October 2019

UNCUT

Uncut is the essential magazine about rock music, written by people who love that music as much as you do. Every month, it features the most comprehensive and trustworthy album reviews section in the world. There are in-depth interviews with the finest mu

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Editor
AT the risk of sounding needlessly highfalutin, this issue of Uncut contains some discussion about the transformative nature of music. Here’s Justin Vernon, for instance, talking to Stephen Deusner about the new Bon Iver album. “I’ve always been obse
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Betty’s Back!
DANIELLE Maggio was 19 when she first heard the music of Betty Davis, via a series of revelatory 2007 reissues on Light In The Attic. “I was blown away by the music, and then when I saw her image I was so inspired and empowered,” Maggio says of what
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Playing A Blinder
FROM the moment Cillian Murphy first rode through the misty streets of 1920s Birmingham on a black horse to the sinister strains of Nick Cave & Bad The Seeds’ “Red Right Hand”, Peaky Blinders set a new bar for British TV drama soundtracks. Over the c
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Counter Culture
IN 2009, record sales rep Graham Jones wrote a fond eulogy to a disappearing culture called Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened To Record Shops?. In 2012 a documentary followed, as did various revisions of the book. Those updates soon became out of
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“They Walk Out Onto The Crossing, Into History”
EACH afternoon for weeks as his band neared its desolate end, Paul McCartney entered Abbey Road studios with a commuter’s punctuality and commenced a daily ritual. “Paul slaved over getting ‘Oh! Darling’’s vocal right,” reveals assistant engineer Ala
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Altın Gün
FOR a musician, inspiration can strike at any time. But when you’re in a band that only plays Turkish pop standards from the 20th century, you have to make your own luck. “I was in a Turkish grocery store once and heard a song and thought, ‘Hmm, that
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Uncut Playlist
When you’re hot, you’re hot: just a few months after the sensuous UFOF comes this rawer, punchier set, culminating in an unusually seething guitar solo on “Not”. From the sparse and sombre new album, Free, an emotional reading of Lou Reed’s poem, a
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Radio Uncut
John Dwyer and co return this month with the charmingly titled Face Stabber, Oh Sees’ longest and most sonically expansive record so far. “The Experimenter” is a speeding punk-rock juggernaut, like early-’70s Miles played at double-speed. Full review
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“It’squite Feminine But Also A Bit Heavy Metal” AN AUDIENCE WITH BAT FOR LASHES
HAVING just flown into London the previous day, Natasha Khan – these days a resident of Highland Park, Los Angeles – is savouring a proper cup of tea. “I do take PG Tips over with me,” she confides, “but the water’s different, so it still doesn’t tas
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New Albums
Alabama Shakes singer/guitarist shows there’s “so much more” with her solo debut. By Rob Mitchum BRITTANY HOWARD has the kind of voice that instantly summons the musical past. And that’s the problem. Her band, Alabama Shakes, tried its best to dod
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Howard’s Way
Just five months after the release of Sound & Color , Howard and some Nashville buddies dropped this raw, surprise release. In Thunderbitch , Howard stripped back the fussier elements of her main gig for garage-rock brazen enough to include a track c
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Brittany Howard
WHY did this feel like the right time to do a solo record? You know, I just turned 30, and I was having a kind of moment with myself where I was saying, ‘What do I want with my career? Why do I do this?’ I create because I have to, because that’s wh
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Oh Sees
THE news that John Dwyer has generously delivered a double album as the 22nd full-length studio recording by some configuration of his band Thee (or The or the or nothing at all) Oh Sees may be the least surprising thing about it. Indeed, Face Stabbe
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Q&A
Face Stabber feels like another brave leap in another direction. How much does each new Oh Sees album tend to be a reaction to the previous one? All the albums have a common thread from the previous ones – it’s unavoidable. We aren’t really a “conc
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A to Z
Eighth outing for dance-punk crew more pronounceably known as chk chk chk The New York band’s eighth full-length serving of snarky humour and left-field dancefloor fare, Wallop marks 23 years of activity for !!!, a long enough period for their mo
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Wilco
ODE TO JOY is not a great title for Google search results, but it certainly succeeds as a statement of no-fucks bravado. Indeed, the follow-up to Star Wars (2015) and Schmilco (2016) is precisely the opposite of the grandiose and anthemic symphony co
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Americana
Superior post-Dead jams from underground supergroup Wooden Wand’s James Toth first met Nick Mitchell Maiato more than a decade ago, when the latter had booked him for a show in Manchester. Bonding over a shared love of Crazy Horse, Little Feat and
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Americana Round-up
It’s been three years since Sturgill Simpson’s (pictured) last album, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth. But he’s finally announced his latest, due for release on Elektra this autumn, with an accompanying anime film on Netflix. Talking up Sound & Fury with f
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Hiss Golden Messenger
The opening track on HGM’s latest, “I Need A Teacher”, is an open, unembarrassed call for a guide from an emotionally adrift MC Taylor, which sets the album’s tone of introspection and vulnerability. He admits there were specific challenges to be met
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Q&A
What do your guest vocalists bring to The Practice Of Love? They bring their wonderful textures, timbres, personalities, sensibilities and vocal ghosts. They also gave me the opportunity to compose differently, as some of the songs were composed af
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Kazu
Judged on “Salty”, one might imagine the rest of Adult Baby, the solo debut from Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, to be a heavily electronic album. This subtle, wispy mirage of a record is much more varied than that, though. “I didn’t really have a conc
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Tinariwen
THE stories that are told about Tinariwen elevate the group virtually to the status of myth. Founded in the late ’70s by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, the son of a Tuareg rebel executed by the Malian government, the group spent their early existence as refugee
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Jenny Hval
ON her six albums to date, Norway’s Jenny Hval has ranted and ruminated across a broad spectrum of gender politics, religion, patriarchy, menstruation, sexualised female bodies, “capitalist clit” and “soft dick rock”. Her sonic explorations have been
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Iggy Pop
STOOGE, solo artist, actor, raconteur, collaborator, lecturer, author, artist’s model, radio host, barista… Iggy Pop has enjoyed many guises during his formidable career. Latterly, though, he has taken on a new role – as a semi-retired rock star. Whi
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Gruff Rhys
TWENTY years ago, Super Furry Animals released Guerrilla, a technicolour, hyperactive pop album – or at least the quintet’s twisted idea of a pop album – laced with manic electronic beats, Caribbean textures, Beach Boys harmonies and songs about chew
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Q&A
Was Muzi especially keen to work on a set of Welsh songs? I think he speaks six languages. When he came to Cardiff he loved hearing conversations go from Welsh to English and back again, because it reminded him of his linguistic reality. So he was
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Q&A
Had you played Afghan music before? Al McSween: We never worked with Afghan musicians, but we did work with musicians from either side of Afghanistan – Iran and India – and there are points that Afghan music has in common with, say, Hindustani or Per
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Discovered
A thoroughly modern, multicultural masterpiece. By John Lewis IN a curious way, Songs Of Our Mothers is the sound of urban Britain now. It’s like the Babel of sounds from a dozen inner-city immigrant communities that have been reassembled into a
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Jonah Tolchin
Jonah Tolchin is frank about the “total fucking shit storm” of experiences that hit him hard in 2016 and informed Fires For The Cold . “Among these was the end of a marriage and a psychotic episode that stemmed from the combination of an identity cri
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Various Artists
FIFTY years on, it can be hard to grasp the purchase the blues had on America’s counterculture in the ’60s; the way young listeners and artists were beginning to understand, in a much broader way, how the blues really was the bedrock of much of the m
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Jim Fishel
WHEN the planning for Ann Arbor Blues Festival kicked off, had you just finished at University of Michigan? Well, I never went to the University of Michigan. My brother transferred to the University of Michigan in 1967. I was graduating high school
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Rediscovered
Cleveland’s proto-punk spirit in excelsis. By Jon Dale YOUNG, precocious, a bit of a hipster, Peter Laughner had grand designs for his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and its underground scene: “I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for C
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Manu Chao
MANU CHAO was in a bad way when his band Mano Negra broke up in 1994. Intended as a potent Gallic equivalent of The Clash, after four albums in a turbulent seven years the group had fallen apart in the wake of an insane tour by train across war-torn,
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Q&A
We couldn’t track Manu down for this Q&A. How hard did you find it to pin him down when you wrote your book? It’s like he sings on “Desaparecido”, one of the most important, autobiographical songs on Clandestino – he is “the disappearing one... hurry
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The Specialist
Almighty paeans: compelling collection of underrated soul 45s LIKE JUST about everything else in the lives of African-Americans through those turbulent times, gospel music was in a state of flux in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Robert F Darde
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Put The Load Right On Me
“UNFINISHED business?” says Robbie Robertson. “No, I don’t think about… unfinished business.” Robertson is in the process of addressing the weird logistics in his current workload. There is a new solo album, Sinematic – his first since 2011’s How To
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One Man Band
Robertson’s copious contact book ensured a lavish solo debut. Guests Rick Danko and Garth Hudson were joined by Peter Gabriel and U2, while the latter’s producer, Daniel Lanois, added trademark swampy atmospherics. The mostly spoken-word “Somewhere D
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“An Impossible Relationship…”
“THE film is a spiritual adaptation of Testimony,” says Daniel Roher, director of Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson And The Band. “It’s all specifically through Robbie’s lens: this super-ambitious, visionary kid who came from a single mum in a sub
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“He Loved Music, It Was In His Soul”
“ JEFF was never going to sit still, never,” explains Buckley’s former manager Dave Lory. “He wanted to do a heavy metal album, he wanted to do MTV Unplugged, he wanted to do a Pakistani record. He let me read one of his diaries once, where he wrote
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Mystery White Boy
“FROM an early age Jeff could carry the tune while I was singing harmony, and that’s not easy for a six-year-old. By the time he was 12, I was singing the main tune and he’d be doing harmony. He had the instrument – you’re born with a certain voice,
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“I Have Always Elicited Strong Reactions”
THE telephone is ringing in Patti Smith’s room at the Miyako Hotel. San Francisco’s fabled rock’n’roll hangout since it opened in the late ’60s, the Miyako has always been Patti’s preferred hotel when she visits the city, where she is drawn to its ri
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“She Was This Extremely Intense Presence”
“I had gotten a call from Todd Rundgren to go to the Hit Factory in New York. Patti was in the control room. But the real force in the sessions that I was involved in was her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, who was producing Dream Of Life , and a real s
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“It Was Like Entering Another Dimension”
“I WAS working for Hanuman Books, which published a book of Patti’s called Woolgathering in 1992. We were based in the Chelsea Hotel, and when she called from Detroit sometimes, she liked hearing how the sunlight was looking from there. She spoke ver
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“She Said, ‘We’ve Already Won…’”
“SHE curated Meltdown [in 2005] and it was also Robert Mapplethorpe’s anniversary, and she had written a poem, The Coral Sea, about him, and she said I’d like to do something. She really liked Loveless. You know, Cat Power was also involved. It was m
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“Some Dreams Aren’t Dreams At All…”
IN 2016, Patti Smith found herself having breakfast one morning at the Wow Café on San Diego’s Ocean Beach Pier. Over coffee and cinnamon toast, she ruminated on a number of symbols and portents she had recently encountered. Mysterious hotel signs,
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Devendra Banhart
“I’M a little bit out of my mind,” explains Devendra Banhart from his home in Los Angeles. “I got back from Japan yesterday and I’m going to Nepal tomorrow for a month. It’s half a pilgrimage, half shooting a movie. Oh, and a video too!” The singer-s
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“Something’s Happening... I’m Happy Again”
JUSTIN Vernon wants to mow his lawn. It’s not overgrown at the moment, despite the record temperatures this summer in the Midwest, but lately he has other matters demanding his attention. “That’s one of the things I just don’t have enough time to do,
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“Giving It A Facelift”
Shortly after the release of Bon Iver’s debut, Justin Vernon bought a house near Fall Creek, Wisconsin, just outside of Eau Claire, where he built a studio called April Base. Even more than that remote cabin where he made For Emma, Forever Ago, it ha
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From Bees To Feathers
Released just a year after For Emma, Forever Ago, this lush, melancholy collaboration with the Milwaukee post-rock outfit Collections Of Colonies Of Bees was the first indication that Vernon was more than just Bon Iver. They would follow it up four
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This Is It
SOME time in early 1985, Miles Davis and his wife Cicely Tyson hosted a dinner party at their Malibu home. Among the exclusive group of celebrity friends – Sammy Davis Jr, Bill Cosby, Helen Reddy, Herb Alpert and Warner Bros boss Tommy LiPuma – was R
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Miles Davis And Prince
THERE was a mutual admiration between Prince and Miles Davis throughout the 1980s. “Miles loved the funk sound that Prince made, and there were efforts to get him to come in and record with us,” recalls Randy Hall. “I think Miles and Prince saw a l
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Bus Stop
“WE knew ‘Bus Stop’ was going to be a hit as soon as we’d cut it,” recalls Graham Nash. “We really did. Just listen to it – even today it sounds like a hit!” Sure enough, on its release in June 1966, “Bus Stop” became The Hollies’ ninth Top 10 succes
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Bob Dylan/ Neil Young + Promise Of The Real
One show, two legends – each with a very different take on their greatest hits NEIL Young is just finishing a version of “Like A Hurricane”, an encore that is fizzling out like a match in a puddle. Times past, this great song has burned like someth
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Bob And Neil Come Full Circle
DYLAN and Young didn’t appear together at Hyde Park, disappointing many. Two nights later, however, at Nowlan Park, Kilkenny, Neil joined Bob for what the former later described as “a celebratory shared goodbye to our old friend”, a version of the po
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Womad
Robert Plant’s latest gang are the quietest act at this riotous pan-global celebration A DEFIANT carnival of rainbow-coloured multiculturalism, WOMAD has always been a bigger, richer, stranger affair than its caricatured image as a tasteful ethno-f
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Bluedot
Kraftwerk and New Order dazzle at music/science fest FIFTY years since Neil Armstrong’s giant leap, Bluedot celebrates the anniversary with a galaxy of moon-themed talks, workshops and installations. Astrophysicist Eamonn Kerins draws a mid-afterno
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Books
TRIPPING relentlessly to nullify the grind of seemingly endless tours with pub-rock journeymen Brinsley Schwarz, bassist Nick Lowe crumbled in the mid-1970s before finally seeking psychological help. “I didn’t speak and I was covered in lice and I ha
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Films
ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD One of the many misconceptions about Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film is that it would be cast in the mould of his idol Sergio Leone’s epic revenge western Once Upon A Time In The West (1968). It definitely has that film’
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DVD, BLU-RAY & TV
JOHN LENNON knew exactly what he was doing. He was going to make an album that would establish him as a fully fledged solo act, one to prove that going primal on Plastic Ono Band and becoming a “conceptual artist” like Yoko didn’t mean he’d lost his
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Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly is where film’s noir’s pessimism meets the atomic nightmare. The film’s barely started and we are plunged into a lurid otherworld of treachery, terror, Cold War paranoia, the looming threat of nuclear extermination. The opening credits
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Not Fade Away
ART Neville was still at high school when he fronted R&B septet The Hawketts, whose 1954 rendition of “Mardi Gras Mambo” became a local chart hit and future staple of New Orleans’ carnival season. Influenced by James Booker, Professor Longhair and Bi
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Feedback
Splendid Blue Note article [September issue] – a big thank you to Peter Watts and John Lewis for putting this together. The praise you give Rudy Van Gelder for his recording techniques is well deserved. When you hear the poor recording quality of som
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Richard H Kirk
There was some interesting stuff bubbling under before punk kicked in. I’d been listening to Faust when I was at sixth form, so I probably just spotted this in a record shop. I was quite into the whole idea of drones and long, repetitive tracks. I us

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