Table of contents for October 2025 in UNCUT

Still buzzing from the Oasis shows? Wish Portishead had reformed instead? Either way, you’ll want to check out the latest in our Ultimate Record Collection series, The 200 Greatest British Records Of The 1990s… Ranked! It’s a journey beyond Britpop to discover the best UK albums and singles of the decade. Find it in shops August 22 or via our online store at shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Don’t pass me by! The Deluxe 148-page edition of our Ultimate Music Guide to Ringo Starr is available from the same places on August 29. And if Uncut’s current David Bowie cover story isn’t enough for you, then The History Of Rock: 1972 charts the rise and rise of Ziggy Stardust through the pages of NME and Melody Maker. Also out August 29… On September 15,…

THE BESNARD LAKES The Besnard Lakes Are The Ghost Nation FULL TIME HOBBY As a not-so-coded rebuke to acquisitive neighbours, the reliably magnificent Montreal soundscapers deliver their poppiest record since 2007 classic …Are The Dark Horse. NEKO CASE Neon Grey Midnight Green ANTI-“We all crave some wildness…” A glorious, string-drenched splurge that, in many ways, is just as revealing as her recent memoir. KURT VILE & LUKE ROBERTS  “Hit Of The Highlife” VERVE On which Philly’s KV and Nashville’s LR go hunting for kicks in New York City, but inevitably end up with a skinful of disillusionment: “Man, this country sure is confusin’…” BITCHIN BAJAS Inland See DRAG CITY Following their crucial contribution to Stereolab’s Instant Holograms…, the Chicago drone rangers keep it mellifluous on this shimmering tribute to Neu!’s softer…

“Everything uncool becomes cool again!” SOLO artist, super-producer, session musician to the stars… it’s no surprise that Blake Mills reckons he regularly used to spend 15 hours a day, five days a week, at his enclave in LA’s famous Sound City Studios. Then three months ago his daughter was born “and that just came to a screeching halt”. With new priorities in his life, he’s having to come to terms with the “slightly uncomfortable” fact that perfectionism may no longer be an option. “I’ve already found myself moving past hills that I thought I needed to die on. What if something’s not clear, or not just right? What’s the worst case scenario? It’s a big change, but I’m cautiously optimistic.” However, a project that snuck in under the wire is…

Goodluck Man GOOD HORSE, 2015 Having issued a self-titled EP two years earlier, McHone’s debut album is a summation of her formative days playing honkytonks around Austin. Highlights include “Dram Shop Girl” and the aching “Gentle With My Mind”: “My broken heart won’t play gentle with my mind/Every night I find myself thinking of you”. 7/10 Carousel  LOOSE, 2018 Not quite a full-fledged follow-up, as McHone chose to re-record a bunch of songs from her debut. The arrangements are largely unchanged, albeit with a little more polish courtesy of Spoon producer Mike McCarthy. But the new tunes shine, particularly the waltzing country of “Sad” and the raw “Spider Song”. 7/10 Still Life LOOSE, 2022 McHone largely dispenses with trad country for something more ambitious on a set that detours into…

Brett Anderson: “We’re the only band of our generation who aren’t releasing records as souvenirs” Is this the darkest Suede album? There’s certainly a sense of memento mori about the record. People might see it as morbid and macabre, but it’s actually life-affirming: the reminder of death makes you aware of how precious life is. It’s about the joy within a moment when you realise that life is fleeting and you have to live it to the full. That’s how I feel about my life and my career. I don’t know how long either of them will go on for, but let’s enjoy it while it lasts. You seem to be getting more intense as you get older… In rock music, you have two approaches: young men singing about young…

Fudge POLYDOR 7/10 WERE there a subtitle to Michael Kiwanuka’s new album, it might read “feel the fear and do it anyway”. Landing less than a year after Small Changes, Fudge is his first since his 2012 debut to be made without producers and co-writers Danger Mouse and Inflo onboard. That seriously solid teamwork had been crucial in the building of Kiwanuka’s world, a space where plaintive, classic songcraft bonded with psychedelic pop and progressive orchestral soul to irresistibly enveloping effect. The end of this relationship after three consecutive albums must have been a daunting prospect, but Fudge keeps Kiwanuka’s ship on course while revealing new vistas. Its dozen songs date from the three years of Small Changes’ unfolding – and at least one from much earlier – but are…

NIKKI SUDDEN Waiting On Egypt ABSTRACT, 1982 Nikki’s debut album doesn’t fully disconnect from the Maps’ orbit – Biggles and Phones guest, and there are version of two lost Maps songs, “Forest Fire” and “New York”. But its Stones songs, Johnny Thunders tributes and more streamlined, tightly wound approach certainly point the way forward for this singular songwriter. 8/10 SOUNDTRACKS & HEAD  Daga Daga Daga GLASS MODERN, 2024 Recorded in 1981 and then lost for over four decades – save a 1982 12” single pairing “Rain Rain Rain” with “Ghost Train” – finally hearing Daga Daga Daga offered nothing short of a revelation, with Epic and Jowe stretching their limbs on this experimental set: krautrock broadcast from an abandoned castle. 9/10 RICHARD EARL  The Egg Store Ilk  PILOT, 1981 The…

Anna Canoni, Guthrie’s granddaughter and Vice-President of Woody Guthrie Publications How long have you known about these tapes? We’ve known about them for a long time, but it’s only due to improvements in audio technology used by Steve Rosenthal that we’ve been able to release them. I felt that if Steve could do his magic, it’s important to share these songs about racism, fascism and greed. Woody was a teacher and role model in terms of how to deal with hard moments such as the current one. He dealt with it through song and hope, but with truth and fact as well. We could do with a little bit of that. Rosenthal said that finding the new verses for “This Land…” is like a new version of the “Star-Spangled Banner”.…

DAVE BIXBY Ode To Quetzalcoatl (reissue, 1969) GUERSSON 8/10 A lost Christian psych-folk record by an LSD burnout turned cult member IT’S not easy to pinpoint what makes this 1969 album, a landmark of private-press acid folk, sound so unusual. It’s mostly just a guy playing a guitar and singing. Dave Bixby’s strums are emphatic and florid, his voice careful, measured, robust, but not really weird. And yet the music is profoundly strange, unsettling even. Somehow those simple elements coalesce into a fantastical soundtrack, as though the heavily reverbed instruments are enacting the spiritual questing of the lyrics. It’s little wonder Ode To Quetzalcoatl has become a cratedigger’s treasure: while it might bear comparisons to Syd Barrett or maybe Larry Norman, it sounds utterly like itself and nothing else. Born…

ELECTRIC URSA NO QUARTER, 2014 Shelley herself considers this early album as something of a sonic precursor to Real Warmth. “There’s a bit of the bigness of the space,” she says, suggesting the slower pace of post-rock or even a hint of gothic rock. “A bit more reverb, percussion and grandness — it echoes back to Electric Ursa,” she adds. But in terms of the songwriting, the albums are nothing alike. “The focuses have all changed,” says Shelley. “The subjects have all gotten way more complicated. It’s a younger record from a younger writer.” As her albums go along, they get quieter, more confessional. Electric Ursa looks further outward, though the seeds of self-reflection are planted. 7/10 OVER AND EVEN NO QUARTER, 2015 This one marks Salsburg’s first appearance on…

“INBRED” EP  DAUGHTERS OF CAIN, 2021 The final and most fully fledged of the three EPs released as “scenic diversions” during the long gestation of Preacher’s Daughter, with a strong dreampop influence throughout, a touch of bombast and some downright creepiness. Early supporters Lil Aaron and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal guest on “Michelle Pfeiffer” and “God’s Country” respectively, both willing accomplices to Cain’s budding gothic romanticism. 8/10 PREACHER’S DAUGHTER DAUGHTERS OF CAIN, 2022 The debut opus, conceived and developed over several years. Like a Tennessee Williams play with a shoegaze soundtrack, the album follows Ethel Cain’s desperate fate as she flees family violence only to be used and abused, murdered and frozen for later consumption. No true-crime podcast ever sounded this ravishing and atmospheric. 9/10 PERVERTS DAUGHTERS OF CAIN, 2025…

HATE YOUR FRIENDS TAANG!/WORLD SERVICE, 1987 Amid the hardcore and Boston post-punk influences, there’s a potent melodic seam running through the band’s debut album. Vocals and songwriting duties are split between Dando and Ben Deily (who left to become a real-life Don Draper in the ad world). 6/10 IT’S A SHAME ABOUT RAY ATLANTIC, 1992 After several lineup changes and a major-label signing, The Lemonheads, now featuring Juliana Hatfield on bass and backing vocals, make perhaps their best album, a fizzing power-pop delight. It’s J Mascis’s favourite, too. 9/10 COME ON FEEL THE LEMONHEADS ATLANTIC, 1993 The excellent follow-up includes some of Dando’s finest songs, from opener “The Great Big No” to the pedal-steel-assisted “Big Gay Heart”. “Into Your Arms” became their biggest hit. 8/10 CAR BUTTON CLOTH ATLANTIC, 1996…

HEATHEN marked the first collaboration between David Bowie and designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who ended up working on the covers of Bowie’s final four studio albums. Heathen introduced a style and colour palette that defined three of these albums – Reality, featuring an illustration by Rex Ray, is the outlier. Bowie knew Barnbrook from a book he’d designed for Damien Hirst in 1997 and commissioned him to design a book Bowie and Iman did together in 2001. Barnbrook was then asked to help on “Everything with David was direct,” says Barnbrook. “He had an arrangement that the record company wouldn’t see anything until the cover was completed and that certainly made it easier because it was just him, there was nobody involved from marketing. He didn’t want to explain the songs.…

THE sixth – and final – of the era-spanning Bowie boxsets, I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002–2016) comes as a 12CD or 18LP set with a hardback book including previously unseen notes, drawings and handwritten lyrics from Bowie, as well as photos and memorabilia. Here’s a guide to the music contained within. HEATHEN Bowie’s reunion with Visconti saw him record in upstate New York with new collaborators as he set out to forge a modern sound that would sustain him for the rest of his career. MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL Previously unreleased live show spread over four LPs or two CDs, with Bowie and band playing Heathen and Low – plus other choice selections – at Montreux in 2002. REALITY The rapid follow-up to Heathen was a more conventional effort, designed to be…

Royal Festival Hall, London, July 19 AS a core member of two of the greatest Japanese bands of all-time – folk-rockers Happy End and electro-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra – Haruomi Hosono’s legendary status is assured. But his eccentric solo career, pursued between and after his stints with those two landmark groups, has proved to be equally influential. Last year’s Hosono House Revisited found acolytes including Mac DeMarco and John Carroll Kirby reimagining the songs of Hosono’s 1973 debut, an irresistible Canyon-meets-cantina classic that also inspired the naming of Harry Styles’ Harry’s House. Hosono’s solo journey has gone on to encompass everything from pretend Bollywood soundtracks to excursions into ambient and techno music. But the challenge of combining seemingly disparate musical styles and traditions is never something he has agonised…

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EVE ADAMS American Dust BASIN ROCK 8/10 Once upon a time in the lonely American Southwest Following the country-noir mortality musings that shaped her terrific 2021 album Metal Bird, Eve Adams digs deeper into classic saloon-bar Americana here, drawing inspiration from her Oklahoma family roots and current home in the high California desert. From smouldering, jazzy torch songs like “Ask Me” to the exquisitely intertwined close-harmony weepie “Death Valley Forever”, Adams is a high plains drifter of heartache. Arguably the strongest track here is the least typical: the seven-minute “Ricochet”, a mini-movie murder ballad of bluesy waltz-time melancholy that morphs midway through into a shimmering Lynchian dreamscape. Adams is Lana Del Rey in a 10-gallon hat, and this is clearly not her first rodeo. STEPHEN DALTON JEHNNY BETH  You Heartbreaker,…

Shrunken Elvis: “We value songs as much as exploration” How did you work up the material here? SPENCER CULLUM: Mikey [Rich Ruth] usually comes up with the base of it, especially using the drum machine, then we’ll all get together and add parts on top of it and whatnot. We got snowed in really hard in Nashville one winter, and that forced us all to finish the record. RICH RUTH: There’s a blend of these more electronic-leading pieces, and then these more organic, Cluster & Eno ones. I feel like those were ones that Spencer started. There’s always a pulse to your stuff, which sets it apart from most ambient music.  RUTH: We love all the free expression of ’70s German stuff, and the proggier, weirder English folk, but I…

Tav Falco: “All I do with clichés is rub them together until they explode” With such a wide-ranging back catalogue, how did you select the songs for Desire On Ice? We ferreted out those that seemed to resonate today with meaning and lyrical import. Desire On Ice explores thematic areas and seeks to define and heighten collusion with our audience who have also evolved. What drew you to collaborate with particular artists on these new interpretations? Charlie Musselwhite tacitly understands how I came to the experimental from the traditional. All I do with clichés is rub them together until they explode. Bobby Gillespie has expressed a certain kinship with our stance in not allowing professionalism, media market constraints nor virtuosity to get in the way of hurling ourselves into the…

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE & THE MELTING PARAISO UFO La Nòvia (reissue, 2000)  NECIO 9/10 25 years on, Acid Mothers’ finest trip is celebrated anew When La Nòvia was originally released, a quarter of a century ago, it felt like the culmination of the first phase of Acid Mothers Temple’s long, strange exploration of “extreme trip music”. They’d already released a bunch of mind-boggling psych-rock albums where high volume and endless acceleration met the pothead pixie ethos of groups like Gong and Hawkwind; here, though, they dug much further back, drawing from the folk song tradition of Occitania to help connect the dots between the medieval troubadour music head mother Kawabata Makoto loves so much, and the psychedelia they worshipped. It’s still their greatest album, where the heraldic form of the…

Buckingham Nicks (reissue, 1973) RHINO 7/10 TAKE it with a pinch of salt, but it’s a tough time to be a Fleetwood Mac fan. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are still at loggerheads after the guitarist was turfed out of the band in 2018 – Nicks declared she was “no longer willing to work with him”; he suffered a heart attack soon after being fired – and the window has all but shut on a Fleetwood Mac classic lineup reunion now that each member is pushing 80 and Christine McVie has gone. Holograms could be the answer. But before the credits roll on this most enduring rock’n’roll saga, a key chapter in the band’s origin story from a more harmonious time 52 years ago is finally being reissued. Buckingham Nicks,…

“OZZY lived three or four streets away from me, so we were both working class, no money, no transport, not much of a shiny future, but he was hilarious, he had me in stitches laughing all the time with his quick wit and antics. The first time I actually met him he was wearing his dad’s brown work overall, a chimney brush over his shoulder, a shoe on a dog leash and nothing on his bare feet. He was looking to join my band at the time and I immediately recruited him. “The whole band was from Aston in Birmingham and we became closer than brothers. We shared everything we had and that remained true throughout the ’70s. None of us expected to have the success we had and we…

PARIS, 1970 A hands-off 60-minute Yorkshire Television performance doc. Start by enjoying some low-key larks and Brummie muttering; stay for a fiercely dynamic show from Paris. “Let’s hit the roof! There’s someone not clapping – I can see you!” NEVER SAY DIE, 1978 End times for Sabbath and Ozzy, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it on this VHS classic from Hammersmith in June 1978. Old and new sit well side by side on a furiously paced set. “Let’s go!” DON KIRSHNER’S ROCK CONCERT, 1975 Peak Sabbath on this 25-minute US TV fixture. “Hole In The Sky” is revealed as a glam metal monster. NEW YORK PALLADIUM, 1981 “Everybody go crazy!” A bootleg super-8 captures the Blizzard Of Ozz with Randy Rhoads in fiery form. Raw footage, the better to match…

“WE wanted to start anew,” says Frank Fiedler, who co-founded Popol Vuh with classically trained pianist Florian Fricke in 1969. “We were living with the Iron Curtain and the threat of nuclear war, like a Damocles sword over all of us. So we endeavoured to find a way, using extraordinary sounds, to elevate the wellbeing of people. It was like, ‘Come to our world!’” Even next to their German contemporaries on the ’70s kosmische scene, Popol Vuh were unique. Under Fricke’s leadership, they pioneered the use of the new Moog III synthesiser to create mystical electronica that blended world music, ambient textures and experimental sound design. The arrival of Amon Düül II guitarist and percussion player Danny Fichelscher in 1973 signalled a more avant-rock approach, though the music was no…

EVEN amid Elektra’s wildly diverse roster, David Ackles was something of an anomaly. A former child actor and private eye, he’d never performed solo in public prior to joining the label. He favoured piano over guitar, sang in a rich baritone and wrote intensely dramatic pieces partly informed by the works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. “His albums were like intimate musicals”, noted Elektra boss Jac Holzman. 1968 debut David Ackles was lauded by critics and peers alike, but failed to find an audience. A similar fate befell striking followup Subway To The Country. Ackles pressed on regardless. By August 1970, he found himself sharing a bill at the Troubadour in Los Angeles with committed Ackles fan Elton John, then making his live Stateside debut. Ackles was already planning…

“HE WANTED TO CHANGE EVERYTHING – A WHOLE NEW BAND” ALL albums begin with a phone call. David called me up and said he wanted to make a new album and he had some radical ideas for it. It wouldn’t be like anything else he had ever done. He might take some of the ideas that we’d used when we worked together on Scary Monsters and the other records, but it was really going to be a new thing. We had left each other on good terms after Scary Monsters, so I was surprised when I didn’t hear from him for such a long time. But I always gave my blessing if he wanted to work with another producer. I knew I didn’t own him exclusively and we had been…

DAVID Bowie wanted to record Heathen with different musicians, but when it came to touring he turned to familiar faces – Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard on guitar, Mark Plati on bass, a rhythm section of Gail Ann Dorsey and Sterling Campbell, and the redoubtable Mike Garson on piano. The band had been told by Bowie he would take them on the road even though they weren’t on the record, but that didn’t make missing the studio sessions any easier. “Every album I didn’t record with him, I got a twinge,” says Garson. “Even as I talk about it now, I’m twingeing. But David’s integrity was so high that if he didn’t hear me in his inner ear when making an album, that was all that mattered. It wasn’t about…

LONDON has many stations for David Bowie pilgrims. There are his childhood homes in Brixton and Bromley. There are haunts in Beckenham such as the site of Haddon Hall where he began to define his creativity. There’s the Soho studio where Ziggy Stardust was born. To this list we can now add the David Bowie Centre, which will open at the V&A East Storehouse in September at the former Olympic Park in Hackney. This is the new permanent home for Bowie’s personal archive of more than 90,000 objects, including instruments, costumes, props and thousands of notebooks, photographs and letters detailing the birth of classic albums and tours as well as plans for numerous unrealised projects. “I have always loved his music, but I have built such an appreciation for Bowie’s…

SOMEWHERE YOU FEEL FREE WARNER 7/10 RELEASED the same year that Kurt Cobain took his own life and Johnny Cash launched country’s greatest comeback, Wildflowers was a landmark album for Tom Petty, establishing him as a middle-aged hitmaker still relevant during grunge’s heyday. Rather than embrace distorted guitars or looped drumbeats, he and co-producer Rick Rubin stripped his sound down to its most basic elements: rock, blues, folk and R&B, complemented with ’60s pop flourishes and elaborate, albeit subtle orchestrations courtesy of composer Michael Kamen. Thirty years later it has become his most beloved album – no small feat considering his remarkable catalogue – and the subject of the excellent 2020 boxset, Wildflowers & All The Rest. Petty wrote some amazing songs whose implications he would only grasp much later,…

DAVE COUSINS Long-standing Strawbs skipper (1940–2025) LIKE many from his skiffle generation, West Londoner Dave Cousins was initially inspired by Lonnie Donegan’s version of “Rock Island Line”, though it was American blues, R&B and bluegrass that exerted a greater pull. Discovering the music of Flatt & Scruggs on a Newport Festival compilation had a particularly profound impact, prompting him to start working out licks on banjo. Cousins’ proficiency led him to co-found bluegrass outfit the Strawberry Hill Boys in 1964, finding regular gigs on the capital’s folk circuit. Within three years they’d become the Strawbs. “Our first influences were derived from the Harry Smith collection,” Cousins told interviewer Roch Parisien in 2010, citing 1952’s Anthology Of American Folk Music. “I got my guitar tunings from banjo tunings and that’s what…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by David Bowie. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win £50 of Rough Trade vouchers to spend online. Closing date: Thurs, Sept 11, 2025. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1 Paul Weller, the guy who went from The Jam to The Style Council to solo (3-11) 9 Incorrectly granted an album to The Fall (7)  10 “I pictured a _______, you held it in your hands”, from The Waterboys’ “The Whole Of The Moon” (7) 11 “Oh no, don’t say it’s true”, 1980 (5-2-5) 14+6D Leonie’s arrangement of a Neil Young album (2-5)  15 (See 17…

THE UPSETTERS Blackboard Jungle Dub UPSETTER, 1973 If we’re talking epiphany moments, I’ll start with “Blackboard Jungle Dub Version 1” [AKA “Black Panta”] by Lee Perry, because it was just so radical – and it still is. Obviously he’s used the “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” bassline and made it into a dub tune. But the use of the stereo is so drastic. You’ve got the drums on one side and Lee doing animal noises through a delay unit on the other. It’s absolutely as vicious as anything. I think I heard it first on a mono PA at the Newlands Club in High Wycombe, where I started DJing as a 13-year-old kid in the afternoons. But the first time I heard it on a stereo unit, I was like,…

HAYDEN PEDIGO “He’s an instrumental guitarist – a little bit John Fahey, a little bit Ry Cooder – but he’s very charismatic, even though he’s not singing. It’s just the way he plays guitar. He’s got this very country, authentically Texas sort of feel, but there’s also a bit of jazz in there as well. I saw him at South By Southwest around three years ago and he was incredible. He also ran to be a politician in Amarillo – there’s a film about it called Kid Candidate. So that makes him even more interesting.” MOHAMMAD SYFKHAN “He’s a bouzouki player who fled Syria after Islamic State killed one of his sons, and he settled in Ireland and started making music there. He plays Kurdish traditional songs with an electronic…

VARIOUS ARTISTS 2015–2025 Les Disques Bongo Joe: 10 Years of Sonic Explorations BONGO JOE 8/10 Adventurous Swiss label celebrates a decade of transglobal underground sounds MARKING its 10th anniversary with this gloriously eclectic compilation, the Geneva-based label, record store and community café Bongo Joe began with the commendable mission statement of dirtying up the Swiss city’s clinically clean, notoriously dull image. Behind the banks, designer watch stores and NGO institutions, argue label co-founders Cyril Yeterian and Vincent Bertholet, lies a vibrant underground community full of musical exiles, diaspora bands, squat party scenes and fertile cultural collisions. As befits a label named after a cult outsider artist, Florida-born street musician George “Bongo Joe” Coleman, these crate-digging connoisseurs have also curated adventurous, obscure and overlooked artists from across the globe. Paying little heed…

“OZZY was a very straightforward, very pleasant man, easy to work with. He was always wanting to learn, always worked hard, gave everything onstage. His voice was the selling point of [Black Sabbath], it was a very honest voice. He didn’t have any affectations, he didn’t pretend to do anything, he just opened his mouth and bellowed. It seemed to start somewhere in the pit of the stomach and come out a fully fledged roar. “At the beginning, I didn’t like the name Earth. I came up with a load of blues names and they all hated those; they came up with a load of names in whatever style and I hated those. We had regular weekly meetings. Then Geezer Butler said, ‘I’ve got it… Black Sabbath.’ There was a…

DAVID ACKLES ELEKTRA, 1968 A late bloomer, Ackles was 31 when he made this exquisite studio debut, backed by labelmates including future Rhinoceros members. Stately outcast tale “Down River” is masterful, eclipsed only by sweeping mini-epic “The Road To Cairo”. 9/10 SUBWAY TO THE COUNTRY  ELEKTRA, 1970 Ackles’ theatrical grounding is evident on the Brecht/Weilllike “Main Line Saloon” and “Inmates Of The Institution”, offset by jazz-fluid beauty “Woman River” and the countrified, ever-so-dark “Cabin On The Mountain”. 8/10 AMERICAN GOTHIC  ELEKTRA, 1972 A hands-down masterpiece, recorded in London with producer Bernie Taupin and string conductor Robert Kirby. Vividly imaginative portraits of Americana dominate, from the astonishing title track to boho-jazz fever dream “Oh, California!” 10/10 FIVE & DIME COLUMBIA, 1973 Post-Elektra, Ackles’ fourth is a more pared-back affair, though no…

“KEITH and I sparred for a while and then later he told me had to give me 20 years of that ‘because you were one of Marlon’s friends’ – as simple as that. He had to see if I was gonna stick around. ‘I’ve been watching you from afar,’ he told me. Keith and I finally came to a truce. He’s very cool. He taught me how to smoke a joint where you do this pot yoga, where you get all the alveoli opened up. Then he grabbed his Roman sword off the wall and held it to my neck: ‘You’re not on television now, man, I’d just as soon slit your fucking throat and throw you in the fucking moat!’ And my 10-year-old self was like, ‘This is the…

PERHAPS understandably, Matt Chamberlain was nervous when he turned up for the first session at Allaire studio. David Bowie was sitting on a sofa, casually reading a book and smoking a cigarette, just a few metres away from Chamberlain’s kit, while the drummer tried to nail the opening song. Fortunately, he got it right. “When we broke to have lunch, David put his arm around me and said something like, ‘Well, it’s lucky you can play drums. I guess we’ll keep you,’” says Chamberlain. For the initial tracking of Heathen, it was just Bowie, Visconti and Chamberlain. The trio soon developed a routine. Bowie, who was staying with Iman and their one-year-old daughter Lexi, rose early to play with the baby and then work on ideas with Visconti. Chamberlain would…

WHEN New Yorker Glenn Max got the dream job of programming the South Bank’s Meltdown festival, the first name on his wishlist was David Bowie. A letter was despatched, but Max got lucky when he ran into Bowie and Iman at a restaurant in SoHo in autumn 2000. “I had to take my chance,” says Max, who lives in LA and records music as Vanderwolf. “It was 11am and, delightfully, he was eating a bowl of pasta. Iman wasn’t all that thrilled to see me, so I kept it quick.” The personal touch worked. Bowie gave his consent, but got sidetracked when Virgin turned down Toy. Max tried again the following year. Bowie agreed but nothing was signed and the clock was ticking. “This was how David Bowie saved my…

BST Hyde Park, London, July 12 IT’S a strawberries and cream dream of an English midsummer evening as Stevie Wonder shuffles onstage, guided by his daughter Aisha and his son Kailand. Spiffed up in a sparkling white Nehru jacket, he looks more than ever like a visiting dignitary, a minister of culture from Wakanda or Sun Ra’s Saturn or George Clinton’s Chocolate City. There are 60,000 in Hyde Park tonight and it’s fair to say that Stevie has every one of them in the palm of his hand for the next three hours. His own posse is almost as large – Aisha and Kailand return for their own songs later, while a couple of other daughters, Sophia and Zaiah, appear for a jubilant, celebratory “Happy Birthday”. He even teases an…

IN The Colonel And The King, Peter Guralnick – the great chronicler of the life of Elvis Presley – tells a tale about the 80th birthday party of Colonel Tom Parker. The event took place at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1989. At the end of the evening, Guralnick went to thank Presley’s former manager and found him “surrounded by various images of elephants, including a giant ice sculpture behind him, tusked and trumpeting, with Sam Phillips standing just to his left”. An intense discussion was underway about the events surrounding the sale of Elvis’s contract in 1955. Phillips – who released Presley’s first records on his label, Sun – and Parker were arguing the toss. “The discussion was proceeding not week by week,” Guralnick writes, “not day by day,…