Uncut Magazine 295 (December 2021) David Bowie

Uncut Magazine 295 (December 2021) David Bowie

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

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

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

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

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

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

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

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

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

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

REM: The making of “Electrolite”.

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

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

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

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