JERKY, PUNKY, FUNKY!

The Soft parade!

Yo La Tengo reunite The Soft Boys on stage in New York

Now I’m a cowgirl

Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres , on the new queer country album she’s made with Julien Baker of Boygenius

Tangerine dreamers

A new book by Wolfgang Seidel – once of influential Berlin bands Ton Steine Scherben and Eruption – aims to reclaim krautrock from the Brits

“There was such a sense of mystery and magic”

Photographer Dean Chalkley on shooting Jack and Meg at the height of White Stripes mania in 2005

In on the film maker

A new fan-focused Fugazi doc captures the DC punk purists at their most inspirationally intense

A Quick One

They were stardust, they were golden… Yes, the

Sam Moss

I’M NEW HERE

Uncut Playlist

On the stereo this month...

UNCUT PRESENTS... A WILCO EXCLUSIVE!

W ILCO have spun gold yet again with

The latest greats

Those previous Wilco/ Uncut projects

AN AUDIENCE WITH... VASHTI BUNYAN

The bucolic singer-songwriter on Nick Drake, Monty Python and her remarkable second life: “I still don’t quite understand it!”

NEW ALBUMS

“Back when the words came easily/I had the answer

ARCHIVE

REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS

THE MAGIC GARDENER

There’s something stirring up at the allotment where RICHARD DAWSON has been carefully tending a new album, End Of The Middle. The latest blossoming in the singer-songwriter’s compelling and deeply unique body of music, the album explores the dynamics and trauma of families – with typically idiosyncratic results. Peering into the polytunnel, we discover how lightning strikes, gnomes, Noel Edmonds, Andrei Tarkovsky and “frail” drums have helped nurture Dawson’s latest musical harvest. “A song is a form of magic,” he tells Tom Pinnock

HUNG UP ON A DREAM

From posthumous hit singles to imposter groups, critical rehabilitation and, at last, a place in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, no-one has enjoyed an afterlife quite as unexpected or rewarding as THE ZOMBIES . As a new documentary looks set to bring their story to a new audience, COLIN BLUNSTONE , ROD ARGENT and their bandmates wonder where it all went right. “The enjoyment and the applause has made it all worthwhile,” they confide to Peter Watts. “It was something we never expected to see in 1968.”

VISUAL ODYSSEY

The Zombies on screen – and reissued

THE FAKE ZOMBIES!

Dawn of the dead ringers. And their return…

Throwing Muses

Kristin Hersh counts backwards through one of indie-rock’s most gloriously idiosyncratic catalogues

AT CLOSE RANGE

In a rare break from his regular gig with Drive-By Truckers, PATTERSON HOOD has reactivated his long-dormant solo career. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams finds Hood’s songwriting at its most autobiographical and compassionate – whether memorialising figures from his past, reflecting on childhood obsessions or even penning a “love song” to one of his closest bandmates. “I just have to follow what my gut tells me,” he tells Stephen Deusner. “That’s all I can do.”

UNDER THE HOOD

A buyer’s guide to Patterson’s solo work

TEENAGE LOBOTOMY

Patterson Hood tells the story behind that sharp album cover

FEED YOUR HEAD

Psychedelic scenesters who became the poster band for “the New Rock”, San Francisco’s JEFFERSON AIRPLANE helped take the counterculture to the masses with songs about outer space, white rabbits and James Joyce’s Ulysses . 60 years on, the Airplane’s resident acid queen GRACE SLICK and her former co-conspirators relive the days of revolution, LSD and tying David Crosby to a medieval torture rack. “We felt that we were on a crest of a wave,” they tell Rob Hughes. “Of course, you think it’s going to last forever.”

PICK OF THE ’PLANE

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE TAKES OFF RCA VICTOR, 1966

FRIENDS REUNITED

Casady, Slick and Kaukonen at the Hollywood Walk

DAMAGED GOODS

Honouring their fallen comrade Andy Gill, GANG OF FOUR are taking their innovative brand of angular post-punk on tour for one final time. Here, Gill’s fellow co-founders Jon King and Hugo Burnham revisit the band’s potent early days, where Marxist cultural theory and anti-fascist marches helped inspire a slew of pioneering records that antagonised everyone from Cliff Richard and Pink Floyd to the BBC. They tell Dave Simpson, “We were banned more than the Sex Pistols!”

“MICK ASKED HIM TO TRY ‘MISS YOU’…”

Jon King on the time Mr Jagger called for Andy Gill

The First Cut Is The Deepest”

Sabotaged by Rod Stewart, spiked by Andrew Loog Oldham… how the soul singer’s future rested on the success of her signature track

Decibels Per Minute

Emerging from a period of intense upheaval, uncertainty, addiction and recovery, A GHOST IS BORN was a Grammy-winning artistic triumph, driven by WILCO ’ s increasingly adventurous sonic shape-shifting and the daunting tribulations of the band’s chief architect, JEFF TWEEDY . As an expanded reissue shines new light on their creative processes, Uncut travels to Wilco HQ in Chicago to unearth the album’s secret history – via outtakes, alternate versions and abandoned recordings. “If you don’t have any kind of struggle in your life, how do you learn anything?” Tweedy aks Stephen Deusner

OTHER HAUNTINGS

Songs and recordings from the A Ghost Is Born sessions seeded several releases before and after the album hit stores

MAPPING THE FUNDAMENTALS

M OST of the songs from A Ghost

BANNED AT SEAR SOUND

How the inventor of the modern tuba opened one of New York’s oldest studios

FROM IMPROBABLE TO IMPOSSIBLE

Nels Cline on how a Ghost Is Born outtake transformed into the heart of Sky Blue Sky

ROCK AWAY BEACH

Butlin’s, Bognor Regis, January 3-5

THE JESUS LIZARD

Concorde 2, Brighton, January 12

HI-FI Darling buds

The pick of the best wireless in-ear ’phones

SCREEN

Architecture and morality in postwar America; paradise lost in ’70s Brazil; sheep farming in Ireland; and repression in Iran…

ALSO OUT...

Ke Huy Quan in Love Hurts

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN

IN IMAX ON FEBRUARY 5 AND 6, THEN IN CINEMAS FROM FEBRUARY 7

BOOKS

Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup: publishing deal was far from all right

Not Fade Away

Fondly remembered this month...

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Send your brickbats, bouquets, reminiscences, textual critiques, billets-doux and all forms of printable correspondence to letters@uncut.co.uk

Crossword

WIN!

Wolfgang Flür

The former Kraftwerk man reveals the sounds picked up by his musical antenna: “I was a real dreamer”

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