Hit Singles

Hit Singles

Blossom Toes – We Are Ever So Clean/If Only For A Moment

At Blossom Toes’ 1960s pad, a stone’s throw from Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, things could get pretty lively. “There were people coming and going all of the time,” guitarist Jim Cregan tells Uncut. “You’d go into the kitchen and there would be Eric Clapton hanging out with Stevie Winwood, then you’d have Captain Beefheart on acid in the living room flicking the lights on and off and going, ‘Oh wow!’ Then you’d have our manager Giorgio Gomelsky dropping by with a bunch of German businessmen saying, ‘I want to show you what a hippie house looks like.’ And some girls, I’d imagine.” ORDER NOW: Kate Bush is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Indisputably at the heart of the action in the late 1960s, Blossom Toes played to the hip glitterati at the Scotch Of St James and entertained the fast set during a residency at Paris’s Le Bus Palladium, but their two LPs for Gomelsky’s Marmalade imprint – 1967’s whimsical We Are Ever So Clean and 1969’s more hefty If Only For A Moment – sold poorly. Flush with their successes with the Bee Gees and Bert Kaempfert, Marmalade’s parent label Polydor apparently dismissed Blossom Toes… Read More →

Hit Singles

Modern Studies – We Are There

Perhaps it is the awareness, inescapable of late, that life is both precious and fragile, but the fourth album by Modern Studies exhibits a toughening of sinew, a quickening of intent. The sense of urgency marks a small but significant evolution from their last record, The Weight Of The Sun, released in early summer 2020. ORDER NOW: Kate Bush is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Since forming in 2015, the music created by this collaborative quartet has tended towards shiver, shimmer and murmur. Modern Studies blend into an unclassifiable whole elements of hazy, pastoral psych-folk and the slips and sighs of analogue electronica, alongside pickings from krautrock, Brubeckian jazz, blissed-out Cali canyon harmonies and the sweet tang of chamber pop. Instruments seemingly named after decommissioned weaponry or tools of torture (sub 37, ms10, clock gong, saw) bubble beneath the contrasting voices of the group’s two songwriters, Emily Scott and Rob St John. The former is cool, clear and unsentimental, with echoes of the some of the great English stylists, from Sandy Denny to Jacqui McShee. The latter is rich and deep, near-gothic. Working in tandem, singing over and under each other, the effect is of a… Read More →

Hit Singles

Brian Wilson – Long Promised Road

Near the start of Brent Wilson’s modest, elliptical, ultimately desperately moving new documentary, the director sits Brian Wilson at a piano in his lambent Beverly Hills mansion and tosses him a few questions about his unexpectedly productive third act. “You’ve been working non-stop since your late fifties. Where did this sudden surge of creativity come from?” “Well,” says Brian, looking about as comfortable as a Californian black bear asked to explain exactly what goes on in the woods, “it starts from my brain, works its way out into the piano and then into the speakers in the studio.” “Is that something you can explain?” the director enquires, hopefully. “No,” responds Brian firmly, “I can’t.” ORDER NOW: Kate Bush is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut At this stage another film about Brian Wilson may seem less than necessary. After I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (1995), Endless Harmony (1998), Beautiful Dreamer (2004) and 2014’s biopic Love & Mercy, it’s a story that Uncut readers will know better than most: the California childhood overshadowed by a brutally domineering father, the Beach Boys riding early-’60s surfmania into international acclaim, how Pet Sounds became Brian’s own sonic Sagrada Família… Read More →

Hit Singles

Listen to The Coral’s remastered version of “Dreaming Of You” to mark its 20th anniversary

The Coral have released a remastered version of their 2002 hit “Dreaming Of You” to mark its 20th anniversary this year. The track is also part of the forthcoming reissue of the band’s self-titled 2002 debut album, which is set for release on March 4 via Run On Records in association with Modern Sky. ORDER NOW: Kate Bush is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: The Coral – Album By Album Coral frontman James Skelly said in a press release that “Dreaming Of You” “nearly didn’t make the album” 20 years ago. Advertisement “It was a song we hadn’t yet recorded during the main studio sessions, but when [producer Ian] Broudie heard it, he said it had to be on there,” Skelly recalled. “We went back into the studio to get down this angular version that fitted the rest of the album. “I’d had the song since meeting [Shack founders] Mick and John Head for the first time, and they said they really liked our stuff. We sat and spoke about Love, who we are massively influenced by, as he actually knew Arthur Lee a bit. I just went home from their praccy room, picked… Read More →

Hit Singles

Introducing the Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide to The Byrds

BUY THE BYRDS ULTIMATE MUSIC GUIDE HERE When some years ago Roger McGuinn connected with Uncut to talk about the band’s latest box set – 2006’s There Is A Season – he was reminded of an early guest at the band’s 1965 recording sessions: Bob Dylan. Dylan – then as much songwriter selling his wares as lightning rod for twentieth century culture – had arrived, essentially, to pitch the band his song “Mr Tambourine Man”. David Crosby apparently wasn’t keen on the time signature, or seemingly on much else about it – though the band were ultimately convinced by its writer to give it a shot. Advertisement Dylan hung around, and was still there when the band got the song down completely, turning it from a delicate acoustic piece into something which seemed to hover somehow, powered by its own ethereal forces of guitar and harmony, becoming the “magic swirling ship” emerging from Dylan’s tumbling words. As McGuinn recalled it, Dylan asked “What’s that?” He no longer recognised his own song. This kind of transformative power is part of the magic of the Byrds. Folkies who had bent an ear to the Fab Four’s British invasion, the band had a… Read More →

Hit Singles

Jeff Parker – Forfolks

In his 1889 essay “The Decay Of Lying”, Oscar Wilde argued that, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” But the literary giant never lived through the shuttering of rock clubs, salons and hole-in-the-wall bars that are a sole source of promotion, incubation and performance for an artist and his work. That’s not to say Jeff Parker’s latest is a pandemic album, but it is one that effortlessly transmits the heart of a society in exile, just a man with a guitar in his house, improvising to no-one but himself and a friend who’s set up the mics. A man alone with his thoughts and hands. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut The premise is simple, but the result is remarkable – a multitudinous work of solo electric guitar that’s a testament to Parker’s versatility, intuition and skill, a low-key display of self-effacing virtuosity that doubles as a balm for our time. Ambient jazz at its finest, and further proof that Parker’s playing is impressive in almost any setting, even if it’s a far cry from the ensembles he rose to prominence with, and from the paths he has worn… Read More →

Hit Singles

Anaïs Mitchell – Anaïs Mitchell

The first phase of the Covid crisis brought a rude interruption to normal life for Anaïs Mitchell. She was living in New York, in the ninth month of her pregnancy with her second child. Mitchell’s creative life was dominated, as it had been for some years, by the demands of Hadestown, the juggernaut of a musical which has grown from her folk opera about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (also the basis for her 2010 album). It’s hard, with the world now stuck in a state of numbed alarm, to remember the fearful reality of the early part of the pandemic, but Mitchell reacted by quitting the city and going back to Vermont. Mitchell’s family moved into her grandmother’s old house, just along the driveway from her childhood home. Her second daughter was born a week later. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Creatively, this enforced stillness offered a chance to refocus. “There was something about feeling kind of invisible,” she tells Uncut. “Maybe I felt I had more access to me in the music, and it didn’t matter what came out of it.” This fresh sense of perspective is clear… Read More →

Hit Singles

Black Flower – Magma

Belgium has been the butt of jokes from the Anglophone pop world for decades – Technotronic, the Singing Nun and some hilariously hi-NRG gabba acts being the country’s prime pop exports – but the Belgian jazz scene has a long and noble history. Artists as diverse as Django Reinhardt, Toots Thielemans, Philip Catherine and Marc Moulin have created varieties of jazz quite distinct from anything that was happening in the United States. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Now in the Belgian vanguard are Black Flower, fronted by Nathan Daems, a multi-instrumentalist who started out on the violin and trained to a high level on several reed instruments at the Ghent Conservatory. But he was always looking for music outside the US jazz canon: playing guitar in avant-rock groups, playing various saxophones in reggae and Afrobeat bands, and travelling the world to study non-Western tunings, wind instruments and alternative forms of improvisation. Brussels is as diverse as London, and Daems’ experiments in pancultural fusion are very similar to the madly eclectic, Commonwealth-accented jazz that has emerged in the UK in recent years. One of Daems’ projects, Echoes Of Zoo, is a sax-fronted… Read More →

Hit Singles

Imarhan – Aboogi

Imarhan have long been anointed as official heirs to Tinariwen’s desert-rock throne. Frontman Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam) is the cousin of Tinariwen’s bassist Eyadou Ag Leche and has joined them as a touring member on occasion. The bond between the two bands continues on this album, with Tinariwen’s Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni and Mohammed Ag Itlale (aka Japonais) contributing guest vocals – the latter, poignantly, in his final recording session before his death in February. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut While the music Imarhan make draws from the same well, combining blues and rock with Tuareg folksong and its distinct flavour of “assouf” (which broadly translates as longing or solitude), they always set out to distinguish themselves from their forebears by incorporating poppier influences and appealing to a younger generation. Press photos around the time of their 2016 self-titled album showed the quintet dressed in jeans and leather jackets rather than the traditional allichu veils, while the promo clip for the following year’s terrific “Azzaman” found them cruising around the suburbs in fancy shades and pulling donuts in the desert, in a knowing nod to hip-hop culture. The video for… Read More →

Hit Singles

Jake Xerxes Fussell – Good and Green Again

The centrepiece of Good And Green Again, the ingenious and soulful new album by North Carolina-based folk musician Jake Xerxes Fussell, is “The Golden Willow Tree”, an epic story-song about the sinking of a ship. Combining lyrics and melodies from various folk tunes – including a song by The Carter Family and another by a North Georgia singer named Paralee McCloud – it’s an intricate tale of maritime espionage, of courage and conspiracy, betrayal and comeuppance, told over a dozen swashbuckling verses. Fussell recounts a sailor’s offer to scuttle his own ship to win the favour of a rival captain, depicting the event in grave detail: “He had a little auger fit for the bore, and he bored nine holes in the bottom of the floor,” he sings, his robust voice sounding particularly downcast. “And sunk her in the low and lonesome water/And he sunk her in the lonesome sea.” ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Those last two lines become the song’s primary refrain, growing more intensely regretful and melancholy with each repetition: as the sailor navigates the dark waters back to the captain, as he asks for his reward, and… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Soundcarriers – Wilds

It’s unfortunate that The Soundcarriers are so identified with ‘hauntology’, the term coined by Simon Reynolds to describe what he referred to as “ghostified” music. While it’s unquestionably invited and warranted, this emphasis on the Nottingham band’s expertise at evoking a bygone era, as well as the technical manner in which they do so, focuses the spotlight on their historical influences. Prioritising style over their substance does the quartet few favours, however, because it makes it harder to think of them as a ‘living’ band. The reality is that while they may raise ghosts from the past – among them producers from the 1960s and early 1970s such as Joe Meek, David Axelrod and Serge Gainsbourg – The Soundcarriers are considerably more substantial than they are spectral. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut On Wilds that’s more obvious than on their three previous collections, which have generally been more whimsical, flower-power affairs, indebted to breezy sources of folk, tropicália and psychedelia like Pentangle, Erasmos Carlos and The United States Of America. Leonore Wheatley’s maidenly vocals still indicate a fondness for chasing white rabbits like Grace Slick or skipping round maypoles in the… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Pretenders – Ultimate Music Guide

Celebrating the recent re-release of the band’s classic first two albums, the Ultimate Music Guide to the Pretenders. How Chrissie Hynde put together the first No 1 band of the 1980s, piloting them through drama and rebirth, with their attitude and their unique sound intact. “I got to have some of your attention…” Buy a copy here!

Hit Singles

Mary Wilson – The Motown Anthology

The writing was on the wall for Mary Wilson long before “Reflections”, The Supremes’ 1967 hit, and 13th consecutive million-seller. It may have been the first single where the name of the group on the label was prefaced by the words “Diana Ross And…”, but lead vocal opportunities were already scarce – Wilson was afforded the middle-mic spotlight on just three tracks from the trio’s previous half-dozen albums. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Yet, even when Motown founder Berry Gordy stepped back from overseeing the trio three years later to focus on the departing Ross’ solo career, Wilson continued, to a degree, playing second fiddle to Ross’ replacement, Jean Terrell. She’s front and centre for two big-hitters from the post-Diana era, trading verses with Terrell on 1971’s “Floy Joy” and whisperingly seductive on the following year’s “Automatically Sunshine”, and this two-disc compilation sets out to retrieve less lauded performances that fell between the cracks. The division of labour to come is absent on 1960’s soaring, Spector-like Motown prequel “Pretty Baby” when the group were still trading as The Primettes (a female counterpoint to the all-male Primes before they evolved into The… Read More →

Hit Singles

Cat Power – Covers

A cover can be a disguise or a source of warmth. Or it can be someone else’s song. For Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, all definitions apply. Ask her to explain the process of choosing which songs to record on her third album of covers and she will respond with a rush of consciousness that mirrors the way the record was made. ORDER NOW: Johnny Marr is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Some of the songs evolved through live performance, sometimes as reactions to Marshall’s own compositions. She took to singing Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” as an antidote to performing “In Your Face” (from 2018’s Wanderer) on tour, seeing it as a way of not getting pulled down by the weight of her own composition. Clearly, the line between resilience and despair is drawn in chalk, because “Bad Religion” is a confessional about a long night of the soul, with a taxi driver in the role of therapist, or at least an empathetic pair of ears. In Ocean’s version, the religious imagery is foregrounded by the arrangement. Ocean’s driver is Muslim, and the cultural awkwardness he described prompted some wayward interpretations of the lyrics. Marshall swerves… Read More →

Hit Singles

Pavement announce expanded reissue of Terror Twilight

The long-awaited deluxe edition of Pavement’s final album will be released by Matador on April 8. Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal expands the remastered original album with B-sides, home demos, rehearsal tapes, live recordings and the rough tracks from Pavement’s scrapped session at Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studio. It features 45 tracks in total across 4xLPs or 2xCDs, 28 of them previously unreleased. Hear one of those unheard tracks, “Be The Hook”, below: Advertisement Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal includes a book with never-before-seen photos and commentary from band members Mark Ibold, Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Spiral Stairs and Steve West, as well as producer Nigel Godrich. The LP version restores Godrich’s suggested sequence for the album; peruse the full tracklisting below and pre-order here. LP1 – Side A 1) Platform Blues 2) The Hexx 3) You Are a Light 4) Cream of Gold 5) Ann Don’t Cry LP1 – Side B 1) Billie 2) Folk Jam 3) Major Leagues 4) Carrot Rope 5) Shagbag # 6) Speak, See, Remember 7) Spit On a Stranger LP2 – Side C 1) The Porpoise and the Hand Grenade 2) Rooftop Gambler 3) Your Time to Change 4) Stub Your Toe 5) Major Leagues (Demo… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Chieftains – Chronicles : 60 Years Of The Chieftains

Perhaps it’s only now, with the passing of founder Paddy Moloney, that we can appreciate the enormity of The Chieftains’ achievement. Their longevity and profuse output (44 albums) are cause for celebration, but their real legacy is the transformation of Irish music from a backwater interest to a world-conquering force. It’s hard to understand, in an age when all things “Celtic” are a powerful strand in popular music, but when the Chieftains formed in 1962 – a collection of enthusiastic part-timers – Irish folk had little respect even at home. Inspired by the short-lived composer Sean O’Riada, who aspired to ally the beauty and mystery of folk with classical tradition, and with whom Moloney started his career, The Chieftains re-purposed their native tradition for modern times, becoming hugely influential on a new generation of musicians – Horslips, Planxty, the Bothy Band – and ultimately on their nation’s idea of itself. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Chronicles provides an admirable résumé of the band’s career, mixing tracks from all eras with live performances and collaborations with guest singers – songs always took second place to the purity of instrumentation and the grail of… Read More →

Hit Singles

Kelley Stoltz – Antique Glow

When Kelley Stoltz moved to San Francisco at the start of the millennium, he intended to record an album with his flatmate, a drummer. But after his friend began to take more of an interest in the bars than his bass drum, Stoltz took matters into his own hands. He taught himself to drum and acquired a Tascam 388 eight-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. He wedged his mic into a half-open drawer for a mic-stand and when he needed bass, he detuned his guitar. But the coup de grace was a huge old two-deck keyboard loaded with effects that he found for $50 in a Salvation Army charity shop and wheeled home on a skateboard. He dubbed it his “granny organ”. ORDER NOW: Paul Weller is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut Using this rudimentary gear he recorded 2001’s Antique Glow, a landmark in home-production techniques thanks to the scale and execution of its ambition. Stoltz’s second album after the CD-only The Past Was Faster, Antique Glow showcased his excellent songwriting in the form of a hard-earned gift for hooks inspired by his love of ’60s pop – a vinyl nut, he worked in a record shop during the… Read More →