On a freezing New York night in January 1971, Curtis Mayfield is performing with a new band for the first time. He is also recording a live album. Over four evenings at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, he beds in with the musicians while making Curtis/Live – one of the most engaged and electrifying concert recordings of all time. Mayfield was a multi-faceted genius. Artistic courage was just one of myriad talents.
“Curtis said, ‘We’re going to do a live album,’” recalls guitarist Craig McMullen, the last surviving member of that lineup. “I said, ‘Live album? Man, I don’t even know the names of the songs!’ He said, ‘Me neither! Don’t worry about it, we’ll just do it.’ Usually with a live album it’s a show you’re familiar with, but the spontaneity came across on the record.”
Eddie Kramer, the producer at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady studio, recorded Curtis/Live in FEDCO, a converted bread delivery van housing a 16-track recording console. The connection felt significant. Hendrix, who had died the previous September, “was a huge Curtis fan”, says Kramer. “It was a very exciting night. The audience was pumped, they couldn’t wait for him to come in and do his thing. Curtis was so commanding on stage, he had such good communication with the audience. They were following everything he did. You got the feeling that they were holding on to every last phrase.”
America was listening. Mayfield had become the voice of a cultural movement, speaking hard truths with depth, empathy and humanity. Four months before the Bitter End shows he’d released his debut solo album, Curtis. Within a year of Curtis/Live, working with the same band, he released Roots and had started work on Super Fly, the soundtrack to the blaxploitation film which made him, briefly, a mainstream superstar.
These are the records on which Mayfield’s legacy rests, each one as totemic as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On. Musically, the mix of melody and rhythm, beauty and toughness, influenced everyone from Bob Marley to Prince and Kanye West. Lyrically, the songs are powered by righteous anger infused with a spiritual humanitarianism. As the storm of the Civil Rights struggles of the ’60s subsided, Mayfield posed the question, both to himself and his audience: what next?
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW IN UNCUT SEPTEMBER 2021
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Low have shared the latest taste of their forthcoming 13th record Hey What in the form of slow-burning new single “Disappearing”.
You can hear the track below, along with an elegant video centred around a life model, directed by and starring the multi-disciplinary artist Dorian Wood.
Wood said that the video was inspired their personal experience posing for virtual life drawing classes during lockdown.
“I borrowed a friend’s empty guest room and twice a week I would set up my laptop and lights and pose for three hours at a time,” they said. “During these long stretches of time, I’d lose myself in thought while delivering poses that best showcased all this fat brown beauty.
“In my mind, I travelled to places and memories, and in the case of ‘Disappearing’, I not only visited the ocean in my mind, I became it.”
“Even at its most empowering and meditative, a modelling session was often a reminder of how lonely one can feel when the other humans in the room immediately vanish once the laptop shuts down. And still, a semblance of hope always lingered,” they added.
“There’s a lot of ‘coming home’ love in this video. I’m honoured to be able to share this love.”
The Minnesota band have also announced details of a world tour in support of ‘Hey What’, including a number of UK and Ireland shows which are as follows:
Monday 25 – Edinburgh, Queen’s Hall
Tuesday 26 – Dublin, Vicar Street
Wednesday 27 – Manchester, Manchester Cathedral
Thursday 28 – Brighton, St. George’s Church
Friday 29 – London, St. John at Hackney Church
Saturday 30 – Bristol, Trinity
“Disappearing” is the second taste of Hey What, and follows lead single “Days Like These” which appeared last month. The album will be released via Sub Pop on September 10.
In April, Low appeared on Uncut’s exclusive Bob Dylan covers CD with their take on “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” – listen to it here.
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Disney+ has confirmed that Paul McCartney’s forthcoming docuseries McCartney 3,2,1 will air in the UK on the streaming service next month.
The upcoming six-episode documentary series premiered in the US on Hulu last week but it has now been confirmed that viewers in the UK will get to see the first episode on August 25.
The show will see the legendary musician break down his music career in depth with acclaimed producer Rick Rubin.
“In this six-episode series that explores music and creativity in a unique and revelatory manner, the documentary gives a front-row seat to Paul and Rick in an intimate conversation about the songwriting, influences and personal relationships that informed the iconic songs that have served as the soundtracks of our lives,” a synopsis for the series reads.
The pair are seen dissecting Beatles songs including “Come Together”, “All My Loving”, “With A Little Help From My Friends” and “In My Life” in the trailer, which you can watch above.
Meanwhile, Disney+ also recently confirmed that Peter Jackson’s forthcoming docuseries about the Fab Four, Get Back, is also coming to the streaming service later this year.
The Beatles film will focus on the making of the band’s penultimate studio album Let It Be and will showcase their final concert as a band, on London’s Savile Row rooftop, in its entirety.
It was cut from 55 hours of unseen footage filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969, and 140 hours of mostly unheard audio from the recording sessions.
As a result of the lengthy footage the documentary will be presented as three separate episodes on Disney+: on November 25, 26 and 27. Each episode is approximately two hours in length.
Ahead of the documentary’s release, The Beatles: Get Back book will come out on October 12 which features transcriptions of the band’s recorded conversations and hundreds of exclusive, never before published photos from the three weeks of sessions.
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Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have announced they will head out on their first-ever UK tour as a duo this autumn.
The Bad Seeds duo will play 20 shows across September and autumn in support of their acclaimed album Carnage, which arrived earlier this year.
While not a full Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record, the album is the latest from nearly 25 years of collaboration between the pair. Ellis has been a Bad Seeds member since 1997 and has been Cave’s songwriting partner for many years, including work as side-project Grinderman and many film, TV and theatre scores and soundtracks.
Cave and Ellis will be joined on stage by musician Johnny Hostile and backing singers Wendi Rose, T Jae Cole and Janet Ramus.
You can view the tour dates in full below, including two nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall, ahead of tickets going on sale here from this Friday (July 23) at 10am BST.
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Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant has revealed how he’s been dreaming about hanging out with the late John Bonham, describing his visions as “magnificent moments of great relief”.
Speaking on his own podcast Digging Deep, Plant explained how the restrictiveness of lockdown has led him to experience lucid dreams filled with “amazing landscapes” and visions of the legendary drummer, who died in 1980.
Other figures in his dreams, Plant explained, included his son Karac, who died aged five in 1977 from a stomach virus.
Plant explained: “I’ve dreamt that I’ve been back with old friends, quite a lot, like John Bonham, like my father, my son who left when he was five. And they’ve been magnificent moments of great relief.”
He added to host Matt Everitt: “The reason we’re here now is we both like what we do, and there’s a certain toll and a price that goes with it. At the same time, it’s way better than accountancy or whatever it might have ended up as.
“But it does create some sort of energy in me that I’ve had to manoeuvre into another part of my being – subjugate it, stick it in a corner. Because I was always on the go, always planning the next thing. So it seems that when I’m asleep sometimes, I’ve been in a really great place… and I’ve gone somewhere, and now I’ve got to get back to wherever it was, and I’m making my way back through these amazing landscapes.”
Explaining his own experiences of lockdown, Plant said he was “really lucky because my next-door neighbour, who lives 100 feet from me – who played with me and Bonzo [John Bonham] in the 1960s – he’s there. We’re part of a pod. And the farmer who was born in my place, whose family owned my place, he’s over the road and we’ve turned into the greatest pals – the card schools that go on for ever!”
Meanwhile, September sees the publication of the first-ever John Bonham biography. Beast: John Bonham And The Rise Of Led Zeppelin, was penned by journalist C.M. Kushins, with a foreword by Dave Grohl.
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