Table of contents for April 2025 in UNCUT

“The frocks change, but people do exactly what they’ve always done” MADDY Prior may be about to celebrate her 25th album at the helm of British folk-rock institution Steeleye Span, but she’s just as keen to talk about the singing retreats she hosts with her daughter and sometime collaborator Rose-Ellen Kemp. “One of our signature courses is ‘Singing For The Uncertain’,” she enthuses. “So many people have been told they can’t sing. They think it’s something special that other people do, but most people can sing perfectly well. It gives a lot of joy, and it’s very good for you. We have a fantastic time and we eat very well. I think some of them come for the food, actually…” Prior’s singing courses generally take place at her Stones Farm…

1 Kansas (feat. Steve Earle)2 Hollywood ’553 Live In The Moment, Baby4 Brooke/1712 North Crescent Heights5 Andy (A Guy Like You)6 The Tourist (feat. Barny Fletcher)7 Freaks On Wheels8 Blues For Terry Southern9 Memories Of Monterey10 Riding Down To Mardi Gras11 Hopper’s On Top (Genius)12 Transcendental Peruvian Blues13 Michelle (Always Stay)14 Freakout At The Mud Palace15 Daria16 Ten Years Gone (feat. Bruce Springsteen)17 Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend (feat. Fiona Apple)18 Rock Bottom19 I Don’t Know How I Made It (feat. Taylor Goldsmith)20 Frank (Let’s Fuck)21 Katherine (feat. Anana Kaye)22 Everybody Loves Dennis Hopper23 Golf, They Say24 Venice, California (Victoria)/The Passing Of Hopper25 Aftermath Produced by: Mike Scott, Brother Paul Brown, Famous James Hallawell, Simon Dine Personnel: Mike Scott (vocals, guitar, organ, FX, Mellotron), Brother Paul Brown (Hammond B3, slide guitar, pedal…

ANTIGONE, daughter of Oedipus, heroic challenger to male authority, has stamped her identity on Western culture over millennia, the subject of ancient Greek tragedy and French drama, European operas and world cinema. In Sophocles’s play, she ends up hanging herself rather than being walled up alive in a tomb. Eiko Ishibashi’s latest album may share a name with the tragic heroine, but there’s no melodrama here. The prevailing mood is a stalling world nudged by invisible forces off its axis, beginning its slow spin into decay or disaster. Which makes it a pertinent listen for the wobbly historical moment we find ourselves in. The sleeve art sets the tone perfectly. Computer-generated blobs and geometric solids loom above Taro Mizutani’s monochrome land- and cityscapes. They are like stills from an alien…

P29 DESTROYER P30 BOB MOULD P31 JETHRO TULL P33 THE LOFT P34 BROWN HORSE P36 BEIRUT P38 SONGS OF GREEN PHEASANT SAM AKPRO Evenfall ANTI-8/10 Fab debut from south London skater Peckham songwriter Sam Akpro has been releasing EPs since 2019, gaining acclaim for his eclectic, layered songs that combine influences from indie, electronica and hip-hop to build something thoroughly original and modern. Evenfall maintains that approach with a rich but laidback sound on songs like the title track, “Death By Entertainment” and the glorious “Cherry”. Even on songs like “Tunnel Vision”, a track about dislocation, or a seemingly abrasive instrumental like “Baka”, there’s an enduring warmth to the record that comes from the fuzz of psychedelia that holds everything together. PETER WATTS MARSHALL ALLEN New Dawn MEXICAN SUMMER 8/10 The exquisite…

What was the genesis for this record? Being unemployed for two years [during lockdown] I was a little bit lost. Touring solo again, I began trying out new material and began to write what you hear now. The last record was overtly political, would you say this one is? There are a few threads of politics in there but it’s more my emotional state and tapping into the simplicity of songwriting and guitar playing. I wanted to write these immediate direct pop songs and not get hung up with how clever the words are. Was the three-act structure of this record intentional from the beginning? It revealed itself after the sequencing. Once it fell into place I was like, ah, I see a theme here: act one, uncertainty, act two, darkness,…

1 Notes Campfire2 Full Picture3 Lottery Brazil4 True Swamp Too5 Feel Better6 Mar’boro Man7 Wind To Dry8 Over The Hill9 Why, Are You10 Around The Horn11 Rise Above It12 You13 In The Mud14 Little Bessie15 Rock That Cradle Lucy16 Blue Eyes Cryin’ In The Rain17 Downblossom18 Heyday19 Before Tonight20 Suitor’s Bridge Personnel: Joe Adducci (vocals, bass, guitar, keyboard, mandolin, accordion, Fender VI, cello), Chris Grigoroff (vocals, guitar, harmonica, drums), Scott Tuma (guitar, steel guitar, vocals), Jamey Barnard (drums, vocals), Bob Egan (pedal steel on “Notes Campfire”), Scott Lucas (drums on “Downblossom”)…

P46 BELLY P46 DAVID BOWIE P46 THE CREATION P47 NICO P48 HIROSHI YOSHIMURA P50 PENTANGLE P51 WINGS P51 YES DANIEL BACHMAN Where The Tide Ebbs And Flows BANDCAMP 8/10 American folk luminary revives his early guitar recordings When Daniel Bachman regained control of the masters of Seven Pines and Jesus I’m A Sinner from his former label, he found himself reckoning with their contents. These two albums first put Bachman – a hotshot young fingerstyle guitarist from Fredericksburg, Virginia – on the map. But a decade on from their release, and with the knowledge that’s come with the passing years, Bachman found himself baulking at some of the titles that unknowingly harked back to his native Virginia’s colonial past. Consequently, this digital re-release collects both albums under the new title…

NEXT time around we’ll be taking a listen to some very promising new records from William Tyler, Bon Iver, Kassi Valazza, Samantha Crain, Salif Keita, Lucius, The Mekons, Hawkwind, Daniel Bachman, Angel Bat Dawid & Naima Nefertari and a host of others. From the recent and more distant past, there’ll be releases celebrating Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra, Motörhead’s debut LP and Tracy Chapman’s eponymous classic, alongside a rollocking boxset for The Blasters and unheard music from John McKay and – yes! – Jeff Bridges. EMAIL TOM.PINNOCK@KELSEY.CO.UK…

BARRY REYNOLDS: “I got a call from a mutual friend [in 1976] saying Marianne was putting a band together and would I be interested? All I knew was ‘As Tears Go By’ and it didn’t interest me, but I was persuaded to go to rehearsal in Chelsea. I was smitten. She was incredibly smart, well-read and very funny, a devastating wit. “We had a great time on tour, and then I called her and said let’s do it again. We finished by going into the studio and recording ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ and ‘Broken English’ and took them to Chris Blackwell. He told us to do a whole album. She was incredibly lazy. I’d turn up with music and lyrics and she always had fuck all: ‘Oh darling, I forgot.’…

JASON Isbell admits it was a dumb thing to do. He’s standing in the foyer of his manager’s office in Nashville and giving the thumbs-up sign to illustrate his story of how things almost went south. During a recent fluke snowfall in Tennessee – the kind that sends Southerners to the grocery to stock up on bread and toilet paper – the singer-songwriter took his daughter out sledding in their front yard. “We were hauling ass, but we were headed for the trees,” he says in his thick Alabama drawl. “The right move would have been to roll off the sled, but for some reason I thought I’d put my hands down to slow us down and steer us away from a crash.” As soon as he put his hands…

IN 1976, David Bowie is exhausted. Increasingly heavy drug use, the breakdown of his marriage and a split with management company MainMan lead him to flee the US and seek refuge in Europe. There, he began work on the visionary ‘Berlin’ Trilogy – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger – with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno. As it transpires, Low is a reflection of Bowie’s fragile state of mind and one of the first tracks recorded for the album at Château d’Hérouville outside Paris is “Sound And Vision”, the ultimate retreat song: “I was going through dreadful times,” Bowie told Melody Maker in 1978, “wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” “Sound And Vision” is a pop song built…

IT’S late afternoon and the winter sun is setting early over west London. But in Bryan Ferry’s studio – an ornate warren of rooms off High Street Kensington, adorned with Warhol prints, vintage synthesisers and Roxy ephemera – it feels like the working day is just beginning. Recording engineers, more used to poring over multitrack mixing desks, are slowly getting to grips with cameras and video editing software, preparing for the multimedia rollout of Ferry’s new album, Loose Talk. It’s a remarkable venture, recorded over the past couple of years with the painter and spoken-word artist Amelia Barratt, scotching the idea that, with the release of last year’s 80-track Retrospective, Ferry was going to spend his ninth decade simply curating, remastering and re-presenting his vast archive of existing material. In…

“THE film illustrates what happens in that first year. It goes through what people were doing before Led Zeppelin, then it’s the first rehearsal, off to my house to rehearse, the first tour in Scandinavia, recording and then going to the States. 1969 was so fast. We got two albums out in the first year. It’s bloody mad. We were playing in LA, but it’s San Francisco where we really take off. We just decimate anything that’s in our way. We don’t mean to, but the bands take one look at us and don’t turn up again after the first night. We’re making our way across America, playing in all these places, these bastions of the underground, and they’re full. By the time we got to New York, Iron Butterfly…

SET 1 1 Wolves 2 Don’t Look Back 3 Trigger Happy 4 On Pain 5 No More Love Songs 6 Why I Love Country Music 7 2CV 8 Undressed 9 Warm By The Fire 10 Rattlesnakes 11 Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? SET 2 12 Past Imperfect 13 Night Sweats 14 Speedboat 15 Blue Like Mars 16 Minor Character 17 The Young Idealists 18 Woman In A Bar 19 The Over Under 20 No Blue Skies 21 Perfect Blue 22 Perfect Skin 23 Myrtle And Rose 24 The Idiot 25 Brand New Friend 26 Forest Fire ENCORE 27 Mainstream 28 Jennifer She Said…

FLOW Directed by Gints Zilbalodis Opens March 21 Certificate U 9/10 WHEN AUTUMN FALLS Directed by François Ozon Starring Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasko, Ludivine Sagnier Opens March 21 Certificate To be confirmed 7/10 ON FALLING Directed by Laura Carreira Starring Joana Santos, Inês Vaz, Piotr Sikora, Jake McGarry, Neil Leiper Opens March 7 Certificate To be confirmed 7/10 DAY OF THE FIGHT Directed by Jack Huston Starring Michael C Pitt, Steve Buscemi, Joe Pesci Opens March 7 Certificate 15 6/10 SISTER MIDNIGHT Directed by Karan Kandhari Starring Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam Opens March 14 Certificate To be confirmed 7/10…

KASSI VALAZZA From Newman Street LOOSE MUSIC In which the alt.country upstart goes to bed at the titular Portland address and wakes up amid the Liefs and Trees of classic British folk-rock. THE GOLDEN DREGS Godspeed JOY OF LIFE INTERNATIONAL “On the inside, such lovely weather/It’s hard to tell one day from the other…” Exquisite ennui from the millennial Lee Hazlewood and sharp-suited compadres. GALACTIC & IRMA THOMAS “Lady Liberty” THIRTY TIGERS/TCHOUP-ZILLA Following her long-overdue duet with the Stones, the Soul Queen Of New Orleans stays on a roll with this finger-snapping call to action: “Get up for something, or you can fall for anything…” COLE PULICE Land’s End Eternal LEAVING RECORDS Bay Area experimentalist constructs an ethereal sunset haze from ripples of ambient sax, felted piano, a borrowed Strat and…

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Fisherman’s Blues ENSIGN, 1988 The original high-concept album followed Mike Scott’s relocation to Dublin and his full immersion in Celtic music. Frustrated with the difficulties of reproducing his rock sound live, Scott and a reconfigured Waterboys explored traditional forms, brilliantly infusing the rhythm of reels and jigs with the deep sentiment of country music. 10/10 An Appointment With Mr Yeats W14/PROPER, 2011 Scott’s appreciation of the poetry of WB Yeats was no secret (Tomás Mac Eoin recited The Stolen Child on Fisherman’s Blues) but here he dives in, repurposing the poems as rock songs. He’s not afraid to reshape the material, but the concept is approached with due respect, and delivered with awe and wonder. 7/10 Good Luck, Seeker COOKING VINYL, 2020 Though this eclectic set has no overall theme…

1 October2 Coma3 Trial4 Nothing As5 Mona Lisa6 Continuous Contiguous7 The Model8 Antigone Produced with Jim O’Rourke [NB: this is how it is worded in the credits] Recorded at: Hoshi To Niji Recording Studio; Steamroom; Atelier Eiko, Japan Personnel: Eiko Ishibashi (vocals, piano, Rhodes, synths, sound collage), Jim O’Rourke (synths, Bass IV, drum machine), Tatsuhisa Yamamoto (drums), Marty Holoubek (bass), Ermhoi (vocals, backing vocals), Joe Talia (percussion, drums), Kalle Moberg (accordion), Kei Matsumaru (alto and tenor sax), Toshioaki Sudoh (bass), Mio.O (violin), Kirin Uchida (cello)…

1 Disappearances And Losses2 Forest Encyclopedia3 Oceanus Procellarum4 Villa Sacchetti5 Mare Crisium6 Garbo’s Face7 Mare Imbrium8 Tuanaki Atoll9 Mare Serenitatis10 Guericke’s Unicorn11 Mare Humorum12 Sappho’s Poems13 Ghost Train14 Caspian Tiger15 Mani’s 7 Books16 The Moonwalker17 Mare Nectaris18 Mare Tranquillitatis Produced by: Zach Condon Recorded at: Condon’s homes in Berlin, Germany, and Stokmarknes, Norway; Dreamland Recording Studios, Hurley, New York (strings) Personnel: Zach Condon (vocals, ukuleles, piano, pump organ, organetto, accordion, glockenspiel, synths, trumpet, percussion), Clarice Jensen (cello), Laura Lutzke and Ben Russell (violin), Kyle Miller (viola), Griffin Rodriguez (upright bass), Nick Petree (drums)…

It’s been four years since When The Weather Clears – how’s life been? Time since my last release has gone by pretty fast and life as usual has been up and down. It takes me a long time to get things together – I think too much, and worry too much. Four years is actually quite quick for me. Most of the songs have been kicking around for years in some form or other. Is there anything lyrical or conceptual that ties together these seven songs? It completes a trilogy of records I’ve done for Rusted Rail. There’s a kind of broad narrative running through the three – loss, reclamation, atonement. I like people’s stories, the things that unite our experiences, so they’re an attempt to say something about that.…

US SAUCER My Company Is Misery AMARILLO, 1993 US Saucer were one of a handful of bands in San Francisco, alongside peers Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, The Double U and SF Seals, who weirded traditional forms in subtle but unmistakable ways. For US Saucer, that meant syringing the energy out of country music and replacing it with a maudlin, warbly drowsiness, delivered at a laggard’s hesitant crawl. 8/10 TARNATION I’ll Give You Something To Cry About! NUF SED, 1994 The vision of singer-songwriter Paula Frazer, Tarnation bubbled up from the same San Francisco ferment as US Saucer, and their songs were heartbreakingly direct, swampy country hymns. Ivo Watts-Russell was so impressed he signed Tarnation to 4AD, and some of these songs reappeared, remixed, on their label debut, Gentle Creatures.…

CD1 Atlanta, South East Music Hall. January 5, 1978 1 God Save The Queen2 I Wanna Be Me3 Seventeen4 New York5 Bodies6 Submission7 Holidays In The Sun8 EMI9 No Feelings10 Problems11 Pretty Vacant12 Anarchy In The UK CD2 Dallas, Longhorns Ballroom. January 10, 1978 1 Intro/Radio Ad2 God Save The Queen3 I Wanna Be Me4 Seventeen5 New York6 EMI7 Bodies8 Belsen Was A Gas9 Holidays In The Sun10 No Feelings11 Problems12 Pretty Vacant13 Anarchy In The UK14 No Fun CD3 San Francisco, Winterland Ballroom. January 14, 1978 1 God Save The Queen2 I Wanna Be Me3 Seventeen4 New York5 EMI6 Belsen Was A Gas7 Bodies8 Holidays In The Sun9 Liar10 No Feelings11 Problems12 Pretty Vacant13 Anarchy In The UK14 No Fun…

Music For Nine Post Cards SOUND PROCESS, 1982 Yoshimura’s impossibly lovely debut and the work that sparked his career in environmental music. The moods are largely tranquil and elegant, with twinges of wistful melancholy. An essential album in the history of Japanese ambient. 9/10 Green SONA GAIA, 1986 A favourite of his among his own albums, on Green Yoshimura uses Yamaha FM synthesisers to craft the warm and winsome pieces here. The title is not meant to refer to the colour, but rather what Yoshimura thought of as “the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN”. 8/10 Wet Land EASTWORLD, 1993 The most beloved Yoshimura album not yet reissued on CD or vinyl, though easily accessible via YouTube. The music is as misty as the title suggests, the…

ROB ELLIS: “I worked with her for 20 years, which is the longest working relationship I’ve had with anybody. We started in 2004. By then Marianne was enjoying newfound respect from younger songwriters. Polly Harvey was asked to co-write some songs on an album with Nick Cave and Damon Albarn. Polly put together a band, which was me and Adrian [Utley] from Portishead. When recording those songs, we got to know her and that was the beginning. “Marianne’s voice had a visceral effect. She cut through to the raw emotion. The first time I heard her voice was on a compilation of Kurt Weill songs Hal Willner had made, and her voice stood out a mile – and Tom Waits and Lou Reed were on that record. It was so…

SIRENS OF THE DITCH NEW WEST, 2007 Isbell’s first record after leaving The Drive-By Truckers is nearly a Truckers album: Patterson Hood produced it and most of the band – including Mike Cooley, bassist Shonna Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan – play on these heavy, hardscrabble songs about dead friends, soured relationships and smalltown life in Alabama. 8/10 SOUTHEASTERN SOUTHEASTERN, 2013 His first record after getting sober features some of Isbell’s most focused songwriting and some of his most vivid storytelling, establishing him as a troubadour in the Kristofferson or Prine mould. He addresses his recovery, celebrates a new relationship and finds joy in emotional stability, although the highlight is “Elephant”, an absolutely crushing song about a man watching a friend succumb to cancer. 10/10 SOMETHING MORE THAN FREE SOUTHEASTERN,…

PUSHIN’ AGAINST A STONE (2013) June came to wider attention with this Dan Auerbach-produced collection, showcasing her extraordinary voice and her melding of musical styles. These were songs that seemed to belong to Tennessee, to the church and the Appalachian mountains, but most specifically to the unique talent of June herself. 8/10 THE ORDER OF TIME (2017) June’s fourth record was written following the death of her father and the birth of her nephew and concerned itself with ideas of “life cycles and our journeys.” It has its raucous moments, but for the most part the album was more ruminative than its predecessors, that magnificent voice frequently offset by space and silence. 8/10 THE MOON AND STARS: PRESCRIPTIONS FOR DREAMERS (2021) Recorded and released during the pandemic, June worked…

June 1976 David Bowie and Iggy Pop arrive in France to record The Idiot at the Château d’Hérouville with engineer Laurent Thibault, studio owner and former bassist in Magma. They introduce ideas that will later be used on Low September 1976 Bowie begins to record Low with Tony Visconti and a rhythm section of Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis and George Murray, who lay down a backing track for what will become “Sound And Vision” October 1976 After Mary Hopkin and Brian Eno record their backing vocals for “Sound And Vision” in France, Low is completed at Hansa in Berlin January 1977 “Sound And Vision” is identified as the album’s first single and reaches No 3 in the UK. It is later covered by Franz Ferdinand and Beck, while part of the song is used…

HANDSWORTH REVOLUTION ISLAND, 1978 Intense, austere debut in which Steel Pulse set out the mission that will inspire them over the next 50 years. Racism was a focus of several songs, but Steel Pulse also explored other aspects of the black British experience on “Prodigal Son” and “Sound Check”. 9/10 TRIBUTE TO THE MARTYRS ISLAND, 1979 Musically more approachable, Steel Pulse’s brilliant second LP combined a gift for melody and hooks with an increasingly political message as Hinds celebrated Rock Against Racism on “Jah Pickney – RAR” while Brown preached defiance on “Babylon Makes The Rules”. The martyrs of the title include George Jackson and Steve Biko. 9/10 TRUE DEMOCRACY WISE MAN DOCTRINE, 1982 Now on their own label, Steel Pulse’s fourth LP sees the band’s sound get richer as…

ROXY MUSIC ROXY MUSIC (ISLAND, 1972) Released the same week as Ziggy Stardust, Roxy Music’s debut was arguably the bolder album, with musical ambition, courtesy of magpie mavericks Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay, to back up the conceptual audacity. “Re-make/Re-model” was a postmodern manifesto worthy of Bryan’s one-time tutor, Richard Hamilton. BRYAN FERRY THESE FOOLISH THINGS (ISLAND, 1973) Lesser artists might release covers collections, but Ferry preferred the term “readymades”. Whatever you call them, these hysterically inspired refashionings of songs from Dylan, the Stones, Lesley Gore and Billie Holiday wittily deconstructed rockism and set a new standard for pop appropriation. BRYAN FERRY THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE (EG, 1978) In the aftermath of punk, Bryan’s admiration for Marcel Duchamp, from whom the title of his fifth album was borrowed,…

“I WAS listening to a lot of Indian music during my time as a session musician. Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Halim Jaffer Khan. I had met Ravi Shankar early on, way before The Beatles. I went to Bombay on my own, on the way back from Australia with The Yardbirds. I was the only person who got off the plane. That was the best part. I just had my suitcase. I was there to see Ravi Shankar, who had a deal with World Pacific records. He was going to put his royalties into something called the Bhulabhai Institute in Bombay. It was going to be Indian Arts on each floor. Dancing, singing, sitar-playing, there’d be tablas, this, that and everything. I thought, ‘What a wonderful concept.’ “While I was there, I…

ORDER TODAY! MARCH 2025 COVER STORY Wilco INSIDE Jefferson Airplane • Zombies • Patterson Hood • Vashti Bunyan FEBRUARY 2025 COVER STORY The Band INSIDE TheVerve • SharonVan Etten • Blue Öyster Cult • Keith Richards JANUARY 2025 COVER STORY Kate Bush INSIDE Albums Preview • The Damned • Quincy Jones • TheWeather Station REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2024 COVER STORY Nick Cave INSIDE Bruce Springsteen • Blur • Alice Coltrane • Elvis Costello • David Gilmour DECEMBER 2024 COVER STORY The Cure INSIDE Kim Deal • Radiohead • The MC5 • Magazine • Joan Armatrading • Queen NOVEMBER 2024 COVER STORY The Beatles INSIDE Joni Mitchell • Spacemen 3 • Peter Perrett • Van Morrison • Suede OCTOBER 2024 COVER STORY Jimi Hendrix INSIDE GillianWelch • Fontaines DC •…

GARTH HUDSON The Band’s secret powerhouse (1937-2025) BACKING rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, The Hawks were already well established around Southern Ontario when they encountered Garth Hudson in 1961. But his arrival changed their course. A classically trained pianist and tenor sax player with a fascination for American roots music, Hudson had been gigging since the age of 12, most recently with Paul London And The Kapers. “Garth could play anything and play it better than anyone you knew,” drummer Levon Helm later told interviewer Max Weinberg. “Once we had a musician of Garth’s calibre, we started sounding professional.” Several years older than his fellow Hawks, Hudson initiated their transition from capable bar band into something way more inclusive, ditching Hawkins in 1963 and exploring the full range of America’s musical…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by Led Zeppelin. 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 a prize. Closing date: Thursday, March 27, 2025. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 The Jam just gave up on that rhythmic sound with their final release (4-9) 8 ‘Help’ was too much for these prog-rockers (3) 10 Alt-J’s first album release turned into a tsunami (2-7-4) 11 “I was playing rock and roll and you were just a ___”, from Elton John’s “Love Lies Bleeding” (3) 12 Former bassist in the Pixies who formed The Breeders (3-4) 14 The Cure sounding like they were stoned…

From us to you! The latest Ultimate Record Collection dispatch is Volume 1 of our guide to The Beatles, covering the years 1960-64 and featuring new writing on every album, every single, every EP and – as Beatlemania strikes that part of the world – every weird North American variant. It’s in shops now, with Volume 2 coming next month. You can order both directly from us at shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… And careful with those mags, Eugene! In the year that Pink Floyd celebrate their 60th anniversary, the next Ultimate Music Guide is a 172-page Definitive Edition covering their interstellar career. Featuring classic interview encounters, in-depth writing on each of the albums and an eight-page foldout timeline, you can find it in shops and our online store from March 14 – along…

1 TOBACCO CITY Buffalo Chicago’s Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard are going from strength to strength. A set of confident Americana rock’n’roll, new album Horses really builds up a head of steam on this infectious slice of choogle, with an unexpected coda. 2 FLORIST Have Heaven Jellywish is the new album from Emily Sprague’s Florist project, and their best yet. There are echoes of Big Thief in its crepuscular, hushed songcraft, but also a light rural psychedelia in its picked acoustic guitars, warbling tapes and curdled electronics. 3 NICO GEORIS Geological Observations From his Granny’s Dancehall studio in Death Valley, this sonic adventurer has been busy working with the electronic pulses of psychedelic mushrooms over recent years. Music Belongs To The Universe is all his own work, however – a welcoming…

Do you identify with the mythical figure of Antigone? It seems our fate as human beings is to live in a daily conflict that we cannot separate from one another. However, as social and personal matters have become too close to each other, it seems like the default has become ease of understanding. Also, when I go for a walk, I always end up in a cemetery. I like cemeteries because I feel at home there, and although I have no sympathy for Antigone, I thought the title was fitting since the song contains such things. I don’t know why there are so many references to graveyards in the lyrics. Perhaps it is because I’m experiencing more and more the loss of people we love. Are there any secret audio…

1 Here We Go Crazy2 Neanderthal3 Breathing Room4 Hard To Get5 When Your Heart Is Broken6 Fur Mink Augurs7 Lost Or Stolen8 Sharp Little Pieces9 You Need To Shine10 Thread So Thin11 Your Side Produced by: Bob Mould Recorded at: Electrical Audio, Chicago; Tiny Telephone, Oakland; Brothers (Chinese) Recording, Oakland; Granary Music, San Francisco; Granary Music, Palm Springs Personnel: Bob Mould (guitars, vocals, keyboards, percussion), Jason Narducy (bass), Jon Wurster (drums, percussion)…

How important was it to capture the live immediacy of the road in the studio? ROWAN BRAHAM: We want to make songs that six people can play night after night and I think we’d lose something by being too precious in the studio. It was great to be as tight as possible from that huge run of shows, but perfection is never really the aim. The record essentially is us playing live. It’s a more expansive sound compared to Reservoir… Having Phoebe [Troup] on board for the whole process really helped. And Emma [Tovell]’s pedal steel really allowed us to pursue a sound that we just wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. We’ve been able to push things a lot further in different directions. Lyrically, it often feels very ambiguous……

Was the project’s theme initially daunting? At first I approached it somewhat superficially, even zeroing in on the novelty of certain odd chapter subjects. I think I was avoiding the topic somewhat. So at first it was quite simple: write a song or create a scene about the now-extinct Caspian tiger or this lost architecture or island atoll. I think by circling the heavy stuff I made my way slowly inwards, somewhat unaware until the end of where I was going. By avoiding overwhelm and chipping away at individual worlds I was able to build up a bigger piece that, when I listen to it, feels like loss, feels like staring into the void, considering the disintegration of things. How much creative freedom did you have? Viktoria Dalborg, the director…

How did the anthology come together? How did you choose the songs? Chris Grigoroff: Well, Tom [Adelman], our manager, picked them. Joe and I left it up to him. We’re concentrating on our new record. I don’t know whether they’re good choices or not, but I didn’t have a problem when I saw the list. If something’s an anthology, why should we pick them? It wasn’t hard for us to let somebody else do it. You could pick ’em all, as far as we’re concerned. Joe Adducci: I like the idea of somebody else taking care of the anthology. That’s separate from us. Bands don’t make their own anthologies… Or do they? [laughs] I don’t know! That’s good, to be independent of us. I’m glad somebody liked a group of…

Was the tour as mad as everybody says? The tour was chaos. All hell was breaking loose on this mad trip across the South. The police were following us, the press were saying we were coming to corrupt America and Sid was trying to score all the time. People turned up to throw as much stuff at us as possible. I remember seeing rats and pigs’ ears and the stage covered in bottles. I’ve no idea how we didn’t get seriously injured. Did you know Winterland was the end? I thought we’d have a break and then regroup in London. You can read what John said in many different ways, and I’m still not quite sure what he meant. He could have been talking about himself, the audience, the whole…

IN 1924, the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was on a diplomatic visit to Jerusalem, where he chanced upon a 40-piece brass band in the city’s Armenian quarter. Learning that they were all orphans of the Armenian genocide, he decided to adopt them, bringing the young musicians to Addis Ababa to work as his Royal Imperial Brass Band. Over the coming decades, this band started to refashion Ethiopian music: refracting the nation’s ancient pentatonic scales through an orchestral prism, eventually giving birth to the genre now known as “Ethio-jazz”. By the 1970s, this brass band template had been scaled back to nimble, lightweight septets, and the best known of these were the Ibex Band. They backed some of the biggest singers of Ethio-jazz, including Mahmoud Ahmed (on his 1975 breakthrough album…

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: “I first met Marianne at a party for Adrienne Posta. I had recorded Adrienne doing an awful song by Mick and Keith called “Shang A Doo Lang” – you can imagine how bad it was from the name. Marianne was there. She had an acoustic guitar and was sitting on a radiator looking extraordinary. She recalled that I went up to her and said, ‘Can you sing?’ She said, ‘Sort of.’ That was enough. I told her to meet me at Olympic the following week. This was an era when you could record your friends, and you never recorded anybody you didn’t like. “When we did ‘As Tears Go By’, we persuaded Lionel Bart to pay for the session. We wanted to own the record, we didn’t want…

AS TEARS GO BY (DECCA SINGLE, 1964) The debut single is also the first authentic Jagger-Richards original, aiming for Françoise Hardy but creating something all their own. COME AND STAY WITH ME (DECCA SINGLE, 1965) One of Jackie DeShannon’s finest songs, and the single that blew the six-year-old Morrissey’s tiny mind. SISTER MORPHINE (DECCA SINGLE, 1969) Marianne’s first dark masterpiece was withdrawn from sale after just two days and later emerged on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers credited to Jagger and Richards. DREAMIN’ MY DREAMS (FROM DREAMIN’ MY DREAMS, NEMS, 1976) Marianne goes country, via the Weimar Republic, on this fleeting glimpse of success from her lost decade. WHY D’YA DO IT (FROM BROKEN ENGLISH, ISLAND, 1979) Heathcote Williams apparently wrote the ferocious lyric with the idea of selling it to…

“If you play something over and over, a repeating theme, you can hypnotise the audience and tell them whatever you want to tell them. They’ll believe it. If you’ve just got one guitar and your voice, the guitar has to do a hell of a lot of the hypnotising, because the voice is doing all of the telling. Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings are both doing some incredible things right now. I love Leo Kottke and John Fahey, both masters of hypnotising. The way Nick Drake played acoustic guitar was perfect and his attack on the strings really sticks with me. And he’s barely singing anything. There’s like nine words in ‘Pink Moon’. But his vocal is so powerful because the guitar is there as the counterpart. “I wish I…

ALBUM THEY SAY I’M DIFFERENT BY BETTY DAVIS “I love the story of underdogs like Betty Davis. The title of this album says it all. Throughout my career, I have had to constantly explain what I do and why being just a little different is OK. Even within the modern shifts of highlighting ‘black country’ or the context of seeing black artists for just doing what they do without needing to explain why it’s OK to exist in the marketplace, I still find myself an indefinable oddball when it comes to the market of music. Everything about Betty was different. She was a trailblazer with a cult following. Her voice is edgy and not necessarily what people think of when they think of a black American female singer. She was…

IN the wake of Destroyer’s most successful album to date, 2011’s Kaputt, Dan Bejar was introduced to a music licensing guru. “It’s the only frank discussion I’ve ever really had with anyone in the music business,” he reveals. “To me, Kaputt seemed like the kind of thing that someone would license. And the dude was just like, ‘I’m sorry, man, but your words are weird and your voice is weird, and there’s too many words so you’re constantly hearing your weird voice.’” He smiles ruefully, though clearly he also takes some pride from his rejection by the system. “It’s all there in that answer, the good and the bad.” From inauspicious 4-track beginnings, Destroyer have stubbornly chiselled out a place in the indie firmament, doing more than anyone to uphold…

UNCUT: What’s your background as an artist? BARRATT: I’m a painter who also writes and works with performance and my own voice. I trained in fine art. I studied at Glasgow School of Art, and I really wanted to learn how to make oil paintings. I got to do an MA at the Slade in London and I found it quite experimental there in the best possible way. There are a couple of tutors who really encouraged me to tune into the writing that I was doing. My writing is pretty much always in collaboration with other artists, so I’ve been invited in the past by painters to write texts that respond to their exhibitions. It’s not necessarily writing about the work like a press release would. It offers another…

SIDE ONE CUSTARD PIE Hard-rocking Side One begins with a song recorded at Headley Grange in 1974, partly modelled on unreleased, widely bootlegged, “She Left”. THE ROVER Underrated rocker first recorded acoustically for Zep III. This version was cut during the Houses Of The Holy sessions then overdubbed for Physical Graffiti. IN MY TIME OF DYING Zep stretch out to close Side One with a 10-minute epic, inspired by Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed”. The 2015 deluxe edition of Physical Graffiti includes initial rough mix. SIDE TWO HOUSES OF THE HOLY Recorded in 1972 for the album of the same title and a perfect fit for Physical Graffiti’s expansive Side Two. TRAMPLED UNDER FOOT Fantastic funk number that developed from a jam. A live favourite, with…

SONY WH-1000XM5 £249 Nobody was able to knock the WH-1000XM4s off the top of this list for two years… yet Sony’s latest model manages to be even better. The new carbon-fibre composite 30mm drivers are key: they bring even greater clarity than the previous generation, and the sound reproduction is beautifully precise. The simple fact is that these are the best noise-cancellers around by almost every measure. You really won’t regret buying them. 10/10 CAMBRIDGE AUDIO P100 £199 There are so many headphones that have some kind of drawback: they’re too expensive (Sonos Ace, Dyson OnTrac), they’re too heavy (AirPods Max), or the buttons are a confusing mess (loads of the effing things). All you get from Cambridge Audio’s Melomania P100s is joy. Everything works as it should. They sound…

STEVIE WONDER Talking Book TAMLA, 1972 I remember this record playing in our house when I was very young, particularly “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life”. It’s an absolute skill to write lyrics that are so simple and so effective, even if it could only have been written in that time, because no-one had used that set of lyrics before! But it’s such a gorgeous record. My mom would also play me things that Stevie Wonder had done in the ’60s when he was a kid, and it’s interesting at a young age to have an idea of how an artist can evolve. Something that’s stuck with me is the realisation that there are a million different ways to be an artist, and as you get older, your ability…