Innehållsförteckning för August 2025 från UNCUT

“People were throwing pint glasses. The road manager would show me great big shards that just missed my head” “IT’S like a sports car that you’re slowly bringing up to speed,” says Billy Idol on a Zoom call from Nashville, 10 dates into his world tour. By the time he reaches the UK – for the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl and his own headline show at Wembley Arena – he promises to be firing on all cylinders. “We got the macro, we’re just dialling in the micro – haha! I enjoy performing. When you jump about like I do for an hour and 40 minutes, it’s incredible exercise. And it’s fun, too. You’re surfing on top of this incredible sound wave. I don’t go on stage high…

SAYA GRAY “Qwerty II” DIRTY HIT, 2024 Toronto-born, Tokyo-based multi-instrumentalist Saya Gray spent a decade as a session bassist for the diverse likes of Liam Payne and Daniel Caesar before releasing her own wildly imaginative music. Sandwiched between her two full-length albums to date, the “Qwerty II” EP is an irrepressible melange of bounding bass, unabashed riffs, fizzing beats and seductive pop R&B vocals. 8/10 MARY IN THE JUNKYARD “This Old House EP” AMF, 2024 “Angry, weepy chaos rock” is how London-based classically trained teen trio Mary In The Junkyard describe their sound. Teasdale first picked up on haunting debut single “Tuesday” (“I was obsessed,” she says) before this debut EP was released last summer, blending breathy vocals, undulating math rock guitars and spindly but virtuosic violin. 7/10 FEEBLE LITTLE…

ALLO Bright Nights FIKA 7/10 Timely reunion record from Anglo-Australian indie-poppers From the sundappled opening notes of “Leaves In The Spring”, the first album in 11 years from the reunited Allo Darlin’ feels like a balm for troubled times. The Anglo-Australian quartet – who reconnected over Zoom during the pandemic – retain their skill for bright melodies but here set them to a softer sonic palette, often drawn from country and folk. “Tricky Questions” and “Historic Times” are packed with tender, observational detail, raising everyday moments to tenderly nostalgic poetry: apricot juice running down a loved one’s chin, the moon “a custard cream”. When, later, Elizabeth Morris sings “We’re not in it for the ride, we’re in it for the long run”, you’ll find yourself hoping she means it. LISA-MARIE…

“YOU have to be able to speak through your instrument,” says Booker T Jones, the mastermind behind Booker T & The MGs, one of soul music’s greatest groups. “Those old MGs songs were like conversations between the four of us, especially ‘Green Onions’. You could consider my organ part the first statement, with Steve Cropper answering on guitar and Al Jackson Jr responding on drums.” For more than 60 years, Booker T has been speaking clearly through the Hammond B-3 organ, which he started playing as a teenager at Stax Records in Memphis. Since then, he’s been finding new ways to make its lush thrum sound just as conversational as the human voice, which was crucial for a band that specialised in instrumentals like “Time Is Tight”, “Hang ’Em High”…

ROBERT Elms can remember the precise moment when Sade became a singer. It was in the back of a transit van on the way to Cardiff to see Blue Rondo À La Turk. The driver, Lee Barrett, then manager of a band called Arriva, asked Sade if she could sing. “She said she could,” remembers Elms, Sade’s boyfriend and a journalist at The Face. “I thought there had been no evidence of this, so asked her about it when we stopped at a petrol station. She said, ‘How hard could it be?’” A couple of years later, Arriva had become Pride had become Sade – who were on Top Of The Pops with her debut single, “Your Love Is King”. How hard could it be? The record opens with a…

EVERYTHING about Zuma was done on the fly, including the cover by Young’s old friend Jim “Sandy” Mazzeo. It’s one of Young’s very best album covers – not quite as loaded with imagery as On The Beach, but boasting a goofy, dreamlike exuberance that accurately captures the music within. Not everybody is a fan, but Young himself digs it, naming it a personal favourite. “They thought I was nuts at Reprise,” he said in Shakey. “It was a concept thing. Everything everybody was doing was getting really slick.” Mazzeo had been Young’s sidekick during the 1974 CSNY tour and kept that role through 1975 at Briggs’ Malibu rental. “We didn’t know if it was an album, but then the record company told him that if he got them the album, they…

“ONE LOVE” LA GARAGE SESSIONS ’83 Nifty little pop song with a synth-pop feel, as Bruce’s echo-laden vocals introduce a track that has some similarities to “Hungry Heart”. “UNSATISFIED HEART” LA GARAGE SESSIONS ’83 Surely a close run for Born In The USA, this is a dense and tense study of a man whose past catches up with him, with a killer chorus. Shares a theme and lyrics with the same album’s “Fugitive’s Dream”, another cracker. “MAYBE I DON’T KNOW YOU” STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA SESSIONS Sparse, bleak rumination with Bruce as the bewildered lover realising he doesn’t really understand his partner. The song encapsulates the sense of dislocation that pervades the album. “REPO MAN” SOMEWHERE NORTH OF NASHVILLE Has Bruce ever sung with more abandon than on “Repo Man”? It’s…

“THIS is our home ground!” exclaims Cymande’s Patrick Patterson, namechecking the nearby Brixton haunts where his band once cooked up their unique brand of off-kilter diasporic funk, largely overlooked in its own time but now enjoying a richly deserved renaissance. It feels bitterly ironic that a local campaign group tried to deny them this moment by getting the festival shut down. But the sheer joy that ripples through the crowd when the springy guitar line of “Bra” kicks back in after an effusive percussion solo is a feeling that can’t be cancelled. Only a couple of Cymande’s original cohort remain, but they’ve chosen to replenish with musicians of their own generation, maintaining a crucial authenticity. And ultimately these effervescent old-timers bring rather more vitality to the occasion than Cross The…

With David Johansen after a show at The Palladium “I’d done a deal with The Telegraph to go out to New York and photograph Debbie Harry for a Sunday Magazine cover story. Blondie had a gig at The Palladium, which was kind of a homecoming show, having been on tour in Britain and Europe for so long. There were various parties going on before and after the gig, and I just photographed what happened. To be honest, it was like a punk cocktail party! It was the normal rock’n’roll thing, but with spikier chat. Blondie also had a close link to the whole art scene of New York, so we went to another party with Andy Warhol and [the next day] we ended up at Studio 54 with Tony Curtis!”…

MODERN NATURE The Heat Warps BELLA UNION Ultimate Painting fans rejoice! Having pushed Modern Nature as far out as they could go, Jack Cooper rediscovers languid observational songwriting, while retaining that elemental shimmer. CASS McCOMBS Interior Live Oak DOMINO “I never lie in my songs…” Cass sleuths have 16 sets of typically artful new lyrics over which to test this theory, though musically he’s more direct than he’s ever been. KIERAN HEBDEN & WILLIAM TYLER 41 Longfield Street Late ’80s EAT YOUR OWN EARS Taking ambient Americana to the next level, the alt.country guitar master and dance festival heavyweight bond over a surprising shared love of Joe Ely and Lyle Lovett. GWENIFER RAYMOND Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark WE ARE BUSY BODIES Cosmic drones and furious fingerpicking from the Welsh…

THE B-52s Live! 8-24-1979 RHINO, 2015 Recorded at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, Massachusetts, a month after the release of their first album, this is a raw document of their early onstage power. They’re tight and energised, with Kate Pierson – simultaneously on vocals, organ and keyboard bass – especially impressive. FRED SCHNEIDER Just Fred REPRISE, 1996 Produced by Steve Albini, Schneider’s second solo album is a riot. Backed by various punk luminaries, notably the Blues Explosion’s Russell Simins, Schneider kicks out the jams and proves he could have been a more than serviceable hardcore vocalist on the likes of “Sugar In My Hog”. 8/10 THE B-52s Funplex ASTRALWERKS, 2008 Their last album to date, this finds the group updating their sound with particular attention paid to LCD Soundsystem,…

PETE ASTOR Unsent Letters (Home Recordings 1984–2024) TAPETE 7/10 The past revived: down-home and downright lovely Forty years after their dramatic split, Astor’s cultish band The Loft recently released their debut studio album, Everything Changes Everything Stays The Same; now, just four months later, this batch of previously unheard songs arrives. Some date from his time in The Loft but were never played by them, others were written across a long career away from that band, with no thought of their future surfacing. Necessarily unthemed and sensibly eschewing chronology (the dullest of compilation orderings), Unsent Letters is an up-close and intimate offering of 16 unvarnished, though completed, indie-pop treasures, many clocking in around the two-minute mark. They see Astor tracking the slow death of a relationship (“Every Happy Day”), profiling…

’Frisco Mabel Joy ELEKTRA, 1971 Newbury revisits characters introduced on Looks Like Rain (the title track), sifts through stalled romances (“Remember The Good”), and breaks into the US Top 30 singles chart with the original “An American Trilogy” – charting 40 places higher than the subsequent Elvis cover on 45. Fat Possum reissue this album in August. Heaven Help The Child  ELEKTRA, 1973s Distinguished by its cross-generational, coming-of-age title track, its closing verses were adopted by anti-Vietnam war protesters. There’s a rare country rock swagger to “Why You Been Gone So Long”, but more familiar dark hues in “Sunshine” and reworkings of “Sweet Memories” and “Good Morning, Dear”. A reissue is also coming in August. 7/10 A Long Road Home ’Frisco Mabel Joy ELEKTRA, 1971 Newbury revisits characters introduced…

“HIGHER education was a mandate in my family. My grandfather was a man who valued education very highly and he instilled that in us. He built a school. My father was a math teacher and my mother was a high-school secretary. Plus, they had worked so hard for me. My dad carried the band members and all our equipment around town in his car, from gig to gig, so I owed that to my family. I saved up money for college from all those gigs and studied hard to pass a very difficult jury at Indiana University. “Bloomington, Indiana was my second home for four years, so I know the road between there and Memphis blindfolded. I made that 400-mile drive so many times. I was a kid trying to…

CLIMATE OF HUNTER VIRGIN, 1984 Hardly anyone bought Walker’s rich, enigmatically beautiful solo comeback, despite the magnificence of pieces like “Sleepwalkers Woman” and “Track Six”. 8/10 TILT FONTANA, 1995 Emerging from the wilderness once again, Walker returns in imperious form, tracks ranging from the approachable “Farmer In The City” to the fabulous orchestral derangement that is “Patriot”. 9/10 POLA X (OST) BARCLAY, 1999 Walker’s first film score (for Leos Carax) veers between malignant industrial noise and orchestral grace, spliced with dialogue and a brief snatch of Tilt’s “The Cockfighter”. 7/10 THE DRIFT 4AD, 2006 The full flowering of solo Scott Mk II, transposing his multi-layered nightmare visions onto huge columns of hushed-to-hellacious sound, complete with vast string sections and unnerving percussion. 9/10 BISH BOSCH 4AD, 2012 A huge, invigorating odyssey…

CRAZY Horse celebrated the release of Zuma with six unannounced free shows in towns around San Francisco. Long-time Neil Young fan DON LEARY happened to catch the final one, at the Marshall Tavern on December 21, 1975. “It was a dreary, rainy day. I was living in a house on the Sacramento River and one of my roommates and I decided for some reason to drive to the coast. It was raining, so we decided to get a beer at the Marshall Tavern – we’d never been in it before. It was a weird little room – long and skinny with a stage to the left. When we walked in, there was a long table to the right that had a sign: ‘Reserved for Neil Young and Crazy Horse’. We asked…

THE FIVE BELLS The band first developed their unique sound during weekly rehearsals in a room above this New Cross pub, much to the annoyance of the Millwall-supporting locals. AVALON CAFE Alternative arts hub where Caroline’s Mike O’Malley does the sound. The buried club track on “When I Get Home” was recorded from the venue’s toilets. RED LION BOYS CLUB Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis signed Caroline after catching an early in-the-round show at this property guardianship (a kind of agreed squat) in Surrey Quays. Some of the first album was also recorded here, as part of their quest for “the perfect reverb and snare drum sound”. NUNHEAD CEMETERY One of South London’s hidden treasures, scene of Caroline’s al fresco rehearsals during lockdown. They returned here to record a portion of…

BRUCE Springsteen ends the Lost Albums film with a bombshell. “This is Tracks II: The Lost Albums, but there will be a Tracks III,” he grins. Quite what that will consist of remains open to speculation. Producer Ron Aniello recalls that at one stage Tracks II was much longer. “We had 10 discs and I think we had a couple of extra albums, but I can’t remember much about them,” he says tantalisingly. “I know at one point we had 110 songs. The others might turn up on Tracks III. I don’t know. I am aware of stuff I’ve recorded with him that hasn’t been released – and there’s a lot of it. With each record, stuff gets left behind.” Erik Flannigan is also aware of more material than has…

THERE is no shortage of books about The Beatles. When Stuart Maconie tells Hunter Davies (the group’s official biographer) that he is writing another, Davies replies with faint encouragement: “Oh you absolutely should. There hasn’t been one for a good half hour.” With A Little Help From Their Friends is an act of curation, similar in tone to Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four. It assumes knowledge and is light on musicology. The key is the book’s subtitle: “The Beatles changed the world. But who changed theirs?” Can you tell the story of The Beatles without reference to The Beatles? Not really, and that’s not Maconie’s game. By focusing on the group’s external contacts, he – as did Brown – rescues The Beatles from over-familiarity, placing them in a context…

JAMES LOWE Charismatic frontman of The Electric Prunes (1943–2025) RELEASED in November 1966, The Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” epitomised the thrilling promise of psychedelia: a three-minute charge of pounding garage-pop, swimming in backwards effects and distorted guitar, complete with suitably lysergic vocal. The song transformed the West Coast quintet into nationwide stars when it just missed Billboard’s Top 10 in the new year. “It was the first time ever that street people had been allowed into the studio to do what they wanted to do – to mangle the records a little bit,” singer James Lowe told Ptolemaic Terrascope in 1997. “Everything before that had been left to these stuffy engineers…” Like many of his American peers, Lowe had been galvanised by the British…

Did you know that there’s a magazine on sale? Just in time for her fervently awaited UK tour, the updated second edition of our Ultimate Record Collection: Lana Del Rey dives into the songs that helped bring her “57.5 million listeners on Spotify”. The albums. The singles. It’s the definitive timeline, in shops now or available direct from us at shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Also out now from the same places is our 172-page Definitive Edition of the Ultimate Music Guide to Oasis. In-depth reviews. Classic interviews. An eight-page foldout miscellany timeline. What’s the story? It’s Liam and Noel’s glory years, in full… As first showcased in Uncut Take 272, Gus Coral’s striking photos of The Rolling Stones’ first UK tour in autumn 1963 are currently on display at London’s Dockside Vaults until…

“FROM the time I saw them, I wasn’t so much a Dr Feelgood fan as an addict,” says Wreckless Eric. “I’d never seen a band go at it so hard, with such intensity. Wilko Johnson’s guitar was angular, violent. And he looked like a psychotic axe murderer. He wore a black suit with a black shirt buttoned to the neck with no tie. The absence of a tie was a sure sign of a nutter. He reminded me of the man who lived in the bedsit downstairs from me when I first left home. Very scary.” Eric’s teenage crush on Dr Feelgood is why he’ll be one of the nightly guests at Wilko: Love And Death And Rock’n’Roll when it transfers to the Leicester Square Theatre after a sold-out run…

1 GOLOMB Staring The Beat Goes On is the new album from this Columbus trio of two siblings and a married couple. The influences are hardly rare – the slacker angularity of Pavement, the curdled anthems of Guided By Voices, the narcotic fug of Spacemen 3 – but the way this power-driving group put them together results in something gloriously fresh. 2 MIKE POLIZZE Is There Anybody Out There? The Purling Hiss and Birds Of Maya singer and guitarist returns with his second solo album, Around Sound, a long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s Long Lost Solace Find. It’s in the same vein – acoustic-based, mixing the feel of British ’60s folk with more modern American influences – but with even stronger material. 3 THE NEW EVES Cow Song This Brighton-based group…

Music For Nitrous Oxide (reissue, 1995) ARTIFICIAL PINEARCH MANUFACTURING 7/10 IN naming their band and their 1995 debut album, Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride knew exactly what they were doing. Stars Of The Lid referred to patterns “seen” with closed eyes – “your own personal cinema”, as the late McBride put it – while the titular gas’s psychoactive properties had been enjoyed recreationally for two centuries. That its most notorious effect had earned it the nickname “laughing gas” wouldn’t have put them off. As residents of Austin, the “Live Music Capital of the World”, they may have anticipated mockery for their lo-fi tinkering with tapes, guitars and pedals. But this was a punk-rock response to prevailing trends – “muscle rock and country”, according to Wiltzie – and its phantasmagorical sweep…

Agharta (reissue, 1975) MUSIC ON VINYL 9/10 RECORDED in 1975 at the Osaka Festival Hall in Japan, Agharta isn’t merely a concert recording, it’s a document that marks the zenith of Miles Davis’s career and the end of a period of peerless exploration when the boundaries of jazz had been torn and reassembled into something entirely different. It exists in a state of flux, shifting in tone and texture, but always anchored to its primal pulse. From In A Silent Way (1969) to this group’s disintegration in 1975, Davis danced with chaos, pushing jazz into dark, uncharted territory. While he was smashing boundaries, he was also breaking himself. The pressure of constant evolution, mixed with his spiralling addictions and personal demons, nearly destroyed him. When he essentially retired in 1975,…

GREEN ONIONS STAX, 1962 Booker T & The MGs recorded their first songs in spring 1962, before they had even named their new, interracial band. When “Green Onions” became a massive hit, peaking at No 3 in the States, they quickly assembled an album of mostly covers by Ray Charles, The Isley Brothers and Dave “Baby” Cortez, but the originals truly shine on their debut, especially the inverted “Mo’ Onions” and the bluesy “Behave Yourself”. 8/10 SOUL DRESSING STAX, 1965 Partly written during the long drive between Memphis and Indiana, where Booker T was attending college, Soul Dressing was three years in the making, which allowed the band to write more originals and develop their in-the-pocket dynamic. Together, they focus on funky interpolations of Memphis blues and R&B, such as…

“SCOTT and I hit it off instantly after I’d got in touch about doing the score for The Childhood Of A Leader [2016]. We had a lot of conversations about Julius Eastman and Terry Riley and good minimalism. It’s funny, it’s a maximalist score on the one hand, but then the base of every track has very redundant patterns. It’s sort of what Scott does, the peaks and valleys of his work. He was as interested in silence as he was cacophony. “We mostly spoke about films. He was an incredible cinephile. I’m surprised that he didn’t do more film scores, because he was so passionate about it. He loved Robert Bresson and we had a lot of conversations about Volker Schlöndorff and [his 1966 drama] Young Törless. One thing…

UNCUT: What was Neil’s mood going into Zuma following the break-up with Carrie and the CSNY ‘Doom’ tour? UBILLY TALBOT: My main memory of Zuma is being in Malibu in some bar having a beer with Neil and talking about how he was happy that we were going to do some recording. He was happy about that, and that’s all he was thinking about. I don’t think he was thinking much about Crosby, Stills & Nash at that point. He was past that. Neil is always moving forward. As for Carrie, it wasn’t spoken. It was like any other gang. You don’t speak about things when you are trying to get past them – you try to have a good time, but you don’t moan and groan because that’s not…

AMONG the many jewels in 2020’s Archives Volume II: 1972–1976, Dume’s alternate vision of Zuma illustrated just how astonishingly prolific Neil Young’s mid-’70s were. Named after the Point Dume area of Malibu where co-producer David Briggs lived, Dume expanded the original album – minus “Through My Sails” – with an additional half-hour of unreleased gold. Young had already cut a solo “Kansas” for the doomed Homegrown in January 1975, but chose to revisit the song five months later with Crazy Horse. Written in the aftermath of his split from Carrie Snodgress, its new electric setting amplifies the simmering tension of Young’s lyric. The similarly themed “Hawaii” is a minor wonder too, its inviting groove tipped with razor-edged guitars, in typical fashion. Young wasn’t quite done with the song, revisiting it…

FOLLOWING her appearance earlier this year on These New Puritans’ Crooked Wing, Caroline Polachek is fast becoming the avant-pop guest singer of choice for adventurous British bands. Keen to explore what Mike O’Malley calls “the pop vocal device” – and unable to resist the synchronicity of having someone actually called Caroline sing on one of their records – the band sent Polachek a speculative DM, expecting a remote contribution at best. So they were amazed and overjoyed when she turned up at their studio and spent a day writing and refining her parts for Caroline 2’s “Tell Me I Never Knew That” until they were perfect. “She’s much more hard-working than us!” laughs Jasper Llewellyn. “She’s doing takes until she gets it right. She’s coming to the control room, making…

LA GARAGE SESSIONS ’83 “This was a record I made following in the footsteps of Nebraska, doing something that people today would call more of an indie-type record. It was as if you had taken Nebraska and had one more step of development, bringing in a rhythm section.” STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA SESSIONS “I thought I’d like to make a record similar to ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’ where I made my own loop. Maybe I’ll make an album in this style using synthesisers and drum loops, which is fundamentally what Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions is about.” SOMEWHERE NORTH OF NASHVILLE “I wrote all these country songs at the same time I wrote The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Those sessions completely overlap each other. I ended up making a country record on the…

PHILIPS V9000 £TBC WHEN Philips was trying to decide on a nickname for its V900 – claimed to be the world’s most powerful all-in-one turntable system – it’s likely that some options made a lot more sense than others. While we may likely never know whether ‘The Bob’ or ‘The Neil’ were under consideration, we can accept that with 120W of power, two full-range speakers and a 4in bass reflex subwoofer, Tina Turner feels like a very apt namesake for it. ‘The Tina’ doesn’t just play records either. Having Bluetooth 5.3 on board means you can stream the V9000 from your phone or laptop, with support for SBC and LC3 codecs and a DAB+/FM tuner lets you tune into your favourite radio stations, too. USB playback is also covered and…

LITTLE RICHARD Here’s Little Richard SPECIALTY, 1957 Little Richard took my breath away when I first heard him and he was always in the forefront of all my music. He was raucous and loud and made you wake up and want to rock. I’ve been thankful to him for his influence and humour – his music is sensational and a one-off, never to be repeated. “Long Tall Sally” was inspiring, so we thought it would be a fun cover to do with The Kinks. Ours holds up as a fun and grittier version. I met Little Richard in an elevator once and I thought he was really funny, but he didn’t say anything about The Kinks’ version of his song. He was very into himself, but I liked that about…