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Consistency can be a curse. Now into his fourth decade in action, Dean Wareham has a catalogue that contains unimpeachable masterpieces – Galaxie 500’s “On Fire” and the one-two mid-1990s punch of Luna’s “Bewitched” and “Penthouse” among them. But truth be told, he has yet to make a bad record. Luna’s less-ballyhooed later albums are understated but sparkling gems, and Dean’s duo records with his longtime partner Britta Phillips update the Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra template to marvellous effect. He’s nothing if not reliable. But that steadiness means that, at this stage, even longtime fans might be guilty of taking Wareham for granted.

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We shouldn’t do the same with I Have Nothing To Say To The Mayor Of LA. This 10-song collection, Wareham’s first solo LP in seven years, belongs in the upper echelon of his oeuvre, whether with Galaxie 500, Luna or otherwise. He’s in his comfort zone here –dreamy guitar pop matched with lyrics that find the balance between a cockeyed sense of humour and straightforward emotion. But the LP has more than enough new wrinkles to keep things interesting, enough surprises to always keep you on your toes. Wareham may not be interested in a dialogue with the Mayor of Los Angeles, but he still wants to connect with his listeners.

It’s the overall sound of I Have Nothing To Say… that draws you in at first. Produced and mixed by Jason Quever (Papercuts, Skygreen Leopards, Cass McCombs) at the semi-clandestine Panoramic House in Stinson Beach, California, the LP has a warmth and directness that results in a timeless feel. Wareham and Quever’s guitars shimmer, Phillips’ bass is melodic and full, and Roger Brogan’s drums are crisp. Most interestingly, Wareham’s vocals are mixed to the fore, a distinguishing characteristic compared with some of his previous efforts, where he’s been content to stay in the background. He’s always been an underrated singer, making up for what he lacks in range with impeccable phrasing and effortless coolness, that unmistakable New Zealand-meets-New York accent of his strangely seductive. Like Lou Reed, one of Dean’s formative influences, he does a lot with what he’s got.

Though every cratedigger dreams of such moments, few enjoy the exhilaration Mike Nishita, Money Mark’s brother, felt in January 2018 after his latest visit to The Roadium, a swap-meet in Gardena, California. Digging through a haul of reel-to-reel tapes, he noticed many came from Sea-Saint Studios, the New Orleans establishment co-owned by legendary songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint.

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Plenty of this material, Nishita discovered, was rare, some entirely unreleased. Among its most precious treasures were recordings marked with the name Leo Nocentelli, founding member and lead guitarist of Toussaint’s house band, The Meters. Contacted by The LA Times 18 months on, Nocentelli was shocked. “Those,” he said, “are tapes I thought were destroyed.” They nearly were: Nishita soon learned they were rescued after the studio was swamped by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

Nocentelli hadn’t intended them to be shelved but, as the ’70s unfolded and his band enjoyed increasing success, they were set aside, then presumed lost. Their rediscovery is a revelation. Though his accompaniment displays the same restraint from which The Meters benefitted, and his technique remains unmistakable, Nocentelli plays a nylon-stringed guitar on 10 tracks owing as great a debt to folk as funk. He calls it “my country-and-western album” and, though misleading, this indicates how far they are from his day job’s work. Had these songs been available in 2002, one might even have assumed Beck had modelled parts of Sea Change on them.

For more than 20 years, Damon Albarn seems to have been desperate to escape the suffocatingly restrictive straitjacket of Britpop and engage with a wider world. There have been collaborations with musicians from Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, Syria, Japan, Cuba and Iceland; charity projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Chinese operas commissioned in Paris; hook-ups with everyone from Bobby Womack to Lou Reed, from De La Soul to Erykah Badu.

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As a routine example of Albarn’s rootless cosmopolitanism, his second solo LP – and his 28th album, or thereabouts, as a leader across sundry outfits – was commissioned by a festival in Lyon and started in Iceland, taking inspiration from the house Albarn built outside Reykjavík 20 years ago. “I always wanted to get a small chamber orchestra and play the outlines of what I could see from my window,” he says, referring to Mount Esja and the Snaefellsjökull volcano and glacier. But, after some early sessions with an Icelandic string ensemble, the pandemic halted the project in early 2020. Albarn returned to England for lockdown, completing the album at his home studio in Devon with help from his long-term guitarist Simon Tong and his music director and saxophonist Mike Smith. What started as an expansive, symphonic project started to take on the dimensions of a home-studio creation, a clatter of antique drumboxes and multi-tracked instruments. And, for all its exotic genesis, The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows is soaked in a peculiar English melancholy.

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Damon Albarn‘s new solo album, The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows, goes on sale today. In this interview – an edited version of which appeared in the December 2021 issue of Uncut – Albarn discusses the late, great Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, cormorants, solar flares and an abandoned cruise ship…

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UNCUT: How much did the project change when you switched recording from Iceland to the UK in early 2020?
DAMON ALBARN: It was originally commissioned as an orchestral project so we brought some musicians over to Iceland and set up in my house, looking out at the view with the mountain Esja and we literally started playing what we saw, the landscape, the line of the mountain, the weather coming in, it came together that way. We had a tour planned, with shows in Reykjavík and all over Europe when the pandemic hit, that’s when I went back to the music and the songs emerged and an album took shape.

Do you regard John Clare as a bit of a hero? The first time I’d heard of him was when I read a column a few years ago in the Guardian by George Monbiot about John Clare as a revolutionary working class proto-environmentalist…
It was actually my mum who introduced me to him. She said, ‘I think you’ll like this guy, he’s got this very interesting history. He’s a working-class poet in the 19th century, who was very into nature and allusions… and then he had this period where he checked himself into a retreat, because of mental health problems.’ So he always fascinated me and I always really enjoyed reading his poems. And this particular poem really struck a chord with me, especially after my dear friend Tony Allen passed away last year. I started looking at the poem in the context of what I was doing, as opposed to just this beautiful line which inspired me when I was looking out of my window up in Iceland. This was always going to be the tune that set the tone of the record. The track “The Nearer The Fountain More Pure The Stream Flow”s is an adaptation of a poem by John Clare called Love And Memory, but the title of the song and the album is taken from a line in the poem.

George Harrison‘s childhood home in Liverpool, where he, John Lennon and Paul McCartney rehearsed as teenagers, is set to be auctioned off.

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• READ MORE: George Harrison – All Things Must Pass: 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe review

The late Beatles guitarist moved with his family to 25 Upton Green in the Speke area of the city in 1949 when he was six years old.

The house was the site of many rehearsals for the Beatles members’ former band The Quarrymen, which they formed when they were teenagers. It was also where Harrison learned to play the guitar, before he and his family left the house in 1962, just as the Beatles began to gain worldwide success.

A sign of how quickly the folk, country and “baroque and roll” of The Beau Brummels entered mainstream consciousness came with their appearance in a 1965 episode of The Flintstones. Billed, almost inevitably, as The Beau Brummelstones and sporting plum-coloured, turtleneck prehistoric garb, the San Francisco five-piece had been together less than 18 months when their animated versions took to the stage of the Bedrock A-Go-Go nightclub to perform Laugh, Laugh.

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That debut hit (co-produced by a 21-year-old Sylvester Stewart, before he rebranded himself as Sly Stone) was at the vanguard of the Bay Area’s reaction to the British Invasion, and swathes of the Anglophiles’ early recordings were informed especially by the acoustic strum of Beatles For Sale. However, the harmonies of lead singer Sal Valentino and guitarists Ron Elliott and Declan Mulligan were, initially, rooted in the pop-folk of closer-to-home outfits like The Kingston Trio.

Introducing The Beau Brummels sets out their stall, hook-packed Elliott originals (the bubblegum-tastic Stick Like Glue) supplemented by feather-light covers of country star Don Gibson’s Oh Lonesome Me and bluesman Jimmy Reed’s Ain’t That Loving You Baby. Volume 2 is even more harmony-laden and arguably the band’s strongest set of songs, with Byrds motifs aplenty on the jangle overload Don’t Talk To Strangers.

Some artists don’t need producers – picky auteurs, say, or those who pride themselves on undiluted communication, warts and all. For everyone else though, a producer remains a crucial part of musical creation, one that can make the difference between a good and a great record.

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La Luz, formed in Seattle a decade ago but based in California since 2017, have made especially strong choices with their studio collaborators. For their second album, 2015’s Weirdo Shrine, they enlisted Ty Segall to energise their grimy garage-surf; he set up a makeshift studio in a friend’s surfboard workshop to bring echoey lo-fi gallops like You Disappear and Black Hole, Weirdo Shrine to life. Dan Auerbach came on board for 2018’s Floating Features, and made their beats tighter and crisper, their organs fuzzier and their music more three-dimensional.

Returning now with their self-titled fourth album, they’ve bloomed into Technicolor with the help of Adrian Younge, the producer and composer seemingly enamoured of the same retro sounds as La Luz. Shana Cleveland’s guitars still clang and warp in homage to the surf instrumentalists she loves, especially on the rushing The Pines and Metal Man, but there’s a more extreme psychedelic feel to many of these tracks. The low-slung funk of Watching Cartoons, for instance, features a starry-eyed, patchouli-scented electric sitar solo. That sound is scattered subtly throughout the rest of the record too, much in the manner of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s use of the instrument.

On April 19, 1971, Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson were still essentially students in “ratty jeans”, being suspiciously eyeballed by the seasoned jazz and soul vets who had gathered to record their first album of proper songs at RCA Studios in New York City. On bass was Ron Carter of Miles Davis’s second great quintet; on drums was Aretha Franklin’s musical director Bernard “Pretty” Purdie; on flute, established bandleader Hubert Laws; and conducting them all was The Impressions’ arranger, Johnny Pate.

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“Terrifying, that’s the best way I can describe it,” says Brian Jackson today. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute – who am I, what am I doing here?’ I hadn’t even turned 19 and here are some of my biggest heroes all assembled in one place to play the music that I wrote. I remember Ron Carter having a little joke with me, questioning me about one of the chord changes. I was so intimidated that I said, ‘Well, what do you think it should be?’ And he was like, ‘No, man, I’m just kidding ya!’ and they all laughed at me. Which broke the ice. More than that, it demonstrated to them that we knew what we wanted.”

And when Gil Scott-Heron opened his mouth, everyone listened. His was not a classic soul voice; instead you were struck by the offbeat phrasing, wise tone and lyrical concision, something akin to a black Bob Dylan – a man with his finger on the pulse of a jittery and divided but still optimistic nation. Saxophonist Carl Cornwell, who used to jam with Scott-Heron in the practice rooms at Lincoln University before joining his backing band later in the 1970s, says that his vocal style was always unconventional. “When ‘Winter In America’ came out, we would always joke about how it was such a great song but he still couldn’t sing! But with the message he was delivering, it really didn’t matter. He wasn’t trying to be Bill Withers, he was trying to be a messenger.”

Anyone lucky enough to see The Waterboys in 1989 was in for a wild ride. Building on the momentum of the Fisherman’s Blues album, released the previous year, the band had evolved into a supercharged roots-and-rock collective, tearing through Ireland, Britain, Europe and North America. On a good night, and most of them were, the new seven-piece Waterboys seemed almost mystically attuned to a higher musical plane. The title of one new song summed it up: further up, further in.

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“It was amazing to be part of,” says fiddler and longstanding Waterboy Steve Wickham. “I remember talking to Donal Lunny, the great Irish trad musician, who came to a gig we played way down the country in one of those funny little ballrooms. Donal came up to me afterwards and said it was like looking at a juggernaut heading straight down the road towards you. He meant it in a really good way. It was a powerful thing, all right.”

A Waterboys show at this time could include almost anything: reels, rockers, reshaped originals, new songs, ancient gospel numbers, jigs, jives, country tunes, Beatles and Dylan covers. Friends, pipe bands and waltzing couples were invited on stage. Off stage, in buses and planes, dressing rooms, pubs and hotels, the party continued. “We were dizzy with music,” says Waterboy-in-chief, Mike Scott. “Playing all the time. We were surrounded by music.” For John Dunford, the band’s veteran sound man, immortalised on Fisherman’s Blues’ Dunford’s Fancy: “It was some of the greatest music I’ve ever been involved in in my life.”

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David Bowie, Pink Floyd, REM, The Waterboys, Led Zeppelin, Modern Nature, Michael Chapman, Gil Scott-Heron, Dion, Dean Wareham and The Beatles all feature in the new Uncut, dated December 2021 and in UK shops from October 14 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.

DAVID BOWIE: On the cusp of a new century, what does David Bowie do? Having plotted a dramatic course forward across four decades, he decides instead to revisit a number of songs from the earliest days of his career. But the album he records, called Toy, is consigned to Bowie’s vaults, where it has been the subject of much intense speculation ever since. To celebrate its imminent release – 21 years late! – we bring you the definitive account of David Bowie’s legendary lost album as told by Bowie’s closest collaborators and confidants. “It’s a ghost album,” Tony Visconti tells Peter Watts. “I’m so glad people are now getting to hear it, because I think some of David’s finest work is on Toy.”

OUR FREE CD! CONVERSATION PIECES: 15 fantastic new tracks, including songs by Courtney Barnett, Modern Nature, Endless Boogie, Bedouine, Richard Dawson & Circle, Tobacco City, Damon Albarn, New Age Doom & Lee “Scratch” Perry and more.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

PINK FLOYD: From Roger Waters’ kitchen table in the South of France to the cavernous soundstages of Pinewood Studios, stadia and beyond… With a new book featuring previously unseen artwork due out this month, Gerald Scarfe rebuilds Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “They thought I was ‘fucking mad’,” he tells Nigel Williamson.

THE WATERBOYS: Riding high on the creative momentum of Fisherman’s Blues, in 1989 The Waterboys reconvened at their new spiritual home on the west coast of Ireland to make the follow-up, with a seven-piece live band that had been hitting rare heights of roots rock rapture on tour. Mike Scott’s plan to broaden the sound didn’t quite go to plan, but as a new box-set reveals, Room To Roam was far from the misfire it was initially dismissed as. Graeme Thomson gets the whole story from the artists formerly known as “The Magnificent Seven”.

GIL SCOTT-HERON: Poet, jazz musician, rap pioneer, radical activist… Gil Scott-Heron broke a lot of ground during the early ’70s. As his landmark album Pieces Of A Man turns 50, collaborators and eyewitnesses tell Sam Richards about Scott-Heron’s creative peak, the power of his songs and the importance of what he was saying: “He was serving the entire community, the entire world, by bringing these things to light…”

MODERN NATURE: Zookeeper, garage-rock avatar, avant-garde explorer… Jack Cooper had already travelled long distances before he left the city for the right kind of quiet. But while this move has given Cooper fresh perspective, what does it mean for his band, Modern Nature? Tom Pinnock joins Cooper in a field in England: “I’m after openness and expansiveness now.”

MICHAEL CHAPMAN: With Michael Chapman’s passing, we have lost a true original: an indefatigable singer-songwriter who bridged the gap between the visionary guitarists of the ’60s and their 21st century counterparts. In this interview from 2016 – much of it previously unpublished – Chapman talks Tom Pinnock through the many highlights of his remarkable and enduring career: “All there is, is freedom.”

DION: The irrepressible rock’n’roller shares his stories of a life well lived, from riding rhinos in Bronx Zoo to watching Dylan go electric – and even getting on the good side of Lou Reed. “I’m tellin’ ya!”

REM: The making of “Electrolite”.

LARAAJI: Album by album with the American multi-instrumentalist.

DEAN WAREHAM: First solo album from the man who gave us Galaxie 500 and Luna.

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In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Damon Albarn, Bedouine, Margo Cilker, Endless Boogie, Curtis Harding, Richard Dawson & Circle, and more, and archival releases from The Beatles, Radiohead, John Coltrane, Echo & the Bunnymen, Leo Nocentelli and others. We catch Genesis and New Order live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Dune, Last Night In Soho, The French Dispatch and Look Away; while in books there’s Bobby Gillespie, Paul Morley and Shane MacGowan.

Our front section, meanwhile, features Led Zeppelin, The Wedding Present, Charles Lloyd, Dead Moon and Billy Nomates, while, at the end of the magazine, Nubya Garcia reveals the records that have soundtracked her life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

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“The English excel in dancing and music for they are active and lively. They are vastly fond of great noises that fill the air, such as the firing of cannon, drums and the ringing of bells. So that it is common for a number of them when drunk to go up into some belfry and ring the bells for hours together.” So wrote the German lawyer Paul Hentzner in 1598 in his Travels In England During The Reign Of Queen Elizabeth, quoted in Simon Reynell’s short 1988 film about the scrapheap orchestra Bow Gamelan Ensemble.

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This grab bag of Arts Council Of England arts documentaries from the late ’70s to the mid-’90s aspires to capture the great noises of the second Elizabethan era. From Linton Kwesi Johnson filmed in Brixton in 1979, to John Cooper Clarke in Manchester in 1982, via the radical compositions of Cornelius Cardew, the cultural fusion of Asian Dub Foundation and the brass band fantasia of Mike Westbrook, the collection looks, on the face of it, like a testament to a gloriously various lost age of state-funded arts programming, capturing the moment of punk cabaret, early Channel 4 and arts centre metal bashing.

In practice the quality is highly variable: Franco Rosso’s Dread Beat An’ Blood remains a fascinating document of LKJ in his time and place, touring with the sound systems, strolling through the market and visiting Tulse Hill schools, vividly capturing black British culture in a country on the cusp of Thatcherism, just a few months before the Brixton uprising. Meanwhile, Cooper Clarke in Nicky May’s 10 Years In An Open Neck Shirt is reliably entertaining, leading a troupe of ranting people’s poets, including a youthful Steven Wells, on a whistle-stop tour performing for earnestly pensive early-’80s students.

Behold Bob Dylan’s ’80s, that blighted hour. No-one could really argue if you described it as largely a time of muddle and waste, lit up here and there by occasional flashes of the inspiration Dylan seemed previously to have had on speed dial but which was now mostly dodging his calls. The records he made then are testament to that – the versions of them he released, anyway. There were six studio albums across those years, and Springtime In New York – in its fullest iteration, a 5CD set with 57 tracks – focuses on the first three, Shot Of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque. All of them were shadows of the albums they could have been – the outtakes are a testament to that. All those orphaned tracks, recorded and discarded, sprung eventually from extended archival jail time by the liberating hand of the Bootleg Series.

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Springtime In New York picks up Dylan’s story in April 1981, 11 months after the 79-date Gospel Tour redemptively documented on Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Volume 13, Dylan wrapping an unprecedented eight months’ work on Shot Of Love, his third consecutive album of evangelical sermonising. It’s released in August 1981 to a dismal reception and worse sales. Dylan would probably have got better reviews if he’d packed the album with the cover versions recorded during album rehearsals, featured here on CDs 1 and 2. There’s a version, for instance, of The Temptations’ I Wish It Would Rain, sensationally sung, that Dylan virtually throws himself into; a dark, churning Mystery Train, with gospel wailing, writhing guitars and Ringo Starr on drums; a simmering version of the Peggy Lee standard Fever; a duet with Clydie King on Let It Be Me that turns The Everly Brothers’ heartbreaker into a lover’s prayer, a full-on rendition of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. Among the discarded Dylan originals included here, the raucous Price Of Love is driven by a Bo Diddley beat, garage band organ, sax and rockabilly guitar, Fur Slippers is a rough, sardonic blues and Borrowed Time is something you wish Bob Johnston had got his hands on.

Even the album’s harshest critics recognised Every Grain Of Sand as a remarkable thing, one of the great songs of the Born Again era. Shot Of Love was otherwise shot down in flames. How different it might have been if Dylan hadn’t jettisoned three key tracks. The raging Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar was dropped from the original vinyl release but reinstated for the CD edition. The apocalyptic panoramas of the mighty Angelina weren’t revealed, however, until 1991 when a sepulchral piano and organ-led version appeared on The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1–3. The version here is the very first take, with a full band, but feels already like something shaping up to be astonishing. Caribbean Wind remains the album’s greatest lost track. An epic song about romantic turmoil and Armageddon written in the time-shifting narrative style of Tangled Up In Blue, it appeared in a lumpy version on Biograph. There was a lovely, slowed-down rehearsal version on Trouble No More, plus a live version from November 1980 at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre that Clinton Heylin described as Dylan’s “greatest in-concert performance”. The best take, however, was the swaggering Studio 55 version of bootleg legend, produced by Jimmy Iovine with David Mansfield on mandolin, disappointingly missing from this set. Pretty galling when there is yet space for an alternative version of the lamentable Lenny Bruce, complete with choir.

Where Monk was mysteriously interior and Coltrane beatific, Mingus was volcanic, a big, turbulent man who notoriously punched the embouchure and prospects of his trombonist Jimmy Knepper to bits, and regularly blew his own career stormily off-course. His autobiography Beneath The Underdog saw his music subsumed by wild pornographic excess, even a composing sanctum in a plush New York pad paid for by the tortured pimping of willing lovers. Where smack and a wounded liver were the crosses Coltrane’s genius bore, libido and temper were Mingus’, snagged at root on American racism’s barbed-wire, which sometimes made him feel that even playing jazz was a defeat, compared to the major classical writing his skin colour (and Nina Simone’s and Billy Strayhorn’s) denied him. His music’s surging peak in 1957-’65 sublimated this painful, erratic, wholly committed life into passages of churning ecstasy, near chaos and sorrowful beauty. Tenderness and yearning spirituality were this furious man’s grace notes, as strong as gentle John Coltrane’s.

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These two vinyl reissues are part of Universal’s jazz imprints’ new high-end, high-priced range. Mastered from analogue, with luxurious sleeves, they actually offer vinyl fetishists’ mythic warmth and fidelity for an extra tenner, so this is as good a way as any to sink into Mingus.

Mingus’ own exhaustive liner notes to The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady (1963), setting out his compositions’ ambition, castigating his pianist and bemoaning his arranger’s fee, asking the listener to “throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other”, then leaving his psychiatrist to describe the album, gives a pungent, early taste of the man. The album is a song-suite, with the opener Solo Dancer entering on a swarm of saxes, the sound choppily tidal and almost inchoate, but achieving a turbulent coherence that partly defines its composer. Group Dancers is fragmented, clashing dance music, its Spanish guitar meant to recall the Spanish Inquisition; Mingus’ lonely, intimately personal classical piano solo lingers longer.

In the mid-’50s, no-one wanted to cut Bye Bye Love. The songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant shopped it around Nashville and got 30 rejections. Then the song found its way to a teenage duo freshly arrived in town and signed to Cadence Records. Don and Phil Everly – 19 and 17 years old respectively – agreed to cut it. But once they got in the studio with a band, led by their mentor Chet Atkins, they realised something was missing.

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During a break, Don started practising a riff on his acoustic guitar – a choppy, staccato rhythm with an emphatic downward strum. He’d based it on a Bo Diddley lick. Boudleaux Bryant loved it. They added it to the song’s intro as a fanfare, and the single nobody wanted quickly shot to No 2 on the Country charts. By the time they performed it at the Grand Ole Opry, they had a crossover hit on their hands. No more country package tours; they quickly graduated to rock shows organised by Alan Freed.

Don Everly’s riff was significant – not just as a revved-motorcycle opening to one of the great singles of the ’50s – but also a demonstration of how he and his brother bridged black R&B and white country music to put a new spin on rock’n’ roll. Bye Bye Love heralded a band steeped in expressive songwriting – by the Bryants, but also by Don himself – and taut sibling harmonies. The song’s subject matter is bleak
– “Hello emptiness, I feel like I could die”– but their harmonies are upbeat, chipper, cavalier, as though this teenage heartbreak is an everyday affliction. They don’t brush off those bad feelings but complicate them in a way that resonated with fans then and fans now.

You can watch McCartney 3,2,1 in any order. It’s not sequential. But it just so happens that the exchange that takes place at the top of the first episode tells you what you can expect from Disney+’s six-part Maccamentary. Rick Rubin asks Paul McCartney, “Are you up for listening to a bit of music?” And Paul, sitting opposite him in a low-lit warehouse space where someone has conveniently left a mixing desk, says, “Yeah, what have you got?”

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And that, in essence, is the concept of McCartney 3,2,1. It sounds simple, but actually, it’s really not. While interviewing people might not be the hardest thing in the world, the really good ones make it look much easier than it is. In the case of Rick Rubin – whose Broken Record podcasts are also adhere to the same rule – it’s a matter of not saying anything unless you absolutely have to.

In fact, it’s mostly in the eyes, and with McCartney that’s perfect. Because McCartney is all about the eyes. That’s why over the course of his life, his eyebrows have slowly travelled halfway up his forehead and forgotten the way back. It’s the face you make when you want someone to look back at you and know that you’re on the same wavelength. Seated on opposite chairs, it’s what he and Lennon did when they wrote songs together. Chas Hodges of Chas & Dave once recalled McCartney playing him a test pressing of the just-finished Revolver and McCartney staring at him the whole time, reading every nuance of Hodges’ response. It discombobulated him so much that he still talked about it decades later. And in these programmes, McCartney clearly gets a lot back from Rubin’s eyes. The producer’s gaze is rapt, respectful, affectionate – and McCartney reciprocates by relaxing into a mixture of anecdotes you already knew and a few that certainly this writer didn’t.

For a while now, 51 years maybe, there’s been talk of de-Spectorising All Things Must Pass, of wiping away the reverb like grime from a golden murti. Phil didn’t make it easy, though: rather than adding effects during mixing, the layers of echo that cloud this motherlode of songs and jams are often baked onto the tapes themselves.

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This 50th-anniversary edition, therefore, is not the clear and crisp version of All Things Must Pass that’s hovered in some people’s imaginations for decades like some audiophile Holy Grail, as sparse and dry as 1973’s Living In The Material World. On this new mix by Paul Hicks, the fog is very much there, but a little daylight (good at arriving at the right time, you may recall) has been let in. The breadth and ambition of All Things Must Pass remain astounding in better definition: for a sense of scale, George’s contributions to the White Album total 13 minutes, while All Things Must Pass is itself 13 minutes longer than the entirety of The Beatles.

The most striking difference here is Harrison’s voice, set forward, intimate and relatively dry, so that quivers or inflections in his singing that might have been subsumed in the mush are unearthed. Instrumental parts are also clearer: the acoustic guitar picking, timpani rolls and low, buzzing synth on Isn’t It A Pity, the subtleties in the drums on I’d Have You Anytime, every curlicue of Pete Drake’s pedal steel, even the maelstrom of free-jazz horns and guitars at the end of the immense Let It Down. Harrison’s masterful slide guitar parts (he had only taken up the technique the year before) are even more striking in this new setting.

During lockdown, Liam Kazar found new ways to make a living. With his regular gigs playing in Jeff Tweedy’s live band on hold, Kazar opened Isfahan – a delivery-only kitchen, named after a Duke Ellington song, whose cuisine is inspired by his Armenian heritage.

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Such resourcefulness has been evident throughout Kazar’s career so far. As a teenager in Chicago, he was a member of Kids These Days, an eight-piece musical collective whose sole album Traphouse Rock was produced by Tweedy. Since then, Kazar has busied himself as a journeyman guitarist, performing with Tweedy, Steve Gunn, Chance the Rapper and Daniel Johnston. Before the pandemic, he and some friends put together a David Bowie tribute show.

Inevitably, Kazar – born Liam Cunningham – arrived late to a solo career. He finally made his debut solo recording on Uncut’s Wilcovered compilation in 2019, where his version of Sunloathe came bathed in warm slide tones that foregrounded the George Harrison influence on the original. Meanwhile, the first sightings of Kazar’s original material arrived last year with Shoes So Tight, a sprightly, soulful jam built around Kazar’s core band: Spencer Tweedy on drums, Lane Beckstrom on bass, Dave Curtin manning a punchy Prophet VI and co-producer James Elkington on pedal steel. The video found Kazar in full Pierrot make-up, inspired by Lindsey Kemp – but with his mop of tousled brown hair, he looked more like Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Tour. The song was a terrific calling card from an artist who, nine years after his recording debut with Kids These Days, had at last found his own voice. “I lost a few good years killing time,” he sings on So Long Tomorrow, which seems like he’s doing himself a great disservice: Due North might have been a long time coming, but it’s very much the work of someone who’s benefitted from spending a long time watching others do it well. Much like a chef at a pop-up restaurant, you might say – following treasured recipes and putting his own spin on them.

Two days before she entered the studio to record her new album, Kacey Musgraves drove to a house outside Nashville, put on a blindfold and took a dose of psilocybin mushrooms. Her only sensory stimulation was a special playlist curated by neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University to trigger different emotions and guide the listener through the journey. “Music has never sounded so good than it did when I was in that state,” she says. “You notice every nuance of every note. You react viscerally to it. And that served as a lot of the inspiration for the new record.”

• ORDER NOW: Read the full interview in the October 2021 issue of Uncut

Listening to the regal melodies of Vivaldi’s “Concerto For Lute, 2 Violins” early on the playlist, “I remember thinking, ‘Why the fuck did I do this? What am I even doing here?’ But then you move out of that place of anxiety and grief.” By the time Musgraves heard Strauss’s dramatic Tod Und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), “I was ripped open. I was sobbing like a child. And that felt good. I needed that.” Toward the end, around the time The Beatles burst in with Here Comes The Sun, “I moved into this more hopeful place of gratitude and warmth and thankfulness for the relationships you do have, for the angels you have in your life.”

Going into that experience and making herself so vulnerable scared her, but “I knew there would be some kind of reward at the end of it. When you face whatever demons you have, it instantly makes them smaller.” The demons she was confronting were connected to her recent divorce from a Nashville artist named Ruston Kelly, who was the inspiration behind the open-hearted love songs on her 2018 studio album Golden Hour. Their separation after three years of marriage understandably left her feeling hurt, confused, and traumatised. Most days she barely felt she could get out of bed, let alone make a new record.

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Specials, Kacey Musgraves, Supergrass, Caravan, Buena Vista Social Club, David Crosby, Low, Shabaka Hutchings, and Van der Graaf Generator all feature in the new Uncut, dated October 2021 and in UK shops from August 19 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS: Moroccan opium dens! A song called “Jazzmen”! “I spend my days pushing Elvis Presley’s belly up a series of steep hills”! As a new compilation featuring previously unreleased material from Nick Cave’s most recent studio albums emerges from the vaults, Peter Watts takes a dive into a remarkable secret history – a rich and strange phantasmagoria of lost songs, near-forgotten gems and other sonic outcasts. Our guides are Bad Seeds Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, Thomas Wydler and Mick Harvey along with Cave himself. “You can’t buy that stuff!” he tells us…

OUR FREE CD! TOMORROW’S SOUNDS TODAY: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the month’s releases, including songs by The Limiñanas/Laurent Garnier, The Felice Brothers, Low, Devin Hoff and Sharon Van Etten, The Stranglers, Little Simz, Sarah Davachi, Matthew E White and more.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

THE SPECIALS: The No 1 success of Encore proved The Specials remain a vital force – but what are Terry Hall, Horace Panter and Lynval Golding doing for, well, an encore? Taking a stand against the “heavy atmosphere” of the last 18 months, they have recorded a set of protest songs by artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, Big Bill Broonzy and Chip Taylor. “All we can do is try and raise awareness,” they tell Peter Watts. “That’s our role.”

KACEY MUSGRAVES: By confronting Nashville conservatism, she became the outspoken queen of “galactic country” – but how will magic mushrooms, “insane spiritual welfare” and a rose-strewn bed that resembles “some Brian Wilson shit” help Kacey Musgraves sort out her next “Big Bang explosion of ideas”? She tells Stephen Deusner, “Sometimes I contradict myself from one song to the next…”

CARAVAN: Join us at the bar in The Millers Arms, before genial host Pye Hastings takes us on an evocative tour of Caravan’s old haunts around Canterbury. Along the way, Sam Richards hears how wigwams, Brussels sprouts and a bypass near Sevenoaks helped them become the enduring, if unlikely, heroes of prog. “The problems of the world didn’t really affect us… We lived in our own little bubble.”

BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB: In 1996, Ry Cooder assembled the Buena Vista Social Club and turned Havana’s forgotten musical aristocracy into unlikely stars. Twenty-five years on, the magic of the joyous, bittersweet album they recorded together is stronger than ever. But how did its curator and venerable cast navigate power cuts, food shortages and meetings with Fidel Castro? “We got in there and did great things,” Cooder tells Graeme Thomson.

SMALL FACES: Kenney Jones reveals his plans to restore the lost treasures of the Small Faces.

DAVID CROSBY: As new album For Free caps a remarkable renaissance, Croz recalls jamming with Hendrix, being “stupefied” by The Beatles… and the making of High Noon.

SUPERGRASS: The making of “Richard III”.

SHABAKA HUTCHINGS: Album by album with the Brit saxophonist.

LOW: Duluth duo’s intense 13th album Hey What masterfully combines the difficult with the beautiful.

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In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from The Stranglers, Pokey LaFarge, Saint Etienne, Little Simz, José González, Arushi Jain, and more, and archival releases from Van der Graaf Generator, Joan Shelley, Rory Gallagher, Whipping Boy, Charles Mingus and others. We catch Roger and Brian Eno, and Chrissie Hynde live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Respect, Censor, New Order and Pig; while in books there’s Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer.

Our front section, meanwhile, features Small Faces, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, John Grant, and Adia Victoria, while, at the end of the magazine, Pat Metheny reveals the records that have soundtracked his life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

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End Of The Road have announced the comedy and literature programmes at this year’s festival.

The line-up includes Simon Amstell, Josie Long, Shaparak Khorsandi, Sam Lee and Sophie Heawood.

They join the festival’s musical bill who include Stereolab, Sleaford Mods, Damon Albarn, Jonny Greenwood, The Comet Is Coming and Shirley Collins.

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Over the years, Laura Nyro has not been short of admirers. There was David Geffen, of course, who managed her. And Clive Davis, who signed her. Peter, Paul and Mary, Barbra Streisand, and Three Dog Night, who covered her songs. And Bette Midler, who inducted Nyro into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by noting how “she could make a trip to the grocery store seem like a night at the opera”. But perhaps the definitive compliment came from Alice Cooper, who once described the experience of listening to Nyro’s second album, Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, with awe-struck simplicity: “You sit there and go, ‘That’s songwriting.’”

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Nyro was indeed a consummate songwriter. Her extraordinary melding of pop and R&B and jazz and avant-garde piano compositions suggesting a wellspring of musical talent, and a degree of finesse that seemed somehow at odds with her beginnings: the self-taught daughter of a piano-tuner from the Bronx who grew up singing on street corners and subways stations.

Despite her fervent supporters, these days Nyro rarely receives the immediate deference she deserves. Instead, her name bubbles up occasionally – the subject of an anniversary tribute, or as a reference point for other celebrated songwriters (more recent fans have included Kanye West, Jenny Lewis and Tori Amos). In part this is because of the brevity of her life – Nyro died in 1997, aged 49 – and the brevity of her career: signed at 18, by the age of 24, then five albums deep, she had married a carpenter and retreated to rural Massachusetts, far from the grasp of the music industry.

The Replacements have announced a 40th anniversary deluxe edition of their 1981 debut album, Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash.

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Released through Rhino on October 22, the 4CD/1LP set features 100 tracks, 67 of which have never been released before. These include the band’s first demos recorded in early 1980, as well as a live show recorded at the 7th St Entry in Minneapolis from January 1981. Along with a newly remastered version of the original album, the deluxe edition also uncovers unreleased rough mixes, alternate takes and demos from the band’s first 18 months together.

The LP included in the set, titled Deliberate Noise, presents an alternate version of the original album using these previously unreleased tracks.

Fleetwood Mac‘s Christine McVie, who wrote iconic hits such as “Little Lies” and “Don’t Stop”, has become the latest artist to sell her back catalogue of hits to Hipgnosis.

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• READ MORE: Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie on Peter Green: “Every guitar player adores him”

The singer-songwriter sold the copyright of 115 songs to the London firm for an undisclosed fee, which gives investors the chance to take advantage of royalties from a selection of classic hits.

Merck Mercuriadis, the founder and chief executive of Hipgnosis, said: “In the last 46 years the band have had three distinct writers and vocalists but Christine’s importance is amply demonstrated by the fact that eight of the 16 songs on the band’s Greatest Hits albums are from Christine.”

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Mercuriadis, the former manager of Beyoncé and Elton John, obtained the catalogue of McVie‘s former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham in January. It included 161 songs including “Go Your Own Way”.

“I am so excited to belong to the Hipgnosis family, and thrilled that you all regard my songs worthy of merit,” said McVie.

Hipgnosis, which has spent more than $2billion (£1.4billion) buying the rights to hits from iconic artists such as Neil Young, said it now owns the rights to 48 of 68 tracks on Fleetwood Mac’s most successful albums.

The investment company also made waves after purchasing the catalogues of artists including Blondie and half of Neil Young’s songs in a deal thought to be worth an estimated $150million (£110million).

Shakira also sold all 145 of her songs including “Hips Don’t Lie”, “She Wolf” and “Whenever, Wherever”, all part of the deal.

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Earlier this year Mercuriadis said that cultural importance is key when it comes to the artists whose back catalogues they have acquired.

“So, with over £1bn invested, we only own 57,000 songs. But 10,000 of them are Top 10 songs, almost 3,000 of them are No.1 songs. So it’s a very small catalogue, relative to Universal, Warner or Sony. But the ratio of success within that catalogue is very high, there are very few songs that are not successes.”

Over the past few decades, Soul Jazz have made a name for themselves with stylish, smartly conceptualised comps. Their curatorial touch is sure but lightly applied, and if they sometimes skirt predictability, there’s something to be said for the reliability of their approach, particularly when taking on a catalogue as deep as the productions made at Clement Dodd’s Studio One, the ‘Motown of Jamaica’. A legendary place, with Dodd a gifted producer, some of reggae’s greatest passed through – Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Bunny Wailer and Johnny Nash all cut sides there, often backed by house band the Skatalites; arranger Jackie Mittoo finetuned his craft at the studio, too.

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Fire Over Babylon is particularly potent, though, for its focus, pulling together a selection of Studio One sides lit by the devotional spirit of Rastafarianism. A religion steeped in defiance of ongoing colonial invasion, Rastafarianism cohered as a belief system in the 1930s, with preachers calling for a return of all black people to Africa, following the appearance of their new god. Rastafarianism’s history is a complex one, a sect in perpetual battle with hegemonic institutional forces (the police, the government), defiantly anti-capitalist, and imbued with a deep sense of righteousness, ‘rebel spirit’, and a relentless drive towards black self-determination.

Dodd never clearly articulated his faith to the public, but he ran deep with Rastafarian artistic communities. He’d take members of the Skatalites to drummer Count Ossie’s ‘reasoning and jam sessions’ in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Ossie was central to the development and dissemination of nyabinghi, a compelling rhythmic base to those reasoning sessions. At its most furious and expansive, Ossie’s music was properly psychedelic, as form-disruptive and mantric as free jazz: Soul Jazz head Stuart Baker describes Ossie’s work with Cedric “Im” Brooks and the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, as a “supergroup the equivalent of Sun Ra and John Coltrane in jazz”.

Damon Albarn is the latest artist announced for this year’s End Of The Road Festival.

He joins a line up that also includes Hot Chip, Sleaford Mods, Stereolab, Jonny Greenwood, The Comet Is Coming and Shirley Collins.

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As well as Albarn, other new additions include Crack Cloud, Sipho, Balimaya Project, Loraine James and Anna B Savage.

The forthcoming new and authorised Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin has finally been completed.

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Directed by Bernard MacMahon, the film was first announced back in May 2019 to mark the band’s 50th anniversary in 2018.

MacMahon yesterday (August 2) confirmed the film’s title, Becoming Led Zeppelin, and announced that work on the documentary has been completed.

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“Becoming Led Zeppelin is a film that no one thought could be made,” MacMahon said in a statement. “The band’s meteoric rise to stardom was swift and virtually undocumented.

“Through an intense search across the globe and years of restoration of the visual and audio archive found, this story is finally able to be told.”

Becoming Led Zeppelin is the first time that Led Zeppelin have participated in a documentary in 50 years, with the band granting MacMahon “unprecedented access” for the film.

New interviews with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones will feature, while rare archival interviews with the late John Bonham, who died in 1980, are also set to be included.

A release date for the film has yet to be confirmed.

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Last month Plant spoke about how Bonham had featured in his dreams during lockdown.

“I’ve dreamt that I’ve been back with old friends, quite a lot, like John Bonham, like my father, my son who left when he was five,” Plant said on his podcast Digging Deep. “And they’ve been magnificent moments of great relief.”

Anyone familiar with the eponymous 2018 debut by LUMP – Laura Marling and Tunng’s Mike Lindsay – will recall that the album ended with a track called LUMP Is A Product, which saw Marling list the personnel involved in making the record. The businesslike delivery was what her fans have come to expect from her. There are no outward signs of levity here. If Laura Marling derives any cathartic release from the act of writing and recording her songs, that’s something she withholds from view. Which isn’t to say that she’s a cold fish (of the hundreds of artists this writer has interviewed over the years, she remains the only one who made us soup), it’s just that if Marling is having a brilliant time, it doesn’t quite manifest itself in all the usual ways.

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It must surely, then, speak volumes about Marling’s collaborator in LUMP that she decided to return to do it all over again, complete with another end-credits monologue on the plaintively pretty closer Phantom Limb. And, indeed, the longer you spend with these 10 songs, the easier it is to see why. Mike Lindsay has, almost by stealth, evolved into a kind of low-key Eno for the Green Man generation. Like Eno, Lindsay seems to understand that a true sense of freedom is best attained by setting out fixed parameters. In the case of LUMP’s second album, these parameters came courtesy of a change of scenery. Relocating to Margate after a four-year spell in Reykjavík, Lindsay’s new coastal setting prompted the observation that “waves go in circles of seven, so I started to write all the music in seven form”.

For Marling, arriving in the studio with nothing prepared, that must have been a surprise. “Pulling out the rhyming pattern in the tracks that were written in 7/4 was very difficult… to get my head around,” she recalled. To say that she rose to the challenge barely scratches the surface of what she and Lindsay have actually achieved on this record. In fact, it’s hard to square the record’s genesis with the sheer accessibility of the resulting songs. As the first song to be released from Animal, its eponymous title track hints at this harmonious outcome. “Dance, dance, this is your last chance to break a glass heart just like you wanted”, she sings over a synth hook that could just as easily have escaped from a Daft Punk record. Even taking into account the mid-song groans that pass for a middle eight, it’s the most poptastically funky moment of Marling’s musical life.

With the passing of Top bassist Dusty Hill this week, we revisit the band’s formidable discography in the company of his compatriot, Billy Gibbons. This interview first appeared in Uncut’s February 2009 issue (Take 141), where Gibbons’ reflects on Southern boogie, Hendrix, the blues, Soft Machine, cars, girls and MTV…

ZZ TOP’S FIRST ALBUM
(London/Warners, 1971)
From supporting Hendrix with the psychedelic Moving Sidewalks, Gibbons returns to the blues, with a nod to the British power trios
We were fresh off the psychedelic plane, having worked the Moving Sidewalks act which was kind of inspired as an offshoot of some of our heroes – the 13th Floor Elevators. Having launched that bit of business we had a fairly decent regional round of recordings that landed us an opening spot with the Jimi Hendrix tour of 1968, also featuring Robert Wyatt’s band the Soft Machine. We had quite the psychedelic go-around prior to leaning toward something quite a bit different – the Sidewalks morphed into the trio format, coming off of a four piece band doing this psychedelic routine. Quite a lot had transpired and in no small part favoured the Jimi Hendrix and the Soft Machine trio line-up. The Sidewalks’ drummer Dan Mitchell and I found ourselves alone, looking for a direction to turn to having the former keyboard player and the bass player off to the military. They got snatched up. But the good news is the drummer and I elected to stay on the point and we thought that maybe the trio would do us well. [Mitchell was replaced by Frank Beard, while Dusty Hill joined on bass]. Keep in mind that not only was there Jimi Hendrix and the Soft Machine, there was some other pretty stalwart trios, like Cream, which were very hard and edgy blues. I guess that was probably the beginning of what later became known as power-trios.
It’s no secret that it was the enthusiastic and rather forensic inspection of the Blues, by British musicians, down to the genetics, that was the salvation of this rapidly disappearing artform. We were actually re-embracing and re-learning ways to become interpreters of what was in danger of evaporating. In essence that took us into ZZ Top land, launching the first album in 1970, which was definitely a blues rock experience.

TRES HOMBRES
(London/Warners, 1973)
Nudie suits and Texicana: finally, a hit single with “La Grange”, and the group’s charms are amplified thanks to the arrival of a stack of Marshall amplifiers
The first album in 1970 and then Rio Grande Mud in 1972 were the stepping stones towards really refining the direction which resulted in 1973’s release, Tres Hombres. That landed us the first Top Ten chart record, “La Grange”, being the top selling single from that, which really brought it to the forefront. That song was it was about the Waldorf Astoria of whorehouses in Texas, and it was like a green light for us. We just thought, “All right, this is us. We can do this.”
Once again, the British to the rescue – we were treated to the discovery of this contraption called a Marshall 100 watt amplifier stack. It was a revelation. It wasn’t just about the noise: the volume was certainly there, but it was all about the tone. That was successfully captured on Tres Hombres. We had found the cornerstone of our sound, which we were able to take on to subsequent releases. That being: a good Fender bass, a Gibson Les Paul, a backline of Marshall gear. We had the man with no beard, Mr Frank Beard, holding down the percussion slot between these two stacks – he was doing the best he could to keep up. But it forced us into learning how to embrace the power of the trio. And about the song “La Grange”: there’s no secret that Slim Harpo probably set the stage to deal with that fancy boogie-woogie. It’s a grand tradition. Going all the way back, T-Bone Walker meets Cream meets John Lee Hooker meets Slim Harpo meets the Rolling Stones! There’s a long lineage of that infectious beat. And it’s still workin’!

Yoko Ono has reacted to her and John Lennon’s classic, “Imagine”, being used during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.

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• SHOP NOW: The Beatles Miscellany & Atlas

The ceremony, which was held last Friday (23 July), marked the official opening of Tokyo 2020, a year later than planned, after it was postponed due to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Held at Tokyo’s new Olympic Stadium, socially distanced and masked athletes walked out and waved to empty stands – something acknowledged by Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The recent popularity of Alice Coltrane’s music among a new generation of listeners can be a puzzle to longtime admirers of her late husband’s work. A distinguished John Coltrane scholar who teaches at an American university told me earlier this year that, while his students are extremely enthusiastic about Alice, they listen to John and don’t understand what the fuss was about. And one of the less ecstatic reviews of the recent Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders album observed that the music seemed to be doing little more than trying to replicate the mood of Alice’s recordings at their most trance-like and undemanding.

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Yet from the work of her nephew Steven Ellison (Flying Lotus) to explicit homages paid by Paul Weller, Laura Veirs, Sunn O))) and others, the textures and flavours of the albums Alice made between her husband’s death in 1967 and her own departure for other planes of being in 2007 are now a common resource, forming a part of the fabric of modern music and an object of reverence for exponents and admirers of “spiritual jazz”.

What does the enthusiasm for spiritual jazz really amount to? A sceptic would say that its protagonists are looking for an easy way to enjoy or play jazz, entering through a gate beyond which lies little of the challenge that characterised the music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and, of course, John Coltrane himself, whose late work will provoke heated arguments for as long as people still listen to recorded jazz.

By any yardstick, Chris Barber was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century British popular music. His death in March, just before his 91st birthday, inspired tributes to a man whose instincts and enthusiasms helped lay the foundations for just about everything that happened in the 1960s and beyond. This set of four CDs, meticulously compiled and copiously annotated by Alyn Shipton, handsomely illustrated and limited to 1,000 copies, presents an unanswerable and probably definitive case for his significance.

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Barber played trombone, but that was the least important of his accomplishments. A natural-born bandleader, he was an encourager, a facilitator, an enabler. The 69 tracks making up A Trailblazer’s Legacy, ranging over his entire career, demonstrate the breadth of his interests, his inclusive approach to making music, and his knack of playing a part in events that would later be seen as historic.

The Hertfordshire-born son of left-leaning parents – an insurance statistician and a headmistress – arrived on the British jazz scene just after the start of the New Orleans revival, forming his first amateur band in the late 1940s. While recording an album in 1954, Barber included a track reflecting his habit of presenting a short set of skiffle songs as an interlude in a club or concert appearance. Rock Island Line featured the singing of the band’s banjo and guitar player, Lonnie Donegan, with Barber on bass and Beryl Bryden on washboard. Released as a single under Donegan’s name, it fired the imagination and reshaped the thinking of an entire generation.

The latest instalment in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series is released on September 17.

Springtime In New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 (1980-1985) focusses on Dylan’s albums Shot Of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque and will come complete with previously unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, rehearsal recordings, live performances and more.

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You can hear “Too Late (Band Version)”, an outtake from the Infidels sessions, below:

Low have shared the latest taste of their forthcoming 13th record Hey What in the form of slow-burning new single “Disappearing”.

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You can hear the track below, along with an elegant video centred around a life model, directed by and starring the multi-disciplinary artist Dorian Wood.

Wood said that the video was inspired their personal experience posing for virtual life drawing classes during lockdown.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have announced they will head out on their first-ever UK tour as a duo this autumn.

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• READ MORE: Review: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Carnage

The Bad Seeds duo will play 20 shows across September and autumn in support of their acclaimed album Carnage, which arrived earlier this year.

While not a full Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record, the album is the latest from nearly 25 years of collaboration between the pair. Ellis has been a Bad Seeds member since 1997 and has been Cave’s songwriting partner for many years, including work as side-project Grinderman and many film, TV and theatre scores and soundtracks.

Beholden to no-one but themselves, The Flatlanders’ dogleg career is impossible to second guess. Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock first got together in 1972, but their proto-Americana – a porous blend of country, folk, rock’n’roll and western swing – fell largely on deaf ears outside their home state of Texas. They were done in a little over a year, the band taking on semi-mythic status (their aborted debut eventually landed in 1990) as each member advanced into a successful solo career.

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Treasure Of Love, their first studio effort in 12 years, might not have happened at all if it hadn’t been for the pandemic. The trio began recording these tracks some time ago, only finding time to revisit them when the touring circuit shut. Co-produced by longtime collaborator and fellow Lubbock legend Lloyd Maines, it’s a wondrous celebration of the music that’s sustained them over the decades, much of it part of their stage repertoire.

The Flatlanders exude joy here. Popularised in the late ’50s by The Everly Brothers, Long Time Gone is a faultless distillation of timeless honky-tonk; Johnny Cash’s Give My Love To Rose takes on the requisite Tennessee Two chug; country licks
and pedal steel spark the engine of Leon Russell’s exuberant She Smiles Like A River. Hancock’s own Moanin’ Of The Midnight Train, revived from his ’90s solo catalogue, feels of a piece too, with its raw swing and spacious Texan groove.

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The Beatles, Lindsey Buckingham, Big Red Machine, Leon Bridges, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Gunn, Curtis Mayfield, Shannon And The Clams, Mercury Rev, The Sugarcubes, Ripley Johnson, The Beach Boys and The Lovin’ Spoonful all feature in the new Uncut, dated September 2021 and in UK shops from July 15 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.

THE BEATLES: Is it any wonder that The Beatles nearly named their seventh studio album after a magical invocation? After all, no other word captures the feats of creative alchemy that transpired on Revolver… Fifty-five years on, Uncut has assembled a crack team of Beatles heads – including Johnny Marr, Brian Wilson, Graham Nash, Roger McGuinn, Rickie Lee Jones, Sean Ono Lennon, Dhani Harrison, Steve Cropper, Margo Price and Wayne Coyne – to explore their favourite tracks from this, the Fabs’ finest body of work. Even Paul McCartney is on hand to tell Uncut about the origins of his experimental side.

OUR FREE CD! HEAVY ROTATION: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the month’s releases, including songs by Son Volt, Liam Kazar, Nathan Salsburg, Bnny, Shannon And The Clams, Suzie Ungerleider, The Scientists, Villagers and more.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM: There’s not much that can keep this singer-songwriter down. Not heart surgery, the pandemic or even his exit from Fleetwood Mac. As he resumes his solo career as one of rock’s most discreet musical radicals, Buckingham tells Uncut about false starts, his “crisp and dirty” new songs, the death of Peter Green and the ongoing soap opera around his alma mater. “Who knows, maybe the five of us will end up doing something…”

CURTIS MAYFIELD: He covered a vast amount of ground during the ’60s with The Impressions – but as a solo artist he went into overdrive. Bandmates and family tell Graeme Thomson about the soul superstar’s creative peak in the early ’70s – from pioneering anthems of empowerment to killer live sessions, a blaxploitation soundtrack and beyond…

BIG RED MACHINE: Deep in upstate New York, The National’s Aaron Dessner is masterminding the next phase of Big Red Machine – the musical collective he founded with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Friends and contributors – including Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold and Anaïs Mitchell– join Laura Barton to discuss community, collaboration and creative “mess”… Reveals Dessner, “We’ve never had a master plan!”

LEON BRIDGES: Blending avowedly ‘retro’ R&B with lo-fi garage grit, Leon Bridges became a Grammy-winning Texan success story. Back home in Fort Worth, he tells Stephen Deusner of the nocturnal LA sessions that birthed his third album Gold-Diggers Sound. “It’s hard to unlock a sexy vibe at 11am,” he reasons.

THE SUGARCUBES: It is 1987 and the Sugarcubes’ extraordinary debut single, “Birthday” is galloping up the charts. As the band put the finishing touches to their breakthrough album Life’s Too Good, Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts learns the Icelandic art of creation, and inspiration from Björk, Einar and their cohorts.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: The Boss’ acclaimed autobiographical show makes an emotional return to Broadway.

MERCURY REV: From their base in the cosmic Catskills, Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper recall rolling with Alan Vega, deafening Bob Dylan and a ruckus at the Royal Albert Hall.

THE LOVIN’ SPOONFUL: The making of “Summer In The City”.

RIPLEY JOHNSON: Album by album with the eccentric star.

STEVE GUNN: New album Other You is a beguiling and mercurial folk gem.

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In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Shannon And The Clams, David Crosby, Son Volt, Sault, Nathan Salsburg, Liars, Liam Kazar, and more, and archival releases from The Beach Boys, George Harrison, Aztec Camera, Christine Perfect, Jackie Leven and others. We catch Eliza and Martin Carthy and Black Country, New Road live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Riders Of Justice, Summer Of Soul and Night Of The Kings; while in books there’s Baxter Dury and Genesis P-Orridge.

Our front section, meanwhile, features Bruce Springsteen, Karen Black, Edward Bell, and Juni Habel, while, at the end of the magazine, Martha Wainwright reveals the records that have soundtracked her life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

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Should there be any doubt about the primacy of language in Anthony Joseph’s worldview, there’s cast-iron proof of it in the epic Language (Poem For Anthony McNeill), from his fourth solo album. In what’s essentially a secular riff on the beginning of John’s Gospel, he declares, “It is language which calls all things to creation and language is the origin of the world/The word was a great mass of a black star exploding…”

• ORDER NOW: The August 2021 issue of Uncut

Joseph’s words, meanwhile, don’t so much explode on The Rich Are Only Defeated… as illuminate, recollect, bear witness, question and – crucially – enthral; his poems are energetic yet nuanced flows of richly imaginative language in masterful control, not flashy displays. A Trinidadian who moved to London in 1989, Joseph has made the written and spoken word his life’s work on multiple fronts. He’s released three studio albums with The Spasm Band (whose players included Shabaka Hutchings and Keziah Jones), the first being 2007’s Leggo De Lion. It set Joseph’s recitations of lyrics from his novel The African Origins Of UFOs against a backdrop of jazz, Afrobeat and stripped-down, heavily percussive funk. He’s also recorded three solo albums, published numerous works of poetry and prose and currently teaches creative and life writing at De Montfort University. If one UK figure is currently the ne plus ultra of experimental writing and spoken-word performance rooted in Caribbean identity, it’s surely Joseph.

His new record takes its title from The Black Jacobins, a book by Trinidadian historian CLR James published in 1938. It tells the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led enslaved black labourers to victory in the Haitian Revolution. But it’s in no way a concept album – in the mix are personal reminiscences, homages to Joseph’s Caribbean literary progenitors (Sam Selvon, Anthony McNeill, Kamau Brathwaite) and particular narratives that carry universal truths. Nor is it strictly solo: Joseph is backed by a cast of musicians that includes woodwind players Denys Baptiste, Hutchings, Colin Webster and Jason Yarde (who also produces) and French pianist/organist Florian Pellissier. Joseph told Uncut he was initially aiming for more of a “spiritual jazz vibration” than on his two previous LPs but that Covid and the murder of George Floyd saw the sound become infused with “a more righteous rage”.

First off, a gentle reminder that our excellent new issue of Uncut is in the shops now, featuring Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic on Nirvana, plus Sly Stone, Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse, Altın Gün, Grateful Dead, The Jam, Will Sergeant, Rodney Crowell, Sparks, Rodrigo Amarante and more. Full details about the new Uncut are here, in case you missed them.

As is tradition abound now, I tried to round up my favourite albums from so far; specifically releases from January until the end of June. I’ve listed them here in (roughly) order of release – just to be painfully clear, this is very much my personal choice and is in no way representative of the Uncut writers in general.

UPDATE! Okay, a quick couple of amendments. Firstly, I’ve removed one of the duplicate entries for The Coral and also added two albums I can’t believe I forgot to include: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’ Carnage (thanks for the spot, Robert Franks) and also Field Works’ Cedars.

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Nirvana, Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse, Altın Gün, Sly Stone, Grateful Dead, The Jam, Will Sergeant, Rodney Crowell, Sparks, Rodrigo Amarante, Lump, Jakob Dylan and PJ Harvey all feature in the new Uncut, dated August 2021 and in UK shops from June 17 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.

NIRVANA: Thirty years after Nevermind transformed Nirvana from adolescent punks to global superstars, Uncut revisits this era-defining classic in the company of its surviving creators. In brand new interviews, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic trace the album’s remarkable journey from a rented barn in Tacoma to the stage of Seattle’s Paramount Theatre and beyond, while producer Butch Vig reveals the secrets of the band’s working practices. There are cameos from Neil Young’s producer, aspiring cast members of Annie – The Musical and an ill-fated blue Datsun B210. And what of Kurt Cobain, you might ask? “He was vastly underrated as a comedian.”

OUR FREE CD! ENTERTAIN US: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the month’s releases, including songs by Mega Bog, Rodney Crowell, Juni Habel, The Grid / Fripp, Charlie Parr, The Black Angels, Dot Allison, Los Lobos and more.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

PAUL MCCARTNEY: Photographer Harry Benson was nonplussed when he received a commission to cover The Beatles in 1964. All the same, travelling from London to Paris and New York during this breakthrough year, he struck up a rapport with the band – and McCartney in particular – that endured through several decades. With a new collection of his images due for publication, Benson shows us McCartney at work and at play – backstage, in hotel rooms and on private jets.

ALTIN GÜN: From their base in a former Cold War nuclear bunker, the psych warriors are busy reinventing the deep and mystical sounds of Anatolian rock. Their tools? Fuzz pedals, electronics, and ancient instruments once used in shamanic rituals. But their message, they tell Uncut, is universal: “Songs about love, hate, tragedy, death,  war… it’s all basic human emotions…”

SLY STONE: It is 1969 and the singer is on the brink of superstardom. Ensconced in his Bel Air mansion, he has begun work on a new album. But surrounded by dealers, groupies and gangsters, it takes over two years to finish the record – during which time the life-affirming utopianism of his music is replaced by darkness, drugs and isolation. Fifty years on, band members recall the turbulent making of a masterpiece: There’s A Riot Goin’ On. “Fame attracts wonderful people,” hears Michaelangelo Matos. “But fame also attracts guns and dogs.”

SPARKS: Fifty years after releasing their first album as Halfnelson, Sparks are finally ready for their close-up. A new documentary, The Sparks Brothers, directed by Edgar Wright, pays tribute to the indomitable, pioneering spirit of music’s oddest couple. “People expect us to try to alienate them from time to time…”

GRATEFUL DEAD: Dead freaks unite! 1971 was a momentous year for the Californian band – involving landmark shows, bizarre ESP experiments, French Acid Tests, hypnosis, new faces and emotional farewells. Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and other eyewitnesses share tales from this momentous journey with Uncut: “We were just coming alive.”

THE JAM: Previously unseen photos of the English mod band show Weller and co’s impatient evolution.

RODNEY CROWELL: The Americana star on wild times with Guy and Townes, the generosity of Johnny Cash and the sex life of the Tennessee cicadas.

AMY WINEHOUSE: The making of “Back To Black”.

ANGELIQUE KIDJO: Album by album with the Afro-fusion artist.

RODRIGO AMARANTE: On new album Drama, the Brazilian songwriter crafts an exquisite sonic world marked by global rhythms, cinematic textures and playful takes on tradition.

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In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Lump, John Murry, The Flatlanders, Kings Of Convenience, Sleater-Kinney, Yola, John Frances Flynn, and more, and archival releases from Alice Coltrane, Laura Nyro, PJ Harvey, The Shins, Michael Small, Chris Barber, Aretha Franklin and others. We catch Songlines Encounters Festival and Gruff Rhys live; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Martin Eden, Punk the Capital: Building A Sound Movement and Rockumentary: Evolution Of Indian Rock; while in books there’s Sinéad O’Connor and Nico.

Our front section, meanwhile, features The Jam, Will Sergeant, Ellen Folley, Roy Harper and Arooj Aftab while, at the end of the magazine, Jakob Dylan reveals the records that have soundtracked his life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

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Before Beirut was wrecked by the civil war fought in its streets between 1975 and 1990, it was called “the Paris of the East”. It was a city of bars and boulevards, philosophers and poets – and, it could readily be imagined, wry and reflective singer-songwriters of the calibre of Rogér Fakhr, crooning in some cool café amid mists of arak fumes and Gauloises smoke.

• ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut

The tracks on Fine Anyway were recorded in Beirut in 1977 and Paris in 1978. Fakhr was, by then, living between the two, busking on the Metro in the latter: balancing, like many Lebanese of the time, the danger of home against the loneliness of exile. It’s unclear just how much this melancholy disorientation directly informed his material, but these songs do not want for a sense of melancholy disorientation. Reference points, contemporary and subsequent, include John Prine, Gordon Lightfoot, Lee Hazlewood, Elliott Smith and Gene Clark. Crucially, Fakhr would not be out of place in their company.

The greatest of these songs are extraordinary. Fakhr created this music against rather considerable odds, which may go some way towards explaining why it has barely been heard. Some of these recordings were originally circulated on cassettes among a mere handful of cognoscenti (and they have the background hiss to prove it), some of them have never been released at all.

The new issue of Uncut includes a candid interview with Klaus Voormann about his encounter with a 17-year-old George Harrison, during The Beatles’ formative residencies in Hamburg. The German artist and Plastic Ono Band member tells Graeme Thomson tales involving fish finger diets, late-night phone calls from “Herr Schnitzel”, and the making of George’s very own masterpiece…

• ORDER NOW: Read the full interview with Klaus Voormann in the July 2021 issue of Uncut

The thing to remember about George Harrison is that he was a Gemini. The twin sign. Yin and yang. On Revolver you have “Love You To” and “Taxman”. Two sides. He could be really living this spiritual life – into meditation and getting up at 5am to see the sun come up – and doing it very extensively. Then suddenly he would go crazy! He could swap from the one extreme to the other, and he could find ways to make himself believe that it was the good thing to do. He would talk himself into it. This is why he was always searching for something – because he knew himself well enough to know that he needed something to hold onto.

The first time I saw George he was only 17 years of age. He was very different to how he was later. He was a cocky little boy! This band he was with was completely unknown. It was the autumn of 1960. In this club in Hamburg, the Kaiserkeller, they played for people to dance. George was singing all those funny songs, which he did later on a little bit, when he sat around and played ukulele. He was into songs like I’m Henry The Eighth, I Am, singing it all cockney. He would sing all those Eddie Cochran numbers too, like Twenty Flight Rock.

Sometimes, the only way to follow-up a best-selling critically acclaimed album is to do it all over again, only bigger. That’s the approach Crosby, Stills & Nash took in 1970 with their follow-up to May 1969’s Crosby, Stills & Nash. They enlisted Neil Young to expand the trio into a quartet and spent six months hammering out arrangements in the studio, but in most other ways they simply repeated their magic trick of combining “big personalities, pristine voices and achingly personal lyrics”, as Cameron Crowe summarises it in his liner notes. The same but bigger also describes this set, which comes either in a 4CD/1LP version or across five LPs. As well as the original album, there are 38 additional songs, many of which are previously unreleased.

• ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut

These are divided into three categories, Demos, Outtakes and Alternates. They confirm two things about the sessions: firstly, that all four of the quartet were in the middle of a hot streak where songs were simply pouring out of them; and second, that Neil Young was divided from the rest of the group by more than just an ampersand. He’s always been a noncommittal presence on Déjà Vu, contributing his own two songs – “Helpless” and “Country Girl” – sharing a credit for “Everybody I Love You” with Stills, and adding the occasional guitar lick, but otherwise the junior partner. That feeling doesn’t change after exposure to this edition’s many extras, which again show Young ploughing a lone furrow. There’s a perfect “Birds” with Nash on harmony, which Young was in the process of recording for After The Gold Rush, an alternative version of “Helpless” with harmonica that has been released on Archives 1, and he adds occasional musical support to some of Stills’ compositions. But the bulk of the material comes from Crosby, Nash and especially Stills. These include early versions of several tracks that would soon appear on the trio’s own solo albums.

If Neil Young has always been elusive, Joni Mitchell has previously felt excluded. She was a ghost behind the machine of Déjà Vu, another massive talent only half-inside the tent as the inspiration for Nash’s “Our House” and the writer of “Woodstock”, which was memorably covered by Stills to close Side One. Here, delightfully, she finally has a physical presence thanks to one of two demos of “Our House”, which sees her singing a duet with Nash, giggling when he fluffs a line. It’s one of the highlights of the set, a real peek behind the corner into the soap-operatic personal lives that made Déjà Vu such a hit.

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Prince, Liz Phair, Bobby Gillespie, George Harrison, Lambchop, Ann Peebles, Kurt Vile, Jackson Browne, Gary Bartz, Tracey Thorn, Faye Webster, BLK JKS, The Orb and Joni Mitchell all feature in the new Uncut, dated July 2021 and in UK shops from May 20 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time comprising 15 tracks of the month’s best new music.

PRINCE: For decades, his vaults have been rock’n’roll’s own El Dorado – a mythical place filled with untold treasures. We carry out an extensive archaeological survey into this legendary archive and discover – via revelatory eyewitness accounts from 3rdeyegirl, Pepé Willie, Dez Dickerson, Shelby Johnson, Matt Thorne and Paisley Park Records’ manager Alan Leeds – a trove of lost albums, mysterious side-projects and secret gigs that amount to an entire parallel history stretching far back to his earliest days in Minneapolis.

OUR FREE CD! DIAMONDS & PEARLS: 15 fantastic tracks from the cream of the month’s releases, including songs by Liz Phair, Lambchop, Faye Webster, Lucy Dacus, Loscil, Billy F Gibbons, Anthony Joseph, Rose City Band and more.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

LIZ PHAIR: After an 11-year absence, she has returned to reclaim her title of fearless songwriting superstar. But how has a song about Lou Reed, a country-rap crossover hit and her own trailblazing debut helped prepare her to re-enter the fray? “I’ve had to pick myself up from being dead many times…”

BOBBY GILLESPIE: Primal Scream’s inveterate rabble-rouser has written a memoir about his early life and recorded an album of heartworn duets inspired by the country greats. He’s even – finally – come to terms with his early records. But where is all this soul-searching heading? “People want us to take their heads off. But I don’t know if that’s the kind of music I want to keep on making.”

LAMBCHOP: The pandemic has brought back into focus the qualities that inspired Kurt Wagner to make music in the first place. But as a new album ushers in yet another new era for his band, there’s no danger of him dwelling on his many former glories. “Hopefully, I can live up to the future…”

JACKSON BROWNE: From Greenwich Village to LA’s Troubadour and beyond, Jackson Browne has always written songs about love, hope and defiance – but with his new album Downhill From Everywhere these themes have taken on a bold, new urgency. “I’ve always been connected with people who are trying to make things better…”

GEORGE HARRISON: He was a “cocky little boy” of 17 when he met Klaus Voormann during The Beatles’ formative residencies in Hamburg. They remained close confidants and Voormann enjoyed a ringside seat – as friend, flatmate and collaborator – during the Fabs’ imperial phase and, later, Harrison’s own blossoming solo career. Uncut listens as Voormann recalls tales involving fish finger diets, late-night phone calls from “Herr Schnitzel” and the making of George’s very own masterpiece…

KURT VILE: On his role in a brand new tribute to The Velvet Underground. “It was powerful as hell…”

TRACEY THORN: The Everything But The Girl star answers your questions on the New Romantics, working with Paul Weller and how her knitting is going…

ANN PEEBLES: The making of “I Can’t Stand The Rain”.

GARY BARTZ: Album by album with the lifelong sax explorer.

FAYE WEBSTER: New album I Think I’m Funny haha is reviewed at length, while the wunderkind sheds light on her favourite guitar, fake fadeouts and the beauty of Atlanta.

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In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Lucy Dacus, BLK JKS, John Grant, Faye Webster, Billy F Gibbons, Vincent Neil Emerson, David John Morris, Anthony Joseph, and more, and archival releases from Spirits Rejoice, Joni Mitchell, The Yardbirds, Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band, Squarepusher and others. We catch Tame Impala and Moses Boyd live online; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are First Cow, In The Earth, 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything and My Name Is Lopez; while in books there’s Buzzcocks, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers and Kristin Hersh.

Our front section, meanwhile, features Jim Morrison, Kurt Vile, Dot Allison and Cedric Burnside while, at the end of the magazine, The Orb’s Alex Paterson reveals the records that have soundtracked his life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.