The New Cue #409 August 30: The Smile, Manic Street Preachers, Tinashe, Rosie Lowe, Sunstack Jones, Julie Dawson, Jon Hopkins, Wunderhorse

"The promoter told us we were a fucking joke"

Hello,

Welcome to your weekly Recommender edition of The New Cue. This edition contains 3 x Recommenders, 1 x An Album To Blow Your Mind, 1 x And Finally and 1 x This Intro That Is Sometimes Really Hard To Write Especially If You Leave It To The Last Minute On A Thursday Evening. Please check that your edition of The New Cue is not missing any of these vital components.

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Here's this week’s playlist:

And here for the Apple Music clan.

Enjoy the edition, see you on Monday

Ted, Niall and Chris

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An Album To Blow Your Mind

Rosie Lowe picks a soul livewire

The new album by Rosie Lowe is one of the British singer and producer’s best, a collection that glides from atmospheric electronica to minimalist soul to cut-up alt-pop. Titled Lover, Other, it’s out now and you can listen here:

Here, Rosie tells us about why Donny Hathaway captured at his potent live best is her mind-blower pick:  

Donny Hathaway
Live (1972)

“Donny Hathaway is up there with my favourite voices of all time and this live album really showcases the true soul and depth of his voice, the freedom in his keys playing and unbelievable band that play with him & the synergy between the band and the audience. I could listen to the album for the bass playing alone, Willie Weeks goes in! I love how you can hear the band speed up, slow down, responding to the audience. It’s just such a joyful listen. I challenge anyone to listen to this album without smiling or dancing. Impossible. 

Donny covers Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ (less than a year after the original was released), Carol King’s ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ and a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy’ which might be one of the best vocal performances I’ve ever heard.

I love live music so much and this recording captures so much of the magic, making it feel like us listeners are there in the room with Donny and his band. Each performance marks a new act of creation. The audience is as much a participant as the band on this album, you can hear them yell, scream out, clap and sing along; the audience becomes a part of the music. Both the band and the audience communicate through an exchange of energy that is so specific to live music. I would do anything to have seen Donny perform live but listening to this album makes me feel like I have and, for me, it’s a spiritual experience.”

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Recommender

Niall Doherty

There was not a worse time to start trying to drum up excitement for a new single than Monday afternoon just gone. Oasis rumours were in full, frenzied swing but that is exactly when the Manics snuck out a little snippet of their new single, eventually released in full this Thursday. The Manics have been denied the bottled-up excitement you get around a reunion because they have done the most maverick thing a rock’n’roll band can do and not split up. They haven’t even had a hiatus, the nutters. The trio had me on board with their new single before I’d even pressed play on their new single Decline & Fall by using the classic font from their Generation Terrorists days for their current logo – I am a simple creature like that – and the song itself is just as gripping, a driving rock number retaining the 70s symphonic pop panoramas of 2021’s The Ultra Vivid Lament but with James Dean Bradfield’s sizzling guitars elbowing their way to the front once again. Plus it has that classic Manics thing of sounding like it would be a perfect fit for a Goals Of The Month compilation.

I have stopped trying to guess when Radiohead might return (I haven’t, I’m about to do it again now). I said that they would get back to it after the first album by The Smile, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s side-project that often sounds a lot like Radiohead with some ingredients added and some ingredients missing. Then I said they would get back to it after the second Smile album Wall Of Eyes, released in January. And now they’ve gone and announced a third Smile album.