Table of contents for March 2026 in UNCUT

Watch that man! David Bowie is the inaugural subject of our new Uncut Greats series, which will tell the life story of Uncut’s pantheon of artists via excellent new writing, ranked reviews and classic features. The Bowie edition is in shops now or available to order direct from us at shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Take it on faith, take it to the heart: the 148-page Deluxe Edition of our Ultimate Music Guide to Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers is out on February 13. There’s also an updated version of Ultimate Record Collection: Curated By Sleaford Mods due on February 20. You know where the shop is, don’t ya?… Club Uncut is back! After putting on early UK shows by the likes of The War On Drugs, Phosphorescent and Joan As Police Woman in…

Somebody Tried To Sell Me A Bridge ORANGEFIELD 8/10 AS they enter their ninth decades, it’s not surprising that some of those musicians who grew up learning the foreign language of the blues should feel like returning to the source of all they became. Dylan nodded to that urge with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. The Stones went all out with Blue & Lonesome. Now Van Morrison, never reluctant to acknowledge his debt, gives us an 80-minute, 20-song set largely made up of material from artists he was listening to and learning from in his Belfast teens. Future historians will marvel at the earnest diligence with which, in the British Isles, a generation took to singing about mojos and king bees and hoochie coochie men, achieving enough authenticity to convince their young…

SONIC YOUTH “SHAKING HELL” (CONFUSION IS SEX, 1983) Written as a commission for Dan Graham’s film Rock My Religion, this is the Kim Gordon Rosetta Stone. Over a corroded bassline, she doesn’t sing so much as invoke a possession, shifting from a breathy whisper to a feral shriek (“I’d like to shake off this skin!”). SONIC YOUTH “THE SPRAWL” (DAYDREAM NATION, 1988) A masterclass in detached cool. Inspired by the fiction of Denis Johnson, Gordon delivers a spoken-word drift regarding the flatness of suburban life, bridging the gap between art-gallery intellectual and punk icon, and showing she could command a song without ever raising her voice. FREE KITTEN “NEVER GONNA SLEEP” (SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION, 1997) While Sonic Youth became festival headliners, Gordon kept it lo-fi. On this messy, bratty, and unpolished…

EVEN amid the Grateful Dead, who were all anarchists doing their own thing, Bob was idiosyncratic. As a young folk guitarist about to join The Warlocks in 1965, he decided to study [pianist] McCoy Tyner’s left hand as preparation. That’s Bobby. In his own way, he was quite brilliant. I went to my first Grateful Dead show in October of 1972. I remember Bobby being a little more physically emotive than Phil and Garcia, who pretty much stood still and played. There was this youthful quality to him that lasted well into his years. Garcia was cynical, Phil was intellectual and Bobby expressed things that seemed more benign, yet were very thoughtful. He was a dreamer, and he dreamt his way through a whole lot of music. When Garcia invited…

AGE DONʼT MEAN A THING BIG LEGAL MESS/FAT POSSUM, 2016 Finley’s debut album, recorded at the age of 62, served up a classic Memphis soul sound, including a cover of the Bread hit “Make It With You”. 7/10 GOINʼ PLATINUM! EASY EYE SOUND, 2017 With the help of producer Dan Auerbach’s songbook and Nashville’s finest session musicians, Finley broadened his musical palette to include R&B stompers and retro funk boogies. 8/10 SHARECROPPERʼS SON EASY EYE SOUND, 2021 Finley returned to songwriting duties and a rootsier sound on this outstanding and deeply autobiographical soul and blues record. 9/10 BLACK BAYOU EASY EYE SOUND, 2023 An album with a darker, swampier edge as Finley’s charismatic voice offered up tall tales in the Southern Gothic tradition. 8/10 HALLELUJAH! DONʼT LET THE DEVIL FOOL…

LOOP RECORDED 1964 This experimental piece – seven minutes of lo-fi, blown-out scree that seems to invent drone metal – was recorded by John Cale before the Velvets but released with a Warhol-edited issue of Aspen magazine in December 1966. THE OSTRICH RECORDED 1964 “OK, I want everybody to settle down, we got something new we’re gonna show you…” So begins Lou Reed’s greatest song for the low-rent Pickwick Records. With its troglodyte riff, droning guitars and screaming, it’s pretty much the first Velvets track. I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN (DEMO) RECORDED 1965 This May ’65 demo cut by Reed and Cale is swinging country-folk, somewhere between Dylan and ancient Delta blues. The vibe is reminiscent of Downtown rebels The Fugs, and Cale’s harmonies are eerie and European, but the…

HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by The Velvet Underground. 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: Thursday, Feb 26, 2026. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+1D Honestly, this sounds just like Manic Street Preachers. What do you reckon, honestly? (4-2-2-5-4-2-5) 8 “Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the _____ tender”, from Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender” (5) 9 Trump’s wok stirs up something from Dry Cleaning (9) 11 US industrial metal band with a view of the Dark Side Of The Spoon (8) 13 They may or may…

BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY We Are Together Again DOMINO If The Purple Bird was the Nashville album, this is very much the Louisville album – a warm, intimate gathering of friends and family: “The bathtub needs draining/But I’m not complaining…” AL GREEN “I Found A Reason” FAT POSSUM Yes, as in the Velvet Underground song! Perfectly timed for our cover story, the Reverend turns Lou’s wispy doo-wop tribute into a string-drenched Memphis soul showstopper. TINARIWEN Hoggar WEDGE A poignant rallying of the Tuareg rock tribe, with members of Imarhan, Terakaft and Tamikrest all involved. But there’s still room for guests from Sudan (Sulafa Elyas) and Sweden (José González). ANDREW WASYLYK Irreparable Parables CLAY PIPE MUSIC/STATE 51 Wintry and wondrous chamber-pop fantasias, elevated by a smattering of simpático vocalists including Gruff Rhys,…

“The in-between stuff is what I was interested in” FOR a guitarist who has bagged 20 Grammy awards in a staggering 10 different categories, it’s perhaps not surprising to discover that Pat Metheny is largely baffled by the concept of genre. “It’s always been kind of mysterious to me,” he confesses down the line from upstate New York. “What is rock? What is pop? What is jazz? If I think of the spectrum of all the sounds that human beings could possibly make, it is interesting to me how it’s so tightly clustered around a very tiny part of that spectrum that has to do with somebody playing the root on one, somebody smacking the crap out of two, maybe something on three, and then somebody smacking the crap out…

ALTIN GÜN Garip GLITTERBEAT 7/10 Anatolian rockers pay tribute to key influence For their sixth effort, the Amsterdam-based quintet choose to toast the legacy of late Turkish folk master Neşet Ertaş, whose music provided the soundtrack to lead singer Erdinç Eçevit’s childhood. Rooted in ashik tradition, Ertaş’ songs are reimagined in numerous ways here, from “Niğde Bağları”’s flowing grooves and the mod-ish buzz of “Zülüf Dökülmüş Yüze” to the lovely, gently symphonic “Suçum Nedir”, one of several tracks featuring the Stockholm Studio Orchestra. Altın Gün’s more psychedelic tendencies are less overt this time around, though there’s still plenty to enjoy, not least synth-led outlier “Bir Nazar Eyeldim”. ROB HUGHES APPARAT A Hum Of Maybe MUTE 6/10 Deluxe electronica meets mushy emo-pop balladry Berlin-based electronic composer Sascha Ring has been keeping…

TORI AMOS Strange Little Girls (reissue, 2001) RHINO 7/10 Her typically unorthodox jukebox favourites When you need to deliver a contract-fulfilling album to get out of a record deal, a set of paint-by-numbers covers is a conventional kiss-off. Yet Tori Amos was never one to do anything quite so boringly predictable, so she gave her collection a twist. Released in 2001, Strange Little Girls came in six different album sleeves, each featuring Amos dressed as a different character inspired by the songs. The selection inside was equally surprising, with covers of songs by Eminem and Slayer alongside more conventionally canonical fare such as “Heart Of Gold”, “I Don’t Like Mondays” and “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, all skewed from their original male points of view. Extras: 7/10. The original dozen…

KELAN PHIL COHRAN & LEGACY African Skies (reissue, 1993) LISTENING POSITION 9/10 Essential reissue of divine music composed to accompany a sky show at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium MANY talents orbited in and around the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), but trumpeter, composer and educator Kelan Phil Cohran is one of the most fascinating. Born in 1927, he grew up in the American South and cut his teeth playing with pianist-bandleader Jay McShann and in a military band after being conscripted in 1950. By 1959 he had moved to Chicago, where he met John Gilmore, one of the primary saxophonists in the Arkestra, who led the band for two years after Sun Ra’s death until his own in 1995. Cohran was drawn to…

JULIA CAFRITZ (PUSSY GALORE, FREE KITTEN) “I’VE been thinking about the differences between how Kim and I worked in Free Kitten, and how she operates now. I feel like Kim really works like Kim, no matter who her collaborators are. She has a lot of confidence, whereas I have a lot of bravado. She has a deep willingness to just jump in and see what happens. It was both incredibly freeing and challenging to work with her in Free Kitten. She was so ‘loosey-goosey’. I’d be the one saying, ‘No, we’re going to learn this song and practise.’ But she wasn’t tethered to that process.” TONY OURSLER (MULTIMEDIA ARTIST) “I didn’t know Kim wanted to perform when I first met her. I remember we talked quite a bit about the…

ARETHA FRANKLIN “I just love the way she expresses herself in lines like ‘Ain’t no way for me to love you, if you won’t let me…’ or ‘I don’t want nobody, sitting around me and my man…’” ISAAC HAYES “He brought rock’n’roll into the church, or took the church to the juke joint, whichever way you want to put it.” JAMES BROWN “I love James Brown and I love singing his songs. Doing ‘I Feel Good’ is a chance to show everybody the bottom of your shoes.” RAY CHARLES “When I first went blind, I was thinking of guys like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. If they were born blind and could go on and do everything they’ve done, then I knew I’d be OK.” AL GREEN “An incredible voice,…

“I DON’T think there has ever been a film about Jeff that matched him on any level,” says filmmaker Amy Berg. “I wanted to create an immersive experience for everyone.” The film assembles childhood photos, unseen footage, Buckley’s freewheeling journals and copious voicemail messages which, for ex-girlfriend Rebecca Moore, were too painful to play back until now. “I still had this wall up of ‘You’ll never be able to listen to those things. You’ll never be able to even listen to his songs again’,” she says. “I thank the film for forcing me out of that. Mostly I’m happy for Jeff, because his voice is the throughline in his scribbles and musings, and his music is the driving force to him telling his own story.” In a cathartic scene, Berg…

“I DON’T think Lou had any resentment about anything that happened in 1966. Towards the end [of Lou’s life] I remember he got [2013’s] White Light/White Heat Super Deluxe Edition in the mail. He’s like, ‘What the hell is this?’ He’s pissed they did this without him. He puts it on and he just flips from being angry to feeling this nostalgia for the moment captured on tape. He goes over to his computer and starts writing an email to John Cale, just complimenting his playing. They weren’t in regular touch, but this wasn’t the first time he had just written to him out of the blue, and it was very warm – the tone was to the effect of ‘hope you’re doing well’. “Lou didn’t really like to talk about…

“SLIM’S whole sound was mysterious,” says Tommy Stinson of guitarist Bob ‘Slim’ Dunlap, his former bandmate in The Replacements. “You’d see him playing and wonder, ‘Where is that coming from?’ He’d mess with electronics and make his own effects pedals. He was like the old genius uncle, with all kinds of stuff going on. I always loved that about Slim.” Fifteen years Stinson’s senior, Dunlap was a key figure in Minneapolis’s emergent independent scene of the late ’70s. Local entrepreneur Peter Jesperson (who would later sign and manage The Replacements) was inspired to start the Twin/Tone label in 1977 as an outlet for R&B combo Thumbs Up, featuring Dunlap and powerhouse soul shouter Curtiss A. The duo then transitioned into the punky Spooks. By the time Paul Westerberg asked him…

1 THE STUDIO 68! WITH DANI TURNER Funky People This month we kick off with a raging rock’n’roll cut from the reformed Studio 68!, early-’90s mod revivalists, and Devon singer Dani Turner. There’s a definite air of Betty Davis to Turner’s raw vocals, and a marvellous Funkadelic-go-freakbeat vibe to the music from this revived group. 2 THE DELINES The Meter Keeps Ticking Willy Vlautin’s Portland band return with The Set Up, their most cinematic, loosest album yet. It could almost be a soundtrack to one of Vlautin’s novels, perhaps the new The Left And The Lucky, with a varied mix of spoken word, delicate instrumentals and soulful songs such as this standout. 3 ALTIN GÜN Öldürme Beni Garip is the first LP to be released by these Amsterdam-based Anatolian explorers…

“I shed my skin/The end is the beginning” The Mountain KONG IN TV they talk of the “anthology series”: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales Of The Unexpected, Inside No 9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits – Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes – as “anthology groups”: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song. Gorillaz are, of course, the anthology group ne plus ultra. Just two threads hold the project together. One is the punky, cartoonish artwork of Jamie Hewlett; the other is the anything-goes sonic adventurism…

BEGGAR WEEDS Tragedy In US History STROLLING BONES 8/10 Unsung Florida trio reissue their small catalogue, featuring Michael Stipe THE Beggar Weeds were three young men from Jacksonville, Florida, who spent their early twenties touring the country and making sense of a cockeyed world. That makes them no different from thousands of other underground bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they made that quest for meaning the foundation for their small catalogue – just a dozen or so recorded songs that sound as edgy and cathartic now as they did 30 years ago. On “Graduating”, a coming-of-age rumination with an excitable beat and pinprick guitars, they struggle to reconcile their rootless rock’n’roll existence with the roles they’re expected to play. “I got a job working with my…

“THERE are ideas that Weir has had that I would never have had,” Jerry Garcia said in 1981 about his Grateful Dead bandmate, the late Bob Weir. “He’s an extraordinarily gifted guitar player, in a world full of people who sound like each other… With Weir, I have a real hard time recognising any influences in his playing.” Garcia’s observation, reflecting on a musical relationship that, at that point, spanned several decades, cuts to the core of what made Weir such an essential element in the Dead’s unique chemistry. Weir passed away on January 10 from underlying lung issues, having recently been diagnosed with, and beaten, cancer. For those of us removed from the immediate Dead orbit, it’s possible to read this loss as something close to a definitive end…

BORN CROSS-EYED ANTHEM OF THE SUN, 1968 Weir’s first solo song to be recorded by the Dead. A typically cryptic reflection on feelin’ groovy and lookin’ fine. The non-sequitur title and elliptical melody are echoed in the line, “Fuzzy then and still so obscure…” SUGAR MAGNOLIA AMERICAN BEAUTY, 1970 Possibly the most winsome item in the Dead’s entire catalogue. Written about Weir’s then girlfriend Frankie, who “waits backstage while I sing to you”.The “Sunshine, daydream” coda, often extended in live performances, was not played for an entire week when promoter Bill Graham died. TRUCKIN’ AMERICAN BEAUTY, 1970 One of the most emblematic of Dead songs, a road anthem befitting this most travelled of touring bands. Contains the legendary line, “Lately it occurs to me/What a long, strange trip it’s been”.…

THE road to Bernice is littered with roadkill and burst tyres. Highway 167 runs straight through this tiny town in north Louisiana, where the street numbers don’t make it out of single digits. Built around a sawmill in 1899, fewer than 2,000 people now call it home. As landmarks go, there’s a post office, a water tower painted with the face of the Tin Man from The Wizard Of Oz and a black metal plaque, down near the Baptist church and the liquor store, bearing the name and biography of an “old school, guitar slingin’ blues and soul man” named Robert Finley. “I’m just glad I’m here to see it,” says Bernice’s most famous resident. “Most times you see a monument like that, it’s in the graveyard.” A couple of…

“I never the lead singer and I didn’t write that many songs, but The Temptations has always been my group,” says Otis Williams. “Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson always said if there was no Otis Williams, there would be no Temptations. Smokey used to call me ‘Oak’ – I was the big tree at the centre. I wasn’t the falsetto or the baritone, I was right in the middle, the glue holding everything together.” Through numerous lineup changes, 30 members and some reunions, The Temptations produced several charismatic frontmen – David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Dennis Edwards – but it was Williams who founded pop music’s greatest boyband in 1960 and who still, at the age of 83, tours with an incarnation of the group. Williams has also become the band’s…

SKETCHES FOR MY SWEETHEART THE DRUNK COLUMBIA, 1998 The Verlaine sessions and subsequent Buckley demos provide sometimes satisfying blueprints for Grace’s fantasy studio sequel. 8/10 LIVE À L’OLYMPIA SONY INTERNATIONAL, 2001 The most valuable of endless live albums includes Nina Simone’s “That’s All I Ask” amid landmark Paris shows, adding a bonus duet with Azerbaijani Mugham singer Alim Qasimov, the stuff of Buckley’s Qawwali-adjacent dreams. 7/10 SO REAL: SONGS FROM JEFF BUCKLEY COLUMBIA, 2007 Best of Buckley’s now improbably extensive discography, including an unreleased cover of The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over”. 7/10…

“THE first time I went away it was a confluence of things. I was wanted as a person of interest in a murder that occurred on the Upper West Side. I was not in school and they couldn’t find my mother, who was living on the street, and when they found my father, he hadn’t seen me. Then I happen to be in one of the biggest narcotics busts in the history of the US. I talked my way out of it, saying I was just visiting the wife of the drug dealer. But the minute they entered my name in the report at the station, my name came up in 14 different ways, as a person they were very interested in talking to, as a missing person. I was…

Subscriptions FROM £15 Reasons to subscribe: • Save on the shop price • Never miss an issue • Delivered directly to your door OVER 45 TITLES TO CHOOSE FROM GO TO SHOP.KELSEY.CO.UK/NY26AD SCAN THE QR CODE AND GO DIRECTLY CALL 01959 543 747 AND QUOTE 'NY26AD' Terms & Conditions: Lines are open Mon-Fri 8.30am to 5pm. Calls are charged at your standard network rate UK customers only. Offers end 31st March 2026…

ON her first trip to New York in February 1977, Adele Bertei finds herself in the West Village apartment of gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs. A visitor from Cleveland, Bertei has been gifted a round-trip ticket by her friend Peter Laughner. Bangs’ apartment is exactly as you’d expect: littered with pizza boxes, beer cans, typed pages, pharmaceuticals. On that first night, they head to CBGB to see the Ramones. Bertei – no slouch with the critical capsule review herself – notes that Joey Ramone is like “Ronnie Spector with a head cold”. Then it’s back to Lester’s place, where the critic digs out his copy of Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady, and the record plays out into the darkness, “the hums sounding like so many yellow…

CHRIS REA Reluctant blues-rock superstar (1951–2025) CHRIS Rea was forever drawn to the road, calling it “a metaphor for where we’re going in life”. It was also, one way or another, a means of inspiration. “Driving Home For Christmas” was conceived in December 1978, when the singer and guitarist was returning to Middlesbrough from London, only to get caught in snowbound traffic. Clocking his miserable fellow motorists, Rea began singing the title in jest. Similarly, 1989’s “The Road To Hell” emerged after being stuck on the M4-M25 interchange during rush hour. Fearful of being saddled with a signature festive song, Rea hadn’t initially wanted “Driving Home For Christmas” to be released at all – a saga that was indicative of his difficult relationship with the music business. The title of…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Performance OST WARNER BROS, 1970 When I was 15, I was really interested in hippies, and curious about what was happening from the remnants of the ’60s. I’d read about hippies and Haight-Ashbury stuff in The Observer colour supplement and I thought it all looked like a great escape. I got the Performance soundtrack when it came out: I loved all the swirliness, the drugginess of some of the tracks, and then the more hardcore rock tracks. “The Hashishin” [featuring Ry Cooder and Buffy Sainte-Marie], “Performance” [with Merry Clayton and Bernard Krause] and The Last Poets tracks were favourites, but I loved them all. I only had a mono Bush record player in my room and all the tracks sounded great. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO The Velvet…