Innehållsförteckning för May 2025 från UNCUT

“My love is in and around you, hey/I bless the day that I found you” FOR Kenney Jones, reclaiming the Small Faces legacy has been a lengthy battle, doggedly pursuing unpaid royalties and restoring the management of this beloved group’s back catalogue. “I don’t think any band’s been treated worse than the Small Faces,” Jones’s former bandmate Ian McLagan ruefully told Uncut in 2014. Jones’s achievements, then, are nothing short of heroic – as this month’s cover story attests. Nominally a celebration of the posthumous – and now radically expanded – The Autumn Stone album, Rob Hughes’s piece explores the band’s tumultuous 1968, discovering along the way tantalising new insights into the music they made in their final year together. “It’s amazing how many songs we did in such a…

PLENTY of music biopics are unable to use songs by the artists they depict. Some, like the 2020 Bowie-related movie Stardust, struggle as a result; others, like Backbeat or Nowhere Boy, find ways to tell a more introspective tale. “For me, it was a beautiful obstacle to overcome,” says Ido Fluk, the Israeli writer and director of Köln 75, which dramatises the events surrounding Keith Jarrett’s famous Köln Concert without being able to feature a single note of his music. “It’s about this legendary concert where a pianist has to improvise for an hour on a broken piano. As artists, the creative process is often about dealing with obstructions and obstacles. Telling this story without using any of the original music was our broken piano.” Fifty years ago, the American…

THIS month’s CD features a slew of rare Small Faces goodies, largely pooled from Kenney Jones’s recently revived Nice Records. “I started the label in the ’90s to raise money for Ronnie Lane when he had multiple sclerosis,” Jones tells Uncut. “I put it to bed after he died, but have since thought, ‘No, I want to do something with this.’” The first Nice release was 2021’s Live 1966, an extraordinary document of Small Faces’ two sets at the Twenty Club in Mouscron, Belgium, selections from which comprise the first half of our CD. “It was one of the first gigs we’d ever done abroad,” recalls Jones. “We always loved jamming and that gig is really what the Small Faces were all about. You can hear why Led Zeppelin became…

LOOSE/FLUFF & GRAVY ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 “I’m stressed out, I’m far away/There’s a dizzy dancing in my head” KASSI VALAZZA opens “Roll On”, a meditative country-tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”. Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps,…

Time Indefinite PSYCHIC HOTLINE 9/10 FOR William Tyler fans, the last five years have been an exciting, if confusing, time: just what would the Nashville guitarist’s follow-up to 2019’s Goes West, his last proper solo album, sound like? Each of his varied releases since then could have been a blueprint: 2020’s haunted and experimental mini-album New Vanitas, perhaps, or his acoustic, gnarled soundtrack to Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow; 2021’s Lost Futures, a more accessible collaboration with Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson, or his “Frozen Shelter” piece, 39 minutes of scorched radio static and frayed sound; even 2023’s Secret Stratosphere, a kraut-boogie live set with backing band The Impossible Truth, featuring psychedelic pedal steel guru Luke Schneider. That this half-decade of wayward experimentation also coincided with a stretch of mental health issues…

“IT’S about preparing for an Earth without humans,” says Dave Brock of new Hawkwind album There Is No Space For Us. “It’s also about how giant gas planets could be living entities eating other planets, entering the world of black holes and dwarf stars. This could be happening on a giant scale that we humans have no concept of.” So that rather lovely little bossa nova called “Co-Pilot” is about another astral voyage? “No, funnily enough that’s a love song to my wife Kriss,” says Brock, with a laugh. “She’s our manager and effectively my co-pilot.” Brock, ever-present since 1969, is the only founder member left in Hawkwind, but drummer Richard Chadwick has been a member since the 1980s, and even synth maverick Tim Lewis, aka Thighpaulsandra, who joined during…

EVEN an email chat with Evan Parker will offer up Ea wide frame of reference. In just a few hundred words, the 80-year-old legend of free improvisation remarks on John Cage, the Oscars ceremony, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and the early philosopher Heraclitus. His new album The Heraclitean Two Step, Etc is named after “the saying of Heraclitus about not being able to step into the same river twice”, he explains. Parker tests this dictum on the first CD, by returning to the Unitarian Chapel in Warwick to make additional river-titled recordings to complement a live track from 1994 that still intrigued him. The ‘Etc…’ refers to the other three CDs in the set, recorded around the “Covid hiatus” at Arco Barco studios in Ramsgate. It’s a huge set of recordings. As…

“It’s a howl from the desert, a scream from the slums” An American Music Story: The Complete Studio Recordings 1979–1985 LIBERATION HALL REISSUE OF THE MONTH 9/10 TOWARDS the end of March 1982, Dave Alvin, sitting in fading Texas sunlight on the top steps of a fire escape running down the side of a club called The Fitzgerald in a north-western suburb of Houston, was talking about “American Music” – “It’s a howl from the desert, a scream from the slums/The Mississippi rollin’ to the beat of the drums” – a key song in The Blasters’ early repertoire; a battle cry, a call to arms. It was originally the title track of the debut album The Blasters cut in 1980 for Los Angeles rockabilly label Rollin’ Rock: 13 tracks, recorded…

Expansions (reissue, 1975) ACE 9/10 ON 1975’s Expansions, American jazz musician and composer Lonnie Liston Smith took the big leap. It’s an album that’s rightly feted as key to a very open, dynamic form of jazz-funk fusion, one that’s less about tricksy musicianship, more about texture, space and groove. Of course, the various players that joined Smith – the members of his band, the Cosmic Echoes – were excellent musicians in their own right, but the joy of Expansions is in its subordination of ego, the way the players are all in service to the rhizomatic flow of the seven songs here, whether vamping on a groove, or pivoting around a riff or simple, see-sawing chord change. Expansions was both popular in its own time and had ongoing influence on…

MAN, I’m glad to be here – still kickin’ it!” Bootsy Collins greets Uncut down the line from the Cincinnati ranch home he’s dubbed the Bootzilla Rehab Center, named after one of his freakiest alter egos. More precisely, he’s in Noah’s Ark, his studio stuffed with mementos from 55 years as funk’s premier bassist, ranging from the hotpants he wore when he played with James Brown to the star-framed mirror glasses and stack-heeled boots of his P-Funk pomp. Bootsy’s first album in five years, Album Of The Year #1 Funkateer, includes a guest spot for Snoop Dogg as well as an affecting reunion with Fred Wesley, another veteran of Brown’s band, on the nostalgic “J.B.’s Tribute”. Those storied names aside, the album’s credits are dominated by up-and-coming singers and rappers…

PLANET TELEX An expansive yet claustrophobic fanfare, promising and warning that Radiohead’s second album will not be another collection of uncertain indie jangle. THE BENDS An appropriate title track for an album substantially about coming up too fast, queasy at getting everything you wanted and discovering you don’t want it. HIGH AND DRY Possibly the most influential track on The Bends, inasmuch as it helped inspired Coldplay and similar into being. Probably not coincidentally, Thom Yorke claims to hate it. FAKE PLASTIC TREES The song which did more than any other to define Thom Yorke – much to his annoyance – as an indie-rock Holden Caulfield: nevertheless, a rousing anti-anthem. BONES A demonstration of the essential tension of The Bends – a group who don’t want to be a great…

Barrowland, Glasgow, February 26 There is outright mischief in his own material IS this Sturgill Simpson we see before us, modest yet muscular? Or are we instead witnessing the Scottish debut of Johnny Blue Skies, the soulful alter ego responsible for last year’s excellent Passage Du Desir? Anyone who has followed Simpson’s slaloming career over the last decade will appreciate that whichever name he chooses to play under, his live set contains musical multitudes. Passage Du Desir, inspired by restorative sojourns in Paris and Thailand, was a personal reset, following a period of vocal problems and entrenched depression. Pseudonyms aside, Simpson has clearly emerged from the experience a different person, though he remains a cosmopolitan country contrarian, the master of the deft left-turn. This typically epic three-hour set steers gleefully…

IN SELECTED CINEMAS FROM APRIL 24. 2025 REMIX SOUNDTRACK ALBUM RELEASED MAY 2 8/10 PINK Floyd and experimental filmmakers were made for each other. Sketchy plot? Unknowable characters? Third act still in development? In the era immediately after the departure of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd could certainly empathise with all of that – and for the right fee would be able improvise you some searching and intermittently explosive music to soundtrack it. It had recently worked for the BBC (the moon landings, 1969) and Barbet Schroeder, for his films More (1968) and La Vallée (1972), but when he approached Pink Floyd, the French director Adrian Maben had arguably left it a little too late to get their full attention for a vaguely outlined project juxtaposing their music with works of…

“EVERY day I wake, wait for the tragedy”. The lyric with which Emily Sprague has chosen to open Florist’s latest album Jellywish could easily be read as melodramatic, were it not for her understated delivery: softly spoken and matter-of-fact, an unfiltered early-morning thought over gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar. “The album starts that way because it’s important to call attention to the fact that we’re dysfunctional as humans on Earth,” says Sprague, Florist’s vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter. “We’re not really symbiotically living on this planet and with each other. We get stuck in these ways of believing what we think is true. But it doesn’t have to be so narrow.” The band formed 12 years ago in Albany, New York. Originally they were a trio, with Rick Spataro on bass…

Cardiac Country SOPHOMORE LOUNGE 8/10 SINCE quitting The Black Swans in 2012, founder member DeCicca has enjoyed something of an eclectic career. His solo albums have been interspersed with production duties for outsider artists like Ed Askew, Chris Gantry and Will Beeley, plus collaborative projects with Sir Douglas Quintet veteran Augie Meyers and overseeing archival projects for the Numero Group. The past couple of years, however, have seen DeCicca undergo some intense personal drama. Mostly conceived in a two-week burst at home in Bulverde, Texas, Cardiac Country was written just prior to a previously undetected health issue that required open heart surgery. Peculiarly enough, many of these songs feel like premonitions of fate, as DeCicca wrestles with precious notions of time, mortality and loss. “Long Distance Runner”, for example, braces…

So Kono NO FORMAT! 8/10 MALI might be one of Africa’s poorest nations, but it remains a musical superpower. The centre of the medieval Mande empire has been the breeding ground for dozens of global success stories, including Toumani Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré, Rokia Traoré, Oumou Sangaré, Fatoumata Diawara, Boubacar Traoré, Afel Bocoum, Bassekou Kouyate and Amadou & Mariam – not to mention Tuareg rockers like Tinariwen, Tamikrest and Songhoy Blues. Salif Keita might be the most famous of them all, but he was always the odd one out. Not only was he an albino in a society that regarded albinos as cursed, but he was an outcast from a minor royal family, competing with storytelling griots who tended to come from an ancestral lineage of musicians. It helped that…

Fall Float Love (Works 1989–1993) CHERRY RED 8/10 THE ethereal voice of Julee Cruise is as essential to the world of Twin Peaks as cherry pie and Dale Cooper’s dreams, yet we may have never heard it if visionary director David Lynch had had more funds. He wanted to include This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song To The Siren” in Blue Velvet, but couldn’t afford the rights. Composer Angelo Badalamenti, who would soon become Lynch’s go-to for the rest of their careers, was tasked with writing an original piece of music for the movie instead, and given little instruction beyond the phrase “mysteries of love” (its eventual title) and an idea that the song should “float on the sea of time”, with Elizabeth Fraser’s voice in mind. Badalamenti…

RARE are the spoils of life as a cult indie-rock figure. In lieu of the best tables at the finest restaurants or a bulging bank account, Dean Wareham has learned to appreciate the small things. “On my tax return it still says ‘entertainer/songwriter’,” he says proudly, speaking to Uncut from his hillside home in Echo Park, Los Angeles, the white walls adorned with posters, guitars and books. “If music hadn’t panned out, I thought I’d go back to school, then into academia. But somehow people kept responding and I was able to eke out an existence. Why ‘entertainer’ and not ‘musician’? Well, you learn when you’re going through customs that you don’t wanna put the word ‘musician’ on anything. ‘No, no, I’m not a musician, I’m in a musical group…

THE Pogues often gave the impression that they somehow managed to pull together a career out of chaos and disorder. As it transpires, Pete “Spider” Stacy thinks the band were more thoughtful in their approach than it may have otherwise appeared. “Every step we took seemed to be a logical continuation of the journey,” he says, as he looks back at the band’s discography. Originally the band’s tin-whistle player, Stacy co-founded the Pogues with Shane MacGowan, Jem Finer and James Fearnley in North London in 1982, going on to become their reluctant frontman after MacGowan left in 1991. By then, The Pogues had recorded five studio albums and one outstanding EP. Two more albums followed before they broke up in 1996. After reforming with MacGowan in 2001, the band focused…

“THIS used to be a giant landfill site, it was where London dumped all its rubbish,” says Jack Barnett, striding off down the rutted concrete track leading from Leigh-on-Sea station towards Two Tree Island. These days, the area is a nature reserve, where birdwatchers come from far and wide to see the dark-bellied brent geese who migrate here from Siberia during the winter. Caught between two worlds, the island feels desolate and mysterious, like the cockle trawlers left abandoned in the surrounding mudflats, whose once-bright colours and nobly rusted patinas, as Jack observes, now resemble abstract paintings. As we reach the end of the track, there is a bleak beauty to the scene looking out across the Thames Estuary to Kent, or along the coast towards what remains of the…

MR BURTON “Do you have everything you need, Mr Burton?” asks Lesley Manville, rather wasted as the brisk, bright landlady at the start of this new biopic, released to mark the centenary of Richard Burton’s birth. She’s talking to Philip Burton (Toby Jones), the genteel bachelor schoolteacher who boards with her in 1940s Port Talbot. On the face of it, he does – he’s a well-respected master with a successful sideline in scriptwriting for the BBC. He’s Squadron Commander for the local RAF training corps and leads a theatre group at the YMCA. What more could he want? The big problem for Marc Evans’ tidy, careful origin story is that it never really gets to grips with this question. The real Philip Burton was a frustrated actor with a self-confessed…

MIKE AND THE MACHINE February and March are the time of the year when I tend to reminisce over the careers of artists such as Mark Hollis, Scott Walker, Mark Lanegan, Gary Brooker and Mark Linkous, who all departed this earth within a few weeks of one another in various years. So now we can add Mike Ratledge to that list, the composer and performer of the best of Soft Machine’s tracks at the height of their creativity. In your April obituary you rightly cited “Slightly All The Time” and “Out-Bloody-Rageous” as twin peaks of Mike’s work and for me these two pieces have stood the test of time, still sounding fresh and still revealing more detail on each listen. To those I would add “Chloe And The Pirates” from…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by the Small Faces. 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 £50 of Rough Trade vouchers to spend online. Closing date: Thursday, April 24, 2025. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 The Manic Street Preachers to allow an old-time black singer to perform (3-7-4) 10 “Get your motor running, head out on the _______”, from Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” (7) 11 The Cure’s live performance is part of the town centre attraction (7) 12 Not so much rubbish to be put on this Clash album (3-3-4) 14+6D “Well, I’ve been in town for just about 15 minutes…

NODDY Holder is recounting the colourful discussions that led to Slade In Flame, the 1975 feature film that stalled the band’s career but has been subsequently hailed (by critic Mark Kermode) as “the Citizen Kane of British pop movies”, poised for a plush 50th-anniversary remaster by the BFI. “We were adamant we were not going to do a slapstick movie, which is what was expected of us,” says the ever-avuncular Holder. “Although, we were quite interested in one idea for a sci-fi horror movie – a spoof of The Quatermass Experiment. We all liked it apart from Dave Hill. He was going to be eaten by a triffid in the first 15 minutes, and all we’d see for the rest of the movie was his hair dangling out of its…

TOM Sheehan knows exactly where he was the first time he heard Oasis. He was taking pictures of Ride for their Carnival Of Light album at Abbey Road when he got chatting to Noel Gallagher about leather jackets. A few hours later, Alan McGee turned up with a DAT of early Oasis recordings. “It just sounded fucking perfect, you know? Absolutely blistering. Cocky fuckers, but with the talent to back it up.” Six months later, Sheehan was delighted to get the call from Melody Maker to accompany Oasis to New York, where they were due to play Wetlands Preserve as part of the city’s annual New Music Seminar. By then, “everything was going off, as you might recall.” Despite packing a showcase gig, a magazine cover story and a video…

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Where is Newman Street? Is it in Portland or New Orleans? It’s in Portland. I started writing the album there. At the time I was taking a little break. I moved into a friend’s basement apartment on Newman Street, which is a little bit on the outskirts of Portland. But the city is really just a bunch of neighbourhoods, so nothing’s ever too far away. I went through a real reclusive phase where I didn’t really leave very much or talk to people. But I wrote a ton. I wrote most of the songs in that basement, and then the rest I wrote in New Orleans after I moved there. Is that how you typically go about writing, by secluding yourself? Definitely. I’m not a very social person. I love…

The Melancholy Season DARK HORSE 8/10 BENMONT TENCH doesn’t name his pianos as such, but he lovingly distinguishes each of the keyboards he plays on his latest album. “Mr Tench’s piano” is a Steinway B, as is “the Village Recorder’s piano” used in the eponymous studio. “Mr Wilson’s piano”, belonging to producer Jonathan Wilson, is a 1913 Steinway A3. You get to know all these keyboard characters and more on The Melancholy Season, the gorgeous, heart-warming second solo album by a musician better known as a sought-after Los Angeles session player and lifetime member of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Benjamin Montmorency Tench III’s artistic alliance with Petty stretches back to the early ’70s in their native Florida. He was a founding member of the Heartbreakers, collaborating joyfully across the…

Sable, Fable JAGJAGUWAR 9/10 LAST autumn, Wisconsin band Bon Iver released a new song named “Speyside”, a pared-back and rueful composition in which Justin Vernon’s voice clung only to guitar and pedal steel. It was an astonishing piece of songwriting, but its demeanour was familiar; many wondered whether it might signal a doubling-back to the folky and forlorn terrain of their first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, after so many years in the experimental wilderness. Bon Iver is now a band of 18 years and five albums’ standing. Their shape and size has been fluid, and their output diverse. But their career to date has been a lesson in the unfaltering power of narrative. Their 2007 debut was a record of startling perfection, and the story that accompanied its release…

Remembered In Exile: Songs And Ballads From Nova Scotia DRAG CITY 8/10 AS we know from the recent quixotic renaming of the Gulf Of Mexico, geography is written by the winners. Nova Scotia was named ‘new Scotland’ by 17th-century European settlers – but this large promontory dangling off the east coast of Canada was taken from the Mi’kmaq nation, who themselves had warred for generations against the Kwēdĕchk. On the fluid ocean of history, songs float like bottles containing rolled-up messages from workers, farmers, fishers and lovers, preserving ancestral voices and stories. Since the late Victorian era, it’s been the job of self-appointed folklorists to gather in the bottles and record their messages. Helen Creighton, who was born and lived in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, until she died aged 90 in…

How soon after The Blasters formed did you start writing songs and who and what were the main influences that shaped early Blasters classics like “Marie Marie” and “Border Radio”? I started writing songs for The Blasters about six months after we formed. I believe the first songs I brought in were “I Don’t Want To”, “Flat Top Joint” and “American Music”. The main influence on my songwriting in those days was what the band could or wouldn’t play. The Blasters were a blues/R&B band who didn’t want to sound like a stereotypical blues/R&B band. This allowed me to mix in other styles of American music – Cajun, rockabilly, West Coast country – that we were fans of and grew up listening to. The Blasters gigged at a lot of…

“I find music comes and goes in seasons,” muses Jeff Bridges, reclining in an easy chair over video from his Santa Barbara home. “All of a sudden, it blooms up and I will write all these songs. These ones came from a particularly good season.” He’s talking about Slow Magic, a collection of experimental, laidback, kind of crazy recordings Bridges made in the late ’70s that found their way to Light In The Attic several decades later. “I don’t know what people will make of it. I don’t know what to make of it myself.” Bridges was always drawn to music but was persuaded to choose acting partly because of his father, Leon Bridges. “My dad said the great thing about acting is I’d get called upon to do all…

IN 1995, when Radiohead opened for REM on the Monster tour, the older band may have looked to them like something of a ghost of Christmas future: another rock group who’d started out as determined indie oddballs, acquired critical acclaim and a cult following, had a hit or two more or less by accident, then found themselves filling arenas and stadiums. I’ve a vague recollection, dating from this trip, of Mike Mills cheerfully agreeing with my supposition that the backstage dressing room in which we were drinking was bigger than some of the venues his band had once headlined. It all looked to be happening rather faster for Radiohead than it had for REM. The latter had made five albums for independent label IRS before signing to Warners and having…

“BACK in 1969, Andrew [Oldham] asked me to come up with something autumnal for the Small Faces. So I sandwiched a load of leaves between two pieces of glass and photographed them, then tinted three or four of them. It was about leaves falling and time passing – the end of summer, the end of a period in history – and linking those things together. We ended up having the four sepia Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake portraits on the front, which fitted into that nostalgic idea. “Because the band had already broken up when The Autumn Stone was put together, I had to use existing pictures. I’d been experimenting with homemade filters when we did the ‘Tin Soldier’ shoot and it seemed to me that the Small Faces were so…

Buskirk-Chumley Theater, Bloomington, Indiana, February 26 JONATHAN Richman has a question for us. “Audience!” he declares, two songs into his first live show of 2025. “Are we ready to rid ourselves of the sinister dark mistakes we’ve made in our lives?” It’s a question more expected of a cult leader than a cult hero, but Richman is merely setting the tone for a musically and spiritually generous performance. “Don’t say yes if you’re not sure,” he cautions. “Because, as we know, it’s better to be a sincere denizen of the dark than a false bearer of the light.” Then, with a shout of, “Are you with me?” he launches into “Let Her Go Into The Darkness”, a song that first appeared on his 1995 album You Must Ask The Heart…

TIME TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS OPENS MARCH 28 Two friends running a vintage shop in Muswell Hill find a time-travelling dodgem car and start ransacking history to replenish their stock in this starry but patchy sci-fi comedy. THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA OPENS APRIL 4 Paul Walter Hauser stars in the real-life story of Michael Larson, the man who won a then-record breaking $110,000 on the 1980s US game show Press Your Luck. DROP OPENS APRIL 11 Meghann Fahy (the beautifully cynical Daphne from season two of The White Lotus) stars as a widowed mum re-entering the dating pool, in this thriller from the director of Happy Death Day. HOLY COW OPENS APRIL 11 After his dad suddenly dies, a carefree teenager resolves to become a prize-winning cheesemaker in the feature…

8/10 IN 2023, Neil Young embarked on his first concert tour in almost four years, 15 shows that never strayed too far from the Californian coastline. For Young – subjected, like all of us, to lockdown restrictions – this was the longest period he’d been off the road since 1978. As a consequence, Coastal finds Young in unusually reflective form. “It’s going to be a real trip walking out there on stage,” he confides to driver (and straight man) Jerry Don Borden. “Focus somewhere else,” advises Borden sagely as he pilots Young’s beloved Silver Eagle tour bus along the highway. Directed affectionately by Daryl Hannah, Young’s wife, we see him soundchecking in the afternoon sunshine, practising vocal warm-ups in his bus and finally taking the long walk towards the stage…