Take a bow!
Take a bow!
Welcome to Uncut Greats…We’re the latest addition to the Uncut family of music titles.
In this new magazine we’re taking what you might call a greatest hits approach – offering all the quality and expertise you’d expect from Uncut, while cutting straight to the chase. Like it says on the cover: the life story, the greatest recordings, the Uncut version. And the Greats? They’re our personal pantheon of classic artists, who just happen to have made some of history’s finest music.
This month, our cover star is Morrissey. Inside we’ll be providing a countdown of his 20 greatest albums, his greatest work with The Smiths – as chosen by his peers – and telling his life story. We’ll also be zooming in to provide extra detail on particular periods of interest from our own investigations.
We’ll hear the story of The Smiths’ breakthrough second album Meat Is Murder, the album where Morrissey’s conviction gave the band an important politicised direction – as told with thoughts from Paul Weller, Billy Bragg – and Neil Kinnock.
“Morrissey always wanted to be part of a gang,” says Richard Boon, then production manager at Rough Trade Records. “He’d never been, because he was such an outsider character. I remember being in the band’s van once when they were coming down to London. They were all wearing white T-shirts because that would make them stand out and they wanted to stand out. By Meat Is Murder, The Smiths had cohered as a gang.”
If those were the best of times, we’ll also hear a bit about those which ranked among the worst. Food poisoning. Health scares. Cancelled shows… Morrissey’s 2013 was shaping up to be a nightmare – until his much-anticipated Autobiography (a Penguin Classic!) arrived to reclaim the year for the better. With a new Morrissey album arrived this week, a record exec pal tells us what the artist will be expecting it to achieve.
“He wants success,” says Jennifer Ivory (who worked on You Are The Quarry). “He wants people to hear his music, like every other artist I’ve ever met. But he wants it on his terms.” What are his terms? “He won’t compromise himself. If he doesn’t want to do something, he’s not doing it.”
Enjoy the magazine, and join us for more soon. You can get yours here.
The post Introducing the latest Uncut Greats…Morrissey appeared first on UNCUT.
