Originally published in Uncut’s July 2022 issue “I think it was shown on MTV once, maybe twice,” says bassist James McNew, remembering “Sugarcube”’s video. “As far as I know, that’s it. That’s all.” In the 25 years since, however, the promo has racked up millions of views on YouTube, no doubt helped by the presence of its stars David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, the latter now better known as lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He has, it turns out, been a Yo La Tengo fan since the early ’90s. Advertisement “We were all fans...
It’s been another momentous year for Neil fans. Just as we’d settled down to enjoy the rowdy delights of Barn, the Official Bootleg Series truffled out new perspectives on his storied ’70/’71 and the Eldorado reissue brought back into focus Young’s creative rehabilitation at the end of the ’80s. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut This week, Young releases Noise & Flowers – a live album taken from his 2019 European tour with Promise Of The Real. Young started the tour a few weeks after the death of his long-serving manager, Elliot...
Earl McGrath sounds like a character from a Paul Thomas Anderson film. A socialite and bon vivant, he was born into poverty in Wisconsin before leaving a troubled home at 14 to join the merchant navy. Having broadened his geographical horizons, he started on his cultural ones, meeting WH Auden, Henry Miller and Leonard Bernstein before organising a music festival in Italy in 1959 featuring Cecil Taylor and Jack Kerouac. While there, he met and married an Italian countess, moving effortlessly into high society. An art collector and cultural dabbler, he worked in Hollywood – he bought pot from...
Ask anyone who was a fan of Little Feat during their initial run – a decade-long stretch from 1969 to ’79 where vocalist and guitarist Lowell George, and keyboard player Bill Payne, steered a leaky ship through toil and trouble – and they’ll tell you Little Feat’s music truly came alive onstage. Much like peers the Grateful Dead, the Feat needed the unpredictable conduction of energy between band and audience, plus the heat-of-the-moment, now-or-never fury of live performance, to take flight. It’s no surprise, then, that Waiting For Columbus is one of Little Feat’s most enduring albums, often included...
To really know somebody is to know all the little ways to hurt them. It’s fitting, then, that the most devastating moments on Take It Like A Man are rarely the most dramatic. “You can say it’s all my fault, we just couldn’t get along”, she sings on the quietly dignified “Fault Lines”. “Just so you know, I’ll say ‘I don’t know’/But no-one’s gonna be asking me”. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Like a lot of people – like a lot of wives and mothers – Shires experienced something of a...
Like so many artists from the Deep South, Lee Bains is conflicted about his upbringing to the point of obsession. Albums like Deconstructed and Youth Detention have been filled with songs that explore his roots and the complex socio-political legacy of the South, usually set to an energetic musical accompaniment that owes more to The Clash than Skynyrd. Old-Time Folks sees Bains – once of the Dexateens – on familiar lyrical territory, but musically he has tried to slow down a little, introducing elements of folk and country with the assistance of Drive-By Truckers producer Dave Barbe. ORDER NOW:...
Sam Prekop and John McEntire have worked in harmony for close to 30 years. As the singer-guitarist and drummer in The Sea And Cake – alongside bassist Archer Prewitt – the pair have amassed a body of work that takes a good few hours to sift through on Spotify, though such is the breezy, effortless nature of the material, you’d be hard pushed to remember which songs stand out. For fans, this familiarity has long been part of the Chicago band’s appeal: across 11 albums since their debut in 1994, The Sea And Cake’s innocuous post-rock – at times...
Given how all-out sinister Javier Bardem has been in some of his best-known roles – the merciless killer in No Country For Old Men, 007’s suave nemesis in Skyfall – you can’t easily imagine him being avuncular. Yet that’s altogether what he is in new Spanish feature The Good Boss – although his character is as sinister as uncle figures get. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut In this black comedy by Fernando León de Aranoa, Bardem, benign-looking in casual jackets and jumpers, plays Blanco, owner of a factory that makes scales....
Andrew Tuttle’s fifth album begins with a sense of being untethered and adrift, washes of abstract sound floating through the mix, a feeling of disorientation dominating. You might be reminded of the famed opening sequence of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, with Popol Vuh’s uncanny soundtrack accompanying the misty visuals of 16th-century conquistadors trudging through a treacherous Amazon rainforest. Where are we? How did we get here? Tuttle isn’t one to let his listeners drown in a whirlpool of confusion, however. After a minute or so, his resonant, reassuring five-string banjo appears like a beacon in the...
When the Grateful Dead departed California for their first European tour on April Fools’ Day 1972, they did so with an entourage almost 50 strong. As the tour programme proudly told us, they were not just a rock’n’roll band but an entire “community”, rooted in a freewheeling hippie idealism that for band and fans alike was a core part of the Dead’s raison d’être. Yet among the hipsters, flipsters, lovers and others along for the ride, central to the travelling circus was the recording crew under Betty Cantor, who captured every one of the shows in 16-track glory for...
