way of singing it live that captures something of the whirligig imagery of the places she visited and the feeling underneath the songs,” he explains. “The White Chalk tour was quite folksy. Polly would banter and people would shout requests or, ‘We love you, Polly!’ But you don’t really come to a gig for the inter-song banter, do you? You come to be immersed and opened up by the song. On Let England Shake, we found ways of blocking shout-outs and requests between songs so that you just buried yourself in the flow of…

I GOT TO know Cate’s work because I was looking for a support act for the [2011 album] Strange Mercy tour, and I got sent Cyrk. I loved it, and asked her to come and open the US tour and all around Europe, too. Cate and Toko [Yasuda, St Vincent bk instrumentalist; bk vox on Le Bon’s Mug Museum] and I became thick as thieves. It was a gruelling tour and we all became friends as Cate fits so well into my team. She’s easy to have around, a great drinking buddy, friend and confidante. One of the reasons I love the music is that it feels like a full extension of who she is – honest and down to earth, without being pretentious. It feels authentic, but it doesn’t…

Do you still consider yourself a regular record collector? No – irregular. Yes – obsessive, unerring. Are you surprised by the surge of interest among archival labels in American independent rock of the late ’80s and ’90s? If any sweet piece of our intellectual property falls out of print, why not bring it back into production? For much of the USA, intellectual property is the only valuable export. Do you worry that we’ll run out of fresh musical territory to discover? Have you ever visited archives of dialects? They’re unimaginable. I am in awe of such extensive collections of our voices and their nuances. In record stores, we find gospel church choirs, obscure Cherokee peace dances, Everglade alligator songs, Maori friendship movements, poet spoken-word treaties, ballads of the Civil Rights…

TRACKLIST 1 Gradually 2 Fever Dream 3 Between Two Fires 4 Winter’s Eve 5 Women’s Company 6 Faces Of My Friends 7 Running With The Front Runners 8 Never Goes Away 9 Bricks And Wood 10 New Year Of Grace THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN pop music, initially seen as a fleeting youth movement, and age, its sworn enemy, has come far. Neil Young’s famous battle cry seems long forgotten, not least by Young himself, while the reaction to David Bowie’s recent death suggests we now expect our musical deities to be indestructible, not incendiary. As a 53-year-old, Ben Watt’s not only old enough to have attended his own fair share of funerals, but has also looked death head on. His 1996 book, Patient, related his struggle with the rare, life-threatening disease…

Kevin Morby’s superb third album is the sound of a man gently losing his mind to music and not caring all that much, most of the time. “My head ain’t right,” he confesses on mid-album rocker “Dorothy”, while on “Black Flowers” he utters a detached “Oh no, there goes my head”, with the idle curiosity of a man on acid. “Will I lose my mind?” he asks matter-of-factly on the circulatory “Ferris Wheel”, before answering his own question with a shrug. “Sometimes.” Easy come, easy go. Formerly a member of Jeremy Earl’s laidback psych-poppers Woods, Morby takes some of that band’s playfully warped atmosphere and solders it to more traditional songwriting inspired by the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Morby’s deadpan voice is scarily Dylan-like, never more so…

AS A KEY voice in Tuareg music, Omara ‘Bombino’ Moctar carries a heavy weight, not that you would notice from the lightness he has traditionally brought to his songs. He first broke international cover thanks to the Sublime Frequencies label run by Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls – indeed, Bishop deserves greater recognition for his ongoing support of modern Tuareg rock, particularly through such series as Guitars From Agadez, of which Bombino’s debut album ‘proper’ was the second instalment. While the romance afforded to Tuareg music belies a colonial impulse that tries to inscribe its specific tonal and rhythmic properties as a subset of the dreaded ‘world music’, there’s a lot more than generic constraint going on in the music of artists such as Bombino. It builds from specific…

Part of a notional ‘next wave’ of Tuareg music, Imarhan’s debut, self-titled album surprises for its fluency: the group seem effortlessly to switch things up across its 10 songs, embracing a multiplicity of influences without exactly alighting on any one point. When pressed on this aesthetic foraging, leader Iyad Moussa Ben Abderrahmane, aka Sadam, reflects, “We listen to traditional Tuareg music up to American pop, and music from Arabic cultures, ancestral songs to today’s worldwide hits or Western rock classics of the ’70s. “Lately, we’ve been discovering the last album of Daft Punk and love it,” he continues. “But when we were recording our album, no specific artists were important… Our songs are our own style, they are Tamashek above all.” Indeed, their grounding in the music of the “Tamashek…

After 14 years, why release a solo record now? It was just me responding to changes in my personal life that are dramatic and traumatic. A lot of it is a continuation of Wild Tales . Once I looked back at my life for the book, I realised that for part of it I wasn’t happy, and I need and deserve to be happy. I’ll take it any way I can get it, kid! What was the process? It came together very quickly. In October of last year while [CSN] were on tour, my friend Shane Fontayne – who was the second guitar player in the CSN band – and I wrote 20 songs in a month and then recorded them in eight days. These words…

Was the idea of sharing artistic control daunting? Yes, but in a positive, “What is going to happen here?” way. For me, this was a practice largely in surrender and shape-shifting. We were interested in the malleable potential and what could be created by letting the words and melodies of one be affected, influenced and changed by the other. It did not come without challenge – to the ego, in particular. This is where trust came in. I trust Sam as a writer, so I had to bend and stretch. In what ways are your sensibilities aligned? Coincidentally, the year before I met Sam, I’d started developing my own sort of country style. The song “Pegasi” on my upcoming solo record is a good example. I found this dabbling with…

DOWN DOWN DEMO ON THE LEVEL At the end of On The Level’s second disc is this 1974 Rossi demo of Quo’s future chart-topper, sounding like he recorded it into the cheapest tape recorder he could find in his local Woolworths. He’s got some of the lyrics, and most of the chords, but struggles hilariously with the framework of the song, stopping dozens of times. “What’s this? No 116?” KEEP ME GUESSING EARLY DEMO IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT… On a bonus disc filled with work-in-progress demos from 1978-79 – including “One By One”, a Parfitt song unreleased for 20 years, and “No Time Left To Cry”, a Rossi tune later retitled “Another Game In Town” – “Keep Me Guessing” has the closest thing to…

WITH THE EXCEPTION of some tentative, fledgling recordings made before she had found her wings as a singer and her flight path as a songwriter, one of Britain’s finest folk singers never recorded an acoustic album. With Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny helped to birth electrified English folk-rock, singing Dylan songs, original compositions and trad ballads to a backbeat. She followed a similar course with Fotheringay and her heavily produced solo albums featured alumni of her former bands and/or grandiose orchestral arrangements. Yet there are many who will tell you that Denny was at her dazzling best as an intimate performer in a solo setting, either accompanied by her own six- or 12-string guitar or seated at a piano. Linda Peters (née Thompson), who first met her at The Troubadour on…

With spring in bloom, it seems it’s time for rebirths in the release schedule, too – Antony Hegarty is now known as Anohni, and the more electronic, outgoing Hopelessness is the debut album from  the New York-based singer’s alter ego. Beth Orton releases her first full-length for four years, Kidsticks, a return to the electronic sound of her ’90s work, this time produced by Fuck Buttons’ Andrew Hung. Meanwhile, Brian Eno launches The Ship, his first solo LP since 2012’s Lux. Unlike that ambient treasure, this dark, meditative work features vocals from Eno, a poem read by Peter Serafinowicz and a cover of The VU’s “I’m Set Free”. Fresh from appearing on Ben Watt’s new LP, Boston singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler releases Strangers, her seventh and perhaps…

“Mark was brilliant at creating the energy around the band” “IDIDN’T GO in there to make The Fall more successful, but I thought I could add some light to their shadow. And I was pretty good at a hook. I wanted it to make sense to everybody, not just left-brained jazz listeners.” Brix Smith Start is recalling her time as guitarist-songwriter in The Fall during the ’80s, during which she added a splash of psych-pop to their dense sound. It was a tenure that coincided with the band’s most commercial phase, including lauded albums This Nation’s Saving Grace and The Frenz Experiment, plus hit covers of “There’s A Ghost In My House” and “Victoria”. Raised in California and Illinois, Laura Salenger had already formed her own group, Banda Dratsing, by…

RUBAN NIELSON, UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA “I wasn’t that familiar with the Dead as I’m from NZ and wasn’t exposed to that whole jam culture. I was into punk and hip hop so they weren’t a natural progression when I was a kid. I just remember them having cool T-shirts and a cool name. Since the Dead were known more for the culture of their live shows, it isn’t appreciated down there as much. As my band became more interested in improvisation the Dead became more relevant to us.” IRA KAPLAN, YO LA TENGO “The Dead loomed large in the town I grew up in, it felt like a rite of passage. The thing that sticks out most was in Jersey City [ June ’74 ] I…

‘‘PAUL AND BRIAN really have a deep mutual respect – it’s not just a Hollywood thing”, says Walusko. “They know each other from way back, and Paul hangs out with him every chance he gets. His favourite song is ‘God Only Knows’, and he played it onstage with us, jumping up and down, saying, ‘I finally got to sing “God Only Knows” with Brian!’ There are fringe benefits, playing with Brian. Pete Townshend, Neil Young and other legendary artists are like acolytes – they get down on one knee for Brian. They’re musical equals, but they feel like he got there before them and he hit huge highs with the music.”…

ME OH MY IRONY BORED, 2009 Le Bon’s debut is a formative outlier in her discog, owing a debt to Neil Young and minimalist Americana, as she spins stories of the dead animals of her youth into existential fables. CYRK THE CONTROL GROUP, 2012 Inspired by a trip to the Isle Of Eigg in the Hebrides, Le Bon’s second starts to show off her unique guitar style and her knack for understatement. CYRK II THE CONTROL GROUP, 2012 Equally as lovely as its Cyrk counterpart, this EP collects five of the more personal songs written for Le Bon’s second album. The crystalline organs of “The Eiggy Sea” belie a debt to Stereolab. MUG MUSEUM TURNSTILE, 2013 Named in tribute to her crockery hoarding habits,…

MARVIN GAYE What’s Going On Sturgill Simpson cites the influence of singer Bill Withers on A Sailor’s Guide To Earth – his love of Stax and Motown is just as clear. But when it comes to the new album’s shape, flow and thematic richness, the biggest inspiration is Marvin Gaye’s 1971 masterpiece, a song cycle written from the perspective of a soldier returning home from Vietnam. DAVID BOWIE The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust… Inspired by Bowie’s “fearlessness of evolution,” Simpson was crushed to learn of his passing upon arriving to play some UK solo shows in January. (Just by chance, he’d spent the flight listening to Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory .) A note on the sleeve…

You’re best known as one half of Everything But The Girl and as a DJ. Do you see solo work as a radical departure? I began as a singer-songwriter-guitarist in 1980. My first single was produced by Kevin Coyne. On my second release, an EP, I invited Robert Wyatt to collaborate. I was only 19. My debut album then went to No 1 on the UK indie album chart. Yes, I then took a 30-year diversion, which muddies the waters, but I feel happier now with this music than at any time for ages. Does it concern you that people might think some of these songs are specifically about you and Tracey (Thorn)? Not at all. Some are. We have been together a long time. I try to talk about…

How did you write Singing Saw ? I moved to Mount Washington, a very beautiful, rural part of Los Angeles. I’d go the whole day not seeing anybody, writing and recording, and then in the evening walk round the neighbourhood. The house had a piano. I didn’t know how to play; it was like learning a new language. I was able to mess around and wrote all the string melodies and harmonies on the piano. I met Sam Cohen and we went to his friend’s place in Woodstock to record. We planned to build it up together, but Sam began to call up people and they were all incredible musicians. For the harmonies, he was able to put together three women who had never sung together before.…

Brandy Clark’s highly engaging recent single, “Girl Next Door” , offers a foretaste of her much-anticipated new album. Due in late spring, Big Day In A Small Town is a loose concept piece centred around daily life in a specific locale. As with 2013’s striking predecessor, 12 Stories , the Nashville songwriter says it’s about real people and real things, though “It’s sonically a little different. The songs are rough around the edges in parts.” Her profile spiked by her involvement with the soundtrack for the second series of True Detective , Lera Lynn returns with Resistor . The result of spontaneous, experimental Nashville sessions with co-producer Joshua Grange, the US songwriter promises Americana roots…

The title, Azel , has multiple meanings: it’s a place; it’s the roots and stems of a tree; it’s an expression of enthusiasm. I love the name for the album because it has multiple meanings and each one works correctly with the music. I really wanted to dedicate a project to the town of Azel for a long time, and here I saw the perfect opportunity. Meanwhile, for the younger Tuaregs, the word “azel” is something that they relate to easily. So I think in one small word we are able to make a connection with a lot of people and inspirations for this album. How did recording with David Longstreth shape the album? Dave is a very cool and relaxed guy. With Dave the music…

Usually when musicians embrace the traditional songs of their homeland, it is with much earnest beard-scratching about reconnecting with their roots. Not so with Aidan Moffat. “Not at all,” he says. “I’d read reviews, even in the Arab Strap days, that mentioned a folk influence in my stuff, but it was purely coincidental, so I was always curious. It was only when we started researching the tour and film that I really delved into it in any depth.” Despite or because of his late arrival on the folk scene, Moffat avoided the common trap of regarding the old songs as fragile and venerable artefacts. “Adapting songs is a folk tradition in itself,” he says, “so it seemed like the natural thing to do. Folk’s got a pretty austere reputation, but…

Raised amid nature on the remote Orcas Island some 100 miles north of Seattle, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith began her career in music, playing classical guitar. But while studying composition at Boston’s prestigious Berklee School Of Music, a chance encounter with a Buchla synthesiser nudged her onto a different path. Soon she found herself entranced by the organic, malleable possibilities of analogue synthesis – and in particular, the functions of the Buchla Music Easel, a rare and ergonomically beautiful example of ’70s synth design. “Buchla synths have always resonated with me, because I first taught myself synthesis on various Buchla instruments,” she says. “It feels like an extension of my voice. I don’t limit myself to just Buchla synths – but they are a feeling of home for me.” The natural…

“Sleeping’s cheating!” laughs drummer and vocalist Alex Neilson. “I think I have masochistic tendencies and I like to push myself very hard.” Neilson certainly has a busy schedule – as well as his continuing work as a quarter of Trembling Bells, the Glasgow-based musician is also planning to team up with Shirley Collins, and release a live album drawn from shows he’s played with Will Oldham. Rumour has it that he’s even helming a collection of traditional songs sung by Stewart Lee. “I’ve learned a hell of a lot while travelling the world with Josephine Foster, Current 93, Will Oldham, Baby Dee, Alasdair Roberts and many more,” says Neilson, who’s also performed with Mike Heron and Jandek. “The fact that these people even know my name is still pretty baffling…

What attracts you to sacred music? It’s so loaded with the promises of transcendence, and reverence for something that isn’t obvious and material. A lot of art is devotional, in the sense that it is committed to or affirms something, but I’m more interested in using the veneer of transcendental music as an elastic surface to bend, mutate and replicate it into something else. I started this record overtly appropriating musical scores from 15th-century composer Josquin Des Prez. Even at that time he wrote both sacred and secular music, so the distinction isn’t all that important. I worked on mutations of those pieces with a synthesiser, then worked with the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson to write choral arrangements that interacted with the original reworked pieces as an almost ouroboros of the…

“One of the most distinctive things about Quo is my strange, nasally voice” YOU’D BROKEN INTO the Top 5 in 1973 with Piledriver . By the time you made On The Level , did it feel like Quo were moving through the gears? It did to me, yes. We’d been labelled a ‘pop band’ in the ’60s – like, ooh no, that’s some sort of bad thing – but to be honest, I think we’ve always been a pop band. Status Quo seems to be a mixture of rock, pop, blues and country, but a master of none of them, if you like. On The Level had some of our most commercial stuff and it’s probably one of my faves. There’s an unmistakable live-in-the-studio…

Reflecting on Giant Sand’s endless reinvention down three decades and their hefty body of work (nearly 30 albums), Howe Gelb chooses to describe himself as “a painter more than a performer. I’ve dabbled in song paint and the recording thereof,” he says, “and when this place got too cluttered with ’em, I bundled ’em up and took ’em to market. It’s been an invigorating process and has allowed for such unexpected longevity.” Which begs the question as to why he’s decided to call time on the band: “At my age, sensible notions take hold, like putting Giant Sand to bed at an even 30-year interval, especially after such a perfect LP (for us) [ 2015’s Heartbreak Pass ] and since it’s been more fun and inspiring…

The film has a point of view, but it’s not stated overtly. The music, and the imagery, do the talking SCORING: 10 A true classic 9 Essential 8 Excellent 7 Very good 6 Good 4-5 Mediocre 1-3 Poor TO FULLY APPRECIATE James Szalapski’s sketchy documentary about the music of Nashville and Austin in 1975, you have to understand what the film isn’t. It is not a film about outlaw country, though it does include footage of David Allan Coe playing a show in Tennessee State Prison. It’s not even a film about New Country, though that was the working title, and it does include the teenage Steve Earle, who would be a leading player in what became known as the New Country movement a decade later. It is, slightly, a…

MILES AHEAD Director Don Cheadle Starring Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor Opens April 22 Cert 15 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP Director Whit Stillman Starring Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny Opens May 27 Cert U MIDNIGHT SPECIAL Director Jeff Nichols Starring Michael Shannon, Adam Driver Opens April 8 Cert 12A MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES Director Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato Starring Debbie Harry, Fran Lebowitz Opens April 22 Cert 18 DISORDER Director Alice Winocour Starring Matthias Schoenaerts, Diane Kruger Opens March 25 Cert 15…

Head looks well, which he attributes wryly to a “crystal meth and carbonara” diet LAST SUMMER, Mick Head played a low-key solo show in a Stoke Newington church, for a small audience of invited guests. The show, the venue, and the small devoted congregation seemed to articulate a long implied truth – that being a fan of Head, and his groups Shack, the Strands or (stretching back as far as the early 1980s) The Pale Fountains, was an act of faith. And a belief, ultimately, in a favourable outcome for Head, whose warm psychedelic music has in its time faced challenges, both from the music business and from its own maker. Bands have expectations made of them, but such expectations have generally seemed unimportant to Head, who receives inspiration, he…

COLIN VEARNCOMBE “Wonderful Life” singer, aka ‘Black’ (1962-2016) IT’S FAIR TO say that Colin Vearncombe was being deeply ironic when he conceived “Wonderful Life” at the back end of 1985. “I’d been in a couple of car crashes, my mother had a serious illness, I’d been dropped by a record company, my first marriage went belly-up and I was homeless,” he recalled later. “Then I sat down and wrote this song called ‘Wonderful Life’”. Delivered in his luxuriant baritone over a melancholy backdrop, and recorded under Vearncombe’s stage name, Black, the single only grazed the charts when it was released the following year on indie label Ugly Man. It did, however, attract the attention of A&M, who snapped him up for a debut album, Wonderful Life. Similarly reflective ballad “Sweetest…