M_010_22_acisuM by aquiaqui33

“You’d look out and there’d be a bunch of kids in the samewearingaudiencetheglasses.”

46 JACKIE LEVEN

52 THE LIBERTINES

FEATURES

THE BYRDS,

How The Smiths, The Clash, Mythicke Englande and mental illness combined on Up The Bracket, 20 years young. “We were woefully reckless,” survivors recall.

62 THE BYRDS The rise from folk purism to pop primacy and beyond, encapsulated in newly unearthed photographs. “We didn’t have a blueprint,” admit Hillman and McGuinn.

68 KATE BUSH As Running Up That Hill continues to fuel her record-breaking summer, MOJO goes back to the source with a deep dive into Hounds Of Love, with help from collaborators, admirers and MOJO’s top writers. ✦ MEMPHIS

CONTENTS

Inc.Photography,FeinsteinBarryFeinstein/©Barry MOJO 3

36 NEU! Did the odd couple of German rock drive each other wahnsinnig? No question. Did they also invent music that new generations still strive to emulate? Stimmt !

ROGER M c GUINN, P62

Splitting glam futurists Be-Bop Deluxe baffled label and fans, but Wakefield’s guitar guru was on another path. “I’ve got to do my thing,” he tells James McNair.

Tragedy, daddy issues, and a brush with the uncanny have helped Southern rock’s New Blood find his voice: “I had this eerie feeling, like the presence of death…”

Rolling Thunder veteran, Americana evangelist, consigliere to the stars, and now producer of a single disc worth £1.5m: the Renaissance Hillbilly opens up.

Navigating the late, lamented Leven’s labyrinth of half-truths and genius songs with the help of friends, lovers, antagonists, a Sex Pistol and Ian Rankin.

COVER STORY

56 BILL NELSON

30 T BONE BURNETT

✦ ALBION OCTOBER 2022 Issue 347

42 MARCUS KING

LONDON

David Fricke

Nature’s rhythm: Makaya McCraven, Lead Album, p80.

122 HELLO GOODBYE Gloria Scott remembers her sudden beginning and ending with Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes troupe.

This month, David renews old acquaintances, going deep with producer T Bone Burnett in the MOJO Interview – he saw him live with The Alpha Band in ’76 – and revisiting Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with leader Jeff Tweedy, 20 years after appearing in the classic making-of documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. The US annual subscription price is $114.98. Airfreight and mailing in the USA by agent named World Container Inc, 150-15, 183rd Street, Jamaica, NY 11413, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Brooklyn, NY 11256. US Postmaster: Send address changes to MOJO, World Container Inc, 150-15, 183rd Street, Jamaica, NY 11413, USA. Subscription records are maintained at H Bauer, Subscriptions, CDS Global, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough, Leicester LE16 9EF, United Kingdom. Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent. Tracks of tribute: Leonard Cohen, p19. THIS MONTH'S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

Simon Prades process

What’s next, after Todd Haynes’ doc, for the VU obsessive? Thurston Moore has a little something for you, involving decades of secret interviews and some remarkable slept-on pics.

80 NEW ALBUMS Makaya McCraven’s timely release, plus Lambchop, The Proclaimers, Beth Orton, Suede and more.

MOJO FILTER

John Aizlewood

Khruangbin hook up with Vieux Farka Albums,Touré,p84.

(from Call Mother A Lonely Field). He celebrates this extraordinary singer-songwriter from page 46.

Simon works and lives with his family in the Black Forest, Germany. As an illustrator he works mostly for clients in editorial, but also publishing, advertising and film. His

usually involves drawing with pencil or ink on paper and digital colouring. He illustrates this month’s lead album on page 81.

16 NATALIE MERCHANT Once one of 10,000 Maniacs, the veteran solo talent prepares to step out of the shadows with a new “four-records-in-one” album.

There’s a new exhibition and book of portraits of the Mighty Upsetter by on-the-inside photographer Dennis Morris. Read on for an exclusive preview and personal recollections of reggae’s genius, one year on from his passing.

112 REAL GONE Paul Ryder, Barbara Thompson, William ‘Poogie’ Hart, Alan Blaikley, Bob Rafelson and many others, goodbye.

12 JONI MITCHELL Unbelievably, she played her first full gig in 20 years last month at the Newport Folk festival. Musicians who were there say how it all went down.

4 MOJO

Otis Williams, Lynda ‘Wonder Woman’ Carter and Greentea Peng share their golden records.

108 BOOKS Biography of jazz-loving Stones drummer Charlie Watts, plus World Of Twist, Gary Moore and history of Scots indie pop.

22 LEE ‘SCRATCH’ PERRY

John ate reindeer with Jackie Leven in Bergen, Norway, drank coffee with him in Marylebone, London, and really can’t think of a better lyric than Leven’s, “like young Irish men in English bars, the song of home betrays us”

120 ASK MOJO Who re-titled their albums for overseas territories? Everyone!

REGULARS

14 VELVET UNDERGROUND

9 ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

18 JULIAN LENNON The son of John talks new music, covering his dad’s most famous song, the unique predicaments of his position, and who he’s really been doing this for all these years.

WHAT GOES ON!

94 REISSUES Wilco are hot to Foxtrot, plus Charles Stepney, Neu!, Stereolab and Sun Ra.

The venerable British vocal group tackle an ethereal Georgian folk song, named after a village whose name apparently translates as “at the well”. Kate Bush fans, of course, will recognise it as the choral melody from Hounds Of Love ’s Hello Earth: a notable horror buf (see page 78), the singer frst heard a version of the piece on the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre.

Bush also sings on this 1982 single by Kiwi new romantic Zaine Grif Bush and Grif met in Lindsay Kemp’s mime class, and Flowers is a tribute to their master. “Lindsay was such a powerful infuence on us both – as he is on anyone who is captured by his strong magic,” wrote Bush in 1984. “It was a real pleasure to be a part of something dedicated to him.”

6 MOJO

3 Nite Jewel Hounds Of Love

(2)Shutterstock(6),Getty(3),AlamyLtd,RecordsPropercourtesyO’DohertyEamonn

2 Zaine Griff Flowers

9 SmecenoPlanxtyHoro

When Kate Bush appeared on the MOJO cover in 2014, around the time of the Before The Dawn gigs, LA’s Ramona Gonzalez – AKA Nite Jewel – provided this gorgeous cover as a digital exclusive. Eight years later, Nite Jewel’s Hounds Of Love takes its rightful place on Thunder In Our Hearts; a dreamy and ravishing version that subtly updates the sound design without losing the quixotic spirit of the original.

Like Youth, Weber is another genre-defying bassist who became a critical Bush accomplice in the 1980s – it’s his distinctive sonorities that you can hear on The Dreaming, Hounds Of Love, The Sensual World and Aerial. The German jazz double bassist also has a stellar solo career on the ECM label: his Pendulum album from 1993 was played at the Hammersmith Apollo before Bush’s Before The Dawn shows.

“I’ve a very strong folk music infuence,” Bush told MOJO’s Colin Irwin in 1980. “First songs I ever sang were dirty sea shanties… Traditional music says a great deal about the country.” Bush explained to Irwin how Babooshka was based on the English ballad Sovay, interpreted by A.L. Lloyd and performed here a cappella by the great Anne Briggs in 1973.

Bush’s love of folk music extends towards Ireland as well as England, and her association with the Irish group Planxty began with several of them guesting on 1982’s Night Of The Swallow, before playing key parts on Hounds Of Love and The Sensual World. This frenetically virtuoso track fnds them combining Irish folk with another Bush obsession, Bulgarian traditional music.

Pendulum

To begin: Kate Bush! That, unmistakably, is her voice at the start of this duet with the antic Harper. 1980 found the pair collaborating on Bush’s Breathing and on You, a dramatic highlight of Harper’s tenth album, The Unknown Soldier. Another auspicious Bush connection, too, as the song’s cowriter and guest guitarist is David Gilmour, her frst patron.

4 Anne Briggs Sovay

Thunder In Our Hearts

The Irish actor’s reading of the fnal section of James Joyce’s Ulysses had a profound infuence on Bush, inspiring the title track of 1989’s The Sensual World. Bush’s original plan to use Joyce’s original words was stymied by the author’s estate, but when she revisited the song on 2011’s Director’s Cut – retitled Flower Of The Mountain – she obtained permission to use Molly Bloom’s words, with a co-songwriting credit for Joyce.

Written by Joyce. Copyright Control. Originally released 1961.

Composed by Eberhard Weber. Published by GEMA 1993 ECM Records. From Pendulum.

Written by Kate Bush. Published by Whichever Way Music (SESAC) adm., ©Gloriette Records

A Kate Bush Companion

11 The King’s Singers Tsintskaro

Written by Roy Harper. Published by Science Friction Ltd. District 6 Publishing. ©Roy Harper. From The Unknown Soldier. https://www.royharper.co.uk/

1 Roy Harper You (The Game Part II)

Trad Arr. &©Signum Records 2020. From Finding Harmony. www.signumrecords.com

Written by Zaine Gri f. Published by Zg Music Limited. (Apra) admin Zg Music Limited. From Figures. 1982 www.zainegri f.com

10 Siobhan McKenna Soliloquy Of Molly Bloom

12 Eberhard Weber

“Billie Holiday hit me very strongly when I frst heard her,” Bush told Radio 1 in 1979. “I just couldn’t believe her voice, I mean it just made me want to cry, it was just amazing.” When asked to contribute something to an auction for the War Child charity in 1996, Bush created a bronze sculpture at the Royal College Of Art, inspired by and entitled Strange Fruit.

A very obvious connection here: anyone familiar with 1980’s Never For Ever will know the track Delius (Song Of Summer). Bush was inspired by Song Of Summer, Ken Russell’s 1968 TV drama about the British composer, and named after the symphonic piece he completed in 1931; one of his last major works before his death in 1934.

Among Kate’s more esoteric interests was Armenian mystic George Gurdjief – “They open doorways that I thought were shut for good/They read me Gurdjief and Jesu,” she sang on Them Heavy People. Gurdjief was also a fne composer, as this 1920s piece written with Russian musician Thomas De Hartmann proves.

13 Billie Holiday

8 Thomas De Hartmann/GurdjieHartmann fThe Bokharian Dervish, Hadji Asvatz-Troov

Written by L Allan. Tin Pan Alley. Originally released 1948.

Bush’s love of those “dirty sea shanties” derived in no small part from Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd’s 1957 Blow Boys Blow (Songs Of The Sea). “I was brought up with this album,” she told Smash Hits in 1980, placing it at Number 2 in a Top 10 albums list, just between Frank Zappa’s Over-Nite Sensation and Eagles’ One Of These Nights

The HoundscompleatOfLovebeginspage68

14 London SymphonyDeliusOrchestraASong Of Summer

Written by Delius. Copyright Control. Originally released: 1953

15 Mary O’Hara

6 Tracey Thorn Under The Ivy

Killing Joke bassist Youth entered Bush’s orbit in 1985, contributing to The Big Sky on Hounds Of Love. In the intervening four decades, his career has taken in many diverse production roles, but his detonating bass lines have remained a constant, showcased brilliantly on this 2018 collaboration with musician/producer Gaudi.

My Lagan Love

Arr Hamilton, Harty. Published by Boosey And Hawkes. Originally released 1958.

One of Bush’s most beloved nonalbum tracks, Under The Ivy was written “really quickly” and recorded in a single afternoon to provide a B-side for the single release of Running Up That Hill in August 1985. Tracey Thorn released her own version as a single in 2014, elegantly feshing out the stark piano and vocals structure of the original with an empathetic string arrangement.

7 Youth & Gaudi Bass Weapon

Strange Fruit

The Handsome Cabin Boy

OR A POP SUPERSTAR, KATE BUSH HAS KEPT SOME strikingly esoteric company over the years. Mime artists, post-punk provocateurs, ambient jazz bassists and folk maestros have fgured among her collaborators. Armenian mystics, Georgian choirs, experimental Irish novelists, jazz icons and Bradford composers have provided critical inspiration. David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and Elton John might be her more illustrious friends, but from the start of her remarkable career, Bush has always ventured deeper, and more fearlessly, into the cultural hinterlands.

5 Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd

Written by A.L. Lloyd. Copyright Control. Originally released 1957.

It’s this questing spirit that has helped elevate Bush’s art so far above that of most of her peers. And it’s this radical vision we celebrate on Thunder In Our Hearts, this month’s MOJO CD that we’ve styled, with attendant Weimaraners, as A Kate Bush Companion. There are songs by her inspirations and collaborators, loving interpretations of her own classics, and even a couple of tracks that feature Kate herself. C’mon, let’s exchange the experience!

Kate Bush’s catalogue of cover versions is a notably short one, and attention usually gravitates towards her takes on Marvin Gaye and Elton John. Her love of Irish folk does occasionally manifest, though: there’s a 1995 stab at the rebel song Mna Ná Héireann, and a Hounds Of Love -era version of My Lagan Love. This version of the traditional Donegal air dates from 1958, courtesy of folk revival singer and harpist Mary O’Hara.

Written by GI Gurdjie f. Copyright Control. Originally released 1955.

Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?

My head is like a random jukebox. What is your favourite Saturday night

My taste has always been quite eclectic. I recently created a ‘Wonder Women Of Music’ playlist… Aretha Franklin, Linda Ronstadt , Dolly Parton, Stevie Nicks . I love all the vocal powerhouses. And Kacey Musgraves ’ Golden Hour, such a touching album. I think she’ll be remembered as one of the great songwriters of her generation. And my daughter Jessica Carter Altman just released a fantastic single called Cherry Blossoms. What can I say? I’m a proud mama.

Nightmaresrecord?On Wax , African Pirates.

Tapestry by Carole King . In 1972, people didn’t know Carole King, but in a way they did, because she had written so many hits for other artists. Tapestry was like this great, shining moment when she stepped into the sunlight and then never left.

Which musician, other than your self, have you ever wanted to be?

What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album?

Which musician, other than your self, have you ever wanted to be?

What do you sing in the shower?

my shower and I get out. But if I was to stretch my vocal cords in there with a lot of steam, randomly I’d pick (starts singing), “I’ve hungered for your touch”… I used to sing that when I was younger. Unchained Melody, that’s the name of it.

The Isley Brothers ’ Shout, in Detroit, in 1959. I don’t remember where, except it was a record shop in Detroit, but there were so many around. I was just walking by one when I bought it.

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

New single Look To Him is out now on AMF Records.

What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?

Lynda Carter’s Human And Divine (Dave Audé Remix) is available now via Green Hill Music.

And your Sunday morning record?

My mother and grandmother were into gospel, like the great Mahalia Jackson, The Dixie Hummingbirds, The Swan Silvertones. I’d follow them with Sam Cooke

The Temptations, The Four Tops and Odyssey tour the UK from September 30.

GettyPocket,StefyUme,ofcourtesyLeonScott MOJO 9 “My head is like a jukebox.”random GREENTEA PENG THE STARS REVEAL THE SONIC DELIGHTS GUARANTEED TO GET THEM GOING... ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

My mum passed me on those CDs, and musically Finley Quaye inspired quite a lot of my music, and lyrically Fugees are just ridiculous

What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it?

Lynda Carter THESP, WONDERSINGER,WOMAN

Any of the classic Rolling Stones albums. Sometimes when I’m at home in Miami, I’ll just put on my headphones, open up all the windows, turn off all the lights, and just rock out.

I have so many. Harmony Of Love by The Five Dollars. What’cha Gonna Do by Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters. Twelve Months Of The Year by Harvey Fuqua & The Moonglows Why Do Fools Fall In Love by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers. That was the music of my youth in Detroit.

What music are you currently grooving to?

Wu-Lu ’s new album [Loggerhead ]. I love it. He deserves much wider recognition than he’s getting. He’s a very talented guy and a great artist. I like all the songs on there. I’m patiently waiting for it on vinyl. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? It’s so hard, but maybe The Score by Fugees . On the same level for me is Maverick A Strike by Finley Quaye

I don’t often go out on a Saturday night any more but that is a big tune.

I specifically remember buying Genie In A Bottle by Christina Aguilera on tape. It must have been in HMV. I listened to it on headphones. Once I was older, I moved on to Heaven Is A Halfpipe [by pop punks OPM], Linkin Park , shit like that.

I saw Grace Jones at Meltdown and she’s up there. The way she was completely running things in her seventies, it was incredible. I definitely want to be doing that shit when I’m 70. I’m in my twenties and she was putting me to shame.

I’m an across-the-board listener. Gospel, R&B, jazz, pop, a little rap. Being in the business, I need to be open to everybody!

What do you sing in the shower?

I don’t really like showers, so I take baths. I think the last song I sang out loud in there was Bank Robber by The Clash . I often catch myself singing random tunes – I was singing Burn by Usher yesterday.

What music are you currently grooving to?

On Sunday mornings, opera and classical music.

Oh, that’s so personal, but I’ll oblige. It’s never anything in particular, I just love to sing. I mostly just practise my scales.

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

Otis Williams

THE LAST TEMPTATION

I’ve liked so many artists, so that will be a whole lot of namedropping! But I could say Roy Hamilton, Luther Vandross and Ronnie Isley

I don’t sing in the shower. I just take

What do you sing in the shower?

Greentea Peng SOUTHNEO-SOULLONDON

Which musician, other than your self, have you ever wanted to be?

What music are you currently grooving to?

That’s a big tune, it gets you moving.

Sister Nancy, Bam Bam for sure. Or Eek-A-Mouse, Ganja Smuggling. Especially if the sun is shining.

I don’t think there is anyone else that I’d like to be, but I’ve always admired Ella Fitzgerald . I don’t think anyone could be her, but I certainly grew up wanting to perform as boldly as she did.

What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album?

It was the single Teen Angel by Mark Dinning . I bought it at a local record store in Phoenix.

Mark Wagstaff

Matt

Among this contributors:month’s

Associate(News)Editor

MOJO SUBSCRIPTION HOTLINE 0185 8438884 For subscription or back issue queries contact CDS Global on Bauer@subscription.co.uk To access from outside the UK Dial: +44 (0)185 8438884

You’re the ones on the battlefield, it’s your call Great Springsteen Top 50 [MOJO 346], and who

Hill took over the world earlier this summer, Kate Bush spoke about the phe nomenon on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme. As ever in her rare interviews, she was polite, solicitous and discreet. “I never listen to my old stuff,” she told the host, Emma Barnett. “I hadn’t heard it for a really long time.”

It is now 11 years since Bush was happy enough to release any new music. But what happens next remains tantalisingly uncertain – “Gardening,” she told Woman’s Hour, “is my thing now.” As it was, perhaps, in 1985: “Go into the garden/Go under the ivy/Under the leaves/Away from the party…”

JOHN MULVEY, EDITOR

Del

Associate Editor

Tel: 020 7437 9011

Acade mic House, 24-28 Oval Road

Thank you for a wonderful September edition of MOJO dedicated to the Boss over 20 pages, with a wonderful supporting CD. I have seen every Springsteen UK appearance since The River tour. Visiting such venues as Birmingham NEC, Villa Park, Roundhay Park, Wembley Stadium, Millennium Stadium, Wembley Arena, Ricoh Stadium and Earl’s Court. When the Europe tour dates were announced, I waited in anticipation for the UK leg. However, when the ticket sale opened today I was amazed at what was being charged in these inflationary times. I am now a pensioner with no idea of the full impact increased fuel and power bills will bring come the autumn. Reports seem to indicate the cost is nothing to do with Bruce and the band, but based on the dynamic pricing model used by the agencies. Therefore, much as it pains me to say it, I will not be seeing Bruce Springsteen this tour or possibly ever again.

Thanks for their help with this issue: Keith Cameron, Del Gentleman, Ian Whent

Cover: John Carder Bush (Inset: Nina Westervelt), Martin Bostock, Andrew Catlin, Danny Clinch, Joe Dilworth, Barry Feinstein, Norman Griner, Peter Lindbergh, Dennis Morris, Jason Myers, Tom Sheehan, Paul Slattery, Nick Stevens, Nina Westervelt.

Ian

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Editor

AROUND THE TIME RUNNING UP THAT

Art Editor

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk

Turner

Grahame Rhodes, via e-mail

John Mulvey

Tony Taylor, via e-mail

Andrew

London NW1 7DT

General e-mail: bauermedia.co.ukmojo@

As your quote went in How To Buy Soul Jazz Records [MOJO 344], “every release an unerring labour of love”, it’s great to see one of the hands-down best compilation labels get some deserved love. Running a record store myself, ordering stuff from Soul Jazz and seeing them announce yet another release is one of the more exciting bits of my day job, even after all these years and different releases. Such labels put in a massive amount of work to make things easy for us crate-diggers. They’ve led me, and many people I’ve had the joy of recommending

Editor

Production

Contributing

Male

Associate(Reviews)Editor

Editors

For many of us in MOJO’s world, of course, Running Up That Hill and its parent album, Hounds Of Love, has been more or less a constant soundtrack for the past 37 years. This month, we dig deep into the mysteries of Bush’s uncanny classic, and uncover truths and insights that’ll hopefully surprise Kate Ultras as well as Kate neophytes. “Kate’s always in charge,” Hounds Of Love engineer Brian Tench tells us. “She asks your opinion, she asks questions, but she knows what she wants. She’s not happy until she hears what she wants to hear.”

Senior Editor

Jenny Bulley

Art Editor

Your friend is stuck. You get me money, I make him unstuck.

Deputy

…I know you do these things to gain a response, and I know you can’t include everything, and I know you use the line ‘The Debate Starts Here’. But where on your Bruce Springsteen list is Stolen Car (You May Kiss The Bride version)?

Reader queries: bauermedia.co.ukmojoreaders@

I’m betting the fate of the planet that you’re one of the good ones

10 MOJO

Simon McEwen

am I to pick fault with your esteemed writers. But no sign anywhere of the truly epic Drive All Night? Top 10 all day long. And If I Should Fall Behind a criminally low Number 45?

Gentleman Picture Editor

rants,Theories,etc.

Phil SylvieKeithAlexander,Cameron,Simmons

Harrison

Danny Eccleston

Among this photographers:month’s

Charlie Brown, Cardiff

Senior

Website: mojo4music.com

Manish Agarwal, Martin Aston, John Aizlewood, Mike Barnes, Mark Blake, Glyn Brown, David Buckley, John Bungey, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Stevie Chick, Andrew Collins, Andy Cowan, Grayson Haver Currin, Tom Doyle, David Fricke, Andy Fyfe, Pat Gilbert, David Hutcheon, Chris Ingham, Colin Irwin, Jim Irvin, David Katz, Dorian Lynskey, Andrew Male, James McNair, Bob Mehr, Kris Needs, Chris Nelson, Lucy O’Brien, Mark Paytress, Andrew Perry, Clive Prior, Jude Rogers, Jon Savage, Victoria Segal, David Sheppard, Michael Simmons, Sylvie Simmons, Mat Snow, Ben Thompson, Kieron Tyler, Charles Waring, Lois Wilson

Raheema Rahim

Direct Marketing Executive

£££SAVEOFFCOVERPRICE!AMAKESMOJOGREATGIFT!!! MOJO 11

Head of Magazine Media

For subscription or back issue queries, please contact CDS Global on Bauer@subscription.co.uk Phone from the UK on 01858 43 8884. Phone from overseas on +44 (0)1858 43 8884. For enquires on overseas newsstand sales e-mail Paul.Maher@seymour.co.uk No part of the magazine may be reproduced in any form in whole or in part, without the prior permission of Bauer Consumer Media. All material published remains the copyright of Bauer Consumer Media and we reserve the right to copy or edit any material submitted to the magazine without further consent. The submission of material (manuscripts or images etc) to Bauer Consumer Media, whether unsolicited or requested, is taken as permission to publish that material in the magazine, on the associated website, any apps or social media pages affiliated to the magazine, and any editions of the magazine published by our licensees elsewhere in the world. By submitting any material to us you are confirming that the material is your own original work or that you have permission from the copyright owner to use the material and to authorise Bauer Consumer Media to use it as described in this paragraph. You also promise that you have permission from anyone featured or referred to in the submitted material to it being used by Bauer Consumer Media. If Bauer Consumer Media receives a claim from a copyright owner or a person featured in any material you have sent us, we will inform that person that you have granted us permission to use the relevant material and you will be responsible for paying any amounts due to the copyright owner or featured person and/or for reimbursing Bauer Consumer Media for any losses it has suffered as a result. Please note, we accept no responsibility for unsolicited material which is lost or damaged in the post and we do not promise that we will be able to return any material. Finally, whilst we try to ensure accuracy of your material when we publish it, we cannot promise to do so. We do not accept any responsibility for any loss or damage, however caused, resulting from use of the material.

Alas I forgot myself in the record store again. But it would be nice to see some more similar How To Buy Top 10s of some other deep-digging labels. Numero Group and Analog Africa spring to mind, or why not the relatively new but popular Habibi Funk? Keep up the great work.

Inserts Manager Simon Buckenham Production Manager Carl Lawrence Sales Operations Executive, BMA Finance Helen Mear

Talys Andres

MD Bauer Media Advertising

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Direct Marketing Manager Julie Spires

Printing: William Gibbons MOJO (ISSN 1351-0193; USPS 17424) is published 12 times a year by H Bauer Publishing Ltd, Media House, Peterborough Business Park, Lynch Wood, Peterborough PE2 6EA, United Kingdom. H Bauer Publishing is a company registered in England and Wales with company number LP003328, registered address Academic House, 24-28 Oval Road, London NW1 7DT. VAT no 918 5617 01.

CEO of Bauer Publishing UK Chris Duncan

Editorial Assistant Whitney Jones MOJO CD and Honours Creative Director Dave Henderson

Soul Jazz have never really put a foot wrong, though the Delta Swamp compilations I feel lack a bit of cohesiveness. But I’d like to give dues to the two volumes of Country Soul Sisters, that both do a damn fine job of bringing us some country women’s greatness. Good to see Nu Yorica! featured, next to which I’d recommend the equally excellent Brazil USA 70. And as there are a myriad of superb Studio One comps, for those looking for more serious roots digging, Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon and the three volumes of Black Man’s Pride are wonderful.

Who knew you could see your own future?

Phil, via e-mail

Greetings from across the pond. My wife and I moved from northern California to Natchez, Mississippi a year ago and the MOJO subscription never missed a beat despite the change of address. Every month I look forward to the new arrival and am never disappointed. Every issue is jam-packed with stories, trivia, heretofore undisclosed info, and always written with insight. From Robbie Basho to Marc Ribot, Ornette Coleman to Charles Lloyd, all the wonderful retrospectives make for joyous and investigative reading every time. The discs are a bonus, to be sure, but the articles remain the focus. Do I have a request, you say? Doesn’t everybody?!

For syndication enquiries go syndication@bauermedia.co.ukto:

We gonna do this, or are we gonna keep chit-chatting like this is your mommy’s book club?

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Just read the article in MOJO 346 on The Stooges and it reminded me of the time back in 1971 when, as an 18-year-old, I was seriously into them. To my delight I saw that they were going to play the London Roundhouse, so on that Sunday I set off for the venue and it wasn’t until after I’d paid my 50p admission (yep, that’s how cheap it was for an eighthour session and half a dozen great bands) that it transpired they weren’t going to show. I was totally gutted, as you would expect, but I did get to see Sha Na Na, who were also on the bill, and they were superb. I never did get to see The Stooges, but I did get to see their Detroit counterparts the MC5, when they came over in 1972. Guess ya can’t win ’em all.

Simon Kilby

To find out more about where to buy MOJO, contact Frontline Ltd, at 1st Floor, Stuart House, St Johns Street, Peterborough PE1 5DD. Tel: 01733 555161.

That’s what’s killing the kids. Inspired by your recent coverage of Roxy Music [MOJO 344], I dug out For Your Pleasure. Oh my. Eight extraordinary songs with not a chorus or a middle eight between them. They’d have thrown Bryan Ferry out of the Brill building.

Business Analyst Mita Parekh Marketing Manager Susan Litawski

You were so close. So close to the truth.

Managing Editor Linda Steventon

PA to Publisher Tayla Todd

Excellent article about the Grateful Dead’s 1972 European jaunt [MOJO 343], but I wish you’d found room to explain the whole “Bozo”/“Bolo” thing was part of the Dead’s devotion to American comedy geniuses The Firesign Theatre, who released their fourth LP I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus in 1971. In addition, in the ’80s Firesign member Phil Austin was hired to write a screenplay, tentatively titled The Dead Sell Out at Jerry Garcia’s insistence, meant to star the group, but it was never produced.

Classified Sales Manager Ben Peck

Senior Events Producer Marguerite Peck

Sander Varusk, Tallinn

I got to the letters page in MOJO 346 and was taken aback by the accusation of misogyny regarding the Patti Smith front cover. Using an old image is not misogyny – if it is you stand accused of ageism against Springsteen on the cover of said issue.

Chief Financial Officer, Bauer Magazine Media UK Lisa Hayden

I loved your Harvey Mandel article [MOJO 344]. However the caption for the photo at the bottom of the page says “On-stage with Canned Heat in 2015.” This is not Harvey but I believe it is Dale Spaulding, who replaced Harvey. Harvey also does not play a Les Paul.

Clare Chamberlain

Brand Director Joel Stephan Sales Operations Co-ordinator

Commercial Marketing Director Liz Martin

Mark Leviton, Nevada City, California

A feature on one Bill Nelson would be most welcome, but, hey, in the wake of the new Elvis movie, that’s all right. MOJO, any way you want to do. Thank you so very much.

Great feature on Burning Spear [MOJO 346], but “last living legend of roots reggae”? As far as I know Big Youth is still alive…

Classified Sales Executive Imogen Jackaman

Rance Haig, via e-mail

The obvious things are not what people observe

I have subscribed to this mag for more years than I can remember, and you have turned me on to many very talented women who would have otherwise passed me by. I would say you present a balanced view of the music scene and even pull up Albini in the issue about his ’80s group name. Keep up the good work covering all bases: maybe time for a female guest editor to push a few boundaries?

Helen Morris

Willie Hines, Natchez, Mississippi

Publisher, Premium and Entertainment Lauren Holleyoake PA to Group MD Elisha Thomas

Head Of Magazine Brands Anu Short

H Bauer Publishing is authorised and regulated by the FCA (Ref No. 845898).

It’s forced conforming.

Group MD Women’s Mass & Celebrity, Premium and Entertainment

Robert ‘Angelo’ Sawyer, via e-mail

We are nerds and freaks

Regional Advertising Katie Kendall

Mark Critchell, Dorset

Are you gonna hurt us with your mean stare again?

them to, to discover artists or scenes we might have otherwise missed.

EA to CFO Stacey Thomas

COMPLAINTS: H Bauer Publishing is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (www.ipso. co.uk) and endeavours to respond to and resolve your concerns quickly. Our Editorial Complaints Policy (including full details of how to contact us about editorial complaints and IPSO’s contact details) can be found at www.bauermediacomplaints.co.uk

EA to CEO Vicky Meadows

N A THURSDAY afternoon in late July, Blake Mills received a text confrming that what had seemed impossible only a year earlier: that Sunday, July 24, Joni Mitchell would take the stage to play an unannounced set at the Newport Folk Festival. Mills would be one of the guitarists fanking her.

“On this text thread, we get a picture of them all buckled up on a plane, including Joni – I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is actually happening,’” Mills told MOJO days later, during an Illinois tour stop. “But so many aspects of this were left up to the fnal moment: How much is she going to sing? What would her voice allow her to do? And is she going to play guitar?”

That future had now arrived. Mitchell and Carlile were bringing the Joni Jam to Newport – her frst appearance there since 1969 and, more important, her frst full performance in more than two decades.

On Friday afternoon, the band rehearsed in a barely air-conditioned building on a nearby naval base. Mills had transcribed arrangements from Mitchell’s albums and YouTube videos, hoping to capture some of the dynamism of her classic bands. T he ragtag team ran

That night, Carlile took the whole crew to dinner at the ocean-side Castle Hill Inn (Mitchell had lobster). “We were all freaking out that we had not only been witness to this magic but also part of a small group lifting her up on that stage, especially for those of us who have been long-time Joni jammers,” said Lucius’ Jess Wolfe. “She is our hero.”

JONI MITCHELL

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO

A ForRoundFriends

When Mitchell arrived, she wanted to rehearse the set twice more. “She’s 78 years old, and there’s very little air in this room,” Mills remembered, laughing. “By the third time, I was drenched in sweat. And I was just amazed that she’d been singing for two hours.”

On Sunday, a few dozen performers and supporters gathered around Mitchell, including Mills, de facto MC Carlile, and country singer Wynonna Judd, who, like many on-stage and in the audience of 10,000, wept. At one point, Allison Russell, who sang harmonies and played clarinet, watched Mitchell lean forward to belt out a song. She smiled when Carlile adjusted her gold-plated microphone, trying to make this oncefamiliar but now-novel endeavour more

WHAT GOES ON!

On the carousel of time: Joni Mitchell takes the throne for her first full per formance in over 20 years, Newport Folk Festival, July 24, 2022; (clock wise from top right) Brandi Carlile shows her appreciation; bigging up the Joni Jam; a cast of thousands; Mitchell takes up her guitar.

“Thatcomfortable.gestureof care spoke to their loving trust,” said Russell. “They are a chosen family, and it almost feels like Brandi is Joni’s daughter.” Mitchell and Carlile were interviewed together by CBS the same day, when Joni said, “I’ve never been nervous about being in front of an audience. But I wanted to be good, you know… I didn’t sound too bad tonight.”

Just seven years earlier, Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm and lost the ability to sing and even walk. But in recent years, she’d doggedly returned to performing inside her California home at a series of star-studded intimate gatherings dubbed Joni Jams. They were facilitated by folk singer Brandi Carlile, a Mitchell acolyte who became a confdant.

a set that included Mitchell standards like Carey and Case Of You and some of her personal Joni Jam favourites, like Love Potion No. 9.

“I wanted to be good… I didn’t sound too bad tonight.”

12 MOJO Getty(4),WesterveltNina

Joni Mitchell makes her live comeback with a star-packed jam at Newport!

Grayson Haver Currin

At Mills’s frst Joni Jam – in Septem ber 2021, with Chaka Khan in attendance – Mitchell started to sing more of her own songs. “The following day, Brandi explained how different that was. She said, ‘Just watch… Joni’s back,’” says Mills, who serenaded Joni alongside Paul McCartney for her birthday during a subsequent Jam. “She recognised that moment, and she could see the future.”

Hi-C

HE BOOKS we publish exist as love letters,” says Thurston Moore. He’s referring to Linger On: The Velvet Underground – Legend, Truth, Interviews by Ignacio Julià. “This book exemplifes that principle because it’s based on this relationship that [Spanish music journalist] Ignacio Julià had with The Velvet Underground which began back in the days when Spain was being controlled by Franco’s fascist regime,” he says. “The VU became a voice for his own aspirations, and later, he was able to befriend the band in a way that was unlike any normal rock journalist.”

Donna Lynn

boythingbandelectricCambridgejugwithaforteddyhairstyles

THURSTON MOORE BRINGS LINGER ON, A REVELATORY UNDERGROUNDVELVETBOOK

“T

GIMME FIVE… SONGS ABOUT HAIRCUTS WHAT GOES ON! journalist.”normalunlikeinthetowas“Ignacioablebefriendbandawayanyrock

Similarly barbers-inclined: My Beatle Haircut by The Twiliters and The Swans’ The Boy With The Beatle Hair.

The dad of the Wigan ukulele OG, who was sufering from TB, tells of the chaos that ensues when he adopts a radical new haircut (“to show what a nut I could be”). A distant antecedent to Beck’s Devils Haircut.

MOORETHURSTON

Linval Thompson Don’t Cut O f Your Dreadlocks ( THIRD WORLD, 1976)

I’ll be your rear VU mirror: (clockwise from above) Nico and her harmonium, New York, 1971; Lou Reed and John Cale in 1989; Thurston enjoys Lou’s Metal Machine Music, 1978; (inset) the book’s cover.

George Formby Sr. I Parted My Hair In The Middle ( ZONOPHONE, 1914)

“[The Velvets] historically found journalists diffcult,” says Moore. “But Ignacio was really immersed in their history and never really had an agenda. Sterling really opened up to him.”

Linger On is a lavishly mounted collection of Julià’s personalised conversations with Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Mo Tucker, Doug Yule and, signifcantly, Sterling Morrison, interspersed with many glorious, previously

Cheery cash-in teen pop from Canada, about a lad whose Fabs coif made him so irresistible his girlfriend had to get one too.

Leave My Curl Alone (SKANLESS, 1991)

14 MOJO courtesyParis,HaroldphotoThurstonLibrary,PeaceEcstaticcourtesyJulià,IgnaciobyOnLingerfromHamilton,©James

Compton MC lists the trials and triumphs of JehrisportingCurls–the wet-look wave favoured by discerning early-’90s West Coast rappers.

THE MOJO RECORD CLUB

“There are points in the Sterling interview that really made me laugh out loud,” adds Eva, “like the rant he goes on where he calls Frank Zappa ‘a horrible triumph of self-promotion.’”

Order Linger On from: cargorecordsdirect.co.uk

unseen Velvets photos by the photographer James Hamilton. Published by Ecstatic Peace Library, the books imprint run by Moore and his wife and collaborator, the publisher Eva Marie Moore, it’s a book that captures this most bristly and wary group of musicians in an almost relaxed and intimate setting. The results can sometimes be unsettling, such as when Nico confesses to Julià that she is “a secret Nazi… I like extreme things.” Even Reed eventually drops his customary disdain, relaying a side of himself that Julià describes as “gentler and full of affection”.

THURSTON MOORE discusses his book in a recent episode of our new podcast, The MOJO Record Club. Hosted by Andrew Male, a new episode arrives every fortnight in your usual podcast places. Find out more at mojo4music.com/podcast.

The intimate, secret-knowledge feel of the book extends to the use of images by the New York photographer James Hamilton, many of which have never previously been seen. They include a remarkable set of Nico studies in which she resembles a formidable heroine from a ’70s Italian giallo, her face painted white and framed by a severe page-boy crop. “Eva and I love his work,” says Moore, “but his images just don’t exist on the internet. He’s pre-internet.”LingerOnis the latest in Ecstatic Peace Library’s output, which, since launching in 2008, has released books as wide and varied as Jørn ‘Necrobutcher’ Stubberud’s frst-person account of the Norwegian black metal scene, a lavishly presented compendi um of Glasgow punk fanzine Ripped And Torn, and a biography of Liverpool poet Adrian Henri. Discussing their next release, the autobiography of London Feminist Improvis ing Group founder Maggie Nichols in October, Eva says, “These are books that would never get made otherwise. There’s no point coming to us with a book that would get published by Taschen because you already have an outlet for that. We want to keep fnding the voices that wouldn’t ordinarily be heard.”

Andrew Male

play like no one’s listening, which, as they only pressed up 50 copies, wasn’t that far from the truth. Apparently, they’re still going and working on LP two.

Toby Jug Washboard& Band Greasy Qui f (NO LABEL, 1969)

My Boyfriend Got A Beatle Haircut (CAPITOL, 1964)

Linval does not advise a haircut – hair are your aerials, and look what happened to Samson. There’s further reggae hair counsel on Marley’s Natty Dread and Grow Your Locks by Cocoa Tea, or try Bob’s Crazy Baldheads for the inverse.

See also various shouts to the Hi Top Fade ’do by Public Enemy, EPMD, NWA, etc.

October’s Shufemania!, ROBYN HITCHCOCK is already thinking of new music. “I’m always working on stuf, like a hamster gnawing a piece of toilet paper… [it’s] good for my mind”

HIS IS the frst interview I’ve done in a few years,” says Natalie Merchant with a laugh, as she readies her frst full album of original material since 2014. “I’m a little rusty…”

Ian Harrison

JONES (left) premiered two new songs, Born Black and No More War, at her recent headline Meltdown show in London…

She describes it as, “like four records in one stylistically,” with soul, orchestral pop (“like Vashti Bunyan, or even Nico”), chamber music and, for a cover of Lankum’s Hunting The Wren, “a kind of dirgey, folky Celtic sound.” Though electric guitars appear just twice on the record, dynamism is promised. On the all-acoustic Guardian Angel, she says, “there is a moment where there’s this crescendo, it’s as powerful as Led Zeppelin just at that moment (laughs). There’s a lot of open space and moments of silence, then rising to these kinds of crescendos.”

Title:

There were multiple reasons for her silence. As well the 18-year demands of motherhood – “The whole album recording/ releasing/touring cycle, that’s just not conducive to mothering,” she says – in recent years she underwent surgery which involved

P.J. HARVEY (right) revealed to Rolling Stone that she’s been recording a new LP to be released next summer. “I literally sang in the phone; I didn’t even demo it, because I didn’t want to get attached to the demo versions,” she revealed

She plans to keep busy, spending September and October in Italy putting the words of Italian-Jewish poet Lina Schwarz to music. Then the album, entitled Keep Your Courage, will be released in spring 2023. “I’m actually going to tour which I haven’t done for an album in many, many years,” she says. “It’s going to be an exciting year, next year.”

feelings, actually.”exhilarating,18which10tomyselfbecausedamsuppressing.thatcreatecompulsionthistosomething,I’dbeenThebroke,fnally,Igavepermissionsitatthepianoforhoursadayagain,Ididn’tdoforyears…thatwas

Natalie Merchant

Clarke. He’s also nearly completed a new LP of his own, telling ABC Audio it was done remotely between his bathroom studio in Manhattan, Brooklyn, California and Lubbock, Texas …touring in Europe, THE SMILE have been playing new songs, including Colours Fly, of which Thom Yorke said, “new one… work in progress… there are a few.” Others are Bodies Laughing and Friend Of A Friend …to follow

year …DRY CLEANING release their new LP Stumpwork in October.

threewicked‘Somethingthiswaycomes!’yearsago,

16 MOJO fBlickenstaJacobGetty(2)

three bones being removed from her spine; she also, for a time, lost the use of her right hand. “And, I lost my voice for a year,” she says. “So I felt like, in a way, my resurrection was getting my voice back. This project was very healing and about overcoming the obstacles – for me, it’s the subtext.”

FACT SHEET Keep Your Courage

Vermont, under Covid conditions (“it felt a little like a New England Decameron going on,” says Natalie). Long-time guitarist Erik Della Penna and drummer Allison Miller were joined by guests including singer Abena Koomson-Davis, and over fve months, band, strings and brass were recorded in stages. “I’d say it’s the most fun I’ve ever had making a record,” says Merchant. “It was exciting, and I think we captured that excitement.”

Songs: Come On, Aphrodite; Eye Of The

The Buzz: “I’d been up all these

stirring

SPARKS are recording a new LP …Boston shoegazers DROP NINETEENS, who split in 1995, have re-formed three-quarterswithof the line-up that recorded 1992’s Delaware New LP Hard Light is expected next

ValentineTheTowerNarcissus;Storm;OfBabel;FeastOfSaint

Is there an overarching concept, asks MOJO? “The theme is love in its many aspects, which I’ve kind of avoided most of my career,” she says. “I counted up how many occasions I use the word ‘love’ in the lyrics, and it was 26 times… I think I’ve allowed myself to be a little bit more obtuse and opaque in my language, and more creative, than I’ve been in the past. Maybe it’s similar to how I wrote in my earlier days. [But] I just have so much more life experience to draw from.”

She adds that visual cues were pinned to the studio wall for each song: “Guardian Angel had a watercolour by William Blake of a demonic angel wrestling with a human,” she says. “Big Girl was a Diane Arbus photograph, and for Hunting The Wren, I had a daguerreo type of an Irish peasant girl… everything I perceive is in visual terms, it’s how I function. It might come from being dyslexic, I don’t know.”

WORKING

The “main thing” which got her back in the studio, she says, was her daughter going to college. Recording began late last year at Guilford Sound, a residential studio in

MOJO WORKING

“T

Courage calls courage: Natalie Merchant, singing of love in all aspects.

GRAHAM NASH has contributed to a new solo LP by his old Hollies bandmate Allan

“This crescendo, it’s as powerful as Led Zeppelin…”

ALSO

its

NATALIE MERCHANT GETS RESURRECTED ON SOLO LP SEVEN

NATALIE MERCHANT

Produced by John Parish, tracks include No Decent Shoes For ConservativeRain,Hell and Icebergs …after sharing a studio snap and the words GRACE

Due: April 2023 Production: Natalie RyanSnyder;(engineering,MerchantDavemixing,Freeland)

The Beatles dynast talks musical exorcism, the dread and panic of singing Imagine, and dad John.

CONFIDENTIALROCK’N’ROLL THESESLENNON’S Julian’s hot ﬁve. 1 John Lennon Imagine ( APPLE, 1971) 2 Julian Lennon Saltwater ( VIRGIN, 1991) 3 Bob Marley & The Wailers One Love (ISLAND, 1977) 4 Tears For Fears Sowing The Seeds Of Love (FONTANA, 1989) 5 The Beatles A Day In The Life (PARLOPHONE 1967) “Am I asking for itYes.trouble?Bringon.” JULIAN LENNON Julian better,makebeginningLennon:toitbetter,better...

In some part, it was because of [2021 documentary] Get Back and looking at Dad and seeing him in a new, loving light again. It was a reminder of who he was back when we lived together, and how mad he was and clever and smart and funny and idiotic and crazy… you know, I fell in love with him again.

18 MOJO AscroftRobert

About four or fve years ago, I received, from my old business managers’ basement, a few boxes of tapes. There was 30 years of diferent

What sent you back to music?

You recently covered your dad John’s song Imagine for Ukraine. I’d been dreading this moment for 30, 40 years, literally. My manager Rebecca says to me, “Global Citizen are doing this big thing called Stand Up For Ukraine, do you have anything up your sleeve?” I knew what that meant immediately. The moment I said yes, the panic really did set in, because how the ‘f’ am I going to do this? And the frst thing I thought was, “OK, acoustic guitar, raw, no production, honest, I don’t want to bullshit the public on this one, or myself.” This was one of the most scary moments in my life, but you know, I think we did OK.

Te ll us something you’ve never told an interviewer before.

It’s a heavy patrimony – you’ve referred to “non-stop John Lennon weirdness” –and must have been very strange a lot of the time.

Ian Harrison

Tell me about it. I certainly could have lost it a few times. But I’ve always said since day one that I wanted to make my mother [Cynthia] proud, above and beyond anything else in the world. I mean, she was my rock. She still is. Whether you believe in this stuf or not, I still think she guides me sometimes. All I wanted for her was to have a happy and peaceful life, and not have a young reprobate tearing up and causing her worry and trouble! Even though I did in my earlier days.

The album’s called Jude… Ha! Am I asking for trouble? Yes. Bring it on. I mean, Hey Jude, it’s lovely having someone write a song about you and their hopes that you’re going to make it through this pile of s-h-i-t, but people don’t realise that every time that song is played, and I probably have heard it more than most people, it’s a reminder of when my parents split up and it all went pear-shaped. But the song was all about making your way through the world and making life better, and becoming who

HIRTY-EIGHT years after debut solo hit Too Late For Goodbyes, Julian Lennon has returned with the boldly-titled Jude, his seventh solo LP and his frst since 2011. More recently engaged in photography, documentary-making and his charity The White Feather, he calls Jude his “coming-of-age” album, blending indie-moderne and inevitable echoes of Fabness with environmental and humanitari an concerns. “It’s all about love, light and shade, and everything in-between,” says the personable 59-year-old in tones which still reveal a soft Scouse accent. “Where it really came from was looking into the mirror and going, OK, where am I now? Who am I now? And what does this all mean?”

Are you more reconciled to your dad now?

JULIAN LENNON

you’re meant to be, you know? I just felt that, especially in the last few years.

formats, of songs in demo form to nearfnished stuf. I came across songs that I loved, and all that needed doing was updating the production, and maybe some instrumenta tion. That got me in the mood to work on other ideas. Making music’s naturally within me, if I hear melodies in my head, I have to put it down and get it out, like an exorcism. If people like it, they like it. If they don’t, they don’t.

I’ve given all my secrets away, I’m afraid. All my cats are out of the bag. You know, I’ve only told a few other people this, but a few years ago, I decided to change my name by deed poll. By birth, I am John Charles Julian Lennon. And for years, I’ve been proving to myself what I can do. I just decided, switch ‘John’ and ‘Julian’ around, so that, you know, I’m fnally me. And Jude was a whole part of that process.

Yeah, I’d seen him do that at another show and watched it on YouTube, and I kind of went, “Errrr, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that.” It shocked me. But then when I saw it at Glastonbury, on a big screen with a good sound system – near enough to being there – you know, I actually enjoyed it, especially as it was Paul’s eightieth, and Glastonbury… you know, hats of

Paul is now virtually duetting with John live, notably at Glastonbury.

Jude is out on September 9 on BMG.

Does he think she might record again? “I would n’t be surprised,” he says. “She’s a hard worker. She’s working at regaining the ability to play guitar, and what that means is that she’ll start experimenting, and who knows what’s gonna come with that?”

MOJO 19 TillyerYorkOxley,TomSanton,MyriamLainez,ShervinAlamy, WHAT GOES ON!

I was 18 and it was the heatwave summer. The tarmac was melting. I was living at my mum and dad’s house in Menlove Gardens in Liverpool. I had these Wharfedale Linton speakers in my bedroom I was very proud of – me and my mates would get stoned and listen to music. Frank Zappa, Beefheart, Tangerine Dream, Faust… then I heard the frst Ramones album which, in a way, would have ruined the whole dream.

I probably bought it at [record outlet] Probe. There was a shop called Penny Lane where, after I heard Ramones, I sold all my records and started again. It was my gateway to Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith, and a gateway to the rest of my life really. It felt like I could be in this band. Ian Ramone? If only.

PETER GABRIEL, IGGY, AND MORE SALUTE THE GENIUS OF LEONARD COHEN

He’s talking about Here It Is: A Tribute To Leonard Cohen. Released on Blue Note, it features 12 Cohen songs, two of them instru mentals, the others sung by 10 different vocalists, each of them backed by the group of largely jazz musicians that Klein assem bled. The songs span Cohen’s musical career and include the less covered as well as the obvious, with a line-up including Norah Jones, Gregory Porter, Mavis Staples and James Taylor. Sarah McLachlan does the honours on Hallelujah: “She sang it as if her life depended on it,” says Klein. “You cast voices to songs, but the priority for me is that I want to have the person sing something that they feel in their blood. David Gray (who does a bereft version of Seems So Long Ago, Nancy from Songs From A Room) had fxated on that song for a long, long time, so serendipity has a hand in it, as well.”

As told to Ian Harrison

Another voice is Peter Gabriel, who sings Here It Is from Ten New Songs and notes, “anyone looking at an empty page trying to write a song lyric sits in the shadow of the mountain that was Leonard Cohen.” Iggy Pop, meanwhile, takes on You Want It Darker, speaking the words in a deep, dark voice over dramatic drums and sax. It’s worth noting that Iggy and Cohen have history. In the days before Tinder, when Iggy was

Strangers at the wheel: Leonard Cohen revs up; (insets, from top) tribute-payers Peter Gabriel, Mavis Staples and Norah Jones.

E WAS a very dear friend of mine,” says musician and producer Larry Klein of the late Leonard Cohen. “About fve years after he passed in 2016, I thought, there’s this wealth of great songs to work with, do a record and hopefully enable people to hear them in a new way. But the other reason was that I just wanted to keep him in the air around me, because I missed him so much.”

LARRY KLEIN

A MYCHANGEDRECORDLIFE

“H

Growing up in the ’60s in Liverpool, obviously there was the Beatles thing, then I got into The Velvet Underground, I was playing guitar, all that. Disco and prog rock were still going on. But this was an emotional reaction, like, I’m sick of everything and this is my music. I couldn’t imagine being in Genesis or something, but I could do this.

Lightning Seeds’ See You In The Stars is out on October 14 on BMG. The band tours the UK from October 27.

The Mersey hitmaker wigs out over Ramones (Sire, 1976).

It wasn’t just notes or a muso thing – it smelt of New York and danger and excite ment. It was anthemic, yet it connected with the ’60s pop I loved, almost like warped doo wop. It was like performance art, they’d seen the Bay City Rollers and they had their uniforms too. So it had a physical efect – you pufed out your chest and got a leather jacket and some 501s from the Army & Navy Stores. I remember being chased around town because I didn’t have fares on… only certain people knew the secret, a lot of people couldn’t get it, and you loved that. All your mates from that point were people who knew the secret too. But I still don’t know what the secret is.

Klein tells MOJO that his former spouse Joni Mitchell also hoped to contribute. “She was anxious to do it. She’s been working her way to regain all sorts of things, and she’s been wanting to sing again, she just hadn’t gotten to the point where she had the confdence to go into the studio.”

“I voiceLeonard’shadsort of in the back of my head.”

Sylvie Simmons

Here It Is: A Tribute To Leonard Cohen is out on Oct 14 on Blue Note.

LAST NIGHT

recording in LA, the two teamed up to answer a personal ad from a woman seeking a man with “the raw energy of Iggy Pop” and “the elegant wit of Leonard Cohen.” Don Was took a photo to certify the reply.

Ian Broudie

Though instruments and arrangements differ, the album’s overall mood has much in common with the concerts on Cohen’s remarkable late-life tour – the vocals soft, dark and half-spoken, the music detailed and textured, but restrained in service of the lyrics. Says Klein, “Everything that we did had to serve the poetry, because I knew that Leonard was constantly frustrated, even on his own versions of songs, that the music was getting in the way of the words.”

Arguably, the most intense tracks are the two without words – instrumental versions of Avalanche, with Immanuel Wilkins on sax, and Bird On The Wire, with guitarist Bill Frisell. “I hope he would have loved it,” says Klein of his friend. “When I was working on it, I had his voice sort of in the back of my head. [But] he was very forgiving to people when they covered his songs.”

one daily meal of a hotdog and potato salad. My manager asked if there was anything I wanted, and I said, ‘I’d really like a car’.”

Twenty tracks of soulful swamp pop ofincludingglory,coversI’mSo

the bittersweet title track. Other

SWAMP THINGS

Recorded at the Los Angeles dancehall, this primordial live album stirs up R&B, C&W and cajun, and features the pair’s Another Saturday Night comp duet Try To Find Another Man.

I Ran Down Every Dream ( YEP ROC, 2022)

tinued to play Louisiana casinos and write songs: his most famous, If You Don’t Love Me (Why Don’t You Just Leave Me Alone), was a hit for Freddy Fender in 1977. His new album is flled with similar pained gems, including a new version of No Tomorrows Now, a should-have-been hit from the days of struggle. “To get that song recorded back in the early ’70s,” he recalls, “I had to collect empty Coke bottles to sell back just so I could call my producer.”

I Ran Down Every Dream is out on Yep Roc in August. UK dates are expected later in the year.

As with many large-living road dogs, there’s sadness and regret at the heart of many McLain songs. “I liked to party,” he recalls. “We’d stay up for three days taking speed, then pills to go to sleep… but I quit drugs when I was about 45. I probably stopped just in time.”These days he’s a devout Catholic Evangelist, enjoying a second coming of his own. “It took me four years to make this album,” says McLain, who continues to play shows. “During that time we had two hurricanes, my house burned down and I had a heart attack, but I guess someone up there wants me to have this time. I’m on my way again, baby!”

Picking out a brand new Ford Futura, McLain knew that hotdogs were forever off the menu, saying, “I was on my way, baby!”

Except, he wasn’t: Sweet Dreams was McLain’s only hit. Anyone who remembered him likely discovered him th rough his two songs on 1973’s Charlie Gillett-curated Another Saturday Night compilation of ‘lost’ Louisiana ’60s acts. Yet, among those fans were Lily Allen – who few McLain to the UK to play at her frst wedding – Joe Strummer, Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello. The latter two and many more (see sidebar) appear on his frst new album in 40 years, I Ran Down Every Dream

McLain was bassist in West’s band until he recorded Sweet Dreams.

At The Purple Peacock ( JIN, 1965)

Clint West And The BoogieFabulousKings

Andy Fyfe

“It went higher in the charts than Patsy Cline’s version,” the 82-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist says from his home in tiny Plaucheville, Louisiana, “but I came home with 30 cents in my pocket, living off

TOMMY c

OUISIANA SWAMP pop pioneer Tommy McLain thought he’d made it in 1966, when he returned home from touring w ith Dick Clark’s Caravan Of Stars. That July his single Sweet Dreams, a celestial yet eerie song of Lethean heartbreak, had hit US Number 15.

20 MOJO Getty

Tommy McLain

Another track, I Hope, was written especially for him by early rock’n’roll songwriter and fellow Louisianan Bobby Charles. “Elvis Costello heard me play it live some years ago and immediately went off to record it,” says McLain. It appears as a bonus track on Costello’s 2010 album National Ransom

Neville.MeyersJonVanplayersweightheavytributeincludeDykeParks,Cleary,AugieandIvan

Living the dream: Tommy McLain, with hope in his heart; (top) Tommy in 1965.

Tommy times three. Tommy McLain The Essential Collection ( JIN, 1997)

McLain w as a lifer, howe ver, and con

His frst new album in 40 years, with duettingco-writingCostelloandon

“We’d stay up for three days taking speed.”

SWAMP POP GREAT TOMMY McLAIN GETS BACK ON TRACK WITH COSTELLO AND MORE!

CULT HEROES

LAIN

Lonesome I Could Cry, When A Man Loves A Woman, and his defnitive version of Fats Domino’s Before I Grow Too Old, written by McLain’s friend Bobby Charles.

of wildly attired “serious joke” madness internationally.

MOJO 23 (2)MorrisDennis

Ian Harrison

A new book and exhibition by photographer Dennis Morris salute the Mighty Upsetter, Lee Perry…

Scratch Aﬁre

a reggae version of the Sex Pistol’s Submission. Images of Scratch moving to the music and enjoying a smoke in the studio betray none of the chaos waiting in the wings (the Black Ark would be destroyed by fre in 1983, whereafter its architect would leave Jamaica for London). He can also be seen in the capital in 2003, the year he programmed the Meltdown Festival on the capital’s South Bank, and in a fnal session on a tourist bus in 2016. Excitingly, the exhibition promises to include a recreation of the Black Ark, plus DJ sets.

T HE STRANGEST thing about Lee Perry was, whenever I photographed him, I never needed any light,” wrote photographer Dennis Morris. “We spent the night travelling around London on top of an open-top bus; it was late, it was dark, but Scratch shone, he provided the light…” Morris’s illuminating encounters with Scratch can be appreciated anew in photobook Super Perry, and in a photo exhibition. They’re timed to mark the frst anniversary of the reggae music titan’s passing on August 29, 2021, and the Notting Hill carnival: both boast rare shots of the producer at home and abroad, working in his storied Black Ark studio in Kingston, Jamaica and spreading his unique kind

“He was the Dali of music.”reggae MORRISDENNIS

ON!

“

Super Perry: The Iconic Images Of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry by Dennis Morris is published by Tang Deng Co. The exhibition, at 30 Old Burlington Street, London, W1S 3AP, is open to the public from August 27 to September 1, 2022.

Among Morris’s portraits are scenes of John Lydon during his 1978 trip to the Black Ark when he attempted

WHAT GOES

Aiding and upsetting: (clockwise from left) Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry makes his point outside the Black Ark studio in Washington Gardens, Kingston, Jamaica, 1976; John Lydon and guitarist Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith at the Black Ark, 1978; two images of Scratch in the studio, 1976; Scratch rests from organising his Meltdown Festival, London, 2003.

“From our frst meeting at the Black Ark studio in 1976, it was magical,” Morris attests. “He MOVED, he just kept on moving… he pushed a button, then he danced a Monster dance and the sound kept changing… Each move he made, at the recording board, created a sound, then another sound then another and like a painter, after many layers, came the full picture… he was the Dali of reggae music.”

FACT SHEET

● For fans of: Julia Holter, Nadia Reid, Karima Walker, Yo La Tengo, Mount Eerie

● ”I find it really hard to listen to music when it just merelysoundsgood,” says Horn, “when it’s not profound.”somethingpenetrating

● “Fiction writing is a lot more painful than songwriting,” says Horn. “Yeah, like literally. Oh my God, my butt hurts from sitting in this chair for too long, my eyes hurt because of all the staring at the screen. But also because it’s more putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Where you can never find the missing piece.”

24 MOJO fBlickenstaJacob

Horn of plenty: Jana vibrates on the music of Silver Apples, Sibylle Baier and The Fall.

Planned for release next year, Horn’s next album will be, she says, infu enced by Western esotericism and The Fall.

Andrew Male

hinted at in Horn’s unspooling lyrics and the ominous bass-like rhythms that underpin many of her songs.

That attempt to capture something genuine and true found its way into the music Horn started recording with local Austin psych-country out ft Knife In The Water for what would eventually become her debut LP, Optimism There’s even a homage to Baier’s unique pronunciation of the word “tonight” in her own spectral song of the same name. Self-released in 2020, and then reissued by the No Quarter label earlier this year, Optimism at frst seems to resemble the contemplative daydream meanderings of Jessica Pratt or Cate Le Bon. But there is something more elusive and unsettling here,

Jana Horn plays the End Of The Road festival on September 4, and London St Pancras Old Church on September 8.

that new world I was entering into.”

Surrounded by musicians, Horn devoured her new friends’ favourite artists, everyone from Harry Nilsson to Silver Apples: “I put them on like strange out fts, and tried to fgure out what they meant.” Two of her favourite discoveries were Richard & Linda Thompson and the obscure German folk singer Sibylle Baier. “I just found them both to be profoundly genuine and true,” she says, “like someone captured it in a jar. It didn’t feel like they were putting anything on.”

KEY TRACKS

It’s curious talking to Jana Horn about Optimism in 2022, this record she recorded in 2018, then left behind for a postgraduate course in creative writing at the University Of Virginia. “And suddenly it’s time to talk again about that album again,” she says. “Optimism was written amidst lots of travelling, meeting new people, trying new things. The next one was just written in my bedroom, during the pandemic, not going anywhere.”

● Jordan ● Time Machine ● Optimism

“I got obsessed with school.”CohenLeonardinhigh

ISTENING TO Jana Horn’s hushed, hypnotic interior ballads after discover ing that she was raised in a strict Baptist community in Glen Rose, Texas, the tempta tion is to draw a hard line of infuence and connection. But when MOJO suggests to Horn that the Baptist faith or the writings of the Bible might have infuenced her songwriting, she politely questions the simplicity of our argument.

● Horn’s home town, Glen Rose, Texas is home to both millionformationsanddinosaurwhichValleyandisbeliefwhichEvidenceCreationMuseum,supportsthethattheEarth6,000yearsold,theDinosaurStatePark,featuresfootprintsgeological113yearsold.

“I think very fondly of my religious upbringing,” she says, “but we had quite a literal approach to religion. There was no space for metaphor. It was more about memorisation. It was never about an embodied personal experience. It was justInknowledge.”fact,itwasn’t until Horn moved to Austin, Texas for college that she began to experience anything close to a personal spiritual epiphany, and this time it came through music. “I’d grown up listening to Michael Jackson, Queen, some country music and Christian radio in the car,” she says. “And I got obsessed with Leonard Cohen in high school. But when I moved to Austin I was just extremely open to everything, just vibrating on

“I write a lot whilst driving,” explains Horn, “so it’s like an oral tradition of self, singing it, then remembering it by repeating it. The bass pulse thing comes from stuf like Silver Apples and The Raincoats, just plucking out patterns on the top two bass strings of my guitar.”

“The radio broke in my car,” she says, “so I listened to 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong over and over again. Repetition has always felt important to me but maybe on this album more so, with the repetition of an insular life embedded in the process.”

JANA HORN MOJO RISING DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS, THE HYPNOTIC INTERIOR BALLADS OF JANA HORN

26 MOJO ShutterstockOperated,Machine

HERE WAS a tribe system at school,” remembers Miles Romans-Hopcraft, “everyone asking, ‘What are you?’” In thrall to Nirvana and Slipknot, the Brixton polymath was “a ‘grunger’. I didn’t wear Nikes – I wore Vans. But I had a double life. Outside school, my rude boy mate George would school me in grime, and my skater mate Remy taught me about dub, and my uncle played me Public Enemy records. And through the soundtrack to the Tony Hawk skateboarding video games, I discovered Bad Brains and Madlib.”

An eco-message drift, with Eno joining Mark Hollis or Scott Walker as voice of ether. From new LP FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE. Find it: YouTube

2 BIG JOANIE IN MY ARMS

“The mind expansion process reaches anoth er dimension,” promises this pirate radio ad for a bygone Islington house night. From tape release Pause For The Cause: London Rave Adverts 1991-1996, Vol. 1.

Miles

● For fans of: Tricky, TV On The Radio, Black Midi

Find it: YouTube

● South is about the gentrification of Brixton. “Brixton was a dumping ground for Caribbean people –they migrated here, set up shop, and made it wholesome and beautiful. Then the big franchises came in and I don’t see familiar faces any more. The song’s about a community being sidelined and moved on.”

●

ahead: RomansHopcraft – “Wu-Lu is about evolving into different iterations of intensity. MOJO RISING

Find it: YouTube

“Some

ENTER THE WU-LU!

A handful of experimental EPs and cassettes chronicled Wu-Lu’s embryonic develop ment. But 2021 single South – a dub-grunge broadside against urban gentrifcation – proved a landmark moment, nailing the fecund crossover sound that Loggerhead explores in depth. The LP’s lyrics, meanwhile, examine the fragility of mental health, informed partly by volunteerRomans-Hopcraft’sworkwith at-risk youth. “Some of the tunes come from a paranoid headspace,” he nods. “The record’s like a message to my friends and family, that I love you and I don’t want to see you get lost. When you break your mind, it’s a hard thing to fx.”

The Australian guitarist knuckles down for a fidgety, funky, microtonal systems jam. Wait for the album, wherein Jim O’Rourke, B.J. Cole and more join the avant-party.

Paste

Wu-Lu remains a work-in-progress, and Romans-Hopcraft clearly relishes the project’s protean nature. “Future releases might be orchestral, jungle or pop. Wu-Lu is about evolving into diferent iterations of intensity. And,” he promises, “it’s only gonna get more weird.”

With a professional trumpet-player dad who’d often take his sons on tour, and a contemporary dancer mum who ofered limitless encouragement, it was inevitable Romans-Hopcraft would make music. But, following forays into turntablism and producing dubstep as DJ Mileage, he hit a wall. “I wanted to develop beyond just making computer music,” he says. “I was a session bassist, I was DJing and producing, but I’d never married the two before.”

Stevie Chick Loggerhead is out on Warp.

● andthatatreasureLoudiscoveredtothat,waterandsuggestedIlanguageAmharic,andRastafarianwasnamecameRomans-HopcraftupwiththeWu-Lu“whenI20,onathing,tryingtolearntheofEthiopia.wantedanamethatfluidity,theirwordforis‘Wiha’.IlikedbutIchangeditWu-Lu.IlaterthataWuisapowerfulinFengShui,U-shapedvesselholdsspiritsdragons.”

1 BRIAN ENO THERE WERE BELLS

“

Loggerhead, and is a member of postpunks Warmduscher.

The Texan planetary dub ensemble and Mali’s blues guitar scion pay gliding tribute to Ali Farka Touré. From new LP Ali Find it: streaming services

Find it: YouTube

BRINGING THE DUB-GRUNGE RUCKUS FROM GENTRIFICATIONBRIXTON’SFRONTLINE

The long and winding road to Loggerhead involved “a lot of trial and error,” he admits. “I’d just keep throwing in ideas, like ingredients into a pot. I didn’t want to get pigeonholed. The jazz scene in south London was bubbling, but I didn’t want to be a jazz guy. I wanted to do me.”

This riot of apparently conficting infuenc es shaped the music Romans-Hopcraft makes as Wu-Lu. His debut album, Loggerhead, is a powerful fusion of alt-rock noise, dubby textures, inventive production and simmering urban frustration. It’s a defantly post-genre sound that’s struck a chord. Romans-Hopcraft Zooms MOJO on a Monday morning from beneath his duvet, still recovering from a weekend of record shop in-stores in Bristol and London meeting his fans. “They chat about how the music gives them a release when they’re pissed of,” he says, “and how they love the representation of a black person who skates and is on some grunge thing.”

5 HAPPY MONDAYS TART TART (LIVE)

6 COSEY FANNI TUTTI CORNET LAMENT

From new LP Delia Derbyshire: The Myths And The Legendary Tapes, brass reverberations evoke haunting Radiophonic brainscapes. Find it: streaming services

7 OREN AMBARCHI SHEBANG 1

Find it: Bandcamp

● Benmusic,we’reBenhe’dbacksomethingaboutbe.careeronbuttoandencouragedHopcraft’sRomans-dadMilestwinbrotherBenlearninstruments,alsodrilledthemhowtoughainmusicwould“He’dlectureusneedingtofallon.Thenwhenleavetheroom,wouldsay,‘Butgonnadoinnit?’”appearson

Find it: streaming services

FACT SHEET:

8 DAVID WESTLAKE MALLORY KEPT CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN

Odd, twangy retro-adventure from former Servant about the man who conquered Everest in 1922 and perished there in 1924.

Find it: streaming services

9 PLAINS PROBLEM WITH IT

10 ANONYMOUS RADIO PIRATE SOBELL RAVE

TRACKS:KEY

Serendipitously timed, Becker & Fagen’s 2000 cover of the Joni Blue song sneaks out. Inspired by the caves of Matala rather than Altamira, but the tonal congruity between LA sophisto-pop titans is heady.

Crossing county lines, four-line highways and heartbreak: Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) and Jess Williamson’s new collaboration taps deep into their shared country roots.

With a new LP in November, the feminist punk trio put riffs and hooks before books on this catchy Cars/Go-Go’s-level gem.

3 KHRUANGBIN ET VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ DIARABI

4 STEELY DAN CAREY

Get down with the month’s best punk, desert blues and electronics.

● South ● Broken Homes Calo

Re-released on 7-inch for MusiCares, favoured charity of late bassist Paul Ryder, twisted funk recorded in Sheffield in ’89.

Find it: Bandcamp

tunes come from a headspace.”paranoid MOJO PLAYLIST

MOJO MEMBERSHIP AT MEMBERS.MOJO4MUSIC.COM

Introducing, then, the MOJO Membership. We’ve launched a new deal which will bring you MOJO at less than the price you’d pay in the shops. And besides all the content you know and (hopefully) love, you’ll also get an exclusive weekly MOJO Filter email, rewards and discounts which will be genuinely useful, and lots more excellent benefts as our MOJO Membership community grows. Have a look, and see what you

A N AD HOC community, scattered across the globe, united by a love of great music and an understanding that the best place to discover more about it is via MOJO Now, though, we hope you’ll appreciate that we’ve worked out a way to make our community a bit more organised.

JOHNthink.MULVEY, EDITOR

FOR NEARLY 30 YEARS, MANY OF YOU WILL HAVE FELT PART OF A MOJO CLUB.

Choose to read or listen to the articles. Immediate access to archive of previous issues. Exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need each week. Rewards and discounts for you to access. BENEFITSMEMBERSHIPBECOMEAMEMBER from just £4.99* per month for digital access on the new MOJO app DIGITAL ONLY Read on your phone or tablet, access archive of previous issues + membership benefits PRINT + DIGITAL All the benefits of a digital membership + 12 issues of the print magazine every year including FREE UK delivery Terms & Conditions: *Monthly digital membership price. +Digital only members. Print Membership will start with the next available issue. The minimum term is 13 issues. After your first 13 issues your membership will continue at this price unless you are notified otherwise. You will not receive a renewal reminder and the recurring payments will continue to be taken unless you tell us otherwise. For full terms and conditions please visit: www.greatmagazines.co.uk/offer-terms-and-conditions. Offer ends 31/12/2022.

And he’s got work to do. In the studio next door, Burnett has been scoring the next season of The Old Man – an FX series starring Jeff Bridges as an ex-CIA op – and writing new songs for a Coward Brothers project, his periodic duo with old friend Elvis Costello. Burnett also has a new album under his own name: The Invisible Light: Spells, the second record in a trilogy of spectral blues and noir-ish electronics created with drummer Jay Bellerose (a veteran of Burnett sessions) and composer Keefus Ciancia. “Every day I get less interested in mass culture – our world is thrown around in circles by short-term trends,” Burnett contends in a warm, buoyant drawl located somewhere between West Coast aesthete and Texas cowhand. He quotes the abstract-expressionist painter Barnett New man: “Time passes over the tip of a pyramid.”

From The Legendary Stardust Cowboy to a Dylan disc worth a million, he is a facilitator of the extraordinary. But did he never want stardom for himself? “It was never a goal of mine or even an interest,” shrugs T Bone Burnett

“What he meant,” Burnett explains, “was there’s plenty of room on the sides of the pyramid for things, but time presses them into the sand. But if you put something on top, it stays there.”

”T Bone Burnett is an absolute Coward. He keeps me out of trouble, armed only with a fountain pen and a length of rope, sensing the proximity of River Of Love, Invisible Light and a new breeze etched in an indestructible circle. Records click into clarity like petals of a kaleidoscope. He and his beautiful friend, Bob Neuwirth, permitted me a bridge for It’s Not Too Late and I believe this to be true.” NOT WORTHY

MOJO 31 SeligerMarkMyers,Jason

Elvis Costello writes an ode to a T Bone.

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

Interview by DAVID FRICKE • Portrait by JASON MYERS

WE’RE

Burnett, 74, has hit many of his peaks in service to others, producing hit albums and creative turning points for Costello, Los Lobos, B.B. King, Elton John and the unlikely duo of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, to name but a few. Parallel triumphs in movies and television include 2000’s platinum-busting soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? and an Academy Award with singer Ryan Bingham for Best Original Song in the 2009 flm Crazy Heart. Born Joseph Henry Burnett in Fort Worth, Texas, he was already part-owner of a local studio, Sound City, in his teens, wrangling a mad gamut of Texans to tape, from psychedelic lunatic the Legendary Stardust Cowboy to future country outlaw Delbert McClinton (1972’s Delbert And Glen).

➢

A turn as a guitarist in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue led to an acclaimed spell in the Alpha Band – formed with fellow Rolling Thunder refugees Steven Soles and David Mansfeld – while a cluster of solo albums in the ’80s in effect predicted Burnett’s success as a producer: fnding new roads through country, folk and blues with a modernist’s ear for songwriting and a seeker’s commitment to righteous storytelling. That, inevitably, has brought him back to Dylan, who has recut more songs from his canon with Burnett as Ionic Originals.

N JULY 7, 60 YEARS ALMOST TO THE DAY after Bob Dylan recorded the protest anthem Blowin’ In The Wind in 1962, his new studio version of the song – pressed as a single acetate in a new high-end analogue-playback format, Ionic Originals – sold at auction in London for £1.4 million. T Bone Burnett, who produced the re-recording and is a founder of the company that developed the technology, did not see the hammer fall. “More than anything, I didn’t want to get on a plane,” Burnett confesses the day before, speaking in his Nashville home offce.

The Ike And Tina Turner Show on Warner Bros., released in 1965]. I thought, “Oh, God, that’s the sound I’ve been trying to get on every record I’ve ever made!” Whatever Ike and Tina did that night put some kind of spell on me.

Junior choice: the eight-year-old Joseph Henry Burnett III in New Orleans (guitarist unknown).

3 From the top: Burnett on-stage with The Alpha Band at Winterland Arena, San Francisco, January 29, 1977.

7 Kings of America: Burnett with fellow Coward Brother Elvis

You grew up in a family with strong

4 Pitch me another: The Alpha Band in 1977 (from left) Steven Soles, T Bone Burnett, David Mans feld.

6 Fruitful endeavour: Burnett in 1987.

Jimmy Rutledge, who was in a band called Bloodrock. [Their death-rock classic D.O.A. went Top 40 in 1971.] And we had other investors come in. I was there all the time. I started college, paid tuition for a couple of years but never showed up. I found what I wanted to do.

What kind of recording experience did you have before you and some friends bought Sound City in 1965?

As I remember, it cost $20,000. But it was an extraordinary amount of equipment. The friends were older. One of them was this guy

CheuseJoshBarnett,RaynSherryx2,GettyFeingold/Deborahx3,GettyAlamy,Collection/EverettBurnett,BoneTofCourtesy 32 MOJO

Christian ties. How did you reconcile that spiritual conservatism with the transgres sive appeal of blues and rock’n’roll?

Incredibly, Paralyzed got picked up by a major label, Mercury.

What were your frst musical epiphanies? As a teenager, you snuck into Fort Worth clubs with your friend Stephen Bruton, who went on to play guitar for Kris Kristoferson.

Our studio was in the basement of KXOL, the Top 40 station in Fort Worth. I took this tape into the programme director’s ofce and said, “Man, you gotta hear this.” He listened to it and went, “That’s it, that’s the new music. I’m playing it tonight at 6 o’clock.” T hey played it and got 750 calls in the frst hour – more calls than they’d had in two months. And people loved it: “That’s the greatest thing in the world”; “This is something to love about Fort Worth!” Mercury came down and bought it.

➣

9 “I never thought I could be a solo artist”: T Bone Burnett photographed in 1983, upon the release of Proof Through The Night, his third solo album.

In 1968, you co-produced and played drums on one of that decade’s most unhinged singles: Paralyzed by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. What was that session like? It hardly sounds produced at all – more like you hit ‘record’ and hoped for the best.

At the time, across the hall from our ofce, was a vacuum-cleaner company. These guys came into work one morning, and they said, “Man, we heard this guy last night at the Roundup Inn. He set up instruments for an hour, then he started screaming, and the waitress threw a tray of drinks across the room.” I said, “Bring him in, it sounds fantastic.”

I feel the opposite way, that so much of what is represented as Christianity is transgressive and that blues and rock’n’roll were more welcoming, loving and ecstatic – everything you want religion to be. I felt excluded and judged by the church. I remain a Christian because I believe in the idea of loving your enemy. But I don’t care how Christianity feels about me at all.

Yet there is a strong, moral authority that runs through your songwriting. Your 1980 solo debut was called Truth Decay, and the new album takes unforgiving aim at the partisanship in America and the hypocrisies of populism.

Then there was the Jacksboro Highway where bands were coming through all the time. The Band played out there [as the Hawks] at this place called the Skyliner Ballroom. I remember this Ike And Tina Turner show I’d seen there when I was a kid. It was the early ’60s. Years later, I found a recording of it [Live!

A LIFE IN PICTURESA LIFE IN PICTURES

“It’s not some hype or record-busi ness game. I’m not the record business.

2 Stormy weather: a scene from Martin Scorsese’s flm Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, showing T Bone Burnett at lower left next to the piano-playing Dylan.

8 Invisible lights: Burnett with Jay Bellerose (left) and Keefus Ciancia, 2019.

Burnett worth: a taste of T Bone.

He showed up in a green Chevrolet Biscayne with “NASA Presents the Legendary Stardust Cowboy” spray-painted on the side. There was a map of the moon on the roof. And he had a trunk full of this writing he had done about the Legendary Stardust Cowboy riding his winged horse Pegasus through the universe. He comes in, we turn on the tape machine and that’s what happened.

You were 17. What did it cost and how did you pay for it?

You also saw The Beatles live in 1964. They played the Memorial Coliseum [in Dallas]. There was a crush getting into the place, and I got caught in one of those crushes. I was actually lifted above the crowd and moved around. I lost a shoe and my belt in that crush. It was mostly teenage girls, so it wasn’t horrifcally scary. But I think I’ve had claustro phobia ever since.

1 4 3 2

Costello at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, CA, June 30, 1984.

5 Sunnyside up: Burnett with his Album Of The Year Grammy for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? OST, 2002.

I was in a band in high school and to get gigs, we thought we’d record a song. We went into Sound City, and it was ridiculous fun. I thought, “God, we came in here with nothing.” We spent a couple of hours and we came out with an acetate. But they said, “The studio’s for sale.” And I said, “We should buy this.” So we did.

There is a lot of hyper-criticism in what I do. I was talking with my wife Callie this morning. I don’t know how this came up, but she said, “There’s disappointment in your work.” I think that’s right. At the same time, I know that I am optimistic and hopeful, and I believe in love and kindness. I hope that’s under everything I do. I hope that all of these things I do are acts of generosity.

I’m a hillbilly guitar player,” he laughs, “fghting for good sound.”

There were some great clubs in Como, the African-American part of town. There was a crossroads with two joints across from each other, Mabel’s Eat Shop and the New Bluebird Nite Club, and on another corner, a Zion Baptist church. Down the hill, on Friday nights, there would be this old voodoo lady that sang these beautiful melodies. And downtown, there was a great singer, Robert Ealey And His Five Careless Lovers. [R&B guitarist] Cornell Dupree used to play around there. It was a musical paradise when we were teenagers.

Suddenly these coloured notes started coming out of the speakers, and my chair went up to the ceiling. I was foating around in these notes. I could see each one as it was being played and the colour of it. At that moment I thought, “This is something I will do every day for the rest of my life” (laughs).

It’s something I resisted for years because just down the road from Fort Worth was T-Bone Walker, the preeminent electric blues guitarist of all time. It was a name I got as a kid in the neighbourhood, probably when I was six or seven years old. There was a guy named Carl Wayne Hickey. He was called Bone, and I was called Bone because we were both skinny. At some point when we met, I became T Bone.

Later, when Dylan was putting Rolling Thunder together, Neuwirth said, “Come and play.” I was living in Los Angeles at the time. I came to New York. Dylan was playing a week at the Other End, and that band became ➢

“I saw The Beatles in Dallas. I lost a shoe and my belt in that crush. I think I’ve had claustrophobia ever since.”

What was your working method as a young producer? How did you judge a good take from a bad one, then express it to the artist?

don’t you just play it?” I thought, He is so much better as a drummer than me. Why would I even do this? Why don’t I listen to what he has to say? That was the beginning of me opening up, working almost exclusively from encour agement and support, only interjecting myself when need be. It’s more about trying to ‘listen’ the music into being fnished.

How did you end up playing guitar in the Rolling Thunder Revue? And given that Dylan had Roger McGuinn and Mick Ronson there, what were you adding?

Miller with The Rolling Stones; Bob Johnston with Dylan. Did they infuence your approach?

Early on, I used to write everything down. I wrote charts for people to play. I was very controlling. There was a band I worked with called the 3rd Avenue Blues Band – there’s some stuf on YouTube you can check out, a thing called Come And Get It [Uni Records, 1970]. Billy Maxwell was the drummer, and I gave him a pattern to play. He said, “Why

I have a 1968 album that you produced: The Unwritten Works Of Geofrey, Etc. by a group with the dubious name of Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit & Greenhill. It has obvious Sgt. Pepper aspirations. Did you have your own psychedelic phase – and was acid involved?

8 9 5 6 7

No. But I will say that the other guys were taking quite a bit of LSD. I remember Philip White, the bass player, walked in one morning, plugged his headphones into his bass and went, “Man, I can’t hear myself.” I knew we were of to a good start thatButday.working on that record, I was smoking some grass, sitting in the chair and looking at the board, listening through those beautiful Altec speakers.

I was adding very little (laughs). There was some stuf I was able to put down. The way it came about was in 1970 or ’71, after Janis Joplin died, [Dylan’s then-man ager] Albert Grossman called. He’d heard a tape of songs I’d done in Fort Worth. He wanted me to meet the guys in [Joplin’s] Full Tilt Boogie Band to see about joining as a songwriter and singer. So I went up to Woodstock. Bruton was living there, and I stayed at his house. The frst night, there was a gathering and [songwriter] Bobby Charles was there, guitarist Amos Garrett – and I met Bobby Neuwirth. He and I became fast friends.

David Bowie [then signed to the label] heard it and it became part of his repertoire.

You came of age in the studio at a time when producers and engineers were stars in their own right: Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd at Atlantic; Jimmy

You used your real name in early writing and production credits and released your frst album – 1972’s The B-52 Band And The Fabulous Skylarks as J. Henry Burnett. By the time of Rolling Thunder, you were going by T Bone. When and how did you get that nickname?

There’s a thing Wexler used to say: “Young producers are track-happy.” I thought that was a very interesting phrase. For years and years, engineers would mix by putting up the bass drum, getting the sound, then the snare –each individual track. Then they would put up the vocal and try to make it ft everything else. What I learned was to put up the vocal frst, then [place] the other instruments around the melody so they are not interfering or being discordant. It’s like a painting. You’re blending sounds – like colours – and trying to create a feld where they all exist around the storytelling.

“I’ve never seen anybody more generous than Bob Dylan. That level of intensity and honesty became a standard for me.” ➣

After Rolling Thunder, you made three great, eccentric albums with The Alpha Band – avant-pop songs caked in blues and country grit. How did you manage to keep

“At this point in my life, I have no complaints, and nothing but good will”: T Bone Burnett reflects, Nashville, April 2022.

34 MOJO

Neuwirth used to say, “Art isn’t for everybody.” There’s been this story in my life, that I’ve been critically approved but I’ve never had commercial success. It was never a goal of

from Blood On The Tracks that would just destroy the audience. When he played Simple Twist Of Fate, it was heart-stopping. That level of intensity and honesty became a standard for me, for what music is, what it can do and be. Everything I’ve done since has been trying to get to that, seeing how close we can come.

your record deal wit hout having any hits? [Arista president] Clive Davis just loved us. He saw us play a show in New Mexico and was incredibly taken with the band. It wasn’t something that had mass appeal. It was carrying on the freedom and transgressive aspects of Rolling Thunder.

the house band for Rolling Thunder. What did you learn from the Rolling Thunder experience – especially from Dylan about leadership and songwriting – that carried over into your work?

Courage – and I learned what a generous performance was. I’ve seen extraordinary performances through my life – Nina Simone, Pablo Casals. But I’ve never seen anybody more generous than Bob. He would do songs

I really tried to be a public performer. I thought, I’m gonna give this a go. But I never thought I could be a solo artist. It’s a rare, amazing person that can be a solo artist, Bob Dylan being one. He’s written his songs, he’s sung ’em, he’s performed them. He’s done it. I felt I was working more at my speed when I was playing guitar with Robert and Alison on their Raising Sand tour. I thought, I feel comfortable here. I have these great singers, these killer guys I’m playing with. That seemed like the right place for me.

For the Coen prison-escapeBrothers’lark,set in

Neuwirth used to give me trouble for that all the time. I’m sure that I’ve hidden behind other people. At the same time, what I want to do for myself is not anything I would ever earn a living from. There was a time in the ’80s when I was out there, performing, and I was actually pretty good. But I never got anywhere close to the people I thought were good, like Ray Charles, The Beatles, Hank Williams.

Elvis and I both have the streak you were talking about. He writes with a great deal of moral authority. But frst of all, we bonded over loving the same music. He knows more about American music than 99.9 per cent of the people in this country. So we were able to DJ for each other, hip each other to things. We have the same taste. And he’s an artist – an honest-to-God solo artist.

How do you respond?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (LOST HIGHWAY, 2000)

T Bone on the menu. Your waiter: David Fricke

According to Stanley, who sang that stunning a cappella version of the tradi tional ballad O Death, you originally recorded him doing it in the style of Dock Boggs, playing a banjo.

THE PRESERVATION ACT Various ★★★★★

[into the studio], and Ralph said, “You know, I would like to just do this a cappella.” And I went, “Great, let’s do that.” (Laughs) That’s collaboration, where you all come to the right conclusion.

You won your frst Grammy for the 2000 soundtrack album O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Were you surprised by the success of that record, given that the Coen Brothers’ flm was based on music from the Great Depression?

★★★★

MOJO 35 MyersJason

I produced a couple of records in the ’90s: [1993’s] August And Everything After for Counting Crows and [1996’s] Bringing Down The Horse for The Wallfowers. Both of those records were very much like O Brother. There was a continuity in them that had to do with folk music, Dylan and The Band, all of that stuf. We weren’t making O Brother to sound like an old-time bluegrass record. We had this extraordinary group of musicians and singers – Emmylou Harris, Ralph Stanley, Gillian Welch – and I thought, We have a George Clooney movie to put a light on this music.

TO THE BONE

You have long-running relationships with artists, including Costello, Plant and Krauss, John Mellencamp and Elton John. Have there been acts of, say, classic rock vintage who wanted to work with you but you felt didn’t have any more gas in the tank? Oh, yes, I have.

I was sitting two feet from him. And we played the song. It happened in fve minutes. We did other songs. But this one – I think we played it just once. We all knew it. As you know, Mr Dylan is very discreet. I don’t feel at liberty to say the other songs at this point. But he chose them from all throughout his working life.

What is your take on the current generation of pop producers, such as Jack Antonof and Mark Ronson? And what is the future of record production when young artists think they can do it themselves in their bedrooms?

No, we haven’t. And how do you produce Dylan? You put a mike in front of him and say, “We’re rolling.” That’s it. He produces himself. If we were to do something more convention ally, we could do it completely simple and straight up.

The new version of Blowin’ In The Wind was your frst production for Dylan. And you played guitar on it. What was it like readdressing a song that he had already recorded to historic e fect?

mine or even an interest. Mass approval doesn’t make something good.

You were an opening act for Elvis Costello before co-producing and playing on his 1986 album, King Of America. Why did the two of you bond so quickly?

There are always going to be artists that take whatever technology there is and make mind-blowing music with it. Billie Eilish and her brother [Finneas] are geniuses of digital music. They use that technology for what it’s worth. Mark Ronson’s around town and we’ve got mutual friends. I’d love to do something with him someday. There’s a guy named Bobby Krlic [AKA The Haxan Cloak]. He’s an excellent producer-composer. We hang out and compare notes. He’s studied a lot of stuf that I haven’t and vice versa.

When I interviewed you in 1986 for a Rolling Stone story on Costello, you said this about him: “My main criticism is that some of what he’s done is too facile. He has to be careful with his brain.” And when I mentioned that to Costello, he replied, “I know how to write songs already. What I learned from T Bone was when to leave them alone.”

I guess the producer is the one that has to deal with the budget. Other than that, he’s just another guy in the room. At times, young artists need someone who knows their way around the studio. But it’s not about the technology. It’s the artist. Artists can make art out of mud.

Fresh from the mad-circus energy of Rolling Thunder, Burnett, Steven Soles (vocals, guitar) and David Mans feld (anything with strings) founded this trio in the same jubilantly confounding spirit, fusing folk roots, country comforts and bar-band hooks with subversive glee and surrealist dread –alternative Americana before there was a name for it. The second and third LPs are just as weird and compelling.

I have a new song called Everything And Nothing, and it starts with the line, “Everybody wants to know the truth, but nobody wants to hear it.” (Laughs) I never asked anybody to like me. But I’ve had an extraordinary run. At this point in my life, I have no complaints and nothing but good will.

AFTER THE THUNDER! The Alpha Band

You know who I really love? And I’m going to fnd something to do with her – Miley Cyrus. I think she’s the world’s greatest rock’n’roll singer at the moment. And it wouldn’t be an album. I actually have something I’m gonna call her about. That could be surprising because people think of me… ( pauses) I don’t know how people think of me. I’m so disconnected from mass culture. I have no idea what’s going on (laughs). And I don’t care.

The Alpha Band ( ARISTA, 1976)

Have you and he talked about making a studio album of new material?

Yet you had a brief rock star phase in the ’80s, opening shows for The Who and making records like [1983’s] Proof Through The Night with all-star sidemen. What changed your mind about that kind of fame?

He didn’t want to do it that way. He was struggling with the banjo. But this is the thing about being a producer. It’s all about empathising with the performer. I thought, Why are we doing this with a banjo anyway? We should just do this a capp ella. I walked

1930s Mississippi, Burnett revived America’s bedrock hymns and ballads in a vigorous, present tense of progressive country singing (the angelic tandem of Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch in I’ll Fly Away), profound resignation (Ralph Stanley’s O Death), and the improbable surprise of the Peasall Sisters, a young trio with the vocal chops and glow of the Carter Family.

AND THIS IS ME... T-Bone Burnett ★★★★

Is there anybody you’d like to produce that you haven’t worked with yet?

Well, somebody else does that (laughs). That might be a curse – the go-to guy – because then there is something expected. Once again, that gets you into the tyranny of the audience. Artists have to be careful – and I say this as a Christian who loves all mankind (laughs). We have to be careful of letting the audience determine what we do. Society is a campfre that people sit around for safety and warmth. They gather, and they stay there. Artists are the ones who hear the scary noise in the darkness, go out and fnd out what it is. If artists just sit around the campfre with everybody else, you just have a bunch of campfre music.

Proof Through The Night ( WARNER BROS., 1983)

That criticism doesn’t ring true today. He’s way past that now. It’s been fascinating writing these new [Coward Brothers] songs together. We’re both operating at complete autonomy. Neither one has any objections to anything the other does, which is the way to collaborate. The thing I can’t stand in collaboration, the thing I try to head of at the pass, is when a person says, “I feel very strongly that…” (laughs) As soon as a person says that, I usually say, “This isn’t a time for strong feelings.”

Nothing sums up Burnett’s ’80s firtation with the mainstream better than the modern pop craft in these radio-leaning songs, grounded in a lyric confronta tion that suggests Peter Gabriel writing like the ’66 Dylan (the ill-fated tenderness in Fatally Beautiful; the broken promises in The Sixties). Even with a guitar army including Richard Thompson, Pete Townshend and Mick Ronson, Burnett’s best shot stalled on Billboard’s album chart at 188.

Do you sometimes wish you spent more time on your own music?

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“I normally played head down,” he explains, “long hair, deep in the music. But I sensed something was different this time. So I looked up at the crowd and the people in the front row were standing there with open mouths, and then I looked at Klaus and I see blood squirting all over the stage. Klaus played with broken cymbals and hit them like the devil. Well, he’d cut his hand and the blood was spurting everywhere and he didn’t stop for a second. He just kept on playing. That determination, that power. I would have stopped and said, Oh, I need a Band-Aid. Klaus Dinger was determined to give everything. That impressed me so much. If it hadn’t happened like that there might have been no Neu!. I might have been a school teacher with a private love for music. I was fortunate to be taken by fate to meet these people.”

T IS THE SUMMER OF 1971 AND MICHAEL ROTHER IS LOST IN THE moment. He’s on-stage with Düsseldorf group Kraftwerk, comprising Rother on guitar, Florian Schneider on fute, keyboards, electric violin and electronics and Klaus Dinger on drums (founder Ralf Hütter having temporarily left the group to continue his studies in architecture). Rother’s been playing with them since February 1970, jamming in their studio on Mintropstrasse in between doing community hospital service as a conscientious objector and studying psychology at university.“I’dbeen detaching myself and feeling very lonely,” says Rother now. “But on-stage with Kraftwerk suddenly I was not alone. It was the opening to a completely new world. It wasPreviously,inspirational.”Rother half-imagined he’d soon be turning his back on music. Today, something changes.

hereinCreditPeterLindbergh/courtesyGroenlandRecords NEU!’s otherworldly sound, one of the most inﬂuential in rock, was the brainchild of two men: ambient guitar guru Michael Rother and screaming madman drummer Klaus Dinger. As another generation of bands tip their hats on a new tribute LP, MOJO asks how this telepathic unit ended up the best of enemies. “Klaus gave me so many pains,” Rother tells ANDREW MALE. “But I owe him so much.” Photograph: PETER LINDBERGH 36 MOJO

MOJO 37

Imperfect harmony: Neu!’s Michael Rother (left) and Klaus Dinger (right), with friends, in 1972.

T’S A WARM JULY MORNING IN 2022 AND

“When we went into Star Studio in Hamburg with Conny Plank to record that frst Neu! album we were still looking for the right sound,” says Rother. “Everything was like a Konradpremière.”‘Conny’ Plank, a former jazz musician turned sound engineer, was at the heart of the new sound coming out of Ger many, one with few debts to blues-based US and UK rock. Already known for his work with the early Kraftwerk and Cluster, he was more than a producer: a co-conspir ator with the ability to hear potential and opportunity in disparate, protean elements.

“It was not possible for Klaus and Michael to play live because everything in the studio had been 50 per cent Conny Plank,” Kranemann explains. “First I played electric bass, electric cello and Hawaiian guitar and then we added Uli Trepte of Guru Guru on bass. Michael played perfect, exact, hard rhythm guitar and I played the solos on Hawaiian guitar very free and loud! Noise, noise, noise. We played six or seven live concerts in 1972 in Hamburg, University Of Münster, Düsseldorf… this wonderful experimental music.”

Speaking to MOJO’s John Mulvey in 2000, Dinger described the working relationship between himself and Rother as “blind under standing [that emerged] sort of automatically”. Rother agrees but qualifes that “Klaus was not always in control of his desires. It made him do great things but also stupid crazy, nasty things. He went to the extreme because he thought he would reach some higher pow er of understanding. He wished to liberate himself from thinking.”

The collection, which brings together Neu!’s frst three studio albums (plus, for the CD box, the fascinat ing experimental misfre of Neu! ’86 ) also includes a new tribute album of Neu! songs reworked by The Na tional, Mogwai, Idles, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and Ste phen Morris of New Order. It’s this tribute album that perhaps best attests to the lasting infuence of Neu!’s revolutionary sound – from the driving, to-the-horizon trance of 1972’s Hallogallo to the screaming spiritual ur-punk of 1975’s Hero, all underpinned by Dinger’s radically simple Apache beat, the rhythm that came to be known as ‘motorik’. Yet as Rother tells it, the story of that sound is as much one of chance and serendipity as invention and intention.

Dinger decided to name the group after what he told journalist Biba Kopf was “the strongest word in advertising… I don’t know why nobody else did that before”.

“When we recorded Hallogallo,” says Rother, “there was this fuzzy idea of creating a strong machine pulse and then giving that pulse meaning with my guitar, but Hallogallo only came together at the mixing desk. Watching Conny memorising all these elements which were scat tered on tape, mixing by hand, was unbelievable. It was like watching a great cook turning simple ingredients into this prize-winning dish.”

Sounds from the metronomic underground: (clockwise from above) The Smash, 1969, with Dinger (second right); Kraftwerk in 1971 (from left) Rother, Florian Schneider, Dinger; Rother onstage with Spirits Of Sound, 1968; Rother playing live with Kraftwerk, 1971; Dinger on-stage with Kraftwerk, 1971; Neu!, 1972; producer Conny Plank, Star Studio, Hamburg, “like a great cook turning simple ingredients into this prize-winning dish.”

As well as establishing himself as the third member of the group, Plank shared the fnancial risk of the frst Neu! album, and, perhaps most impor tantly, acted as mediator as it became obvious Dinger and Rother were not an emotionally compatible duo.

HE FIRST NEU! ALBUM WAS A COMMERCIAL SUCCESS, selling around 30,000 copies in Germany in its frst year. A series of live gigs, however, were less successful. After playing with tapes proved an audience turn-off, the duo recruited Krane mann from Düsseldorf avant-gardists Pissoff.

“Back then I thought calling ourselves Neu! was just a bit too cool,” says Rother. “Klaus said, ‘We have to have a symbol that hits the people when the record is in the window.’ I remember going into town when it came out and seeing all the record stores with our new album in the window. And of course, Klaus was right. I tip my hat to him.”

Michael Rother is at home in Lower Saxony talking about the forthcoming box set that celebrates 50 years of the band he formed with Dinger following their departure from Kraftwerk in July 1971.

38 MOJO RecordsGroenlandRecords,GroenlandLindbergh/CourtesyPeterGetty,Archive,DingerKlaustheatYuiMikiLindbergh/CourtesyPeter(3),RotherMichaelCourtesy

One area in which the duo initially disagreed was in the naming of the band. Immersed in the world of Düsseldorf advertising agencies, and then living with the photographer Peter Lindbergh,

“Before Kraftwerk and Neu!, Klaus was known to everyone in Düsseldorf as a hard, strange rock musician,” explains Neu! collaborator Eberhard Kranemann. “He’d played in two hard electric rock bands, The No and The Smash, whereas Michael had only played in a very normal rock band in the English style, Spirits Of Sound. Klaus embraced the anti-artist ideas of [German Fluxus artist and provocateur] Joseph Beuys to turn everything upside down. I don’t think this was Michael’s idea.”

“That wasn’t very heartwarming,” says Rother. “You went down two stories underneath the earth along this endless corridor, with supply pipes overhead, no daylight. Also, Klaus was taking LSD regularly by then. His singing on Super is exciting and unusual and extrovert and he is playing the drums like his life depended on it, but there was no oxygen down there so after a minute Klaus just collapsed on the drum kit. Conny had to splice two performances together. The combination of his approach and my approach worked well in the studio but as soon as we closed the studio door we went separate ways. My girlfriend hated him because he was so very loud and demanding in a nasty way. Sorry, Klaus.”

MOJO 39 ➢

The Metronome label released Super as a single to little fanfare. It most likely would have been forgotten, if not for its pivotal role in the recording of Neu! 2 in early 1973.

“We were pointing our Titanic straight at the iceberg,” says Rother. “How much music do we have? That’s not an LP! Trying to make Für Immer a ‘super Hallogallo’ was not a smart idea. Maybe it’s psychologically understandable that we ran into this trap, trying to improve something like Hallogallo that cannot be improved in its frailty, its beauty…”

wards, forwards. What we didn’t take into account was that it takes twice as long to record 16 tracks as it does eight.”

“We went into Windrose-Dumont-Time Studios in Hamburg,” says Rother. “This was a 16-track studio so the temptation was to add more colours, more layers. Five guitars, three pianos, back

“People in the front row were standing there with open mouths, and then I looked at Klaus and I see blood squirting all over the stage.” Michael Rother

Contributing to Rother and Dinger’s problems in the studio –where they were struggling to come up with enough ideas to fll an album – were problems at home: “Both our partnerships were going off the rails,” says Rother. Then they ran out of money.

URING HIS QUEST FOR OTHER MUSICIANS TO bolster the live Neu!, Rother had visited the two members of kosmische synth duo Cluster, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, in their medieval countryside retreat, Alter Weserhof in Forst. The three musicians began to develop a delicate ly-wrought new sound steeped in the pastoral light of their location. They would eventually name themselves Harmonia but there was a brief moment when it could have been a new incarnation of Neu!.

With live performance ruled out, in the summer of 1972 the trio of Rother, Dinger and Plank decided to record a 7-inch single in Giorgio Moroder’s new 16-track Musicland complex, located in the basement of the Arabella Bogenhausen Hotel in Munich.

“Many years later,” continues Kranemann, “I realised Klaus put me in Neu! because he wanted to have a friend to use against Michael because he knew Michael wanted to make perfect clean music. I wanted to make crash-hard-noise anti-music. Years later I realised he was setting me against Michael. That was not good. It was silly and crazy. It was shit.”

“We went to Alter Weserhof,” says future Neu! drummer Hans Lampe, “Klaus, myself and Klaus’s brother, Thomas. We played together with Michael, Moebius and Roedelius. But Klaus’s behav iour was… not grounded, so Moebius and Roedelius didn’t want to make a group together with this person. No, never.”

Over the second half of 1973, Rother, Moebius and Roedelius recorded the groundbreaking Music Von Harmonia, an album that tapped into a sense-memory of Central European folk and classical music, the sound of new machines in old landscapes. The unwanted Dinger had plans of his own.

“Eberhard was more interested in deconstructing Neu!,” laughs Rother. “That was his personality, going ‘MRRRARRGGHHGH!’ but we didn’t know any other musicians. Maybe we should have asked Ralf and Florian. That would have been marvellous.”

After not seeing daylight for eight days, the duo worked through the night, speeding up and slowing down the Super/Neuschnee single to make two ‘new’ tracks – Super 16 and Neuschee 78 – then playing it through a damaged cassette recorder to make another: Cassetto. Today, side two of Neu! 2 can be seen as a triumph of invention over adversity, “a pop-art cut-up statement” as Julian Cope calls it in his book Krautrocksampler, and a series of early prototypes of the modern remix. At the time, however, it marked the end of Neu! Mk1.

Unfortunately, Kranemann’s ideas of wonderful music did not correspond with those of Michael Rother.

Motor away: (clockwise from left) La Düsseldorf (from left) Hans Lampe, Thomas Dinger, Klaus Dinger; Neu! 50! box set; Klaus from the Neu!-La Düsseldorf TV performance of Hero, 1974; Dinger and Rother reconnected as Neu!, 2000.

“We produced 5,000 albums by the band Lilac Angels to sell to Philips,” explains Lampe. “They offered us eight Deutschmarks per album. Klaus wanted 10. No one got 10! So the deal failed which meant he couldn’t pay the invoices and everything fellAsapart.”aresult, the Klaus Dinger who returned to Neu! for the recording of their fnal studio LP was a fnancially broken man.

HEN HARMONIA DISBANDED IN 1976, ROTHER began his solo career and started to sell records. Simultane ously, Klaus started to do well with La Düsseldorf. Things were looking up.

“I’m trying to do this serious tape music and Klaus is jumping up and down with a bubble machine.” Michael Rother

Although Neu! were no more, their infuence was growing, audible in David Bowie’s V-2 Schneider and A New Career In A New Town, PiL’s Public Image and Digital by Joy Division.

Split into two sides, with the second dedicated to the four-piece Neu! line-up of Rother, the Dingers and Hans Lampe, Neu! 75 is the sound of the future, the drifting side one compositions inspiring the ambient projects of Brian Eno and the driving, double-drum kit attack of side two’s Hero and After Eight sounding like eerie premonitions of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen.

“I was already into what was derogatorily called ‘Krautrock’,”

Perhapsmachine.”inevitably, the Dingerland label was a failure.

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40 MOJO CowlardDavidRecords,GroenlandCorbijn/CourtesyAntonBiermann,HansofCourtesy

“He was desperate, sad, and frustrated with his life,” says Rother. “Plus, his girlfriend Anita had gone back to Norway. But

“For Hero we did the basic recordings – two guitars and two drums – then Klaus added the vocals,” explains Rother. “I was with Conny in the mixing room when Klaus started singing: ‘Back to Norway!… Fuck the press… Fuck the company!’ We just looked at each other. After he fnished, we went, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ You can’t improve on that. It will forever be one of my favourite Neu! tracks. The honesty, the desperation, the frustration at all the things that had gone wrong because of all his bad choices.”

out of that chronic frustration at the record industry and his girlfriend grew the sound of Neu! 75.”

“Klaus sat down and really worked on a new concept,” says Lampe, “about the city where he lived, Düsseldorf. He said, ‘If every tenth citizen of Düsseldorf will buy an album about their city we can earn some money.’ He started learning guitar. He had a structure, an idea for a record label…”

“I came back to Klaus because I’d developed some ideas which didn’t work with Harmonia,” says the guitarist. “Klaus had recruit ed these two drummers, Thomas and Hans, because he wanted to be centre-stage, playing rhythm guitar. German TV was invited and… I look at that clip and I know exactly how I felt, sitting in the back with two serial Vox machines… totally annoyed. I’m trying to do this serious tape music and Klaus is in the spotlight with people looking up to him in this show band, jumping up and down with a bubble

“In the beginning of La Düsseldorf, Klaus was really grounded,” explains Lampe, “but we sold 250,000 copies of the frst LP and even more of the second and that was too much for him. Suddenly he felt he was better than Bowie, Dylan, Jagger. He stopped working hard, took lots of LSD then bought a studio complex in the Netherlands with our money without telling us. We started with court cases but I never saw that money.”

The Dinger brothers and Lampe would become La Düsseldorf: a rapturous pop translation of the classic Neu! sound. But frst came the label, Dingerland, launched with a brace of free concerts in the city in September 1974 – the frst a surprising rapprochement with Rother, as he joined Lampe and the Dingers under the tattered banner of Neu!. Footage of one song, the squalling Hero, with Dinger stomping and wailing in his trademark white dungarees, can be seen on YouTube. In it, Rother looks bemused.

It was the inclusion of Neu!’s Hallogallo and Hero that led to the plan of reissuing all of the Neu! albums on his own label, Grönland.

Tim Gane (centre): “Neu! created the pathway.”

“I couldn’t understand why Neu! were seeing no money from their music,” says Miller. “The problem was they’d fallen out so badly they couldn’t even be in the same room with each other.”

One positive of Dinger’s behaviour in those fnal years was that it reconnected Rother with Hans“HansLampe.and Thomas [Dinger] could no longer trust Klaus so they both looked to me to give them proper information about their shares in Neu! 75. Then Hans contacted me and said, ‘I still play drums. I have this drum

Also, I discovered it’s great music to play live, because it really takes of. It’s like a vehicle that’s barely in control and you’re just about keeping it on the road. It’s got the relentless excitement of punk but it’s texturally not the same at all. Harmonic resonances rise up like a cloud of bees, creating cosmic interactions.

Even then, there were problems. A week before the albums’ official release, Dinger contacted Grönemeyer demanding the releases be stopped. “Luckily,” says Rother, “Herbert is a strong character with a good heart and he just decided, ‘Nope, we are going to shut our eyes and go ahead with the release, no matter what Klaus screams at us.’ Herbert didn’t tell me that story until months later. He knew I’d have had a nervous breakdown.”

HE LAST TIME MICHAEL ROTHER saw Klaus Dinger was during a visit to Metropolis Studios in London in Feb ruary 2001 to remaster the Neu! records with engineer Tim Young. In the fairytale version of this story, it would have resulted in reconciliation and closure.

There are lots of unforeseen things that can happen when you’re playing that music. But you have to remember it’s not just a formula – it’s also a secret. It’s there for you to utilise, to create something texturally and harmonically complex. Klaus, Michael and Conny created the pathway, a new approach to rock music that will always be with us.”

“Thiskit…’”was 2013,” says Lampe, “and if you’d told me I’d leave my job in TV and go on to play over 100 concerts with Michael Rother I’d think I was dreaming. It’s really a pleasure to play the music of Neu! again.”

Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris tells MOJO today. “I loved Can, Amon Düül, but Neu! was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was beautifully simple. If we’re talking about punk, you listened to Klaus’s drumming and thought, ‘I could do that.’ So much about Neu! was punk before punk. But in terms of influence, Digital sounds like a meticulous Neu! copy to me.”

“I have no way of knowing,” he says, “but I fear that no matter how much respect he would have received he’d still be saying, ‘Yeah, right. I’m up there with Bob Dylan. That’s where I belong.’”

After various individual meetings throughout the decade, on October 21, 1998, in a restaurant in Düsseldorf’s Nord Park, Dinger and Rother met face-to-face with Miller. “And I thought we were getting close,” says Miller. “Polygram wanted to do it. Both members of the band wanted to do it. Klaus said he wanted £100,000 but I ignored that. The real stumbling block came when Klaus refused to sign the same contract that Michael was signing. Then it fell apart and it wasn’t until Herbert Grönemeyer got involved that they agreed.”

A well-known musician and singer in Germany, in 1999 Gröne meyer organised the release of Pop 2000 , eight CDs celebrating “50 years of pop music and youth culture in Germany”.

Lampe will be playing with Rother (plus Franz Bargmann on guitar) at the Clapham Grand in November, celebrating 50 years of Neu!’s debut album. Klaus Dinger died on 21 March, 2008, three days before his 62nd birthday. I ask Rother how he might have felt about these anniversary celebrations.

“It’s Like A InThat’sVehicleBarelyControl”

“You know,” says Rother, “I worry that I’ve been too hard on Klaus speaking to you. I still have the memories of all the bad things he did. He gave me so many pains. But I owe him so much for his artistic contributions to our music. The knowledge and experience he had, the desire to create a new musical identity, to demand to be different. That’s not such a bad legacy.”

“Klaus behaved so badly,” sighs Rother. “He was paranoid, he shouted at Tim Young. He had brought two ‘witnesses’ with him, plus various documents and a video recorder. He was really paranoid at this point. The promo interview we did in London was also a disaster because he mistrusted everyone. I still get shakes when I remember that time. It was so diffcult, so psychotic.”

People like Terry Riley had been doing that kind of minimalism for a long time but this was diferent because it was frmly in the rock world, primitive, but also complex because it opens up so many vistas. When I started playing like that with Stereolab I noticed that the fewer notes you have, the more choices you can make for melodies. You could have these quite linear patterns, but then have Beach Boys-style melodies over the top. It transforms an ordinary idea into something very un-ordinary. So when we frst started playing gigs in London we automatically sounded diferent.

A decision was made to seal the tapes and never release them. Then, in October 1995, Rother received a fax from Dinger, congratulating him on “the release of Neu! 4 in Japan tomorrow”. The drummer had re leased his copies of the recordings through Japanese label Captain Trip. (Some of the material would enjoy an offcial release, as the aforementioned Neu! ’86, in 2010.)

Neu! 50! CD/vinyl box sets will be released by Grönland Records on September 23.

Another Neu! revival was on the cards in 1985 when Rother and Dinger cut a new set of tracks, intending to send them out to UK record labels. Initially, the plan was also to include Conny Plank as producer and media tor. Plank, understandably, asked that they use his studio and that he be incorporated into the business plan.

The dark ’90s also saw a parallel rise in groups inspired by Neu!’s motorik groove –notably, Stereolab – and Neu! CD bootlegs from unknown sources, a phenomenon which caused Mute label boss Daniel Miller to consider the possibility of releasing Neu! legitimately on his own label.

MOJO 41 M

“I BOUGHT the frst Neu! album from Notting Hill Record And Tape Exchange around 1980. I’d just discovered the frst Faust album so I’d started looking for other German bands. I didn’t like Neu! as much as Can or Faust at frst but after a while I started to fnd it much more interesting, something about the linearity. I became obsessed with Klaus Dinger’s drumming because it was so relentless, while Michael Rother’s guitar sound, a two-note chord all along the six strings, was so simple but strange.

Stereolab’s TIM GANE explains the appeal of Neu!’s motorik blueprint.

“Talking to Herbert was like talking to a psychiatrist,” says Michael Rother, laughing. “They’d told him, ‘These guys are idiots. They just fight. Nobody manages to get them together!’ Herbert didn’t give up.”

“Ah, the ’90s,” says Rother. “The dark decade. Klaus ran into money problems. Sky Records had already made us an offer and I’d refused because the [money] was embarrass ing. I think that pushed Klaus over the edge. The next thing I hear is this fax and Klaus inviting me to sign a contract for my share of the deal. He was on a very lonely planet, very lost and he made many enemies. He later apologised for his actions, but not in a very sincere way.”

“I now regret we didn’t do that,” says Rother. “But Klaus and I remembered the stress of working to deadlines with Conny. Now we had our own professional recording gear and limitless hours of time to fuss about. What a mistake. We fought over really stupid things instead of focusing on the basic idea of our music. In the end, we both lost.”

There is a pause.

Photography by DANNY CLINCH

O SAY MARCUS KING WAS BORN WITH A GUITAR IN HIS HANDS WOULD BE AN overstatement, but not by much. His father Marvin is a pro blues-rock guitarist, and from the moment Marcus picked up his acoustic Epiphone El Dorado aged three, it seemed to fll a hole.

“He left me in the company of Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Skynyrd, Clapton and Cream, and The Allman Brothers,” refects King, “and I guess that me playing along to those records was both a solace and a way of trying to connect with him.”

ClinchDanny 42 MOJO

➢

Sitting backstage before his show at Manchester Apollo, the baby-faced 26-year-old says this with no apparent pain, regret or judgment. While MOJO gets a frm ‘Don’t go there’ look when his mother is mentioned – she was an even sketchier presence in his childhood, although they’ve recently reconnected – there’s nothing but appreciation for his father’s contribution.

MOJO PRESENTS

King’s home of Greenville, South Carolina, already boasted a couple of key entries in the Southern rock encyclopedia. It was from the town’s airport that Lynyrd Skynyrd took off on October 19, 1977, before the tragic crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and four others. A more direct infuence on the young Marcus, behatted Marshall Tucker Band guitarist Toy Caldwell, was from the Kings’ own neighbourhood.

“Toy grew up right up the street from me,” King says, putting on his very Caldwell-esque hat for MOJO’s beneft, as if drawing the line between private and public personas. “That was a big, big deal, that we could both see the Spartanburg water tower and we drank water from the same tap, so to speak. So if he could get out, I could get out.”

“My daddy was on the road a lot,” King recalls, “and me and my sister were at home, with my grandparents living next door. They just kind of watched over us in the garden, so that guitar was pretty much my babysitter.”

Scion of a blues guitar dynasty, his visceral licks and soulful howl tempered by tragedy, MARCUS KING was always the hot young torchbearer of Southern rock. Now, with Dan Auerbach in his corner, he’s adding something unique to the mix: himself. “Dan’s helped me strip it back to me,” he tells ANDY FYFE.

King crimson: Marcus kicks back at The Dive Motel, Nashville, January 18, 2022.

But there are worse things than school, or a 9-to-5. As a teenager, with his own band just taking off, King lost his frst sweet heart, Hallie, in a car accident. By then his musical tastes had moved past his father’s introductions to embrace Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Tina Turner and The Temptations, but he was still a guitar player, not a singer.

“I started singing because, after she passed, I couldn’t wrap my fnger around the total need I had to express my emotions,” he says,

“It’s all I cared about,” he says, “while all those other kids only ever worried about getting to college. You know, Daddy had tried working a proper job after I was born, working as a contractor, and he hated it. I was never going to do that, and I was lucky to get out.”

Asked the Sophie’s Choice question – would he save his ability to play or his passion to sing? – he’s genuinely stumped: “I really don’t know how to answer that other than I feel like a guitar player and I’m still just trying to fgure out the singing part.”

F MARCUS KING NEEDED WARNING OF THE MUSIC business’s darker side, he needn’t look far beyond his father’s struggles with alcohol and record labels. In 1993 Marvin’s band, all in their late-thirties, were given one last dice roll, signing with Liberty/Capitol in Nashville. Just as they were about to record what they believed would be a breakout album, their A&R man was fred and all his acts dropped. Among the songs chalked in for the album was Simmons and Loudermilk’s Indian Outlaw; a year later the song became the frst US Top 20 single for big-hat C&W star Tim McGraw. It’s a cautionary story of the industry’s fckleness that King Jr takes to heart. King Sr, however, is no longer complaining.

“He was a really fery player,” says Marcus, “especially tapes of him back in the ’70s and ’80s. He just never quite believed in himself enough to be his own artist, but now he gets to come out and play with us and live vicariously.”

“Hey, a great song is a great song,” shrugs King, “and it’s a great song. It’s got soul.”

Southern rock royalty: King (clockwise from below) at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway, January 2022; with Dan Auerbach in Easy Eye Sound Studio, Nashville, 2019; on-stage with father Marvin King, Greenville, 2019; loving life on the road, 2022; microphone fiend: Marcus performing at Hinterland Music Festival, St. Charles, Iowa, August 7, 2021.

You’d never guess it from watching King perform live, where his voice comes into its own, sounding like Otis Redding one minute, Lowell George the next. It’s an ability to harmonise diverse influences that’s reflected in a list of live covers encompassing Blind Faith, Webb Pierce, When A Man Loves A Woman, Black Sabbath’s War Pigs (with a trumpet solo) and even Don’t Dream It’s Over. Who knew the world needed a Southern rock version of Crowded House?

“It’s not the same as being locked up, but if you see someone in math class every day you might as well hang out, right? I just wasn’t really tight with anybody, which probably wasn’t their fault. I went to high school parties,” he says, a mischievous grin breaking across his face, “but that was because I had the best weed.”

Meanwhile, the pitfalls of the life his father once negotiated are addressed in the song Rescue Me, from Young Bl ood . In it, the

ARCUS KING GOT OUT. WITH A sound that fnds a home for Creedence and AC/DC, The Black Crowes and Funkadelic, his fve albums so far – the most recent being 2020’s El Dorado and the pending Young Blood – have poured new energy into Southern rock’s classic mix. But while his ascent seems swift, he’s paid his dues: playing on albums with his father at 11, gigging at 13, living a life that alienated him from his peers. At high school, he was a loner, preferring the company of guitars to his classmates. He likens his years in education to a prisoner serving time.

his voice hesitant. “I just knew I couldn’t get all that out through the guitar alone.”

In truth, all King wanted was to be on the road, playing guitar, either with his dad’s band or his own.

44 MOJO ClinchDannyGetty,Boehm,LisaWinchester,DonnaGafkjen,Alysse

“DADDY HAD TRIED WORKING A PROPER JOB AFTER I WAS BORN, AND HE HATED IT. I WAS NEVER GOING TO DO MarcusTHAT.”King

Bridge Of Sighs (Chrysalis, 1974)

“Once you’re in with Dan, you’re in,” says King. “He has this open studio policy, so if I’m at a loose end I’ll go down and see who’s around. You never know who you’ll end up playing with.”

Live (Atlantic, 1972)

Even without the lyrical confessions, Young Blood is hard and direct, but adds a funky, chicken-grease swagger earlier albums lacked.

Marcus King embraces, encouraged by Auerbach. The pair started working together after the Black Key phoned King up unprompted, and the guitarist immediately few out to Nashville, where he’s lived ever since.

PONTANEITY IS SOMETHING

“Donny has such a sorrowful voice, you can hear all his pain. I feel stronger after listening to Donny –I always listen to him before shows.”

And just like that, Marcus King’s life begins to square its own circle.

Not that King has much free time. Wary of taking his foot off the pedal, he’s constantly touring, is itching to record his already-written third album with Auerbach, and there’s the small matter of getting married in February.

There’s a song on Young Blood that’s like no other King has ever recorded before. Dark Cloud starts bluesy and cowbell-heavy, then unexpectedly spirals off into a pop galaxy chorus. King himself feels the song is a little special, but the story behind it is simply weird.

“The frst album I bought with my own money, when I was 11. I’ve still got the same copy, so it’s made this journey with me.”

THE BEACH BOYS

I was aged four or fve. Absolutely the epitome of what a live band at their peak can sound like.”

Live At Fillmore West (Atlantic, 1971)

Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966)

The next day he went into the studio, the band ready to record, and Auerbach asked what they were writing about today. King said, “Well, funny you should ask…”

“If I was on the road with my daddy, why shouldn’t I have The Marcus King Family Band on the road with me?” he laughs. “Daddy, me, Briley, fve or six kids. Sounds damn fne, don’t it?”

JEWELSCROWN

Five albums that fuelled Marcus King.

“I’ve heard that this album is a departure,” says King, “but really Dan helped me strip it back to me, to make me believe in myself. Like my band, he understands that James Brown thing of the percussive importance of ‘the one’ and that every instrument is percussion.”

younger King is explicit about his battles with temptation, the need to be pulled “away from this fre”. The words “only vice, cocaine and whiskey/Walk the line, carry my suffering with me” are hollered out to a sleazy, stripped-down tune coaxed out of King by the album’s producer, Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. “It’s something that I’ve learned to even out on the road,” says King, “but sometimes you just need to cut loose, so, you know, there’s that.”

“Amazing Grace is great too, but this was recorded shortly before her band leader King Curtis passed. There’s a lot of cool covers, too, even Bread.”

ARETHA FRANKLIN

MOJO 45 M

THE AtBROTHERSALLMANBANDFillmoreEast (Capricorn, 1971)“One of the frst albums I ever heard.

“It just showcases the vast opportunities you have in a studio like no other record. It scares the shit out of me, but it’s also incredibly uplifting.”

“Right now not much in my life isn’t great,” he says, just as his future wife and sometime backing vocalist Briley Hussey walks into the dressing room to pull on the turquoise go-go boots she wears on-stage.

ROBIN TROWER

While his Nashville house was off limits thanks to exterminators, King and his thenpartner decided on a staycation at a downtown hotel. After an argument, he went for a walk around the early morning streets to cool off. “I had this eerie feeling the whole time, like the presence of death,” King recounts. “There was this guy on the other side of the road and when he turned and looked at me, he had a hood up, and where there should be a face it was just a void. Darkness. I’m not ‘that’ kind of guy, but I recognised it as Death.”

DONNY HATHAWAY

“I’m just telling MOJO here about us going on the road with all our kids,” he tells her.

“Really, that’s what we’re doing, huh? OK,” comes the happy reply.

PORTRAIT

That wasn’t Leven’s only train drama. In October 1988 he was bound for Moscow (or was it St Petersburg?) and whom should he meet, but Bob Dylan? Naturally the two songwriters pooled their resources and wrote a song. By the time they detrained in St Petersburg (or was it Moscow?) they had written As We Sailed IntoThereSkibbereen.aresceptics who argue that Sting is very much alive and well, and that while the splendid As We Sailed Into Skibbereen is indeed credited to Leven/Dylan, its melody is too close to One Too Many Mornings for copyright comfort.

It’s cramped and sepulchral, the smell is a little musty and the bookcases heave with modern poetry; Rainer Maria Rilke is a favourite. It is a poet’s playground. And Leven, who died of cancer in 2011, aged just 61, is here, in a giant jar flled with his ashes. It’s safe to say it’s exactly what he would have wanted and where he would have wanted to be. He’d have written a song about it.

So it doesn’t matter that his proprietary whisky, Leven’s Lament, was decanted Bell’s with a new label (“nice labels though,” insists Greenwood) and that Salman Rushdie may not have actually endorsed it (“Try it – you’ll be sadder but wiser”) or that Elegy For Johnny Cash , Leven’s fabulous album of 2005, was recorded in Wales, rather than, as the sleevenotes claim, Beirut (“He’d got into Lebanese music and Lebanese musicians guested,” notes Greenwood). And while former Yacht and Christian Henry Priest man certainly played on 2000’s Defending Ancient Springs, credits that place him on other Leven albums are spurious.

For instance: when Leven heard that much-loved singer-songwriter Sting had died in a tragic helicopter crash in Southampton around the turn of the century, he was on a train from Edinburgh to Kirkcaldy. Always the public servant, he announced the news to his fellow travellers. Mobile phones weren’t ubiquitous

UCH OF LEVEN’S STORY IS SHROUDED IN MYTH, but he was likely born Alan Moffatt in Fife’s Leven Valley, his parents – so he claimed – a peripatetic Irish-Cockney carpet ftter father and a blues-loving Romany Geordie mother, hence the Doll By Doll album, Gypsy Blood. “That’s not quite true, though,” says someone who enjoyed the Moffatts’ hospitality in the late ’70s. “His mum used to say, ‘What’s all this about us being gypsies?’ Jackie’s explanation was that we all have gypsy blood. Oh, his father came from Weybridge.”

“Mind you,” Priestman admits, “my ‘massed plucked cellos’ [another Leven invention] were praised in a review of Gothic Road.”

“Loosely and just for a wee while, Alan was my frst boyfriend,” she reports. “Tall, very good looking, he had silky foppy hair, which he grew longer than any boy in school. He had big, beautiful eyes, a wide, shy grin and very good teeth. He appeared to be a non-conformist loner, but he was not averse to being the cen tre of attention. He came to school every day with an acoustic guitar over his shoul der. He swaggered around with it and had adoring adherents following him.”

46 MOJO SheehanTom JACKIE LEVEN WAS A FIBBER, A FANTASIST, A JUNKIE, AN UNDER-ACHIEVER, A CELTIC FOLK-PSYCH-PUNK-POP ONE-OFF AND ONE OF THE GREAT BRITISH SONGWRITERS. AS HIS SOLO MASTERPIECE GETS ANOTHER DAY IN THE SUN, HIS FRIENDS AND ALLIES REMEMBER AN EXTRAORDINARY FORCE OF NATURE. “HE WAS A BIG FAT LIAR,” THEY TELL JOHN AIZLEWOOD , “BUT ALL HIS LIES WERE TRUE.” JACKIE LEVEN IS IN TOUCHING DISTANCE.

There was a sister, Wendy, and, unbeknown to Scottish folk legend Rab Noakes, who knew Leven for over 40 years, a broth er. Marianne Mitchelson was two years below Alan Moffatt at Glenrothes High School.

THE TRUTH IS ➢ BY

Leven was a poet, a scamp, a Scottish griot, a rogue, a warrior, a wit, a big man in every sense, a well-read polymath and either scary or wonderful company. A recording artist from 1971 until the year of his death, he left behind a catalogue of extraordinary beauty and eye-watering volume. As a performer, he was mesmeric, either as the confrontational, eye-popping singer of Doll By Doll or, later, the solo raconteur who would punctuate his ten der, acutely observed, Celtic-tinged songs of love, rue and crushed hopes with the adventures of a budgerigar called Cunt. And he played guitar like John Martyn or Davey Graham. But he had better stories.

then, but they weren’t unknown either. “Why haven’t we heard?” asked one doubter. “Because it’s only just happened,” said Leven with appropriate solemnity. “My girlfriend works in an offce down there. She saw it…”

We’re in a traffc magnet of a Hampshire village, sip ping herbal tea served by his partner in life and music, Deborah Greenwood, at the table of his working room.

He married young and was a periph

“He was a big fat liar, but all his lies were true,” chuckles Deborah Greenwood.

MOJO 47 hereinCredit hereinCreditDeep in the heart of London,Jackienowhere:Leven,1981.

eral part of a late-’60s folk scene, based around The Elbow Room in Kirkcaldy.

Their four extraordinary albums sold poorly (“I’m glad they weren’t successful,” says Greenwood. “Success would have killed Jackie”) and Leven’s substance-fuelled behaviour made few friends, certainly not in Devo and Hawkwind who both threw them off 1982’stours.

F THE FUTURE CLAIMS OF GYPSY HERITAGE WOULD prove fanciful, Moffatt/St. Field’s restlessness was real. By the mid-’70s, he had a son, Simon, and at least one divorce to his name when he was invited by guitarist Jo Shaw (now Joe, formerly John Culshaw) to join a squat he shared in Corfe Mullen with drummer Dave McIntosh. In 1977, after a period in West Berlin, he returned the favour, moving the newly married Shaw into a squat three doors down from his own in Maida Vale.

“I said, ‘This is what I can do for you.’ I got no response whatso ever. Their eyes were on stalks, they were totally off their faces. Nobody I worked with polarised people so much. There was no middle ground, they were loved or, certainly by John Peel, hated. To some people Jackie had a Manson-like quality. People believed his every word and followed him.”

man saw them at Eric’s in Liverpool on April 12, 1979.

On February 1, 1970, Noakes and Moffatt were double booked at an Ardrossan folk club. They shared the bill and the takings. The following year, watching The Byrds at Lincoln Folk Festival, Noakes bumped into Moffatt, who explained his name was now John St. Field. An e-mail relationship developed decades later, but the pair would never meet again.

“I was told I wasn’t required any more,” sighs Shaw. “It broke my heart. I walked home in the snow in fucking bits, went to the pub and put the world to rights with this guy I’d never met. He asked me to join his band, The Pretty Things. I stayed for six years.”

“We were baring all,” explains Shaw. “Sometimes it was macho and violent, sometimes sensitive. Jackie said it was OK to be angry, but it was also OK to feel your feminine side. I still can’t stand bands who smile at each other all the time.”

Maida Vale neighbour Tom Newman, co-producer of Mike Oldfeld’s Tubular Bells, was recruited to helm the self-titled third album. “Me and Jackie were both into drugs and drink,” he notes. As Leven and Newman sampled the Warwick Castle pub’s spirit shelf, the singer would read newspapers, culling phrases from the letters pages to redeploy as lyrics.

“My diary says ‘Celtic Stax Motown meets psychede lia’,” says Priestman. “They blew me away. It was scary and mind-altering. Jackie was so forbidding. A few months later we Yachts were in the same restaurant as Doll By Doll. I was too scared to go up and say, ‘I love what you’re doing.’”

“Alan would have been very welcome to join our gang,” remembers Noakes. “But he never came that close. He performed foor spots which showed a deep sonorous voice and guitar playing which refected Bert Jansch and Davey Graham.”

Out of control: Leven, AKA John St. Field, an alias he adopted in 1971 “because I was in a little trouble with the forces of law and order.”

Gone was St Fieldian folk, although the acid unquestionably re mained. Older than their punk peers, Doll By Doll were Celtic new wave with an undertow of mental health concerns who lived Leven’s manifesto of being beautiful on record, but ferce on-stage. Priest

Mick Houghton would be Doll By Doll’s press offcer.

Newman-produced Grand Passion, Doll By Doll’s fourth and fnal album (an unreleased ffth may exist; Newman isn’t sure), probably features Warwick Castle drinking chum David Gilmour, although nobody can say on which tracks. But by then, Shaw and McIntosh were out.

Later in 1971, John St. Field made Control, an acid-folk album of timeless beauty, “following an intense period of taking LSD,” he claimed in the sleevenotes to the 1997 reissue, adding the alias came “because I was in a little trouble with the forces of law and order”. Control was fnally released in 1973, but only in Franco’s Spain where St. Field briefy lived.

48 MOJO

It was here that St. Field became Jackie Leven (a dialectical pun, suggests Noakes: Jack Of Leven) and, with McIntosh and a succession of bass players, Doll By Doll, named after a line in the e.e. cummings poem, The First Of All My Dreams, were born. “The frst night we took a tab of acid and went for a pub crawl,” remembers Shaw. “Then we got down to work.”

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“Jackie became very violent towards whichever girl it was,” remembers Newman, who had been taught mar tial arts. “Nobody could work out what had fred it off, but Jackie was lashing out at everybody. I grabbed Jackie

Before the incident, Leven had taken to heroin. “He dared me to take it,” shrugs Newman. “He’d inject but I snorted. Within 15 minutes of tooting it, I felt so bad and down.”

“I hid at the back. I was amazed and deeply, deeply disappointed at the gall of him making so much about what had happened. He did the whole ‘I used to be able to sing’ emotional bollocks and sang these lovely songs in his beautiful voice, with and without fal setto, not knowing I was there. Afterwards I caught him and after decades of not seeing each other, he said, ‘Did you see it all?’ to fnd out if I’d heard everything… There was no ‘How are you?’”

Danger men at work: Doll By Doll in London, June 10, 1981 (clockwise from left) Jackie Leven, Jo Shaw, Tony Waite, David McIntosh.

The pair met once more when Newman chanced upon a Leven solo show at Soho’s 12 Bar.

MOJO 49 ArchiveGreenwoodDeborahHoughton,MickCourtesyGetty,Slattery,Paul

Doll By Doll were now just Leven, fuelling himself with two bottles of vodka a day, and latest amour, Helen Turner (“She was infatuated, gobsmacked by his masculinity,” insists Newman). Later to provide vocals and key boards in The Style Council, she sings the band’s parting shot, the astonishing So Long Kid. It’s a gorgeous unacknowledged standard.

N 1985, WHILE RECORDING HIS FIRST solo album at Newman’s Easy Studio in Islington, Leven stumbled the five miles home to Maida Vale drunk in the smallest of hours. Passing through Chapel Market he was viciously assault ed by a mysterious group of men who appeared from the darkness. As Leven would explain for the rest of his life, the attempted strangulation almost destroyed his larynx, robbed him of his falsetto and cast him into the darkness of heroin

After it, Leven’s use spiralled. His latest girlfriend, the model Carol Wolf, joined him in addiction. He would not surface until 1988, when, still squatting in Maida Vale, Lev en, Shaw (they’d remained friends: “I don’t live my life bearing grudges,” says the guitar ist) and McIntosh joined fellow Maida Vale resident Glen Matlock to become Concrete Bulletproof Invisible.

“Jackie was funny, educated,” remembers the ex-Pistol. “He came from the Tom Waits school where tales took on new meanings as he told Europethem.”was toured and their Matlockpenned single Big Tears deserved rather ➢

“They were loved or hated”: Doll By Doll at the Nashville Rooms, London, 1978; (below) Leven with (right) Doll By Doll’s press officer Mick Houghton; (below left) a bottle of Leven’s Lament whisky, “The Lonely Spirit Of The Glens”.

“DOLL BY DOLL BLEW ME AWAY. IT WAS SCARY JACKIEMIND-ALTERING.ANDWASSOFORBIDDING.”

“‘Viciouslyaddiction.assaulted’?

in a neck lock and got him down on the foor to stop him swinging around. I didn’t put fghting strength into it. He could have easily got out. When he got up, he felt desperately humiliated because there was a girl there. Next day there was nothing wrong with him, he was fne, he didn’t lose his falsetto, but over the next few days he cancelled me. Then I realised how much of a pose he was living.”

‘Mysterious group of men’? ‘Appeared from the darkness’? Oh fuck off,” says Shaw today. “He was a great storyteller who didn’t know when to stop.” Even Greenwood rolls her eyes at the thought of anyone attacking this giant drunk apropos of nothing. As far as MOJO can reconstruct in 2022, it seems that Leven was walking with Newman, a roadie known as Scottish John and a woman who may or may not have been Helen Turner.

Leven and Wolf stopped heroin and started the CORE Trust (now Westminster Drug Project) to help others including Shaw to do the same via holistic methods. Princess Diana’s patronage gave CORE kudos. Naturally Leven had a tale to tell which involved Diana futtering her eyelashes and asking, “What are you doing afterwards?”

Goldschmidt resisted Leven’s desire to release an album every three months, allowing a new alter ego, Sir Vincent Lone, to mop up some of the excess of what was becoming a canon of remarkably consistent quality. Guests abounded, from Doll By Doll’s Shaw and McIntosh, poets such as Robert Bly to fellow travellers David Thomas, Johnny Dowd, Mike Scott, Andy White and Priestman. As his most regular collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Michael Cosgrave explains, Leven would enter the studio with melody and arrangements mostly in place, leaving wiggle room for lyrical updates and curveballs such as asking drummer Tim Robinson to play “like you’ve failed a Peter Gabriel audition” on 2007’s Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me!

50 MOJO GettySheehan,Tom(2),DilworthJoe

After hearing the album, married mother Green wood wrote the frst and last fan letter of her life (“How is it he knows everything that’s going on in my head? This person can see into people’s souls”). Weeks later she saw Leven at the 12 Bar, alone, after friends bailed out. Afterwards, they talked and she discovered he’d kept the letter. “We arranged to meet the next day. That sealed our fate.”

➣

After working with Leven, Matlock turned teeto tal. They would meet again, but briefy. “To be hon est, he really annoyed me. I’d stopped drinking. He hadn’t. It wasn’t the same.”

“I’d never met anyone like him. Still haven’t,” says Cosgrave. “I’m not confrontational and he’d reached the point in his life

“I fell in love with The Mystery Of Love…,” says label boss Martin Goldschmidt, who was aware of folk artist Alan Moffatt, but unaware until now that Moffatt was Leven. “He was a lunatic, but a friend too. You couldn’t work out the lie from the truth, but he had me every Leven’stime.”1994 song Heartsick Land had confessed, “I have a son that I never see… I always know he is a part of me.”

The Mystery Of Love… thanked ‘Mr and Mrs P. Mof fatt’ in the credits and introduced a new Jackie Lev en. Gone was Doll By Doll’s in-your-face intensity, replaced by a Celtic poet with a beautiful croon, a deft touch with melody and in Call Mother A Lonely Field (“Like young Irish men in an English bar, the song of home betrays us”), perhaps the song of his lifetime.

“JACKIE WAS A LUNATIC, BUT A FRIEND TOO. YOU COULDN’T WORK OUT THE LIE FROM THE TRUTH.”

Mick Houghton was back, too. “We hadn’t seen each other for 13 years. His penetrating stare had gone, he was less wired, more mellow.”

Celtic soul: Leven raises a glass, 2000; (left) Doll By Doll, Notting Hill, 1984; (below left) Leven and Deborah Greenwood at La Pedrera, Barcelona, October 16, 2006.

994’S MAJESTIC THE MYSTERY OF LOVE IS GREATER Than The Mystery Of Death began the Jackie Leven solo career after, he implied, a period living in Argyll, absorbing his heritage. “He was still in Maida Vale,” chuckles Shaw. “He went on holiday to Argyll.”

more than cult status. “He was too pissed to care about me having the A-side,” chuckles Mat lock. Leven’s gorgeous B-side Braid On My Shoulder would be the bridge between Doll By Doll and his solo work.

From there until his death, Leven was signed to Cooking Vinyl.

“We had a call from his son, Simon, who’d heard the song,” says Goldschmidt. “They hadn’t spoken in years and through the album they got back together.”

CALL MOTHER A LONELY FIELD

Henry Priestman: “It’s got mentions of the sea, a beautiful melody and it’s less abrasive Doll By Doll. It looks towards his musical future.”

Rab Noakes: “In cultural terms, the Fife indeindustrialisationresonates.connectionThetheThatcheryears

Glen Matlock: “It still sounds good and it’s a great song. I put Joe’s guitars through reverb so they sounded like bagpipes. He was quite annoyed.”

JS: “It’s got everything. Some of it popped in my head the other day and I thought, ‘Where did that come from?’ It’s an incredibly complicated piece of music. Utterly, utterly, utterly stunning.”

(from Doll By Doll’s Remember, 1979)

“He and Debbie stayed with us and I loved it,” says Rankin, whose forthcoming Rebus novel, Heart Full Of Headstones, takes its title from a line in Leven’s song Single Father.

“The frst time I saw him, this big guy in shorts and kilt socks lumbers on-stage and starts tuning up. His shirt was untucked and there was hair in his eyes. He was not the svelte fgure I’d seen in photos, he was a guy who’d seen a bit of life. I thought he was a roadie.”

(from The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death, 1994)

(from Night Lilies, 1998)

Ian Rankin: “A story of betrayal. I love Debbie’s singing on it. I saw the two of them doing it at a pub on the way to Perth in the middle of nowhere. The hairs went up on my arms.”

Deborah Green wood: “The couldn’tWesongautobiographicalmostforus.It’strue.decidedwebetogether

‘I know that friends say that I’m rough’ is so him as a young man.”

(from Sir Vincent Lone’s Songs For Lonely Americans, 2006)

DOLL

Sadder but wiser: Jackie Leven and friend, 2002.

POORTOUN

“I was supposed to do a gig with him in Belfast,” says Rankin. “They said he wasn’t well and couldn’t make it. That’s when I got an inkling…”Levenand Shaw met every year at the Larmer Tree Festival in Dorset.“Thelast time, I was having a beer. He was having water. He was tearful and said there’s no point going on. I put my hand on his and said, ‘What is it Jackie?’ He said Deborah was insisting he see a doctor, but he didn’t want to hear bad news…”

EXIT WOUND

THE VIEW FROM SHIT CREEK

Greenwood threatened to leave him if he didn’t seek help. He sought“Hishelp.doctor sent him to Urgent Medical Care at Southampton General,” she explains, falteringly. “The surgeon said, ‘Three months at the most.’ I had to tell Jackie because they hadn’t.”

HE STORIES BECAME LESS OUTLANDISH TOWARDS the end, but Leven’s musical powers remained undimmed. The death of his alcoholic brother hit him hard and, having kicked heroin cold turkey, Leven did the same with drink. The weight fell off. It kept falling off. His feet swelled. Something was wrong beyond grief.

“At the funeral, I was a pallbearer,” says Shaw. “But I fell to the ground crying. I completely crumbled. Our bond had lasted forever.”

The pair collaborated on-stage where Rankin read his wry short story Jackie Leven Said as Leven played musical interludes and songs such as The Haunting Of John Rebus. There was a lot of chat and a live album.

any more, because it was too painful for the ones we loved. This is almost word for word what happened. Thank God we were wrong.”

Joe Shaw: “Mine and Jackie’s guitar arrange ment and the syncopa tion with the reggae-ish rhythm are fantastic. It’s very beautiful and was originally acoustic.”

BRAID ON MY SHOULDER

“It was a life-changing experience. I put a cup of water to his lips and talked about the beautiful, wonderful things we’d doneLeventogether.”diedon November 14, 2011. Before the funeral, in accordance with Leven’s song Gylen Gylen and Celtic tradition, Greenwood had put pennies over his eyes to pay the ferryman taking him to the next life.

And yet, 11 years after his passing, Leven lives on. Greenwood is spearheading a campaign to have him recognised as a poet by the Scottish literary establishment. Cooking Vinyl has tended the catalogue lovingly – a vinyl version of The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death surfaced in July – and proselytisers such as Rankin have kept the flame burning and a new generation intrigued. He didn’t want to go, but as he said in Elegy For Johnny Cash – ostensibly about Cash, but, like all his work, really about himself – “Lord, don’t make me wait too long, I’m already rich. Rich in the things I’ve seen and done.”

Shaw visited one last time.

MOJO 51 hereinCredit

JANICE

Author Ian Rankin was a fan too, as was his best-known character, John Rebus.

“We had a tour booked for October. Jackie cancelled it at the end of the summer. He told me, ‘I’m unwell, I might be very unwell,’” remembers Cosgrave.

HIGHLAND RAIN

(from Doll By Doll’s Gypsy Blood, 1979)

Martin Goldschmidt: “The best starting point to Jackie. It hit me between the eyes and still moremeanscancer,hadmydedicatedcamevinylyear.itcomingmyshiverssendsdownspine.IkeepbacktoyearafterWhentheversionout,heittomumwhodiedfromsoiteventome.”

was critical and families were really afected. The ‘Young boys staring into burnt out cars’ might have been slightly exaggerated. I play it live: it always goes down well.”

UNIVERSAL BLUE

(from Creatures Of Light & Darkness, 2001)

(Concrete Bulletproof Invisible B-side, 1988)

COURTSHIP IN SCOTTISH FACTORIES

DG: “The tender ness of him being the guy waiting for his girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve heard. It’s exquisite.

(unreleased, 2011)

(from Fairy Tales For Hard Men, 1997)

Today, Greenwood has found new love and plans to move from the home she and Leven shared. In the corner of the room, his ashes still lie undisturbed: “We thought he was indestructible, you know…”

10 great JACKIE LEVEN songs, by the people they touched.

where he didn’t want hassle. After the frst couple of tours, we didn’t rehearse much. All he wanted was me to be prepared live and in the studio. He trusted my playing and I trusted his songs. With me, there was much less for him to carry over a show.”

Michael Cosgrave: “I recorded this on the Jackie tribute The Wanderer. It’s the way he contextualises the alcoholic knowing where to buy the cheapest vodka, with the understanding that it’s going to lead to an early death.”

THOSE IN PERIL (from Doll By Doll, 1981)

Time for heroes: high jinks and open flies from The Libertines’ Carl Barât (left) and Pete Doherty, The Met Lounge, Peterborough, June 14, 2002; (right) the debut album.

PD: I don’t know what Carl saw in me but we had this connection. I thrust myself upon him, playing an acoustic guitar outside his window. I’d hang around the stage door of the Old Vic and badger him to work with me. He was an incredible musician, a mysterious grumpy fella always trying to avoid me. I saw in him my ticket to the big time (laughs). Whenever we did sit down to write something together, it was amazing. Productive, if infrequent.

Carl Barât: I met Peter through his sister [in 1997], we were at Brunel University together. I wanted to be an actor.

Pete Doherty: I remember reading The Severed Alliance, Johnny Rogan’s book on The Smiths. That was the ultimate dream for me – to go to London, form a band and sign to Rough Trade before I was 23. I was conscious that Morrissey was 23 when he got a record deal. That seemed important.

MOJO 53 Retna/Avalon MOJO EYEWITNESS

➢

Interviews by PAT GILBERT • Portrait by NICK STEVENS

In 2002, who would ride the new garage rock wave and be the British Strokes? Step forward PETE DOHERTY and CARL BARÂT, who in making their fantasies of mythical Albion come true, seized imaginations and gave fans a rare sense of belonging. The Clash’s MICK JONES was besotted enough to produce them, and for a time it was heaven, though catastrophe was waiting in the wings. “We may have been in the middle of a manic episode,” reﬂect the band and intimates, “but we were deﬁnitely on an upswing.”

LIBERTINESTHE GIVE INDIE A PUNCH UP BRACKETTHE

CB: We signed for £50k. We got a new Albion Rooms out of it [a fat at 112A Teesdale Street, E2] and blew loads on cocaine. It was like those programmes where they throw a stack of money in the air and do a jig around the room. We drank London dry.

JE: Bernard was going to produce the album but he couldn’t for some reason. So I was talking to Jeannette [Lee, at Rough Trade] about a suitable producer. I still had in my mind a guitarist from a London band, and she said, “What about Mick Jones from The Clash? I can get a message to him.” I was like, “Wow!”, I wasn’t thinking that big.

JE: A lot of people just didn’t get it. They said, “Rough Trade have got The Strokes, why do you need this band?” They’d already been around for a couple of years, remember. But The Strokes were New York and The Libertines couldn’t be more English. You had to meet Pete and Carl – that was the key. You instantly fell under their spell.

Tunic for the troops: (clockwise) Doherty on-stage, Crystal Palace, July 2002; bed-bound in the Albion Rooms, Bethnal Green, May 1, ’02; debut single What A Waster; Doherty inspiration The Severed Alliance; on TOTP, December 19, ’02.

James Endeacott (Rough Trade A&R): I was given a demo and met the group. Peter and Carl had their own little world going on. They liked WW1 songs, Chas & Dave, Victorian music hall. They were into that nostalgic, English seaside vibe.

JH: Pete and Carl invited me back in. They had written all those great songs and now there was more urgency about the music. Lyrically, you could hear it was the same band but now it was presented diferently.

GP: Once we signed to Rough Trade, we started getting really serious about the music. We rehearsed all the time. Carl had that Kinks thing

JH: We went in the studio with Bernard Butler to record a single [What A Waster/I Get Along, released June 2002]. It was an eye-opener. We hadn’t had much recording experience and Bernard was a very professional kind of guy.

PD: With Bernard there was a lot of pushing and pulling trying to get his sonic vision. I didn’t want guitar pedals – just plug the Epiphone into the Marshall. I had to fght Bernard of with a mike stand to stop him putting FX on the guitar.

CB: Pete and I had this vision of a ship, The Albion, sailing to an imagined Arcadia. Nostalgia for a time that never existed was always our thing. The things we celebrated and championed about England only existed in mental projections of the romance of the past… We used to play the 12-Bar club with the forge [behind the stage] from the 1600s or whatever. It’s timeless. Steptoe’s horse is still clattering over the cobbles somewhere.

Gary Powell: I was introduced to Pete and Carl by [music lawyer] Banny [Poostchi]. Our local boozer was Filthy MacNasty’s [in Islington] and the frst thing Carl said to me was, “Have you ever tried a David Niven’s [whisky cocktail]?” The Libertines were just Pete and Carl at that point.

PD: Everything was done with The Albion and Arcadia in mind. It was like a trance – I really believed in Arcadia. A Bohemia that never was. I needed this fantasy world because I wasn’t getting much from modern life in London. I was living in these poems and these songs and this Arcadian dream, and thought we’d recruit more dreamers to help us do our bidding.

CB: We met up at a rehearsal place in King’s Cross. Mick turned up with a bag of cans and sat on the sofa and said, “Play me the songs.” We did, and he fell asleep. He woke up, so we played them all again, and he said he loved it. I was expecting a gangster and it was the opposite, nothing but a beacon of positivity and understanding. It was all in Mick’s eyes, he’d seen it all before.

Suits you: (from left) original Libertine Steve Bedlow, AKA ‘Scarborough Steve’, Barât and Doherty in the latter’s flat, Whitechapel, August 2001.

John Hassall: I was in the band in the earliest days. We were getting nowhere, so I had started studying again, Sociology.

➣ “WE SIGNED FOR £50K… AND BLEW LOADS ON COCAINE.” Carl Barât

important.

going on the guitar, Peter was raw and bluesy. John was amazing as a bass player, with lots of feeling. They created a soundboard unknown to me at that time.

JE: The fact Gary was a black guy immediately stopped the Union Jack fags and [later] the

anydeliberateItauniformsguardsmen’sbeingracistthing.wasn‘tinway,butitbecame

54 MOJO SargentRoger(3),AvalonAlpha,(4),Getty

PD: We bought some guitars from Denmark Street. We’d been banned from most of them for nicking stuf, but it was like, “No, we’ve got some money!” I bought a 1957 New York Epiphone Coronet and Carl bought a couple of Gibson Melody Makers. The rest we took out in £50 notes and kept in the fridge. That paid for the knees-up that’s… still going on, really. We were woefully reckless.

JE: Pete came in 15 minutes late on an Italian scooter with no number plates and a Chinese takeaway hanging from the handlebars. The band played some songs – Up The Bracket, Time For Heroes, I Get Along, Horrorshow maybe – and Mick was dancing around, grinning ear to ear, going, “Let’s do it.”

GP: Did I buy into The Albion and Arcadia? No. That was Pete and Carl’s dream. It was a little too white for me (laughs).

CB: There was a kung fu incident [at Whit feld Street]… that was me being over-exuberant.

MOJO 55

CB: The songs captured the energy of the time. That record means a lot to a lot of people. What more can you ask?

JE: When Up The Bracket came out in October [2002], the reaction from the critics and the press was quite muted. No one was saying it was one of the great albums of all time – which they did about The Strokes’ frst album.

JE: They went on tour and it just got bigger every week. The album sold more as the momentum grew around the country. You knew it was happening when kids started turning up to gigs dressed like Pete and Carl.

(A&R, Rough Trade Records) M

CB: After the frst album came out, things took a darker turn. I was quite mentally ill for a number of years and lived each day as if it was my last. Peter was on his particular journey… yes, it did get quite decadent.

much changed, we weren’t exactly stopping trafc in the street. We played on [TV show] T4 with Girls Aloud. The gates rattled open and there were six taxi-bikes, each with a band member on it. I said to James Endeacott, “Why can’t we have taxi-bikes?” He said (broad Yorkshire accent), “Taxi-bikes?! You can get the fuckin’ tube for 90p!”

GP: We were booked into RAK studios to make the album. To me, it was mind-blowing. On the frst day we were meant to be there at 11 in the morning to set up. I arrived at nine. I sat having tea with [RAK owner and music biz legend] Mickie Most and he told me his whole life story. Paul McCartney popped in; the receptionist is telling me about the time they went to Belgium to fnd Marvin Gaye. I thought, “This is my life now!”

● James Endeacott

(guitar, vocals)

PD: I was a bit disoriented by the impact. We had lots of coverage in the NME and did TOTP [with Time For Heroes] but I was a little bit gutted. It wasn’t the revolution I was braced for. That’s probably why I went a bit mad. I’m still waiting for the revolution now.

Gary Powell (drums)

●

John Hassall (bass)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE ● Carl (guitar,Barâtvocals)

MJ: A group like that only comes along once in a generation. I love them. Pete and Carl are really talented, and so are the others. We were looking forward to doing the next album…

● Pete Doherty

PD: Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that. It ended badly. I had a fat lip and didn’t make it to a gig in Scarborough [on August 3, 2002]. High jinks…

CB: There was a great deal of mental illness in the early years of The Libertines – and a lot in the later years too (laughs). We may have been in the middle of a manic episode, but we were defnitely on an upswing. It’s rock’n’roll, really. You pull back the curtain and on one hand it’s unity and bliss, on another it’s a manic upswing.

The expanded 20th anniversary edition of Up The Bracket is released on October 21.

JE: Mick thought they were funny and loved their youthful energy. It was pretty much recorded live, with him in the middle of the room dancing around with a can of Stella and a splif. He was a vibes merchant as much as anything else.

Mick (producer)Jones

JE: We were all living the dream. Then the crack appeared. So the second Libertines album [in 2004] was a very diferent story.

The push and pull: Barât and Doherty on-stage at the Forum, London, December 18, 2003.

CB: Mick was good at harnessing our chaos; whereas Bernard – who I was very fond of –wouldn’t have been so good at containing our mentalness.

JH: Mickie Most sat there in a blazer reading yachting magazines. An old-school gentleman.

A lot of people thought it was a bit scamble-y, a bit under-produced. But that’s what makes it great. They had everything a great rock’n’roll band should have – energy, comedy, beauty, unpredictability.

MJ: Pete and Carl reminded me of myself and Joe [Strummer] in the early days. That same push and pull.

CB: The album got to Number 35. Not

Mick Jones (speaking to the A.V. Club, 2006): I sat around the frst few weeks and didn’t do anything. They went, “What kind of producer is he?” I just sat and gawked through the studio window. In the end, I decided to just record them as-is. Build the band up and get them to the right moment, then make sure the tapes were running. It should be all about the feeling.

JE: Mick came into his own during the mixing at Whit feld Street studios. Pete and Carl didn’t know much about him to begin with. He talked a lot about recording The Clash’s frst album there. It was a magical time.

56 MOJO hereinCredit hereinCredit

Electric dreams: Be-Bop Deluxe in 1975 (from left) Simon Fox, Bill Nelson, Charlie Tumahai.

Back in the US, Perry remained dubious. He mailed Sound On Sound to DJs across America and courted feedback. “This nationwide survey came back,” says Nelson with a laugh, “and it was this thick (mimes hefty wad of paper). All of the comments were like, ‘Too whacko for us!’ Or, ‘What is this shit?’ It was so funny.”

hereinCredit

N 1979, WHEN BILL NELSON DELIVERED SOUND ON SOUND , the frst and only Red Noise album, Capitol Records’ Rupert Perry didn’t ‘get’ it. “He told my manager he thought I’d gone crazy,” says Nelson today.

“The more popular a band becomes, the more locked-in they become,” Nelson wrote in his sleevenotes for some recent Be-Bop re-releases. “I wasn’t comfortable with that limitation, so disregarding all advice I broke the spell.”

IN JULY 2022, THE PROMPT FOR MOJO’S SUMMIT WITH NELSON IS A Cherry Red reissue of his Red Noise music: a 2-CD version of Sound On Sound and a 6-CD box set, Art/Empire/Industry, that brings remixes, home demos, radio sessions, B-sides and more. We meet him at his home, a fetching cowshed conver sion outside of York, days after a mishap he described online, headlining it “BLOODY MOTHS…” When one such insect alighted on his Japanese wife

MUSIC IN DREAMLAND

For EMI, Be-Bop Deluxe had been an earner. Not a golden goose as such, but proftable over fve inspired art-rock albums with an arch understanding of metanarrative. Be-Bop had hatched Maid In Heaven – succinct, fawless pop with a side order of Nelson’s guitar heroics – and Ships In The Night, the unrepresentative hit single he quickly grew to despise.

MOJO 57 RecordsRedCherryCourtesy➢

In the UK, EMI had already sanctioned release of Nelson’s avant-garde vision of a futurist dystopia – but only after he’d agreed to call his new act Bill Nelson’s Red Noise. Maybe that way, the bean-counters surmised, fans would make the link back to Nelson’s previous band Be-Bop Deluxe.

Alas, the world wasn’t quite ready for Red Noise. Critics panned their album for sounding artifcial, but for Nelson that was the point. “I wanted it to sound machine-like,” he tells MOJO, “to have electricity zapping through it, which I think it achieved.“Afterthat, we toured the UK,” he adds. “Be-Bop fans thought we’d do Be-Bop songs, which we didn’t. Some of them got Red Noise and some were confused, but that wasn’t really my concern. I had to do what I had to do.”

“Bill hated the idea of being commercial,” says Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise producer John Leckie. “He almost hated the idea of being famous.” But Nelson wanted to be a moving target, too, and, hip to Kraftwerk, Belgian synth-poppers Telex, new-wave emergents XTC and Talking Heads, he disbanded Be-Bop and beckoned the future.

A portal opened. Through it came Yoko Ono and the Fluxus movement, Oz magazine and International Times articles about the UFO Club in London. In the college library, Nelson discovered a book of screenplays by surrealist polymath Jean Cocteau and became “completely captured by his approach to things”. Nelson also caught jazz “in a big way”. Wes Montgomery. Then Gil Evans. “So even before I’d made a record, all of that stuff was going round in my head.”

Strong as Be-Bop Deluxe’s 1974 debut Axe Victim was, the fedg ling group Nelson had formed with his Wakefeld friends didn’t see themselves as contenders. Initially a glam rock act signed to EMI after John Peel gave airplay to the entirety of Nelson’s homespun 1971 debut Northern Dream – and after Nelson repeatedly spurned EMI’s solo deal offers – they got their kicks, he says, “getting dolled-up for gigs and freaking out the Thornborough Miners’ Welfare Club.”

When John Leckie frst met Nelson – “It was the ’70s; he was a bit provincial but we got on great” – it was when they mixed Axe

It was later, though, while study ing at Wakefeld College Of Art, that Nelson’s mind was truly opened. “The older students were the backend of the Beatniks,” he says. “They’d stand on tables and recite Ginsberg and Kerouac.”

More than the pain, more than this fresh shock to his 73-yearold system – Nelson is deaf in one ear, diabetic, and has monthly eye injections to arrest macular degeneration – it was the impact on his barely relenting churn of often ambient, largely instrumental solo releases that

“Normallychafed.every day is the same,” he says. “I spend daytime working on artwork for the album packages, then I’ll do music in my studio from about 5.30pm.” Post ‘fame’, this strict cottage-in dustry regimen has yielded literally hundreds of Nelson albums, many of them deliciously idiosyncratic, each one lapped up by his modest-but-avid fanbase. Northern Powerhouse? Here he is, working alone alongside his studio cat, Django. Fittingly, one 2021 release was titled My Private Cosmos

Nelson had seen Bowie and Ronson do Ziggy and thought “That’s a good way to go!”, but he hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to buy make-up. “So we used poster paint, which ran and looked horrendous.”

“ That’s the guitar you want,” Nelson’s father Walter said, pointing at the Gibson 345 touted by the band’s lead guitarist. And lo, it was a Gibson 345 that his father bought for him soon after at Kitchens music in WalterLeeds.Nelson was a jazz saxophonist. He had led his own big band in the late ’40s and early ’50s and met Bill’s mother Jean, then a tap-dancer, while performing. Jean fostered Bill’s love of the visual arts; Walter his love for music. Seeing The Shadows play Wakefeld was seismic for the boy: “The spotlight hit Hank Marvin and I thought, I want to do this!”

Muff Winwood, for example, wanted him in a supergroup with Mitch Mitchell, Free’s Andy Fraser and Scots soul singer Frankie Miller (“tempting because of Mitch”), while Ron and Russell Mael, encountering Nelson at a Radio Times photo-shoot at the peak of their fame, asked him to join Sparks. “I said, ‘I really like what you’re doing, but I’ve got to do my thing.’”

“BILL HATED THE IDEA OF BEING COMMERCIAL. HE ALMOST HATED THE IDEA OF BEING FAMOUS.” JOHN LECKIE

58 MOJO GettyShutterstock,(3)RecordsRedCherryCourtesy

Axe Victim heralded a songwriter of sophistica tion, and an extraordinary guitar talent. The title track seemed almost too prescient, Nelson fagging the hollow ness that can lie at the heart of fame. Elsewhere, the title of Love Is Swift Arrows was an acrostic spelling-out the frst name of Lisa Rosenberg, a girl Nelson had fallen “deeply in love with”.

How is it that, after over half a century’s experience of recordmaking, he still feels the urge?

➣ Emiko’s fower arrangement, Nelson tried to free it outdoors, tripped and head-butted a fagstone. “The blood fow was profuse and frightening,” he wrote. It also precipitated a stay in A&E being patched-up with Steri-Strips.

“I have tons of guitars,” says Nelson. “They call out to me, and each of them has a different story to tell. Even now, the guitar is still the centre of what I do, but I have very little to do with the music business these days.” He pauses for a moment, then smiles. “The shine wore off.”

Axe Victim ’s only real misstep was its ‘skull-guitar’ cover art: more metal than meta, and the kind of red-herring, perhaps, that would periodically lead listeners to misread Nelson as axe hero frst and foremost, or worse, only. Later in Be-Bop Deluxe’s touring career, American promoters paired them with Ted Nugent; others saw Nel son as a guitar-for-hire.

ILL NELSON ALWAYS KNEW how to dream. Aged 10, he made a cardboard replica of Duane Eddy’s Gretsch semi-acoustic, glueing on shirt buttons for controls. As a teenager, he and his family would holiday in Withernsea, Yorkshire, and it was there, one night, that the family saw Alan Dean & His Problems.

More happily, Nelson had assembled three-quarters of a defnitive Be-Bop Deluxe line-up comprising himself, chisel-jawed drummer Simon Fox, and smiley, shock-headed bassist Charlie Tumahai. Former Mother’s Pride keyboardist Andy Clark would join Be-Bop after playing on the Futurama tour.

Most of the album’s songs were written on an old upright piano in Nelson’s tiny front room in Wakefeld, the instrument salvaged from a local church. He was still living with his frst wife, but had

Future shocks: (clockwise from top left) the original Be-Bop Deluxe, 1974 (from left) Rob Bryan, Nick Chatterton-Dew, Nelson, Ian Parkin; the Modern Music-era Be-Bop Deluxe, 1976 (from left) Fox, Nelson, Tumahai, Andy Clark; Nelson live in London, 1976; Futurama producer “naughty public schoolboy type” Roy Thomas Baker, with (left) Alice Cooper, 1981; from the Axe Victim sleeve, Nelson with a guitar later owned by Skids’ Stuart Adamson.

“Roy struck me as the naughty public schoolboy type,” says Nelson. “He would sit in an armchair on a fight case and go, ‘Rolypolys! Takey-wakeys!’ That’s about all I remember him offering.”

Meanwhile, Roy Thomas Baker’s ‘japes’ became more disrup tive. “He even set fre to the mixing desk,” says Nelson. Worst of all was a vocal overdub session at Sarm West in London during which Baker deliberately cranked Nelson’s headphone mix to an injurious level. “I said, ‘Right! Any more of this and you’re off the session!’ and he and [second engineer] Gary [Lyons] looked a bit sheepish and put their heads down. Later on Roy went (teasingly), ‘Oh, Bill. You’re such a prima donna.’”

“It’s not easy to live this way/Just an hour and a feeting kiss ’til the morning,” ran part of Maid In Heaven, while Sister Seagull, the defnitive version of which would grace Be-Bop’s 1977 double-live set Live! In The Air Age (a UK Number 10) spoke of “…waiting here for the tide to turn.”

RIOR TO PRODUCING BE-BOP DELUXE’S BRILLIANT

1975 album Futurama, Roy Thomas Baker had already en joyed huge success producing Queen. And maybe that was the problem. Initially, all had augured well, but as sessions at Rockfeld Studios in Wales commenced, Nelson realised that he and Baker were “like oil and water”.

begun a relationship with Jan Monks, later his second wife, and the sister of Be-Bop Deluxe’s guitar tech, Stuart.

UNSURPRISINGLY, NELSON WANTED TO PRODUCE the next Be-Bop album himself. Unconvinced, EMI suggest ed a compromise. John Leckie had tape-op’d or engineered albums by Pink Floyd, George Harrison and Roy Harper, and was ready to make the leap to producer. Perhaps he and Nelson could produce Be-Bop’s next record together?

“Yes, both those songs were about my heart being somewhere else,” says Nelson. “My frst marriage didn’t last long – it was a real mismatch.”Thetrue star of the Futurama sessions, he says, was engineer Pat Moran, a wizard with sonics whether tracking The Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s brass on Music In Dreamland or upright bassanchored bossa nova tune, Jean Cocteau.

The deed was done after a gig at Biba’s Roof Garden in Kensing ton, London. “Rob [Bryan, bass] was very upset,” recalls Nelson, “but Nick [Chatterton-Drew, drums] and Ian [Parkin, rhythm gui tar] said, ‘It’s OK – we saw this coming.’ A Jean Cocteau quote on Axe Victim ’s cover seemed to signal the putting away of childish things – and signposted Be-Bop’s future: “No longer continue art as a distraction, but as a priesthood,” it read when translated from the French.

MOJO 59

The pairing proved so sparky that the band released two UK

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Victim together. Leckie immediately saw that Be-Bop Deluxe’s vision was wholly dependent on Nelson. So much so, in fact, that he would soon need to jettison Be-Bop Deluxe Mark I, a Saturn V rocket that launched but could not sustain him.

Nelson’s ambient, gently AmericansoundtrackkineticforStamps, a Public ServiceBroadcastingTV documentary about postage stamps whose artwork illustrated diferent facets of US life and culture. A gorgeous, transporting curio typifed by dream-like evocations A Christmas Cowboy Out ft and Beach Hut Beauties.

There was something faintly ridiculous about tour life, too. The Artie Fufkin types, mimicked by Andy Clark on Modern Music, and Be-Bop publicist Tony Brainsby hatching tall tales about Bill buying a horse called Darth after attending a US screening of Star Wars.

BE-BOP DELUXE

For Scots new wave band Skids, Bill Nelson’s existence was vital. “We actually came together at a Be-Bop Deluxe concert at The Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline,” says singer Richard Jobson. “I’d gone to see the support act Doctors Of Madness and this guy who turned out to be [Skids guitarist] Stuart Adamson came up and said, ‘Why don’t you hang about? I’m thinking of forming a band.’

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North East. Accordions and twanging Gretsch guitars feature; the ‘orchestra’ was Nelson triggering samples. “One of the best things I’ve done,” he says. “It’s a mystery to me how I achieved it.”

Not that Nelson didn’t enjoy some of the trappings of fame. Leckie recalls going to see Magazine in Sheffeld in Bill’s metallic blue Rolls-Royce: “We’re doing 110 and drinking cocktails, and Bill’s like, ‘Look! The car’s not even vibrating!’ Then we get to the venue and the electric windows got stuck. We missed the gig; couldn’t leave the Rolls.”

“Yeah, Bill was such a nice chap that he wouldn’t want to offend anyone unless it was absolutely necessary,” says Leckie. “But really he should have offended people a lot more, because a lot of the people around him didn’t have his best interests at heart.”

“He was more of a loner,” Leckie goes on. “He didn’t hang out in pubs and clubs. Don’t get me wrong; Bill and the band were big, close buddies who had a lot of fun together, but Bill would stay in the studio getting the job done. The only time I couldn’t get through to him was when his girlfriend Jan turned up at the weekends. They’d sit at the back of the studio holding hands, and that would be it ’til NelsonMonday.”agreeshe tired of the album-tour cycle very quickly. “I realised that we weren’t going to see much of America other than hotel rooms and aeroplanes, plus audiences always wanted stuff from two albums ago. I had this nightmare vision of us dragging out the old numbers 20 years on…”

“Bill’s guitar playing was a huge infuence on Stuart, but Stuart was also a very complicated person who could disappear for weeks.

Futurama (Harvest, 1975)

“Bill did everything, really,” says Leckie. “Wrote the songs, played all the instruments on his demos including drums, then said to the band, ‘Copy that.’ There was no creative output for them other than on-stage, and later, around [fnal Be-Bop album] Drastic Plastic, that was one of the reasons the band ended. Charlie Tumahai and Simon Fox were very talented guys, but they were also rock’n’rollers who wanted to shag girls and tour America. Whereas Bill of course hated touring America.

★★★★ Picture Post (Sonoluxe, 2010)

BILL NELSON AND HIS ORCHESTRASIGNALLIGHTHOUSEMECHANISM

bed-ridden robot cover-art, SOS was an angular, manic-sounding reinvention with fractured guitars and fzzing Moog synths. Its dystopian sci-f themes were part-inspired by E.M. Forster and Ray Bradbury stories.

BE-BOP DELUXE

Sunburst Finish (Harvest, 1976)

“It’s a brave new world for Nelson,moderns,”youngsangandnow he was one of them. Playful, like its

It’s Leckie’s view that after Modern Music and before the dry-run for Red Noise that was 1978’s Drastic Plastic, Be-Bop Deluxe could have become a jazz-rock group. “They had the chops, and loved stuff like Stanley Clarke and what John McLaughlin and Miles Davis were doing,” he says, “but I think Bill felt like a bit of a dinosaur.”

★★★★★

OST BE-BOP AND RED NOISE – EMI DROPPED HIM IN 1979, along with Wire “and anybody interesting, really” after the company merged with Thorn Electrical Industries –Nelson found favour as a producer, collaborator and infuencer. He worked with Gary Numan, David Sylvian and Yellow Magic Orchestra, and when someone spotted David Bowie buying Nelson’s 1980, Devo-meets-T.Rex single Do You Dream In Col our? at Virgin Records in Marble Arch, the NME reported on it.

The defnitive Be-Bop line-up arrives, and Nelson’s vocal gift makes a quantum leap. The title references a ’60s guitar brand and a ‘world of the future’ exhibit/ride at the 1939 World’s Fair; highlights include the fuid thrills of Stage Whispers and Music In Dreamland. “This guitar does not lie,” sang Nelson on the former. Prophetic.

Be-Bop continue to stretch, employing an orchestra and Penny Lane’s piccolo trumpet player David Mason on Crystal Gazing, and critiquing the profteering of Christian US evangelists on Blazing Apostles. For all the experimentation, it was the band’s breakthrough album, a UK Number 17.

★★★★ Sound On Sound (Harvest, 1979)

BILL NELSON

Flame on: Be-Bop circa Sunburst Finish, 1976 (clock wise from left) Tumahai, Clark, Fox, Nelson. ➣ FUTURE PROOFJamesMcNair

★★★★ The Alchemical Adventures Of Sailor Bill (Sonoluxe, 2005)

An evocative holidayschildhoodinspired“coastalrichly-layeredandsongsuite”byseasideinthe

BILL NELSON’S RED NOISE

In truth, the vehicle wasn’t actually Nelson’s. It had been leased by his then-manager Mike Dolan “to beneft his company as a taxrelief thing,” says the guitarist today, and this, in Leckie’s estimation, was symptomatic of an overly-trusting attitude to manage ment that eventually saw Nelson take his overseers to the High Court over purloined master tapes and missing revenue (he won).

Top 20 albums in 1976: Sunburst Finish and Modern Music. “The fow was completely natural,” says Nelson. Working at Abbey Road, and necking Tequila Sunrises and White Russians after successful takes, Be-Bop developed a more expansive and progressive sound. Nelson nodded at Jimi Hendrix’s ballad-style on Sunburst’s Crying To The Sky, and devoted the second side of Modern Music to a suite of songs “that was a critique of the music business in the US”.

★★★★★

MOJO 61 BostockMartin(2),RecordsRedCherryCourtesy(2),NelsonBillCourtesy

The frst Skids song Nelson worked on was the non-album single Masquerade, a co-production with Leckie.

“Bill’s unique,” concludes John Leckie. “He hasn’t stopped and never will. The only thing he needs is an editor…”

“MY GUITARS CALL OUT TO ME, AND EACH OF THEM HAS A DIFFERENT STORY TO TELL.” BILL NELSON

“He did a brilliant arrangement and introduced us to keyboards,” says Jobson. “We loved Bill – he was a fairly iconic fgure. He was also the frst person I encountered who took my lyrics seriously and liked the abstraction of them.”

Sound On Sound and Art/Empire/Industry by Bill Nelson’s Red Noise are released by Cherry Red/Esoteric on August 26.

thinking has continued to expand exponentially. Miles on the clock; wisdom accrued.

“We had a similar outlook, I think. The music business wasn’t taken too seriously. That’s why I fnd it hard to grasp that Stuart took his own life – he wasn’t a depressed person when I knew him.”

When we made [1979’s] Days In Europa we needed a producer that he would respect and want to work with, so I suggested Bill.”

Nelson still dreams a lot, too. But these days the catalyst tends to be the statins and blood pressure tablets he must take. His dreams often feature those he’s lost. Charlie Tumahai and Ian Parkin. His ambient music collaborator pal, Harold Budd. His father. His mother. His kid brother, Ian, sometime saxophonist for Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise.

As he cues-up a new song titled Faulty Wiring, MOJO ponders Nelson’s Yeti-sized footprint. Albums, paintings, photos, film scores, his online journal and his two-volume memoir, Diary Of A Hyperdreamer. What’s the ultimate goal?

Nelson recalls visiting the Skids rehearsing in Dunfermline. “The frst thing Stuart said to me was (passionately) ‘You’ve got to have your guitar back!’ Years earlier he had bought the actual white Hoyer Les Paul copy I’m holding on the cover of Axe Victim – not from me, from somebody else. I said, ‘No, no – keep it!’

Nelson laughs. “To keep myself amused until the bitter end.”

N PERSON, NELSON IS A WARM, CALM PRESENCE LOOK closely, and the cheekbones that spearheaded Be-Bop’s stylish ascent are still there. There’s no holding back the years, but his

Style revolutionaries: (clockwise from above) Red Noise in 1979 (from left) Andy Clark, Steve Peer, Bill Nelson, Ian Nelson, Rick Ford; Nelson (second left) with Skids’ Richard Jobson, William Simpson and Stuart Adamson, 1979; Be-Bop get switched on, 1978; Nelson at his home studio near York; (insets) the final Be-Bop Deluxe album Drastic Plastic; Skids’ Nelson-produced Days In Europa; Bill’s memoir.

Interview done, MOJO asks to see Nelson’s home studio and we go upstairs. There are retro toy robots everywhere. A photo of Les Paul signed ‘to Bill’ and a large box-file labelled ‘Bill Nelson notebooks’.

He tells MOJO of his early, brief encounter with Pentecostalism, and of discovering Buddhism. Of being a master of a Rosicrucianism temple in Leeds for a year, then joining a kind of “magickal masonry” order called The“IMartinists.wasinterested in the history and how that im pacted upon The Golden Dawn and the occult in Victorian times,” he explains. “People like W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, of course. But I was very careful…”

62 MOJO

original members of The Byrds – Hill man, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby – have collaborated on a coffee-table tome, The Byrds: 1964-1967, published by BMG. It collects some 500 images across 400 pages – including pics by noted rock snappers Henry Diltz, Barry Feinstein, Jim Marshall and Linda McCartney, as well as uncredited photos from the collection of former Byrds manager Jim Dickson – along with extensive commentary by the band members.

“All these old Byrds pictures just jumped out at me,” says Hillman of the trove of several thousand rare images. “Some of them I didn’t remember, some of them I hadn’t ever seen before. But they were so great, it seemed like we really should do a photo

Through the book’s pages we watch The Byrds battle the era’s pop ma chine. “There’s one picture from Ed Sullivan of David – you can see in his face that he had just completely blown it,” recalls Hillman. “He got into an argument with the producer of the show, and we were fred that day, and never went back. David was always the bad little boy. It’s kind of funny to see that, looking back.”

Six decades on, it seems little has changed amongst The Byrds. “Yeah, but the three of us are still here, still walking the earth,” says Hillman. “Given that, the book seemed like a good opportunity to look back on what we were and what we did.”

FEW YEARS AGO, BYRDS bassist Chris Hillman was work ing on his memoir, Time Be tween, when he managed to gain access to the band’s photo archive at Columbia Records.

Now,book.”thesurviving

➢

Funny, perhaps, because Crosby – who offers insightful contributions to the text and signed some limited-edition copies of the book – continues to enjoy fraught relations with his Byrds brethren. In 2018, McGuinn and Hillman went on tour together, billing it as a tribute to the 1968 Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album – which seemed to irk Crosby, who acquired legal rights to The Byrds’ name in 2002. More recently the combative Croz has apparently blocked McGuinn on Twitter, and isn’t actively promoting the new book. “David’s an interesting fellow,” says the ever diplomatic Hillman. “He doesn’t cease to get into mischief.”

Rising to folk rock eminence in the mid-’60s, the band weren’t immune to that staple ’60s indignity: the wacky promo shoot. McGuinn recalls the band’s frst ever as a kind of slapstick comedy. “We’re posing, and [drummer] Michael Clarke was up on this scaffold ing and he pulled a pin and the whole scaffold went down and hit the photographer on the head,” he laughs. “The next session we did, the photographer came with a hard hat on that said ‘BYRDS’ on it.”

“We were aware of having an image and a look,” says McGuinn. “Certainly we were inspired by the British Invasion, The Beatles and the Stones, and all the Carnaby Street stuf. Early on, we wore [matching] suits like The Beatles – but they got stolen. I remember telling John Lennon that and he said, ‘I wish our suits had been stolen!’ By this time, we’d gone back to T-shirts and jeans. I got that little yellow jacket I’m wearing from [Quicksilver Messenger Service singer] Dino Valenti up in San Francisco.”

MOJO 63

“We were going to project that on a screen behind us as we played. There were a lot of interesting [visual] ideas like that early on.” Adds Hillman: “It wasn’t just The Byrds, everything was exploding then. It was an innovative time in the culture – in music, art, flm. Everything was coming away from that staid 1950s aesthetic.”

64 MOJO hereinCredit (4)RockSheila

Before adding a rhythm section, Crosby, Gene Clark and McGuinn developed their chops as a vocal trio. “People always thought we were doing a three-part harmony,” says McGuinn. “But Gene and I would sing in unison, and then David was free to pop around. He didn’t do strict parallel parts, he liked to do counterpoints, but he was really brilliant at it. Gene had a lower voice and that gave me a little bit of bottom, and I gave him a little bit of something else on top. What we had together was a very unique sound.”

“Around that time, I’d bought a Bolex 16mm movie camera and I started shooting single-frame stuf,” recalls McGuinn.

For the frst couple of years of their career The Byrds’ lives were a blur of roadwork and recording. “That kind of hectic schedule was really Columbia Records’ idea,” says McGuinn. “They had us touring constantly, doing TV shows and press, and every few months they wanted you to crank a record out. Honestly, I think the record company were afraid this was all a fad and would fade away, so they thought we better get our money while we can.”

MOJO 65 hereinCredit hereinCredit

“I love that we went from covering folk songs, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, to doing something like Eight Miles High [of Fifth Dimension] in such a short amount of time,” says Hillman. “That transition as a band, within a year and half, was exciting. We became really tight and really musical and really diferent. I always wondered where we would’ve gone if we could’ve stuck together as the original entity.”

As the band gets ready to rehearse for their frst national television appearance on Hullabaloo, McGuinn peers at the camera through his signature specs. “I frst saw John Sebastian [of The Lovin’ Spoonful] wearing them in Greenwich Village; he had these little cobalt blue sunglasses,” says McGuinn. “When I got to LA, I got some of those frames, took them to the eye doctor and had my prescription put in. It became a common style in that era – you’d look out and there’d be a bunch of kids in the audience wearing the same glasses.”

66 MOJO hereinCredit

While McGuinn, Clark and Crosby led a strong frontline, the Byrd who cut perhaps the most striking fgure was the man behind the kit, Michael Clarke. “Michael had never played drums before,” remembers McGuinn. “He got the gig ’cos he looked like Brian Jones! I saw him walking in front of the Troubadour –I thought, ‘Wow, let’s get him in the band!’ I asked if he knew how to play the drums. He said, ‘Well, I play a little congas, man.’ So we got him some cardboard boxes and he learned how to play on those.”

“The green cape! I think David wore that thing every waking moment of his life,” chuckles Hillman. “It’s really funny, because in one of the pictures there’s this other cape, a brown leather one he had made. I told my wife that was his ‘dress cape’. David would be coming through Laurel Canyon, down the hill, on his Triumph Bonneville, and the cape would be fying behind him. This was not long after Lawrence Of Arabia came out. He was like Lawrence Of Laurel Canyon.”

MOJO 67 hereinCredit

The still-scufing young Byrds visit Columbia Records’ headquar ters in New York. “I remember walking around, the fve us,” says McGuinn, “just sort of taking up the whole street. It felt like being in a cool gang.” Hillman notes that “at this point, we had no money, as you can see. It was cold, and we didn’t have the right clothes or jackets. You go from that, a bunch of guys starving together, to suddenly fnding mass acceptance, hit records… it all happened very fast.”

“The best thing about The Byrds was that we didn’t have a blueprint,” says Hillman. “We basically started out as folk singers, acoustic players, and became pop stars – we were making it all up as we went along. Once the band really got going, there’s part of you that thinks it’s never going to end. And in a way, I suppose it hasn’t. It’s almost 60 years later and we’re still looking at this stuf, looking at these photos, and marvelling at the experience.”

The Byrds: 1964-1967 is published on September 20 by BMG books. Prices from £100. Visit: bmgbooks.com. M

When Netﬂix’s STRANGER THINGS went big on RUNNING UP THAT HILL, no one predicted the avalanche of interest in KATE BUSH ’s apotheosis.mid-’80sNow it’s MOJO’s turn to take its shoes o f and throw them in the lake, as we dive deep into HOUNDS OF LOVE: its creators, its songs, its lore, and more. Portrait by JOHN CARDER BUSH .

The Song

MAGICKALTHINKING

T’S NOT THE FIRST TIME RUNNING UP THAT HILL HAS turned Kate Bush’s fortunes around. Ahead of its original release on August 5, 1985, the singer had seen increasingly diminishing returns in the British singles charts. While 1981’s stunningly peculiar Sat In Your Lap had climbed to a respectable Number 11, the title track of ’82’s challenging The Dreaming album stalled at 48 and follow-up There Goes A Tenner only managed to reach Number 98. It seemed Bush’s career as a hit-making artist might well have been over.

Includes! Running Up That Hill The story of the song Hounds Of Love How they made it The Ninth Wave Prog pop’s Trojan horse The Horror! Kate’s scary movies

Taking aim: the cover photo for Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill single, 1985.

It appeared that Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), far from losing any of its appeal in the intervening four decades, had only gained in power and potential. In some respects very much of its time – perfect for the ’80s staging of Stranger Things – its breakout into the wider world in 2022 underlines what’s timeless and unique about the song. Built around a circular, tom-tom heavy LinnDrum groove programmed by Bush’s thenboyfriend – bassist and recording engineer Del Palmer – its staccato chord stabs and quirky instrumental hookline were added by Bush using the effected waveforms of the Cello 2 patch on her then-high-end sampling system, the Fairlight. Yet in 2022, barely a whiff of anachronism arises from its dated Subject-wise,technology.the song continues to intrigue. Bush imagines making a bargain with the Creator in which she swaps souls with her lover, so that they can both experience the feelings of the opposite gender, leading to, as the song’s creator put it, “a greater understanding”. Both lyrically and mu sically, it remains an outstanding example of how innovative, catchy and weird pop music can be.

➢

MOJO 69 BushCarderJohn

The post-Stranger Things stats were staggering. Fuelled by an average six million Spotify streams per day in June and July, Running Up That Hill became the most-played track in the world, twice topping Billboard’s Global 200 chart. In the UK, it reached Number 1 and stayed there for three weeks, trumping its initial ’85 chart placing of Number 3, while also hitting the top spot in Australia, Ireland, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Switzerland and Sweden. In the US – where the song had previously been Bush’s biggest hit at Number 30 – it gave the singer her frst American Top 5 hit when it reached Number 4.

How Running Up That Hill conquered the world. Twice. By TOM DOYLE .

Beating a retreat from London to a new rural home near Sevenoaks in Kent, in 1983 Bush set up a songwriting room centred upon her piano, her Fairlight and an eight-track tape recorder. “I intend just to keep on

O ONE COULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING. During the late spring and summer this year, Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) enjoyed a barely credible commercial resur gence, spot-lit by its usage in the fourth season of the Netfix sci-f horror series Stranger Things. Over mul tiple episodes, Bush’s Hounds Of Love keynote emerged as not just a groovy soundtrack inclusion but instead as an essential narrative device. Beleaguered tomboy teen Max Mayfeld de ploys the song as a sonic talisman; played through the headphones of her cassette Walkman, it strengthens her in her battles against a supernatural, serial-killing entity.

Meanwhile in the UK, she broke no less than three Guinness World Records: oldest female artist to reach Number 1 (at the age of 63), longest time for a track to reach the top of the charts (37 years) and biggest gap between Number 1s (44 years since Wuthering Heights). Music sales data company Luminate calculated that this year alone the track has earned Kate Bush $2.3 million (and counting).

Just how low Bush’s commercial stock had plummeted was high lighted by the fact that in the summer of 1985, one weekly music

“THE TENSION IN THAT TRACK IS JUST REMARKABLE. EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, THERE’S A LITTLE TWIST.” DRUMMER S TUART E LLIOTT

September(left)TVsingleThings;takesvideo;Runningbackand(clockwise)communication:KateBushMishaHervieugotobackfortheUpThatHillMaxMayfieldithigherinStrangerperformingtheliveonGermanwithStuartElliottandDelPalmer,5,1985.

Bush herself felt that Running Up That Hill sounded like a win ner. And it was to provide the catalyst for the completion of the rest of its parent LP. “From that moment,” she later noted, “the album process steadily rolled.”

“For me, that is the title,” she said at the time. “But I was told that if I insisted [on keeping it], the radio stations in at least 10 countries would refuse to play it – Spain, Italy, America, lots of them. I thought it was ridiculous. Still, especially after The Dreaming, I decided to weigh up the priorities. I had to give the album a chance.”

70 MOJO fNet©Meyer,Fotex/Jensix/SuppliedbyLMK,EverettCollectionInc/AlamyStockPhoto

➣ writing,” she informed the members of her fan club that sum mer, in one of her increasingly irregular newsletters. “So, yet again, I slip away from the eyeball of the media to my home.”

PON THE COMPLETION OF THE HOUNDS OF LOVE LP in the summer of 1985, it was clear to both Kate Bush and her label EMI that the opening track was the frontrunner for the frst single. The only problem was that it was still called A Deal With God. EMI argued that any song with “God” in the title carried risks.

As work on what would become Running Up That Hill pro gressed, top UK session guitarist Alan Murphy arrived to add his clipped, percussive lines and skronky power chords over Palmer’s pulsing bass line, while the singer’s brother Paddy Bush laid down a wristy balalaika part. Drummer Stuart Elliott – who had appeared on every Kate Bush album since 1978’s The Kick Inside – was brought in to record his rolling overdubs, many of which were fed through voluminous reverb to thunderous effect.

Here, Bush demoed the song that was frst titled A Deal With God. Then, at the beginning of 1984, she moved operations to her new private studio at East Wickham Farm, her childhood home in Well ing, Kent, where her parents still lived. It was in this closeted, crea tively-freeing environment, over the next year-plus, that Bush honed the album that would revive her broader appeal: Hounds Of Love

Vocally, Running Up That Hill showcased a full range of Bush’s lead and backing vocal styles. A confdante in the verses (“D’you wanna hear about the deal that I’m making?”) supported by an odd-sounding choir (“Yeah yeah yo…”), she becomes insistent in the choruses, yet

“It was good fun doing Running Up That Hill,” Elliott told MOJO in 2018. “I just sort of overdubbed on top of the LinnDrum and did big, explosive drum flls at the end. But the tension in that track is just remarkable. Every step of the way, there’s a little twist and turn that’s different from the previous verse – an extra line or one line less, or a repeat just in the perfect places. There’s abso lutely no dead space in that track and it’s just so deceptively simple.”

at the same time retain ing a strange sadness (her affectingly pining delivery of the line, “Say, if I only could…”). In the middle eight, she turns urgent and demanding (“Come on darling, let’s exchange the experience!”).

Four years on from Bush’s last Top 20 hit, neither artist nor re cord company wished to hamper the single’s commercial chances. So, in a rare moment of artistic capitulation, Bush agreed to change the title to Running Up That Hill, bracketing A Deal With God. In her mind, the latter remains the proper name of the song.

Hill

“Kate Bush?” responds her co-star Caleb McLaughlin AKA Lucas Sinclair. “Never.”

have to work together well.”

Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions Of Kate Bush, is published on October 27 by Nine Eight Books.

Inside the Running Up That Hill video with Kate’s co-star, MISHA HERVIEU. By MARTIN ASTON . FROM sameathleticism.emphasiseddramasKateHeightsWUTHERINGonwards,Bush’svisualhadherAtthetime,shefelt

When I interviewed Bush for MOJO in 2005, I asked her if she’d consciously tried to regain commercial ground with the singles released from Hounds Of Love.

In 1985, “becauseMichael,byhereveryonewasIwho“ThoughHervieuhidingBush:knowPineapple,LondonforBarnumcircus-themedwasprofessionalclassically-traineddancerMishaHervieuworkingfull-timeintheWestEndspectaclewhenanauditioncameupamusicvideo.EvenonarrivalatdancestudioHervieudidn’ttheclientwas“Shewasabit,”recalls.IknewKatewas.lovedthatshediferenttoelse,inallwork.”Hervieu,thengoingherbirthforenameoffeltshewonthepartIwasn’tfollowingtrends.

“Oh yeah,” she brightly responded. “I don’t remember there being four. Oh, that’s not bad, is it?”

So was Hervieu, whom actors’ union Equity chastised for moonlighting, and she was fred from Barnum. “I’d lied, and said I was ill, because I knew the video was important,” she says. The next (and last) time Hervieu saw Bush, it was 1990, in Soho. “She was scurrying around, in disguise, but I knew Kate well enough to recognise her. We just chatted away. She keeps her private life very private, which I respected, but she allowed me in for the

“Yeah, I guess hooky.”

The part where the pair had to rugby-tackle each other was trickier. “She’s Kate Bush, and I didn’t want to hurt her! But I was told to go for it, and I either cracked, or bruised, her rib. She was in a bit of trouble after the shoot.”

(Number 18) and The Big Sky (Number 37).

that music video was doing a disservice to dance. “It was used quite trivially, it was being exploited,” she said. “Haphazard images, busy… without really the serious expression, and wonderful expression, that dance can give. How interesting it would be to make a very simple routine between two people, almost classic, and very simply flmed.”

All John Carder Bush photographs are from Kate: Inside The Rainbow by John Carder Bush, published by Sphere, hardback price £50.

Accessible? Hooky?

Thirty-seven years later, in Episode Five of Season 4 of Stranger Things, Sadie Sink as Max Mayfeld frets of Run ning Up That Hill, “What if, by listening to this over and over, I get sick of it, and suddenly it’s not my favourite any more? Will it still work? Or will Kate Bush lose her magic power or something?”

Rehearsals at Bush’s home were arduous, and spread over several months. “I’d done other videos,” says Hervieu, “but Running Up That Hill was more akin to making a flm.” She found Bush, “beautiful, like an elf,” but says she wasn’t fazed by the occasion. “I’d met other stars, like [Barnum’s] Michael Crawford, so I treated Kate just as a person. But I felt we had a good relationship. When you’re dancing that close, you

she drives a taxi and acts in historical re-enactments (the day before MOJO called, she played King Charles II at the island’s Elizabeth Castle); she acknowledges that the luminous world of Kate Bush seems, “another time and place away.”

Hervieu wasn’t an automatic choice, though. “The issue was, Kate is quite petite, and I’m quite tall, at fve-foot 10. But we discovered the height diference allowed Kate to wrap around my body, like a snake. And I could lift her really high.”

“I ANDINTOWENTWORKSOMEONESAID,‘DIDYOUKNOWYOU’RENUMBER1?’”

BLOOD SHOTS

MOJO 71 hereinCreditPostEveningJerseytheofcourtesyBush,CarderJohn

paper included her in a “Where Are They Now?” feature. Within days, she appeared on BBC1’s chat show Wogan, debuting her come back single for an estimated TV audience of nine million UK viewers.

The strangeness of Running Up That Hill was made explicit during Bush’s performance, in which she stood singing behind a lectern, backed by two standard-bearers wielding billowing fags and a six-piece band that included Del Palmer and Paddy Bush. All wore buttoned-up brown duster coats that could easily have been mistaken for monks’ habits. As the song moved through its slowbuilding arrangement, the musicians stepped closer and closer to the singer. Particularly in the context of a cosy mainstream show, there was something distinctly ritualistic about the whole affair, certainly in keeping with the song’s magickal theme.

As a plan, it paid off. Hounds Of Love would produce four Top 40 “Werehits. four of them hits?” Bush wondered aloud. “I can only remember three.”

I listed them for her: Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) (Number 3), Cloudbusting (Number 20), Hounds Of Love

HervieuwhereLivingvideo.”inJersey,shegrewup,rarelydancesnow:

Hervieu doesn’t recall conversations about the song itself, “but more about movement in relation to the lyrics, which came from [choreographer] Diane Gray more than Kate. The song was all about the relationship and the turmoil between a couple; I was given certain positions to stand in, and then express it, to feel it.”

It was that period of [TV dance troupe] Hot Gossip, a lot of robotic-type dancing. I didn’t do that.”

“There probably was a little bit of that,” she admitted. “I think there was an element to me thinking that [Side 1 of the vinyl record] that had those single tracks, that it would make sense if they were more kind of… what’s the word? Not commercial. But more… I don’t know. I can’t fnd a word.”

One potent expression mimicked an archer pulling back an arrow (which Bush adopted for the single’s artwork). “Kate’s brother Paddy did a form of archery, which she must have transferred into her thoughts,” says Hervieu.

When Running Up That Hill subsequently hit Number 3, it be came Kate Bush’s biggest hit since her Number 1 Wuthering Heights debut, seven years before. Off the back of the single’s suc cess, Hounds Of Love became her biggest-selling album, topping the chart after its frst week of release and going on to achieve double platinum status in the UK, with more than 600,000 sales.

“I CRACKED HER RIB!”

Not a fan of “creepy horror”, Hervieu hadn’t seen the Net fix series Stranger Things that catapulted Running Up That Hill back up the UK chart. “I went into work and someone said, ‘Did you know you’re Number 1?’ which felt Seeingodd!”thevideo again, she says, “is a strange feeling. Bloody hell, was that me? At the time, I’d only have seen the tiny imperfections, but actually, it’s really good and I’m very proud of it. It’s such a lovely song too. But Kate’s the talent. I was just the dancer.”

“THE FAIRLIGHT SHATTER AND CRASH, THE FULL -MOON HOWLS – IT’S ALMOST KATE BUSH IN THROBBING GRISTLE MODE.”

the use of repeated phrases that shift in meaning: the hunted cry of “Oh here I go” becomes a declaration of capitulation while “two steps on the water” shifts from a means to shake off the hounds’ scent to a passionate surrender to the erotic, with Bush growling, “Do you know what I really mean? Do you know what I really need”, in case we’ve perhaps missed the allusion: “I need la-la-lala-la-yeah”. Does she sing the actual word ‘love’? No, but we know what she really means. The spell has worked.

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That summoning begins with an appropriate snatch of dialogue – “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” from Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror flm, Night Of The Demon, based on M.R. James’s 1911 tale of demonic possession, Casting The Runes. It is the voice of a dead professor (Maurice Denham) speaking through a medium (Reginald Beckwith), warning that the satanic curses of necroman cer Julian Karswell are too powerful to resist. The recontextualisation is powerful when you imagine how Bush arrived at this connection: seeing love as a runic malediction that cannot be outrun. The pulsing rhythms of Fairlight and LinnDrum, coupled with the breathless, scything chase of Jonathan Williams’ cello, and the girl-group do-do-do’s (that might just as easily be canine howls) only serve to enhance this mood of hypnotic incantation and relentless animal pursuit.

Lyrically, it begins as a short story, told in the frst person, about a child convinced she is being hunted by dogs who, like an image from a medieval bestiary, embody the imagined pain and responsibility of romantic love. Musically, it is a rhythmic, pagan invocation of those hounds, the studio as its site of conjuration.

Yet the multiple takes required to get from there to here aren’t detectable. Bush celebrates the childhood pleasure of looking at the sky, with passing mention of Noah’s Ark. “You never understood me… you never really tried,” is the only poser. The rest is gleefully uncomplicated.

M.R. James’s Casting The Runes reworked as a love story? Only Kate, says ANDREW MALE .

Martin ‘Youth’ Glover’s liquid bass line is the foundation, against which walloping drums, brother Paddy’s didgeridoo and Alan Murphy’s slashing guitar are thrown. Just as the song comes to the boil, Bush presses ‘pause’ – “for a jet” – and a plane zooms past. Then it starts up again.

Looking up to the heavens and laughing. MARK BLAKE laughs along.

Side One, Continued...

Gradually, subtly, these two strands, the childlike fear and the feral invocation, begin to merge, as if a transformation is at work in the very heart of the song, and our terrifed narrator is being seduced into belief. Bush conveys this subtly through her changing vocal delivery, moving from the vulnerable to the impassioned, and

The devil is in the details. The Big Sky’s position, track three on Hounds Of Love, is important. Suddenly the sky’s turned blue and the sun’s out. It’s a goofy smile of a song, even if it nearly broke its composer. “It gave me terrible trouble,” Bush said.

THIS IS POP? Hounds Of Love

Here I go: Bush with Gow Hunter on the set of her self-directed video for Hounds Of Love.

There’s humour too. “That cloud looks like Ireland,” Bush giggles. Musicians and family members add similar observations on the 12-inch single’s ‘Meteorological Mix’. “That cloud looks like snow,” suggests one, “No it doesn’t…” etc, while the song is deconstructed and re-assembled, one vocal trill and didgeridoo warble at a time.

The Big Sky

“A FRAU BUSCH CALLED WHILE YOU WERE OUT”

Double bassist

EBERHARD WEBER , on a creative alliance spanning four Kate Bush albums.

The next day we went to the studio and I presented the melody I’d come up with [for the song Houdini, on The Dreaming]. Kate sang to it and noticed that at one point her voice and my proposed melody got in each other’s way. We were able to solve the problem, and the job was done.

Back then Kate had already retreated from the concert business. During one of our cosy evenings together, Kate hinted at the fact that if she was ever to give concerts again, she would want me to be there. When I found out in the summer of 2014 that the time had fnally come, my phone didn’t ring – I had told her long ago that my musical career had been cut short [after a stroke in 2007]. Instead, I later received an e-mail from her. What she wrote moved me: “Did I tell you we played your stunning Pendulum CD in the venue before each and every show as it’s my very

And the rain, and the tears, come down.

Cloudbusting

On the title track, Bush identifes with the hunted: here is the hunt er’s perspective. The threat is no longer in the trees. It’s coming from inside the house.

The Big Sky was the album’s fnal single and stalled at Number 37 (but 15 in Ireland, thanks to that cloud, perhaps). Strange, because it’s as close as Hounds Of Love gets to a conventional, won’tscare-the-horses pop song.

As per Hounds Of Love, the song, Mother Stands For Comfort is rich in classic horror imagery. “It breaks the cage/And fear es capes and takes possession/Just like a crowd rioting inside” suggests a beast unleashed, a monster pursued with pitchforks or planes. The murmured “Make me do this/Make me do that” is out-ofcontrol Jekyll-and-Hyde-style body-horror; the soft repetition of “mother” evokes Norman Bates (“Mother will stay mum,” indeed).

The flm was worthy of the music – no small feat, given Cloudbusting’s depth-charged emotional pull. As with all Bush’s greatest songs, it harnessed naive melody and incongruous components (banjo; pan pipes; string sextet; a steam train) in service of that

KEITH CAMERON dabs a hankie.

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“There’s room for a life in your womb, woman,” sang Kate Bush on 1978’s Room For The Life. “Inside of you can be two, woman.” From The Kick Inside to The Coral Room, Bush has been fasci nated by the tender and traumatic elements of maternity, but on Mother Stands For Comfort she asks unthinkable questions. What happens if the life you created grows up evil? How far do apron strings stretch before somebody chokes? “It’s a bit of a strange mat ter, isn’t it really?” said Bush in 1985.

extraordinary voice, as elemental as blood or air. Prior knowledge of Reich’s story – the rainmaking machine, the destination of the “big black car”, the signifcance of yo-yo’s to this father-and-son relationship – was not required. Everything is contained in the second line: “I wake up crying”, the most sorrowfully visceral perfor mance on the record, if not in Bush’s entire canon.

Long before Stranger Things’ use of Running Up That Hill, the Hounds Of Love track presumed most conducive to visual drama was Cloudbusting. For its video, conceived as a seven-minute short flm, EMI gave Bush a six-fgure budget, and she duly sought out fellow mavericks with Alist cachet. Terry Gilliam, her favoured director, was too busy with his Orwellian epic Brazil, but he proffered Julian Doyle, editor of the Python flms. Bush then doorstepped Donald Sutherland at his Savoy Hotel suite and persuaded him to play the song’s troubled hero, psychoanalyst and self-styled Cosmic Orgone Engineer Wilhelm Reich, opposite herself as Reich’s son Peter. “I remember the frst morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint,” Sutherland said. “I loved her.”

Frau Busch turned out to be Kate Bush. Needless to say, I knew Kate as a pop star – after all, Maja, my wife, was a fan of hers and owned a few of her LPs. I knew of Kate’s exceptional voice and talent for arrangements.

Surprised that she knew my music and claimed to be a big fan of ECM, I became curious about her reason for contacting me. She then let the cat out of the bag and asked if I could fy to London to record a special bass melody which I was to think up for one of her tracks. When I arrived at the airport with all of my junk, she was there to pick me up in person with one of her brothers, and we drove to her fat.

Narrated by a self-declared “murderer” and “madman”, Mother Stands For Comfort salutes a woman who will never betray her child, the eternal alibi, the unspoken accomplice. “She knows that I’ve been doing something wrong/But she won’t say anything,” sings Bush with cold, wily precision. If the murderer’s voice is com placent, soothed by Eberhard Weber’s double bass, thready um bilical synthesizer and lullabying piano, there’s no missing the violence underneath. The Fairlight shatter and crash, the full-moon howls – it’s almost Kate Bush in Throbbing Gristle mode. If The Dreaming’s Get Out Of My House was about autonomy, about evict ing unwelcome squatters from your head, here the “concierge” has been overwhelmed by her parasitic child, hollowed out, colonised.

Upon release in October 1985, the Cloudbusting video received UK cinema distribution as the prelude to the latest Hollywood hits like Back To The Future and Desperately Seeking Susan. Almost 30 years later, when Kate Bush fnally returned to live performance, her set front-loaded ‘the hits’, then got down to the serious business of The Ninth Wave and A Sky Of Honey. For an encore, however, Bush bestowed one fnal gift. Cloudbusting was now the epilogue to the main feature – and who knows, possibly the last song she would ever sing in public. Lo and behold, the tears rained down.

The video captured its charming, sunny energy. “Tell me, sis ters,” declares Bush, frugging away in a Bacofoil boiler suit fanked by somersaulting acrobats, waving fags, and her musicians wearing airmen’s goggles, like Biggles crossed with the Moscow State Circus. It would have made a great set piece for those Before The Dawn shows. There are even a couple of giraffe heads bobbing around at the end. Why? Just because.

Mother Stands For Comfort

A few years later, she called me again. This time, I didn’t have to prepare anything in advance. I was fown in to record straight onto the tape [for Mother Stands For Comfort and Hello Earth on Hounds Of Love; Weber also contributed to Never Be Mine and Walk Straight Down The Middle during sessions for The Sensual World ]. That, too, worked. Maja came with me this time. She and Kate had a lovely conversation in the evening.

album!”favouriteSoIhadbeenthereallthesame! From equinoxpub.comJazzWeber:EberhardAGermanStory(2021) “I THATSURPRISEDWASSHEKNEWMYMUSICANDCLAIMEDTOBEABIGFANOFECM.” Eberhardbetter:Four-stringsbassguruWeber.

IN 1982 , on returning to my hotel in Hamburg from a rehearsal, the receptionist handed me a note with a telephone number written on it: “A certain Frau Busch called while you were out.” Busch, Busch, a Frau Busch – who could that be? A number with the UK country code –00 44. Calling back didn’t help –there was no answer. I had to wait until I returned home and mail from England landed in our letter box.

We didn’t see each other again for some time. Kate had a baby, little Albert. We eventually met again, on her gorgeous estate somewhere near Theale, where she was living with Albert and her husband Danny. It was an enormous property with a river running through it and an old mill with a functioning water wheel – very romantic. The recordings [π, and Prologue, from Aerial ] were made in her own studio. This time I was in a position to make many suggestions as a contribution to her half-fnished songs.

Mama Horror: Bush voices the killer inside. VICTORIA SEGAL finds somewhere to hide.

Though far from state-of-the-art compared to the best London studios – kitted out with the assistance of the “tech guys at Abbey Road”, as engineer Paul Hardiman recalls, it made do with a 24-track Soundcraft desk, for example – Kate’s semi-rural retreat still worked well enough to realise what she heard in her head. Pride of place went to a LinnDrum machine and her Fairlight CMI sampler, which, allowing her to texture melodies and harmonies while she wrote them, increasingly supplanted the Yamaha CS-80 piano as her main compositional tool.

high windows under the eaves let in natural light, and stone-fagged foors – the very fabric of the building – felt warm and natural; doves and pigeons outside added their own cooing voices.

’VE WORKED IN ALL THESE FAMOUS STUDIOS

ITH “MUSICIANS COMING IN WHEN NEEDED,” AS Hardiman recalls, when it came to the actual recording process, it was a small central team based around Bush and her bassist and boyfriend Del Palmer, whom Hardiman had been mentoring as an engineer too.

– Montserrat, New York…” recording engineer Bri an Tench summarises his CV. “But it still has a special place in my head and my heart; it was just fantastic.”

“It” is the formerly mice-infested barn-cum-dis used dairy at East Wickham Farm, near Welling, where south-east London shades into rural Kent. Her pre-fame KT Bush Band had rehearsed and demo’ed here, and here Bush returned to build her means of production as part of a grand rethink following 1982’s emotionally, physically and fnancially draining The Dreaming. She needed to create on her own turf and on her own meter, not the £90 an hour she would run up at Abbey Road with anxious EMI execs popping by to see how it was all going.

“I

Bush that button: Kate at the Fairlight in her home studio: (right top) Hounds Of Love engineer Brian Tench; (below) bassist Martin ‘Youth’ Glover feels at home. BARN!

“She has to get along with the people that she works with,” Tench stresses. “They have to try and understand her world. ‘I want it to sound like the trees in the distance…’ OK, let’s try and do that.”

Experimental pop that sounds as natural as air, or trees. That was the sonic stamp of Hounds Of Love, writes MAT SNOW.

Inspired by her friend Peter Gabriel’s new home studio near Bath, she spent as much as she could afford on a recording space of her own tailored to the music she wanted to make. A blessed relief after the windowless basement studios she’d worked in previously,

“One room in the dairy had a tiled foor for hosing down after milking which had an incredible sound,” Hardiman recalls. “I de veloped the vocal sound you hear on Running Up That Hill, Hounds Of Love and Cloudbusting using that room and a U87 or U47

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The Soundworld

With no computer, and using the monitor faders to obtain a 48-track mix from a 24-track desk, mixing was a pernickety, sixhanded process, and took months. But fnally it was done. Then as now, Hounds Of Love slotted into that small côterie of auteurist artrock albums, including classics by Peter Gabriel, The Blue Nile and Talk Talk, that harnessed new studio technology to create deeply personal, pensive music.

–

“THE LIGHTS WOULD BE OFF AND THIS VOICE WOULD COME OUT, AND YOU’D GO, ‘WOW, IS THAT SAME PERSON?’” B RIAN T ENCH

URING TENCH’S STINT, ONE TRACK WAS CREATED from scratch: The Big Sky. Because Bush was a Killing Joke fan, their former bassist, Youth – AKA Martin Glover – was invited to play. Habituated to the ensemble recording style of a band, he had to adjust to Kate’s additive process (second nature to Tench, having worked with Visage, Ultravox and Landscape). In one respect, however, Youth felt instantly at home, as he related to Graeme Thomson for his Bush biography Under The Ivy: “There were quite a lot of the ‘exotics’ going around. She’s quite hippydippy, dreamy and out there anyway. She’s actually quite a ‘head’ and likes to get out of her body a bit.”

“Kate’s always in charge,” Tench laughs. “She asks your opinion, she asks questions, but she knows what she wants. She’s not happy until she hears what she wants to hear.”

“IT’S AN IMPOSSIBLE WORLD”

For every engineer, the day started with the commute, Hardiman all the way from Berkshire, Tench from north London, to be greeted at the farm by the Weimaraners Bonnie and Clyde, as famously pictured on the sleeve: “I think they only got used to me in the last month I was there,” Tench laughs. Breakfast around 10, usually home-cooked by Kate’s mother Hannah, then work until late evening, fve, sometimes six days a week; her father Robert would often do a run to the local Indian or Chinese takeaway, and her brothers would drop by too. “We’d have breakfast, dinner sometimes, and just sit there talking about what was going on, what was needed,” Tench recalls. “And also talk about other things to take your mind off the album, and then go back into the control room and continue. It was a really lovely atmosphere. Her mum was lovely, dad was lovely. Her brothers are great. Kate has a lovely personality. You enjoy being around her. We had a great time. It was very relaxed, lots of fun.”

From the earliest days there was a tacit agreement in the music industry including the media not to embarrass Bush by bringing the matter up in public, but the enhanced sensitisation to music in all its patterns and nuances that marijuana induces is old news to creative musicians, from jazz to reggae, rock, hip-hop and beyond. But what role did it play in Bush’s process? “I plead the Fifth,” Tench

Ultimately, who was in charge?

Front and centre is that voice. “Kate’s voice we had very bright and in your face,” Tench says. “Kate is a great vocalist. She’d go off into the studio and say, ‘Let me try this voice.’ The lights would be off so you couldn’t see her and this voice would come out, and you’d go, ‘Wow, is that same person?’ It was just incredible. She could make her voice dance, give emotion in a single word just

Knowingchuckles.when to stop was also key, letting the music breathe. “If you listen to the record, there’s not a lot on it,” says Tench. “It’s not crowded, it’s quite empty. There are no cymbals or hi-hat so that clears up a lot of space straight away. Generally, it was lots of little bits and pieces, but the tracks were solid.”

“When we fnished The Ninth Wave, the second side, I remem ber at 8, 9 at night driving over to my friend’s – it was someone in the studio world – saying, ‘Wow, you just have to listen to this,’” Tench recalls. “They just sat there mesmerised. And I still love listening to that very frst moment, that piano, ping, ‘a little light!’ It just draws me in.

“OUR MAM had the Hounds Of Love album and would play it all the time –in the house, in the car. It felt part of the fabric of childhood along with story books and Star Wars, like a fairy tale.

“Back in the ’80s there was a lot more experimentation because we didn’t have everything coming out of a box,” Tench remembers. “We wanted a big splash on Hello Earth. We ended up throwing bricks into Kate’s pool outside and recording then slowing it down. These days you just search for the effect you want and there it is. Back then you had to create.”

[microphone] cranked up through a limiter/expander. Various overdubs were recorded in the room including the toms on Hounds Of CommittedLove.”

to producing Lloyd Cole And The Commotions’ Rattlesnakes, Hardiman left the sessions with the album far from fnished, and other engineers, most importantly Haydn Bendall, stepped in before Brian Tench took over for the fnal furlong.

When I got into playing music, it was guitar and drums, you know – rock’n’roll. So I suppose I lost touch with Kate Bush. Later, [fellow Wearsiders] The Futureheads covered Hounds Of Love – I helped them record the demo – so that must have been the start of my reconnection with the album, and then, when I was making The Week That Was album [in 2008] I got really, really deep into it, to the extent that I was basically ripping it of and have been trying to ever since.

A big part of what makes it sound unique is the rhythm. It’s not just the LinnDrum machine, because everyone around that time was using LinnDrums; it’s the sound of other drummers weaving in and out, treated with really creative reverbs – so a really low reverb will make a certain drum part sound like thunder. There’s also a kind of musique concrète thing happening: the sounds of trains and bells and choirs. There’s a sense of place – but it’s not a place you’ve ever been. It’s a fantasy world created by these strange juxtapositions.Ithinkshewas the master of the

Fairlight – which as you’ll know contained samples of real instruments that could be changed and manipulated. So the sounds are real, but at the same time they are unreal. I played this Kate Bush tribute gig in Aberdeen in 2016 which was organised by Emma Pollock from The Delgados, and we had a hell of a time trying to work out the sounds. Like, in the chorus of Running Up That Hill, there’s a shushing that might be a cymbal, but I think it’s a choir patch on the Fairlight with all the bass rolled of So it’s a human voice doing the job of a cymbal – because actual cymbals are hardly there at all.

Hounds Of Love exists out of time, outside what the Zeitgeist was even then. The closest thing would be Peter Gabriel, maybe some of what Thomas Dolby was doing, or some of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Fairlight stuf, but they’re not the same. Hounds Of Love is its own world, an impossible world.”

“It was a joy sitting next to Kate, just the ideas that fowed from her. People say you fall in love with Kate, which you do – with her personality and her talent.”

OF“THERE’SASENSEPLACE BUT IT’S NOT A YOU’VEPLACEEVERBEEN.”

The range of vocal sounds is amazing – as textures, as instrumen tal lines… or making dog sounds! They’re like, displaced. Sometimes close, sometimes far away. She changes her voice in a very actorly way. And she’s not afraid to bring other voices in – like all the diferent voices in Waking The Witch – if it enhances the story.

changing its infection, and all of a sudden you feel drawn in, moved somewhere. Her breath control was fantastic. She could sing a line just holding her breath and get to the end. I don’t think many singers could have got that far without taking a breath and still maintain the quality of the voice.”

Growing up obsesssed by Hounds Of Love, by Field Music’s PETER BREWIS.

Then the second part of that song, with her voice cut up and stuttering using digital efects, and then the scary Inquisitor voice, which I think is her again through an Eventide pitch shifter. I’m trying to think of precedents for this kind of music making. And I suppose there’s modern classical things like Stockhausen, and The Beatles around Sgt. Pepper.

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sailors, this provided some comfort, so that if they did encounter the big one they might wash up on “the Blessed Isles”.

LL CULTURES THAT ARE SURROUNDED BY sea conjure myths about what lurks in the wilderness of water. Ancient mariners of several cultures told of “the ninth wave”, the last and most devastating of a series of large waves that can appear unexpectedly. Celtic lore speaks of Hy Breasil, an eternal sanctuary of peace waiting somewhere far west of Ireland, a group of islands invisible to the human eye but accessible “beyond the ninth wave”. One assumes that, for Celtic

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,

Immersing in The Ninth Wave, Hounds Of Love ’s side two opus, JIM IRVIN surfaces with pearls of wisdom.

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Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and all the wave was in a fame

Those lines appear on the back of Hounds Of Love. In 2014, they also floated down from the eaves of the Hammersmith Apollo on gossamer-thin slips of paper printed with the quatrain in

The Suite

In 1869, Alfred Tennyson published The Coming Of Arthur as part of his epic retelling of the Arthurian legend, The Idyll Of The King. As the infant Arthur is deposited at Merlin’s feet by the sea, Tennyson writes:

OCEAN OF SOUND

Waving, not drowning: Bush in the ocean and (bottom inset) on-stage for Before The Dawn’s The Ninth Wave, 2014; (insets from top) Alfred Tennyson; Richard Hickox; vocal arranger Michael Berkeley.

Polyphonic spree: Georgian choral music was channelled by Bush for Hello Earth.

Hello Earth relocates her dream to space, watching storms form over America and advising all sea-farers to do what she longs to do: “Get out of the water!” Unearthly choral voices (The Richard Hick ox Singers) arrive to lull her to her fnal sleep. “Deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depths there is a light,” she whispers, in German. Then, suddenly, the joyful Morning Fog starts up. She is being rescued. “I kiss the ground, I tell [my family] how much I love them.”

Caption in here, please. Caption in here, please. Caption in here, please.

composerapproachedzone,outAsharmoniespolyphonicforher.thetaskwasofhiscomforthetheMichael

Based on the songs alone, one could feel that the rescue is just another of her dreams. But in Before The Dawn, it was dramatically invoked when a full-scale helicopter descended from the rafters. Kate on flm was winched from the sea. Dream-state Kate was pulled from a hole in the stage and carried off by the people in her dreams. In 2016, Kate was happy to confrm to MOJO that her character does indeed, like a Celtic sailor, live on after the Ninth Wave.

MOJO 77 hereinCredit

Bush contacted Hickox, the 36-year-old music director of the City Of London Sinfonia, asking if he could recreate the

Tennyson’s handwriting, as the frst half of Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn live shows closed with a heart-stopping staging of her Hounds Of Love suite.

The sudden clarity of Jig Of Life jolts us out of this narcotic spell. In one of Bush’s trademark POV twists – this is the woman, remember, who wrote an anti-nuclear war song from the viewpoint of a foetus – this song seems to feature the woman’s Irish heritage asking her to “let me live”. Then a sonorous, male Irish voice (Kate’s brother John Carder Bush), appears to be Death entreating her to come early to the inevitable. “Catch us now for I am your future… waiting in this empty world… and you will dance with me in the sunlit pools.” But perhaps not yet.

THOUGH IT shares cinematic roots with other songs on Hounds Of Love, Hello Earth, the penultimate segment of The Ninth Wave, proves the least explicit in giving up its infuences – as a result, however, it’s the most otherworldly and unsettling. Given the provenance of the Richard Hickox Singers’ input, it could hardly be otherwise.

Berkeley (now Baron Berkeley of Knighton and presenter of Radio 3’s Private Passions) for assistance. A former rock musician, Berkeley was impressed by Bush’s vision, comparing her ideas to Stockhaus en. “Structure was carefully delineated,” he told The Guardian, “and she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms.”

ONTEMPORARY PLANS TO MAKE A VIDEO ALONG these lines were abandoned. It would be another 30 years before she’d bring her vision to life for the Before The Dawn shows. Bush played the stranded woman on flm, singing while foating in the ocean – a water tank at Pinewood flm studios – in her life jacket with its “little light shining”. Her character is drifting in and out of consciousness, aware of the cold, aware of imminent danger – Under Ice; Waking The Witch – and this dream-state self was portrayed by Kate live on-stage.

She told Radio 1’s Classic Albums series in 1992 that she had always recognised the concept’s flmic quality. “The Ninth Wave was a flm, that’s how I thought of it, the idea of this person being in the water. How they’ve got there, we don’t know. But they’ve been on a ship and been washed over the side so they’re alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery, the thought of being completely alone in all this water… They’re absolutely terrifed, completely at the mercy of their imagination, which again I personally fnd terrifying, the power of one’s own imagination being let loose on something like that… And if you fall asleep when you’re in the water, I’ve heard that you roll over and drown, so they’re trying to keep themselves awake.”

Hello Earth, and its debt to drinkingKakhetiansongs,by

DAVID HUTCHEON .

GEORGIA ON HER MIND

Zinzkaro originated in Kakhetia, a wine-growing region just to the east of Tbilisi, with a rich heritage in folk music and a distinct style. Throughout the country, three-part harmonies dominate, and choirs are either all male or all female; in Kakhetia, two lead voices are woven together as intricately as Everly Brothers’ harmonies; beneath them there is a bass drone; above, there is a counter-harmony of spellbinding complexity.

There was no sheet music, though, and no one even knew what the original tongue was. Berkeley had his work cut out, but Bush was prepared to let him improvise, even invent his own language, as long as the results sounded “harmonically a surprise”. Given that this was two years before 4AD reissued Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, the gateway to eastern European polyphonic singing for adventurous western pop fans, it could hardly fail to surprise. If you need more,

The Tsinandali Choir’s Table Songs, released on Real World in 1993, is the best collection ofofdrinkingKakhetiansongsonthemarket.(That’s‘Cheers!’inMikhedrull,course.)

And Dream Of Sheep was the third song Bush wrote for the album. Many of her songs are dense with narrative and ripe for expansion, but something about this idea, she told us in 2016, required it to be developed further, though she wasn’t sure why. “Something I’d wanted to do for a while was a conceptual thing over a side of vinyl. When that song came in, it felt like it could go somewhere.” Presumably the song “came in” after exposure to Tennyson’s verse. Bush, of Irish descent, has not referred to Ninth Wave’s place in Celtic folklore, but the presence of an Irish jig later in the suite suggests she was aware of it.

“THE POWER OF ONE’S OWN TERRIFYING.”IBEINGIMAGINATIONLETLOOSE...PERSONALLYFIND K ATE BUSH

Bush discovered Vocal Ensemble Gordela’s recording of Zinzkaro (or Tsintskaro – transliter ating the title from the Georgian Mikhedrull script allows for variation) on the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s 1979 flm Nosferatu The Vampyre, starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s expres sionist remodelling of Dracula. The original recording is readily available on a Russian compilation, Georgian Folk Song And Dance Ensemble, released on the Melodiya label in 1969; that its title in English, At The Well, ftted in with the turbulent aquatic themes of The Ninth Wave was serendipity.

A set depicting a tilted, underwater sitting room was one of her frst ideas for the show. There, father and son, unaware of mother’s fate, await her return and swap small talk about what’s for tea and what’s on telly. When the father exits, Kate is revealed behind the door singing Watching You Without Me. Musically too, the whole suite to this point has happened in a watery, off-kilter realm, a place perhaps familiar to such a keen consumer of marijuana as Bush in her twenties, a place where consciousness and unreality ooze into one another. The tracks feel protean and opaque, techniques are employed to obfuscate. Here, the words “You can’t hear me, you can’t feel me in the room with you” are sung in a near indecipherable murmur. In Waking The Witch, the words “Help me baby, talk to me, talk me” are made unrecognisable by a judder ing effect – the rapid opening and closing of a noise-gate placed on the vocal track – providing further disorientation.

WAS“THERENOSHEETMUSIC,ANDNOONEEVENKNEWWHATTHEORIGINALLANGUAGEWAS.”

On the album’s fipside, The Ninth Wave teems with ghosts (Watching You Without Me), nightmares (Under The Ice) and ech oes of the 1968 Vincent Price freakout The Witchfnder General (Waking The Witch). There’s a touch of European gothic, too, in Hello Earth’s choral debt to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre. On this record reality is constantly being bent and blurred.

Hounds Of Love ’s healthy obsession with the supernatural. By DORIAN LYNSKEY.

The movie was Night Of The Demon, in which Andrews plays Dr John Holden, a sceptical psychologist who investigates Aleister Crowley-esque cult leader Professor Karswell. Based on Casting The Runes by M.R. James, the Edwardian maestro of the super natural story, it was a tonal bridge between the chillers that director Jacques Tourneur had made for RKO’s Val Lewton in the 1940s and the lurid new wave of Hammer Horror. Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett wanted to respect James’s taste for ancient forces that insinuate themselves into sleepy old England, unseen and un explained, but the brash American producer Hal Chester was ada mant: “You cannot cheat the audience. They expect to see a demon, so give them one.” A rather shonky fre demon duly appears.

Though a fop at the time, the flm has since become a cult favourite and, thanks to a single line of dialogue, a lively footnote in the Kate Bush story. At one point Holden reluctantly attends a séance where the medium channels the spirit of the fre demon’s frst victim, jerking his head back and crying, “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” The voice we hear sampled on the song Hounds Of Love belongs to a dead man. In the song, Bush takes from the movie the themes of fear and pursuit. Love itself is “com ing for me through the trees”, although, as Bush said, “perhaps these baying hounds are

It‘s behind you: (clock wise from above) Night Of The Demon’s titular ghoul; Jack Nicholson in The Shining; Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu The Vampyre.

Bush revisited Night Of The Demon in her derided and disowned 1993 flm The Line, The Cross And The Curve. While an obvious homage to Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, it also takes from Tourneur’s movie the idea of a curse transmitted by runes on paper and a rather camp pair of fre demons. Unfortunately this was the Hal Chester version of Kate Bush, making too much explicit. It pales next to the unseen men ace of Hounds Of Love because Bush is much more at home with ghosts, shadows, dreams and the ungraspable mysteries of life. As Dana Andrews says at the end of Night Of The Demon, “Maybe it’s better not to know.”

N OCTOBER 1956 THE AMERICAN ACTOR DANA Andrews met the young Queen Elizabeth II at a Royal Com mand Performance in London. She asked him about the movie he was making. “Well, it’s about witchcraft in England,” he replied. Her Majesty wrinkled her nose. “Good heavens! Don’t bring that back again!”

“ON THIS RECORD REALITY IS ANDBEINGCONSTANTLYBENTBLURRED.”

EXORCISING GHOSTS

The Horror!

really friendly” and fear itself is the enemy.

Bush has always been drawn to the supernatural, from personify ing a ghost in Wuthering Heights all the way through to the various eerie encounters on 50 Words For Snow. Get Out Of My House, a kind of inverse Wuthering Heights in which the house itself is pos sessed, was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but more often Bush tapped into the creeping strangeness of the English un canny. Growing up, she seems to have had similar tastes to the actor/ writer Mark Gatiss: the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham, the country-house horror of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, the pastoral mysticism of Powell and Pressburger, and Nigel Kneale’s hybrids of sci-f and folklore. Even Get Out Of My House is anglicised – more James than Kubrick; more fear than violence. “It’s just the idea of someone being in this place and there’s something else there,” Bush said. “You don’t know what it is.” So, too, with Hounds Of Love.

78 MOJO (3)Alamy

YOUR GUIDE TO THE MONTH'S BEST MUSIC EDITED BY JENNY BULLEY jenny.bulley@bauermedia.co.uk MOJO FILTERCONTENTS 80 ALBUMS • Makaya McCraven, he moves with the times • The gospel according to Lambchop • The Proclaimers get their wisdom teeth • Beth Orton weathers a storm • Dark stars, Suede • Plus, Built To Spill, Sampa The Great, Ozzy Osbourne, The Mars Volta, Neil Young, Altered Images, Death Cab For Cutie, Vieux Farka Touré Et Khruangbin and more. 94 REISSUES • Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot : over but not out • Charles Stepney in the raw • File Under, how Nucleus achieved fusion • A World Spirituality Classic by Alhaji Waziri •OshomahPlus,Sun Ra, Ray Charles, Fela Kuti, Neu!, Stereolab, Bobbie Gentry and more. 106 HOW TO BUY: • The Staples and solo. 108 BOOKS • Charlie says: the Stones drummer’s authorised biog. • Plus, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Gary Moore, a history of Scottish indie, Dylan transcripts and more. INDEX “It’s the sketchbook.”orauthor’sfindingequivalentmusicofagreatjournalsanartist’s ANDREW MALE DIGS IN CHARLES STEPNEY’S LOFT, REISSUES PAGE 97 A’s, The 85 Afghan Whigs, The 82 Air Waves 86 Altered Images 84 Andy, Horace 82 Assassins 86 Au Suisse 87 Baker, Chet 100 Beths, The 89 Blakey, Art 100 Boris 90 Branch, Michelle 90 Built To Spill 86 Charles, Ray 97 Cooper, Erland 89 Davis, Miles 102 Death Cab For Cutie 82 Dorados, Los 89 Dr. John 90 Editors 90 Farka Touré, Vieux Et Khruangbin 84 Frahm, Nils 82 GA-20 87 Gentry, Bobbie 97 Harlem Travelers,GospelThe 89 Heads, The 100 Hoop, Jesca 86 Hooveriii 90 House Of Love, The 85 Jockstrap 89 Johnston, Freedy 84 Lambchop 83 Lennon, Julian 84 Machine 99 Manic PreachersStreet 97 Marrow, Esther 99 Mars Volta, The 82 McCraven, Makaya 80 McDuff, Jack 100 McLain, Tommy 90 Moskus 89 Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, The 102 Nelson, Bill 100 Neu! 102 Nucleus 98 Oliver Sim 87 Orton, Beth 86 Osbourne, Ozzy 85 Oshomah, Alhaji Waziri 99 Proclaimers, The 85 R.E.M. 92 Risco Connection 100 Sacred Souls, Thee 89 Sampa The Great 87 Say She She 84 Sheer 87 Son Parapluie 90 Stepney, Charles 97 Stereolab 100 Sudan Archives 84 Suede 88 Sun Ra 99 Thompson, Sean 85 Unloved 87 Various: Before The Day Is Done 99 Various: Rise Jamaica! 99 Various: With Love 97 Wilco 94 Young, Neil 84 MOJO 79

Makaya McCraven

Rather than charge at you, the often impish, contemplative results take their own sweet time coaxing their way into focus. The whoops and crowd applause that open the title track are soon subsumed by a ghostly hover of melancholic strings before Greg Ward’s alto sax glides above McCraven’s bed of polyrhythms, rolling beats that betray his early roots in Massachusetts jazz-hoppers Cold Duck Complex, mixed up with fidgety snaps of tambourine and kalimba. Boasting a similarly classy orchestral sweep to Arthur Verocai’s arrangements for BADBADNOTGOOD’s Talk Memory, McCraven takes initially staccato string refrains out of the austere and into somewhere much fresher on This Place That Place, over more slippery, shapeshifting beats.

80 MOJO Getty

In These Times

Where his breakthrough LPs deftly shaped improvisations into compositions, In These Times reverses the trick – adding textural depth and layer upon layer of intrigue to McCraven’s emotionallycharged meditations on life and identity. Given half a chance, its enchanted moods and nimble funambulist swagger could convert even the most jazz-cautious listener.

MAKAYA SPEAKS!

While the label’s ethos of creativity, friendship and community has further obfuscated the lines about whether what they do is jazz or not – they prefer to describe their output as ‘boundary-defying music’ – International Anthem’s rapid progression from an indie outlier to a globe-spanning cultural game-changer (with a distribution deal with Nonesuch) –was rapidly expedited by the deep impact of the label’s second release in 2015, Makaya McCraven’s In The Moment

For all his mastery of studio technique, McCraven makes the most of his cadre of resourceful players – right hand man Junius Paul’s intuitive bass pulse is an ever present , while the rippling waves of Brandee Younger’s harps, subtle warmth of Joel Ross’s vibraphone, Jeff Parker and Matt Gold’s guitar interventions and Marquis Hill’s soothsaying flugelhorn all have a n impact. There’s even a hint of Morricone’s old western soundtracks to the far-tooshort The Calling, set adrift by Hill’s goosebump-raising trumpet figure, and a real arc of dramatic tension to the minor key piano ruminations of The Knew Untitled. Elsewhere, The Title offers up a hard-to-shake brass melody, repeated at varying levels of intensity.

Studs Terkel, Belafonte recalls the

of his

HEN MIDWEST DIY-punk scene veterans Scottie McNiece and David Allen founded Chicago-based label International Anthem in 2014, they began by documenting the emerging community plying their trade at Curio, a basement club beneath the city’s Gilt Bar. There, the energy mirrored that of the underground punk scene, even if their music paid greater heed to the avant-garde instincts of Chicago institution AACM (Association For The Advancement Of Creative InternationalMusicians).Anthem duly laid down its manifesto to challenge existing musical classifications, beginning with 2014’s Alternate Moon Cycles by Rob Mazurek, a lavish, Kickstarter-funded vinyl press of abstract cornet improvisations over swooshing ambient drones. Eight busy years later they have developed a progressive roster that includes the breezy R&B-laced fusions of Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, soul-voiced trumpeter Jaimie Branch, wayward operatics of Black Monument Ensemble singer/clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid and, more recently, raspy Mancunian saxophonist and poet Alabaster dePlume.

If anything, the long gestation period, and the continual refinement of McCraven’s technical craft on other projects, has worked in this LP ’s favour.

drilled C&O’s

Tunnel through

comrades as they

Lifted

While Parker adds his grasp of a well-timed solo to the impressionistic beats and baby sitars of High Fives and a classy bit of tremolo picking to the keening violin skein of Lullaby, Ross’s vibraphone brings an almost steel band-feel to So Ubuji, and the springy, six-string bedrock of Dream Another gives De’Sean Jones’s flute free reign to explore. Meanwhile hand drums scuttle back and forth like hopped-up cockroaches amid the slow melodic release of Seventh String. Even when order flirts hard with chaos, as it does here, these large ensemble pieces never feel cluttered or overwrought, betraying a jazz player’s gift for improvisation, a classical understanding of orchestration and a beat-maker’s basic instinct for chopping up sound.

It’s In The Trees

Chicago-based jazz drummer’s eloquent chamber meditation on the rhythm of life. By Andy Cowan. Illustration by Simon Prades.

The Paris-born percussionist, who followed his wife Nitasha Tamar Sharma to Chicago after she took up a professorship at Northwestern University, stumbled upon a radical new approach to production when he took 48 hours’ worth of live improvisations from his band’s residency at old bank vault The Bedford back to his home studio and looped, layered and spliced them into something new. Its febrile results – 19 short but sophisticated melds of trumpet, saxophone, bass, vibes and guitars over pinsharp, hip-hop-edged beats, complete with crowd chatter – mirrored the similarly labour-intensive craft of magpie-minded rap producers Madlib and J Dilla, while keeping the energy and impulsiveness of the not its original performances intact.

M C CRAVEN ON IMPROVISED SAMPLING AND MAGIC.

belongs

★★★★

● The only

So sweeping were the reverberations from McCraven’s box fresh brand of ‘improvised sampling’ that he effectively put the traditionally composed offerings that make up In These Times – his fourth solo LP proper – into cold storage while he rode its wave (although many of its song s have been

Virginia’s finishdiedwhatourthepipedcompletesteamwouldMountains.AppalachianFearingmenbelaidoffifadrillwasusedtothejob,Henryup:“Nobodyhasrighttotakeawayresponsibilityforthesepeoplehavefor…Wegottoit.” FILTER ALBUMS “ In texturalTimesTheseaddsdepthandlayeruponlayerofintrigue.”

and the

INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH/XL RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP

BACK TUNNELSTORY:VISION voice heard In These Times at the start of the title track, to Harry Belafonte (above). from an interview with Pulitzer Prizewinning oral historian struggle of infamous railroad worker John Henry death many handBig Bend West

stapled into his live sets). He further refined his discrete studio process on re-imaginings of Gil Scott Heron’s final LP I’m New Here (2020’s We’re New Again), and ’60s hard bop Blue Note standards (last year’s Deciphering The Message). 2018’s interim LP, Universal Beings, was a sprawling set drawn from live band session s with a changing cast, captured in Chicago, New York, L os A ngeles and London.

A thematically linked suite that, at its base, explores polymetric time signatures inspired by West African drumming and Bulgarian folk music, McCraven painstakingly culled and collated its final mix from five different studio sessions and four live performances. Take a close listen though, and you won’t hear the joins.

Stevie Chick

Makaya McCraven: making rhythms to measure time.

welcoming back to the fold guest vocalists Susan Marshall (who sang with the group circa 1965 ) and Marcy Mays (who sang My Curse on 1993’s highpoint Gentlemen), and featuring the final contribu tions from frontman Greg Dulli’s departed friend, Mark Lanegan. Dulli remains the Whigs’ dark heart, however, the focal point of their slowburning disquiet. And How Do You Burn? finds the group on vintage form throughout, from the QOTSA-esque malevolence of I’ll Make You See God, to Catch A Colt’s exquisitely bleak funk, to Domino And Jimmy, a molten, soulful dialogue between long-suffering lovers that’ll leave you craving a Mays and Dulli duets album. The Getaway, meanwhile, renders Dulli’s nihilism sub lime, as he croons of “waiting for the night while I destroy the day” over a majestic Beatles pastiche.

“‘Jazz’ is insufficient at best and offensive at worst for what we’re dealing with. When I was growing up jazz was like a dirty word –not the provocative music I came to admire and look up to. I wanted to reappropriate it for myself. Duke Ellington once said that music is like a tree. And as it branches out it incorporates a little bit of everything it touches, but you can always follow it back to its roots – Africa. I really like that. I only call it ‘jazz’ for the sake of communication, I often think of it as musician’s music.”

Asphalt Meadows

The WhigsAfghan ★★★★ How Do You Burn?

Simon McEwen

The Mars Volta ★★★★ The Mars Volta CLOUDS HILL. CD/DL/LP

familysecondremarkableAfghanalbumthirdinWhigs’actisareunion,

ON U SOUND. CD/DL/LP

legend Horace Andy, then this dubbed-up companion LP even takes it up a notch. Here, On-U head honcho and pro ducer Adrian Sherwood flexes his considerable mixing-desk skills, applying maximum bass pressure to Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm (retitled Mid night Scorcher) with hyped interjections from gruff-voiced MC Daddy Freddy, while the warped sub-frequencies and smoked-out Pablo-esque melodica on instrumental Sleepy’s Night Cap makes it almost unrecognisable from the original. Best of all are retooled cuts of perennial dancehall anthems Fever (Feverish) and My Guiding Star (Dub Guidance – with

Dubwise version of Sleepy’s Midnight Rocker set.

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LEITER. CD/DL/LP

Stevie Chick

Andrew Perry

Back in black: The Afghan Whigs (Greg Dulli, second right).

How would you describe what you do? Is it jazz?

When The Mars Volta blew apart 2012’safterNoctour niquet – their sixth verylong-player in 10 years –there were creative tensions between core pairing Omar Rodríguez-López (guitar) and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (vocals), which were soon resolved for a new joint project, Ante masque, and reunions with their first band, At The DriveIn. For those who found Volta’s progressive indulgences too meandering, the lay-off has paid dividends as they return with a pointedly self-titled seventh LP which totally rede fines their vision: Blacklight Shine inaugurates a brittle, summery Latin groove, where funky riffing, complex percus sion and silky falsetto reflect the duo’s upbringing down by the Mexican border. Graveyard Love pursues the same upbeat Hispanic pop with bonus synths, while Blank Condo lences recalls early-’70s Isley Brothers, and The Requisition’s unfolding funk rock nods to post-millennial Chili Peppers. A far cry from the murky jazzmetal wig-outs of yore, TMV is a triumph of melody, smooth instrumentation and soul.

After a decade’s pause, the Texan prog-punks go Latin pop!

days

Finest post-reunion album yet from the grunge era’s most soulful sinners. The

“One beautiful thing about instrumental music is that we can take so much out of it for ourselves without being literal about it. Initially I was investigating rhythm and time – dealing with complex polyrhythms and the complexity of time and presenting it in a way of simplicity. It’s my representation of life, in a way. Rhythm is the only way we have to measure time going by. We put a pulse to it, the ticking of a clock, as part of existence… But making a record, for me, is all about the process. This time the process was finding ways to edit in and overlay live recordings with more composed songs, recorded in many different versions.” It sounds intense. Do you drive yourself a bit mad in the process?

The dynamo pianist drops into deep listening for shallow rewards.

Grayson Haver Currin

fluid chatter from veteran Jamaican deejay Lone Ranger), now transmogrified into heavyweight rub-a-dub-style groovers made specifically to be played out on soundsystems. Loudly.

Nils decidedFrahmto try homeboundingdifferentsomethingdurthelonely, in his office – that is, his

“Growing up, ‘jazz’ was a dirty word.”

“I’ve been working on it, in one way or another, for years, in between all the other records we’ve been putting out. In 2012, I did my first big ensemble concert at Chicago’s Millennium Park and I remember coming out thinking, ‘Next time I’ll be much more prepared’. I am now. The variety of musicians I work with has allowed me to have modular ensembles of people coming in and out, growing the band so that I can easily expand or contract when performing. This album evolved naturally with the improvised sampling process I stumbled on when I made In The Moment.”

exquisite studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus. Pushing away from piano to program glacial drones and glittering sequenc es, to tinker with the harmo nium or incidental percussion, Frahm began building this 10-track, three-hour expanse of extended Eno-cum-ennui daydreams. He has equated these 13- and 27-minute pieces to staring at waterfalls or bask ing in glades; indeed, at their best, they offer the embrace of forest bathing, of disconnect ing for a spell amid soft-focus splendour. Do Dream conjures the soporific bliss of The Stars Of The Lid, while Seagull Scene suggests Thomas Köner gone balmy. But in an era of endless ambient playlists, there’s little here to remember, to draw you back to this flickering flame. A pleasant way to pass time in transit, but not a destination itself.

How does it feel to finally release In These Times?

“Both came with a very open, inquisitive mind to music. They were very intrigued by folk music from around the world. They instilled in me an oral tradition – learning by ear, by doing, by participating – and there was a real musical work ethic. They also came from an organic place, where music is not about money or fame, but about the magic of what you do.”

Horace Andy ★★★★ Midnight Scorchers

StokesSulyiman

What influences did your jazz drummer father Stephen and Hungarian flutist/singer mother Ágnes Zsigmondi instil in you?

Makaya McCraven speaks to Andy Cowan.

Death Cab For Cutie ★★★★

“Yeah. My file management systems need to get better… I have tons and tons of recordings – years of stuff, many different versions of things, stuff that got lost in the fray. It’s a bit intensive. The album had so many different lives it took me a while to let it go.”

ROYAL CREAM. CD/DL/LP

Is there a central theme to the album?

Nils Frahm ★★★ Music For Animals

Novelistic lyricism and faultless crescendos; Death Cab’s tenth is a triumph. Oft derided as a librarian intruding upon rock’n’roll’s wild bacchanal, Ben Gibbard might hardly be Iggy Pop, but there is potency within his poise. His songwriting has always suggested Gibbard could transition to penning novellas, and the stories collected on Death Cab For Cutie’s tenth album are rich in both detail and substance, with solitary lines that can unravel you. A rumination upon mortality and agnosticism set to iridescent guitar and New Order basslines, Here To Forever is a thoughtful masterpiece. The modest midlife crises of I Miss Strangers and Roman Candles, meanwhile, are lent weight by Gibbard’s native feel for anthemic crescendos; the moment in Roman Candles, when he announces, “I used to feel everything like a flame/ Now it’s a struggle just to feel anything”, over squalling Sonic Youth guitars, is electrifying, and possessed of a raw power all its own.

If April’s slick Midnight Rock er album was a highOnepost-Studiocareerforreggae

It’s an album you’ve wanted to make for a long time.

ATLANTIC. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

Throughout, there is a febrile mood of loss, of dissipation, of powerlessness. “It’s awful when you leave this world,” sings Wagner on A Major Minor Drag, a Sparky’s Magic Piano blues, harp and bells creating an angelic haze just off screen. On His Song Is Sung, Wagner takes the cold cosmic vistas of Bon Iver and compresses them back onto the human scale, death up close and personal. When the mood does completely shift, the ethereal becoming physical – Little Black Boxes’ vocodered funk unleashing a torrent of lusty disco, for example – it comes as a shock.

That is emphasised by the ominous gothicgospel Police Dog Blues, inspired by the death of George Floyd and a 1929 blues track by Blind Blake.

“I’m furious” – bring Wagner’s simmer to a full boil.

FILTER ALBUMS

Yet since Lambchop’s debut release, I Hope You’re Sitting Down in 1994, Wagner has been just as likely to worry at the meaning of life as any more flamboyant rock philosophers, seeking out the moments of transcendence that poke through the chipboard scenery of everyday life. If Lambchop originally played out like an expansive alt-country Tindersticks, Wagner’s MO has become increasingly experimental, 2016’s FLOTUS marking a distinct shift into electronica –

FOR SUCH a profoundly unassuming man, Kurt Wagner has given Lambchop’s new album quite the title. It’s the kind of thing you could imagine Nick Cave getting away with, the veteran preacher-showman in elegant bat-black, but not Wagner, the former carpenter in his ever-present animal feed supplier’s cap and heavy rimmed glasses.

Singer Hallman’sMadisonvocals –

Cryptic, allusive (“Fred MacMurray was a motherfucker”), impressionistic, The Bible needs its own concordance at times. Yet after three decades on a quest to close in on the my steries of being human, Wagner’s perceptive edge hasn’t blunted. The truth is in there.

Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner: cryptic, allusive and impressionistic.

MOJO 83

A new testament from Nashville’s enduring sage. By Victoria Segal. Lambchop

processing his voice, playing with textures and beats, opening out the space around him, all the better to let a moment of revelation creep through. When he sings, “I’m eating pizza with a fork” on The Bible’s A Major Minor Drag, for example, bells and vocals ringing around him, it lands like divine wisdom, something bursting with meaning. Every Child Begins The World Again has a lot in common with Cave’s Push The Sky Away and his more florid sun-stroked visions: “And I too have woven some kind of basket/Yeah, I broke into Hank Williams’s casket,” sings Wagner, voice processed into the electronic ether. It’s a remarkably adaptable approach, as bright and flexible as modular furniture: one adjustment – a gospel choir, a sharper glint of brass – and the whole shape and mood shifts with very littleThelifting.lightness is deceptive, though. Following 2019’s This (Is What I Wanted To Tell You), The Bible was recorded for the first time with outside producers Andrew Broder and Ryan Olson and made in Minneapolis rather than Nashville.

Good News!

The Bible CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP

Say She She ★★★★ Prism

Since the com parisons with his

Veteran singer-songwriter’s first new LP in seven years.

Sylvie Simmons

New York-based Johnston’s tenth album – a Byrdsy jangle to the title track which opens the album; the pedal steel on the single Madeline’s Eye. But mostly it’s country pop of the Nick Lowe kind. One thing Lowe and Johnston have in common is that they both know how to write a really good pop song – timeless, with a hook and a story, and the kind of modest charm that instantly makes them feel good to hear. Among the best on this album are pure pop There Goes A Brooklyn Girl; Darlin’, with Aimee Mann add ing a lovely backing vocal; The Power Of Love, with Susan Cowsill among the almost CSN-esque harmonies; and dreamy, midtempo sunset ballad Somewhere Love. The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs also guests.

First album in 11 years from Cynthia’s son.

Piya Malik and Sabrina Cunningham first got together after hearing each other singing through the floorboards of their neighbouring apartments on New York’s Lower East Side.

40 BELOW. CD/DL/LP

There’s a warm country rock feel to a num ber of the 10 new songs Kansas-born,on

David Hutcheon

Having spent years avoiding the legacy of his father, Ali Farka Touré, Vieux has now released two albums honour ing him in quick succession. Les Racines arrived in the spring, a straightforward Saha ran blues session, but now he has gone back to his father’s catalogue to… not exactly cover his music, but to make it connect with an audience beyond his immediate grasp.

Neil Young & OfPromiseTheReal

retiringderailwouldfatheralwayshim,from

KARMA CHIEF/COLEMINE. DL/LP

Inward-looking yet confident second LP from Ohio rapper/singer/violinist.

Freedy Johnston

Altered Images

★★★ Jude BMG. CD/DL/LP

Vieux Farka Touré KhruangbinEt Ali

before the opening show. A deluxe edition includes two LPs and a concert film.

Sylvie Simmons

David Hutcheon

After Toast with Crazy Horse comes a live album with that other sideband.

84 MOJO

Enter Khruangbin, whose knack for bringing a shimmer ing haze to all they touch makes them ideal collabora tors for someone from Mali, taking bass and a drum kit where they would seldom have appeared before, and using Mark Speer’s laid-back guitar to tell the other s to relax and let the magic work at its own pace. Vieux is on fine form, but it’s yet more evidence that the Texans are one of the sharpest groups around – somebody give them a festival to curate.

STONES THROW. CD/DL/LP

Three years after exploring a supernatural character’s adventures on her debut Athena, LA-based singer, rapper, beatmaker and avantgarde violinist Brittney Parks looks closer to home. The likes of Selfish Soul and Home Maker tackle societal expectations and identity head on – Parks’s outward self-assurance masking a sensitive side, riven with swelling anxieties –above a refined backdrop of neo-soul, experimental funk and spiralling strings. She further tweaks her bespoke sonic template on the slick autoeroticism of Chevy S10, creepy whispered raps of OMG BRITT and vocodered discopop of Freakalizer, revealing further contrasting sides of her personality and a keen ear for harmonic quirk. “I’m not average,” repeats Parks on the title track. It’s a cool understatement on a bold

Altered Images’ Clare Grogan ignites the kitchen-disco bangers.

★★★★ Back On The Road To You

DEAD OCEANS. CD/DL/LP

After 39 years, Gregory’s girl proves Bite was no fluke.

★★★★

A new twist on the old desert blues.

COOKING VINYL. CD/DL/LP/MC

FILTER ALBUMS

Home and Beautiful T hing). The 1980s may be long gone, but they really never left us… and the T-shirt still fits!

Superb psych-soul-disco debut from New York female harmony trio.

Andy Cowan

After recruiting Malik’s friend Nya Gazelle, Say She She issued two singles, Forget Me Not and Blow My Mind, both catchy disco funk numbers indebted to Chic (phonetically their name sounds out “C’est chi chi”). They aren’t on this debut: instead, recorded ad hoc in various friend’s basements on old tape machines, Prism is more psychsoul based, the trio’s honeyed voices a glorious overload of joyful elation and spiritual elevation as they deliver paeans to love and messages of female empowerment. They cite Rotary Connection and ’70s girl groups as influences, but the music is theirs and utterly timeless.

SH AMBOLIC YET fun debut, disastrous second, a third album so sophisticated the band struggled to convince anyone that it was them –the fallen Peel favourites relinquished the limelight in 1983, splitting before their indie plus ingénue shtick became a cliché. Now, after a lockdown epiphany – “Well, why not?” – Clare Grogan and Steven Lironi return (with the assistance of Bobby Bluebell a nd Bernard Butler) wielding 12 selfpenned kitchendisco bangers, each one a gem. As with Tracey Thorn’s Record, Mascara Streakz is a hymn to the sticky carpets and dancefloors of ever y Tiffanys or Night Moves

Julian Lennon

(Glitter Ball; Red Sta rtles The Sky) from the perspective of people who bought the T-shirt 40 years ago and still have it somewhere (the wisdom of

Mascara Streakz

sequel whose charms unravel further with each listen.

★★★★

It’s been a long, hard, fourweek wait for a new Neil album, but worth it. Another really good one, this was recorded live in the summer of 2019, at four shows on a short European tour (incl. Hyde Park, London) with his off-and-on backing band since 2014’s Farm Aid. Fourteen songs, four of them epics (Throw Your Hatred Down; Rockin’ In The Free World; On The Beach; Fuckin’ Up) from all over his career: Springfield, solo debut, Mirrorball; Déjà Vu; Decade and more. What makes it great is something else – an energy and a vibe that give the strange sensation you’re there with them. Partly it’s the noisy, grungy festival sound. But a bigger part, Neil’s linernotes suggest, is that every song was a celebration and memorial to longtime manager Elliot Roberts, who died two weeks

★★★★

Lois Wilson

Noise & Flowers REPRISE. CD/DL/LP

music seemed a sensible option for Julian Lennon after 2011’s pleasing Everything Changes. Yet there was a sense of unfinished business, and during 2021 he turned his attention to updating songs which hadn’t made previous albums. The result, partly titled after Paul McCartney’s song for him (although ‘Hey‘ might have been better), is more coherent than some rejigged castoffs ought to be, whether offering balm on the dreamlike Free dom, or, surprisingly, swearing on the more strident Lucky Ones, which took eight people to write, including New Radical Gregg Alexander. Former collaborators Guy Chambers and The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan re-surface, Chambers co-writing the piano-propelled Love Don’t Let Me Down and Buchanan adding winsome vocals to the gorgeous closing lullaby Gaia, based on Bill Laurance’s instrumental, Cables.

John Aizlewood

Sudan Archives ★★★★ Natural Brown Prom Queen

birds, were favourites of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s, and more recently of Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath (two-thirds of Appala chia modernists Mountain Man), who conceived The A’s as a similarly swinging harmony duo. They even cover two of the sisters’ signature songs: the zany Why I’m Grieving, and the lullaby Go To Sleep My Darling Baby. But Fruit is no tribute act: a wheezing sax peps up Cop per Kettle (one of several tradi tional covers), a bass synth pulse underpins Meath’s origi nal When I Die (The A’s stated aim is to make you laugh or cry), and Nilsson’s He Needs Me is laced with old-st yle strings, sounding like a throwback to an ancient Disney soundtrack.

Twins imperative

Now 60, the Reid twins haven’t thumped the proverbial tub with such sustained vehemence since 1987’s debut This Is The Story. Indeed, although their breakthrough came via a song linking the Highland Clearances with Thatcher’s assault on subsequentProclaimerscollectivistScotland’sculture,Theowetheirpopularitymore

CHERRY RED. CD/LP

to pre-eminence in the personal, rather than political, domain, an aptitude for soaked-hanky balladry and smooth-edged soul underpinning the last two decades’ regular quality output. The arrival of producer Dave Eringa for 2015’s Let’s Hear It For The Dogs and 2018’s Angry Cyclist inculcated a brawnier aspect, however, and here the longtime Manics consigliere clearly relishes the heightened polemic and its concomitant demand for yaggerdang. The World That Was channels Stonesy riffola for a brisk demolition of the “totally demented” worship of glory days that never existed. Things As They Are, an amped-up orchestral swoop also graced by JD Bradfield’s eloquent powerage, upbraids proprietors of newspapers whose “every page is engaged in keeping things as they are”. The glam-stomp of The Recent Past knowingly broadens the nostalgic malaise: “Eighties pop stars, who thought they would last, now at Butlin’s can be seen.” As for here today, gone tomorrow politicians, Drop Dead Destiny’s “washed up illusion” feels awfully familiar: “A bellicose voice, untroubled by charm… I’ve heard more sense come out of a farm,” Craig notes.

Non-country Nashville songwriter’s debut covers the Americana waterfront. Fresh out of

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The House Of Love A State Of Grace

The Proclaimers’ singles chart-topping days doubtless belong to the previous century, but Dentures Out proves you don’t need to be a young pretender to land hit after palpable hit.

Andrew Collins

Patient Number 9

impersonatingthemselveswhoDeZurikyodellingMinnesota’sSisters,taughtby

Of noble brow and still in charge, House Of Love founder Guy Chadwick seems reborn here for the band’s seventh, boldly opening against a whale mimicking My Bloody Valentine. The cover image (Dungeness nuclear power station) says ‘Made in Hastings’ as if it were a local artisanal product. Buying local and burning his bus pass, Chadwick lets light in upon gloom.

Solo album 13, with guests including Jeff Beck, Tony Iommi and Eric Clapton. When inglyalmostreleasedOzzy2020’sshockgood

Sean WeirdThompson’sEars

By Keith Cameron.

Ozzy Osbourne ★★★

★★★★

Lyrically, he’s even tickled: “A friend of mine thinks I’m funny when I drink wine… I never worry, I’m drinking wine.”

James McNair

Sean WeirdThompson’sEars

Dentures Out’s opening title track rips along waves of electric six-string efflorescence, ear-catchingly styled after Johnny Marr and played by none other than James Dean Bradfield. The lyrical metaphor is straightforward: Britain’s a toothless old crone, living in the past, reduced to low blows: “Blame the Jocks and blame the Paddys/Blame the scourge of absent daddies,” hoots Craig Reid, staunchly harmonised by brother Charlie. “Proof there is if proof were needed/That the right-wing press succeeded.”

PSYCHIC HOTLINE. CD/DL/LP Two-thirds of Mountain Man pay homage to country stars the DeZurik Sisters.

Reflective glory: The Proclaimers’ Craig (left) and Charlie Reid give a biting state-ofthe-nation address.

British pub rock on Alley Scrapper. He’s no mere fanboy, though. There’s an urgent joy to all he does, the similarly unfazed Weird Ears ensure the ancient musical references don’t sound dated and those harmonies are divine.

COOKING VINYL. CD/DL/LP

The great man’s ongoing rage against the dying of the light still has its triumphs, though, not least the epic, Jeff Beckbolstered title track. One of those doomy, minor-arpeggio affairs Ozzy does so well, it’s both daft and brilliant.

THE UNBE ARABLE shiteness of Britain has persistent currency in rock’n’roll: from the twin piques of Anarchy In The UK and The Queen Is Dead, through multiple contributions by the Manic Street Preachers, on to Brexit-era wrath from the likes of Sleaford Mods and Idles. Yet in all those 40-odd years, Perfidious Albion has rarely been so comprehensively or eloquently lampooned as by the 13 short songs, full of both punch and age-conferred wisdom, that comprise the new album by The Proclaimers.

John Aizlewood

Americana, there is seemingly nothing that can faze Sean Thompson. Barefoot Jerry’s self-titled second album and Grass Roots-esque harmonies form the obvious bedrock, but he’s a many-trick pony. Setting out a varied stall, he embraces the sweep of American Beautyera Grateful Dead on New Trailway Boogie (“hills are high and so am I”), before veering towards intricate J.J. Cale-style plucking on the instrumental, Instrumental Health and understated Uncle Tupelo complexity on Before The Flowers Bloom. Still restless, he throws in curveballs such as traditional country on Sad Old Singers and even griz zled

The satirical splurge is sagely tempered during a reflective final third. Zac Ware’s pedal steel takes the laurels as Draw Another Line warns against the hubris that invariably accompanies flag-waving, while Sundays By John Calvin deploys lilting pizzicato strings for its lovely evocation of how every lockdown day felt like a Scottish Presbyterian Sabbath, “when they tied up all the swings”. Each song abounds with such pinpoint detail.

everyforambassadorbutNashville,reallyanalmostfacetof

Banjo, lap steel and self-pity (“lost my job, lost my car”) are rinsed to a gleam in Warne Livesey’s mix: a swaggering return to proficiency, from grunge epic Clouds to hypnotic road movie rocker Dice Are Rolling. Chadwick dares to end with Just One More Song, a porch lament redolent of Lena Martell’s One Day At A Time, Sweet Jesus. Call it a comeback.

Martin Aston

EPIC. CD/DL/LP

Indie darlings’ seventh LP, recorded near Guy Chadwick’s hometown of Hastings.

★★★★

CURATION. CD/DL/LP

The A’s ★★★ Fruit

Ordinary Man, walking with a cane and diagnosed with Parkinson’s, many feared it was his swansong. He’s since had neck and back ops, yet here he is singing, “I come alive at the second of midnight” on vam piric boast Immortal, a punish ing big riffer featuring Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready. Though Ordinary Man producer Andrew Watt’s keen under standing of Ozzy’s cod-horror mythos endures, the arrange ments sound less finessed, less ‘performed’ and more fileshared this time out, and you sense Patient Number 9 has known corrective surgery.

The Edinburgh duo bid adieu to the red, white and blue.

The Proclaimers ★★★★ Dentures Out

even a promise that the twinkling gloom of her new songs was so stunning it sent clueless executives scurrying.

“I’m gonna throw my cards as far as I can,” Orton half-whispers above flickering electronics during the finale, “to know what’s in my hand.” That is exactly how Weather Alive feels: a test of oneself after a long season of personal challenge. The answer? This is as moving and rea l as Orton has ever been.

Weather Alive PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP

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For the first time in her 30-year career, she opted to produce her songs herself, recruiting a top-shelf cast of musicians like multi-instrumental mensch Shahzad Ismaily and intuitive horn players Alabaster dePlume and Stuart Bogie to command. The result, Weather Alive, is a complex rumination that looks across false binaries – how you can feel loved but lonely, how you can feel in awe of the world but threatened by it – to find some hard truths in between.

Beth Orton: as moving and real as ever.

Victoria Segal Assassins ★★★★ The Year That Never Came MACHINES MAKE US. DL

Jesca Hoop ★★★ Order Of Romance

Butsystem.themusical richness only mirrors Orton’s astounding writing here, her frank but impressionistic reflections on modern possibility and suffering. “When the sea comes in, it’s hard to believe it’ll ever go out again,” she sings early on, her voice collapsing near couplet’s end, as if permanently bruised by experience. That is the state of play throughout Weather Alive, where Orton moves between extolling the restorative power of love to callin g herself a whore and asking who could ever love her. The present is a gift during the magnetic opener, where the rising sun is a semaphore of possibility, while it’s an invitation to be let down just four tracks later. The future is a string of broken promises one moment, a series of fascinating challenges the next. There is neither hope nor hopelessness here, just a zero-sum survey of survival.

By Grayson Haver Currin Beth Orton

★★★ The Dance

John Aizlewood

When The Wind Forgets Your Name

★★★★

The sounds of these eight tracks nestle somewhere between Talk Talk’s final years and Bill Fay’s late beauties, between Alice

FIRE. CD/DL/LP

California-born, Manchesterbased singer-songwriter’s sixth album, is bracing from the start, theatrical vocals, horns and woodwind clashing against homespun rhythms and nursery-rhyme folk. If Silent Extinction or Hatred Has A Mother sound ethereal, like a Haight-Ashbury Björk or The Raincoats off-off-off Broadway, the lyrics are worldly, explor ing environmental meltdown, family trauma and revolution ary politics. I Was Just Four teen turns the policing of female sexuality into layered performance art; Sudden Light and Firestorm share anxieties with TuneYards or This Is The Kit. It’s not quite as accessible as 2009’s Hunting My Dress or 2017’s Memories Are Now, but Order Of Romance has an astringent – and sometimes startling – beauty of its own.

Sorry, potatoes – with a new rhythm section, BTS are still Idaho’s best export.

Air Waves

Mercury rising

Part-time rockers ’ final album in the wake of their main man’s passing.

Most obviously when co-singer Merritt Lear takes the lead, the quintet are closer to Garbage than dream-pop, a torrent of energy blitzed by electronics as much as guitars, yet it’s still built around Cassidy’s forlorn voice and melodies. The hard/soft contrast is sublime, and everchanging; the title track hovers Butterfly Child-like before Girgio goes off like a rocket; Gonna Go Out Right seems designed for the dancefloor, while Dead Is Dead –Armageddon borders on the industrial.

MEMPHIS INDUSTRIES. CD/DL/LP Love songwriteridiosyncraticinsurrection:singer-throwsher arms around the world.

★★★★

Grayson Haver Currin

almost entirely committed to working alone, piloting the fragile dream-pop vessel Butterfly Child. But after moving to Chicago in the early 2000s, he formed Assassins, though it took them until 2015 to kickstart a follow-up to 2006 debut, You Will Changed Us, and it’s only now finished.

broken (“no one can give up on us ’cos we gave up a long time ago”), but always grown up. Cass McCombs adds vocals on the most sparse moment, Alien, but he’s strictly a foil for Schneit, while The Light merges plucked guitar with ghostly harmonies and an undercurrent of threat.

SUB POP. CD/DL/LP/MC

Nicole Schneit’s fourth album, but the first to feature Cass McCombs. Their trading name inspired by Guided By Voices song Waves, Nicole Schneit’s three previous Air Waves albums were exercises in whipsmart minimal pop, albeit with a subtle, luxurious hue. Given a leg up by Dan Deacon’s endorsement, this time around Schneit has never sounded quite so imperial. Their voice is as sonorous as latter-day Tanita Tikaram, but behind them, the musical backdrops are simple yet, especially on the opening The Roof, as warm as This Is The Ice Age -era Martha & The Muffins. Lyrically they’re either lovelorn (“you’re the wind, I’m the swallow”) or

Martin Aston

Coltrane’s intimate hymns and Fiona Apple’s softest moments. The shuffling wonder Friday Night unfurls as a luxuriant expanse of tide-like synthesizers and mellotron, flute sometimes rising like a firefly to meet Orton’s piano. She ends Fractals as an excitable jazz singer, offering extemporaneous proclamations about magic in a spirited dialogue with dePlume’s saxophone above a taut disco shaped by Toms Skinner and Herbert. And the spectral backing vocals and vintage synth warbles of Forever Young seem to haunt Orton, as if trapping her ache inside some tensile web. Orton’s arrangements are meticulous but never precious, an improvisational spirit exhaled into a Pro Tools

A new Jesca Hoop record tends breezetoin like a rogue system,weathermov ing on its own musical cross winds – cosmic barbershop, maybe, or hippy musical thea tre – regardless of seasonal norms. Order Of Romance, the

What Built To Spill have long lacked in pro lificacy – this new marksbatchjust nine albums in three decades, the first originals in seven years –they have always countered with consistency. Doug Martsch’s pride-of-Idaho outfit have made a handful of mas terpieces but never a bad record, a run that continues here with a rhythm section borrowed from the wild Brazil ians of Oruã. Martsch’s soursweet falsetto still delivers

Built To Spill

wisdom (“No one can ever help no one/Not get their heart broken”) through hooks that snag the first time, and his guitar’s ragged glory, served in relative moderation here, still scintillates on command. But there are enough surprises here – the dubby playground of the heretic and smirking Rock Steady; the country purr of the existential Alright – to forestall gripes of careerist retread. This is, instead, one of the States’ great indie rock institutions, finding renewal largely in the familiar.

Her first self-produced wonder amid another season of self-doubt.

BETH ORTON was driving when a rather large record label dropped her – and, with that, plans to collaborate with a marquee producer – more than six months into the pandemic. Rather than despair, Orton, then on the cusp of 50, seems to have taken preemptive rejection as a challenge, or perhaps

Joe Cassidy, who died unexpectedly in 2021, was

Stevie Chick

YOUNG TURKS. CD/DL/LP

Sampa The Great

Crackdown

Let’s Turn It Into Sound

Lois Wilson

BY STEPHEN WORTHY

2019’sSampa’sZambian-borndebut, The Return, prom ised much, but diluted its impact with much drama and not enough focus. This followup is an emphatic remedy. Her ambition hasn’t ebbed – “You say, ‘Stay in your lane’, thinking I had one” she sings, celebrat ing her polymath self – but As Above, So Below communicates a coherent vision: simply, Afri ca’s answer to Beyoncé. Sam pa’s an adept shape-shifter –channelling Miseducation -era Lauryn and dancehall on Lo Rain, slipping between staccato trap flows and sly Ray Charles interpolations on the joyous IDGAF – but her own voice is always unmistakable. Her uncompromising politics never come at the expense of the music: the beats make strident points of their own, Imposter Syndrome’s imperceptible segueing between tribal drum circles and modern digital beats lending weight to Never Forget’s strident claims for Africa as the source of modern pop’s rhythms and sensibility.

Au Suisse has been long in gestation. In the early 1990s, Morgan Geist and Kelley Polar studied at renowned Ohio liberal arts college, Oberlin. Later, as Metro Area, Geist became one of the most influential dance music producers of his generation, often leaning on Polar’s string arrangement skills. In return, Geist produced Polar’s two infuriatingly under-appreciated albums of clever synth pop. Au Suisse is the duo’s first ground-up project.

The Jam & Lewis pristine R&B and sophisti-pop of Provision -era Scritti Politti – Polar’s sweet voice has a wispy, Gartsidian quality – are helpful reference points. Each note feels laser cut, accompanied by the bellowing bass keys that have long characterised Geist’s work. There’s a theatricality to Control, Polar’s breathy intro giving way to a swarm of throbbing modular synths, while Eely is an ’80s electro waltz searching for a John Hughes movie. For Au Suisse familiarity, it seems, breeds respect.

…And Then There Were Four

Sylvan Esso Rules Sandy

ELECTRONICAALSORELEASED

will be familiar with the reverb-sodden narco-pop of Unloved’s previous outings (Guilty Of Love and Heartbreak), heavily featured throughout. The whooshing screams and semi-dub bassline of Boowaah, sinister analogue throb of Call Me When You Have A Clue and gentle ache of Jarvis Cocker duet Accountable underline Unloved’s skill for creating moody, twisted waltzes that mix ’60s psychedelia with distorted industrial noise and a jazzy swagger. Vincent’s shiv ery vocals – a curious mix of indie chanteuse fragility and Ronettes-like stridency – glue the disparate styles together over ethereal melodies that err more towards sadness than joy. Perfect for Twin Peaks’ Bang Bang bar, but at 90 min utes duration its lesser parts drag like an over-indulgent director’s cut.

Skudge ★★★★ Soundworks SKUDGE. DL/LP Then a techno,atwereSweden’sduo,SkudgeinvitedtoplaythetempleofBerlin’s

Lamin Fofana ★★★★ The Open Boat BLACK STUDIES. CD/DL/LP To call Thewholly‘ambient’Fofana’sLaminworkfeelsinadequate.SierraLeone-

HEAVENLY. CD/DL/LP

Feature film-length double from singer Jade Vincent and soundtrackers David Holmes and Keefus Ciancia. Anyone inasseasonComer’swatchedwhoJodiefour-turnVillanelleKillingEve

★★★★

CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP

As Above, So Below CONCORD. CD/DL/LP

Oliver Sim ★★★★

born, Berlin-based artist explores weighty themes like the hegemony of European music and the shifting geographies of the West African diaspora. On the final part of a triptych, Fofana merges sound design, field recordings and elegant, hypnotic synthesised music. The results are innovative, moving and intoxic ating.

Berghain, soon after releasing their debut single in 2009. It’s an accolade that speaks volumes. Now under the sole stewardship of Elias Landberg, Skudge’s fourth album spirals between locked-in, dubby grooves, dark, Drexciya-like electro-funk and explosive dancefloor ordnance. You can almost taste the dry ice.

The Pink Album

Au Suisse

The stimulus behind Amelia Meath and Nick electronicshiny,Sanborn’ssophisticatedpopis, they say, an ongoing “argument” between themselves. If so, recording the North Carolina duo’s fourth album must have been a tumultuous, unfettered affair. It’s a free-wheeling surge of glitchy beats and fizzing, ravey energy, with the wobbly UK garage underpinnings of Echo Party a notable standout.

★★★★

GLASS MODERN. CD/DL/LP Country-soul soundtrack music from Greenock, via Malaga. Primal Scream guest.

With hindsight, The xx’s aura of mystery might be linked to both hesitationsingers’to address their sexuality. After Romy Madley-Croft came out in 2020, it’s the key component of Hideous Bastard, a record

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Martin Aston

steeped in “fear and shame,” says its maker, with John Grant levels of candour. Lead single Hideous epitomises solo Sim: imagine The xx’s brooding electronic soul bursting into colour, capped by the confes sion, “living with HIV since 17”. With bandmate Jamie xx pro ducing, the heightened state of drama is matched by the slow-burning Saccharine (“I thought I could survive with out letting anyone near”) and the urgent finale Run The Credits, where Sim concludes, “even Romeo dies in the final scene.” Nevertheless, in titling two songs Sensitive Child and Confident Man, Sims’ painful journey also feels like cathar sis, and packs a vivid state ment of musical intent.

COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP

Impressive third album from current heirs to the blues throne.

Sheer ★★★

Au Suisse

Long-term pals join forces for ’80s electro-pop homage.

Strident second album makes good on previously unfocused promise.

Hideous Bastard

★★★ No

Unloved ★★★

This great follow-up to last year’s Hound Dog Taylor trib ute, Try It… You Might Like It!, sees the three-piece – guitarist Matt Stubbs, vocalist Pat Faherty, drummer Tim Carman – stood at the crossroads where blues, country and rock’n’roll meet. The aforesaid Hound Dog’s still a chief influ ence here; Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester are touchstones too, the latter two specifically on the sashaying Dry Run, one of the album’s high peaks. The others include Easy On The Eyes, an atmospheric blues after-hours strut; the rockin’ By My Lonesome, think Jerry Lee does Chuck Berry; the foot stomping Fairweather Friend and Just Because, a birth-ofsoul ballad. Produced by Stubbs and recorded live at Q Division Studios in Somerville, Massachusetts, Crackdown is fuzzy but focused and shows the blues’ future is in capable hands.

LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

GA-20

GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL. CD/DL/LP Modular synth maven Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith here expands her range dramatically. G etting extra mileage out of her voice – presented highly processed and distorted –Smith’s usual ambient-leaningmeditative,approach is dialled back in favour of soaring wonky pop, ornate neoclassical and even quasi dancefloor moments. It gives rise to her most joyous music yet. SW

Not hideous, but beautiful: The xx’s bassist/co-singer’s solo debut.

Andy Cowan

Surely oddballrecallpletistsRecordsCreationonlycomwillSheer’s1992

Oliver Sim: his painful journey also feels like catharsis.

debut, Absolutely Sheer, where core member Sheer Taft exper imented with Jah Wobbleinspired indie-dance. That prior knowledge helps not a jot here, as Taft, exactly 30 years later, breaks cover for a second time, barring a brief mid-2010s stint in the Oasis-y The Method One, in his native Greenock. Recently relocated to southern Spain, his new Sheer outing has a ramshackle vibe recalling early-’70s Lee Hazlewood, and Bob Dylan’s Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid soundtrack. Amongst rare vocal ventures, Every body’s Been Somebody’s Fool and the duet (There Goes) A Friend Of Mine are pure Nancy & Lee, and winningly so. The rest is frazzled country-soul, summoned by a cast including mosaic artist Ed Chapman and, from Primal Scream, Andrew Innes (guitar; beautiful celeste), Martin Duffy intentionallyMooneyivory-tinkling)(premiershipandDarrin(loosestbeats).Anlostclassic.

★★★★

Andrew Perry

Enduring dark stars shake out their psyches “punk”

Shadow Self’s brutalist cabaret, meanwhile, sounds like Pornography with John Lydon MC-ing, both early Cure and Public Image Ltd

Suede: squaring up to mortality and meaning.

Yet it’s that doubt that makes Autofiction so moving, the punk ferocity protecting a deeply vulnerable core. It’s not just deckclearing, a necessary purge – Autofiction builds its own emotional momentum as Suede, once again, write new chapters of their story. Whatever’s loom ing on the horizon, that’s a reason for celebration.

swirling thickly through Autofiction’s close atmosphere.TheChameleons-like closing track, Turn Off Your Brain And Yell, might once have been a mission statement, a reminder to recalibrate after The Blue Hour ’s references to Penda’s Fen and Penderecki. Yet Autofiction is not back-to-basics cosplay, the band equivalent of a bad midlife tattoo. While it’s dangerous to call any art – never mind an album titled Autofiction – “honest”, Anderson’s lyrics have rarely sounded more transparent. She Still Leads Me On and Blinded open a metal memory box, complex, full-hearted testaments to his late mother. The exquisitely lonely Drive Myself Home and Black Ice grasp the metaphorical steering wheel to describe two sides of a relationship, one tender, one dangerously out of control; What Am I Without You? is as mournful as its piano. “I’m not the kind of person who never feels uncertain,” sings Anderson on The Only Way I Can Love You, “so many ways to do what I do wrong.”

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2016’s Night Thoughts coldsweated through the terrors that flood in just before dawn; 2018’s The Blue Hour

Since their 2011 reunion, however, that blurry existential threat has come into sharper focus, more specific, grown-up fears jolting through their music.

Dread music

ninth album. By Victoria Segal. Suede ★★★★ Autofiction BMG. CD/DL/LP

ran even further with Brett Anderson’s fatherhood anxieties, a spectacular folkhorror forage through England’s grotty hedgerows. The singer’s evocative memoirs, Coal Black Mornings and Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, also seem to have shaken something loose – an older, wiser, sadder desire to dig into what it means to be a father, a son, a partner, an artist. With The Drowners having turned 30 in May, it’s a good (or profoundly terrifying) time to make a record that squares up to mortality and meaning as furiously as Autofiction

Anderson has described Autofiction as Suede’s “punk album”, the five band members hashing it out in a King’s Cross rehearsal room with little rock-star insulation. You can hear the metal and cement in That Boy On The Stage’s filthy rockabilly guitar, or 15 Again’s vertiginous dynamics; on Personality Disorder’s gothic aggro, Anderson rages so hard against the dying of the light it has no choice but to back off.

ChalkleyDean

SPEEDING DISASTERS, flash boy killings, broken bones in council homes: ever since Brett Anderson demanded a gun in the opening seconds of Suede’s debut The Drowners, a sense of doom has lurked at the edges of their music. Even at their most delirious or numbed, there was always trouble rumbling through their tower block walls, sex-and-glue psychos around every corner.

Kieron Tyler

Music For Growing Flowers

Bird’,asTranslating‘ThePaper Papirfu glen is a filmNorwegian1984centring

ROPEADOPE. CD/DL

I Love You Jennifer B

In the five years since Black Country, New Road violinist Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye started their disruptive pop project at Guildhall School Of Music & Drama, Jockstrap have refined their knack for marrying seemingly disparate elements with rule-breaking delight. Their debut maxes out their signature contrast between plaintive songs and wide-eyed electronica amid the wall-to-wall choruses of Greatest Hits, throwback orchestral pop of What’s It All About and all-out romanticism of Concrete Over Water (despite a chorus of barking dogs and frantic proggy synths), ending on a high with the acid techno weirdness of 50/50. While production high jinks threaten to override shapeshifting songs like Neon and Angst, the delicate balance between Ellery’s lithe, effectual voice and Skye’s

David Sheppard

MERCURY KX. DL/LP

Excellent second LP from the reconfigured three-piece, produced by Eli Reed and featuring guest vocals from Aaron Frazer (Durand Jones).

CARPARK. CD/DL/LP

singsdyingantime/’Tiloveryou’reexpertinafield,”Beths

linchpin Liz Stokes, Kiwi accent shining through. Her band’s third album trades in literate, emotionally intelligent powerpop, all the while pondering the leftover feelings that can “smoulder in the wreckage” of ruptured relationships, romantic or platonic. Designed to ‘work’ live, the vigorous, often zippy arrangements finessed at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s Auckland home stu dio offer chipper contrast to the subject matter, Stokes a thoughtful, knowing presence variously reminiscent of Aimee Mann or Kirsty MacColl, and Pearce an able foil given to sparky, spontaneous sounding guitar-leads and ingenious arpeggios (Knees Deep; A Passing Rain). Though love’s potential for miscommunica tion is never far away, there are moments of joyful catharsis too: “Some things are best left

Charles Waring

DAPTONE/PENROSE. CD/DL/LP Superb Gabe Roth-produced debut from the San Diego trio. For med in 2019 in San Diego via Instagram, Thee Sacred Souls are a three-piece – drummer Alex Garcia, bassist Sal Samano and singer Josh Lane – who play classic soul. At times they sound like Durand Jones & The Indications: as with the aforesaid’s Aaron Frazer, Lane’s touchstone is Al Green and he’s blessed with a tantalising falsetto perfect for expressing romantic longing and societal hurt, while the rhythm section approach their craft with warmth and a close attention to detail. The 12 songs making up their self-titled first album, though, are broad in scope and full of individual flourishes. The heart-stopping Weak For Your Love, with its deep Philly feel, the infectious Chicano soul keen of Love Comes Easy and the soft soul balladry of Can I Call You Rose? are all special indeed.

Lois Wilson

Nueva Luz

Since their 2019 debut He’s On Time, the group have gone from quartet to trio with co-founders Thomas Gatling and George Marage now joined by Gatling’s college pal Dennis Bailey. Their vocal impact remains just as strong and soulful, though, and is often reminiscent of Smokey with the early Miracles, especially on Nothing But His Love. Although mostly relating to God and worship, their messages can also double as empowerment anthems with a more wide-reaching appeal.

Thee Sacred Souls ★★★★ Thee Sacred Souls

★★★★

COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP

Off the wall: Thee Sacred Souls deliver classic soul that’s broad in scope.

“Love learnedis

– part of ongoing Platinum Jubilee celebrations – whose Cooper-created Astley’sthemovementsscapes,harp,softlyingharmony.dulynumerically-titlednaturalworkdrinkroundingtoaccompanimentambientisdesignedsoftenthenoiseofthesurcity.Thisismeatandforacomposerwhoseregularlyexplorestheworld,andtheeightpieceshereradiateasenseoforganicWhiletheshimmerdronesofParts1and2,etchedwithpianoandsummonEno’sdrift-later,string-basedareclosertolyricalarcadiaofVirginia

Orcadian composer’s floral tribute.

Moskus ★★★★ Papirfuglen HUBRO. DL/LP Far-out disparateseamlesslyNorwegiansblendingredients.

The Beths ★★★★ Expert In A Dying Field

New Zealand quartet beloved of Phoebe Bridgers bring third album.

Erland Cooper ★★★★

to rot,” enthuses Stokes on Best Left. James McNair

Los whoseDorados,name in English means “the gold ones” and refers to Pancho Villa’s band of guerrilla fighters in the Mexican revolution, formed in 2003 and began as a jazz quar tet but quickly evolved into a progressive genre-blurring outfit whose line-up now includes a turntablist, DJ Rayo. This, their first album in a decade, which melds jazz improv with rock, blues, and ambient electronica, is defined by Daniel Zlotnik’s elegant reed playing and Demián Gálvez’s twangy guitar. Some of the group’s slower numbers resonate like soundtrack mate rial, such as the mournful Despedida and the atmos pheric title track, where a woody clarinet and astral synths entwine in an ecstatic musical embrace. The gnarly Desert Blues shows the band in a more visceral light while Naufragio, simmering with a quiet intensity, exudes a noirlike ambience that highlights the ineffably filmic quality of Los Dorados’ sound.

layered abstractions continues to confound expectations in singular skew-whiff fashion. Andy Cowan

Look Up!

Los Dorados ★★★

Jockstrap ★★★★

MOJO 89 OlivaresGustavo

For instance, on the title track they sing, “You’ve got to raise your gaze above the haze and find yourself some better days.” Hold Your Head Up and Fight On!, meanwhile, are

We Feel Secure. Only Parts 1 to 4 are used in the installation, but the remaining essays are no less beguiling, with Part 5’s soaring female chorales elevating proceedings towards the celestial. These are beautiful, immersive meditations, with or without the botanical context.

Superbloom is an installation

millionamerLondon’sTheTransformingTowerOfformoatintoseaof20flowers,

London pair’s fizzy debut splices classic songwriting with electronic curveballs.

Fourth album from filmic Mexican quintet.

From Gardens Where

ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP

on whether a fatal fall from a balcony was murder or a vol untary act. Its title is borrowed for the fifth studio LP from the also-Norwegian improv trio Moskus. Over the 10 years from their first, they’ve shifted further and further from genre classification. Though initially bracketed as jazz, they’ve become as stylistically slippery as the film’s premise. Viz: third track Lokk Til Eurydike – a Tangerine Dream spaciness enfolds, but insistent double bass and distant woodwind imply a landing has been made in a glade where tradi tional music is being played with non-traditional instru ments. Six minutes later, Hilde gard takes it further out with bowed cello, cembalo, scraped strings and clattering percus sion to create what could be a fractured giallo soundtrack. Confoundingly, it all gels.

Lois Wilson

written specifically as vehicles for social protest, “battle cries in the war against white supremacy,” says Gatling.

The GospelHarlemTravelers

Pop prodigy grows right up on rapturous fourth LP.

Boris ★★★

REVERBERATION APPRECIATION SOCIETY. DL/LP

Dr. John: took his last trip to the country.

Third prog-psych escapade from the LA troupe. One

Signed Madonna,by and with her first two LPs topsellers, Branch was once a pop singer known for her howls of teen angst. Now though, 39, a mother of three and married to Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney – who co-produced this fourth outing – she’s an adult of raging indie-rock sensibili ties. On Closest Thing To Heav en, with its hooky bridge, the vocal is world-weary: “Remem ber the time you told me you were done?/Well, I already knew.” I’m A Man is devastating in its strutting indictment: “I’m a man/And I’m out of control/ And I can’t get it up, and I can’t let it show…” A few track s disappoint; but there’s lusty Fever Forever (a little Wet Leg, a little Joan Jett) and graceful Beating On The Outside, which could be Rosanne Cash.

Sylvie Simmons

They’re all beautifully sung in French by Mark Lanegan’s former muse Isobel Campbell, à la Birkin or Juliette Gréco at their most left bank. Then two of the songs recur twice, in remixed form. So, while it’s hardly the most heavyweight of projects, there’s a lightness of touch which, especially on the impossibly lovely Je Ne Finis Rien and the quietly brass-laden Un Thème, achieves most of what Didelot intended. Of the four remixes, Boo Radley Martin Carr brings a 21st century throb and sheen to the title track, while Jah Wobble catapults Un Thème into O Superman with added clatter. This curve ball may be a diversion for everyone, but it’s a worthy one nevertheless.

John Aizlewood

ROUNDER. CD/DL/LP

First LP in 40-plus years from Louisiana swamp pioneer.

Though the odd icy shard of remains,six-stringEBM sees a indie-guitarone-timeact achieve full metamorphosis. Now channelling Nitzer Ebb, Rammstein and Front 242 influences on lengthy, dramatic songs, Editors have hatched a perturbed and maximalist affair whose thundering algo rithms target the darkest, least inhibited corners of the dance floor. The catalyst, they say, was new member Benjamin Power, AKA Blanck Mass, whose beefy electro-industri al/techno beds sparked the writing of Tom Smith’s vocal melodies and further embroi dery from the rest of the band. It’s an approach that reaps dividends on Heart Attack, wherein Smith’s baritone has a Bowie-esque grandeur, and on dystopian banger Strawberry Lemonade, which references our “broken nation”. The album’s title is an acronym for Editors/Blanck Mass and a nod to ’80s Electronic Body Music, the progenitor of its sound.

Tommy McLain

NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP

Tokyo avant-garde trio cross-pollinate Lemmy and Ayler; wild scenes result. After 30 years of andpopnies,progambient-symphodream-reveriesexcursions

Stevie Chick

Son Parapluie

into nigh-unlistenable noise, only fools try to predict where Tokyo experimentalists Boris will go next. Their ongoing Heavy Rocks series plays things relatively straight, however, restricting their palette to metallic tones. Even so, this third volume rewrites the rule book. An opening brace of tunes gallop like vintage Motörhead, if they were being chased by wild banshee saxo phones. Grandiose wall-ofthrash Question 1 plays like a more gonzo Mastodon, push ing the proggy complexity to impressive degrees, while Ghostly Imagination’s ugly grind, needling lead guitar and thumping beats posits Slayer jamming with 2 Unlimited. The latter track is as gruelling as that sounds, but Boris’s mission to push metal into the realm of the avant-garde remains laud able, and often electrifying.

Editors ★★★ EBM

Martin Aston

“One of the great unsung heroes of American vocalising” is what Elvis Costello calls 82-year-old McLain. Costello’s on an impressive list of guest musicians/co-writers that include Van Dyke Parks, Ed Harcourt, Ivan Neville and Augie Meyers – lots of great keyboards then – as well as Nick Lowe, with whom McLain has been touring. Produced by swamp rocker C.C. Adcock, its 13 songs are mostly slow (bar Sir Doug Quintet-like Some body) but diverse. California (with Parks) sounds like a song from a musical that Tom Waits could sing. Doomy, Spectoresque My Hidden Heart feels like one of those mirrorballed ’60s songs on David Lynch soundtracks, as does the title song, featuring Costello on backing vocals. Elsewhere it’s country soul, sometimes senti mental (That’s What Mama Used To Do; London Too), sung in a dusty voice that still sounds strong, as the sparsest song, Stand For Something, shows.

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★★★★ I Ran EveryDownDream

Paris N’existe Pas EUROPOP 2000. CD/DL

The Trouble With Fever

Iconicpix

ing Lips before they found pop, a jagged, raucous, flailing trip. Round Of Applause is being promoted as the quintet’s pop record after winding down the jam-band inclinations of 2021’s Water For The Frogs album. But Round Of Applause is no Soft Bulletin, not with this level of hard rock dynamics, prog flourishes and stylistic hairpin bends. While My Directive and Twisted And Vile mirror Osees’ tightly coiled Krautrock, there are moments of levity: a Bowie-esque Time – The Outlaw, Stone Men’s sumptu ous jazzier chops, a Nilssoninspired The Pearl. Core mem ber Bert Hoover’s lyrics tend toward the fantastical (from Iguana: “A light so bright, it’s meaningless, penetrates my eyes/Take it straight and filter less”), adding to the air of psychedelic overload. Suitably comes in purple vinyl too.

James McNair

Glyn Brown

Michelle Branch ★★★

Dr. John ★★★★ Things Happen That Way

YEP ROC. CD/DL/LP

Hooveriii

siderandimodusHooveriii’sshortcutpotentialtooperistoconTheFlam

His final prescription: a country album.

Heavy Rocks (2022) RELAPSE. CD/DL/LP

Think Dr. John and we tend to think R&B, funk, blues and psychedelia, but as an avid listener to late ’40s-founded US radio show Louisiana Hayride, the man born Malcolm John Rebennack also loved country. His death from a heart attack while making THTW in June 2019 freights covers of Hank Williams’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and Willie Nelson’s Funny How Time Slips Away with extra poignancy, but with Willie, his son Lukas’s band and Aaron Neville helping out elsewhere, there is audible love in the room. Three final, reflective and intimately presented Rebennack originals shine (try Give Myself A Good Talkin’ To), but best of all, perhaps, is his take on Thedeftit’sLeemarchNewasHereOfWilburys’TravelingEndTheLine.renderedasyncopatedOrleanssungàlaHazlewood,atypicallyswitcheroo.

It’s a sweet idea: a con scious attempt to evoke the louche, late’60s Paris of Jane Birkin and Serge Gains bourg, via four new songs by Orwell’s Jérôme Didelot.

James McNair

The album also known as Paris Does Not Exist by His Umbrella.

Line-up re-boot reveals what they do in the shadows.

★★★

PLAY IT AGAIN SAM. CD/DL/LP

Round Of Applause

★★★★

Junior Brother

MUDDY LEAF. CD/DL/LP

R.E.M. in 1982: (from left) Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Bill Berry.

Blue Orchids

IRS/UME. CD/DL/LP/MC

★★★★

As befits her multi-arts background, Williams’ songs scan like short stories. On Radioactive, a song begets a dream, and crowds move “in a cumulus of hidden thought” marshalled by drums and faint electro pulses. A highlight of these broad-ranging songs. JB

Like Neptune

STRANGE BREW. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

R.E.M.

Kanda Bongo Man ★★★ Kekete Bue

★★★ Beautiful Blue

★★★★

Chip Wickham

ONE LITTLE INDIAN. CD/DL/LP

While Stratospheric and Winter merge modal hard-bop with spiritual jazz, the peak is a homage to Tubby Hayes. AC

Kathryn Williams

Ronan Kealy displays unique storytelling gifts, but it’s his untamed voice – part Kevin Coyne, part Richard Dawson – that makes his second LP’s unfiltered acoustic mix of neuroses, loss of innocence and religious oppression truly unforgettable. AC

John Doe ★★★ Fables In A Foreign Land

The Roots and Mavis Staples collaborator balances past and future with stylish precision on uplifting fourth LP. To wit, the gorgeous melting soul of Drummer, the Eddie Hazel guitar coda and languid dusty grooves regenerated on Playing Both Sides. JB

Angus Tempus Memoir

The Great Irish Famine

WAHALA SOUNDS. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

Isthisforreal?

The OddityKoreatown

Steve Pilgrim

FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP

Butcher Brown

EXTENDED

Presents Triple Trey CONCORD. CD/DL/LP

Virginia band’s intuitive lineblurring majors on a psychedelic mash-up of P-funk, jazz and hip-hop. Tennishu’s verbal flurries star on a party-aimed big band chop-up, epitomised by a crunchy re-work of Notorious B.I.G.’s Unbelievable. AC

Tan Cologne ★★★★ Earth Visions Of Water Spaces

Chronic Town

★★★★

STONES THROW. DL/LP

Brighton Everyman flits between wild flute and emotional tenor sax on originals underpinned by Sneaky’s languid double bass.

Victoria Segal PLAY

The soulful folk-pop of former Stands and current Paul Weller drummer’s fifth LP is elevated by some quietly stunning string arrangement s, courtesy of Hannah Peel. Standout title track lands in a pastoral wonderland worthy of late Nick Drake foil Robert Kirby. CC

Based on the conceit the LA producer is really “an English nigga”, TKO raps over vignettes with sonic left turns. His style sneaks in social comment via the back door on History Tension and Endless Run. AC

★★★★ Cloud 10

White WastedGirl

TINY GLOBAL. CD/DL/LP

Son Little ★★★★

★★★★

Inspired by weekly patio jams, these dustbowl narratives are a concept album set in the 1890s, revelling in simplicity. Doe possesses a voice like oak, made for Americana, shining best on the darkly comedic See The Almighty. SC

ANTI CD/DL/LP

Despite falling between debut single Radio Free Europe and first album Murmur, R.E.M.’s 1982 EP Chronic Town is not so much transitional phase as hermetically sealed little universe. Issued here for the first time as a standalone CD complete with sleevenotes from producer Mitch Easter, these five tracks still generate an atmosphere of outsider art magic, heady Southern gothic cut with the post-punk energy of a band forged at student parties in deconsecrated Athens churches. Melody pours out of them, but Michael Stipe’s atomised vocals and Easter’s ectoplasmic production make the radiant jangle of Wolves, Lower or Gardening At Night feel like snapshots from a disordered mind, discernible lyrics (“house in order”, “it must be time for penitence”) suggesting a kind of visionary mania. Murmur would change their game, but Chronic Town remains a perfect distillation of R.E.M.’s early mystery.

Night Drives

White Girl Wasted

His first album since 2010, the Congolese soukous singer’s voice is as unfailing as his rolling rhythms. Some plinky keyboard may scare purists, but the title track, with subtle voice modulation, vindicates his urge to innovate. JB

Drenched in drugginess and dubious advice, Danny Brown producer The Purist’s dusty beats meet MC Sonnyjim’s quotables. With potent cameos (DOOM, Madlib, DJ Premier), no note is wasted. AC

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GONDWANA. CD/DL/LP

Since 2016, ex-Fall man Martin Bramah has been seized by a late-life creative burst. So it continues on this stirring, time-slipping concept piece, where often effusive garage psych betrays protest, occult philosophies and daring, with echoes of his storied past. IH

DAUPE!. DL/LP

New Mexico duo’s floatation tank-ready sounds: nine waterthemed tracks (Floating Gardens; Blue Swim; Shell Grotto) of blissful ambient guitar pop with a Mazzy Starlike vocal drift, shroud currents of ecological anxiet y. JB

LABRADOR RECORDS. CD/DL/LP

Radio Daze

Wilco’s masterpiece that nearly never was celebrates its 20th anniversary with a model of box-set shock and awe. By David Fricke.

Wilco’s winding path to the explosive desire and slurred-Dada remorse in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is spread over several outtakes, an adventure in moving parts and perpetual investigation. A piece of Tweedy’s infamous entrance (“I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue”) shows up in an entirely different, bluesy shuffle, American Aquarium, with a lyric that he pulled, in turn, for the album’s pale beauty Radio Cure. Then there’s the odyssey of I Am Trying… itself through assorted tempers and atmospheres, among them a live-rehearsal draft with psychedelic church organ and the closing-time aura of Tweedy’s poignantly strained vocal with a saloon-piano trio in ghostly reverb. The words and urgency are always there; they’re waiting for the right, illustrative bedlam.

BACK NOTSTIRRING,STORY:SHAKEN

JEFF SPEAKS! TWEEDY ON MUSICAL MEMORY, BAND DYNAMICS AND THE WHITE ALBUM

● On September 27 and 28, 2001, six months before releasedNonesuch Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – and just two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks – Wilco performed at New York’s Town Hall, previewing more than half of the songs on the album, including unintendedthemourning of War On War and Ashes Of American Flags. But Jeff Tweedy chose not to play the ballad Jesus, Etc. because of the second verse (“Tall buildings shake…”).

In every other way, the top-tier edition of this 20th-anniversary party is a model of box-set shock and awe. There is the inevitable remastering of the 2002 album; a celebratory round on stage from St. Louis that summer; and a period radio interview with in-studio performances. But this reissue goes the extra, illuminating distance with four hours of music from the very process Tweedy describes above. Here are the demo sketches, test-run arrangements and wholly discarded songs that he, Bennett (who died in 2009), bassist John Stirratt, keyboard player and guitarist LeRoy Bach and new drummer Glenn Kotche passed through to the definitive sound of hearts broken, minds blown and those ruins built anew. A solo, acoustic pass at Poor Places is Tweedy with Nick Drake and early-’70s Richard Thompson on his mind. In an early stab at the plaintive, wheatfield Cure of Kamera, the song gets a bright teen-dance kicking like something Bruce Springsteen would have conjured for light relief on The River. And if you want to imagine Wilco as prime-time Little Feat, check out the version of I’m T he Man Who Loves You with slinky R&B guitar and jaunty congas.

Yankee… was decisive risk with a greatesthits spine, its wilful andwithdispatchedclattermusicalemotionalpurpose.”

“

Wilco ★★★★★

sides t wo and t hree on LP and which remains so in this reissue.

94 MOJO Getty

But Wilco were already on the way, by their own route and definition. “I sincerely believed that this was the most contemporary and accessible record that we had ever made,” Tweedy said of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that day in New York. This is how they got there, step by step.

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N FEBRUARY 2002, speaking to MOJO in a New York hotel room a few weeks before its release, Wilco’s founding singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy explained the eccentric genesis of the country-soul confession, assured-if-bent pop hooks and startling, contrarian noise on his band’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. “I was taking this approach of documenting each song as accurately as possible,” Tweedy said, “spending six months coming at each of [them] from another direction… trying to find something else in there that was more exciting than those six chords strung together with a bridge and chorus.”

“That was too soThatafterthisthinkmaketoday.traumatising,”vividlyhesays“AndIwantedtosurepeopledidn’tIjustmadeupsongsoquicklythoseevents.wouldhavebeenamoral.”

The enduring irony of all that ruckus: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was decisive risk with a greatest-hits spine, its wilful clatter and abstraction dispatched with the same musical and emotional purpose Wilco brought to the double-album sprawl of 1996’s Being There and the modern-rock tensions on 1999’s Summerteeth. “This is an honest, vivid chaos, and it tells a story,” I wrote in my original Rolling Stone review, an assessment that still rings true through the alcoholic storm of the immortal opener, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart; the blizzard of static that falls over the despair in Poor Places, a woman intoning the album’s title (from the phonetic shortwave-radio alphabet) like a distress signal; and the avant-shred guitar slicing through the foggy brass and rapture of I’m T he Man Who Loves You. Even in the resurgent age of vinyl, I prefer the CD flow of Ashes Of American Flags’ shattered patriotism into the nostalgic, hippy bliss of Heavy Metal Drummer, a healing sequence broken up between

The improbable, star-crossed saga of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is now established music-business legend: the zealous turn into textural experiment and lyric surrealism; the high cost in band members as two got fired along the way, including Jay Bennett, Tweedy ’s co-writer and primary collaborator at the time; Tweedy ’s close mischief in the mixing stage with Sonic Youth guitarist and post-rock sage Jim O’Rourke; the album’s rejection by one record company and its eventual release by another imprint under the same corporate overlords – eight months after Wilco put it out for free, streaming the whole thing on their website. Never mind Napster and iTunes; the 21st-century freefall of major-label autocracy starts here.

The songs Wilco left behind are more obviously retro but a good-time album unto themselves. The jangling folk rock of Shakin’ Sugar (with a guitar break that shouts George Harrison on Rubber Soul ) feels like it’s been hanging around since Wilco’s 1995 alt-country debut, A.M.. Not For T he Season – which resurfaced as Laminated Cat on 2003’s Loose Fur, Tweedy’s side project with Kotche and O’Rourke – bolts out of the gate like T he Modern Lovers’ Roadrunner, complete with a Jonathan Richman-style count-off. And Tweedy kept at least one song in reserve, Remember To Remember, retitled Hummingbird when it fluttered on to 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, leavening that album’s extremes like Big Star in Tin Pan Alley. In one of the takes here, Tweedy sings it against a bar-band dub of rhythm section and spook-house organ, making you wish he’d just piled on the guitars and aimed for hitsville.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Super Deluxe Edition) NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP

Public broadcasters: Wilco (from left) Glenn Kotche, LeRoy Bach, John Stirratt and Jeff Tweedy, 2001; (inset) Jay Bennett.

“For as long as I can remember, The White Album has been my platonic ideal. That’s probably why I keep making double albums. Even records like [2015’s] Star Wars and [2016’s] Schmilco – they feel like a double album. I love that contrast where you put something direct and pleasant next to something challenging and disorienting. I find that to be an accurate portrayal of the world as I experience it – moment to moment, feeling that something’s figured out and then nothing is figured out. I like music that reconciles that.”

When you performed YHF in New York this spring, to mark its 20th anniversary, you played a second set that included some of the outtakes in this reissue. How seriously did you consider songs like Shakin’ Sugar and The Good Part for the album at the time?

“The thing I’ve discovered from all of these archival reissues is that my memory of my musical past, in terms of honesty and accuracy, is much better than my memory of my biographical past (laughs). What I hear sounds like how I remember it. I can hear myself trying to push past the limits of what I thought of as a really good rock’n’roll combo – of that not being enough for me, as much as I love really good rock’n’roll combos. I also hear myself wishing I could do something as artistic as the modern composers I was listening to at the time, having that musical-theory background and the permission to use other sounds.”

“I can’t remember exactly how long those were actually in the running. Knowing myself at the time, I thought a lot of those songs as being too much like [1999’s] Summerteeth. A Magazine Called Sunset would have fit in really well on Summerteeth, so that was a good enough reason to set it aside. Cars Can’t Escape had been in the running pretty seriously, for a long time, but I thought Ashes Of American Flags had a much better lyric in the context of the album.”

“I’ve had that feeling about so many Dylan tracks I’ve heard on after-the-fact anthologies, but it made sense at the time. I think that version of Anniversary was recorded on the [tour] bus. We used to have recording gear set up in the back lounge. There were a fair amount of things done there when the bus was parked outside a venue.”

Love Will (Let You Down) sounds like an outtake from The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup – a reminder that YHF was made by a band, not just a studio concoction.

What you did, during and after YHF, was build the band you needed to go forward. You now have a line-up that is fluent in everything released under Wilco’s name.

sound like (laughs). Just put it through a little amp right here.’

The advance word on YHF had Wilco turning into Radiohead with a country tinge. But when I finally heard it, the record struck me as more

“I never sought to reinvent the language, make a whole new alphabet. I’ve always admired bands that have achieved a playing style that takes those ingredients and makes its own form, its own thing that happens only when these people play together. That’s what I think a band is. We went even further in that direction on [2004’s] A Ghost Is Born, because we were able to go out and play these [YHF ] songs as an ensemble. I would have loved to see The Beatles stick around long enough to wait for the technology to catch up with them in a way that they could expand their palette on-stage.”

“Exactly. That happened because I was trying to explain to Jim O’Rourke what I wanted [in the mix]. I said, ‘It’s in the same key. Let’s just put it on top.’ It was [a sample] from [1930’s] Symphony Of Psalms. I only knew it was in the same key because it said so in the Stravinsky box set.”

I think it damaged Jay, the rock’n’roll mythology of tortured genius. He had so much to offer. He was so talented and beautiful in so many ways. But that side of it had done a number on him. Rock’n’roll has done a lot of damage. And I love rock’n’roll music. But it has distorted people’s ideas of what the important parts are.”

“We’ve been together a little over 17 years now. But, yeah, that was the idea. It was hard playing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot even as a five-piece. I didn’t like the unreliability of samples, to have that as a part of our live sound. I wanted real sounds to be happening, so we needed more hands on deck. We ended up using a fair amount of samples when we did these [20th anniversary] shows. But we also had more hands in the horn and string sections. That was the quintessential version of how that record can be played.”

How do Ashes Of American Flags and War On War resonate for you now, in a nation even more torn apart from the inside? The title track of your latest album, Cruel Country, feels like a sequel to the original dilemma – a love of America in spite of itself?

“One of the weird things about Cruel Country was we were making it at the same time we were rehearsing the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot shows. There’s this bleed-over in gear between the two records. But my goal was never to point out how bad things are. My goal is to reconcile being OK (laughs), having some peace of mind in spite of the fact that there’s no peace of mind. I don’t have any interest in anybody listening to my music that doesn’t see the world clearly. If they see the world clearly, they don’t need me to tell them what’s wrong with it.”

like The Beatles’ White Album – that dedicated, experimental verve with a loyalty to the sanctity of the song.

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy speaks to David Fricke

I love the version of Anniversary (Nothing Up My Sleeve) on the American Aquarium disc. It’s like an Everly Brothers outtake. How did that get left by the side of the road?

96 MOJO

“Rock’n’roll has done a lot of damage.”

There is the so-called ‘Stravinsky Mix’ of Ashes Of American Flags with that orchestral and choral flourish at the end.

What is it like for you to revisit Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in this kind of detail?

Jeff thinker.AquariumAmericanTweedy:

Is that concept – the duality of The White Album – something that you and Jay Bennett agreed on as you made YHF ? You co-wrote a lot of the material together.

“Jay and I were very sympathetic collaborators when it came to the song part – our vocabulary, the music we were drawing from. I went farther afield than Jay in my listening habits. But Jay was enamoured with the mythology – of having a story to tell about how a record was made. I wanted weirdness, but I wanted the music to do that. Jay would get wound up making a recording – like calling a phone booth down the street and running a microphone cable there to record the call. I’m making that one up. But it was things like that which we indulged and went through sometimes because they were fun. Other times, I would want to say, ‘Jay, I know what that’s gonna

The record begins in intimacy, with Stepney’s voice announcing “Left channel, front. Right channel, front”, followed by the sound of his footsteps as he walks back to his keyboard, and that’s the goal of the record – to allow us into a relaxed, laid-back version of Stepney’s melodic soul world. Opening track Gimme Some Sugar is raw, drummachine backed keyboard soul in the manner of Timmy Thomas’s Funky Me or Sly Stone’s Spaced Cowboy, yet with a bright, melodic optimism. The most immediately engaging tracks are the demos of tracks Stepney would eventually rework for Earth, Wind & Fire. That’s The Way Of The World, the seductive soul sigh from their 1975 self-titled LP, steeped in Herb Alpert-esque horns, is here in primitive form; the kind of wobbly talking-Moog instrumental that might have accompanied an Open University segment on the periodic table. The Rhodes keyboard blueprint of EW&T’s Imagination even comes bookended with the voices of Stepney’s daughters, talking about how much closer this version is to Stepney the father, rather than Stepney the arranger.

★★★★

Victoria Segal

With Love Volume 1

Keith Cameron

– Compiled By Miche MR BONGO. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

If that seems overly romantic and sentimental, that’s really what this compilation is all about, a chance to reconnect with the tangible humanity and the creative quintessence of an artist who devoted his talent to the betterment of others over himself.

Brother Ray addresses his country’s good and bad. Few onheartformsongcouldvocaliststakeanyandperopen-surgeryitlikeRay

MOJO 97 hereinCredit FILTER REISSUES

Concentrated shot of singersongwriter’s dizzying scope. 2018’s eight-disc compendium The Girl From Chickasaw County re-ignited interest in Bobbie Gentry, who quietly removed herself from public life in 1981, aged 39. This collection distils her work down further from her studio albums and unre leased recordings from the box set, offering another chance to experience Gentry’s depth and fluidity. While it inevitably starts with the inscrutable folklore of Ode To Billie Joe, the compilation also includes a bossa take of Sunday Best, a string-free duet with Glen Campbell on Let It Be Me, a wild Niki Hokey/Barefootin’ live on the BBC and a remixed version of Carpenters-in-space chorale Casket Vignette. It’s compact, yes, but there’s still a lot of wild ground to cross between the aromatic country of Chickasaw County Child, cosmic folk Refractions (from 1968’s The Delta Sweete) and versions of Eleanor Rigby (flamenco-style) and This Girl’s In Love With You

Charles. The Father of Secular Gospel, social issues were uniquely personal for him as a Black American. On this 1972 album he nails a batch of tunes that critique – as well as praise – his nation. He kicks off with the hymn Lift Every Voice And Sing, often called the Black national anthem, and ends with America The Beautiful –a stirring song that many wish was the US national anthem. In between, he covers Mela nie’s TakeJohnaboutAbraham,Tolamentanti-commercialismWhatHaveTheyDoneMySong,Ma;Dion’shitMartinAndJohnhistory’smartyrs;andDenver’sodetonature,MeHome,CountryRoads.

Miche’s sets at London’s Spir itland, tracing deep soul to free jazz, have shown the serial crate-digger’s passion for the exotic. While that’s reflected in Brazilian rarities (Quientaessencia), this compi lation’s real finds hail from America, be it the featherlight rasping soul of Marin County’s Smoke Inc, or searching flutes and wah wah funk of Seattle Latin jazz pioneers Papaya. The early ’80s provide a par ticularly rich seam, from Man disa’s languid sun-kissed soul to the yearning anguish of Superior Elevation and slap bass gospel moves of Keith Chism & Light. Miche tellingly includes both sides of South Funk Blvd’s hyper-rare 45 Skying High, a feel-good boo gie crossover that, like every thing on this intimately sequenced set, deserves a wider audience.

INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM. CD/DL/LP

Various ★★★★

Let it be naked

SONY. CD/DL/LP

TANGERINE. CD/DL/LP

B-sides Just A Kid, Masking Tape and Locust Valley) helps reframe this period in terms of creative plenty as opposed to indulgence, while Rosebud, bizarrely omitted from the original, is supreme Manic melancholia. Now also with a Dave Eringa remix, KYE finally makes its voice heard.

It’s the music equivalent of finding a great author’s journals or an artist’s sketchbook. It feels vital, personal, vulnerable but also incomplete.

Ray Charles

Bobbie Gentry

In albumtheirersStreet2001,FebruaryManicPreachheraldednewwith

Primarily recorded on 4-track in his South Side Chicago home studio, this is the Stepney aesthetic repurposed as personal, reclusive, DIY: Stepney, alone, playing all the instruments by himself; the godfather of primal soul.

UMC. CD/DL/LP

Know Your Enemy

Spiritland programmer’s clutch of soul, funk and fusion rarities.

Andy Cowan

Step On Step

★★★★ A Message From The People

Double LP of home recordings from the Americanrevolutionaryrecordproducer and composer. Abandoning his preconceptions, Andrew Male Charles Stepney ★★★

The Girl ChickasawFromCounty –Highlights From The Capitol Masters

Sprawling 16-song LP re-cast as two records with extra tracks, plus a disc of demos.

simultaneous singles So Why So Sad and Found That Soul. What seemed like mere mar keting shenanigans was actu ally a remnant of the album’s original design as two sepa rate, sonically distinct records: acoustic-oriented Door To The River and its noisier twin Soli darity. Greeted sceptically then as a bit of a hotchpotch, this restored Know Your Enemy foregrounds stellar material –Epicentre, worthy of R.E.M. circa Lifes Rich Pageant, or The Convalescent’s enraged Ste reolab – that got overlooked. Adding non-albumcontemporaneoustracks(suchas

GO BACK just 10 years, and there is a good chance that the four-track recordings on this record would have ended up on a bonus CD, accompanying a Best Of Charles Stepney. But times change and so do music narratives.

In fact, the raw sound of Step On Step corresponds more to the post-studio aesthetic of the past 10 years and the rise of the bedroom producer.

From his time as a staff arranger at Chicago’s Chess Records, to his production and writing work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Minnie Riperton and Terry Callier in the 1970s, Charles Stepney specialised in a lush, expansive style that might best be described as “psychedelic baroque”; a heavenly, up-scale sound that perfectly represented the aspirational goals of America’s new, prosperous Black middle classes. When Stepney died, suddenly, of a heart attack, during the recording of Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1976 LP Spirit, he left behind a legacy that seemed confined to a certain moment in history, until hip-hop artists such as Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde began sampling his work in the late ’80s and ’90s. Yet there is nothing in these 23 bare-bones tracks that relates to the high-wrought rococo flamboyance late-’80s hip-hoppers were drawing on.

Beat master: Charles Stepney brings home the sound of Chicago’s South Side.

Michael Simmons

Manic PreachersStreet

Labyrinth ★★★, the fourth album, the first of two issued in 1973, started as a commissioned work around the Greek myth of the Minotaur. Tightly written by Carr, with the band augmented by soloists Kenny Wheeler and Tony Coe and (wordless) vocalist Norma Winstone, it’s perhaps more formal in tone than their other records, their first without a guitar player as Allan Holdsworth had just departed. While exceptional in places – Carr loved the stirring Bull Dance and lengthy closer Naxos is atmospheric and lyrical – it’s usualunrepresentativeperhapsoftheirsound.Sixthalbum,1974’s

Sensing it was time for a change, British jazz trumpeter Ian Carr plugged into the grid. By Jim Irvin

HEN IAN CARR conceived Nucleus, after leaving the highly regarded but low-selling Rendell/Carr Quintet in the spring of 1969, he’d become tired of the “scrappy and precarious” lifestyle and fatalist culture befalling players of moder n jazz in Britain, who seemed to believe that the lack of work and decent remuneration was somehow proof of quality, the “we’re too good to be noticed” stance. Watching what Jon Hiseman was achieving with Colosseum, Carr envisaged a new ensemble of excellent jazz players that thought and behaved like a rock act, utilising roadies, management and a PA, playing electrified, exploratory music appealing to more than die-hard nerds while charging rock band prices: truly modern jazz, in other words.

Under The Sun ★★★ has echoes of Weather Report (In Procession) and Miles (The Addison Trip), but also some of Carr’s best themes for brass (Rites Of Man) that sound like no one else. Carr rated the chaotic and funky Sarsaparilla, notable for its free-form electric piano playing. This may be their most varied, most fusion-y release.

The band didn’t record for a further 18 months and, by the time of Belladonna (an

Within months of launching, Nucleus was chosen by the BBC as its representative

98 MOJO Getty Atomic tionalistfreneticbrain:conversaIanCarr.

New electrichybridCarr

FILE UNDER...

“An ensemble of jazz players that thought like a rock act.”

Ian Carr ‘solo’ album that was effectively a dry run for a new Nucleus line-up), their concept was neither so novel or so challenging; Miles’s electric albums had dropped, Mahavishnu Orchestra had broken through, and ‘fusion’ was officially a thing. Subsequent Nucleus albums, arguably stronger records, therefore made less impact, but these days, divorced from any ideological handwringing or genrecrunching associations that surrounded the band, their output – eight albums in five years – simply sounds exciting and all their releases are desired by collectors. That they recorded for Vertigo has helped push prices skywards. The resourceful Be With label reissued fifth album Roots (1973) last year and now reissue a further three.

But the plum here has to be eighth album Alleycat ★★★★, second of two 1975 releases, both admirably produced by the aforementioned Jon Hiseman, a drummer. The drum sound is brilliant and Hiseman encourages the band to groove more fluidly than ever before. Elevenminute funk opus Splat evolves into a frenetic conversation between trumpet (Car r), sax (Bob Bertles), drums (Roger Sellers) and percussion (Trevor Tomkins) working up a vicious head of steam. The lengthy Alleycat itself is full of unexpected twists and turns. Parts of this record sound like Miles playing with Fela Kuti, and that can only be good.

for the June 1970 Montreux International Jazz festival, a competitive event which Nucleus won, just as debut album Elastic Rock appeared. Winning at Montreux meant a slot at Newport in the USA the following month, also a huge success. By the end of 1970 they’d cut two further albums, We’ll Talk About It Later and Solar Plexus, and seemed on an unstoppable trajectory. But management problems and line-up changes – key members, instrumentalistmulti-Karl Jenkins and drummer John Marshall were lured to jazz-rock brand leaders Sof t Machine – dictated otherwise.

FLYING DUTCHMAN. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

BY DAVID HUTCHEON

SE Rogie

Rise Jamaica! IndependenceJamaicanSpecial

David Katz

★★★★

★★★★ Vol

MOJO 99 hereinCreditWelles-NystromEric

Air Volta

Andy Cowan

GRAPEFRUIT. CD

NUMERO. DL/LP

Alhaji OshomahWaziri

As fans of the Sun ArkestraRa know, the boss and crew releasedselfcountless albums on their own Saturn label, beginning in the late 1950s, and have continued to do so after Ra’s death in 1993. Initially debuting under this title in 1983 in a limited quantity, Ra To The Rescue! is a blend of the original release with additional tracks from the mid-1980s. (Ra clearly had no interest in making life easy for his devoted discographers.) The music is standard-issue Arkestra: it’sainterplanetarytionpronouncementlight,pianothemesgroupsynthesizer,drumbig-bandEllington-esqueswing,percussivecircles,atonalfreejazz,melodicvocalchantswithouterspaceandgorgeousjazzballadry.Theset’shighTheyPlanToLeave,isaofRa’sintentotakehisgrouponantripwrappedinbewitchingmelody.Asusual,completelyunusual.

An early (pre-name change Anikulapo)to Kuti classic, first released in 1972 as Music Of Fela but now bolstered with two 1971 non-album singles. The title track is the one to head for – a fierce, horn-led slab of funk that would evolve into Zombie – but 45s Shenshema and Ariya illustrate the speed at which Fela was developing

Sun Ra ★★★★ Ra To The Rescue!

LUAKA BOP. CD/DL/LP

TROJAN. CD/DL/LP

Martin Aston

PARTISAN. DL/LP

Two African acts come to Numero’s 1200 series – Le Super Djata Band Du Mali being the other – but a chance to investigate Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) makes this the pick. Volta-Jazz released one LP, in 1977, and it’s their singles from a decade earlier that excite collectors, so this comp is the perfect place to discover their soulful big-band sound.

Esther Marrow ★★★★ Newport News, Virginia

Denou may dispute that. Sierra Leone’s Rogie was a studentunion staple for a while, his “discovery” by Andy Kershaw giving him a hip cachet, his “palm-wine music” a gateway to West African guitar playing. This is a lovely set from 1994, though the singer died a few months after its release. Movers 1 1970-1976

MODERN HARMONIC. CD/DL/LP

album, she’d already sung jazz on the road with Duke Elling ton and gospel alongside Dr Martin Luther King on civil rights marches. Yet in the stu dio with producer Bob Thiele and arrangers Gene Page and Artie Butler, she sung neither, instead letting loose on a fiery mix of soul and funk, her vocal, strong and pure and totally commanding on vivifying covers of JJ Barnes’ Chains Of Love and Jesse Stone’s Money Honey, both in-demand spins today. Marrow, who cites Mahalia Jackson as her biggest influence – she took on Jack son’s Queen Of Gospel title after Jackson’s passing – saves perhaps her greatest perfor mance for Walk Tall, bringing the house down with her declamatory proclamations for equality and respect.

Deep in the woods: Saraband (here as The Honeydew, 1971) contribute to the Folk Heritage comp.

Michael Simmons Machine

frown of World and spokenword environmental plea Only People Can Save The World. While Watson’s talent for writing powerful, hooky choruses ensured the latter two lived on (via covers on Whatnauts On The Rocks), Machine’s remaining instru mentals boasted a touch of Sly Stone, a hint of The Temp tations and a smudge of Curtis Mayfield, without being overly derivative of anyone.

The first of two secular albums by the gospel singer still performing today.

The

Although the Jamaican music industry was still fledgling when the island achieved its independence from Britain in 1962, its creative forces were already fashioning something distinctive. Gathering material recorded during this breakthrough year, Rise Jamaica! contrasts patriotic numbers like Derrick Morgan’s Forward March and Al T Joe’s Independence Time Is Here with ballads of courtship and heartbreak, such as The Belltones’ Gloria Love, Jimmy James’s Bewildered And Blue and Owen Gray’s Nobody Else. There are also likeable instrumentals mid-way between rhythm and blues and ska, such as Drumbago’s Duck Soup and Roland Alphonso’s Easter Bonnet. The coloured vinyl edition is limited to a single LP, but the CD format comes with an excellent second disc comprised of wonderful Duke Reid productions dispatched the same year, at least 10 of which are previously unreleased alternate takes, taken straight from the master tapes.

First CD anthology of Folk Heritage industryManchester’sRecords;cottage-folkshrine.

Disowned by his parents after he chose to become a musician in the late 1960s, Waziri adapted the folk music of Edo State to Western instruments – keyboards, sax and especially guitars –producing a gorgeous dance music clearly influenced by the Ghanaian highlife produced by Ebo Taylor et al, yet its rhythms are not in the least bit intimidating to those of us who don’t know the prescribed moves. He’s still playing to this day, but these seven cuts recreate a simpler time in Nigeria, when a Muslim band could play songs of devotion and pack dancefloors with believers of all faiths, the band having walked miles to get to the gig with – true story – their instruments and amps balanced on their heads. Another gem from Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality series; the first one was Alice Coltrane’s Turiyasangitananda, a tough act to follow.

68 tracks from Folk Heritage and its associated imprints, from late ’60s through the ’70s, typically culled from severely limited editions. No one here reached Fairport/Steeleye/ Shirley Collins levels of appre ciation, but songs associated with those icons received equally vibrant treatments: The Wayfarers’ Matty Groves, The Bards’ Blackleg Miner, Michael Raven and Joan Mills’ Death And The Lady. With the notable exception of Bristol teens Folkal Point, the folkrock and singer-songwriter entries (leaning toward covers, including Dylan, Melanie, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Stills) are less essential; Folk Heritage did trad best, often to stark and blood-curdling effect. Given The Young Folk, Horden Raikes, Spinning Jenny, The Oldest Proffession, The Pendlefolk, Gallery and the ironically named Jovial Crew also present, and Grape fruit’s pricing, Before The Day is a VFM treat.

labelancontinuestreasure’‘buriedGrapefruit’sfolkserieswithextensivespotlight;

REAL WORLD. CD/DL/LP

Opinions vary Machine’swhether sole LP received a full release in 1972. The eye-watering f igures its origi nal copies have fetched since suggest not. Masterminded by guitarist Michael Watson, alongside Curtis McTeer (bass) and Donald McCoy (drums), the session musicians for Balti more’s The Whatnauts showed their considerable skills amid the driving horns and Ham mond crunch of Time Is Run ning Out, burbling bass of anti-racist anthem Why Can’t People (Be Colors Too?), soulful

★★★★ Machine

Second life for hard-to-find slab of socially conscious, A-game ’70s funk.

World Spirituality Classics 3

Dead Men Don’t Smoke Marijuana

Fela Ransome-Kuti And The Africa 70 ★★★★ Roforofo Fight

WEWANTSOUNDS. DL/LP

Arguably the pick of Real World’s recent run of Farafina’sthoughreissues,fansof Faso

Blue beat and ska cut in JA’s year of independence.

Lois Wilson Various ★★★★ Before The Day Is Done

By 1969 when Esther herandingsignedMarrowtoFlyDutchmanrecordeddebutsolo

ANALOG AFRICA. CD/DL/LP

Prolific in the early 1970s – fans rarely went a couple of months without a new single or album – this South Africa outfit came on like the M.G.’s (with hints of Inspiral Carpets), switching smoothly between instrumental Memphis grooves and catchy township jazz. Oupa Is Back, a showcase for guitarist Oupa Hlongwane, will have Steve Cropper wondering when exactly he recorded it.

ALSOWORLDRELEASED

Various ★★★★

Rare Ra makes its CD and LP reissue debut.

Volta-JazzOrchestra

★★★★

Muslim highlife from southern Nigeria.

Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk ★★★★

Live In Paris: The Radio France 1983-1984Recordings

Once postertheboy for the blossomedscenecoolinfluentialschoolthaton

STRUT. CD/DL/LP

Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk

at Studio One, following the breakup of The Skatalites in 1965. Moving to Toronto in the 1970s, Isaacs immersed himself in rhythm and blues and Philly soul, and when disco came on the scene, he formed Risco Connection in 1979 to fuse rock steady and disco. Using a mix of Jamaican, Canadian and US session players, Risco pro duced the 12-inch singles that are collected here, including the incredible take of McFad den & Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now that was championed by DJ David Man cuso, along with one-away versions of Chic’s Good Times, Diana Ross’s It’s My House and Inner Life’s I’m Caught Up, all with slapping bass, phat synth lines and peppery percussion. There are funky reggae originals too, the surreal Argument playfully recounting the hostility Jamaicans often met abroad.

at Seattle’s Parnell’s, a tiny 125-seater dubbed ‘Roy’s living room’ after its owner Roy Parnell and because of its intimate vibe. At the time, demand for soul jazz, espe cially that led by organ, had waned (jazz fusion was king), yet with saxophonist Danny Wollinski, guitarist Henry Johnson and drummer Garrick King behind him, McDuff rocked the house, as borne out on this 15-track cherry-pick from the dates. On tough, gritty R&B numbers such as Walkin’ The Dog and Blues 1 & 8, McDuff summons the sweat and heat of the B3’s swinging ’60s golden age. Standards such as A Night In Tunisia match total control with literary flair. Make It Goo d and Untitled D Minor, mean while, bring a freedom spirit to the groove.

In June 1982, B3

longplayederorganistHammondBrothJackMcDuffaweekresidency

CowlardDavid

seemed to possess an intuitive understanding of the unique sonic architecture of the pia nist’s compositions together with his penchant for challeng ing meters. The pair’s deep sense of simpatico is clearly audible on this 65-year-old one-off session for Atlantic, where the pianist sat in with The Jazz Messengers. The results are tomakesnever-heard-beforetheAnOrleans-styleisshards,definedondissonances,backdropJohnnyHard-blowingspectacular.saxophonistGriffinprovidesafluidforMonk’sclunkyshiningbrightestthequirkyEvidence,byitsjaggedmelodicandBlueMonk,whichrenderedasaslowNewfuneralmarch.alternativeversionofalbum,assembledfromouttakes,this2-LPsetareissuesavour.

Risco Connection ★★★★ Risco Version

Andrew Perry

Stereolab: nailing their progressive take on motorik.

Revelatory live discoveries from the jazz legend’s twilight years.

Stereolab

seriesexperimentalists’Krautpopodds-and-sodsdeliversoncemore.

drummerJamaican Joe Isaacs helped birth SoulsteadyrockintheBrothers

Jack McDuff

Pulse Of The Early Brain ’90s

A-sides like French Disko (until their Elektra deal, at least) and long-form pieces which dazzlingly showcased their avant-gardism. Thus, the early volumes of Switched On were tastier than your average rarities comp, and this fifth instalment is also up to snuff, kicking off with two tracks it’s hard to believe weren’t featured before: Simple Headphone Mind, and its 20-minute abstraction, Trippin’ With The Birds, each from 1997’s

★★★★ Live At Parnell’s

John Aizlewood

[Switched On Vol. 5] WARP/DUOPHONIC UHF. CD/DL/LP Reactivated

ROOSTER. CD/LP

NoiseTheArt/Empire/Industry:CompleteRed

★★★★

Charles Waring

Lavish, extended collisions of rock steady and underground disco.

★★★★

Bill RedNelson’sNoise

AS AN independent group of the old school, Stereolab often left their finest recordings off studio albums, such as

Under Sided Deluxe

When they disbanded in 1978, leader Bill Nelson cranked up the Harold Budd records in the studio, re-read 1984, donned some Mao suits and merged the energy of new wave with technical wizardry and dysto pian lyrics. The result was Sound-On-Sound, the only Red Noise album. It’s enhanced here by a new mix, a concert, demos and B-sides. Excess bag gage notwithstanding (there’s a 2-CD version too), from Furni ture Music (lyrically a cousin of Brian Wilson’s In My Room) to the furious Orwellian stomp of Art/Empire/Industry, it’s a succession of peaks. Folk main stay Dave Mattacks drums like Keith Moon on Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric), A Better Home In The Phantom Zone name checks The Byrds and Leo Sayer, but nothing eclipses the elegiac anthem Revolt Into Style, Nelson’s finest moment, with Red Noise and beyond.

Be Bop Deluxe never

Bristol slack-psych quartet celebrate 20 years of their oft-overlooked third album.

Jazz legends’ 1957 collaboration reissued with previously unreleased cuts. Few

David Katz

ATLANTIC/RHINO. CD/DL/LP

Americ a’s West Coast in the 1950s, Chet Baker’s Adonis-like visage had given way to a weathered, emaciated look by the ’80s; a startling physical transformation brought about by years of substance abuse. But as the three performances on this superbly annotated double album reveal – all recorded within an eightmonth period between 1983 and ’84 – his gorgeously lyrical trumpet playing appeared untouched by his personal travails. His delicate voice, too, which always possessed a curiously androgynous quality, is also in fine fettle and projects a heart-tugging vulnerability on the achingly romantic There Will Never Be Another You. The trum peter’s providingsterlingandbassistsGrailliermusiciansaccompanying(pianistMicheltogetherwithDominiqueLemerleRiccardoDelFra)offersupportthroughout,anunobtrusive

ELEMENTAL. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

ESOTERIC. CD

★★★★

By the time The releasedHeadsUnder Sided in 2002, their dreams of making a living from rock’n’roll had longsubsided. Following a twoyear period of stasis/self-doubt (hence the album’s title), the foursome reconvened for an intense six-day recording session (cost: £980, including mixing). Two decades on, Under Sided still sounds as if it was recorded yesterday, seismic opener Dissonaut confirming their unique ability to marry an interstellar ’70s psych-cum-motorik groove with Mark E Smith’s hunched vocal approach. As well as the freshly remastered original eight-track album, this deluxe edition comes with an avalanche of bonus material – including their remarkable Peel session from 2000. Everyone’s favourite critic/comedian Stewart Lee (who reviewed Under Sided for The Sunday Times back in the day) adds a set of deeply evocative sleevenotes that also suggest he’ll be first in line to pick up the 4-LP plus 2-CD version of this truly mind-rocking set.

SOUL BANK MUSIC. CD/DL/LP

collaborative 12-inch with Nurse With Wound, where Stereolab best nailed their progressive take on motorik Other highlights: Spool Of Collusion, a catchy ’60s Gallic pop 45 from 2008, and all four cuts off 1992’s Low-Fi EP, which range from the title track’s scuzzy Velvets groove right through to (Varoom!)’s staunch nineminute drone. Seen from 2022, Stereolab’s sheer breadth of endeavour here can justly be vaunted as heroic.

Phil Alexander

Blakey,rhythmlarMonk’scoulddrummerstuneintosinguapproachtolikewho

The Heads

backdrop that allows Baker to shine brightly.

warranted.tractioncommercialmanagedquitethethey

Lois Wilson

Six-disc set from band who made one album.

Charles Waring

FILTER REISSUES 100 MOJO

Chet Baker Trio

Newly restored 1982 live set from the Hammond organ don.

★★★★

BECAUSE MUSIC. CD/DL/LP

Xxxxx Xxxxxx ★★★ Xxxx Xxxxxx XXXXXXXXXXXXX. CD/DL/LP

Their reputation built on a sole 1967 Deram 7-inch, the vaporous Beeside b/w Vacuum Cleaner, this Brit psych cult were recently anthologised on Grapefruit’s 2-CD version of this covetable 2-LP. The vinyl omits the odd version/demo to keep things moving. Revelations –shelved single Snowmen – abound. JB

★★★★

Lois Wilson

SONY/LEGACY. CD/DL/LP

The Heptones ★★★

The Limiñanas

BMG. CD/DL/LP

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: That’s What Happened 1982-1985

Neu!

LOST LAGOON. LP

DOCTOR BIRD. CD

Grounation

Various ★★★★

Box set of magisters’Düsseldorffirstthree, plus double tribute album.

Lionel CoetzeeMannenbergFeaturingPillayBasil

Top Ranking DJ Session Volumes 1 & 2

SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP

102 MOJO hereinCredit

SAMADHISOUND/UMC. LP

The rarest of the guitarist/ singer’s recordings were released on cassette through New Age shops in 1983. Now restored, it’s a set of wavering hymns to love and faith – some wordless, some not – all unbound by convention, yet underpinned by Basho’s kaleidoscopic playing AM

Everybody’s In Show-Biz

The RevelationMystic Of Rastafari

DOCTOR BIRD. CD

★★★★

Even when hope was a rare commodity during the apartheid era, Lionel Pillay and Basil Mannenberg Coetzee fought to make music on their own terms, in open defiance of the powers that be. Originally recorded in sessions for 1979’s joint Plum And Cherry LP, the title track elaborates on Abdullah Ibrahim’s 1971 arrangement, both parties twisting and testing the fluidity of its loping central refrain. Coetzee’s pure tone and warm sound compliment Pillay’s unshowy approach – even when adding low rattling organ atmospherics – as 25 minutes breeze imperceptibly by. While the second side’s Pillay original Slow Blues For Orial is another horizontally laidback treat, swinging covers of Mankunku’s Yakhal Inkomo and Weather Report’s Birdland fail to rival the main event.

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Various ★★★★ Crossroads Kenya

Your guide to the month’s best music is now even more definitive with our handy format guide. CD COMPACT DISC DL DOWNLOAD ST STREAMING LP VINYL MC CASSETTE DVD DIGITAL VIDEO DISC C IN CINEMAS BR BLU RAY ★★★★★ MOJO CLASSIC ★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★ GOOD ★★ DISAPPOINTING ★ BEST AVOIDED ✩ DEPLORABLE

WE ARE BUSY BODIES. LP

Another satisfying cache of rarities from the jazz icon’s Columbia archives.

First anthology of key musical/ political figure from São Tomé & Principe. Subocha, from his 1981 solo debut, entreats support for the islands’ first indep endent president, Pinto da Costa, over a languid groove. Consciousness extends to the dancefloor on upbeat Balança Cunxença. JB

After health issues and cocaine addiction saw him withdraw from recording and performing for five years beginning in 1976, a rejuvenated Davis returned to the music scene in 1981 with an electric fusion sound that drew inspiration from funk and contemporary pop. Although it divided the critics, it brought him a devoted legion of younger fans. This excellently

Better Days/King Of My Town

COMING NEXT MONTH... Dry Cleaning, Simple Minds, Bonny Light Horseman (pictured), Can, The Cure, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Robyn

The Kinks ★★★

The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari are an amalgamation of horn and flute player Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks’ The Mystics and Count Ossie And His African Drums. Together they released just two albums, the first, 1972’s three-LP Grounation, a reggae landmark capturing the music’s past, present and future in its sacred communion of freedom-pursuing spiritual jazz and consciousnessseeking Nyabinghi beat. Count Ossie’s rhythms were first captured on The Folkes Brothers’ Oh Carolina in 1960 and they recast the song here as a cultural identity roots anthem. Other highpoints include Bongo Man and Four Hundred Years, both mesmeric meditations that share common ground with Coltrane in their strive for understanding and a spiritual centre. As with Coltrane, though, the Revelations’ work needs to be consumed whole, not as individual tracks, to experience its full impact.

Verciis

Miles Davis

GRÖNLAND. CD/LP

Sun Ra Arkestra and more. RATINGS

Pedro Lima ★★★★ Recordar É Viver: Antologia Vol. 1

Charles Waring

NO WAHALA SOUNDS. CD/DL/LP

REISSUES EXTRA GoodwinJames FILTER REISSUES

50!

1987 compilation showcases South African pianist and Cape Town sax legend in perfect harmony.

Nequodisque pa cones nobis sint is et doluptatiur aut a conse laccus eum.

After 2003’s Blemish, this 2009 LP took Sylvian even further from pop idolatry. Against a backdrop of improvisations from a band including Evan Parker (sax), guitar/laptop whiz Fennesz and AMM pianist John Tilbury, Sylvian paints such vivid lyrical images as the terrorist cell in Random Acts Of Senseless Violence. JB

★★★★ Electrified

Following on from last year’s excellent NWS comp The Boys From Nairobi, Crossroads Kenya similarly cherry-picks super-rare 45s of exuberant East African benga and rumba from the early to mid ’80s. A joyous, harmonious blend of infectious rhythms, twinkling guitars and divine vo cals. SM

Like the Bo Diddley beat, the Amen Break or the Purdie Shuffle, some rhythms have a life of their own. So it is with the ‘motorik’ pulse of late Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger. Consequently, the urge to examine what made the group so compelling remains strong, which is why this package of their first three LPs comes augmented by Tribute, where names including Idles, The National and Alexis Taylor get inspired to re-synthesize the essence rare. There is piquancy in Mogwai’s elegiac mix of Super, and the programmed beats heresy of Stephen Morris and Gabe Gurnsey’s re-rub of Hallogallo, but the real miracles begin with the LPs proper, from the ebbs, flows and vorwärtsimmer glide of ’72’s Neu! to beatific-then-punk-attunedthe Neu! 75 . Listen to the driving kosmische minimalism of Für Immer, and ponder how acid head Dinger and stabilising guitarist Michael Rother achieved such sublime, unspoken understandings.

rehenisdoloredelerumessimus,enisquuntvendaipitatuscusnis

Xxxxxxx Xxxxx

REAL GONE. LP

★★★★

David Sylvian ★★★★ Manafon

Ian Harrison Hitchcock, & FORMATS

Shrimp Boats

Robbie Basho ★★★

BONGO JOE. CD/DL/LP

Two-fer of the harmony trio’s late-’70s LPs, produced by ‘Niney’ Holness. Though past their commercial peak, Crystal Blue Persuasion is a joy. ‘Discomixes’ include a top Niney dub of Through The Fire I Come. JB

curated three-disc set uncovers a selection of previously unissued outtakes from his Star People, Decoy and You’re Under Arrest albums and also serves up a thrilling 1983 live performance recorded in Montreal. Among the studio highlights is an extended version of his beautifully lyrical take on Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, plus an electrifying Latin-tinged slice of chromatic funk called Santana and Minor Ninths, a beguilingly intimate duet with trombonist J.J. Johnson featuring Miles on electric piano.

Bouquet

Crucial declaration of Rasta consciousness and astral jazz.

Andy Cowan

Three-disc best-of the ultra-cool French drone-psych duo’s seven studio LPs plus umpteen rare singles, EPs, collaborations (Peter Hook, Laurent Garnier) and new songs (La Musique’s glowering pulsations). Physical editions feature a disc of early material as Les Bellas. Superfans Iggy and Hooky contribute to the liners. JB

All-killer 44-track round-up of ’70s JA deejays produced by Joe Gibbs and engineer ‘ET’. Top-tier toasters Big Youth, I Roy and Trinity rub shoulders with lesserknown chatterers Jah Grundy and Weedy Dread, but all ride the diamond-tough rhythms in fine, loquacious style. Essential. SM

Remastered along with Muswell Hillbillies, this 1972 double – side two live from Carnegie Hall – saw The Kinks in full theatrical flight. Ray’s Vaudevillian instincts prevail, though Sitting In My Hotel and Celluloid Heroes are still reflective, empathetic gems. JB

Tintern Abbey ★★★★ Beeside

THE GRASS ROOTS Where Were You When I Needed You / Let’s Live For Today / Feelings / Lovin’ Things BGOCD1478 MASON WILLIAMS The Mason Williams Phonograph Record / Ear Show / Music / Handmade / Sharepickers BGOCD1481 RITA COOLIDGE Anytime… Anywhere / Love Me Again / Satisfied / Heartbreak Radio BGOCD1476 NILS LOFGREN Night After Night BGOCD1473 THE BEAT GOES ON… For these and many more great releases, visit our website at www.bgo-records.com Buy any 2 CDs from the website, get free shipping (UK only) All BGO Records new releases are available from Amazon and all good record shops or online at www.bgo-records.com For a free BGO Records text catalogue listing and order form, please email mike@bgo-records.com or call 01284 724406 BGO Records, 7 St Andrews Street North, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 1TZ • Distributed in the UK by Proper Music MELANIE Born To Be / Melanie / Candles In The Rain / Leftover Wine + bonus track BGOCD1479 TOMMY SHAW Ambition BGOCD1480 Featuring tracks by CaptainChuckBlazeBeefheartFoleyJacksonLinkWrayMichaelHurleyandmanymoreBetween the Music Volume One Out 16.09.22 – Released on End of the Road Records Double Vinyl and CD ofpresentedhiddencompilationAendoftheroadfestival.compre-order:ﬂawlesslycuratedofgems–byEndtheRoadFestival

ITH CLIENTS including The Kinks, The Who and Led Zeppelin, producer Vic Maile recorded the punchiest, hard-as-nails British rock’n’roll on albums including Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades and Dr. Feelgood’s Down By The Jetty. In the summer of 1987, with The Godfathers’ Birth, School, Work, Death, he would add another LP to the hit list.

And so the punishment continues. The psychedelic When Am I Coming Down nails the hellish predicament of a bad trip with no end, with panic’d narration by Bradford-born drummer George Mazur. “We turned all the lights off in the studio and listened to it in the dark,” says Coyne, “and got scared!” The queasy glam of The Strangest Boy, he adds, is a takedown of Morrissey (sample lyric, “I do as I please/ Unless the cause is me”), while the sleeve for the album’s splenetic second single ’Cause I Said So was meant to feature a Warhol-like portrait of Margaret Thatcher with a Hitler moustache. The label refused to allow it, though T-shirts featuring the design were sold.

Dredged up in concrete overshoes, south London R&R enforcers lay down the brutal truth.

There was angst, too. “It was after the print workers’ strike,” Coyne remembers of a Long Good Friday-like landscape of old certainties swept away by ruthless capital.

“There were still police and protesters on the streets in Wapping… there was a lot of tension in the air, and that fed into the Tensionrecordings.”andthreat run deep in these grooves, where the meanest sawn-off guitar riffs are doused with the grit and acid of Coyne’s pitiless sneer. The monolithic title track and lead single was inspired by doomed British comedian Tony Hancock’s unrealised dream of making a flm encompassing a single human life from frst breath to last. “Reading about that flm was when the phrase ‘Birth, School, Work, Death’ came into my head,” says Coyne. “I wrote all the lyrics in

Now, with new LP Alpha Beta Gamma Delta coming in September and UK dates in the pipeline, Coyne has no plans to throw in the towel. “The Godfathers are always going to do our best for rock’n’roll music,” he vows.

PETER COYNE

On the waterfront: The Godfathers (from left) Peter Coyne, Chris Coyne, George Mazur, Mike Gibson, Kris Dollimore, Southend, Essex, February 11, 1988; (below) the rejected ’Cause I Said So artwork and album cover.

BURIED TREASURE

“I’m like the Terminator –I do not stop until the job is done.”

The Godfathers Birth, School, Work, Death EPIC, 1988

CREDITS

They split in 2000. After Coyne spent time in The Germans with Rat Scabies, The Godfathers regrouped in 2008, though Chris Coyne left the fold in 2017. “Let’s just say,” says his sibling, “brothers being brothers.” Peter’s keeping the title ‘Birth, School, Work, Death’ in reserve for his memoirs, and notes how the phrase, “entered the cultural fabric,” turning up as a question on US game show Jeopardy, being adapted for Metallica tour merch, and inspiring cover versions including Manhead’s fruity Gallic disco take.

Ian Harr ison

Memento Mori

104 MOJO PykeSteve

to produce their frst full-length LP.

“We’d played a lot of the numbers live already, and we recorded live, so it took about three weeks,” says Coyne. “Vic Maile was a sonic genius and it turned into such a partnership, because we would write the material and he would fashion it with his sound on top… he was the loveliest guy as well. He’d sit there with a cigar going, ‘That weren’t bad, boys!’ I’m almost crying thinking about him [Maile died in 1989].”

Tracks: Birth, School, Work, Death/ If I Only Had Time/ Tell Me Why/It’s So Hard/When Am I Coming Down/ ’Cause I Said So/The Strangest S.T.B./JustBoy/Like DeadObsession/LoveYou/Is Personnel: Peter Coyne (vocals), Chris Coyne (bass, vocals), Kris (violin)Bobby(drums,George(guitar,Michael(guitar,Dollimorevocals),Gibsonvocals),Mazurvocals),Valentino Producer: Vic Maile Released: January, 1988 Recorded: Elephant, Wapping Available: Cherry Red CD reissue

The Godfathers’ story began in Walworth, south London. From an Irish family of 10, music-obsessed teen Peter Coyne had written for Zig Zag and Record Mirror before mounting the stage to front retro troublemak ers The Sid Presley Experience in 1982, with his brother Chris on bass. “There wasn’t one single band in the UK that played rock’n’roll as we wanted to hear it,” Peter says today, “so we had to do it ourselves. We wanted to have a name that touched on everything that was great in rock’n’roll music – Sex Pistols, Elvis Presley, The Jimi Hendrix Experience… it went off like a rocket but then it just collapsed, bang. Finished. We had to do something else. And that became The Godfathers.”

After the title track made US chart inroads, Coyne recalls a purported re-recording for a worldwide fzzy drink ad campaign – ‘Birth, School, Work, Pepsi.’ “It was a huge amount of dosh on the table,” he says. “If The Rolling Stones could do that Rice Krispies advert in ’64, then of course we would have done it!” He adds that Bowie saw them live twice (“He was there, going, ‘Wotcha!’” says Coyne. “I was like, oh my God”), Iggy Pop once complimented them on their live cover of Anarchy In The UK, and that Birth, School, Work, Death was in Lou Reed’s record collection, which is on show at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts until March 2023. The Godfathers stayed with Epic until 1991’s Unreal World: in a review, the late David Cavanagh wrote, “to many people [The Godfathers] represent British rock at its apex.”

Formed in 1985, success on the indie chart followed, where the group’s besuited hardnut image cut an incongruous dash (“as someone once said, ‘The Temptations don’t look like their roadies,’” says Coyne). In 1987 The Godfathers signed to the Epic label and went into Elephant Studios in Wapping with Maile

practically one go. It became an instant universal anthem for us – a lot of people identifed with it. There was, and is, lots to be angry about.”

“There was, and is, lots to be about.”angry

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“The Staples fused the Civil struggleRightsinto a succession of soul/R&B hits.”

4The SingersStaple

Led by patriarch Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples, the Mississippi-rooted, Chicago-based group – including daughters Mavis, Yvonne and Cleotha, and son Pervis – began playing in local Windy City churches in the late 1940s, before scoring a hit in 1956 with the spiritual Uncloudy Day.

For What It’s Worth (The Complete Epic 1964-1968)Recordings

106 MOJO Getty

The flash-filled ’80s were not the best time for the Staples’ brand of earthy music, but Turning Point found them reaching a late peak, buoyed by their dance-funk version of Talking Heads’ Slippery People (which reached Number 22 on the US R&B charts and became a club favourite). Produced by Pervis Staples – with a pair of tracks shaped by popmeisters Mike Piccirillo and Gary Goetzman – the record finds a happy medium between mod ern studio sensibilities (synths, Fairlight, etc) and the group’s gutsy vocal sound, with solid material provided by a contin gent of their most reliable Stax songsmiths, including Sir Mack Rice and Homer B anks.

SOULMUSIC, 2018

Afterhits.the fall of Stax, the group continued to find success, recording the hit Curtis Mayfieldproduced soundtrack to 1975’s Let’s Do It Again, and tried a variety of musical styles during stops at Warner Bros (where they recorded as The Staples) and 20th Century Fox into the 1980s. By the early ’90s Pops and Mavis had turned their focus to their respective solo efforts, and the group effectively ended its long run in 1994.

You say: “Not as raw as the early stuff or as polished as the Stax output, but the Epic years offer uniformly con sistent material and stirrings of a soul-pop sensibility.”

Tamar Kaufman, via e-mail

PRIVATE I/EPIC, 1984

CAST VOTES…YOUR This month you chose your Top 10 Staple Singers LPs. Next month we want your Don Cherry Top 10. Send selections via Twitter, comments.printCherry’‘Howwithbauermedia.co.uke-mailInstagramFacebook,ortomojo@thesubjectToBuyDonandwe’llthebest The Staple Singers And Solo

Ties The Staple Singers, 1970 (clockwise left) Cleotha, Pops

that bind:

Yvonne,

and Mavis.

VER THE course of a six-decade career, the Staple Singers moved from Southern gospel to topical folk, from deep soul to hit pop, while the family’s larger journey took them from post-slavery to the Great Migration, the Civil Rights era to the birth of Black empowerment and beyond – with their music documenting those many changes, upheavals and triumphs.

Pops died in 2000, followed by Cleotha in 2013, Yvonne in 2018 and Pervis in 2021. Mavis would rally from her personal losses to enjoy a remarkable resurgence, releasing a series of acclaimed albums and winning a trio of Grammys over the last decade. In 2022, she continues to thrive, both in the studio and on the road, carrying the torch for her family’s musical legacy.

Given their numerous label affiliations and stylistic shifts, enjoying the full scope of The Staple Singers’ music had long proved a challenge. In more recent years, the situation has improved dramatically with the release of multiple labeland career-spanning box sets, deluxe editions, and rarities collections, several of which we have included in our list to give the group’s expansive catalogue its proper due.

Staples’ Stax work fused the spirit of the Civil Rights struggle and the message of Black consciousness into a succession of signature soul/ R&B

10The SingersStaple

Turning Point

You say: “Late period for them but so worth it for the cover of Slippery via@youknowigotsoul,People.”Twitter

The Staples’ four-year, sixalbum run on Epic tends to be somewhat overlooked. But the period produced some of the most charged and powerful records of their career. Beyond the previously highlighted Freedom Highway, the group’s mid-’60s work reflects the ratcheting intensity of the Civil Rights struggle, compelling Pops Staples to bring a more strident political element to their music. This box set makes a compelling case that the Epic era was as vital as anything that came b efore or after.

from

They cut their early gospel tracks – elemental numbers featuring little more than their voices and Pops’ quavering, ethereal guitar – for United and Vee-Jay, before moving on to folkflavoured sides for Riverside and Epic, where they were swept up into the spirit of the ’60s, recording several notable protest anthems andThealbums.Staples’ run at Memphis’ Stax Records, from 1968 to 1974, would prove their most commercially fruitful. Brought to the company by promotions man and future label president Al Bell, the

Keeping the faith with the first family of gospel-soul. By Bob Mehr

Few artists have released more mesmerising, singular music than The Staple Singers during their years with Chicago label Vee-Jay. The group’s epochal gospel sides, featured on this 22-track compilation, would exert a profound effect on a generation of musicians and listeners. A young Bob Dylan called Uncloudy Day “the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard.” Pops’ haunting bluesy guitar – learned in Mississippi at the feet of Charley Patton –wraps around his children’s genetic harmonies, creating a swirling otherworldly sound that still captivates.

UNIVERSAL/STAX, 2015

You say: “A blinding, career-spanning set: socially powerful, spiritually correct, musically moving. The remastering and sound are top-notch.” William Davies, via mojo4music

You say: “Ry Cooder provides an evocative atmosphere that allows Mavis to connect with the deepest parts of her voice and past. Stunning.” S.L. Larson, via e-mail

You say: “American history, present and past. Pops Staples was a man of God, and he and his family have the voices of angels.” @ Venetianblonde, via Twitter

You say: “Even pushing 80, Pops’ guitar work is exem plary. There’s a mix of sonic approaches – with multiple producers – but a satisfying whole nonetheless.” Rich Ruggiero, via e-mail

MOJO 107 HOW TO BUY

POINTBLANK, 1992

The Staple Singers became symbols for the socially and culturally rooted vision of Stax’s ambitious post-Atlantic rebirth. A boon for com pletists, Come Go With Me fea tures all the Staples studio albums for the iconic Memphis label: their 1968 debut Soul Folk In Action, high watermarks like 1971’s The Staple Swingers and 1972’s Be Altitude: Respect Yourself, 1974’s Stax swansong City In The Sky, plus a bonus disc of rarities, non-album sin gles, and live recordings.

1 The Staple Singers Faith & Grace: A Family Journey 1953-1976

You say: “Both records are fantastic, and way underrat ed. Mavis does Bacharach (A House Is Not A Home) like nobody’s business.” Daniel Small, via mojo4music.com

NOW DIG THIS

CRAFT, 2020

VEE JAY, 1992

You say: “No one can claim to have a proper record col lection without the Staple Singers’ Vee-Jay work as part of it.” Dennis Eberhard, via mojo4music.com

5The SingersStaple Freedom CompleteHighway

ANTI 2007

6Mavis Staples We’ll Never Turn Back

By the time of his first proper solo album, Pops Staples was already in his late seventies. Yet Peace To The Neighborhood plays as a vibrant mix of mes sage songs and funky excur sions, reworkings of old stand ards and newer explorations (including covers of Los Lobos and contemporary Christian group DC Talk). While Pops’ voice and guitar are central to the sound, he receives assis tance from fellow guitar greats Bonnie Raitt and Ry Cooder, session aces Jim Keltner and the Memphis Horns, with pro duction by Willie Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Perfectly cap tures the beatific soul of the Staples’ paterfamilias.

3The SingersStaple

Smaller, f riendlier-priced comps include the 2004 Kent 2-CD The Ultimate Staple Singers: A Family Affair, 19531984 , and the 1986 Stax anthology The Best Of The Staple Singers. Mavis’s solo trio of Jeff Tweedy-produced projects – You Are Not Alone, One True Vine, and If All I Was Was Black – are also worth exploring. Beyond the records, Greg Kot’s 2014 book, I'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers, And The Music That Shaped The Civil Rights Era, adds depth and detail to the family’s story. Essential view ing includes Jessica Edwards’ Peabody Award-winning Mavis!, a 2015 documentary. Also, the Staples famously steal the show in both the 1973 concert film WattStax, and Martin Scorsese’s 1978 feature on The Band’s fare well, The Last Waltz.

2The SingersStaple Come Go With Me: The Stax Collection

MILESTONE, 1975

8Mavis Staples Mavis Staples/ Only For The Lonely STAX, 2006

You say: “The Staple Singers’ Riverside albums get short-shrift, but there’s plenty of gold to be mined there.” Andy Morris, via e-mail

From Curtis Mayfield to Prince, Mavis Staples has attracted an array of impressive producers over the course of her career. Yet no one seemed to grasp her inherent strengths as well as Ry Cooder on this striking album of freedom songs. Spare, elemental production and Cooder’s feel for Pops Staples’ guitar stylings mark this as perhaps the best – cer tainly, the rawest and most vis ceral – entry in her solo cata logue. Mixing Civil Rights-era anthems, deep blues cuts, and a handful of Staples/Cooder originals, it reflects the residu al anger of the George W. Bush presidency, and hints at the hope of Barack Obama. Her most righteous recording.

The Staple Singers’ 1965 con cert at New Nazareth Church in Chicago, released that year as Freedom Highway, has long been considered a landmark, totem of the Civil Rights move ment (though, criminally, it was out of print for years). Billy Sherrill – later famous for his lush country productions on George Jones and Tammy Wynette – captured the raw magic of the Staples’ show, but edited and rearranged tracks for the LP. This edition restores the full concert and running order. Now in its original con text, the power of the preach ing, speechifying and music is more profound than ever.

A somewhat reluctant solo art ist, Mavis Staples did put out a pair of early albums for Stax. Her self-titled 1969 debut was helmed by Steve Cropper and Al Bell and leaned heavily on reinterpretations of songs by Dionne Warwick, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding. Her second effort, from 1970, came under the auspices of producer Don Davis and felt more purpose ful, highlighted by the aching I Have Learned To Do Without You, and the bluesy How Many Times. Combined in 2006 in this two-fer package – and bonused by a rare duet with Johnnie Taylor – the records have aged far better than their modest reputations would indicate.

While not comprehensive – it skips The Staple Singers’ latter-day work – this 2015 box set stands as the most satisfying survey of the group’s golden era. Gathering the essentials from their gospel, folk and soul periods, it also recovers the Staples’ earliest recordings – super-rare tracks unavailable since the early ’50s – as a bonus 45. Compiled by veteran A&R man Joe McEwen, Faith & Grace: A Family Journey is a lovingly curated set that plays out The Staple Singers’ story across four discs and 80 tracks. A true testimonial to one of America’s greates t musical institutions.

LEGACY, 2015

7The SingersStaple Great Day

Uncloudy Day & Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

9Pops Staples Peace To NeighborhoodThe

You say: “The Staple Swingers will always be a favourite… the eternal hope and joy that emanates from What’s Your Thing, birthed straight from the Civil Rights move ment as a display of smiling resistance in the face of so much public @theaudiovore,hatred.”viaTwitter

Great Day explores the best of the Staples’ early-’60s record ings for New York City jazz label Riverside. The period found the group expanding their source material, tapping into the storytelling spirit of the folk boom, discovering the depths of the Dylan cata logue (with Pops’ potent take on Masters Of War) and adding rhythmic backing and innovative arrangements to their sanctified sound. This compilation was originally released on vinyl in 1975, with a 1992 CD edition by Ace. Both remain sadly out of print, though digital versions of the Staples’ original Riverside LPs are now available.

All of which means writer Paul Sexton has his work cut out to turn Watts’s story into anything other than a big, fuffy Charlie love-in, a task potentially made harder by the involvement of Watts’s devoted family. Yet, commendably, he turns the situation to his advantage, painting an intimate, highly detailed portrait of a man whose life may not have the drama of Mick or Keef’s but was equally full of

Not a book overloaded with freworks, then, but one nevertheless as gentle, fascinating and companiona ble as the man himself.

● Charlie’s wife Shirley is a horselover, hence their stable of expensive humans”.morecompanysaid,Watts,thoroughbreds;Arabmeanwhile,“Ienjoytheofdogsthanthatof

● His beCharlie’scircumstancesconsiderfamilytheexactofdeathtoaprivatematter.

Family-endorsed biography of the gentlemanly, eccentric, jazz-loving Stone. By Pat Gilbert Charlie’s Good Tonight Paul Sexton HARPER COLLINS.

strange eccentricities and entertaining stories.

collecting American Civil War artefacts, buying a $740,000 Arab stallion (he didn’t ride) and a feet of vintage cars (he didn’t drive; he’d dress in his fnest threads and sit in them, admiring their design). He lavished his friends with thoughtful gifts – Wyman a bronzeage sword; Jools Holland, signed Fats memorabilia.WallerRarely,we’retold, did this modest, impeccably turned-out soul ever let his ego take charge, and if he did, there was always his beloved wife Shirley there to keep him in check. “He came home [from the 1969 US tour] full of conceit about being a member of The Rolling Stones,” she said. “So I made him clean the oven.”

FILTER BOOKS

When it comes to Watts’s musical craft, late-’70s/’80s Stones engineer Chris Kimsey offers priceless insights into the drummer’s singular tics and fuid style, which only wobbled when Watts had an infamous late-era dalliance with hard drugs in the mid-’80s (Watts blamed “the male menopause”). This was the era when Charlie famously punched Mick Jagger for

● Watts began his career in the late ’50s playing with his blind uncle, Lennie Peters –later of &sensations’70sPetersLee.

£25

● The book is named Jagger’safterquip on the live-in-’69 Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! album: “Charlie’s good innee?”tonight,

introducing him at a party as “my wealthlike“hadsometimes”“impossibleofdaughter,Seraphina,drummer”.Watts’spaintsapictureahuman,falliblefather,tolivewithandonewhohisowndemons,everymusician”.WithStonessuper-camemorequirks:

108 MOJO Getty

★★★★

A Man Of Wealth And Taste

Central to Charlie’s endearing oddness, it transpires, was his OCD tendencies and life-long insomnia. Though these traits were less evident in his years growing up listening to jazz and sketching compulsively in the family’s prefab in Wembley, by the Stones’ lift-off they were in full effect. Bill Wyman recalls the group vaulting down a staircase during a manic Hard Day’s Night-style chase, only to fnd Watts returning to the top step to retrace his fight. Charlie packing his suitcase, says Keith Richards, was “like watching a Buddhist ceremony”. Years later, an inability to sleep on tour saw him regularly walking the streets alone; once he took refuge in an Indian restaurant, fnally fell asleep, and was woken up a few hours later by local police. “Where am I?” he enquired. “Toronto.” “What the fuck am I doing in Toronto?” he puzzled.

“A book as himself.”theionableandfascinatinggentle,compan-asman

WHAT LEARNTWE’VE

● And he was – on that record you can hear him expertly reverse up-endedthebeat of Little Queenie’s intro, just in time for Jagger’s vocal entrance.

Mr Nice Guy: Charlie Watts takes a fag break, April 8, 1964.

HARLIE WATTS’ passing after a short illness in August 2021 felt particularly sorrowful because, as his obituaries hammered home, the Stones’ drummer wasn’t just one of the nice guys in rock’n’roll, he was most probably the nicest. Who couldn’t love this shy, dapper, intensely private homebird who openly admitted his band’s music “wasn’t really his cup of tea”? He preferred jazz, of course, and in 1966 levelled with Rave magazine that his gig in a group, then only second to The Beatles in popularity, was “just a job that pays good money”.

Cosey Fanni Tutti’s 2014 memoir Art Sex Music was an uncompromising romp through the thisenthrallinginrebelliousnesssister’sherfreeDerbyshire’sparticularlywhichignitedistantcuriosityself-serving,MargerymedievalpioneerherCosey’sthree-wayfollowslivesqualitiescommitmentthroughoutpoles,penetrationsperformancesGristleTransmissionsundergroundradicalofCOUMandThrobbing(detailsofendingwithbynail-studdedanyone?)butCosey’stothemagicalofwomen’sartisticburnedfiercely.Re-Sistersthatlead.Adense,explorationofworkagainsttwooflodestars,radiophonicDeliaDerbyshireandChristianmysticKempe,itisneverbutfullofactiveaboutthewaysartistscompelandus.Someelementswithsheweavesparallelsarefascinating,likeinvolvementinloveandthetraumaofchildhood(notablyherdeath),whileKempe’sandresistancepilgrimageemanatesanpower.Sodoesbook.

untilPostcardoninvariablypunkScotland’sofpost-movementfocusedGlasgow’slabel,Grant

WHITE RABBIT. £20

Interview transcripts for the first major Dylan bio.

The Dylan Tapes

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS. £20

Michael Simmons

Keith Cameron

JAWBONE PRESS. £14.95

Victoria Segal

Unrepeatable Northern retrofuturists World Of Twist missed out on chart action by a whisker and were gone after just one 1991 LP. But just because a band fails to ignite doesn’t mean they can’t be life-changing, as eminent WOT connoisseurs the Gallagher brothers and artist Jeremy Deller would confirm. Penned with admirable frankness and attention to detail by guitarist King, the engaging narrative is rich in comedy, mundanity, fantasy, hubris and poignancy, and its lightning conductor is eccentric, loud and magnetic frontman Tony Ogden. If the chemistry wasn’t built to last – eventually, the late Ogden decides he no longer wishes to be the singer – the group burned brightly enough to make the ultimate squib-out (almost) worthwhile. The title, meanwhile, is what Ogden said to Wayne Fontana during a post-band trip to a ’60s revival bash in 1993 in Caister-on-Sea. It remains a pertinent question, and in its promise of transcendent madness, World Of Twist are there.

★★★★

Gary Moore: The BiographyOfficial Harry Shapiro

NINE EIGHT BOOKS. £25

Ian Harrison

★★★★ Gordon King

In SingalongHarmony:Perfect Pop In ’70s Britain

The Wombles hide behind the eyeshadow and fur. “Dare I suggest,” he asks, “that Leap Up And Down (Wave Your Knickers In The Air) by St Cecilia might reveal more about contemporary attitudes than, say, We Are All Prostitutes by The Pop Group?”

★★★ Anthony Scaduto

In this “brickiebubblegum,seesWill“disposable”surveyastuteof’70spop,Hodgkinsonwhatsecretsglam”and

McPhee’s 2015 documentary Big Gold Dream reframed the story as a mildly competitive pas de deux between the Alan Horne/Edwyn Collins enterprise and Edinburgh’s Fast Product, run by Bob Last and Hilary Morrison. Now musician Douglas MacIntyre utilises McPhee’s interviews to chart the scene’s origins, ascent, demise, and afterlife. Intrigue and pathos abound, as Fast Product deploys the same Marxist strategies to both The Human League and the Fire Engines, according equal value to each, and the authors suggest a more sanely organised Postcard could have emerged via signing star acolytes Altered Images and The Bluebells. The sorry tale of the Jazzateers, meanwhile, is more Kafka-esque than Josef K’s worst nightmares. An epic, exhaustive work, Hungry Beat honours a cultural legacy which far transcends Scotland.

The Q.T. on Madchester’s cult should-have-beens.

Cultural history of the songs everyday folk leave behind.

When Does WorldAndStart?Mind-BendingTheTheLifeTimesOfOfTwist

NINE EIGHT BOOKS.

Weeps,”Guitarit’sshredderhigh-decibel–“Gary,WhileMyGentlypal

When an electronic pioneer, medieval mystic and avantgarde provocateur met.

£20

No rubbish: Wombles Wellington, Orinoco and Tomsk remember the singalong ’70s.

Getty

Tutti&MargeryDeliaRecordingsTheRe-Sisters:LivesAndOfDerbyshire,KempeCoseyFanni ★★★★ Cosey

Jude Rogers

James McNair Fanni Tutti

Profiling Thin Lizzy’s restless super-sub. Though many recall Moore as a

Vivid oral history of Scottish Pop Independence, 1977-84. Accounts

Moving between Clive Dunn’s 1970 hit Grandad (compared to “early Pink Floyd”) and St Winifred School Choir’s veiled 1980 testament to extended family breakdown There’s No One Quite Like Grandma, the author has a ballroom blitz on what Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep reveals about the EEC, or the resonances between synthetic band-free singles and new agricultural practices. Full of bold characters, strange stories, and shifting so cial attitudes, In Perfect Harmony might start out Middle Of The Road, but it takes audacious left turns all the way.

110 MOJO FILTER BOOKS

★★★★ Will Hodgkinson

FABER. £16

appendices, this is also a penetrating study of the musician’s complex psyche, Shapiro noting that, for his subject, the guitar was “as much shield as axe.” We learn of Moore’s troubled childhood, of his stage fright, fear of flying and possessiveness in romantic relationships. Though the Irishman finally hit solo career pay-dirt with 1990’s Still Got The Blues, Shapiro makes a case for greater acclaim, and explains why his personal life and headstrong talent sometimes got in the way. The book’s detailed exposition of Moore’s final days is poignant, the guitarist ultimately undone by alcohol, guilt and a heart defect.

Scaduto’s 1971 book Bob Dylan: An BiographyIntimatewas the first serious tome to recount the bard’s life, landing like a biblical scroll during Dylanology’s infancy. A seasoned news reporter, Anthony Scaduto did due diligence and got pals, musicians and girlfriends to reveal the personal history of the Howard Hughes of rock. Even Dylan agreed to be interviewed and made factual corrections, telling the author, “I like your book.” This new collection presents two dozen transcripts, ranging from Minnesota to Greenwich Village. Most of the subjects are revealing, a few (like girlfriend Suze Rotolo) are reticent, but her terse responses to Scaduto’s questions often confirm his queries. Unsurprisingly, Dylan’s contributions are fascinating: third-p erson pronouns in his earlier songs are actually him, The Beatles were his inspiration for playing with an electric band, and he was angry only when discussing mentions of his wife and kids.

Hungry Beat ★★★★ Douglas MacIntyre & Grant McPhee with Neil Cooper

George Harrison counsels here – Shapiro’s book extols the Belfast-born virtuoso’s versatility. Hence we read of gob-smacked music store punters witnessing him mimic Django Reinhardt. Packing various guitar-head-friendly

Born on April 24, 1964, and raised in the Salford suburb of Worsley, he drove the band

For the thrills: Paul Ryder in New York, June 1992, working on Happy Mondays’ …Yes Please!

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The group came to the attention of producer Stan Watson in 1966, who recorded

‘Poogie’WilliamHart

Later activities included guesting with Ian Brown, playing with Big Arm and Bufalo 66, and being cast as a Haçienda club bouncer in Factory biopic 24 Hour Party People. Latterly a resident of California, since 2012 he had taken part in Happy Mondays reunions, and was planning to write his memoirs. He died hours before a Happy Mondays gig in Sunderland. “Long live his funk,” said his bandmates in tribute.

REAL GONE

Charles Waring

A Man Called Horse

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HEN HAPPY MONDAYS played 1990’s Rock In Rio II festival in front of 198,000 people, a torrential downpour threatened to stop the show and, worse, electrocute the band. Unfazed, Paul ‘Horse’ Ryder began the next song’s bass intro. “Rain,” he later mused to Mondays biographer Simon Spence. “No big deal to us, we’re from Manchester.”

in other ways. His father Derek was a postman and played the clubs as half of a music and comedy duo; his mum Linda was a school nurse. After he and his elder brother Shaun obsessed over the Stones, The Beatles, Bowie, Motown and Joy Division, Paul got his frst bass in 1980. He said he learned using a plectrum thrown into the crowd by Scott Gorham at a Thin Lizzy gig; the band he formed with Shaun would, like Thin Lizzy, enjoy an outlaw reputation and huge success, and be derailed by excess.

groups, with Hart and his younger brother Wilbert leading diferent versions of The Delfonics for many years. More recently, in 2013, Hart recorded a radical new Delfonics album, Adrian Younge Presents The Delfonics, which took his music to a new audience. He died on July 14 in Philadelphia, after complications following surgery.

FAMED FOR his soaring falsetto voice, William ‘Poogie’ Hart led Philadelphia’s infuential vocal trio The Delfonics to chart glory.

Voice of The Delfonics BORN 1945

after two sui generis LPs (1987’s Squirrel And G-Man… and ’88’s Bummed ), they led the Madchester boom of the late ’80s, reaching their apex with 1990’s Top 5 Pills’N’Thrills And Bellyaches and singles Kinky Afro and Step On. Drugs and chaos destroyed the band after 1992’s underwhelming …Yes Please!, with Paul’s heroin addiction leading to stints in rehab and under section. He rejoined the band for an ill-fated, Admiral sports wear-sponsored 1999 reunion, but left after clashes with Shaun.

Delfonically yours: Philly groover ‘Poogie’ Hart.

Alongside brother Shaun’s pungent glossolalia and the wah wah geometries of guitarist Mark ‘Cow’ Day, Paul’s James Jamerson-indebted, stink-funk basslines were an essential dimension of the Happy Mondays’ mutant sound. Signing to Fac tory,

Happy Mondays bassist Paul Ryder left us on July 15.

Ian Harrison

them on his Philly Groove label using rising arranger Thom Bell to cushion their doo wop-infuenced vocals with sophisticated orchestrations. Memorable soft-soul US and UK hits followed, including the much-covered La-La (Means I Love You) in 1968 and 1970’s Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time), both co-written by Bell andAfterHart.the hits dried up, the trio splintered into two rival

British jazz BORNeminence1944

An unsatisfactory experience in the pit band of the West End production of Cabaret in 1967 led Thompson to dedicate herself to her own music. In the 1970s, she led the Latin rock ensemble Jubiaba and fusion quintet Paraphernalia with whom she toured and recorded extensively. She also appeared in the Euro fusion all-star United Jazz + Rock Ensemble as part of a voluminous career, dynamically assisted by Hiseman,

Xanadu hit UK Number 1 in February 1968), and Elvis Presley’s I’ve Lost You in 1970. With Howard, Blaikley also wrote for Marmalade, Matthews Southern Comfort, Lulu and many more: the duo’s other credits included the theme to BBC series Miss Marple, a musical version of The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, and a remarkable concept album with radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Blaikley also trained as a psychotherapist, and completed a memoir entitled Have I The Right?.

Chris Ingham

Pop songwriter of note BORN 1940

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1997, she expected to concentrate on composing, but with advances in medication, continued performing with Colosseum and Paraphernalia until 2015. Productive, creative and energetic to the end, recent projects include a 14-CD Live At The BBC, a memoir Journey To A Destination Unknown and a 2021 collaboration with NYJO.

ThompsonBarbara

notes”. His long life revealed bombsite hardship and whalemeat rations, and a haggled-over 1930s Gibson guitar that had to be knocked down from £17 to £16 before Dad would stump up (“I’ve still got that guitar!” Monty later declared). Other activities ranged from light opera to The Goons, 1959 Clif Richard musical Expresso Bongo, translating Irma La Douce into English, and failing to sell his doomed Dr Crippen musical, Belle. In 2001 he had to tiresomely defend his Bond theme at the High Court. And won.

BEFORE MUSICAL success, Hamp stead Suburb-bornGarden Alan Blaikley published social and cultural critiques and worked as a journalist and producer for the BBC. With his childhood friend and writing partner Ken Howard, however, he would fnd acclaim writing memorable, superior pop hits including 1964’s Joe Meek-pro duced worldwide smash Have I The Right? by The Honeycombs, 13 chart entries for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich (The Legend Of

Manny Charlton NazarethBORNproducerguitarist/1941

Alan Blaikley

“With hits.”superiormemorable,acclaimwouldAlanHoward,partnerwritingKenBlaikleyfindwritingpop MOJO 113 MirrorpixShutterstock,(2),Getty

Monty Norman: writer for The Goon Show, Cliff Richard and the James Bond franchise.

which gave her an enviable international reputation. Thompson recently recalled Ronnie Scott saying to her, “you’re the only group that got out of England”.

Andrew Collins

Ian Harrison

James McNair

Initiallychoir.inspired aged 17 to take up saxophone by hearing Johnny Hodges (she called it “the most expressive sound I’d ever heard”), she joined Neil Ardley’s New Jazz Orchestra in 1964 where she met many British progressive jazz luminaries as well as drummer and future husband Jon Hiseman, with whom she appeared on early Colosseum recordings.

For Destruction in 1986. It was Manny Charlton, purveyor of chewy guitar arpeggios on Nazareth’s hit 1976 cover of Love Hurts, which he produced alongside six LPs of Naza reth originals. Born in Andalusia to Scots parents, Charlton co-founded Nazareth in Dunfermline in 1968, persuading them to shed their show-band incarnation The Shadettes. Roger Glover’s requests that he play like Richie Blackmore grated when the Deep Purple bassist produced a string of early Nazareth LPs, but Charlton later assumed control on landmarks including 1979’s No Mean City, though he would be sacked from Nazareth circa 1989’s Snakes ’N’ Ladders. Any enmity from former bandmates had dissipated before Charlton died suddenly at home in Texas on July 5. “Manny was never happier than when sitting in the producer’s chair,” recalled Naz bassist Pete Agnew.

AN IMPASSIONED saxophonist and fautist at the forefront of the European jazz-rock scene in the ’70s and ’80s, Barbara Thompson MBE was also a prodigious, versatile and expansive composer whose work included pieces for big band, chamber orchestra and 100-piece

FEW WRITERS of world-beating jingles and rif s must defend their work in court, but few were the composer-about-town, variety turn and lyricist born Monty Nosero vitch. Having sung for Ted Heath and Cyril Stapleton’s big bands, he became a Soho superstar circa 1962 after a fortuitous meeting with producer Cubby Broccoli landed him a stake in debut Bond flm Dr No. Norman’s twang-o-ram ic James Bond Theme – played by The John Barry Seven – mainlined ruthlessness and glamour, all, purred Monty, conveyed by “a few

“GET ME the guy who produced Hair Of The Dog,” Axl Rose demanded as Guns N’ demoedRosesAppetite

Barbara andimpassionedThompson:saxophonistprodigiouscomposer.

Monty Norman Bond theme composer BORN 1928

LennonJohn , McCartneyPaul and HarrisonGeorge to sing backing vocals –the frst time The Beatles recorded together. After Starr left in 1962, the band played on until the death of guitarist Ty O’Brien in HARMONICA1967.ace

Copacabana in early 1970. “I’m taking your fucking bassist,” he told Wonder backstage. The Mississippi native’s percolating vamps – honed under Funk Brother James Jamerson’s tutorship – add ed a hypnotic impact to 1971’s radically edited flm score Jack Johnson, the proto-sampling of 1972’s On The Corner and enigmatic sonic funk of 1977’s Dark Magus. He

PUNK ASTRONAUTMARK (b.1954) was the founder and only memberconstantof

Factory Canteen News and Working Class Man. After Third World War’s 1973 split, Avery played with Leo Sayer ’s group and Razar PROG multi-instrumentalist VITTORIO DE SCALZI (below, b.1949) co-founded New Trolls in Genoa in 1967. In 1971 they found success in Italy with the classically informed Concerto Grosso Per I New Trolls. Soon after, De Scalzi emerged victorious from legal wrangling over the group’s name and led them through changing musical landscapes and line-ups, until 1997. He also collaborated widely, founded the Magma label, and recorded solo. He gave his last performance, with symphony orchestra, in Sanremo 10 days before his death on July 24.

Let It Be album. An early contributor to Rolling Stone, he was originally a photographer who drifted into journalism when he found his “captions getting longer and longer.”

(5)Getty REAL GONE

Kid on the corner: Michael Henderson, with Miles Davis.

BASSIST LU WALTERS (right, b.1938) played in

quietofReceiver,I’mhitsscoringMysingleConnors’Normanup1976YouAreStarship,soloR&BwithTakeMeYoursandWidewhileasextetalbumsforBuddahmixedstormballadrywithaside

from 1966 to 1968. Rafelson then directed the group’s self-sabotag ing feature Head, while scoring as a producer of the existential-biker smash Easy Rider, establishing an iconoclastic bravado and fondness for antiheroes that shattered Hollywood norms in 1970’s Five Easy Pieces and 1972’s The King Of Marvin Gardens, both directed by Rafelson and starring his friend and lifelong collaborator Jack Nicholson. In 1997, Rafelson –whose last flm was a 2002 noir, No Good Deed – summed up his life in the dream factory: “I was one of those guys who took on all comers.”

PSYCHEDELIC TEXAN GEORGE KINNEY (b.1946) learned guitar from his school friend Roky Erickson and later fronted “turned-on garage band” The Golden Dawn. Their sole ’68 album Power Plant – recorded in 1967 but gazumped by labelmates the 13th Floor Elevators ’ Easter Everywhere – convinc ingly transmitted acid revolution. Kinney also played in Headstone, wrote novels and re-formed The Golden Dawn for the Texas Psych Fest in 2002.

Born Mark Wilkins, he formed the band in Welwyn Garden City after booking the Sex Pistols to perform at a local college. After releasing a self-titled EP in 1979, their 1981 debut LP Peter Pan Hits The Suburbs featured Hawkwind’s Nik Turner on sax and mixed psychedelia and folk with Wilkins’ skewed view of life in Thatcher’s Britain. The Astronauts continued to perform and record; Wilkins’ last album, When We Were Otters, was released this year.

ROCK SCRIBE DAVID DALTON (b.1942) chronicled the music scene through genre classics like Janis (1972) and co-wrote Marianne’s Faithfull: An Autobiography (1994). He also wrote biographies on James Dean and Andy Warhol. An participantenthusiasticaswell as elegant prose artist, he hung out with Warhol and BeatlesThe theaccompaniedbookanco-writing,authorisedthatreleaseofthe

DahoEtienneinvited her to duet on Comme Boomerang,Un the Gainsbourg song she’d hoped to sing at Eurovision in 1975. Experimental yet playful (witness her 99-track album Haikus), subsequent recordings belong in the pantheon of great LPs by grande dames who have seen, and done, it all.

longstanding Hertfordshire outsiders The Astronauts

TOMMY MORGAN (b.1932) played his frst session, for The Andrews Sisters, in 1950. He later worked with The Beach Boys (Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations), Elvis (’68 Comeback), Quincy Jones, The Carpenters, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Randy Newman, and many others. His hundreds of flm and TV credits included The Twilight Zone, Mike Post ’s Rockford Files theme and work with Maurice Jarre, Lalo Schifrin and Henry Mancini. He retired in 2013.

Liverpool local heroes Rory Storm And The Hurricanes alongside Ringo Starr. Born Walter Eymond, in 1960 Walters’ aspirations to sing saw him fnance a recording of George

RepublicSavage

Green On Red Christian left the group before the release of their 1983 debut LP Gravity Talks to form Naked Prey, whose distorted take on country helped pioneer the desert rock sound picked up by the likes of Kyuss in the early ’90s. After Naked Prey’s split in the late ’90s, Christian recorded and performed solo.

THEY ALSO SERVED

FRENCH singer and actress DANI (below, b.Danièle Graule, 1944) enjoyed yé-yé success in the 1960s and flm stardom in the ’70s (François Truf aut and Claude Chabrol were fans), after which her life spun out of control. Yet she made the most of the inchancesecondofered2001when

Michael Simmons, David Hutcheon, Chris Catchpole and Ian Harrison

SummertimeGershwin’swithStarrondrumsatHamburg’sAkoustikStudio.Heasked

A NEW YORK native, Bob Rafelson drifted through rodeo work, philosophy classes and consistent issues with authority (court-mar tialled twice during military service; fred from Universal

Pictures after a clash with the studio boss)

MILES DAVIS pulled no punches after he saw the 18-year-old Michael Henderson play with Stevie Wonder at Manhattan’s

hard funk. Henderson played intermittently after retiring in 1986, but returned to Davis’s electric period with fellow alumni to form Children On The Corner in 2002. Andy Cowan

GUITARIST DRUCKERPHILIP(b.1959), AKA Jackson Del Rey, was post-punksCalifornianmemberfoundingaof

DRUMMER, singer and guitarist VAN CHRISTIAN (b.1960) was a founding member of rootsy, rockersUnderground-adjacentPaisley

bandaboutThedisruptivevehicleperfectSchneiderco-producerdevisingbefore–withBert–theTVforthatenergy:Monkees,aseriesafctionalpopthatbecamealltooreal

Wide bass receiver BORN 1951

David Fricke

BALLADEER ADAM WADE (b.1935) had three Top 10 US hits in 1961, one of which, Take Good Care Of Her, also went Top 40 in the UK. After making appearanc es in Shaft (1971) and Across 110th Street (1972), in 1975 the personable, Pittsburghborn Wade presented US gameshow Musical Chairs, the frst African-American to do so. He released a self-titled soul album in 1977.

WEST LONDON BASSIST JIM AVERY (b.1947) played in The Attack and Thunder clap Newman, whose single Something In The Air hit UK Number 1 in 1969. In 1970 he formed street-level, left-wing proto punks Third World War with guitar/singer Terry Stamp, making two LPs of nihilistgleefulbrutalityfeaturingsuchsongsasYobo,

Formed as Africa Corps at UCLA in 1981, the krautrock-infuenced group mixed tribal rhythms performed on pipes, oil cans and 55-gallon drums with lengthy drone-like ragas. Drucker left the group in 1983 to form 17 Pygmies alongside former bandmate Robert Loveless.

Bob Rafelson Man behind The Monkees BORN 1933

struck out alone after his melodic tenor lit of

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HendersonMichael

AUGUST 1962 ...The Tornados launch Telstar

AUGUST 17 bom-daaa,”“Bom-bom-bom-bom-warbled producer Joe Meek, of-key and wide-eyed in his gear-strewn fat/studio at 304 Holloway Road, north London, over a twangy guitar backing track. “Lay-de-dee-dee, doo-dadayyy ya-da-da-day… da-da dee-da-dee deedle-oo.” So was Telstar, a space-age instrumental that sold millions and topped charts internationally, conceived and demo’d.

A volatile, complex individual given to

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Telstar came fortuitously, as the original plan had been for The Tornados to record old Jimmy Dorsey hit The Breeze And I (Shane Fenton’s Fentones got there frst). Having already enjoyed chart-topping success when he produced TV star John Leyton’s dramatic death disc Johnny Remember Me in 1961, Meek smelled another big hit.

‘la-la-la,’ banging his leg, and said, ‘Got it boys? I want it like this!’ It was painful! And he shot back into his control room.”

Meek, Britain’s frst independent hit-maker with a revolutionary ear for sound, was moved to create by the July 10 launch of the Telstar 1 satellite. Orbiting the Earth, the 34” metal spheroid packed with transistors would relay the frst transatlantic TV broadcast two weeks later. Yet just days after lift-of, Meek’s cracked sketch would be recorded by The Tornados, house band for his RGM Sound production empire, at Holloway Road.

all-night sessions and extreme mood swings, Meek believed in omens. His numerous death discs beftted a man who believed his music was directed by the departed spirit of Buddy Holly. He was also gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal. “It’s true that a lot of what Joe did was about escapism from the real world,” drummer Clem Cattini refected later. “I think a lot of it was to do with his sexual you-know-whats… it was taboo then, you were drummed out of the world for that. [But] the genius of Joe was that the things that he improvised were incredible. As a sound engineer, he was one of the best, and he had an ear for hit songs.”

CLEM CATTINI TIME

Released by Decca on August 17, in September the single entered the Top 50. One of Meek’s seances predicted it would reach Number 4, but in October it replaced Elvis Presley’s She’s Not You as the UK Number 1. The following month it topped the US charts, making The Tornados the frst British group to do so. It would sell upwards of 5 million copies worldwide, and won Meek an Ivor Novello in May ’63.

Cooking up a storm: The Tornados (from left) George Bellamy, Roger LaVern, Clem Cattini, Heinz Burt and Alan Caddy at 304 Holloway Road, 1962; Telstar 1 in orbit; Joe Meek with Burt, June 20, 1963; Meek at work in his home studio.

Yet the single would prove ill-starred in other respects. At the height of their fame, The Tornados were hamstrung by promoter Larry Parnes locking them into long tours as Billy Fury’s backing band. “The way we were

“A lot of what Joe did was about escapism from the real world.” MACHINE

The Tornados recorded the basic tracks for Telstar and its fipside Jungle Fever in a day and a half, before heading back to fulfl summer season obligations in Great Yarmouth. Then Meek began the sonic re-imagining that made him a legendary fgure in production. With regular collabora tor Geof Goddard playing Telstar’s galloping melody on the keening Clavioline proto-syn thesizer, Meek added echo, compression and bursts of cosmic noise – generated by the ingenious recording of fushing toilets, among other sound sources – evoking spiritual longing and an ecstatic escape from Earth’s gravity. Goddard recalled there was a massive thunderstorm as the song was completed, a good omen in Meek’s book.

After a demo was played, keyboardist Roger LaVern recalled, “Joe came in and went,

Harrison,

Ian Harrison

AUGUST 6 After playing The Cavern the night before, Beatles drummer Pete Best is called to a 10am meeting at manager Brian Epstein’s ofce in Whitechapel, Liverpool. He is told that Ringo Starr will be replacing him the following Saturday. “I agreed to play a couple more nights before Ringo joined,” Best told MOJO,

mismanaged was criminal,” Cattini said in 2019, adding that such was their gruelling work rate that he once fell asleep playing Telstar live. “We had a worldwide Number 1 and we never even went to America.” In May 1963, French composer Jean Ledrut sued, claiming Meek had stolen his theme for the movie The Battle Of Austerlitz, tying up funds at the moment of triumph.

The Telstar Story: Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes (Cherry Red) is released this month.

MILES AND GIL

“but… I just couldn’t do it. I’d been betrayed.” It’s a busy month for the band: on August 22, they’re flmed by Granada TV at a lunchtime show at The Cavern, and the following day John Lennon marries Cynthia Powell at Liverpool’s Mount Pleasant register ofce. Epstein is best man; Paul McCartney and George Harrison are also present.

AUGUSTSINGLESINDIA11 1I’M WINDOWOUTLOOKIN’THECLIFF RICHARD COLUMBIA 2 LET’S ABOUTTALKLOVE HELEN SHAPIRO COLUMBIA 3 THE MEXICAN THE FENTONES PARLOPHONE 4 COUNT EVERY STAR LINDA SCOTT LONDON 5 WHEELS BILLY VAUGHN LONDON 6 MELODYBERLIN BILLY VAUGHN LONDON 7 OUTSIDER CLIFF RICHARD HMV 8 THE TWIST CHECKERCHUBBYLONDON 9 LANDWONDERFULSHADOWSTHELONDON 10 CITYLONELYJOHN LEYTON HMV TOP TEN

AD ARCHIVE 1962 MOJO 119

FRED ALERT

BEACH MEET

26In the middle of recording his second LP The Freewheelin’…, Bob Dylan attends the wedding of folk singer and activist Gil Turner and Lori Singer. Pete Seeger and the Reverend Gary Davis are also present. Earlier, on August 2, the man previously known as Robert Zimmerman legally changed his surname to Dylan at the New York Supreme Court.

Three:

13Miles Davis records material for his 1963 LP Quiet Nights with arranger Gil Evans at Columbia 30th St Studio in New York.

Fab (from Lennon, George Paul McCartney and, on borrowed time, Pete Best, December 17, 1961.

Helen attalkingShapiro:romanceNumber2. Songs of freedom: Prince colonialistthrowsBusterofftheyoke.

left) John

SkaIndependencetime

At last! The bright new taste of TODAY’s prunes, to make you “go”. See also the ‘Ring O’Prunes Salad’ with cottage cheese, gelatin and vinegar!

The Tornados split in 1965, and it took Cattini decades to receive his royalties. Yet he retains his respect for the otherworldly genius of Joe Meek. Before his death in 2013, LaVern also remembered the Telstar moment with acute fondness. “Every time you switched the television on, you were on it,” he said. “It was the most vibrant, ecstatic time of my life, and I loved it.”

25The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean play the Reseda Jubilee in Reseda, CA. The Beach Boys also back up Jan & Dean, who record two Brian Wilson/Mike Love songs for their next LP.

ALSO ON!

BEATLES BOOT OUT BEST

GOODBYE, MARILYN

AUGUST 16 A British colony since 1655, Jamaica gains its independence under Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante. With Princess Margaret witnessing the symbolic lowering of the Union Jack just before midnight at Kingston’s National Stadium, acts including The Skatalites, Jimmy Clif and Byron Lee & The Dragonaires play the island’s nightspots in celebration. Notes British Pathé news, “the whole population hung out the fags and metaphorically threw its hat in the air.” The event is also marked by songs including Independence Song by Prince Buster, Lord Creator’s Independent Jamaica, Derrick Morgan’s Forward March and Rico Rodriguez’s August 1962. Earlier, the Independence Celebrations Committee announced that Jamaica’s national motto will be Out Of Many, One People.

8Right, Said Fred, Bernard Cribbins’ novelty number about tea-drinking removal men struggling with an immovable object, reaches its UK chart peak of Number 10. “He’s got a great future,” says producer George Martin.

5Film star and icon Marilyn Monroe (above) is found dead after an overdose of sleeping pills. Her singing credits include Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend and I Wanna Be Loved By You. In May she sang Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden.

The Tornados enjoyed three more British hits, though Meek was to score just one more international smash with The Honeycombs’ Have I The Right? in 1964. Lovestruck, he also attempted to make a star of Heinz Burt, The Tornados’ bleachhaired bassist. Overworked, paranoid and, according to some reports, increasingly deranged by drugs, Meek died by suicide after murdering his landlady Violet Shenton at his studio, where Rod Stewart, Tom Jones, Ritchie Blackmore and many others had passed through. It was February 3, 1967 – the anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death –and the Telstar case was still unresolved.

PROPER BOB

Which LPs had multiple titles?

released as Heaven Is In Your Mind (US), Coloured Rain (Sweden), Reaping (Canada), Hole In My Shoe (Germany), Trafc (Italy) and, in Japan, Trafc First Album. Got any good ones?

I heard on a podcast an interesting nugget of information regarding late British TV chef Keith Floyd. According to the story, he once used Burgundy on a recipe and then went on to recite Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in its entirety on one of his episodes that aired on the BBC. Is it anywhere to be found online?

I recently picked up the Record Store Day edition of Nick Lowe’s Wireless World – a record given a third title after being called Pure Pop For Now People in the US and Jesus Of Cool in the UK. What other LPs had diferent titles when released abroad?

Paul Stevens, via e-mail

Kevin Wainwright, via e-mail MOJO says: The untitled LP in question was meant to have a “ghost theme” and was demo’d in mid-’86. The wheels came of the band before they could all be recorded – the last thing they did was farewell single (Waiting For The) Ghost Train – but all the songs intended for the LP can be heard either in demo form online or re-heated for 1988’s controversial LP released as The Madness

120 MOJO Alamy(3),Getty

ASK MOJO

MOJO says: If we can overlook minor-ish tweaks in tracklistings, you’re on. The rock-era starting gun for retitled international editions was arguably fred by With The Beatles/Meet The Beatles! Some have been inadvertent, like Morrissey’s Viva Hate being called its working title Education In Reverse in Australia, or the frst Electric Light Orchestra LP being renamed No Answer in America (the US label couldn’t get in touch with manager Don Arden, and a memo was taken literally). Other examples of US rejigging are Slade’s Old New Borrowed And Blue becoming Stomp Your Hands, Clap Your Feet, Judas Priest’s Killing Machine re-dubbed as Hell Bent For Leather, and Dusty Springfeld’s Everything’s Coming Up Dusty regenerating into You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me once the titular song was a big hit in ’66. Further international examples include The Clash’s ’77 debut LP being released as Pearl Harbour ’79 in Japan and London’s Burning (Arde Londres) in Argentina, The Who’s My Generation getting a ’68 Dutch re-release as Big Hits Like Who, and the Spanish version of early Bowie comp Images 1966-1967 rejoicing in the title El Rey Del Gay-Power, with somewhat misleading Ziggy-era sleeve art. As for the album with the most names, Trafc’s debut Mr. Fantasy has to be in with a shout: it was also

Have you got a challenging musical question for the MOJO Brains Trust? E-mail askmojo@bauermedia.co.uk and we’ll help untangle your trickiest puzzles.

My favourite chance meeting: when Moby Grape were recording their Wow/Grape Jam double album in 1968, veteran US radio personality Arthur Godfrey was nearby. He duly introduced and played ukulele on Skip Spence’s old-time Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot. Listeners had to get up and change the turntable speed to 78rpm to play it properly, it sounded very strange otherwise.

The game of the name: (clockwise from left) Dusty Spring feld makes her move; Bob Dylan, bangers-loving chef Keith Floyd’s favourite artist; Luther Vandross got on the remix tip; Madness’s Suggs looks like he’s seen a ghost.

HELP MOJO

album before they split up, are its whereabouts known?

Craig Farrell, via e-mail

CONTACT MOJO

MAD’S GHOST LP?

NEXTDOOR MEN REVISITED

Dave Freeman, via e-mail MOJO says: True serendipity! For other studio-next-door stories, thanks to Andrew Hunt for bringing up the time The Move’s Roy Wood and Trevor Burton guested on You Got Me Floatin’ on The Jimi Hendrix Experi ence’s Axis: Bold As Love, and to James Graham for reminding us that Michael Jackson sang on Tex-Mex new wavers Joe ‘King’ Carrasco & The Crowns’ song Don’t Let A Woman (Make A Fool Out Of You) in 1981. He was paid $100, by the way.

Let us assist you in solving your rock’n’roll queries, puzzling enigmas and niggling mysteries.

I was watching some clips of Glastonbury from 1986 where Madness played the unrecorded song Precious One. Was this ever recorded in the studio? I also read they abandoned a whole

Hector Giannopoulos, via e-mail MOJO says: Can anyone out there shed light? We can confrm, though, that the late Keith was a Dylan nut, choosing Positively 4th Street for his Desert Island Discs in 1991, quoting lyrics in his books and having Bob among the choices at his funeral in 2009, where songwriter Bill Padley sang his song the Keith Floyd Blues (sample lyric: “he’s a wizard in the kitchen and a wizard in the bar”). Padley wrote the song for Keith when they were at his restaurant in Phuket, Thailand, and tells MOJO, “Keith LOVED Dylan, and he would often sing Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright whenever I had a guitar.” The Keith Floyd Blues is unrecorded, though a sadly ailing Floyd tried to sing it on the notorious 2009 Keith Allen documentary Keith Meets Keith which broadcast the night he died.

Re: MOJO 344. Further to convenient meetings in adjoining studios: when veteran DJ Justin Strauss was remixing Luther Vandross’s Never Too Much in 1989, Luther was working next door and liked the mix so much he recorded new vocals for it.

26 Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick reunite (5)

58 Thalia Zedek’s combo (4)

30 Band later known as Osees (3)

Decks Magic!

60 Echobelly, Altin Gün and Funki Porcini, not off (2)

14 The station for Smokin’ In The Boys Room (11)

34 S-S-S-Single Bed hitmakers (3)

46 Melody, whose Histoire it was (6)

61 He made Hells Roof with DJ Muggs in 2019 (3)

65 The Jam say go (5)

48 Love, Alone Again… (2)

1 See photoclue A (4,6)

1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 6 7 8 11 7 8 9 13 17 10 11 13 14 11 13 19 14 22 18 19 20 15 16 2117 18 20 31 22 28 23 24 30 25 26 32 27 28 29 30 31 35 32 33 34 35 36 37 42 44 38 39 40 4248 44 49 43 44 51 45 46 47 48 55 56 49 50 55 51 5258 53 54 55 63 62 56 57 58 59 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 60 12 38 19 67 41 42 C A B MOJO 121 (3)Getty

11 Now what --------, asked Boys Wonder (8)

22 AKA Yellow Magic Orchestra (1,1,1)

49 Barrett, Straw or Dale? (3)

We have a Revolution GO and two Victrola Eastwoods up for grabs, to be assigned at random, so vanquish this month’s crossword brainteaser and send a scan of it to mojo@bauermedia.co.uk, making sure to type CROSSWORD 347 in the subject line. Entries without that subject line will not be considered. Please include your home address, e-mail and phone number. The closing date for entries is October 2 . For the rules of the quiz, see www.mojo4music.com.

56 Phil Collins’ ’60s covers LP (5,4)

1 German thrash elders (7)

21 Six Organs Of Admittance sheltered from it (3)

7 Rod Stewart, feeling dysfunctional in ’88? (3,2,5)

38 NY R&B and jazz label (3)

50 Matchbox, charged at Midnite? (7)

Winner: Vincent Piggot of Fife wins a Joué Play music interface and a pair of Lypertek PurePlay Z5 earphones.

On The Bullshit in ’86 (6)

54 Public Enemy’s Uzi-weight (3)

For more info, go to www.victrola.com

59 From Them to Patti Smith, in excelsis (5)

MOJO 345

64 Street-punk for yobs (2)

23 Even now, Joy Division’s 1981 compilation (5)

28 Mr Kamoze, the Hotstepper (3)

18 See photoclue C (9,6)

13 Lionel ‘Ganja’ Barrett rides the range (5, 6)

31 Psych rockers who did My Clown and Dandelion Seeds (4)

20 Elliott Smith’s fourth (1,1)

35 Washington funkers who declared War

52 The Fall’s senior grouping? (2,4)

17 See photoclue B (7)

47 Sweden’s war historians of metal (7)

62 Bill Nelson’s was Northern (5)

MOJO COMPETITION

Win! Revolution GO and Eastwood turntables from Victrola .

32 AKA a recording date (7)

37 Dexys’ Al (6)

66 Marley’s middle name (5)

52 Folk label who released The Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon (1,1,1,1)

63 Richard Meltzer’s chunderous punk band (3)

12 Ex-proggers who had a US hit with Der Kommissar (5,3,4)

36 They transmogrified into Spooky Tooth (3)

45 The Damned’s Mr Jugg (5)

2 A place off the Florida Keys, say The Beach Boys (6)

33 The Band’s drummer (5,4)

49 Dennis Coffey’s stinging breakbeat (7)

3 Clash affiliate Mr Dogg (5)

16 Eat’s LP for the finer things (7)

43 Smog did it twice (5)

24 Decca Dick, who turned down the Fabs (4)

57 ELO drummer Mr Bevan (3)

ANSWERS

5 Augustus Pablo’s label (7)

9 Maggie K de Monde and Rick P Jones’s shade of Fantastic (7)

25 UK counterculture mag, ’67-73 (2)

67 Hereditary West African singerhistorians (5)

ANCY A NEW turntable? Luckily, we have two models from the venerable house of Victrola to give away this month. First up, the CES Innovation Award-winning, fully portable record player the Revolution GO is powered by the company’s signature VinylStream technology, allowing records to be played via any external Bluetooth speaker (you can use headphones or connect stereo speakers too, of course). With a built-in Bluetooth speaker delivering stereo sound and a passive bass radiator, its Audio Technica AT-3600LA moving magnetic

29 Scott Walker plays pinball? (4)

6 Sound advice from The Players Association (4,3,5,2)

53 Colloquial Fender guitar nickname (5)

62 US label who released Liberace, Jimmie Rodgers, Pat Boone, etc (3)

19 Brian Auger’s route to Oblivion (7)

55 Berlin dubtronicist, flying the flag? (4)

44 Cutlery rockers from Texas (5)

DOWN

8 The Mission’s super-fans (7)

51 Florida funkers with numbers, not names (6)

10 What Half Man Half Biscuit had the urge for (5)

6 Supergroup who hymned Rosanna and Africa (4)

15 Clock, Beggars or Earth? (5)

Down: 1 Shuggie Otis, 2 Internal, 3 Heading, 4 Pasta, 5 O.G., 6 DDA, 7 Lowedges, 9 Ozark, 10 Nun, 12 All Saints, 16 Neo, 20 Graham Bonnet, 21 Ramin, 22 Evo, 23 Ann Orson, 24 CD, 26 Daydream Nation, 27 Eurythmics, 32 L.A.M.F., 33 Eon, 36 De, 37 It, 39 Fife, 42 Computer, 43 Ass, 44 Be, 45 Akhenaton, 47 MOR, 50 Sass, 51 Bang, 53 Dang, 54 An, 56 IRS, 57 Loobie, 58 RC, 60 River, 62 Common, 65 E.S.P, 68 S.J., 73 Back Door, 74 Bajas, 79 Normal, 80 Arcadia, 81 Shannon, 82 Another, 83 Unseen, 87 Kross, 89 Raven, 94 Yeti, 95 Loud, 97 LTO

27 Lou Reed’s Machine Music substance (5)

ACROSS

4 The Pet Shop Boys agree (3)

41 Original The Tide Is High hitmakers (8)

18 Bill Steer’s pioneering Goregrinders (7)

39 Iggy, unlearned? (The -----) (6)

42 Solfège from Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer (2)

Across: 1 Slim Harpo, 2 DL, 8 Bon, 11 Agadoo, 14 Zu, 15 Unthanks, 17 LA Woman, 18 Gee, 19 Ed, 20 Gregory Isaacs, 25 Dick Dale, 28 Ravi, 29 Dawg, 30 Amoeba, 31 Gun, 32 Layter, 34 Hi, 35 Odin, 38 SFA, 40 Oy, 41 Anita, 42 Cabretta, 46 Imprint, 47 Moses, 48 Skiff, 49 Blossoms, 52 Adam, 55 ARP, 56 Inhaler, 59 Armani, 61 Necks, 63 UCR, 64 Nonce, 66 Inn, 67 SST, 69 So, 70 Goa, 71 Savages, 72 Jeb, 75 BT, 76 ET, 77 Times, 78 Radiation, 80 Arista, 84 Eno, 85 Oh, 86 Kon Kan, 88 Kora, 90 Roc, 91 NATO, 92 Sad, 93 Asylum, 96 Ole, 98 OMV, 99 Eo, 100 Dion, 101 Stevo, 102 Tull, 103 Son, 104 Rancid, 105 Wagoner

11 Barry Ryan’s cri de coeur in ’69 (6)

44 Goblin’s horror soundtrack supreme (8)

cartridge and an anti-vibration enclosure ensures clear, smooth audio. The Victrola Eastwood hybrid turntable, meanwhile, combines vintage audio charm and convenience with modern hi-tech streaming features.

40 Martin Fry’s lexicographers (1,1,1)

GOODBYE 1966

It was an adventure. On that bus every night – where are we? – that was our home. We were just young girls and I learned a lot.

122 MOJO GettyAlamy,

So I auditioned right there on the spot, in front of the Fillmore audience. I didn’t have a chance to rehearse with them or anything. I sang [Supremes hit] Come See About Me. I think I was so excited, not scared. I was like 18, and it seemed like a big night. I remember I had on a blue and black shiny out ft and some high-heeled black suede

He said, “Let the ‘b’ quit.” I quit. Then, when I was living in LA, Ike called me because they had a show that night. Since he was in a tight spot, I said, “Are you going to still fne me?” He said, “Yes. You’re not gonna get that money back.” I said, “I’m not coming back”, and he just hung up. That was the end of my career with them. I felt relieved. Ike was hard to work with and I didn’t like the way he treated Tina, he was being so abusive. He had some deep issues. The person out front always gets all the glory, and I think his ego was very, very defated. But the show wouldn’t have gone on without him.

An Ike & Tina Revue fyer had come to my home when I was still in high school, and I remember just staring at it. I was familiar with some of their music, and they had a great revue. Very professional, with tip top singers, top of the market, as far as Tina goes.

Tina was always a good person. She didn’t talk about problems that much, but we could see what was going on. She hung in there, and boy, it took her a long way. I did wonder, if I’d stayed, what would have happened to me? [Fellow Ikette] P.P. Arnold stuck it out, at least until they got to Europe – actually, we wrote a song together, Show Me, for my new album So Wonderful, a very important part. Looking back, it’s a yin and yang, a yay and nay. But you know, each person has their own path. As told to Ian Harrison

And then she was gone: Ike and Tina in ’66, after Gloria’s departure.

Tina would say, “I wonder why Gloria only ever talks back to Ike?” One time, Ike said, “If anybody messes with anybody in the band, I’m gonna send ’em home.” He was messing with one of the girls in the group, so I said, “Well send me home now!” I had that attitude about it, like, you can’t tell me nothing!

HELLO GOODBYE

“We got fined a lot… we always owed him money.”

Gloria Scott and The Ike & Tina Turner Revue

Then one night I guess we got tired, because we missed the bus taking us to Houston, Texas – a long drive. To make the gig, we had to fy. Ike made us pay our way on the plane, and he fned us. Tina said, “If you fne her, she’s going to quit.”

Shake some action: The Ike & Tina Revue, Los Angeles, November 29, 1965 (from left) Gloria Scott, P.P. Arnold, Herb Sadler, Tina Turner, Ike Turner, James Norwood, Sam Rhodes, Maxine Smith; (below) Scott today.

Gloria Scott’s So Wonderful is out on September 30 on Acid Jazz.

In the live show, I was only with them just about nine months. A lot happened during that time. Sometimes Ike would tease us, sometimes it’d be fun, but he was very hard on us girls. He would embarrass us if we didn’t have our wigs on tight – he pulled them. And if I had a tag hanging of my dress, if one of the other girls didn’t catch it, we all got fned. And we got fned a lot. It was always, like, $25. We were only making $25 a night, so we always owed him money.

Theyshoes.took me to LA that night – we stopped by my mom and dad’s in Santa Cruz and I said, “Bye, Mama!” I didn’t start working with them immediately, they just took me to all their gigs and I watched the set every night, and sometimes I would even be babysitting. The original Ikettes were still working with Ike and Tina then.

It began on-stage at the Fillmore West. But the last straw came after a missed bus.

HELLO 1965

I’d met Sly Stone, and I knew that my way was to keep going in the music business. Then Charles Sullivan, the person that owned the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, invited me to audition for some people. I didn’t know who, but I just showed up that night and it was Ike and Tina Turner.

After a few months they got me a job on a Dick Clark

tour, for like, four months. They had diferent sets of Ikettes on each tour, and I was in one of the sets. When [the other line-up] heard we were making more money than they were, and Ike wouldn’t give them a raise, they quit. That’s how I became an Ikette, when the other Ikettes quit.

GLORIA SCOTT

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Articles inside

T BONE BURNETT

THE LIBERTINES

THE BYRDS The rise

NEU! Did the odd couple of German rock drive each other wahnsinnig? No question. Did they also invent music that new generations still strive to emulate? Stimmt!

JACKIE LEVEN

MARCUS KING