It’s hard to evaluate a miracle using standard critical criteria. Joni Mitchell’s return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival last July was an event as triumphant as it was wholly unlikely, following her long (and continuing) struggle back to health in the wake of a brain aneurysm in 2015. The show preserved and presented here was intended as a public recreation of the Joni Jams, the informal, good-timey, therapeutic evenings of music and laughter which Mitchell has hosted with a bunch of musician friends in recent years. Chief among the Jammers is Brandi Carlile, who was the...
Roger Waters will debut The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux at the London Palladium. This auspicious event will take place on October 8. Earlier this month, Waters confirmed that the project will be released as one of his solo albums, and is due in shops on October 6 – the album is available to pre-order here. Advertisement Joining Waters on stage will be his current touring band, who presumably all played on these new recordings: Gus Seyffert (bass), Joey Waronker (drums), Jonathan Wilson (guitars), Johnny Shepherd (organ), Via Mardot (Theremin), Azniv Korkejian (vocals), Gabe Noel (strings), Jon Carin...
John Lydon is in this month’s issue of Uncut talking about Public Image Ltd’s new album, End Of World. In this extended Q&A – an online exclusive – Lydon digs deeper into loss, glam rock rock and what he really thought of the American punk scene… First of all, I want to offer my condolences…No. I don’t want to hear that. You don’t get to enforce your opinions on my tragedy on me. I do not want your disingenuous sympathy. No, I’m not being disingenuous, I was very sorry to hear about it…Nora’s death breaks me down and breaks...
After Bruce Springsteen cancelled a planned E Street Band tour in 2020, Nils Lofgren spent many long pandemic hours in his home studio in Scottsdale, Arizona, jamming along to records by Albert King, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Soon he realised he needed to do something more creative with his time. “So I decided to make a record. Whatever comes out, I’ll just share it with people.” The bluesy Mountains, his first album of all-new originals in a decade, sounds lively and engaged, by turns angry at the state of the world and ecstatic over the state of his...
“It’s turning!” shouts a bloke in the crowd, pointing at the giant Lovell Telescope overlooking the main stage, which has slowly started to revolve towards us as Pavement play the sadly majestic “Here”. It’s hard to imagine the band instigating such a piece of theatre – unlike some previous Bluedot headliners, Pavement are not ones for big cosmic gestures – but it nonetheless confers a sense of grandeur on the occasion. 31 years after their first UK show, these perennial mid-afternoon underdogs finally feel like bona fide festival headliners. Last year at Primavera Porto, Pavement looked a tad uneasy...
Neil Young’s 1976 live collection Odeon Budokan will get a standalone vinyl release via Reprise on September 1. Side 1 was recorded live at Hammersmith Odeon on March 31 1976 and features Neil Young’s solo set on guitar and piano from the first half of the concert. Side 2 was recorded two weeks earlier at Nippon Budokan Hall in Tokyo on March 11, 1976, with Crazy Horse in full electric flight. Produced by David Briggs and shelved for several decades, the album was previously available on CD in 2020 as part of the Archives Volume II collection. This will...
In the mid-’70s, in opposition to the repressive fist of the military junta, the Brazilian counterculture flourished, finding their métier in resistance through dropping out and turning on. The return of two exiled musicians and legends, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, had something to do with it; Veloso’s long hair and feyness was a defiant finger to conservative sensibilities, for example. But there was more going on here, with ragtag assemblages of ‘curtição’ and ‘desbunde’ (trip-outs and dropouts), artists, filmmakers and musicians, all gathering to get free on the beaches of Ipanema, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro. The...
There’s always been a fine line between the nostalgic and the timeless. Both acknowledge the past, of course, but one depends upon former glories to justify its present, while the other’s historical ties are a mere bedrock for its future. The line’s becoming ever finer, too, as pop continues to eat itself. Contrived familiarity, after all, is a comforting illusion, and if recent legal cases – like the Marvin Gaye estate’s against Ed Sheeran – have exposed the form’s structural limitations, advancing technology has also allowed easier appropriation of production techniques. Not that the nostalgic is purely worthless, nor...
The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy direct from us here – includes a deep dive into the heady world of San Francisco psych pioneers Moby Grape, investigating why a band blessed with five songwriters and seemingly endless promise fell apart so quickly. You can read the full feature exclusively in the magazine itself, but here’s a little piece of bonus content for you: a short interview with Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, recounting his personal encounters with the Grape: “Quite simply, their sophistication was over my head!” What did you make of the...
HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME All copies of the September issue of Uncut magazine come with a free, 15-track CD – Now Playing – that showcases the wealth of great new music on offer this month. All of these artists appear in the pages of Uncut’s September 2023 issue – either in features or our essential reviews section. Here, then, is your guide to Now Playing… 1 BlurSt Charles SquareMessrs Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree return with the second track from their new album, The Ballad Of Darren, and it’s a spiky, Scary Monsters behemoth that’s...
