Table of contents for SPECIAL (YEAR REVIEW) in UNCUT

WHEN Lora Logic first met Poly Styrene, everything was magic. Lora, a 15-year-old sax player, had answered a small ad which said “young punks wanted”. She was greeted by the singer, who was about to become the face of first-generation punks X-Ray Spex. “We were even wearing the same clothes when I knocked on her door, which no-one else wore,” says Lora. “We thought up the name of the band. We were in the kitchen giggling, eating chocolate eggs. ”As much as Poly’s impassioned vocals, Lora’s sax defined the sound of X-Ray Spex’s breakthrough single, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” She viewed Poly like an older sister: “I never tried to upstage her. You couldn’t upstage Poly Styrene – she was a rooster, a dynamo. I was happy to take a…

The Edge Of Forever APPALACHIA 7/10 FIFTY-THREE years ago Jessi Colter released a solo debut titled A Country Star Is Born. She had already made a limited impression as Miriam Eddy, performing throughout the 1960s with her first husband Duane Eddy and writing songs for Don Gibson and Nancy Sinatra among others. But renaming herself after a male ancestor who rode with Jesse James, her first solo album represented a breakout and its title was prescient – a few months later she was nominated for a Grammy as best country performance by a duo or group with her second husband Waylon Jennings for their version of “Suspicious Minds”. Together with Waylon, Willie Nelson and Tompall Glasser, she went on to appear on the seminal 1976 compilation Wanted: The Outlaws and…

Me Neither NO QUARTER 7/10 “I’VE always been more interested in sketches than finished paintings,” says James Elkington. “I like listening to people’s demos. I’m very interested in unfinished work, or work-in-progress. And I wanted this to sound like that.” Me Neither isn’t Elkington’s official follow-up to 2020’s excellent Ever-Roving Eye (that’s coming next year, along with a duo album he’s made with Nathan Salsburg). In fact he only finished this batch of recordings in September, and wasn’t planning to release them formally until No Quarter’s Mike Quinn intervened. “I haven’t even had a chance to think about whether it’s a good idea to put it out,” Elkington admits. “That’s partly why it’s called Me Neither. I’m not sure exactly what my involvement level is with this, really.” It’s not…

“I find truth in a fable, faith in a rhyme” REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS THE BLACK CROWES The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion: Super Deluxe Limited Edition UME ON “Remedy”, the biggest single off The Black Crowes’ second album, Chris Robinson slithers along to the band’s fidgety Stones groove and sings, “If I had a remedy, I’d take enough to please me”. In the best way possible, it sounds like a confession he couldn’t possibly have written. It sounds more like a line in any number of blues songs written and sung and recorded and forgotten about long before this Atlanta band played their first note together. That word “remedy” carries a lot of meaning in the American South, where it’s associated with medicine shows and…

The Red Shoes/Director’s Cut (reissues, 1993, 2011) THE STATE51 CONSPIRACY/FISH PEOPLE 8/10, 8/10 ONCE an archetypal old-school major-label star, Kate Bush is now the world’s most improbable indie artist. Having regained full ownership of her back catalogue, Bush launched her own Fish People label in 2011, releasing remastered versions of her full set of studio albums five years ago. Through a new distribution deal with London-based independent outfit The State51 Conspiracy, these remasters are now back in deluxe repackages, including handsome coloured vinyl pressings. These “indie” editions cover every Bush album from The Dreaming onwards. Owing to different rights agreements in the UK, her first three will only be available as US imports. Coincidentally, these latest reissues also coincide with the 30th anniversary of The Red Shoes. It’s still an…

The Roundhouse, London, September 28 POLLY Harvey walks on stage into a set which responds beautifully to light. At times it can seem like a wall of flaking plaster in a neglected urban space, at others a leaf skeleton. With dramatic underlighting it can resemble a bat colony, photographed in mid-flight. The immediate impression, though, is of branches – the better, perhaps, to establish her in a new context, queen of rural rock. That, anyway, is the effect. Harvey herself emerges in the white dress she wears on the back cover of her new album – something like the Victorian sanatorium calico in which she appeared on the cover of her 2007 album White Chalk. This was the ghostly giant of an album that reconnected her with the Dorset soil…

As 1978 began, BOB DYLAN prepared to shift gear yet again. Launching his first world tour since the “electric” controversy of 1966, he seemed intent on another decisive and equally dramatic break with his past. But what followed over the next 12 months was transformative, even by Dylan’s mercurial standards… Forty-five years on, Damien Love reconstructs one of Dylan’s most intense years, from satin stage suits and silent audiences to a knife-wielding Sid Vicious and the biggest crowd of his career. “People complained, ‘This doesn’t sound like Bob Dylan’ – well, that’s the fucking point.” ON February 20 1978, Bob Dylan stood on stage at Tokyo’s cavernous Budokan concert hall wearing a bespoke three-piece white silk suit, a blue muffler and a generous application of eyeliner. It was his first…

AS if to banish immediately any misconception that the presence of three backing singers in evening dress and an eight-piece band, including a saxophonist, on stage at Earls Court might represent an excursion into territory somewhere between the Las Vegas Strip and E Street, Bob Dylan opened his first London concert in a dozen years with an instrumental version of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. Then he stepped up to the microphone to deliver “Love Her With A Feeling”, a 12-bar blues written and recorded by Tampa Red before World War II. We were firmly in Dylan’s territory, simply with expanded boundaries. This was June 15, 1978, the first of six consecutive nights in West London with which he kicked off the European leg of a world tour. Anticipation and…

FALLEN LEAVES You can’t rely on many things these days, but you can sit down for an Aki Kaurismäki film reasonably confident you will find a) mournful Helsinki citizens drinking and smoking like they mean it, b) moments of romantic transcendence as evanescent as Finland’s winter sun, and c) the best soundtrack of the year. Fallen Leaves doesn’t disappoint on any count. It’s the surprise fourth instalment in what most of us thought of as the proletarian trilogy; bittersweet (though mostly bitter) tales of men and women scuffling through temporary occupations of manual labour, finding each other through songs, films and alcohol. Ansa (a careworn Alma Pöysti, last seen dreaming up the Moomins in Tove) is a zero-hours shopworker, responsible for chucking out the expired food at the end of…

ORANGE AMPS ORANGE BOX-L £315/orangeamps.com ORANGE’S debut valve amp was brought to life in the back room of a London tobacconist. Today, the brand’s distinctive orange cover and basket weave grille cloth are instantly recognisable. So releasing a Bluetooth speaker with the full Orange glow-up is a risky move. Get it wrong and it’ll be viewed as nothing more than a mere costume cash grab. Thankfully, this is far from the case. Available in black or orange (naturally, we went for the classic choice), it really does feel like a genuine Orange amp has met with a shrink ray. The build quality is superb — from the textured leather-like Tolex covering, to the delightfully tactile grille and perfectly placed Orange badge, it’s a genuine pleasure to hold. Mind you, being…

“And I know loss/But I choose love” THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES BILL RYDER-JONES Iechyd Da DOMINO A DECADE ago, Bill Ryder-Jones made what he would come to think of as the defining record of his career. Then a few years out of The Coral, the band he had co-founded with a group of school friends as a teen, and a solo album deep (an instrumental recording with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra that served as an imaginary soundtrack to Italo Calvino’s novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller), he released A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart. The album set out Ryder-Jones’ stylistic and thematic stall: songs marked by a remarkable closeness, by the intimacy of place and people. It was a world filled with colloquialisms…

Albion BELLA UNION 8/10 TAKE a look at the cover of Albion and you’ll see a bearded, cloaked traveller – Harp’s Tim Smith – on a bleak, snow-dappled moor, guitar held at his waist in place of a sword, an ill-advised and dangerous quest no doubt weighing heavy on his mind. It’s a brilliant, and silly, image, and yet it says something about the long journey Smith has been on since he left Midlake, the band he fronted and ostensibly led, back in 2012. The Texans had been trying and failing to make the follow-up to 2010’s The Courage Of Others when Smith departed, fed up of it all. While 2006’s stellar The Trials Of Van Occupanther had been a record that predicted much of what was to come in…

Magic Music For Family Folk ANTONES/NEW WEST 7/10 FATHERHOOD has brought new perspectives to Luther Dickinson. “Having daughters altered my listening habits and it was hard to find records that we all liked,” he explains. “So I had to make one.” Magic Music For Family Folk is the singer-guitarist’s attempt to do just that, with friends invited along too. Aside from his offspring, Dickinson’s mother also guests, plus Allison Russell, Lillie Mae, Yola, Sharde Thomas and Sharisse Norman. Taking his cue from The Staple Singers’ spirit of togetherness, Dickinson collects a batch of songs and imbues them with familial warmth and his trademark Southern grooves. “Are You Sure”, a soulful plea to the more charitable and inclusive side of human nature, as recorded by The Staple Singers in the early…

WORKING as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter Whas made powerful, uncompromising music processing her experience of misogyny and abuse. But towards the close of 2022, Hayter announced she was retiring the name, re-emerging as Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter. “I left Lingua Ignota behind because it became too painful to perform and I felt stuck in material I was trying to move on from,” Hayter tells Uncut. The new name reflects her burgeoning interest in the Pentecostal-Holiness Movement, a distinctly American strain of evangelical Christianity she started exploring during the making of her last album under the Lingua Ignota name, 2021’s Sinner Get Ready. “I became fascinated by Pentecostalism because of how gigantic and global it is as a movement – but it is still considered extreme and some of its practices…

AGift From A Flower To A Garden (reissue, 1968) THE STATE51 CONSPIRACY 8/10 LATCHING onto the prevailing spirit of glam rock, 1973’s Cosmic Wheels was Donovan’s last significant success. The intervening years saw him undergo what amounted to a long slow fade from public view, once sending himself up in song as “A Well Known Has-Been” and quitting completely for over a decade. Even Rick Rubin couldn’t salvage his fortunes in the ’90s. Given the above, plus only sporadic bouts of activity since, it’s sometimes easy to overlook Donovan’s legacy. But the ’60s would’ve been a very different place without him. A leading light of the counterculture, he transitioned from Dylan-alike folkie (“Catch The Wind”) to psychedelic pioneer (“Sunshine Superman”) in little more than 12 months, marking him out as…

Hollywood Bowl – August 18, 1967 EXPERIENCE HENDRIX/LEGACY 7/10 FOLLOWING his dazzling return to the US at Monterey in June 1967, Hendrix and the Experience stayed in the US to play shows on both coasts including an awkward tour supporting The Monkees. Are You Experienced was still awaiting US release when the band were invited to play the Hollywood Bowl on August 18 opening for the Mamas & the Papas and Scott McKenzie. This 40-minute set has never previously been released in official or unofficial form and is a rare, unheard document of Hendrix in the US during this period. It’s accompanied by a 10-minute film, Monterey Pop To The Hollywood Bowl, available on You Tube, which traces Hendrix’s uncertain progress through the US from Monterey to LA with contributions…

THE night before his first gig at Earls Court, Dylan snuck away from a party organised by his record company to prowl London in search of live music. Final stop was the Music Machine in Camden, for an eventful, no-hard-feelings reunion with his erstwhile bandleader Rob Stoner, playing there with rockabilly revanchist Robert Gordon and one of Dylan’s musical heroes, Link Wray – who had recently recorded a truly incredible version of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. Stoner tells the story. “Dylan came to see us play in London, June 14, 1978. He was a big fan of Link, and because I was in the band, he wanted to say hello. Backstage after the show, Bob told Link he’d seen him in the 1950s, that he was even…

SHOWING AT FESTIVALS 7/10 WHEN Harry Shearer was looking for a pianist to take on tour with Spinal Tap in the early 1990s, his first thought was Nicky Hopkins. Since the 1960s, Hopkins had accompanied everybody from John Lennon to David Soul, but Shearer decided that joining Spinal Tap may have been a step too far – Hopkins was “too good to be funny”. In the end, Hopkins played on Tap’s “Rainy Day Sun” with typically modest panache, adding another credit to a list that includes “Jealous Guy”, “She’s A Rainbow”, “The First Cut Is The Deepest”, “Revolution” and Who’s Next. Hopkins was so good that even other piano players wanted him on their albums – that’s Hopkins on Harry Nilsson’s “You’re Breaking My Heart”. As well as stories, the…

COMMERCIAL APPEAL I was very pleased to see Dave Simpson’s excellent article on The Adverts, an often overlooked and underappreciated band, in the December issue of Uncut [Take 319]. They happened to be the very first band I went to see live (at Wakefield Unity Hall in September 1977) and I still have great memories of the gig despite the rain of spittle! TV Smith was the best lyricist/vocalist of all the punk bands and is still performing today with the same anger, energy and passion. Well worth checking out live as are all his post-Adverts solo albums. How about similar retrospectives in future issues about other artists who perhaps don’t now receive the recognition they deserve – The Daintees/Martin Stephenson, Latin Quarter/Steve Skaith, Fischer-Z/John Watts and The Icicle Works/Ian…

“I WRITE a lot of songs on my front porch,” says Karly Hartzman, singer and guitarist for the North Carolina band Wednesday. That porch overlooks a couple of grassy acres called Haw Creek, a small village of misfits just outside the city of Asheville. “We’re surrounded by mountains here. It gives the illusion of being way out in the country, but I’m five minutes away from the mall.” The setting has informed much of Wednesday’s thunderous, country-inflected indie-rock – including their terrific 2023 album Rat Saw God. “Any line about Mandy fighting with her boyfriend in the yard, that’s all stuff I’ve observed from my porch.” Wednesday formed in Asheville in 2017, largely as a songwriting vehicle for Kartzman, but it quickly became a North Carolina band, with members scattered…

THE most experimental aspects of Niecy Blues’ Tquietly arresting debut for Kranky may not be immediately associated with sacred music. Yet the music on Exit Simulation is very much rooted in the sounds she heard at church while growing up in a religious household in Oklahoma. “I have always been drawn to mantric and sacred music,” says the now South Carolina-based artist, who uses she/they pronouns. “I feel a deep ancestral connection to circular sound, sounds that repeat and loop. Hymns, worship music, spirituals and other music like that felt very natural for me to sink into – it was often the most compelling part of church-going for me.” She notes it was there in the rhythm, cadence and poetic speech of the pastors, too. Blues proves to be similarly…

WHEN Candidate’s Joel Morris speaks to W Uncut, he’s preparing for a band rehearsal with brother Alex, a welcome novelty after 16 years. Meaning to return with a “spartan, late night” lockdown record, Point Clear instead bears a more “playful”, personal blueprint. “We were obsessed by those pre-Britpop indie bands, whatever was playing in nightclubs when we were 17 – early REM, Julian Cope, Triffids.” Following previous albums inspired by The Wicker Man’s Scotland and a Festival Of Britain monument, songs concerned “where we grew up, and our families”. Morris wrote in St Osyth, a village on their native Essex coastline. “Like The Woman In Black, the tide came in and you couldn’t leave,” he recalls. “It was so near where we grew up that I felt safe, but also…

DISCOVERED Searching out the best albums new to UNCUT The Holy Mother: Madhuvanti Pal Plays The Rudra Veena SUBLIME FREQUENCIES 8/10 THE millennia-long history of North Indian classical music admits to great intricacy in its telling: tracing the various pathways the music has taken, its variations, its structures and rules, is a study unto itself. Then there’s the decades of dedicated practice it takes to master playing the music. To ‘master’ the music – this gendered terminology is worth noting, not least as there’s a multifaceted history of women playing the rudra veena, from early documentation of their engagement with the instrument, to stigma and ‘curse’, to the pioneering recent work of rudra veena artist Jyoti Hegde. But it is indeed true that until The Holy Mother, no vinyl LP…

¡Con Piano, Sublime! Early Recordings From The Caribbean 1907-1921 MAGNIFICENT SOUNDS 7/10 WHEN the record industry took off with the development of the 78rpm shellac disc in the 1890s, it wasn’t the pop music of the day that you could buy. Instead, for reasons of class, power and access, nearly all recorded output was classical: operatic arias and symphonic excerpts, rather than folk, ragtime or music hall. The New Jersey-based label Victor, however, had its ear closer to the ground, recording the first example of blues in 1915 and the first jazz band in 1917. But even before that, Victor was dispatching lathe recording equipment to Cuba, Trinidad and Puerto Rico to document the exotic music that was starting to dominate American dancefloors. The results, compiled on ¡Con Piano, Sublime!,…

ALEX Gibney is a film director who, as well as making journalistic documentaries on dozens of subjects, has also made inventive films about some key musicians, including James Brown, Fela Kuti and Frank Sinatra. “It was my Sinatra film, All Or Nothing At All, that Paul Simon and his people liked,” says Gibney. “So when they sent out feelers for me to make a film about Paul, of course I was interested. I’m a huge admirer of his work and, as with Sinatra, Paul’s career is like a history of America over a 60-year period. But it got interesting when Paul said, ‘I’m working on a new album, do you wanna watch me work on it?’ So that became the entry point – we move back and forth between the…

IN January, 2015, Uncut witnessed Polly Harvey’s Recording In Progress installation at Somerset House, London. There in the basement, we watched as Harvey and her band worked on what became The Hope Six Demolition Project album, sealed behind one-way aquarium glass in a soundproofed box. The installation partly served to shine a light on the myths that cluster around Harvey’s intensely private methods, revealing her working practices as a collective endeavour, lit with moments of creative electricity. Harvey has allowed us behind the scenes again, this time on I Inside The Old Year Dying – her fourth consecutive Top 10 entry in Uncut’s Albums Of The Year. This time, the album sessions that took place at London’s Battery Studios were captured by long-term friend and visual collaborator Steve Gullick. “…

JOHN Gosling, The Kinks’ keyboardist for much of the ’70s, died on August 4, aged 75. A classically trained church organist, his bluesy piano from his audition for the band was used on the band’s 1970 comeback hit “Lola”. He then joined as fifth Kink in the extended lineup responsible for Muswell Hillbillies, the five ambitious concept albums that followed, and the beginnings of the band’s slicker American success, finally leaving in 1978 after M i s fi t s. It’s his piano or organ on some of Davies’ most gorgeous ballads, such as “Oklahoma USA” and “Celluloid Heroes”. Gosling also played a full part in The Kinks’ light-hearted ’70s hellraising, reportedly turning up for a band meeting wearing a Viking helmet and blowing his horn just as manager Grenville…

1 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON MAYBE Martin Scorsese feels the need to make three-and-a-half-hour films because he’s carrying the full weight of American cinema – all that ambition, the vision and purpose – on a single pair of skinny octogenarian shoulders. But Killers Of The Flower Moon was never ponderous – indeed it was as heartfelt, beautiful and brutal as the films with which he made his name half a century ago. And though he crusades against the decline of the artform into franchise exploitation, in a way it’s one more excursion into the Martin Scorsese extended universe, his long investigation into the origins of American violence. There are magnificent performances here: Robert De Niro is uncanny as cattle rancher William “King” Hale, sporting devilish driving goggles like a kind…

UNCUT: When did you get the idea to record a Bob Dylan live album in Tokyo? Sugano: When I heard from the promoter that Dylan’s Japan dates were set in the fall of 1977, I immediately told my boss at CBS/Sony of my interest in making a live album. He started negotiating, and by the beginning of 1978, we obtained approval from Columbia in the US and the Japanese promoter, pending Bob’s visit to Japan for the final decision. How were you struck by the band Dylan had when he came to Japan? It came as quite a shock. Because the band, complete with a female chorus, performed new arrangements of well-known songs that were not immediately recognisable. In Japan, Dylan was revered as a ‘folk god’ and his image…

A Brazilian giant bids farewell FROM political prisoner to government minister, Gilberto Gil has traversed these dizzying extremes with open-hearted élan. A prince of Brazil’s subversive tropicália movement alongside frequent collaborator Caetano Veloso, Gil’s early restlessness could be seen in the contrast between the lushly orchestrated bossa nova of his debut Louvação (1967) and the fractured freakout of Gilberto Gil (1969). Going on to incorporate reggae and synthpop in a career of continuous reinvention, at 81 he’s become an intriguing amalgam of Dylan, Bowie and Tony Bennett – a generation’s radical voice, avant-garde explorer and enduring, beloved entertainer. This Albert Hall gig has been dubbed his farewell to London, and a packed-out, largely Brazilian ex-pat crowd are here to joyously see him off. Hair silver-grey and sporting sandals, Gil follows…