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Watch a video for Shabaka Hutchings’ new track, “End Of Innocence”

Sam Richards
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Watch a video for Shabaka Hutchings’ new track, “End Of Innocence”

UK jazz figurehead Shabaka Hutchings – formerly of the bands Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming – has released his first new music since quitting the saxophone at the end of last year. “End Of Innocence” is the first single to be taken from his new solo album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, released by Impulse! on April 12.

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While the album mostly features Hutchings playing a range of different flutes, “End Of Innocence” marks a return to his first instrument, the clarinet. Watch the Phoebe Boswell-directed video below:

The track also features Jason Moran (piano), Nasheet Waits (drums) and Carlos Niño (percussion). Other contributors to the album include André 3000, Lianne La Havas, Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney, Brandee Younger, Floating Points, Laraaji, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams and Elucid.

“I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” says Hutchings. The album was recorded at the historic Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, which he says “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary.”

You can pre-order Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace here and peruse the tracklisting below. Look out for an in-depth interview with Shabaka Hutchings in the new issue of Uncut, due out in UK shops tomorrow (March 29) or available to order online here.

  1. End Of Innocence
  2. As The Planets And the Stars Collapse
  3. Insecurities
  4. Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become
  5. The Wounded Need To Be Replenished
  6. Body To Inhabit
  7. I’ll Do Whatever You Want
  8. Living
  9. Breathing
  10. Kiss Me Before I Forget
  11. Song Of The Motherland

Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss for 2024 Outlaw Music Festival Tour

Michael Bonner
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Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss for 2024 Outlaw Music Festival Tour

Willie Nelson‘s Outlaw Music Music Festival Tour this year will feature Willie Nelson & Family, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss and John Mellencamp among its storied bill.

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“This year’s Outlaw Music Festival Tour promises to be the biggest and best yet with this lineup of legendary artists. I am thrilled to get back on the road again with my family and friends playing the music we love for the fans we love,” said Nelson.

The festival made its debut in 2016 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and has since gone on to include Neil Young, Van Morrison, ZZ Top, Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt in various line-ups.

This year’s festival runs for 25 dates, beginning on June 21 at the Ameris Bank Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, Georgia and finishing on September 17 at the Darien Lake Amphitheater in Buffalo, New York.

Also on the bill are Brittney Spencer, Celisse and Southern Avenue while Billy Strings will also join the tour for one show at The Gorge in Washington.

You can find the full list of dates by clicking here. Tickets go on sale from Friday, March 1.

Scott Fagan – South Atlantic Blues (reissue, 1968)

Sharon O'Connell
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Scott Fagan – South Atlantic Blues (reissue, 1968)

Tales of contenders who never fulfilled their early promise are plentiful in the music game, but Scott Fagan’s comes with intriguing details – including having sired Stephin Merritt – and an idiosyncratic soundtrack. Raised in the US Virgin Islands, he moved to New York in 1964 and there started co-writing songs with the heavyweight Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman team. Over the next three years, he also penned the songs that were to form his debut album. The “bigger than Presley” success predicted by Fagan’s high-profile manager, Herb Gart, never came to be, while a deal with Atlantic subsidiary ATCO saw him stuck in a contract with no label advocate. South Atlantic Blues disappeared, leaving only a trace.

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It’s clearly not through lack of ability or youthful appeal, as this vinyl reissue – which reinstates the original artwork (replacing the 1970 Jasper Johns lithograph, Scott Fagan’s Record, that appeared on 2015’s repressing) – attests. The singer-songwriter was a photogenic 22-year-old when he recorded it with producer Elmer Jared Gordon and the 10 tracks are as accomplished as they are immediately likeable. They’re also diverse, combining folk, country, psychedelic pop and orchestral soul, with calypso and show tuneage providing top notes. Three songs are co-writes with Fagan’s pal and fellow “hardscrabble kid” Joe Kookoolis; one, “Crystal Ball”, with Shuman. Melodrama is in play, due in part to fêted arranger Horace Ott’s work.

Fagan’s voice is as much a defining element of South Atlantic Blues as his songs’ style: its slightly histrionic push and flutter, which recalls early Bowie, may be something of an acquired taste, but in his moodier moments he conjures Scott Walker and Gene Clark. The former is certainly present in set opener “In My Head”, whose lyrics are characteristically allusive (“Myself and I have always seen the sea as secret lover/But does she, does she, does she want the sky instead?/Oh, no, it’s something, something in my head”), the strident brass blasts and Fagan’s anguished, paranoid cry sending mixed emotional messages to great effect. “Crying” is another standout, a slice of bittersweet Southern soul thrown slightly off its axis by a plinking keyboard motif at the two-thirds mark. Very different are “The Carnival Is Ended”, a lilting, Bacharach-meets-Bowie number with steel pans and mariachi brass, and the socially conscious “Tenement Hall”, a Dr John/Van hybrid replete with improv strings and guitar savagery, which exits on Fagan’s near sob of “insane”, repeated to fadeout.

The reissue of his slightly mystical debut will no doubt stoke interest in director Marah Strauch’s forthcoming documentary on Fagan’s life and his new album in the pipeline – the unrecorded soundtrack to Soon, a rock musical co-written with Kookoolis which had a fleeting Broadway run in 1971. One more (deserved) shot at wider recognition, perhaps.

Uncut – April 2024

Michael Bonner
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Uncut – April 2024

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Pink Floyd and Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, The Beach Boys, Adrianne Lenker, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Shabaka Hutchings, Townes Van Zandt, Jah Wobble, Wayne Kramer, A Certain Ratio and more all feature in Uncut‘s April 2024 issue, in UK shops from February 2 or available to buy online now.

All print copies come with a free CD – One Of These Days, featuring 15 of the month’s best new music including The Black Keys, Jane Weaver, Ride, Cedric Burnside, Waxahatchee, Pernice Brothers, Jim White and more!

INSIDE THIS MONTH’S UNCUT

PINK FLOYD: With his SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS band, NICK MASON is on a mission to save the potent, foundational music of PINK FLOYD. In doing so, he aims to reassert the Floyd’s historic creative path from three-minute pop fantastias and cosmic-progressive freak-outs to the transitional epiphanies that led to The Dark Side Of The Moon. “In Pink Floyd, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing half the time,” Mason tells us. “What we did have was an abundance of ideas.”

THE BEACH BOYS: From three brothers wrestling on their front lawn to the miraculous creation of numerous pop masterpieces, a new photobook chronicles The Beach Boys’ Californian dream, in their own words and pictures. As Brian Wilson remembers, “We were one of the biggest things going”…

ADRIANNE LENKER: Away from her day job with BIG THIEF, ADRIANNE LENKER has developed a parallel career as a solo artist, whose intricate and vulnerable folk songs mine deep, emotional truths. In New York, she talks to Uncut about creation, catharsis and connection. “In a way, it’s like one song that I’ve been writing since I was 10 years old…”

SHABAKA HUTCHINGS: The UK jazz magus has retired his celebrated bands Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming – and even put aside his trusty saxophone – in order to seek out fresh creative inspiration. His quest takes him from a bamboo forest in Japan via the birthplace of A Love Supreme to a kids swimming pool in Croydon. “It’s gonna be good, so just enjoy the ride…”

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN: Since reuniting in 2007, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN have proved that even the most tempestuous sibling relationships can enjoy successful second acts. As they prepare to mark their 40th anniversary with a new album and an autobiography, JIM and WILLIAM REID explain how the shared ideals they developed in their East Kilbride bedroom still apply in 2024. “Your fantasy of being in a band is in every way better than the reality…”

TOWNES VAN ZANDT: A dive bar in a rundown Texas neighbourhood, The Old Quarter was a regular haunt for VAN ZANDT. In 1973, it also became the setting for a live recording that vividly captured the renegade singer-songwriter’s wild charisma and quicksilver poetry. “I’d seen him fucked up, I’d seen him really good,” recalls Steve Earle. “For some reason he took those nights very seriously.”

WAYNE KRAMER: Uncut’s Jaan Uhelszki first met the MC5 in 1965; here’s her personal tribute to their inspirational leader

REM: Stipe, Buck, Mills and Berry make a pilgrimage back to Athens’ 40 Watt club for Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy’s Murmur tribute. “It’s an honour to hear the songs so fresh, live in a room again,” Stipe tells us.

NICO: With reissues for Desertshore and The Marble Index due, in this archive interview John Cale remembers recording the Velvet revolutionary: “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into…”

AN AUDIENCE WITH… JAH WOBBLE: The ex-PiL bass invader talks Can, Sid, Sinead and “going deep into the heart of space”

THE MAKING OF “THERE’S A BREAK IN THE ROAD” BY BETTY HARRIS: How the Florida singer found her funk-soul heart with help from Allen Toussant, The Meters and “psychedelic music”

ALBUM BY ALBUM WITH A CERTAIN RATIO: The Greatest Manchester post-punk funkateers chart their sonic journey from 1980 to the present day

MY LIFE IN MUSIC WITH ALBERT HAMMOND: The songwriter’s songwriter on his most enduring listens: “Music will be there forever”

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REVIEWED: Cedric Burnside, Jane Weaver, Waxahatchee, Charles Lloyd, Ride, BrhyM, Love Child, Faust, Alice Cooper, Creation Rebel, Pixies, Werner Herzog, Jim Gordon, Kristin Hersh, Nirvana, Depeche Mode, Margo Price and more

PLUS: Farewell Damo Suzuki; Arthur Russell unseen; Lulu; our pick of the best speakers; introducing Oisin Leech…

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Introducing the new issue of Uncut

Michael Bonner
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Introducing the new issue of Uncut

THERE have been many twists in the long-running saga of Pink Floyd, but few could have predicted the events of May 20, 2018. On stage in Camden’s Dingwalls, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets opened a surprising new chapter in the band’s story, reviving the three-minute pop fantasias and cosmic-progressive freakouts of the Floyd’s foundational years before The Dark Side Of The Moon. In our cover story, Mason looks back on the creation of this magnificent, irregular music, while along with his co-conspirators in the Saucers, he explains how – and why – they’ve brought it back to life. “The best Pink Floyd gigs were voyages of discovery, accompanied by a sense of mystery and adventure,” Mason tells Uncut. “I was excited about playing music with a sense of freedom, music that involved improvisation. That’s what Saucerful Of Secrets is all about.”

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There’s plenty about creativity, and what fuels it, in the rest of the magazine – whether it be the open-hearted songwriting of Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, the harmonic brilliance of The Beach Boys or the careworn poetry of Townes Van Zandt. In a typically wideranging issue, we head off in further sonic directions in the company of The Jesus And Mary Chain, Shabaka Hutchings, Jah Wobble, Betty Harris and A Certain Ratio, and also pay homage to two great instigators – Wayne Kramer and Damo Suzuki.

One of the best things about writing this column for you every month is getting to marvel at the incredible variety of music we stack inside every issue. This one is no exception; you’ll even find Lulu on the time she recorded with the Memphis Horns, Duane Allman and Dr John. Not a story you’re likely to read about every day…

Send us your questions for Vini Reilly

Sam Richards
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Send us your questions for Vini Reilly

Vini Reilly has fans in high places. When God appeared to Tony Wilson in the film 24 Hour Party People, it was to suggest that he release a Durutti Column greatest hits. As the Lord Almighty correctly observed, “It’s good music to chill out to.”

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The Durutti Column were the first band signed to Factory Records in 1978, although they soon became a de facto Vini Reilly solo project (with staunch assistance down the years from drummer Bruce Mitchell and others). The group’s music – quiet, pensive, beautiful – was in stark contrast to the punk scene Reilly came up in as guitarist for Ed Banger & The Nosebleeds.

His delicate playing incorporated scales and techniques from classical and flamenco traditions rarely heard in rock. Occasionally The Durutti Column’s music has drifted towards the zeitgeist, as on 1989’s quasi-Balearic Vini Reilly album, soon to be reissued as a five-disc box set.

The year before, he played a key role on Morrissey’s debut Viva Hate. But mostly Reilly has preferred to do his own thing, maintaining a rare purity of vision.

So, what do you want to ask a singular British guitar genius? Send your questions to audiencewith@uncut.co.uk by Wednesday March 6 and Vini will answer the best ones in a future issue of Uncut.

Introducing the Ultimate Genre Guide: Singer-Songwriter

John Robinson
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Introducing the Ultimate Genre Guide: Singer-Songwriter

My first meeting with a giant in the field of singer-songwriting wasn’t in an LA canyon, but somewhere on a hill outside San Francisco. Tasked 25 years ago with interviewing Neil Young for NME, myself and a photographer took a long taxi ride outside the city and up to what was then apparently one of Neil’s incognito hangs – a homey restaurant within a wooded area called the Mountain House. As we pulled up and stepped out of the taxi in our unCalifornian black clothing, we were greeted by a genial voice: “Great,” it announced, wryly. “The English are here!”

This, of course, was Elliott Roberts, then 30 years into a role which he occupied for over half a century, quietly influencing the careers of the most single-minded and ungovernable artists in music history: Neil Young of course, but also Crosby, Stills and Nash, and our cover star, Joni Mitchell. These artists, their contemporaries, kindred spirits and fellow travellers like James Taylor, Carole King, Judee Sill and Jackson Browne are at the heart of this publication.

They are also what we think of when we talk about the art of the singer-songwriter: the song as an investigation of the self, a discovery of emotional truths. Geographically and metaphorically it was an escape from the crowd: the old bands, and the old ways of doing things. As much as it was about the individual writer, it was also about a wider empathy: a tuneful and engrossing pursuit which won its musicians millions of fans all over the world.

In this magazine, you will of course read about the Canyon artists – the mismatch between turbulent life and melodious, easy-listening music of James Taylor is a particularly extraordinary treat – but you will also read in-depth reviews of artists who didn’t easily sit within the west coast songwriter circle. 

There’s impressive new and recent writing on the resolutely east coast Laura Nyro, whose work so enraptured the young David Geffen, and helped point his road ahead. Present also are new opinions on unclubbable visionaries like Van Morrison and Tim Buckley, and the quietly spectacular Paul Simon. Joni Mitchell connected Leonard Cohen to the Laurel Canyon scene, but his troubled relationship with his muse was destined to sit uneasily within it, despite the best efforts of David Crosby. You’ll find what amounts to last words on the scene from Croz at the back of the magazine.

“And then there was Joni,” he says. “Formidable talent doesn’t even begin to describe it, she was the best of us. She’s absolutely the best singer-songwriter of our time.”

You can find yourself a copy here.

Aziza Brahim – Mawja

Nigel Williamson
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Aziza Brahim – Mawja

Aziza Brahim’s homeland of Western Sahara is listed by the UN as the last remaining colony in Africa. Under Spanish control until 1976, the territory was then annexed by Morocco and has been under occupation ever since. Denied self-determination, many of its people, the Sahrawi, were forced into exile in refugee camps in the Algerian desert. Those camps are where Brahim was born, her mother having fled the family’s ancestral home following Morocco’s military invasion.

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Growing up, Brahim recalls singing as the principal form of entertainment, and she was soon setting to music the verse of her grandmother, Lkhadra Mint Mabruk, a celebrated Sahrawi writer, revolutionary and feminist hero known as “the poet of the rifle”.

In her teens Brahim was educated in Cuba before returning to the desert in 1995, where she joined the National Sahrawi Music Group. She then chose Spain as a suitable base from which to raise the plight of her oppressed people via her music.

After releasing her debut album in 2012 – which included settings of her grandmother’s poems – she was signed by Glitterbeat, for whom she has recorded a series of proudly defiant albums full of moving songs yearning for her homeland and espousing the cause of freedom.

A fearless moderniser who at the same time sounds somehow ancient, her work to date has found acclaim in world music circles without making the transition from a WOMAD audience to the mainstream in the way that, say, Tinariwen have done.  Deeply rooted and yet sonically adventurous, Mawja should, if there is any justice, change that.

‘Mawja’ means ‘wave’ in the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic, a reference to the radio signal which growing up in the refugee camp kept her in touch with the outside world and the electronic “waves” that now carry her music and the story of her people to a wider audience.

Since her last album, 2019’s Sahari, much has happened to turn Brahim’s universe upside down and the travails have fed into Mawja to create her most accomplished and rounded work to date. With her mother, brothers and sisters and one of her daughters still living in the barren region of the Algerian desert known as The Devil’s Garden, she suffered a crisis of anxiety, characteristic of many exiles separated from their loved ones, which was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Then in November 2020 the uneasy 30-year ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the armed wing of the Sahrawi liberation movement, broke down and fighting resumed.

In 2022 came the death of the grandmother whose revolutionary poetry Brahim had sung so stirringly and who had taught her to be “proud and tenacious” in the face of adversity. Out of anguish, though, came inspiration, and the spirit of the great matriarch permeates the album from “Duaa”, a blues-drenched prayer in her honour, to the tender tribute “Ljaima Likbira”.

Brahim’s default musical currency is a resonant African desert blues freighted with a mournful yet defiant passion, but with a distinctly feminist perspective that is as different from Ali Farka Toure or Tinariwen as, say, Bessie Smith was from John Lee Hooker or Robert Johnson.

It’s a potent and compelling sound, inextricably linked to the resistance struggle but with an inherent dignity and elegance – not merely a cry of protest at oppression but a celebration of a proud culture, too. Her country may have no official status but it “exists without restrictions in our words, in our memory and in our voices.”

Playing the traditional Sahrawi hand drum known as the tabal and accompanied by Western rock instrumentation, her soulful voice has a delectably creamy tone capable of subtly different emotional shading. With its flute and chiming guitar there’s a folkish vibe to “Marhabna 2.1” (‘Welcome’), a syncopated reimagining of the opening track on her 2012 album. There’s more of a defiant edge to “Haiyu Ya Zawar” (‘Cheer, Oh Revolutionaries’), a song of resistance and struggle with some thrilling flamenco-style guitar played on a Cuban tres, while the raw, fiery blues-rock of “Metal Madera” was inspired by Brahim’s admiration for The Clash.

Amid the militant rallying cries there’s a healthy dose of myth and magic, too, particularly on the gently swaying “Bubisher” about a legendary bird, the appearance of which in Sahrawi folklore is meant to be a portent that better times are on the way. The Sahrawi, it seems, desperately need another sighting. Meanwhile, Mawja is an eloquent homage to the indomitable spirit and rich culture of Brahim’s troubled but proud people.

How To Buy Jerry Garcia And Friends

Jon Dale
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How To Buy Jerry Garcia And Friends

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With the reissue of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s So What, a meandering and lovely acoustic jazz set from 1998, Jon Dale singles out other collaborative highlights from the Grateful Dead frontman’s extra-curricular career…

JERRY GARCIA & DAVID GRISMAN

So What (reissue, 1998)

ORG MUSIC

7/10

A curious album, this one. Garcia and Grisman were long-time collaborators, having met in the late ’60s, which led to Grisman appearing on the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album American Beauty; they’d soon play together in bluegrass band Old & In The Way, and later, in the ’90s, they released a string of collaborative albums, including an album of children’s music (Not For Kids Only). There were many strings to their collective bow, then, and while their focus did tend to be on bluegrass and folk – Grisman combined these genres with jazz into a form he called Dawg Music – So What feels like a bit of an outlier, given its focus on acoustic jazz. They take on a few Miles Davis tunes here, flexing from a spirited “So What” to a tender “Milestones”; the real gems here, though, are the lovely runs through Milt Jackson’s “Bag’s Groove”.

The best of Jerry’s collaborations

HOWARD WALES & JERRY GARCIA

Hooteroll?

DOUGLAS, 1971

8/10

A surprisingly sturdy, impressive jazz-rock album, Hooteroll? has Wales and Garcia going at it particularly feverishly. It’s on Wales’s terms, largely – his overdriven organ tends to dominate proceedings – but when Garcia steps in, he’s more than capable of taking up the baton. One of the better albums in this genre.

MERL SAUNDERS

Fire Up

FANTASY, 1973

8/10

Saunders started playing with Garcia at The Matrix, the beginning of a long, fruitful collaboration. On Fire Up, Saunders is joined by Garcia, fellow Grateful Dead member Bill Kreutzmann, and Creedence’s Tom Fogerty. It’s a joy, Saunders’s piano and Garcia’s guitar and singing in perfect tandem, a deep blues-funk groove.

OLD & IN THE WAY

Old & In The Way

ROUND, 1975

8/10

A joyous, celebratory live performance from this bluegrass gang, where Garcia returns to the banjo, and joins David Grisman (mandolin), Vassar Clements (fiddle), Peter Rowan (guitar) and John Kahn (string bass). Playful and full of spirit, it’s a lovely documentation of the group, recorded late ’73 in San Francisco.

Hear Paul Weller’s new single, “Soul Wondering”

Michael Bonner
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Hear Paul Weller’s new single, “Soul Wondering”

Paul Weller has released a taster for his new studio album.

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You can hear “Soul Wondering”, the first single taken from 66, below.

66 is released on May 24 on Polydor Records. The album will be available on all major streaming platforms, CD and vinyl. It’s been produced by Weller and recorded at his Black Barn studio over the course of three years with a host of guest musicians including Suggs (“Ship Of Fools”), Noel Gallagher (“Jumble Queen”) and Bobby Gillespie (“Soul Wondering”).

66 also sees the co-writing return of Erland Cooper and duo White Label, and string arrangements from Hannah Peel. Additionally, there are two collaborations with French producer and recording artist Christophe Vaillant (Le Superhomard) while Brooklyn trio Say She She add vocals to “In Full Flight”. Other collaborators include Dr Robert, Richard Hawley, Steve Brooks and Max Beesley.

The tracklisting for 66 is:

Ship of Fools

Flying Fish

Jumble Queen

Nothing

My Best Friend’s Coat *

Rise Up Singing

I Woke Up

A Glimpse of You *

Sleepy Hollow

In Full Flight **

Soul Wandering

Burn Out ***

Produced by Paul Weller

Except:

* produced by Christophe Vaillant

** produced by Weller / White Label

*** produced by Weller / Charles Rees

I’m New Here – Conchúr White

Johnny Sharp
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I’m New Here – Conchúr White

The term ‘dreampop’ is often used in these pages, but it seems to apply to Conchúr White’s work in a slightly different way to that of his ethereally inclined contemporaries. In the songs of his debut album Swirling Violets, dreams – surreal visions and imaginings of the afterlife – form a recurring theme, framed within beautifully soft-sung acoustic vignettes and chamber pop confections.

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“I got friends who died a thousand different times, strewn across the sky,” run the first words of opening track “The Holy Death”, luring us into a world of “surreal settings with tangible messages”, as he has previously put it. Northern Irishman White (his first name is pronounced “Conor”) has seen his profile grow over the past couple of years thanks to slots opening for the likes of John Grant, John Cale and The Magnetic Fields. Meanwhile, last year’s “Atonia” single, inspired by studies of sleep paralysis, proved an enticing precursor to Swirling Violets.

“I’ve long had an interest in filmmakers like David Lynch and stuff like Carl Jung’s The Red Book,” says White. “I spent a lot of time wrestling with those ideas: dreams and death, collective unconsciousness. When I was a kid growing up in a Catholic household, I’d ask so many questions about whether there’s an afterlife, my parents got a bit worried about me!”

This enduring sense of wonder has infused his songs since he parted company in 2018 with indie-folk outfit Silences, the band he helped form at school in Portadown, County Armagh. In some instances, his warm harmonies, pop hooks and nostalgic reference points will strike a universal chord, as on “501s”, a catchy paean to a childhood crush. But he also speaks of particular times and places in lines such as “Remember the boy at the Centrepoint / When he kicked us out for passing the bottle,” referring to youthful mischief at his hometown’s leisure centre.

Elsewhere, there are darker allusions to the Ulster he grew up in, mostly post-Troubles, but still scarred by the intolerance that characterised them. “Fenian boy without a father / Mother drank / It almost sunk her and it drowned him in the end,” he sings on “Deadwood”, and while it’s not autobiographical, he explains that “it’s just about how as a child you’d be narrowed down. That’s what you were – a Fenian or… I don’t want to say the other one.”

White’s interest in inner lives was further piqued by his former day job working in child and adolescent mental health services, something he says has seeped into some songs on this album, such as the “Women In The War”, with its passionate declaration of undying devotion to a (possibly unrequited) love who is “pushing daisies”.  “You’d come across that kind of intense love and infatuation, but also intense pain and tragedy,” he says.

All this is beautifully wreathed in atmospheric arrangements, whether it be the ghostly whispers shrouding “Deadwood”, the delicate piano and woozy electronic decoration of “Righteous”, or the subtle lacings of vocal harmony on “River”. So far, White hasn’t been able to fully recreate this sound in his stripped-down solo support slots, but that hasn’t stopped him winning followers with every performance. “I’m hoping to go out with a full band [later this year],” he says, “but I’m a big believer that if a song sounds good when it’s fully arranged or when it’s just played with a piano and vocal, then it’s passed an important test.”

Swirling Violets is out now on Bella Union

Four Beatles biopics to be directed by Sam Mendes

Michael Bonner
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Four Beatles biopics to be directed by Sam Mendes

Separate biopics of each of the four Beatles will be the directed by Sam Mendes.

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According to Mendes’ creative vision, the four feature films – one from each band member’s point-of-view – will intersect to tell the Fabs’ story.

“I’m honoured to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” said Mendes.

This is the first time Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison – have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.

According to a statement, ‘the dating cadence of the films, the details of which will be shared closer to release, will be innovative and groundbreaking.’

When Pirates Ruled The Waves

David Cavanagh
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When Pirates Ruled The Waves

With Radio Caroline and Radio London both turning 60 in 2024, here’s a piece on the much-loved pirate radio stations from the Uncut archives. This feature first appeared in Take 144, dated May 2009. Since this piece was originally published, the author as well as some of those interviewed have died.

A misty November morning in 1964. Radio Caroline’s 21-year-old breakfast DJ Tony Blackburn awoke early in his cabin and wandered up on deck. The sight that greeted him was like a scene from Powell & Pressburger’s The Battle Of The River Plate. The thick sea mist slowly cleared, revealing a huge ship – twice the size of Caroline’s – anchored a fair distance away. Three-and-a-half miles off the coast of Essex, Caroline suddenly had company.

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The new arrival was the MV Galaxy, a 780-ton former WWII minesweeper. Now it was to be the home of Radio London (‘Big L’), an American-financed station that would give Caroline – the original UK pirate, launched seven months before – a serious run for its money. Radio London would play an all-day diet of the best ’60s pop (Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks) as well as helping to ‘break’ many important bands of that decade, notably The Byrds, The Animals, The Small Faces, The Move and Cream. The Perfumed Garden, a show hosted by John Peel from March to August 1967, would earn a dedicated late-night listenership for its unique mix of psychedelia, folk, West Coast rock, blues and poetry. Wherever you looked on the Galaxy, the future was happening.

“The ship that transformed everything was Big L,” agrees Tony Blackburn, who joined it in 1966. “Everybody remembers Caroline as the famous one, but Big L was modern radio as we know it.”

As it began broadcasting for the first time (December, 23 1964), Radio London had two advantages over its rival Caroline. Firstly, it boasted the slickest American-made jingles that UK audiences had ever heard; and secondly, it had Kenny Everett, a 20-year-old newcomer who would become a pirate radio sensation. Everett’s daily double-header with Dave Cash (the surreal, knees-obsessed Kenny & Cash Show) began in April 1965, soon topping the ratings. Other Big L jocks included Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, Tommy Vance and Keith Skues.

“It was a very professional station, very much based on American Top 40 radio,” recalls Skues, nowadays a veteran of BBC regional broadcasting. “The boat was much larger than Caroline, so you could go out and sunbathe on deck, which we did, until someone told us we were going to die of radiation from the aerial. We were also warned we’d lose our hair by the age of 26.”

The ’60s pirate radio phenomenon was founded on a simple loophole and a cunning understanding of maritime law. If a ship was moored three or more miles off the British coastline, it was technically sailing in international waters. A commercial radio station broadcasting from that ship – without a licence, on a stolen (‘pirated’) frequency, and with no intention of paying taxes on its profits – was legally untouchable. The Government, police, Navy, Customs & Excise and Coastguard had no jurisdiction.

“We had left the British Isles,” points out Blackburn. “Officially we were on the way to Holland. We just never got there.”

One can almost hear Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” as we visualise the scene. A flamboyantly-garbed DJ bobs up and down on the ocean wave, braving a force nine gale, fighting off an attack of seasickness and defying Harold Wilson’s Government all in the same moment. At the height of Big L’s popularity, that DJ broadcasted to around 12 million listeners a week, who showed their appreciation by sending fanmail by the sack. The pirates – heroes, outlaws, celebrities, pariahs – were an habitual topic du jour in Parliament, not to mention a source of immense discomfort to the BBC. But what would it take to stop them?

In the end, it would be a shotgun.

Mid-1965. In less than a year, Caroline and Radio London have revolutionised British radio. By giving airplay to new groups – Big L even puts them in its Fab 40 – the pirates have curbed the dominance of major labels EMI and Decca, and made the BBC (which rations its pop output to a few hours a week) look like a dinosaur. Keith Skues: “Pirates started appearing all over the place. They changed the whole face of ’60s music.”

“Suddenly the cartel was broken,” remarks ex-pirate Johnnie Walker, who began on Swinging Radio England in 1966, “and a lot of music – like Motown – was played for the first time.” The BBC may have denounced the more excitable pirate DJs as “bingo callers”, but the BBC, as Gary Leeds of The Walker Brothers explains, was the main reason why the pirates had to exist. “There was a Catch-22 situation,” he says. “The BBC had to play your record to get you in the charts. But if you weren’t in the charts, the BBC wouldn’t play your record.”

As a pirate, Tony Blackburn had enjoyed adventures that no land-based BBC presenter like Alan Freeman could match. One day Blackburn shinned to the top of the mast of Caroline’s vessel Mi Amigo, after a severe gale entangled the wires on the aerial. On another occasion he was hauled to safety when the Mi Amigo ran aground on the Essex coast. Pirates frequently had to broadcast in atrocious weather while the shipped rolled giddily. “In the summer, it was much nicer,” notes Keith Skues. “Little pleasure-boats used to come out from Frinton and people would throw presents to us.”

Radio London’s DJs shared the Galaxy with a crew of Dutch seamen, including a captain. The captain’s rules – no drunkenness, no girls, no insubordination – were not negotiable. Each DJ was permitted two bottles of beer a day, no more. Food and cigarettes were provided free.

They settled into a three-week cycle. Two weeks at sea; a week of shore leave. To return to the boat, they caught trains from London to Harwich, showed their passport at Customs and took the two-hour journey out to the Galaxy in a tender boat. The tender also ferried provisions (milk, water), occasional pop stars such as Marianne Faithfull, and the all-important new record releases.

The Walker Brothers were particularly grateful to Radio London for its support, even recording special jingles for Kenny Everett and Dave Cash. “Can you imagine?” Cash laughs. “‘Kenny and Cash on Lon-do-n…’ With Scott Walker’s amazing voice, and that echo.” Gary Leeds: “We know the image that Scott projects now, right? But it was totally different back then. We were young and foolish. Sometimes we’d have our picture taken up at Marble Arch, and Dave and Kenny would be around the back making rude noises.”

Kenny Everett, a timid Liverpudlian who became electrifying behind the microphone, was envied for his genius as a tape editor, and for his assortment of Goon Show-inspired voices and characters. Everett also proved vital in establishing Big L’s friendly relationship with The Beatles, travelling with them on their 1966 US tour – he later recalled fainting with excitement when he heard that he’d been invited – and remaining on good terms socially. This culminated in Radio London’s greatest coup of 1967: a world exclusive pre-release of Sgt. Pepper, which they played in its entirety again and again.

For the most part, the Big L Top 40 format was strictly adhered to. The DJ would play a song from the Top 10, then one from numbers 10 to 40, followed by a ‘climber’, then another Top 10, then another 10-to-40, then an oldie. The sequence would be repeated. But some areas of Big L’s schedule proved more difficult – if not impossible – to control, and the anarchic Everett became the first Radio London DJ to be sacked in disgrace.

Skues: “We had a religious programme called The World Tomorrow. None of us liked it, but the company that produced it paid Radio London a huge amount of money. We were constantly told, ‘This is where the income comes from, so don’t knock it.’”

Hosted by an American evangelist, Garner Ted Armstrong, The World Tomorrow was pre-recorded and sent out to the ship on tape. Everett, sick of having his daily show interrupted by Jesus Christ, decided to edit one of the tapes. Dave Cash: “We cut it apart, so that instead of saying ‘Garner Ted Armstrong loves you all’, it said ‘Garner Ted Armstrong loves vice, sex and corruption.’ Oh dear. And he happened to be in the country at the time.”

Even at their most innocent, however, the pirates were a scourge to Tony Benn, the Government’s Postmaster General (in charge of telecommunications and broadcasting), who promised legislation to ban them. He called the pirates a hazard to shipping (which they denied) and condemned them for stealing their frequencies (which they accepted, while adding that there were plenty to go round). In 40 years, Benn has never wavered from his position. He says today: “It had nothing to do with the music they were playing. That was never the issue. In fact, I bullied the BBC into starting Radio 1 to cater for the pop music audience – which they didn’t want to do. They said it would be like keeping the pubs open all day.”

In June 1966, with the pirates’ audiences still rising, and no sign of an end to the media coverage (both pro- and anti-), a pop group manager named Reg Calvert, who owned a pirate station called Radio City, paid a visit to the Saffron Walden home of a Radio Caroline director, Major Oliver Smedley. The two men had planned a joint venture, but had abandoned the idea after an argument. Later that day, it was reported that Smedley had shot Calvert dead.

From that day forward, the pirate ships knew they were on borrowed time. “Without a shadow of a doubt, the Radio City incident stirred the Government to try and speed up legislation,” Keith Skues writes in his authoritative history of offshore radio, Pop Went The Pirates. In the extraordinary series of events that followed Calvert’s death, his widow was given police protection, Major Smedley was acquitted at his trial on grounds of self-defence (and awarded 250 guineas costs), and the Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill was introduced to Parliament in July 1966.

Johnnie Walker is not the only ex-pirate to feel uncomfortable. “It was very suspicious, that whole thing,” he says. “The Bill was announced almost immediately. I think there can be question marks over that episode.” Dave Cash: “There was a hell of a lot of political manoeuvring.” One source suggests that Smedley, who died in 1989, may have had influential political friends.

The Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill passed through the House Of Lords in June 1967, receiving Royal Assent on July 14. Under the new Act, it would become illegal at midnight on August 14 for a British subject to operate, assist or publicise a pirate radio station. Most of the stations prepared to close. Radio London considered – then decided against – forging ahead with a new team of non-British DJs. It broadcast for the last time on August 14, shutting down at 3pm. Keith Skues, on shore leave at the time, met the Big L presenters off the train at Liverpool Street. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Thousands of people had turned up. It was like a stampede. I got knocked over and dragged down, and ended up in the ladies’ loo. They weren’t attacking us, they were there to greet the DJs off the ships. No DJ who was on that train will ever forget it.”

One pirate station defiantly carried on: the station that had started it all. As the clock ticked towards midnight, Johnnie Walker on Radio Caroline cued up The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and told his listeners: “We belong to you, and we love you. Caroline continues.” Walker knew it was a huge moment. In a year when two of The Rolling Stones had been sent to jail, it seemed realistic to imagine Caroline being surrounded by police launches within hours of defying the midnight deadline. Walker and his fellow Caroline DJs, facing instant arrest if they set foot in Britain, now based themselves in Holland. But the station’s advertisers had pulled out, and the tender boat stopped its daily deliveries, and the fanmail no longer arrived. Radio Caroline, as it had been in 1964, was out there on its own.

Of the pirate DJs who returned to dry land, many accepted jobs at the BBC’s new pop station, Radio 1. After three years of being the enemy, the Corporation was now the employer. Tony Blackburn opened up Radio 1 on September 30, 1967, Keith Skues following him on to the air. Dave Cash, Kenny Everett and Ed Stewart decamped to Broadcasting House too, as did Radio London’s late-night DJ John Peel, who’d joined the station in its final months. After some initial doubts (Skues: “I thought, ‘What a weird bloke’”), the other presenters had warmed to Peel’s intelligence and gentle personality. “He was good for the station,” Dave Cash admits. “He attracted a whole different set of advertisers, and he had music integrity all round.” Peel would go on to become Radio 1’s longest-serving presenter (1967–2004).

Johnnie Walker’s stint on Radio Caroline ended in March 1968. Having flouted the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act for seven months, he found doors slamming in his face when he returned to London to seek work. One memo from BBC bosses to Radio 1 producers read: “On no account employ Johnnie Walker for at least a year, to let the taint of criminality subside.” Walker went on to become one of Radio 1’s star presenters of the 1970s. He now broadcasts on Radio 2, and in February 2009 began a new Saturday night programme. With wonderful irony, it celebrates the golden days of ’60s pirate radio stations, among them Radio Caroline.

17-track Brian Eno compilation to accompany new doc

Sam Richards
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17-track Brian Eno compilation to accompany new doc

Gary Hustwit’s experimental “never the same twice” documentary about Brian Eno will get its UK premiere at London’s Barbican on April 20.

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The day before that, UMR will released an accompanying soundtrack album, featuring 17 Brian Eno tracks culled from throughout his career, including three previously unreleased recordings. Hear one of those, “Lighthouse #429”, below:

You can pre-order the album on double black vinyl, double pink and blue vinyl or CD here. If you place an order by 4PM GMT on Wednesday (February 21), you will receive exclusive access to the ticket pre-sale for the Eno film premiere at the Barbican on April 20, including a live discussion with Brian Eno, Gary Hustwit and the film’s creative technologist Brendan Dawes.

Watch a trailer for Eno below:

Grandaddy – Blu Wav

Laura Barton
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Grandaddy – Blu Wav

The great gift of Grandaddy records has always been their ability to immerse the listener in a distinct musical landscape. The small-city drift of Under The Western Freeway, the humidity of 2000’s The Sophtware Slump.

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The band’s sixth studio album belongs to somewhere new again: in part rooted in Modesto, the California city where songwriter Jason Lytle was raised, and to where he returned in 2016, setting up a home studio. It belongs, too, to neighbouring Nevada, where in recent years Lytle has liked to take long desert drives. And in some way it is a record of Tennessee – on one of his roadtrips, Lytle having heard Patti Page’s 1950 recording “Tennessee Waltz” spilling out of the car radio, and wondering whether maybe heartbreak didn’t sound something like pedal steel.

Various heartbreaks run through Blu Wav. Not least the loss of long-term Grandaddy member Kevin Garcia, who died suddenly of a stroke in 2017. Garcia’s passing was the latest downswing in the life of a band that had often been unsettled, and was sometimes barely a band at all. Formed in 1996, and often touted as America’s answer to Radiohead, Grandaddy spun a kind of warm, witty space rock chronicling the melancholy meet-cute between mankind and the natural world. 

For a time they seemed destined for immense success, but despite touring extensively and enjoying critical success, the rock’n’roll life proved too unwieldy, too mentally draining, too financially precarious, and the band broke up in 2005. A later reformation brought the post-divorce record Last Place, but came to an abrupt halt with the death of Garcia two months later. None of this – the loss of a friend, the end of a band, appears to be addressed directly on Blu Wav, and yet it runs beneath these songs like a strange kind of undertow.

More directly, these are songs of romantic break-up and disenchantment, storytelling sometimes, autobiography the next: an outdoorsy sort acknowledges the inevitable failure of his relationship with an office worker in the exquisite “Watercooler”; a jealous lover haunts his ex via their favourite songs on “Jukebox App”; and a far-flung suitor drifts into deep longing on the bittersweet “On A Train Or Bus”. All tell stories of love at a remove – protagonists out of time or physically apart – and these intimate emotional gulfs help to underscore the sense of space that has long characterised Grandaddy’s music; a vastness that somehow sweeps together the American landscape, cyberspace and great expanses of feeling.

“Ducky, Boris And Dart” is more tangential – named for three departed animals, a kitten, a bird and a cat, and at first sounding little more than a dusty, sweet ditty, it manages to serve as a tribute to all losses, drawing the ear back, looping it around and burrowing deep. It’s too categorical to call this a song for Garcia, but it’s hard not to wonder as Lytle sings the song’s refrain: “Well thank you my friend, but this ain’t the end/We will meet again”.

Lytle made this record pretty much solo, though in the story of Grandaddy this has often been the case; the songs unspooling from him, and for the most part set down by him, too. This has allowed the band to establish a particular sonic signature in which the pastoral meets with technological twists and buffers Lytle’s dusky falsetto. Blu Wav’s title nods to an unexpected intersection between bluegrass and new wave, and the songs here do meet that brief: they sound both heartfelt and hardwired, simple and lilting tunes encounter electronics and overdubs, found sounds, recordings made at the local Guitar Center, and tapings of coyotes in Los Angeles. 

Lytle has noted that seven out of the album’s 13 songs are waltzes, and that there is “an inordinate amount of pedal steel” to boot. It’s the first time Grandaddy have in any way rooted themselves in a specific genre, and it proves strikingly successful; Lytle’s more experimental electronica pushing against any notion of nostalgia or country pastiche. It’s not unfamiliar territory – a fine recent companion to Blu Wav might be Angel Olsen’s Big Time, which also reckoned with loss via a contemporary take on country music. Lytle similarly takes distinct musical touchstones, those waltzes and pedal-steel quivers, pairs them with some of the iconography of Americana, cabins, jukeboxes, barrooms, and wraps them in synths and compressors and pre-amps. 

The effect is to send the listener into a kind of emotional, geographical and chronological freefall, as if we might be passing through any decade, state or era in recent American history. A little lost, a little lovelorn, in hope of a place to land.

Brittany Howard – What Now

Sharon O'Connell
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Brittany Howard – What Now

Following the release of their second album, Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes were slated to scale even greater heights than a US Number One album and four Grammy Awards. However, Brittany Howard had reached a crossroads. Her decision to step away in 2018 wasn’t a move against the band – “incredible” is how she described the Shakes’ achievements to Uncut – but rather towards creative and personal fulfilment. The wisdom of that move was borne out by Jaime, her 2019 solo debut, which landed as a tour de force of funk, jazzy R&B, soul and blues-edged rock, corralled into songs about everything from racism to a childhood crush on an older girl.

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If that stylistic departure both surprised and impressed, Howard has trumped it with the follow-up, a Jaime 2.0 likely to secure her status as an auteur in terms of both conception and execution. It’s a bigger, freer-thinking and more dynamically audacious record; one which uses lessons learned from her debut – chiefly, to forget any fear and trust herself – while uniting her disparate musical loves and, with long-term collaborator Shawn Everett, being more adventurous in arrangements and production. Howard took a relaxed approach, so much so that when she first started writing, in March 2020, she didn’t really know she was making an album. As she tells Uncut, “I was just day-to-day recording music in this little room in a house I’d rented in Nashville, just going in there and kind of journaling my thoughts and feelings.” It was August 2022 when she went into the studio with a batch of demos, and around three months later What Now was finished. Most of the recording was done at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, with players including the Shakes’ Zac Cockrell on bass and drummer Nate Smith, both returnees from Jaime. Clearly, there’s no bad blood there, and though it’s been more than eight years since the Shakes’ last LP, officially they’re on hold rather than disbanded.

The album’s title is intriguingly slippery: it seems to echo our widespread collective despair and exasperation born of the current global hellscape – what else could possibly happen? – yet lacks the question mark that would indicate righteous ire. At the same time, it’s a kind of rallying cry: we must do something, pronto – but what? In fact, the title track tells of a love that’s died and is a brutally honest, borderline venomous declaration of disengagement: “I surrender, let me go/I don’t have love to give you more,” sings Howard, in her thrillingly powerful growl. “You’re sucking up my energy/I told the truth, so set me free.” That statement, referring not to one particular partner but a situationship the singer found herself in again and again, is set to an infectiously juddering, synth-soul backing. It’s both typical of the self-interrogation at the heart of this record and a strong argument for how much more effective a song may be if the mood contradicts the emotions expressed. It’s a juxtaposition Howard enjoys, having grown up listening to girl groups like The Supremes and The Marvelettes and later picking up on the same, bittersweet interplay in Latine music.

What Now airs less obvious socio-political comment than Jaime: these new songs focus heavily on love and the singer’s behavioural patterns in relationships, her self-exploration the result of “for the first time being able to feel my feelings and look around” during the 2020 lockdown. Meditation, counselling and alternative therapies, including sound baths, also played a part. The exception is “Another Day”, though its message, like that of the brief “Interlude”, which features a clip of Maya Angelou reading from her poem “A Brave And Startling Truth”, is more humanitarian than political. In it Howard, a queer, mixed-race woman, declares her faith in a future where unity and understanding have displaced divisiveness and intolerance: “I believe in a world where we can go outside and/Be who we want and see who we like/And love each other through this wild ride”.

While her ground-level emotions give the songs viability, it’s Howard’s artistry that sends them off on an invigoratingly fresh course, switching between currents of Southern soul, R&B, astral jazz, psychedelic funk, doo-wop, garage blues and rap, while her voice is variously mellow and tender, a belting force of nature, sweetly reassuring and degraded. The hypnotic tones of crystal singing bowls (played by two of her friends) act as a mood reset in between each track, while cardboard boxes, forks and an empty jug are used as instruments. On “Samson”, the otherworldly sounds of the Cristal Baschet can be heard. Opening the set is “Earth Sign”, where in a soaring, multi-tracked vocal Howard manifests her desire for new love in a way that’s more spiritual than carnal or romantic. “I Don’t” follows, reading like an ode to our post-pandemic existential malaise and carried by a sweet mix of doo-wop and vintage R&B given warm, deep-space production. There’s a woozy cocktail of synth soundscaping and cosmic soul on “Red Flags”, which sees Howard admit to a habit of charging headfirst into love while ignoring all warning signs, her voice rising to a sky-scraping falsetto before dropping suddenly to a choral chant, then drifting off into wordless vocables.

On the other side of “Interlude” sits the thumping “Prove It To You”, in which mid-period Prince (Howard’s voice sounds strikingly similar) is recontextualised for loved-up clubbers via broken beats, a tinkling keys motif and clouds of blissed-out synth. “Samson”, the longest track here at just over five minutes, follows. Moody, sensual and effortlessly light on its jazz-soul feet, it features Fender Rhodes and a forlorn, blues-soaked trumpet in a missive about summoning the courage to leave a relationship when, mentally, emotionally and psychically, you’ve already checked out. There’s a radical switch with “Power To Undo”, where high-wattage falsetto, flashes of dirty, buzzing guitar and cardboard-box beats recall a mix of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Prince and Jack White.

Howard exits with the beautifully bruised “Every Color In Blue”, addressing the depression that’s dogged her since childhood in a voice like an anguished angel, with plaintive trumpet accompaniment. “Here comes that feeling we don’t talk about,” she sings, “that dull cloud coming in on the horizon/I feel the rain but it’s all out of rainbows.” As album closers go, it strikes an unusually sombre note, but the singer told Uncut that she “didn’t want to wrap it up tidily. I didn’t want to end it like everything’s okay, because I don’t think that’s realistic.” As a child she didn’t talk about her feelings, “just never did. I always felt this shame around it. Like, you can’t tell anyone how sad you are.” Emotional truth-telling, broken taboos and myriad questions about how best to live her life in music that thrillingly expands Howard’s artistry, rather than treads old ground. Which begs another question: where might she go next?

Pearl Jam: “10 million records, that’s such a crazy number”

Nick Hasted
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Pearl Jam: “10 million records, that’s such a crazy number”

With news that Pearl Jam are releasing Dark Matter, their 12th studio album, on April 19, we dip back into the Uncut archives for this Album By Album feature from Take 109, from June 2006.

Pearl Jam are, along with Mudhoney, grunge’s great survivors. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were in the Seattle genre’s first band, Green River, then Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andy Wood, in what would become a Seattle disease, fatally overdosed on heroin on the verge of success. But when charismatic, beautiful, tortured singer Eddie Vedder joined the pair in 1990, alongside co-guitarist Mike McCready and a succession of drummers (Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron took the seat with 2000’s Binaural), Pearl Jam swiftly became America’s biggest rock band. Sometimes sneered at in the UK for perceived self-pity, in the US Vedder’s sympathetic lyrics of teen sufferation made him a generational figurehead second only to Kurt Cobain. Later refusal to release singles, videos or even tour for a time shed millions of fans. But their albums have actually improved, seeing them bloom into a classic, morally concerned, spiritually questing American band.

When Uncut visits them at their Seattle office, founders Gossard and Ament pair up, then McCready and Cameron. Vedder sits alone in a shadowy, candle-lit alcove, his dog at his feet, and talks warmly in his sonorous voice of the grunge days, Kurt’s death, and how and why Pearl Jam are still here.

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TEN

Epic, 1991

Released in Nevermind’s wake, the more traditional hard rock of Pearl Jam’s debut was initially derided by Cobain (he later retracted). But teen suicide smash ìJeremyî, a triumphant Lollapalooza slot and a cameo in Cameron Crowe’s Seattle movie Singles helped shift 10 million

AMENT: The first week that we played with Ed, we knew it was on. It was like a second chance. Because up to that point, I was in limbo, man. I was thinking that somebody had some big plan for me, and that Andy dying was part of the plan. When Ed turned up and we started playing those songs, it was like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do.’

GOSSARD: We went from playing two Seattle clubs a year in front of 50 people to touring with the Chilli Peppers in front of 2000 people every night, and actually having magazines wanting to talk to us. There’s 11, 12 years before that where if any one of those things had happened it would have been the greatest year of your life. But I was just thinking, we’ve gotta hold it together, with the stress of knowing what happened to Mother Love Bone. I didn’t enjoy it until recently.

McCREADY: It was all very exciting, all the band’s cylinders were firing. This is what I’d been dreaming about since I was 11 years old and I got into Kiss. It was brand new. We were just beginning.

CAMERON: Ten was exploding in the charts. The grunge phenomenon was something we’d never anticipated in Seattle. Suddenly there were cultural ramifications to what we were doing, which we didn’t feel within ourselves. Once Nirvana started to take over, it became a post-Nevermind world. No-one wanted to be left in the dust. There was this unspoken competition.

VEDDER: Any phenomenon that extreme is going to have positives and negatives. How much rich food can you eat? The first two mouthfuls taste great, then you’re vomiting for days. It had a global effect which in the end I think we’re all proud of. I think Kris [Novoselic] and Dave [Grohl] are absolutely proud of it. I liked the idea that women were going to clubs with tattered sweaters that allowed them to be who they were, and not with bustiers and leather pants. There wasn’t a mandate, I don’t think. There was just this natural evolution into self-expression and independence and self-worth, based on people understanding their isolation, and being able to share it through the music. I think what was interesting about that first year is how quickly the feeling of excitement changed. It went from going downhill, and thinking, ‘Oh, this is great, we’re finally getting some speed, to – we’re gonna fuckin’ die.’

Vs.

Epic, 1993

This sold a million in its first week, five times Nirvana’s In Utero, and sharp punk punches like “Animal” improved on their debut. But Vedder agonised about the staggering scale of success on stage, cutting a graceless figure to some

McCREADY: We’d had a wave of emotions at selling millions, from gratitude to confusion to fright. The energy of what we’d gone through is on that record. It’s hard-hitting and immediate, on songs like “Go”. There was some pressure, but the songs were so good, we felt like it was going to do okay. Then things just exploded again. I think we had a better hold of it. But maybe not.

AMENT: I think the Vs. era was a pretty dark time. We had all kinds of battles going on at that point.

GOSSARD: It was the transition of Ed asserting himself in the band. In the beginning, Jeff and I put the deal together, we had the relationships in the record business. But Ed was realising, ‘Wow, I’m the centrepiece of this thing that’s sold fucking 10 million records. And I’ve gotta have my hand on the wheel.’

CAMERON: It’s difficult to complain when you’re successful. That’s always been the Seattle perception, that we’re all just a bunch of whiney bitches. We’re the Choke Central city of the world. And to a degree that’s true.

VEDDER: When you’re up there, you fall into things that you think a rock star should be. It was a struggle. But I do think I was reacting to things as a human being. Not like a celebrity non-human, or a prop put up there by the corporate mainstream. Those are difficult situations, especially at that time, to have been graceful in. I mean, putting a gun to your head isn’t graceful either. But that was certainly one approach.

VITALOGY

Epic, 1994

Released a week early on vinyl (also fetishised on “Spin the Black Circle”), this saw Pearl Jam pull free of grunge into a more relaxed rock classicism. Cobain committed suicide soon after its first sessions, on March 4 1994

McCREADY: I think we were on tour when Kurt killed himself. I remember that, because Ed destroyed a hotel room.

VEDDER: It affected me in ways that are just endless. I normally don’t talk about it too much, in respect to Kris and Dave. Because those feelings are still very alive in all of us. The positives and the negatives. It seemed like it was such an extreme act, and moment, and some kind of insane resolution. It seemed like that was just going to change things in the same way that I thought it would when Princess Diana was killed and the paparazzi were involved. It changed music. But it didn’t change the level of understanding about people to artists. I thought it would. We retreated after that, for survival.

AMENT: If you look at Kurt killing himself and not being able to deal with the pressures of what he became, Ed related to that in a big way. In that period I was feeling more for Dave and Kris, because I was more like them. This is crazy, but maybe six months after Kurt died, a friend and I were going snowboarding, and we got in a car wreck. I thought we were dead. I got out, look back, the car’s upside down, it’s smoking, snow’s coming down. And the first person that turned up was Kris, who I hadn’t seen since Kurt died. I was like, ‘I am fucking dead.’ It was like the biggest hallucination I’ve ever had in my life. He pulled up and he goes, [stoner voice] ‘Hey, Jeff – what’s u-up?’ I thought he was up in heaven visiting Kurt. And that that’s where we were.

GOSSARD: Oh my God, I didn’t know that. There was something in the air then. Even lyrically, in one session we wrote “Dead Man Walking”, “Immortality”, “Nothingman” – all three could have resonance with Kurt. It’s because Ed had been through enough to recognise what Kurt felt, in terms of – ‘I’ve got this fucking huge thing going, and I don’t know if I can do it, and it can take you somewhere you don’t want to go, and how do you get off, how do you control it?’ We were still at the stage where we were blind to the potential of the situation we’re at now – that of course, we can just go home. All we’d done was work our asses off for 15 years, and then it happens, and it’s like, wow, nobody seems to be very happy here. It’s all falling apart.

Vitalogy was a real nervous time for me, because Ed starting to write a lot more songs, and I was feeling disconnected from that process. Simplicity scared me when we made it. I wanted more riffs, more complexity, more Zeppelin. I was like, I don’t know if I wanna play someone else’s songs.

McCREADY: I was pretty fucked up then, on drugs, and drinking. I have a real blurry vision of that time – I don’t remember most of it, you know. It’s this weird dark period of my life.

NO CODE

Epic, 1996

Released as the band’s bitter fight with Ticketmaster over their price-inflating near-monopoly on US concert ticketing saw touring grind to a halt, this more contemplative, experimental record felt like an abdication from audience expectations. It would be their last really big seller.

GOSSARD: Ed was pushing us as a band to say, we can be small. A song doesn’t have to have this enormous impact, Ed doesn’t have to scream his head off, it’s about something else than someone might expect from Ten.

VEDDER: When it came to the songs on that record, maybe we were indulgent in a way where we just didn’t give a fuck. If we wanted to keep the momentum of the group going in the context of all the other music that was out there at the time, No Code should’ve been a heavier record. But we had to get it out of our system.

McCREADY: It felt like a left-turn when I wanted to go straight back to rocking. Part of me thought the album cover was better than the album itself. We were all on different wavelengths then. The band were travelling by plane, and Ed was driving around, doing his own radio show after a three-hour gig, cold and sweaty in a van. Which is crazy. I have pictures of four of us getting on a plane – where the hell’s Ed? It got to the point where he got sick, at a free show in Golden Gate Park where 50,000 people showed up. It was a fucking nightmare. Neil Young jammed with us for a few songs, and people were still pissed. We had a big three-hour meeting the next day, and I remember Stone going to Ed, point blank: ëDo you still want to be in this band?’ Fortunately, he did.

BINAURAL

Epic, 2000

Partly inspired by the anti-globalisation riots that flared in Seattle as they recorded it, this re-integrated their rocking and sensitive sides on career highs like “Insignificance”. But nine fans being crushed to death as they played Denmark’s Roskilde Festival on June 30 2000 overshadowed its release.

AMENT: We were in the studio when the riot happened. You could stand out in the sidewalk and hear it going on. At one point, I rode my bike down there, and then the crowd suddenly got big behind me, I was riding my bike through thousands of people, and I ended up getting out of there, because obviously shit was not going right. It was pretty surreal.

VEDDER: Those protests were something we had to think about, they were happening right outside our door. The interesting thing about them was the way they were handled. Why weren’t you able to walk down the streets with signs and singing? Why were there rubber bullets and tear gas from guys in shoulder pads provided by Nike? That was the beginning of realising that free speech in America was not the guaranteed right we thought it was.

McCREADY: Then Roskilde coloured all of our lives, I think. It’s a void, or a terrible tragedy, that I will never forget. I’ve never been through anything like that before, and I never want to again.

CAMERON: It’s the last thing you would ever expect, and we saw it happen. I don’t think we all went into deep depression for a great length of time. We saw it as the tragic accident that it was. But it was always associated with our show by the media, and that wasn’t nice to go through.

PEARL JAM

J, 2006

Partly a continuation of the overtly politicised, post-9/11 Riot Act (2002), anti-war sentiment here alternates with songs like “Big Wave”, where Vedder seems to want to get away from the whole mess. Their hardest rocking set for a decade

GOSSARD: This record has a little bit of AC/DC or the Stones. We can play it top to bottom live, we don’t have to worry about the tabla part. The lyrics seem to run the full gamut. They’re politically engaged and topical, and then ìSevered Handî’s about somebody just indulging themselves to the ultimate degree. You don’t get that out of Ed a lot.

VEDDER: It’s healthy to limit yourself when you can to things that actually concern you. I mean really – this might be dangerous to say – but on a certain level, we could look at the war where it doesn’t affect us one stitch. It’s healthy to step back from that sometimes, to get out in the ocean and surf and clear my head. Life offers you situations where you can’t step back, where your best friend is dying and you have to be living next to the nightmare. On the other hand, it was a gift to be in a studio the day after Bush’s election. It was a mental health issue at that point.

Musically, we know we’re going down roads that have already been cut, by The Who, or Springsteen or The Stooges or Velvet Underground or Talking Heads, or even some of the side-paths cut by Sonic Youth or Fugazi. And I think at this point we are trying to keep that spirit and legacy alive. We want to represent that.

CAMERON: The initial blast of Pearl Jam came at a time when there was a palpable groundswell, there was a real event that happened. People wanted to hear something different, and the band’s association with that initial realism in rock has carried over. Not necessarily in the music industry. They probably think we’re just a bunch of old greaseballs, and I love that. I love that they don’t respect us, and they don’t think we have anything left in our tank. It’s a great feeling that we’re being perceived as underdogs, when we’re still really successful.  

GOSSARD: I think when you sell 10 million records, that’s such a crazy number. I don’t think anyone can keep that going. For Ed to show us that we could actually pull back and take control of the situation was a huge transition. Maybe we’ll end up making another record that people do relate to in a big way like Ten. Or maybe we’ll make some records and they’ll do whatever they do, and we’ll just be a live band.

VEDDER: Did pulling back save my life? I’ve fallen off a number of cliffs since. If they had’ve been higher, I could have died. Yes.

The Making Of “Bra” by Cymande

Sam Richards
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The Making Of “Bra” by Cymande

A key scene in new documentary Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande shows how DJ Jazzy Jay used to cut between two turntables to extend the exuberant breakdown of “Bra”, sending a Bronx block party into raptures. It’s no surprise that the track became a foundation stone of hip-hop, sampled by Sugarhill Gang, Gang Starr and De La Soul, as well as on Raze’s early house hit “Jack The Groove”.

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So who were the impossibly funky crew behind it? Surely they were from Harlem or New Orleans? Or maybe Kingston or Lagos? Nope. “Bra”’s co-writers Patrick Patterson and Steve Scipio grew up on the same street in Balham, south London, after their families emigrated to the UK from Guyana when they were kids. Coming of age in the late ’60s, they envisioned a band that would capture the spirit of the times – black pride, peace and love – while celebrating their Caribbean heritage. Their name came from a popular calypso about “a dove and pigeon fighting over a piece of pepper” – Cymande was the dove – and they recruited band members from south London’s Caribbean diaspora.

With lyrics that encouraged its listeners not to abandon the struggle (“But it’s alright/We can still go on”) “Bra” made a decent splash on its US release in 1973, following Cymande’s debut single “The Message” into the R&B charts and winning the band a support tour with Al Green. But back in the UK, the glass ceiling descended. Dispirited with the lack of opportunities for black British groups, Cymande disbanded in late 1974.

Patterson and Scipio eventually both studied law, going on to take up important positions in the governments of various Caribbean nations. As such, they were oblivious to Cymande’s second life as hip-hop progenitors. But word eventually reached them of their popularity amongst a new generation of crate-diggers, and Cymande reformed to jubilant scenes in 2014 with most of their original lineup intact. A new album is currently in the works, to follow the reissue of their original three albums.

“I had no idea,” says drummer Sam Kelly of Cymande’s miraculous rebirth. “One of the things that blows my mind is that we played in Brazil, we went to Croatia, all these places. My partner and I went to Australia a couple of years ago – we’d go out to a restaurant and hear our music being played in Melbourne, 12,000 miles away. It still puts a shiver down my spine.”

PATTERSON: I came to London in 1958, Steve came in ’63. And since then we’ve been together. Our street was full of people, many of whom came from our country, and we were all in the same community. So we carried our Caribbean culture with us. [In the late ’60s] we had a jazz group called Metre, which was the genesis of Cymande. We used to do Miles Davis’s “Footprints”, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, things like that. We liked to play in different time signatures. Looking back on it now, we were very inventive.

SCIPIO: For seven or eight months before we started to put Cymande together, we also played with a Nigerian band called Ginger Johnson And His African Drummers. Ginger was a well-known performer, he played with The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park.

PATTERSON: All of it contributed to where we were as musicians, directing us towards our future musical style.

KELLY: We started in the basement of my family house on Crawshay Road in Brixton. The main thing they emphasised is that, come hell or high water, they wanted to do original material. I wasn’t playing an instrument at all before I joined Cymande, but I used to listen to everything from James Brown to Hendrix, Sam & Dave to Pink Floyd. I was a blank canvas – I didn’t want to sound like any other drummer. The person that had the most influence on my playing was Steve. He didn’t play bass rhythmically, he played it lyrically. I was just trying to complement what he was playing.

PATTERSON: The support for black bands like ours was from places like Upstairs At Ronnie Scott’s, The 100 Club, the Pheasantry, Café Des Artistes. Small venues. We played the Croydon Greyhound with Edgar Broughton.

SCIPIO: We started doing some shows outside London, in some of the northern clubs. But I don’t think we were what they were expecting! In some of them, it didn’t go down very well…

PATTERSON: [adopts bolshie northern accent] “Do you know any Bill Haley? Come on!”

KELLY: Obviously we came across problems when we were trying to get record deals. They’d say, “You’re an all-black band, you should try to sound like the Americans – Otis Redding or Curtis Mayfield.” But we didn’t want to sound like that.

SCIPIO: There’s so many versions about how we connected with [producer] John Schroeder. John says he was in Soho, was passing this club and heard this racket going on. But my recollection is that our booking agent brought John Schroeder to us. In those days, John was a cool fella! Long blond hair and a big white Roller.

KELLY: He liked what he heard and thought he could work with us as a producer, which is a bit strange in a way, because the people that he had produced before – Cliff Richard or Helen Shapiro – were a million miles away from what Cymande was going for. But he let us just do what we did.

PATTERSON: We always give him credit for his commitment to the band. He liked what he heard and wanted to capture that, not to produce it or turn it into something else.

SCIPIO: Most of the first album was already written because those were the songs we were using on the road – they got perfected while we were gigging. For “Bra”, the bass was the genesis. How we were writing at the time is that the bass was used melodically. I’d go to Patrick with an idea and often he’d start putting stuff on top of that. In some songs, the vocals were the last thing to be developed. Normally it’s the other way around.

PATTERSON: When I was laying things on top, I was just thinking about patterns to fit. I’m a touch player, not a heavyweight player, so I’m bouncing off Steve rather than setting a thing myself.

KELLY: Unlike a lot of rhythm sections who are trying to lock in, we’re all playing individual things, so you’ve got this mixture going on.

SCIPIO: “Bra” was one of the popular songs at gigs. The middle break with just the bass and drums, as recognised in the documentary, people appreciated that even then.

KELLY: I’m playing four-to-the-bar on the bass drum. We were just trying to think how we could join the middle of the song to the end section. But the DJs turned this into a whole new record – amazing.

PATTERSON: When we came up, it was the time of “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud”. You had the Black Panthers, you had the Black Liberation Front, you had artists who were articulating a black position and trying to make sure that black people recognised the importance of working together. The lyrics of “Bra” reflected that time.

SCIPIO: “Bra” is slang for brother. Within our community, everybody knew what it meant. It was only when we went to the States that you might have people saying, “Why are they singing about brassières?”

PATTERSON: Joey Dee was a talented, brilliant singer. He had a wonderful range, so we could put anything before him and he could sing it. And he had a good presence too. The voice was an instrument in Cymande, but it still gave him scope for demonstrating his talents.

SCIPIO: De Lane Lea was a wonderful studio because it was used for recording movie soundtracks as well as bands. Everyone had their little compartment to control the spillage and we just performed as if we were doing a live gig. We were young people, uninhibited! We didn’t have responsibilities, so when we went in the studio it was just pure enjoyment. A lot of producers want to put their stamp on the music, but John wanted the raw element of what he heard.

PATTERSON: And he produced it well. You could hear every instrument in its own space. Working with John was easy.

SCIPIO: It was very exciting to see our records on the charts in America. John wanted us over there as soon as possible to ride on the wave. It was like going to the centre of music, the Mecca.

KELLY: In England, we were playing relatively small venues. To then be suddenly supporting Al Green on these huge stages… I was half a mile away from Patrick and Steve! But Al Green’s drummer was amazing. For the first week, he would stand by the side of the stage and watch me play, and afterwards he’d come over and give me some advice. I’ll forever be grateful for that.

SCIPIO: The Apollo [in Harlem] had a reputation for not tolerating below-par performances – and the crowd would let you know! So I think some of us had some apprehension about it, but the week we did there was fantastic. We had Jerry Butler coming in and shaking our hands.

KELLY: The Apollo was a real pit, to be honest! The paintwork was crumbling, it smelt… but there was so much black music history oozing out of those walls. It was a great experience.

SCIPIO: It was very frustrating to have your music appreciated by that number of people and then to come back here and there being no-one at the airport, not even one reporter asking about how the tour went. No interest, no articles, nothing.

PATTERSON: It was demoralising. We were entitled to some recognition. So you come back and you find nothing… It says a lot about the industry and how it deals with us as black musicians. There was little or no promotion here, and no airplay.

SCIPIO: [After a while] we all recognised that performing in front of 40,000 and then doing gigs to 300 people, that’s not where we should be.

PATTERSON: We can’t go backwards in that sense. Who does it help? It doesn’t help black musicians or the aspirations we might have to achieve things in music. So let’s take a rest and see where we go.

SCIPIO: I joined Mike [‘Bami’ Rose, Cymande flute/sax player] in a South African band called Jabula. I played with them for maybe five years, but I wasn’t satisfied with just being a squad member in somebody else’s project. I started my law degree, and that was the last time I played any live music until Cymande came back together. I moved to Anguilla to work in the attorney general’s chambers.

PATTERSON: After Cymande, I was musical director for the Black Theatre of Brixton, then I went back to my law studies. I practised in chambers in England, then I worked for the government of Dominica.

SCIPIO: I certainly wasn’t aware of what was going on [with “Bra”’s use
by hip-hop DJs]. The documentary was an eye-opener for me!

KELLY: Myself and Bami Rose kept playing professionally. I’d be somewhere setting up or packing away my drums and I’d hear “Bra” or “The Message” being played, which was really satisfying. But I didn’t have any idea what the DJs in the States were doing. It wasn’t ’til the film came out that I found out people had taken our tracks and remixed them. Watching these DJs talk about Cymande’s music in such reverent terms was just amazing.

SCIPIO: I’m happy people see something in our music that’s influential. To listen to something and appreciate it is one thing, but for it to impact on you in such a way that you take elements of that thing and make it part of your own, that’s on an entirely different level.

KELLY: We had unfinished business, but I didn’t know it was going to take 40 years!

SCIPIO: When we came off the road in the ’70s, it was never intended to be a disbanding, just a hiatus. But the renewed interest in us provided the opportunity to put into effect the plans we had when we first decided to call it a day.

PATTERSON: It was very exciting to see that we had, if you like, travelled through time. We were now faced with a bunch of young people appreciating our music.

SCIPIO: We’ve just completed a tour of Canada and the US, and at the end we took three or four days off and said, “We’ll do a couple of tracks.” And they went well.

PATTERSON: We recorded at a great studio in LA. It suited us, because we still cut live. This will be quite an important album, I think. The aspiration has to be consistent with what we have already created.

SCIPIO: The spirit of the performance should still be recognisably Cymande. Not like a load of old doddery guys just going through the motions!

Neil Young & Crazy Horse announce album and tour dates

Michael Bonner
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Neil Young & Crazy Horse announce album and tour dates

The tour and FU##IN’ UP are both due in April

Neil Young & Crazy Horse are back on tour in April and May this year, with an album called FU##IN’ UP due as well.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

The 16-date Love Earth tour begins in San Diego. The line-up features Young, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot with presumably Micah Nelson once again deputising for Nils Lofren, who’ll be fulfilling his E Street Band duties with Bruce Springsteen at that time.

Wednesday, April 24 – San Diego, CA – Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre
Thursday, April 25 – San Diego, CA – Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre
Saturday, April 27 – Phoenix, AZ – Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre
Wednesday, May 01 – Austin, TX – Germania Insurance Amphitheater
Thursday, May 02 – Dallas, TX – Dos Equis Pavilion
Sunday, May 05 – Huntsville, AL – Orion Amphitheater
Tuesday, May 07 – Atlanta, GA – Ameris Bank Amphitheatre
Wednesday, May 08 – Franklin, TN – FirstBank Amphitheater
Saturday, May 11 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live
Sunday, May 12 – Camden, NJ – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion
Tuesday, May 14 – Queens, NY – Forest Hills Stadium
Friday, May 17 – Mansfield, MA – Xfinity Center
Saturday, May 18 – Bridgeport, CT – Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater
Monday, May 20 – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage
Wednesday, May 22 – Clarkston, MI – Pine Knob Music Theatre
Thursday, May 23 – Chicago, IL – Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island

Tickets will be available starting with a Neil Young Archives pre-sale beginning on Tuesday, February 13 at 10 AM PT. Additional pre-sales will run throughout the week ahead of the general onsale beginning on Friday, February 16 at 10am local time at LiveNation.com. At time of purchase, fans can opt in to receive a physical CD of FU##IN’ UP included with their tickets for no additional cost.

The provenance of FU##IN’ UP is slightly less clear at this point. According to an email received bt Young’s Archives subscribers:

Neil and The Horse have played together for over 50 years and the performances of these familiar songs, recorded in 2023, is a true highlight. As Neil explains, “In the spirit it’s offered…made this for the Horse lovers. I can’t stop it. The horse is runnin’. What a ride we have. I don’t want to mess with the vibe. I am so happy to have this to share.” FU##IN’ UP contains 9 songs on 2 LPs. The album will be released in limited edition color vinyl pressing on Record Store Day April 20 with a wider, all format release starting April 26.

According to rumours, it might well be a recording from a private performance at The Rivoli, Toronto on November 3, 2023.

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets annouce new tour dates

Michael Bonner
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Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets annouce new tour dates

Set the controls!

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets will head out on a new UK tour later this year, including a show at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

TALKING HEADS ARE ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

This is the Saucers first UK tour since their May 2022 Echoes Tour. Since then, they have since played extensively through America and Europe.

Their stop-off at the Royal Albert Hall is significant: The Pink Floyd first played there on December 12, 1966, as part of an Oxfam benefit evening. They subsequently returned to the venue in 1967, 1969 and 1970. Meanwhile, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets made their Royal Albert Hall debut in 2022.

Says Mason, “Six years ago when I got behind the drums again and we started playing the early Pink Floyd material, it was a real pleasure on so many levels. Many of the tracks had never actually been played live, so to have performed them all over the world has been something we’ve all enjoyed immensely. To get the opportunity to come back to the UK for another tour is something the band and I had been hoping we would be able to do, so to say ‘we’re back’ feels good!”

Aside from Mason, the Saucers’ line-up includes Gary Kemp, Guy Pratt, Lee Harris and Dom Beken.

Tickets for the tour go on sale from Friday, February 16 at 11am from www.myticket.co.uk.

The tour dates are:

Tuesday, June 11 – Stoke, Victoria Hall

Wednesday, June 12 – York, Barbican

Thursday, June 13 – Nottingham, Royal Concert Hall

Saturday, June 15 – Oxford, New Theatre

Monday, June 17 – Bristol, Beacon

Tuesday, June 18 – Birmingham, Symphony Hall

Wednesday, June 19 – Manchester, O2 Apollo

Friday, June 21 – Glasgow, SEC Armadillo

Saturday, June 22 – Gateshead, The Glasshouse

Monday, June 24 – Cardiff, Wales Millenium Centre

Tuesday, June 25 – Poole, Lighthouse

Wednesday, June 26 – Brighton, Dome

Friday, June 28 – Ipswich, Regent Theatre

Saturday, June 29 – London, Royal Albert Hall

The band have already announced a brace of European shows:

Thursday, July 18 – Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan

Friday, July 19 – Piazza Dei Signori, Vicenza

Saturday, July 20 – Sequoie Music Park, Bologna

Sunday, July 21 – Cavea, Rome

Tuesday, July 23 – Belvedere San Leucio, Caserta

Wednesaday, July 24 – Teatro Il Castello, Roccella Ionica

July 28 – Herzberg Festival, Germany

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