Keep a little Marc in your heart! Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to Marc Bolan and T.Rex. Celebrating 50 years of “T Rextasy”: the moment in 1971 when Marc Bolan caught pop music’s changing mood, and took a huge audience with him for a thrilling glitter rock ride. Buy a copy by clicking here
A dazzling blend of greatest-hits show, avant-garde ballet and timely political statement, David Byrne’s 2018 American Utopia tour was a natural candidate for an extended Broadway encore. Shot in late 2019 and premiered on HBO in October, Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s sold-out Hudson Theater run is respectfully faithful to the stage performance, with a few deft embellishments. Stripping the stage down to an artfully minimal art-space, Byrne is joined by a multinational ensemble of 11 bare-footed singer-dancer-musicians, all dressed in stylishly egalitarian grey uniforms. Played on portable wireless instruments in thunderously percussive marching-band arrangements, rebooted Talking Heads classics...
It is a line AC/DC are obviously pleased with: they’ve wheeled it out more than once. The gag runs that, during some or other promotional campaign, some upstart critic accused them of having made the same album 11 times. AC/DC retort to the effect that this is an outrageous, ignorant and insupportable calumny: they have, in fact, made the same album 12 times. The numbers vary with the telling, but AC/DC’s repeated deployment of this quip is itself almost a meta-commentary on the joke they’re telling against themselves. It’s also an assertion of the – correct – belief that...
It begins quietly in A&M Studios, Los Angeles, on November 15, 1972, and ends several thousand miles away on March 10, 1976 in a blaze of feedback at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall. The intervening years – those covered, no less, by this ambitious second instalment of the expansive Archives project – remains a critical period for Neil Young, not just for the stellar run of albums he made during this time, but for the way it continues to dominate our thinking about his long, capricious career. After The Gold Rush and Harvest made Young a solo star at the start...
NYC-based multi talented artist Aicha Dosso, with African roots, raised in Paris, France, released her debut single “Bien,” mixing cultures and showcasing her cosmopolitan heritage and views. The talented Aicha wants to incorporate the vibe of NYC into Parisian Cabaret music as she mentions: “I feel I can add a special New York flavor to my songs.” The mission seems impossible, but there is nothing impossible for Aicha. The talented singer-songwriter is also quite a successful actress and writer. She sets herself a goal and does not stop unless reaching it. The talented and devoted artist studied acting at...
30 GRANDADDY The Sophtware Slump: 20th Anniversary Collection DANGERBIRD Two decades on, the ‘American OK Computer’ (or one of them, anyway) got a deluxe vinyl box, featuring two LPs of rarities and B-sides and a full 2020 re-recording of the album on piano. The latter, rush-recorded during lockdown in Jason Lytle’s LA apartment, was a surprise highlight, actually shining new light on the 11 songs that made up the original record. 29 BRIAN ENO Film Music 1976 – 2020 UMe While Eno busied himself with a collaborative project alongside brother Roger (Mixing Colours, Luminous), the reissue of his back...
50 MARGO PRICE That’s How Rumors Get Started LOMA VISTA Recording in Hollywood with Sturgill Simpson in the producer’s chair, the Midwest farmer’s daughter tried her hand at a West Coast pop album for her third LP. Rather than country confessionals, then, here were 10 songs taking in Heartbreakers-esque new wave, gospel and prime Fleetwood Mac. Complete with a more oblique, lyrical voice from Price, the result was another step forward for a musician who respects tradition but has never been shackled by it. 49 GWENIFER RAYMOND Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain TOMPKINS SQUARE A fearsome live performer, foregoing...
The latest issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here – includes a fascinating survey of Stevie Wonder’s early-’70s, during which he transformed from teen idol to the visionary auteur behind double-album masterpiece, Songs In The Key Of Life. The story begins at Madison Square Garden on July 26, 1972, the final date of The Rolling Stones’ STP Tour across America. Stevie Wonder has just come on stage to play an encore with The Stones and to wish Mick Jagger a happy 29th birthday. Even the nosebleed seats stomp and cheer as...
As unexpected as it is to find Luluc closing out 2020 sharing a producer with pop behemoth Taylor Swift, it seems like a fitting end to this liminal, otherworldly year. The kinetic Aaron Dessner beat that opens the Australian duo’s fourth album is as much of a departure from the more muted tones of their previous work as its siblings brought to folklore – and yet, just as those propelled Swift’s heroine east from St Louis, this synthesised pulse also takes the listener on a journey. The opening “Emerald City” began in a world halfway between the Melbourne of...
Moments of crisis have often been strangely liberating for Paul McCartney’s music. When The Beatles were running on vapours, he retrenched and wrote his disarming debut album, McCartney. Ten years later, after a pot bust, a cancelled tour and a general weariness with Wings, he broke free to make McCartney II in 1980. These are both great albums and big ones, but they seem to have defined themselves very clearly as a “type” in Macca’s mind, and in his canon. Rather than “proper” records (today he uses the word “commercial”) if it’s called McCartney somewhere then it’s in some...
