As Suede conclude their triumphant Southbank Takeover, here’s Brett Anderson, Bernard Butler, Mat Osman, Simon Gilbert and producer Ed Buller remembering the creation of their debut single, “The Drowners”. Inspired by glam and “engorged flesh”, it earned the band celebrity fans and a record deal, and helped change the course of ’90s indie… For Suede, it was, in many ways, the worst of times. Singer Brett Anderson had broken up with girlfriend Justine Frischmann, losing along the way his residence in her plush Kensington flat, and her hustle as ersatz band manager. Advertisement It was also the best of...
Dissenting voices face their own challenges Once upon a time it felt like Hollywood had a monopoly on channeling the dream life of America, what Norman Mailer called “that subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence”. Today that river is barely below the surface – it gushes right out of the sewers and straight down main street, via the relentless torrents of social media. Dissenting voices face their own challenges. Networks are pulling talk show hosts, newspapers are firing columnists, and distributors are so shy of antagonising MAGA that...
Dissenting voices face their own challenges Once upon a time it felt like Hollywood had a monopoly on channeling the dream life of America, what Norman Mailer called “that subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence”. Today that river is barely below the surface – it gushes right out of the sewers and straight down main street, via the relentless torrents of social media. Dissenting voices face their own challenges. Networks are pulling talk show hosts, newspapers are firing columnists, and distributors are so shy of antagonising MAGA that...
The unparalleled exemplar of back catalogue management… What record companies back then used to do with their artists’ back catalogues was wait until enough of the artists’ records had charted and then re-release them all again as Greatest Hits collections. When the artists started to run out of hits, there were Best Of compilations. Either way, content was re-cycled, with little annotation and nothing so grand as contextualisation, beyond in those days an occasional sleeve note from a fan on the music press (“… some of the best music known to mankind…”), a cheery note from a band PR...
Courtney Marie Andrews returns with “Cons And Clowns”, her first new music for three years. “’Cons And Clowns’ is an ode to all the artists, outsiders, and shy loved ones you want to see shine!,” says Andrews. “In this world of growing sameness I wanted to write a love letter of encouragement to anyone who was afraid to be their wildest and weirdest self, especially amid the dark landscape of now. With a desire to embody the unencumbered playfulness of youth, I played the flute on this track, an instrument I haven’t played since my childhood.” Advertisement Andrews is...
Bob Dylan‘s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 is released on October 31 by Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalogue division of Sony Music Entertainment. You can hear “Rocks and Gravel” from the set below. Originally recorded on April 25, 1962 for the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions, it was later dropped from the album’s final tracklisting. Advertisement As per the title, Through The Open Window covers Dylan’s emergence as a songwriter and performer, from Minnesota to the Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. The set includes rare Columbia Records outtakes, recordings made at club...
With the imminent release of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition, we revisit this career-spanning Genesis interview from Uncut’s December 2014 issue… “Well, we managed to sack the lot of you!” One evening during the summer of 1998, a group of friends met for dinner in the discreet private dining room of a fashionable London restaurant. The mood was warm and convivial and, by all accounts, the meal went on late into the night. Casually dressed, all in their fifties, you might suppose this to be a meeting of senior partners in a business...
“It’s a thriller set in 1993, in and around raves,” says Geoff Barrow of Game, the debut feature from Invada Films, the new offshoot of his record label Invada. “The film’s basically about drugs, poaching and survival.” Having started out making imaginary soundtracks with Portishead, Barrow has progressed via composing actual film scores (for Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Civil War, among others) to now co-writing and producing a film of his own. His recently concluded final tour with Beak> coincided with a shift in priorities. “Music has started to fall away a bit,” he confesses. “I’ve really enjoyed...
A fastidious biographer with a habitual disregard for hyperbole In The Colonel And The King, Peter Guralnick – the great chronicler of the life of Elvis Presley – tells a tale about the 80th birthday party of Colonel Tom Parker. The event took place at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1989. At the end of the evening, Guralnick went to thank Presley’s former manager and found him “surrounded by various images of elephants, including a giant ice sculpture behind him, tusked and trumpeting, with Sam Phillips standing just to his left.” An intense discussion was underway about the events...
Suede have just released their latest album Antidepressants to stunning reviews (including Uncut, who called it their “most intoxicating, unhinged Suede album since Coming Up”). Now put Antidepressants on the stereo, turn it up and enjoy this classic An Audience With… Brett Anderson from the Uncut vaults. Brett Anderson has some fans in odd places. This month, Uncut’s email boxes are positively heaving with questions from adoring fans in Peru, Serbia, Japan, New Zealand, Belgium, South Africa, Slovenia and Russia.“I’m quite popular in odd places,” he says. “Suede had No 1s in Chile and Finland. We were massive in...
