The Uncut ultimate music guides cover the careers of single artists but miss out on those who may not fill up a 100-page bookazine as the trade calls them. That’s where the genre guides plug up the gap, sweeping up names which by themselves only merit a page or two, but still merit attention. As you may have noticed from reading around AUK what fits within a given genre is often open to debate, but at least with this description you can say that everyone featured sings and writes songs.
With Joni Mitchell on the cover, we know what the editors are thinking. And there is a focus on Laurel Canyon, including a virtual tour map of the homes of the stars towards the back. Where they have published artists guides, on Mitchell, or Van Morrison the material is new, or at least newly reprinted form the pages of Uncut itself or the Melody Maker archive.
But it is the less well covered names who make this worth buying. The name that made me pick it up off the shelf in Sainsbury’s was Judee Sill. As a fan I grab any new nuggets of information about her, and Jim Wirth’s article is well written and dodges the myths, although I take issue with a 7/10 score for ‘Heart Food’. But the gold is a 1972 interview form Melody Maker and a page of Sill reviewing the latest singles from April of that year. Both a fascinating and both are new to me.
The centre of the magazine is occupied by a list of 40 albums “anticipated or advanced the concept of the singer-songwriter form.” Some entries are obvious, Dylan, represented by ‘Blood On The Tracks,’ but for the most part it’s lesser-known names, ‘Midwest Farm Disaster’ by Bob Martin, for instance. It’s a fascinating list and clearly had thought put into it.
The reason for buying publications like this, at least for me, is to find people you may have missed. In this case Tim Buckley, who I’ve never got around to until I started reading about him, and Laura Nyro, who I had dabbled with listening to, but never really investigated in depth. Of course, now I talk about them both with all the zeal of a late convert.
Not everyone featured is likely to show up on Americana UK often, although the pieces on James Taylor and Carole King refreshed my view of both. The most interesting essay was oddly on the early work of Elton John. While it’s not turned me into a convert, I’m not totally opposed to the idea of listening to one of his albums now.
With brief pieces on other industry figures like David Geffen and Peter Asher to flesh out some of the information picked up in the main articles, this is a good way to while away a Sunday afternoon. It’s still available from Kelsey Media’s online shop as either a print or digital copy. There are always going to be names missed, which we feel should have been included. The only British entries are for Elton John, Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. Richard Thompson is an obvious gap, as are Dylan, Gene Clark and Tim Hardin. If, however like most of us here at AUK, the more information about the music and singers you can grab the better then the Uncut guides are usually worth considering. This Singer Songwriter genre guide will almost certainly send you either back to your own record collection or off in search of something new.
Bob Martin “could have been bigger than Dylan” and this is the album picked to represent his talent.
