The boozing depicted in Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round looks like mere middle-class dilettantism – which, of course, it is – compared to the hard living associated with Shane MacGowan. Excess is central to the myth of the Pogues’ founding bard, but it had a catastrophic effect on MacGowan’s creative abilities and his health. Crock Of Gold is the latest film from Julien Temple, who has been documenting the hard cases of the British music scene for decades, with MacGowan the latest subject in a series of portraits that has also featured Ray Davies, Wilko Johnson and Joe Strummer. MacGowan...
Has there been a more iconic bassist in the history of music than William ‘Bootsy’ Collins? The top hat and star-shaped shades make for an instantly recognisable silhouette, but more importantly Bootsy’s strident basslines helped formed the bedrock for what we understand as funk today. After holding it down for James Brown – no mean feat – he hitched a ride on the Funkadelic mothership in 1972, becoming a prominent figure in the P-Funk family. Stretching out as a bandleader with Bootsy’s Rubber Band, songs like “I’d Rather Be With You” provided the blueprint for west coast hip-hop, before...
One of the recent sensations in the hip-hop scene is the female rapper from Central Florida, Priceless Scott, whose recent release, the new EP titled Pressure Makes Diamonds stole the show for good. She makes urban life popping with her unique mixtures of old school hip-hop and her signature style sounds. All six tracks included in the EP are filled with tasty melodicism, a perfect balance of harmonic and power rap, as well as distills atmospheric energy throughout. Each of the tracks has verses deserving to be quoted and remembered. The artist’s lyricism deserves special and detailed attention. “Pull...
Hip-hop’s golden artist JGOTITT has released the hottest music video, and I would even dare to say in the whole history of hip-hop, for his recent track “Bounce That Ass.” The video’s fiery visuals recreate what the title states: beautiful ladies bouncing their beautiful body parts around the rapper who doesn’t seem unfamiliar with the scene. He enjoys every bit of the show and remains cool and edgy. The song itself is filled with groove and style. It is really grounded in the lyricism yet, provides a very out of body experience with the swaggy, groovy beats that pump...
In 1970, George Clinton and his merry pranksters of P-Funk released three albums that, collectively, worked to rewrite the possibilities of soul, funk and rock as integrated forces across the landscape of popular music. With Parliament’s debut set, Osmium, and these first two Funkadelic albums, Funkadelic and Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, Clinton and P-Funk set out the parameters of their thing – a plasmic, irruptive funk-rock hybrid where riffs were elastic, grooves were eternal, the world was rendered surreal, politics were both prurient and profound, and comedy came both at, and from, the core: equal...
Taken from Uncut’s August 2020 issue A follow-up to this spring’s Song For Our Daughter may be a little way off, explains Laura Marling. “If I’m on the road for an extended period of time, I tend to have written an album by the time I get back,” she says. “Obviously that’s been completely scuppered by coronavirus. When I’m at home I play the guitar but I don’t really feel the need to write – I mean, I’m at home, I’ve got nothing to miss.” For now, though, there’s her extensive back catalogue to enjoy, and it’s this body...
The trippy story of how Jimi Hendrix ended up playing a concert in front of a few hundred spectators at a windy cow farm next to a Hawaiian volcano features a cast of characters that could come from a Thomas Pynchon novel. There’s Chuck Wein, aka The Wizard, a Leary-lite Harvard graduate who dated Edie Sedgwick and made films with Warhol before dropping into the hippie world. There’s Michael Jeffery, Hendrix’s manager, a shady operator with a line in tall stories about his career in the British Army. And there’s Hendrix, who found himself committed to making a soundtrack...
During the enforced idleness of the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people hatched ambitious plans: reading unreadable books, mastering a language, baking virtuous sourdough. For Jeff Tweedy, the global crisis truncated a Wilco tour, and he found himself at home with his family. His son Spencer lives at home anyway, and his other son, Sammy, returned from New York to do remote schooling. Tweedy had tuned in to the discussion about creativity during times of quarantine, and had learned (the arguable fact) that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while sheltering from the plague. What to do? Well, in...
Last year, Dave Vanian admitted to Uncut that a reformation of the classic Damned line-up was unlikely, describing the relationship between fellow original members Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies as a “powder keg”. But it seems that the fuse has been re-lit, with the foursome announcing a reunion tour for July next year. In the latest issue of Uncut – in shops now, or available to buy online by clicking here – all four original Damned members tell Peter Watts why they decided the time was right to get back together. “Everybody wants to do it and life is...
Jason Lytle has always been drawn to the wilderness, but civilisation seems to have a way of drawing him back again. After years in his hometown of Modesto, California, in 2006 he headed to Montana for the best part of a decade, before relocating to Portland, then Modesto again and now Los Angeles. When Uncut speaks to the songwriter, he’s out in the wilds again, having left the smoke and traffic of Southern California for a camping trip in Idaho. “I’m in the mountains,” he says, “and I’m about to drive further into the mountains today.” It’s this see-sawing...
