Ultimate Music Guide

14/01/2026

"Somebody's got to save rock'n'roll from all those prats with synthesisers!"

That was Shane MacGowan in 1979. He was 21, furious and absolutely certain he was right.

Did he save rock'n'roll? Debatable. But he and his crew did drag Irish traditional music into sweaty punk venues, and they could make you cry and want to start a fight in the same song.

The new Ultimate Music Guide - The Pogues from Uncut Magazine tells the whole story. The chaos. The genius. And, sure, the booze. Pre-order your copy today 👇

Ultimate Music Guide THE POGUES | Kelsey Media

06/01/2026

Happy birthday, Syd Barrett 🎸

Born on this day in 1946, Pink Floyd's original frontman brought something genuinely strange and luminous to rock music and the counterculture in general.

Former bandmate Nick Mason remembers him as "the most charming guy." Uncut Magazine talked to the Floyd drummer about Barrett's brief, brilliant spark.

The Pink Floyd drummer remembers his mercurial former bandmate

05/01/2026

What better way to kick off 2026 than with the full, brilliantly unpredictable story of Pulp?

The new Ultimate Record Collection – Pulp charts their journey from Sheffield obscurity to Britpop glory. The band's recollections of the early years are typically wry and self-deprecating – Jarvis Cocker recalls that the engineer who recorded 1987's Freaks told him: "Please don't put my name on it."

Order your copy now – link in first comment 👇

18/12/2025

Ozzy Osbourne was a big fan of Black Sabbath, and so are we.

From the makers of Uncut Magazine, the Definitive Edition Ultimate Music Guide: Black Sabbath is a 172-page compendium of riffs, wreckage and redemption, from the early days in Aston, Birmingham, to the final farewell.

Inside: every album covered in depth, classic interviews, big recent chats with Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, plus an eight-page foldout Ozzy timeline and extras on the making of Paranoid and Sabbath’s 1980s (by Tony Iommi).

Enjoy the magazine! It’s in shops now, or you can get yours by clicking the link in the first comment.

17/12/2025

On this day in 1971, David Bowie released Hunky Dory in the UK. It's still a proper genre-hop (folk, pop, theatre, soul), but with a bigger, more confident sound. “Changes” sets the tone, “Life On Mars?” brushes with perfection, and you can hear the path towards what comes next.

Uncut Magazine recently revisited the bigger question: how David Jones invented his majestic, mythologised alter ego. Put on Hunky Dory and have a read!

A Starman is born! The inside story of how David Jones invented his majestic, mythologised alter ego, David Bowie

10/12/2025

Thought it was hard to get Radiohead tickets?

On this day in 2007, 20 million people applied for 20,000 tickets to see Led Zeppelin at London's O2 Arena. It still holds the Guinness World Record for the highest ticket demand ever.

Success wasn't a slam-dunk. Their 1985 Live Aid reunion was a disaster. Phil Collins flew in on Concorde and learned the songs mid-flight. Plant later called it "a fu***ng atrocity for us. It made us look like loonies."

This time it worked. The New Yorker: "The failed gigs of the nineteen-eighties and nineties have been supplanted by a triumph." NME, speaking for the 19,980,000 who didn't get in: "We can only hope this isn't the last we see of them."

The complete Page & Plant story—exclusive Robert Plant introduction, classic interviews, the solo years, everything that came after Zeppelin—is in Uncut Magazine's Ultimate Music Guide - Page & Plant.

Hit the link in the first comment to order your copy!

05/12/2025

It’s the final day of our Black Friday offer! Get up to 30% off all Uncut Magazine guides and specials, but only until 11:59pm GMT tonight. Apply your chosen discount code at checkout and make the most of our biggest deal of the year while it’s still available.

Hit the link in the first comment to grab yours 👇

02/12/2025

"Blue Monday" is the best-selling 12" single of all time — and one of the weirdest success stories in pop. A few things you might not know:

The whole point of the song was so New Order could walk offstage and let the machines finish the gig without them. As Gillian Gilbert put it: "The idea was to do a song that was completely automated, so at the end of the gig you could walk off and just leave the machines playing."

The title? Lifted from Kurt Vonnegut. Stephen Morris was reading Breakfast of Champions, spotted drawings captioned "Goodbye Blue Monday," and shortened it.

They recorded it at Pink Floyd's Britannia Row studio in late 1982 and were, by their own admission, "out of our heads the whole time." Bernard Sumner wore a lab coat throughout. Peter Hook thought it made him look like he'd actually gone to work.

Then there's the sleeve. Peter Saville's iconic die-cut design cost more to manufacture than the single sold for, meaning every copy lost Factory Records money.

And despite all this, the band grew to despise playing it live. Hook: "We wanted to change it, but the roadies were reluctant to let us do it. We got absolutely fu***ng sick of playing it."

More where that came from in the Ultimate Music Guide: Deluxe Edition - Joy Division/New Order 👉

Guides and Specials | Kelsey Media

26/11/2025

This Black Friday 🎉, get up to 30% off all Uncut Magazine guides and specials. Apply your chosen discount code at checkout and enjoy our biggest offer of the year. All Black Friday codes expire at 11:59pm GMT on Friday, 5 December 2025.
Link in the comments 👇

24/11/2025

Joy Division didn’t set out to be a cult. In 1979 they were just four young men from Greater Manchester whose first album, Unknown Pleasures, sounded like nothing else around – stark, intense, oddly beautiful. At the centre of it all was singer and lyricist Ian Curtis.

“We’re free to do what we want. There’s no one restricting us… We don’t want to get diluted, really,” he says in a 1979 interview with NME writer Paul Rambali, who has come to Manchester to see what this band are doing to people in small, dark basement venues.

One thing that sets them apart is the way they want the songs to be heard. Bassist Peter Hook talks about not pinning down “official” meanings. Joy Division refuse to print lyric sheets. Misheard lines become part of the experience. Different listeners can take completely different things from the same song and still be right. The echo, the space, the way Curtis's voice sits inside Martin Hannett’s production – all of that is deliberate.

Curtis also reflects on the factory job he *used* to do, pushing a wagon of cotton up and down the floor while he daydreamed about records and weekends in London. Most people, he says, live in their own private worlds. Music is where those worlds finally collide.

That 1979 feature is reprinted in full in our new Ultimate Music Guide – Joy Division / New Order, alongside classic archive interviews, brand new album reviews and deep dives on side projects, rarities and more.

🔗 Link to the magazine in the first comment 👇

21/11/2025

NEW! Our 148-page Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide – Joy Division / New Order traces the story from the early Factory days through Unknown Pleasures, Power, Corruption & Lies, Technique and beyond. Inside you’ll find classic archive interviews, in-depth new writing, and expert, album-by-album reviews – including live releases and key side projects – all putting these era-defining records back under the microscope.

Whether you’ve lived with these albums for decades or you’re just starting to explore them, it’s an unmissable read on two bands who reshaped British music.

Link in first reply 👇