UNCUTの May 2026 の目次

You’re right, it’s time: the third edition of our Uncut Greats series is dedicated to Morrissey, with every album from Viva Hate to Make-Up Is A Lie reviewed and ranked, plus the making of The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder and plenty of wit and wisdom from the archives. Find it in shops now, or order direct from us at shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Available again from the same places, to coincide with Robert Smith’s curation of the Teenage Cancer Trust shows at the Albert Hall, is Ultimate Record Collection: The 200 Greatest Goth Albums… Ranked. And that’s followed on April 2 by our Ultimate Music Guide to Creedence Clearwater Revival… We’re delighted to bring you news of another Club Uncut show, featuring Chris Eckman, Tenderness (aka Katy Beth Young of Peggy Sue) and…

CHUCK D was working as a Record Store Day ambassador in 2014 when he saw Doors drummer John Densmore across a crowded room: “I said, ‘John, you got the beats. Let’s do something together!’” Twelve years later, that meeting has produced No Country For Old Men, the duo’s debut album under the moniker doPE, which handily combines the names of both their legendary bands. In the course of our Zoom interview, the considerable common ground between the two men becomes clear. Densmore, 81, calls from his drum room at home in LA; he’s a rangy, unreconstructed hippie in body and soul, with long white hair and a moustache. Chuck, 65 – in dark garb and baseball hat on the East Coast – mellowly defers to his senior partner. Densmore was…

ALDOUS HARDING Train On The Island 4AD The many voices of Aldous Harding reconvene for another stunning set of confounding confessionals: “No regrets/Just things that’ll haunt me…” BON IVER Volumes: One JAGJAGUWAR Backing up Justin Vernon’s claim that “this is really us at our best”, these rousing 2019–’23 live performances cast Bon Iver’s vocoder years in a whole new light. MICHAEL STIPE & ANDREW WATT “I Played The Fool” WARNER BROS The REM icon is in fine voice on this ruminative theme tune to the new Steve Carrell series The Rooster, with punchy production from latter-day Stones enabler Watt. STEVE GUNN Shape Of A Wave NO QUARTER Two dreamy new songs with James Elkington, plus two even dreamier remixes by Sonic Boom of tracks from last year’s Daylight Daylight. THE…

“We tried all sorts of weird things because the technology hadn’t caught up with us” NORMAL pressure hydrocephalus may sound the title of a Rick Wakeman album from the 1970s, but it’s actually the neurological condition for which the keyboard maestro had to undergo corrective brain surgery at the end of the last year. Thankfully it all went well, and Wakeman is already back to his usual jocular, enthusiastic self. “I mean, I’m not going to make the Olympics,” he laughs, “but I’m walking again. Luckily, it didn’t affect the piano-playing. That gets affected by the arthritis, which is a pain, but I’m 77 this year – what do I expect?” Although he’s been unable to reschedule his planned tour dates with singer Hayley Sanderson, he’s about to go on…

JOSHUA ABRAMS Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation DRAG CITY 8/10 Natural Information Society leader gets arty If you weren’t able to visit LA’s Redcat gallery in summer 2023 to hear this piece in four-channel surround sound on an endless loop, then this stereo album version will be welcome. Composed to soundtrack bandmate Lisa Alvarado’s Pulse Meridian Foliation exhibition, Abrams’ extended composition drifts beautifully between ambient abstraction and glacial melody. Two violas, courtesy of James Sanders, slide and seesaw between discord and harmony, while Alvarado’s subtle harmonium and Abrams’ ebbing electronics intertwine in the background. It’s eerie, beautiful and vacant, evoking Brian Eno and Morton Feldman, plus Miles Davis’ spacey “He Loved Him Madly”. TOM PINNOCK TORI AMOS In Times Of Dragons FONTANA 8/10 Amos’ 18th is a cry of defiance…

These songs are full of yearning and melancholy… Yes, I think the songs are always longing for something greater. Maybe music provides space so you can sense that there is something bigger, closer, more real and fulfilled, that you can glimpse but never fully reach. The songs long for genuine connection – with oneself, with others, with nature. They dream of a fuller way of living, followed by the resistance and standstill that inevitably comes up along the way. How connected do you feel to folk music? A lot of it probably comes down to taste and to all the musical heroes who have followed me through life: Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Ane Brun and so many more. I feel completely free from the genre but I love the music…

“Let him go ’cause he is rocking/He is sorry that he never changed” REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS Songs To Remember (reissue, 1982) ROUGH TRADE IT’S hard to recall the ferocity of the ideological arguments that surrounded pop music in the early 1980s. There was much talk about hegemony, many inverted commas. There was a made-up thing called New Pop in which the scratchy energy of post-punk was traded for something more commercial. Scritti Politti were stationed at the centre of this uncertain moment, having started as a punk-inspired DIY collective in a Camden squat, before graduating to a position in which singer Green Gartside could be heard serenading the philosopher Jacques Derrida on a limited-edition picture disc (it was the flipside of “Asylums In Jerusalem”, a…

LUCIANO CILIO Dialoghi Del Presente (reissue, 1977) SUPERIOR VIADUCT 9/10 Deeply moving, melancholy minimalism from Italy THE story of Italian composer Luciano Cilio is a simple one of quiet achievements and quieter tragedy. Born in Naples in 1950, Cilio’s early involvement in architecture and music transmuted into his engagement, in the early ’70s, with the nascent Italian progressive rock scene. He worked alongside musicians such as Alan Sorrenti, performed at benefit gigs for Demetrio Stratos of Area, and organised concerts of contemporary music under the auspices of the municipality of Naples. Those two apparent polarities – progressive rock and contemporary classical music, bordering on minimalism – are at work in Dialoghi Del Presente (Dialogues Of The Present), the only album Cilio released. Composed in the late ’60s, the album’s eventual…

“NOT FOR SALE (POLAR BEAR)” (CD2 – SESSIONS) This McCartney-esque ballad was written several years earlier as a potential Christmas single. “We had written and recorded a version of this during the Smile days,” says May. “At a time when we were writing constantly, we didn’t find a way of fitting it on to this album. It was a fragment of a slightly earlier version of us, so it got left by the wayside. I was happy to revisit it here.” “SEE WHAT A FOOL I’VE BEEN” (CD2 – SESSIONS) “In the same way that ‘Father To Son’ is our Who tribute, this is very much indebted to Led Zep,” says May. “Again, we didn’t think it fitted on the album, but we used it as a B-side.” A live…

WHEN I first heard Tom Waits, aged around 14, the phantasmagorical sound of his music was a revelation. His songs were these hard-to-pindown concoctions. I think if you grew up or lived in Los Angeles, that sensibility is a byproduct of this strange amalgamation of a city, with glamour and decay laid on top in equal measure. Melding sounds and genres is an extension of the environment we both grew up and spent considerable time in. Pico-Union/MacArthur Park is a strange, forgotten, in-between neighbourhood. It’s never been gentrified and it’s not much talked about. But it’s one of the oldest parts of LA. I think he moved back to that neighbourhood when I was a teenager, even after he achieved success, which is a very unusual move. It’s not a…

ONE of the best lessons in making music that I ever had – and my biggest takeaway from the Alice and Blood Money sessions – was the way Tom approached each song. He never spoke of genre or style. Tom approached it very much in the theatrical sense. Direction from him was all about the character that I was playing in the context of that scene, or that story. I remember once, I was all set up in the studio and Tom peeked through. He opened the control room door and said, “OK. You’re 78 years old and you’re playing your last ever song at the regular Saturday night gig you’ve had for the past 48 years in the bar down the street from your house. As you play, the…

ON an unusually wet and miserable night in Los Angeles, it takes a lot to tempt the locals away from the shelter of their homes. Tonight, though, something special is happening at The Wiltern. This gorgeous Art Deco theatre in Koreatown, which opened in 1931, is playing host to an evening of contrasting styles from a pair of musicians each blessed with their own particular methods for electrifying an audience. First up is Patty Griffin, the 61-year-old folk singer whose raw, tender songwriting has only grown richer since she made her debut with 1996’s Living With Ghosts. Some of her preoccupations clearly remain unchanged, as she opens tonight’s show by announcing, “We’re going to start with a ghost song,” before launching into a hypnotic performance of “All The Way Home”,…

FUZE OPENS APRIL 3  Hell Or High Water director David Mackenzie reunites with the propulsive thriller format, this time in London, where the discovery of an unexploded WWII bomb provides the cover for an audacious jewel heist. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James lead. CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN’ OPENS APRIL 10 James McAvoy makes his directorial debut with the true story of two Dundee neds who con the music industry by pretending to be an established Californian rap duo. GLENROTHAN OPENS APRIL 17 Alan Cumming returns to a Scottish Highlands whisky distillery after 35 years in America, forced to confront his estranged brother and the violent family history he left behind, in this tense drama directed by Brian Cox. WILD FOXES OPENS APRIL 17 Belgian debut director Valéry Carnoy brings visual flair to…

FOCAL BATHYS MG Price £999 IF you thought the Focal Bathys over-ear wireless active noise-cancellers were expensive, think again. The French firm has had a good long think about things: it’s developed an all-new magnesium driver and built it in-house, then it’s added a lovely new ‘chestnut’ finish and badged the resulting model Bathys MG. Oh, and stuck an even bigger price ticket on it. But don’t imagine the MGs can’t justify that price. They really look the part, and are beautifully built and finished. They have potent battery life, and manage to remain comfortable even if you drain all that power in one sitting. They use Bluetooth 5.2, with aptX Adaptive compatibility and multipoint pairing. They have a great control app, are compatible with your source player’s native voice…

BEFORE Third Man Records, Third Man Books and all the rest, there was Third Man Upholstery – the furniture restoration business Jack White founded prior to hitting the big time with The White Stripes. He’s continued to make physical artefacts throughout his career, from sofas to abstract sculptures, and now this aspect of his creative practice will be on show in a dedicated exhibition at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery from May through to September. These Thoughts May Disappear includes a collaboration with Hirst called Supernova, consisting of a painted leather hide by Hirst upholstered to an Eames DCW chair by White and then protected in epoxy resin. A recent video uploaded to White’s Instagram account shows him creating other artworks for the show in and around his Nashville workshop:…

THE DAMNED LYRICS Brian James’ original handwritten lyrics for the first ever UK punk single, “New Rose”. Estimate: £8,000–£12,000 SEX PISTOLS POSTER Promo poster for the “Pretty Vacant” single from the personal collection of Julien Temple, signed by the filmmaker on the reverse. Estimate: £800–£1,200 SIGNED CLASH ALBUM A copy of The Clash’s London Calling LP, fully signed by the band. Estimate: £1,000–£1,500 ROXY CLUB FLYER An original flyer for a March 1977 show at the Roxy in Covent Garden, featuring The Heartbreakers and Siouxsie & The Banshees. Estimate: £800–£1,200 Bonhams’ 50 Years Of Punk auction runs April 20–30 at bonhams.com BRIAN JAMES’ GUITAR The 1964 Gibson SG used extensively on Damned Damned Damned and Music For Pleasure, as well on James’ work with Iggy Pop. Estimate: £12,000–£15,000…

NEIL YOUNG & THE CHROME HEARTS AS TIME EXPLODES REPRISE/WARNER Young has sadly been forced to cancel his planned European dates, but at least we’ve got this document of last year’s triumphant Love Earth tour, captured at various shows on both sides of the Atlantic. The tracklist includes “Cortez The Killer”, “After The Gold Rush”, “Like A Hurricane”, “Ohio” and “Vampire Blues”. ROBERT PLANT & SAVING GRACE WITH SUZI DIAN ALL THAT GLITTERS WARNER Although they only released their debut album in the autumn, Plant’s current combo have been playing together for seven years now, building up quite a repertoire of songs old and new. This EP contains four recorded especially for Record Store Day, including Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl” and Bert Jansch’s “Poison”. TALKING HEADS THE CBS/COLUMBIA DEMOS RHINO…

1 CAROLINE POLACHEK Look At Me Now “I met Caroline in 2017 when we played with John Cale. I knew her band Chairlift a little, and then I got into her solo records. Every time I fly, I play her record Pang, and this track in particular. She has such a beautiful voice. It definitely tugs on your heart.” 2 MIKE POLIZZE Cheewawa “You can hear me singing in the background of this song, and playing harmonica. This song is short and sweet. Mike Polizze is the best guitar player in Philly. He’s from Purling Hiss, and he really honed his songwriter chops on his solo record Long Lost Solace Find.” 3 ROYAL TRUX Waterpark “Whenever I sing with a snarl in my voice, it’s because of Jenny Herrema. This is…

Mutiny After Midnight ATLANTIC OUTPOST 9/10 “JOHNNY can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ’70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg. Simpson’s first five albums proper burned Nashville bridges in an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul. Johnny Blue Skies blew this preordained cycle away. He feels more real this time round, not as a Ziggy-style persona but as a vehicle for instantaneous, unshackled creation. Mutiny After Midnight is a dirty boudoir record, a Southern take on Emotional Rescue, staged in a small-town honky-tonk cleared for a disco. “I wrote…

EARLY ROUGH TRADE, 2005 This compilation of early Scritti shows that their musical antecedents were in pre-punk experimentalism. “Skank Bloc Bologna” is more anarchic than danceable, and many of the songs sound like arguments. The opening rhythm of “Bibbly-O-Tek” is allegedly borrowed from The Jacksons’ “Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)”. This may not be obvious. 6/10 CUPID & PSYCHE 85 VIRGIN, 1985 Green was living the dream, having teamed up with David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher in New York. Scritti’s most complete commercial album includes the Arif Mardin-produced “Absolute” and – with a bit of postmodernism in brackets – “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)”. Don’t forget “The Word Girl”, another great song about songwriting. 8/10 WHITE BREAD BLACK BEER ROUGH TRADE, 2006 Back on Rough Trade…

What did the very first Super Furry Animals songs sound like? We were coming from a guitar band background, but we were fascinated by electronic dance music, so we would spend long nights trying to recreate what we’d heard in the clubs and just fuck about with synths and drum machines and sequencers and learn how to make music that way. The first tour we did was supporting Anhrefn. They’d be booked to play these Celtic festivals, with harps and bagpipes and all this stuff going on. They wanted to shake it up a bit, so they asked us to come along to support them and do a purely electronic set, which probably 10 per cent of the audience really enjoyed, and the other 90 per cent thought was sacrilege.…

Season Of Glass (reissue, 1981) SECRETLY CANADIAN 8/10 “WOMAN’S career is not taken seriously,” Yoko Ono told the writer Joy Press in the mid-’90s, “so no one’s keeping an archive for you.” The subsequent reappraisals of Ono’s body of work over the decades have been informed by many things – Beatles adjacency, feminist critique, art-historical reimaginings, experimental film explorations – but shadowing it all has been a sense that we’re never quite getting the full picture of all Ono has achieved during her seven-decade career in art, music, film and writing. That Season Of Glass is often read as her best album tells us much about how context informs reception. Recorded after the murder of her husband, John Lennon, it’s long been understood as an exploration of grief and personal…

BOYS FOR PELE (EASTWEST, 1996) After her first two albums established her singular brand of piano angst, Amos returned with a self-produced concept album, named for the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele. It swapped her ethereal keys for dingy harpsichord and a guttural, grunge-baroque sound that skewered toxic masculinity and the men who’d caused her harm. The artwork famously included an image of her suckling a pig. 9/10 FROM THE CHOIRGIRL HOTEL (EASTWEST, 1998) Following the success of 1996’s ravey “Professional Widow” remix, Amos supercharged her emotional excavations, drawing on jazz, bluesy rock, trip-hop, eclectic percussion and, on “Raspberry Swirl”, a thumping four-to-the-floor beat. Written after two miscarriages in her mid-thirties, the subject matter was still potent, and it included “Spark”, her highest-charting US single. 8/10 SCARLET’S WALK (EPIC, 2002)…

THE GRIMMROBE DEMOS HYDRA HEAD, 1999/(SOUTHERN LORD, 2005) A demo album originally released in a limited edition of 500, funded by a fee for covering Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. The 20-minute cap-doff of “Dylan Carlson” lays out their dues-paying chops. 7/10 WHITE2 SOUTHERN LORD, 2004 Epic opener “Hell-O)))-Ween” is an especially confident reading of the Sunn O))) liturgy, while the other three sides create a heavy early Floyd/post-rock sense of unease. 9/10 BLACK ONE SOUTHERN LORD, 2005 Black metal immersion leads to a full Game Of Thrones assault. Amazing pseudonyms include Mystik Fogg Invokator (Anderson) and MK Ultra Blizzard (O’Malley). Noise artist John Wiese comes along for the ride. 8/10…

WHEN Jesca Hoop first relocated from California to the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 18 years ago, it was something of a culture shock. “I was like, ‘Where is all the deliciousness?’” she laughs. Thankfully, Hoop has long made her peace with slate-grey skies and gravy on everything. For years, she returned to LA to make her albums with early mentor Tony Berg, and then with his protégé, Blake Mills. But more recent efforts have been fashioned here in the UK, primarily with British musicians. Her new album, Long Wave Home, is her first self-production, created in four different studios around the country, with Hoop driving between them in her camper van. “It’s a pretty serious bootstraps moment,” she admits. “It came with its challenges, for sure.” Not least when she…

THE night I first met Tom Waits, in 1998, he told me that he had known about Guy Clark before any of us singer-songwriters. In the ’60s, Guy’s little string band used to play this place in San Diego, the Heritage, where Tom played and worked the door. He said he saw Guy’s band back then. You see, Tom started out as a folkie. He was famous for playing Bob Dylan covers when he first started doing hoot nights at the Troubadour. Then he started writing his own songs and sneaking them in there. Straight away, Tom made perfect sense to me. John Prine had come through in 1971, but Tom was the first guy to come on the scene after I felt I could really call myself a songwriter.…

WE’D heard Tom Waits was a fan of The Replacements. I’d read something that he said about me in an interview, about how it must have been kind of crazy being 12 years old and starting out in this racket, “sipping brandy, going down the road of life”. We were recording Don’t Tell A Soul at Cherokee in West Hollywood when we heard he wanted to come down and check us out. I don’t think he was drinking much then. It was before he was totally sober, but he was trying to lay off the sauce. Well, we were drinking! Across the street from Cherokee was this weird Asian Tiki place called the Formosa Café. We walked over there with Tom and his wife and had a cocktail. We didn’t…

COUNTRY JOE McDONALD Countercultural fixer (1942–2026) THE most iconic moment in Joseph Allen “Country Joe” McDonald’s life was unscheduled. Asked to step in solo at 1969’s Woodstock Festival when Santana were unexpectedly delayed, the frontman of Country Joe & The Fish leaned into the band’s so-called “Fuck Cheer” as a prelude to his anti-Vietnam War satire, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag”. “Nobody knew who the hell I was,” McDonald recalled to Uncut, “but I went out there and shouted, ‘Give me an F!’ and everybody started going crazy… It was a unique social-political moment.” The son of Communist Party members, McDonald’s upbringing in a house of radical progressives steered his approach to songwriting, along with a deep love of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. The ex-navy man had written “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” in the…

NAT ‘KING’ COLE Unforgettable CAPITOL, 1952 That’s one of the first records I can remember. Sometimes we spend time with our grand-aunt, and she like that type of singing. So I think the first time I was exposed to Nat ‘King’ Cole was her playing some of his records, and it did get my attention. It has been a part of my consciousness from the first time I heard his voice. I never heard anybody sing like that! I’m in Jamaica, I don’t hear that type of singing. In my house, with my mother and father, we didn’t have Nat ‘King’ Cole. He wasn’t a constant in my life – I heard him when I was younger, then him disappear, so when I got old, I started looking for some…

HI MELISSA! What was it like plunging back into the grunge glory years for your new memoir, Even The Good Girls Will Cry? The book wrote itself, all from memory and like a waterfall. I tell about the time that Courtney and I went to Milan Fashion Week and found ourselves backstage with Donatella Versace and all these supermodel boys offering themselves to us. A lot of the dark, heavy, complex stuff also came easily. I remembered too much, and I think it’s because I kept a diary and photographed so much that my memory lodged it in a very clear way. I can tell all these wild stories and the detail of the deli platter backstage and the grisly abscess on Courtney’s ass! But my obsessive documentarian role was…

11 The Parade, Beynon Road, Carshalton, SM5 3RL In the racks: 10,000 vinyl records spanning classic rock, prog, indie, jazz, blues, soul and more – plus cult DVDs, books and even clothing. On the wall: Currently several highly sought-after Vertigo swirl and soundtrack LPs, including an original Italian copy of Giuliano Sorgini’s The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue. Having a browse: Wilson can count on regular custom from his many musician pals, not to mention a weekly visit from ’60s chart-topper Chris Farlowe. FOR YOUR MEMORABILIA NEEDS, VISIT: Heritage Auctions ha.com/uk • Special Auction Services specialauctionservices.com Omega Auctions omegaauctions.co.uk • The Original Memorabilia Company originalmemorabilia.co.uk • Bonhamsbonhams.com…

SMOG Knock Knock DRAG CITY, 1999 EMMA TOVELL: Smog’s mega-hit Knock Knock is a perfect indie-rock album, melancholic, brooding but also kinda funny. Callahan’s pinned-together fragments of a break-up written on the road, with its gentle darkness rubbing up against wicked guitar riffs, is definitely one of the benchmarks for my contributions to Total Dive. CATHERINE IRWIN Little Heater THRILL JOCKEY, 2012 ROWAN BRAHAM: One of my favourite songwriters and a completely incomparable vocalist. The production on this is unsettlingly raw and Irwin’s intensely expressive voice can just take off to somewhere else at any point. Her version of “The Whole Of The Law” is one of the most beautiful recordings I’ve ever heard. MODEST MOUSE The Lonesome Crowded West UP/MATADOR, 1997 NYLE HOLIHAN:This has been my favourite record for…

What still attracts you to the piano? Well, my fingers don’t work very well any more, so I lost all the virtuosity I had on the piano. But the prepared piano is something totally different. You play it like percussion. Also, I’m fascinated by that incredible richness of sounds and timbres you can get from a very recognisable instrument. Tell us about the nature recordings… I was on the terrace outside, amazed by this mixture of three nightingales at the same time, and the frogs, and very faintly far away there was a herd of sheep. The sound was so amazing that I went into the house and got my recording machine. It was a very special night. Also, the sound of rain. For me, it’s something very magical. It’s…

Green Gartside: “I thought I wanted to be a pop star” Could you tell us about your musical influences? They seem to derive from the non-punky parts of the John Peel show. Leaving aside the question of how pop music is powerful, the “power” was unleashed for me by The Beatles. I fell in love with them and their music and was led by them, taught by them. Like Timothy Leary said, “They are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars the human race has ever produced.” The attraction of progressively more challenging music was inculcated by The Beatles’ development and my following them adoringly. They gave me a taste for change, for challenge, for ideas. A list of people whose music I have loved and affected me psychoactively deeply would…

AVERAGE WHITE BAND Soul Searching (reissue, 1976) DEMON 8/10 The funky Scotsmen’s 1976 platinum-seller merits a fresh vinyl edition The Demon label’s programme of reissues celebrating the Average White Band’s 50th anniversary continues with the group’s third and final entry in the US Top 10. When many of their funky peers were streamlining and simplifying their sound to get with disco’s rise to dominance, the AWB charted a different course on Soul Searching. While “I’m The One” and “Goin’ Home” demonstrate their continued forte – tight, JB’s-worthy grooves – other tracks point toward the smooth and supple yacht-soul that predominates on underrated later efforts like 1980’s Shine and 1982’s Cupid’s In Fashion. The sultriest example here is “A Love Of Your Own”, a co-write by AWB co-founder Hamish Stewart and Malibu…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Ayam El Disco: Egyptian Disco, Boogie And Jeel Cassettes 1978–92 WEWANTSOUNDS 8/10 Straight outta Cairo: slippery, addictive disco tapes uncovered EGYPTIAN disco music is one of those genres that you’re probably barely aware of, but once you’ve started exploring it via various online rabbit holes, you’ll find yourself wanting to listen to little else. It flourished in the late 1970s and ’80s, in the hotel bars, cabaret lounges and cafes of Cairo, and would be primarily distributed by cassette, a medium that had all but eclipsed vinyl in much of the Middle East in the 1970s. The Egypt-born, Amsterdam-based sociologist and DJ Moataz Rageb, aka Disco Arabesquo, has become the foremost curator of this music, and follows his nine-track 2022 compilation Sharayet El Disco with the 11-track Ayam…

“IT’S a very familiar place. We were going there every year to either make a record or rehearse for a tour from 1997 through 2009. But it’s been a long time since the three of us [Amos, Evans and drummer Matt Chamberlain] were actually in the same space together, making a record live. Ocean To Ocean and Tori And The Muses were done remotely – Covid and all that stuff. There is definitely something to be said for being in place with people for a couple weeks at a time, having meals together and getting in that flow. When you’re there, you’re so immersed in the studio – and it rains a lot, so it’s very focused on the task at hand. There aren’t long walks over the moors. “It…

JULIAN COPE (WHITE1, 2004) “Play your gloom axe, Stephen O’Malley…” The arch-drude nails it with a remotely recorded folk poem that gives some shape to “My Wall”. OREN AMBARCHI (MONOLITHS & DIMENSIONS, 2009) Australian avant guitar/noise lord cements his many live appearances with this recorded showing. SCOTT WALKER (SOUSED, 2014) In truth, on this collaborative album Sunn O))) are more like Scott’s honoured guests, tailoring their ideas to his vision. But what a vision! BORIS (ALTAR, 2006) The mononymic Japanese doom radicals are a cousin to Sunn O))). Peak hook-up here is “Her Lips Were Wet With Venom” with Dylan Carlson on board, too. ROBERT MACFARLANE (SUNN O)))), 2026) More Dryrobe than Grimmrobe, writer/academic Macfarlane supplies thoughtful musings on “deep time” and beyond for the liner notes of the new…

I STARTED listening to Tom Waits from his very first records. In particular, Nighthawks At The Diner was a big record for me. I just ate up that scruffy, livingout-of-an-LA-motel persona, because it was so evocative of the Beat generation. I was in college and I saw him play in 1975 or ’76 with his combo: standup bass, lamppost on stage. It was an incredible concert. All the early records knocked me out. Then I got involved in the burgeoning punk, new wave and no-wave movements. When Sonic Youth began, my head was in other places. It was ’83 in New York and we were just coming out of this period where the aesthetic was you didn’t have to know how to play in order to play. You could beat…

ON stage, there is one thing Tom values more than anything else. There are some people who like to feel a groove and there are other people who need to feel a groove. Tom has a deep need to feel that groove. If he’s not feeling it, you know it! When you see footage of Tom banging the microphone stand on the stage – well, man, that ain’t a show. He’s telling the band: “Give me that beat!” He’s always cool, but when that stand started pounding and little pieces of the stage were flying off, you knew you better get with the programme. Because he needed to feel the groove in a very particular way. The first time I met Tom, he came down to a couple of gigs…

WORKING with Tom was amazing. He’s so good at following directions and sharing his vision. He was part of the team. A lot of superstars want to steer the boat, but he’s a great collaborator and contributor with a lot of his own ideas. There’s a story in the movie about a crooked tree – that was his own story, it wasn’t in the script. On the DVD, in the extras there’s one deleted scene where he’s hypnotising a chicken. That was also his idea. It was really funny, because he’d clearly done it many times before… I needed a really charismatic character. This was a low-budget movie, so some superstar wasn’t really an option. But Tom and Kathleen are very unusual; they’re not so money-driven. We met up in…

THERE is much that is typical in the story of Stuart Adamson. An underrated musician, he shaped two notable groups: first as guitarist with the Skids, and then as frontman of Big Country. In the cruel amnesia of rock history, he’s cited for his influence on U2, with The Edge acknowledging the “big noise” of the Skids’ early records. More precisely, he is remembered for a guitar sound that appeared to mimic the drone of a bagpipe, employed in a widescreen Celtic rock idiom that is usually characterised as “epic”. Adamson enjoyed considerable success, but was ambivalent about the immodest business of being a frontman. While Skids singer Richard Jobson high-kicked in the spotlight, Adamson fled – sometimes literally – when the demands of the job grew too onerous. In…