Next month, Spiritualized will launch the The Spaceman Reissue Program with a half-speed remaster of their 1992 debut, Lazer Guided Melodies. While bandleader Jason Pierce is in retrospective mode, we’ve managed to collar him to answer your questions for Uncut’s next Audience With feature. Over the course of 35 years in music, Pierce’s unyielding psychedelic vision has provided us with numerous moments of spiritual and emotional enlightenment, first with the perfect prescriptions of Spacemen 3, then with the celestial majesty of Spiritualized, not to mention various solo excursions into free jazz and soundtracks. He’s walked with Jesus, he’s floated...
Of all the strange blooms to flourish in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ first tour across the infernal English summer of 1976, the boldest and brightest was Poly Styrene. A mixed-race child of a sad-eyed Somali stowaway dad and fierce white south London mum, she walked into their gig on Hastings Pier (supporting Welsh metallers Budgie) on her 19th birthday as Marianne Joan Elliott-Said and skipped out a transformed woman. “The world is still playing catch-up with Poly,” says Pauline Black towards the end of this artful, lyrical, moving film. And after a journey taking us from a...
Cometh the hour, cometh the man – and if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about carnage it’s Nick Cave. Some of this he’s historically created himself. Some has been cruelly thrust upon him. But whatever the situation, this is someone who doesn’t shy away from what’s happening; who plays the cards as they fall. Now, locked down like the rest of us (maybe not quite like the rest of us – he makes a couple of mentions of a balcony where he vaults into the imagination and back while reading and notating Flannery O’Connor), he presents...
The current issue of Uncut – in shops now and available to buy online by clicking here – features a candid interview with Green Gartside of Scritti Politti as he reflects on the full Scritti saga, from anarchist squats to Top Of The Pops and creative prevarications, via Derrida, breakdowns and Miles Davis. In this extract, as Gartside gears up to tour the band’s brilliant and confounding album Cupid & Psyche 85 for the very first time, he looks back at its recording… Working with David Gamson and Fred Maher, how did Cupid & Psyche 85 take shape? David...
Ideas forever above their station, baroque two-piece Nirvana were thrown to the wolves somewhat in 1967 when they were billed to play an Island Records showcase at London’s Saville Theatre. With the stage still half set for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (featuring Cleo Laine and Bernard Breslaw), and the audience eagerly awaiting new rock sensations Traffic, Patrick Campbell-Lyons, Alex Spyropoulos and their mini-orchestra were barely audible. “We had only had three rehearsals,” Campbell-Lyons recalls ruefully in the sleevenotes to this remastered vinyl collection of their five studio LPs, plus an unreleased sixth. “It was a dreadful...
If you’re already familiar with Julien Baker’s pared back, acoustic guitar and piano-led songwriting, the wider sonic palette is the first thing you’ll notice about Little Oblivions – the exhilarating gasp of synthesiser on “Faith Healer”; the way that “Hardline” roars and crunches to its conclusion; the stately, synthetic percussion underpinning “Relative Fiction”. The Memphis songwriter’s adoption of drums on this third album – her second for Matador – has, as she has joked in interviews, the potential for a Dylan moment given the sparse confessionals typical of her work to date. But regardless of ornamentation, Baker’s writing remains...
Man the barricades! The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to order online here, with free P&P for the UK – features Ian MacKaye’s first-person account of Fugazi’s incredible, and loud, career at the vanguard of America’s post-hardcore scene. In this extract, he recalls being inspired by Sex Pistols and The Cramps to form Minor Threat, before ripping it up and starting again in even more ambitious fashion with the radical, inspirational Fugazi… —- When punk rock appeared, the media were really derisive about it. At first I just took a bite of the media’s...
Founded in 1995 and initially a trio, Glasgow’s Mogwai made their debut with “Tuner/Lower”, a self-pressed seven-inch in thrall to Slint and Codeine. They went on to synthesise post-rock, metal, slow-core, instrumental soundtracks, Krautrock and electronica into something distinctively their own, moving well beyond the “quiet/loud” aesthetic that dominated their early years. Their reach has encompassed a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf”, on obscure, absurdly titled split single “Two Sonic Scratches Of The Big Bad Rock Arse”, substantial remix projects and scores for art movies, such as the cultish and acclaimed Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. As they...
“Look Into My Eyes” is an eye-opening performance by emerging artist CG Naughty, leaving the audience wanting more. An impressive technique mixed with unprecedented lyricism adds to a great work, which incorporates various issues of our modern society’s dark side. The United States of America have been going through countless police brutality cases, with police officers often being only suspended while getting paid leave. This unfair treatment has given rise to songs similar to “Look Into My Eyes.” Perhaps, the song’s title suggests that because so many police officers fail to look at the eyes of the people they...
It didn’t take long for Peter Murphy to make an impression. Three minutes into Bauhaus’s first ever studio session, the former bookbinder’s apprentice from Northampton stepped up to the mic and began singing about velvet-lined coffins and virginal brides with such conviction that their first-take recording of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” remained on the indie charts for two years. In that time, Bauhaus managed to stake out a whole new musical territory. Murphy understandably bristles at the ‘Godfather Of Goth’ epithet, given that his wide-ranging solo career has taken in everything from violin-driven alt.rock (on massive US radio hit “Cuts...
