The New Cue #443 November 22: James Blake, Al Green, Everything Is Recorded, Horsegirl, Ela Minus, Michael Kiwanuka, spill tab, The Murder Capital, Lambrini Girls

"He ended up throwing up on my shoes"

Hello TNC crew,

Welcome to the 443^rd edition of The New Cue. 443! You have no idea how many WhatsApp messages have gone into those 443 deliveries. A lot. Like, if there was an inquiry into The New Cue because, I don’t know, somebody in the government’s Music Journalism Watch Department had raised an objection to the adjectives we used to describe an Alt-J song once and they had to go through our phones then they’d bin it off after a couple of hours. So many messages. Messages about interviews. Messages about artists. Messages about that week’s releases. Messages taking the piss out of people we don’t like. So many!

And why are we telling you this? Well, so that you know how much love, care, attention and piss-taking it requires to get this edition to your inbox. Which probably means that if you enjoy it, you should be one of the absolute dons who pay £5 for full access to every edition by pressing Subscribe Now here:

But if you don’t want to do that, then you can stay here and hang out with the paywall below instead. Here’s a playlist to keep you company:

And one for the Apple Music inclined.

Enjoy the edition, see you on Monday for freebie shenanigans,

Ted and Niall

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Recommender Pt. 1

Ted Kessler

There was a time, from around 1994 onwards, when I’d want prison time for anyone playing or singing REM’s depression lullaby Everybody Hurts near me. There had been too much of Everybody Hurts, everywhere, all the time. At first it was great, then it was a lot, fairly soon it was too much. But today, thirty-two years after first hearing it, it is I who has played Everybody Hurts three times in a row, and that’s because Al Green has produced his own honey-voiced version of it. The good Reverend Green recorded it this year in Memphis with various heavyweight members of the Hi Rhythm Section, along with Steve Potts from Booker T & The MGs: it’s a thing of such soulful, soothing, bewitching magic that I may now play it again. No idea why Al Green has done this, there’s no album announced, but sometimes the Lord works in mysterious ways.

I wonder what James Brandon Lewis Trio’s version of Everybody Hurts would sound like? (Picks up Dictaphone, “idea for a compilation album: twenty contemporary artists produce their own version of REM’s Everybody Hurts”.) The trio’s latest release, Five Spots To Caravan, is a magnificent, improvised journey around Lewis’s cyclical saxophone riff, their playing as tightly wound and as far-out as it’s possible to be when you’re making up avant-garde jazz on the spot. It’s a cut from the JBL trio’s upcoming sixteenth album Apple Cores, whetting all appetites appropriately.

As you grow older, it becomes clearer which years tick upwards most noticeably on the life graph. For Rianne Downey, 2024 will be one of those standouts. The Liverpool-based Scottish singer joined Paul Heaton’s band last summer and has since then appeared on his recent hit The Mighty Several album, stepped out with him for a Glastonbury Pyramid Stage set, and is currently on Heaton’s big national tour. She’s also, meanwhile, recorded her own solo debut album, the first track from which is the lovely Stevie Nicks-like lament for lost love, Lost in Blue, which is out today.