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The ‘Land Of Hope And Dreams’ tour will see Springsteen joined by Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello at every date, with the tour set to run up until a show in Washington DC on May 27. See the full list of dates here and find any remaining tickets here.

Announcing the tour, Springsteen said: “We are living through dark, disturbing and dangerous times, but do not despair – the cavalry is coming!”

“We will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America – American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream – all of which are under attack by our wannabe king and his rogue government in Washington, D.C. Everyone, regardless of where you stand or what you believe in, is welcome – so come on out and join the United Free Republic of E Street Nation for an American spring of Rock ‘n’ Rebellion! I’ll see you there!”

The January show in Minneapolis was billed as “a concert of solidarity and resistance to defend Minnesota”, and it saw Morello join Springsteen for a guitar-shredding version of ‘The Ghost Of Tom Joad’, as well as a set of his own, made up of Rage and Audioslave classics.

As their numerous punk-era brushes with authority signposted, The Stranglers have always ploughed their own furrow. Here, an intriguing, masterfully restrained setlist showcases how effectively the “Meninblack” have ceaselessly reinvented themselves yet always sounded inimitably, incorrigibly like The Stranglers.

There’s playful electro-pop (“Thrown Away”, “Pin-Up”), gorgeously gentle balladry (“Strange Little Girl”), and the evergreen “Golden Brown”, which patented the unlikely Top 3 formula of a song reputedly about heroin, performed in waltz time.

“Was It You?” and “Always The Sun”’s ruminations on authoritarianism and division are arguably even more relevant now. On the evening that the Duke Of York relinquishes his titles, Warne pointedly updates “Peaches” to observe: “I can think of worse places to be… like in Prince Andrews’s head.”

Meanwhile, the newest stuff sounds fabulous: brooding dark epics laced with reggae, chamber pop or orchestral-type sections, which show their inventiveness is ongoing. Although their catalogue is rich enough for them to ignore big hitters including “Walk On By” and “Nice ’N’ Sleazy” in favour of 1977’s “Mean To Me” – a Feelgoods-y romp performed for only the third time in their career – the last 25 minutes include a quartet of copper-bottomed classics.

Throughout, former punk ‘enfant terrible’ Burnel seems unusually wistful, as if realising that now, this late in the day, each moment must be savoured. Warne is obviously joking when he quips “See you in another 51 years”, but with over half a century on the clock, The Stranglers are in formidably fine fettle.

THE STRANGLERS SET LIST:
Goodbye Toulouse
Straighten Out
Was It You?
Skin Deep
15 Steps
5 Minutes
Tramp
Instead Of This
Strange Little Girl
Golden Brown
Thrown Away
Pin Up
Peaches
Mercury Rising
White Stallion
Dead Ringer
Breathe
Something Better Change
Duchess
Hanging Around
ENCORE
Always The Sun
Mean To Me
No More Heroes

BUZZCOCKS SET LIST
What Do I Get?
I Don’t Mind
Promises
Senses Out Of Control
Sick City Sometimes
Why Can’t I Touch It?
Destination Zero
Orgasm Addict
Manchester Rain
Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have?)
Harmony In My Head

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On its release, NME rated the album 9/10 and wrote: “Meet the new year, same as the old year. Radicalism doesn’t pay, complacency’s at an all-time high, so keep your head down, smile for the cameras, mind your language and stick to the Third Way. The music scene’s not so hot, either. That we could do with a fully plugged-in, turned-on, fucked-off Primal Scream at this point is hardly front-page news; for ‘Exterminator’ to pulverise the senses with quite such righteous, incendiary beauty most definitely is.”

The record went on to be named by NME as the second-best album of 2000, it picked up the Best Album award at the 2001 NME Awards and later landed at Number Three in our Albums of the Decade list.

Primal Scream remain politically outspoken to this day, recently joining hundreds of other artists in joining the No Music For Genocide campaign, a cultural boycott in which musicians pull their work from major streaming platforms in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

They also called on Keir Starmer to “end UK complicity” in the Gaza offensive this summer, and are set to play at the ‘Gig For Gaza’ event at London’s Troxy on October 17.

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Springsteen would make another speech against the current US administration on the second night of his Manchester dates, after which Trump called for a “major investigation” into the artist and other musicians who supported Kamala Harris. In late May, he would also share fake a clip of himself attacking Springsteen with a golf ball.

In June, the music legend would continue publicly criticising Trump, calling him a “moron” in an interview with The New York Times and condemning the current political climate by telling The Times: “I haven’t lived through a time like this in my entire life and I’m 75 years-old.”

Reaction inside the stadium at the US Open as President Trump is shown on the Jumbotron during the national anthem – pic.twitter.com/c8aghuUtPQ

— Olivia Rubin (@OliviaRubinABC) September 7, 2025

While neither man came face-to-face at The US Open, Trump appeared to be confronted by boos from the crowd when appearing publicly for the national anthem. The footage was censored on some television networks, but shared on social media.

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As Cosmopolitan reports, some criticism also came from pop musician King Princess in a TikTok video. While King Princess did not name Betty Who, fans are largely speculating that the video is about Betty, as it repeats the topics discussed in the controversial podcast episode.

“Date a man, it’s not a big deal,” they said in the TikTok. “But why are you on a podcast talking about it? It’s not an interesting narrative. We live in a country where our rights are being stripped from us every day, and you think it’s important to get on a podcast and talk about how hard it is to be in a heteronormative relationship? Diva!”

@kingprincess

♬ Girls – King Princess

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Their joint performance of ‘Atlantic City’ comes almost a year after they first performed the track together in Philadelphia last August. During the August 2024 performance, they also performed their collaboration ‘Sandpaper’, which appeared on Bryan’s July 2024 album ‘The Great American Bar Scene’.

In late June this year, Bryan headlined BST Hyde Park, where he was supported by Dermot Kennedy, Mt. Joy, Gabrielle Aplin, Willow Avalon, Ole 60, Noeline Hofmann, recent NME cover star Waylon Wyatt, Aaron Rowe and Nadia Kadek.

During his BST Hyde Park performance, Bryan invited a persistent fan and TikTok user onstage to play ‘Heading South’ with him. The moment came after the fan made daily viral posts asking the ‘Nine Ball’ singer if he could join him on stage.

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Cornell’s former bandmate Thayil added: “I’m super honored to record alongside all the amazing musicians appearing on the King Ultramega project. I’m equally proud that it celebrates Soundgarden in this tribute to the songwriting of Chris. Ultra-admirably, everyone’s participation is supporting the work of the MusiCares Foundation.”

Soundgarden’s Ben Shepherd recently shared an update on the band’s final album with Chris Cornell, which they had been working on at the time of his death, suggesting that they’re finally back to working on songs from the unreleased project.

Soundgarden have also been announced as inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year. Following the announcement of their impending induction, Thayil shared an update on finding a vocalist to fill in for Chris Cornell at the ceremony in November.

Thayil said several names have come up for a potential replacement, but he’s keeping tight-lipped for now: “Some suggestions have come out; I’m not prepared to share that, but I’ll just say it’s a higher bar than the usual composite of guitarists and drummers or singers.”

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“Since the 1948 Nakba, where over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, the violence has not stopped,” they continued. “We must look to their strength and stand with them and demand more from the governments who make us complicit by spending our taxes in facilitating war crimes.”

Israel has been carrying out a full-scale military campaign on occupied Gaza for almost two years, following the October 2023 attack by Hamas at the Israeli music festival Supernova where 1,195 people were killed.

The UN has found Israel’s military actions to be consistent with genocide, and at least 56,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. As the conflict continues to escalate, Israel continues to deny allegations of genocide and war crimes against the people of Palestine, in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

“Saoirse is about resistance, and about the roots that tie us all together,” Maruja’s statement continued. “We don’t choose where we are born, but we can choose to act. It’s our decisions that define us. At our gigs, through listening to our music, you lift us up, our bodies physically moving through the crowds, our messages amplified.

“Sugar Magnolia” starts the second half in country mode with classical violinists converted to hoedown fiddles. As Weir sings of an old ‘70s girlfriend, he plucks individual, ringing notes. The multi-generational crowd have been boisterously out of their seats for most of the night and now spin with delight at the start of the “Terrapin Station” suite. “His job is to shed light, not to master,” sings Weir of the song’s storyteller, and that is also his modest way, his expansive vocal turning introspective as he explains a sailor’s doomed romantic bargain and heads towards the titular destination, forever just out of reach.

Then the Wolf Bros exit, the orchestra quieten and Weir puts down his guitar to sing “Days Between”, the last song written by Garcia before his death. Weir’s gruff, strong voice summons Hunter’s lyric’s combination of chivalrous nobility and sorrow, appropriate in the encroaching twilight of the Dead’s story, with Weir standing ever more alone. “Those were days,” he sings three times. “The brightest ever seen… still tender, young and green… soft as velveteen.” This is a taste of Weir’s own power, apart from but still in service to the Dead’s tale.

Weir windmills his guitar on the home strait and boils down “Hell In A Bucket” to a hedonistic sentiment fully embraced by the dancing crowd: “Might as well enjoy the ride!” Finally, the orchestra retire and the Wolf Bros dig into Weir’s solo songbook. His fuzzed-up guitar is loud and clear on  “She Said”, by his ‘90s band RatDog. Then “One More Saturday Night” brings this Saturday night to a close in party mode. With ferocious attitude belying his 77 years, Weir is happily howling by the end. Stripped of the Dead’s weight, he still simply wants to play rock’n’roll.

Bobby Weir & The Wolf Bros set list at Royal Albert Hall, London, June 21, 2025:

SET ONE:
A Grateful Overture
Truckin’
Black Peter
China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider
Brokedown Palace

SET TWO:
Sugar Magnolia
Terrapin Station
Days Between
Jack Straw
Hell In A Bucket
Sunshine Daydream
She Says
One More Saturday Night

“Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”

Springsteen’s comments due ire from President Trump, who described him as “highly overrated” and “dumb as a rock”, later accusing him of participating in an “illegal election scam” for Kamala Harris.

The tracklisting for the EP is:

Land Of Hope And Dreams (introduction)
LAnd Of Hope And Dreams
Long Walk Home
My City Of Ruins (introduction)
My City Of Ruins
Chimes Of Freedom

You can find the EP here.

Springsteen returns to the UK to play Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium on June 4 and 6. You can find his full run of European tour dates here.

Naturally, the gear list includes a staggering array of vintage synthesisers and other keyboard instruments – from the Vox Jaguar and the Moog Matriarch to the obscure East German organ namechecked in the title of “Vermona F Transistor” – most of which are played by the band’s resident boffin, Joe Watson (you don’t have to have written a PhD thesis in transduction and performativity to work here, but it helps). Woven into this rich tapestry are a variety of more acoustic textures, some of which are new to these parts. Stereolab have used brass before – Sadier herself wields a mean trombone – but it’s never been played with quite the same intensity as Bitchin Bajas’ Rob Frye and fellow Chicago avant-jazz head Ben LaMar Gay offer here. Frye’s wonderfully visceral saxophone break towards the end of the epic “Melodie Is A Wound” sounds like it’s literally ripping open the music’s shiny electronic veneer to expose the raw human flesh beneath.

That song is immediately followed by the unusually folky and introspective “Immortal Hands”, driven by a proggy, harpsichord-style figure and the purposeful strum of Tim Gane’s 12-string acoustic guitar. It’s momentarily reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” with added marimba. Then suddenly a drum machine sputters into life, taking the song to another dimension, before it ends with peals of warm brass and bucolic flute. There are similarly reflective moments secreted throughout the album, even if a rasping Roobarb & Custard riff is never too far away.

The vocal arrangements are equally inventive. While the band could never hope to replace the late Mary Hansen, whose voice intertwined so naturally with Sadier’s, the staggered multi-part harmonies of “Le Coeur Et La Force” are constructed with the delicacy of a matchstick Versailles, with Frye’s twin saxophones adding further layers of bliss. There is so much to enjoy about this constantly shimmering tableau of sounds that it would be easy to think of Sadier’s vocals as just another instrument. But her lyrics confront the horrors of the 21st century head-on.

Take “Colour Television”. You might assume from the title that it’s a jolly piece of retro-futuristic fluff, a knowing callback to a time when the cathode ray tube felt the portal to a new world. But in fact the song is a pithy, withering takedown of the kind of bogus aspirational narrative now spouted by politicians of all stripes – “a deluding promise of a middle class for all” – that allows the rich to continue to divide and rule. “It’s a single story/Violently imposed as the/Universal narrative/Of progress and development and of civilisation,” trills Sadier, over pleasantly chuntering systems music. But if that makes said narrative sound ingrained and hopeless, in Stereolab’s world, a happy ending can always be glimpsed, if we want it: “Open are the possibilities!”

“Melodie Is A Wound” tackles an even more sinister reality in the form of creeping authoritarianism. “The goal is to manipulate/Heavy hands to intimidate,” sings Sadier, calmly explaining how Trumpian tactics “Snuff out the very idea of clarity/Strangle your longing for truth and trust”. It reads like a lyric to be snarled over serrated post-punk guitars and apocalyptic kick-drum thuds. But naturally it’s a breezy slice of Bacharach-style pop with an extended, accelerating coda.

Sadier comes armed with solutions, too. “Explore without fear the rhizomic maze,” she instructs, towards the end of the album. “Wisdom, faith, courage are necessary.” And if it still occasionally sounds like she’s reciting situationist pamphlets, there’s a more relatable, healing aspect to “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption”, which invites you to explore your “inner world” to “restore completeness” as a frisky rhythm periodically dissolves into vibraphonic bliss, “the place where dark and light touch”.

“Transmuted Matter”, meanwhile, draws on The Path Of The Rose, a spiritual teaching attributed to Mary Magdalene, to assert that paradise is within our grasp, if we are prepared to give ourselves over to love. “Fully human fully divine, entwined,” sings Sadier, enraptured. “Tell me what do you see through the eye of the heart?”

In a world where startling numbers of people seem to have lost faith in themselves and humanity as a whole, turning instead to destructive political nihilism, Instant Holograms… offers a kind of manual on how to resist the negativity and reconnect with society. Alternatively, it’s another super-fun Stereolab album full of obscure synth blurps, nifty lounge-pop tunes and gnarly motorik wig-outs. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

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The post drew the attention of The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), which issued a statement defending both the ‘Born to Run’ singer and Taylor Swift after Donald Trump attacked them both on social media.

Since then, Trump has called for an investigation into Springsteen, who he claims was paid by Kamala Harris for his “POOR PERFORMANCE DURING HER CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT,” while he also criticised other artists, including Bono and Beyoncé, in a run of Truth Social posts.

Numerous musicians have come to Springsteen’s defence. One of these was Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder (May 18): “Part of free speech is open discussion. Part of democracy is healthy public discourse,” he said. “The name-calling is so beneath us. Bruce has always been as pro-American with his values and liberty, and his justice has always remained intact. And I’m saying this now to be sure this freedom to speak will still exist in a year or two when we come back to this microphone.”

Neil Young also called out Trump for his response to Springsteen’s criticisms. He shared a new blog entry on the Neil Young Archives website, where he hit out at the President: “Bruce and thousands of musicians think you are ruining America. You worry about that instead of the dyin’ kids in Gaza. That’s your problem. I am not scared of you. Neither are the rest of us. You shut down FEMA when we needed it most. That’s your problem Trump. STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT ROCKERS ARE SAYING. Think about saving America from the mess you made.”

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He went on: “In America the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now. In my country they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They are removing residents off American streets and without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.

“A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American. The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said, he said ‘in this world there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.”

Now, Trump has responded to Springsteen’s speeches with a post on Truth Social that was just as scathing.

The President wrote: “I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States. Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.”

Although a rousing “Hungry Heart” appears early on, the floodgates open with “Because The Night“, an epic singalong “Badlands” and a furiously rejuvenated “Born In The USA”, which sees gravel creep into Springsteen’s vocals as he roars the chorus with the crowd. “Dancing In The Dark” is pure gleeful pop and “Born To Run” sounds so enormous one fears the roof will blow off and it won’t be an indoor venue any more. By now, the house lights are up, guitarist Nils Lofgren is spinning round during solos, the audience’s  hands are in the air and Springsteen is down in the crowd for “the bit that really matters”.

By the end, for a closing cover of Bob Dylan’s rallying cry “Chimes Of Freedom”, he looks emotionally and physically drained, but euphoric. The message of this incredible show is that however bad things may seem people have the power. As Springsteen puts it, “I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said: ‘In this world there’s isn’t as much humanity as people would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.” Amen.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played:

Land Of Hope And Dreams
Death To My Hometown
Lonesome Day
My Love Will Not Let You Down
Rainmaker
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
The Promised Land
Hungry Heart
My Hometown
Youngstown
Murder Inc.
Long Walk Home
House Of A Thousand Guitars
My City Of Ruins
Letter To You
Because The Night
Human Touch
Wrecking Ball
The Rising
Badlands
Thunder Road
Born In The U.S.A.
Born To Run
Bobby Jean
Dancing In The Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Chimes Of Freedom

TALKING HEADS
Fear Of Music
SIRE, 1979
This album got me through a lot of all-nighters at art school, when I wasn’t as attentive to my studies as I should have been. It’s Talking Heads exploring a lot of the stuff that will become more finessed and polished later on. It confounded my expectations of what a song could be, because the narratives are so strange, but they’re not dislocated. The band are very concerned about making sure the songs have an engaging structure and that there’s a chorus that will work for you, but the narrative is shifting all the time. The songs are inventive and funny, but they’re also a bit scary. You’re never quite sure whether or not you’d be happy if David Byrne showed up at your door.

CRAIG ARMSTRONG
It’s Nearly Tomorrow
BMG CHRYSALIS, 2014
A lot of actors use music to help them get into the zone. For instance, when I was doing Malcolm Tucker, I would have “Scary Monsters” playing, because it’s quite jagged and hard to relax to. And It’s Nearly Tomorrow is the one that did it for me in relation to the rather well-known character of Doctor Who. I was keen to try and bring some kind of melancholy to the role, I guess because I was older, and this album provided a way into that. It seems to be about time, loss, humanity, love, confusion and fate. The music is infused with this dark, relentless power, like the forces at work in the universe, so it would help me think about how to be a strange, alien Time Lord.

ENNIO MORRICONE
The Mission OST
VIRGIN, 1986
It’s often said of Ennio Morricone that you know it’s him from the first note, and that’s absolutely true of this album. The film is about the European incursion into Latin America and how the Jesuit priests would set up missionaries in the jungle to try and convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity, which all goes terribly wrong, as you might imagine. Morricone illustrates that story by combining his typically heartbreaking European, classical, choral sound with these indigenous rhythms and voices. So it’s a little bit like world music, but not quite. He’s a master composer of soundtracks, so he evokes this whole thing for us in a very beautiful way. He’s the greatest film composer – apart from Bernard Herrman – because he infuses his material with so much emotion.

WILLIE NELSON
A Song For You
HALLMARK, 1983
Willie Nelson was huge in the ’80s, but I did have a fear that getting into him meant going the full Ken Bruce, and that easy listening would take me over like the fungal virus in The Last Of Us. So I dug deeper into Willie’s back catalogue looking for purer country stuff. There was plenty, and it sounded great. But so did the standards. I finally accepted this when we found the album . My partner Elaine and I played it all the time on a battered cassette as our life together unfolded. His versions of these standards have everything – they’re moving, frank, wise and for the ages, all culminating in his version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Loving Her Was Easier”, the song that we danced to at our wedding.

JAN GARBAREK & THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE
Officium
ECM, 1994
In 2004, I went to make a film in Iceland. It’s one of the strangest and most haunting places I have ever been, and I loved it. The film was low-budget so I was not put up in a hotel, but lodged in the Reykjavik basement of a fabulous bohemian couple named Sverrir and Eda. They left me a CD player and a number of CDs. This was the first one I put on. The Hilliard Ensemble is a vocal quartet devoted to early music; Jan Garbarek is a Norwegian jazz sax and clarinet player. The combined sound is haunting, medieval, yet kind of jazzy. The track “Parce Mihi Domine” plays like the theme music to some lost Icelandic noir movie. Heard once, it stays forever.

Peter Capaldi’s new album Sweet Illusions is out now on Last Night From Glasgow

The famously reclusive Keith Jarrett had no input into the film, but his brother Chris – also a renowned pianist – was a script advisor. “We wanted to make sure we got our portrayal of Keith right,” says Fluk. Help also came from the film’s producer Oren Moverman, who co-wrote two of the more impressively unorthodox music biopics of recent times, I’m Not There and Love & Mercy.

The Köln Concert is the subject of another upcoming film called Lost In Köln, a documentary that forensically interviews dozens of people involved in the show. Brandes was involved in both projects, and Fluk sees them as complementary. “But my film certainly isn’t a documentary,” he emphasise. “I also didn’t really want it to be a jazz film, just as The Köln Concert isn’t really a ‘jazz’ album – it’s as much a piece of country-rock, blues and classical music. I wanted to make something similarly genre-free, something that wasn’t gatekeepy, something accessible to everyone.”

Köln 75 will be released in the UK later this year

All of this is felt in Yoshimura’s own music, sculpted from his various influences and transformed into the uniquely environmental ambient soundscapes that would become his calling card. He managed to effortlessly capture moods so comfortable, charming and calming that the release of his first album, the aforementioned Music For Nine Post Cards, was actually inspired by listener inquiries. It was sparked by a visit to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, during which he was moved by the view of trees in the courtyard as seen through the window. The museum agreed to play this music within the building, and visitors who heard it were so interested that the album was given a wide release as the first installment in fellow ambient pioneer Satoshi Ashikawa’s series Wave Notation.

This eventually led to a number of commissions and compositions, some for independent film but others with a more site-specific intent. With his background as a sound designer, Yoshimura had developed an uncanny ability to both reflect on and respond to the location where the work was intended to be played. 1986’s excellent Surround, for example, was commissioned by home builder Misawa Homes; the music was meant to be regarded as an amenity of the company’s prefabricated homes. In Yoshimura’s own view, the album belongs in the same sound world of “the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup.” It’s a brilliant distillation of the fact that his pieces place the seemingly mundane in a new context, subtly altering perceptions and usually drawing your attention to the environment around you.

Following the release of Music For Nine Post Cards, a string of similarly designed albums followed, almost none of which would have been easily accessible outside Japan. Since the 2017 reissue of Music… and his inclusion on the Kankyō Ongaku compilation, a growing series of reissues is bringing his music all across the world. The most recent is Temporal Drift’s reissue of Flora, an album recorded in 1987 but not released on CD until 2006. Stylistically in line with the ambient, New Age-inflected work Yoshimura had created the previous year, Flora is a buoyant expression of the textures of the natural world, likely inspired by walks he took at the Edo-era park near his home.

It opens with the instantly pleasing “Over The Clover”, plinks of sound gliding in and out of the dimensions of daily life. “Asagao” is all shimmers and whistling wind, while “Ojigisou” is just a touch angular, minimalist piano interspersed with synth pulses resembling alien transmissions; both pieces are named after flowers. The album comes the closest to a traditional song with the delightful “Maple Syrup Factory”, which feels like a clear precursor to modern microgenres like cozy synth. “Adelaide” has a vaguely galactic feel yet hums with an earthy pulse, a kind of minimalist contradiction.

Yoshimura is no stranger to wistfulness either, and we get various melancholy moods throughout the second half of the album, until the piano-driven “Satie On The Grass” brings us back to a soft, delicate space. Yoshimura’s serene, life-affirming music deserves the widest audience possible, and this reissue of Flora is one more step on the way to expanding it.

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In early 2024, the trio announced their hiatus at a secret show in LA. “We’re going away for the foreseeable future,” fans quoted them as saying. “This is our last show, and we’re feeling it.”

Now, Dacus has opened up about the end of Boygenuis and how it arrived at the “perfect time”. Speaking to The New Yorker in a feature about her forthcoming solo album ‘Forever Is A Feeling‘, Dacus discussed how the group took priority over her solo career and explained: “We had these big goals of playing sick shows. But it immediately outpaced our expectations. We just had to adjust. I’m still shocked”.

She continued: “That’s something all of us talk about and work on. I feel dissociated. I also feel like it could go away in a second. Because, if it can show up in a second, it can go away in a second.”

Which brings us back to Lights On A Satellite, a welcome new recording from a maestro who has seen it all and then some. The titular track is a terrific way to open the set, a gentle piano melody in conversation with a tapestry of saxophones, carried along on the wave of a full-fledged orchestra. Stand-out solos abound throughout: James Stewart’s explosive tenor saxophone on “Reflects Motion”, Farid Barron’s limber piano on “Images”, Knoel Scott’s yearning baritone on Sun Ra staple “Tapestry From An Asteroid”. One of the few non-Ra compositions by another jazz musician is “Dorothy’s Dance”, written by one-time Arkestra trumpeter and fellow innovator Phil Cohran. The album even includes what could be considered the world premiere of Ra’s slowburn, swinging 1955 composition “Baby Won’t You Please Be Mine”, a piece unearthed by Allen in his estate six years ago but only recently added to the ensemble’s repertoire. The Arkestra breathes completely new life into “Holiday For Strings”, a classic American composition best known for its use as a mid-century variety show theme song. Their version swings but steers mostly clear of novelty territory, the original’s vague pleasance transformed into an exuberant fantasia studded with free jazz saxophone shrieks and an agile guitar solo.

Sun Ra’s power exists, in part, due to the polyphonic sweep of his influences, expertly bridging the swinging big band of his first life as Herman Blount with the far out, cosmic explorations of his second coming as Saturn’s son. That breadth is lovingly captured here, a fitting tribute to Allen’s own terrific musicianship, intuitive leadership of the band and continued stewardship of Ra’s music.

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“Hosono and his music have been one of the only unwavering influences since I started putting out records – it’s hard to quantify how much his music means to me,” says super-fan Mac DeMarco, whose strip-backed version of “Boko Wa Chotto” is reassuringly faithful. “The song has this bittersweetness to it that I gravitate towards, maybe a bit of hopefulness too.”

DeMarco has met Hosono a few times and once sung “Honey Moon”, from 1975’s Tropical Dandy, with him onstage. LA-based pianist and producer John Carroll Kirby has also hung out with Hosono. “He’s a gentle, humble person who seems to not relish the ‘GOAT’ status he’s achieved,” says Kirby. “What I admire most about him is his sense of melody, his use of synthesisers, his sense of humour and his prolific output. When I look at his catalogue, I get the sense that his work is like a journal of where he’s at in life at any given period. Approaching music in that way is liberating.”

Kirby’s raucous take on “Fuku Wa Uchi Oni Wa Soto” with the Mizuhura Sisters – one of whom, Kiko, is Kirby’s partner – is a highlight of Hosono House Revisited. “Kiko and her sister Yuka are both friends with Hosono and have a deep understanding of his catalogue, so I knew we could make something great to honour the spirit of Hosono.”

And what does Hosono think of this rebuilding of Hosono House? “The first one I received was Sam Gendel’s cover of “Koi Wa Momoiro” [“My Love is Peach-coloured”] and I was amazed when I heard it. He translated the lyrics faithfully into English, and his completely different interpretation was refreshing.” Now 77, Hosono says that he keeps abreast of the latest cultural developments by watching videos daily on YouTube. And he remains a keen observer of the world around him. “Every day, I write down my ideas and thoughts like a diary.” However, he appears in no hurry to turn these thoughts into a new album. “Lately, I’ve been feeling my age more and more,” he admits, “so I just make sure not to overdo anything.”

Hosono House Revisited is out now on Stones Throw

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Applications for Johns Hopkins’ new four-year hip-hop degree program close today (January 3) – you can find more information and apply for the course here.

Per the course’s official site, the degree program will be led by accomplished composer, producer, pianist and professor Wendel Patrick. It will consist of one-on-one turntable majors with a private instructor, rap majors with Lupe Fiasco and will include performances among students.

Apart from private lessons, students and applicants will also learn about the cultural history and influence of hip-hop.

Lupe Fiasco isn’t the only acclaimed musician to be taking on the role of professor this year. Brian Eno is similarly teaching a course on songwriting for the School Of Song’s January 2025 program.

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The course, titled Songwriting With Brian Eno, will take place over the course of a month. The course will see Eno conduct four lectures via Zoom, lead hour-long Q&A sessions with students, song-share sessions and even a live in-class writing exercise with the musician himself. Topics being covered during the course include The Role Of Surrender, Avant Gardening, Oblique Strategies and more.

The program will cost USD$160, with registrations closing on January 4 – just a day before the first session begins. You can register for the course here.

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT: From hippie communal living to sold-out arena tours via heavy licks and eldritch mythologies, BLUE ÖYSTER CULT were one of ‘70s rock’s biggest – and strangest – bands. “We had no concept of being commercial…”

ASWAD: Championed by Bob Marley and lauded by early punk audiences, ASWAD were UK roots reggae pioneers, battling prejudice to share their message of anti-racism, Rastafarianism and community. “We wanted to fight for what we believed was right.”

NADIA REID: After a rollercoaster decade, the stars finally seem to have aligned for New Zealand singer songwriter NADIA REID as she prepares to release her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness. “The whole thing’s been mad.”

THE MOODY BLUES: LSD with Timothy Leary, trips to Disneyland and a Vietnam-inspired hit single. Behold, the lost heroes of psychedelia!

SEAN O’HAGAN: Career highlights from MICRODISNEY to THE HIGH LLAMAS via STEREOLAB and (almost) THE BEACH BOYS.

GARY KEMP: The Spandau Ballet songwriter turned Saucerful Of Secrets frontman talks Soho, Black Midi, Ronnie Kray and kilts…

EDDIE CHACON: The second-chance soulman on the records that bring him pleasure, joy and happiness: “I learned that imperfections can be beautiful”

REVIEWED: New albums by Chris Eckman, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Yazz Ahmed, The Delines, Songhoy Blues, Jim Gedhi; archive releases by Lotti Golden, Doug Sahm & The Sir Douglas Quintet, Television Personalities and Brides Of Funkenstein; Mark Lanegan birthday tribute and The Necks live; James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic on the big screen and the Yardbirds on the small screen

PLUS: Paul McCartney gets back; The Chills; Keith Richards unseen; Candi Staton; Echolalia; farewell Andy Paley and Leah Kunkel and introducing Greg Mendez

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR

As an Uncut reader, you may have some qualms. Though based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, in familiar biopic fashion the story plays fast and loose with the historical record, cavalierly conflating people, places and events. And it doesn’t really know what to do with either Sylvie or Joan Baez, who spend much of the film simply gazing wistfully, resentfully or with plain exasperation at the wilful upstart.

But if Rolling Thunder had several wildcards up its sleeve, Mangold (whose 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line offered an ultimately well behaved kind of outlaw) seems to take his liberties in the name of neatness. Though Bob himself apparently annotated and signed off the script himself, you might struggle to detect much of his mischief in the polished finished product. There is lightning in many of the performances, but as a film A Complete Unknown never quite goes fully electric. Maybe, as with Star Wars or The Godfather, the real crackling heart of darkness will come in the franchise’s second episode…

This new pin-sharp remaster of Talking Heads: 77 emphasises the freshness of the whole endeavour. The guitars are trebly and crisp, the rhythms brisk and utilitarian, perfectly designed to induce dancing in people who don’t usually dance. Byrne plays his role perfectly as the wide-eyed alien fascinated by daily life on earth: disconcertingly earnest, often agitated but never cynical.

Almost half a century on, it feels rather more like the start of something new than those other big New York punk touchstones of 1977: say, Rocket To Russia, Blank Generation or even Marquee Moon. Sure, the cod-calypso flourishes of “Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town” still sound a little gauche, but it’s precisely these gleeful anti-rock touches that set this album apart, prising open new horizons and laying the groundwork for more convincing fusions to come.

Disc Two rounds up all of the B-sides and outtakes of the era, including brassy ‘Pop’ versions of “New Feeling” and “Pulled Up”, plus bouncy earworm “Sugar On My Tongue”, strangely overlooked for the original album. Most significantly, there are two alternative versions of “Psycho Killer”: a harder-rocking take that plays up Byrne’s original intentions to write a song in the style of Alice Cooper; and an acoustic version, first heard as the B-side to the 1977 single release, which features Arthur Russell on cello. It’s an intriguing meeting of downtown New York minds, even if Russell’s ominous scrapes and swoops are a slightly-too-obvious nod to Bernard Herrmann.

But the real find of this Super Deluxe Edition, and the main justification for its existence, is a previously unreleased live set, forged in the white heat of CBGB on October 10, 1977. Taped a month or so before the performance featured on Side One of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, it underlines what an incredible live band Talking Heads were from the get-go. Every song is ridiculously tight and punchy, driven by Chris Frantz’s metronomic yet inventive drumbeats, while Byrne’s vocal performance is pure controlled mania, retaining the essential soulfulness of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” while adding a whole new level of crazed intensity.

“Thank You For Sending Me An Angel”, soon destined to become the opening song of the second album, is a two-minute frenzy of roiling excitement. Without pausing for breath, the band drop straight into the taut, stop-start funk of “Who Is It?”, Byrne scatting like a madman. The tension between these often fun, danceable songs and Byrne’s high-pitched, hair-trigger delivery is as riveting as any psycho thriller. Finally, it’s a chance to hear the band as Lenny Kaye and other CBGB scenesters first saw them: “a blaze soon to engulf the world.”

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JONES: I first came to Europe with the Lionel Hampton band when I was in my early 20s. In 1957 Eddy Barclay offered me the job of musical director at Barclay Records in Paris, which was great firstly because I also got to study under Nadia Boulanger, who had been mentor to Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and many other classical musicians. She was the lady. I learned so much from her – in New York they wouldn’t let you arrange strings if you were black – only horns or rhythm section.

Paris at that time was hot. Bardot was 24, Jeanne Moreau 23, I got to meet people like Pablo Picasso and James Baldwin. Lots of American jazz musicians went and lived in Paris because they loved the freedom and respect they got compared to back home. France nurtured jazz.

I went back to Paris in 1959 with an all-star band for the European tour of a Broadway show, Free And Easy. The band was terrific – guys like (trumpeters) Clark Terry and Harry Edison and (alto sax) Phil Woods, all the guys on Birth Of A Band!, but after the show bombed I lost a lot of money trying to hold the band together. That’s when I learned the difference between music and the music business.

RAY CHARLES
THE GENIUS OF RAY CHARLES

(ATLANTIC, 1959)

In previous years Charles had scored a string of R&B hits but after signing with Atlantic the scene was set for crossover success. Who better to help arrange than Ray’s old sidekick…

That was the first time I worked with Ray in the studio, though we had been friends since we were teenagers. He had wanted to get as far away from Florida as he could and that was Seattle, which in 1946 was on fire.  It was a port for the Pacific Theatre in WW2.  You could hear R&B, be-bop, any kind of music. The Chicago pimps moved there ‘cos that’s where the business was. We used to wear sailor suits because the sailors got the girls. That was an amazing time to come up.

After our paying gigs playing pop hits, Ray and I would go down to the Elks Club and play bebop all night for free. Ray sang like Nat Cole and Charles Brown and played alto sax like Charlie Parker. By 1959 he was a big star but controversial in the black community because he had taken gospel music and made it into pop records like “I Got A Woman”. Then he broadened out into big band jazz like Genius, with people from the Basie and Ellington bands playing. We did it again a few years later on Genius Plus Soul = Jazz, which has a great arrangement of “One Mint Julep”.

QUINCY JONES
BIG BAND BOSSA NOVA

(MERCURY, 1961)

A trip to Brazil in 1961 furnished Quincy with a new source of inspiration and another signature tune, “Soul Bossa Nova”, a swaggering big band blast still familiar two generations on through the Austin Powers soundtrack

We had previously made a State Department trip to the Middle East with Dizzy Gillespie, and it got back to Washington that we had done a good job. They said “We’re gonna send you to Latin America.” We went to Ecuador, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and finally to Brazil. Lalo Schiffrin (pianist and composer) had told me, ‘Wait until you get there!’ It was during the time that Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joaos and Astrid Gilberto and the rest of the bossa nova – ‘new wave’ – were happening. When you listen to it (hums Jobim’s “She’s A Carioca”) – all those flattened fifths in bossa, you can see how influenced it was by jazz. Everyone caught the bug – Stan Getz obviously, and Sinatra did an album with Jobim.

I still go every year to Carnival in Rio and then to see my friends up in Bahia for the carnival in Salvador de Bahia. Next year we’re planning a float in the Rio carnival parade for New Orleans musicians, have them meet up with Brazilians, and we’re gonna have William Friedkin [director of The Exorcist] shoot a film there for an IMAX movie, because a lot of Americ`ns don’t know about carnival, which is a spectacular and spiritual event. Imagine – all those girls dancing on a giant screen!

FRANK SINATRA
SINATRA AT THE SANDS

(REPRISE, 1966)

In 1964 Quincy had arranged a Sinatra hit, “Fly Me To The Moon”, which appeared on It Might As Well Be Swing, with backing from the Count Basie orchestra. When Sinatra decided to cut his first live album, Basie and Quincy were his go-to guys

I first met Frank when I was playing a gig for one of Princess Grace Kelly’s events in Monaco in the late ‘50s. He had me playing “Man With The Golden Arm” as he came on stage and worked the crowd, which included people like Cary Grant and David Niven, then he just took off into “Fly Me To The Moon”. Sensational. Then I worked with him and the Count Basie orchestra in 1964. Those were the days when singers were expected to deliver words like musicians played notes. Frank was actually the one who started calling me “Q”. When we were flying out to Vegas, he asked if we could play “Shadow Of Your Smile”. I said, Sure, as long as you know the lyrics. Then he wrote out the words over and over again and the next night he hit it perfectly – just check the record. And I worked with him again on ”LA Is My Lady”, one of his last records, in 1984.

Sinatra had certain catchphrases. He would say; “Q, live every day like it’s your last and one day you’ll be right.”

THE ITALIAN JOB
MUSIC FROM THE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

(PARAMOUNT, 1969)

Quincy had scored a dozen films by the time the call came to soundtrack The Italian Job – among them The Pawnbroker, In Cold Blood and In the Heat Of The Night. From The Italian Job an English national anthem would emerge …

I recall it well, as that was the time my son (Quincy Jones III) was born – he was born in London. We had a lot of fun doing the score – we were recording in the daytime at Olympic Studios where the Stones were cutting Sympathy For The Devil at night. Michael Caine would come by every day, then we’d go eat spaghetti con vongele in the King’s Road. Michael and I became great friends – I was with him and Shakira [Caine’s wife] just last month – and I discovered we were born the same year, day and hour – we’re celestial twins. Michael taught me cockney rhyming slang – “Watch the boat on the ice cream and check out the bristols on the richard.” No-one knows what you’re talking about.

I got an Ivor Novello award a couple of years ago and Elton John told me that only a Brit could write “Self Preservation Society”, which became the anthem of the movie, and I said wrong! Don Black did the words but I did the melody. I heard that they play it at every English soccer game – David Beckham told me that!

MICHAEL JACKSON
OFF THE WALL

(EPIC, 1979)

Prior to producing Off The Wall, Quincy was known as a jazz man and soundrack composer – the nearest he had come to making a crossover black pop record was working with guitarist George Benson on Give Me The Night. That was about to change

My connection with Michael came through love, like everything else y’know! I met him when he was twelve at Sammy Davis’s house. Then Michael played the part of the scarecrow in The Wiz (1978 Motown adaptation of Wizard Of Oz) where I was the musical director. On a musical the most important thing is the pre-recording because the movie is shot to that, at least the songs are, the score comes later.

Michael asked me for suggestions on who might produce his first solo album. I didn’t know how intuitive he was; he knew everyone’s lines, dance steps, he didn’t miss a thing. They were rehearsing one day and Michael’s thing was to read a famous quote – he pronounced Socrates as ‘so-crates’ and when I corrected him he looked like a deer in the headlights he said ‘Really?’. At that point I said I’d like to take a shot at his solo album and he said ‘Really?’ in the same way.

The record company said “No, Quincy’s too jazzy,” but that record saved half the A&R jobs there because it sold 12 million copies. I got Michael to sing “She’s Out Of My Life”, a song I was saving for Sinatra, and he cried during every take. The tears are there on the record, man.

MICHAEL JACKSON
THRILLER

(EPIC, 1982)

Where Off The Wall had been been recorded quickly, making Thriller sprawled over months, with obsessive attention to detail. Matters were complicated by the decision to make another album concurrently – E.T. , a ‘storybook’ of Spielberg’s feature film that Quincy scored and Michael narrated (it was soon wthdrawn as at Epic’s insistence). Deadlines loomed

In the summer of 1982 I had too many projects on the go. I was working on Thriller with Michael, working with the McCartneys, and working on E.T. To record Thriller I had three studios on the go – there would be Michael in one, Eddie Van Halen in another (Guitarist on “Thriller”), Bruce (Swedien, Q’s engineer and mixer) in another. We recorded a huge amount of material for the album. Then when we’d assembled nine tracks I took out the weakest cuts and put in “Beat It” and “Human Nature”, that really turned the album upside down cos we had “Billie Jean”, “Starting Something” and “Thriller”. It was incredibly strong. The sequence is very important – that’s the architecture of an album. When you have multi-producers you end up in trouble ‘cos they don’t have any sense of overal architecture and the dramatic sequencing.

Eventually we finished at nine in the morning after putting the overdubs on “Beat It”. I took Michael to my house and said Bruce is going to take the tape to get it mastered, so I got three hours sleep. When it came to the playback the album wasn’t working, so Michael starts to cry.

I’d been telling ‘em all along that if you want big grooves, you have to have 18 or 19 minutes a side, not 24 or 27 cos it won’t hold it, you get a tinny sound. I’d been asking Michael to cut down the introduction to ”Billie Jean” ‘cos it’s 11 minutes long and he’s saying “But it makes me want to dance,” and who are we to argue with him, us fat belly guys? Anyway we had to cut it down, take out a verse.

I’ve always tried to make records that have six exits and six entries so you can’t hear all of it at once; you have the bass line here, the backing singers there and so forth and you can’t hear it all, so you play it until the vinyl wears out and have to buy another copy.

Nobody knew Thriller would become the biggest album in the history of music, nobody, because that’s what God sends.

It never ceases to shock me that wherever in the world I go – and I travel constantly, man, I love it – that at twelve o’clock you are going to hear “Billie Jean” or “Wanna be Starting Something”. Else it will be “Ai No Corrida” from my album The Dude, or George Benson’s “Give Me the Night”. Absolutely everywhere!

MILES DAVID & QUINCY JONES
MILES & QUINCY IN MONTREAUX

(WARNER BROS, 1991)

Jazz’s dark prince finally acceded to Quincy’s request to revisit the tunes he’d recorded with producer Gil Evans in the 1950s on classic albums like Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain. It proved to be Miles’ final album

Miles never wanted to do that concert. It took me 15 years to talk him into that. He was never one to look back, always wanted to keep moving forwards. His early stuff, though, has to be some of my all time favourite music. People always ask me how to get kids into jazz and I say “Give em Kind Of Blue’ and make them take it every day, like orange juice.” But I also liked Bitches Brew. People were telling us not to mix jazz with rock, that myopic mentality. That’s bullshit. Miles, Cannonball Adderley Herbie Hancock and myself used to talk about this, how you should try everything. We’d talk about rock bands. I used to say, “How come we’re drinking on a Saturday night and they’re the ones with the gigs?” One by one we expanded – Herbie wrote “Watermelon Man,” Cannonball did “Mercy Mercy Mercy”, I did “Walkin Into Space” in 1969 and Miles did Bitch’s Brew in 1970. See, the electric bass changed everything. That instrument was the one changed the genre – there would be no rock and roll, no Motown, no nothing without an electric rhythm section.

Montreux was the first time I ever saw Miles smile at the audience! He waved a towel at the audience and smiled. Once Miles had done the show he loved it. He said “We should take this shit all over the world.” I don’t know why he was so resistant, man, that was Miles. He was mad on technology, like Brando – they were complex guys.

QUINCY JONES
BACK ON THE BLOCK

(QWEST, 1989)

After three Jackson albums and We Are the World, had Quincy run out of road? Uh-uh. Back On The Block mixed old school talents like Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles with cutting edge rappers and mixed genres into a seamless whole. It won seven Grammys, including best album

We’d won Grammys on other albums like The Dude and Smackwater Jack, but nothing like Back On The Block. It had the widest range – be-bop, zulu music, soul…that’s my speciality, I love that conglomerate. It kind of ushered in hip-hop too, ‘cos we had Ice T, Daddy Kane, Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee.

I’m all for the rappers, because the spoken word is the third genre after music and singing, right? It’s like praise songs in Africa. The lyrical skills are astounding but the lyrical content is often a problem and sampling is also a bad habit. I understand the fascination with gangsterism because I grew up in Chicago, the home of that stuff.

So a lot of hip-hop’s problems have a social source and that’s why I’m working hard now to build a consortium to get to the kids in school to know their roots. It’s crazy that kids don’t know about Duke Ellington and The Cotton Club. It’s starting to turn round – a lot of young guys come to me and say “I want you to teach me how to be a musician.” That’s the attitude we want.

It’s when Johnson looks inwards that he produces his most stirring work. “Where Do We Go When We Die?” is a beautiful tribute to his late father that wrestles with life after death, while pondering the cycles and meanings to be found in life while experiencing grief. There’s more emotional weight carried in the two lines he sings about taking his father’s clothes and books to the charity shop than can be found in any of the state of the world addresses heard elsewhere on the record.

“I Hope You Remember (The Things I Can’t Forget)” unfolds with an almost Tom Waits-like shuffle, with Cadogan’s snaking guitar lines matching the woozy percussion. Johnson leans into a slightly more gruff voice too, as he imagines a world on the brink but dives deep into the comfort of nostalgia, basking in the scent of his grandmother’s perfume and the engulfing haze of old tobacco smoke. It’s these kinds of moments and details that are needed to lift the album up from the bleakness and paranoid leanings.

Historically, The The have always been a difficult band to label. Over the years, they’ve hovered around art-rock, synth-pop, post-punk and new wave yet they’ve never really belonged to any of them. On Ensouled, things feel equally as tricky to nail down, but generally things are slower and less musically direct, and so you have an amalgamation of alt.rock, leftfield folk, pop, jazz and touches of electronica. However, while stylistically varied, it can feel a little lacking in variety and dynamism at times, as it very much sits in mid-tempo mode for much of the 12 tracks, the sprightly pop of their early period rarely appearing. Johnson feels nicely in sync with his band though, who possess both precision and personality in their playing.

Regardless of a few wrong turns, it’s wonderful to have such a natural songwriting talent as Johnson back on record again. It’s just a shame he doesn’t always seem to realise that the most interesting soul he could mine here is his own.

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The exchange was like a subtle shift of specific gravities. On The Pearl, Eno had set Budd’s piano in a pellucid green world, the air humming and the streams alive with bright fish. Here, on a track like “Memory Gongs” the cavernous reverb of Robin Guthrie’s production transplants Budd somewhere altogether more sinister – it’s like a grand piano playing Satie onboard the Nostromo as Riley enters sleep stasis at the end of Alien. Budd himself fades discretely into the background of more conventionally Liz-focused grottoes like “Eyes Are Mosaics”, while “The Ghost Has No Name”, featuring the saxophone of Dif Juz’s Richard Thomas and some fretless bass from Simon Raymonde, feels like it might have calved from the lazy-calm glacier of Victorialand.

Within the larger cartography of the Cocteau discography, The Moon And The Melodies is a curious but charming backwater, overshadowed by the more obvious peaks of Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven Or Las Vegas. Within Budd’s discography it’s arguably important as the first step on the more fully collaborative Guthrie/Budd projects including After The Night Falls/Before The Day Breaks (2007) and Bordeaux/Winter Garden (2011).

So how to explain the freak breakout success of “Sea Swallow Me”? Is it simply an algorithmic glitch, like the one that resurrected Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes”? Is it down to the way the opening bars have become a jingle for emo TikTokkers (Jane Schoenbrun’s phantasmagoric film I Saw The TV Glow is arguably a 100-minute elaboration of this vibe). Or is it simply the most accessible portal into the rich and strange world of the Cocteau Twins?

Brian Eno was fond at the time of talking of his work as research and development, as opposed to the General Motors mass production lines of Pink Floyd or U2. You might see The Moon And The Melodies perhaps as one of the R&D seed projects that eventually led to the formation of Peaceful Piano, the limpid, ever-growing playlist that now rules from the heart of the Spotify world. It’s testament to the enduring artistry of Budd, Fraser, Guthrie and Raymonde, that it continues to sound as magically mysterious as ever, whatever its shifting context.

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He was then asked if he would ever direct again. “I’ll never do it again. Never again,” he declared confidently before backpedalling – “I might. Sorry. I apologise. I might.”

His last appearance was in the French historical drama Jeanne Du Barry, playing King Louis XV. The film’s director Maïwenn later described working with Depp as “difficult” and said that the crew were “afraid of him”.

In other Depp news, fans recently speculated that it appeared Depp had fixed his teeth, based on a video of him mixing drinks behind a bar in the Bahamas.

Click here to read Uncut’s review of Archives Vol. 1: 1963–1972

Click here to read Uncut’s review of Archives Vol. II: 1972–1976

One day in early 1977, Neil drove out to Linda Ronstadt’s Malibu digs, with producer David Briggs and a bunch of new songs he wanted to play to Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson. They sat at a kitchen table, Briggs taping the entire session, presented on Disc 4 as “Snapshot In Time (1977)”. Neil starts with “Long May You Run”, already recorded and released in 1976 on the Stills-Young Band album of the same name, but here sung in a lower register than usual. Ronstadt and Larson pick up on it quickly, joining in on the chorus and laughing out loud when Neil gets to the line about The Beach Boys, “Caroline, No” and “getting to the surf on time”. There’s an early take on “Hold Back The Tears”. “This is the fiddle part,” he says and starts humming. “Pocahontas”, recorded at Ronstadt’s kitchen table, may be the best version of the song.

Young turns up at Reprise early that same year with some tracks he’s recorded in Florida, at Triad Studios in Fort Lauderdale, to test the reactions of label bigwigs Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker. They think the songs need a band. Instead of throwing a tantrum and heading off on tour with a balalaika quartet to piss them off, he takes their advice. He’s soon in Crazy Mama Studios in Nashville, with a hardy troupe that includes veteran Nashville fiddle player Rufus Thibodeaux. The 12-track Disc 6 of the anthology, Oceanside Countryside, features 11 previously unreleased tracks from the sessions, which also yielded the version of “Lost In Space” that appeared on Hawks & Doves. “Field Of Opportunity” is undiluted bunkhouse country, the kind you might hear in a hundred roadhouses and honky tonks. A version of “It Might Have Been” makes you think of George Jones. “Dance Dance Dance” is a hoedown. There are unreleased versions of “Comes A Time”, “Peace Of Mind”, with multitracked vocals, a handsome take on “Sail Away”; an unreleased mix of “Pocahontas”, heavy on the tom toms. “Human Highway” is here, too, a song that changes so little from take to take he could have added bagpipes and a kazoo orchestra to the arrangement to no noticeable effect.

The Crazy Mama sessions were sidelined when Young became once again interested in Comes A Time, with Nicolette Larson as co-vocalist, backing from The Gone With The Wind Orchestra and a host of studio regulars. In August 1978, after months of dithering over test pressings and the tracklisting, Young finally released Comes A Time – originally called Give To The Wind. It was his first Top 10 hit since Harvest and a tour quickly followed. Disc 7, “Neil Young & Nicolette Larson Union Hall (1977)”, was recorded at a rehearsal before a benefit show in Nashville. It has a behind-the-scenes appeal, but a disc of the concert itself would have been a better document than this boomy tape, voice, guitar and drums dominating a tough sound mix. The disc is almost saved, however, by a Comes A Time outtake, a beautiful duet version of Hank Locklin’s classic tearjerker, “Please Help Me, I’m Falling”.

Armed with another batch of new songs, Neil played them over 10 shows in 1978 at the Boarding House in San Francisco. There are first performances on Discs 8 and 9 of “Shots”, “Hey Hey, My My”, a fantastic “Thrasher”, “Ride My Llama”, “Already One”, a Comes A Time highlight. “Human Highway” makes an inevitable appearance and there’s a stunning solo acoustic version of “Powderfinger”. There’s also a generous serving of songs by now regarded as classics. A version of “Birds” is shiveringly beautiful. As he reminds us in another brief “rap”, on the morning of the second Boarding House show, he went into the studio to cut the torrid, slightly unhinged version of “Hey Hey, My My” with Devo, complete with Booji Boy vocals, that opens Disc 9.

You can only imagine the look on David Geffen’s face when Neil played him his first album for his new label after leaving a longtime home at Reprise. Trans, with its synthesisers and Vocoders, was unlike anything Young had done, an album about “teaching robots to sing”, as he puts it in one of his “raps”. Fans and critics, unaware of the personal circumstances that had inspired the record, were aghast. There are six tracks from it included on Disc 12, which also includes tracks from Johnny’s Island (originally Island In The Sun), an album recorded in Hawaii around the same time and with the same crew as Trans, mostly music with a sunscreen gloss made by people in shorts, Wayfarers and deck shoes that makes most Yacht Rock sound like Big Black. “Island In The Sun” even has bongos on it. “Raining In Paradise” is more weather forecast than song, and “Big Pearl” evokes grass-skirted hula hula girls and coconuts. “Johnny” is a song about urban terrorism saddled with gallumphing synths.

Trans had rattled Geffen, and they were further shocked when Neil as a follow-up offered the original Old Ways, a country album the label, appalled at the idea, rejected. In response to their demands for something “more rock’n’roll”, he knocked off Everybody’s Rockin’, a 25-minute rockabilly pastiche that Geffen released with possibly gritted teeth and much hyperventilation in the accounts department. Reviews were poor, sales worse. Geffen sued Young for $3.3 million for making records that were “not commercial” and “musically uncharacteristic”. Meanwhile, Neil was having the time of his life on a tour of state fairs and rodeos with a country band he called The International Harvesters, featuring Rufus Thibodeaux and pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins. Disc 14, “Grey Riders: 1984-1986“, features 14 live tracks from the tour, half of them previously released on 2011’s A Treasure. The disc is an appropriately barnstorming ruckus of blazing fiddles, banjo, pedal steel, Neil on fire, too. There’s a tremendous unreleased version of the bleakly sardonic “Nothing Is Perfect”, one of the songs he played with the Harvesters at Live Aid, whose initial hillbilly pieties are brutally undermined by successive verses that evoke an idyllic America ruined by corporate greed. Like Dylan’s “It’s All Good”, the scathing closing track on Together Through Life, “Nothing Is Perfect” turns a cliche into an indictment. “The Old House”, likewise unreleased, is a gorgeous lament that describes similar economic ravages, distressed communities, farm foreclosures, lives destroyed.

In February 1984, Neil and Crazy Horse fetched up at The Catalyst, a club in Santa Cruz, for a four-night stand, apparently to work up songs for a new album that was abandoned when Neil went off to make Old Ways. The eight tracks on Disc 15, “Touch The Night (Crazy Horse 1984)”, include riff-heavy blues rock versions of “Barstool Blues”, “Welfare Mothers”, and “Violent Side” and “I Got A Problem”, the latter pair prototypes that would appear in glossier form on 1986’s Landing On Water. There are three unreleased songs, “Rock”, “Your Love” and something called “So Tired” that sounds worryingly like a Black Sabbath tribute band. A more familiar Crazy Horse emerges on an 11-minute version of “Touch The Night”, another track destined for Landing On Water, its smouldering grandeur a welcome contrast to the fraught belligerence elsewhere.

As a 2021 Christmas gift to fans, Young started streaming an unreleased album on the Neil Young Archives website. The eight-track Summer Songs, the final disc of the collection, was originally recorded at his Broken Arrow Ranch in 1987. There’s a simple, heartfelt “American Dream”, preferable at least to the ghastly, overblown monstrosity that became the title track of CSNY’s regrettable 1988 reunion album. “Someday”, “Hanging On A Dream” and a re-written “Wrecking Ball” were all revisited on Freedom. “For The Love Of Man” wouldn’t resurface until 2012’s Psychedelic Pill, 25 years later. The very last track of the anthology is an official release for “The Last Of His Kind” – “the Farm Aid song” – a celebration of American working-class nobility that could easily be about Young himself.

Available only on the US Deluxe Edition, there are also 11 films on five Blu-Rays, with a total running time of 14 hours, including the 1982 feature, Human Highway, starring Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell and Devo – a film “made up on the spot by punks, potheads and former alcoholics”. There’s footage from the 1978 Boarding House shows, a 1982 Berlin concert and the 1984 Catalyst shows, as murky as the music. Muddy Track is a documentary about an unhappy 1987 European tour. In A Rusted Garage is from a 1986 concert in California, with a guest appearance from comedian Sam Kinison. A Treasure has mostly ropey visuals, but a ferocious version of “Grey Riders” with The International Harvesters. There are two Blu-Rays dedicated to Trans. Best of all is Across The Water, 14 songs from the 1976 Budokan shows and some hilarious clips of Neil busking in Glasgow and a side-splitting encounter with the London hippie known as Jesus famous for dancing naked at the Roundhouse and assorted festivals. “Jesus?” Neil says. “Well, I hope it goes better for you this time.”

It’s the footage of “Like A Hurricane” from Hammersmith 1976, the first time you saw him, that really sticks. Neil looking like he’d just fallen out of a Laurel Canyon treehouse, long bedraggled hair blown askew by the wind machine, turning to the camera wild-eyed, with a Spahn Ranch grin, an air about him already of someone who’d long since stopped playing by anyone’s rules but his own. And thus it continues.

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Jain also hosts a monthly show on NTS radio and runs a label, both called Ghrunghru, which focus on new experimental electronic music emanating from the South Asian diaspora. “The reason I started writing this music is because I was feeling a lot of dissonance within myself around what I was doing so far from home,” she says. “That experience of taking multiple worlds of yours and putting them together is something that all immigrants have to do. Under The Lilac Sky helped me glue the different parts of me together.”

BRUCE BOTNICK: It was just really, really unusual for me. I had never heard anything like that before. But I loved the energy. The drummer [Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer, who’d trained as a pianist, not a percussionist] struggled with the tempo. After about 30 takes Arthur said, “Sit down, I’ll play.” I guess Snoopy must have then figured out how to do it.

ECHOLS: By that time everyone was cursing at the poor man. We played it so much that by the end my fingers were bleeding, but after that we felt we could do anything. We realised we needed a real drummer, so finally got Michael Stuart [now Stuart-Ware] from the Sons Of Adam.

MICHAEL STUART-WARE: Arthur had heard the Sons play a few times. One day, he came by our pad in Laurel Canyon and said, “You guys can have this tune if you want it”, and banged out “7 And 7 Is” on his black Gibson acoustic. Our lead guitarist Randy Holden said, “That’s not really us”, so Arthur played us “Feathered Fish”. Randy went, “We’ll take that!” and we covered it. Love’s original drummer, Don Conca, was fabulous, but the drugs took over and he stopped showing up for gigs. One night Arthur asked, “Is there a drummer in the house?” So Snoopy had filled in, but was more comfortable once he switched to harpsichord. Arthur was always asking me to join and after the Sons stopped getting along, I finally said OK. When I bumped into Don Conca he said, “That’s cool, man. You’re the only drummer in Hollywood who can handle it.”

ECHOLS: Don Conca was a loud showman, like Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich. Michael was a finesse drummer. He did these rhythmic counterpoints that sounded marvellous. We all had eclectic tastes. Country, gospel, blues, jazz. Arthur and I went to the same Memphis high school as Charles Lloyd and I’d watch fascinated as he played clarinet. After we moved to Los Angeles, Charles came to see Love at [LA club] Bido Lito’s. We were drawing 10 times more people than him. He was kinda miffed, but light-heartedly. When we wanted to go more jazzy we got Tjay Cantrelli, who we’d played with in the Grass Roots, on woodwind. He was just going to play a session, but the flute changed the sound so much that he became part of the group.

STUART-WARE: I’d listened to the first Love album, but Arthur wanted to cover new ground from a jazz foundation. At the first practice at Arthur and [guitarist] Bryan MacLean’s pad on Brier, we smoked hash and listened to Charles Lloyd, Cat Stevens and Fresh Cream. Then Arthur played his new tunes on the Gibson, including “She Comes In Colors”. On stage at Bido Lito’s, Love were a natural LSD trip with no comedown, but the new songs sounded more sophisticated.

ECHOLS: We also changed producers. Mr Holzman [also Elektra Records boss] came from a folk music background and wanted everything clean and pristine, but our sound was loud, levels driven into the red. When Jac told us about Paul Rothchild, who’d just got out of prison for selling marijuana, we thought that was the coolest thing. We hadn’t heard his stuff. The only reason we hired him was because he’d gotten out of prison. We also got a new engineer, Dave Hassinger, who captured our sound as it was and got a great mix. We went into RCA Studios, because Paul Rothchild was working with The Doors in Sunset. RCA had installed an eight-track machine, so we could overdub on Da Capo. It was a brand new slate. I think Paul Rothchild expected us to do something like the first album. It took him a while to get used to these jazzier songs, but then he got on board and he was perfect.

STUART-WARE: Love ruled the Sunset Strip mysteriously. Because the group didn’t play often, everyone was always, “Where are they?” Our racial diversity enhanced that mystique and was an integral part of our difference.

ECHOLS: We were a racially diverse hard rock group because Arthur and I were racially diverse and grew up in a racially diverse community. We wanted our group to reflect who we were. We didn’t want to be typecast as R&B, or play the Chitlin circuit, where Chuck Berry’s manager had to carry a 45 and say, “Pay me now
or he’s not going on.”

BOTNICK: It was highly unusual to have a black person doing rock’n’roll, before Hendrix, but Arthur never called any race issues. He dealt with you on the level of: “This is my music and this is what I want.”

ECHOLS: Arthur had taken accordion lessons and his parents had also bought him an organ. He only joined the band I had with Billy Preston in school because young ladies flocked to us. He had a musician’s soul but didn’t want to take the time to become one. His genius was to be able to sit down with a group of us and sing songs that he’d written, and as we’d find the chords he’d go, “I like that.” He assembled the music like a collage, in his head from what we played. “She Comes In Colors” was the most difficult song on Da Capo to record. It probably took seven or eight takes, because in a way it’s three songs in one, but it’s hard to hear where the changes are.

STUART-WARE: Playing unusual time signatures didn’t present much of a challenge for anyone in the group. I’d listened to Dave Brubeck in school and played in a high school jazz group. The jazzy groove on “She Comes In Colors” was one I had from the get-go. I just had to play harder because I was up against electronic instruments. The flute and harpsichord duet was groundbreaking, and Arthur’s vocal was diverse and immaculate, as always.

ECHOLS: Arthur was a showboat, an introspective child who’d found his thing by being different. In summer he’d wear a fur coat and one shoe, sweating in that coat so much it smelled. He had this idea that a rock person should be nutty, but he was a fantastic poet. Even in elementary school he was always writing little rhymes. He had the knack of taking the most mundane situation into something interesting, and you’d think, ‘Wow.’ He wrote “She Comes In Colors” about his girlfriend, Annette Bonan. She’s Annette Ferrell now, but always wore colourful clothes, like the flower children did then.

STUART-WARE: I never really knew what the songs were about. Arthur usually left it to the listener to work out the reality. If he was ever asked, self-deprecation was his blade of choice: “It’s just about some chick.” But maybe he did write that song for Annette.

ECHOLS: When Arthur sang “When I was in England town, the rain fell right down” he’d never been to the UK. I explained, “Arthur, it should be ‘London town’.” But he sang it anyway. Maybe he didn’t want to share songwriting credits, but people here think “England town” is kinda cute.

BOTNICK: By then Love should have been hugely successful, but Arthur wouldn’t tour, wouldn’t leave Hollywood. In those days to promote an act properly you had to play somewhere to get radio. I think he felt comfortable and safe in his environment, but not touring harmed their career.

STUART-WARE: Concert promoters would track me down by phone. I’d call Arthur and the answer was always no. Eventually he got mad at me for asking. I often wondered, ‘What’s with the not playing?’

ECHOLS: We played in New York, Vegas, or Massachusetts, but we couldn’t play in the South or middle America, or sometimes we’d have bookings cancelled. The problem was the racial makeup of the group. It hurt us, because The Doors and Buffalo Springfield and all those other groups were able to tour. But we were getting successful, buying houses and had women chasing us, whereas at the start we were just trying to make a living. Also, we did some dumb things. I’ll demonstrate the mindset of a rock’n’roll kid. I bought an E-Type Jaguar, and when it ran out of gas I left it at the side of the street. My father begged me to go back for it. Eventually it was impounded and auctioned. Those cars are worth hundreds of thousands now. Leaving my car was probably the dumbest thing I ever did, along with insisting that Elektra sign The Doors. We got a fantastic offer from MCA Records, who could get us into way more shops, but we knew that having Love on their label was part of Elektra’s cachet. We figured that if they had The Doors, maybe they’d let us go. But instead all the money that was going to promote Love went on The Doors. People went “What did you do that for?” Because we were dumb kids! I was barely 18 then.

STUART-WARE: Then The Rolling Stones stole the line “She comes in colours” for “She’s A Rainbow”. Wasn’t Mick [Jagger] afraid of being sued? I remember we all thought, ‘Wow. How could Mick think it was OK to do that?’

BOTNICK: We all take stuff, but I do remember Arthur being offended.

ECHOLS: When Madonna used the melody from “She Comes In Colors” for “Beautiful Stranger”, Arthur was credited as a writer.

STUART-WARE: It doesn’t bother me that neither Da Capo or Forever Changes were hugely successful. What does bother me is that we didn’t work harder to promote both albums, or play more shows just for the thrill of playing.

ECHOLS: But even though Da Capo didn’t sell a whole lot, we felt we’d arrived as a group. People like The Beach Boys were talking to us as peers. On the next album we felt we had to push it to another higher level. The universe smiled on us, we did Forever Changes, and in the 55 years since it’s never been out of print.

The Love band featuring Johnny Echols tour the UK in July – tickets can be found here

Michael Stuart-Ware’s Love book, Behind The Scenes At The Pegasus Carousel, is now available as a Kindle under the title Pegasus Continuum

He continued: “I am honoured to be joined by dozens more of my favourite artists, each of whom brought their unique personalities to this record. Perhaps the biggest shock of them all was when Rufus Wainwright brought his warm, theatrical vocal tone to my symphonic metal anthem ‘Type III.’ I am grateful he took a chance and sang in this genre, which is new for him.”

McCreary is known for composing scores for hit films, TV series and games such as Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, God Of War, Call Of Duty: Vanguard and more.

Earlier this month, Spotify confirmed the streaming thresholds for its new royalty model.

According to a Billboard report, a track would have to meet a minimum annual streaming threshold before it would start to generate royalties.

However, the streaming threshold at which tracks will generate royalties has now been confirmed in a Consequence guest column by Kristin Graziani, president of music distribution platform Stem.

“After doing some analysis on what Spotify has actually communicated to distributors, we can say that in reality, these changes are intended to benefit emerging and growing artists,” Graziani wrote.

According to the article, Spotify is introducing three new policies in 2024. Firstly, all tracks will have to reach a minimum streaming threshold of 1000 streams within 12 months to be paid a royalty.Secondly, labels and distributors will be charged a penalty for delivering content responsible for fraudulent streams.

And finally, functional tracks, like white noise or environmental sounds, for example, will require a longer minimum play time than music tracks to earn royalties. Graziani said that “Spotify is starting to take steps in the right direction”.

Last year, the CMA formally launched a new study to examine the music streaming market in which it considered “whether innovation is being stifled and if any firms hold excessive power”.

The findings were published in a report, which found that analysis “suggests it is unlikely that an intervention by the CMA would release additional money into the system to pay creators more”.

Aniston, who portrayed Rachel Green in the US sitcom opposite Perry’s Chandler Bing, wrote in a lengthy note that the loss has “cut deep” and has caused an “insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before”.

Her personal tribute followed Matt LeBlanc’s note shared yesterday (November 14) in which the actor, who portrayed Joey Tribbiani – Chandler’s best friend in the series – said that it was an “honour” to share the stage with him.

“Matthew. It is with a heavy heart I say goodbye,” LeBlanc wrote in the post, alongside some stills from Friends. “The times we had together are honestly among the favourite times of my life.

“It was an honour to share the stage with you and to call you my friend. I will always smile when I think of you and I’ll never forget you. Never. Spread your wings and fly brother you’re finally free. Much love. And I guess you’re keeping the 20 bucks you owe me.”

Fellow star Courteney Cox, who played Monica Geller in the show (later marrying Chandler), also paid tribute to Perry yesterday.

“I am so grateful for every moment I had with you Matty and I miss you every day,” Cox wrote.

“When you work with someone as closely as I did with Matthew, there are thousands of moments I wish I could share,” she said, before going on to share a clip from the sitcom that she felt was enhanced by Perry’s natural comedic charisma.

The Friends cast shared a joint tribute shortly after news of his death broke.

Revisit more tributes to the late film and TV actor here.

In October 2023, Perry, who played Chandler Bing in the main show, died aged 54. The rest of the cast paid tribute to him in a joint statement.