The New Cue (2025)

14/10/2025

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
“It might not sound obviously like advice but it is advice to me. It was talking to my friend Angel Bat Dawid a few years ago and talking about how, because my music moves around style and genre so much, it can feel like people don’t always get it. She said to me, ‘You are the genre’ and I’ve really held that deeply and closely since then, it’s made me feel a lot more comfortable to be myself, to do what I do and trust that other people will find me if they’re supposed to find me.”

—

Mercury Prize-nominated jazz polymath and multi-instrumentalist dynamo Emma-Jean Thackray takes on our Life & Times questionnaire. It’s a free edition, link in bio!

06/10/2025

Have you ever been arrested?
“Yeah, a few times. What’s the best one? Well, we all were on a plane once with the Charlatans and we all got arrested. There was some smoking going on, and there’s some drinking going on. I remember Rob [Collins, keyboards] was drinking Bailey’s at the time and it just went everywhere. No one was happy with Bailey’s all over their seat in the middle of a flight. There was a passenger in front of me who put his hand over the screen the back of my seat, on purpose. I didn’t do anything, but Mark [Collins, guitarist] tickled his finger, and he got up and whacked my head rest. Everything got out of hand then… we got arrested and wound up in downtown New York police cells without our shoelaces. Martin [Blunt, bass] was actually not involved at all. He’s on the other side of the plane asleep, and he still got arrested.”

—

In today’s edition, The Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess takes on our Life & Times interview. It’s free for all to read, link in bio!

29/09/2025

Which talent would you most like to have?
“I’ve already got it. When I was young and I heard Buddy Holly and I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing?!’ I was already writing poetry and I got very excited about, ‘How do you do this?’ and I very quickly realised I had a talent for words and poems and then I picked up the guitar and found I really loved that. At 16 and 17, as I really got going on the guitar, I realised I already had the talent so I did need one now, I have it, it’s here… come to Richmond and hear it onstage, October 12th!

—

The legendary Donovan takes on our Life & Times questionnaire, featuring The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Happy Mondays, Pink Floyd and more. It’s a free edition, link in bio!

22/09/2025

Tell us the story of your latest album.
“The story of my album - oh, I like that. It makes it seem like a fairy tale. Well, it’s pretty simple. There’s not really much to it. We were reissuing my first three records, which was a few years in the making, and we were digging up a bunch of unreleased music. Domino ended up releasing that, it’s called Seed Cake on Leap Year. Working closely with Jason Quever, who recorded my first two records, and the Seed Cake stuff, we realised we just always had a really great connection musically, and everything. Just a lot of similar interests and similar family bu****it. Anyway, we started recording together again, it’s great - and that’s kind of the story, I guess.”

—

In today’s edition, the great Cass McCombs takes on our Life & Times questionnaire. We had exactly thirty minutes allocated to tackle it before his next appointment: quite a bit of that was eaten up by Cass’s bemused, amused pauses as he rolled the questions around his head, repeating them back as if to extract their true meaning. It’s a good one - link in bio.

17/09/2025

If you could identify one single thing that surprised you the most about doing the book, what would it be?
“I think the way that Keith wrote about P*P, off The Holy Bible. He investigated the workings and the process of Richey writing that lyric itself. He discovered more than I already knew that was there, on a sixpence he turned on that way of thinking of Richey where if you’re trying to drive a wedge between extreme left and extreme right, it becomes indiscernible from each other sometimes, that complicated way of thinking of finding the hypocrisy in everything or finding the fallibility in every ideology or finding fault lines in every politician’s words. That song epitomises that and Keith found all the bones in that song. He found out where all the cracks and chinks in the armour in political thinking was and it was amazing that somebody could write so much about one song and one lyric. I think that’s a testament to Keith and Richey’s writing.”

—
In a bonus Wednesday edition for our legendary TNC subscribers, Manics singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield talks to us about the process of getting involved in Keith Cameron’s excellent new Manics book 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure. And we’ve got a copy to giveaway! Link in bio.

15/09/2025

What is your earliest memory?

“Not to arc too deeply into the nepo memory bank, I think sometimes you are forced to remember things because they become infamous. So one of them is actually standing outside the shop [for the cover of Ian Dury’s New Boots and Panties] because obviously that happened and that became a record cover, and therefore you’re reminded of it constantly from that point onwards. Whereas everything else is fogged in a sort of domestic haze that is a forced memory. I have evidence of that memory.”

—

Today we’ve got a Life & Times interview with , whose excellent new record Allbarone came out on Friday. It’s a free edition, link in bio.

08/09/2025

What would people be surprised to learn about you?
“That I have a sense of humour. I try to show more and more to show that side of me because all my friends are hilarious, I only have people who I think are hilarious. There’s not a day I don’t laugh with my friends. Even Johnny Hostile is a funny fu**er. There are some artists that we don’t suspect that they are funny. I remember Johnny worked with Nick Cave and the first day he did with Warren Ellis and Nick at rehearsals for that tour, he called me and he said, ‘Nick Cave is hilarious’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course he is’. And I don’t think they are contradictory, there’s a persona and actually onstage, he cracks a few jokes.”

—

In today’s edition, takes on our Life & Times questionnaire, pulls apart the questions, tells us what her Oscar-winning acting role would be, shares the invaluable advice Richard Hawley gave her and more. It’s a free edition, link in bio!

01/09/2025

What’s your pet peeve?
“When things that are not rock get called rock. Like that thing that happens where Ed Sheeran wins Best Rock at the Grammys or Coldplay wins Best Rock. I mean, it’s fine, it’s probably great, but it’s not rock.”

That’s a very valid complaint.
“Yeah, it’s like as soon as somebody puts a guitar on something, people assume it’s rock music and it’s not. AC/DC is rock, Coldplay is not rock. If AC/DC and Coldplay are the same genre, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Coldplay, I’m saying it’s not rock.”

Yeah, there should be some sort of official rules, like in Italy when you can only make pizzas with certain ingredients.
“Yeah, there’s got to be a DOP designation for rock… does it have a basic blues scale? Are they singing about f**k The Man or partying? If yes, maybe it’s rock.”

—

In today’s edition, frontman Pelle Almqvist takes on our Life & Times questionnaire. Also includes some very nifty advice Mick Jagger gave him about boat acquisitions. As with every Monday edition, it’s free for all to read - link in bio!

18/08/2025

Have you ever broken the law?
“Yeah, to varying degrees. Trespassing so much as a kid. When I was a skater, going to construction sites, taking plywood and leaving it in our garden in the back. My mother would wake up the next morning and there would almost be a construction site worth of material in the back for a ramp we’d make. Fortunately, she was such a cool character, she was a cool mom that everyone knew we could do that and she wouldn’t be thinking too much about it.”

—

Today we’ve got a Life & Times interview with Interpol’s Daniel Kessler, who recently released the second album by his ambient, atmospheric project Big Noble. It’s a free edition, link in bio!

04/08/2025

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

“Anywhere from 10-15 years back. When you lose someone so close you really do wake up to seeing what’s important and what’s not important and what’s been a waste of time and a waste of energy and concern in your life and you wish you could go back and take that time and energy and focus on the things you know were most important. Not that you were neglecting anything, you just realise, ‘Wow, it turns out these things were the most important and I should’ve been spending all my time focussing on that and not so worried about this or that’. It’s not so much that I have regrets, it’s just I can look back pretty easily and see things I would’ve done differently and that I would’ve spent my soul on a little bit more instead of some things I thought were important and thought were worth worrying.”

—

Today’s edition is an emotional Life & Times interview with Alan Sparhawk, the US singer-songwriter who was guitarist and vocalist in Low until the death of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker in 2022. Alan’s answers will stir your soul. It’s a free edition, link in bio.

28/07/2025

What would people be surprised to learn about you?
“That I wanted to be a ballet dancer when I was a kid. My mum was a ballet teacher so I learned ballet. I don’t know if they do this in the UK, but at schools in New Zealand, when you’re 12, the class wrote down, ‘What do you think people are going to grow up to be?’ and I wanted to be a ballet dancer and everyone thought I would be a ballet dancer, I was kind of like a New Zealand Billy Elliott... with a much more supportive family. They said one of my friends was going to be a rubbish man. Pretty outrageous!”

—

In today’s edition, we’ve got a Life & Times interview with Bret McKenzie. Best known as one half of the Grammy Award-winning musical comedy duo Flight Of The Conchords, Bret is also an Oscar-winning composer, a dashing elf in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit films and, since 2022, a solo artist signed to Sub Pop - his second record Freak Out City is out next month. It’s a free edition, link in bio.

21/07/2025

What is the closest you’ve ever come to death?
“I was away on tour with Lee Scratch Perry in Greece, having a nap for five minutes longer than I should have in order to ready myself to join the tour bus to go to the next gig. I took a quick shower in a bath without a slip mat and fell over. I felt like I’d cracked my skull open. I had an out of body feeling, saying to myself ‘Come on, you can’t die here - we got a gig to do!’ But it resulted in a cracking of my spine. It healed back but I had to have an operation called a laminectomy to have my right-side nerve removed from the tip of my spine. It was a very, very, very scary moment. Thank God I survived, but it rendered me unable to do certain things with my right hand, like playing the bass guitar. I can play, but I can’t do the two- or three-hour concerts I used to with Linton [Kwesi-Johnson] anymore.”

—

We’re very happy to share this morning’s Life & Times interview with you as it’s with MBE, the 72-year-old musician, producer, songwriter and all-round ubermensch whose imprint has been stamped through so much of the best reggae, dub, post-punk and skewiff pop produced in the UK since the mid-70s. Link in bio!

The New Cue