AT the time of writing, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and The Rolling Stones are all on tour, either in Europe or America. As you can read from various reports on these outings in this issue, the artists continue to go about their business with commendable vigour, delivering performances that spectacularly reaffirm music’s unifying power. After seeing the Stones’ opening show in Houston, Stephen Conn – one of our subscribers – emailed to me to say: “In a world where Paul McCartney is still revising a Beatles saga that wrapped up decades ago and we now spend most of our lives trapped in a 16-year-old’s diary on Planet Taylor, that old totems like the Stones are still capable of ecstatic musical transcendence like this is a remarkable thing.”
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The road figures a lot in this new issue of Uncut, in one form or another. To the Grateful Dead, it was a place where songs reinvented themselves, every night for 30 years. To Kraftwerk, it signified functional elegance. And to our cover star Joni Mitchell, it was a place to escape. In all three instances, the road is also a place of transformation. “The refuge of the road is a real thing,” Natalie Mering aka Weyes Blood tells us, as part of our cover story dedicated to Joni’s Hejira album. “She is singing about having a weary, wandering soul and realising that when you are wandering you have your greatest sense of belonging.”
There’s an abundance of goodness elsewhere. John Cale, Arooj Aftab, Warren Ellis, Stevie Nicks, Bonny Light Horseman, Inspiral Carpets with Mark E Smith and plenty more.
As ever, let us know what you think.
