The year 1979 was when synth-pop went overground. In May, Tubeway Army released their final single “Are ‘Friends’ Electric”, a Moog-powered track that propelled the band – and their pale cyborg of a lead singer Gary Numan – to the top of the charts and onto Top Of The Pops. That same month, another seminal synth-powered record hit shelves. That The Bridge is seeing its first vinyl reissue since 1979 would seem to indicate it’s more of a footnote in the history of electronic music than a foundation stone. But a listen from the vantage point of 2022 reveals...
When Big Mama Thornton took the stage in 1977, she was struggling. Despite pioneering rock, blues and R&B in the 1950s, she’d been largely forgotten except as someone whose songs were covered and whose style was copped by Elvis and Janis Joplin, among others. Influence, however, doesn’t pay the bills. She toured continuously to survive, despite being so physically weak that she had to be helped onstage. Alcoholism hastened her decline and ravaged her voice, so that it was barely a squeak compared with the hurricane it had once been. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in...
Jack White has shared the title track from his forthcoming album Fear Of The Dawn, one of two records he’ll release this year, alongside Entering Heaven Alive. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Following on from the similarly blistering “Taking Me Back”, White’s latest track is a freewheeling, fuzzed-out rocker that clocks in at just over two minutes, with the former White Stripes frontman howling over heavily distorted guitars. Listen to “Fear Of The Dawn” below: Advertisement White announced both Fear Of The Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive back in November...
BUY THE BYRDS ULTIMATE MUSIC GUIDE HERE When some years ago Roger McGuinn connected with Uncut to talk about the band’s latest box set – 2006’s There Is A Season – he was reminded of an early guest at the band’s 1965 recording sessions: Bob Dylan. Dylan – then as much songwriter selling his wares as lightning rod for twentieth century culture – had arrived, essentially, to pitch the band his song “Mr Tambourine Man”. David Crosby apparently wasn’t keen on the time signature, or seemingly on much else about it – though the band were ultimately convinced by...
Celebrating the enduring legacy of The Byrds, whose joyful music invented (and escaped) folk rock, and country rock, becoming along the way home to some of music’s most legendary singer-songwriters: Gene Clark, David Crosby and Gram Parsons. “A time to every purpose under heaven…” Buy a copy here!
In his 1889 essay “The Decay Of Lying”, Oscar Wilde argued that, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” But the literary giant never lived through the shuttering of rock clubs, salons and hole-in-the-wall bars that are a sole source of promotion, incubation and performance for an artist and his work. That’s not to say Jeff Parker’s latest is a pandemic album, but it is one that effortlessly transmits the heart of a society in exile, just a man with a guitar in his house, improvising to no-one but himself and a friend who’s set up the...
As soon as music venues reopened their doors last summer, Black Country, New Road were pretty much the first band back out on tour, playing to audiences seated at tables in socially distanced bubbles. Sure, they had a critically acclaimed debut album to promote – For The First Time was released at the height of lockdown in February 2021 – but they seemed keen to quickly push beyond that. The setlist for that first show, at Bath Komedia on June 15, included only three songs from the album, and four they hadn’t recorded yet. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is...
The first phase of the Covid crisis brought a rude interruption to normal life for Anaïs Mitchell. She was living in New York, in the ninth month of her pregnancy with her second child. Mitchell’s creative life was dominated, as it had been for some years, by the demands of Hadestown, the juggernaut of a musical which has grown from her folk opera about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (also the basis for her 2010 album). It’s hard, with the world now stuck in a state of numbed alarm, to remember the fearful reality of the early part...
Erin Rae has been quietly making strides around Nashville these past few years. 2015’s self-released Soon Enough – which found her fronting The Meanwhiles – brought her to the attention of John Paul White, who promptly signed her to his own Single Lock label for Rae’s solo debut, Putting On Airs, in 2018. For all their merits, however, neither of those albums quite prepare you for the major leap forward signalled by Lighten Up. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Produced by Jonathan Wilson in his Topanga Canyon studio, Lighten Up...
Lou Reed wasn’t known as the sentimental sort. And yet, he kept a memento of his earliest days as songwriter where he could see it every day. The demo tape he posted to himself to self-copyright in 1965 is one of the treasures in the Lou Reed Archive and the exhibition celebrating it, Caught Between The Twisted Stars, which opens on March 2, Reed’s 80th birthday. “We’d tried getting into a locked safe, thinking it was there,” curator Don Fleming recalls. “But it was right behind him at his desk in his office, on a shelf with a bunch...
